Why use nuclear power?

Almost all Western governments have recognised that Greenhouse/Climate Change is a major problem. Many are proposing nuclear power as the main way of reducing our greenhouse impact. Why?

The next quesion is what will it cost? Is nuclear the cheapest way to reduce greenhouse impact?

We have lived with nuclear powered electricity generation since the 1950s. So far as I know all the world's nuclear power stations have been built by national governments and no-one seems to know what nuclear power really costs.

If it was the cheapest option then we should be able to leave the building and running of new nuclear power stations to private enterprise. Of course it would have to be a whole package, part of the deal would be the locking away of appropriate sums of money for decommissioning of reactors at the end of their useful life and for the safe long-term disposal of all radioactive materials. Disposal of radioactive waste, in particular, is difficult to cost because it must ensure that the material is kept out of the active environment for several thousand years or even more.

I strongly suspect that no company would be interested in taking full financial responsibility for the whole life of a nuclear power station and the waste; the amount of money that they would have to lock away would be too large and would make the whole operation economically unviable. If building and running nuclear power stations is economically unviable for private enterprise why should our governments take it on and we the tax payers foot the bills? Private industry is willing to build sustainable power generation facilities – wind, solar and geothermal – that are comparable in cost to fossil-fueled power stations when the cost of pollution or the proper disposal of waste is taken into consideration. It seems that the most cost-effective of wind, solar and geothermal generation is cheaper than nuclear power.

Conserving energy and using electricity more efficiently is by far the best way that we can reduce our greenhouse impact.

What really is the attraction of nuclear power stations to Western nations? I must admit that I don't know the answer.

Why build nuclear power stations that will be a great target for bombing in any war, and a great target for terrorist attack, if you don't need to? What would happen to New York if a nuclear power station on its outskirts was bombed? It would be much worse than Chernobyl because of the huge number of people irradiated.

Disadvantages of nuclear

• Nuclear power is expensive. While it is very difficult to get accurate figures on the cost of nuclear – because nuclear power stations have always been given big support from government and little is known about the true cost of decommissioning and disposal of waste – it seems that it is significantly more expensive than some sustainable alternatives. Nuclear power is very difficult to cost because, if the figure is to be meaningful, it must cover mining, building the power station, running costs for the full life of the power station, protecting the nuclear material from possible theft by terrorists, decommissioning costs, and costs of disposing of the radioactive wastes and protecting them from disturbance for many years.
• Climate change demands quick action. Planning and building a nuclear power station is slow, it takes at least 15 years.
• Renewable energy such as wind, solar and geothermal could be built by private industry without government subsidy (so long as there was a 'level playing field') while no private company would be willing to touch nuclear power without big government subsidies.
• Nuclear power stations would be a target in any war. A bombed nuclear power station would spread incomparably more radiation around than would any nuclear bomb – because there are many tonnes of highly radioactive material in a nuclear power station. Wind turbines and solar panels, because they are spread over a big area, are much more difficult to destroy by bombs, and would not spread pollution if they were bombed. Only a small section of the top, at most, of the deep wells that are the most expensive part of a hot dry rock geothermal power station could be destroyed by bombing; these could be relatively cheaply and quickly repared.
• As it is used at present nuclear power is a very inefficient use of uranium. Only about 1% of the energy available in the uranium is used. See Fast Nuclear.
• Nuclear power, as it is in the early twenty-first century, produces large quantities of radioactive waste that need to be isolated from the envionment for thousands of years. In September 2009 it became public knowledge that the Italian Mafia had been involved in taking ship-loads of nuclear waste to sea and sinking them rather than disposing of the waste properly. A Mafioso involved had confessed to being involved in three such shipments; there was reason to believe that twenty or thirty more might have been similarly disposed of. How much nuclear waste has been disposed of improperly elsewhere in the world?