1438: "The power of nuclear fission and fusion belong in the stars. And that is where they should stay. The recent catastrophe in Fukushima is a strong vindication of this truth," argues Tilman Ruff - chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons - in an opinion piece published by Kyodo News.
全文如下：
OPINION: From Hiroshima to Fukushima and back
By Tilman Ruff
TOKYO, March 19, Kyodo
Settled agriculture began about 12,000 years ago. If human children are still born and play on a hospitable planet in another 12,000 years, it will be because we succeeded in eradicating the terror of nuclear weapons and preventing runaway climate change. Twelve thousand years is not very long really.
Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years. 400 human generations; one half of one half-life of plutonium-239, among the most potent radioactive carcinogens, produced in every nuclear reactor, present in large amounts in the mixed uranium/plutonium fuel in the Fukushima Daiichi No.3 reactor, and one of the two fuels for nuclear weapons.
If people can look back in 12,000 years, they will scratch their heads at the unrivalled folly of the 20th and 21st centuries. Very cleverly packaging the primordial energy that powers the stars into nuclear weapons in their tens of thousands, about 2,000 still ready to be launched in minutes. Weapons by which a self-selected few claim the right to threaten the birthright of all. Weapons able to unleash temperatures hotter than the sun, and radiation which can deliver a lethal dose with little more energy than the heat in a cup of coffee.
The same awesome power dispersed in hundreds of nuclear reactors to boil water for electricity in the most hazardous way possible, amplifying the radioactivity of the starting fuel around one million times. After a few decades the reactors themselves become radioactive waste, needing absolute isolation for hundreds of thousands of years on a small interconnected planet, with 11 earthquakes of magnitude 8.5 or greater in the 20th century, and 5 in the first 11 years of the 21st, almost all of them followed by tsunamis. More nuclear reactors raising further the danger of nuclear war have been justified on the pretext of slowing climate change.
Our paramount shared responsibilities are clear: first, negotiate an irreversible, verifiable global treaty to outlaw and eliminate nuclear weapons, urgently. This will require enrichment of uranium to be very tightly restricted, and extraction of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel to cease. Second: prevent rampant global warming by massively and speedily scaling up energy efficiency, demand reduction and benign, renewable energy production.
In our ordinary, fallible, uncontrollable world, there are already enough primordial forces capable of great destruction. We don't need any more. The power of nuclear fission and fusion belong in the stars. And that is where they should stay. The recent catastrophe in Fukushima is a strong vindication of this truth.
(Tilman Ruff is chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and associate professor in the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne, Australia.)
==Kyodo
