no free lunch

Most of the debate over nuclear power as a replacement for fossil fuels centres on three things:

1. security risks associated with proliferation of raw materials for nuclear weapons;
2. health risks from accidents or sabotage; and
3. unresolved challenges in long-term management of nuclear waste.

The arguments assume that if we could resolve those issues then we would have a free lunch: low-carbon energy for the masses. Actually, carbon wasn't an issue when the pitch for nuclear energy was first made, but now it's presented as the main reason for rejuvenating the flagging industry.

Let's suspend reality for a moment and assume that those three issues are actually resolved. Then we have to ask, "is nuclear really low-carbon?" The answer is being debated. Some claim that if you consider life-cycle emissions, there are quite a lot of carbon emissions in the construction of plants, and in the mining and processing of uranium. Others say that carbon emissions for wind and nuclear fission are on a par. I don't have a hard time buying the argument that its carbon footprint is a better bet than fossil fuels.

But the next question is the clincher: "is it a cost-effective way to address climate change?" If it's going to cost South Africans R400 billion to finance a planned nuclear programme, which won't even touch the country's short-term energy crisis, does the argument that nuclear is the only non-coal way to meet the needs of a growing economy really hold water? Has anyone really looked at how much R400 billion could achieve with a combined strategy to implement distributed renewable generation systems and increase energy efficiencies to reduce demand?

"It's easy to show that building more reactors makes climate change worse than it should have been," says Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank in Snowmass, Colo. "That's because a dollar put into new reactors gives two to 10 times less climate solution for the amount of coal-power displaced than if you had bought cheaper solutions with the same dollars."

The RMI argument is presented in Nuclear power: economics and climate-protection potential [535 KB PDF]. In the US, nuclear power is responsible for 20% of electricity generation, and RMI estimates that cost-effective competitors could produce more than 13 times this - and do it quickly, without the risks I mentioned at the beginning. Keeping nuclear power alive means diverting private and public investment from the cheaper market winners - cogeneration, renewables, and efficiency - and delaying carbon reductions for more than a decade.