Fukushima looked ugly but the alternative is so much worse
THE Fukushima nuclear emergency has intensified the global climate change debate.
THE Fukushima nuclear emergency has intensified the global climate change debate.
Japan's post-tsunami crisis has prompted an immediate reappraisal of ambitious nuclear energy plans in the booming markets of China and India and hastened the withdrawal of ageing plants in Western Europe, most notably Germany.
According to some calculations, if the world's nuclear ambitions are reduced because of Fukushima global carbon emissions could increase by an additional three billion tonnes by 2030.
Some believe this would be enough to push global temperature rises beyond 2 per cent and into a potentially calamitous upward spiral.
This has caused leading environmental campaigners, such as British author George Monbiot, to reappraise their attitude towards nuclear energy with some dramatic results.
Monbiot has not only changed from nuclear avoider to pro-nuclear campaigner he has taken on the long-standing figurehead of the anti-nuclear cause, Australia's Helen Caldicott.
"I'm very worried that the global response to what's happening in Fukushima will be to shut down nuclear power stations around the world and to cancel future nuclear power stations, and that what will happen is that they will be replaced by coal," Monbiot wrote this week.
And after years of campaigning against nuclear power, Monbiot now describes the exaggerated claims of the health impacts of radioactivity as akin to what he believes are the pseudo-scientific pleadings of climate change deniers.
"The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health," Monbiot wrote.
Monbiot cites a UN Scientific Committee report into the Chernobyl accident, which found that of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation. The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, including four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia.
In the rest of the Chernobyl population there have been 6848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children arising "almost entirely" from the Soviet Union's failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131.
Otherwise "there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure".
Japanese authorities have responded with greater speed and precision to the Fukushima emergency than did their Soviet counterparts at Chernobyl, which was a much more serious accident.
Nonetheless, the Fukushima accident has again demonstrated the strength of community fears about radioactivity.
But it has also served to highlight the fact that rejecting nuclear power is not a zero sum game when it comes to carbon and climate change.
The environmental and health effects of burning more coal and gas can be much worse than the risk of radioactive fallout.
The evidence is that for countries at the forefront of the so-called nuclear renaissance, a future without nuclear would undoubtedly put new strains on demand for fossil fuels such as coal and gas.
Despite some wildly enthusiastic claims, present renewable technologies are not yet advanced enough to replace fossil fuels for base load power.
And government programs to promote them are either too clumsy or poorly targeted to give the impetus needed to catch up.
This is particularly the case in Australia where a report this week by the Grattan Institute lifted the lid on how the hundreds of millions of dollars promised by government for renewable programs is being recycled rather than spent.
The report found that, on average, for every $1 million the government has announced under its $7 billion of grant tendering programs, only $30,000 of operational projects result within five years and only $180,000 within 10 years.
The Clean Energy Council says it is still early days in both technological development and deployment.
And the council's chief executive, Matthew Warren, says the ability of renewable technologies to displace fossil fuels or replace nuclear will vary widely according to location.
Worldwide, despite the enthusiastic assumptions of clean energy boosters, , the evidence is there is still a long way to go.
Much will depend on the successful development of new generation technologies such as carbon capture and storage, thorium-based reactors, algea, wave, tidal and geothermal, all of which are still in the development phase.
And in its first Clean Energy Progress Report released this week, the International Energy Agency provided a relatively downbeat assessment.
The report said the success stories in developing renewable energy technologies were being overshadowed by surging demand for fossil fuels, which were outstripping deployment of renewables.
The IEA's deputy executive director, Richard Jones, said the world's dependence on fossil fuels was posing short-term risks to political stability and economic activity and threatening environmental stability.
"Despite countries' best efforts, the world is coming ever closer to missing targets that we believe are essential for meeting the goal agreed in Cancun to limit the growth in global average temperatures to less than 2C," Jones said.
