Hidden dangers: When we extract uranium from the ground, we dig up the rock, we crush it and we leave behind this finely pulverized -- it's like flour. In Canada, we have 200 million tons of this radioactive waste. 85 percent of the radioactivity is in that crushed rock. How long will it be there?
          Well, it turns out that the effective half-life of this radioactivity is 80,000 years. So it means in 80,000 years, there will be half as much radioactivity in these tailings as now. You know, that dwarfs the entire prehistory of the Salzburg region which goes way back to ancient, ancient times. Even archeological remains -- 80,000 years. We don't have any records of human existence going back that far. That's the half-life of this material. And as these tailings are left on the surface of the earth, they blow in the wind, they wash in the rain into the water systems, and they inevitably spread. Once the mining companies close down, who is going to look after this material forever? How do you in fact guard 200 million tons of radioactive sand safely forever?

• http://www.foe.co.uk/CAT/ -- The Center for Alternative Technology
  "We are an educational charity striving to achieve the best cooperation between the natural, technological and human worlds. We test, live with and display strategies and tools for doing this. We are working for a sustainable future."
  Centre for Alternative Technology
  Machynlleth, Powys, SY20 9AZ, WALES, UK
  Phone: +44 1654 702400, Fax: +44 1654 702782
• http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/ -- Solar Radiation Resource Information
• http://www.slip.net/~ckent/earthship/ -- Earthship
  innovative, truly self-sufficient home-building living with the land
  Solar Survival Architecture
  P.O Box 1041
  Taos NM 87571
  505.758.9870
  earthshp@taos.newmex.com
• http://solstice.crest.org/ -- Solstice: Documents and Databases
• http://www.publiccitizen.org/cmep/index.cfm -- Critical Mass Energy Project, from Public Citizen
• http://www.homestead.org/builnet.htm
  -- Vernacular Architecture Internet Sites (MANY resources listed)
• http://www.eren.doe.gov/ -- Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Network (EREN) (US DOE)
• http://www.nrel.gov/ -- National Renewable Energy Laboratory (US DOE)
• http://www.rsvp.nrel.gov/ -- Renewables for Sustainable Village Power

While the uninformed citizen was slowly and trustingly learning to live with the `peaceful atom', the more realistic insurance industry, lacking actuarial data, was refusing to insure it. In the USA the clause `not covered in the event of radioactive contamination' was written into all property insurance policies. In order to protect the desired new industry, the US Senate enacted the Price-Anderson Act in 1957 to provide insurance for nuclear industries for ten years. The hope was that ordinary insurance mechanisms would be able to take responsibility for insurance at that point, as is the custom in all high-risk ventures. (The entire transcript of senate deliberations on the 1975 extension of the Price-Anderson Act is reproduced in vol 3, no. 1 of The Advocate, 160 Chace Avenue, Providence, Rhode Island 02906. The historical perspective on this nuclear subsidy is given in the same issue, by Doug Wilson, former Washington correspondent of the Providence Journal. R. I. Senator John Pastore served on the US Joint Atomic Energy Commission as Vice-Chairman, and later Chairman. It was he who `managed' the Price-Anderson victory.)
          However, the Price-Anderson Act had to be extended and amended in 1965, 1966 and 1975 [and 1988 --ratitor]. The present nuclear insurance policy in the USA, at tax payer expense, extends to 1 August 1987, assuring thirty years of federal insurance for the commercial industry.
          Under the law, public recovery of damage from nuclear electricity companies is limited to $560 million and recovery from the nuclear manufacturing industry is altogether prohibited. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates that a major nuclear accident would cost around $15 billion or more. Others have estimated damage at $17 billion to $280 billion from the `maximum credible accident'. Assuming a low-cost $14 billion accident, the victims would receive 4 cents on each dollar actually lost. Besides its financial inadequacy, the philosophy behind the Price-Anderson subsidy is seen by many as directly opposed to the free-enterprise system. Price-Anderson is a good indicator of how much the commercial nuclear industry is desired by the US government, and how much it is protected from the usual market-place demands.
          Electricity companies operating nuclear power plants can purchase insurance from `insurance pools': Mutual Atomic Energy Liability Underwriters for liability, and American Nuclear Insurers for property coverage. No other home, automobile, property or business owner can be insured against nuclear accidents. . . .
          Meanwhile, the myth of cheap atomic generation of electricity was perpetuated. The hidden subsidies provided by governments were never included in the cost.

