The Original Sin
A First Meditation on Nuclear Power
The pacific use of Nuclear Power for civil electricity generation seems to suffer from a priori stigmatisation preventing us from seeing the evidence of its safety, cleanliness and reliability as an affordable, decarbonised energy source. Too often, such bias hijacks optimal decision-making in a matter of energy production, environment protection and human health & safety.
In the forthcoming series of few short articles, I will reflect and invite readers to reflect on some possible origins of the public opposition to civil nuclear, that looks widely diffused despite being contradicted by scientific and statistical evidence of safety, cleanliness and social profitability.
In the beginning, it was war: the atrocious fire of the primordial gods bringing death and suffering among humans, destruction into the world … and prodigious inventions. Under the selective pressure of martial competition, the human brain’s soft tissue produced the hardest weapons. Peace then came, and made those weapons tools, for the sake of progress and growth… Until the ensuing battle. Stones were thrown ad sticks were slashed; fire was set to dwellings, blades were stabbed in the flesh. Every bridge and road made armies pass, well before goods. As haunted animals that gather strengths to fight or flee, as predators that want to strike their prey, so humans did at war: investing all they had. Is truly war the fastest way to squeeze inventions out of our brains?
Nuclear power, i.e. the generation of electricity in thermal power plants that use nuclear fission as a primary energy source, undeniably derives from WW2 and Cold War military programs. Not from the weapons themselves, we must clarify, but from the military technology then developed to produce the fissile; and from the complex physics that stands behind the understanding of nuclear fission and the capability to control it inside a reactor (or to make it go wild in a bomb).
The US Manhattan Project, that giant puzzle whose participants were not aware of more than the tiny piece in the hands of each one of them, brought to the development, in record time and on record investments, of the “atomic” (nuclear fission) bomb. Similar projects (less effective, History tells) were ongoing at the same time in other countries. Equally effective others started around the Planet after WW2, all intended to provide their respective countries with the new, terrible weapon. “The Bomb” troubled anyone’s sleep with nightmares of mass extermination during the interminable Cold War. On the positive side, that dark menace perhaps prevented (up to now) the explosion of another global-scale conflict; it also came with mountains of experimental results, functional reactors and fuel fabrication processes available, essentially for free, to allow the rising of civil nuclear power. What did the military apparatus see in the civil nuclear to let themselves drag towards such an impetus of generosity? Maybe, the right question is ‘what did the Governments see in civil nuclear to force the military apparatus to such a friendly sharing’; and I bet the answer is “strategy”. If WW1 had taken war from the battlefields to trenches and WW2 had savagely brought the fire amid civil population, Cold War infiltrated the conflict in any area of human life, and Energy did not make an exception. So, no surprise: if any effort had become normal for the dominion of oil wells, why should the development of a high-potential energy source, like civil nuclear, have appeared in a much lower line of a State agenda?
On a side note, we might argue that, if that branch of research for power generation that is nuclear fusion has been advancing so slowly, continuously postponing the set-up of a first industrial plant capable of net electric power generation, one of the reasons could be the limited heritability of knowledge and technology from the corresponding military sector. In fact, while the basic physics of the nuclear fusion reaction is the same in both cases, the civil use of nuclear fusion for energy production faces problems of unique complexity, not part of the military application. Therefore, the development of all the complex science and frontier technology necessary to sustain and control the high-temperature & low-pressure nuclear fusion reaction out of its natural environment (that is the core of a star), has been counting on lower budget sources of financing.
After the USA nuclear strike against Japan, which revealed to the world the same existence of the new bombs and their devastating potential, the international pacifist movement took a position against nuclear weapons. Anti-nuclear protests began all over the Western Bloc, exactly as protests were commonplace advocating for the end of the Cold War’s several proxy conflicts (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc.), expression of widespread concern. The nuclear weapons testing (intensively conducted by USA and USSR, but also by France, UK, PRC, India, Pakistan and, much more recently North Korea) that had started with the same Manhattan Project become massive between the ´50s and the early ’90s; 1962 saw a nuclear test explosion every 2 or 3 days. Therefore, it does not surprises that Environmentalism became concerned too.
While anti-nuclear activism emerged strongly in the Western Cold War block, the Popular Republic of China, the Soviet Union and the other communist countries of Asia and Eastern Europe did not let trespass information on anti-nuclear protests.
In the West, both Pacifism and Environmentalism have traditionally found themselves close to the political Left; this may be a reason for the more evident and frequent position against civil nuclear power among Left than Right. Curiously enough, anyway, China and USSR, the two countries most ideologically close to the western Communist and Socialist political parties, have always been pushing hard developing a solid, effective civil nuclear industry and building a great number of civil nuclear power plants. Even now, several years after the end of the Soviet influence, it is in the East that most of the European civil nuclear power plants are currently under construction or seriously planned. What is it that predisposes East-European countries to such a more pragmatic approach than most West-European ones? Is there more attention in the East while informing the voting population on the actual effectiveness, safety and reliability of the various way to produce electricity? Is it the high degree of independence of Nuclear from imports (especially of Russian natural gas) more appealing to them due, perhaps, to the recall of Russian domination? Did Eastern Europeans develop a lesser inclination to protest against their Governments during the long years of the Soviet regime’s influence? Is it due to the still live memory of how more challenging life is among frequent electrical blackouts?
It is hard to say what, among activists and the general public, brought the same opposition triggered by nuclear weapons also against civil nuclear power. Was it confusion between power reactors and weapons, due to the complexity of the matter and the ineffective communication by governments, industry and the scientific community? Or was it scare for a still unknown technology, together with suspicion instilled by the thick aura of secret around many early nuclear facility (especially the first generation of research facilities, somehow hybrid civil and military)? Maybe, the suspicion that nuclear power plants would also be used to produce military-grade fissile?
Let us suppose that you are an early human in the savannah, nakedly walking around, aiming to recollect veggies, hunt animals, and stay alive against your predators’ will. If you incline to run away quickly at any menace, often misjudging simple shadows for actual predators, maybe you lose your face with the tribe, but tend to stay alive long enough to find a partner and have children. On the contrary, if you hardly opt to run, you may be regarded as a hero, but your glory will be soon chanted… in remembrance; maybe before you can transmit your genes to a new generation; thus, failing the level. Nowadays, very few of us live the adventurous life of the hunter-gatherer; our “savannah” has now the multiform shape of an open-space office, a jammed motorway ring and the global financial market; our most menacing predators are investment banks and tax collectors; we still die eaten, yes, but by cancer or mortgage. Yet, our survival instinct, baffled by the freewheeling acceleration of our civilisation process in just a handful of millennia and, even more, by the true hyperspace jump it made in the last three centuries, did not have time to adjust itself. As it is true for other equally powerful instincts we still carry, our sense of self-preservation clocks, more or less, as it “learned” to do while evolving with us along millions of years: down from the trees, across the bushes and towards the crops. Consequently, should it surprise us that, reacting under the instinct’s impulse, we easily mistake shadows for tigers, bushes for enemies or civil nuclear electricity generation for military applications?
To wrap up, the present civil nuclear is possible due to the huge investments once made for military purposes: civil nuclear power plants share with the military projects the fundamentals of the same physics and part of the auxiliary technology. Such original sin may be the very root of the hateful opposition that, since its beginning, civil nuclear has been experiencing, and that still prevents us from taking full advantage of civil nuclear power to make Human life better compatibly with the respect of the environment (that, again, also comes to our full advantage).
