Nine: Nuclear Energy - Salvation or Damnation?
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?
The following statement was made six years ago. At the time, it seemed highly unorthodox.
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. Common sense, on the contrary, would suggest that the burden of proof should lie on the man who wants to introduce a change; he has to demonstrate that there cannot be any damaging consequences. But this would take too much time, and would therefore be uneconomic. Ecology, indeed, ought to be a compulsory subject for all economists, whether professionals or laymen, as this might serve to restore at least a modicum of balance. For ecology holds "that an environmental setting developed over millions of years must be considered to have some merit. Anything so complicated as a planet, inhabited by more than a million and a half species of plants and animals, all of them living together in a more or less balanced equilibrium in which they continuously use and re-use the same molecules of the soil and air, cannot be improved by aimless and uninformed tinkering. All changes in a complex mechanism involve some risk and should be undertaken only after careful study of all the facts available. Changes should be made on a small scale first so as to provide a test before they are widely applied. When information is incomplete, changes should stay close to the natural processes which have in their favour the indisputable evidence of having supported life for a very long time".''
The argument, six years ago, proceeded as follows: Of all the changes introduced by man into the household of nature, large-scale nuclear fission is undoubtedly the most dangerous and profound. As a result, ionising radiation has become the most serious agent of pollution of the environment and the greatest threat to man's survival on earth. The attention of the layman, not surprisingly, has been captured by the atom bomb, although there is at least a chance that it may never be used again. The danger to humanity created by the so-called peaceful uses of atomic energy may be much greater. There could indeed be no clearer example of the prevailing dictatorship of economics. Whether to build conventional power stations, based on coal or oil, or nuclear stations, is being decided on economic grounds, with perhaps a small element of regard for the 'social consequences' that might arise from an over-speedy curtailment of the coal industry. Put that nuclear fission represents an incredible, incomparable, and unique hazard for human life does not enter any calculation and is never mentioned. People whose business it is to judge hazards, the insurance companies, are reluctant to insure nuclear power stations anywhere in the world for third party risk, with the result that special legislation has had to be passed whereby the State accepts big liabilities. Yet, insured or not, the hazard remains, and such is the thraldom of the religion of economics that the only question that appears to interest either governments or the public is whether 'it pays'.
It is not as if there were any lack of authoritative voices to warn us. The effects of alpha, beta, and gamma rays on living tissues are perfectly well known: the radiation particles are like bullets tearing into an organism, and the damage they do depends primarily on the dosage and the type of cells they hit. As long ago as 1927, the American biologist, H. J. Muller, published his famous paper on genetic mutations produced by X-ray bombardment.' and since the early 1930s the genetic hazard of exposure has been recognised also by non-geneticists. It is clear that here is a hazard with a hitherto inexperienced 'dimension', endangering not only those who might be directly affected by this radiation but their offspring as well.
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.
But what is a safe place, let us say, for the enormous amounts of radioactive waste products created by nuclear reactors? No place on earth can be shown to be safe. It was thought at one time that these wastes could safely be dumped into the deepest parts of the oceans, on the assumption that no life could subsist at such depths." But this has since been disproved by Soviet deep-sea exploration. Wherever there is life, radioactive substances are absorbed into the biological cycle. Within hours of depositing these materials in water, the great bulk of them can be found in living organisms. Plankton, algae, and many sea animals have the power of concentrating these substances by a factor of 1,000 and in some cases even a million. As one organism feeds on another, the radio- active materials climb up the ladder of life and find their way back to man.
No international agreement has yet been reached on waste disposal. The conference of the international Atomic Energy Organisation at Monaco, in November 1959, ended in disagreement, mainly on account of the violent objections raised by the majority of countries against the American and British practice of disposal into the oceans. ‘High level' waste continue to be dumped into the sea, while quantities of so-called intermediate' and 'low-level' wastes are discharged into rivers or directly into the ground. An AEC report observes laconically that the liquid wastes 'work their way slowly into ground water, leaving all or part (sic!) of their radioactivity held either chemically or physically in the soil.
The most massive wastes are, of course, the nuclear reactors themselves after they have become unserviceable. There is a lot of discussion on the trivial economic question of whether they will last for twenty, twenty-five, or thirty years. No-one discusses the humanly vital point that they cannot be dismantled and cannot be shifted but have to be left standing where they are, probably for centuries, perhaps for thousands of years, an active menace to all life, silently leaking radioactivity into air, water and soil. No-one has considered the number and location of these satanic mills which will relentlessly accumulate. Earthquakes, of course, are not supposed to happen, nor wars, nor civil disturbances, nor riots like those that infested American cities. Disused nuclear power stations will stand as unsightly monuments to unquiet man's assumption that nothing but tranquillity, from now on, stretches before him, or else - that the future counts as nothing compared with the slightest economic gain now.
