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Solution for AI and cryptocurrency?

Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change
by M.V. Ramana

Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2024
$39.95 / 9781804290002

Reviewed by Loÿs Maingon

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When Laurie Swami (CEO and President) of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) publicly declares: “This project will solve an environmental issue and supports Canada’s climate change goals,”1 should Canadians really believe that nuclear energy is part of the solution to climate change?  M.V Ramana convincingly argues to the contrary. 

Nuclear energy was a major environmental concern in the ‘60s, long before climate change became a concern in the ‘90s.  In the light of renewed interest in nuclear energy as a solution to our economy’s energy-dependence on fossil fuel, interest in nuclear energy is staging a comeback.   Major environmental figures, notably James Hansen, James Lovelock and George Monbiot, have all fallen for the Circean charms of nuclear energy industry’s representations of itself as a substitute for fossil fuels, and a solution for that aspect of climate change.  All have accepted the nuclear industry’s representations of nuclear energy as a benign reliable source of electricity that could safely replace fossil fuels, in spite of all historical evidence to the contrary.   It is not really all that simple for several reasons, most of which are well argued by UBC’s M.V. Ramana, who is both a noted physicist and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security.

Ramana presents a useful updated and well-informed guidebook to the deceitfulness of the nuclear industry.  Many of the concerns and much of the data that he presents will not be new to those who have watched the nuclear debate over the last seven decades, but they deserved to be repeated, particularly from the climate change angle which presents new allures to a public which will undoubtedly have been encouraged to forget the past debates, and the repetitive past disasters of the nuclear industry.

From the introductory quote Swami and Ramana will agree that the inescapable product of nuclear energy is radioactive pollution that has proven intractable for the past eight decades. Swami believes that a containment facility can address the problem.  Ramana pointedly notes that humanity has never built facilities that can outlast the millennial lifetime of radioactive plutonium. Materials degrade and leak faster than the radioactive products of nuclear energy. In brief: “Safe methods of disposal are not proven” (p. 50).  The problem therefore continues to be intractable and is merely handed on to future generations at a time in which scientists are increasingly concerned about societal collapse.2

However, the other half of the proposition, whether nuclear energy can be a reliable safe and economical source of public energy has always been a figment of the industry’s penchant for public relations magical thinking.  It is a mantra promoted by governments favourable to the nuclear industry every ten years, generally a decade after a major nuclear calamity has receded from the memory of a distracted public.  It is always sold as a “new,” “safe” design. As Ramana correctly documents, these designs are not new. They are always just variations of designs rejected as unsafe by original post-war research.  As Canada’s recent involvement in Moltex, a company operating on recycled “nuclear waste,” shows, time has not corrected the flaws (page 222). 

The nuclear industry is never really reinventing itself, but it is always inventing new ways to sell itself, socialize its costs, and privatize its profits. In this endeavour, it always finds willing promoters among the world’s billionaire class. Governments and billionaires always work in tandem to promote the prestige and power that comes with nuclear energy.  In that regard, Ramana reminds us of Pakistan’s dictator General Muhamad Zia-ul-Haq’s public explanation for developing nuclear energy: “Once you have acquired the technology you can do whatever you want” (page 165). Having military nuclear power protects North Korea, having lost the same has made Ukraine open to aggression.  Every would-be dictator knows that.  This is not lost on Donald Trump’s circle who always crave to do whatever they want.  The nuclear industry can only be made relatively safe if it is in a stable and tightly regulated environment.  Ramana pointedly notes that throughout Trump’s first term and already at the start of his second term, the nuclear industry and tech billionaires associated with it clamour for deregulation (pages 224- 227.). The questions raised by Ramana in this book therefore have a special urgency, given the deregulatory environment we can expect in the coming years.

As reviewer Dr. Loys Maingon writes, questions surrounding nuclear power infrastructure brought up by UBC’s M. V. Ramana “have a special urgency, given the deregulatory environment we can expect in the coming years.”

