Never Kick a Sleeping Dragon

Never Kick a Sleeping Dragon

Bilbo Baggins may be the only person I ever met who got away with waking up a dragon. Of course he had that weird ring that made him invisible when he did it. I knew it would never fit me or I might have tried some slight of hand. 

Unfortunately the sleeping dragon at Fukushima was awakened on March 11th and the Japanese were not in possession of the ring. 

The Fukushima dragon did not present the world with "the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl" (as some would claim). It is, by some respectable accounts, as much as FIFTY TIMES WORSE. The dragon has handed the planet the worst nuclear disaster EVER., 

Within hours of a 9.0 earthquake, and subsequent tsunami, we have now learned that three fire breathing reactors went into full meltdown. Right then. Right there. 

Anyone, with a more than cursory knowledge of the nuclear dragons, already knew that . . . despite what the Japanese authorities and the Shire media were telling us.

I rambled through my old emails and discovered that, on the day after the -now acknowledged - meltdowns, I was letting Bilbo, Frodo, friends and family know that every indication was that Fukushima could well be "a LOT worse than Chernobyl." "We’re all gonna DIE!" I wrote in another. 

You probably don’t want to be on my mailing list. Even Gandalf opted out. 

Now, keeping in mind that three reactors had already melted down, it’s surreal that Japanese authorities initially only evacuated an area up to two miles from the wakened dragon. As the dragon got angrier they tripled the evacuation area to a little over six miles and, later, to something like 20 miles. It is horrifying to realize that the entire rock should have been evacuated (as well as lands far from the Shire such as the entire East Coast of China and the West Coast of the US). 

A recent ABC (of Mordor) article suggests that more aggressive oversight and some sort of new international bureaucracy will compensate for the dire hazards associated with nuclear power. 

That "nuclear plants are dangerous" is compared with perils of man’s early attempts to get airborne (although, they admit, maybe even worse). But nowhere in the article does it infer that nuclear power is as dangerous as a rabid and angry dragon that is frothing at the mouth. Nowhere does it state the obvious: mother nature (to say nothing of terroristic insanity) can be as violent as an angry drunk - times about a million.

In a point, that must seem unrelated, I do not know of a single business in the Shire that has an eighty year business plan. Even more removed is a business that has a plan that reaches eighty thousand years into the future. 

The greatest cultures in history can only claim existence for hundreds of years - or perhaps several thousand years (as in the case of Elves, Dwarves and Egyptians). 

How is this related? The half-life of radioactive particles, from a dragon’s breath, range from less than a second to billions of years.

No country, no international organization, nor any corporation can sanely make the claim that they will be around, to make sure that radioactive waste is properly contained (as if there WAS a proper way to contain these deadly toxins), for hundreds of thousands of years.

The handlers of the dragons of Fukushima did not unleash "the worst nuclear incident since Chernobyl." They unleashed the worst nuclear catastrophe EVER. 

And, to make matters worse, there are more than four hundred dragons sleeping (however unsoundly) all over the planet. The recent tornadoes in the Midwest tore down power lines affecting three more reactors and flooding raised concerns at several others. 

The World Nuclear Association estimates that 20 percent of nuclear reactors worldwide operate in areas that are specifically vulnerable to earthquakes. Which means that somewhere around a hundred of these things are a breath away from affecting tens of millions of Americans, not to mention countless Europeans, Asians or others. 

The only question that remains is this:

How do we exterminate these deadly dragons?

Copyright 2011 Timbre Wolf