The Nuclear Forum on June 2nd was an example of the broad community interest in the nuclear issue and also the wide appeal of CANWin. The audience of about 70 was a mix of ages, classes, levels of education, political leaning and included those with pro, con and undecided opinions on the appropriateness of the nuclear option. Not only was the audience very heterogeneous, but the evening was an excellent example of people demonstrating respect for each other and their differences.
To the best of my recollection, this is what I heard from the four speakers:
Dr. Tom Romberg, formerly of the CSIRO and the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, presented the technical facts about nuclear power generation, and he expressed a great deal of confidence in the safety of the latest generation of nuclear reactors. From a purely scientific perspective, the nuclear option seems to be a practical proposition, provided that coal-fired electricity production is priced to reflect its real cost to the environment. However, Dr. Romberg stated very emphatically that nuclear power is not the solution to climate change. The Switkowski Report to the government admitted that it would take 10-15 years to get nuclear power up and running, too late to have any significant impact on a fight against climate change that is becoming increasingly urgent. Dr. Romberg doubted that a nuclear power industry could be in place even in 15 years, due to the shortage of trained personnel and technical expertise in Australia, and considered that 20-25 years would be a more realistic timetable.
Graham Sanders, an electrical engineer and former lecturer at the University of Sydney, provided an evaluation of alternative forms of power generation.
Hydropower is clean but is already about as developed as it is going to get, especially in an increasingly dry continent. Natural gas is the only immediately available alternative for additional base load generation, and could fill the gap while waiting for renewable forms of energy to be developed further. It burns much cleaner than coal, but still produces greenhouse gases, and is a more expensive option, though not as expensive as nuclear.
Hot-rock geothermal power in central Australia is the most promising, as it offers potentially well-priced, abundant, full-time electricity production with no carbon emissions, and could be available within 10 years. The main drawback is the distance over which the power must be transmitted, but this is not insurmountable.
At this stage, wind-power is the most competitive in terms of price, (cheaper than nuclear, but more expensive than coal) but there are problems balancing demand with production, which varies with the wind. As yet there is no cheap, simple and reliable means of storing electrical power so as to even out the load.
Solar power is similarly variable, producing only when the sun is shining. Photovoltaic cells are still relatively expensive per unit of energy, though the price will fall and efficiency will rise over the next few years. Solar thermal plants have an advantage in that some designs incorporate methods of storing electricity so that they can generate power even when the sun is not shining, and they will produce power more inexpensively than photovoltaic cells.
Other sources of power that are convenient to a population that lives largely on the coast include waves and tides, but the technology has not yet progressed to a stage where commercial quantities of power can be supplied.
However, Graham said that the single most important contribution that can be made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and one that can be made immediately is an increase in efficiency in our use of energy. Simply using less energy far outweighs any potential advantage provided by nuclear energy or any other form of energy in the short to medium term, and is absolutely essential if we are to make a meaningful impact in reducing our carbon emissions.
Whereas the first two speakers addressed that which can be done with nuclear power, Sandra Menteith, a lecturer in ethics, talked about whether or not we should do anything at all with nuclear power. Indeed, this is the crux of the issue, and hence the most important question to be answered. She noted that ethics is all about how we act toward others; so, ethical considerations have to do with putting our own wants aside to consider the needs of others. With regard to nuclear power, we must first ask: who wins and who loses, who profits and who pays, who gains and who suffers.
Even if the risks associated with nuclear power are as reasonable as the nuclear industry suggests; even if the risks are more than balanced by the advantages, it is unethical to impose those risks on others, especially future generations that have no say in the matter. The more that is learned about exposure to radiation, the stronger the medical opinion that there is no safe level of exposure. If, as is claimed, the radiation leaking from a typical nuclear power plant is about the same as the background radiation from cosmic rays, it still means doubling the number of cancers that would be caused by background radiation alone.
History shows that dangerous or polluting industries follow a path of least resistance to the poorest and most powerless members of the community. Those who profit from the nuclear industry inevitably will not be the ones who live near uranium mines, nuclear power plants and nuclear waste storage sites. (As yet there is no safe commercial long-term storage facilities for nuclear waste.)
Noting the long history of accidents and near accidents in the nuclear industry, it would be naïve to think that it was now without danger. Even the best science cannot rule out human error and even the best engineering cannot produce a fault-free plant. Insurance companies, which make a business of evaluating and quantifying risk, have never been willing to insure a nuclear power plant against a major accident. The cost of such a tragedy would fall upon the taxpayer.
Apart from the very first members of the nuclear club, which developed nuclear power from their weapons programs, the later proliferation of nuclear weapons has followed the development of nuclear power plants; hardly what is needed amid today’s violent and unstable political situations.
Although there are several moral arguments against nuclear power, there are none to support it. It does nothing that another, less polluting form of power cannot do, particularly in Australia, which is blessed with abundant sun, win, geothermal, and tidal sources of power. With regard to combating climate change, Sandra agreed with the other speakers that nuclear power would be too little and too late to make a significant difference, and she added that, even if one were to pursue nuclear power at a later time, even with the best of intentions (e.g. to reduce carbon emissions), it would be a morally flawed means of obtaining that goal.
