TL: A FAREWELL TO NUCLEAR POWER SO: Greenpeace International, Amsterdam (GP) DT: 1990 Keywords: nuclear power problems greenpeace reports gp europe failures global construction reductions economy / Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Have Arrived Since the beginning of the industrial age, energy consumption has lead to increasingly destructive impacts on human society and the environment. The buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, threatens global climate changes that could irreversibly alter the ecosystems upon which human society and all species depend. Fossil fuel combustion has also resulted in a variety of other serious environmental problems. With the steady demise of arguments that nuclear power is safe, clean or economic, some advocates are now attempting to promote it as a solution to the global warming problem, on the grounds that it produces no direct carbon dioxide emissions. However, a close examination shows that it could not adequately address this problem, and that it poses further problems of its own. At most, nuclear energy could only readily displace the fossil fuels used to generate electricity in power plants, which only accounts for about 11% of the global warming problem Furthermore, nuclear power is plagued with a number of debilitating problems, such as safety, nuclear waste, proliferation, and cost escalations. The dramatic improvements now possible in energy efficiency, and the implementation of a wide range of renewable energy technologies, offer a much more viable, long-term formula for meeting the world's energy needs. NUCLEAR POWER WORLDWIDE IS ON THE DECLINE The 1980's witnessed a virtual worldwide collapse of orders for new nuclear plants. The past dozen years have been marked by frequent technical mishaps, two serious accidents, huge cost escalations, and a rapid decline in public acceptance of nuclear power. Electricity planners are favoring faster and cheaper efficiency improvements over commitments to massive nuclear power generating stations. Today, nuclear power provides only about 5% of the world's energy supplies There are less than 100 nuclear plants under active construction worldwide, compared to more than 200 as recently as 1983. In 1989, the nuclear industry crossed a significant threshold; more nuclear capacity was cancelled than was brought on line that year . In the early 1990's, worldwide expansion will slow to a trickle. It now appears that in the year 2000, the world win have at most 400 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear capacity, about 9% of the 4500 GW forecast by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1974. Most governments have curtailed their nuclear power programs, or cancelled farther expansion entirely. Only in a very few countries are there still plans for expansion. As the pioneering nuclear nation, the United States had the world's most ambitious nuclear program in 1978; it has now been 12 years since a new plant has been ordered, and 116 have been cancelled, including all those ordered after 1974. The US nuclear construction industry has essentially disappeared; only two plants are under construction. Reports in 1987 and 1989 by the Commission of the European Communities state that a consistent majority of Europeans in all countries surveyed, including those that had until recently been broadly in favor of nuclear power, now consider risks of nuclear power to be unacceptably dangerous. A 1988 vote in Italy denied the Government the authority to site new nuclear plants, blocking expansion of the country's already stalled nuclear industry. Two months later, the Government stopped work on the country's only remaining nuclear construction project. Switzerland, which has not completed a nuclear plant since 1980, cancelled plans in 1988 to build the country's sixth plant. Swiss voters will decide in a referendum later this year whether to phase-out nuclear power altogether. Sweden decided in a 1980 referendum to completely phase-out nuclear power by 2010. In West Germany, three reactors have been shut down and the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant cancelled due to economic forces and citizen action. Political action has also prevented the commissioning of the Kalkar Fast Breeder Reactor. No further reactors are under construction or under order In the United Kingdom, a clear majority oppose increasing the country's reliance on nuclear power, and plans for three future plants have been cancelled. The unsuccessful privatisation of the British nuclear industry in 1989 highlighted its economic failures. Austria and the Philippines have both decided to scrap their first fully operable nuclear power plants before they even began operation -- writing off billions of dollars of investments. Along with these two countries, Australia, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Portugal, and Norway have all adopted explicit non-nuclear energy policies. France is now the only Western European country moving forward steadily with nuclear expansion. But in recent years, France's nuclear program has experienced problems with reliability, radiation leaks and