The Arabs and nuclear energy
Issandr El AmraniA few years ago, nuclear power was all the rage in the Arab world. Gamal Mubarak tried to boost his own statesman credentials by announcing that Egypt would build its first commercial nuclear plant. Soon most of the GCC followed suit, Jordan, Morocco and Algeria began feasibility studies, and it looked like the entire region would get on the nuclear bandwagon. Much of this nuclear talk had a whiff of nationalism about it, as if nuclear plants were as much prestige projects as an answer to skyrocketing electricity consumption (that for instance caused rolling brownouts last summer in Egypt and could very well do so again). The context of Iran's nuclear weapons program led to a spate of stories about how this was a preliminary to a region-wide nuclear arms race, even though the two issues are quite separate.
The US and other Western powers, as well as countries with solid nuclear experience like Russia, Kazakhstan or South Korea, generally rejoiced at this news because the Arab countries would be concluding juicy contracts with their firms. They began to compete for who would get the contracts. When Egypt's own $160m feasibility study was carried out by an Australian firm called WorleyParsons rather than Bechtel, as initially planned, it was said it was because the firm's local consultant was Mounir Thabet, the brother of Suzanne Mubarak (others joked it was because Bechtel had recently hired David Welch, a former US Ambassador in Cairo that Mubarak could not stand.) The US in particular was hoping to sell General Electric and Westinghouse's latest type of nuclear reactor, which they said made the misuse of spent fuel to generate weapons-grade material impossible and would grant control of the fuel cycle to the West. (This may or may not have been a selling point of the reactors for a depressed American nuclear industry had lobbied for with Dick Cheney's secretive energy task force and produced the Bush administration nuclear-pushing GNEP.)
Then the revolutions came. It's not clear whether Egypt or other countries outside the GCC will pursue their nuclear policies anymore. For one, they are facing serious fiscal problems and may not have the resources to invest in plants that cost multiples of billions of dollars. The political (and economic) motives for the nuclear project may also change. And of course, there's Japan. I don't know enough about what happened in Japan to tell whether it's a universal risk: the plants affected, after all, were all 1970s models and it's been reported newer models do not have their safety flaws. Nonetheless, it's quite a warning for those of us who thought nuclear energy, overall, was fairly safe.
I have been a big fan of nuclear energy, as used by France for instance. It makes sense for Middle Eastern states to develop electricity production that does not rely on burning fossil fuels they could be exporting or using in plastics plants or refineries. Of course that could be renewables — if you can eventually get them to be more productive. There remains a strategic argument for developing the indigenous technology know-how behind nuclear power, too: it will make a nuclear weapons program substantially easier to start. Any country would bear that in mind, especially in a region a war-prone as this one and in which a theological state already has a substantial arsenal which the current foreign minister has threatened to use (i.e. Israel.)
The Heinrich Boll Stigtung, the think-tank and NGO arm of the German Green party, has recently translated a book on the risks of nuclear energy into Arabic. You can get it here (as well as in English). The latest issue of their magazine, Perspectives, has a debate on the issue of nuclear energy in the Arab world (again from the critical angle.) I'm not sure that it's worth abandoning nuclear power altogether (that's a debate the world is having post-Japan) but it's an issue that is worth having a wider debate about in the Arab world, learning from the evolution of the debate in Europe and elsewhere since the 1950s.
Reader Comments (8)
Nuclear power plants are not as cost effective as they may appear. The amount of energy required to build them and dismantle them after their lifespan is about what they produce. Then there's the issue of what to do with the waste something that doesn't go away for thousands of years.
also the day to day costs of running nuclear plants is huge too compared with anything else + security. Also where does the uranium come from? It doesn't grow on trees. Australia and Canada currently are thought to have the biggest uranium ore reserves and they'll happily sell to the likes of USA and China.
i would prefer to see much more effort on solar/solar thermal. How much free sun is there in the Arabic states? How many people use tubes/panels to heat their hot water in Cairo? It's free, can last for 25 years or longer and there we go....maybe the revoltions can spark off a major new ecological thrust too
I've seen a couple articles about this in the press but I'm curious if this is even being discussed by officials in Egypt anymore...who are the new people that cover energy policy and what are their positions and goals? Renewables are very costly tand won't be able to make up significant portions of the energy mix.
