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Chernobyl, does the Australian government get it?
Have any lessons been learnt?
No is the answer, as the Australian government again places profits above public safety, the environment and truth. No surprises here, this is what a corrupt regime does - the AWB being just the ice on the cake.
"The noted American writer Mary McCarthy once famously observed of the equally noted but politically discredited playwright Lillian Hellman: "every word she utters is a lie, including 'and' and 'but' ". As we have seen over the past 10 years, the same can be said of the Howard Government from the children-overboard scandal to "there will never be a GST" to "yes, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq". Now - joined by misguided and misinformed members of the ALP and a few scientists who should know better - the Government is embarked on another mendacious, ill-advised, and downright dangerous enterprise: transforming Australia into a nuclear-powered, uranium-exporting nation, deploying as a rhetorical fig leaf the spurious message that nuclear power is emissions-free, green, and safe and will save Australia - and indeed the world - from the effects of global warming. Let's pull away that tattered fig leaf and look at the facts."
Nuclear power's sick legacy, The Age, April 17, 2006http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/nuclear-powers-sick-legacy/2006/04/16/1145126005354.html
Guillaume Grandazzi
Commemorating the Chernobyl disaster: Remembering the future
No is the answer, as the Australian government again places profits above public safety, the environment and truth. No surprises here, this is what a corrupt regime does - the AWB being just the ice on the cake.
"The noted American writer Mary McCarthy once famously observed of the equally noted but politically discredited playwright Lillian Hellman: "every word she utters is a lie, including 'and' and 'but' ". As we have seen over the past 10 years, the same can be said of the Howard Government from the children-overboard scandal to "there will never be a GST" to "yes, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq". Now - joined by misguided and misinformed members of the ALP and a few scientists who should know better - the Government is embarked on another mendacious, ill-advised, and downright dangerous enterprise: transforming Australia into a nuclear-powered, uranium-exporting nation, deploying as a rhetorical fig leaf the spurious message that nuclear power is emissions-free, green, and safe and will save Australia - and indeed the world - from the effects of global warming. Let's pull away that tattered fig leaf and look at the facts."
Nuclear power's sick legacy, The Age, April 17, 2006http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/nuclear-powers-sick-legacy/2006/04/16/1145126005354.html
Guillaume Grandazzi
Commemorating the Chernobyl disaster: Remembering the future
Continue reading: Eurozine, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-04-21-grandazzi-en.htmlChernobyl is more than a technological accident belonging to the past; it is a catastrophe that has an effect on the present and that determines the future. But amidst the commemorative events, will the lessons of Chernobyl be heeded? The conclusions of last year's Chernobyl forum report suggest not: presented as "reassuring", they stem from a way of thinking that aims to minimize not the real consequences of the catastrophe, but the image of these in the eyes of the victims and the public. According to Guillaume Grandazzi, the commemorations will attempt to salvage the fiction of risk-free atomic power. (.....)
Commemoration and trivialization of a catastrophe
How does one commemorate a catastrophe that is still unfolding? It seems that commemorations of technological catastrophes are above all occasions to take stock, to review what we know about their consequences (a knowledge which in the case of Chernobyl will always remain provisional), and to rewrite the history of those tragedies. Most importantly, these symbolic dates reveal the future of the catastrophes and of the populations concerned. Thus the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster is being carefully prepared by international organizations who, starting in the late summer of 2005, kicked off, and set the tone for, numerous initiatives to commemorate this event; this came only a few weeks after the sixtieth anniversary of the bombardments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which reminded us of the circumstances of Western civilization's entry into the atomic age, after which humanity lived on borrowed time. If the atomic age has a history that can't be ignored, then Chernobyl is undoubtedly one of the major events in that history, and we must try to comprehend that event both in its uniqueness and in its paradigmatic character. The area contaminated by the radioactive fallout is a vast open-air laboratory and a testimony to what Günther Anders said only fifty years ago about the atomic bomb: "experiments" are now constituent parts of our historical reality.[4] The Chernobyl disaster, the outcome of a failed experiment, made the residents of these territories learn that painful lesson, turning them into the new guinea pigs of the nuclear age. (.....)
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