on the good. video on demand. my old girls. are a sense for you in the palm of your. call . if you just join us for a warm welcome this is r.t. can you live from the russian capital twenty four hours a day top stories now. nato air strikes and once again hit the libyan capital the rebels hope to cash in on their country's rich resources if gadhafi goes there are warnings that their actions and overzealous support of nato couldn't buy a chain reaction of civil wars in the region. it's almost twenty five years since the chernobyl catastrophe and a possible new radiation leak at the site is attracting increasing concern after

the distress at fukushima showed how vital it is to be prepared for the repeat of a nuclear disaster. and a culture clash an infamous russian not great breeds of controversy after winning a state award for one of their works they say what they did was artistic protest critics argue it's nothing more than obscenity and vandalism. probably about with more those stories and other news for in less than thirty minutes from now the mean time cross talk host piece lavelle and his guest discuss if the world should keep using nuclear energy one day ahead of the twenty fifth anniversary of the chernobyl disaster that debate is next on r.t. . if. you. he can. start. to

think. well come across like i'm peter lorre twenty five years ago the world was coming to grips with the catastrophe unfolding eternal today the same could be said about the sheema what is the future of nuclear power does it run its course or is it in evitable that it will be with us for a very long time. to. start. to cross the pros and cons of nuclear energy i'm joined by william tucker in new york he's a journalist and author of terrestrial energy in paris we crossed to benjamin so cool he is an assistant professor at the national university of singapore he's also author of the forthcoming book contesting the future of nuclear power a critical global assessment of atomic energy and in austin we have robert bryce he's a senior fellow at the manhattan institute and author of power hungry the myth of

green energy and the real fuels of the future all right gentlemen this is cross talk that means you can jump in so this is the twenty fifth anniversary of the tragedy of chernobyl let's take a look back. at the telegraph the noble enough and your crane is destined to stay abandoned it's high radiation levels and decaying infrastructure so this is a reminder of the west's nuclear plant as a human history since then new critical issues have been modernized significantly to survive the accident of this scale the industry was virtually forced to reinvent itself so brazing and your safety culture are the less those coco's think use of nuclear energy well it always played a trick on both cards because the damage caused is hard to forget. thirty one people were killed by the chernobyl accident in the first three months that's many more days later it's a result of radiation and related sickness the impact on public health remains in the streets it is today radioactive contamination spread over about forty percent

of hero and turned the chernobyl blast into an international tragedy today only tourists are permitted to enter the exclusion zone but there are extreme health risks when doing so the proponents claim nuclear technologies have become much more sophisticated this chill vulnerable to natural disasters that earthquake and tsunami the tristen three to japan turned to the city of fukushima into a dead zone because afraid asian levels because seamus severity level was raised to seven the same as. some experts remain steadfast in the face of chernobyl and for pushing away and continued to think nuclear the only major energy source that is available when oil stored missing and running short is nuclear power and we better get prepared for when they hear countries continued to have a rely on nuclear power in france for example it's almost a seventy five percent of it so it's basically needs to noble seriously undermined

the nuclear industry and many countries refused to build more nuclear power plants but resistance gave way to a too many coal and nuclear renaissance with more countries opting for nuclear energy the same may happen in light of copper shima it's may encourage a global rich think but the world is unlikely to allow it's the nuclear option any time soon and that's a petrol offer cross-talk r.t. . ok william tell you you're going to go you first. for the industry reason knock out because of the severity of the of the accident is going to be with us for quite a while still. yeah i think it's a black eye it's definitely not a knockout most countries are not going to abandon nuclear those the who are putting themselves in a real bind i mean you already see germany is floundering around what are we going to do next if we ban a nuclear italy has the highest electoral cross and europe and they think they're

going to abandon it i think i think it'll it'll countries will react to different degrees some may quit altogether but those that move ahead i think are going to reap the advantages of that for benjamin what do you think about that in paris i mean this is that this is the second really serious accident year and it is as much as people talk about new technologies we still have the same kind of critical. level of danger seven ok we had it twenty five years ago we have it now ok and that's all with nuclear technology that has been improved and others will say these were not it this was an old plant but nonetheless tragedies out there when it happens it happens big. you know i think the person gets corrected is that you know fukushima and sure noble aren't the only major nuclear accidents if you use the i.n.t.'s scale it's true that these are the units you that are level seven we did a long toodle study of one hundred years of energy accidents of my own university

