“Climate change is the biggest environmental challenge of our time,” Yukiya Amano, head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, told French ministers at a meeting in Paris
on Wednesday. “As governments around the world prepare to negotiate a
legally binding, universal agreement on climate at the United Nations
Climate Change Conference in Paris at the end of the year, it is
important that the contributions that nuclear science and technology can
make to combating climate change are recognized.”
A few days earlier, Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican
Governor of New Jersey and one-time chief of the Environmental
Protection Agency under George W. Bush, added her thoughts on the same
topic: “Nuclear energy already provides more than 64 percent of our
nation’s clean-air electricity,” Whitman wrote in an op-ed for The Hill blog — one sponsored by the industry’s chief lobby, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI).
“[I]ts long-term benefits simply cannot be replaced by any other
energy source,” Whitman added, “especially when we consider the
long-term impacts of climate change.” It would be easy to dismiss such appeals as so much self-serving
industry propaganda — not least because Whitman herself serves as a
co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition,
a Washington DC-based outfit that bills itself as a “grassroots
organization that supports the increased use of nuclear power,” but
which is essentially a public-relations project financed by the NEI.
It is surely a bit of spin, but the core argument here — that nuclear
power has a key role to play in the effort to combat global warming
— is one that increasingly cuts across social and partisan lines.
President Obama’s proposed Clean Power Plan
would provide a small credit to states that rely on nuclear power as
part of their proposed emissions reduction schemes, and the nuclear
industry is lobbying hard to have that credit increased — something that the administration has suggested it is considering.
“Nuclear power is part of an all-of-the-above, diverse energy mix and
provides reliable baseload power without contributing to carbon
pollution,” an Environmental Protection Agency spokeswoman recently told The Hill blog. “Nuclear power from current and future plants can help the U.S. meet its [emissions reduction] goals.”
Public support for nuclear power has been in decline over the last five years.
That notion has become axiomatic in certain scientific and policy
circles — and indeed, many experts have argued that the sort of swift
reduction in global carbon emissions that is needed to stabilize global
warming simply cannot be achieved without an expansion of nuclear power.
Such was the conclusion of a handful of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, who penned an open letter
to environmental groups in 2013 imploring them to abandon their
reflexive opposition to nuclear energy, for the sake of the planet.
“As climate and energy scientists concerned with global climate
change, we are writing to urge you to advocate the development and
deployment of safer nuclear energy systems,” wrote the group of
scientists, which included NASA’s James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel of MIT,
Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in
Colorado and Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution for Science in
California. “We appreciate your organization’s concern about global
warming, and your advocacy of renewable energy. But continued opposition
to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous
climate change.”
“Almost half of the American population believes that nuclear power makes the global warming problem worse.”
The reasoning behind this: While renewable, low-carbon power sources
like wind, solar and biomass are important, these energy sources simply
can’t be developed quickly enough, and at the sort of scales necessary,
to truly combat the gathering climate crisis.
Not everyone agrees with this line of thinking, of course, and two
years after the scientists’ impassioned letter — and despite some
bipartisan support and continued investment in safer, next-generation nuclear technologies — a true nuclear renaissance remains, for the most part, an industry pipe dream.
“The nuclear industry is in decline,” declared the authors of the most recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Part of this can be blamed on the meltdown that befell the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in 2011, which spread
new fears about nuclear power across the globe and nudged several
governments to halt projects or forswear nuclear power development all
together.
Still, the industry was stagnating long before this. The 2014 nuclear
status report counted a total of 388 operating reactors globally as of
2014 — 50 fewer than the high point for the nuclear power industry in
2002. Total installed nuclear power capacity inched up as high as 367
gigawatts in 2012, but has since retreated to 333 gigawatts, which is
“comparable to levels last seen two decades ago,” according the authors.
Nuclear power’s total share of the energy pie is now at a new low,
accounting for just 4.4 percent of global commercial primary energy
production.
