Elderly sanitation worker’s death shows need for collective action and solidarity

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14 December, 2015

Sanitation workers in the southern city of Guangzhou have had considerable success over the last few years in taking collective action to improve their pay and working conditions.

However, the tragic death of Wang Shoucun, a 70-year-old sanitation worker in the northern city of Datong, underscores the fact that far too many elderly cleaners and street sweepers are still vulnerable and unprotected.

Although he was well beyond retirement age, Wang took a job two years ago at a refuse processing station in Datong in order to support his impoverished family. He earned just 1,500 yuan a month, was required to live on-site and be on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whenever a delivery was made to the refuse station.

On the morning of 14 October, Wang reached for what he thought was a water bottle and drank the contents. The bottle contained an industrial solvent known as 1,2,3-Trichloropropane. Wang collapsed and was rushed to the local emergency room. However the hospital failed to realise the severity of the situation and released Wang the same evening.

When Wang started to vomit blood the next day it was already too late. The local hospital said he had serious liver failure and would have to go to Beijing, more than 350 kilometres away, for specialist treatment.

Wang Shoucun in hospital. Photo courtesy the Wang family.

Since Wang was not insured, his family had to borrow from relatives and loan sharks to pay the 140,000 yuan in medical bills charged by the Beijing military hospital he was taken to. Wang’s son and two daughters made repeated trips back to Datong to ask the sanitation company for help but they didn’t get a penny.

After eight days, the hospital stopped treatment because the family ran out of money. They were forced to take Wang back to his hometown in the countryside of Datong where he died on 28 October.

Wang’s family is trying to get compensation from the local social security authority, claiming that Wang’s death was work-related, and are seeking legal aid from the local trade union federation, but so far to no avail.

The family are unlikely to get work-related injury compensation however because Wang was well-over the statutory retirement age and many local governments and courts have argued that post-retirement-age employees are no longer protected by labour law. Instead, they claim that elderly workers are merely service providers.

In one case in the southern city of Foshan in 2013, five elderly sanitation workers who were demanding compensation for wages in arrears and years of unpaid overtime, social insurance contributions and other allowances were told by the courts that they were not eligible for compensation because they had already exceeded the statutory retirement age.

This is a serious problem because elderly workers make up a huge proportion all sanitation workers in China. Not only are they poorly paid and have to work long hours in hazardous conditions, they have next to no legal protection.

The number of street sweepers killed or badly injured in traffic accidents every month, for example, is startling. In November alone, CLB’s Work Accident Map recorded 13 incidents in which sanitation workers were killed or injured by moving vehicles. Many of these workers were elderly, came from poor families and had no medical insurance.

As individuals, these workers, like Wang Shoucun, are in a very vulnerable position. However, as the Guangzhou sanitation workers have shown, taking collective action can bring about positive results.

Most recently, a group of 40 sanitation workers in the district of Shatou were able to end their precarious agency labour existence and sign new contracts directly with the cleaning company that employed them. This followed a long-running dispute in the University Town area of the city in which around 200 workers took collective action to force the boss to come to the negotiating table.

In both these cases, it was the well-established and respected Panyu Workers Service Centre that was instrumental in helping the workers take collective action and defend their rights to decent pay and proper employment contracts.

The centre’s director Zeng Feiyang, and staff members Zhu Xiaomei and Meng Han are currently being held in police custody as part of sustained attack in labour groups in the Guangzhou area.

China promises rights to citizens born in violation of one-child policy

China promises rights to citizens born in violation of one-child policy

About 13 million people will be permitted to register for ‘hukou’, documents allowing access to education and healthcare long denied to them

 A slogan in Hebei province calls on residents to ‘pay attention to one-child policy’. China says it will now allow millions born in violation of that policy to get official documents. Photograph: China Stringer Network/Reuters

Agence France-Presse in Beijing

Thursday 10 December 2015 05.15 GMTLast modified on Thursday

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China will allow millions of unregistered citizens – many of them children born in violation of the one-child policy – to obtain documents vital to secure education and health services long denied to them, state media reported.

