Our society is powered largely by burning fossil fuels. This is the equivalent to living on our savings. Fossil fuels — oil, coal and gas — were laid down over a period of a hundred or so million years and we are using about a million years’ worth every year. Even if there were not the risk of climate change, we should be looking for alternatives.
Ultimately, we need to be aiming for complete renewability, but this will require some massive changes in human societies, and some enormous leaps forward in technology. Humans have never used any resources renewably (apart from a few insignificant exceptions).
The immediate alternatives to fossil fuels include wave, tide, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass, solar and nuclear power. All have their up and down sides but all can make some contribution, and it would be foolish to rule any out without strong reaons. That is just what many environmentalists do when they rule out nuclear power from the future energy mix. Can other sources suffice?
Recently, New Scientist looked at one scientist’s efforts to “do the math” (2 April). Axel Kleidon, a physicist from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany, has calculated that building enough wind farms to replace fossil fuel-derived energy would actually remove a significant amount of energy from the atmosphere and alter rainfall, turbulence and the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface.
Humans at present use some 47 terawatts (TW or trillions of watts = joules per second) of energy of which 17 TW come from fossil fuels. The rest is made up of renewable sources, mainly harvesting farmed plants. This is only about one twenty-thousandth of the energy coming from the sun.
But the useful energy available to us is restricted by the laws of thermodynamics to what is termed the “free” energy, the rest being unusable heat. Kleidon calculates that we are using some 5-10% of the free energy, more than is used by all geological processes, such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tectonic plate movements! If we were to set up wind and wave farms with a theoretical output of 17 TW, we would find, first, that a lot of waste heat would be produced, contributing to global warming. We would also deplete the available energy in the atmosphere: Kleidon calculates that this could reduce the energy to be harnessed from the wind by a factor of 100.
There are other sources of energy but these have their drawbacks. Geothermal power stations rely on pumping water into hot rocks fractured by explosions, but experimental plants are losing unacceptable amounts of water underground so the outputs are lower than expected.
Solar electricity relies on rare elements such as indium and tellurium, which are projected to run out within decades. Cheaper versions of solar cells still require another rare element, selenium.
Solar heating, using large mirrors to focus the Sun’s rays to boil water and drive turbines, is a very promising technology but it is not clear that this could fill more than part of the gap. For one thing, the Sun does not shine so strongly (or at all) on many parts of the Earth or during many times in the year.
Is it wise to rule out nuclear power? Many eminent environmentalists are coming round to the view that it isn’t.
Mark Lynas, writing in the New Statesman shortly after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan (21 March), warned that a panicky abandonment of nuclear power would lead to catastrophic global warming, a far greater problem. He argues that renewable sources are not going to be able to fill the gap in energy for countries like Japan, certainly in the short to medium term, and they will simply increase their use of fossil fuels.
And long-time environmentalist George Monbiot (Guardian, 22 March) called for a sense of perspective over Fukushima, with no deaths (apart from two killed by the tsunami, and over the enormous disruption of the landscape which would be necessary if renewables were to supply all of our energy needs. Not only would there be enormous areas devoted to onshore windfarms, but also increased networks of grid connections to get the electricity to where it was needed. Pumped storage facilities would be needed to store the energy for when it was needed.
Other options favoured by some involve reversing the pattern of industrialisation and moving people back into rural communities where power could be produced locally. Except, according to Monbiot, it couldn’t. In the UK, he says, generating solar power involves a “spectacular waste of scarce resources”, while wind power in populated areas is largely worthless, since we build in sheltered spots. And direct use of energy by damming rivers or harvesting wood would wreck the countryside.
One of the UK’s oldest environmentalist groups, Friends of the Earth (FoE) consistently opposes nuclear power. Its five year-old report, Nuclear power, climate change and the Energy Review, raises the following objections.
Nuclear power is error-prone and likely to fail in ways dangerous to lots of people; it assists in the proliferation of nuclear weapons; it is vulnerable to terrorist attack; and that it is anyway unnecessary to use nuclear power at all in the complete replacement of fossil fuels in power generation and transport which FoE also calls for.
The claim is repeated that, though nuclear power generates electricity without releasing CO2, the extraction of uranium and the building of plant result in carbon emissions — as though this was a significant objection. Every current and proposed energy technology will result in carbon emissions as the concrete, steel, etc, will have to be made using current fossil fuel resources. The point is that it will make far less overall than the fossil fuel burning it will replace.
The Green Party uses many of the same arguments.
Both the Greens and FoE both give expense as an argument against new nuclear power, and yet the report the Greens cite states that the increased nuclear option would be the cheapest, while the no nuclear/all renewable option would be the most expensive (necessitating energy imports as well!). FoE’s own figures show nuclear power’s costs sitting right in the middle of all other energy sources.
