Nuclear power and ‘Promethean Environmentalism’

Put all the energy cards on the table to solve climate change fully

The climate changes because it is forced to do so. That may sound a little strange, but “forcing” is a real technical term for any pressure that causes the “average weather” to shift. Positive forcings (e.g. increased solar activity, more greenhouse gases) induce global warming, whereas negative forcings (e.g. more low-level clouds, volcanic dimming) result in cooling. Climate system feedbacks (e.g. melting ice, more water vapour) act to enhance these processes. That’s the way it’s always been, throughout Earth’s long history. When the planet is thrown out of energy balance by a change in forcing, it must respond, by warming or cooling. It can’t be bargained with and it has no room to compromise. It will do what it must do. It’s the laws of physics.

So there’s no point in half-fixing climate change. If this is our strategy, whether implicit or explicit, people may as well enjoy the Platinum Age (as Ross Garnaut calls the last few decades) and be done. Cap-and-trade systems to reduce emissions by some percentage are a good example of a “half-fix” policy. Due to the long lifetime of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere (about 20 per cent of CO2 released today will still be airborne in 1,000 years), it is only the total amount of CO2 released by humanity during the fossil-fuel age that really matters. We must limit total emissions.

In order to stop forcing the climate system towards further warming - to avoid the worst predicted impacts of climate change - we therefore have to stop using coal, oil and gas. We cannot afford to burn all of the available reserves of these, and other carbon sources, such as tar sands and oil shales.

But modern society needs energy - lots of it. Although there is plenty of scope for more efficient use of energy in developed nations, the developing world is desperately striving for energy growth. The obvious source of energy for these emerging economies is the same source used by the developing world to build its wealth and prosperity. Wishing this weren’t so won’t make that fact go away.

But if neither the developed or developing worlds can risk using coal, oil and gas, where does this energy come from? Renewable energy, for instance solar, wind and wave power, is clean, and there are huge amounts of it available. But it is diffuse - vast areas of land or coastline must be harnessed to use it on a significant scale - and it is mostly intermittent, so a distributed grid with plenty of storage and backup is essential. Scaling up renewables to be a viable replacement power source on a planetary scale is an incredible logistical challenge, and quite possibly not ever achievable.

This above should not be taken to imply that I do not support expansion of renewable energy and widespread adoption of energy efficiency measures. In some places there are wonderful opportunities for these. For instance, Australia could cut its greenhouse emissions by around 30 per cent, at little net cost, due to the payback from lower power bills thanks to more sensible use of energy. Further, Australia has a wealth of renewable energy options at its disposal (huge deserts that are perfect for solar thermal power, long stretches of windy coastline for large turbines, and a large endowment of deep hot dry rocks that have the potential to supply baseload geothermal energy).

Sadly, that isn’t the case everywhere. Some nations with large populations have few renewable energy sources available to them. And even for Australia, it will almost certainly be too difficult and costly to run our entire energy economy using renewable power, without sufficient non-coal backup, because of serious technical, logistical and cost penalties of energy storage, integration and grid management.

Nuclear energy may well be that backup, or indeed (as I suspect) a mainstay for future energy generation in Australia and worldwide. For instance, there is a technology developed at the Argonne National Laboratory USA called integral fast reactor nuclear power, which burns up 99 per cent of the nuclear fuel, leaves no long-lived waste, is passively safe (“meltdowns” are exceedingly unlikely) and does not generate weapons-grade material (see Part II for more details). It’s been researched for more than 10 years and is ready for demonstration. It, and other new generation nuclear technologies, warrants further attention.

One risks ire from many sides when discussing nuclear energy as a climate solution. Those climate sceptics with a vested interest in the fossil fuel forever status quo will say there is no climate or energy supply problem to fix, so why bother? Hardened environmentalists will tell you that nuclear in any form is unsafe, polluting, risks weapons proliferation, and is unnecessary given renewable power sources (even when briefed about how integral fast reactors solve all of these concerns). No matter. It is vitally important that everyone else, and that’s most people, understand the real issues.

So my basic point is this. Do you wish to be part of a full solution to the climate crisis? Furthermore, do you want a secure domestic energy supply that is not dependent on foreign oil and other dwindling, increasingly expensive and polluting sources? If you are NOT satisfied with only half-fixing these problems, then it’s time to lay out all of the future-of-energy cards on the table, for open and rational discussion. Nuclear may well be the ace in the deck, or it may be the card that makes up the royal flush. Either way, don’t throw it on the discard pile.

Why old nuclear power is not new

Earlier, I expressed the view that nuclear power will play a key role in the world’s future energy mix. My bottom line was this: the climate and energy crises need fixing with extreme urgency, and both require solutions which completely solve their underlying causes. Half measures at best merely help to delay the same eventual result as business-as-usual (and at worst encourage complacency), saddling future generations with a climatically hostile planet with a scarcity of available energy.

In recent “lively” discussions I’ve had with other environmentalists about nuclear power, five principle objections are consistently mounted against the viability or desirability of nuclear power.

First, uranium supplies are small, such that if the world was wholly powered by nuclear reactors, there would be at most a few decades of energy to use before our resource was exhausted and the power plants would have to shut down.

Second, nuclear accidents have happened in the past, and therefore this power-generation technology is inherently dangerous.

