by Rona Fried
Nuclear energy is fast coming back into favor. Citizens around the world are feeling the heat of global warming and are succumbing to politicians’ (backed by the nuclear industry) cries that nuclear is the "only" answer – and besides, it’s "safe and clean." Countries around the world are planning a nuclear renaissance – even some of the most respected environmental leaders are nodding their heads in that direction.
Our leaders tell us we have no choice – the world will demand 51% more energy by 2030 predicts the International Energy Agency in Paris. If we were to supply that with oil and coal, we would face a CO2 nightmare. They tell us renewables like wind and solar can’t meet that demand, natural gas is too expensive and hydropower taps out at 20%. All that’s left is nuclear.
I spoke on a panel at a conference last week. One of the people in the audience said he would never be in favor of having "ugly" wind turbines all over the place. Would having nukes all over the place be better? He wouldn’t have to see them.
A 2005 European Union poll found that 60% of respondents accepted lowering greenhouse gas emissions through nuclear and saw it as a clean way to reduce dependence on oil, up from 41% in 2003.
There are 442 nuclear plants operating in 31 countries, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Most of them are in the U.S. where 103 plants supply almost 20% of the electricity. France follows with 59, then Japan, with 55. Nuclear supplies 16% of the world’s electricity – the rest comes mostly from burning coal, oil and natural gas.
29 new plants have permission to go-ahead – 100 more are in government development plans for the next three decades. India and China are rushing to build dozens of reactors each; even Persian Gulf oil states are planning for them.
In the U.S., the Bush Administration’s new budget calls for a 5% increase in federal spending on renewable energy (energy ($60M increase, total: $1.2B), a 38% increase for nuclear (total: $874.2M) and 33% for fossil fuels. The President asked for nearly $500M for the Yucca Mountain waste dump alone. Then there’s the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership which would put the U.S. into the nuclear technology business. Bush requested $405M to sell nuclear fuel to nations that can’t manufacture it on their own.
The first U.S. Early Site Permit – which fast tracks nuclear plant approvals – was awarded to Exelon Generation Company’s Illinois site this year. Finland is building a giant new nuclear reactor, the first in Europe in 15 years.
Before we jump on the nuke bandwagon, accepting a "simple" solution to a complex problem of how to supply energy, let’s look deeper.
How Realistic is Nuclear?
The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), the esteemed nonprofit long led by Amory Lovins, has made the case for energy efficiency and hybrid cars for 30 years. To build enough nuclear plants to satisfy the IEA’s projected energy demands, RMI says, a new plant would need to be built every 2.4 days, at a cost of $525 billion each year.
That’s impossible, but even if we somehow managed to do it, greenhouse emissions would continue to rise because nuclear only provides electricity, which accounts for a third of fossil-fuel use.
RMI points out that nuclear construction costs are always higher than projected. But even at a typical $4-5 billion per plant, a building spree would drain so much capital that the very economic growth that’s driving energy demand in the first place would slow or even stop. Debt levels in the Third World would double.
Leaders assure us the dangers of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are behind us – plants "are so much safer now." Even if that’s true, building all those new plants has to raise the risk, doesn’t it?
All the known problems with nuclear energy would be exacerbated: intractable, dangerous wastes, vulnerability to terrorism, and threats to public health.
Leading scientists tell us we have 10 years to reduce emissions dramatically to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Every day we emit greenhouse gases, we pay a "procrastination penalty" because mitigating or adapting to climate change becomes harder and more expensive.
It takes an average of five years to build one nuclear power plant (and clean-coal power plants). Many renewable energy technologies, on the other hand, can be deployed in less than a year.
Skeptics contend the nuclear resurgence will cool when nations get entangled in the high costs and long delays typical of nuclear construction. After 14 years, construction of Argentina’s Atucha II plant was halted.
