A background paper by GREENPEACE.

The nuclear industry is in near-terminal decline world-wide, following its failure to establish itself as a clean, cheap, safe or reliable energy source. The on-going crisis in nuclear waste management, in safety and in economic costs have severely undermined the industry’s credibility. It is currently desperate to find a valid rationale and justification for renewed state support and funding. It is promoting the claim that as nuclear power stations do not emit carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, switching from fossil fuels to nuclear power is the only way to cut Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) without radically changing consumption patterns. However, even the most perfunctory examination of the issue shows that nuclear power has no role whatever in tackling global climate change. In fact quite the opposite is true; any resources expended on attempting to advance nuclear power as a viable solution would inevitably detract from genuine measures to reduce the threat of global warming.

There has been a marked downward world-wide trend in the fortunes of the nuclear industry throughout the last two decades. By the end of 1998, it is expected that no new reactors whatever will be under construction anywhere in either North America or in Western Europe. Global orders have declined from a high point in 1968, when over 40 GW of nuclear plant orders were placed, to the position today where the industry is barely able to replace the capacity of those reactors being closed.

It is clear that immediate action is needed to halt climate change. Instant cuts in CO₂ emissions must be made. Electricity production is a major source of CO₂. To tackle global warming, we therefore have to look for ways of producing and using electricity which significantly lessen the CO₂ burden. And in deciding how best to tackle global warming, we have to take into account both the cost effectiveness of alternatives to fossil fuels, the cost of their environmental impact and their impact on global security.

According the American business magazine ‘Forbes’, "The failure of the US nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history".

Early hopes of cheap nuclear energy were based on an expectation that whilst nuclear power stations would be more expensive than fossil fuel plants, their running and maintenance costs would be extremely low. Experience has shown that the early optimism was totally misplaced.

The cost of nuclear activity at all levels has exceeded those early predictions. In many countries, the construction costs of nuclear power plants have proved to be much higher than first expected. Plants have taken longer to build and there have been many unforeseen technical problems. Running costs have also been much less predictable than was first thought. The costs of increased safety demands and regular equipment breakdowns have been compounded by the expensive question of how to deal with the nuclear waste. In addition, the predicted cost of decommissioning power stations has also escalated.

Reliable figures on nuclear generating costs are difficult to obtain. According to a current international study, which examined the cost information provided by nuclear operators, industry figures are frequently dubious or inaccurate. The assumptions on which they are based are often over-optimistic. Alternative options, which are risk-free and less CO2 intensive are in fact cheaper.

In the United States, for example, no new nuclear power stations have been ordered since 1978. This has happened in a country which launched the Pressurised Water Reactor design and which houses many more nuclear reactors than any other country. Construction and operating costs have risen so dramatically, especially since the extra safety demands made after the accident at Three Mile Island, that some companies have faced bankruptcy.

In the United Kingdom, after a review of the privatisation of the nuclear power industry, the government dismissed the industry’s demands for public funding to build new reactors to combat global warming. Six months later, British Energy cancelled two proposed stations, leaving the UK for the first time in over 40 years with no plans for new nuclear power stations.

Since the oil crisis of the 1970’s, several ‘new’ forms of electrical power generation have emerged, and of these a handful are now considered ‘mature’ and ‘bankable’. This means that they are considered to be reliable and durable power production systems and are therefore able to secure private investment. Many of these technologies are therefore coming into main-stream use, with hundreds of megawatts installed each year. On the other hand it has become clear that nuclear power is not bankable. In particular the World Bank states:

Furthermore the Asian Development Bank write:

Wind power, hydro electric, photovoltaic, land-fill gas and biomass all derive their energy from the sun, whether by direct conversion using solar cells, the global thermal currents created by heating, potential energy imparted through the water cycle or through the energy absorbed by plant life which is released with decomposition. Since the sun is expected to be shining for several million years, these energy forms may be taken as sustainable. Nuclear power on the other hand uses a finite fuel.

In the late 1990’s, the renewable industries have been aggressively competitive. The following table shows the competitiveness of renewable energy technologies, even ignoring the environmental costs associated with fossil and nuclear generated electricity (for further information on Renewable Energy Technologies, see Annex I).

