Modern-day Tower of Babel

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Pope Francis Calls Nuclear Power Plants a Modern-Day Tower of Babel​

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In an audience with Japanese Bishops, Pope Francis had criticized nuclear power by comparing it with the Tower of Babel, as reported by Takeo Okada, the Archbishop of Tokyo. When human beings attempted to reach heaven they triggered their own destruction. “Human beings should not break the natural laws set by God,” the Pope said. ( Mainichi Shinbun March 22, 2015; Asahi Shinbun March 25, 2015)

This is probably the first clear-cut criticism of the “civil use” of nuclear power issued by the Vatican. The Pope expressed his conviction during an ad limina meeting with the Japanese bishops on March 20. “The destruction of nature is a result from human beings claiming domination (over the earth).” With these statements the Pope referred to the TEPCO-nuclear disaster in Fukushima in March 2011. Soon after the terrible disaster, the Japanese Catholic Bishops’ Conference had publicly demanded from the government the immediate shutdown of all nuclear power plants.

During the audience, Bishop Katsuya Taiji, head of the “Council for Justice and Peace” of the Japanese Catholic Bishops’ Conference, had handed over letters of two activists from Fukushima to the Pope. The first author was Takumi Aizawa, a school clerk from Iidate Mura, the most contaminated place in Fukushima Prefecture, who is involved in health care and protection of children since the disaster. In fact Mr. Aizawa had the great wish to inform the Pope personally about the real situation of the people in the contaminated area because the government, the administration, many doctors and scientists, and the media try to cover up the extremely dangerous situation. The second author is Mako Oshidori, a well-known journalist from Tokyo, who attended most of the TEPCO press conferences with critical questions and who is investigating the contaminated region constantly.

Shortly before, Mr. Aizawa and Ms. Oshidori had delivered presentations about the situation in Fukushima at the international and interreligious conference on “Contributions of religious groups to the energy shift” which was organized by the Center for Ecumenical Work in March 3.-6. 2015 in Arnoldshain (Germany). Prof. Ichiro Mitsunobu S.J., a representative of the “Council for Justice and Peace,” also participated in the conference and gave a talk about the position of the Catholic Church in Japan. Triggered by this conference, the “Council” asked the two activists to write letters to the Pope which the bishops wanted to hand over during their audience two weeks later.

One of the main goals of the conference in Arnoldshain on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the TEPCO nuclear disaster was to stimulate international and interreligious networks to abandon nuclear power and to engage in climate protection. The developments outlined above may be considered a first result of such an endeavor.
 
That’s funny, considering that the Sun is one giant nuclear fusion power plant, and when one considers solar flares and coronal mass ejections, it is also a big polluter of the immediate environment.

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The difference being, we can’t control the sun.
We don’t have to build nuclear reactors. 😀
 
The sun is powered by nuclear fusion, not fission.

Edit: I earlier counted geothermal energy as fission, but upon further reading, it is not that simple. Roughly half comes from nuclear beta decay in the earth’s mantle and crust. A smaller fraction, perhaps 10%, may come from fission. The remainder is thought to be residual heat from the accretion of the planet.

I think Pope Francis might be stretching it a bit to say that human beings are breaking the natural laws set by God. By that logic, most technology would be banned. “If man were meant to fly, he would have wings.” The issue with nuclear power is elsewhere, like hubris, negligence, lack of stewardship (passing the buck to future generations with nuclear waste).
 
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What to do with the waste. That seems to be the big deal with nuclear power.
 
Fusion power plants continue to be a possible option. There are some difficult technical problems to solve, but, they say we are getting closer.
 
No one knows how the Sun actually works. It’s just projecting our most powerful technology onto nature, like how late Medievals thought the universe was best described or understood in terms of mechanical clocks, which is radically simplistic by today’s understanding. We don’t have any technology that can penetrate into the Sun for experiment or observation or to collect data.
 
Well, actually we do have one class of instrument that can observe the deepest interior of the sun. That is neutrino detectors, data from which support the hypothesis that the sun is powered by nuclear fusion.

Here on earth, we can also replicate, on a much smaller scale (using particle accelerators), the nuclear reactions that are thought to take place in the sun. This involves both experiment and observation in earth-based laboratories. The results have given us much insight regarding the sun.
 
Those are emissions from the Sun. That is an effect. We cannot be sure of the cause: we can assume neutrinos emitted from the Sun are produced how we might produce neutrinos or how other things subject to experimentation produce them. But that is speculation.

We do not replicate the Sun. We produce things that are like the Sun in its effects in many respects; but “like this/these; therefore, is this/these” is fallacious reasoning.
 
The Sun’s energy is an interesting piece from Ethan Siegel at Frobes that explains the current thinking on the fusion process in the sun. Undoubtedly, it is more complicated than he portrays it…
 
I am no scientist, but I know that fusion reactions produce a lot of heat. The problem is how to contain something that hot.
 
What is interesting is that a number of environmentalists have come out in favor of adding nuclear power to the list of the means of generating electricity.
 
Please include a link.

Regardless, it is still impossible to be rid of nuclear weapons without nuclear reactors (presuming, of course, that you also reject detonating them underground). Commanding an end while condemning the only means to attain that end is contrary to reason. There is no way around it: only by burning up the cores can nuclear weapons be truly disposed of, and only nuclear reactors are capable of this. Disarmament is not like the frozen embryo question, where we may hope for technology to provide a solution in the future; this is something compelled by the laws of physics and chemistry. There is nothing you can do to weapons-grade nuclear fuel physically or chemically that cannot be undone by the same technology. The only way to disarmament is consuming the fissile material itself.
 
It was said, you know it is legit because a they said it will be done in 20 years.

Anyhow, I must admit it might occur in my lifetime.
 
Funny, I have heard from any of these folks. The environmentalists I know put nuclear power at the top of the pollution list when it comes to the environment, because of the toxic, radioactive waste that no one knows what to do with. The environmentalists I know prefer solar power and wind power, which are clean and renewable.
 
And where do you propose to store the lethal, radioactive waste from these nuclear power plants? No one wants that stuff stored near them. Even the folks in Nevada have been fighting the big waste dump that has been built out there.
When you factor in the clean up from the Japanese nuclear power plant disaster, nuclear is hardly cheap.
 
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