Cross-posted at EuroTrib.com.
The IAEA has a “contradictory role, as nuclear policeman and nuclear salesman,” said Greenpeace International’s Mike Townsley (AFP), criticizing the choice of Mohammed ElBaradei and the IAEA as recipients of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. (Take the POLL BELOW: Do you agree?) Townsley did acknowledge that ElBaradei has been “‘a voice of sanity’ in his advocacy of a nuclear-free Middle East.”
PHOTO CAPTION: ” Greenpeace activists attach a 60-metre long (65 yards) banner and a balloon in the shape of a nuclear bomb in front of the United Nations building in Vienna September 26, 2005. The activists denounced the International Atomic Energy Agency, saying it promoted the use of nuclear power and thereby aiding the spread of nuclear weapons.” (Yahoo/Reuters)
A French group, Sortir du Nucleaire (Get Out of Nuclear) accuses IAEA of promoting civilian nuclear plants while giving “countries the means to build atomic bombs” and “hoodwinking” the public while nuclear proliferation accelerates. (Yahoo/AFP Photo : ‘Sortir du Nucleaire’ activists demonstrate on a Brittany beach in July 2004.)
Equally severe was The Guardian columnist George Monbiot:
George Monbiot … said the 2005 prize to the IAEA and its boss “was a reward for failure in an age of rampant proliferation.”
He saw a parallel with the controversial awarding of the 1973 Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. The former US secretary of state and national security advisor helped extend the Vietnam War to Laos and Cambodia before negotiating the conflict’s end.“The currency (of the Nobel Peace Prize) is beginning to be devalued,” Monbiot said.
ElBaradei like Henry Kissinger? Well …
As Meteor Blades said in his recommended diary — “A Nobel Bush Won’t Love” — here on October 7, much of our initial satisfaction came from the fact that the ElBaradei had not only survived Dick Cheney and George Bush’s attempts to throw him out of the IAEA, he also proved them and the Neocons wrong on Iraq, and more:
Whoever’s on the Nobel committee this year, let me give you a big kiss. Choosing Mohammed El Baradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency to receive the 2005 Peace Prize warms my heart for three reasons: 1) both have deserved it for years; 2) its recognition that the smirky American rightwing attitude toward international agencies is gravely misplaced; and 3) it pokes Washington in the eye, but that is redundant.
“In addition to their traditional worries about nuclear proliferation,” reports AFP, “environmentalists are concerned that the civilian nuclear industry — dealt a crippling blow by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster — is on the rise once more.”
Nuclear power is becoming eagerly pursued in China and India to help meet surging energy needs at a time of expensive, vulnerable oil supplies.
And in Europe, some countries that vowed to scrap or freeze their nuclear power programmes are now discreetly looking at reviving them to meet their commitments on greenhouse-gas pollution from fossil fuels.
I suppose you in the U.S. have seen the new, dreamy TV ads about the need for more nuclear energy. Well?
Alfred Nobel was born in 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden. His family was descended from Olof Rudbeck, the best-known technical genius of Sweden’s 17th century era as a great power in northern Europe.
Nobel invented dynamite in 1866 and later built up companies and laboratories in more than 20 countries all over the world.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel/alfred-nobel/industrial/lundstrom/index.html
For hundreds of years, black powder was the only explosive available for civilian as well as military purposes. Alfred Nobel’s invention of the detonator ensured a controlled explosion of nitroglycerine and made it possible to introduce this much stronger explosive on the civilian explosives market. His second important invention, dynamite, facilitated the transport and handling of nitroglycerine.
An entirely new industry grew up, based on Nobel’s patents and with Nobel as the initiator. Within ten years, 16 explosives producing factories had been founded in 14 countries with Nobel as shareholder or co-owner.
Cross-posted at DailyKos.
also crossposted from dKos…
IAEA’s mission is explicitly to police nuclear proliferation internationally without interfering with domestic energy policies, provided these are compatible with the first goal.
Civilian nuclear power is compatible with non-proliferation, and it is not up to the IAEA to fight it. In making the distinction between legal use of nuclear and illegal ones, they are not encouraging the civilian use per se, but providing information.
If Greenpeace is not happy with nuclear power, they should lobby the various governments but putting the blame on the IAEA is stupid. But Greenpeace seems defined by its hostility to nuclear and it’s hard having a rational conversation with them on that topic.
Greenpeace seems defined by its hostility to nuclear and it’s hard having a rational conversation with them on that topic.
Why do you insist that those who are opposed to your approval of more nuclear power plants are not rational?
