Olly Zanetti: Going nuclear
The current nuclear crisis in Japan may have extraordinarily converted some green activists, but reliance on atomic energy is still dangerous and unsustainable.
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At the time of writing this, approximately 1256 square kilometres of northern Japan are all but uninhabited after the meltdown and release of radioactive material at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a result of the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami which hit Japan last month. Across an additional 1571 square kilometres, places have been rendered ghost towns with the population advised to stay indoors. It's a huge area, but some say it still isn't enough. In all, around 206,000 people have been directly affected by this tragedy, and the crisis is far from over.
The result, unsurprisingly, has been a shift in public opinion worldwide away from nuclear. Following the Fukushima crisis, the German government ceased operations at its eight oldest nuclear power stations and may never be brought back online. The Swiss are being cautious too with plans to build new nuclear power stations put on hold for at least two years.
Although a pro-nuclear stance might have been expected from such right-wing papers as The Telegraph, the fact that it's now being taken by influential environmental journalists like George Monbiot and Mark Lynas in the wake of the disaster is odd. I tend to have a lot of time for what they say, but I don't get this. In the face of disaster they seem to be adopting what feels like an ill-considered, pro-nuclear machismo.
I'd urge everyone to read their pieces and get the arguments straight from the horses' mouths but, for the sake of continuity, I'll run through their main lines of arguments – boiled down massively I admit. Firstly, they say that we need nuclear because we have no other energy source that can produce on the scale and reliability our society needs without emitting greenhouse gasses. Secondly, it's argued that the dangers of nuclear power are overblown, or at least comparable to that of other energy sources. Finally, they suggest that Fukushima was somehow exceptional, that the problem was not that it was a nuclear power plant but that it was a nuclear power plant built on a fault line. As arguments go, all are pretty compelling. That said, I still can't agree with them.
My first problem with nuclear energy is the time scales it deals in. Take the site of the nuclear power station in Chapelcross, Scotland for example. Energy was generated at Chapelcross from 1959 to 2004. However, assuming everything goes according to the published plan, the decommissioning of the site itself will not be finished until 2128. This means the final stages of work to make the site safe will be completed by our great grandchildren. On top of this, the waste from nuclear energy generation will be with humanity for far, far longer still. Given that our system of political organisation finds the coherent planning of anything beyond the date of the next election near on impossible, building an infrastructure whose effects will remain for hundreds, if not thousands, of years seems extraordinarily reckless.
My second big problem is about risk. Something going wrong in a nuclear power plant is an extraordinary situation. Nuclear reactors are, in normal operation, extremely safe. But we need to realise that extraordinary events are in fact pretty ordinary. What do I mean by that? Well, the exact chains of events that caused disasters at Fukushima, Chernobyl or Three Mile Island are so extraordinary they're unlikely to ever be repeated. But the chances of another extraordinary series of events taking place, like in Japan, is actually quite high: humans make mistakes, organisations cut corners, terrorists do dumb things. The world is unpredictable and we can't know what's around the corner, but we'd be naïve to assume that nothing is.
Also, the calculations of the dangers are pretty disingenuous too. Sure, Mark Lynas is right to point out that “all of us are exposed to radiation every day of our lives. Very little of this comes from nuclear power or nuclear weapons” but try telling that to the 206,000 people evacuated in Japan. Of course radiation exposure averaged across a large area is low, but if a nuclear accident happens and you're nearby, the dangers of radiation exposure can be real and serious. It is, I reckon, inevitable that the world will see another big nuclear accident in the next fifty years. Can we really justify exposing ourselves and others to that?
But we do need energy and this is where things get complicated. The options for renewable power generation that we've got now are pretty low key. We need serious research into new technologies which can work on far bigger scales. But we also need to look hard at the way of life which necessitates the kind of energy use only nuclear can supply. Is our addiction to power really so serious that we'll tolerate either complete disruption of the world's climate or the enormous dangers of nuclear energy, just to maintain our lifestyles exactly as they are? Is the way we live now – overworked, overstretched and overconsuming the world's resources – really so perfect?
Fukushima might have “converted” George Monbiot , but it certainly hasn't converted me.
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Going nuclear (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (6)
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"According to Scientific American, the average coal power plant emits more than 100 times as much radiation per year than a comparatively sized nuclear power plant in the form of toxic coal waste known as fly ash."
http://www.scientificamerican......r-waste
If we're going to meet our power needs, we need to switch from fossil fuels to nuclear as a matter of urgency.
Second, X-Ray Dan, I think you may have misunderstood the piece. I don't have anti-nuclear blinkers - I have genuinely considered the situation from a variety of angles and the above is a summary of the conclusions that I've come to. I've come across that stat you mention too, and completely agree that there's little that's good about coal! But my argument follows a different line.
As I said in the piece, "[n]uclear reactors are, in normal operation, extremely safe." But my point is that in abnormal operation nuclear reactors are very unsafe. Added to that, nuclear accidents can and do happen. Sure, new reactors might be safer than older ones, but if more reactors are built the level of total risk isn't necessarily reduced (by which I mean, and these figures are only meant to be illustrative, if we had a 1 in 10 chance of an accident every 50 years and we had ten reactors, there would be one accident; but if we had safer reactors with a 1 in 100 chance of an accident, but built more, say 100 of them, there'd still be one accident).
Then, of course, there's the problem of the radioactive waste - which I've yet to see a good answer to.
Framing it as an either / or problem where we respond to our energy needs by either coal or nuclear misses the point entirely. If we can accept that neither the coal solution nor the nuclear solution are good, then surely we need to look differently at the problem? We need to think why we are locked into a culture which requires such a lot of energy to operate. Rather than keeping our lifestyles going by employing technologies which have so many negative consequences (and then spending ages discussing which is the least worst of two bad solutions), why don't we simply reduce our need for those technologies in the first place?
This wasn't the case even 20 years ago. You're living in a dream world if you think our need for power is going to lessen anytime soon.
Be realistic, we need huge amounts of power and we're going to demand more as more of the world develops.
Yes, nuclear is not without risks but how many people actually died at Fukishima? After a 'once in a 1000 year event' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie.....2740649
I'm not proposing that we all live in caves or anything like that. But I am proposing serious investment in technological fixes that solve the problem, rather than just desperately tacking one bad solution on top of another one. There's no absolute technical need for a high end computer to consumer a certain amount of energy, it just does because that's what's available - the commercial imperatives to make computers more energy efficient just aren't there. Were energy ten times the price, I'm pretty sure that manufacturers would quickly make their products ten times more efficient. Humans are, after all, an innovative species.
As for the deaths in Fukushima, sure, no one (yet) has been killed by it - but radiation causes long term problems not short term ones. Also, and probably more significantly, think of the economic and social losses that have come about as a result of protecting people from injury. 200,000 people have had their lives severely disrupted across an area of over 1000km2. Is that insignificant? I don't think so. If we do go on to build tens of nuclear power stations in the UK, where do you propose we site them? How do you propose we respond in the event of an accident?
And the once in a 1000 year event link is pretty disingenuous, don't you agree? The story is about the frequency of tsunamis not nuclear accidents. I doubt there will be another tsunami like that in my lifetime, but there'll certainly be another nuclear accident of a similar severity.
'Nuclear Eternity'
This innovative and award-winning film takes a timely look at the dangers of the nuclear power industry. In the few decades since the first nuclear reactors were built, more than 250,000 tonnes of radioactive refuse have been produced, which will remain hazardous to human life for at least 100,000 years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....ALX6FZk