[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Comment to Mark Lynas on Nuclear Energy

[Bill Totten]

September 26 2008

Dear Mark:

I read with surprise and dismay your "Why greens must learn to love
nuclear power" in last week's New Statesman {see below}. Your unstated
premise seems to be that those of us in the very richest nations must
find ways to continue using as much energy as we've grown addicted to
using during the past few decades, which is many times greater than the
vast majority of people living in the poorer nations use now and also
many times greater than people in the very richest nations used until a
generation or so ago. Based on that premise you claim we "must learn to
love nuclear power". If you are truly an environmentalist, and not a
shill for the nuclear industry, you should be proposing ways those of us
in the very richest nations can learn to live sustainably on far less
energy than we've become addicted to using. Physics tells us that the
energy required by any activity varies with the square of that
activity's speed: twice the speed requires four times more energy,
thrice the speed requires nine times more energy.  Slowing economic
activity (aka GDP or GNP) by half would cut our energy needs by 75%!
Are most of today's air and automobile travel, video games, round the
clock air conditioning, neon signs, "just in time delivery", and the
vast amount of other things that consume most of the energy used by the
very richest Earthlings really necessary for our health and happiness?

Bill Totten

_________________________


Why greens must learn to love nuclear power

Global warming and finite resources mean our way of life is more
threatened than ever, and it's time for the environmental movement to
face up to some hard truths

by Mark Lynas

New Statesman (September 18 2008)


"If nuclear power is the answer, it must have been a pretty stupid
question", went an oft-cited slogan of the 1970s environmental movement.
But the question was not stupid, and it is even less so today when the
challenge is even blunter: how are we going to provide for our energy
needs in a way that does not destroy, via global warming, the capacity
of our planet to support life? The hard truth is that if nuclear power
is not at least part of the answer, then answering that challenge is
going to be very difficult indeed.

Unfortunately, just by writing the sentence above, I will already have
prompted many readers to switch off. Being anti-nuclear is an article of
faith (and I use that word intentionally) for many people in today's
environmental movement and beyond, just as it was during the 1970s. That
the Green Party, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have held the same
position on the subject for thirty years could show admirable
consistency - but it could also be evidence of dogmatic closed-mindedness.

When I first broached the issue in these pages three years ago, the
reaction was extraordinary. A close acquaintance sent me a tearful email
saying that I had "destroyed" her motivation for environmental
campaigning. Other friends here in Oxford accused me - jokingly, of
course - of having formed a romantic liaison with BNFL's spokeswoman.
Just last week, after tackling the subject once again, I received a
one-line email from a well-known environmentalist accusing me of having
"done a considerable disservice to the cause of combating climate change".

So why does the nuclear issue evoke such strong reactions? For answers,
I think we need to look to nuclear's past, when today's entrenched
positions were first formed. Civil nuclear power began life as a heavily
state-subsidised industry largely designed to produce plutonium for
bombs. Civil nuclear power was part of the military-industrial complex
and shrouded in secrecy. An association with the mushroom cloud has
tainted the nuclear industry ever since - and clearly continues to be an
issue in countries such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan.

Then there is radiation. Most people are terrified of radiation
precisely because it is invisible, making it all the more threatening,
and because of its potential to cause cancer and genetic deformities.
(Many other cancer-causing agents such as food or smoke seem innocuous
by comparison.) Nuclear accidents and near-meltdowns - such as Three
Mile Island in 1979 - provoke scary headlines throughout the media, as
did popular treatments such as the film The China Syndrome (released, by
an extraordinary stroke of luck for the film-makers, just twelve days
before Three Mile Island), in which a sinister nuclear cabal covers up
evidence of an accident.

It is undeniable that nuclear fission generates radioactive by-products,
some of which will inevitably enter the environment. It is also
undeniable that exposure to radiation increases the risk of cancer
(though radiation can also be employed to treat cancers). But it is the
level of risk that counts, and here the story is less fearsome than many
would have us believe. Take Three Mile Island, which exposed local
populations to one millirem of radiation on average. This equates to
roughly what we all receive from natural sources (cosmic rays and
naturally occurring radioactive elements in the ground) every four days.
The number of deaths from Three Mile Island - the worst civil nuclear
accident ever in a western country, and one that ended the US nuclear
programme (not a single reactor has been built since) - is therefore
officially estimated to be zero.

