It is seldom acknowledged the tremendous burden that the Nuclear Age leaves on future generations, and the environment, for an extremely long time. Nuclear processes, and products, are activated at energies millions of times higher than the energies of chemical processes, and consequently they cannot be eliminated by the natural environment on Earth. So it turns out that hundreds of nuclear tests performed in the atmosphere left a huge radioactive contamination; Rosalie Bertell estimated 1,300 millions victims of the Nuclear Age; civil nuclear programs have produced enormous quantities of radioactive waste, whose final disposal has not been solved by any country; decommissioning of tens of shut down nuclear plants shall involve costs which were underestimated in the past; spent nuclear fuel accumulates in decontamination pools, or in dry cask storage, but no final storage has been carried out yet; radioactivity of spent fuel will last for tens of thousand years; military nuclear programs leave, besides almost 15,000 nuclear warheads, approximately 1,300 metric tons of plutonium; even mining of natural uranium was, and is, carried out mainly by poor and exploited populations, which suffer serious health consequences; paradoxically enough (or maybe not), French territory itself is widely contaminated. All these facts have been downplayed during the whole history of the Nuclear Age. Future generations shall not be grateful.
From this point of view, I have little doubt that the Nuclear Age has been an extreme breakthrough in the development of processes and products which are absolutely incompatible with the Earth environment, often really extraneous to it.
My argument has a basic physical reason, namely the enormous energy gap between nuclear and chemical processes, which is of the order of a million times. As a consequence, the Nuclear Age has produced artificial processes and products that Nature on the Earth is, and never will, absolutely be able to get rid of. The Atomic Age has created problems that have no solution, and will all the more worsen as -civil and military -nuclear technology shall be developed. Not to mention that nuclear weapons imply the ongoing impending threat of destruction of the human society.
I have always contended that the nuclear choice is a dead-end and no-return way. Once embarked on, it necessarily produces artificial products which can in no way be eliminated, are extremely dangerous for health and the environment (besides perpetuating the risks of military proliferation), and can hardly be disposed in safe and permanent way, isolated form the human society for extremely long times, and requiring in any case huge costs.
It goes without saying that nuclear processes play instead a fundamental role in the Universe, as the “fuel” of stars, at whose interior in fact temperatures of million degrees exist. Nuclear processes are not absent on Earth, but they play a marginal role in physical and chemical phenomena. In any case, “natural radioactivity” entails health and environmental dangers, and is carefully monitored.
A clarification seems necessary. From my considerations the medical applications of nuclear physics are excluded. I don’t have sufficient scientific competence, however every physician is aware that any use of radioisotopes or ionizing radiations for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes has unavoidable potential harmful health effects, and the resort to them must be made only in concern-driven cases and with a rigorous cost-benefit assessment. In any case, hospital nuclear waste (although unavoidable) are themselves a serious problem, but are excluded from my analysis.
I would add also that I imagine the possible criticisms to my considerations from some colleagues, whose blind faith in the power of Science and in its ability to solve every problem I well know. Apart deeply disagreeing in principle, 5 here I will only add that any artificial nuclear process designed to remediate the present artificial nuclear products or waste is bound to produce more unstable nuclear products, precisely on account of the energies at which it happens, which are artificially produced on Earth. An example of how one is groping around are past projects of launching nuclear waste in the Sun (or in sea bed): it is not enough that we polluted our Planet! Not to mention the tragic consequences of a possible failure, which occurred in other cases. Anticipating a successive example, the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel is no solution, it implies the use of huge quantities of highly contaminating substances, and its substantial result is the separation of plutonium, increasing the risks of military proliferation, since it is unrealistic the recycling of such huge quantities of plutonium in nuclear fuel, even in the most optimistic scenario of increase of nuclear power.
In this paper I shall discuss in the order, the devastating and enduring effects of nuclear tests, the burdens and costs of the civil nuclear power programs, the consequences and cleanup of nuclear facilities and nuclear accidents, the unmanageable problem of spent nuclear fuel, the accumulation and dangers of plutonium and military materials, and last but not least the front end of the nuclear cycle, uranium mining, which has always implied the savage exploitation of poor population and countries. environment, they probably could have been reabsorbed. In my opinion it would be methodologically useful to distinguish Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and something like “Industrialcene”, as successive and qualitative increasing steps of the human action on Nature, as distinguished from that of the other living species. 5 I refer for a deeper discussion to my article “Can Science make peace with the environment? Science, power, exploitation”, in T. Arabatzis, J. Renn, A. Simeões, Relocatig the History of Science, Springer, 2015, p. 367-383.
The, increasing, radioactive pollution of the Earth surface and atmosphere by human activities has already caused huge damages, which are not easy to assess: illnesses, contamination form nuclear tests or accidents of wide areas, which sometimes have become practically uninhabitable. The well known environmentalist Rosalie Bertell (1920-2012) edtimated twenty years ago up to 1,300 millions “victims of the Nuclear Age”! 6 “Killed, maimed or diseased by nuclear power since it’s inception. The industry’s figures mass
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