Another problem identified is that of disposal of waste, including dangerous high-level waste. This has a solution — burial in geologically stable strata deep underground. The waste has to be inaccessible for about 100,000 years, but there are plenty of rock layers where movements of chemicals is measured in a few metres per million years (for example, the Oklo “natural” reactor).
The problem of nuclear accidents was perhaps the most prominent criticism raised by FoE five years ago, and the accident at Fukushima would not diminish the shrillness of their alarms. Nowhere do FoE or the Greens even mention the possibility of improved safety features in current reactor designs, for instance, ones that rely on gravity to flood overheating reactor cores with water, rather than as at Fukushima using pumps whose electricity could be cut off by an earthquake.
Nowhere do they raise the need for new designs using thorium which are “fail safe” and could be adapted to burn up the high level waste which is such a problem and has to be dealt with whether we have nuclear power or not. And nuclear reactors even now are burning up “surplus” nuclear weapons.
The Labour Party’s “green wing”, the Socialist Environmental and Resources Association (SERA), does not differ from FoE and the Greens in opposing nuclear power, though they concentrate on problems of time and money.
They ignore the fact that the delays are due to the political cowardice of Labour governments and refusals to support research into new reactor designs.
It is notable that the environmentalists seem to have stopped blaming nuclear power stations for clusters of childhood leukaemias (no link with any other form of illness has been found). Such clusters are in fact found in many places where workers and their families have moved from elsewhere and may be due to lack of resistance to locally occurring viruses.
If one hoped for an independent voice from the SWP, one would be disappointed. In a slightly revised update of a 2006 pamphlet, Martin Empson refers blithely to the cancers and other illnesses coming to the Fukushima clean-up workers “as with the Chernobyl disaster”. He is clearly unaware of the massive differences in the two cases and the absence of evidence of long-term harm in the unfortunate but brave Chernobyl workers who survived initial exposure to radiation.
He sets up the straw person who argues that nuclear power is “the only way that we can produce low carbon electricity” and repeats the irrelevant fact that some CO2 will be released in setting up reactors. He insists that “Fukushima shows that nuclear power is extremely dangerous”. He doesn’t recognise that the reactors survived one of the most powerful earthquakes and tsunamis recorded with minimal damage and would have been virtually problem-free had a fail-safe cooling system been installed — as should and could have happened.
He repeats the discredited allegations of clusters of leukaemias around nuclear plants. He rubbishes suggestions of as few as 4,000 excess deaths due to Chernobyl which came from a United Nations report in 2005, preferring another “independent” report which suggested some half a million deaths already(!). He seems unaware of the latest UN report which drastically reduces estimates of illness and death from Chernobyl. It states that 28 of 134 “liquidators” died of acute radiation sickness at the time and a further 19 have died but not of radiation-linked diseases. Fifteen of some 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer have died (this problem arose only because of the criminal negligence of USSR authorities). No other deaths have definitely been attributed to radiation from Chernobyl. Professor Wade Allison, a radiation expert from Oxford University, argues that people’s natural defence mechanisms against radiation damage have been greatly under-estimated.
The environmentalists and the SWP appear to be unaware of the fact that fossil fuel extraction and use is thousands of times more dangerous than nuclear power.
Nuclear power, climate change and the Energy Review, Friends of the Earth 2005
Meeting the UK’s 2020 energy challenge: Do we need new nuclear?, Alan Whitehead MP, SERA January 2008
Climate Change: Why Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, Martin Empson, SWP 2006 (“updated” 2011)
Health effects due to radiation from the Chernobyl accident, UNSCEAR 2011
Radiation and Reason: The Impact of Science on a Culture of Fear, Wade Allison (ISBN 0-9562756-1-3, pub. 2009), http://www.radiationandreason.com
Comments
Don't rule out workers' power
Les, Your article seems to be based mainly on the arguments now being put forward by George Monbiot and Mark Lynas - both deservedly respected thinkers and researchers on climate change. Though you list the objections to Nuclear Power, you don't even attempt to answer many of them, and on the issue of waste disposal, plant safety and cost, you repeat the fundamental mistake of Lynas, and (to a lesser extent) Monbiot, which is that you fail to see the reality of Nuclear Power within the context of a global capitalist economy. Astonishingly, you don't even call for public ownership and democratic workers control of nuclear production.
Critically, you also fail to question the projected “energy gap” which is being used to justify Nuclear Power expansion as a necessary stop-gap to maintain our energy supply without catastrophically increasing CO2 emissions. And you don't ask what is the best way forward for energy in the interests of the working class.
Capitalism is immensely - criminally - wasteful of the fossil fuel energy we are currently burning up as if there was no tomorrow. Insulation and energy conservation at every level could slash by a third our current consumption in Britain. Vast amounts are burned globally to power totally uneccessary production for manufactured consumerist needs, in order to generate private profit. The stuff that is produced is purposefully designed to break rather than to last or be easily repairable, leading to more energy being burned for repeat production. Personal travel and the transport of goods occur in a totally irrational way because of the demands of the competitive capitalist economy. Advertising, marketing, commercial lighting, stuff on standby out of work-hours etc, are also inherently massively wasteful. I dare say that they have occurred precisely because fossil fuels have been such a cheap source of energy in the past, but none of these aspects of Capitalism's energy wasting are in the interests of working people, except in the immediate interest of providing jobs.
