on not going nuclear

It is the very bitter pill, the controversial fix, the thing that stirs involuntary reflexes of alarm. The choice of increasing our use of it is apparently borne of a kind of resigned pragmatism, recognising it as an important part of the solution in a less than pefect world. Our government, despite earlier signs to the contrary, have given the industry a thumbs up and now are poised to embrace it more formally, with as many as ten new reactors in the pipeline. We need it, we are told. As much of it as possible, and fast. The case, we are assured, is obvious; renewables are considered patchy when compared to the comparably vast amounts of energy currently produced by the fossil fuels that we must surely start to put behind us. Expansion of nuclear power is seen by many as the only realistic option left to us if we’re to see a future both free from climate chaos and in which we can still function as a modern society, ie a world in which we aren’t subjected to power cuts that will send us back to level of squalor comparable with the Middle Ages, or at least 1974.

There are no shortage of facts being banded around in what has become a war for public sympathy; renewables have effectively been competing with nuclear for funding for some years. It’s true that the former, with previous levels of investment, currently constitute an incredibly modest proportion of the power currently supplied by coal. In March this year a report by the Royal Academy of Engineering suggested that massive investment in nuclear as well as renewables and carbon capture and storage was necessary if we are to both meet our carbon targets and make up the ensuing energy shortfall. They tout the need for as many as forty new nuclear or CCS power stations in the country. This seems a sober appraisal of the potential – and limits – of renewables. But it stands at loggerheads with subsequent and comprehensive evalutaions from the Centre for Alternative Technology and a report sponsored by UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, the Scottish government, and a number of large companies. Charged with looking at the potential for the UK of offshore wind, the report concluded that this resource represents the opportunity for us to become a net exporter of energy.

Critics of nuclear point out that it won’t affect our CO2 emissions rapidly enough. The power stations carry too much risk of accident, attack or simply criminal indifference. We still don’t know what to do with the waste and the cost of handling it, and the costs of decommissioning old plants is astronomic. Take the underground waste storage facility in Yucca mountain, Nevada for example; down a tunnel eight kilometres long, designed to comply with a host of regulations, it is arguably as close as anywhere will get to get to the kind of place required for the long term storage of the waste. But when the sheer enormity of the time scale required for the waste to become stable are factored in – hundreds of thousands of years – the chance of a leak created by geological activity, or simple human buffoonery makes the enterprise look like something of a hugely high-stakes gamble. And at Yucca there was shown to be a clear risk of permeating water contaminating the local area, which has effectively put on hold a project that has already swallowed hundreds of millions of dollars. Then there is the issue that, like transport networks and the banks, nuclear power projects are simply too big to fail – whether or not taxpayers are expected to front the subsidies, the governmental bail outs if things go wrong are almost impossible to avoid.

The long-neglected potential of thorium reactors seems to hold a really interesting potential here, in that it offers a means of disposing of uranium from used warheads, is relatively danger free compared to its more unstable and widely used cousin, (even though claims that it is impossible to use the stuff in weaponry after domestic energy use seem to be not entirely accurate) and is far more abundant globally. But the costs and speed of building the new (and much smaller) models of reactors that it would be ideally suited to mean that some kind of uranium/thorium hybrid reactors look depressingly more likely, negating to a great extent the safety and waste related advantages it holds. And, even with thorium forming the vast majority of fuel used, there will still be waste, though it would remain dangerous for hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands of years. The fact that exposing only a few dozen generations to hideous risks seems like a suddenly rosy option gives some indication of how deeply out of balance the very essence of nuclear is, whatever form the fuel.

Nuclear power as it stands remains a kind of poisoned chalice, a throwback to the bright dreams of another era where electricity was cheap by any standard, a kind of wonder stuff that echoed aspirations of a cleaner, more civilised world. Like much of such notions we have inherited from our parent’s generation, the cracks have been showing for some time now and we are approaching the threshold where things could be different or where – if we let ourselves be taken in – a stale and hazardous continuation of a long outdated, terrifying model stands set to be continued down the years. Nuclear is symptomatic of the worst that modernity has to offer us. It is at once anaesthetised and semi-sterile, offers us so much while leaving a truly awful legacy. It capitalises on perhaps our greatest blind spot in the Western world – what we do with the waste we produce. Generally we try our best to ignore it and nuclear appears to be no exception, as the problem of ships carrying this cargo being turned away from ports, dumping illegally off the coast of Africa and even in the Mediterranean (albiet by non-governmental gangsters) only goes to show.

The waste however sits on our collective conscience, hidden away but gnawing at the edges of our memories, the weight of it growing surreptitiously more septic every passing day.  Every container, every barrel of rods that sits there, inconvenient, reminds us that perhaps we cannot have everything we ever dreamed of after all, that energy and matter play by other rules than endless credit without price or repercussions – we have to live within some kind of limits and efforts to transcend them invariably lead to a literally deformed ecology.

In Britain, there is probably no realistic option other than keeping hold of our existing plants until such a time as they can no longer safely function (even by the somewhat dubious standards of the present age). But after that? Building new plants or prolonging the life of those already existing constitutes an act of violence on matter itself. We are after all engaged now in the business of leaving a future fit for living in. Jeopardising this so fundamentally for potentially such vast distances of time seems a deeply perverse attempt to pay our debt to coming generations.

The alternatives are there if we choose to give them credit. And reducing demand – accepting that there is a balance to be struck and that we have to move to greater efficiency on all levels – should be a given in the years ahead. Not because the world we’re on the threshold of needs to be unduly austere, if we invest wisely while we can. But we have to acknowledge that much of the energy we consume today is wasted needlessly and, in a world of rising populations, we all must embrace a greater degree of voluntary simplicity – out of an appreciation of the richness of what such simplicity can bring, coupled with the knowledge that we’re all in this together if and when some form of carbon rationing comes in. Changing our lifestyles – driving and flying less, steering ourselves away from consumerism, leading lives more geared to our localities – is the only hope, in a world of rising populations and aspirations, for more of humanity to live with dignity and a decent – not corpulent – level of material wealth.