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May 7-13, 1995 - Defense Environmental Conference
http://www.angelfire.com/mac/egmatthews/worldinfo/problems/war.html
Problem
There are several areas of this planet permanently damaged by pollution from
weapons of war. Some modern weapons have effects greater than intended.
So-called Depleted Uranium has been used to make shells heavier and more
penetrating. Its manufacturers claim it has no radioactive effects. However in the
places it has been used: Iraq and Kuwait (1991); Kossovo and Serbia 1999 there have
been rises in the rates of cancers and malformed births. Is this caused by the residual
radioactivity or by chemical effects? No-one knows as insufficient research has been
done.
So far the military have not admitted responsibility.
The US sprayed defoliating agents over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the
Vietnam war. There has been a legacy in that area of birth malformations and high
rates of cancer, caused by the TCCD which was a contaminant of the main chemical -
a hormone weedkiller. The purpose was to kill the rain forest, which only slowly
grows back.
Among the sufferers are many of the US forces who delivered the chemicals, ate fish
and animals from the affected areas, swum in the rivers and lakes.
Cluster bombs and Mines
Although some of the major powers have agreed not to use landmines, the US and
Britain still use cluster bombs: a single bomb containing many small bombs which
are released on the first explosion. Many of these small bomblets do not explode at
once but remain unexploded like landmines.They continue to endanger lives.
Children tend to pick them up. They can be active for tens of years after the conflict.
Mines can remain for many years, blowing off people's feet and legs.
Possible Solutions
1) Can the military be forced not to use chemicals and other substances that have
long-term health effects?
The military are notoriously resistant to any control.
2) Can some of the weapons of the past ever be cleared up?
So far the TCCD dropped on Vietnam seems to be there for ever. Should the land be
abandoned? Where would the people go? Is there serious research into a way of
removing this substance? Could there be a microbial method of digesting it? We
should all hope so, but so far there are few indications of success.
There is no known method of recovering the depleted uranium from shell fragments
and dust. If found on the surface it can be gathered up and buried in deep pits, but
only some of it can be treated in this way.
Radioactivity
Problem
The energy contained in the nucleus of atoms was discovered in the first half of the
20th century. As early as the 1930s there were warnings that releasing it would be
dangerous to life. During the second world war an international team headed by
American scientists produced the first explosions based on an uncontrolled nuclear
reaction. Two of these were used on Japanese cities in July and August 1945.
Following the second world war other powers acquired the means to make these
bombs, first the fission bomb using Uranium or Plutonium, later the fusion bomb
using Lithium and heavy hydrogen (Deuterium).
The essential substance for these weapons was plutonium which does not exist in the
natural world. It can only be produced by the action of neutrons on uranium. The
military powers therefore had to build industrial plants to produce plutonium for
bombs. In the 1950s these were sold to the public as nuclear power stations
producing electricity. It was claimed that the electricity would be "too cheap to
meter" . However, the cost of electricity was in fact subsidized by the military uses of
the plutonium, alleged to be a "by-product" . By the 1980s it was shown that the cost
of electricity from nuclear power stations was much higher than from conventional
coal and oil burning stations, especially if the cost of dismantling was taken into
account. Moreover, no method of safe dismantling was actually known.
In addition there were persistent reports of higher levels of leukemia and other
cancers in the areas round power stations and processing factories. A world wide rise
in cancer incidence followed the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere in the
1950s. These tests spread radioactivity throughout the world and increased disease
incidence everywhere. A Partial Test Ban treaty did not stop testing but confined it to
underground sites. Nevertheless gaseous radioactivity continues to escape from the
underground tests.
Other rises in cancers and deaths of unknown causes followed nuclear accidents to
power stations at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl in the Ukraine.
Several parts of the world have accumulated high levels of radioactivity such that at
some time in the future they may be regarded as uninhabitable. These include:
Pacific Islands near the American atmospheric testing grounds of Eniwetok and
Bikini; parts of South and Western Australia where Britain tested weapons; parts of
French Polynesia where France tested weapons;
Parts of Kazakhstan near Semipalatinsk in the Soviet Union where many of the
inhabitants were irradiated during tests; Novaya Zemlya where much of the former
Soviet Union's nuclear navy is beached or dumped, the sea off Norway where the
Komsomolets foundered with several nuclear weapons aboard in an increasingly
dangerous condition.
