Rationality and Ritual

Participation and Exclusion in Nuclear Decision-making

Brian Wynne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781849711623
• eBook ISBN: 9781317972761
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ecology

In Rationality and Ritual, internationally renowned expert Brian Wynne offers a profound analysis of science and technology policymaking. By focusing on an episode of major importance in Britain's nuclear history – the Windscale Inquiry, a public hearing about the future of fuel reprocessing – he offers a powerful critique of such judicial procedures and the underlying assumptions of the rationalist approach.

This second edition makes available again this classic and still very relevant work. Debates about nuclear power have come to the fore once again. Yet we still do not have adequate ways to make decisions or frame policy deliberation on these big issues, involving true public debate, rather than ritualistic processes in which the rules and scope of the debate are presumed and imposed by those in authority. The perspectives in this book are as significant and original as they were when it was written.

The new edition contains a substantial introduction by the author reflecting on changes (and lack of) in the intervening years and introducing new themes, relevant to today's world of big science and technology, that can be drawn out of the original text. A new foreword by Gordon MacKerron, an expert on energy and nuclear policy, sets this seminal work in the context of contemporary nuclear and related big technology debates.

1

Introduction

In the 1970s, energy – and especially nuclear power – became one of the most urgent problems in all advanced industrial societies. Many see it as ‘the most important propaganda battle now being fought in the industrial world’.¹ On few other issues have diverse pressures focused so rapidly, putting enormous strain on traditional democratic institutions. Pressures underlying local decisions have coalesced to make each decision the subject of broader conflict. Nuclear power is associated with nuclear weapons, oligarchic and repressive government, scientific and technological hubris, environmental depradation and even male chauvinism.

Decisions taken in industrial societies are exacerbated by implications for developing countries and vice versa. It is a tragic irony that many adopted civil nuclear power – ‘atoms for peace’ – as a kind of penitence for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only to find 30 years later that the biggest political question against it is the risk of nuclear devastation due to commercial pressure for worldwide diffusion of nuclear power plant. The American Acheson–Lilienthal Report’s original judgement of 1946 that civil and military nuclear activity could never be divorced has returned to haunt debate since the mid-1970s.² Nuclear developments are conducted at the highest diplomatic levels; governments have their fate determined by their stance on nuclear power.³ Yet at stake in the nuclear issue is not just the fate of specific governments, but governability as such.

Although the hope is for ‘the application of reason in disputes between citizens and in the control of the actions of those in positions of authority’,⁴ ‘reason’ itself is problematic and contestable. Calculative reason, in the form of engineering safety analysis, has been applied longer and more rigorously in the nuclear field than in almost any other. But the same has not been true for public debate and decision-making. Proponents of nuclear power repeatedly claim unique possession of rationality, demanding debate in terms of hard facts alone. Yet Flowers has reminded them that ‘one cannot simply avoid the emotive issues and hope that what remains is therefore reasonable. Politics which ignore the emotive and intuitive feelings – of engineers as well as of ordinary folk! – are in themselves unreasonable.’⁵ Whereas the dominant assumption is that reason restrains power,⁶ others argue that scientific reason can be invested with meanings that obscure power by portraying social visions as given in nature.⁷ The conflict in science between ideals of pluralistic criticism and unified truth resolves itself in practice by channels limiting criticism and supporting established social values. Rationality becomes a focus of conflicting interpretations, and the inherent contradition between criticism and authority can be only temporarily patched over. Bacon’s optimism – ‘see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power’⁸ – is tempered by the indications that power is able to control scientific reason through rituals which lend a rational image to decisions whilst restricting the real scope for rational criticism.

Whatever the basis of the consensus in past decades over the worth of science-based technology, it is now breaking down. As the figurehead of the UK nuclear industry, Sir John Hill, observed in 1977: ‘The principal problems of nuclear power are not now engineering or technology but problems of political will and public acceptability.’⁹ This soon became the emphatic message that the central task of the industry was social acceptance, not technological development; acceptance by political elites was seen to be an inadequate basis for nuclear growth.¹⁰ Late 1976 saw the threat of violent action in Britain over the government’s handling of the proposal to build a new international nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Windscale.¹¹ Such threats were fulfilled in Germany, France and elsewhere, but not in Britain’s integrated and ritualized political culture. There have been peaceful occupations at the Scottish Torness site and in Cornwall, and marches, but these have been relatively thinly attended and polite occasions. When a joint Anglo–Dutch demonstration was held in 1977 against the twin expansion of uranium enrichment facilities at Capenhurst (England) and Almelo (Holland) the English meeting attracted 300 people, whilst its equivalent in Holland attracted 30,000. Even as objectors threatened to boycott the 1983 Sizewell public inquiry into Britain’s first proposed pressurized water reactor (PWR), an energy minister felt able to commend the inquiry system as a central factor in Britain’s relatively peaceful debate.¹²

