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  • Caselist.RoundClass[0]
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Caselist.RoundClass[0]

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1		-2016-10-04 22:36:30.806
	1	+2016-10-04 22:36:30.0

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Cites

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	1	+Affirmative Case
	2	+I Affirm Resolved: Countries ought to prohibit the production of nuclear power.
	3	+“Nuclear Power” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as:
	4	+“Nuclear Power, n.1." OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 20 September 2016.
	5	+ Electric or motive power generated by a nuclear reactor.
	6	+“Ought” is defined by Random House Dictionary as:
	7	+"ought". Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 20 Sep. 2016. Dictionary.com http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ought.
	8	+used to express duty or moral obligation
	9	+Because the resolution asks us what countries ought to do, my Value is Morality.
	10	+
	11	+My Criterion is Utilitarianism, defined as maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for the greatest number of people. This is the best criterion for two reasons.
	12	+
	13	+First, utilitarianism is the only philosophy that makes sense for governments, because they have to balance the interests of all their citizens. Philosopher Robert Goodin 1995:
	14	+Robert E. Goodin. Philosopher of Political Theory, Public Policy, and Applied Ethics, Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1995. p. 26-7
	15	+The great advantage of Utilitarianism as a guide to public conduct is that it avoids unnecessary sacrifices, it ensures as best we are able to ensure in the uncertain world of public policy-making that policies are sensitive to people’s interests or desires or preferences. The great failing of more deontological theories, applied to those realms, is that they fixate upon duties done for the sake of duty rather than for the sake of any good that is done by doing one’s duty. Perhaps it is permissible (perhaps even proper) for private individuals in the course of their personal affairs to fetishize duties done for their own sake. It would be a mistake for public officials to do likewise, not least because it is impossible. The fixation on motives makes absolutely no sense in the public realm, and might make precious little sense in the private one even, as chapter 3 shows. The reason public action is required at all arises from the inability of uncoordinated individual action to achieve certain morally desirable ends. Individuals are rightly excused from pursing those ends. The inability is real; the excuses, perfectly valid. But libertarians are right in their diagnosis, wrong in their prescription. That is the message of chapter 2. The same thing that makes those excuses valid at the individual level – the same thing that relieves individuals to organize themselves into collective units that are capable of acting where they are isolated as individuals are not. When they organize themselves into these collective units, those collective deliberations inevitable take place under very different circumstances, and their conclusions inevitably take very different forms. Individuals are morally required to operate in that collective, in certain crucial respects. But they are practically circumscribed in how they can operate, in their collective mode. And Those special constraints characterizing the public sphere of decision-making give rise to the special circumstances that make utilitarianism peculiarly apt for public policy-making. in ways set out more fully in chapter 4. Government house utilitarianism thus understood is, I would argue, a uniquely defensible public philosophy.
	16	+
	17	+Second, utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism, which means that it is impartial and can resolve actual moral dilemmas. Philosopher Lars Bergstrom 1996:
	18	+Lars Bergstrom Prof. of Practical Philosophy, Stockholm U., “Reflections on Consequentialism,” Theoria, Vol. 62, Part 1-2, 1996, pp.74-94. AT
	19	+(i) Consequentialism is morally attractive. In the first place, it may even seem intuitively self-evident that we should always act so as to achieve the best possible outcome. What could be better? Besides, if we think more specifically of classical utilitarianism, as a main version of consequentialism, this is morally attractive in at least two different respects. First, it stresses the way people (or sentient beings, in general) are affected by our actions. What matters is the welfare or the preferences of everyone to whom our actions make a difference. This is surely very important. It expresses a generalized version of the idea that one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself. Second, it is completely impartial. It rejects all forms of egoism, ethnocentrism, and racism. It is also temporally impartial. Future generations have the same weight in a consequentialist calculus as our own generation (other things being equal). ¶ (ii) Consequentialism solves moral conflicts. In ordinary life, moral considerations sometimes point in different directions. Those are the very situation in which a moral theory is most needed. When different moral rules give different directions, there is a moral conflict. We need to know how to handle such conflicts. Consequentialism presents a general solution to such conflicts. This solution may be hard to identify in practice, but it is at least a solution. According to consequentialism there is always an answer to hard moral questions. ¶ (iii) Consequentialism is a bold conjecture. For one thing, it is bold in the sense that it is simple and has very broad scope. Maybe it can also be said to be "bold" in a sense similar to that stressed by Karl Popper for scientific theories,12 namely that it contradicts earlier theories while at the same time explaining their relative success. Consequentialists often claim that many moral principles, which are strictly speaking incompatible with consequentialism, can actually be given a consequentialist motivation if they are interpreted as useful approximations to be used in practice. Also consequentialism can be said to be bold in the sense that it has more content than many alternative views. Alternative theories, such as Kantianism, Christian ethics, existentialism, natural right theories, and so on, seem to give rather indeterminate answers to actual moral problems. Consequentialism, on the other hand, has a definite answer to every question concerning the moral rightness of actions. ¶ (iv) Consequentialism is theoretically fruitful. In the development of moral philosophy since the time of Sidgwick, say, utilitarianism and consequentialism in general has played a major part. It has been theoretically very fruitful in the sense that it has stimulated philosophers to work out details and answer difficult objections. It has given rise to a many interesting problems and to a lot of professional discussion. In recent years, John Rawls's theory has also been very influential, but on the whole I think it is fair to say that consequentialism has been more theoretically fruitful, in our time, than any other moral theory.
	20	+
	21	+Contention 1: Accidents
	22	+The most comprehensive study finds that the likelihood of a massive nuclear accident is incredibly high. According to the MIT 2015:
	23	+MIT technology review. “The Chances of Another Chernobyl Before 2050? 50, Say Safety Specialists.” https://www.technologyreview.com/s/536886/the-chances-of-another-chernobyl-before-2050-50-say-safety-specialists/. April 15, 2015. LG
	24	+Given that most countries with nuclear power intend to keep their reactors running and that many new reactors are planned, an important goal is to better understand the nature of risk in the nuclear industry. What, for example, is the likelihood of another Chernobyl in the next few years?∂ Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Spencer Wheatley and Didier Sornette at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Benjamin Sovacool at Aarhus University in Denmark. These guys have compiled the most comprehensive list of nuclear accidents ever created and used it to calculate the likelihood of other accidents in future.∂ Their worrying conclusion is that the chances are 50:50 that a major nuclear disaster will occur somewhere in the world before 2050. “There is a 50 per cent chance that a Chernobyl event (or larger) occurs in the next 27 years,” they conclude.∂ The nuclear industry has long been criticised for its over-confident attitude to risk. But truly independent analyses are few and far between, partly because much of the data on accidents is compiled by the nuclear industry itself, which is reluctant to share it.∂ The International Atomic Energy Agency rates accidents using a system called the International Nuclear Event Scale, which is related to the amount of radiation released. However, the Agency does not publish a historical database of these accidents, probably because it has a dual role of both regulating the nuclear industry and promoting it.∂ So it has fallen to others to compile lists of accidents, the most comprehensive of which contains details of 102 events. (By comparison there are 72 events that have a rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale.)∂ Wheatley and co have significantly increased this number. They refrain from using the data from the International Atomic Energy Agency and compile their own list instead.∂ The metric they use in assessing each accident is its total cost in U.S. dollars (based on the dollar value in 2013). And they define an accident as “an unintentional incident or event at a nuclear energy facility that led to either one death (or more) or at least $50,000 in property damage.”∂ Each accident must have occurred during the generation, transmission, or distribution of nuclear energy. That includes accidents at mines, during transportation by truck or pipeline, or at an enrichment facility, a manufacturing plant, and so on.∂ The team gathered their data from a number sources, such as published reports and peer-reviewed papers but also from press releases, project documents, public utility commission filings, and newspaper articles in English.∂ They then calculated the cost of each accident based on all the economic losses it caused, such as the destruction of property, the cost of emergency response, environmental remediation, evacuation, fines, insurance claims, and so on. Whenever an accident resulted in the death of an individual, the team added $6 million to the cost, a figure also used by various U.S. agencies in calculating the value of a life.