Why greens must learn to love nuclear power 19 September 08

Well, I take you very seriously Mark, so I’m re-examining my position as honestly as I can. I hope there will be plenty of well-informed responses here to help me. My first reaction was like you had just announced that GMO’s would help us combat food shortage – it’s just not a risk we can take or a legacy we can leave our children.

The idea of burning up all the stockpiles of old waste is VERY appealing. But then you mention the new waste products being “inert in a couple of centuries” and all waste being safe in “less than a thousand years”.

Do you really know that an informed and well-resourced civil society which could manage this legacy is going to be around in even 100 years? I’d say there’s a good chance it won’t. We would still be gambling with the health and safety of future humans – my own decendants – and I have an ethical sticking point there.

It’s appealing to think of all these new reactors quietly closing themselves down to sleep safely for a few centuries if the workforce are delayed from coming in one day by climate disaster, war, or famine. Hmm… They would have to be extremely well-designed and constructed by people who were genuinely planning for ALL eventualities, including future civil collapse.

Of course, you’re banking on Nuclear providing enough carbon-free energy to help us avoid those terrible outcomes and keep society intact. Is that because you don’t see the Zero Carbon Britain plans outlined by C.A.T. or Monbiot’s European Super-Grid as viable options?

Wouldn’t it be preferable to pursue those “solar farms in the North African desert” ? And do we really need to “match current consumption” or do we need to learn that there is no safe, sustainable and acceptable way to do that – we need to power down instead.

I think that people are scared that our society is too addicted to high-energy life to make the necessary change – visions of Monbiot’s “austerity riots” etc. Well firstly let’s see how this recession pans out in terms of consumption habits, and secondly lets go for the lowest longterm ecological impacts possible. If my society collapses, that’s my reponsibility. I shouldn’t stake my society’s survival on leaving toxic waste for others to deal with.

But I know that these are real issues and not articles of faith, so I’ll keep listening however uncomfortable it makes me!

Mark’s article is replete with so many errors, probably because he has read too few critical studies of nuclear, and relied upon unreconstructed pro-nuclear enthusiasts such as Tom Blees, who does not match his enthusiasm for exotic, untried nuclear technology with robust facts. Below I past a new article by Paris-based energy consultant, Mycle Schneider, just published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It does not address the technical mistakes in Mark’s article, but does demonstrate the unliklihood of the kind of nuclear industrial renaissance favoured by the the atomic enthusiasts.

Dr David Lowry

Stoneleigh

contributing author, Nuclear or Not? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/reports/2008-world-nu…

Hype over the future of nuclear power is rampant, but the facts tell a different story. The percentage of nuclear-generated electricity in the overall global energy mix is decreasing. In this three-part series Mycle Schneider, a French independent nuclear analyst, explores the difficulties facing nuclear power throughout the world and in Western Europe and Asia in particular.

2008 world nuclear industry status report: Global nuclear power

By Mycle Schneider | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 16 September 2008

Last Thursday, in the midst of the world media’s constant constant nuclear revival reportage, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had an embarrassing announcement to make. While it has increased its projections for nuclear generation in 2030, nuclear’s share of global electricity generation dropped another percentage point in 2007. The world’s nuclear electricity generation had decreased by 2 percent in 2007-in the European Union (EU) it dropped 6 percent-more than in any other year since the first fission reactor was connected to the Soviet grid in 1954. The drop by about 60 terawatt hours corresponds to the average annual generation of 10 reactors.

Major contributing factors were the seven units at Kashiwazaki, Japan, which have remained shut down since a severe earthquake shook the region in July 2007; the up to six German reactors that have been taken off the grid simultaneously for major repairs; and the numerous French reactors that have undergone inspections and maintenance after a generic problem was identified in their steam generators. The latter issue is expected to cost the French nuclear fleet another 2-3 percent of its average load factor for 2008 and through 2009. The “Big Six” nuclear powers-the United States, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, and South Korea-saw their global share of nuclear-generated electricity drop from about three-quarters in previous years to 68 percent in 2007.

At the beginning of September, there were 439 operating nuclear reactors worldwide, five less than five years ago, with a total installed capacity of 372 gigawatts in 31 countries. No new nuclear plant has come online since the beginning of the year.

The installed capacity has increased slightly through “uprating,” or technical improvements at existing plants that increase electricity generation. According to the World Nuclear Association (WNA), the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved 110 uprates since 1977, a few of them “extended uprates” of up to 20 percent. An additional seven uprates are to be completed through the end of the year. As a result, close to an additional 5 gigawatts were added to the U.S. nuclear capacity through uprates alone—the equivalent of about four new plants. Europe is experiencing a similar trend of uprates and life extensions of existing reactors.

The capacity of the global fleet increased between 2000 and 2004 by about 3 gigawatts per year, much of it through uprating. That dropped to 2 gigawatts per year between 2004 and 2007 and to about 0.5 gigawatts over the first eight months of 2008. These figures should be compared to the global net increase in all electricity generating capacity of an estimated 150 gigawatts for all new power plants, from fossil-fuelled facilities to renewable energy, per year. That leaves nuclear energy with an insignificant fraction in the global power marketplace.

In 2007, nuclear power plants generated 2,600 terawatt hours, about 14 percent of the world’s commercial electricity (down from 15 percent in 2006 and 16 percent in 2005) or less than 6 percent of the commercial primary energy and on the order of 2 percent of final energy. Only five countries (Armenia, Romania, Slovenia, South Africa, and Switzerland), which together operate 11 nuclear plants, increased their nuclear share in the power mix in 2007 over the previous year. Fifteen countries remained stable (less than a 1 percent change) and in 11 countries the role of nuclear power declined. (See chart PDF.)

Construction sites in the 14 countries that are currently building nuclear power plants are accumulating substantial and costly delays. At the end of August, the IAEA listed 35 reactors as “under construction,” which is one more than at the end of 2007, but 18 less than at the end of the 1990s. The total capacity is just under 28,300 megawatts with an average size of 800 megawatts per unit. A closer look at the list illustrates the level of uncertainty associated with reactor building:

• Eleven reactors, almost one-third of the total listed, have been under construction for more than 20 years. The U.S. Watts Bar 2 project holds the record with an original construction start in December 1972 (subsequently frozen), followed by the Iranian Bushehr plant that was started by German Siemens in May 1975 and is now to be finished by Russia.

• Fifteen projects don’t have an official start-up date, including all seven of the Russian projects, two Bulgarian reactors, and three of the six Chinese units under construction. In fact, one Russian plant (Balakovo-5), which had been listed since 1987 and was to go online by the end of 2010, was abandoned and pulled off the list earlier this year. It was replaced by a new project (Novovoronezh 2-1) without any indication of a planned start-up date.

• Two-thirds of the under-construction units have encountered significant construction delays, pushing back officially announced start-up dates. Only 10 projects haven’t indicated delays, they are three Chinese, one Pakistani, three South Korean, and three Russian units. They were all started within the last three years and haven’t reached their projected start-up dates yet, which makes it difficult or impossible to assess whether they are on schedule.

The geographic distribution of nuclear power plant projects extends the trend of previous years. Between 2004 and 2007, 14 nuclear plants, the total number of units that started up during that time, were located in Asia or Eastern Europe. Similarly, 30 of the 35 reactors currently “under construction” are also located in those regions. The average global construction time for nuclear plants (more than nine years for the 14 most recent ones) isn’t a useful metric because of great differences between countries. The four reactors that started up in Romania, Russia, and Ukraine took between 18 and 24 years, while the 10 units that were connected to the grid in China, India, Japan, and South Korea took only five years to complete on average.

Lead times for nuclear plants don’t only include construction times but also long-term planning, lengthy licensing procedures in most countries, complex financial negotiations, and site preparation. In addition, in most cases, the grid system has to be upgraded, often with new power lines that have their own planning and licensing difficulties. In some cases, public opposition is significantly higher in regards to high-voltage power lines than for the nuclear plants that generate the electricity. NRC Chairman Dale Klein noted that potentially necessary grid extensions could lead to further delays of nuclear projects and indicated that he was surprised to learn that “it may take as long to site, permit, and build a transmission line for a new plant as to site, license, and build the plant itself.”

In the past, nuclear planning has rarely turned out to be accurate. In an article entitled “President Offers Plans for Revival of Nuclear,” the New York Times reported that the administration “today formally specified the steps it will take to revive commercial nuclear power.” That piece appeared in October 1981 and the president was Ronald Reagan. Twenty years later the “nuclear revival” is once again on the agenda, with President George W. Bush promoting Nuclear Power 2010.

In October 2001, as part of Nuclear Power 2010, the Energy Department planned to “complete construction and deploy multiple commercially viable new nuclear plants by 2010,” and at a minimum deploy “at least one light water and at least one gas-cooled reactor.” Reality is quite different, and it’s now obvious that no new U.S. plant will be up and running by 2010. Energy’s July 2008 update on the status of commercial nuclear reactor licenses lists nine submitted applications for combined construction and operating licenses (COL) and a further 10 intended applications. Only one unit is currently planned to operate under a new license before 2015. NRG Energy plans to start construction at its South Texas site as early as 2009 with grid connection in 2014. NRG’s COL is currently under review by the NRC. However, as Energy points out, “There is no assurance that any of these plants [which it licenses] will ultimately be built or operate commercially,” and “COL filings often include a goal to ‘keep the nuclear option open’ rather than full commitment [to construction].”

Moody’s Investor Services, which provides risk analysis to the capital markets, expects extensive legal cases: “We believe the first COL filing will be litigated, which could create lengthy delays for the rest of the sector.” The Financial Times obtained confidential government documents that confirm a similar situation in Britain: “Fresh legal challenges are expected to hamper plans to build new nuclear power stations in [Britain].”

Without any significant new build for years, the average age of the world’s operating nuclear power plants has been increasing steadily, now standing at 24 years. Some nuclear utilities envision reactor lifetimes of 40 years-or even 60 years. Considering that the average age of the 119 units that have already been shutdown is 22 years, the doubling of operational lifetime seems rather optimistic. If one assumes an average lifetime of 40 years for all the world’s operating reactors (with the exception of 17 remaining German units that, according to German legislation, will be shut down after an average operational lifetime of 32 years) and the 20 units that were under construction as of January 2008 that have an official start-up date (down from 24 units at the start of the year), one can calculate how many plants would be shut down year by year over the next 50 years-see chart PDF.

The exercise enables an evaluation of the number of plants that would have to come online over the next several decades simply to maintain the same number of operating plants around the world. In addition to units under construction with a scheduled start-up date, 70 reactors (generating 40,000 megawatts) would have to be planned, completed and started up by 2015-one every month and a half-and an additional 192 units (168,000 megawatts) over the subsequent decade—or one every 18 days.

The achievement of the 2015 target is simply impossible from an industrial point of view, which means that the number of operating reactors will decline over the years to come unless lifetime extensions beyond 40 years become standard, which would raise safety and maintenance questions. The overall replacement of some 260 units by 2025 seems equally unlikely.

The international nuclear industry lobby, however, claims it can do that and more. The WNA has stated: “It is noteworthy that in the 1980s, 218 power reactors started up, an average of one every 17 days. . . . So it is not hard to imagine a similar number being commissioned in a decade after about 2015. But with China and India getting up to speed with nuclear energy and a world energy demand double the 1980 level in 2015, a realistic estimate of what is possible might be the equivalent of one 1,000 megawatt unit worldwide every 5 days.”

Such a “realistic estimate” seems hard to believe. The situation in the second decade of the twenty-first century will be radically different from that in the 1980s. The nuclear industry will not be in the same position it was in the 1980s, when it started to harvest the early heavy investments made in nuclear. At that time, it also didn’t have to deal with the nuclear waste issue, which was simply put on the back burner, nor the cost of reactor decommissioning, which was underestimated. In that earlier period, the nuclear industry still appeared progressive, attracting young and talented people. And ferocious competitors such as modern natural gas, combined heat and power, and various renewable energy sectors didn’t exist.

The replacement of the aging world nuclear fleet or even the extension of the operating plants encounters three major problems:

• Limited industrial capacity. In the 1980s, there were about 400 nuclear suppliers and 900 nuclear-certified companies in the United States. These have shrunk to fewer than 80 suppliers and 200 certifications in recent years. Even if some of this is due to corporate takeovers, the decline is dramatic. Currently there is only one steel plant in the world, owned by Japan Steel Works that can fabricate the 450-ton ingots needed for so-called generation III reactors such as the Franco-German European Pressurized Water Reactor (EPR). A nuclear power plant construction infrastructure assessment PDF by Energy concluded that major equipment (reactor pressure vessels, steam generators, and moisture separator reheaters) for the near-term deployment of generation III units would not be manufactured by U.S. facilities and would result in procurement and construction delays.

• Skilled worker shortage. According to Power Engineering, Art Stall, Florida Power & Light Company’s senior vice president and chief nuclear officer, told the American Nuclear Society’s 2007 annual meeting that the nuclear industry’s revival has been slowed down by the challenges of building new nuclear power plants, which includes finding qualified craft labor, technicians, engineers, and scientists to support both construction and operation. He said that 40 percent of current nuclear plant workers are eligible for retirement within the next five years and that only 8 percent of the workforce is less than 32 years old. While students studying nuclear engineering and other nuclear-specific technical subjects are increasing, there is much competition from other industries for talent. “[T]he nuclear industry must become creative if it is going to entice these graduates to enter and remain in the nuclear field,” he told the crowd. The situation is similar in most European nuclear countries.

• Skeptical financial markets. Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating company, warned in May 2007, “In the past, engineering, procurement, and construction contracts were easy to secure. However, with increasing raw material costs, a depleted nuclear-specialist workforce, and strong demand for capital projects worldwide, construction costs are increasing rapidly.” In October 2007, Moody’s delivered a striking analysis of the U.S. nuclear sector, saying it did “not believe the sector will bring more than one or two new nuclear plants online by 2015.” It concluded that it believed many of the current expectations for nuclear were “overly ambitious.” Moody’s had more bad news for the industry when its June Global Credit Research paper concluded, “The cost and complexity of building a new nuclear power plant could weaken the credit metrics of an electric utility and potentially pressure its credit ratings several years into the project.” Even the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade organization, admitted in an August white paper PDF, “There is considerable uncertainty about the capital cost of new nuclear generating capacity.”

After thorough analysis it seems surprisingly evident that contrary to the public’s perception and the industry’s efforts, nuclear power will continue its long-term decline rather than move toward a flourishing future revival.

Mycle Schneider

Schneider is an independent energy consultant based in Paris. He has consulted for the Belgian Energy Minister, the French and German environment ministries, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Greenpeace, the European Commission, and the French Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety. He is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials and founded the Energy Information Agency WISE-Paris in 1983, which he directed until 2003. Since 2004, Schneider has led the Environment and Energy Strategies lecture series at the French Ecole des Mines in Nantes.

Dear Mark,

In relation to climate change and the need to cut CO2 emissions, the case against nuclear power is straightforward:

• It is one of the most expensive ways of generating electricity (see http://www.mng.org.uk/gh/no_nukes.htm) and, since the whole nuclear cycle is a long way from being zero-carbon (ibid.), it is an even more expensive way of reducing CO2 emissions. Two good pieces about how costly it is are:

- Paul Brown’s “Voodoo economics”: http://www.mng.org.uk/gh/resources/voodoo_economics.pdf .

- Amory Lovins and Imran Sheikh on “The nuclear illusion”: http://www.mng.org.uk/gh/resources/lovins_sheikh_article_2008-05-27.pdf .

• There are more than enough alternatives that are cheaper, quicker to build and altogether more attractive, see: http://www.mng.org.uk/gh/energy.htm .

• In other words, we get bigger cuts in CO2 for a given amount of money, and we get them sooner, if we choose renewables with energy conservation—and without using nuclear power. We certainly don’t need both.

With best wishes,

Gerry Wolff

Mark’s right, we do need to look seriously at all the options, and dig down to real evidence.

Perhaps my most serious concern about nuclear – of whatever variety – is that while it may help solve the energy crisis and contain climate change, it does nothing to address the fact that ecosystems are already over stressed from our current levels of consumption. (See UN’s Millenium Ecosystem Assessment).

I’m no hair shirt and sandals environmentalist – but we do need to seriously reduce our total impact on the planet. Higher energy costs (whether due to shortages and/or taxation) is one driver for reshaping our economies towards lower resource intensity.

Large supplies of cheap energy will allow politicians to ignore the fact we live in a closed, finite, ecosystem.

Nuclear as part of a mix of energy sources, maybe. Without a strategy that reduces our total impact on the planet – which must surely include energy taxes or rationing – nuclear will just buy us a little to watch ecosystem services (such as fresh water, healthy soil, fisheries etc) collapse around us.

Osbert

All sounds reasonable enough to me. Action is required for sure. Whilst governments sit around debating these issues we could be on with building these new type reactors and investing in all the renewable options as well. This might be a timely boost to the building contractors as well given that the housing market is stagnant at the moment. On top of that unemployment is rising rapidly perhaps some of those people might be glad of a job at the moment. Just a thought Gordon! Really struggling to find any negatives here

I think myself and many more people would have less problems with nuclear energy if it were not in the for-profit world. If it were regulated with every possible safety precaution in place. Where no corners were cut: the cheapest suppliers used with parts from the most underpaid, unskilled corners of the world, outsourced workmanship, the cheapest possible workforce (low skills) etc. Pare down the costs to the bare minimum, that’s the business ideal. Then, there are the byproducts, the refuse: also cutting corners wherever possible, dumping in poor parts of the world, DU & the military etc. Transport as well – it’s secretive and sometimes high risk (through heavily populated areas).

If you want an example of how things can go wrong in an unregulated situation untill you end up with an accident waiting to happen, read up on the Koeberg power plant in South Africa.

If there were clear and cautious government regulations in place, if this industry start to finish were in the hands of a department of energy, if no expense or manpower would be stinted when it comes to safety issues, I’d not have so much of a problem with it. But as long as it’s in the hands of private companies who want to maximise the profits for their shareholders, I’m against.

The argument sound plausible, and provides more evidence than that available in the media generally. Uranium supplies available from mining are in limited supply, so if IFRs can use spent fuel from earlier generations this might just tide us over until the next practical clean energy source is developed. But is the old processed fuel really available? Is it not encased in concrete or vitrified or otherwise taken out of the system? We will have an energy crisis anyway as it seems to take so long to commission a nuclear power station, and we don’t even have an energy policy never mind starting the process of building. Our politicians (of all colours) have failed us again!

It would be so useful if we could add Nuclear Power as another option in our efforts to combat climate change.

But sadly it is too late!

We have to deal with Climate Change over the next 100 months. (At most probably 15 years). Nuclear Power has a history of failing to deliver. Over the next 15 years Nuclear Power will deliver very little in carbon reduction. But the huge construction programme over that period will ADD to CO2 emissions. It is an option that we must sadly forgo, if we are serious about stopping runaway climate change.

Theo – I’m not arguing that the waste problem can be forgotten about, but that it is pretty negligible in terms of its impacts on the environment (and people), certainly when compared with other non-renewable energy sources. With vitrification and deep disposal, the reduced amount of waste would not present much of a threat. Remember, there is radioactivity all around anyway in the ambient environment – radon gas is a good example – which our bodies have evolved to cope with. Check out the Cohen online book (ref #2) for more on that.

Plus, as I said, this is not an either/or with nuclear and renewables. I see nuclear as replacing coal and gas primarily. Ideally we’d see a 60/40 split in UK electrical power with renewables/nuclear, though how the grid is managed is pretty complicated.

In terms of powering down electricity use – this simply isn’t going to happen. It’s wishful thinking. Sorry. We’re going to see continual increases in electricity use, particularly as the transport sector is increasingly electrified (cars, trains etc). And as George Monbiot’s book shows, going for energy efficiency can peversely increase electricity use, but making it cheaper. The main thing is to have a strong cap on carbon, not energy per se.

- Dr David Lowry: It’s not good enough to say that my article is “replete with so many errors” if you can’t actually name any. Please oblige, or recant. Simply posting someone else’s tangentially-relevant article is not going to make your argument for you.

- Osbert Lancaster: I totally agree that we need to reduce pressure on ecosystems. Nuclear is probably the energy source that does this best. Fossil fuels and biofuels are worst. What we want to avoid is swapping a below-ground usustainable source with energy harvested from the ambient biosphere, further to the detriment of the remaining natural ecosystems. Renewables like wind and solar are very benign at small scales, but scale them up too far and there will again be impacts – on land use, biodiversity, water, toxics etc. I think that in terms of pure ecology nuclear is probably the most benign of all, despite the fact that there is a waste issue. Just look at the natural environment around Chernobyl, which is flourishing, because all other human impacts have stopped.

Anja – as I say in the article, nuclear on any comparable scale is safer than most other energy sources, partly because it is subject to such a stringent regulatory system. Has there been a single death in the UK attributable to having 20% nuclear electricity for the past 30 years?

Peter and Maurice – The old chestnut about how long it takes to build a nuclear power station and the urgency of climate change simply won’t wash (sorry to mix metaphors!). Are you suggesting that we won’t need any energy in 15 or 20 years? No? Then we need a long-term solution to the problem. Sure, we can peak emissions in the meantime with quicker options, but we still need energy indefinitely. Plus – if there were less challenges to nuclear from greens, it would be a lot quicker to build! The time is mostly about the planning system, not the engineering.

In the three years since you first suggested nuclear power can play an important role in combatting climate change you seem to have been further taken in by the nuclear industry. More than a decade and half ago it was identified that the nuclear industry was facing terminal decline – no new orders, ageing plant, no solution to waste, strong anti-nuclear sentiment and very poor economics. The industry needed to find a new rationale that could convince policy makers, politicians and media that they had a future. Climate change became that lifeboat – and yet nothing has changed in terms of the critical reasons why nuclear cannot and will not play an important role in combatting climate change. What has happened is that commentators have jumped on the bandwagon created by a global public relations budget (the Nuclear Energy Institute an industry funded body – pumps 100 million dollars a year into convincing those ready to be convinced that nuclear is our saviour). These commentators (and even climate change authors) are now unwittingly at best part of the industry strategy of convincing the public that nuclear is part of the solution. Despite the impression that the world is on the verge of a new nuclear age – the projections for the next 10 years show a real decline in electricity generated from nuclear. The construction of 20-30 reactors underway at present – not at all what it seems given how long some of these have been under construction – will not match the 70 or so additional reactors required by 2015 to replace those shutting down – thats one new reactor every month and a half. Contrast that with annual installed wind and solar.

Your latest piece on nuclear power is even more full of holes than your last piece in the NS. In the run up to the 20 year anniversary of Chernobyl the IAEA and WHO released a report that stated 4,000 deaths. Challenged on this by two reports in March/April 2006, one of the leading authors from WHO broke ranks and stated that the earlier report was more political than scientific. The range of fatailities from 40-100,000 were deemed more credible. What is disappointing is that you seem to take on blind faith the instititions – including UNSCEAR – that for decades has underplayed the impact of low level radiation. As the 30 year anniversary of Three Mile Island approaches you repeat the industry claims that there were zero deaths – again the many thousands of law suits by residents in Pennisilvania prompted by a large increase in still-births, infant deaths, soaring cancer rates and more would tend to counter your assurances. By being selective in your research and dismissing the effects of man-made level raditio on public health you might convince yourself but do indeed do a disservice to the victims of nuclear power and those fighting climate change (and nuclear power).

It is on the role of fast breeder reactors however that your advocacy of nuclear power becomes a dangerous joke. The claims that – Russia, India, China and Japan are all building or operating such reactors does not describe the reality of their programs – if they have been so successful why have these centrally planned economies not built more ? The answer is that they barely work, they suffer accidents and they are hugely expensive – the 6 billion US$ Monju operated for less than 9 months in 1995 at pretty much zero power, and even now they are putting back start up after finding further problems. OK, so maybe the French much touted today as getting it right on nuclear power faired better ? Eh, no. The Superphenix reactor from start up to shut down (1985-1996) generated 8.2Twh – a capacity factor of 7% – the worst record of any operated reactor. Oh yes, it cost 11 billion US$ – ie a lot of efficiency measure or solar.

