An opinionated review
Since you are reading
this you will almost certainly have your own views about the future role of
nuclear power. So did Mark Lynas! In the Introduction to his book he says that
he was a convinced anti-nuclear campaigner until, whilst attending a 2005
Oxford conference, he realised that nuclear power provided 15% of global
electricity (2005 figures) and that this reduced CO2 emissions by 2 billion
tonnes/year. As a parent, concerned for
his children’s future, he had overlooked the potential of nuclear power to
ameliorate climate change.
His short 100 page book
seeks to justify his view that without replacing the energy generated from
fossil fuels with nuclear power, as well as renewables, we have no chance of
stopping the rapid increase of atmospheric CO2 before it’s too late to prevent
runaway climate change. In my
opinion, he succeeds but then I’ve thought the same and written about it for
some time, even if not so concisely and factually as Mark Lynas does. In Chapter 7 he calls this strategy “All
of the Above”.
Now read on?
So if you are more
concerned with the potential risk of
an early death due to a nuclear power station accident than you are with
reversing the rate of increase of discharges of CO2 from burning fossil fuels, you
need read no further. Equally those
people, who like some of my acquaintances, prefer coal burning power stations
with the certainty of the premature
deaths that will result from cancer and respiratory diseases caused by
particulate air pollution and are not concerned about their uncontrolled
release of radiation into the environment can stop here and write their comments.
Those who are less dogmatic
and more pragmatic about where they stand on this highly emotional subject are recommended
to read Mark Lynas’ fact packed book.
It’s well presented and well argued.
He supports many of his statements with references, a total of 95
references or explanatory notes for seven chapters, and if you read the ebook
version the references are in the form of active links.
Other reviewers and commentators
Other reviewers like Jonathon
Porrit and Dr.
Karl-Friedrich Lenz make no attempt to demolish his central argument or
dispute his calculations in any quantitative way. Jonathan Porritt offers a series of put downs
without actually refuting any of the facts carefully referenced in the book. He also advances the familiar qualititative
arguments, based on faith, stating that we will see a reduction in the costs of
renewable power sources and increases in efficiencies that will square the
circle, and make everything come right. He
ignores the enormous areas of land that will need to be made available (see
below) for any impact to be made on reducing the global rate of discharge of
CO2 with renewables. He also doesn’t believe
that there is any problem of intermittency/energy storage.
Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz
on the other hand, in a more tetchy review, concentrates on picking at this or
that element in an attempt to discredit Mark Lynas, and support his own fixed
views. Both are avoiding having to face the uncomfortable truths that Mark
Lynas presents to those environmental activists, who like his earlier self,
have campaigned against nuclear power all their lives.
Some commentators have
taken issue with Mark Lynas’s selective use of references concerning, for
example, the health effects of radiation releases from Chernobyl and
Fukushima. Others disagree with his
dismissal of the Linear No Threshold model for calculating expected early
deaths from radiation exposure in chapter 4 pages 49-53.
In a short 100 page book
it’s not possible to present fully balanced and detailed arguments for every
subject area which it addresses and it’s inevitable that he would be accused of
being selective.
All of these criticisms
are peripheral to Mark Lynas’ main argument that to reduce discharges of CO2,
and prevent runaway climate change, it’s necessary to retain nuclear power and also develop it, together with renewables. I haven’t yet found a dissenting reviewer or
commentator who argues against this fundamental assertion with realistic facts
and figures.
In this short BBC video
Mark Lynas introduces his ideas.
Energy conservation is not enough
In Chapter 2 pages 24–26
Mark Lynas deals briefly with the history of the environmental movement and discusses
Amory Lovin’s and E.F. Schuhmacher’s 1970’s idealistic view that humans should
use less energy. As a result of their
philosophy European and North American environmentalists often say that what
will solve the climate change problem is more energy conservation and a change
in people’s lifestyles.
I agree that we all need to
do more to save energy, but as Mark Lynas points out in chapter 2, even if we
did it wouldn’t be enough to make a significant global impact. It’s totally unrealistic to expect the
populations of developed countries to adopt the lifestyle of their great great
grandparents, to heat only one room in the house, to travel in horse drawn
vehicles, to wash their clothes by hand and to harvest crops with scythes. Even if everyone did so, it still wouldn’t
address the energy needs of industry.
