International panel FAQs on nuclear power:
What are the costs to the consumer of nuclear energy?
Are marketplace lenders shunning nuclear energy?
For how long do the various forms of nuclear waste remain dangerously radioactive?
Is community acceptance of nuclear waste the main barrier to nuclear power?
Can Australia play a role as champion of safe nuclear power?
Has nuclear energy proven to be ‘very safe' as claimed by Mr Murdoch this week? 31
To what extent has the risk of major accidents been resolved?
Is there any published assessment of the risk of terrorist attack on nuclear power plants?
Will people be able to opt out of receiving any energy generated by nuclear power plants?
What is the cost of nuclear energy, including building, mining, transport, safety, enrichment, storage of waste, remediation and decommissioning?
Professor Steve Thomas: This is a difficult question to answer as it requires a large number of assumptions to be made, which in the past have proved difficult, and forecasts have often been very inaccurate, almost invariably far too optimistic.
The main cost of a kWh of nuclear electricity is the fixed cost associated with building the plant (usually about two thirds). This has three main components: the construction cost, the cost of borrowing and the reliability. The first, construction cost is widely discussed and the ‘nuclear revival' is based on the premise that the cost of new designs will be much lower and more predictable than in the past. However, this is a claim that the nuclear industry has been making for more than 30 years and so far it has not been fulfilled. The real cost of building nuclear plants has gone up, not down and still construction programmes are going off-track. The Olkiluoto order in Finland, widely touted as the project that would demonstrate the ability of the nuclear industry to build to time and (low) cost is already going seriously wrong and little more than a year into construction, it is a year behind schedule and well over budget.
The second element, much less discussed is the cost of borrowing. Reforms of electricity industries worldwide have tried to introduce competition into the electricity generation business and, if this works well, this will mean that if things go wrong in a nuclear project, it will be the plant owners that pay, not the consumers as was the case in the past. This increased risk on plant owners is reflected in much higher costs of borrowing because the threat that plant owners could go bankrupt is demonstrably real and banks risk losing their money.
The third element, again little discussed, is plant reliability. The more output a plant can produce, the more thinly the fixed costs can be spread. The nuclear industry has always predicted very high reliability for nuclear plants, typically 90 per cent, but this has seldom been realised and, 15 years ago, the average reliability worldwide was about 70 per cent. Improvements have been made and now the worldwide average is greater than 80 per cent but still, even new designs are having reliability problems. The predecessor to the Areva EPR (the design used at Olkiluoto) was the N4 and in the first four years of operation of the four units of that design built, the reliability was only 45 per cent.
The operating cost (operation, fuel and maintenance) is also little discussed and while generally lower than for fossil fuel stations should not be discounted. Fuel is a small element of this and mining is a small element of the fuel cost so if the uranium price were to stay high, it would not make a big difference. Of course there may be other impacts, for example, if high prices encouraged the mining of low grade uranium ore, the environmental impact of mining would be much higher. Enrichment costs have also proved relatively stable because of large enrichment capacities.
Non-fuel operating costs per kWh are much higher than expected and, of course, this is influenced by any need for safety upgrades and to deal with equipment failures.
If waste disposal and decommissioning costs are on the scale forecast by the industry and if the cost of electricity includes an element to pay for this which is kept separate from company accounts so it will not be lost if the company fails, these costs are also not a major element of the kWh cost of electricity. However, there is minimal experience of decommissioning of large commercial nuclear plants that have operated for a prolonged period (the materials have been heavily exposed to radiation) and there is little if any experience of disposing of waste, especially the longest lived and most dangerous wastes. So these estimates must be seen as little more than guesses and, if the history of the nuclear industry is a good guide, could be well below real costs. Even before there is actual experience of these operations, estimates are going up rapidly and, for example, the estimated cost decommissioning Britain's oldest reactors has gone up by a factor of about six in only 15 years. This could create huge problems for a plant owner that has taken money from consumers to pay for these operations, only to find half way through the life of the plant that the cost is dramatically higher than predicted. Companies would have to significantly increase their prices to pay these extra costs (increasing price might not be possible in a competitive market). This will be seen as a major risk by financiers, again reflected in the cost of borrowing.
What are the costs to the consumer of nuclear energy?
