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Radioactive waste: Politics and technology
Humanity’, saying that ‘human beings and the natural world are on a collision course’ which ‘may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know’. Fifteen hundred scientists from around the world signed the warning, including ninety-nine Nobel Prize winners and a dozen national academies of science. Among the recommendations of the UCS are more efficient use of natural resources and stabilization of population. Thus a growing consensus appears to support the main thrust and timeliness of the Beyond the Limits message. Although the computer automatically conjures up a numbercrunching image, this book serves best as a good qualitative account of the dynamics of the human-environment system. Especially useful are a num-
ber of simple, easily understood graphics. Nonetheless, one can expect that there will be some who will use the inability to make very detailed, very specific, unqualified predictions as an excuse for inaction. To those I commend the words of Jan Tinbergen, Nobel Laureate, Economics, who, in the book’s foreword, says that ‘the possible average sustainable income level is lower today than twenty years ago’. One hopes Be_yond the Limits can help rally the worldwide behavioural changes long past due if a satisfactorily sustainable future is to be realized. George ~~c~nko of G~gra~hy and Land Studies Central ~~sh~ngt~n University E//ensburg, WA, USA
~epa~~enf
Nuclear waste - comparative policies RADIOACTIVE WASTE: POLITICS AND TECHNOLOGY by Frans Berkhout ~out/e~ge,
London,
1991,256
pp
Fears of ozone depletion, global warming and various environmental catastrophes may have temporarily distracted attention from the problems posed by nuclear energy. As the nuclear industry struggles to secure its commercial future in the West, attention has become focused on the intractable problem of radioactive wastes. As the evidence mounts of leakage of radioactivity and dumping on land and in the ocean in the former Communist countries, so the problems of nuclear risk have multiplied. Add to this the dangers of proliferation, and Berkhout’s daim in this timely book that the nuclear industry remains the ‘single clearest threat to the environment’ (p 44) is entirely plausible. He focuses on the problem of dealing with nuclear wastes, the growing burden of dangerous materials that constitute a potential threat to health and safety in the present and down the future generations.
310
Nuclear waste is a problem that is at once technical and politicat. At the technical level, the nuclear industry goes to ever greater lengths to provide hypothetical demonstrations of safe containment and the elimination of risk over unimaginabIe lengths of time. Paradoxically, as Berkhout points out, as the technicat safeguards become more stringent, so political acceptability and support for policy appears to diminish. This exposes a key contradiction in the industry’s case: ‘Absolute protection or safety cannot be assumed and at base there is something illogical in such an effort.’ (P 2). The core of the book (chapters 3 to 5) is a comparative study of the technical and political conflicts that have shaped radioactive waste policy in three countries - the former West Germany, Sweden and the UK. Although democratic, they each provide contrasting political institutions. The key to the differences in policy between them lies in their distinctive political institutions but also in the nature of the nuclear fuel cycle in each country. Sweden and the UK are politically centralized, Germany is federal; Sweden has forsaken reprocessing,
GLOBAL
Germany has flirted with it, while the UK has made it the cornerstone of its nuclear policy. In Germany and Sweden the nuclear industry has, at times, been a central issue of national politics, while in the UK it has achieved less political salience. In Germany, reprocessing and radioactive waste management became inextricably locked together in a concept known as entsorgung. This integration of the back-end activities of the nuclear cycle led, in effect, to ‘a reprocessing policy masquerading as an environmental policy’ (p X9). The theory was savaged when the attempt was made to put it into practice. The selection of the salt formations at Gorleben in Lower Saxony as a site for the Entsorgungszentrum unleashed a political controversy that embroiled the nuclear industry in the shifting political alliances within the complex web of federal/lun~e relationships. By 1979 Gorleben had become a politically unacceptable site. Although Gorleben remains as the probable disposal site for nuclear wastes, the proposed reprocessing plant was transferred to Wackersdorf in Bavaria, but subsequently abandoned in the face of escalating costs and environmental opposition. Berkhout shows how a comprehensive technical approach to waste management foundered on the political rocks of reprocessing. Germany now faces the problems of clean-up of nuclear sites in the newly incorporated former East Germany and a problem of nuclear waste storage which may be temporarily alleviated by reprocessing contracts with the UK and France. By contrast, it seems, Sweden has achieved a political solution, though not without political struggle and future uncertainty. Berkhout’s explanation for Sweden’s apparent political success lies in the early abandonment of reprocessing and the subsequent agreement to phase out the nuclear industry altogether following the referendum in 1979. Here, too, the nuclear industry was a major national issue, and probably a decisive one in the 1975 general election. As Berkhout shows, Swedish policy is based on the notion of absolutely safe disposal. ‘idealists
ENVIRONMENTAL
CHANGE
September
1993
Book reviews
imagining an impregnable fortress underground’ (p 115). The result has been the ‘belt and braces, massive, over-engineered tomb concept’ (p 128) for high-level wastes purporting to demonstrate an acceptable and safe technology ‘without actually constructing it’ (p 115). The Swedes do, though, have a repository under the Baltic for the lower-level wastes. Will the Swedish emphasis on safe containment encourage a revival of the nuclear option to close the country’s energy gap?
