Asean trending monitoring
AS SINGAPORE mulls over whether it should go down the route of nuclear energy, Asian countries are leading the field in what some insiders have called a nuclear renaissance.
"There's certainly an expansion in nuclear power, especially in Asia. Sixty-one reactors are under construction worldwide and 40 of these are being built in Asia," Mr Scott Peterson of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) in the United States told Today.
"Even the UAE in the Gulf, which you would think would use oil and gas," is embracing nuclear power, said Mr Ian Cronshaw, a top official at the Paris-based International Energy Agency. "It's definitely fair to talk about a nuclear renaissance."
There are strong reasons for this trend. At a time of volatile gas prices, nuclear energy could ensure "stable" electricity prices, said Mr Cronshaw, highlighting an advantage of nuclear power amid rising energy use worldwide.
In a world confronting climate change, nuclear is a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels and it provides energy security, he said.
Nuclear power is also an energy-dense resource, leaving a small amount of radioactive residue or spent fuel, and requiring less space than renewable energy projects such as wind farms, the industry says.
"Uranium has tremendous energy density," said Mr Peterson, the NEI's vice-president of communications. "The amount of spent fuel that was used to provide electricity for a family of four in the US during their lifetimes is about the size of a 12-ounce can - a Coca-Cola can."
The greatest growth in nuclear generation is expected in China, Japan, South Korea and India, according to the London-based World Nuclear Association (WNA).
In contrast, the US is emerging from a 30-year period in which few new reactors were built and the European scene has remained relatively dormant, activists and industry professionals noted.
In South-east Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam have expressed interest in nuclear power and Singapore announced earlier this year it was conducting a feasibility study.
LIVING NEAR A PLANT
However, the decades-old debate surrounding nuclear power continues - and it is as polarised as ever. The industry says nuclear energy is clean and safe, while anti-nuclear activists disagree, advocating a zero-tolerance approach to nuclear risk. Experts can disagree on the facts, making it even trickier for laymen to navigate the often emotive debate.
Concerns about safety and security are paramount, with memories of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island etched into the public consciousness. To this end, "about a third of the costs" go towards safety systems in Western reactors, said Mr Ian Hore-Lacy, a WNA spokesman. New large reactors in the US cost between US$6 billion ($7.8 billion) and US$8 billion, according to the NEI's Mr Peterson.
Contrary to the expectations of some, nuclear facilities can be sited near urban areas without affecting safety. At a recent lecture in Singapore, Mr Yukiya Amano, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said: "There is not such a rule in the IAEA that a nuclear power plant should be constructed some distance from a populated area."
The US is the world's largest producer of nuclear energy and each of its 104 reactors is surrounded by a "10-mile (16km) safety zone", said Mr Peterson, adding "that doesn't mean that residents don't live near the plants because many do".
This safety zone is central to planning evacuation programmes in the event of a nuclear accident, he said. As a testament to nuclear safety in the US, these evacuation plans have "mostly been used for other purposes, such as natural disasters (like) Hurricane Katrina", said Mr Peterson.
ANOTHER CHERNOBYL?
A repeat of the 1986 nuclear explosion at Chernobyl, which caused thousands of radiation deaths, is "impossible", said Mr Peterson, expressing a view found throughout the industry. "It's impossible for a Chernobyl to happen in any Western reactor because it's a totally different reactor design."
But while a reactor like that used at Chernobyl is obsolete, some scientists believe a nuclear accident on a similar scale could take place.
"It wouldn't happen in exactly the same way", said Dr Edwin Lyman, a scientist at the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists in the US. However, a similarly catastrophic event could occur "in light water reactors - which can be found in the US, China and Japan - if there is a failure in some equipment, blocking cooling-water from carrying heat away from the nuclear fuel", he explained.
Accidents can also be caused by "human failures", such as the lapses at the Forsmark nuclear facility in Sweden, said Mr Peer de Rijk, director of World Information Service on Energy, an anti-nuclear network.
Human error can be compounded by cover-ups at the facilities concerned.
"In 2002, it emerged that Japan's biggest electric company Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company) had covered up cracks," said Mr Philip White, a spokesman at the Citizens' Nuclear Information Centre in Japan.
Tepco admitted in August 2002 that it had misreported safety problems in the late 1980s and early 1990s after a government report revealed 29 cases of cracks or minor structural damage in eight of the company's 17 nuclear reactors.
Mr White described a "series of scandals" where the Japanese public has grown increasingly wary of nuclear power. In recent years, earthquakes affected operations in certain Japanese plants thought to have been relatively safe from the seismic tremors that the country is prone to.