On the issue of not requiring additional uranium this is the argument that they breed their own fuel – plutonium – except the breeding ratio is in most cases far less than 1. The doubling time – that required for one IFR-type reactor to produce sufficient plutonium fuel to fuel another reactor blows a hole in industry and your arguments. A Monju type reactor would require as much as 60 years of continued operation to produce sufficient plutonium to fuel itself. The theoretical breeding ratio for the abandoned IFR was 0.65. So that won’t work. On plutonium separation, Mr Blees who seems to have convinced you Mark – suggests that it will not require large stocks of separated weapons material and therefore very different from Sellafield – this is based upon the notion that pyroprocessing (as opposed to Purex-type) would be utilised – again, there is technically no difference in terms of proliferation resistance – you have the technology to separate plutonium – and therefore nuclear weapons.

The timeframe for rolling out FBR’s – despite claims that we could deploy it now – does not match the timeframe for combating climate change, that is the next decade or so. As stated before, the industry does not even claim that Gen IV can be deployed commercially for decades – and they have consistently underestimated the timeframes.

Mark I’m aware you come at this issue from being concerned about climate change (I know its much stronger than this) but there are other issues to be aware of not least the threat from nuclear proliferation. A world of fast breeder reactors and rampant nuclear weapons proliferation would be a world you would not want to see (see, www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/france/ presse/dossiers-documents /japanesenuclearpolicy.pdf – for some regional some scenarios)

So why point to a solution that isn’t ? Seeking to portray those critical of nuclear power as stuck in 1970’s dogma is perhaps an attempt to distance yourself from that old-style environmentalist – but they were the ones first warned of unsustainable energy paths, ozone depletion and dangerous climate change – they also promoted the real energy solutions – efficiency and large scale renewables. That’s an honourable history to be part of. Their fears for the future of the planet were at least as genuine as yours – but they did not embrace any solution offered – they studied the options and concluded nuclear was too high a price to pay. As you are aware, the challenge of climate change is unprecedented in human history – promoting solutions that could work is essential – promoting non-solutions that also make the world a more dangerous place is not.

In 2005 the trade journal Nuclear Engineering International (not an anti-nuclear journaly as you’d guess) published the analysis of the 2004 Edition of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report under their headline. “On the way out – In sharp contrast to multiple reporting of a potential ‘nuclear revival’, the atomic age is in the dusk rather than in the dawn”. (see, www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/ dokbin/206/206808.pdf )

If they get it why don’t you ?

Shaun Burnie – Thanks for your response here, and I mean that genuinely. I see you work for Greenpeace on nuclear issues, so it is useful to engage with the organisation which is probably the most dogmatic on all on these issues. I suspect it cannot be any other way, since Greenpeace was founded largely as an anti-nuclear organisation. Reconsidering would be like the Pope reconsidering the Virgin Birth.

Arguing that I and others who have tried to be open-minded about this issue have been ‘taken in’ by the big, bad nuclear industry PR machine is patronising nonsense. Nuclear industry PR is terrible, and has been spectacularly unsuccessful in communicating to the public even the basic facts about nuclear power and radioactivity. Greenpeace and its allies have won the PR battle hands down for decades, though this may be starting to change.

As to Chernobyl, it seems to me that you are being selective with the science, and employing just the same tactics that climate change deniers employ in order to support a preconceived position. If you reject ‘official’ reports from the likes of WHO and UNSCEAR then perhaps you might also like to reject similarly official, authoritative sources like the IPCC on climate, and instead cite your own preferred, though rather less authoritative sources. Focusing on a the political debate surrounding the WHO report reminds me of sceptics always alleging that the IPCC is a ‘political’ organisation and that its Summary for Policymakers cannot be believed.

For both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island you have to stick to the science – that means rigorous, controlled epidemiological studies. I am not aware of any for TMI or any other western country which definitively show increased cancers or any other impact from the very small releases of radiation that have so far taken place. If there were such studies, you and others would be able to cite them (repeatedly), rather than simply referring to the number of lawsuits in Pennsylvania. I don’t think counting lawsuits counts as an epidemiological study. Remember: if there were to be leukaemia and other cancer clusters, you’d expect them to be around coal plants, which release far more radioactivity than nuclear stations, as you must know. But everyone seems to forget this.

I’ll skip the technical arguments on fuel production in fast-breeder reactors here, because it’s complicated, and what you say is again at odds with everything else I’ve seen. I’m not a nuclear engineer, so I cannot claim to have the last word here of course. I notice though that you don’t engage with the potential of IFR-type reactors to burn up current stocks of high-level radioactive waste, depleted uranium and plutonium. Is this inconvenient?

Proliferation is certainly an issue – civil nuclear power must always be subject to a rigorous international regulation and inspection regime. That helps keep us safe from both accidents and states intent on gaining nuclear weapons. But it has long been agreed by the international community that nuclear weapons should be separated from power production, and that all states have a right to the latter – that is the essence of the NPT.

You repeat another persistent myth – that we must solve climate change in the next decade or not at all – to support the idea that nuclear stations take too long to build. Sure, there will be a time-lag, just as there will be to dramatically scale-up renewables (though I don’t see Greenpeace deploying the same argument against offshore wind or CSP, which also face substantial engineering and capacity challenges). I suggest we pluck the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of energy efficiency win-wins to reduce emissions initially, until scaled-up low-carbon power production can take over. Or are you suggesting that we cease to need electricity at all after 2020 or so?

I’ve said loudly and repeatedly that it’s not an either/or with nuclear and renewables. So why posit solar and wind as counter-arguments? They are complementary: the most important thing is to get off coal. Unfortunately, the Greens in countries like Germany have been far busier trying to close nuclear stations than anything else, with the effect that more coal stations (without CCS) are now planned. That’s the worst of all possible options.

Yes, greens have an honourable history, and I am proud to be part of it. But times change, and opinions must change too in the light of new evidence. I respect the people that have gone before me, but I want to learn from them and stand on their shoulders rather than in their shadow.

To conclude: climate change must be our pre-eminent concern, and is manifestly more dangerous than any amount of worst-case nuclear accidents. All energy sources have their drawbacks, even renewables. It is the totality of impact on the biosphere we must look at, and here nuclear may even be better than renewables at a massive scale. So you really cannot argue that nuclear is a non-solution: according to the IPCC we’re already saving 2 billion tonnes of CO2 thanks to nuclear power. We need to increase that figure, not reduce it.

Why is no body taking on board what is the most important factor in this whole debate.We are running out of Uranium on this little planet of ours. At the present level of usage in some 440 reactors generating some 363 gigawatts 67,000 tonnes of natural uranium are required each year. Increasingly lower grade ores will have to be mined and more energy will be expended in its extraction and refining process than will result from the nuclear reactors. Witness last weeks request by Russia (yes a country the size of Russia) to enter into a contract to buy Uranium from Australia.

Good for you Mark. Having been against the Bomb, in the ‘60s & ‘70s, it took James Lovelock, a few years ago, to get me to look at the situation we find ourselves in. We are a power hungry country, and Wind, Solar, Tide & Wave cannot generate the power need to run the country industially let alone domestically. Without Nuclear Power we would soon find industry grinding to a halt, well, I suppose it already has we manufacture so little these days but we must keep the lights on in the City & Stock Exchange.

I became aware of Climate Change in the mid ‘70s, just by keeping my senses open to what was happening around me with the chemical soup we were pouring into the atmosphere, and what effectit was & could have on our environment. Now I’m no scientist, but by the early ‘80s I could see changes taking place in the countryside and I began to talk to friends about it, they laughed & said I was crazy. Interesting now, how they do their recycling yet still drive their Chelsea tractors about town. Then, I wrote a piece on Water & Food conflict along with currency colapse, againg folks laughed. It is said that he who laughs last laughs longest, but I have two Grandchildren. What are we leaving them? We won’t be around to clear up the mess we’ve help create. I do believe we are at the ‘tipping point’ infact I think we’ve passed it & are now in a Damage Limitation exercise. The Godfather of the Ecology Movement, Prof. Eugene Odum, toldme a tale, back in the ‘80s, of an interview for an American PBS station. He was asked, what is the worse case scenario when it comes to the environment. He answered “HE WHO COULD LITTLE DID NOTHING.” Sorry for putting that in caps but it’s so true. We have to act now & with what we’ve got. We can’t wait for Tide & Wave technology to catch up, it’ll take 30-40years before it gets to where it can be used. Wind & solar will never generate enough to power the country so, if we are to give up burning fossil fuels, then Nuclear is the only way. The so-called Green Movement is very green & blinkered when it comes to looking at the Whole Picture. They only see a tiny fraction, they don’t see outside of their emotional world sadly. It took me time t0 look at the whole picture but as soon as I did, my views changed. I may be a crazy old Yarnweaver/storyteller, an ancient Hippy, but I Do care for our environment, and I want action NOW from our government/s and not the lip-service we’ve had for the last 10yrs. I’m starting to ramble so I’ll leave by saying this. If anyone out there can generate enough power to run the whole country in 10yrs, without burning fossil fuels then they should start putting it into place now.

Good to hear you on Today this morning. The Green Party leader nicely illustrated your point that her party’s anti-nuclear stance is based largely on dogmatic, almost religious, belief rather than on good science. Shamefully she played the percentage game as in “it’s only x percent” and “something else can do y percent” – so what, can’t we do both to achieve x+y? She also trotted out the old chestnut about “only” z percent of input energy to large power stations ending up as useful electricity whilst failing to point out that most micro-generation plants succeed in delivering a lower proportion of useful electricity per kilowatt input.

Perhaps no one should be permitted to pontificate about electricity unless they have the qualifications that would have entitled them to chartered membership of the old Institute of Electrical Engineers (like what I have and to prove it I was a C Eng, MIEE!). But, given the truth about what you say about the nuclear industry’s poor PR, perhaps engineering boffins do need some expert communicators to help them talk to the rest of humanity rather better…

I disagree with Brian: I thought that Caroline was excellent at rebutting Mark’s points. I thought Mark let himself down by saying that what Caroline said was “complete rubbish” when it was palpable that what Mark then went on to say did not rebut Caroline’s points in the slightest… As Ed Sturton then pointed out, and Mark basically had to admit… But that’s all by the by. The question is for us to look at what is wrong with the substance of your arguments, Mark. And there is so much wrong with them, that sadly I truly don’t have enough time to enumerate it all… But most of the counter-arguments [some of them already well-outlined above] can be easily found at my blog, www.rupertsread.blogspot.com (e.g. search for ‘nuclear’ with the search facility there). And EVERYONE interested in this topic should read David Fleming’s superb ‘Lean report’ on nuclear power: http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/nuclear/index.html This systematically devastates every conceivable argument for nuclear power, including the argument that Mark will use against Alex: namely, that fast breeder reactors are allegedly different. Once one understands the science, set out beautifully by Fleming, then one finds that this isn’t true: fast breeders, paradoxically, will run out of fuel even faster than regular reactors (and they are also likely to be phenomenally unsafe, basically untested). How about this one, too, Mark? I’d love to hear your response: Mark is getting a lot of page-time and air-time at the moment with his ‘iconoclastic’ embrace of nuclear power, but the funny thing is, Mark’s own work already implicitly shows why he is wrong to back nuclear power, yet he has somehow missed this… Mark shot to prominence with his wonderful book ‘High tide’, about how incipient climate chaos is already rendering many coastlines and even entire islands less- or un- inhabitable. Where are virtually all the world’s nuclear power stations? At sea level, because of their need for huge amounts of water for cooling… It would be a vast crime, if this generation were to build yet more nuclear power capacity, in places that are in many instances likely to be inundated by rising sea levels, even if we manage to get manmade climate change under control at about 2.5 degrees of over-heat (let alone if we don’t…). Mark also fails to mention a huge part of the real solution, that lies in those same waters: Let’s harvest the energy that we need from those rising and falling tides—rather than seeing them create the mother of all eco-catastrophes, if we put our eggs into the deadly energy basket-case of nuclear… Tidal power is bigger than wind. Mark’s attacks on wind are excessive—but he fails altogether to mention the water power that will render his anti-renewables invective irrelevant. This, despite the fact that he would quite possibly be unknown as a writer were it not for the power of that very same water, that he himself has so powerfully chronicled… Isn’t life ironic…

Well done, Mark!

With the approaching energy gap, Prof Fells power cuts, fast rising populations all wanting the electricity high life and not wanting to save energy let alone be energy efficient, why not leave it to France to sell us their nuclear electricity? Let them expand and we get on with offshore wind and other renewables and, the likes of us – the righteous remnant – vainly pleading for a low energy future!

Oil is more important as a chemical building block for the 500 everyday products on which we depend than to turn, very inefficiently, into electricity. It is urgent that we stop burning oil.

Many years ago, I can remember Jonathon Porritt saying that renewables would not be enough but we must go down that route. The Greens were right since the 1970s when New Zealand was the first Green Party. Our Manifesto for a Sustainable Future is correct in its analysis and solutions. However, such is the urgency of reducing the burning of fossil fuels, I now think that James Lovelock and Mark Lynas are right, too. Nuclear is the lesser of two evils. BUT, leave it to France AND still use deserts and rooftops for solar power – everywhere.

Humans won’t restrain themselves, so nuclear is what they must have – to postpone inevitable ecocide!

I hereby resign from my life membership of the Green Party and FoE!

Mark – appreciate the quick response, but disappointed but not surprised that you demonstrate your limited understanding of nuclear power history. The WHO in matters related to radiation and health is required to report to the IAEA – the latter is in the driver seat and when the 2005 report was released WHO staff were not happy. That would explain why 6 months later, rather than defending the 4000 fatalities reported by the IAEA/WHO report, one of WHO’s lead radiation scientists (Elisabeth Cardis) confirmed that 30-60,000 cancer deaths was the right order of magnitude. Now you may not consider that number so significant in terms of the impact of climate change, but then you are not one of the victims or a family member. The fact is the IAEA is a very political organization – its mandate is to promote nuclear power, while also trying to detect the diversion of nuclear materials to weapons purposes. To compare the IAEA and WHO (in the area of radiation) to the IPCC is wholly disingenuous. To some up I reject official reports when they deliberately mis-represent reality – and the history of the nuclear industry and its sponsoring organs, principally the IAEA has these in abundance.

One of the problems about a discourse on nuclear power between those who have spent their lives understanding and then opposing it on the one hand, and those who have not, is the political dimension of nuclear power. The former understand that it is political, and the latter don’t. Therefore to insist on sticking to science ignores the political forces that have framed the debate these past decades. The founder of health physics, Karl Morgan whilst leading the US Atomic Energy Commission investigation into the effects of low-level radiation with the aim of setting ‘safe’ radiation standards concluded that there was no safe limit, no threshold below which there would not be a measurable effect – this was after three decades of research. His work was not made public until he went against his employers. He then spent the rest of his life warning of the dangers of nuclear energy. The nuclear establishment which through the last half century has been an extension of government does not take kindly to evidence that shows their industry to be inherently dangerous. In the decades since UNSCEAR, BEIR and the ICRP began reporting on radiation and health, their recommended limits have been in nearly all cases downwards. The dose you would have received in 1950 and deemed within limits would now be regarded as very significant and unacceptable. The trend is clear – not fast enough in heeding the warnings of Morgan and not fast enough to protect the public. Since your reading matter seems to be limited to Bernard Cohen and his ilk, (it was he who described plutonium as one of humanity’s greatest gifts I think was it not?) I’d suggest some alternatives – such as the Mancuso-Stewart-Kneale study on Hanford workers, and Morgan’s last book The Angry Genie: One Man’s Walk Through the Nuclear Age. To underscore the nature of nuclear power and science one final example. In 1997 an epidemiologist called Andre Viel co-authored a study on childhood cancer rates around the la Hague reprocessing plant in Normandy. The study was devastating, concluding that there was a correlation between radioactive discharges and cancer clusters, the first of its kind in France. The government’s response was to set up a commission to investigate – its still investigating. In the meantime Andre Viel has lost his academic post and he moved home after his family received death threats.

The Chernobyl study I would point to as perhaps the most authoritative (because it is based on the work of health professionals in the Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation) is the Greenpeace report of April 2006. In its foreword Alexei Yablokov of the Russian Academy of Science eloquently summarizes the devastating impact of Chernobyl and how data is suppressed to suit political ends. In the two years since its publication not one science based rebuttal has been published although it clearly shook the IAEA to its core. (Shortly after its release and a further study by Sumner and Fairlie) the IAEA removed its report from its website for ‘alteration.’)

By highlighting the work of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory on radiation releases from coal plants (fly ash) I agree that that is worrying – radiation is a direct health risk from what ever manmade source. (I’m not doubting the science of ORNL – I would point out that it was where the Hiroshima bomb was born and is fully funded by the US Dept. of Energy whose primary role is the production of nuclear weapons and development of nuclear energy) I’m not in favour of coal plants for obvious reasons. The study of course does not factor in the full nuclear life cycle – ie where the largest percentage of radiation is released during uranium mining, milling etc and, where conducted, reprocessing. Nuclear power plants are operated on the basis that there is a threshold below which there is no effect. That of course is wrong. With a no threshold policy all nuclear plants would have to be shut down. I know there are other more important reasons for shutting down coal plants, but your point merely adds another one. I’m a little bit suspicious of your motives in grasping at the coal radiation report – as its publication has been seized on by the nuclear establishment. Are you seeking to convince yourself that nukes are safe ?

Rather than skipping fuel production on breeders I’d expect you to try and answer the challenge of how a reactor that is supposed to provide energy security by breeding its own fuel can in fact not do so unless operated over decades ? On burners – the alchemy of transmutation of high level waste remains that – having been talked about for almost as long as the nuclear age there remains no facility anywhere with none I predict in the next decades. On plutonium burning the U.S,/Russia agreement of 1997 committed each nation to ‘disposing of 34 tons of plutonium’. This has been increased to 50 tons each. Eleven years later the U.S. program is years behind schedule and billions over budget, with only one test conducted in North Carolina (this was in a conventional light water reactor using 140kg of plutonim). And, oh yes the test failed earlier this year when the fuel pins ruptured. The Russian program is even further behind with plans to burn in its BN-600 and unbuilt BN-800 stalled. The alternative option of immobilizing plutonium with high level waste – far cheaper, technically feasible and most importantly quick (the longer separated plutonium sits around the greater the proliferation risk (unless you see the world through the eyes of Bernard Cohen) was blocked because of vested interests in the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy (they really still believe in breeders) and USDOE having fallen under the spell of French lobbying.. It’s not inconvenient it just does not work in reality. From the Carter Administration through to Clinton, the U.S. rejected fast breeders as too expensive, unreliable, and a direct proliferation risk. That changed with Dick Cheney and his so-called Energy Review Board. The board was dominated with industry types – ENRON and AREVA (the latter being lined up to build any future reactors in the UK). Personally I’m a bit dubious of an energy policy put together by Dick and his friends. You appear not to be. If all you have ‘seen’ on breeders runs counter to what I say, then you clearly don’t come from the environmentalist spectrum on energy policy.

On proliferation – civil nuclear power must be, but is not, subject to rigorous international regulation. Read your history of safeguards starting with Acheson/Lilienthal of 1946 – they cannot be relied upon was their conclusion – the widespread use of nuclear power will give nations the bomb option. By the way the NPT is a flawed instrument – obtaining access to nuclear power under Article IV is what has given us the current Iran crisis, and tens of other states that have the option to go nuclear. Article IV directly undermines the intentions of Articles I, II and III. If the nuclear weapon states continue to defy their commitments under Article VI (to disarm) then those states with access to so-called peaceful nuclear technology will increasingly question their own commitments to abide by the NPT. Of course, this does not even factor in the latest U.S./India nuclear agreement where a non-NPT member gets access to nuclear technology which will directly assist its nuclear weapons program. Relying on the NPT as it approaches disintegration is not credible. Given that the IAEA cannot meet its own safeguards goals today, a world with more breeder reactors, plutonium and reprocessing plants should be of deep concern to those aware of proliferation risks. If your priority is climate change then maybe you can just rely on assurances that someone will take care of it. But that’s not my position. I think climate change should be a priority but not at the expense of rampant nuclear proliferation and the risk of nuclear war.

What I’m saying on timeframes includes the fact that for every euro/dollar/rhenminbi and rupee sunk into nuclear directly undermines the deployment of large-scale renewables. You have heard of Amory Lovins I presume ? Go read his stuff and come back and say that nuclear can do it. If you have got the time read Peter Bradford formally a commissioner at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission on why nuclear will not make it. Since your probably not old enough this next quote does not apply to you, but it makes the case succinctly, “Those suffering from nuclear amnesia have forgotten why nuclear power faded from the energy scene in the first place, how many times it has failed to deliver, how often it has disappointed its most determined advocates, how extravagantly it has squandered unparalleled, unstinting support from taxpayers around the world, leaving them with burdens that may last for millennia” Walt Patterson who has done more for explaining energy policy and promoting renewable energy from the 1970’s onwards than most.

Only this month the industry stated at one of its annual knees up (World Nuclear Association) that the spiraling costs of nuclear meant that they should no longer commit to public disclosure of price ! The argument being that to reveal the ever increasing costs helped those opposed to nuclear power. Too right ! When a CEO of Florida Light and Power states that future nuclear costs could be in range of US$5-7,000 kW you know why they are worried. And remember those are light water reactors the basis of the vast majority of the world’s operating reactors – not breeders, including IFR’s of which a handful have ever been built and only one on a commercial scale. Of course as predicted AREVA’s plants under construction in Finland and Flamanville France are now significantly over budget and behind schedule. However it seems the reality of climate change is so shocking that it has removed key critical faculties of people who should know better. But worse than this, to advocate nuclear power is to set back efforts to combat climate change. If part of the solution is to throw money at the problem – and over the next decades it will be trillions in the energy sector globally – as Lovins says, every dollar spent on nuclear buys far less coal displacement. So think about this – your advocacy of nuclear power is helping to bring about the very thing you are justifiably extremely worried about! I predict that you will not be able to accept this, will dismiss the figures and claim that other evidence says differently. I’m OK with that except I worry about climate change so would rather those with a profile on the issue use it promote real solutions not dangerous fantasy.

Your dismissal of environmentalists in Germany is arrogant and uncalled for – and makes me question your credentials. You’ve written two good books and then spoken about climate change. Very good. And what else ? What’s your experience of working in environmental movements/ advocacy/policy/ industry to bring about change – including energy policy ? Perhaps you have done a lot more I’m not aware of, but those German greens seem to have been quite successful in pushing renewables. So they have not stopped coal because they focused on nuclear? That’s just childish nonsense.

I’m happy you acknowledge the past role of environmentalists, but I’m not sure many of them will understand or respect your support for nuclear power. Perhaps there is something revealing in the words you use when you say you want to be not in their shadow but on their shoulders. You clearly like the profile – it gives a good buzz, makes you feel important, and at the end of the day you are talking about a huge threat to the planet. I’ve been there. But actually being in the shadows of environmentalists is no bad place to be – it teaches a bit of humility and maybe a bit more depth to your thinking and certainly a great deal less arrogance.

I welcome your article Mark because of your willingness to address the energy issue as a matter of fact rather than opinion. Its no use carpetting the entire country with wind farms if they won’t even turn all the lights on let alone boil the kettles. It is the mathematical equation of the energy demand versus the energy supply that we need to address. No amount of anti-nuclear sentiment can change the numbers.

I do take some issue though with the way you attack people who express doubts about the CO2 argument. You ( and many others ) freely use loaded language to disparage those who worry about the downside of reducing CO2 emissions. Are they “sceptics” or “deniers”. Are these terms interchangeable as mere terms of abuse or is there some other meaning. They can sometimes be found in the same paragraph.

Scepticism is the first quality of any true scientist. Some climatologists shout that the theory of AGW is the most successful in science. I am sceptical about that. Time will tell. The most mathematically successful theory is Quantum Theory. It is testable to 15 decimal places. But phycisists have just built a 3 billion dollar experiment to check it further. They must be sceptical.

“Deniers” though is a much darker word. Why do you use it? Putting the obvious analogy with the holocaust to one side, in my experience of following the argument there is no denial by anybody that the climate has warmed over the last decade or so. It would be absurd to do so. The argument is with the cause of the warming and as far as I can tell from my reading- there is no proof. Do you have it? There is no proof either in the historical record, as far as I can tell, which supports the idea that reducing CO2 will reduce global temperature. Do you have it?

