Robert Frost penned his pointed masterpiece, "The Road Not Taken," in 1915, at a time when turning points everywhere confronted the world's peoples with decisions about the sorts of futures that their descendants--us--would have the chance to experience. He imagined a traveler, recognizing the impossible conundrum of wanting to try each available opportunity, intoning that
Knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I would ever come back
to the untried path. Our times also reveal transitional moments that likely are profoundly important for the future of our kind. In no area of life, are the choices starker than they are on matters of how we will create electricity and other forms of motive energy. Unfortunately, the Obama administration's selection of massive loan guarantees for nuclear power, basically foreordained by the seemingly inextricable link between nukes and the powers that be, sets us on a road that not only will be replete with danger and destruction and bankruptcy, but it also directs us on a journey toward the total evisceration of democracy.
The inherent destruction of democratic forms by nuclear bureaucracy has at least three important elements. Number one, the huge safety and health concerns of the atomic way militate for a climate of cover-up and secretiveness. Number two, the gigantic capital investment in new plants means that other forms, plausibly of more community-oriented and user friendly investment, verge on the impossible. Finally, the heretofore, and some would argue eternally inevitable, inextricable link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons precludes any sort of open deliberative and decision making process. These rationale suggest that a United States decision for a nuclear future means the attenuation, if not the outright elimination, of United States forms of democracy, dialog, and politics.
Before turning to these points in more depth, perhaps a brief overview of the history of matters atomic is in order. The pre-bureaucratic roots of nuclear fission relate essentially to the development of modern physics, prior to the solidification of the connection between research science and corporate hegemony. Various sources attest to this history, and its interest and importance, such as Major Problems in the History of American Technology. The point is not that technology failed to contribute to capitalism or that business ignored technical innovation, on the contrary, their interdependency dates from the inception of the capitalist era. Their thoroughgoing political intersection, however, had in some ways to await Einstein's letter to FDR, about the plausibility of a mega-bomb as a result of fission, and the inception of the Manhattan project. This eventuality yielded a demonstration model of pork barrel logrolling for the incipient 'military industrial complex,' and the link between the upper reaches of industrial and finance capital and the nuclear production process became unbreakable. For one account of this process, among many, The Manhattan Project, edited by Cynthia Kelly is a useful resource.
The Bush's uncle, Vannevar, and his science industrial policy commission report, Science: The Endless Frontier( a complete copy of which is freely available at http://www.nsf.gov/... made this linkage explicit. Big capitalism required big science, popular involvement with which was of little or no concern, except as a public relations matter. David Lillienthal, a good friend of Al Gore's papa and head of one of the first exhibits of nuclear-utility-military-industrial interconnection at the Tennessee Valley Authority, exemplified the 'spin' on these developments in his 1952 screed, Big Business: A New Era, when he reached down to the local Chambers of Commerce and other denizens of the petty bourgeois and instructed them, essentially, to suck it up and cash in however they might on the inevitable triumph of plutocratic approaches. The central chapter in the volume, "Bigness for National Security," harks back to his experience on the early Atomic Energy Commission, which concluded that an industrialization of mega-death was a key to U.S. survival.
Basically concurrent with Lilienthal's marching orders for the community representatives of capital, the 'Atoms for Peace' campaign was getting under way, and the start of 'commercial' nuclear power generation followed within a few years, at Shippingport's reactor near Pittsburgh. Ralph Lapp, whose life in many ways embodied this conjunction of industry and science and money and politics and 'defense,' wrote the promotional monograph, Atoms and People, in 1956, concomitant with the opening of Shippingport's facilities. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb,' scoffed at the whole notion of 'affordable' or in any other way practically utilitarian atomic energy, viewing the entire process as yet another hidden sop to the weapons systems that remained at the heart of U.S. 'strategic' thinking until at least the end of the century. Kai Byrd and Martin Sherwin, in their American Prometheus, a biography of Oppenheimer, give the broad outlines of this story.
Through massive subsidies that ignored gargantuan cost overruns, unavoidable bankruptcy, and all manner of safety and operational issues--Yucca Mountain yucks anyone?--America, as a matter of policy, embarked on a nuclearization of electricity that only came to a hiatus after the meltdown and nearly monumental public health debacle at Three Mile Island, thirty one years ago next week.
For one account of the impact of TMI on the atomic energy industry folks may look at SERMCAP's pieces from last year on DailyKos, filled with vitriol and non sequitur but deeply researched and full of leads.
Now we are about to engage another expansion of splitting atoms to create heat and thereby develop the electricity grid, an enlargement of capacity that would dwarf the initial effort and send our nation irretrievably along the nuclear highway. Of course, the 'full faith and credit' of the central government is necessary to accomplish this, since no sane financier is going to risk his, or his customers', capital on this tortuous road of unproven safety, efficacy, or long-term viability.
The potential still exists to pause this process, though for how much longer we may impede the atomic soul train, we do not know. The balance of this installment presents three ways in which proceeding along the nuclear highway will undermine, and perhaps destroy, democratic possibility. The first concerns inherent dangers and ineluctable safety lapses. Though tens of thousands of sources attest to such problems, the work of Helen Caldicott generally, for example in her autobiography, A Desperate Passion, and in the outpouring of such grassroots organizations as the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, http://www.nirs.org/... are decidedly anti-nuclear caches of information and argument.
Given the inevitability of health impacts and difficulties remaining anything akin to safe, two things transpire which work against community engagement and majority rule. The first is the tendency, legendary in the industry to seek to cover up failures and to downplay problems, A priori, any technology which guarantees such developments must undercut democracy, which absolutely requires transparency and access, at every turn. Not only do all sorts of sources again document these tendencies, one can turn to a note from today's Secrecy News, Steven Aftergood's virtual newsletter, and discover that even public health and safety do not override promises to remain mum. As Judge T.S. Ellis, of the Eastern District of Virginia Federal District Court recently stated the matter,
Simply because you believe that something that's going on that's classified should be revealed to the press and to the public, so that the public can know that its government is doing something you think is wrong, that doesn't justify [publicly disclosing] it.... Noble motives don't erase the violation.