China reforms hukou system to improve migrant workers' rights

An estimated 13 million Chinese, or 1% of the country’s total population, do not have proper household registration permits, or “hukou”.

Some of them are orphans, but many more are people born in violation of the highly controversial “one-child policy”, which restricted most couples to only one offspring, and barred any extra from being registered unless their parents paid a hefty fine, which many could not afford.

Known as “black children”, they are unable to go to school or obtain formal employment, and often have problems travelling, among other difficulties.

The policy’s replacement with a two-child rule for all was announced in October, and the government promised to “fully resolve the hukou registration problem for unregistered people” at a meeting chaired by president Xi Jinping on Wednesday, according to a statement released by the official Xinhua news agency.

Call for China to free labour activists or risk backlash from frustrated workforce

“It is a basic legal right for citizens to lawfully register for hukou,” the statement said. “It is also a premise for citizens to participate in social affairs, enjoy rights and fulfil duties.

“We will deal with and protect every citizen’s rights to permanent hukou registration according to the law,” it added.

Enforcement of the family planning policy has always varied across China, and a few local authorities have already said they will start granting hukou to people whose parents have not paid the fines.

But the new policy will still have to be implemented area by area, and some families have previously complained that no changes have been made “on the ground” no matter what reforms were promised by higher officials.

Pregnant women workers struggle to defend their rights in China’s factories

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1 December, 2015

Yin Jing was one of the lucky ones: A Beijing appeals court ruled on 5 November that she had been illegally fired because she was pregnant, and ordered her employer to pay her 62,237 yuan in compensation.

Yin had been employed at a Beijing shopping mall since 2009 and had even been promoted to counter manager because of her outstanding performance. But in 2014, soon after she told her supervisor that she was pregnant, she was transferred to another shopping mall way out in the suburbs on the other side of town.

“It takes three hours to get there using public transport. That would be unbearable while pregnant,” she told Labour Midday News (劳动午报). When she refused to take up the post she was dismissed for disobeying company directives.

Yin refused to back down and sued her employer for illegal dismissal. Yin was lucky because she had clear documentary evidence in the form of text messages that proved her employer was aware that she was pregnant when they transferred her to another store.

For the court, the evidence was incontrovertible and the law was very clear. Article 27 of the Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests states that:

No entity may, for the reason of matrimony, pregnancy, maternity leave or breast-feeding, decrease a female employee's wage, dismiss her or unilaterally terminate the labour (employment) contract or service agreement, with the exception that the female employee requests to terminate the labour (employment) contract or service agreement.

And Article 29 (3) of the Labour Law clearly states that an employer may not rescind a labour contract of female employees “during pregnancy, childbirth or while nursing.”

Despite ample legal protection, most women who are fired when they become pregnant still struggle to defend their rights because, unlike Yin, they cannot produce concrete evidence that they were fired because they were pregnant or simply cannot afford the time and money needed to go to court.

Sacked workers from the Gaoya Jewellery factory take their case to the Guangzhou Federation of Trade Unions.

Employers can very easily appeal rulings against them and prolong the legal process for months, even years, in the hope that the plaintiff will eventually give up or accept a reduced offer.

Moreover, as labour activist Zhu Xiaomei explained, many factory bosses are already very adept at getting around the law and making life difficult for pregnant workers:

“Pregnant women workers face three main problems,” Zhu said. “First; factory managers often force them to leave by using tricks like transferring them to positions not suitable for pregnant women, or finding fault with everything they do. Eventually the workers just leave because they can’t take it anymore.”

Secondly, many pregnant workers only get paid their basic wage because the boss refuses to let them work overtime. Factory workers in Guangdong rely on overtime and bonuses just to get by, Zhu said. No one can survive in the Pearl River Delta on just a basic wage of 1,500 yuan per month.

Finally, women having a second or third child are often denied their statutory 98-days maternity leave by their employer because they cannot obtain a family planning certificate for that additional child.

Many women workers want to take a stand against their employer’s intimidation tactics but they lack the time and resources to do so. One middle-aged worker, Xu Yanqing described how:

They started picking holes in everything I did; being harsh to me in order to make me quit so they didn’t have to pay any compensation. They only granted me one week’s leave. I told them it was impossible to complete the whole maternity process in one week but they just said that was not their concern.  

