Page 2 of 2 Australian uranium to fuel
Asia By Andrew Symon
nuclear-power plans, but among the
existing nuclear-power states in East Asia -
including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan - the
outlook is still mixed.
Japan's nuclear
capacity is the largest in the world after
France's, and it plans a significant expansion to
meet its growing energy needs. This will in part
also help Tokyo meet its greenhouse-gas reduction
commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. Still,
the
environmental lobby against
nuclear power in Japan is strong, drawing strength
from several well-publicized cases of negligence
in plant safety in recent years. South Korea also
has significant expansion plans, which don't face
the opposition seen in Japan.
Radioactive economics For other
countries looking to take the nuclear-power
plunge, the cost-benefit economics are not
clear-cut. While the actual day-to-day operating
costs of nuclear power may be low, the initial
capital costs are the highest of any other type of
power plant. How these startup costs would be
financed in less developed countries such as
Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh is still a big
question mark.
It's still unlikely that
the big multilateral lending agencies - including
the World Bank and Asian Development Bank - will
move into the business of financing the
construction of nuclear plants over cheaper, safer
options such as hydropower. Finance, construction
and operation of nuclear plants in developing
Asian countries would almost certainly need to be
secured, led and carried out by Western and
Japanese companies possibly supported with
government export credit schemes. Russia is also a
player and in 2002 was scheduled to build a
nuclear test reactor in Myanmar, which was later
scrapped because of financing problems.
Meanwhile, nuclear-reactor safety is still
a major global concern, especially in aspiring
Southeast Asian countries prone to natural
disasters, poor governance and terrorist attacks.
How high-level nuclear waste should best be stored
and treated has not been fully resolved in
developed countries, which still tend to bury it
deep in rocky geological structures despite the
fact it will remain radioactive for tens of
thousands of years.
This already looms as
a major problem in Europe and North America, where
waste is steadily building up from nuclear plants
commissioned in the 1960s and '70s. So far,
interim measures have sufficed, where for an
initial 30-40-year period waste is left to cool
off and decay on the plant site or other dedicated
sites where special containers are placed in
concrete bunkers. As densely populated Asia
explores the nuclear option, waste-disposal issues
will grow in importance.
Finally, of
course, there is the specter of nuclear-weapons
proliferation. Once a country has the capability
to enrich uranium to levels adequate for nuclear
power generation, regional history shows it can
often quickly move further to enrich enough
uranium to make nuclear weapons. Countries can
also gain the capacity to develop weapons through
the plutonium produced in the initial
uranium-fission process in the power-generation
plant. (The North Koreans are believed to have
used plutonium harvested from their small research
reactors for their controversial nuclear-bomb test
last year.)
One modern reactor that uses
natural rather than enriched uranium technology is
the CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium) design.
Clumsier to operate, it has not yet won commercial
favor in Asian countries that already generate
nuclear power, and the Canadian design nonetheless
still produces plutonium during its
energy-production cycle.
One possible way
to balance Asia's nuclear-energy ambitions and the
West's concerns about nuclear-weapons
proliferation would be the international
regulation and control of the movement, processing
and disposal of enriched fuels - thereby
eliminating the need for now non-nuclear countries
to develop their own enrichment facilities. This
would also arguably represent a more economic
option for developing Asian countries and one
favored by the US government and the United
Nations' Geneva-based International Atomic Energy
Agency.
Such a proposal was first broached
in the 1970s, when there was a sprint toward
nuclear power due to oil-price shocks. Support for
the idea receded in the 1980s and 1990s as
fossil-fuel prices stabilized and interest in
nuclear power waned. That coincided with rising
political opposition to nuclear power in the wake
of the 1979 Three Mile Island plant meltdown in
the US and the 1986 Chernobyl plant accident in
northern Ukraine.
Now, surging Asian
energy demand is pushing nuclear power generation
into a new age - one that presents big new
regulatory challenges. At the Group of Eight
meeting in St Petersburg last July, the US and
Russia proposed that enrichment be limited to a
small set of countries that already possess the
technology and facilities. This built on a US
initiative called the Global Nuclear Energy
Partnership, under which existing major Western
and Japanese producers of nuclear fuel and reactor
technology would undertake to provide other
countries with reactors and fuel for the life of
plants with the provision to take back spent fuel.
For Australia, more uranium exports all
point toward more complex commercial relations
with Asia. Expanded uranium exports will almost
certainly be complemented by wider
responsibilities and obligations required by the
international and regional communities to avoid
the risks of nuclear accidents and weapons
proliferation.
It's one thing for
Australia to expand its exports of uranium oxide
to Asia; it's quite another for Canberra to assume
a leading regional and international role in
dealing with the potential risks and waste those
shipments will create in their wake.
Andrew Symon, an Australian, is
a Singapore-based journalist and analyst
specializing in energy and natural resources.
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