Nuclear energy: born again?

The cover story of the September 2007 of The Economist magazine is "Nuclear power's new age". It contains an essay entitled "Atomic Renaissance" that opens with the following paragraph:

Over the next few months America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) expects to receive 12 applications to build new nuclear-power reactors at seven different sites. It is preparing to see plans for another 15 at 11 more locations next year. These will be the first full applications to build new nuclear plants in America for 30 years. If they are all successful, the number of reactors in the country will increase by roughly a third. The output of nuclear electricity would grow even more sharply—the new reactors would be more powerful than older ones. The new enthusiasm for building reactors means America's long-awaited “nuclear renaissance” is about to become reality.

There is a battle being waged between the nuclear and renewable energy (primarily wind) industries over which will become the anchor of our energy infrastructure in a world undergoing climate change. It is in very high gear. (GW)

Reaction time: climate change and the nuclear option

By Ian Lowe
ABC News.com
September 14, 2007

There is no objective truth about the future performance, cost and safety of nuclear reactors. There is a range of defensible opinions, as well as some that appear indefensible.

Even when dealing with the history, some people are selective in choosing evidence that seems to support their position.

We are all influenced by our experience, our culture and our values in trying to make sense of complex and uncertain issues. So you should read all statements about the nuclear issue - including this essay - with a critical eye.

The Fox Report of 1977, on the proposed Ranger uranium mine, made the telling point that nuclear power, while it had been relatively safe and clean until that time as a means of generating electricity, had two fundamental problems: it produced radioactive waste that would need to be stored for immensely long periods, and it provided fissile material that could be diverted to produce weapons.

The report argued that it would be irresponsible to contribute to a worsening of these problems without convincing evidence that they had been solved, or were at least likely to be.

After considering these arguments, I accepted that I had been wrong to support nuclear power and became more critical.

I now found that the claims about the economic case for nuclear power were very dubious, usually based on careful selection of the past evidence or heroic assumptions about future costs.

Back in the UK, I was involved in the late '70s debate about a bizarre proposal by the electricity authority for a crash program to build 36 nuclear reactors in 15 years to avert the coming energy crisis.

There was at the time no evidence that an energy crisis was imminent, but when we analysed the demand for concrete, steel and other materials that would be produced by the proposal, we found that it would itself have created a crisis, which the authority would then claim to be solving!

So by the time I returned to a permanent appointment at Griffith University in 1980, I had become very jaundiced about the claims of the nuclear power industry.

Safety

By then it was clear that nuclear power was expensive, but the industry still had a reasonable safety record and could justifiably claim that it killed and injured fewer workers than did the production of coal-fired electricity.

Even this argument was subsequently weakened in 1979 by the Three Mile Island accident; the reactor almost melted down and was effectively destroyed. While good management of the crisis averted a major radiation leak, it is sobering to reflect that the same basic design is used in most of the world's reactors.

We were not so lucky with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which spread a swathe of radioactive pollution across Europe from the Ukraine to the western parts of the British Isles. That marked the end of public support for the European nuclear power program.

The level of nuclear power then steadily declined, as old reactors were retired and not replaced.

The Thatcher government tried to prop up the nuclear industry by enacting an obligation for a minimum percentage of power to come from sources other than fossil fuels, but instead this kick-started the UK wind energy industry.

By the end of the 20th century, nuclear power looked like a dying industry.

Re-badging

Then something very strange happened.

A small group in the UK nuclear industry concocted the idea of re-badging it as the answer to global climate change.

This struck me as a very improbable line. The nuclear power industry had previously used every trick in the book to disparage environmental activists, who had been critical of the industry's record.

But desperate times call for desperate measures.

The nuclear lobby embraced the science of global climate change, aligning themselves with their old foes such as WWF and Greenpeace.

The industry embarked on a very clever campaign of briefing journalists and opinion-makers with the new line: global climate change is a serious problem, clean energy is needed, renewables are unreliable so the world needs nuclear power, which they re-defined as being "clean".

Though the claim to cleanliness was dubious, it was seized on by some politicians and journalists.

Their enthusiasm was perhaps a sign of desperation, born of a desire either to cling to the old idea of centralised electricity or to find a "silver bullet" for climate change now that the urgency of the issue was plain.

This campaign had not yet reached Australia when I spoke to the Press Club two years ago, saying that nuclear power was not a sensible solution to climate change, but I was concerned that it might be transferred here from Western Europe.

Not long afterwards, the tide turned on public perceptions of global warming and the studied inaction of the Howard Government was finally shown by its own polling to be indefensible.

Then the Prime Minister returned from Washington in mid-2006 to announce that Australia needed to consider nuclear energy as an option. Interviewed on AM, Howard said:

"What I am saying to the Australian people is: let us calmly and sensibly examine what our options are. Let's not set our faces against examining all of those options and when all the facts are in, we can then make judgments. But I don't think all the facts are in in relation to nuclear, because we've had very little debate on this issue over the last 25 or 30 years, because everybody's said, 'oh well, you can't possibly even think about it.' That's changed a lot."

It wasn't clear at that point that things had changed a lot, but the Prime Minister set about ensuring that they did.

Nuclear by Tuesday

A task force described by John Clarke as "people who want nuclear power by Tuesday" was hastily put together. The process was so rushed that Howard was only able to give the waiting press the names of some members of the taskforce on the day he announced its formation.

In a reminder of the truism expressed by an anonymous American as "Facts ain't given, they're gotten!", the task force seems to have set about finding facts that would show the nuclear industry in the best possible light.

The subsequent report by Dr Ziggy Switkowski and his colleagues was hailed by the Prime Minister and his media cheer-squad as giving the green light for the nuclear industry: "a glowing future" was the Freudian slip in a headline used by The Australian.

That section of the press even rang me to ask if I had been persuaded by the "rational argument" of the report to "move beyond my emotional opposition to nuclear power."

I told them that my opposition to nuclear power was rational and based on both the experience of the last 50 years and a sober assessment of global futures.

Change is coming

Energy is essential for civilised living, but the current approach of basing our energy-intensive lifestyle on fossil fuels is unsustainable. We need to make fundamental changes if our society is to survive.

The nuclear option does not make sense on any level: economically, environmentally, politically or socially. It is too costly, too dangerous, too slow and has too small an impact on global warming.

That is why most of the developed world is rejecting nuclear power in favour of renewable energy and improved efficiency.

We should be a responsible global citizen and set serious targets to reduce our greenhouse pollution, but we should not go down the nuclear path.

The rational response to our situation is to combine vastly improved efficiency with an investment in renewable energy technologies.

Professor Ian Lowe is the president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and author of the latest Quarterly Essay, Reaction Time: Climate Change & the Nuclear Option. The essay will be launched by Robyn Williams at the Brisbane Writers' Festival on Saturday September 15.