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UNITE! Info #315en: Longer reply (1) to "Green-Left" glparramatta - On
nuclear
energy
[Posted: 14.04.2008]
Note: The "UNITE! (etc) Info" posting series (1995 -) advocates the
political
line of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong. For all items, see
www.rolf-martens.com.
INTRO NOTE, WITH SOME BACKGROUND TO OUR DISCUSSION, INCLUDING MY SAYING,
WHO AM
I, AND TRYING TO FIND OUT, WHO ARE YOU:
Hello again, glparramatta <glparramatta@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
And, as I said before, very welcome to the "Modern Marxism" mailing list
managed by me, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/modern_marxism/,
which you
joined on 01.04.
It's very good, I think, that a certain debate between you and me already
has
begun - and the more that others join in in it too, all the better. I've
already sent some briefer replies to some of your postings so far, and
above
all have promised you a longer one. Here's a first such.
Why I'm choosing it to be about nuclear energy I shall soon explain -
after
this intro note, which I think it's suitable to make a rather long one
too.
Sorry that this reply of mine now comes a whole week later than I had
originally hoped and "advertised". But all the longer does it get to be. I
hold
that this length of it is justified, though, considering the *enormous*
social
im****tance that this question has, in the world of today.
Your postings to MM so far have been list messages #1466 (01.04.2008),
"What's
new at Links: Tibet; Venezuela; Nepal; Communist Manifesto at 160;
Kosova",
#1472 (02.04.2008), replying to me under the above subject line, #1496
(04.04.2008), "Cuban permaculturist: `Climate change means we must change'
|
Links", #1498 (05.04.2008), "A revolutionary response to the climate
change
crisis | Links", #1512 (07.04.2008), "More videos added -- Cuban
permaculturist: `Climate change means we must change' | Links" and #1518
(08.04.2008), "What's new in Links: Cuba; climate change; India; African
farmers".
I've replied (briefly) to you with list messages #1468 (01.04.2008),
#1497
(04.04.2008) and #1499 (06.04.2008). The main contents of these was
something
which I wrote in #1468, namely:
"I like that article of yours, glparramatta, with various links to
articles
which look very interesting, and I've joined that list with news that you
showed us, at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373.
At the same time, seeing the very name of your organization, "Green Left",
Australia, I suspect that you may be falling into one pretty big trap set,
globally, by the imperialists, who under a cover of "environmentalism",
not a
genuine but a phony such, are combating the development of industry, in
particular modern such (nuclear energy!), in order to create unemployment
in
the "rich" countries and to hold the people in the poorer ones down in
underdevelopment as particularly low-paid labour power.
Thus I hold that it's possible that you, alongside your good stuff, may be
helping the imperialists by mistake in certain fields.
It would be a very good thing, I think, if you and I (and of course
others)
could discuss these things in some depth, over several months, say."
Who are we who've begun this discussion?
You and I, glparramatta, live in countries, Sweden respectively Australia,
which are rather similar as to their social systems and their
international
position. Both of these, relatively "rich", countries back in 1974, when
Mao
Zedong's famous analysis of the then international situation was presented
(see
my Info #011en, part 1/2 and part 2/2), belonged to what he called "the
Second
World" - a concept which in today's situation, I hold, is valid only to a
much
lesser degree. Both of "our" countries happen to be rather thinly
populated -
or expressed otherwise, with plenty of room for people and plenty of
natural
resources (actual or potential farmland, iron, uranium, oil and stuff -
some of
it being kept secret of course by the ruling capitalists).
Sweden, on the northern outskirts of Europe and with a surface area larger
than
all of Germany, has only some 9 million inhabitants - appr. 20 per square
km.
Australia - not quite the "antipode" of Sweden; that's New Zealand - is
almost
as big as all of Europe, or China or the USA or Canada. With its 21
million
people, it's one of the most thinly-populated, or "elbow-space-rich",
countries
on earth, has some 2.6 inhabitants per square km. Sweden, stretching
between
55º and 69º North, is rather cold and very sun-poor. Australia, on the
contrary, lying between 10º and 40º South (for comparison, at some 40º
North
lie Spain, Greece and southern Italy here in Europe, and on other
continents
southern China, northern "mainland" Japan, and New York City in the USA),
is
one of the most Equator-close, warm and sunny countries among those which
(today) have a majority of "white-skinned" people.
Of some interest, now that we shall be discussing "green" policies, not
least,
are the respective actual colours of our countries - not the political
ones, I
mean, but those which can be seen from a satellite. Thus viewed, Sweden is
very
much on the green side, being covered, in addition to its (still)
considerable
farmlands, to some 50% by forests, with all in all some 1 trillion trees,
over
100,000 per inhabitant - plenty of material for "pulp fiction" and for
more
interesting printed stuff too. Australia in that respect - today - is
much
less favoured, being even to its largest part a yellow, brown or grayish
country of deserts and semi-arid lands - something which however it's
technically very easy to change completely with some massive irrigation,
of
course. This only requires such very large amounts of very cheap energy
(the
results of nuclear energy above all! - for desalination of sea water)
which
will become available very soon once those miserable small cliques of
imperialist-bourgeois scumbags who today rule this planet have been wiped
off
its surface.
About me:
I on my part am today, and since a long time back, not a member of any
political party. I'm in quite a number of non-party-political
associations,
that is, organizations of a united-front type, though. The basic political
programme I'm adhering to is shown by these lines at the top of the
"index"
section of my homepage www.rolf-martens.com, set up in March 2005:
"Advocates
the political line of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong. Strives to sup****t all
actions which favour the vast majority of people." Some details concerning
me
and concerning my political programme can be found in my homepage sections
"On
my background" and "Some programmatic articles".
As can be seen in those sections too, I during some 16 years from 1974 on
was
in close contact and co-operation with a certain small and - in the1970s,
at
least - actually Marxist-Leninist and very advanced party in Germany, the
KPD/ML (NEUE EINHEIT) (or "NE" for short), from which, I think today, I
learned
very much but which I in 1990 criticized as then bourgeois-degenerated
(for
some main points in English of that criticism, see my Info #106en, part
3/7)
and broke with. From 1975 on, as can be seen in my homepage section
"Texter på
svenska, 1975 - (Swedish)", I'm publi****ng a leaflet series (mainly) in
Swedish, the "INFORMATIONSBLAD" series, with items since long however
appearing
only rather seldom, mainly on 1st of May each year. From late 1995 on, I'm
publi****ng an Internet posting series, "UNITE! (etc) Infos", mainly in
English,
all of whose items are now at my homepage.
