Taking a Bath with my iNuke
When the nuclear industry failed to get funding for increasingly enormous power plants, despite Obama declaring nuclear power was not a Greenhouse Gas (just an apocalyptic one), the nuclear industry turned its resources towards smaller devices.
Now average people can purchase pocket-sized reactors (iNukes) for different rooms of the house and for each car and classroom in our children's schools, completely eliminating the need for oil, gas, coal, and even geothermal, wave, solar and wind even cell phones.
Miniature reactors now monopolize the energy market, replacing batteries in children's toys and old peoples' hearing aids. I mean how much radiation do you really need to warm a classroom?
Stories of video surveillance of miniscule reactors purchased by terrorists at Home Depot are immediately squashed on the Internet as quickly as Vogue magazine removed its fawning article about glamorous, skinny, fashionable Asma al-Assad in 2012 when they realized her husband was a mass murderer, slaughtering thousands of opponents and their children, denying his people the most basic of human rights: life.
To Vogue readers, Asma's guilt by association for standing by her man with the Hitler mustache while insatiably shopping like Imelda Marcos for extravagant luxuries on the Internet and in Parisian boutiques was bad for Vogue's high fashion image. Pretty little Asma had begun to be referred to as the Marie Antoinette of the Arab Spring and Vogue's article praising her as a role model for women had to go. However it is now a well-known fact that she has put in the first order with Tifanny for a diamond-studded iNuke and she has redeemed herself as a fashion icon.
The nuclear industry has proven much more effective than Vogue in squashing damaging press in general, ensuring that its image is nothing but positive. Because the latest nuclear reactors are so small with such minute meltdowns, news of their role in terrorism and mini-accidents can be easily squelched, even if this at times requires the "Karen Silkwood Cure" of journalists by plutonium poisoning via simple packets of sugar in their take-out coffee from Starbucks.
There have been several reports of miniature nuclear devices being used as hockey pucks on playgrounds, bed warmers for hospitalized patients, and in prison cells for God-knows-what. They are not allowed on public transportation but many have been found rolling around on the floor of the New York subway system and the Paris Metro. They are banned from carry-on luggage on planes and have to be inserted into checked luggage before departure. Mickey Mouse mini-nukes are often placed in children's school lunch boxes for cooling sandwiches, though an accidental meltdown could cause the food to become dangerously hot in both senses of the term. For careful, well-behaved children, this has not been a problem.
Obama continues to insist that radioactive energy is clean energy because:
1. It's invisible
2. It doesn't smell bad
3. You can't taste it
4. It's not a fossil fuel
5. It leaves no carbon footprint
6. The President of the United States says so
7. There are 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S. already
8. Obama plans to use 36 billion tax dollars to build more
Obama is therefore thinking of a deal with Toyota lifting the ban on large nuclear-powered vehicles like minivans by 2016.
He has combined his concern for jobs and the environment by offering subsidies to Toyota to design a fuel-efficient minivan depending solely on nuclear power.
"It really made sense given the proximity of Toyota headquarters to a ready-made fuel source, the core meltdown at Fukushima," said the president.
Toyota Motor Corporation is a multi-national automaker headquartered in Aichi, Japan, only 398 kilometers (247 miles) from the epicenter of the meltdowns. It was thought that the proximity to the melt-down could enhance the program by redirecting already escaped radioactivity straight into the vans. Because radioactive cesium has a half-life of thirty years, it is conceivable that these vans would never need refueling.
"Nuclear energy is clean energy because it emits no greenhouse gases," said the president, as he has said many times before, following a logic only he is privy to.
As he spoke on the White House lawn, Michelle and the girls were seen waving around harvested kale, Michelle's biceps looking like they may have had some nuclear enhancement as well.
"This is going to be such a fantastic delivery system for our (radioactive) organic produce to stock homeless shelters, " she said.
"Given that parents will be driving children to school in these minivans, have you thought about what might occur during a vehicular accident?" asked one reporter.
"That's very, very unlikely," said Obama, as he always says when questioned about nuclear accidents.
The good news: Global Warming has ceased as the nuclear industry predicted.
