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As the director-general of the World
Nuclear Association, John Ritch has a
bird’s eye overview of the trends and the
issues associated with nuclear technology.
Unsurprisingly, as an ally of the industry,
he champions the nuclear option,
calling it an indispensable asset for a
world that wants more energy (lots
more, in fact) in order to prosper and
also wants it to be increasingly carbon free
to fight climate change. While maintaining
that other alternatives will play
their roles, too, he insists that current
debates about the future energy-mix
often obscure an overriding trend: most
leaders in the United States and in Europe
are embracing nuclear power as a
mainstay in their countries’ emerging
energy strategies. Already, nuclear energy
powers roughly one light bulb in
five in the United States and one in three
in Europe, and now new political commitments
and financial investments are
starting to flow into commercial nuclear
power. As Ritch explains it, the new energy
crisis is more complicated than previous
energy shocks because this one involves
so many interlocking questions:
supply security versus dependence on
imports; competitive costs of different
fuels; and environmental stabilization
and sustainability.
Fundamentally, Europeans and
Americans view the energy crisis from
different perspectives. For Europeans,
“energy” is essentially a question of natural
gas and their dependence on Russia
as an unreliable, increasingly pricey
source of supply of electricity (Russia is
expected to provide as much as two thirds
of Europe’s natural gas by 2050.)
For the United States, “energy” essentially
means oil for cars and trucks,
which has to come mainly from the Middle
East. Put another way, Europe uses
much less oil to run its vehicles – it manages
the “demand” for oil and other energy
with taxes. In contrast, the United States tends to think more in terms of
“supply:” It produces most of the energy
it consumes, except for oil, where imports
are rising. Translated into figures,
the EU is more than 50 percent dependent
on energy imports (a level set to rise
to 70 percent by 2020) – most of it from
Russia. In comparison, the net energy
imports of the United States amount to
less than 25 percent of its consumption.
Both sides of the Atlantic recognize
the need to do better on both supply and
demand – and, Ritch insists, both sides
will find that their approaches are necessary
but not sufficient unless they include
a lot more nuclear energy in their
own countries, in Asia and in fact
around the world. Nuclear reactors can
compete directly with natural gas and
coal in generating electricity in Europe
and the U.S. Of course, nuclear energy
does not directly power vehicles, but, as
Ritch notes, it can produce the huge
amounts of hydrogen and battery power
that many people expect will be needed
as a fuel to drive cars completely cleanly.
Many people in the policy community
have been slow to recognize the
scale and challenges of a new nuclear
revolution that is already under way,
Ritch contends, because the nuclear industry
does not possess the pubic-relations
machinery and clout of its longstanding
rivals such as coal and oil. Since
those fossil fuels involve enormous ongoing
operations of mining, refining and
distribution, they generate large permanent
payrolls and huge financial flows. In
contrast, nuclear power – unleashing
huge amounts of energy from small
amounts of uranium – is financially
much smaller and lacks the means to pay
for and support a ubiquitous “nuclear
lobby” – which exists, he says, only in
environmentalist fantasy. The important
point, Ritch says, is that the strength of a
pro-nuclear message today derives not
from any well-financed effort to market
the message but rather from the intrinsic
merits of the case for nuclear power,
which governments are examining and
finding persuasive.
The data and predictions highlighted
in Ritch’s overview of the energy-environment
debate challenge much conventional
wisdom – including the realistic
potential for Transatlantic cooperation
on energy – and the likely limitations on
it. Despite calls for strategic energy cooperation
from both sides of the Atlantic,
the Bush administration is sticking
to its position that new technologies,
including nuclear, offer the way forward
– and rejecting carbon taxes or any regulatory
measures such as caps on greenhouse
emissions.
