Over the last several decades, the cost of electricity from solar panels has declined dramatically, while the cost of building new nuclear plants has risen steadily. This has reaffirmed the long-standing view of many environmentalists that it will be cheaper and easier to reduce global warming emissions through solar electricity than with new nuclear plants. But while continuing price declines might someday make solar cheaper than nuclear, it’s not true today. Yet the mythmaking persists.

Ted Nordhaus

Michael Shellenberger

Nuclear is “the least economical probably of any” energy source, Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the San Francisco Commonwealth Club in 2011. Activist Bill McKibben late last year told the Daily Beast that nuclear is “incredibly expensive, it’s like burning $20 bills to generate electricity.”

Exhibit A for green leaders is a beleaguered new nuclear plant in Finland. It was supposed to cost $4 billion and begin generating electricity in 2009. It is now projected to cost $11 billion, and Finland’s electric utility says it won’t open until 2016.

The same environmental leaders point to Germany’s solar program as a model for effective action on global warming. Mr. McKibben describes Germany as “the only major country that’s really pursued renewable power at an appropriate pace” and points out that its state of Bavaria boasts more solar panels than the entire U.S. Germany’s solar panels were “enough to provide close to 50 percent of the nation’s power,” Mr. Kennedy wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times.

All of this has led many to conclude that electricity from Germany’s solar power is far cheaper than Finland’s new nuclear power will be. The opposite is the case.

The cost of building and operating the Finnish nuclear plant over the next 20 years will be $15 billion. Over that time period, the plant will generate 225 terawatt-hours (twh) of electricity at a cost of 7 cents per kilowatt hour.

Since 2000, Germany has heavily subsidized electricity production from solar panels—offering long-term contracts to producers to purchase electricity at prices substantially above wholesale rates. The resulting solar installations are expected to generate 400 twh electricity over the 20 years that the panels will receive the subsidy, at a total cost to German ratepayers of $130 billion, or 32 cents per kwh.

In short, solar electricity in Germany will cost almost five times more for every kilowatt hour of electricity it provides than Finland’s new nuclear plant.

Over its 60-year lifetime—which can be extended by relicensing—the Finnish plant likely will generate more electricity than Germany’s solar panels ever will. That’s because solar panels only have an expected lifetime of 25 to 30 years and lose about a half a percent of their efficiency every year. Compared over their full lifetimes, the Finnish plant will produce power at a cost of about 4 cents per kwh, while Germany’s solar panels will produce electricity at a cost of 16 cents per kwh.

Does that mean we should give up on solar? Of course not. Thanks to several decades of public support, solar panels have gotten better and cheaper. Continuing efforts to develop better panels deserve our support. But the insistence that solar is ready to play a major role in meeting our energy needs today is both delusional and irresponsible.

Messrs. McKibben and Kennedy, for instance, have boasted that on one day in 2012 half of Germany’s electricity came from solar. They neglect to mention that it was a cool and sunny day over a weekend, when demand was unusually low. The real story is much more sobering. In 2012, solar generated less than 5% of Germany’s electricity despite a decade and over $100 billion spent in subsidies.

Misleading claims about solar’s readiness might be excused as the exaggerations of enthusiasts if the claims weren’t coming from environmentalists who believe that global warming is a planetary emergency. If they were really serious about the need to move to zero carbon energy, they would see nuclear energy as the obvious answer.

The only nations in the world that have achieved emissions reductions at a pace and scale that begins to approach what will be necessary to mitigate global warming are France and Sweden. Both did so by switching to nuclear energy. France shifted over 80% of its electricity to nuclear in about two decades. Renewable energy, despite decades of public subsidies, can make no such claim.

Warning of the end of the world and delivering the good news about solar and wind plays well with green audiences, but anyone truly concerned about climate change will need to reconsider their opposition to nuclear. It is the best chance we have to make big reductions in carbon emissions quickly.

http://www.thebreakthrough.org/

In their determination to attack nuclear power and those who support it, anti-nuclear activism has walked away from the scientific process. As a result, nearly the entire community of environmental organisations in Australia is currently standing behind figures that are completely mathematically incorrect. Will they correct these blatant errors and open their publications to expert external review? Or is correct maths and good science optional when you wear the colour green?

