NUCLEAR ENERGY CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE
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Nuclear is the problem not the solution
Our planet, its ecology and our society are faced with the incredibly serious problem of climate change. Already temperatures and seas have risen, global ice is melting, species have become extinct, storm damage has broken all records, annual deaths are measured in hundreds of thousands.
The future looks far worse with predictions of wide spread ecosystem collapse, increased spread of tropical diseases, huge numbers of extinctions, millions of refugees fleeing effected areas, flooding of our coasts, and storm damage equaling human economic output by 2060.
Sadly all this will have been caused by our own hands due to our increasing the level of Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases allow energy from the Sun to reach the earth but trap the heat the sunlight
generates. These gases include CO2, released from and clearing and burning of fossil fuels, and methane CH4) released from agricultural practices such as growing cows, sheep and rice.
We have no choice but to reduce our Greenhouse gas emissions. In this context the nuclear industry have sort to position themselves as the solution to climate friendly energy.
“With carbon emissions now threatening the very stability of the biosphere, the security of our world requires a massive transformation to clean energy. ‘Renewables' like solar, wind and biomass can help. But only nuclear power offers clean, environmentally friendly energy on a massive scale”
This quote from the World Nuclear Association is part of a huge propaganda push by the Australian government and the international nuclear industry.
Even some of the world's most prominent environmentalists are talking about nuclear power as a solution to global warming. “There is no sensible alternative to nuclear power if we are to sustain civilisation” writes James Lovelock, pre-eminent world leader in the development of environmental consciousness.
ENVIRONMENTALISM
The propaganda push is an astonishing distortion of the facts and a bizarre perversion of environmentalism. Environmentalism can essentially be summed up as the idea that each generation should leave the earth in the same condition it was in when it inherited it. This is known as sustainability. What some people who call themselves environmentalists are doing is to say that we have to choose between two environmentally unsustainable industries. These people are not environmentalists. The continuation of the nuclear industry will leave a legacy of contamination and destruction that will threaten all life on earth.
The continuation of the fossil fuel industry at levels above the carbon cycle of the earth will severally damage the earth's life support systems. This fact isn't in dispute by proponents of nuclear power as a solution to climate change. What is being proposed is that we have no choice but to swap one form of disastrous pollution for another. There is an alternative we can pursue energy conservation and sustainable clean renewable alternatives.
The concept of the nuclear industry as saviour of the planet leaves the writer of this article almost speechless. It is so disastrous for the environment that I am left thinking that its just propaganda. They don't care about the environment, and are just using the situation to the advantage of there industry so as to maximise there own profits.
NUCLEAR WONT SOLVE THE PROBLEM
However, nuclear power is neither a viable solution to world energy needs, nor to global warming.
At Present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world. If as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power where to replace fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 new 1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the US since 1978 this proposal is less than practical. To put this in perspective: it takes 10 to 15 years from inception to build a single nuclear reactor. It simply isn't feasible to build enough new nuclear reactors in the time scale that they are needed.
Furthermore, Jan-Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith argue:
“The use of nuclear power causes, … under the most favourable conditions, approximately one-third as much CO 2 -emission as gas-fired electricity production. The rich uranium ores required to achieve this reduction are, however, so limited that if the entire present world electricity demand were to be provided by nuclear power, these ores would be exhausted within three years. Use of the remaining poorer ores in nuclear reactors would produce more CO 2 emission than burning fossil fuels directly.” ( Nuclear Power: the Energy Balance www.oprit.rug.nl/deenen/ )
NUCLEAR AS POLLUTER
In the US , where much of the world's uranium is enriched, the enrichment facility at Paducah , Kentucky , requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50 per cent of global warming.
This facility and another at Portsmouth , Ohio , release from leaky pipes 93 per cent of the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gas emitted yearly in the US . CFC gas is the main culprit responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion. But CFC is also a global warmer, 10,000 to 20,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel at all of its stages – the mining and milling of uranium, the construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste.
