The Nuclear Comeback

I went to the Academy Cinema for the second time in a week on Thursday, to see the Documentary Film Festival screening of The Nuclear Comeback. The director is a New Zealander, Justin Pemberton, and at the end of the film he stood up in front of the audience for a question and answer session. Documentaries are the kind of film in which hearing from the director can add so much to the viewing experience. While the director obviously intended to focus more on the problems associated with nuclear power rather than the benefits, I found him to be pretty level-headed in the Q&A session and not excessively biased towards his cause. During the session there was a lively debate between the director and a pro-nuclear supporter. I'll mention more about it after the following brief overview of the film.

The title relates to the recent worldwide resurgence in nuclear power generation, which has happened as a direct result of climate change and global warming fears. Global warming is caused by carbon emissions, and the major benefit of nuclear power is that because no fossil fuels are burned, no carbon emissions are produced. Nuclear power also produces far more power per tonne than any other energy source, which is extremely important, given that the world's electricity consumption is expected to double in the next 25 years.

Governments are paying attention, and consequently 27 nuclear power stations are under construction, with projections for another 136 within a decade. A new group of campaigners have arisen, known as pro-nuclear environmentalists. Bruno Comby of Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy says, "We have absolutely no choice. We need to turn to nuclear energy because it is both clean, safe and abundant enough to ensure the survival of our civilisation."

Although several pro-nuclear commentators were interviewed, including a French pro-nuclear environmentalist who said that he would be happy to have nuclear waste stored underneath his house, the bulk of the film focused on the director's visits to several notorious nuclear sites around the world. These included a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, which suffered a large, highly radioactive leak in 2005, and of course, Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was the focus of the debate I mentioned earlier between the director and a pro-nuclear supporter in the audience. This man was no ordinary audience member, however. He appeared in the film, firstly speaking to a community group about the benefits of nuclear power and then to the director about his view that New Zealanders need to be more open-minded when it comes to nuclear energy.

The man's name is Dr. Ron Smith, and during the Q&A session, he became very irate about the inconclusiveness of the film in regards to how many people actually died as a result of the meltdown. He said that the director had not even mentioned a recent World Health Organisation report which claimed that the harmful effects of the accident had been overestimated.

I had a brief read of that report. Here is a quote from it: "Given the low radiation doses received by most people exposed to the Chernobyl accident, no effects on fertility, numbers of stillbirths, adverse pregnancy outcomes or delivery complications have been demonstrated nor are there expected to be any. A modest but steady increase in reported congenital malformations in both contaminated and uncontaminated areas of Belarus appears related to improved reporting and not to radiation exposure."

The director did indeed leave room for speculation in this section of the film. One pro-nuclear commentator he spoke to said that the best sources he had access to put the number of deaths at 56. However, snippets of interviews with two other people were then inserted, one of whom said that because of Soviet cover-ups it was hard to get an accurate picture of the real number of deaths. She said numbers as low as 37 and as high as seven million have been given.

During the Q&A session, Justin mentioned these interviews in response to Ron's outburst. He continued by saying, "We've had this debate, Ron, so I don't want to get into it now." An audience member then piped up and said, "Yeah, but the audience hasn't heard it." Sadly, they didn't go into it, and that was the last we heard from Ron.

Ron Smith was interviewed on Campbell Live a little while back, and made it quite clear that he feels nuclear energy is very safe, clean, efficient etc. Providing the opposing viewpoint was the acting Energy Minister, Trevor Mallard. I thought Trevor made good sense and also got to the heart of the matter by highlighting the prohibitively high costs of building nuclear power plants. That interview can be viewed here.

As mentioned before, climate change is the driving force behind the renewed interest in nuclear power. However, it is not completely clear whether using nuclear power will actually reduce carbon dioxide emissions. A study conducted by the Institute for Applied Ecology concluded that based on the emission of global warming gases, nuclear power compares unfavourably to:

1) Conservation through efficiency improvements
2) Run-of-river hydro plants
3) Offshore wind generators
4) Onshore wind generators
5) Power plants run by gas-fired internal combustion engines
6) Power plants run by bio-fuel-powered internal combustion engines

Of the eleven ways to generate electricity that were analysed by the Institute, only four are worse than nuclear power in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Every stage of nuclear power production, from the manufacture and eventual dismantling of nuclear plants, to the mining, processing, transport, and enrichment of uranium fuel produces emissions. Further emissions accompany the eventual processing, transport, and burial of nuclear wastes.

Even if this data is wrong and nuclear power is clean and green, not to mention safe, as Ron Smith would have us believe, there is a far more important issue that few seem to realise. And that is that many natural resources have reached their peak, and are now in decline. Not just oil, but metals, minerals, fish harvests, fresh water, fertile land. The list goes on. Our demand for all of these resources is increasing, while the supply is shrinking.

Having an abundant energy supply such as that provided by nuclear power would just bring further problems. More available energy means further industrialisation, leading to greater economic growth. This in turn leads to further increases in population and consumption. Which would also bring about more greenhouse gas emissions.

The simple truth is that the Earth has its limits, and cannot cope with humanity's over-exploitation of everything it has to offer. We will see economic contraction in the not-too-distant future. The question is whether societies will contract and simplify intelligently, or valiantly try to maintain the status quo with ambitious projects that will be ultimately unsustainable.

Studies have shown that uranium is unlikely to last any longer than 2050. There are plenty of other energy sources that will always be around. The way forward is finding out how to utilise these efficiently. Solar and wind energy are intermittent, so we need to create better electricity storage devices to ensure power can still be supplied during off-peak periods. I think New Zealand is on the right track. We know we don't have a need for nuclear power, and we know that renewable energy sources have to be tapped to mitigate our dependence on rapidly depleting fossil fuels.

If we want the future to offer hope, we have to realise that we live in a world of scarce resources. We have to work within those parameters. The era of great material abundance is over.