Fri 11 Aug 2006
Posted by Darragh Field under
Peakist
Nuclear energy is currently the forerunner in the race to help the UK get over the coming energy gap and while it is a undisputed contendor it is not the silver bullet EDF, the Nuclear lobbists and New Labour would have us believe.
Safety is simply the overiding issue, no matter what pro nuclear campaigners say about new the generation of reactors there is always a risk.
“BNG’s Thorp spent fuel reprocessing facility at Sellafield is still closed after the leak of radioactive liquid in May 2005, involving enough material to half fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. BNG was prosecuted separately over the incident by the Health and Safety Executive in June and is due to be fined in October. “
“At the UKAEA’s Dounreay facility in Scotland last September, 266 litres of hazardous nuclear waste split on to a laboratory floor when it was being mixed with concrete and pumped into 500-litre drums for storage.”
source: Independent Michael Harrison
Essentially technology breaksdown and when a wind farm or a tidal turbine breakdown they do not endanger the immediate area with being a possible radiation hotzone. There is no arguement against this. If you don’t believe its a health hazard why not buy a holiday property in chernobyl? I believe you’ll find some outstanding value.
There is still the outstanding issue of £70 Billion pounds worth of nuclear waste still without a home. Thats 470,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste - enough to fill the Albert Hall five times. Should we sort this first before creating more
Thirdly the contract up for tender are already name checked for EDF its french subsideries. This is a huge amount of tax payers money simply leaving the UK. For a country that so vehmently refused to give up the pound it seems staggering we’d hand our future energy dependancy to a foreign state to develop.
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August 13th, 2006 at 2:46 am
The article concludes “A spokeswoman for the UKAEA said the Dounreay incident had been unfortunate but stressed that no employees had been harmed. The NDA said that in the case of Sellafield, no release of radiation had occurred beyond the boundary of the site and no workers had been irradiated but it was nevertheless a serious lapse in management.”
I’ve not heard anyone saying that nuclear power is a silver bullet or that it’s risk free. There are risks involved in everything we choose to do, or not to do. The only nuclear fatalities so far were at Chernobyl and there weren’t very many of them; contrast this with fatalities in other industries: from a 2001 Paul Scherrer Institute report, in deaths per terrawatt year, “Coal 6400, Gas 1200, Hydro 4000, nuclear 31″.
What are the risks of not going nuclear? We’ll carry on pumping out vast quantities of CO2 inviting the most “terrifying climate storm in 55 million years”. Wind farms on the scale required to replace oil and gas would decimate every square inch of our landscape. There is an almost linear relationship between a country’s GDP and its energy consumption so that any kind of ‘powerdown’ scenario (bring on the oxen?) would drive more people into deep poverty and, because poverty kills, kill many of them. In the balance of risks, I think nuclear power is by far and away the safest. If we can then prize the bombs from the cold dead hands of the international nuclear weapons industry we’ll be onto a winner.
[The £70 billion nuclear cleanup cost is historic and does not reflect future costs. The reason we still have a ‘nuclear waste problem’ is because, for decades, the anti-nuclear lobby have opposed the only sensible thing that can be done with it - dig a big hole and bury it.]
August 13th, 2006 at 4:39 am
“For an industry said to be on the verge of a renaissance, nuclear power has not been coping very well with an exceptionally hot European summer. On August 8th the firm that runs Finland’s grid announced that the country might run short of power in 2009, partly as a result of delays in the construction of a new nuclear reactor, Europe’s first in over a decade. Earlier this month the Swedish government ordered the indefinite closure of four reactors while it investigated the failure of several safety systems during a power surge at one of them. Spanish authorities, meanwhile, have slapped one of their nuclear plants with a record fine of €1.6m ($2.1m) for poor maintenance in 2004. All summer, nuclear plants across Europe have had to trim output to avoid breaching environmental regulations.
The most serious incident took place at Forsmark I, one of three reactors 130km (80 miles) north of Stockholm. On July 25th a short circuit on the national grid cut the plant off from the mains. An accompanying power surge knocked out two of the four generators that provide the back-up power needed to shut down the reactor. Somehow, both a mechanism that protects against power surges and an auxiliary connection to the grid failed. Happily, other safety systems worked as advertised, and staff were able to shut the reactor down safely within 45 minutes.
In fact, a prolonged drought has been sapping Sweden’s other main source of power, hydroelectric plants. Elsewhere in Europe, hot, dry weather has not only drained reservoirs and pushed up demand for power to run air conditioners; it has also warmed up the rivers used as a source of water to cool many nuclear reactors. In most countries, environmental rules prevent nuclear power stations from releasing water above a certain temperature back into rivers. The hotter the water is to begin with, the harder it is to comply. Last month, a few nuclear plants in Spain and Germany had to scale back their operations to meet the rules. Other German plants, and many French ones, secured government approval to exceed the temperature limits. Similar regulations crimped operations at coal-powered plants too.
In late July, as a result of all this, European wholesale electricity prices hit record levels. Such spikes will become more frequent if, as many project, global warming brings more stifling summers, and more power-hungry appliances to cope with them. If that happens, Europe will clearly need extra generating capacity—but the past few weeks have given many reasons to wonder whether nuclear is the right source.”
The Economist
Your arguement regarding CO2 output completely ignores the impact of the same time and money currently being invested in Nuclear being invested in renewable energy.
August 13th, 2006 at 9:22 am
In 2005 there were 441 nuclear power stations generating 368 gigawatts of electricity. It’s hardly surprising you’ll find the odd problem, but the level of sometimes justified paranoia has made nuclear power one of the safest industries we have. The Economist article demonstrates that governments, nuclear regulatory agencies, environment legislation and multi-redundancy engineering are all working well and we can expect only an improving situation. Not to be complacent, of course.
I’m unable to tell the energy industry how to best spend their time and money. I don’t think that nuclear should be subsidised. I do think that the real cost of energy should be reflected in a massive carbon tax, and then people and companies can decide for themselves where to invest. Under those circumstances I think nuclear will do very well; if you’re right, and there’s better technology elsewhere, it won’t.