[Ian:] uses... now the reason we need, not just nuclear power of course, but all other sources of energy er is erm illustrated by these next couple of slides erm I'm sure you've seen data like this before... growth in the world's population over the last er few hundred years erm... over the middle ages the er world's population was fairly stable, although the birth rate was high er the death rate was equally high because of things like cholera and bubonic plague and smallpox and other things that used to kill people off in large numbers. But mainly these diseases have now been er controlled if not completely eradicated and as a result the world's population is er is likely to zoom up as you can see... right off the top end of the, of the graph... and we're expecting something like eight billion people er and, and still rising at the end of the, of the century and it'll be some time way into the next century before the world's population actually starts to er er to level out. So more people means more resources, in the context of today's talk, more energy resources so we're particularly keen to find all the energy resources that we er that we can. And to show you what the situation is er the world's energy demand is very likely i i i is almost certain to increase er because of development in the world and also because of the growing population... er that arrow is some sort of guess as to how the world er the demand for energy worldwide is likely to increase... when you set that against the curves at the bottom which show the likely projections for oil and natural gas... as you can see as we get into the next century those er fossil fuels, which we've been using with gay abandon for many decades, will start to into er decline. Now I, I often gives in, in schools, and I particularly show that slide because as you can see it goes up to the year twenty forty... er now I shall be a hundred and four in the year twenty forty... I won't ask you to calculate what age you will be in the year twenty forty... it might be quite large... erm
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Ian:] some of you are a lot younger than me of course, it could be a lot smaller, but er er showing this to teenagers, if you work out what age a teenager will be in the year twenty forty, they'll be about er in their mid sixties... so this period of time, basically, is the time over which our present... er generation of schoolchildren will have their adult life. So these basically are the problems that they're gonna have to er... er have to face.... Now uranium erm is, is er a non-renewable resource like oi oil and coal and gas but there's an awful lot of it in the world and this is erm... the reserves of the energy they can give are compared to the remaining reserves of coal or and er gas, you can see it's one of the largest energy resources on... on earth. To take advantage of that large amount of fuel, we have to develop what are there is the fast reactors, and this is Britain's fast reactor... a fast reactor erm uses energy... erm about sixty time uses uranium about sixty times more efficiently than the present type of reactors... not sixty percent but sixty times... so it obviously has tremendous implications for uranium resources. Erm so quite clearly this is the erm er reactor of the future. Er you must therefore ask yourselves the question, why is it therefore the government has decided to er re re remove the funding er for this particular project... erm never mind they said er we now know how to build fast reactors, look there's one we've already built, a prototype... we have th the, the er the th the blueprints, the drawings for a full scale version... and when we actually need the fast reactors in say the year two thousand and ten or thereabouts, we'll just get the blueprints out of the filing cabinet and we will build them. Er I'm sure they didn't, I'm sure he didn't believe it either. What is likely to happen of course is that er in the year two thousand and ten when we do need these fast reactors, we'll be buying in French or Japanese technology... as we've done in many other areas which is all rather... sad really. Erm the erm th this shows Britain's stockpile of, of uranium... this is actually depleted uranium which can be used in the fast reactor but can't be used in the present type of er thermal reactors... but what you see there is virtually the er all of it,th it's, it's erm stored at a place called erm er Capenhurst in, in Cheshire on the Wirral... erm and erm there's a few jars off the edge as you can see but basically that's er that's it and what you see there, in energy terms, represents erm the equivalent of our entire coal reserves. You don't have to, it doesn't have to be mined, we don't have to import it from any Arabs, it's ours, we own it and it gives us that amount of energy but only if we develop the fast er reactors. If we don't develop the fast reactors, that just becomes rather embarrassing waste and has to be disposed of.... Now of course there are other er forms of erm er o o of fuel... er there's coal erm and we have large stocks of coal in this country... er enough for about two hundred er years... er again you ask the question well why therefore is the, is the government coal cl cl closing down er a large part of the coal industry? Erm a again the answer is it's cheaper to import it from er overseas. Erm one wonders whether that's erm... wise in the long term because once you've closed down a coal mine of course you can't er re-open it very easily because the roof falls in and it floods... and effectively you have to start again from er from scratch.... Erm probl er coal does have its problems of course erm... er it does produce an awful lot of pollution. We have a large coalfired power station near where I live er in Oxfordshire er at a place called Didcot, which is also a railway er junction... erm roughly halfway between Harwell where we, we invented er nuclear power... and, and Culham where they're working on nuclear fusion which is a different kind of nuclear power, roughly halfway between... the government decides to build the largest coalfired power station in the country. Erm of which there, of course is erm impeccable logic... er you might think well there aren't any coal mines in Didcot, which of course there aren't, but Didcot is actually a railway junction as I mentioned and in fact it's on the main line from the midlands erm and they can get coal in from the Midlands very easily... er it's on the main line er also from South Wales and they're getting co getting coal from, from er South Wales... in the days when they built Didcot power station they still had coal m m mines in South Wales, so this was an obvious place to locate a large coalfired power station. Erm the fact it's now burning Australian coal does tend to undermine the arguments er but nevertheless it does have a good rail connection down to the coast, the p ports on the south coast where it can, can er take the stuff in from the... er from the ports. Erm well coal er is quite a dirty fuel when it's burnt erm... D Didcot power station... er this is the sort of pollution you get from Didcot power station, it doesn't give the time on there... er you might be surprised to, to realize that's actually er per day... erm that's the amount of pollution you get per day from a large coalfired power station. The C O two comb erm erm contributes to er the greenhouse effect... er the S O two, sulphur dioxide, contributes to acid rain... er the dust and the ash are basically just er... an inconvenience.... Erm another s source of energy we've been considering is th is, is a tidal barrage across the Severn [clears throat] and erm you probably recognize this as a, as a map of the Severn Estuary... er er and if you didn't it says the Severn Estuary in big letters er across the er the bottom
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Ian:] er the proposal is to put er a barrage roughly across there erm I've shown... er linking those two erm... islands in the middle, Flat Holm and Steep Holm. That er, if built, would provide us with about ten percent of our electricity at current rates of use. Erm it's er would take about er twenty years to build, would cost about ten billion pounds, but of course once you've built it, er the running costs are very er small. We ha we have to look at the environmental consequences, you stick a barrage that size across erm a large er river system... you've got to ask what happens upstream erm and of course Bristol for example is a port, how to get the ships in and out is another problem... but er these are being considered at the moment and there's quite a lot of mo money going into, into studies but no commitment yet as to actually, to actually build it. Of course that's the only big site that we've got, so once you've built that one well that's more or less er it. The other source of energy we've been considering is wind power. Erm... er there's various parts of the country where this is er suitable, this is a windmill in er Orkney... a place called Bungay Hill... er that provides electricity for most of the, the main island. Erm but of course to provide erm electricity on a larger scale, you can't put these things too close together, you need about... er a thousand of those to, for example, to replace say a power station like Didcot... and er and a thousand of these windmills would o occupy about three hundred square miles, and this is what three hundred square miles looks like... er it's, it's the major part of, of central... L you wouldn't put them in central London of course but erm... gives you some idea of the sort of area you'd have to devote to wind farms if you were to use this particular type of er of energy. Erm so there are these other forms of energy as well, erm nuclear power er will take its place along those, alongside those I'm sure in the future... er it does have its problems, the main problem is the possibility of er major accidents and many of you will remember the accident at Chernobyl in the, what was then the Soviet Union, it's now the, now the er Ukraine... erm when in nineteen eighty six the, there was a very serious accident... and the er roof er blew off and er radioactivity was pumped into the er atmosphere. Very serious accident indeed... er two people died from falling masonry... er in fact one of the bodies is still in there somewhere, they haven't found him yet... and twenty nine people died from large doses of radiation... erm erm and others will die prematurely because of the large radiation dose that they got, mainly the emergency workers who went in to erm... sort out the er er the problem. Erm... what's happened to that?... There we go. Ra radiation is potentially harmful, er particularly in large doses. Erm... this shows the er affect of radiation against er dose... er ten thousand units is, is er fairly le is, is lethal... you'd die within minutes if you got that sort of dose of radiation. Down at about a thousand units erm [clears throat] you er b between ten thousand and a thousand units... er you'd suffer the symptoms of radiation sickness... erm your hair would drop out and your teeth would drop out and you'd vomit and... your skin would turn a funny shade of green and... and you'd be very ill erm but you, you'd probably recover... er you might not but you, you, I mean people have actually had those sort of doses of radiation... and have actually recovered er from it. So there's, there's a chance you'd recover in that, in that range, though you will be ill for a while. Lower than a thousand units er there's no immediate affect... and one's tempted to think that erm... the er er it's, that radiation's therefore safe below that level and that's not strictly true because there is the possibility of a long term affect... it can actually cause cancer in the long term... but with very low er ra- er levels of risk cos you can see down at the levels where people actually get radiation doses... er like erm members of the public or erm from the actual background of people who work in nuclear power stations, you're talking about very low levels but the levels, those sort of levels... I mean one in three hundred thousand, one in three million, that sort of thing... you can't actually measure in real er populations because there er any effects that there are can be swamped by other ways of getting er of getting cancer.... Er in fact most of the radiation we get in fact is not from