Really!

All governments lie, indeed. All governments try to hide the hippopotamus under the rug. And when it comes to a nuclear deal, public relation becomes more important than public safety.

The myth of a clean nuke
They say nuclear technology is clean. And the only time a reactor actually releases a bulk of radiation is during an accident.

The truth is every nuclear power plant is capable of an accident.

Every nuclear plant releases radiation during every stage of its production. Workers at all stages of the uranium purification process are exposed to radiation. The fairytale of safe nuclear power is thus mostly based on imperfect assumptions and wishful thinking.

According to environmentalist Dr. Vandana Shiva: Just because we don’t get to see radiation, doesn’t mean that nukes are clean.

The myth of a safe nuke
They say, other than Chernobyl, Three Miles Island, and Fukushima, there has never occurred any serious accident at any other nuclear plants.

However, unfortunately, there is quite a lengthy list of nuclear accidents, which includes explosions, near-meltdowns, burnt cables, electrical errors, faulty installation, underground pipe leakage, accidental release of plutonium sludge, radioactive fluids leaking into drains and ending up into nearby rivers, and so on. Hundreds of nuclear accidents are reported each year only in the United States alone. Between 1993-1995, international researchers pointed out more than hundreds of “hazardous incidents” at nuclear plants in India.[1]

The claim of a ‘safer’ nuke is thus ambitious, obnoxious, and inaccurate.

At a time, when the Germans are getting ready to shut down all their nuclear plants by 2022, the Chinese are putting the construction of all their nuclear power plants on hold, the Indians are relentlessly protesting against it for the last 20 years; somehow, we have managed to come up with a safe nuke!

Are we not sleepwalking towards a disaster?

The myth of a cheap nuke
They say nuclear technology is a good technology with a low cost. The question is, how good and how low?

According to various studies:
- It takes around $800 million to set up a 1000 MW gas based plant.
- It takes around $1400 million to set up a 1000 MW coal fired plant.
- It takes around $2-3 billion (around $2000-3000 million) to set up a 1000 MW nuclear power plant.[2] So it is clear that nukes cost way more in terms of capital investment.

However the biggest argument in defence of nuclear power is that the per unit production cost/fuel cost for a nuclear power plant is actually much lower than a coal based or natural gas based power plant.

In short, in case of a nuke, you put more bucks in the beginning, so that you can save up later. Sounds like a deal, but here is the hitch.

The piece of information they don’t give us:
a) The maintenance cost of such a nuclear power plant is ludicrously high compared to coal/gas/solar plants.[3]

b) The day to day operation of a nuclear plant requires continuous cooling down of the reactor by the use of a titanic amount of water which handsomely skyrockets the operation cost of nuclear energy, deeply challenging the popular myth “Nukes are cheap.”[4]

c) To run a 1000 MW nuclear plant, it requires at least 185 MW electricity. Which means a nuke eats up at least one fifth of its own energy.[5]

d) The waste disposal of a nuclear power plant is costly, complex and chaotically hazardous.

e) In case of an accident (which is almost inherent to nuclear technology) the repair or replacement cost could be a terrible rip-off. (Since 1987 to 2002, at least 6 serious accidents had occurred in different nuclear power plants in India which cost nearly 1 billion dollar to repair).[6]

So the bottom line is: Nukes cost a hell lot, and doesn’t really save a hell lot. Now the question on the table is, is there any comfortable alternative?

The energy debate: Can we have a coal-free, nuke-free future?
It is true that fossil fuels or nuclear power both are capable of producing an enormous amount of energy which is crucial for rapid industrialisation and heavy manufacturing. It is true that in an exponentially expanding growth economy, solar and wind offer no practical alternative to fossil fuel and nuclear power. It is also true that the adoption of renewable energy, such as the construction of a 1000 MW equivalent PV solar panel (equivalent to a Ruppoor Nuclear plant) may turn out to be costlier than a nuclear power plant (at this point).

However, the good news is, the Sun is taking over! In the last few years the cost of solar energy have been falling fabulously low, while the cost of nuclear energy have been flying terribly high. [7] The most recent cost projection for a brand new nuclear reactor is pointed out to be at least four times higher than the earlier projections. [8]

Meanwhile the renewable energy scientists have already declared that the historic “solar-nuclear-cost-crossover-moment” has finally been reached (which simply means, the per unit production cost for solar photovoltaics is finally becoming cheaper than nukes). [9][10]

In addition, here are some recent headlines:
Prices of solar panels falling: By 2013 they will be half of what they cost in 2009 (The Guardian, June, 2011).

Solar, once the most expensive of the “renewables,” has become cheaper than nuclear plants. (NC Warn, July 2011).

A sharp 70 percent reduction in the cost of solar panels since 2009 (Clean Technica.com, December 2011).