In contrast, the European Union
puts its prime emphasis on energy conservation
imposed by regulatory measures
to control emissions, as seen in its
adherence to the Kyoto protocol. One of
the reasons some European countries
have been able to accommodate the
Kyoto targets is that economic recession
at the beginning of the 1980s (and the
collapse of economies in ex-Soviet-run
states) structurally altered economies
away from heavy industry towards services. But, as economist Dieter Helm
noted this fall in the Financial Times,
these industries did not go away - they
relocated in the rapidly developing
countries of the Far East, China and
India. “In importing from these countries,
the developed countries are implicitly
responsible for the pollution caused
in their manufacture.” So the U.S. and
Europe are actually polluting much more
than the crude emissions data indicates.
Ritch predicts a gradual, partial
Transatlantic convergence as European
countries make a new commitment to nuclear
power and, hopefully, as post-Bush
diplomacy starts moving toward an emissions
regime to succeed the Kyoto protocol
when its expires in 2012. Ritch predicts
that a new regime will need to be a global
system of emissions-trading, which yields
worldwide incentives to move toward
cleaner energy. This goal may be out of
reach, practically speaking, but, he says,
even a start in global negotiations aiming
at this target would be a powerful signal
and incentive to markets – including, of
course, the reviving nuclear industry.
Some readers will find Ritch’s approach
provocative because of its emphasis
on the under-recognized role of nuclear
energy in recent decades and its
confident predictions of massive expansion
in the world’s fleet of nuclear reactors
and renewed competition in the increasingly
privatized nuclear industries.
But Ritch combines unusual credentials
as a policy intellectual, who has genuine
expertise and feels free to be remarkably
outspoken. He did not come to his current
position from a background as a scientist
or a nuclear-industry professional.
For most of his career, Ritch worked in
foreign affairs as an adviser in the United
States Senate, where he focused on arms
control, notably on efforts to combat nuclear
proliferation. In the Clinton administration,
he became U.S. ambassador to
the International Atomic Energy Agency,
the Vienna-based UN agency responsible
for policing the treaty against nuclear weapons
proliferation and for promoting
the spread of civilian nuclear technology.
During his eight years in the job, he became
convinced that, while not abandoning
the effort to prevent weapons proliferation,
the international community
needed an intensive focus on using nuclear
energy as an urgently needed tool
for global environmental preservation.
Ritch says that his convictions about
the need for nuclear and his realization
about the extent of confusion about the
role of commercial nuclear power
prompted him to help create the World
Nuclear Association, the London-based
organization that serves as a coordinator
and advocate for the enterprises that
comprise the global nuclear industry.
With worldwide membership, the WNA
has members in almost every country in
Europe and North America and has
links with non-governmental and intergovernmental
bodies involved with nuclear
electricity-generation and other
peaceful nuclear applications in medicine
and agriculture. The WNA took the
lead in founding the World Nuclear University,
a partnership that draws on the
major intergovernmental institutions
like the IAEA and leading national academic
and professional resources to provide
“big picture” training to nuclear physics
students and young professionals
accepted from countries all over the
world. It is a part of WNA’s effort to prepare
a “successor generation” of nuclear
leaders as the global fleet of reactors expands
dramatically in the coming years.
The WNA’s essential message is that
nuclear power not only offers energy security
but is also environmentally
friendly because it does not produce
greenhouse gases responsible for global
warming. As Sir Nicholas Stern argues in
his recent report for Chancellor Gordon
Brown in Britain, science has accumulated
overwhelming evidence that our
world faces a threat of accelerating and
irreversible climate changes that could
prove as disastrous as the world wars of
the last century. So, Stern concluded,
governments and companies should act
now against the risk that accelerating
global warming will bring on a “tipping
point” that precipitates the planet into
climate catastrophe. Stern’s report
seemed in many respects to be aimed at
overcoming U.S. reluctance to act
strongly against global warming by
demonstrating how costly a failure to act
now could be – for developed nations as
well as the less developed.
Ritch takes a similar view of the
threat. In this interview in November
with European Affairs, he argued that energy
security – and the indispensable role
that nuclear power can play in providing
it – should be at the top of the geopolitical
agenda in Europe and the United
States. Excerpts of the discussion follow.
European Affairs: Some people are talking about a “nuclear renaissance” being
already under way? What is the evidence for that? Where do the United States
and Europe stand?
