The Nuclear Debate Reignited

by Michael Kennedy

The nuclear debate has arisen once more, not that it ever left. With the continuing tragedy in Japan from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, focus has been on the nuclear power plants damaged by the Earth's rumblings. The Fukishima plant has had three explosions since the quake less than a week ago and an exclusion zone tens of kilometres wide enforced. 200,000 people have been evacuated. Radioactive materials have escaped and have been detected around the vicinity of the plant. There is no denying that this is a disaster, though it has not reached meltdown proportions, despite the fear-mongering that the media has engaged in, a media which has jumped on board the numerous disasters which have occurred in the past few months and milked them and resold the gravitas of the situation in consumable units.

To put the nuclear disaster in perspective, zero people have died (yet) from it. Chernobyl killed 43. Mining of coal, to fuel coal power plants among other uses has resulted in up to 100,000 deaths¹. Coal also potentially threatens to change a climate which humanity has become accustomed to, a climate we have become reliant on to sustain the existing population. Tens of thousands are dead from the quake and tsunami itself, but this event has nevertheless reignited debate and given ammunition to the anti-nuclear movement.

It should be clearly stated that nuclear power is the best of a bad lot, with emphasis put on the fact that it is part of a bad lot. Even long term supporters of nuclear power would have to admit, that is is far from perfect (though those with a direct financial interest in the industry may disagree). It is difficult and costly to build a plant that is safe, in a safe location, it is difficult to decommission safely, something that there is no good procedure for yet and worst of all, leaves behind dangerous waste which must be kept away from people, from living things and from entering the ecosystem, water or air cycle, for tens of thousands of years. The fact that after a magnitude 9 quake, and 10 metre tidal wave the plant has held up reasonably well is a testament that the immediate dangers of a well build plant are often overstated.

Nuclears long lasting legacy.

The issue with nuclear power lies in the waste it created. Waste that remains long after the water which was boiled to create the electricity has cooled, long after the electricity has been consumed, long after the individual who used the power has died, long after the device which was used has been discarded, quite likely even long after the civilisation that used the power to drive its economy and sustain itself has ceased to exist. To believe that it is possible to take care of this waste for this period of time is frankly laughable. For a society which cannot plan more than a few years in advance, taking on the responsibility of ensuring that spent fuel from a nuclear reactor remains tightly locked away and trapped, is not a responsibility that we should be taking with, or even remotely capable of handling.

While nuclear power may provide ample energy, it creates a debt, a long lasting debt. Future generations will be burdened with the cost of dealing with the waste, with potential issues from it leaking, with potential deaths, cancers and mutations from the leak, for something they didn't use. What if King Ur-Nammu from the Ur civilisation 4000 years ago, in order to power an entertainment device left behind a toxic package which the current inhabitants of Mesopotamia, the modern day Iraqi's still had to concern themselves about, and contend with? Is it morally justifiable to create such a long lasting debt to satisfy contemporary needs? This is, in this authors opinion, the one aspect of nuclear power which turns it from a 'bad, but definitely usable for now' source of power to a 'definitely powerful, but just wrong' one. Is it foolish to forgo the use of nuclear power for the moral purpose of saving future generations of this debt? It's a complex issue. It could be argued that future generations would inherit indirectly benefits gained from the use of nuclear power today in the form of technical and medical advancements, and this is indeed a good argument, but the lifetime of the waste means that these benefits must last many times longer than any civilisation has lasted for. Also, what benefit do they gain from modern day squandering and reckless use of power? From using power to run larger and larger TV's, home theaters, unnecessary street lighting, production of goods purely to sustain a decadent, consumerist lifestyle and to sustain an obsolete economic model which only a few really benefit from?

This raises another issue, which is at the real heart of the nuclear debate. From those who vehemently oppose it, to its supporters, it has to be realised by all who engage in debate, that nuclear is only good compared to other bad and insufficiently powerful sources of power. Even some environmentalists are accepting that nuclear power may be necessary, as it is less evil than coal. Renewable energies, while inarguably much cleaner and better, aren't reliable enough and don't provide the quantity of energy that modern civilisation seeks to consume. The issue is how did we reach a state where considering such options become a necessity?

Is it a necessity?

