On
June 4, 2015, on Russia
Today’s Worlds Apart program, the
journalist Oksana Boyko interviewed the director general of the World Nuclear Association
(WNA), Agneta Rising. Throughout the interview, Ms. Boyko attempted to portray her
questions as tough and challenging, but she also made statements that indicated
that she was sympathetic to the nuclear industry’s claim that nuclear energy is
a viable way to offset the effects of burning fossil fuels. This overly
friendly interview could lead the viewer to wonder if Russia Today really is a
propaganda tool for the Russian government, as some American politicians like
to say. While the French, German, American and Japanese nuclear giants have
declined, the Russian state-owned nuclear giant, Rosatom, has been very
aggressive and successful in recent years in closing deals in developing
countries. Nonetheless, there have been other reports on Russia Today that
provided comprehensive and critical coverage of the nuclear industry. But then
again, one has to wonder if that was just to give Rosatom a competitive
advantage. There is no critical reporting on RT about the Russian nuclear
industry.
The only
challenging questions were focused on weapons proliferation and the risk of
terrorism, and Ms. Rising’s answers were not probed deeply at all. There were
no questions about nuclear waste management, the impacts of uranium mining,[1]
and the severe financial crisis within the nuclear industry. Because Ms. Boyko
was poorly informed about these issues, or perhaps complicit in wishing not to mention
them, the interview fell fall short of being hard-hitting and comprehensive.
Ms.
Boyko began by restating Ms. Rising’s previous assertion that the reaction to
the radiation from Fukushima was more dangerous than the radiation itself. Ms.
Rising accepted that statement as accurate and added that it was “first a very
big earthquake and tsunami who killed a lot a lot of people,” [sic] but “around
the world people think it is the nuclear accident” not the tsunami and
earthquake that caused these deaths.
Ms.
Rising is not a native speaker of English, so her grammatical errors perhaps
need to be forgiven, but it is curious that she used the relative pronoun “who”
with the grammatical subject “earthquake and tsunami.” Nuclear proponents have
always spoken in a way that diminishes human responsibility when things go
wrong, describing crimes of gross negligence as “accidents.” It is common to
hear statements like “it was once in millennium” or “no one could have seen
this coming” or “it was a freak, one-off event that could never happen here.”
In this instance, instead of removing human agency from the crimes that led up
to the Fukushima catastrophe, Ms. Rising adds
human agency to an event in which there was none.
She
goes on to assert without evidence that people around the world think all the
deaths were caused by the nuclear accident. This was the first of many absurd,
distracting, evasive and irrelevant points she made during this thirty-minute
interview. No serious critic of the Fukushima catastrophe is confused about the
deaths caused by the earthquake and tsunami. If we tend to focus on the nuclear
disaster, that is only because we understand that human actions and inactions
were not a cause of the earthquake and tsunami. Ms. Rising’s logic seems to
suggest that the anti-nuclear movement should transform itself into an
anti-tsunami campaign and go looking for a force of nature “who” could be
blamed and sued for damages.
Later
in the interview she said about the Fukushima evacuation “that of course was
necessary.” Here she admits that the uncertainty of that time and the existence
of short-lived radioisotopes (Iodine 131) were reasons to evacuate, but she
suggested that the remaining contamination should not be a concern and people
should have moved back quickly. She emphasized that Fukushima was primarily a
disaster of economic consequences, and she spoke of it in the past tense, as if
it wasn’t an ongoing radioactive nightmare that has no end in sight for next
several decades at least—a fact which even TEPCO no longer tries to deny with
such delusional thinking.
While
many experts have called Fukushima Dai-ichi one of the greatest industrial
accidents in history, perhaps the greatest, Ms. Rising said it was “not one of
the biggest industrial accidents… not even as big as what happens every year.”
She didn’t explain what she was alluding to as happening every year, but she
was likely referring to the health impacts of burning fossil fuel. Again, this
is a failure of logic, if this was the point she wanted to make. The regular
operations of the fossil fuel industry are deliberate. They can’t be classified
as industrial accidents.
Ms. Boyko
showed her agreement with her guest stating, “… not only Japanese people
reacted in a somewhat irrational manner.” Throughout the interview, both women focused
on the “emotional reaction” and constructed a false dichotomy between emotion
and reason. This has been a constant point of confusion and ignorance displayed
by people who earn their living in the nuclear industry. They dismiss their
opponents’ reactions as “emotional” while never acknowledging their own
emotional attachments to their paychecks. The Age of Reason created a legacy of
confusion about the relation between emotions and reason. Those who put too much
faith in rationality fail to see that emotion is the basis of all reasoning. Whatever
we judge to be reasonable and sensible is based on emotional values that have
been shaped by biological and cultural evolution. The rational choice to eat
arises from a feeling that one wants to live. The “irrational” decision to continue
living in a world where everyone dies eventually stems from an emotional attachment to
life.
Ms.