"Investors are open and interested but still need to be convinced. The financial community has long memories. They lost tens of billions of dollars during the 1980s and 1990s when utilities built the current reactors," says Caren Byrd, Morgan Stanley Executive Director, Global Power and Utilities Group.
The cost to build a reactor is a make-or-break decision for most U.S. utilities. Exelon Corporation is the largest with a market cap under $50 billion. "Company market caps are small compared with the cost of the projects, which require a significant amount of state and federal support," says Richard Myers, vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s lobbyist.
Jerry Taylor, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, says, "If the government is worried about carbon dioxide, they should tax carbon, not subsidize nuclear power. If nuclear power has merit, investors will embrace it."
How Clean and Safe is Nuclear Energy?
Nuclear proponents’ major argument is that nuclear energy can uniquely provide clean energy on a massive scale. Once a plant is operational that’s true, but what about the greenhouse gas emissions it takes to build the plant?
Policymakers look only at what comes out of the stack, ignoring the fact that substantial carbon emissions are produced by mining uranium, transporting it to construction sites and constructing the plant itself.
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, one of the authors of a British report, "Secure Energy? Civil Nuclear Power, Security and Global Warming" concludes, "The assumption has long been that the greenhouse effect is zero, but the evidence shows otherwise." The report shows that nuclear carbon emissions "lie somewhere between renewable energy sources and fossil fuels." Coal produces 755 grams of carbon per kilowatt hour, nuclear produces 10-150 grams, and wind energy produces 11-37 grams.
Van Leeuwen contends that nuclear will become more carbon polluting over time because it will be increasingly difficult to extract uranium ore and store nuclear waste, requiring more materials, equipment, and energy. The report states that even if nuclear remains at today’s level – supplying just over 2% of the world’s energy – by 2070 uranium-fueled nuclear power would produce as much carbon as gas-fired power – nearly 400 grams per kilowatt hour.
Indeed, there is no pure clean energy source, or for that matter any material we make. Carbon emissions are also generated to make raw materials and components for solar collectors and wind turbines.
The question we should be asking is which combination of energy technologies can provide the most energy with the smallest lifecycle footprint. That would include net carbon emissions, net energy consumption and net impacts on public health and the environment.
A little known fact is that about a third of the water used in Europe is used to cool electrical generators, including nuclear reactors.
Last summer, Europe’s extended drought lowered water levels in lakes and rivers – already at historic lows – forcing utilities to take some nuclear plants offline and reduce operations at others. Even though the plants secured regulatory exemptions to discharge overheated water into the environment, the utility Electricite de France, which normally exports energy, had to buy electricity on the spot market to meet demand.
Sweden shut four of its 10 nuclear reactors when a short-circuit cut power at a plant, raising fears of a dangerous design flaw. One week later, Czech utility officials shut down one of the country’s six reactors because a serious mechanical problem leaked radioactive water.
Moving onto the issue of nuclear plants being targets for terrorist attacks, Paul Leventhal, long-time head of the NGO Nuclear Control Institute said, "Nuclear power plants in today’s security environment should be regarded as strategic targets in the U.S. with the fullest protection the federal government can provide. They should be protected with ground to air missiles integrated into both the military and the Federal Aviation Administration systems with careful command and control systems. There may have to be permanent troops or special federal protection forces."
Leventhal, who died last week, held senior staff positions in the U.S. Senate on nuclear power and proliferation issues. He served as co-director of the bipartisan Senate Special Investigation of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident, and helped draft the 1974 legislation that established the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Iran and Korea are constantly in the news related to their nuclear development. The more nuclear plants the greater the chance weaponry will be produced. It only takes a fraction of the 500 pounds of plutonium a typical plant produces each year to build a weapon.
Then there’s the intractable issue of nuclear waste, which remains radioactive for a million years. If we can find somewhere to store it all – imagine the waste from all the proposed new reactors – and can afford to spend the money to do it (why not put it toward renewables?), scientists question whether current encapsulation methods will even work.
