The Unclear Nuclear Future - Nuclear power for New Zealand?

Politically sensitive topics - taboos, if you will - have constantly changed and eroded over the few decades in which New Zealand has existed as a nation. Our attitudes towards religion, towards sexuality, towards race, towards gender, towards immigration, towards welfare have grown and evolved. Positions politicians would have once flouted have been swept away in the tides of progress; others that are today second nature would once have been political suicide. There are few topics, though, from which almost all politicians continue to shy away. One of the most potent is surely nuclear power.

New Zealand not only possesses a strident anti-nuclear attitude, it wears it with pride. The 1980s saw mass marches and protests against the incursion of nuclear-propelled vessels and weapons testing, and it's an ideology that holds strong today. But it wasn't always the case.

A history

Commercial nuclear power plants supplying electricity to the public have existed since the mid-1950s, first in the Soviet Union, and then in England. From there they spread rapidly, and today there are 439 nuclear power reactors in operation across 31 countries, accounting for 14% of the world's electricity.

A nuclear power supply for New Zealand was first considered seriously in 1968. That year's national power plan suggested the country would require it by the mid-1970s, due to the expected exhaustion of good hydro-electric generation sites. The plan identified and reserved a likely site for New Zealand's first nuclear reactors: Kaipara Harbour's Oyster Point, near Auckland. The University of Canterbury even offered a nuclear engineering course in anticipation of a demand for skilled technicians.

The need for such a plant fell away in the intervening years with the discovery of coal reserves near Huntly, and the Maui gas field. The next significant consideration of nuclear power was in 1976, with the establishment of the Royal Commission on Nuclear Power Generation in New Zealand. In 1978 the Commission reported that there remained no need for nuclear power generation in New Zealand, but that planning for a nuclear programme should begin in the latter years of the next decade, as by the early years of the next century a "significant" programme would be "economically possible".

Which, of course, is where we are today. So why aren't those Willy Wonka-esque toadstool cooling towers peppering the landscape?

Nuclear's decade of bad PR

Nuclear energy's public image suffered greatly over the next decade, particularly in New Zealand. The Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania resulted in a tremendous amount of radioactive gases being released from a nuclear power plant due to a mix of mechanical and technical failures and human error. Fortunately, the gases were relatively harmless, and no deaths were attributed to the accident. It nonetheless represented an all-too-close call, and helped cement a certain caution in the minds of the public about nuclear power.

Seven years later, a considerably larger accident provided the world an even more chilling picture of what nuclear power might do should things go wrong. An explosion and fire at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant released massive amounts of radioactive fallout across the western parts of the Soviet Union and into Europe. 31 deaths were directly attributed to the disaster, with 64 since confirmed as a result of radiation. Projected deaths from cancer caused by fallout have ranged from 30,000 to 200,000 to as many as 985,000. The area has since been abandoned, and residual radiation remains across a wide area, with effects expected to be felt for a further century. It remains the worst nuclear disaster the world has seen, and even if New Zealand had still been contemplating nuclear energy, it would have been a massive turn-off.

But contemplating nuclear energy New Zealand was not. In fact, the public had been whipped into an anti-nuclear frenzy over the decade. The issue even precipitated the 1984 snap election, which saw the election of David Lange's Labour government. That government then passed in 1987 the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act, "to establish in New Zealand a Nuclear Free Zone, to promote and encourage an active and effective contribution by New Zealand to the essential process of disarmament and international arms control". The legislation prohibited "entry into the internal waters of New Zealand by any ship whose propulsion is wholly or partly dependent on nuclear power" as well as dumping of radioactive waste within the zone, and prevented New Zealand citizens or residents from manufacturing, acquiring, possessing, or controlling any nuclear explosive device.

What the legislation did not do was ban nuclear power generation. It remains a legal option in New Zealand today.

The green glow of nuclear power

The reasons for choosing nuclear power are largely financial in nature: it's less expensive than fossil fuels such as coal or gas, even when one factors in the costs of disposing of nuclear waste and the eventual, inevitable decommissioning of a plant. Hydro-energy remains cheaper, but there are definite limits on available generation sites; there are few more options for this available in New Zealand.

Money isn't the only check in nuclear power's favour, though. Despite popular perception, it may also be one of the greener forms of energy generation. British environmentalist James Lovelock, proponent of the "Gaia" theory, has urged the world to switch to nuclear power, which he terms "the only green solution"; a means of production that can satisfy the massive energy demands of humanity while minimising greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions from nuclear power plants are, across a plant's lifecycle, indeed considerably lower than that of coal or gas, though still higher than wind, solar, or hydro.

But despite this, is the stigma around nuclear energy just too much? No matter how much you quote the figures about it's environmental bona fides, popular perception of nuclear energy defines it as artificial and dangerous to humans and the countryside alike. Even if the New Zealand population were to change its views, that still leaves the tourism market to convince, a market we try to win over with a "clean green" image, touched as little as possible by the encroachment of humankind.

