Helen Caldicott and George Monbiot have recently attacked each other in anti and pro-nuclear articles, and honestly I now am entirely unsure of the truth. Both claim scientific backing, though Monbiot appears to shred Caldicott’s claims. I have a great deal of respect for Monbiot; back when I was doing my own research on climate change (I was a sceptic and was attempting to see if it was real, was human-caused, was dangerous, etc, and I read lots of real science in the process), I found him to be ruthlessly honest and perfectly aligned with the actual science.

That said, I think the pro-nuke crowd, now including George Monbiot, is making two grave errors. The first is claiming that low levels of radiation are safe.

As an example of this, something that really struck me as a blow to the nuke movement was a seemingly unrelated article posted on Reddit a few weeks or so ago discussing the nude-o-scanners used by the TSA. The author interviewed a scientist who flat-out said that the scanners would cause cancer in some people. The reasoning went thusly:

• The risk of a mutation caused by the scanners is very low, say 1-in-10,000,000
• However, many tens of millions of people pass through the scanners each year
• Therefore, some of those people will develop cancer caused by radiation from the scanners

In this case, “low risk” still means “will cause cancer in some people.” Not everyone wants to take that risk, and may be unhappy about others forcing that risk upon them.

This brings me to my second point; Monbiot seems just as political in supporting nuclear energy as Caldicott is in opposing it. In fact, this seems a common theme among many pro-nuclear ‘environmentalists.’ Take these paragraphs from his article, my emphasis added:

If…we make the wrong decisions, the consequences can be momentous. …that countries [will] shut down their nuclear power plants or stop the construction of new ones, and switch instead to fossil fuels. Almost all of us would prefer them to switch to renewables, but it seems that this is less likely to happen.

In response to the Fukushima disaster, for example, the German government insists that it will replace its nuclear plants with new renewable power sources – particularly large wind farms. But as most of its wind is in the north and much of its nuclear capacity is in the south, this will require a massive new construction of power lines. That gives the government just as much of a political headache as the current anti-nuclear protests. The new lines are also likely to take around 12 years to build, raising the possibility of shortages.

In other words, Monbiot (and “almost all of us”) think renewables are a better idea, but will support nuclear because it seems politically more feasible. Chalk one up for the nuclear lobby. He also states that new power lines will take about 12 years to build – which is about the amount of time required to build a nuclear plant, assuming it’s not stopped by the kinds of mass protests recently seen in Germany.

Monbiot digs himself in deeper by assuming that power lines will be opposed equally as have been nuclear plants, but this seems a stretch.

In his book Heat: How to stop the planet from burning, Monbiot thoroughly analyses nuclear energy, and some of the dangers he points out are not trivial:

• p. 90: “…every nuclear power station leaks radiation into the environment. As well as their routine emissions into the air and the sea, the nuclear generators are surrounded by dumping scandals.” He then goes on to detail numerous examples, and as we have seen with Fukushima, the same leaks and cover-ups occurred there.
• p. 92: Monbiot discusses the intractable and so-far insoluble problem of nuclear waste, and that there have also been cover-ups in this department, in which proponents of the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada “falsified the rates at which water percolates through it.”
• pp. 92-95: Monbiot discusses the financial cost of nuclear power, concluding that it only exists courtesy of large taxpayer subsidies and that the actual “price of nuclear power is a function of your political position.”
• p. 97: “…sixteen years would be needed to obtain finance and planning permission and to design a build [a new nuclear] plant.” Monbiot does agree that this timeline also rules out any large-scale energy development, and so the government would have to fast-track (i.e. ram through) projects like this.

And Monbiot’s conclusion?

Because of the industry’s record of corner-cutting, because of its association with weapons of mass destruction and because of the unresolved questions about waste disposal and energy balance, I will provisionally place nuclear power second from last in my list of preferences, just above generation using coal from open-cast mines.

So George – which of these things has changed in the last few years? The answer, of course, is none. The only thing that has changed seems to be that Monbiot has abandoned hope that we will embrace renewables or conservation – for political reasons. He has thus given up and is now shilling for his “second from last” energy choice, the one he places one short step above coal, because he thinks that’s the best we can get – even though it’s not very good at all.

George Monbiot is entitled to his change of political views. But to become a proponent of nuclear power now, not because it’s better than the alternatives or even necessary, but because that’s all the nuclear lobby will allow, is a disgrace. His words again:

This is an especially difficult time to try to make the case for keeping the dangers of nuclear power in perspective. The frightening events at Fukushima are still unfolding, the disaster has been upgraded to category 7, making it one of the two worst such events on record. But it is just when the case is hardest that it most urgently needs to be made, however much anger this generates. If we don’t stick to the facts, if we don’t subject all claims to the same degree of scepticism, we could make a bad situation worse.

Sometimes, George, the reason the case is hard to make is because it’s not a very good case. And yes, we should stick to the facts. Those facts are that conservation and renewable energy are the best, and ultimately the only, path out of our current spiralling energy addiction that is causing climate change. Nuclear power is at best a stopgap measure; it just pushes the problem down the road a ways.

Forget immediate concerns about irradiated food and water, and increased cancer risk, for the moment; let’s say they’re exaggerated or a trade-off we’re willing to make in order to phase out coal (because conservation and renewable energy are ‘politically more difficult.’) A nuclear accident like Fukushima has the potential to render large areas uninhabitable for generations. What is the cost of that?

And consider this; if we decide to forge ahead with nuclear power, we will need thousands more nuclear plants all over the world, including in many countries far less politically stable or technologically advanced as Japan. The risk of accidents will surely increase exponentially, as will the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Finally, not a damn word about conservation, which could cut our need for energy enough to make battles over nuclear versus renewable much less of a concern – and, if we don’t start conserving, will ultimately lead to massive energy generating plants and related problems all over the globe anyway.

George Monbiot, I am disappointed.

******************

UPDATE: Guy Dauncey has written an excellent dissection of nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima: Nuclear – Hope or Hype? It is an extract from his equally good book, The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming. Dauncey takes a no-nonsense, fact-based approach to his evaluation, looking at nuclear from all angles: economic, waste storage, global warming, and more.

The latest poll has Mr. Layton and the New Democratic Party he leads in an odd situation: The party remains stubbornly at about 16% in the polls, while Jack Layton himself is the second most trusted politician, and the most trusted to lead a coalition, should it come to that. His personal credibility is not rubbing off on the party he leads.

I suspect many Canadians feel as I do about the Conservatives and Liberals: meh. Uninspiring, either one will keep us on much the same path Canada has been on for decades: largely following the U.S. lead, basing our economy on exports of raw resources, and pork barrel politics.

The latter is what got the Liberals tossed out some years ago, and from which they have never recovered, thanks to the rise of the Bloc, the Greens,and of course the Conservative Party. The Conservatives have turned out to be no better, with a long list of scandals that easily equals the worst the Liberals did with Adscam. (In my own riding, the Conservatives built “an overpass to nowhere.” They spent millions on an overpass to the Victoria airport, a tiny airport with no need whatsoever of an overpass, while promising to build the much-needed Mckenzie Road overpass in a nearby – Liberal – riding if those voters elected a Conservative.  If that’s not porkbarrel politics, I don’t know what is, and from a guy who promised to clean up government.)

And yet, none of this seems to ‘stick’ to Mr. Harper or his Conservatives; they remain stubbornly at around 35%, give-or-take, in the polls. I suspect the reasons are that people are utterly uninspired by the alternatives, most of us in the west don’t trust the Liberals as far as we could throw their bloated and festering carcass, and combined with the loss of 50 seats in Quebec to the Bloc, the Liberals may well be done as Canada’s “natural ruling party.” No loss, as far as many of us are concerned.

However, that does leave us with two uncomfortable problems: Porkbarrel Steve is clearly getting more blatantly corrupt  the longer he is in power. This seems to be a natural thing; power really does corrupt. Really, building prisons – while the crime rate is declining – for “unreported crimes?” How does Mr. Harper plan to fill those new billion-dollar prisons? Or the relatively recent and quite disgusting gorging at the public trough that were the G20 and G8 summits – how does Mr. Clean justify that massive doling out of pork in the middle of a recession? There are a lot better ways to create jobs, and it shouldn’t mainly go to your buddies. It’s time to change the political diaper.

