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Democracy is not really possible with nuclear power

nuclear power is about to become less and less a creature of democracies……

In any country independent regulation is harder when the industry being regulated exists largely by government fiat. Yet, as our special report  this week explains, without governments private companies would simply not choose to build nuclear-power plants.

 new nuclear plants are likely only in still-regulated electricity markets such as those of the south-east……   the promise of a global transformation is gone. 

Nuclear power:The dream that failed A year after Fukushima, the future for nuclear power is not bright—for reasons of cost as much as safety The Economist Mar 10th 2012 | THE enormous power tucked away in the atomic nucleus, the chemist Frederick Soddy rhapsodised in 1908, could “transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden.” Militarily, that power has threatened the opposite, with its ability to make deserts out of gardens on an unparalleled scale. Idealists hoped that, in civil garb, it might redress the balance, providing a cheap, plentiful, reliable and safe source of electricity for centuries to come. But it has not. Nor does it soon seem likely to.

Looking at nuclear power 26 years ago, this newspaper observed that the way forward for a somewhat moribund nuclear industry was “to get plenty of nuclear plants built, and then to accumulate, year after year, a record of no deaths, no serious accidents—and no dispute that the result is cheaper energy.” It was a fair assessment; but our conclusion that the industry was “safe as a chocolate factory” proved something of a hostage to fortune.

Less than a month later one of the reactors at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine ran out of control and exploded, killing the workers there at the time and some of those sent in to clean up afterwards, spreading contamination far and wide, leaving a swathe of countryside uninhabitable and tens of thousands banished from their homes. The harm done by radiation remains unknown to this day; the stress and anguish of the displaced has been plain to see.

Et tu, Japan

Then, 25 years later, when enough time had passed for some to be talking of a “nuclear renaissance”, it happened again . The bureaucrats, politicians and industrialists of what has been called Japan’s “nuclear village” were not unaccountable apparatchiks in a decaying authoritarian state like those that bore the guilt of Chernobyl; they had responsibilities to voters, to shareholders, to society. And still they allowed their enthusiasm for nuclear power to shelter weak regulation, safety systems that failed to work and a culpable ignorance of the tectonic risks the reactors faced, all the while blithely promulgating a myth of nuclear safety

Not all democracies do things so poorly. But nuclear power is about to become less and less a creature of democracies……

March 9, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general