It is breathtaking to suggest that the carbon savings resulting from nuclear power, which provides 15% of world electricity, are not worthwhile. The same argument would apply to any low-carbon solution. Would you say that the 18% of electricity from hydropower was not worthwhile? Even if the amount of wind capacity in the world grows by a factor of ten it still would not save as much carbon as nuclear power. Would this not be worthwhile either?

The argument is nonsense. We need all the low-carbon sources we can get, and nuclear happens to be one of the most easily scalable.

The International Energy Agency says, in order to de-carbonise the global energy supply and wean us off fossil fuel, globally we need to be building an additional 24 to 32 GW of nuclear plants per year, providing about 25% of world electricity supply. Their scenario also encourages “a massive switch to renewables for power generation, especially to wind, photovoltaics, concentrating solar power and biomass” which would provide 46% of the global power supply.

It also includes measures on the demand side such as home efficiency and a move towards hydrogen and electric vehicles:

- Widespread conversion of buildings to very low energy consumption (“zero carbon”);
- early retirement of existing coal powerstations;
- really massive uptake of renewables (up to 55GW of new onshore wind every year);
- 1 billion electric or hydrogen vehicles on the roads;
- biofuels, for trucks shipping and air transport…

It is all hugely ambitious but still only results in the minimum 50% cut in CO2 by 2050. And frankly the nuclear deployment is the easy part. Uplifting the proportion of non-hydro renewables from the current 2% to near 33% of electricity is an astonishing aim. Without nuclear it would need to go up to 68%.

http://www.iea.org/Textbase/techno/etp/index.asp

The executive summary has some figures:
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/techno/etp/ETP_2008_Exec_Sum_English.pdf

Consider that Greenpeace’s current “convenient solution” plan for UK electricity acknowledges that a 100% renewable solution is not remotely possible in the next few decades and hence relies on natural gas for a significant proportion of electricity. It doesn’t acknowledge the need for more electricity to decarbonise transport. And hence it cannot make sufficient cuts in CO2 overall. This is blatant, overt support for fossil fuel to construct a superficial and inadequate solution purely to avoid the use of nuclear power.

A reasonable person could only conclude that Greenpeace has no genuine interest in tackling climate change.

The nuclear industry only appears “accident prone” because it announces all incidents, of the most minor nature, and they are reported with relish in the media as scare stories. The fact is there has only ever been one accident at a civilian nuclear powerstation that has ever caused acute radiation fatalities, and that is Chernobyl.
The WHO source that you quote is not a list of nuclear power fatalities – it is a list of radiation fatalities. The single largest source of radiation fatalities is medical equipment. There have been some at research reactors and quite a few military related. But the only civil powerplant radiation deaths are from Chernobyl. Here is a database of radiation incidents to study for yourself:
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radeventdata.html

I am not sure what Greenpeace’s view is on nuclear medicine. Are they campaigning to ban radiography? Because it certainly causes many more fatal radiation accidents than nuclear power.

Any meltdown in a non-soviet era powerstation is likely to be no worse than Three Mile Island, which did not kill anybody. The containment prevents the release of radiation. Such containment was not present at Chernobyl, one of several flaws in the RBMK design.

The chances of a containment failure combined with a meltdown at a nuclear powerstation in the UK is estimated to be 1 in 2.4 billion per reactor year. At those odds, the “law of averages”, as you call it, doesn’t apply (unless you are planning to use fission reactors for billions of years). There is no inevitability that an accident would happen.

Regarding the exposure from the normal operation of nuclear power, do you understand what you are saying when you refer to the collective dose from Rokkasho reprocessing plant? I suspect not. For starters, it is not related to the people close to the plant, it is related to the whole global population, applying a tiny risk to huge number of people over a very long time. Here is the Greenpeace document that I assume you are trying to paraphrase:
http://www.greenpeace.or.jp/campaign/nuclear/images/n0800206_en.pdf

The global collective dose from the reprocessing plant is 7400 person-Sieverts for the emissions from one year of operation.

That is the total amount of radiation that will be received by people anywhere in the world, at any time up until the radioisotopes have decayed (over hundreds of years). The discharges from reprocessing plants are in the form of gasses and liquids which rapidly disperse and are diluted so that the risk to individuals is trivial.

By comparison the average exposure from natural background radiation is 2.4 milli-sieverts per year which equates to a global collective dose of some 14,400,000 person-Sieverts per year (between 6 billion people). i.e The global collective dose from the reprocessing plant is 20,000 times lower than the dose from background radiation.

