Jack Straw is the pen name of a well-known local progressive activist.

It’s truly surprising that today all kinds of people and organizations are nodding to nuclear energy, as the nuclear industry pushes forward in our belated (re)awakening to polluting carbon combustion and other sources of greenhouse gases. Choose your poison. Yet, nuclear energy gives us radiation poison and nuclear weapons. Both carbon pollution and nuclear pollution are terribly dangerous, short and long term.

Nuclear fusion is mentioned as a future alternative, but the reaction is tough to control, and produces long-lived radioactive byproducts. Not a panacea.

The entire world is already “low-level” poisoned due to twentieth century (and current?) nuclear and thermonuclear fallout from weapons testing, radiation poison highly implicated in our culture of cancer. Concentrated high-level nuclear poison is scattered all around and/or “contained” at nuclear power plants and at nuclear energy and munitions technology development centers in every nuclear engineering country. Not only in the USA (Oak Ridge, White Sands, Hanford, etc.) and the old Soviet Union, but in more recently poisoned nations as well.

We haven t lobbed The Bomb for some time now, but be very, very glad you weren t deployed to, and don t live in or near, Iraq or Afghanistan. Our military insists on using depleted uranium munitions. As they burn, the wind spreads radiation poison and disease far and wide.

It’s amazing how much in radioactive poison emissions is considered acceptable for nuclear power plants already in operation. Even if new “cleaner” designs produce less radiation per energy benefit, because nuclear energy developers envision much growth, more nuclear means a lot more radiation poison.

A lot of dangerously radioactive materials reach us from nuclear energy and from nuclear manufacturing industry facilities, equipment, and supplies. A lot reach us from medical, food processing, and other industries. Perhaps most primary users are very careful, but the public is systemically exposed to radioactive fuels, by-products, waste, and recycling because (to mention only several) of ground, sea and air transport of radioactive materials; radioactive gold recycled into metal for jewelry, dental, etc.; radioactive steel recycled in the mills; spent fuel storage; high-energy sources for irradiating food; and the ionizing polonium hidden in household smoke detectors. No more than an x-ray, nuclear medicine injects and implants short half-life radiation into patients, then sends them home to expose family and friends for weeks. Few radioactive people, and little resellable nuclear waste, are publicly identified or quarantined.

Poison, does it matter? Some speak of teeming plant and animal life in and around Chernobyl s mess, and of course there s great water sport over by Three Mile Island, so don t worry! Maybe it s the new evolution: whatever microbes, plants, animals, humans that may survive whatever doesn t kill you Choose your poison, but they all kill you.

Heaven help us, Earth s children, what can survive in a world of breezy false choices like nuclear over greenhouse gas? Do we have another generation till our only descendants are robotic artificial intelligence? Airless machines, so very boride-crystal resilient and efficient. Choose your poison, engineered is the new natural.

Choose my poison? I prefer none. We ve lived on dirty, poisonous coal, oil, and nuclear technology for so very long, but now let s stop throwing good money after bad. Now let’s phase out nuclear and thermonuclear technologies.Now let s put away poisonous technologies, and do safe engineering for solar, wind, ocean, and microbiological energy. Now let s re-engineer combustion to scrub effluents and recapture carbon, and let s share and transfer those technologies. Now let s invest heavily in healthy, sustainable, renewable technologies. Now let s prosper and live well.