Too Costly, Too Risky, Too Late: Why Nuclear is not the Answer
After thirty years of talk, there is now a solid global consensus among politicians that climate change is a serious concern and urgent action must be taken. The lone holdouts against reducing carbon use are the dictators ruling carbon economies and the failed dictator of Mar-a-Largo. And even the dictators of Moscow and Riyadh acknowledge that climate change is a concern, even while they fund massive disinformation campaigns to persuade people otherwise.
The global environmental movement has been developing plans for replacing the carbon economy for the past four decades. These plans have changed over the years but there is now rough consensus on replacing coal, oil and gas with wind, solar, wave with hydro and geothermal resources being exploited where possible. Matching of generation capacity to demand will be addressed through a combination of upgrading hydro to pumped storage, battery technologies and hydrogen technologies.
Hydrogen is a particularly interesting storage technology as it can also be used to replace coal in energy intensive industrial processes such as steel, to power heavy equipment such as trucks and is a probable (but not certain) replacement for kerosene as an aviation fuel either directly or by reversing the current processes used to generate hydrogen by reforming natural gas.
The global transition to a carbon neutral economy is now a matter of when, not if. Like the tobacco industry of the 1950s, big oil understands that it is only a matter of time before they lose. And as for big coal, well it isn’t big any more. Sending people and machines hundreds of feet underground to carry up coal is an inherently more expensive process than drilling a pipe and extracting gas.
The carbon fuel producers are beaten because their product has become uneconomic. In 2010 the cost per MWh of producing electricity using a wind turbine was roughly double the cost of using natural gas and slightly more expensive than coal production. Today wind is a third the cost of coal and 30% cheaper than natural gas. A gas glut created by fracking is the only reason natural gas has remained competitive against wind.
At this point, it is only the sunk capital costs of existing coal and gas plants having been built and the time taken to build out renewable replacements that is keeping carbon power plants in business. The only country that is currently building new coal power plants on a large scale is China where the peculiar economic system makes capital expenditure for the sake of spending necessary. Ghost cities without population sit next to idle power stations built to serve them. The alternative of failing to make their quotas is not something local party bosses dare risk.
As recently as the 2016 US Presidential election, big oil was aggressively funding climate change denial. Despite or quite possibly because of Trump’s win, this funding has all but dried up. Fellowships at K-Street institutes ‘researching’ climate change (i.e. prostitutes paid to manufacture lies) have become extinct. This has led to a lot of former climate change deniers demanding to know why nuclear isn’t a part of the solution.
Neither a lower second in classics, nor a fat check from the nuclear industry gives anyone license to demean others on the topic of nuclear power or any other.
PWR Nuclear: Unsafe at any speed.
The short answer to the nuclear question is of course Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The fact that the industry has suffered three of the most serious industrial accidents in history does make it difficult for politicians to propose more nuclear. But paradoxically, the fact that nuclear is risky is just about the only thing keeping it in business.
I know from personal experience that any suggestion that nuclear power remains unsafe is met by a bullying attacks, to oppose nuclear on safety grounds is to be weak, cowardly, unfit. Only people who have no understanding of nuclear power think that nuclear is unsafe.
At this point I respond that one of my degrees is in engineering, the other is from the Oxford University Department of Nuclear Physics and as a senior IT security professional for over 25 years, I am very experienced in assessing and mitigating risk.
So my first point is that nobody should allow themselves to be bullied out of their opinion that nuclear power is unsafe because the fact is that the industry has an abysmal record. I was an intern and sponsored student at ICI, a major chemical manufacturer. I know an intrinsically safe design is and any plant that will explode if the cooling systems fail is not intrinsically safe by definition.
For better or worse, the nuclear power industry has adopted the Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) design as their only bet on their future. Excluding the two nuclear power plants whose construction has been suspended in Japan, all of the six nuclear plants currently under construction are of the PWR design. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima were all PWR designs and it was the fact that they were PWR designs not the particular details of the design that led to the disasters. The idea of a PWR is to establish a sub-critical nuclear mass and then keep it cool enough to avoid it melting its moderator and creating an elephants foot as at Chernobyl or worse. The flaw intrinsic to the PWR design is that they require active cooling to keep them safe. The CANDU reactor uses a heavy water moderator designed in such a way that overheating will cause the moderator to safely drain away, shutting down the reaction.
