Ian Lowe’s rebuttal to why we should say YES to nuclear power

NOTE:

This is NOT the complete other side. It is Ian Lowe’s response to Barry Brook’s specific arguments. For his complete opposing argument, read the other side after you have read his rebuttal.

Professor Barry Brook’s argument is essentially that the world will need more energy and that the growing demand cannot be met by renewables, so we have to embrace nuclear power. He also asks us to accept that the continuing problems of the 50-year nuclear experiment will be resolved by a new generation of reactors, and that we can expect unlimited cheap clean energy “once the awesome potential of fast reactors and liquid fluoride thorium reactors is fulfilled”.

In my reply I will discuss the scale of future energy needs, the capacity of renewable energy technologies to meet these needs and the wisdom of relying on a promised new nuclear technology that does not yet exist. I will also make briefer comments about the economics of nuclear power, proliferation risks and the inefficiency of the old model of centralised generation. (If you haven’t yet read my argument in full, please flip the book over after you’ve read my response to Professor Brook.)

Efficiency

As I say in my main argument, a common tactic of those advocating nuclear power is to project a future world in which more than nine billion people are squandering energy as wastefully as the worst today. They then seek to show that it is impossible to expand energy supply from fossil fuels or renewables to meet that demand. This allows them to conclude that nuclear energy is the only route to the high-energy future we all desire.

In the last five years, some pro-nuclear enthusiasts have shown a new-found interest in slowing climate change, seeking to strengthen the case for nuclear power by ruling out the continued use of fossil fuels.

Yet there have been several studies which conclude that the industrialised world could live at today’s level of material comfort using much less energy. For example, Factor Four by Weiszacker, Lovins and Lovins1 concludes that primary energy use could be reduced by three-quarters in most areas using technology that is already proven and economically viable, while a reduction of up to 90 per cent would be a reasonable “stretch target”.

At side events associated with the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen, I heard presentations on specific case studies in the United Kingdom, Denmark and western Europe generally.2 All concluded that by 2030 energy use could be reduced to half the present level or less with no loss of material living standards. A 2003 Australian Government report on the National Framework for Energy Efficiency3 concluded that energy use could be reduced by 30 per cent using measures based only on existing technology, and that the cost of these measures would be repaid by the savings they could generate in under four years.

The reason for these findings is obvious. For the last half century or so, energy in the Western world has been plentiful and cheap, so there has been little incentive to pursue savings. When I was a member of Australia’s National Energy Research, Development and Demonstration Council from 1983 to 1989, it constantly had great difficulty interesting industry and commerce in efficiency improvements. Energy bills were (and still are) so low that managers paid little attention to efficiency except for a small number of energy-intensive activities like aluminium smelting and road freight, which are, in any case, given large public subsidies,

The same is true of domestic electricity use and, until recently at least, private use of transport fuels; the costs are such a small fraction of the typical household budget that there has been little interest in efficiency.

The average fuel efficiency of the Australian car fleet is no better than 50 years ago.4 Australian fuel use would be halved if the vehicle fleet had the same average efficiency as Europe’s even if transport behaviour was unchanged.5 Shifting from car use to more public transport or cycling would achieve even larger savings.

The crucial point is that there is nothing pre-ordained about the level of future energy use. Every decision to build roads or extend the subsidy of road freight is a decision to encourage further wasteful energy use; any decision to invest in quality public transport, build cycleways or phase out subsidies is a decision to encourage improved efficiency. Any government decision to hand out subsidies to coal-fired electricity generators is essentially a decision to delay the introduction of low-carbon alternatives.

At the global level, university studies have moved from the specialist literature to the semi-popular with the publication of an article in the November 2009 issue of Scientific American by Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobson and University of California, Davis research scientist, Mark Delucchi.

They were responding to Al Gore’s challenge to power the United States with carbon-free electricity by 2020 by tackling the bigger task of powering the world by 2030 from wind, solar and water power. They found that ranking energy supply systems according to their overall environmental impact put wind, solar, geothermal, hydro-electricity and tidal power at the top. “Nuclear power, coal with carbon capture and ethanol were all poorer options” – as, of course, were oil and natural gas.

