For the last few days, I've been immersed in the up close and persona investigation of the various textures of snow (and yes I did inspect it with my entire body a couple days ago - not a garage sale fall but definitely a roll over and laugh with snow in your nose fall). And I've been reading a lot on technology, including the day to day distraction effects of mundane cyborg tech like cell phones (Hamlet's Blackberry is particularly readable on this) and larger issues of how we view the world (as a giant resource dump? as a set of living systems? as made by this or that really strong God who also told the priests what it was all for?).
Today I listened to the download of Sexy Beast's soundtrack, including the chilling voice of Ben Kingsley as a psychopathic thug, and that rocking song Peaches that starts the film's ball rolling (those of you who know the film will get that slight spoiler joke). Then I decided to follow up my recent documentary watching (The Botany of Desire; Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room) with a quick Youtube turn about nuclear power. So as I was cooking bacon, scrambling eggs, and making toast (all with power completely trucked into this ski resort) I watched these four bits in succession.
The first film, produced in January 2006 by ABC Australia, is titled Who's Afraid of Nuclear Power. The blurb goes:
Almost every day seems to bring more horror stories on fossil fuels. We're bombarded with reports about global warming. The price of oil keeps increasing. But with each gloomy media prediction, the nuclear industry can boast: we've got the clean answer. This week's documentary looks at different approaches to nuclear power. It focuses on Australia and Scandinavia - where attitudes couldn't be more different. While Australia derives 80% of its energy from coal, half of Sweden's power is nuclear. Could Nuclear hold the answer to the world's looming energy crisis?
The show begins by showing happy people, most naked, swimming in the Baltic. Usually it is only warm enough to swim comfortably in for three weeks a year, but here in this cove, Swedes swim for four months. The idyllic scene (complete with very nice soothing music) then pulls back to reveal that the source of the warmth is the nuclear power station across the way. The smiling Swede looking up at the camera from the water lets us know that there’s no danger whatsoever. And the rest of the film goes back over the debate, from the early 1970s attempt to site a nuke plant in what is now a pristine nature preserve. At that time, the political drive was not simply to produce energy, but to allow Australia a nuclear option by producing weapons grade materials. The fact that this exactly mirrors Iran doesn’t somehow come up.
The second film is called Nuclear Nationalism. It turned out not to be about nuclear power, but about India’s underground testing of three nuclear devices. The film connects this policy to the two potent right wing forces in Indian government: the BJP party, but more importantly, its ultranationalist and Hindu fundamentalist militia wing (though that may be too strong a word), the R.S.S. The juxtaposition of RSS youth groups (mostly from the affluent middle classes of BJP support) with their links to the party now in power in India (the BJP) is pretty terrifying. The RSS argues that there are no “muslims” but that everyone in India is Hindu, that it is one culture. And of course the rhetoric of power and national pride is shown to drive some of the nuclear weapons strategy (I believe the BJP prime minister was in office only two months before he provocatively set off the tests and then announced them as proof of India’s power and new course). The narrator consistently compared the RSS youth groups, marching in uniforms through public places and chanting Hindu slogans, to the Hitler youth (crossed with the Boy Scouts). When you hear the Prime Minister of India calmly explain the RSS ideology, and then see the nuclear tests and the political fallout (1998, more than a million troops poised along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir) you realize that that time paralleled the Cuba Missile Crisis in certain scary ways. Of course nothing is mentioned of nuclear energy in the film, but Paksitan has three commercial nuclear power plants. India has twenty, an atomic program since 1957, and is (at least according to the World Nuclear Association), currently building five more, including a large Russian reactor which will produce weaons grade plutonium, and a large Breeder reactor. Ten more plants are planned for the next ten years.
Putting the puzzle piece together for a moment: Australia’s decision to mine more uranium directly affects India, which must import all of its uranium fuel; a dip in world production in 2008 – 2010 had a big impact on India’s nuclear production. In addition, the language of nuclear power in India is rife with nationalist and patriotic rhetoric: there is reference to its “indigenous” nuclear program and expertise, and the search for indigenous and new designs that allow India to use thorium instead of uranium as a nuclear fuel. One reason for the “indigenous” nuclear program is that India, like Pakistan,Israel, and North Korea) is a nuclear armed country that is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Lastly I checked out the CBS “expert analysis” of the Fukushima disaster. Professor Cham Dallas of the University of Georgia, an expert on nuclear energy, stood in front of a schematic of a nuclear reactor, and explained how it is supposed to work, and what went wrong. He gave the simple explanation (the nuclear fuel rods make heat which makes steam) and when confronted with the situation in Japan now, he focused first on what went right: they automatically shut down 11 reactors when the quake hit. The problem is the heat being generated, and the need for constant cooling via water. “It’s just like your stove at home” was more or less what he said; it takes time to cool, and reactors take days. From this stove metaphor the anchor then says “So that is the partial meltdown we’ve been hearing about.” The tone of it was interesting to me, honestly; I think the anchor was trying to find that middle ground between hyped fears and technospeak that seems to cover up more than it explains. And that was what Cham Dallas was after as well, I think.
He stresses it was NOT like Chernobyl, a total meltdown (a funny moment occurred onscreen when the reactor animation showed fuel rods descending all the way to the bottom of the hot reactor; both anchor and Dallas were quick to say no no that isn’t what happened, though the simulation showed how easily and more or less naturally it would go from top to bottom to meltdown). Instead it was a partial meltdown, from the top. And here is my favorite part: his metaphor for the meltdown was “its like a candle.” How it is like a candle? “Well, a candle burns from the top, and then it stops, well, we’re hoping that’s what happened here.”
The other part I think a lot of Americans picked up on: we’re hoping. They voted for Hope with Obama (who contiues to support nuclear power in the strongest way), and now we are assured that there is only a partial meltdown AND we are hoping that it is only partial.
Here’s hoping at you, kid.
Citations:
Who's Afraid of Nuclear Power? ABC Australia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLPu_xPD8Qo
Nuclear Nationalism - India ABC Australia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWIJ8tXH0I4&NR=1
Are America's nuclear power plants safe? CBS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK-De9ulFvI&feature=fvst
Japan's nuclear power plant: What went wrong? CBS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gch0z456Ohc&NR=1
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