Inappropriate Content: Two Decades

September 27th, 2004, and at 11:55 pm tonight, I'll have been bumbling around this planet of our for precisely two decades. It's not really an occasion for deep and meaningful insights, like a 80th or a 100th birthday, so I won't. Instead, how about a few shallow and meaningless notes from the past weekend?

A nuclear plant in Westfield, West Virginia. Went out there to get fitted for a tuxedo for a...something or other, next weekend. The town was having one of those late-summer festivals small towns have. Lots of kids, families, arts and crafts booths; literally hundreds of yard signs for the election. (Kerry, 15; Bush, 2) All of it in the shadow of three great cooling towers across the river.

I've been talking nuclear quite a bit this weekend, and occasionally—disturbingly—pronouncing it just like the president. I think that having an understanding of how truly horrendous nuclear weapons are helps avoid a paranoid view of nuclear power. The fact remains that as they generate power, nuclear plants are the cleanest source of power on the planet. Cleaner than wind, or at least the wind farms in Berkeley that occasionally catch migrating birds in their props. Certainly cleaner than the thirty year old coal plants littering the Midwest, pumping poison gas into our atmosphere all day, every day.

But of course that leaves the question of nuclear waste. Imagine taking all that poison coming out of a coal plant or an oil refinery, over ten years, and putting it in a dozen two inch wide, three foot long rods. The most deadly waste on the planet.

I think there are benefits to it. This is going to sound like a bad episode of Star Trek (or bad Honor Harrington book, for the barflies) but it's a serious proposal. Let's shoot the stuff into the sun. We can put together a bunch of those old Saturn V's we used for the Apollo missions. Get all that poison out of the atmosphere, instead of into it. Because either we're putting all this stuff into our ecosystem over thirty years, or all at once with a bombing at Yucca; the fact remains that we are putting the same amount of toxins into the planet's lungs.

We can transport the waste safely, with a little care and a lot of money. At worst, one or two of the rockets will explode. We should plan for it. Break the waste in the smallish loads. A high-atmosphere explosion will spread the radiation out far enough that it'll blend into the background buzz that we get naturally, from the sun and cell phones and Peter Frampton concerts. A low-atmosphere explosion would be very bad; unless we use the Marshall islands as a launching ground. We've already blown up the atoll's with hydrogen bombs, how much more damage are we even capable of? At least we'll be able too use the dead islands we've made for something.

Maybe that does seem too easy.

Downtown. Working for Kerry. It's a good way to spend your birthday. More later.