Taking the nuclear option

The compromise stuck at the Copenhagen conference on climate change was a face saving consensus. Clearly, the economically developed nations were not in a mood to compromising on the high level of consumption. The Utopia of a carbon-free ecology still remains a distant dream.

But clearly, the almost irreversible damage done by carbon emission is a disaster staring us in our face. So what do we do?

Let us look at recent world energy scenario. Oil counts for about 35 per cent of energy consumption in the world. Next comes coal and natural gas with 25 five per cent each. Thus eighty percent of world energy comes from burning fossil fuel. At the current rate of consumption, crude oil can last for 25 years, coal for 150 years and gas for 30 years.

On the other hand it is overwhelmingly recognised by now that nuclear power-based energy is the safest and cleanest. Compared to the innumerable disasters at the coal mines, and the carbon emissions, nuclear is safe, despite the unholy propaganda against is. Nuclear waste is a minor problem and well under control.

The world average of nuclear power is about seven percent of the total energy consumption, though India remains at the three per cent level. France produces around 80 per cent of its power from nuclear resources.

To maintain a reasonably healthy planet we need to devise a more efficient use of energy, implying a paradigm transition in our life style. But reversing an uninterrupted dominance over fossil products for over three centuries may not easy. And the troubling fact is that anthropogenic (or man made) carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere would affect climate for hundreds of thousands of years. The Greenland ice sheet melt area has increased on an average by 16 per cent at the rate of 1 per cent a year. The surface temperatures in Arctic in summer were highest in seventy-seven years of record keeping. The ice-bound north-west passage even opened up to navigation. In a business-as-usual scenario, by 2040, the summer sea ice may be gone, releasing some 550 billion tonne of water into the oceans, raising their level between seven and 15 metres.

Kolkata and Bangladesh’s surrounding delta structure has already moved above the dangerous level. The final irony is that the average Chinese still emits 3.5 tonnes of CO2 per year, while a Briton helps in sending 10 tonne up and an American 20 tonne. India is still considerably less than China. No wonder Copenhagen got so murky, when India and China were being blamed for high intensity emissions.

So what’s the way out? Nuclear and solar are two promising options. Afer the Indo-US deal, access to uranium as fuel for nuclear reactors has opened up. India is on the verge of a nuclear renaissance. The number of reactors being planned across the country has jumped up and by 2020 India expects to produce 20,000 mw from nuclear plants, with the aim of taking the production level to 60,000 mw by 2032. Yet, even by that date, it would take care of only about 10 per cent of India’s needs.

Large scale tapping the ultimate source of all energy, the sun, is a real possibility. The national solar mission has aimed for 20,000 mw by 2022. The first solar facility to produce electricity was installed way back in 1912 in Egypt. The great Sahara desert is an incredible solar powerhouse. A stretch of 210 square km of the desert is all you need to provide for entire globe’s consumption, provided we are able to transmit it efficiently.

The photovoltaic cell is still expensive and not economically viable. As my friend Carlo Rubbia, Nobel laureate, and a great advocate of solar power puts it, “Just as Microsoft changed everything on earth by a bunch of young lads working in a garage, we have to invent more novel and attractive ways to produce solar energy efficiently.”

In Spain, for example, Plataforma Solar Sanlucar produces 300 mw by installing a simple reflector, thus avoiding 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide emanation. Even in Nevada such experiments have been highly successful. In India, we are quite advanced in nuclear power but miserably behind in solar, though we have worshipped the sun for millennia. Wind power is still scratching the surface. What is needed is a revolution from fossil to solar. The green producers and the industrial revolutionists must put their minds together to help produce the energy of the future. It’s not beyond mankind to do so.

The writer is former director of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and at present Homi Jehangir Bhabha distinguished chair professor at Department of Atomic Energy