Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Technology

Did They Kill It with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch?

Time for the Monty Python troupe to come out of retirement; either that, or Jimmy Carter, nookular engineer, should get his canoe paddle out of the attic.  From the Associated Press: "Radioactive Rabbit Trapped, Killed":  

A radioactive rabbit was trapped on the Hanford nuclear reservation, and Washington state health workers have been searching for contaminated rabbit droppings.

The rabbit was trapped in the past week and was highly contaminated with radioactive cesium. It was killed and disposed of as radioactive waste.

There's a movie in this somewhere: Attack of the 50-Foot Glow-in-the-Dark Killer Rabbit.


Categories > Technology

Discussions - 5 Comments

Hmm, isn't the importance of this that the local wildlife has someone been irradiated? Is Hanford throwing out cesium with the leftovers? It's a little more serious than you make ought, I'll be bound.

"It was killed and disposed of as radioactive waste."

Translation: They allowed on-site contractors to dump it in a creek or sell it at a local grocery store in the "specialty meats" section.

If the latter, here's hoping it gets purchased by a die-hard libertarian (opposed to burdensome regulations!) with a clean-green-nuclear fetish.

It may be serious, but it's still a hoot!

I'm thinking of Wallace & Gromit in the sequel...
Revenge of the Glowing Were-Rabbit!!!

Sometimes you do have to see the humor in even what is serious stuff. Otherwise you will surely go mad.

It's funny when it's Blinky the 3-Eyed Fish on The Simpsons, but not as funny when it's actual wildlife, and the joke's perpetuated by those who have a reputation for minimizing and/or dismissing real environmental problems (in the Limbaugh vein of We-couldn't-possibly-damage-the-environment-in-any-significant-way-even-if-we-tried.).

I've known some people who live pretty close to Hanford (within 30 miles) - I bet they'd be hard-pressed to find humor in this story, as they're constantly plied with propaganda about how very well the on-site radiation is contained, and not a danger to them.

I think this has more to do with BRAC, or the procedures the military follows when cleaning up after itself.

"recent demolition of a Cold War-era building used in the production of nuclear weapons."

The rabbit just drank the water... if the rabbit drank the water and became a threat...well then tossing the rabbit into a creek, while improper would be less troubling than not dealing with the the waste water at the site.

I am also not sure this has anything to do with being libertarian, a liberal or a conservative.

Obviously attorneys will make libertarian sounding arguments to defend big polluters, and attorneys for plaintiffs will make liberal sounding arguments a la Erin Brockovich.

I suppose I wouldn't pick Libertarians for the jury, but I am not so sure. Libertarians who have read Coarse, Judge Learned Hand, and take an active interest in property law and nuisance might in fact be more than willing to force polluters to internalize the externality, or be outraged that this wasn't already occuring.

If you look at the nation that is most invested in Nuclear Power, i.e. France it becomes somewhat harder to argue with a straight face that Nuclear isn't a progressive energy source.

You also have to examine the alternatives. Coal is hardly a clean source of energy, especially if you factor in how it is mined.

Of course mountain top coal removal only harms those hicks in West Virginia, who are too poor and unsophisticated to embrace NIMBY.

It seems to me that Nuclear should be doable, and if you want to move beyond broad brush partisan labels and get down to details: Why isn't it possible that the anti-nuclear lobby isn't really paid by BTU(peabody energy)?

To me at least it matters that the source of this polution was the government.

As far as I can tell Nuclear is the only energy that is actually forced to fully internalize its externalities, and it even seems possible to me that a large chunk of the arguments against nuclear are paid for by the coal industry.

I don't think it makes much sense not to be somewhat sceptical of Nuclear power, and personally as a fisherman I think it is ridiculous that there is a limit to how many spawning walleye folks can catch in the Maume. The Limit is in place to actually insure that the walleye can replentish themselves, but there is about a 100 fold magnitude between the walleye killed(gainfully used?) by fisherman and the number of walleye killed by the light water reactor at Davis Besse.

Folks joke about three eyed fish in the Maume, but a lot of libertarians(in your sense folks who don't mind assuming some risk) eat these fish, and Davis Besse and Toledo Edison spends a lot of money helping to clean up the Maume and the Lake Erie region.

I actually think that if there is a nuclear debacle at Davis Besse, you would see a lot of "libertarians" leading the charge against Toledo Edison, because it is the folks who eat the fish they catch, or hunt the rabbits that assume the most risk and thus have the most standing.

These so called "die-hard libertarian" hunters and fishers, who argue for less "(burdensome regulations!)" and have a "clean-green-nuclear fetish", are simply folks who have a sort of reliance interest and trust in Toledo Edison.

In some sense it isn't ideological but rather a sort of factual finding, we belive that Davis Besse isn't poisoning us.

If you have a very strong case you might actually want all Libertarians on the jury, because these will be the folks who feel the public trust most violated. The liberals on the other hands might look at the evidence and decide that it was actually not as bad as the bogey man expectations they had concerning nuclear, and thus might be more sympathetic to a sort of assumption of the risk defense.

Leave a Comment

* denotes a required field
 

No TrackBacks
TrackBack URL: https://nlt.ashbrook.org/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/15836


Warning: include(/srv/users/prod-php-nltashbrook/apps/prod-php-nltashbrook/public/sd/nlt-blog/_includes/promo-main.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /srv/users/prod-php-nltashbrook/apps/prod-php-nltashbrook/public/2010/11/did-they-kill-it-with-the-holy-hand-grenade-of-antioch.php on line 562

Warning: include(): Failed opening '/srv/users/prod-php-nltashbrook/apps/prod-php-nltashbrook/public/sd/nlt-blog/_includes/promo-main.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/opt/sp/php7.2/lib/php') in /srv/users/prod-php-nltashbrook/apps/prod-php-nltashbrook/public/2010/11/did-they-kill-it-with-the-holy-hand-grenade-of-antioch.php on line 562