Xu thought about going to labour arbitration but that could have taken months to complete and even if she was successful, she said, the compensation she would get was unlikely to be more than a few months’ salary.

Eventually, Xu decided to accept the three and a half months' salary being offered by the factory and left. "What else could I do? The best thing for workers like me is to get the compensation," she said.

Meanwhile, Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer has reportedly introduced anexpectant mothers’ production line at its Shenzhen factories. Pregnant workers do not have to wear uniform; they can set their own work hours and their own production targets. See photo below. However, very few other manufacturers offer such facilities, and even at Foxconn, it is not clear how much the workers on the expectant mothers’ production line will actually get paid.

Foxconn’s production line for expectant mothers. Photograph from the Guangdong Provincial Trade Union

What makes China able to plan for the future Part 3

What makes China able to plan for the future

Part 3

By Deirdre Griswold posted on November 29, 2015

In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we have discussed the phenomenal rise of the People’s Republic of China as a major world manufacturer and what has fueled its growing economy. Since China has more coal compared to other fossil fuels, it has relied — like the United States — on coal for most of its energy.

But coal is one of the worst generators of greenhouse gases. As China rose to become the number one manufacturer in the world, it also surpassed the U.S. in greenhouse gas emissions — although not on a per capita basis. That dubious distinction still belongs to the U.S.

Now, at a time when global warming has been clearly identified as the major threat to our environment, China has laid out very detailed and ambitious plans to move away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. It will continue to expand its solar and wind capacity, but a more significant source of energy now embraced by Chinese planners is nuclear.

In the U.S., there is much opposition to nuclear energy. Nearly all the plants here are privately owned and operated for profit. There is much justifiable fear that the profit motive will override safety considerations, especially as these plants are old.

China is a young nuclear power. It has no old plants. By contrast, the average U.S. nuclear plant was built 36 years ago when reactors were subject to dangerous accidents, especially if something damaged the cooling system — as happened to the General Electric reactors in Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant. However, China has the benefit of many improvements in reactor design developed by scientists since then.

The IFR- Integral Fast Reactor.

Ironically, one of the designs China originally pursued was worked on at the Argonne National Laboratory in Idaho from 1984 to 1994. Called the Integral Fast Reactor, it takes a very different approach than the light water reactors then in use. Several books on the subject explain that the great advantages of the IFR, also called a fast breeder or fourth-generation reactor, involve safety and solving the problem of nuclear waste.

The IFR, instead of being water-cooled, uses a passive system to cool the reactor. If anything happens to interrupt the working of the reactor, it will passively shut down. No human intervention is necessary.

The IFR, also known as a closed nuclear fuel reactor, can burn up to 99 percent of the energy in uranium, leaving very little radioactive waste. This contrasts with the light water reactors, which use only 1 percent of the energy in enriched uranium, leaving the rest as waste to decay over hundreds of thousands of years. Even better, the newer reactors could run on the waste left behind by the older reactors, thus helping clean up the vast amounts of radioactive materials that have presented a danger for many, many generations to come.

The Argonne scientists were certain they were in the process of developing a safe technology for powering the world. However, in 1994, Washington suddenly shut down the program to build the IFR, just three years before its scheduled completion.

Leading the charge in Congress against the project was then-Senator John Kerry. The scientists involved were baffled and outraged. Many saw the hand of the oil, gas and coal lobby in the shutdown. One can only imagine their frustration today as the dire news about the consequences of global warming make headlines.

In the meantime, three other countries have succeeded in developing functioning fast-breeder reactors. Today, China, Russia and India all have them, after years of testing involving pilot projects. The expense of developing and building these fourth-generation reactors has been borne by the governments involved.

When the Argonne IFR program was shut down in 1994, neither the U.S. government nor any of the privately owned U.S. energy companies were willing to lay out the large sums of money that would be needed to develop a new, safer generation of nuclear power.

