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Published May 7 2006 by Energy Bulletin, Archived May 7 2006

Nuclear power, Peak Oil and Climate Change - May 8

by Staff

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Australia: Nuclear no cure for climate change, scientists warn
Wendy Frew, Sydney Morning Herald
AUSTRALIA could not develop a domestic nuclear power industry in time to stave off the effects of climate change and such a program would be prohibitively expensive, energy experts say.

The cost of building the large number of nuclear power stations needed to even partly replace coal as a source of electricity would be so heavy no private investor would take on the risk without huge government subsidies, they said.

The Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, warned at the weekend that Australia would have to get used to the idea of a domestic nuclear power industry because it was part of the solution to global warming.

Scientists have warned the world needs to make large cuts in greenhouse gas emissions now to avoid further big changes to weather patterns.

But coal-fired power plants could not be replaced fast enough with nuclear plants to make any real difference, said the research principal at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, Chris Riedy.

"It would take 10 years to get one nuclear power plant up even if there was no public protest," Dr Riedy said. "And all of the evidence from where they have been built [overseas] shows they have had to have massive [government] subsidies to keep them going."

A 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant would generate between 2 and 3 per cent of Australia's current electricity consumption, said Dr Iain McGill, research co-ordinator for the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets at the University of NSW.

"Coal generation is about 85 to 90 per cent of national electricity market generation, so it might require around 30 to 40 such plants to replace coal-fired generation," he said. "Such a program would almost certainly take numerous decades."

Dr Mark Diesendorf, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of NSW, said a 1000-megawatt nuclear plant would cost at least $3 billion to build - 2½ times that of a coal-fired power plant - and much more to operate than fossil fuel plants. To build a lot of nuclear plants, say, over 20 years, would emit so much greenhouse gas it would take 40 years to break even in terms of CO 2, he said.

"You would have this great big spike in CO2 emissions … I think the whole thing is insane," he said of suggestions that nuclear power could help fight global warming.
(2 May 2006)

Why Nuclear Power is a Non-Response to Peak Oil
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
My first reason why nuclear power is a non-response to peak oil is that it will take the steam out of the profound and far-reaching renewables revolution which is the only thing that will actually get us through peak oil. In the long run, we need to restructure society so that it becomes more local, with local food production, decentralised energy grids and so on, as has long been argued at Transition Culture . This is the ONLY thing that will pull us through. Nuclear power offers the illusion that “something is being done”, and takes the steam and the necessary funding out of the urgency to start the programme of profound change needed.

The structural relocalisation of the UK, the retrofitting of its buildings, the stimulation of new local businesses and manufacturing and so on will be expensive, and now, while there is still electricity, while the (albeit diminishing) wealth from the North Sea bonanza is still in the economy, and while we are not in a crippling crisis, is the time to do this, on the scale, as many writers have argued, of a war time mobilisation. A new programme of nuclear power will draw away funding from that.

Peak oil appears to be happening far faster than predicted, and actual shortages of fuel appear to be a possibility in the near future. The dream of shiny new nuclear reactors in 20 years time is a distraction with which people can delude themselves that business as usual can continue. It can’t. Really.

We have to begin the Great Reskilling and profound relocalisation, and we have to start now, applying all the resources we have at our disposal. This is our once off window of opportunity, one which nuclear power would close for good. By the time we realise that we have made a mistake it is too late, the economy is contracting, we have other priorities like feeding ourselves and so on, and the ability to make all the equipment needed will have passed.
(3 May 2006)

Full series:
Part 1. Do We Really Have to Argue All This Again?
Part 2... because this is The Only Chance to Get It Right…
Part 3. because if it Goes Wrong it Goes Really Really Wrong…
Part 4. How do you propose We Clean Up All The Mess?
The Final Installment. Because there are Just Too Many Other Reasons…

Also: “Revenge of Gaia” - James Lovelock Speaks at Dartington.

