Nuclear energy option for Singapore still far away: MTI

Jermyn Chow Straits Times 17 Mar 11;

ANY decision on whether or not to have nuclear energy in Singapore is a long way away, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) reiterated yesterday.

Responding to requests from The Straits Times for an update on the nuclear option, MTI said that Singapore is in the midst of a 'pre-feasibility study on nuclear energy'.

It said safety is a very important consideration, and is one of the key areas being studied.

'It will be a long time before we make any decision on nuclear energy. We are closely monitoring and learning from the developments in Japan,' it added in a statement.

At an energy conference in November last year, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had identified nuclear power as an 'important part of the solution to mankind's energy problems'.

He said Singapore was building up its capabilities now because the nuclear option is one it 'cannot afford to dismiss'.

Measures taken will include getting in touch with nuclear experts as well as training local engineers and scientists.

He said then that MTI was doing a pre-feasibility study on having nuclear power here, but it will be a long time before any decision is made.

Those in the nuclear and energy fields contacted said that events in Japan were unlikely to derail the pre-feasibility study.

Assistant Professor T.S. Gopi Rethinaraj of the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy said: 'What happened in Japan is an act of God and highly unlikely to happen in Singapore as it does not sit on any fault lines and will be insulated from any earthquakes or tsunamis.'

He holds a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Agreeing, Dr Hooman Peimani, who heads the energy security division at NUS' Energy Studies Institute, pointed out that there had been only two other major nuclear plant accidents over the last 60 years.

They were the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in the United States, and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine.

He said that aside from natural calamities, terrorist threats and saboteurs, there were no 'worst-case scenarios' that might hamper Singapore's nuclear capabilities.

'Even so, Singapore's oil refineries have already been so well guarded over the past 30 years, I don't think defence or security will be an issue,' said Dr Peimani, who presented a paper on the viability of underground nuclear reactors in Singapore at the Nuclear Power conference last year.

Mr Ravi Krishnaswamy, vice-president of consultancy Frost & Sullivan's Asia-Pacific energy and power systems practice, said that the decision to build nuclear reactors will take years.

During pre-feasibility studies, the authorities will, among other things, assess if nuclear energy is feasible and look at its implications on health, he said.

Decision on nuclear energy will take "a long time": MTI
Hoe Yeen Nie Channel NewsAsia 16 Mar 11;

SINGAPORE: Safety is one of the key considerations in a current pre-feasibility study on nuclear energy, and it will be "a long time" before any decision is made, said Singapore's Trade and Industry Ministry.

The ministry said this in response to a query from Channel NewsAsia which received comments from viewers who wanted to know about Singapore's nuclear plans in the wake of Japan's crisis.

The ministry said it is also monitoring and learning from the developments in Japan.

In November, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had said Singapore should not dismiss the option of nuclear power as a viable and clean source of energy.

Mr Lee also said a nuclear power plant could be built within his lifetime.

Friday's deadly quake and tsunami have damaged a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, causing fears of a nuclear meltdown.

The crisis has prompted several European countries to review safety standards at their plants.

- CNA/cc

No nuclear energy plans yet for Singapore but study in the works
Today Online 17 Mar 11;

Responding to MediaCorp's queries, Singapore's Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) reiterated that it "will be a long time" before the Government makes any decision on nuclear energy.

According to MTI, the Government was in the midst of a "pre-feasibility study" on nuclear energy. The pre-feasibility study is to explore whether Singapore can even begin to consider nuclear energy.

The MTI said: "Safety is a very important consideration and is one of the key areas being studied."

It added: "We are closely monitoring and learning from the developments in Japan."

Last November, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had said that while a nuclear power project was not scheduled to start any time soon, a nuclear plant could be built in Singapore "during my lifetime". ESTHER NG

Rethink Singapore's nuclear option
Straits Times Forum 17 Mar 11;

AS JAPAN continues to race against time to avert a nuclear disaster in the wake of last Friday's earthquake and tsunami, other Asian nations, including Singapore, should pause and review the feasibility of the nuclear energy option.

The Government and our experts must carefully study the claims of nuclear power plant companies that are promising high safety and reliability standards.

Despite the safety measures Japan adopted, what we have seen in recent days is a breakdown of the assurances by the nuclear industry.

Singapore is small and it is physically impossible to meet the 30km radius safety requirement for a nuclear power plant.

Siow Jia Rui

How sure are we of nuclear safety claims?
Letter from Siow Jia Rui Today Online 17 Mar 11;

AS JAPAN continues to race against time to avert a nuclear disaster in the wake of last Friday's earthquake and tsunami, described by Prime Minister Naoto Kan as the "most severe crisis" since World War II, it is useful for countries in Asia, including Singapore, to pause and rethink the feasibility of the nuclear energy option.

In 2008, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew noted at the Singapore Energy Lecture that "the real alternative that can produce the electricity generation to match oil and gas is nuclear".

