Nuclear Power in India: The Vision of Shiv Viswanathan

The Indian writer Shiv Viswanathan, who describes himself as a “social science nomad,” published a brilliant essay last year on the raging debate over the construction of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu, on the southern tip of India.

India has been attempting to go through the same process of “development” that Japan went through in the 1960s and 70s, but it seems to have learned nothing from the mistakes of those who have gone down this path before. Like Japan, India has adopted the energy megaprojects of a large state which feels it must crush fishing villages and any other small community that stands in the way of national goals.

Unfortunately for state planners, Fukushima happened just as the Kudankulam project was nearing completion. The locals rose up and mounted an opposition which dominated national and international headlines. Japanese villagers had no precedents to inform them about the nuclear juggernaut that was descending on them, but Indians had the lessons of Chernobyl and Fukushima to make them wary.

Kudankulam Background from The Week:

• The agreement on the Kudankulam nuclear power project was signed in 1988 by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. It hit the first roadblock when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.
• Owing to the political developments in Russia, the construction of the plant started only in 2001.
• Concerns about the safety of the plant rose after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 caused by an earthquake and tsunami. People of Kudankulam started mass protests against the plant.
• In November 2011, a panel constituted by the Union government, which did a survey of the safety features in the plant, said the reactors are safe.
• In February 2012, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed some western NGOs for fuelling protests against the Kudankulam plant.
• In March 2012, an expert panel constituted by the Tamil Nadu government submitted a report in favour of commissioning the plant.

Shiv Viswanathan wrote his essay in the form of a dream in which he conversed over the meaning of Kudankulam and nuclear energy with Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and various writers and philosophers. This is an unusual device because with it he attributes to these people words that he only imagines they would speak, but they are actually his own insights. He may have written it this way to honor their influence on his thoughts, or perhaps he just wanted to be modest. Nonetheless, I think Mr. Viswanathan should take full credit for them. The full essay can be found at Dianuke.org, but I’ve excerpted some of its gems below:

·           One cannot think of the modern state without the baggage of necessary evils. Torture is a necessary evil. Detention is a necessary evil. Suspension of rights is a necessary evil. Genocide is a necessary evil. It is almost as if you cannot have a social contract without necessary evils. The greater the evil, the bigger the necessity.

·           I somehow want to belong to a world where ethics is not a technical answer to a technical question. 

·           Today politics has become a dismal science and science a dismal politics. 

·           Science has to return to life. It needs a good laugh at the pomposity of clerks who run our world, who titrate truth through pipettes.

·           Number is seen as a form of assurance that creates certainty for the Hamlets in us.

·           Between facts and truth lies life. Facts are seductive, apples of knowledge which lie.

·           …Niels Bohr… loved the logic of quantum but still stuck a horse shoe in his lab door. When asked, he said, “just in case…”

·           You need knowledge to say you do not know. Not knowing is an essential form of knowledge… knowledge is not hubris, it is a form of caring. 

·           [Not knowing] is an ethics of prudence, of modesty of a science that senses limits and converts them to possibilities.

·           Nuclear Energy is a reason of state.

·           I think when Japan decided to shut down the nuclear plants, it became a civilization again. Ethics and aesthetics, honor and modesty became a weave. Japan realized the limits of modernity.*

·           Admitting a mistake is the beginning of a civilization.

·           A poker player, a good one, knows when to stop. Scientists are good poker players. They are worried that God might play dice with the world but man cannot. 

·           No good insurance agent would insure a nuclear plant. A scientist should at least know what an insurance salesman does.

·           Scientists who join committees often think like one.

·           Risk is a recognition that science has changed. It is an acceptance of prudence, the recognition that you do not know, the acknowledgement that a road accident and a nuclear explosion are different, different in scale and quantity. You have to design differently for both.

·           Pilgrimage should be a part of scientific method. Every atomic scientist should visit Hiroshima and Chernobyl, spend a few moments in meditation to understand what a hibakusha means, a survivor of an atomic blast.

·           If a nuclear reactor is bad science, what makes it good politics? Politicians. And scientists playing politicians… Good scientists who were better nationalists. They left science to become devotees of the nation state.

·           Nuclear energy feeds the state not a people.

·           Civil society felt that energy is a form of civics. Gargantuan energy leads to gargantuan states.

·           1984 should have been about a nuclear plant. 

·           No housewife would want a nuclear plant. It breaks the Swadeshi rule. You cannot control it. 

·           Nuclear Energy brings out the theologian in us. And the feminist.

·           A housewife is a body of knowledge. She knows what budget as a number means. Budget is a ratio of limit to possibility. Budget is an ethics. Budgets are not just about households. They are about planets and the cosmos. You need energy budgets for the world.

·           A budget is also a theory of suffering. A housewife suffers. She understands the everydayness of suffering. She knows you cannot buy happiness cheap. Nuclear energy tries that. It isolates the ethics and ecology of a housewife. See it as a feminine logic not as a feminist ideology.

