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Gallup Poll: Nuclear Power Less Popular Than Other Energy Strategies
Lydia Saad, Gallup
Conservation-oriented proposals draw widest support
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PRINCETON, NJ — John McCain has ramped up his longstanding call for building more nuclear power plants — 45 new ones by 2030 — drawing the sharpest distinction between himself and Barack Obama on energy policy, but also, to some degree, throwing the political dice.
According to a July USA Today/Gallup poll, the impact of a candidate’s favoring greater use of nuclear power is mixed. Forty-seven percent of Americans say they are more likely to back a candidate who favors expanding nuclear power, while 41% say they are less likely to back such a candidate. But on a relative basis, the nuclear option is near the bottom of a list of possible solutions to the energy situation.
(7 August 2008)
August Nuclear Thoughts: the New Proliferation
Gavan McCormack, Japan Focus
It is 63 years since mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age. The attacks on the two cities are now solemnly commemorated on 6 and 9 August, when the two city mayors issue their messages calling on the world to disarm, messages as necessary as they are certain to be ignored by the powers.
… In Japan too the search goes on for a long-term repository. Gradually, the country’s northern and eastern districts around the Rokkasho plants are being transformed into a vast, poisonous complex, over which generation after generation, for millennia, a heavy, militarized guard must be maintained.
Bizarrely, it even seems possible now that local government authorities in depopulated, mountain or coastal villages may be swayed by fiscal incentives of the most blatant and short-term political kind to embrace the nuclear waste option, committing their home towns and villages to become wasteland for the coming million years, for ever that is.
The future nuclear state can only be centralized, heavily policed or militarized, non-, if not anti-democratic, and a continuing and growing threat to humanity. The Bush administration’s GNEP, belittling cost, technical feasibility, and risk, offers the nightmare prospect of the global spread of nuclear technology and materials. The nuclear reactor is as false a response to global warming as the nuclear weapon is to global security.
Gavan McCormack is a coordinator of Japan Focus and author of Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (New York, Verso, 2007, with Japanese, Chinese and Korean editions in press). This text is an expanded version of his August essay for the Korean vernacular newspaper, Kyunghyang sinmun, where it is to be published on 6 August, “Hiroshima Day.” See also his article on “Japan as a Plutonium Superpower”.
(4 August 2008)