It appears necessary to find sources of power which can meet current consumption levels because it is assumed that the consumption of power is necessary. But quick observation shows this isn't true. Quite easily, power consumption can be cut by simply eliminating the most wasteful behaviours. Leaving lights on in rooms when not in use, something commercial establishments commonly due. Removing unnecessary street lighting and 'decorative' lighting which only exists to cast light for visual effect. Planning shopping trips better to eliminate frequent drives to pick up a few items and so on. Household devices have also become more energy hungry. TV's of old used to have a definitely on/off button, whereas now all appliances have a 'standby' mode, of little use, but a mode where the appliance still draws power. TV's are becoming larger and much more power hungry. Computer monitors larger and the computers themselves draw more and more power as they run faster processors and more powerful graphics cards. Add to that, the increasing list of devices, the DVD player, the PVR, the set top box, the modem router, the home theater and its easy to see why household energy usage is increasing, and for what?

But looking further out, we see vast amounts of energy being used to manufacture consumable and quickly replaced electronic items, marketed to have a short shelf life, designed to become quickly obsoleted by the next product. Then there is the energy used to produces a cornucopia of goods which no one really needs, energy used to market it, and energy used by people to have a job to earn the money to buy these goods.

Everywhere you look, you see a society built upon the assumption that energy is limitless. The city of Melbourne is geographically speaking, one of the largest in the world. New suburbs are built around the car. There is a lack of corner stores, as all stores are centralised into shopping centres. No public transport and few nearby working opportunities. The preoccupation with growth is creating suburbs up to 40km and more away from the CBD, which require people to use more and more fuel in order to go to work and back to earn a living. Our economic and social system, as we currently maintain it, require growth, require consumption and the production of surplus goods and services, all energy consuming activities.

But what if a change in the economic and social order could result in a state of existence by which a good standard of living was maintained, but with far less extraneous energy use? This certainly is possible but whether it would remove the need to consider nuclear is unlikely.

How did we reach this state?

This begs a deeper question. How did we reach a state where in order to maintain our current system of civilisation, we must choose between the horrendous pollution of fossil fuels, and the morally repugnant nuclear, which as the potential for quite severe accidents?

Humanity and civilisation has quite simply grown faster than the means to support it sustainably have. There is no escaping the fact that we have not restrained our growth and demand for resources and chose not to wait till a demand for power and resources could be satiated sustainably before creating the demand. Restraint is a much needed but lacking quality in modern civilisation. Had we, upon the discovery of the use of fossil fuels, been able to think ahead, to take into account their finiteness, carefully planned our growth so as to be within the limits of these resources, this debate perhaps won't be occurring. While it may not be reasonable to have known about climate change, or how quickly these fossil fuels may be exhausted, the industrial system marched on without any restraint or planning.

The crisis isn't simply about where to get power next, it goes much deeper than that. The nuclear debate, a debate about which of the two evils we will choose is the result of a population and industrial system which was allowed to grow to a size beyond its own capacity to support itself sustainably. Renewable energies could be viable if civilisation as a whole has the will and capacity to restrict its size and consumption within that which nature can support, but such a change of perspective is unlikely to come about with leaders who are beholden to commercial interested, to big business and who, because of the democratic political system, would have extreme difficulty in enacting unpopular, but necessary changes.

While some political schools of thought try to resist any challenge to the current status quo, it is necessary to look deeper than the nuclear/no nuclear dichotomy and challenge the assumptions about the necessity to use the quantity of energy we use now and to challenge the automatic assumption that further growth must be accommodated as is inevitable.

Our societies approach to the energy supply problems that we face have always been to force change in the source of energy, but perhaps we should look at both sides of the equation. Perhaps the issue of finding the resources isn't simply to force more resources, but to also adapt ourselves and accept the limitations of what the planet can provide and adjust ourselves, our own practices and assumptions and social morals in order to make our lifestyle more compatible the resources our planet can provide. This requires changes which most people would immediately dismiss as a pipe dream, as impossible, but unfortunately we are left with little choice.

1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining#Dangers_to_miners

Nat Alt Booklist - Recommended Reading

Below is a list of recommended books. Thought provoking, controversial, historic, moving and informative.

Any one of following works are not listed in any order of importance nor do they represent in absolute the view of Nationalist Alternative instead we draw on large or small elements of each in synthesizing our world view.

We simply ask people approach the following topics with a clear and open mind free of previously held bias.

