Review of "The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age"

Review:

The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age, by Robert A. Jacobs, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, 176 pages

“There’s nothing new or original left to be said about nuclear weapons… [but] I am prepared to grovel, to humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let’s pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes and speak our second-hand lines in this sad second-hand play.”

- Arundhati Roy, 1998

In 1998, the year Pakistan tested its first nuclear weapon, and a quarter century after India's first test, the novelist Arundhati Roy wrote the passage above in her essay Pokharan: The End of Imagination.[i] After this humble introduction, she proceeded to write something highly original - an additional 5,000 words that must be one of the most articulate and moving essays ever written against the possession of nuclear weapons. She demonstrated that while the message may be old, there are always new ways to express it and a new generation that has to learn what their elders may feel has become too tiresome to revisit.

These thoughts about Roy’s essay came to mind as I read The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age,[ii] by American historian Robert Jacobs. Nuclear threats are arguably as dangerous now as they were at any time in the past, so silence is still indefensible, and Jacobs too has found a way to make a fresh contribution to the history of the atomic age for a new generation.

Older people who remember the early Cold War may find this book covers familiar ground, but they must know that this book is not written for them. Knowledge of this era will die on the shelves if it is not kept alive in the minds of successive contemporary scholars and reinterpreted for each new generation. It is easy to forget that freshman university students in 2013 were born in 1995. They have no living memory of the first Gulf War, Apartheid, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Vietnam War. They were just starting to learn how to read when airliners crashed into the World Trade Center. People over the age of forty tend to assume these events are common knowledge, and they don’t realize how difficult it is for young people to grasp how there could have been such deep animosities across ideological lines during the Cold War.

Jacobs limits his coverage to the time between Hiroshima and the end of atmospheric weapons testing in the 1960s. The analysis of the historical events and their impact on culture is so good that readers will be left hoping for one or two sequels about the late Cold War period of the 70s and 80s, and the contemporary age consisting of threats by loose nukes, non-state entities building a bomb, aspiring nuclear states, Fukushima, and cell phones with built-in Geiger counters crowd-sourcing fallout data.

People coming of age in the 21st century are not likely to have much awareness of nuclear history because they have no link to a pre-nuclear world. They didn’t live through a time when everyone was talking about this new frontier in the history of humanity, about this new danger that could destroy civilization, and much of the ecosystem, in the span of a few hours.

Nowadays, the person on the street is unlikely to know how many nuclear weapons there are in the world and who owns them. From now on, all generations will have to be consciously taught nuclear history if they are to understand the implications of the weapons (functional or not) and the waste we are leaving behind for them. 50,000 years from now, when the future inhabitants of the earth are trying to understand the implications of their local nuclear waste dump, no one will be speaking 21st century English, or any other language now spoken. The Dragon’s Tail and other such chronicles of these times will have to be passed down like Greek myths, translated by successive generations of scholars.

The Dragon’s Tail begins with an explanation of how the atomic bomb was understood as a profound break with the past. Whereas we used to be in the hands of God, or a fate beyond our control, we now had the power to decide if Armageddon would occur today. In the social sciences, the first reaction to this problem was to dwell on the sorry, violent nature of man rather than to build the political structures that might constrain it.

From these early conceptions, the bomb soon took on mythical and magical properties. Because radiation was intangible yet so destructive, it took a role in popular culture whenever there was a need to display something transformative, awesome and powerful. The Nevada desert, home of weapons testing, came to represent the magical, other-worldliness of everything connected to the new technology (think of alien landings mythology associated with Area 51,[iii] The X-Files,[iv] and the two places where the Freudian id was given free reign – Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site).

Films, comic books, novels and consumer goods all picked up the atomic motif (the 1982 documentary Atomic Cafe[v] was a chronicle of this era for the previous generation). Godzilla  and Spiderman are two of the familiar fictional supernatural beings created by radiation, but Jacobs describes many more examples − some well-known, others obscure and forgotten. Some are fantasies that portray radiation as having transformative powers unrelated to its real effects, while others are grounded in accurate representations of the effects of radioactivity and the implications of nuclear warfare. There are so many examples described in The Dragon’s Tail that readers come to see the essential role that nuclear physics played in modern realistic and fantasy science fiction. These genres wouldn’t exist without it, and they pushed aside traditional fantasy genres because, when writers had radiation to work with, they didn’t need wizards and magic spells. The arrival of Harry Potter in 1997 might be taken as a sign that the novelty of radiation had run its course in the public imagination.

By the dawn's early light: Bomb tests were
visible to motel guests in Las Vegas

The trivia about atomic monsters is interesting enough, but this book excels in its analysis of the role that fiction came to play in real-world conceptions and understandings of the atomic era. There were official attempts to get the public to take up roles as citizen-soldiers who could survive a nuclear attack, and the public was initially receptive. For a while, a Los Angeles television station actually live-broadcasted nuclear tests in Nevada. But eventually the absurdity of public information programs became apparent, and the official appeals were weakened by their own contradictions. The hydrogen bomb tests that began in 1954 made it ridiculous to suggest that there would be anything worth living for after a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange. Children wouldn’t be able to just duck and cover then get back outdoors to “clean this place up” (as one famous government film reel declared). Jacobs makes it clear that it was popular culture that helped the public process their fears and honestly confront reality. Fiction gave more honest and informative depictions of the nuclear dilemma than non-fiction reporting.

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove[vi] (1964) is a well-known example of such fiction, but Jacobs wisely steers clear of it and digs up the more obscure, and arguably more important, creations that came before it. Others have written about Dr. Strangelove, but who remembers a 1954 episode of the television series Medic?[vii] We can thank Jacobs for reminding us that the information available wasn’t all just ridiculous Department of Energy newsreels deceiving a gullible population. In this era, the American public was exposed to a diverse range of information which might compare favorably with the quality of what we presently get from twenty-four-hour cable television news.

In the episode of Medic, (recently issued on DVD) the prime time audience was shown the suburban aftermath of a nuclear attack on a large city some distance away. Nothing in the story is sugarcoated like the information in government leaflets. The hospital is visited by irradiated, blinded children, and other children who need to be told that mommy is “still in the city.” Morphine has to be denied to people with grotesque injuries so that there will be some for those patients who still have a chance of being alive in a few days.

In an episode of another television series, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone,[viii] a group of superficially friendly neighbors are confronted with the news that nuclear war has started. As they fight over scarce resources and a place to shelter, bitter resentments emerge, and by the time the false alarm has been confirmed, their once-peaceful relations have been destroyed. Rod Serling appears at the end to remind the audience, “For civilization to survive, civilization has to remain civilized.”

