Eliot Marshall. Science. Volume 309, Issue 5738, August 2005.
“Nuclear power faces stagnation and decline.” So warned a group of scientists in a sweeping review published 2 years ago by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Led by chemist John Deutch and physicist Ernest Moniz, both of MIT, the study concluded that nuclear power was in trouble and deserved a helping hand from government. Despite high construction costs, the authors argued that the United States should triple the number of nuclear power plants by midcentury because they can deliver electricity without emitting greenhouse gases such as CO2. The MIT group proposed a hefty tax on carbon emissions to help get this cleaner energy source moving.
The political and economic environment has changed dramatically since that report came out. On 8 August, President George W. Bush signed into law the first major U.S. energy bill in a decade. Although it does not tax carbon, it promises subsidies across the board for new investments in renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, and a grab bag of more than $6 billion in benefits narrowly tailored for builders of new nuclear reactors (Science, 5 August, p. 863). The bill was a plum for the nuclear power industry-one of several events that have got people talking about a “nuclear renaissance.” Indeed, that’s the title of a book published earlier this year by physicist and energy policy analyst William Nuttall of the University of Cambridge, U.K. One reason for optimism, Nuttall points out, is that oil and natural gas prices have shot up since 2003, making non-fossil fuel energy more attractive. Meanwhile, some public leaders have cited nuclear power as a way to reduce the impact of global warming-and even some environmental advocates seem to agree.
Although a few Asian countries never got off the nuclear bandwagon, new ones are now climbing aboard to meet rapidly growing electricity demand. India, with the most reactors under construction in the world, is planning a unique system that relies mainly on thorium rather than uranium fuel (see p. 1174). Japan continues work on fast neutron reactors that can “breed” plutonium (see p. 1177). And China announced in April that it will more than quadruple its nuclear electric capacity by 2020, buying among other designs a new “pebble bed” reactor that shuts down if it overheats. Nuclear advocates in the West also hope that advanced reactor designs can help overcome the lingering memories of Three Mile Island and Chornobyl (see p. 1172).
Does all of this amount to a nuclear renaissance? Skeptics point out that it would take a huge leap in the pace of plant construction simply to maintain nuclear power’s current global share of electric output-about 17%-let alone increase it. Many aging U.S. and European reactors will have to be dismantled in the next couple of decades. Even new ones remain more expensive than coal- or gas-fired systems. And governments are not imposing stiff taxes on carbon emissions, the one strategy the MIT report said would tip investment decisions toward nuclear. Moreover, even if the economics were to favor nuclear power, two issues will continue to dog the industry: fears of nuclear weapons proliferation and disputes about how to dispose of high-level wastes (see p. 1179).
Optimists still think that the problems can be fixed. Reiterating his view of 2 years ago, Deutch says: “If nuclear power can get its costs down and address the important issues of waste management and proliferation, its future will be very bright.” The next few years may reveal just how bright.
Apocalypse pending
The threat of global warming is perhaps the key factor in the rethinking of nuclear power. The nuclear industry, in particular, has seized on it as a reason to switch from fossil fuel to the atom. For example, John Ritch, executive director of the London-based World Nuclear Association (WNA), an advocacy group backed by power supply companies, told an audience in Idaho last month that unless the world cuts greenhouse gases, it will “face catastrophic climate change, with the severest consequences for sea levels, species extinction, epidemic disease, drought, and extreme weather events that could combine to disrupt all civilization.”
WNA suggests that the best solution would be to raise the number of nuclear electric plants in the world from 441 today to 5000 by the end of the century. That is the most ambitious scheme anyone has proposed, but so far, it has few takers. A more modest proposal-to maintain the nuclear share of electricity at the current level as a “bridge” to future clean energy technologies-has struck a chord, however.
