Going Nuclear: Can We Even Manage Domestic Waste?

THE COMMITTEE of experts set up by the government to look into Ghana's prevailing energy crisis has identified nuclear energy as the only long-term panacea. Among other things, the committee has called for immediate steps to be taken in pursuit of nuclear energy as an alternative source of power.

The recent energy crisis has caused us to look beyond the narrow confines of our hydroelectric and thermal power for generation of electricity. Now today, our experts are calling for nuclear energy as the last bastion against any energy crisis.

These recommendations are enough to bring a relief to a nation sweltering under the heat of energy crisis, which has crippled the economy, but before we are consumed to believe that Ghana going nuclear energy would solve our problem let us look dark side which nuclear energy brings. The committee report seems to be silent on this. We can get electricity 24/7 as results of going nuclear but other set of problem will emerge. The solution of one problem brings into face the emergence of another one.

In this present world, the emphasis has been producing a clean energy and not just any energy. The recent G8 Summit in Germany sought to reduce carbon emission and the potential of a nuclear fall out from new emerging nuclear nations like India, Pakistan and Iran.

Some few years ago, there were two imperatives driving energy policy - affordability and security of supply. There is now a third right up there in lights alongside them. It is the need to stop poisoning our atmosphere with carbon emissions and other harmful gases and thereby contributing to the rise of global warming.

Perhaps the nuclear age is winding down in the global scale. The gap between the cost of nuclear and other technologies like solar and wind is narrowing. Indeed, some energy experts say in certain places, high-tech windmills are already cheaper than atomic power.

Concerns about global climate change have led many nations to join together in an effort to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. As part of an international treaty signed in Rio de Janiero in 1992, the industrialised nations agreed to voluntarily cut emissions back to 1990 levels.

First, it is too expensive to set up a nuclear plant. Second, nuclear power lacks broad-based public support. And third, the long-term safe management of nuclear waste is far from being resolved. Among the major sources of electricity generation, nuclear power is the most expensive. A new nuclear power plant costs three times as much to build and run as a new natural gas-fired power plant.

In fact, nuclear power is now even more expensive than many renewable energy technologies, including wind, biomass, and geothermal power. The only way that this trend could be reversed is if taxpayers subsidize nuclear power. That seems unlikely, since public support for building new nuclear power plants has all but evaporated.

Money wasted on nuclear power would be unavailable for other, more effective ways of preventing global climate change.