It would be strange indeed if Greenpeace betrayed all their supporters by giving approval to more nuclear power plants which have massive problems with waste disposal.
That question really has me thinking! On one hand i am very happy that Bush didn’t get it and if he happens to get snubbed in the process I dont mind a bit. On the other hand I have been a bit skeptical over who gets the nominations at times.. and that handing out of money. Maybe that’s because if I’m doing ‘noble’ or ‘Nobel’ (in this case, i guess) then I’m not after a reward.. I’m just doing what I think should be done and I’m probably enjoying doing it. Its it’s own reward, right?
Then some guys from a committee come along and ploink a lot of money down at your feet for doing what everyone should be doing in the first place and they tell you what a good chap you are.
Now, I know that I’m making too much of a meal of this but I just don’t like the idea of giving out rewards for kindness in cash and fame. There should be reward but it should be culturally given in the form of smiles and nods of respect as people greet you. In our society , it seems like everything is down to a fame-wealth transaction. look you did great therefore you both need and deserve to be rich!
I have to laugh here because I do know that there are good reasons to give Nobel prizes.. and I know many deserve to be recognized and maybe this is the onyl way we can recognize them in this backwards world of ours.. yes, I’m sure that ElBaradei probably deserved his award but I don’t personally know him.. and I suppose that’s my real complaint. In this world, it’s harder to show our respect for good deeds face to face.. so they have to be given out as prizes like a sort of lotto for good works (which hundreds of people may be doing in any given year.. it’s just one or two lucky people that actually get chosen for the prize)
PS.. should I run out of the room or just duck? 😉
I have not seen much online on the risks of nuclear power plants. It is promoted as clean energy but “where the waste goes, nobody knows.” The industry is rather secretive about its accumulation of radioactive waste which lasts for thousands of years.
How much of future US nuclear waste will be dumped at Hanford WA?
Also each plant emits a certain amount of radiation every minute of the day.
I think it all comes down to regulations and technology. I know that nuclear tech has come so far in the past few years. It seems a shame that we are so ready to pollute the air with coal rather than use technology to improve the safety and viability of nuclear.
I don’t know what to do with the waste, and that is the sticking point. Obviously more research needs to focus on this area. From what I have read, nuclear plants are incredibly safe today, but it is the waste disposal that is the problem.
I figure the $200 billion we have spent in Iraq could probably take us much closer to finding a workable solution.
I was typing while you were posting the same points – see below.
Prices of heating oil are reaching the point where they will begin literally killing people. Nuclear power is by far the most realistic alternative source we now have available.
If we’re prepared to invest in R&D the safety concerns can be overcome. The US is spending 166 million dollars PER DAY for nothing in Iraq. I can’t believe that just a fracion of that amount redirected to nuclear research wouldn’t solve the waste disposal problem, or perhaps, show the way to nuclear fusion rather than fission.
ElBaradei knows that we must get past our knee-jerk fears about nuclear power at the same time we address the real threat of nuclear weapons.
No doubt Sierra Club Canada’s statement will be considered another “ill-informed activist protest.”
The “waste concerns” are pretty big and all I can find out for solutions is “bury it in thick concrete, bury it deep, and hope for the best.” It will continue to accumulate more and more as the industry expands and it lasts for thousands of years.
On the other hand, Sierra Club USA has not updated its position (online) on nuclear power plants since 1986.
seems to be going around about the very real and possibly intractable problems with nuclear power. Posters here and pundits elsewhere summarily dismiss the weapon/power reactor connection as if it doesn’t exist, and ignore the waste disposal problem as if throwing more money at it is certain to reveal some ideal fix.
The reality is that there is an intimate connection between civilian nukes and weapon-making. Why do you think everyone is in such a state about Iran and N Korea, among others, having power nukes? As long as there’s enriched uranium fuel, as long as there’s plutonium in the waste, there’s material for weapon making. Nobody has come up with a technology that eliminates both.
The longer nuke power goes on without an accident, the more certain it becomes that there will be a big one somewhere along the way. To prevent the possibility of catastrophic accidents takes a degree of alertness and dedication almost impossible to sustain over the long term. Given the gross incompetence demonstrated by the US over the past few years, I have little faith that the extreme care nuclear needs can be maintained even here, much less in a Serbia or a Yemen or a Peru.
The waste problem is not some little detail that just hasn’t been studied enough. Billions have been spent over the past 50 years to come up with responsible schemes, and the best they’ve offered after all that is burying the waste under ground. Those repositories will be deadly traps for generations to come, for a period that spans more years than human civilization so far. I think there’s a very real question about whether we have the right to burden our successors with thousand-year timebombs for the sake of satisfying our own gluttonous desires.
