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This chapter focuses on the privatization of the nuclear industry. It looks at the 1994 nuclear review and the subsequent sale of some of the nuclear reactors, leaving only the Magnox stations with British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) (which also took much of the nuclear contractual risk for the new British Energy, as well as having responsibility for the THORP reprocessing plant and the Sellafield site).

During the war, theoretical ideas had been translated with dizzying rapidity into immense industrial enterprises. The concentration of wartime experience at a handful of centres was crucial in nurturing the new specialists. But the drive for the new field was provided by glimmers of technological possibilities and the opportunities that they might provide to build a new discipline. The design of ‘atomic piles’, or nuclear chain-reactors, became the aspiration and focus of activity at a half-dozen national labs. In the USA, ‘nucleonics’ was promoted as a new field, while in the UK nuclear engineering received little support from administrators as a new discipline. In each country, empirical engineering science became the focus of attention, leading to hybrid scientist-engineers unlike their pre-war counterparts.

Chapter 1 begins by stressing the severity of climate change (CC) and showing how, contrary to popular belief, atomic energy is not a viable solution to CC. Many scientists and most market proponents agree that renewable energy and energy efficiencies are better options. The chapter also shows that government subsidies for oil and nuclear power are the result of flawed science, poor ethics, short-term thinking, and special-interest influence. The chapter has 7 sections, the first of which surveys four major components of the energy crisis. These are oil addiction, non-CC-related deaths from fossil-fuel pollution, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and catastrophic CC. The second section summarizes some of the powerful evidence for global CC. The third section uses historical, ahistorical, Rawlsian, and utilitarian ethical principles to show how developed nations, especially the US, are most responsible for human-caused CC. The fourth section shows why climate-change skeptics, such as “deniers” who doubt CC is real, and “delayers” who say that it should not yet be addressed, have no valid objections. Instead, they all err scientifically and ethically. The fifth section illustrates that all modern scientific methods—and scientific consensus since at least 1995—confirm the reality of global CC. Essentially all expert-scientific analyses published in refereed, scientific-professional journals confirm the reality of global CC. The sixth section of the chapter shows how fossil-fuel special interests have contributed to the continued CC debate largely by paying non-experts to deny or challenge CC. The seventh section of the chapter provides an outline of each chapter in the book, noting that this book makes use of both scientific and ethical analyses to show why nuclear proponents’ arguments err, why CC deniers are wrong, and how scientific-methodological understanding can advance sound energy policy—including conservation, renewable energy, and energy efficiencies.

This chapter focuses on the production of “complex product systems,” and, in particular, large-scale nuclear power plants that are produced and deployed on a one-off basis. The authors examine the commercial capabilities needed to design and deploy these product systems. Despite expectations to the contrary, many of the most critical capabilities actually do not move from the innovating firm/nation to the place of purchase or deployment. Procuring nations can gain knowledge to manufacture heavy components or construct systems, but they are unable to force the transfer of system design and system integration capabilities. This means that Western firms’ design and integration capabilities are often enhanced rather than undermined by the outsourcing of lower-level design work and component production.

This chapter examines nine cases of peaceful nuclear cooperation that do not appear to be influenced by the supplier state's political interests: the United States' nuclear cooperation with Indonesia, 1960–1965; Brazil's nuclear cooperation with Iraq, 1980; Britain's nuclear cooperation with South Korea, 1991; Canada's nuclear cooperation with Romania, 1977; France's nuclear cooperation with Iraq, 1975–1981; Germany's nuclear cooperation with Brazil, 1975; India's nuclear cooperation with Vietnam, 1999; Italy's nuclear cooperation with Iraq, 1976–1981; and Soviet nuclear cooperation with Yugoslavia, 1956–1967. The chapter shows that three of the outlying cases are best explained by the need to sustain domestic nuclear industries; in three other cases, suppliers engaged in oil-for-nuclear technology swaps—that is, they provided nuclear technology to influence the recipient country on issues relating to oil supply.