Finally Rob Parker recounted the political history of nuclear power in Australia, and noted that it continues to be a function of the lobbying power of the mining and other industries, as well as a means by which the government can be seen to be doing something to cover up the apparent inadequacy of their response to climate change to date. He called upon the people to lobby for immediate action on climate change, particularly to obtain the help of government to bring about the necessary behavioural change toward a sustainable life style, which is the single most important ingredient in reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas production.
All of the presentations were well done and thought provoking. As one who came from a science and engineering background before moving into the ministry, I can appreciate the technical beauty of the modern nuclear reactor, and I understand Dr. Romberg’s position very well. It is easy to marvel at the technical brilliance that humankind has brought to the task of overcoming problems and improving its lot. However, having been a reliability engineer for an aerospace company and the quality manager for a global corporation, I know how quality and reliability decrease as a device moves from the brilliance of the scientist’s invention and the attention to detail in the engineer’s design to the factory where it is made to the place where is to be used to the human beings who operate and maintain it. If I was the fifth speaker, I would have wanted to say:
Quality and reliability are design parameters that are quantified and costed. In the end, the design parameters can be no more stringent than can be funded by the budget for the project. GM has the ability to make a Holden that will last as long as a Rolls Royce, but if it did, we would have to pay Rolls Royce prices for our Holdens. Perhaps, with an infinite budget, we could make a device that would last forever and never falter, but in the real world compromises must be made. Customers will only pay so much, and manufacturers must make a profit, so there are limits to quality and reliability, even in nuclear reactors.
The device that has probably the highest-ever levels of designed-in quality and reliability, full of redundant systems to guarantee fail-safe performance, is the space shuttle; yet, over only 120 flights, two have been lost along with their crews. Despite all the money and brainpower that has gone into making space shuttles failsafe, almost 2% of the shuttle missions have ended in disaster. Would you fly in an airplane that crashed 2% of the time? Nuclear reactors are somewhat safer, of 440 plants in the world, two have melted down, i.e. a little under half a percent, but still an unacceptably high rate of catastrophic failure. There have, of course, been thousands of other less serious accidents that you never hear about. Generation IV reactors may indeed be safer, but since none have ever been built, we do not know for certain whether or not practice will measure up to the theory.
One of the basic tenets of reliability engineering is that, all things being equal, the more complex a device, the more it is inherently unreliable. It is a statement of the obvious: the more complex something is, the more there is to go wrong. Space shuttles and nuclear reactors are immensely complex. Add the flaws inherent in human nature to the inherent unreliability due to the complexity of the device, and you have a dangerous mix.
I have dealt with numerous failures of supposedly very reliable products and processes in my working life, and they happened for all sorts of reasons. It is not that the designs were flawed, though they sometimes are, but that human beings conspired to create a series of unpredictable events that overcame all of the quality measures and redundant systems. If an engineer was to imagine that a particular failure would only occur if a particular component failed at the exact time that five different people did something wrong in a particular order over a precise timeline, he might reasonably conclude that it would never happen in a million years; but sometimes the millionth year plus one comes first. Space shuttles crash and nuclear reactors melt down.
Perhaps a factory manager is pushed to meet a budget and a deadline, and he is falling behind, so he takes a short cut and overrides a quality manager’s decision. Perhaps a government inspector finds the fault, but he needs money, and a bribe helps him forget to report the problem. Perhaps an operator is overtired because he had a fight with his wife and didn’t sleep the night before, and he pushes a wrong button. Normally, a safety device would notice his mistake, but this device was the one made by the factory with the harried manager, and passed by the bribed inspector. Of course, there is a back-up safety device, but at the very moment it was needed, there was a fraction of a second in which the power was interrupted due to a lightning strike nearby. In that fraction of a second there is a cascade of failures as one failure brings on a failure in a related system, and so on.
If the project quality manager had suggested that this precise series of events might happen, he would have been laughed down. But things like this really do happen. They cause planes to crash and submarines to sink, space shuttles to blow up and nuclear reactors to release radiation upon an unsuspecting neighbourhood full of children. Early in his presentation Dr. Romberg noted that life is a series of risks that we take daily. Simpy to use a car to attend the forum required a risk to be taken. But there is moral question with regard to risk. Space shuttle pilots, airline passengers and operators of motor vehicles know the risks, and choose to take them. The children who live next door to a nuclear plant have not accepted the risk, nor are they likely even to be aware of it; rather, it has been imposed by others who’s objective is money and/or power. Moral or immoral?
If you talk to the people who actually work with the equipment, their stories will be quite different to the stories of the owners of nuclear power plants or designers of the plant or the managers who devise the procedures. The workers will tell you of workmates who are drunk or stoned, mistakes that have been covered up and shortcuts that have been taken; accidents that have happened but are not reported, and reported accidents that have been covered up under the guise of “security.â€
There is one thing that can be depended upon in any human endeavour, particularly one as complex as nuclear power: if there is something that can go wrong, it will. If that “something†is as devastating as a nuclear meltdown, the only way to guarantee that it will never happen is to avoid building any nuclear reactors. Sandra quoted Ian Lowe, a former nuclear scientist and professor at ANU, who said, “If nuclear is the answer, it must have been a stupid question.â€
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