My and many other’s worry is that should we be spending billions of hard earned tax dollars on a theory of AGW when there are many other proven uses for the money right in front of us? We could clean up an awful lot of pollution with carbon offset taxes.

The scientists who said that the millenium bug was going to bring western civilisation to its knees were just as passionate about their theory. But the sceptics were right.

Thank you for offering a realistic position on the subjects of energy and the environment. You are correct to say that it is unrealistic to assume power can be cut back enough to reduce our impact on the environment. Anyone who disagrees can go and pick out the hospitals to close and convince everyone to unplug their refrigerators. The truth is, we need a lot of power in the magnitude that only nuclear plants can produce cleanly. I think that wind and renewable production could maybe provide 20-30% at most.

Due to being out of town I’ve missed out on this discussion, but let me just add a bit. Mr. Lowry’s characterization of me as an “unreconstructed pro-nuclear enthusiasts such as Tom Blees, who does not match his enthusiasm for exotic, untried nuclear technology with robust facts.” rings extremely hollow, since he has never read my book. Since he just pasted his comment from the New Statesman discussion here, I’ll refrain from pasting my response. If anyone’s interested they can go there to read it.

There are many good questions and points of concern by the commenters here, many of which would take a lot of writing to address clearly. Virtually all of them are dealt with in my book, so at the risk of sounding like a salesman I must simply suggest that people who are concerned about these issues pick up a copy from Amazon and take the time to read it. It’s 3 AM and I have business early in the morning. My apologies for not being able to contribute fully to this conversation. The fact is that the Gen IV nuclear technology that Mark and I are advocating is very little known even by physicists. But Gen IV makes all the difference in the world when discussing the possibilities of nuclear power. The IFR was specifically designed to eliminate all the problems with nuclear power—safety, proliferation, cost, waste—and it was a spectacular success. Those who decry Mark’s disregard for these problems in his advocacy of this technology simply do not have the facts. Before railing against Gen IV reactors, learn about them. What you find will be quite surprising, I can assure you. Many previously ardent anti-nuclear activists have become zealous supporters of these reactors, and for good reason. To dismiss them, and to dismiss their proponents as shills for the nuclear power industry, is simply invalid.

Friends of the Earth tried to wind down campaigning on nuclear power, some members got aggrieved about this and two Sundays ago, they passed a Conference Resolution calling on the board to consider increasing campaigning on this issue and assisting local campaigns against nuclear power stations and dumps.

Never mind that this is like sacking one of your best firefighters for BO and timekeeping when your city’s burning down.

Or that, if indeed the Government is sidelining renewables so as to keep an attractive field for nuclear, the longer you delay a new nuclear programme the longer they will keep sidelining renewables also.

It seems to me to be as futile to expect major environmental groups to relax their stance on nuclear power in any way, as it is of those groups to think they are helping the environment with that stance. Except for the matter of international proliferation, which I think can be looked at separately.

Thanks to everyone for further comments on this issue.

Shaun – your posting certainly falls under the category of ‘ad hominem’, I’m afraid – against the policy of this site. Your arguments would have much more weight if you could make them without accusing me of arrogance and suchlike. I won’t remove it, because I want others to be able to read your substantive points, but nor will I take the time to respond since you cannot be polite.

I have been encouraged by the increasing trend of noted figures with green credentials softening their anti-nuclear positions, changing their minds, or reiterating their support for the technology. I recently graduated from Imperial College London with a Masters degree in physics. I was fortunate enough to see Mr. Lynas in person there earlier this year, speaking about his book ‘Six Degrees’ in the same lecture theatre where I had learned enough about the basic physics of nuclear fission to satisfy myself of its potential value.

Nuclear fission does present problems. It is not an ‘ideal’ source of energy. The biggest problems are, in my opinion: the economics; nuclear weapons proliferation; and in a distant third, the availability of nuclear fuel.

The issues that anti-nuclear activists often focus on – safety and nuclear ‘waste’ – do not seem to be significant problems when considered quantitatively and in context. As a rational, scientifically educated person I understand that, like any process involving the handling of hazardous materials, the nuclear fuel cycle poses risks. I am satisfied that these risks are negligible when compared to risks that the public readily accepts, such as that of carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty domestic gas boilers – this predictably results in roughly 50 prompt fatalities per year in the UK. I live in a house with a gas boiler and I’m not scared of it. Being scared of the nuclear fuel cycle or nuclear ‘waste’, which has caused zero provable fatalities in the UK in the past 30 years, in that context would be ridiculous.

The problems with the economics of nuclear power are that the cost is dominated by that of physical capital which must be paid before any electricity can be delivered and any money can be made; and that the capital investment must be large, long-term, and requires very careful technical management. Reactors do go over time and over budget – not always but often due to obstructive legal action by opponents, which has also prevented completed plants from operating. This hugely disadvantages nuclear reactors in a deregulated energy market where fossil plants can be brought on line more quickly, much less expensively, and in which profits are guaranteed because natural gas generation sets the price of electricity. Likewise, wind turbines or solar PV can be built quickly and, though expensive, profits are guaranteed thanks to renewables obligations or feed in tariffs. These options are less risky for investors, and that really does make securing financing for nuclear new build from private firms difficult.

The French experience should simply torpedo any claim that nuclear power is inherently ‘too expensive’. France has some of the least expensive electricity in Europe; and far from being dependent on taxpayer money, EDF and Framatome (now AREVA) were and are hugely profitable sources of income for the French government. Decommissioning and waste management are fully priced in, by the way. This was achieved when the French state created a technically competent engineering organisation (CEA), charged it with making nuclear the mainstay of electricity generation, and supplied inexpensive financing with government-backed loans. It is clear that the French success came when the government ‘picked a winner’ and stuck with it: anathema to modern market ideologies. I suspect this sort of approach will be essential if fossil fuel fired electricity is to be phased out as quickly as climate science says is necessary.

Nuclear weapons proliferation is a thorny issue that can’t be easily dismissed. What I will say is this. Opponents say that nuclear weapons can’t be eliminated in a world that uses nuclear power. This is really about expertise: its dangerous to have people around who understand nuclear fission. Well, I want to understand nuclear fission. I don’t think that should be a crime! As long as there are people who do, a state that wants nuclear weapons will be able to create them. That genie is out of its bottle. On the other hand, if there was no nuclear power it would be impossible to carry out enrichment or reprocessing (the activities of concern from a proliferation standpoint) under the cover of a civilian power programme. This would make acquiring a bomb somewhat harder, but not impossible. I think any sufficiently determined state would probably manage it anyway as long as people who understand the theory are available.

Finally, the availability of fuel is an issue if the world intends to expand nuclear power dramatically. Breeder reactors will eventually be required. I am not yet expert enough on the technical readiness of Generation IV reactors to comment on this, but there seem to be no showstoppers. In the meantime, another generation of proven light water reactor technology will not deplete the recoverable U-235 during their lifetimes. Breeder reactor R&D should clearly be a priority during that window. If Gen IV plants are ready to roll out before U-235 is becoming scarce, all the better.

Another problem for nuclear energy right now is the existence of supply chain bottlenecks: notably large steel forging capacity, and expertise. The former is quickly disappearing, a sure sign that the steel industry at least thinks the ‘nuclear renaissance’ is real. As for the latter, well, let me say a few more words about myself. On Monday I will be starting my first real job. My employer will be AREVA, and my job title will be Graduate Engineer. They’re going to train me for two years, and I’m very much looking forward to it. I’m part of a cohort of ten from all around the world. If the websites of the major players in the industry are anything to go by, they’re very keen to hire new talent. Its time to get building, and I’m very excited to be part of it!

Shaun Burnie’s (of the Green Party) contribution has a familiar ring to it; if the facts don’t support the argument, change the facts. The GP’s stance for example on the use of animal testing for medical research is only supported by misrepresenting the evidence. The Green Party, like the two major political parties have, needs to have a careful look at its policies and jettison those that are no longer relevant to the world in which we now live.

I think lots of you are missing the point of debate here. Especially you Cliff! “Deniers” Holocaust? Why would you assume Mark is making some kind of sinister reference here or are you likening those whom use the words “sceptic” or “denier” to Nazis? Get off your high horses! The point originally made here I think is simple. The renewable sources available, all of them, wont be enough and can’t be built fast enough. Nuclear is likely to be a better answer, certainly in the short term. Yes, we all know it is not without it’s problems and is not the perfect solution. Yes we should invest in renewables AS WELL. At this rate by the time anybody takes any meaningful action it is highly likely that it will be way too little too late. If you are a “sceptic”, if I am allowed to use the word, fine. Then none of this concerns you anyway because you already know you are right and that Mark Lynas and the current scientific concensus has got it wrong. ??? Or actually are you not that sure? STOP being so negative and learn to express your views in a better manner.

Fast breeder reactors. Let’s burn it and run the risk of dumping it in the atmosphere like we dump everything else in our atmosphere? Fast breeders… like mankind’s endless ‘growth’. But of course the real argument here is that the Green New Deal doesn’t fit the corporate model of endless ‘growth’... of wasteful consumerist junk products (that is leading to global economic & glacial melt-down unless we change course right now). If our government were to simply invest in people, we could have solar water heaters for every domestic property & for a starters that would cancel the negative effects of recent price rises and save millions of people from fuel poverty this winter. The energy companies would also see that there’s ‘competition’ now and so prices would have to fall to compete! We mustn’t miss this opportunity. If we don’t have massive investments in renewables, it is people who will suffer long-term. The jobs are sorely needed too and this was always the promise of ‘New-Technologies’! So where are the jobs? The amount of jobs per £billion building nukes is miniscule next to a national programme of investment in jobs in renewables! The ‘Home Improvements’ Companies that brought us Double Glazing should long ago have been bringing us solar water heaters (at the very least.. if not the full solar wind & groundheat package to get as many as possible off grid… thus freeing up the national grid’s electricity for industry’s use). I haven’t even touched on solar PV, or miro wind, because in an ideal world that requires that manufacturers change the voltage of domestic apliances to be more compatible with that technology… so in the meantime renewables like PV & wind can be plugged back into the grid thus producing energy ‘locally’ and reducing wastage in transportation (was the figure mentioned 5-10% loss in transportation?... well there’s ALL the new nukes for a start)... not to mention reducing people’s bills even further! And why doesn’t every pylon in the country have a verticle blade wind turbine on its top to boost power a bit more? There’s millions of pylons already there so nobody could claim it was an eye-sore! The fact is, nuclear power isn’t anywhere near as ‘cheap’ as they claim when one factors in the de-comissioning costs! Something that never gets done because the taxpayer is still expected to come up with that money as well… what was it? £70+ billion at a recent estimate (but of course nobody really knows because how do you know what it’ll ‘cost’ in a thousand years time)? Add de-comissioning costs to the ‘cost’ of nuclear power ‘at the plug’ and your hairdryer becomes the most expensive hairdryer in history! Having said ALL of that the real danger is this civilisation of ours (that seems to be teetering on the edge of a global catastrophy of its own making), leaving a toxic technology legacy that nobody understands in the future, which poisons future generations for hundreds of thousands of years and yes it is hundreds of thousands… Plutonium has a Half-Life of 250,000 years (which means if an ounce of plutonium kills you in ten minutes now… in 250,000 years it will take twenty minutes for you to die!) The stuff is just too dangerous to leave for future generations… and of course that’s where it all comes back to weapons again. Once again we are looking to replace Trident and suddenly we need to ‘love’ nuclear power stations again and this time they’re trying to ‘sell’ it as an ‘environmentally friendly thing’ to do… please don’t suggest there isn’t a weapons connection… There’s always a weapons connection with nuclear power. From Iran to Sellafield. Its about being in the nuclear ‘club’... There is nothing environmentally (or any other way) ‘friendly’ about nukes and its high time we stopped trying to solve problems with the same sort of thought processes that created those problems in the first place.

Mark – sorry that you believe I have been rude to you. But that was not me on Radio 4 calling the information on a Greenpeace site “lies” or dismisssing Caroline Lucas with the phrase “utter nonsense”. Perhaps the impact of witnessing over a few decades the impact of nuclear power on people’s lives in the United States, former Soviet Union, Japan, Korea, China, and western and eastern Europe has led me to be a bit emotional. Your advocacy of nuclear power is indeed an insult to their suffering. In 20 years or so from now when further billions have been squandered on nuclear power resulting in a fraction of the electricity we need, and renewables and efficiency have failed to reach their potential as a result, those who made the monumental error of supporting nuclear power development will have to answer the question, why?

A very interesting debate. I will be very glad if people arguing against nuclear power answer to these doubts of mine.

1) Nuclear power is expensive : This is what everyone says. But why should the nuclear power be expensive ? Is it the material required for construction ? Can solar or wind be done for less concrete/steel/other material than nuclear ? Can they be done for less land ? Or is it the shortage of personnel and the salaries that have to be paid for them ? Or is it the fuel which is expensive ? There has to be an inherent reason why nuclear power is expensive. Can somebody please give a breakup of nuclear costs and explain why nuclear will remain inevitably more expensive than solar / wind ?

2) Nuclear power is a proliferation danger : Can you convince every single country in the world to abandon nuclear power ? We have not been able to yet convince each country to destroy their nuclear bombs. How can we get them to abandon nuclear power ? If USA or UK stops using nuclear power, is there any guarentee that China or Pakistan will do likeways. In fact, Pakistan has just signed a nuclear deal with China.

3) Breeder reactors and Plutonium : Can somebody tell me why breeder reactors are more dangerous than the current nuclear reactors, either in terms of proliferation or safety ? Are breeder reactors more prone to accidantal meltdown than the current reactors ? Do breeder reactors produce fissile material in a format better suited for nuclear bombs, than say current nuclear reactors ? Can Uranium used as breeder reactor fuel be directly used for nuclear bombs ? If not, what more has to be done ? Do breeder reactors produce more waste (or more dangerous waste) than the current nuclear reactors ? Do they pollute water sources or atmosphere with some emissions or radiation ?

Please reply to me with answers. This information will be very useful for arguing against a pro-nuclear person. Thank you very much :)

Matthew, Congratulations on picking a career that should prove quite profitable and fulfilling. While I strongly encourage you to check out my book that deals with the many points you brought up, I’d just like to comment on your concerns about proliferation. If humanity is to avail itself of the many benefits of advanced nuclear power, we really must divorce nuclear power from nationalism and look to set up an international regime similar to what France has done with EDF and AREVA, where a single organization of highly trained individuals oversees every aspect of nuclear power, from mining uranium (which we wouldn’t have to do with IFRs) to waste disposal (which is very easy, cheap and safe with IFRs since there are no long-lived actinides). The solution to this is a major component in my book, and I believe it can be accomplished. The problems are not technical but political, hence my attempt to present an actual multifaceted solution for the general public to become aware of and then, hopefully, to create the pressure to force our leaders to act in our best interests.

If we follow this plan, uranium availability will be a moot point in the long run, for we’ll be able to switch to all-IFRs by about 2030, and with that we’ll have enough fuel to power the planet (for all our energy, not just our current electrical needs) for literally hundreds of years with fuel we’ve already got out of the ground.

You are to be congratulated, Mark, for putting your sound reputation as an environmentalist behind an objective assessment of nuclear power’s potential role in reducing carbon emissions. This is much needed. You are right to recognise the difficulty for the ‘green’ organisations in accepting that nuclear power can have a role, but given that the public is generally not well placed to assess their arguments and distinguish between fact and dogma, it becomes vitally important for respected, impartial commentators like you to be heard. With the urgency of reducing the world’s continuing carbon emissions it is surely irresponsible to be arguing about whether we need to be investing in improved energy efficiency, the renewables or nuclear power: we need to be doing as much as we can in all of these. There is no evidence that one will stifle investment in any other. Nuclear (and the renewables) moreover should not be seen just as a means of meeting the need for electricity generation, but as sources of non-carbon energy that can be used, with electricity as the energy carrier, to substitute for fossil fuels in use areas currently dependent on these fuels.

The arguments against nuclear tend to fall into five categories: safety; pollution of the environment; waste management; cost; and proliferation risk. A few words on each.

Safety

Nuclear power must be under strong and effective regulation. No plant must be built or operated until it has been subject to the most stringent, independent safety assessment to be satisfied that whatever goes wrong the likelihood of harm to anyone is very low, and that of a major accident vanishingly small. Anyone who has experience of the NII’s scrutiny of plans for building and operating UK nuclear plants will know how intense this scrutiny is. As a result it’s difficult to see concern over safety as a sustainable argument against the future building of nuclear power stations in the UK. (It could however be a valid argument against nuclear power in countries which do not have the institutions, infrastructure or political stability to provide this necessary standard of regulation.)

But everyone has heard of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Don’t these accidents shake our confidence that nuclear power really is safe?

Three Mile Island actually supports the argument that nuclear reactors can be built to be safe. Despite the catastrophic meltdown of the core, the engineered systems worked as they should to contain almost all of the radioactivity. As you note, despite numerous independent epidemiological studies, no discernible health effects have been detected in the population exposed to the radioactivity that was released, and there have been plenty of people keen to find such effects! The accident has moreover led to important improvements in the safety of all nuclear plant. A major contributing cause of the accident was the lack of instrumentation, which meant that the operators did not know what was happening when an initial malfunction occurred and this led them to respond to it in a way that was the complete opposite of what was needed. This then led directly to a loss of cooling and the overheating of the core. Had the operators done nothing no one would now remember Three Mile Island! Since this accident regulators in all countries pay special attention to the adequacy and effectiveness of instrumentation.

Chernobyl, seen by many to typify the risks of nuclear power, is quite untypical. It was of a reactor type that had potentially dangerous characteristics that meant that it could never have been licensed in the West; it was operated with criminal irresponsibility (safety interlocks designed to prevent this from being done had been switched off to allow an unauthorised procedure to be carried out, with disastrous results); and the political/cultural mores of the then Soviet Union provided no checks on this irresponsibility.

These two major accidents underline the importance of maintaining the strictest possible safety management of nuclear plant but don’t support the concern that nuclear power is inherently unsafe.

Pollution

There is a common impression that nuclear power is heavily polluting. While it does produce gaseous and liquid emissions that are radioactive, these are tightly controlled against limits set to ensure that even the hypothetically most exposed individual does not receive a dose significantly above the average background dose. As compared with the toxic emissions from many other industries, the environmental impact of the nuclear industry is benign.

There have of course been leakages that have attracted a great deal of attention, and there are some examples of past environmental practices that would not be acceptable today. Standards have changed since the early days but the legacy of these past practices lives on. Some of the early plants and storage facilities were built to lower standards than would be obligatory today, and leaks and unauthorised discharges have occurred, especially at Sellafield and Dounreay where there are complex, often aging chemical plants built in the 1950s or before. In most cases these leaks have been radiologically insignificant, often involving no release of radioactivity beyond the site boundary (sometimes entirely contained within a building), but they should not occur and are properly reported to the world. However because they involve radioactivity they tend to receive disproportionate and sensational reporting by the media.

New nuclear power stations will meet modern environmental standards, with discharge authorisations set to reflect these standards. Because they are likely to use a fuel cycle that does not involve reprocessing, effluents associated with fuel reprocessing will avoided.

Waste disposal

Much is made of the fact that “we do not have a means of disposing of nuclear waste”, and some in the ‘green’ movement see this as a clinching argument against nuclear power. Ultimately a means will have to be found, to deal with the considerable holdings of waste not yet disposed of that has been accumulated from the past 60 years of nuclear research, weapons production and electricity generation. Until this can be disposed of, it is being safely stored on the nuclear sites in purpose-built facilities and is being put into a form that immobilises the waste and eliminates any risk that the radioactivity could become dispersed into the environment in the event of flood, fire or any other calamity. The waste can therefore be stored almost indefinitely, although it would obviously be preferable to be able to place it into its final repository. The problems of finding a place for such a repository are essentially social/political rather than technical. However once such a site is found and an underground repository created, dealing with the additional wastes from future nuclear stations will add a comparatively modest increment to the capacity needed – requiring only a few extra caverns to be excavated. The waste from future stations will be very much less than that from the old Magnox and AGR stations because of their different design and different fuels.

Cost

Government has said that it will not subsidise those wanting to build new nuclear stations. Therefore any that are built will have to be economically justified against the market conditions expected to be prevailing, allowing also for any carbon premia placed on fossil fuels or obligations for non-fossil generation. It will be for the private investors to judge whether an investment in a nuclear power station is justified, and therefore it is a little odd that many in the green movement keep chirping that nuclear power is too costly. If it is, no one will want to build nuclear stations and there will be no need to oppose them!

Much is made of the fact that decommissioning all the existing nuclear stations is estimated to cost the government an enormous £75 billion, and there is the concern that building future stations could be similarly as expensive. However, the current decommissioning bill is heavily weighted by the costs of decommissioning Sellafield, the UKAEA’s research facilities at Dounreay, Harwell, Winfrith and Culham, and the old Magnox stations, which in relation to their generating capacity are very bulky plants, expensive to dismantle and creating large volumes of waste. None of these early installations were designed with ease of decommissioning in mind. More recent power stations, like the PWR station at Sizewell, will be much easier and less expensive to decommission, producing very much less waste, and without reprocessing will not create a decommissioning requirement corresponding to that of Sellafield. Utilities will be required to create adequate provisions for the back-end costs of decommissioning and waste management, and there is no reason why they will not be able to do this or why the cost may fall on the tax payer.

Having said all this, cost is a disincentive to investment in nuclear power. The very high proportion of total lifetime costs that occur at the beginning make the economics of the investment very sensitive to delays in the planning, construction, commissioning and licensing stages, and to risks that can affect the rate of return. The very politicised nature of all things to do with nuclear power creates risks to the investment, and there may be a role for Government in minimising some of the risks if it is to create an environment conducive to nuclear investment. Moving ahead with creating a waste repository would remove an important uncertainty over future waste management costs.

Proliferation

Building new nuclear stations in the UK does not increase the likelihood of nuclear proliferation. Countries set on acquiring nuclear weapons can, regrettably, get the necessary know-how from the many states that have now despite the NPT obtained the technology. Safeguards arrangements enforced by the UN and EU ensure that nuclear materials such as plutonium and enriched uranium cannot be covertly diverted to weapons production, and physical security measures prevent risk of such materials falling into the hands of terrorists. Stringent nuclear accountancy controls show where all such materials are at any point of time. Undoubtedly more needs to be done to strengthen the NPT and its application, and there may be concern about the protection of nuclear materials in some parts of the world. However, coupling non-proliferation with the issue of whether the UK should invest again in nuclear power is merely a device by those opposed to nuclear power. George Monbiot recently argued that it was inconsistent for the UK Government to be planning for more nuclear power in the UK while arguing against Iran’s plans for its (quite unnecessary) fuel enrichment plant. He either does not understand the Iran issue or is just being mischievous.

Fast Reactors

You refer to the fast breeder reactor as a potentially attractive ‘fourth generation’ reactor system, because of its ability to burn existing stocks of plutonium. This could be a distraction in the current debate. The experience of the past history of nuclear power is that it is only after a reactor design has become established, with a succession of near-identical plants built and operated, that there can be confidence that construction can be completed with minimum delay, and that faults will not emerge that cause problems during its operating life. For this reason those planning to build new stations are likely to want to go for a design that is evolutionary from well-tried current designs, primarily the PWR. A fast reactor is a completely different beast and is unlikely to be an attractive early investment option. The UK had a leading position in fast reactor technology until the Government stopped the programme in 1990, and a design had been developed with French and other European partners for a full scale, ’commercial’ fast reactor. This was seen as having generating costs, before allowing for the first-of-a-kind launch costs, broadly comparable with those of a then current PWR. However, launch costs for the first-of-a-kind would make this first one uncompetitive, and with uranium prices forecast to remain low for the foreseeable future and no other nuclear capacity planned during the 1990s, the fast reactor did not have a sufficient economic edge to justify continued Government development funding or investment in a ‘commercial’ lead station. Despite this, it is not true that the technology ‘failed’; it just was not needed at the time.

