Even with a hypothetical socialist government, under utopian conditions, prepared to properly resource this technology and find technical solutions to all the problems that crop up, nuclear power would still be extremely expensive, complex and slow to build. The planetary emergency that is climate change requires us to deploy technological solutions (alongside fundamental political, economic and social changes) that are relatively cheap, quick to put in place, scalable and available worldwide.
If we really did face a choice between nuclear power and climate change, we might need to accommodate ourselves to those shortcomings. But we don’t, not because climate change isn’t an issue, but because nuclear is inadequate to its threat. The lead-in time for nuclear power already rules it out if we are serious about adopting emissions scenarios that stand any chance of avoiding dangerous levels of warming. It doesn’t make any sense at all to commit the vast sums nuclear requires when spending the same amount of money on renewables would provide almost five times as much generation capacity in a fraction of the time, particularly with nuclear’s record of delays and failures.
Ploughing resources and political commitment into nuclear will only slow down the response to climate change, and trying to engineer around the myriad problems of nuclear power is a distraction we cannot afford from the engineering problems that we should be focussing on: using demand management, energy efficiency, storage, international interconnectors and non-polluting load-following power sources to make a grid powered by renewables a reality.
In summary, nuclear power is antithetical to the world we want to see. From its origins as a figleaf to distract us from the grim truth of mutually assured destruction, to its recent resurrection as a bogus solution to climate change, it is inherently bound up with violent state forms and paranoid and secretive hierarchies. It cannot be deployed at a speed and scale to make a difference to climate change, but it will make the world less safe and stable at a time when we can least afford to manage the many problems that come with it. People will already have to deal with its legacy for countless generations and the only moral course of action is to decline to add to their burden by generating more waste.
Climate change mitigation measures need to be prefigurative of the other changes we want to see in the world. Technology will never be the solution to climate change, but any viable solution will need to deploy it alongside social change. Nuclear cannot deliver on even the limited grounds where it claims to make a difference and is a distracting dead end. In political circumstances where social change is not immediately realisable, we need to be advocating for technologies which are in harmony with the changes we want to see, not providing free PR for an industry which should have been left to die decades ago.
Democratically controlled renewable power generation is much more amenable to the types of adaptation and demand matching that make a zero carbon grid a realistic possibility. Renewables are less complex than nuclear power, much quicker and easier to deploy, and much more scalable. The technologies can easily be shared globally, and building more cross-border grid interconnectors will make it much easier to manage the variance of renewable generation. Rather than reproducing existing oppressive structures and relationships, these technologies are at the very least compatible with the relationships and institutions we would want to see as socialists.
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