Nuclear Power, Economic Development Discourse and the Environment: The Case of India

ISBN-13: 9780415629164 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 230 str.

Manu Verghese Mathai

Opis

Nuclear power is often characterized as a 'green technology.' Technologies are rarely, if ever, socially isolated artefacts. Instead, they materially represent an embodiment of values and priorities. Nuclear power is no different. It is a product of a particular political economy and the question is whether its political economy is conducive to the challenge of addressing the environmental crisis on a finite, inequitable and shared planet. For developing countries like India, who are presently making infrastructure investments which will have long legacies, it is imperative that these investments wrestle with ecological limits, scale and inequality and prove themselves capable of sufficiency, greater equality and inclusiveness.

This book offers a critique of civilian nuclear power as a green energy strategy for India and develops and proposes an alternative 'synergy for sustainability.' It situates nuclear power as a socio-technical infrastructure embodying a particular development discourse and practice of energy and economic development. The book reveals the political economy of this arrangement and examines the latter s ability to respond to the 'energy-environment crisis.'

Manu V. Mathai argues that the existing growth-based, highly technology-centric model of organizing economic activity is unsustainable and needs to be reformed urgently. Within this imperative for change, nuclear power in India is found to be and is characterized as an 'authoritarian technology'. Based on this critique the book proposes an alternative arrangement, a synergy of ideas from the fields of economic development, energy planning, science, technology and society studies as well as the political economy of institutional arrangements.

Spis treści

Preface 1. Passions of Power and the "Tryst with Destiny" 2.Modernity, Cornucopianism and the Megamachine 3. The Evolution of India's Economic Development Discourse: Independence to 1985 4. The Embrace of Nuclear Power and The Development-Energy Treadmill In India 5. The Advance of Economic Liberalization in India: 1985 to Present 6. Political Economy of Nuclear Power in India7.Beyond Cornucopianism and the Megamachine Organization 8. Epilogue

O autorze

Manu V. Mathai is a Research Fellow with the Science and Technology for Sustainable Societies Program at the United Nations University Institute for Advanced Studies, Japan.