{"id":47815,"date":"2017-05-05T13:59:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-05T11:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/?p=47815"},"modified":"2023-08-29T11:19:04","modified_gmt":"2023-08-29T09:19:04","slug":"nuclear-power-and-the-collapse-of-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/story\/47815\/nuclear-power-and-the-collapse-of-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear power and the collapse of society"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On March 1 1954, on Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, the US military detonated the world\u2019s first lithium-deuteride hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The radiation blew downwind, to the southeast, and irradiated the residents of Rongelap and Utirik atolls, and the crew of tuna boat Fukuryu Maru, \u201cLucky Dragon.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n

The islanders and fishing crew suffered radiation sickness, hair loss, and peeling skin. Crew member, Aikichi Kuboyama, died six months later in a Hiroshima hospital. Island children, suffered lifelong health effects, including cancers, and most died prematurely. The Lucky Dragon sailors were exposed to 3-5 sieverts<\/a> of radiation.<\/p>\n\n

One sievert will cause severe radiation sickness leading to cancer and death. Five sieverts will kill half those exposed within a month (like the workers who died at Chornobyl within the first few week). Ten sieverts will kill any human being. Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims received 150 Sieverts. Even microorganisms perished.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a9 United States Department of Energy<\/div>, Image by United States Department of Energy” alt=”Castle Bravo Blast
\u00a9 United States Department of Energy<\/div> by United States Department of Energy” class=”wp-image-47819″ title=”Castle Bravo Blast
\u00a9 United States Department of Energy<\/div> – Creative Commons “\/>
Castle Bravo Blast
\u00a9 United States Department of Energy<\/div><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

Today, inside the crippled Fukushima nuclear reactor-2, the melting core releases 530 sieverts per hour, enough to kill a human instantly and melt steel robotic equipment within two hours.<\/p>\n\n

The meaning of \u201ccollapse\u201d<\/h3>\n\n

When we hear the term \u201ccollapse of industrial society,\u201d some may picture a doomsday or a Hollywood apocalypse film. But the collapse of societies \u2013 like in Rome, Mesopotamia, or the Rapa Nui on Easter Island \u2013 doesn\u2019t work like that. The \u201ccollapse\u201d of a complex society usually involves ecological habitat degradation that can take centuries. So, what does \u201csocial collapse\u201d really look like?<\/p>\n\n

James Kunstler calls the collapse of industrial society a \u201clong emergency<\/a>\u201d – a process that unfolds in fits and starts over generations. Some social conflicts we witness in the world today \u2013 banking crises, war, refugees, racism – can be understood as symptoms of this long, ecologically-triggered collapse. Russian author Dmitry Orlov describes the five stages<\/a> of collapse: Financial, commercial, political, social, and, finally, cultural. When business-as-usual becomes impossible, communities seek alternatives to currency trading; markets fail, faith in government disappears, trust of neighbours erodes, and people lose faith in common decency.  <\/p>\n\n

Dr. Joseph Tainter, professor of Environment and Society at Utah State University describes collapse<\/a> as a \u201csimplification\u201d of society, a reversal of the process by which the society became increasingly complex. \u201cTo understand collapse,\u201d he explains, \u201cwe have to understand complexity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Societies evolve complex solutions to solve social problems that arise, generally from environmental limits. Eventually, the marginal benefits of these alleged solutions decline. Consider oil, military aggression, or nuclear power as solutions to problems, that later manifest unintended consequences. As technical solutions meet bio-physical limits, added investment leads to less benefit, until the society grows vulnerable to catastrophe, such as global warming, war, or radiation.<\/p>\n\n

Societies collapse, according to Tainter, when technical complexities cost more than they return as benefits. This understanding of social collapse fits the state of chaos now unfolding at the nuclear plant at Fukushima.<\/p>\n\n

Socialise the cost<\/h3>\n\n

TEPCO, the company that owns the Fukushima reactors, ignored early warnings<\/a> of risk, from both inside and outside the company, because the safeguards were too expensive. Thus, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami destroyed the plant\u2019s cooling systems and led to a core meltdown in all three reactors.<\/p>\n\n

Years after the incident, the reactor cores are melting down through the rock, and radiation levels are so intense that even robots can\u2019t survive long enough to locate the burning fuel rods. Removal of the rods, originally scheduled for 2015, were constantly delayed. Meanwhile, 300 tons of radioactive water floods into the Pacific Ocean every day.<\/p>\n\n

Cleanup cost estimates have risen to several billion Euros per year and decommissioning is now expected to take about 40 years. In December, 2016, the Japanese government announced that the estimated cost of decommissioning the plant and storing radioactive waste, if they can achieve this at all, would reach over 21 trillion yen (\u20ac180 billion; US$ 200 billion). This scenario is based on no major earthquakes occurring before the 2050s.<\/p>\n\n

