Movements against nuclear power
The threat of a nuclear crisis in Japan has summoned pro- and anti-nuclear power debaters to the streets (over 200,000 Germans across the country participated in anti-nuclear protests last week), and to online outlets (“nuclear power” showed up in over 76 millions websites last week, compared to 1.87 million websites during the same period last year). Several countries, including Germany and China, have suspended plans for nuclear power expansion.
There is a striking amount of variation among countries in the use of nuclear power for electricity, and this variation does not simply map onto differences in resources and technological training: for example, France has 58 nuclear power plants while Germany has 17.
Status of Commercial Nuclear Power Plants Globally, data updated May 2009
The factors accounting for this variation are abundant, and enough to fill several volumes. One interesting variable, the indications of which have seen in Germany, is the presence and relative success of anti-nuclear social movements across countries. Various scholars (e.g. Samuel Walker in his book on the Three Mile Island crisis) have suggested that these movements have been important in shaping nuclear policy (for a more comprehensive account of how social movements effect policy across issues and countries, see Marco Giugni’s book, Social Protest and Policy Change; he argues that political opportunity structures, public opinion, and issue type shape the impact of a social movement on policy outcomes). So, why are Germans particularly organized against nuclear power at this moment? Why do we not see similar protests in the U.S., where there are over five times as many nuclear power plants?
First, some background on the use of nuclear power globally. As of January 2011, there were 442 nuclear power reactors in the world, almost one fourth of them in the United States, the largest consumer of nuclear energy in the world. Based on 2005 data, the U.S., Japan, and France accounted for 56.5% of all nuclear power used internationally (measured in terawatt hours). Nuclear power provides about 75% of electricity in France (a figure topped only by Lithuania, which derives over 76% of its electricity from nuclear, according to I.A.E.A. figures in 2010), and about 20% of electricity in the U.S. in 2009 . In contrast, there are only 6 nuclear power plants across all of Africa, South America, and the Middle East.
The anti-nuclear movement, unlike other types of social movements, has the feature of being periodically reinvigorated around extreme, potentially cataclysmic disasters such as at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Fukushima Daiichi plant. In explaining the presence and success of anti-nuclear movements, a number of analysts have pointed to the importance of political opportunity in shaping the nature and success of those movements. Political opportunity (or political opportunity structure) theory has provided a central framework for understanding social movements broadly. This approach argues that the nature of social movements (e.g. what kinds of claims are made, what types of relationships between people or organizations are forged, what tactics are utilized) and the impact of a movement on policy depend on features of the political environment (e.g. the extent of state capacity, or the relative distribution of power in a political system) in which people are mobilizing.
Christian Joppke (in his book, Mobilizing against Nuclear Energy) argues that part of the difference between anti-nuclear social movements in the U.S. and Germany can be attributed to the political structure of the countries. The multi-level and fragmented nature of the U.S. political structure allows for new issues to arise, but often dilutes their strength, while in Germany, an exclusionary state structure facilitated a more unified movement. Koopmans and Duyvendak (1995) compare responses to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, where Germany was the only country with a substantial increase in the number of anti-nuclear protest events. They argue that the objective conditions (how much radiation the countries received after the disaster) had no bearing on anti-nuclear mobilization in the countries. Instead, the state of anti-nuclear movements and the political landscape in those countries at the time, in addition to the ability to control interpretation of events, drove differences in the response to Chernobyl. The authors conclude that political opportunities– especially the distribution of political power– determined the degree of success of anti-nuclear movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which influenced later movement mobilization.
The social movements literature reminds us of all the intermediary steps between complaints and successful mobilization to address those complaints. Political opportunity structure and control over the interpretation of recent events in Japan may be most important in determining what shape anti-nuclear protests in the U.S. take now.
Read more about political opportunity explanations of social movements in the Blackwell Companion to Social Movements here.
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Last year I showed a film in my class called “Poisoned Waters”. The film documented water pollution in the US. The film also touched on the politics surrounding water pollution. One point the film made was that in the 1960s and early 1970s there were several high profile environmental disasters – a large oil spill off Santa Barbara, Lake Cuyahoga catching on fire etc. The film suggested that perhaps there has been no mass movement against water pollution because today it is simply not as visible to most Americans. This seemed a reasonable explanation but I think the writers for this documentary would rethink this assumption after the BP oil spill and the nuclear disaster.
The political opportunity structure in the United States seems highly unlikely to produce a viable environmental movement that would restrict offshore drilling, nuclear power, or natural gas exploration despite an academy award nominated film on the subject. Perhaps the filmmakers for “poisoned waters” (still a great documentary by the way) would have benefited from reading some of the literature you cited.