Such simple truths were nowhere to be found in the official line about nuclear weapons, which focused instead on concerns such as how to defend one’s fallout shelter from the unprepared victims who might want to fight their way in. Jacobs comes to the strongest point of his thesis when he identifies the origins of the counter-culture movement in the way children of the fifties noticed the gap between propaganda and reality. Fiction shed light on a truth that the government and the older generation wanted to look away from, and this was the origin of the baby boomers’ rejection of their parents’ values. The counter-culture movement might seem to have stemmed from the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, but it was the “duck and cover” safety drills of the 1950s that made the post-war generation doubt that adults could be trusted. The official pamphlets and newsreels had the opposite effect of making children feel safe. The hypocrisies and contradictions of nuclear defense drills planted the seed of the rebellion that would come in the sixties.

Jacobs illustrates this point effectively with an analysis of a piece of sci-fi schlock that less astute observers would dismiss as an unimportant B-grade movie. Who would have thought that The Blob[ix] (1958) could really be about so much more than a small town terrified by an expanding mass of jelly? The film revealed the emerging cultural shift triggered by a totally new kind of existential threat, and the adults who were incapable of recognizing it. While the fifties are famous for television shows like Father Knows Best[x] (1954-60), it was also the era of James Dean and the Beat Generation, precursors of the sixties counter-culture. Millions of people were tuning out of the square society being handed to them. In The Blob, a new genre emerges – that of the youth who must save themselves and the world while authority figures snooze and fumble in the face of a new threat they can’t even recognize.

Jacobs’ coverage is limited in this short book to the first two phases of the Cold War – the period of testing fission bombs, and the next period of testing massive hydrogen bombs. The analysis stops at the time when atmospheric testing ended, almost entirely, in 1963. Of course, the Cold War didn’t end then. Weapons testing moved underground, both literally, and figuratively in the collective subconscious. It was out of sight and out of mind, but the existential threat never went away. There would be a shortcoming in Jacobs’ book only if it left some readers with the impression that the story was over when the baby boomers grew up and the Cold War came to its conclusion in 1991. In future studies, we can hope that Jacobs will apply his talents to a book about the culture of more recent nuclear history.

In the present age we are preoccupied with the ecological crisis, and we’ve grown complacent about the threat of nuclear war. It didn’t happen during the worst crisis in 1962, so we have mistakenly assumed that we’ve figured out a way to avoid the worst in every scenario that might arise. As the Cold War heated up in the 1980s, there were new films about nuclear threats such as War Games[xi] (1983), The Day After[xii] (1983, which is credited with changing President Reagan’s thinking about nuclear deterrence, which led to drastic reductions in Soviet and American stockpiles[xiii]), Special Bulletin[xiv] (1983), and Threads[xv] (1984). These confronted mass audiences (after a two-decade lull) again with serious messages about the futility of possessing nuclear weapons. Since then the message seems to have stalled. Nuclear weapons in subsequent films showed the planet-saving meteor-buster of Armageddon[xvi] (1998), or the terrorist’s ticking time bomb defused by agent Jack Bauer in 24[xvii] (2001-2010). This is the most that popular culture can come up with while we live with the aftermath of Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear waste that has nowhere to go, and proliferation risks that are inextricably linked to an energy industry believed by some to be the solution to global warming.

Another false impression that readers might get from The Dragon’s Tail is an understanding that nuclear catastrophe was avoided only because of bottom-up resistance that drew its inspiration from popular culture. Jacobs cannot be blamed for choosing this focus for his book, but there are questions to be asked about how much it was bottom-up pressures that prevented worse outcomes. What influenced Soviet and American leaders to make them realize they had to step back from the brink? When they managed to agree on a moratorium on testing from 1959-60, then on the end of atmospheric testing three years later, they might have been influenced by films like The Blob and The Day the Earth Stood Still[xviii] (1951), or by citizens who had been moved to action by such stories. Another possibility is that it was initiatives by elite intellectuals that opened up East-West dialog and changed thinking in both Washington and Moscow. The Russell-Einstein manifesto of 1955[xix] led to the Pugwash Conferences (in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada) where top Western and Soviet scientists met for the first time. It’s also possible that the enormous expense and danger of the nuclear buildup was so obvious that Khrushchev and Kennedy didn’t need rocket scientists or science fiction writers to tell them it couldn’t go on. Then again, it’s just as likely that the worst was averted only because of luck and chance decisions like the one made by the captain of a Soviet submarine who decided in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis that, despite the pressure on him to press the button, he didn’t want to start World War III.[xx]

None of this quibbling is to take away from what Robert Jacobs has achieved with his study of the culture of the early Cold War era. The Dragon’s Tail serves as an excellent point of entry for anyone who wants to learn about this field and related aspects of the nuclear age.

Endnotes

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[i] Arundhati Roy, Pokharan: The End of Imagination, Dianuke.org, May 2013. Originally published elsewhere in 1998. http://www.dianuke.org/pokharan-the-end-of-imagination-arundhati-roy/.

[ii] Robert A. Jacobs, The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). Japanese publication: Robert Jacobs (author),Takahashi, Hiroko (editor), Nitta, Jun (translator), Kaku no Anzen Shinwa to Amerika no Taishu Bunka (Gaifusha, 2013). ロバート・A・ジェイコブズ (著), 高橋 博子 (監修), 新田 準 (翻訳)ドラゴン・テール――核の安全神話とアメリカの大衆文化. 凱風社 (2013/4/22).

[iii] Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base (Back Bay Books, 2012).

[iv] Chris Carter (producer), The X-Files, 20th Century Fox Television, 1993-2002.

[v] Jane Loader, Kevin Rafferty, Pierce Rafferty (directors), The Atomic Cafe, Libra Films, 1982.

[vi] Stanley Kubrick (director), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Columbia Pictures,1964.

[vii] John Meredyth Lucas, James E. Moser (directors), Flash of Darkness (episode title, aired February 1955) in Medic, (television series, aired 1954-1956), NBC Television, Timeless Media Group DVD release: 2011.

[viii] Rod Serling (creator and director), The Shelter (episode title, aired September 1961) The Twilight Zone, CBS Television, 1959-1964. Nuclear holocaust was a recurring theme of the series in other episodes such as A Little Peace and Quiet and Shelter Skelter (from the 1985 series of the same name).

[ix] Irvin Yeaworth (director), The Blob, Paramount Pictures, 1958.