NUCLEAR ISNT SAFE
Nuclear power isn't as proponents claim - safe. Human error, natural disasters, terrorism and war can prove catastrophic. Humanity seems to have a very short memory. After the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 in the Ukraine the international case for nuclear power was basically lost.
“In Spring 1986 the world's worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, 80 kilometres North of Kiev in the former USSR . On 26 April 1986 at 1:23 AM a core meltdown occurred at reactor no 4, creating a chemical explosion and a fireball which blew off the reactors 1000 ton shell and concrete lid. Some 190 tons of highly radioactive uranium and graphite were expelled, spewing radioactive substances to a height of more than one kilometre into the earth's atmosphere.
It is estimated that the explosion released more than 200 times the radioactive fallout of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, spreading radioactive fallout over large parts of the northern hemisphere.
The radioactive by product of the Chernobyl plant explosion will remain in the affected area for some 48000 years. An Official exclusion zone around the plant remains in place, extending for 18 miles. It is one of the most dangerous regions on earth.”
Info courtesy of a backgrounder on Chernobyl prepared by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. www.wagingpeace.org
“At least 3 million children in Belarus , Ukraine and the Russian federation require medical treatment due to the Chernobyl accident. Not until 2016, at the earliest, will we know the full number of those likely to develop serious medical conditions.”
Kofi Annan Secretary General of the United Nations
What is astonishing about Chernobyl isn't that it happened, or how bad it was. What's astonishing is that it only released some 3% of the radiation in the reactor core. If all the radioactive material had been released Europe would now all be a radioactive wasteland. If Europe had had reactors during world war two it would now be totally uninhabitable.
Nuclear isn't safe. Nuclear is the single most dangerous activity that humanity continues to engage in. To make matters worse, a study released last week by the National Academy of Sciences shows that the cooling pools at nuclear reactors, which store 10 to 30 times more radioactive material than that contained in the reactor core, are subject to catastrophic attacks by terrorists, which could unleash an inferno and release massive quantities of deadly radiation -- significantly worse than the radiation released by Chernobyl, according to some scientists. This vulnerable high-level nuclear waste contained in the cooling pools at 103 nuclear power plants in the US includes hundreds of radioactive elements that have different biological impacts in the human body, the most important being cancer and genetic diseases.
NUCLEAR IS EXPENSIVE
Nuclear power isn't cheap as proponents cheap. In fact if all environmental costs are included it's astonishingly expensive.
Nuclear energy has received huge subsidies since its inception: government-funded R&D, uranium enrichment, security systems, and insurance from accidents. In the USA the latter subsidy was institutionalized by the Price-Anderson Act which initially limited the liabilities of a single nuclear accident to $560 million.
Much of the data claiming that nuclear energy is cheap comes from industry and government sources that cannot be verified. But we now have much better data from two countries where the electricity industry has been corporatised and privatized: USA and UK . Here the market has revealed the real costs of nuclear energy.
In the USA , no nuclear power stations have been ordered since 1978, primarily because of poor economics. (Initially the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 discouraged nuke building, but memories of that accident have faded and nowadays it is economics that rules out this technology.) However, there are signs that the Bush administration may be preparing to grant a new round of massive subsidies to nuclear power.
A 2003 report on "The Future of Nuclear Power" (to access the report, just Google the title) from an MIT team estimated that a hypothetical new nuclear power station in the USA could produce electricity at US 6.7 c/kWh (Aus 9 c/kWh). For comparison, wind power in the USA is currently priced in the range 4-5 c/kWh, and Aus 7-9 c/kWh in Australia depending upon siting and size of wind farm.
In the UK , when the electricity industry was deregulated, nuclear energy had to be subsidised from a levy on electricity amounting to 1.2 billion pounds sterling per year. That is equivalent to a subsidy on each unit of nuclear electricity of UK 3 p/kWh (about A 6 c/kWh), making the total cost of a unit of nuclear electricity almost double the price of wind power at excellent sites in the UK .