The Europeans have already shown in practicality, renewable energy can actually take the load away from the national grid only if the right amount of money is put into it. For instance, in the year of 2011 alone, as much as 7,400 MW of electricity has been produced in Germany (equivalent to seven Ruppoor power plant) based on solar technology only. [11] Certainly, the Germans are wholeheartedly shifting their resources from nukes to solar.

Therefore, it doesn’t sound too complicated when the energy scientists say: Europe can go ‘100% renewable’ by the mid century, and ultimately phase out ‘dirty’ energy. [12]

In short, if we are so equipped to accommodate a super expensive nuke, and if we are already super-subsidising the short-term, oil-based quick-rental power plants; it only makes super-sense to shift our resources to solar, which is super safe, sustainable, long-term and also, on the way to be super-cheap! And most importantly, it doesn’t leak (it emits neither carbon, nor radiation).

The nature of the beast we have come to call growth
However, the real danger still exists, and that is our obsession for Growth. In general a country’s energy appetite gets fatter and fatter in direct proportion to its economic growth. To keep up with the ‘growth’ ladder, human civilisation has moved from wood to coal, coal to oil, and ultimately oil to nukes. The age of easy oil is over. We have already burnt too much of fossil fuels (up to a point that it dug a hole in the ozone layer), the natural gas bases are shrinking as well.

Too many of us are consuming too many resources too fast in the name of economic growth. The expansion of the global nuclear industry (based on today’s apparent affluence of Uranium) is therefore, the inevitable by-product of the hysterical expansion of the “growth” economy.

The Roman civilisation ran on slavery. The 21st century civilisation runs on energy. And the universal energy law runs on a simple algebra: The more and more you dig, the less and less you get. The less and less you get, the more and more energy you require to dig deeper and deeper. It comes to a point where digging deeper requires more energy than what it actually gets from digging. The end game is simple: sooner or later the global enterprise of “digging & drilling” will be asking for a bail out. Indeed, the earth’s natural resources are finite. If we keep digging for them, we will eventually exhaust them.
It has become a matter of simple commonsense.

If we simply choose to “grow”, which is the default position of our politicians and economists, no combination of nukes, fossil fuel, solar, and wind will be able to sustain such an arrogant economy. The ones who desire Bangladesh to be a middle-income economy by 2020, or aspire to have an India-like-super-duper-growth-rate, need to ask a simple question: Do we have the fuel to fuel a fat economy?

Therefore, it is vital to look beyond the very wasteful system of economic growth. It is vital to stop the chaotic expansion of the urban base. It is vital to rethink and reorganise the grammar of economics. Rapid urbanisation and gigantic development projects do not necessarily raise the quality of life of people. The ‘50s Nehruvian vision of big development projects had ultimately come to be known as “anti-people”, due to its built-in characteristic of destruction and displacement. India’s monstrous nuclear power industry has ultimately been tagged as friends of ‘Industrial India’ but enemy of the common men. A long and brutal history of economic growth tells us, a double digit growth does not ensure quality of water, freshness of air, fertility of seeds and soils, health of human beings.

A big economy eats up big energy, a small economy eats up smaller.
Therefore, it is important to look for small and localised solutions, rather than humongous, highly centralised, and filthy rich projects.

Ultimately, ‘decentralisation’ is the key to energy distribution. Thus, the alternative lies in thousands of tiny projects of renewable energy. The alternative lies in preserving our agriculture, our rivers, our rural communities, and our ‘smaller’ ways of lives. As Gandhi once said: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed”. Interestingly, the Gandhian way of ‘sane’ consumption is becoming more relevant than ever.

Lastly: nuclear energy is neither cheap, nor clean, nor safe. It is a brutal and wasteful technology which doesn’t do “Gandhi” very well.

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Maha Mirza is a researcher and activist. She is a graduate in economics and international political economy.

Footnotes:
1. Benjamin K. Sovacool. A Critical Evaluation of Nuclear Power and Renewable Electricity in Asia, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 40, No. 3, August 2010, p. 380.
2. Risto and Aija. Comparison of Electricy generation costs. Lappeenranta University of Technology. Lappeenranta, 2008.
3. Cooper, Mark. The Economics of Nuclear Reactors: Renaissance or Relapse. Vermont Law School, 2009.
4. Blackburn and Cunningham. Solar and Nuclear Costs —The Historic Crossover, Solar Energy is Now the Better Buy. NC Warn. 2010.
5. Renewableenergyworld.com
6. Cost comparison of energy supply technologies:http://www.unenergy.org/Popup%20pages/Comparecosts.html
7. Battle of the Grids, a 2011 report, by Greenpeace International.
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Activists of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) march during an election campaign rally. Photo: Reuters

Hindustan Times has given full ‘Marx’ to Mamata, for finally being able to kick out the Marxist zombies, and for putting an end to the 34 years of stagnation of Left rule. The Economist has branded the ‘comrades’ as the “vanishing communists of India”. The overtly keen ones have simply called it the “final end of reds”.