The issue of nuclear waste remains a serious problem for both fission and fusion nuclear power. And no, it is not possible to solve the problem of nuclear waste by recycling it into fuel either. While it is possible to recover nuclear fuel from nuclear waste, these processes create more waste than they consume.
Fast breeder reactors which ‘create their own fuel’ are also a misnomer. What those reactors are doing is using the radiation from an active nuclear pile to transmute inactive or long half-life isotopes into short lived isotopes of an element that can be extracted more cheaply by a chemical process than enriching uranium by centrifuge etc. processes. While this process may or may not produce less nuclear waste than uranium mining, it is still a source of nuclear waste, not the solution.
There are much better solutions to the problem of nuclear waste than the current solution of keeping it in storage ponds close to the reactors. And not all nuclear waste is a serious safety concern. The lowest level nuclear waste is no more toxic than the granite beneath many large cities such as New York and Edinburgh.
But don’t be fooled by the propagandists. The nuclear waste that gives off the most intense radiation isn’t much of a problem because it decays rapidly becoming inert. The nuclear waste with the longest half lives can be radioactive for millennia but at such a low level it isn’t a concern. Those are the types of waste the propagandists like to talk about. The waste that is the real concern is the stuff in the middle which will be giving off sufficiently intense radiation to be dangerous for centuries.
Of course, at a national level it makes perfect sense for the US to start transferring waste from storage ponds next to reactors to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. But the idea of creating such a facility 80 miles from Las Vegas was always absurd at the local level.
All these problems were fully understood at the start of the nuclear age. The reason politicians in the US, UK and France were prepared to ignore these issues then was that they understood that a civil nuclear program was necessary to create sufficient fissile material to build nuclear bombs. Repeated official categorical denials to the contrary, a large portion of the fissile material used to make the nuclear weapons during the cold war came from the civil nuclear program.
By any rational calculation, the unsolved problems of safety and waste disposal should make nuclear power politically untenable. But politics is not a rational activity and politicians are not rational actors. Being an advocate of nuclear power allows a politician to present themselves as manly and heroic as they are prepared to dare to impose an unpopular choice on other people.
As evidenced by the Trump years, performative cruelty can be a surprisingly effective political strategy. If the possibility of government improving peoples’ lives is dismissed on ideological grounds, all that remains is ruining the lives of perceived enemies. Building a nuclear power station nearby is an effective means of blighting a community. And people who have absolutely no intention of living next to one can gaslight those who have no other choice telling them that their safety concerns indicate they are feeble, stupid or both.
Nuclear Power for me but not for thee
Climate change is a global problem that requires a global solution. Severe climate change can only be avoided if every country reduces and eventually eliminates use of carbon fuels. A technology that can only be used in the technologically advanced countries is a local solution at best.
Building and operating nuclear power demands a considerable degree of technological sophistication which is simply not available in large parts of the world. How can a country that struggles to build a road operate a nuclear power plant?
If there is one issue that practically every elected politician in the US, UK and Europe agree on it is that is that nuclear proliferation is a bad thing. Whatever the merits or demerits of one’s own country possessing nuclear weaponry, pretty much everyone agrees that no more foreigners ‘should get the bomb’.
In the 21st century, design and manufacture of a nuclear weapon is relatively straightforward. Engineering technologies that were exotic at the time of the Manhattan project are commonplace. The difficult part remains the design and enrichment of the fissile material.
It is a simple and inescapable fact that any civil nuclear power plant can be converted to military use by turning it into a breeder reactor. Thus proliferation of civil nuclear must inevitably result of proliferation of nuclear weapons.
New Nuclear, Too Little, Too Late.
The Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) approach was not the only nuclear power plant design deployed in the early decades of the nuclear age. The Advanced Cooled Gas Reactor and Canadian CANDU system both offered superior safety but at a higher cost. If PWRs aren’t the answer, why not look into new nuclear designs?
Of late, there has been much enthusiasm for ‘thorium reactors’ an interest that I find remarkably odd given that fact that there is no such thing. There are a few research reactors that use thorium in addition to uranium or plutonium to create a breeder reactor. But there is no such thing as a thorium reactor today.
Back in the earliest days of the nuclear industry, thorium was considered as an alternative to uranium. Had that path been taken we would no doubt be hearing of uranium reactors as an alternative to thorium. The sad fact of the matter is that thorium and uranium both present essentially the same advantages and disadvantages as a power generation source albeit in slightly different degrees. The reason we use uranium is the same as the reason we use PWRs, the QWERTY keyboard, the UK drives on the left, etc. etc. Path dependence is a powerful thing.
