1) It is bad systems design.

With small decentralised units, when technology advances (as it is doing, rapidly) you can swap in new units.

With nuke you’re stuck with a monolithic system for 50 years.

CHP[12] units are already used extensively by EU/Scandinavian countries, 8% of US power is generated using CHP. This is not rocket-science, though could be with the levels of investment that nuclear will cost… just to deal with its waste.

In addition to this, smaller decentralised units are more resilient to outages, are quicker to deploy and quicker to decommission. They create a competing ecosystem of technologies that is under pressure to advance. Nuke doesn’t.

To draw an analogy, Nuke is like a system of mainframe computers (from the 50s), while decentralised micro-generators is an internet of rapidly advancing, competing and evolving systems.

In systems-engineering terms, nuke stations also represent “single points of failure”. They’re less resilient.

From a military/terrorist perspective, they’re a giant “Kick Me” sign.

2) Nuke is dangerous.

Despite what the nuke industry says (you know, the people who last time around said it would be “too cheap to meter”), nuclear power is dangerous. When a fuse blows [1], you have to shut down a portion of the grid. Despite what the nuke industry says, cockups and accidents are happening all the time [2][3][4][5][6]

Nuke lobbyists now claim that it’s safe (funny, they said that last time round) but, (and this should be the first, last and only nail in the coffin of this idea) the UK govt has decided that nuke companies should not be responsible for the costs of cleaning up after an accident because no company should be reasonably expected to handle such a huge expense. This is an admission of risk – no company should have to pay for a Chernobyl… the public should.

This simple fact kills all arguments about safety.

And, once again, it’s privatised profits and socialised risks in a set up that resembles if not a monopoly then a cartel.

3) The economics stink

Nuclear power cannot work economically without massive government (that means you) subsidies. Anyone subscribing to ideas about free-markets should reject nuclear economics as a point of principle.

The potential for (distributed) profit from renewable technology on the other hand is vast – and this is technology that can be happily sold everywhere on the planet, without the paranoia we’re currently seeing over Iran etc. Instead of the benefit remaining in a few (gnarly old) hands, it can be distributed more democratically, planet-wide.

CHP (and other renewables) also offer much greater scope for local control.

Downstream energy savings (ie: efficiency) create huge upstream savings. The idea that our current escalating energy consumption needs to keep escalating at its current rate is nonsense. Amory Lovins’ (from the video above) company recently retrofitted the Empire State Building, reducing it’s energy consumption by 40% [9][10]

That’s a downstream energy saving – in the UK, 60% of energy generated goes straight up as heat. Our systems are inefficient… every watt saved at the wall-point, saves orders of magnitude greater of watts at source.

4) We don’t know what to do with the waste we already have.

Nuke is not clean, it’s incredibly dirty.

The Nuke industry have jumped on the idea that it produces low carbon emissions (and that’s ignoring that extraction/ running/ decommissioning etc are so carbon-intensive that nuke only represents a saving of 8% [13]) to promote the idea that it’s clean.

It’s not.

Nuke waste storage currently costs £1 billion a year, year in, year out, essentially forever. The half lives [7] of nuke waste runs to hundreds of thousands of years. How would you feel if… Oliver Cromwell’s generation say, had invented nuke power and left us with a billion pound a year storage bill? Feel a bit differently about them?

How about Willam the Conqueror?

The Romans?

The Sumerians?

Seems crazy doesn’t it? Look at it this way: one day, tens of thousands of years from now there will be cultures looking back at us as unimaginably distant memories… far far older than the Assyrians, Sumerians etc etc are to us…

…and they’ll still have to be dealing with this crap that ignorant morons from the 20th century left them with. That is our legacy. That’s the tyrrany we’ve already gifted to the future: taxation without representation.

