Nuclear Power and Europe's Clean-Energy Future
By John Ritch, Director General,
World Nuclear Association
European Energy Focus, July/August 2003, p44-47.
| Nuclear power combines reliability, affordability and energy independence. The greatest asset of nuclear energy may be its capability to generate emissions-free - and therefore climate friendly - electricity on a virtually unlimited scale. |
Nuclear energy in Europe is making a visible comeback, after more than a decade of presumed eclipse. Among many national planners, the main question today is whether nuclear capacity can expand fast enough to meet the increasingly urgent goal of sustaining modern industrial economies while reducing climate-threatening emissions.
Nuclear power combines reliability, affordability and energy independence. The greatest asset of nuclear energy, however, may be its capability to generate emissions-free - and therefore climate friendly - electricity on a virtually unlimited scale.
The nuclear industry's future still presents hurdles. Political resistance among minority Greens remains adamant, and public opinion about energy issues is demonstrably not well informed. This makes "energy" a topic where superficial postures often substitute for sound policies. But across Europe there are spreading signs of a growing recognition and acceptance of the need for more nuclear power.
Some countries - including Finland and several in central and eastern Europe - are building new reactors to obtain energy power for economic growth on environmentally acceptable terms. Other countries such as Sweden and Germany, having flirted with a "phase out" of nuclear power, now seem likely to keep the reactors they have and eventually even add to their existing capacity. In Belgium, where 60% of electricity comes from nuclear power, a government change has recently refortified that country's long-term commitment to nuclear energy. Swiss voters just endorsed keeping their country's reactors.
These developments underscore the realization that Europe gets about one third of its electricity from nuclear generation - by far the continent's principal clean-energy source. France is the leader, at 78 percent. But even nations like Austria, Denmark and Italy - which have no reactors on their own soil - rely on imports of nuclear electricity from their neighbours.
It is far from coincidental that Italy - which has few domestic energy resources and which has shunned nuclear power - has acquired the dubious distinction of becoming the world's largest electricity importer.
Over 70% of Europeans in the EU live in countries that produce nuclear power. When the states of the former Soviet Union are included, the figure is about 80%.
For its part, Russia is planning a major nuclear energy expansion. Fortunately, Russia will do so using 21st century technology rather than the ill-conceived Chernobyl-style reactor design that caused such disruption in the Ukraine accident of 1986.
The new European mood of open-mindedness to nuclear energy is based among energy experts and government leaders who recognise what is truly involved in maintaining prosperity while cutting fossil emissions. But gradually public opinion is catching up.
The Kyoto Protocol commits European countries to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 2008-2012 to eight percent below their 1990 levels. Even if achieved, however, these cuts would be only a beginning.
In May 2003 British Prime Minister Tony Blair showed environmental leadership by outlining the full scope of the clean-energy challenge. He called upon European and other industrialised nations to play their part in achieving global sustainable development by cutting emissions by not less than 60 percent by 2050. Blair is the first leader in Europe to proclaim such ambitious targets, and he is pressing to get them adopted by the whole EU.
Blair did no more than articulate politically a strong scientific consensus that began to coalesce several years ago. His initiative was notable nonetheless because most people have not yet grasped the scale of transformation that will be needed - and the central role that nuclear energy must play - if Europe is to achieve a clean-energy economy in the 21st century.
British policy itself is a key example. Despite Blair's leadership in setting goals, the British government is still skirting the nuclear issue by focussing on "experiments" with energy efficiency, solar panels, and windmills that hold little real hope of producing the needed emissions-lowering result. These experiments are scheduled to continue until 2010. But most serious analysts believe it will take less time than that for the British government to acknowledge reality and mandate the building of new nuclear power plants.
Another factor influencing European planners is the dawning of a new age of clean-energy transport that uses hydrogen as fuel. Hydrogen gas can be efficiently compressed or solidified for safe storage and mobility, has no noxious emissions, and may be used in internal combustion engines - or, much more efficiently, in revolutionary devices called fuel cells.
Hydrogen offers tremendous potential for clean transport. But achieving a "hydrogen economy" will require vast quantities of pure hydrogen. Hydrogen can be obtained in pure form only by extracting it from a chemical compound like water - a manufacturing process that requires some form of "primary energy".
In other words, hydrogen is like electricity - a clean means of distributing energy that is produced elsewhere. If hydrogen is to be environmentally beneficial - rather than being simply a means of displacing pollution from one location to another - its manufacture must be clean.
Only nuclear power offers the large-scale clean-energy capacity that a hydrogen economy will require.
The increasing stress on clean energy provides the impetus for a spreading realization among Europeans that they need more nuclear capacity. Indications can be seen both in major nations of the European Union and also among the energy-hungry states of central and eastern Europe that have lined up to join the EU.
A dramatic example was the recent decision by Finland's parliament to build the country's fifth nuclear plant. This was significant - initiating the first reactor construction in the EU in more than decade. Elsewhere in environment-conscious Scandinavia, Sweden's state-owned utility Vattenfall has announced a $2 billion investment to expand capacity in that country's 11 nuclear reactors. This nuclear upgrade will compensate for the capacity lost in 1999 when the Barseback power plant was shut down under pressure from the Green lobby - one of the rare cases where a reactor has been closed by political pressure.
