Why nuclear energy struggles to get private sector funds February 20, 2010
People have forgotten - a younger generation perhaps never knew - what is scary about nuclear energy.
Anti-nuclear campaigners such as Dr Helen Caldicott are routinely disparaged nowadays. A quick trawl through the clippings yields choice descriptors: "inane", "hysteric", "rabid", "ageing", "anti-nuclear messiah" and "warrior princess".
One columnist accused her of speaking to a meeting of the so-called ''9/11 truth'' movement (people with conspiracy theories about September 11). It was completely untrue.
There is no doubt a growing number of Australians believe nuclear energy is the answer to our coal dependence, as global warming accelerates.
That number will be boosted by news that the US and Britain are both commissioning new nuclear reactors. This week the US President, Barack Obama, said he would provide $US8.3 billion ($9.25 billion) in loan guarantees to underpin construction of two reactors there - the first new plants built in three decades.
Rudd jumped again to rule out nuclear power for Australia this week but his Energy Minister, Martin Ferguson, has already called for a debate.
Proponents such as Leslie Kemeny, a foundation member of the industry-backed International Nuclear Energy Academy, say Australia is the only country in the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development without an active nuclear program, and could achieve all the emissions reductions targeted by the Garnaut Climate Change Review by building five reactors by 2020, and 25 by 2050. This country has 40 per cent of the world's high-quality uranium reserves.
Critics hotly dispute the central greenhouse-friendly claim for nuclear energy and raise a host of other issues: the cost; time to build; potential for accidents; risk of terrorist attack and nuclear proliferation; lack of a waste solution.
For all these reasons, financial backing for new nuclear power stations in Australia could be difficult to obtain. The then chief executive of the National Australia Bank's investment banking division, John Hooper, told The Australian in late 2008 that nuclear power would struggle to obtain private sector funding. "It has a complex range of after-effects that make funding for nuclear power quite difficult ? It would have to be a government-led response initially. I think it's difficult to let the private sector lead in that type of investment."
Critics also ask: where would we put the reactors? Which communities would bear the brunt of an Australian decision to go nuclear? Everyone derides NIMBY-ism but very few of us are immune to it.
Having a mature debate about finding 25 sites for nuclear power stations near our capital cities sounds sensible, until you consider the health risks involved.
A recent German epidemiological study found that the risk of leukaemia in children under five years old was doubled when the child lived within five kilometres of a nuclear power plant.
The so-called "KiKK" study (for 'Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung von Kernkraftwerken', or 'childhood cancer in the vicinity of nuclear power plants') was commissioned by the German Environment Minister in 2001, and conducted by the German Childhood Cancer Registry. It took six years to examine every case of leukaemia in children under five living near 16 nuclear reactors and diagnosed between 1980 and 2003. The project leader was the head of the registry, Dr Peter Kaatsch, who told G-Biz: "Our result was that there is an association between the distance of the place of residence to the nuclear power plant and the occurrence of childhood leukaemia in children below five years."
Critics of nuclear power say the result is definitive. Kaatsch is more careful. First, although there is a statistical link between proximity and leukaemia, it is not clear why there might be such a link.
Exposure to ionising radiation from the reactor is not relevant, Kaatsch says.
Second, although the study showed risk levels double with proximity to a reactor, the absolute numbers are tiny.
"In Germany we have 250 childhood leukaemia cases in children below five years each year," he says, "[but] there are very few children living within five kilometres of a nuclear power plant. So it is not relevant to the public health.''
When parents who live close to the reactors ask if they should leave, Kaatsch says no, "because we do not know why we have such results."
He says subsequent epidemiological studies in Britain and France have tried but failed to reproduce the hugely controversial KiKK study results. Nevertheless, he says, the debate in Germany is leaning away from nuclear power - even under the conservative government.
Can you imagine more fertile ground for public concern? No such studies have been done in the US - because, Caldicott believes, the nuclear lobby does not want anyone to know. She takes a jaundiced view of Obama's new policy: the nuclear proponent Exelon donated $US200,000 to Obama's election campaign and key staff members, including his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and David Axelrod, have links to the company. Obama's home town of Chicago has the heaviest dependence on nuclear power of any US city, she says.
Caldicott says the public is misinformed and the risks are misunderstood. It might feel safe to swim in the waste water of a nuclear reactor, as they do in Europe, but it takes 15 to 60 years for the cancer to show.
''That's the ace up the sleeve of the nuclear industry,'' she says. ''It's a silent, cryptogenic disease that doesn't denote its origin. You have to do big epidemiological studies like the German study to find out what's going on.''
Caldicott concedes anti-nuclear campaigners are losing the war for hearts and minds at the moment. In the past two years, just as an example, media mentions of her sparring partner, Ziggy Switkowski, the chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, outnumbered her own by 371 to 28.
Recently she emailed supporters to raise about $9000 to advertise an open letter signed by a number of doctors supporting People for a Nuclear Free Australia, to run in Crikey and the Australian Medical Association journal, warning of the health risks of nuclear power and disputing the pro-environmental claims made by the nuclear industry. That will begin next month.
Federal and state governments, which are increasing uranium mining in Australia, are unlikely to be listening.
When Caldicott appeared before a parliamentary inquiry, Ferguson talked over her - which, she says, ''shows he is (a) ignorant and (b) arrogant beyond belief''.
