By Harvey Wasserman

There is no separation between nuclear power and nuclear war. The “Peaceful Atom” is a radioactive myth.

The world’s fleet of atomic reactors is the happy-faced infrastructure for the global radioactive weapons industry.

In the United States, 94 commercial nukes comprise the core foundation of the world’s biggest Bomb machine. They are, above all, military devices.

Amidst the massive multi-billion-dollar government-sponsored expansion of the Piketon-Portsmouth Enrichment facility in southern Ohio, the prime function of every U.S. reactor is to be an essential provider of waste management, fuel, and expertise for radioactive weapons of mass destruction.

The Biden Administration is now further blurring the lines with a controversial plan to use weapons-grade materials in civilian reactors, a move that can — according to Scientific American — greatly facilitate the building of more Bombs.

The public smokescreen for all this back-door weapons proliferation remains an updated version of the original “too cheap to meter” lie that “our friend the atom” now produces “carbon-free” energy.

In fact, virtually all operating reactors spew radioactive carbon-14 into the biosphere while emitting countless tons more greenhouse gasses through the mining, milling, enrichment, and ultimate attempted disposal of fuel.

Commercial reactors operate at ~570 degrees Fahrenheit, pouring massive quantities of waste heat into the atmosphere and nearby rivers, lakes, and oceans.

And they churn out electricity at far higher cost than solar, wind, hydro, battery storage, efficiency, and other green energy sources. At massive geezer sites like Diablo Canyon, Cali., the nukes’ hyper-expensive, inflexible baseload supply clogs the grid and blocks off far cheaper, far more flexible renewable sources.

At the tail end of the fuel cycle, uranium, plutonium, hyper-radioactive cladding, and other components now find their way into the warheads and depleted uranium shells of global mass destruction. The reactors themselves are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive suicide.

The devastating explosions at Chernobyl and Fukushima underscore the potential of atomic reactors to spew their own apocalyptic quantities of deadly radiation throughout the planet.

But the Ukrainian war zone exposure of six Zaporizhzhia nukes also makes it terrifyingly clear that even a single errant shell fired by a warring nation or a tiny terror group could send one or more lethal Chernobyl-sized clouds over all of Europe and, via the jet stream, throughout the planet.

Even less dramatic catastrophes at Three Mile Island, Fermi One, Santa Susana, Windscale-Sellafield, Kyshtym, Mutsu, Kashiwazaki, and more have produced massive health, ecological, and financial fallout. Each sitting nuke and its fuel pool thus plays the role of a pre-deployed weapon of apocalyptic mass suicide.

None are insured. Nor are they reliably inspected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency, or other so-called regulatory bodies throughout the world.

So one must ask: if atomic reactors can’t economically compete, can’t be insured, operate un-inspected, worsen climate chaos, are sitting ducks for terror attack, and so much more….why are they still running?

The answer is clear: they are the unspoken infrastructure for our nation’s Bomb-making machine, playing the same role for dozens of other countries around the world.

So next time someone tells you to support nuclear power, ask them:

“Exactly which reactors can you prove to be safe?”

“Which ones’ future are you ready to personally guarantee?” … and …

“Why do you support these atomic reactors’ irreplaceable role in the continued production of nuclear weapons?”

— Harvey Wasserman wrote this for CounterPunch (Oct. 27, 2023), and is author with Norman Solomon of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation (Delta 1982).