The nuclear approach to climate risk

June's United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20, was criticized in many quarters for failing to produce binding agreements on climate change and other global issues. The criticism was justified, insofar as the international community has made so little progress in recent years toward addressing the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming, especially in the developing world. In my native country of Nepal, glaciers are retreating and creating new lakes that present terrible risks to people along riversides at lower elevations. The melting of Himalayan glaciers also threatens the supply of drinking water to millions of people in Nepal, India, and China.

Due to risks like these, it is only natural that developing countries — especially middle-income nations with high economic growth rates — are searching for alternatives to fossil fuels. Nuclear energy is among these alternatives; its ability to generate electricity without carbon emissions is one reason that a large number of developing countries, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), are considering the development of nuclear power sectors.

But several issues stand in the way of nuclear power's expansion in the developing world. The 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, for example, dealt a severe blow to an industry that had expected to receive a boost from fears about climate change. The accident provided a reminder that, even if one acknowledges the positive aspects of nuclear power, serious dangers remain inherent in its use. The dangers include, along with incidents such as Fukushima, an increased risk of weapons proliferation.

But, complicating matters, an ongoing tension characterizes efforts to contain proliferation and to facilitate the spread of peaceful nuclear energy. To some extent, this tension dates to the days of President Dwight Eisenhower. The United States under Eisenhower strongly promoted the peaceful use of nuclear power around the world, and Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program created a conducive atmosphere for the birth of the IAEA in 1957. But after all, it was the United States that had dropped two atom bombs on Japan in 1945. Even today, the IAEA's twin objectives of promoting peaceful nuclear applications while stopping the spread of nuclear weapons can sometimes seem at odds.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that the IAEA cares only about preventing military applications of nuclear technology, but at times the agency and its Board of Governors are portrayed as improperly favoring the most powerful member states — which seem to care much more about proliferation than about expansion of nuclear power. The agency has been accused of issuing flawed reports regarding the alleged proliferation activities of some NPT signatories; for example, a November 2011 report on Iran has come in for heavy criticism, and not just from Iranians. At the very least, the agency's commitment to facilitating the spread of peaceful nuclear technology does not seem to match the vigor it exhibits on proliferation questions.

Taking Iran as an example again, the IAEA and a number of major powers have been heavily engaged in efforts to stop that country's perceived weaponization. The latest negotiations between Iran and the five recognized nuclear weapon states, plus Germany, have not yielded positive results; but far more effort has been expended on Iran than seems to be devoted to helping developing countries exercise their inalienable right to nuclear power.

Something similar might be said regarding North Korea. That country's withdrawal from the NPT in 2003, and its tests of nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009, arguably sprang — at least in part — from a US failure to hold up its end of the bargain spelled out in 1994's Agreed Framework. Under that agreement, the United States was to facilitate construction of proliferation-resistant light water reactors in North Korea and to provide Pyongyang with heavy fuel oil to make up for the electrical capacity North Korea would lose by freezing operations at its existing nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. The light water reactors were never completed; the shipments of fuel oil were suspended in 2002. Today, a resolution to the North Korean nuclear crisis is as elusive as ever.

So the IAEA (and the major powers) failed to stop proliferation in the North Korean case and may be on the verge of failure in the Iranian case. To be fair, the agency is designed as a warning system, not as a police force; if it finds that a country is out of compliance with its obligations under the NPT, the only action at its disposal is to bring the noncompliance to the attention of the UN Security Council. Still, just as the Iranian and North Korean cases suggest that the IAEA is sometimes unable to meet the NPT's nonproliferation objectives, the agency also sometimes fails to facilitate the spread of nuclear technology's peaceful uses. Perhaps this suggests that a deep conflict is at work between promoting power reactors and banning nuclear weapons.

Obstacles and solutions. But the IAEA cannot be blamed for everything. Also unhelpful to the goal of expanding the peaceful utilization of the atom without introducing unacceptable risks is the role that commercial considerations sometimes play in nuclear issues. A case in point is the 2008 US-India nuclear cooperation agreement, and the arm-twisting that the world's only superpower exerted to convince the Nuclear Suppliers Group to grant India an exception to its export controls despite India's not being a signatory to the NPT. In this instance a nuclear-armed country outside the nonproliferation regime gained many of the benefits that participation in the regime would confer. Such an arrangement contributes nothing to the integrity of the nonproliferation regime, because all countries that aspire to the development of a nuclear energy sector should enjoy the confidence that others are playing the game fairly.

