2007 Nuclear-Free Future Lifetime Achievement Award
Armin Weiß, Germany
Since its very beginnings, the nuclear industry has
harbored a secret ally – the sheer abstract difficulty of
nuclear physics. Because people tend to leave
complicated matters to those 'in the know,' over the years
nuclear industry scientists have scored an extended chainreaction
of successes. But what happens when expert
clarification turns into perverse over-simplification –
what happens when the making of a case depends on
everything unmentioned, left out of the equation?
Concepts like 'fuel rod reprocessing,' or 'final
nuclear waste repository' are reassuring, clean-sounding
terms that have no basis in reality. When proponents of
the 'peaceful use of the atom' invoke such phantom
concepts, they falsify our picture of the world.
The anti-nuclear movement would have long been
helpless were it not for the likes of such authentic
scientific experts as Professor Dr. Dr. Armin Weiß, for
these are the people who help us see beyond the nuclear
industry’s propaganda.
Armin Weiß was born and raised in Stefling, Bavaria,
not far from Wackersdorf, where, during the eighties, the
West German nuclear industry, the national government in
Bonn, and the Bavarian govern ment under Franz Josef
Strauß, began building a nuclear reprocessing plant. Upset
to his core at the environ mental violation of his
homeland, Armin Weiß, taking leave from his position as
Prof essor of Inorganic Chemistry
at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, appeared on TV and
at public debates and gatherings, to undo the deceptions
of politicians and nuclear industry spokespeople – and he
always won over his audiences by using simple,
irrefutable facts. For instance, before uranium as a nitrate
and plutonium as an oxide can be harvested from the
reprocessing phases, .05% of the total radiation is doomed
to escape into the atmosphere, triggering death. Or: »A
nuclear power plant chiefly produces iodine-131 as a
radioactive isotope. It has a physical half-life of some
8.1 days. In addition to iodine-131, a reprocessing
facility produces iodine-129. Its half-life is some 16
million years«.
Armin Weiß's knowledgeable activism triumphed:
the construction of Wackersdorf was aborted, shutdown.
Weiß remarks of himself, »I undertook none of these
activities for personal gain. I did it solely for the thing in
itself«. As a fresh Green party member of the Bavarian
state government, he continued to rage against all things
nuclear, lambasting the Bavarian powers that be for the
radioactive legacy we are passing along to the coming
generations.
On the fifth of November the learned chemist
Armin Weiss, the youngest child of two elementary
school teachers, will turn eighty. November in Germany
hosts a number of dark dates that demand public
observance. But for the German anti-nuclear movement,
November 5th is a day that invites celebration.
Thank you Professor Dr. Dr. Armin Weiß.
--Claus-Peter Lieckfeld (English version Craig Reishus)
|