In France, which is Europe's leading nuclear energy producer and the world's top exporter of electricity, the government has launched a sweeping energy policy-review. Even with a robust pro-nuclear consensus, French leaders are rightly interested in experimental programs involving renewable sources. French policy has embraced the sound strategy of joining renewables with nuclear power as clean-energy partners.
But French leaders have no illusions that these new power sources can do the whole clean-energy job. Thus, while testing renewables, Paris is planning to upgrade and replace existing nuclear plants with the next generation of nuclear technology, starting with the new European Pressurized Water Reactor that incorporates the best French and German designs.
Even Germany, despite its influential lobby of viscerally anti-nuclear Greens, seems likely to continue running most of its 19 reactors for decades - and even to build more. Chancellor Schroeder's tenure in office has, from the outset, depended on support from the Green party, to which he has yielded much of German energy policy. But Germany's nuclear "phase-out" has been scheduled to occur so far in the future as to allow it to be reversed by a future German government not beholden to the Green party to sustain a parliamentary majority.
In short, Germany's famous nuclear "phase-out" is more a political pretence than a national policy.
Among the EU's new and applicant states, the Czech Republic and Romania recently completed new reactors; and Bulgaria, Lithuania, Slovakia and Ukraine are planning new reactors as they seek to raise national living standards. In the process, several of these countries are grappling with the hurtful economic effects of having to close down Soviet-era reactors that have been safety-upgraded but still carry the taint of the Chernobyl disaster.
In reviving its nuclear future, Europe is clearly in step with much of the rest of the world, where many big, populous and economically vigorous nations have embraced the nuclear option.
Asian nations - notably China and India, which represent some 40% of humanity - are pursuing ambitious nuclear power programs. Their imperative, and their dilemma, is to achieve strong growth in per capita energy consumption without incurring disastrous environmental consequences.
China has seven reactors in operation and four more under construction. India began catching up fast in the late 1990s, and should have 22 reactors in operation by the end of 2003.
Among Asia's more developed countries, Japan and Korea are the nuclear leaders. Japan is the Asian nuclear powerhouse with 53 reactors - ranking only behind the United States and France - and also has 3 under construction and 12 more on the drawing board. South Korea, which already generates more nuclear power than Britain, plans an additional 10 reactors beyond its current set of 18.
In America, even though President Bush has rejected the specific provisions of the Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. government has acted decisively to reduce carbon emissions and build energy independence. Its main means has been to reinvigorate the American nuclear industry.
The U.S. Department of Energy is now sponsoring advanced nuclear research, and President Bush has, with congressional endorsement, approved a national repository for nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, thereby resolving a long-standing question. This American decision - a major step that followed a lengthy scientific and political debate - parallels similar advances on waste disposal that are under way in Finland, Sweden, Russia and Japan.
A remarkable phenomenon about nuclear power - demonstrated by polling data in Europe, America, and elsewhere - is that public opinion is considerably more pro-nuclear than many political leaders assume. Indeed, people in general tend to express a more pro-nuclear view themselves than they predict "other people" will hold. The surprisingly common attitude everywhere is: "I accept it, but I don't think others do".
Another notable factor in the nuclear debate is that the strong views tend to be voiced only by one side: small, passionately committed Green minorities. That single-issue determination among Green parities has sometimes given them inordinate power. In Germany, Sweden and Belgian, this phenomenon has been on clear display when Greens have insisted on a "nuclear phase-out" as a condition of supporting a tenuously constructed governing coalition.
Despite these anomalies, nuclear power continues to hold a secure place in the energy mix, and Europeans are increasingly voicing support for it as a way of curtailing greenhouse emissions. In fact, when Greens have tried to convert dogma into public policy, the result has been a kind of "inoculation effect". As people debate the consequences of shutting down nuclear plants, they come to recognize the unique clean-energy value of nuclear power.
In a significant test in May 2003, a Swiss referendum - precipitated by anti-nuclear activists - showed voters substantially opposed (by 58 percent in one vote and 66 percent in another) to calls for moratoria on nuclear plants. Hans Rudolf Gubser, senior executive of the leading Swiss nuclear operator NOK, sees the vote as a clear showing "that our population prefers to maintain the CO2-free Swiss electricity mix of 60 percent hydropower and 40 percent nuclear". Swiss officials plan life-extensions for the country's five reactors, following this citizen affirmation that nuclear is an acceptably safe and highly reliable source of power.
There can be no doubt that the risk of nuclear accidents is evocatively imprinted on European consciousness by Chernobyl and to a lesser degree by Three Mile Island. But frightening as they were, the two events must be viewed factually. In the U.S. case, it was a bad scare, with no injuries and no significant escape of radioactivity. The Chernobyl disaster was far more serious, but far less damaging than generally perceived. The harm to the public has so far been confined to some 1,800 cases of adolescent thyroid cancer that is normally curable.
The conclusion that Chernobyl caused much less damage than widely thought comes from an authoritative United Nations report produced by a team of World Health Organisation experts, chosen for knowledge and objectivity, who conducted an extensive study 15 years after the 1986 accident.