·           Nuclear energy was a failure of language, of storytelling. It should have been a cosmo-comic, a story that inhales huge sections of time. The time of nuclear energy runs to millions of years and yet we telegraph it to a decade. When storytelling declines and language suffers, you get symptoms like nuclear energy. There was no poignancy, no pathos, no irony, and no regret. No guilt. Cost benefit analysis and efficiency tells you little. A thermometer measures heat but a Dante has to tell you about hell.

·           Aesop had more wisdom than all the cost benefit analysts in the world. A hundred fables of nuclear energy told with the endearing affability of the fox and the crow. 

·           Kudankulam should not be a petition to the state. It should have been a civilizational debate, summoning Tagore or a Gandhi.

·           Kudankulam is a thought experiment in the real time. It shows that if you begin with official science, modern economics, and political theory, you will reach Kudankulam. Current categories lead to the current crisis. Look at all the key terms at Kudankulam--energy, security, efficiency, development, progress, and cost. It is a don’t-use-me dictionary of terms, a lethal thesaurus of our time. You cannot argue the case in these terms.

·           Our protest movements are too reverential. They enter the debate as supplicants, as petitioners when actually we need a new Magna Carta, a freedom to dream and live differently.

·           Half of Delhi cannot identify Kudankulam on a map. Our clerks will claim it enters history only as a nuclear plant. For our bureaucrats, fishing villages have no history.

·           Our democracy breeds and thrives on informal economies, on margins, on nomads, and slums and pastoral groups. We pretend they do not exist and get irritated when they insist that they do.

·           We are a strange democracy which attributed thought only to experts. Fisherman can fish but not think. If they do, then it must be foreign hand, an NGO conspiracy, and the dangers of conversion. Delhi and Jayalalitha are convinced fisherman who think and think about nuclear energy are alien creatures. A state which treats them like planktons suddenly sees them as sharks.

·           Kudankulam needs to be fought legally and philosophically. Kudankulam is the heart of India. It belongs to all of us. Like Gandhi would advise, we fight it twice. As a village struggle and as a drama of modernity.

·           We begin without consulting the people. By the time, the displaced organize, the contractors are already at work. Everyone argues that the half done has to be completed. The contractors sound more patriotic as the project proceeds.

·           Security cannot deprive us of rights. Security cannot threaten livelihood.

·           Saying no to nuclear energy is the beginning of the new democracy.

·           Does democracy choose life or in its indifference decide it is quietly genocidal?

·           History has shown that a civilization begins to die when it ignores an ethical debate in a village. The butterfly effects of history have already begun happening.

All sections in italics by Shiv Viswanathan.

* Unfortunately, the writer seems to have been deceived by Japan's vague promise to abandon nuclear sometime in the future. In 2012, the government led by Prime Minister Noda made statements about aiming to abandon nuclear energy by 2030, but soon waffled on the commitment. The policy was never established as a firm national goal, and the present government led by the LDP is determined to make use of the nuclear investment as soon as its safety can be guaranteed, which logically means never, but for the government means soon. Japan is far from being done with its nuclear experiment.

Sources:

The Times of India, Inferior parts being used in Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant: Top Scientist, April 7, 2013.

Garavi Gujarat News, India Court Rejects Plea to Block Nuclear Plant, September, 13, 2012.

Raminder Kaur, “Nuclear Power vs. People Power,” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July, 2012.

Martin Fackler, “Japan to Begin Restarting Idled Nuclear Plants, Leader Says,” The New York Times, February 28, 2013.

Shiv Viswanathan, "On Saying No to Nuclear Power," Dianuke.org, June 12, 2012.

Joanna Sugden and Aditi Malhotra, "Anti-Nuclear Campaigners Down, Not Out," The Wall Street Journal, India Real Time, May 6, 2013.

Kudankulam on Wikipedia.

How the Atom Bomb Rocked the World

If you look at all these early performers, they were atom-bomb-fueled… They were fast and furious, their songs were all on the edge. Music was never like that before.

- Bob Dylan, 2007

I learned about atomic weapons and the potential of nuclear war at a young age, and I was sometimes puzzled that people could carry on like the threat didn’t exist, but then again, the point is that I was only sometimes puzzled. Most of the time I was getting on with my life, like everyone else. I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative, and Chernobyl, but it was the Fukushima meltdowns too close to my home that got my attention and made the nuclear threat unforgettable.

It might seem that most people live as they did before the 1940s, concerned with their families, traditional beliefs, jobs and where to take their next vacation. We hear about close calls like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and bluffs by crazy world leaders like Kim Jong-un or Richard Nixon that remind us of the dangers of nuclear warfare. There is the occasional nuclear power plant meltdown, but it seems to be impossible for humanity to sustain a persistent awareness that nuclear war, or just a colossal accident in a spent fuel storage pool, could wipe out civilization--and it is probably a good thing that we can put these worries aside. Nonetheless, the awareness is always there at some level and it has had profound effects on history, culture and consciousness.

