Nuclear power
It’s as though the 1980s never went away. In Germany, green protestors chain themselves to railway tracks
to block a train transporting reprocessed nuclear fuel. Meanwhile, in the UK, the coalition government approves
eight locations for new nuclear power plants, completing a U-turn from the anti-nuclear stance of the first half of the decade.
Ever since the first nuclear power plant began commercial operation at Calder Hall in Cumbria in 1956, the industry has rarely been far from controversy. Today, the tensions that surround the great bogeyman of the environmental movement are more acute than ever, and nuclear energy finds itself on the fault line of those great geopolitical issues of our time: energy security and climate change.
And right now, the momentum appears firmly with the nuclear industry, as governments are increasingly persuaded by the case for nuclear power. Nuclear is poised to scale up dramatically. According to the World Nuclear Association (WNA), the industry advocacy body, there are currently 442 nuclear plants around the world, with a further 63 under construction, 156 planned and another 322 proposed.
Nuclear generating capacity worldwide is currently 377 gigawatts (GW), but WNA projections indicate that this will rise to between 1,100GW and 3,500GW by 2060. Nuclear’s share of world electricity production is currently around 15 per cent; the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reckons that this could rise to 25 per cent by 2050, an expansion that would need capacity to more than triple over the next 40 years.
The largest concentration of nuclear power plants can be found, perhaps unexpectedly, in Europe: the EU has some 150 nuclear reactors in operation, generating about a third of the region’s electricity; in France, which has the largest collection of nuclear reactors (58), nuclear power accounts for 75 per cent of electricity generation. But the Asia-Pacific region is the new centre of gravity for nuclear power, with China embarking upon a six-fold increase in nuclear capacity to 50GW by 2020, and planning a further 110 nuclear plants; India aims to add 40 reactors in the next decade or so.
At least 25 countries are considering joining the nuclear club in the next decade, including Thailand, Turkey, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam. Jordan argues nuclear power will ease the pressure on its resources by providing energy for mammoth water-desalination projects; Venezuela has calculated that it can use nuclear power for domestic energy and sell its oil abroad.
Financial realities
So what’s driving this passion for nuclear power? The industry pushes its carbon-free credentials (although Dr Ian Fairlie, a radiation-risk consultant, points out that the energy-intensive mining, milling and transport of uranium ore, fuel enrichment, fuel reprocessing and storage, radioactive waste treatment and eventual waste disposal result in considerable CO2 emissions) but its attraction is less to do with altruism and more to with financial realities. ‘Support for nuclear power is all to do with energy security and economics,’ says Malcolm Grimston, a senior research fellow at London-based think tank Chatham House. ‘As long as you can build a nuclear power plant in reasonable time and to cost, nuclear should be the most economical option.’
Russia’s belligerent behaviour has also focused minds, according to Ian Hore-Lacy, spokesman for the WNA. ‘To a greater or lesser degree, countries around the world are buying into nuclear for three reasons: basic economics, energy security and constraining carbon emissions. We’ve all noticed how [Russian president Vladimir] Putin turned the gas taps off in Ukraine, and we can see those long pipelines feeding Europe from Russia and Africa, and the US army’s fuel supplies are essentially dependent on the Middle East.’
Others are more circumspect in their assessment of nuclear’s momentum. ‘It’s too early to say that the world is definitely experiencing a nuclear renaissance,’ says Dr Mervyn O’Driscoll, a senior lecturer in history at University College Cork and an expert in nuclear energy, history and strategy. ‘Rather, what we are seeing now is a re-evaluation of the wider utility of nuclear power, and there are several factors that lead to a more positive assessment of nuclear energy in the energy mix of some key countries. Both energy security and climate change are playing a large role in the decisions of states and regional organisations.’
Environmental groups remain sceptical of these geopolitical arguments. ‘The nuclear industry has done a really good job of lobbying governments around the world, and the public – reinventing itself as a sensible option,’ says Ben Ayliffe, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace. ‘We’re seeing a natural reaction to that from governments – they’re between a rock and a hard place; they have to be seen to be doing something about climate change while keeping the lights on at the same time.’
Greenpeace is also uneasy about the impact that nuclear power might have on alternative forms of energy. ‘The danger is that we will miss the boat with renewables,’ says Ayliffe. ‘We’re at a crossroads. Either we can revolutionise the way in which we produce energy, with smart grids, renewables and combined heat and power, or we can look to the past and stick with an incredibly inefficient energy system. Nuclear will lock us into this antiquated system for the next 40 or 50 years. If we do that, we will miss the opportunity to really reap the benefits of renewable technologies.
