FIRST, our own finance minister, gets his facts all wrong by spending R500 000 000 on radioactive toasters and nuclear kettles –the so-called Mini-Koeberg “Pebble-beds”. Then Erwin, contradicts his own finance minister and announces a further R500 000 000 or so to be spent on a “second” Koeberg, that’s right, lets push South Africa to the brink of nuclear empowered disaster.
Where do our politicians get the time to push dirty Nuclear Energy that is not only expensive, but a major source of pollution and background radiation to boot. Don’t we know that radiation from the nuclear chain is bad for us, and the Uranium Mining industry is worse than the Asbestos Industry? Remember Asbestos “perfectly safe for you and that’s a guaranteed promise with no money back
from Alec Erwin, Trevor Manual and the South African government.”
Why not simple spend the money on world trip to push nuclear powered outboard motors for the next big spend grand prix?
The anti-nuclear lobbey is one of the longest running environmental campaigns in South Africa. In fact, alongside Nan Rice’s Dolphin Action Group, Mike Kantey’s Koeberg Alert, it predates the formation of Earthlife Africa
Despite the Koeberg Alert’s concerns about the so-called “peaceful use of nuclear energy”, and the fact that South Africa’s own nuclear bomb industry was finally exposed to be a giant fraud. (De Klerk and his National Party only came clean after 1994). South Africa and our own Erwin & Manual, continues to espouse the doctrine of nuclear power for peaceful ends. An oxymoron of a ministry if ever there was one.
Unfortunately, the debate around Koeberg has swung from mass rallies against nuclear energy, to self-satisfied and smug debates of the bourgoisie vs labour;the pros and cons of nuclear safety and of course, the energy issue. The public is confused, politicians are hamstrung, tongue-tied, and bound up by Patricia De Lille and Helen Zille and just nobody knows what to think as the 25 year old debate about renewable resources vs peaceful nuclear energy which continues to give partriarchy a hard-on, and male cabinent members a re-usable condom.
Enough is enough. Let’s top debating the issue. Lets stop haggling over renewable minutia and strategic advances on the quantum-micro-macro economic level. Let’s stop buying into the lies about Koeberg and Koeberg 2 and focus our efforts instead on demonstrating that the nuclear industry is exactly what it says it is, “As safe as the Asbestos Industry”.
Getting rid of dirty Asbestos-siding is one of the green movement’s few success stories — local industrialists once claimed “asbestos was good for everything,” just like nuclear energy. And of course, “blacks asbestos miners don’t need environmental awareness or green leftists to save them from cancer”.
Asbestos the Uranium of the Sixties was forced to close down and pay reperations for health loss and damage to lungs to countless workers, by the actions of Koeberg Altert, ELA, EJF and the Cape Town Ecology Group
And with nothing to gain, except notoriety for effecting change in society, change that lead to transformation and sustainable development.
Get the message straight;keep it simple: We don’t want safe nukes, or peaceful nukes, what we demand is no nukes whatsoever.
Close down Koeberg, Stop the Refueling Shipments, and Forward to a Nuclear-Free, Non-Racist, Non-Sexist African Continent.
I was recently at a public participation forum run by a new uranium mine soon starting production in the central Namib. Not many of the public bothered to come – and not a single representative from any environmental organisation. It was cheered by the Australian CEO, who added, in verbal parentheses, every SINGLE time he used the U word “for clean, safe power”. What worries me is that if they say it often enough we might just start to believe them. I’ve certainly noticed a slackening off amongst the more middle class environmentalists as the end of oil gets closer and their energy exorbitant lifestyles get threatened.
theirs nothing anybody can do because we need power any kind of power, how do you expect for humans to survive, the world is getting
smaller eventually we’ll be going to the moon, and other planets.