[x] Peter Tewksbury (director), Father Knows Best, CBC Television, 1954-1960.

[xi] John Badham (director), War Games, United Artists, 1983.

[xii] Nicholas Meyer (director) The Day After, ABC Television and Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1983.

[xiii] Eric Schlosser, Command and Control (Penguin Random House, 2013), p. 451.

[xiv] Edward Zwick (director), Special Bulletin, NBC Television, 1983.

[xv] Mick Jackson (director) Threads, BBC, 1983.

[xvi] Michael Bay (director), Armageddon, Touchstone Pictures, 1998.

[xvii] Joel Surnow, Robert Cochrane (creators), 24, 20th Century Fox, 2001-2010.

[xviii] Robert Wise (director), The Day the Earth Stood Still, 20th Century Fox, 1951.

[xix] Josehph Rotblat, “The 50-Year Shadow,” The New York Times, May 17, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/opinion/17Rotblat.html?ex=1270785600&en=37bef79604f97228&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&_r=2&

[xx] Edward Wilson, “Thank you Vasili Arkhipov, the man who stopped nuclear war,” The Guardian, October 27, 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/27/vasili-arkhipov-stopped-nuclear-war.

Ontario's Nuclear Village

When the story of the Fukushima catastrophe was told, one of the evident lessons learned was that the “nuclear village” of Japan was an insular rats’ nest of incestuous relations between power utilities, workers’ unions, professional organizations, advertising agencies, media, academics, journalists, bureaucrats and political parties. Even the judiciary was on board, having sided with the nuclear industry and national energy policy in numerous lawsuits brought by citizens’ groups that tried to raise the alarm about the potential for an unprecedented earthquake-tsunami-meltdown syndrome.

In 2009 the opposition Democratic Party of Japan came to power, but they too were pro-nuclear because of the support they had from power plant workers’ unions. Japan Press Weekly reported,

“Donations to the DPJ and its lawmakers come not only from nuclear-related corporations but also from pro-business labor unions. The pro-business Japan Trade Union Confederation (Rengo) affiliated-Federation of Electric Power Related Industry Workers’ Unions of Japan (Denryoku Soren) and its member unions give donations to the DPJ.” 

It was only after the meltdowns that Prime Minister Naoto Kan made his conversion to being anti-nuclear, while his successor from the same party remained pro-nuclear.

I use the word “union” above loosely because nuclear workers in Japan seem to have never had anything resembling a healthy oppositional relationship with management. None of these worker unions threatened action over safety issues, or fought for equal benefits for sub-contracted labor that was always stuck with the dirty and dangerous jobs. The unions and professional organizations recognized that they had common interests with their employers, and when disaster struck, they had been playing along obediently for a long time. It was common knowledge to everyone working in the Fukushima Daiichi plant that the sea wall wasn’t high enough, yet management didn’t have to worry that there would ever be job action over the issue.

These considerations make me wonder why Bruce Power Limited Partnership (Ontario, Canada), operator of the world’s largest nuclear power station on the shores of Lake Huron, needs to have the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System as a major partner, and The Society of Energy Professionals and the Power Workers’ Union as minor partners. The former has a 1.2% share, and the latter has a 4% share. If regulators and politicians aren't allowed to have investments in the industries that they oversee, why is it all right for staff in a power plant to have a similar conflict of interest?

It is easy to predict the answer given by the company. This investment should create an incentive for workers to care about the long-term viability and safety of the power plant. They would never dare overlook a safety issue that might later lead to scandal or a regulator shutting down operations, would they?

In spite of this theoretical positive incentive, there is another one working to negate it. Because of the workers’ investment in the company, anyone who might otherwise be tempted to blow the whistle on a safety concern now has a reason to hesitate. Speaking up might cause the plant to close down for a while and have a bad quarter, or if it’s a serious problem, it might lead to a permanent shutdown.

It’s bad enough that one’s job security is often the reason to ignore safety concerns, so it is difficult to understand why an additional conflict has to be added to the organizational structure. The history of industrial accidents and scandals shows that the person who brings problems to public attention is often the whistleblower who had knowledge of day-to-day operations. The people who have the official responsibility for guaranteeing safety are more famous for the hazards they overlooked.

The above criticism of a weakness in the organizational structure is not a criticism of the many individuals in the nuclear industry and regulatory bodies who work very diligently and ensure safety.  Nothing horrible has happened (in Ontario), so they must be doing many things right that the public never notices. In places with a good safety culture workers are taught to question a superior’s orders if they seem to be violations of safety, and they are explicitly trained not to give in to the temptation of letting mishaps go unreported, or altering records in the hope that regulators won’t find out. In light of how much has been done to improve institutional safety culture in recent years, it is just strange that the partnership arrangement at Bruce is not considered a problem.

The entities that have the larger interests in the Bruce Power Limited Partnership (Cameco Corporation, TransCanada Corporation* and BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust,** each with 31.6%) have obvious incentives to get the workers’ groups on board. It’s not as if they were utterly incapable of finding investors to buy the last 5.2% share of ownership. The important thing was to make sure that everyone working at the plant was co-opted.

This blog has pointed to no evidence of safety lapses at Bruce Power, but it does pose an important hypothetical question. If a senior engineer came to feel that management was refusing to address serious safety concerns, would he speak out, or would he worry about the consequences a shutdown would have on his retirement plan?

* Bruce Power proudly boasts of its contribution to reducing carbon emissions, but the major partner, Transcanada Corporation, is primarily involved in the oil industry, most notoriously the Keystone XL pipeline that will send tar sands oil from Alberta to the American refineries. If the company had a principled stance that nuclear was a solution to global warming, it would not accept members of the oil industry as partners.

** BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust was established by the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System specifically as a way to hold a major stake in Bruce Power. This partnership establishes grassroots support for nuclear power, but such support can only be in the form of financial interest. The partnership also guarantees that the support is a political issue. The sudden devaluation of civil servants’ retirement funds can quickly become a political crisis, thus support for nuclear energy has been woven into the social fabric of the province. Like Japan, Ontario has its own nuclear village. Support has been constructed so that it is not based on a rational or principled evaluation by the public of nuclear energy’s merits and demerits.

Sources:

“DPJ’s cozy ties with Nuclear-related companies and unions affect resumption of Nuclear Power Plant,” Japan Press Weekly, April 18, 2012.

Roger Pulvers, “Citizens’ lack of resolve leaves nuclear door wide open for next disaster,” The Japan Times, February 3, 2103.

A billion loonies here, a billion loonies there…

Yes, soon it adds up and you’re talking real money, but the there are other things to consider. People in Ontario, Canada tend to not give much thought to their heavy reliance on nuclear energy. Although they are likely to worry about the price tag of future projects, the important questions have little to do with money. The issue is whether sticking with nuclear will be a lost opportunity to develop better ways to generate electricity, avoid the damage to the industry that will come with the next nuclear catastrophe (wherever it is), end the accumulation of nuclear waste and stop nuclear energy’s role in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

A recent editorial in The Toronto Star shed some welcome light on Ontario’s dependence on nuclear power. Since Fukushima, the major media in other nuclear-energy-dependent states (France, U.S.A, Japan, U.K) have given fairly extensive coverage to legitimate public concerns about regulatory capture, safety, costs of new facilities, upgrades and decommissioning, and whether it would be better to pursue other alternatives.

The province of Ontario relies on nuclear energy for about half of its electricity supply, but the media coverage since Fukushima has been relatively tame and scarce compared to other nations where nuclear is a large player in the energy mix. I haven’t seen everything in the Canadian media, and I can’t prove a negative, but in Canada there seems to have been a relative lack of interest in nuclear news during a time when it was on the front pages everywhere else.

In one report, I even saw an industry spokesperson thanking the local media for getting the story right since the Fukushima disaster. She didn’t seem to notice how embarrassing this compliment might be for a professional journalist. Yet, oddly, the journalist smiled and didn’t notice that she had just been called a lapdog.

Similar to the way they launched a real estate bubble right after they had watched the real estate market in the US implode in 2007-08, Canadians have a boundless ability to engage in “it’s-different-here” thinking. We think we are more progressive than the Americans, better governed, more rational, more egalitarian. The whole world wants to immigrate to Canada, supposedly. Our nuclear power plants must be better too, so why worry or ask questions?

Thus the media took the power companies’ word for it when they said vaguely that “lessons have been learned” from the Fukushima catastrophe. They never explained what improvements were made during the extensive safety reviews because doing so would have implied that decades had gone by with the plants exposed to unnecessary risks. Fortunately for the power companies, the media and the public were too complacent to ask probing questions.

To some extent, the lack of concern is understandable and deserved. There haven’t been any nuclear accidents in Ontario’s generating stations, and they use heavy water reactors that are much less vulnerable to the meltdown than the light water reactors used in Fukushima (also used in New York State, on the American shore of Lake Ontario). However, I doubt the Ontario public even cares enough to have learned about this difference. Another factor is that the public hasn’t experienced any massive earthquakes or tsunamis that would give the matter any sense of urgency.

Furthermore, the Canadian regulators and power companies have never come close to the awesome depths of arrogance, corruption and incompetence exhibited by the nuclear village in Japan. In Canada, we don’t hear reports of organized crime rings getting contracts to do the most dangerous cleanup operations during plant maintenance. We don’t hear of these sub-contractors rounding up day laborers (homeless and nameless people who disappear after the job), to be exposed to radiation on cleanup jobs that the power companies are too stingy to carry out safely. We don’t hear stories about such casual workers dying from leukemia without disability compensation and health care (for details, see The Nuclear Mafia Derails Democracy in Japan). Perhaps this was a fatal error made by the nuclear industry in North America: Because nuclear energy was managed with a relatively high regard for safety in a somewhat functioning democracy, when the technologies were exported, there was a flawed assumption that the safety culture could be exported as well.

In spite of the safety record in Canada, there are still good reasons for people in Ontario to think more seriously about their commitment to nuclear, and especially about the heavy dependence on a source of energy that cannot be replaced quickly in an emergency.

Cost

Nuclear has enormous multi-billion-dollar up-front costs that somehow manage to not scandalize a public that is so quick to see waste everywhere else. This was the subject of the editorial in The Toronto Star that pointed out how a cancelled gas generating station had become a political scandal for having “wasted” $585 million. Another report in The National Post noted with outrage:

“The estimated cost of tearing up contracts with the developers of the gas plants and building new energy projects in Napanee and Lambton has soared to at least $585 million, far above the $230 million McGuinty and the Liberals had been claiming.”

The outraged writer of this analysis seemed not to notice that his own wording implied that the “wasted” costs include the cost of building the generating station in a different location – in other words, what it would have cost anyway, had it been built in the original location. The editorial in The Toronto Star pointed out the gas plant scandal pales in comparison to recent and upcoming expenses of overhauls to the province’s nuclear fleet. The figures from the report are arranged in the table below:

		A	B	B/A
Nuclear Power Plant	date of estimate of repair costs	estimate of repair costs CAN$	actual cost of repairs CAN$
Point Lepreau, New Brunswick	2008	0.75 billion	2.4 billion	3.20
Pickering, Ontario	2000	1.30 billion	2.6 billion (repairs not yet complete)	2.00
Bruce, Ontario	2005	2.75 billion	4.8 billion	1.75
Darlington, Ontario	2010	6 – 10 billion	?	?
Cost of obtaining only an estimate of the Darlington repair costs: $1 billion
The original estimate of construction cost of Darlington was $3.95 billion; the final cost was $14.4 billion, 3.64 times more expensive than the estimate.
According to the B/A column, the historical average of final repair cost vs. estimated cost is 2.31. Thus we could estimate how wrong the estimate of Darlington’s repair cost will be. Actual costs can be estimated to be 2.31 times more expensive than the original estimate – thus a final cost likely to be between $13.8 billion and $23.1 billion.

 Major Power Generating Companies in Ontario

	Generating Capacity (Megawatts)
	nuclear	hydroelectric	thermal
Ontario Power Generation	6606	6996	5447
Bruce Power	6300	----	----

(The canceled gas thermal plant would have contributed 800 megawatts in this mix.)

For perspective, it is worthwhile to see these costs in context of the annual Ontario budget. For 2013-14 there is a $127.6-billion spending plan with a projected deficit of $11.7 billion. Ontario’s debt will grow to $272.8 billion. The big ticket items are $48.9 billion for health, $24.1 billion for education, and $10.6 billion for interest on debt.

So we could say it’s a bargain to spend $20 billion or so for a service delivered over decades, to keep the juice flowing for a province with a GDP of $600 billion. No electricity, no economy. It certainly makes the cost of the gas generating station seem like peanuts, though a consideration of its worth has to take account of its generating capacity – 800 megawatts, or 13% of the capacity of Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. Nuclear proponents stress that the up-front costs are huge, but the fuel is cheap. With a thermal station, it is the opposite, so over time it’s hard to say which is more costly. Thermal stations allow for flexibility. Because they don’t involve huge sunk costs, they can be shut down in the future if better options become available.