‘Nuclear is too little, too late,’ he continues. ‘It’s not practical as a key pillar of energy strategy. We have very limited time to make the cuts required – nuclear won’t do it for us. For every dollar you spend on energy-efficiency technologies, you get seven times the return you would for nuclear power.’
Yet others argue that to push for renewable energy at the expense of nuclear is to miss the point. ‘Renewables and nuclear don’t compete,’ says Grimston. ‘Renewables are not suited to the base-load [24-hour] energy approach that nuclear provides. They’re more intermittent. You can’t replace nuclear with renewables – you can only replace it with coal or gas. It’s economically illiterate to say that if you improve energy efficiency by 20 per cent, then you get a 20 per cent cut in energy use.’
Safety issues
Safety, and what on Earth to do with nuclear waste, stand at the heart of the nuclear debate. Environmentalists warn of the risks of proliferation or of material being obtained by terrorist groups (the IAEA has recorded more than 600 cases since the early 1990s of illicit trafficking of radioactive or nuclear material).
And – to state the achingly obvious – you don’t want to cut corners with radioactive materials. Spent fuel from nuclear reactors will remain extremely radioactive for millennia. ‘Spent fuel requires very heavy shielding. If you were to stand in front of an unshielded spent fuel rod, you would receive enough radiation in a few minutes to kill you,’ says Fairlie.
Spent fuel gives off alpha, beta and gamma rays, with the last of these generally of most concern. ‘The unstable radionuclides in spent fuel decay, and in so doing, they emit radiation,’ explains Fairlie, who was scientific secretary to CERRIE, an independent UK committee that studied the risks of internal radiation. ‘Spent fuel contains fission products, such as caesium and strontium, which have half lives [the length of time it takes for half of the atoms in a given amount of a substance to decay] of 30 years. You need to keep them out of the environment for at least 300 years. It also contains a whole range of activation products – uranium, plutonium, americium, curium. Some of these will remain active for millions of years. So it’s my contention that the dangers of exposure to radioactive waste are such that we should be looking for safer means of generating electricity.’
Given the dangers that Fairlie outlines, it may come as a surprise to learn that, across the planet, there is no long-term, final deep geological disposal site for high-level waste. This waste, which encompasses both spent fuel and reprocessing wastes, represents around three per cent of all nuclear waste by volume but about 98 per cent of its radioactivity. ‘What nuclear power hasn’t done is solve its waste issue,’ says Mike Childs, head of climate change at Friends of the Earth. ‘Any industry that produces radioactive waste that lasts for thousands of years and doesn’t know what to do with it is pushing it to call itself clean.’
Each year, 7,000 cubic metres of high-level waste are typically produced in the EU alone. According to the WNA, high-level waste is increasing by about 12,000 tonnes worldwide every year, which is the equivalent of a two-storey structure built on a basketball court. ‘Interim storages are no long-term solution as they need continuous maintenance and oversight,’ says a European Commission spokeswoman. ‘As they are typically close to or on the surface, there is, in addition, a risk of accidents, including airplane crashes, fires or earthquakes.’
Since last autumn, EU states have been legally obliged to identify disposal facilities; the first is supposed to be operational by 2025, although the appetite to achieve this remains uncertain. ‘It has been a particularly unedifying experience watching the industry attempt to secure a final depository,’ says Ayliffe. ‘The one area in the UK that has been identified as suitable is in the Lake District National Park – there’s just a possibility that walkers, locals and tourists will object to that.’
Fairlie and other scientists feel deeply uneasy about the entire process, and question whether nuclear waste can be stored safely in perpetuity. ‘We just don’t know,’ says Fairlie. ‘Humanity’s recorded history goes back perhaps 8,000 years, but the half lives of these radioactive constituents are often much longer than that. We will give this serious problem to our children and future generations for which we get the benefits. There is surely an ethical question about this.’
Fairlie also points to nuclear’s current place in the wider energy mix – around 16 per cent of UK electricity, which, in turn, is around 20 per cent of all energy production. ‘There comes a point when you think of the relatively small amount of energy we get from nuclear, is it really worth the candle?’
Any discussion about nuclear safety is inextricably linked with the Chernobyl disaster (see Chernobyl’s deadly legacy), but the nuclear industry argues that such an incident could never happen again. ‘To blame the nuclear industry for Chernobyl is like blaming the aviation industry for the Hindenburg disaster,’ says the WNA’s Hore-Lacy, who says nuclear power plants have been collectively operating for the equivalent of 14,240 years and seen just two accidents – at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Chernobyl is ‘irrelevant’ and couldn’t be repeated, according to Hore-Lacy. Most plants in operation are second generation (although the UK still operates four first-generation plants). ‘The majority of new builds are third generation,’ he says. ‘They are all safe – if you’re living next door to a power plant where there is a serious problem, you are still safe, whether it’s second or third generation.’
