Climate Action Now Wingecarribee (CANWin) Inc.

CANWin member Peter Lach-Newinsky wrote this essay for stateofnature.org. It’s published here now as his response to fellow member Rob Parker’s article Safe Climate Needs Nuclear Power. Your comments on both articles are more than welcome, especially if they focus on questions like “How much energy do we need?” or “How can Australia go 100% renewable and when?” WebTeam

In 2011, at the time of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the British journalist George Monbiot became the latest environmentalist and climate change activist to convert to nuclear power. Amazingly, it took the very meltdown and ongoing contamination of and by the Fukushima plant to finally convince him. He joined a gaggle of previous environmentalists-for-nuclear graced with illustrious names like James Lovelock, James Hansen, Steward Brand and Tim Flannery. Their common, logically infantile and ethically untenable, position boils down to ‘coal is worse’ (more about that below).

With the overcompensating zeal of the recent convert who needed to bludgeon his own doubts and convince himself of his new creed, Monbiot wrote two articles in The Guardian. One played down the likely effects of the Fukushima meltdown and reframed the disaster as actual ‘proof’ (‘scientific’, no doubt) of the minimal risks associated with nuclear power plants. The other negated all estimates of the numbers of Chernobyl victims but the official ones by the UN; the former were labelled as unscientific, irrational green scaremongering and conspiracy theories on a par with those of climate change deniers.

At the time of Monbiot’s articles, various radioactive emissions were thousands or millions of times the legal limits, with iodine and caesium emissions at 73% and 60% of Chernobyl levels. The levels of radioactive caesium emitted into the Pacific Ocean will necessarily bio-accumulate up marine food chains. The then emerging picture relating to the contamination of Japanese food growing districts and urban water supplies did not forebode well either. The Fukushima plant contained ten times as much fresh and spent nuclear fuel, and thus radiation, as Chernobyl did. Fukushima at the time seemed like Chernobyl in slo mo.

I will leave the discussion of the various estimates of Chernobyl victims (from 6,000 to 1.8 million) aside for the moment. In this essay I would like to concentrate on a few of the common myths that nuclearists like Monbiot tend to use, ex- or im-plicitly, when discussing the nuclear issue.

We’re Rational, You’re Emotional

This is a favourite one at some point in the debate. Science and Reason are posited as being exclusively on the side of the nuclearists while anti-nuclear positions are denigrated as being merely emotional, irrational, conspiratorial, extremist. It is revealing that this monopolising of calm, unemotional rationality for oneself is often, as in Monbiot’s case, put forward with great emotion. It doesn’t take much knowledge of psychology to work out that the self-styled representatives of science and Reason – still mostly but ever less exclusively men ‒ are also driven by complex emotions, the difference being that the emotions are covert and for the most part unconscious. These emotions may have to do with the unconscious defence of self-identity wedded to complex belief systems ranging from things like the efficacy of scientific and technological fixes for all social problems or the need for eternal economic growth right up to the ultimate meaning of life. All these may be seen as threatened by anti-nuclear stances and ‘green emotionalism’. Scientists, not being trained in areas like ethical thinking, emotional intelligence or social critique, may view all such ethical and ‘soft science’ perspectives as threatening. Denigrating them as irrational and emotional helps avoid them and suppress those aspects within oneself that might be tending that way. It takes a lot of emotion to remain emotionless. Denied is the simple human fact that emotions may guide and inform rationality to the mutual benefit of both heart and head. Yes indeed, the heart may have quite a lot to say about nuclear energy if it is allowed to do so.

Science is What We Say It Is

In all these anti-anti-nuclear diatribes the notion of ‘science’ is simply assumed as naively defined in the popular imagination: i.e. as an activity that is value-free, objective, non-ideological and non-political, as an institution that possesses a solid consensus on most issues and that can thus objectively guide political decision-making. In a secular world it has come close to replacing the Church as the supreme authority on interpreting reality and meaning-making.

In the real world of course, ‘science’ is a much more complex phenomenon. Rather than being non-political and objective, it is very often closely bound up with social and economic interests. Government and industry can often buy and/or cherry-pick the scientific results they need (as we know they may do with intelligence to justify military invasion). Thus, for example, officially ‘safe’ levels of chemicals or radioactivity in food vary greatly between countries and times and are often adjusted upwards during disasters in order to safeguard specific industries or the economic system as a whole. The definition of ‘safety’ becomes more an ‘economically feasible’ than a strictly scientific issue. Continue reading →