More subsidies

Despite the fact that this failed technology has received global subsidies of around $1 trillion over the past 50 years, Ritch wants the nuclear renaissance to be “pump primed ” with even more taxpayers money. The world should move “beyond Kyoto” to a regime with strong political signals and economic incentives for what he calls “clean-energy technology”.

Ritch accuses UN development bodies of being “intimidated by, old-school anti-nuclear environmentalism”. He says international institutions should directly support nuclear investment with even more subsidies disguised as aid for the developing world. “This economic aid will be the most cost-effective in history if it helps to prevent the globally destructive growth in greenhouse emissions that might otherwise occur in the developing world”.

Nuclear Waste

There is no operating nuclear dump for high-level radioactive waste anywhere in the world yet, according to Ritch, nuclear waste isn’t a problem, compared with carbon emissions:

“…the small volume and manageability of nuclear waste represent distinct environmental assets in a world where the continuing use of our atmosphere as a carbon dumpsite is fast carrying us toward global catastrophe”.

He says if we generated all the world’s energy from reactors we would create “an amount of high-level nuclear waste no greater than the amount of carbon waste that today’s power plants spew into Earth’s atmosphere every four minutes, around the clock”.

All except one of the few nuclear waste dumps planned around the world are expected to open after 2020. The delayed Yucca Mountain project in the US has been pushed back from the original deadline of 1998 to at least 2012. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) a tripling of global nuclear capacity to 1000GW would require a new Yucca-sized dump to be opened somewhere every three or four years, and even without new reactors, the US will need a second dump by 2012, if Yucca sticks to its statutory limit for waste.

But Ritch wants a twenty-fold increase in nuclear capacity. He says we need nothing less than 8,000-10,000 Gigawatts by the end of this century. “To plan for anything less would be to invite environmental disaster”. Even a tenfold increase would require a new Yucca Mountain to be opened somewhere in the world every year.

Proliferation

Ritch says nuclear proliferation dangers come not from the existence of nuclear facilities but from the intentions of those who possess them.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says we need a new system to ensure that 20 to 30 new countries do not develop nuclear weapons, on top of the nine current nuclear powers, including North Korea. The IAEA wants to keep sensitive nuclear facilities that can be easily used to divert materials for making bombs within the G8 countries. Other countries would not be allowed to enrich uranium fuel, or to reprocess spent fuel to extract plutonium. They will be permitted to run reactors to generate electricity but will have to buy fuel enrichment and reprocessing services from G8 countries.

Ritch says WNA is working with IAEA to strengthen proliferation safeguards but these must happen in parallel with, and not be allowed to delay global nuclear expansion. Controlling who can have access to what type of technology is almost certain to be impossible, and attempting to enforce it would engender resentment and create a colossal security threat. Yet Ritch doesn’t want to wait until such a system is set up to see if it works because:

“…there is no global security measure more urgent or important than the nuclear renaissance itself.”

Even MIT says the current non-proliferation regime must be strengthened or “…the option of a significant global expansion of nuclear power may be impossible”.

Under MIT’s scenario in which global nuclear capacity triples, it would take the theft of just 0.0025% of the MoX manufactured every year to provide the plutonium for a nuclear bomb. The number of reprocessing facilities required – given the inherent difficulty in attempting to safeguard large plutonium separation plants – would pose a huge proliferation risk.

The massive increase in global uranium enrichment capacity required to feed Ritch’s 20-fold expansion of nuclear capacity would require a diffusion of knowledge and increase in trade in specialised materials and equipment on an unprecedented scale, making it progressively more difficult to identify clandestine weapons programmes.

Ritch doesn’t mention one of the unique vulnerabilities associated with nuclear power – the potential for catastrophic accident. Under MIT’s scenario traditional risk assessments suggest that there would be 4 core damage accidents by 2055. MIT notes that this many accidents “poses potential significant public health risks and … would destroy public confidence”. Of course Ritch wants ten times more capacity than MIT – so that’s 40 accidents – a mixture of Chernobyls and Three MileIslands by 2100. Maybe the public should skip a step and withdraw its confidence now rather than waiting for the accidents.

Developing countries, like the rest of us, have limited resources, and so must choose the most efficient way to spend. Ritch is right about the seriousness of the climate change threat, but this makes it essential that limited resources are spent on the fastest and most effective climate solutions. Nuclear power is just the opposite. Investment in more expensive nuclear power will, in effect, worsen climate change because each dollar spent is buying less solution than it would do if it were spent on energy efficiency or renewables. What we should be doing is helping developing countries establish the infrastructure for a sustainable energy system by, for example, building energy efficient light bulb manufacturing facilities.

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