Whether it will be needed in the future is a moot point. Increasing uranium prices could justify building fast reactors at some time. It’s doubtful that they could be justified just as a means of ‘burning up’ plutonium and other long-lived actinides (some stored plutonium can in any case be incorporated with fuel for thermal reactors). However, coming along in the wings is the promise of fusion power, which the experts now at last seem confident is technologically achievable. The big $12 billion international investment in ITER at Caderache in France (funded by the EU, Russia, China, Japan, S.Korea, India, and USA) will provide the final demonstration of technical feasibility, beyond which comes the challenge of engineering it for economic and reliable operation. As you will know, fusion has a number of environmental advantages over fission reactors.

Earl writes: “The amount of jobs per £billion building nukes is miniscule next to a national programme of investment in jobs in renewables!” Here is the anti-nuke own goal again: On the one hand we’re told how uneconomical nuclear power is compared to renewables, while on the other we’re told that non-nuclear technologies will supply exponentially greater numbers of jobs. Which is it? (Rhetorical question) As for your concerns about nuclear waste, if we switch to IFRs there simply won’t be any long-lived waste. We’ll use it all up easily and safely, and what’s left can be as easily and safely disposed of without burdening future generations (details in my book, I can’t write everything here).

I look forward to coming back here at the end of the day to address Shaun at length, but right now I have a workday to attend to. Shaun, please don’t give up on this thread. Check it tomorrow, please. And really, you needn’t worry so much about the future if you’ll countenance the possibility that there’s a type of nuclear technology that really can not only be safe but clean up the legacy of nuclear “waste” quite readily. There is, indeed, such a technology, and that’s what Mark has been advocating. He hasn’t suddenly gone from being a responsible environmentalist to a heedless pawn of the nuclear industry. The very idea is ludicrous. Maybe he knows something that’s gone under your radar. Mark is not to be so breezily dismissed. He is as committed an environmentalist as you are. You may notice that Dr. James Hansen has also come out in favor of IFRs. Is he too an apostate? I can think of few people with more credibility as an environmentalist. He’s Al Gore’s science advisor, and was warning about global warming when many of today’s environmentalists were in nappies (or merely a gleam in their daddy’s eye).

More later, if you’ll allow me the time to earn a living today.

Kiran,

I look forward to responding to your questions in detail later tonight. Please check back tomorrow.

Mark Lynas may not want to respond to Shaun Burnie’s post, but I would like to pick up on one point that Mr Burnie raised – Karl Morgan’s conclusion that there is no safe limit for radiation exposure.

Clearly this means that we should strive to reduce radiation exposure to a minimum and as such the anti-radiation stance that Mr Burnie takes is a reasonable one. It is also equally clear that a nuclear power plant can release radioactive material to the environment (and potentially extremely large quantities at that), which is an excellent reason to be extremely careful about how nuclear power plants are operated or to be entirely against building them in the first place.

However a coal-fired power station also releases radioactive material to the environment. Typically a 1GW installation will emit around 15 tons of radio-nucleotides to the atmosphere per year; this release will be entirely uncontrolled and furthermore, a consequence of its normal, routine operation. Yet I am not aware of groups such as Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth devoting any resources to raising public awareness about this issue or campaigning for coal generators to be made to take responsibility for the radioactive waste that they produce.

Why is this?

Regards Luke

Okay, Shaun – let’s be very specific here. You say I am insulting the suffering of all the people whose lives have been blighted by nuclear power. Let’s just look at this one issue then, and cut the emotion. So give me some good citations for peer-reviewed epidemiological studies which show clearly and irrefutably that cancer and other disease risk is elevated around nuclear installations, and where a clear connection is demonstrated. I’ve had a good look through the literature, and can only find studies finding no statistically significant link at all between the incidence of leukaemia and other cancers near nuclear sites in Spain, France, Sweden and the US.

I’d like to respond to shaun, though I won’t attempt to match his quantity. Allow me to briefly sum up your points, shaun: 1) No solution to nuclear waste 2) Politically unpopular 3) Economically untenable 4) Nuclear industry hoodwinking unwitting “climate change authors” (presumably Mark) into pushing their line of propaganda 5) Chernobyl deaths to 100,000 6) Patently false claims of disaster at Three Mile Island 7) Breeders are economically untenable 8) Doubling times of 60 years cited 9) Pyroprocessing and PUREX are no different in terms of proliferation 10) Dangerous amounts of radiation are released during mining and processing of uranium 11) Nuclear material should be under international control to prevent proliferation 12) Amory Lovins is an authority on whether nuclear power is tenable or not

Let’s look at these briefly:

1) Not applicable. IFRs burn nuclear waste as fuel. In the building pace proposed in my book, all the spent fuel in the world could be used up just loading primary fuel loads in IFRs in about 3.5 years. 2) That can be changed, especially with IFR technology once people learn about it. 3) Simply untrue for Gen III and Gen IV reactors when built in other countries. See ABWR in Japan & Taiwan and AP-1000 in China. It’s not cost-effective in the USA because the government encourages private utility companies to gouge their customers.

Mark ably rebutted #4-6, though in regard to Chernobyl I’d question shaun’s objectivity when he dismisses the report of the 2005 Chernobyl Forum, a study group that involved over 100 scientists from eight specialist UN agencies and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Its conclusions are in line with earlier expert studies, notably the UNSCEAR 2000 Report. But all these are dismissed as political coverups. The charges of conspiracy fly thickly from the antinuclear movement, but it’s hardly convincing.

7) Which design? The PRISM should be about the same or less than the Gen III designs, very probably less (far more simplified). 8) If you configure them for maximum breeding, a fast reactor of the PRISM type could have a doubling time as low as 7 years. 9) Absolutely untrue. Purex isolates plutonium, pyroprocessing does not. 10) If we run IFRs that point will be moot, because we don’t have to mine anymore for hundreds of years. 11) I couldn’t agree more 12) Amory Lovins’ arguments against nuclear power barely apply to Gen III reactors and don’t apply at all to Gen IV. Ideological opposition to a technology is no virtue, nor any validation of authority.

The problem with nuclear reactors is sea level rise. With the majority of world’s nuclear fleet, currently over 440 reactors, sitting at sea level at the coast (for access to cooling water), shouldn’t the nuclear industry be dismantled as fast as possible? Are we really going to build hundreds of more nuclear reactors only to see them submerged by the rising waters?

The public really does not need some straight answers on this. The public should expect total honesty from the nuclear industry on the risks of putting yet more nuclear reactors on today’s beaches.

Surely it is better to let wind turbines be lost to the rising sea rather than dozens or hundreds of nuclear reactors?

Dear Mark:

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

Sincerely, Bill Totten

mark, it would be good if you turn your attention from your spat with Shaun and answer the point I made earlier on the future supply of refined uranium. All the other relevant concerns of storage, cost, environment etc etc etc are as of nothing if there is not going to be available fuel to put in the reactors. I make this point on websites, letters to the papers, phone-in’s and yet no-one with any clout is picking this up and running with it on this very important debate. The developed world is walking in to an energy and fuel desert and time is fast running out for solutions. What would be the point of building a new round of reactors all around the world, if years down the line we end up with white elephants with no fuel for them. Can we move this debate along on to a more realistic level.

Alex, you have a very valid point, but this is true only when we discuss current nuclear reactors which use U-235.

The type of reactors being proposed by Tom Blees or Mark Lynas are very different. They use U-238 (which is 100 times more common). It is also known as depleted Uranium or nuclear waste.

Estimates vary on how long U-238 lasts, depending on whether you count seawater extraction or not. In general, they vary from 1000 years to 100,000 years.

Great debate so far – but you can’t all be right! I’m waiting to see what anyone has to say about the last couple of questions: 1) Would there be enough future fuel anyway? 2) What happens to my local nuclear plant at Hinkley Point when the sea level rises and floods the basement much faster than previously expected?

Dear Mark

Bill Totten is an excellent example of the new environmentalist school of thinking. “Slowing economic activity (aka GDP or GNP) by half would cut our energy needs by 75%!”. This is presumed to be a good thing.

The economic ignorance of this remark beggars belief. It is no wonder that environmentalists have so easily swallowed the AGW argument. There is no requirement to support science with fact. Mere assertions and computer models are sufficient.

The IPCC famously states “CO2 emissions are very likely the cause of global warming” . What other political movement or science discipline (other than climatology that is) would base its credibility on the premise of “very likely”.

Members of the jury I urge you to find the defendant guilty as charged and condemn him to a lifetime of unemployment and financial misery because he is very likely to have done it.

I rest my case Mr Rumpold.

As some one who on a clear day can see Hinkley Point over the Somerset levels, I’d like some one to respond to the rising sea-levels issue. It’s rather important isn’t it?

Hello, Mr. Lynas.

With all its potential, the future of energy conservation is a bright one. There is an inverse relationship between our efforts to conserve nuclear energy and our efforts to produce it, so with the threat of nuclear energy in mind, well, “Brilliant!”.

A recent report on bubbling of methane from seafloor vents in the arctic marks a tipping point in the global warming scenario. Either that increase of energy used by nuclear power, in a positive future, dies as the waste of energy that it was, or, somehow, building out nuclear energy production capacity will be more important than ever. Once you pour nuclear waste into a barrel of energy, you’ll see yourself in a sea of clothes dryers, dead cows, lawn clippings, and cars, all sloshing around you. So there’s an illuminating argument for nuclear waste, if you must crack that barrel open.

No, there’s got to be a better way of producing energy than nuclear. A by-the-barrels, fire-when-ready atmosphere, already about to explode, deserves a better hug than it gets from cracked towers leaking steam that shoot electrons at its molecules.

Yes, the globe and the atmosphere may part ways if we fart in it and radiate the wrong side of it, but until that happens, civilization must remain civilized. If we choose to suffer this sad discussion of thwarted purpose, to let it drag us into that black hole swirling in our power plan, and leave us to finally suck up to the overheated atmosphere, then lets avoid that argument, and conserve our energy for more important things, like frugal living.

I hope your writings remind me of them again.

Thank you for your excellent book, Mr. Lynas.

-Noah Scales

Michael @ 1:04: We could just build all the new reactors on higher ground.

Bill Totten: While energy efficiency like California’s already achieved could dramatically reduce energy demand and thus obviate the urgency of building new power plants as rapidly as it seems we need them, if we want to eliminate anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions we’re going to have to build a lot of power plants because we have to replace all the fossil-fuel fired ones. I often read sentiments like yours, that we simply have to be content with less energy and, if need be, a slightly lower standard of living. This assumes that energy supplies are constrained. Yet if we build as many IFRs as we’d like we have plenty of fuel to power them for hundreds of years, and it’s already mined and milled. We only need accept constraints on our energy use if we refuse to build sufficient IFRs to provide the energy that is just sitting there waiting to be used. Theo, I think that answers your question about fuel availability. You can find details and documentation in my book at www.prescriptionfortheplanet.com. By the way, Kiran, economically recoverable uranium resources, when burned in IFRs, will last (according to the data in my book) about 50,000 years if we use it to produce all the energy humanity needs. As you can imagine, the point is academic.

I have only recently read James Lovelocks “Revenge of Gaia”, something that i’ve been meaning to do for a while as I was interested to read about his stance on nuclear energy and how it could help. It was a bold and probably for him very nervous step into and area unknown. An environmentalist and Greenie suddenly switching and suggesting we may need to consider nuclear.

Firstly let me say that in no way do I support nuclear energy as a permanent solution. I believe that if Nuclear energy can help us reduce carbon emissions in the short term to such levels that can be managed rather than being at uncontrollable levels then thats surely a good thing. Alongside its use we need to have strong commitments and agreements that alternative energy generation technologies will get the investment they require and also phase out dates if carbon emissions reduce to manageable levels and alternative sources of energy production have been found.

I have strong concerns about the waste produced by Nuclear power stations and also the damage to life and the environment that could be caused if any accidents happen. The Revenge of Gaia clearly displays tables of information and data showing fatalities caused by all the main energy sources and it really opens your eyes to the fact that some of the greener options such as hydro electricity generated at high levels by dams is one of the most damage and could cause the largest amount of deaths if say the dam failed.

What I’m trying to say is that considering all the options we have for generating electricity, is Nuclear really as bad as we make out? technology has moved on and in this day and age we need to open our minds to whatever aids can help us reduce the affects of climate change.

What is the greatest threat to humans, wildlife, the environment and the planet we live on? Is it Nuclear or climate change and global warming? I think we know the answer, and so being open minded and considering all our options is essential .

Being Green and anti-nuclear has been a strong partnership for years, since the formation of CND. But I think more and more people are starting to look at the 2 issues separately.

Its also worth remembering that we an mak the biggest impact by behavioural change. If we used energy more responsibly, used and manufactured more energy efficient products and basically became more energy savvy we would save more energy than by taking any other approach.

Our demand needs to recuce and has to reduce if we are going to make a change.

Its up to us all and how we live our lives at the end of the day.

What a pity there are not more ‘greens’ with Mark’s foresight; perhaps this country would not now be suffering from the stagnation of growth and lack of expertise in the nuclear sector, for which Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc must take some responsibility. Professor Lovelock, one of our most respected environmental scientists, led the way a couple of years ago when he rejected outright the stance of anti nuclear groups and made it clear his support for nuclear energy. The science debate for nuclear is well known but how many people are aware of the industry’s environmental record? It may come as a complete surprise to the ‘Greens’ that the nuclear industry takes its environmental obligations very seriously and has a large number of people working hard to ensure the industry is compliant with legislation and the Environment Agency. Biodiversity Action Plans are now a requirement for each site and Biodiversity Benchmark accreditation from the Wildlife Trust has just been granted for the site I work on as an environmental consultant. All this is in the public domain, so there is no excuse for the anti nuclear lobby to do a bit of research and find out the real facts.

The world’s oceans contain four billion tons of dissolved uranium. A practical means for extracting this uranium from ocean water has been demonstrated in Japan. If you extract uranium from the surface of the ocean more will dissolve into the water from the ocean floor. The ocean water extraction process is about ten times as expensive as mining natural uranium in rich deposit locations such as Canada and Australia. So given today’s economic balance it is less expensive to mine new uranium than it is to extract if from ocean water. The economics of nuclear power are not dominated by fuel costs, so a ten-fold increase in fuel costs would not cause a large increase in final production costs for nuclear fission generated electricity. In direct language, the supply of inexpensive uranium in inexhaustible.

Modern reactors can also fission other heavy elements, including thorium which is three to four times more available than uranium. There are many good technical reasons for using thorium instead of uranium. It is also inexhaustible, and leads to better solutions for proliferation concerns.

There is more than enough clean fuel available for us to design a future that supports a healthy, vibrant, sustainable, and meaningful style of human living. By changing to this concentrated form of energy we can dramatically reduce the impact of human living – just as the transition from horses to tractors has allowed the forest cover in North America to increase by 24% during the last fifty years.

I just wanted to reply to Theo’s point about sea level rise, since he asked nicely. This is an important point, because many reactors are based around the coast, and therefore vulnerable to rising seas. The first question is: what is the magnitude of sea level rise likely to be? The latest research suggests that it is physically almost impossible, given ice-sheet dynamics, for sea levels to rise by more than 2 metres by 2100 – though that’s quite a lot, and the oceans will continue to rise for centuries after that date.

But for the lifetime (including decommissioning) of existing plants, straightforward sea defences (walls etc) would be more than enough to cope. I would expect newer plants to be built with sea level rise in mind – these people aren’t completely stupid, and they’re about to invest an awful lot of capital.

So in summary, I don’t think this is a killer issue really.

Incidentally, Greenpeace have promised to send me an annotated version of my original NS article, with their objections of fact stated explicitly. I’ll ask for permission to post it here.

I believe I have come up with a practical way to convert existing coal power plants to TRISO (not conventional) nuclear quickly and economically. This will end 70% of the CO2 accumulation that is causing Global Warming without bringing us to financial ruin.

Thank you.

http://www.coal2nuclear.com

What many nuclear opponents forget is the scale of energy production and the energy density, and thus low environmental impact, nuclear power has. To give an example: A molten salt thorium breeder reactor, a type prototyped in the US in the 1960s and 70s, is estimated to consume about 1 ton of thorium per year and electrical GigaWatt output. It produces also about 1 ton of waste fission products per GWyear. Such a thorium breeder (a GenIV reactor type) has the unique property of not needing any enriched fuel, except for first startup, and produces only trace amounts of long lived radioactive transuranics. This means that “waste” will be no more radioactive than natural uranium ore after about 300 years. Even as soon as after 10 years it is possible to extract very valuable and rare elements from it, which have decayed to non-radioactive stability in that time. The fuel cycle it uses is also fairly proliferation safe, as it would be very very difficult to build a bomb with the material. To illustrate what 1 ton per GWyear means: I live in an area with a granite rock underground. The soil im my garden, common for granitic soils, has a Thorium content of about 16 grams per ton. My households electrical power consumption is about 7000 kWh per year. With a thorium breeder reactor, 1 tonne of garden soil from my garden contains enough thorium to power my household for 20 years. I would gladly dig a hole of 1m x 1m x 0.65m in my garden to have clean power for 20 years. Recently there were finds in a single site in Idaho (Lemhi Pass) of Thorium ores estimated at about 600 000 tons, with probable reserves of 3.2 million tons. Part of that site’s ore has Thorium concentrations of 25-65%. At 25% concentration only 4 tons of ore are needed to power a 1 GWatt Thorium breeder reactor for a full year. Four guys with shovels and a pickup truck can easily “mine” 4 tons in half a day, and thus produce enough “fuel” to power a large city reliably for a year. No other energy source has that density and such a low environmental impact.

Mr. Totten:

“Slowing economic activity (aka GDP or GNP) by half would cut our energy needs by 75%!”

Having done that, I suppose you suggest we do it again, then again, then again.

We all know that the most safe, most secure, most energy efficient work of mankind is that which is not performed. No cave dwelling for me, thank you.

Mark, can you please clarify why it is physically impossible to have more than 2 metres sea level rise by 2100.

Tom, regarding the siting of nuclear reactors inland, can you please clarify why the potential for secondary impact of planetary oceanic redistribution on earthquake susceptibility is zero. Once the polar regions decompress, it is really anyone’s guess what the effects may be on fault zones and plate structures. Surely, once the planet responds to the major melt, we need for safety’s sake to have all these hyper-risk installations 100% decommissioned. In other words, a precautionary approach (ie looking after the public and the environment) would involve dismantling the existing nuclear industry – including all inland installations – as soon as possible.

If the nuclear industry is going to build nuclear reactors inland (against all common sense) it needs to provide the public with 100% guarantee that the reconstruction of the earth’s crust and associated shifts in water tables etc will not affect any installation. Specifically, it needs to clarify also why such inland sites would not be affected by water shortages and lowering water tables. Such clarification should be provided with answers inspired by honesty and humility and most importantly statements that there are unknowns in matters of safety. Of course, once the industry does tell us there are these great unknowns then we are back to square one with the issue of 100% safety.

With regard to the remote possibility (to which I do not subscribe) that nuclear industry experts know (1) everything about what may influence the future development of the nuclear industry during fleet lifetimes, (2) how the earth is going to respond to sea level rise and polar reconstructions, and (3) are able to satisfy us to 100% satisfaction on public safety issues, I would urge them speak to central bankers about their recent experiences of dealing with complex fast-changing systems. It is surely one thing for the public to have to pick up toxic debt, it is quite another to leave to future generations a portfolio of crippled nuclear installations, whether they are submerged under water (either at the coast or inland), compromised by broken dams, or rocked by earth shifts inland.

Surely with all the unknowns and potentially enormous dangers, future generations (if they could speak to us) would urge us to forget the nuclear option, dismantle all existing reactors while there is time, and go all out for renewables. It is a matter of safety and responsibility.

At the end of his detailed contribution, Ian Colls mentions that ‘coming along in the wings is the promise of fusion power’. Well, this has been the promise for some 40 years but fusion energy has yet to illuminate a light bulb. The idea that ITER will prove that fusion energy is technologically possible is hardly correct; all it might do is to teach us more about the required plasma conditions. I could write an essay here but the main difficulties with the fusion dream are: 1) The only realistic way of testing the complex array of materials in the very difficult fusion reactor environment (void swelling, hydrogen and helium embrittlement) is in a fusion reactor. But you cannot build one until the materials are fully tested; a classic Catch 22 situation. 2). Will anyone want to build a reactor estimated to cost six times that of a PWR, which has a load factor of only 75%, might not have enough tritium to start it, depends on the 100% reliability of superconducting magnets, might have a fatal disruption in the first week, and cannot be maintained due to the very high radioactivity? As it is, we have given ITER a blank cheque for billions of euros. Might that money not be better spent on fast reactor development – or even on continuing to improve solar cells? One point about fast reactors – having sodium on one side of a thin metal wall and water on the other is not the best of ideas.

I am an ecologist, I consider myself Green in every possible way and I whole heartedly support Nuclear Power. By campaigning against nuclear power the ‘’Green lobby’’ are putting humans first and the planet second. Surely humankind now has a duty to accept the low risks posed to ourselves in order to save the planet from ecological disaster? Organisations like Greenpeace and FOE should be championing that cause – after all they were set up to save the planet not humans weren’t they? If this were the 1970s then maybe we could achieve a lowering of global carbon emissions without further increasing nuclear power, but we have left it too late. Renewables will not meet that demand unless accompanied by large scale destruction of the very thing we are trying to preserve, the biodiversity of our planet. Without nuclear power in the equation the pressure to develop our most beautiful and fragile habitats will be immense. I have been deliberating for the past year whether or not to cancel my membership to FOE and the Liberal Democrats but I think that time has now come. Carry on the good work Mark.

- Michael – the work on sea level rise I refer to is a paper by Pfeffer et al, recently published in Science (abstract only, $ub req’d). There’s also a free press release with more info. I have to say the rest of your posting, about ‘polar decompression’, is simply bizarre. I guess the point is to raise the bar so extraordinarily high (nuclear has to ‘prove’ itself against all sorts of ridiculous claims) that it can never happen.

- Rachel – I wholly agree with you, that at a very large scale, renewables are almost certainly more damaging to the biosphere than nuclear. The impact on ecosystems of current civil nuclear power seems to be minor to non-existent, whatever the supposed effects on human health. You simply can’t argue with the energy density factor, as Klaus reminds us above. I do wish more people in the anti-nuclear green lobby would stop to consider the environment for a change! Don’t cancel your memberships though: make your point to FoE and others from the inside, or they’ll never change.

Mark – I have sent to you by email some reports on the issue of nuclear proliferation and breeder reactors which make clear the dangers inherent in such technology. The interview with Richard Garwin, whose credentials are impeccable in support of nuclear power and certainly not part of the anti-nuclear ‘dogmatists’ is particularly revealing he supports breeder reactors but only when costs and proliferation risks are reduced to level of LWR’s – ie not in the foreseeable future – see, www.fas.org/pubs/pir/_docs/2007%20spring.pdf

Frank von Hippel on the same issue is clear as to the implications – www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/pdf/13_3%20Kang%20vonhippel.pdf –

On the prospects for the integral fast reactor I would recommend www.npec-web.org and a paper by Ed Lyman of Union of Concerned Scientists.

I also wonder whether you are aware of the nuclear industry’s dread of fast breeder technology – the proponents come almost entirely out of the nuclear research establishments – particularly US DOE, Russian, French and Japanese as well as within the IAEA. I am unaware of any utility that has breeders on their horizon for the simple reason that they cost so damned much (and not to forget their track record of failure). There has been discussion in recent years about the danger for nuclear utilities in the promotion of Generation IV when what they want is to secure approval for Generation III and III+ (actually they want to make money). The GNEP concept from Cheney/Bush was hardly greeted with enthusiasm – but maybe they are just visionaries. Breeders just make the whole debate more complex and put off new build. This would explain the conclusions of the U.S. National Academy of Science report in October 2007 which concluded that the GNEP program should not go forward. (http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11998&page=1).

I’m reasonably happy that you are in fact undermining the case for all new reactors currently under construction and planned over the next 2-3 decades (as well all the existing ones). Maybe in time you will get back an honorary Green Party membership card for accidental services to the anti-nuclear (and climate change) movement !

On radiation and health, would draw attention to the following:

On radiation linkage with childhood cancers, see http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/314/7074/101 the study by Viel and Pobel – particularly relevant in light of your advocacy of integral fast reactors which require reprocessing (OK – so its called pyroprocessing but the releases will be in the same order).