Parts of Utah and New Mexico in the United States near testing grounds;
Massachusetts Bay (where radioactive waste was disposed of for many years (1945-
59));
Parts of the Urals near Kshytim and Chelyabinsk during the early work on the Soviet
nuclear weapons where an explosion of nuclear waste occurred in the 1950s: this is
estimated to have allowed 20 times the amount of radioactivity to escape as at the
later Chernobyl. Many people are believed to have died;
the area around Chernobyl including large parts of the Ukraine, Belarus, eastern
Europe and pockets of western Europe including parts of Snowdonia and the Scottish
Border country, following the most serious nuclear accident in 1987 (estimated early
deaths by 1991 -10,000 plus with perhaps millions to come).
A British consultancy has already recommended that the city of Kiev
(3,000,000 inhabitants) be evacuated and abandoned. It is unlikely to be
implemented.
Chinese testing grounds at Lop Nor in the Far West
The Cumbrian Coast and Irish Sea following uncontrolled emissions of radioactive
substances including large amounts of Plutonium (estimated 500kg) into the sea from
Sellafield processing plant. This affects the whole northwest coastal zone of the
United Kingdom.
Some areas of Washington State near military processing plants;
Areas near India's nuclear centers and power plants;
A plane containing nuclear weapons crashed on Greenland in the 1950s scattering
plutonium over a large area; the area remains radioactive, though largely uninhabited;
and many others
All these sites will remain dangerous for a period into the future of at least 20,000
years - equal to half the past history of conscious humanity.
The Russian designed nuclear power stations of eastern Europe, and especially the
station at Kosloduy in Bulgaria are a potential danger. Others are those in Czech
Republic and Bohunice in Slovakia (near Bratislava and Wien) and Poland. The UN
believes all the Soviet reactors are unsafe. In Yugoslavia a war has been taking place
near nuclear stations.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has released on to the clandestine world market a
quantity of plutonium and Uranium 235, giving rise to fears of terrorists and others
making use of it. There are also large numbers of unemployed nuclear scientists who
may be tempted to work for "rogue" governments. South Africa is another source.
Possible Solutions
It would seem to be sensible to build no more nuclear installations of any kind and
close down the existing ones as soon as possible.
There is no present or foreseeable technology which can put the radioactive
substances back where they came from.
In the future, even when existing nuclear activities have been closed down, there will
be areas of the earth's surface which will have to be evacuated. All existing nuclear
sites may remain uninhabitable and unusable for agriculture. (If the loss of rent for
agriculture for thousands of years from each site could be calculated and added to the
cost of electricity, they would be seen to be impossibly expensive).
However, in all industrial countries there seems to be a large lobby of people
irrationally attached to this dangerous technology. These people were well-funded
during the nuclear arms race (not ended even now) and still advocate more nuclear
power stations, though it is now impossible to get non-government finance to build
them. Ordinary banks cannot finance them. The insurance cost alone is prohibitive as
it would be impossible to meet the real costs of an accident.
Some countries, such as France, Czech Republic and Slovakia and the Soviet Union
have become dependent on nuclear power for much of their electricity needs. These
countries may need external aid if the nuclear power stations are to be closed down
quickly. East German stations were closed soon after German unification; other
equally dangerous nuclear stations of the same bad design remain in operation in
Czech Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Germany had
the resources to replace them with gas turbines and surplus capacity in the west
German network; the others have no access to western technology (or can't afford it).
A similar investment in solar power using the fusion reactor that is the Sun would
seem to be a more sensible solution to the shortage of energy than to increase the
number of fission reactors or attempt the building of fusion reactors on earth.
It is to be hoped that there will be no further use or construction of nuclear weapons
which would damage both the user and the "enemy" . Their only legitimate use might
be the defense against asteroids, but non-nuclear means might well prove to be
effective for this.
The Club of Rome would prefer to do without nuclear power but admit that it might
be necessary to keep the possibility in case solar developments occur too late to
replace fossil carbon fuels when climate changes are causing a panic (after having
delayed the controls on oil and coal until climate change will already be causing
serious problems).