Godzilla and the Great Lakes

As News Hits walked away from a weekend conference that focused on this region's nuclear issues, we weren't sure what should be worrying us the most.

Is it the proposed underground repository in Ontario, where low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste would be buried within a mile of Lake Huron? Or the plan to ship radioactive boilers down the Detroit River and though the St. Lawrence Seaway to Sweden? Maybe it's the effort to build a new nuclear power plant down in Monroe, or perhaps the attempts to re-license the much-troubled Davis-Besse plant along Lake Erie in Ohio?

The conference, held on Saturday at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, and attended by about 50 people, featured a handful of experts long engaged in battles with the nuclear industry.

During one of several PowerPoint presentations, a photo of Godzilla appeared on the screens placed around the room. Introduced to the world by Japanese filmmakers in the 1950s, the monstrous mutant created by nuclear detonations serves as a fitting metaphor for the horrors currently unfolding at the badly damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactors.

Just as Godzilla hovered menacingly on the screens, the Fukushima disaster served as a backdrop for the conference, providing a devastating example of just how nightmarish reality can become when the unthinkable occurs.

And just as the world is now wondering how the Japanese could ever have been foolhardy enough to build something as inherently dangerous as nuclear power plants above earthquake fault lines, future generations will one day look back with bewilderment and dismay at the craziness of locating nukes in the heart of the Great Lakes, home to 20 percent of the world's fresh surface water.

A few days after the conference, as we were still trying to make sense of it all, we dispatched an e-mail to several of the event's key players, asking them to help us tie the disparate threads together.

Among those replying was Gordon Edwards, co-founder and president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. Edwards, who has a Ph.D. in math and at one point considered a career in the nuclear field, provided us with this observation:

"I think the common theme of all this is that the second phase of the nuclear age is upon us.

"In the first phase, we were promised clean, safe, cheap, abundant energy, with the promise that all radioactive waste materials will be meticulously isolated and segregated from the environment of living things.

"In the second phase, we see the reality — the nuclear industry is struggling for survival, the nuclear facilities are rapidly deteriorating, the variety of radioactively contaminated materials is much more voluminous and intractable than ever imagined by the nuclear proponents, and so the biosphere is threatened as never before by accidental (Chernobyl, Fukushima) and deliberate (steam generators, deep underground dump) releases of hundreds of radioactive species, each with its own unique pathways through the environment and the human body.

> Email Curt Guyette