Third, expansion of nuclear power would axiomatically risk the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Fourth, in taking the short-term nuclear energy option, we would be bequeathing future generations with the legacy of long-lived nuclear waste requiring thousands of years of management.

Fifth, large amounts of energy (and possibly greenhouse gases) would be required to mine, mill and enrich uranium, and to construct and later decommission the nuclear power stations themselves.

Cost and embedded energy arguments used against nuclear are complex and must be left for another time, because to be addressed fairly, this also requires a critical examination of the costs and embedded energy requirements for the alternative sources (renewables and fossil fuels).

Now all five of the above points have some merit, although their relative importance compared to threat of climate change and the societal disruption caused by critical energy shortages is debatable. The chaos and bitter complaints which stemmed from the power shortages experienced during the current heatwave in southern Australia demonstrate how dependent we are on a secure, reliable energy supply. But to be honest, there is little point in even having a debate on how persuasive these five objections are, because none will be applicable to future nuclear energy generation.

Of the 440 commercial nuclear power stations operating worldwide today and supplying 16 per cent of the world’s electricity, almost all are “thermal spectrum” reactors. This technology, first developed for the US Navy in the early 1950s, uses ordinary or heavy water to both slow the neutrons which cause uranium atoms to split (fission) and to carry the heat generated in this controlled chain reaction to a steam turbine to generate electricity. Because of the gradual build-up of fission products (nuclear poisons) in fuel rods over time, we end up getting about 1 per cent of the useable energy out of the uranium, and throw the rest out as that problematic long-lived high-level waste.

With 50 years of subsequent development, the nuclear industry has come a long way in terms of efficiency, costs reductions and risk minimisation. Modern reactors are incredibly safe, with physics-based “passive” safety systems requiring no user-operated or mechanical control to shut down the reaction. Indeed, a certification assessment for the “Generation III+” Economic and Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) put the risk of a core meltdown as severe as the one which occurred at Three Mile Island (TMI) in 1979 at once every 29 million years. For reference, the TMI incident resulted in no deaths. Similarly, comparing the inherently unsafe Chernobyl reactor design, with a flawed design and no containment building, to an ESBWR, is akin to comparing an army revolver to a water gun.

“Fast spectrum” liquid metal reactors, and molten salt liquid fluoride reactors, also known as “Generation IV”, are able to use 99.5 per cent of the energy in uranium or thorium. There is enough energy in already-mined uranium and stored plutonium from existing stockpiles to supply all the world’s power needs for over a century before we even need to mine any more uranium to supply Gen IV - although I should note, for Australia’s immediate benefit, that uranium mining will need to continue for at least 40 years to ensure ongoing supply to the world’s currently operating Gen II and recently built Gen III/III+ reactors. Looking further ahead, there is enough energy in proven uranium and thorium deposits to supply the entire world for at least 50,000 years. Gen IV reactors can also burn up all existing reserves of plutonium and the “high-level waste stream” (spent fuel from the once-through cycle) of past and present Gen II/III reactors.

The safety features of Gen IV designs, due for instance to the metal alloy fuel used, is superior even to the ESBWR. The nuclear fuel used by fast reactors is fiendishly radioactive and contaminated with various heavy elements (which are all eventually burned up in the power generation process!), making it impossible to divert to a nuclear weapons program without an expensive, heavily shielded off-site reprocessing facility which would be easily detected by inspectors.

Yet in reality the only nuclear waste material that will ever leave an Integrated Fast Reactor complex (a systems design for a Gen IV power station which includes on-site reprocessing) are fission products, which decay to background levels of radiation with a few hundred years (not hundreds of millennia), and can be readily stored because they produce so little heat compared to “conventional” nuclear waste.

For further details in an accessible (indeed highly readable) form, I refer you to the book Prescription for the Planet by Tom Blees (look on Amazon), which discusses the Integral Fast Reactor technology in-depth, as well as ways to transform our vehicle fleet to use zero-emissions metal-powered burners and how to convert our municipal solid waste to plasma. I have also set up an information page on these critical technologies at my climate and energy website.

Business-as-usual projections suggest that at current pace, we may have Gen IV fast spectrum reactors delivering commercial power by 2025 to 2030. Too late, you say! True enough, but these same sort of forward projections resulted in the International Energy Agency recently predicting that non-hydro renewables will go from meeting 1 per cent, to 2 per cent, of global energy use. Either option therefore requires radically accelerated research, development and deployment, if it is to make a difference to climate change and energy supply. A project of Manhattan-style proportions (America’s development of the atom bomb, three years after the first controlled chain reaction) or the audacity of the moon-shot vision (12 years from Sputnik to Neil Armstrong’s famous small step), is required.

There is no doubt in my mind that we have the means to “fix” the climate and energy crises, or at least avert the worst consequences, if we have full recognition of the scale and immediacy of the challenges now faced. New generation nuclear power is one possible path to success, and one that all nations should actively support - though certainly not to the exclusion of other zero-carbon energy options such as renewables and efficiencies. So let’s be sure, when rationally considering energy planning, that we are not mired in old-school thinking about exciting new technologies.

The time has come to be “Promethean Environmentalists”, by embracing nuclear fission as the most well-developed, scalable and concentrated form of clean and sustainable power for an energy-hungry world.

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