cooling capacity failures The French state utility has built up an enormous debt of $39 billion, and has been ordered by the Government to implement a phased debt reduction . No new orders have been placed for nuclear reactors, apart from the eight now under construction . Japan's nuclear power program has moved forward, but more slowly than once planned. In 1984, Japan lowered the forecast for its nuclear capacity in the year 2000 by 31% . Japanese utilities are now ordering just two reactors per year, a rate more likely to fall than to increase. Since Chernobyl, the pro-nuclear consensus in the Soviet Union has clearly broken down . There has been an unprecedented wave of anti-nuclear protests throughout the country . Cleanup at Chernobyl has been difficult and expensive. Not surprisingly, Soviet authorities have halted or cancelled plans for adding approximately 100 GW in capacity . In Eastern Europe, the new governments are scaling back or reviewing plans for further expansion. For example, due to rising safety and economic pressures, the future of the CSFR nuclear industry is in doubt. And in East Germany, the four-unit Greifswald plant is due to be shut down by 1992 because of safety problems. NUCLEAR POWER IS PLAGUED WITH PROBLEMS Accident and safety risks: ========================= In terms of its total environmental health, and economic impact, Chernobyl was the worst industrial accident in history. Thirty-one people were directly killed; but even conservative estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of fatal cancers may eventually result, half of them in non- Soviet Europe. Over 30,000 square kilometers of some of the most productive agricultural land in the USSR have been abandoned indefinitely. According to a study by the Soviet Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering (responsible for designing the Chernobyl reactor), cleanup will cost up to $350 billion. After Chernobyl even the IAEA acknowledged that, based on worldwide operating experience to date, a serious 'core melt' accident could occur somewhere in the world - on average -- more often than once every five years. Waste: ===== With more than 400 nuclear power plants operating worldwide, there are still no long-term management programs in operation for high-level radioactive waste. Every year, a modern reactor produces some 30 tonnes of this lethal material which will be hazardous for fifty times longer than recorded history.. Also, the volume of "front-end' waste in uranium mining, often overlooked, is staggering. Approximately 500-1,000 times more waste by weight is generated than uranium product shipped to market. Radiation risks: =============== Based on a re-examination of data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, official estimates of cancer risk from certain low-level radiation exposure have been revised upward threefold. A recent study concludes that the increased incidence of leukemia in children in the vicinity of Britain's Sellafield reprocessing plant is correlated with paternal employment at the plant. These new results suggest that a father's exposure to routine, low-level radiation on the job may increase his children's risk of contracting leukemia by six to eightfold. Proliferation risks: =================== Expansion of nuclear power substantially increases the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. Commercial nuclear reactors provide both the technical knowledge and the necessary materials to make nuclear weapons. The typical 1000 MW light water reactor produces about 250 kg of plutonium each year, enough to make some 25 nuclear weapons. THE NPT'S FALSE PROMISE TO THE DEVELOPING WORLD Article IV of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) amounts to a firm pledge -- by the nuclear states and other suppliers -- of assistance to non- nuclear parties in developing nuclear power to help meet their energy needs. These benefits have never materialised. Only six developing countries have operating nuclear power reactors. Of the more than 400 nuclear plants worldwide, only 27 are in developing states . The lessons of the 1980's demonstrate that nuclear power has never been economically viable. In recent years, nuclear projects in developing countries have been plagued by technical problems, delays, and staggering cost overruns. For example, Mexico has just commissioned its first nuclear plant -- 12 years late and 600% over budget 19. There are only two developing countries -- South Korea and Taiwan -- likely to get more than 10% of their electricity from nuclear power by the year 2000. PHASING OUT NUCLEAR POWER Some analysts have suggested that there is no practical way to achieve a complete phase-out in countries that have substantial nuclear power programs. Sweden is often cited as an example, in view of the Swedish referendum results requiring nuclear power be phased out by 2010. However, in 1987, a study for the State Electricity Board lead by Dr. Thomas Johansson concluded that the 50% fraction of total electricity production currently met by nuclear power can be replaced by energy efficiency and new energy technologies without