Curiously, none of the media reports explains why the construction and repair costs are conceived as part of the provincial government budget. The power companies were privatized in the 1990s, so one would assume that costs would be recovered by selling electricity to customers. Perhaps the government is lending the money up front, and taking legal liability for accidents and regulatory decisions to cancel or change plans, but it’s hard to understand why the Darlington repairs would be considered as part of the provincial budget. Ratepayers and taxpayers are the same people, so it feels like a tax when everyone has to pay for an essential service one way or another, but it is misleading to say the overhaul of the nuclear fleet is a government cost, unless something goes terribly wrong and the government has to compensate radiation victims and evacuees, or pick up the tab for projects that fail to deliver the promised services.

So, no, cost is not the issue, if the nuclear fleet could operate cleanly and efficiently for the next few decades. The point I make here is that there is a good chance that nuclear could fall out of favor for numerous reasons besides cost.

Future Disasters Could Lead to the Demise of the Industry

Fukushima and Chernobyl are the acknowledged nightmare disasters, supposedly the worst possible events that the nuclear industry promises will never happen again, but in a certain sense, the real nuclear energy accident that matters hasn’t happened yet. The victims of Chernobyl and Fukushima didn’t really matter to those who were interested in maintaining nuclear power. They were small populations of rural people - nobodies living in political systems that could ignore them. When a catastrophe happens near Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Washington, London or Paris, the “fallout,” in every sense of the word, will be different. When the radionuclides are landing on the children and grandchildren of the political and financial elite, the evaluation of what is acceptable risk will be somewhat altered. The costs arising from a level 7 accident (worst on the scale) in France is estimated to be €430 billion by l’Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire (IRSN). But it seems like complete guesswork to say what the economic and social impacts could be. Much would depend on the way the wind was blowing and where the fallout rain came down.

I state this also as an eventuality, not a hypothetical. There is a long record of near misses in the operation of American nuclear plants, and flood risks equal to the tsunami risk in Japan are still being ignored. There is no reason to believe that the nuclear regulatory system functions any better than the financial regulatory system (see Gar Smith’s Nuclear Roulette for a full accounting of regulatory capture and risks in the American nuclear fleet). When the disaster happens, public support and financing for nuclear power will dry up, and it won’t matter which utilities have good safety records or superior technology.

Waste and Environmental Impacts

The nuclear industry likes to repeat the falsehood that nuclear energy is clean and carbon free. Ontario’s Ministry of Energy carefully states:

”Nuclear power is a reliable, safe supplier of the province’s baseload generation needs, accounting for about 36 per cent of the province’s installed electricity capacity. Nuclear operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and it produces about 50 per cent of the electricity generated in Ontario. Nuclear power does not produce any primary [italics added] air pollution or release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

The key word here, unlikely to catch the attention of a casual reader, is primary. Pronouncements on the websites of Ontario power companies don’t even bother with such hedging in their claims that nuclear is clean or that no member of the public has ever been harmed by the nuclear industry in Canada. There are numerous indirect polluting impacts in the nuclear supply chain. The air in Toronto is cleaner than it used to be since Ontario shut down coal-fired generating stations, but that doesn’t mean nuclear is without its own environmental impacts.

In Port Hope, a small town one hour east of Toronto, a billion-dollar decontamination project is underway to clean up the mess left over several decades by Cameco’s nuclear fuel facility. Canadian taxpayers, including those from provinces that never used nuclear energy, pick up the tab while the corporate polluter carries on with concerns, one of which is its role a major partner in Bruce Power.

In the Northwest Territories and Northern Saskatchewan, native people who worked in the uranium mines suffered from high rates of lung cancer and their lands were contaminated. Conditions for miners have been improved compared to those of the early years of the industry, but the historical record of abuse and neglect is deplorable. Heather Tufts summarized the issue this way in her article The Impacts of Uranium Mining on Indigenous Communities:

“The climate change debate positions nuclear power as a partial solution to carbon emissions according to some scientists and politicians. Uranium mining speculation lacks comprehensive health and safety regulations while the ethics of Canadian exported uranium, which can lead to depleted uranium used in zones of war, needs greater scrutiny. Abandoned uranium mines and the subsequent hazards experienced in forgotten communities have been virtually ignored in Canada leading to tragic, unmitigated circumstances.”

In addition to the health consequences, which were never officially acknowledged or compensated, the tailing ponds left from these mines are extremely toxic, radioactive dumps for which there has been very little attempt at remediation. A short report by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War summed up the situation:

“Saskatchewan's Premier in the 1970s, Allan Blakeney, was quoted as saying: ‘On the issue of radioactive waste disposal we have had to make a leap of faith and assume that a satisfactory means of disposal will shortly be found.’ Several decades later, there is no satisfactory solution - only a longer list of failed attempts. The first phase of the clean-up of Saskatchewan's abandoned uranium mine sites was only announced in 2007 and is estimated to cost $24.6 million [2.4% of the amount for Port Hope cleanup]. The growing volume of nuclear waste poses a safety and health risk for generations to come.”

The spent fuel disposal problem, still with no permanent solution (though the latest proposal is to bury it near the shores of Lake Huron – go here to learn more or sign the petition), gets relatively more attention than the mining waste problem that exists in the open air at mines worldwide. Furthermore, unlike Port Hope, the local communities in Saskatchewan are not full of quaint heritage homes that attract the hearts of Toronto realtors. This environmental blight is entirely beyond the awareness of the Canadian public, so it will never get its own billion-dollar cleanup project.

Graffiti in Toronto's upscale Forest Hills (March 2013), referring
to the GE-Hitachi nuclear fuel processing facility a few kilometers
away in a more downmarket part of town.

In addition to the hazards and carbon fuel involved in uranium mining, there are energy inputs and environmental costs at all other stages of the nuclear energy system - fuel processing, fuel enrichment, fuel transport, plant construction, plant decommissioning, spent fuel cooling, transport and disposal. The enrichment process has been a particularly well kept dirty secret. Massive amounts of fossil fuels and CFC coolants are used to enrich uranium, and the CFC gases used were an exemption from the Montreal Protocol of 1987. [see Makhijani et. al] To say that nuclear is clean is highly misleading – a frequent deliberate distortion of nuclear promoters. We can compare the energy return on investment (EROI, how much energy input is needed to get X amount of energy out of a technology) of nuclear with other ways of generating electricity, but there is not likely to be any consensus on the figures. There are too many variables, and too many ways for advocates on various sides to make their own interpretations. Nuclear might come out with a better EROI, but only if we devalue the environmental burden and risks that will be placed on future generations. If a nuclear plant or spent fuel storage pool is destroyed in a war or accident, then nuclear energy will be seen in the future as a foolhardy and devastating mistake. It is wrong to judge nuclear energy's value only by the standards of the minor catastrophes that have happened so far.