Nuisance value By comparison with Germany and Sweden, in the UK, according to Berkhout, ‘radwaste policies have no more than nuisance value’ (p 177). He attributes this to the traditional secrecy of government and an early commitment to both nuclear defence and reprocessing. Debate over the back-end was not stirred until the 1977 Windscale Inquiry over the THORP reprocessing plant (finally commissioned fifteen years later). There was only a fleeting debate over government strategy during the conflicts over repositories on greenfield sites for nuclear repositories during the mid-1980s. In a series of displays of political cowardice, the government progressively surrendered its policy options until it was left only with Sellafield and Dounreay as potential disposal sites. Yet Berkhout remains doubtful whether disposal at Sellafield, the preferred option, will be acceptable, since both the industry and its opponents ‘are unwilling to court unpopularity by taking seriously the responsibility which radioactive wastes have left them’ (p 179).
Berkhout shows how technical options can, in part, explain the political debate and policy outcomes in the three countries. The case studies are worth reading for the insights they provide. The rest of the book is disappointing. The author attempts to set up a conceptual framework at the beginning which this reviewer found unfathomable, and which seems largely independent of the chapters that follow. Similarly, the concluding chapters introduce new concepts and ideas that do not clearly emerge from the empirical analysis and which do not illuminate the general conclusions that should be drawn from them. In the effort to achieve synthesis, the author has obscured comprehension of the basically simple and valuable observations that emerge from the detailed studies. There are, perhaps, three conclusions that might be drawn. One is that technical solutions to radioactive waste cannot guarantee safety from risk. Another is that public anxiety will progressively narrow the political options available for radioactive waste management. And a third is that any solution is provisional and provides no security against proliferation or accident sufficient to rebuild the future of nuclear technology. We should heed Berkhout’s warning that ‘There can be no proof of safety over periods of tens of thousands of years, the genie may yet escape from its bottle.’ (p 226). On this basis alone, nuclear energy cannot be contemplated as an acceptable solution to the problems of global warming.
Andrew Blowers Open University, UK
Russian forest management THE DISAPPEARING RUSSIAN FOREST: A DILEMMA IN SOVIET RESOURCEMANAGEMENT by Brenton Braden
M. Barr and Kathleen
E.
Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ, 1988, xvii + 252 pp, $38.50 (cloth)
GLOBAL
ENVIRONMENTAL
This is not a book about the effects of Russian deforestation on the global environment. Rather, it focuses on economic losses in the forestry sector, sustained and potential, in a country with enormous and promising forest resources. Barr and Braden expose a pattern of resource (mis)management which has led to excessive cutting in
CHANGE
September 1993
certain areas, insufficient reforestation, and regrowth of poor species mix and low-quality timber. Minimal investments have doomed the industry to antiquated technology, lowering productivity. The dominance of primary products is evidence of the underdeveloped nature of production. Not only are foreign exports in no way commensurate with the resource’s potential; the forest industry even fails to meet internal demands for highvalue forest products, requiring imports. As geographers, the authors underscore the spatial imbalance between trees (three-quarters of the forest stock is found east of the Urals in Siberia) and consumers (almost 90% live outside this region). Extensive depredation of the growing stock in European Russia has led to increased emphasis on ‘virgin’ Asiatic forests. However, severe environmental and economic obstacles to the expansion of Asiatic harvests bring into question Soviet analysts’ acceptance of the inevitability of such a shift eastwards. Barr and Braden suggest throughout the book that alternative patterns of consumption, harvesting, and especially regeneration, could avoid the costs of increasing reliance on the Asiatic forests, without harming, in fact improving, the western timber stocks. After a useful introduction to players and terminology (Chapter 2), Barr and Braden describe the forest resources available and used (Chapters 3, 4); the spatial and structural changes in forest and wood-processing industries (Chapter 5); the role of Soviet forests in international trade (and the need for imports); and technological developments in the industry (Chapter 8). In the short but illuminating Chapter 6, they also discuss non-industrial uses of forest, such as recreation, food gathering and ecosystem preservation. A final chapter summarizes findings and asks if the ‘dilemma’ has a solution. Barr and Braden, long-time students of Soviet forest resources, have meticulously researched their subject, and make the quantitative data readily accessible in numerous tables and graphs. Since many of the data show
311
