Future of Nuclear Power Looks Dead — Siemens Quits the Business

© 2011 Peter Free

 

19 September 2011

 

 

Fukushima’s bifurcated demonstration

 

Fukushima Daiichi’s radiation release has apparently persuaded much of the developed world that human beings are too capitalistically greedy and too governmentally inept to manage significant technology risks.

 

Germany’s nuclear power giant, Siemens AG, said that it is quitting the nuclear power business, apparently due to the wide-ranging political effects of Japan’s disaster.  Germany’s downstream decision to quit nuclear power forced Siemens out, said CEO Peter Loescher.

 

 

Consider the massive historical irony

 

Japan, not a nation one ordinarily thinks of as symbolizing sheer stupidity, appears to have elevated itself into the paradigmatic example of the incompatibility of entrepreneurial greed with regulatory-shy government.

 

One would have thought that the first nation ever to experience the horror of nuclear war would have girded itself to handle nuclear power with utmost safety.  Instead, Japan managed to bungle significant elements of its nuclear power infrastructure with such avaricious incompetence and governmental inadequacy that the Dominion of the Rising Sun has apparently persuaded the rest of the world that nuclear power is simply too dangerous for egregiously flawed human beings to handle.

 

Though Chernobyl caught the world’s attention in 1986, no one ever credited the Soviets with either caring about life or being especially competent in its preservation.  So when the plant blew up, killed and sickened lots of people, and poisoned a noticeable bit of the planet, no one was surprised. Few extrapolated any overwhelmingly important “lesson” to more “enlightened” societies.

 

Japan, however, was something else — until Fukushima in March 2011 provided us with an example that arguably outstrips Chernobyl in the “how careless can you get” category.

 

 

Not Japan alone, of course

 

We in the United States can point to our decades-long fiasco in attempting to find a place to store nuclear waste safely.

 

In essence, we permitted commercial interests to build the equivalent of nuclear-waste generators, without first mandating that it (or “we”) be able to safely store radioactive waste products over the long term.

 

 

Not much is rational in a lot of this, of course

 

There something about radiation that scares people more than being daily poisoned by coal-burning byproducts in the air and coal-mining detritus in our water.

 

Familiarity breeds ease, even where should be none.

 

 

The moral? — Ain’t no angels here

 

Edmund Burke-style conservatives were correct — human beings, en masse, are too “fallen” to be trusted with anything particularly important.

 

Democracy seems to enhance this tendency.  At least insofar as we permit moneyed interests to buy allegedly democratic institutions.