Proliferation

People in the nuclear energy industry reject the linkage between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. It is theoretically possible that humanity could forsake nuclear weapons but use enriched uranium and plutonium only for “peaceful” purposes. Yet the historical record shows that almost every country that builds nuclear power plants also wants nuclear weapons, or the ability to manufacture them in the event that their coverage under a nuclear umbrella should become unreliable. Alternatively, they become complicit, with or without intention, in spreading proliferation risks. Canada’s claim to fame is to have sold CANDU reactor technology to India, which India quickly used to launch its own weapons program. All nuclear reactors produce waste that can potentially become fuel for nuclear weapons or sub-critical radiological “dirty” bombs.

If nuclear fuel is cheap, it is largely because of the economies of scale created by the weapons industry of the Cold War. For example, since the 1990s, the American nuclear industry has been getting cheap fuel from Russia taken from decommissioned nuclear weapons. The infrastructure for fuel processing and enrichment was established by and paid for by the U.S. government, primarily for weapons production. (Ontario's heavy water reactors used to use non-enriched uranium, but they now use slightly enriched uranium made in America.) The creation of a nuclear power industry was a way to make use of the existing plants and regain some of the costs of building weapons. Without the government interest in producing weapons, it is doubtful that private investors ever would have been interested in pursuing a form of energy production that was so dangerous, and expensive, and difficult to manage safely in a way that would make it acceptable to the public. For that feat, we needed governments to impose it on us.

Technological Change

Nuclear power might be perceived as cost effective over the long haul, if everything goes well, but the large initial costs make this a very big gamble and a potential lost opportunity to pursue other options. Nuclear power is said to be the ocean liner of energy types. Once it is built and on its way, it cannot change course, no matter what icebergs appear in front of it. The Titanic metaphor is perhaps why this problem is referred to as “sunk costs.” Take the Japanese government now (and, as Henny Youngman would plead in the joke about his wife, I say “please”). The world’s worst nuclear accident has contaminated the northern half of the country. Everyone knows a massive earthquake could strike anywhere. It has become painfully obvious, even to nuclear proponents in other countries, that nuclear power cannot be done safely in this kind of seismic zone, but still the government, the bureaucracy and the corporations invested in nuclear are determined to make use of their sunk costs. Prime Minister Abe wants a restart “as soon as the safety of nuclear plants can be guaranteed.” He thinks this means “soon” but he doesn’t realize that for all disinterested and rational observers, it means “never.”

The hazards of getting committed to sunk costs have been made apparent not only by Fukushima but also by a rapid change in the price of other energy sources. A glut of natural gas has reversed the “nuclear renaissance” that was underway just a few years ago. Several American nuclear plants have closed down, and more are likely to follow. New projects are stalled because private capital and the insurance industry are not interested. And who knows what else could come along at any time? This month there was news of a breakthrough in solar energy that is going to be a “game changer” according to the inventor and the experts who have seen his plans. The technology is under patent application at the moment, so little is known about it. However, this is what a report in McClatchy Newspapers had to say:

“… the previously undisclosed invention has yet to be constructed and fully tested. But John Darnell, a scientist and the former congressional aide who has monitored Ace’s dogged research for more than three years and has reviewed his complex calculations, has no doubts. ‘Anybody who is skilled in the art and understands what he’s proposing is going to have this dumbfounding reaction: Oh, well it’s obvious it’ll work,’ said Darnell, a biochemist with an extensive background in thermodynamics. ‘Ron has turned conventional wisdom about solar on its head.’”

If this innovation, or others in energy storage and efficiency, deliver on their promises, nuclear power plants might soon be regarded like other steam engines of the past.

Early 20th century steam engine.

Late 20th century steam engine.

Sources:

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.

Jose Etcheverry, “Cancellation of Ontario Gas Plants Pales in Comparison to Nuclear Repair Costs,” The Toronto Star, May 9, 2013.

Ontario Power Generation.

Bruce Power.

Ontario Ministry of Energy.

Javier E. David, “Nuclear Power Falters, Engulfed by 'Cauldron' of Bad Luck,” CNBC, May 13, 2013.

Keith Leslie, “Dalton McGuinty testifies that it was his decision to kill gas plants at cost of $585-million,” The National Post, May 7, 2013.

Gar Smith, Nuclear Roulette: The Truth about the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth, 2012.

Greg Gordon, “Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy 'Breakthrough,’” McClatchy Newspapers, May 8, 2013.  

Heather Tufts, “The Impacts of Uranium Mining on Indigenous Communities,” Peace, Earth and Justice News, February 12, 2010.

Richard Wilcox, “The Nuclear Mafia Derails Democracy in Japan,” Dissident Voice, August, 2012.

Vincent Thimonier, “Nucléaire: un Fukushima français changerait-il la donne?” Lyon Capitale, May 13, 2013.

“Hibakusha Worldwide: Northern Saskatchewan, Uranium Mining Site,” International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 2012.

National Post News Files: Ontario Budget, May 2013.

“Ontario budget 2013: 10 Highlights,” The Toronto Star, May 2, 2013. 

Enviros, Pro-Nukers and Global Warming Skeptics: A Love Story

We know the stale dichotomies of modernity: left and right, liberal and conservative, constrained vision versus utopian vision. Yet the world is actually much more complicated. The extremities not only touch; they elbow, jostle, hook up, spawn weird offspring, then ditch each other to move on and look for better options.

This can be seen in the strange love-hate triangle that has emerged between environmentalists, nuclear energy advocates and global warming skeptics. The latter two can best be viewed as male suitors competing for the acceptance of the environmental movement. Let’s call these actors Ned, Fred and Ellen, and just think of N as in nuclear, F as in fossil fuel, and E as in environmentalism.

Ned and Fred know that they both have a serious reputation problem, and they would desperately love to win the hand of Ellen. If they could do so, they would bask in the nurturing glow she casts, and win the blessing of the angels and the approval of the public. Some serious positive re-branding comes from winning the hand of she who stands for all things good and nurturing. The suitor that wins Ellen's heart will prosper and multiply. Every king needs a queen. If you win the heart of she who stands for Mother Nature, you win the game.

