ブックタイトルRILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

概要

RILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

American Beef and Nuclear Power Plants: Risk Management of Complex Technological Systems and the Precautionary Principledue to that fact that the country has been expanding itsnuclear energy industry (training people, accumulatingconstruction expertise, building maintenance knowhow,etc.), while the competitors (who were alreadymore advanced in nuclear technology) made a“mistake”in trying to reduce their dependency on nuclearenergy for last 20 years. The South Korean governmentand nuclear energy supporters do their best notto tell people that these countries might have had verygood reasons to reject nuclear power. They have astrange logic, starting from what they perceive to bethe indubitably true premise that nuclear energy isgood. Add another empirical fact:“We are now gettingahead in nuclear power plant technology.”The happyconclusion is that we are experiencing a nuclearenergy renaissance!Proponents of nuclear energy do cite some supportingevidence for their first premise. One exampleis the often-cited, economic advantage of nuclearenergy and another is nuclear energy’s benefits in thecarbon-regulation age of climate change. Let us lookat each and examine their claims more carefully.Nuclear energy production is generally touted aseconomically efficient, meaning its production costper unit of energy is lower than other energy sourcessuch as coal or oil. It is true that the conventional calculationof energy production costs supports thisconclusion. However, the conventional way of calculatingproduction costs is faulty in many aspects. First,it does not take into account the fact that raw resourcesfor nuclear power production, such as uranium, arehighly concentrated in a few regions in the world. It islikely that the price fluctuation of raw resources wouldbe more severe than more widely dispersed resourcessuch as coal and oil. It is worth noting that renewableenergy sources such as wind or sunlight are omnipresent.The uneven concentration of raw materials fornuclear power plants raises its security costs significantly.Although security costs are not alwaysconspicuous under normal circumstances, that doesnot mean that the costs do not exist and we are safe toignore them.Secondly, and more seriously, the conventionalcalculation simply omits an incalculable cost altogether;that is, the maintenance costs of highlydangerous nuclear waste that will be around for atleast for ten thousand years). Used nuclear fuel andcontaminated materials necessarily emitted duringnuclear energy production exude radiation at fatallevel for many years to come. In order to prevent thehazardous consequences of radiation, an ultra-highlevel security system must be set up and maintainedfor many years as well. The cost for this is notincluded in the conventional calculation. The only partof the costs for dealing with nuclear wastes is thedemolition cost of a nonoperational nuclear powerplant, and even this is routinely and notoriously underestimated.If we properly calculate the real total costfor nuclear power production, taking into account itsentire energy production cycle, nuclear energy looksdisastrous even in purely economic terms.There is a relatively new and fashionable claimthat nuclear energy is clean and“green”. This claimrelies on another calculation that CO2 emission duringnuclear energy production is moderate compared toother ways of producing energy such as thermo powerplants using coal or oil. Nuclear energy production,however, is not completely CO2 free, even though the“green energy”labeling is likely to mislead peopleinto believing otherwise. Given its relative advantagein contributing to our international effort to reduceCO2 emissions as quickly as possible to slow the rateof climate change, some countries are seriously consideringusing existing nuclear power productionfacilities as much as possible.It is not however that apart from notable exceptionssuch as France and China, most countries aretrying to use up their remaining plants as a sort ofbridging technology that allows them to go to the fullygreen energy stage, perhaps envisioned in Rifkin’srecent book, The Third Industrial Revolution. ? Thereason is obvious: nobody would want to use potentiallydisastrous tools to prevent another potentiallydisastrous event in the long run.A more sensible course of action would be to finda more sustainable solution to the problem. Currently,the best candidate for a satisfactory solution is recycledenergy such as sunlight, sunheat, wind, etc. Thereare many difficulties to overcome with regard todeveloping the use of these resources, including loweringthe energy production costs, developing anefficient storage system, building a smart grid network,renovating the energy production-consumptionpattern, and so on. International coordination ofenergy consumption is also crucial to obtaining a stableenergy regime on earth. ? These are daunting113