Speaking at the World Nuclear Symposium in London, the multi-award-winning architect behind numerous iconic projects, including the HSBC building in Hong Kong and The Gherkin building in London, warned that, over decades, the targets set to address climate change had not been met, and fossil fuels still dominated.
The 19th Century was the age of the Industrial Revolution, he said, but the world was now moving into a new age, of “electrical revolution”. He gave examples of what he called “the rampant destruction” of the countryside by renewable energy projects, and said: “Overdependence at the moment on solar and wind to counter climate change … the very aim of saving the planet and its fragile ecosystems is in many ways threatened by the very device that we have to save them.
“As a civilisation we hinge on the balance between the built-world and nature, so there is an imperative to get that balance right and not to threaten the very ecosystems that we survive on.”
He gave the example of schemes covering areas larger than London and said that small modular reactors could be deployed instead, which he said would be carbon-free and take up only a small fraction of the land area. He added that, compared with fossil fuels and other forms of generation, nuclear was the safest form of power generation.
“I could go on about the virtues of nuclear. You know them, I know them, but most people outside this hall are not aware of them. So there is a communications threat – otherwise why would some countries such as Germany have closed down (their nuclear plants)?” said Foster.
He described himself as a fairly recent convert to nuclear energy – “my entry point was the nuclear battery, the micro-modular reactor – I was amazed to discover that something container-sized, with a co-generator, another similar-sized container of six metres/20 feet, could power 25 East Side blocks, a small town or community”.
Referring to a project in Downtown Manhattan, catering for 14,000 people, he said “a small reactor in the basement could make it totally autonomous, and that got me into thinking ‘well why aren’t we industrialising these units, why are they not coming off a production line like a jet engine?’ And, of course, everyone said, ‘well it’s expensive’. But automobiles were expensive when they first came on the market … but then you got a production line and bingo, everyone could afford them.”
He referred to the old telephone exchange system with millions of kilometres of cables and large numbers of people working at telephone exchanges in the USA in the 1950s, and how that had all changed to an autonomous system with mobiles and satellite networks. Foster suggested that national grids could face a similar evolution.
“What was fascinating for me was to discover that those people who are in the business of SMRs, MMRs, they see it as something for niche communities in the wilderness. It never occurs to anybody to question the very nature of a grid … the grid can’t cope with the new data centres and the data centres are only the tip of an iceberg of electrification,” he said, adding that there was an opportunity for emerging economies to “leapfrog and leave behind this obsolescent idea of the grid”.
Foster said that with the need for the world to ensure there is power to provide access to clean water for everyone, to tackle climate change and to meet the rising demands from areas such as electrified transport “there is an extraordinary demand for abundant clean energy, not business as before – this is truly a revolution and it will need all the elements – it will need solar, integrated into buildings seamlessly, the facades, the roofs can at the same time absorb and harvest energy. Wind power, but in the right places. And here I would suggest industrialised nuclear to augment the existing systems … industrialised nuclear has a critical role to play.”
In his speech, delivered without notes, the 91-year-old said that he had championed the cause of nuclear in the “corridors of power, discreetly” and said that, via courses at the Norman Foster Institute, had helped “change the policy of at least one nation”.
The World Nuclear Symposium, organised by World Nuclear Association, is taking place in London from 9-11 September. Foster is Senior Executive Partner and Executive Chairman of Foster + Partners, which he founded in 1967. He is also president of the Norman Foster Foundation, based in Madrid, which includes the Norman Foster Institute, an applied Research Centre for Sustainable Cities which aims to bridge academia and practice.
