French exceptionalism: a guide through the energy wars

Are the “culture wars” being transformed into “energy wars”? That’s what we might see after Bali for quite a while - brought about by the Green doctrine on human-made global warming, which is going mainstream and could ultimately rock most developed economies.

What is at stake in this new battle? With the kind of European pressure experienced in Bali - with the backdrop of the so-called consent on climate change getting more controversial by the day - the Rudd Government seems committed to set short-term emission cuts on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by mid-2008 at the earliest.

Yet such cuts jeopardise our standard of living and Western credentials to boot: individual liberty, indispensable economic growth, free trade and markets.

Emma Brindal arguing for “climate justice” in the run up to Bali wrote on the Australian Climate Action Network’s Weblog, a climate change response should have “at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources”. This motive together with the tactical exclusion of the developing countries by European activists exposes the global warming campaign as another envy driven anti-capitalist attack.

If carbon cuts of about 20 per cent by 2020 or 80 per cent by 2050, based on 1990 emissions, become official policy, Australians might wake up to a different world. Any service and product may then become subject to carbon-taxes with energy prices the first to rise dramatically.

Already UN officials are threatening to enforce a “mandatory global CO2 tax”. And the European Commission is aiming for carbon regulated cars that would cost $2,000-3,000 more than at present.

An assault on human freedom to procreate comes from Dr Barry Waters, who in a recent issue of the Australian Medical Journal calls for green population control with a “Baby Levy”. This is meant to offset the “carbon footprint” of newborns by planting 40 trees. Parents who give birth to more than two children, would be charged $5,000 at birth for each one, followed by an annual carbon-tax of $400-800.

With most of the Anglosphere possibly dominated by the secular Left in years to come, green Democrats and Labour are trying to occupy the commanding heights of “cultural hegemony”. Let’s look for respite at the Francosphere. France provides an attractive role model for the “energy wars”.

France has, for the better part of the last century, been the beacon of nuclear energy generation worldwide - against a trend among most, but by no means all, of her neighbours. Nevertheless the mere persistence of France’s exception has already helped to turn around public opinion in the West. A 2005 EU poll returned as much as 62 per cent votes to the advantage of nuclear power, up from 41 per cent in 2001. And in a recent poll a mere 30 per cent of Britons were against and 60 per cent in favour of nuclear energy. In nuclear-free Australia a public poll returned only 45 per cent in favour last March, down from 49 per cent in June 2006.

Lucky France, where for a long time polls returned a stable two-thirds majority for nuclear power. Some pundits even guess America, long known for her unique exceptionalism, while now on the right track, is roughly 50 years behind the French in realising that Western security is jeopardised by the reliance on imported energy.

Greenpeace founders James Lovelock and Patrick Moore, now advocates of nuclear power, appear as mavericks compared to the French mainstream environmentalist Bruno Comby, who founded Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy (EFN) which has grown since the early 90s to a nearly 10,000 member strong international organisation.

However, we have to keep in mind that after all, it is far from proven that reducing GHG can halt global warming. Nevertheless the French experience has been widely cited as demonstrating both the impact nuclear power can have on curbing dependence on fossil fuels and on the emission of greenhouse gases.

In September last year the London based Economist opined, “geopolitics, technology, economics and the environment are all changing in nuclear’s favour”. The main reason: the bulk of fossil fuel is in the hands of instable or hostile countries, but an abundance of uranium comes from friendly Canada and Australia. Another reason: increasingly costly gas is setting electricity prices and has made existing nuclear plants greatly profitable.

Back to miraculous France. Upon travelling through the beautiful Loire valley during summer you will notice a nuclear power station with an attractive design by the father of Op-art Victor Vasarely. A few hundred meters downstream you may then observe people blithely enjoying a dip in the river.

Contrary to most other rather boring power stations the French boast an almost Cartesian-Palladian design. During the better part of the last century French exceptionalism granted firm support by the political left for nuclear energy. In fact the founder and head for the first decade of the French post-war atomic enterprise was a leading communist: Nobel Prize winner Frederic Joliot-Curie. Everywhere else the left opposed nuclear power with only marginal exceptions such as Britain’s Tony Benn.

It was only when, for a short while, in the late 1980s France tried to “bury” nuclear waste permanently in dumpsites that protest flared up. After officials understood the psychology behind the protests, the desecration of the earth, order and calm was restored with a policy of temporary storage on site until science can deal with the problem.

In the era of knowledge-based economies Australia could learn a lot from France’s exceptionally strong cultural appreciation of scientific progress - famously expressed in very popular projects like the high-speed train TGV, the late supersonic Concorde, Airbus 380 or the fusion reactor ITER. This is an international cutting-edge research project, co-ordinated by France in which scientist hope to generate energy from the fusion of the massive nuclei of trans-uranic elements. Other parties are the European Union, Japan, China, India, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the USA.

France boasts that, since 1973, it has continuously increased nuclear electricity generation so that it is now close to 80 per cent of the country’s needs, thus reversing her role from being a net energy importer to being by now the largest exporter of electricity in the world. Italy, Belgium, UK and Germany are meanwhile major customers of “politically incorrect” nuclear electricity from France - generating revenues of €3 billion a year.

