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Nuked By Friend And Foe

George Monbiot | 21.02.2009 16:18 | COP15 Climate Summit 2009 | Analysis | Energy Crisis | Other Press

An unsentimental appraisal of our energy choices doesn’t boost your popularity. One of my favourite environmental writers, my friend Merrick Godhaven, is taking shots at me and Mark Lynas -  http://bristlingbadger.blogspot.com/2009/01/nuke-mark-lynas.html. It concerns that most divisive of green topics: nuclear power. Merrick argues that if you express even qualified support for new nukes, it takes the pressure off governments to invest in renewables and reduce energy consumption. He also exposes the contradictions in the positions Mark and I have taken over the years.

He has a point of course: governments will seize any excuse not to confront the electorate with hard choices, and to assist a powerful and none-too-scrupulous nuclear industry. But I feel we have a duty to be as realistic as possible about how we might best prevent runaway climate breakdown.

It’s true that my position has changed. As the likely effects of climate change have become clearer, nuclear power, by comparison, has come to seem less threatening. Three things in particular changed my view:

- reading the technical report by the Finnish radioactive waste authority Posiva -  http://www.posiva.fi/raportit/POSIVA-2002-01.pdf. This seems to me to be a convincing demonstration that the long-term storage of nuclear waste could, in principle, be carried out safely.

- reading the Sustainable Development Commission’s paper on nuclear safety and security -  http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/Nuclear-paper6-SafetyandSecurity.pdf . I was also struck, reading all the papers in this series -  http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/is-nuclear-the-answer.html - by the gap between the evidence the SDC amassed and the conclusions it came to. The technical papers suggested that modern nuclear power production is safe, sustainable in terms of uranium supply and a source of low-carbon electricity. The SDC’s position paper, however -  http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications.php?id=344 - came out strongly against it. I found this hard to understand.

- discovering that routine discharges of ionising radiation from coal plants are higher than from nuclear power stations -  http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

But I have not, as many people have suggested, gone nuclear. Instead, my position is that I will no longer oppose nuclear power if four conditions are met:

1. Its total emissions - from mine to dump - are taken into account

2. We know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried

3. We know how much this will cost and who will pay

4. There is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be diveerted for military purposes.

None of them are insuperable. In the UK Condition 4 already applies: as long as chapter 7 of the Euratom Treaty is rigorously enforced -  http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/dat/12006A/12006A.htm
The big block is Condition 2. The most fundamental environmental principle, taught to every child before their third birthday, is that you don’t make a new mess until you have cleared up the old one. It seems astonishing to me that we could contemplate building a new generation of nuclear power stations when we still have no idea where the waste from existing nukes will be buried.

In these respects my position differs from Mark Lynas’s. He would impose fewer barriers to building new nuclear power stations -  http://www.marklynas.org/2008/9/19/why-greens-must-learn-to-love-nuclear-power.

So why contemplate nuclear power at all? Why not, as Merrick suggests, decarbonise our economy solely through energy efficiency and renewable power?

In principle it could - just about - be done, as Mark Barrett at UCL -  http://www.cbes.ucl.ac.uk/projects/energyreview/Bartlett%20Response%20to%20Energy%20Review%20-%20electricity.pdf - and the authors of the ZeroCarbonBritain report - www.zerocarbonbritain.com - suggest. But as you load more renewable energy onto the grid, it becomes more expensive and harder to manage. As Mark Barrett, ZeroCarbonBritain and the German government -  http://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/institut/system/projects/TRANS-CSP_Full_Report_Final.pdf - have shown, you could have a balanced, reliable electricity supply consisting largely of renewables. But the balancing costs will rise a good deal as the penetration of renewables increases beyond, say, 60 or 70%. It is also worth noting that some of the more ambitious renewables proposals will take at least as long to implement as a new nuclear programme. We could decarbonise the electricity supply quicker and more cheaply if we complement renewables with other sources.

So what should these be? My priorities are as follows:

1. Gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS).
2. Nuclear power.
3. Coal with CCS.
4. Gas without CCS.
5. Coal without CCS.

I have listed them, in other words, in terms of their impacts on both the climate and the wider environment. While gas comes top of the list, we cannot ignore the threats to its security of supply (though this could possibly be ameliorated by means of underground coal gasification).

All I am seeking to do is to be clear about the opportunities and obstacles. I realise that this will provoke hostile responses from almost everyone - including my friends - but we do our cause no favours by obscuring the choices we face.

George Monbiot
- Homepage: http:// www.monbiot.com

Additions

please stop spamming regions

23.02.2009 20:57

Please don't select a region unless your article has a specific (and obvious) link to that region. It abuses the system and creates extra work for volunteer admins (we have to go through and manually untick the region, as I've done with this article).

George: This appears to be the third time this month you have ticked 'Oxford' on an article with no obvious specific link to Oxford or the surrounding area:
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/oxford/2009/02/422591.html
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/oxford/2009/02/422367.html
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/oxford/2009/02/421828.html

If it carries on happening, we'll assume it's deliberate "region spamming" and future articles which are inappropriately sent to regions may be hidden altogether under the guidelines:

"Disruptive: Contributions by individuals who habitually publish above mentioned discouraged content. Posts where topical or regional selections disrupts the utility of the sub pages (ie spamming regional and topic selections)."

Cheers

an imcer


Comments

Hide the following 2 comments

But Nuclear Power is a fossil fuel energy sink...

21.02.2009 16:49

See the comment I posted to the repost of the article that the article above is replying to:

 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/02/422561.html?c=on#c216252

Also see this from 2006:

Pulling a fast one - Monbiot champions nuclear
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/06/343572.html

If nuclear power is the "answer" then there must be something seriously wrong with the question...

Chris


yeah erm but

21.02.2009 23:01

I admire your belief in the new Finnish designs of reaktor. However as someone that grew up in the shadow of nuclear power plants, with family working there, I have to protest at what I see as pure green wash.

Nuclear power in this country was developed for one reason, to produce nuclear weapons. Energy was a "waste" product. The disaster at Windscale was down to us rushing to get the A bomb, and hiding the fact we were doing so from the USA. In the 80s under Thatcher, nuclear workers were piling in fuel almost weekly to make create a huge stockpile of weapons.
This stockpile is unfortunately rotting in bunkers round the country, and needs replacing. Hence this new demand for nuclear power. It is weapons, not energy our government now wants.

Its not an answer to our climate change fears, its another problem all of its own. It will create yet more dangerous rubbish that our future generations cannot deal with. Our reprocessing plant Thope does not work, and much of the waste from our nuclear industry is simply buried in trenches or piped into the Irish sea, (the most radioactive sea in the world) . Do the fins have an answer to this? I don't think so. The EPR reaktor is an advanced design that hasn't proved itself yet, and leaves some questions as to how it would work at all.

No one has built a reaktor in the UK for over 20 years. Who has the knowledge and skills to do this now? The highly skilled and knowledgable people that built our nuclear power stations are now retired, or working for agencies on half their previous wages as they are the only ones who know how to run the things.
I don't see a new generation rushing to sit in on nuclear science degrees. We all remember Chernobyl.

Please George stop wasting our time. It takes 10-15 years to build a nuclear power station. If we started building now we wouldn't see the benefits for 15 years. It would be too late then.

My own father, who as a systems engineer, designed nuclear power stations himself, states that it is not the answer. Lets not loose ourselves in a magic answer that will come along and save us. There isn't one. We need to stop using fossil fuels now and start actually using the energy that is all around us. Expensive, dangerous and morally dubious projects are not the answer.





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