Risky transfers

This update is 6 days old, but it hasn't made any more sense with time. Perhaps it was the way it was written - my opinion: the stress on the financial benefits of offsetting local plutonium storage with monetary compensation is alarming. That Germany will pay the UK to store this ridiculously dangerous material, that the UK will risk political backlash because the "financial benefits from the title transfer will exceed the long-term costs of the material's safe storage and management", that France will then supply processed MOX fuel for use in German reactors, that the UK will then argue that it is glad it has been spared the trouble of shipping plutonium while implying that it is comfortable being the site of nuclear waste storage... are all alarming developments.

Why? Because, even though I'm pro-nuclear, the backlash that could arise out of this could negate years of progress in developing MOX-processing technologies and installing them in the middle of energy policies of three countries. One problem is already obviously foreseeable: Germany's reluctance to continue its reliance on nuclear power is simply short-sighted. If it requires any more power in the future, it will have to purchase it from France, which, given the knee-jerk shutdown of NPPs worldwide after the Fukushima Incident, is just as surprisingly displaying enough sense to rely on NPPs. By then, I hope monetary advantages will not suffice to mask the reality that Germany would be paying to have France purchase its troubles. Unless, of course, there is some other agreeable form of risk-transfer.

Just ugly.

The secularism of genocide

France has enacted a Bill that makes any denial of the Armenian genocide punishable by law, with deniers earning up to a year in prison and a EUR 45,000 ($58,600) fine. While most countries recognize the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 in Turkey to be a genocide, Turkey contests the numbers and, more importantly, that the characterization of the event (as a genocide or not) should be historians, not legislators. Here, I agree with Turkey.

Let's get the political angle out of the way: the conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy aims to garner support from the sizable local Armenian population in its run up to the elections next year. Beyond that, sealing the event by law to be of a particular nature heavily influences debate on the subject. I don't deny that the event happened, and going by the scale of things, I can't deny that it was genocidal, but both these facts have been established by reason. Reason is secular. Facts become facts only when established by way of logical reasoning and scientific evidence. When jurisprudential factitude is attached to it, the fact's secular character becomes sidelined. Now, argumentatively, I can't even debate the genocidal aspect of the Armenian genocide.

That well-informed French politicians have voted to pass the Bill unanimously means nothing: when there are political rewards or sanctions become involved, politicians will move guided only by them. On the other hand, that the Bill was drafted in the first place is a dubious act of gaining political leverage because it comes at the cost of the rejection of historical evidence. From this point on, the Armenian genocide in French debate will be a law-point, not a factual point.

What stops the French from labeling future events as genocides even though they may not have been so? It will be making that decision based only on what it chooses to know, not what it should know.