1) It is bad systems design.
With small decentralised units, when technology advances (as it is doing, rapidly) you can swap in new units.
With nuke you’re stuck with a monolithic system for 50 years.
CHP[12] units are already used extensively by EU/Scandinavian countries, 8% of US power is generated using CHP. This is not rocket-science, though could be with the levels of investment that nuclear will cost… just to deal with its waste.
In addition to this, smaller decentralised units are more resilient to outages, are quicker to deploy and quicker to decommission. They create a competing ecosystem of technologies that is under pressure to advance. Nuke doesn’t.
To draw an analogy, Nuke is like a system of mainframe computers (from the 50s), while decentralised micro-generators is an internet of rapidly advancing, competing and evolving systems.
In systems-engineering terms, nuke stations also represent “single points of failure”. They’re less resilient.
From a military/terrorist perspective, they’re a giant “Kick Me” sign.
2) Nuke is dangerous.
Despite what the nuke industry says (you know, the people who last time around said it would be “too cheap to meter”), nuclear power is dangerous. When a fuse blows [1], you have to shut down a portion of the grid. Despite what the nuke industry says, cockups and accidents are happening all the time [2][3][4][5][6]
Nuke lobbyists now claim that it’s safe (funny, they said that last time round) but, (and this should be the first, last and only nail in the coffin of this idea) the UK govt has decided that nuke companies should not be responsible for the costs of cleaning up after an accident because no company should be reasonably expected to handle such a huge expense. This is an admission of risk – no company should have to pay for a Chernobyl… the public should.
This simple fact kills all arguments about safety.
And, once again, it’s privatised profits and socialised risks in a set up that resembles if not a monopoly then a cartel.
3) The economics stink
Nuclear power cannot work economically without massive government (that means you) subsidies. Anyone subscribing to ideas about free-markets should reject nuclear economics as a point of principle.
The potential for (distributed) profit from renewable technology on the other hand is vast – and this is technology that can be happily sold everywhere on the planet, without the paranoia we’re currently seeing over Iran etc. Instead of the benefit remaining in a few (gnarly old) hands, it can be distributed more democratically, planet-wide.
CHP (and other renewables) also offer much greater scope for local control.
Downstream energy savings (ie: efficiency) create huge upstream savings. The idea that our current escalating energy consumption needs to keep escalating at its current rate is nonsense. Amory Lovins’ (from the video above) company recently retrofitted the Empire State Building, reducing it’s energy consumption by 40% [9][10]
That’s a downstream energy saving – in the UK, 60% of energy generated goes straight up as heat. Our systems are inefficient… every watt saved at the wall-point, saves orders of magnitude greater of watts at source.
4) We don’t know what to do with the waste we already have.
Nuke is not clean, it’s incredibly dirty.
The Nuke industry have jumped on the idea that it produces low carbon emissions (and that’s ignoring that extraction/ running/ decommissioning etc are so carbon-intensive that nuke only represents a saving of 8% [13]) to promote the idea that it’s clean.
It’s not.
Nuke waste storage currently costs £1 billion a year, year in, year out, essentially forever. The half lives [7] of nuke waste runs to hundreds of thousands of years. How would you feel if… Oliver Cromwell’s generation say, had invented nuke power and left us with a billion pound a year storage bill? Feel a bit differently about them?
How about Willam the Conqueror?
The Romans?
The Sumerians?
Seems crazy doesn’t it? Look at it this way: one day, tens of thousands of years from now there will be cultures looking back at us as unimaginably distant memories… far far older than the Assyrians, Sumerians etc etc are to us…
…and they’ll still have to be dealing with this crap that ignorant morons from the 20th century left them with. That is our legacy. That’s the tyrrany we’ve already gifted to the future: taxation without representation.
This is assuming of course, that everyone producing this stuff is dealing with it responsibly. Know why the Somalian Pirates are seen as heroes by Somalis? Because EU ships have been dumping nuclear waste off the African coast[8]
Part of the sweetner that the UK govt is offering to the nuke industry to make new plants is to hide the costs of the waste in existing waste programs. They can’t do this without lying to us what the real costs are. Take a look at the history of the nuclear reactor that is being built in Finland [11]
Or to put it another way, they’re lying on behalf of big business, against your interests, again.
5) Centralised control.
You’ve seen what centralised control of dwindling resources (yes, there is such a thing as Peak Uranium, we have at most 50 years worth) did to the 20th century. You really want that for the 21st?
