Are we still going nuclear?
“If France can produce 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear power, why can’t we?”
- John Mac Cain, US Senator
Putting thoughts in an envelop to be reopened when the big debate is on
Australian Columnist Annabel Crabb is right. “Wish we could wait till the dead are counted in Japan before we have the climate/nuclear catfight.”
The trouble for the quality of the debate to come is that we know how hard it is to focus public attention on systemic issues once crises have passed. We just saw what happened during the GFC. Promises to reform the financial system vanished as soon as business-as-usual operations resumed.
The other difficulty is that whilst witnessing exactly the same events unfolding, both sides of the debate reach totally opposite conclusions. Pro-nuclear supporters see the Fukushima reactor meltdown as a demonstration of safety standards and a contained crisis [Slate], whereas their detractors see an unacceptable ‘black swan’ event.
Caught between the horror and genuine pain for what has been happening and the irrepressible imperative to form a view given what is at stake, I thought a useful exercise could be to write down some thoughts before they get lost, and put them in an envelop to be reopened when the proper nuclear debate starts.
Which nuclear debate exactly?
Today’s circumstances are different from the 1970s when a country like France faced the oil crisis and decided to push towards “energy independence” to eventually reach 75% of nuclear electricity. Whilst still revolving around fossil fuel, our current problem is to develop greener ways of producing energy to limit our impact on the environment.
So for Australia, the question is not so much to debate the absolute merit of nuclear energy per se, but to appreciate whether to introduce its use is appropriate in that context. Is it the right logic to swap fossil fuel issues for nuclear ones?
Pierre and Marie Curie – 1903 Physics Nobel Prize
Back then, risk trade-offs were made
Whether you agree or not with the use of nuclear energy, you can admit that there was a logical path that led to its development throughout the 20th century.
The relativity theory pushed physics beyond the human scale of high-school Newtonian physics. It also unleashed forces of nature that can only be understood with deep expertise. The US made the dreadful decision to use it to end the WWII bloodshed. History being written by the victors, it went into the text books as the most palatable option they could chose and justified the nuclear research.
Finally, post war governments made risk trade-offs to harness the nuclear energy for civilian use. Toxic wastes and the danger of frightening radiations were accepted by the politicians driving the agenda. The context of an epoch marked by a belief in science and technological progress probably helped. The arms race between the US and USSR made populations swallow quite a few pills. And the economic hardship inflicted by the oil crash of the 1970s did the rest. Cynical realpolitik, but rational.
This is exactly what happened in France when an aggressive program was launched in 1974. The French case actually provides valuable insights that countries willing to embark on such a project might want to consider.
Was the community engaged and consulted in the decision to proceed?
The short answer is no.
The key support the government relied on came from the unions, not from the population which had not been consulted.
Unions had been put on side since the creation of the state energy monopoly Electricité de France (EDF) in 1946. The utility became one of the 1st employers in the country and closely associated unions to the management of its large social fund, equivalent to 1% of the company’s financial turn over. This close relationship proved instrumental to the implementation of the aggressive nuclear program. No matter the quibbles of the public opinion, work was going to get done.
Once things were on the way, subsequent effort to craft a national narrative in support of this enterprise kicked in. No efforts would be spared through schools and the media to build a specific pride in scientific research and engineering culture. Pioneers of the nuclear research like Pierre and Marie Curie came as handy symbols to celebrate. It was as if the development of the nuclear sector was legitimatised as the pursuit of the direction they had set. The development of the nuclear energy was the French ‘Moon Race’.
So what was the nuclear promise?
Prime Minister Pierre Messmer who supervised the launch of the program outlined the pro-nuclear case on national television in 1974:
“France has not been favoured by nature in energy resources. There is almost no petrol on our territory, we have less coal than England and Germany and much less gas than Holland … our great chance is electrical energy of nuclear origin because we have had good experience with it since the end of World War II … In this effort that we will make to acquire a certain independence, or at least reduced dependence in energy, we will give priority to electricity and in electricity to nuclear electricity.”
That was it. See you 58 nuclear stations and 35 years later.
Did it deliver?
A recent report commissioned by the Greens group in the European Parliament gave a fair assessment (1).
“There is no doubt that such a nuclear program represents a remarkable scientific, technological and engineering performance, [however] it has been designed, developed and implemented under the guidance of a powerful technocrat elite, beyond governmental changes and outside parliamentary decisions and control.”
The study shows that the impact of nuclear power to reduce fossil fuel consumption is more limited than commonly thought. Whilst 77% of the French electricity comes from nuclear plants, it only represents 16% of the total energy consumed by the country. Total dependence on fossil fuels is far from been broken.
A perverse effect of the nuclear program has also been to artificially boost electricity consumption instead of encouraging substitution for other energy sources. Because its nuclear capacity was significantly oversized, and instead of scaling down when it could in the 1980s, the public power company developed very aggressive policies to export base load power and to dump electricity into markets like space heating, hot water heating or home cooking appliances. You might notice next time you visit France how prevalent electrical heaters and stoves are in households.
The safety record is also less idyllic than commonly admitted. Superior safety standards are traditionally a strong argument in favour of the nuclear sector.
The trouble with opposing the safety of the 442 reactors to the 50,000+ fossil fuel power plants worldwide, is that we are not really comparing likes for likes. Instead it would be more insightful to understand how the current statistics would evolve if nuclear plants proliferated in the same scale as fossil fuel facilities.