Using nuclear magnetic resonance, a very sensitive technique which detects radiation damage, scientists find that zircon, a synthetic material used to encapsulate plutonium, degrades faster than expected. It may not be able to contain the waste until it becomes safe.
"Using the technique on other materials, we can confidently predict how they will behave for thousands of years into the future," say Ian Farnan, a materials physicist at the University of Cambridge in England. The findings are particularly important for long-lived isotopes such as plutonium, uranium and neptunium.
The Nuclear & Renewable Energy Relationship
First and most importantly, if the billions of dollars in nuclear and fossil fuel subsidies were applied instead to renewable energy, the world would very quickly be supplied by truly clean energy.
Second, sending nuclear energy through transmission lines limits the space left for renewable energy. Referring to Ontario’s decision to restart units at the Bruce A nuclear generating station, Shawn-Patrick Stensil of Greenpeace Canada says, "The documents we obtained indicate that additional nuclear capacity will use almost all the existing transmission capacity, and wind power in the region will be capped at 1000 MW."
The $4 billion contract to restart the ageing nuclear reactors could cost Ontarians hundreds of millions of dollars a year if additional transmission to support the plant is not built in time. To build the transmission lines in time, the government would have to bypass community consultations and streamline environmental approvals.
Stensil says, "The Liberal government gives lip-service to green energy, but when you follow the money it’s all about nuclear power. Without multi-billion dollar repairs the eight reactors at the Bruce nuclear station would shut down over the next 10 to 15 years, freeing up transmission space for the full development of wind power in the Bruce region, one of the top regions for wind development in Ontario."
What About France?
Nuclear proponents always point to France, which gets 75-80% of its electricity from nuclear and has the lowest carbon emissions in Europe per unit of GDP, as the best example of the potential for the industry. Yet the report, "Low-Carbon Diet without Nukes in France," counters that France could phase out nuclear over the next 30-40 years while reducing carbon emissions by 40%.
Authored by The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), the report shows greenhouse emissions are high and have been rising in France, because emissions come mostly from the oil and natural gas used for residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors.
"It is not possible to significantly reduce greenhouse emissions in France without large efficiency gains in the transportation sector and in residential and commercial heating," says Dr. Arjun Makhijani, IEER president and co-author of the report, "Official devotion to nuclear energy, including heavy subsidies for plutonium fuel production [$1 billion per year], has sidelined other aspects of energy policy."
"Nuclear power creates serious long-term security issues in the form of risks of proliferation, severe nuclear accidents, and vulnerability to terrorism. It’s not a desirable trade-off."
The report recommends:
* National policies to put wind, pumped hydro, natural gas and eventually solar PV at the center of the electricity sector.
* Regulations requiring new cars to achieve an average fuel efficiency of 100 miles per gallon by 2020 and improvements in efficiency of delivery vehicles and trucks.
* Improvements in heating and cooling in the residential and commercial sector using existing technologies like co-generation and earth-source heat pumps.
* Government procurement of advanced technologies to stimulate innovation, in place of tax breaks for existing technologies.
* Abandoning reprocessing and retiring nuclear plants when they reach the end of the licensed lifetime (40 to 45 years after start up).
The Real Solutions
The Rocky Mountain Institute says: Changing every light bulb in America to compact fluorescents would close 40 large power plants, and save $10 billion a year. Building every office between now and 2050 following best practice would save the equivalent of 85 power plants and two Alaskan oil pipelines. Double the fleet efficiency of cars, and carbon emissions drop proportionately. Every dollar spent on efficiency could displace nearly seven times as much carbon as a dollar spent on new nuclear stations.
The Nuclear Control Institute says there is "ample evidence that conservation alone could eliminate the need for the existing fleet of nuclear power plants, let alone new ones."
In an April 13 article in The Age, Mark Diesendorf, director of the Sustainability Centre and a professor of environmental studies at Australia’s University of New South Wales, disputes the common perception that renewable energy can’t supply the world’s energy needs. His book, "Greenhouse Solutions with Sustainable Energy," will be published next month.