The production of new generating capacity is not the only way of meeting the expanding demand for new power. The growth in demand can also be addressed directly. In 1990, Bill Keepin and Gregory Kats of the Rocky Mountain Institute, Colorado, conducted a detailed analysis of the potential roles of nuclear power and energy efficiency measures in reducing CO2 emissions. They concluded:

Based on these results, assuming a strategy of displacing coal-fired power, 50 kWhs of energy can be displaced by a dollar spent on electric efficiency, compared to 7.4 kWhs spent on subsidising nuclear power.

In addition to compensating for the industry’s optimistic assumptions, the true cost of any power source must include external costs. Such costs do not appear on the operators’ balance sheets, however, and are therefore hidden.

The external costs of nuclear power include the cost of environmental damage, the effect on human health and society following an accident, damage to human health and the environment during routine operation of nuclear facilities and also long term problems associated with nuclear waste and decommissioning of nuclear facilities. ‘Externalities’ that lend themselves to monetary quantification include economic effects, employment, environment, environmental impacts, health effects & government subsidies, Figure 3.

When such quantifiable social costs are added to the core price of electricity, the total costs of nuclear power are extremely high. As Figure 4 shows, nuclear power no longer stays competitive against the latest generation of renewable energy, see.

Sustainable energy sources can clearly be more effective as non-CO2 emitting energy sources than nuclear power. However, there are also a number of environmental problems associated with nuclear power which go beyond direct quantification as ‘externalities’. These make nuclear power unacceptable from an environmental perspective.

Taking the idea of "nuclear power to protect the climate" to its logical conclusion, it is necessary to ask how many nuclear power stations must be built to achieve internationally-agreed climate protection goals. The consequences of only doubling nuclear power’s contribution to the world-wide primary energy mix demonstrates the legal and technical impracticality of this proposal.

Currently, around 440 nuclear power stations provide approximately 5 % of the global primary energy mix. If this figure is doubled, a corresponding number of new nuclear power stations would have to be built in the coming years. Despite this enormous effort, nuclear energy’s contribution to the primary energy mix would not be twice as high but would decrease, because, in absolute terms, world energy demand is expected to increase by at least one half in the next 25 years. To double nuclear energy’s share in the "business as usual" scenario, would in fact require not a doubling, but a tripling, of the number of reactors. Not 440 but 1,320 nuclear reactors would have to be on the grid in 25 years’ time.

With an optimistic construction time of 10 years, this scenario would mean that one reactor would have to be put into operation each week, starting from the year 2007. Even then, nothing much would have been gained from the point of view of climate protection. In the medium term, climate protection requires a reduction in CO2 emissions by 80%. Nuclear energy’s share in the increasing primary energy consumption would therefore have to be further increased in the future in order to make a significant contribution to climate protection. Even the construction of 1,320 new reactors would not be enough, and a much larger number would eventually have to be built .

Such a massive expansion of nuclear power would require the removal of political obstacles such as moratoria on the construction of new plants and the reversal of long standing public and political decisions to abandon nuclear power currently in place in many countries. Today, in the European Union, 14 out of the 15 Member States either do not have any nuclear reactors, intend to phase out nuclear power or have no plans to build new reactors in the foreseeable future. Indeed, many E.U. countries have turned away from nuclear power due to public opposition. The nuclear industry lost in national referenda held in Sweden, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.

The main technical constraints to substantial expansion would be construction lead times and industrial capabilities for building nuclear power plants and fuel-cycle facilities. Any expansion of nuclear power would also involve extensive deployment of nuclear technology, including radioactive waste dump sites and fuel cycle facilities around the world.

It is often said that nuclear power is now a mature technology as it has been operating for over 40 years. Despite this, there is still no environmentally appropriate programme of dealing with any form of radioactive waste. This problem is made worse on a daily basis by the continual production of radioactive waste.

Nuclear waste is produced at every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to the reprocessing of spent nuclear. Much of this waste will remain hazardous for thousands of years, leaving a deadly radioactive legacy to future generations.

