A popular refrain in recent debates on global climate change is that nuclear power must be a significant part of any strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Proponents argue that, as a carbon-free technology, nuclear power is one of the few ways that carbon dioxide emissions can be significantly reduced while meeting growing energy needs. This claim does not hold up to careful scrutiny, either on technical or economic grounds. Nuclear power and high levels of fossil fuel use each create a diverse set of problems. This article examines issues relating to nuclear power, while the accompanying articles on global warming and creating a sustainable energy supply look at some fossil fuel related questions.

Reactor Safety

There is no practical or reasonable way to eliminate the safety and proliferation threats arising from commercial nuclear power. All reactor types that have been developed or designed pose some level of risk of catastrophic accidents on scales similar to Chernobyl, though the specific accident mechanisms and probabilities depend on reactor design.¹ This is in part because commercial nuclear power was developed as an adjunct to the nuclear arms race and as a tool of Cold War propaganda.² In its rush to build new reactors, the industry, from its inception, put public safety, health, environmental protection and even economics behind weapons development and propaganda.

From the early days of reactor development, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was aware of the possibility for catastrophic accidents. In 1957, Brookhaven National Laboratory published an assessment, known by its report number, WASH-740, which outlined the potential health and property damages that could result from a severe reactor accident. Several months after the release of the report, Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act, limiting liability of utilities to $500 million -- just ten percent of the property damage costs estimated in WASH-740.³ This amount was increased to $7 billion in 1988, still far below the likely damages of such an accident.

The nuclear industry continues to downplay the potential for catastrophic reactor accidents, despite the evidence presented by the Chernobyl disaster in April, 1986. The explosion and fire at Chernobyl deposited fallout on every country in the northern hemisphere and forced the evacuation of over 100,000 people in a 30 kilometer zone around the plant, and the abandonment of 250,000 to 375,000 acres of agricultural land. But the nuclear industry as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), citing erroneous official Soviet data and ignoring the lack of accurate data on health effects, have tended to minimize the significance of the accident. Official estimates of the radioactivity released in the first ten days were 80 million curies. But in an independent assessment, Soviet scientist Zhores Medvedev estimated that the releases of radioiodine and radiocesium were about three times higher than officially stated.⁴ The overall costs of Chernobyl are difficult to calculate, but even the official estimates of about ten to fiften billion dollars surpass the $7 billion liability limit of the Price-Anderson Act.

The most important and tragic lesson of Chernobyl is that the most severe kind of nuclear power accident can actually happen. Moreover, the problems created by such severe accidents will persist for many generations. While claims have been made for a new generation of "inherently safe reactors," they are exaggerated and highly misleading.⁵ It would take many decades to test various designs to determine whether creating a practical reactor that is economical and invulnerable to catastrophic accidents is achievable at all.⁶ Consequently, nuclear power cannot safely help the world reduce carbon dioxide emissions-a pressing need that must be addressed with policies in place in the next few years.

Economics

As demonstrated in the accompanying table, nuclear power is a far more expensive and risky way of generating electricity than highly efficient combined cycle natural gas plants. Even in France, which is highly dependent on nuclear power, officials have admitted that combined cycle electricity plants using natural gas are more economical than nuclear power plants.⁷ Each nuclear plant built can typically be expected to cost from about $1 billion to several billion dollars in excess lifetime costs.⁸ To make a substantial reduction in CO₂ emissions, nuclear power plants would not only have to supply much of the world's electricity growth but also replace many coal-fired plants as they are retired. This would require the construction of on the order of 2,000 nuclear power plants (1,000 megawatts each) in the next several decades. The total cost penalty of using nuclear would amount to several trillion dollars. This vast sum of money would have to come in the form of subsidies from governments and/or electricity ratepayers (in the form of higher prices). It could be much more efficiently used to make investments in energy efficiency, cogeneration, renewables, combined-cycle power plants, fuel cells and the like. Thus, investments in nuclear power will detract from efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by preempting more appropriate investments.

Non-Proliferation and Disarmament⁹

The challenges of non-proliferation and disarmament issues are even more daunting and basic than safety and economic issues, because they are not only technological, but also military, political, and institutional in nature.

Plutonium is made in all commercial reactors.¹⁰ Once separated by reprocessing, the plutonium in this spent fuel can be used to make nuclear weapons. Stocks of separated commercial plutonium have been growing very rapidly since the early 1980s and are set to surpass military stocks in the next few years. There are now five countries that have commercial reprocessing policies: France, Russia, Britain, Japan, and India. Six other countries also own commercially separated plutonium: Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and the United States (from a commercial reprocessing plant that operated from 1966 to 1972).¹¹

If nuclear power were used as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the inventories of plutonium would rise dramatically. If 2,000 new nuclear power plants are built over the next several decades (in addition to replacing the present 350,000 MW of nuclear capacity), the global inventory of commercial plutonium would rise to about 20,000 metric tons by the middle of the next century, dwarfing present stocks. This inventory, the pressure on uranium resources, and the popular opposition to nuclear waste repositories would greatly intensify pressures for commercial plutonium separation and the use of such plutonium in nuclear reactors. This would further exacerbate economic, environmental, and proliferation problems associated with nuclear power.

