Apres moi, a half life of 48,000 years.....

The quote, Apres moi, la deluge, (After me, the flood) was attributed to the 18th century French king, Louis XV. To be accurate though, it was actually his mistress La Pompadour, who uttered the comment. Louis XV ruined the French economy. He engaged in a ruinous war that he lost and the effort to wage the war decimated France. Forests were cut down to build ships. Thousands of men were slaughtered in the campaigns. France lost Canada, but at Versailles, the party never stopped. This was the legacy he left his son, the fated Louis XVI, a bankrupt nation on the verge of Revolution. There

was a sense of madness infecting the ruling class of France. A desperate attempt to create a false front of serene power on all fronts. A senile nobility trying to maintain an illusion of power through the excessive fashion and cosmetics. Even old men could not be seen in public with out a properly powdered wig, a coating of white lead tinted thick pancake makeup and the liberal use of red rouge and a beauty mark. The the thick white make up sort of filled in the wrinkles, the beauty mark distracted the eye from "imperfections"...the rouged cheeks and painted on lips? Mark it up to the rigid style which made everyone look sort of the same. I suppose you could find an analogy in the esthetic of conservative American media and politicians. Freeze dried bo toxed Blond women, blow dried touped tanned men all with a secret mania for cosmetic surgery to stave off the inevitable fate of obsolescence.
I suppose I should ask here, what is the half life of a FOX News female talking head? If you're a guy, heck, you can go on until you wither up and die on screen, like Wolf Blitzer or or just plain senile and incoherent, like, uh, Rush Limbaugh or like Geraldo, because, nobody really notices anyway and senile mental incontinence seems to be a big plus in that business, it would seem.  But the rampant sexism of conservative media will not tolerate any less than plastic coated cyber blond perfection in a woman. But, back to the quote, After me, the deluge, represents an attitude which is more alive today than it was in the 18th century. It is the attitude of the financial industry, the attitude of corporations like Monsanto. The financial industry is all about their profits; protecting and enriching themselves and those blessed to be insiders and the future be damned. Corporate mentality is the same. Monsanto and the pharmaceutical industry, for example plays by their own rules when it comes to marketing and testing ideas and products. They create and control their own studies to prove to the consumers that their products are safe and the consumers must buy them or be damned. More about Monsanto, which I have been ranting about for years in another post.
I have to say first, that I am militantly opposed to Nuclear Energy...it is not the future. I won't deny the science or the possibilities, but the commercial attempts by corporate interests to sell us the concept of safe and affordable Nuclear power have failed catastrophic level in every aspect. We have had the concept of safe affordable nuclear energy force fed to us for over a half century. What could go wrong? And when something inevitably goes wrong...who knew?
The history of nuclear energy and research has been one of ever accelerating attrition for our planet. More and more parts of the planet are becoming sacrifice zones. There is an area in the Caucasus region of Russia, Kyshtym which had a storage facility accident in 1957. The entire area is still too dangerous to venture into almost 60 years later. America is still dealing with the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the ongoing radiation problems it has been responsible for in Washington State since the end of WW2. The problems are incrementally ongoing and growing. France is just beginning to deal with it's super secret nuclear industry and the contamination it has created in the hills outside of Limoges. America and the rest of the new born nuclear nations on earth have been using the ocean as a convenient place to make nuclear waste disappear. Except it doesn't.  Here's a partial list of civilian nuclear accidents starting in the 1950's. In 1964, I was a kid on a field trip to Luna Pier, Michigan to visit the new Detroit

Edison Enrico Fermi sodium breeder reactor power plant. We were treated to a tour and a cartoon presentation about the wonderful world of the future of cheap and safe nuclear energy. Just a few weeks later, The Enrico Fermi Reactor was stopped mere minutes before it would have created a situation that wiped out the city of Monroe, Michigan and Detroit, just 40 miles north.
The disaster was a minor design problem, which no one could have anticipated or even diagnosed until years later. The results? Thousands of gallons of highly volatile plutonium contaminated sodium in barrels too dangerous to move stored in a facility on the fragile shore of a Lake Erie swamp. Half life?

We lived through Three Mile Island and it's been a quarter century since Chernobyl. When will the land around Chernobyl be safe enough to live on again? Here's a link to a study of the biological consequences that are just beginning to be understood in the Chernoblyl disaster. 60 years into the age of Nuclear attrition and the plants we built over the decades are beginning to fall into obsolescence. Materials decay and fail. Accidents occur. Obsolete plants have to decommissioned and decontaminated. You pay for this. Here is a great breakdown of the real costs of Nuclear energy. If you do a little research, nuclear energy was never cheaper than other sources and will never be. It is a corporate money pit. A short sighted phony miracle to generate immediate profits for corporations that will be the responsibility and onus of future generations to contain and try to safely manage. We have waste untold trillions of dollars on a death wish. Think about the race and money spent to develop  nuclear energy in WW2. It was done in record time. We have been dragging our feet and fighting the corporate interests in our quest for clean affordable dafe energy. The gains are incremental, but if we had a "Manhattan Safe Energy Project" years ago, we would all be the winners. A safer planet and more manageable lives. 

In Japan, we are now dealing with the biggest ever ongoing Nuclear Attrition Disaster Zone. We all watched the video over and over again in horror as the Fukushima Daiichi Tepco reactors blew after the March 11, 2011 earthquake. Again, the best excuse the industry could muster boiled down to "Who knew?"

But the nuclear industry in Japan has been a terrible nightmare of mismanagement, organized graft and cutting corners and costs hiding behind a wall of industrial government sanctioned security. The author Alex Kerr wrote a book in 2001 called Dogs and Demons. He is an American author but has lived in Japan since childhood. He is the only western author to ever have won their highest literary award for his earlier book, the classic on Japanese culture, Lost Japan. In Dogs and Demons, Kerr documents and chronicles the history of coverups of the Japanese Nuclear Power industry. The book created such unease in Japan, that Kerr found himself, once a celebrity, shunned and really had to leave the country. His book was suppressed in Japan. But this only reiterates the power and complicity of industry in ignoring regulations and making profits at any costs. As far as they are concerned, what you know won't hurt them, and if you get hurt, it's just too damn bad and just too damn late. Now, after 2 years, the drama is just beginning. There have been two years of ongoing Cover ups about the loss of containment of the contaminated water which is now seeping into the ground water and flowing into the ocean at an incremental rate and the TEPCO officials just have no idea how to stop it.  This is the deluge and it has a half life of 48,000 years. We all owe ourselves, our planet and the future generations our whole heated, passionate desire to see the end of the death wish, dead end of the myth of safe nuclear energy. We have been lied to repeatedly and we have been denied the future that we could have had already. Here's a list of anti nuclear power groups, world wide to check out. I have been a member of Greenpeace for almost 6 years!