Facts For Working People is publishing this essay for the interest
of our readers. The issue of nuclear energy is a controversial and
important one and the organizers of this blog admit that our understanding of
it is limited. We thank the author for taking the time to express one viewpoint
on it.
Added note: It has been demanded of the two founders of this blog that we share our views on this subject. It is safe to say it has been our position that socialists oppose nuclear energy based primarily on it's incredible destructive potential as a weapon and how to deal with waste. But both of us know very little about the subject. David Walters has shared views we have not heard and we share them here. Hopefully a discussion on it will expand our knowledge of the issue and allow us to make a fully informed decision about its future. RM and SOT.
The Socialist Case
for Nuclear Energy
The deepest, the most
objective and the most indisputable criterion says: progress can be measured by
the growth of the productivity of social labour.
-- Leon Trotsky, The Lessons of October (1932)
by David Walters *
Energy, the environment, global climate change, and sea level rise are all
huge, vast interconnected subjects that generate much debate and controversy at
every level of society. One expects this when the future of our species, and
all other species, are at stake.
The center of this discussion can be narrowed down to one technological and
scientific issue: the generation, use, and distribution of energy. The historic application, or utilization, of various forms
of energy is a measure of human progress. Even before the rise of civilizations
such as the Indus, Greek, Persian, and others long gone were relegated to the
anthropology text books and museums, and even before the development of class
society, human use of energy set us apart from all other species, including the
higher ones such as dolphins and apes.
Heat to cook food or keep warm in colder climates was the first human use of
energy generated by the chemical reaction (though unknown to early humans) of
hydrocarbons when brought to a higher temperature. This was low-density energy
from a strictly biological source: wood.
Every step up the climb from pre-class society through the first civilizations,
through the massive slave societies of the Egyptian and Roman empires through
feudalism, and into and including our modern imperialist; with every advance in
the mode of production; with every step forward in the application of
scientific techniques for growing food, understanding the seasons, and
increasing productivity of commodity creation; each has been intertwined
dialectically with the discovery and deployment of ever more abundant, ever
more useful, ever more dense forms of
energy that could be deployed easily by growing numbers of people seeking to
make their lives easier.
The rise and uplifting of human culture has always depended on, and been a
function of, this development and utilization of cheaper, abundant and denser
energy.
Most on the socialist left have forgotten this. The development of energy use
by humans shows an evolution from wood to water/hydro and wind to coal and
later to petroleum and gas, and finally to nuclear power. Each has provided
vaster quantities, and qualities, of energy for human use. Each one has been denser than the last, that is, more
energy could be extracted from each subsequent form per measured unit of weight
or volume.
This aided the expansion of the forces of production and the utilization of
more labor-saving devices and techniques, and led to higher-quality goods and
superior means of distribution.
It this development of
the productive forces that Marx saw as being increasingly in conflict with
the mode of production we know as
capitalism. Thus, he saw the increase in production per capita as a goal, a
human species goal, and something to
strive for. Capitalism was beginning to hold this back, and thus one of the
main underpinnings of Marxism was established: showing the contradictory nature
of capitalism and how historically it sows its own doom.
But what does this have to do with the central question raised earlier? In the
left today, and the much broader Green and environmental movements, this
expansion of production is considered a “bad thing.” It causes pollution,
ecological collapse, and climate change. No doubt, the rapid expansion of
industry under capitalism in the 19th & 20th centuries
has caused these terrible changes. But it also has allowed humans to develop
solutions through techniques that could alleviate these problems were such
forms of production placed under the democratic control of society, that is,
what we call socialism.
Marx understood at least under communism, production would have to increase to alleviate the grinding
poverty that prevailed in 90% of the world’s population of his day. In his 1847
essay The Principles of Communism, he
posed the following question and provided an answer:
What will be the consequences of the ultimate
disappearance of private property?
Society will take all forces of production and means of
commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the
hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan
based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In
this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated
with the conduct of big industry will be abolished.
There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which
for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause
of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further.
Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary
requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will
create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will
become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no
longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done
in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will
undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison
as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This
development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of
products to satisfy the needs of everyone.
The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers
from the pressure of private property and is held back by the division of
privately owned land into small parcels. Here, existing improvements and
scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward
which will assure to society all the products it needs.
In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to
satisfy the needs of all its members.
This holds as true today as it ever did in the imagination
of Karl Marx before the 1848 upheavals across the European continent. For
today’s 7 billion (and growing) people, socialism, which can only be built by
harnessing the productive forces of the entire planet, promises what Marx wrote
of in 1847. But we can do it wisely,
and democratically, only if we
eliminate the global imperialist system.
Such a world of abundance will require more, not less energy.
Yet, there is a belief, especially in the advanced Western countries of Europe
and North America among socialists and activists for social change, that humans
“use too much.” This is an idea that has been absorbed from the forces around
the Greens and others who think there are too many people, that we cannot
possibly sustain so many people on Earth, and that if we brought the standard
of living of the entire world up to that enjoyed by workers in these Western
countries, the planet would be ruined.