But whatever one concludes about the damage from Chernobyl, it bears emphasis that the Soviet-era reactor involved was an unfortunate, badly managed antique, has no equivalent in the West, and would not be licensed anywhere in the world today. Except for those who have embraced Chernobyl as an icon of alleged nuclear evil, that accident holds little relevance to the question of whether the world needs nuclear power in the 21st century.
How to dispose of nuclear waste - the radioactive by-products of splitting the uranium atom for power - is a commonly mentioned issue because many people assume, wrongly, that science has produced no sound answer.
In fact, the focus on the waste issue is ironical, insofar as waste is actually a comparative asset of nuclear power - precisely because the volume is relatively tiny and can be managed, in the short-term and over time, without harm to people or the environment. In contrast, fossil fuel consumption continues to use the biosphere as a free dumpsite - spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate 25 billion tonnes a year, or 800 tonnes a second. The adverse health and environmental consequences are proving disastrous.
Comparison should also be made with non-energy industries like chemical manufacturing, which produce highly toxic wastes in enormous volume. In contrast, the potentially dangerous residue of nuclear power-production is miniscule. The entire quantity of highly radioactive nuclear waste left every year - worldwide - could be put in a two-storey building placed on a basketball court.
Like the United States, Sweden and Finland, most nuclear-power producing countries plan to establish underground repositories in geologically stable depths where the long-term waste can repose safely for thousands of years, gradually returning to the normal levels of the radioactivity that exists naturally all around us. (Most of this "decay" to natural levels occurs in the first 100 years.) By rational standards, this material will be eminently safe in a well-planned geological repository - prevented by engineered and natural barriers from any potential harm to people or the environment.
As to cost, nuclear power is highly competitive. While fossil fuel waste continues to pour into the atmosphere without charge, nuclear is the one major energy source that includes waste-disposal costs in its market price. Eventually, however, a penalty will be imposed on carbon emissions, either through direct carbon taxes, the purchase of permits, or emissions trading. When that occurs, nuclear energy will emerge as a clear winner on the field of energy affordability.
Among clean-energy sources, nuclear power is far cheaper, so far at least, than any of the "new renewables".
Recently, an EU-backed report, entitled "ExternE", attempted to quantify the "external" costs - i.e., the environmental and health impacts - of various energy sources. In the findings, nuclear electricity's non-billed costs averaged 0.4 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, much the same as hydro-generated power. Coal's unbilled costs were at least 10 times as high (between 4 and 7.3 cents depending on the country), while gas ranged between 1.3 and 2.3 cents. (Only wind had cheaper external costs - 0.1-0.2 cents - but wind power is far costlier to generate.)
In recent years, North Sea supplies of natural gas have enabled Europe to reduce consumption of highly polluting coal. But now these reserves are running out, pointing Europe to a future of increasing reliance on gas imports from Siberia and the Middle East. Because gas cannot be stored for more than a few weeks' supply, this prospect raises the most serious strategic questions about Europe's future energy security.
In the immediate future, we can expect to see politicians responding to the environmentalists' enthusiasm for wind, solar energy and other "renewables'' such as geothermal energy and wave power. This is desirable insofar as these technologies should be explored and harnessed in the interest of achieving the maximum possible clean-energy production. But this exploration should not be allowed to nurture illusions. No responsible analyst believes that "renewables" alone can meet Europe's clean-energy needs or the world's.
One good example of such experiments is Germany, where a serious investment has been made to test wind power technology on a large scale. Germany now has half of Europe's installed wind capacity. This has been an impressive achievement but also a demonstration of inherent limits. Even with the benefit of heavy subsidy, the German wind program now produces only 8% of that country's electricity. Meanwhile, Denmark recently halted an ambitious wind program, having found the high costs involved in marrying a sporadic power source to conventional systems of steady power generation.
Britain too is investing in wind power experiments. As part of a plan to spend £1 billion on renewables by 2010, Britain will build 12,000 big wind turbines - mainly in offshore "wind farms''. The aim is to create 25 gigawatts of electrical capacity (Germany's wind power now totals 18 gigawatts). But even this big new source of power, if achieved, is expected to supply no more than five percent of the country's electricity - due to sporadic changes in wind intensity, which necessitate that other energy sources "fill in".
Although the Blair team has postponed any decision on new nuclear power stations until at least 2007, scientists at the Royal Society have called on the government to "show political courage" sooner by providing a blueprint for a clean-air alliance, involving nuclear power, renewables and energy-efficiency savings.
This alliance is opposed by anti-nuclear lobbies, which still preach environmental salvation but apparently prize their own dogma above the facts. Paradoxically, this uncompromising view - which fails under any serious scrutiny - seems to be accelerating the emergence of a strong popular foundation supporting nuclear power. Increasingly voters in Europe are grasping the stakes, the evidence and the choices.
Citizens in Europe and elsewhere are recognising a nuclear-renewables partnership as our best hope for clean energy on the massive scale our world will need in the 21st century if we are to reconcile the needs of an expanding global population and environmental imperatives too urgent to be ignored.