Still, despite all these difficulties, it might be possible to strike an acceptable balance between the benefits and risks of nuclear expansion — whether the risks are Fukushima-type accidents or the clandestine pursuit of nuclear weapons. Establishing such a balance might depend on the development of advanced reactor technologies with enhanced safety features, but additional useful steps could include multilateralization of the fuel cycle and a corresponding strengthening of the multilateral framework for the control of nuclear facilities and materials. If a strengthened framework were established, one in which all countries could place their confidence, safeguards and safety regimens could be steadily enhanced. Thus the way might be paved for a time when the peaceful atom could be embraced by all nations that could afford the cost. Such a day must be hastened if the most harmful effects of climate change are to be averted.

Participants in this Roundtable are asked whether, given the dangers that climate change presents, nuclear energy is worth the risk for developing nations. My own country, South Africa, offers a particularly interesting lens through which to examine this question.

South Africa is best known internationally as the one-time home of apartheid. Not as well known is that during the apartheid era, as South Africa became an international pariah, the country's decision-making elites responded to perceived threats to national survival by encouraging the development of sophisticated capabilities in science, engineering, and technology. One manifestation of this was a nuclear weapons program.

During its transition to democracy South Africa abolished its nuclear weapons program and, in 1991, acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Thus it became the world's first nuclear-armed country to voluntarily relinquish its weapons. This fact alone places South Africa in a unique position from which to reflect on questions of nuclear proliferation and nuclear energy.

In want of water. Today, the greatest threat to South Africa's survival, and certainly to its prospects for prosperity, may be water scarcity — a problem that, as will be explained, is closely connected to climate change.

South Africa is among the 40 driest countries on earth. Its location between three global weather systems — the intertropical convergence zone, the Southern Ocean, and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation — helps account for the nation's annual average rainfall of only 495 millimeters (mm), compared to a global average of 860 mm. So severe are South Africa's water challenges that a national economy only exists because, through hydraulic engineering projects, rivers have been pushed around on a national scale.

Complicating matters, the majority of the country's economic activity takes place in the hinterland, on a high and dry central plateau. Johannesburg, which is the economic capital not only of the country but of continental Africa, is the world's largest city not located on a river, lake, or seashore. At about 1,800 metres above sea level, it straddles the continental divide that separates the Orange and Limpopo River Basins.

The Orange and the Limpopo, which drain into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans respectively, are crucial to the nation's economy — but only a small percentage of the rain that falls across the country is converted into water in these rivers. The conversion rate in the Orange River Basin, for example, is a meager 3.4 percent. This means that, of 100 units of water that fall as rain across the surface of the basin, only 3.4 units become water in the river and thus become useful for industrial purposes. The rest is lost to evapotranspiration. Climate change will likely cause low conversion rates to fall even further as losses to evapotranspiration increase.

South Africa has attempted to address its chronic water shortage through dam construction, but dam-building is reaching its limits. In the Orange River Basin, total dam storage capacity is already equal to a staggering 271 percent of the annual average flow of the river. To put it another way, almost three times as much water is stored in dams on the Orange River as would flow through the river, undammed, over an average annual cycle. This is indicative of water constraints that call into question South Africa's viability both as a stable democracy and as a nation capable of providing full employment for all.

Hotter, drier. Climate change, with its new and largely ill-defined risks, threatens to make matters worse. Increases in the ambient temperatures in South African river basins will exacerbate evaporative losses and disrupt weather patterns that are already unpredictable. And as ambient temperatures increase in areas that are stressed to begin with, the country's problem with excessive nutrient flows is likely to worsen — already, about one-third of South Africa's available water is highly eutrophic (that is, rich in dissolved minerals and thus supportive of excessive life, most notably blue-green algae).

As a professional in the water sector who is deeply involved in strategic planning processes, I see no viable future for South Africa unless we develop a sophisticated recycling ethos. Today, national water resources that are available at a high assurance of supply amount to about 38 billion cubic meters annually. This number needs to increase to about 65 billion by 2025 if we are to achieve full employment (assuming that the water-use patterns on which employment depends do not become more efficient). This means that South Africa will either have to gain access each year to an additional 27 billion cubic meters of water from rivers to which we have no legal riparian claim (the Zambezi or the Congo) — or we will have to use our total national resources about 1.7 times each year. But such recycling in effect implies desalination, because excessive mineral salts and endocrine-disrupting chemicals must be removed. This, in turn, requires massive amounts of energy.