nuclear power, it's from erm... man made sourc it's from, from natural sources... eighty seven percent of the population as an average comes from our natural environment... a lot comes from radon gas erm... a small amount of radioactivity in our food... erm we were discussing at er er lunch in, in fact the... benefits of, of eating er low sodium salt... salt is meant to be bad for you so the health er er... er freaks say... and it's the sodium, therefore you should buy low sodium salt which is calcium chloride rather than sodium chloride... what they forget to tell you of course is that potassium er sorry it's, it's potassium chloride rather than er than s than sodium chloride, what they forget, forget to tell you of course is that potassium is slightly radioactive... it contains erm a small amount of, of a naturally occurring radioactive potassium... so you get a small dose of radiation er to compensate for the fact you aren't eating any sodium. Erm... [clears throat] a small amount of, of erm... radiation from cosmic rays from outer space and from building materials and so on er eighty seven percent in total of average. Of the man made er sources of radiation, twelve of the thirteen percent you see are from medical uses... from X-rays, that kind of thing, and only one percent comes from all the others, of which point one percent comes from nuclear er installations. So erm... er erm by n by no means er could you call one... point one percent of something that can vary by factors of three in, in, in, in Cornwall the natural radiation is three times what it is in, in Essex... erm... er but they seem to be quite er healthy nevertheless in Cornwall... erm so point one percent is er varies by factors of three, obviously can't be considered to be erm er a major political er a major erm er environmental hazard. The problem of course arises, as I've said earlier, when things go wrong, things like Chernobyl accidents and so on so we've gotta use nuclear power obviously... we have to erm er make sure that we... don't have accidents like that. I'll just finish with, with a er er er a small anecdote to show erm the relative affects of radiation compared to other things. You, you, you've all hea heard of Marie Curie, famous erm scientist who pioneered a lot of the work on radioactivity in the early part of this century and the last part of the last century... she in fact was Polish, lived in, in, in Paris, married a French man called Pierre... er hence she's known as Marie Curie... well Pierre Curie was also a scientist and he was er baffled by the affect that,th the fact that there didn't seem to be any biological affects... er certainly the doses of radiation that, that they were, they were getting... they'd handled tons and tons of pitchblende, that's radioactive ore... they extracted several grammes of radium from it, they'd been handling stuff for years... they weren't ill, they obviously hadn't died and so on. So he, he thought he'd do an experiment, er he took a small piece of radium which he'd extracted... from several tons of pitchblende... and he put this bit of radium on his forearm... and, and put a bandage round to hold it in place and left it there for a week and said right I'll see what happens. So after a week he takes away the bandage, removes the bit of radium, sure enough there's a bright red radiation burn on his forearm but apart from that he feels fine, he doesn't feel ill, he obviously hasn't died, er so he said well I'll leave that for a few weeks and monitor my, my health and see if there's any long term affects from this exposure to, to radiation. But we shall never know the results of that experiment because the very next week he was run over and killed by a bus erm
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Ian:] which all goes to show that yes, you know in large doses radiation can be harmful to you, er but in the sort, the sort of levels that you and I are likely to come across... er almost certainly something else will get you first. Thank you gentlemen.
[speaker002:] [applause] Gentlemen I'm sure there must be questions. Would anybody like to start the ball?... Don
[Don:] Yes... a after Chernobyl there was a certain amount of alarm about erm about hill farms, Cumberland and so forth and it's all gone quiet now, can you update us on what exactly
[Ian:] Yeah. Yes what er happened,th there was erm erm er the radioactive cloud that came up was swept by the winds around the world and in fact as it went over the United Kingdom... er it happened to rain on er Cumbria and North Wales so some of this radioactivity was brought down, it settled on the grass and got into the soil. Erm and the hill er farmers who graze their sheep up there... there are very strict regulations about the amount of radioactivity that you're allowed to have in any meat and in, in, in sheep it's erm... er er about ten thousand units er per kilogramme. That's the, the, the internationally approved level. Well in Britain we decided we'd be on the safe side, we'll reduce that to a thousand... we put another factor of ten in... and what's more i if one sheep in, in a whole flock is more than a thousand units, er then we will condemn the whole flock. So it's pretty, it's pretty er er and in fact some of these, these flocks who were grazing at the er w where just above that er that limit... only just but just slightly above it... so, so... but in fact i if the farmers er grazed their sheep er further down the hillside... er then in fact the, the er er the level dropped very rapidly and the sheep were then... erm so it was a, a commercial decision as to whether to keep your sheep up on the hills to, to eat radioactive grass and get the compensation... or to graze your sheep further down and actually the, the lamb... the, the, the lambs for, for, for... for the market. Erm s so er because obviously these hill farmers were compensated for, for the loss of, of sales. As far as I know, er the levels have now dropped and I don't think there are any further restrictions, as far as I know. But it was just on the, on the margin er er o o of something that was already a large factor below the international limit, so it was er there were very large safety factors involved in that in fact....