John Ritch: The International Energy Agency (IEA), the intergovernmental
think-tank and policy-coordinator on energy, has just overturned its longstanding
skepticism about the future of nuclear energy. Its new estimate, released in November
in the latest World Energy Outlook, more than doubles its previous forecast for the
growth of nuclear generation. Now it foresees expansion by 2030 of as much as 40 percent. That translates into orders for about 50 new reactors in the coming 15 years, a
very short time for energy development, and an additional 100 by 2030. I still consider
them too cautious about the prospects for nuclear power. But even in their view – and
the IEA has no pro-nuclear bias – the revolution seems to be here.
This nuclear wave has been unleashed in a global context, on every continent,
with Asian countries such as India and China, Japan and Korea setting the fastest pace
for the moment. In Europe and the United States, governments are soberly looking at
what their energy options are, both in terms of supply security and in terms of constraining greenhouse emissions. As a result, with rare exceptions, governments are
now embracing nuclear-based strategies. This does not mean they are abandoning
their dependence on fossil fuel (coal, oil and natural gas), which is too extensive to be
divested quickly. But with rare exception they are choosing nuclear power as a key
component in their long-term energy plans. Europe, the main base of nuclear energy,
and the United States, which has the largest number of nuclear plants, still have technological
leadership, but they are part of a larger phenomenon.
EA: Can you be more specific about where the U.S. and Europe stand?
Worldwide, there are 443 nuclear-power reactors in operation. Europe currently
has 142 of them (plus 25 more if you include Switzerland, Bulgaria, Romania and
Ukraine), and many EU countries have programs under way to expand their nuclear energy
capacity. Sometimes this involves upgrading existing reactors, but some countries
also have new reactors under construction. Finland is building the world’s largest
reactor and is talking about starting another one. Poland is planning its first reactor.
Bulgaria has just ordered new reactors. Britain’s government has announced that nuclear
energy will continue playing an essential role, implying that reactors’ lives will be
prolonged and new ones ordered. France has plans to renew its entire fleet of 59 reactors
and has started work on the first of this new generation of reactors.
In the United States, which has 103 reactors in operation, half a dozen utilities
have filed preliminary applications for new reactors, most on the same sites as existing
plants – to simplify regulatory and public acceptance. The recent U.S. energy bill
sought to rev up the process of “nuclear new build” by reducing what investors call
“the regulatory risk.” This involved creating an approval process that is largely completed
in advance so that construction of new plants is less liable to be upset by
protests or political interventions. (In the past, such delays were terribly costly for investors,
and sometimes fatal to projects, because in nuclear power, 75 percent of a
plant’s lifetime costs are in the construction.) In addition to this fast-tracking, the new
U.S. legislation also provides some financial incentives for “first-movers” in building
this new generation of nuclear power plants. These are not subsidies but simply onetime
help for companies ready to pave the way.
EA: Who will be building these nuclear power plants?
Countries on every continent will be expanding their nuclear portfolio. If you
mean “which companies?” the competition for contracts to build these new reactors is
already intense. Big new players are emerging from a phase of consolidation in the nuclear-manufacturing sector. The French company Areva is the world’s largest manufacturer
of nuclear technologies including fuel enrichment, reactor design and manufacture
and also reprocessing: it has benefited from integrating German and U.S.
nuclear companies that suffered from the eclipse of nuclear building in those countries.
Areva has recently concluded a tie-up with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, so it is
clearly a major contender. General Electric and Hitachi have announced that they will
join forces in the nuclear field and we will see how strongly GE revives in this sector.
Toshiba has taken over the nuclear parts of Westinghouse, a company that started in
the U.S. and had been bought by Britain’s state-owned British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. India
has developed its own sophisticated nuclear technology during the decades it was
barred from getting foreign help in this sector. The recent U.S.-India deal is set to normalize
India’s ability to import and export commercial nuclear power technology, so
now it is poised to become a player. There are also Canadian, Russian and Korean
manufacturers, so it’s going to be a very competitive market. South Africa has a design
of its own, called a modular reactor that it hopes to sell in markets looking for smaller
reactors that can be expanded gradually as local electricity demand grows.
