ISPG IELTS, OET & PTE

Nuclear and renewables

or nuclear or renewables?

Robyn Williams: One of the few politicians calling for

nuclear power in Australia is now in the New South Wales
upper house.
Mark Latham: Around-the-clock baseload power is our
best insurance policy against blackouts. Two ways of
achieving this are through nuclear power and/or coal-fire
stations, yet across the country nuclear is banned while coal
is being run out of the market through the subsidies targets
and special deals being offered to renewable energy.
Robyn Williams: Mark Latham giving his maiden speech
in the New South Wales parliament. But there are problems:
[Audio: siren]
Vivienne Nunis: The sound that changed the lives of
people in Fukushima forever. On 11 March 2011 an
earthquake struck north-eastern Japan. The force was so
great, the country's largest island Honshu was itself forced
2.4 metres to the east.
Robyn Williams: And so in this shaky and violent Science
Show we shall visit earthquakes, assess the present state of
nuclear fission for power, and meet a Vice-Chancellor who
once was a brave germ weapons inspector.
And so to the nuclear option, hardly mentioned during the
election campaign, except to dismiss it in the case of the
Prime Minister Scott Morrison a couple of weeks ago. So
where are we now?
[Audio: siren]
Journalist: The sound that changed the lives of people in
Fukushima forever. On 11th March 2011 an earthquake
struck north-eastern Japan. The force was so great, the
country's largest island Honshu was itself forced 2.4 metres
to the east. The jolt triggered a series of powerful tsunami
waves that battered Japan's eastern coastlines. Seawater
surged as far as 10 kilometres inland, and the Fukushima
Daiichi Nuclear Power Station shut down, causing the
reactor to go into meltdown.
News reader: Coming up, hundreds dead as Japan is
rocked.
News reader: Officials in Japan say up to 300 bodies have
been found after a tsunami caused by a massive earthquake
hit the northern coastal…
Journalist: Japan is used to earthquakes, but never before
has it seen one like this.
Journalist: The news just kept getting worse. The
Fukushima nuclear power plant was unable to cool down
one of its reactors without power for its water pumps, and
now radioactive steam may have to be released to relieve the
pressure building up inside.
Robyn Williams: Part of a report from the BBC World
Service. So what are the negatives? I asked famed
antinuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott to look at a book by
a leading environmental writer Fred Pearce, and these are
some of her conclusions:
Helen Caldicott: In his book Fallout, Fred Pearce details
his visits to Chernobyl, Fukushima and Sellafield, all of
which experienced nuclear reactor accidents resulting in
huge numbers of people being irradiated. Pearce notes that
the exclusion zone around Chernobyl teems with wildlife,
reassuring himself that intense radiation exposure has done
little harm. He then questions the groundbreaking work of
noted evolutionary biologist Tim Mousseau who has spent
years examining the wildlife around Fukushima and
Chernobyl. Barn swallows have smaller than normal brains,
40% of males are sterile, mutational abnormalities abound
and many have tumours and cataracts.
Fukushima. Pearce once again downplays any medical
ramifications of this dreadful accident, claiming that
'nobody seemed to have died as a direct result of the
accident'. The only malignancy being examined is thyroid
cancer in people under the age of 18 at the time of the
accident. Currently 196 have a disease and some have
metastasised. However, all cancers can be induced by
radiation. Japanese doctors have been warned not to inform
patients that their illnesses could be radiation related or
they risk losing government funding. Pearce devotes a whole
chapter to questioning the norms established by the
Biological Effects of Radiation Report commissioned by the
American Academy of Sciences which states that no
radiation is safe. Instead he quotes from well-known pro-
nuclear people, and ends by writing: 'I have come to believe
that the threshold argument makes little sense.'
He's a good journalist but doesn't understand the
internationally accepted tenets of radiobiology, nor does he
seem to understand the pathogenic effects of internal
emitters, nor the latent period of carcinogenesis which
reigns for four to 80 years post exposures.
