Why we should say NO to
nuclear power

6. Because there are better alternatives

So what is the alternative? Carbon dioxide production must be dramatically reduced. What package of measures could achieve that?

The first and fundamental point is that by far the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions is to improve the efficiency of turning energy into services. As American energy expert Amory Lovins famously said, people don’t want energy, they want hot showers and cold beer!

People in the developed world enjoy far greater material comfort than previous generations because they have access to huge amounts of energy. We can do with ease tasks that previously demanded great physical effort, from washing clothes to building houses. We can also do things that previous generations could never do, like flying long distances or using advanced communications.

Energy is also the key to ending other shortages. Desalination can extend limited water supplies, but it takes energy. Poorer grades of ore can be mined when rich deposits are exhausted, but it requires more energy. Land can be farmed more intensively to increase food production, but again more energy is needed.

The crucial point is that we want the services – clean water, adequate food, and useful minerals – not the energy itself. Respectable engineering studies16 have concluded that we could live at our present level of material comfort using just one quarter of the energy we now use, simply by improving the efficiency of turning the energy into the goods and services we require.

Without any pain at all, Australia could make serious reductions in energy use over the next decade by replacing its inefficient vehicle fleet with vehicles that reflect the standards of western Europe or Japan, and by replacing inefficient appliances, like old refrigerators, with models that reflect current northern hemisphere standards.

Such efficiency improvements come with significant financial benefits: more than a free lunch, a lunch you are actually paid to eat! A 2003 Australian Government report, National Framework for Energy Efficiency, found that domestic, commercial and industrial energy use could be cut by 30 per cent using measures that have a pay-back time of less than four years. The program would create more than 10,000 jobs in areas such as retrofitting buildings with insulation, replacing inefficient equipment and installing solar hot water systems. So the first sensible step toward a low-carbon future is to reduce energy demand.

The second is to develop a range of renewable energy supply technologies: wind, solar thermal, photovoltaic cells, geothermal and so on. As long ago as 1992, a Department of Resources and Energy report, Renewable Electricity for Australia, estimated Australia could get 30 per cent of its power from renewables by 2020 at an average extra cost of about 1 cent a kilowatt-hour. To put that figure in perspective, typical household prices were then about 8 cents, and are now in the region of 12 to 15 cents.

What I pay in south-east Queensland has risen by 3 cents a kilowatt-hour in the last year. So much for the lower prices that were supposed to result from the state government selling off parts of the electricity system to private operators.

The 1992 report calculated that, based on the technologies of the time, renewables could supply all of Australia’s power by 2030. The study found that it would cost only about 4.5 cents extra per kilowatt-hour to have electricity based entirely on renewables, including the cost of storing power for times when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

Professor Mark Diesendorf of the University of NSW, in Sydney, has developed a range of approaches to supplying our energy needs in a low-carbon future. For example, he has suggested in his book, Greenhouse Solutions with Sustainable Energy that a typical 1000-megawatt coal-fired power station could be replaced by a combination of 375 megawatts of wind capacity, 206 megawatts of bio-electricity and 220 megawatts of combined cycle gas power, which would provide usable heat as well as electricity.

In A Clean Energy Future for Australia, Diesendorf and scientist Hugh Saddler along with economist Richard Denniss argue that demand management measures like solar hot water and efficiency improvements can be used to reduce electricity demand in 2040 to 14 per cent below the 2001 figure, despite an expected increase in population to 25 million.

This is an important point. Some studies assume continued rapid growth in demand and conclude that it is impossible to build renewable capacity fast enough. But the medium-efficiency scenario in this study reduces carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 80 per cent with a supply mix of gas 30 per cent, bio-energy from crop residues 28 per cent, wind 20 per cent, coal 9 per cent, hydro 7 per cent and solar 4 per cent.17

While the big polluters have been huffing and puffing about the scale of job losses from cutting back on carbon dioxide production, a range of serious studies concludes that there are many more jobs in a clean, green future than in the old smokestack industries.

For example, the 2008 report Bright Future, by Jay Rutovitz, for the Australian Conservation Foundation and other groups, calculates Australia could get 25 per cent of its electricity from a mix of renewables by 2020 and that such an approach would create 17,000 new jobs. Against that, only 2,000 to 3,000 jobs would be lost in the coal industry because coal would continue to supply at least 60 per cent of Australia’s power in 2020.18

Of course, some regions would be hit harder than others by the change, so there would have to be structural adjustment packages to ease the transition. However, we must keep the possible loss of a few thousand coal jobs in perspective: during the 12 years of the Howard governments, about 150,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, mostly because falling tariffs made imports cheaper and transferred Australian jobs overseas, mainly to China.

Australia coped with those job losses, mainly by retraining people and attracting them into remote mining jobs with high wages. It is a less-daunting proposition to entice a much smaller group of people out of dangerous work in coal mines into jobs helping speed the transition to a clean, green future.

It is sometimes suggested that while Australia might be able to meet its energy needs from renewables, most of the world is not so fortunate and other countries will have to go down the nuclear path. Again, this is simply a furphy. Barry Naughten, formerly a senior economist with the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economists, has summarised the global situation this way:

A major model-based analysis by the International Energy Agency in June 2006 analysed cost-effectiveness of technologies that could together reduce emissions at 2050 by 60 per cent. Not all these scenarios included expanded nuclear. Indeed, the IEA noted that many of its member-states opposed such expansion. But even in a scenario where such expansion was assumed, nuclear was found to account for only 6 per cent of the total emission abatement compared with 44 per cent from improved end-use efficiency, with the remaining 50 per cent from a variety of other technologies.

That study calculated the path to reducing emissions by only 60 per cent by 2050. Climate scientists are now arguing that we need to cut emissions further and faster. But that would not improve the chance of nuclear power playing a significant role, because of the very large initial inputs of fossil fuel energy needed to get a nuclear program operating.