Here are two things to keep in mind about nuclear power and nuclear waste:
1.) Simple and inexpensive processes for destroying the radioactivity in nuclear waste have been known for decades:
“Radioactive isotope decay rate or half-life can be increased or decreased as needed to deactivate radioactivity or to increase shelf life of radioactive isotopes. Currently many investigators/experimenters have reported half-life anomalies and have demonstrated repeatability of the various processes. The deactivation/neutralization of radioactivity in isotopes by the several demonstrated processes clearly suggest the possibility of full scale processing of radioactive nuclear materials to deactivate radioactive nuclear materials. ”
http://mobiusasi.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/understanding-the-opposition-one-key-to-educate-non-scientists/
“In 1964 we thought and believed that radioactivity in nuclear waste would soon be history on planet earth. As history has proven us wrong, we now know and understand that there is a fortune, billions yearly, to be made by saving every scrap of radioactive nuclear waste and trying to bury it in Yucca Mountain and in cleaning up spills, leaks, and escaping radioactive particles from decaying containment schemes. We were just looking at the wrong goal post. No one receiving the funds has any interest in eliminating radioactivity in nuclear waste. Nuclear Half-Life Modification Technology could reduce the cost to a fraction of the cost that is experienced today.” ( “Radioactivity Deactivation at High Temperature in an Applied DC Voltage Field Demonstrated in 1964”. Larry Geer & Cecil Baumgartner, http://www.gdr.org/nuclear_half.htm )
Destroying radioactive waste on site obviates concerns about reprocessing, packaging, transportation, storage, and worries about terrorism and off-site accidents.
There are more details, and other processes, described in my article “Adventures in Energy Destruction” at scripturalphysics.org/qm/adven.html
2.) I am told that about 96% of high level nuclear waste can be reprocessed and reused as fuel. So why would we want to destroy it permanently? There is certainly one good reason (among others): the nuclear power industry is headed for the junk yard. It will be going the way of the Linotype machine, the mechanical typewriter, the landline telephone, and the incandescent light bulb. Already consumers are becoming able to sell power back to the utility companies from their homes. Eventually, even the Grid will disappear. There are political developments too: Germany is trying to shut down its nuclear power industry. And Japan, Italy and Switzerland are having second thoughts.
But the thing that will destroy the nuclear power industry is economics and lack of investors. Rapid advances in other energy fields will make nuclear power obsolete. Here is one example from solar power:
RSi’s ChemArc Process has greatly reduced the cost of photovoltaic silicon.
http://www.engineeringtv.com/video/The-Chemistry-of-RSis-ChemArc-P
And relevant advances are being made in storage of electrical power:
“Utilization of poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastic and composition-modified barium titanate powders in a matrix that allows polarization and the use of integrated-circuit technologies for the production of lightweight ultrahigh electrical energy storage units (EESU)” http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7466536.html , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor
“This paper reports the successful creation of a new ultracapacitor structure that offers a capacitance density on the order of 100 to 200 Farads per cubic centimeter; versus the current state of the art capacitance density of 1 F/cm3. ” (“New mega-farad ultracapacitors”, Bakhoum, E., 2009, ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4775259
“We report the observation of extremely high dielectric permittivity exceeding 10^9 and magnetocapacitance of the order of 10^4% in La0.875Sr0.125MnO3 single crystal.” (“Giant dielectric permittivity and magnetocapacitance in La0.875Sr0.125MnO3 single crystals”, R. F. Mamin, T. Egami, Z. Marton, and S. A. Migachev, 29 March 2007; DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.75.115129 ; PACS numbers: 77.22.d, repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1158&context=physics_papers
In the last citation, a dielectric permitivity of over a BILLION (one thousand million) is simply astounding, and would also be useful in antigravity research. (scripturalphysics.org/4v4a/ADVPROP.html#Biefeld-BrownEffect )
Old battery charging technology is being pulled out of the closet too. One implementation uses an AC electropolishing technique to increase the charge/discharge cycling life times of ordinary batterys by a factor of 20 to 30 times the usual.
pages.ripco.net/~marnow/uk/NASA_Vargo_Start.html
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/2752550.pdf
This is just ONE example in ONE industry. There are many others, and some are astonishing–real “poop-a-brick” developments!
The nuclear power industry has only a short, limited future. This is NOT a good time to build new nuclear plants. But it is a good time to DESTROY radioactive waste ( or “spent fuel”) permanently by simple, safe, inexpensive processes that have been known for decades. Some additional research will be needed to convert this knowhow into an industrial process, but that will still be MUCH cheaper than digging more 100 billion dollar holes in the ground. The nuclear power industry would have quickly solved these problems if it had been required to dispose of its own nuclear waste on-site at the power plant WITHOUT help (subsidies) from the federal government!