Nuclear Industry Provides Object Lesson

A year on from the Japanese tsunami I would like to think about how the consequent disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant is something of a parable of the problem of increasing scale without rethinking design. This is a story told by Adam Curtis in his documentary : here I apply it to the need to rethink our economic scale.

In its early days the nuclear industry was dominated by scientists; sometimes they were rather over-exuberant and they made claims that they later found it hard to meet, but for the first generation of nuclear developers, science was queen, and their respect for her was appropriate. What they designed was a nuclear reactor for use aboard submarines, to enable them to continue to function without the need for refuelling, a crucial geopolitical advantage in the era of the Cold War.

At the size necessary to power a submarine the reactor could not go into meltdown; there was simply insufficient fuel to enable this to happen. But at this scale nuclear reactors to generate electricity could not be profitable: in order to create a nuclear generation programme the reactors needed to be built on a much larger scale. A difficult conflict arose between the need for safety, which can never be guaranteed when a chain reaction is technically possible, and the need for scale in order to create scale economies and ensure profitability.

The argument was won as soon as the US companies Westinghouse and General Electric moved into the production of nuclear plant on a large scale. They gambled that they could persuade the engineers to move with them, and they sidelined the question of safety by inventing the concept of ‘containment’. Although much of the debate around the Fukushima disaster has focused on this concept, it is in reality an example of discourse manipulation rather than scientific debate. It is of the nature of nuclear energy that it is explosive and cannot be contained: once a chain reaction begins it will generate energy beyond the control of engineering systems. 'Containment' is a concept that makes us feel safe with nuclear power, a PR word and not a scientific concept.

I introduce this example to demonstrate how the gap between scientifico-technical responses and policy can be jumped without adequate democratic debate, especially when matters of survival can be cited as justification. Similar unaccountable decisions are being made right now, in the context of climate change, about the next generation of nuclear power-stations.

The example is also useful in demonstrating that what is meant by ‘economies of scale’ cannot really be interpreted without bearing in mind the economist’s other notion of an ‘externality’. Economies of scale can be achieved by ensuring that the costs of a production process are minimised. In the case of the nuclear industry this meant ensuring that any potential risks could be excluded from the cost curves of the companies engaged in developing the technology: the costs of accidents and decommissioning would not, and never have been, borne by those who built the plant.
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Beware the Blandishments of the Tescopolist

Capitalism is threatened by climate change and it is responding. I offer as evidence Tesco's endowment at Manchester University of a Sustainable Consumption Institute. You will have heard arguments recently that New Zealand lamb or Kenyan cut flowers are actually more sustainable than locally grown alternatives. It is in order to produce data to support claims such as this that the Institute is being funded. Its existence proves not only that our higher education system has now become the prostitute of globalised capitalism, as Thatcher long ago intended, but also that capitalism is adapting to the strictures climate change brings.

Tesco is getting extremely good value for money. They are investing a mere £5million in return for which they will divert the energies of a sizeable group of leading UK researchers to justifying their own corporate ends. They are also using this to repair their tarnished media reputation, including by claiming magnanimity in sharing the research findings with others. So you should think yourself lucky that you will be able to use Tesco's figures to justify the globalised economy without having to pay them for the privilege.

But can capitalism ever make itself sustainable? As an economic system it relies on the extraction of the surplus value of workers and the planet to pay for all the various parasites who do no work but live from ownership and investments. As such it is a system that meets the needs of the majority in an inefficient way, because the needs of the greedy minority must be satieted. As Gandhi put this so eloquently, 'the earth has enough to satisfy every man's need but not to satisfy the greed of some'. The very nature of this unfair system of distribution puts pressure on the planet as well as on those who sell their labour.

In the globalised capitalist system most work is done in the countries of the Global South, translated from de jure into de facto colonies, their resources and their labour power still stolen by the rich West, but these days through the less unsightly mechanisms of trade treaties and financial organisations, and with armies reserved for extreme situations only.

Globalisation represents the ultimate victory of the notion of 'economies of scale' that economists love so much. Now the scale is that of the planet as a whole, with corporate barons organising who shall produce what where and fixing the prices. Failing to respect Nature's scale has led to the huge imbalances of wealth and well-being we see around us, as well as creating climate change through the unncessary production of transport-related carbon dioxide emissions.

Finally, the way capitalism creates money, through debt-based bank money, requires the constant expansion of the economy without regard to natural limits. I have blogged about this elsewhere: it is really the most fundamental explanation of the link between capitalism as an economic system and planetary destruction.

I have been in this game for a while now so I have become fairly experienced at spotting a corporate scam. Hence I was intrigued by the arguments about the distribution system of globalisation being more sustainable, not to mention more supportive of our brothers and sisters in the South. I was also depressed to notice how many good people I interact with were swallowing this line.

Sadly my own resources for investigating the assumptions on which the justification for buying New Zealand apples in the UK in September are limited. And I don't suppose Terry Leahy will be offering me money to explore my proposed alternative of bioregional distribution systems any time soon.

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