Events following the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 have served to focus public attention starkly on the dilemmas facing those taking decisions about energy. Understandably, some people have been asking why we should be considering nuclear energy, given the risks that it seems to pose.

Fukushima, though not in the same league as Chernobyl (the only nuclear accident with detectable offsite health consequences), was certainly a serious reminder of the issues associated with nuclear energy. People have been evacuated, it has been a serious challenge to bring the reactors into a stable condition and radioactivity, though not at levels that represented a significant risk to human health, was detected a long way away from the plant itself.

However, the argument for any fuel is never that "it is not as bad as some people think it is". For any source of energy to be used, it must seem reasonably clear that the world would be a better place with it than without it.

Even before Fukushima, one of the most remarkable things about the recent „nuclear debate‟ was that there was a nuclear debate. Not so very ago nuclear energy had widely been dismissed as a possible future energy source – as recently as 2001, for example, public opinion in the UK was running at 2 or 3 to 1 against building new nuclear power stations and there was only a handful of reactors under construction worldwide – a stark contrast to 1984 and 1985, each of which saw more than 30 new nuclear reactors entering service. In 2003 the UK government Energy White Paper Our energy future: creating a low-carbon economy said: "Nuclear power‟s current economics make it an unattractive option for new, carbon-free generating capacity and there are also important issues of nuclear waste to be resolved. This White Paper does not contain specific proposals for building new nuclear power stations."

Just five years later, in 2008, the Nuclear Energy White Paper Meeting the energy challenge was stating: "The Government has concluded that nuclear should have a role to play in the generation of electricity. Nuclear power is a tried and tested technology. It has provided the UK with secure supplies of safe, low-carbon electricity for half a century. More than ever before, nuclear power has a key role to play as part of the UK‟s energy mix." By early 2011 there were around 70 nuclear plants being built around the world with many more planned and 8 sites had been identified in the UK as suitable for new nuclear reactors.


Why the change?

We need four things from our energy (and especially electricity) systems.

First, they must be reliable and secure. If the lights go out the costs are enormous – economically (factories and workplaces cannot operate, perishable stocks like food can be lost and it can take a longtime to get computer systems working again after a power cut), socially (crime and looting, fear, accidents) and so on.
Secondly, production costs should be as low as possible. High energy costs have a damaging effect on jobs and people‟s quality of life.

Thirdly, they must be environmentally acceptable – possible environmental damage connected with energy includes climate change, acid rain, damage to local living systems (e.g. because of a tidal barrage or coal mine), possible radioactive emissions (notably from accidents and waste management), need to transport the fuel, the effects of electricity pylons, visual intrusion and noise.

And fourthly, they must be socially and politically acceptable, not causing too much fear or disruption to people‟s lives, damage house prices, represent unmanageable security risks and so on.

The challenge of energy policy is that very often these four aims do not fit together well. For example, if we are afraid of how much we are coming to rely on imports of natural gas (as our own reserves run short) we might decide to use more coal, which may be more expensive and lead to more emissions of the greenhouse gases associated with climate change, notably carbon dioxide. Wind energy might cut emissions but be unreliable and expensive (and sometimes unpopular). Nuclear energy may be secure and have very low carbon dioxide emissions but it creates radioactive waste and has from time to time been politically unpopular, especially in the wake of major accidents.

In the 1990s and early 2000s in the UK there was a rare period when a single policy – the „dash for gas‟ – was ticking all the boxes. Gas was reliable (we had our own North Sea reserves and a great deal of gas was being discovered globally); gas itself was very cheap at that time and there was a new cheap way of making electricity from gas, known as the „Combined Cycle Gas Turbine‟ or CCGT; switching from coal to gas was giving us reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, since producing electricity using gas from nearby reserves only emits about half as much carbon dioxide as using coal; and gas was not politically or socially very controversial. So the UK build a lot of gas-fired power stations in the 1990s (gas went from nowhere in 1990 to producing about 40% of our electricity in 2000) and it seemed the job had been done without any need for nuclear power.

