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Saturday, October 10, 2020

The frozen politics of debate about nuclear energy

Taylor Dotson and Bouchey, Democracy and the Nuclear Stalemate, The New Atlantis, Fall 2020.

This is a long article about nuclear power. Here's an excerpt about a quarter of the way in:

We find the same divergence in estimates about nearly every other key factor of nuclear power. Cost is another instructive example. Advocates will often tout how cheap it is to produce nuclear power, while neglecting the enormous expense of building the plants in the first place. But is the high cost of the plants a factor of the technology itself — or just of the American regulatory process? When comparing to renewables, do we factor in that renewables require the extra expense of updating the power grid and building backup plants and energy storage to compensate for their intermittency? Exactly how much does ten thousand years of nuclear waste stewardship cost?

Different assumptions result in dramatically different estimates, but every estimate must make some such assumptions. These will be based on values, preferences, and biases that may each be rational and defensible. Underestimating deaths, say, may be better if we prefer to include only figures of which we are absolutely confident, overestimating may be better if we prefer to err on the side of caution — but in any case, no study can hope to be value-free. We will likely never be able to know as definitively as some claim how many people died from the Chernobyl disaster, or the true costs of nuclear power.

Decisions about how to factor in all these possibilities and uncertainties can never be entirely objective. This is the predicament that Alvin Weinberg recognized fifty years ago. When it comes to questions about the dangers of chronic low-level radiation, the risks of rare catastrophes, or what energy source will best serve humanity in the future, science alone cannot make these decisions, and the claim that science does will not make it so. These matters are trans-scientific.

The problem is not that the science has not been done yet, but rather that it may be undoable. Some questions may simply exceed the reach of our methods. For other issues, we may lack the resources or wherewithal to adequately answer them, or we may discover that any solution is inextricably intertwined with our values. Weinberg warned that scientists had “no monopoly on wisdom where … trans-science is involved.” The best they can offer is the injection of additional intellectual rigor to the debate and a delineation of where science ends and trans-science begins.

In a morass of uncertainty, it can be comforting to believe that one’s chosen position is supported by the true facts. Rather than nuclear politics being beset by too little science, we actually suffer from what Daniel Sarewitz has called an “excess of objectivity.” Given the high stakes, the research is invariably politicized, and any study will face sufficient scrutiny that it is almost guaranteed not to settle the matter. The relevant sciences cannot settle the political question, but actually preclude an answer.

None of this is to say that science is unhelpful here. Even imperfect estimates are better guides than none at all. Rather, the problem lies with the way “the facts” are used, and science is weaponized, in political debate.

Later:

Despite these being immensely complex problems, near absolute surety is somehow not in short supply. When empirical knowledge is seen as determinative of politics, the outcomes of any policy change are seen as knowable in advance. Perhaps the challenge of contemporary politics is not that expertise has been shoved aside by emotion but that political discourse is beset by a simplistic view of what expertise can accomplish.

As Daniel Sarewitz has argued, the political process is gridlocked by this tendency to hide behind “science,” “facts,” and “expertise.” Politics is no longer recognized as a never-ending dynamic process of negotiation, compromise, realignment, and experiment among a diversity of competing interest groups, but instead is expected to be a straightforward implementation of unassailable Truth.

Builders and conservers:

If love or hate for nuclear power is not a matter of simply accepting the facts, then what does underlie it? As for most risky technologies, support is not a matter mainly of rationality but of trust, fairness, control, responsibility, and plain subjective aversion to catastrophe. Science writer Robert Pool, in his 1997 book Beyond Engineering, offered a helpful distinction between “builders” and “conservers.” While builders have immense faith in our capacity to technologically manipulate our environments for the greater good, conservers need considerably more evidence to be persuaded that people are capable of deploying a new technology responsibly.

The builder mentality, although probably more common among scientists and engineers, is not more scientific. It mostly reflects a difference in trust, something that is easier for the people doing the building. Everyone else moves along the builder–conserver spectrum based on a myriad of factors, including recent events and their own experiences.

Public confidence in nuclear power perhaps began to erode when the performance of early generations of nuclear plants turned out to not match rosy predictions of energy “too cheap to meter,” as Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss had promised in 1954. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima reasonably aggravated fears about safety. Statistics and other factual appeals in support of nuclear now fall on deaf ears, not because the public is anti-science but because the technology and its advocates are no longer trusted.

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