The atomic age came with the establishment of the American world economic order. The Bretton Woods agreement set the stage for dollar-denominated global economy, and that economy was based on military spending and nuclear weapons build up (for data on the spending, see 50 Facts About U.S. Nuclear Weapons).

Space exploration, telecommunications research and computer innovation were all directly or indirectly stimulated by the nuclear arms race. The Soviets and the Chinese were ostensibly not part of this new American world order, but they had to militarize their societies to keep up with the Americans. The atom changed everything, and it is still at the forefront of the major issues of this century. The intractable conflicts in the news this year are all rooted in the questions of who will be allowed to have a nuclear deterrent, and who will be offered protection under a nuclear umbrella.  So if you think you aren’t thinking about nukes, you just aren’t paying attention.

Bob Dylan spoke about this effect of the nuclear age in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine in 2007:

It wouldn’t have made sense to talk to somebody back then [in the 1920s and 1930s], to ask him, “What was it like in the late 1800s or 1900s?” It wouldn’t have interested anybody. But for some reason, the 1950s and 1960s interest people now. A part of the reason, if not the whole reason, is the atom bomb. The atom bomb fueled the entire world that came after it. It showed that indiscriminate killing and indiscriminate homicide on a mass level was possible…. I’m sure that fueled all aspects of society. I know it gave rise to the music we were playing. If you look at all these early performers, they were atom-bomb-fueled. Jerry Lee [Great Balls of Fire], Carl Perkins [Blue Suede Shoes], Buddy Holly [Rave On], Elvis [Shake, Rattle and Roll], Gene Vincent [Be-Bop-A-Lula], Eddie Cochran [Summertime Blues]… They were fast and furious, their songs were all on the edge. Music was never like that before. Lyrically, you had the blues singers, but Ma Rainey wasn’t singing about, nobody was singing with that type of fire and destruction. They paid a heavy price for that, because obviously the older generation took notice and kind of got rid of them as quickly as they could recognize them. Jerry Lee got ostracized, Chuck berry went to jail, Elvis, of course, we know what happened to him. Buddy Holly in a plane crash, Little Richard, all that stuff.

Then in this new record [Modern Times], you’re still dealing with the cultural effects of the bomb?

I think so.

Dylan wasn't saying anything original here, but he gave a worthwhile lesson to a generation that didn't directly experience how the atom bomb affected society in the years after WWII. The concept of the bomb as a socially disruptive power was expressed by many artists in the late 1940s. In the book American Scream:Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, Jonah Raskin wrote:

“Nineteen forty-eight was the crucial postwar year,” Ginsberg explained. “It was the turning point. Of course the atom bomb had already gone off in 1945, and Kerouac and Burroughs and I had talked about it, but the psychological fallout from the bomb—the consciousness—didn’t really hit until 1948. There was the splitting of the atom and the splitting of the old structures of society and also a sense of the inner world splitting up and coming apart.” Like many other writers around the world, Ginsberg turned the atom bomb into an all-inclusive metaphor. Everywhere he looked he saw apocalypse and atomization.

This view of the world passed from the Beat Generation, to Dylan, then to the rock music of the 1960s. Pete Townshend of The Who looks back on the era in the same way as Dylan:

As a young kid, walking around in my neighborhood, all of the older boys had been told… “Here’s a gun, go and kill the enemy.” We had none of that. What we had was, “There’s this bomb. We dropped it in on Japan. War is over. We now have an even bigger one. The Russians have it. We’re all doomed.” That was what I grew up with. So in a sense, the sound of the war, the sound of the bombers – I wanted my music to speak of that. That was the umbrella, the cloud that we grew up in in West London. And I know you guys had it too, so when we brought our music to America – although your situation wasn't as acutely bad immediately after the war - the one thing that triggered was the anger and the revolution and the reaction in the music. It really chimed with our audience here.

- Pete Townshend of The Who, interviewed by Barbara Walters and others on The View, 2012.

Dylan and Townshend seem to be saying here not that everyone was thinking directly about Armageddon all the time, or that Elvis was an avid reader of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. None of the songs on Modern Times, and hardly any other music of the last sixty years, is explicitly concerned with nuclear arms. They are about characters living in this world where things have changed, where there are direct and indirect effects of the atom bomb throughout our culture.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

As the music became “fast and furious,” so did the pace of social change. If further examples of the modern interest in this era are needed, consider the present popularity of cable television series like Mad Men (set in the early 1960s) and The Americans (set in the dying days of the Cold War), or the fact that my freshman students in Japan listen to 1970s progressive rock, or even Bob Dylan sometimes. There is still intense interest in these decades that made the modern world.