This is assuming of course, that everyone producing this stuff is dealing with it responsibly. Know why the Somalian Pirates are seen as heroes by Somalis? Because EU ships have been dumping nuclear waste off the African coast[8]

Part of the sweetner that the UK govt is offering to the nuke industry to make new plants is to hide the costs of the waste in existing waste programs. They can’t do this without lying to us what the real costs are. Take a look at the history of the nuclear reactor that is being built in Finland [11]

Or to put it another way, they’re lying on behalf of big business, against your interests, again.

5) Centralised control.

You’ve seen what centralised control of dwindling resources (yes, there is such a thing as Peak Uranium, we have at most 50 years worth) did to the 20th century. You really want that for the 21st?

One of the things about renewables is that they’re oligarchy-breakers. They obviate the need for trillion-dollar wars.

They’re representative of participatory cultures (which is what we’re moving into) as opposed to nuke, which is representative of command-cultures (which is what we’re moving away from, but which all of our institutions are firmly entrenched in)

6) Proliferation

Nuke power provides the perfect shelter for proliferation of nuke weapons.

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Why? Why do all this? We already have alternatives – we’re already building them. Why invest all these hundreds of billions into something that is so inadequate?

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[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12731668?nclick_check=1&forced=true

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/nuclearpower/5509277/Nuclear-disaster-averted-by-dirty-laundry.html

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/us/03nuke.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

[4] (UK) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/29/britishenergygroupbusiness.nuclear

[5] (Fr) http://www.euronews.net/en/article/24/07/2008/france-fourth-nuclear-incident-in-a-fortnight/

[6] (De) http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,576550,00.html

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

[8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html

[9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKnxDcIUfdY

[10] http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid598.php

[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environment/29nuke.html

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration

[13] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/nuclear

(The Bullingdon Club)

When is a reformation not a reformation?

Exhibit #1.

Ed Milliband’s recent call for “Reform” :

• More power for parliamentary select committees to scrutinise legislation.

• The format of PMQs.

Exhibit #2:

David Cameron’s recent call for “Reform” :

• Limit the power of the prime minister by giving serious consideration to introducing fixed-term parliaments, ending the right of Downing Street to control the timing of general elections.

• Strengthen local government by giving councils the power of “competence”. This would allow councils to reverse Whitehall decisions to close popular services, such as a local post office or a railway station, by giving them the power to raise money to keep them open.

–

So what have we got? Here’s a glib truism:

The founding priorities of any institution fall to second place upon formation – and the first priority becomes self-preservation.

What we are “given” is a series of empty gestures that are so facile, that you could change the context and they’d become satire. What we will always be “given” as reforms from they-that-would-be-reformed, falls into two main categories:

1) gestures designed to placate, so business can carry on as normal

2) shock-doctrine tactics designed to push through (same-old) agendas that were previously unpopular, ie: bad.

Really, I’m not bothered what MPs wear, they can dress up as giant bees for all I care, so long as they don’t:

- sell 220 million worth of IR buildings to a company (that we now (and forever) (have to) pay rent to) operating out of a tax haven
- commit us to 200 billion in future spending in highly dubious PFI deals
- get us into an illegal war, ignoring millions of people who took to the streets and protested, and about which we were told lie after lie after lie

and so on.

And as I am paranoid, I’m inclined to interpret David Cameron’s call for “giving power back to individuals” as being a species of the “small government” new-speak as lovingly crafted by the massively corporate-funded free-market think-tanks in America.

“Small Government” is slight of hand for reducing democratically mandated control over corporations – so creeping privatisation becomes galloping privatisation, the 4th Estate consolidates to become even more of an arm (or mouth) of the ruling elite than it already is, and externalisation of corporate costs can become even more egregious and exploitative than they already are.

It’s not about reducing the power of government, it’s about reducing the power of democracy. It’s about ceding power back to a baronial class.

And this (given the photograph at the top) really ought come as no surprise to anyone.

So… we can’t let the terms of reform come from political incumbents – they’ve got to come from us.

So what do we want? What questions do we need to be asking ourselves?