Why we should say NO to
nuclear power

1. Because it is not a fast enough response

The urgency of climate change means the world must start reducing its production of greenhouse gases within a decade. The 2007 Bali conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change concluded that the developed nations that comprise the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development needed to reduce their combined emissions by between 25 and 40 per cent by 2020.2

As Australia produces more carbon dioxide per head than any other country, its goal should certainly be toward the top of that range.

Engineers Australia, a professional body representing the engineering profession, held a series of workshops in 2009, challenging participants to work out how to cut Australia’s emissions by 50 per cent. This is not a trivial task. Reductions on that scale require widespread changes: technical, social, economic and political.

The workshops I attended involved more than 200 well-qualified professionals. Hardly anybody proposed nuclear energy as part of the solution, because it is unrealistic to expect it to achieve the rapid reductions needed.

The most fundamental obstacle is that Australia does not have the individual skills, the corporate organisation or the regulatory framework to build nuclear power stations.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was widely believed that Australia would go down the nuclear path. There was a School of Nuclear Engineering at the University of New South Wales to train technical experts. At the same time, the Australian Atomic Energy Commission was generously funded to research all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining and enrichment to radioactive waste management.

Everything changed after 1975 when the Australian Government scrapped the last serious proposal for a nuclear power station. The School of Nuclear Engineering was closed; one former staff member still writes letters to newspapers complaining about Australia’s failure to embrace his dream of a nuclear future.

The AAEC was reconstituted as ANSTO, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. It is still well funded, but its publicly visible activities are oriented toward defensible uses of nuclear technology in medicine, industry and environmental monitoring. Even those are politically contentious. There was a real battle when ANSTO recently needed hundreds of millions of dollars to replace its ageing reactor; many scientists thought this should not be a priority for the Australian government’s limited science budget.

The fact remains that the technical capacities of ANSTO and the regulatory capacities of ARPANSA, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Authority, are not oriented toward a civilian nuclear power industry. It would take years – and huge amounts of public money – to develop the capabilities to support and safely regulate nuclear energy.

This was recognised in the 2006 “Switkowski report”,3 commissioned by the Australian government to investigate the feasibility of nuclear power. The task force was chaired by Dr Ziggy Switkowski, who also chairs the Board of ANSTO and is a prominent advocate of nuclear energy, so the report could certainly not be accused of being biased against the technology. Satirist John Clarke even described it as “an independent group of people who want nuclear power by Tuesday”!

The report acknowledges it would take at least 10 years, perhaps 15, to build a nuclear power station. Going nuclear would initially, at least, actually increase significantly our greenhouse gas emissions through mining and processing uranium, preparing the power station site, pouring concrete and fabricating steel.

It would not be until sometime in the 2020s, that the first nuclear power station would come on line and start delivering electricity with less carbon dioxide emissions than burning coal.

It would then have to generate enough energy to offset the fossil energy used in construction and commissioning. The Switkowski task force put this payback time at five years or more after a power station starts operating. However, a 2006 University of Sydney study4 for light water reactors estimated a range of from 5.6 to 14 years. So even if all went smoothly, it would take between 15 and 30 years, all up, for a first Australian nuclear power station to repay the energy needed to build and commission it, after which it would be delivering low-carbon electricity.

Yet proven renewable energy generators, such as wind turbines, could do so in just 15 months. Even less-developed technologies, like solar thermal, could be expected to deliver low-carbon electricity within five years. If Australia is serious about making major reductions by 2020, there is no prospect – even in principle – of nuclear power contributing to this goal.

Even if we were to accept a much longer time scale for the development of a nuclear power industry, the pro-nuclear case remains unconvincing. For example, the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties agreed in March 2009 that Australia should try to reduce its emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050. So could a concerted move to nuclear power enable us to achieve that target?

Not according to the Switkowski report. It concludes that even if Australia achieved the almost impossible scenario of approving 25 reactors by 2050, it would reduce the growth in our carbon dioxide emissions by between only 8 per cent and 18 per cent. As a move to a low-carbon future, that really is underwhelming.

Even a sympathetic task force could not construct a future scenario in which nuclear power would enable Australia to meet responsible greenhouse gas reduction targets. Nuclear power is too slow a response and makes too little difference.