Fissile fantasies

Fissile fantasies
Adam Ma’anit
Red Pepper, June 2006

The nuclear industry has
always had something
of the absurd about it.
Efforts to recover its lost
glory by painting itself
green is just the latest
example of this, as Adam Ma'anit
explains

At the dawn of the atomic age there
was a great deal of faith that
nuclear physics would solve many
of the world's most pressing
problems. People were spoon-fed a diet
rich in promises of nuclear salvation. By
the time Italian scientist Enrico Fermi
managed to control a chain reaction on a
Chicago squash court in 1942, earlier
discoveries into the nature of radiation
had already sparked off a massive appetite
for all things atomic.As Wilhelm Conrad
Röntgen, the German scientist who
discovered X-rays in 1895, remarked to
his colleagues:'And now the Devil has
been let loose.'

With full confidence in the atomic
dream, people embraced snazzy new xray
technologies with eagerness. All sorts
of ludicrous applications of these new
discoveries were devised. X-ray devices
were used for everything from curing
headaches and colds to fitting shoes.The
radioactive element radium, first
discovered by Marie Curie at the turn of
the century, was used in 'health foods' and
cigarette filters in Europe and North
America. Men were encouraged to use
radium suppositories as an early 20th
century Viagra.

This mass psychosis lasted decades and
was not just the preserve of quacks and
venture capitalists. Mainstream media, the
government and the medical and
scientific establishments were the honour
guard
of this new
nuclear revolution.This
mainstream endorsement
combined with the
prevalent cultural atomophilia
led many to undergo dangerous treatments
and expose themselves to high levels of
radiation unnecessarily. For example, while
Captain Atom adorned the covers of little
boys' comic books in hospital waiting
rooms, their mothers and grandmothers
were having their ovaries irradiated as
'treatment' for depression and menopause.

The atomic age not only spawned a
whole culture and attendant
industry, it pointed to a
fantastic techno-future where
anything was possible (with
nuclear power of course).
One science journalist
predicted that there
would no longer be
such a thing as bad
weather thanks to
the help of
nuclear 'artificial
suns' mounted on
gleaming towers
all over the
world.Another
researcher
suggested that
roads could be
improved by using
reactors to melt
highways directly on to
the landscape.

Perhaps the most enduring nuclear
fantasy was the one articulated by Lewis
L Strauss. In 1954 Strauss, then head of
the US Atomic Energy Commission,
famously opined that:'It is not too much
to expect that our children will enjoy in
their homes electricity too cheap to
meter, will know of great periodic
regional famines in the world only as
matters of history, will travel effortlessly
over the seas and under them and
through the air with a minimum of
danger at great speeds, and will experience
a lifespan far longer than ours as disease
yields and man comes to understand what
causes him to age.'

It was on this wave of gushing optimism
that the majority of the world's civil
nuclear reactors were built, the bulk of
which are still in operation today. It wasn't
until the Three Mile Island meltdown in
Pennsylvania in 1979 and the Chernobyl
disaster in Ukraine seven years later,
however, that the industry's fortunes began
to freefall.The fantasy, it seemed, was firmly
shattered for a broad majority of people
once the realities of this dangerous dicegame
became apparent.

Of late, though, it seems that once again
we can hear the rattle of the dice as nuclear
is making a comeback. But this time it is a
different fantasy that is being promoted -
that of nuclear power as a solution to
climate change.

The Lovelock syndrome

It was two years ago that I first began to
take notice of just how seductive a tale this
was for many. Sure, the nuclear lobby had
been banging on about its climate friendly
credentials for years before, but few paid
them much notice, given that anti-nuclear
activism has long been the bedrock of
modern environmentalism. But this
changed in May 2004 when a now
infamous article by scientist James
Lovelock, founder of the Gaia hypothesis
(which postulates that the earth acts as one
super organism), was splashed across the
front page of the Independent.

The article conjured up fears of
impending doom from climate change,
overpopulation and deforestation. Lovelock
admonished critics of the nuclear industry
and what he called their 'irrational fear fed
by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green
lobbies and the media'.Their fears, he said,
are unjustified, and 'nuclear energy from its
start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of
all energy sources'.The environmentalist
icon concluded that 'nuclear power is the
only green solution'.

The outburst was hardly surprising from
the always pro-nuclear Lovelock, but the
article's release was well timed.The British
government had just been making some
noises about its climate change policies and
energy strategy, hinting at a possible nod to
nuclear power. Estimates of the death toll
from France's 2003 heatwave had also just
been released suggesting that upwards of
20,000 people died that summer and climate
change was widely fingered as the culprit.
And the rising price of oil was beginning to
feature regularly in news reports as a cause
of concern to the frequently 'jittery' markets.
Momentum was building.

