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November 22nd, 2008

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The ghost of Soviet nuclear past

Nuclear forum could blow breath into dying industry
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November 28th, 2007 issue

By Jan Haverkamp

Has nuclear energy finally grown up?

Many Czech and Slovak government officials would like us to think so. They hosted the European Nuclear Energy Forum in Bratislava Nov. 26–27 to trumpet the industry’s self-proclaimed “renaissance.” In this vision, nuclear energy has finally grown up and will be able to provide affordable, safe, secure, climate-saving energy.

Vladivoj Řezník, director of the European agenda department of ČEZ, the Czech electricity giant, said he supported the forum as “a platform for objective and fact-based discussion on nuclear energy exploitation.”

In response to Řezník, let me tell you the old Dutch saying: If the fox preaches the passion, farmers watch out for your chickens.

Instead of a “renaissance,” let me tell you why the nuclear industry currently looks much different.

During one high-level panel at the forum, I was to give an introduction on “Opportunities of Nuclear Power.” While preparing for the forum, the only slide I could think of to show were the words: “There are no opportunities — clean up your rubbish.”

In any case, every year, more nuclear reactors worldwide are closed than opened, so talk of a renaissance is preliminary at the very least.

Our nuclear waste problem appears to be unsolvable. For the most dangerous forms of radioactive waste, only temporary storage possibilities are currently under investigation. The Czech Republic hopes to open its first final storage of spent fuel in 2065; my teenage son will be 73 years old at that time!

Secondly, cases like North Korea and Iran reconfirm the risk that nuclear power poses for proliferation of nuclear weapons. So far, plans for nuclear reactors in Bangladesh, Belarus, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Israel, Libya, Nigeria, the Philippines, Surinam, Syria, Venezuela, Vietnam and Yemen show that political stability at least does not seem to be an argument in the debate.

Third, you would expect nuclear safety to play a bigger role in the debate, since this is a part of Europe hit hard by the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986. Still, the planned Belene nuclear power station in Bulgaria is sited in an area where 120 people died in a 12-kilometer radius in a 1977 earthquake. The construction of the Romanian Cernavoda 3 and 4 reactors is to take place in the same seismic active area.

Cernavoda will consist of old-style, second-generation reactors — new safety techniques are apparently not on offer for second-class citizens. Hungarian and Czech officials are contemplating allowing lifetime extensions for their 1970s and 1980s reactors. Those reactors are not fitted with so-called second containment structures however. These are structures designed to prevent radioactivity from escaping in emergency situations, as well as to keep out projectiles like terrorist hijacked aircraft.

Not only is Cernovada without proper safety structures, but the Italian utility ENEL is currently planning to bring two more of those completely outdated nuclear reactors online in Mochovce, Slovakia.

The registers are now open to let the Ghost of Soviet Nuclear Past reappear: Officials talk of dividend holidays and low reservations for waste and decommissioning costs, they want to skip the normally compulsory environmental impact assessment (with the hilarious argument that a communist-era 1986 building permit is still valid), and they want to skip all ordinary forms of public participation in planning procedures, including input from neighboring countries that could be affected by a major nuclear accident.

More nuclear power is needed, the energy industry claims. Regions like Central Europe, especially, face the danger of high dependence on Russian energy — the same country with a monopoly on nuclear fuel and technology for Mochovce and Belene.

Finally, there is the climate change argument. Nuclear power might not be the golden bullet, but it should be seen as an indisputable part of the future energy mix, supporters argue.

In reality, nuclear power cannot help too much with fighting climate change. The most optimistic industry scenarios would call for another 1,000 reactors to be added by 2050 to the 439 that are currently operating. Even were that to happen, nuclear power would require an incredible investment of 3 trillion to 5 trillion euros to reduce CO2 emissions to less than 10 percent, according to analyst estimates.

All of this will come about as long as uranium stocks last; under this scenario, they’ll last a maximum of 50 years. Greenpeace showed in an earlier published study that the needed green-house gas reductions can be reached more realistically, more quickly and more cheaply with a mix of existing techniques for energy efficiency and renewable energies. In short, in the climate question, nuclear power does too little too late against too high a cost.

So what is this nuclear forum going to discuss?

I would have liked to take Řeznik at his word. Let’s use it as “a platform for objective and fact-based discussion on nuclear energy exploitation.”

Why didn’t we face the above-mentioned facts, and talk about a sensible future scenario for the nuclear industry?

One part of Central Europe already showed us what there is to do: the former East Germany. There, the nuclear industry was transformed in an industry to clean up the legacy of nuclear power: safe decommissioning of the existing reactors in Greifswald (of the Dukovany and Mochovce type, deemed too unsafe for a united Germany), and above all an almost superhuman effort to clean up the former uranium mining grounds of the infamous Russian-(East) German WISMUT company.

If we face facts, there is a lot for nuclear experts to do — tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste to be managed, for example, and the legacy of uranium mining in north Bohemia to be cleaned up. Let’s discuss how to phase out this outdated technology in a way that we can hand over to our children and their children without shame.

Keep dreaming.

In the view of the nuclear industry, the majority of Europeans may be skeptical about nuclear energy, but they’ll change their opinions if they’re bombarded with information that nuclear power is safe, its waste problem is solved, and that it is cheap — never mind the facts.

Let’s be honest, this strategy worked in Central Europe, where critical voices about nuclear power still face intimidation. So we were treated in Bratislava to another round of slick, nuclear agit-prop, meant to tease taxpayers into more indirect and direct subsidies; and to tease banks into investments of billions of euros in financially highly risky projects.

That information will also tease young engineers into joining the nuclear church instead of putting their shoulders under the enormous task to make the energy sector sustainable, based on efficient and renewable energy use. It will tease the population of Central Europe into believing that the centralized planned way of working wasn’t that detrimental after all, that they should be proud of their nuclear temples.

The only new nuclear reactor currently under construction in Europe — the French-designed EPR reactor in Finland — was hailed as the future of the industry. Did anyone hear the faint voices reminding us that this project after two years of construction is already more than two years behind schedule and 50 percent, or 1.5 billion euros, over budget?

— The author is a nuclear energy expert for the Greenpeace EU Unit in Brussels. He lives in Prague. He participated in the European Nuclear Energy Forum.

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