NUCLEAR NIHILISM
2010
Before Christmas, I was asked by The Green Party to join and support the campaign ‘No Need for Nuclear’. This, I was happy to do.
I was asked to write in support of the House of Commons Early Day Motion No 557: INQUIRY INTO NEW NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS
“That this House notes that if new nuclear power stations are built they will not come into operation before 2019 and so cannot in any way assist with the energy gap that Ofgem has said may arise in 2015; notes too that as regards to long-term electricity needs the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC)wrote to the Sustainable Energy Partnership on 10 December 2009 that 'DECC has not made any long-term projections of electricity demand/supply' and that ‘our latest projections were published up to 2022...and DECC is developing scenarios of potential electricity demand/supply to 2050 but don't have any definite figures for this yet’; further notes from statements made by the Government that it has already decided that new nuclear power stations are needed to satisfy future demand for electricity; believes that this is a wholly perverse way of making policy, whereby large infrastructure is built before an assessment of the long-term need for it has been made; and therefore calls on the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to suspend any decision to build new nuclear power stations and to commence immediately a parliamentary and public investigation into the need for new nuclear power stations and related matters including their cost, their effect on electricity prices and on fuel bills, and on whether they, or the alternatives to nuclear, are the best ways to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and to create jobs in the energy sector.”
The Early Day Motion faults nuclear on cost and on failure to meet energy requirements. I was supplied with detailed and thoroughly researched information which demonstrated why new nuclear power stations are unnecessary, costly, unenvironmentally friendly and will not create the jobs claimed But, for me, these are not the most compelling reasons against nuclear energy.
In February 2007, when he was shadow minister of the environment, Chris Huhne made this very clear and sage statement:
‘The doubling of our electricity generation from wind in a little more than a year shows what renewables can do and gives the lie to the need for a new generation of nuclear power… On a windy island surrounded by waves and tides, we should never be short of environmentally friendly energy sources’.
Huhne’s position in government now seems to be this: that an ever expanding economy requires ever expanding energy inputs, far exceeding the capacity of renewable sources other than nuclear.
This begs an obvious question: isn’t it about time that we subjected ‘the economy’ itself to human control? The human race used ten times the energy in the hundred years after 1900 than it did in the thousand years before 1900. The USA has used more energy in the past fifty years than all other countries put together have ever used. When it comes to standard of living, the US is the model for all other countries to follow. And, as a result of a growing economy and a growing population, energy demands are increasing exponentially. The strongest argument in favour of nuclear energy is that a growing economy requires ever growing energy inputs. ‘The economy’ is a false necessity, not an argument. There is a need to examine what interests and what imperatives lies behind ‘the economy’. The accumulative logic of the economy indicates that enough is never and can never be enough. Safe or otherwise, nuclear is forced onto us as a result of a false argument. Come 2010 and Chris Huhne is now backing a new generation of nuclear power stations. Of course they generate the energy required, generate jobs, etc. They always do. And of course they are safe. They always are. Just as another phase of urban regeneration always delivers more investment, jobs, training … The promises are part of the package. Of course they are. Haven’t we learned not to take such claims at face value?
The Fukushima disaster in Japan highlights the insanity of government deciding to build new nuclear power stations before having made a proper assessment of energy demand and supply. The U turn by the Liberal Democrat leadership makes the Green Party the only major UK-wide party firmly opposed to new nuclear power stations. They may be small, but they are right. And, ultimately, it’s truth and not numbers that determines the quality of an argument.
All over Europe, nuclear projects are being reviewed in light of the emergency in Japan. The German and the Swiss governments have suspended decisions on their nuclear programmes and the European Commission is holding a meeting of ministers and experts.
I would ask just what evidence and argument there is to support the building of more nuclear power stations. I am not counting ‘necessity’, economic, military or other, as an argument. In the words of PM Pitt, ‘necessity is the tyrant’s plea’. We need to persuade government to make a long term assessment of energy demand and its sustainability, emphasising at all times the need to move to green sources of energy whilst cutting back its use.
The nuclear issue seems very simple and straightforward. For all of the reasons offered concerning defence, cost effectiveness, the claims to generate jobs and energy – in which one set of facts and figures are traded for another, claim for counter-claim – one simple reason stands out in the case against nuclear power. The engineers are always sophisticated and skilled – it’s their job to get things right and get things done – the systems always work according to design – they are supposed to – the maintenance is always carried on – it’s the protocol. But there is one inherent fault that no science and technology can ever eliminate – the human factor. As Immanuel Kant put it with regard to the human species, ‘out of nothing so crooked can something entirely straight be made’. With nuclear, there is no margin for error. Nuclear and its use requires that the human species be something it has never been – ‘entirely straight’. Error with respect to nuclear comes with a disproportionate outcome far, far in excess of other energy generating systems. Catastrophe is avoided only by being ‘entirely straight’ once and for all. No science and no technology can meet this criterion. Nothing human ever can.
Nuclear energy is a power beyond human abilities. Every stage of human civilization is accompanied by a consciousness appropriate to its technics and culture. This consciousness is likely to correspond with underlying material structures and relations. But emerging productive forces break this correspondence and subvert existing arrangements, leaving consciousness out of kilter with reality. This is the situation today, with technics and culture containing a potential to realise human needs which far exceeds perceptions of the possible which is fitted to a bygone age. Without more adequate mentalities and modalities fitting perceptions of reality to the potentials of the new productive forces, one is left with obsolete institutions and a morally and intellectually unanchored population. Current modes of thought, action and organisation are not adequate to the task of guiding and controlling the vast institutional and systemic apparatus that human ingenuity has built. However, mindful of Faust and the sorcerer’s apprentice, they are more than capable of unleashing this apparatus of power as a mindless juggernaut, destroying the built and the natural environment, obliterating civilised values, and instituting a meaningless, soul destroying domination over all.
Here is Erich Heller in The Disinherited Mind:
“Life is frightened out of its highly enlightened wits by the return of ancient nightmares: the tales of the sorcerer's apprentice, of dwarfs with magic powers. The promise of Heaven for the poor in spirit is understood to mean that, on earth at least, they should be educated into clever people able to manipulate and let loose the technical installations of Hell. And in art, there are sounds most skilfully organized, furies expressed in the most virtuoso fashion, and proud of signifying nothing.”
Within a modern world in which means have displaced ends, ignorance refers to an instrumental rationality that functions without knowledge of ends. Ignorance in this respect is the failure of intelligence to be intelligent about itself. This indifference to ends explains the blindness of the scientist and technician, the bureaucrat and the functionary, who absolutizes the instrumental activity within the whole but fails to grasp its actual and potential relationships to all other activities and to any end in question.
Then, there is the technological imperative; the new idolatry, the sorcerer’s apprentice, Dr Frankenstein's monster. Whether it was ever wise to engage in a Promethean quest with the gods for knowledge is a moot point. Since, as Nietzsche pointed out, we have killed god, it may now be wiser to creatively live up to the power that is knowledge. This requires that we place our technical means in their proper place as means, restricting excess and tempering possibility according to humane scale and qualitative ends.
Nietzsche’s serious point was that the value system of traditional Christianity had been dissolved and the idea of a universal, objective morality could not be sustained within modernity. The death of God was and is a tragedy. It calls upon human beings to fill the gap and become gods by creatively living up to their powers. Instead, human powers in alien form have come to constitute a new absolutism. Human beings cannot supply their own ends but are lost in a disenchanted world of increasing rationalization. This rationalization relates to technique and the means to achieving social goals. However, the values which supply these goals are obscure.
This was Nietzsche’s point when he wrote of the death of God:
‘The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers."' Few quite understand what Nietzsche means by announcing 'God is dead'. As the quote indicates, human beings are responsible for the death of God, and it is not at all clear that this is an unequivocal good. Nietzsche is attempting to make humanity confront the God-sized hole that the growth of reason and science has brought about. Religion continues as an empty show, with churches merely 'the tombs and sepulchres of God'. The ‘death of God’ has left humanity rudderless, without meaning. Nietzsche is attempting to make it clear that it is now our responsibility to assume moral control of our powers and create our own meaning. This remains the task confronting humanity. Science gives us knowledge and technology, but technology is not a culture and nor is it a way of life. Technology cannot supply an orderly, meaningful universe. Having lost our innocence, we must grow up: having performed the terrible deed, 'Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?' It is we. who must take responsibility for our values and beliefs, not God.
As Max Weber showed, the paradox of rationalization as a disenchantment is that it frees human beings from magic and superstition but renders the world meaningless through its subordination to science. Science is not a morality and does not deliver meaning in itself. As the everyday world is filled up with scientific knowledge and practice, the world becomes devoid of values. Science can answer the question ‘how’ but has nothing to say on the question ‘why’. That is not a failure of science; that is a failure of a culture that is unable to arrange human capacities in their proper places and prevent scientific and instrumental rationality from encroaching into places where it does not belong. Science can never tell human beings what they ought to do. Human beings are caught between the how and the why, subject to knowledge, disciplines and techniques that overload the former with means, but empty the latter of ends. The result is a bifurcation as individuals become objects of a struggle between unresolved and irreconcilable paradigms.
For all that it analyses, the scientific worldview cannot form the basis of a civilisation. For science is not a philosophy, an ethos, or a culture. Which is why an Enlightenment focused on reason in the scientific and technical aspect keeps falling short of its promise, even turning against the peace, freedom, democracy it promises. For all it contributes to knowledge and understanding, science does not and cannot deliver meaning of itself. The domain of science is on the other side of the subject/object, fact/value, material/spiritual divide. The Enlightenment continues to struggle to redeem its promises precisely because it focuses on the one side of this divide, failing to realise that knowledge and its accumulation does not deliver meaning nor increase wisdom. Weber referred to the inversion of means and ends, the pathos of instrumental means coming to displace ethical human ends. This pathos is expressed in trusting the results of science and its method above all others for fixing truths. The Faustian pact upon which the modern world rests places its faith in science, its method and its results on the assumption that the expansion of reason it delivers will be meaning enough. This faith is misplaced. The result is a culture of uncertainty and even anxiety since, ultimately, science is not so much about ‘truth’ as its endless questioning. The achievements are real but are not integrated into a wider culture. Human beings live more copiously but less happily; more proficiently but less meaningfully; we live with more knowledge but with less wisdom. To know how does not answer the question of why.
‘Man ought not to know more of a thing than he can creatively live up to', argued Nietzsche. The modern age is presenting us with an image of human beings armed with cosmic power and living as gods. But we are not seeing progress as salvation, far from it.
With every nuclear incident and accident at nuclear plants comes the reassuring claim that modern designs are better. They always are. And yet the incidents and accidents continue. Even if one accepts the safety claims, an understanding of history should make us cautious. If you really want to know what's going on in the world, study history. Read how Socrates founded moral philosophy and the very terms and concepts of civilisation by challenging the overweening claims of science. Hubris brings nemesis.
An understanding of history shows how the world is always changing, how what is happening today has happened before, how civilisations and societies rise and fall. Believe it or not, ‘the economy’, and the energy to power and expand it, didn't begin in the twentieth century. ‘The economy’ and energy demands and inputs have always been around. These things have happened before. And will happen again. And the lesson is that there is no perfect society, no perfect system and no perfect technique. History comes with no guarantees. Human actions and choices shape the course of history, the way human agents act or fail to act. There is no scientific, technical, economic imperative.
To take the option of unsafe energy in an increasingly unsafe world is the sheerest folly. True, many ecologists will choose nuclear over fossil fuels in an attempt to buy time in the present in order to scale back for the future. I can see the argument made by the likes of James Hansen and James Lovelock. Climate change, however, comes not only with adverse weather but also social conflict over dwindling resources and political instability. Radioactive waste remains dangerous for 20,000 years. If a week is a long time in politics, how much longer is 20,000 years? Can anyone vouch for the safe production and disposal of nuclear waste over that time span? If nuclear is made the essential energy of the modern economy, all countries will go nuclear. How many stable governments are there in the world today? How many of the governments to come in the next 20,000 years will be stable? How many will keep the maps of their waste and where it is disposed? Where will it all be disposed?
This is the senility that comes before death. The planet is on the brink of a lunatic enterprise that will do nothing to solve an energy crisis caused by an ever expanding economy that does not and cannot know the meaning of enough.
Witnessing the events concerning the damaged nuclear plants in Japan has brought home the dangers to life and to the environment that nuclear power represents. Huhne was right first time round and needs to return to the sane and sober position he adopted in 2007 with regards to nuclear energy. Government needs to reconsider the commitment to nuclear power, knowing that ‘necessity’ – the false fixity of accumulative economic imperatives – has already decided the ‘argument’. Because, of course, it is not science that is the problem at all. Bill Clinton never spoke truer words when he said ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ It is indeed ‘the economy’, that slippery euphemism for capitalism. And ‘the economy’ is stupid, very stupid. The stupid economy for the ‘age of stupid.’ And science and politics in the service of economic determinism, the accumulative logic and imperative of the capital system? The real truth is that the Marxists have been right all along about the symbiotic relation between the state and capital. As Ed Miliband’s father Ralph Miliband wrote: ‘The state has only the illusion of being determinant, whereas in fact it is determined; it does, in time, subdue private property and social wills, but only to give substance to the will of private property and to acknowledge its reality as the highest reality of the political state, as the highest moral reality’ (Miliband Marx and the State, The Socialist Register 1965). The state must facilitate the process of private accumulation as a condition of its own power. The state gives the illusion of political choice to the sovereign people, but its actions and policies are determined by other than democratic forces.
The problem is that imperatives – scientific, technical, economic – have a bad history. Scientific speculation predates Socrates, the natural philosophers were in the field before the moral philosophers. The ‘Age of Reason’ in the seventeenth century was succeeded by the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. If science in itself was going to set us free, it would have done so by now. This observation reveals something about science, technology and knowledge in the modern world. Far from rendering human conduct and the processes and structures of society 'transparent', the world evinces nothing so much as power out of control. An assertive and confident scientism is plainly untenable. The failure lies in believing that the cognitive approach was self-sufficient, causing it to systematically exclude ideas belonging to the moral perspective of transcendence. Historical experience indicates that this scientistic paradigm has continually misfired and fallen far short of its claims. For this reason, the cognitive dimension is one dimension of reason, not the only one. One has to return to the ethical perspective that seeks to transcend a reality given to the senses by reference to ends determined by independent human reason. It is time to assert these moral ends over technical and economic imperatives.
And if scientific claims to peace, reason and freedom are untrustworthy, the claims made for economic growth are plainly delusory. How many centuries of economic growth have passed? Human freedom, fulfilment and happiness ought to have been achieved by now. Instead, a system of endless growth – a nihilism – has brought about unparalleled climate change threatening global warming. And nuclear is offered as a solution. Why? Merely to produce more means to power the endless accumulative logic of the capital system.
Max Weber saw that the rationalisation of society has delivered not freedom, but its opposite. In The Protestant Ethic he wrote that the order of the modern world
is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilised coal is burnt.
Nihilism arises in part through the collapse of objective values and the inability of individuals in a rationalised world to provide their own. This reveals the emptiness of absolute freedom: freedom as arbitrariness but also as determination. The subject of this empty, arbitrary freedom is subject to the 'iron cage' of modern capitalist rationalisation. Certain socially imposed goals work through this apparent arbitrariness. Nihilism here derives from the unsatisfying and essentially unsatisfiable nature of these goals.
Instrumental reason promises efficient means towards the realisation of an individual's goals. However, in its characteristically capitalist form, these goals are not independent but are subordinate to ‘the economy’. And this economy, organised around an accumulative imperative, pursues ends which are essentially unrealisable. The power which is sought is not the capacity to carry out a particular task or range of tasks, but is merely the means to acquire further means to further means, and so on indefinitely. That’s why, where energy is concerned, enough can never be enough. Whatever ends are achieved are valued only insofar as they are means towards further ends which are themselves means. This programme of endless deferral of ends is neither coherent nor satisfying. The result is not the efficient realisation of ends, but a compulsive repetition which, being endless, is nihilistic.
Nuclear power is one of the big technological hopes in dealing with climate change. But, leaving aside how much energy it can generate at what expense, it is just not safe. Certainly not compared to carbon capture and storage and renewable energy.
All forms of electricity supply are unreliable. There really is little difference between an unexpected shutdown of a large coal-fired generator, a sudden fall in wind speed at a wind farm and a cloudy day over a solar thermal facility. However, in a nation with a large land mass, wind and solar generating facilities can be spread over large areas, more continuous supply being ensured by diverse weather patterns ensuring ('Technical reliability of single generating units is not the issue: modern wind turbines are 98-99% available, far better than any thermal plant. The issue is rather the aggregate effect of some renewables' variability' (Amory Lovins and Imran Sheikh, 'The Nuclear Illusion', Rocky Mountains Institute, 27 May 2008, p. 22).
Further diversification is possible through the use of tidal power. Denmark already draws 21 per cent of its electricity from wind power and three northern German states draw more than 30 per cent from wind, so the notion that countries could increase their shares of wind-power is at least feasible (Lovins and Sheikh, 'The Nuclear Illusion', p. 22, n. 88). It is estimated that offshore wind farms could provide a quarter of Britain's electricity needs (Anon., 'Offshore wind farms could meet a quarter of the UK's electricity needs', Guardian, 25 June 2009. An electricity system with a diversified supply of renewable energy could be more reliable than one dependent on a few very large coal or nuclear plants. In The Nuclear Illusion, Lovins and Sheikh argue that 'Research is increasingly showing that if we properly diversify renewable energy supplies in type and location, forecast the weather (as hydropower and windpower operators now do), and integrate renewables with existing demand and supply-side resources on the grid, then renewables' electrical supplies will be more reliable than current arrangements' (Lovins and Sheikh, 'The Nuclear Illusion', p. 24).
Of course, the controversy concerning nuclear power is complicated, not least in relation to its role as a renewable energy in an age of global warming. Indeed, an appreciation of the scale of the threat posed by climate change leads one to positively evaluate any energy alternative to coal-fired power stations. A choice between a new wave of nuclear power plants and a new wave of coal-fired power plants is, however, not much of a choice. Certainly, one can appreciate that nuclear is an established technology whose dangers can be contained, if not resolved. But how does one compare and contrast the threat of climate change generating runaway global warming to the potential damage to the environment and human health from nuclear accidents? The situation is akin to Socrates having to choose the method of his execution. Confronting the problems of waste storage, nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, I swear I can’t get that excited about arguments concerning the costs and timing of nuclear power compared to the alternatives. I take it that the Early Day Motion is well-intentioned and well-reasoned and sourced. But it just doesn’t seem to be the real issue. However, the evidence is clear that nuclear suffers from many of the drawbacks of carbon capture and storage. In those nations which already have experience with nuclear power, including well-established regulatory and waste-disposal regimes, it takes a decade or more for a new nuclear power plant to be planned, approved, built and commissioned. Average construction time alone is six years (Amory Lovins and Imran Sheikh, 'The Nuclear Illusion', p. 8, n. 39. So The Green Party are correct to argue that new nuclear plants will not meet the UK’s energy needs of the near future.
But the point is much more than this. The International Energy Agency envisages a four-fold increase in the amount of electricity generated by nuclear power by 2050. This necessitates the construction of 32 nuclear power plants every year from now to 2050. The massive expenditure that this requires would be rewarded with a mere 6 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector. By way of complete contrast, wind farms could generate the same amount of power for just 60 per cent of the construction cost, without the additional and continuing expense of supplying fuel and disposing of waste, and with much greater emissions savings (Greenpeace International, 'Nuclear Power: An expensive waste of time', Greenpeace, Amsterdam, 2009. I note the argument in favour of nuclear as a renewable energy. However, ‘the more urgent it is to protect the climate, the more vital it is to spend each dollar in ways that will displace the most carbon soonest' (Lovins and Sheikh, The Nuclear Illusion, p. 20). The big advantage that investing in energy efficiency and various forms of renewable energy, including storage technology, has over nuclear power is that they do not generate waste that is dangerous for 20,000 years or provide materials that can be used for hostile purposes. I note the claims that such risks could be reduced with the successful development of so-called fourth-generation nuclear power. The claim is that Generation IV nuclear energy includes several designs for power plants that are safer and produce much less radioactive waste than conventional plants. How much less? And how soon are these technologies likely to be commercial? Scientists are saying that we have five years to make the changes necessary to stay the safe side of the 2C temperature increase, beyond which climate change becomes dangerous and even irreversible. A nuclear programme cannot be put together in time.