• 3   Bringing the Bombs Home
  http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO3.html
• 5   Continued Testing: Tragic Repetitions
  http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO5.html
• 7   Nuclear Workers: Radiation on the Job
  http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO7.html
• 9   Uranium Milling and the Church Rock Disaster
  http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO9.html

          Available facts do not allow us to fix the precise date when Secretary Stimson decided to act as a de facto commander-in-chief and to execute his plan to use the atomic bombs as a "MasterCard" to end the war. Stimson would have been the last person in Washington to encroach on the prerogatives of a president, so we know with certainty that his "command decision" was made sometime between the death of President Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, and the meeting he had with Harry Truman on April 25 to tell the new president the secrets about the success of the Manhattan Project.
          Many entries in his diary help us to understand Stimson's acts and thought processes after Roosevelt's death. With FDR gone and a new president in the White House who knew absolutely nothing about this supersecret project, Stimson's authority as the surviving supervisor was paramount, and he apparently decided it was his duty to make the final decisions about the deployment and use of the new weapon.
          The upshot of this fateful decision was an obsession that influenced Secretary Stimson to personalize atomic issues and to dishonor the ethical principles he had long championed. Soon thereafter, he made a reference in his diary to "my secret," and it seems clear that, in his mind, the atomic weapons became "my bombs" and the plan to use the two bombs to destroy Japanese cities became the Stimson plan. . . .
          When one studies Stimson's conduct in the spring of 1945, the overarching question that recurs again and again is: What influenced this magnanimous man to be so stubborn in his opposition to peace negotiations? The explanation, I am convinced, can be found in his obsession with his secret weapon as a war-ending deus ex machina. To understand Stimson's behavior, one must understand that his behavior was guided by the premise that the way to end the war was to "lay the atomic bomb on Japan" and then negotiate.

Later in his narrative, Udall goes on to describe what can happen when a man of 77 years with "impeccable credentials" is the only `source', of how his statements become "facts" -- the catch-22 that can occur when only one person knows "the facts":

          The myth that administrators such as Ralph Bard and Dr. Vannevar Bush and scientists such as Oppenheimer, Compton, Fermi, and Lawrence were decision makers who helped guide the bombers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not only inaccurate, it places an unfair burden on these men. Henry L. Stimson was the author of this fable. He was the first member of the [Interim] committee to publish a memoir about the climactic events that launched the unveiling of the atomic age, and since all of the pertinent documents were official secrets, Stimson's account of what happened established a baseline of "facts" that historians and journalists could not question.

Udall, pp. 73, 75,75, 102-103

1. John W. Gofman and Arthur R. Tamplin, "Low Dose Radiation and Cancer," paper presented October 29, 1969 at the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium, San Francisco. In IEEE Transactions On Nuclear Science Vol.NS-17, No.1: 1-9 February 1970. (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, New York City.) 1969.
2. John W. Gofman and Arthur R. Tamplin, "Epidemiologic Studies of Carcinogenesis by Ionizing Radiation," in Proceedings Of The Sixth Berkeley Symposium On Mathematical Statistics And Probability: 235-277. (University of California Press, Berkeley, California 94720.) 1971.

          Nuclear reactors had been in use in the U.S. since the early 1940s. chief function had been to generate plutonium for use on Nagasaki, and in later tests. But as a by-product these reactors also generated large quantities of heat. By harnessing this heat to boil water, steam would be created to turn turbines and generate electricity. Given the apparently infinite power of the atom, there seemed no reason why nuclear electricity could not also be infinitely inexpensive, or--as its supporters would later put it--"too cheap to meter." A new industry had been born.
          But America's private utilities were skeptical. With a few exceptions its generally conservative executives were worried about the dangers of a nuclear accident and the risks of sinking so much capital into an untested technology. It was only with government-insurance guarantees, fuel subsidies, and lavish research-and-development help that commercial atomic power moved ahead. Even at that, private utilities did not become heavily involved until faced with the threat of being squeezed out of business by federal competition in the form of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other government-owned utilities. To this day TVA remains the nation's single largest reactor buyer. As Sam Day, former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told us: "The private electric companies did not jump into nuclear power. They were kicked in."3

---

3. Sam Day, interview, June 1981. See also, Irwin Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian, Light Water (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 35.