The second element of this initial aspect of degradation results from the monstrous toxicity of the wastes and by-products of nuclear production, which require monitoring and isolation that are fundamentally incompatible with community participation or open dialog. Again, copious documentation of such issues, and the attendant ill impact of open government, abound, among them reports and articles by this author. A recent piece that is chilling in its conclusions in this regard appeared in March seventh's New York Times Book Review. There, in "American Wasteland," Charles Bock considers About a Mountain, a brief account of the travesty at Yucca Mountain that, as Bock puts it, "ponder(s) our precarious moment in history."
The second anti-democratic aspect of nukes is economic. This ties into the Bush Commission's and Lilienthal's perspectives about 'big' science and big business. The Senate Energy Committee has projected, Circa 2006, as many as 200 reactors for the United States alone; worldwide, corporate elites salivate at the prospect of up to a thousand new facilities. At five to thirty billion dollars apiece, depending on whether historical experience of cost overruns or typical utility and construction contractor reassurances guide our estimates, that means five to thirty trillion dollars down the nuclear drain, or into the capital sinkhole that contemporary business has become.
In some ways, the economic conundrum of nukes--they seem so ludicrously anti-cost effective that they require complete subsidies in their seventh decade of 'free market' operation--intersects with the anti-democratic results of their safety problems. One might reference two recent Black Agenda Reports that witness this problem, one of which deals with the Vogtle Nuclear complex right here in Georgia, which the Southern Company has slated to receive new reactors in the next decade or so. http://www.blackagendareport.com/... Essentially, poor black communities, which haven't the political muscle effectively to protest, are all too frequently the sites of choice for reactors, so that the people there pay a disproportionate cost in cancers and other health disparities that follow those who are downwind, or downstream, of such facilities. At the same time, these household power users pay, in advance, at a forty-odd per cent premium, for the power production that corporations foist on their communities.
In such a context, what would remain for solar and other accessible and sustainable methods of power production? What would happen to efforts to make the electricity grid more community oriented? What degree of commitment would emerge to insist on conservation? The answers to these questions, and similar inquiries about any potential for a democratic approach to electric power, is the same: 'Nothing,' 'None,' or 'Zero,' might be apt ways to word the replies. Heather Rogers, in her article "Current Thinking," gives a fascinating account of the early electricity pioneers who foresaw a solar boom on the horizon. Though Thomas Edison, bless his naive and populist, albeit occasionally reactionary, heart, said that he "would bank on the sun" to power the future, such potential will continue as nothing but a fantasy of a 'Road Not Taken' in a coming decades overarched by nuclear police, nuclear elites, and regular disasters involving nuclear accidents and nuclear attacks. Or the human moment in history could come to an end in a nuclear cataclysm.
And this is the third devastation of democracy inherent in a nuclear highway. Not by accident is the 'Department of Energy' the U.S.' central H-bomb factory minder. Not by accident are the leaders of the only nation to employ nuclear weapons in a panic at the prospect of a nuclear Iran, despite our overlooking Israel's substantial arsenal and our complicity in the debacle of the nuclear flashpoint in Pakistan and India. Again, hundreds of authorities are at our fingertips to point out both the catastrophic dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation, on the one hand, and the inescapable connection between nuclear power production and atomic weapons, on the other hand. On the web, one might turn to Physicians for Social Responsibility, at www.psr.org, or to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where the time reads, "six minutes to midnight," at http://www.thebulletin.org/ as portals. Offline, if one leans one way, one can examine the recent efforts of Georgia's own Sam Nunn, or, if one has a more progressive spirit, the recent monograph by Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger(and btw, George Bush's Military Industrial Complex has become Barack's bailiwick)details these matters.
As these and copious other sources, along with common sense, make plain, any pretense of democratic methods in the context of proliferated hydrogen bombs is out of the question. Omnipresent secrecy, ubiquitous deception, and heavy-handed oppression are the only responses in such a context. The Patriot Act's depredations against freedom are only a foretaste of what is to come if we do not, in some fashion or other, find a way to avoid the irradiated nightmare of this nuclear highway.
Given such concerns, the Obama Administration's rubber stamping of the Senate Energy Committee's and Chancellor Cheney's secret plans for the nuclear highway, whatever people might think, might seem anomalous. At the least, a thorough national dialog, an ongoing and wide-reaching citizen panel to consider these matters would seem in order. The question is therefore obvious. "Why has the Democratic Party so completely bought into this anti-democratic formula?" And this is one of the ways in which critics of the nuclear highway and others who do in fact believe in freedom and democracy go wrong. Their response is that bad managers, bad decisions, and bad judgments underlie these decisions.
Instead, if we examine the historical record, and reflect on the current crises of capitalism, which revolve around finding something to do with capital that keeps its circulation firmly in the hands of its current rulers, the nuclear highway is the optimal, perhaps the only, solution other than a space colonization program that will stay fantastical for the foreseeable future, and in any event is not at odds with the growth of an earth ensconced on the nuclear highway. In this view, the rulers of capital know exactly what they are doing. In this view, Barack-the-Magnificent is their man. In this view, the only way to upend the bandwagon for a nuclear future is to upend capitalism itself.
Of course, that would require us to commit ourselves to actual democratic work, instead of merely insisting on the Democratic Party. As Frost intoned almost a century ago,
I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood and I...I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.
The chance for true democrats to organize for a 'path less traveled' is growing short. What will they do to meet this necessity? Inquiring minds want to know.