In 1977, the village of Gorleben in the border county of Lüchow-Dannenberg was nominated as the potential site of a nuclear waste reprocessing and storage facility. This chapter argues that the presence of the Iron Curtain shaped and magnified every aspect of the ensuing siting controversy. In view of discursive patterns conceived in the 1950s that framed the border regions as areas in need of industrial development, Gorleben’s borderland location precipitated its nomination. The siting decision endowed county officials with leverage over the federal government, a newfound power they exercised along the lines of the well-established borderland lobby work. The immediate proximity of Gorleben to the inter-German border also drew the GDR into the siting dispute. Gorleben turned the periphery into the center of the longest-lasting anti-nuclear protest in the Federal Republic and changed its energy future, albeit not in ways that proponents of nuclear energy imagined in the 1970s and 1980s.

This chapter examines how peaceful nuclear assistance to other states is used by nuclear weapons suppliers as a tool of economic statecraft to influence the behavior of their friends and adversaries. It discusses three main politico-strategic reasons why suppliers engage in peaceful nuclear cooperation: to keep their allies and alliances strong; to constrain their enemies; and to prop up democracies in the international system. It also considers three alternative explanations for peaceful nuclear assistance: countries use atomic assistance to strengthen nonproliferation norms; countries sell nuclear technology to make money; countries offer nuclear assistance to sustain their domestic nuclear industries (for example, suppliers with lower domestic demand for nuclear energy are more likely to provide nuclear assistance than states with a high domestic demand for nuclear energy).

Things used to be so simple. In the old days, a thousand generations ago or so, human technology wasn’t much more complicated than the twigs stripped of leaves that some chimpanzees use to fish in anthills. A large bone for a club, a pointed stick for digging, a sharp rock to scrape animal skins—such were mankind’s only tools for most of its history. Even after the appearance of more sophisticated, multipiece devices—the bow and arrow, the potter’s wheel, the ox-drawn cart—nothing was difficult to understand or decipher. The logic of a tool was clear upon inspection, or perhaps after a little experimentation. No longer. No single person can comprehend the entire workings of, say, a Boeing 747. Not its pilot, not its maintenance chief, not any of the thousands of engineers who worked upon its design. The aircraft contains six million individual parts assembled into hundreds of components and systems, each with a role to play in getting the 165-ton behemoth from Singapore to San Francisco or Sidney to Saskatoon. There are structural components such as the wings and the six sections that are joined together to form the fuselage. There are the four 21,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines. The landing gear. The radar and navigation systems. The instrumentation and controls. The maintenance computers. The fire-fighting system. The emergency oxygen in case the cabin loses pressure. Understanding how and why just one subassembly works demands years of study, and even so, the comprehension never seems as palpable, as tangible, as real as the feel for flight one gets by building a few hundred paper airplanes and launching them across the schoolyard. Such complexity makes modern technology fundamentally different from anything that has gone before. Large, complex systems such as commercial airliners and nuclear power plants require large, complex organizations for their design, construction, and operation. This opens up the technology to a variety of social and organizational influences, such as the business factors described in chapter 3. More importantly, complex systems are not completely predictable.

Safety is often confused with security. A system or an environment may be secure, but if its normal operation does not achieve the intended goals, it may not be safe. Events will not progress as intended, and could go horribly wrong, even to the extent of grave injuries and loss of life. The more society relies upon digital technologies, the more we count on software to assure our safety. The issue of safety arises in a great variety of circumstances. Our discussion will start with dangers to the individual, then we will widen our focus to the organization, to society, and, finally, to the world. The digital divide that discourages internet use among older adults is due in part to threats posed to safe use of computers by ‘evil’ software such as programs that ‘phish’ for personal information, thereby gaining access to finances and committing identity theft, as we have discussed in the previous chapter. We shall enlarge upon this discussion by speaking of another risk—computer rage, which is caused by frustration when users cannot understand or manage the technology. Such instances are especially dangerous for senior citizens. We shall also discuss two ways in which the internet may not be safe for younger people: cyberbullying and revenge porn. We then examine a topic that arises in daily life: safety threats caused to pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers by the continual use of distracting mobile devices. Our inability to control the costs of large-scale data processing implementations is a threat to the safety and health of organizations and governments, as is our inability to understand, modify, and fix large software systems that are no longer maintained by their creators. We shall describe several software disasters, both during their development and after they have been deployed and used. These include the software crisis at the turn of the century—the Y2K threat—which actually was averted, and several cases in which up to billions of dollars or pounds were wasted, including the decades-long saga of air traffic control in the USA.