After stamping it politically incorrect in the 1980s, Western governments are cautiously reopening the nuclear option. And the risks are being debated openly.
Melting icecaps - a driver of atomic power expansion.
Would you rather have a nuclear power plant in your backyard, or more melting icecaps? Should terrorists and hostile nations get better access to fissionable feedstocks for bombs, or would you prefer to freeze in the dark? Deciding what to do about atomic energy is a classic case of tough choices and risk trade-offs.
Energy options faced by Western governments are notoriously tricky. Marginal supplies of oil and gas, America’s and Europe’s leading fuels, are dominated by African, Middle Eastern and Russian sellers who for political reasons sometimes shut their taps. Baby-boomers and older people still recall the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo. Even fresher memories are the Russian cut-offs to Europe: last year gas supply was interrupted to The Ukraine, and in January this year the ironically named ‘Friendship’ oil pipeline – Germany and Poland’s primary source – was locked down for a few days.
Sales of coal, which is plentifully available, have perked up sharply in response, but the black stuff has its limitations. As a solid, it is more difficult to handle than fluids, gas and oil; and when burnt, it generates even greater quantities of greenhouse gases.
So, faced with energy-hungry consumers crying out over short supply and tall prices, what’s a western government to do? In a number of cases, it is to inch back cautiously, humbly and rather quietly towards a source that is plentiful, relatively benign on global warming and perhaps less expensive: nuclear.
Re-learning how to love nukes
This former pariah, tripped up by a 1979 accident at America’s Three Mile Island reactor and nearly felled seven years later by a meltdown in former Soviet Chernobyl, is no longer a dirty word in many halls of power. One country formerly opposed to it is now constructing an atomic plant, while others are re-opening doors that appeared to be locked and nailed shut.
How the new nuke in Finland will look.
Finland has its neck out furthest. Although the country last commissioned a nuclear plant in 1982, twenty years on the government decided to try again. Electric generator TVO (Teollisuuden Voima Oy) is building a new reactor that will start up in 2009. The go-nuclear decision was no easy ride. After an on-and-off public debate lasting some 15 years, Finland’s Parliament voted in favour by a rather slim majority of 107 to 92.
The UK and the US seem to be following the Finns. In neither land are new reactors under construction, but both governments are trying to make this more likely. In an energy policy review last year, the British government rejected a nearly-two-decade moratorium, concluding that “nuclear has a role to play in the future UK generating mix because of its contribution to increased diversity of energy supplies and its role as a source of low-carbon generation.”
America’s about-face
America made its about-face in 2001 with a revised National Energy Policy, and its Energy Policy Act of 2005 sweetened the pot by offering ‘first-come first-served’ tax credits to companies that erect new capacity. A “renaissance of nuclear energy” is coming to America, contends James Lake, Associate Director of the US Department of Energy’s Nuclear Programme, adding that he expects “near-term announcements of several orders for new nuclear power plants to be constructed and operated in the next 10 years.”
Patrick Moore, Greenpeace founder and now a nuclear energy supporter.
Even former opponents are changing their minds. Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace and one-time nuclear critic, came out in 2006 as a convert. Writing in the Washington Post on April 16, he argued that “nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster, catastrophic climate change.” While conceding his own as still a minority view among greens, Moore says other influential environmentalists have joined his camp, including atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, "Whole Earth Catalog" founder Stewart Brand and the late Hugh Montefiore, founder and director of Friends of the Earth.
Convert, before it’s too late
This has won attention in hard-line anti-nuclear nations, most noticeably Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. Only a decade ago, to think that these poster-countries for green-ism would seriously think about a return to atomic energy would have been, well, unthinkable. Sweden is considering reversing its ban on new reactors that was decided by a 1980 national referendum. (Momentum was slowed, however, after two accidents last year at a reactor in Forsmark were made public.) One of Switzerland’s leading socialist politicians and head of the country’s energy ministry, Federal Councilor Moritz Leuenberger, said in December 2006: “We must keep the option of nuclear energy open. It still is a long-term way to close the energy supply gap.”
Germany’s top politician has been more coy about her conversion. In a statement on energy policy delivered in early January, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that although she thinks the country’s plan to shut down all nuclear plants by around 2020 is wrong-headed, she will not hinder its execution. Political analysts say this is a signal she will begin battling the exit plan when she runs for re-election in 2009. Her party, the Christian Democrats, already is campaigning against it.
These policy u-turns can be viewed with bemusement by two countries that never left the atomic camp. Since the 1980s, France and Japan have expanded not just their generating but also their contracting capacity. Both are home to some of the biggest, most successful licensors of reactors. These are rubbing their hands together at a tidal wave of growth coming from a sector that always has been less skittish about atomic power – the developing world. By 2030, says the International Energy Agency, that region will place the bulk of new orders for new reactors, estimated to top USD 200,000 million in total.
What, me, worry?
That a technology once shunned can over two decades become acceptable is not simply a matter of hypocrisy, say proponents. Its relatively low contribution to global warming – one of nuclear’s strongest selling points – became politically significant only from the mid-1990s onward.
Moreover, experts say, two of atomic power’s biggest stumbling blocks have been debugged. Runaway, meltdown cores have been engineered out of today’s third-generation reactors, say Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors John Deutsch and Ernest Moritz, who co-chaired a 2003 study called ‘The Future of Nuclear Power.’ Disposal of radioactive spent fuel, the other chronic technical concern, has also been cracked. “Decades of studies,” Deutsch and Moritz point out, “support the geologic disposal option [burial in sealed caverns located half a kilometre or more underground].” Such a tomb is being built alongside Finland’s new nuclear plant, with start-up set for 2020.
Proliferation? That’s policy
Then there is proliferation – the spread of weapons-grade plutonium to hostile states or terrorists. Nuclear power proponents’ response is a shoulder shrug coupled with a sidestep. “We’ve responded to the technical objections to nuclear power,” said a generating executive on the fringe of a recent conference in Brussels, “and we can solve technical issues. But proliferation is not a technical issue. It is a policy issue.”
Policy’s fix, at least so far, has been to require non-atomic (weapons) nations to run their power plants on ‘borrowed’ nuclear fuel. Spent reactor rods, which could be processed into weapons, are to be sent back to ‘trustworthy’ countries such as France, Russia, the UK and the US. Clearly, this is not a foolproof system, as demonstrated by recent breaches in Iran and North Korea. At the same time, it is unclear that halting new nuclear plants in the West would have made much difference.
On balance, it seems that the West is now willing to accept these risks in order to reap their returns. For now, it looks as though we will live with more nuclear plants to save more icecaps, and we will accept what may be more proliferation to avoid freezing in the dark. Still, these choices are as yet somewhat untested. “At this point it is still hard to say if the West is just running from its oil problems, or if we are truly committed to resurrecting nuclear power,” commented the generating executive with a sigh. “We’ll see how strong the consensus is when something, be it technical or political, goes horribly wrong.”
