In the Beginning
When I started Potential Energy in May my secret hope was that I’d be able to find some kind of anti-nuclear info that stood up to scrutiny. I was hoping that I’d uncover something that backed up all of those bad things I’ve heard about nuclear power my whole life.
I failed.
Right away, even before I started, I realised that my views of nuclear power had been formed during the Cold War when anything ‘nuclear’ meant sudden, horrible, painful death and the end to all life as we know it.
Nuclear Power Is Not Nuclear War.
They are as different as Jedis and Siths in ‘Star Wars’. Both Jedis and Siths use the Force. Jedis use it for good, Siths use it for evil. The Force itself is not inherently evil nor inherently good. Likewise, nuclear fission itself is not a moral nor immoral process. To approach it as anything other than amoral is as daft as believing there is some innate goodness or badness in ‘water’.
First, I wanted to find out about radiation. I was pretty convinced that I’d find out that it was indeed as nasty as I always thought it was. I learned everything I could about radiation and came to this conclusion:
I have to say that after learning about alpha, beta and gamma radiation, looking at the decay chain, seeing the illustration of what stops radiation and reading about nuclear waste storage, this is the first time in my life that I am not afraid of stored nuclear waste. I may even go so far as James Lovelock and say that I’d have no issue with it being stored in my back garden.
I then decided I’d look into the risks of nuclear power. It’s made out to be one of the most dangerous things on the planet, surely something nasty would turn up.
[B]ased on the statistics since the end of the Second World War, it is certainly not responsible for a large number of deaths- 50 to be exact- 47 of those at Chernobyl, the worst nuclear reactor disaster in history.
The World Nuclear Association has gathered together some information on energy related deaths since 1979 which makes for some extremely interesting reading. In China in 2004, 6,027 people were killed in coal mining accidents (China averages over 5,000 deaths per year from coal mining). Though the Australian coal mining industry is considered the safest in the world, there have been 112 deaths in new South Wales mines alone since 1979. In 1979 and 1980, 3,500 deaths were caused by the failure of hydro-electric dams in India.
Despite all of these facts, nuclear power is still deemed ‘too risky’. If the risks don’t come from ‘accidents’, where do they come from?
So far radiation wasn’t quite as dangerous as I had been lead to believe and the nuclear power industry wasn’t nearly as dangerous as the coal industry. Surely then, the problem with nuclear must have something to do with the fact that it’s not ‘renewable’. Clearly, anything that isn’t “renewable” is bad, right? Nuclear power clearly can’t be a renewable energy source as we’ve all heard that there’s only about 50 years of uranium left on the planet…
First, I found out that the oceans hold an “infinite source of uranium” and read about how the Japanese are working to extract it from the Black Current.
If we use Bernard Cohen’s calculations, we find we have 5 billion years of energy available using breeder reactors. Considering the Sun is halfway through its lifetime of 10 billion years (give or take several million), then we have enough energy to last as long as the Sun is able to support life. Even if we only had enough uranium to last us 5,000 years using current energy production technologies, I’d feel pretty confident that we’d have enough time to develop something new to take its place.
By this point I was struggling to find anything bad with nuclear power at all. I just couldn’t believe that it was ‘unsafe’. I tried to find a scientist who was anti-nuclear power and after a bit of a search I found one. His concerns weren’t to do with the science or the safety of nuclear power. He was more worried about the practical and sociological problems:
“[T]he longevity of data is a key concern for nuclear power. It’s a massive commitment on the part of future generations, when at the moment, we have trouble even going back 3000 years and finding things that have survived of societies in any meaningful way. I believe that it’s not ethical to commit future generations to the responsibility of making good the waste that we generate.
“The half life of Plutonium 239 is 24000 years. What do we know of civilisations that existed in 22000 BC? What evidence do we have that, as a species, we can sustain data integrity for that length of time?”
The possibility that we are living in a Digital Dark Age has been a topic of interest for me for several years. I had never thought about how we can make sure that our descendants hundreds and thousands of years in the future will be able to understand the dangers inside nuclear storage facilities. The average English speaker can’t even read a book written just over 500 years ago… what happens in 1,000 years? 10,000? This is still a concern of mine, but it doesn’t stop with nuclear power… there are huge swaths of knowledge and information that we need to preserve.
Whilst writing voicing my concerns about the collapse of society after massive Global Warming-related disasters, I was pleased to discover that nuclear power was the best option to keep electricity supplies going during a zombie-led take over of the world as they are able to run the longest without human intervention. So that made me happy.
Waste. Nuclear waste. Surely, that was going to be the place where I’d find out the whole nuclear business was nasty and dangerous. Nope:
[O]nly 1% of the total of UK’s nuclear waste- past, present and future- is high-level radiation and that would be roughly equal to the lobby of the Albert Hall in volume. A large reactor will produce about 3 cubic metres of vitrified waste per year. That waste isn’t allowed to contaminate the water in the way that heavy metals and various other toxic materials have done when leached from landfill sites. That waste doesn’t add to the Greenhouse Gases in the way that landfill methane does. That waste doesn’t cause asthma and breathing problems in the way the waste from coal-burning does. When that nuclear waste is reprocessed, it is vitrified, then encased in steel and buried underground in cement bunker the radiation unable to escape.
