Abstract
This article makes two sets of observations about the moral bases of opposition to nuclear power. First, the article distinguishes between survivalist opposition to nuclear power (built on a conviction that the central moral fact about nuclear power is the cataclysmic threat it represents) and a more political opposition that focuses on matters of justice and democratic equality. Second, the article notes that the tension between these two styles of moral reasoning reflects a more general tension in the environmental movement as a whole. The movement against nuclear power therefore provides an illustration writ small for why environmentalists would do well not to rest their politics entirely on claims about human (and broader ecosystem) survival.
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Notes
James M. Jasper, Nuclear Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 123.
Ibid., 217.
Robert Jungk, The New Tyranny: How Nuclear Power Enslaves Us (New York: Fred Jordan Books/Grosset and Dunlap, 1979), 3.
John Francis and Paul Abrect, eds., Facing Up to Nuclear Power (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 156.
Ibid., 1.
http://www.clamshellalliance.org/legacy/?p=319, (accessed May 2012).
http://www.clamshellalliance.org/legacy/?p=314, (accessed May 2012).
Jasper, Nuclear Politics, 32.
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/16398/page3/, (accessed May 2012).
Reported by Felicity Barringer, “Old Foes Soften to New Reactors,” http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/national/15nuke.html?pagewanted=all, (accessed May 2012).
Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss, “Nuclear Now!,” Wired, issue 13.2, February 2005, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/nuclear.html, (accessed May 2012).
For an account of these matters, see Barringer, “Old Foes.” For a more recent and thorough presentation of Brand's thoughts on nuclear power, see Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (New York: Viking, 2009), chapter 5.
For example, James Lovelock, author of the famous “Gaia hypothesis,” announced in 2004 that, “nuclear power is the only green solution.” James Lovelock, “Nuclear Power is the Only Green Solution,” The Independent, 24 May 2004.
Richard Heffern, “Environmentalists Spar Over Nuclear Power,” National Catholic Reporter, 15 March 2011. See http://neronline.org/blogs/eco-catholic/environmentalists-spar-over-nuclear-power, (accessed February 2013).
“The Fukushima Accident and Its Implications for Nuclear Power in the US and Globally,” www.nrdc.org/nuclear/11061701.asp, (accessed May 2012).
Heffern, “Environmentalists Spar Over Nuclear Power”.
http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/, (accessed May 2012).
This is the United Nation's estimate. Physicist Richard A. Muller, in his influential Physics for Future Presidents (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2008), presents reasons why he thinks this figure may be significantly inflated. See 102–10.
This is the figure given by William D. Nordhaus in a recent New York Review of Books review. He points out that other estimates are significantly higher. William D. Nordhaus, “Energy: Friend or Enemy?,” New York Review of Books, 27 October 2011, 30. For another set of estimates, see the Civil Society Institute's discussion at www.civilsocietyinstitute.org/media/b012511release.cfm, (accessed May 2012).
There are also serious environmental dangers and environmental-justice concerns associated with uranium mining. See, for example, Doug Brugge, “The History of Uranium Mining and the Navajo People,” The American Journal of Public Health 92 (September 2002): 1410–19.
The New York Times's “Green Blog” from 17 February 2011 is helpful on these matters, and it provides a link to a detailed report on the cost of coal by the Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and Global Environment: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/premature-deaths/, (accessed May 2012).
New York Review of Books, 13 October 2011, 29–32.
See Greenpeace at http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/nuclear/, (accessed May 2012). Of course, many individuals still subscribe to the older “absolutist” position. Greenpeace's Chris Miller, for example, has recently argued that the environmental risk of nuclear power is simply too high to contemplate. See Erika Lovely, “Environmentalists See Fission on Nuclear Power,” Politico, 31 January 2008. My point is not that everyone has abandoned the absolutist position, but that this position is no longer as widely accepted or fully persuasive as it had been a generation ago.
http://www.clamshellalliance.org/legacy/?p=319, (accessed May 2012).
Jim Falk, Global Fission: The Battle over Nuclear Power (Melbourne and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 327.
Alain Touraine, Anti-Nuclear Protest: The Opposition to Nuclear Energy in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3.