After the atomic bomb, people were on the move in the perpetually militarized and technological economy. Jack Kerouac was On the Road and Allan Ginsberg was Howling. People became much more inclined to question the authority and tradition that were filling the atmosphere with nuclear fallout. By the time the first post-war generation came of age, everything was being questioned. The establishment pushed back hard, but the Cold War unraveled in unexpected ways regardless. The danger seemed to be resolved, but it never really was. Little cold wars still play out in the Middle East, South Asia and the Korean peninsula, with enormous effects on all the proxies involved.

The World Health Organization is subordinate to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which promotes nuclear power while pretending to keep us safe from it. Seventy years of nuclear waste has piled up with no place to go. Hundreds of aging nuclear power plants will need to be decommissioned in the coming decades, and it would be naïve to think there won’t be another level 7 disaster at one or more of them before they are safely put to rest. Thousands of nuclear weapons are still ready to launch and be in the air within thirty minutes. Barack Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize for once having said some fine words about nuclear disarmament, but since receiving this prize he has achieved nothing on this issue, primarily from lack of trying. With absolutely no intention of giving up their own nuclear weapons, Israel and the US toy with the notion that there is a military solution to stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. How could all of this not be rocking your world?

_____

Dylan songs on politics, war and apocalypse (partial list):
Chimes of Freedom, Desolation Row, High Water, It’s All Good, It’s Alright Ma, Let Me Die in My Footsteps, Man of Peace, Masters of War, Political World, Slow Train, Talking World War III Blues, With God on Our Side and...

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

Words by Bob Dylan, covered by Joan Baez, Bryan Ferry, Edie Brickell, George Harrison, Arcade Fire and many others.

No, it's not atomic rain, it's just a hard rain. It isn't the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that's just gotta happen... In the last verse, when I say, 'the pellets of poison are flooding the waters', that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers. (Cott, 2007)

Because this song was written at the height of Cold War tensions and during atomic weapons testing, many people thought the hard rain referred to the fallout rain. Dylan denied this in the quote above, but still this song illustrates what he meant when he claimed that the atomic bomb changed music and culture in profound ways.

Oh, where have you been, my blue eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a gonna fall

Oh, what did you see, my blue eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a bleedin'
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a gonna fall

And what did you hear, my blue eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin'
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a blazin'
Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin'
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a gonna fall

Oh, who did you meet, my blue eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded with hatred
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a gonna fall

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a fallin'
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'
But I'll know my song well before I start singin'
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a gonna fall

Sources

Jan S. Wenner, “The Long View,” Bob Dylan: 40 Years of Rolling Stone Interviews, p. 69-75, 2013. Originally published in Rolling Stone, Vol. 1025-1026, May 3-17, 2007.

Jonathan Cott, Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, p. 7-9, in Wenner, 2007.

Robert A. Jacobs, The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

Jane Loader, Kevin Rafferty, Pierce Rafferty (directors), The Atomic Café, Libra Films, 1982.

Jonah Raskin. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (University of California Press, 2004).

The Brookings Institution, 50 Facts About U.S. Nuclear Weapons, 1998.

The Stag of Dallas

   It seems impossible that the solutions to the most pressing problems of humanity will ever be resolved through debate among scientists, politicians, or the writers of newspaper editorials. Scientists can look at the same phenomenon; for example, the Fukushima disaster, and split into opposing groups who see it in two extremely divergent ways. How is this possible with the same data to work with? It is either a public health catastrophe that has ruined half of Japan, or it is an event of almost no consequence at all. If their data and their scientific methods can provide no answers and no way forward, it may be only artists who can guide us at this point.

   I was reminded of this idea recently when I saw the sculpture The Stag on display in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas. Like all the other busy convention-goers, I walked past a few times without noticing it. You just don’t expect to find such a stunning work of art in a hotel lobby.

   When I finally shook off my flight fatigue, I was able to pay proper attention to my surroundings. I took some photos of the sculpture, and found out from the staff that the piece was made by the hotel’s 2011 artist in residence. (More about the artist, Hobbes Vincent, here.)

   The work immediately told me much of what I've been trying to say for two years about the Fukushima disaster and humanity’s relationship with nature. Artists are often amused by what observers say their work means, but I’ll at least tell what it said to me.

   One review I came across described it as “surrealistic sculpture,” but I would add that it is also absurdist because the sight of the construction crew assembling a living creature immediately conveys that the idea is preposterous, for we all know the notion expressed in the poem Trees (only God can make a tree), or the moral of the tale in Humpty Dumpty. Yet we forget these simple lessons from our earliest education. It is not hard to find numerous examples of our pathetic, vain attempts to improve nature or to fix the damage we inflict on it.    We bio-engineer life to make pesticide resistant crops, which justifies applying more pesticides, which kills the bees that used to pollinate a neighboring orchard. We justify the existence of the nuclear industry because we need it to produce the isotopes that will “conquer” cancer. (Do I need to explain that irony?) There are even grand plans to geo-engineer a fix to climate change.

