The Nuclear Power Debate: How It Has Been Influenced by Philosophy and Personal Values

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The Nuclear Power Debate How It Has Been
Influenced by Philosophy and Personal Values

• Oregon State University
• April 24, 2001

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Most Common Public Concerns about Nuclear Power

• Are Nuclear Plants Safe?
• Fear of Radiation
• How will Nuclear Wastes be permanently stored?

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View of Scientists on How to Proceed with Nuclear
Energy

• Source Rothman-Lichter Survey, Public Opinion,
  Aug, 1982
• RandomSampling of 130,000 Scientists listed in
  American Men and Women of Science

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Other Influences on Public Attitudes

• The Linkage between Peaceful Nuclear Power and
  Nuclear Bombs
• Phobic Fear? Occurs with matters which
• Are not well understood -- are a little
  mysterious (e.g., flying)
• We do not feel are within our control
• Have the potential for large consequences if
  something goes wrong

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Survey Results Among Decision-Makers from Seven
Categories

• Clearly the antis make few distinctions in
  their assessments of nuclear powers dangers --
  which raises the possibility that their views on
  these problems may be less the cause of their
  opposition than its consequence
• the antis look first to environmental, social
  and moral factors, and last to science and
  technology for the antis, it (nuclear power)
  is a moral issue to be assessed in terms of
  broader social values Source Cohen and
  Lichter, AEI Journal on Government and Society,
  March 1983.

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The Nuclear Debate

• As it became better understood, it was clear that
  the framework for the nuclear debate was
  complexA public discussion of energy
  development between groups with these opposing
  views is like a discussion of pork processing
  between farmers, meat processors and Orthodox
  Jews and Muslims. One may talk about humane
  slaughtering techniques, but the underlying issue
  is whether or not pork should be eaten. Bert
  Wolfe, quoted in Nuclear Industry Magazine, 1978
• By the mid-1970s the (nuclear) controversy had
  become, for the most committed, an explicit
  battle of ideologies Spencer Weart, Nuclear
  Fear, 1988, p. 356

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C.P. Snow The Two Cultures

• Saw culture divided between natural scientists
  and literary intellectuals
• Between the two a gulf of mutual
  incomprehension, sometimes hostility and dislike,
  but most of all a lack of understanding. They
  have a curious distorted image of each other.
  Their attitudes are so different that even on the
  level of emotion, they cant find much in
  common.
• Snow saw science as the great hope for the
  future of mankind -- we would need to value
  science to transfer the benefits of the developed
  world to the undeveloped world

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C.P. Snow -- What Happened?

• The scale of the response was astounding -- there
  was global interest and it was translated into
  several languages including Hungarian, Polish and
  Japanese
• But it petered out because no one really knew
  what it meant
• Still it did not go away

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The Science Wars

• Postmodern thinkers, so-called cultural
  relativists -- the intellectuals -- in the
  1980s argued that science was socially
  constructed
• The doctrine of social construction denies the
  very possibility of verifiable, objective truth
  upon which the authority of science depends
  (WSJ, May 29, 1996)
• The Alan Sokal hoax (theoretical physicist at
  NYU)
• Transgressing the Boundaries Toward a
  Transformative Hermenuetics of Quantum Gravity
• Social Text, (Spring/Summer 1996) by Alan Sokal
• A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies
• Lingua Franca, May-June 1996, by Alan Sokal

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A House Built on Sand Exposing Postmodernist
myths about Science Noretta Koertge, 1998, p. 6

• We kept stewing about what was going on.
  Everyone had an ingredient to add the Viet Nam
  war and Sputnik, C.P. Snow, Alan Bloom, Kuhn,
  Feyerabend Three Mile Island, Bhopal, and the
  spotted owl .
• Neither our seminar nor this volume could
  fruitfully grapple with themes of such magnitude.
  A respectable account of the broader historical
  context of the Science Wars awaits the touch of a
  future Gibbon.

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The Clash between Modernism and
Post-modernismModernism

• The birth of the modern age
• Liberating people from prejudice and superstition
  and replacing it with science, reason,
  rationality, and empiricism
• Sees the universe in objective terms -- truth is
  objective reality is objective
• Through science we would come to understand our
  world, feed the hungry, provide clothing and
  shelter, improve our lives -- sanitation, medical
  care, education, labor saving machines
• It saw progress through industrialization

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The historical evolution of Post-Modern
Ideology

• The Enlightenment was a new idea, a break with
  history, built on confidence in reason, the
  belief that humanity would be liberated from
  prejudice and superstition by using disciplined
  thought.
• But as thinkers pursued this, they began to
  realize it would lead to determinism
• David Hume
• La Mettrie, Man the Machine

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Determinism -- An example

• Thomas Wolfe, Sorry, but your Soul Just Died,
  FORBES, ASAP, December 2, 1996Every human
  brain is born, not as a blank tablet waiting to
  be filled, but as an exposed negative waiting to
  be slipped into the developer fluid you are
  going to get precious little that is not already
  imprinted on the film. The print is the
  individuals genetic history, over thousands of
  years of evolution, and there is not much anyone
  can do about it genetics determine not only
  things such as temperament, role preferences,
  emotional responses, and levels of aggression,
  but also many of our revered moral choices, which
  are not choices in any free will sense, but
  tendencies imprinted on the hypothalamus of the
  brain.