Yet despite extensive modifications, the safety features of early Soviet-designed reactors don’t conform to Western standards, according to the WNA. Three former Eastern Bloc countries – Bulgaria, Slovakia and Lithuania – were forced to close eight Soviet-era nuclear power reactors as a condition of joining the EU. However, 16 early Soviet reactors remain in operation, 15 of them in Russia.
The 16th, in Armenia, is the most problematic. Armenia’s sole nuclear power plant, Metsamor, is a 1970s VVER-440/230 pressurised-water reactor located in a highly seismic area. It was closed after the 1988 Yerevan earthquake, but reopened in 1995. Today, Metsamor supplies about 35 per cent of Armenia’s total energy output and has been the subject of rigorous updating. It’s scheduled to close in 2016, but the Armenian government says that this is conditional on a new plant being commissioned.
‘The problems of nuclear accidents – even if infrequent – and waste need to be properly addressed and fully factored into the cost of nuclear power,’ says O’Driscoll. ‘Catastrophic accidents can never be ruled out. Although they are rare and less likely after more than a half century of operation, increasing numbers of nuclear power stations worldwide increase the risks. Nuclear power must be limited to long-term, stable and compliant states so that it can’t be misused and adapted to military purposes. States should remain politically moderate, stable and not collapse – and that is almost impossible to guarantee.’
Changing views
But while governments may change, so do the views of environmentalists. The most startling twist in the debate in recent years has been the softening of a sizeable section of green opposition. Childs admits that nuclear, for so long a clear-cut line in the sand for the green movement, has become more complicated.
‘Can we achieve our emissions reduction targets without nuclear power? Many studies have suggested we can,’ says Childs. ‘But it’s clear that there’s a lack of action on meeting our emissions-reduction targets, and that brings the question of nuclear back to environmentalists as much as anyone else.’
One argument that gets a sympathetic hearing with some environmentalists is that nuclear power can buy time while we shift from fossil fuels to renewables. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, recently agreed to extend the working lives of Germany’s 17 nuclear plants by an average of 12 years, arguing that this would be a ‘bridge’ that would allow more time for reliable and affordable technologies to be developed.
‘Things move on, as the urgency of the situation with climate change becomes clearer,’ says Childs. ‘There’s a broad acceptance that climate change is a greater risk than nuclear power. Both are unwanted and both bring risks. Philosophically, Friends of the Earth seeks to hand the planet onto the next generation in the same or better shape, and radioactive waste has never really fitted with that. It’s our preferred route to avoid nuclear power if possible, but the reality is that it might be an option in extremis. In the UK, keeping plants open for another five or ten years may buy time for renewables.’
High-profile green campaigners have been more forthright in their endorsement of nuclear. In 2004, James Lovelock, the scientist and green advocate who conceived the idea of Gaia, called on environmentalists to drop their opposition to nuclear power because it didn’t produce the greenhouses gases of conventional power stations.
Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace who has supported nuclear power since, as he puts it, he lost his fear ‘about the safety of nuclear waste’, is another advocate. ‘Nuclear power doesn’t pollute the air, it doesn’t contribute greenhouse gases to any significant extent,’ he says. ‘There are many more coal plants in the world today than if nuclear had expanded, and that’s because environmentalists lobbied successfully against nuclear.’
The nuclear industry hasn’t helped itself, according to Grimston. ‘The nuclear industry was quite up itself,’ he says. ‘It was supremely arrogant, saying how clever its people were, and how they knew best. It just put people’s backs up. They kept telling us how safe they were, and how irrational everyone else was. If you do that, then it’s an entirely rational human reaction to think that they must be anything but safe.
‘The industry needs a lower profile and to just get on with what it does – producing electricity,’ he continues. ‘There are a lot of unpopular industries out there, so you don’t need vast public support to do what you do.’
Crucial period
No-one can agree on quite where all of this leaves the nuclear industry in the long term. ‘There are several scenarios that suggest that nuclear power will be the number one source of electricity by 2050,’ says Hore-Lacy. ‘I hesitate to say that it’s probable, but it’s certainly possible. It depends on the success of carbon capture and storage (CCS) – if you can apply CCS to coal-fired power generation at a reasonable cost, then I can see that being used widely.’
If nuclear doesn’t meet the need for huge amounts of base-load energy, something else will, suggests Grimston. ‘If we extend the lifetime of existing reactors and build new ones to schedule, nuclear’s role will be more or less the same,’ he says. ‘But if neither of those happens, then you lock yourself into a decline – someone else will be building something to supply the missing energy.