Rising went on to exhibit great confidence in new Japanese nuclear regulators
and upgrades to existing facilities. She seems to have missed the news that the
new regulatory agency has already been purged of the experts who were slowing
down the process of getting some nuclear reactors back on line.[2] Her
confidence is purely a matter of faith, as it remains to be proven whether the new
nuclear establishment can prevent another catastrophe when the next large
earthquake or volcano strikes.
She
added several comments about the crucial importance of public acceptance, as if
the public anywhere was ever honestly and fully informed and allowed to have final
say in a decision to build a nuclear power plant. She said, “…it’s important to
have good support in the general public,” “good transparency” and “possibilities
for the public to have an opinion and be involved in the process.” She also
said there is “lots of construction going on in the third world,” so she
apparently believes this public support and transparency exists there in
abundance.[3]
The
interviewer shouldn’t have let these statements go unchallenged because there
is plenty of evidence in all nuclear nations that the process has never been
transparent or concerned with anything more than lip service to public opinion.
In countries where some appearance of a democratic process is required, “public
debates” are held as a formality, but there is no real possibility of rejecting
the plan by this stage. In France, when the public debates were held in Penly
regarding a new EPR power plant, President Sarkozy had already formally
authorized the launch of the project. Nonetheless, the French nuclear
authorities define these debates as essential public involvement. [4] [5] I
leave it to the reader’s imagination to wonder how this process unfolds in India,
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
As
for public acceptance in Japan, Ms. Rising says, “… the whole system was
questioned, so it’s hard to get someone to trust… it will take some time to
build trust again.” The obvious question remains: why bother with all the work
of building the trust when we could more conveniently decide to never see
this betrayer again? This is the way it tends to go in human relations where it
is very rare to see an injured party interested in building trust after it has
been lost.
When
Ms. Rising spoke of nuclear energy’s capacity to bring “energy independence” to
various countries, it was a perfect opportunity for the interviewer to call out
a ridiculous and easily disproven assertion. She cited France as an example,
but it is well-known that France gets most of its uranium from its former
colonies in Africa (which it refers to possessively as France-afrique). The statement was either a bold lie or a tacit
admission that the WNA regards France’s longstanding neocolonialist policy as
legitimate de facto recolonization. France
has energy independence only if these countries are considered to be French
possessions.
Other
deliberate deceptions were on display when Ms. Rising stated, laughably, that
the UK is “taking the lead in new construction in Europe.” She was referring to
the EPR project that is currently stalled due the bankruptcy of the maker,
French nuclear giant Areva, and the billion-euro engineering gaffs that have
halted, and probably doomed, construction of the EPR project in Flamanville,
France. As far as the UK is concerned, their lead in new construction is on an
indefinite pause.[6] These were just some of the many inconvenient details that
Ms. Rising chose not to talk about, and Ms. Royko went along with the
omissions, either out of ignorance or complicity.
Of
course, the main point of the whole interview, supported apparently by the
interviewer herself, was to make viewers believe that nuclear energy is carbon
free. This point was made with such statements as “France decarbonized in the
1980s.” When faced with a knowledgeable audience, nuclear advocates concede
that nuclear energy has a significant carbon footprint (how much is a topic of
hot debate), but when faced with an audience that seems deceivable, they choose
to lie and say it has no footprint.[7]
Another
false assertion was made repeatedly in the claim that nuclear is “reliable 24/7.”
This also is not true because nuclear plants need to be stopped for refueling
and maintenance, and they are often shut down during storms and other emergencies.
When a bad accident happens, every reactor in the country might have to be shut
down because of the need for safety reviews, or just because of a shift in
public opinion—as was the case in Japan. This lie is also a deceptive
distraction from the progress being made in energy storage. Renewables are likely to provide a baseload supply of electricity in the near future.
It is
impossible to put a monetary value on energy when no one can predict the
technologies and the level of supply and demand that will exist in the future,
but Ms. Rising was ready to say that in spite of the enormous costs, nuclear is
a “very long-term low-price energy source, very competitive.” It would be
better to say nothing because it’s impossible to know the future cost of energy, but because she’s the
director general of the WNA, we are supposed to just take her word for it. She
may be right inasmuch as the costs of the nuclear waste legacy will never be
kept in the accounts of private corporations. The eternal cost of nuclear waste
management will be a burden to future generations long after such entities as Rosatom
and GE-Hitachi have ceased to exist.
The
interview descended into absurdity when Ms. Rising claimed that nuclear is
presently being “hurt by subsidies in other systems.” She speaks as if the
nuclear industry never got an assist from the government investment in the
weapons industry, or never got any other form of government assistance. It is
well known that nuclear corporations won’t build a reactor in a country until
they get a guarantee that the government will cover the liabilities for
accidents (Such assurance was recently given in India. The most famous example
is the Price Anderson Act in the United States).
