This is a response to Ashutosh’s thoughtful and thought-provoking blog on Top 5 reasons why so many intelligent liberals dislike nuclear power. I am aware that many scientists feel that the opposition to nuclear power comes from a failure to understand the science. I feel that, on the other hand, promoters of nuclear power fail to understand that humans are social animals. I think that Ashutosh has pretty well expressed how many hard scientists see the issue.

I don’t know if I count as an intelligent liberal but here are my personal top 5. (I am not even going to get into the issue of the fact that nuclear weapons are indeed dependent on the products of the nuclear industry. Nor that Chernobyl and Goiana showed the real effects of relatively localised nuclear disasters. I’m just sticking them in an aside.)

1. The potential for an accident is huge. Too huge and too devastating to be acceptable. If this isn’t a real problem, why don’t they build nuclear power stations in the centre of New York or London?

2 The technology is intrinsically vulnerable to deliberate attack in ways that vastly exceed the potential damage from other forms of power generation. One suicide bomber hitting a power station or stealing a container of hot waste could single-handedly destroy a vast area. You think 9/11 was a disaster?

3 As a result, the technology requires a strong repressive state apparatus to protect it – whether from physical attack. theft of materials or leaks of information. Even in the most ideal democratic society, this represents a threat to civil liberty. In the average tyranny, it’s a licence for corruption and repression.

4 There are NO historical precedents for the existence of a stable society that can provide the level of protection necessary beyond a few centuries. Power stations produce materials with half-lives that put the whole of human society to shame. The time-scales are completely out of synch with human life-spans or the endurance of forms of social organisation. There is war and unrest throughout the planet. All sane projections are that social instabilities will get ever more extreme as the global population gets ever greater than the capacity of the planet to provide for it. It is head-in-the-sand-buryingly over-optimistic to assume that society x will be stable for the next few decades, let alone thousands of years.

5 Before we consider building more of these inherently dangerous power stations, we should have at least come to the limits of what can be achieved by cutting back on our insane wastefulness, making use of the available alternatives and developing technologies that aren’t so dangerous.