Just how ‘green’ does nuclear power have to be before people accept it as a legitimate and safe power source?
By this point I realised that the nuclear industry was nothing near as bad as it’s been portrayed in the media over the years. It’s not as dangerous as I had been led to believe, it’s not as risky as I’d been led to believe, it will last longer than I was led to believe, it’s cleaner than I was lead to believe… It was kind of like finding out that Hitler was in reality a great spiritual leader, proponent of non-violence and one of the greatest humanitarians of the 20th century, but had been the victim of a very successful smear campaign. It made me feel slightly uneasy and…well, dirty supporting nuclear power, but I had to state the facts as I saw them.
I would imagine a lot of previously anti-nuclear people would find it difficult to look at nuclear power without their pre-conceived ideas getting in the way. It wasn’t very easy for me, but I forced myself to look at all of the issues in a way I never had before.
I started out leaning towards anti-nuclear and have become a supporter.
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July 23rd, 2006 @ 8:41 pm
Gia:
You have done a fine job of critically thinking about the large body of information that is available about nuclear energy. I agree with your conclusions.
Just out of curiosity, have you begun to question why there is so much anti-nuclear mis-information being spread around the world?
You have taken the step of recognizing that anti-nuclear sentiment is possibly an illogical or unnatural pattern. That should lead a critical thinker like you to that next question - why has it developed that way? Are there any reasonable explanations about why efforts to slow nuclear power have received continuing political and financial support?
Rod Adams
July 24th, 2006 @ 1:29 am
There’s good nuclear power and bad nuclear power, though. A lot of reactor designs are horribly inefficient and have poor reliability. Thermal reactors in particular generate large volumes of hard-to-dispose-of transuranic waste. Nobody’s managed to demonstrate a real nuclear industry that could survive without massive subsidy. Nobody’s managed to find a really safe geological storage location, and so on.
Nuclear power could be great but we have to do some serious engineering to make it workable, not just buy a bunch of off-the-shelf PWRs.
July 24th, 2006 @ 5:15 pm
Jas,
Thermal reactors running on natural or enriched uranium generate transuranic waste. Thermal reactors running on uranium-233/thorium can be built that generate virtually no transuranic waste.
July 24th, 2006 @ 6:48 pm
If this thing is still on, I’d like to leave the principals and commentators with the question I’ve been proposing. Because I’ve found a nice new version of it:
In some traditions Atlantis was a continent. More likely it was a volcanic crater with sea access that looked like a nice harbour, until it became excessively volcanic.
Suppose, though, that the “continent” version were true. How do we know the Atlanteans didn’t build a large number of nuclear power stations, and there isn’t, on the ocean floor, a megatonne or two of spent Atlantean nuclear fuel?
How do we know we’re not, right this moment, living with a legacy of nuclear contamination from Atlantis?
— G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: internal combustion without exhaust gas
July 24th, 2006 @ 8:18 pm
Rod- I think there’s so much anti-nuclear misinformation mainly because a lot, perhaps even the majority of, people don’t trust scientists. The closer one gets to hard science the more people mistrust it.
A scientist friend of mine was just involved in a discussion about ’sustainability’ with someone - a non-scientist - whose entire job was based on selling ‘energy conservation’ products. My scientist friend said, ‘We should just build a lot of nuclear power plants and be done with it.’
The non-scientist got very angry, was against nuclear power and said, ‘There’s only a decade left of uranium anyway.’
My scientist friend, having read *this* blog, told him about how the Japanese are working out how to extract uranium from the oceans, so we may have an infinite amount of uranium. He then went on to say that even if that doesn’t happen we have at least 50 years’ worth of uranium and by that time we’ll be building fusion reactors.
The non-scientist shouted at him, ‘You can’t just say things, you’ve got to prove them!’
My friend pointed out that his ‘10 years left of uranium’ claim was not only unproven, but it was wrong and that he’d be more than happy to show the non-scientist the proper information about nuclear power and uranium reserves.
The non-scientist didn’t want to know.
That non-scientist has been featured in the media several times talking about ’sustainability’…
July 24th, 2006 @ 11:07 pm
Gia:
I think you are missing the key idea in your description of the non-scientist.
One of the real reasons that people have spread such misinformation about nuclear power is embodied in your comment about the non-scientist’s employment. As you say “. . .whose entire job was based on selling ‘energy conservation’ products.”
When the scientist told him that we could simply build nuclear power plants and be done with it, OF COURSE the non-scientist reacted with anger. After all, the scientist was threatening his livelihood!!
