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Playthings Not for Mankind

BEFORE THE ENORMOUS might of nature, mankind and its achievements are mere playthings, fully subject to its whims.

This fact comes home to me while watching a photo of a ferry hanging on top of a two-storey building in Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, and a train dismembered like trampled centipede among the debris that the recent tsunami in Japan left behind on its wake. It silenced the bloody disturbances in the Middle East, at least as far as local media coverage is concerned. It awakens the eyes of the world on how the technology that man created can turn against him with a simple nod from nature. Useful as they seem in powering up homes and industries, the destructive display of the forces of earth and water strikes home the fact that even Japan cannot master a human technology gone wrong.

That will serve as a lesson that must be thought hard and long before our own Bataan Nuclear Plant be allowed to have its switch flipped on. Will the Philippines do better? Do we have the capability to contain the disaster to lives when this nuclear plant goes wrong? Will our certainty for a risk-free plant be close to the point of perfection enough to allow us to believe that even a Plan A for disaster becomes unnecessary?

These considerations may sound difficult to achieve in practice. But that is after all the point I want to make. Even a 1% weakness in the design and maintenance of the plant can mean hundreds of years of radiation casualties, if not for the entire country, at least for the thousands of people so-and-so kilometers around the plant. Uranium-234, for example, requires 240 thousand years to decay half of its volume to thorium-230. As risky as a nuclear accident in a world where perfection never comes, our resources in money and talents may be better used in finding cheaper alternatives to nuclear energy.

The dangers that radiation brings behave much like the fatal misfortune surrounding the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) infection. Once you got it, there is no turning back, and that serious error of decision-making in the past will haunt not only the maker but also the innocent people not privy to the foolish choice made.

The stake is always very high when the cost is counted in lives.

At the end of the day, there is a devastating difference between avoiding disaster and tempting it. And as always only those who died knows the difference.
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