Nuclear Power?

From END Info 28 - Jan/Feb 2022 - DOWNLOAD

By Tom Unterrainer

The following text is from the introduction to the new Spokesman Dossier titled Nuclear Power?

The papers and articles collected in this Spokesman Dossier span five decades. As such, you might expect many of the arguments to be dated or even irrelevant in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Sadly – and a little surprisingly – this is not generally the case.

Take, for example, Tony Benn’s evidence to the Sizewell Inquiry (1984). Benn argued that coal and other fossil fuels present a preferable means of securing energy supplies than would nuclear. Given what we now know, such an argument alone would be unviable, to say the least. However, this is not his central argument. In fact, Benn’s evidence to the Sizewell Inquiry opens an invaluable window on the mechanisms by which sections of government and industry work together to further a complex of financial and military interests. Benn is clear on the link between nuclear power generation and the needs of British and associated nuclear weapons systems: a link still ‘submerged’ in general understanding of the issues, as Phil Johnstone and Andy Stirling explain in their more recent article.

The first item re-published here is by Malcolm Caldwell. It is part of a longer article on ‘The Energy Crisis’, published in 1972 in a remarkable collection titled Socialism and the Environment. Edited by Ken Coates, this volume brings together a series of papers presented to a conference organised by the German Metal-workers’ Union, I.G. Metall on ‘The Quality of Life’. Caldwell dissects the claims made for nuclear energy and finds that the hopes behind the claims are “sagging, if not receding”. Why this conclusion? The costs, delays, dangers and damaging environmental impact of nuclear energy production was as evident in 1972 as it is in 2022. So why do certain governments persist in this wasteful and dangerous enterprise? Why do some entertain the idea that nuclear energy has ‘green credentials’?

Alan Roberts, who went on to become a campaigning Labour MP, points out in ‘The Politics of Nuclear Power’ (1977), that the drive towards nuclear energy generation is intimately linked with the overall dynamics of capitalism; an argument addressed again by Dave Cullen in the final essay in this Dossier (2021).

The stirring words of Petra Kelly in her 1986 article, ‘Neither Safe Nor Essential’, should have removed all uncertainty about the dangers of nuclear energy. Written shortly after the disaster at Chernobyl and delivered as an address to the Oxford Union, Kelly starkly outlines the perils presented by nuclear reactors. The world did not listen. Nearly two decades later, we have Rosalie Bertell writing that ‘Chernobyl Still Matters’ (2003). Still, the world ignored the warnings. By the 2010s, we have the deadly lessons of Fukushima. Still, the world ignores the warnings.

By the 2020s, not only are billions of pounds to be ploughed into new nuclear reactors, but so also is the fantasy of ‘nuclear fusion’ (always ‘25 years away’) still tickling the synapses of all-too-many. We are now supposed to believe that nuclear energy generation will be the saviour of a world on the brink of climate catastrophe! The grotesque proportions of this transformation are the main motivation for producing this Dossier at a time when the world faces very many other dangers and acute crises.

We are supposed to forget the political-economic-military nexus driving nuclear power. We are supposed to forget Chernobyl, forget Fukushima, and forget all the other deadly nuclear incidents. We are supposed to forget about the toxic nuclear waste that will be created by a new generation of nuclear reactors. The public is supposed to believe that the billions to be spent on new nuclear reactors would not be better spent on clean, renewable, truly ‘green’ energy sources.

The writers collected here devoted their talents and energies to exposing the dangers posed by nuclear power. We should follow their example.

December 2021