One of the things about renewables is that they’re oligarchy-breakers. They obviate the need for trillion-dollar wars.
They’re representative of participatory cultures (which is what we’re moving into) as opposed to nuke, which is representative of command-cultures (which is what we’re moving away from, but which all of our institutions are firmly entrenched in)
6) Proliferation
Nuke power provides the perfect shelter for proliferation of nuke weapons.
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Why? Why do all this? We already have alternatives – we’re already building them. Why invest all these hundreds of billions into something that is so inadequate?
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[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12731668?nclick_check=1&forced=true
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/us/03nuke.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss
[4] (UK) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/29/britishenergygroupbusiness.nuclear
[5] (Fr) http://www.euronews.net/en/article/24/07/2008/france-fourth-nuclear-incident-in-a-fortnight/
[6] (De) http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,576550,00.html
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
[8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
[9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKnxDcIUfdY
[10] http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid598.php
[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environment/29nuke.html
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
[13] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/nuclear
That has the feel of a coherent and well reasoned out argument to me and I have not even looked at 1/2 the links (it is a Sunday after all). I kind of get the feeling now I may have been sucked in by the incumbent propaganda on nuclear power after reading this.
Does anyone out there have a counter argument to this?
Should it be kept (for example) purely for research purposes not mass power generation?
Are there realistic alternatives considering the ever increasing power demands. Can we get what we want (note I did not use the word ‘need’) from renewables alone?
Nuclear would appear to be on the verge of getting dropped from the energy manifesto at this point in time.
There’s an article here about civil servants delaying feed-in tarrifs that are widely (and successfully) used in the rest of Europe here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/12/renewable-energy-feed-in-tariffs
and an analysis/comment on why your government is lying to you about nuclear power about 1/2 way through this podcast:
http://audio.theguardian.tv/audio/kip/world/series/guardiandaily/1247469596840/4309/gdn.gd.090713.hjg.guardian-daily-podcast.mp3
These people, in my most humble of opinions are utter scum. They should be in prison.
I suppose the bottom line is if they invested even 1/2 the cash and political will in renewables as they have in nuclear we would already be well on our way to sustainable energy.
Harvesting the energy from the moons gravity must be the biggest un-tapped renewable resource. Twice a day you can fill up a huge pond without using a pump, then empty it via a turbine to harvest the gravity with very little environmental impact. Anybody who has been tossed around in moderate surf on the beach will appreciate how much energy is available even in slightly moving water.
The trouble is renewables seems to be encouraged in the rhetoric but not in practise. A colleague of mine tried to install a micro generation scheme in a field hw owned with a small stream running through it. It needed a very small pond slightly offline from the stream a tiny turbine a bit of cable and not much else for him to come off grid and probably sell a bit back to it in the summer.
What happened you ask.
He gave up.
The red tape was so onerous in terms of surveys and permissions required to ‘modify a watercourse’ that it would cost thousands in professional fees and could even then still be rejected.
I see this sort of red tape strangulation of worth while schemes all the time in my job.
he had to jump through the same hoops fro his micro scheme as N powewr would have to jump through for impounding a river. It did not matter that it was bloody obvious there are no salmon in this tiny mountain stream, they had to pay aprofessional to assess it etc etc etc etc.
The whole system is feeding on itself. There are not enough useful things for people to do so we invent red tape to keep people busy, people who are trained not as free thinkers but to tow the line to make sure the red tape carries on in order for them to keep thier job, in order for them to consume stuff they dont need in order to keep the economy growing.
I just can not get my head around how bonkers it all is when what potentially on offer is the opportunity for people to all work less, consume less and pursue things which provide genuine pleasure. We have the technology to do it for ***** sake for the first time in human history!
What does it take to get through to people now?
Its like we are all hypnotised, sleepwalking, subdued.
Will noboddy do a damn thing until the requirement to do something is forced upon us.
Why do we all sit on our arses watching u-tube or TV eating too much and avoiding talking to the neighbours?
Its like some kind of mass catatonic state.
I get so distressed about it sometimes. Do people not see how beautiful this place we live in is?
I better stop now, this kind of outburst often preceedes a bit of a downward spiral bourne of frustration and an acute sense of helplessness.
I am going to make myself a stiff drink and go for a short walk and watch the trees blowing in the wind for a bit.