Anyone who expressed shock, surprise,
horror or
helpless
mirth at the government's decision to give the go-ahead to a new round
of nuclear power stations in the UK deserves a slap and a strong
injunction to wake up and smell the plutonium. This was always
going to happen, so get used to it. Some people may have thought, in
the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and the revelations of
gross and grotesque safety infringements by nuclear companies in the
70's and 80's, that nuclear's goose was cooked, and that public opinion
was irreversibly set against its comeback. Such optimists underestimate
the power of creeping propaganda by the
state and overestimate the collective memory of the public.
What, besides a lot of bilge about new safety procedures and new ideas
about waste disposal, has really swung it for the nuclear lobby is the
increasing fear that we, in the West, are either going to be hostages
to the mullahs in Iran or those commies in Venezuela for oil, or
hostages to the Russian mafia for gas (who have shown themselves quite
capable of turning off the taps if they don't get the price they want).
Blair's government have played a clever game of buttering up the public
with so-called energy reviews, which were really about acclimatizing
public opinion to the inevitable. The greens have been effectively
neutralized, being unable to find a
way out of the environmental frying pan of fossil fuels without hitting
the fire of nuclear fission, while emerging research into wind power
has set back alarmingly the time necessary for this technology to
start being a net carbon saver, from an estimate of 18 months by the
wind turbine industry itself to between 8 and 16 years by independent
researchers, on a projected 25 year turbine life span (New Scientist,
July 8).
And could there be another and darker reason why nuclear is back on the
agenda and the same money is not going to be spent either on
renewables, or even more sensibly, insulating houses and finding ways
to reduce consumption? The original reason for the nuclear programme
was that not only could you run steam turbines
with the resulting water vapour but you could also build bombs to
vaporize your political and economic rivals, and the reasoning still
holds good, in a world of ageing nuclear arsenals and an emergent
superpower, China, whose expected ruthlessness in suppressing global
competitors may be judged by its ruthlessness in suppressing its own
people.
But the bitterest pill for environmentalists to swallow is that the
government's case on nuclear is actually pretty hard to fault.
Renewables provide about 4 per cent of the UK's energy supply and the
most massive expansion programme imaginable is not going to increase
that amount to a significant level for decades,whereas the threat of
strangulation from global suppliers of oil and gas is immediate and
stark, as are the spiralling price rises.
While the USA and the UK may with impunity invade Iraq when its
chieftain starts monkeying around with oil supplies, the same tactic is
hardly going to work in Venezuela, heavily backed by China, or in
Russia, which nobody has ever invaded without immediately and solemnly
wishing they hadn't. There are no other emergent technologies. Fusion
is still decades away, and always will be, according
to the old joke. Cold fusion is, according to the accepted wisdom, just
a joke. As hydro goes bigger, the cracks in the dams start to appear,
much to the embarrassment of Chinese engineers, and the energy of wind
appears to be best harnessed by building on, and effectively
destroying, millions of tons of peat bog, itself a massive carbon sink.
If socialism were established tomorrow, the question of nuclear energy
would take a back-seat, behind more pressing questions of food
production. But it would re-emerge, amid a hotly disputed debate over
energy consumption and reduction. A socialist society which had to find
energy out of nowhere and with no time
to develop renewables, might conceivably go nuclear, at least for a
time. But it is not a racing certainty, or even an ambling probability.
If one were to take away the factors of capitalist competitive
production which so completely influence the present controversy one
would be left with a more rational basis for planning, which would take
into account global minimum energy requirements, both domestic and
industrial, rather than global optimum industrial
performance to outdo business rivals. If Europe, for example, didn't
have to stay one jump ahead of South East Asia and China in
manufacturing stakes, and if China wasn't in such an all-fired rush to
industrialise simply to compete on global markets, the question of
energy might be approached in an altogether calmer and more globally
sustainable way.
But in capitalism, the energy question is really one of global
dominance. The power at stake is really political and economic. Whether
the source of that power is from nuclear fission, fossil fuels, or
farting Friesians, is entirely beside the
point.
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The Sting
The ongoing war between mainstream
scientists and the
homeopathic
community,
which recently saw the Royal Veterinary Society obliged to withdraw a
list of homeopathic vets from its website after a storm of
protests from the
scientific
community, has begun to assume farcical proportions. Now holidaymakers
are returning home with malaria after refusing conventional
anti-malarial drugs in
favour of homeopathic 'alternatives' (BBC Online, July 13).
An undercover investigation by
the groupSense About Science and BBC's Newsnight programme
revealed that homeopathic
consultants were telling people they didn't need the 'horrible'
conventional drugs and could safely use homeopathic medications, which
on analysis turned out to be 99.99 per cent water with a virtually
undetectable level of quinine.
When challenged by Newsnight, the clinics claimed this was a mistake,
and that clients were told to consult their doctors, a claim not
supported by the secretly recorded interview transcripts.
However, all this doesn't seem quite fair on the hardworking
homeopaths. Being in a sympathetic mood, Pathfinders offers the
following explanation: what the clinics really meant to say was that
their remedies were indeed perfectly effective,
but only against homeopathic mosquitoes.
The fact that mosquitoes are usually in the habit of delivering
large and potentially
deadly doses of malaria is a disappointing reflection on their
unchristian natures but this can hardly be blamed on homeopathic
clinics, who are only trying to help.
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