The only real advantage of thorium is that it is three times as abundant in the earth’s crust as uranium. But that is rather less interesting than its advocates make out because even though thorium is almost as common as lead, it is considerably less abundant than Yttrium which is a rare earth. There are a half dozen rare earths more abundant than thorium. Path dependence has left us with a uranium supply chain that is more than sufficient to meet current and future needs.
As previously mentioned, breeder reactors do not magically transmute nuclear waste into fuel. The transmute less interesting isotopes into isotopes that can be easily refined into fuels. That technology is well understood, it is the technology used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
So thorium is a blind alley, what about new fission reactor designs? What about fusion? The problem is time.
There are good reasons to research new designs for nuclear reactors but climate change is not one of them. The most promising new design, the Pebble Bed Reactor is the only one to have received funding to build a full scale prototype in recent years and that project was cancelled in 2010. It will take a minimum of ten years to design a new nuclear technology and a minimum of ten more years to build a prototype. It will then take another decade to build and commission the new reactors. It is thus a minimum of 30 years before such systems can begin operating at scale. That is simply far too long to be relevant to climate change.
The Power of Wind
Virtually all the investment into new electricity generation in Europe at present is centered on renewables and in particular offshore wind. The reason is not hard to see. Wind turbines are expensive to install, maintenance can be expensive but the fuel is free.
As a result of continued improvements in turbine and blade design and in particular size, the capital and maintenance costs for wind are now substantially less than the cost for gas. The Haliade-X offshore wind turbine stands 248 meters tall with three 110 meter blades. With 14MW capacity and a load factor of 60–64%, each turn of a Haliade-X turbine’s blades produces enough electricity to power a home for two days.
The UK Dogger Bank and Hinkley Point C projects present a stark contrast between the economics of wind and nuclear. Both promise 3.2–3.6 GW of nameplate capacity within the same time frame but the cost of the nuclear option is £22 billion against £5–6 billion for wind.
Even taking into account the fact that wind only operates at full capacity for part of the time, Dogger Bank wind is a vastly better financial option than Hinkley Point C even before we take note of the fact that the cost of every UK nuclear plant has been underestimated.
We will return to the issue of peak versus base load in a moment. First though, lets step aside to take a look at the particular crazy which lacking a proper name I call operation boondoggle.
Operation Boondoggle
In 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced to the Conservative Party Conference “All of Britain’s household energy needs supplied by offshore wind by 2030,”. Household use is only about 40% of total electricity use in the UK. But why build Hinkley C if offshore wind is set to grow so far and so fast?
Part of the answer of course is that the pretense that the UK remains a world power can only be sustained as long as it is a member of the nuclear weapons club. While it is not necessary for a country to have a civil nuclear program to be able to design and manufacture nuclear weapons, as discussed earlier, it is much easier to maintain a weapons program if you have a civil program. In the case of the UK though, operation boondoggle is also a personal vanity project for the Prime Minister.
As Mayor of London, Johnson spent a vast amount of money on the design of a garden bridge that was never built. His plans for a bridge between Ireland and Scotland remain stalled by the fact that nobody knows how to build one over or through the Beaufort Trench, a deep gash in the sea floor where bridge or tunnel is supposed to go that to make things more challenging is filled with all the explosives left over from WWI.
It is therefore entirely in character that Johnson has diverted an as yet unspecified amount of money to build a palatial HQ for Boondoggle. The ostensible purpose of Boondoggle is to build ‘Small Modular Reactors’ which will be cheap to build because they will be build using off the shelf technology so no research will be needed and generate 440–470MW of clean British nuclear power. Boondoggle’s design will be assessed by tippety top experts later this year with the first unit being completed in 2030 and ten built by 2035.
Anyone remotely familiar with the UK nuclear industry and Boris Johnson knows that the only thing they have in common are that they have a long history of wasted money and broken promises. As Mayor of London, Johnson spent over a billion pounds on a series of vanity projects. Boondoggle might be different in that we might at least get a building out of it. But in the wake of COVID and BREXIT, even that is far from certain.
Johnson is not the first Prime Minister to propose a vanity project. Tony Blair put a vast amount of his personal political capital into his proposed National Identity Card. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown showed little interest in his predecessor’s political project which was swiftly cancelled when the Conservatives took power in 2010.