Until then, talk of supporting new
nuclear power stations in the UK was
considered political suicide. None of the
major parties would touch it with a
cooling rod. But the Gaian guru's insistence
that we have to use nuclear 'now, or suffer
the pain soon to be inflicted by our
outraged planet,' drove a wedge.

A number of high-profile greens
followed Lovelock's lead with cautious, and
in some cases enthusiastic, endorsement of
this once reviled technology, helping to
break the taboo still further. Greenpeace
co-founder Patrick Moore, Hugh
Montefiore, former Bishop of Birmingham
and long-time Friends of the Earth trustee,
and a few others played their part. So what
was so different that suddenly
environmentalists felt they could jump on
the nuclear bandwagon?

'It's not that something new and
important and good has happened with
nuclear,' explains US environmentalist
Stewart Brand.'It's that something new and
important and bad has happened with
climate change.' British author and climate
activist Mark Lynas echoes this sentiment:
'If you ask me, anything is preferable to
planetary climatic meltdown combined
with a 1930s-style collapse into political
darkness. Even nuclear power.' It is clear
that most of those greens that favour
nuclear power are motivated less by a
genuine enthusiasm than by overwhelming
terror of looming climate catastrophe.
Unlike the almost maniacal optimism of
the first atomic age, their support for
nuclear's second wind is rooted in a
desperate pessimism.

All that glitters is not green

Many governments are indeed likely to
fail to meet their meagre greenhousegas
reduction commitments set out
under the Kyoto Protocol, and as
concerns about climate change mount,
inaction may finally begin to be
politically costly.

This shines a new and more flattering
light on the nuclear power industry. Every
pro-nuclear organisation now touts the
technology's carbon-free credentials.The
visitor centre at the Sellafield reprocessing
facility on the West Cumbrian coastline has
almost as much exhibition space devoted
to climate change as to nuclear science.
Global warming has given the industry
such a PR boost that if climate change
didn't exist, the industry would want to
invent it. As Guardian columnist George
Monbiot acidly observed:'For 50 years,
nuclear power has been a solution in search
of a problem.'

It is perhaps due to this confluence of
events and opportunities that the UK
government changed course so
dramatically in its energy policy. In 2003 it
ruled out supporting nuclear, arguing that
to do so would guarantee 'that we would
not make the necessary investment in both
energy efficiency and renewables'. Its 2003
energy white paper assured us that the
government would pursue a policy that
reduced 'the amount of energy we
consume, together with a substantial
increase in renewable energy',much to the
approval of leading environmental groups.
It has, however, spectacularly failed to
follow through.

According to Greenpeace, the
government has 'done nothing to
encourage wave and tidal energy
projects, has cut financial support for
micro-renewables and is winding down
its support programme for solar energy
six years early. It has failed to give grants
for the second round of offshore wind
developments, failed to alleviate the cost
of connection to the National Grid and
failed to aid development of combined
heat and power.The government has also
cut back on community power schemes
for small-scale renewables two years
early.'

Instead of addressing these failings, there
was silence and inertia.That is until the
2005 Labour Party conference, at which
Tony Blair asked:'For how much longer
can countries like ours allow the security
of our energy supply to be dependent on
some of the most unstable parts of the
world?' His answer: 'an assessment of all
options, including civil nuclear power'.
After Blair dropped that bombshell, his
chief scientist, Sir David King, suddenly
came out with guns blazing. Long a
climate hero to environmentalists for his
willingness to speak critically about US
intransigence in the climate talks, King
was now using every media opportunity
afforded him to big-up the nuclear
option.

Given these signals, it is widely believed
that the current energy review is a fait
accompli and that nuclear will be given the
'green' light. Even the usually diplomatic
WWF lambasted the government for its
handling of the review, accusing it of being
'a smokescreen for the resurgence of
nuclear power'.

Whispering green nothings

But is nuclear power really a solution to
climate change? After all, the arguments
against nuclear are as valid today as they
were 20 years ago at the peak of the antinuclear
movement.The technology is still
extremely dangerous, relies on dwindling
supplies of uranium and remains so costly
that massive government (read taxpayer)
subsidies are required. It is vulnerable to
terrorism, can feed weapons proliferation
and produces volumes of toxic waste with
no satisfactory storage solution.

The nuclear process employs energyintensive
industries dependent on vast
quantities of fossil fuels. It requires
uranium mining, enrichment and
transport across the globe, the
construction and decommissioning of
facilities, and the processing, transport and
storage of radioactive wastes. All these
consume huge amounts of carbon-based
energy such as oil and coal. Nuclear
power simply can't hold a candle to
renewable energy technologies such as
windmills and photovoltaic panels with
their minimal reliance on fossil fuel use
and 'one-off ' environmental costs.

