Ian Lowe

There are no universal truths in a complex question such as the future role of nuclear power. Each country has a unique energy supply and demand pattern. At one extreme, France gets over 80% of its electricity from fission reactors, so the country would find it almost impossible to do without nuclear power on any realistic timescale. At the other extreme, countries such as Australia, Portugal and Norway have no commercial reactors and limited capacity to develop the technology quickly, so it would take decades for them to develop a nuclear-power industry. Most countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, such as the UK, are somewhere between those two extremes.

The only reason anyone would even consider building nuclear power stations in a nation that does not already have any is the recognition that climate change is a serious threat to our future. A decade ago, nuclear power was widely seen as a failed technology. Originally hailed as cheap, clean and safe, after the Chernobyl accident it was seen as expensive, dirty and dangerous. The peak of nuclear-power installation happened more than 20 years ago. Since then, cancellations and deferments have outnumbered new constructions.

If nuclear power were the only effective way of slowing climate change, then I would support it. However, we would have to put a huge effort into managing nuclear waste. That problem is, in principle, one that we could eventually solve. Storing the current waste is a technical problem, while it is possible in principle to design reactors that could burn materials that are now seen as waste. But even if it were solved, I would remain desperately worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as this is a social and political problem with no apparent prospect of a solution. Fortunately, we may not have to face that terrible dilemma as there are other, much better, ways of moving to a low-carbon future.

Nuclear-waste risks
Nuclear power is certainly not a fast enough response to climate change. In Australia, for example, a strongly pro-nuclear government committee concluded that it would take 10–15 years to build one nuclear reactor from scratch. It proposed a crash programme of 25 reactors by 2050 but then calculated that this would not actually reduce Australia’s carbon-dioxide emissions; it would only slow the growth rate.

Nuclear power is also expensive. In most countries, there have to be direct or indirect public subsidies to make the nuclear option look competitive. Applying a carbon price of about £30 per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted by fossil-fuel power stations would make fossil-fuel electricity more expensive and make nuclear look more attractive, but it would also improve the relative economics of a wide range of renewable supply options. It might be true, as optimists assure us, that a promised new generation of reactors could deliver cheaper electricity, but we cannot afford to delay tackling climate change for decades.

While modern nuclear power stations do not have the technical limitations of the Chernobyl reactor, there will always remain some risk of accidents. There is community anxiety about nuclear energy because an accident at a nuclear power station poses a much more serious risk than an accident at any form of renewable-energy plant. Since nobody has yet demonstrated the safe and permanent management of radioactive waste from nuclear power stations, we can only give the public assurances that the problem will be solved in the future.

There also does not seem to be any real prospect of stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Only five nations had nuclear weapons when the Non-Proliferation Treaty was drafted in 1970. Today, however, there are nearly twice as many, while a further group of countries has the capacity to develop weapons. The more countries that use nuclear technology, the greater is the risk of fissile material being diverted for weapons. Indeed, Mohammed El Baradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the United Nations that he faced the impossible task of regulating hundreds of nuclear installations with the budget of a city police force. His agency documented countless examples of attempts to divert fissile material for improper purposes. There is a real risk of unaccountable military regimes, rogue dictators or even terrorists having either full-scale nuclear weapons or the capacity to detonate a “dirty bomb” that could make an entire city uninhabitable.

The fundamental point is that there are better alternatives. Australian, European and global studies have concluded that we could reduce demand dramatically – not by turning out the lights, but simply by improving the efficiency of turning energy into services such as lighting – and get all our electricity from a mix of renewables by 2030. That is a more responsible approach to tackling climate change. The clean-energy strategy is quicker, less expensive and less dangerous and there is no risk from terrorists stealing solar panels or wind-turbine blades! A mix of renewable supply systems would decentralize energy production, thus making societies more resilient and better insulated against natural disasters or terrorist action. We also know how to decommission wind turbines and solar panels at the end of their life, at little cost and with no risk to the community. So the question for pro-nuclear advocates is, as Australian political analyst Bernard Keane put it, “Why should taxpayers fund the most expensive and slowest energy option when so many alternatives are significantly cheaper and pose less financial risk?”

Barry Brook

As China, India and other populous developing nations expand their economies, with the very human aim of improving the prosperity and quality of life enjoyed by their citizens, the global demand for cheap, convenient energy is growing rapidly. If this demand is met by fossil fuels, then we are heading for both an energy-supply bottleneck and, because of the associated massive carbon emissions, a climate disaster.

Ironically, if climate change is the “inconvenient truth” facing high-energy-use, fossil-fuel-dependent societies such as the US, Canada, Australia and many countries in the European Union, then the inconvenient solution staring back is advanced nuclear power. The answer does not principally lie with renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, as many claim. However, these technologies will likely play some role.

