Fukushima and Beyond

Nuclear Power in a Low-Carbon World

Christopher Hubbard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409454915
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317131465
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Energy Industry
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The catalyst for this study was the Fukushima-Daiichi major nuclear accident of 11 March 2011. In this event, a severe earthquake and15 metre tsunami caused serious damage and equipment failures at Japan's Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant which were judged by the International Atomic Energy Agency to be equally as serious as the Soviet Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. Against a background of nuclear hesitancy and reassessment, the prospect of including or excluding nuclear power in a low-carbon twenty-first century world is now increasingly critical. It is in this emerging scenario and context that this book presents a full suite of historical, contemporary and projected data. Its use of complementary and comparative country-based case studies provides ample opportunity for developing strongly illustrative analysis of policy effectiveness in diverse polities and markets. In this way, it combines clear, comprehensive and rigorously science-based evidence, analysis and interpretation of data, all leading to conclusions and policy recommendations. Furthermore, it builds an understanding of the complexities and many challenges posed by the nuclear power option.

I The Road to Fukushima

1 Introduction: The History and Challenges of Nuclear Energy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315583624-1

The catalyst for this book is the Fukushima Daiichi major nuclear accident of 11 March 2011. In this event, a 15-metre tsunami was associated with a magnitude 9.0 megathrust type earthquake off the east coast of Japan. The earthquake and tsunami caused serious damage and equipment failures at the Fukushima No.1 Nuclear Power Plant, located on the northeast coast of Honshu Island, resulting in explosions involving reactor core containment vessels, multiple fuel rod meltdowns and large scale releases of radioactivity into the environment. The accident was judged by the International Atomic Energy Agency to be equally as serious as the Soviet Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, and its political, social, environmental, technological and energy security related effects and ramifications promise to resonate around the world for many years to come.

Furthermore, the shock and uncertainty which this almost unprecedented nuclear event created throughout the world resulted in immediate and continuing country-based and globally extensive reassessment of the wisdom of creating, developing, retaining and expanding national nuclear power generation infrastructure, systems and technologies as a necessary component of present and future national power generation assets.

As serious and tragic as the human consequences of the Tohoku earthquake were for Japan and its people, the immense tsunami impact and the resulting nuclear disaster at the Fukushima No.1 Nuclear Power Plant itself carry far wider implications for all actors associated with the global nuclear power generation industry, as indeed they do for the world's entire population. Those now looming large are immensely significant, enduring, complex and crucial in the short, medium and longer terms; among the most critical is the urgent need to strike a durable and effective balance between the perceived safety (or otherwise) of past, present and future nuclear power generation technologies, and achievement of rapid progress on nationally-based and globally coordinated greenhouse gas emissions abatement strategies. To the extent that nuclear energy is able to contribute to those strategies in clearly sustainable ways, and do so into the distant future, its fate is bound up with that of each person now living, and their descendants. Against a background of hesitancy and urgent reassessment of nuclear energy, combined with a growing conviction that the planet may be rapidly approaching an anthropogenic global warming/climate change tipping point, national and international policy approaches to the prospect of including or excluding nuclear power in a low-carbon twenty-first century world are now moving rapidly from the merely pressing to the increasingly critical.

It is in this emerging scenario and context that this book presents a full suite of historical, contemporary and projected discussion and analysis touching on the broad sweep of these issues and their implications for humankind. Its use of complementary and comparative country-based case studies provides an appropriate analytical landscape for developing strongly illustrative analysis of policy effectiveness in diverse polities and markets. In this way, it will combine clear and rigorously science-based evidence, analysis and interpretation of legitimate and reliable data, leading to conclusions and policy recommendations relevant to agents and organisations of all kinds with wide policy or advisory responsibilities, as well as to concerned generalist and citizens throughout the world. This structural and analytical strategy underpins the value of a study of this kind for all stakeholders in the global energy future, aimed as it is at the policy generalist and specialist, as well as the broader public.

The single most important aspect of the study is that it will take a transdisciplinary approach and vision in building understanding of the complexities of the many challenges posed by the nuclear power option. With this in mind, the book's raison d’être can be briefly expressed as an assertion that the very nature of the technologies which produce the nuclear generation of electrical energy are far less well understood by governments, communities, myriad organisations of all kinds and by their leaders around the world than it must rapidly become. The world's peoples and nations (at least in truly liberal democracies) must have clear access to the knowledge necessary to make informed and considered decisions about their futures, and those of nations and generations to come. Nowhere is the epithet ‘knowledge is power’ more apt than here, and now.

This serious deficiency in nuclear-related knowledge and understanding which is independent of commercial, ideological or other partial or special interests and concerns has increasingly left public debate and decision largely in the hands of those who frame, direct and seek to influence nuclear policy generally, and nuclear power generation in particular, without the inconvenience or the benefits of sufficiently rigorous political and social participation from fully informed citizens and others. As a result, those with views tending towards both extremes of the nuclear policy continuum increasingly dominate national nuclear policy debate and discussion. This outcome inevitably leaves the middle ground poorly served in terms of the capacities of its many adherents to perceive and comprehend, as the basis for private decision and public action, the positive and negative aspects of the full suite of available alternative policy analyses, recommendations and decision options. A worrying element in this process is the growing intensity of attack on the validity of many salient data, often on the basis of the alleged illegitimacy or irrelevance of the scientific methodologies by which they have been generated and evaluated.

