Today, Australia is one of the highest producers per capita of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the world, and has the highest-carbon-intensity energy consumption in the world, at 3.08 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of oil equivalent.

Australia is facing a major moral responsibility to reduce emissions and the impact of climate change, even if changes in Australia’s emissions will have only a minimal direct effect on the global situation. This is a challenge that should be high on the scientific and political agenda. Emissions are also not decreasing, but increasing, so we must look at the reality of what the results will be if something is not done right now.

The issue of climate change and CO2 emission reduction has many facets and each of these can be grasped by interest groups to promote their particular point of view.

For ANSTO, there is a clear science and technology response to this problem and we have a defined interest in such an approach.

Nuclear science and technology offers some amazing tools for understanding past and present climate. For instance, we can date the water coming from bores on the Great Artesian Basin and show that it last fell as rain 300,000 years ago. We can examine precipitation in the Amazon Basin and show what proportion of water that falls as rain evaporates from the ground or water, and what proportion is evaporated by transpiration through leaves.

We know that the average time of water falling as rain and returning to clouds is only five days. We can examine ice cores from Antarctica and derive climate records for several hundreds of thousands of years. Next year, we plan to construct climate records of the south-west of Western Australia for about 500 years.

All of this is exciting and adds knowledge that can be applied to further understand and predict future changes. If we stand back from this and ask the question ‘Will this avoid future climate change?’ the answer has to be heavily qualified. My analysis of the root cause of the climate change problem is rather broader. The first inescapable fact is that the global population is rapidly approaching nine billion, of which two billion in the developed world consume 80 per cent of the energy.

There is also a growing number of people in the developing world who seek to move to the standard of living of the developed world and this correlates to a greatly increased energy demand. China is the greatest example of this, where the current rate of the expansion of electricity generation is equal to installing the Australian capacity each year. Herein lie the very interesting moral questions about the sharing of global resources that underly the global need to constrain energy
demand.

How can countries that consume more than 7000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per person ask countries that consume 70kWh per person to show restraint? There are some billions of people who have no prospect of improved standards of living in the near future unless they have the necessary energy to sustain growth. Clearly this problem requires creative and innovative solutions from the diplomatic, political and business communities to solve an intergenerational problem.

While the world continues with a business-as-usual approach, we are heading for the emission of 40 billion tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030 (as a balloon of gas 33.5 kilometres in diameter). Best estimates indicate that by 2050 we need to avoid the release of 20 billion tonnes of CO2 to halt the increase in atmospheric CO2.

The approach to gaining this saving has not been addressed at the magnitude of the problem and the rapidly increasing development in populous developing countries.

Some of this is based on what society has come to accept as the norm. If it was proposed to develop a power generation method that produced waste streams per gigawatt year (Gwy) which included 8.8 million tonnes of CO2 and 3.3 million cubic metres of solid waste (the volume of 1352 Olympic swimming pools) – containing heavy metals including arsenic, uranium and thorium – the proposal would be under severe scrutiny. Yet this is the waste stream from a single existing large coal-fired power station in NSW.

On the other hand, a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of electricity would produce a waste stream containing only 16 cubic metres of spent fuel – producing 0.9 cubic metres of high-level waste, 75 cubic metres of intermediate radioactive-level waste, 222 cubic metres of low-level waste and 35,000 tonnes of CO2. However, it is this technology that is under the most severe scrutiny.

Back to the Olympic swimming pool analogy: France, which has produced 80 per cent of its electricity for domestic and export from nuclear stations for the past 25 years, is yet to fill the volume of one Olympic swimming pool with high-level waste.

To save 12.5 per cent of the target of 20 billion tonnes of CO2 release we would need to:

• build 700 one-gigawatt (GW) nuclear power stations (1.8 times the current number)
• install two million 1GW wind generators (50 times the current number);
• install two million hectares of solar panels (700 times the current area); and
• develop, license and install carbon capture and storage for 800GW of coal-fired power stations.

This illustrates the power and breadth of the problem for which the public is offered simplified solutions peripheral to the ultimate solution. The challenge is to objectively look at the issues at hand and weigh up the pros and cons.

Australia needs a baseload power source, which only coal, nuclear or hydro can offer. We do not have enough water for hydro to be sustainable, so the options are less. Clean coal technology is also not yet proven, so cannot be an immediate solution. However, nuclear is proven and it is clean. The waste is also a lot less than some would have you believe and can be safely managed. It is something to think about and rationally, without emotion, discuss. Climate change has to be addressed and it needs to be addressed now. 

Dr Ian Smith FTSE has been chief executive of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) since May 2004 , before which he was Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research Enterprise & International) at the University of Otago, New Zealand. A former head of the of Queensland’s Department of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering, he was GM Advanced Technical Development at CRA Limited. He is a member of the Advisory Committee for National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy and a Member of the Expert Group for Research Quality Framework and of the Research Quality Framework Development Group.