two thoughts on nuclear power
There are increasing signs that Australia is going to go nuclear in the medium term.
First Thought
One way of looking at the benefits of nuclear power versus the risks is to consider the worst case scenario of an accident, rather than the base likelihood of an accident.
As an analogy, consider the difference between a plane and a car in operation. If something goes badly wrong with a car, it might be really bad for a few people in the immediate area, but most likely it will just break down and require repair. If something goes badly wrong with a plane, it’s almost certain to be really bad for all aboard, and for anyone who happens to be in the area at which it reaches an altitude of 0. A plane may have many advantages over a car, including efficiency and an overall much lower rate of failure, but when it fails in flight it has very, very serious implications.
Arguably, a corresponding comparison can be applied to nuclear power and other forms of power. If a coal power station malfunctions seriously, there are likely to be localised problems at worst. If a nuclear power station malfunctions badly, you might end up with a Chernobyl-type scenario (and yes, the design of Chernobyl was inherently faulty, but unless we have devised a way to see the future with 100% certainty then it could still happen again).
Rationally, one must accept that there are many advantages of nuclear power. However, does the worst case scenario warrant the risk? To take the analogy a step further, there’s a good reason why the average punter doesn’t fly a jet plane to work, and there’s arguably a good reason why thousands of nuclear power plants spread across the globe is a bad idea too.
Second Thought
Another hypothetical: let’s say nuclear power does become the default for most countries. The fascinating film Crude Awakening gives an estimate of 10,000 nuclear reactors being needed to fully replace oil as a source of power.
Now suppose there’s a serious war somewhere. What are the chances of a stray missile or bomb hitting a reactor? What would the consequences be? What about the temptation to hit one deliberately? Eliminating power is a basic military strategy, after all, and if recent conventional wars are anything to go by the ability to attack far outweighs the ability to defend in modern warfare.
Is deliberately bombing a nuclear power station the equivalent of an attack with a nuclear weapon?
Your thoughts…
Pictured: an abandoned fairground near Chernobyl.
Taken in part from this post (by the same author) at Larvartus Prodeo.
Well, as I said at LP, I don’t think you’re comparing equivalent worst-case scenarios. The worst-case scenario for a nuclear plant is catastrophic meltdown or fission explosion, which, true, is pretty bad. The worst-case scenario for continuing and expanding coal-fired generation, on the other hand, is the continued atmospheric pollution that is currently responsible for very large numbers of lung-disease deaths, and of course, the climate change that comes of runaway carbon emission. The problem for coal isn’t accident, it’s the side-effects.
I know I’m thinking about the ever-tempting Touchup in Tehran. Eliminating a country’s nuclear potential is the classic motivation for destroying nuclear plants, as Israel did back in the 1980s. Power in a country can be knocked out much more quickly and easily than destroying plants; you simply need to destroy the lines, which unlike the plants, are unguarded.
The consequences: it stops the fission cycle, so there’s no fission explosion, just a whole lot of very dirty dust.
No.
[ahem] I mean that the consequences of bombing a reactor is that it stops the fission cycle. You can’t precipitate a nuclear explosion that easily.
No, I appreciate that it would not lead to a meltdown in a modern reactor (most likely, although who knows what a cruise missile right into the core would do…). But as you say, it would be similar to a dirty bomb. So I find it hard to distinguish between deliberately hitting a reactor and a dirty bomb attack.
Of course, of course. I suppose I was implicitly limiting the scenario to the very short term, i.e., what happens if it blows up, basically. But the counterpoint to the long term effects of carbon is nuclear waste, which presents some severe problems of its own.
An interesting thing to come out of the documentary I refer to (Crude Awakening) is that we might not have a greenhouse problem soon enough because we’re going to run out of carbon-based fuels…
Well, it stops the fission cycle assuming that it is a modern and properly designed/maintained reactor which defaults to “off” (which Chernobyl did not), and the effects of any attack allow this to happpen.
Good point about the power lines. But what about random carnage during a sustained bombing campaign, for example? It’s relatively unlikely when there are only a few hundred such stations in the world, but if they were ubiquitous it’d be sure to happen sooner or later.
No, even a very well-aimed missile that landed right on top of the reactor pile would be hard pressed to start a fission explosion. It’s really a surprisingly difficult engineering problem to get a critical mass together and start the chain reaction right.
