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Cold war

Jaap den Haan | 07.02.2007 16:48 | Climate Chaos | World

The meltdown: of the ice-caps

On their way to the North-Russian port of Murmansk, located to the Barents Sea (part of the Arctic Ocean, exactly under the ice-cap, now rapidly waning, of the north pole), were a Dutch team to try to more or less safely store nuclear waste from old Soviet submarines. During the cold war, the Soviet Red Banner Northern Fleet used the southern reaches of the Sea as a ballistic missile submarine bastion, a strategy that Russia continues. Nuclear contamination from dumped Russian naval reactors is an environmental concern in the Barents Sea.
The operation was paid by the state Norway, out of concern for the whole region. Nobody in Russia, nor elsewhere, knows exactly how to manage the huge amount of radioactive waste still left in the area of Murmansk and in particular Central Asia – which has presumably helped the Union fall apart and is piling up, not only from this region – and currently only the Dutch seem to have the expertise to do this correctly within existing limits.
But also in the Netherlands there are only a few men who can lead such a team. These have been now hired by Norway.
I spoke with one of these men, and he said that the nuclear waste-problem is a real doomsday-scenario. Barrels of nuclear waste simply start to rot and are leaking already. He had also aided in Chernobyl after an accident at a nuclear power plant in 1986 (with resulting radioactive fallout spreading over half the globe), and he has returned for inspection.
He was not optimistic in having been there: "Everything looks equally greyish: houses, trees, people and animals," he said, "and not from old age."
It has been said that most of our contemporary sicknesses have been related to radiation, and that man overestimates his safe control of nuclear energy. The whole world is more or less contaminated. There are even those who add that without divine intervention the earth would have been practically uninhabitable by now.
May 13, 06, Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, received the Four Freedoms Award – in Middelburg, Zealand, the Netherlands – from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute (in conjunction with the Roosevelt Academy. Roosevelt's family are originating from Zealand, it is claimed).
However he did not die long before, we can assume that president Roosevelt has had to legitimately wrestle with his conscience to let throw atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war, and had not intended the application of atom-energy for the free market or to make a competition of it.
Robert Oppenheimer was dismissed as a director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico – where he had helped to develop the first atom bomb – after he no longer wanted to co-operate in the development of nuclear power for military aims.
Military and economic aims have the same impact today.
Oppenheimer had not counted on (the impact of) the radiation released and was exposed at the first test (Albert Einstein had already calculated the release of radiation).
Oppenheimer died in solitude.
How many have followed?

Russia has been more or less forced by the West to embrace the free market. This has become a nervous situation, as there is nearly no middle class left in the country.
As our above referee, working in nuclear waste-management, has said: "There are some very dubious people who were responsible for the nuclear arsenal of Russia, living now in Florida as multimillionaires, even though they had low income in the past."
The same was asked if he did this type of work from idealism or simply for the money.
He answered that he had an ordinary month salary but is no idealist.
That would possibly be too flirtatious.

A cigarette more or less does not concern our future on earth; to believe it would is a painful apology of the West.

Wat does.

Jaap den Haan

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