Nuclear power's green promise dulled by rising temps

Problems with Europe's nuclear plants have raised worries just as the energy was gaining support.

By Susan Sachs | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

PARIS - Summer is exposing the chinks in Europe's nuclear power networks.

The extended heat wave in July aggravated drought conditions across much of Europe, lowering water levels in the lakes and rivers that many nuclear plants depend on to cool their reactors
As a result, utility companies in France, Spain, and Germany were forced to take some plants off line and reduce operations at others. Across Western Europe, nuclear plants also had to secure exemptions from regulations in order to discharge overheated water into the environment.Even with an exemption to environmental rules this summer, the French electric company, Electricité de France (EDF), normally an energy exporter, had to buy electricity on European spot market, a way to meet electricity demand.

The troubles of the nuclear industry did not end there. Sweden shut four of its 10 nuclear reactors after a short-circuit cut power at one plant on July 26, raising fears of a dangerous design flaw. One week later, Czech utility officials shut down one of the country's six nuclear reactors because of what they described as a serious mechanical problem that led to the leak of radioactive water.

The disruptions highlight some of the vulnerabilities of nuclear power, just at a time when its future was looking brighter in traditionally nuclear-shy parts of Europe. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for example, has just launched a drive to promote nuclear as the key to making his country self-sufficient in energy.

But antinuclear activists have seized on nuclear plants' summer troubles as evidence of the energy's limitations.

Austrian protesters, including politicians, have demanded that the Czech reactor - which is located just over the border - be closed. In Germany, influential antinuclear groups reacted to Sweden's closures by calling for the closure of the country's 17 reactors, many of the same design.

"Global warming undermines the arguments we've always heard about nuclear power, that it doesn't damage the environment," says Stéphane Lhomme, spokesman for a French group, Sortir du Nucléaire, or Abandon Nuclear. "Nuclear is not saving us from climate change. It's in trouble because of climate change."

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Here we see that the consequences of one human caused activity, rapid burning of hydrocarbons, ripple through not only the system that comprises the globalized political economy, but also throughout the planet's living and physical systems as well, producing effects such as reduced flow in rivers. This effect interacts with our attempt to deal peak oil's effect on the global economic system, by increasing our use of nuclear power. But the lack of water for cooling will severely limit the operations of nuclear reactors.

In a system you can't do just one thing. Everything affects everything else in often surprising ways. Therefore, our assumptions about how to deal with global warming, peak oil, and the consequences of globalization, at best often must fail, and at worst, actually exacerbate the compounding, inter-reacting, existential problems we face.

We can't engineer our way out of this mess. Only a substantial lifestyle change will save us. I will be discussing this in my subsequent books, "The Foundations of Infinity's Rainbow" and "The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow."