Howard A. Doughty
In 1937, the American literary critic Kenneth Burke buried this gem in a footnote in his book, Attitudes Toward History: “Among the sciences, there is one little fellow named Ecology, and in time we shall pay him more attention.”
Almost ninety years later, the time has come. This is, however, also a time when science itself is widely mistrusted. The guides of reason and evidence, passed along to us from the European Enlightenment, seem to be failing. Still, one science compels our attention. Says David A. Bell: “Even Marxist scholars, for all their continued belief in the importance of class, no longer have any confidence that the history of class struggle… points toward… a more just society.” And liberals, while “embracing a Western model of capitalism as well as moderate social democracy, have seen their dreams turn into nightmares.” He therefore concludes that, if any group of contemporary academics is forecasting what is to come in a convincing manner, it is climate scientists, and if a specter is haunting the world today, it is the all too real specter of ecological doom.
A major part of the debate about ecology concerns energy and a major part of the energy debate concerns nuclear power. The principal point of this piece is to set out a framework for thinking about what lies at the core (so to speak) of the nuclear power debate. Three lines of inquiry unsurprisingly stand out.
Environmental Issues
The most attractive quality of nuclear energy is that it does not directly depend on fossil fuels. It does not burn coal, oil, or natural gas. It therefore does not release the notorious CO2 “greenhouse gas” into the atmosphere. So, its advocates say, it does not add to global warming.
Even the contrarian Academy Award-winning movie-maker Oliver Stone praises nuclear energy as a “realistic” alternative to the petroleum industry in his recent documentary, Nuclear Now. Meanwhile, Jacobin has been criticized by the venerable Canadian independent socialist magazine, Canadian Dimension, as a victim of delusory technophilia for suggesting that nuclear power plants, electric vehicles, so-called carbon capture technology, and even illusory “fusion fuel” reactors will cleanse the environment.
As for worries about further immediate and long-term damage arising from disasters from Chernobyl, Ukraine, to Fukushima, Japan, as well as the unsolved and perhaps unsolvable problem of toxic nuclear waste, they are dispelled by reassurances that all will be well.
There is plainly passion on both sides of the argument. What must be explored, however, is the science and not the cinematic summaries of costs, benefits, aspirations, and failures.
Economic Factors
Economics does not merely involve the price of the final product-per-kilowatt hour. Consumer costs are important, but so are matters of reliability and efficiency. Recalling that the term “economics” derives from the ancient Greek word oikos (household) and that the phrase “home economics” is therefore essentially a redundancy, nuclear energy must meet criteria of dependability and efficacy, as well as relative affordability.
Enthusiasts insist that nuclear power is relatively cheap, especially when compared to the increasing costs of dirtier “tar sands” petroleum and environmentally destructive fracking extraction of natural gas. There are ample resources — both scientific and propagandistic — from which to gain information (and disinformation) about comparing nuclear energy to fossil fuels on the one hand and to renewables such as solar, hydro, tidal, and geothermal on the other. They come from the left, the right, or the squishy centre of political opinion.
For instance, the Australian organization, Green Left, says its mission is to “expose the lies, hypocrisy and bias of the billionaire class and their media.” It outlines arguments against nuclear power as an expensive, wasteful, non-renewable energy source. Focusing on reliability, the World Information Service on Energy explains that nuclear power is not limitless. If it were to meet goals of supplying the current 20 percent of global energy to as much as 90 percent, it claims that uranium supplies would be exhausted in about six years.
Moreover, since the 1980s, the estimated construction cost of reactors has risen by up to 600 percent with expenditures rising to as much as $25 billion for nuclear reactors in the United States. So, when Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario premier Doug Ford recently reached across jurisdictional and party lines to commit more than $1 billion in public money to a new generation of reactors, skeptics could be forgiven for thinking them unduly optimistic.
Cost/benefit analyses can be conducted. Conclusions can be drawn. They will be unable to offer sound judgements.
Political Problems
An often ignored but significant issue concerns the interrelated structures of political power and excessive wealth, both of which are sustained by ideological hegemony. To help investigate these arrangements, one helpful resource is an inventory of critical assessments published by Climate and Capitalism. It balances the information presented by nuclear supporters such as the Canadian Nuclear Association and its trove of studies advertising nuclear energy as a crucial part of Canada’s economic and environmental future. Just as economics is more than intersecting supply/demand curves and calculations of marginal utility, so politics is more than governance systems for the “authoritative allocation of values.” How people are taught to think is almost as important as what they say and do.
Over the past 40 years, the dominant ideology in North America, Western Europe, and most of the “developing” nations has unquestionably been a “neoliberal” version of capitalism. It has devalued the public sector, encouraged frantic growth, promoted transactional human relations, and sought to deregulate domestic and international trade. Regardless of whether victorious political parties have been labeled Conservative, Republican, Democratic, Liberal, Labour, or Social Democratic, neoliberal priorities have dominated. Keynesian economics are out; corporate domination, privatization, and market determination is in. An example of its effects could be seen in last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to hobble the Environmental Protection Agency is just one of many measures to put profits before people and other living things.
Ten years ago, Christian Parenti offered a “radical approach to climate politics” in which he argued that “realistic climate politics are reformist politics” with an emphasis on “mitigation and adaptation.” Now, the pervasive neoliberal political culture restricts ecological choice, in terms of policy alternatives and social priorities. As Ruuska, Heikkurinen, and Wilen succinctly put it: “It is important to note again that the capitalist mode of production has to expand in order to reproduce itself.” Productionism, which is the political economy of cancerous growth, defines our era. For things to be otherwise may require an almost metaphysical shake-up in society.
Today, there is still a kind of optimism that imagines that we can survive and thrive by “advancing [a] global clean energy transition over the next 30 years [which will allow] the existing nuclear power plants that are well-functioning to continue operating through the course of their normal service lives. But continuing to operate these existing plants for the next one to two decades cannot be confused with a massive expansion of new reactors, when we know that a high-efficiency and renewables-dominant energy infrastructure can deliver a zero emissions global economy within 30 years.”
This may not do.
Full disclosure: From 1986 to 1991, I worked as a communications consultant with clients including the former Ontario Hydro, Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd., SaskEnergy, and the Canadian Nuclear Association. What I learned then is now economically and environmentally almost antediluvian, but it was enough to make me dissociate from the industry while also respecting the ingenuity and enthusiasm of those who, for example, continue to pursue the elusive fusion reaction process that promises to solve our energy problems… sometime… in the indeterminate future.
From what I understand, the problem is “quantitative” – in the sense that nuclear power is the only way to get *close* to enough of what we need to maintain our standard of living (approximately) without fossil fuels.