Nuclear power - it's not the answer!

Don't believe the hype. Yes, the magnitude and urgency of climate change require that nations, and individuals, respond on a massive and urgent scale. Yes, climate change requires that we think “outside the box." No, the answer to global warming is not to re-open the Pandora's box of nuclear power. Check what all of those long-standing opponents of nuclear power are currently saying, and you'll be hard-pressed to find more than a few who are suddenly touting the industry line. This story about the “greening of nuclear power," which suddenly seems to be all the media rage is coming from the same people (many of them scientists or PR people working for the nuclear industry) who brought you the news that maybe Chernobyl wasn't so bad - after all, the radioactivity is abating, and hey, wildlife is bounding down every abandoned street in Ukraine.

 

So why isn't nuclear power the silver bullet for the (convenient) problem of global warming? Perhaps the most compelling reason is that nuclear power poses as great or possibly even greater dangers to international and environmental security as global warming. And there are enormous feasibility issues. Let's take a quick look.

 

Major studies from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), agree that about 1,500-2,000 large new atomic reactors would need to be built for nuclear power to help lessen greenhouse emissions. The operation of that many new reactors (currently there are about 440 reactors worldwide) would cause known uranium reserves to run out within a few decades, forcing the mining of lower-grade uranium, which would lead to higher greenhouse emissions. (By the way, nuclear power, which can only produce electricity, does not address emissions from planes, trains, and automobiles, the largest source of carbon emissions.)

 

But, if the world were still to press ahead and build all these new reactors (it would need to open a new one every two weeks for the next 60 years), carbon emissions would drop by… sorry, only about 20 per cent worldwide. Building this many nuclear plants would cost trillions of dollars (U.S. reactors went online in the '80s and '90s to the tune of, on average, four billion dollars apiece), crowding out available funds for sustainable energy technologies. If you're into numbers, energy efficiency improvements are seven times more effective at reducing greenhouse gasses, per dollar spent, than nuclear power. And the operation of 2,000 nuclear reactors would create a need for a huge, leak-proof radioactive waste dump to open somewhere in the world every three to four years (there isn't one yet).

 

Then there's the little issue of safety - the operation of 2,000 nuclear reactors could result in a Chernobyl-scale accident as frequently as every five years. What about terrorism? Although the nuclear industry does claim that all of the highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel stored temporarily at nuclear facilities around the world is natural-disaster proof, it doesn't make the same claims for its ability to human-proof the plants - if a reactor or stored fuel is attacked by a saboteur, or hit by an intentional (or unintentional) aircraft or missile strike, the results could be catastrophic. Since there is no way to hermetically seal the “peaceful" atom off from the military one, civilian nuclear power has always posed huge proliferation risks. Nevertheless, the Bush administration is promoting its “vision" of a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a $100 billion plan to develop, over several decades, a global nuclear enterprise to extract plutonium and uranium from spent fuel and “recycle" it as “fresh" fuel. Picture just a little bit of this “reprocessed" spent fuel, which is now weapons-grade, in the hands of terrorist organisations or regimes. They're out there actively seeking it as you read this.

 

In March 2006, the U.S. reached a landmark agreement to inaugurate an era of “full civilian nuclear energy cooperation" with India, despite the fact that under international law, the U.S. is prohibited from the sale of nuclear technology to countries (such as India), which refuse to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), refuse to allow full safeguards on their nuclear facilities, and which develop nuclear weapons and detonate nuclear tests in defiance of the treaty (India, India, and India).

 

There are hopeful signs that some countries are still trying to contain the nuclear genie in its bottle - Spain, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and Belgium have abandoned nuclear power. And according to a 2005 IAEA survey, most people around the world do not favour the construction of new nuclear plants. It will take citizens at the grassroots to convince their leaderships, in the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, India, Japan, China and elsewhere, that the answers to the climate change dilemma do not lie with nuclear power, but with solar, with wind, with energy efficiency, and with protecting the natural “systems" like mangrove forests, coral reefs, and wetlands that nature has given us.

 

First published in Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXVI. No. 4. August 2006