These
complaints about unfair subsidies point to the fact that it is actually
impossible now to see a clear line between public and private investment. If
the nuclear industry now cries foul because renewables are gathering more investment,
public or private, all we can say is: Sorry, times have changed. This is what
people want. You didn’t complain in the old days when it was your turn at the
public trough.
More strange
assertions came when Ms. Rising said about Japan’s nuclear restarts, “they are
not going to destroy their country!” Perhaps she hasn’t heard of Easter Island,
the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pearl Harbor, or Fukushima for that matter. History
tells us that nations have an astounding capacity for marching like zombies
toward disaster. The Fukushima Dai-ichi meltdowns very well could have set off
a cascade of disasters at other power plants along the coast, and that scenario
would have meant the destruction of the country. Japan sleepwalked straight
into it and was saved only by sheer luck and the courageous actions of a few. What
if the tsunami had hit at night when few personnel were on site to deal with
it? So, actually, yes, they would destroy their country.
Toward
the end of the interview, Ms. Royko managed to ask a few somewhat tough
questions about the wisdom of building reactors in politically unstable
countries, but Ms. Rising simply denied that this was happening. She said, “nuclear reactors are very safe,” oblivious
to the fact that this word “safe” has no scientific validity. It’s like saying
fire is safe, or fire is dangerous. Either statement is meaningless.
Ms.
Royko managed to push a little on the question of political unrest, but Ms.
Rising reiterated with her next meaningless statement: “We don’t put it in a
region where there is war or unrest.” The war between Yemen and Saudi Arabia was
raging as she spoke, yet Russia is going ahead with a deal to build a nuclear
power plant in Saudi Arabia. Not only is she oblivious to the present state of
the world, the WNA apparently has a crystal ball that tells them where there
will be war or unrest during the 40-60 year operating duration of a nuclear
reactor, not to mention during the longer lasting existence of nuclear waste.
Don’t worry. Just repeat the mantra “nuclear energy is safe.”
Ms.
Royko kept pushing on questions about security and political stability, but Ms.
Rising wouldn’t give an inch. She denied that the international regulatory
framework wasn’t up to the task. She expressed faith in such vague concepts as “international
involvement,” which I suppose means the IAEA and the governments that are
supposed to follow its unenforceable recommendations. We can keep in mind how
the IAEA did such a bang-up job getting Japan to listen to its guidance in the
years before 2011.
Toward
the end of the interview, the subject came back to Fukushima, which Ms. Rising
described as an “economical catastrophe… [it] has not killed anyone… [and it] will
not have any discernable effects for anyone in the future, either.” Once again,
the nuclear industry gets to repeat its favorite lie that nuclear catastrophes
have had no effect on public health.[8]
The
most interesting and telling statement came toward the end of the interview
when Ms. Royko reminded her guest that she once said, “nuclear energy must
remain free of politics.” I was expecting her to deny that she ever said such a
ridiculous thing, but she admitted it and elaborated further. The statement
reveals that it was fitting for Ms. Rising to appear on a program called Worlds Apart, for the technocrats of our
era really do live in their own reality. Any person who has a developed
political consciousness knows that wishing for a technology to be free of
politics is like wishing for it to be free from the constraints of reality
itself. The sociologist Jacques
Ellul once wrote, “When these technocrats talk about democracy, ecology,
culture, the Third World, or politics, they are touchingly simplistic or
annoyingly ignorant.”[9]
Sometimes when an organization is in its dying
days, the leader who is pushed to the top is someone who never would have been
a contender during better days. The guilty and the powerful want to get out
while the getting is good, so they set up a fall guy (or girl) to be at the
helm when the ship goes down. I can’t help but wonder if this is the case now
that Ms. Rising has been put in charge of the WNA.
A more competent and honest leader would be able
to see that the argument made in the Worlds
Apart interview makes the WNA look ridiculous. It is illogical, and laughably
evasive and in-denial of the unpleasant truths facing the nuclear industry. It
begs for subsidies because no one wants to invest in nuclear energy anymore. It
is being overtaken by progress in renewables. It was a 70-year experiment, and
now the results are in. Honest leadership in the nuclear industry would admit
that the game is up. The industry can survive a little longer by selling to
gullible populations and corruptible governments in the developing world, but
soon they too will wise up. It’s time for the pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear
forces to recognize that they have an obvious emerging common interest. There
is an opportunity for reconciliation here if a face-saving exit can be taken,
and if each side can have a way to portray the truce as a victory to their base
of support.
As hundreds of nuclear power plants will soon be simultaneously
in need of decommissioning (a process that takes decades for each one)[10],
people with technical expertise are going to be needed to manage nuclear plant
decommissioning and nuclear waste management.[11] When the public realizes the
scale of the problem, there will be plenty of jobs to go around for displaced nuclear workers. The
opportunities, like nuclear waste itself, have no end in sight.
Notes
[8] For information on the health effects of
radiation, listen to some of the excellent interviews done by Libbe Halevy on
her podcast:
[9] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
1990), p. 29.