It seems to me that Stevie has had his day. As Layton says in one of the NDP’s campaign ads, Stephen Harper has simply replaced Liberal scandals with his own. But, given that many of us no longer consider the Liberals a viable alternative to the Conservatives, where do we go?

Go Green?

I find the Green Party actually very progressive conservative in many ways, but they haven’t been able to elect a single candidate since their inception. The momentum they had after Jim Harris greatly increased the Green vote has sputtered and stalled under Elizabeth May. Suggestions that proportional representation are needed may be true (all European democracies use some form of PR), but the Reform and then Conservative Party managed to gain seats without it.

Overall, I doubt the Greens are going to make much of a breakthrough under Elizabeth May and with their current messaging strategy.

NDP: Social Democrats with a Failure to Communicate

Like the Green Party, the NDP seem to have a very difficult time appealing to those outside their ‘base.’ They are stuck at ~16% in the polls, and I believe the main reasons are:

• The economy is doing tolerably well, which always favours incumbents, and
• They just don’t know how to talk to people who don’t already ‘get’ what they’re saying.

The Greens also suffer from both problems, but the NDP do have seats and decent organization. What they lack, completely and utterly, is humility. The result is that they keep preaching to the choir while getting frustrated when nobody outside the church converts.

If you look at what the NDP want to do, it could actually be quite popular with a much broader cross-section of Canadians than it currently is. Essentially, the NDP want to bring Canada more in-line with what well-run social democracies like Germany, Denmark, and Norway do. Germany, for those not paying attention, is an economic powerhouse.

• Germany is who the broke nations of the EU turn to for bailouts
• Germany has a trade surplus of high-tech manufactured goods with China
• Germany has a high rate of unionisation, yet labour problems are rare – because the unions serve on the Boards of Directors and have a significant say in a company’s strategic and tactical decisions (and guess what: workers think longer-term than CEOs, who tend to focus on next quarter’s profits and their own bonuses)
• Germany has a solid, stable manufacturing base
• Germany is moving into the ‘green’ economy in a huge way, including being a leading producer of things like wind turbines, high-speed trains, and buildings that use zero energy for heating and cooling

What Canadian wouldn’t want Canada to be doing the same? We don’t just have to export our raw resources, leading to a boom-and-ultimately-bust economy. How much will a house in Fort McMurray be worth when the tar sands have been drained dry? About the same as houses in any other mining town when the mine closes: A heck of a lot less than people paid for them during the boom.

If the NDP would shift us in a more German/Nordic economic direction, this would be a very good thing. It would rebuild our manufacturing base while ensuring unions and management work for the best for all. It would give Alberta and Saskatchewan a manufacturing base to buffer the ups-and-downs of a resource-based economy.

The NDP would shift tar sands subsidies to things like wind and solar factories, both energy sources the prairies ultimately have more of than oil. Imagine if Jean Chretien had done this after he signed the Kyoto Accord; billions of dollars would have been put into clean and green energy and thousands of jobs created.

We need to start doing things like this: rebuilding a competitive manufacturing base, becoming a world leader in ‘green energy,’ and eliminating labour-corporate strife.

Too bad the NDP doesn’t know how to talk to anyone but themselves. Jack, if you want some help talking to people outside the church, give me a call. I won’t hold my breath; I bet tonight’s debate will be yet another wasted opportunity to reach out.

UPDATE:

As requested, here is some information on the German economy, and why it is a model that Canada would be wise to follow.

A good place to start is Wikipedia, of course, which points out that Germany, despite being “relatively poor in raw materials,” and needing to import two-thirds of its energy, is “the largest national economy in Europe, the fourth-largest by nominal GDP in the world.” Germany exited the recession in 2009.

Keep in mind that Germany had the very heavy burden of reunifying the formerly Communist East Germany with the free West, and that placed a very heavy burden on the country as a whole that has still not been overcome.

