Deja Deja Deja Vu
May 24th, 2007
Views: 1009
Posted by ChrisG at 8:48 am
Today’s Guardian leader, commenting on the upshot of yesterday’s energy white paper, sums things up succinctly: little has changed since the last wave of enthusiasm for nuclear power two years ago. The arguments are the same (energy gap, therefore nuclear). Blair writes over in the Times that
It is right that we consider how nuclear power can help to underpin the security of our energy supply without increasing our reliance on fossil fuels
That little phrase ‘it is right that…’ has crept into the official lexicon of NuLab cliche recently, generally prefacing a policy statement that is questionable from a plurality of angles, but suggesting that there is, somewhere behind it, a glimmering moral awareness, a pure thread of deontological agenda that clandestinely drives everything the government does.
Given this intrinsic moral angle to energy policy, it behooves us to raise again (apologies to regular readers, who will have encountered this sort of thing passim hereabouts) the ethical (and political) arguments against nuclear power, which are all quite well-known, and which should of course be featuring quite heavily in the promised public consultation – proper one this time, honest.
So: given that nuclear power, via the as-yet-unsolved problem of high-level waste disposal, and the always uncertain (and likely to rise throughout the lifetime of a power station and thereafter) costs of decommissioning, places unpredictable and very serious risks and financial burdens on hundreds of future generations solely for the short-term benefit of those alive now and their immediate descendants, why should it even be considered as a possible solution? As a policy it violates the principle of taking into account equal and fair treatment for all those affected by it. As Derek Parfit has argued, just as there are no moral grounds for assigning a lesser status to someone affected by our actions just because they are ‘over there’ rather than ‘over here’, so there is no moral argument for discriminating against someone affected by our actions just because they are temporally distant from us.
So maybe Blair needs to get things rolling on this question before he decamps, to help us think through just how ‘right’ the government’s shiny new energy policy is – looking forward to a Big Conversation, Mr B. Maybe afterwards we can get onto the anti-democratic nature of the new proposals to ’streamline’ the planning process in favour of big infrastructure projects (another favourite topic here at SW). No doubt Justin, among others, will be wanting to have a chat about this, also.
[...] Probably more to come from me on the newly announced energy strategy, particularly as there are suggestions (coming via that excellent chap, Rochenko) that they might like to stick a nuclear power station near Brighton. [...]
That little phrase ‘it is right that…’ has crept into the official lexicon of NuLab cliche recently,
It’s liturgical, quite literally. (At least, it was when I was a regular church-goer, just a couple of decades ago.)
Celebrant: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
Congregation: It is right to give Him thanks and praise.
Celebrant: It is not only right, it is our duty and our joy, at all times and in all places, to give You thanks and praise, merciful God, loving Father [and so on and so forth].
I remember our Rector didn’t like appearing to correct the congregation week after week, so he mumbled the first few words of the last bit – “wrrwrr right, it is our duty and our joy” usw.
So there you have it – it is wrrwrr right, our duty and our joy to consider how nuclear power can help to underpin the security of our energy supply. Odd that their language should take this turn just when Blair’s actually going.
Bugger – forgot to close those italics. That’s better.
[...] If the industry manages to buck its longest trend, and produce technology that attains the performance targets set for it, then the risks of instability derive from the amount of plutonium that will be made available. Leaving aside the issue, dear to our hearts here at SW, of the inherent injustices of nuclear waste production, the likely proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possibility of weapons material being readily available to anyone interested in a bit of asymmetrical advantage would only increase already recognised dangers. What the ORG report asks us, despite the language of cost-benefit analysis that frames it, is to consider questions that cannot be reduced to risk calculations: is a world powered by a massively expanded programme of breeder reactors the sort of world we would wish to live in? Related posts: [...]