Renewables group criticizes energy conference for support of nuclear
BONN, Germany, 2004-09-29 (Refocus Weekly)
Two global energy groups have a different view of the future role of nuclear power.
The general conclusion at the recent congress of the World Energy Council in
Australia is that fossil energy will remain as dominant as in the past and that
nuclear needs to increase its share in world energy supply, says Hermann Scheer
of the World Council for Renewable Energy. The congress theme of ‘Delivering
Sustainability: Opportunities & Challenges for the Energy Industry’
examined the opportunities and challenges only of the conventional energy
industry but not the challenges connected to energy which the global environment
is facing.
“The World Energy Council predicts that nuclear energy ‘will increase its
role in delivering sustainable energy in both developed and developing countries
in the years to come’ but it did not explain that a sharp increase of nuclear
energy based on today’s technology will be impossible due to the scarcity of
uranium resources, that new nuclear technologies like fusion reactors will not
be available for at least the next 50 years if it could become available at all,
that nuclear energy has already consumed world-wide $1 trillion of subsidies and
will further rely on it, and that huge accidents in the past and possible more
in the future and the unsolved waste disposal contaminate our environment and
threaten human life,” he says.
“In the same time, the WEC denounces the potential of renewable energy to
provide an environmental friendly total world energy supply” and concludes
that renewables will play a minor role,” he adds. For 80 years, WEC “has
been the leading advocate for the fossil and later nuclear energy industry”
and the Sydney conference “has shown that the WEC has not changed its main
focus on the promotion of fossil and nuclear energy.”
“It is time that the issue of energy is discussed with a broader perspective,”
says Scheer. At the World Renewable Energy Forum in Bonn in June, WCRE showed
that renewables are a “realistic and necessary option for the future world
energy supply in order to secure the world’s natural living base, to avoid the
dependence on finite energy resources and to give underdeveloped countries a
realistic chance for developing their economies.”
In an article published in the German weekly ‘Die Zeit,’ Scheer says nuclear
is “still too expensive and too dangerous,” and claims that Europe spent
$1,000 billion on nuclear research while renewables “fell by the wayside.”
As fossil fuels are depleted, advocates of nuclear are urging new reactors to be
build beside the 442 reactors now operating around the world with total capacity
of 300,000 MW. The International Atomic Energy Agency predicts that number will
increase 250% by 2030 and 400% by 2050.
The pro-nuclear argument releases contrary facts to promote the economic
advantages of nuclear and minimize its risks, while renewables are “denounced
as uneconomical, with their potential marginalized in order to underscore the
indispensability of nuclear energy,” he says. The “massive” tragedies from
nuclear and fossil fuels “necessitate mobilizing renewable energy as the only
prospect for lasting, emission-free, benign and inexpensive supplies.”
Before 1973, OECD nations spent $150 billion in nuclear research and “practically
nothing” for renewables, he claims. Between 1974 and 1992, $168 billion was
spent on nuclear and only $22 billion on renewables.
“Only $50 billion has been spent on renewable energy,” and no international
organizations exist today to promote renewables, similar to the IAEA, and he
criticizes nuclear for its need for large quantities of water and the danger of
nuclear terrorism, among others. Studies which show renewables can provide
15,000 times more energy that current nuclear and fossil sources have never been
seriously refuted but “all are ignored by conventional experts.”
Germany has installed 16000 MW of green power capacity over the past 12 years as
a result of its renewable energy law, including 3000 MW of new facilities in
2003 alone, he adds. If that rate were replicated over the next half-century,
total capacity of 166000 MW would result, equivalent to conventional capacities
of 55000 MW.
“Renewable energy has unimagined advantages,” with shorter chains to final
consumption, less loss of energy conversion and transformation, less centralized
plants and reduced need for wide-area infrastructure development. “The time
has come to overcome structural-conservative blindness and faint-hearted
technological pessimism toward renewable energy.”
“Renewables must be ambitiously explored and promoted in politics, science and
technology as nuclear power was once supported,” he concludes. “The combined
technological and economic optimization of renewable energy will be easier to
realize than for nuclear power, while avoiding its incalculable risks. The
future age of nuclear/fossil energy should - the sooner, the better - be
relegated to technological museums.”
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