   The sculpture also reminded me of the contentious line from the 2012 US presidential election, President Obama’s declaration you didn’t build that. It led to a ridiculous false debate, with one side making the obvious point that private enterprises depend on publicly funded institutions in order to succeed, and the other making the point that private enterprises make funding of public institutions possible. They could have just argued whether the chicken or the egg came first, but even then they would have missed the essential point that only God can make a chicken or an egg, or anything that we ultimately derive our prosperity from.

   The sculpture has another interesting layer of recursive meaning, for the artist himself is, like the construction workers in The Stag, daring to mimic the Creator. But I put the artist in a separate category from those who make vain attempts to “decontaminate” Japan or “remediate” the Gulf of Mexico. While industrial accidents offend nature, the artist’s intention and purpose, and the effect of his work, are a tribute to natural creation, and they remind humanity of its lost humility.

Trees

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.     

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;         

A tree that looks at God all day,        

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;      

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;         

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain. 

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree. 

- Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918)

Nuclear Reading List

I'm on a break from the blog, so I'll fill the gap this week with a simple display of references I've used over the past two years. These sources are a good reminder that it is important to look away from the daily output of blogs, news media, twitter and facebook and instead dig a little deeper into long-form writing on nuclear history. 
Many of the "shocking" revelations that appear on social media are actually rediscoveries of issues that were written about 20-40 years ago. Just to take one example, this week I read the "news" from a new book that tells of prisoners in the US who were the subjects of experiments investigating the effects of radionuclides on reproductive organs. While it is important to teach this history to a new generation, we should remember that it is old news and look back at the work of the researchers who were the first to record the history. In this case, it was the journalist Eileen Welsome in the 1990s who wrote the first comprehensive study of America's radiation experiments on uninformed citizens. In the same way, all the books displayed below provide a nuclear education that cannot be had by reading blogs and twitter feeds. Anyone who has been following this blog might be interested in going offline for a while and reading some of these:

Will Disaster Capitalism Win Out?

Ishinomaki before the tsunami - not an enviable model of urban planning - 

little green space, high density neighborhoods, the lowland ecosystem 

completely paved over.

   There has been an impolitic and perhaps insensitive thought on my mind since the first days I saw towns in northern Japan swept away by the tsunami. I could cry for the loss of lives, homes, communities and jobs, but I hesitated to say that I couldn’t regret the loss of a slice of 20th century Japanese urban landscape. Perhaps it is time now to have a conversation about what is obvious to everyone who has traveled through Japan. Many towns look like they have already been hit by a slow-moving disaster.

Japanese cities were rebuilt quickly after WWII. Even if there had been planners with inspired visions for new urban landscapes, the nation was bankrupt and starting over from zero. The emphasis of national planners was all on industrial revitalization. The result was densely packed cities with very limited zoning to separate heavy, polluting industries from residential neighborhoods. Streets are narrow, often with no sidewalk for children to safely walk to school. Parks are an afterthought, and if they exist they are located in a place that was worthless for any other use.

In addition to the lack of funding and imagination, another factor that made Japanese cities an irregular jumble of aluminum siding and wooden firetraps is, ironically, a certain degree of freedom that is not allowed to prevail in the freedom-loving West. Rational zoning and urban planning require top-down governance and a willingness of individual stakeholders to go along with what has been decided through the democratic process - to accept land swaps and buyouts, for example. In Japan, much is decided by consensus, which means that quite often nothing is done at all because it takes only one individual to shut down a proposal. This might be why the big national projects, like the construction of Narita Airport, failed so badly. When the government knows the consensus building approach won’t work, they ram through their plans unilaterally. So in Japan the landscape is either an un-zoned chaotic expression of freedom, or a heavy-handed obliteration of it.

   Nowadays urban planning and ecological sciences are more advanced than they were in the mid-20th century, and Japan is not devastated from a recent war, but it seems like Japanese bureaucrats are not able to imagine anything other than the urban environment that they are accustomed to living in. On an individual level, people are turned inward, focused on the meticulous cultivation of their inner environments, but oblivious to a local environment of bleak architecture, pachinko parlors, and small industrial incinerators.

The plans for rebuilding the northeast coast are stuck in the old mindset, as they are influenced by an unattainable wish to bring back exactly what was lost. The global fame of the victims and the disaster is getting in the way of clear thinking about what should be done with the region. The victims genuinely deserve the sympathy, and deserve much more material support than they have received, but it would be wrong to go along with a nostalgic wish to give them back their towns just as they were before. This is a chance to build something much better in their place.

Is anyone really going to miss above-ground wires or the kitsch of 

Statue of Liberty replicas? Will reconstruction consist only of 

continued destruction of the environment?

I understand why the towns’ elders want to rebuild what was there before. It is possible to long for an ugly place and not realize that the longing is for something other than the parking lots, aluminum siding and billboards. I can get very sentimental for the suburban landscape of strip malls and freeways where I grew up, but I have to remember that I am really missing what I was then, and the moments and the people I was with. I might suffer from the illusion that the place was beautiful, but this is only because of the associations it has for me. As much as the whole world sees the pain of people in places like Ishinomaki, it would be a shame if Japan spent its precious remaining wealth on a promise to the middle-aged and elderly to bring back all that has been lost.