"If the fallacy that renewable energy can’t provide base-load power becomes widely accepted," he says, "it will remain a niche market rather than achieve its potential of being part of mainstream energy supply technologies."
Energy efficiency and conservation measures can reliably reduce demand for base-load and peak-load electricity. Renewable electricity sources like bio-energy, hot rock geothermal, large scale thermal solar and wind power can provide base load power, he says. Solar thermal, for example, can store heat overnight in water or rocks, or in a thermochemical store.
While one wind turbine provides an "intermittent" energy source, power output from a system of several geographically separated wind farms tends to vary smoothly and rarely falls to zero. Technological advances in wind energy storage could alleviate the need for gas turbine back-ups, but even if needed, it would amount 20-33% of wind capacity for widely dispersed wind farms. The back up would provide low cost, reliability insurance.
No back up would be needed, however, if transmission lines connect national grids as they do between Denmark and Norway. Countries would buy supplementary power from neighbors.
Renewable energy, he says, can supply over half Australia’s electricity, reducing electricity generated emissions by almost 80%. When solar electricity drops in price, there is no technical reason that renewables can’t supply 100% of grid electricity.
The real barriers are neither technological nor economic, he says, but are the immense political power of the big greenhouse gas polluting industries: coal, aluminum, iron, steel, cement, motor vehicles and parts of the oil industry.
In the end, the world can’t solve the climate change problem by technology alone. The public will have to change behaviors and values as well as light bulbs.
Even James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia Theory, is resigned to nuclear because he doesn’t believe humans are up to the task of conserving energy on a large scale. In his new book, The Revenge of Gaia, he says, "Renewable energy has a future, but we have no time now to experiment with visionary energy sources. Civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear energy now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet. We must save energy and use renewable energy, but I suspect that, like losing weight, it is easier said than done."
Commentator Ann Coulter wrote, "We will not live like the Swedes. We want 18-ton Ford Exploro-cruisers, cell phones, CDs, hot showers, blow dryers, DVD players and jet skis. Fuel is the metric of prosperity, and conservatism is an acknowledgement that we are in decline – that this is the beginning of the long bleak twilight of civilization."
Hopefully, leaders will stand up and convey a compelling vision of life in a less consumptive world where less is more. Otherwise, we could well dive into nuclear, with all its terrifying problems, because we can’t give up our culturally entrenched entitlement to waste and unlimited energy consumption.
Society needs the chance to invest appropriately in and exhaust the potential of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Few options are easy and problem-free, but these are far safer, faster, cleaner and more stable options than nuclear or fossil energy – and they give us a permanent foundation for building a sustainable post-carbon economy.
++++
Rona Fried, Ph.D. is editor of Progressive Investor, a monthly sustainable investing newsletter, and CEO of SustainbleBusiness.com.
October 2008 Update:
The Flawed Economics of Nuclear Power:
Earth Policy Institute, by Lester R. Brown, October 28, 2008
[sorry this link is no longer available]
The cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant would be 14¢ per kilowatt hour and that from a wind farm would be 7¢ per kilowatt hour. This does not include the additional costs for nuclear of disposing of waste, insuring plants against an accident, and decommissioning the plants when they wear out. The costs of nuclear waste disposal comes to a staggering $923 million per reactor-almost $1 billion each. Recent estimates show that for some reactors decommissioning costs can reach $1.8 billion per reactor. At the beginning of this decade uranium cost roughly $10 per pound; today it costs more than $60 per pound. The collective cap on nuclear operator liability in the event of a catastrophic accident is $10.2 billion. This compares with an estimate by Sandia National Laboratory that a worst-case accident could cost $700 billion, a sum equal to the recent U.S. financial bailout. So anything above $10.2 billion would be covered by taxpayers.
Loading...