My friend Pax's blog

I've been reading my friend Pax's blog "your passport to complaining." (Find it at http://paxus.wordpress.com/). Pax and I are old friends, and have both been anti-nuclear activists. So it is with great interest that I am reading his nuclear blogs, and wanted to share a few of the highlights.

First is his concept of being "information rich." When Pax was organizing in the Czech Republic against Brno and other reactors, he needed to be able to compress arguments because the translators were going to spend twice that long in taking his words and making them Czech-friendly.

Second is the notion, possibly obvious but often not acted upon, that "The media people always come with a story, they have written at least part of the story before they arrive. We are supposed to prove that some thesis of the story is write." In Pax's case the media story is that "the tsunami-earthquake of 3/11 was as transformative event for Japan as 9/11 was for the US." The role of a good information rich media wrangler is to challenge this story enough to make your own points dramatic, and to avoid being made part of a packaged story that contains and domesticates whatever you say, including radical challenges to said story. So Pax's line is that whereas 9/11 "permitted the civil and legal rights of many US Americans and even more internationals to be violated," he hopes 3/11 will help the Japanese people to act boldly to get rid of toxic nuclear power, as the Germans have. Here the information rich add-on (did the media get how huge the German and Swiss moves to get rid of nukes are?) tilts the story on its ear. Wait - are nations actually doing something based on Fukushima?

The Swiss and German stories are to say the least underreported in the mainstream/corporate US press. And at the end of the day, coherent stories and not overly listy arguments are more likely to be successful in getting a wide range of people to begin rethinking how we get energy. The Swiss phase out of nuclear is quite slow (2034) but the halt of new plants in two countries that are seen as technology-savvy is huge. If they imagine it can be done without nukes, well, maybe there is something to this notion. And it provides a counterweight to the huge propaganda push to see nukes as carbon-friendly alternatives to dirty coal and the awful natural gas options.

So it is important to be information rich, to be constantly updated and do your homework (when I was at Stanford, as activists we always tried to do our homework, to really educate ourselves not just with antinuclear facts but also counterarguments, and to have every person involved as aware as possible). But it is also HUGELY important to have a coherent story. This is why ever nuclear story is a story about coal. About global warming. About consumption. About peak oil. About governments that govern in the name of corporate profits, and about moving those governments toward governing for survival.

Pax says as much in a blog on German responses to nuclear power: "Nuclear power only survives thru a collection of interlinked paradoxes: The denial of the link between civil and military nuclear programs. “Confidence” that high level waste can be managed, when ever nation has failed for decades. Claims that new reactors are economic or even will be “too cheap to meter” while it is really “too expensive to matter.”

These paradoxes don't stand up very well to scrutiny, which is why it is so valuable to keep shining a light into these dark places.

One last point: Pax lays out the German commission's findings on the future of nukes:

1) The 8 closed reactors will remain closed

2) The 9 younger reactors will be closed by 2022

3) Since civil and military nukes cant be separated, they are calling fro the reform of the IAEA

4) Waste storage locations more than Gorleben need to be located and waste must be retrievable.

[Here is the Greenpeace full press release]

Pax's point isn't simply that this supports anti-nuclear positions, but that before Fukushima this policy would have been UNTHINKABLE except for...wait for it...radical anti-nuclear activists. Second, his language here is terrific: "This is Fukushima’s very expensive silver lining. While closing the reactors will grab the headlines, it is points 3 and 4 which dare to touch key nuclear paradoxes that are especially important."

He then lays out the problem of having the UN's nuclear watchdog IAEA caught between supposedly promoting "safe" nuclear power and on the other hand preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons. Except for China, all the nuclear states got weapons from reactor technology: India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa. So when you see who wants to sell reactors to Iran, you need to see that they are selling the ticket to the nuclear weapons club. PS guess who was selling nuclear reactor technology to Vietnam? Wait for it....TEPCO. In a partnership with the Japanese government.

So the information is rich, but it usually is not valuable unless places in a story, in this case, a story about the paradoxes of nuclear energy. And...the story gets more complex as it winds outward (nukes, to energy in general, to use of energy, to obstacles in front of any solution to energy issues, to immense difficulty in getting political unity to do anything) the story has to stay coherent, clear and simple enough to convince.

Can we do it? My friend Chris, at the end of a lot of reading on evolutionary psychology, has come to the conclusion that we are, in the end, crazy monkeys. I think we need to see, really see, how bad things can get. And, like, evolve. Or evolution will move on without us.