Nuclear Power Q and A | Friends of the Earth Scotland

Nuclear Power Q and A

Nuclear power is an expensive, ineffective and a risky way to address climate change. Nuclear power also leaves future generations a legacy of deadly radioactive waste to deal with.

Investment in energy conservation and renewables is cheaper, safer and quicker than nuclear. As a means of solving climate change and improving energy security nuclear power is a 'white elephant'.

Nuclear white elephant

Read our Q and A below to find out more and then have your say.

Q: Is nuclear power carbon free?

A: No, but it is low carbon. The acutal level is debateable and perhaps as bad as gas.

Q: If you accept it is low carbon, why not use it as part of the solution?

A: There are still key problems of waste and proliferation.

Q: You didn’t say ‘safety’ – do you accept that it is safe?

A: No, there are still issues for waste, and a possibility of high impact events and poor management.

Q: Going back to waste, isn’t there a solution?

A: No – there are storage techniques of variable risk, but none that can be guaranteed for the millennia needed, and no we can’t fire it into the sun …

Q: Some environmentalists have said that they have changed their minds on nuclear because of climate change – why haven’t you?

A: I appreciate their concerns, though few are really recent converts. We think nuclear is not only unnecessary to deliver climate change targets (as well as being a technology that we can’t safely share all around the world); but that it undermines sustainable options such as efficiency and renewables.

Q: But don’t we need nuclear for energy security (to keep the lights on) – the wind doesn’t blow all the time, gas is imported and running out, and you’re anti-coal too.

A: Nuclear is inflexible, we can do better with improved storage, carbon capture and storage, efficiency etc – and uranium supplies aren’t all that secure in reality either.

Q: So why is nuclear back on the agenda?

A: A number of reasons - there is a powerful lobby, the link with weapons, it's a Labour opportunity to attack SNP and it's a big industry with unionised workers.

What you can do

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Comments

15 September 2010 - 5:21am — Anonymous
» Biofuels are of course

Biofuels are of course renewable. But look at what's left of Britain's forests. Energy from photosynthesis does not sustainably produce enough for our vastly increased population and its profligate ways. Britain went to coal because we'd run out of forests, remember? Until we shut down the coal burning plants, global warming goes on. Your information on nuclear is widely believed, but false. See http://www.world-nuclear.org/infomap.aspx?=atg Wind turbines, photovoltaics, and biofuels are not going to shut down a single coal plant, nor stop drilling in the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico. Nuclear can, and prevented France even from building coal burners. Of course, that would be the dreaded Socialism that Maggie Thatcher abolished in the UK. The safety record of nuclear power plants is far better than that of the coal and "natural" gas that produce about 70% of the world's electricity. The total number of people actually slain even by the Chernobyl disaster and all other nuke power accidents is tiny compared with actual deaths in mine disasters and gross emissions from fossil power plants. The estimated number of deaths from coal ash, vehicle emissions, toxic fossil fuel gaseous emissions, and perhaps floods and hurricanes aggravated by the global warming from CO2 (which I'm not counting as poisonous) in the last decade vastly exceeds any plausible estimate of the probable deaths from radioactive nuclear plant waste. While we're on the subject, coal burning actually emits about a hundred times as much radioactivity, uranium and thorium in the fly ash, than a nuclear plant is permitted to emit. In fact, burning a million tons of coal produces about eighteen tons of uranium and thorium. That's enough to fuel a breeder reactor that would supply ten time as much energy as the coal did. A breeder is reactor capable of creating as much fissile fuel as it consumes, and at the same time consuming the long-lived isotopes that strike such fear into the hearts of nuke-ophobes. The USA had a reactor that was designed and, in the very month that Chernobyl had its meltdown, tested successfully for its passive resistance to exactly that problem. The Sierra Club and others who should have known better got it cancelled. British Energy Co. is now a subsidiary of the French EDF.