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Determinism (Contd)

• Thomas Wolfe, Sorry, but your Soul Just Died,
  FORBES, ASAP, December 2, 1996The young
  generation takes this yet one step further. Since
  consciousness and thought are entirely physical
  products of your brain and nervous system and
  since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth
  what makes you think you have a free will?
  Where is it going to come from? I have heard
  neuroscientists theorize that, given computers of
  sufficient power and sophistication, it would be
  possible to predict the course of any human
  beings life, moment by moment, including the
  fact that the poor devil was about to shake his
  head over the very idea.

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One Answer Reject Reason!

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
• Has the progress of the sciences and the arts
  contributed to corrupt or to purify morals?
• Challenged conventional ideas of progress and
  the goals of civilization
• For Rousseau, reason is not the final test.
  There are some conclusions against which our
  whole body rebels sometimes reason is the
  better guide, but in the great problems of
  conduct and belief we trust to our feelings
  rather than our diagrams instinct and feeling
  are more trustworthy than reason
• Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, pp. 196-7

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The Dilemma

• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
• For Kant there were two main objects of
  admiration and wonder, the starry heavens above
  and the moral law within.
• Kant was not able to achieve a resolution and
  left us with a bifurcated reality
• Reason/Science/The Physical World Faith/the
  transcendentalworld
• Many have called this the dilemma of modern
  humanity

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Dealing with the Dilemma

• Following Kant a new line of thought began to
  develop which conflicted with traditional
  Enlightenment thought
• German Romanticism
• Existentialism (Keirkegaard, Nietzsche,
  Heidegger, Sartre)
• Expressed in the mid-20th century as Beats,
  Hippies, Bohemians
• Today captured by postmodernism

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The Clash between Modernism and
Post-modernismPost-modernism

• The Post Industrial age
• Lacks confidence in science, reason and
  rationality -- trusts feeling and intuition more
• Not so sure about the objectivity of truth and
  reality
• Sees the downside of industrialization --
  environmental degradation, alienation, loss of
  community

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Pre-Sixties America

• A culture characterized by Modernism
• Belief in science and technology
• Trust in objective truth and objective
  reality
• Confident that they would lead to a better world
• A culture of Science, Protestantism, and
  Capitalism
• But there was a growing adversary culture
• Artists
• The avant garde
• Beatniks, bohemians

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Postmodernism The Legacy of the Sixties

• This adversary culture erupted during the
  Sixties.
• By the end of the decade there had been a
  complete shift in the culture. Daniel Bell wrote
  in 1976
• .. The adversary culture substantially
  influence if not dominate, the cultural
  establishment today the publishing houses,
  museums, and galleries the major news, picture
  and cultural weeklies and monthlies the theatre,
  the cinema and the universities
• The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 1976

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The Monolithic Culture Herbert Marcuse and
Jacques Ellul

• The values, attitudes and methods of science are
  so thoroughly integrated into modern industrial
  society they threaten to destroy all humanistic
  values
• They lead inevitably to domination of man by man
  (Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1964)
• Or man becomes the victim of a runaway
  scientific-technical mentality that dominates men
  blindly, impersonally, and to no human ends at
  all. (Ellul, The Technological Society, 1973)

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Science was blamed for our modern problems

• Schumacher (Small is Beautiful)
• the modern world has been shaped by technology.
  It tumbles from crisis to crisis on all sides
  there are prophesies of disaster and, indeed,
  visible signs of breakdown.
• Lynn White Jr. (The Historical Roots of our
  Ecological Crisis)
• ..somewhat over a century ago science and
  technology joined to give mankind powers which,
  to judge by many of the ecological effects, are
  out of control . Modern technology with its
  ruthlessness toward nature

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How Attitudes toward science changed during the
Sixties
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The Port Huron Statement -- 1962

• We should undertake here and now a fifty year
  effort to prepare for all nations the conditions
  of industrialization
• To achieve this, atomic power plants must
  spring up to make electrical energy
  available. Drafted by Tom Hayden.

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Abraham Maslow

• The fact remains that science has come to a
  dead end, and (in some forms) can be seen as a
  threat and a danger to mankind, or at least to
  the highest and noblest qualities and aspirations
  of mankind. Many sensitive people, especially
  artists, are afraid that science besmirches and
  depresses, that it tears things apart rather than
  integrating them, thereby killing rather than
  creating.
• As quoted in Creative Initiative Guide to
  Fulfillment, 1976

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Postmodern values also reflected in ...