The world’s maximum power demand today is about 12.5 terawatts. Projections for 2030 have typically been about 17 terawatts, based on assumed growth in population and continued wasteful energy use.6

The Stanford study concluded that a totally renewable energy supply in 2030 would need to be only 11.5 terawatts because of efficiency improvements inevitably associated with electrification. An extreme example is a car with an internal combustion engine: typically 20 per cent or less of the energy in motor spirit is used to move a car, with the rest wasted as heat. But an electric car turns about 80 per cent of the energy into propulsion.

Studies in Australia7 as well as a pilot scheme in Spain8 have considered a “smart grid” with electric cars powered from renewable energy supplies like solar and wind. It would significantly improve use of those intermittent sources, giving both more economic electricity and more efficient transport.

The Stanford study supplied the projected global 2030 demand from a mixture of wind (about 50 per cent), solar (40 per cent) and “water” – hydro, tidal and geothermal – (10 per cent). The land “footprint” of the 3.8 million wind turbines would be only about 50 square kilometres. Most of the solar energy supply systems would be rooftop photovoltaics (arrays of cells that convert solar radiation into direct current electricity). They would be supplemented by about 100,000 large-scale power systems of 300 megawatts each. Altogether, the area needed for energy supply would be about 1.3 per cent of the Earth’s land.

A case study for the state of California by Stanford University’s Graeme Hoste9 found that the state could be totally powered by a mix of four renewable sources – wind, geothermal, solar and existing hydro – by 2020. All these studies assume that the only significant efficiency gains are those inevitably resulting from the replacement of internal combustion engines by electric vehicles or hydrogen fuel cells.

End-use demand for energy could be halved by 2030 simply by universal application of current best-practice technology, according to research by Dr Paul Allen of the Centre for Alternative Technology in the United Kingdom.10 This study is a reminder that people don’t want energy, they want the services energy provides, like hot showers and cold beer.

Turning energy into services more efficiently benefits everybody by reducing power bills and avoiding needless pollution. Improved efficiency is by far the most cost-effective way to reduce carbon dioxide production and slow climate change.

The economics

As far as the economics go, Professor Brook uses optimistic forecasts of the possible future costs of reactors which have not yet even been designed, let alone built and operated.

However, the Stanford University study used actual data from power generation in the United States, a basis that is generous to nuclear because of the huge public subsidies over the last 60 years. It finds “the cost of wind, geothermal and hydroelectric are all less than seven cents a kilowatt-hour; wave and solar are higher. But by 2020 and beyond, wind, wave and hydro are expected to be 4 cents a kilowatt-hour or less. For comparison, the average cost of conventional power generation and distribution in America was about 7 cents a kilowatt-hour, and it is projected to be about 8 cents a kilowatt-hour in 2020.”

“Conventional power generation” means coal and nuclear, which cost about the same in the United States. By 2020, geothermal is expected to be 7 US cents a kilowatt-hour and concentrated solar 8 cents. Only photovoltaic cells (at about 10 cents) are expected still to be more expensive than coal, natural gas or nuclear power.

Even the Switkowski report,11 which could not be accused of bias against nuclear energy, concluded that both carbon charges on fossil fuels and direct public subsidies would be needed to make nuclear energy economic in Australia. It also concluded that we would need to be “late adopters” of the promised new wonder-reactors to benefit from their improved construction and to get power at a competitive price.

That is a key admission because waiting for nuclear power to become economically attractive means it probably cannot be a timely response to climate change.

I have a similar criticism of Professor Brook’s calculations of material needs. He manages to make wind power look unattractive compared with nuclear by assuming that turbines will last only 20 years. He then assumes that nuclear power stations will last for an improbable 60 years and deliver full power for more than 90 per cent of that entire period. That is wishful thinking on a grand scale.