Professor Steve Thomas: Governments typically claim to follow the ‘polluter pays' principle, which would imply that consumers of nuclear electricity should pay all the costs listed above. In practice, when things go wrong with nuclear power, costs are passed on to taxpayers (the government has to pay costs that the companies can't meet) or, worse still, costs are passed on to future taxpayers. For example, the cost of decommissioning existing nuclear facilities in the United Kingdom will fall on the taxpayers of the day, when the costs are incurred. On current plans, this could mean taxpayers 100 years or more in the future will be paying to decommission today's nuclear facilities: clearly a morally indefensible position.
Are marketplace lenders shunning nuclear energy?
Professor Steve Thomas: Perhaps it would be more accurate to say marketplace lenders are shunning nuclear because of the risk to their investment that these concerns bring. As argued above, in the past a company lending money to build a nuclear power plant faced a low risk, because if anything went wrong, the consumer would pay. The risks are the same as they have always been but now a company owning a nuclear plant could go bankrupt and financiers would lose their money. This was very clearly expressed by the Thomas Capps, Chief Executive Officer of Dominion, a company widely reported as being likely to order a new nuclear plant soon. He said in 2005: "We aren't going to build a nuclear plant anytime soon. Standard & Poor's and Moody's would have a heart attack. And my chief financial officer would, too." The investment in new nuclear power plants in Europe have been described by the consultancy UBS as "a potentially courageous 60-year bet on fuel prices, discount rates and promised efficiency gains."4
Even if they would lend money, the interest rate might be so high (to reflect the risk) as to make nuclear power hopelessly uneconomic.
4 UBS 2005
Is it possible to control the nuclear fuel supply process so that countries can't divert nuclear fuel to make nuclear weapons?
Professor Steve Thomas: The non-proliferation regime is necessary and important but there can be no guarantees it will be infallible. Countries such as Israel, South Africa, North Korea, Pakistan and India have all acquired nuclear weapons under the cover of civil nuclear programmes.Mycle Schneider: The technical capabilities to control nuclear facilities and nuclear materials have been increasing steadily. However, the IAEA's [International Atomic Energy Agency's] and EURATOM's Nuclear Safeguards systems have never been designed to prevent diversion for military purposes but rather to make the detection of a diversion sufficiently probable to deter any diversion in the first place. The national authorities of the countries that sign a verification agreement with the IAEA are responsible for the physical protection of materials and facilities covered by the agreement as well as for the accountancy and control.
The safeguards system can only detect something that has already taken place. There is no feasible technical possibility to gain a 100 per cent detection capability. The probability to go undetected, if difficult to put a figure to, is in fact relatively high. Confidential IAEA Safeguards Implementation Reports have been full of technical problems reaching from blank films in surveillance cameras to operator inspection refusals because of insurance issues. History has shown that the IAEA has missed substantial developments in member states signatory to the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty]. For example, up to the first Gulf war, Iraq (an NPT signatory) developed the first steps towards a substantial uranium enrichment project on two large sites that were unknown to the IAEA.
The most frightening developments stem from the Khan network. The former head of the Pakistani nuclear program admitted transmission of highly sensitive information to various countries including Libya (an NPT signatory) and North Korea (then also an NPT signatory who quit the NPT in 2003).
History has also shown that several countries, including Pakistan, India and Israel, have diverted materials and facilities that were earmarked as civil. The idea to export nuclear materials to a country like Indonesia that has a broad terrorism problem seems to be particularly adventurous.
The proliferation proof nuclear fuel system is not realistic. New concepts like fuel leasing – for example the Russian sponsored concept of leasing compact fuel elements for the entire life of a reactor and taking it back after – do not change the principles of the problem. Limited technical capacities are only one side of the issue. The political will of the IAEA member states, of the states that export nuclear materials and equipments and of the states that are on the receiving ends is crucial.
In the past the practice has shown that exporting states, including Australia, has willingly accepted a system that is all but a guarantee to exclude that physically Australian uranium gets mixed up in the French nuclear fuel system that does not distinguish between civil and military uses. The 1978 trilateral Agreement between France, EURATOM and the IAEA only stipulates that an equivalent quantity of material remains under safeguards and clearly favours the conditions of the nuclear weapon state France. Australia has never insisted on anything else but the assurance that an equivalent quantity of Australian uranium remains under peaceful end-use conditions.
