In what is an echo of a previous excuse, no writing due to debating commitments stands as the famine of this blog limps along. In the same competition as the one previously noted, Davin and I debated the motion 'This House rejects the use of nuclear power as a solution to the energy crisis' - we opposed this motion. The speech was as follows;
Ladies, gentlemen, esteemed adjudicator, members of the proposition and of the audience. Mr. Clarke and I strongly advocate that nuclear power not be disregarded as part of the solution to our oncoming energy crisis. Not only do we vehemently criticise the naive position of the proposition, and the consequential beliefs by pure association, but we also accuse them of illogical, alarmist and biased ideas. To justify this I will first focus on the current coal, natural gas and oil situations with their nuclear answers, followed by the questions of nuclear waste and nuclear proliferation. Mr. Clarke will then further expound on this by addressing some seemingly forgotten facts of the so called renewable energy sources, again with their relative nuclear answers, followed by exploring our ever increasing understanding and improvement of the fission process. He will then finish with the always fragile topic of terrorism.
Commonly held assumption one; radiation from Nuclear Power Plants is infinitely worse for your health than current CO2 emissions. Ladies and gentlemen, in the course of this debate alone each person here will be struck by roughly 60 million particles of this same type of radiation. And this is lauded simply as ’background radiation’ - because it has no discernable affects. For someone living close to a nuclear plant, their radiation exposure goes up by 1%. The reality is, for a given amount of energy produced, coal ash, for example, is far more radioactive than nuclear radiation. This is because the quantity of coal ash is literally millions of times greater. If the skull and cross-bone dangers of radiation card is to be played, I ask you to cast your eye on the abundantly present coal industry we currently face. Therefore, this argument is a non-starter.
Commonly held assumption two; this is nuclear technology, and it can explode! Ladies and gentlemen, this statement is founded on zero evidence other than the attendance of the word nuclear. Mr. Clarke is going to go into further detail about how nuclear power plants are extremely safe in his speech but a key point to be made is that the uranium enriched in nuclear plants cannot explode, it is not even nearly weapons grade. But, if this argument is to be allowed - consider a natural gas tanker - which transports natural gas cooled and liquefied to around -160 degrees Celsius overseas in an extremely expensive and extremely fragile procedure. These glorified thermos flasks have the explosive potential of a hydrogen bomb. Why do the proposition not speak out about the deadly killing potential of such a device, which harbours on our ports regularly? The paradoxical hyprocritical double standard is obvious for all to see.
The third assumption I will address is the propounded ‘unsolved problem’ of nuclear waste. Nuclear waste comes in what are called spent fuel rods. Of which only 5% is ‘high-level waste’ ie stuff that is actually debatably dangerous. Debatable because when controlled, parts are also be used for medical purposes. The other 95% is the same uranium you dig out of the earth, and countries such as France and Canada recycle parts of this to extract energy from the waste.
To put the scale of nuclear waste into perspective, if ALL the electricity you will ever use in your lifetime were to come from nuclear, the waste would fill a coke can. In contrast, in one day a coal plant (1 GW) uses 8,000 tonnes of coal, translating into 19,000 tonnes of CO2 with no containment method, pumped into our breathing air. Many often hark and scowl at the proposal that nuclear waste be stored for a thousand years, but compare this to solid wastes through coal burning, such as arsenic and chromium - these don’t have ‘half-lives’ and cannot be stored until it is safe, they last forever. And there is no conceivable way to isolate waste that pumps out roughly three tonnes of ash per second. Nuclear waste, to the contrary, is extremely controllable and myths of green goo seeping into our drinking water is only propounded by the anti-nuclear priesthood. Is it not logical that the waste from our energy be stored rather than littered into our air? Taking France as an example. In a 50 year period, the most nuclear intensive country in the world has all their waste stored in one room, in 50 years.
Can the proposition really be telling us that nuclear energy, a huge branch of scientific technology, be disregarded whilst we wait it out, during which time coal plants continue to make our air unfit to breath, during which time we continue to rely on corrupt political regimes for our energy, during which time price volatility for energy fluctuates in the rising pattern it has in the past decade, until comparably inefficient and unreliable renewable energy is optimised? Even then it would not be enough. Therefore, this is not good enough! I remind the audience that we, the opposition, are not cancelling out renewable technology, but we are advocating that nuclear is the greenest alternative to coal, natural gas and oil that can support the base load of our growing electricity consumption as countries such as China and India continue to grow, and they can do this reliably, comparatively cheaply, and are not temperamental.
On the issue of nuclear weaponry, I simply ask the proposition what their supposed plan would be for the decommissioning of nuclear weapons. Whilst enriching uranium to weapons grade is extremely difficult, using it for fuel is simple. As an example, half of the nuclear energy used by the USA comes from the decommissioning of outdated Cold War Russian warheads, without which, they would still be a threat to us all. No other technology is so strongly an advocate of nuclear non-proliferation than nuclear energy.
Ladies and gentlemen, the proposition have signed their subscription and joined this auction of hyperbole and credulity surrounding nuclear energy propagated falsely by the mass media. They are putting illogical principles before facts in an aprioristic style. We must polemicise our way out of this religious type taboo where it is blasphemic to correlate nuclear with progress and good. The point is ladies and gentlemen, not that non-renewable energy sources are bad, or even that renewable energy sources are inadequate, but that the very criticisms of nuclear energy are ill-founded, propagandist tripe used to manipulate your interpretations of the technology. And we, the opposition, ONLY ask you to not disregard it completely, to fit it into the equation somewhere, as the proposition refuse to do, in our own energy crisis. Thank you.
The debate took place on the 15th December and Davin and I defeated the motion and advanced to the next round.
