Nuclear Evasions

October 20th, 2006

Views: 566

Posted by ChrisG at 10:01 am

The security utopia. Hygienically cleansed of all threats. First it was Terror that impinged on us, then the threat of Inadequate Energy Supplies. The next issue to be sucked into the black hole at the heart of this rapidly overheating metaphor is Climate Change. ‘Climate security’ looks like the next spike that Blair will use to hammer home his determination to see a new wave of nuclear power stations built, with all the attendant unknown risks and inherently unpredictable costs.

This morning, the Today programme saw a ‘re-opening of the nuclear debate’ (Real Media). Which amounted to a report containing a number of half-truths and a feeble interview by Jim Naughtie, in which he allowed Norman Harrison, from the Atomic Energy Authority, to get away with the usual evasions, especially on the issue of nuclear waste.

First came a report on the decommissioning of the FBR at Dounreay, which is now apparently ‘far advanced’ (actually, the active phase will last until 2031, as the reporter himself noted a few seconds later). The Fast Breeder Reactor programme was presented as entirely successful because it meant that FBRs, experimental reactors, were built and they managed to function, putting electricity into the grid. This amazingly unhistorical judgement is nonsense. The story of the FBR programme is one of a colossal transfer of public funds into a technology that, over the course of 30 years, proved itself non-viable. From the mid-60s onward the FBR vision was the mainstay of UK energy policy, driving the gradual decline in coal and gas power stations to make room for a new miracle technology which soaked up many billions of pounds of public investment. The FBR programme was ended in 1994, due to the fact that it never lived up to its promise. The point of FBR was not just to ‘put electricity into the grid’, but to recycle fuel – to produce more plutonium than it used. However, this was never the case: worldwide, FBRs ended up using more fuel than they could ever produce.

When the spotlight was given over to Harrison, he continued this unquestioned line by arguing that the FBR programme had been entirely successful, giving future generations ‘insurance against energy crises’. And then claimed that things are now very different in terms of environmental protection and safety in the nuclear industry. When Naughtie got onto the subject of nuclear waste, mentioning the problem would be around for ‘generations to come’ (without giving an estimate as to how many) and asking whether waste could now be disposed of safely, Harrison evaded the question (still to be solved to the point where any kind of industry standard exists) by reframing it. He stated that the question of waste storage was ‘clearly a matter of national decision’ – indeed it is, in the sense that the Committee on Radiocative Waste Management (CoRWM) has been working on a strategy for convincing the public to accept out-of-sight-out-of-mind deep burial as the only option for a while. He then suggested that other countries in Europe had moved ahead with their nuclear power programmes and had therefore obviously gone through the same sort of national decision making process that CoRWM is supposed to be managing.

Which amounts to saying that the industry body who is responsible for implementing safety measures does not (and we could add, cannot) know whether the waste storage safety situation has indeed changed since the 1960s, mainly because the safety of the solutions chosen cannot be determined in the laboratory, but only through using them in the real world over the course of several thousand years. Harrison’s reversion to a ‘well, everybody else is doing it’ non-argument demonstrates the inherent temptation to irresponsibility contained in arguments for nuclear energy, which never quite seems to come to the surface in public discussions – as proven by Naughtie’s failure to press further on the problem of waste solutions.

To get at this unspoken temptation, other questions need asking, urgently – of all those who insist that ‘things are different now’. And these are the same questions that should be asked whenever nuclear energy is touted as a miracle solution.

• How many generations will be saddled with the waste?
• Will it simply be hidden from sight?
• If so, what if there is a problem, 500, 1000, x years down the line?
• Will instructions on how to access the waste and deal with any problems be stored somewhere?
• How will we ensure that they are still readable, given the mutability of language?
• How can the legitimacy of decisions about the siting of nuclear waste for x thousand years be taken now, especially with (as CoRWM are proposing) economic incentives being offered to local communities to get them to accept nuclear waste depositories on their doorstep?

Security utopias are ones which follow the general logic of technological solutions: everything will be OK, if only you let us do this one thing… But when a whole trail of other things need doing to cope with the consequences of that one measure, arrival in utopia is, as usual, postponed indefinitely.