There is a modern tendency to attribute morality to inanimate things. Thus ‘energy’ is ‘good’, and ‘pressure’ is ‘bad’. ‘Positive’ and ‘negative’ are used for ‘good’, and ‘bad’, whereas the terms just mean the presence or absence of something, or opposites, such as in negative and positive electrical charges. A positive test for HIV is not good. All technologies are morally neutral but their applications may be moral or immoral. Steel is morally neutral but the use of steel in a surgeon’s scalpel is good and in torture equipment is bad.
The same applies to energy technologies. Nuclear and solar energy are neither good nor bad, just facts of nature (both come from the nuclear force). Policy decisions about their use can indeed be moral. If you choose an energy technology that is worse for man and nature over a better one, you are acting immorally. If you deliberately choose solar and wind over nuclear for grid electricity, you are acting immorally. But this is what politicians around the world are now doing. The chant ‘Nuclear Bad! Renewables Good!’ is wicked nonsense.
In South Africa, nuclear (Koeberg) is providing us with the cheapest, safest and cleanest electricity in our history, while ‘renewables’ – under the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme (REIPPPP), our compulsory renewable energy programme – are forcing upon us the most expensive in our history and the worst.
Yet our woke commentators are saying that the ruinous REIPPPP is a huge success and nuclear is ‘unaffordable’. Around the world, the final price of electricity keeps going up and up as more renewables are added to the grid (despite green claims that renewable prices are dropping), while countries with a high level of nuclear have much lower final prices. France, with 75% nuclear, has cheap electricity; Germany and Denmark, with high percentages of renewables, have expensive electricity. Yet our big media, with the Daily Establishment (sorry, Daily Maverick) leading the pack, denounce nuclear as unaffordable, and call for more extremely expensive renewables.
Nuclear is at least as ‘renewable’ as solar and wind, and has a lesser waste problem. There is so much natural nuclear fuel in the ground and sea that it will last the remaining lifetime of our planet (about 5 billion years). Nuclear power works in harmony with nature, using nature’s most concentrated energy, requiring the least amount of materials, with the least environmental disruption.
Conquer and dominate
Proponents of solar and wind want to conquer and dominate nature with tens of thousands of their gigantic machines. Because solar and wind energy is so dilute, you need colossal structures, using vast amounts of materials, to provide even small amounts of grid electricity. Wind turbines require over ten times as much steel and concrete as nuclear power per kWh.
All energy technologies, including solar and wind, leave toxic wastes that last forever (all stable isotopes last forever and most are toxic under some circumstances). Only nuclear, with tiny amounts of waste, has procedures for storing them safely. In Baotou, in China, the toxic wastes left by mining for neodymium used in wind generators are poisoning the environment and causing cancer, skin diseases, respiratory diseases and infant abnormality. Nothing like this has ever happened from the wastes of nuclear power.
Nuclear has by far the best safety record. Of the three major nuclear accidents, only one, Chernobyl, caused any loss of life from the radiation. The Chernobyl accident was caused primarily by a very bad reactor design, the RBMK, which could not guarantee safe operation under all conditions, unlike the Western PWRs (Pressurised Water Reactors), such as Koeberg’s. Russia’s other nuclear reactor design, the VVER, a type of PWR, is excellent, with a splendid safety record. The VVER1200 is one of the best two reactors available now (the other is the Westinghouse AP1000 and its Chinese variant, the CAP1400). Accidents in wind and solar have killed far more people per kWh.
‘Charm offensive’
The Daily Establishment recently warned us against a Russian ‘charm offensive’ to sell us their VVER reactors. Strangely enough, this organ has never warned us of a far more potent charm offensive by the big, rich renewable power companies, most of them overseas. They have been very successful in selling us their dreadful technologies at sky-high prices. They dominate the big media, and seem to have captured the CSIR and the Department of Energy. Eskom is forced to buy their unreliable electricity at 215 cents/kWh in 20-year contracts, when its own average selling price is about 90 cents/kWh. To convert this unreliable electricity into reliable electricity probably costs Eskom another 200 cents/kWh.
By contrast, the nuclear vendors provide excellent, affordable technology but are hopeless salesmen. Rosatom, the Russian vendor, is a prime example, with the best reactors in the world and clumsy, naïve marketing.
The ANC has wrecked Eskom, and we face electricity shortages for about 10 years. Beyond that, our biggest hope is nuclear. The ANC will try to wreck that too. All we can do is strive for honesty, transparency and competition. Otherwise, we may as well despair.
[Picture: Jose Roberto Jr. Del Rosario from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend