MANILA BULLETIN
Business & Society
June 1, 2009
Removing the Emotions From the Nuclear Debate
The next President of the Philippines will have to do his best to remove all the emotions
out of the debate on the Bataan Nuclear Plant. I may no longer entertain any hope that we
will ever see a nuclear plant in Bataan because of the very convoluted circumstances
surrounding that Westinghouse power plant built during the Marcos regime. For the good of
future generations, however, I sincerely hope that in one or more of our more than 7,000
islands there will someday be the safest, cleanest and most sustainable source of energy:
nuclear energy.
A recent report about the Japanese planning to reopen a nuclear plant that was
temporarily mothballed caught my attention. If there is any nation that has been traumatized
by anything related to the word "nuclear", it is our neighbor to the North. If reopened, that
particular nuclear plant will be the largest in the world. It is admirable how the Japanese
people are able to use scientific evidence to remove the emotions out of the nuclear debate.
Let me present here the content of an article by Andrew Kenny that appeared in the
September 2008 issue of Spectator Business. The author is a British-born engineer with a
background in industry and energy research, who lives in Cape Town. He is convinced that
nuclear power can not only supply an increasing share of the world's electricity safely,
cleanly, economically and sustainably, but it can also provide heat, including hightemperature heat, for desalination of water, chemical production, manufacture of synthetic
fuels (such as petrol and diesel from coal and natural gas), hydrogen production (through
thermo-chemical reactions) and winning of oil from tar sands.
The local critics of nuclear energy who cite experiences like Chernobyl to demonstrate
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that nuclear is not safe are not being empirical but more emotional. Over the full energy
cycle, nuclear power has been demonstrated the safest over the last thirty years. In the years
1969 to 1996 the number of accidents that killed five people or more in each energy
technology was as follows: Coal: 187. Oil: 334. Natural gas: 86. Hydroelectricity: 9.
Nuclear: 1. The single such nuclear accident was Chernobyl, to which 56 deaths (and a
possible 4,000 cancer cases) were attributed by a WHO report in 2005. Since 1996 there has
been a large number of accidents in coal, oil and gas that have killed five people or more:
accidents in Western Europe, China, the USA, Russia and elsewhere. There has been no such
accident in nuclear, anywhere.
It is important to understand why nuclear power is so safe. The lesser reason is
elaborate safety mechanisms and procedures; the major reason is inherent safety coming from
the laws of nature. An atomic bomb requires uranium enriched (that is, treated so that it
contains a higher proportion of the uranium-235 isotope) to over 90 per cent; power reactors
have less than 10 per cent enrichment, and it is physically impossible for them to explode like
a bomb. Moreover, nature allows us to exploit "negative feedback" in designing a power
reactor, which simply means that any deviation automatically corrects itself; if there is a
sudden surge in power, the uranium fuel will become hotter and automatically slow down the
reactor (the Doppler Effect:).
The Chernobyl accident was caused primarily by bad design and secondarily by blatant
violation of safety procedures. Chernobyl, unlike all Western power reactors and indeed
unlike other reactor designs in the USSR, did have positive feedback under certain
circumstances. A sudden increase in power at low levels caused steam bubbles ("voids") in
the coolant water. In Western reactors, the voids would automatically slow down the reactor;
in Chernobyl they speeded it up, and the resulting surge of heat blew it apart.
The worst-ever accident in a Western nuclear power station was at Three Mile Island in
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the USA in 1979. It was caused by overheating of the fuel in the core (against which there
are now multiple defences). It drew headlines around the world. The total casualties of
Three Mile Island accident were as follows:
Deaths: 0.
Injuries: 0.
Health effects
afterwards: 0. So why is it still being cited by anti-nuclear groups? Because they have
nothing else to cite.
Over 40 people have died in wind-power accidents since the 1970s. Given that nuclear
power has produced vast amounts of electricity in this period and wind very little, this means
that wind power is far more dangerous than nuclear power--but both are relatively safe. It is
obvious from these considerations that objections to nuclear power on the basis of safety are
more emotional than rational. As a last thought, it is ironical that the anti-nuclear forces are
oblivious to the fact that Taiwan, literally a stone's throw away from Northern Luzon, gets
more than 50 per cent of its energy from nuclear. If safety is a problem, the Philippines
would have been blown to kingdom come long ago. So, let's put on our thinking caps and see
how some time in the second decade of this present century we can have the safest, cleanest
and most sustainable source of energy.
bvillegas@uap.edu.ph.
For comments, my email address is