welcome back you with the launch from moscow with me to share a quick recap of the top stories now slamming the social media but society feeling sidelined as david cameron calls from twitter and facebook locals in the violent struck streets put faith in their own strength they're out to protect homes from what's been branded a sick part of society. stripped of all the immunity for u.s. defense secretary donald rumsfeld good fun him self in the dog to iraq war veterans

are given the green light to sue them for alleged war crimes they claim are rumsfeld's responsible for their arrest and by fellow servicemen without challenge . and the media in the hungary is the government keeps a firm grip on the press with a controversial law that sees hundreds of journalists silenced broadcasting licenses are being revoked and newspapers for voicing critical opinions despite biggest opposition. so i want to stay with us here and i'll see up next it's a heated debate with people on this panel of guests i do stay with us crosstalk. hungry for the full story we've got to. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers on the. case.

welcome to cross talk i'm peter all over twenty five years ago the world was coming to grips with the catastrophe unfolding it turned obama today the same could be said about the sheema the future of nuclear power as it run its course president evitable that it will be with us for a very long time. to take. to cross stop 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 cross to benjamin so cool he is an assistant professor at the national university of singapore he is 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 mists 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 verse three of the tragedy at chernobyl let's take a look back. the tongue optional goal in nothing ukraine is destined to stay abandoned its high radiation levels and again infrastructure so the soaring mind of the breasts nuclear plants is a straight in human history since then nuclear technologies have been modernized significantly to survive the accident of the scale the industry was virtually forced to reinvent itself for bridging industries to culture nevertheless those who pose the use of nuclear energy will always play the true noble courage because the damage caused is hard to forget thirty one people were killed by the sheer noble accident in the first three months but many more days later it's a result of radiation related sickness the impact on public health remains and make sure that this city radioactive contamination spread over a about forty percent of europe and turn the trend of

a 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 your great acknowledges have become much more sophisticated and this chilled all new reports from natural disasters that earthquake and tsunami the tricyclic japan turned to the sea to focus she went into dead zone because afraid and love those who push him a severity level was raised to seven the same as true noble some experts remain steadfast in the face of chernobyl and for pushing him and continue to think nuclear be only major energy source that is available when all you start missing and running short is nuclear power and we better get prepared for many european countries continue to have the rely on nuclear power in france for example it amounts to seventy five percent of its three cents in needs to ennoble seriously undermines the nuclear industry and many countries are fused to build more nuclear

power plants but resistance soon gave way to its many coal and nuclear renaissance with more countries opting for nuclear energy. the same may happen in light of its main currency global ripping the well it is unlikely to allow its the nuclear option any time. cross our team. ok william trigger in new york if i go to you first black eye for the industry or is it a knockout and because of the severity of the of the accident it's going to be with us for quite a while still yeah i think it's a black eye it's definitely not a knockout we're not most countries are not going to abandon nuclear those that do are putting themselves in a real blind i mean you already see germany is floundering around what are we going to do next if we banned in italy has the highest electoral costs in 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 for benjamin what do you think about that in paris i mean this is that this is a second really serious accident here and is as much as people talk about new technologies we still have the same kind of critical. level of danger seven ok we had a twenty five years ago we have it now ok and that's always with nuclear technology that has been improved the 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 is correct is that you know fukushima and your noble aren't the only major nuclear accidents if you use the i an e.f. scale it's true that these are the only two that are level seven we did a long to do a study of one hundred years ago energy accidents of my own university and we found that there are one hundred three significant nuclear incidents or accidents that

either resulted in a fatality or cause more than one million dollars in damages so the question of will this be a blackout of 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 kind of abandon the earlier power plants they can't because they've build an infrastructure that is so capital intensive that switching trajectories because of any reasons disaster or 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 cheaper and more widely available we're going to go 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 that 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 it when when i was preparing for this program it's such a politicized issue a come across articles you say everything's just fine this is just a black eye the future is writing for a radio and then other stuff saying these plants are there all they're getting older is not enough new ones being built are extremely expensive they're actually not very efficient eccentrics century 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 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 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 it looks expensive you toss five billion dollars to build one reactor but look at the alternatives i mean 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 do then. 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 irrespective of their expensive to make each country see another country can't turn off your electricity . 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 put 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 per installed kilowatt the only other technology that's that expensive 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 and if you look at the worldwide history over the course of nuclear power and global capacity factors below seventy percent and that's of largely due to what's called a steep learning curve with new reactors and so if we're talking about historic

reactors keeping the reactors on the line learning to treat at a point where you've got a generation three or four reactors. job and go ahead well if you get that when you get to the top of the learning when you get to the top of learning that you don't want to quit then you that's where you got that's the point. the best example where usually i first really big no ok go ahead and go to robert going to shoot. the newest reactor being bill right now which is a kind of generation three plus is 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 nuclear design both of these projects are four to 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 is completely a false argument ok robert jump in 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 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 at the numbers the world's new 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 black out and with 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. all right gentlemen 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 our key . players can you see the as the for. the first some. wealthy british style some times let's let.

market financed scandals find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's concert for a no holds barred look global financial headlines tune in to cause a report on. the phone. more news today violence is once again flared up the families are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada the first showing up for asians are all of a. look. can . still.

welcome back across the capitol hill to remind you we're talking about the future of nuclear energy. can. still. 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 expansion 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 that another market the 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 have everybody has to plan for their energy security so then what about that i mean irrespective you like nuclear power not you

there you disappear lot of countries just feel compelled to go in that direction because it will be their energy. there's a lot with a comment first i think bill's you know the sound bite that it's either pro-nuclear or program is brilliant it's a great comment but it kind of illustrates the completely false dichotomy that it's either a 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 renfield 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 tested on new nuclear reactors you can kind of already see the market is choosing to meet increases and want to see demand with renewable sources as well as energy efficiency what's interesting is if

you look at what cuts carbon the fastest as in 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 or 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 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 energy security and it will you find go to you i mean i don't know how

inefficient countries like. but see in. it is but it certainly has the desire. to be have its own energy independence here and there and nuclear is one direction there you know like i said what's going to happen to oil i mean obviously they're going to 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 with then you do with hole 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 mines around the world right now one of russia is talking about supplying all the developing countries with uranium on this exchange basis they have one mind one uranium mine it's all 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 rain everywhere so really for countries that want to supply their own energy players just ideal. benchers of these programs are legit and you just click ok you dissented go ahead benjamin 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 or uranium isn't 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 boyle is

so we really kind of replacing one set of dependence with another set of dependence ok robert 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 two 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 try says many cars and we're driving them at prices 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 the 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 on shore 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 par 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 a centrally zero so that 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 dresses 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 a plan. yeah let me throw out the renewals all you're going to hit with all these are new and you're going to hit a point of diminishing returns very quickly you can throw 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 at windmills and having these inefficient turbines you end up using more gas with windmills than you would without where else do you think about that benjamin i mean just and if you go back to something we said earlier in the program learning curve i mean have we reached the top of the learning curve for renewable zameen it's a relatively new why did it lease for commercial use and industrial use. i mean not really of the one big advantage that renewables have in terms of learning curves and more rapid turnover right it takes two to three four maybe four years at most to build a new wind farm you've got you know present will be modulating 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 into new designs is much quicker when you have technologies that are like cell phones rather than technologies that are like the theater what's 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 has been subsidized you have a nuclear sector that's eating three quarters of all global research subsidies related to energy going back for fifty years and externalities we're talking about all of these things hazardous pollutants with uranium i mean limited liability for nuclear accidents free on site storage of fuel decommission of facilities that are always excluded from nuclear costs 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 the presidium william if i go to you and we did a program on energy. a few months ago and we had a gentleman on from france and he was obviously was trumpeting the you couldn't industry in france and what it was was brought up with this 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 retailers 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 collection taxes the investment taxes the mandates whoever mandated that anybody had to build a nuclear reactor so the 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 but that's all that has already been incorporated what about that robert o. energy is subsidized by somebody and it's almost always the taxpayer. well that's true. yes there there's no such thing as a free market that's certainly true in the energy business but 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 in 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 wind 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 guest today in new york austin and in paris and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember across tough rules.

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