nuclear-news

In considering the possible role of greed, it’s not enough to emphasize the role of the profit motive. We also need to consider the vast quantities of cheap and convenient energy that we enjoy. Why do we “need” so much? Because we take for granted an extraordinarily wasteful and (from that perspective) inefficient economic system, which emphasizes consumerism.

One of the main arguments for nuclear energy is that, although nuclear plants are prohibitively expensive and slow to build, they can most reliably supply the massive amounts of electricity we need. But a society less consumerist could flourish on much less energy. If greed is understood as “never enough,” the issue of whether to rely on nuclear power is inevitably connected with greed both on the consumer side and on the producer side. Is an economic system that depends on constant growth — that needs to expand if it’s not to collapse — really compatible with the finite ecosystems of the biosphere? And does consumerism really make us happy?….

do nuclear power plants embody structural aggression? A nuclear plant can be built without any intention to harm anyone, but what if it is nonetheless likely to cause serious harm to vast numbers of living beings in the future?

One part of the argument is that serious accidents, with horrific consequences, have always happened and will continue to happen, because the factors that cause such incidents cannot be avoided. After every Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima disaster, we always hear some excuse from the nuclear industry about why that was an exception, and that it can’t happen again. Yet it will continue to happen again, because human error cannot be eliminated and the forces of nature cannot be completely controlled or even anticipated.

Nuclear power plants also produce huge amounts of radioactive waste, which threaten to poison all living beings for many thousands of years.  Ten years after its removal from a reactor, the surface dose rate for a typical spent fuel assembly exceeds 10,000 rem/hour, but a fatal whole-body dose of radiation for humans is only about 500 rem (if received all at one time). There are already thousands of spent fuel assemblies, and no one really knows what to do with them because there is nowhere and no way to store them safely for such a long period of time. The United States has at least 108 sites that are contaminated and unusable, some of them involving many thousands of acres. The lifespan of some of these radioactive materials is very long: plutonium-239 has a half-life of about 24,000 years, meaning that half of it decays during that period but the other half remains as poisonous as ever. Human agriculture began only about 10,000 years ago; the likelihood that we will be able to secure such dangerous waste for much, much longer than that is not something to rely upon, to say the least.

In practice, the short-term “solution” has been to store the waste materials somewhere, put a fence around them, and forget about them. If the industry can get everyone else to forget about them too, the problem is solved — for the time being, anyway. Let’s leave it for our descendants to figure out what to do, and hope that will happen before the radioactive waste percolates into the water table……

the delusion that we humans are a unique species, obviously the most important of all, and therefore we can pursue our own benefit without any concern for the well-being of the rest of the biosphere. If we had a more nondual appreciation that we are an integral part of the planet — that the Earth is not just our home but our mother, and that we never really cut the umbilical cord — then it is inconceivable that we would choose nuclear (or fossil fuel) power over renewables, given all the long-term risks for such short-term gain.

The final irony is that the short-term gain for which we are willing to sacrifice so much (no, not our own sacrifice, of course — we sacrifice the future!) may not be much of a gain at all. The purpose of any economic system is to help our societies flourish, yet it’s becoming more doubtful consumerism is actually serving that function. Recent research by sociologists, psychologists and even economists suggests that, once a basic level of income has been achieved, what makes people happy is not more consumption but the quality of one’s relationships with other people. Then why do we remain so committed to a dysfunctional economic process, which (among other problems) requires so much energy to keep producing so many unnecessary products?

If we can see through that collective delusion, the renewable alternatives to nuclear power become compelling. Rather than asking how we can generate the enormous amounts of energy that a consumerist economy needs, we need to restructure our societies according to the amount of renewable energy that’s safely available. David R. Loy is an advisor to the Ecobuddhism project.    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/the-three-nuclear-poisons_b_2983534.html