Minor bad news: there are few species left except for house pets, fleas, rodents and bed bugs. Global warming has been replaced by "background radiation", leading to sky-rocketing rates of cancer, birth defects and almost universal infertility, not to mention a drastic reversal of the previous longevity trend. Forty has become the new eighty. Only babies brought to term in hatcheries have any chance of being viable. Pessimists claim we are witnessing the beginning of our species' extinction.
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Author's Note
Finalist for the 2012 Glass Woman Prize.
Thanks to Beate Sigriddaughter.
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Reads like a short version of the history of the 2nd half of the 20th century. I'm still hoping it won't turn into a description of our own future. The outline of the use of "iNUKES" reads like a marketing brochure, very convincing! If I wouldn't be a physicist I might have fallen for it…
A physicist? Than can you reassure me that I am hallucinating my worst fears? Thank you for your fine first comment and your physicist's stamp of approval, with some scientific reservations.
Going from "enormous power plants" to "smaller and smaller nuclear power reactors" would require correspondingly new technology yet I have no doubt that someone, somewhere, is working on that possibility. Your fictional use of the idea expresses a valid concern and, along with the Vogue comparison, is very creative. I empathize with your concern. Although bringing Obama into the picture doesn't significantly further the story since the president of the USA has been nothing more than a puppet for quite some time now, especially when it comes to major issues like energy and nuclear power. *
This is a fright to read yet so well written. I whiffed so many truths in it, without knowing a thing about nuclear hockey pucks. Once, in Minnetonka, the city came to install smoke detectors in each bedroom by new law. The smoke detector in the hallway had been sufficient to alert us the one time there was a small fire (caused by a candle). I detached one of the new detectors from its base and brought it upstairs, where the woman contractor my mother had hired to renovate her bathroom was talking with my mother, and I showed her the label inside the new detector that said Marie Curie (something 7) radon and asked her what it meant, and she backed from me in fear. My mother later would not allow me to detach the detectors. Then one day, I detached the city-installed detectors and placed them inside my mother's metal garbage can that held her potting soil. I figured if she was unconcerned about radiation in the house, she would not mind it in the potting soil. City hall later misrouted my absentee ballot for Obama and Al Franken. *
J. my husband agrees with you about Obama and I may just delete him. Good suggestion. I read a recent article on small plants, though not ipold size. The whole think terrifies me for my childrens' futures.
Ann, I know, radon in smoke detectors. Where will it end?
Thank you both for long thoughtful comments and faves.
Once it gets past the first somewhat tortured paragraph, it starts to develop a critical mass of good black humor. The last sentence is great but the preceding paragraph needs some leavening- it's a bit earnest and heavy.
It's in a rough state, obviously not very polished. I will take all your suggestions and run with them. thank you so much for your thoughtful input.
It reads like a news report, almost. Nicely crafted.
Hoping it will never be a news report.
This is great. Chilling, where my thoughts lie, not unfamiliar. This current future terrible ..projecting holds only horror and the inevitable turning away. Distraction of the everyday. .. you adroitly flip it on its head to face us. Just to be awkward, i found final para very satisfying but wished final cake sentence was not there..felt it detracted from the grandeur. Good news. Ha. Made me think of Jehova's Witnesses..
*
I love feedack. Will take cake right out. It's overkill.
I have a guilty love of dystopic pieces that focus on well-intentioned technological "advances" going awry. The riff on the Vogue article seemed a little distracting to me.
Unfortunately the original piece had fantastic illustrations including a tiny model nuclear plant, a leggo hazmat team, the fashonable murderous Assads and the Karen Slkwood car crash that I just could not technicallly get into the text that would have tied it together. It was meant as a picture book. I will work on this, as I enjoy such stories. You are right, it was a distraction, but my obsessional hatred of the Assads got the better of me. I should have killed my darling Asma. Great point. But I'm a girl. Vogue stays.
I'd lie this expanded. I see a world that needs space to breath. Keep this going, Gloria. Make this a novel, please. :)
Life is short and art long as Hippocrates said. This is my curse and my blessing: big ideas in small packages. Thank you.
Where did my original comment go? Maybe I forgot to click post?
I think this is fabulous. My most dreaded line was: "For careful, well-behaved children, this has not been a problem" *
Oh, for me that line was the most toxic of the entire toxic piece.