So far as work is concerned, how many jobs could be created in the insulation and conservation industries, premises conversion, public transport expansion etc that energy efficiency demands? And at what saving to working-class people?
It is true that people in the rest of the world will have a growing energy need over the next decades, but while they need and have a right to expect more, we in the western capitalist world could actually use a lot less with no drop in social well-being and an actual improvement in the living conditions of most working people. Monbiot and Lynas make the mistake of equating the energy needs of competitive capitalism with the rational needs of humanity, and I think this article does the same.
Monbiot and Lynas are ultra-aware, (as are most other environmentalists, though you seem to question it) of the urgent need to cut CO2 emissions. It is so urgent that it raises a problem for revolutionaries as, with or without a socialist transformation, we need to deal with it now if the human species is going to survive. This is why the desperate measure of proliferating a hazardous technology seems necessary and acceptable to some climate-change analysts. But I think it betrays a class attitude which is not acceptable for socialists.
It concentrates more power and wealth, with massive public subsidies, into the hands – and behind the fences of - corporations with an appalling track-record. Nuclear Power by it's very nature demands high security and centralised control, and in the present world that means also an inherent lack of the transparency and democratic accountability which are absolutely essential where hazardous industries are concerned.
Monbiot and Lynas play fast and loose with the safety of working people in their calculations – one nuclear accident has the potential to destroy the lives of hundreds if not thousands of workers and working-class communities – even if as it appears some radiation dangers have been miscalculated in the past. As Fukushima showed, the unthinkable can still be avoided, but only at an inconceivable public expense for the containment and clean-up, at the cost of wholescale evacuation and land contamination, and with the long-term health fears for everyone exposed. Even then it was touch and go.
Japanese Nuclear Power used to be heralded as the safest in the world, before the unthinkable happened. You say Fukushima “would have been virtually problem-free had a fail-safe cooling system been installed — as should and could have happened”. Ah, yes – If only capitalism
hadn't cut corners and disregarded safety, it would have been virtually (only virtually?) problem-free! Elsewhere you talk about “the possibility of improved safety features” as if a capitalist industry will go for the best and safest method rather than the cheapest it can get away with. But this is one industry where shoddy workmanship means potentially mass disaster.
You don't deal with the proliferation argument at all. But you can't advocate nuclear power expansion in one country without it being for all countries, however unstable or tyrannical they are.
And again, you then have to take responsibility for how it will actually be developed in those countries and how much that increases the hazard of nuclear accidents occurring which are a threat to people everywhere, and particularly to the workers living near them.
You seem to have single-handedly dealt with the waste problem, so my great grandchildren will thank you for that! You also play down renewables alarmingly. If you are so confident that designers can improve nuclear design, why don't you have the same faith in workers in the renewables sector to devise better ways of harnessing the sun's power directly and indirectly? What's wrong with the Europe-wide supergrid idea, using new conducting technologies, integrated renewable energy generation on a continental and local scale, and massive solar harvesting in Northern Africa etc?
Monbiot and Lynas have no faith in the ability of the international working class to take control of the situation and transform production. But most of the international working class will have little faith in our new-nuclear saviours, especially with Fukushima still steaming away. We need to come forward with a strong and uncompromising socialist programme for energy and cutting emissions, not give any more energy to this divisive and hazardous distraction.
The Fall of Rome
It is historical record that the Romans reliance on lead piping had a direct affect on their ability to sustain their empire. In the modern age our cross to bear is energy consumption and the resulting pollution of our environment. Nuclear power using Uranium and Plutonium only serves one purpose. That is to create nuclear fuel for weapons. The energy created is a by product that is harnessed for additional wealth generation for a smal group of elites to enjoy. Thorium has been off the table for years because it cannot be used to create weapons.
The problem with the current situation is that we will not only kill our selves off with nuclear power but we will cause ourselves to become extinct. The radioactive fallout from Fukushima has now blanketed the entire northern hemisphere. Over 5000 radionuclides are being emitted in the Toxic Cloud of Death many of which have not been seen since the planet was created over 3.5 billion years ago. Cesium-137 has a full life of over 300 years. That means the dairy and meat industries have been contaminated for the next 300 years. The pollutants that have been dumped into or absorbed by the ocean have half lives of 25,000 years.
What we are witnessing at Fukushima is the destruction of the environment and global food supply. The complete disregard for life in any form can only be justified when the capitalist agenda is allowed to control the management process. Only an accountant could justify dumping millions of litres of radioactive water with half lives of 25,000 years in the ocean and permanently (in human years) toxifying the seafood supply.