Nuclear power ‘not right for every country’, UAE summit told

ABU DHABI // Nuclear energy is not right for all countries, experts told a conference in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday.

Climate change and a greater potential for natural disasters means some countries would face higher costs to ensure the safety of their nuclear power plants.

“The reality is that nuclear energy doesn’t always fit every context,” said David Scott, executive director of economic and energy affairs at the Abu Dhabi Executive Affairs Authority.

“Sometimes it does but it’s a tricky thing to determine that concept. We can find many instances in which parties have tried to implement nuclear power in the wrong context, which leads to high costs and exposes populations to a greater risk of accident so it’s important to find the right context for nuclear energy.”

Mr Scott was speaking at the New Nuclear International Conference at the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

“Nuclear energy has some specific requirements,” he said. “In Bolivia, which is a landlocked nation where it’s relatively arid so there’s no water cooling, it would be very difficult. In some cases, it’s a geographically imposed context. In others, it’s the size, or if a country has bad credit, because nuclear energy is very expensive.”

Mr Scott said some states may have the appropriate sites for a power plant but not all the other pieces.

“Some countries might have the money but it might be seismically active, so when parties try and force that square peg to fit into a round hole, it creates problems,” he said.

Those problems can lead to significant financial losses once countries eventually realise their power plants are not economically competitive.

“It’s possible to put a plant in a location where it maybe doesn’t belong,” he said. “The accident in Fukushima is an example of that, where the design of the plant they deployed was not appropriate for the natural challenges of that site, so context is very important.”

The UAE, Mr Scott said, was a country where nuclear power made “good sense”.

“We have many of the characteristics that make us an ideal customer for nuclear power,” he said.

“The UAE was fortunate because the Critical Infrastructure and Coastal Protection Authority’s mandate was perfect for nuclear power.

“They cover all the issues that would be of concern and the way our security apparatus was set up naturally fed into a very good solution on nuclear security.”

But different security apparatuses and legal frameworks in different countries can pose a serious challenge to the security of nuclear power.

“Part of the problem is that every country has such a unique security apparatus and, because of this, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution,” Mr Scott said.

Kristine Svinicki, a member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said the challenge of meeting rising demand, while balancing cost, safety, security and environmental protection, was leading many countries to consider deploying new nuclear power plants.

“But unlike safety, risk assessment for security does not generally involve a known set of verifiable scientific and engineering parameters,” she said. “So it is often a challenge to strike the necessary regulatory balance. But safety and security take priority over all other considerations.”

Increasing climate change is also a concern.

“It could be something that we will see in the future if sea levels rise around what people project,” Mr Scott said. “There will be certain plants that will start to face a different environment that they were in initially, because of storms and the possibility of flooding which can be problematic. And they will have to invest in very expensive engineering solutions such as creating changes to sea walls and amendments to the plant such as sealing entry ways.

“But when it comes to structuring security practices, nuclear security requires a bespoke solution for every country that takes into account how they are organised and the neighbourhood they live in, and then converts that into the right solution to provide the appropriate level of security to the plants. That is a challenge that you have to think about.”

cmalek@thenational.ae