Energy Crisis: Nuclear vs Renewable Sources

It is a curious fact that the number of further years that fossil fuel resources will last has remained unchanged for the last few decades! It is virtually impossible to predict how long these resources will last because there are undiscovered resources and because the rate of use cannot be predicted accurately. There are still vast unexploited resources in Canada and Siberia (to name but two). In addition some estimates predict that the lifetime of natural gas is about 350 years! There is no need at the moment to search for a new power source. That money would be better spent on creating technology to clean the output from power stations. We can explore other sources of energy when it becomes necessary in the future. When we do so it will be from a much more advanced basis making development easier.

Even apart from the safety issues, there are a number of problems with nuclear power. Firstly, it is expensive and relatively inefficient. The cost of building reactors is enormous and the price of subsequently decommissioning them also huge. Without massive government subsidy the nuclear industry cannot make money and building new plants is uneconomic compared to other methods of power generation.

Then there is also the problem of waste. Nuclear waste can remain radioactive for thousands of years. It must be stored for all this time away from water into which it can dissolve and far from any tectonic activity. This is virtually impossible and there are serious concerns over the state of waste discarded even a few decades ago. Governments have frequently resorted to dumping waste into the sea; an action which it has been shown has lead to an increase in radioactivity along many coastlines.

The nuclear industry has a shameful safety record. We can pick out a number of separate problems. There is always the risk of a meltdown or explosion. At Three Mile Island we were minutes away from the former and at Chernobyl the unthinkable actually happened. The fall out from Chernobyl can still be detected in our atmospheres. The effects on the local people and the environment were devastating. It is perfectly true that modern nuclear reactors are safer but they are not perfectly safe. There is always that chance of a disaster and if we build more reactors then sooner or later there will be another Chernobyl. It is quite simply not worth the risk. The dumping of nuclear waste, as explained above, also presents a host of problems. There have also been a number of ‘minor’ accidents in nuclear power stations recently. Reprocessed fuel from the United Kingdom was recently rejected from Japan after it emerged that test results had been fabricated. The Nuclear Inspectorate in the UK has also been very critical of safety standards within the industry. We have been told by the industry that these are problems are being ironed out and that they will not happen again. Time and time again, however, these same problems reoccur and we have to conclude that the industry is not to be trusted. It is too dominated by the profit motive to really care about safety and too shrouded in secrecy to be accountable. In addition, the nuclear industry has had a terrible cost on the lives on those living around power plants. It cannot be a coincidence that the rate of occurrence of certain types of cancer, such as leukaemia, is much higher in the population around nuclear plants.

The proposition lists a number of problems with alternative energy. It is perfectly true that alternative energy is not efficient enough to serve the energy needs of the world’s population today. However, with investment all these methods could be made efficient enough to serve mankind. It is also true that initiation of alternative energy schemes, such as the Aswan dam, have caused problems. But the opposition are not advocating a blanket solution to every problem. Many dam projects, for example, could have been replaced by solar power had the technology been available, without the downside to the dams. In addition, there is almost always one renewable resource that a given country can exploit; tides for islands, the sun for equatorial countries, hot rocks for volcanic regions etc. and so any given country can in principle become self-sufficient with renewable energy. The global distribution of uranium is hugely uneven (much more so than fossil fuels) and the use of nuclear power therefore gives countries with uranium deposits disproportionate economic power. It is far from inconceivable that uranium could be subject to the same kind of monopoly that the OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) places on oil. Indeed, if the whole world went over to nuclear power, supplies of usable uranium ore would run out within a few short decades. This prevents countries from achieving self-sufficiency in energy production.

It is entirely fatuous to suggest that nuclear power is the only employment provider. There will always be roughly the same number of jobs in energy production. If spending on the nuclear industry were redirected to renewable energy then jobs would simply move from one to the other.

Encouraging the further adoption of nuclear power is against our security interests. The scientific understanding and technology needed to generate nuclear power is the same as that needed to create nuclear weapons, and it is all too easy for rogue states to pretend they are only interested in peaceful uses while secretly pursuing military applications. This is the route India and Israel have followed, and that Iran may well be following at present.

Even if the intentions of foreign governments are good, widespread nuclear power plants are at risk of terrorism. This applies just as much in the USA or other western countries as it does in the developing world. If a September 11-style flying bomb was flown into a nuclear power plant, the potential disaster would be catastrophic. And the more nuclear material is transported around the world, the easier it will be for terrorists to get hold of some in order to make their own nuclear weapons. An atomic bomb might one day be within the reach of some international terrorist groups, but even today a simple ‘dirty bomb’ (in which highly-radioactive materials is blasted over an urban area using conventional explosives) could be deadly to many thousands of people.