A concerted effort to shift from fossil fuels to energy efficiency, renewable energy and natural gas is technically possible. And this could also be achieved at reasonable economic cost. But is it politically possible? Structural transformation causes disruption. True, jobs lost in the old energy industries can be compensated by more and better jobs in the new industries. Are politicians willing to court unpopularity through a proper transformation of energy systems, with all the disruptions that this entails? Given the prospect of catastrophic climate disruption, this is not too much of a price to pay. Yet such calculations loom so large that no government seems prepared to do what is required, which is to address citizens directly and honestly, explaining that we face a climate emergency that can only be met at some cost and inconvenience. The sad truth is that the national and international political institutions that must bring about the changes in energy systems are too inert, too compromised by their links to and dependence on business and too dominated by old modes and mentalities to authorize the energy revolution that is required to guarantee human survival.
“At the present rate of progression since 1600, it will not need another century or half century to tip thought upside down. Law, in that case, would disappear as theory or a priori principle and give place to force. Morality would become police. Explosives would reach cosmic violence. Disintegration would overcome integration”.
These words were written by Henry Adams in a letter to Henry Osborn Taylor in 1905. He elaborated upon the ideas in his essay on the Phase Rule in History. Adams's forecast of ‘cosmic violence’ in which force and police replace law and morality aptly summarise the political and cultural changes accompanying the transformation of the physical sciences and technics. Adams’ prophecy was fulfilled with the invention of the atomic bomb, including the disappearance of law and morality when the bomb was actually used in Japan.
Events in Japan once more should make us all consider the potential that nuclear power has for ‘cosmic violence’. For we have now to devise, under pressure of the growing climate crisis facing humankind, the political and moral controls that will prevent our technics from causing life, in all its organised forms, to disappear from the planet. No previous crisis in the history of humankind can compare with this, given the threat to the biosphere. The question is not whether this or that government or nation can survive but whether humankind as a whole has sufficient nerve and nous to marshal, on behalf of Being and Living, forces which have hitherto been mobilised only for war, power and profit. Without such a dynamic there is nothing but the same old sterile grooves of ever increasing energy inputs for diminishing and ever more dangerous outputs.
Frankly, I don’t trust science and technology in the service of economic, political and military imperatives. And I don’t trust nuclear power in the hands of states subordinate to capital. The coalescence of private interests and government in the inflation of defence budgets, with international tensions and wars following as a matter of course, is coming at a time when the systemic imperatives of the capital economy need to be curtailed in order to address the issue of climate change and the threat of global ecological devastation. Far from coalescing for the long term common good, we seem to be witnessing the rule of thanatos, a system in its death throes but determined to take the rest of the world with it.
Nuclear power is a cosmic power with the potential for cosmic destruction and violence. Up to the invention of this power, human development has been slow, with a wide margin of error. Sir Karl Popper quotes Oscar Wilde: ‘experience is the name we give to our mistakes’. With nuclear, we cannot afford to learn from such experience. With nuclear power, our errors could prove fatal to the human race as a whole. The margin of error has narrowed to a hair-line. Any mistakes in the exploitation of nuclear power - or one big mistake - has the potential to sentence a substantial part of humankind to extinction. James Lovelock recently made headlines by opining that the human race is too stupid to save itself. He didn’t actually say that. His point was that, mentally and institutionally, human beings are hard wired to maximise resources for themselves in the short run. Humankind’s customs and attitudes now need to develop a long range strategic capacity. Human beings are insufficiently prepared for the climate emergency. Nuclear power is precisely the cosmic power that Henry Adams warned of, and with it comes the potential for cosmic violence and destruction. Humankind can no longer afford to learn just by experience, at least not in this realm. Any mistake here will be the beginning of the end.
And mistakes are all too predictable.
In The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (2009), James Lovelock makes this bold statement with respect to the safety nuclear power.
It took a medium-sized industrial accident in a Soviet nuclear power station at Chernobyl in the Ukraine to trigger the monstrous anti-nuclear energy story that has haunted the world ever since. The accident, a steam explosion, happened in an unstable reactor that was undergoing an unwise and improperly planned experiment. The whole sad event was a sequence of false steps that could only have happened under the corrupt statist politics of the Soviet Union. (Lovelock ch 4 2009).
Lovelock’s breathtaking confidence with regard to nuclear is mirrored by others in this supposed nuclear renaissance. So serious is the climate crisis and so inert have human institutions and psychologies proved in addressing this crisis, that many are to be found advocating a major worldwide nuclear programme.
Here is Stewart Brand.
Reactor safety is a problem already solved. In 2008 the world had 443 civilian nuclear reactors boiling up 16 percent of all electricity and keeping a yearly 3 gigatons of carbon dioxide that would have been generated by coal plants out of the atmosphere. Year after year, the industry has had no significant accidents, having learned hard lessons from the three that got away—England's Windscale fire in 1957, the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979, and the Chernobyl steam explosion in 1986. (Brand ch 4 2009).
There is no denying that there is a climate emergency and there is no denying that time is running out. None of that makes nuclear safe. The very accidents that Lovelock, Brand and the eco-engineers said was impossible happened within a year of the publications of their books.
And it was all so predictable. We know that the engineering should not go wrong. Given sufficient time and sufficient resources, with no cut corners and skimping on safety, an engineering design will be what its engineers claim – the engineers get their sums right. But when have such perfect conditions ever existed in business and politics? When have such standards ever been universal? To the vicissitudes of business and politics we can add the vagaries of the weather. Both Lovelock and Brand, all those who advocate nuclear to deal with the climate crisis, know that one of the features of climate change is adverse weather. They also know that nuclear reactors tend to be built on the coast to avail themselves of a consistent water supply.
Simply, even apart from questions concerning the safety of nuclear power as a source of energy, as well as the safety of the nuclear reactor as a design, both human error and natural disaster are entirely predictable.
With Fukushima, the Japanese government and emergency services were having to deal with the consequences of an earthquake and tsunami, having to evacuate thousands of people from the danger zone. Further, the shutting of a dozen or so nuclear plants brought about blackouts around the whole country. Fukushima presents us with a classic example of how our over-reliance on all too fallible technology renders civilised life vulnerable to the unintended consequences of political, human and natural events. I would have said unpredictable were it not for the fact that it was all too predictable in terms of prudential judgement. But in less general terms, warnings based on evidence had also been given by analysts. In 2006, professor Katsuhiko Ishibashi resigned his position on a nuclear power advisory panel, claiming that the policy of building in earthquake zones could lead to catastrophe. That seems obvious enough. But the warnings were ignored. Lovelock writes of ‘corrupt state politics’. The problem with arguments from necessity and the problem with expensive energy infrastructures like nuclear is that they generate inescapable imperatives that remove free choice. Even in the aftermath of Fukishima, the argument can still be heard that Japan is so deficient in alternative energy sources that it has no option but to continue with its nuclear programme. Without nuclear, Japan’s lights go out. And I’m afraid that, regardless of safety, that, to many, is a compelling argument. Warnings will be suppressed, silenced or just plain ignored.
The idea advanced by Lovelock, Brand and others that things can’t go wrong with the design and the technology has been heard many times before. The idea should be given short shrift. The claim has been subjected to close analysis. Back in 1984, Charles Perrow, a Yale professor, thoroughly examined the question of accidents in complex technologies. Significantly, the study was entitled Normal Accidents. Perrow didn’t do the easy thing and analyse accidents due to eliminable, one-off errors. He looked at normal accidents in chemical plants, air traffic control, shipping and dams, and most of all in nuclear power plants. Perrow’s principal focus is upon the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. Perrow shows how things can go wrong with design, equipment, procedures, operators, supplies and the environment. At times, two or more problems will occur at the same time. This, Perrow argues, is an ever-present potential in a complex technology such as a nuclear plant. Subjecting what went wrong in the first 13 seconds of the incident to a close five page analysis, Perrow concludes that "no matter how effective conventional safety devices are, there is a form of accident that is inevitable" in complex systems. Hence the phrase "normal accidents". Set against Perrow’s rigorous analysis, claims that nuclear accidents shouldn’t and hence won’t happen are lame.
Writing of Chernobyl, Lovelock asserted that such a thing could ‘only have happened under the corrupt statist politics of the Soviet Union.’ (Lovelock ch 4 2009). Brand asserts that ‘reactor safety is a problem already solved.’ He says that the hard lessons of Windscale, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have been learned: ‘Year after year, the industry has had no significant accidents’ (Brand ch 4 2009).
Within a year of being written, such claims had been exposed as foolish in the extreme. Back in 1984, Charles Perrow also made a prediction. Perrow predicted that there would be future disasters at nuclear plants. Two years later the Chernobyl plant melted down. The World Health Organisation estimate 9,000 deaths, Lovelock and Brand claim none. The economic damage has been estimated to be as high as $100bn (£62bn). (I shall leave the expense of constructing and decommissioning nuclear power plants. Suffice to say, it’s prohibitive).
System accidents are endemic to many technologies, particularly the most complex and most centralising. Whilst a blow-out causing a pile-up on a motorway may be disastrous for those involved, the impact is immediate and contained. A disaster occurs in those cases where a technology has the potential to affect more than those immediately involved. That’s the "dread factor" which surrounds nuclear power. Even though the tsunami that hit Japan has had much greater immediate impact on lives and infrastructures, the great fear amongst the Japanese people has been of the nuclear danger. Lovelock calls this unreasoning, claiming more deaths as a result of the fear of nuclear energy than from radioactivity itself. It’s a line taken by Stewart Brand and repeated by Mark Lynas. It might – might – be technically correct, but it is remarkably poor psychology. Years of dealing with physical measurement, causality and fact leave some scientists remarkably deficient in empathy – they lack the human factor. And with nuclear energy, there is no avoiding the ‘dread factor’. Here is an instance where the instincts of the people – the wisdom of millennia of evolution – are more reliable than the alleged rationality of the scientists.
And popular instincts are certainly more trustworthy than anything business and politics offers. Popular scepticism only increases in the aftermath of disaster, as government ministers and scientists along with representatives of the nuclear industry line up to reassure that all is well. It is a clear example of an attempt to manage popular perception in a crisis. There might well be a need for calm. But when statements so clearly contradict what people know and feel, official statements lose credibility. That ministers and scientists could speak so clearly and with such certainty within days of the Fukushima simply invites popular incredulity. The question is begged as to why government, industry and the scientists in their pay are so assertive and so strongly supportive of particular technologies, even as those technologies are failing.
This view applies to the whole question of energy infrastructures. Government and industry not only need to be more open and straightforward with the public, the public themselves need to be more questioning not only of energy infrastructures, but of energy demands. How, on earth, are we in such a grip of necessity that nuclear is still being strongly advocated in light of a disaster that governments and experts said could never happen?
