it is shown to us very well most of all to you live here most good top stories of the hundreds of british vigilance is moved to protect the streets from troublemakers communities across england accuse the police of late during the recent destructive wave of unrest. former u.s. defense secretary donald rumsfeld faces a lawsuit from two americans over that alleged torture no rug in for ease of security for claim they were beaten and punished for months before being released from a u.s. military facility without challenge. and journalists are outraged and hungry every

new law that could effectively silence critics of the government for indian education and dangerous press freedom and the very notion of democracy. i've got more news for in this in half an hour from now on the meantime another car debate with peter lavelle and his panel of guests stay with us for cross talk that's next . keep. welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle twenty five years ago the world was coming to grips with the catastrophe unfolding it turn noble today the same could be said

about the sheema place the future of nuclear power as it run its course or is in evidence that it will be with us for a very long time. to cross-talk 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 a twenty fifth anniversary verse three of the tragedy of chernobyl let's take a look back. the noble enough in ukraine is destined to stay abandoned it's

high radiation levels and decaying infrastructure so this remind of the gross nuclear plant is a state 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 to bring in you see the culture nevertheless those who pose the use of nuclear energy will always play the chernobyl cards because the damage caused is hard to forget. thirty one people were killed by the travel 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 we should at this stage radioactive contamination spread over about forty percent of europe and turned. into an international tragedy today only tourists are permitted to enter the exclusion zone but there are extreme health risks on doing so the proponents claim nuclear technology is have become much more sophisticated this

chill of honorable to natural disasters that earthquake and tsunami the tristen freak in japan turned to the city before pushing right into a dead zone because afraid asian levels push him a severity level was raised to seven the same as. some experts remain steadfast in the face of general go in for questioning and to continue to think nuclear the only major energy source that is available we all use towards missing and running short is nuclear power and we better get prepared for many european countries continue to have to rely on nuclear power and france for example it's almost a seventy five percent of its visits and needs to ennoble seriously undermines the nuclear industry and so many countries are fierce to build more nuclear power plants but resistance gave way to what many call in new clear renaissance with more countries opting for nuclear energy the same may happen in light of its may encourage

a global whipping but the world is unlikely to allow it's the nuclear option any time soon in this a patrol off across r.t. . ok williams ok if i go to you first black eye for the industry reasoning knock out because of the severity of the of the action it 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 we're not most countries are not going to abandon nuclear those that do 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 electrical costs and europe and they think they're going to abandon that 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 the 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 the nuclear technology that has been improved others will say these were not and this was an old plant but nonetheless tragedies out there when it happens it happens to be. you know i think the person is correct it is that you know fukushima and your noble aren't the only major nuclear accidents if you use the irony at 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 of energy accidents of my own university and we found that there are one hundred three significant nuclear incidents or accidents that either resulted in if a tally or cause more than one million dollars of 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 they kind of abandon the earlier power plants they can because they 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 and cheaper and more widely available robert i 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 bill i think that 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 good 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 would 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 a black eye the future is writing for a radio and then other stuff saying these plants or they're all getting old there's not enough new ones being built are extremely expensive they're actually not very efficient eccentric fancher 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 just would always be a certain percentage of our energy needs you know like twenty percent twenty four percent whatever 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 of energy any energy source and they're also immensely profitable and 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 but the difficulty is that we've had this hiatus where we haven't built anything for twenty five years i it looks expensive you toss five billion dollars to build one reactor but look at the alternatives that 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 and 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 can't you can a country can't turn off your electricity. well i mean there are

a few points the first is the bills right the current plants that are operating are very profitable but when you're talking about building new plants which is prone to costs 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 install of kilowatt the only other technology that's that 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 and if you look at the worldwide history over the course of nuclear power the global capacity factors below seventy percent and that's 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 underlying order truly well at a point where you've got a generation three or four reactors. job in hand well if you get there 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 you thought you were going to really go i could go ok go ahead and i'll go to robert going to chicago it's. just 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 the 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 and even slight modifications of reactor designs i think it's completely a false argument ok robert german 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

a 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 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. 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 lobel 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. after a break we'll continue our discussion on the use of nuclear power stay with our. live. live. live. live. live. live. live.

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live. live welcome back to. i'm peter lavelle to remind you we're talking about the future of nuclear energy. can't. stay. benjamin's 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 weak specially 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 then 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 unpack with a comment first i think bill's you know sound bite that it's either pro nuclear or pro block out 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 supply as well as the cheapest involved in renewable electricity in both europe and the u.s. it's a 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 you look at global investment patterns you had one hundred eighty five billion dollars invested on renewables you had about six last year and vested on the nuclear reactors you can kind of already see the market is choosing to meet increases in like this the 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 in a fuel standards for vehicles that cut energy costs far below that of the price of building any new power plant and you may think that countries like japan or the u.s. or china have it really taps 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 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 the economy is that kind of distorts the real picture of the options that countries

have to meet energy security it will you find go to you i mean i don't know how inefficient countries like. the street. it is but it certainly has the desire. to be have it's 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 still want oil in gas but this is something for a longer term because the plants last longer the 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 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 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 mines 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 reigning everywhere so really for countries that want to supply their own energy players just ideal. vendors of these programs are legit and you can get is quick 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 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 really kind of replacing one set of dependence with another sort 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 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 is big 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 twice 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 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 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 a centrally zero so that but i think peter just to direct the conversation of 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 of 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 people that. yeah let me throw in rather a new will is 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 there 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 then putting up the windmills and having these inefficient turbines you end up using more gas with windmills than you would without windmills do you think about that benjamin because i go back to something we said earlier in the program dog learning curve i mean but how we reach the dock top of the learning curve for renewables i mean it's a relatively new i did it lease for commercial use an industrial use. to me not really of the 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 every manufacturer 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 permitting and so the ability for us to learn more rapidly and intricate that learning into new designs is much quicker when you have technologies that are like cell phones rather than technologies that are like cathedrals and 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 this development has been subsidized you have the nuclear sector that's eating three quarters of all global research subsidies related to energy going back for fifty years extra nowadays 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 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 president william and i'm going 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 could and in industry in france and was brought up because 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 auction 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 that's all that 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 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 that world is

moving to renewables because this is the cheapest fastest way is 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 gets to be in new york boston and in paris and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember across tough rules. for the full story we've got it for the time the biggest issues get the human voice

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