6. The Great Energy Revolution is realized.
6.1. New energy system
The communist environmentally sustainable planning economy will also have a major change in the way of energy supply that supports production activities.
In terms of energy, the sustainable planning economy realizes a low-energy economy, therefore it is certain that the dependence on fossil fuels, especially petroleum fuels, which has supported the capitalist production system since the industrial revolution, will decrease dramatically. Instead, a new energy system is built based on renewable energy.
The issue of promoting the introduction of renewable energy itself has long been called out in the backdrop of the problem of global warming. But it tends to end up as a slogan under capitalism. The reason is that renewable energy such as natural energy alone cannot meet the high energy demand that covers the capitalist mass production-mass distribution-mass disposal cycle, and the technological development and practical application of renewable energy is costly.
However, in the essentially low-energy communist economy, the use of renewable energy will be significantly promoted. And the abolition of the monetary economy will eliminate the "problem" of the cost associated with the technological development and commercialization of renewable energy - in other words, the problem of money.
The above-mentioned energy revolution will be promoted on a global scale, combined with the development of sustainable natural resources in transnational dimensions mentioned in the previous section.
In accordance with these changes in the energy system, the development and innovation of new energy supply systems, such as cogeneration, will progress further than in capitalism.
In this regard, it is often said that communism must stagnate the technological innovation that capitalism has boasted, but capitalist innovation is biased towards developing technologies exclusively for productivity gains, not a few of which have harmful environmental consequences. In contrast, communist technological innovation will rather make more significant progress than capitalism in terms of environmental technology, as exemplified by new energy technologies.
6.2. Criticism of the Nuclear Renaissance
Here, we must touch on nuclear power generation, a major issue that cannot be avoided when considering energy issues.
In recent years, against the background of global warming, the significance of nuclear power as a means of generating electricity that does not emit carbon dioxide has been reassessed. As a result, a phenomenon known as the "Nuclear Renaissance," in which plans to build and expand nuclear power plants, which had been stagnant since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) at the end of the former Soviet Union, were revived worldwide. Just then the "Renaissance seemed to hit by the Fukushima nuclear accident (2011) in Japan, which had been shrouded in "nuclear safety myths."
However, just like Chernobyl, Fukushima is also fading with the passage of time, and signs of a "Renaissance" are beginning to emerge. In such cases, advances in safety measures and technology are used as an excuse.
Still, no matter how much technological innovation progresses, there is no 100% guarantee of safety. The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, caused by the earthquake and tsunami, made this point vividly clear to the world. This is the first problem with nuclear power.
Second, there is the issue of processing and disposal of nuclear waste. In many cases, the stabilization of the various radioactive materials emitted by nuclear power plants takes a historically significant amount of time. In addition, the plutonium emitted from the reprocessing of spent fuel is highly carcinogenic and is said to have an adverse effect on the ecosystem over an extremely long period of time. The policy of reusing MOX fuel (mixed oxide fuel), which is a mixture of uranium and plutonium (so-called plu-thermal), is also criticized for not being highly effective in reducing plutonium, despite the high cost.
The third is the danger of military use of plutonium. In particular, the proliferation of nuclear power plants to militant nuclear-weapon states and countries with ambitions to develop nuclear weapons would increase this danger, and in the worst case, the nuclear material could be distributed through the black market to civilian armed groups, including terrorist groups, drug cartels and other criminal organizations. The dreadful situation of "nuclear privatization" that even individuals have small nuclear-weapons is not an unreasonable concern.
Fourth, from the perspective of a planned economy, the characteristic of nuclear power generation, which makes it difficult to finely adjust electrical output in response to electricity demand, means that it is not suited to a planned economy - on the other hand, since mass output is easy, it may be suited to a mass-production, capitalist energy source.
6.3. The road to "nuclear power abolition"
That said, as long as we maintain an essentially high-energy capitalist mode of production, if renewable energy alone cannot meet our electricity needs, and we cannot rely on carbon-intensive thermal power generation, there is an inevitability that there will be a tendency toward nuclear power. Thus the nuclear power problem cannot be discussed regardless of the mode of production.
If we really want to go beyond "nuclear power phase-out" and think about “nuclear power abolition”, we need to be prepared to break away from capitalism once and for all. Subsequently, shifting to a low-energy, communist mode of production would allow all production activities to be covered by renewable energy, natural gas, and minimal thermal power.
Even if that is impossible, all production activities must be kept within the range that can be covered by means of power generation other than nuclear power. This is because energy, which is merely a means of production under the capitalist market economy, itself becomes a strict condition for production under the environmentally sustainable communist planned economy.
Thus communism is the path to "nuclear power abolition," but since nuclear power plants have already spread all over the world, the path must be constantly explored through a plan to phase out nuclear power plants on a global scale.
To that end, it is necessary to establish a transnational agency such as the World De-nuclear Monitoring Agency to formulate and implement a nuclear phase-out plan on a global scale. It also depends on the creation of the World Commonwealth as we will see in the final chapter.
