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.…”
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
