Nuclear energy has record of safety and security -


In contrast to Jeremy Rifkin's assertion (Opinion, 4/10), nuclear power is not being "resurrected" or "re-introduced" into the world. Nuclear power has never been away. The world has been living safely with nuclear power for 50 years.
Today, 442 nuclear power plants produce 16 per cent of the world's electricity, cleanly and virtually without carbon dioxide emissions. Australia exports uranium to many of the 31 countries using nuclear power under 19 safeguards treaties negotiated since 1979.
As the cost of energy rises throughout the world and global warming becomes a more pressing issue, the world's demand for nuclear energy is also rising. From Australia's point of view, with one third of the world's known low-cost uranium resources and only 20 per cent of the world's production, this represents a major opportunity with a potential pay-off in jobs and export dollars.
Rifkin questions the economics of nuclear power. The capital cost of nuclear power plants is greater than the alternatives. Yet, around the world, 28 plants supplying more than 22,000 megawatts are under construction by either governments or private corporations. That they are being built despite a substantial capital cost component is strong evidence they are economic. The low fuel cost is the key to the economics of nuclear power plants.
Where nuclear power is not affordable or economic, a different fuel mix will emerge. Australia is a case in point. Because of the low cost of alternative fuels, it is one of the few countries in which nuclear power is not competitive at present. Its future viability is being debated today and will continue to be.
Rifkin's second contention is that "scientists still don't know how to safely transport, dispose of or store nuclear waste". Yet the record shows that there have not been significant problems or incidents in transport, disposal or storage of nuclear wastes in the half century of nuclear power.
The management of used nuclear fuel involves storage as the level of radioactivity diminishes. After 40 years, the level of radioactivity is reduced to about one thousandth of the original level. The used fuel can then be disposed of in deep geological repositories.
Safety is a strong point for reactor operation too. The Chernobyl disaster tragically underlined the reason plants of that type could never be built outside the Soviet Union. The incident at Three Mile Island in America in 1979 resulted in injury to no one or any greater dose of radiation than one would get in an hour's flight.

Third, Rifkin's belief that known supplies of uranium are so limited that they may "fail to meet demand, possibly as early as 2026" is misleading. The known resources of any mineral, including uranium, bear little relationship to what is in the Earth's crust. There is a strong and proportional relationship between known resources and the money and effort spent looking for and defining them. Little exploration effort has been expended on uranium since the mid-1980s. That is now changing, as demand for uranium grows.
Even if Rifkin were right, so what? In that circumstance, other fuels would be relatively more economic and the mix of fuels used in the world would change.
Fourth, he argues that the growth of the nuclear industry increases the hazards of terrorism. The point is a contentious one, especially as there has not been a nuclear-related terrorist attack of the kind Rifkin refers to. What can be said is that research shows that US nuclear reactor structures can protect the fuel from the impact of commercial aircraft; and that such an attack would not result in significant radioactive contamination nearby.
Finally, Rifkin seems to complain that nuclear power represents the centralised technology of a bygone era. The fact is that most demand for power is still demand for continuous, reliable supply on a large scale, which nuclear power is well suited to supply. There is nothing "bygone" about that. At the same time, there is no reason why distributed technologies - small-scale power generation close to the point of use - should not co-exist with large-scale technologies such as nuclear energy and coal.
Michael Angwin is executive director of the Australian Uranium Association.