Similarly the Gardiner study on Sellafield workers and child cancer, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1662579 which of course the nuclear establishment have spent the last years trying to dismiss, however also See NRPB Risk of Leukaemia and Related Malignancies following Radiation Exposure: Estimates for the UK Population: Report of an Advisory Group on Ionising Radiation, Doc NRPB, 2003, which concludes, “The advisory group recommends further studies of the risks to people exposed to high doses, and that more information should be obtained on people exposed to low doses, such as radiation workers.”

On childhood cancer related to tritium discharges from nuclear power plants see, www.iop.org/EJ/article/0952-4746/28/1/M01/jrp8_1_m01.pdf, and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18082395

The June 17 2005 issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine; authored by Dr. David B. Richardson, assistant professor of epidemiology and of University of North Carolina and Dr. Steven B. Wing, associate professor of epidemiology at the UNC School of Public Health for research on cancer risk of radiation at low level supported by U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health – contact steve_wing@unc.edu;

For a summary of radiation impact at the Rawatbhata nuclear power plant in India see, http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/vol_11/sda11-1.pdf

The UK Government CERRIE report on internal emitters (radiation) and their effects http://www.cerrie.org/pdfs/cerrie_report_e-book.pdf

See NRPB Risk of Leukaemia and Related Malignancies following Radiation Exposure: Estimates for the UK Population: Report of an Advisory Group on Ionising Radiation, Doc NRPB, which concludes, “The advisory group recommends further studies of the risks to people exposed to high doses, and that more information should be obtained on people exposed to low doses, such as radiation workers.”

Also, Radiation Exposures by nuclear facilities, evidence of the impact on health; German Society for Radiation Protection, International Workshop, 1996, ISBN 3-9805260– which in particular looks at low lever radiation dose health effects.

Am not sure what search engine you are using but last time I looked the European Journal on Cancer, the British Medical Journal, the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the German Society for Radiation Protection and UK NRPB were not dogmatic members of the anti-nuclear movement.

This is not to even include the devastating evidence of uranium mining impacts on workers and their families over the last six decades. I doubt after one day working in the unregulated mines of Niger, Namibia or elsewhere there would be many people left enthusiastic for nuclear power – never mind loving it. Safe to support nukes when the closest you come to mined uranium is a light switch in the south of England but not so pleasant up close. Given that there is not going to be a generation of fast breeders, IFR included, built in the next 3-4 decades, nuclear power expansion over the coming years if it happens, will be dependent upon uranium fuelled light water reactors. No environmental impact ? http://www.wise-uranium.org/stk.html?src=stkd01e

On radiation risk alone, nuclear power whether routine releases or in the event of accident requires to be opposed – adopting the precautionary principle on radionuclides from nuclear energy for example would see its prohibition. Any chance the EU adopting a nuclear REACH?

Mark (at 11:54) – are you suggesting that there is no downward displacement of the Greenland bedrock on account of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS)? Are you also suggesting that as GIS disintegrates, the Greenland bedrock will not rise and that there will be no consequential effects through and across the earth’s crust?

To my mind, it seems quite sensible (and not ‘bizarre’) to consider the potential effect of redistribution of the ice in the Greenland and Antarctica sheets (equivalent to about 80 metres sea level rise in total) into the world’s oceans as having a potential effect on the earth’s crust. If the effect of this on the earth’s crust over the coming decades and centuries is to trigger earthquakes, then surely that is something the purveyors of nuclear reactors should consider and be compelled to inform us of the outcomes of their substantive deliberations. The least they can do is to inform the public whether or not it is safe to build nuclear reactors on shaky ground.

As far as rates of sea level rise are concerned, history shows sea level rises of one metre per 20 years. Melt water pulse 1 (MWP1) is a case in point. Since there are no models currently available to describe the complex dynamics of compromised ice sheets and their interactions with the oceans etc, it would be sensible for risk management purposes to take a worst case sea level rise as being potentially 5 metres this century (ie to 2100) and 5 metres the following century (ie from 2100 to 2200) etc. Note that the reactors on and to be built on the beaches (eg at Sizewell) are going to be around well after 2100. Don’t forget we are dealing with the most dangerous technologies ever created – and they are not usually designed for operation and maintenance while being submerged in salty sea water.

What the nuclear industry must do (and be compelled to do) is a thorough investigation of the potential risks involved. That has not yet been done, and yet the profit rush to build new reactors on the beaches has already begun. As this is matter of public safety there really do need to be some public investigations of the risks involved. In the meantime, Parliament should call a halt on new build while the nuclear industry prepares a risk assessment of the existing fleet.

Concerning Chernobyl, first of all, I thought that they moved the worst-case estimate from 4,000 to ~10,000, not 60,000. Note that this is an upper-bound estimate that is not supported by any observations, but is a strictly theoretical/hypothetical estimate based on conservative (and probably incorrect) linear-no-threshhold theory.

Even of one accepts this as correct, however, the total eventual effects of even the Chernobyl event are dwarfed by the ANNUAL consequences of fossil fuel power plants. Fossil plants cause several hundred thousand deaths every single year, worldwide, along with being the single largest contributor to global warming.

Furthermore, the worst possible consequences of any accident or attack on a Western nuclear plant are much smaller than that of Chernobyl. And this is something that is unlikely to ever happen at all, let alone annually! In fact, over their entire ~40-year history, Western nuclear plants have never had any measurable health impact (with no member of the public ever being exposed to more than a tiny fraction of natural annual background).

Based on the above, it is clear that the environmental risks/costs of nuclear power plants are negligible compared to those of fossil power plants, even before global warming is considered. Virtually all scientific studies that estimate the external costs of various energy sources (such as the European Commission’s ExternE project) come to the same, obvious, conclusion. Such studies show that nuclear’s total external costs are a fraction of a cent/kW-hr, not much more than renewables (solar PV was, in fact, higher). Meanwhile, fossil fuels such as coal and oil are more than an order of magnitude higher, ~4-8 cents.

While uranium mining has some impact, it is much smaller than that of coal mining, on a per energy generation basis. Oil and gas extraction are probably larger too. It also should be noted that the impacts of renewables are not zero, as the studies clearly show, and as Mark points out. Farming the biosphere for energy (i.e., biomass) will clearly have a greater impact on said biosphere than extracting concentrated fossil fuels from deep underground (at a small number of point locations). Covering huge swaths of land or the shallow ocean with heavy industrial machinery will clearly have a tangible impact varous ecosystems as well.

Some have expressed concern about uranium supply. This is a complete non-issue, and nobody in the business is even remotely concerned about it. If they were, they would not be eager to build plants that will last 60-100 years. With (eventual) breeders, the fuel supply is essentially infinite (a million years or so). Even without breeding or reprocessing, however, we will have hundreds of years of uranium supply.

Unlike gas and oil, we’ve just started looking for uranium, which is a fairly common element in the earth’s crust which contains thousands of times as much energy per unit mass as oil (millions, with breeding). Discovering uranium only costs ~0.3% as much as discovering oil, on a per energy basis. Now that the price is higher, we’re hearing about new discoveries of high-grade uranium ore almost every week.

Also of note is the fact that, since uranium ore cost is only a few percent of the total cost of nuclear electricity, even a large increase in ore cost will have little impact on the overall economics of nuclear power. This increases the potential reserves by orders of magnitude.

More discussion on uranium supply is at:

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html

and

http://216.94.150.122/investor_relations/speeches/speech_text.php?spid=49

Jim Holm, Your idea of converting coal plants to nuclear is absolutely necessary to avoid the stranded costs that would keep us from doing that, but there’s one critical hitch in your plan: you use pebble bed reactors. That type of reactor leaves you with spent fuel still containing actinides that’s mixed with graphite in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to reprocess. Thus you still have the long-lived nuclear waste problem. Better to utilize something along the lines of Toshiba’s 4S “nuclear battery” system, which will run for 30 years virtually hands-off. After that time you can take out the spent fuel and use it up in an IFR, replacing it with new fuel from that same IFR to run another 30 years. No more long-lived nuclear waste.

Michael, The new IFR-type reactors are built to be extraordinarily earthquake-resistant, and building them at least 5 meters above sea level would of course be prudent, and easily accomplished. Thorium reactor proponents have proposed siting that type of reactor underwater anyway, as a matter of fact. The lifetime of a nuclear reactor is small compared to even rapid geological changes, so an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And they can be decommissioned if necessary. It’s not like the sea level is going to rise a meter in a week or anything. Methinks thou doth protest too much.

shaun burnie,

“Nuclear power plants are operated on the basis that there is a threshold below which there is no effect. That of course is wrong. With a no threshold policy all nuclear plants would have to be shut down.”

As would virtually all other power plants using the same criteria, since all fossil plant emits radiation. If you then include bird kills as an “effect,” then all of the wind farms in California (and likely world-wide) would face a similar fate.

Is is not that power production has no effect. The question becomes does the benefit outweigh the cost (consequence/risk)? Can one achieve greater benefit at constant or reduced cost?

Having recently driven through the Central Valley of California, the production of foodstuffs is clearly more valuable and beneficial than plating the valley with solar panels. It is also much better feeding people versus bio-fuels production.

Michael,

“To my mind, it seems quite sensible (and not ‘bizarre’) to consider the potential effect of redistribution of the ice in the Greenland and Antarctica sheets (equivalent to about 80 metres sea level rise in total) into the world’s oceans as having a potential effect on the earth’s crust. If the effect of this on the earth’s crust over the coming decades and centuries is to trigger earthquakes, then surely that is something the purveyors of nuclear reactors should consider and be compelled to inform us of the outcomes of their substantive deliberations. The least they can do is to inform the public whether or not it is safe to build nuclear reactors on shaky ground.”

If what you suggests comes true (very unlikely, but others can debate what 10^ (-) large number it may be), then mankind has far larger problems to deal with than the small number of nuclear plants on the coastlines. Consider how many petro-chemical, refinery, chemical shipping, and other industrial operations are situated to take advantage of water transportation systems in the world? Last time I looked, most of those operations involved materials that had infinite half-lives. What about those operations? “Bizarre” was, in fact, the appropriate term to be applied to this line of questioning.

Michael,

“To my mind, it seems quite sensible (and not ‘bizarre’) to consider the potential effect of redistribution of the ice in the Greenland and Antarctica sheets (equivalent to about 80 metres sea level rise in total) into the world’s oceans as having a potential effect on the earth’s crust. If the effect of this on the earth’s crust over the coming decades and centuries is to trigger earthquakes, then surely that is something the purveyors of nuclear reactors should consider and be compelled to inform us of the outcomes of their substantive deliberations. The least they can do is to inform the public whether or not it is safe to build nuclear reactors on shaky ground.”

If what you suggests comes true (very unlikely, but others can debate what 10^ (-) large number it may be), then mankind has far larger problems to deal with than the small number of nuclear plants on the coastlines. Consider how many petro-chemical, refinery, chemical shipping, and other industrial operations are situated to take advantage of water transportation systems in the world? Last time I looked, most of those operations involved materials that had infinite half-lives. What about those operations? “Bizarre” was, in fact, the appropriate term to be applied to this line of questioning.

A great post Mark, I’m glad to see more environmentalists speaking up in favour of a rational approach to learning about and talking about nuclear energy.

I will cite or respond to a number of previous comment posts, in chronological order as you read down through the thread:

Theo: “The idea of burning up all the stockpiles of old waste is VERY appealing. But then you mention the new waste products being “inert in a couple of centuries” and all waste being safe in “less than a thousand years”.

Do you really know that an informed and well-resourced civil society which could manage this legacy is going to be around in even 100 years? I’d say there’s a good chance it won’t. We would still be gambling with the health and safety of future humans – my own decendants – and I have an ethical sticking point there.”

Well, the radioactive fission products in the nuclear fuel, caesium-137 and strontium-90 for example, the significantly radioactive radionuclides which can’t be further “burned” as fuel, remain significantly radioactive and potentially dangerous for about 300 years, so that’s the chronological scale you’re talking about if you want to talk about geological deposition and isolation of radioactive waste.

But future generations, their societies and their civilisations are not responsible for perpetuating the longevity of the isolation of this radioactivity from the environment in such a repository – half a kilometer of rock is responsible for that, amongst other things. When these repositories are designed and set up properly, as with the work of SKB in Sweden, loaded up with material and sealed, they do not require any future work, monitoring, maintainence or anything, ever, and future generations need not have anything to do with it.

Peter Brown: “But is the old processed fuel really available? Is it not encased in concrete or vitrified or otherwise taken out of the system?”

You raise a valid point. Clearly the nuclear fuel and material that contains valuable stuff – uranium, plutonium and other actinides that make for good “fuel” – along with other valuable, usable materials in the fission products – should not be sealed up in concrete or glass or synrock or so forth; it’s terribly wasteful!

Maurice Spurway: “But the huge construction programme over that period will ADD to CO2 emissions.”

The same can be said of wind turbines, photovoltaic cells, hydroelectric dams, or, really, construction of anything and everything.

shaun burnie: “In the run up to the 20 year anniversary of Chernobyl the IAEA and WHO released a report that stated 4,000 deaths.”

If you quote, say, 4000 deaths from Chernobyl, I’ll accept that. The figure of 56 or so deaths that you often hear is the figure of deaths that we absolutely factually know happened and absolutely, factually can be causally linked to the Chernobyl accident. I think most people accept that there were many thousands of deaths, but it’s just so hard to construct factually accurate data about who did and did not die as a result of the Chernobyl accident, so, scientifically, we don’t like to say definitively, so in rigourous scientific terms, we remain a bit agnostic about it.

Yes, there were many thousands of deaths, in all likelihood. The trouble is, instead of considering things scientifically, discussions of Chernobyl are treated with emotion and dogma.

For example, consider the following.

Some people say that there are children in Belarus or in the Ukraine today who have thyroid cancer, or are at risk of developing thyroid cancer, because of the Chernobyl disaster. When I hear that, however, I know that it is entirely false, and no amount of purported studies or reports make it true.

No, there are no children in the Ukraine below the age of seven who are at an elevated risk of developing thyroid cancer due to the Chernobyl accident. In fact, there are no people in the Ukraine, or Belarus, below 19 or so years of age who are at any increased risk of developing thyroid cancer due to the Chernobyl accident.

Why? Because they were never exposed to any radioactive iodine-131 source term.

I-131 has a short half-life: 8 days. The Chernobyl Forum puts the release of I-131 from Chernobyl at 1.8 EBq – that’s 1.8×10^18 Bq; a hell of a lot of radioactivity. Because of what happened to Chernobyl Unit 4, and because Iodine is so volatile and reactive, that represents nearly the entire amount of I-131 in the nuclear fuel of the hot, operating reactor.

Just one year after the disaster, 0nly 0.88 microcuries of I-131 remained in the environment, undecayed. There are no children being exposed to I-131 from Chernobyl today. The only people with an increased risk of thyroid cancer are those who were there in 1986-1987, during and immediately after the accident, when the I-131 was present.

I have seen anti-nuclear dogma-packing “Greens” go absolutely nuts at me when presented with the above information, and I’ve been called all kinds of names. This kind of thing is a very useful litmus test to see if a person is prepared to treat nuclear safety as a science-based issue, or if they’re confined to dogma alone.

Furthermore, and more to the point, whilst a lot of people were harmed at Chernobyl, it just has no relevance to nuclear power in the world today, outside of the Soviet Union.

To consider just how far departed from nuclear power in the Western world Chernobyl was, consider this. In the 1940s, Edward Teller realised that the primitive graphite piles reactors used for weapons production at Hanford were potentially dangerous – they were graphite-moderated, water-cooled, had significant positive void coefficients of reactivity, had no real containment structures, and could suffer dangerous, explosive power excursions if they were forcibly restarted from a condition of xenon-135 poisoning and operated at a very low power level.

Edward Teller took reactor safety very seriously, and studied it very carefully. He ruffled a lot of feathers, as he carried on about the things that were not safe. Some derisively called him “the reactor opposer”. But thanks to his lobbying, no more such graphite piles were built ever again, aside from those very first few graphite reactors at Hanford, even though if building plutonium bombs is your goal, they’re the easiest, cheapest way to do it.

In short, everything that happened in the dangerous reactor at Chernobyl in 1986 was completely understood… nearly 40 years before the disaster. Perhaps we might have given that information to the Reds – but I don’t think Teller and his colleauges would have approved that idea.

Aside from Chernobyl, I don’t think it’s possible to name anybody who has ever been killed or harmed by radioactivity or radiation at a civilian nuclear power plant, anywhere in the world, ever, outside of the Chernobyl accident.

Yes, you’ve had a couple of people who died in the Tokaimura criticality accident, working with very highly enriched uranium for an experimental fast breeder reactor – very highly enriched uranium is much more dangerous in terms of criticality safety – and you had a couple of deaths in a very early experiment with a very early experimental power reactor prototype for the military in the US, and one man who lost his life due to hydrofluoric acid poisoning after a uranium hexafluoride vessel burst. There was also one fatality at an experimental research reactor prototype in Argentina in 1983.

None of these are really related to civilian nuclear power at all – and anyway, even if they were, that’s an extremely good safety record for the amount of electricity that nuclear energy has generated over the last 50 years – a safety record far superior to wind turbines or hydro dams.

Alex Dickson “We are running out of Uranium on this little planet of ours. At the present level of usage in some 440 reactors generating some 363 gigawatts 67,000 tonnes of natural uranium are required each year. Increasingly lower grade ores will have to be mined and more energy will be expended in its extraction and refining process than will result from the nuclear reactors.”

Yes, something like that quantity of uranium is mined each year – to support the ridiculous current fuel cycles where most of the uranium-238 and a good portion of the U-235 is simply put aside as “depleted uranium”, then the fuel is irradiated, and the resulting fuel, which is still made up of 96% unchanged uranium, plus some plutonium and actinides, is called “waste” – it’s an incredibly wasteful, ridiculous and indeed unsustainable process, and that’s coming from a strong advocate of nuclear energy.

“Since your reading matter seems to be limited to Bernard Cohen and his ilk, (it was he who described plutonium as one of humanity’s greatest gifts I think was it not?) I’d suggest some alternatives – such as the Mancuso-Stewart-Kneale study on Hanford workers…”

Cohen publishes transparent, sensible, peer-reviewed science. If you want to attack what he says, I suggest you attack Cohen’s science with your own science – in the scientific world, this is always welcome – as opposed to argumentum ad hominem. Nothing Mancuso writes is backed up by a body of peer-reviewed science. Cohen is quite correct – Humanity will need sensible, sustainable nuclear fission fuel cycles to drive its future – and the Uranium-238 fuel cycle is part of that.

“Another problem for nuclear energy right now is the existence of supply chain bottlenecks: notably large steel forging capacity, and expertise.”

Regarding this buisness about the pressure vessel forgings, Russia has their own forging capacity, Japan has theirs, and AREVA is building new forging capacity to support their new builds.

More to the point, only conventional Pressurised Light Water Reactors require these pressure vessels. So, if it’s a problem, don’t use use them. Use CANDU PHWRs, Pebble Bed Modular Reactors, Liquid Fluoride or Molten Salt Reactors, Liquid-Metal Fast Reactors, or any of the other, better, reactor designs that don’t require these forgings.

“The jobs are sorely needed too and this was always the promise of ‘New-Technologies’! So where are the jobs? The amount of jobs per £ billion building nukes is miniscule next to a national programme of investment in jobs in renewables!”

You know, when they introduced looms into the textile industry in Britain in the early 1800s, they said exactly the same thing – it threatens jobs!

If all we wanted was lots of jobs for everybody, we could just get rid of all trucks, and people could carry stuff around on their heads. (Thank you Rod Adams.) Yes, if you try and scale up solar and wind to the scale of nuclear energy generation, you’d need heaps of jobs – and yet you people try and tell us that these are more economical alternatives to nuclear power? Which is it?

“The fact is, nuclear power isn’t anywhere near as ‘cheap’ as they claim when one factors in the de-comissioning costs! Something that never gets done because the taxpayer is still expected to come up with that money as well… what was it? £70+ billion at a recent estimate (but of course nobody really knows because how do you know what it’ll ‘cost’ in a thousand years time)? Add de-comissioning costs to the ‘cost’ of nuclear power ‘at the plug’ and your hairdryer becomes the most expensive hairdryer in history! Having said ALL of that the real danger is this civilisation of ours (that seems to be teetering on the edge of a global catastrophy of its own making), leaving a toxic technology legacy that nobody understands in the future, which poisons future generations for hundreds of thousands of years and yes it is hundreds of thousands… Plutonium has a Half-Life of 250,000 years (which means if an ounce of plutonium kills you in ten minutes now… in 250,000 years it will take twenty minutes for you to die!) The stuff is just too dangerous to leave for future generations…”

Plutonium does not have a “half-life of 250,000 years” – that’s just mendacious rubbish. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and the other nuclides produced in nuclear reactors generally have far shorter half-lives than that.

Why on earth would you leave plutonium for future generations, anyway? It’s valuable, potent fuel for us to use.

Take the costs of decommissioning nuclear power plants, and divide them over the price that every kilowatt-hour of electricity that those nuclear power plants ever produce, and it’s only a tiny contribution to the cost of electricity.

“Slowing economic activity (aka GDP or GNP) by half would cut our energy needs by 75%!”

You know, I’m pretty sure that the economy is not actually a moving object with mass and kinetic energy. Perhaps your example is a good example of a big problem which is of relevance to our problem here - taking some hyperbolic nonsense and dressing it to sound like it’s physics?

I read Mark’s comments in the Telegraph. Having been a Gpeace and FoE member for many years, and also a science background I have long held the view pro-nuclear. Yes the consequence of failure is large, but the risk is small and the benefits huge. Mark’s news on technology to use existing waste – fantastic. Why can’t we do it now. I was also please on EDF purchase of British Energy. Wind and solar alone will not deliver us from fossil fuels – nuclear can and we should be embracing it. Otherwise environmental movements will be seen as a bunch of campaigners who don’t see the big picture rather than those who have a pragmatic solution.

James Hansen recently made an appeal to 4th generation nuclear power that was essentially squashed during the Clinton administarion. He wants it to come back and Thorium can be used to which is an abundant element.

The idea is a good one and one that has been reasoned before Mark came along by energy experts but alas as yet no big commitment globally as building this many nuclear recators might get the lobbyists a big worked up from the fossil fuel industry by all accounts.

I personally have no problem with a large nuclear program but is the industry able to respond? Does it have the technical expertise to build 50 reactors per year for 50 years, it seems doubtful to me and things never go as planned what with delays and finance issues. So France is the only example of a nation who have gone nuclear and everyone seems to cite them but can we scale it up safely and find the finance?

You say: “Only this time nuclear power – instead of being part of the problem – can be part of the solution”? Nuclear energy was the solution then too. How many people died from atmosphere pollution from the coal plants in the 70’s and 80’s, before they “cleaned up” with higher smokestacks and filters to remove the visible waste. By eliminating nuclear as an option your generation left us a planet in crisis, but you still believe you were right then? You inspired these chuckleheads today who belief that highly concentrated waste is bad. I’d prefer a single nuclear fuel rod to a hundred thousand tonnes of CO 2 in the air or thousands of miles of solar panels littering the landscape. You had no idea what the consequences of your actions were, just like today no one knows the effects of bio-diesel, oops never mind, of wind turbines. What happens to the ecosystem if too much energy is taken from the wind? What happens to the weather systems? You have finally accepted that Nuclear power can be a solution to climate change. You should also accept the responsibility for the destruction global warming is causing. Maybe then these “greens” could understand the effects of unintended consequences.

Arcs_n_Sparks at 0401.

The thread is on nuclear. However, if the matter of sea level rise is broadened to potential impact on other installations and operations at coastline, the implications are indeed very serious. The vulnerability of coastal toxic dumps to induced washout is of particular concern when one considers what is in some of them. The sort of issues that will be confronted in the years to come are likely to come in multitudes because the way we have configured the current world economy is basically as a coastal economy. It is highly vulnerable to the potential sea level rises that could arise. Today we take it for granted that if a plant needs a spare part, we can order it on the internet and it will be couriered the next day from some specialised fabrication facility somewhere in the world through some complex supply chain. When the specialised fabrication facilities, and the chemical refineries, and oil refineries, and ports, ... and you name it what ever is on the coast or connects logistically with something on the coast, has been compromised … then which are the plants to be serviced first with difficult-to-get spare parts? Will it be the nuclear reactor needing new circuit boards for the cooling water circuits … or will it be servers in one of the remaining functioning data centers, compromised by dirty power supplies as coastal power stations are compromised? We could face huge problems in the future if climate change is not treated as the very urgent problem it is.

