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Nuclear power is safer now, but we still don't need it

George Monbiot

It's true that another Chernobyl couldn't happen in a new reactor, but the case against nuclear power is as strong as ever.

IF SOMEONE had worked out how to cause a war within the environment movement, they could not have developed a better means than nuclear power. In public we will line up to attack the energy review published by the U.K. Government today. But in private we will reserve some of our venom for each other, as we start to ask ourselves whether we have made the right decision.

The U.K.'s dying nuclear power stations are, at the moment, Britain's source of low-carbon energy. Electricity produced by a pressurised light water reactor, when all its carbon costs have been taken into account, emits around 16 tonnes of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. Gas produces 356 tonnes and coal 891 tonnes. If the U.K.'s nuclear power stations are replaced by thermal plants, the country's annual output of CO2 will rise by roughly 51 million tonnes, or 8 per cent of the total. This is breathtaking. We campaign to prevent electrical appliances being left on standby, hoping to save some four million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. How can we then dismiss a cut 13 times as great?

Some groups, such as Greenpeace, the New Economics Foundation, and the Sustainable Development Commission, have produced reports showing that the Government's target can be met — a 60 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050 — without recourse to atomic power. They are right, but the target is now irrelevant. In the book I am publishing in September, I will show that when you take into account both human population growth and the anticipated reduction in the biosphere's ability to absorb carbon, we require a worldwide cut of roughly 60 per cent per capita by 2030. If emissions are to be distributed evenly, this means that the U.K.'s need to be cut by 87 per cent in 24 years.

In seeking the best means by which this cut can be made across all sectors (transport, electricity, heating, and construction), I have been forced to set aside my prejudices. I hate nuclear power, but do we need it to help prevent the planet from cooking?

Answering this question means challenging people on both sides of the debate. Anti-nuclear campaigners have a tendency to believe anything that casts the industry in a bad light. Last month's edition of The Ecologist magazine, for example, contends that 14 million tonnes of concrete are required to build a nuclear power station, resulting in a massive release of carbon dioxide. Specifications are notoriously hard to come by, but I have managed to find the figures for the British reactor Calder Hall A, opened in 1956. It used 72,500 cubic yards of concrete, which equates to 108,000 tonnes, or less than 1 per cent of The Ecologist's estimate. Modern power stations are smaller.

We have made similar mistakes over the global supplies of uranium. Noting that the world possesses "assured reserves" of high-grade ores sufficient to last for 40 or 50 years at current rates of use, some environmentalists have argued that if new nuclear plants are built, they will run out of fuel before they reach the end of their lives. But they have confused assured reserves with total global resources. In other words, they have assumed that no further discoveries will ever take place. Forty to 50 years is in fact a very high level of assurance.

I am forced to admit that an accident like Chernobyl's could not take place in a new nuclear power station. Secondary containment of the reactor core and new safety systems make a total meltdown impossible. Nor do I believe that new reactors would present a useful target for terrorists. It would not be difficult to make the containment buildings strong enough to resist an impact with an airliner.

Fundamental principle

But there are other arguments that do stand up. The most fundamental environmental principle — one that all children are taught as soon as they are old enough to understand it — is that you do not make a new mess until you have cleared up the old one. To start building a new generation of nuclear power stations before we know what to do with the waste produced by existing plants is grotesquely irresponsible. The British Government's advisers have determined only that it should be buried. No one yet knows where, how or at what cost.

How on earth can we say what nuclear power stations will cost if we do not even know what their decommissioning entails? The Government will assure us today that there will be no subsidies and no guaranteed prices for the nuclear industry. This should allow us to forget about the cost, and leave the market to determine whether nuclear power stations should be built. But in order to guarantee public safety, the Government must be ready to rescue our power stations or their waste piles if the nuclear operators are in danger of going bankrupt. To ensure that the operators do not fudge their figures, the Government must make it clear that it is not prepared to rescue them. It is a paradox that cannot be resolved.

And how does any system — political or technological — cope with the timescales involved? If, as a result of slow leakage into the groundwater, radioactive materials from a burial site were to kill an average of only one person a year for one million years, those who made the decision to bury them will — through their infinitesimal and unrecorded impacts — be responsible for the deaths of a million people.

It has also become clear that we will never rid the world of nuclear weapons if we do not also rid it of nuclear power. Every state that has sought to develop a weapons programme over the past 30 years has done so by manipulating its nuclear power programme. We cannot deny other states the opportunity to use atomic energy if we do not forswear it ourselves.

But perhaps the strongest argument against nuclear power is that we do not need it, even to reach the extraordinarily ambitious target that the science demands.

With similar levels of investment in energy efficiency and carbon capture and storage, and the exploitation of the vast new offshore wind resources the Government has now identified, we could cut our carbon emissions as swiftly and as effectively as any atomic power programme could.

Some of our arguments against nuclear power have collapsed, but it seems to me that the case is still robust. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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