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The phantom solution: Alan Roberts explains the danger of pursuing nuclear power when it will fail to meet both environmental and energy needs.

Article Excerpt
It was once hailed as the solution to humanity's energy demands, promising electricity 'too cheap to meter'. But nuclear power has not lived up to its advance publicity. Thousands of stations, it was confidently predicted, would greet the millennium; but they neither exist nor are on order. After more than half a century of development, the nuclear industry can show less than five hundred power stations, yielding in 2002 around 2 per cent of the world's total energy production and only about a sixth of its electrical output. This last fraction had actually slipped back a little from the peak achieved by nuclear power fourteen years earlier in 1988. In its biggest market, the United States, no new nuclear stations have been ordered for over twenty-five years. In the whole world, only three new reactors came on line in the five years from 1998 to 2003.

Resuscitating a Dinosaur?

This is the picture of a stagnant or declining industry, one that many commentators, those opposed to the industry in particular, have labelled a 'dinosaur', with all its future behind it. But in recent years, we have heard voices striking a far different note. A comment in the Guardian (12 August 2004) is typical:

Nuclear power is back on the march. Reviled and rejected for 25 years as man's most dangerous and unsustainable fuel source ... is it possible that public opinion is wrong, and that nuclear should be the fuel of choice of the future?

Other nuclear proponents have stressed how it can save the landscape from unsightly windmills and insulate the economy against future oil shocks. But the preponderant argument by far is environmental: to ward off climate change, we must go nuclear.

It would be wrong to think that this new case for nuclear power is made only by the old and new nuclear club. Listen to quite a different sort of proponent, none other than the scientist and environmentalist responsible for the Gaia hypothesis:

I hope that it is not too late for the world to emulate France and make nuclear power our principal source of energy. There is at present no other safe, practical and economic substitute for the dangerous practice of burning carbon fuels.

Thus James Lovelock. And while his is not the only voice now advocating nuclear power on environmental grounds, he is certainly the one most distinguished and respected in both activist and scientific circles.

Another stream of environmental opinion, while not so emphatic, has unmistakably shifted away from a blanket condemnation of nuclear power. For example: 'Paul Allen, development director at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth ... says he is not endorsing nuclear, but is trying to keep an open mind'.

It is evident that an informal body of 'Environmentalists For Nuclear Power' has emerged. Are they right--has the unacceptable now become a lesser evil? How we answer will obviously depend on how seriously we regard the prospect of climate change. To decide, there are two preliminary issues that need to be first clarified: is there indeed a threat of human-induced climate change that would have disastrous effects on our own species and others, and can nuclear power significantly counteract this threat and thus help to avert or at least reduce the damage?

Is Climate Change Really Happening? Is It Human Induced?

In 1988, the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Program set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Panel's Third Assessment Report (2001) drew on the research, authorial and reviewing services of experts from 56 countries, including 16 people from Australia, and left little doubt that significant 'anthropogenic' (human-induced) climate change has already occurred.

The direct indicators are briefly listed in Table 2-1 of its Synthesis Report, (available at <www.ipcc.ch>); one is the global mean surface temperature, which increased by about 0.6 degrees Celcius in the course of the twentieth century. Other indicators include the decreased daily range of land surface temperature in the last half of the twentieth century, and (listed as 'likely') the decrease of cold and frost days and the greater severity and frequency of droughts in some regions (such as parts of Africa and Asia).

Why is this, in all probability, the result of human activity? The clues are in the same table, where the amounts of various gases in the atmosphere are given. Typical is the finding for carbon dioxide: over the last couple of centuries or so--that is, over the industrial era--its concentration in the air increased by around 30 per cent. Now, carbon dioxide acts like the glass roof of a greenhouse: it lets sunlight through easily, but blocks off the waves of milder heat travelling up from the ground. Thus it cuts down this 'upward' heat loss, so there results a higher temperature at ground level than would otherwise be the case. For obvious reasons, it is called a 'greenhouse gas'; so is methane, for example, of which the air now holds some 150 per cent...

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