There are signs that two years after the disaster, others are raising the alarm about the way rebuilding has been conceived so far. Winnie Bird wrote in The Earth Island Journal this month about the possibility that Japan is losing a chance to move away from disaster capitalism toward disaster environmentalism. The former consists of the traditional approach to development: pouring concrete. Heavy machinery is to be applied to building seawalls and rebuilding towns and roads on the flood plains behind them. The latter concept, disaster environmentalism, would see the disaster as a chance to restore what had already been destroyed before the disaster.

The plan would consider whether economically viable towns could or should exist in the same places. Since before the disaster young people were already leaving for the big cities, and they are unlikely to come back. If the majority of the population is going to be senior citizens, they can collect their pensions anywhere. These regions might be more valuable to the nation as protected floodplains free of human habitation. Farmers and fishermen can commute from residences inland and leave the shoreline for better uses. Rather than just letting the land go back to nature – which would result only in weed-infested lots among the concrete rubble – managed ecological preserves could be established. Wildlife could be restored for the enjoyment and economic profit of people living nearby but not on the valuable floodplains that will, in any case, be hit by a tsunami again someday.

Winnie Bird visited the coast near Sendai and spoke with ecologist Takao Suzuki there:

To our left, bulldozers and cranes shaped a huge mound of earth into a new seawall. Suzuki told me walls like this one could threaten the future of tidal flats by cutting them off from the ocean and rivers. “The government didn’t consult biologists when planning the seawalls. When the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transportation and Tourism proposed the walls, they issued a statement saying they would consider ecosystems. But the ecosystem is different in each location, and they don’t have specific information about each one,” he had explained earlier in his office. He is lobbying the government to modify the plans in order to preserve at least some important tidal flats.

She goes on to write, “… much of what I saw this time around looked like plain old disaster capitalism — devastation as a chance for the government to funnel money towards huge corporations and promote a pro-business agenda… In the case of sea walls and breakwaters, which are being rebuilt taller and more extensively than ever before by Japan’s infamous concrete and construction companies, the recovery threatens to create new environmental problems." She described the situation further by relating what she was told by long-time resident of Japan and environmental writer, C.W. Nicol:

“Seventy hectares of [rice] paddy land has been submerged in Higashi Matsushima. It was formerly wetland. The land sunk a meter or so, and also, the tsunami and tidal water since then has made trenches four to five meters deep, with a covering of water everywhere. We are doing surveys on water birds . . . fantastic! There are shellfish clinging to half-submerged telephone poles, and I know that the area is thriving with sea life.” Nicol wants to transform the area into a wetland park, but says local officials insist on reclaiming the land for agriculture. “The cost for this will be astronomical and nobody really wants to farm the place anyway,” he concluded.

Two years after the disaster, the political machinery that built Japan’s urban landscape is back in power. So far, their vision of the future is entirely retrograde. The best they can think of is to suggest that hosting the Olympics, pouring concrete and printing cash will produce the pixie dust that takes the nation back to an imagined better past. Just as the radioactive “decontamination” around Fukushima was a farce that funneled money to a few construction firms, the reconstruction projects for the towns destroyed by the tsunami might end up being more of the same - a sham that will fail to improve the ecology or the lives of the people in the affected regions.

Sources:

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2008.
From Amazon.com review:
“Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine advances a truly unnerving argument: historically, while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times. As Klein demonstrates, this reprehensible game of bait-and-switch isn't just some relic from the bad old days. It's alive and well in contemporary society, and coming soon to a disaster area near you.”

Short video about The Shock Doctrine.

Winnie Bird, "Japan’s Reconstruction Two Years On — Plain Old Disaster Capitalism," The Earth Island Journal, March 11, 2013.

Just after I wrote this post, Ms. Bird wrote more on the topic for The Japan Times:
Winifred Bird. "Tohoku Coast Faces Man-Made Perils in Wake of Tsunami." The Japan Times, March 17, 2013.

Two Years Since the Earthquake-Tsunami-Meltdown Syndrome

Today the world media is focused on the second anniversary of the triple disaster in Japan, and I don't have much to add to the wide range of reporting that can be found in the mainstream media and all the alternatives to it. But to sum up, I'll just say that the prevailing attitude I have observed is expressed by this comical translation error I have seen on signs for sale in hardware stores.

It is unfortunate that more people don't want to reflect on the disaster and use it as a teachable moment about the need to come up with better solutions to the energy crisis. Instead, Japan is more interested in “recovery,” and not in a good way. The concept of recovery is one of denial. The present government, with its high approval ratings, dreams of the impossible return to the comfortable past - the past of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics followed by decades of economic growth.