and we found that there are one hundred three significant nuclear incidents or accidents that either result in if it's ality or cause more than one million dollars of damages so the question of will this be a black eye to the nuclear industry is probably not because the industry is very used to dealing with incidents and accidents but this is also a pretty big disadvantage to nuclear power these facilities are so large so expensive they tend to lock in different decisions so even if japan wanted right now to take out of abandon italy or power plants they can't because they build an infrastructure that is so capital intensive that switching trajectories because of any reasons disasters shortages of fuel high costs is virtually impossible which is something that you don't see with your energy efficiency measures or your renewable energy technologies which are quicker and cheaper and more widely available to you and we locked into the nuclear future we don't even have a choice right now do we. well. i agree more with bill i think then with benjamin the the fact is for the for the near term fukushima

is going to hinder nuclear development globally but look at what's happening in china a country that is heavily reliant on coal for what about seven hundred seventy five percent of its electricity they're planning to build sixty new nuclear reactors over the next decade it's clear that in the near term this action at fukushima is going to drive the world more toward natural gas because that's the only other source that is scalable and as relatively low carbon but over the long term i think nuclear is going to have to be and will be part of the answer because the demand for electricity globally is so great well you know if i go back to new york william what about the cost of it i mean when when i was preparing for this program i just such a politicized issue would come across articles to say everything's just fine this is just the black guy the future is writing for a radiant and then other stuff saying these plants or they're all getting old there is not enough new ones being built are extremely expensive they're actually not

very efficient eccentrics cetera i mean it's very intensely debated it's been debated all of our lives here i mean is it just going to continue on in the way it is because it's just going to always be a certain percentage of our energy needs you know like twenty percent twenty four percent wherever you're listening to. but i don't think you can say existing plants are inefficient they're running at about ninety percent capacity which is the best in energy any energy source and they're also immensely profitable the average reactor in the united states is making about two million dollars a day because they had their construction costs retired and now they're just making money the difficulty is that we've had this hiatus where we haven't built anything for twenty five years i it looks expensive and you toss five billion dollars to build one reactor but look at the alternatives if you try to duplicate that amount of power with windmills you what you would you would spend more natural gas looks cheap because they're easy to build but who knows what the price of natural gas is

going to eventually and she'd like a reasonable comment there i mean they're profitable and i want to talk a little bit about energy security in the future i mean we respect if they're expensive to make each country see another can't you can a country can't turn off your electricity going well i mean there are a few points the first is that bill's right that the current plants that are operating are very profitable but when you're talking about building new plants which is prone to cost that are incredibly high cost that could be as high as eight to nine thousand dollars per installed kilowatt cost of building a new winter of mine is about two thousand dollars for a start kilowatt the only other technology that's not expensive on a capital intensive basis is solar panels and nobody's talked about making centralize solar facilities so there's not many countries the second interesting point is that when you talk about capacity factor it is true that most plants in the u.s. are actually close to ninety six ninety seven percent for the last few years but if you look at the worldwide history over the course of nuclear power the global capacity factors below seventy percent and that's a largely due to what's called

a steep i don't watch a learning curve with new reactors and so if we're talking about historic reactors keeping the reactors online learning the truth at a point where you've got a generation three or four reactors. jumping ahead well if you get that when you get to the top of the learning when you get to the top learning you don't want to quit then you know where you got that's the point. the best example where you are going through sugar like we've been oh ok benjamin go ahead and i'll go to robert going to ship. the newest reactor bill right now which is a kind of generation of three plus there's the european pressurized reactor this one being built in finland and i believe one in sweden in this illustrates the complexity and the difficulty with doing a new nuclear design both of these projects are forty five years behind schedule and i've seen cost overruns of two hundred to four hundred percent so this idea that we've already surpassed the learning curve with even slight modifications of reactor designs i think it's completely a false argument ok robert go ahead. well i think this is peter this is clearly the

issue is how is the nuclear industry industry going to address the cost issue going forward and this make no mistake this is the real problem that the industry faces the capital costs for these these plants is that at minimum five thousand dollars per installed kilowatt and as benjamin pointed out can be much higher given cost inflation but the reality is we just have to get good at nuclear right now i just looked up the numbers. the world's fleet of four hundred reactors or so is avoiding about two point five billion tons of c o two emissions per year that's nearly ten percent of global c o two emissions so if we're concerned about c o two we have to embrace nuclear i think that going forward we have a lot of options going to smaller what are called modular reactors possibly for fueling them with or to reduce proliferation risks that combination of technologies

can help bring the price down you go to a manufacturing type of base of production rather than a best poker on site construction methodology that could help bring costs down but in my view if you're anti carbon dioxide and you're anti-nuclear you're just pro blackout and with the global demand for electricity expected to grow by eighty percent over the next twenty or twenty five years we simply don't have an option but to continue to work hard at getting good at nuclear. when we're going to go to a short break here right now after a break we'll continue our discussion on the use of nuclear power stay with her thing.