Then Pearce deals with the legacy of nuclear waste. In 2017,
160 commercial reactors were closed, while 449 were still
operating. Decommissioning or dismembering a single
reactor building produces 60,000 tonnes of radioactive
waste and costs $2.6 billion. Britain's Sellafield site alone
contains 240 highly radioactive buildings, huge leaking
pools full of dangerous sludge and high level waste, giant
tanks full of hot liquid radioactive waste requiring constant
cooling, and 130 tonnes of plutonium dioxide, currently
increasing by four tonnes yearly. The US owns over 100
tonnes of plutonium, and 90,000 tonnes of spent reactor
fuel. Pearce describes similar pernicious situations in
Germany, France and of course Japan.
According to the US EPA, high-level waste must be stored
isolated from the ecosphere for 1 million years, a human and
physical impossibility. Radioactive elements will inevitably
leak and concentrate in the biosphere over time, thereby
inducing epidemics of cancer, leukaemia and foetal
deformities in all living species. Yet the nuclear industry
persists making more waste while claiming that nuclear
power is the answer to global warming.
Small modular reactors are the latest wet dream. Its typical
design is prism which consists of three blocks of three small
reactors connected to a single turban generator. Buried
underground, the nine reactor modules will be operated
from only one control room to be fully automated, staffed
with only three operators. Experienced nuclear engineers
have noted that one operator could simultaneously be faced
by a catastrophic situation triggered by an off-site power
loss in a unit at full power and another shutdown for
refuelling and one in start-up mode. These reactors will
require no containment vessel, fire alarms or radiation
monitoring.
Fuelled by plutonium and cooled by liquid sodium, which is
highly reactive, if the liquid sodium boils or leaks, an
explosion could be triggered in the plutonium fuel,
spreading carcinogens far and wide. The fuel will be
fashioned using plutonium from decommissioned bombs or
reprocessed fuel. Of course these so-called fast reactors will
produce high level waste themselves. The nuclear industry
claims that this variety of reactors are said to be cheap
because they are turnkey reactors, prefabricated off-site.
However, to be commercially viable, a factory must initially
have 40 to 70 orders, and few so far have been ordered.
In this day and age of unrestrained global warming, with
renewable energy far surpassing coal and nuclear in cost,
reliability and safety, why does the nuclear priesthood
persist in its dedication to all things nuclear, I wonder?
Robyn Williams: The case for the opposition. Dr Helen
Caldicott, trained in medicine in Adelaide University, taught
at Harvard, and now lives on the New South Wales south
coast.
Back to the BBC:
Vivienne Nunis: Hundreds of thousands of buildings were
destroyed, and reconstruction is still ongoing. The World
Bank estimates the total economic cost of the disaster could
reach $235 billion, making it the costliest natural disaster in
human history. The tsunami disabled the power supply to
three of Fukushima's nuclear reactors, stopping the vital
cooling process and causing a meltdown. More than
100,000 people were evacuated from the surrounding towns
and villages.
And where does that leave nuclear energy in Japan? Because
a lot of people looked at this accident and saw it as a reason
not to pursue nuclear energy. I know the reactors in Japan
have mostly been switched off. Do people want to leave it
behind now, given what happened in 2011?
William McMichael: I don't think anybody in Fukushima
prefecture wants the country to go back to nuclear energy
again. There are definitely a lot of investments being made
into using renewable energy sources to produce energy, and
in Fukushima I think that's definitely the mindset. I think
Japan as a whole definitely also realises that it may be too
soon to completely switch to non-nuclear sources for energy,
so they do have to restart some of the nuclear power plants.
Vivienne Nunis: William McMichael there. So where does
the Fukushima disaster leave us when it comes to the use of
nuclear energy? Here's how the technology was viewed
when it was introduced back in 1956:
Archival audio: History is made at Calder Hall, the first
large-scale nuclear power station in the world. It marks the
birth of a new industrial revolution in which Britain is
taking the lead.
Vivienne Nunis: Fast forward to today and there are
currently 447 nuclear reactors operating across the world. In
some countries in Western Europe, nuclear power is being
phased out, while in other parts of the world like China,
nuclear energy is being rapidly expanded. In fact, 55 new
plants are under construction worldwide. But let's hear from
one country where nuclear power is being switched off
forever in 2022. Jo Leinen is a member of the European
Parliament for Germany.
Jo Leinen: We have the national plan to go up to 65%
renewable energies in the overall energy consumption by
2030. We are now with 38% of renewables, so there's a
longer way to go until the end of the next decade. And in
between it is true that we use still coal and gas.
