From Detroit to Toledo
I drive by and by
Monroe’s Fermi 2
Nuclear waste tower
Falling over
Penning only
A plume of death
In place of this poet
A prophet taking
Having called for its decommissioning
Offers no comfort
Only one more thing to mourn
Sanity unheeded
As the tsunami of insanity
Overtakes us
A graveyard of scant profits
Where we stood
Where we lived
And worked
No re-creation
As even the god of destruction
And his unwitting fallowers
Dare not rejoice
Today is the three-year anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear power plant ongoing disaster. I joined some folks outside the Japanese consulate in Detroit. The Japanese consulate and security would not let us in the renaissance center where the consulate is located. We wanted to deliver a letter mourning the loss of life due to the Fukushima meltdowns, and deliver a call to remediate additional harms as this disaster continues to unfold. We protested outside and read the letter publicly. There were as many police and private security personnel as their were protesters, so no one was harmed in the protesting of this mega-disaster. If only such well-resourced public safety extended to nuclear power plants.
I wrote this poem a couple of months ago, spurred on by driving past the Fermi 2 nuclear reactor in Monroe, MI, on my way to Toledo from Detroit. I’ve driven through this nuclear kill zone many times, and I live most of my life in the kill zone. The Fermi 2 nuclear reactor site has an overfilled high-level radioactive waste storage building, five stories tall, that cannot be off-loaded because it was not built to its design specs — oops. If this tower falls, the death toll would be unfathomable. There is no permanent solution to radioactive waste here or anywhere, which has been building up over 60 years of commercial nuclear reactor operations in the United States. Making matters worse, there is a proposed Fermi 3 nuclear power plant, a $15 billion monstrosity as an answer to declining electricity usage in the region. We need to end nuclear power before nuclear power ends us.
