Nuclear Power

I’ve changed my thinking on nuclear energy in recent years, and it's taken a decided turn toward the skeptical.

It’s ironic that the concern about fossil fuels and their environmental impact is reaching a fever pitch just as the age of cheap energy based on those fuels is coming to an end. The globalized world power structure may indeed be out to accelerate the disintegration of that energy paradigm — with no scalable alternative anywhere in sight — but they’d be pushing ahead a trend that’s been in progress for some time now. It’s simple numbers really. The world runs on oil and natural gas, and it’s getting harder and harder to extract them from the ground in a way that generates a net energy ratio on which our civilization can continue to function.

Wind and solar are the go-to “clean energy” heroes of the chattering classes, but those in the know will admit, when pressed, that these offer no hope in the near term of replacing fossil fuels in a manner that wouldn’t cause a civilizational collapse. And so many across the ideological spectrum have been calling for a massive investment in the only power source that could theoretically come close to matching the energy output of fossil fuels — nuclear power. It’s important to note that this call does not come from the “Environmentalist Left” nor from the globalized governments of the world power centers. (Case in point: Germany has made it a mission to systemically dismantle its nuclear infrastructure, and are now firing up their coal plants as Russia cuts off the gas.)

The Environmentalist Left’s disdain for nuclear energy in particular has long grated on me because I believe that it illustrates their insincerity when it comes to solving the world’s energy issues. And I still believe this to be true. The Environmentalist Left doesn’t really want to swap out energy sources within the world structure as currently constituted. It is deconstructionist and deeply anti-natalist — they’d much prefer reducing the number of people, along with their quality of life.

But even if they’re disingenuous, they’re right about the risks, though not for the reasons they state. It seems to me deeply unwise for a society in decline to put their eggs in the nuclear basket. To begin with, getting large scale nuclear infrastructure up and running in extraordinarily expensive, and can take decades before it contributes meaningfully to a modern nation’s energy needs. And now people point to the more recent meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima plant in 2011 as illustrative of the human and environmental tranche risk of nuclear power. Again, this risk is very real, and the environmental damage from Fukushima can probably never be properly quantified, and the same goes for the damage to their population’s previously ironclad institutional trust. But it doesn’t really illustrate the risks I’m talking about. Japan showed remarkable fortitude and institutional efficiency in the wake of Fukushima despite the much-ballyhooed errors, and they flexed their culture’s elite level of social trust as elder citizens and those without families lined up by the thousands to risk death to save those they had never met from danger. The risks of nuclear power that stand out to me have more to do with poisoned systems and their degrading human capital.

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster seems more instructive, seeing as its story is more foreboding to the West. This may be one reason the horrors of the titular HBO miniseries strike close to home in a way we can't quite put our finger on. It's true that the Soviet Union had cut some important technical corners prior to the disaster, but the Chernobyl story is primarily one of institutional failure. There were heroic efforts on the ground by men of the military and engineering corps to keep the fallout from being as bad as it could have been — the Russians are a formidable people — but the event revealed the entire Soviet system to be an elaborate contraption of blame-shift mechanisms. Since the early days of the Soviet regime, officials within its tangled web of state machinery labored under the constant threat of the gulag or the bullet, and like any adapative organism had over time developed means of avoiding the hammer of the power structure in a way that saved their skins but produced sclerosis within the system. If leftism is fundamentally a position of irresponsibility, then it's no surprise that the machinery of accountability had eroded so thorough within the bureaucracy of the Soviet state by 1986. Many of the era's thinkers pegged Chernobyl as the ultimate death knell of the Soviet Union. Too simplistic of course, but it cast a very bright light on profound decay. The sclerotic state had become unable to manage its ambitious yet corroding infrastructure. Sounds familiar. But the Russians at least still had a decent foundation of human capital to work with.

The layers of expertise and institutional respect required to build and then maintain advanced nuclear infrastructure rest on top of countless sublayers — education, social trust, and a general dynamism that characterizes civilization on the come-up as they gain complexity. These forces draw from and hone base levels of population intelligence. If IQ is said to be largely heritable (which it is), then the West is in for a rough ride in the coming decades. The gender dynamics alone point toward inevitable brain drain. As the more intelligent women have been sucked into the university-to-office-job pipeline — laden with debt and funneled into urban centers — the number of children they have has plummeted. The cities have always been a society's fertility dead zones, but we've become much more urban while crafting an egalitarian system that guarantees the most intelligent people pass on their genes less and less frequently. All this while immigration from the Third World is sent into overdrive.

So the prospects of the population maintaining its general intelligence, let alone increasing it, seem to me quite dim. Societies lose their competence for a variety of reasons. The digital age might make us more resistant to profound knowledge loss of the kind that happened during the Bronze Age Collapse — on a longer time scale I'm not convinced of this — but the foundational quality of a civilization always declines one way or another, and with it the ability to perpetuate top level complex systems.

Nuclear programs are certainly complex. But the risks are different than those present when the Byzantines forgot how to make Greek Fire. Chernobyl very nearly went full meltdown, which could have made it impossible to grow food across a huge swath of Europe's agricultural bread basket. We still don't know the full effect of the Fukushima disaster. Perhaps the Japanese effectively limited the fallout - after all, they remain a highly competent First World population. But the potential damage caused by nuclear malfunction could render a nation sick, dying, and mad. Or simply accelerate the death of a nation already in such a state.

So to me, those nuclear plants that used to look like beautiful monuments to mankind's mastery over the elemental forces of nature look more and more like a kind of civilizational Dead Man's Switch. Primed and ready to unleash horrors on a people if their societal stock ticker dips too low. Given my obvious pessimism about my country's prospects over the next century, it seems a risk too great. My future grandchildren may or not may grow up in an intact or functional United States, but I'd at least want them to be able to grow food and avoid leukemia. Score one for the environmentalists, I suppose.

But then what about the energy crisis? There's likely no way to avoid some sort of energy crash, and with it a likely large degree of global population reduction. And as said before, it's clear to me that barring a major paradigm shift in battery technology, things like solar and wind will never come close to filling the deficit left by fossil fuel depletion. My money is on some combination of hydro power from the rivers and tidal power from the oceans. The later awaits some big time technological advancements, but it's where I would invest since there could be massive upside.

And if a collapsing state finds itself unable to maintain such power sources, it doesn't risk turning itself into a dead zone.