The Gray Monk

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May 19, 2006

Nuclear future?

It was entirely predictable that, as soon as the PM mentioned the "N" word in his speech the other night, that all the usual fluffy jumper, dodgy science brigade from Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and CND would be out in the media in force howling about "renewable" energy and "energy saving" and how the money could be "better spent" on any number of crack brained schemes they espouse. All the usual claptrap about "massive quantities of radioactive waste" and "potential bombs" have re-emerged, alongside, of course, the plea to completely cover the UK in wind turbines, wave generators and barrage schemes. As usual too, the statistics are trotted out that show that, per head of population, we use more energy than a peasant in Dharfor or the outer reaches of the Australian Outback Aboriginal tribesmen. Which ignores completely that fact that a peasant in Africa probably has less need to heat his home than I do, but he also has far more offspring than I do. Ergo, if you measured it on a like for like basis, the balance would be a bit more even!

Looking at the breakdown of energy sources in the UK, we find that currently 40% is from natural gas, 33% from coal (now THAT really pollutes and certainly kills more people than the nuclear industry has done), 20% nuclear and 3% comes from wind turbines and hydr-electric schemes. The pro-renewable lobby want to achieve a balance by 2020 that sees the wind turbine section replace nuclear - ergo to expand it to 23% of the supply, and to run down the coal portion as well. Given that we are already net purchasers of power from French Nuclear Electrc sources for the South East and that the gas we use is increasingly imported from the Middle East and Russia, the sums simply do not stack up in favour of the woolly-pully arguments for renewables - not without a major reduction in power consumption (not going to happen) or a serious reduction in population (again, not likely) or a return to some sort of 1950's idyll where we used less power, heated our homes with small gas fires in one room only and lived on "organic" food which was locally produced.

Lets get real. Nuclear offers the least problems in terms of environmental impact, carbon emmissions and waste. Yes, the disposal of the waste is a longterm problem, but it is not insurmountable and solutions are being found to a great deal of it. The most radioactive part of it, the fuel rods, can be reprocessed and re-used (renewable fuel) and the actual quantities produced and in use at any one time are very small indeed. It is time that the anti-nuclear lobby stopped trying to frighten people with their exaggerations and their decidely iffy science and started behaving positively and responsibly in the pursuit of solutions. They are rapidly becoming a major part of the problem when they should be a part of the solution. For example, few people will now remember the row over the proposal to sink the redundant Brent Spar oil storage platform in a deep trench under the Atlantic. Greenpeace claimed there was over 50,000 tons of oils still onboard and launched court cases, protests and a political campaign to prevent this process - even claiming there was "radioactive waste" onboard.

In the end, the Spar was broken up on land, causing of the order of ten times the pollution and it was then revealed that there was no more than a hundred tons of oil sludge - oily sediment that settles out of crude oil - in the bottom of the tanks and that the "radioactive waste" was in fact this same mud. Have we had any apology for misleading the public? Or for the health hazard they imposed on those who broke it up, disposed of the contaminated steel or the sludge? Of course not! Neither Greenpeace nor Friends of the Earth would wish to own up to the fact that almost all of their campaigning does not rely on science, it is emotive and it is designed to play on the fears of the ignorant. It is time to put a stop to that, and to act responsibly, something those running these political lobby groups are simply incapable of doing.

I rarely agree with this government, but this is one occassion that I do. Nuclear power is the only truly viable way to reduce the serious emmission problem from power generation and we would be lunatic not to use it. Our next big hurdle is to address the one thing everyone ignores - heat exchange. This is only my guess, but my limited understanding of physics tells me that everytime we heat something, the heat must be absorbed in the atmosphere (and the oceans are really only liquid atmosphere!) and it must therefore impact cumulatively on the overall atmospheric heating. More people, generating more heat, more heat to be dissapated and absorbed - and we have a prime source of heating of the atmosphere.

It really is time to stop squabbling over targets and percentages which have no scientific base and to look at the whole problem, not isolated bits of it! For the moment I am for nuclear power, but I also want to see a proper appraisal of the impact of heat loss from everything we do. Only if we address the whole package and take action on every front can we hope to find a solution that does not create a further problem in the future.

Sadly, I think the anti-nuclear groups are incapable of seeing anything constructively or holistically. We opened Pandora's Box a long, long time ago and nothing we have taken out of it can ever go back into it. We have no choice but to find ways of using the things we have taken out wisely, safely and well for the benefit of every single one of us. It's that or extinction.

Posted by The Gray Monk at May 19, 2006 08:07 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Slim Jim at May 19, 2006 09:36 AM