About you, glparramatta - I've tried to figure out what's your political
affiliation and/or programme but only have landed in a quite complicated
maze:
Since your e-mail address is <glparramatta@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, I first
concluded
that you'd be in an organization called "Green Left" in Australia, as I
wrote
in my abovequoted reply to you, MM list message #1468, thinking that this
was
the case. You did give a hint at another organizational affiliation of
yours,
by writing, in the very first lines of your first posting to MM, #1466:
"Subscribe free to Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal - at
http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373."
I've subscribed to the news items sent out from that "Links" website,
which
sometimes has been difficult to reach via that link which you showed us. A
better one has turned out to be: http://links.org.au/.
Now is that -
obviously
Australia-based - "Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal",
which
you're recommending, an organization in itself, or being managed by one,
and
if so, on the basis of what political programme, I wondered.
And it turns out that it doesn't have any definite programme, but
basically
only says that "Links is an avowedly left-wing site..." and that "Comments
[on
articles published at it] must be...in the spirit of furthering the aims
of the
left and green movements worldwide". (Two different sets of aims, thus. It
seems the website is hinting that they're parallel, or approximately the
same.
On that I don't agree at all, as you'll see.) By way of organization or
leader****p, this "Links" website has an editorial board, which "sets
parameters
for" it but also is said to be only "advisory", consisting of 17 named
persons
from 8 countries, including one who is also its managing editor, Terry
Townsend, of Australia. Only very vaguely and uncertainly do the things
said at
that website define any political affiliation and/or programme of yours, I
think, glparramatta.
That website may correspond roughly to one of those many united-front-type
associations which I on my part am in, except for the fact that the
"Links"
website does not state concretely what it is that it wants.
Now "Green Left" seems to be a concept, at least, which outlines a
political
affiliation of yours. A Google on that shows a website at
http://www.greenleft.org.au/,
of a *newspaper* called "Green Left" or
"Green
Left Weekly". Any programme, does it have? No. Is it an organization of
its
own, by itself? No information is provided on that. Any organization
that's
publi****ng it, which might have a programme? Nothing such is shown at that
website either.
Some lines which I also found via Google however say: "Green Left -
Australia's
radical weekly newspaper. Online version of the progressive newspaper
published
by the *Democratic Socialist Party* (Australia)." Aha - there *is*(?) a
*party*
behind it, after all, the DSP. Still strange, though, that the "Green
Left's"
own(?) website isn't saying this. Looking up that party, the DSP, I found
that
it, together with a youth organization which it has, called "Resistance",
has a
website of its/their own, at http://www.dsp.org.au/dsphome.htm.
And that
website i.a. says: "Green Left Weekly - Australia's best and most widely
circulated progressive newspaper, which the DSP and Resistance help
produce and
distribute."
What's meant by that "help", I wondered then. Are those organizations,
jointly,
only "*helping*" produce and distribute that newspaper, and are *not
completely* responsible for doing this? Or isn't - which would be more
suitable
- one of them that, as was maintained, about the DSP, in those other lines
I
found on the Net? That gets to be the next question, of course, for any
"outsider" who, like me, is trying to find out what's what concerning
your
organization, glparramatta - if you in fact are representing one.
Now what does that website which the DSP in Australia has (together with
its
youth organization) say about the DSP itself? I found that that party at
least
seemed to have a political programme. Because at
http://www.dsp.org.au/dsp/program/dsp-prog.html
is shown: "PROGRAM OF THE
DSP
- Adopted by the 15th National Conference of the Democratic Socialist
Party,
January 1994".
But - that party apparently *isn't* even *there any more*, as a party.
Some
other lines at its (shared) website say: "The Democratic Socialist Party
is now
the *Democratic Socialist Perspective*." (Yes, this latter is actually the
heading of "its" website too - at first, I didn't understand why. And
further:)
"At our 21st Congress on December 27-30, 2003, we voted to stop operating
as a
separate party, and to function from now on as a tendency within the
Socialist
Alliance, working to implement the decision of the May 2003 Socialist
Alliance
conference to become a united, multi-tendency socialist party. The May
2004 SA
conference took further steps in that direction, voting to continue the
process
of the Socialist Alliance having more editorial input into Green Left
Weekly."
So that somewhat more concrete thing, the party called "DSP", apparently
had
transformed itself into such a more nebulous thing as "a perspective" or
"a
tendency" - an idea, thus. That other entity mentioned in these lines, the
Socialist Alliance (SA) in Australia, was another thing that I hadn't
heard
about earlier, here in Sweden. Some more googling produced: "Australia's
Socialist Alliance - Electoral coalition of several Australian socialist
groups. www.socialist-alliance.org/". And that website,
http://www.socialist-alliance.org/,
among other things says: "Join the
Alliance! Download a member****p form". That means, the SA is an
organization in
its own right (too), which you can join as an individual member. It's not
only
"a coalition". Mysterious to me in this connection, by the way, is the
fact
that the DSP doesn't seem to be functioning even as a constituent party in
that
coalition - if it indeed is one - but only as a "perspective" or
"tendency"
within the SA.
Now in that Socialist Alliance, had I finally found the organization - or,
an
organization - that, today, is publi****ng the newspaper "Green Left" or
"Green
Left Weekly"? And whose programme then, presumably, is that of that
publication
too? No, clearly not. As said by the former Democratic Socialist Party,
and
present-day Democratic Socialist Perspective, as quoted above (how the
heck, by
the way, does "a perspective" go about saying something - do you have any
idea
about that, glparramatta?), there was (and presumably still today is) only
"a
process of the Socialist Alliance having more editorial input into" that
newspaper".
This whole thing, of my trying to find out who organizes what, who's
responsible for what, in this connection, strongly reminds me, I must say,
of a
term used by Marx and Engels when criticizing, at an early stage of their
work,
some parts of that then existing, very idealistic, "German Ideology". It
was
"ghost stories", "Gespenstergeschichte", they wrote. That "organizational
setup" which is found there, concerning the "Green Left", Australia,
really is
an utter "ghost story".
This "ghost story" type organizational setup which there turns out to be
in
connection with "Green Left", Australia, is one which obviously makes it
very
difficult - actually impossible, it seems to me - for its "ordinary"
adherents
to get to know, what body or bodies, what persons (elected ones? and if
so, how
and by whom?) it is that's running things, and whom or what body they can
turn
to if they have criticisms or suggestions for some changes in policies,
within
what body they might combine with others with the same view as theirs, on
some
point or other, so as perhaps to get a majority vote for a certain change
that
they might want.
It has turned out to be impossible for me to find an organization and/or a
political programme which you might be representing, glparramatta. Perhaps
you're basically "operating", politically, on your own - as am I, as you
can
see above - considering yourself to be responsible (as do I) only directly
to
the vast majority of people on earth?
Or do you consider yourself to have a responsibility to an organization or
other, and/or have a political programme that you intend to follow, and if
so,
which one(s)?
It seems that only you yourself, glparramatta, can tell us others, your
readers, who you are more precisely, as to possible organization
affiliation
and political programme.
But while I'm at it, I want to mention briefly some other people in
Australia
whom I've been reading or even have corresponded a little with.
That's firstly *Bill Weller* <mikabill@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>. He wrote on
16.12.2007 in
a certain public discussion, as quoted by me in Info #300en, "More on
Michael
P.'s BIG 'M-L' question":
"In Australia the only left party of any note and strength is the
Australian
Greens which is not a Socialist or communist party but has many former
members
of both as well as former anarchists."
To which I replied that he was "making a serious mistake" concerning the
character of that party. I advanced some arguments for that and also
invited
Bill to the MM list, which he did join but later left, unfortunately
without
there having arisen any further discussion between him and me concerning
the
issues of "green" politics.
Looking up the *Australian Greens*, I've found that that party, which
clearly
has nothing directly to do with the "Green Left" in Australia, although
Bill W.
did call it a "left" party too, has a website at http://greens.org.au/.
It
has
been inspired by that first "Green" party, formed in the then West Germany
in
the late 1970s, it says, and further:
"In 1992 the representatives from around the nation gathered in North
Sydney
and agreed to form the Australian Greens. - The Australian Greens is part
of
the Global Greens network, with around 70 Greens parties established
world-wide."
Among these is Miljöpartiet de Gröna here in Sweden, which says at its
website
i.a.:
"The Green Party of Sweden (Miljöpartiet de Gröna) has a unique position
in
Swedish politics. In 1988, we were the first new party in more than 70
years to
enter the Swedish parliament." (It's still represented in it, having 19
seats
out of 349, with 5.24% of the votes in 2006.)
That international crowd seems to differ from "yours", glparramatta, above
all
in that those parties are *not* saying that they are "Leftwing" or
"Socialist"
parties.
Secondly, I during several years and with great interest read the website
of
someone in Australia who very much and clearly with great knowledge
*opposed*
precisely that thesis which is a dominating part of your postings today,
glparramatta, the thesis that there is "harmful manmade global warming",
namely
the website created by *John L. Daly* of Tasmania (1943-2004) at
http://www.john-daly.com/,
"Still Waiting for Greenhouse", a site which
today
is being continued (at a slower pace) by some others. He not least brought
to
public knowledge, concerning the question of sea level rise, a sea level
benchmark set in 1841 on the "Isle of the Dead" by the Antarctic explorer
James
Clark Ross, and was the first to expose, I think, that fantastic fraud
attempt
(wasn't it a such, in your opinion too?) by the so-called
Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 with the "Hockey Stick graph"
falsification of temperature history.
John L. Daly replied to my thanking him for his excellent website and my
saying
that, however, quite irrespective of whether there was "manmade global
warming"
or not, nuclear energy was clearly much superior to all other energy
sources
known today anyway, with the propositions, both of which I argued against
in a
further reply to him, that nuclear power plants "are not necessary in
Australia" and that "anyway, most people here are against them".
On the question of whether there really is a danger of a manmade global
warming
or not, I absolutely disagree with you too, glparramatta, as you'll
already
have seen here. But on this I shall write more in a later reply, for now
only
referring you to the arguments in my Infos #165en (part 1/4 etc), #230en,
#244en, #272en and #298en, which are items (1) - (5) in a sub-series "The
big
'greenhouse' hoax", and to those at some further scientific websites to
which
I'm linking under "On pur****ted 'manmade global warming'".
To *Joe Vialls*, another Australian (as Daly, likewise an immigrant to
your
country from the UK), who now is deceased too but whose website, at
http://www.vialls.com/,
likewise is being continued by others, I once
wrote
too, and got a rather grumpy reply since I maintained he wasn't completely
right on all points in his many "private investigator" writings. Some real
smashers of his however were, I thought and think, for instance the
exposure of
the CIA's sabotaging of the *Bodra #3* "ultra deep" oil drilling project
in
West Bengal in 1983 (so as to try to hide that im****tant fact that oil
comes
from deep down in the earth's mantle and is very plentiful on this
planet), and
of the 1990s "Gulf Syndrome" of many US armymen as due to certain very
*harmful
vaccinations* which had been forced on them.
[Bodra #3: http://www.vialls.com/wecontrolamerica/peakoil.html
harmful vacciations: http://www.vialls.com/myahudi/biowar.html]
It was in August 2000 that I first read the very im****tant writings of
*Eleni
Papadopulos-Eleopulos*, of the so-called Perth Group, and other medical
scientists, from several other countries, at the Australia-based website
http://www.virusmyth.com/,
which then already since long was demonstrating
that
there is no "HIV", nor anything that might justifiably be called "AIDS",
and
that therefore the massive campaign, by the US imperialists quite in
particular, since the early/mid-1980s, maintaining that people "very much
must
fear" "these things" and, if they're "HIV positive" (which nobody ever
was),
"need to" take some lethally poisonous "medicines against AIDS", was and
is
nothing but a total, enormous hoax, a campaign of mass terror and mass
murder
in the world by those abovementioned small cliques of utter scum who today
still are controlling it.
Having gotten to know about this surprising, seemingly fantastic fact, I
wrote
my Info #129en (part 1/2 and part 2/2) and some other Infos in order to
help
warn people against that terror hoax, and started a (small) particular
posting
series about it, with postings headed "American Imperialist Dumb ****
propaganda". Any individual writer or any political group in any way
striving
to represent or sup****t the common interests of the vast majority of
people on
earth of course needs to help out in this respect, as soon as he, she or
it
gets to know the basic facts about that vile terror campaign, I hold. And
it's
not precisely a good sign concerning those persons who're responsible for
"your" "Green Left Weekly" newspaper, and/or for the other entities
somehow
connected with it, glparramatta, that they so far apparently have not
taken the
slightest interest whatsoever in this whole question.
Concerning oil, I had a debate on its origin and thus its availability on
earth, back in 1996, with a person in that "neighbouring" country of
yours, New
Zealand, by the name of *Bruce Hamilton* <B.Hamilton@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, author
of an,
in that particular respect, wildly inaccurate "Automotive Gasoline FAQ"
which
still can be found on the Net. (Well, I suppose that it's only to some of
us up
here at your "antipodes" that those two countries may seem to be very
"neighbouring". Measuring distances on some maps, I've found that New
Zealand
is as far from Australia as is southern Italy from Malmö in southern
Sweden
where I live.)
Anyway, Bruce nicely wrote to me, in the vein of the TV soap opera
"Mission:
IMPOSSIBLE!": "So... Rolf, your mission - should you choose to accept it,
is to
repudiate the evidence presented in the following sources, which I have
already
referenced once in response to one of your earlier, messy crossposts." I
did
accept it, found every one of "oil pro" Bruce's source articles, otherwise
unknown to oil-amateur me, at the University Library in nearby Lund, and
was
able gleefully to point out that they (too) in fact all contributed
towards
showing that it was his "mission" of making that (still "prevailing", of
course) "Dino dinner" "theory" about oil's origin appear somehow likely,
as to
the facts, that was really "IMPOSSIBLE!". (See my Info #028en, part 7/8
and
part 8/8.)
I hope you or others haven't been bored too much by my including rather
much of
"introductory stuff" here, about contacts and exchanges of mine with some
people in your part of the world. It's all intended too to constitute some
parts, from my side, in that debate on several questions which I think
it's
good if you and I (plus others, of course), could have, perhaps stretching
over
several months, as I've suggested earlier.
sOME POINTS ON WHY IT'S SO *VERY* WRONG, SO VERY HELPFUL TO THE VERY WORST
OF
THE RULING IMPERIALIST-BOURGEOIS SCUM ON EARTH, TO TO THAT WHICH FROM THE
BEGINNING ON HAS BEEN THE VERY *MAIN* PROGRAMME POINT OF THE "GREEN"
POLITICAL
FORCES - TO *COMBAT* THE UTILIZATION OF NUCLEAR ENERGY
Today of course you and your "green-thinking" friends, glparramatta, are
stressing above all, publicly, "beware!" of that "other wolf", "manmade
global
warming". In which you're very much mistaken too.
But at the very "heart" of the entire "green" ideology - your ideology,
isn't
it? - still lies that *opposition to nuclear energy* in the world which,
from
the beginning on, all those organizations which have been calling
themselves
"green", that is, from the late 1970s on, have had as their main programme
point. (And from a decade or so earlier on, there were some
otherwise-named
forces who above all were combating that energy source, nuclear energy.)
So in
a discussion with you, it's most suitable, I think, to begin precisely
with
this question.
The anti-nuclear-energy standpoint of "your crowd" did show up, in one of
your
recent postings to MM too, even if only "in a small way", namely, by your
mentioning in your list msg #1472, more or less in passing, as one of the
speakers at a conference planned precisely for the present weekend, "Jim
Green,
FoE anti-nuclear campaigner".
I think the reasons why those persons who control "your" organizations
(this is
the same in several other countries than Australia too) today are not
stressing
publicly "No to nuclear power plants!" very much at all are: Firstly, that
the
*bourgeois* forces in those countries already since long are pretty much
in
agreement *not* to build any such (any more). And secondly, that the
majority
among *ordinary* people *in favour of* them is getting even more
overwhelming
than it already was, so that a "no-(civilian-)nukes!" propaganda today
will be
met with even more of such scowls on their part as, I hold, it does
deserve.
But *some* "ordinary" people *are* against nuclear energy, aren't they.
And
why?
Those not so few (though in no country, ever more than a certain
minority),
some younger people above all, I believe, and some others too, above all
in
those countries in the world which are said to be "rich" (Sweden and
Australia,
for instance), who are well-intentioned and/but think, that the use of
nuclear
energy in the world really is "a very bad thing", they have been *fooled
most
terribly* into thinking this, by the main ruling cliques' mass media,
schools,
universities, their film, TV and theatre production pieces, etcetera, in
short
*the entire bourgeois superstructure*, which above all, since some four
decades
back (at least) has *prevented* them from getting to know even those *most
elementary facts* of the natural sciences which are relevant in this
context.
And *nobody* - more or less! - is telling them that there today - and
since at
least some four decades back - is a *massive political motive* for the
main
ruling cliques in the world - above all, those of US imperialism, but also
others - to *hate* (peaceful) nuclear energy, which they *do*, most
fanatically, today.
Furthermore, there's a massive propaganda too coming from a number of
*phony*
"Left-wing", *phony* "Marxist" organizations in many countries, saying -
and in
this the openly-bourgeois mass media very much agree with them too - that
it's
a "leftist" political standpoint to be *against* nuclear power plants and
a
"rightist" one to be *for* them. Which is completely upside-down too. But
clearly, a few people, among them probably relatively many sincere
leftwingers,
do believe this.
Obviously you, for instance, glparramatta, are among those people. So how
to
explain those things to you?
Lots of articles precisely on this subject I already have at my homepage -
see
under "anti-nuclear energy campaign" in its "Subjects in postings" section
-
and there are also a number of websites which I'm finding good on it and
am
linking to. Here I want to go into only a few points which I think are
particularly im****tant.
1. WHAT'S NUCLEAR ENERGY?
One rather well-known (of course bourgeois) scientist, Linus Pauling, the
USA,
wrote something about that, back in 1954, in fact as the very end lines of
a
textbook of his, "General Chemistry":
"The discovery of the controlled fission of atomic nuclei and controlled
release of atomic energy is the greatest discovery that has been made
since the
controlled use of fire was made by primitive man."
This it absolutely is, I hold - as far as technical/scientific discoveries
are
concerned. And that statement we in a small non-party-political
organization
which I'm in, here in Sweden, the Committee Save Barsebäck (we have some
members in neighbouring Denmark too), have at the top of the main page of
our
website, at http://www.save-nukeplant-barsebaeck.com/main.html.
At that
website, which has many articles also in English, you can find, among
other
things, the main history concerning nuclear energy, and concerning the -
very
reactionary, and above all US-imperialism-inspired and pushed-on -
campaign
against it too, in Sweden.
Why is nuclear energy such a most superior energy source, compared to all
others that are known today?
Linus Pauling wrote in 1954, in the lines immediately preceding the
abovequoted
ones:
"The foregoing calculation illustrates the great significance of the
fissionable elements as a source of radioactive material. Their
significance as
a source of energy has also been pointed out, by the statement that 1
pound of
uranium or thorium is equivalent to 2.5 million pounds of coal. When we
remember that uranium and thorium are not rare elements, but are among the
more
common elements - the amount of uranium and thorium in the earth's crust
being
about the same as that of the common element lead - we begin to understand
the
promise of nuclear energy for the world of the future, and the
possibilities of
its contribution to human welfare."
It's the enormous amounts of energy which you get from only small
quantities of
matter with this technology, the enormous *energy density* in it, that
makes
nuclear energy - already at that stage of it which has been developed
today (in
fact, already since over 50 years ago), of nuclear fission (not yet
nuclear
fusion, for energy production, whose potential is even much more enormous
again) - so superior to all other known energy sources.
About that superiority you don't get to hear or read much today, of
course.
That's because something has happened in society - in particular this was
in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, when certain events caused the bourgeoisie
to
start putting some earlier policies it had into "reverse gear" - that has
made
the ruling small imperialist-bourgeois cliques on this planet more and
more
just *hate*, quite in particular, precisely *this* energy source. On *why*
that
has been and is, see in the below.
How much of the raw materials for it (nuclear fission) are there, and how
easy
or difficult are they to extract? These materials are in fact rather
common
elements on earth, as for instance Pauling wrote back in 1954.
There are some 4 grams of uranium (U) and 12 grams of thorium (Th) in each
ton
of (solid) material in the earth's crust - that thin skin of this planet
which
isn't yet "ours" that stretches between 15 and 50 km down, or
corresponding to
some 0.1 mm down from the surface of a sizable orange. And there are also
some
3.3 milligrams of uranium in each ton of sea water. The ores of uranium
being
mined today are either "low-grade" with a content of 100 to 2500 grams
uranium
(oxide) per ton, or in a few cases, such as a 1940s small one in the Congo
or
some present-day large ones in the Athabasca Basin in Canada,
"high-grade",
with up to 700,000 grams per ton (70% of the "dirt" found being uranium
oxide).
That obviously "strange" phenomenon, by the way - have you thought about
that,
glparramatta or other readers? - of metal ores quite in general, of there
being
found, in certain places on earth, iron, aluminium, lead, uranium, silver,
gold
etc in concentrations thousands or even millions of times their usual ones
in
the earth's crust, you as good as never get an explanation of in
literature,
including on the Net, today. But it's obviously, as explained in a book by
the
astronomer (etc) Thomas Gold (1920-2004) as late as in 1999 (see Info
#267en,
section 06) due to large amounts of those metals having gotten dissolved
in
enormous subterranean lakes and rivers of liquid hydrocarbons, oil in
fact,
which had surged up from their source in the earth's mantle during earlier
millions of years, and then trans****ted to those locations which we today
call
metal "ores", and for some reason or other leached out of those solutions
precisely there.
The ruling cliques don't want you to know about that, because they want to
hide
how enormously much oil there has been, and still today is, in the earth's
crust. Even less do they want you to know about how even much more, and
even
much cheaper, energy there is to be gotten from uranium and thorium - once
that
big *social* problem which there is on this planet, that of those cliques'
rule, has been solved.
Do I need to remind you, glparramatta, or other readers of this, how
absolutely
*vital* it is, for the people in all countries, that *energy*, all energy,
is
*plentiful and cheap*? Hopefully not. It must be pretty obvious to
practically
everybody, I think, that if energy production is artificially made more
expensive than, technically, it needs to be, and/or if such production,
willedly, is being strangled, then this causes enormous material damage,
all
around the world, and very many deaths, quite in particular in those
poorer
countries in the world where, already to begin with, energy is very scarce
and
expensive for the people.
Nuclear fuel already today is *very* cheap, and it will last practically
*forever*.
The price of raw uranium in April 2007 was $117/lb, or $251/kg. And from
*1 kg*
of (natural, unenriched) uranium you get, in those conventional or thermic
nuclear power reactors which since long are in rather common use (most of
which, in the world today, are using uranium enriched in the fissile
isotope of
it, 235U, from 0.7% to some 4%, and using as moderator, and also as heat
transmission fluid or cooling fluid, ordinary or "light" water), some
*60,000
kWh* of electricity.
That can be compared to what you get from 1 kg of oil, the secondmost
energy-dense substance in use today, which is some 12 kWh of heat, or *4
kWh*
of electricity in an oil-fired power plant.
The uranium cost per kWh produced, in such reactors, thus is some $0,0024.
To
get the actual fuel cost you must add the enrichment and fuel element
manufacturing costs etc, but those are small. Thus already with today's
technology, the cost of nuclear fuel is no more than some *0.3 US cents*,
or 3
mill, *per kWh*. With the nuclear technology, the installation costs, for
reactors, buildings, enrichment plants etc, are relatively large of
course, but
not all that much larger that those for oil-fired or natural-gas or
coal-fired
power plants, so that already today it's the nuclear power plants that
produce
electricity in the cheapest way, compared to everything else.
The reactionary authorities in certain countries, in the USA not least,
since
long are setting up regulations having no other real purpose than to make
electricity artificially expensive, quite in particular such that comes
from
nuclear power plants. But even so, the capitalists in the power industry
also
in the USA, for instance, know quite well that it's from such power plants
that
they're getting clearly the cheapest-produced electricity.
The cost of nuclear fuel already today is quite low, and will get even
lower
tomorrow.
Now that nuclear fuel price, of some 0.3 US cents per kWh, is also much
higher
than that which you'd get with so-called breeder reactors, a im****tantly
more
advanced type of reactors whose development was well under way in some of
the
relatively more highly-industrialized countries, above all in France and
also
in (West) Germany, already back in the 1970s, but which has also been
particularly fanatically opposed by that very biggest and nastiest mob of
exploiting, oppressing and mass murdering imperialist-bourgeois scum which
there is in the world today, the US imperialists (and some of their very
closest friends), so that today, breeder development is almost entirely
banned
in the world, only continuing, now 30 years later, at a very slow pace, in
some
very few countries (India, Russia, Japan).
But even according to some now rather old calculations made in France,
from the
year 1978, such reactors could produce some 2.2 million kWh per kg of
natural
uranium. That calculation was on the basis of some 20% of all the uranium
nuclei undergoing fission - thus rather many of the 238U ones too, which
make
up some 99.3% of all the uranium - in their case, this occurs by means of
their
first being transformed, "breeded", into fissile plutonium nuclei of the
isotope 239Pu. No doubt it's possible today, with not too much
(technical!)
difficulty, to make some 60% of all the uranium nuclei in one kg of the
stuff,
say, undergo fission, directly or indirectly, in a breeder, so that from
that 1
kg you'd get, not 60,000 kWh, but some *6 million kWh* of electricity.
And
the nuclear fuel cost then would be of the order of some *0.003 US cents
per
kWh*.
Which of course is practically nothing. This does not mean that the cost
of
nuclear-power-produced electricity, with such technology, would be of
quite
that low order, because there still are those installation costs, for the
reactors buildings etc, and for reprocessing plants, necessary for
breeders -
which are being called "breeders" because they, after each time they've
gotten
"loaded up" with nuclear fuel, as a result produce more such fuel, mainly
in
the form of 239Pu, than was put into them - since it's in reprocessing
plants
that the plutonium nuclei, "breeded" from 238U nuclei, plus those
remaining
235U nuclei which have not, that time, undergone fission, get separated
from
the rest of the reactor core material.
(Today existing reprocessing plants in the world are only two, as far as I
know, namely, Sellafield in the UK and La Hague in France - and you
probably,
glparramatta and others, all have heard some of those particularly loud
and
hateful outcries against those plants which have come from the US
imperialists
and some of their very closest friends. Installations which, on principle
at
least, go in the direction of helping make electricity "dirt cheap" for
ordinary people, that's something which those scum really hate like the
pest.)
Even when taking into account the installation costs for such a much more
advanced form of nuclear energy production, the production of electricity
with
such a method undoubtedly, technically, very easily *can* be made to be
*"dirt
cheap"*. What some - also bourgeois-thinking - people said about peaceful
nuclear energy back in the late 1940s in fact was, that "it eventually
will
make electricity too cheap to meter". This by no means was "an unrealistic
fantasy and dream" as some others have said, much later. The real
objection to
this perspective, by representatives of the ruling reactionary
bourgeoisie, of
course was - and is: "What, electricity that nobody's even paying for,
that's
sheer communism, for chrissake!" Precisely a most im****tant part of that
future
and very much higher stage of society, communism, is what it really is
too.
A certain turning-point in history in the 20th century, after earlier some
5,000 - 8,000 years of exploiting classes rule, that's really what the
discovery of nuclear energy - even more than those many other im****tant
discoveries in that century, did mean.
Approximately in the mid-1940s, the bourgeoisie in the world had gotten so
far,
in its continued striving to develop the productive forces - while
retaining
its system of exploitation of oppression of the vast majority of people -
that
it had "let that genie out of the bottle", nuclear energy, which, even
more
than a number of "brother" and "sister" genies likewise "let out of the
bottle"
in the 20th century, or some of them already even in the 19th century, was
and
is really so big and strong, as a productive force, that it in the longer
run
is *incompatible with* the continued rule of a minority exploiting class.
Is nuclear energy "perhaps needed anyway today" "in order to avoid manmade
global warming"?
No, that's what it's *not* needed for, since there *isn't* any "manmade
global
warming". That so-called "argument for" nuclear energy is being advanced
lately, by some bourgeois forces, who really only are after making oil
etc,
environmentally unjustifiedly, scarce and expensive, and who actually
don't
intend to build many, or even any, new nuclear power plants. It was after
the
arch-reactionaries thought that they now had already gotten nuclear energy
"contained", prevented its further construction and development, in the
late
1980s, that their massively increased their mendacious "manmade global
warming", then going after the secondmost-modern energy sources too.
This false "argument" for nuclear energy unfortunately is being repeated
also
by that otherwise very good international organization Environmentalists
For
Nuclear Energy (EFN, website at http://www.ecolo.org/),
which today has
some
9,000 members and is led by my good friend Bruno Comby, France. I'm an
active
member of EFN since many years back, and we in the Committee Save
Barsebäck
(see above) invited the im****tant pro-nuclear-energy activist Bruno to
come and
hold the main speech at our public protest meeting here in Malmö on
21.05.2005
against the Swedish government's arch-reactionary and illegal closing down
of
the perfectly well-functioning reactor Barsebäck 2 (producing 3% of all
electricity in Sweden), which unfortunately did take place anyway, despite
the
fact that over 90% of all living in this country were strongly against it.