‘We are now bang on the crucial period that will tell us what nuclear will look like over the next 15–30 years,’ he continues. ‘My feeling is that the argument for nuclear is so strong that we will see more plants built, although there are quite a few barriers in the way.’
‘With memories of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island fading, it becomes easier to argue the case for nuclear to many Western audiences,’ says O’Driscoll. ‘Western audiences may become less opposed to nuclear energy if it assists in preventing the lights from going out and they feel it doesn’t contribute significantly to global warming. But it takes a single-minded type of company or state to commit to nuclear energy in light of the negative popular perceptions prevailing in many Western states. Authoritarian or non-democratic states would find it easier to do so.’
Despite the softening stance of some environmentalists, Ayliffe believes the case for nuclear power remains weak. ‘People say Greenpeace is just ideologically opposed to nuclear, but that isn’t the case,’ he says. ‘It’s true that we have significant issues with things such as radioactive waste, but our approach is entirely rational. If nuclear power was a feasible part of the solution to the climate crisis then we would change our position, but it isn’t. There are more effective, more applicable and cheaper technologies out there, and if we maximise the use of these, the case for nuclear disappears.’
BOX: Copying the sun
If the big yellow circle in the sky is to solve our energy problems, it may not just be down to solar power. At the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) in Oxfordshire, scientists are steadily working out how to harness the process of nuclear fusion, which occurs at the heart of all stars.
The principle of fusion is that energy is released when two light atomic nuclei are fused together to form one heavier atom; in the sun and other stars, hydrogen nuclei are combined to form helium. Current fusion research centres on two isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium, which are heated to a plasma of more than 100 million degrees Celsius in order for fusion to take place.
The CCFE research feeds into a multinational project, ITER, a 500-megawatt plant being built in France that seeks to confirm that fusion power is commercially viable and will start operating in 2019. ‘Fusion is the perfect way to make energy, but it’s really difficult to do,’ says Professor Steve Cowley, the director of CCFE. ‘But supplies would last for 30 million years. We don’t have to cover large areas in wind farms or solar panels, it’s carbon-free and has none of the risks of nuclear fission.’ The net energy yield of commercial fusion power stations is likely to be 20–30 times the amount of energy required to heat the plasma.
This is no overnight project, and Cowley expects fusion to become part of our energy supply only in the latter part of this century. ‘Is it possible that fusion is impossible to do commercially? I don’t think in the history of humanity we have come across something that turned out to be impossible,’ he says. ‘We tried to fly for 1,000 years before we figured out what the trick was – fusion will only take a few decades.’
Fusion, however, continues to receive a lukewarm endorsement from the green movement. ‘The simple fact is that nuclear fusion is still a long, long way from being commercially viable,’ says Greenpeace’s Ayliffe. ‘We’re all for research into new technologies, but it makes sense to focus our efforts and resources on those technologies that are most effective and can be installed quickly enough to help meet the immediate challenges of climate change and energy security.’
Chernoby's deadly legacy
On 26 April 1986, an explosion at one of the four Soviet-designed nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl Power Complex, 130 kilometres north of Kiev, released at least 100 times more radiation than the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
An experiment with the reactor’s cooling pump system caused power to surge to dangerous levels and blow the reactor’s roof off (the reactor didn’t have a reinforced concrete shell). The accident caused the deaths within a few days of 30 power plant employees and firemen, including 28 deaths from radiation exposure, and led to the immediate evacuation of 116,000 people, and the relocation
of 220,000. It also entrenched negative attitudes towards nuclear power for decades.
Health effects have included malignancies, especially thyroid cancer and leukaemia, non-malignant somatic disorders, deformed babies and wider psychological effects. In the short term, according to a report by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, childhood thyroid cancers in heavily contaminated areas increased tenfold, although the report concluded that ultimately ‘the vast majority of the population need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident’. The IAEA/UN Chernobyl Forum has documented 4,000 thyroid cancer cases, and estimates the accident will ultimately cause an additional 9,000 cancer deaths. Scientists estimate that the area immediately surrounding Chernobyl won’t be safe for human habitation for up to 900 years.
A quarter of a century on, the ramifications continue to be far reaching. Fairlie points to evidence that health problems still occur, and that levels of radioactivity in children are actually increasing. ‘Among many scientists, there is still quite a bit of concern about the effects,’ he says.