EA: Until recently, at least, nuclear power has been widely written off in the EU and the
U.S. as a technology that had failed to live up to its promise and was being phased out.
Are you saying that this is now changing?
It’s true that the U.S. and some EU countries could be said to have moved away
from nuclear energy in the sense that they built no new nuclear reactors for a quarter century,
roughly speaking since the 1980s. Some countries such as Germany and
Britain embraced plans to phase out their existing reactors. (There are exceptions:
France never envisaged a phase-out and its economy gains a competitive edge by getting
78 percent of its electricity from low-cost nuclear energy.) But even during this
“moratorium,” nuclear power remained a crucial part of the energy mix on both sides
of the Atlantic, accounting for over 20 percent of our electricity constantly even when
our economies were growing and our use of electricity was expanding. The expanded
output was attained by productivity increases in existing reactors and the arrival on
line of new reactors that had been in the pipeline. What is happening now is that governments
in most countries have a fresh commitment to the nuclear option. The
United States and Britain are prime examples. The Bush administration’s new energy
legislation has provided start-up incentives for a new generation of reactors. The Blair
government spent several years trying to find a viable formula for massive reliance on
wind power and other so-called renewables. Predictably, this proved futile as an overall
solution. Britain continues to subsidize renewables, but this year the government
made a firm and clear commitment to nuclear energy as part of the future British
portfolio of fuels.
EA: Where does the rest of Europe stand on the promise of nuclear power?
Public opinion has moved away from the anti-nuclear taboos that prevailed in the
final two decades of the 20th century. Similar trends are evident right across Europe.
Swiss voters have twice rejected new curbs on their country’s nuclear-power program
in recent referenda. Belgium and the Netherlands have reversed plans to close nuclear
facilities. In Sweden, as a result of the educational effects of a prolonged national debate,
the public has now become one of the strongest supporters in Europe of the expanded
use of nuclear energy. In Germany, where nuclear policy became hostage to
the Green party’s pivotal position in the Green-Social Democrat alliance, the government
adopted plans to phase out nuclear power by 2020. But the new conservative
chancellor, Angela Merkel, would like to reverse course and expand nuclear energy.
Since she has to reckon with the Social Democrats, her junior coalition partners, she
will have to wait for the right political opportunity. In Ukraine, scene of the world’s
worst-ever accident with civil nuclear power at Chernobyl, the people and the government
are solid supporters of additional nuclear power, which they view as a safe, affordable
technology that can reduce their dependence on Russian gas. Bulgaria has just announced an order for a new reactor from Russia. Romania is building a nuclear
plant. The three Baltic states have created a consortium to build and share new nuclear
power. Nuclear energy is well-entrenched in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia.
In Europe only a handful of countries – Austria, Denmark and, for the time being,
Italy (which has to import nuclear-generated electricity from France), plus a diehard
fraction of the German electorate – are resisting what is increasingly a collective
recognition of the need for nuclear to be a big part of the solution to climate change.
These countries are an anomaly.
EA: How do you explain this turnaround in attitudes and policy? Are you saying that it
is due to hopes that nuclear energy is the answer to the problem of global warming?
A major shift has certainly occurred, and it comes partly from the spreading realization
that we face an ominous and potentially overwhelming environmental challenge.
That has stimulated new thinking about nuclear power, including among many
environmentalists, because nuclear reactors can meet rising energy needs – on the
scale the planet is going to need – without emitting greenhouse gases. Given the scale
of the challenge – and people like me see climate change as the biggest collective challenge
in our history as humankind – I believe that any rational response to global
warming must include recognition that we must
embrace, stimulate and manage an exponential expansion
in our use of nuclear energy. We need
more energy, much more, and we need to get it
cleanly. Nuclear meets this dual challenge.
