But risks of accidents, such as at Chernobyl in 1986 in what is now Ukraine, mean anguished decisions for governments attracted by nuclear power as a weapon to fight global warming. “Nuclear is not a straightforward choice,” said Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Climate Panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice-President Al Gore. “You can’t ignore it, it accounts for 16 or 17 percent of the electricity generated in the world,” Pachauri said. “But you need institutions in place to handle it, places for disposal...I think it’s a sovereign decision for each country.”

Some waste will be toxic for thousands of years and no permanent repositories exist for high-level waste, more than five decades after the Obninsk reactor opened in June 1954. Nevertheless, Britain decided to invest in a new generation of nuclear power stations this month, Finland and France are building new plants, while companies in the United States have begun filing licence applications. Thirty-four plants are under construction worldwide.

“There’s a big hype about a ‘nuclear renaissance’, saying that countries are looking more positively at nuclear power, arguing about climate change and security of supply,” said Jan Beranek of the Greenpeace environmental group. “It’s a dead end,” he said, arguing that nuclear energy was soaking up investment that could otherwise go to renewable energies such as wind, hydro, solar or tidal power.

“There are huge storage problems with nuclear power,” said Norwegian Environment Minister Erik Solheim, whose country has

never had nuclear power. Oslo favours a drive for technology to bury carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel power plants.

Still, Pachauri’s U.N. climate panel said in 2007 that “nuclear power is an effective greenhouse gas mitigation option”.

The panel quoted a study saying that nuclear power already avoids 1.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases a year compared with the world average emissions for electricity generation. By comparison, Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2005 were 1.4 billion tonnes. Other studies put emissions from nuclear higher because of factors such as ore processing and decommissioning.

And there are public doubts about the environmental impact, alongside fears of terrorist attacks on plants or that states might use the technology to make bombs.

Even for developing nations, nuclear power could be an attractive environmental option. It could help countries such as China to curb smog in cities including Beijing. In India, one IAEA study indicated that nuclear power could compete more than 800 km from coal mines because of high transport costs.

There are temporary storage sites for waste but no permanent repositories “yet exist for high-level waste such as spent light-water reactor fuel,” the UN Climate Panel said. However, future technologies might allow recycling of the waste before it needed to be buried forever.
-Alister Doyle (Reuters)