Its beyond me why Arabs need nuclear power. Other than sucking an enormous amount of money and taking decades to build and bring online, the expertise that one would need to build and maintain power stations, and never being profitable. Why does the Arab world not concentrate on renewable energy. It sits in one of the best sun areas in the world, limitless energy with only a fraction of the land needed to supply the world country. Its amazing and staggering stupidity to import a dirty expensive and stupid energy source when potentially you could supply your country with free energy. At a fraction of the cost!!
"The US and other Western powers, as well as countries with solid nuclear experience like Russia, Kazakhstan or South Korea..." is a statement herein contained that astonishes. "Solid" is not an appropriate descriptor for the mentioned countries nuclear "experience." Twenty-five years ago this month, the US experienced the 3-mile Island disaster with consequences still being felt today. In addition, on-line facilities at Oyster Point,NJ; Yankee Station in Vermont and, in New York, Indian Point, all have serious, protracted, and, as yet, unresolved critical leakages. Also, consider that the US has been warehousing years of accumulated nuclear waste without providing any adequate long-term permanent storage facilities needed to lock them in for the duration of their 240,000 shelf life, that is, approximately, 12,000 generations. The USSR, of course, gave us Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear disaster after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The cause was largely blamed on insufficiently trained technicians as well as faulty equipment. The fallout is so persistently potent, it has created a no-man's land the size of Great Britain (uninhabitable for at least 400 years) and, to date, has claimed (and will continue to claim) the lives of nearly a million people (most from cancers related directly to the thousands of millisieverts of radioactive nucleotides absorbed into their tissues these past 25 years). In Germany, mushrooms and boar are radioactive; the former can't be eaten, the latter can't be hunted for sport or meat. Kazahkstan's reactors are ancient, USSR-manufactured and, like their counterparts in the US and elsewhere, running well past their prime. Decommissioning reactors entails more than a loss of an energy source. What to do with the spent fuel and pools of radioactive waste remains debated, an unresolved problem. It is, therefore, reasonable to doubt these governments have considered, let alone implemented, all the fail safes and backup plans contingent upon a catastrophe. Japan, as we are now learning, for all its vaunted technologies and scientific expertise, dropped the ball on Fukishima as well as other nuclear facilities: Fukishima had been experiencing problems prior to the quake/tsunami. Nuclear power is not cost-effective nor is it a more efficient or safer alternative power source. Climate change, pollution and war - one or all three will be the death of us ALL. Though we have failed to stem the tide of this trio by limiting some of the contributing factors, adding the probability of an uncontainable nuclear accident and its far-reaching results seems overkill.
@boredwell
I agree with your points, just one small correction:
"Twenty-five years ago this month, the US experienced the 3-mile Island disaster"
3-mile-Island was 79. The unhappy twenty-five year anniversary this month is the one of Chernobyl.
interesting that every feedback comment so far is anti-nuclear! I agree totally Issandr. We must focus on alternatives. One secret is controlling the utilities ourselves and then having a new type of freedom based more on self-sufficiency. Nuclear just plays into the hands of the big boys and keeps us all slaves to the system.
There is no reason why a lot more solar should not be implemented but there are also interesting projects like OTEC in Japan and Seagen in the UK who are harnessing the sea power.
If we had all properly researched all this free energy pre-1950's we might even have almost unlimited free energy by now. Sea power could have provided the base load we all need and then mixed with the likes of wind and solar and geo-thermal if available. Mexico was a pioneer of the last but once again the oil industry all but killed it off as with electric cars etc
Egypt could be a pioneer country now that it wants a fresh start.
My own efforts to develop electricity cooperatives in the UK failed because of "blocking" by the power interests and general fear/propaganda/dependency culture/human condition problems of the general public. I think the Egyptians having abandoned fear so bravely could be at the forefront of a new way.
In any case do we actually have a choice anyway, and how the hell did we get into digging up oil and gas and destroying the planet in the first place?? We're mad.
Ancient cultures like the Incas new how to harness the forces of Mother Nature. We need this again.
Go for it Egypt!