The U.S. today has by far the most nuclear power reactors in the world — 99, operated by 30 different power companies. But they are old. Almost all the nuclear-generating capacity in the U.S. comes from reactors built between 1967 and 1990. Only five new reactors are under construction, and they are all light water reactors.

By 1990, the U.S. had already gone to war in oil-rich North Africa and Southeast Asia against Iraq. That was just the first in a series of conflicts, from Iraq to Syria to Libya, that held the promise of vast profits for the military-oil-banking-industrial complex — especially since it’s the public, not the energy companies, that pays for these wars. Whatever the outcome, the war budget doesn’t come out of their bottom lines.

For the hundreds of millions of people living in North Africa and West Asia, the result of these wars for oil has been a disaster. Is any more proof needed than the millions of refugees now risking their lives trying to find somewhere to live in peace?

And the whole world is affected. The scramble by the imperialist powers, most of all the U.S., to control profitable fossil fuels has precluded any adequate expenditures to develop renewable energy. It would take a massive investment on the scale of what is now spent on imperialist wars for the U.S. to change course and wean itself off coal, oil and gas. That’s not going to happen without a revolutionary change in class relations.

Why socialist planning is necessary

The World Nuclear Association summarizes China’s nuclear power development as follows:

“China has 30 nuclear power reactors in operation, 21 under construction, and more about to start construction. Additional reactors are planned, including some of the world’s most advanced, to give more than a threefold increase in nuclear capacity to at least 58 GWe by 2020-21, then some 150 GWe by 2030, and much more by 2050. The impetus for increasing nuclear power share in China is increasingly due to air pollution from coal-fired plants. China’s policy is for closed fuel cycle. China has become largely self-sufficient in reactor design and construction, as well as other aspects of the fuel cycle, but is making full use of Western technology while adapting and improving it.”

The rich imperialist countries accumulated their wealth generations ago by grabbing much of the world’s resources and super-exploiting workers in the global South. So how is it that a developing country like China can forge ahead with a nuclear program that promises to outdistance them in every way?

The answer lies in China’s ability to control and plan the central components of its economy, especially the infrastructure on which all other activity is based. While the Communist Party and the government made a decision decades ago to allow private ownership of many types of commercial enterprises in order to amass the capital they needed for growth, they have not surrendered ownership and control of the land, the sources of energy, the means of transportation and communication, and other essential elements underpinning modern life.

This allows government economic and social planners, scientists and technical people — not beholden to any private interests — to work together, look ahead and make decisions based on solving immediate and anticipated problems. The government is then tasked with carrying out these plans. While the existence of for-profit enterprises and very rich capitalists can impede this, leading to corruption of many officials in China, the planning principle remains strong.

This is how workers’ wages have been increased on a very steady basis for at least the last two decades. Even U.S. publications like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal acknowledge thatin the last 10 years alone, wages in China have increased fivefold. In the same period, workers’ wages in the U.S. have actually declined in constant dollars, even as the income of the capitalists has soared exponentially.

This is also how the Chinese government is able to allocate a great deal of wealth for future development on a sustainable basis. Its planners are able to think nationally and even globally because they are not hamstrung by the immediate profit needs of the dog-eat-dog economic system, in which each enterprise is in a life-and-death struggle against its competitors.

And how did China get to this point?

Through the revolutionary struggle of millions of poor and oppressed people. Many of them were very exploited workers, but a majority were downtrodden peasants, whose life offered nothing but unending toil and brutal punishment by parasitic landlords. Since that revolution and China’s economic growth, hundreds of millions of young people have migrated to the cities from rural areas and become workers. They are organized, educated and demand a better life. From their ranks also come a new generation of scientists and technical personnel.

The Chinese Revolution was victorious because it was led by communists, who saw the potential for China to become great based on the unity of the workers and peasants. Their goal was to get rid of the old and build something new — a socialist society. Despite detours and setbacks, that goal has not been abandoned, and the hard-won fruits of its planning can be seen more clearly as China continues to shake the world.