The absence of major nuclear reactors in British Columbia may lead British Columbians to believe that nuclear energy is not an immediate concern.  Not so.  It is important to remember that, from its inception in 1961, BC Hydro has repeatedly proposed building reactors in the earthquake-prone Lower Mainland.  More recently, the leader of the conservative provincial party, John Rustad, like many right-wing politicians in Canada and the United States, made building SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) a part of his party’s platform. Forty-four percent of the population voted in support.  As Ramana pointedly argues and documents, while SMR’s sound nice, they are not only more expensive to build and operate than large projects, they spread out the risks and are equally as accident prone (pages 208-214).

As Canadians, there are some things that our governments would prefer we forget.  So, for a mnemonic apéritif here is quick précis of events that may have slipped from our memory.  The nuclear industry returns after a litany of major accidents, the foremost being: Sellafield (1957), Idaho Falls (1961), Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), Fukushima (2011), and not to be outdone or forgotten, Canada’s Chalk River hosted the world’s first nuclear meltdown in 1951, and a second accident in 1958 at the opening of its second “fail-proof” reactor.   If you have forgotten the Chalk River accidents, or were conveniently not taught about them in school as “world class” Canadian disasters, then you will also not have been told the other half of the story.  While Chalk River is now touted for the production of medical isotopes, and while back in the 1940s and 1950s the Canadian government assured Canadians that Chalk River was built only for non-military purposes, Chalk River was an extension of the wartime “Université de Montréal Lab,” which was the subject of Gilles Sabourin’s 2022 book Montreal and the Bomb.3   The fact is that:  “Canada supplied the United States with uranium for military purposes for two decades after the war, along with 252 kilograms of plutonium between 1959 and 1964.”4

I point out this historical fact, just to substantiate the technical fact masterfully laid out by Ramana that, while the nuclear industry repeatedly claims to separate the peaceful uses from the military uses of nuclear energy, that is technically impossible. The partitioning of peaceful nuclear energy from military uses is just a misleading sales pitch.  Plutonium is a by-product of all reactors. The US Department of Energy notes that any combination of plutonium isotopes can be used to make a nuclear weapon.  As Ramana points out“even though there are differences between different kinds of nuclear reactors, they all can be used to make nuclear weapons” (page 173).  Hence the unending concern with Iran’s use of peacetime reactors to use the plutonium by-product in order tobuild its military nuclear capacity.  Iran would just be repeating the trajectory of India’s development of nuclear bombs from Canadian nuclear technology that was not to be used to develop military applications. A similar situation would arise if North Korea or China were to use Candu reactors for that purpose.    With every decade memories fade and the nuclear industry finds new opportunities to present itself as a much-misunderstood blessing to humanity in order to stage a return…much like the proverbial bad penny.

The process leading to the world’s first nuclear meltdown is explored in Baraka Book’s recent title Montreal and the Bomb

With the Chalk River project, the Canadian government did not simply mislead the public about its strictly peaceful purpose.  It followed a pattern of prevarication that pervades worldwide government relations with the nuclear industry and the private corporations associated with it.  Familiarity with the nuclear industry’s ecosystem frequently leads scientists to jaded conclusions.  The account of Princeton’s Ted Taylor is exemplary.  Taylor had an illustrious career as a nuclear weapons designer.  In the mid ‘60s, he “began to see how nuclear technology could be abused by governments, terrorists and criminals – which aren’t separate categories in my mind.” (page 161). Criminality these days has the banality of social respectability in prominent offices. Today’s promoters of nuclear energy are Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, leading lights of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.  All of these billionaires are currently deeply committed to promote nuclear energy.  Zuckerberg has revealed plans to build multiple SMRs to power Meta, Facebook, What’s App, and all AI-related interests.  Washington state has signed agreements for 3 SMRs with Amazon.  Musk has campaigned for the indiscriminate reopening of decommissioned nuclear plants.  Gates and Microsoft have invested in the reopening of the site of the United States’ worst nuclear accident, Three Mile Island.

