Nuclear Power You Can Trust?

Having been involved in the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment in one way or another since the 1970s, I’ve always been in the “anti-nuclear” camp.

Indeed, I think I was the first per­son to cre­ate an Eng­lish ver­sion of the famous “Atom­kraft? Nein Danke” logo – for the cover of an edi­tion of Under­cur­rents mag­a­zine – a mag­a­zine that was into renew­ables (mainly of the DIY vari­ety) before a lot of peo­ple. (You can read some copies of it here.)

Of course there are plenty of rea­sons to be wary of nuclear power – of the cur­rent vari­ety at least.

• There’s the ques­tion of energy secu­rity: Ura­nium doesn’t come from here, we have to import it, or reprocess other peo­ples’. So although I gather there might be deposits off the British coast, it doesn’t seem at this point to help decou­ple us from poten­tial prob­lems with depen­dence on over­seas sources.
• There’s the prob­lem of nuclear waste dis­posal, though some peo­ple (James Love­lock for exam­ple) are con­vinced that this can be done safely and permanently.
• Nuclear power as we cur­rently do it is absurdly inef­fi­cient. What you do is you let radioac­tive decay heat some water and then pass it through tur­bines. It’s just like a con­ven­tional power sta­tion, except you heat the water dif­fer­ently. I can imag­ine the effi­ciency is sig­nif­i­cantly less than 50%. What­ever hap­pened to inno­v­a­tive direct con­ver­sion tech­nolo­gies like MHD (Mag­ne­to­Hy­dro­Dy­nam­ics), where, for exam­ple, you can run a plasma back and forth in a mag­netic field and pull elec­tric­ity directly off the plasma, in a kind of fluid dynamo? The Sovi­ets had some pilot plants gen­er­at­ing sev­eral megawatts. What happened?
• And there’s the risk of dis­as­trous acci­dents, like Cher­nobyl, Three Mile Island and now Fukushima, which can poten­tially spread sig­nif­i­cant amounts of irra­di­ated mate­r­ial over a wide area, with poten­tial health effects like increased long-term can­cer risk and other prob­lems beyond the direct effects of radi­a­tion poisoning.

Counter to the last of these, there’s the fact that remark­ably few peo­ple have actu­ally been affected by radi­a­tion from nuclear power plants. Many, many fewer than have been killed or injured by coal-mining acci­dents and other fossil-fuel-related dis­as­ters. If Ger­many was as sen­si­tive to risks to life from bac­te­ria as it is from nuclear power, it would have closed down the organic food indus­try by now. But instead, it’s clos­ing down its nuclear plants, which, as far as I know, have not caused any deaths at all, unlike the con­t­a­m­i­nated beansprouts.

But of course, it’s never as sim­ple as that.

The fact is that right now we need low-carbon energy sources, and quickly, to com­bat the threat of anthro­pogenic (human-created) global warm­ing (AGW). There is no doubt about the threat of AGW, and I’m not going to enter­tain dis­cus­sion about it here. Sorry.

Much as I am in favour of renew­ables, and much as I like the sight of ele­gant, vir­tu­ally silent wind tur­bines dot­ting the land­scape (and I would as hap­pily have some in the field behind my house as James Love­lock would have a nuclear waste stor­age facil­ity behind his), the fact is that renew­ables are almost cer­tainly not enough, and we need some­thing more to replace our age­ing and hor­ri­fy­ingly destruc­tive carbon-spewing fossil-fuel pow­ered gen­er­at­ing sta­tions. Nuclear is the obvi­ous option, so after years of tak­ing an anti-nuclear stance, I am chang­ing my mind. And in doing so find myself aligned with peo­ple like George Mon­biot and Pro­fes­sor Lovelock.

In my opin­ion, even if we did no bet­ter in the inter­na­tional nuclear power indus­try than we have done to date, any threat to human life from nuclear power, past, present and future, is as noth­ing com­pared to the bil­lions whose lives are threat­ened by AGW and will be over the 50–100 years ahead.