The great scientist Carl Sagan famously said that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. So how is it that Jim Green, an anti-nuclear campaigner with no scientific journal publications, can accuse James Hansen, one of the most extraordinary scientists of the last 50 years, of junk science?

In Green’s recent article “James Hansen’s nuclear junk science” he does precisely what good scientists don’t do. He cherry picks data.

For those who came in late, Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen recently calculated, in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, that the historic deployment of nuclear power had likely prevented 1.84 million air-pollution related deaths, and by mid-century would prevent a further 420,000 – 7.04 million such deaths.

James Hansen

In response, Green has the temerity to call Hansen a “policy flake”. That’s bizarre. For his outspoken policy advocacy on climate change such as the phase out of the coal industry and the cessation of tar sands operations, together with advocacy for fee-and-dividend carbon pricing, Hansen has been rightly lionised by the left and respected almost universally. But there is another platform to his policy position: that nuclear power must be deployed to prevent further climate destabilisation. Same man, same intellect, same  background. This should give pause to those on the left who oppose nuclear power.

But according to Green, Hansen is now peddling junk science, claiming that Hansen got the mortality rates from nuclear power wrong. So the guts of Green’s article is a table of numbers giving deaths per gigawatt year of various energy technologies, with nuclear faring just as poorly as coal. He would have us apply this table in place of the figures provided by Kharecha and Hansen.  He boldly criticises the authors for their sourcing relating to nuclear mortality, saying this:

 They say: “About 25% of these deaths are due to occupational accidents and about 70% are due to air pollution-related effects (presumably fatal cancers from radiation fallout; see Table 2 of ref 16).” Ref 16 is a 2007 article in The Lancet — which makes no effort to explain or justify its figures for nuclear power deaths.

This shows both arrogance and laziness. Firstly, The Lancet is one of the world’s most highly respected medical journals. As far as sourcing goes, that’s a good first step.

Furthermore, Green is just plain wrong. The Lancet says exactly what is contained in the estimate: “…occupational effects (especially from mining), routine radiation during generation, decommissioning, reprocessing, low-level waste disposal, high-level waste disposal, and accidents.”  They also clearly cite the estimate as a summary from the ExternE project.

ExternE is a huge actuarial project run between 1998 and 2005 involving an array of experts in Universities across Europe, under the auspices of the European Commission. The table in question is the summation of thousands of pages of methodology, assessment and reporting, all of which is publicly available. ExternE spends 250 pages justifying its nuclear power death estimates.

Kharecha and Hansen apply the expert information in this table to calculate that nuclear power had saved 1.84 million lives since 1971. But rather than relying on this work by experts, Green refers readers to an alternate table of figures, shown below.

The mortality table published by Choose Nuclear Free

Forgive the interrupted prose, but the process by which this table was developed is best explained with bullets.

• As source for this table, Green directs the reader to a page at an anti-nuclear website Choose Nuclear Free. The page is authored by Green.
• The page repeats the table, and references a more detailed paper. This paper is also authored by Green.
• The paper repeats the table again, this time listing the various sources.
• For figures on biomass, rooftop solar, and oil, Green draws on information from a non-peer reviewed webpage found through the Lifeboat Project.
• In converting these mortality factors from terawatt hours (TWh) to gigawatt years (GWy), he butchers them by accidentally dividing the figure by 8.76 when it should have been multiplied by 8.76. All of these figures are numerically incorrect. For example, Biomass should show 105 deaths per GWy instead of 1.4. Oil should be 315 instead of 4.5. Green’s coal figures are a from a mish-mash of sources, some of which measure in deaths/GWy and others in deaths/TWh. Ignoring this and just using the Lifeboat figures for simplicity, the range should be more like 131-2,435 deaths per GWy.
• This source (Lifeboat Project) also provides a number for nuclear power (0.04 deaths per TWh which would have, erroneously, converted to 0.005 deaths per GWy by Green’s maths or 0.35 using actual maths) . Green ignored it, presumably because this was too low.
• He instead builds his own nuclear mortality factor by:
  • Firstly selecting a 1996 estimate from the IAEA for fatalities from Chernobyl (26,000) and normalising to deaths per GWy. That this 1996 expectation hasn’t eventuated is demonstrated by later assessments of the evidence which Green ignores (see our reference below to the 2007 UNSCEAR assessment).
  • Then selecting a single, non-peer reviewed discussion from a US nuclear physicist (Garvin, 2001) for mortality from the rest of the nuclear energy chain. We have serious misgivings about this assessment itself, however that deserves its own investigation;
  • Then summing the two figures above; then finally
  • Cherry picking a single line from a 424 page 2006 report of BIER as justification to double the upper end of his own mish-mash figure.