Notice that I say “include” nuclear because my
advocacy of this technology does not mean excluding
everything else and trying to get the world to
rely on nothing but nuclear. It doesn’t blind me to
the arguments in favor of alternatives such as wind power or, for that matter, energy
conservation. These approaches have their uses, but only as far as they go. People
should understand, rationally, that “energy saving” or “renewables” cannot do the job in
trying to take the planet forward safely. Even in combination and even under the most
optimistic assumptions, the renewables simply cannot meet the problem on the scale
that we have come to understand.
Non-nuclear alternatives, while good up to a point, all have major drawbacks
when it comes to deployment on a large scale. Clean-coal technology has not been developed
and proven: if and when it is, it can be expected to be expensive. Wind and
sun power probably are appropriate in some limited applications, but they are not
constantly reliable. There are times when they don’t work, so they have to be backed
up by other power sources. Then the question becomes how clean, how reliable, how
expensive is the back-up power? If it’s non-nuclear, then it will be dirty, i.e., carbon emitting.
And that brings us back to the argument favoring nuclear. There are places
where wind can work: Denmark, for example, can invest heavily in wind because
when it needs more electricity, neighboring Norway can simply release more water
from its dams and pass along electricity generated by hydropower. In sum, the renewables
are limited answers to huge problems of getting lots more of what we call “base load”
power for our electricity grids. As we search for ways to wean our economies off carbon-emitting fuels, renewables help. But in any foreseeable future, they will inevitably
be a junior partner to nuclear in producing clean energy.
EA: Many voices in the U.S. and in the EU are enthusiastically evoking bio fuels as a
possible panacea for the current energy crisis because they are clean and can be home-grown as “energy crops.” Sweden, for example, has announced a bid to use bio fuels to entirely replace oil and gasoline in its fuel economy. Is there scope for U.S.-EU cooperation here?
It remains to be seen whether these bio fuels actually constitute a long-term contribution
to a sustainable strategy for clean energy. If we look at the underlying causes
of the climate crisis, we see two principal elements: one is the explosive growth of carbon emissions, but a secondary and not insignificant one is the shrinkage of “carbon
sinks” as the world’s forests get converted to farm land. This switch greatly reduces the
carbon-absorption ability of the planet. Already, half the world’s forests that existed at
the start of the last century have been converted. It’s another example of the limits on
“renewables.” Bio fuels to power tomorrow’s vehicles can sound attractive, but their
wide use would run up against two realities. The first is the limited amount of additional
farmland. The second constraint, more conceptual, is that clearing woods to
plant these crops actually heightens our vulnerability to amassing more greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere. In contrast, energy from uranium (of which we have a limitless
supply, including untapped sources in the seas) can power batteries or cleanly
make hydrogen for emission-free fuel cells for transport on an unlimited scale.
EA: And what about the other basic question we mentioned before: Why is public opinion now starting to see this?
Several factors explain the shift in perceptions. There is the environmental imperative,
which is spreading awareness that we need to drastically cut greenhouse gases,
that we are yet not doing it, and that nuclear power can help do it because nuclear
generation does not release any greenhouse gases or other harmful emissions. (ge
smoke emerging from reactors’ tall cooling towers is water vapor that contains no
emissions or any radioactivity.)
Another part of the answer is energy security. When a country has a nuclear
power plant, it avoids pollution and it also avoids part of its need to import energy.
This realization is dawning now because the overall energy picture – environment,
costs, supply security – was tilted during most of the last decade. Many countries
made a “dash to gas” at a time when natural gas seemed cheap and reliable, adaptable
and relatively clean as a fuel for generating electricity. True, gas is cleaner than coal
(but it still emits greenhouse gases that nuclear does not), but the other assumptions
about gas have shattered as prices have spiked dramatically in the last two years. (In
contrast, uranium, the nuclear fuel, is comparatively cheap, stable in price and mined
in reliable supplier countries.) The gas-price surge has doubled electricity bills for
homeowners and businesses in many countries. In addition, the recently demonstrated
readiness of Moscow to turn off the tap on its gas-export pipelines has given
Europe a foretaste of what its energy dependence can mean in terms of vulnerability.