We should be sceptical of all pretences of knowledge. The claim to scientific certainty is itself deeply unscientific. A more humble approach to knowledge is not only justified in light of the unknowns, it would also foster greater trust amongst the public. In complex issues such as energy and technology, a measured approach based on reason, fact and evidence is required. But there is also a need to go beyond the experts and expertise to engender a democratic debate about the choices we are making and directions we are taking. Ultimately, this is a question of politics and how citizens live their lives, not just science. Decisions about technology and energy need to address catastrophic potential. These decisions can be informed by experts and expertise, but the questions are ethical in character and political in resolution.
The lessons of Perrow’s ‘normal accidents’ is that since technologies can potentially have disastrous effects on large numbers of people, their interests need to be represented. One would have thought that this is the role of government. Unfortunately, governments have become advocates of nuclear power for a number of reasons. The dependence of governments upon economic growth has meant that they are forever attempting to secure the energy supplies that fuels that growth. Lately, nuclear has been favoured as a relatively low-carbon technology that reduces dependence on fossil fuels. Whatever the merits of these arguments, their effect is to have reduced the government’s ability to act and to be seen to act as honest brokers. This has become apparent in the aftermath of Fukushima, exposing the extent to which information relating to faults and accidents at reactors has been covered up in Japan. James Lovelock writes of the ‘corrupt state politics’ of the old Soviet Union. He should read more history about the connection of the state and corrupt politics. Corruption is in the DNA of the state and that alone counts against nuclear power.
Time and again, research has highlighted the extent to which political ‘debate’ on energy has been simplistic, narrow and closed – loaded from first to last to reach the desired conclusions. Government ministers and policymakers rush to embrace nuclear power as the solution to all our problems, even whilst calling for a ‘debate’. A debate over what? These politicians have already made their minds up and are simply presenting the public with a done deal, soliciting support for a pre-determined position. The classic example here is UK prime minister Tony Blair publicly pre-empting the conclusions of a consultation about energy options by declaring to the nation that nuclear power was back "with a vengeance". Whilst the irony of these words will be lost on the advocates of nuclear power, the people of Fukushima will see it all too clearly.
After Fukushima and the disaster that could not happen, the people and governments in a number of nations - Germany, Switzerland and Austria – are having a profound re-think concerning energy policy. The UK's chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, is quite right, on point of logic, to argue that the events in Japan are not comparable with the situation in the UK, the UK does not have the same earthquake risk as Japan. But the problem of ‘normal accidents’ is not just about earthquakes. The problem of risky technologies is about the whole range of things that can go wrong. There are other problems. For all of the claims of safety, firms and investors involved in nuclear power often fail to take regulatory and political risk into account. Judging by the assertions of Lovelock and Brand, this is a congenital weakness of the pro-nuclear camp. To argue that nuclear accidents are only possible in the context of ‘corrupt state politics’ shows a breathtaking ignorance of the extent to which states have practised a corrupt politics throughout history. It also ignores the logic of ‘normal accidents’.
And then there’s the expense. Avoiding nuclear accidents requires tighter regulations, which in turn increases the cost of nuclear energy. The advocates of potentially disastrous technologies need to bear the full costs of their products, and this includes insurance liabilities and the cost of independent monitoring of environmental and health effects. At present, it is taxpayers who are liable to pay the price for any future nuclear incident, in every way. Further, there is every reason to think that as finances become ever more straitened, the tendency of states to cut corners and take short cuts will increase.
It is too easy to portray critics of technology as being anti-technology as such. Not so. Even less are critics of a particular technology anti-science. On the contrary, critical thinking is the very essence of science. It is certainly central to any decision-making process that can be considered rational. The uncritical support of a technology for reasons of necessity, convenience, politics and economics is certainly contrary to scientific principles. Tony Blair is typical of those people who mistake the products of science, which he waxes lyrical about, with science as such. That is uncritical thinking which is implicated in poor decision making.
With respect to technologies that lack catastrophic potential, accidents are disastrous to those immediately involved and affected, but do not amount to disasters. What distinguishes nuclear power is that it is a technology which possesses catastrophic potential. The argument that nuclear power is ‘necessary’ in light of energy requirements and/or the need to reduce carbon emissions, raises significant questions about why we need to adopt technologies that have such potential. What is the nature of this necessity that so removes our ethical and political choice. If we are being told that we have to embrace nuclear power, even in the aftermath of disaster, then we need a public debate concerning the necessity that lies behind the nuclear imperative.
Such a debate will expose a false necessity rooted in the imperatives of an economic system that is endlessly expanding, transgressing planetary limits and threatening the foundations of civilised life.
The fact that other governments in the world are not following the nuclear option indicates the extent to which there is a choice on energy infrastructures and that assertions of necessity are bogus. Just across the water, Germany is taking an entirely different direction on energy policy.
As the disaster unfolded at Fukushima, government scientists reassured the public that there was nothing to fear. At the same time, Japan's nuclear safety agency raised the crisis level to seven: the highest category of nuclear accident. The government widened the evacuation zone. The myopic approach of the Japanese government has been reproduced by nuclear advocates the world over. Experts stated that the Japanese accident had no relevance for the rest of the world.
The unpalatable truth that these nuclear advocates and experts do not want to face is that like Chernobyl, the legacy of Fukushima will be with the world for a long time to come.