Obviously this did not happen by chance. It was the result of thorough thinking and pure necessity. France has few fossil fuel resources of its own, and therefore the nuclear option was pivotal to post-war reconstruction.

France commenced with a quasi-autonomous institution, called Comissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA), directly linked to the Prime Minister and therefore not subject to budget battles. Nevertheless it was again the exceptional trust in French public service officials, who tend to be trained engineers - rather than lawyers as typical in the US - that helped to maintain public confidence in the nuclear program.

The excellent security record of the French nuclear industry is usually attributed to synergies from central management, reactor standardisation, a better learning curve and better homogenous training facilities for personnel. France has reached a higher degree in standardisation in her nuclear industry than anyone else in the world.

But after the oil shock and the huge extension of the French nuclear power program public trust was also greatly enhanced by multi million dollar television advertising campaigns that explained the necessity of electricity generation: “France does not have oil, but France has ideas.” Public tours to power plants in the past, taken up by 6 million visitors, have also helped to produce a steady acceptance. With her first commercial reactor commissioned in 1963 the average age of French reactors is now 18 years giving them a remaining operating time of about 22 years. Therefore France is well positioned to utilise significant amounts of nuclear energy in the decades to come.

However still 50 per cent of her total energy consumption comes from imported oil, down from 76 per cent in 1973. Of the ₣400 hundred billion (francs) (in 1993 prices) for its nuclear program half has been self-financed by “Electricite de France” (EdF), 8 per cent invested by government, and 42 per cent financed through commercial loans.

France claims that its latest generation N4 reactors (1,450MW) which have operated in Civaux since 1999 are at least as economic as equal sized coal plants and well below costs of gas-fired units. This has made France’s electricity among the cheapest in Western Europe. French and German engineers are presently developing the next generation of nuclear reactors, the European Pressurised Water (EPR) reactor expected to start operation over the next five years. The Italians are jostling to join in as well.

A comprehensive evaluation and critique of the French Nuclear program has been published by the London-based economist Francois Nectoux for Greenpeace in 1991. Back then he opined the French nuclear program was in the midst of an “economic and industrial crisis”. That has not materialised 16 years on. However on the positive side Green peace conceded that the French program reduced heavy oil and coal import for electricity generation.

This sort of fair judgment seems to have been lost since with other parts of the Green movement. Just look at the terrible experience of Germany with a prospect of a nuclear-free future. There you see the deplorable effects of the Green party, which held the balance of power for a decade and used their influence to stop all nuclear development. A dedicated nuclear scientist has described it as “a soul-destroying experience for thousands of scientists and engineers who have spent most of their lives bringing their project to fruition”.

The Green movement has already created a lost generation of science-illiterate youths in many Western countries with long-lasting cultural effects. Again the French have experienced exceptionally less damages of this kind thanks to venerable institutions like the Grande Ecoles and the Engineering Universities. As someone presently working everyday in the august Victorian State Library - packed with thousands of Chinese and Indian students - I get a feeling as to who will finally win the energy wars.

Responsible energy mix for Australia

Britain’s government has just decided on a new nuclear energy program and will build four new nuclear power stations in the coming decade. A 2006 study from the Australian House of Representatives detected 441 commercial nuclear power reactors worldwide operating in 31 countries. They generate 16 per cent of our energy supply. About 27 nuclear reactors are currently under construction and at least 38, some estimate well over 100, are planned or on order worldwide.

Therefore nuclear capacity is expected to increase by 22 per cent until 2025 - generating a surging demand in uranium, of which Australia has plenty. There is a strong case to be made for the use of nuclear power in Australia in order to provide the more than doubling demand in electricity from 48GW now to 100GW by 2050.

Under a scenario in which the first reactor comes online in 2020, and with a fleet of 25 reactors in place by 2050, nuclear power could be delivering about one third of Australia’s electricity needs.

Another good argument is the due replacement of her submarines giving a welcome opportunity to catch up with international standards of nuclear propelled ships. Unfortunately the two parliamentary reports do not discuss the potential benefits of smart fast breeders. These fast-neutron reactors could extract much more recycled nuclear fuel and minimise the risks of weapon proliferation. They produce much less nuclear waste with a radioactivity dropping to safe levels in a few hundred years instead of tens of thousands of years. Fast breeders not only would increase the efficiency to 90 per cent they also render the uranium supply inexhaustible and enabling true sustainability.

And - just to set the minds of some climate-alarmists at rest - this would save GHG emissions of roughly 50 per cent of the projected emissions from electricity generation. Already by the year 2000, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, nuclear and hydroelectric power together annually avoided GHG emissions of about 8 per cent of the total global emissions from fossil fuels, equal to 1.2 billion tons of carbon.

One last reassuring thought in the tradition of good old French scientific enlightenment: man did not invent the nuclear processes that occur in nuclear fission reactors. These processes have been occurring on the earth since its formation. Such natural uranium fission was discovered by French scientist in 1972 in the Oklo uranium deposit in Gabon (equatorial Africa). Thus are we not just emulating nature? It has been theorised in this sense that a “natural reactor” in the earth’s core produces enough heat to keep its outer layer liquid, which produces the enormous electricity required for the earth’s magnetic field. Are we going to allow the Greens to persuade us we can do without?