A lot of the Yukon uranium mining claims are in the Peel watershed, thousands of them. In his letter to the Yukon News from June 24 "Uranium Moratorium Now" Lewis Riffkind laid out what some of the unavoidable consequences of uranium ming are, radioactive tailings from where dust travels and ground water is contaminated. Because of that British Columbia has a uranium mining moratorium in place. The danger of uranium mining alone warrants the protection of the Peel watershed, at least 50 % of it. The ecological reasons have been explained but its also the responsible thing to do to preserve peace, to prevent a waste of public money for useless and harmful nuclear installations. I am going to discuss a concern that the nuclear industry, of which uranium mining is part of, has managed to play down very well. In fact so well that even critics usually buy into it. Its all about the idea that the purpose of the nuclear industry is to produce energy. Its a carefully crafted fiction that we need to leave behind in order to touch reality. Its an industry that is almost entirely funded by taxes. The profiteers in the business have a few front operations like medical isotopes or power plants that deliver electricity into the grid.
Now that the Chalk River hell hole is finished because its so scary, medical isotopes seem not so very important and irreplaceable any longer. The US Department of Energy has wind power listed as about 50 % more expensive than coal which makes it cheaper than nuclear power. Nuclear energy never had and never will have a market, there is no real business accounting, many costs are hidden in military and other expense accounts. Some of the data are hard to come by but independent researchers suspect that the energy balance is negative. That would mean that nuclear energy facilities use more energy in fossil fuel, hydro power and other energy forms than what is ever put out in the life time of the nuclear power plants of a given countrys program. Aside to diminishing oil and gas and money reserves huge quantities of metals as well natural space, ecology and brain power are tied up in the hubris. Another commodity that the nuclear industry eats up is democracy, for reasons like impossible security and truth management problems. So why is it there? The answer is bombs. French nuclear power is an often cited and often misunderstood example. France needed its own uranium enrichment program for weapons because it bailed out of NATO in 1958. There too the energy business is the perfect front for the bomb business. People everywhere wouldn't stand for such overkill in the bomb business and knowingly being taxed so much for universal holocaust proliferation. It just makes sense, nothing seems ever too expensive in order to have bigger and better guns than somebody else. You see, its not just radioactive contamination that leaks out, the cause is so purely corrupt and so entirely false that proportional to the industry size of a country, corruption tends to spill over into other spheres of life. Imagine the potential for criminal activities in the current Yukon Party government if it was overseeing a uranium producing mining sector in the Yukon.
Nuclear weapons are not an ugly sideline of the 'industry', they are its origin, its core and its foundation. Lets be clear about this, there is no peaceful use of the atom, other than perhaps some really small scale research and medical installations. How could there be in a market economy when nuclear power generation costs are outclassed by every other large scale form of power generation and are not even long term competitive to solar panels? The misunderstanding of weapons-grade materials as possible but not desirable extension of power generating plants is the big lie of the nuclear industry. It is the other way around, the reactors with their fuel cycles are a necessary part of manufacturing weapons-grade materials.
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Great Bear Lake Uranium Miningby petrcizek12,536 views
That is an Iraqi child.
Peacetoyouandyours 2 years ago