Here again, the French example gives interesting insights. Between 10,000 and 12,000 events are identified (pdf) in French nuclear plants every year of which 600 to 800 are considered “significant events”. Moreover the current trend of privatisation of the energy sector is becoming incompatible with the “risk appetite” of the nuclear industry. The pursuit of commercial profit and nuclear safety do not mix. The state is now a majority shareholder in nuclear power in France whose priority is the maximisation of financial dividends and returns. As a result, the enforcement of strict and costly security standards has given ground to financial profitability. Because of increasing concerns about those compromises on safety, even conservative politicians such as Gaullist sovereignist Nicolas Dupont Aignan now call for a re-nationalisation of the sector.
This is compounded by the difficulty to maintain a high level of competence in the workforce. 40% of the generation of scientists and engineers that have conceived and operated the current nuclear facilities will retire by 2015. Replacing them has become EDF’s most urgent management concern in the last years. Imagine how this type of issue would play out in Australia where skill shortage is already a problem.
I could go on.
So what does this all mean for today’s debate?
First of all we have to be clear that the nature of the debate is totally different in Australia compared to countries like France, the US or Japan. For them the options are to phase it out, or to keep investing in it. For the Australians, it is to decide whether we want to get into this business or invest in other technologies. Those differences are crucial.
Another way to ask the question is: if we had to invest today the equivalent of money and effort which led to the development of the European nuclear capability would we spend it again on the same technology, or would we rather leap frog to the next generation of energy production?
Some believe that this next generation is a greener nuclear alternative like Thorium (2). It would have the significant advantage of going through a more controllable chain-reaction and also produces wastes that only stay radioactive for 500 years instead of 10,000 as plutonium does. 500 years instead of 10,000… Wastes buried in 1511 would only start to become innocuous today.
This technology certainly has got merits for countries already equipped with nuclear plants, but really, is it seriously the type of ‘green’ energy we should be looking at? Trading off carbon emissions against toxic wastes that will last the time it took since the Spanish started to conquer South America?
To take a really systemic approach would require us to agree that this debate is first and foremost about our attitude towards energy production as well as consumption. On the consumption side it should mean a change in our lifestyles in ways that we are still reluctant to accept. On the production side, it would lead us to appreciate that our global ecosystem – planet Earth – has been pumping its energy from the Sun. Most of the megawatts we consume, apart from geothermal and nuclear, are derived from it.
As a first step, for centuries we have been using the by-products of this mega reactor. Wind, water, wood, coal, oil, gas all stock energy derived from solar activity.
Then, rather than using it indirectly, we tried to recreate it. Conceptually, the nuclear energy has been an attempt to reproduce the Sun’s behaviour on a human scale. An awesome scientific idea, which unfortunately comes with the side effects we have been discussing. Even balanced proponents of nuclear power agree that the future lies in developing an energy mix to prevent putting all our eggs in the same basket.
Australia should reach the conclusion that there is enough of the nuclear technology around the globe. The world does not need an other country to add to it. Instead of debating a technology from the 1970s, an impactful contribution to the global agenda would be to lead the charge towards getting us closer to truly harnessing the energy produced by this solar mega power plant. Australia should also realise that its high levels of ‘insolation’ and healthy economic situation make it an ideal candidate to lead that charge.
This would take us to a new level of energy production: after inefficiently using the Sun’s by-products, after recreating its atomic reaction in risky conditions, we would finally focus on using it as a direct source. Not to mention that it is the ultimate renewable generator: as long as we need energy the Sun will be there to supply it.
This is really point I reached when researching this piece. I don’t want to deny that nuclear science was at a certain period of history a welcome scientific progress. I don’t want to enter a sterile debate and hear that anti-nuclear activists are turning their back to progress, or want to bring us back to the stone age. My argument is exactly the opposite. Nuclear had its place. Some countries took a bet on it, good on them. It might have suited populated areas such as Europe or Japan whose climate does not enable solar energy to supply base load power. May those-nations-that-have-not-gone-that-path move on to the next wave of innovation, especially if their geography permits. And good on the activists for keeping the pressure on.
What the nuclear industry actually tells us is that when meaningful investment and policies support scientific research, anything is possible. Who would have thought 70 years ago that atomic forces could be released as they are today?
Now is the opportunity to make sure that something good comes out of the tragedy happening at Fukushima. 70 years on, the world needs a new ‘Manhattan Project’ (3) to focus money and brainpower to develop the next generation of the solar industry, both in terms of technical research as well as policy setting (4).
This is the opportunity that Australia should be seizing to show global leadership.
Voila. Time to put this in an envelop to be reopened when the big debate is on.
{ leLaissezFaire }
References
(1) http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/dokbin/258/258614.mythbuster@en.pdf
(2) Tim Dean (@ockhamsbeard) on Thorium in The ABC Drum and Cosmos Magazine
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
(4) And I’m not talking of the Australian failed rushed attempt to stick solar panels on roofs, which ended up with the political fiasco we saw !
Further reading
Agree / Disagree with George Monbiot – Guardian:
- Japan nuclear crisis should not carry weight in atomic energy debate
- A kneejerk rejection of nuclear power is not an option
Beyond Zero Emissions : Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan:
http://beyondzeroemissions.org/zero-carbon-australia-2020
- A 10 year roadmap for 100% renewable energy
- Baseload energy supplied by renewable sources
- Affordable at $8 per household per week
“The Zero Carbon Australia 2020 plan shows that it is technically feasible and affordable to replace all fossil fuel electricity with 100% renewable energy”
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