[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] How nuclear power can save the planet

[Bill Totten]

Increased use of nuclear (an outright competitor to coal as a deliverer
of baseload power) is essential to combat climate change

by Mark Lynas

New Statesman (August 14 2008)


The location for this year's Camp for Climate Action - outside the
Kingsnorth power station in Kent - was well chosen: it is here that E.ON
wants to build the first new coal-fired plant in the UK in nearly thirty
years. With coal the most global-warming-intensive fuel on the market,
and six more coal plants in the pipeline if Kingsnorth gets the
go-ahead, there is a clear line to be drawn in the sand.

But the Kent protesters are not the only ones banging the drum against
coal. Dr James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space
Studies and probably the best-known climatologist alive, has been
travelling the globe trying to persuade politicians that the best way to
rein in future climate change is by a rapid phase-out of coal-burning
power stations. First stop was Germany, where Hansen met the environment
minister, Sigmar Gabriel. Germany is planning more than twenty new
plants, despite Chancellor Angela Merkel's much-vaunted determination to
combat climate change. The meeting ended without success. "We agreed to
disagree, as we were both trying to be cordial", Hansen reports.

Next stop was Britain, where Hansen received a letter from the
environment minister Phil Woolas in response to his earlier petitioning
of Gordon Brown to lead a moratorium on new coal plants. The letter -
available on Hansen's website - is notable for its "self-deception" (in
Hansen's words): the government pretends that new fossil-fuel plants can
be built almost with impunity as long as they are "carbon-capture
ready", allowing "economic retrofit of the technology when commercially
available, by 2020 if possible". In essence, the government is putting
all its environmental eggs in the basket of a technology that has not
yet been invented. Self- deception indeed.

Then Hansen moved on to Japan, where carbon emissions are rising -
almost entirely due, as in the UK, to a resurgence of coal burning in
power generation. First, Hansen fired off a letter to the prime
minister, Yasuo Fukuda, restating the urgency of the situation - that
the "global climate is approaching critical tipping points" and that we
are already in the zone of extreme danger even at current levels of
atmospheric carbon dioxide. Then came the ask: Hansen begged Japan to
use its platform at the G8 summit to demonstrate world leadership on the
issue of a global phase-out of coal emissions between 2010 and 2030,
with most of the world's remaining coal reserves allowed to remain in
the ground. He was, as anyone who reads the papers will know, disappointed.

Hansen's message is unpalatable to governments because he states his
points bluntly and with constant references to irrefutable scientific
evidence. "A strategy based on twenty per cent, fifty per cent or eighty
per cent carbon dioxide emission reduction is doomed to failure", he
asserts, because of the long atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide (a
significant fraction hangs around for 1,000 years or more). It is the
total carbon input to the atmosphere that counts, not the time taken to
burn it. Yet emissions reduction is the only strategy talked about at
the global level. A more realistic approach would be to adopt a
"production cap" - as advocated by Oliver Tickell in his current book
Kyoto2 - and mine only as much fossil fuel as the planet can withstand
us burning. The long-term objective, over a century or so, is to reduce
carbon levels to 350 parts per million at most (they are at 385 ppm and
rising fast), but that is something no leading politician is yet
prepared to contemplate.

Hansen is a self-declared "agnostic" on nuclear power, a topic which
recently landed the writer George Monbiot in hot water when he admitted
in his Guardian environment column that he "no longer cared" if nuclear
power was part of the answer. The article upset many in the
environmental movement. I would take a stronger position myself: that
increased use of nuclear (an outright competitor to coal as a deliverer
of baseload power) is essential to combat climate change, but clearly
there need to be some significant technical advances in nuclear fission
if it is to become acceptable to many in the west.

There is plenty of opportunity for improvement: one design of
fast-breeder plant, the integral fast reactor - unfortunately mothballed
by the Clinton administration for political reasons - could generate
power by burning up nuclear waste, leaving only short-lived by-products
unfit for nuclear bombs (and therefore weapons proliferation). The
reactor design is also close to "fail-safe": it automatically shuts down
if things begin to go wrong, because the safety mechanisms are inherent,
and do not depend on human or mechanical intervention.

Such "fourth-generation" nuclear power is still a dream, but potentially
a much more realistic one than carbon capture and storage. Deployed
entirely in tandem with renewables, fourth-generation nuclear could
offer a complete decarbonisation of the world's electricity supply - and
on the sort of timetable that Dr Hansen and his fellow climatologists
demand.

_____

Mark Lynas is a climate change writer and activist, author of
theacclaimed book High Tide (2004) and fortnightly columnist for the New
Statesman. He was selected by National Geographic as an
'EmergingExplorer' for 2006, and blogs on www.marklynas.org

http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2008/08/lynas-climate-nuclear-coal

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