ber of simple, easily understood graphics. Nonetheless, one can expect that there will be some who will use the inability to make very detailed, very specific, unqualified predictions as an excuse for inaction. To those I commend the words of Jan Tinbergen, Nobel Laureate, Economics, who, in the book’s foreword, says that ‘the possible average sustainable income level is lower today than twenty years ago’. One hopes Be_yond the Limits can help rally the worldwide behavioural changes long past due if a satisfactorily sustainable future is to be realized. George ~~c~nko of G~gra~hy and Land Studies Central ~~sh~ngt~n University E//ensburg, WA, USA
~epa~~enf
Nuclear waste - comparative policies RADIOACTIVE WASTE: POLITICS AND TECHNOLOGY by Frans Berkhout ~out/e~ge,
London,
1991,256
pp
Fears of ozone depletion, global warming and various environmental catastrophes may have temporarily distracted attention from the problems posed by nuclear energy. As the nuclear industry struggles to secure its commercial future in the West, attention has become focused on the intractable problem of radioactive wastes. As the evidence mounts of leakage of radioactivity and dumping on land and in the ocean in the former Communist countries, so the problems of nuclear risk have multiplied. Add to this the dangers of proliferation, and Berkhout’s daim in this timely book that the nuclear industry remains the ‘single clearest threat to the environment’ (p 44) is entirely plausible. He focuses on the problem of dealing with nuclear wastes, the growing burden of dangerous materials that constitute a potential threat to health and safety in the present and down the future generations.
310
Nuclear waste is a problem that is at once technical and politicat. At the technical level, the nuclear industry goes to ever greater lengths to provide hypothetical demonstrations of safe containment and the elimination of risk over unimaginabIe lengths of time. Paradoxically, as Berkhout points out, as the technicat safeguards become more stringent, so political acceptability and support for policy appears to diminish. This exposes a key contradiction in the industry’s case: ‘Absolute protection or safety cannot be assumed and at base there is something illogical in such an effort.’ (P 2). The core of the book (chapters 3 to 5) is a comparative study of the technical and political conflicts that have shaped radioactive waste policy in three countries - the former West Germany, Sweden and the UK. Although democratic, they each provide contrasting political institutions. The key to the differences in policy between them lies in their distinctive political institutions but also in the nature of the nuclear fuel cycle in each country. Sweden and the UK are politically centralized, Germany is federal; Sweden has forsaken reprocessing,
GLOBAL
Germany has flirted with it, while the UK has made it the cornerstone of its nuclear policy. In Germany and Sweden the nuclear industry has, at times, been a central issue of national politics, while in the UK it has achieved less political salience. In Germany, reprocessing and radioactive waste management became inextricably locked together in a concept known as entsorgung. This integration of the back-end activities of the nuclear cycle led, in effect, to ‘a reprocessing policy masquerading as an environmental policy’ (p X9). The theory was savaged when the attempt was made to put it into practice. The selection of the salt formations at Gorleben in Lower Saxony as a site for the Entsorgungszentrum unleashed a political controversy that embroiled the nuclear industry in the shifting political alliances within the complex web of federal/lun~e relationships. By 1979 Gorleben had become a politically unacceptable site. Although Gorleben remains as the probable disposal site for nuclear wastes, the proposed reprocessing plant was transferred to Wackersdorf in Bavaria, but subsequently abandoned in the face of escalating costs and environmental opposition. Berkhout shows how a comprehensive technical approach to waste management foundered on the political rocks of reprocessing. Germany now faces the problems of clean-up of nuclear sites in the newly incorporated former East Germany and a problem of nuclear waste storage which may be temporarily alleviated by reprocessing contracts with the UK and France. By contrast, it seems, Sweden has achieved a political solution, though not without political struggle and future uncertainty. Berkhout’s explanation for Sweden’s apparent political success lies in the early abandonment of reprocessing and the subsequent agreement to phase out the nuclear industry altogether following the referendum in 1979. Here, too, the nuclear industry was a major national issue, and probably a decisive one in the 1975 general election. As Berkhout shows, Swedish policy is based on the notion of absolutely safe disposal. ‘idealists
ENVIRONMENTAL
CHANGE
September
1993
Book reviews
imagining an impregnable fortress underground’ (p 115). The result has been the ‘belt and braces, massive, over-engineered tomb concept’ (p 128) for high-level wastes purporting to demonstrate an acceptable and safe technology ‘without actually constructing it’ (p 115). The Swedes do, though, have a repository under the Baltic for the lower-level wastes. Will the Swedish emphasis on safe containment encourage a revival of the nuclear option to close the country’s energy gap?
