NUCLEAR POWER AFTER FUKUSHIMA 2011

PROMETHEAN AND BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVES ON ADVANCED ENERGY TECHNOLOGY

Graham Parkes, Department of Philosophy, University College Cork, Ireland (g.parkes@ucc.ie)

Abstract

Since the catastrophe at Fukushima, Japan and several other nations are reconsidering their reliance on nuclear energy. The primary motivations remain unclear, since attitudes toward the dangers of nuclear radiation are anything but rational, and nuclear energy has been far safer (in terms of deaths per unit of energy generated) than energy derived from fossil fuels. The major drawbacks are the problem of where and how to store the radioactive waste, and how to finance the building and insuring of nuclear power plants. But as anthropogenic global warming through the burning of fossil fuels threatens to cause widespread death and destruction, the question of ‘how to continue to meet our energy needs’ becomes ever more urgent.

But this question is dangerously superficial: we need to go deeper and question the mindset behind the drive to generate ever more energy by burning fossil fuels or breaking open the basic particles of matter. In the West the relevant background is the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to humans, and also gave human beings the arts and crafts of survival. The gruesome fate of the story’s protagonist should make us reflect on the long-term consequences of the drive to make our lives comfortable through dangerous technologies. In Japan the relevant background is the Buddhist tenet of the impermanence of all things, especially as expressed by the twelfth-century poet-recluse Kamo no Chōmei, whose response to natural disasters is highly instructive in our present predicament.

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1. Introduction

Since the explosions and meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in March 2011, Japan is seriously reconsidering its reliance on nuclear energy and several more nations (including Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Thailand, and Malaysia) have decided to phase out, or cancel plans to build, nuclear power stations. The primary motivations remain unclear, since people's attitudes toward the dangers of nuclear radiation are anything but rational -- as evidenced by the mass departure of foreigners from Japan after the catastrophe at Fukushima, when the health dangers beyond the immediate vicinity of the power station were nil. In Europe the reaction to the Fukushima disaster was aggravated by the memory of Chernobyl, a far more destructive event, the death toll from which stands at only 30, even though the wider repercussions continue to be hotly debated. (A great deal of heat has been generated around the publication of a study by a group of scientists from Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, who claim far more serious and widespread health consequences than the series of reports issued by the U.N.)

The human death toll and environmental devastation caused by nuclear energy have been nothing compared to the damage caused by the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, owing to mining accidents, oil spills, and so forth -- not to mention carbon dioxide emissions. On the other hand, the problem of how and where to store the steadily increasing amount of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, which remains deadly for many thousands of years, has yet to be solved. When adequate safety features are included, nuclear power plants are becoming ever more expensive to build, and the costs of insuring them against accidents are becoming so prohibitive that governments have to subsidise them, which they are becoming increasingly unwilling to do.

Last week two dismal world records were announced: in 2010 we discharged a record amount (over 30 gigatonnes) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuels; and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (as measured at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory at Mauna Loa in Hawaii) reached a record level of 395 parts per million. These figures suggest that we are continuing to generate a rise in global average temperatures that will jeopardise the lives of hundreds of millions of people. For those who are concerned to avoid such a catastrophic scenario, the urgent question is often this: “Should we continue to meet our energy needs by increasing or decreasing our investment in nuclear power, or in carbon capture and sequestration technologies?” But this question is dangerously superficial, since it conceals the root of our problems which lies much deeper.

When mythology is understood not as primitive proto-science or pseudo-history, but as a set of narratives that exemplify patterns of human behaviour that are not always apparent, myths can be highly instructive. In the West the relevant mythical background to the human employment of technology is the story of Prometheus, many features of which fit our current situation perfectly. In the case of Japan, a philosophical rather than mythic principle proves enlightening: the Buddhist emphasis on the impermanence of all things, to which the Japanese (inhabiting an archipelago that is unusually prone to earthquakes and tsunamis) are especially sensitive.

Group photo at the United Nations in Viennataken during the First Technical Meeting, November 2009

According to Hesiod in his Theogony, there is an eventual release: with the consent of Zeus the heroic Heracles liberates the suffering Prometheus. But one might well be wary of a freedom effected by the Heracles, who employs his enormous muscle power to work against natural forces. (Nine of his famous Twelve Labours involve overpowering wild animals or monsters by killing or capturing them.) What would correspond to rescue by Hercules would be the replacement of the dangerous Promethean business of burning fossil fuels by the tricky technology of initiating chain reactions in nuclear reactors. Although this newer technology is quite different in kind from combustion, it still furthers the Promethean enterprise of engineering comfortable lives through ever more invasive techniques. It was recognised early on that the arts Prometheus stole for mortals were used to exacerbate mortality as much as enhance it, for destructive as well as creative purposes—for wars and (as is more obvious today) other human activities that tend to devastate our natural environment. Along with carbon sequestration and geo-engineering, nuclear power sounds like another of those “blind hopes” bestowed upon us by Prometheus in order to veil from us our ineluctable mortality.