Nevertheless, the politics of election and the matter of ‘Marx’ in West Bengal has been a profoundly twisted one. And therefore, it is too convenient, too early to refer to the entire election-outcome of 2011 as the ultimate farewell to Marx. Let’s not undervalue the toll of someone’s 34 years of groundwork.

In general, a 34-year establishment has certainly assembled a collection of deeply ingrained vested interest groups in every chapter of the Bengali society. In addition, stagnated or not, the Left rule, had indeed deposited a load full of ‘Creative Marxism’ in every pillar of West Bengal’s rural life. And therefore, the traditionally pro-Left, preferably laid back, and deeply political Bengalis, (unlike the profoundly apolitical rest of affluent India), are most likely to come back to ‘Marx’, sooner or later. Let’s say, the Left must have done something quite right to remain in power for a good long 34 years.

The legacy of land reform
In 1977, when the CPI(M) cadres finally climbed up to power, the way Jyoti Basu’s comrades reached out to the rural poor of West Bengal, and the speed with which they had diverted resources to local bodies, had been unparalleled by any other contemporary political party in India. CPIM’s fondness towards a pro-poor agrarian transformation in the ‘80s had undoubtedly opened up the floodgate of possibilities, if not for a perfectly egalitarian democratic society, but at least for a reasonably equitable one.

Let us look at some facts derived from India’s latest Economic Surveys.
1. West Bengal holds only 3.5 per cent of agricultural land in India, however, accounts for around 23 percent of entire India’s land reform.
2. Since late ‘70s, CPIM was able to officially register more than 1.5 million sharecroppers to the right of secure tenures, and locked them with legal protection from eviction.
3. Dalits and Adivasis accounts for around 41 per cent of the registered sharecroppers in West Bengal.
4. 84 per cent of land in West Bengal is practically owned by only small and marginal farmers (owning less than 2.5 acres).
5. West Bengal supplies the cheapest irrigation water to the farmers at only Rs. 37 per hectare, compared to Rs 156 to Rs 267 per hectare in the rest of India.

What is truly remarkable about this tale of land reform is, the entire dealing of such land reform course in West Bengal was never really seen as a complex piece of legislation or as a routine administrative work, but was actually being pulled off through mass movement of the peasantry and by power-sharing with the locals. It was not really the bureaucrats or the party members, but the locally elected Panchayats who had been made accountable for the entire homework-phase of the land reform era, (i.e. identifying surplus lands, carrying out the takeovers, and redistributing it accordingly). In an inheritably feudalistic society of landlordism, if this is not institutionalisation of democracy at the people’s base, then what is?

The poise of Panchayat
It was long before the NGOs and the civil society’s discovery of fancy jargons like ‘participatory development’, and the World Bank’s breakthrough invention of tools like ‘local ownership’ and ‘grassroots democracy’, West Bengal, surprisingly enough, had tried out all such fashionable textbook terminologies in practicality, and made them function at the ground level with phenomenal success as early as in 1978.

Let’s not forget, West Bengal was the very first state to hold elections to the Panchayat back in 1978. It was also the first state to flow a fabulous share of fiscal fund towards the previously powerless, toothless, penniless local Panchayats. On top of that, such revolutionary effort of devolution of fund occurred at a time when local bodies like Panchayets were not even tagged by Delhi as the official tiers of the government!

(It was only in 1992, the 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution, qualified the elected local persons of Panchayat as the authorised ‘third tier’ of the government. It is also known that a team of legislators practically went to West Bengal to study the working of the Panchayats before drafting India’s groundbreaking Panchayat Bill). No wonder, the apparently pale and charmless West Bengal had always been referred to as the perfect model of the noisiest form of rural democracy.

No wonder, for decades, though the urban educated elites of West Bengal were deprived of shining shopping malls and glitzy marble-crafted airports, the dalits, the adivasis, the minorities and the rural farmers had constantly voted for CPIM, as the only custodian of their rights.

* * *
For decades while the rest of India was busy hard-kicking the farmers (in order to assemble the nuts and bolts of ‘shining India’ on top of their lands), the Marxists, at the very least, had given the rural Bengal an ideological boost, a sense of dignity and the economic sovereignty to till, to plough, and to grow one’s own food (if not absolute liberty from poverty). While the rest of India were being violently ‘Walmartised’ and ‘Coca-Colonised’, millions of little retailers and local shopkeepers of Bengal are said to have had been able to keep their source of livelihood due to CPIM’s constant opposition of FDI in Retail. Even The Economist has ultimately come to admit that they (CPIM) pushed literacy and women’s rights, and opposed “untouchability” and the caste system… (therefore) A battering at the polls… will not quite finish them off. Unfortunately, the measures of dignity and democracy are not a matter of economic growth. They don’t dazzle, and don’t reflect in GDP.

