France – drshyamalavatsa

A few days ago, I saw on the news that Niger wants France to clear up radioactive waste in the French-owned uranium mines around the city of Arlit.

I was surprised that anyone would leave radioactive material lying around, and that too, France, which generally comes across as a responsible country. Fifty percent of the uranium ore from Niger’s mines goes to fuel France.

I could be wrong, but it looks like no country has a perfect plan for disposing of radioactive waste. There is a stockpile of radioactive waste from nuclear reactors in the world stored in temporary facilities. The intention is to eventually bury it deep underground in cement canisters.

I know that ‘high-level’ waste is less than 3% and the rest is ‘low-level’ waste that supposedly decays and becomes harmless over time, and this depends on the half-life of the element. I know very little beyond that and hope people who operate nuclear reactors know what they are doing.

Three months ago Japan announced that it planned to release treated radioactive water from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea starting two years from now. Japan says nuclear power plants all over the world routinely release water that has minute amounts of tritium into the sea anyway!

After the Fukushima incident, some countries like Germany and France have started shutting down their nuclear reactors and are temporarily going back to coal until they can increase renewable sources of energy like wind and solar. Italy closed down its nuclear power plants in 1990 following a referendum. Some countries are opposed to nuclear power and have never set up nuclear power stations.

It seems such a shame, because nuclear makes for a cleaner environment than coal. On the other hand, there have been a total of more than a hundred serious nuclear accidents in the world, five or six of them in India . . .

To come back to Niger, I wondered why a system hadn’t been put in place in the forty years France has been mining uranium there. The locals must have been adversely affected for decades, so who exactly are these affected people?

Apparently they are mainly the Tuareg nomads, an ethnic minority, who have lived in those parts from the 5^th century CE. They are spread across many countries – Libya, Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, as well as Niger. They are more loyal to their Tuareg identity than to Niger and are often at odds with their government over the ownership of the land leased out to foreigners for mining uranium.

Like the Yazidis, Kurds and other ethnic groups that are spread across many countries and don’t have a nation of their own, I guess they get sidelined in the affairs of their country.

Some activists have taken up their cause. But I get the impression that the European Union politely listens to their concerns, waits for the spike in public interest to subside, and ultimately doesn’t do much.

Then again, why will the ‘world’, i.e. the G7+EU+/–Russia+/–5-emerging-economies, care about the tribulations of a nomadic tribe that doesn’t contribute to the world economy? The ‘world’ is like an eye, the economy occupies the fovea, and images of events that are seen as dragging the economy down land on the blind spot, the point that ironically connects the eye to the brain! Of course, the fact that I get my ‘news’ from English-language channels and sites decides what I ‘know’, so someone somewhere might be taking action on this and I may never hear of it.

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These were some of the thoughts triggered by what I read off the ticker on TV. Then I browsed the net a bit and found that pros and cons are still being debated furiously. While environmentalists have raised concerns about the ‘dangers’ of nuclear reactors and radioactive waste, the World Nuclear Association and scientific journals and blogs have countered the ‘myths’.

So I’m none the wiser!

If I have to choose I might throw in my lot with Science, because I believe scientists take a calculated risk after working out the theoretical framework of anything experimental. And new findings are peer-reviewed and replicated by others. It is not my business to make judgments on nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.

Leave alone nuclear reactors, I wouldn’t have had the imagination to invent a bicycle if it didn’t exist! I wouldn’t think it possible to stay balanced and move forward on two narrow wheels attached to a frame, a thing on which I can stay astride only as long as I constantly work my feet up and down!

We flew from Bangalore to New Jersey last week. I fell asleep soon after boarding the flight because we had started out for the airport at 4:00 a.m. When I awoke we were flying over the Zagros Mountains between Iran and Iraq. I followed the flight path on the Moving Map on the computer screen in front of me.

After passing over the mountains we flew almost directly over Mosul in Iraq. 10,000 meters below us the ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) militants were wreaking havoc. We, the passengers in the plane, were on the same lat-long, but different altitude. Almost like in parallel universes. Forty Indian nurses were somewhere down there, staying home for safety. That was on the news the night before we left. What was happening there now?

Further on, we passed not far from Crimea and Donetsk on our starboard side. Russia had invaded and occupied Crimea 2-3 months ago. It was a sobering thought, that below us a battle was raging and people were being shot dead even as our plane made its benign passage overhead. Just 10,000 meters altitude and a few degrees of lat-long separated us from a war zone! On the port side we passed Istanbul, then crossed a small part of the Black Sea into Europe, entering the airspace over Rumania.

Flying above France I thought of the French politician, Marin Le Pen, who is one of the people spearheading the movement to break up the EU “like the Soviet Union.” Another era ends?

Then the beautiful patchwork of fields as we approached London, then over London itself. For decades I had thought of London as a welcoming city where Londoners accommodated other people looking for jobs there. But allowing hordes of citizens of EU states to grab the jobs of the British was a bad idea, which has understandably not gone down well with the locals, to say nothing of the hordes of Indians who have been there for decades already. Though I do understand what drives people to emigrate I sometimes wonder if it isn’t a little like a house guest overstaying his welcome and being a burden on the host.