The truth about how we sacrifice people for progress

Silecroft Beach, proposed site of a nuclear waste dump

I want to talk about sacrifice.

Not the kind you make to your gods, although there are parallels.

The kind of sacrifice you expect other people to take.

It’s a failing of human progress, where people feel they can say ‘Yes! We need it, we like what it gives us; but we don’t want the bad parts here’.

Not here; there.

So the problem on my mind most of all right now, is nuclear power. (It isn’t the only example).

The nuclear-waste elephant in the room

Nuclear proponents won’t hear anything bad about it. It’s clean, it’s green; it’s a technology with a life of its own. The entire production process is a low-carbon option, with more effective outcomes than renewables. The other options are more expensive, not as productive. It’s inevitable, so we should embrace it. Wait till we figure out fusion!

But who takes the waste from these processes?

Whose land submits to that risk?

Who gets the industrial construction, the high-security police, the warming seas, the uncertainty?

And who gets to live with the potential pollution consequences later on?

Others.

Skin in the game

Politicians talk about making ‘tough decisions’, but it’s easy to be tough when you don’t have any skin in the game.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about skin in the game in his book Antifragile. To paraphrase, he uses this analogy: you should never get on a plane without a pilot; or which doesn’t have a co-pilot.

The point is simple: the pilot has skin in the game. It’s in his best interests to ensure that the plane stays in the sky as appropriate. The co-pilot is the back-up plan if something unexpected occurs. Built-in redundancy. It’s risk management, baby.

The problem with decisions made about nuclear power and radioactive waste is that those making the decisions do not have enough skin in the game.

They also don’t have a back-up plan.

Whose skin is really in the game?

There are a few assumptions that can be made about why rural places are the loci of UK nuclear power and now the planned radioactive waste. The main one is that there are fewer people.

Populations are smaller, so damage limitations are natural: frequently more desperate for employment opportunities, their protest doesn’t have as much impact because they are fewer; if the unimaginable occurred, their loss would be less damaging to the country’s GDP. Even displacement in the event of disaster would be less expensive in real terms.

The favoured location for the UK’s first geological disposal facility (GDF) for nuclear waste is, unsurprisingly, in Cumberland, where around 275,000 people live, spread across about 70 miles, about 25 miles deep. It’s conveniently near to the infamous contaminated Sellafield, under a seabed already proven geologically unsuitable for the task.

Those people can be sacrificed for the good of everyone else. Their ground, their sea, their drinking water. Their lives and health.

That fundamental belief feels like injustice.

The sacrifice of others is a theme of capitalism that has shaped the Global South, its people and land sacrificed by those with no skin in the game for the good of the more economically developed Global North. That same behaviour is played out here.

Why does ‘progress’ mean ‘good for some and not for others’?

There’s something wrong with the way we think about nuclear power. In the haste to find an alternative that powers industrial human activities, there’s a lack of clear thinking.

The Consilience Project discusses this issue at length in its several-hundred-page article Development in Progress. A flaw in our thinking has dogged us since the beginning of our rush into capitalist progress: an inability or refusal to consider – and then mitigate – the negative side effects of technology alongside the positive.

Immediate side effects are simple to handle. Plans can be designed with those in mind; where disaster strikes, mitigations and bans can be quick and effective. Thalidomide is a standard example of this.

But second and third order effects are not considered. Even if they are presented, they can be dismissed for decades due to lack of proof. Given a handy passage of time between cause and effect, they can be plausibly denied. And even after the problems are known, if the effects are far enough into the future, humans simply ignore them.

For second order consequences, think cigarettes causing cancer; mass fossil fuel burning creating greenhouse gas build up; PFAS found in the womb and in brains, and the Greenland ice sheet; and the use of Roundup in both commercial and domestic vegetable growing, with its links to cancer.

And the third order effects – a rapidly warming climate; healthcare services groaning under the weight of cancers and dementias; a huge drop in human reproduction rates. These were predicted. They were understood. But hidden, or ignored for too long.

Why proof is a problem for everyone

Progress has its own story. A story of human resilience and improvement. Of sanitation, magical vaccines, and two cars for every family in the West. Everyone likes that idea of progress. Nobody likes a Debbie Downer.

So the burden of proof sits with the concerns, not with those creating the problem. We require more proof that the problem should be considered at all than we do that the problem doesn’t exist.

Turned on its head: who can prove a GDF will safely contain radioactive wastes for 50,000 years? Or that heating up the seabed with 200ºC waste for at least 8,000 years will not significantly warm the sea above it? Or that an abandoned mine under the sea will not fill with water and speed the corrosion of radioactive containers?

Absolutely nobody.

Scientists don’t even know what exact conditions cause borosilicate glass to corrode, and that’s after 50 years of study. That’s the same glass used to contain waste plutonium.

But, in the current, flawed methodologies of development, to ensure the growth and expansion of industrial activity, nuclear power must apparently continue, unabated, and faster.

For the sake of the environment, you understand.

It’s as if there isn’t another way for humanity to continue forward.

Inequality at the heart of nuclear power

All those people who came up with the technology in the first place – they didn’t know what to do with the waste (they initially dumped it on a nearby beach), but still continued their activities. Now there are 140 tons of UK plutonium to divest, and nowhere to keep it.

So, some people, some places, must carry the sacrifice.

And that isn’t okay.

Somebody, somewhere, balanced the problems, and decided that despite the potential harms to the people living near a radioactive dump, that the cost was worth it. They believed it was a positive-sum situation.

It is, for them.

Not for my 6-year-old daughter, occasionally swimming in a radioactive sea with her friends. Not for me.

If we’re looking for a world without inequality, our thinking has to go beyond the idea that ‘others’ can be sacrificed to carry the cost.

We have to move outside the paradigm of searching for more and more energy to fuel more and more growth, because even non-nuclear, so-called renewable energy sources continue to exploit people.

There are no solutions without degrowth.

What will it cost us to take a responsible approach instead?

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