The nuclear crisis in the Japanese power plant at Fukushima raises profound environmental ethical questions about risk and how we handle it.

Click on this Youtube link for a report comparing Fukushima and Chernobyl:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLFbZ0eo1rY

In 1942 Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard created the first atomic reactor in a squash court in Chicago. The implications have remained with us of unleashing an uncontrollable fission which could in principle be highly destructive of human welfare.

Since 1942 there have been a number of incidents. In Britain the serious radiation leak in Sellafield, Cumbria in 1957 was hushed up – even the local fire brigade knew nothing of the fire in the graphite reactor core for two weeks. In 1986 a similar graphite fire in Chernobyl blasted the top out of the reactor and spewed a great cloud of radioactive dust over Europe. Today radiation at the site is still 300 times that of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Again, no news was revealed until Swedish scientists blew the Russian secrecy over the incident. Why then this dishonesty attaching to what is meant to be the most carbon friendly power source?

One is a utilitarian desire not to generate panic and alarm where none might be appropriate given the level of risk. However, the public have learnt to distrust politicians on this issue – there has been too much secrecy and too many lies in the past.

A second is the very problem with the utilitarian view: we cannot predict consequences. Nuclear power is a tamed monster, kept in check by cooling systems and rods. Should the chains that bind it fail, as happened in Chernobyl and may be in Japan, then the consequences are unthinkable – an invisible peril which can kill and maim slowly for years, making the earth around uninhabitable. It is the unpredicatibility of consequences and the arrogance of thinking we have countered every risk which generates public scepticism.

All this points to the need for honesty as advocated by virtue ethicists and Kantians alike, but not placed central to pragmatic utilitarians. Of course, Mill might argue for a rule of honesty because the long-term effects of dishonesty on general welfare are very negative when people distrust safe alternatives to global warming and so pressurise politicians into actions which promote the other doomsday scenario of rapid global warming.

One thing is interesting though. The heroism of the ageing nuclear workers who came out of retirement to fight the Chernobyl blowout because they had less life left to lose is now being replicated by the engineers in Japan who face a shortened lifetime of suffering to save the majority. This kind of sacrifice is something which, paradoxically, the rational utilitarian would argue for – lay down your life to promote general welfare: it’s the reverse side case of the familiar objection to utilitarian ethics, that it tramples on the rights of the few to increase the happiness of the many.

Click here to read a recent article on Chernobyl twenty-five years on.

For a discussion of the environmental effects of Chernobyl click here.