Is this Solidarity or Green World that I’m reading? According to Stuart Jordan (24 Jan), whatever the answer to climate change is, it’s not nuclear power! Nuclear plants are always late and over budget, unlike anything else.
Apparently, uranium would run out in 10 years, a fact that had escaped the companies that are keen to build and run new power stations. So why is Gordon Brown keen on nuclear? Because his brother is a “lobbyist” for EDF!
Of course!
Instead, we need “a massive investment in renewables, energy storage and carbon capture technology”, with “a giant international supergrid covering Europe and North Africa”, all by 2017. Am I the only reader who finds this difficult to credit. Just consider how many off-shore wind turbines we would need, with their massive concrete bases destroying the undersea habitat, not to mention the quarrying necessary for the limestone. Tidal barrage across the Severn? Another habitat destroyed for temporary gain (until the river silted up).
Meanwhile, nuclear power is the safest form of power generation and has minimal effect on the environment. “What?! Are you mad?”, I hear people say. “Didn’t we read Paul Vernadsky (Solidarity, Debate, 13 October) saying that ‘nuclear power is dangerous, expensive and unnecessary’?”
Consider this. The worst nuclear disaster in the world, Chernobyl, killed less than 60 people (under 50 emergency workers exposed to high radiation levels and 9 fatalities from thyroid cancer). Undoubtedly, there will have been other cancers caused by radiation escapes but these are almost undetectable amid the millions of cancers occurring “normally” (about one third of people contract cancer at some time).
60 plus deaths – that doesn’t sound too good. But now consider this. 100 coalminers died in October in a mine explosion in Ukraine, in the prime of life. Several hundred have died in Ukraine’s mines since the Chernobyl accident in 1986. In China’s mines, more people die in a week than were killed by Chernobyl (some 4,000 per annum). In UK, more people die from miners’ lung (a legacy of UK’s defunct coal industry) every three months than were killed at Chernobyl.
This is just one aspect of the damage caused by one part of the fossil fuel industry: there’s also acid rain, particulate pollution, asthma, and so on, before we even reach global warming.
OK, you say, but why not just replace fossil fuel power with renewable energy? Well, if only it were that simple. The most proven form of renewable energy is hydroelectric. Like all forms of energy generation, this has negative, as well as positive, effects. Habitats and livelihoods can be destroyed (look at the Three Gorges project in China) and thousands of lives threatened in dam collapses, while silting reduces their efficiency (Aswan Dam in Egypt).
Of course, we need answers to the (greatly overstated) problem of nuclear waste. Suitable underground storage sites exist but scaremongering stories make these unacceptable at the moment. A better option would be to generate less with better reactor designs and to “burn up” existing waste in a new form of reactor that runs on the plentiful element thorium. This process is called Accelerated Transmutation of Waste and could also be used to turn our arsenal of atom bombs into useful energy.
Stocks of uranium probably amount to decades’ worth, even without new discoveries, while fast breeder reactors could convert the 99% of uranium which is presently useless into plutonium. Hundreds of years’ worth of thorium exists.
Nuclear accidents, at present extremely rare, could be made almost non-existent with fail-safe thorium reactors. These do not have a chain reaction and could be simply halted by the flick of a switch.
Yes, we need renewable energy as well, but this comes at a price. Let’s do the sums honestly.