Original Link (obsolete): http://www.thedefendersonline.com/2009/06/05/getting-our-environmental-%E2%80%98glow%E2%80%99-on/
This originally ran on TheDefendersOnline.com.
Getting Our Environmental Glow On
Posted By The Editors | June 5th, 2009 | Category: Hot Topics |
By Eisa Ulen
On March 28, 1979, my mother crouched low, gripped my shoulders, and told me this: “If they evacuate today, they’ll take you to the State Farm Building. There will be lots of kids there, because all the children in Harrisburg will be taken to the same place. Don’t be afraid. Keep your eyes on your teacher, and never leave her or let her get too far from you. You’ll probably have a partner, like on a field trip. Hold your partner’s hand, tight. Don’t let go for a moment. Don’t wander away. And don’t be scared. No matter what, I’ll be there. I’ll be coming. Don’t worry. Mamma will get to you.”
Then she hugged me close.
I nodded, said nothing more than our usual goodbyes, grabbed my book bag and my red Tupperware lunchbox, and walked to the bus stop. There, all the kids in my neighborhood were subdued. The quiet was deafening. Everyone’s mother, it seemed, had told them something meant to inspire calm but that had, by the sheer act of telling, instead inspired fear.
We were on our way to North Side Elementary School in the Central Dauphin School District, near the state capital in Harrisburg, the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, several dairy farms, some Amish households, and, by a distance of about 12 miles, Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island power plant, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in American history.
On the surface, nothing had changed. The boys still clutched their Pittsburgh Steelers lunchboxes, the girls still wanted to be Sandy in Grease, and we all, I knew, had at least one Star Wars folder in our three ring binders. But now, as we stood there, I imagined a mist of fallout, a radioactive cloud, a puff of chemicals that hovered just over our heads. To my 5th grade mind, poison was being sucked into my body with each breath. Maybe that’s why everyone kept their mouth shut. We would soon, I was sure, be fired, lit like matches to a ghastly, chemical-induced glow.
Out of the gray of that March morning, the yellow school bus appeared. Miraculously, no one’s skin was ablaze. “But we will be glowing from the radiation,” one kid said with a giddiness near hysteria that I now know only comes from fear. “One day in the future, like, in the year 2001, we’ll all be glowing.”
I counted in my head. 2001 was so far away. I’d be so old. It was impossible for me to imagine myself so many years away from that moment, grown, and all aglow.
Most of us laughed, way too loudly. “Hey, right now, I see your hand glowing. No, your face. Hey, your teeth are glowing – or are they just yellow because you didn’t brush, because your breath stinks.”
“It’s the nuclear leak! I opened my mouth this morning, and now my teeth are glowing.” We worked hard to crack ourselves up.
All of us laughed our way through the vapors that, I just knew, still hovered, that were seeping into my very pores. Only one of us cried.
“What are you guys talking about?” he wailed. “I don’t wanna glow in 2001.”
He was clueless. Maybe because his parents had never even heard of The China Syndrome. Maybe they were Amish or something and so they didn’t watch the news on TV like the rest of us did. Anyway, his parents hadn’t told him anything about the core meltdown, the leak, the danger in the air all around, and we were, literally, scaring the pee out of him.
The schools never were evacuated, but, by that weekend, after conflicting reports from officials about our safety, my grandfather called to give Mommy this order: “Get my granddaughter and get the hell out of there.” Divorced from my father at that point, she did. We moved to Maryland, where we lived until I grew up, and moved away.
Three Mile Island changed everything for me. That Unit 2 core meltdown reconfirmed over several hours what the crying Indian in the public service announcement had taught me in just 30 seconds. Americans were destroying everything sacred, the Earth herself, and no amount of “Give a Hoot” anthropomorphic owls was going to stop the grown-ups’ destructive behavior. I knew that then as Truth. Now, I want to tip this Truth toward Change.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that Wednesday morning 30 years ago, the day the disaster began. With North Korea launching nuclear test missiles and fears of a nuclear Iran, with Pakistan flexing nuclear credentials to compete with India, and with Americans starting to actually consider increasing the number of nuclear power plants in the US, the adults are mucking it all up again.
Nuclear power is re-entering the public discourse on the coattails of sustainability and environmentalism, counter intuitively, as a good thing. At last October’s Time Warner Politics 2008 Summit, “Energy, The Election, and Economic Emergency” panelists included Anne Korin, Co-Director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS); David Manning, Executive Vice President of National Grid; Fred Krupp, President of the Environmental Defense Fund and author of Earth: The Sequel; John Rennie, Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American; and moderator Rick Kessler, President of DowLohnes Government Strategies.
According to these experts, proponents of nuclear energy identify five key points. Nuclear power releases no emissions; unlike solar or wind power it keeps running 24 hours a day; it’s cost-effective; and 20% of the country is powered by nuclear plants like TMI already. But, John Rennie said, these are “strong but not necessarily compelling reasons” for us to go nuclear.
According to the Environmental Defense Fund, “nuclear power comes from splitting uranium or plutonium atoms.” Although generating electricity from nuclear fuels emits little CO2, nuclear power poses grave risks to both human health and the environment. Safely storing nuclear waste is an extremely difficult problem. Although supplies of uranium and plutonium should last for more than a century, no more nuclear plants are being built, in large part because of high costs.
Though studies have concluded there was no increase in cancer rates as a result of the Three Mile Island incident, I’m all for a solution to the climate crisis that will simply eliminate the need for any more long-term cancer rate studies at all. Like windmills, which date back to the 9th or 10th century. Over hundreds of years, this effective use of clean energy has never caused a Chernobyl-like disaster.
The people that lead the world in wind turbines today aren’t the Dutch. It’s the people of a BRIC nation, one of the four countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) that a 2003 Goldman Sachs report speculated would be wealthier than most current economic powers by the year 2050. While we Americans remain in a hostile environment where too many conservative right-wingers resist the kind of change outlined in Obama’s 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act, India fuels her future-with wind.
At the 2008 energy panel, Fred Krupp said we need presidential leadership to “galvanize folks,” as our country must rejoin other industrialized nations already investing in green technology. We now have that leadership in Obama.
Most recently, President Obama moved our nation forward with his mandate to increase automobile fuel efficiency standards. According to the White House Office of the Press Secretary, Obama’s plan- “for the first time in history-set in motion a new national policy aimed at both increasing fuel economy and reducing greenhouse gas pollution for all new cars and trucks sold in the United States. The new standards, covering model years 2012-2016, and ultimately requiring an average fuel economy standard of 35.5 mpg in 2016, are projected to save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the life of the program with a fuel economy gain averaging more than 5 percent per year and a reduction of approximately 900 million metric tons in greenhouse gas emissions.”
This is good news, as Fred Krupp identified Climate Change as a national security issue and, on that same 2008 panel, Anne Korin talked about the problem of wealth transfer from oil consuming to oil producing states. We can put the world’s deserts to better use than we do now.
Since we’ve made it this far (even past 2001!) without the freakish burnish to our skins my 5th grade friends predicted, let’s truly innovate. I don’t want our children to fear a radioactive glow like Generation X did. To protect them, I say down with all the Mr. Burns and the nuclear power plants they own.
Fred Krupp said the new administration must understand that our nation is already energy-rich, with wind across the country, geothermal technology in Texas, wave and tidal energy on three coasts, and, in our desert, solar power. Now that we have our first African-American and Green president, let’s get really ambitious and step into a sustainable future, a world where our energy choices repair the damage done to the ozone layer, so all our glows can be safely sun-kissed.
Eisa Ulen Richardson, a writer working and living in Brooklyn, N.Y., is the author of Crystelle Mourning