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Nuclear power: for and againstDate: 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. A response to Mayer HillmanStephen Tindale Mayer is right that energy conservation is a ‘better’ response to climate change and energy security than nuclear power, or indeed any form of generation. Conservation will reduce carbon emissions more quickly, is more cost effective, and will create many thousands of new jobs. We should do everything we can, personally and professionally, to conserve energy. But energy conservation is not enough. The political and behavioural challenges to getting individuals and organisations to stop wasting energy are large (though the tax system is a good way forward, which is why PSI’s Green Fiscal Commission is so important). Also, not all energy use is waste. People need heat to stay alive, light to be educated, or to work. And those living in rural areas need cars more than those living in towns or cities do. The debate must be moved on from whether energy efficiency, renewables, carbon capture and storage (CCS) or nuclear are better responses. We must pursue all of them. However well we do on energy efficiency, there will be a significant increase in electricity use as surface transport runs on electricity rather than oil. We can be 100 per cent renewable, but not until 2040 at the earliest. (Apart from the cost and implementation issues, the issue of energy storage from intermittent renewables like wind and solar needs to be solved.) So we need ‘bridging technologies’ to get to 2040. Fossil fuels with CCS should be demonstrated as soon as possible, since CCS at large scale is not yet a proven technology. And new UK nuclear power stations should also be supported. Mayer says that there will not be any operational before 2025. He’s right that they certainly won’t be quick to build, but with increased public support the first may be operational in 2020. The UK has an EU target that 15 per cent of our energy (electricity, heat, transport fuel) should be from renewables by 2020. This is a ten-fold increase from today’s level. Even if it’s met, that will leave 85 per cent from fossil fuels or nuclear. There is far too much debate, from campaign groups and in the media, about what we should be against. Such talk is necessary, but there should also be much more about what we should favour. Controlling climate change will not only make us safer; it could and should also make us happier, healthier and richer. That’s why I’ve co-founded a website called Climate Answers, to try to spread this message. Mayer says that it’s immoral to leave nuclear waste and the financial cost of decommissioning power stations to future generations. Perhaps it is, but surely it is morally worse to leave future generations the legacy of high concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gasses. And this is not just a future problem: the World Health Organisation says that climate change may have caused over 150,000 deaths in 2000. As I said in my last contribution, the main threat from nuclear power is weapons proliferation. President Obama has this week put the issue of a nuclear weapons-free world on the international political agenda. This must be linked, as Henry Kissinger and George Schultz have said, to a system to control the international nuclear fuel cycle. Mayer concludes by saying that it’s immoral of our generation to refuse “to behave responsibly by living within the planet’s means and our fair share of it”. He calls for carbon rationing. Rationing, or Personal Carbon Allowances (to use a more politically acceptable term!) should certainly be supported. As well as protecting the climate, this would also be socially progressive, as it would distribute money from the rich, who produce a lot of carbon, to the poor. David Miliband supported Personal Carbon Allowances when he was Environment Secretary, and the Institute for Public Policy Research is doing good work on this now. But rationing isn’t the whole answer. The global community cannot be 100 per cent renewable until 2040. Until then, we need bridging low-carbon technologies, and nuclear power should be one of them. 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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NewsChanging attitudes of older workers [added 17/02/2009] The challenge of climate change [added 17/03/2009] Workshop examines well-being at work [added 21/01/2009] Canadian academic discusses economics of citizenship [added 02/02/2009] Seminar series discusses work and social policy issues [added 28/11/2008] How to improve engagement with local services [added 11/11/2008] Michigan professor delivers memorial lecture [added 04/11/2008] PSI research influences welfare reform [added 12/08/2008] |
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