As I'm an educator, I’m interested using this historic event to make people question this juvenile fantasy of recovery. I've locked onto the nuclear crisis because it is such an effective way to teach across the curriculum. You can't understand it unless you engage with chemistry, physics, biology, political science, history, economics, sociology, philosophy and psychology, and the subject areas where these all come together - the arts. The men of science will scoff at this idea, but I think if there is a way out of this mess, it will be philosophers, novelists, poets, filmmakers and musicians who lead the way. After being warned for decades by protesters--who were repelled by the very water cannons which would one day be used to cool the damaged reactors--the nuclear engineers, politicians, bureaucrats and corporate executives were not wise enough to take heed of their "amateur" critics. It would be foolish to look to the "experts" for future solutions.

The Fukushima meltdowns could be a pivotal moment that prompts us to turn away from self-destructive technologies and ideologies. Otherwise, we'll end up like the guy in the cartoon. Two years have passed and it seems like the teachable moment is fading away.

cartoon by TomToro

My pick for the best of the 3-11 memorial stories:

David McNeill, "Japanese Media, International Media and 3.11 Reportage," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 11, Issue 10, No. 3, March 11, 2013.

Uranium Enrichment, Moral Impoverishment

The latest uranium enrichment method using lasers:
cheaper, smaller, less energy intensive

One of the less examined aspects of the nuclear debate is the enrichment process. Blogs and editorials make frequent mention of the famous disasters, the health effects or radiation, regulatory lapses and the risks of mining uranium and operating nuclear plants. However, a crucial, overlooked step in the process is enrichment, and it is a step where the civilian and military uses of uranium intersect and become indistinguishable. Nuclear security and economic advantage are blended together as powerful nations vie for where enrichment will happen, how it will happen, and who is allowed to do it.

One thing that mitigated the dangers of the nuclear age was the fact that making a nuclear weapon was a massive industrial enterprise. Few countries had the resources for it, and those that tried to make nuclear weapons could not conceal their intention.

The Manhattan Project of the early 1940s required scientific and engineering expertise, a large workforce, access to the raw materials, and electricity supplies equal to what lit up New York City at the time. It was the lack of all these prerequisites that made it impossible for the USSR, Japan and Germany to produce nuclear weapons during WWII, though historians debate whether Germany, using other methods, might have been able to scrape together enough fissile material for a bomb. 
After worrying that the enemy might get the bomb first, people running the Manhattan Project quickly realized the enormous scale of the project. They knew at that time that no country but the U.S. had the capacity to build a bomb. If Germany or Japan had tried to set up the required gigantic enrichment facility, it could have been found easily and destroyed in an air raid. The Soviets were set back by having had massive losses on their own territories. This implies that the US could have called off the Manhattan Project at this time, if the true concern had been that WWII enemies would get the bomb first. However, there were obvious reasons to develop this new weapon for the post-war world that was coming into view.

Since the UN and nations of the world applauded themselves for signing the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, they have done a good job of not mentioning that uranium enrichment facilities were never forced to reduce their emissions of banned substances. According to Arjun Makhijani et al, the gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment process at the American USEC facility (and at perhaps similar facilities in other countries) continued to emit CFCs at its usual levels until 2002. Internet searches for exemptions to the protocol turn up some for asthma inhalers and other uses that account for trivial amounts, but there is no mention of the large consumption of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) used in uranium enrichment since 1987 at the USEC facility in Paducah, Kentucky. It seems to have been tactfully left unmentioned in UN documents that were meant to tout the victory and not allow the public to question the judgment that nuclear was clean and green enough to be given a pass on its ozone depleting emissions. Although no one wanted to draw attention to the exemptions, CFC pollution by the nuclear industry has long been an open secret, and it is not denied by the polluters themselves.

The additional problem with CFCs is that, as well as being ozone depleters, they are said to trap heat 10,000 to 20,000 times more effectively than CO2. Thus the global warming impact of nuclear energy (mining, processing, construction of plants, cooling of fuel, decommissioning of plants, decontamination, transport and storage of waste) takes a huge increase when we consider the energy used to run the cooling systems and the impact of coolant leaks. 

Because of the Montreal Protocol and the desire to portray nuclear as green and carbon free, the nuclear industry has been highly motivated to reduce the energy and CFC inputs required to enrich uranium. In addition, there would be tremendous cost advantages to any nation that could secure a less energy intensive way of enriching uranium.

The gaseous diffusion method was Cold War technology that was finally headed for phase out in the early 21st century. It was overtaken by the less wasteful method of using centrifuges, but since the 1960s, the holy grail of enrichment technology has been to use lasers to separate the valuable U-235 isotope from other uranium isotopes. This technology has become viable in the last decade, and in September 2012, GE Hitachi finally won approval to operate a laser enrichment facility in North Carolina, but this has come with some very anxious concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation. Just as a gaseous diffusion plant in Nazi Germany would have been easy to find and bombard, enrichment facilities have always been relatively easy to detect. This will no longer be the case if laser enrichment technology becomes widespread.