Here’s an excellent article on German economic strength. Some high points:

• “Germany’s per-capita income was $44,600 [compared to] America’s $47,500 — an impressive performance in itself and all the more so when you realize that the typical German worker put in just 1,432 hours in 2008 versus 1,792 hours for the typical American.”
• “Germans now live nearly 14 months longer on average than Americans.”
• “From 1998 to 2008 the German current account went from a deficit of $5.9 billion to a surplus of $267.1 billion. The contrast with the United States could hardly be starker: The American current account deficit shot from $233.8 billion in 1998 to $568.8 billion in 2008.”
• “Germany is a leader in key new technologies, including renewable energy such as solar and wind power.”

There’s lots more, from six weeks annual paid vacation to a much better social safety net to worker involvement in corporate decision making, which results in higher productivity (if lower executive salaries). Google away.

UPDATE 2:

This post has sparked quite a bit of comment; for an interesting discussion, head over to the thread at Reddit.

Following the multiple partial meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, I find it mind-boggling how quickly the pro-nuclear shills are out claiming that a) nuclear is safe, really, and b) it’s our only hope for a future energy source that is sufficient to meet our needs and not destroy the planet via climate change.

Both are utterly bogus, but you can’t tell the shills that; they are fanatics on a par with the climate change deniers. They believe what they want to believe, and that’s that.

a) Nuclear power is NOT safe

Sorry, lads, but it just isn’t and to maintain that in the face of what has happened and is happening in Japan is just nuts. Numerous dolts are trying to claim that nuclear power is perfectly safe, but that can be disproved with a simple Google search, so I must conclude that people who say this are wilfully dense or are paid shills.

As to the safety record of nuclear power generally, it’s really quite poor. Again, numerous pro-nukers want to say the risk of accident is minuscule. Again, not true. It’s easy enough to get a rough calculation of the odds of disaster: Divide the number of nuclear plants on the planet by the number of major disasters:

According to this site, there were 442 plants as of January 2011. According to Wikipedia, there have been at least 18 serious accidents, so the odds of a serious accident are 18/442 = 4%, or 1 in 25.

Those are terrible odds, and that’s not counting the countless smaller leaks that are routinely covered up by the nuclear industry.

(Note: This is being generous. In reality, the odds are worse because most of these accidents happened when there were fewer nuclear reactors on the planet. And the argument that newer reactors is safer is debatable techno-optimism, given the recent meltdowns in Japan.)

The shills often then retreat to the position that nuclear is safer than coal, but this is hardly difficult and not-at-all comforting. We simply have to stop buying into the idea that we have no choice but to trade off the greater evil for the lesser.

b) It’s nuclear or collapse!!!!

This is simply scaremongering by the shills to prevent us thinking sensibly about other options, like heaven forbid, conservation. Or passive solar combined with geothermal storage. Or storing excess wind/solar/wave/tidal/whatever in molten salts, pumped hydro, hydrogen, and whatever else we come up with, none of which risk making large areas of one’s country, and perhaps a few neighbouring ones, uninhabitable by humans for the next 100,000 years or so.

The fact is, we have non-nuclear options and we need to start exploring them. There may well be a further economic collapse as the price of oil increases, but building hundreds more nuclear plants everywhere is a highly risky ‘solution.’ There are better ways to go.

And by-the-way, Japan’s wind turbines survived the earthquake and tsunami.

UPDATE: An interesting article, from the Toronto Sun, of all places. It contains this gem:

The potential power, energy and financial returns were calculated for the indirect subsidy that is currently provided to the U.S. nuclear industry in the form of liability caps, with providing the same level of indirect subsidy to the solar photovoltaic manufacturing industry in the form of loan guarantees. The startling results show even if just this one relatively minor subsidy was diverted from nuclear power generation into large-scale solar manufacturing, it would result in both more installed power and more energy produced by mid-century. Such a policy would increase the cumulative solar industry over the 500 TW-hrs mark in just 10 years and by the end of the study the cumulative electricity output of solar amounts to an additional 48,600 TW-hrs worth more than $5 trillion over the nuclear case.

At the rate we’re going, we may not make it even that long. I’m not really a “doomer,” but I have always maintained that political events may bring a sudden end to our current idea of civilization long before climate change or even peak oil really set in. And current political events in the Middle East should be giving any thoughtful person plenty of reason to wonder if they will be a catalyst to rapid change.

