Undesirability of nuclear power

Arguments opposing nuclear bombs have become more comp-rehensive with passing years since 1946.

It was on July 16, 1945, that atomic bomb was tested in the USA’s Nevada desert, and the world lost its nuclear innocence. Twenty-one days later, on August 6, the experiment was live-tested on Japanese people when the USA dropped a 15-kiloton Uranium-235 fission bomb on Hiroshima.

The experiment was immediately hailed in the New York Times in an article titled, “Day of Atomic Energy Hailed by President, Revealing Weapon”, in which US president Truman said: “What has been done is the greatest achievement of organised science in history.”

A second live-test was conducted three days later by dropping a 21-kilotonne Plutonium-core bomb on Nagasaki. The NYT also reported on the hitherto secret July 16 test, writing, “... a group of eminent scientists gathered, frankly fearful to witness the results of the invention, which might turn out to be either the salvation or the Frank-enstein’s monster of the world.”

The Frankenstein monster released on the “Day of atomic energy” lives and prospers in the intimate relationship between bombs and nuclear power, because weapon-grade Uranium-235 and Plutonium are products or by-products of the nuclear cycle vital for the operation of nuclear power plants (NPPs).

The NYT report provides justification to shift the discussion from experiments with bombs on people to NPPs, which are essentially controlled nuclear experiments, though the nuclear industry has self-certified it as proven technology.

In experiments, things can and do go wrong. In NPPs, whatever the triggering factor for accidents, the real effects on public health and safety are hidden from the public by the secretive, government-protected nuclear industry. The Frankenstein monster bared its fearsome visage when the world witnessed accidents that could not be hidden from the public, at Windscale (UK), Three Mile Island (USA), Chernobyl (USSR) and Fukushima (Japan).

When nuclear accidents cannot be hidden, the industry downplays their effects with outright falsehoods, equivocating statements and technical-political verbiage. All this even while nuclear power continues to be promoted as the best combination of safe-clean-cheap-reliable (SCCR) energy, with the additional advantage of carbon-emission reduction to mitigate global warming. Nations with nuclear capability have enacted laws to provide a secrecy-screen to the nuclear industry because of legislators’ blind trust in esoteric science and technology.

The secrecy-screen is required precisely because of the intimate link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It makes the plans, projects and expenditures of the nuclear industry opaque to the public and law-makers alike.

Thus, the legislative body which legitimises nuclear secrecy effectively, scores a self-goal. However, the nuclear industry selectively puts out information for public consumption, spends phenomenal funds on propaganda to advertise its SCCR-energy operations, and as part of the military-industrial complex, secretly builds nuclear weapons.

In 1948, US General Omar Bradley warned: “We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living.”

Problems of life

But opposition to nuclear bombs and nuclear power has been expressed right from 1946 onwards, and the arguments have become more comprehensive, cogent and forceful with the passing years. This has developed into a school of thought and peaceful action which the ruling political class, under thrall of the nuclear industry, pejoratively dubs “anti-nuclear”.

But, those who oppose nucle-ar bombs and nuclear power are primarily concerned with problems of life, livelihood, health and safety of present and future generations of human and non-human life, and thus are pro-life rather than anti-nuclear.

The impossibility of keeping present and future generations safe from nuclear pollution (contamination) created in the past and continuing with increased vigour in the present, is a truth which the nuclear industry has consistently denied and ridiculed. The denial and ridicu-le is changing especially in rec-ent times, into violent opposition by the nuclear industry to those who articulate these truths and call for shutdown of NPPs.

This is happening globally and is exemplified in India by violence in support of the nuclear industry, by Tamil Nadu police against peaceful opponents of Kudankulam NPP by lathi and bullet-force, jailing protestors, charging them with sedition and waging war against the state.

Sooner rather than later, the public is sure to recognise the awful reality of the nuclear Frankenstein. As the world touches the 71st anniversary of the nuclear bomb and protests against the nuclear industry multiply, Nicholas Walter’s words are apt: “No one can tell when protest might become effective, and the present might suddenly turn into the future.”

(The writer, a retired Major General, is with People's Union for Civil Liberties)