Furthermore just saving
energy in developed countries would not be enough to moderate global CO2
emissions because it takes absolutely no account of the energy expectations of
the rapidly growing populations of developing countries who all want to improve
their lives and have washing machines and fridges. Western environmental campaigners will be
hard pressed to persuade the inhabitants of such countries that they don’t have
the right to enjoy the benefits of economic development and the energy
consumption that goes with it. Have a
look at Hans Rosling’s “Washing Machine” TED talk on this subject because he’s
so much more eloquent than me. I guarantee that it’s worth ten minutes of your
life and it will change the way that you think about energy conservation!
The global growth of renewables
In spite of the recent
massive global investment in renewable power in the form of wind and solar they
still represent only a very small fraction of global energy consumption. To paraphrase Mark Lynas in Chapter 2 pages
22 and 23,
“Solar’s meteoric 1200% growth over the last five years took it from
producing 0.01% of global primary energy to 0.17%. Wind, with its 200% growth went from
providing 0.3% to 0.95% of global primary energy.” Meanwhile, “between 2007 and 2012 coal added
7 times more to global primary energy than wind and 430 times more than solar.”
So the huge development
of renewables in recent years, due to the encouragement given by subsidized
buy-in tariffs for the energy generated, has failed to outpace the building of
coal and more recently gas fired power stations.
The German experiment
In chapter 2 page 58 Mark
Lynas refers to the German experiment.
We tend to forget that
more than 20,000 people died in the Japanese tsunami in 2011, because the world
was gripped by the dramatic events and subsequent release of radiation from the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. As a
direct result Germany decided on a policy of Energiewende (Energy Shift) to
replace nuclear power with renewable energy.
Two years down the road, however, in spite of successfully installing
major wind and solar power developments, these have not replaced all of the
power generated by the nuclear plants that have been closed. Germany has meanwhile opened two new
1,100MW brown coal burning power plants at Neurath, and in
2012 they were importing more coal and gas than in 2011. Furthermore they were forecast to add another
4GW of coal fired electricity to the grid in 2013.
This year (2014) Angela Merkel’s Energy and Economics Minister (he has
both portfolios) Sigmar Gabriel, has stated that the Energiewende is
on the verge of failure due to the ongoing cost of subsidised green
electricity buy-in tariffs.
So if you make replacing
nuclear power with renewables your first priority, it’s just completely
unrealistic to expect to lower the burning of fossil fuels at the same
time. But when you are capable of
ignoring the figures and simply sticking to dogmatic orthodoxy, then anything
can seem possible.
The real result of decades of anti-nuclear campaigning
In Chapter 3 Mark Lynas makes
the case that, partly as a result of highly successful campaigning against new
nuclear power stations by activists since the 1970’s, the burning of coal was
guaranteed to grow in the decades that followed, as country after country
cancelled their nuclear power programmes.
In Chapter 4 page 56, he
quotes a 2013
paper in which “Hansen and Kharecha calculate that the use of nuclear power
between 1971 and 2009 avoided the premature deaths of 1.84 million people
thanks to its air pollution benefits”. The
extra air pollution over the same period from coal fired plants, built as a
result of cancelled nuclear power station projects, could have been avoided and
many more lives saved.
In addition environmental
activists’ opposition to new nuclear power station research, development and
construction means that we are now extending the operating licences on
fundamentally unsafe 50 year old nuclear power stations instead of replacing
them with much
safer designs like those proposed by the Generation IV International
Forum.
Furthermore an
increasingly onerous regulatory environment has been developed which risks
stifling new nuclear developments. For
example in the US, to gain licence approvals to build and operate a new nuclear
facility the proposer of the design has to pay $800/day for each man-day of
work done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the proposer has no control
over the amount of time spent by
them. As
Bill Fox, chief executive of Generation mPower LLC recently said to the UK
Parliamentary Committee on small nuclear reactors, it typically takes several years to prepare an
application and then three or four years for the NRC to review it.
Inherently safe nuclear power plants
Some of the Generation IV
designs are inherently
safe and can’t explode, can’t meltdown, reduce their power output if they
overheat and shut down safely when there is no power supply. Mark Lynas in Chapter 5 page 62, quotes the example of
Argonne National Laboratory’s Experimental
Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) in which, two weeks before the fire at Chernobyl,
operators shut down the safety systems and turned off the coolant flow to the
reactor in front of a group of international experts to prove that their design
was safe. The reactor shut itself down
without operator intervention and the passive cooling system allowed residual
heat to decay without any risk of a meltdown.
The EBR-II was part of
Argonne’s Integral Fast Reactor Programme which was terminated by John Kerry of
Clinton’s Administration in 1994.