But Bruno Comby I've - so far - not been able to convince that "manmade
global
warming" is a big fraud. He's making a mistake on this which is opposite,
so to
speak, to that which the Australian John L. Daly, who helped refute that
fraud
(see above), made concerning nuclear energy. But there are a few - also
non-Marxist - writers who, very rightly, *both* are advocating nuclear
energy
*and* combating the big "greenhouse" hoax, for instance the blogger
("Alain")
of the im****tant French language http://petrole-abiotique.blogspot.com/
("The
Abiotic Oil"), Zbigniew Jaworowski of Poland and S. Fred Singer (see
http://www.sepp.org)
and Steven Milloy (see http://www.junkscience.com/)
of the
USA, the lastmentioned obviously closely connected with certain industrial
capitalists, which doesn't change the fact that his writings on those
particular and im****tant subjects are very good.
2. WILL THE FUEL, FOR THE NUCLEAR (FISSION) REACTORS, "RUN OUT" - FOR
INSTANCE,
"RELATIVELY SOON"?
Of all the absurd and upside-down "objections" raised against that energy
source, nuclear fission, by representatives of the ruling reactionary
bourgeoisie - including, by representatives of that class who have been
masquerading as "Leftists" or even "Marxists" - the proposition that "its
fuel
will run out" (or "get too costly", which is the same thing) absolutely
deserves the prize, I think, as the very most absurd and upside-down.
Of course, even this may possibly fool some people anyway, because the
simplest
facts concerning this question (too) is being systematically withheld from
the
public, and even from many supposedly "pro-nuclear energy" bourgeois
institutes, there often emerge such statements as, "there are ascertained
uranium (and thorium) resources for (only) so-and-so many tens of years in
the
future, and likely existing ones for (only) so-and-so many hundreds of
years".
What such idiotic (as they are) "resource estimates" almost always are
keeping
away from the reader is, that those "estimates" are referring to such
resources
which can be exploited extremely cheaply, at a cost below a certain
(defined or
undefined) amount, that is, uranium ores which are relatively quite rich.
Now
in reality it's the case, however, even if only today's conventional,
thermic,
nuclear power reactors are considered, even a doubling or, say,
fivefolding of
the "accepted" uranium production cost, which then *enormously increases*
the
"ascertained" or "likely existing" fuel resources, by including in them
much
more meagre ores too, will increase the cost of nuclear-produced
electricity
*only very marginally*, by no more than some 1 US cent or so.
And when calculating with breeder use, even *strip mining common granite*
for
its 4 grams of uranium and 12 grams of thorium would make for electricity
production costs, with the use of such material, that would remain, more
or
less, in the "dirt cheap" region - though this will never become
necessary.
Much cheaper uranium and thorium production than this you can get, for
instance, by using the small amounts of them (3.3 mg of uranium) per ton
of sea
water, vast volumes of which can easily made to circulate through a
production
plant so as to compensate for those very small concentrations, a method
which
is as effective as today's mining.
Such things are what has made, for instance, John McCarthy, a
bourgeois-thinking writer who however does not agree at all with the
arch-reactionary "doomsday" propaganda of the ruling bourgeois cliques of
today, write at his website "Progress and its sustainability" at
http://www.formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
- which I'm recommending also
for
other reasons - obviously quite correctly, and argued for in detail by
him:
"With the development of nuclear energy, it became possible to show that
there
are no apparent obstacles even to billion year [NB!] sustainability."
How about that, glparramatta? You wrote in your posting MM message #1472,
in
reply to me:
"I'd like to set your mind at ease over our sup****t for environmentally
sustainable industry. ..."
But at the same time, you precisely are *opposing* - as is a main point in
all
so-called "green" programmes, isn't it? - precisely that most sustainable
energy source of them all, and also a particularly clean one, nuclear
energy.
This obviously is a big mistake of yours.
It's worth noting in this context too that the very term "sustainable
development" is one that was invented by and began to be used by some
forces of
the reactionary bourgeoisie, back in the early 1990, and which has as its
only
"point" that clear hint, which it contains, that the earlier and quite
normal
technologies and raw materials which had been in use up until then were
"not"
sustainable - that is, that they would either "run out" or else "dirty
up" the
earth "impossibly" - which by no means was or is the case. That term,
"sustainable", in its use in this context still today, in fact is a
bourgeois-reactionary "codeword" - one of quite many such - for willed
*strangulation* of industry, and in particular, of all effective energy
production.
3. IS THERE A "PROBLEM" WORTH MENTIONING WITH *WASTES* FROM NUCLEAR POWER
PLANTS?
Certainly *not*. The proposition that there is one of course is one of the
most
usual, and long-lived, among the many pur****ted "technical arguments
against"
nuclear energy advanced either by the openly-bourgeois reactionaries
themselves
or by a number of pur****tedly "Leftist" or even "Marxist" organizations
which
in reality are utter puppets or ventriloquists' dummies of theirs. And
this
proposition too is quite false and factually even ridiculous.
The substances in question - today called "wastes", among which some,
those
which have been in an operating nuclear power reactor itself or very close
to
one during a longer time, really are so intensively radioactive as to be
dangerous to approach by humans without there being an effective ****elding
around them - are being produced in only *very small amounts* per kWh of
electricity produced by the reactor in question. To store them
underground,
quite safely, and for a very long time too if needed, is no big technical
problem at all, and costs very little.
The Swedish solution for it, for instance, said by some to be a
"Rolls-Royce
solution", can be viewed in detail at the website of the company SKB at
http://www.skb.se/
and the electricity consumers already today are paying
some
$0.0016, or *0.16 US cents, per kWh*, for that complete storage programme.
This
is, true enough, a certain addition to that part of the electricity price
that
covers the nuclear fuel cost, some 0.3 US cents per kWh, but likewise a
very
small one, and a very small part of the electricity price for the
consumers,
which today is over 10 US cents per kWh in the USA and even much higher in
some
of the relatively "rich" European countries too.
For instance, at the discussion website "The Oil Drum: Europe", at
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3795,
one writer, Bill Hannahan,
recently
pointed out:
"Mandating the widespread use of expensive energy systems has resulted in
the
highest electricity prices in the world, Denmark, 41 cents per kWh,
Germany, 30
cents per kWh."