Dear readers, we give you junk science. This isn’t so much cherry picking as it is a half-baked cherry pie. Yet this unbelievably bad bit of work is hosted by  a site with a tag line “Accurate information about Australia’s energy options”.

But this is especially concerning because Choose Nuclear Free also hosts a joint statement against nuclear energy signed by every major environmental organisation in Australia. This is why peer reviewed science matters. Environmental organisations cannot be permitted to excuse themselves from that process in undertaking their activism and get away with endorsing a non-peer reviewed, mathematically incorrect melange of cherry picked sources that is then leveraged to influence national policy. That’s exactly the practice they object to when it is evident in climate change denial. By insulating themselves from review and indulging in group-think on nuclear, they are just as guilty.

Green’s case falls apart when he tries to claim there have been “countless” accidents in the nuclear energy chain. Wrong. You can count them alright, and that’s what the Energy Related Severe Accident Database does. It tells us that between 1970 and 2005, in the OECD coal incurred 81 severe accidents (defined as 5 fatalities or greater) across the energy chain resulting in 2,123 fatalities. For nuclear, the figures are zero and zero. In non-OECD nations, the figures for coal are 1,507 severe accidents for 29,816 fatalities, and the figures for nuclear are 1 and 31 (being direct fatalities from Chernobyl). ExterneE replicates these findings. This mis-step in logic by Green is extreme.

Green mentions serious hydro accidents in brackets as though they somehow don’t quite count. The ENSAD records two hydro dam failures alone, Banqiao and Shimantan, as responsible for 26,000 fatalities, and ten further failures causing a further 4,000 deaths. These accidents counted for those victims. It is unacceptable to devalue human life when it fails to support the anti-nuclear argument.

The article is padded with discussion of the effects of low-level radiation and Chernobyl. This is an area of ongoing scientific uncertainty, and credible organisations provide differing conclusions. But Green leverages this uncertainty to the most extreme result.

His firstly distances himself from the advice of the peak body while criticising Hansen for attending to it. This is in every way akin to climate denialists dismissing the IPCC. Green remains comfortably distant from the up-to-date advice of the UN who stated, following a major review in December 2012,

 “Because of the great uncertainties in risk estimates at very low doses, UNSCEAR does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels”.

Green rejects Hansen’s upper limit estimate of 4,900 deaths from nuclear accidents, stating that credible estimates for Chernobyl range from 9,000- 93,000. The link provided to support this statement is to another non-peer reviewed article co-authored by Green himself, which itself provides no source for these figures. But the figures can only be arrived at by doing precisely what UNSCEAR cautions against: multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals.

Hansen is correct to quote the figure for known fatalities for Chernobyl of 43 (28 in the event and immediate aftermath plus 15 fatal cases of latent thyroid cancer). He is reasonable in offering an estimate of 4,900 addition deaths for the industry as a whole, being fatal cancers that may have occurred, but at a rate that is too small to distinguish from what is normal.  He is well-supported when he reiterates that this is a probable over-estimate due to the wealth of evidence suggesting that low-dose radiation is simply not harmful, including the 2007 observation from UNSCEAR that after 20 years of exhaustive studies of Chernobyl there was “no persuasive evidence of any other health impact in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure”. This is hardly going to be the end of the matter for all concerned. But it is certainly not junk science.