The International Energy Agency attributes
the industry’s broader struggle, which began in the 1990′s, to a
variety of factors. These include increasing public concerns over
safety, to be sure (see earlier incidents like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl), but also a plague of high costs and construction delays (a 1985 article in Forbes magazine suggested
that the U.S. nuclear power plant build-out was “the largest managerial
disaster in business history”), and the more recent re-emergence of
cheap and abundant fossil fuels — particularly natural gas.
The upshot of all of this is that whatever reactor construction is
underway is concentrated mostly in Asia, while ambivalence toward
nuclear power continues in the West — including in the United States,
which is among the world’s giants in per capita greenhouse gas
emissions, and where climate scientists have begun pleading with
anti-nuclear activists to reconsider their positions for the sake of the
planet.
So far, the argument isn’t working.
Public support for nuclear power in the U.S. is nearly at its lowest point in 20 years of polling, according to the Gallup organization. Even more telling: According to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
at the University of Connecticut, most Americans really don’t make a
strong connection between nuclear power and climate change solutions. In
fact, while there are virtually no greenhouse emissions associated with
the day-to-day operation of a nuclear power plant, almost half of the
American population — 44 percent — believes that nuclear power plants
actually make the global warming problem worse, according to Roper’s analysis.
That sort of confusion doesn’t bode well for a rapid expansion of
nuclear power — and that seems to suit many climate advocates just fine. Early last year, in response to the nuclear advocacy of of Hansen et
al, a group of over 300 civil society and regional environmental groups
published a letter of their own:
“Instead of embracing nuclear power, we request that you join us in
supporting an electric grid dominated by energy efficiency, renewable,
distributed power and storage technologies,” the organizations wrote.
“We ask you to join us in supporting the phase-out of nuclear power as
Germany and other countries are pursuing. It is simply not feasible for
nuclear power to be a part of a sustainable, safe and affordable future
for humankind.”
Activists from Greenpeace protest against coal and nuclear energy in Germany last week. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
More recently, Worldwatch Institute founder and Earth Policy Institute president Lester Brown has argued
that a global transition away from fossil fuels and cleaner,
climate-friendly sources of energy is already well underway — and all
without the help of nuclear power. As of last year, Brown and his
co-authors note in a new book, The Great Transition, “some 31 countries were still operating nuclear power plants, but scarcely half as many … were building new ones.”
Whether that’s good news or bad news for the climate remains very
much an open question. Critics argue that nuclear power is simply too
risky, and more practically speaking, too costly
to be considered a significant part of the post-carbon energy
portfolio. Others wonder why cost is seen as an impediment for some
technologies, but not others.
“When renewables are expensive, people want to find ways to bring
costs down, [but] when nuclear is expensive, people see cost as a reason
to reject the technology,” noted Ken Caldeira, the atmospheric
scientist and one of the co-authors of the 2013 open letter arguing for
further development of nuclear power. “I would think some combination of
innovation and more sensible regulations could bring costs down in the
nuclear sector.”
Caldeira also suggested that those hoping wind and solar power alone
might deliver the world from runaway greenhouse gas emissions are
fooling themselves. “From the position of physical possibility, sufficient power could be
delivered without nuclear,” Caldeira said. “In the real world, with
technical, economic, and political constraints, it seems highly unlikely
that society can stabilize climate without nuclear power.
“The question is not ‘What is possible?’” he added, “but ‘What is
feasible?’ or ‘what is achievable given real world constraints?’” Reasonable people might disagree on the answers, but these are
precisely the sort of questions that the nation’s leaders ought to be
confronting with a greater sense of urgency, according to Michael E. Mann, professor of meteorology and the director of Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.
“I think there is an honest debate to be had about the role of
nuclear power in the transition away from fossil fuel energy,” Mann
said. “I don’t see it as my role to try to prescribe that debate, but I
will say this: Were that Congress was busy engaging in this worthy
discussion of solutions, rather than denying that climate change even
exists.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomzeller/2015/05/28/do-we-need-to-go-nuclear-on-climate-change/?ss=energy