Nuclear power plants produce dangerous amounts of radioactive emissions, leave a legacy of massive amounts of nuclear waste, and can be used to produce nuclear weapons. Each typical 1000-megawatt nuclear reactor manufactures 33 tonnes of thermally hot, intensely radioactive waste per year. Already more than 80,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste sits in cooling pools next to the 103 US nuclear power plants, awaiting transportation to a storage facility yet to be found. This dangerous material will travel through 39 states on roads and railway lines for the next 25 years.
NO SOLUTION FOR NUCLEAR WASTE
No solution to the problem of storage of nuclear waste exists. Nuclear waste needs to be isolated from the elements for thousands of years. The cost of doing this is simply staggering. Seismic activity, adverse weather, and wars pose serious and real threats to any nuclear waste store. Communities across the world intensely resist the dumping of nuclear waste in their backyard.
Plutonium 239, one of the most dangerous elements known to humans, is so toxic that one-millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. More than 200kg is made annually in each 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant. Plutonium is handled like iron in the body, and is therefore stored in the liver, where it causes liver cancer, and in the bone, where it can induce bone cancer and blood malignancies. On inhalation it causes lung cancer. It also crosses the placenta, where, like the drug thalidomide, it can cause severe congenital deformities. Plutonium has a predisposition for the testicle, where it can cause testicular cancer and induce genetic diseases in future generations.
Plutonium lasts for 500,000 years, living on to induce cancer and genetic diseases in future generations of plants, animals and humans. Plutonium is also the fuel for nuclear weapons – only 5kg is necessary to make a bomb and each reactor makes more than 200kg per year. Therefore every country with a nuclear power plant can theoretically make 40 bombs a year.
FUEL FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS
The international nuclear safeguards system has been discredited time and time again. Retired diplomat Professor Richard Broinowski, in his 2003 book Fact or Fission? The Truth About Australia's Nuclear Ambitions , details how the safeguarding of Australian nuclear exports has been steadily weakened in many ways. He argues that accounting for Australian nuclear exports is “tenuous, and subject to distortion or abuse.”
“Uranium mining is a risky business that threatens the health of workers, local communities and the surrounding environment. It takes a naturally occurring hazard that has effectively been in a geological cocoon and concentrates this in a powdered form that can move through wind and water. It interrupts the flow and reduces the quality of ground and surface waters at the mine site and releases gases that can cause cancer and other diseases. It also creates large amounts of long lived radioactive waste product known as tailings. These routinely contain around 80 per cent of the radioactivity of the original uranium ore and are difficult to control and isolate. They pose a direct threat to humans and the wider environment for thousands of years”.
With the push for nuclear energy and a tripling of the price of uranium there is a massive push on for an increase in uranium mining in Australia . Western Mining Corporation is proposing to triple the size of the Roxby mine in South Australia , taking it from about 10 per cent to 30 per cent of world output. This proposal involves a huge open cut mine and water usage for one day of at least a massive 100 million litres – in the driest state of the world's driest continent.
The Great Artesian Basin supports many mound springs – unique arid land habitats that have world-class natural and cultural significance which support unique, rare and delicate micro flora and fauna. They have been adversely affected by WMC's water take. They are also culturally significant for the Arabunna, the traditional Aboriginal custodians of the land.
The Arabanna have a long history of opposing uranium mining on their land. WMC has a long history of divide and conquer, finding Aboriginal people they can negotiate with for mining. The situation is so severe that Arabunna elder Uncle Kevin Buzzacott attempted to charge Hugh Morgan, previous WMC CEO, with genocide.
The nuclear industry is currently at full tilt promoting the fantasy that nuclear power is an answer to global warming, with the Australian government's enthusiastic backing in its quest to increase uranium mining. Not only is nuclear not an answer to the world's energy crisis, it will leave a toxic legacy for all future generations; it produces global warming gases, it is far more expensive than any other form of electricity generation, and it produces the materials for nuclear weapons.
Hillel Freedman, Nuclear Free Australia ( www.nukefreeaus.org )
Reading : Hot Politics Testing Times – a feature on nuclear issues in Australia available with the June edition of Friends of the Earth's publication C hain Reaction .
