Light neutrons, heavy debate

[Hans De Keulenaer]

On the nuclear energy discourse

Am I pro or am I con regarding nuclear energy? I honestly do not know. I cannot answer the question without putting in caveats. Or maybe I just don't want to answer it. I feel a fierce resistance to answering it with an unequivocal yes or no, because the question is simply too heavy.

I realized this when reading the essay 'Paradoxes on death penalty' by Gerrit Krol. Krol is a Dutch writer, thinker, and computer scientist. In 1992 he published 'For who wants evil / Reflections on death penalty'. In this book, he does not take a position in favour of nor against the death penalty for unscrupulous murderers; it only brainstorms freely on the subject and considers both pro and con arguments. But that was enough to cause him to be publicly denounced. Krol reacted with a new essay, 'Paradoxes on death penalty'. This text contains the following apt analysis:

'Death penalty seems to be a political problem with such a heavy weight, that just like natural gravity, it pulls to it everything that is coming near, no matter of which kind. If there are no exceptions, a man stops thinking. Whoever has never seen an apple not fall when released, hasn't got the slightest clue on what is gravity. He does not see what is happening, when the apple falls. Only when two apples, when released, keep on turning around each other, one starts to imagine what gravity could be.

You would wish that a problem that risks crushing human judgement by its weight, could be made a little lighter, so that in its less threatening form, leaves intact our ability to judge.'

That's it. That is also what is hampering a real public debate on nuclear energy. Both supporters and opponents are too blind to see the exceptions in their arguments. The subject is so heavy, so overly-symbolic, that it has become a black hole that sucks up every attempt to think on it with an open mind.

The burden of its military origin

It is not too difficult to explain how nuclear technology got loaded with such a heavy symbolic value. We all know its military origin, we know the history of Los Alamos and we all have seen pictures of Hiroshima after the bomb. Nuclear energy is both the height of human achievement and the height of human horror. It is the perfect real-world example for both the people who believe that technology leads us to heaven, and those who believe technology leads us to hell. Consequently, the debate being fought out under the flag of nuclear energy is a debate that reaches much further than the actual subject, far into the realm of Weltanschauung.

One would have expected that with the end of the Cold War and its seemingly permanent state of nuclear peril, the debate would have grown less sharp. Indeed, this has happened but only relatively. Under the pressure of rising concern over climate change, a few rare individual green thinkers have recently dared to express the heretical opinion that not everything to do with nuclear power is evil and placed themselves in favour of nuclear energy (see former blog post). But in general the debate stays in a constant state of trench warfare in which nobody dares to leave his trench for a free wander into the open field of rational and emotion-free debate.

Examples of twisted reasoning

The following are a few examples of how prejudices can prevent sound argumentation:

• Greenpeace made up a ranking of the available electricity supply packages in Belgium according to their environmental performance. The package 'Electrabel Groen' is set into the last, red category, although it only makes use of renewable energy. The argument: 'Because the investments [Electrabel] made in nuclear energy and their interest to keep on investing in nuclear energy, Electrabel Groen is given the minimum score in the category investments (- 1).' So suddenly the whole company of Electrabel is judged, and not merely the product Electrabel Groen. Moreover, despite this disputable low score, Electrabel Groen still gets 25 points. It is nevertheless ranked below Essent, which received 0 points but is allowed into the middle, brown category. That is very strange reasoning: first setting up a scoring system and then saying that this system is not valid for the ranking. For Greenpeace, nuclear energy seems to be infinitely heavy, not able to fit into any scoring system.
  
• The arguments on the other side are often not any better. In their study 'The role of electricity', Eurelectric investigated the impact of energy policies and technologies up to the year 2050. Four scenarios were developed using the PRIMES and PROMETHEUS models. In all of these scenarios, nuclear energy is coupled to the development of Carbon Capture and Storage at fossil fuel power plants. The individual influence of nuclear energy can therefore not be assessed. But the policy recommendations contain the following threatening sentence: 'Any policy that tends to exclude specific elements of this balanced portfolio will fail to build a robust and economically-sound low-carbon electricity system.' In other words, an ill-disguised defence of nuclear energy rather than a sound conclusion based on the simulated scenarios. See also the recent blog post 'The role of electricity in a carbon constrained world... and the role of power utility companies'.
  
• See my Sustainable Energy blog post 'Studies can prove whatever you want them to' of 7 July 2007. It contains another striking example.

I would like to invite all readers that have similar examples of twisted reasoning on nuclear energy to post them as a comment underneath this article.

Lightening the debate to enlighten the question

In order to develop a genuine and honest debate and an enlightened vision of nuclear energy, the subject should first be liberated from its heaviness and its symbolic baggage.

A good start would be to put the importance of the issue into perspective. Whether we continue with nuclear energy or not is just one of the many questions on our energy future.

• According to the IEA, nuclear energy accounts for only 6 per cent of the total energy consumed worldwide, and this figure is not likely to change drastically in the coming years.
  
• As far as I can judge, whatever policy will be followed, nuclear technology on its own does not have the potential to ensure a worldwide security of energy supply, nor can it be a complete solution for climate change.
  
• Is nuclear waste a major problem? Certainly. It is a serious ethical issue whether we may produce something that requires safeguarding for thousands of years. But today it's too late; the nuclear waste is already there. We will have to find a solution for it anyway, whether or not we continue with nuclear energy. This debate should have been held in 1950.

So in the end, am I pro or am I con regarding nuclear energy? Maybe it is not that important to be either. What is important though is that we keep on thinking and debating with a free and open mind using arguments based on factual data and not just prejudices or emotional opinions.