Global Ecological Problems and Issues

Humanity currently produces about 2 per cent of its energy in nuclear power plants. Many people have recently proposed, that nuclear power could be a partial solution to the threat of global warming, because it does not produce greenhouse gas emissions. The lobbyists for the nuclear industries are talking about increasing the world's nuclear power capacity by 20-fold in order to halt the global warming. The only country in the North that has already decided to build a new nuclear power plant is Finland, but other Northern governments are playing with the same idea. The government of Russia is discussing a plan to construct up to 30 new nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power has several aspects related to democracy issues. The most important one is obvious. Large-scale production of nuclear power could, within a few generations, pollute the whole planet with various long-lived radioactive contaminants. The scientists estimate that the Earth should be habitable for humans and other living beings at least for a thousand million more years before the Sun becomes so hot that all life will be destroyed. Some of the radioactive contaminants produced by nuclear power plants would still be around when this happens. Plutonium 244 has a half-life of 70 million years and the amount of uranium-235 is halved once in 710 million years.

Do five generations of people inhabiting the planet have the right to contaminate the planet permanently, in a way that might harm fifty million future generations of humans and their descendants and other living beings sharing the same planet with us? Future generations do not have the right to vote in our elections so how do we ensure that their rights are taken into consideration?

Another problem are the large bribes that have been paid to government ministers and other politicians by the nuclear industries. The companies that are producing nuclear power plants have staked huge amounts of investment capital on the success of the technology. The performance record of the nuclear power plants, however, has not been very satisfactory. Nuclear power has been, for most countries, a very expensive option even though the costs of radioactive pollution, dismantling the used nuclear reactor and storing the nuclear waste have not been properly included in its present price tag. Also, nuclear power has not been a popular option because most people do not like to gamble with the lives of their families. This has forced the nuclear industries to use bribes much more often than other types of companies working in the energy sector have committed similar crimes. This has contributed to serious corruption, which is a big problem for democracy.

One of the most famous cases took place in the Philippines, when Westinghouse paid a bribe that may have amounted to 35 million US dollars to a government minister for securing a decision to buy a nuclear power plant from the company.

The third major problem is that the large-scale use of nuclear power might lead to the deterioration and finally dismantling of human rights and civil liberties in the countries that invest in this technology.

The world is rapidly drifting towards a kind of asymmetrical world war in which numerous violent underground organizations are fighting the world's leading industrialized countries through the means of terrorism. Terrorist organizations will in any case be a major threat to democracy everywhere on Earth. The gradual dismantling of civil liberties and human rights can be legitimized and rationalized to people with the need to fight terrorism. This might finally, through a slow and creeping process of gradual deterioration in the situation, transform many democratically ruled countries first to some kind of police states and then to full-fledged military dictatorships.

In the fight against terrorism the important issue is to ensure that only a very few people are willing to commit serious acts of terrorism. This is the only way to win the struggle. Fighting terrorism with violence will only worsen the problem by multiplying the number of potential terrorists. It is not possible to prevent terrorist strikes if there are hundreds, thousands or millions of people willing to carry out such strikes - and who are even willing to sacrifice their own lives in the process.

This is the main point. However, we already are in the middle of a vicious cycle of strikes and counter-strikes, and halting the killing may be a very slow and demanding process.

In this kind of situation nuclear power is very dangerous both for general safety and for democracy. By hijacking jet planes and crash-landing them on skyscrapers the terrorists can kill thousands of people. If they decide to attack nuclear power plants or nuclear fuel reprocessing plants they could kill millions or possibly even tens of millions of people.

Because nuclear power plants are the ultimate terrorist targets they might also - during the so called war against terrorism - provide the ultimate legitimization for the dismantling of democracy. Thus nuclear power may pave the way to police states and fascist regimes more effectively than any other factor.

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