Doing so under capitalism, the world would
be ruined. Capitalism has no way to lift the masses from poverty. Consider the
following:
Ø There are 1.6 billion people with no electricity.
Ø Billions of people have no access to energy
efficient mass transportation.
Ø Billions of people have little or no access to
education and health care.
Ø Increasingly vicious wars and privatization continue
to cause grinding poverty, dislocation
and environmental destruction.
Capitalism is the cause. To bring the entire world to the
(rapidly dropping) levels of Western workers or “middle income” families would
require not simply a fundamental increase in wealth redistribution and energy,
but a vast per-capita increase in both. But the refrain from many
environmentalists and even socialists
continued: “We use too much!” This is as reactionary as wanting to bust unions
or launch wars of aggression of neo-colonial conquest.
These same leftists put their hopes in the false panacea of what has been
called a “100% fossil fuel-free/nuclear-free carbon-free renewable energy
economy.” Many academic papers have been written seeking to prove the
practicality of such a project. An equal number of papers destroy this myth;
that is not the purpose of this essay. Rather, consider several points about
energy.
The advance of civilization has been predicated on the accessibility of and
increased per-capita use of energy, but every paper advocating renewable energy
is based on a massive reduction in
per-capita energy use. While arguing renewable energy can power a high-tech
civilization on a planetary scale, authors believe that such an endeavor itself
could be carbon-free. Consider one example: according to almost all studies,
land-based wind energy, the only kind being built in the United States, uses 8
to 12 times the amount of concrete per unit of energy compared to nuclear power.
Concrete uses massive amounts of dirty natural gas in its production. It uses
more steel, copper, and aluminum, not to mention that far more intensive
extraction-mining of rare earth metals is required for wind generators than for
nuclear power.
Because wind and solar energy have
actual usable energy production, or capacity factors (CFs), that are very low,
massive overbuilding of these systems will be needed. Nuclear energy in the
United States is around 90% CF; that is, 90% of the time, a 1,000 MW plant
produces 1,000 MWs. In some countries, it is even higher. Wind’s CF on
land-based wind farms is only 33%. Solar is only 20% because the sun is only at
its useable height in the sky from about 10am to 3pm.
What to do? There is a lot of talk about storage, big batteries, or using hot
molten salts to store power. This can be done, but can it be done on a genuine
utility-scale basis? The costs are overwhelming, as every solar and wind plant
utilizing storage has proven. And they have remained in the experimental stage
for more than a decade.
Nuclear is safe. This sounds like an outrageous claim in light of Fukushima and
Chernobyl. In fact, the number of deaths per amount of energy for nuclear is
way lower than it is for fossil fuel. It is lower than wind and solar if
installation and industrial accidents are taken into account. People will argue
about the numbers, but given what our species face with respect to global
climate change, this is the wrong argument. Those numbers are going to be
outrageous; they already are.
Fukushima could have been prevented. The capitalist board of directors of
Fukushima’s operator TEPCO had its seawall only to minimum “recommendations”
when common practice in other countries, for private or public utilities, is to
build beyond specs. They also built
their fuel tanks for the auxiliary diesel generators powering their auxiliary
cooling system right on the water at their intake structure, rather than
locating them behind the plant up on the hill from where the video was taken of
the tsunami hitting the plant. There would have been no "Fukushima
accident" had TEPCO put safety ahead of profits.
However, there were no deaths from the accident itself (compared to the 20,000
who died from the earth quake and tsunami itself!) and many experts believe
there will likely be no fatalities because the population was exposed to so
very little radiation after the accident.
Chernobyl, a truly horrific accident that caused 4,000 treatable thyroid cancer
incidents (a number most likely vastly underreported), was a one-off incident.
A converted military-style reactor built by the U.S.S.R using a design banned
in all but two countries of the world, exploded. The explosion sent dozens of
tons of fuel into the atmosphere. There are still 10 such reactors online and
yet, despite Chernobyl and despite the collapse of the U.S.S.R., there have
been exactly zero other accidents of the type that happened there at any of
those plants. Why? The nuclear industry in Russia stepped up and engineered out
the ability of humans to cause such an accident, and began to add large, heavy
containment to existing plants and design it into future plants. The Russians
also stopped building this type of Chernobyl-style reactor.
Even under capitalism, the nuclear industry, despite corruption, despite the
profit motive, has proved superior to the fossil fuel industry (including both
privately run and publicly owned plants) in the number of deaths incurred
through normal operations. Any comparison of fossil fuel plants and nuclear
favors nuclear technology shows this to be the case.
Socialists argue that, like any technology, nuclear energy would be far better
employed in a democratically run, worker- and consumer-controlled public power
grid. Of this there can be no doubt. But we are talking about technologies that
are being employed under capitalism generally. Many developing countries are
delving into nuclear energy and developing nuclear plants or at least the
safety regimes required by international law as a prerequisite to building a
nuclear grid. Countries currently building nuclear grids include China,
Vietnam, India, Pakistan, the UAE, South
Africa/Azania, and many more. They do this without influence from the
"Nuclear Industry" or other lobby groups but after reviewing all the
alternatives. Some of these same countries are also building new coal and gas
plants and, at the same time, investing massive amounts to develop wind and
solar power.