And I think there’s quite an important difference between destroying a nuclear reactor conventionally and the with the use of a fissile weapon—though I think we’d both agree that the difference would be lost on the human victims.
Well, my (possibly out of date) understanding of fission reactors is that the chain reaction, with critical mass, is underway in there, it’s just kept under control by the use of control rods. So I suppose I was wondering about the possibility that an explosion could somehow prevent the control rods from working properly and thereby create an uncontrolled chain reaction.
Indeed – once you toss an actual nuke in it changes the whole equation. Speaking of which, I came across this a while back – a nuclear bomb so big that a conventional aircraft would be unable to clear the area before the explosion caught it. Those crazy Ruskis!
That was pretty crazy, but not quite as frightening for my money as this one.
Australia has most of the uranium. Let’s use some of it for our own benefit.
Given Australia’s intensive mineral production industries, nuclear power is a viable way of feeding demand long term. Also, given current and future projected water shortages, surely nuclear power gives a viable way of generating clean water without the CO2 emissions. The farmers along the Murray can take all they like, we can drink the sea.
The perceived problem of storing the waste doesn’t necessarily have to be a problem. A shift in perception about risks through rational debate and not through scaremongering by uneducated emotive fools would help. We need to have faith in future generations’ intelligence. The waste will be with the earth for a very long time. Would it at all be possible that at some point in the future a better way of handling nuclear waste may be identified? I would like to think so.
The problem with arguments against nuclear power is that commonly it becomes quite emotional and people consider only what has happened in the past, project that into the future and establish a climate of fear. We all like to fear something, but on the flip side consider France, where 80% of their power requirements are generated through nuclear. Surely there are lessons to be learned from a successful nuclear scheme. But this probably won’t happen as the emotional value is low.
The only rational way of arguing for or against nuclear power in Australia is to remove emotional debate and carry out a risk assessment:
[Risk] = [Severity] x [Likelihood]
(with agreed number systems used)
Reduce the argument to numbers, design out risks to make everyone happy, and if the risk is still too high then maybe nuclear is not for us. I should, however, think this unlikely.
PS. Once nuclear fusion is nailed then all the problems disappear anyhow. Relax.
I see the danger of a nuclear accident (however small) as being primarily an environmental one. Even with the great Chernobyl disaster, only four thousand people died (according to the UN International Atomic Energy Agency).
This is bad, but you have to factor that remote risk against the danger that climate change presents the long run.
The really dodgy aspect of nuclear energy, as far as I’m concerned, is the nuclear proliferation issue. It is only a small step from producing plutonium (as nuclear reactors do) to re-processing it. Then you have the ability to make nuclear weapons.
I don’t believe Australia, as a responsible global citizen, should be encouraging such a paradigm.
Well, that’s the estimate of direct deaths, but other reports and investigations suggest that rates of cancer caused by the accident mean that the actual figure is probably in the tens or even hundreds of thousands: linky.
Nuclear proliferation is a massive, massive issue. I think the only responsible way to export uranium is to do so on a return basis, i.e. you can’t have any more until you return the spent fuel to us. Yes, we end up with waste, but we also know where potential fissile material is going.
God, some of those weapons (e.g. the “Davy Crockett”) are ridiculously dangerous – small, portable, easy to use nukes. If the US built them, so did the USSR, and you can bet the latter doesn’t have a good handle on where they all ended up.
I would like to think so too, but it’s hardly something to rely on. If dangerously radioactive waste lasts for even 10,000 years, then that’s basically longer than civilization has lasted so far, so you have to work on the assumption that society by then could be practically anything from utopia to Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
True, and their stance on this issue (and genetic engineering) are why I stopped giving money to Greenpeace, despite agreeing with them on many other issues. But there is a corresponding danger in writing off legitimate concerns as “emotive”, I think. I feel.
I had precisely this equation in mind when I was writing, actually. But how do you get “severity” and “likelihood” into the same scale for nuclear versus other forms of energy? As the whole climate change debate shows, severity and risk are massively dubious in terms of fossil fuel based power production.
Rock on fusion, fo shizzle. We (the people of earth) are actually building a proof-of-concept fusion reactor in France as we speak, no-one really knows if it’ll work or not but if it does the whole equation changes. Or possibly the government blows is up like the movie Chain Reaction, starring Keanu Reeves.