Nor is there much solace to be found in nuclear power, which is nowhere near as environmentally benign as its proponents claim. Studies of the life-cycle of CO2 emissions of nuclear plants vary widely, since no one knows the total cost of decommissioning a nuclear reactor or permanently storing toxic waste. [32] One can, however, estimate the greenhouse-gas emissions required to process uranium fuel. The use of low-grade ore (<0.01 per cent) may create the same greenhouse-gas footprint as a methane-fired power plant, belying claims that nuclear is a carbon-neutral source of power. More startlingly, perhaps, the use of low-grade ore would give a nuclear-power plant an energy return on investment of 1:1—literally not worth the effort. This is not an abstract problem: 37 per cent of global uranium reserves are found in deposits that are only half as rich (<0.005 per cent). Furthermore, the power density of nuclear plants varies tremendously, depending on the size of accompanying radioactive glacis and dedicated cooling lakes. While some projects have fairly high power density, as Fukushima Daiichi did (1,300 W/m [2] ), others are puny, like the Wolf Creek facility in Kansas (30 W/m [2] ). [33] Economically, of course, nuclear plants are always white elephants: every kilowatt-hour produced by Hinkley Point C will cost double the wholesale rate—and this at a time when prices for wind and solar power continue to plunge.
There have been enough accidents over the past half-century to discredit nuclear power. Without detailing all of these, in their various shades of hubris and incompetence, examination of the most recent will suffice. The clean-up crews at the Fukushima Daiichi plant do not even know where the fuel rods of the three destroyed reactors actually are. Six hundred tonnes of still-fissioning uranium melted through their containment vessels and continue even now to sink deep into the earth beneath the plant. Five robots sent to look for the lost fuel rods ‘died’ during their mission, when radiation destroyed their wiring. Cleaning up may take forty years or longer and cost $20 billion, while the total cost of the disaster is estimated at $188 billion. [34] Part of the reason why the destroyed plant is so difficult to clean is that it needs to be inundated daily with 150,000 litres of ocean water. In its early days, the deluge cooled and stabilized the damaged reactors, arresting the core’s meltdown; without it, the radiation would have spread much farther, forcing the evacuation of up to 50 million people from Tokyo and its environs, a dislocation the Japanese prime minister compared to ‘losing a huge war’. [35] The official stance of the government and the UN is that no one has died because of the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, but this already defies belief. Some scientists have predicted that there will be 1,000 to 3,000 excess cancer deaths, a figure commensurate with the much smaller release of radioactivity compared to that of Chernobyl in 1986. It was not until twenty years later that the UN admitted there were any deaths at all as a result of the Chernobyl explosion, beyond the 50 in its early aftermath. Today, the most conservative estimates put the figure at 9,000. [36]
According to the ‘largest statistical analysis of nuclear accidents ever undertaken’, another disaster on the scale of Fukushima in 2011 or Chernobyl in 1986 has a 50 per cent chance of occurring before 2050. [37] Yet prominent greens, including George Monbiot, James Hansen and James Lovelock have lined up to declare their support for nuclear power. Monbiot became pro-nuclear after the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, reasoning that the result wasn’t so bad despite the worst possible luck. [38] Writing with the geo-engineer Ken Caldeira, a collaborator of Keith’s, Hansen has called for the world to build a nuclear reactor every five days between now and 2050. These 2,135 new reactors would dwarf the current total of 440 and almost certainly inflate the peril of another meltdown. [39] Yet seemingly not content with the riskiness of common nuclear power, many atomic-environmentalists, including Monbiot, Hansen and Stewart Brand, advocate the even more untested and unstable variant of fast-breeder reactors, the name referring to their ability to produce more fissile material than they consume, usually turning uranium or thorium into plutonium, a bomb material par excellence. [40] Liquid sodium is used as a coolant, but this has a snag: it combusts upon exposure to air. Most breeders spend nine-tenths of the time offline for repairs, since even the smallest leak causes a fire, making renewable-energy systems seem quite reliable. The only fast-breeder facility with a better track record was Russia’s BN-600 reactor in Zarechny which, uniquely and terrifyingly, continued operating during fourteen liquid-sodium conflagrations over seventeen years. Although many trumpet the advantage of breeders in producing little toxic waste from spent fuel, they ignore the fact that the sodium coolant becomes radioactive after use. [41] After wasting $100 billion on decades of experimentation, governments in the US and Western Europe have mothballed their fast breeders. India is one of the few countries that currently has plans to build them, but less as unreliable power plants than as plutonium factories to arm thousands of nukes.[42]
(Excerpted from: ‘TO FREEZE THE THAMES: Natural Geo-Engineering and Biodiversity’ by Troy Vettese’ at <https://newleftreview.org/II/111/troy-vettese-to-freeze-the-thames>.)
