When I was growing up, I did so in the shadow of a constant fear, an ugly technological nemesis.

Looming off in the distance, less than 10 miles from my home, was a town named Shoreham. Shoreham, on the northern shore of Long Island, N.Y., really wasn’t anything to be scared of by itself. In fact, it was quite nice, quiet, scenic, and affluent. However, it was what was in Shoreham that panicked me to no end.

Shoreham was home to a nuclear reactor.

The recent plans by the Department of Energy to convert commercial nuclear reactors into “tritium farms,” makes me once again remember what it was like to live where I did — it was hell.

Life can so easily be hell in the face of reckless and partisan confusion. And more often than not, in the local news I was able to understand at the time, there was nothing but partisan confusion.

Scientific experts, corporate suits, and their critics battled bitterly about the perils of having a reactor on an archipelago — there was no escape plan should an accident occur. The only outlet was an expressway heading west — not quite the ideal way to evacuate nearly 3.2 million people.

Residence in Eastern Suffolk County was a trap, a craps game with Father Time, Mother Nature, fate, and the Grim Reaper.

Whether or not there was a “way out,” is not the point I’m trying to make. Even though I’m no longer a child, the dark reality of nuclear power can’t help but remain with me.

That’s what I’m getting at; if the word “safe” can be put in front of the word “nuclear” at all, it should be preceded by the phrase “not really.” After all, I see nothing that speaks otherwise.

The fact that local communities decide to utilize nuclear power to begin with is spine-chilling enough. To have the Department of Energy step in and redefine the role of those (nuclear) reactors in the midst of a civilian populace greatly multiplies the stakes of the enterprise.

And for obvious reasons, the redefinition of those roles, again makes me conjure images of the past. The government’s interest in tritium is still war.

Back when I was a kid I was also living in an age when childhood fear of nuclear war loomed large. Life in an agitated nuclear age was far from a relaxed era.

As it was, I was going to bed at night only to find myself tossing and turning, waiting. What was I waiting for?

To be honest, I was waiting to die. Communists, red scum, were going to supposedly going to murder me. Or at least this is what I was lectured by all kinds of mass media vehicles both far and wide. I was going to melt from the heat of a warhead. I was going to go blind and starve from a nuclear winter. Life was going to become a cancerous and chaotic barbarism. Doom was imminent …

But aren’t these days of apocalyptic vision over? Isn’t the type of childhood I lived long extinct?

I disagree. Somehow the nightmare that I — among many others of my generation — suffered, hasn’t really ended. The proof is in the fact that the government still wants to “cultivate tritium.” Just think, a nucleo-agrarian society is what we need to feel safe. And it’s now characterized as attractive to do it within the civilian population. How comforting a concept …

Why is it that every time we gasp in relief that the nuclear timetable has been wound counterclockwise, paranoia and intolerance make in spring right back? No wonder hypertension is such a “popular” health disorder.

It makes me uneasy that someone, somewhere, cringes in fear of their neighborhood reactor. And this fear is likely to only get worse if the DOE has its way. Reactors promise to work around the clock, work overtime, in order to manufacture a false security.

Then again, perhaps the only thing it’ll guarantee is to irreparably scare the shit out of some little children.

Remember that the word “annihilation” doesn’t apply to fears of the past, but instead relates to obscene realities of the present. Who says that nuclear is a useful and good thing?

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David C. Ptak is a senior in philosophy from Long Island, New York.