Ugly Duckling or White Swan

The Glory of Nuclear Energy

There are plenty of people, particularly in New Zealand, who have a visceral fear and loathing of nuclear energy. It is always bad, bad, bad.

The Scriptures, however, tell us that nothing which God has created is intrinsically good or bad in itself. It is the uses to which it is put that make it so. The idea that something in the created world is intrinsically evil is nothing less than a modern manifestation of primitive animism.

We came across a piece recently which should interest anyone who is willing to be objective on the subject of nuclear energy. According to the ABC, there appear to be some truly exciting technological advances arriving on the scene.

Why Old Nuclear Power is Not New
Barry Brook

Previously in this forum I have expressed the view that nuclear power will likely play a key role in the world's future energy mix. My bottom line was this: the climate and energy crises need fixing with extreme urgency, and both require solutions which completely solve their underlying causes. Half measures at best merely help to delay the same eventual result as business-as-usual (and at worst encourage complacency) - saddling future generations with a climatically hostile planet with a scarcity of available energy.

The comments in response to my openness about the nuclear option were not unexpected. In short, five principle objections were mounted against the viability or desirability of nuclear power.

First, uranium supplies are small, such that if the world was wholly powered by nuclear reactors, there would be at most a few decades of energy to use before our resource was exhausted and the power plants would have to shut down. Second, nuclear accidents have happened in the past, and therefore this power-generation technology is inherently dangerous. Third, expansion of nuclear power would axiomatically risk the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Fourth, in taking the short-term nuclear energy option, we would be bequeathing future generations with the legacy of long-lived nuclear waste requiring thousands of years of management. Fifth, large amounts of energy (and possibly greenhouse gases) would be required to mine, mill and enrich uranium, and to construct and later decommission the nuclear power stations themselves.

Cost and embedded energy arguments used against nuclear must be left for another day, because to be addressed fairly, this also requires a critical examination of the costs and embedded energy requirements for the alternative sources (renewables and fossil fuels).

Now all five of the above points have some merit, although their relative importance compared to threat of climate change and the societal disruption caused by critical energy shortages is debatable. The chaos and bitter complaints which stemmed from the power shortages experienced during the current heatwave in southern Australia demonstrate how dependent we are on a secure, reliable energy supply. But to be honest, there is little point in even having a debate on how persuasive these five objections are, because none will be applicable to future nuclear energy generation.

Of the more than 440 commercial nuclear power stations operating worldwide today and supplying 16 per cent of the world's electricity, almost all are thermal spectrum reactors. These use ordinary water to both slow the neutrons which cause uranium atoms to split (fission) and to carry the heat generated in this controlled chain reaction to a steam turbine to generate electricity. Because of the gradual build-up of fission products (nuclear poisons) in fuel rods over time, we end up getting about 1 per cent of the useable energy out of the uranium, and throw the rest out as that problematic long-lived waste.

Modern reactors are incredibly safe, with physics-based 'passive' safety systems requiring no user-operated or mechanical control to shut down the reaction. Indeed, a certification assessment for the 'Generation III+' Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) put the risk of a core meltdown as severe as the one which occurred at Three Mile Island (TMI) in 1979 at once every 29 million years. For reference, the TMI incident resulted in no deaths. Similarly, comparing the inherently unsafe Chernobyl reactor design to an ESBWR is a bit like comparing an army revolver to a water gun.

Did you get that? Apparently the risk of core meltdown is now itself been subject to meltdown.

Fast spectrum reactors, also known as 'Generation IV', are able to use 99.5 per cent of the energy in uranium. There is enough energy in already-mined uranium and stored plutonium from existing stockpiles to supply all the world's power needs for over a century before we even need to mine any more uranium. Once we do start mining again, there is enough energy in proven uranium deposits to supply the entire world for at least 50,000 years. Fast reactors can be used to burn all existing reserves of plutonium and the waste stream of the past and present generation of thermal reactors.

Did you get that? Present uranium stock piles will meet all the world's power needs for over one hundred years. As we have argued before in these pages, access to electric power is one of the essential technologies to enable people to lift themselves out of squalor, disease, and poverty. Supplying the whole world with electric power is now possible and feasible.

And, if proven uranium deposits are mined, there is enough to power the world for fifty millennia!

The safety features of Gen IV designs, due for instance to the metal alloy fuel used, is superior even to the ESBWR. The nuclear fuel used by fast reactors is fiendishly radioactive and contaminated with various heavy elements (which are all eventually burned up in the power generation process!), making it impossible to divert to a nuclear weapons programme without an expensive, heavily shielded off-site reprocessing facility which would be easily detected by inspectors.

Even better. The latest reactors could be deployed around the world without creating a situation of easy access to nuclear weapons capability.

Yet in reality the only nuclear waste material that will ever leave an Integrated Fast Reactor complex (a systems design for power stations which includes on-site reprocessing) are fission products, which decay to background levels of radiation with a few hundred years (not hundreds of millennia), and can be readily stored because they produce so little heat compared to 'conventional' nuclear waste.

For further details, I refer you to my review of the book Prescription for the Planet, which discusses the Integral Fast Reactor technology in-depth, as well as ways to transform our vehicle fleet to use zero-emissions metal-powered burners and how to convert our municipal solid waste to plasma.

So, the nuclear waste problem looks like it will be a thing of the past, as well.

Business-as-usual projections suggest that at current pace, we may have Gen IV fast spectrum reactors delivering commercial power by 2025 to 2030. Too late, you say! True enough, but these same sort of forward projections resulted in the International Energy Agency recently predicting that non-hydro renewables will go from meeting 1per cent, to 2 per cent, of global energy use. Either option therefore requires radically accelerated research, development and deployment, if it is to make a difference to climate change and energy supply. A project of Manhattan-style proportions (America's development of the atom bomb, three years after the first controlled chain reaction) or the audacity of the moon-shot vision (12 years from Sputnik to Neil Armstrong's famous small step), is required.

There is no doubt in my mind that we have the means to 'fix' the climate and energy crises, or at least avert the worst consequences, if we have full recognition of the scale and immediacy of the challenges now faced. New generation nuclear power is one possible path to success, and one that all nations should actively support - though certainly not to the exclusion of other zero-carbon energy options such as renewables and efficiencies. So let's be sure, when rationally considering energy planning, that we are not mired in old-school thinking about exciting new technologies.

The real driver for development of the Gen IV technologies is not the prevention of global warming. That is a fundamental misdirection. The real driver is to provide access to essential electric power to the entire human race, the majority of which remains in poverty and squalor.