hungry for the full story we've got. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers on the. wealthy british style. markets finance scandal. find out what's really happening to the global economy with max keiser for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to the report on our key. can. welcome back across the capitol hill to remind you we're talking about the future

of nuclear energy. can. mention if i go back to you in paris i mean irrespective of your attitude towards nuclear energy one thing is for sure demand for energy is going to continue to grow expression in china was already mentioned in the program as we speak right now there's a lot of controversy about nuclear power plants being built in india and another market that desperately needs more energy and and we live in a very volatile world gentlemen i mean the politics of all oil the geopolitics of oil is out there in our face now we don't know what the world's going to be like in twenty years twenty five years but you everybody has to plan for their energy security so then what about that i mean irrespective you like nuclear power not you there you just a lot of countries just feel compelled to go in that direction because it will be their energy. there's a lot with with

a comment first i think bill's you know soundbite that it's either pro-nuclear or provocative is brilliant it's a great comment but it kind of illustrates the completely false dichotomy that it's either nuclear power or fossil fuels if you look including at china and india in the past five years both the fastest growing sources of new electricity supplies what was the cheapest involved in renewable electricity in both europe and the u.s. it's been natural gas wind and landfill gas globally it's been hydro geothermal wind as well as solar electricity even in china you had about six times more renewable energy capacity installed last year the nuclear capacity if you look at global investment patterns you had one hundred eighty five billion dollars invested on renewables you had about six last year and rested on nuclear reactors so you can kind of already see the market is choosing to meet increases in like this new demand with renewable sources as well as energy efficiency what's interesting is if you look at what cuts carbon the fastest as and what does the most bang for the

buck about an eight to one ratio favorable to nuclear energy is energy efficiency this is you know things you can implement demand side management practices more efficient homes more efficient you know fuel standards for vehicles that cut energy costs far below the price of building any new power plant and you may think that countries like japan or the u.s. or china haven't really tapped this energy efficiency potential of they have tapped it when in reality you've got probably thirty to fifty percent of electricity demand today can be cut with cost effective measures and these are numbers that don't just come from industry trade groups but also consulting groups like mckinsey or the i.p.c.c. just released a report a few months ago so this issue of we have to build more power plants to meet demand rather than what's actually reduce the demand first is another one of these kind of dichotomies that kind of distorts the real picture of the options that countries have to meet and the security needs it will you implying go to you i mean i don't know how inefficient countries like i. would say aid. it is but it certainly has

the desire. to be have it's own energy independence here and there and nucular is one direction there you know like i said what's going to happen to oil i mean obviously they're still want oil in gas but this is something for a longer term because the plants last longer investment is huge and as we've been told on this program they're hugely profitable so again kind of repeating my question i mean countries like that really don't have an option they really feel they need to go take the nuclear option for their own energy self-sufficiency. well the thing we always talk about with nuclear power is its energy density it has you get two thousand times the energy from the same volume would than you do with coal and i came across a figure there they really amaze me there are something like two thousand coal mines in the in the entire world is four hundred four hundred coal mines alone in kentucky there are forty five year rainy and minds around the world right now one

all russia is talking about supplying all the developing countries with uranium on this exchange basis they have one mind one uranium mine so we're going to come out of one mine so you get such a tremendous advantage when you go with nuclear and of course there's your reigning everywhere so really for countries that want to supply their own energy there is just ideal. ventures of this program is all that eventually you get this quickly ok you dissented go ahead jimi go ahead and then we'll go to robert sorry and then it's only that it's interesting that if you're talking about energy security and fuel the ability for your anus and everywhere you've got three countries kazakhstan canada and australia that are responsible for more than sixty percent of production and you've got about twelve countries that are responsible for ninety percent of production so it's even as concentrated in terms of supply as oil is so we've been really kind of replacing one set of dependence with another set of dependence ok

robert i mean it's go down the road here of renewables because a lot of people are saying that again i've come across very different numbers about the efficiency of investment in renewables as compared to fossil fuel and nuclear energy. sure well to benjamin's point about efficiency look no one is opposed to efficiency saying you'd be opposed to efficiency is akin to saying i'm opposed to air the world has been is getting more efficient in its energy consumption it's happening everywhere the us is now today using about the same amount of oil as it did in one thousand nine hundred eighty three despite the fact that we have tried as many cars and we're driving them at twice as many miles so i'm all for efficiency but we can't keep the lights on with efficiency we have to generate electricity why because we don't have a perfect storage method for electricity if we had such a method then that is a true game changer but with regard to renewables look at the just the latest report from the energy information administration here in the united states the

estimated natural gas fired electricity is about the cheapest form of power production and about sixty three dollars per megawatt hour onshore wind generated electricity costs fifty percent more offshore wind costs four times as much and and solar thermal cost five times as much this idea that renewables are cheaper than conventional for forms of electricity generation is just simply not true further even if it were on car they're not dispatchable the reality is we need electric sources electricity generation sources that we can turn on and off that's what gives them value having them be intermittent and highly variable gives them of a real world value of essentially zero so but i think peter just to direct a conversation if i could one idea i think the bigger problem for nuclear going forward is the issue of global cooperation with regard to the fuel cycle this is regard it addresses the issue of proliferation one of the first responders after fukushima was the international atomic energy agency this the i.a.e.a.

