The Guardian 25 October, 2006
Book Review by Peter Mac
Nuclear power is not the answer
to global warming or anything else
Author: Dr Helen Caldicott
The nuclear power industry enjoyed relatively high public approval in the 1950s. However, subsequent accidents at nuclear plants created great unease about public safety. The 1973 US Three-Mile Island disaster caused injuries, illness and panic, and the value of nuclear power shares plummeted. Finally, the terrible 1986 Chernobyl meltdown gave the nuclear industry the coup de gras — at least until the implications of greenhouse warming became clear.
Global warming occurs because certain gases in the atmosphere prevent solar radiation, which reflects off the earth’s surface, from escaping back into space. The primary culprit is carbon dioxide (CO2), which is mainly emitted by the combustion of coal in power stations and heavy industries, and of oil in vehicles.
Because nuclear power plants emit virtually no CO2, the nuclear industry has sprung into action, lobbying politicians to build new plants, and promoting nuclear power as cheap and squeaky clean.
As Dr Caldicott explains in Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, these claims and others promoted by the industry and its political supporters are false. Her book focuses primarily on the US nuclear energy situation, which the Howard Government would undoubtedly follow as a model, in establishing a nuclear energy industry. So let’s see what his brave nuclear world offers us, as explained by Dr Caldicott.
The uranium timeframe
The world’s known resources of high-grade uranium are only sufficient for the next 50 years, at current levels of demand. The extra energy needed for processing lower grade uranium makes the process economically unfeasible. Moreover, a 2001 study by the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that by 2026 the rate at which usable uranium could be supplied might fail to meet anticipated demand. If the number of operational reactors increases, as sought by the industry and its backers, the time-frame would be even shorter.
Value for money?
The industry’s claims that nuclear power is cheap are nonsense. Their calculations only include the costs of running an established power plant, whereas the real cost of producing power from any energy source involves the bill for all aspects of the process.
The nuclear power cycle is vastly more complex than that of other energy technologies. It includes mining uranium-bearing ore, milling it, remediation of the tailings, converting the ore and enriching the uranium, fabricating the reactor elements, loading them and subjecting them to nuclear fission, cooling and disposing of the reactor water, storing, cooling and guarding the radioactive waste for 60 years, and transporting it to a prepared site of safe and secure storage.
And that’s just to boil water for the generators! This part of the process has been described as "like cutting a pound of butter with a chainsaw". But there’s more. Nuclear power plants costs some 50 percent more to build than an equivalent-size coal-fired plant, far more than a gas-fired plant, and in the long term will probably be vastly more expensive than establishing a number of renewable energy plants to produce equivalent amounts of energy.
The costs of removing redundant nuclear plants is as yet unknown, but will be astronomical, because each plant includes highly radioactive elements which cannot be dismantled for at least ten years, and possibly not for centuries.
Last but not least comes the incalculable cost of looking after radioactive waste, vast quantities of which have been accumulating in "temporary" storage sites in many countries. Unless science provides a safe means of removing the radioactivity of this material, it will require storage and guarding for at least 240,000 years, i.e. the time for the radioactivity to dissipate naturally. Science may or may not oblige, but in any case the enormous expense of seeking a solution will doubtless fall on the taxpayer.
In fact the US taxpayer already pays for milling the uranium ore, and provides enormous subsidies to the industry. No insurance company will insure a nuclear plant, so the US Government has agreed to cover the costs of dealing with a serious accident or meltdown.
Meanwhile, US corporations have cut their own costs, for example by dumping unremediated radioactive tailings in deserted areas, particularly in land reserved for indigenous people.
A green façade
As this book reveals, the construction of nuclear power plants, and the subsequent huge nuclear power cycle, involves massive CO2 emissions. Moreover, the plants frequently emit hazardous radioactive gases.
US physicist Tom Cochran recently calculated that adding a thousand megawatts to global nuclear power production would cost between one and two trillion US dollars and would require 1,200 new power plants and 15 new uranium enrichment plants. It would result in almost a million tons of high-level waste, containing enough plutonium for hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons. And it would only reduce the rise in global average temperature by one fifth of one percent.
Safety and health
Nuclear power generation involves a series of extremely hazardous processes, producing a cocktail of viciously dangerous substances, the worst of which is plutonium. The quantity of plutonium discharged from the crippled Chernobyl reactor has been estimated as sufficient to kill 11,000 times the world’s entire human population.
Had this chemical landed in a more densely populated area the results would have been unimaginably catastrophic. The explosion’s emissions spread from Britain to Siberia, disrupting or terminating agricultural production within much of this area.
Most of the contaminants fell in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, within 150,000 square kilometres, the combined size of Ireland and Scotland, inhabited by 8.4 million people. Approximately 400,000 people were evacuated. Within this area some 52,000 square kilometres of agricultural land will be unusable and uninhabitable for thousands of years. Denmark has banned the construction of any more nuclear plants, and Germany will decommission all its plants by 2025.
The number of Chernobyl casualties will probably be in the tens of thousands. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings demonstrated that casualties from associated diseases such as thyroid cancer or birth defects (which have rocketed in the worst-affected areas) occur over many decades. However, as this book reveals, the Chernobyl casualty rate may never be known, because a 1959 agreement between the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency forbids the WHO from investigating the health impacts of nuclear technology.
Security and weapons proliferation
The US has 103 nuclear plants, out of the world’s total of 441. New York is surrounded by 13 nuclear power stations, the closest being only 60 kilometres from Manhattan. Many of these plants are old and have experienced very serious accidents and malfunctions.
As Dr Caldicott reveals, nuclear plants are potential bombs, and are sitting ducks for terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which has jumped because of US foreign and military policies. The US Government has designed massive screens to protect plants from aerial attack, but nuclear corporations have refused to install them because of the expense. The level of US nuclear plant security has remained largely unchanged since the 9/11 bombings.
Nuclear power plants also use uranium, which can be enriched to produce nuclear weapons, and produce waste plutonium, which can also be used for weapons production. Tonnes of plutonium are now stored in waste dumps around the world, often with inadequate security.
A great many US plants are also situated in areas which are vulnerable to natural cataclysms, such as tsunamis or earthquakes, or the fierce storms that are appearing a result of global warming.
Diversion of research and development grants
In the US, post-WW2 funding of research into energy generation has been largely consumed by the nuclear industry. In Australia, the bulk of the Howard Government’s recently-announced energy research funding is going to coal sequestration and nuclear power, to protect the interests of mining and heavy industry corporations, rather than the population.
Conclusion
This fascinating book has some shortcomings: It deals very briefly with the difficulties renewable energy systems face in achieving stable "base load" energy supply levels, and the intriguing solutions which are being devised in Australia and elsewhere. It does not deal with the Australian "Synroc" process, which immobilises high level waste in synthetic ceramic, but which hasn’t prevented the waste levels from rising. Nor does it deal with the voracious water supply requirements of nuclear reactors, an issue of huge importance in Australia.
Nevertheless, the book is direct and relatively easily understood, dealing with the very complex issues involved without oversimplifying them, It also strikes a very positive note in discussing alternative energy systems, which are developing rapidly and promise magnificent alternatives to coal-fired and nuclear power generation. The decisions that are made now are of crucial importance to the lives of our children and future generations.
If you’re concerned about these issues (and you should be) Dr Caldicott’s book is a "must read".
Dr Helen Caldicott,
Nuclear Power is not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else,
Melbourne University Press, 2006, $24.95.