Of course, Green glosses over the 64 Gt of greenhouse gas emissions avoided through nuclear power deployment to date. That’s unreal, but sadly typical. It seems anti-nuclear activism would happily cook the globe if it meant no more nuclear power.

France supplies electricity at around 80g CO2/kWh. Australia’s National Electricity Market produces around 800g CO2/kWh

The article attacking Hansen is not a critique. It is a deliberately constructed mis-reading of a scientific paper and its reputable sources, aimed at discrediting a celebrated scientist whose work has become problematic for the author. It is clumsy, lazy, shoddy and deceptive, having failed to read and understand the source material and then accusing Hansen and The Lancet of a lack of rigour. At every turn it seeks to weight the argument against nuclear by steering away from the best sources, the best science, the multi-paper reviews, and the peak bodies. It provides instead a self-referential pastiche, cobbled together from the fruits of non-peer reviewed activism, cherry picking, merging and simply butchering select references in the process. To top it off, this error-ridden product is currently leveraged by every major environmental organisation in Australia to push their agenda and influence Australia’s policy directions on energy. That’s not science. That’s not a critique worthy of publication in a peer reviewed scientific journal. That’s an attack on the scientific process itself, and a direct analogue to the techniques of climate change denial.

Hansen is but one in a growing group of highly credible voices who have reached the same conclusions: that an effective strategy to address climate change simply must include nuclear power, and that the hazards presented by nuclear power have been greatly exaggerated and pale in comparison to the threat of climate change. If environmentalism wishes to retain any kind of moral high ground in climate change as we push past 400 ppm CO₂, it must reject the junk science of non-peer reviewed anti-nuclear activism. It must evolve to a position based on the transparent application credible, expert science.

Ben Heard is Director of ThinkClimate Consulting, a climate change and sustainability advisory firm. Geoff Russell is a mathematician, computer programmer and longstanding member of Animal Liberation SA. Both authors have rescinded previous positions of strong opposition to nuclear power and have become vocal nuclear advocates.

Ben Heard www.thinkclimateconsulting.com.au ; www.decarbonisesa.com ;

Twitter: @BenThinkClimate

Geoff Russell www.perfidy.com.au

Twitter: @csiroperfidy

As you might imagine, I left with mixed feelings. I had just delivered my now somewhat-seminal presentation Nuclear Power: From Opponent to Proponent for the first time. I thought I  had something, but it was an inglorious start to be sure, and I did not know if the issue really  had legs.

If, on that day, I could have seen the flyer for this future conference, I would have been blown away. Some may still like to behave as if nuclear is an intractable issue, but this is simply not true. In the last two-and-a-half years Australia has come a long way. Now, thanks to the courage of ATSE, we are gearing up for our first major, committed conversation on the topic. For two full days, local and international experts will canvass a full range of issues. A special edition journal of papers will be released. We are now on the road. Follow this link to register

Please share this conference information widely. ATSE have done a wonderful job of keeping costs low. Those with any professional interest in Australia’s energy future must attend. There are also a small number of exceptionally discounted student places.

I look forward to seeing the turnout for this important conversation!!!

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Critics and reviewers have called it “a documentary that fundamentally changes the way you think” and “the most important movie about the environment since ‘An Inconvenient Truth’”.

But, at time of writing, Pandora’s Promise is without Australian distribution.

Australia, my home. Highest per capita greenhouse emissions of the developed world. Nearly double the global average use of coal for electricity. Largest proportional exporter of coal in the world. An arbitrary prohibition on nuclear power.

This is a film Australia needs to see.

Please, share the trailer either through this post or directly from YouTube. Like the Facebook page and call for a local release. Australian distributors need to hear that Australians want to see this movie.

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Brian Eno

Brian Eno

I have long known Brian Eno as a producer for Talking Heads and U2 (a mere fraction of his contribution to music). What I have just learned is that this remarkable man is also a board member of the nuclear disarmament group BASIC  and the environmental NGO ClientEarth.