The NPT member states generally have shown a certain hypocrisy in the past by not giving the IAEA urgently needed additional funds to carry out more effective verification activities – the IAEA had many years of zero budget growth prior to 11 September 2001 – and complaining of the lack of efficiency after.
For how long do the various forms of nuclear waste remain dangerously radioactive?
Mycle Schneider: There are radioactive isotopes or radio-nuclides of half-lives varying from hours to millions of years. During a half-live the radioactivity naturally decays by half of the original value. Depending on their respective radiotoxicity, radionuclides can represent a significant health risk for many times their half-life. The impact of radioactivity on health and the environment depends on the physical and chemical form and the type of radiation, its radioisotopic composition of radioactive substance as well as on the way it is integrated into the human body or the environment. For example, plutonium particles inhaled can cause lung cancer in quantities of a few millionth of a gram while its penetrating radiation is low and can be shielded relatively easily. Plutonium is also a highly strategic heavy metal that is very dense. The 6kg that were contained in the Nagasaki bomb would fit into a coke can.
Significant radionuclides in nuclear wastes include the radioactive form of hydrogen tritium with a half-life of 12.3 years. Tritium behaves like water, including in the human body, and is extremely difficult to contain. The radiological half life of plutonium is about 24,000 years and the biological half life is about 20 years for liver and 50 years for skeleton. Plutonium represents about one per cent of spent nuclear fuel. A standard light water reactor produces about 250kg of plutonium per year. A large scale reprocessing plant separates several metric tons of plutonium per year.
Other significant radionuclides contained in nuclear waste include iodine-129 with a half-life of 16 million years that is released into the air and the sea in vast quantities by reprocessing plants or remains contained in spent fuel. Iodine fixes on the thyroid and the short-lived isotope iodine-131 released from Chernobyl has generated hundreds of cancer cases in children and adults. Technetium-99 (half-life 214,000 years) discharges from the UK Sellafield plant have led to particular concern.
Technetium concentrations in crustacean – particularly in lobster – reached 13 times the European Council Food Intervention Level (CFIL) in the vicinity of Sellafield, travelled by sea as far as Norway and has concentrated there in fish, shellfish, sediments and aquatic plants, sometimes exceeding CFILs several times.
Is community acceptance of nuclear waste the main barrier to nuclear power?
Antony Froggatt: It is clear that nuclear waste is one of the key issues for public acceptance for nuclear power, but it is by no means the only issue. Other issues include:
- Nuclear safety: Following the accident at Chernobyl in 1986 nuclear power orders were cancelled across the world.
- Nuclear economics: The high cost of nuclear power has stopped private and public utilities choosing to put nuclear power in their energy mix.
- Nuclear waste is an important issue for the public, both because of the scientific uncertainties over nuclear waste disposal, due to the polarised debate over the impact of radionuclides on human health and the longevity of many of the radio-isotopes involved and because it is in many countries the only visible 'dirty' side of nuclear power. As uranium is often mined and made into nuclear fuel in another country, the disposal of nuclear waste highlights to many people the environmental consequence of nuclear power.
What guarantees exist about groundwater supplies at proposed waste dump sites both in Australia and around the world?
Antony Froggatt: It is not possible to answer this question either for Australia or for other proposed sites around the world. Some radioactive waste requires isolation from the environment for thousands and even hundreds of thousands of years; it is impossible to give any guarantees and even if they were it is highly questionable of what value they would be.
What guarantee is there that levels of security and safety for the storage of nuclear waste in relation to governance and environmental/geological conditions will remain the same in hundreds of years time?
Antony Froggatt: The intergenerational aspects of nuclear waste storage or disposal raise a number of important questions. Given than some waste needs to be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years, it is difficult to know what guarantees could or should be given.
Can Australia play a role as champion of safe nuclear power?
Professor Steve Thomas: No. If Australia is to build nuclear power plants, it should only be using technology that meets the highest standards. The plants should be built, operated and maintained to similar high standards. However, this applies to any other country seeking to build new plants. Australia is not in a position to demand from vendors higher standards than apply elsewhere in the world.
Has nuclear energy proven to be ‘very safe' as claimed by Mr Murdoch this week? 31
Mycle Schneider: The term 'very safe' needs to be defined. The Oxford American Dictionaries define ‘safe' as "not likely to cause or lead to harm or injury; not involving danger or risk". The enhancement 'very safe' could therefore stand for "highly unlikely to cause or lead to harm or injury; never involving danger or risk". Considering its history of accidents and near-misses, it is hard to understand how anyone could then label nuclear power as 'very safe'.