The term ‘bizarre’ relates to the matter of bedrock rebound and consequential crust dynamics. That issue has not yet been addressed.

Tom at 0141 “It’s not like the sea level is going to rise a meter in a week or anything”. Check out how quickly the Larsen B shelf disintegrated. At the time it happened, climate scientists jaws dropped to the ground.

Roll the clock forward to a few years from now when the methane chimneys (which have now been detected) are going full-out. Check out how quickly the ….. sheet partially disintegrates. The oceanic response would be pretty quick.

I would remind you that the lifetimes of the some of the existing reactors already extend well beyond 2100. The fast dynamics that could happen with GIS and WAIS are within such lifetimes, let alone those of the hundreds of new reactors being contemplated.

The point I am making is that the nuclear industry has not thought this through properly, and has not made a case to the public that its planned actions are safe and that the public has nothing to worry about.

The Environmental Impact Assessments which the industry has put forward need to be reworked to encompass these aspects and offer full evaluation of the building, operation, maintenance, and decommissioning of plants in an environment which is very different to one we are dishing. These are matters of public safety and the public has a right to be properly informed of the risks. The nuclear industry must be compelled to carry out proper EIAs. Parliament must ensure that the nuclear industry does that.

I apologize for the double post on 1 Oct 2008 ~4:00 a.m., but have no way to remove it.

Mark, I’m so disappointed. For generations, for decades, for thousands of years, for hundred thousands of years to comer to come, people will have to live with the waste from our generation. Not only nuclear waste. What is it that we leave for generations to come, for our children? It’s just a big, big garbage dump. Oh, I’m so disappointed.

Well done Mark on having the guts and the intellectual honesty to query one of the main articles of faith of green movement.

I hope this will inspire you to take a sceptical look at some other green beliefs. Once again, you may be surprised by what you find.

I’ve always found it quite simple to find the safest and most objective way to form an opinion on anything controversial. Research deep and wide and listen to everyone, most of all to those you believe the least. Then form your opinion based on the evidence before you. Finally, most importantly and probably the hardest thing of all… be truthful to yourself with these facts no matter how painful they are to accept. I believe this is the pathway Mark Lynas is taking and it is a courageous thing too.

As empirical evidence I thought I’d drop in with my experience dealing with this topic. I too have been challenged aggressively for doing something very dangerous. Seeking the truth. Follow this link for a short story that might help:

http://gco2e.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-can-we-win-race-against-climate.html

Mark Lynas was actually at this meeting and had to leave early. I was not then aware that he too was contemplating how to deal with this apparently religious inquisition.

On several occasions I’ve even had Greenpeace, after lengthy debate, and in a logical corner say, “We cannot do this nuclear thing. It means business as usual in the capitalist world. We cannot have that. So nuclear is not acceptable”. This is quite common behaviour within the movement. There is a hidden political agenda that does not care about climate change then.

Also I hear different language around job protection particularly in the CSP lobby. (which I think is a great idea by the way too) They are quite open on how anti wind they are not to mention nuclear. They offer much emotional “evidence” but little coherence. They are anti nuke because they see a threat to their industry as more important than climate change.

I’ve also been inadvertently engaged with some far less than desirable folks who have been promoting a vociferously anti nuclear stance but counter intuitively I later learned they are being funded by big oil. No surprises there. But the real irony on this occasion was that they didn’t know where the money was coming from. Again climate change came second.

The majority of the public don’t have to be that smart to see this duplicity. Sadly its still the majority that need to be persuaded. With the irresponsible behaviour above, they may then tar climate change mitigation incorrectly with the wrong brush and have a “good” reason not to support it. Sad too, as this undermines the hard work of the truly objective workers within the movement such as Lynas.

I believe that the technical challenges to the climate problem are already resolved or at least will be solved very easily once the imperative for action has finally been accepted by the majority. It is the behaviour of the people above and their leadership that present the real challenges around the values and prejudices of their own interest groups.

Oh yes I nearly forgot. I was at an entrepreneurs conference in Cambridge the other week and Prof MacKay did yet another excellent talk on the Real numbers around sustainable energy. After, I asked him how he deals with people who still challenge him on irrefutable numbers when the alternative is a tough change in core beliefs. Before he could answer a Green Party member stepped in and went on to state for the next 5 minutes how those real numbers are lies or something to that effect. I rest my case.

Many thanks Mark for starting this extremely interesting and productive debate. And to your correspondents who have provided so much useful analysis and comment

Perhaps there would be a broad consensus that it is worth asking Areva and EdF to build one or two fixed price PWRs in the UK, protected from sea level rise and from aircraft impact? This would have many advantages.

Most imporantly, it would show us whether nuclear stations could be built at competitive cost. The Finnish reactor built by Areva will probably cost about the three times its initial estimate. It has sucked in skilled labour from all parts of Europe. Is the UK, with its long and sad history of mismanaged large projects, actually capable of building one of these power stations?

To my mind, the benefits of a large-scale experiment, with the financial risks taken by the French state as in Finland, outweigh the disadvantages.

Thanks again for such a good discussion.

I’m sorry that Robin and others have met irrational hostility for raising the nuclear issue. I think we all need to strive for absolute clarity and honesty in the testing times ahead. But it’s hardly a “hidden political agenda” that many of us question the functionality of capitalism as a sustainable system at this time. It’s not looking very functional from where I’m sitting!

Ironically for me, if I thought our world was being managed in a rational communitarian gaia-minded way, I might feel happier with these fbr proposals. But it isn’t. It’s being run by very short-term self-interest, the profit imperative and military force. This is precisely why I remain unconvinced so far.

The comments seem to divide between those who have a historically-blinkered faith in the long-term stability of technocratic society and those who aren’t prepared to “gamble the farm” on it, even if they believe it is just about conceivable that there could be a clean and safe nuclear industry in the best of all possible worlds.

Any society anywhere in the world could break-down very rapidly under the storm of ecological and ecomomic crises ahead. This is no time to add more potential high-impact hazards to the brew. Our solutions must refer to the whole picture and take account of the worst-case scenarios.

Mark – I picked up a review of your article in ‘The Week’ s best articles, and have trawled through the less verbose responses. I would like to insert a plug for CSP as mentioned by Theo and yourself as an important potential global energy source . You will know that enough solar energy could be captured in a small area of N Africa to power the whole of Europe with zero emissions and no known toxicity (ref.r TREC-UK/DESERTEC). The only stumbling block seems to be around the installation of a network of HVDC cables to distribute the stuff. Apparently this would cost £65bn to install, though I don’t know how this figure is arrived at: there is already an existing HVDC cable cross -channel and cable laying is a century-old technology. There seems to be widespread ignorance about the potential of CSP and I wonder what your thoughts are about this?

Michael @ 10:35 writes: I would remind you that the lifetimes of the some of the existing reactors already extend well beyond 2100.

This is patently untrue. Nuclear power plants are designed for a service life of 40-60 years. Even with license extensions there is not a single reactor that comes close to 2100.

Henrick, with the type of nuclear power Mark is advocating, the IFR, not only will nuclear waste not be a problem but we’ll be able to take all the spent fuel from previous generations of reactors and dispose of it safely and productively. Might I humbly suggest you read my book, Prescription for the Planet (available on Amazon.com), for all the details. Mark is advocating a solution, not adding to the problem.

David, in my book I pose a question that relates to your CSP in the Sahara: “Keeping solar panels clean so that they run as efficiently as possible, whether PV or reflectors, requires frequent pressure washing—every ten to twenty days, for example, at a large trough reflector system in California. Solar arrays are generally sited in deserts to avoid cloud cover. Where will all the water come from?”

Solar arrays sufficient to power Europe would have to cover tens of thousands of square miles. Even if your transmission lines were made of superconductors (not yet possible, and perhaps never will be), it still wouldn’t be possible to scale up to that size. The limitation is that sunlight is very diffuse. It’s not a question of ideology or funding or antisolar conspiracies. It’s just a matter of physics and simple logistics. To say that all Europe’s power can be produced and transported there by solar panels in the Sahara is simply wishful thinking. Wishing will not make it so.

“Who can cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast?” William Shakespeare, Richard II

Tom,

Not only is the water for pressure washing a problem, but also cooling. Any thermal plant requires cooling. The better the cooling, the higher the efficiency. That’s why thermal plants are usually water cooled. Air cooling is by far not as efficient. But especially in the Sahara there’s another problem that the CSP plants in California don’t face: In my foolish younger traveling days I drove a car once through a heavy winter sandstorm in the Sahara. The car worked still, fortunately, but there was not much paint left on it, and windows were also sand-blasted almost opaque. The mirrors of a CSP plant can be sandblasted into scrap metal by a decent sized sandstorm, not to speak of the damage to the positioning mechanics.

Oh, Klaus, must you be such a realist?

Here are some points relating to what people have said on this blog about concentrating solar power (CSP):

• Mark Lynas: Re building times, it is true that CSP, like any other technology, can be delayed by bottlenecks in production but otherwise it is clear that CSP plants can be built much more quickly than nuclear plants.

• David: “Apparently this [an HVDC transmission grid] would cost £65bn to install”. The TRANS-CSP report from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) estimates (page 77) that a 100 GW HVDC transmission grid spanning Europe, the Middle East and North Africa would cost 45 billion Euros (not pounds). The report may be downloaded from http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/reports.htm . Some related information about costs may be found on http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/csp/costs.htm#hvdc_costs .

• Tom Blees: o “Keeping solar panels clean so that they run as efficiently as possible, whether PV or reflectors, requires frequent pressure washing—every ten to twenty days, for example, at a large trough reflector system in California. Solar arrays are generally sited in deserts to avoid cloud cover. Where will all the water come from?” There is a page about how to minimise the use of water in CSP plants here: http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/csp/no_water.html . o “Solar arrays sufficient to power Europe would have to cover tens of thousands of square miles.” Researchers at the DLR estimate that the area required to generate as much electricity as Europe is now using would be 55 km × 55 km = 3025 km squared. This is a big area but is relatively small compared with the area of desert that is available (see the map on http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/csp.htm). In the scenario up to 2050 described in the TRANS-CSP report, CSP imports would provide 15% of Europe’s electricity. o “Even if your transmission lines were made of superconductors (not yet possible, and perhaps never will be), it still wouldn’t be possible to scale up to that size”. It is certainly feasible to create an HVDC Supergrid spanning the whole of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, as is described in the TRANS-CSP report. Transmission losses are about 3% per 1000 km plus AC/DC conversion losses up to 2%, taking both ends together. So losses between North Africa and the UK would be less than 10%. Airtricity has proposed a Europe-wide HVDC Supergrid composed entirely of submarine cables. This idea has been endorsed by EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs (see http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2008/03/31/afx4833163.html ). o “The limitation is that sunlight is very diffuse. It’s not a question of ideology or funding or antisolar conspiracies. It’s just a matter of physics and simple logistics.” When sunlight is concentrated with mirrors it produces temperatures that are quite high enough to drive a thermal generating plant, just like a coal-fired power station or nuclear power station. Using CSP, less than 1% of the world’s deserts could generate as much electricity as the world is now using.
• Klaus Allmendinger: “The mirrors of a CSP plant can be sandblasted into scrap metal by a decent sized sandstorm, not to speak of the damage to the positioning mechanics.” There is something about this here: http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/csp/questions.htm . CSP plants have been generating electricity successfully in California since the mid 1980s without significant damage from sandstorms.

Well, sadly have run out of time to read this interestting exchange of views. Just wanted to say that I spent a fair bit of time last year researching and writing a paper on the sustainability characteristics of gen IV and gen III+ reactors, and have to confess I was hoping to be able to comprehensively pan them on those grounds. Of course, once I ditched my preconceptions I was forced to conclude their sustainabilty characteristics were actually rather positive – I did, however, have to delve deeply into the green psyche to explain why the opposition to them has been so rabid. Sadly I was forced to conclude that debating the issue with any of the major green advocacy groups was essentially a waste of time. Ideology, rather than rationality, dominates their discourse on the subject. It was when I understood that Germany, in so many ways a leader on sensible climate change actions (solar feed-in tariffs anyone) was closing nuclear power stations in order to build coal capacity, without even the fig leaf of CCS, that I realised that the political Green movement was as biased and blinkered as the Neo-Cons (well, that might be a slight exageration…).

I now base my assessment of the opinions of people writing on these subjects purely on their ability to write a grammatically correct account of their opinions in blog posts…

Seems to eliminat a lot of the chaff, and at least I don’t feel obliged to wade through pages and pages of semi-coherent gibberish any more…

Of course, that also means I no longer have to proof-read what I post ;-)

Up with reality based planning!

Tom Blees at 08:56 wrote “designed for a service life of 40-60 years”. Readers should not be taken in by the twist in language. I would recommend to readers that they retrieve for themselves the service life and decommissioning at end-of-life plans for a few of the existing installations. Then overlay on the plans sea level rise risks as discussed above. Then look at the plan and ask: does this plan take the risks into account? That’s the core of the problem. The installations we have now were put in place without addressing climate change risks as they are now more properly appreciated. Decommissioning plans as serviced by current planning documents still do not address risks properly.

Those rushing to build new installations on the beaches (focus on Sizewell if you need a case study) are ignoring reality at our and future generations’ peril. With climate change, the earth condition that we have not cherished will be gone. A new harsh condition will come about, perhaps sooner than many realise. It is the responsibility of those driving the current spasm of nuclear proliferation to conduct and deliver proper and full investigation of what it means to operate, maintain and decommission these potentially very dangerous industrial installations in the degraded environmental and stressed economic conditions which may be prevalent in the second half of this century. It is not sufficient to plan on the basis of conditions that prevailed, say, a few years ago.

In this regard, those in parliament must discharge their duties of care to the public. They must insist that the nuclear industry carry out proper EIAs and fullsome and fit-for-purpose risk analyses. This is the least the public should expect of them.

Tom Blees at 01:41 writes “And they can be decommissioned if necessary”. That is no consolation. A decommissioned nuclear installation is an installation that diverted potential investment away from renewables in the first place and then leaves an energy shortfall and failure in delivery of energy security at the premature decommissioning.

Talking of premature decomissioning, the financials for nuclear reactors with prematurely truncated service lives do not stack up. Potential investors should be cautious about nuclear investment opportunities as they may find their investments end up being buried at sea. A good investor would ensure that the due diligence process of the nuclear prospectus addresses fully the issues which have been raised in the prior postings. In the case both water-cooled plant and IFRs, the investor should focus specifically on the cooling systems and their coherent and viable maintenance under environmentally degraded conditions. Then go deeper in the risk assessment.

@Tom Blees (regarding your comment on October 1st, 2008 at 01:30 AM)

Where did you get the idea that pebble bed fuels cannot be recycled? I have heard that comment in a number of different venues, but I also have seen the equipment where pilot fuel is being produced and where rejected particles get recycled. I know this concept might be foreign to many nukes, but there are rather simple mechanical means of grinding coated particles. Once ground up, separating materials like uranium dioxide from carbon is not terribly difficult.

In addition to the fact that coated particle fuels like those used in pebble bed reactors can be recycled at some time in the future after they are first used, there are also concepts in advanced stages of development and testing for something called “deep burn” reactors using coated particles. These fuel designs look pretty similar to traditional TRISO particles, but the coatings are a bit thicker while the fuel kernel is a bit smaller. Changing that ratio around a little provides more room for fission product gas expansion and allows for burn-ups approaching 750 MW-days per Kg – about 75% of maximum theoretical burn-up. That is about 15 times what a traditional light water reactor can reach. (Of course, that old fashioned grinding and separation would still be available after that burn-up but it would not occur for many years after the fuel was first loaded into the core.

The main point that even supporters of nuclear energy miss is that the technology is still very new compared to all other energy sources. There are SO many possible avenues to develop – all of them are superior to continuing to depend on fossil fuel combustion. That is the real competition and where we should be focusing our comparisons.

There is no real need to criticize other fission ideas as long as they are as safe as the existing reactors. After all, how much safer an industrial record can you have than 0 deaths in 50 years?

Gerry Wolf writes that tiny robotic dusters can keep the CSV panel clean. That’s lots of robots, but okay, let’s just look at the area needed to cover. He says ”...the area required to generate as much electricity as Europe is now using would be 55 km × 55 km = 3025 km squared.” Contrast that with a 2008 Scientific American special edition on solar power which says that providing 69% of the USA’s electrical needs in 2050 would require 30,000 square miles of solar panels. Europe (excluding Russia) uses a bit less than the USA, but at present relative rates of electricity usage that would mean that Europe would need almost 26,000 square miles (about 67,000 square kilometers) to provide for just 69% of their needs. Is Scientific American that far off? Even if Europe uses just half of what they’ll ostensibly use in 2050, Gerry’s estimate is still off by a factor of ten. Sorry, Gerry, I’ve seen enough stats from even pro-solar zealots to know that SciAm’s figures are a lot closer to reality than yours.

As far as you quoting me on the impossibility of scaling up the grid, what I was referring to was scaling up the solar arrays, not the grid. As for concentrating sunlight with mirrors, we know how CSV works. That doesn’t change the scale of the project. What’s the point of comparing the area to that of the whole Sahara? The fact is that construction of such a system would require completely covering 4.5 square kilometers per day with solar panels and all their supporting infrastructure, every single day for over forty years.

And I find your easy dismissal of notoriously severe Saharan sandstorms entirely unconvincing. California’s deserts (I live here) simply don’t have anything to compare. If you’re serious about eliminating fossil fuel use, solar isn’t going to cut it by itself, not even close. Remember, we’re not just talking about electricity needs as we know them today. We’re talking about energy needs in toto, replacing gas heat and vehicle propulsion with electricity too.

To add to Toms comment: I also live in Southern California. There are no sandstorms here. But I have experienced them in the Sahara. Not a fun experience. Just to show how bogus the 55×55 km solar plant claim in the sahara is, here a short calculation:

The Sahara desert has a solar insolation (yearly average over 24/7/365) of 250 W/m^{2 according to NASA solar insolation maps. Solar insolation is the average power delivered by the sun at the earth surface, averaged over a 10 year period. As energy cannot be created from nothing, that’s all that’s available. 3025 km}2 calculates to a total solar insolation of 756 GWatt. With solar thermal plants of 40% average efficiency, including overnight storage (VERY optimistic), this is a generation capacity of 303 GWatt. The 2005 electricity consumption in Europe was ~ 3 Trillion kWh. This is equivalent to 342 GWatt generation capacity running 24/7/365. The 55×55 km array would already be too small for Europes 2005 consumption level. For 2050 the electrical power consumption for Europe is forecast to double, as more of transportation, heating and so on will be electrified. The 3025 km^2 do of course not take into account any shading when the sun is at a low level, or access roads. These increase the area requirement several times.

Contrast that with the alternative: In the desert in Nevada lies a 3200 ton repository of Thorium nitrate. The nitrate is stored in a shallow ditch in containers, covered with dirt. The US government collected that in the 60’s, and with the (politically forced) end of thorium breeder research, needed to get rid of it, as there is very little industrial demand for that material. These 3200 tons, when used in thorium breeder reactors, would be sufficient to supply all of Europe’s electricity for 10 years at 2005 levels.

Michael, I agree that it makes sense to build new nuclear plants plenty high above sea level to take into account even dramatic sea level rises. There’s no deal-breaker here as long as new plants are built with that in mind.

Ron, The proponents of pebble-bed reactors tout the difficulty of separation of the components of the pebbles as an argument in their favor in terms of proliferation and terrorism. The difficulty of reprocessing those fuel pebbles is only one of the disadvantages compared to metal-fueled fast reactors, which can burn all the actinides and whose fuel is easily reprocessed. Whereas IFRs can breed fuel, pebble-beds require U-235 to make the pebbles and end up leaving long-lived actinides as waste. Over the long term, with many reactors operating you’d end up with fuel supply issues, unlike with IFRs. There are other more technical difficulties possible that I won’t get into here, which are theoretical at this point, of course. It just seems that there are way more disadvantages to pebble beds than advantages when you compare them to IFRs. The number one objection the public seems to have with nuclear power is the waste factor. Why not use a system that’s been proven to totally eliminate not only its own waste but that of all the old lightwater reactors too?

I agree, of course, that the point is to eliminate fossil fuels. But if we’re going to utilize nuclear power, as I believe we must, it makes sense to use the system with the least disadvantages, and to try to avoid any system that will leave long-lived nuclear waste to deal with, and will have an unlimited fuel supply. I don’t believe pebble beds measure up compared to IFRs. Do you?

Tom, here in the UK EDF is being permitted to construct two more reactors at Sizewell in Suffolk and two at Hinkley Point in Somerset. These are all pressurised water-style reactors. In view of what you have written at 06:00, the Chairman of EDF and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom should give the public a clear explanation for the proposed new build on the beaches.

This is a matter of public interest.

@Tom (minor point first – my name is Rod, not Ron.)

Though I have nothing against the IFR concept from a reactor point of view, it has certain challenges from a power system point of view. Since my goal is to produce low cost, reliable, clean electricity I have to think about the whole system, not just the heat source.

Though current designs for pebble bed fuels do not envision much conversion or breeding, it is possible to rearrange some material ratios to achieve breeding with a high temperature gas reactor. General Atomics has produced some designs along those lines over the years and also has one specifically designed as an actinide burner. (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4075194)

When it comes to power conversion systems, the huge advantage that high temperature gas reactors have over liquid metal cooled reactors is that they can directly use Brayton cycle gas turbine systems and are not limited to Rankine Cycle steam plants. Liquid metal systems just cannot produce the turbine inlet temperatures that Brayton cycle gas turbines prefer for reasonable thermal efficiencies.

Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against steam plants. I am a steam plant engineer from way back and have wonderful memories of plant warm ups, fixing gasket leaks, establishing initial conditions for weld repairs, crawling around in bilges inspecting carbon steel piping, and lapping dozens of valves.

I also happen to be a lazy cheapskate and think that gas turbines offer an interesting technical path for avoiding some of the inherent problems associated with steam plants and steam piping systems. I also like having a coolant that is really cheap and readily replaceable; liquid metals do not fit that description.

Once again – my goal is to beat the fossil fuel competition. There is plenty of room in the power arena for lots of diverse nuclear fission based power plants.

In fact, I like the idea of a diverse set of nuclear plant designs of various sizes, shapes and technologies all competing and helping to improve each other through that competition. The last thing we need is some kind of nuclear fission monoculture where only one kind of plant survives.

(Yes, I do recognize the risk of producing one of a kind plants like we did during the first nuclear age in the US. That is why I want to build dozens to hundreds of much smaller plants in an assembly line fashion.)

Correction: the figure I gave earlier for the area of desert required to generate as much electricity as Europe uses was for the Middle East and North Africa, not Europe. The figures for Europe given by researchers at the German Aerospace Centre are: 127 km x 127 km = 16,129 square km.

Tom Blees writes: “a 2008 Scientific American special edition on solar power which says that providing 69% of the USA’s electrical needs in 2050 would require 30,000 square miles of solar panels.” I guess this means the article called “A Solar Grand Plan” from December 2007 (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan) where the authors say:

“In our plan, by 2050 photovoltaic technology would provide almost 3,000 gigawatts (GW), or billions of watts, of power. Some 30,000 square miles [77,700 square km] of photovoltaic arrays would have to be erected.”

Since The U.S. electric power industry’s total installed generating capacity was 1,089,807 megawatts (MW) [1090 GW] as of December 31, 2007 (Edison Electric Institute), the area needed to generate that amount of power using the statistics from the Sci Am article would be 30000 * 1090 / 3000 = 10900 square miles = 28230 square km.

This is bigger than the figure for Europe from the DLR but:

Total electricity generation in the US: 4286356 GWh or 4286 TWh (IEA 2005).

Total electricity generation in Europe (27): 3311000 GWh or 3311 TWh (IEA 2005).

If we adjust for the relative amounts of electricity being generated in the US and in Europe, then, according to the figures from the Sci Am article, the area needed to generate what Europe is using would be 28230 * 3311 / 4286 = 21808 square km. This is a bit larger than the 16129 square km figure from the DLR researchers but the difference is not dramatic.

