Loving nuclear power

The craving of certain men to embrace nuclear power is as beautiful and terrifying as the proud phallus of the priapic god the moment before insemination.

Then, everything seems possible, for the fall has not yet happened, and the moment of communion is nigh.

The impatience with which they approach their subject, intoxicated by the smell of its potent and forbidden pleasures, becomes so great the closer they get to the palpitating object of their desire, that they would risk everything for a chance of a kiss.

Even the lives of their mothers.

These men who seek to share a playground or a bed with the force at the heart of the sun are modern Prometheuses, toiling up the tall mountainside, dragging their burdens behind them.

The power of the gods is the lure which beckons them on, and they are hell bent on stealing it. They will promise you anything to let them go there.

As if hypnotised by the notion of flight, they are about to jump, wingless, off the mountain top.

From below, we watch, eyes pinned open, unable to move away from the end point of their trajectory.

They would destroy their mother to steal this prize from their father, Zeus: Mother Earth.

"Prometheus first transmuted / Atoms culled for human clay." - Horace

Let's not get carried away by metaphor or Jungian psychology. But recall the anger of the gods at Prometheus' daring deed.

Yes, he brought fire to the cave men, to warm them in the winter nights, to roast their joints of sabre-toothed tiger, to begin the trail which led to the industrial revolution.

But by way of punishment the gods connived to send mankind Pandora's Box which, when opened, let fly millions of miseries over the earth - diseases, sorrows, vices, and crimes - spereading like radioactive fallout, to plague mankind ever since.

Of course all renewable energy also uses the power of the sun - but it doesn't try to mimic it. Instead it turns to our ends what the gods have chosen to send us.

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