Peter Jones: Why environmental benefits of nuclear outweigh waste worries

Published on Thursday 16 April 2009 21:40

NUCLEAR power, we are routinely told by Scottish Government ministers, is "dangerous and unnecessary". Whenever I hear this, I am moved to wonder if Alex Salmond has told the French government.

The French people, bereft of much in the way of natural resources to exploit for their energy needs, get about 80 per cent of their electricity from nuclear power.

The French government's belief that nuclear power is not only safe, but also necessary to the future of its country, is such that they are about to embark on building some more nuclear power stations. Have they not heard the warnings from Scotland about this folly?

Business readers, I know, also wonder about these curiosities. They are also concerned about two other things – the future provision of electricity and, like most people, the environment, specifically, whether Scotland can play its part in cutting harmful carbon emissions.

The Scottish Government says the best way to cut the emissions caused by the generation of electricity is to build new sources of renewable electricity – wind turbines on land and offshore, wave and tidal generating sources, and to capture and store the carbon produced by traditional coal and gas-fired power stations.

And since there is no doubt that Scotland has the resources to produce an awful lot of power that way, that's why nuclear power is unnecessary, says the Scottish Government.

Regular readers will know that I question whether the non-wind-based technologies are going to be proven, both technically and economically, in time to be built before some of our conventional coal and nuclear power stations have to shut down. I also question whether the finance necessary to develop these alternatives will actually be available.

Personally, I hope the technologies can be proven in time and there will be the money to develop them. But because that can only be a hope, I believe it would be prudent to examine the alternative: nuclear power.

A challenge to the SNP administration's dogged opposition to nuclear power was raised yesterday by Ed Miliband, Climate Change and Energy Secretary, during his visit to Hunterston nuclear power station.

The question is: which is the more important threat to the environment, radioactive waste and its storage problems, or raising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels so much that we may make the world uninhabitable?

Ten years ago, I would have agreed that radioactive waste was a bigger problem. Now I think that carbon pollution is a far greater problem.

The interesting thing about a nuclear power station is that it does not produce carbon dioxide. It is a carbon-free means of electricity production.

Environmentalists will protest about this, saying the mining of uranium, its transport, and all sorts of other activities produce lots of carbon emissions. And they are quite right.

But when calculated on a life-cycle basis – that is taking all the emissions caused by construction, mining, transport and decommissioning into account – nuclear energy comes near the bottom of the league for carbon production.

In a study for British Energy, the now French-owned producer of Britain's nuclear electricity, AEA Technology calculated that the life-cycle emissions of a new nuclear station the size of Torness in East Lothian were between five and seven grams per kilowatt hour (g/kWh) of electricity.

That is incredibly low, not far above the life-cycle emissions for wind power. Ha, you may say, British Energy would say that wouldn't they?

Actually lots of other people say the same thing. A study by Vattenfall, a Swedish power company, found that nuclear produced 6g/kWh, slightly more than its wind farms at 5.5g/kWh. This is insignificant compared with a coal-fired station at 980g/kWh and a combined cycle gas-fuelled station at 450g/kWh. And a nuclear station's carbon output is still better than a coal plant equipped with carbon capture and storage technology because only reduces carbon output by around 90 per cent.

The numbers produced by other such studies, such as one by the Institute for Applied Ecology in Germany, vary but they are all in the same ballpark.

Environmentalists also point out that we could reduce electricity consumption, and hence the need for new power stations, if we did things like insulating our homes, switching TVs and computers off instead of leaving them on stand-by, and so on. That is quite right, and it is also economically the most efficient way to cut carbon emissions.

But the UK government was busy promoting the joys of electric cars yesterday. If they become popular, and they could well do, that implies we will need a lot more electricity, possibly more than might be saved by energy efficiency measures.

What this all means is that there is not just an economic argument for nuclear power, but also a pretty strong environmental case too.

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