气候变化领域集成服务门户(CCPortal): Tanya Glafenhein, M.V. Ramana: At Vancouver’s clean energy summit, nuclear is making a play

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Tanya Glafenhein, M.V. Ramana: At Vancouver’s clean energy summit, nuclear is making a play 科技资讯

时间：2019-04-30 来源：[美国] Daily Climate

Around the world, uranium mining and processing has been primarily carried out on Indigenous lands and Indigenous peoples have been significantly affected. Impacted communities include the Navajos in the United States, the Dene people in the Northwest Territories, and the Santhal, Munda, and Ho people in India. Proposed sites for the deep geological repository in Canada are almost all on traditional First Nations land, in a practice that has been termed nuclear colonialism.

Accidents

Nuclear energy is unique among all electricity generating technologies in its propensity for catastrophic accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima that create radioactive contamination on a potentially global scale. In those locations near the site of the accident where contamination levels are high, the hazards to health will last for decades if not centuries.

The “exclusion zone” with radiation levels deemed too high for human habitation encompassed 4,300 square kilometres in the case of Chernobyl; at least 116,000 people were evacuated from the area.

The contaminated area is smaller in the case of Fukushima because most of the atmospherically released radionuclides were deposited into the Pacific Ocean due to the prevalent wind direction during the first few days of the accidents.

Many proponents of nuclear energy argue, despite this history of disastrous accidents, that reactors can be operated safely. Critics respond: “The key question is not whether it can be safe, but whether it will be safe.”

The simple answer is no. Not when this has to be done across countries, across many facilities, according to multiple priorities including cost cutting and profit making, and using multiple technologies, each with its own vulnerabilities.

Weapons

Though the nuclear industry is loath to admit it, there is a very close relationship between nuclear power and weapons. In the words of the late Ted Taylor, a former weapons designer turned nuclear abolition advocate, “the connections between nuclear technology for constructive use and for destructive use are so closely tied together that the benefits of the one are not accessible without greatly increasing the hazards of the other.” Nuclear war would be the ultimate environmental catastrophe.

This connection is particularly important to emphasize given that many of the members of the Clean Energy Ministerial are either nuclear weapon states or members of military alliances with nuclear weapon states. Members include the U.S., China, France, Russia, India, United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan to name a few.

But isn’t nuclear the cheap way to fight climate change?

Despite all these problems with nuclear energy, some might argue that this technology remains the only way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The problem with this argument is that nuclear energy is fading in importance globally. Nuclear power’s share of global electricity generation was 17.5 per cent in 1996. Since then, this fraction has steadily declined, reaching 10.3 per cent in 2017. For a variety of reasons, the downward trend is expected to continue.

What is behind this trend? The primary reason is that nuclear plants are no longer financially viable. Because they are hugely expensive, it has been known for a while that building new nuclear plants makes little economic sense. What has changed in the last decade is that it is not just constructing new reactors, but just operating one, even one that is old and has its capital costs paid off, that has ceased to make economic sense in many cases.

原文来源：https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2019/05/27/Nuclear-Making-Play-Clean-Energy-Summit/