Report justifies use of nuclear power

Press, 4 February 1987, Page 28

Report justifies use of nuclear power

By

ALAN ELSNER

of Reuters London A significant report clearing the way for Britain’s first nuclear power station in more than a decade has provided a boost for nuclear energy world-wide, which is still suffering from the impact of the Chernobyl disaster. The recommendation to approve the Sizewell B power station on England’s east codst, followed a four-year public inquiry. The Government-funded independent probe was chaired by an eminent lawyer and examined in' unprecedented detail economic and environmental arguments for and against nuclear power. After sifting through 55 tonnes of testimony, the committee’s chairman, Sir Frank Layfield, produced a 3000-page report which concluded:

“In my judgment, the expected national economic benefits are sufficient to justify the risks that would be incurred.” The reverberations of Sir Frank’s assessment are likely to spread far beyond Britain.

All over the Western world, nuclear power is still facing a crisis of confidence after the Cher-

nobyl disaster last April in the Soviet Union, which killed 30 people and sent radioactive particles drifting in the atmosphere over Europe and beyond.

As several countries banned the sale of milk and leaf vegetables and counted the cost of the disaster on their agriculture and wildlife, public opinion swung sharply against nuclear power. In several European countries, including Britain, West Germany and the Netherlands, nuclear power emerged more sharply than before as a party political issue, attacked by the Left and defended by the Right. In West Germany, where nuclear power was a major theme in the recent Federal election campaign, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s centre-right coalition backed the country’s 20 existing nuclear stations on economic

grounds but pledged higher investment' in alternative energy forms.

The fact that Kohl’s party lost ground in the election while the environmentalist Greens party increased their parliamentary representation by 50 per cent suggested that voters were far from convinced.

As a result, key projects to build a reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf, in Bavaria, and to licence a fast-breeder prototype on the Rhine are still in doubt.

Sweden, which was badly affected by Chernobyl, is already committed to scrapping its 12 nuclear plants by 2010 despite the fact that they supply half the country’s energy requirements. The authorities are now looking at ways of dismantling them ahead of schedule.

The centre-right Dutch Government delayed

plans for four new light water reactors and said it would study the issue Britain’s “Financial Times” newspaper was moved to ask last June: “After Chernobyl, will anybody dare to order a new nuclear reactor?” With the Layfield report behind her, officials say the British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, is almost certain to do just that within the next three months. Surprisingly, publication of the report prompted little public response with protests limited to a few fringe environmentalist groups. Industry analysts say the importance of the Sizewell report lies in the fact that it specifically approved the construction of an American-designed pressurised water reactor (PWR) similar to most reactors operating outside the communist world.

The report is likely to

be particularly welcome in France which generates 65 per cent of its electricity from 44 nuclear power stations. Opinion polls suggest that French support for the nuclear programme, traditionally higher than in most countries, took a severe knock from Chernobyl, falling from about 62 per cent who favoured building new nuclear plants in 1984 to only 37 per cent, last October.

.Remy Carle, director of Electricite de France, recently expressed concern about his country’s ability to press on with its programme when other countries had either frozen or were cutting back on theirs.

“We don’t want to be alone. We cannot be alone. The French people would not understand in the long term that nuclear energy would be good for them but not good fof

anybody else,” he said. In fact, world use of nuclear power continued to grow last year in spite of the Chernobyl disaster. It now accounts for more than 15 per cent of electricity production compared to five per cent 10 years ago, according to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (lAEA). For the United States, which leads the world with 97 operating reactors, Chernobyl came at a time when public confidence was recovering from the effects of the Three Mile Island accident, in Pennsylvania, in March, 1979, when ruptured fuel rods in a PWR reactor led to a large release of radioactivity.

“We were on a roll until Chernobyl blew its top. There is no question that the Chernobyl accident dealt us all an enormous setback,” said Carl Gold-

stein, vice president of the United States Committee for Energy Awareness a few weeks after the disaster.

In spite of that, no new nuclear power stations had been ordered without subsequently being cancelled since 1974, and anti-nuclear groups had succeeded in delaying full power licensing for units at Seabrook, New Hampshire, and Shoreham, New York. . Even so, nuclear power is playing a steadily growing role in energy production across the United States, rising from 12.6 per cent of electricity generation in 1983, to 16 per cent now anc| an estimated 20 per cent by 1990, said Scott Peters, spokesman for the Atomic Industrial Forum trade group. The Soviet Union, which now generates 10 per cent of its electricity

from 50 nuclear power stations, is also increasing its dependence on the atom as an energy source. Planners expect that proportion to double during the latest five-year plan which began last year and the authorities have pledged to complete eight reactors similar to the Chernobyl design which are under construction.

Analysts say a British decision to go ahead with the Sizewell B station will bolster the resolve of Governments like France already committed to nuclear energy programmes and could encourage others, like West Germany and the United States, to take on their environmentalist lobbies. The alternative, they say, is growing reliance on coal as a energy source and probably more expensive electricity into the next century.