On nuclear power, Eno has made some of the most eloquent statements I have yet read. Here is an extract (complete statement is here):

As a result of over-excited media reporting (‘great story!’ I heard one journalist say) that single word (Fukushima) has probably condemned nuclear power for another generation, when in fact the accident produced no radiation-related deaths (and it’s doubtful that it will produce a discernable statistical blip in cancers in the future). In a conspiracy which seems almost dishonest, most Green groups failed to acknowledge this – it was too good as propaganda for them to let the facts get in the way – and of course the press never returned to the subject with any correctional follow-up. It became one of those little nuggets of received, and totally incorrect, wisdom: Nuclear=Fukushima=Catastrophe.

.…the real catastrophe of Fukushima is in the future, waiting for us in the form of vastly increased atmospheric CO2. An emotional over-reaction to a media storm has produced a thoroughly bad decision with long term global consequences.

Fantastic words from an amazing guy.

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A former anti-nuclear environmentalist has become one of the first people in the world to co-author an independent report pitting the advantages of nuclear energy against renewable energy for electricity generation.

Addressing the Paydirt 2013 Uranium Conference in Adelaide today, ThinkClimate Consulting Director, Mr Ben Heard, unveiled Zero Carbon Options – Seeking an Economic Mix for an Environmental Outcome – a comprehensive, self-funded report analysing 13 specific benchmarks to identify the most efficient energy source to replace two small coal-fired power stations at Port Augusta in South Australia.

“If as a country, we continue to say ‘no’ to nuclear energy as a way of addressing climate change, we better damn well be sure we know why we are saying ‘no’,” Mr Heard said.

 “To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever been done before anywhere in the world,” he said.

 “One of the advantages of this report is the fact it is based on an actual case study – powering the Port Augusta electricity stations – so can easily be used as a blueprint for similar plants utilised anywhere in the world.

 “This report applied a multi-criteria analysis of the performance of different technology solutions against the specific task of reliability replacing the electricity provided by two small coal-fired power stations.

 “If Australians are genuinely serious about addressing climate change including reducing greenhouse gas emissions – nuclear is by far the best way to go.

 “Across the board, the results stand for themselves – less start-up costs, lower cost electricity, much smaller land use, no use of fresh water, more reliable generation capacity….the list goes on.”

The multi-criteria analysis used to compare nuclear energy against a hybrid renewable option (combining solar and wind) included capital cost, operational waste, land use, water consumption, job creation, lifespan of plant, reliability and existing global and national generating capacity.

 Mr Heard said the challenge of maintaining and building Australia’s economy while engaging in rapid decarbonisation was a daunting one.

“But to take the challenge without impartially exploring every available zero-carbon generation technology is unwise – and arguably, irresponsible,” Mr Heard said.

 “And as any environmentalist knows, to reduce our carbon footprint coal must be eliminated from the global energy debate post haste,” he said.

 “And ALL options need to be considered for that footprint reduction to occur.

 “Our hope that this report will foster a more open and accountable decision of all the zero-carbon options that are currently available to us”.

 A copy of the report can be obtained at http://www.zerocarbonoptions.com/

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I was prompted to examine it more closely after reading this article by Gilding. I appreciate optimism. But this piece leaves optimism behind in preference to incredible confirmation bias.

All evidence is pulled together to support Gilding’s premise of imminent renewable revolution as part of global mobilisation against climate change, while any and all countervailing evidence is blinkered out. He references the headline from Bloomberg regarding new renewables in Australia now being cheaper than coal. This headline finding and the work underpinning it was demolished in critique by both me and Tristan Edis of Climate Spectator, both of us (but the latter in particular) being supporters of renewables having a role in the changes to come. But Gilding took it at face value, along with everything else. His article managed to talk about winning the climate crisis seemingly on the back of wind and solar. There was no mention of biomass, energy storage or, you guessed it, nuclear power. So I picked up the book with trepidation to check the treatment of nuclear power in Chapter 12. It began promisingly:

I’m simply advocating a careful rational discussion about the opportunities open to us, and an intelligent debate about the alternatives, in the context that a failure to change will have consequences.