[speaker002:] Er Frank
[Frank:] Yes thank you Mr President erm we worry about our, our stations though I don't think we've got very many in fact... but within reach, within twenty five miles across the Channel there are probably ten or twenty French power stations that could cause just as much trouble as any of ours surely? And any fallout from them would affect most of the southern half of England I think, is this true?
[Ian:] Yeah er the, the French erm... have a very large nuclear programme er for, for a good erm logical gallic reasons, I mean they've got no oil, they've got no gas, they've got no coal, so they decided, oh years and years ago in the nineteen fifties, to have a very large nuclear programme. Seventy five percent of their electricity comes from nuclear power in France. And that will rise to ninety percent early in the next century.... Er so they actually got themselves organized and they erm have factories that, that er mass produce the components and they're producing nuclear power stations at the rate of about one every six months. And, and erm because it's all mass produced er they can actually build a nuclear power station for half the price that we can... that obviously has an effect on the economics. And when they sited their power stations, they decided erm, again for good economic reasons, to site them er along the channel coast and actually down the, down the Rhine... most of the power stations are, are er th they have power stations elsewhere but a lot of the power stations are in these areas here... and the reason for that was, by putting it near to their borders, they were able to export electricity to their neighbours. Er they were banking on the fact that there'd be problems for other countries because of, you know, public perception etcetera, you know the French had decided... almost all of them decided they'd have a nuclear programme anyway so, so, so they were er o okay. Er so a lot of their power stations are actually built near borders for that reason, they're, they, they, they, they make a lot of money by exporting nuclear electricity across the border to Germany, into Switzerland, to Belgium, to Holland and of course, through this,the these couple of cables under the channel, to Britain. So in fact five percent of our electricity comes from French nuclear power stations, in fact at the present time. Er but yes wh what happens if there's er er an accident? Erm the French erm safety record is extremely good. Erm we've had a, a major accident in nineteen fifty er... ninety fifty seven, one of the Winscale small reactors at Winscale caught fire... er the Americans had an accident at Three Mile Island which erm w was... catastrophic as far as the reactor was concerned, but the safety devices prevented any radioactivity escaping... the Russians have had their Three Mile I er their erm Chernobyl accident which was catastrophic.... Er the French, despite the size of their programme, erm haven't had any serious incidents at all, in fact they they're very well run er stations.... So erm yes there is the risk that the French, one of the French power stations could go wrong and it would affect southern England. Erm but er certainly the record to date has been that these power stations are erm extremely erm well run and that they ha they've had no major incidents at all. Yes there's always the possibility that it might. But then of course France is a, is a, is a separate country and we can't actually tell the French what to do. Er we could refuse to buy their electricity off them I suppose but it wouldn't be... have much affect. But if you can actually influence the French let us know because, or let the government know, because they, they've been trying for years... ever since Napoleon's day, to try and do something. I mean we Mitterand and take him down to the I suppose, see if that'll do any good but erm
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Ian:] erm you know the each, I mean, basically we are, we are a world of a hundred or so independent sovereign states... and each sovereign state can do what it wishes within its territory... with the exception of Iraq of course
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Ian:] er for, for other reasons. But I mean erm... er which means basically that er if, if a country wants to build a nuclear power programme... er they ha they, they can do so. And most countries with nuclear power programmes are, are pa er er are, subscribe to the International Atomic Energy Agency which sets international standards... er and they have inspectors who, who er check these standards are being observed. Er and of course France is a member, we're a member, in fact all the nuclear... c countries with nuclear power st er programmes are members. Which er gives some sort of erm er comfort that in fact the international standards are being maintained. The French are a fairly responsible people after all... er er with, with reason a reasonable standard of technology. And certainly they're record to date has been better than ours so erm... maybe we should
[speaker002:] [cough] Gentlemen I'll just take one last question, Gordon
[Gordon:] Yeah... in today's press it says that er the government are going to subsidize now the coal industry... something like seven hundred millions due to the miners' kerfuffle, which is going to mean between five and ten pounds... subsidy per ton. Now it also goes on to say that's going to affect electricity prices which will rise, now how will that... compensate with, with nuclear... electricity?