Acknowledgements.
The author wishes to acknowledge reprinted material from articles by Mark Diesendorf and Helen Caldicott Resources
Nuclear Free Australia www.nukefreeaus.org
Future Energy www.futureenergy.org
Sustainability Centre www.sustainabilitycentre.com.au
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation www.waging peace.org
Nuclear Policy Research Institute www.nuclearpolicy.org
World Information Service on Energy (WISE) www.antenna.nl/wise
Nuclear what then are the alternatives?
Adrian Whitehead futureenergy.org
We have exposed the lies behind the claims of the nuclear industry and will paint a picture of how we can create a would which is climate friendly and socially just through the adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Renewables can they do they do it? Yes they can!
A clean energy future is possible. This future has two key elements, energy efficiency and renewable energy. Implementing energy efficiency is the most cost effective way of reducing Greenhouse gases however we will still need power even if massive energy efficiency gains are made.
The home is a good place to start. People have built homes for decades that require no or almost no heating or cooling other than that of the sunlight or air flow. It would be easy for government to mandate all new homes to be built to these standards and old homes improved on sale or new leasing agreement. Yet governments don't and instead people put air conditioners on their homes which in turn fuels the demand for new power stations to meet growing peak electricity demands at summer time.
Other opportunities exist including improving lighting efficiency and use or buying energy efficient white goods.
Likewise in business there exists huge opportunities to improve efficiencies. Alcoa, which uses 28% of Victoria 's power, and is subsidised 100 million dollars per year to do this, could improve the efficiency of its Portland smelter by 30% by using modern equipment. Many business could save large amounts money by simply looking at improving the efficiency of their heating and cooling and lighting within their building stock. Urban design and the provision of good public transport and freight infrastructure are also critical to reducing our energy use.
Renewables already supply 21% of the worlds energy (mainly hydro and biomass), with wind power and solar power growing annually at 30% and 20%.
Today you can buy electricity made from 100% renewable sources but you will need to pay a bit more for it. The only reason renewables can't compete on price with coal or gas is that the damage that coal or gas do to the environment and people are not factored into the price.
Despite this wind power (the cheapest form of renewable electricity production) will be cost competitive or cheaper with electricity produced from gas plants in 10 years and coal power plants in 15 years due to technological improvements and scales of production.
The doubling of peak electricity pricing would enable new solar photo voltaic cells designed here in Australia to produce electricity for the market at a profit, and send a price signal to those using air conditioners
to insulate and use external blinds instead.
Supplying our energy needs with renewables will require a mix of different types, some reworking of our power grids which are design to feed power in from large centralised coal plants, and the use of some peaking power such as hydro. Wind and solar are viable now, while wave power, geothermal "hot dry rocks", and others are close to commercial production, despite a lack of government support for the renewable sector in general. It is simply a matter of investing the billions of dollars in renewables and not spending them on building new nuclear or coal power plants.
Can we afford to? We have no choice, any failure to act and spend the required money now will only increase the magnitude of the disaster we face, and the billions and billions of dollars dealing with the problems.
Goesquestration, the storage of CO2 in underground, is touted as the saving grace of the coal industry. The technology is 20 to 30 years away for implementation, time we don't have if we want to prevent the worst of climate change. Goesequestration if proved technically feasible would add between 6-8 cents per kW hour to the cost of coal electricity which is already 3-4 cents per kW hour, making more expensive than wind power today which cost between 7-9 cents per kW hour.
Many experts are predicting we are either in or 2-3 years away from reaching global peak oil production, the amount of oil produced reduce fall from then on. Oil demand is still growing so oil will become very expensive and prohibitive as a transport fuel. This gives us the possibility of moving our transport sector to a clean energy, though some are suggestion converting coal to a liquid to replace oil and using nuclear power to provide the energy to do it.
Energy efficiency and renewable technology provide the world with an opportunity to provide and clean, sustainable and socially just energy future for the world.
Adrian Whitehead Futuerenergy.org
(www.futureenergy.org)