James Lovelock criticises critics of nuclear energy for their ‘unreasoning fear’. The simple facts alone are frightening enough. Nuclear consulting engineer John Large informs us that the six reactor cores in Fukushima held 487 tonnes of uranium (of which 95 tonnes includes 230kg of plutonium, which is even more dangerous, from the Mox assemblies), and a further 1,838 tonnes of stored spent fuel. The "ongoing" releases from this radioactive storehouse are not in doubt, only their extent.
However, regardless of the threat or actuality of disaster, the bare facts concerning the cost and ability of nuclear power to meet the world’s energy requirements and address the problem of climate change should be sufficient to render the nuclear option prohibitive and irrelevant. UK Government figures indicate that the ambitious and costly new nuclear-build programme will supply only 4% of the energy required. Electricity provides just 20% of UK energy, with nuclear at its peak nuclear providing a mere 20% of that electricity. Steve Thomas, a professor in energy policy, argues that even nuclear sceptics have been surprised by the scale of problems at newbuild reactors in Finland and France. From an original cost of €3bn, the Finnish reactor's cost has ballooned to at least €5.7bn. The same thing has happened to the French reactor. Then we come to the nuclear waste bill. In Britain, liability estimates have grown from £50bn in the mid-2000’s to £80bn at present. At a time when economies are stagnant and finances are dwindling, such costs cannot be born.
In Germany, chancellor Angela Merkel is leading a "measured exit" from nuclear power. In contrast, the chief executive of EDF insists that new UK reactors "will have to go ahead". Part of the reason for this blind commitment is the £12.4bn they've already spent on the purchase of UK nuclear sites. Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg stated the obvious when he suggested that the next generation of nuclear power stations may never be built on account of the fact that the recommended higher and more costly safety standards would render them financially prohibitive. Chris Huhne’s response was to accuse his party leader of behaving like a "headless chicken" on the issue. Huhne’s head is buried in the sand, he is in denial of the problems mounting around him.
At least Huhne called on the Health and Safety Executive's chief nuclear inspector, Mike Weightman, to do a "thorough report on the implications of the situation in Japan and the lessons to be learned". The problem is that the HSE review looks suspiciously narrow, with the usual pro-nuclear proponents doing the fact-finding and weighing of evidence. Critical voices are absent from the whole process. Once more we see how ‘corrupt state politics’ is the norm and not the exception when it comes to the issue of nuclear power. Such inherent institutional bias typifies the approach to nuclear regulation.
When it comes to nuclear risk management, there is a sharp contrast between rhetoric and reality. The philosopher AN Whitehead wrote of the error of misplaced concreteness. Many proponents of nuclear power take the rhetoric for the reality, whether deliberately or otherwise, but there is no reason for the rest of us to make the mistake. There is a need for critical thinking on nuclear given the serious "what if" questions pertaining to cost of construction, insurance, fuel supply and manufacture, vulnerability to attack, radioactive waste management, radiation risk, decommissioning, reactor coastal siting, adverse weather including flooding, nuclear costs and accident liabilities.
And that’s only the start of it. As E3G director Tom Burke argues, the question of energy and climate policy is not merely a calculus of technological causation and human casualties. The bigger question concerns the relevance of nuclear power to the problems of energy security and climate change.
The transition to sustainable energy entails a variety of energy options. Andy Stirling at Sussex University has done pioneering work here on a range of technically and economically viable alternatives, including European-scale networks for energy distribution ("big grids"); small-scale distributed energy ("smart grids"); large-scale infrastructures for carbon sequestration; energy market innovations from supply to services; more distributed and integrated energy services through a restructured built and transport environment; and the generation of evolving forms of renewable energy.
To opt for the centralising, authoritarian, prohibitively expensive and ecologically irrelevant nuclear option demonstrates a poverty of the imagination, a weakness of the political will and a failure of scientific reason. Nuclear belongs to an old and failing mode of production that is on its way out.
As in so many areas, Germany leads the way on viable renewable technology. As Keith Barnham, Imperial College physicist, has pointed out, Germany has installed more windpower capacity than the entire UK nuclear capacity. That capacity is being increased at the rate equivalent to more than one reactor a year. In 2009 alone, Germany installed solar photovoltaic systems with a capacity which is equivalent to approximately four nuclear reactors.
Under EU directives, the UK is obliged to reduce its energy intensity through efficiency measures and to increase its proportion of renewables to 15% by 2020, thus creating the foundation on which a non-nuclear, demand-side management, low carbon future can be constructed.
The issue has to be informed by expertise – clearly – but its resolution is an ethical and political matter since it concerns the way we live our lives. Few people are energy technology, infrastructure and policy experts and practitioners, so it comes down to prudential judgement. But in deciding who to trust, it is worth bearing in mind what Andrew Warren, director of the Association for the Conservation of Energy, says: the UK and Germany have the same carbon objective, yet Germany has opted clearly for the non-nuclear route, the UK government, Huhne and the EDF have gone down the pro-nuclear route – who is likely to be right? The UK? Or Europe's most successful economy with a proven record for successful long term strategic planning?
I fear the worst on this issue. To me, going nuclear to deal with climate change is like the old joke about the man who fell out of the plane. Fortunately, there was a haystack below him. Unfortunately, there was a pitchfork in the haystack. Fortunately, he missed the pitchfork. Unfortunately, he missed the haystack.