Nuclear Power and the Quest to Perfect Nature

A good book to read in light of recent events is William R. Newman's Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature. Now I don't have it handy and I don't want to misrepresent his argument, but if I recall correctly he suggests that a number of the desiderata of the early modern alchemists were in fact eventually obtained. We can in fact turn one element into another (if not quite the elements that interested them most); we do in fact have flexible glass, in the form of plastic, and so on.

Of most relevance, we do in fact have a sort of perpetual-motion machine, which was certainly the most sought-after invention of early modern Europe (in the 1670s G. W. Leibniz ridiculed Joachim Becher for having claimed to have made one; Becher responded by saying that Leibniz's plan for a high-speed conveyance belt between Hanover and Amsterdam was no less ridiculous). Definitions vary, but at a minimum a perpetual motion machine is one that gives you work without needing to be fueled (and thus has as a corollary but by no means primary feature that it can keep going forever). This, as I recall Newman suggesting, has been to some extent realized by nuclear energy. It gives us something for nothing.

But the persistent theme of Newman's book --the title references an expression from Pope John Paul II-- is that throughout Western history the quest to perfect nature, and to make it give us more than it is in its primordial state willing to give, is one that has throughout the same history left many people feeling uneasy. Newman himself is only diagnosing; he certainly does not side with the pope or with the Catholic wariness about modernity.

The former pope unwittingly finds common cause in his suspicion of humanity's Promethean ambitions with the environmentalists, who more often than not draw their inspiration from what they take to be pagan sources. Wherever the inspiration comes from --scripture or some imagined past harmony with Mother Earth-- it is hard not to think they're onto something as we watch what looks to be a nuclear meltdown in Japan. During a crisis like this, it is hard not to conclude that it is foolish to try to get something for nothing. In any such attempt, humanity will end up paying sooner or later. (I suspect this is why, in spite of so many scientific studies proving the contrary, conventional wisdom holds that aspartame causes cancer. For if it does not, we are getting something for nothing, which is impossible.)

Of course, there is one source of energy which simply gives, and gives, and that is the sun. It is not a perpetual motion machine --it will run out of energy at some point in the future-- but on the scale of human existence, it may as well be. It is the starting point of the terrestrial life cycle; it is so important to our existence that philosophers have at times suggested that even though it is a particular, and there is only one of it, still in some sense it ought to count as a sort of honorary universal. Aristotle said that 'the sun and man generate man', and that has it just right. Each species is responsible for its own reproduction in specie, but the sun (via the plants, the atmosphere, and so on) keeps it all going. And at least if we are willing to accept the conditions of an organismic life cycle (finiteness, illness, etc.), then we may say that it does so for nothing.

All this leads me to think that the anti-nuclear, pro-solar camp is really, whether it knows it or not, taking up a parti pris in a very fundamental and millennia-old debate about the proper comportment of man towards nature. The two camps are roughly, as I see it, these: the one says you should go with it, the other says you should fuck with it. 

Increasingly, though I have a lingering admiration for early modern inventiveness, I am coming to think that the quest to perfect nature will always come at a cost greater than any advantage it confers, and I am ever more sympathetic to the papal warning, and to all the pagans who have heard it. I am coming to agree ever more with Ogden Nash: "Progress is a fine thing, but it's gone on long enough."

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The image is of me at Rancho Seco nuclear power station, near Sacramento, California, circa 1988. Photo credits Jay Truesdale.

Comments

[Cameron Brown]

As I recall, Newman also traces the history of conceptual distinctions between perverting, perfecting, and recreating nature that I think is relevant here. I'm not sure what he has to say about nuclear power, but it seems to me our use of it is best described by the first or third category, inclusive: it's a perversion of nature in view of past and present disasters, the hazards of uranium mining, an unmanageably dangerous legacy of waste, etc. And it's a recreation of nature - in the sense of a transmutation - insofar as it gives us something for nothing (well, almost nothing).

Harnessing genuinely sustainable sources of energy, on the other hand, can be thought of as perfecting our place in nature. We can no more exhaust the wind than we can apples in a well-tended orchard - I take this in a way to be Aristotle's point: the perfective is analogous to that which grows, and in this way is renewable. Of course, creating a new hydroelectric reservoir radically alters an environment, but it remains a habitat, a place where things grow.

Actually, I'm not sure how sound this interpretation is. For one, the area around Chernobyl has become a very interesting habitable place. Two, it may be some kind of mechanical, medium-sized object prejudice that we privilege things like mills because we can easily grasp how they operate, whereas we have no such familiarity with atomic and sub-atomic processes.

Either way, this isn't to deny the view of nuclear power as a doomed quest to perfect nature. For these are both conceptual and rhetorical categories: when industry boosters claim to be 'perfectionists', opponents may respond by calling them 'perverts'.