This discussion aims, first and foremost, to survey these issues and challenges, and offers analysis and its interpretation, leading to policy recommendations using data which are scientifically and intellectually legitimate, reliable and trustworthy, as well as cogent and persuasive in their arguments and implications while remaining, above all, widely accessible and usable. In essence, this amounts to a claim that greater levels of knowledge and understanding lead, all else being equal, to enhanced empowerment and agency at a time of increasing danger and uncertainty, a goal towards which this book is intended to make a significant contribution in a controversial but immensely important policy field. The dominant policy question within it can be condensed as the nature of the processes by which nations and their governments will determine just how the world will power its global economy into the distant future, a future its people will only have if, together, they make both rational and informed choices within the next few years.

In terms of theoretical grounding, the study will use a straightforward liberal institutional framework which accommodates a broadly liberal interpretation of public international law, while allowing a coherent incorporation of mainstream critical security precepts and their interpretation within transdisciplinary approaches to energy security analysis. The scientific method will, of course, also underpin the study's rationale, aims and analyses, as well as its arguments, their interpretation and application, and its subsequent conclusions and recommendations.

The book's analytical structure divides it into four parts, each with three chapters. Part I: The Road to Fukushima introduces the rationale and aims of the book, explaining its significance while introducing its analytical strategies and theoretical framework. It then introduces the nature and capacities of nuclear technologies, placing nuclear power generation within the totality of national and global energy policy contexts. Finally, it addresses and critiques the social, political, economic and technological significance of nuclear energy when placed within the context of a low-carbon energy world of the near future.

Part II: Turning Point: Fukushima as Guide and Warning begins by examining the opportunities and drive which the Fukushima event has generated in many countries for an urgent and thorough reassessment of the future of nuclear energy. A major element here is an evaluation of the Japanese experience in its effect as a catalyst for global action, which in the months and years following the incident has been as clear and unmistakable as it has been unusual in its intensity. Part II continues by engaging in a critical and comparative study of contrasting nuclear-engaged and aspirant states in respect of the past, present and possible future direction of their nuclear power policy strategies, using Fukushima as the independent variable. It then moves on to discuss evolving nuclear generation technologies, emphasising their increasing safety and efficiency, enhanced weapons proliferation resistance, modular flexibility and economic costs of ownership, as well as their decreasing output of less problematic radioactive waste materials.

Part III: Nuclear Power and Energy Policy Choice discusses and examines the economic viability, for a range of categorised countries, of nuclear energy generation as a long term component of their energy policy strategies. It asks a deceptively simple question: ‘Is nuclear power feasible or desirable as an energy option for [this country] into the distant future?’ Part III then examines the increasing marginalisation of the middle ground of national nuclear policy debates which, in many polities, has been effectively annexed by actors on, or tending towards, the extremes of the nuclear energy and environmental policy continua. To avoid unhelpful complexity, illustrative generic examples are employed in a discussion which critiques the qualities of agency available to citizens on nuclear affairs in plural democracies. In closing, Part III critically examines the role and success enjoyed by mass communications media of diverse types and origins in reflecting and interpreting with accuracy the full range of national views around the world on nuclear power, while fostering open and fearless national and global debate on nuclear energy issues and concerns.

Finally, Part IV: Conclusions: Review, Decision, Consequence asks, given the appearance of new and emerging policy options, whether nuclear energy should now be carefully and fully reconsidered as an important element of national policies for economic and environmental flourishing into the distant future. What range of issue areas will impinge on existential decisions of this magnitude? Will nuclear energy now begin finally to fulfil its early promise of the post-war era? What defensible grounds exist to reject a nuclear energy future in 2014 and beyond? The final chapters emphasise the reality that choices made today will have enormous and possibly irreversible consequences, some beneficial but many malign, in the years, decades and centuries to come for successive generations of the world's people. In summarising and reinforcing the study's analytical strategy, conclusions and recommendations, readers are offered an integrated, comprehensive and accessible vision of an energy-hungry but ultimately environmentally sustainable world. The weight of its interpretation of the evidence presented, as well as its reliance on a rigorously scientific evidential methodology in support of its analyses and conclusions, is intended as a strongly positive marker of the capacity of human societies and natural science to work in complementary, as well as incompatible, ways towards sustainable futures.

A Short History of Nuclear Energy

Energy in its myriad forms surrounds us, shaping and mediating our lives even as it lies dormant, unrecognised or unused. The presence of energy may be as obvious as the wind that turns the blades of electricity-generating turbines on hilltop towers, or as subtle as the Strong Nuclear Force which holds together the subatomic particles (such as protons and neutrons) forming the nucleus of each atom. The energy available to mankind exists in multiple modes and usages, nearly all of them with their ultimate origin in the Sun. Its generation, control, transfiguration, transmission and use imply a multitude of physical consequences; all are as old as the fabric of the universe itself, and all follow the universal laws of natural science.

The physical phenomenon of energy is also polymorphic in the sense that it can change form from, for example, chemical to kinetic energy in an explosion, and can neither be created nor destroyed in a closed system. Energy is most readily definable as the capacity of a physical system to perform work, and is present as mechanical, chemical or kinetic energy, as heat, light, sound and electricity, and in its potential to perform work (one example being the energy available from the water impoundment contained in a hydroelectric power generation system). Whatever its origin or nature, energy derived from all its currently practical sources is under increasing demand pressures as rapidly developing national economies such as those of China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia and beyond urgently seek enhanced access to the energy they must have to fuel their burgeoning economic systems and meet the growing needs and demands of their peoples.

Basic statistical data illustrate this general point in stark terms. In 2011 the International Energy Agency of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD-IEA) reported that non-OECD countries (essentially countries with developing economies) will account for some 90 per cent of world population growth, 70 per cent of increases in economic output and around 90 per cent of energy demand growth in the period 2010–35. Furthermore, the report noted that global investment in the order of US$38 trillion in 2010 dollars will be needed over that period to fund new energy supply infrastructure (OECDIEA, 2011).

With the reality of exponentially increasing global demand for energy from all sources comes the still disputed need to ensure that new energy production capacity is increasingly created using sources which align with long term and global environmental sustainability goals. Most energy sources with the current capacity or short term potential to contribute to this broad requirement are well known and increasingly well understood, as are their relative merits and disadvantages. In recent times, newly identified prospective sources of economically and environmentally significant energy, such as hot rock geothermal resources, have emerged in outline but are yet to be established as potentially important contributors to an energy hungry and increasingly globalised economy. In 2014 and beyond, as the world's seven billion people approach what may be an irreversible anthropogenic climate change tipping point, the rising costs of doing nothing about the continued dominant use of environmentally unsustainable energy sources such as black and brown coal and other fossil-based fuels are so dire that inaction now is increasingly likely to condemn our descendants to the realities and consequences of humanly insupportable and worsening climate change. Among these may be counted premature death from exposure to pollutants, chronic and growing water shortages, the progressive collapse of global food production, catastrophic base load electrical energy deficiencies, and many more (OECD-IEA, 2012).

Projected environmental effects such as these, resulting as they surely will from a global incapacity to act to restrain the world's greenhouse gas emissions, especially energy-related carbon dioxide and methane, will only worsen as global carbon dioxide levels rise beyond the current atmospheric concentration level of 400 parts per million by volume over the years to come. It is sobering to contemplate that this CO² level has not been surpassed for at least the last 800,000 years.

The Evolution and Status of Global Nuclear Energy Generation

The building blocks of nuclear energy science were substantially assembled from the nuclear-related discoveries of the final decade of the nineteenth century. During that era these included the nature of ionising radiation by Röntgen, Becquerel and Villard, and the discovery of polonium and radium by Pierre and Marie Curie. Research accelerated in the years before the First World War at the Cavendish Laboratory and the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom as Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr developed successful theories of atomic structures (most importantly, the atomic nucleus) as well as ionising radiation and the effects of alpha particles (helium nuclei) on the formation of elements.

As the twentieth century unfolded, experimental scientists added the discovery of isotopes, also known as radionuclides, of naturally radioactive chemical elements, while the British physicist James Chadwick added his seminal discovery of the neutron, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935. Later scientific work by Hahn and Strassman in Berlin contributed the discovery of the neutron's ability to transform uranium into other, lighter, elements through the bombardment of its atomic nuclei; in effect, they had demonstrated nuclear fission. In the years leading up to the Second World War Lisa Meitner and Otto Frisch showed that nuclear fission released prodigious quantities of energy, which they measured at some 200 million electron volts, thus confirming Albert Einstein's 1905 thesis on the direct equivalence between mass and energy, described in his famous equation E= MC ² (WNA, 2012).

It was from the late pre-war period, beginning early in 1939 as Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht made final preparations for war in Europe that the broad outline and fundamental physical components of the modern nuclear era began to emerge. In essence, a self-sustaining fission chain reaction in uranium was now known to be possible, releasing enormous quantities of energy in either a controlled way within an ‘atomic pile’ or as an uncontrolled fission process resulting in an atomic explosion. Each fission event, whether controlled within a reactor vessel, or released as a gigantic explosion of energy, involved the collision of a free neutron with an atomic nucleus, splitting it into two roughly equal parts while also producing another neutron. That neutron then collided with another atomic nucleus, and so on, producing a chain reaction. In this way the only two known and readily fissile materials – uranium (relatively abundant in nature) and plutonium (of which only minute traces exist naturally) released the nuclear energy within.

Unfortunately, in terms of the p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I: THE ROAD TO FUKUSHIMA
• PART II: TURNING POINT: FUKUSHIMA AS GUIDE AND WARNING
• PART III: NUCLEAR POWER AND ENERGY POLICY CHOICE
• PART IV: CONCLUSIONS: REVIEW, DECISION, CONSEQUENCE
• Index