• The rise of a new spirituality
• The rise of a new environmentalism linked to this
  new spirituality
• The shift from preservationist to activist
• The adoption of a new ethic

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The Historical Roots of our Ecological
Crisisby Lynn White Jr. -- Science, 1967

• Our Judeo-Christian Heritage is responsible for
• The rise of science and technology
• our exploitation of nature
• The solution requires a changed ethic
• Our present science and technology are so
  tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance
  toward nature that no solution for our ecological
  crisis can be expected from them alone
• The beatniks show a sound instinct with their
  affinity for Zen Buddhism, which conceives of the
  man-nature relationship as very nearly the mirror
  image of the Christian view.

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The New Environmentalism

• Developed further in the 70s -- the deep
  ecology movement
• Making nature equal to or more important than
  humanity
• Examples
• Greenpeace Ecology teaches us that humankind is
  not the center of the universe the whole earth
  is part of our body and we must learn to respect
  it as we respect ourselves
• An NEI Poll in 1995 showed
• 69 agree with the statement Humans are equal to
  the rest of nature
• 28 agree with the statement Humans are more
  important than nature

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The New Environmentalism

• It is more than expressing a concern about
  cleaning up the environment
• It proposes a new way of thinking about the
  relationship between humanity and nature, our
  role in the universe, our visions for society,
  and implicitly the whole Enlightenment project
  -- its visions of progress.

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How it affected the nuclear controversy ..

• E.F. Schumacher established the vision in 1973 --
  Small is Beautiful
• Small had appeal because it focused on
• Restoration of community and control and
  implicitly a rejection of modern industrial
  society
• Emphasizing a restoration of our relationship
  with nature
• Seeking low tech solutions

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Amory Lovins

• Amory Lovins refined it in a new energy policy
  Energy Strategy The Road Not Taken, 1976,
  Foreign Affairs
• Energy policy requires us to choose between the
  hard path and the soft path
• The soft path relies exclusively on renewables
  used in small form and conservation
• Lovins argued this would be sufficient to meet
  all our energy needs
• The Problem
• It was a rural answer for an urban world

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Lovins on nuclear power

• If nuclear power were clean, safe, economic,
  assured of ample fuel, and socially benign per
  se, it would still be unattractive because of the
  political implications of the kind of energy
  economy it would lock us into.
• Foreign Affairs, p. 93

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Charles Komanoff The Ten Blows that Stopped
Nuclear Power

• The analysis by Amory Lovins was a tour de
  force that reconceptualized the entire energy
  debate. He held out an enticing, almost
  irresistible vision of a non-nuclear future that
  also avoided an over reliance on fossil fuels.

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Some consequences of our commitment to the soft
path

• Conservation efforts have reduced electricity
  growth rates from 7 per year to 2 per year
• But it still meant new electricity would be
  needed -- demand increased by 1300 billion kwh
  from 1973 to 1998 -- 170 new 1000 Mwe plants
• The resistance to central station generation
  proved a major barrier to new central station
  generation
• From 1988 1998 total electricity demand grew at
  2.3 per year, while new generation grew at .6
  per year

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Renewables helped, but not enough

• The commitment to renewables meant an increase of
  27 per year in the decade from 1988-98
• Renewables supplied 8 of total energy
  consumption in 1996
• Over 90 was from Hydro (53) and Bio fuels
  (41)
• But while the total contribution from wind,
  geothermal, and solar in 1996 was ...
• 25 billion kwh and
• 86 of the world total
• It was less than 1 of U.S Electricity
  generation.

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We are now committed to a fossil fuel energy
policy

• Roughly 97 of new electricity generation between
  1973 and 1996 came from coal and nuclear power.
• The US Department of Energy forecasts that 80 of
  new electricity generation globally through 2020
  will come from fossil fuels -- coal and natural
  gas. Most of the rest will come from major new
  hydro projects.
• Coal production is projected to increase by 2.3
  billion short tons, a 41 increase
• Nuclear power is the only primary energy source
  projected to decline

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Less nuclear has meant more coal and more air
pollution

• Since 1970 coal production increased by 188
• In 1996, the coal production that was displaced
  by nuclear power meant
• Sulfur dioxide emissions were reduced by 5.3
  million tons
• Nitrogen oxide emissions were reduced by 2.5
  million tons
• CO2 emissions were reduced by 147 million tons

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Why attack nuclear even if it means we will use
more coal?

• Nuclear power captured the anti-establishment
  issues in a way that coal did not
• It brought together the elements of the iron
  triangle -- the alliance between industry,
  scientists, and government -- there was no
  parallel to motivate a similar reaction to coal
• Nuclear power symbolized the growth of science
  and technology -- the values of the
  Enlightenment Project in a way that coal did
  not
• Nuclear power was the epitome of high
  technology -- new, mysterious, probing the
  secrets of nature, posing risks to nature and
  humanity that were unfamiliar and perceived to
  have unprecedented danger

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A Summary

• The conflict over nuclear power was as much about
  values and philosophy as it was about technical
  issues
• These issues tended to revolve around ones views
  of science, technology, and industrial progress
  -- most captured by Modernism and
  Postmodernism
• The root of the division between these two world
  views is philosophical -- the so-called dilemma
  of modern humanity -- our inability to find a
  secular philosophy which can explain our rational
  world and our spiritual humanity at the same time

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