Those effects are also being felt in the UK: radiocaesium-137 was carried westwards and deposited in some upland areas, where sheep farming is the primary land use. Radiocaesium passes easily from peaty soils to grass and accumulates in sheep, and more than 350 farms and 190,000 sheep remain under radiation-related restrictions.
Ever since the first nuclear power plant began commercial operation at Calder Hall in Cumbria in 1956, the industry has rarely been far from controversy. Today, the tensions that surround the great bogeyman of the environmental movement are more acute than ever, and nuclear energy finds itself on the fault line of those great geopolitical issues of our time: energy security and climate change.
And right now, the momentum appears firmly with the nuclear industry, as governments are increasingly persuaded by the case for nuclear power. Nuclear is poised to scale up dramatically. According to the World Nuclear Association (WNA), the industry advocacy body, there are currently 442 nuclear plants around the world, with a further 63 under construction, 156 planned and another 322 proposed.
Nuclear generating capacity worldwide is currently 377 gigawatts (GW), but WNA projections indicate that this will rise to between 1,100GW and 3,500GW by 2060. Nuclear’s share of world electricity production is currently around 15 per cent; the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reckons that this could rise to 25 per cent by 2050, an expansion that would need capacity to more than triple over the next 40 years.
The largest concentration of nuclear power plants can be found, perhaps unexpectedly, in Europe: the EU has some 150 nuclear reactors in operation, generating about a third of the region’s electricity; in France, which has the largest collection of nuclear reactors (58), nuclear power accounts for 75 per cent of electricity generation. But the Asia-Pacific region is the new centre of gravity for nuclear power, with China embarking upon a six-fold increase in nuclear capacity to 50GW by 2020, and planning a further 110 nuclear plants; India aims to add 40 reactors in the next decade or so.
At least 25 countries are considering joining the nuclear club in the next decade, including Thailand, Turkey, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam. Jordan argues nuclear power will ease the pressure on its resources by providing energy for mammoth water-desalination projects; Venezuela has calculated that it can use nuclear power for domestic energy and sell its oil abroad.
Financial realities
So what’s driving this passion for nuclear power? The industry pushes its carbon-free credentials (although Dr Ian Fairlie, a radiation-risk consultant, points out that the energy-intensive mining, milling and transport of uranium ore, fuel enrichment, fuel reprocessing and storage, radioactive waste treatment and eventual waste disposal result in considerable CO2 emissions) but its attraction is less to do with altruism and more to with financial realities. ‘Support for nuclear power is all to do with energy security and economics,’ says Malcolm Grimston, a senior research fellow at London-based think tank Chatham House. ‘As long as you can build a nuclear power plant in reasonable time and to cost, nuclear should be the most economical option.’
Russia’s belligerent behaviour has also focused minds, according to Ian Hore-Lacy, spokesman for the WNA. ‘To a greater or lesser degree, countries around the world are buying into nuclear for three reasons: basic economics, energy security and constraining carbon emissions. We’ve all noticed how [Russian president Vladimir] Putin turned the gas taps off in Ukraine, and we can see those long pipelines feeding Europe from Russia and Africa, and the US army’s fuel supplies are essentially dependent on the Middle East.’
Others are more circumspect in their assessment of nuclear’s momentum. ‘It’s too early to say that the world is definitely experiencing a nuclear renaissance,’ says Dr Mervyn O’Driscoll, a senior lecturer in history at University College Cork and an expert in nuclear energy, history and strategy. ‘Rather, what we are seeing now is a re-evaluation of the wider utility of nuclear power, and there are several factors that lead to a more positive assessment of nuclear energy in the energy mix of some key countries. Both energy security and climate change are playing a large role in the decisions of states and regional organisations.’
Environmental groups remain sceptical of these geopolitical arguments. ‘The nuclear industry has done a really good job of lobbying governments around the world, and the public – reinventing itself as a sensible option,’ says Ben Ayliffe, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace. ‘We’re seeing a natural reaction to that from governments – they’re between a rock and a hard place; they have to be seen to be doing something about climate change while keeping the lights on at the same time.’
Greenpeace is also uneasy about the impact that nuclear power might have on alternative forms of energy. ‘The danger is that we will miss the boat with renewables,’ says Ayliffe. ‘We’re at a crossroads. Either we can revolutionise the way in which we produce energy, with smart grids, renewables and combined heat and power, or we can look to the past and stick with an incredibly inefficient energy system. Nuclear will lock us into this antiquated system for the next 40 or 50 years. If we do that, we will miss the opportunity to really reap the benefits of renewable technologies.
‘Nuclear is too little, too late,’ he continues. ‘It’s not practical as a key pillar of energy strategy. We have very limited time to make the cuts required – nuclear won’t do it for us. For every dollar you spend on energy-efficiency technologies, you get seven times the return you would for nuclear power.’
