Is It An Inalienable Human Right to Self-Destruct and Take Others With You?
Are a few decades of electric power really worth future millennia of radioactive waste deadly to all living things?
Nuclear Logic
Atomic reactors were originally developed to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Using the heat of their operation to produce steam pressure to drive turbines to generate electric power was a convenient cover story necessary to overcome people’s fear and repugnance against using nuclear weapons after the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Since nuclear reactors’ inception, over 50 years of repeated official promises to ban nuclear weapons have never been honored.
Every nuclear power reactor in every nuclear nation, and the accumulated radioactive spent fuel from its operation, is a potential nuclear weapon-in-place for saboteurs and terrorists.
Uranium mining, milling, enriching, fuel fabrication and nuclear reactors are also the industrial foundation for nuclear weapons production.
The ‘inalienable right’ to have nuclear power therefore also carries with it the right to make nuclear bombs.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), or the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty
In the week of March 3 to 7, 2025 activists and government officials from around the world will converge the United Nations Headquarters in New York to participate in events centering on the third Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
“On 7 July 2017 – following a decade of advocacy by ICAN and its partners – an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations adopted a landmark global agreement to ban nuclear weapons, known officially as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It entered into force on 22 January 2021.”
There is a growing intention on the part of thousands of global citizens to end the threat to planetary life from nuclear weapons. Heroic efforts resulted in the signing of more than half the world’s nations to the prohibition against nuclear weapons.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), along with the Nuclear Truth Project and others are sponsoring a rich program of side events to the UN conference. ICAN is the international campaign to stigmatize, prohibit & eliminate nuclear weapons.
The writers will be attending the week’s events as members of the Nuke Watch Delegation competently organized by Kelly Lundeen.
EON is also honored to be a co-sponsor of Beyond Nuclear’s Nuclear Free Future Awards ceremony.
Outing the Nuclear Industrial Complex
There is a global network of pro-nuclear forces, which likes to call itself by the complementary and benign-sounding label, ‘The Nuclear Enterprise.’
We prefer the more transparent and accurate term, Nuclear Industrial Complex.
This is a globe-spanning network comprising corporations, government institutions, industry-captured, so-called ‘regulatory agencies,’ compromised and mis-led labor organizations and various deluded interest groups. They are mesmerized by the false promises of pro-nuclear cultists who have an almost religious ‘belief’ in nuclear technology. What we’ve observed is that they believe that no major problems will ever happen and that they can continue on without threatening the planetary ecosystems.
Nuclear Neurosis
In addition to its potentially incredible historical significance, the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty also highlights the impact of what can be termed the ‘Nuclear Neurosis’ infecting the entire transnational nuclear policy-making process.
As the Affected Communities and Allies Working Group for a Nuclear-Free World ACAWG states in its Recommendations on Articles 6 and 7 and Preamble and
advocates in its Recommendation # 9
“The nuclear industrial complex facilitates States’ censorship of pollution, emissions, and proliferation data caused by the nuclear weapons fuel chain. The global nuclear industrial complex promotes nuclear weapons reactors by advertising for its byproduct energy without ensuring: human and ecosystem safety or that the nuclear material will not be used for weapons. Meanwhile, Members of this complex shroud data related to nuclear waste, such as tritium and plutonium, which present proliferation risks as nuclear reactors emit this dangerous nuclear weapons material. The nuclear industrial complex, including IAEA and nuclear States, obscures facts related to nuclear energy, proliferation, and contamination, thus endangering communities and their environs.”
So Soon, They Forget…
The first documentary we produced together back in the ‘80’s was Strategic Trust: The Making of Nuclear Palau. It was a look inside the nuclear free and independent Pacific movement. Back in those days of yore, it was generally understood that nuclear weapons and energy and the waste they all produce are inseparable.