Even Chernobyl, surely the worst-imaginable case for a nuclear disaster,
was far less deadly than most people think. In the immediate aftermath
of the explosion, 28 people died due to acute radiation sickness - all
firemen and power plant workers, some of whom had been exposed to
radiation doses as high as one million millirems. By comparison, 167 men
were killed during the Piper Alpha disaster on a North Sea oil rig in
1988. But it is the long-term effects from Chernobyl that tend to scare
people most. In a 2006 report, Greenpeace claimed that "60,000 people
have additionally died in Russia because of the Chernobyl accident, and
estimates of the total death toll for the Ukraine and Belarus could
reach another 140,000".

These figures, if correct, would make Chernobyl one of the worst single
man-made disasters of the last century. But are they correct? The United
Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation reports
4,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and young people in Belarus,
Russia and Ukraine, but very few deaths (thyroid cancer is mostly
treatable). Indeed, it concludes, "There is no evidence of a major
public health impact attributable to radiation exposure twenty years
after the accident", and no evidence of any increase in cancer or
leukaemia among exposed populations. The World Health Organisation
concludes that while a few thousand deaths may be caused over the next
seventy years by Chernobyl's radioactive release, this number "will be
indiscernible from the background of overall deaths in the large
population group". Without wishing to downplay the tragedy for the
victims - especially the 300,000 people who were evacuated permanently -
the explosion has even been good for wildlife, which has thrived in the
30 kilometer exclusion zone.

A plentiful supply of free fuel

One way of statistically assessing the safety of nuclear power versus
other technologies is to use the measure of deaths per gigawatt-year.
This technique is cited by Cambridge University's Professor David MacKay
in his book Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air (available free on
the web), and shows that in Europe, nuclear and wind power are the
safest technologies (about 0.1 death per gigawatt-year), while oil, coal
and biomass the most dangerous (above one per gigawatt-year).

A focus on statistics is also useful when assessing the financial costs
of nuclear power. The high price for nuclear waste disposal and
decommissioning - with a hefty chunk always payable from public funds -
is surely one of the environmental lobby's strongest 	arguments,
particularly if any subsidy from taxpayers means taking money away from
investment in renewables. Helen Caldicott's book Nuclear Power is Not
the Answer discusses the finances of nuclear under a chapter subheaded
"Socialised Electricity", quoting figures for nuclear's subsidy in the
US over recent decades of $70 billion. To make a direct cost comparison,
the International Energy Agency in a 2005 study looked at life-cycle
costs for all power sources - including construction costs, operations,
fuel and decommissioning - and concluded that nuclear was the cheapest
option, followed by coal, wind and gas.

But how about nuclear power's potential contribution to mitigating
global warming? One persistent myth is that once construction and
uranium mining are taken into account, nuclear is no better than fossil
fuels. However, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), total life-cycle greenhouse-gas emission per unit of
electricity is about 40g CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour, "similar to
those for renewable energy sources".

But why not ditch nuclear and focus only on renewables, as the greens
suggest? MacKay calculates that even if we covered the windiest ten per
cent of the UK with wind turbines, put solar panels on all south-facing
roofs, implemented strong energy efficiency measures across the economy,
built offshore wind turbines across an area of sea two-thirds the size
of Wales, and fully exploited every other conceivable source of
renewables (including wave and tidal power), energy production would
still not match current consumption.

This is rather different to Britain being the "Saudi Arabia of wind
power" as many in the environmental movement are fond of asserting.
Indeed, MacKay concludes that we will need to import renewable
electricity from other countries - primarily from solar farms in the
North African desert - or choose nuclear, or both. Indeed, it is vital
to stress the neither I nor MacKay nor any credible expert suggests a
choice between renewables and nuclear: the sensible conclusion is that
we need both, soon, and on a large scale if we are to phase out coal and
other fossil fuels as rapidly as the climate needs. As MacKay told me:
"We need to get building".