new, environmentally-damaging, large-scale hydro-power capacity; without raising carbon dioxide emissions; and without increasing the costs of electricity services in real terms. ENERGY EFFICIENCY HAS ARRIVED Greater energy efficiency currently offers the fastest and most affordable solution to environmental problems caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. New technologies in lighting, motors, transport, industrial processes, building design and cookstoves can cut energy consumption by 50% to 90% without reducing energy services. These technologies cost only a fraction of their supply-side alternatives -- eg building new fossil fuel power plants and oil wells. Even the most advanced nations use energy at a level two to ten times more intensely than is economically optimal. When a coal-fired power plant is operated to deliver electricity to heat a house, 75% of the energy is lost in thermal conversion and transmission. Most of the remaining fraction is then pumped out through leaky windows and poorly insulated walls and roofs. Between 1973 and 1988, most industrialised market economies improved their energy efficiency by between 15% to 30%. During this period, the US economy grew by 4O% while energy use remained constant. In 1988, the most detailed study ever conducted of global energy end-use, lead by Professor Jose Goldemberg, was released. It concluded that, even with a 40% increase in world population by 2020 and dramatic improvements in global average living standards, total energy demand need only grow by 10% from the 1986 total of 10 TW if presently available energy efficient technologies were to be used on a comprehensive basis. A recent study found that further improvements in electrical efficiency would be up to seven times more cost effective than nuclear power in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Further research and development can only improve this potential. At present, efficiency only accounts for 8% of the national energy research budgets of EC nations, compared to 55% for nuclear. One example of the tremendous opportunities for reducing energy demand through efficiency is the simple light bulb. Incandescent bulbs can be replaced with newly-developed compact fluorescent bulbs, which are just as bright, use one-fourth the electricity, and last ten times as long. Over the lifetime of the bulb, a single compact fluorescent replacing one 75 watt incandescent lamp will avoid the emission of close to a ton of carbon dioxide and 8 kg of sulfur dioxide, and will save $20 to $30 worth of fossil fuel. It has been estimated that replacing incandescents with compact fluorescents throughout the US lighting sector could offset (he electricity provided by 40 nuclear power plants. RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES Renewable energy sources (i.e. wind, direct solar technologies, hydropower, biomass, and geothermal) combined provide approximately 17% of the world's energy. "Renewables" now offer alternatives only marginally more expensive than the current price of fossil fuels. Nuclear power is almost twice as expensive as many of these new technologies. Unlike small- scale renewables, both fossil fuels and nuclear power have serious environmental costs associated with them. Although photovoltaic (PV) technology remains about two and a half times as expensive as nuclear power, prices have dropped by 300% over the past 10 years and continue to fall . However, wind, geothermal and solar thermal technologies (at or below $0.10/kWh) offer electricity at costs below nuclear power ($O.12/kWh), and the cost of biomass energy is comparable to that of fossil fuel (about $0.05 - 0.06/k(Vb). Although more work remains to be done in further developing these and other renewable technologies, they are already at the point of becoming commercially competitive -- even in a market where fossil and nuclear fuels are protected by hidden subsidies. The potential of renewable energy is impressive, even in the short-term. For example, by the year 2000, it has been estimated that wind could produce some 6% of US electricity, geothermal a further 3%, and PV a full 8%. One promising long-term application of PV technology is in producing liquid hydrogen fuel, an extremely clean source of energy. A report by the World Resources Institute in 1989 suggested that a complete transition from fossil fuel to a global solar hydrogen economy might be feasible by the middle of the next century. The potential for PV technology was recently assessed by the US Department of Energy. Its findings were: (a) PV can be used effectively anywhere in the US; (b) Rather than the usual incremental growth, there is a likelihood of explosive growth in the PV industry when the price reaches about $0.08/kWh, which could happen as early as 2000; and (c) PV appears to be a long-term and desirable solution to US and global concerns about energy and the environment. The IAEA -- not known for its vocal support of renewable energy -- estimated the "total realisable potential" of renewables to be 24 terawatts (TW), more than twice current global energy demand. When the World Commission on Environment and Development, scrutinized