Yet Ellen is a fickle creature, in no rush to settle for the least bad choice when the stakes are so high. She has been burned before. She is skeptical about global warming skeptics, and unconvinced that nuclear energy could be safely expanded to a scale that would satisfy mankind’s lust for energy. So she waits, and her suitors begin to seethe with resentment.

What is she anyway, they ask, other than a bloated lobby supported by Hollywood celebrities and wealthy urbanites? These people have no idea what it is like to earn a living off the land and truly manage the earth’s resources for the betterment of the common folk. They work from lawyers' offices and bureaucracies in Washington and Brussels, locking up vast tracts of productive land so that it can be preserved in its “natural” state, and this very act of preservation worsens the problem by removing land from active human management. Ellen is a prima donna, an expensive and puffed up princess consuming the very thing she claims to preserve. But still, she stands for the elusive goal of a better world, a solution, and they need her.

And so one strategy is to belittle the competition. Ned says only he can avert the calamity of climate change caused by Fred. Fred says the climate science is all flawed, the solar system and the earth are too big, and time is too vast for a couple centuries of fuel-burning to have made a difference. Sure, we must conserve and develop clean alternatives, but Fred is not the culprit here. “Work with me,” he says, “and forget about Ned’s false promises.”

But Ellen remembers Chernobyl, the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Fukushima and the Athabasca Tar Sands. Ned and Fred are both too quick to overlook the harm they have caused and duck responsibility. Their entreaties, their feckless mansplaining and condescension leave her cold. They are stale and lacking in imagination. Radioactive waste piling up everywhere, or particulate matter in our lungs? Really? Are these the only choices, the price we have to pay for the so-called benefits of our way of life? There’s got to be another way. Better to wait than to settle for one of these two.

And Ned and Fred should know it’s hopeless to go on courting her, and they are each aware that their counterarguments are mutually destructive. While Ellen turns away, they are left to spout their views in their respective narcissistic echo chambers. At heart, the seducer’s quest is all about self-love anyway. And as much as Ned and Fred are antagonists, they must admit it is the bromance that keeps them going. Deep down, no matter how they self-deceive about wanting the best for the next generation, they love each other for being on a as competitors on the same team, on a mission to advance the corporate interests of their respective sponsors and cheerleaders.

A fine example of an attempt to strut and woo the environmental movement is in the marketing underway for the new film Pandora’s Promise, due for wide release in June 2013. The film is a strained attempt to re-brand nuclear as an environmental savior, as if the only choice were between fissile fuel and fossil fuel.

Like many documentaries these days, it is not a documentary in the traditional sense. There is no attempt to be objective, or to look at the issue from many facets. Documentarians used to stand back, let their images speak, and interview people on all sides of an issue, leaving the audience to make up their own minds or leave the theater with unresolved questions. Now, the only approach in films such as this is to be having a thesis and a passionate belief that it is correct. Then the director proceeds to select only the evidence that fits. The best examples of the genre feature the middle-aged apostate acting as auteur. In Waiting for Superman, it was a formerly avid supporter of public education who saw the light and took to promoting charter schools and demonizing public school teachers. And it wasn't just a lone director exploring a topic that captivated him. The project was backed by wealthy donors and groups that had a shared view of how to proceed with education reform. It was a pure propaganda piece.

Pandora’s Promise seems to be another entry in this dismal trend. It was shown at the Sundance Festival, and it is presently going through advance publicity as showings at select university campuses. The trick is to the create buzz among the select few whose opinions matter, then they are unleashed onto social media before wide release of the film. This stealth marketing campaign is supposed to change the parameters of the global conversation about what it means to be an environmentalist.

The writers at Beyond Nuclear have already done a critique of the film’s flaws – not only in terms of its content but also the people behind it and the hype around it. For example, the film claims to feature several “leading environmentalists” who were once anti-nuclear, but it turns out they were never much of either, except in their own recollections.

The Beyond Nuclear report gives details on the numerous omissions and distortions in the film that strive to make nuclear energy seem harmless, affordable and manageable. For example, the director Robert Stone visits a spent fuel storage facility in France and perpetuates the sunny description of it that he has been told by the people hosting his visit. Beyond Nuclear had a contrary assessment:

“… Stone’s self-confessed ‘aha moment’ [occurred] when he was ‘granted entry into a room in France (the size of a basketball court) where all the waste from powering 80% of the country for 30 years is stored.’ But this room, located at the La Hague reprocessing facility, contains in vitrified form only 4% of the country’s high-level waste, and none of the intermediate and low-level waste, none of the plutonium or contaminated uranium, nor of course the waste still at, and being generated by, France’s operating reactors. (The French nuclear industry exempts irradiated and reprocessed reactor fuel from being classified as ‘waste.’ It ‘could be potentially reused at an undefined time in the future’ allowing for the misrepresentation made to Stone at La Hague). The premise for making the film was therefore based on, at best, a mistaken impression.”

The Beyond Nuclear report also notes that the film is supported by The Breakthrough Institute (BTI), and that it prominently features the viewpoints of many of this organization’s members. The BTI has a strange record of wanting to cover all of the anti-environmental angles, while attempting to position itself as the voice of a redefined environmental movement that can accommodate the energy desires of a global population of 10 billion. Ironically, they have a record of both denying anthropogenic climate change and promoting nuclear as the only solution to it. Beyond Nuclear cites a report by thinkprogress.org:

“… they [BTI] spent the past two years dedicating the resources of their organization to help kill prospects for climate and clean energy action — and to spread disinformation about Obama, Gore, Congressional leaders, Waxman and Markey, leading climate scientists, Al Gore again, the entire environmental community and anyone else trying to end our status quo energy policies.”

The Beyond Nuclear report notes how the press releases for Pandora’s Promise have been continually revised and removed from the film’s website. As anti-nuclear critics note every outrageous claim or quote from a fake “expert,” the producers issue new promotional material to tone down the language and look for ways to say things that won’t be immediately ripped apart by critical reviewers.

In the present version of the official trailer, Michael Shellenberger, president of The Breakthrough Institute, says of his past beliefs, “To actually believe in nuclear power was, by definition, to be a dupe.” I am yet to see the film, but based on what has been presented on the official website and the critical reviews of it, and on what I know about this issue (see previous post about the argument made by the organization Don’t Nuke the Climate), I have to conclude that Michael Schellenberger’s younger self would not approve of what he has become. He is, indeed, a dupe. And the public is duped if they believe his self-description as a leading global thinker on energy, climate, security, human development, and politics. He is described this way only on the website of the organization that he is president of, and by a few right-wing publications that find him useful. None of the leading environmental organizations recognize him as a prominent in the field, nor do they endorse nuclear as a solution to climate change. Almost all of Shellenberger’s publications listed on the BTI website are self-published right there.