Even with large scale investment in renewable sources of energy, worldwide renewable electricity generation since 1990 grew an average of 2.7 per cent a year, which is less than the 3 per cent growth for total electricity generation.
The IEA says achieving the goal of halving global energy-related CO2 emissions by 2050 would require a doubling of all renewable generation use by 2020 from today's level.
Without nuclear, the challenge is even bigger.
The IEA report says while nuclear capacity has remained nearly flat for the past decade, countries are now constructing 66 nuclear reactors that should add 60 gigawatts by 2015.
But the recent earthquake in Japan and resulting damage has led countries to review nuclear safety and investments.
"As a result, nuclear expansion is likely to be slower than planned," the IEA said.
An analysis by French bank Societe Generale estimates that if all 34 countries in the OECD were to shut their nuclear power plants and replace them with gas plants before technology to capture their carbon emissions is developed, OECD carbon emissions could rise by nearly one billion tonnes of CO2 a year.
Germany has already pledged to shut down eight ageing nuclear plants before the end of the year. And the country's deputy environment minister has said the decision has already been made to phase out all nuclear power in Germany before 2020.
According to an analysis by Thomson Reuters Point Carbon, Germany's initial decision to close all its nuclear power stations built prior to 1980 for three months would result in eight million tonnes of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere if fossil fuel stations were used to fill the resulting energy gap. German energy traders say stopping Germany's nuclear program would boost the company's demand for coal by about four million tonnes.
Deutsche Bank has estimated that if Germany's seven oldest reactors were permanently shut down immediately and the remaining 10 allowed to continue generating under terms of revised legislation passed in 2010, Germany would generate an additional 250 million tonnes of CO2 between 2011 and 2020.
Lynas has estimated a complete German nuclear phase-out would produce an additional half a billion tonnes of CO2 by 2020.
Pressure is also mounting to head off a resumption of the nuclear power program in the US, despite President Barrack Obama's continue support.
A US phase-out of nuclear power, replaced by an equal share of coal and gas by 2030 would produce another half gigatonne of CO2 emissions.
If the US phased out only the 23 nuclear power plants with the same design as Japan's troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex by 2030, carbon dioxide emissions in the US would increase overall by at least 1 per cent.
China is at the forefront of the new era of nuclear construction and development and is planning a four-fold growth in nuclear power to 40GW.
But consideration of new plants has been frozen in the wake of the Japan emergency.
If China were to shy away from nuclear the lost power would most likely be made up by coal-fired power, which is already growing at a faster rate than nuclear, hydro, gas, wind and solar combined.
An additional 260GW of coal-fired power generation is already in the pipeline, compared with 40GW for nuclear, 63GW of new hydro, 22GW in gas-fired generation, 48GW of new wind power and 5GW of solar.
If China were to abandon plans to build 100 Chinese nuclear plants by 2030, each could be replaced by coal fired power stations emitting 10 million tonnes per year, resulting in an additional one gigatonne of CO2 a year.
If the anticipated nuclear renaissance falters in other OECD countries such as Japan, Britain and the rest of the European Union, another half-gigatonne of CO2 emissions could result from additional fossil fuel plants.
This is why the IEA says in order to achieve a 50 per cent reduction in energy-related CO2 emissions by 2050, IEA research shows that about 100 large-scale carbon capture and storage projects will be needed by 2020, and more than 3000 by 2050.
"This represents a significant scale-up from the five large-scale carbon capture and storage projects that are in operation today."
For Australian nuclear expert Ziggy Switkowski, the contribution made by nuclear energy to limiting global carbon emissions is obvious.
Nuclear currently supplies 14 per cent of the world's electricity, which is responsible for 15 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions a year, he says.
Given these figures, the world's 440 nuclear plants avoid the emission of about two billion tonnes of CO2 a year.
The Australian uranium used to generate about one quarter of the world's nuclear power saves about 500 million tonnes of CO2 almost equal to Australia's total carbon emissions of about 600 million tonnes a year.