Yet others argue that to push for renewable energy at the expense of nuclear is to miss the point. ‘Renewables and nuclear don’t compete,’ says Grimston. ‘Renewables are not suited to the base-load [24-hour] energy approach that nuclear provides. They’re more intermittent. You can’t replace nuclear with renewables – you can only replace it with coal or gas. It’s economically illiterate to say that if you improve energy efficiency by 20 per cent, then you get a 20 per cent cut in energy use.’
Safety issues
Safety, and what on Earth to do with nuclear waste, stand at the heart of the nuclear debate. Environmentalists warn of the risks of proliferation or of material being obtained by terrorist groups (the IAEA has recorded more than 600 cases since the early 1990s of illicit trafficking of radioactive or nuclear material).
And – to state the achingly obvious – you don’t want to cut corners with radioactive materials. Spent fuel from nuclear reactors will remain extremely radioactive for millennia. ‘Spent fuel requires very heavy shielding. If you were to stand in front of an unshielded spent fuel rod, you would receive enough radiation in a few minutes to kill you,’ says Fairlie.
Spent fuel gives off alpha, beta and gamma rays, with the last of these generally of most concern. ‘The unstable radionuclides in spent fuel decay, and in so doing, they emit radiation,’ explains Fairlie, who was scientific secretary to CERRIE, an independent UK committee that studied the risks of internal radiation. ‘Spent fuel contains fission products, such as caesium and strontium, which have half lives [the length of time it takes for half of the atoms in a given amount of a substance to decay] of 30 years. You need to keep them out of the environment for at least 300 years. It also contains a whole range of activation products – uranium, plutonium, americium, curium. Some of these will remain active for millions of years. So it’s my contention that the dangers of exposure to radioactive waste are such that we should be looking for safer means of generating electricity.’
Given the dangers that Fairlie outlines, it may come as a surprise to learn that, across the planet, there is no long-term, final deep geological disposal site for high-level waste. This waste, which encompasses both spent fuel and reprocessing wastes, represents around three per cent of all nuclear waste by volume but about 98 per cent of its radioactivity. ‘What nuclear power hasn’t done is solve its waste issue,’ says Mike Childs, head of climate change at Friends of the Earth. ‘Any industry that produces radioactive waste that lasts for thousands of years and doesn’t know what to do with it is pushing it to call itself clean.’
Each year, 7,000 cubic metres of high-level waste are typically produced in the EU alone. According to the WNA, high-level waste is increasing by about 12,000 tonnes worldwide every year, which is the equivalent of a two-storey structure built on a basketball court. ‘Interim storages are no long-term solution as they need continuous maintenance and oversight,’ says a European Commission spokeswoman. ‘As they are typically close to or on the surface, there is, in addition, a risk of accidents, including airplane crashes, fires or earthquakes.’
Since last autumn, EU states have been legally obliged to identify disposal facilities; the first is supposed to be operational by 2025, although the appetite to achieve this remains uncertain. ‘It has been a particularly unedifying experience watching the industry attempt to secure a final depository,’ says Ayliffe. ‘The one area in the UK that has been identified as suitable is in the Lake District National Park – there’s just a possibility that walkers, locals and tourists will object to that.’
Fairlie and other scientists feel deeply uneasy about the entire process, and question whether nuclear waste can be stored safely in perpetuity. ‘We just don’t know,’ says Fairlie. ‘Humanity’s recorded history goes back perhaps 8,000 years, but the half lives of these radioactive constituents are often much longer than that. We will give this serious problem to our children and future generations for which we get the benefits. There is surely an ethical question about this.’
Fairlie also points to nuclear’s current place in the wider energy mix – around 16 per cent of UK electricity, which, in turn, is around 20 per cent of all energy production. ‘There comes a point when you think of the relatively small amount of energy we get from nuclear, is it really worth the candle?’
Any discussion about nuclear safety is inextricably linked with the Chernobyl disaster (see Chernobyl’s deadly legacy), but the nuclear industry argues that such an incident could never happen again. ‘To blame the nuclear industry for Chernobyl is like blaming the aviation industry for the Hindenburg disaster,’ says the WNA’s Hore-Lacy, who says nuclear power plants have been collectively operating for the equivalent of 14,240 years and seen just two accidents – at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Chernobyl is ‘irrelevant’ and couldn’t be repeated, according to Hore-Lacy. Most plants in operation are second generation (although the UK still operates four first-generation plants). ‘The majority of new builds are third generation,’ he says. ‘They are all safe – if you’re living next door to a power plant where there is a serious problem, you are still safe, whether it’s second or third generation.’