Amory B. Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” originally published in Foreign Affairs, reprinted by Friends of the Earth, Special Reprint Issue, Not Man Apart, November 1977, vol. 6, no. 20. This can be found at http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Library/E77-01_EnergyStrategyRoadNotTaken, (accessed May 2012).
In his classic essay, “Conservation is Not Enough,” Joseph Wood Krutch captures this dual mood by simultaneously warning us that our material voraciousness is responsible for “the most prodigious imbalance in the natural order which has ever existed,” yet reminding us both that we should allow the “earth to produce beauty and joy” and that “[w]e must live for something besides making a living.” Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert (New York: William Sloane, 1967), 201–202, 200.
Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love (New York: Scribner, 2010), 161.
Ibid., 169.
Ibid., 201.
“Farmers toil. Nature laughs. Farmers weep. There's your history of agriculture in a nutshell.” Ibid., 207.
Christopher Lasch provides the best discussions of the artisanal and populist versions of this impulse. For a short version of Lasch's argument, see the essays in the first section (chapters 1–5) of his The Revolt of the Elites (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). For a more fully developed version, see The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
Ernest Callenbach, “Sustainable Shrinkage: Envisioning a Smaller, Stronger Economy,” Solutions 2, issue 4, 11 August 2011, 12. http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/968, (accessed May 2012).
Ibid., 11.
Bill McKibben, Deep Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 96.
Ibid., 122.
“[I]t's enough to say that, for reasons of ecological sustainability and human satisfaction, our systems and economics have gotten too large, and that we need to start building them back down.” Ibid., 141.
“In a changed world, comfort will come less from ownership than from membership.” Ibid., 120.
Ibid., 231.
Ibid., 120.
Bill McKibben, Enough (New York: Times Books, 2003).
Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).
In a comment that is perhaps a little too flip, McKibben suggests that we are biologically adapted to farmers’ markets. Interview of McKibben by Krista Tippett, “The Moral Math of Climate Change,” Speaking of Faith (NPR) 10 December 2009. See http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2010/moral-math/, (accessed May 2012).
One of the least persuasive elements in this tradition is the suggestion by some that there will be no significant cost to choosing a simpler life. It is often assumed that we can have all manner of “good” technologies without being burdened by those thought to be counterproductive to the good life, even though they are all of a piece. See, for example, Callenbach's assumption that we can throw away what he takes to be our alienating cell phones without inhibiting the robust development of desirable medical and reproductive technologies. See “Sustainable Shrinkage,” 12.
In the opening pages of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes of the triumph of science over nature and of the threat this poses to our ability to think and speak politically and through a common language. “The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of ‘character’—that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons—or their naiveté—that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use—but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power.” Like McKibben, Arendt fears that the radical human control of nature poses a grave threat to democracy. But she also offers reasons that environmentalists, such as McKibben, haven’t yet fully explored. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 4.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, “The Death of Environmentalism,” http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2004/10/the_death_of_environmentalism.shtml, (accessed May 2012).
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 17.
Ibid., 120.
Ibid., 135.
Ibid., 211.
Ibid., 238–39.
Ibid., 270.
Ibid., 271.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger's defense of an expanding economy and consumer culture is remarkably compatible with James Livingston's recent left-wing defense of consumer culture, Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2011). Livingston writes (43), “We need to map a new moral universe, where the deferral of gratification—postponing our desires, withholding our income from immediate consumption—serves neither the public good of fostering economic growth nor the private purpose of building individual character.” Like Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Livingston is a progressive who deeply distrusts those who would criticize material excess (see 79).
Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Break Through, 16.
For an even more polemical attack on those who would rein in the power of science and technology, see David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (New York: Viking, 2011). Deutsch (441) inveighs against the environmentalism of technological modesty and natural limits: “There is as yet no serious sign of retreat into a sustainable lifestyle (which would really mean achieving only the semblance of sustainability), but even the aspiration is dangerous. For what would we be aspiring to? To forcing the future world into our image, endlessly reproducing our lifestyle, our misconceptions and our mistakes.”
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I would like to thank Ben Minteer, Patrick Neal, Nancy Schwartz, Fran Pepperman Taylor, and two anonymous referees for Polity for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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Taylor, B. Thinking about Nuclear Power. Polity 45, 297–311 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2013.3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2013.3