* * *
However, the systematic rotting of CPIM in the recent decade could be understood as an inevitable and natural outcome of any longstanding power-belt. Though according to Indian historian Ramachandar Guha, they (CPIM leaders) are probably the only politicians in India who don’t have accounts in Swiss Bank. The Left rule in Bengal, nonetheless, had come to become an industry of rampant lower-tier corruption, arrogant hooliganism, deliberate stagnation, cheesy nepotism and shallow propaganda. And most importantly it had long given up its creative characteristics, its pro-poor persona.

The NondiGram and Singur episode was not only an “undo” of its decades of creative work, it was more like an effortless ‘copy-paste’ of the work of its neo-liberal counterparts. The Left front crumbled and fell apart when its original business of ‘pro-people-ism’ gradually turned into a ‘business-as-usual’ of the modern-day-farmer-kicking-shining-India. People finally got rid of the Left when no ‘Left’ was left in it.

Comrade Mamata’s Marxist counterfeit
And it is in such a moment of opportunism, the Banarjee-booster had become relevant and applicable. Let’s note, Mamata’s political life had been widely referred to as inconsistent, due to her on-and-off whimsical alliance with both BJP and Congress. However, she had been clever enough to understand that the Manmohan-cocktail of ‘buy-free-market-get-double-digit-growth-free’ is not the right sort of trump card to play in a culturally pro-Left West Bengal. And for that matter, she had to carefully manipulate the Nondigram-happening in order to occupy the obvious political vacuum. An Outlookindia commentary pointed out on Mamata’s Nandigram-stand: The fact remains that it was a piece of opportunism that will go down in history as one of the greatest services done to human kind.

However, in this very process, Mamata had to push herself to be reborn as a Leftist, kept pretending to be a Marxist, and ironically, kept calling the CPIM leaders the “pseudo followers of Marx and Lenin”. The Kolkata based Daily Telegraph pointed out rightly: The 83-page manifesto of Trinamul Congress…, could not help but parroting the CPIM on subjects close to the average comrade’s heart.

In that note, let’s have a quick glance at Mamata’s manifesto:
-“No land can be forcibly acquired for industry”. “Agriculture must not be sacrificed at the altar of industry.” “TMC wants industry but not at the cost of poor farmers.” “SEZs would not be allowed in West Bengal”. (Does it sound like Tata matters to TMC?)

-“Globalisation is necessary but it is also necessary, even more important, to develop local resources and skills.” “Stop entry of big capital, domestic or foreign, in retail sector.” “There should be no divestment of public sector enterprises, instead, state enterprises have to be protected.” (Sounds familiar? Jyoti Basu must be giggling in his grave!)

And last but not least, “No foreign capital in sectors other than high-quality technology and other industries, indispensable for the country.” (By the way, this is a clear-cut copy-paste from CPM’s 2005 manifesto).

And my personal favourite one: “TMC Opposes the construction of all shopping malls in Bengal”. (A perfectly ideal Maoist society?)

No wonder they say, didi is simultaneously riding not two, but at least three boats. She has gathered the traditional left voters dejected by the Left Front’s policies, the ultra-leftists who always thought of the CPM as bourgeoisie, and also the traditional right wing and feudal interests.

The point is, whether Bengal can boom like Bangalore, or glow like Goa, is not really a simple black and white matter of ‘getting rid of the Lefts’. Let us not overlook: the era of liberalisation and reform has come to manufacture a peculiar form of democracy, which generates political outcomes, rewarding only the few rich, and punishing the many poor.

In a time when ‘farmer-crashing’, ‘poor-trashing’, ‘worker-bashing’ policies have been proven to be super healthy for India’s economic growth, when India’s super power craving has been knotted and wedded with a baggage of some eight million displaced farmers along with 2 million dead ones, when the 780 million Indians (living under 20 rupees a day) have become the “gutter” of the hyper-affluent India, the very mathematics of the so-called ‘minus-Left’ led prosperity for West Bengal, sounds pretty much like a shaggy dog story. The ‘way out’ for Bengal is rather imbedded in its age-old cultural debates: industry vs. agriculture, growth vs. farmers, and development vs. displacement.

This is rather the distinctive delicacy of West-Bengal’s democracy. Leftism has been so deeply implanted in its culture, and pro-farmer policies been localised to such an emancipating level that whoever enters Bengal’s power politics, is left with no other choice but to be a ‘Left’.
Heads Left wins, tails Left wins too.

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Maha Mirza is a researcher and activist. She is a graduate in economics and international political economy.