The State of Nuclear Energy
On Nuclear Discourse
Written by Dom Brennan
5th October, 2020
In the early 20th century, Australian engineer Louis Brennan developed the revolutionary petrol-powered, gyroscope-stabilised monorail. The promise of unparalleled speeds and cheap construction costs, married with the natural stability afforded by gyroscopic physics, incited prodigious public interest. ‘Revolutionary!’ A cry of fecund anticipation hailed by the press of the time; all hope inevitably petering out in the years succeeding the Great War. For all the praise awarded by the tabloids, the industry’s little interest for Brennan’s revolutionary concept failed to materialise. Whilst reliability may certainly have been a point of contention, P. J. Bowler suggests a more immediate and imposing barrier to its development: a natural—psychological—aversion to the concept. Such confidence had the marketers in the safety and potentiality of the design, that adverts depicting the monorail on its single-cabled attachment precipitously traversing deep valleys and roaring seas complemented its mention across tabloids. This hubris served only to foster in the reader a distaste for what appeared as a fierce threat on life; whether such a threat was extant or not becomes lost in the face of terrifying risks. For all the claims of reliability, economic benefits, and frontier-building, Brennan’s monorail collapsed under the weight of its own expectations, resigning it to history.
The above text serves to illustrate the damaging effects of hubris. It is the opinion of this author that the nuclear power industry is currently experiencing—and has for several decades—the same life-limiting troubles for the same hubristic reasons as Brennan’s monorail. This short essay founds the groundworks towards demarcating and delineating the areas in which the nuclear power industry fails to appropriately or effectively manage its image in the public imagination.
Nuclear power began on the back foot, its first reveal to the public being its twisted use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ever since, the nuclear power industry has battled against its own makings. It is losing. Civil nuclear power plants are not nuclear bombs, they have neither the as-run capacity nor the intention to become nuclear bombs. How many know this? Civil nuclear power plants are low in carbon emissions per unit of energy produced, lower than solar and wind. How many people know this? How many people care? Whilst Herculaneum efforts have been made by a host of individuals towards promulgating this knowledge, whatever efforts have been made by official bodies responsible have been lacklustre. This raises the near-century long question of: why?
Let us first consider this thought: if the safety limits set by a governing body, say, on acceptable radiation exposure, are reduced, is the environment more, or less, safe? One’s first response is typically “less.” The limit is contracted. Previous studies were wrong. How many have before felt secure—dangerously so—in exceeding this reduced level that we now know is ‘safe’? This foregoing line of reasoning is facile; it is in fact the reverse. A safer environment tolerates fewer unsafe excursions, therefore in lowering the upper bound one ensures that the safer methods are enforced. R. Calder argues it this way: consider a car insurance company; when it is obvious that a previously excused accident is, through improved knowledge and efficiency of design, avoidable, the bonus granted for avoiding such an accident is reduced; after all, why should someone be rewarded more for something that is now easily avoidable?
This language of ‘safer’ hamstrings nuclear power. The comparative ‘safer’ implies the superlative ‘safest’, and once the option of ‘safest’ is in the imagination of a public, it is unmoved. Scientific fact and discourse become tertiary, comparative reasoning is now secondary, fear is the thraldom. The ‘safest’ option, a public may say, is no risk of radiation; never mind if that risk, if materialised, is barely a thousandth the worth of radiation any one person is exposed to in normal life. Never mind if this ‘safest’ option, renouncing nuclear power, demands the use of air-poisoning gas power plants to take its stead, as is occurring in Belgium. It is the failing of the nuclear power industry to educate, successfully, why the car insurance company should reduce its bonus—not increase—following an improvement of efficiency. “It is safer!” Is part of the problem.
I use the word ‘scientists’ with distaste. One scientist may disagree with another; this is the founding philosophy of science, so much so that it is more prudent to write “One scientist should disagree with another.” It is in this discourse that true knowledge is born. Two sides with the same data (for pure data is insensitive to bias) may produce opposing conclusions. It is up to the discourse to persuade the jury—the people—why one only is correct. However, in collecting all under one umbrella term, ‘scientist’, we become vulnerable to ambiguity and in turn perceived perjury. When a scientist of one field comments without due diligence on the proceedings of another of vastly different scope, this scientist is to be rightfully opposed. In collecting all who study a science under the title of ‘scientist’, we are susceptible to appropriating weight upon an ignorant scientist the same weight attributed to a bastion in the relevant field. The tabloid “Scientists disagree!” promotes the image of “Scientist disagrees with self!” This problem is limited not only to the nuclear power industry, arising also for vaccination advocates and climate change spokesmen. In acquiescing the scientific(this being the operative prefix) discourse with those not studied in the field, the nuclear power industry is conceding the control of the narrative, for those not learned in the field are unfortunately more numerous and thus much louder.
The preceding point must be caveated with the following: that in the establishing of how scientific discourse proceeds, a careful balance must be struck such that the nuclear scientists involved (any scientists for the relevant field) remain yet merely a lodestone in the founding of nuclear power. Moreover, those most eminent in the field are such because they are in the best position to say, “We know how much we don’t know.” These most eminent are not to be put on a pedestal, for their knowledge is subject to the same facts known to all at the time; therefore, if a time comes where something previously unknown is revealed—the known unknown—they are neither culpable of perjury nor of disinformation. Unfortunately, a pedestal currently exists.
Being an essay on the groundworks, this text shall be left as it is. It is not the intention of the author that this act as a diatribe against the nuclear power industry, far from it. Eventually, hopes of an appropriately distanced and genuinely helpful service on behalf of the industry for the public are maintained.