HOW MUCH RADIATION IS DANGEROUS?
In a landmark accident, part of the core of the reactor melted at Three Mile Island in the US. However, the reactor in the 1979 incident contained the resulting radiation, as it was built to do, said WNA's Mr Hore-Lacy. "It was a very serious accident but nobody was exposed to any significant level of radiation. Nobody got a radiation dose from that any higher than you would get flying from Singapore to Hong Kong," he said.
Radiation occurs in the everyday environment and nuclear radiation is no different from any other radiation, anti-nuclear groups and industry insiders agree. Natural sources, such as radon in rocks, account for most of the radiation we all receive every year.
"The average American receives about 300 millirem per year from natural sources like the earth, radon and food and water. If someone lives within 80km of a nuclear power plant, they will receive on average 0.009 millirem per year ... far less than living near a coal-fired power plant (because of natural uranium in coal) at 0.03 millirem per year," said Mr Peterson. The millirem is the American measure for radiation.
"For comparison, an average person receives 0.1 millirem each year from their computer screen."
While radiation is a part of life, exposure to radioactive nuclear substances is an emotive issue affecting the handling, storage and disposal of nuclear waste. Anti-nuclear advocates insist no safe level of radiation exists - a view refuted by nuclear insiders and some scientists. "The scientific consensus is that there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation," said Dr Lyman.
The influential International Commission on Radiological Protection is among the organisations that use the Linear-No Threshold (LNT) model accepted by mainstream scientists, which implies that all exposure to radiation - even at very low levels - carries a risk of causing damage.
Not all agree with this methodology. Critics question using data on high doses to extrapolate conclusions for risk estimates on low doses. The Health Physics Society, for instance, states that "there is substantial and convincing scientific evidence for health risks following high-dose exposures" but below 5 to 10 millirem, the risks are "either too small to be observed or are non-existent".
"Current radiation protection standards and practices are based on the premise that any radiation dose, no matter how small, may result in detrimental health effects, such as cancer and hereditary genetic damage," it added, taking issue with this LNT approach. "There is substantial scientific evidence that this model is an oversimplification."
A POLITICAL ISSUE
Nuclear radiation remains a political issue around the world. "In the US, in the last half-dozen years, ageing plants have been leaking radioactive tritium via broken pipes," said Mr Michael Mariotte, executive director of the anti-nuclear group, Nuclear Information and Resource Service. While nuclear authorities say tritium is not a health hazard, a leaking nuclear plant in Vermont in the US has become a political issue in the governors' election race.
Anti-nuclear activists say there is no solution to nuclear waste because there is no permanent way to dispose of it safely; some nuclear substances can remain radioactive for thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years.
If storage facilities are completely sealed, "if you are not exposed, there is no harm. But if they get into the environment, they can get into the drinking water or the food chain, leading to internal contamination", said scientist Jan Vande Putte of Greenpeace International. In 2008, he noted, some of the 126,000 barrels of radioactive waste at the Asse nuclear waste storage facility in Germany were found to be leaking.
Training, safety and security measures at nuclear facilities are extremely rigorous. While nuclear waste is stored underground in many countries, in the US, the spent fuel and waste products are mostly stored onsite in dry casks or in pools of water. The NEI's Mr Peterson cited safe storage "for five decades at the plants, under 30 feet (9m) of water, in water-filled vaults made of concrete and lined with steel."
Security-wise, nuclear plants can withstand assaults such as a targeted aircraft strike like in the 911 terror attacks, he added.
Spent fuel, which can be reprocessed for further use, can be transported away from countries with nuclear plants - arguably a possible political solution to the "not in my backyard" syndrome, where local populations are inimical to the idea of nuclear power in their neighbourhood.
"For suppliers of nuclear fuel like Russia's Rosatom, once you have finished with the spent fuel, they can take it back and store it in their own countries, or they can actually reprocess it and give it back to you," said Dr Hooman Peimani, principal fellow at the National University of Singapore's Energy Studies Institute.
While nuclear arms technology is different from commercial nuclear production, proliferation is another key concern. Mr Vande Putte of Greenpeace is of the view that "it is almost impossible for a terrorist organisation to do it (build a nuclear weapon), but a state with its resources" would be able to.
"It is actually impossible to have a totally transparent nuclear debate because of strategic sensitivities" concerning military nuclear weapons, said Mr Vande Putte, offering a reason for the polarised nature of the global nuclear debate.
