Recently, the media has come alive with disaster coverage. The focus has been split three ways: the Arab Spring, in particular the recent intervention in Libya; the Japanese earthquake and the resulting tsunami; and the situation that has developed in, and around, the Fukushima power plant.
Whilst these are all terrible events, they are not of the same scale. The first two are true catastrophes, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people, displacing hundreds of thousands more and fundamentally changing the lives of all the people in the affected areas. The third, Fukushima, has resulted only in injuries to the brave engineers and firemen who have been working to contain the accident.
However, the reaction to the situation has been massive. Apart from the overblown media coverage, all members of the international community have announced changes to their nuclear programs. Germany, for example, has shut down many of its reactors. The US and China have both announced indefinite delays to the construction of new plants.
So are the concerns and the coverage justified? I certainly don’t think anyone would claim that nuclear power is completely safe. It is a certainty that accidents can, and will, happen. In the 50 or so years that we have been using nuclear power, there have been three major accidents: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. All three of these captured the public attention at the time, causing huge evacuations and mass panic. However, we now know that the damage was not as bad as the initial reaction might have suggested. Neither Three Mile Island nor Fukushima caused a single death, and a recent UN study into Chernobyl stated that it caused at most a thousand, that figure including lives cut tragically short due to cancer.
The alternatives, by contrast, are devastating. Coal power, which is the most like for like replacement, kills over a million people a year globally. That means that for every 8 hours it runs as designed, it kills as many people as Chernobyl. The biggest power disaster was not due to nuclear, but instead the breaching of the Banqiao dam. That single event took the lives of over 200,000 people – a massive 200 Chernobyls.
You might then suggest that the best way to compare different power systems would be to look at the number of deaths by power generated. After all, coal power plants are much more widely used than nuclear ones. Indeed, such a study has been done, and the results are extremely interesting. Coal is far and away the worst, although if we only take into account clean coal, we get a minimum of 15 deaths per TWH generated. Oil is similar. Natural gas is much safer, with only 4 deaths per TWH. Then there are the renewables, ranging from hydro power, which causes about 1.5, down to wind at 0.15. Nuclear is the safest with only 0.04.
Fukushima has certainly highlighted a problem with nuclear power, one that persists throughout the Western world. Our nuclear reactors are old. Not just a little bit either; here in the UK every single commercial reactor was built in the 1950s and 60s. Their would-be replacements are cheaper, they can use existing nuclear waste as their fuel and they’re safer still than the existing ones.
We have to make the right decision now if we want to secure our energy future. Nuclear will never be the miracle cure that was promised in the 1950s, but we need something to tackle the energy crisis and climate change now. The alternatives, Gas, Oil and Coal, are dangerous and running out. We must scrap the existing power plants and begin building newer, safer ones. You can even build one in my backyard.
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