The UK's Sustainable Development Commission, in its 2006 report on
nuclear power, argued that new plants should be ruled out until the
existing waste problem could be solved. But what if a new generation of
nuclear plants could be designed that, instead of producing more waste
to leave as a toxic legacy for our grandchildren, actually generated
energy by burning up existing waste stockpiles? This is the solution
proposed by Tom Blees, a US-based writer, in his upcoming book
Prescription for the Planet. Blees focuses particularly on so-called
fourth-generation nuclear technology - better known as fast-breeder
reactors. While conventional thermal reactors use less than one per cent
of the potential energy in their uranium fuel, fast-breeders are sixty
times more efficient, and can burn virtually all of the energy available
in the uranium ore.

This gives these fourth-generation reactors a big advantage. As Blees
puts it: "Thus we have a prodigious supply of free fuel that is actually
even better than free, for it is material that we are quite desperate to
get rid of". Moreover, fast-breeder reactors can also run on the
"depleted" uranium left behind by conventional reactors, and help reduce
the proliferation threat by burning up plutonium stockpiles left over
from decommissioned nuclear weapons. Blees estimates that supplies of
nuclear waste and depleted uranium are sufficient to "provide all the
power needs of the entire planet for hundreds of years before we need to
mine any more uranium". Although these reactors produce plutonium -
which might be used for nuclear weapons, and could therefore pose a
proliferation threat - weapons-grade material is never isolated in the
fuel-cycle process, making fast-breeders less dangerous to international
stability than conventional reactors, and relatively simple to inspect.

But what about the waste these reactors themselves produce? Since the
by-products of fast-breeder reactors are highly radioactive, they have
much shorter half-lives - rendering them inert in a couple of centuries,
instead of the longer time over which conventional nuclear waste remains
dangerous. (Once again there is a powerful myth here - that high-level
waste from reactors remains dangerous for enormous lengths of time.
Greenpeace states that "waste will remain dangerous for up to a million
years". In fact, almost all waste will have decayed back to a level of
radio activity less than the original uranium ore in less than a
thousand years.) Fourth-generation nu clear technology is also
inherently safer than earlier designs. The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR),
discussed at length by Blees, operates at atmospheric pressure, reducing
the possibility of leaks and loss-of-coolant accidents. It is also
designed to be "walk-away safe", meaning that if all operators stood up
and left, the reactor would shut itself down automatically rather than
overheat and suffer a meltdown.

So why, given the purported advantages in safety and fuel use, have
fast-breeders not been developed commercially? The US Integral Fast
Reactor programme was shut down in 1994, possibly - Blees suggests -
because of political pressure levied on the Clinton administration by
anti-nuclear campaigners. (Even so, fourth-generation nuclear power
plants are being built in India, Russia, Japan and China.) Ironically,
the Clinton administration may have inadvertently killed off one of the
most promising solutions to global warming in an attempt to please
environmentalists. Even if the decision were to be reversed immediately,
twenty years has been lost.

It is worth remembering the contribution that nuclear power has already
made to offsetting global warming: the world's 442 operating nuclear
reactors, which produce sixteen per cent of global electricity, save 2.2
billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year compared to coal, according to
the IPCC. Blees agrees that "the most pressing issue is to shut down all
coal-fired power plants" and urges a "Manhattan Project-like" effort to
convert the world's non-renewable power to IFRs by the thousand. This
sounds daunting but it is not unprecedented: France converted its power
supply to eighty per cent nuclear in the space of just 25 years by
building about six reactors a year.

An anti-nuclear report published by the Oxford Research Group in 2007
concluded that an additional 2,500 reactors would need to be built by
2075 to significantly mitigate global warming. The report's authors
suggested that this was a "pipe-dream". But it sounds eminently
achievable to me, given that it is only a five-times increase from
today. The question is this: are those who care about global warming
prepared to reconsider their opposition to nuclear power in this new
era? We are no longer living in the 1970s. Today, the world is more
threatened even than it was during the Cold War. Only this time nuclear
power - instead of being part of the problem - can be part of the solution.

_____

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

http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2008/09/nuclear-power-lynas-reactors


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