Yet despite extensive modifications, the safety features of early Soviet-designed reactors don’t conform to Western standards, according to the WNA. Three former Eastern Bloc countries – Bulgaria, Slovakia and Lithuania – were forced to close eight Soviet-era nuclear power reactors as a condition of joining the EU. However, 16 early Soviet reactors remain in operation, 15 of them in Russia.
The 16th, in Armenia, is the most problematic. Armenia’s sole nuclear power plant, Metsamor, is a 1970s VVER-440/230 pressurised-water reactor located in a highly seismic area. It was closed after the 1988 Yerevan earthquake, but reopened in 1995. Today, Metsamor supplies about 35 per cent of Armenia’s total energy output and has been the subject of rigorous updating. It’s scheduled to close in 2016, but the Armenian government says that this is conditional on a new plant being commissioned.
‘The problems of nuclear accidents – even if infrequent – and waste need to be properly addressed and fully factored into the cost of nuclear power,’ says O’Driscoll. ‘Catastrophic accidents can never be ruled out. Although they are rare and less likely after more than a half century of operation, increasing numbers of nuclear power stations worldwide increase the risks. Nuclear power must be limited to long-term, stable and compliant states so that it can’t be misused and adapted to military purposes. States should remain politically moderate, stable and not collapse – and that is almost impossible to guarantee.’
Changing views
But while governments may change, so do the views of environmentalists. The most startling twist in the debate in recent years has been the softening of a sizeable section of green opposition. Childs admits that nuclear, for so long a clear-cut line in the sand for the green movement, has become more complicated.
‘Can we achieve our emissions reduction targets without nuclear power? Many studies have suggested we can,’ says Childs. ‘But it’s clear that there’s a lack of action on meeting our emissions-reduction targets, and that brings the question of nuclear back to environmentalists as much as anyone else.’
One argument that gets a sympathetic hearing with some environmentalists is that nuclear power can buy time while we shift from fossil fuels to renewables. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, recently agreed to extend the working lives of Germany’s 17 nuclear plants by an average of 12 years, arguing that this would be a ‘bridge’ that would allow more time for reliable and affordable technologies to be developed.
‘Things move on, as the urgency of the situation with climate change becomes clearer,’ says Childs. ‘There’s a broad acceptance that climate change is a greater risk than nuclear power. Both are unwanted and both bring risks. Philosophically, Friends of the Earth seeks to hand the planet onto the next generation in the same or better shape, and radioactive waste has never really fitted with that. It’s our preferred route to avoid nuclear power if possible, but the reality is that it might be an option in extremis. In the UK, keeping plants open for another five or ten years may buy time for renewables.’
High-profile green campaigners have been more forthright in their endorsement of nuclear. In 2004, James Lovelock, the scientist and green advocate who conceived the idea of Gaia, called on environmentalists to drop their opposition to nuclear power because it didn’t produce the greenhouses gases of conventional power stations.
Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace who has supported nuclear power since, as he puts it, he lost his fear ‘about the safety of nuclear waste’, is another advocate. ‘Nuclear power doesn’t pollute the air, it doesn’t contribute greenhouse gases to any significant extent,’ he says. ‘There are many more coal plants in the world today than if nuclear had expanded, and that’s because environmentalists lobbied successfully against nuclear.’
The nuclear industry hasn’t helped itself, according to Grimston. ‘The nuclear industry was quite up itself,’ he says. ‘It was supremely arrogant, saying how clever its people were, and how they knew best. It just put people’s backs up. They kept telling us how safe they were, and how irrational everyone else was. If you do that, then it’s an entirely rational human reaction to think that they must be anything but safe.
‘The industry needs a lower profile and to just get on with what it does – producing electricity,’ he continues. ‘There are a lot of unpopular industries out there, so you don’t need vast public support to do what you do.’
Crucial period
No-one can agree on quite where all of this leaves the nuclear industry in the long term. ‘There are several scenarios that suggest that nuclear power will be the number one source of electricity by 2050,’ says Hore-Lacy. ‘I hesitate to say that it’s probable, but it’s certainly possible. It depends on the success of carbon capture and storage (CCS) – if you can apply CCS to coal-fired power generation at a reasonable cost, then I can see that being used widely.’
If nuclear doesn’t meet the need for huge amounts of base-load energy, something else will, suggests Grimston. ‘If we extend the lifetime of existing reactors and build new ones to schedule, nuclear’s role will be more or less the same,’ he says. ‘But if neither of those happens, then you lock yourself into a decline – someone else will be building something to supply the missing energy.
