[The following article appeared in the March 7 issue of Rouge, the French Trotskyist weekly. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The recent increases in the price of oil are now being used as a pretext for a sharp acceleration of all the nuclear power-plant construction programs in the developed capitalist countries. Never has a technical decision by employers and governments aroused so many-often completely contradictory-responses. Official bodies such as the EDF [Electricité de France, the state electricity trust] have stepped up their soothing reassurances. On the other side, roundly denouncing nuclear energy, are scientists (for example, the Appeal of the 400) and more or less marginal newspapers-opponents lacking unity but basing their case on solid technical and scientific studies. This dossier reopens the discussion in Rouge on this problem.
It is a dossier for activists. We will show that the present decisions in support of nuclear energy are dictated in the first place by class interests, without regard for the environment, the health, or the real needs of the workers. We are not seeking an academic debate among specialists.
Already involved in concrete struggles are small peasant landholders ruined by expropriation; fishermen whose jobs are threatened,? nuclear-industry workers who are victims of difficult, unhealthy working conditions; and scientists and youth rebelling against the monstrous wastage under capitalism. In this struggle we have to choose sides. And, in contrast to the bourgeois humanist currents that often predominate in the ecology movement, or
1. See box accompanying this article.-IP
Any Wattage the reformist currents that dominate the workers movement, we reaffirm the necessity for socialist revolution to bring about a satisfying and lasting solution to the energy needs of humanity.
The accidental risks: While the possibility of a serious accident of the LOCA type? is slight, no one dismisses it completely. It would have very serious consequences.
The chronic risks, while less spectacular, are real:
• Thermal pollution.
• Radioactive contamination of the environment with serious genetic consequences, which are aggravated by cases of concentration throughout the food chain.
These risks are underestimated and even systematically hidden from the workers by official bodies. Doesn't EDF tell its personnel that "we must see to it that the population as a whole is not contaminated by adverse publicity" and that "participation in debates must be limited to carefully defined circles, such as municipal councils, doctors and engineers clubs, Rotary clubs, and so on"?
One of the most delicate problems is the handling of wastes at all stages of disposal: transportation, storage, and inspection. For wastes with a long half-life, the safety of storage sites must be guaranteed for several centuries. Up to now this problem has not at all been worked out satisfactorily.
However, listing these harmful effects is only a secondary argument in the polemic against the proponents of nuclear energy. It gives them the chance to emphasize that the radiation artificially produced between now and the year 2000 will not be more than several hundredths of the natural radiation to which the whole population is exposed, and that methods of measurement and protection against radioactive pollution are much better developed than those relating to "classical" pollution (for example, chemicals).
To center the critique on this aspect of the problem, by making nuclear energy something absolutely different from other forms of energy, is to start from an abstract, nonhistorical point of view. In place of the class point of view it offers the fear of the petty bourgeois bewildered and impotent in face of the dangers (many, in fact) that he encounters in his daily life.
After the age of coal, then of oil, now comes the age of the atom. A clear sign of the new trend is the involvement of the oil trusts-including the "big name" firms like PUK, Nickel, and so on-in everything from the mining process to production of the radiating fuel. What are the reasons for this decision?
1. To begin with, there is the availability of a technology that has been developed for military objectives and through public finaneing since the Second World War. The capitalists merely needed to seize the opportunity to profit from it through exploiting it privately.!
In this respect, the example of its development in the United States is instructive:
• From 1939 to 1946 financing fell exclusively to the War Department.
• After 1947, the creation of the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission), with responsibility for overseeing all development and research in the nuclear field, paved the way for turning over the technological results already obtained to civilian ends. The AEC took charge of basic research work up to the building of prototypes. Only in 1966 (that is, when nuclear energy began to become competitive on the market) did private investment in the construction of power plants in the United States exceed those of the AEC. Once the technology has been developed, considerable profits can be made, of course, out of contracts or purchases of licenses and patents.
• In France it is the CEA [Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique], today broken down into many sectors and a number of branches, that provides the close linkup to the private sector. This division into differ ent sectors has gone hand in hand with attacks on the gains made by the CEA
The "natural uranium-graphiteworkers.
gas" branch has been handed over to Westinghouse, General Electric, and Gulf General Atomic.
2. Industries whose weight is already decisive in the world economy-iron and steel; electronics; electrical, civil, and chemical engineering companies—are investing in the nuclear industry.
The required investments are so great that they necessi-
HIN
tate the reapportionment of capital in all these sectors. For example:
MEMORIAM
• From
Westinghouse
1966 to 1971, received 40 percent of (potential) orders in the United States; GE, 35 percent.
