Akwaaba!

Public Acceptance of Nuclear Energy

Nuclear energy still remains skeptical to policy-makers and the general public in several countries for it is shrouded in myths and fuelled by misinformation. Public acceptance of nuclear energy is the basis for a political will that is needed to surmount the colossal barriers that keep the poor nations from the benefits of nuclear energy.

However, public acceptance has recently started to grow in some countries due to diverse reasons such as the rising cost and volatility of oil and gas as well as the terms of the Kyoto Protocol for the industrialized countries. Australia , where the cost of electricity from mainly coal-fired plants is one of the lowest in the world, is one of nations that have initiated public debate on nuclear because it is clean. Their Prime Minister said recently that “Improved economic competitiveness and safety of nuclear power, along with concern for energy security and climate change, are leading to a steady increase in worldwide nuclear power capacity.’’

I should not hesitate to add that, there are many anti-nukes out there with divergent views about nuclear energy. But their stance is outweighed by that of certain individuals such as Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, who said, when testifying before the U.S. House Congressional Panel on Energy Resources in April 2005 that “There is now a great deal of scientific evidence showing nuclear power to be an environmentally sound and safe energy”.

One of such scientific evidence could be the ExternE Project of the EU-15 and Norway The project was a ten-year study on health risks and socio-environmental damages (external costs) caused by energy sources used for power generation. The estimated external costs in euro-cent per kWh are given in Table 1. Take a closer look at the data of nuclear and hydro for France and Sweden, where substantial part of their hydropower is from ‘the run-of- the river’ plants, which have far less impact on the eco-system than the usual hydro plants with dams. It is clear from the data that nuclear is more environmentally friendly than hydro even in cold areas. Then in the tropics, where dams are the sources of many serious water borne diseases such as malaria, river-blindness and so on, nuclear should be more environmentally friendly than hydropower.

Some recent studies done by the Environmental Protection Section under the EU-25 Commission also show that nuclear energy has less impact on health and global warming than that of hydro and solar. Similar results by the Swedes are shown in Fig 1.

In Fig 2 are the results of the independent studies of the Paul Scherer Institute in Switzerland, which also show that nuclear energy is very benign to the environment. These studies covered the effects of global warming not covered under the ExternE Project. It is also very interesting to compare the production cost of nuclear to that of other energy sources in the figure. These data show emphatically that the unit cost of solar-generated is extremely expensive, just as reported in some studies done by the Ghana Energy Commission.

Another study of interest done by the same Swiss Institute was about ‘Accidental Deaths’, where the number of deaths for a given energy source was compared to the amount of electric energy produced by the source. Their results in Fig 3 show that nuclear has the least number of accidental deaths or accidents, which agree with the findings of the ExternE Project. The worst case for accidental deaths is for hydro. Certainly the accidental deaths associated with the Akosombo Dam in Ghana give credence to the results of this study. In Fig 4 are results of similar studies done in Sweden. 

Though the pie-charts in Fig 5 and Fig 6 were done in the UK and the US respectively, they carry remarkably the same message that the radiation from nuclear industries is negligibly very low. Table 2 is on radiation exposure to general public in the USA, where there are over 100 nuclear power plants producing over 20% of their electricity. The data in the table also show that the share of radiation from nuclear plants is less than 0.1% as compared to about 15% from medical sources.

Radiation offers the cheapest and the most effective way for sterilizing heat sensitive materials such as surgical gloves as well as bones and tissues for grafting. It is also worth mentioning that cooked meals eaten during space missions, including the historic moon-landing, are sterilized by radiation to keep them nutritious, harmless and wholesome. Several radio-isotopes are indispensable for diverse applications, such as the radiopharmaceuticals used for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes in hospitals.

Perhaps, if one gets to know from Table 2 that the amount radiation that the general public in the US (or France or the UK) receive in year from many nuclear power plants is far less than what they receive in one hour when traveling by air or from watching television, will be less apprehensive about nuclear energy.

Table 1: Extracted from The ExternE Project of the EU-15

Published by the EU Commission's Joint Research Center

Table 2: Radiation Exposure to US Public

Extracted from Radiation and Risk, published in the Radiation Information networks of Idaho State University

Fig 2: Comparison of Production, External and Global Warming Costs 

By Paul Scherer Institue, SwitzerlandTwin bars represent the range of values for plants operating in Switzerland

Rp=cent SFr    1SFr=US$0.83452

Fig 2a:  Accidental Deaths