Fourth generation nuclear
power plant designs also burn their fuel more completely and thus reduce the
quantity of waste generated. Some
reactors operating in the fast spectrum like the EBRII can use nuclear waste as
a fuel.
Much of this technology
is still at the conceptual stage, although like the EBR II, a demonstration
molten salt reactor was operating successfully at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory ORNL as far back as the 1960’s. Not wishing to staff the project
over the weekends the operators used to switch off the power and it would shut
itself down, it was walk away safe.
Wind farms twice the area of Spain
In Chapter 6 pages 78-81,
Mark Lynas critically examines the Greenpeace
and Global Wind Energy Council’s report published in November 2012 and
takes a critical look at its scenario for 2030, which projects wind power
generating 22 per cent of global electricity and solar 17 per cent. He
calculates that this would require an area of land to be covered in wind farms
which would be twice the size of Spain (or alternatively the combined areas of
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Maine, South
Carolina, West Virginia, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island). Solar plants would cover another 50,000 square
km. Even if such a massive scale up of
renewables was technically, financially and politically possible, whereas this
could displace 6.5 billion tonnes of CO2 generated by fossil fuel burning by
2030, under the Greenpeace scenario this falls to only 1.9 billion tonnes of
CO2 if all nuclear power plants are all shut down, because wind and solar
replace nuclear power rather than fossil fuels.
Furthermore this would still lead to an increase of CO2 emissions of 22
per cent by 2030 compared with a 2011 baseline as a result of the global
increase in demand for energy. It would
be the German experiment on a global scale.
All of the Above
But Mark Lynas wants to
finish his book on a positive note and at the same time set an ambitious target
to limit climate change, so he accepts that such a scale up of renewables is feasible
in order to create his vision for 2030.
In Chapter 7 Lynas recounts
his involvement with a joint
2012 press release by Renewable UK,
the Carbon Capture and Storage
Association CCSA and the Nuclear Industry
Association in which they call for a zero carbon target for the UK
electricity system by 2030 to be included in the Energy Bill. The Bill was passed with an overwhelming
majority on 5 June 2013.
Lynas considers that this
represents a clear “All of the Above” strategy, which allows for long term
contracts to give renewables, nuclear and CCS the chance to compete against
conventional fossil fuel power stations.
He goes on to rerun the
Greenpeace and GWEC highly ambitious
2030 global scenario for renewables deployment but this time including a major
scale up of nuclear to achieve 1000 nuclear plants as against 420 today. This investment would generate 12,000 Terawatt-hours
from solar and wind whilst nuclear would contribute 8,000TWh.
If all of this was
possible, and dogma and old enmities could be put aside, then there is a 50%
chance that global temperature rise could be limited to 2deg C.
Mark Lynas on Hard Talk
Nuclear Investment
So where are we with investment in nuclear power. Partly as a result of Fukushima Daiichi and the resulting public pressure to close nuclear power stations, attracting private investment funding for research and development in the developed world is difficult but Western governments in the US, France and the UK are, nevertheless, still committed to nuclear power and are funding research and development of various options. These include small modular reactors, which should deliver significant cost reductions and timescale benefits. By fabricating smaller reactors in a factory environment there are benefits of economies of scale and efficiency. Time on site is reduced and the regulatory burden is also lessened. Several countries and companies are promoting this promising approach.
China
has enormous and growing energy needs.
At present China is coal and coal is China! It’s choking itself on coal fired air
pollution and is continuing to open 60 coal fired power stations per year.
But China is also highly committed to nuclear research and development and by 2015 it will have over 750 researchers working on new nuclear technologies, including molten salt reactors, with the target of having commercial plants available within 15 years. At the same time it’s installing both renewable power and new nuclear power stations using current generation 3+ technologies.
It currently has 21 nuclear power reactors in operation and 28 more under construction. By 2020 it plans an additional 58GWe of nuclear power generation, all of this development will still only raise nuclear’s share of power generation to 6% by 2020, but it also plans to build an additional 100GWe of nuclear power station capacity between 2020 and 2030.So the scale-up of nuclear power at the rate proposed by Mark Lynas is possible when you have the political will and the money to do so.
Conclusion
It’s both a challenge and an opportunity for environmental groups to recognize the real priorities in this debate. I congratulate Mark Lynas for writing this book and simplifying this complex issue so that it can be more easily understood. What is at stake is your children’s future.
http://www.marklynas.org/
