Despite the risks, we still need nuclear power

The environmental lobby group Greenpeace really has it easy. As the significance sinks in of the 1977 explosion in a nuclear waste pit at Dounreay and of the subsequent cover-up by the site's managers, it has become all too clear that the nuclear industry is its own worst enemy.

Yet nuclear power, despite the industry's best efforts to shoot itself in the foot, is a technology we cannot do without.

In 1992, the world's population was around 5.4 billion people and growing at a rate of just under 1.7 per cent a year. That is 90 million new mouths to feed every year, a new China every decade.

These people need to be housed, fed, clothed and have a right to expect some sort of a life beyond that. All of which consumes not just crop plants but energy. And the world's appetite for energy is voracious. In 1992, the world consumed the equivalent of 7.8 billion tonnes of oil. Much of this was in the form of wood for the rural poor's cooking fires.

The rate of increase in the world's population has declined in recent decades, from 2 per cent in 1973 to the present 1.68 per cent. But while the increasing prosperity which follows from economic growth may reduce the population growth rate, it disproportionately increases each individual's energy consumption and switches the patterns of consumption from firewood to more convenient fuels such as oil. By the year 2020, the World Energy Council estimates that global energy consumption will have doubled to around 17 billion tonnes of oil-equivalent.

There is a chilling warning in a little-noticed paper published in the American journal Science a few years ago. Three geologists from the impeccably respectable US Geological Survey predicted that global oil production will peak and begin a permanent decline around the year 2020 - 25 years hence. Their estimates are based on an assessment of the geological strata in which oil occurs - and so the constraints which they predict are not simply a consequence of political or economic problems.

There are fossil fuel alternatives to oil: according to the researchers, "natural gas can displace oil as an energy source in stationary end uses and also can be converted to liquid transportation fuels." But they go on to warn that "gas conversion as with all alternative fuels requires substantial capital investments" and that even if oil prices rise drastically, that may not be enough to stimulate the development of substitutes on a large scale.

All human activity demands energy supply. It is difficult to see how that can be provided in developed countries without recourse to nuclear power.

In its White Paper on nuclear power published last month, the Government effectively ended the building of new nuclear power stations in Britain when it refused any funds for a proposed new twin-reactor nuclear power station at Sizewell-C. That station would have had a power output of 2.6 Gigawatts. To match that with wind energy would require around 14,000 generators, each the size of Nelson's column occupying 35,000 acres of land. The twin reactors would have consumed around 60 tonnes of uranium each year - the equivalent of burning five million tonnes of coal.

Nuclear power will never fulfil the American Atomic Energy Commission's promise in the 1950s that it would deliver "electricity too cheap to meter", but, despite the mess, despite the costs, despite even the extensive pollution from the Chernobyl accident, those who have pronounced the nuclear industry's obituary may be premature. The economic, environmental and political costs of satisfying the world's thirst for energy by other means will be simply too high. TW

1938: Uranium fission discovered by Hahn and Strassmann in Berlin.

1942: World's first nuclear reactor goes critical in Chicago.

August 1945: Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.

August 1947: Britain's first reactor at Harwell, goes critical. New atomic energy site at Windscale (now Sellafield) in Cumbria announced.

April 1954: Government announces fast breeder reactor (DFR) to be built at Dounreay in Caithness.

October 1957: Windscale accident - fire in No1 reactor scatters radioactivity over much of Cumbria. 1962: DFR generates electricity.

March 1977: New Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR) at Dounreay achieves full thermal power; DFR closed down.

May 1977: Violent explosion in shaft used for nuclear waste disposal scatters fragments of radioactive fuel around the Dounreay site and on to foreshore.

March 1979: Three Mile Island accident.

1984: First radioactive particles from explosion found on beach.

June 1984: Dounreay wins a national industry safety award for 20th year in succession.

July 1985: BNFL found guilty on four charges of contaminating Sellafield beaches in 1983.

April 1986: Chernobyl.

March 1994: PFR ceases operation.