That’s what I’m advocating, though I recently argued the discussion will need to be pretty quick with some winners picked. But then on page 166 the author says this:

I don’t see how nuclear can even be a good partial solution given the complications of waste, terrorism and supply limits. I’m certainly open to being persuaded why I might be wrong, but I haven’t been yet.

I’m going to resist the temptation to go after the obvious points of waste, terrorism and supply limits. Instead I want to look at the packaging.

Firstly “I don’t see how nuclear can even be a good partial solution”.

Gilding has missed the fact that it is already well more than a partial solution. Thanks to the existing deployment of nuclear power, over 400 reactors in around 30 nations, this technology avoids emissions of around 2 billion tCO₂-e every year. If that is not the starting point of considerations, then the ensuing discussion is going to be anything but careful and rational.

Secondly, “I’m certainly open to being persuaded why I might be wrong, but I haven’t been yet”.

This irks me. The message seems to be that the world owes Gilding an argument in favour of nuclear, made to Gilding’s satisfaction. It doesn’t. I used to be ardently anti-nuclear. I changed my mind over a period of years, firstly just quietly thinking and paying attention, then actively researching and exploring the issues. Many people were influential. No one persuaded me why I was wrong. I did that bit. It’s called analysis.

Gilding then asserts that “geothermal and renewable energy provide an intrinsically more elegant and intelligent solution to our energy needs than anything else”. If anything in this space could be described as “intrinsically intelligent”, it would be the fastest possible replacement of fossil plants with zero-carbon alternatives that deliver the exact same service. That’s what France did, and the technology deployed was nuclear power. Again, as recently argued, trying to deploy technologies that act nothing like what they are supposed to replace is part of what has driven our failure so far.

Gilding supports his position with factoids you will recognise about the amount solar energy hitting the earth, the amount of wind blowing around, and the amount of energy in the tides. He is comfortable to skip a few steps in the process and make this conclusion:

So there is just so much energy available, it is implausible that we cannot access it effectively and at a reasonable price if we put our minds to the task.

Consider the alternate burdens of proof. In the case of nuclear power, a case must be hand-delivered covering a range of issues to the author’s satisfaction, despite the fact that it is already doing precisely what is needed (with some acknowledged drawbacks). In the case of renewable technologies, the mere presence of an abundant raw resource makes anything other than success “implausible” provided we try hard enough. What happened to “careful rational discussion” and “intelligent debate about the alternatives”?

This is self-serving reasoning for a vision that arbitrarily excludes nuclear.  This point becomes apparent when Gilding assures us that “something else will come into play that will kill off nuclear power and coal with CCS. That is the speed of change”.

Within a few pages “careful rational discussion” has become “kill off nuclear power and coal with CCS”. Rapid growth in the renewables sector is invoked with the simultaneous assumption that development of any other technology is on hold. This is clear confirmation bias. Overall growth in the quantity of energy demanded is sending emissions skyward even as these mind-boggling growth rates in renewables occur. It’s a simple as looking at the data.

The pretence that the author has been careful and rational in his consideration of the role of nuclear is dangerous. Some readers will believe he put some effort into considering the sensible place for nuclear power in a world that needs to tackle climate change. He didn’t. It is a perfect illustration of the point I recently made with co-authors at The Conversation: if we fail in the next 25 years as we have in the previous, it will be so-called environmentalists who are as much to blame as anyone.

In decarbonising the world, there are bound to be a few complex formulae that will be required. But here’s a simple one that may be the most important:

Hope ≠  A Plan

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What the authors did in this study was put methodology and numbers around something many of us have understood for a long time: even without considering climate change, combustion of fossil fuels is bad for our health to a level that nuclear fission just can’t match. Here is the abstract with the key findings and figures. Lest you submit to Abstract thinking, the full article is here: Prevented mortality and greenhouse gas emissions.

