FEATURE - Nuclear renaissance has to reckon with Chernobyl
Date: 23-May-01
Country: UK
Author: Duncan Shiels
Days later, the fearful continent learns why.
A huge explosion has blown the roof off Reactor Four at Chernobyl in Soviet Ukraine and a radioactive cloud is blowing northwestwards.
According to the United Nations, some five million people were exposed to the radiation or otherwise affected by the Chernobyl disaster. More than 4,000 people who took part in the former Soviet Union's clean-up attempt have since died and another 40,000 involved in the operation became ill or were disabled.
But after 15 years the nuclear industry has received the endorsement of President George W. Bush which it hopes could herald its rehabilitation into public acceptance.
Bush last week unveiled a national energy plan to boost domestic U.S. energy supplies, with fossil fuels and atomic power playing a key role.
The industry has always maintained that the Chernobyl accident resulted from a design flaw which Western reactors do not share - the lack of a structure to contain radioactive material in the case of an accident.
It has also pointed to poor regulation inherent in the centrally planned Soviet system which disintegrated a decade ago.
Such reasoning failed to convince the United States - which had its own near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 - and governments in Europe that the public would accept new nuclear plants to meet expected increases in electricity demand. So what has changed?
The answer is global warming.
Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels - oil, coal and gas - which fire 80 percent of the world's power plants, are being linked to rising world temperatures which threaten to melt the polar ice caps, engulfing lowland areas and wiping low-lying Pacific islands from the map within a century.
But as Vaughn Gilbert, spokesman for U.S. reactor manufacturer Westinghouse says: "The only carbon emissions that come from a nuclear plant are from the nostrils of the people working there."
30 NUCLEAR PLANTS UNDER CONSTRUCTION
In fact, around 30 Western-designed nuclear reactors are under construction around the world, all outside the U.S. and western Europe, adding to the current total of over 430.
Within the European Union, only Finland is considering building a new plant and a parliamentary decision on that was delayed recently until the end of the year.
But Foratom, the Brussels-based European nuclear industry umbrella group, believes Washington cannot be ignored.
"What we observed in the past was (that) most of the developments in the energy field started in the U.S., then Europe followed - with a time delay but sometimes with higher amplitudes," says Foratom's executive secretary Wolf-Juergen Schmidt-Kuester.
"We know that utilities are seriously investigating the question of whether they should be building new nuclear plants."
Analysts question the economics of building new reactors, given the colossal capital costs involved and the long period of construction, traditionally around 10 years.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates current designs have capital costs of $2,000 per kilowatt of electricity, compared to $1,200 per kWe for coal-fired plants.
Economists also point out that newly liberated energy markets mean wholesale electricity power prices, which govern the rate of return on investment, are no longer fixed in advance but move with commodity-type power markets, making it very hard to commit resources.
"Profits in most developed power markets are insufficient for the level of return companies are looking for unless there is a payment for emission reduction or electricity prices go up because of penalties on gas and coal power generation," said Neil Cornelius, analyst at ICF Consulting.
Benito Mueller of the Oxford Institute for Energy Research says that companies which invest also want government guarantees on decommissioning when the reactors reach the end of their operational life.
"That is one reason the industry cann