As I write in my main argument (in the flip-side of this book), if you assume that a nuclear power station will last for 60 years and deliver power 90 per cent of the time, the economics and materials balance look much better than if you base your calculations on actual performance. The problem is that many existing reactors have only delivered about a third as much energy as assumed in Professor Brook’s unrealistic calculation.

New-generation reactors

My more fundamental concern with Professor Brook’s analysis is that is assumes the successful development and deployment of new-generation reactors. As I said in my essay, since the 1960s the nuclear industry has promised new generations of reactors that will be cleaner, more efficient and cheaper than existing models. Just because they have been consistently wrong for more than 40 years does not mean they will always be wrong, but it does mean we should be cautious about their assurances.

My doctoral studies more than 40 years ago were funded by a British group working on the United Kingdom’s prototype fast reactor. It was eventually shut down, as were the fast reactor programs in most countries, because of the intimidating technical problems and apparently intractable safety issues. Development was not shut down because uranium is cheap and plentiful, as Professor Brook argues; it was because the fast reactors looked just too hard.

It is conceivable that a new generation of scientists might tackle and solve those problems. However, the outlook is not promising enough to justify pouring huge amounts of public resources into the project.

Spread of plutonium

There would also remain the problem that fast reactors on a scale that could potentially supply the world’s electricity needs would mean producing and distributing huge amounts of plutonium, much more each year than the present total weapons stockpile. It defies belief that this could be managed without some of it being used by rogue states or terrorists to produce weapons. This sort of expansion of nuclear power would make the world much more dangerous: a terrible legacy to our descendants.

Radioactive waste

There is also the unsolved problem of radioactive waste. Professor Brook cites the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in the American state of Nevada as a shining example of what can be done. Unfortunately for that argument, there are moves by the Obama administration to abandon the project.12

No country or institution has yet demonstrated secure long-term storage of radioactive waste despite the constant assurances from politicians and scientists over the last 30 years that waste is not a serious concern. I vividly recall that in 1977, the then Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, calmly stated that the waste problem had been solved. I cheekily described it as a remarkably low-key announcement of a major scientific breakthrough! Of course, the problem had not been solved.

Expanding nuclear power is just irresponsible until safe management of waste has been proven technically and socially feasible. Otherwise it simply passes a complex problem to future generations.

Economic, environmental and security problems

There are also economic, environmental and security problems with large-scale power stations and long supply lines.

The drive for larger units was a bid to reduce the cost of power and the associated pollution. Doubling the size of a power station does not double the costs of construction, so there are economies of scale that deliver cheaper electricity. However, having larger units means that more reserve capacity is needed to cope with outages.

In the 1970s, for example, there was a drive for larger power stations in Britain. However, when the overall sums were done, there was little if any benefit from moving to bigger units.13 The whole system had just become more wasteful.

Then there is security. For example, in the Australian electricity system of 2010, Melbourne is almost totally dependent on one power distribution link from the Latrobe Valley, Sydney on one link from the Hunter Valley, Brisbane on one link from central Queensland and so on. That leaves the cities critically vulnerable to natural calamities, like bushfires, or possible terrorist actions. A system of embedded generation, based on large numbers of small generating units across cities would provide much greater security and resilience. That looks increasingly like a smart option in the insecure world of the 21st century.

Conclusion

I agree with Professor Brook that “the hard truth is that the energy replacement task will be inordinately tough whatever principal route or energy mix we choose”.

We should not choose an option that creates a whole new set of problems and relies on advanced technologies not yet proven, like new-generation nuclear power. We should instead move to a “green” future based on technologies that:

• are proven

• are clean

• do not worsen security problems

• do not increase terrorist risks, and

• can be deployed in modular form throughout the distribution system.

If nuclear power were really the only way to avoid dangerous climate change, the risks might be worth taking. But we do have better alternatives.

Nuclear energy is too expensive, too dangerous, too slow and makes too little difference to be a sensible response to climate change.

If not, read Ian Lowe’s case for Why we should say NO to nuclear power