David King, science adviser to the U.K. government, has spoken publicly about the need to keep nuclear power as a clean energy option. Britain, the world’s most visible campaigner for action on global warming, faces a common dilemma, as King explained to the Independent newspaper in May. He described a looming “gap” in clean energy production. About 27% of U.K. electricity now comes from nuclear power, he noted, but without a “new build,” only one reactor unit (Sizewell B) will still be running in 2025, producing an estimated 4% of the needed electricity. King said he was “not a great fan of nuclear” but was willing to consider it because “the climate change issue is so important.”
A recent U.K. government forecast lends weight to King’s analysis: Solar panels, windmills, and wave-driven generators cannot pick up the slack anytime soon. An electricity strategy issued in May by the U.K. Council of Science and Technology, which reports to King, notes that “the existing policy to reduce CO2 will not be sufficient … since the nuclear stations are likely to be replaced by carbon-based technology (e.g., gas) in the short term.”
And even the United Kingdom, which has championed the international effort to curb CO2 emissions, is failing to meet its selfimposed CO2 reduction goals. Physicist David Wallace, vice president of the Royal Society in London, warned in May that “our emissions are clearly going in the wrong direction,” and that U.K. government forecasts of achievable CO2 reductions have been “frankly unrealistic.” Royal Society president Robert May has written that “it is difficult to see how we can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels without the help of nuclear power.”
A few leaders in the green movement have endorsed the idea of using nuclear power as a bridge to cleaner systems in the future-including U.K. ecologist James Lovelock. Creator of the “Gaia” metaphor that describes Earth as a living organism, Lovelock published a broad appeal last year. “Only one immediately available source [of energy] does not cause global warming, and that is nuclear energy,” he wrote. “I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded opposition [to it].” A few others, such as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, have made similar statements. But environmental advocacy groups are not following.
Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace International in London, says it’s “misleading” to suggest that “the green movement is suddenly embracing nuclear power on the back of Lovelock’s statement.” He sees nuclear revival talk as “a big distraction” from the need to invest in moderate-scale, renewable energy systems. He adds that Moore is “vehemently opposed to everything that Greenpeace stands for” and now makes his living “by being anti-Greenpeace.”
Likewise, the head of Friends of the Earth in London, Tony Juniper, says, “we have reviewed our position on nuclear power,” in part because of the urgency of the climate change issue, and concluded that it is a “false solution” pushed as part of “a clever public relations campaign” by “nuclear industrial interests.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council has also reviewed its policy recently, says NRDC physicist Thomas Cochran in the Washington, D.C., office, and concluded that nuclear couldn’t survive without massive subsidies. As a June NRDC issue paper says, nuclear “suffers from too many security, safety, and environmental exposure problems and excessive costs to qualify as a leading means to combat global warming pollution.”
Cochran offers a scenario to illustrate why he doesn’t see nuclear as a good option. He begins with a modest goal: avoiding a small amount (0.2°C) of global warming at the end of this century. He calculates that relying on nuclear electricity for this benefit would require increasing the number of reactors in the world from the current 441 to at least 700 by mid-century and holding that number steady for 50 years. Allowing for retirement of obsolete equipment, he suggests, this will require building 1200 new plants in all, at a rate of about 17 per year. The support requirements, he argues, would be staggering: a dozen new fuel-enrichment plants for reprocessing, the same number of Yucca Mountain-sized waste repositories if there were no reprocessing-or hundreds of thousands of tons of material to guard during reprocessing. Because just 8 kilograms of diverted plutonium would be enough to “take out lower Manhattan,” a nuclear renaissance isn’t worth the risk, Cochran says.
The MIT review 2 years ago acknowledged that “shortcomings” in the international safeguards on nuclear materials “raise significant questions about the wisdom of a global growth scenario” for nuclear power. It did offer a fix: Tighten up the management of nuclear materials by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and persuade France, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom to cut down the traffic in plutonium by shutting their reprocessing factories. But those changes have not occurred.
The threat of global warming may not have sparked a nuclear renaissance yet, but it is breathing new life into a debate over nuclear power that, in many countries, had been quiescent for the past few years.