In Part 4, Rob Hopkins explores what dealing with nuclear waste might be lik in a post oil peak future:

I’d like you to imagine yourself about 50 years from now, in a post-peak world. We are assuming for the purpose of this post that everything more or less worked out OK, we managed to contract our economy and our consumer addictions to a point where our quality of life is much improved, where we live in local economies, with local food, local products, local currency and so on.

We manage fine on less than one-quarter of the fossil fuel that we managed on in 2006 and are continually devising ways of managing with less. Cement production is now minimal as it was just too energy intensive to sustain, and very little new steel is created. Not so much new building happens these days, what does happen uses mostly local materials, clay, timber, hemp, straw, lime and so on. Imagine in this world you are faced with the challenge of keeping 250,000 tons of radioactive waste safe into perpetuity (that’s the amount already in storage in the UK, plus what will join it when the UKs current plants are decommissioned, never mind any new ones). How are you going to do it?

Nuclear power has always been predicated on the concept that future generations will be more capable than we are to deal with nuclear waste. The logic runs that they will, by that time, have cracked how to make it safe, and so therefore it is fine to leave it as some kind of intellectual puzzle for them to figure out. There is however a very strong case that we are about as technologically advanced as it is going to get. If not, we are at least the generation with the most cheap oil at our fingertips. Future generations will not have the dubious luxury of being profligate with fossil fuels as we have been. To saddle them with a legacy upon which they will need to expend vast amounts of a precious resource is insane.

Chris Vernon from Oil Drum UK comments:

Nuclear waste is a problem. That’s an understatement. I believe the UK has decided that our ~20 legacy nuclear sites will require £70bn+ spending on them excluding a ‘final’ solution for the waste. That’s some £3.5bn per site, a lot of work.

The thing is, what’s happening in the FSU? There are over 100 ‘legacy’ nuclear sites there which are certainly not scheduled to have several hundred billion pounds spent on them.

Either the UK is doing something unnecessary or the FSU isn’t doing something that is necessary. I suspect it’s the latter. So what is the implication of a decaying nuclear legacy in these poorer parts of the world ‘cos that’s what a new nuclear build in the UK would create at the end of life.

It's worth noting that compared to commentators like James Howard Kunstler, Hopkins has an unusually promising, if quite compelling, vision of how an energy descent culture might manage itself. What would happen in a less functional 'long emergency' type situation? -AF

Audio: Nuclear - Is it an option?’
Dr. David Fleming, FEASTA
An audio recording of a talk given on April 19th by Dr David Fleming on nuclear power, together with responses by John McGuirk of the Freedom Institute and Nuala Ahern of the Green Party, can now be downloaded in mp3 format. This talk took place at the 11th Convergence Festival.
David Fleming's talk
(5.7 MB)
John McGuirk's response
(1.2 MB)
Nuala Ahern's response
(1 MB)
(26 April 2006)
Dr. Fleming's talk is based on a document Why Nuclear Power Cannot Be A Major Energy Source, published by Feasta in collaboration with the New Economics Foundation. It can be read in html format here and downloaded in pdf format here (400 K).
-AF

PHOTO PRESENTAION: Does nuclear power produce no CO2?
Dave Kimble, PeakOil.org.au
Every step of the nuclear power cycle involves the expenditure of energy derived from fossil fuels, which nuclear electricity cannot replace. Thus it is untrue to say that nuclear energy is greenhouse friendly.
(4 May 2006)
Dave Kimble has produced this excellent photo presentation of some of the fossil fuel inputs into uranium mining and processing.

Our Nuclear Future?
Britt Peterson, Seed Magazine
In the summer of 1981, Ken Caldeira found himself in jail after protesting the slated opening of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, NY. Caldeira, then a freelance software developer working on Wall Street, was an ardent member of the anti-nuclear movement: In 1979, he was arrested at a weapons demonstration just a few blocks away from his office, wearing the same suit he had worn to work. As part of a group called Mobilization for Survival, he helped coordinate a 500,000-person demonstration in Central Park on June 12th, 1982, against nuclear weaponry and power.