National Veganism, Paganism and Environmentalism

by David Ellerton

In the year 2010, we saw another farcical election in Australia. The two major parties were so boring, and so out of touch with the public's feelings, that neither of them could secure a majority. The parties were out of touch, especially on the immigration issue. The Howard and Rudd governments, in the past ten years, brought in over a million immigrants into Australia, most of them Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino. Perhaps, if Labor or Liberal had offered to cut immigration to zero, and expel the immigrants who've already arrived, they would have won more votes. But, as it was, they were indecisive - not only on immigration, but on the economy as well.

Because of the election, people have been asking me what sort of policies I'd support. My answer is that Nationalist Alternative is not yet an electorally-registered political party. We don't yet have a political platform.

What I can do in this article is to describe, in broad strokes, my own personal world view, my own ideology. I won't be outlining any specific policies. Instead, I'll be talking in broad terms, and hopefully my readers will be able to see, for themselves, what sort of policies would flow from these ideas.

Firstly, my ideology is part of a world-view - what I call a pagan world-view. To explain:

I don't see man as being a creature who is separate from both nature and other sentient beings - that is, mammals, fish and birds. Man is part of  nature and the animal world. Together, they form a whole. In the Christian, Jewish and Islamic world view, of course, man has special rights and privileges. He's superior to the animals. Even the most degraded man - a heroin addict from Footscray or Cabramatta, or a Somali child-soldier rapist - has more rights, has more value, than a beautiful tiger or whale. I don't see man as having a special spiritual essence compared to nature, and to animal life, and indeed, my view is that some animals, and even birds and fish, have a greater value than certain degenerate human beings.

My doctrine is that white, Western man should live in harmony with nature and the animals. One of the implications is that man shouldn't chop down more trees than is necessary, and that man shouldn't eat, skin, exploit or injure animals in any way. I could go through a great many arguments as to why we shouldn't use animal products, and harm and kill animals, but, in the end, it comes down to feeling: either you feel an aversion to hurting intelligent life-forms, or you don't. The white, Western peoples have displayed more of this feeling than any other racial group. It was we who put forward the notion of animal rights, and laws forbidding animal cruelty. Some advocates of animal liberation recognize this: the British pop singer Morrissey, for instance, recently described the Chinese as a 'subspecies' for their treatment of animals - for their flaying, torturing and cooking dogs, and so forth. The British left-wing media were horrified by his statements, and attacked him viciously. One of the things that they didn't like was the notion that some racial groups may have less of a feeling for animal welfare than others.

This leads to my second point. In my ideology, there are great differences, real differences, between racial and ethnic groups, and, indeed, between one individual and another in that group. A certain racial and ethnic group may have splendid qualities compared to another - it may be more hard-working, industrious, intelligent, law-abiding, than another; it may be more healthy, more beautiful. As well as that, one individual may be greater than another; he may be more intelligent, talented, special. In short, genius, and great men, great individuals, exist. This view is in direct contrast to the Marxist world-view, which says that only the mass of people, the poor, exploited mass, who make history and indeed have value. Great men don't exist. What's more, great races, unique, special ethnic groups, don't exist either.

The Left, in Europe, America and Australia, wants to reduce man to the lowest common denominator. That's why they lobby, incessantly, for more and more immigration. They want to turn Western countries into dumping grounds for the refuse of the Third World. Take Sweden, for instance. This is a beautiful, prosperous, clean, safe, country. The Swedish people are renowned for their physical beauty, for their healthy lifestyle, their business acumen, which in itself has led to Sweden being one of biggest exporters in the world, and one of the richest countries. The Left resents all this. Unfortunately for Sweden, the Left has been in control of Sweden for a long time, and so Sweden has been taking in over a 100,000 immigrants a year, most of them from the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa. The intention of the Left is to degrade the Swedish people. The Left wants to turn Sweden into a dumping-ground for the refuse of the Third World, and give those immigrants the same rights, the same status, as native Swedes who have built up Sweden from being one of the poorest countries in Western Europe into one of the richest. The Left's message to the Swedish people is, 'You're nothing. A burkha-wearing pram-pusher, a Somali child soldier, is just as "Swedish" as you are, and has just as many rights to Sweden's wealth, prosperity, and to Sweden's welfare state, as you do. You Swedes may think you're better than Kurds, Turks and Arabs, but really, we're not. We in the Left are going to bring all the poor and dispossessed of the Third World, all the refugees and the people who can't find jobs back home, over to Sweden. And there's nothing you racist, bigoted Swedes can do about it. Nothing!'.