The US government is confident that its laser secrets, shared with GE Hitachi, are safe, but there is no guarantee that this situation will last. If the secrets are not stolen, they could be rediscovered independently. A criticism quoted in a New York Times article was “the demonstration of a new technology often begets a burst of emulation because the advance opens a new window on what is possible.”

Within the reports that mention this new laser technology, proponents of it make no mention of the wasteful CFC and energy consumption of the old enrichment technologies. They merely use words like “more efficient” and “less costly.” To speak of the carbon footprint of the old methods would be to admit that all along nuclear energy wasn’t as clean and green as was advertised.

The US government seems willing to take the proliferation risk in this case in order to make nuclear greener, but it also seems to want this as a way of cornering the market in enriched uranium fuel production. A strategic interest in controlling proliferation risks is also obvious. If the laser method is 70-80% cheaper (as claimed in this report by The Center for Strategic and International Studies), and the US can justify not sharing the secrets of laser technology (because of the proliferation risk), then it has the potential to become the sole supplier for the dozens of new reactors being built in China and India, as well as for existing nuclear power plants. By gaining exclusive control of this technology, the US gains both geopolitical and economic advantage, but at considerable risk that the exclusivity might not last. However, the CSIS report cautions that even the large cost reduction may not be enough to make energy companies switch suppliers. The biggest cost of nuclear remains the cost of building and operating power plants. If this is true, the political support for laser enrichment might be rooted more in the lobbying efforts of GE Hitachi.

This sheds light on why Barack Obama pivoted to a strongly pro-nuclear stance once he was elected. In 2008, during the campaign, he said the NRC was a “moribund agency” that was “captive of the industries it regulates” (Gar Smith, p. 137). After the election, the Obama administration became firmly pro-nuclear, offering loan guarantees of billions of dollars for projects that can’t obtain financing without a promise of government bailout if things go wrong. And GE Hitachi has also had its hand out for loan guarantees for the new enrichment facility. Just in case something happens to turn global opinion against nuclear (what could possibly go wrong?), all nuclear ventures these days want government to provide loan guarantees and liability insurance.

Since Obama came to power, there has been no reform of the “moribund” NRC, and no enforced closures of aging nuclear plants that are plagued with safety issues. Some utilities have announced the shutdown of aging, troubled reactors, but these have occurred because the facilities were no longer financially viable.

The strong commitment to laser enrichment is, to say the least, a strong disincentive for the US government to reduce dependence on nuclear energy. It is committed to extending licenses on aging reactors and expanding the industry, even when they are financially unsound. The financial incentive to profit from laser uranium enrichment makes the US promote nuclear expansion abroad, yet the promotion of nuclear energy abroad wouldn't be taken seriously if the US had a domestic policy of reducing reliance on nuclear. Thus the commitment to enrichment reinforces the commitment to nuclear power plants, and vice versa, no matter how costly and dangerous it becomes to operate its fleet of troubled reactors.

After the Fukushima disaster, the US government joined the Japanese government in playing down the implications, and was alarmed when the Japanese government indicated that it might withdraw from nuclear entirely. The promotion of a global expansion of nuclear energy provides more reasons to add to the list of complaints that the satirical Final Edition listed in their article Nobel Committee Asks Obama “Nicely” To Return Peace Prize. A Nobel Peace Prize should not belong to a leader who wants to increase weapons proliferation risks and add to the stockpiles of nuclear waste for which there is still no disposal solution.

Sources and Further Reading:

Arjun Makhijani, Lois Chalmers, Brice Smith, Uranium Enrichment: Just Plain Facts to Fuel an Informed Debate on Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Power, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, (October, 2004). "The manufacture, import, and use of CFCs were substantially restricted by the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, which the U.S. is implementing through the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act. As a result of these commitments, the manufacture of Freon in the U.S. ended in 1995 and its emissions to the air in the United States from large users fell by nearly 60% between 1991 and 2002. The emissions from the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant, however, have remained virtually constant over this time, falling just over 7% between 1989 and 2002. In 2002, the Paducah enrichment plant emitted more than 197.3 metric tons of Freon into the air through leaking pipes and other equipment. This single facility accounted for more than 55% of all airborne releases of this ozone depleting CFC from all large users in the entire United States in 2002."

Christopher Donville. “GE, Hitachi to Seek Guarantees for Nuclear Project,” Bloomberg. June 30, 2009. 

Gar Smith, Nuclear Roulette: The Truth about the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012), p. 137. 

International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer, United Nations. 

Matthew Fargo. “The Commercialization of Uranium Enrichment,” The Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 17, 2012.

Norm De Pleume, “Nobel Committee Asks Obama 'Nicely' To Return Peace Prize,” The Final Edition, (2011).

Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, USEC.

Uranium Plant Using Laser Technology Wins U.S. Approval, Associated Press, (September 27, 2012).

William J. Broad, “Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear,” The New York Times, (August 20, 2011).