Fast-forward 20 years: Caldeira is a climatologist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford University, and a specialist in energy and global warming. And he has flip-flopped his stance on nuclear power in the face of the mounting dangers of climate change, though his change of mind comes with some ambivalence.

"I'm kind of a reluctant supporter to the expansion of nuclear power," Caldeira said. "It's not my favorite choice, but it's not as bad as burning coal,"
(26 April 2006)
This is a good well-balanced article, exploring both the concerns of the environmentalists turned nuclear advocates and their critics. -AF

Audio: James Lovelock-Gaia's Revenge
Philip Adams, Late Night Live, Radio National Australia
A discussion with the independent scientist James Lovelock - originator of the Gaia Theory - who has written a new book on the urgency of the global warming threat. He says the Earth’s physical condition is seriously ill, 'and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as one-hundred-thousand years.'

'Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.'

Lovelock has fallen out with many of his erstwhile green travellers, because of his advocacy of nuclear power, and more recently, his criticisms of renewable energy wind farms.
(20 April 2006)
Whether you disagree with his stance or not, he does sound like a nice old chap! -AF

Safely, greenly nuclear
Ian Hore-Lacy, general manager of the Uranium Information Centre, The Age (Australia)
Doubling the world's nuclear contribution would eliminate one-quarter to one-third of the CO2 emissions from power generation. The fond hopes of the green movement cannot match this.
...
Audited data shows that the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the full life cycle of nuclear power is up to 5 per cent that of gas-fired plants, but could rise to 7 per cent with the very low-grade ores asserted by Caldicott as likely to be needed.
(28 April 2006)
See full article for a good summary of other pro-nuclear arguments as the industry presents them. As Hore-Lacy's job is to promote uranium, it's unsurprising that the CO2 emissions figures quoted are on the optimistic side.

Nuclear currently supplies something like 2.5% of the world's energy. So at best, even if nuclear produced no CO2 emissions, a doubling of nuclear capacity might reduce greenhouse emissions around something like 3-4% a year (if we ignore the 'greenhouse spike' refered to by Dr Mark Diesendorf from the construction process.) We must also consider that in light of peak oil and gas, it is just as likely that these cleaner and more versatile fuels will be replaced, rather than coal.

A draft study forwarded to us by nuclear scientist Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen (David Fleming relies heavily of van Leeuwen's research also) includes results from his own life cycle analysis of nuclear power, which suggest that nuclear power emits more than 30% of the amount of CO2 of a gas-fired plant, using current average grades of uranium ore. This is a vastly higher amount than that which Hore-Lacy quotes, which unfortunately aren't refenced. This is perhaps a problem with newspaper conventions as much as Hore-Lacy's piece, although there are ways to mention studies by name.

Storm van Leeuwen considers the cost of dismantling the plants at the end of their lifetime as a large component of emissions. Emissions are also expected to rise rapidly as ore quality (percentage of uranium per ton) drops.

Van Leeuwen also considers other greenhouse gases including freon, fluorine, chlorine and their compounds. In the US, freon emissions from enrichment processing accounts for 5 grams CO2 equivalents per kilowatt-hour. (A natural gas powered plant produces about 380 g/kwh).

These are obviously difficult and important questions. As many readers will know, life cycle analyses (for ERoEI or greenhouse gas emissions) are complicated, such that vastly different results can be reached depending on data, assumptions and methodology.

Some earlier studies by Storm van Leeuwen and the late Philip Smith are available at www.stormsmith.nl
-AF

Greens see red over WWF, yellow cake
The Age (Australia)
WWF-Australia chief executive Greg Bourne, a former head of energy company BP Australasia, was quoted as saying Australia was destined - under all governments - to be mining uranium and exporting it to a growing world market.

At issue was the safety aspect of uranium usage, he said.

"The key issues are, if we're going to be a nation exporting uranium, we have to know absolutely it's only being used for peaceful purposes and waste products are being stored safely," Mr Bourne told News Ltd.
...
"WWF and Greenpeace both have international policies that nuclear power is no solution to climate change and both groups oppose an expansion of nuclear power in this or any country".
(4 May 2006)