Nuisance value By comparison with Germany and Sweden, in the UK, according to Berkhout, ‘radwaste policies have no more than nuisance value’ (p 177). He attributes this to the traditional secrecy of government and an early commitment to both nuclear defence and reprocessing. Debate over the back-end was not stirred until the 1977 Windscale Inquiry over the THORP reprocessing plant (finally commissioned fifteen years later). There was only a fleeting debate over government strategy during the conflicts over repositories on greenfield sites for nuclear repositories during the mid-1980s. In a series of displays of political cowardice, the government progressively surrendered its policy options until it was left only with Sellafield and Dounreay as potential disposal sites. Yet Berkhout remains doubtful whether disposal at Sellafield, the preferred option, will be acceptable, since both the industry and its opponents ‘are unwilling to court unpopularity by taking seriously the responsibility which radioactive wastes have left them’ (p 179).
Berkhout shows how technical options can, in part, explain the political debate and policy outcomes in the three countries. The case studies are worth reading for the insights they provide. The rest of the book is disappointing. The author attempts to set up a conceptual framework at the beginning which this reviewer found unfathomable, and which seems largely independent of the chapters that follow. Similarly, the concluding chapters introduce new concepts and ideas that do not clearly emerge from the empirical analysis and which do not illuminate the general conclusions that should be drawn from them. In the effort to achieve synthesis, the author has obscured comprehension of the basically simple and valuable observations that emerge from the detailed studies. There are, perhaps, three conclusions that might be drawn. One is that technical solutions to radioactive waste cannot guarantee safety from risk. Another is that public anxiety will progressively narrow the political options available for radioactive waste management. And a third is that any solution is provisional and provides no security against proliferation or accident sufficient to rebuild the future of nuclear technology. We should heed Berkhout’s warning that ‘There can be no proof of safety over periods of tens of thousands of years, the genie may yet escape from its bottle.’ (p 226). On this basis alone, nuclear energy cannot be contemplated as an acceptable solution to the problems of global warming.
Andrew Blowers Open University, UK
Russian forest management THE DISAPPEARING RUSSIAN FOREST: A DILEMMA IN SOVIET RESOURCEMANAGEMENT by Brenton Braden
M. Barr and Kathleen
E.
Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ, 1988, xvii + 252 pp, $38.50 (cloth)
GLOBAL
ENVIRONMENTAL
This is not a book about the effects of Russian deforestation on the global environment. Rather, it focuses on economic losses in the forestry sector, sustained and potential, in a country with enormous and promising forest resources. Barr and Braden expose a pattern of resource (mis)management which has led to excessive cutting in
CHANGE
September 1993
certain areas, insufficient reforestation, and regrowth of poor species mix and low-quality timber. Minimal investments have doomed the industry to antiquated technology, lowering productivity. The dominance of primary products is evidence of the underdeveloped nature of production. Not only are foreign exports in no way commensurate with the resource’s potential; the forest industry even fails to meet internal demands for highvalue forest products, requiring imports. As geographers, the authors underscore the spatial imbalance between trees (three-quarters of the forest stock is found east of the Urals in Siberia) and consumers (almost 90% live outside this region). Extensive depredation of the growing stock in European Russia has led to increased emphasis on ‘virgin’ Asiatic forests. However, severe environmental and economic obstacles to the expansion of Asiatic harvests bring into question Soviet analysts’ acceptance of the inevitability of such a shift eastwards. Barr and Braden suggest throughout the book that alternative patterns of consumption, harvesting, and especially regeneration, could avoid the costs of increasing reliance on the Asiatic forests, without harming, in fact improving, the western timber stocks. After a useful introduction to players and terminology (Chapter 2), Barr and Braden describe the forest resources available and used (Chapters 3, 4); the spatial and structural changes in forest and wood-processing industries (Chapter 5); the role of Soviet forests in international trade (and the need for imports); and technological developments in the industry (Chapter 8). In the short but illuminating Chapter 6, they also discuss non-industrial uses of forest, such as recreation, food gathering and ecosystem preservation. A final chapter summarizes findings and asks if the ‘dilemma’ has a solution. Barr and Braden, long-time students of Soviet forest resources, have meticulously researched their subject, and make the quantitative data readily accessible in numerous tables and graphs. Since many of the data show
311