Russia supplies more than a quarter of the gas consumed in EU states (where gas is the
second most important fuel) and more than half the gas consumed in Central and
Eastern Europe. (Illustrating Europe’s overall dependence even more dramatically, the European Commission has reported that Europe imports more than the total amount
of energy it consumes, and its rate of net dependence is set to rise to 70 percent. In
contrast, the U.S. rate is less than 25 percent.)
So pocket-book pressures about energy’s cost and reliability, as well as environmental
pressures, are contributing to this groundswell of renewed public and political
acceptance of nuclear energy.
EA: Does this trend have a Transatlantic dimension in the sense of having particular impact and potential for the EU and the United States either separately or as partners?
In some senses, the U.S. and Europe are lagging in this worldwide trend toward
much more reliance on nuclear. The Atlantic community retains technological leadership,
but other nations, particularly in Asia, are moving ahead more aggressively to
meet their faster-growing energy needs. India has an enormous construction program
under way and has announced plans for hundreds of new reactors. These plans will
probably be accelerated as the long overdue deal goes through to lift the restrictions
on international nuclear commerce with India. China has similar big ambitions to expand
its nuclear sector from the current handful of reactors to hundreds by mid-century
and probably well over a thousand by the end of this century.
In the EU, the European Commission resembles many other international institutions
in often having de facto dragged its feet in
recognizing the need for nuclear power. All these
international bureaucracies were prone to be intimidated
by Green lobbying. At the Commission,
nuclear energy too often became a hostage
to commissioners for the environment, with their
Green-influenced views, while the commissioners
for energy or finance were often neutralized.
Now, this anti-nuclear tilt in the Commission is visibly changing. To some extent, it is
being softened by the widespread support for nuclear energy in the new member
states in Eastern Europe. More importantly, the new pressures I’ve mentioned about
energy security have pushed the issue to the top of the EU agenda. Of course, the EU
has no “common energy policy” and decisions remain national. But the Commission
has influence, and I read with interest a speech on an EU energy agenda given by President Manuel
Barroso in Lisbon in October. He said:
“For those that want it, there is nuclear energy. It is for the Member
States, not the Commission, to decide on whether they use nuclear energy.
But the Community can make a contribution to those that want,
for example on research and on safety. We cannot hide from the issue. A
debate on nuclear energy in Europe should not be taboo.”
Such forthrightness represents a new realism among EU Commissioners.
EA: Mr. Barroso has also called for a “strategic dialogue” with the U.S. on energy. Do
you see much that can be achieved there on civilian nuclear energy?
I’m not convinced that a great deal can come of this in concrete terms beyond
some cooperation on R&D and perhaps some useful emulation. We already have good cooperation on safety through the World Association of Nuclear Operators, in which
plant operators visit each others’ installations for peer review on safety practices.
(WNA strongly supports WANO, and works jointly with WANO to sponsor activities
of the World Nuclear University.) But on changing the nuclear landscape, the major
developments are going to be commercial and, to the extent they’re international, bilateral.
For instance, Finland bought its new reactor from a French company. More
broadly, take the fact that some European
countries, mainly France, have maintained
the practice of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel
to re-use some of the emissionable material
and reduce the amount of highly radioactive
waste. This European support for
reprocessing played a role in influencing
Washington recently to drop longstanding
U.S objections to this practice. The American
view was that the technology had an
undesirable by-product, plutonium, which can be diverted to weapons, and the technology
was abandoned in the U.S. But various factors – including a desire to provide a
fully-supervised international system for handling the full nuclear fuel cycle – have induced
the Bush administration to drop U.S. opposition and turn to France to import
some pilot technology as the U.S. starts developing its own plans for safe reprocessing.
So, industrially, there is a lot of Transatlantic cooperation. (Areva, for example, is the
largest single supplier to U.S. nuclear power facilities.)