Meanwhile, a number of authorities are engaged in defining 'maximum permissible concentrations' (MPCs) and 'maximum permissible levels' (MPLs) for various radioactive elements. The MPC purports to define the quantity of a given radioactive sub- stance that the human body can be allowed to accumulate. But it is known that any accumulation produces biological damage. 'Since we don't know that these effects can be completely recovered from,' observes the US Naval Radiological Laboratory, 'we have to fall back on an arbitrary decision about how much we will put up with; i.e. what is "acceptable" or "permissible" - not a scientific finding, but an administrative decision.'" We can hardly be surprised when men of outstanding intelligence and integrity, such as Albert Schweitzer, refuse to accept such administrative decisions with equanimity: 'Who has given them the right to do this? Who is even entitled to give such a permission?'" The history of these decisions is, to say the least, disquieting. The British Medical Research Council noted some twelve years ago that:
'The maximum permissible level of strontium-90 in the human skeleton. accepted by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, corresponds to ].000 micro-micro- curies per gramme of calcium (= 1,000 SU). But this is the maximum permissible level for adults in special occupations and is not suitable for application to the population as a whole or to the children with their greater sensitivity to radiation.'
A little later, the MPC for strontium-90, as far as the general population was concerned, was reduced by ninety per cent, and then by another third. to sixty-seven SU. Meanwhile, the MPC for workers in nuclear plants was raised to 2,000 SUs.
We must be careful, however, not to get lost in the jungle of controversy that has grown up in this field. The point is that very serious hazards have already been created by the 'peaceful uses of atomic energy', affecting not merely the people alive today but all future generations, although so far nuclear energy is being used only on a statistically insignificant scale. The real development is yet to come, on a scale which few people are incapable of imagining. If this is really going to happen, there will be a continuous traffic in radioactive substances from the 'hot' chemical plants to the nuclear stations and back again; from the stations to waste- processing plants; and from there to disposal sites. A serious accident, whether during transport or production, can cause a major catastrophe; and the radiation levels throughout the world will rise relentlessly from generation to generation. Unless all living geneticists are in error, there will be an equally relentless, though no doubt somewhat delayed, increase in the number of harmful mutations. K. Z. Morgan, of the Oak Ridge Laboratory, emphasises that the damage can be very subtle, a deterioration of all kinds of organic qualities, such as mobility, fertility, and the efficiency of sensory organs. 'If a small dose has any effect at all at any stage of the life cycle of an organism, then chronic radiation at this level can be more damaging than a single massive dose.... Finally, stress and changes in mutation rates may be produced even when there is no immediately obvious effect on survival of irradiated individuals.'"
Leading geneticists have given their warnings that everything possible should be done to avoid any increases in mutation rates:' leading medical men have insisted that the future of nuclear energy must depend primarily on researches into radiation biology which are as yet still totally incomplete;" leading physicists have suggested that 'measures much less heroic than building ... nuclear reactors' should be tried to solve the problem of future energy supplies - a problem which is in no way acute at pre- sent;" and leading students of strategic and political problems, at the same time, have warned us that there is really no hope of preventing the proliferation of the atom bomb, if there is a spread of plutonium capacity, such as was 'spectacularly launched by President Eisenhower in his "atoms for peace proposals" of 8 December 1953'.
Yet all these weighty opinions play no part in the debate on whether we should go immediately for a large 'second nuclear programme' or stick a bit longer to the conventional fuels which, whatever may be said for or against them, do not involve us in entirely novel and admittedly incalculable risks. None of them are even mentioned: the whole argument, which may vitally affect the very future of the human race, is conducted exclusively in terms of immediate advantage, as if two rag and bone merchants were trying to agree on a quantity discount.
What, after all, is the fouling of air with smoke compared with the pollution of air, water, and soil with ionising radiation? Not that I wish in any way to belittle the evils of conventional air and water pollution: but we must recognise 'dimensional differences' when we encounter them: radioactive pollution is an evil of an incomparably greater 'dimension' than anything mankind has known before. One might even ask: what is the point of insisting on clean air, if the air is laden with radioactive particles? And even if the air could be protected, what is the point of it, if soil and water are being poisoned?
Even an economist might well ask: what is the point of economic progress, a so-called higher standard of living, when the earth, the only earth we have, is being contaminated by substances which may cause malformations in our children or grand- children? Have we learned nothing from the thalidomide tragedy? Can we deal with matters of such a basic character by means of bland assurances or official admonitions that 'in the absence of proof that (this or that innovation) is in any way deleterious, it would be the height of irresponsibility to raise a public alarm? Can we deal with them simply on the basis of a short-term profitability calculation?
'It might be thought.' wrote Leonard Beaten, 'that all the resources of those who fear the spread of nuclear weapons would have been devoted to heading off these developments for as long as possible. The United States, the Soviet Union and Britain might be expected to have spent large sums of money trying to prove that conventional fuels, for example, had been underrated as a source of-power.... In fact ... the efforts which have followed must stand as one of the most inexplicable political fantasies in history. Only a social psychologist could hope to explain why the possessors of the most terrible weapons in history have sought to spread the necessary industry to produce them.... Fortunately,... power reactors are still fairly scarce.