In the aftermath of the March 2011 accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the future contribution of nuclear power to the global energy supply has become somewhat uncertain. Because nuclear power is an abundant, low-carbon source of base-load power, on balance it could make a large contribution to mitigation of global climate change and air pollution. Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented about 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes (Gt) CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. Based on global projection data that take into account the effects of Fukushima, we find that by midcentury, nuclear power could prevent an additional 420,000 to 7.04 million eaths and 80 to 240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels, depending on which fuel it replaces. By contrast, we assess that large-scale expansion of natural gas use would not mitigate the climate problem and would cause far more deaths than expansion of nuclear power.

Here’s one of the key figures from the article

Just how can this be? To put it simply, fission is not combustion, and waste is not pollution. Have a look at this shot of two reactors in China. You may notice something. Rather, you may notice the absence of something.

Two CANDU 6 reactors (690 MWe each)

A chimney. A stack. An exhaust pipe as it were. There isn’t one. Unlike fossil combustion, nuclear fission does not expel harmful waste products all day long. The same goes for biomass. I found the open fire cosy and romantic for a night of roughing it in a hut over the Easter weekend, but smoke is really, really bad for your health over time.

Nuclear fuel enters a reactor as a ceramic and leaves again as a ceramic. There’s no smoke, no exhaust. There is waste. But not pollution because the waste is contained as standard operating procedure. Even that waste is just another type of fuel. You just need the right reactor.

As the recently published paper makes clear, the cumulative impact of the nuclear power in use is nearly 2 million deaths prevented, and in future it will be millions more, even taking highly conservative assumptions about the health impacts from the nuclear sector (as the paper has done).

To bring this all back to something real, lets visit Australia’s National Pollutant Inventory, and look up a few well known air pollutants: PM 10 (larger particulates), PM 2.5 (smaller particulates), oxides of nitrogen and sulphur dioxide. Let’s see check the contribution, and ranking, from two sources: electricity generation and coal mining.

Those are the big ones.  To review every pollutant reported for Australia’s fossil dependent electricity generation sector in the NPI, click here. To review every pollutant recorded for coal mining in Australia, click here.

When I said to an audience that we could have a future without air pollution, this is what I was getting at. So much of what harms us that we either accept, or remain completely ignorant of, can be completely eliminated by rebooting our energy system with a judicious combination of nuclear power and renewables. We need to eliminate coal, head off a major reinvestment in gas, then develop substitutes for our liquid fossil fuels using the clean energy.

If we incur pollution for other benefits, where simple substitutes don’t exist, well, ok… at the very least we need to have a discussion of trade-offs. Here, there is no trade off. It’s all upside. Dramatically less mining (and transport) for the prodigious volumes of fuel. The elimination of huge amounts of air pollution. Vastly safer.

The transition to nuclear is a valuable evolution of our civilisation without the urgency of climate change. We need to ditch our dependence on 18^th century fuel, and embrace the technology of the 20^th and 21^st Century. It’s better for us.

Update: Click here for a just released (April 2013) review of global impacts of coal combustion on human health from the Chicago Institute of Public Health

Coal_Literature_Review_2

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The following bit of wisdom can be found adorning the bumpers and t-shirts of environmentalists everywhere.

It even get’s its own brand of cleaning products to make people feel a little better about something.

Seven generations… shall we call that 150 years?

Many of the same people who wear the t-shirt or buy the detergent will also either say, or find themselves nodding along to, a statement like this:

Nuclear waste needs to be managed for hundreds of thousands of years. This is contrary to notions of intergeneration equity.

The two statements are utterly irreconcilable. The statement credited to the Iroquois is the vastly wiser of the two for a very important reason.

It does not excessively prejudge either the needs or the capabilities of our distant descendants, thereby not unduly hindering our ability to make sensible decisions on both our behalf and their behalf today. If we can be confident in maintaining something safely for 150 or so years, we can consider our responsibility to future generations discharged. They have the right to make their own decisions, and they will almost certainly be better equipped to handle challenges.

Right now, a 150 year time frame of continuing fossil fuel dependence spells catastrophe for coming generations. Deployment of nuclear fission in exchange for spent nuclear fuel that we already know how to both store and recycle, has the power to kill that dependence.

The bumper sticker is right. We are just screwing up the interpretation and application.