A Technology of Poor Choices

August 27th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 12:04 pm

Mr Justin McKeating over at Greenpeace’s Nuclear Reaction blog draws our attention to the latest developments in the UK Government’s somewhat under-the-radar attempts to get local authorities to bid for the right to have thousands of tonnes of high-level nuclear waste buried somewhere within their jurisdiction – otherwise known as the Managing Radioactive Waste Safely (MRWS) programme, or perhaps more accurately as OSOM (Out of Sight, Out of Mind).

Which of course will involve generous financial incentives.

Cumbria County Council is the latest to begin thinking about affirming its interest in this scheme, following Copeland Borough Council’s expression of interest last year in the MRWS programme. Look at Copeland’s profile and you’ll see that it’s suffered from rising unemployment in various areas due mainly to the erosion of long-standing local industries, leading to a couple of wards featuring in the rankings of the most seriously deprived council wards in England. But in the ward where BNFL Sellafield is located, the level of employment is unsurprisingly high.

One of the iron laws of neo-liberal Britain seems to be that local authorities faced with having to manage a history of deprivation bound up with the death of traditional industries will grab at any carrot offered them – whether this be a dangerous reactor design, a nuclear waste reprocessing plant, or now it seems an untested and untestable HLW disposal technology. And of course, each time a project is accepted, it becomes all the easier to deposit more risky infrastructure in the area, to the point where a new economic and social history could be told of how certain localities in the UK have come to bear the uncertainties of technological development on behalf of everyone else. This story can be told anywhere in the UK that has been touched by the economic and social impacts of globalisation, i.e. anywhere at all – Middlesborough springs to mind of course, but the case I’m familiar with locally would be Neath Port Talbot Council, and its willingness to trade the imposition of long-term risks and insecurity on its residents for short-term economic gain. But more on that another time…

What the Government proposals for its MRWS programme amount to is essentially a prisoners’ dilemma, in which local government, trying to manage the local consequences of a neo-liberal global economic and political order, screams and claws for whatever pot of money is offered to it. Where this situation differs from the traditional prisoners’ dilemma is, of course, that the deal which needs to be struck to “escape” will be one where the other side is composed of voiceless future generations. It’s as if the traditional game-theoretical version of the dilemma were to be played with one player coshed unconscious, while Prisoner A sits down with the warders to decide how best to swindle his cell-mate.

As Justin points out, the problems with nuclear energy lie in the way it locks societies remorselessly into patterns of development which are defined by a multitude of bad options. Faced with the HLW-disposal problem, there are either those options (e.g. deep geological burial, subduction zone burial, seabed burial) which amount to launching packages of poison off to a fate unknown and unknowable, or those options which require people here and now to assume the burden of guarding a legacy to future generations in which all those who’ve benefited from nuclear power – and that’s all of us – are complicit. That’s why retrievable storage, which implies a constant need to repair and restore storage arrangements, is the only ethically and politically legitimate bad option.

But what the difficulties of retrievable storage imply, in turn, is that we shouldn’t produce any more nuclear waste. Which gets us back to the prisoners’ dilemma faced by local government as consultees in the MRWS scheme. As in the original prisoner’s dilemma, perhaps the best thing is to refuse the rules of the game which you’re offered: don’t take the carrot, and refuse to be locked into a nuclear fate.