Rod, like you I see displacement of fossil fuels as the primary objective. I understand your desire, after your long personal experience, to avoid the problems of steam systems, but I’m sure you’ll admit that they’re well-understood and can be relied on. As for the sodium coolant, it doesn’t go anywhere or get used up, so its cost and replaceability isn’t really an issue. One of the main reasons I believe IFRs are preferable to pebble beds is because they’re designed to use up all the actinides and leave no long-lived waste, use up all the waste already here, and completely utilize all the depleted uranium, assuring a plentiful supply of power for centuries without any mining. Those are compelling reasons to opt for the IFR.

@Tom – we will have to agree to disagree. I think you are overlooking some of the challenges associated with using liquid metal coolants including the initial cost of filling the system, the operational challenges associated with maintenance for a coolant that prefers to be solid at temperatures where maintenance normally occurs, and the challenges and costs of designing a building reliable heat exchangers.

Even when components or system coolants do not get “used up” they do have an initial cost and they do have a disposal or recycling cost once the system has completed its operational life.

There are some pretty solid economic reasons why liquid metal coolants have discouraged practical engineers who have to pay attention to system costs in a competitive energy environment. Please understand that I realize that some of the above challenges can be overcome with proper research and investment.

I have no problem at all with supporting some amount of basic research that can then be made available to all comers, but I would have a problem with supporting a “public-private” partnership where the private partner escapes with all of the intellectual property. I fear that is already happening in the NGNP project with high temperature reactors, but I am doing my best to help decision makers realize the hazards of that kind of model.

Here is why I think that high temperature pebble beds have fewer challenges than you might think:

The “waste” issue is no where near as large as many contributors to the nuclear power discussion would like everyone to believe. Even the “nuclear industry” has been guilty of trying to make a mountain out of a tiny volume that would make just a small hill on a football field. My cynical nature believes they are simply trying to force action that benefits them – mainly in the form of taxpayer subsidies to take care of the problem. If the problem is properly described, there would be little appetite for immediate, costly solutions.

What is so hard about putting the material in a monitored container that can be opened at some later date by a society that has increased its knowledge level? After all, every year that the slightly used material sits around it becomes less difficult to handle – especially if it is in a stable form like light water reactor fuel or pebble bed reactor fuel. From the service vendor’s point of view, that is not particularly satisfying. After all, one man’s “cost” is another man’s “revenue”.

Finally – what is so bad about uranium mining? Accepting any kind of industrial society implies a de facto acceptance of the need to mine all kinds of materials including iron ore, aluminum, copper, silver, gold, titanium, cobalt, nickel, concrete source material, etc. Uranium mines are no more dangerous or destructive to the environment than all those other mines. Not only that, but the jobs they provide are pretty solid, good paying jobs that can last a lifetime.

Mark – still hoping to get your feedback on my comment Oct 7th re CSP (not CSV!), whilst noting the opinions of others who clearly think that solar protagonists live in cuckoo-land and that the future is mainly nuclear. I think : a. that all options need to be examined in parallel and not rubbished by enthusiasts for a particular energy source (incidentally , so does Sir David King, who presumably knows a thing or two – as explained in ‘The Hot Topic’ 2008). b. A european HVDC supergrid is a realistic and affordable option c. notwithstanding sandstorms , dirty mirrors, and probably lots of other problems, solar power is 100% clean, more constant than wind (but not tide), and not going to be interrupted – unless Yellowstone blows up, in which case we shall all be in our bunkers…

Rod, you’re talking about two different realms here, the technical and the political. As for the former, sodium-cooled reactors have been built and operated and continue to be built. Sodium is relatively inexpensive and despite its volatility is easily handled (using argon environments, for one thing). The heat exchangers are straightforward double-walled stainless. There are no deal-breakers there, either technologically or economically. EBR-II ran for 30 years with nary a hitch.

On the other hand, however easily you might dismiss the waste and mining issues associated with pebble bed reactors, in the public’s collective mind those are exceedingly prickly issues. And an end to uranium mining is preferable to continued uranium mining in anybody’s book, I don’t care how safe one claims to make it. Do we need mining to run our modern society? Of course. Do we need uranium mining? Of course not. The bottom line: If pebble bed reactors have no compelling advantages over LMRs like the PRISM, and some definite disadvantages, why push for pebble beds? What’s the point?

Gerry, are you planning to build your solar installations to provide the electricity you need today or the electricity you’ll need in the future? If we’re going to eliminate fossil fuels we’ll not only have to replace all our electrical generating capacity today but increase it to the point where we can convert everything to electricity that now uses natural gas and oil as well (heating, transportation, etc). Even with new energy efficiency technologies, demand is going to increase dramatically.

My point is not to dismiss solar’s contribution. It is only to point out that solar (and wind) simply can’t provide all the electricity we need, or all we’re going to need. The infrastructure and cost and maintenance is simply not tenable. Proponents of such scenarios describe how we’ll be able to store extra energy for when wind or sun aren’t providing power, ignoring the energy penalty anytime one converts from one energy type to another, e.g. electricity from wind to compressed air storage (or choose your storage system) then back to electricity. And nearly every solar and wind proponent seems to be okay with using natural gas for backup. I thought we were trying to eliminate fossil fuel use.

Pretending that wind and solar and other renewables can provide all the energy we need and trying to shove nuclear off the table is irresponsible, for the numbers just don’t add up. The longer anti-nuclear proponents remain adamant and prevent nuclear power from carrying a share of the energy load, the more years we’ll see the continuing use of fossil fuels. As long as nuclear power technology, the kind Mark is calling for, is available and safe and entirely feasible, it is unconscionable to reject it out of hand. The sooner we push solar and wind and nuclear to the limits of our ability, the sooner fossil fuels will be consigned to the dustbin of history. If you can’t help but feel uncomfortable with nuclear, look at the facts of what Gen IV nuclear can do, then look at the alternative of fossil fuels and remember the old adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

@Tom – What makes you think that sodium would continue to be “relatively inexpensive” if we began building hundreds of new IFR type reactors – all of which require a rather large initial charge of sodium meeting stringent quality standards? I have not run any numbers, but any commodity price depends on the balance between supply and demand.

You also exposed a misunderstanding of economic reality when you stated “And an end to uranium mining is preferable to continued uranium mining in anybody’s book, I don’t care how safe one claims to make it.”

Obviously, there are people who would take issue with this statement – do you think that uranium miners, mining company executives and mining company stock holders want to see their safe and profitable business disappear? Do you think that the government officials in areas where uranium is being extracted want to see the business disappear, taking away the tax revenues?

Finally, you ask “If pebble bed reactors have no compelling advantages over LMRs like the PRISM, and some definite disadvantages, why push for pebble beds? What’s the point?”

For me, the advantages are compelling. I believe I have found some rather inexpensive and flexible ways to build safe reactor heat sources of various sizes up to about 250 MWth that can be turned into competitive electrical power generators by the addition of a compressor, a turbo expander, and a cooling system. (If interested, google can find my company web site.) The disadvantages are not as large as you imply – you call them political. In my experience it is far easier to change minds than to change technical limitations or physics.

As a guy who has operated and maintained reactor power plants and other kinds of power generation systems, I can see some real challenges associated with liquid metal cooling systems that do not exist with inert gas or ordinary water coolants. These challenges can be overcome, but it will not be easy. In my dictionary, “not easy” translates into “added expense”.

I have no real beef with other reactor choices – I think that the more the merrier as long as we all play on a level field of regulations. Why limit our choices?

Nuclear Power—we don’t have to love it, even if we have to live with it :)

And we must always stand ready to oppose uranium mining’s harms to people, especially tribal people, their health and their subsistence lands.

And we must make darned sure it actually reduces our GHGs per KW of energy (we must consider all the GHG emitting energy that goes into mining uranium, shipping, storing, safe disposal, etc.)

First do no harm … & try out Amory Lovin’s soft path and negawatts idea. The U.S., at least, is so inefficient, it could probably (I don’t reall know) close down ALL its coal-powered plants, leaving only its existing nuke plants, without lowering productivity or living standards. At least we should try.

Hello Mark!

First let me commend you on your decision to change your mind about nuclear power. Even if I hadn’t been a proponent of nuclear power, I still would admire your courage to speak from your heart and your mind rather than letting dogma and politics guide you. Going against popular opinion in order to speak what you believe is never easy, and you have my admiration for doing it.

Secondly, let me hand you a few more clue-stucks with which you can bat away undue attacks.

So far your arguments about the waste problematics rest on the usage of fast breeder generation IV-reactors. However even with today’s horrendously inefficient lightwater reactors and their 1% fuel usage, there exist solutions for storing the waste from them indefinately, and has done so since the 70’s.

The first such solution is sea floor storage. Now I know this one is a PR nightmare because Greenpeace and others would paint it as we were about to chuck barrels of nuclear fuel into the sea, agreeably not a good idea. But drilling down into mud floors in geologically inactive regions was proven in the 70’s to be not only feasible but even very preferable since the mud was completely stable and acted as a very good absobant of dangerous waste. Plus that gravity will make sure that the waste can only go down.

The second and today much more viable solution (PR-wise) is that of deep geological storage. The reason we know this method is safe is because of the natural nuclear reactors in Oklo, Gabon, Africa. 1,5 billion years ago, these natural reactors operated for hundreds of thousands of years, burning up approximately 12 000 kg of uranium, thus producing fission products, i.e. nuclear waste. This waste was was sitting there, unprotected in the rock, while water came right through it. The water flowed in, sparked the nuclear reaction of the remaining uranium, boiled out as steam when the heat rose, then came back again. And it did so in millions of cycles.

But despite the conditions being such that they would make even the most ardent proponent of deep geological storage gasp in horror, the waste stayed put. It has not moved more than a few meters, most of it only in the orde of magnitude of centimeters, in 1 500 000 000 years. If 1.5 billions years cannot be concidered safe, I dare say whoever utters such an opinion is going slightly silly when it comes to broadening the safety margins.

Best of luck on your new stance Mark. Let’s hope we were not too late in saving the planet for our kids.

Let me finish this post with a quote from my favorite poet, Taylor Mali: “Changing your mind is one of the best ways of figuring out whether or not you still have one”.

Rod: Sodium can hardly be considered hard to get, given that it’s what salt is made of (along with Cl, of course) and there’s plenty of that around. And of course uranium mining companies and employees don’t like to see the end of uranium mining. Neither will coal mining companies like to see the end of coal mining. Alas, neither of these will disappear overnight.

My main beef with pebble beds, to move to a more consequential topic, is the leftover actinides. I’m not convinced that a solution to that is at hand. Until it is, I suspect that the political ramifications of long-lived waste that can’t be recycled in full will be a deal-breaker once people realize that Gen IV reactors can handle all the spent fuel.

While I advocate the deployment of PRISM reactors because they’re ready to build and I think we need to get busy fixing the problem now, there’s a distinct possibility that something like the ELSY might end up working fine and ultimately displace PRISM as the dominant reactor type. It’s just not ready yet. The challenges to working with sodium-cooled reactors, though, are not nearly as serious or expensive as you would imply. As far as I’m concerned let the best system move forward. It’s the inability to recycle that I find objectionable about the pebble beds. I would indeed advocate limiting the choices to those systems that don’t burden future generations with long-lived waste.

Lynn, IFRs don’t require any uranium mining. I made that point and others about life cycle GHG emissions to Amory Lovins just last week in an email exchange we had. While I strenuously disagree with him on virtually everything he says about nuclear power, pursuing energy efficiency is clearly the low-hanging fruit of our energy crisis and should most definitely be vigorously pursued. But if we plan to convert to an all-electric society (cars, heating, etc) there’s no way that even the most draconian efforts at improving efficiency will suffice if we simultaneously want to shut down all our coal plants. We’re going to need some nuclear. Let’s just do it right.

I have been amused by many of the contributions to this blog but they miss the point. If we are to stem the ever increasing build up of CO2 in the atmosphere we need to be investing in improved energy efficiency, non-carbon sources of energy, and carbon capture. And we need to be doing this urgently, now. The only non-carbon sources are the renewables and nuclear power, and to maximise their contribution both are needed.

If nuclear power is to be part of the panoply of responses to the CO2 problem we need to be building new nuclear stations on an early timescale. Otherwise the nuclear contribution to meeting the world’s energy demand (currently around 7%) will rapidly decline. Over the years many different types of nuclear reactor have been conceived – using uranium cycles and thorium cycles; gas cooled, water cooled, and liquid metal cooled; thermal and fast reactor; molten fuel and pebble bed; etc. Several have been developed to prototype stage and a few concepts have become commercial workhorses in different parts of the world. Different ones have different advantages (and disadvantages), and there are those who will be passionate advocates of different concepts, especially if they have spent their careers working on them.

However, what has been learnt from the past half century of nuclear development is that it takes decades, and billions of pounds, to take a concept to the stage of its becoming fully commercialised. The design has to be proven through years of operation, fuel has to be developed and proven, again through years of operation, and safety performance has to be fully evaluated, again a long process for anything novel.

For this reason, if nuclear power is to continue supplying just its present proportion of total world energy demand, utilities need to be relying on reactor types that are an evolution from those in commercial use today, not looking to radically different reactor concepts. Therefore I don’t agree with those arguing in the blog that the only way forward is to go for Fourth Generation, Integral Fast Reactors or Pebble Bed reactors. The time for these may well come, but championing these as the only form of nuclear power that could be acceptable fails to recognise that we need to be building the next generation of reactors now, not in decades ahead, and that these new reactor designs will necessarily be evolutionary from those already commercialised with which designers, regulators and operators are already familiar. They will not be the same designs as these of existing reactors (at least 30 years old) but will incorporate significant major improvements to enhance safety, reliability and economic performance. The anti-nuclear movement, which whetted its arguments in the 1970s, needs to recognise that the world has moved on and that the concerns they had then are no longer justified. Environmentalists should not be nuclear opponents.

Ian Colls

Ian, I agree that we have to start building right away, and even though the PRISM is designed and ready to build, under the best case scenario we’re probably looking at 2015 before we have on up and running and showing how reliable it can be. But we should definitely do that as quickly as possible, because breeders, deployed quickly enough, will allow us to build Gen III nuclear right now in volume without running into uranium scarcity down the road. The ABWR is already built and building, and despite Westinghouse’s self-inflicted hiccups with certification of the AP-1000 in the States, China is building four of them right now. GE’s ESBWR, probably the best of the Gen III bunch, is in the process of certification and could be ready to build shortly, especially if the new administration gets a little urgency into their plan. As for the PRISM, we might well see the first one built in Korea, for they see this as an opportunity to move their plan for breeders and a closed fuel cycle up by a couple decades. And why not? They’re just reinventing the wheel, as are most countries due to poor technology sharing regimes. That has to change if we want to do this right. The safest and best designs should be widely shared with every country that has a nuclear program, with appropriate proliferation safeguards, of course.

Tom,

My concern is that, by holding out the integrated fast breeder reactor as the holy grail that will make nuclear power acceptable to environmentalists, there is a danger that many will say that until we can have these reactors nuclear power is unacceptable.

I am not saying that we should not look forward to Generation IV stations but that we should see them as genuinely long term.

You should not underestimate the time it takes to bring a concept though to prototype stage, then to a first-of-a-kind commercial version, and finally to full commercialisation. PRISM has yet to reach prototype stage, electrochemical fuel reprocessing is, I believe, scarcely off the laboratory bench, and fuel fabricated through this route has yet to be tested in-reactor. If PRISM were operating today along with electrochemical fuel reprocessing, I guess it could be at least ten years before utilities felt confident enough in the reliability of the system to start series ordering. So we are looking many decades ahead before IFRs could be making any significant contribution to energy supplies.

The US has of course never seen the fast reactor as very important, and you are right to champion their future potential role. No electricity has ever been generated in the US from fast reactors. By contrast, the UK and several European countries (as well as the USSR/Russia and Japan) have had large fast reactor development programmes for many years. As early as the 1950s the UK saw fast reactors as the way forward, with thermal reactors only as an interim step and as a means of obtaining the plutonium for the first fuel charge needed to start a fast reactor programme. Since then the largest part of the UK government’s funding for civil nuclear development has been on fast reactor R&D. A 250MW(e) prototype fast reactor (PFR) operated at Dounreay for 19 years supplying electricity to the national grid before being shut down in 1994. A design for a 1250MW(e) commercial station had then been worked up and there were hopes that government would provide funds for a first-of-a-kind build, in collaboration with French, German and other European partners. I mention this just to note that fast reactors are a familiar concept this side of the pond, and development was taken almost to the point of commercialisation.

However, in the 1990s the UK Government concluded that there was no prospect of the country needing to build a fast reactor for many decades into the current century – gas was seen as an easier (and less politically contentious) source of energy for electricity generation so that no nuclear build of any kind was envisaged for many years, and previous concerns that there would soon be uranium shortages had dissipated. This led to the decision to cease further funding of fast reactor R&D and to the closure of PFR.

While the world is not going to ‘run out of’ uranium, any more than of oil, its price will rise, and while this will stimulate further exploration and discovery of new reserves, we must expect this rise to continue until it makes once-through thermal reactor systems uneconomic. Those planning investment of new nuclear stations take this into account, looking up to 50 years ahead. At some stage fast reactor systems will become the preferred type (unless fusion gets there first), and sometime before then there needs to be investment in R&D and construction of lead stations to establish the technology. Unfortunately these lead stations will not be economic, compared with currently available Generation III stations, because of the additional costs of building the first-of-a-kind, and if they are to go ahead either governments or large utilities must be prepared to make the investments in order to secure a position for the future.

I doubt whether any would want to make this investment now, when the first priority is to restart the building of new nuclear power stations to replace those that are now closing. In rough terms, the same funds would provide two Generation IIIs or launch one first-of-a-kind fast reactor and fuel system.

So,Tom, please keep reminding the world that it should consider the integrated fast reactor as a long term, even more beneficial form of nuclear generation, and be prepared to put money into this, but that in the meantime reactors such as AP1000, EPR and ESBWR represent significant advantages over previous designs and that environmentalist should not be afraid of supporting them.

Mark,

You make a very good argument for fast breeder reactors. I did research on the subject in 1978 and found against it.

In my research I found there was a type of nuclear reactor under development that was fueled by Thorium and cooled with helium gas. I haven’t been able to find anything about this technology lately – it created no burned nuclear waste and no radioactive disposal problems from its parts of construction.

It was a much more inefficient process than Uranium-based nuclear, but it still was efficient enough and scalable to a small unit. Better than coal as you say.

I kind of think that it is already too late – we’re just doing token service to a problem that is already catastrophic and will lead to human extinction.

Oh well.. Maybe “Life will find a way”.. As much as I hate to quote Crichton.

Thanks,

Rick

Oh dear Rick! Please refrain from quoting anyone alive, you clearly bring bad luck! And by the way it’s NOT too late to do anything in relation to climate change but I do agree with you that at the moment we are collectively paying lip service to the problem. Lets hope Obama comes through with some decent policy on the matter!

Tom’s rhetorical question in response to my post is based on a lack of understanding of how those ‘jobs’ are created. Or perhaps he simply didn’t read it correctly? The number of jobs created in the nuclear industry ‘per billion pounds’ invested, is tiny by ANY industrial standards. Invest 10 billion in a nuclear reactor & invest 10 billion in factories & materials to make solar water heaters (& the people to install them on every roof in the UK)... and the fact is there would be many many more jobs in the renewable solar water heaters than in the nuclear power station (which no doubt would go billions over ‘budget’ & be years behind schedule & then only be allowed to opperate half the time due to ‘safety’ outages). Furthermore the solar water heater option would start to reduce pollution from the day the panels started rolling off the factory floor! The reactor would take years to build before producing one watt of energy. Renewables are deliverable NOW! Fact is you wouldn’t see ANY electricity produced by a solar water heater and once it is built & installed there is NO pollution of any kind from then onwards. Why produce radio-active waste at all, when the energy can be produced without any waste? But of course solar water heaters aren’t the only renewable technology available to us and the whole strategy would be about a wide VARIETY of different renewable options. i.e. NOT putting all our eggs in one nuclear basket! There’s ‘Ground Heat’ which can be retro fitted to properties & SHOULD be the industry norm for all new homes if only government would legislate & councils would refuse planning permission without ‘renewables’ being built into new properties! There’s solar PV which, while quite expensive now, if it was mass produced, would cost a fraction of what it costs now! Like everything which is mass produced, all renewables would cost much less as mass production increased. There’s VORT wind turbines that blend into a rooftop scene without being obtrusive in any way and both PV & wind can be linked up to the Grid thus helping with ‘local’ production of energy. 10% is ‘lost’ in transportation in the grid, so producing it ‘locally’ would produce the SAME as ALL the new reactors that are planned for the UK! Of course, as so many before me have pointed out… if we simply spent the money on energy conservation & insulation, & government legislates for ‘A’ rated appliances to be a higher standard & yet to cost LESS through less taxation & tax breaks etc (thus blowing less efficient appliances out of the market), then in the UK alone we could SAVE 30% of all the energy consumed today! That is three times what ALL the new reactors could produce IF they were up & running 24/7 for their entire lifespan without one shutdown or accident! There is absolutely NO NEED for any nuclear power stations at all! Once again its about the nuclear ‘club’ & it is truly about replacing our nuclear arsenal… if the truth was told! We’re ‘told’ we need to replace Trident (although THAT is doubtful too) & suddenly surprise surprise nuclear reactors are back on the agenda! Only this time they’re ‘marketing’ it as ‘eco-friendly’ as a strategy to try & stop the environmentalists winning the arguments all over again! How many Chernobyls must we have before these people wake up to the CLEAN & renewable ‘alternatives’ that don’t leave ANY legacy of toxic poisons for our great grand children? Nuclear power is totally unneccessary & a dangerous distraction.

@Earl Bramley-Howard:

“Renewables are deliverable NOW!”

No they are not… in the same way that gold is not deliverable out of seawater despite there being an amount that is 30 times more than all current gold reserves. The seas around the globe contain 740 000 tonnes of gold. It’s right there in the water. So why are we not all billionaire sin gold? Answer: because it is not deliverable.

Renewables require hardware too. And when you need approximately 500 wind turbines per TWh/year and you have an annual national energy consumption of 350 TWh for electricity alone (UK)... then there is a slight but hardly irrelevant problem with the deliverability, to put it mildly.

”...once it is built & installed there is NO pollution of any kind from then onwards.”

Key word here being “once it is built”. But you cannot ignore the fact that they must be built! You don’t build wind turbines and photovoltiacs from a steady North Sea breeze and some sunshine. They are built with resources… consumable resources… non-sustainable resources. For photovolticacs this is particulary evident, since photovoltiacs require rare metals such as Indium and Tellurium. Indium for instance is predicted by some to come up short in little over a decade because fo its high demand in LCD screens/TV’s. Wind is slightly better… but it still consumes for instance 50 tonnes of copper per TWh. (Source: Vattenfall, swedish energy producer)

The hardware for collecting renewable enegry also has a finite service life, of no more than 30-40 years. Then it have to be replaced… that is to say: built again.

Saying “once it is built” is dishonest arguing. It is trying to hide the true cost of renewables. What you must always do is to look at the life-cycle. A life-cycle runs from concept, to planning, to building, to running and finally dismantling the hardware. A life-cycle analyis (LCA) reveals the true cost of any power source. And in LCA’s, nuclear power holds its ground very well. Different studies places nuclear at even or better than wind. Solar isn’t even in the race… it’s alot worse than both wind and nuclear (though better than coal).

“Why produce radio-active waste at all, when the energy can be produced without any waste?”

You just stated a false dilemma, because with today’s technology, we cannot produce any kind of energy without leaving a footprint on the environment. Wind, solar and other renewables are not, I say again: not exempt from this. This coupled with the fact that renewables are very low in density and has horrendously poor reliability, the sheer amount of hardware needed means that the renewables are just as bad, or worse, than nuclear.

In short: renewables are not sustainable

People harping on about how bad Chernobyl was (and the evidence suggests that it was indeed nowhere near as bad as some claim) miss one very important point. Chernobyl was the result of unbelievable negligence on behalf of the Soviet authorities before, during and after the incident itself. The chances of such an event happening again are minuscule just for that very reason.

