▶ Calamity in Japan May Complicate Energy Aims
LEADERS IN THE West, like President Barack Obama, have viewed nuclear power as a way to help solve the problem of global warming, regarding it as a safe, emissionfree source of electricity to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels.
The disaster in Japan has altered that equation.
Energy officials in major industrial powers in the West are suddenly thinking twice about nuclear expansion. But in energy-ravenous developing countries, the unfolding crisis with Japan’s crippled nuclear reactors is unlikely to force them to rethink their energy calculus. While acknowledging the need for safety, nations like China and India say their unmet energy needs give them little choice but to continue investing in nuclear power.
“Ours is a very power-hungry country,” Srikumar Banerjee, the chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, said March 13 in Mumbai. Nearly 40 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people do not have regular access to electricity, he said. “It is essential for us to have further electricity generation.”
And in China, which has the world’s most ambitious nuclear expansion plans, a vice minister of environment, Zhang Lijun, said that Japan’s difficulties would not deter his nation’s nuclear rollout.
All but paralyzed for decades after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the nuclear industry in the United States was poised for a comeback before the accident in Japan.
Mr. Obama and many leaders in the United States Congress agreed that nuclear power offered a steady energy source that would mitigate climate change, even as they disagreed on virtually every otheraspect of energy policy. Mr. Obama is seeking tens of billions of dollars in government insurance for new nuclear construction .
Now, that is in question.
With China and India driving the expansion - and countries from elsewhere in Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East also embracing nuclear power in response to high fossil fuel prices and concerns about global warming - the world’s stock of 443 nuclear reactors could more than double in the next 15 years, according to the World Nuclear Association, an industry trade group.
Not that Indian and Chinese officials are heedless of the risks of nuclear energy. India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said on March 14 that his country’s Department of Atomic Energy would review all safety systems at India’s nuclear plants, “particularly with a view to ensuring that they would be able to withstand large natural disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes.”
China’s nuclear power industry has 11 reactors operating, but on March 17, the government announced that it was suspending new plant approvals until it could strengthen safety standards. It also announced stepped-up inspections at its existing plants.
China plans to add more than 25 reactors, but most are already under construction, and it was unclear how many would be affected by the new order. China’s electricity consumption continues to climb 12 percent a year.
India, with 20 nuclear reactors already in operation, plans to spend an estimated $150 billion adding dozens of new ones around the country. Its forecast calls for nuclear power to supply about a quarter of the country’s electricity needs by 2050, a tenfold increase from now.
Three of the world’s chief sources of large-scale energy production - coal, oil and nuclear power - have all experienced eye-popping accidents in just the past year. The Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia, the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the nuclear crisis in Japan have dramatized the dangers of conventional power generation .
“It’s not possible to achieve a climate solution based on existing technology without a significant reliance on nuclear power,” said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and an energy and climate change adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign. “It’s early to reach many conclusions about what happened in Japan and the relevance of what happened to the United States. But the safety of nuclear power will certainly be high on the list of questions for the next several months.”
“The world is fundamentally a set of relative risks,” Mr. Grumet added, noting the confluence of disasters in coal mining, oil drilling and nuclear plant operations. “The accident certainly has diminished what had been a growing impetus in the environmental community to support nuclear power as part of a broad bargain on energy and climate policy.”
Concerns about earthquakes and nuclear power have been around for a long time; new questions might also be raised now about tsunamis and coastal reactors.
Walt Patterson, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London, predicted that the problems at Japan’s nuclear plants would refocus attention on safety and away from the economic viability of atomic energy.
“The question mark about safety was really way down the agenda,” Mr. Patterson said. “This will bring it right back to the top of the agenda.”
On March 15, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany temporarily shut down all seven of the nation’s nuclear plant that were built before 1980 while their safety is reviewed.
Switzerland on March 14 suspended plans to build new plants and replace existing ones. The Swiss energy minister, Doris Leuthard, said the “safety and well-being of the population have the highest priority.”
But Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic all said they would stick to their energy policies.
Across the Middle East, countries have been racing to build up nuclear power, as a growth and population boom has created unprecedented demand for energy, and as Iran forges ahead with the Bushehr nuclear facility.
The United Arab Emirates has taken the lead with a plan to build four plants in the city of Braka, on the Persian Gulf, by 2017 to generate about a quarter of the country’s power by 2020.
The Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation, the project’s developer, is “closely monitoring the situation in Japan,” a spokesman said on March 14 .
One of the emirates, Abu Dhabi, chose Braka because it is near the water and an existing power grid, far from populated areas, and lies on a seismically stable landmass. Because the Persian Gulf is an enclosed sea, planners say there is little threat of a tsunami in the event of an earthquake.
By contrast, Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, also on the Persian Gulf, is much less seismically stable, which worries environmentalists.
Any nuclear leak there would quickly reach the wealthy emirates of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and others because of the gulf’s currents .
The Iranian plant unloaded nuclear fuel in February after a computer worm infected the reactor.
Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Egypt are all also studying nuclear energy, and even oil-rich Saudi Arabia is considering a nuclear-powered city.
Most plants would be placed in seismically stable areas, although one planned by Jordan at the Red Sea port of Aqaba is on a major faultline.
Turkey on March 14 said it would move ahead with plans for two nuclear plants, including one that may use Japanese nuclear technology from the Tokyo Electric Power Company and Toshiba. Numerous geological faultlines cross the country.
In India, controversy surrounds a nuclear project on the western coast of the country, north of Goa, a tourist destination. As envisioned, it would be the world’s largest nuclear energy complex.
But analysts in India said the Japan crisis was unlikely to stir up significantly more public protest against nuclear plants here, given the pressing demand for more electricity.
“If 1 percent of the population was against nuclear power, you might now get 2 percent,” said G. Balachandran, a consulting fellow at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis, a policy research organization in New Delhi. “I am really not concerned about the opposition that may develop around this.”
By HEATHER TIMMONS and VIKAS BAJAJ
Accidents like the one at Three Mile Island, above, and in Japan raise doubts about nuclear power.
BILL BOWDEN/YORK DAILY RECORD, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Three Mile Island accident brought nuclear energy development in the United States nearly to a standstill.
MARTHA COOPER/HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
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