Nevertheless, a new mood emerged from the mid-1970s, even in Britain. Political authorities recognized this by accepting – not without ambivalence – that nuclear energy problems are unique and that all important future nuclear decisions will be subjected to more deliberate forms of public investigation.¹³ In 1982, the Conservative government’s commitment to this had yet to be tested, but preparations for the Sizewell inquiry indicated little change from the time of the Windscale inquiry. If anything, there was a hardening of the government’s desire to keep the most politically relevant and sensitive issues – economics and need – out of the inquiry. Yet these are the very issues where the case for development is weakest and which have had most criticism from expert sources.¹⁴ At the same time the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) as developer adopted a harder line with opponents, for example in conducting a lawsuit against the Cornwall police for not intervening to end a peaceful occupation of a potential nuclear site in Luxulyan.

Extraordinary tensions have been created by complex circumstances: the industry’s demoralized state worldwide, crying bitterly for ‘political will’ to ‘regenerate the nuclear option’,¹⁵ yet without orders since 1978; the opposition’s growing political organization; industrial countries’ perception that nuclear expansion is inevitable and urgent; the contradiction between dealing rationally on a one-at-a-time basis with the need for new power stations and the need for programme commitments in the nuclear construction industry; the authorities’ escalation of propaganda to try to capture public opinion, producing at best a mixed effect. These factors add up to an increasingly polarized political conflict; yet political institutions decreasingly comprehend it.¹⁶

The more disorder is threatened, the more a framework of political control is sought. In a democratic society, where physical coercion is abjured, public knowledge becomes the key in the struggle for order. Scientific knowledge has become the exclusive form for reliable public knowledge, buttressing deference to expertise and technical authority. Disorder was first pre-empted in the nuclear field by simply stifling public knowledge.¹⁷ But as conflict emerged, concern shifted to restricting debate to specific facts, in the attempt to leave more nebulous but perhaps more important issues untouched. The demand for ‘hard facts’ alone excludes debate about the interpretive social frameworks within which those facts have meaning. Those who define the facts also give them political meaning, defining alternative perspectives as irrational rather than as legitimate competitors.

When, in the 1970s, the ‘hard facts’ of economics and energy demand were shown to be at best ambivalent, the nuclear industry began to expose its own commitments beneath the rhetoric of scientific objectivity.¹⁸ Yet its public language is still dominated by the insistence on a particularly narrow form of reason. In this context Lindblom’s question – ‘how far can we go in reasoning out policy instead of fighting over it?’ – raises further ones.¹⁹ Are reason and fighting the only alternatives? Is reason, as opposed to fighting, an immutable category, free of ritual and all that implies about myth and symbolic meaning? If we constrict our definitions of reason too severely, does that drive us into greater conflict as the only apparent alternative?

It is not public disorder as such, but loss of its own authority and power which has been the primary threat to concern the nuclear establishment. As the tradition of private decisions lost authority, the nuclear issue expanded beyond the largely technical matters defined by the experts. Technical experts earlier considered the issues straightforward: the development of nuclear technology into a mature, self-refuelling cycle of operations, with thermal ‘burner’ reactors only a stage on the way to breeder reactors. More recently, however, the struggle has been over the basic definition of the issues involved: what is the point from which reasoning can begin? Political analysts have recognized that ‘problems are not self-evident, they have to be perceived; it involves a judgement to establish what a problem is, and in identifying a problem in particular terms, limitations are straightaway placed on the nature of the decisions taken about it’.²⁰

Rituals are necessary to secure assent to the framework of debate, and they cultivate the pretence that the framework is ‘natural’. Since reason can relate different views only if shared premises already exist, ritual may be a necessary condition of reason’s effectiveness. Further, the debate itself may be more significant for its ritual reinforcement of the favoured framework (boundaries of relevance and possibility) than for specific conclusions. Ritual may mediate the ‘rational’ resolution of conflict as well as fighting.

However, if it is true that ‘for complex policy problems, analysis can never be finished – it will always be subject to challenge’,²¹ then those in power always have the problem of stabilizing the framework. One approach is to demand repeatedly an emasculated definition of rationality as the sole framework of debate, of the kind criticized by Flowers. Established institutions control this definition in well-defined ways. Thus rationality becomes a ritual, imposing strict control on the issue’s public characterization. When the political need to render decisions immune from constant challenge – a need most often fulfilled by appeals to ‘objective’ authority – is added to this, ritual evidently pervades policy analysis and implementation.

Despite acceptance of the unique decision-making problems of nuclear power, the 1979 Conservative government lost no time in expressing an uncompromising commitment to a large and early programme of nuclear expansion. Given the deepening threats to public disorder posed by the nuclear issue, the question arises whether the new frameworks for public debate of the late 1970s laid down new standards of rationality, as many claimed, or whether they only elaborated pre-existing rituals, thereby exacerbating underlying conflict. It is necessary to ask whether public reason is possible without ritual, and, if not, to question the forms and consequences of these rituals.

