Go Greener, Australia

Today we’ve got a guest post from Wendy Palmer, who you might recognise from her comments on earlier posts here. Wendy is a fiction writer with an interest in environmental issues. She’s written a review for us of the Ian Lowe essay I mentioned yesterday.

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Reaction time: climate change and the nuclear option. Ian Lowe. Quarterly Essay 27; Melbourne, Black, Inc.Over the last year or so, the ‘nuclear power option’ has been touted as a viable solution for cutting carbon emissions and countering climate change. The publicity has been such that even some trenchant anti-nuclear people are considering nuclear power as the lesser of two evils. But can nuclear energy really solve our growing climate change and energy supply issues?In his wide-ranging essay, Lowe goes through five reasons why nuclear energy is not the solution:

• Economically, nuclear power would cost more than alternative energy producers (as well as more than conventional coal): one estimate is $75-105 per megawatt hour; only solar has the potential to cost as much at $70-$120 per megawatt hour, while wind and gas are much cheaper
• Nuclear power is too slow a response to cut carbon emissions: realistically it could take up to ten or fifteen years to build one nuclear power station in Australia, then another five years to make up for the construction and fuelling energy costs; this means it would be fifteen to twenty years for it to even start making a contribution to cutting carbon pollution. Compare that to fifteen to twenty months for introducing large-scale renewable energy production
• Nuclear power is not carbon-free: it takes a lot of fossil fuels to mine and process the ores, enrich the fuel and build the stations. Obviously the same argument applies to building renewable energy grids, but arguably they are less intensive in this regard
• Just like oil, uranium ores are a limited resource: the high-grade ores are limited and could only supply present demand for fifty years (ten years, if we increase demand to replace all coal-powered station). Then we have to use the lower-grade ores, which would require so much extra energy for extraction and processing that they could release more carbon dioxide than burning gas
• Nuclear power is dangerous: both in terms of the risk of accidents and the risk of terrorism or proliferation. The management of the radioactive waste is another major issue here, both morally (we export the ore; should we take back the waste?) and technically. These are the concerns which make many people anti-nuclear; it’s the other four issues that should make us re-consider whether it is, indeed, the lesser evil.

The whole essay makes for fascinating reading. Lowe covers some of the politics of nuclear energy and evaluates (and eviscerates) the Howard government taskforce report, Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy – Opportunities for Australia?, showing how much of its ‘positive’ endorsement for the nuclear power option is pure spin.

Lowe also spends time dispelling some of more entrenched myths about renewables: that they can’t handle baseload, that they’re expensive and will cost jobs, that they can’t be scaled up etc. In fact, the record of alternatives is pretty good both economically-speaking (job creation, for starters) and performance-wise, especially given the comparative lack of research funding.

Compared to the practicalities of nuclear power stations – where will we build them if for maximum effectiveness they should be near the demand (ie near population centres) and on the coast (for cooling water)? What will we do with the waste? How are developing nations going to handle these issues? – renewables look easy.

Lowe’s underpinning argument is simple: those touting nuclear energy as the solution are looking for a technical fix that would allow the western world to maintain its current, incredibly wasteful, lifestyle. On the other hand, alternative energies can be brought on board much faster than nuclear power and can handle our energy needs if we also become more energy-efficient – which doesn’t take a huge sacrifice on our part.