Fukushima forever

Since I wrote last things have only gotten worse but not dramatically so. There may never be a big boom to grab our attention and horror. Fukushima will just linger, a chronic illness. We will learn to live with it. 

The physicist Michio Kaku recommends entombing the Fukushima reactors like Chernobyl was entombed: dumping sand, boron, concrete from above. That is about as much of a solution as burying our heads in the sand. It will tamp down the radiation, perhaps limit it to a forever-contaminated radius of a few miles. It will help temporarily. But they are already planning to build a new, bigger, more expensive, hopefully more durable sarcophagus around Chernobyl.

You can see it coming. Every few decades the “containment” will have to be enlarged or strengthened. It will become a monument to human arrogance every bit as futile as the Tower of Babel. This tomb will be bigger and costlier than the pyramids in every way, and it won't dare become a future tourist attraction.

They say people shouldn’t live around Chernobyl for a thousand years. A thousand years! Think back. It’s like including in the Magna Carta a prescription for where people should never live. And expect enforcement down through the ages.

I have trouble wrapping my mind around the time spans of radioactivity, but then I have always had trouble understanding things that are bigger than human scale. I worked a long time ago as a writer for a construction trade association. These were big builders. They gouged out the earth and built skyscrapers and highways and dams. I could never understand how they dared take on such huge projects. How could they even imagine such things? It boggled my mind.

My boggled mind is perhaps under the influence of estrogen. As a female I have evolved to tend the minutiae of life, creating life, nourishing life, cleaning up around it, thinking about it—not pushing the earth around or building monuments that will last for thousands of years or pushing technology beyond the beyond. 

I’m not blaming Fukushima on testosterone. I’m just saying there is nothing in my visceral makeup that helps me understand how and why we humans do such things. I have no empathy for it. I just don’t get it. Can somebody enlighten me?

What I do have some feeling for is the earth’s deep time. Time of the scale of radioactivity and even the pyramids belongs to the earth, the rocks, the elements, the generational nature of life, the chain of being. We run into trouble when individual, temporal—temporary—human beings or clusters of humans, focused on their personal aims and goals, and dependent on their current knowledge, set things in motion that will affect the earth and future generations of life. 

Face it. We don’t know how to do this well. We’re not smart enough or wise enough. And yet we have always done it and continue to do it and, I suppose, there’s no stopping us.