TEPCO will likely go bankrupt before it will pay these costs, so the government has stepped in, which means the citizens pay the costs, just as they bailed out the banks after the last economic collapse. This is a core policy for large, modern corporations: Privatise the profits, socialise the costs.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

The nuclear \u201csolution\u201d to growing energy demand – now a massive technical and financial black hole, with negative marginal returns, draining scarce resources from struggling communities – is what industrial collapse looks like in the real world.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a9 DigitalGlobe<\/div>. \u00a9 DigitalGlobe” alt=”Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant Damage
\u00a9 DigitalGlobe<\/div>. \u00a9 DigitalGlobe” class=”wp-image-47818″ title=”Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant Damage
\u00a9 DigitalGlobe<\/div> – DIGITALGLOBE”\/>
Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant Damage
\u00a9 DigitalGlobe<\/div><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

The victims<\/h3>\n\n

The wealthy may not notice collapse in the early stages, as the first victims are the poorest and most vulnerable. The nuclear meltdown at Fukushima displaced over 150,000 people<\/a>. Some 1,600 died<\/a> during evacuation, and the survivors live in makeshift camps on meagre allotments of food and supplies. As families abandoned their homes, lifelong dreams shattered, childhoods were disrupted, families broke apart, and modest enterprises lost forever.   <\/p>\n\n

Women and children suffered the greatest challenges and risks due to \u201ca yawning gender gap\u201d in Japanese society, as Kendra Ulrich writes in \u201cUnequal Impact.<\/a>\u201d Among the 34 highly developed countries, ranked for gender wage gap, Japan stands at the bottom<\/a> with South Korea and Estonia. After the nuclear meltdown, single mothers faced financial and social barriers to recovery. Radiation puts fetuses and young children at the greatest risk for future health effects.<\/p>\n\n

In 2016, Ichiro Tagawa, 77, returned to his village of Namie and reopened the bicycle repair shop that had been in his family for 80 years. \u201cI am so old,\u201d he told a New York Times<\/a> reporter, \u201cI don\u2019t really care about the radiation levels.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

\"Light
A special light painting technique reveals radioactive contamination at Toru Anzai’s former home in Iitate. Surrounded by forest, the property remains contaminated despite being cleaned up. Five years on Mr Anzai is trying to move on with his life, and as he does not wish to return to his contaminated home, it is now falling into disrepair. Here we see radiation levels between 0.61uSv\/h and 1.11uSv\/h, with yellow showing spots elevated above the government decontamination target of 0.23 uSv\/h.
\u00a9 Greg McNevin \/ Greenpeace<\/div><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

To save money, the Japanese government has declared some towns near Fukushima \u201csafe,\u201d by increasing the radiation limits and then cancelling evacuee housing and insisting that citizens return to those \u201csafe\u201d villages. Sending people back to that environment could amount to random murder, since some will attract cancer and die from the radiation.<\/p>\n\n

Corruption and cover-up have become a way of life inside TEPCO and the nuclear industry. The Japanese government and TEPCO also increased \u201csafe\u201d radiation limits for plant workers by about 700-times, and then ordered scientists to stop monitoring radiation levels in some areas of the plants that exceed even these new, dangerous regulations. According to Tomohiko Suzuki\u2019s book, Yakuza to Genpatsu<\/a> (The Yakuza and Nuclear Power), TEPCO subcontractors pay bribes to Japanese crime gangs, the Yakuza, to obtain construction contracts, and the Yakuza pay politicians and media to keep quiet. Workers lured into the plant include the homeless, the mentally ill, illegal immigrants, and former Yakuza debtors.<\/p>\n\n

The deadly industry<\/h3>\n\n

The story of how nuclear generated power came to be starts in the 1950s. After WWII, the US, UK, France, Russia, and China set out to build arsenals, but required more plutonium than could be furnished by their respective military programs. A US Atomic Energy Commission study concluded that commercial nuclear reactors for power were not economically feasible because of costs and risks. Dr. Charles Thomas, an executive at Monsanto, suggested a solution: A \u201cdual purpose\u201d reactor that would produce plutonium for the military and electric power for commercial use.<\/p>\n\n

Companies profited from these dual markets, while leaving the public to assume responsibility for research, infrastructure, and risk: Privatise the profits, socialise the costs. The real purpose of a \u201cnuclear power\u201d industry was to provide plutonium for weapons and profit for a few corporations.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

