Nuclear power: for and against

Date: 31 March 2009

With the problem of climate change becoming more urgent by the day, the future of power generation in the UK has provoked considerable debate. In February 2009, a number of Britain's leading environmental campaigners publicly declared that they had come round to the view that nuclear power was essential in the effort to combat anthropogenic global warming.

Here, one of those campaigners, PSI Visiting Research Fellow Stephen Tindale, former Executive Director of Greenpeace UK, explains his change of heart. In response, PSI Senior Fellow Emeritus, Mayer Hillman, author of How We Can Save the Planet, argues that nuclear power is not the answer. Read Mayer's article here.

Update: 7 April 2009

Read Stephen Tindale's response to Mayer Hillman here.

The case for nuclear power

Stephen Tindale

I have spent the last two decades arguing and campaigning against nuclear power, working for NGOs, think tanks and government. But the climate crisis is now so great that we must do everything we can, whatever the economic cost, to try to control it. Nuclear power is not zero carbon, but it is low carbon.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), created in the late 1980s to consider scientific issues and advise governments, concluded last year that it is now “unequivocal” that climate change is human-induced. Of course, there are still some who argue the opposite – that the observed and recorded increase in global temperature of recent years is part of a natural cycle. But there are still some who argue against evolution, 150 years after the publication of The Origin of the Species. We cannot afford to waste even the next 150 months debating whether humanity is causing climate change, if we are to survive.

Renewable energy, from wind, wave, tidal, biomass, hydro, solar, are an essential component of the future energy mix, and the UK is extremely well resourced in all of these except solar. The Labour government’s policies to promote renewables have been good, but implementation has been poor. So only 1.5 per cent of UK total energy used (electricity, heating and transport fuel) comes from renewables. The UK’s EU target is to increase this to 15 per cent by 2020, which is achievable, but only if planning and grid access delays are sorted out.

At such low levels, the fact of intermittence (the wind doesn’t always blow) is not a significant problem. But once the total electricity supply goes above about 20 per cent from intermittent sources, it is a problem which needs to be addressed. Biomass and hydro are not intermittent, but wind and wave are. Tidal power is entirely predictable and reliable, but not constant. So a means of storing electricity when generated, to be available when needed, must be developed.

The main existing options are pump-storage, where water from below a hydro-electric plant is pumped back above the dam, which is little used in the UK but extremely common in Norway, and large batteries. Future options will include larger and more effective batteries, millions of batteries on electric vehicles which can be used to store electricity and feed it back into the grid when needed, and hydrogen gasometers. All of these options should be funded and developed.

Electric vehicles have advantages beyond electricity storage, of course. Even with the existing electricity generation mix, they result in lower carbon emissions per kilometre than petrol or diesel, and as the generation mix becomes lower carbon, emissions will fall further. Also, oil which comes from tar sands, which is what is happening in Canada, is even more disastrous for the climate than that from oil fields. Air quality will also improve with electric vehicles. President Obama is promising that cars and lorries will increasingly run on electricity. Gordon Brown should follow Obama’s example and massively increase support for electric vehicles.

Wider use of electric vehicles means that, whatever progress is made on energy efficiency, there will be a significant increase in electricity usage, globally and in the UK. And there are other reasons why electricity use will increase. One sensible option for reducing emissions from the generation of heat is the Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP). This pipes liquid underground, where it is heated by geothermal energy, and then back above ground and around the building. Geothermal energy is zero-carbon, and GSHPs should be mandatory on new buildings, but the pump requires electricity.

There will also be increasing demand for air conditioning as summers get hotter. Not all of this will be necessary or even desirable – many offices are so ‘well’ air-conditioned that a jumper or jacket is needed to keep warm enough to work. But many thousands died in the 2003 European heat wave, and globally heat waves kill tens of thousands every year already. This will increase as temperatures increase, so to argue that all air conditioning is unnecessary or undesirable is untenable.

So we will need more electricity in future. We must therefore develop all low-carbon options. Renewables should be rapidly and ambitiously expanded, but they cannot be expected to provide all UK electricity before 2030 at the earliest, and then only if the storage issue can be solved. Carbon capture and storage (CCS), the much-discussed way of reducing emissions from fossil fuel power stations, must also be developed and demonstrated, since the technologies are not yet proven. And new nuclear power stations are also needed.

There are clearly risks associated with nuclear power, including radioactive waste, pollution and cost. These are serious, and certainly cannot be ignored, but they are less serious than the risk of a six-degree rise in global temperatures.

In my view, the main risk of nuclear power generation has always been weapons proliferation. Every state that has nuclear bombs has acquired them by developing nuclear power first – except Israel, which purchased its weapons. The UK already has nuclear power, and nuclear weapons, so a new generation of UK nuclear stations will not directly contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation. But the UK should finally get serious about trying to control nuclear proliferation. It should shut down the Sellafield Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) and Mixed Oxide (MOx) plant, since both are highly polluting, uneconomic, and produce plutonium which is then (in the form of MOx) shipped round the world.

The UK should also meet its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires nuclear states to negotiate away their own nuclear weapons, as a ‘bargain’ with those states that promise not to acquire them. There is a review of this treaty in the spring of 2010. The UK’s current approach, based on upgrading Trident, is entirely incompatible with our treaty obligations. The Labour Party has steered clear of any discussion of nuclear weapons since it abandoned unilateralism to shed the ‘loony left’ label in the mid-80s. Unilateralism is not necessary, but the upgrading of Trident should be abandoned, and the many billions of pounds saved invested instead in developing a low carbon economy.

Henry Kissinger now says that nuclear deterrence has become obsolete since the end of the Cold War, and advocates negotiations to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. Presumably Kissinger cannot be dismissed as ‘loony left’.

To finish, I should say that I am now doing some consultancy work for npower renewables, whose parent company, RWE, is a nuclear utility (among many other forms of generation) and is now seeking to build new nuclear power stations in the UK. My consultancy work is on renewables, and I am doing it to try to help RWE Innogy – of which npower renewables is now the UK arm – achieve its ambitious targets of 4.5 gigawatts (Gw) of renewable capacity by 2012, and 10 Gw by 2020. No one from the RWE group has asked me to say anything about nuclear. I would not have taken work from the RWE group if I had not already decided that nuclear power should be supported.

Nor am I saying this because I’ve worked in the past for the Labour Party. I now believe that Labour is right to support new nuclear power stations. But it was wrong to support the invasion of Iraq. It is wrong to want to upgrade Trident. And it is wrong to support airport expansion.

Stephen Tindale is a Climate and Energy Consultant, and can be contacted at stephen.tindale@hotmail.com . He was Executive Director of Greenpeace UK from 2001 to 2006 and is co-founder of the website Climate Answers.

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