Nuclear Power: the Problem is Political, the Problem is Human Nature.

simple and easy
are two different things i received a question from a member of the audience asking me about the safety reliability advisability of nuclear power generation my answer is simple but it's not easy to grasp the problem we're dealing with here is not a scientific question of what is safe or unsafe we're asking a question about politics we're asking a question about human nature the problems with nuclear reactors nuclear waste nuclear power generation are human all too human they have to do with political structure authority ultimately human responsibility and human nature on the most profound and general level i just mentioned that i often have to reflect on what a strange minority of human beings are capable of thinking politically at all i very often have conversations with people who are computer programmers i very often have conversations with people who are scientists and say chemistry or biology and it's very strange to me that they are in some ways intelligent people perhaps in some ways highly highly accomplished successful people and yet they're really totally incapable of doing what it is i do so casually and constantly in not just thinking about politics understanding politics analyzing situations but also being able to communicate that to others explain to others what the issues are and come to recommendations or decisions about it to me it doesn't feel like there's anything extraordinary about me but on the other hand i never developed my mind in a way that i'm able to do you know molar math i'm not able to think in terms of the periodic table the elements i'm not able to do the type of computations that are involved in those sciences i don't know how it would have changed my character from an early age i'd developed in that direction i think training yourself to be a computer programmer over time this also has similar consequences for your way of thinking and for what is unthinkable to you now i've done a lot of reading recently about the french revolution and the rise of napoleon after the french revolution and one of the interesting things about that period of history is that i'd say it was the last period of history in which the most important politicians were also the most famous and renowned scientists i'd like to propose to you that that was not a good thing that was actually one of the reasons why the french revolution ended in failure the marquis de condorcet is remembered as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians of his era great innovator but perhaps the reason why his own political career ended in failure perhaps the reason why he was unable to communicate to other people very simple and fundamental ideas like that women should have equal voting rights and privileges in parliament and to accomplish those goals or basic equality for people of black skin brown skin different ethnicities and so on he was right about many things that the western world didn't didn't come to the right answers about for a century uh thereafter he was ahead of his time most people would say but he was a scientist he didn't understand human nature he didn't understand how the how to play the game of thrones he actually was a hit author but the books he wrote weren't really political in this sense and in case you didn't know he ended up dying in a prison cell he was himself torn down and destroyed by the same revolution that earlier lifted him up and put him in his vision of power one of the very first conflicts i had at the university of victoria here in british columbia canada one of the very first conflicts i had was about nuclear power and the other people i was talking to i think all of them were under 30 but they were variously ba students m.a students phd students in the sciences and it was really remarkable to me how impossible it was to get them to take this simple step i concede the point that on the chalkboard nuclear power may look completely safe completely reliable we can draw out a diagram and show how it works and it can be completely simple and unproblematic but my method of reasoning is not to start from an abstraction on the chalkboard and to work my way down to material reality i start with reality and work my way up so i say here's a list of nuclear power generating stations in the world still in operation in order of their first construction so there were still some built in the 1960s 1970s early 90s they're still generating power to this day um if you take the particular names of any of those older generators and put them into google you are going to find newspaper articles interviewing scientists very often scientists who just visited and took a tour of the facilities for whatever reason you're gonna find interesting scientists saying this is really dangerous it should be shut down this is not a case where you can say there's like the informed scientific perspective over here and then someone like myself represents a naive jejune outsiders on scientific perspective no you can find examples of reactors that have been in constant use since the 1970s or early 1980s that are in venezuela that are in argentina that are in poverty-stricken countries with serious political instability serious doubts about the competence of the government at the best of times and those governments go through periods of real bankruptcy and of course questions of corruption and so on and so forth so now i'm not talking about a nuclear generator that's on a chalkboard i'm talking about a nuclear generator in a third world country where the government is going through a sovereign debt crisis a total collapse of the economy where there are issues like corruption mr and i was just writing these people this is all email saying can't you recognize this can't you see the danger can't you see the problem and this isn't a hypothetical worst case scenario this is a real world scenario right now and again i didn't have to go far each of these generators has a distinctive name obviously i didn't google all of them but it seemed like every single one whenever i just took the name put it into google i'd find a couple of articles even and i was only looking in english in english it was like well these scientists visited this nuclear generator and said boy you know they should be decommissioned or shut down or there should be a major overhaul there are safety concerns right so uh the people i was talking to at university of regina absolutely could not or would not budge and again i don't know who the oldest maybe there was someone there who was maybe there were a couple people over 40 because a lot of people here in canada go back to university later in life um there wasn't it wasn't a real young crowd but let's say a lot of these people are around age 25 and yet they were already absolutely set in their ways they already had this mentality that i i find is very common among scientists very common among computer programmers very common among video game addicts where they absolutely cannot think politically and reality is political okay i mean human nature once you move up from a scale of just one or two people it's political you might trust one person to run this nuclear power plant nuclear power plants aren't run by one person right and again in a context like argentina it doesn't matter how much you trust that one person there's a whole structure of authority a culture and so on and so forth now the context for that conversation i had at university of china that by the way ended with me being kicked out of the group and so on there was real acrimony um you know and again i don't see myself as anti-science here but they see me that way they saw me as being company they could not stand to keep um the context was the disaster in fukuyama daiichi japan japan is not a third world country it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world japan is not a terribly corrupt country it has one of the most efficient and effective governments in the world it has probably the lowest crime rate of any large country in the world japan and singapore probably number one number two um japan has incredibly high levels of education they have especially high levels of education in the sciences especially in many ways japan is an absolute best case scenario and yet even there in japan we saw this avertable nuclear energy disaster with terrible consequences that are still ongoing today so the judgment you make about nuclear energy about nuclear power is not a judgment about science it's not a judgment about a theory on a blackboard it's a judgment about how those scientific principles are going to be put into practice by human beings by human beings and positions of authority by complex governments that collect taxes and sometimes prolong and misspend those taxes governments that can be corrupt governments that can be bankrupt and there are worse examples to consider there are nuclear generators in countries that are right now in a state of civil war there are nuclear generators in countries that have terrorist attacks right you may not be planning on having a civil war right now venezuela isn't planning that so argentina isn't planning to it's quite possible right nobody plans for this stuff the people who live their lives thinking in terms of computer programming and thinking in terms of abstractions on a chalkboard they are in many ways in our society today the same kind of obstacle to progress that the church men represented in the past there was a time when the catholic church in england the anglican church when large church organizations were a major part of political negotiations were part of the progress of society and they were an obstacle to that progress and part of the problem was that those are men who had been trained to reason from abstractions in the sky down to thinking about what we have here in reality on the ground that's exactly the wrong form of reasoning and in our times we have these men who are so esteemed many of them become wealthy and powerful and influential because they've managed to make money with computers and with chemical formulae with breakthroughs in technology sciences but they too like the church men think from abstractions down to dictating what reality ought to be given those abstract principles and that is the opposite of thinking responsibly that's the opposite of thinking politically that's the opposite of reasoning from human nature from real conditions to the conclusions on a policy level of what we ought to do