The 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine has illustrated once again the terrifying practice to account for human detriment in terms of number of visible body bags. An expert controversy about how many people were and will be killed was sparked by the anniversary of the most terrible accident of the industrial age.
Thousands of coal mining workers get killed in Chinese coal mines every year: an appalling and totally unacceptable safety level. By the way, this is a situation that has never seemed to disturb the non-Chinese companies that are producing far more than half of the Chinese exports and consuming considerable amounts of coal-fired electricity.
However, as the exact type and extent of future impacts of the emissions of greenhouse gases are hardly known yet, a lot of the impacts of radioactive emissions are unknown yet. Worse, the established consequences are far from part of the collective consciousness. While the Chernobyl death toll is still a matter of debate, it is established that several tens of thousands of people around the planet will likely die from fallout.32
Besides the 'body count', the devastating effects of the disaster on the environment, on the economy, on some 400,000 dislocated people, and the general state of health in the most affected areas are well documented but not well known. In fact, 40 per cent of the European territory was contaminated to various degrees and the radioactive fallout continues to impact agriculture and food management in several Western European countries. Twenty years after the accident, highly contaminated game in Germany, reindeer in Scandinavia and mushrooms in various countries cannot be consumed. About 200,000 sheep in the UK have to undergo a complex pasture management scheme in order to allow them on clean pastures for the natural decay of radioactivity taken up on contaminated pastures before.
The Chernobyl-4 reactor generated power for two years, four months, and four days but human suffering, health detriment and environmental pollution will go on for generation after generation. Who would dare to say it was worth the risk?
While an 'identical accident' as in the Chernobyl type reactor is unlikely to take place in any other type of reactor, an accident that releases the same amount of radiation of even more is perfectly plausible. Worse, many units operate in densely populated areas that would make the effects of an accident even much more severe than in the case of Chernobyl.
But also the normal operation of nuclear power plants leads to radiological risks. A very large research project into the impact of radiation on worker health published the results in 2005:
"On the basis of these estimates, 1-2% of deaths from cancer among workers in this cohort may be attributable to radiation. Conclusions: These estimates, from the largest study of nuclear workers ever conducted, are higher than, but statistically compatible with, the risk estimates used for current radiation protection standards. The results suggest that there is a small excess risk of cancer, even at the low doses and dose rates typically received by nuclear workers in this study".33
Nuclear power will never be 'very safe'.
31 Paul Starick and Christopher Russell, Murdoch slams lack of
planning, November 15, 2006, Courier Mail (Brisbane)
http://www.news.com.au/sundaymail/story/0,,20766452-953,00.html :
Mr
Murdoch, chairman and chief executive officer of News Corporation
(publisher of The Courier-Mail), was in Adelaide yesterday for a
shareholder information meeting. Speaking after the meeting, he said
nuclear energy had proven to be "very safe", if expensive. "It takes
time ... but we should be getting on with it. Right away," he said. He
conceded waste disposal was "a problem"for community acceptance of
nuclear power but it should not be a large barrier. Mr Murdoch also
said climate change was too serious an issue to ignore and it was up to
private enterprise to act. News Corporation was determined to take a
responsible position on reducing greenhouse gases, he said.
32 see
for example: Ian Fairlie, et al. The Other Report on Chernobyl,
commissioned by Rebecca Harms, MEP and the Combecher-Altner and
Hatzfeld Foundations, Berlin, Brussels, Kiev, April 2006,
http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/dokbin/118/118499.the_other_report_on_chernobyl_torch@ru.pdf
33 Elisabeth Cardis, et al. Risk of cancer after low doses of ionising radiation: retrospective cohort study in 15 countries, British Medical Journal, 29 June 2005
To what extent has the risk of major accidents been resolved?
Peter Bradford: It seems likely that decades of operating experience with existing plants will have led to safety improvements in the design of plants now under consideration. However, the unfavourable economics of nuclear power also lead to considerable pressure to reduce costs in ways that may offset some of the safety gains. Without substantial operating experience with the AP 1000, definitive statements about its safety performance are not to be relied upon.
Is there any published assessment of the risk of terrorist attack on nuclear power plants?