I will be a lit­tle con­tro­ver­sial and say that in my per­sonal view (and I am not a nuclear power expert, so may be wrong), the cur­rent level of nuclear power tech­nol­ogy is much safer than the chain that ends in a con­ven­tional fossil-fuel-driven power sta­tion. That, to me, is not the question.

Instead, the ques­tion is, can we trust any­one to build, main­tain and oper­ate nuclear power sta­tions safely?

You could argue that by and large, the answer to that ques­tion is yes. Nuclear power as it is prac­tised today is in fact extremely safe com­pared with fossil-fuel gen­er­a­tion. But there is a bit of a knife edge here. Fun­da­men­tally, how­ever intrin­si­cally safe the cur­rent tech­nol­ogy is, the fact is that I do not trust for-profit cor­po­ra­tions to do the job prop­erly. I am not even sure I trust gov­ern­ments. They will always be look­ing to cut cor­ners and save money, time or what­ever else, and the result will be a greatly increased risk. Take a look at this:

 

This is the seg­ment on nuclear power from Adam Curtis’s Pandora’s Box series on some mis­uses of sci­en­tific research. I’m a big fan of Curtis’s work (although I have some issues with his lat­est series, All Watched Over By Machines of Lov­ing Grace) and I think the above is spot on.

So, I think the tech­nol­ogy of cur­rent nuclear power is fine in the­ory, but we are going to screw it up in prac­tice. How can we have our cake and eat it? What we need is a method of nuclear power gen­er­a­tion that you can’t screw up [very easily].

The answer just might be hinted at in this arti­cle from, of all places The Mail On Sun­day, a paper I would never have thought I’d find myself rec­om­mend­ing in, er, a month of Sun­days. It’s also rec­om­mended by the climate-sceptic Global Warm­ing Pol­icy Foun­da­tion. Talk about strange bedfellows….

The piece is about the “Elec­tron Model of Many Appli­ca­tions”, or EMMA. Here’s the arti­cle. Research into this tech­nol­ogy is going on in Cheshire and it might just pro­vide the key to one method of using Tho­rium in a reac­tor to gen­er­ate elec­tric­ity – assum­ing the UK gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues fund­ing the research prop­erly, which I doubt. Here’s the begin­ning of the piece:

“Imag­ine a safe, clean nuclear reac­tor that used a fuel that was hugely abun­dant, pro­duced only minute quan­ti­ties of radioac­tive waste and was almost impos­si­ble to adapt to make weapons. It sounds too good to be true, but this isn’t sci­ence fic­tion. This is what lies in store if we har­ness the power of a sil­very metal found in river sands, soil and gran­ite rock the world over: thorium.

One ton of tho­rium can pro­duce as much energy as 200 tons of ura­nium, or 3.5 mil­lion tons of coal, and the tho­rium deposits that have already been iden­ti­fied would meet the entire world’s energy needs for at least 10,000 years. Unlike ura­nium, it’s easy and cheap to refine, and it’s far less toxic. Hap­pily, it pro­duces energy with­out pro­duc­ing any car­bon diox­ide: so an econ­omy that ran on tho­rium power would have vir­tu­ally no car­bon footprint.

Bet­ter still, a tho­rium reac­tor would be inca­pable of hav­ing a melt­down, and would gen­er­ate only 0.6 per cent of the radioac­tive waste of a con­ven­tional nuclear plant. It could even be adapted to ‘burn’ exist­ing, stock­piled ura­nium waste in its core, thus enor­mously reduc­ing its radioac­tive half-life and toxicity.…”

Now read on.

It seems to me that this tech­nol­ogy could answer many, if not all, of the envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns about the accept­abil­ity of nuclear power. Of course I want to read the full report that is appar­ently soon to be pub­lished, and no tech­nol­ogy comes with­out draw­backs (or unin­tended con­se­quences for that mat­ter), but pre­lim­i­nary accounts, like the one above, seem to offer promise.

For more on other pos­si­ble uses of Tho­rium for power gen­er­a­tions, see this Wikipedia arti­cle. You’ll see it’s not entirely problem-free – but then noth­ing is.

*Header image from MensPulpMags.com