Don’t nuke the climate

Jakarta Post 14 Dec 07;

While the ‘high level segment’ of the climate negotiations is about to start everyone involved is also aware of the difficult decisions that are to be made. There seems to be a lot of optimism inside the convention centre and according to officials we are close to agreements.

While that would be a success in itself we should not forget that the real tough decisions and actions are to be taken in the coming years; how will we actually achieve the targets that we agreed upon.

Of course, we have savings and more efficiency, and we know there is much even so called low hanging fruit in there still. But we will also need more energy, at least for many developing countries who have the full right to increase their energy consumption, hopefully mainly helping the almost 2 billion people who currently do not even have access to electricity.

If the environmental movement, together with a coalition of willing governments manage to set very high standards for solutions as bio fuels and clean coal the pressure to go nuclear will increase.

And so one can already see this happening in the climate talks. From our 30 years experience of working on this issue my organisation strongly believe this would be the wrong path to go, not only dragging us into a new era of nuclear pollution, cost-overruns, accidents, more radioactive waste for which we don’t have a solution but also leading necessary investments in the wrong direction, effectively locking us in for many years.

Nuclear energy is not a sustainable energy source. Not only does it effectively contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases (life-cycle analysis show that a kilowatt of nuclear energy emits as much as one from a modern gas-fired plant), are we running out of the be-needed uranium, some of the man-made radioactive elements like plutonium will be with us forever, causing cancers and leukaemia for hundreds of generations to come.

Some argue that we have no choice but to accept nuclear in the so-called transition phase, the 30 or so years in which we leave behind the fossil era and move towards the real sustainable energy future. One should than take into account that there are two very good reasons not to accept nukes even for a limited period. First are the costs. A single modern nuclear power station costs about 3.5 billion dollar to build. That is, if everything goes smoothly. The only western country currently building an npp (Finland) has to deal with large cost overruns. This is all money that, if invested in clean energy sources, would much quicker be able to serve the needs. And without any environmental disadvantages.

Second is the timing. We need climate action and we need it now. It takes at least 15 years (again, if everything goes as anticipated) to build an npp. If we would only want to replace the existing fleet as they are in the coming decades to be closed because of aging, we would need to build dozens of them.

There is no way the industry is capable of doing this. Let alone real new plants to meet the growing need for energy. It would be too late, too expensive and too dirty. So, accepting nuclear as part of the solution to fight climate change would effectively only mean new huge state subsidies and incentives for a nuclear industry which has, despite having had 50 years to proof itself, completely failed to deliver an affordable, clean and reliable source of energy

In 2000 we managed to keep the nuclear option out of the so-called flexible mechanisms going with the Kyoto-agreement. We now have to be very aware of this danger again and make sure that any post Kyoto agreement recognises nuclear as a false solution.

(Peer de Rijk, Nusa Dua, Bali. The writer is Executive Director of World Information Service on Energy.(WISE)