∂ Wheatley and co acknowledge the imperfections of this technique but say it has the huge advantage of representing all the negative consequences of an accident in a single U.S. dollar figure. And this in turn allows the accidents to be ranked∂ The resulting list ranks 174 accidents between 1946 and 2014 and includes their date, location, the monetary cost in U.S. dollars, and the rating where available on the International Nuclear Event Scale and on another well-known scale called the Nuclear Accident Magnitude Scale.∂ The top five accidents ranked by monetary cost are the Fukushima accident in March 2011, the Chernobyl explosion in April 1986, a fire at the Tsuruga nuclear plant in December 1995, a fire at Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in September 1957 and an incident in March 1955 at Sellafield, then known as Windscale, two years before the infamous fire at the facility. Indeed, Sellafield appears five times in the list of the top 15 of most expensive nuclear accidents.∂ The new database contains 75 percent more entries than the most comprehensive list up until now. And this extra data significantly improves the kind of statistical analysis that can be done.∂ Wheatley and co take full advantage of this. They say for a start that the new database reveals just how poor the International Nuclear Event Scale actually is. For that to be consistent, the Fukushima disaster would need to be rated at 10 or 11, rather than at the current maximum level of 7, they say.∂ The team go on to calculate that the rate of nuclear accidents costing more than $20 million has decreased steadily from the 1970s. Along the way, the rate dropped significantly after Chernobyl and now sits at 0.002 to 0.003 events per plant per year.∂ A significant change in the distribution occurred after the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979. The safety improvements introduced after the accident reduced the median size of accidents by a factor of 3.5.∂ However, the largest accidents appear to follow an entirely different statistical distribution, probably because they occur as a result of set of entirely unforeseen combinations of circumstances.∂ These kinds of large unexpected events are known as dragon king events and particularly difficult to analyse because they follow this different distribution, have unforeseen causes, and are few in number.∂ Nevertheless, Wheatley and co say their data suggests that the nuclear industry remains vulnerable dragon king events. “There is a 50 chance that a Fukushima event (or larger) occurs in the next 50 years,” they say.∂ Fukushima was by far the most expensive accident in history at a cost of $166 billion. That’s 60 of the total cost of all other nuclear accidents added together.∂ The team calculate that A Chernobyl-scale event, the most severe in terms of radiation release, is as likely as not in the next 27 years, and they say a Three Mile Island event in the next 10 years has a probability of 50.
	25	+
	26	+Nuclear plants are so complicated that we cannot safeguard against any substantial proportion of possible accidents. Charles Perrow 2011:
	27	+Perrow, Charles. Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Yale U. “Fukushima and the inevitability of accidents.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 67.6 (2011): 44-52. MO.
	28	+This litany of regulatory failures, failures to heed warnings, and commonplace failures is independent of normal accident theory. That theory says that Even if we had excellent regulation and everyone played it safe, there would still be accidents in systems that are highly Òinteractively complex.,Ó and If the systems are tightly coupled, even small failures will cascade through them.. The theory is useful for its emphasis on system complexity and tight coupling; these concepts play a huge role in analyzing the failures of any source in risky systems. In the financial meltdown, for example, the mounting complexity of the overall system allowed fraud and self-dealing to go undetected, and the tight coupling of many systems allowed the failures to cascade. ¶In my work on Ònormal accidents,Ó I have argued that some complex organizationsÑsuch as chemical plants, nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons systems, and, to a more limited extent, air transport networksÑhave so many nonlinear system properties that eventually the unanticipated interaction of multiple failures may create an accident that no designer could have anticipated and no operator can understand.¶ Everything is subject to failureÑ designs, procedures, supplies and equipment, operators, and the environment. The government and businesses know this and design safety devices with multiple redundancies and all kinds of bells and whistles. but nonlinear, unexpected interactions of even small failures can defeat these safety systems.. If the system is also tightly coupled, no intervention can prevent a cascade of failures that brings it down.¶ I use the term ÒnormalÓ because these characteristics are built into the systems; there is nothing one can do about them other than to initiate massive system redesigns to reduce interactive complexity and to loosen coupling. Companies and governments can modularize integrated designs and deconcentrate hazardous material. Actually, though, compared with the prosaic cases previously mentioned, normal accidents are rare. (Three Mile Island is the only accident in my list that qualifies.) It is much more common for systems with catastrophic potential to fail because of poor regulation, ignored warnings, production pressures, cost cutting, poor training, and so on.