Part 1: Global warming, nuclear power and China

Part 2: China moves decisively on global warming

China moves decisively on global warming - Part 2

China moves decisively on global warming

Part 2

By Deirdre Griswold posted on November 2, 2015

China is the most populous country in the world, with 1.3 billion people. In little more than a generation, its rapid industrial development has made it the world’s second-largest economy. Over the past three decades, this has made it possible to lift 500 million Chinese out of extreme poverty.

This transformation in the lives of the people took place as China became the factory of the world, producing everything from clothing and digital devices to machine tools, giant construction cranes and merchant ships. But to power that factory required a tremendous increase in its ability to generate electricity.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, by 2012, China had surpassed the U.S. in total electricity generation — 4,768 terawatt hours versus 4,048 TWh for the U.S. By 2014, China’s electric output had risen even further, to 5,523 TWh.

China has little oil or gas, but it has a lot of coal. In 2014, about three-quarters of China’s electric power still came from burning coal, even though the country had risen to first place in the world in installed wind power and second place in solar power.

Thus, the tremendous increase in China’s productive capacity came at a great price to the environment. Burning coal resulted in serious air pollution, especially in China’s eastern cities, where the majority of the people live. It also released CO₂ gases into the atmosphere.

Around 2007, China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. However, historically and also per capita, the U.S. remains by far the biggest contributor to global warming.

These are some of the factors that have made the leaders of China commit to the most ambitious program of developing nuclear power of any country in the world today.

Graphic: popatomic.org

Nuclear power produces zero greenhouse gases. Unlike solar and wind — which only generate power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing — nuclear energy is a constant, not intermittent, producer of power around the clock.  

In November of last year, China’s State Council published an “Energy Development Strategy Action Plan” for the period 2014 to 2020. The plan aims to cut the country’s reliance on coal and promote the use of clean energy. It calls for the “timely launch” of new nuclear power projects on the east coast and for feasibility studies for the construction of inland plants. It also calls for substantially increasing the installed generating capacity of hydro, wind and solar power.

Among the various agencies in the world that monitor economic activity, this action plan is not seen as a mere wish list, subject to the whims of elected officials. It is taken seriously, since the Chinese government has consistently carried through with its previously published plans for development, often exceeding its goals.

China goes further for COP21

For 12 days, beginning this Nov. 30, the 21st United Nations climate change conference — known as COP21 — will convene in Paris. So far, 140 countries have submitted their national climate change commitments. It is China’s pledge that has the environmental movement buzzing.

Wrote one news source that focuses on renewable energy: “China, a major powerhouse for renewables, has pledged to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 60 percent, peak its emissions and generate a fifth of its electricity from clean sources by 2030.

“Clean energy investment in China already marked a 32 percent jump last year to hit the staggering USD 89 billion (EUR 78 billion), more than any other country in the world, according to estimates of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“China plans to boost installed capacity of wind power to 200 gigawatt and solar power to around 150 GW by 2020, up from around 100 GW and 35 GW respectively, last reported in June.” (SeeNews, Oct. 15)

This very specific pledge was received with much enthusiasm by climate scientists around the world, as it showed that China, a huge country that is trying to entirely eradicate poverty, is building protection of the environment into its plans for development.

Even as China invests billions of dollars in hydroelectric, wind and solar power, and improving the grid that brings electricity from areas with more wind and dams to areas with more people, it still finds it necessary to greatly expand its nuclear capacity if it is to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.

U.S. nuclear plants: old and profit-driven

In the United States, more than two-thirds of the electric power is produced by burning fossil fuels — mainly coal and natural gas. For years, the energy giants financed campaigns to belittle and even deny that climate change exists. Nevertheless, popular awareness of the dangers of global warming has grown. In September 2014, hundreds of thousands of people participated in the People’s Climate March in New York City, calling for  phasing out fossil fuels.

At the same time, there has been much popular opposition to nuclear power. Unlike in the rest of the world, nearly all the nuclear plants in the U.S. are privately owned by for-profit corporations, and there is the justifiable fear that they will skimp on safety costs in order to boost their profits.

