The main cause of the complacency – now gradually diminishing – about future energy supplies was undoubtedly the emergence of nuclear energy, which, people felt had arrived just in time. Little did they bother to inquire precisely what it was that had arrived. It was new, it was astonishing, it was progress, and promises were freely given that it would be cheap. Since a new source of energy would be needed sooner or later, why not have it at once?
— E. F. Schumacher, the opening lines of chapter 9
Schumacher’s name is rarely if ever listed among the influential opponents of nuclear power. Yet his opposition was implacable, and he came to it earlier than most, in the 1960s – a decade of near-universal euphoria over nuclear power. It would be several years at least before the more insistent voices Gofman, Brower, Nader, and others would be raised against the atom. ¶ As the patron saint of appropriate technology, Schumacher’s spirit was vital to the vision of renewable energy that sustained anti-nuclear activists during the 1970s and early 1980s, when the direction of energy policy hung in the balance. His conviction that reactors were uneconomic in the most fundamental sense – because they worked against the betterment of society – helped stiffen the resolve of the anti-nuclear movement to demand a non-nuclear future.
— Charles Komanoff, director of the Carbon Tax Center, in the 25th anniversary book (1999)
This is Schumacher’s influential rant against nuclear energy. It was a struggle that – after a number of tense moments – he was to win. The key issue is whether may only have been a temporary victory.
The text was based on his Des Voeux Memorial Lecture in 1967, ‘Clean Air and Future Energy — Economics and Conservation’, published by the National Society for Clean Air in London.
What the chapter says…
Schumacher starts with a statement about nuclear energy of which he says: “At the time, it seemed highly unorthodox.”
The time he was referring to was six years before the publication of Small is Beautiful – which takes us to 1967. This was also the year in which he gave the lecture on which this chapter is based – so I think we can assume that he was referring to the reaction to the lecture:
“The religion of economics promotes an idolatry of rapid change, unaffected by the elementary truism that a change which is not an unquestionable improvement is a doubtful blessing. The burden of proof is placed on those who take the ‘ecological viewpoint’: unless they can produce evidence of marked injury to man, the change will proceed… Put that nuclear fission represents an incredible, incomparable, and unique hazard for human life does not enter any calculation and is never mentioned…’
As he explains, insurance companies are reluctant to insure nuclear power stations anywhere in the world for third party risk, which means that they have to pass special legislation so that the state accepts big liabilities. “Yet, insured or not, the hazard remains, and such is the thralldom of the religion of economics that the only question that appears to interest either governments or the public is whether ‘it pays’.”
As long as 36 years before, in 1927, the American biologist, Hermann Muller, published a famous paper on genetic mutations produced by X-ray bombardment. It seemed likely that people would suffer – and especially perhaps unborn children.
“A new ‘dimension’ is given also by the fact that while man now can – and does – create radioactive elements, there is nothing he can do to reduce their radioactivity once he has created them. No chemical reaction, no physical interference, only the passage of time reduces the intensity of radiation once it has been set going. Carbon-14 has a half -life of 5,900 years, which means that it takes nearly 6,000 years for its radioactivity to decline to one-half of what it was before. The half-life of strontium-90 is twenty-eight years. But whatever the length of the half-life, some radiation continues almost indefinitely, and there is nothing that can be done about it, except to try and put the radioactive substance into a safe place…’
Strontium-90 was the isotope that was endangering the lives of young children thanks to the atmospheric nuclear testing in the 1940s and 50s. We hear far less about it these days.
Why did we allow these monstrosities, he asks – and his conclusion is guilt about the bomb. “There is an understandable drive on the part of men of good will to build up the positive aspects of nuclear energy simply because the negative aspects are so distressing,” wrote the American nuclear physicist, Alvin Weinberg. Weinberg also described nuclear energy as a “Faustian bargain” – the first to do so.
Schumacher says:
“Our instinct of self-preservation, one should have thought, would make us immune to the blandishments of guilt-ridden scientific optimism or the unproved promises of pecuniary advantages….Once many more centers of radioactivity have been created, there will be no more choice, whether we can cope with the hazards or not.”
The issue is that we do not know how to deal with the waste produced by nuclear energy. He quotes a report commissioned by the government’s new Department of the Environment in 1972:
“In the United Kingdom, strontium-90 is at the present time stored as a liquid in huge stainless steel tanks at Windscale in Cumberland. They have to be continually cooled with water, since the heat given off by the radiation would otherwise raise the temperature to above boiling point. We shall have to go on cooling these tanks for many years, even if we build no more nuclear reactors…”
At the time, the solution on both sides of the Atlantic was to dispose of the high level waste in the sea. Luckily, that doesn’t happen any more:
“The evident danger is that man may have put all his eggs in the nuclear basket before he discovers that a solution cannot be found. There would then be powerful political pressures to ignore the radiation hazards and continue using the reactors which had been built. It would be only prudent to slow down the nuclear power programme until we have solved the waste disposal problem…. Many responsible people would go further. They feel that no more nuclear reactors should be built until we know how to control their wastes.”
His conclusion is particularly pungent:
”No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make ‘safe’ and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilization could sustain itself on the basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all.”
What happened next?
An “ethical, spiritual and metaphysical monstrosity” – that is what Schumacher called the idea that civilization could or should be sustained on the idea of threatening civilization.
By the end of the 1970s, the campaign against nuclear energy had reached a sort of crescendo. In 1978, the year after Schumacher died, the fire at the Three Mile Island plant at Harrisburg in Pennsylvania demonstrated more of the risks, although mercifully nobody was killed or injured.
A few conservatives still defended it, like Edward Teller, the long-lived ‘father’ of the H-bomb.. “I was the only victim of Three Mile Island,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the same time as passing comment on the nuclear conspiracy film The China Syndrome with Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. He was describing his heart attack at that time. “No, that would be wrong,” he wrote. “It was not the reactor – it was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.”
But, by the time the fire at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine caused a near meltdown and brought Soviet power to a juddering halt – it was clear that there was a danger involved. Just as there was at Fukoshima in Japan much more recently.
this danger is also political. It is certainly not simply that those in charge of the storage of high-level nuclear waste prefer to keep it in leaky tanks on the Sellafield site in Cumbria – because they have no idea where else to put it – but because the kind of institutions it would be necessary to set up to look after the waste would have to be powerful enough to last for 6 or 7,000 years at least.
They would have to be more rigid and powerful than the Roman Catholic church, which has only survived for a mere 2,000 years.
And because of all the security that would be necessary to manage the fuel and waste, in the so-called plutonium economy, would mean that there was no way that any reduction in the cost and reliability of the plants. It will always be an expensive options.
So how has this technology begun to creep back again?
Partly because the prospects of a solar and wind-driven world has not emerged fast enough to reduce our carbon emissions toward net zero (nuclear plans require huge carbon inputs while they are building, but not when they are running). Also partly because Germany, for example, has had to go back to burning coal because they closed their last nuclear power plant immediately before Russia’s Ukrainian invasion.
Ironically, in the UK, it was the election of a right-wing ideologue like Margaret Thatcher in 1979, who believed in the free market so much that she tried to privatize nuclear energy. It was clear then that nobody wanted to buy it, because – as Schumacher says – governments have to underwrite the insurance costs of nuclear energy because no insurance company in its right mind would insure it.
The failure of that privatization led to the demise of the ardently pro-nuclear Central Electricity Generating Board. In Sweden, cities are in charge of generating energy. In the UK, there are now a myriad of different energy providers, and the most enlightened ones – like Good Energy – are entirely committed to the Schumacherian world view.
Questions for discussion…
- What do we feel about Schumacher’s support for burning coal? Would he have continued in this if he was with us today, even when he knew about the greenhouse effect – or might he had supported solar, wind or micro-hydro power as intermediate technologies?
- What about nuclear energy – might he have been tempted to change his mind because of the climate crisis?
- How can we encourage more people to stand up clearly and decisively against widespread public conviction – as Schumacher did in the 1960s with nuclear energy?
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