What that writer rightly called "expensive" energy systems, whose use is
indeed
mandated by the reactionary governments in the countries mentioned, both
of
them heavily influenced by that of the USA, is not least *"wind power"*,
which
cannot be anything than extremely expensive because the kinetic energy in
moving air is so extremely small per cubic unit of it, so that those many
windmills which today are being built in many countries, heavily
subsidized by
the state, at the expense of the working masses of people, for instance
need
for their construction no less than five times the amount of steel and ten
times the amount of concrete, per produced kWh, which is needed for
nuclear
power reactors. Those windmills are nothing else than *propaganda
propellers*,
whose real aim is for the ruling bourgeois reactionaries (and their puppet
organizations) to try to convince people that "there are *no*" *efficient*
energy sources.
And it's also so-called *"bio energy"*, likewise extremely impractical and
expensive. Concerning such things, which - it should be noted - were
massively
propagandized by the of course Republican US president *Bush* in his
"State of
the Union" speech in January 2006, that propaganda even caused the
industrial-capitalists-representing Wall Street Journal to call, quite
justifiedly, that speech by "their own" president "*a wood chips speech*".
(See
Info #249en.)
In many of those countries mentioned, and even much more in the less
"modern"
ones, the now horrendous rises of the energy prices, including the
electricity
prices, are hitting the people very hard, in particular the poorer part of
the
population. But this has nothing at all to do with any "nuclear waste
problem"
costs, but is due to massive willed strangulation of all effective energy
production and to massively increased taxation by the arch-reactionary
governments, often mendaciously "motivated" as "measures against"
(non-existing) "manmade global warming".
Do some nuclear wastes "need to be stored for 100,000 years"? That's very
unlikely. This can be done and wouldn't even be very expensive; this we
electricity consumers here in Sweden are already paying our 0.16 US cents
per
kWh for. But there are already today some quite detailed suggestions for
how to
utilize that extra energy which the radioactivity of these substances
which
today are called "wastes" consists of. One possible technique for this is
a
so-called spallation reactor, still only on the drawing board.
But, if comparing the level of technology 200 years ago, in 1808, to the
one
today, don't you find it pretty unlikely, glaparramatta and others, that,
within the next 200 years from now, the nuclear fission "wastes" of today
will
not have been turned into useful energy sources instead? Or, by the way,
that
the - true enough, quite considerable - technical problems with the
utilization
of nuclear fusion for energy production, whose potential even dwarfs that
of
nuclear fission, will not then have been solved?
Now meanwhile, in the world of today, there concerning nuclear power
plants has
been rather much talk of "possible accidents" with such. The ruling
reactionary
cliques even are maintaining - and not many have contradicted them on this
-
that there some 20 or more years ago did occur two quite serious such
"accidents", one on the respective territory of each of the then two
dominating
superpowers in the world, "as it happened", and one of which was even "an
international disaster".
4. HOW ABOUT THE NUCLEAR POWER REACTOR "ACCIDENTS" AT TMI CLOSE TO
HARRISBURG
IN THE USA IN 1979 AND AT CHERNOBYL IN THE THEN SOVIET UNION IN 1986?
Both of these events were, it can be and has been demonstrated rather
conclusively, *not* "accidents" at all, but due to willed manipulations,
*sabotage* in fact, by some of the main arch-reactionary ruling cliques in
the
world at that time, in both cases with a main aim of combating the use and
further development of civilian nuclear energy in the world.
On these events, I'm copying in here some lines from some earlier Infos of
mine. First, on *"Harrisburg"*, the massive reactionary propaganda
concerning
which among other things got to "motivate" a very particular "*referendum*
on
nuclear power" here in Sweden on 23.03.1980 - one which clearly showed up
the
relation between the so-called anti-nuclear-energy "movement", on the one
hand,
and the most elementary principles of democracy, on the other - from Info
#278en,
[QUOTE:]
THE "HARRISBURG" MANIPULATION IN 1979 AND THE FANTASTIC "REFERENDUM ON
NUCLEAR
POWER" IN SWEDEN IN 1980
On 28.03.1979, there occurred a so-called "accident" at reactor No. 2 of
the
Three Mile Island nuclear power plant not far from Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania,
the USA. Nobody got hurt by it and there was only moderately large
material
destruction, but this event was taken as an op****tunity for some even much
louder anti-nuclear energy howling by the mass media, in the USA itself
and not
least here in Europe, than ever before.
At that time, I got a phone call from my then comrades in the
abovementioned,
tiny but actually Marxist-Leninist party in Germany, who said that they
strongly suspected, not least because of the point in time in which it
occurred, the international political situation which was a particular one
in
several respects then, that this was not really an accident at all but a
manipulation by the US imperialists, in order to create a certain
diversion and
not least in order to get the anti-nuclear-energy "movement" going again,
after
the political exposure of its real background and movers had brought it to
almost a halt in (West) Germany, for instance. (US president then was
Jimmy
Carter, known among other things to be rather extremely
anti-nuclear-energy; he
for instance quite openly had tried to prevent the then West Germany from
transferring nuclear-energy technology to Brazil.) My comrades asked me to
help
collect information internationally on the TMI incident.
And I did find, above all, a particularly "juicy" piece of such
information.
I've earlier written about this in Info #034en, entitled "US trickery on
Barsebäck" and posted to newsgroups etc on 27.05.1997, from whose part 2/3
I
quote:
"After the anti-nuclear-energy campaign had been criticized and the
motives
behind it disclosed, it was slowed down considerably in Europe in 1978.
Therefore and for some other reasons, there for some [people] arose a
'need'
for a 'serious nuclear-energy accident'. And one such was arranged, in the
Three Mile Island 2 reactor south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA, on
28.03.1979. The 'Harrisburg accident' is a whole story by itself, one that
I so
far haven't gotten around to post much about - I'm planning to do so
later. The
KPD/ML (NEUE EINHEIT) in April '79 published a leaflet on it, disclosing
several vital facts, some of which had been discovered by me (who also
reproduced that leaflet in Swedish).
One detail which we found to be very telling was: One week before the
'accident', on 21.03.79, a certain 'fantasy story' appeared in the York
Dispatch, a paper published in York, West Virginia, a city just as close
to the
TMI plant as is Harrisburg, only across the state border. The story,
entitled
'The Total Meltdown', was about how, precisely one week later, on 28.03,
precisely the reactor TMI 2 'suffered a pump failure and then [its core]
melted
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