Nuclear regulation in Japan 'amiable fiction'

You would think that of all countries, Japan would be cautious about nuclear power. But no, this is capitalism, stupid! Nothing must be permitted to stand in the way of profits, not even the threat of a catastrophic meltdown.

The consequences of the disaster at the Fukushima plant following the earthquake and tsunami are just coming to light. Radioactive iodine twice the safe level for babies has been found in Tokyo’s water supply, and there are bans on milk and food from a growing contaminated area round the stricken plants.

Three workers are in hospital after being exposed to excess radioactivity when a plume of radioactive steam rose from the plant on Wednesday. Many firefighters are wondering if they have a future at all, in light of what happened to those who fought the fire at Chernobyl. Japan’s farming industry is being devastated as countries including the US, Australia and South Korea, ban imports.

Japan’s prime minister was overheard accusing the plant’s operators Tokyo Electricity and Power Company (TEPCO) of even now not telling the truth about what is happening. TEPCO have a long history of lies and cover-ups, according to Citizens Nuclear Information Center (CNIC), Japan's largest anti-nuclear organisation.

In 2002, TEPCO’s president and four other executives resigned, admitting “dishonest practices”, after covering up the failure of a crucial piece of equipment in all its 17 reactors. In 2007 a TEPCO plant in West Japan was damaged by an earthquake and burned for two hours; hundreds of gallons of radioactive water leaked into the sea. The company claimed there had been just a small fire and covered up the water leak.

The Japanese state is more concerned with marketing TEPCO’s ageing nuclear technology abroad than with regulation. As Philip White, English language spokesman for CNIC, puts it: "There's no true regulation of the Japanese nuclear industry. It's just an amiable fiction."

Writing in the Guardian this week, George Monbiot explained how the Fukushima accident has, bizzarely, converted him to the joys of nuclear power. If old and inadequate reactors can withstand the biggest-ever earthquake with only a low level of leaking radiation, then nuclear power is OK by him, provided certain conditions are met:

“1. Its total emissions – from mine to dump – are taken into account, and demonstrate that it is a genuinely low-carbon option 2. We know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried. 3. We know how much this will cost and who will pay 4. There is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be diverted for military purposes.”

Clearly, this particular nuclear power development is going to take place on Planet Dreamland. Unfortunately here on planet earth, the nuclear future is in the hands of profit-driven corporations, who have always lied about risks, accidents, costs and waste disposal, and governments who either don’t have the guts to stand up to them, or are actually in cahoots with them.

But Monbiot is not alone. Fuelling capitalist business as usual with nuclear power is proposed by an increasing number of otherwise serious green campaigners. This counsel of despair suggests that human society has no other option than to allow capitalism to go on raping and pillaging the planet, and that our role is to propose new ways for it to fuel its activities.

It suggests that the climate crisis – which is certainly caused by fossil fuel burning - exists in isolation from the existential crisis affecting the survival of the whole eco-system for a multiplicity of reasons arising from the capitalist form of production.

Their problem is liberal scepticism about the potential for change, which A World to Win does not share. Human beings have the potential to replace the current corporate-led governments with a global network of People’s Assemblies.

With democratic control of production, we can establish a rational relationship with nature, where production for need using renewable energy sources, replaces the present obscene multiplication of commodities. It can be done and it must be done.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Risks ignored as Obama leads nuclear charge

President Obama fired the starting pistol for a rush to nuclear power in the US when he announced this week that his government will offer $8.3billion in loan guarantees for two nuclear reactors to be built in Georgia. This puts the US in line with other big powers, where the stampede to build a new generation of nuclear power stations is on.

China has 14 reactors under construction and 35 more planned. India has six under construction and 23 planned. Even Russia, where you would think the safety lesson might have been learned after Chernobyl, has eight under construction and eight more planned. And of course, New Labour recently gave the go-ahead for 10 new plants in the UK.

The result of the expansion programme will be a massive increase in uranium mining, with new operations already being opened up in Namibia and Kazakhstan, which has tripled its uranium output over the past four years and will soon overtake Canada as the world’s biggest producer. Just as with oil, the easy stuff is taken first and then dirtier processes employed to get at the harder to reach ore.

There is no recognition on the part of governments or the nuclear industry of the extensive health and environmental risks at every stage of the nuclear life cycle. As the American organisation Physicians for Social Responsibility says, uranium mining exposes miners and their communities to high levels of carcinogenic radon gas:

“The effects have been so devastating in the United States that the Navajo Nation, upon whose lands sit one of the largest uranium reserves in the world, has outright banned the practice, even as they struggle with crushing poverty. Radio nuclides routinely released in nuclear reactor operations have been linked to developmental problems, birth defects, reproductive problems, cardiovascular disease, leukemia and other cancers. Epidemiological studies of children living near nuclear reactors show a positive association between leukemia and proximity to nuclear reactors.”

We have experience of that in the UK with the identified clusters of childhood leukemia found around Sellafield in Cumbria in the 1980s. There is no safe way of disposing of waste, which also carries significant health risks, particularly associated with leaching into water supplies.

A scandal exposed this week shows the blatant disregard for human health of the nuclear industry. The French newspaper Liberation published photographs of what appears to be nuclear waste from French EDF reactors simply lying in the open, on the ground in a Siberian town to which access is forbidden.

EDF energy, part-owned by the French state and the world’s biggest nuclear operator, admits it is exporting waste to Russia and that only 13% of what it sends comes back reprocessed. What happens to the rest? No comment. EDF is the likely candidate for constructing new plants in Britain.

The question governments can’t answer is why they are doing it? The idea that nuclear is clean and green, and a contribution to reduced carbon emissions is rubbish. The result of extracting the uranium and the billions of tons of cement needed to build all these huge plants will be massive CO2 emissions. It is unlikely any future savings in emissions would offset this early surge over the whole life of a reactor.

A study by the Rocky Mountain Institute, which campaigns for rational use of the world’s resources, says that if every dollar spent on nuclear power were invested instead in energy efficiency measures, it would produce seven times greater reduction in carbon emissions.

But the corporations are not going to get profits from energy efficiency – and people using less fuel means smaller profits for them. The shadow governments of the corporations are pulling the strings for energy planning. For an alternative way to meet energy needs see our Manifesto of Revolutionary solutions.

Penny Cole
Environment editor