Notes and References:
[32] Benjamin Sovacool, ‘Valuing the Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Nuclear Power: A Critical Survey’, Energy Policy, vol. 36, August 2008, pp. 2,940–53. OECD, Costs of Decommissioning Nuclear Power Plants, Paris 2016.
[2] Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, New Haven, CT 2013. The parameters of the Little Ice Age remain hotly disputed. See, inter alia, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Fluctuations du climat de l’an mil à aujourd’hui, Paris 2011, and the discussion of Ladurie’s work in Mike Davis, ‘Taking the Temperature of History’, NLR 110, March–April 2018. See Vaclav Smil, Power Density, Cambridge, MA 2015, p. 247. A notable exception to this is Appalachian mountain-top removal, which has a power density ‘well below’ 100 W/m: p. 107.
[2] Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, New Haven, CT 2013. The parameters of the Little Ice Age remain hotly disputed. See, inter alia, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Fluctuations du climat de l’an mil à aujourd’hui, Paris 2011, and the discussion of Ladurie’s work in Mike Davis, ‘Taking the Temperature of History’, NLR 110, March–April 2018. See Vaclav Smil, Power Density, Cambridge, MA 2015, p. 247. A notable exception to this is Appalachian mountain-top removal, which has a power density ‘well below’ 100 W/m: p. 107.
[33] Keith Barnham, ‘False Solution: Nuclear Power is not “Low Carbon”’, Ecologist, 5 February 2015; Smil, Power Density, pp. 146–7.
[34] Aaron Sheldrick and Minami Funakoshi, ‘Fukushima’s Ground Zero’, Reuters, 11 March 2016; Yuka Obayashi and Kentaro Hamada, ‘Japan Nearly Doubles Fukushima Disaster-Related Cost to $188 Billion’, Reuters, 8 December 2016.
[35] Andrew Gilligan, ‘Fukushima: Tokyo Was on the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Admits Former Prime Minister’, Daily Telegraph, 4 March 2016.
[36] See respectively Jan Beyea et al., ‘Accounting for Long-Term Doses in Worldwide Health Effects of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident’, Energy & Environmental Science, vol. 6, no. 3, 2013, pp. 1,042–5; Frank von Hippel, ‘The Radiological and Psychological Consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi Accident’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 67, no. 5, September 2011, pp. 27–36; WHO, ‘Chernobyl: The True Scale of the Accident’, 5 September 2005. Estimates of the number of deaths at Chernobyl vary between 9,000 and 93,000, the Greenpeace figure. Jim Green, ‘The Chernobyl Death Toll’, Nuclear Monitor, no. 785, 24 April 2014.
[37] Spencer Wheatley et al., ‘Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents and Accidents’, Risk Analysis, 22 March 2016.
[38] George Monbiot, ‘Why Fukushima Made Me Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Power’, Guardian, 21 March 2011. See also James Lovelock, ‘We Have No Time to Experiment with Visionary Energy Sources’, Independent, 24 May 2004.
[39] James Hansen, Ken Caldeira et al., ‘Nuclear Power Paves the Only Viable Path Forward on Climate Change’, Guardian, 3 December 2015. At the 2017 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Hansen shared the podium with Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute, an outfit that supports ‘market solutions’, nuclear power and geo-engineering as means to overcome the climatic crisis.
[40] Todd Woody, ‘Stewart Brand’s Strange Trip’, Yale360, 22 December 2009. Fred Pearce, ‘Are Fast-Breeder Reactors a Nuclear Power Panacea?’, Yale360, 30 July 2012. Jim Green, ‘Nuclear Fallacies’, CounterPunch, 5 October 2017.
[41] Thomas Cochran et al., ‘It’s Time to Give up on Breeder Reactors’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 2010, pp. 50–6.
[42] M. V. Ramana, ‘A Fast Reactor at any Cost’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 3 November 2016.
