Nuclear power is making a comeback. And despite a decades-old debate over its environmental impact, the advocates of nuclear power seem to be winning.
In February, the US president, Barack Obama, unveiled $8 billion (Dh29.4bn) in loan guarantees to break ground on the construction of the first nuclear power plant in the US in 30 years, saying the country had to move past "the same old debates between Left and Right, between environmentalists and entrepreneurs". Mr Obama said the plant would reduce carbon pollution by 14.5 million tonnes each year when compared with a similar coal plant - the equivalent of taking 3.5 million cars off the road.
Proponents of nuclear power argue that it is clean and essentially renewable, allowing nations dependent on fossil fuels to wean themselves off that addiction. Since nuclear power plants do not rely on the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity, they do not produce greenhouse gases or nitrogen and sulphur oxides as waste products during operation. Some greenhouse gases are produced as part of the overall plant construction and nuclear fuel cycle. Mining and milling of uranium ore also can produce greenhouse gases, but these are considered moderate in comparison to fossil fuels, and the UAE intends to import all of its fuel.
And although fossil fuels will eventually run out, unused nuclear fuel often can be separated from spent fuel and reprocessed, effectively making a nuclear power plant a source of partially renewable energy. The plants produce some measure of radioactive effluent, and the amount needs to be monitored by regulatory agencies, but the levels are lower than the overall level of cosmic background radiation that affect human beings every day. An average nuclear reactor produces between 20 tonnes and 30 tonnes of radioactive fuel per year.
The average annual dose of radiation when a person is living within 80 kilometres of a nuclear-powered plant is about 0.009 millirem, a unit used to measure radiation levels, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. A 1,000-rem dose is fatal. By contrast, living the same distance from a coal power plant results in 0.03 millirem in radiation exposure. Simply living at sea level exposes people to 26 millirems of cosmic radiation every year, and one year's average TV watching exposes a person to 1 millirem.
But the UAE will need to grapple with a number of as yet unresolved issues. One primary concern is waste heat. Nuclear plants often use large amounts of water for cooling, and the UAE's plants will be built in Braka, on the shores of the Gulf, raising concerns that water ejected back into the sea at high temperature could cause damage to marine life. The Emirates Nuclear Energy Corp (Enec) expects there to be a "moderate" effect on the local marine ecology, according to its environmental impact assessment.
Another challenge the country has to grapple with is the disposal of radioactive waste. As part of the nuclear fuel cycle, radioactive waste accumulates on the fuel rods and needs to be disposed of. Most plants in the US store radioactive waste on-site as plans are made for more permanent storage facilities, a politically contentious topic because few states want the burden of storing radioactive waste.
"There is still no environmentally appropriate programme of dealing with any form of radioactive waste," according to a Greenpeace study on nuclear energy. "This problem is made worse on a daily basis by the continual production of radioactive waste." Nuclear experts say the best location for storing the waste is in a geologically stable region deep underground. Enec, in its nuclear policy document, says the UAE would prefer to lease the spent fuel to "relieve it of the long-term requirement of safeguarding spent fuel".
In the event such a deal cannot be worked out, Enec plans on building long-term facilities to store and manage the spent fuel under international waste-control regulations. Enec also says the UAE would prefer to use foreign services that reduce the level of nuclear waste through the reprocessing of spent fuel. The UAE will not itself consider reprocessing fuel. The UAE also needs to deal with setting up a storage site for decommissioned nuclear facilities and equipment. Decommissioned nuclear reactors would be a challenge to dispose of and their residual radioactivity could leave a "permanent, irreversible, potentially cumulative and regional" impact, according to Enec.
The last major concern is the potential for accidents that can cause disastrous, long-term damage to nearby areas. Experts argue that the two major reactor accidents - Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and Chernobyl, Ukraine - led to improved safety standards in nuclear power plants. The World Nuclear Association argued that "of all the accidents and incidents, only the Chernobyl accident resulted in radiation doses to the public greater than those resulting from the exposure to natural sources. Other incidents [and one 'accident'] have been completely confined to the plant".
Agreements such as the International Atomic Energy Agency's Convention on Nuclear Safety establish safety benchmarks for countries to aim for. @Email:kshaheen@thenational.ae