Did Gordon nuke it?

Like virtually everyone I know, the recent natural disaster in Japan has given much cause for thought, if not a prolonged wince of pain.  I have little direct link with Japan, though what there is is more significant than it might be: about ten years ago, my sister took part in an exchange with a Japanese school and so we had a Japanese girl stay with us for about ten days.  The cultural differences were palpable, and the language proficiency on both sides lent a good deal of weight to the film ‘Lost in Translation’, even though the title is misleading.  This seems a tenuous link until I say that both she, name of Myka, and her family, were from Sendai.  It is a chilling feeling, needless to say.

            Aside from this, what is perhaps less surprising, and less heart-warming, is the speed at which the focus of the news has moved from a serious natural disaster to the fate of a nuclear power station that has suffered damage as a result of the earthquake.  What I find still harder to swallow is that this has started a debate about nuclear power and has been leapt upon as an instance that proves nuclear power should not be used.  I shall content myself with being a bit cross at the insensitivity of criticising Japan’s governmental provision-of-energy strategy during one of the biggest natural disasters to hit it in living memory, and almost certainly further back. 

Complaints about the strategy of which nuclear sources were part, have included whether or not a power station of that size and age should be used, as well as what place nuclear power has in the modern world.  Unfortunately, when we want to have a coherent strategy for producing energy that is balanced with the Earth’s environment, the probability in practice is that it will include power sources that to not affect this balance either way—of which nuclear power is an example.  This is unless we are to make a gargantuan and frankly impractical change to other methods.  We would, in chemistry terms, be trying to go from an entirely exothermic-reaction-based system, to one based on endothermic reaction(s).  On that basis alone it sounds unrealistic.

There are various misconceptions concerning the provision of electricity though.  David Mitchell showed one such misconception in the edition of Carpool in which he featured (search YouTube.com ‘David Mitchell Carpool’), citing the looming energy crisis, as it seems to be called by the meeja, as the result of privatising the Utilities.  Needless to say I do not think anyone would claim privatisation is problem-free, however what it does do is remove the political element from services provided.  It is frequently the same people who complain about privatisation as complain about the standard of services that are managed by politicians.  Can it be had both ways?  Well, no, it cannot.  A serious point is that the reason why we have this ‘energy crisis’ is because we use more energy than we can produce without noticing the cost, either in financial or in environmental terms.  The reason why we have the infrastructure we do is partly a reaction to Trades Unions’ activity in the 1970s and 80s in which said Unions made it impossible to regulate the supply of electricity according to demand chiefly from burning coal.  Whether or not the workers on strike had a valid reason for doing so is not at stake: the point is, an infrastructure based upon several sources was constructed and gave rise to a consistent supply of electricity.  This infrastructure necessarily included nuclear power.  It still does to this day, as it does in Japan.  However, with fossil fuels falling out of fashion, becoming more expensive, less efficient, and being increasingly less televisual to boot, where are we to go? 

The only route left to us, as far as one can see, is one that includes nuclear power.  This makes me a bit uncomfortable, as it is not a problem-free solution.  On a different note, I suppose that means that dear old Gordon got it right.  This is a strange feeling as it is the first time I can be sure I have agreed with the man.  I could never have voted for him, not least because he had no mandate to govern to start with, something I think is indefensible in a democracy (take that, Col. Gadaffi).  Trouble is, on this point, Mr Brown’s apparent endorsement of nuclear power probably was right, despite the bashing he got from the media.  Nuclear power is no less unsafe than any other method of generating electricity, especially if one is as fortunate as we are in Britain, not to live near an Earthquake zone. 

We are left with a choice: either cut down energy consumption drastically, or make practical alternative sources of power work.  And that means a bigger role for nuclear power, tsunamis, or not.