This deadly industry has now left dead zones and ghost towns around the world. The Hanford nuclear storage site in the US, Acerinox Processing Plant in Spain, The Polygon weapons test site in Kazakhstan, the Zapadnyi uranium mine in Kyrgyzstan, and countless other uranium mines, decommissioned plants, nuclear waste dumps, and catastrophes like Fukushima and Chornobyl.<\/p>\n\n

No one knows exactly how many people have died<\/a> due to the Chornobyl meltdown. The Russian academy of sciences estimates 200,000 and a Ukrainian national commission estimated 500,000 deaths from radiation\u2019s health effects.<\/p>\n\n

\"Abandoned
Abandoned baby shoes in Pripyat’s kindergarten. Before the Chornobyl accident, the town of Pripyat was considered the “glory” of the former Soviet Union. More than 48,000 inhabitants were living here – less than 3 kilometres from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. Many of them were employed directly in the power plant. Today Pripyat is like a ghost town.
\u00a9 Vaclav Vasku \/ Greenpeace<\/div><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

In 1983, a Yorkshire television station<\/a> uncovered evidence that child leukemia had increased ten-times in the village of Seascale, near the Sellafield\/Windscale nuclear site. It has become a deadly radioactive blotch on the landscape, leaking radioactive plutonium-24, americium-241, and caesium-137 into the surrounding environment, and sending bomb grade plutonium into the world’s political environment. According to the BBC<\/a>, the cost of cleaning up the mess is now estimated at \u00a370-billion, and rising annually, as one corporation or consortium after another fails to make progress, but always makes money. These cleanup costs now consume most of the UK\u2019s \u201cclimate change\u201d budget since nuclear power was once considered a solution to carbon emissions.<\/p>\n\n

In February, the EDF Flamanville nuclear plant in France – three-times over budget and years behind schedule – closed after an explosion and fire. France faces a \u20ac200 billion cost to decommission 58 reactors at the end of their life. Germany set aside \u20ac38 billion to decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK estimates a cost between \u20ac109\u2012250 billion to decommission UK\u2019s nuclear sites.<\/p>\n\n

This is the face of industrial collapse, when alleged solutions become bigger problems. Nuclear power has now become a massive liability, draining resources from communities that need schools, hospitals, and the essentials of life. Joseph Tainter, Jared Diamond, and other researchers point out that some societies \u2013 Tikopia island, Byzantine society in the 1300s – avoided collapse, not by increasing complexity with better technology, but by down-sizing intentionally, learning to thrive on a lower level of complexity.<\/p>\n\n

This is now the challenge of industrial society. Can we, and especially the rich and powerful, change our habits of consumption and growth? Can we come back to Earth?<\/p>\n\n

\n\n

 References and Links<\/h4>\n\n

James Kunstler: \u201cThe Long Emergency<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Joseph Tainter, the Collapse of Complex Societies: Book<\/a> and Lecture online<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n

The Dynamics of Complex Civilisations, David Korowicz, Oil Drum<\/a>, 2010<\/p>\n\n

Gail Tverberg: Energy Flow, Emergent Complexity, and Collapse, Oil Drum<\/a><\/p>\n\n

\u201cThe Collapse of Civilization,\u201d New Scientist<\/a>, April, 2008<\/p>\n\n

\u201cLes civilisations sont-elles vou\u00e9es \u00e0 dispara\u00eetre?\u201d: Les Cahiers de Science & Vie<\/a>, (n. 109).<\/p>\n\n

Jared Diamond: \u201cEcological Collapses of Pre-industrial Societies,\u201d Tanner Lecture<\/a>, University of Utah, 2000<\/p>\n\n

\u201cCulture and the Environment on Easter Island and Tikopia,\u201d Ben Ewen-Campen, Swarthmore<\/a>, 2003).<\/p>\n\n

\u201cNuclear refugees tell of distrust, pressure to return to Fukushima,\u201d Japan Times<\/a>, March, 2016.<\/p>\n\n

Tomohiko Suzuki, \u201cYakuza to genpatsu: Fukushima Daiichi sennyuki,\u201d The Yakuza and Nuclear Power: Undercover Report from Fukushima Daiichi), Bungeishunju Ltd.<\/a>, Japan<\/p>\n\n

\u201cEnergy\/War: Breaking the Nuclear Link,\u201d Amory Lovins, 1981; and Annual Report, Commonwealth Edison Company, 1952; at Nuclear Energy Information Service<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Sellafield, UK, \u00a370bn clean-up costs, BBC<\/a>, 2014.<\/p>\n\n

Nuclear Power as a false solution, Rex Weyler, Deep Green: Atomic Renaissance Interrupted, R. Weyler, Deep Green<\/a>, 2008. Nuclear Delusions, R. Weyler, Deep Green<\/a>, 2011. Precaution and Common Sense, R. Weyler, EcoReport<\/a>, 2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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