Mycle Schneider/Peter Bradford: The risk of terrorist attacks on nuclear facilities can be seen under the following aspects:
- the degree of vulnerability of nuclear facilities;
- the potential effect of an attack;
- the probability of nuclear facilities being targeted by terrorists.
Nuclear facilities are highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks. While their radioactive inventory is usually more limited, nuclear shipments are by far the most vulnerable. The safety of most nuclear facilities crucially depends on parts of the system that are easily accessible and highly sensitive to insider sabotage (eg, main steam line, power supply in nuclear reactors).
In a landmark document, in 2003, eight leading nuclear analysts published a detailed analysis of the potential hazard of a lack of cooling accident in a spent fuel pool:
"Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircalloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel's volatile fission products, including 30-year half-life 137 Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl."37
The authors quote the Swiss regulatory authorities as having stated that:
"From the construction engineering aspect, nuclear power plants (worldwide) are not protected against the effects of warlike acts or terrorist attacks from the air … one cannot rule out the possibility that fuel elements in the fuel pool or the primary cooling system would be damaged and this would result in a release of radioactive substances."
The largest radiotoxic inventories are in spent fuel pools, close to nuclear reactors and in particular at reprocessing plants that can contain the equivalent of over 100 reactor cores in the form of spent fuel and several dozen tons of separated plutonium. Analysis on the potential impact of an airplane crash on a spent fuel pool at the French La Hague site or on the high-level waste tanks at the UK Sellafield site have shown that radioactive releases could reach several dozens times the amount released during the Chernobyl disaster.38
There are numerous accounts of alleged interest by terrorist organisations in nuclear facilities. The latest include a statement by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the British intelligence service MI5, who stated on 9 November 2006:
"Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices; tomorrow's threat may include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology."
In Australia reportedly there has also been interest in the only nuclear reactor in the country, the research facility at Lucas Height. According to the BBC, the reactor, in November 2005, “was a possible target for a group of men arrested on terrorism charges”.39
Additional analysis has been published, for example, by the Oxford Research Group.40 Also see the Nuclear Terrorism link on the website of the Nuclear Control Institute.
37 Robert Alvarez, et al. Reducing the Hazards from Stored Spent Power Reactor Fuel in the United States, Science and Global Security, 21 April 2003, see http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/pdf/11_1Alvarez.pdf
38 see http://www.wise-paris.org/english/ourbriefings_pdf/011029AircraftCrashSellafield3.pdf and http://www.wise-paris.org/english/ourbriefings_pdf/010926BriefNRA1v4.pdf
39 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4434270.stm
40 a list of various briefings can be found at http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefings.htm
How much water is used by the current generation of nuclear power plants, and what are the expectations for water use by the next generation of nuclear reactors?
Antony Froggatt: The cooling water needs of one of the British 1170 MW power stations are 108 million litres per hour41.
The Generation-III EPR (European Pressurised Water Reactor) destined for the French Flamanville site projects the use of about 270,000 m3 of fresh water per year. The unit will also pump 67 m3 per second (!) of water out of the sea that are use to evacuate the heat of the tertiary circuit and re-injected into the sea.
41 Nuclear Electric plc, brochure for Hinkley Point.
It's been suggested that a number of nuclear power plants closed in the European summer this year due to high water temperatures and other factors. Is that likely to be an issue in Australia if we go with nuclear power? If so, how?
Professor Steve Thomas/Antony Froggatt: Nuclear power plants do require large amounts of cooling water either from the sea or a river. Where sea-cooling is used, temperature is not likely to be an issue because fluctuations in sea-temperature re relatively small and a nuclear power station would have a negligible impact on the sea temperature. For a river water cooled plant, if the ambient temperature is very high, the river will be warmer than forecast and could reduce the output of the plant. From an environmental point of view, if there is a drought and high temperatures, the nuclear plant if operated could warm the water to such an extent as to damage life in the river. The level of the water could also drop to a level that caused problems.
A more expensive method of cooling and one which uses some of the output of the plant, but which requires less water, is a cooling tower.
In general, when a nuclear plant is sited, the characteristics of the cooling water will be known. Problems in France have arisen because the weather has been hotter and drier than anticipated.
The impacts of climate change will not be restricted to higher temperatures as a general trend in the increasing frequency of extreme weather patterns is also expected. Nuclear power plants have in the past been susceptible to storms and flooding. Furthermore nuclear power plants are also vulnerable to disruptions in the grid as a result of storms or flooding.
