12.09.2024
Another useful innocent
Nuclear power should be supported because it is conducive to trade union organisation and because it is a way of dealing with all that weapons-grade plutonium. So argues Leszek Karlik, a member of Poland’s soft-left Razem party
Jack Conrad is certainly right in his assertion that the destruction of the planet is not wrought by any particular technology, but by the M-C-M' cycle, with its imperative for endless exponential growth, which is simply impossible within limited planetary boundaries.1
Having said that, Emil Jacobs is also right in his assertion that we cannot ignore the nuclear option if we are to save the biosphere from unsustainable level of carbon emissions (within the same exponentially driven capitalist economy some technologies are still much more harmful to the climate than others).2
I am a member of the Polish Razem [Together] party. I would not call myself a ‘communist’ for many reasons (having been born under the rule of an authoritarian government that called itself ‘communist’, for one), but I am certainly a fellow traveller. If I had to label myself, it would be ‘pro-degrowth eco-socialist’ - and yet I am pro-nuclear3. This position is not uncommon on the Polish left.
In 1989 the Polish Round Table Agreement began the process of Poland’s transformation from a ‘real socialist’ economy to a capitalist one. In the process talks on many topics were conducted between the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party and the pro-democratic opposition (which was not very pro-capitalist at the time)4. One of those topics was nuclear power, because Poland was on course to build a Russian VVER-400 reactor (a much safer design than Chernobyl’s RMBK) in Żarnowiec,5 and the opposition (which had many representatives of coal mining trade unions), wanted the project stopped. They called it ‘Żarnobyl’ and they succeeded.
The arguments they used were simple: it is dangerous, and it is expensive, compared to fossil fuels. They wanted Poland to diversify from coal alone - to coal, natural gas and petroleum. And the representatives of the ‘communist government’ pointed out that using fossil fuels will become a problem, because works were already underway to sign international agreements to combat climate change, and nuclear power would be a tool to reduce Poland’s emissions. The answer of the opposition side? “Install filters on smokestacks.”6
The argument about the risks of coming climate change was ignored.
Some negotiators on the opposition side, who were so ardently pro-fossil fuels during the Round Table talks went on to join the Green Party and became anti-fossil fuel, while remaining ardently anti-nuclear.
The nuclear power plant in Żarnowiec (four reactors at 440 MW each) was not built. It is possible to calculate the death toll of this decision, because Poland did not transition to renewables then (to be fair, no-one on the opposition side suggested it). We did not even transition to natural gas, the pollution from which kills fewer people than coal. We kept burning coal for decades,7 to the satisfaction of multiple well-organised miners’ unions - amongst the few unions that kept their power in neoliberal Poland. Unlike coal miners, when nurses’ or teachers’ unions tried to strike for better pay, they were crushed, but miners were always able to get their way.
The continuous burning of coal that would be replaced by Żarnowiec killed somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 people (probably towards the high point of those figures, as historically most studies have tended to underestimate the death toll resulting from air pollution). And it released over half a gigaton of CO2 into the atmosphere - an enormous amount that is going to stay there and overheat the planet for hundreds of years.8
Nuclear waste is a problem, but, compared to fossil fuel waste, it is not on the same order of magnitude.
Democratic
We cannot use technology to get us out of a maths problem, and the continuous, exponential growth capitalism needs to maintain the M-C-M' cycle is a maths problem. We need to transition to a steady-state economy, degrowing some parts of it (like, say, advertising, fast fashion, SUV manufacture, gambling and so on), while growing others (socialised housing, free education for everyone, agriculture that is not actually destroying the planet, plant-based meat replacements and so on). Anything else is a pipe dream, because the maths of exponential growth is merciless.
However, opposition to nuclear power as a technology is a harmful relic of past struggles and, as the example of the internet shows, there are no ‘inherently democratic’ technologies. I remember the hype at the beginnings of the internet. It was ‘decentralised’! It would free us from the control of large media corporations. Everybody could become a journalist! Everybody could host their own server! The technology was networked, distributed, and thus inherently would support democracy, would interpret censorship as damage and route around it.
We all know how it ended up, and now I read the same hype about ‘distributed’, ‘decentralised’ and ‘democratic’ renewables. Fool me once - shame on me. Fool me twice …?
Power industry
The only thing that can remove monopoly power from corporations is not any kind of technology, but politics. Workers’ power, state power, elections and trade unions.
And no technology is inherently anti-democratic either. Any power industry is an industry. For example, I am a freelance translator. I have translated technical documentation for wind power plants and coal power plants. The end customer was the same: a large international corporation that also manufactures turbines for nuclear power plants. The gas industry has actually provided a lot of lobbying support for renewables.9 Somehow, in a capitalist economy, nobody is bothering to turn off their factories when there is a windless spell of low sun. Instead, we crank up the natural gas plants. A capitalist economy with a high share of wind and solar will have fossil fuel infrastructure locked in, probably slapping some ‘green hydrogen ready’ stickers on the fossil gas pipelines and fossil gas power plants - a greenwashing exercise the capitalists excel at10.
