John McTernan: Nuclear sector is far from meltdown

Published on Monday 21 March 2011 14:14

The pictures of the Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan have been horrendous. Day after day, reactors exploded and emergency staff have rallied to cool the overheating fuel rods. The fear of a meltdown is real. The release of radiation into the surrounding area has led the Japanese government to suspend the sale of certain foods from the surrounding area.

On its own, this would be a huge issue for any government to tackle. For Japan, this crisis follows a massive earthquake and a huge tsunami - with the fear of further quakes to come, since we now know that earthquakes tend to cluster.

Among most people around the world, this has led to a huge humanitarian outpouring - a fellow-feeling for the suffering. Among a handful, it has been the source of tasteless speculation. I refer to the anti-nuclear activists who chortle about how much fun they'll have making adverts opposing nuclear power with footage from Fukushima. Well I've got news for them: what's going on in Japan is probably the single best advert for a new generation of nuclear power stations - not just here in Britain, but also around the world.

The first point is quite simple. Despite the most extreme assaults by nature - an earthquake that has shifted the earth on its axis and shortened the day by 1.8 millionth of a second - there hasn't actually been a meltdown. At Chernobyl there were no containment vessels, so when the building blew up the clouds of radioactivity spread rapidly. In Japan, the failsafe systems have worked. All except one. The back-up power sources - diesel generators - which were meant to pump water into the reactors to keep them cool if the main systems failed, were flooded.

The seawall protecting them wasn't high enough. But the firefighters are managing to pump water in and cool down the fuel rods. These are 40-year-old reactors, from a design that's even older. For them to survive these extreme and unforeseen circumstances is a true vindication of the fundamental safety of nuclear power.

The true lesson of events in Japan is that older nuclear power stations should not be prolonged in life; they should be decommissioned and replaced by the new generation of even safer and more-efficient plants. The problem here is political cowardice. It's easier by far to extend the life of an existing station - however ageing - than to hold and win the argument with the public that a new plant should be built.

Second, the need for nuclear power remains overwhelming.Our country, our economy, our civilisation is dependent on intensive use of energy. We can, and will, reduce our dependence, but we will never eliminate it. The need to switch from burning fossil fuels will actually drive up electricity usage as we switch to electric cars and trains rather than burning diesel and petrol.

For all the investment in renewable sources of energy, there are still huge limitations on them. Putting aside hydro-power, the available sources are expensive, intermittent or not proven. Even in gusty Scotland, wind power is barely available for a fifth of the time - but we need electricity to be continuously and consistently on.

All economies need base-load power - that's currently provided by coal and gas stations. But they are the real and present danger. The cost of their pollution is all around us already. Global warming and its consequences - melting ice caps, rising sea levels, extreme weather events - are the price we pay for past and present carbon emissions.

There is no alternative to nuclear power to provide the baseload energy we need all the time. Carbon capture is decades away, if it ever proves feasible. Wave and tidal power are massively expensive and still experimental. And wind power is not going to do it either.

Even if we could imagine local communities being happy to have acres of land occupied by wind farms, there is no way that people are willing to have their electricity bills trebled. That's the truth. There's a limit to what people are willing - or able - to pay. Nuclear power offers cheap electricity that can always be on and is carbon neutral. That's why we need it in Britain - and that's why we will have a new generation of nuclear power stations.

This is, in reality, not a debate about the elimination of the risk attributed to nuclear power. This is a judgment to be made about the balance between competing risks. Nuclear waste is a real challenge - its half-life means that arrangements for its safe storage involve deep time, planning and executing strategies over centuries.

But while 90 per cent of UK nuclear waste was created in the 1950s and has to be handled, the new generation of reactors produce far less than in the past and modern recycling restores much to use as future fuel. This is costly, but so are the protections and mitigations that need to be put in place to prevent global warming wreaking damage. The fact that a lot of the costs fall on developing countries does not excuse us - our consumption of fossil fuels over the past two centuries has got us here and we need to foot the bill.

So the question is, which is the most proximate threat - the management of nuclear waste or the impact of climate change? Families in Bangladesh know the answer to that.

In one sense the only honest voices in this argument are the "deep greens", who are open about the fact that they want our economies to go backward and living standards to fall.For them, all forms of consumption from large families to energy-intensive industries are morally and environmentally wrong. Apart from them, we are all trying to maintain economic growth while slowing and mitigating climate change. There is no constituency for any other approach.

The honest answer to our dilemmas is a renaissance in nuclear power. This is not to deny that, in the aftermath of the Japanese disaster, there are real questions of safety and design to be answered. The public will demand, rightly, a renewed debate.

But that needs to be an honest one that acknowledges trade-offs, because there are no ideal solutions. A new generation of nuclear reactors is going to be part of our future because it is the least worst option.