‘We are now bang on the crucial period that will tell us what nuclear will look like over the next 15–30 years,’ he continues. ‘My feeling is that the argument for nuclear is so strong that we will see more plants built, although there are quite a few barriers in the way.’
‘With memories of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island fading, it becomes easier to argue the case for nuclear to many Western audiences,’ says O’Driscoll. ‘Western audiences may become less opposed to nuclear energy if it assists in preventing the lights from going out and they feel it doesn’t contribute significantly to global warming. But it takes a single-minded type of company or state to commit to nuclear energy in light of the negative popular perceptions prevailing in many Western states. Authoritarian or non-democratic states would find it easier to do so.’
Despite the softening stance of some environmentalists, Ayliffe believes the case for nuclear power remains weak. ‘People say Greenpeace is just ideologically opposed to nuclear, but that isn’t the case,’ he says. ‘It’s true that we have significant issues with things such as radioactive waste, but our approach is entirely rational. If nuclear power was a feasible part of the solution to the climate crisis then we would change our position, but it isn’t. There are more effective, more applicable and cheaper technologies out there, and if we maximise the use of these, the case for nuclear disappears.’
BOX: Copying the sun
If the big yellow circle in the sky is to solve our energy problems, it may not just be down to solar power. At the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) in Oxfordshire, scientists are steadily working out how to harness the process of nuclear fusion, which occurs at the heart of all stars.
The principle of fusion is that energy is released when two light atomic nuclei are fused together to form one heavier atom; in the sun and other stars, hydrogen nuclei are combined to form helium. Current fusion research centres on two isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium, which are heated to a plasma of more than 100 million degrees Celsius in order for fusion to take place.
The CCFE research feeds into a multinational project, ITER, a 500-megawatt plant being built in France that seeks to confirm that fusion power is commercially viable and will start operating in 2019. ‘Fusion is the perfect way to make energy, but it’s really difficult to do,’ says Professor Steve Cowley, the director of CCFE. ‘But supplies would last for 30 million years. We don’t have to cover large areas in wind farms or solar panels, it’s carbon-free and has none of the risks of nuclear fission.’ The net energy yield of commercial fusion power stations is likely to be 20–30 times the amount of energy required to heat the plasma.
This is no overnight project, and Cowley expects fusion to become part of our energy supply only in the latter part of this century. ‘Is it possible that fusion is impossible to do commercially? I don’t think in the history of humanity we have come across something that turned out to be impossible,’ he says. ‘We tried to fly for 1,000 years before we figured out what the trick was – fusion will only take a few decades.’
Fusion, however, continues to receive a lukewarm endorsement from the green movement. ‘The simple fact is that nuclear fusion is still a long, long way from being commercially viable,’ says Greenpeace’s Ayliffe. ‘We’re all for research into new technologies, but it makes sense to focus our efforts and resources on those technologies that are most effective and can be installed quickly enough to help meet the immediate challenges of climate change and energy security.’
Chernoby's deadly legacy
On 26 April 1986, an explosion at one of the four Soviet-designed nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl Power Complex, 130 kilometres north of Kiev, released at least 100 times more radiation than the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
An experiment with the reactor’s cooling pump system caused power to surge to dangerous levels and blow the reactor’s roof off (the reactor didn’t have a reinforced concrete shell). The accident caused the deaths within a few days of 30 power plant employees and firemen, including 28 deaths from radiation exposure, and led to the immediate evacuation of 116,000 people, and the relocation
of 220,000. It also entrenched negative attitudes towards nuclear power for decades.
Health effects have included malignancies, especially thyroid cancer and leukaemia, non-malignant somatic disorders, deformed babies and wider psychological effects. In the short term, according to a report by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, childhood thyroid cancers in heavily contaminated areas increased tenfold, although the report concluded that ultimately ‘the vast majority of the population need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident’. The IAEA/UN Chernobyl Forum has documented 4,000 thyroid cancer cases, and estimates the accident will ultimately cause an additional 9,000 cancer deaths. Scientists estimate that the area immediately surrounding Chernobyl won’t be safe for human habitation for up to 900 years.
A quarter of a century on, the ramifications continue to be far reaching. Fairlie points to evidence that health problems still occur, and that levels of radioactivity in children are actually increasing. ‘Among many scientists, there is still quite a bit of concern about the effects,’ he says.
Those effects are also being felt in the UK: radiocaesium-137 was carried westwards and deposited in some upland areas, where sheep farming is the primary land use. Radiocaesium passes easily from peaty soils to grass and accumulates in sheep, and more than 350 farms and 190,000 sheep remain under radiation-related restrictions.
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