At nuclear power stations, highly radioactive waste has to be regularly removed from the reactor and at most sites this ‘spent’ fuel is being stored temporarily in water-filled cooling ponds. According to independent experts, the global quantity of spent fuel produced without a climate based radical expansion of nuclear power is expected to increase from 145,000 tonnes in 1994, to 322,000 tonnes by the year 2010. Whilst a variety of disposal methods have been under discussion for decades, there is still no demonstrated method for isolating nuclear waste from the environment for adequate time periods.

As part of the routine operation of every nuclear power station, some waste materials are also discharged directly into the environment. Liquid waste is discharged into the sea and gaseous waste is released into the atmosphere.

The problems of reactor safety are three fold:

Around the world nuclear power plants are getting older, both in the East and in the West. Although much public and political concern has centred on the hazards of the older Soviet-designed reactors, experience has shown that problems and signs of ageing are also occurring in western reactors. By the turn of the century some 200 reactors will have been in operations for 20 years. Half of these will be over 25 years old. The safety problems posed by ageing reactors are being largely ignored by the industry. Given the enormous consequences of nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl, great attention must be devoted to the ageing process of nuclear reactors. Unfortunately, instead of placing more stringent requirements on older plant, safety is often cut back to permit continued operation.

In the former Soviet Union at least 9 million people have been effected by the Chernobyl disaster; 2.5 million in Belarus; 3.5 million in Ukraine; and 3 million in Russia. In total over 160,000 km² of land is contaminated in the three republics.

Although the nuclear industry continues to refute evidence on the widespread health effects and prevalence of diseases resulting from Chernobyl, it is now widely accepted that the accident has resulted in a massive increase in thyroid cancers in those three countries. The President of the European Thyroid Cancer Association, Dilwyn Williams, has stated that thousands of children exposed to radiation will contract thyroid cancer in the next 30 years.

The effect of the global increase in the number of ageing reactors is a serious increase in global health risk from nuclear power plants.

The current round of reactor closures in Canada demonstrates that the managerial and procedural inadequacies that lead to Chernobyl are also very much alive in western, OECD nuclear industries. A commissioned "brutally honest" report by Carl Andognini, a U.S. nuclear expert, resulted in the closure of seven nuclear reactors in Ontario on safety grounds. Andognini stated that, "this is not a technology problem. It's a managerial problem", with lack of staff training, minimally acceptable radiation protection and minimal emergency preparedness cited.

Plutonium is an inevitable consequence of nuclear power production. The plutonium is contained in the spent nuclear fuel. It is one of the most radiotoxic and dangerous substances in existence. A single microgram, smaller than a speck of dust, can cause fatal cancer if inhaled or ingested and a sphere of plutonium smaller than a tennis ball can be used to make a nuclear bomb capable of killing many thousands of people.

The links between the civilian use of nuclear technology and military applications is one of the most disturbing aspects of the nuclear age. The very first, crude nuclear reactors were specifically built in the 1940s and 1950s to produce plutonium for the US, former Soviet Union and British bombs. Only later were they adapted to generate nuclear electricity.

As nuclear technology spreads around the globe, so does the risk of nuclear proliferation. Nuclear weapons can be constructed using plutonium from either military or civilian sources.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), several hundred scientists and contributors, all recognised internationally as experts in their field, was brought together by the UN and World Meteorological Society to assess climate change. The IPCC has considered several scenarios into climate change mitigation responses, of which one includes the global expansion of nuclear power.

In 1995 the IPCC published a study which reported as follows:

The nuclear industry’s disingenuous claims to a role in alleviating climate change must be rejected for what they are: dangerous and self-serving fantasies which would create a serious legacy of deadly radioactive waste, increase the risks of catastrophic nuclear accidents and also vastly increase the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Environmental impacts aside, nuclear economics preclude its use to combat global warming. It is not the cheapest of the non-fossil fuel alternatives; nor is it the cleanest. A host of renewable technologies have outstripped nuclear power in development and performance, while energy efficiency measures remain the most cost effective way to address the need for new power.

The challenge posed by climate change raises important questions about what kind of world we wish our children to inherit: one in which the inseparable technologies of military and civil nuclear power are prevalent in every nation or one in which energy is used wisely and generated through the use of sustainable renewable energy systems.

The choice is ours.