[Ian:] Erm... well it depends erm... the, the economics of power production are extremely erm... er complex and, and t to a certain extent arbitrary... erm and erm... I mean there, there are various ways that the government can actually get out of this fix because obviously it's caused a lot of concern to close the, the mines, and one is actually to, to subsidize the mines and put the price on to electricity bills... er the other is to subsidize the mines er but pay for it out of the, out of, er out of taxes... so it's a basic, instead of paying for it on your electricity bill, you pay for it on your tax bill, yeah. A and the, the justification for doing this would be that in the long term we will need the coal... therefore it's ne it's necessary to keep er a viable coal industry going. Er er er th that's a fairly logical argument in fact. Erm... it's one that is er different from the normal philosophy of this government which tends to er work on er... relatively short term economic forces, let the market sort things out is, is, is generally their philosophy. So it would mean actually going against their, their philosophy. Erm... the nuclear industry also has erm er a subsidy, it's known as the nuclear levy... erm and there is reasons for that erm one is that erm some money has to be put aside to decommission nuclear power stations in the future... erm now the s C G B, before it was broken up, had been actually putting some money aside year by year yeah ou ou out of the money that was generated fr er er from selling electricity nuclear power stations, some was put to one side, notionally,o on the accounts... f f for a future decommissioning. Now when the C G B was broken up, that money just disappeared. I mean nobody pinched it, it er actually just went into the general melting pot. So that national er budget that had been accumulating over, over twenty thirty years just basically vanished. Er so that had to be, that had to be re replenished essentially with, with, with other money. Erm... so erm... th the cheapest er fuel at the moment is gas, you know, that's, that's why er a lot of the erm... er er generators are now moving to towards gas er erm er generation... er wh which is fine for as long as the gas exists but, you know, another, give it another ten fifteen years, and our North Sea gas will have gone you see so, so erm... you have to ask well how much do you, weight do you put on market forces... and how much in say, in the energy business, ought you to be thinking longer term? And that's really a political question....
[speaker002:] Thank you Ian. Could I ask Rotarian Jeff please to propose a vote of thanks....
[Jeff:] Right erm... regarding being a Lancastrian I think the er the main for coming down to the south is probably where you are today, I mean, cricket is the great game that we all follow here
[Ian:] [LAUGHTER]
[Jeff:] no doubt you've come down to watch some decent cricket.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Jeff:] I won't say too much about the football cos Manchester United are on top.... Erm... ironically I was one of those that went from Essex to Manchester and I did live up there for a couple of years but er decided to come back. Erm personally, er on the nuclear er atomic side, we we're very involved with our own company, with B N F L at Sellafield, with the er manufacture of the precast concrete and, and I know what it means in terms of the, the safety incurred in... in, in the design because it is quite erm... er strenuous the things we have to go through. I'm going back to the erm controversial emotive subject of atomic power I suppose, as you said earlier, the... the atomic bomb and erm I suppose the most worrying thing for er for everybody was when erm... the Cuba crisis was on and everybody was just waiting for these mushrooms to appear over London because we all thought we were gonna be bombed at any time but... er obviously the other thing that sort of worries people is other things that you said about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island... but on the other side, obviously the erm... the low cost of atomic power must be the advantage for the future. Obviously not being aware that there's er a population of eight billion forecast for the year two thousand and erm obviously with the natural resources of erm... gas and... coal running out and the, the pollution problems you've got with coal... and obviously the great efficiency of sixty times more efficient than other forms of power. Er other areas that probably worried people er i is this storage and distribution and how it's gonna affect us and goodness knows what but I think... that's been gone into in, in great depth and I'm sure it moves around with great safety. Erm obviously other forms of power... er the, the, the water barrage in the Severn erm Estuary and the wind power is, is something but obviously er the thing with this atomic power situation, it's got to be something for the future. Erm I think that's about all I've got to say and I, I'd just like the club to... er thank Ian in erm the usual way please
[speaker002:] [applause] Thank you Mr President. Next week we have Rodney, the District Foundation Chairman, and the hosts are Alan and Mike.... Thank you gentlemen, I will now close the m meeting by asking you to join me in the the erm Final the final toast.... The toast is to Rotary the world over. To rotary the world over.... I thank you. Thank you Ian, that was
[Ian:] You're welcome
[speaker002:] obviously very well received and it's very nice to have met