Why we should say YES to
nuclear power

1. Because renewable energy & energy efficiency won’t solve the energy & climate crises

We must still satisfy the world’s growing demand for energy and clean water

The developed world (which includes Australia, the US, Europe and Japan) enjoys a high standard of living. In part, this is due to a readily available supply of cheap energy, generated mostly from fossil fuels (mainly coal, oil and natural gas). The previously abundant supply of fossil fuels has most likely encouraged the developed world to take its energy use for granted, so much so that fossil fuels are now recognised as a limited global resource.

Oil

Most credible analysts believe that after a century of rising demand we are close to, or have passed, what they call “peak oil”, the point when available oil reserves begin to run out.

Natural gas

So far, we haven’t consumed as great a proportion of the available natural gas (methane) which is used mostly for heating and electricity production. However, globally, methane is also a limited resource, with no more than a few more decades of significant use before supplies start to shorten and prices skyrocket. This is especially likely as oil runs dry and there is a “dash for gas”.

Coal

Coal is more abundant than oil or gas, with a few centuries more of economically extractable supplies. But it won’t last forever.

Efficiency

Certainly, developed countries can and must use the available energy more efficiently than they have. That means using less fuel to get more mileage from cars, reducing power used by lights, fridges and other electrical appliances, and designing buildings to reduce their demand for heating and cooling.

Even so, it is not realistic to think that the world as a whole will use less energy in the future. There are three reasons for this:

First, most of the world’s people currently use very little energy. However, as their circumstances improve, they will increase their use of energy per person. More than a third of all humanity, some 2.5 billion people, has no access to any electricity at all. Understandably, people in the developing world want the kinds of material comforts enjoyed in the developed nations, but meeting their aspirations means a massive increase in their energy use.

Secondly, as oil runs out, it must be replaced if we are to keep our vehicles running, let alone power up the developing world. Creating energy on the grand scale needed – from oil-substitutes, such as electric batteries, or from alternative fuels, such as methanol and hydrogen – will take a lot of extra energy itself!

Thirdly, not only are large portions of the world’s population becoming more energy-thirsty, the population itself is increasing strongly. The United Nations forecasts world population will grow from about 6.7 billion now to some 9.2 billion by 2050.1 This growing population will also add to the impact of climate change and other forms of environmental damage. Those negative effects include escalating demand for clean water (partly to be supplied artificially, through energy-thirsty desalination and waste water treatment). There will also have to be more intensive agriculture, while avoiding ongoing destruction of natural landscapes like rainforests.

Renewable energy is diffuse, variable, and requires massive storage and backup

Say we aim largely to replace fossil fuels with low-carbon substitutes by the year 2050. More efficient use of energy alone will not get us there and citizens in western democracies simply will not vote for governments dedicated to lower growth if it means lowering living standards. Equally, an authoritarian regime such as China is most unlikely to risk social unrest by embracing a low-growth economic strategy.

So can renewable energy technologies realistically supply the energy we need, and when we need it?

The most popularly-discussed alternatives to fossil fuels and nuclear power are:

• harnessing the energy in wind

• sunlight (directly via photovoltaic panels or indirectly using mirrors to concentrate sunlight to produce heat)

• water held behind large dams (hydropower)

• ocean waves and tides

• plants (biomass), and

• geothermal energy, either from hot surface aquifers (often associated with volcanic geologies) or in deep, hot dry rocks.

These are commonly called “renewable” sources because they are constantly replenished by nature.

There are many technical challenges to harnessing renewable energy both economically and reliably. This is a complex topic, and I will touch on just a few key issues.

One is that all of these sources require huge geographical footprints to capture large amounts of energy. For countries like Australia this is not, in itself, a major problem. However, it is a severe constraint for nations with high population densities and thus less available open space.

Another significant problem for most renewables is their variability; sometimes they deliver a lot of power, sometimes a little, and at other times none at all. This means that for power from renewables to be available when people need it, we must find ways to store large amounts of this energy so it can be supplied when the renewable source is non-generating – for example when there is no wind, or it is cloudy. Alternatively, we’ll need to keep fossil-fuel plants or nuclear plants of similar capacity as a backup.

Renewable energy can’t provide reliable 24/7 baseload power

A city’s or country’s power demands are usually lowest at night (when most people are asleep). This minimum demand is called the electricity “baseload”. Some claim that this baseload demand is higher than it needs to be because utilities inflate our night-time use by charging cheap (“off peak”) night-time rates to encourage more use during those times.

They do that because some power stations (including coal and nuclear) are fairly cheap to run. So keeping them humming 24 hours a day will maximise profits. Some critical demand, however, never goes away: for example, the power demands from hospitals, police stations, traffic lights, water and sewage pumping stations, refrigerators and cold storage, 24-hour shops, and some transport. The demand from transport will increase if we are to use more electric vehicles.

If all these services lost power, even for a short while, chaos would ensue, and the community backlash after a few such events would be huge. On the other side of the energy coin, there are huge surges in power demands, such as when everyone gets home from work to cook and watch television, or when we turn on air conditioners during a heat wave. If there is not the energy available to meet this peak demand, there will be some very grumpy people, at a minimum. At worst, the electricity grid could collapse, causing rolling blackouts.

A core limitation of wind, solar and most other renewable systems is that they are not predictable: you can’t know when long stretches of calm or cloudy days will come and go. Renewables will provide a lot of power some of the time, periods when you may or may not need it, and little or none at other times.

In short, renewables can’t provide power on demand. Yet realistically, modern economies work only if their power supply always meets the demand.

Large-scale renewables aren’t cost competitive because they require massive “overbuilding”

The most commonly proposed ways for renewables to overcome intermittency and unscheduled outages are to:

• store the energy they generate when they’re most productive and then draw on these stores when they’re less productive

• have a diverse mix of renewable energy systems coordinated by a smart electronic grid management system (so if the wind isn’t blowing in one place, we can draw power from another, or from the sun or the waves), or

• have fossil fuel or nuclear power stations on standby, to take up the slack when needed.

All these solutions are grossly uneconomic. Even if we were willing and able to pay for them, the result would be an unacceptably unreliable energy supply system.

Truly massive amounts of energy would need to be stored to keep a city or country going through long stretches of cloudy winter days (yes, they occur even in the desert) or windless nights. At the same time, even small-scale energy storage (via batteries, chemical conversion to hydrogen or ammonia, pumped hydropower, and compressed air) is currently too expensive to be viable.

What is more, to deliver all of our regular power demand while also charging up the energy storage, would mean “overbuilding” our system many times, adding to the already huge costs. As a result, an “overbuilt” system of wind and solar would sometimes deliver many times our power demand, and at other times, none of it.

A system which relies on wind and/or solar power, and large-scale energy storage plus a geographically dispersed electricity transmission network to channel power where it is needed, would be 25 to 40 times more expensive than an equivalent nuclear-powered system, and still less reliable.2

All these factors mean that the cost of using wind power to avoid generating one tonne of carbon dioxide costs more than $800, compared to just $22 with nuclear power.3

Some readers will say that surely we could overcome such difficulties with better engineering and integration of geographically and technologically diverse systems (such as a mix of wind farms, wave power and solar plants spread out over a large region).

Alas, no! I haven’t the space in this book to give the detail, but let me assure you that “scaling up” and “backing up” renewable energy to the point where it can reliably meet all (or even most) of our power needs, involves a range of compounding, quite possibly overwhelming, problems.

My conclusion – that nuclear power, not renewable energy or energy efficiency, will be the primary solution to the climate and energy crises – results from trying to be ruthlessly pragmatic about what will and will not work within real-world physical, economic and social constraints.4