Nuclear Implosion

India ratified an international convention on nuclear energy accident liability, the government said on Thursday, the final piece in its efforts to address the concerns of foreign nuclear suppliers and draw them into a market worth billions of dollars. India wants to ramp up the share of nuclear power from barely 3 percent to 25 percent by 2050 has been trying to assuage the fears of the nuclear suppliers. On the other hand, if we go by 2013 standings, countries such as Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Norway remain opposed to nuclear power. Germany and Switzerland are phasing-out nuclear power. It is indeed a no-brainer to comment that these countries are not doing this just for the love of world peace. Even if we choose to attribute the big mishaps like Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster to unfortunate wraths of god, are we ready to surrender our future to an energy source that has the potential of instant world-termination. The nuclear fuel in itself, from its extraction to dumping has not met a solution from any of the 44 nuclear capable countries regarding their complete disposal. We still resort to compressing it under ground or piling it in restricted landfills. The mining of uranium itself creates radioactive waste in high tunes, be it the radon gas or the mining tubings, everything irks a safe responsible resource extraction. As if this were not enough, we are also aware that four fifth of the total world plutonium held for nuclear warheads have come from these civil nuclear exploitations. The sudden unfortunate technical mishaps sometimes complemented by natural calamities just drive my point further because we simply don’t know how to save ourselves from that.

To some people, I may appear logical while to others, I may seem as a maniac bent on pushing a highly capable India back to Neanderthal ages. What I am focusing here is that development is good if it is sustainable. What good is an innovation if it depreciates mankind both physically and morally. The government has its own reasons in pushing nuclear agenda. These nuclear achievements are more like some outdated bureaucratic trophies behind which our politicians have been running around to earn brownie points both in India and in front of their more powerful foreign counterparts. What they don’t see is that several developed and developing economies have been slowly phasing out the idea of nuclear energy. But this is not only government’s fault. A democratic government thrives on people’s whims. Instead of fighting only for land grabbed for these purposes, we should stand and question the whole nuclear idea in itself. Science has given us several powers throughout the ages. Whenever, we have failed to control that power, we have suffered. Powers are becoming more gigantic now. A failure in this will be catastrophic. In short nuclear energy is a suicidal time-bomb at least with the technology we have got today. I don’t know about you, but I would rather let God dig my grave and not do it myself.