Now, let me say that what's happening in Sweden is happening here in Australia and all over the Western world. We find the same phenomenon, and the same causes behind it. We have a Left which is committed to the degradation and destruction of white Western man; we also find that the Left exerts so much control that even the so-called conservatives have given in. In the old days in Australia, you could hold racialist views on immigration, and be a member, in good standing, of the Liberal or Labor parties; now, anyone who holds racialist views has been pushed out of the mainstream of politics. The only place left for them is the so called Far Right. Again, that's thanks to the baby-boomer Left, who have worked for decades to achieve that goal.

So, what's the alternative? The only real alternative, in my view is racial groups living separately from one another: Anglo-Saxons living apart from Muslims, who live apart from Chinese, who live apart from Africans, who live apart from Indians. Separateness leads to a kind of harmony, in which all the different racial groups can go about living life, without interference with from the other, and without coming into conflict whilst still co-operating globally. This segregation has to take place at the national level. Australia, Britain, New Zealand and Canada will only have Anglo-Celtic-Europeans, for instance, India will only have Indians, China only Chinese.

The other component of that world view is that there must be harmony within the nation-state. Take economic life. In Europe in the Middle Ages, the different professions organised themselves into a kind of caste-system, a system of guilds. It was a similar to system to the one that existed in societies of the ancient world, for instance, in ancient Rome and India. Under this system, there wasn't any class conflict, any discord, until much later, until the end of the 19th century. That guild socialism is an ideal for Australia in the 21st century. That is, trade unions and labour should live in harmony, in peaceful co-existence and co-operation, with the capitalist and business class.

Then we have to address man's relations with nature, with the environment, and with animals. There's been a great deal of talk about the BP oil slick in the gulf of New Mexico. BP have been attacked for despoiling the environment, in particular, the wildlife, in that region. At the same, there's been a great of hand-wringing over how many fish will be killed, how this will ruin the livelihoods of the men in the fishing industry. Now you can't live in harmony with nature, you can't respect the rights of the wildlife, you can't have a pristine, untouched environment, while you have a fishing industry which kills hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fish a year. Many of the environmentalists who make their opinions heard in the mainstream media don't seem to understand this.

Environmentalism is, in itself, a good idea. It's very similar to my own ideology. The Catholic Archbishop George Pell condemns environmentalism as a pagan ideology, and he's right. Environmentalism doesn't put man above nature, it puts him at the same level. But the implication of that doctrine is that man is at the same level of the animals as well. A really thorough-going environmentalism would not only fight to preserve the environment, and set aside certain forests and lakes as natural-heritage, protected areas, but preserve animal life from being despoiled by humans. That means, in turn, that mankind must gradually wean itself off its reliance on animal products, and let the animals, fish and birds in peace, in the same way we leave those natural-heritage areas alone, untouched and unspoiled by the hands of man.

The problem with environmentalism is that firstly, it's been infected by the same kind of crazy racial egalitarianism as the Marxist Left. Secondly, environmentalism has become a victim of its own success. It's gone too far. We have compulsory recycling, which is really a useless activity, and would only be useful if there was a war on, and had to ration paper, plastic and the rest. We have overly restrictive rules on, for instance, the burning off of old-growth trees and other vegetation in rural areas, a policy which leads to destructive bushfires which end up destroying animal and plant life. We also have a policy of putting taxes on carbon emissions, which leads to super-high electricity bills. All of this has given environmentalism a bad name. Fundamentally, the ideal of man living in harmony with nature and wildlife is a good one, a great one. But environmentalism isn't the means of putting this idea into practice.

So let's summarise. Animal welfare, conservation, racial segregation and racial harmony, harmony between the social classes: all of this, in my view, forms part of the ideal that we in the West ought to be striving towards. It's all part of an ideology which tells man to accept his place in the universe, and his being part of nature. Most religions will tell you that the divine essence of things, the spirit, doesn't lie in animals, lakes, forests, or even in man's body itself - man has a soul separate from his physical self, his body. Man's physical self, and nature itself - including the animals that live within it - are not spiritual, and so are to be abhorred. That's the Christian, and Jewish-Islamic, teaching. My world view is different. Nature does have a value; so do animals; so does man's body, his race, his degree of physical fitness, health and beauty. There is more spirituality, in my view, in an Australian native forest, or a track and field event with healthy Australian young women, than there is in a grubby synagogue or mosque. That's why I call my world view pagan.

In a future article, I'll to describe the specific and minute political policies which follow from this world view.