Vivienne Nunis: So Germany is phasing nuclear power
out, but in other parts of Europe it's very much static, isn't
it. Some countries are not increasing the number of reactors
they have but they are not decommissioning them either.
Jo Leinen: Yes, of course, there is a huge capital
investment in a nuclear power station and nobody wants to
give up easily that investment, and of course the profits that
are made by nuclear stations. But you are right, there is a
stagnation, there are hardly countries that still invest. It's in
Great Britain, one power station in Finland, and France is
more or less replacing old ones against one or the other new
one. So you could see nuclear power is not really increasing,
whereas the renewables year by year are increasing a lot and
investments in renewables are much higher than in any
other energy source.
Vivienne Nunis: Jo Leinen.
Robyn Williams: And he is a member of the European
Parliament, with the BBC's Vivienne Nunis. Professor Barry
Brook at the University of Tasmania in Hobart has long
supported the nuclear option. But even he says it's a long
way off.
Barry Brook: I think there's a good chance that nuclear is
an option in the long-term, but not in the short-term in
Australia, simply because time taken to prepare the ground,
not just physically for the infrastructure but in terms of
getting public support and political support, is a long-term
goal and probably more than a decade away at least.
Robyn Williams: But do you think in terms of climate
change and doing its bit there as part of a number of
different sorts of responses that it has a place?
Barry Brook: Yes, I think so, definitely, because it
provides a zero carbon alternative to coal. And what the
renewable energy sources like solar and wind don't offer is
that baseload electricity which is sometimes dismissed as
being irrelevant but it is really important and provides a
stable underpinning to the grid. So I think that is nuclear's
role. Whether it can do more than that or not is really a
matter of politics and economics. It certainly could do the
whole job but it could also work as part of an energy mix
quite effectively.
Robyn Williams: Are there two sorts of nuclear power
station now after Chernobyl, which is terribly old-fashioned
and weird, and Fukushima, and Sellafield, which again was
pretty ancient?
Barry Brook: Those reactors you mention were actually
quite diverse. Chernobyl was a very different reactor to
Fukushima, for example. The ones that are built today or
even in the 1970s, I mean, Western countries were called
light-water reactors, there is also heavy-water reactors that
are popular in places like India and Canada. I think the
more useful distinction today is between large monolithic
reactors and small modular reactors, the latter being an
alternative that could be much cheaper, certainly per power
plant because they are much smaller and therefore
potentially faster to deploy, and could be more convenient
because instead of requiring a grid load of many gigawatts,
you only need perhaps a few hundred megawatts or even
less. And so they are feasible in a much wider range of
circumstances.
Robyn Williams: Wouldn't you need an awful lot of them
in a biggish country like Australia?
Barry Brook: Yes but you could also argue you'd need an
awful lot of wind turbines or solar panels. So the smaller the
output of a single generating unit, the more you are
obviously going to need. But you can quite reasonably
concentrate these modules, as they're known, in power
parks. So, for example, you could develop the infrastructure
to house a dozen or even 50 of these modules at a single
power park to produce large amounts of electricity from a
single site if that is what's desired. A key advantage of them
over a large plant is that as soon as you start to install
modules they can generate electricity, whereas you've got to
build the whole plant for a large one before anything comes
out of it, so that delay can be a decade or more until you've
got electricity, where, at least in theory, the small modular
reactors could be built and dropped into site, taken from
factories through a rail system to the site extremely rapidly.
Robyn Williams: And what do they cost? Can we afford
them?
Barry Brook: Well, they are probably cost competitive
with coal. However, that's untested. Small modular reactors
have been used for many decades in the military where cost
wasn't a particular consideration. But developing a
commercial one that could be built in a factory and rolled
out to customers is something that a number of vendors are
pursuing but no one has got there yet. The closest is a
company called NuScale in the US which are going through
licensing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as we
speak. And should they complete that, then they could well
be the first to market, and their goal is to have it cheaper
than coal, and that remains to be seen. But if that was the
case then that would become I think a very attractive option
for a country like Australia to import.
Robyn Williams: And what if you're a villain, what if
you're a terrorist and you want to blow them up, what would
be the effect?
