Page 3 of 3 Petro-power and nuclear
renaissance By Michael T Klare
construction of new nuclear power plants,
giving citizens in these jurisdictions
considerable opportunity to resist the placement
of a reactor "in their back yard".
For
decades, this has been one of the leading
obstacles to the construction of new reactors in
the US, along with the costly and time-consuming
legal process involved in winning over state
legislatures, county boards and environmental
agencies. If this
practice prevails, we are
never likely to see a true "renaissance" of
nuclear power in the US, even if a few new
reactors are built in poor rural areas where
citizen resistance is minimal. The only way to
increase reliance on nuclear power, therefore, is
to federalize the permit process by shunting local
agencies aside and giving federal bureaucrats the
unfettered power to issue permits for the
construction of new reactors.
Unlikely,
you say? Well, consider this: the Energy Policy
Act of 2005 established a significant precedent
for the federalization of such authority by
depriving state and local officials of their power
to approve the placement of "regasification"
plants.
These are mammoth facilities used
to reconvert liquefied natural gas, transported by
ship from foreign suppliers, into a gas that can
then be delivered by pipeline to customers in the
US. Several localities on the east and west coasts
had fought the construction of such plants in
their harbors for fear that they might explode
(not an entirely far-fetched concern) or become
targets for terrorists, but they have now lost
their legal power to do so. So much for local
democracy.
Here's my worry: that some
future US administration will push through an
amendment to the Energy Policy Act giving the
federal government the same sort of placement
authority for nuclear reactors that it now has for
regasification plants. The feds then announce
plans to build dozens or even hundreds of new
reactors in or near such places as Boston, New
York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver
and so on, claiming an urgent need for additional
energy.
People protest en masse. Local
officials, sympathetic to the protestors, refuse
to arrest them in droves. But now we're speaking
of defiance of federal, not state or municipal,
ordinances. Ergo, the National Guard or the
regular army is called up to quell the protests
and protect the reactor sites - energo-fascism in
action.
Finally, there's another danger in
the spread of nuclear power: that it will require
a systematic increase in state surveillance of
everyone even remotely connected with commercial
nuclear energy. After all, every
uranium-enrichment facility, nuclear reactor and
waste-storage site - and any of the linkages
between them - is a potential source of
fissionable materials for terrorists, black-market
traffickers or rogue states like Iran and North
Korea.
This means, of course, that all of
the personnel employed in these facilities, and
all their contractors and subcontractors (and all
their families and contacts) will have to be
constantly vetted for possible illicit ties and
kept under strict, full-time surveillance. The
more reactors there are, the more facilities and
contractors who will have to be subjected to this
sort of oversight - and the more the security
staff itself will have to be subjected to
ever-higher levels of surveillance by state
security agencies. It's a formula for Big Brother
on a very large scale.
And then there's
the special problem of "breeder reactors". These
plants produce ("breed") more fissionable material
than they consume, often in the form of plutonium,
which can, in turn, be burned in power reactors to
generate electricity but can also be used as the
fuel for atomic weapons. Although such reactors
are currently banned in the US, other countries,
including Japan, are building them so as to
diminish their reliance on fossil fuels and
natural uranium, itself a finite resource.
As the demand for nuclear energy grows,
more countries (even, possibly, the US) are bound
to build breeder reactors. But this will vastly
increase the global supply of bomb-grade
plutonium, requiring an even greater increase in
state supervision of the nuclear-power industry in
all its aspects.
The state's iron grip
All the phenomena discussed - the
transformation of the US military into a global
oil-protection service, the growth of the energy
equivalent of a major-power arms race, the
emergence of Russia as an energy superpower, and
the need for increased surveillance over the
nuclear-power industry - are expressions of a
single, overarching trend: the tendency of states
to extend their control over every aspect of
energy production, procurement, transportation and
allocation.
This, in turn, is a response
to the depletion of world energy supplies and a
shift in the locus of energy production from the
global North to the global South - developments
that have been under way for some time, but are
bound to gain greater momentum in the years ahead.
Many concerned citizens and organizations
- the Apollo Alliance, the Rocky Mountain
Institute and the Worldwatch Institute, to name a
few - are trying to develop sane, democratic
responses to the problems brought about by energy
depletion, instability in energy-producing areas,
and global warming.
Most government
leaders, however, appear intent on addressing
these problems through increased state controls
and a greater reliance on the use of military
force. Unless this tendency is resisted,
energo-fascism could be the future.
Michael T Klare is a professor
of peace and world security studies at Hampshire
College and the author of Blood and Oil: The
Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing
Dependence on Imported Petroleum (Owl Books).
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