After the accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, the role of nuclear energy is again at a turning point — the third since the birth of the industry in the 1950s. Views about its future are pulled between the fear of nuclear destruction and the need for energy. Memories of Hiroshima and the Cold War, while fading, can still induce anxiety. The accident at Fukushima also brought the Soviet-era disaster of Chernobyl back to mind.
The primary lesson from Japan’s recent trauma, however, is that a tsunami is dangerous to everything in its path, nuclear plants included. Consider the growing needs for reliable energy, the fact that nuclear is probably the safest form of power that can meet those needs, and the unfortunate truth that fossil-fueled alternatives emit so much pollution that they arguably pose a much greater threat than the darkest nuclear accident scenario.
A logician would see no reason for ambivalence, but most people are not logical when it comes to scary events. That’s why people worry about dying in a plane crash while driving to the airport, even though the drive is more dangerous than the flight.
So even as countries like Germany, Switzerland and — to a lesser extent — Japan swerve away from nuclear energy, many faster-growing economies are staying on course. They see an urgent need for vast amounts of electricity, and see no cleaner, safer, more reliable way to make it.
The first major transformation in nuclear technology was from atomic bombs to commercial electricity generators. The public and politicians were fascinated by the idea of electricity that, they were told, would be too cheap to meter. Although the promise of free energy never came true, the technology pretty much worked as advertised — reliable and safe.
Despite nuclear power’s impeccable safety record, fears of leaks and meltdowns grew through the late 1960s as the environmental movement came of age. Having cleaned up the atmosphere and public waters, many environmentalists trained their sights on eliminating nuclear power. That set the stage for the second turning point — a move away from nuclear energy.
That transition got a shove in 1979 from two events: The release of The China Syndrome, a fictional movie starring Jane Fonda, and the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, in the eastern United States. Public support of nuclear power flagged, and the industry was buffeted by strong economic headwinds, including a prolonged recession and a collapse in natural gas prices.
Nuclear fears and doubts trumped the perceived need. Environmental groups lobbied for safe, “clean” power plants — often, plants that burned coal. The logic must have seemed sound then. Nuclear plants could, under improbable but not impossible circumstances, cause large-scale environmental disaster. Chernobyl was a case in point.
Why take the risk? What similar harm could come from burning coal? Quite a bit. As we now know, coal power plants emit enormous amounts of carbon dioxide — the main greenhouse gas that is changing the earth’s climate. Nuclear plants do not. Today, environmental activists point to plausible scenarios in which runaway global warming causes far worse damage to the Earth than if every nuclear plant — more than 400 of them as of 2010 — were to melt down. At the most extreme, James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, offers the “Venus syndrome”: as warming accelerates, oceans evaporate faster, pushing more water vapor into the atmosphere. Water vapor is itself a powerful greenhouse gas, so a vicious cycle could set in until “the ocean boils into the atmosphere, and life is extinguished.”
Now the world has focused on the danger of global warming and the need for technologies that can supply large amounts of power all day, every day, without emitting CO2. Nuclear plants are the only proven technology that fits that bill; they actually deliver 90 percent of rated capacity. That means a reactor rated at 1,000 megawatts pumps a full 900 megawatts onto the grid, averaged over a decade or so. In contrast, the vicissitudes of sunlight and wind mean that, over a similar period, a solar plant delivers less than 20 percent of its rated peak capacity even if it is in a sunny desert, and a wind farm generates less than 30 percent of its potential. With no good technology to store large amounts of energy, power companies must add baseload generators (nuclear, gas or coal) as backup for every wind and solar facility.
The need for low-emissions power is particularly acute in emerging economies like India and China. Electricity use in China, the Middle East and Africa is growing rapidly — and so far that’s been a good thing. Electricity is displacing dirty sources of heat and light, like home coal or wood fires, which sicken and kill hundreds of thousands every year with their soot.
The energy problem for the 21st century is giving every citizen of Earth enough energy to support a modern standard of living — that probably means quadrupling the output of electrical plants. Advances in efficiency could, in principle, lower that number, but more likely other factors will raise it. Today, for example, only about 1,500 watts of the approximately 6,700 watts of power a typical American uses comes in the form of electricity, based on figures from the International Energy Agency. But if we continue to use more electricity to power cars, trains and other vehicles, demand for electrical power will probably soar.
Where is all that electricity going to come from? We call earthquake-induced waves tsunami — a Japanese word — because these giant sea swells have pounded Japan with some regularity for millennia. Living near the seashore in Japan is wonderful in many ways, but it carries an unavoidable danger of inundation. Although the people of Japan understand that risk, their engineers and planners made some tragic decisions.
The reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, which were designed in the slide rule era and are far less safe than modern reactors, were part of a plant created to survive a 5.7-meter tsunami even though Japan had been hit by a 29-meter tsunami as recently as 1933. When the waves of the March tsunami, thought to have exceeded 14 meters at Fukushima, swept through the plant and disabled the reactor cooling systems, reactions by operators and officials compounded the damage. Fukushima teaches us that nuclear plants — like hospitals, schools and other structures that are hard to evacuate safely — should not be built where tsunamis are likely to reach.
Germans apparently took away a different lesson. Although Germany is not prone to tsunamis, the government decided this summer to shut down seven reactors immediately and to turn off the rest by 2022. It’s not clear whether this policy will stick; the country decided more than 10 years ago to get rid of nuclear power, but that phaseout never happened.
Nor is it clear how the country will meet commitments to make steep reductions in national CO2 emissions if it turns off all its reactors. Germans have heavily subsidized solar power and bet big on wind power, both of which are backed up, when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, by electricity imported mainly from nuclear plants in France, Poland and Russia. Is it fair to call yourself nuclear-free if you effectively outsource the plants?
Germany is prosperous, and perhaps its taxpayers can afford to subsidize solar power, bail out Greece and wind down nuclear power. But money is just one thing at risk. If Germany turns away from nuclear power, its CO2 emissions will inevitably increase. And that will harm the environment everywhere. One hopes that, in the land of Faust, Germans understand the relevance that the bargain he struck has to their current choices.
The future of nuclear energy hinges on how we reconcile fears with needs. For Germans, the emission of CO2 appears to be the lesser evil, at least at the moment.
In just the past few months, Brazil, South Africa and Saudi Arabia announced plans to move ahead with the construction of nuclear plants — 16 of them, in Saudi Arabia’s case. In those nations and in India, China and other parts of the world where nuclear reactors are scheduled to go up by the dozens, the complex calculus of risk may yield a different result.
By Nathan Myhrvold, former chief strategist and technology officer at Microsoft, founded Intellectual Ventures, a venture capital and idea incubation firm that includes nuclear technology in its portfolio. He holds a doctorate in physics from Princeton.