Climate Change, Environment, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Activists Oppose Plans to Complete Nuclear Plants

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 21 2003 (IPS) - A decade-long controversy over the building of a third nuclear power plant in Brazil has heated up again, with environmentalists launching a campaign to block the government’s stated intention of completing the unfinished plant.

Nuclear plants are dangerous and costly, and no techniques exist for safely storing the lethal waste for thousands of years, warns the new campaign by a coalition of environmental organisations led by Brazil’s SOS Mata Atlantica Foundation and the Brazilian chapter of the international watchdog Greenpeace.

”There is still no solution for nuclear waste” six decades after the first reactor began to operate in the United States, the national coordinator of Greenpeace’s energy campaign, Sergio Dialetachi, told IPS.

He underlined that more than 120 accidents have already occurred worldwide, including the one at Chernobyl in 1986 in northern Ukraine, which at the time formed part of the Soviet Union.

The coalition of some 20 non-governmental organisations has come together to block continued work on the partially-built power plant, after the administration of leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former trade unionist who took office in January, announced that it planned to finish construction on the plant.

This month, TV ads featuring Rita Lee, considered the first lady of Brazilian rock, began to urge the public to oppose the project.

Brazil already has two functioning nuclear plants, Angra-1 and Angra-2, which comprise the Admiral Alvaro Alberto Nuclear Plant located on a beach in the city of Angra dos Reis, less than 100 kms directly west of Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil’s ambitious but frustrated nuclear energy programme based on an agreement with Germany had also projected the construction of six other plants before the end of the 20th century.

The equipment already purchased – over a decade ago, in some cases – for Angra-3 before construction came to a halt is worth an estimated 700 million dollars.

Completing construction of the plant would require an additional 1.8 billion dollars in investment, Luiz Messias, the superintendent of projects at Eletronuclear, the state company in charge of the generation of nuclear energy, said in an interview with IPS.

By completing Angra-3, the state will ”recuperate the investment that has already been made,” and avoid the useless expense of 20 million dollars a year that goes towards maintenance of the unused equipment, he argued.

Messias added that Angra-3 would share the infrastructure as well as the experience of the technical personnel at the two existing plants, which would cut costs and strengthen the industrial complex that produces nuclear fuel, by increasing demand.

The Angra plants currently account for around four percent of the energy produced in this nation of 171 million, and are ”essential for guaranteeing reliable supplies of electricity for the states of Rio de Janeiro and Espiritu Santo,” he maintained.

Angra-3 would have the same potential for power generation as Angra-2 – 1,350 megawatts – and the capacity to generate more than 10 million megawatt-hours a year.

Germany’s decision to dismantle its own nuclear power sector by 2030 has provided fuel for the arguments of critics of Angra-3, who say the plant would depend on technology and equipment that are already being phased out elsewhere. Obtaining parts, for example, would become an increasingly difficult problem, said Dialetachi.

Messias, however, denied that there is a global tendency to abandon nuclear energy, and said that on the contrary, the world is witnessing a return to that kind of electricity.

”Opposition to nuclear energy is no longer so intense in Germany,” and the situation is changing in Europe as a whole, where Britain is taking a close look at its energy prospects given the difficulties surrounding oil supplies, and Finland is getting ready to build a new nuclear plant, he said.

In fact, he asserted, environmental questions have to do with that process, because many believe that only nuclear energy will help Europe meet the targets set by the Kyoto Protocol for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Although Messias admitted that the cost of building nuclear plants is still high – around 2,000 dollars per kilowatt compared to 600 dollars for gas-fired plants – he predicted that technological advances and large-scale electricity generation would eventually cut that cost in half.

For his part, Eletronuclear marketing adviser Sergio Mathias told IPS that the costs of alternative and renewable sources like wind power and biomass were much higher.

Furthermore, alternative sources of energy cover just three percent of global demand for electricity, after ”more than two decades of subsidies and research,” while nuclear energy supplies more than 18 percent, he added.

But in Brazil, it is the costly electricity generated by the Angra plants that receives heavy subsidies, Dialetachi pointed out, arguing that it would be more logical to subsidise renewable sources, which have enormous potential and are barely exploited by this country, South America’s giant.

There are also safety problems posed by storing the nuclear waste in the plant itself, until a final destination for the waste has been decided, and the emergency plan in case of accidents is full of holes, said Rafael Ribeiro, an adviser to the Angra Ecological Protection Association.

A drill carried out on Jul. 31 to test the emergency response plan ”was a disgrace,” he told IPS, because the neighbourhoods near the nuclear plant – which are home to tens of thousands of people who would need to be evacuated in case of an accident – did not even hear the warning siren.

Angra Mayor Fernando Jordao demanded compliance with the clause of the agreements between Eletronuclear and the country’s environmental authorities which stipulated that an emergency shelter be built for the local population to use in case of an accident.

There are a total of 441 nuclear plants worldwide, most of which are concentrated in the world’s wealthy nations and countries that previously formed part of the Soviet Union, according to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.

Nuclear plants provide 80.1 percent of electricity in Lithuania and 78 percent of the energy consumed in France, the countries that rely most heavily on that source of energy.

Last year, six new nuclear plants began to operate, including four in China.

In Latin America, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico have two plants each, which account for just over seven percent of the electricity produced in Argentina and roughly four percent in the other two countries.