The sorcerer's willing apprentices

News from Japan's throttled nuclear reactor in Fukushima: the plant has had to unload 11,500 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific with assurances as to the liquid's "low" toxicity.

A necessary step, the site operator TEPCO asserts, to make room for the massive runoff of subsequently pumped waters used to combat reactor meltdown; toxic pools considered far more radioactive than the waters being released over the last couple of days.

This adds to a chain of calamitous events that followed the March 11 earth quake and tsunami hitting Japan, sending three of the plant's six nuclear reactors into partial meltdown; spewing radiation into the air, which prompted the government to evacuate citizens from a 12-mile radius of the plant. Just this past weekend a crack at the site had been discovered hemorrhaging radioactive water onto the shore, but appears for now to have been sealed.

As nuclear power industry defenders circle 'round the wagons to defend what they call a "safe" and "clean" source of energy, it's as good a time as any to think about the radioactive life span of nuclear waste and how there's no community insane enough to welcome its disposal. Radioactive wastes left over from the fissioning of atomic fuel (uranium 235) remain active--as in perilous to human health and life--for at least a thousand years.

Given our civilization's limited real-time experience tinkering with atomic energy and the length of generations-- in the tens of thousands--some of its by-products remain hazardous, how can you not see a race utterly unready to be responsible for the full magnitude of its power?

This imploding, mortal coil

This planet speaks from the deep does it not? Earthquake, tsunami and pestilent radiation--altogether a braided emblem of unrest the world over. The Middle East has awakened from the stupor of populations divided and thusconquered.

The West, even while performing democracy's chorus, stage manages fortriumph of the box-seated season ticket holders, no matter the outcome ofthe drama. We, the remainder of the audience, sit flattened by the torrent of words, images and sound--a phenomenon we confuse as deus-ex-machina; that technology's widening scope and velocity will in the end deliver us all.