Within the secret councils of government, there was opposition to development of the H-bomb. But, tragically, the deliberations were nonetheless conducted in the same manner as everything else had been since the inception of the Manhattan Project -- without public debate or scrutiny. The preceding paragraphs to the one quoted above provide more background on the debate that did occur regarding the deeper moral issues of going ahead with creation of the hydrogen bomb:

          Albert Einstein was among those in 1950 who viewed current events with trepidation. Within the U.S. he warned of "concentration of tremendous financial power in the hands of the military, militarization of the youth, close supervision of the loyalty of the citizens, in particular, of the civil servants by a police force growing more conspicuous every day. Intimidation of people of independent political thinking. Indoctrination of the public by radio, press, school. Growing restriction of the range of public information under the pressure of military secrecy."[143]
          It was in this atmosphere that deliberations over whether to proceed with H-bomb research reached their climax. That secretive process is important to understand "because it is one of the relatively few cases where those who explicitly tried to moderate the nuclear arms race came within shouting distance of doing so," according to Herbert York, the first director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory where much of the hydrogen bomb R and D subsequently took place. Behind the scenes there was, in York's words, "a brief, intense, highly secret debate."[144]
          Under federal law a key source of recommendations for the Atomic Energy Commission was its General Advisory Committee. Called upon by the AEC to take up the question of prospective H-bomb development, the Advisory Committee--chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer and including such luminaries of nuclear physics as Enrico Fermi and I. I. Rabi--met in late October 1949. While urging continued efforts to magnify the power of atomic weaponry, the Advisory Committee urged that the United States not plunge ahead with developing the H-bomb, also known as the "super bomb."[145]
          The panel presented arguments in terms of military strategies, technical aspects, and optimum use of present nuclear resources, concluding that the H-bomb was not needed for U.S. national security. The report also depicted the H-bomb choice as a profound moral issue: "It is clear that the use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations."[146]
          An addendum to the Advisory Committee report, written by James B. Conant--later president of Harvard University--and signed by five other committee members including Oppenheimer, underscored the moral moment of the H-bomb decision: "Let it be clearly realized that this is a super weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb. . . . Its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians. We are alarmed as to the possible global effects of the radioactivity generated by the explosion of a few super bombs of conceivable magnitude. If super bombs will work at all, there is no inherent limit on the destructive power that may be attained with them. Therefore, a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide."[147]
          These and other anti-H-bomb scientists were in effect muzzled from openly expressing their viewpoints at critical junctures, held back by security-clearance status. Thus in the crucial months before Truman proclaimed his decision on H-bomb development, the public was allowed little information about a decision that could potentially result in millions of deaths and change the course of human history.
          In top-secret circles the debate was fierce. Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, confided in Edward Teller that the anti-H-bomb Advisory Committee report "just makes me sick."[148] For their part McMahon and a constellation of atomic scientists, including Teller and University of California Radiation Laboratory director Ernest Lawrence, were determined to bring about development of the H-bomb as soon as possible, believing it to be the best possible response to Soviet possession of the atom bomb.[149]

---

143. The H Bomb, (New York: Didier, 1950), pp. 13-14.
144. Herbert York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1976), pp. ix, 2.
145. Ibid., pp. 150-159.
146. Ibid., p. 155.
147. Ibid., pp. 156-157.
148. Ibid., p. 60.
149. Ibid., p. 45.

• Nuclear Guardianship Project
  1439 Santa Fe Avenue
  Berkeley, CA 94702
  510/559-8910
  510/559-8916 (fax)
  ngp@igc.apc.org
• Plutonium Free Future
  P.O. Box 2589
  Berkeley, CA 94702
  510/540-7645
  pff@igc.apc.org
  
• Nuclear Waste Citizen's Coalition
  110 Maryland Avenue, NE
  Suite 307
  Washington, DC 20002
  202/547-5796
  202/543-0978 (fax)
  fmillar@essential.org
  http://www.essential.org/orgs/nwcc/nwcc.html
• Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS)
  1424 16th Street NW, #404
  Washington, DC 20036
  202/328-0002
  202/462-2183 (fax)
  nirsnet@igc.apc.org
  http://www.nirs.org/

          Each year I receive and answer many hundreds of unsolicited letters from youth anxious to know what the little individual can do. One such letter from a young man named Michael -- who is ten years old -- asks whether I am a "doer or a thinker." Although I never "tell" anyone what to do, I feel it quite relevant to this point to quote my letter to him explaining what I have been trying to do in the years since my adoption of my 1927-inaugurated self-disciplinary resolves. The letter, dated February 16, 1970, reads:

Dear Michael,
          Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning "thinkers and doers."
          The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done -- that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.
          Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don't be disappointed if something doesn't work. That is what you want to know -- the truth about everything -- and then the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their system.
          Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word. Words are tools -- and once you have learned how to use a tool you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is not enough. If your vocabulary is comprehensive, you can comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.
          You have what is most important in life -- initiative. Because of it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.

Sincerly yours,                        

Buckminster Fuller