Jul 23, 6:01 AM
When nuclear policy turns into a battle of commissioned statistics
Switzerland’s reactor debate is being fought less with principles than with studies that manage, with admirable neatness, to confirm the wishes of whoever paid for them.
In Switzerland’s nuclear debate, the most useful tools are no longer arguments but spreadsheets. One recent study, commissioned by the Swiss Energy Foundation, says a new nuclear power plant could endanger up to 16,000 jobs. Its concern is not abstract: the foundation says the threatened positions are mainly in trades and small and medium-sized firms that would otherwise win contracts in solar energy and building renovations.
The rival camp has answered with its own carefully polished calculation. A study paid for by Economiesuisse comes to the opposite conclusion and puts the employment effect at 2,905 new jobs. Its logic is simple enough to fit on a placard: a nuclear plant is a power factory, factories employ people, and cheap electricity helps companies create more work. In other words, the same machine can be sold either as a job killer or as an engine of prosperity, depending on who is holding the invoice.
That is not an accident, and nobody pretends it is. In June, the Swiss Parliament decided that new reactors may again be built in Switzerland, reopening a dispute that had never really gone away. The decision triggered a referendum drive by a broad alliance of the SP, the Greens, the Green Liberal Party, Centre Party Women and environmental organisations. The campaign is now collecting the 50,000 signatures needed to force a vote. The date has not even been set, yet the mood is already suitably febrile.
Political scientist Lukas Golder says this is becoming the standard method in politics: both supporters and opponents try to make their position sound less ideological by wrapping it in research. It is a neat trick. Commission a study, attach a university or institute to it, and suddenly a political preference acquires the aura of neutrality. Whether the numbers are convincing matters less than whether they look respectable.
Both the Swiss Energy Foundation and Economiesuisse say they set the research question themselves but do not interfere with the design of the study. According to both organisations, the universities or institutes decide how the data are collected and analysed, and the sponsors have no say over the result. Economiesuisse’s Alexander Keberle says an institution that allows results to be influenced would not be serious. That may be true. It is also exactly the kind of sentence sponsors like to say when they have just spent money on a politically useful outcome.
The deeper point is not that one side is right and the other wrong. It is that the nuclear question in Switzerland has become a contest over credibility as much as over energy policy. Studies now serve as political weapons, and the more polarised the debate becomes, the more valuable those weapons are. For voters, the awkward task is to decide whether the numbers describe reality or merely the ambitions of the people who ordered them. In a country that prides itself on moderation, the quarrel over atoms has become a rather expensive lesson in selective objectivity.
Written by Thorben Thiede thorben.thiede@alpineweekly.com