and the and the enabling the empowering the funding of the i.a.e.a. is going to be critical for the growth of nuclear globally in the next couple of decades when you think about that william i mean since it's kind of global cooperation we're going to have your go ahead. yeah let me throw out the renewables all you're going to hit with all these are you know you're going to hit a point of diminishing returns very quickly you can throw up a lot of windmills at first to get up to maybe five ten percent of your electricity but after that the winds fluctuation is going to start impacting the grid and at that point it becomes a nuisance more than anything else so what happens is you have to put up natural gas turbines so you can compensate for that and as robert prices pointed out once you start doing that you it would be much more efficient to run baseload combined cycle gas plants just running the gas itself than putting up the windmills and having these inefficient turbines you end up using more gas with windmills than you

would without when we think about that benjamin because and i do go back to something we said earlier in the program about learning curve i mean how we reach the top of the learning curve for renewables i mean it's a relatively new i did at least for commercial use and industrial use. i mean not really of the the one big advantage that renewables have in terms of learning curves or more repetition overwrite it takes two to three four maybe four years at most to build a new wind farm you've got you know pretty simple to be modulated if you manufacture components for a lot of these types of facilities as opposed to nuclear plants which take ten to fifteen years to build if you include permit and so the ability for us to learn more rapidly and integrate that learning insinuate designs is much quicker when you have technologies that are like cell phones rather than technologies that are like cathedrals the other key thing about cost the elephant in the room which no one has mentioned is subsidies and externalities the reason nuclear power seems so cheap is because most of its development is subsidized you have a nuclear sector that's eating three quarters of all global research subsidies

related to energy going back for fifty years externalities we're talking about all of these things hazardous pollutants with uranium mining limited liability for nuclear accidents free on site storage of fuel decommissioning of facilities that are always excluded from nuclear cost if you include them the prices. nuclear often doubles or in some cases even triples so let's be honest about what we're actually including and not including when we talk about the cost of generating a certain type of a chris and william if i go to you know we did a program on energy. a few months ago and we had a gentleman on from france and he was obviously was trumpeting via the you couldn't cheat in industry in france and what was was brought up is intensely subsidized by the state intensely. well nuclear construction nuclear plans was never subsidized the actual construction was never subsidized the united states it was built on the old regime where retirees were guaranteed a profit but there were never any government subsidies now if you want to look for

subsidies just try the windmills the the action taxes the investment taxes the mandates whoever mandated that anybody had to build a nuclear reactor so that on the cost of reactors most of those costs are incorporated the whole business of taking care of fuel has been we've got a fifth twenty billion dollars pot of money waiting to build yucca mountain or something like that that's all it has already been incorporated but about that robert all energy is subsidized by somebody and it's almost always the taxpayer. well that's true. depending on who you ask there there's no such thing as a free market and that's certainly true in the energy business but it when it comes to the growth of renewables in places like china if you look at what has happened here in the u.s. and in fact if you look at the clean energy what is the clean energy mechanism that was mandated under some of these u.n.

rules and then go back and look at china it's clear that that system has been gamed and the chinese have been among the best at collecting these subsidies to build wind projects that some of which are not even connected to the grid so this idea that somehow investment in renewables is leading the world that this is where the world is going the world is going in chasing renewables and most of these countries simply because of subsidies and mandates it's not because the market is free is is is is saying this is the best option benjamin and she gave us one number before of something on the order of two hundred billion invested in renewables ok well that's that seems like a big number here in the u.s. the upstream oil and gas industry alone just in drilling new wells every year since two hundred fifty billion dollars so the idea that somehow that that the world is moving to renewables because this is the cheapest fastest way it's simply not true it's because it's subsidized and mandated that they're going to these inefficient

and incredibly resource intensive projects particularly like we ended that uses up to fifty times more land to the nuclear natural gas and by my calculations about five hundred times. the last movie we've run out of time many thanks to my guess that the new york austin and paris and thanks to our viewers for watching us here are to see you next time and remember a cross talk rules. to . bring you the latest in science to six months from brown's. going to the future of coverage.

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