the development of only some of the "low-impact" and small-scale renewable energy technologies, they arrived at a conservative assessment of the global realisable potential at 13 TW -- greater than today's global energy demand. Using best available energy efficient technologies, the overall potential of renewable energy comfortably accommodates the projection for global energy demand for a substantially increased world population enjoying a material standard of living equivalent to that in Western Europe today. Renewable energy technologies: ============================= Are far safer and cleaner than nuclear power, posing little or no toxic waste disposal problems; Offer cheaper energy than nuclear power, without the costs of decommissioning plants and managing waste; Entail much shorter lead times for plant construction compared with nuclear plants; Have a total realisable potential greater than conventional and nuclear sources; Combined, offer energy self-sufficiency for many regions and reduced reliance on finite resources, which can fuel international tensions; and Are more cost-effective in displacing carbon dioxide emissions than nuclear power, when the energy used in the entire nuclear fuel cycle is considered. Solar Versus Nuclear ==================== Nuclear advocates often cite apparently impressive figures for the quantities of energy locked up in world uranium reserves, which they say could be harnessed if theoretically more efficient "fast breeder" reactors can be made to work acceptably. However, even though the energy released in the fissioning of a single uranium nucleus is 100 million times greater than that released when a photon of light is absorbed by the amorphous silicon in a photovoltaic (PV) solar cell, a uranium atom can fission only once, whilst silicon can repeatedly absorb photons and convert solar energy into electricity. Because of this, and because the layer of amorphous silicon in a solar cell need only be one micron thick, a gram of silicon over the lifetime of a PV system can produce about the same amount of electricity as a gram of uranium using breeder reactors. But silicon is over 5,000 times more abundant than uranium in the Earth's crust. Ignoring its suitability for small-scale dispersed applications such as rooftops, some opponents of solar energy have pointed to what they claim would be the prohibitively large areas of land required for large-scale production of solar electricity. According to Dr. Hans Blix, Director General of the IAEA, some 90 square kilometres of land would be needed to produce as much power from solar energy as from one nuclear reactor. How does this figure compare with the land taken up by nuclear power production? Even using this rather pessimistic IAEA figure, if the radioactive wasteland abandoned as a result of the Chernobyl disaster were used instead to generate solar electricity, it would produce more than all the nuclear power stations in the world. PROPOSALS FOR GOVERNMENTAL ACTION 1. Taking full account of the experience of the past 30 years, those governments which have pursued nuclear energy supply strategies should undertake immediate programs for the phasing out of all nuclear electricity generating capacity and its replacement by clean and more cost-effective energy efficiency measures and renewable sources of supply. Specifically, government energy policies should be re-oriented toward promoting more efficient use of conventional commercial energy and integrating renewable energy sources into the marketplace. This should include, for example: a shift in research and development funding from nuclear to energy efficiency and renewables; tax reform and financial incentives to reflect the full environmental costs of energy production, and encourage economic investment in efficiency and renewable energy; adopting higher efficiency standards and product labelling of efficiency performance in major energy sectors; eliminating conventional and nuclear energy supply subsidies and rationalising energy prices so that they reflect the high costs of new energy supplies; developing relevant information databases and improving the flow of public information about energy-saving and renewable energy opportunities; stabilising consumer fossil fuel prices, so that supply gluts do not trigger higher consumption levels, and greater urgency is given to energy efficiency investment; encouraging least-cost energy planning, where the energy option with the lowest overall social and environmental costs are promoted the most; encouraging greater participation by the private sector in government- sponsored collaborative research and development activities; and removing institutional barriers to the development of efficiency and renewable energy technologies. 2. A new international cooperative program should be launched to develop and implement efficiency and renewable energy technologies, to make such technologies available to all states. Such a program might be developed and coordinated within the framework of an existing multilateral institution, and include economic assistance, technology transfers, cooperative research, and information exchange.