The Öko Institut in Germany released a
10-year study back in 1997 that found that
in a full life-cycle comparison of various
energy technologies, nuclear had nearly
twice the carbon dioxide equivalent of
wind power - even factoring-in the
phenomenal difference in power output
(kilowatts per hour).A more recent study
factored-in the declining ratio of uranium
to mined ore in rapidly dwindling uranium
sources and found that emissions increase
as more mining, refining and transport is
needed to compensate for poorer quality
ore.The report, by Jan Willem Storm van
Leeuwen and Philip Smith, concluded that
the overall emissions needed for nuclear
power are five times higher than even the
Öko Institut estimate. Every new nuclear
power station creates a further demand for
uranium and its attendant infrastructure,
which in turn spirals fossil-based energy
demand upwards.

Even if we ignored the life-cycle
analysis, how many new nuclear plants
would we need? According to a 2002
report by Arjun Makhijani of the USbased
Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research (IEER), to
produce a noticeable reduction in global
carbon dioxide emissions, it would be
necessary to build approximately 2,000
large new nuclear reactors, each with
1,000-megawatt capacity.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change outlines a scenario
whereby 3,000 nuclear reactors would be
needed by the year 2100.This would
mean an average of 75 new nuclear
reactor builds each year for 100 years.The
US National Commission on Energy
estimates that its domestic nuclear-power
capacity alone would need to double and
possibly triple over the next 30-50 years.
This would bring the US total to about
300-400 new reactors, including
replacements for those reaching
retirement age. All this keeping in mind
that it takes on average 10-15 years to
build a nuclear power station in the first
place.

Nor do the difficulties stop there.A
growing number of studies tell us that, if
we were to replace outright all fossilfuel
generated electricity with nuclear,
there would be enough economically
viable uranium to fuel the reactors for
only three to four years.Without
uranium, conventional reactors stop
reacting.

Assuming all these challenges were
overcome, what difference would a
nuclear renaissance make to global
greenhouse gas emissions? Very little, it
seems. Nuclear power stations serve one
major useful purpose and that is to
produce electricity.The percentage of
global greenhouse gas emissions from
world electricity production is only a
small proportion of all polluting sources -
about 16 per cent by International
Energy Agency estimates.

This, then, is the maximum theoretical
contribution that nuclear could make to
our global emissions footprint assuming a
complete and total embrace of the atom
for our electricity needs.Transport,
domestic heating, mining, manufacturing
and other sectors with heavy reliance on
fossil fuels would continue to make up
the lion's share of the global economy's
climate-damaging emissions. Nuclear
power would make no difference to
nearly 85 per cent of the world's climatespoiling
emissions.

Winds of change

In contrast to the obsessive pursuit of some
ultimate techno-fix, the real solutions are
already here.While detractors will say that
renewable energy technologies based on
solar, tidal/wave, geothermal, micro-hydro
and wind resources can never meet
demand sufficiently, the truth is that they've
never really been given a chance.While the
nuclear and fossil fuel industries have
benefited from decades of exceedingly
generous levels of subsidies, renewables
have barely had a look-in.

Each year billions in direct and indirect
subsidies are dished out to nuclear and
fossil fuel energy companies. In 2004 alone,
the government spent upwards of £3
billion to prop-up the bankrupt nuclearpower
firm British Energy. If, however, we
were to stop subsidising fossil fuels and
nuclear and shift resources into renewables,
the prospects of meeting demand would
become far more achievable.

Despite the odds, renewables have
already beaten nuclear in the energy game.
According to the US-based Rocky
Mountain Institute, in 2004 alone, smallscale
renewables added 5.9 times as much
net generating capacity and 2.9 times as
much electricity production as nuclear
power. By 2010, renewable energy is
projected to outstrip nuclear power's
energy output by 43 per cent globally.

If there is anything we can learn from
history, it is that the nuclear industry can spin
a good yarn. I'm sure most of us would like
to believe in the magic techno-fix that can
deliver limitless supplies of energy cheaply,
safely and with marginal environmental
impacts.This is what pro-nuclear supporters
would like us to believe, but sadly the reality
is that there is no such solution.

Eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels and
boosting renewables is only part of the
answer. Larger and more fundamental
questions about the way we live, the nature
of our economic system and how we build
meaningful movements for change remain.
One thing is certain, however - Captain
Atom is not going to save the day.

Adam Ma'anit is researcher with TNI's Carbon Trade wAtch and co-editor of New Internationalist
magazine. This article was adapted from 'Nuclear is
the New Black', which appeared in New
Internationalist No 382, October 2005.
For more info, see: www.newint.org/issue382