Singapore : Nuclear power not ruled out

http://www.post1.net/lowem/entry/singapore_nuclear_power_not_ruled_out


Airborne over Nuclear Power Plant Isar II, Bavaria, Germany

straitstimes.com :

Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong does not rule out the possibility of Singapore having a nuclear power plant in the long term. There would be difficulties, he acknowledged, because of the scale of such a project. At the same time, there would be safety issues. But technology may evolve so that such challenges can be resolved. "I would not rule it out for the long term," he said. "I would not say never, because if global warming is a serious problem, if energy prices in the long term continue to rise, fuel prices continue to rise, and if you are worried about a carbon tax on top of that, then you have to seriously consider nuclear."

Mr Lee's comments yesterday [5 Dec 2008] - in response to a question on whether Singapore has plans for nuclear power - are more positive than his stance a year ago, when he ruled it out as an option. During the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali in December last year [2007], he said nuclear energy was out because of the lack of a minimum 30km safety distance, an issue in small countries like Singapore, which stretches about 40km from east to west. But Mr Lee said yesterday that technology may evolve, mitigating this consideration. "Safety rules may evolve, there might be other possibilities such as putting it (a nuclear plant) underground," he said.


He noted that nuclear power is an issue that "many countries don't want to think about". "But we cannot put it off our mental map," he said. Last month, a high-powered panel set up by the Trade and Industry Ministry to examine Singapore's energy policies said nuclear research, and even a nuclear power plant, could not be dismissed from Singapore's range of long-term solutions. Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew had also revealed that the Government had thought about possible locations for such a plant: Pedra Branca island east of Singapore, or on a floating platform out at sea.

- I have a couple of friends who will only say "boom" whenever I mention that given the realities of peak oil and gas, and ongoing climate change, Singapore needs to go nuclear. They seriously misunderstand. Here's why :

1. "You need a huge exclusion zone." Not really. The exclusion zone around a typical nuclear power plant is actually quite small : Usually nuclear plants have very compact sites of 500 to 1000 acres including the exclusion area around the plant. That works out to only 2-4 square km or 0.7-1.5 square miles.

2. "It is safest to stay more than 30 km away from a nuclear power plant". It doesn't have to be that far. Nuclear plants are engineered with a model of a "fencepost man" in mind. This is also publicly available elsewhere, and like this commenter said : [the] legal limit for exposure to a person living near a nuclear power plant is ... 15 millirem and has been for decades. In fact, that is the exposure limit for a so-called "fencepost man" who lives right at the fence of the power plant, gets his water from a well drilled at the fence line, and grows his food on a plot of land adjacent to the plant. Compared to this, according to the Washington State Department of Health, the average cosmic background radiation is 360 millirems per year, a figure which concurs with other sources I have come across.

3. "Chernobyl shows that nuclear power is not safe". Chernobyl was an old Soviet-era design without a containment structure, which every modern Western design has. The crazy part of the story was, the Russian engineers were conducting a dangerous experiment by removing the control rods to see what would happen. Sure enough, it blew up. You couldn't make up stuff like this. It was bad comedy. No nuclear engineer would run things like the Soviets did.

4. "You can't possibly be safe anywhere near an operating nuclear power plant". Not true. The US Navy has operated nuclear power plants (supplied by my former employer, Lockheed Martin) on their submarines and aircraft carriers for decades with an impeccable safety record. Given the cramped confines within ships and especially submarines, American sailors routinely walk literally within feet of these operating nuclear power plants with no ill effects.

So, never say never. Given current technology and Singapore's geography, there are exactly two choices for base-load electricity generation that could possibly complement the existing natural-gas power plants : coal and nuclear. We do not have the geography for hydro or geothermal. Renewables such as wind and solar, while clean and interesting, are intermittent sources at best. And with Singapore's Kyoto Protocol commitment, it had better not be coal. The conclusion is self-evident. I am glad that Singapore's leaders are starting to see things this way as well.