My old friend Harvey Wasserman has been protesting against nuclear power for more than 35 years now.
He was at the Clamshell Alliance events in New England in the late 1970s.
He was at Three Mile Island in 1980 and interviewed some of the victims.
He went to Chernobyl ten years after that catastrophe, and he puts the death toll from that one at a staggering 985,000 people.
He's written book after book, article after article, about the enormous hazards of nuclear energy, but the industry ignored him, and the U.S. government ignored him, and the Japanese government ignored him.
Well, it's time we stop ignoring him now.
I just saw the latest thing he wrote on Fukushima, and I'd like to share a little of it with you.
"We are obliged," he writes, "for all our sakes, to make sure this never happens again."
"Atomic technology," he explains, "is at war with our Earth's eco-systems. Its centralized, heavily capitalized corporate nature puts democracy itself on the brink. In the long run, it contradicts the human imperative to survive."
Harvey Wasserman has been advocating something he calls solartopia for years now: a world that no longer runs on fossil or nuclear fuels.
We have the technology today to get to solartopia.
And it's a lot better place to be than the nuclear dystopia Japan is living through right now.
If you liked this story by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, check out his story "Nader Urges Biden to Go to Wisconsin to Support Workers."
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