By-the-way, apparently the Mayans didn’t really predict the end of the world in 2012; that’s simply when their calendar ran out, and we have interpreted that as the end of times. Interestingly, the Christian tradition predicts an apocalypse – which will start in the Middle East. I’m no expert on either, so readers please feel free to chime in.

I’ll lay out my concern, and I have no doubt that it is shared by the Pentagon, top U.S., British, and other government officials, and anyone with a stake in anything – family or business – in the Middle East.

• There are currently popular uprisings in several countries in the Middle East. The Tunisian government has fallen, Egypt’s government is threatened, and now so is Yemen’s.
• All of these states were tacitly or concretely supported by the U.S. and other Western countries like the U.K. and France.
• All of these states are, or in the case of Tunisia, were dictatorships. Elections, if they took place, were a farce.
• Fundamentalists like the Muslim Brotherhood, while currently keeping relatively quiet, are almost certainly awaiting their opportunity to step in and seize power, as they have done elsewhere.

So far, we are not staring into the abyss, and we can sit comfortably in our developed, more-or-less democratic and peaceful countries and wish the residents of these countries well. We don’t depend upon Tunisia, Egypt, or Yemen in any real way.

However.

Saudi Arabia is also a dictatorship. Iraq is hardly stable. Iran’s autocratic government came close to being overthrown in 2009 in the Green Revolution. These are major oil-producing nations, where Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen are not. If they are destabilized in any way, the price of oil will go through the roof, and the U.S. economy will literally grind to a halt.

I do mean literally; essentially 100% of transportation of people and goods in the United States is via diesel or gas-powered means: Planes, trains, trucks, and cars. Industrial farming is utterly dependent upon oil in various forms. Everything plastic – which these days is almost everything – is made of oil. I have discussed this elsewhere, as have many others better educated on the topic than I. There is a reason the Pentagon is planning for oil depletion.

Whether the reins of power are seized by the Muslim Brotherhood or some other entity, or whether real democracy and elections break out, decades of support by oil-junkie Western nations for the former despotic regimes is hardly likely to endear those who take power to the West.

They may also be economically unsophisticated. Remember the oil shocks of the 1970′s? There were long line-ups at the gas pumps, prices soared, and we experienced nasty recessions. That was when the Iranians persuaded their fellow Arabs to use “the oil weapon” against the United States. It was a very successful weapon of mass economic destruction – but the backlash was that the subsequent recessions caused the price of oil to plunge, and that slashed revenues for the oil-producing nations.

The Saudis and others learned the hard way that their economies – and therefore the security of the despots in power – was directly tied to the economic prosperity of the United States. Incoming, unfriendly governments may well not remember that lesson, or think that it no longer applies, given the tremendous worldwide demand for oil and the current price of ~$90/barrel.

If any major oil-producing nation significantly reduces oil sales to the U.S. for any reason – unfriendly government, terrorist bombing of oil distribution facilities, war, civil unrest – the price of oil is going up-up-up, and our economies are going down-down-down. Fast.

What that leads to is anyone’s guess. Here’s  mine.

First, I should state that what we could and should do are not likely to be what we actually do. We could, for example, immediately redirect much electricity generation to producing wind, solar, nuclear, etc power plants. We could and should immediately start retrofitting cities with electrified buses and light rail. Above all, we could and should fund conservation measures and local agriculture. That has the potential to drastically cut out oil consumption quickly, possibly saving the economy from collapse.

However, again.

We have had years of warnings. We have had “oil shocks” followed by recessions. We are currently in a bad recession, yet suffering food and fuel price inflation. And, the two most important obstacles:

• Our own governments are not as democratic as we like to believe; they are largely captive to monied special interests like oil companies. There is a reason they continue to receive large subsidies despite earning record profits.
• We are all oil junkies; most of us expect to be able to commute to work and Walmart.

Anybody trying to change the nation’s course will have to overcome both these special interests and a mass of people who feel they are entitled.

We could be in for a bumpy ride sooner rather than later. I hope not; I hope we have the time and wisdom to transition our economies off oil dependency. However, up until now we have not demonstrated that wisdom, and it looks like time is running out sooner than expected.