The director Robert Stone defends the film’s title by pointing out that in the myth Pandora finds hope in the end. This is, of course, after having unleashed all the evils in the world. The opinion we form of nuclear energy depends on when we think the time of hope has arrived, or will arrive. Have all the evils been unleashed, with nuclear now offering us hope for a better future? Or will hope arrive at some time in the future, after enough nuclear catastrophes have convinced us to abandon this toxic technology?

It is to the credit of those who deny anthropogenic climate change that there has not yet been a piece of propaganda like Pandora’s Promise that argues that fossil fuels are the only hope for solving the demand for energy while averting nuclear catastrophes. They know there is no way to put lipstick on that pig. The best they can do is acknowledge the problem, promote green initiatives in the industry, and try to cause as little harm as possible. Long before anyone worried about climate catastrophe, it was well known that hazards like acid rain and particulate smog were causing horrific damage to the environment and human health. These were always reason enough to reduce fossil fuel consumption.

Some climate skeptics, whether one agrees with them or not, have at least taken the respectable approach of not trying to re-brand themselves as environmentalists, or ingratiate themselves with the environmental movement. They are more willing to just kick it in the teeth to make their point.

One example of this is Elizabeth Nickson’s book Eco-fascists: How Radical Conservationists are Destroying our Natural Heritage (published most aptly by Broadside Books). The author puts herself on the side of skeptics who say that climate science is flawed, but doesn't go into details of how it is flawed. In any case, this isn't the focus of the book. I have doubts about some of the points she makes, and while the subtitle is fine, labeling opponents as fascists is a famously cheap rhetorical tactic. Nonetheless, she has written a valuable tear-down of the excesses of the environmental movement.

She describes the insidious bureaucratic creep of the movement in rural communities, using her home on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, as an example. What once started out as a well-intended effort to preserve the island turned it into a flashpoint for ideologues on all sides of land use debates. Regulations, and jobs for regulators, expanded until there was a crippling and expensive process in place for residents who wanted to make even the most minor changes to their properties. Her story describes how she ultimately had some influence in getting the community to roll back the bureaucratic excesses.

Eco-fascists also describes the perspective of land holders throughout the American West who claim they have been deprived of their livelihoods by remote entities, whether they were government, corporations, or environmental groups. The latter erred mostly because of the mistaken belief that land could be preserved if humans just abandoned it and let it go back to nature. However, since the early “noble savage” beliefs of the environmental movement, the science has progressed. 
We now know that before Europeans came, the land was intensively managed by human inhabitants. According to Nickson, the neglect of this history has led to a situation in which large tracts of land are preserved, left unmanaged and removed from contributing to the lives of people who used to work them. Now there are regular catastrophic forest fires in Colorado, for example, which could be happening because of climate change, or because the forests are no longer culled and managed properly. According to this view, the environmental movement has in many cases been the unwitting shock troops that hastened the economic collapse of rural regions. When land owners are bankrupted by regulations and the decline of the local economy, corporate farms and government institutions come later to buy land from those who are forced to sell cheap.

Nickson may be right to reveal these negative effects of preservation efforts, but she seems curiously hellbent on laying all the blame on this one factor, as if the chemical and radioactive pollution of the 20th century was just a little thing that happened on the sidelines. Yes, the original inhabitants of North America had more of an environmental footprint than we once believed, but it can't compare with that left by the industrial age and a population of 300 million. 
The most curious omission in Eco-fascists is that the nuclear history of the American West is never mentioned. The author wrote a great deal about the abuse of the good folk of the American West by remote, powerful institutions (the worst of which seem to be law firms working for NGOs), but if she had really wanted to point to a villain, there are no better examples than the litany of abuses by the nuclear weapons and nuclear energy industry: the uranium mine disaster at Church Rock, New Mexico (more radiation released than at Three Mile Island), still poisonous nuclear facilities at Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Los Alamos, and the millions of people affected by bomb fallout from atomic tests in Nevada.

After reading the book, I couldn't surmise whether Elizabeth Nickson would be against the expansion of nuclear because, if the climate science is bunk, nuclear is not a necessary alternative to fossil fuel. Or would she lump the anti-nuclear movement in with all the aspects of environmentalism that she despises? These questions underscore the chaotic state of flux among the alliances and conflicts forming around energy policy. The multilateral nature of the conflict ensures chaos, which delays meaningful steps toward solutions.
In spite of what the people at 350.org hope, there is not likely to be a smooth transition to a less energy-intensive and less populous world. A return to the conditions of the past might be forced upon us by circumstances, and the road back will not be pleasant. Likewise, the attempt to satisfy demand for more energy will be disastrous. World population grew exponentially after the industrial revolution, not before. Energy inputs enable population growth, so increasing the energy supply ultimately solves nothing. In the past, without huge inputs of fossil and fissile fuels, population growth was always limited by what the sun could turn into food, and what food could turn into animal and human work.

With this, we are back full circle to 1972 and a founding publication in the early days of the environmental movement: The Limits to Growth. In 2010, it was reassessed by Nørgård et al. who called it a "pioneering report," saying, "its approach remains useful and… its conclusions are still surprisingly valid... unfortunately the report has been largely dismissed by critics as a doomsday prophecy that has not held up to scrutiny." Time will tell.

Sources:

Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Vintage Books, 2006.

Linda Pentz Gunter, Pandora’s False Promises: Busting the Pro-Nuclear Propaganda,’ Beyond Nuclear, May 2013.

Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows, William W. Behrens, The Limits to growth: A report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, Universe Books, 1972.

Elizabeth Nickson. Eco-fascists: How Radical Conservationists are Destroying our Natural Heritage. Broadside Books, 2012.

Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, Richard W. Hazlett, The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Joe Romm, Debunking Breakthrough Institute’s attacks on Obama, Gore, and top climate scientists, Climate Progress, June 17, 2009.

Jørgen Stig Nørgård, John Peet, Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir, “The History of The Limits to Growth,” Solutions for a Sustainable Future, 1, no. 2, 59-63, February, 2010.

Linda M. Richards, “On Poisoned Ground,” Chemical Heritage Magazine, Spring 2013.

Mycle Schneider and Yves Marignac. Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing in France: A research report of the International Panel on Fissile Materials. April 2008.

Pandora’s Promise. Official website for the film.