Is there an energy problem? Yes. Would we be better off with non-oil sources? Yes. But if we could spend a lot of money to solve the nuclear waste problem, it’s equally logical that we could devote the resources instead to renewable energy and conservation.
I live in an area with the highest percentage of nuke power in the nation. My electric bills are at least as high as yours, and rising. History so far gives no indication that nuke power is an answer to more or cheaper energy. I think we can do better. We can at least do better than rushing like panicked lemmings into the snares of still more corporate snake oil peddlers.
But if we could spend a lot of money to solve the nuclear waste problem, it’s equally logical that we could devote the resources instead to renewable energy and conservation.
I agree with you completely.
The problem is that all of the energy sources we can think of have problems. Every single one. The chemical pollution caused by the manufacture of photovoltaics is nothing minor. Wind, particularly the way we implement it (in gigantic centralized wind farms), has a huge local effect on ecosystem — OTOH, if we decentralize it, we look at much higher longterm maintenance costs and the like (not to mention that there are limited numbers of places they’re useful), for what is still a relatively inefficient source of energy. Hydroelectric, massive ecological problems. I could go on and on.
I’m not a big fan of the idea of going to lots of nuclear power, but I also think that if you’re looking for something that is both clean and efficient enough for our huge energy needs, you have to look at it with a somewhat open mind. I think huge amounts of research on other, friendlier sources should be done, and we certainly could be doing a lot more in that direction, as well as conservation. But I also think that the non-nuclear “side” of the debate has a tendancy to oversimplify the problems that occur with those, too.
This isn’t an easy problem. I’m personally not ruling anything out, so long as it’s cleaner (and hopefully less scarce in the long run) than what we’ve got now — the push for the next bit is probably going to be for lots more coal, since it’s readily available as a replacement for the oil we’re going to have more and more trouble getting our paws on. Coal’s environmental/safety problems in the here-and-now frankly concern me more than well-engineered nuclear plants do.
between, for example, the pollution problems of photovoltaics and the millennia-long threat from nuclear waste. I think people who buy into the new hype for nuclear power forget that it’s been half a century since we were promised that nuclear power would make electricity “too cheap to meter”. Since that time none of the major problems have been solved. It seems to me to make more sense to spend our resources looking at fixing what’s wrong with newer tech, rather than hammering away for another century on old problems that have so far proven to be intractable.
Re the “hopefully less scarce in the long run” assumption, it’s been a long time since I looked at it, but as of some years ago, the supply of economically significant US uranium was good for no more than a few decades. Committing ourselves to a nuclear energy economy will fairly quickly require us to move to plutonium fuel and possibly fast breeder reactors, which burn waste plutonium, which opens up a whole new set of problems and potential for disaster. (Current power reactors, for example, cannot blow up like a nuclear bomb; fast breeders, theoretically, can.)
I”m willing to look at nukes along with all the other options, but at this point I think we’re being sold a bill of goods by very self-interested parties. It is a measure of their propaganda effectiveness that newly developing renewable tech and conservation, which are barely explored yet, are dismissed as pipedreams, while an old tech that has not solved its basic problems in half a century of effort is somehow the “realistic” alternative. Strange world.
Fair points, though again, when you’re talking about the kind of scale we’re discussing, I don’t think you can discount the pollution we’re talking from photovoltaic manufacture, just as a single example. Radioactivity can be nasty stuff, but you also don’t want to discount the pretty longterm destructive power of highly toxic yet non-radioactive stuff. I think, and it’s really just my opinion, that we’re ultimately more paranoid than we need to be about radioactivity and less paranoid than we should be about, oh, halogenated wastes, mercury, lead, the plentiful nastiness in coal particulates, so on and so forth…
That said, I don’t entirely disagree with you. I think the longterm solution is going to involve diversifying our power sources as much as possible, and I certainly don’t want to see nuclear power become the next “Solution To Everything” — that kind of tactic usually leaves us messed up one way or another. I’m willing, though, to look at nuclear as part of a comprehensive strategy to get us away from fossil fuels and into something cleaner and more sustainable. At least unless we get as smart as plants sometime soon. Those little bastards really got us whupped on this whole power-from-sunlight thing — I think I’m convinced that they’re laughing at us.
At last, an honest look at nuclear power. Thank you.
Canada gave Pakistan the Candu reactor for “nuclear energy” and guess what?