Nuclear Debate

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The Blue letters are For nuclear energy.

The Green letters are Against nuclear energy.

BBC 10/17/2005

Analysis: Is nuclear power the answer?

With Prime Minister Tony Blair calling for an "open-minded" debate on the future of nuclear power in the UK, the BBC's Alex Kirby explores the pros and cons of atomic energy.

Nuclear power looks as if it should be the answer to all our energy conundrums, and perhaps even to climate change.
It provides a steady stream of energy, and does not depend on hydrocarbon supplies from unstable regimes.
It is the nearest thing we have to a non-polluting energy source, apart from natural renewables.
But it still engenders massive distrust, so much that many people say it can never be part of the way to avoid a disastrously warming world.

Nuclear energy has always had its proponents, their ranks swollen now by people who dislike the technology but believe it may be essential.
They point out that a reactor emits virtually no carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas released from human activities (though of course building the power station produces a lot of CO2).

They say nuclear power is safe, and that the 1957 Windscale fire in the UK, Three Mile Island in the US in 1979, and even Chernobyl have killed massively fewer people than the oil and coal industries.
Beyond that, they say modern reactors are inherently far safer than those built 20 or 30 years ago, reducing a small risk still further.
Supporters say uranium prices have remained steady for decades, meaning nuclear energy is far more secure than fossil fuels can ever be.
And they argue that modern nuclear power systems are far more economic than the older versions, and are therefore a good investment.
And yet their opponents insist that, if nuclear power really is the answer, then we must be asking the wrong question.

Terror fears

There is an inevitable link between civil and military atoms, they retort. If we say we need them to stave off climate change, then so can countries like Iran and North Korea - and there is no impermeable barrier between electricity and bombs.

They say nuclear energy is economic only under a very restricted analysis - by the time you have factored in the costs of construction, insurance, waste disposal and decommissioning, you need huge subsidies.

And, opponents ask, what happens to the waste? The only answer we have come up with so far entails storing the most radioactive waste under guard for millennia, until it has decayed to safe levels.

Certainly nuclear power would provide energy to a centralised supply system. But it would do nothing directly to reduce CO2 from transport, unless it made the advent of the hydrogen economy likelier.

Also, given the long planning and construction lead times, it would be a good decade or so before we saw any new power stations, even if we decided to go ahead today.

I once heard from a British environment secretary, Chris (now Lord) Patten, a telling definition of the problem. "Nuclear power? To most people, it's witchcraft," he told his hearers.

Most of us worry far more about something that we see as very unlikely but grotesquely horrible than we do about what we perceive as far likelier but much more mundane.

We have a horror of dying in an air crash, but not of driving to the airport along far more dangerous roads.

We fear radioactive death, but cock an insouciant snook at the risk of dying painfully from the effects of smoking, or obesity, or alcohol.

To that degree, our distrust of nuclear energy may be partly irrational. In other ways, though, it makes very good sense.