South Africa's current energy platform, which is centered on coal combustion, is clearly unsustainable. But nuclear energy would be another story — especially if South Africa were to construct nuclear power plants using thorium as a fuel. Indeed, South Africa is ideally positioned to utilize thorium-based power reactors. First, the country has large reserves of thorium, which is currently regarded as a waste mineral with few commercial uses. Second, South Africa occupies a moral high ground in nuclear affairs by virtue of having relinquished its weapons program, and thus it would make an appropriate candidate to help pioneer the use of thorium, a fuel with enhanced proliferation resistance. It should also be mentioned that South Africa is among the relatively few developing countries that already utilize nuclear energy, and does not lack for technical capacity in this sector.

South Africa's future will be dictated in large measure by the way the country addresses its water scarcity dilemma, and by its ability to create employment amid growing resource constraints. Extensive changes will be necessary if the country's challenges are to be met. Because the hinterland happens to be located on a high plateau, massive amounts of energy are required to pump water uphill to reach it; eventually, major industries will likely have to relocate to the coast. In all probability, desalination of seawater will become the hydraulic foundation of the nation's economy, and this suggests a greater potential role for nuclear energy.

South Africa enjoys an abundance of both uranium and thorium. But it is the latter resource that could provide the country the relatively clean energy it needs for economic development without introducing new proliferation risks.

It is not so simple to answer whether, given the dangers of climate change, the benefits of nuclear power outweigh the risks in developing countries. Different groups of people in the developing world may view the risks and benefits very differently.

For the purposes of this essay I will divide people in the developing world into two categories: a benefit group and a risk group. People in the benefit group, largely poor, are quite vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change, including drought, heat waves, rising sea levels, more frequent and stronger storms, food shortages, and so on. Thus, they may see significant benefits in nuclear energy and its potential to slow climate change. People in the risk group, on the other hand, are more capable of adjusting to climate change. Therefore, it might be expected that they would perceive greater risks in the development of nuclear energy than do the poor.

As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has written, "Wealthy people have had disproportionate influence in most polities at most times in history." Given that members of the risk group are better off financially than members of the benefit group, class-based imbalances in political influence represent a large potential obstacle to the further development of nuclear energy in the developing world.

Making this obstacle even harder to surmount is that most nuclear reactors must be built where water is abundant (particularly along seacoasts or riversides). Locating these facilities close to water is an issue of convenience as well, because proximity to water eases delivery of the large, heavy pieces of equipment that are required for the construction and maintenance of nuclear power plants. But seacoasts and riversides are also the places where members of the risk group are most likely to live. (In China, to take one example, members of the benefit group might or might not live in such areas). That prosperous areas overlap with sites otherwise appropriate for nuclear power plants has ominous implications for the further development of nuclear energy — especially in the aftermath of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

To members of the risk group, who enjoy economically advantageous positions, nuclear power is just one energy option. At the same time, while the effects of global warming may seem like a distant threat to members of the risk group because of their greater resources, a nuclear accident on the scale of Fukushima would threaten both their physical well-being and their livelihoods. Thus, fear of nuclear accidents provides members of the risk group strong incentives to adopt a not-in-my-backyard attitude.

Because people in the risk group have more economic and political power than do members of the benefit group, the expansion of nuclear energy in the developing world seems to face great difficulties. Further complicating matters is a widespread skepticism in the developing world regarding government in general, and in particular government's competence to monitor the nuclear industry. This is a skepticism that characterizes both the risk group and the benefit group.

Political calculations. In China, the central government immediately after Fukushima stopped assessing and approving new nuclear power projects. With the passage of time, some local governments have become eager to resume nuclear projects for the sake of economic growth, but the central government has remained hesitant to grant go-aheads. On May 31 of this year, however, indications emerged that the central government might resume steps toward nuclear expansion. But targets for nuclear power generation seem to be falling sharply. In early 2011 it was envisioned that China's nuclear power capacity would reach 86 gigawatts by 2020, but current forecasts call for an expansion to as little as 60 gigawatts.

This downward adjustment manifests the caution that the central government feels it must exercise in the post-Fukushima era. The central government has spent a great deal of time, of course, weighing the wishes of both the risk group and the benefit group. The government's calculation essentially involves the economic and environmental gains of nuclear energy versus the economic and environmental losses if a nuclear accident occurs — no matter how unlikely such an accident might be.

China has a number of tools at its disposal beyond nuclear energy to help it address climate change. These include the further development of lower-carbon energy sources like natural gas, or zero-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar. The government can also acquiesce in local governments' unconventional measures, like widespread blackouts, to achieve targeted reductions of carbon dioxide emissions — and in fact already did so in late 2010. But if just one serious nuclear accident occurs in China, even if it is not as severe as Fukushima — and especially if it occurs in one of the three most prosperous areas in the country (the Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze Delta, and the Bohai Bay area) — it will be an economic disaster for the country and a political disaster for the central government. Indeed, such an accident might be more than the government could afford.