Nuclear technology has been glamorized as "high technology" for decades, and its promotion is part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.¹² Western propaganda dates back at least to President Eisenhower's December 1953 "Atoms for Peace" speech, in which he connected renunciation of nuclear weapons to the promotion of nuclear energy. The result of these Cold War policies is huge governmental or subsidized private establishments in key countries with a vested interest in plutonium economies. These bureaucracies continue to be politically and financially powerful despite the environmental, non-proliferation, and economic failures of key technologies such as breeder reactors and reprocessing.¹³

Suitability of Nuclear Technology

Nuclear power is irrelevant to the needs of the people in a great majority of countries of the world, since nuclear power plants are too large and too expensive to fit into their electricity grids. In those countries where it might conceivably be applied, such as India and China, the economic and technological arguments are by far in favor of other technologies, such as combined cycle natural gas fired power plants, and of greatly increasing electricity grid efficiency and coal-fired power plant efficiency. Investments in these technologies can produce far more electricity than money put into nuclear power plants. After over four decades of development, only 3 percent of India's electric capacity is nuclear.

Only a few countries have a substantial reliance on nuclear power plants, and these are already heavily industrialized. In these countries, as in others, there is much potential to increase energy efficiency. This is especially true in the United States which has the largest number of nuclear power plants licensed to operate (106 at latest count). Furthermore, some of these countries are reducing reliance on nuclear power, not increasing it. Even in France and Japan, the heavy commitment to nuclear energy is coming under increasing governmental and public scrutiny.

Radioactive Waste

As discussed above, for nuclear power to contribute significantly to the reduction of greenhouse gases, thousands of new nuclear power plants would be needed. This would result in the creation of hundreds of thousands of metric tons of spent fuel in addition to existing wastes. There is no viable policy for the management of spent fuel at the present time. Nuclear power advocates see the "solution" of building a geologic repository as an essential element in the revival of nuclear power, at least in the United States. This has evoked the counter response of opposition to repositories until the issue of long-term management can be separated from promotion of nuclear power. Proposals to manage the waste through transmutation (changing long-lived radioactive elements into short-lived ones), are not viable for several reasons. Transmutation will not only require nuclear reactors of one sort or another; it will require implementation of reprocessing technologies that can also be modified for production of weapons-usable materials. Transmutation and reprocessing technologies will also create their own waste management problems by generating large new volumes of radioactive waste. Thus, what appears at first to be a technical answer to the problem of proliferation and waste management is likely to exacerbate proliferation problems without really solving waste management problems. Besides failing to eliminate the need for repositories or other disposal strategies, these technologies remain very expensive, and would greatly increase the cost of nuclear power, which is already uncompetitive.¹⁴

Phasing Out Nuclear Power

In addition to the safety, proliferation, and economic drawbacks cited above, there are a number of reasons why a nuclear phase-out is necessary to a sustainable, peaceful and healthy energy future, including:

• The presence of large stocks of separated plutonium as well as plutonium in spent fuel can make reversion to a nuclear armed state in times of tension and war more likely.

• The bureaucracies that are most eager to promote nuclear power are also the ones that tend to promote nuclear weapons in many countries, including the present nuclear weapons states. These nuclear bureaucracies continue to harbor hopes of a plutonium economy despite the technological, environmental, and economic failures of nuclear power. This is a continuing incitement to proliferation, declaratory policy notwithstanding.

• Nuclear power plants can become targets in conventional wars, greatly increasing environmental and health devastation.

• Promotion of nuclear power is aggravates conflicts, instabilities, and uncertainties, especially in the Central and West Asian regions (including the Persian Gulf). The conflict between the United States and the European Community, Russia, Malaysia, and Iran over French-Gazprom-Malaysian investments in Iranian gas is an important example.

Unless the West, which first glamorized nuclear power, renounces it and begins to phase it out, others are unlikely to give it up. Nor will the West have a basis to deny this technology to others. For example, although Iran is in compliance with IAEA inspections and safeguards, the US has expressed a great deal of concern about the possible proliferation consequences of its purchase of Russian reactors. This is because the US government suspects Iran of having a covert nuclear weapons program. It is ironic and instructive that it was the United States which first encouraged Iran's nuclear ambitions in the 1970s before the 1979 revolution. While a phase-out of nuclear power in the West does not guarantee progress on other issues or, for that matter, a phase out in all other countries, it is an essential condition for making problems associated with oil, natural gas, and greenhouse gas build-up more manageable. As illustrated above, the problem of long-term management of spent fuel also cannot be addressed satisfactorily without a phase-out of nuclear power.

Nuclear power cannot be phased out immediately or without careful planning. Indeed, in a few countries, if all the nuclear power plants were shut off at once, it would cause severe disruption or even breakdown of all or portions of the electricity grids. France, Germany, Japan, some parts of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and portions of the United States are in this position. It will be necessary while advocating the phase-out of nuclear power to also put forward and implement clear energy polices that will address the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and the energy needs of a majority of the world's population. Many viable policies, technologies and suggestions have been put forward (see sustainable energy article).