As Singapore considers whether or not to embark on the nuclear option, I strongly urge our Government and experts/consultants to carefully study the claims of the nuclear power plant companies that are promising high safety and reliability standards.

Despite all the safety measures put in place in Japan, what we have seen in recent days is a breakdown of the assurances by the nuclear industry that the redundancies and fail-safe mechanisms will actually work.

We all know that the probability of a nightmare scenario can never be reduced to zero. Singapore is small and it is physically impossible to meet the 30-km radius safety requirement for a nuclear power plant.

Realistically, given Singapore's size, if a major nuclear accident were to take place here, we face the real risk of becoming a nation of refugees.

I, for one, am not willing to see that happening to our country or to put at risk the lives of our children and future generations of Singaporeans.


Nothing clean and green about nuclear power
Benjamin K. Sovacool, For The Straits Times 17 Mar 11;

THE unfolding situation with the Fukushima No. 1 and Fukushima No. 2 plants in Japan has underscored the grave safety concerns with nuclear power, which has never had a laudable environmental record.

South-east Asian planners, including those in Singapore, often forget the serious environmental impact associated with other parts of the nuclear fuel cycle, especially those relating to uranium mining and climate change.

For example, the uranium needed to fuel all reactors, including those in Japan, is mined in three different ways: underground mining, open-pit mining and in-situ leaching. Each is hazardous, and bad for people and the environment.

Underground mining extracts uranium much like other minerals such as copper, gold and silver, and involves digging narrow shafts deep into the earth.

Open-pit mining, the most prevalent type, is similar to strip mining for coal, where upper layers of rock are removed so that machines can extract uranium.

Uranium miners perform in-situ leaching by pumping acid or alkaline liquid solutions into the areas surrounding uranium deposits.

In Australia, the third-largest producer of uranium, a detailed investigation of the environmental impact from the Rum Jungle mine found that it discharged acidic liquid wastes directly into creeks that flowed into the Finniss River.

The Roxby Downs mine has polluted the Arabunna people's traditional land with 80 million tonnes of annual dumped tailings, in addition to the mine's daily extraction of 30 million litres of water from the Great Artesian Basin. The Ranger mine has seen 120 documented leaks, spills and breaches of its tailings waste, which has seeped into waterways and contaminated the Kakuda wetlands. The Beverley mine has been fined for dumping liquid radioactive waste into groundwater.

In China, the country's largest uranium mine, No. 792, is reputed to dump untreated radioactive water directly into the Bailong River, a tributary of the Yangtze.

In India, researchers from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai found that underground uranium mines at Bhatin, Narwapahar and Turamdih, along with the uranium enrichment plant at Jaduguda, discharged mine water and mill tailings contaminated with radionuclides such as radon and residual uranium, radium and other pollutants directly into local water supplies.

Such examples have not been chosen selectively, with scores of serious documented incidents also at uranium mines in Brazil, Canada, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, South Africa, Tajikistan, the United States, Uzbekistan and a slew of African states - virtually every major country where it is produced.

Even climate change, an issue the nuclear industry has been quick to rally around, does not bode favourably for new nuclear plants. Reprocessing and enriching uranium require a substantial amount of electricity, often generated by fossil fuel-fired power plants. Uranium milling, mining, leaching, plant construction and decommissioning all produce substantial amounts of greenhouse gases.

When one takes into account the carbon-equivalent emissions associated with the entire nuclear life cycle, nuclear plants contribute significantly to climate change - and will contribute even more as stockpiles of high-grade uranium are depleted.

An assessment of 103 life-cycle studies of greenhouse gas-equivalent emissions for nuclear power plants found that the average carbon dioxide emissions over the typical lifetime of a plant are about 66g for every kilowatt hour (kwh), or the equivalent of about 183 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2005.

If the global nuclear industry were taxed at a rate of US$24 (S$31) per tonne for the carbon-equivalent emissions associated with its life cycle, the cost of nuclear power would increase by about US$4.4 billion per year.

A secondary impact is that by producing large amounts of heat, nuclear power plants contribute directly to global warming by increasing the temperature of water bodies and localised atmospheres around each facility.

The carbon-equivalent emissions of the nuclear life cycle will only get worse, not better, because, over time, reprocessed fuel is depleted, necessitating a shift to fresh ore, and reactors must utilise lower-quality ores as higher-quality ones are depleted.

The Oxford Research Group projects that because of this inevitable shift to lower-quality uranium ore, if the percentage of world nuclear capacity remains what it is today, by 2050, nuclear power would generate as much carbon dioxide per kwh as comparable natural gas-fired power stations.

These two factors - the environmental degradation with uranium mining, and the associated greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power facilities - mean that regardless of whatever happens in Japan, nuclear power is in no way clean, green or carbon-free.

The writer is an assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.