Today, however, things look very different. Britain is fast running out of its own gas (and oil) reserves, which will leave us dependent on imports, largely from the Middle East and the Former Soviet Union. Russian Prime Minister Putin cut exports of gas to Ukraine in 2005 and oil to Belarus in 2006, with knock-on effects for much of Western Europe. Many people would feel uncomfortable if the UK became heavily dependent on imports from that area of the world over which we have little political influence. We are also getting very short of power stations, not really having built any for the last decade or more. Since electricity cannot be stored we need enough power stations available to cover the peak demand each year (typically early evening in January), ideally without having to rely too much on the wind blowing at the right speed or the tide being in.

Gas and coal prices rose enormously during the first decade of the 21st century, on the back of an oil price which went from below $10 a barrel in 1998 to nearly $150 a barrel in 2008 before falling back and then rising again to well over $100 a barrel in 2011.

Fears over climate change grew, with the world making little headway in controlling the growth in emissions of greenhouse gases despite a number of international conferences. Imported gas involves greater emissions of greenhouse gases owing to the energy needed to transport it, especially if it has to be liquefied first.

And as fears of secure and economic supplies have grown, energy has moved back into the political spotlight in a number of countries.

Nuclear energy has looked much more attractive in this world. Uranium is a widespread resource, found in a number of stable and friendly countries such as Australia, Canada and the USA. Although uranium prices did rise in the 2000s, the cost of the fuel is a much smaller proportion of overall nuclear costs than is the case with gas or coal, so nuclear began to look economically attractive again. Nuclear energy produces very little carbon dioxide (mainly from mining and refining the fuel and building the reactors – the power stations do not emit greenhouse gases in normal operation). And public confidence in nuclear power grew in many countries, while governments removed barriers to new nuclear stations and even encouraging them in many nations, including the UK.

Building new nuclear power stations will still present challenges. It is important that the construction side of the industry shows that it can build new stations to time and cost and that they work efficiently once built, something which had not always been the case before. Progress on dealing with radioactive waste has been slow, though several countries, notably Finland and Sweden, have made great strides and showed that it can be done safely and with public support. It is also vital that the very high safety standards of the previous twenty five years are maintained. Clearly this was not fully achieved in the period following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

There are two points to note, however. Of the 14 reactors situated in the area affected by the earthquake and tsunami, only the four oldest (connect to the grid between 1970 and 1974) at Fukushima Daiichi have given cause for significant concern, and the releases of radioactivity from Reactors 1 to 4 are unlikely to cause any detectable health consequences off site despite the extraordinary problems caused by the tsunami in particular (the plants survived the earthquake as they were designed to do). Secondly, the Fukushima plants are based on water-cooled technology some 50 years old. A modern plant, such as that likely to be built in the UK, makes more use of „passive cooling‟ – so instead of depending on pipes, valves and pumps in an accident (as was the case at Fukushima) it makes more use of the forces of nature such as gravity, natural cooling from circulation of air and water and so on, and so would have remained safe even after a tsunami of the Japanese size (never seen in Europe). Britain‟s older nuclear plants are cooled not by water but by carbon dioxide and so are much less vulnerable – for example, since there is no zirconium (used for the fuel cans in Fukushima) or water present there is no risk of a hydrogen explosion like those we saw in Japan.

The long-term effects of Fukushima are hard to predict. In some countries, such as China, USA, South Korea, India, France and the UK, it does not seem to have resulted in major shifts in policy, while in Germany, Japan, Switzerland and Italy the response has been more negative. However, the accident did not change the fundamental issues surrounding energy. The world is set to use much more energy in the future (perhaps twice as much by 2100 as was used in 2000. Traditional energy sources such as oil and gas are limited and concentrated in a small number of countries. Greenhouse gas emissions are growing and causing increasing concern about climate change. There are doubts as to how far renewables can provide the very large amounts of reliable electricity that we need. The question still remains, „if not nuclear, as part of the mix, then what?‟ The Japanese accident has not provided any easy answers to that question, and the fundamental case for nuclear continues to look stronger than it has for some years.

By Malcolm Grimston, August 14th 2011