International dimensions

Interesting differences between different countries await interpretation.²² Chapter 4 discusses the similar pattern of forces and reasoning in the different British and American political settings. The public side of the British system fragments issues into separate decisions and insulates them from each other. The American system allows separate decisions to be connected; for example, a nuclear reactor decision has to take account of waste disposal and alternative energy investments, something which would be ruled out in Britain. West Germany’s political and legal structure also allows issues to be integrated against the political authorities’ wishes; in 1976 a court ruling banned reactor licensing until a satisfactory means of waste disposal was found, leading to a reactor licensing famine for several years, despite government attempts to accelerate nuclear power generation.

The scale, nature and influence of opposition to nuclear power also differs. In Britain there is a relatively rapid translation of general strategy into specific developments. The public inquiry planning control system has had marginal impact on the lead-time of nuclear plant (including Windscale). Other forms of intervention by protesters have had even less impact. The situation is very different in the United States, Japan and Germany, though similar perhaps in France. All these countries have considered developing facilities to close the back end of the fuel cycle, but they have handled it in different ways. France has ploughed ahead in autocratic fashion, hardly altered by President Mitterand’s accession to power. In the United States President Carter decided to abandon reprocessing as a moral act against weapons proliferation, even though one plant at West Valley, New York, had operated for several years and then closed down in a controversy about unsafe operation, and another plant at Barnwell, South Carolina, had been built but not licensed.²³ Germany held extraordinary proceedings over the Gorleben (Lower Saxony) reprocessing and waste disposal facility. This was entangled in wider political conflicts between the federal government and the Lander and in reactions to citizens’ action movements, far more populous and militant than in Britain.²⁴ Similar inquiries into aspects of nuclear power were held in Australia, Canada, and Norway.²⁵ Other countries – Sweden, Austria and Switzerland – held national referenda.²⁶

The most important decision to set against Windscale, however, was the contemporary American ban on reprocessing and spent fuel transfers. This decision came in the context of presidential electioneering, the changing balance of foreign influence following Nixon’s downfall and Carter’s ‘moral politics’. Nevertheless, the common interest of the nuclear nations in establishing a front against protest resulted in the International Fuel Cycle Evaluation programme (INFCE) to coordinate national policies in ways that gave an overall sense of coherence.

The Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Three Mile Island accident at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, declared that the most important damage to public health had not been from radiation but from fear.²⁷ Nevertheless Congress voted a moratorium on nuclear licensing. Although the Reagan administration brought a hawkish attitude towards nuclear power, the economic and safety uncertainties have led the private utilities to cancel many orders. The German state government of Lower Saxony decided that public opposition had no basis in fact but was, however, a fact in itself that militated against the Gorleben development. Nuclear proponents have decried this mentality, which, as they see it, makes decisions according to how many people will be worried as opposed to how many will be killed.²⁸ They have accepted the issues are political, but only to the extent of isolating extremists, informing the ‘ignorant’ that nuclear power is in their interests and persuading politicians to be more courageous.

Commitment to the nuclear industry is already extremely great; those in power see further commitment as inevitable. Yet, the nuclear industry has a fundamental credibility problem with the public and with itself. The authorities see the problem as one of propaganda or reassurance and they instigate decision-making procedures with this in mind. They do not thus seek to defraud the public; but they are effectively seeking naturalistic sanctions for what they regard as inevitable.

What connects such apparently dissimilar episodes as the Windscale decision, the Gorleben decision and the official reaction to Harrisburg is the exorcism of any sense of ignorance and lack of control. These features threaten authority, so they are wrapped in the ritual of political language and participation. Windscale affected discovery of a factual answer to a decision that really concerned complex political choice; although it apparently acceded to public hostility, Gorlehen implicitly measured this against a yardstick of ‘fact’ erected by the expert authorities, rather than as an expression of public choice; the industry’s reaction to Harrisburg was to argue that such an accident was in principle foreseeable and thus eradicable. (The fact that the operators responsible had trained on a simulator with over 100 postulated accidents on its programme, yet which excluded the actual Harrisburg events, suggests that what may or may not be true in theory may be inherently impossible in practice. The label ‘human error’ conceals such an in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Gordon MacKerron
• Preface to New Edition
• Preface to Original Edition
• Abbreviations
• Rationality and Ritual: A Quarter-century Retrospect
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Decision-making Legacy
• 3 Oxide Reprocessing: The Background
• 4 The Public Inquiry Tradition: A Comparative Perspective
• 5 The Emergence of THORP from a Private to a Public Issue
• 6 The Process and Impact of the Inquiry
• 7 Judicial Rationality, Expert Conflict and Political Authority
• 8 The Rationality and Politics of Analysis
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes on Sources and Selected Readings
• Notes
• Index