HOMO
• The Schneider-Creusot Loire Holding has the Westinghouse company (which
SAPIENS
concession) has become the main manufacturer of reactors in Europe thanks to orders from EDF.
EXTINCT
(affiliated to GE), which • CGE
at present has an agreement to build lightwater plants, is preparing for their replaceof the century. The ment at the end government has chosen it to collaborate with the CEA in France and the AGIP oil trust in Italy in the industrial development of breeders.
• The extraction, concentration, refining, and manufacturing of combustible elements is completely dominated in France by PUK, St. Gobain, Rhône-Poulenc, and Nickel, owing to research work carried out by the CEA.
3. Other possible future sources of energy have been and are still systematically underdeveloped.
Senator Mike Gravel noted in the U.S. Congress that between 1954 and 1971, the federal government invested $3 billion in nuclear energy, but only $1 million in solar energy. That is because coal, oil, and nuclear energy were more profitable. In this
1/
opinions and decisions respect, official reflect not the real potential but the priorities of development that flow from the very logie of the development of capitalism.
With respect to solar energy, for example, many estimates show that modest investments to develop research into the conversion of radiation into electricity through photovoltaic cells, and the large-scale manufacture of these units, could cut the present cost of solar kilowatts by a factor of 100 to 200 within the next ten years, bringing it within a cost range where it would be competitive (from the point of view of the capitalist market). But, you see, the trusts are not interested in taking this risk for the coming period. And under the capitalist system, the necessary public investments are controlled by the general interests of the bourgeoisie. It's an open and shut case.
4. The nuclear market can undergo rapid expansion, for two reasons:
• A power plant's life expectancy is March 24, 1975
short, around twenty years. The need to renew and extend the reactor bank offers a stable outlet for big industry. This would not exactly be the case, for example, with solar installations, which are much more durable and which must be based on very long-term investments to be profitable. But no one is going to invest in an enterprise if told it won't pay off for a century.
• It is a market, moreover, whose "geographical" extension (to the Arab countries, India, Iran, and so on) is guaranteed for years to come, in view of the strategic importance of nuclear arms and the fact that the indispensable elements for manufacturing these arms can be obtained with some powerful reactors.
1. Consider the social costs.
In addition to these historical factors, the present decisions are explained by structural factors. In capitalist society costs are evaluated at the company level or a given branch of the economy. Thus the official calculations for the French nuclear program have not taken account of the following:
• The costs of grids, transformers, and distribution to consumers in cases where electrical energy must be substituted for other forms of energy.
• More generally, overall social costs, for example harm to the environment and restoration of a site after a power plant has been dismantled (which would cost at least as much as the contruction of the plant!)*
Researchers from the Economic and Juridical Institute of Energy (IEJE)® have been able to show that if the social costs of the nuclear chain are compared with the social costs of the oil chain, "the first are out of proportion to the second."
2. A negative energy balance sheet.
An estimate that sought to take into account all of these costs ignored by capitalist accounting procedures would, for example, have to calculate the cost in energy of the production of energy. Such calculations have recently been made by several teams of scientists and engineers. Their results are a devastating indictment of the capitalist system.
J. Price's figures, for example, although by researchers for the Economic and Juridical Institute of Energy (IEJE) in Grenoble: "Alternatives au nucléaire" [Alternatives to nuclear energy], Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, February 1975.
he probably overestimates the real load factor, show that the construction of a series of reactors like those called for in the present program of the EDF would consume energy like a veritable bottomless hole.
His figures estimate the energy balance of a bank of nuclear reactors, comparing the sum of energy it consumes in construction and replacement with the sum of energy it furnishes over a given period.
He proves that if the power-plant building program is too rapid, the nuclear program consumes more energy than it supplies! For example, from 1978 on, to carry out the French nuclear program would require:
• As much energy as is produced at present by all the hydroelectric dams in France.
• As much energy as could be produced by twelve 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactors.
But in 1978 the EDF will have only five or six big nuclear power plants. For more than ten years the energy balance sheet of the French nuclear program would be practically nil!
We know that the life expectancy of a nuclear power plant is about twenty years. For this same EDF program, it would be necessary, beginning in the 1990s, to begin to build about fifteen new plants each year—seven or eight to replace those going out of service and the same number to increase the existing bank. The total energy of the seventy-five plants under construction would then have to be allotted to the production of twenty-five plants of the kind already in operation!
