Letters: Honest accounting on nuclear
Is this Solidarity or Green World that I’m reading? According to Stuart Jordan (24 Jan), whatever the answer to climate change is, it’s not nuclear power! Nuclear plants are always late and over budget, unlike anything else.
Apparently, uranium would run out in 10 years, a fact that had escaped the companies that are keen to build and run new power stations. So why is Gordon Brown keen on nuclear? Because his brother is a “lobbyist” for EDF!
Of course!
Instead, we need “a massive investment in renewables, energy storage and carbon capture technology”, with “a giant international supergrid covering Europe and North Africa”, all by 2017. Am I the only reader who finds this difficult to credit. Just consider how many off-shore wind turbines we would need, with their massive concrete bases destroying the undersea habitat, not to mention the quarrying necessary for the limestone. Tidal barrage across the Severn? Another habitat destroyed for temporary gain (until the river silted up).
Meanwhile, nuclear power is the safest form of power generation and has minimal effect on the environment. “What?! Are you mad?”, I hear people say. “Didn’t we read Paul Vernadsky (Solidarity, Debate, 13 October) saying that ‘nuclear power is dangerous, expensive and unnecessary’?”
Consider this. The worst nuclear disaster in the world, Chernobyl, killed less than 60 people (under 50 emergency workers exposed to high radiation levels and 9 fatalities from thyroid cancer). Undoubtedly, there will have been other cancers caused by radiation escapes but these are almost undetectable amid the millions of cancers occurring “normally” (about one third of people contract cancer at some time).
60 plus deaths – that doesn’t sound too good. But now consider this. 100 coalminers died in October in a mine explosion in Ukraine, in the prime of life. Several hundred have died in Ukraine’s mines since the Chernobyl accident in 1986. In China’s mines, more people die in a week than were killed by Chernobyl (some 4,000 per annum). In UK, more people die from miners’ lung (a legacy of UK’s defunct coal industry) every three months than were killed at Chernobyl.
This is just one aspect of the damage caused by one part of the fossil fuel industry: there’s also acid rain, particulate pollution, asthma, and so on, before we even reach global warming.
OK, you say, but why not just replace fossil fuel power with renewable energy? Well, if only it were that simple. The most proven form of renewable energy is hydroelectric. Like all forms of energy generation, this has negative, as well as positive, effects. Habitats and livelihoods can be destroyed (look at the Three Gorges project in China) and thousands of lives threatened in dam collapses, while silting reduces their efficiency (Aswan Dam in Egypt).
Of course, we need answers to the (greatly overstated) problem of nuclear waste. Suitable underground storage sites exist but scaremongering stories make these unacceptable at the moment. A better option would be to generate less with better reactor designs and to “burn up” existing waste in a new form of reactor that runs on the plentiful element thorium. This process is called Accelerated Transmutation of Waste and could also be used to turn our arsenal of atom bombs into useful energy.
Stocks of uranium probably amount to decades’ worth, even without new discoveries, while fast breeder reactors could convert the 99% of uranium which is presently useless into plutonium. Hundreds of years’ worth of thorium exists.
Nuclear accidents, at present extremely rare, could be made almost non-existent with fail-safe thorium reactors. These do not have a chain reaction and could be simply halted by the flick of a switch.
Yes, we need renewable energy as well, but this comes at a price. Let’s do the sums honestly.
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What would Marx have said?
The suggestion, made by Les Hearn, that anti-nuclear arguments are more appropriate to "Green World" than "Solidarity" merely shows the widespread ignorance of Marx's ecological writings that still plagues our movement.
The basis of Marx's ecological thought is found in his theory of the metabolism between humanity and nature. This theory, found in his later work, builds on his dialectical materialist philosophy developed in his earlier years. This concept of the metabolism between humanity and nature, mediated by labour, should form the basis of our assessment on any new technologies. Whereas earlier agrarian economies waste products were returned to the soil, modern capitalist agriculture and trade moves the nutrients of the soil thousand of miles from source. This means that the soil loses vital nutrients and the food production becomes reliant on a fertiliser factories. Meanwhile, human waste pollutes our rivers, spreading disease etc. It is in this way that Marx described how the capitalist mode of production creates a rift in the metabolic relaitonship between humanity and the natural world. There was no doubt that Marx forsaw the danger that this rift posed to future generations.
In terms of the nuclear debate this is significant. Although, Marx never lived to see the splitting of the atom, his theory of metabolic rift holds true. Nuclear technology, as it currently stands, is an inherently capitalist form of energy production where the metabolic rift is most exaggerated and irreperable. Marx recognised that capitalism would leave us with ecological problems that a socialist society would have to sort out. And while most forms of modern industry could feed into sustainable, ecological production processes, thus restoring the metabolism between nature and humanity, it is difficult to conceive of a possible use for nuclear waste (whether this is hundreds-of-years-to-decay thorium waste or thousands-of-years-to-decay uranium waste). This isn't hippy, Luddite nonsense: its Marxist analysis.
Les Hearn believes in a technological fix for the current ecological crisis in the form of Thorium fuelled generators. Thorium is a much more abundant element than uranium, the nuclear reaction can be controlled and the generator could be used to burn up current waste and our nuclear weapons stockpiles. On the face of it, it sounds like a good option. However, apart from India (which has very low uranium reserves) and private companies like Thorium Power (US), noone except Les Hearn himself seems to think this technology is very likely to develop. The only person to bring up thorium technology in the Houses of Parliament was Baroness Miller of Hendon back in May 2007 who was told that any future technological options would be decided by private contractors. Given that there are very few thorium mines and the technology is more expensive than uranium based technology, it seems unlikely that anyone is going to take it up.
This is not to say that there would be no place for nuclear energy production in a post-revolutionary society, where production could be run democratically, for human need and where a scientific ecological understanding of our relationship with the world would be the basis of rational planning. However, the bourgeoisie are simply not interested in preserving the future of the planet, let alone destroying our nuclear weapons stockpiles.
By clinging to Thorium technology, Les seems to have given up on revolutionary Marxist politics in favour of giving cover to the bourgeoisie who are going to build for-profit uranium generators. Uranium nuclear energy generation is not an internationalist solution to the ecological crisis (again, if everyone did it the world's uranium deposits would be used up in 10 years); its a national solution and distracts from the tasks ahead. To advocate nuclear is to turn your back on the rich (but often forgotten) tradition of Marxist ecologists and is more akin to that other ecocidal tradition, Stalinism.
But most depressing, is that Les has been reduced to a pathetic lobbyist for the Thorium technology, penning the odd letter to the Guardian in the hope that he can sway the government and their private contractors into adopting his not-very-radical, oh-so-sensible technological fix. What we need however, is a Marxist, internationalist working-class programme to mobilise around in order to avert the worst consequences of climate change. And lobbying for Thorium nuclear technology just doesn't tick that box.