THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE NUCLEAR POWER INDUSTRY

A century ago, unchecked capitalism brought us the mantra of industrialization. The turn of the 20th Century accelerated the frenzy of mass production begun in the late 1800s, reaching a sort of crude, if dehumanizing, ideal in Henry Ford’s Model T assembly line.

That period also brought a new phrase into American culture: the Robber Barons. If you had been living then, you might have been forgiven for thinking that the term applied to those garnering unimaginable riches through their involvement in the new communications technologies of the time: the telegraph, telephone, even the railroads and automobiles that made distant travel and face-to-face communication possible on a scale never before imagined. But, in time, the Robber Barons became known as the energy kingpins: those who ran the oil companies and, a bit later, the electric companies, that fueled the industrial revolution.

At the turn of the 21st Century, the mantra is globalization.

It’s everywhere: just ask anyone—protestors and World Trade Organization delegates alike—who was in Seattle last November. It’s the global economy, stupid, and if you don’t get it, you just don’t get it. People may still identify themselves as tribal, or local, or national, or even regional; but business—that’s global baby and you’re either on board or sinking fast.

And you will be forgiven if you think that the Robber Barons of this century will be the communications giants: Bill Gates and all the computer and dot.com billionaires; the cell phone giants, the Internet infrastructure companies like Cisco Systems, and all those who already are inventing newerfasterbetter means of communicating than the rest of us have even thought of yet.

But you will be wrong.

The Robber Barons of the 21st Century will be the same as those who came before: they will be the companies, and the people who own and run them, that supply the energy that fuel the digital revolution.

Go ahead, just try and run your computer without electricity (three months without electricity and Microsoft/Intel would be history—no wonder the Y2K issue was solved so persuasively….). Think about flying to make a business deal in France and still arriving home in time for breakfast, without oil. For much of the world, and most of America, imagine the daily commute to work without gasoline. Ok, perhaps many of us can imagine, or even dream, a life like that, but the fact is that energy makes globalization possible, and the energy moguls are still the Robber Barons of our age.

That fact may fly in the face of the headlines, which much prefer to focus on new trends rather than older, but no less valid, realities. And, truth be told, hampered from expansion by regulation and a certain stodginess that had set in following decades of cost-plus contracts and stable supplies, the energy companies—especially electric utilities—are not exactly the poster children of the new globalization.

British Energy just doesn’t have the same cachet as Sun Microsystems; Cogema doesn’t resonate among college kids like Nike; Dominion Resources can’t match Starbucks for star power. Which are more important to the global economy? Nike could disappear tomorrow and people would just buy more Adidas, who cares? But who’s going to manage the world’s plutonium for the next 240,000 years? Who’s going to supply the electricity that allows Intel to exist? These companies may toil in greater obscurity, but in the end, they are far more essential to globalization—and thus to everyone’s lives—than the companies turning urban centers across the world into look-alike shopping malls.

And, in the end, if they are successful, a handful of giant multinational energy corporations will become the Robber Barons of the 21st Century. Already, they are merging and consolidating and growing larger and larger and larger. It’s evident in the oil industry, with the proposed merger of Exxon and Mobil (wasn’t it less than 100 years ago that the government forced them apart?). But it is in the world’s nuclear and electric industries where the trends are now the most pronounced, where the stakes are highest, where the threats to all life are most at risk.

Though a latecomer to the process, perhaps no industry is embracing globalization quite so fervently, and with so little understanding of its ramifications, as the world’s atomic power industry. Five years ago, international mergers and consolidations in the nuclear industry were but a gleam in a few executives’ eyes. Today, they are an accelerating reality that will affect the lives of everyone. They will affect atomic reactor safety, waste disposal, nuclear proliferation, radiation protection standards, the price of electricity, new reactors, reactor siting, industry financing, global warming: in a very few years, if the nuclear industry continues to receive free rein, there will be virtually nothing unchanged for anyone.

Consider just the major examples:

* British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL) in the past year has purchased two of the world’s largest nuclear reactor manufacturers: Westinghouse and ABB/Combustion Engineering (the latter was itself the product of a 1990s merger between the Swedish ABB and the U.S. firm Combustion Engineering). In addition, BNFL has aggressively entered the U.S. nuclear services market, and is spearheading the highly controversial "recycling" of contaminated materials from a uranium enrichment plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn., among other endeavors.