But, in practice, there is a gulf between the U.S. and the EU in their basic approaches
to the current crisis of energy and the environment. Put simply, European governments
put their primary emphasis on regulatory measures as a solution to the problem; in contrast,
the U.S. sets store in the ability of technology and innovation to meet the challenge.
As a result, Europeans look to energy-saving, including a possible carbon tax – an
idea that is being vigorously resisted in Washington for the moment. The Bush administration,
after rejecting the Kyoto protocol on cutting emissions, still has not come forward
with its own ideas of what should come in Kyoto’s place (or, more practically, what
it suggests for a “post-Kyoto” regime starting in 2012). Instead, Washington has
launched what it calls “the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership” that calls for cooperation
with nations such as France that have advanced civilian nuclear energy programs. GNEP
envisages new technologies (such as new forms of reprocessing) and an effort to get nuclear
power to developing countries. Very controversially, it calls for guaranteed fuel
supplies to countries that agree to forego national uranium enrichment and reprocessing
activities and to rely instead on a system of regional repositories under international supervision
that guarantees fuel supply and takes back spent fuel.
EA: So what is actually occurring on these issues among the U.S., the EU and other nations interested in nuclear energy?
There are two main initiatives. One is a dialogue aimed at ensuring that world security
is not diminished by the global nuclear renaissance, which is clearly underway.
Essentially, these are efforts aimed at preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons,
and their key focus is the technologies of enrichment of nuclear fuel, the reprocessing
of nuclear fuel and the security of spent-fuel disposal. The core idea here – put forward
by the IAEA and by the Bush administration and supported by key European nations
– is to create regional centers to handle these technologies so that they can guarantee
all other countries’ needs for reactor fuel (and for its disposal) while cutting
down any risk of opening access to missile material for weapons to countries that do
not already have them. This approach is included in the Bush administration’s Global
Nuclear Energy Partnership initiative.
In reality, these discussions are going to
run up against a hard wall. That is resistance
to the idea on the part of key developing
countries that want to be full players in the
nuclear cycle and feel that they have a perfect
right to do so. Countries in the category include
Brazil, Argentina, South Africa as well
as Australia, which are considering their
broader participation in nuclear commerce.
These countries have legitimacy under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to do this and, where they are concerned, their
doing so would not jeopardize world security. So the idea of getting a vast global solution
to cure a limited number of problems, as represented by North Korea or Iran,
may prove easier said than done.
EA: So you are not very optimistic about the international community’s chances of creating a new regime redefining what had come to be accepted as the rights of NPT-signatory countries to have a full nuclear fuel cycle of their own. What is the other big international dialogue under way?
It concerns ways to actively promote nuclear energy and here I think there is a
very limited role for government. Whatever your general views about the potential
value or risk of government intervention in our nations’ lives, the main thing that governments need to do now about the current nuclear surge is to get out of the way.
Right now, the great international development institutions are in the way of the surge
because they are de facto opponents of nuclear power. They avert their eyes when the
word “nuclear” comes up and so they are busily promoting all sorts of alternative energy
strategies and ignoring nuclear, the one technology that actually stands a chance
of meeting the world’s clean energy needs in this century.
We need – and I’m hoping we’ll get this from the new UN Secretary General – is a
shift so that the entire UN system recognizes and acts to embrace the indispensable
importance of nuclear energy as part of a viable strategy for sustainable development.
The World Bank needs to get its head out of the sand on nuclear energy’s value as a
good investment in clean-energy development in the nations of the South. I’m not
talking about some form of major inter-governmental collaboration to support nuclear
power. But there does need to be a moral and political embrace of this nuclear
necessity and the elimination of all the de facto obstacles that remain in the way – psychological, political, institutional obstacles to recognition that nuclear power must
and will be a growing part of our future energy portfolio.
There is a role for governments in tackling the energy crisis if they can start moving
toward a global system of emissions-trading. The EU has started one, which is
having teething problems. It is modeled on a very successful U.S. model formed to
deal with acid rain by creating market incentives for companies to find ways of reducing
their polluting emissions and getting “credits” for it – credits that can then be sold
to continuing polluters. The Bush administration has shied away from copying this
system for greenhouse gases because it involves imposing a “cap” on emissions to
make a market for trading credits. That amounts in practice to a carbon tax. Significantly, some groups of states in the U.S. are trying to set up a regional system of this
sort. All these efforts point to the likelihood of some sort of carbon tax in future and
that makes nuclear energy even more attractive economically.
