Apologies if this has been posetd earlier. George appeared on...

Apologies if this has been posetd earlier. George appeared on Lateline last night.

George Monbiot joins Lateline
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Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 31/03/2011

Reporter: Tony Jones

One of the world's leading environmental writers, George Monbiot, joins Lateline to discuss why the Fukushima disaster has convinced him to support nuclear power.

Transcript
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Here is tonight's guest. George Monbiot is the author of several books on the environment and writes a weekly column for The Guardian newspaper. He has opposed nuclear power in the past. Since 2009, he's been neutral on the issue, but that all changed after the Fukushima disaster, but not in the way you might expect. George Monbiot says he now supports nuclear power. To explain why, he joins us now from Oxford.

Thanks for being there.

GEORGE MONBIOT, ENVIRONMENTALIST AND AUTHOR: Thank you, Tony.

TONY JONES: Why have you taken this decision to become an advocate for nuclear power in the light of such a disaster?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, it's a horrible, traumatic, extremely dangerous thing that's happening in Fukushima and it's devastating to the lives of many people living around there. But the extraordinary fact is that no-one has yet received what is believed by scientists to be a lethal dose of radiation. And what has happened is that that power station there has been hit by a force nine earthquake, a major tsunami. Those have exposed a horrendous legacy of corner-cutting, poor design and of course appalling siting on an earthquake zone and all sorts of horrible effects in terms of the necessity for evacuation and the spread of low-level radiation and the rest of it. It's about the worst possible nuclear catastrophe that you could envisage and it rates very high on the scale of nuclear disasters. And yet even so, the extraordinary case remains that so far - touch wood, and let's hope very much that this remains the case - no-one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

And that has forced me, really, to challenge myself and to re-examine my preconceptions and to think, well, this is a nasty technology. I don't like it at all. But if the result of the great switch-off of nuclear power in Japan, in Germany, possibly in China, possibly the US, possibly in the UK, many other countries in response to this disaster is to move more into coal burning, which already seems to be the case, then we're talking about moving from a bad technology to a much, much worse one. And faced with a choice between those two options, it has to be nuclear.

TONY JONES: Alright. We'll come to the other possible alternatives shortly. But first of all, the Fukushima nuclear crisis is far from over. I mean, your initial optimism about no-one getting a fatal dose of radiation still may not be held up. So I'm wondering, did you jump too soon on this?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, of course, things might well change and it may be that some people do receive a lethal dose of radiation, and of course, that would be a terrible and a horrible thing. But, please, let's look at what will happen if we switch to coal. In fact, countries are switching to coal at the moment. In China alone, 2,300 people a year die in coal mining accidents and tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands die as a result of lung diseases contracted in coal mining. And that's to say nothing of the very great impacts. We're talking about many, many thousands, tens of thousands perhaps of people dying as a result of lung diseases contracted through air pollution caused by coal burning. And of course it's to say nothing of the far greater impact still of climate change.

Now while of course I put renewables way at the top of my list and way above nuclear power and that's what I want to see being deployed, what is being deployed and what will be deployed if there's this global nuclear shutdown, this is the reality we face, is a switch to coal and that will cause many more fatalities even than the horrible situation we are seeing in Japan at the moment.

TONY JONES: Alright. Let me just be a devil's advocate for a while and go through some of the other key arguments against nuclear power. One of the strongest arguments is an economic one that the nuclear power industry privatises its profits while socialising its costs, and one obvious example of that is the huge cost of decommissioning plants. And in particular you've got the Sellafield nuclear plant in Britain which is going to cost 70 billion pounds to decommission. That's taxpayers have to pick up the bill there. So, first of all, take up the economic argument. Can there be a serious economic argument for nuclear power when those hidden costs are in every reactor?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Look, it's an absolute disgrace. I mean, the failure to prepare for decommissioning, either economically or technically, is absolutely shocking, and the nuclear industry, we'll they're a bunch of corner-cutting scumbags. I don't have any sympathy for them at all. All I'm trying to do here is steer a course between a series of bad options, really. But in terms of the full costs of nuclear power, it probably comes out, most estimates suggest somewhere around four pence per kilowatt hour of electricity generated, which is more expensive than fossil fuel, probably comparable, slightly more expensive than large-scale wind, but cheaper than some other renewable technologies. It comes sort of about two thirds of the way up the scale, as far as we can see. It's not cheap, it's not wildly expensive either, but it is of course a low-carbon source of electricity.

Now if you were to look at the decommissioning costs of coal burning, for example, you will find because they include climate change and the enormous costs of adaptation to climate change, to the carbon dioxide produced by coal as a by-product of that industry, you will find they dwarf those of nuclear power by many, many times. And I just cannot emphasise this enough: that if we're switching from nuclear to coal, as many governments, like Germany's, are doing right now, then that is a disastrous move which will incur far greater costs, environmental, humanitarian and economic, upon the world.