Similarly the equivalent of the entire global collective does from the Chernobyl accident over all-time is inflicted by natural background radiation roughly every two weeks, year after year.
This is why the ICRP warns against applying small collective doses to massive populations. The important risk is not the collective dose, but the individual risk from individual exposure. In the case of background radiation the individual cancer risk is about 1 in 10,000 per year, and in the case of reprocessing plants the risk is far below this level, hence negligible. (The average individual risk of fatal cancer from a 7400 person-Sieverts global collective dose averages at 0.00000006% risk of fatal cancer per person)

Similarly applying tiny risks to massive populations over many decades you can inflate the projected deaths from Chernobyl. But to put this into perspective, using the same model, the global collective dose from natural background radiation is predicted to kill over 30 million people in a 40 year period.

What is more relevant is that the use of coal powerstations in the USA will kill as many people in one year as Chernobyl is projected to kill in 40 years. And a major part of the reason they use so much coal is because Greenpeace has campaigned against nuclear power.

I repeat my request from my original post: quantify the impact of nuclear power.

Alluding to risks such as plutonium in people’s teeth is meaningless unless you quantify the risk to health. i.e. What is the chance of this causing premature death? If you cannot do this you cannot compare the risk to other daily risks. In effect you are simply scaremongering.

You assert that we cannot estimate or model the geological changes that would occur around a waste repository, but this is patently false. An enormous amount of work has gone into quantifying the risks involved based on geological modelling.

The repository is designed so that the waste will have decayed to safe levels long before it re-enters the biosphere. The individual risk to the critical group at greatest risk (those living near the repository) is never greater than 1 in a million per year at any point in the future.
http://www.nda.gov.uk/documents/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&pageid=12038

That is 100 times lower than the risk from natural background radiation.

Dear ColinG,

As reasonable people in Greenpeace we have read the IEA scenario, and put it into the bigger picture; among other things their idea is to quadrupole the nuclear generation by 2050, meaning 32 new reactors every year between 2010-2050. This colossal increase would contribute only marginally (6%) to the CO2 reduction. To build this amount of nuclear power plants – 1,240 to be exact - we would need an investment of 8.7 trillion USD. Now lets put it into context IEA is anticipating 5.7 trillion USD investment into all electricity generation in the next 23 years –so spending 8.7 trillion USD only on nuclear in 40 years in order to achieve 6% reduction in carbon emissions will not be feasible from an economical point of view, and it would mean that taking resources away from more effective measures particularly on energy efficiency.

On another level there is another bottleneck 32 reactors per year is not feasible because current capacity of producing large nuclear reactor components is for 6 reactors per year. Now please add this to the lack of qualified personnel and weak infrastructure and have a look at the delays, and cost overruns at the new reactors in Finland and France; we simply cannot rely upon the promise of nuclear power. They have been promising the great bright future for 50 years now. Contrary to that renewable energy sector has already proven its capability to build large capacities now, with a significant increase in its scale every year. Only in Germany, the newly added wind power plants in single year of 2007 generated 13 TWh (double the added generation of 6.5 TWh in 2006) – an equivalent of two new large reactors. The reasonable choice is very simple indeed.

Dear ColinG,

You seemed to be also confused on many levels regarding nuclear industry, accidents and radiation. First of all the nuclear industry has never been open about the accidents at all; on the contrary industry made a decision to downplay the accidents and incidents by ignoring the long term effects on the workers and general public. Saying Chernobyl is only caused 56 deaths should be one of the most shameless lies of the last century. Even IAEA and WHO already acknowledged an additional 4,000 deaths are attributable to the accident – still a very low estimate by the way. (You might want to have a look at this Greenpeace report, involving 52 respected scientists: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/chernobyl-deaths-180406)

The fact that you cannot attribute with 100% certainty a specific death to a specific exposure does not mean that the increased (fatal) cancers and other health effects can simply be ignored. It is well known that additional radiation exposure increases the risk of radiation related diseases. Similarly we cannot compare it to the background radiation, as there is nothing we can do about it, whereas we can decide not to be exposed to any additional radiation. It is also widely recognized that reprocessing facilities are dominant sources of discharges, emissions and losses of radioactive substances.

This brings us to the question of Rokkasho; or any other problem of discharges; stating discharges from reprocessing plants will disperse so that they are irrelevant is well – could not be further from the truth. Radionuclides from reprocessing (Sellafield and Hague) have been traced through the Irish Sea, the North Sea, along the Norwegian coast into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans giving rise to elevated levels of radionuclides in flora and fauna. – (as was recognised e.g. in the OSPAR Decision 2000/1 http://www.ospar.org/v_ospar/strategy.asp?v0=5&lang=1). The calculations on Rokkasho show that a large number of people will receive an increased radiation dose because of the discharges of reprocessing plant.