This reaction is a true descendent of the followers of Ned Ludd, the mythical leader of the Luddites. Those people, who destroyed mechanical looms at the beginning of the Industrial Age were not opposed to general progress; they were skilled weavers who were forcefully trying to protect their own incomes and social status. After all, if members of their trade could be replaced by a mere machine, what kind of future would they have?
I do not think that purveyors of energy conservation systems are the only ones that are threatened by the potential for nuclear power to drive them from the market. The people that make money from oil, coal and gas - a group that includes the richest and most politically connected people on the planet - have a significant vested interest to protect as well.
I am not just talking about “Big Oil” in terms of companies like Exxon-Mobile or Royal Dutch Shell, but also in terms of national companies from countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
Please, think a bit and ask yourself - do people really have the distrust of science and technology that your reply implied? Look around your world before answering that question.
Rod Adams
July 25th, 2006 @ 7:24 pm
Well done Gia! We’ve enjoyed reading your work!!
August 31st, 2006 @ 7:25 am
dear Gai and others
I recently submitted an article to the International Journal of Greehouse Gas Control comparing the sutainability of new nuclear and CO2 capture and storage (CCS) for new coal build in the UK. Rather like yourself, i came with my own personal prejudices to nuclear power, having been active in CND in the early to mid-1980s. Also, rather like you, I was surprised to find that my prejudices couldn’t really be sustained by the available evidence.
On economic / financial terms, i’d have to say that fossil fuels with CCS comes out slightly better than nuclear - espc. because new nuclear costs quoted depend upon serial ordering of 10 plants. Also, we’ve spent a tiny fraction of the R&D money on CCS technologies that we have on nuclear. Hence, many expect the costs of CCS to come down significantly in the next decade or two. There is too much uncertainty though to draw a strong conclusion on which option is more expensive.
Environmental and health & Safety issues - you’ve covered these above, though i’d note that the Chernobyl record is more complicated than you imply.
A report by the World Health Organisation, UN and IAEA concluded that there would be 4000 eventual deaths arising from Chernobyl, and this figure has been widely accepted and quoted (IAEA, 2005).
Paul Scherer institute did an excellent and thorough study comparing risks of different energy supply chains and the risks of coal - espc. as you note at the upstream end of mining in China, India, etc. - are large. At the same time the costs of an incident, need to evacuate people, etc., are much larger for a nuclear incident. Health risks of coal have come down greatly due to much stricter emissions control of NOx, SOx and particles with the Large Combustion Plant Directive - in Europe but not India, China, etc.
That leaves public / social perceptions issues and this is where nuclear loses out a lot to fossil fuels. At the same time, there is good evidence from UK survey work that the risks of climate change are now swaying people to greater acceptance of new nuclear build, though I’d say it is currently unclear whether such changes in opinion will be resilient in the light of new build with NGOs attempting to sway opinion. As Robin Grove-White pointed out recently, nuclear still has a major social and political legacy arising from the security issues and perceived inflexibility and lock-in, etc., which would have to be overcome through a different culture for the industry.
My conclusion was that we can’t answer the question is new fossil CCS or new nuclear more sustainable by ‘objective’ scientific analysis. Rather it depends upon our own subjective interpretations of the different sorts of risks implied - and the different sorts of worlds that each option implies. I ended the paper as follows:
The most important conclusion arising from this analysis is not that fossil CCS is ‘better’ than nuclear power or vice versa. The more important conclusion is that fossil CCS is a major CO2 abatement option which has to be considered alongside nuclear power as a potential source of low-carbon base load as well as peak-following capacity. Many discussions about energy policy in the media and in policy circles still refer to nuclear power as if it is the only available and credible low-carbon large-scale supply option for electricity (and hydrogen) generation. The recent Energy Review in the UK (HMG 2006) makes this mistake by seriously understating the potential role for CCS and in privileging nuclear, presumably for political reasons. It is therefore urgent that politicians and decision makers are presented with better analyses of the performance of both nuclear and fossil CCS in economic, environmental and social dimensions, building upon analyses such as the one presented here.
Simon Shackley
September 25th, 2006 @ 5:47 pm
Well done Gia and IoP!
I’m really, really happy to see this summary of your thought process. It mirrors quite closely the changes in my own thought over time I’ve been working as a writer and editor in the subject of nuclear power.
I began from a generally supportive position but with a healthy dose of skepticism, but over time as one by one I covered the various parts of the industry I became increasingly reassured. Now, I can easily spot and debunk the half-truths put forward by anti-nuclear campaigners that previously I might have taken on board.
If the nuclear industry really wants to expand and play a full role in our so-called clean energy future it must offer the general public familiarity with the technology.
When you go to a nuclear power plant and you see how clean and orderly it is, you are reassured. When you meet the people working there, you are reassured. When you go underground and see where the waste will be stored, you are reassured. And perhaps most important of all, when you sense the heat and noise of a big plant’s turbine hall, you get a feeling of what a gigawatt is and why we’re doing this in the first place.
The industry’s been hiding its light under a bushel for too long. Providing one fifth of UK power is a great achievement and the man in the street deserves a better idea about where it comes from.