Barry Brook: Well, it would be very difficult to not only
penetrate the perimeter of one of these power plants and get
to the reactor but also to overcome the inherent safety
systems that are built into them. An advantage of small
modular reactors is there are a lot of principles of physics
that you can bring to bear to make them inherently safe
rather than safe due to engineered systems. So it can be very
difficult to disrupt. Another advantage of small reactors are
they can be buried underground, so if you imagine almost
like a concrete bunker and a terrorist having to try and
penetrate those would have an extremely difficult job.
Terrorists have never been able to penetrate any old nuclear
reactor, nuclear power plant to blow it up, and these would
be much more difficult than that, so it seems an unlikely
proposition.
Robyn Williams: As we said, you said in the beginning
that the interest is just at the moment in Australian politics
and society not very great. We've got Mark Latham wanting
them. Scott Morrison has said it's not part of Liberal Party
policy. So do you wish it were acceptable more in a political
sense?
Barry Brook: Yes, I do wish it was more acceptable. I
think the only way nuclear will end up getting built in
Australia is if you have bipartisan support. That doesn't
mean to say you'll get the support of all parties, but really all
you need is Labor and the coalition to jointly agree that this
is a reasonable investment in Australia's future energy
infrastructure and then it can happen. But I think that
decision would have to be catalysed by a number of other
events that haven't yet occurred, and the biggest of those
will be if you can't build new coal fired power stations
because of public outcry, and that seems probable. If the
cost of gas goes up such that they are infeasible for
providing baseload electricity. And if the combination of
large-scale renewables, principally wind and solar, along
with some form of effective energy storage proves to be
economically or socially or environmentally unacceptable,
coupled with an increasing threat of climate change and
potentially more impacts, more extreme events and so forth,
that combination could lead the Australian political
landscape to change enough to support I think some joint
venture maybe between government and industry to build a
future generation of nuclear power plants here. But again, in
that framing it's more likely to be a 10- or 20-year prospect
before there is any excavation or concrete poured on such a
project.
Robyn Williams: Barry Brook is a professor at the
University of Tasmania in Hobart.
And finally, back to the BBC:
Vivienne Nunis: Dr Dorfman, what do you see the legacy
of Fukushima as being?
Paul Dorfman: Nuclear power is quintessentially a late-
20th century technology and it'll struggle to compete with
the technological, economic and security advantages and
advances of the coming renewable evolution. It's not
nuclear and renewables, it's nuclear or renewables. Any
economic professor worth their salt will tell you that the
renewable evolution is here. Nuclear investment is falling
fast, dropping by 45% in 2017.
Vivienne Nunis: Dr Cobb, what are the arguments for
nuclear then in a landscape where technology providing
renewable energy sources is becoming cheaper and more
widely available?
Jonathan Cobb: Well, for a start I would disagree, I think
it is nuclear and renewables. If you look at countries that
have successfully decarbonised in the past - Sweden,
Finland, France, the province of Ontario in Canada - they've
done it by having a mix of nuclear and renewables. And in a
time when we desperately need to reduce emissions fast, I
think you have to look at what has been proven, what works,
and nuclear partnering with renewables does work.
Paul Dorfman: If you want to do short-term, you're
certainly not going to do nuclear. Nuclear, 10 years in the
planning, another 10+ potentially coming online, nuclear is
one of the slowest technologies in coming online.
Jonathan Cobb: If you look at countries that do have an
ongoing build program of nuclear power plants, then the
average time for construction of those plants is just five
years. It's not decades.
Vivienne Nunis: Dr Dorfman, why do you think countries
are increasingly spending on nuclear in some parts of the
world - India, China - if there are better alternatives that are
cheaper already out there?
Paul Dorfman: Even in China itself, renewables are
enormously more cost competitive and are being built at a
phenomenally much greater rate than nuclear, even in
China itself.
Jonathan Cobb: Even if there is great success for
renewables in China, that's great, that's fabulous, but they
are looking at including nuclear as well for their energy
strategy. They haven't chosen one or the other, they have
gone for them all. I think that's a sensible proposition, I
think it's the way we should be going worldwide.
Robyn Williams: Nuclear influx in 2019, an option for the
future perhaps. If there's time.