2. The Growth of Promethean Hubris

According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which weaves together almost every myth of transformation known in the eighth century into one of the world’s most magnificent poems, the Titan Prometheus made human beings in the image of the gods by mixing the newly made earth with rainwater. At first, in the Golden Age, the earth spontaneously produced all kinds of fruits and grains, the rivers flowed with milk and nectar, and the trees dripped honey—and no pines were felled to make timber for ships, which nobody needed for travel. But then, as the Golden Age degenerated into the Silver, and the Bronze, and the Age of Iron, men increasingly employed the Promethean arts of survival in ever more destructive ways and toward greedier ends, which encouraged “snares and fraud, deceit and force and sacrilegious love of gain”. With the advent of agriculture, farming tears up the earth with ploughshares, and with mining the cuts become more unkind and go even deeper, as men began to delve into the bowels of the earth for treasures, “foul iron and still fouler gold”. The mining of precious metals is conveniently accompanied by the extraction of iron for weapons with which to fight battles against those who possess more of the precious ore.

In Ovid’s account, all this Promethean activity gives rise to a race of giants who even presume to mount an assault on the Olympian Gods. This makes Jupiter/Zeus lose his patience with humans and their arrogance, and so he resolves to “excise that malady which can’t be cured, humankind, lest the untainted beings on the earth also become infected”. He sees the danger humanity poses to other species and kinds of being, even to “woodland gods who haunt the mountain slopes”, whom he wants to protect from human predation. And so, with the intention that a new race should arise from the destruction, he sends a great flood that wipes out the human race—with the exception of two individuals: Deucalion, son of Prometheus, and his wife Pyrrha. (The parallels with the Old Testament story of the Flood are remarkable.)

Realising that they are the only two human beings to survive the flood, the fortunate couple consults the oracle at the temple of Themis (mother of Prometheus!), which instructs them to cover their heads and throw the “bones of the great mother” (rocks) back over their shoulders. As they fall toward the ground the rocks turn into human beings, those thrown by Deucalion becoming men, and the stones thrown by Pyrrha becoming women. The poet hints at the moral of the tale that has us humans spring from stone: “From this, our race is tough, tenacious; we work hard—proof of our stony ancestry”. Proof also of our close relations with the hardest parts of the earth’s crust. But, assuming that the rocks back-thrown by the son of Prometheus would thereby pick up a charge of his father’s spirit, men will still be driven by Promethean urges and desires (more so than women, who lack the lineal connection through Deucalion with Prometheus).

The metamorphoses recounted by Ovid attest to Prometheus’s part in making us who we are: molded from clay by his hands, and instructed by his arts and techniques. But the story of the progressive degeneration of humans and their growing hubris is a monitory tale: when they arrogantly overreach, failing to be grateful for what the earth provides, the divine powers of nature strike back with devastating consequences. And in our day the old drama is being enacted again, as our determination to keep on warming the earth’s atmosphere is eliciting in response floods, droughts, and hurricanes.

3. The Promethean Punishment

The drive to go on with “business as usual” in the face of potentially catastrophic global warming, in the belief that further technological developments will save us from the worst, is a perfect manifestation of the spirit of Prometheus. According to some versions of the myth, Prometheus is descended from the divine powers of Heaven and Earth and is actually a progenitor of the human race, which suggests it may be natural for us to be driven by Promethean urges. According to the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus in his play Prometheus Bound, in addition to stealing fire Prometheus also gave human beings the arts of survival: house-building and woodworking, agriculture and astronomy, arithmetic and language, ship-building, the mining of bronze, iron, silver and gold, and the arts of medicine, augury and divination. (The Greek term for “art” here is technē, which also means technique and is the root of our word “technology”.)

In a version of the myth recounted by Plato, Prometheus realised that human beings were naturally more vulnerable than the other animals and so he stole from the gods “artful wisdom along with fire” to compensate for this inherent weakness. But, Plato remarks ominously, humanity in this way got “survival wisdom” but without any “political wisdom” to go with it. This speaks clearly to our current predicament: inspired by Promethean spirit, humans have become highly skilled in the technical arts of survival, but lacks the political arts that would integrate this expertise with the art of living together in communities—especially now that we also live in a global community.