Since that time the once robust nuclear free movement has fragmented into siloed sub-movements operated by hard working, overwhelmed aging activists. If this long-lived movement is not to become a dwindling geriatric remnant of its former self, the key perception of the nuclear cycle as a unified whole needs to be acknowledged and passed on to a new generation of young informed activists. Thankfully Ban Week in NY also includes an active contingent of young people that gives us hope.
French President Macron and CHAT GPT Agree
President Macron of France told it like it is in a 2022 speech when he said,
“One cannot exist without the other. Without civil nuclear power, there is no military nuclear power, and without military nuclear power, there is no civil nuclear power….”
CHAT GPT - the future of which, like all AI, is said to require massive amounts of nuclear power - agrees,
“While nuclear power can exist without nuclear weapons, [a questionable assumption, since every reactor is a weapon-in-place for terrorists] nuclear weapons cannot exist without nuclear power infrastructure. The same knowledge, materials, and facilities that enable peaceful nuclear energy also provide the foundation for weaponization.” Emphasis added.
Wise Proposals
That’s why we support the Affected Communities and Allies Working Group for a Nuclear-Free World (ACAWG) in their call to eliminate the ‘inalienable right’ phrase from the Treaty’s Preamble quoted above. Their Policy Recommendation #13 reads,
“We recommend deleting the misleading language in the preamble of the TPNW regarding nuclear energy, because nuclear energy creates more victims of the use and testing of nuclear weapons and will prevent us from effectively achieving humanitarian goals under Article 6, while impeding the fundamental goal of the Treaty: the total elimination of nuclear weapons through verification.”
ACAWG’s campaign brings attention to the stark reality that, at every phase of the nuclear industrial complex’s cycle, the populations of communities near the industrial facilities involved suffer permanent genetic, environmental, social, cultural and economic damage.
As the saying goes, ‘What goes around, comes around.’ The indivisible Nuclear Industrial Cycle is long-lasting poison at every stage.
Global Hibakusha
Hibakusha is the Japanese word for people affected by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II.
Robert Jacobs was a professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University. He has written a book titled Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha, making the point that, because of WWII atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs, the routine emissions from all operating reactors, nuclear accidents, and decades of radioactive waste accumulation at reactor sites, We Are All Hibakusha.
With regard to spent fuel from reactors, Jacobs points out that,
“This high-level waste has been piling up around the world for over seventy years, most often in the form of temporary storage on site. The IAEA estimated that that the total amount of commercial spent nuclear fuel in 2013 was 180,800 MTH. This is strictly from the operation of nuclear power plants to produce electricity and does not include the vast amounts of spent nuclear fuel left over from plutonium production by the world’s nuclear weapons states.”
The acronym ‘MTHM’ for ‘metric ton of heavy metal’ is the commonly used measure of the mass of nuclear fuel.
The document continues,
“For example the United States has the world’s largest fleet of commercial power plants, with 104 having been operated or currently operating. This commercial operation has produced 67,600 MTHM of high-level nuclear waste. The military production reactors of the United States have produced another 25,000 MTHM, or a bit more than a third of the inventory created by the commercial reactors for a total of 92,600 MTHM from the US …This US inventory amounts to half of the total produced globally by all commercial power generation alone.
“High-level nuclear waste must be competently managed to protect the health and safety of living creatures, today and deeply into the future. This requires that the waste be securely stored for over one hundred thousand years.”
Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle co-direct EON, the Ecological Options Network.
The multi-award winning EON feature documentary SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy, was chosen as the opening film in the 13th annual Global Nonviolent Film Festival, where it also received the Organizers’ Award for ‘BEST ACTUALITY SUBJECT – Feature Documentary’.
SOS has won awards in several other international festivals, and is available for viewing worldwide. The film was produced by Mary Beth Brangan and directed by Brangan, Heddle, and Morgan Peterson, who also served as editor. SOS is a trans-generational family co-creation of two senior filmmakers and a millennial mom with two young daughters.
For information, please visit the SOS website.