EA: So you see technology combined with regulation – emissions trading, for example –
as the formula for achieving the environmental goals that are part of the new definition
of energy security. What would your program be?
On global warming, the first necessity is to create a truly comprehensive global
regime on climate control that would incentivize all countries to invest in clean energy:
this would need to be a regime that covered all countries and used the marketplace
mechanisms to reward innovators and entrepreneurs and managers who found
ways to cut back on carbon emissions. This is an incredibly ambitious diplomatic goal,
and we probably lack the international political will and collective wisdom to put it in
place. Look at the problems of the Kyoto accord, which was much more limited in its
aspirations in every dimension. But if we could just put the quest for a new, truly
global accord and trading system on the international agenda, it would be a major step
forward. Just the fact of an on-going negotiation aimed at these goals would send
strong political signals and create economic incentives favoring efforts to bring about
a worldwide transformation to clean-energy technology.
EA: You confidently predict that nuclear energy will be a major element in such a transformation. But a great many people insist that the nuclear industry must first solve the problem of permanently disposing of its highly radioactive waste. Isn’t that a major hurdle?
There is a great distinction and difference between where science and politics are
on waste disposal. Scientists are satisfied that a well located and well constructed geological
repository for underground storage of waste is a sound, long-term solution for
nuclear waste. (By the way, nuclear waste is physically very small and very manageable
compared to carbon-linked gases that are now being released freely into the atmosphere.)
We have the science, and now we need to convert that concept into reality by
doing it. Some countries have already gone through the process of getting democratic
consensus to do it. Finland, Sweden and the United States have sites in advanced
stages of development. So does Russia. France has said it will start soon, and Britain
has just announced it will, too. Once a few repositories are operating, it will essentially
end the issue as a political debate by demonstrating that it is not a question of whether
or not this can be done but simply a question of doing it correctly.
EA: What about the cost of nuclear energy? Economics was a factor that induced many
utilities to move away from nuclear power in the 1980s. How does nuclear compare to
rival fuels now?
It is now accepted on all sides – except for doctrinaire anti-nuclear militants – that
nuclear power has become economically viable. The new report from the IEA concluded
that nuclear power is cheaper than gas and just as cheap as coal. And those figures
are calculated in the absence of carbon taxes that penalize fossil fuels, including
natural gas. Most planners, including those in industry, are convinced that carbon
taxes are inevitable. Even the United States may move in that direction once Europe
imposes such taxes that will affect U.S. holdings in Europe and put a premium on reducing
carbon emissions. Developments in this direction make nuclear power even
more competitive economically.
An earlier report by the IEA, in conjunction
with another OECD body, the Nuclear
Energy Agency, found that the lifetime costs
of a nuclear plant made it cheaper over two
decades than coal or natural gas. Since then,
the price of fossil fuels has risen sharply
while uranium prices have remained stable.
(Specialists can consult the report to see the
basis for these calculations, which prices nuclear
at just under four U.S. cents a kilowatt
hour and rates it consistently as less than its
rivals.)
A WNA study completed last year identified some causes for the improved economics
of nuclear. Cost reductions have occurred in all aspects of nuclear economics: construction,
financing, operations, and waste management and decommissioning. The
industry is embracing new financing techniques and standardized reactor designs offering
shorter construction times and better operating efficiencies. It is achieving
more generating efficiencies and longer plant lifetimes – improvements that go hand
in hand with enhanced safety.
The U.S. and some EU governments are taking steps to jump-start nuclear revivals
in their countries with incentives for the new programs. But these are one-time help
for the few “first-movers”: they are not subsidies and do not alter the fact that nuclear
is economically competitive with other big sources of energy and likely to become
more so.
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