In fact, a prominent American nuclear physicist, A. W. Weinberg, has given some sort of explanation: 'There is.' he says, '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.' But he also adds the warning that 'there are very compelling personal reasons why atomic scientists sound optimistic when writing about their impact on world affairs. Each of us must justify to himself his preoccupation with instruments of nuclear destruction (and even we reactor people are only slightly less beset with such guilt than are our weaponeering colleagues).'
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. 'It is not too late at this point for us to reconsider old decisions and make new ones,' says a recent American commentator 'For the moment at least, the choice is available.' Once many more centres of radioactivity have been created, there will be no more choice, whether we can cope with the hazards or not.
It is clear that certain scientific and technological advances of the last thirty years have produced, and are continuing to produce, hazards of an altogether intolerable kind, At the Fourth National Cancer Conference in America in September 1960, Lester Breslow of the California State Department of Public Health reported that tens of thousands of trout in western hatcheries suddenly acquired liver cancers, and continued thus:
'Technological changes affecting man's environment are being introduced at such a rapid rate and with so little control that it is a wonder man has thus far escaped the type of cancer epidemic occurring this year among the trout.’
To mention these things, no doubt, means laying oneself open to the charge of being against science, technology, and progress. Let me therefore, in conclusion, add a few words about future scientific research. Man cannot live without science and technology any more than he can live against nature. What needs the most careful consideration, however, is the direction of scientific research. We cannot leave this to the scientists alone. As Einstein himself said.z1 'almost all scientists are economically completely dependent' and 'the number of scientists who possess a sense of social responsibility is so small' that they cannot determine the direction of research. The latter dictum applies, no doubt, to all specialists, and the task therefore falls to the intelligent layman, to people like those who form the National Society for Clean Ah and other, similar societies concerned with conservation. They must work on public opinion, so that the politicians, depending on public opinion, will free themselves from the thraldom of economism and attend to the things that really matter. What matters, as I said, is the direction of research, that the direction should be towards nonviolence rather than violence: towards an harmonious cooperation with nature rather than a warfare against nature; towards the noiseless, low-energy, elegant, and economical solutions normally applied in nature rather than the noisy, high-energy, brutal, wasteful, and clumsy solutions of our present-day sciences.
The continuation of scientific advance in the direction of ever increasing violence, culminating in nuclear fission and moving on to nuclear fusion, is a prospect of terror threatening the abolition of man. Yet it is not written in the stars that this must be the direction. There is also a life-giving and life-enhancing possibility, the conscious exploration and cultivation of all relatively non-violent, harmonious, organic methods of co-operating with that enormous, wonderful, incomprehensible system of God-given nature, of which we are a part and which we certainly have not made ourselves.
This statement, which was part of a lecture given before the National Society for Clean Air in October 1967. was received with thoughtful applause by a highly responsible audience, but was subsequently ferociously attacked by the authorities as 'the height of irresponsibility'. The most priceless remark was reportedly made by Richard Marsh, then Her Majesty's Minister of Power, who felt it necessary to 'rebuke' the author. The lecture, he said, war one of the more extraordinary and least profitable contributions to the current debate on nuclear and coal cost. (Daily Telegraph, 21 October 1967.)
However, times change. A report on the Control of pollution, presented in February 1972, to the Secretary of State for the Environment by an officially appointed Working Party, published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office and entitled Pollution: Nuisance or Nemesis?, has this to say:
'The main worry is about the future, and in the international context. The economic prosperity of the world seems to be linked with nuclear energy. At the moment, nuclear energy provides only one per cent of the total electricity generated in the world. By the year 2000, if present plans go ahead, this will have increased to well over fifty per cent and the equivalent of two new 500 MWe reactors - each the size of the one at Trawsfynydd in Snowdonia - will be opened every day.’
On radioactive wastes of nuclear reactors:
'The biggest cause of worry for the future is the storage of the long-lived radioactive wastes.... Unlike other pollutants, there is no way of destroying radioactivity.... So there is no alternative to permanent storage....
'In the United Kingdom, strontium-90 is at the present time stored as a liquid in huge stainless steel tanks at Wind-scale 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. But with the vast increase of strontium-90 expected in the future, the problem may prove far more difficult. Moreover, the expected switch to fast breeder reactors will aggravate the situation even further, for they produce large quantities of radioactive substances with very long half-lives.
'In effect, we are consciously and deliberately accumulating a toxic substance on the off-chance that it may be possible to get rid of it at a later date. We are committing future generations to tackle a problem which we do not know how to handle.' Finally, the report issues a very clear warning:
'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.' And how is the ever-increasing demand for energy to be satisfied?
'Since planned demand for electricity cannot be satisfied without nuclear power, they consider mankind must develop societies which are less extravagant in their use of electricity and other forms of energy. Moreover, they see the need for this change of direction as immediate and urgent.'
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 civilisation 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.