Reflections on a Revolution

As I observed in another article earlier today, we appear to have devised complex ways of reasoning and calculating risk out of our political discourse. Interestingly, however, Beck observed how this time around, another global energy-related risk — climate change — appears to be pushing the risk of nuclear catastrophe off the radar altogether:

The “existential concern” being awakened across the world by global risks has led to a contest to suppress large-scale risks in political discussion. The incalculable dangers to which climate change is giving rise are supposed to be “combated” with the incalculable dangers associated with nuclear power plants. Many decisions over large-scale risks are not a matter of choosing between safe and risky alternatives, but between different risky alternatives, and often between alternatives whose risks are too qualitatively different to easily compare. Existing forms of scientific and public discourse are no match for such considerations. Here governments adopt the strategy of deliberate simplification. They present each specific decision as one between safe and risky alternatives, while playing down the uncertainties of nuclear energy and focusing attention on the oil crisis and climate change.

The interesting thing to note is that Ulrich Beck, while clearly critical of nuclear power, is far from the standard anti-nuclear environmentalist. In fact, Beck’s issue is not so much with nuclear technology per se, as with the way our governments are failing to address the inherent risk that comes along with it:

… to disregard the “vestigial risk” of nuclear energy is to misunderstand the cultural and political dynamic of the “residual-risk-society”. The most tenacious, convincing and effective critics of nuclear energy are not the greens – the most influential opponent of the nuclear industry is the nuclear industry itself.

Even if politicians were successful in the semantic reinvention of nuclear power as green electricity, and even if the opposing social movements were to dissipate their energy through fragmentation, this is all nullified by the real opposing force of the threat. It is constant, permanent and remains present even when exhausted demonstrators have long since given up. The probability of improbable accidents increases with the number of “green” nuclear plants; each “occurrence” awakens memories of all the others, across the world.

Interestingly, Beck, from his non-environmentalist perspective, ends up finding himself face-to-face with a leading pro-nuclear environmentalist, James Lovelock (of the Gaia hypothesis), who was quoted in today’s Guardian, saying that “there is a monstrous myth about nuclear power. I would make a strong guess that of the tens of thousands of people killed in Japan, none of them will be from nuclear power.”

He added that nuclear power “is very safe,” and that people were unreasonably “prejudiced” against it. Chernobyl, according to Lovelock, was simply an “idiotic mess-up that could only have occurred in the Soviet Union,” and it only killed about 56 people — a fraction of the annual deaths in the world’s oil refineries and coal mines, leaving aside the indirect fossil-fuel related deaths from respiratory disease and the like.

(N.B.: any views expressed in this article are my own)

Also read:

Political Fallout of Japan’s Nuclear Crisis Reaches Europe
While Japanese workers are furiously trying to stave off a nuclear meltdown, the political fallout has already reached European shores — in a very big way.

Man vs. Nature in the Nuclear Age
The triple tragedy that is unfolding in Japan has starkly revealed a major contradiction in man’s relationship to nature under the conditions of late modernity. Stumbling along in ‘collective blindness’, humanity continues to live at the mercy of risks that we will never fully understand.