Renew On Line (UK) 30

Extracts from the March-April 2001 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

Nuclear News and Analysis

Let’s have some more radioactivity

In his latest book ‘Homage to Gaia: the life of an independent scientist’ James Lovelock claims that ‘sometime in the next century, when the adverse effects of climate change begin to bite, people will look back in anger at those who now so foolishly continue to pollute by burning fossil fuel instead of accepting the beneficence of nuclear power’ His ideas were also featured in an article in the Guardian last year (16/9/00).

While Lovelocks ideas about homeostatic planetary balances- the Gaia thesis- have much to recommend them, and indeed have become an inspiration to many greens, he really does not seem to have much of a clue about the nuclear issues. Thus, in the Guardian article, he suggested that the Chernobyl accident really wasn’t that important. True, thirty odd firemen died, but otherwise its impact had been small. No mention of the tens of thousands of people, including many children, who are thought to have been injured by radiation- some people put the figure even higher. But then Lovelock is more interested in the longer and wider view- wildlife he said ‘doesn’t care about radiation’. Natural selection would sort out any mutations and life would go on.

He saw nuclear waste as more or less benign- ‘I have told BNFL, or whoever it was, that I would happily take their full output of one of their big power stations. I think the high level waste is a stainless steel cube of about a metre in size and I would be very happy to have a concrete pit that they would dig’ He added it could be useful for home heating and for sterilising food.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this sort of ill conceived jumble of ideas. Some of it is based on half truths. You couldn’t really use high level waste in its usual form to sterilise food- food radiation involves the use of very powerful beams of radiation from large gamma or neutron sources. But you can extract material from nuclear wastes to use as a source of this radiation. Special nuclear isotopes are used to provide power for spacecraft, but the amount of heat that would be produced from a waste dump would be tiny. He’d probably do better using a heat pump in the soil of his garden, or a solar collector on his roof.

The radiation dose he would receive would however not be tiny- although, as a venerable gentlemen, perhaps that would not matter. But he probably would, or should, be stopped from carrying through his idea of taking a picture of his grandchildren on top of the waste store.

All this was by way of backing up the argument that we ought to use nuclear power to respond to climate change. Sorry, but he’ll have to do better than that. Or perhaps he should just stick to the areas of science he knows?

Taiwan & Turkey to dump nuclear?

Taiwan’s economic minister, Lin Hsin-i, recently proposed that Taiwan give up plans to build a fourth nuclear power plant, despite having already spent several billion dollars on the project, commenting that. "we cannot leave the nuclear waste to our children," Instead Lin supported renewable energy sources. If his proposal is adopted, Taiwan could become nuclear free by 2025, when the country’s three nuclear power plants are scheduled to close. Source: ‘When micropower comes of age: an alternative to nuclear power?’ The Japan Times: Oct. 9, 2000

Turkey has now decided not to pursue its nuclear plans, so the way could be open for it to develop its large wind resource. Turkey’s Prime Minister commented "Why would Turkey build nuclear when everyone else is turning away from it?".

Cleaning up Dounreay

Some parts of the Dounreay Fast Breeder reactor site in Scotland would have to be ‘off limits’ for 300 years, despite the £4bn 60 year decommissioning plan recently unveiled. The big issue however is whether to take the 25 tonnes of spent fuel currently stored at Dounreay to Sellafield to reprocess it, reprocess at Dounreay, or carry on storing it, as most environmentalists would prefer- since reprocessing creates more wastes. Either way, according to the Guardian, environmentalists felt that the total bill for the clean up was likely to be more like £10bn. The only good news that the exercise would sustain 2,000 jobs over the next 20 years- assuming that’s the sort of work you are prepared to do!

Nuclear Scotland?

Meanwhile though there are still some pro-nuclear voices left in Scotland- which after all, after France, Belgium and Lithuania, is still the fourth most nuclear-dependent country in the world.

For example, the Scotsman (7th November) ran an article by Michael Kelly, former Glasgow Lord Provost, entitled ‘The good green sense of nuclear power’ which argued that ‘coal-fired power stations emit more radiation than nuclear ones’ and noted that, ‘when the Magnox nuclear generation plants shut down in ten years’ time, replacing them by gas-powered ones would blast another four millions tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Not only that, 60 per cent of the gas they would consume would come, not from the North Sea, but from such stable states as Russia, Algeria and Iran’.

That’s fair comment- all the more reason to develop renewables we would have thought. But he was unimpressed by renewables, claiming that ‘to meet our Kyoto target of 10 per cent by 2010 would require the construction of three offshore windfarms every day for the next ten years. And it’s the Danes who have got the technological know-how, not us. It's not going to happen, is it? Even if it did, the quality of power produced is inferior. It’s unreliable and the voltage and the frequencies fluctuate. Try sending your e-mail using that. Your computer will crash, probably irreparably.’

That’s clearly not the way things are with grid linked wind systems of the sort spreading around the world. But going out even more on the limb he returns to nuclear which he argues is ‘as natural as any other process. More so. What’s more natural than the heat and light from the sun? The energy we extract from the nuclear process can be thought of romantically as the stored energy of an ancient and distant stellar explosion’.

Safe Energy Journal

If you want to keep up to date on things nuclear, take a look at the Safe Energy Journal, which used to be based with Friends of the Earth Scotland, but is now produced by Greenpeace and presented electronically on the web at: http://kare.enviroweb.org 

That site also contains a lot of other entries on nuclear issues from local organisations around the UK.