This absurdity is all the more revolting in that any later attempt to convert to other energy sources would pose serious problems-the redeployment of tens of thousands of workers, the financing of substithe irreversible tute installations, deterioration of the environment, and so on.
One can be sure that if the overall balance sheet of the nuclear program is very problematical, the financial balance sheet of the nuclear trusts will generally be very positive!
That's not all! The major argument in official justifications for the nuclear race is the demands of economic growth and the resulting growth in energy needs. It is easy to prove that one of the essential factors behind the present impasse in energy supplies is a fantastic wastage in energy that is structurally linked to the capitalist mode of production. Some examples:®
• Domestic consumption of energy in France accounts for 20% of total energy consumption. Proper insulation of buildings would permit a saving of 40% of the energy spent on heating. Solar energy could cover 20% of heating and hot water needs, and geothermic energy, 10%.
8. IEJE study, "Alternatives au nucléaire."
• The way transportation is now organized promotes waste by encouraging individual rather than mass transportation, and road rather than rail transport for freight movements (although railways consume five times less energy in terms of load carried over equal distances).
• The waste of energy affects all capitalist production. For example, through the "planned obsolescence" that shortens the life expectancy of products, the production of useless commodities, the lack of recycling of energy for urban and agricultural heating.
An alternative energy policy would be possible, capable of more adequately meeting the real needs of the workers with smaller quantities of energy. The problem must be posed not in terms of restrictions, but in terms of investment in sectors where waste can be restricted.
This alternative policy implies the establishment of a single nationalized company with a monopoly on foreign purchases, production, and sale of industrial energy. That would permit not only the creation of centralized decision-making, suppression of competition on the energy market, and greater control over pollution problems, but also the development of new sources of energy that do not upset the energy equilibrium of the atmosphere (such as solar energy). It would thereby take into account all social costs in a policy planned in the interests of the workers and controlled by them.
This alternative policy implies above all a socialist revolution, for it could not realize its potential within the framework of a bourgeois state. That is the precondition for an energy policy formulated in terms of human needs (the production of use-values) and not in terms of narrow profitability criteria linked to the uncertainties of the capitalist market (the production of exchange values).
This alternative policy also implies shattering the narrow national framework of the borders of the bourgeois state and replacing it with international cooperation and planning in the interests of the workers-which is incompatible with the existence of multinational corporations.
Once again the law of profit has led to the hasty development of an uncontrolled technology; the price to be paid has become necessity." History will
"economic an undoubtedly retain from the oil age the image of millions of tons of hydrocarbons spilled each year into the oceans, of burnedoff gases that make the air of the big cities unbreathable, creating a spectacular increase in the number of serious illnesses.
The "Nuclear Age" threatens to leave behind an even more bitter memory.
"Here is clean energy," the supporters of nuclear power plants shamelessly proclaim.
To expose the lies of these officials, we need only recall the present poliev of offieiel need only recall the present policy of official bodies on the security plan in the nuclear sector.
The work agreement at the CEA officially states that researchers are subject to professional secrecy. Surveillance over each center is carried out by a security service directly under the Ministry of the Interior. The government, and it alone, decides the orientation of research and whether or not the results should be published.
What confidence can be placed in these walled-off departments, usually run by high civil servants committed to government policy? They sometimes resort to the most far-fetched arguments to defend and justify this policy: an example is the celebrated Pellerin," director of the department of protection against ionizing radiation.
Despite this system of secrecy, some facts are available to the publie. Thus, a recent AEC study showed that workers in nuclear power plants already in service, or in maintenance plants, had on the average been exposed to up to ten times the natural radiation between 1969 and 1973, and that this exposure will increase as the power plants become older. That's only an average. Some workers are regularly exposed to fifty times natural radiation.
With the French nuclear program, several tens of thousands of workers are in danger of being subjected to such radiation levels by 1985. Today, protection against radioactivity in the EDF power plants-especially for maintenance workers—is carried out by a private specialized company over which the workers have no control. The same applies to the companies controlled by Schneider. Trade-union delegates on the hygiene and security commission of the CEA are forbidden access to the site where radioactive debris is stored at La Hague.
Those are the conditions in which the safety of nuclear-industry workers is assured today!
From these preliminary remarks, it follows that these workers are entitled to raise some demands of direct concern to them:
For strict control over:
• The level of harmful effects, both standard and nuclear.
• The methods of measurement and evaluation of the so-called danger thresholds.
French Scientists Call for Moratorium on Constructing Nuclear Power Plants
More than 400 French nuclear physicists and other scientists have signed an appeal calling on the population to "reject the establishment of nuclear power plants until people have a clear understanding of the risks and the consequences involved."
