Another Anti-Nuclear Rant?

Although news about Indonesia's proposed nuclear power plant has been scant recently, it is worth reminding ourselves - and the élite of the business and political worlds - that no country has yet achieved energy self-sufficiency from nuclear power and, most importantly, no country has solved the problem of the disposal of the radio-active waste generated.

I have burdened readers of my anti-nuclear stance 33 times in the life of Jakartass - type 'anti-nuclear' or 'nuclear power' in the SEARCH box in the right column for the multifarious reasons.

This post is not a rant because there's enough recent evidence around from the pioneers of nuclear power - the UK - to demonstrate that for Indonesia to follow the nuclear route would be madness. What I am referring to is a catalogue of disasters in the British nuclear industry rather than the inadequacies of the Indonesian government, local authorities and private companies in maintaining the country's roads.

Don't take my words for it - please click on the links.

Nuclear Power for Dummies
Is nuclear power the answer to the energy crisis? Ian Sample explains how it works - and how we get the awful side-effects of bombs and waste.

The many problems of Sellafield

Britain's nuclear complex at Sellafield is Europe's biggest single industrial site and home to what was meant to be a huge fuel reprocessing system that would produce power while reducing the legacy of radioactive waste. It was built amid enthusiasm that atomic power would be "too cheap to meter" and yet, 52 years on, its catalogue of failures has left it with one of the world's largest stockpiles of plutonium and a bill to the taxpayer of about £3bn a year, a new report says.

Radioactive waste storage at Sellafield

Sellafield houses two state-owned reprocessing works and a plant for making mixed uranium and plutonium fuel called Mox. None of these facilities, which cost hundreds of millions of pounds, work as they were meant to do. Their problems are rebounding on the part-privatised British Energy (BE), which is wholly dependent on Sellafield to reprocess and store spent fuel from its 14 advanced gas-cooled reactors.

The difficulties have also hit the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which the government set up in 2004 to preside over the £72bn clean-up of all British atomic sites and which was meant to be partly funded by income from reprocessing spent fuel.

Costs of Decommissioning 1
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which is nursing a £300m budget overrun for 2006-07 alone, is attempting to raise cash to help pay for a £72bn clean-up bill. It plans to do this by selling off, to the private sector, everything from stockpiled uranium to atomic fuel manufacturing plants and land at 18 sites where they hope new nuclear plants will be built.

Contamination
Two kilometres of beach outside one of Britain's biggest nuclear plants, Dounreay, have been closed since 1983, and fishing banned, when it was found old fuel rod fragments were being accidentally pumped into the sea. The cause was traced and corrected but particles - including plutonium specks, each capable of killing a person if swallowed - are still being washed on to this bleakly beautiful stretch of sand and cliff on mainland Britain's northern edge.

Robot submarines fitted with a Geiger counter are to be used to sweep the seabed in one of the most delicate clean-up operations ever in this country. Each submersible will crisscross the sea floor to pinpoint every deadly speck close to Dounreay before lifting each particle and returning it to land for safe storage.

Costs of Decommissioning 2
Although the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) kept no precise accounts for building and running Dounreay on Scotland's north coast, it is known to have cost several billion pounds. Now a further £2.5 billion will be spent returning the site to its pre-nuclear condition, leaving only a vault, covered with grass, to hold low-level nuclear waste while high-level waste will probably be shipped to a central UK nuclear store yet to be approved.

Waste Disposal
Scientists know that eventually they need to find a way of storing nuclear waste safely for thousands of years. Some countries, such as America and Finland, plan to store nuclear waste in deep underground bunkers. For this to be safe, scientists have to be sure the material could never leak out and contaminate water supplies or rise up to the surface. Other plans for disposing of nuclear waste have included dumping it at sea and blasting it into space

Apparently Britain already has more than 100,000 tonnes of radioactive waste that needs to be stored. No country has yet decided on a definitive method, or place, for the disposal of its radioactive waste.

Sellafield which was built to reprocess nuclear fuel, thus reducing the waste, has been a monumental failure. This February Malcolm Wicks, the energy minister, admitted in parliament that the plant had only produced 2.6 tonnes of reprocessed fuel in 2007 and a total of 5.2 tonnes since it opened in 2001, despite promises it would produce 120 tonnes a year.

On-Site Safety
Work on Britain's Trident nuclear warhead programme was suspended for much of the last year due to wide-ranging safety fears, it has been disclosed. Following suspension of work at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) Burghfield in Berkshire last July, when flooding increased the risk of fire at the plant, concerns about on-site safety became so acute that a decision was taken in the autumn to stop all live nuclear work on missile warheads.

AWE claims to be a 'centre of technological excellence, with some of the most advanced research, design and production facilities in the world'.

Alternatives
A study, commissioned by the UK's Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, has shown that British buildings equipped with solar panels, mini wind turbines and other renewable energy sources could generate as much electricity a year as five nuclear power stations. Furthermore, the report has shown that a large-scale switch to micro renewable energy units could save 30m tonnes of CO2 - the equivalent of nearly 5% of all the emissions produced in generating UK electricity.

Tom Tuohy R.I.P.
An unsung hero, his bravery averted a possible British nuclear catastrophe.