There is a shopping list of “standard objections” used to challenge the viability or desirability of nuclear fission as a clean and sustainable energy source. None of these arguments stands up to scrutiny. Opponents claim that if the world ran on nuclear energy, then uranium supplies would run out in the coming decades and nuclear power plants would then have to shut down. This is false. Uranium and thorium are both more abundant than tin; and with the new generation of fast-breeder and thorium reactors, we would have abundant nuclear energy for millions of years. Yet even if the resources lasted a mere 1000 years, we would have ample time to develop exotic new future energy sources.

Going nuclear
Critics argue that past nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl mean that the technology is inherently dangerous. However, this simply ignores the fact that nuclear power is already hundreds of times safer than the coal, gas and oil we currently rely on. A study of 4290 energy-related accidents by the European Commission’s ExternE research project, for example, found that oil kills 36 workers per terawatt-hour, coal kills 25 and that hydro, wind, solar and, yes, nuclear, all kill fewer than 0.2 per terawatt-hour. Moreover, in nuclear reactors the passive safety features do not rely on engineered intervention and so remove the chance of human error, making it impossible to have a repeat of serious accidents. For example, in an emergency in the core cooling tank of a Westinghouse AP-1000 third-generation nuclear power plant, water is channelled into the reactor core by gravity, rather than by electric pumps.

Some contend that expanding commercial nuclear power would increase the risk of spreading nuclear weapons. First, this has not been true historically. Furthermore, the metal–fuel products of modern “dry” fuel recycling using electro-refining, which are designed for subsequent consumption in fast reactors, cannot be used for bombs because it is not possible to separate pure plutonium from the mix of uranium and minor actinides. Potential bomb-makers would get only a useless, dirty, contaminated product in a mix of heavy metals. Indeed, burning plutonium in fast reactors to generate large amounts of electricity would take this material permanently out of circulation, making it the most practical and cost-effective disposal mechanism imaginable. Those opposed to nuclear energy also claim that it leaves a legacy of nuclear waste that would have to be managed for tens of thousands of years. This is true only if we do not recycle the uranium and other heavy “transuranics” metals in the waste to extract all their useful energy.

At present, mined uranium is cheap. For light-water reactor technology, the total fuel costs – including mining, milling, enrichment and fuel-rod fabrication – is £13m a gigawatt per year. In unit-cost terms, that works out at 0.13p a kilowatt-hour for uranium oxide at a price of £45 per kilogram. However, in the longer term a once-through-and-throw-away use of nuclear fuel makes no economic sense. This is because such “open” fuel cycles not only leave a legacy of having to manage long-lived actinide waste, but they also inefficiently extract less than 1% of the energy in the uranium. Feeding nuclear waste into fast reactors will use all of the energy in uranium, and liquid-fluoride thorium reactors will access the energy stored in thorium, which works out as an 160-fold gain!

After repeated recycling, the tiny quantity of fission products that would remain would become less radioactive than natural granites and monazite sands within 300 years. To claim that large amounts of energy (thus generating greenhouse gases) would be required to mine, process and enrich uranium, and to construct and later decommission nuclear power stations simply ignores a wealth of real-world data. Authoritative and independently verified whole-of-life-cycle analyses in peer-reviewed journals have repeatedly shown that energy inputs to nuclear power are as low as, or lower than, wind, hydro and solar thermal, and less than half those of solar photovoltaic panels. That is today’s reality. In a future all-electric society – which includes electric or synthetic-fuelled vehicles supplied by nuclear power plants – greenhouse-gas emissions from the nuclear cycle would be zero.

Embracing nuclear energy
Finally, when all other arguments have been refuted, critics fall back on the claim that nuclear power takes too long to build or is too expensive compared with renewable energy. These arguments are perhaps the most regularly and transparently false arguments thrown up by those trying to block nuclear power from competing on a fair and level playing field with other energy sources. Many environmentalists believe that the best low-carbon solution is for governments to guide us back to simpler, less energy-consuming lives. Notions like that are unrealistic. The world will continue to need energy, and lots of it. But fossil fuels are not a viable future option. Nor are renewables the main answer. There is no single solution, or silver bullet, for solving the energy and climate crises, but there are bullets, and they are made of uranium and thorium – the fuels needed for nuclear plants.

It is time that we embraced nuclear energy as a cornerstone of the carbon-free revolution we need in order to address climate change and long-term energy security in a world beyond fossil fuels. Advanced nuclear power provides the technological key to unlocking the awesome potential of these energy metals for the benefit of humankind and for the ultimate sustainability of our society.