Peter Paul Rubens, Prometheus Bound (1611)

From Aeschylus we learn another thing that's relevant to our situation—that Prometheus conferred on mortals obliviousness to their mortality: “I stopped mortals from foreseeing doom . . . and instead I sowed in them blind hopes”. But to be given blind hopes is a dubious gift if we are so bedazzled by the Promethean spirit of technology that we refuse to foresee an avoidable catastrophe. The punishment of Prometheus, for his transgression against the gods, is well known (and graphically depicted in the magnificent painting Prometheus Bound by Rubens): he is chained to a rock and an eagle devours his liver every day, which regenerates overnight only to be eaten by the eagle again, and so forth in perpetuity. In antiquity the liver, as the most powerful and blood-rich organ in the body, was highly regarded as “the seat of life” and as the only major organ capable of self-regeneration. The myth suggests that if we Promethean humans keep transgressing natural limits through too much clever technology, we’ll end up having the source of our very vitality destroyed on a daily basis. Or do we think we can act out the story of Prometheus and avoid his cruel punishment?

4. Buddhist Reflections on Earthquakes and Other Disasters

Our ineluctable mortality is precisely what Japanese Buddhism makes central to the task of understanding human existence. Eight hundred years ago a reclusive Buddhist poet by the name of Kamo no Chōmei wrote a brief account (Hōjōki) of the small hut where he lived the last part of his life, in a remote area of the hills near Kyoto. It opens by reflecting on the transitoriness of life: “The waters of the river move on and on, and they are never the same. The bubbles of the whirlpool break, and form again, and again disappear. And so it is in this world with man and his dwellings.”

We tend to think of our dwellings as less impermanent than ourselves, but in Chōmei’s day houses often disappeared before their human inhabitants. He writes of the Great Fire that had burned the capital to the ground some thirty-five years earlier, killing many inhabitants: “But even those who escaped with their skins didn’t manage to save their wealth. At last only embers and rubble remained.” Three years later came the whirlwind: “Of all the houses in its path, mansions and huts alike, not one escaped destruction. The contents of the houses rose in a mad dance into the skies, and the shingles of the roofs were like winter leaves scattering before the wind.” The next year a drought brought a famine that ravished the country for two whole years: “Of all that has passed before my eyes, this famine was the strangest and saddest of all disasters.”

Then the Great Earthquake of 1185 (estimated in retrospect at 7.4 on the Richter scale): “Entire mountains crumbled and slid into the rivers below. The sea rose up and spilled over the land. The earth gaped open and the waters churned with swirling froth. Cliffs were rent and crashed with the roar of thunder into the valleys. Boats were piled high and dry upon the land.” No wonder the man wanted to withdraw from city life, and live in his tiny hut with only a few possessions including his harp. “Now I neither cling to life nor pre-grudge its end. My earthly pleasures are those provided me by the changing beauties of nature. If the heart is not at peace, neither beasts of burden nor possessions are of service, neither palaces nor pavilions bring any cheer.”

The heart infused with the Promethean spirit, which calculates how to achieve its desires through the construction of technological devices, is rarely at peace, whereas the East-Asian traditions have always been wary of the ways the use of gadgetry changes the mind-set of the user. The heart emptied of plots and plans, and thereby more open to the influences of the powers of heaven and earth, would not object to the employment of technologies (like the sailboat and the windmill, and now photovoltaic panels) that make use of natural forces without using them up. But an enterprise that uses high technology to penetrate the elemental cores of atoms and split them apart, and produces long-lasting lethal waste in doing so, would be highly suspect. And given the centrality of impermanence in Buddhist philosophy, a practice that produces waste that is lethal for thousands of generations—a highly non-impermanent danger relative to the those posed by natural phenomena—would be considered offensive in its transgression of natural limits.

References

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Kamo no Chōmei, Notes from My Ten-Foot Square Hut (Hōjōki)

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Plato, Protagoras

United Nations, IPCC (2011), Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change

United Nations, UNSCEAR (2009, 2011), Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation, vol. 2, Scientific Annexes C, D and E Chōmei rocking back ecstatically with his harp

Fukushima Daiichi Power Station on Fire

Conclusion and Recommendations

The story of Prometheus and the cautions from the Buddhists should make us wary of energy technologies that have dangerous consequences. A 1000-page report just published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that renewable forms of energy (bioenergy, solar, geothermal, hydropower, ocean and wind energy) can provide 80% of the world's requirements by mid-century — but only if governments actively promote them. Although vehemently opposed by the oil, coal, and nuclear power industries, this is clearly the most reasonable course of action.

As long as this shift is accompanied by increases in energy efficiency and reductions in wasteful use, catastrophic global warming can be avoided. Nor is there any reason to suppose that these measures will diminish human flourishing. A survey of the ancient wisdom of the world’s philosophical and religious traditions reveals that not one of them claims that a fulfilled human life is to be attained by high levels of consumption of energy or goods. Indeed, they all say the opposite — but are we prepared to listen?