No new nuclear power plants have come online in the U.S. for almost 20 years. The last one was Watts Bar 1 in Tennessee in 1996. Some, like Shoreham on Long Island and Vermont Yankee, have been forced to shut down after large protests.

The average age of a U.S. nuclear power plant is now 36 years. Many of these old plants have dubious safety records; all use earlier and more dangerous types of nuclear technology than what is now available in the world.

After 40 years, the owners of these plants are required by law to seek a new license from the federal government or shut down. However, at least one such reactor at Indian Point, within 35 miles of New York City and close to a geological fault, is now more than 40 years old, yet is still operating, even as a political struggle goes on between state and federal officials over whether a new 20-year license should be issued.

Climate catastrophes worsen

Meanwhile, the terrible dangers to the world resulting from global warming continue to multiply. Many more lives have already been lost to hyperstorms, floods, landslides, drought and extreme heat than to all the nuclear accidents. Species are going extinct. Oceans are warming and fish are disappearing. The Greenland ice cap is melting — and could add many meters to existing sea levels in a relatively short period of time.

Many scientists are looking to newer third- and fourth-generation nuclear power as an indispensable part of the answer to global warming. One of them is James Hansen, who began warning Congress about climate change in 1988, when he was head of NASA and had access to satellite data showing the melting of the polar ice caps and mountain glaciers. Hansen ultimately resigned his NASA position in order to campaign for safer technologies.

In November 2013, Hansen and three other scientists wrote an open letter calling for sharply reducing the burning of fossil fuels. In it they said: “Global demand for energy is growing rapidly and must continue to grow to provide the needs of developing economies. At the same time, the need to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions is becoming ever clearer. … We understand that today’s nuclear plants are far from perfect. Fortunately, passive safety systems and other advances can make new plants much safer … and solve the waste disposal problem by burning current waste and using fuel more efficiently.”

They concluded, “With the planet warming and carbon dioxide emissions rising faster than ever, we cannot afford to turn away from any technology that has the potential to displace a large fraction of our carbon emissions.”

Ironically, the new technology these scientists refer to was first developed in the U.S. at the Argonne National Laboratory between 1984 and 1994. But the Integral Fast Reactor program was shut down by the U.S. Congress just two years before completion.

Today, China has made this fourth-generation nuclear reactor a reality.

Next: Why China can do what the U.S. couldn’t.

Part 1: Global warming, nuclear power and China - Part 1

Global warming, nuclear power and China, Part 1

Deirdre Griswold posted on October 26, 2015

In a surprise move, China and Britain’s Conservative Party government have signed an agreement in which China will participate in the building of nuclear reactors in England. Criticism of the deal comes from those, including members of the British Labor Party, who claim that China’s participation could compromise the “national security” of this NATO member-state.

China General Nuclear Power Corp., a state-controlled corporation, will provide $6 billion toward the completion of the Hinkley Point C power station, giving China a 33.5 percent interest in the plant.

Until now, the plant has been primarily a project of the French company EDF. It has been over-budget and long-delayed in its construction, prompting criticism from anti-nuclear groups over money they say could have been spent on developing other renewable energy sources. However, China’s entry into a consortium with EDF, with Britain’s approval, has revived the project.

In the contract just signed, China will only be supplying technology to EDF to build Hinkley Point C, but the deal opens the way “for China to invest in future British nuclear projects and possibly to play a larger role in building the plants, giving more credibility to the Chinese nuclear industry and perhaps helping it to sell more nuclear plants abroad.” (New York Times, Oct. 21)

Britain has not built a new nuclear power plant since 1995. However, its aging nuclear infrastructure contributes almost 20 percent of the country’s electric power. When completed in 10 years, Hinkley C “is intended to meet around 7 percent of Britain’s current electricity needs and run relatively cheaply for at least 60 years.”

Adds the Times: “China has by far the most ambitious nuclear building program in the world, with 68 commercial reactors under construction or in the planning stages, according to the World Nuclear Association, an industry group. China has received help from the French and the big Japanese company Toshiba but has gradually developed its own local designs and built up a large chain of domestic suppliers.

“Industry executives say this building boom means that Chinese nuclear contractors have gained considerable knowledge and experience, which they hope to apply outside China.”