The appeal, reprinted in the February 11 Le Monde, criticizes the French government's nuclear program in the following terms:
"As research workers, engineers, and technicians, we think the government is making a thoughtless decision, risking serious consequences. There are several kinds of risks. Some affect the safety of power plants—accidents involving possible [radioactive] leaks, while unlikely, could have appalling results. There is the danger to the climate and ecology from thermal pollution. And there is the danger involved in transport, storage, and possible theft of radioactive products; in particular, the problem of disposal of waste is being treated lightmindedly.
"We think that the policy being followed ignores the real interests of the population and of future generations and that what is being termed a scientific decision is in fact political. What is needed is a real debate and not this semblance of hasty consultation."
Those signing the appeal, in addition to physicists, included mathematicians, chemists, biologists, agronomists, and toxicologists.
Le Monde reported that the appeal originated in the
"sanctuary"
of
France's nuclear-physics establishment, the Laboratoire de Physique Corpuscu-
• Constant medical inspection of workers subjected to radiation, including knowledge of individual results for those concerned, and publication of statistical results affecting the population.
An end to all scientific and technical secrecy. Secrecy is incompatible with the need for the fullest possible information on the overall ecological consequences (on people in particular) of nuclear power plants.
These rights will not be granted. They will be won only through struggle!
More generally, we fight alongside all those on whom the bourgeoisie will try to impose the consequences of its energy policy:
• Small farmers threatened with exproplaire of the Collège de France. The former directors of the laboratory, Professors Francis Perrin and
Louis
Leprince-Ringuet, both now retired, were closely involved in the decision to begin immediately construction of nuclear plants.
"It all began in June 1974," the Paris daily said, "when the science council of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics, an agency of the CNRS [Centre National de Recherche Scientifique-National Center of Scientific Research], presented an outline report that was to serve in the elaboration of the Seventh Plan.
*The two reporters, Messrs. René Klapisch, head of research at Orsay, and G. Ripka, a physicist at the CEA, thought they were in a position to approve the official energy policy and dismiss pollution by the plants as negligible. Their view was immediately disputed by the other members of the council, who, considering themselves illinformed, did not want to endorse this decision. A sharp debate erupted within the council, and six specialists were assigned to make a serious study of the problem of nuclear power plants. ...
"From the outset, the data they assembled worried them. Moreover, they were unable to give clear answers to local officials who approached them. During this time the government was making decisions. Hence their intervention, through this 'appeal to the people?.."
Further information on the scientists' appeal may be obtained from Appel des Scientifiques, 2, rue François-Villon, 91407 Orsay, France.
riation in return for miserable compensation.
• Workers of the sea, whose fishing grounds are in danger of being made sterile by the thermal and chemical pollution of coastal waters resulting from the construction of nuclear plants.
In addition, we say:
• No, to the policy of restricted energy consumption that the bourgeoisie is trying to impose on the workers!
• No, to capitalist waste!
We must force full and complete publicity on all the problems posed by the construc tion of nuclear power plants! We must force the government to declare a moratorium on their construction, as demanded by the majority of the ecology movement!
Notes
2. See Notes sur les conséquences de l'implantation des centrales nucléaires sur la pêche mari time et la conchyliculture [Notes on the consequences of the establishment of nuclear power plants on maritime fishing and shellfish breeding], by the Institut scientifique et technique des pêches maritimes [Scientifie and Technical Institute of Maritime Fishing].
3. Loss of Coolant Accident. The effectiveness of the emergency cooling system has never been demonstrated. This undoubtedly weighed heavily in the British government's decision to reject a linkup with the Americans.
3. Start from the real needs of the workers.
4. See the dossier in La Brèche, newspaper of the Swiss Trotskyists, April 2, 1974, June 21, 1974, and July 12, 1974—IP
5. Siguard Eklund, "Energie nucléaire, sécurité et environnement" [Nuclear energy, safety and the environment], in Revue Française de l'énergie, January 1974.
6. An interesting official evaluation of costs will be found in a document just published
7. These figures are taken from J. Price, Dynamic energy analysis and nuclear power, which has just been published in a French translation by Les Amis de la Terre, 16 rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris Paris.
9. Among his many declarations, we can cite this: "Never, throughout the history of technology, have we witnessed such a flood of foolishness as in respect to the dangers electronuclear energy would produce.... To go further (in safety measures) would be to fall into the same irrationality." (In a talk before the students of the Ecole Polytechnique in March 1973.)