A nuclear solution ticks all our boxes

From Today Online: A nuclear solution ticks all our boxes

It is a devastating admission to have to make, especially during the climate talks in Durban. This year, the environmental movement to which I belong has done more harm to the planet's living systems than climate change deniers have ever achieved.

As a result of shutting down its nuclear programme in response to green demands, Germany will produce an extra 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide between now and 2020. That is almost as much as all the European savings resulting from the energy efficiency directive.

Other countries are heading the same way. These decisions are the result of an almost mediaeval misrepresentation of science and technology. For while the greens are right about most things, our views on nuclear power have been shaped by weapons-grade woo.



ANTI-NUCLEAR MUMBO-JUMBO

A fortnight ago, the Guardian examined the work of a Dr Chris Busby. We found that he has been promoting anti-radiation pills and tests to the people of Japan that scientists have described as useless and baseless. We also revealed that people were being asked to send donations, ostensibly to help the children of Fukushima, to Dr Busby's business account in Wales.

We found that scientists at the National Health Service had examined his claims to have detected a leukaemia cluster in north Wales and discovered that they arose from a series of shocking statistical mistakes. Worse still, the scientists say, "the dataset has been systematically trawled". Yet Dr Busby, until our report was published, advised the Green party on radiation. His "findings" are widely used by anti-nuclear activists.

Last week in The New York Times, the anti-nuclear campaigner, Dr Helen Caldicott, repeated a claim which already has been comprehensively discredited: That "close to 1 million people have died of causes linked to the Chernobyl disaster".

The "study" on which it is based added up the excess deaths from a vast range of conditions, many of which have no known connection to radiation, in the countries affected by Chernobyl - and attributed them to the accident. Among these conditions was cirrhosis of the liver. Could it have any other possible cause in eastern Europe?

Earlier this year, when I asked Dr Caldicott to provide scientific sources for the main claims she was making, she was unable to do so. None of this has stopped her from repeating them, or has prevented greens from spreading them.

Anti-nuclear campaigners have generated as much mumbo-jumbo as creationists, anti-vaccine scaremongers, homeopaths and climate change deniers. In all cases, the scientific process has been thrown into reverse: People have begun with their conclusions, then frantically sought evidence to support them.



CHEAPER, AND WON'T MELT DOWN

But now, in the United Kingdom at least, we have an opportunity to make amends. Our movement can abandon this drivel with a clear conscience, for the technology I am about to describe ticks all the green boxes: Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Let me begin with the context. Like other countries suffering from the idiotic short-termism of the early nuclear power industry, the UK faces a massive bill for the storage and disposal of radioactive waste. The same goes for the waste produced by nuclear weapons manufacturing. But is this really waste, or could we see it another way?

In his book Prescription for the Planet, the environmentalist Tom Blees explains the remarkable potential of integral fast reactors (IFRs). These are nuclear power stations which can run on what old plants have left behind.

Conventional nuclear power uses just 0.6 per cent of the energy contained in the uranium that fuels it. Integral fast reactors can use almost all the rest. There is already enough nuclear waste on earth to meet the world's energy needs for several hundred years, with scarcely any carbon emissions.

IFRs need be loaded with fissile material just once. From then on, they can keep recycling it, extracting ever more of its energy, until a small fraction of the waste remains. Its components have half-lives of tens, rather than millions, of years.

This makes them more dangerous in the short term but much easier to manage in the long term. When the hot waste has been used up, the IFRs can be loaded with depleted uranium (U-238), of which the world has a massive stockpile.

The material being reprocessed never leaves the site: It remains within a sealed and remotely operated recycling plant. Anyone trying to remove it would quickly die. By ensuring the fissile products are unusable, the IFR process reduces the risk of weapons proliferation.

The plant operates at scarcely more than atmospheric pressure, so it cannot blow its top. Better still, it could melt down only by breaking the laws of physics. If the fuel pins begin to overheat, their expansion stops the fission reaction. If, like the Fukushima plant, an IFR loses its power supply, it simply shuts down, without human agency.

Running on waste, with fewer pumps and valves than conventional plants, they are also likely to be a good deal cheaper.



SCIENCE, NOT SUPERSTITION PLEASE

So there is just one remaining question: Where are they? In 1994, the Democrats in the United States Congress, led by Mr John Kerry, making misleading assertions, shut down the research programme at Argonne National Laboratory that had been running successfully for 30 years. Even Ms Hazel O'Leary, the former fossil fuel lobbyist charged by the Clinton administration with killing it, admitted that "no further testing" is required to prove its feasibility.

But there is a better demonstration that it is good to go: Last week, GE Hitachi (GEH) told the British government that it could build a fast reactor within five years to use up the waste plutonium at Sellafield (a nuclear reprocessing site in northern England) and, if it does not work, the UK will not have to pay.

A fast reactor has been running in Russia for 30 years, and similar plants are now being built in China and India. GEH's proposed PRISM reactor uses the same generating technology as the IFR, though the current proposal does not include the reprocessing plant. It should.

If the government does not accept GEH's offer, it will, as the energy department revealed on last Thursday, handle the waste through mixed oxide (mox) processing instead. This will produce a fuel hardly anyone wants while generating more waste plutonium than we possess already. It will raise the total energy the industry harvests from 0.6 to 0.8 per cent.

So we environmentalists have a choice. We cannot wish the waste away. Either it is stored and then buried. Or it is turned into mox fuels. Or it is used to power IFRs. We should determine where we stand. I suggest we take the radical step of using science, not superstition, as our guide.

George Monbiot is the author of the best-selling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain.