Energy

plants are being built. Well over 100 more have been written into the development plans of governments for the next three decades. India and China are rushing to build dozens of reactors each. The United States and the countries of Western Europe, led by new nuclear champions, are reconsidering their cooled romance with atomic power. International agencies have come on board; even the Persian Gulf oil states have announced plans for nuclear generators.

“Energy and climate changes can’t remain tied to carbon or hydrocarbon,” the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said in October. “They are polluting, and we’ll have to find substitute energies, including nuclear energy.” It creates heat through nuclear reactions rather than combustion, giving off no carbon dioxide, the most important of the so-called greenhouse gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Utilities are dusting off plans for nuclear plants even though most of the problems that shelved those projects remain. Critics say governments have forgotten the crises of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The costs and time to build the concrete-encased plants far exceed those of conventional plants. There still is no safe permanent storage for the used fuel that will remain radioactive for a million years. Added to these problems are the newly realistic worry of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant.

“It can be very controversial,” Mexican Congressman David Maldonado said of his country’s plans to build a $4 billion nuclear plant in Veracruz. “The things that have happened in years past, going back to Chernobyl, have created a lot of fear.”

In the United States, the Bush administration has strongly pushed nuclear power and backed a 2005 energy bill offering subsidies to utilities to go ahead with projects in a shortened, streamlined regulatory process. The industry talks enthusiastically of 10 to 30 new nuclear plants in the next two decades.

At present, 442 nuclear plants are operating in more than 31 countries, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The United States has the most — 103, which provide about 19.3 percent of the country’s electric power. Next is France, with 59, and Japan, with 55. Worldwide, atomic energy accounts for 16 per cent of electrical production; the vast majority of electricity is generated by burning coal, oil and natural gas.

But carbon emissions from conventional plants bring “higher global temperatures, rising sea levels that would threaten to submerge coastal regions, prolonged droughts and more frequent violent storms”, IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei warned in Jakarta, Indonesia, in December.

The world’s energy needs will rise 51 per cent by 2030 because of industrialisation and population growth, the International Energy Agency in Paris predicts. Add up the carbon-dioxide emissions from all the oil and coal plants that would be built and scientists see an environmental nightmare in the making.

Natural gas is a cleaner fuel for making electricity, but the price has soared. Hydropower from dams has largely topped out at less than 20 per cent of the world’s electric supply. Alternatives such as solar, thermal and wind power remain a tiny contributor in most countries and would require dramatic economic changes to become substantial sources. To many policymakers, that leaves nuclear.

In Britain, such calculations led to a striking reversal in policy. In 2003, a government white paper called nuclear power an unattractive option; in May, Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that nuclear power is “back on the agenda with a vengeance”.

Blair argued that the technology is a way to ensure British energy security in an unstable world and to combat global climate change — a top priority of his government. Twenty-three nuclear plants now provide almost 20 per cent of the United Kingdom’s power. “In the future, energy security will be almost as important as defence,” Blair said in October.

Similar jitters about the reliability — and price — of traditional fuels are adding to the rush to nuclear. Japan, as host to the 1997 Kyoto conference that mandated a global reduction in greenhouse gases, is building three and planning 10 more nuclear plants in the next decade. Its plans are spurred by Japan’s wariness over neighbouring China’s campaign to lock up oil and gas supply contracts with foreign countries.

“The timing of Kyoto Protocol coming into effect and the timing of China endeavouring in its mission to secure natural resources in the world coincide,” said Tadao Yanase, director of nuclear energy policy at Japan’s Agency for Natural Resources and Energy.

China’s plans call for 15 to 30 new nuclear plants by 2020 and even more conventional plants, most of them coal-fired. Its researchers are working on creating smaller, less-expensive nuclear plants. India, with 16 nuclear plants, is building seven more plants and has been promised US help to triple its collection by 2020.

Some nuclear construction will merely keep the status quo. The first big wave of nuclear plants, built in the 1970s and 1980s, are near their planned obsolescence; six have been shut down. Regulators in the United States have extended licences to 60 years, but other countries are replacing aging plants to make sure the nuclear component of their base supply does not disappear.

Proliferation of nuclear material remains a worry. And another disaster like the Soviet Union’s at Chernobyl in 1986 or a near-disaster like that at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979 would likely freeze the plans for nuclear construction.

Industry advocates say the old complaints about nuclear technology have been addressed with simpler and cheaper designs, faster regulatory review, improved security and more operating experience. “Things have changed,” said Adrian Heymer, director of new plant deployment for the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington. The industry expects US companies to apply for 11 construction permits by the end of the decade. “When you put it all together, nuclear becomes an attractive package,” he said.

Critics say that when the emissions from uranium mining and plant construction are counted, nuclear power is not “carbon-free”, as advocates assert. Such environmental concerns have put Germany on an opposite course from most European countries. Six years ago, Germany committed to shutting down all of its 17 nuclear power plants by 2021, prodded by the Greens party, then part of the government.