But there are those who suggest that some power generation methods traditionally considered environmentally-friendly may cause unacceptable levels of a type of pollution particularly threatening to picture-postcard scenes: visual pollution, damaging the unspoiled vistas we use to promote ourselves to the world. Renowned New Zealand landscape artist Grahame Sydney is one of them. He vehemently opposed a plan to erect 178 proud and distinct wind turbines across the Central Otago landscape, holding that a single nuclear power plant, making barely a visual impression, was preferable. "Our landscape is what we have to sell to the rest of the world," he told The Dominion Post. "It's really a no-brainer to me, but you do have to get through an incredibly dense smokescreen of denial and illogical reasons."

The major environmental hurdle of nuclear power, though, is the waste material. Spent nuclear fuel remains dangerous and may continue to be so for tens of thousands to millions of years. It can be reprocessed, but this carries risks in the context of unauthorised nuclear proliferation. While there are plans away for centralised underground repositories, most waste is today stored at reactor sites. Any waste produced from a New Zealand reactor would carry with it significant environmental risks, and would have to be well-guarded, lest it be put to more nefarious purposes.

But New Zealand isn't quite free of nuclear waste today - it already produces some material through medical applications. Until the 1970s, such waste was embedded in concrete and dropped into the sea east of Cook Straight. Today, it resides a lot closer to home: in drums in a concrete storeroom at the National Radiation Laboratory... on Montreal Street just south of Bealey Ave.

Is it even worth our while?

It may be that New Zealand's population, and by extension, its electricity needs, are simply not big enough to justify nuclear power - or to even make nuclear power feasible. A single nuclear power plant generates 1200 megawatts of electricity, and unlike other forms of electricity generation, only ever runs at full capacity. This represents about a seventh of New Zealand's current electricity capacity, which sits around a mere 9000mw.

This might seem a good thing: if a single nuclear plant can provide such a large proportion of our energy requirements, then there would be far less demand on other forms of supply. However, a key quality of a good electricity network is the ability to provide instant back-up should one of its generating units be rendered inoperable, even if it is its largest unit. If a nuclear plant should go out of action, even temporarily, the system would struggle to compensate for the shortfall. This is far less of an issue with a gas station, which might generate up to 400mw - an amount for which it is far easier for other stations to pick up the slack, should it become necessary. French nuclear expert Bertrand Barre told The Dominion Post in 2008 that New Zealand would require a national grid ten times larger than any one nuclear plant in order to make it feasible and reliable. Our capacity might need to increase by half before we can seriously consider a nuclear option.

Safety

Few people in the world are unaware of the disasters that shook Japan this year. After the initial horror of the earthquake and tsunami, attention turned to the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, at which there was an immediate threat of catastrophic disaster. Given the seismic activity we've experienced in Canterbury this year, and the propensity for New Zealand to experience it elsewhere, a nuclear reactor may seem like the last thing we should consider building.

Nuclear power plants have nonetheless been built in many seismically-active areas, particularly in California. During the recent earthquake on the United States' east coast, two nuclear reactors shut down automatically, as they are designed to do - nuclear reactors are built to withstand significant shakes. Reactors operating near the site of the Kobe earthquake in 1995 remained operational and undamaged; three reactors in Taiwan closed down during a 7.6 earthquake in 1999, before being brought back online two days later. Even the major problems at Fukushima came as a result of the tsunami wave damaging the emergency generators that were cooling the plant's reactors - more a result of poor shielding and positioning than anything. Still, given the large proportion of New Zealand's electricity supply a nuclear power plant would provide, as outlined above, the risk of even a couple of days offline may be too significant, particularly in a post-disaster situation.

Other dangers too are unavoidable. Security is a major concern for all nuclear plants. A sabotage or attack could result in a tremendous catastrophe, one from which this part of the world might not recover for decades, if at all. Apart from the immediate destruction that might occur, clouds of radioactive fallout could kill thousands and contaminate the land for the foreseeable future. Forget New Zealand's farming industry: it'd be done for. Spent nuclear fuel must also be disposed of under tight security, lest it fall into the wrong hands.

And no matter how much training is given, no matter how much automated systems are developed, there is always a risk of human error. This cannot be eliminated, as is the case with any industrial undertaking. But the complexity of a nuclear power system, coupled with the significant room for disaster should something go wrong, makes human error a particularly worrying prospect in the case of nuclear power.

Prospects for the future

It's unlikely New Zealand will seriously contemplate nuclear power in the near future. While energy costs are rising, and people become less inclined to pursue environmentally-damaging electricity generation methods, nuclear power remains just too unappealing a prospect. It also seems that we simply don't have the population to justify or sustain it at this time.

But as nuclear technology develops, and as our population grows, New Zealanders may have to let the option enter public debate. The country's ideological opposition to nuclear weapons is well-founded, but there is a real gulf between this and nuclear power generally. Science and economics lend themselves to arguments for both sides, which will require some very deep consideration on our part.