The whole idea of modern nuclear containment is that even if you did have idiots in charge – such as at Chernobyl – the resulting mess would be contained. And there is an international policing body that comes around inspecting.

All of which does tend to make things safer than, say, places like the Bhopal factory in India. Wanna bet – the next huge fatal accident won’t be in the nuclear business. It’s a helluva lot better policed than just about anything else.

I think i want to go and live on Pitcairn or somewhere. Nowhere else is remotely safe from what we are doing to the world, and even there it’s just a matter of time…

So I can’t help but wonder to what degree, in a country that Glenda describes in her post about the burning forests and how Nobody there is responsible. I’m sure the same Nobody would prove to be responcible if there was a nuclear power plant accident. That’s the way the world works, be it third or first.

But I sit here in a haze that is cut visibility and quadrupeled the number of respiratory illness turning up in emergency wards in Kuching. All caused by open burning by people who don’t give a damn. Who probably can’t afford to give a damn because 2 national governments haven’t bothered to teach them the first thing about land management and modern principles of agriculture. Because no one has pointed out to them that it may not be a good idea to have 10 kids when you have an annual income of less than 1000 USD.

As an environmentalist, I feel overwhelmed…and I can’t see that there is a viable alternative to going nuclear. Not while human beings emulate cartoon ostriches with their heads stuck in the stand.

Governments could kick in and subsidise these devices to the extent that they would have spent money on wasteful alternatives. The government could also give individuals discounts according to how much they save on their previous year’s receipted energy usage.

This the answer is a combination of the local and the central, the individual and the collective, as it should be.

As for Malaysia’s specific energy issues, I confess I know little. I do understand that different cultures will require different solutions.

Glenda

If you know a way to curtail growth short of bird flu, I’m with you…

Malaysia is running out of oil. There are no more places suitable for hydro. We are running out of gas. Hi-grade coal has to be imported for powerplants. We have a windless climate and no tides to speak of. And a people who believe they have a right to have as many kids as they like, backed by a government that agrees with that. Where does such a place go from here?
When I first came to Malaysia, the idea of having an aircon in the house or the car was almost unheard of except for the mega rich. Most houses – including my own for 12 years or so – never had a washing machine. Now Malaysians of all walks of life are finding the joys of aircons and all mod cons. Ask them to reduce their consumption and they will laugh at you. And I don’t know how to persuade them otherwise. In fact, I gave in and got an aircon myself. I’m tired of fighting when all around me no one seems to care.

Few people confuse the generation of electricity with the creation of nuclear weapons. Objecting to both does not mean that one can’t tell the difference between them.

The western world sees energy as a right, the necessary grease for a technological consumer society. Energy is not a right. That kind of thinking leads to Iraq. We need to learn to be supply-driven, not demand-driven. We need to say: ‘Here’s how much we can generate; let’s limit our use to that much.’ We need to get smarter, not greedier. This process works as a collective (governmental) decision that devolves to individual responsibility. If I can only use x amount of energy, how do I conserve it? I put lagging on my hot water cylinder. I install solar panels. I buy goods without packaging where possible. I’m careful because I don’t want to go without. I learn, and my kids learn, that we live in a finite world.

Even if nuclear power were totally safe (and scientists the world over do not have a great track record in safety issues — their main philosophy has always been ‘suck it and see’ — I have the geothermal report in my office from which that is a quote) and there was no issue with waste, I would still object to the wholesale installation of nuclear reactors. We need to learn our lessons. We need to learn how to limit our insatiable hunger for energy.

There are (conservatively) 15 million deaths each year directly attributable to starvation. Twenty-eight per minute. Three-quarters of them are children. When will technology produce enough food for everyone?

Now, in fact. The issue of world hunger is not technological, it is one of distribution. Scientists experiment with genetics to improve crops, but social scientists study human organisation and can help explain why food doesn’t get to the people who need it. It’s just that we don’t want to listen. Same with energy. We don’t need more toys in the sandpit, we need to learn to share them.

Here’s what would happen in New Zealand if we built a nuclear power station. Exactly the same as when we went hydro, and when we went geothermal. I know this because I conducted a government-funded two-year study of the consequences of large-scale development projects on the environment. We’d find some ‘waste-land’ to build it on. It’ll probably be indigenous land, because ‘waste-land’ is all they’ve been left with. It’ll have to be close to a river for cooling. Great: dump the coolant, the arsenic and the cadmium into the river, which is used by the local community. Then, because of the indigenous people’s isolation, charge them a hundred times as much as city dwellers to be connected to the national grid. Explain away the high local rates of cancer as ‘not statistically significant’.

There will be environmental and social effects from building large-scale nuclear power stations that have nothing to do with the ‘nuclear’ aspect. Access roads. Canals to get water to and from the site. Displacement of local communities. Dumping of non-nuclear toxic waste associated with the project (whatever the contemporary equivalent of asbestos or PCPs is) to be dug up in twenty years’ time. Visual and noise pollution.

Final point, I promise. In 1998 New Zealand experienced a severe, if short-lived, power shortage, sparked (heh) by a fault in Auckland’s power transmission. In the three months the crisis lasted the country saved 20% of normal power usage by turning off unnecessary lighting, commercial lighting, and other simple conservation measures.

There are good, sensible alternatives. Accept that demand has to be limited. Let those who have studied the benefits and costs of alternatives such as wind and solar power, such as geographers who can advise as to where they might best be sited, get on with the job. Local solutions for local communities, and no more disastrous large-scale, wasteful and damaging developments of any kind.

But Dr Caldicott is, I think, fairly typical of the anti-nuclear lobby. Well-intentioned, but impractical, and muddling weapons with power generation. They have been scared by nuclear history – and it is a pretty unsavoury history too. Hiroshima, the cold war, irresponsible testing even quite recently (in my own back yard when I was a kid, quite close enough for us to suffer the fallout where we lived), irresponsible behaviour by nuclear facilities and irresponsible waste disposal, a history of cover ups… All these events are enough to scare most people, me included.

But I am a rational, thinking human being and I have to see a larger picture and weigh what is happening elsewhere. I see a world where the burning of fossil fuels is already bringing about the end of the world as we know it.
The ice caps are melting for a start. That alone is going to change the world drastically.

I see that technology in the nuclear field is not the same as it was in 1950. Or 1980. Or even 2000. And we shouldn’t judge it by the past, any more than we should judge modern medicine by what they were doing back in the 1950’s. (A lobotomy anyone?)

In theory I would love to have a world with a steady or even falling population, powered by wind and thermal power and tidal energy – oh yeah? Tell me when any of those things are going to happen? And even they have disadvantages. When is nuclear fusion going to be an alternative to nuclear fission?

And that leaves us with the alternative of nuclear energy. I am absolutely against nuclear weapons and I consider any nation that deals with such things to be committing a sin of colossal hubris, and worse, against the human race. But the only way forward that I can see is nuclear power. It is clean, and waste is easily stored and monitored.

An irony is this: the more passion people direct to the anti-nuclear lobby, the less openness there is. And alas, human beings are such geniuses at burying their heads in the sand and pretending everything is all right. It’s not, and the anti-nuclear lobby should shoulder some of the blame for that.

As an environmentalist, I see only one way forwards that contains SOME hope for the world: the nuclear way.

Our problem is our desire as individuals to have our cake (electricity) and not accept any responsibility that goes with it.