TONY JONES: I'm just going to stick with the costs of nuclear power for a moment, because as we know from the experience in the United States, I mean, tremendous subsidies and loan guarantees, federal loan guarantees have been put in to make sure these nuclear power stations are actually built. They get much higher subsidies, they have in the past, than renewable energies. In Asia, economists estimate that the 110 new nuclear reactors that are going to be built in the next 10 to 20 years are going to be subsidised to the tune of $180 billion. I mean, if those kind of subsidies were put into renewable energies, wouldn't that create a different playing field?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well I couldn't agree more, and of course I would love to see that happening. But the situation right now - and I'm sorry to keep coming back to this, but this is a key point and it's absolutely critical for environmentalists to grasp - is that we're talking about a switch not from nuclear to renewables. We're talking about a switch from nuclear to coal. And coal is subsidised by all of us in the form of the costs that we must carry for the climate change and the polluting effects, not to mention the deaths and injuries that it inflicts.

Now, I completely agree: I would love to see that transfer of subsidy from nuclear to renewables, but there's a limit to how far we can roll out renewables if we're also going to have to replace nuclear as well as replacing fossil fuels. We're talking about a steep hill to climb already at the best of times. So, in other words, we're talking about renewables replacing fossil fuel electricity production, replacing liquid transport fuel and replacing heating fuels, gas and oil, in people's homes. That's certainly what we're calling for right across Europe as an environmental movement.

If they're also to replace nuclear power and planned nuclear power, well that makes it a very tall order and it makes our task a lot tougher. And I think our priority has got to be to kick fossil fuels out of the picture and only then do we start to look at whether renewables can also remove the need for nuclear power. Because it's just - it's all a matter of getting our priorities in the right scale. I don't like nuclear power. I think it's a horrible technology, but I recognise that there's some far more horrible technologies which will and are replacing it as a result of the nuclear shutdown.

TONY JONES: Now, there's argument in this country that we certainly need a transitional technology to replace coal, particularly dirty, brown coal-fired power stations and deliver baseload power at lower emissions. The best option that's been come up with here by economists and by the Government is a switch to natural gas-fired power. Now that does deliver electricity at far lower emissions than coal. Why isn't that the alternative, the transitional alternative the Europeans are looking at?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, it's definitely lower than coal. It's far, far higher than either nuclear or renewables, and it is in fact far too high if we're to achieve anything like the climate change cuts, the carbon cuts required to prevent very dangerous levels indeed of climate change - two, three, four degrees of global warming or more. We cannot afford to switch from coal to gas. We have to switch from coal to a much lower emitting technology and that means either renewables, which come ...

TONY JONES: Yes, but George Monbiot, just to - if I could just interrupt you there. I mean, you just made the case that the Europeans are going from - well, you believe they're going to go from nuclear to coal. I mean, why not go to gas as a transitional measure, because the industry claims 70 per cent lower greenhouse emissions than existing coal-fired power stations, brown coal-fired power stations? That is a big reduction. That's bigger than many of the targets that are envisaged by most countries.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Sure. Yeah, but it's still many times the emissions produced by nuclear power. So, to go from nuclear to gas rather than from nuclear to coal does not solve the problem. It means you're going from - in terms of climate change, from a low-emitting technology to a high-emitting one as opposed to an extremely high-emitting one, going from nuclear to gas rather than nuclear to coal. That's not solving the problem, that's going in quite the opposite direction. It's actually increasing the extent of the climate change problem, but not by as much as it would be if you switched to coal.

TONY JONES: Except now from the Japanese case we see very clearly, although it was a disaster driven by a tsunami which is quite unusual, but we see the dangers of siting nuclear reactors anywhere near earthquake zones. And of course, both in Indonesia and in China, which are planning to build many more nuclear reactors, there are serious earthquake zones and issues like that are going to arise. And I'm wondering, why do you trust the Chinese and the Indonesians, for example, to do a better job than the Japanese, who have a high level of technical expertise?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Hey, look, I don't trust anyone when it comes to large-scale energy production of any kind, and I think the only safeguard is total transparency, everything to be above board, things to be very rigorously inspected indeed and the precautionary principle to be applied. And, yes, you're quite right: we should not be building nuclear reactors in earthquake zones.

TONY JONES: But that is the serious problem, because there are nuclear reactors built in earthquake zones in the United States. There are proposals to build them in earthquake zones in China and Indonesia, and yet still, I would imagine, you're arguing those reactors should go ahead.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, it depends what risk you're looking at. I mean, if you're looking at an area of serious seismicity, then that - obviously that's a very stupid place to put a nuclear reactor. So, no, I would not support that decision. But China and the US for instance are very big places and there are plenty of places on those land masses which aren't in earthquake zones and where - or certainly not anything resembling a major earthquake which could cause the sort of situation we've seen in Japan and I don't see why they can't talk about putting them there rather than in the earthquake zones.

TONY JONES: OK, George Monbiot, as usual, you've given us plenty to think about. We thank you very much for taking the time to come and join us on Lateline tonight.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Thank you, Tony.


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