On the Inefficiency and Danger of Nuclear Power

ON THE INEFFICIENCY AND DANGER OF NUCLEAR POWER

By Norbert

[This article originally published November 8, 2004 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.feldpolitik.de/feldblog/item.php?i=240.]



Nuclear power plants were a controversial theme before Chernobyl. The anti-nuclear power scene in Europe has been very active for years but is first given attention in the media whenever a castor-transport with radioactive wastes is carted through the country. Yesterday a 21-year old died when the train severed his leg. The time has come to consider the sense and nonsense of nuclear power.

The prosperity of industrial nations arose through access to enormous quantities of energy, not only through the vast growth in knowledge that made possible automatization and mechanization. Without energy, no machine runs. Without energy, the automatization of the economy is weak along with the prosperity of humankind. Energy + automatization = energy-slave. Access to energy is absolutely necessary to maintain our high living standard.

Nuclear power advocates point out that nuclear power offers the possibility for covering our gigantic energy requirements. Whether the “high living standard” is desirable is seldom discussed in their circles. “Standard of living” today consists of material things while the (energy-saving) social life is disintegrating. Nuclear power supporters are taken in by the greatest error when they think nuclear power is the cheapest form of energy. This is only true under a short-term approach.

If one looks only at the production process of nuclear energy, the construction costs of a power plant are very low compared to the energy output. These costs are attractive. This way of looking at things is typically capitalist and short-term. However the real cost factor of nuclear energy first arises after the production process when the radioactive wastes must be stored. Radioactive wastes have a half-life period that far exceeds a human life. It takes millions of years until the radioactive intensity of the wastes becomes insignificant. During this time, the wastes must be stored. Since this is very dangerous material, this storage must be guarded. The costs extend for an unforeseeable time.

The same principle is in effect in the nuclear industry that is already a rule in the present economic system: Profits are privatized and losses are socialized. When profits accumulate in the production process, these benefit the shareholders while the community as a whole is saddled with the costs arising through the waste-products (including the police convoy to supervise the transport). If the follow-up costs of nuclear energy production were included in the current energy price, nuclear energy would be the most expensive form of energy, not the cheapest. To quote another view on the same problem, the coming generations will worry about problems produced by present generations in their short-sightedness.

The 1986 catastrophe of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant causing the radioactive contamination of large parts of Europe will not remain an isolated case. It seems certain “accidents” must occur several times before lessons are learned. Nuclear power plants need enormous amounts of water for cooling. For that reason, they are constructed near rivers. Water has the quality of seeking the path of least resistance through the terrain. Fissures are often the course of rivers. However fissures are usually the boundary surfaces or interfaces between the tectonic plates. These plates move as one knows from geography classes. Thus earthquakes can be expected at the junctures between the plates. Nuclear power plants are built at spots where earthquakes can be expected more than elsewhere. According to unofficial analyses (cf. a video on this theme), an earthquake in 1986 triggered the catastrophe of Chernobyl. The danger of intentional disturbances of an over-centralized energy supply by terrorists can be added today to the danger through earthquakes. Nuclear power plants represent a very high risk for humans and nature and therefore should be buried as a technology of the last millennium for economic and non-economic reasons.