* Siemens (Germany’s largest reactor manufacturer) and Framatome (with a monopoly on construction of French reactors) in 1999 announced their intent to merge most aspects of their nuclear businesses. Both are actively seeking nuclear services contracts in the U.S. (Siemens is involved in the "clean-up" of the Hanford, Washington nuclear weapons site, for example) and new reactor orders in Eastern Europe and Asia.

* General Electric, the world’s second largest reactor manufacturer (after Westinghouse) has teamed up with Mitsubishi to build new atomic reactors in Japan.

* AmerGen, a company owned 50-50 by PECO Energy (formerly Philadelphia Electric) and British Energy, has purchased the Three Mile Island-1, Clinton, Oyster Creek and Vermont Yankee reactors in the past two years, and is seeking to purchase more. Meanwhile, PECO already owns four reactors outright, with an interest in two others. PECO also has announced its intent to merge with the nation’s largest nuclear utility, Unicom, Inc. of Illinois, which owns 10 operating and three closed reactors. British Energy—a creation of the privatization efforts of former British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, owns and operates 11 reactors in the United Kingdom—with a highly dubious safety record. AmerGen also has set up a Canadian subsidiary, Canagen, to purchase aging reactors in that country. If AmerGen succeeds in its corporate goals, by the end of 2000 it could control as much as 25% of U.S. nuclear-generated electricity and 10% of world nuclear-generated electricity—and it is seeking to buy still more reactors. This is despite the fact that PECO Energy and British Energy have contributed only $110 million between them for this endeavor.

* The Entergy Corporation of Louisiana has purchased Massachusetts’ Pilgrim reactor, and is attempting to purchase and/or several others, including Nine Mile Point-1 and –2 in New York. In late March, Entergy won the bidding to buy Indian Point-3 and FitzPatrick in New York.

* Duke Power of North Carolina and Virginia Power—both of which have stated ambitions to purchase existing reactors—have joined in a consortium with the controversial French firm Cogema to build and operate new facilities in the U.S. to use MOX (mixed-oxide) plutonium fuel in U.S. commercial reactors. Cogema, which also is seeking U.S. nuclear services contracts, is responsible for the radioactive polluting of the Atlantic Ocean that caused the closing of Normany beach resorts in 1997. Greenpeace measured radiation levels near Cogema’s reprocessing plants in Normandy at 17 million times background levels.

* Minatom, the Russian state nuclear agency, has embarked on a new effort to sell nuclear reactors around the globe, and perhaps even more ominously, to import high-level atomic waste to Russia. If this latter effort is successful, it likely would lead to the large-scale commercialization of atomic waste dumping—and likely World Trade Organization involvement in attempting to force least common denominator environmental standards for radioactive waste trade.

* Cheering on, and helping finance, these developments are a small number of international government financial institutions, especially the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and, tacitly at least, the World Bank.

As the nuclear industry increasingly becomes globally-oriented, increasingly consolidated into just a few mega-corporations, so must we. We may have to turn the slogan on its head: we may have to think locally, act globally. We may still live in a world of many different cultures, languages and beliefs (and many disappearing cultures, languages and beliefs), but that’s not the world of globalization, and if we’re effectively to take control of our lives and our environment, we have to understand that our local utility may be based in England and that the coal miner from Leeds’ utility may be based in Atlanta—and that both utilities may be owned by the same parent company.

If we are to finally end nuclear power—and we can—we must take on the nuclear industry as it is, not as we would like it to be. That’s why NIRS has increasingly adopted a global presence over the past few years, and why we will adopt an even more aggressive global outlook and existence over the next few years.

In this special issue of the Nuclear Monitor—timed to coincide with the April 2000 actions at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund--you will meet the major players in this new globalization: the companies that are now controlling the nuclear power and electric utility industries and the international banks and government agencies that support them. You’ll understand what they’re doing and why. And, hopefully, you’ll learn how to stop them. –Michael Mariotte, March 2000