This is why Germany with its Energiewende and Atomausstieg had to rely on “hugely beneficial” (as Jack Conrad calls them) deals for fossil gas from Russia - gas stolen from indigenous people by Russian imperialism, and extremely harmful to the climate. It turns out that there are huge, unreported leaks of methane from rickety Russian gas pipelines,11 built on the quicksand of what we once, in our ignorance, called the ‘permafrost’. It turned out not to be so ‘perma’, when we started overheating the planet!12
When we transition to the eco-socialist economy that we envision for our future, there will be no corporations that bend politicians to their will. But before we transition there, we need to build workers’ power, as shown by the effectiveness of the miners’ unions in Poland in preventing any meaningful transformation for decades.
And nuclear power is much more conducive to unionisation and union power than rooftop solar, just as car factories are hotbeds of unionism, compared to, say, driving Ubers and delivering food on e-bikes. A highly educated workforce that has to come to the same place day in and day out is something that capitalists prefer to avoid (so for many of them a vision of a renewable-powered future is preferable to one with nuclear power plants), but for nuclear it is absolutely necessary and unavoidable.13 Which is why political parties of the left should really support developing nuclear industry - and nationalising it, of course, as a critical part of the infrastructure.
As for the long-lasting legacy of ‘nuclear waste’, something that Jack Conrad seems to miss is that we can have waste that is highly radioactive and very dangerous, or we can have waste that is extremely long-lasting. We cannot have both, because of hard physics: if something has a long half-life (like Plutonium-239, with its 24,000 years), it means that nuclear decay that produces stray particles (what we call ‘radioactivity’) occurs rarely. Plutonium-239 is not a radioactive danger to humans, but the short-lived isotopes are (they are usually mixed in with the long-lived isotopes, but can be filtered out in the process of recycling nuclear waste).
What is a significant radioactive danger are the short-lived radioisotopes used in medicine and in non-destructive testing in industry - like the infamous cobalt-60 radiation source,14 with its ‘drop and run’ inscription and a half-life of five years. And yet we never see anti-nuclear activists demonstrating in front of oncology wards, to ban ‘dangerous nuclear medicine’15 from our hospitals and stick to chemotherapy only, even though cancer radiotherapy produces nuclear waste (and requires nuclear reactors to create some of the isotopes that we use for medical diagnostics and to fight cancer).
And the hardest and biggest problem of ‘radioactive waste’ is the weapons-grade material that currently rests inside the Trident missiles and other weapons of mass destruction. It will remain dangerous and weapons-grade, even after global demilitarisation and the decommissioning of the nuclear triad. The only way to get rid of weapons-grade plutonium in the bright future of global peace and prosperity is to transform it into reactor fuel and burn it up in fission reactors to generate electricity - a true ‘swords to ploughshares’ miracle.
And this is not just a theoretical possibility either: after the fall of the USSR the Megatons to Megawatts Programme purchased 500 metric tons of old Soviet warhead material (90% enriched uranium-235) and converted it to low enriched uranium (less than 5% U-235), which was then used as fuel in the US nuclear reactor fleet. For two decades, as much as 10% of US electricity was generated from old Soviet nuclear weapons material.16 The same can be done with all nuclear weapons material in the world, since plutonium can also be used in light-water reactors (mixed with uranium in MOX fuel).
But we can only do this if we keep nuclear as part of the energy mix, and we keep the skills of nuclear engineers, physicists and designers alive. And before we end capitalism we need to build workers’ power. Nuclear will help with that.
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‘Nuclear power’s useful idiots’ Weekly Worker August 29: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1504/nuclear-powers-useful-idiots.↩︎
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‘Nature’s gift to humanity’ Weekly Worker August 22: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1503/natures-gift-to-humanity.↩︎
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www.weplanet.org/post/degrowing-the-global-economy-will-require-accepting-nuclear-power.↩︎
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polishhistory.pl/the-long-route-to-polands-round-table-agreement.↩︎
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The website with transcripts of the environmental ‘sub-table’ is gone, but the internet archive still has them: web.archive.org/web/20160405200759/http://okragly-stol.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/1989-02-14_ekologia.pdf; web.archive.org/web/20160405205142/http://okragly-stol.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/1989-02-24_ekologia.pdf; web.archive.org/web/20160406015750/http://okragly-stol.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/1989-03-10_ekologia.pdf.↩︎
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notesfrompoland.com/2022/03/01/coal-drops-from-87-to-71-of-polands-energy-mix-in-a-decade-with-renewables-up-to-17.↩︎
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Calculations based on the methodology from A Kharekha and JE Hansen, ‘Prevented mortality and greenhouse gas emissions from historical and projected nuclear power’: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es3051197.↩︎
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www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/22/fossil-fuel-firms-accused-renewable-lobby-takeover-push-gas.↩︎
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www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/russia-greenhouse-gas-emissions.↩︎
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www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Space_for_our_climate/Satellites_yield_insight_into_not_so_permanent_permafrost.↩︎
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world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Unions-repeat-call-for-nuclear-s-inclusion-in-EU-t; www.huffpost.com/entry/westinghouse-nuclear-union_n_65c3b3a6e4b0dbc806aefd1f.↩︎