Pathfinders: Radioactive days (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radioactive days

Anyone who expressed shock, surprise, horror or helpless mirth at the government’s decision to give the go-ahead to a new round of nuclear power stations in the UK deserves a slap and a strong injunction to wake up and smell the plutonium. This was always going to happen, so get used to it. Some people may have thought, in the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and the revelations of gross and grotesque safety infringements by nuclear companies in the 70’s and 80’s, that nuclear’s goose was cooked, and that public opinion was irreversibly set against its comeback. Such optimists underestimate the power of creeping propaganda by the state and overestimate the collective memory of the public. What, besides a lot of bilge about new safety procedures and new ideas about waste disposal, has really swung it for the nuclear lobby is the increasing fear that we, in the West, are either going to be hostages to the mullahs in Iran or those commies in Venezuela for oil, or hostages to the Russian mafia for gas (who have shown themselves quite capable of turning off the taps if they don’t get the price they want).

Blair’s government have played a clever game of buttering up the public with so-called energy reviews, which were really about acclimatizing public opinion to the inevitable. The greens have been effectively neutralized, being unable to find a way out of the environmental frying pan of fossil fuels without hitting the fire of nuclear fission, while emerging research into wind power has set back alarmingly the time necessary for this technology  to start being a net carbon saver, from an estimate of 18 months by the wind turbine industry itself to between 8 and 16 years by independent researchers, on a projected 25 year turbine life span (New Scientist, July 8).

 

And could there be another and darker reason why nuclear is back on the agenda and the same money is not going to be spent either on renewables, or even more sensibly, insulating houses and finding ways to reduce consumption? The original reason for the nuclear programme was that not only could you run steam turbines with the resulting water vapour but you could also build bombs to vaporize your political and economic rivals, and the reasoning still holds good, in a world of ageing nuclear arsenals and an emergent superpower, China, whose expected ruthlessness in suppressing global competitors may be judged by its ruthlessness in suppressing its own people.

But the bitterest pill for environmentalists to swallow is that the government’s case on nuclear is actually pretty hard to fault. Renewables provide about 4 per cent of the UK’s energy supply and the most massive expansion programme imaginable is not going to increase that amount to a significant level for decades, whereas the threat of strangulation from global suppliers of oil and gas is immediate and stark, as are the spiralling price rises.

While the USA and the UK may with impunity invade Iraq when its chieftain starts monkeying around with oil supplies, the same tactic is hardly going to work in Venezuela, heavily backed by China, or in Russia, which nobody has ever invaded without immediately and solemnly wishing they hadn’t. There are no other emergent technologies. Fusion is still decades away, and always will be, according to the old joke. Cold fusion is, according to the accepted wisdom, just a joke. As hydro goes bigger, the cracks in the dams start to appear, much to the embarrassment of Chinese engineers, and the energy of wind appears to be best harnessed by building on, and effectively destroying, millions of tons of peat bog, itself a massive carbon sink.

If socialism were established tomorrow, the question of nuclear energy would take a back-seat, behind more pressing questions of food production. But it would re-emerge, amid a hotly disputed debate over energy consumption and reduction. A socialist society which had to find energy out of nowhere and with no time to develop renewables, might conceivably go nuclear, at least for a time. But it is not a racing certainty, or even an ambling probability.

If one were to take away the factors of capitalist competitive production which so completely influence the present controversy one would be left with a more rational basis for planning, which would take into account global minimum energy requirements, both domestic and industrial, rather than global optimum industrial performance to outdo business rivals. If Europe, for example, didn’t have to stay one jump ahead of South East Asia and China in manufacturing stakes, and if China wasn’t in such an all-fired rush to industrialise simply to compete on global markets, the question of energy might be approached in an altogether calmer and more globally sustainable way. But in capitalism, the energy question is really one of global dominance. The power at stake is really political and economic. Whether the source of that power is from nuclear fission, fossil fuels, or farting Friesians, is entirely beside the point.

The Sting

The ongoing war between mainstream scientists and the homeopathic community, which recently saw the Royal Veterinary Society obliged to withdraw a list of homeopathic vets from its website after a storm of protests from the scientific community, has begun to assume farcical proportions. Now holiday makers are returning home with malaria after refusing conventional anti-malarial drugs in favour of homeopathic ‘alternatives’ (BBC Online, July 13).

An undercover investigation by the group Sense About  Science and BBC’s Newsnight programme revealed that homeopathic consultants were telling people they didn’t need the ‘horrible’ conventional drugs and could safely use homeopathic medications, which on analysis turned out to be 99.99 per cent water with a virtually undetectable level of quinine. When challenged by Newsnight, the clinics claimed this was a mistake, and that clients were told to consult their doctors, a claim not supported by the secretly recorded interview transcripts.