This decade the return of nuclear energy is not driven by the often-stated benevolent intention to help solve climate change.  It is driven by the energy needs of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence under the pretext of helping solve climate change.  Computation is very lucrative, but it is not green. Nor can it be made green through nuclear energy.  It is extremely energy-intensive. Throughout the world concern grows at the growth of vast “data-centres,” most of which were developed to meet the needs of cloud technology.  These centres require vast spaces currently equivalent to the footprint of 66 Walmarts.  They also require massive amounts of water to support cooling systems, creating water crises in communities that harbour them. These centres are already understood to be growing exponentially and are expected to grow yet more with the rising demands of AI and cryptocurrency. Many rural communities rightly see these data centres as “the destruction of America’s rural landscapes and ecosystems.”5   To put this into perspective, data centres in Ireland consume 27% of the nation’s energy. Households consume 18%.  With the growth of AI, the energy demands of data centres is expected to rise exponentially, at the ratepayer’s expense.  This poses an existential threat equal to or greater than climate change.

As Canada’s latest Nobel Prize winner, Geoffrey Hinton, recently pointed out, there is a “10% to 20% chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades.”6 In this light, climate change or a nuclear conflict may become the least of our concerns.  The deregulation of a government-subsidized nuclear industry and the profit margins of tech billionaires should be a greater immediate concern for what they imply, both for the state of the environment and the future of democracy and humanity.

The case against nuclear energy as a solution to climate change can be summarized as follows.  Nuclear energy is the most expensive source of electricity, when compared to hydro or wind and solar. How big a difference?  Using the cost of building Hinkley Point C facility, Ramana argues that at 3,260 megawatts of electricity if final costs of Hinkley are limited to £33 billion, the difference amounts to “nearly six times the corresponding figure for a solar panel on a roof in British Columbia” (p. 75). That cost is passed on directly to the consumer, over and above the cost of building the facility which is government subsidized.

Nuclear reactors are notoriously prone to catastrophic accidents with long-term implications for public health and the environment.  The primary requirement of any nuclear reactor is a stable environment.  Over the past fifty years climate change has destabilized the environment at all scales globally.   Therefore, any nuclear facility should expect to face unforeseen climate stresses, from extreme drought to flooding, to extreme heat affecting building materials. As at Chalk River in 1951, or Fukushima, nothing is really “fail-proof.”

Nuclear reactors have at most a 50-year lifespan. From lessons learnt at Sellafield, de-commissioning a nuclear reactor is a dangerous and extremely slow and expensive proposition. Ironically that is not a problem for the proponents because the same billionaires who benefited from subsidies to build reactors, also benefit from the cost of decommissioning them.  To date there is no real economic and durable solution to the disposal of radioactive waste and spent fuel. Radioactive waste has a lifespan measured in thousands of years. Containment designs, known to date, have a life expectancy that is at best measured in hundreds of years.

In the USA, the permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, on First Nations land, was first proposed in 1957.  It remains to this day “a proposal.”  Similarly, Ontario recently designated Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation land near Ignace as a site for a long-term nuclear repository.  Concern remains for water of the regional water tables, from potential container leakage.  Consistently and almost biblically, First Nations and disadvantaged communities shall inherit contaminated waste and the risk, for the wealthy it remains a faraway problem.  As with Yucca Mountain this project is not without local opposition, and raises questions of social justice. 

Canadian Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, recently pointed out, there is a “10% to 20% chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades.”

Fortunately, few nuclear projects are built in 5 years.  Most take at least 10 or even 20 years to complete.  A lot of things can change in the next decade, if society is capable of making the transformational changes that are stridently called for by science.  Time required to build reactors is one of the biggest arguments against nuclear energy.  If indeed the billionaires’ concern was climate change, to match the energy provided by fossil fuels we would need to build a lot of reactors very quickly. That is impossible without cutting corners and endangering the public.  We do not have decades to solve the energy problem related to climate change.

M.V. Ramana presents the physics or technical aspects of nuclear energy, the corporate and government interests in nuclear energy, and how governments and, in his words, a complicit media (page 225) sell nuclear energy to the public. Interestingly, he presents extensive discussions on why governments endorse nuclear industry in spite  of the fact that only 5 out of 180 reactors were ever built on time and on budget (page 70), and all have essentially been paid for by a public who foot the bill and pay exorbitant electricity bills.