	29	+
	30	+When people have to be evacuated because of a nuclear accident, it creates severe disruptions for the whole community. Prof. Buongiorno, 2011:
	31	+Jacopo Buongiorno TEPCO Professor and Associate Department Head, Nuclear Science and Engineering Director, Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, et al., “Technical Lessons Learned from the Fukushima-Daichii Accident and Possible Corrective Actions for the Nuclear Industry: An Initial Evaluation”, MIT Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, May 2011. DM
	32	+Permanent and long-term relocation can reduce exposure to radiation to essentially zero levels above natural background. What is gained is the elimination of a tiny additional risk of cancer (maximum risk of 42.2 instead of 42.0 at 20 mSv). This cancer, if it appears, will be diagnosed many years, perhaps decades, in the future. but this gain comes with very significant costs. The costs include loss of home or farm, (48,000 homes and over 400 livestock or dairy-farming households are in the evacuation region), loss of privacy (shelters are crowded and residence time is expected to be measured in months before alternative temporary housing will be available), and loss of community (whole towns and villages have been evacuated). Prohibition against consuming contaminated food and water results in no additional internal dose but, for a country already facing food shortages following a devastating earthquake and tsunami, the loss of valuable food, property, and interdiction of farmlands are a significant price to pay.
	33	+
	34	+Contention 2: Renewable Energy
	35	+Nuclear energy is not a good solution to climate change because it still requires us to burn lots of fossil fuels. If we invest in nuclear technology, we can’t invest in the renewable energy we need to save the planet from global warming. Naomi Klein 2014:
	36	+Naomi Klein author, social activist, and filmmaker, Sydney Peace Prize Recipient, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, New York: Simon and Schuster (2014), pp. 137-138.
	37	+As we have already seen, The latest research on renewable energy, most notably by Mark Jacobson’s team at Stanford, shows that a global transition to 100 percent renewable energy-“wind, water and solar”-is both technically and economically feasible “by as early as 2030.” That means lowering greenhouse emissions in line with science-based targets does not have to involve building a global network of new nuclear plants. In fact that could well slow down the transition, since Renewable energy is faster and cheaper to roll out than nuclear. critical factors given the tightness of the timeframe. Moreover, says Jacobson, in the near-term Nuclear is “not carbon-free., no matter what the advocates tell you. Vast amounts of fossil fuels must be burned to mine, transport and enrich uranium and to build the nuclear plant. And all that dirty power will be released during the 10 to 19 years that it takes to plan and build a nuclear plant. (A wind farm typically takes two to five years .)” He concludes that “if we invest in nuclear versus true renewables, you can bet that the glaciers and polar ice caps will keep melting while we wait, and wait, for the nuclear age to arrive. We will also guarantee a riskier future for us all.” Indeed, renewable installations present dramatically lower risks than either fossil fuels or nuclear energy to those who live and work next to them. As comedian Bill Maher once observed, “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.” 32 ¶ That said, about 12 percent of the world’s power is currently supplied by nuclear energy, much of it coming from reactors that are old and obsolete.33 From a climate perspective, it would certainly be preferable if governments staggered their transitions away from high-risk energy sources like nuclear, prioritizing fossil fuels for cuts because the next decade is so critical for getting us off our current trajectory toward 4-6 degrees Celsius of warming. That would be compatible with a moratorium on new nuclear facilities, a decommissioning of the oldest plants and then a full nuclear phase-out once renewables had decisively displaced fossil fuels. ¶ And yet it must also be acknowledged that It was the power of Germany's antinuclear movement that created the conditions for the renewables revolution in the first place. (as was the case in Denmark in the 19805), so There might have been no energy transition to debate without that widespread desire to get off nuclear due to its many hazards. Moreover, Many German energy experts are convinced that the speed of the transition so far proves that it is possible to phase out both nuclear and fossil fuels simultaneously. A 2012 report by the German National Center for Aerospace, Energy and Transport Research (DLR), for instance, demonstrated that 67 percent of the electricity in all of the EU could come from renewables by 2030, with that number reaching 96 percent by 2050.34 But, clearly, this will become a reality only if the right policies are in place.
