It is eighteen months since the meltdown of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power complex after the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. Globally, reaction to this series of events has been mixed, with a number of countries including Germany reaffirming their intentions to get out of civil nuclear power generation, others like China and Indonesia taking a second look at the implications for them and some like France and the UK where the view has been taken that it couldn’t happen here, so there are few if any, lessons to be learned. Our newly minted energy policy hammered out within the Coalition over the past few months and presented to an expectant nation last week, reflects this complacency.
Very striking though has been the reaction of some leading commentators in the environmental movement to the nuclear versus renewable debate in this context. The response can be summarised by the headline to George Monbiot’s article ‘Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power’ in The Guardian on 22 March 2011, just 13 days after the tsunami which triggered the multiple meltdowns there. Monbiot is not alone. Stuart ‘Whole Earth Catalog’ Brand, James Lovelock and Mark Lynas have all piled in. The riffs are slightly different, but the tune is essentially the same, that nuclear power in the context of a rapidly warming planet is a far better way to generate electricity than coal, gas or oil. This, they assert is because it is low carbon, unlike fossil fuels, is more reliable than renewables and some argue, cheaper. Monbiot in particular has become more vehement in the past year and has become a forceful advocate of Integrated Fast Reactors (IFR’s) as the holy grail of both the nuclear industry and sustainable energy production.
Civil nuclear power has a track record and as long as you don’t look too closely at the costs, it is not all bad. It provides most of the electrical generation capacity in France for example. But it is not low carbon, let alone zero carbon. The whole nuclear fuel cycle from mining, refining and transportation onwards produces substantial quantities of carbon emissions. The power stations themselves are hardly models of low carbon infrastructure. This is important because their ‘environmental’ argument for nuclear power is that it is a major weapon in the fight against climate change.
There are a number of other arguments against nuclear power – the costs (the taxpayer subsidies over the past few decades are quite mind boggling and the decommissioning and waste storage costs in the future are even more so), the risks of terrorism, (Flight 93 that was brought down by its passengers in a field in Pennsylvania on September 11 2001 was aimed at Three Mile Island, a point that is frequently forgotten) the threat of proliferation, (if civil nuclear power generation doesn’t lead to proliferation, why is the US taking such an interest in Iran’s nuclear programme? They know it does, but only make a fuss when it suits them. Israel was treated much more gently.) the inability to store or safely manage in the long term the high level nuclear wastes produced, the threats to human health, and its sheer unreliability (the surprise 3.1% increase in UK green house gas (GHG) emissions in 2010 reported in February by DECC, was in large part due to the newest and most ‘reliable’ British nuclear reactor, Sizewell ‘B’ being out of commission for six months). All of these arguments can be rehearsed in some detail, but my focus is on the debate from the perspective nuclear power’s possible contribution to tackling climate change and what that means for the society of the future.
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