The wind as a source of energy has been used for 4,000 years. From its early start in the pumping water in Persia, it has become one of the most successful of the new renewable energy industries , both in terms of turnover and also newly installed capacity. The technology has changed from slow multi-blade rotors such as the American farm wind mill to sleek, three bladed rotors which are optimised for grid- connected electricity generation.

In the same way that an aeroplane plane wing is able to create lift by moving forward through the air, the wind turbine also uses a lift force on its blades to turn the rotor around its circular path and so extract energy from the flow of air. Machines of 1.5MW are now available off the shelf and wind farm installations totalled 6,500MW in 1996. It is anticipated that large wind farms will increasingly be placed off-shore where the higher cost of installation is overcome by cleaner and more consistent winds, while visual, noise and land-use limitations are avoided.

Each day the sun pours 15,000 times more energy upon the earth than we generate ourselves from fossil and nuclear sources. Photovoltaic systems are already a billion dollar business, with over 80MWp of solar cell capacity shipped in 1996 (US$1.12 billion). A PV cell is made from a sliver of silicon which is doped with small amounts of other elements. These impurities are arranged to give it a net excess of electrons on one surface and net deficit of electrons on the other surfaces. Since one side is more negatively charged than the other, an electric field is created. Nothing moves under the action of this field until a particle of light, a photon, kicks an electron out of its place in the crystal of silicon. The liberated electron can move and the space it leaves allows movement of electrons between the two sides of the wafer, Hence a current flows through a circuit joining the two surfaces. The technology is very similar to that of transistors which drive almost all modern electronics . Much younger in their development, PV systems continue to drop in price. The bulk of the current industry is in stand alone power systems that require no maintenance, though in the later part of the 1990s they are now being adopted as roofing materials for grid connected generation.

Solar thermal systems use the same approach as a child with a pocket lens burning a hole in a piece of paper. The lens is replaced by a series of mirrors and the piece of paper is replaced by the a tube of water. The tube acts as a boiler. For power generation the intensity of heat the boiler is increased and the resulting steam is used to drive a steam turbine and generator. Though solar thermal power stations are not yet mainstream the most popular use of solar thermal energy is for providing hot water. It is already popular in a number of countries including China, and in certain other countries a solar hot water heater is now a standard building requirement

Environmentally sound hydro-electricity has come to mean run-of-river turbines, or installations that make use of the flow from existing dams. The vision of thousand megawatt hydro-electric power stations as an ample source of green power has undergone substantial revaluation in the nineties. The public protests at destruction of river systems through flooding have now been joined by a recognition that the decomposition of the submerged forests and vegetation results in the production of large quantities of methane (a considerably more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) and the loss of a carbon sink.

Biomass simply refers to organic material that may be burned to produce energy, such as wood. If the rate of consumption is equal to the rate of renewal of the supply then the cycle is sustainable. For power generation the most common form of sustainable biomass is the combustion of timber waste in managed forests.

Variations include the use of sugar crops to provide alcohol as an automotive fuel as is used by over 10 million cars in Brazil, the use of organic waste in dedicated digesters to produce methane or biogas and the extraction of methane in sewerage systems that not only power the sewerage plants but sell excess energy into the grid. It should be noted that toxic additives such as pesticides in organic matter result in the production of toxic gases unless appropriate emission controls are applied*.

Decomposing organic matter produces methane. Household waste has traditionally been rich in organic waste and so the land-fills where the waste is deposited provide a concentrated supply of methane for two or three decades. By placing a cap on the land fill to seal it, then sinking gas extracting tubes into the area, the methane is drawn off as it is produced and combusted in 1MW engines adapted for the task. As with biomass, emission controls are required to avoid the production of toxic gases*.

Typical land-fills provide between 2MW and 5MW of power. As with biomass, land-fill gas is carbon dioxide neutral as it essentially uses crop waste. Land-fill gas is currently one of the cheapest of the renewables, with costs often less than 5 US cents. However, as recycling - including the composting of household waste - becomes a more productive use of organic waste, the output of future landfills will deteriorate. For the next three decades or so land-fill gas will provide a very cheap from of power and a transition supply as the other technologies further develop.

* The most effective way to prevent the formation of the dioxins and similar toxic byproducts of combustion is to avoid inputs of halogenated species or to remove such chemicals from gases to be combusted prior to combustion.