	38	+Climate change has numerous adverse and irreversible effects on human life. According to the NCA 2014:
	39	+NCA 2014 - National Climate Assessment 2014 “National Climate Assessment 2014: Impacts on Society.” US Global Change Research Program. Global Change.gov. (2014) Web.
	40	+Climate change is affecting the American people in far-reaching ways. Impacts related to climate change are evident across regions and in many sectors important to society—such as human health, agriculture and food security, water supply, transportation, energy, ecosystems, and others—and are expected to become increasingly disruptive throughout this century and beyond.¶ Climate change affects human health and wellbeing through more extreme weather events and wildfires, decreased air quality, and diseases. transmitted by insects, food, and water. Climate disruptions to agriculture have been increasing and are projected to become more severe over this century, a trend that would diminish the security of America’s food supply. Surface and groundwater supplies in some regions are already stressed, and water quality is diminishing in many areas, in part due to increasing sediment and contaminant concentrations after heavy downpours.¶ In some regions, prolonged periods of high temperatures associated with droughts contribute to conditions that lead to larger wildfires and longer fire seasons. For coastal communities, sea level rise, combined with coastal storms, has increased the risk of erosion, storm surge damage, and flooding. Extreme heat, sea level rise, and heavy downpours are affecting infrastructure like roads, rail lines, airports, port facilities, energy infrastructure, and military bases.¶ The capacity of ecosystems like forests, barrier beaches, and wetlands to buffer the impacts of extreme events like fires, floods, and severe storms is being overwhelmed. The rising temperature and changing chemistry of ocean water is combining with other stresses, such as overfishing and pollution, to alter marine-based food production and harm fishing communities.
	41	+The poor are especially vulnerable to ecological disruption. According to Professor of Economics Edward Barbier 2013:
	42	+Barbier 2013 - Edward Barbier Prof of Economics, U. of Wyoming, “Environmental Sustainability and Poverty Eradication in Developing Countries,” Getting Development Right: Structural Transformation, Inclusion, and Sustainability in the Post-Crisis Era. Ed. Eva Paus. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2013), pp. 173-194. AT
	43	+As noted above, The livelihoods of one-quarter of the population in developing countries, almost 1.3 billion, are particularly vulnerable to ecological disruption, and they account for many of the world’s extreme poor. who live on less than US$2 per day (see also box 1.2). These populations live in regions with no access to irrigation systems, farm poor soils or land with steep slopes, and inhabit fragile forest systems. By 2015,, despite a decline in the share of the world population living in extreme poverty, there are still likely to be nearly 3 billion people living on less than US$2 a day. As indicated in box 3.1, Many low- and middle-income economies fall into a persistent pattern of resource use characterized by chronic resource dependency, the concentration of large segments of the population in fragile environments, and rural poverty.
	44	+
	45	+Contention 3: Nuclear Colonialism
	46	+Uranium mining among the Navajo has led to severe health and environmental damage.
	47	+Endres 2009 - Endres, Danielle. "From wasteland to waste site: the role of discourse in nuclear power's environmental injustices." Local Environment 14.10 (2009): 917-937. MC
	48	+Past Uranium mining and milling in the US resulted in severe health and environmental legacies for affected people and their lands. From Uranium mining operations on Navajo land during the Uranium boom (1950s–1980s), there are at least 450 reported cancer deaths among Navajo mining employees (Grinde and Johansen 1995). The devastation extended beyond employees to the larger communities surrounding the mines and mills. The United Nuclear Uranium mill at Church Rock on the Navajo reservation is the site of the largest nuclear accident in the US. On 16 O In July 1978, over 100 million gallons of irradiated water contaminated the Rio Puerco River, plant and animal life, and Navajos. (Grinde and Johansen 1995, Yih et al. 1995). Even now, the legacy of over 1000 abandoned mines and Uranium tailing piles is radioactive dust that continues to circulate through the land (Grinde and Johansen 1995). Yih et al. (1995) cite a statistically significant likelihood of birth defects and other health problems for women living in the vicinity of mine dumps and tailing piles.
	49	+
	50	+
	51	+With this, I conclude my speech. I urge an affirmative ballot.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-10-04 22:36:32.953

Judge

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	1	+idk

Opponent

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	1	+James Duchesneau

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	1	+0

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	1	+1

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	1	+Marlborough Steinberg Aff

Title

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	1	+SeptOct AC

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	1	+WBFL Narbonne