Nuclear vs. burning of fossil fuels

Today, the burning of fossil fuels is the main source of electric power around the world.

Just days after the announcement of the China-British nuclear deal, a hurricane with the strongest winds ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere hit the Pacific coast of Mexico. Amazingly, no lives were reported lost, but it was a chilling reminder of the growing frequency of superstorms as global warming continues.

With the stronger storms, prolonged droughts, and melting of glaciers and polar ice caps that have accompanied record-high world temperatures, there is no longer any doubt that the burning of fossil fuels, which has created a warming blanket of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, must give way to other forms of energy if even greater disasters are to be avoided.

Nuclear plants produce no carbon dioxide (CO2). While many today are looking to nuclear energy as one of the alternatives to fossil fuels, that is not how it got started. The successful splitting of the atom came on the scene long before anyone was aware of the CO2 problem.

Rather than being developed as a source of energy for peaceful purposes, the first nuclear programs were rushed into production for political and military reasons: to build atomic bombs. The first use of the bomb — to incinerate hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians at the very end of World War II — allowed the U.S. capitalist ruling class to claim the role of leading power in the postwar world.

It soon became clear, however, that the energy in the atom could be a virtually unlimited source of electric power. The first nuclear reactor to generate electricity was built by the U.S. government in 1951. However, the focus of U.S. research continued to be military, aimed at providing nuclear power for Navy submarines and aircraft carriers.

While Washington was mainly funding research for war purposes, the Soviet Union in June 1954 put into operation the world’s first nuclear plant to generate electricity for the civilian power grid at Obninsk, 160 miles south of Moscow.

It was followed by England, which started up its first commercial nuclear power station in 1956, named Calder Hall.  Not until December 1957 was the first U.S. commercial nuclear plant opened in Pennsylvania, called the Shippingport Reactor.

It soon became clear that there were many inherent problems in the first two generations of nuclear plants. Some were immediate, including the possibility of a disastrous failure in the cooling systems.

The accident at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979 caused no deaths, but there was great apprehension over the release of radioactive elements and the possibility that the accident could have led to a complete meltdown of the plant. Since then, two other major accidents have occurred — at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine area of the then-Soviet Union, and at Fukushima in Japan, after damage to the nuclear plant there from a major tsunami. The total number of immediate deaths from these two accidents came to less than 50.  Estimates of the long-term mortality due to radiation exposure vary widely.

The other major issue involved in nuclear energy is long-term: what to do with the radioactive waste products.

Problem of radioactive waste

As both military and commercial reactors began to proliferate, investigators found that the storage of nuclear wastes — which could continue to be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years —  was being done so poorly that there could be serious effects on people and the environment.

The problem of what to do with radioactive waste continues to be a huge barrier to the use of nuclear energy. It is the main stated reason why the German government under Chancellor Angela Merkel has abandoned its nuclear power plants and is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to decommission them. Germany now gets about half its electricity from coal, which is the worst polluter in terms of CO2 emissions.

As of 2014, the U.S. got about 19 percent of its electric power from nuclear energy. But the vast majority of it, 68 percent, came from fossil fuels: coal, gas and oil. Only 13 percent came from hydroelectric and other renewables.

China gets most of its electric power from coal and has a very serious air-pollution problem. At present, it has 28 nuclear power reactors in operation, 23 under construction, and more about to start construction. Additional reactors are planned, including some of the world’s most advanced, to give China more than a threefold increase in nuclear capacity to at least 58 GWe by 2020-2021, then some 150 GWe by 2030, and much more by 2050, according to the World Nuclear Association.

What has transformed China, which was a war-torn, impoverished country at the time the U.S. dropped the first atomic bombs, into such a powerhouse for nuclear energy? And are there reasons to believe that its reactors will be safer than those of the past?

Next: China’s energy program, including its fourth-generation Experimental Fast Reactor, which is powered by “spent” nuclear fuel from earlier reactors.

Personal disclosure: The author lives five miles from two of the U.S.’s aging and dangerous commercial nuclear reactors.

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