Antony Froggatt/ Peter Bradford: An adequate water supply for cooling is a must but depends on reactor size, heat load and whether a closed cycle with cooling towers is used. A large transmission link is also a must (both to transmit power and to assure power for safety systems when the plant is shut down). Proximity to population centers is not necessary and is undesirable from a safety standpoint.
Some advanced reactor designs (the Pebble Bed and the GT-MHR) may be able to be sited underground which would be a major safety advance.
Is a nuclear power plant able to follow demand/load, or does it simply run at a flat output? If so, how much energy then is wasted?
Mycle Schneider: Generally speaking nuclear power plants are not designed to do load following but to operate at stable output as much as possible. However, current French reactors are adapted to do load following, which consists in the modification of power output according to a pre-defined level on a daily basis. For safety reasons load following has been restricted on units loaded with plutonium fuels. The so-called Generation-III reactors most likely will not be designed to do load following. They are supposed to operate in base load only, which means is as many hours as technically possible per year. The combination of huge base load overcapacity and the high share of nuclear power in the grid in France (close to 80%) has pushed the state utility to find innovative solutions: one consisted in large scale load following, the other in the shut-down of certain plants … over the weekend.The problems linked to the load following practice are less linked to waste of energy than to economics and safety. A nuclear plant operates more safely (less transient prone load manipulations) and more economically (high capital cost, lower share of operating costs) when used in base load. It is therefore almost certain that some of the current generation French nuclear plants will not be replaced by new nuclear plants in order to lower the nuclear share in the base load.
Does Australia's electricity grid have the capacity to have nuclear power plants added to it and what are the problems?
Mycle Schneider: In principle, whether a nuclear plant or a coal or gas fired plant of the same size is connected to the grid has little impact on the grid. There are a number of conventional power plant projects of 1,000 MW and even 1,500 MW underway in Australia. The question is rather whether to have the centralised expansion of capacity that ultimately always leads to large-scale power transport needs (including inherent large investments and power losses) versus decentralised energy generation.
Will people be able to opt out of receiving any energy generated by nuclear power plants?
Professor Steve Thomas: It may be that, in a competitive retail electricity market, there will be ‘green' electricity suppliers who only buy wholesale power from sustainable sources and retail it to consumers who choose ‘green electricity'. However, industry and commerce would be unlikely to have any interest in making such a moral judgement – they will only be interested in price. Nor, if experience in Europe is anything to go by, would most residential consumers. So if there was a cost penalty to green electricity, it could account for only a small part of the market and would have no impact on nuclear (which in most countries with nuclear power makes up much less than half of all electricity supplies). Of course, if green electricity was cheaper than other forms of electricity, there would be no reason for the electricity industry to build anything other than green sources.
While it is probably right that people should have the ability to choose to buy green electricity, relying on personal choices for such an important issue seems morally questionable. The impact of ‘dirty' electricity is felt by everyone, not just the individual consumer. Consumers are not given the choice of whether their sewage is treated properly or discharged raw to the sea so why should they have to choose between ‘clean' and ‘dirty' electricity?
Who are the independent experts?
- Antony Froggatt, international energy and nuclear policy consultant, UK (panel Chair)
- Stephen Thomas, Professor of Energy Policy, Public Services International Research Unit, Business School, University of Greenwich, UK
- David Milborrow, energy and renewable energy studies consultant, UK
- Mycle Schneider, international consultant on energy and nuclear policy, France
- Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member, US
Read the independent panel's biographies and full report on nuclear power
What is Greenpeace's position on the use of nuclear power to stop climate change?
Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change..
What is being done to stop uranium mining and exports and nuclear waste dumps?
The organisations leading the work on Australia's involvement in the nuclear chain are:
- Friends of the Earth
- Australian Conservation Foundation
- Medical Association for the Prevention of War
- Northern Territory Environment Centre
- Arid Lands Environment Centre
Contact these organisations for information on how you can take action on the many issues relating to the nuclear chain in Australia. Internationally we are working to stop the entire nuclear cycle - from uranium mining through to nuclear power stations and nuclear weapons. In Australia, we provide media commentary on this issue and background support to organisations leading the work to stop the nuclear dumps and uranium mining and exports. We also promote clean, renewable energy and highlight the risks posed by nuclear power.
