Is Nuclear Energy
The
Only Alternative?
By George Monbiot
09 September , 2004
Guardian
For
50 years, nuclear power has been a solution in search of a problem.
Now - oh, happy days! - two of them have arrived at once.
Suddenly, climate
change exists: George Bush says so. After years of ridicule, the greens'
jeremiads about declining oil production are now spilling from other
people's mouths. Politicians and the press have at last picked up our
arguments, and are using them as a stick with which to beat us. If we
care about climate change, if we care about future energy supplies,
then surely we should support the revival of nuclear power?
It is a question
we have to answer. A few months ago, nuclear power was finished. The
public hated it, the corporations wouldn't pay for it, the government
wouldn't risk it. Its energy white paper established that there should
be no new nuclear electricity without a full public consultation.
In May this began
to change. James Lovelock, the environmentalist famous for his "Gaia
hypothesis", made this plea in the Independent: "I am a green
and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrong-headed
objection to nuclear energy." "Green guru goes nuclear!"
the headlines said.
They weren't quite
right. Lovelock has always been an enthusiast. It is, in both senses,
a generational thing. Fifty years ago, Britain was promised that nuclear
power would generate "electricity too cheap to meter". That
dream lodged in the minds of his generation: almost all the technology's
big fans are over 60.
In July, Tony Blair
was asked by the parliamentary liaison committee to answer Lovelock's
points. "I have fought long and hard," he told the MPs, "both
within my party and outside, to make sure that the nuclear option is
not closed off... you cannot remove it from the agenda if you are serious
about the issue of climate change."
Two weeks ago, Blair's
former energy minister, Brian Wilson, bravely abandoning the convention
that articles in the Observer should be written in English, assured
us that "retrievability has been established as being deliverable.
In any case, waste is overwhelmingly a legacy issue. The waste produced
by a new generation of nuclear stations would be incremental only at
the margins." I haven't the faintest idea what this means, but
there might be a clue in the title: "Face the facts. The future
must be nuclear."
Last month, the
directors of the Center for Alternative Technology - which is supposed
to be developing alternatives to nuclear power - argued that "the
worst possible nuclear disasters are not as bad as the worst possible
climate change disasters", and suggested "a modest revival
of nuclear energy in sites where there are already nuclear installations...
to sell the idea to the skeptics".
Their premise is
surely correct. Let us use the cruel moral calculus with which we became
familiar during the arguments over the Iraq war. The daily discharges
from a plant like Sellafield probably kill several dozen people a year.
A meltdown could slaughter thousands, possibly tens of thousands. Climate
change has already killed hundreds of thousands, will kill millions,
and, if we don't do something pretty dramatic pretty soon, could kill
billions.
Nuclear power isn't
carbon-free. Mining uranium, and building and decommissioning power
stations all use oil, and concrete releases carbon dioxide as it sets.
But the total emissions, according to the International Atomic Energy
Agency, are tiny by comparison with the carbon dioxide produced by burning
fossil fuels.
It certainly looks
more expensive, when the costs of decommissioning and waste disposal
are taken into account. But what about the full costs of burning coal
and gas? These are, and should be, incalculable: how do you put a price
on global starvation?
And it may no longer
be true to say that there is no safe means of disposing of nuclear waste.
I have just read a technical report produced by the Finnish nuclear
authority Posiva which, to my untrained eye, looks pretty convincing.
The spent fuel is set in cast iron, which is then encased in copper
and dropped down a borehole. The borehole is filled with saturated bentonite,
a kind of clay. Posiva's metallurgists suggest that under these conditions
the copper barrier would be good for at least a million years.
Of course, what
can be done is not the same as what will be done. There's a danger that
Posiva's good example is used as a Potemkin village by the rest of the
nuclear industry: a showcase project which creates the impression that
the problem has been sorted out. We certainly can't expect Britain's
nuclear generators to behave as responsibly as Finland's.
On Friday, for example,
the European commission took the British government to court over Sellafield's
refusal to let European inspectors examine one of its dumps. (Didn't
we go to war over something like this?). Some 1.3 tonnes of plutonium
has been sitting around in ponds there for about 30 years. Last Tuesday,
the Guardian revealed that British Nuclear Fuels has secretly buried
10,000 cubic meters of nuclear waste from other countries. This sort
of thing goes on all the time. The UK Atomic Energy Authority used to
chuck its waste into two open holes in the cliffs beside its power station
at Dounreay. One of the shafts exploded in 1977, scattering plutonium
over the beaches, but the authority didn't bother to tell anyone for
18 years. The Ministry of Defense has dumped 17,000 tonnes of nuclear
waste on the seabed off the coast of Alderney.
This, rather than
Posiva's expensive method, is the kind of disposal we can expect from
most of the world's nuclear generators. So it's probably fair to say
that the nuclear industry will kill tens of thousands. If, as seems
ever more likely, terrorists get hold of some of this stuff, the deaths
could run into millions.
So the moral calculus
shifts a little, but still comes down on the side of nuclear power,
if that is the only alternative to burning fossil fuel. But it's not.
When Lovelock claimed that "only one immediately available source
does not cause global warming and that is nuclear energy", he was
wrong on two counts. It is not the only one, and it is not immediately
available.
A new generation
of nuclear power stations can be built only with government money: the
private sector won't carry the risk. It would take at least 10 years,
and it would cost tens or possibly hundreds of billions of pounds. The
government will not spend this money twice: it will either invest massively
in nuclear generation or invest massively in energy-saving and alternative
power. The Rocky Mountain Institute has shown that you can save seven
times as much carbon through electricity efficiencies as you can by
investing in nuclear. And you kill no one. There'd be plenty of change
too for a research program to develop cheaper solar cells, with which,
in time, almost every building in Britain could be roofed.
So the dilemma established
by James Lovelock and explored by Tony Blair and his incoherent ministers
is a false one. There need be no choice between two kinds of mass death.
We are still permitted to choose life.
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