However, all this doesn’t seem quite fair on the hardworking homeopaths. Being in a sympathetic mood, Pathfinders offers the following explanation: what the clinics really meant to say was that their remedies were indeed perfectly effective, but only against homeopathic mosquitoes. The fact that mosquitoes are usually in the habit of delivering large and potentially deadly doses of malaria is a disappointing reflection on their unchristian natures but this can hardly be blamed on homeopathic clinics, who are only trying to help.

Paddy Shannon

Material World: TCM – Cheaper and Nastier (2017)

The Material World column from the February 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many practitioners of ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ such as homeopathy claim and seek that the state should support those treatments financially. One such unorthodox medical model was in fact sponsored by a government, not due to a proven track record but inspired by political necessity. Mao Zedong explained his support for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in a 1950 speech:

  ‘Our nation’s health work teams are large. They have to concern themselves with over 500 million people [including the] young, old, and ill. … At present, doctors of Western medicine are few, and thus the broad masses of the people, and in particular the peasants, rely on Chinese medicine to treat illness. Therefore, we must strive for the complete unification of Chinese medicine’ (From Kim Taylor’s Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-1963: A Medicine of Revolution).

Of course, this improvised health service was not suffice for the Chinese Communist Party leadership, themselves.

‘Even though I believe we should promote Chinese medicine. I personally do not believe in it. I don’t take Chinese medicine.’ Mao is quoted as saying. (In the Private Life of Chairman Mao by Li Zhisui, one of Mao’s personal physicians)

Inconsistent texts and idiosyncratic practices had to be standardised. Textbooks were written that portrayed Chinese medicine as a theoretical and practical whole, and they were taught in newly founded academies of so-called ‘Traditional Chinese Medicine.’ Needless to say, the academies were anything but traditional, striving valiantly to ‘scientify’ the teachings of the accepted ‘wisdom’ that often contradicted one another and themselves. The belief running through all aspects of TCM is the notion of qi, an energy life-force that flows through everything. Science-based medicine does not recognise qi energy because there is no convincing empirical evidence that such a thing exists. Nor is there any evidence for the alleged meridians or channels in the body where qi flows that can become blocked and which can be unblocked through acupuncture to allow qi to flow freely and restore health.

TCM advocates point to the thousands of herbs and plants used in treatments and it has never been disputed that a great number of these do have health benefits. However what is surprising from those proponents of TCM in the West is the silence about the use of animal parts. Throughout Asia, thousands of bears are kept in tiny cages their entire lives so that their gall bladders can be tapped for bile. Bear bile has always been a popular ingredient in TCM and is used for many ailments from haemorrhoids to hepatitis. Because only small amounts of bile are used in TCM, there is now a surplus of bear bile so bear farmers have also begun producing shampoo, wine, tea, and throat lozenges containing bile.

Extraction of a bear’s bile is done in a process called ‘milking,’ which is performed twice daily. A catheter is surgically implanted into the bear’s abdomen. Veterinarians rarely perform this surgery, which results in roughly half of the bears dying from infections or other complications. Bile is then drained from the catheter and collected by the farmer. Milking begins at age three, and continues for a minimum of five to ten years. Some bears who have been rescued were found in cages producing bile for twenty years or more. The Chinese government banned the use of the catheter method of bile collection in favour of the ‘free drip’ method which involves surgery to create an open hole in the bear’s abdomen through which bile freely drips out. This was touted as more humane, yet is as inhumane for bile often leaks into the bear’s abdomen, which increases rates of infection and mortality. Farmers have trouble keeping the hole open. This results in more painful surgery, and often the implantation of a small catheter to keep the hole permanently open. The filthy conditions on most farms lead the bears to suffer from further infections, worms, and other parasites. The bears’ muscles atrophy from confinement in such small cages for the duration of their lives. They are also extremely malnourished from a diet of grain mash or porridge, and their teeth and claws are often removed to prevent injuries to the farmers.

Overall, the worldwide trade in bear parts, including bile, is estimated to be a $2 billion industry. Research from 2007 shows its profitability: while the wholesale price of bile powder is around US$410 per kg in China, the retail price increases exponentially to 25 to 50 fold in South Korea, and to 80 fold in Japan. The demand for animal products continues to grow as the worldwide interest in ‘alternative’ medicine grows. The impact of TCM goes well beyond bears and as we know affects tigers and rhinos, amongst many other animal species.

Alan Johnstone