France is the world’s premier user of nuclear energy. The French ruling class
decided that France had to eliminate its reliance on burning oil for power
generation. In 15 years, France went from zero to 79% of its grid powered
by 54 nuclear power plants. When an electric car gets plugged into the
wall at night for recharging, or an aluminum plant is running to produce the
millions of tons of aluminum needed in a modern society, everyone in France
knows it is nuclear, not fossil fuel, providing the power. France has
demonstrated that even a capitalist economy can rid itself of fossil fuels if
it deploys nuclear.
There is nothing objectionable about wind and solar power per se. They can be useful and should be deployed in a limited
fashion depending on local conditions (their ability to displace coal and gas
is overstated; they are married to both, as the experiences of Germany and
Denmark, where wind and solar power are deployed widely, have shown). But it is
nuclear power that socialists should be fighting for: it is power on demand 24
hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year; and every megawatt produced by a
nuclear plant can displace, permanently,
an equal number of MWs produced from fossil fuels. No renewable source of
energy, save for hydro-electricity (which has limited potential) can make the
same claim. This fact alone should disqualify renewables for serious
consideration as the solution to climate change.
While massive amounts of renewable energy has been deployed in Europe, not a
single fossil-fuel plant has been phased out as a result. Nuclear, however,
immediately displaces a fossil-fuel generation plant. China, which today has
30 nuclear plants under construction, would be building 30 coal-fired
plants if the nation could not or was not allowed to go nuclear. Socialists
should not only be defending the right of developing countries to build nuclear
power plants, we should be demanding the bosses’ governments do so, and expand
its deployment. We should be fighting for workers governments to come to power
to organize society along the lines outlined here.
Socialists should oppose waste and inefficiency. These problems are worse in
underdeveloped countries than in the advanced countries, but because per-capita
energy use is much higher in the latter any amount of wasted energy generally
compounds already existing problems from garbage to overextraction of resources
to pollution, as well as climate change. We should be for conservation and efficiency as a function of any rational
society based on human needs and not profit.
-->
But this doesn’t mean lowering anyone’s standard of living
(except the bankers and bosses, of course!). It really means a full-on
reorganization of our productive and consumption capacity with the goal of
raising the development level of the underdeveloped world in a rational and
democratic manner, no longer under the jackboot of imperialism.
What does this mean, really, in many underdeveloped countries where only 10% of
the population has access to electricity? Does it mean a 50" flat-screen
LCD television? A 24-cubic-foot Sub-Zero refrigerator? Central air conditioning and two SUVs in the
front of a 3,000-square-foot home? Of course not. And yet, this seems to be
what so many think when they object to raising the standard of living of the
billions in underdeveloped countries to those of the West.
No, it means this: it means the right to
generate and use electricity. The right to the ubiquitous light switch we
take for granted in the West. It means electric light available day and night, whenever an individual
decides he or she wants to read, whenever a student wants to study. It means at
least a small refrigerator where leftovers can be chilled without spoiling. It
means a laptop computer and access to the Internet. It means, perhaps, a small
television. It means some air conditioning, perhaps only in one room, so
children don’t suffer diseases brought on by increasing temperatures in our
world. It means an electric hotplate or stove top so the 30,000 women and
children who die every year in India from cooking with charcoal indoors can
live. That is what energy means, and that is why we need more of it, a lot more, and why it has to be carbon
free. This is what it will take to make all of Africa, India, and most of South
Asia “developed.”
The anti-nuclear movement condemns billions of people to decades’ more energy
starvation because of misplaced liberal guilt over greenhouse gas emissions.
Rather than coming up with truly better ways to produce energy, this movement
wants us to down-gear and “use less.” This is why anti-nuclear idealism should
be characterized as a reactionary
response to the climate crisis, and it explains why socialists who adapt to the
Green ideology have lost their bearings.
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) of 30MW to 300MWs can be built in mass production
lines, lowering their cost. They can be set up in rural parts of any country
and have an electricity grid literally built around them that could,
eventually, be connected to and form a national grid that would enhance
development and raise people’s standard of living. There are only two things
holding this up:
1. Imperialism, which has been
breaking up countries, fomenting civil wars, and destroying the national
economies of these countries.
2. The anti-nuclear/Green movement,
which views any development in general as harming the planet, and sees nuclear
energy as particularly evil.
For socialists to recapture the true vision of Marxism and the early
revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries means learning the
lessons of the downside of the development of the productive forces such as
climate change. It means using science and technology to alleviate and reverse
the environmental damage capitalism has created, so we can live up to Marx’s
vision of a new society:
“Society will take all forces of production and means of
commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the
hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan
based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In
this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated
with the conduct of big industry will be abolished.
“There will be no more crises; the expanded production,
which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing
cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much
further.”
Further Reading:
The Principles of Communism by Karl Marx:
Left-atomics.blogspot.com
Bravenewclimate.com
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