I don’t see the point in using nuclear energy when at max it will last us 60 years. OIl will rin out soon so obvously we need an alternative so nuclear is fine for that but we need a long term alternative which is renewable and green.

Green is the way forward so our race can live on!!

Anyone contemplating nuclear energy should read The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy

http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/downloads.html#Nuclear Maybe later.

I have a picture on my computer( I forget where I downloaded it from)  that shows a boy born after Chernoble who looks like a different species he has such terrible mutations.  His feet and legs look like they belong to a reptile or some creature from a science fiction movie. 
 If that is any indication of the horrors that could result from radiation,  I and the millions of species on earth want no part of it.  Thank you.

The Lean Guide says that we don't have enough fuel for a nuclear power revolution, even with breeder reactors.

It is not a near term solution.  We can build solar and wind much faster.  We could have hundreds of gigawatts of solar and wind before a single reactor is built.  We need solutions that can be deployed now, not in 10 to 20 years.  Solar and wind are such solutions.  Nuclear is not, and clean coal is not. Hydrogen is not.

From the Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy

“Shortages of uranium – and the lack of realistic alternatives –leading to interruptions in supply, can be expected to start in the middle years of the decade 2010-2019, and to deepen thereafter.” “Every stage in the nuclear process, except fission, produces carbon dioxide. As the richest ores are used up, emissions will rise. “It is reasonable to conclude that,even if the nuclear industry presented no other problems, “peak uranium” would rule out the prospect of the nuclear industry being in any way an answer to “peak oil”, and to scarcities of gas and coal.”

“Nuclear energy certainly has disadvantages, quite apart from the clincher problem of the depletion of its fuel. It is a source of low-level radiation which may be more dangerous than was previously thought. It is a source of high-level waste which has to be sequestered. Every stage in the process produces lethal waste, including the mining and leaching processes, the milling, the enrichment and the decommissioning. It is very expensive. It is a terrorist target and its enrichment processes are stepping stones to the production of nuclear weapons.”

According to Clean Wisconsin.org it cost about $500 million to dismantle each nuclear power plant when it’s useful life ends, and that adds to the waste problem.

1. Further to my comment on Sept 30 at 0705, information about bedrock movement (eg as Antartica ice melts) is now described at http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/38862

2. Michael Karnerfors on Nov 20 at 1013 has suggested that LCA analysis for nuclear puts it on a par with renewables. That is the case for LCA analyses which do not take into account ice sheet disintegration, and those are the ones which have been quoted. If LCA analyses are to be invoked, the analyses for nuclear should take into account burial-at-sea of reactors with rising sea level and the economic, social and environmental burden cascades they induce. Such LCA analyses should also take into account flooding and water table shifting impacts for inland reactors and induced intermittency of operation and consequential energy delivery cascade effects into the economy. That has NOT been done in the publicly available LCA analyses.

3. Ian Stewart on Dec 3 at 0718 states “People harping on about how bad Chernobyl was … it was indeed nowhere near as bad as as people claim”. Go there and speak to the people affected.

My assessment is that there is NO compelling reason to further nuclear energy. Climate change risks (as per above posts) compel us to logically consider the urgent dismantling of the industry.

I do not believe that the building of hundreds of nuclear reactors on today’s beaches and shorelines will stop the seas rising given the rate of environmental change we have induced.

Those who support the furtherance of such high-risk and inappropriate infrastructure have a duty to provide a proper and convincing case as to why the nuclear cnute option has any validity.

@Richard Mercer: First of all I cannot express enough my disgust of the use of sensational imagery like the one described as a case for someone’s opinion. There are hundres of these imgaes floating around the Internet. The big question is: how many of those are actual radiation victims and how many are the result of other medical conditions? The uncritical assumptions that these are victims of Chernobyl does not demonstrate a factual case but is rather evidence people’s willingness to take in just about any piece of argumental trash as long as it supports their opinion.

Second, of more importance here, is the issue of Peak Uranium. This is hotly debated to say the least. The hypothesis of Peak Uranium rests on the assumption that we only stick to already broken ground in very rich deposits. It also rests on the assumption that we will never use Uranium or Throium in anything but open – and thus wasteful – fuel cycles. These assumptions are easilly challengable and thus pushes Peak Uranium forward by hundreds of years.

One need but step outside of the mudflinging and pie wars and look at the numbers to realize that Uranium and Thorium are abundant in the Earth’s crust. In ordinary bedrock there is 2-5 ppm of Uraniumn. Thorium is three times as abundant. With the extraordinary high energy density of these substances, even mining perfectly plain bedrock is economically feasable when it comes to extracting enough fuel to power our nuclear plants.

The final blow comes when we look at the future and realize that today’s solutions are not the solutions of tomorrow. Fusion power research is well underway. Assuming a very pessimistic deadline for fusion power, setting it to about 2150, we realize that today’s energy solutions need only exist for 150 years, at the most. After that we will be getting our fuel from ordinary sea water since deuterium exists in thousands of ppm’s there and have an energy output that even compared to fission is phenomenal.

So in short: nuclear power will, without doubt, be sustainable for as long as we need it.

I’ll ignore the previous post by nuclear fan Michael Karnerfors, it’s total fantasy, especially when he starts into fusion and fuel from sea water! The same old ‘something for nothing’ argument which has fuelled the nuclear mirage for so long. The same attitude pervades the posts from all the nuclear proponents here, both professional and amateur; the techno-fix to all our problems.

I think your conversion, Mark, is caused by the same emotion as Lovelock’s, fear. You have seen the future and it scares you so much you have suspended critical faculties in order to reassure yourself that there is a solution. And it’s the same old solution that, as others have pointed out, has been well and truly proved to be anything but a solution many times already. Far from showing that you’re open minded and prepared to rethink your previous stance, it shows that you are desperate to clutch at straws.

You accuse some of ad hominem attacks on you, yet sneer at those who disagree with you as being ‘dogmatic’ and of having ‘entrenched positions’, of ‘clinging to myths’, and some of those supporting Mark here even see fit to blame the environmental movement for the situation we now face, which is pretty rich considering these same people appear to think we can carry on exploiting the planet for our own selfish desires, including a constantly growing ‘economy’ which is actually the real reason we are in this fix. They look constantly for high-tech solutions which will solve all our problems; free energy, reactors which consume the waste from previous reactors, and downplay all dangers, even dismissing the deaths so far as of little consequence, as if human deaths are the only criteria to be considered. I’m surprised no one has suggested that ‘in the future. we’ll all be driving nuclear powered cars’, oh yes, that was the fantasy in the sixties, for some. Or how about water or air, plenty of them about!

The scientific arguments why nuclear is no answer have been amply rebutted by others with more specific scientific knowledge than I. I merely add a few relevant observations:

1. Sea level rise, despite Marks somewhat casual dismissal, is a major threat to existing nuclear stations, and the building of walls round them is such a ludicrous fantasy – will the workers be taken to work by boat? – that I lost some respect for Mark when I read that. Sizewell, for instance, is right at the present sea level, add to any increase the likelihood of storms and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

2. The carbon footprint of nuclear is debatable, and certainly isn’t zero as the industry claims, but the fact remains that the energy locked in the fissile material [since the creation of Earth] is being released into the environment, and is extra to the energy received from the sun which has been relatively constant for the whole of the planet’s existence and our evolution. This is thus an added energy source to the greenhouse unlike renewables which merely harness solar energy. As anyone should know, if you add an extra heater to a greenhouse, you get higher temperatures.

3. Mark, and other pro-nuclear fans, dismiss as ‘not going to happen’ the necessity for us to reduce our energy use, as if asking humans to downsize their egos in order to survive is just too much to ask. Well, if it is, it’s good riddance to homo sapiens; too selfish and stupid to be viable. Greens have been living sustainably [or at least trying to against ridicule and opposition from ‘realists’] for decades, are we just to accept that there is no other way but for the ‘born to shop’ brigade to continue consuming as if there’s no tomorrow, until there isn’t? Short-sighted politicians only caring about the next election and their well-paid jobs may be obsessed with ‘getting the economy going again’ but that doesn’t mean we all have to go along with it. Capitalism, with its necessity for constant growth in order to stay ‘healthy’, has been consuming the planet’s resources unsustainably and has to be curtailed.

4. Where Mark and many others make a fundamental mistake is to assume that there is still plenty of time to argue, plan, build and commission new nuclear. There isn’t. We are now heading for environmental meltdown from the last hundred years of fossil fuel burning, and even if from today everyone on the planet starts living sustainably, uses little energy [the third world gets by on a tiny fraction of what we waste] and limits their procreation, it will still happen, and it is going to be nasty. Starvation is the obvious way our global population will be reduced; loss of arable land to flooding and drought is bringing that day closer. Disease is another control mechanism we have largely avoided with the development of medicine, but disease organism have a talent for evolving round our cleverness, especially in a warming world, and diseases like malaria are moving north.

What we should be discussing is how we change in order to cope with what is to come, for some to survive and for a new sustainable, ecological ethos to take root. We can mitigate the effects with forward planning, but we can’t avoid them, the damage has already been done.

Mark has grabbed for what looked to him like a viable rescue strategy, but is no such thing. As I’m at the moment reading his book Six Degrees, I must say I’m a little disappointed. Being anti-nuclear isn’t a matter of faith Mark, it’s a matter of common sense and refusing to kid oneself there’s an easy solution, a ‘there there’ for those in a panic. When I see the destruction we have wreaked, and the other species we have destroyed, I do wonder if we are suited to long term survival, despite having egos the size of planets.

@Peter Simmons: “I’ll ignore the previous post by nuclear fan Michael Karnerfors, it’s total fantasy, especially when he starts into fusion and fuel from sea water! The same old ‘something for nothing’ argument which has fuelled the nuclear mirage for so long. The same attitude pervades the posts from all the nuclear proponents here, both professional and amateur; the techno-fix to all our problems.”

Well if you chose to ignore a possible end solution to the energy issue because you cannot stomach the idea that science, research and industry might come up with a truly sustainable solution just because it’s a “techno-fix”, then you will have proven once and for all your complete lack of scientific approach to this issue. All that remains is religious conviction and a glaring inability to admit you may have been wrong.

Your “something for nothing” argument can equally well be applied to wind power and solar power. Or equally well for coal power. Whoever could conceive the notion that burning black rock gets us anywhere?!

Sounds silly… but it works.

So your argument is just nonsense. It’s not a matter of “something for nothing”. It’s a matter of harvesting energy that is there. The same goes for nuclear fission power. Even mining rock with concentrations of uranium as low as 5 ppm is economically fiable. That means we can get it our ot plain bedrock. Takes a bit of work… but it’s viable.

Nuclear fusion has all the potential to work. If you believe otherwise I suppose you had better call up the guys at ITER and tell them to stop construction immediately… and don’t forget to try to put a halt on the plans for DEMO.

Quite frankly I find your attitude close to offensive. It annoys to no end that an adult educated person of obvious lucidity and coherence of thought would willfully refuse to believe in a solution to a potentially planet-damaging problem, just because it might be concidered “a techno-fix”. It’s it just outrageous that someone would concider it more important their need to not have to say “Ok, so I was wrong”, than a reasonable believable clean and sustainable energy solution for our future generations.

The debate in this blog is losing sight of the main issue: even with improved energy efficiency the long term trend is for world energy demand to continue to grow, driven by rising populations and the growth of the developing economies. All but about 12% of this demand is being met by carbon-producing energy sources, and unless we do something radical to diversify away from these fuels we will be continuing to increase CO2 emissions.

The renewables and nuclear power are the only options for diversifying away from carbon producing fuels (although both have themselves some small carbon footprint in their construction/servicing and, in the case of nuclear, its fuel cycle). Both will be critically important to our future.

Nuclear has been providing a small but significant part of total world energy supplies for almost 50 years, currently over 5%. It has been supplying a fifth of the UK’s electricity for several decades – one in five of our electric trains is nuclear powered, one in five of our homes is nuclear lit. This is not a new, untried energy source. And if it has caused environmental problems, are these more serious than those from fossil sources?

Yet why do our environmentalists have such a theological aversion to it? Is it to do with safety, health worries, cost, sustainability, proliferation of weapons, or what? Let them state these concerns and be prepared to listen to authoratitive responses to them.

To add a couple of points to the debate others have started in this blog:

1. Chernobyl is irrelevant to concerns about the safety of future nuclear power stations: it was of a design known to be intrinsically unsafe and was being operated criminally irresponsibly in a regime that provided no regulatory oversight.

2. While uranium is a depleting resource, despite what some bloggers are saying, this does not invalidate the potential of nuclear power. Higher prices will stimulate discovery of new reserves, and the fast reactor when needed largely insulates nuclear power from the price of uranium; the fast reactor is already technologically fully available but at current uranium prices the commercial introduction of these reactors would not be economically justifiable – hence the reason the UK and France have put on hold their further development.

Thank you for your article and I must say that I have mixed your opinion about this situation. I liked your manner to represent the real facts. Yes, you are right that the reason of the global warming are obvious and it will be difficult to solve it with the economy of the resource.

...thank you Mark Lynas for enlarging this ongoing debate. With respect, the ongoing difficulty you face is green hypocrisy, nihilism and phobic anti-capitalism. The last thing the fundamentalists want is public access to safe, inexpensive energy. This is the elephant in the room…and ultimately will vanquish the old left wing greens to total irrelevance. Trust this comment is not too robust…

@Michael Karnerfors okay lets do the math using your figures… 500 turbines per Tw year… interesting figure? How long is a piece of string & how big is a turbine? And a requirement of 359 tw… okay… government studies have shown that there are potential ‘savings’ of 30% from efficiency and insulation projects alone (all creating jobs)! These could be implemented NOW without producing any electricity we would save 107.7 Tw a year! That leaves 251.3. (but its also 3X what your nukes will produce… so where’s this ‘need’ for nukes AT ALL??) Of course you have focussed on wind turbines as if those are the only ‘renewables’ that are available. But lets stick to ‘wind’ for now… have you seen some of the VORT wind turbines coming on the market? There is an excellent one called a TESNIC (look it up on You Tube).. this can be scaled up to just about any size and yet for obvious reasons they have started with chimney-pot sized ones that would fit on any domestic roof quite comfortably even in a city environment without standing out or being noticable if they were a terracotta colour… But more to the point it is scaleable up to very large sizes too & is much more stable (& very efficient) than traditional wind turbines… so… Why not build oil-rig sized VORT TESNICS & site them out in the Atlantic & North sea? If we can build massive rigs to find oil surely we can build them to produce endless wind power too?? It would give jobs to steel workers & the ship-building industry in exactly the same way as building oil rigs does! Its just a matter of scale & then siting them in particularly windy spots (and the UK’s seas have some of the best winds in Europe so we really should be cashing in on it asap!) I’d hazzard a guess that the resources required per Tw year would fall dramatically next to you present day wind turbines… even the biggest of them! I’d like to see the math for a big oil rig sized TESNIC being worked out by someone somewhere instead of just going for the toxic nuclear option yet again when we STILL haven’t found a way to dispose of the waste our parents produced (unless you call putting it in DU weapons ‘disposal’??)!

But that was just wind power… if every home in the UK had a Tesnic eventually, then the resources would be applied in a steady stream & produce a steady stream of power units from the day the factory started up (oh and jobs). Its scale-able and would serve a variety of industries’ interests too! As I said initially there are many more jobs per billion spend in renewables… I stand by that statement!

But hey we’ve only touched on ‘conservation & efficiency’ (30% savings) and wind power (although as I’ve shown you can innovate to make renewables an even better use of resources!)

What about those solar water heaters on every roof? What about the solar PV units (I’ve seen articles about solar panels being built today using nano-inks straight onto foil that are 10X cheaper than standard silicone panels & can be incorporated into roofing material easily) but even at todays prices solar PV pays for itself in 7 years & is guaranteed for 20!! So once its paid for itself (i.e. you get your money BACK) if you then save just 10% ofthe money that USED to go to your electricity company you will save enough money to replace it after the 20 year guarantee expires!! That means you could basically have solar PV energy for 10% (reducing to 5%) of what electricity costs you today from your grid provider!! In fact if you tie into the grid the government will PAY you ROCs for the electricity you USE if you produce it yourself with renewables!! You get PAID to use your own power!

But thats just solar! (water heaters & solar PV)

What about getting ALL new buildings to have a ground heat system built in as standard requirements for planning permission? They can also be retro-fitted.

What about tidal lagoons all around this coast of ours? We have miles upon miles of coast & the tide comes in & goes out twice a day… there is huge amounts of energy available and once again there is MORE jobs in doing a scaled DOWN versions of the Severn barrage and have tidal lagoons instead of a massive project that takes years to complete because its less damaging to the environment and also means the power is deliverable MUCH sooner and could steadily grow to be a significant part of our energy production (the resources aren’t required all at once too)!

The point is in all of this, that putting our eggs in ONE very expensive nuclear option again is a mad polluting waste of resources! The ONLY reason nuclear reactors are back on the agenda is for the weapons grade materials that come out of them & the ‘processing’ plant that is integral to them! Its about weapons again! If it was about energy we would have abandoned & shut the ones we have many years ago! Its always been about weapons!

Frankly speaking we could not be so sure that the nuclear power is the best solution of the problem because of all the destractions and the diseases accused by it. But I understand your idea.

Thanks Mark for your courage. I’d like to add my two cents.

I suppose everybody here will agree that: 1-our primary objective is a change in our way of life before a discussion about how to produce (even more) energy. 2-nuclear power has a pretty bad image in the public. 3-wind/solar have pretty good image in the public. (wether 2 and 3 are justified is left to the reader attention)

Now, which of the following messages serves the most our primary objective: a-don’t worry, with some solar panel here, wind turbines there and a couple of low enery lightbulbs we can make it without nuclear. (-> yeh, lets do that and i go back to my coach) b-with all the calculations and all, even counting in wind and solar, with the present consuption levels, we gonna need those nuclear plants if we don’t reduce. (-> wait, what!? maybe i dont need that new plasma TV that much).

renewable=good=more is better. nuclear=bad=less is better. the fruit of those decades of anti-nuclear movement is ripe: the bad image of nuclear enery is a wonderful tool to promote lifestyle shift. lets use it. (and at worst it may be unjustified)

Nuclear power is being seriously discussed by James Hansen of NASA. He refers to Generation IV plants and claims they are going to be necessary. I’m not against nuclear power at all, if it can be secured. I’m worried about using uranium for other purposes if I’m worried about it at all.

But it’s worth noting that James Lovelock now feels that it’s all too late and we should be focusing on survival. Building hospitals and preparing for mass movements of millions of people. How can we pay for that, and nuclear power too? It seems like we can either spend money on feeding millions of people, or on nuclear plants that may or may not help the problem. Their expensive is prohibitive in light of what else we will need to pay for in the next 50 years with food and medicine and housing for climate refugees.

I’ve also read that Generation IV nuclear plants won’t be ready to begin building until 2030. That’s an awful long time to wait when we could be putting funds into wind and solar and smarter grids, which will all cost trillions, instead.

Heya, bit late I know- but I’ve written a piece on this whole thing on my new blog. Be really interested in what people think. Bare in mind that I try very hard to not dive into jargon or exclusive scientific debates, so it might seem a bit colloquial to some of you guys… but I think its important to speak plainly about nuclear power, particular when so many seem keen to make it an issue only a few elite scientists should be allowed to look over. Obviously I’m against nuclear, but from the stance of a 19 year old with his eye on the future, an angle you probably don’t encounter much. Any feedback would be appreciated, and if you feel compelled to right off the younger generation of anti-nuclear campaigners ad hominem, beware! We’re tougher than you think! http://nonuclearfuture.blogspot.com/

Compeletely agree with you. Nuclear power is the clearest power of all .Anyway it’s very important to find the right way. Because often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

So why does the nuclear issue evoke such strong reactions? For answers, I think we need to look to nuclear’s past, when today’s entrenched positions were first formed. Civil nuclear power began life as a heavily state-subsidised industry largely designed to produce plutonium for bombs. Civil nuclear power was part of the military-industrial complex and shrouded in secrecy. An association with the mushroom cloud has tainted the nuclear industry ever since – and clearly continues to be an issue in countries such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. Well to be honest I dont know but I do know that nuclear power is a great thing, unless the power plant explodes. Mike from joe barrys panic away guide.

Please, don’t refer to Generation IV reactors interchangeably as Fast Breeders and Integral Fast Reactors. An IFR is both as fast burner and breeder of nuclear fuel, since it has an integrated pyroprocessing fuel cycle that is extremely proliferations resistant. “Breeder” will just make people think of out of control plutonium production. IFRs solve the problems associated with fast breeders.

One of the problems about a discourse on nuclear power between those who have spent their lives understanding and then opposing it on the one hand, and those who have not, is the political dimension of nuclear power. The former understand that it is political, and the latter don’t. Therefore to insist on sticking to science ignores the political forces that have framed the debate these past decades. The founder of health physics, Karl Morgan whilst leading the US Atomic Energy Commission investigation into the effects of low-level radiation with the aim of setting ‘safe’ radiation standards concluded that there was no safe limit, no threshold below which there would not be a measurable effect – this was after three decades of research. His work was not made public until he went against his employers. He then spent the rest of his life warning of the dangers of nuclear energy.

The Green Party, like the two major political parties have, needs to have a careful look at its policies and jettison those that are no longer relevant to the world in which we now live.

Nuclear Power—we don’t have to love it, even if we have to live with it :)

And we must always stand ready to oppose uranium mining’s harms to people, especially tribal people, their health and their subsistence lands.

And we must make darned sure it actually reduces our GHGs per KW of energy (we must consider all the GHG emitting energy that goes into mining uranium, shipping, storing, safe disposal, etc.)

First do no harm … & try out Amory Lovin’s soft path and negawatts idea. The U.S., at least, is so inefficient, it could probably (I don’t reall know) close down ALL its coal-powered plants, leaving only its existing nuke plants, without lowering productivity or living standards. At least we should try.

Mark Lynas is ‘on message’ with some half truths and the big nuclear lie.

Off message and not reported in the press the truth is nuclear power is trashing the climate with emissions much more powerful than CO2 - not to mention nearly 500,000 tonnes of Co2 last year from Sellafield’s gas plant

Last year Sellafield (no longer producing electricity) quadrupled its emissions of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) from the period 2007 to 2008. HFC’s are hundreds and can be thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

The reporting threshold is 100kg but Sellafield produced over 4 times this amount in 2008 alone.

Mark Lynas and others have played their persuasive part in last week’s report urging new nuclear build published by Malcolm Wicks which proclaims new nuclear build would “boost energy security” and “tackle climate change.”

Regarding “energy security,” the known UK resource of uranium is on Orkney where the Orcadians successfully won a battle in the 1970’s to keep their uranium in the ground. Regarding climate change, Malcolm Wicks report feeds off the ‘on message’ pundits and politicians misleading the public into believing that nuclear power does not produce Green House Gases. This is clearly untrue and the Energy Paper is the dodgiest of dodgy dossiers.

Far from being the saviour of planet Earth it was nuclear power that first blew a hole in the ozone layer – according to NASA. Apart from hydrofluorocarbons and other potent greenhouse gas emissions, the nuclear cycle absolutely relies on the production of chemicals such as nitric acid. Nitrous oxide (N2O) is produced by nitric acid production and is not only 310 times more powerful than CO2 but it lasts over 100 years in the troposphere.

According to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Sellafield is home to the most dangerous concoction of tens of millions of gallons of nitric acid (1086.7 m3) in High Level Liquid Waste tanks holding “nitric acid solution containing fission products, some actinides and some solids”. Fossil fuel and the internal combustion engine has done much to trash the environment but fossil fuel is well and truly trumped by nuclear power at the top of the polluting industrial food chain and reliant on all other polluters for its existence.

For instance, Sellafield spent £30 million last year on gas at the nearby “Fellside” gas plant built at the nuclear industry’s behest to insure “security of supply” for a nuclear plant that no longer produces electricity.

Nuclear Power needs power plants to feed the power plants to feed the power plants…

and then it needs huge amounts of fresh water and power plants to cool the waste -ad infinitum.

Never mind the known link between nuclear power plants and cancers, it is obvious that nuclear power is neither “home grown” or “climate friendly, ” to pretend otherwise is the most vicious confidence trick imaginable.