The book’s arguments are well presented in six chapters.  The first chapter reviews the risks that nuclear energy poses for the environment and public health, why stringent regulations are needed,  and why cutting corners in a deregulated environment is not in the public interest.   The second presents arguments as to why nuclear energy is not a practical solution by documenting the history of cost overruns and delays that are a defining characteristic of the industry.  The third reviews the history of corrupt business practices and scandals that has been a regular fixture of the industry. The fourth reviews the historical association of governments with the promotion of nuclear industry, involvement in its corrupt business practices and disinformation of the public.  The fifth reviews the physics and the inescapable link between peaceful and military uses of nuclear energy.  The sixth chapter reviews the “magical thinking” that is characteristic of the tech billionaires’ hard sell of nuclear energy as philanthropy, while harbouring ulterior motives driven strictly by aspirations of endless profit and power, and a thorough disregard of the public interest. 

Nuclear energy is part of a societal and economic framework which we inherited after 1945, together with a colonial economy that no longer serves the need of the majority of human beings to whom it was intended.  At all levels both nuclear energy and disaster capitalism pose existential threats to humanity.  They are ghosts of an unsustainable past that continues to cling on, while younger generations of scientists advocate for transformational changes.

Ramana’s conclusion wrestles with the imperative of societal and economic change. As he states in a defense of “de-growth” which is reviled by Sam Altman: “Those concerned with environmental problems and climate change might start with the absolute necessity for systemic change rather than superficial technological bandages.  Any such change would affect the privileges of Sam Altman and the small group of insanely wealthy people who occupy the 0.1 percent of today’s wealth bracket” (page 231).

The real question for readers is whether we can implement real societal change beyond what many scientists see as bogus “net zero” championed by the most superficial environmentalists and craven politicians.7 The question is whether we can make a global cultural shift in social and economic values in this decade to save our planet. Ramana’s book provides a welcome insight into new directions.  It is real hope for future generations consistent with cultural shifts currently observed in the under-40’s Gen Z’s politics which are re-evaluating our relationship with consumerism and abandoning the establishment values represented by the tech billionaires.8   A new order cannot be that far away if the shibboleths of nuclear energy and tech billionaires are challenged. It is a worthy read for anyone interested in transformational change.

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Dr. Loys Maingon

A graduate of the universities of St. Andrews, UBC, and Saskatchewan, Dr. Loys Maingon first taught environmental studies in 1986. An avid naturalist and a registered professional biologist, he is past president of the Comox Valley Naturalists and current webinar host for the Canadian Society of Environmental Biologists. From his home on the Tsolum River near Merville, he owns and operates an endangered plant nursery and oversees a number of regional conservation and heritage programmes. He is also Research Director of the Strathcona Wilderness Institute and does environmental consulting. Arrested at Clayoquot Sound in 1993, Loys remains a strong advocate for social, economic, and environmental change. He contributed a chapter to Clayoquot & Dissent (Ronsdale Press: 1994), and authored Field Guide to Basic Lichens of Strathcona Park (Strathcona Wilderness Institute Press: 2022).[Editor’s note: Dr. Loys Maingon has reviewed books by Arthur S. Reber, Frantisek Baluska and William B. Miller Jr., Peter R. Grant, Joel Bakan, Melissa Aronczyk & Maria I. Espinoza, William K. Carroll (ed.), Philippe D. Tortell (editor), Daniel Pauly, and Collin Varner for The British Columbia Review.]

  1. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/nuclear-waste-storage-site-chosen-1.7395660 ↩︎
  2. Danilo Brosovic (2023) Societal Collapse: A Literature Review.  Futures Volume 145, January 2023, 103075 ↩︎
  3. https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/books/montreal-and-the-bomb ↩︎
  4. https://thewalrus.ca/nuclear-accidents/ ↩︎
  5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/10/virginia-sprawl-data-centers/ ↩︎
  6. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather-of-ai-raises-odds-of-the-technology-wiping-out-humanity-over-next-30-years ↩︎
  7. Charles Fletcher et al. (2024).  Earth at Risk: An Urgent Call to end the age of destruction and forge a just and sustainable future.  PNAS Nexus: 3: 1-20. ↩︎
  8. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/23/gen-z-millennial-politics-new-order ↩︎

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