21st August 2006

Left: Climate Change march in London last year.

Sue Jones asks what are the safer, fairer and cheaper alternatives to nuclear power (10th August).

Well every option is safer than nuclear - just last week more radioactivity was discovered at Dounreay nuclear plant (i) and half of Sweden's reactors closed following an incident described by experts as nearly as serious as Chernobyl (ii)

And every option is certainly fairer - especially as we don't allow developing countries to have nuclear power. Most options are also cheaper than nuclear - which is why no private company will build a nuclear power plant unless the government underwrites the costs.

Simplistically, alternatives to nuclear might include a mix of biomass plants, tidal lagoons, wind farms, tidal turbine farms, rooftop turbines and solar energy, supplemented by increased energy efficiency. Energy efficiency measures alone could easily cut consumption by 10% percent by 2020.

Friends of the Earth have modelled a number of future scenarios for electricity production. They have found that ‘it is possible to meet demand and achieve a 48-71 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in the electricity sector by 2020 without needing to replace decommissioned nuclear power stations.’ (iii)

Sue Jones' letter implies that base-load electricity (i.e. constant output) is more important that variable-load sources. Yet our total regional consumption of electricity varies by at least 50% over a typical day, and whether you have constant-output power stations such as nuclear or variable-output power sources such as PV, tidal, wave or wind, you still need a certain proportion of reserve power stations which can increase and decrease their output to match demand.

Dr Carol Kambites
Stroud District Green party

Notes:

(i) Another radioactive particle has been recovered from the public beach at Sandside near the Dounreay nuclear plant in Caithness. It is the 67th hotspot to have washed ashore from the nearby UK Atomic Energy Authority site. The metallic fragments of reprocessed reactor fuel are linked to a rogue historic discharge from the plant. The particles have been discovered on the seabed and beaches near Dounreay over the past two decades. Last week, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) said it had submitted reports to the procurator fiscal over the finds.
See BBC 13th August 2006:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/highlands_and_islands/4789167.stm
(ii) Half of Sweden's nuclear reactors are shut down, after a security scare at the Forsmark plant, 125 miles north of Stockholm, when two back-up generators failed to work during a power failure. The two other generators were enough to avert a meltdown, but one expert was scathing. "It's a bit like a lottery," said Lars-Olov Hoglund, an engineer involved in the construction of the plant, adding it was nearly as serious as the 1986 accident at Chernobyl. Four other reactors have been shut down as a precaution.
See Guardian 16th August 2006:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,,1844951,00.html
(iii) Friends of the earth (2006) A Bright Future:
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/bright_future.pdf