The figures being put about make absolutely no sense. Why would HMG be building two 1600MW reactors at Hinkley C for £11B each to start generating in 2026 if they expected to be able to build 470MW stations £2B each in 2030. The rather obvious answer is that they can’t and the £2B price tag of the SMR is an aspirational price derived by multiplying the planned generation capacity by the cost per MW that must be reached to be competitive with wind and solar.
The problem with nuclear power is that the capital cost of building the plant is simply too large for it to be competitive. Making the plants smaller is unlikely to allow them to become cheaper per MW of nameplate capacity, the cost is much more likely to go up.
Boondoggle is not the start of a renaissance for British nuclear power, like every other Johnson vanity project, it will lurch from one expensive crisis to another and finally be cancelled by his successor.
Nuclear is Too Expensive
As operation boondoggle demonstrates, working out the cost of nuclear power is very difficult as there are many people with a vested interest in dissembling. Current estimates based on accounts published by energy companies etc. show that nuclear is actually the second most expensive form of energy in widespread use:
All that is needed to understand the collapse of the coal industry is the chart above. The cost of coal has remained constant over the past decade while the cost of renewables and gas have plummeted. But that graph only shows part of the story. It is not just the cost of generation that matters it is when the power is produced. The natural gas and gas peaker plants are not fundamentally different technologies, they are different modes of operating the same technology. In many cases, a single plant can operate in both modes albeit at different efficiencies.
This gets us to the final ‘argument’ for nuclear which is that wind and solar don’t provide constant power but nuclear does. The wind rises and falls. So any renewable power generation ‘must’ be supplemented by dependable sources like nuclear. Like every other argument made by the nuclear lobby, it is nonsense.
Nuclear Isn’t Flexible Either.
The first point to be made is that while wind and solar are highly variable in one locale, the amount of energy reaching the earth from the sun is pretty constant and that is what powers wind and solar. Offshore wind is particularly reliable. Sailing ships would have been considerably less popular as a means of ocean voyaging if being becalmed was a common state of affairs and not an occasional inconvenience. So if your wind generation is spread over a wide geographic area, the troughs and peaks will cancel out. Mixing solar and wind has similar benefits.
As wind provides an increasing proportion of electricity generation, storage and transmission issues are going to become increasingly important. But matching electricity supply to demand isn’t a new problem created by use of renewables. It has been a major consideration since Edison’s day.
Electricity use varies during the course of a day. In the mornings people are making breakfast, in the evenings they are making dinner and watching TV. In certain climates at certain times of the year, air conditioners are in use, etc. etc.
This matching of supply and demand takes many forms and at the wholesale level, the price of electricity varies during the day. Certain energy intensive industrial processes such as electrolyzing salt to make chlorine gas are only performed when demand for and thus the price of electricity is low. Certain types of power generation plant can charge premium rates for their product because of their ability to ramp up production quickly to meet sudden spikes in demand.
In some electricity providers charge residential customers differently according to the time of day electricity is consumed. In some cases they are charged according to a price dependent on the spot market price of electricity. But it is our ability to deploy metering and payments that has transformed this part of our energy ecosystem, not a ‘new’ constraint imposed by renewables. Electricity providers would be just as interested in persuading owners of Electric Vehicles to charge them at night if nuclear power was being used.
Modern meteorology allows wind generators to accurately predict the amounts of power they will generate at given times of the day. That amount is limited by the amount of wind available of course. But this limitation is really only slightly different from the limitation posed by nuclear which like wind presents the same fixed costs regardless of how much electricity is generated.
For this reason, nuclear, wind and solar power are always used to provide ‘baseload’ capacity. Next come regular gas stations and coal which can adjust their output according to demand and finally peaking power plants, hydropower and storage technologies.
The economics of power generation are complicated but the position of nuclear is not. Nuclear power costs the same per MWh generated as a gas peaker plant but doesn’t have the ability to meet variable demand. Storage technologies would be just as critical for any plan to replace gas with nuclear as for wind.
Conclusion
There is no good case for building new nuclear power capacity. Nuclear is more expensive than any renewable alternative, is limited to providing baseload generation and lead times for deployment preclude any role for new nuclear construction in preventing climate change.
There being no economic or environmental case for new nuclear, the safety issues are moot. But what about existing nuclear facilities? Should these continue operating?
That is a much harder question to answer. In the short term, there is no choice but to continue and hope for the best. In the longer term, the nuclear industry will disappear as older plants are decommissioned and not replaced. My guess is that if the industry can avoid a third Chernobyl/Fukushima sized catastrophe, attempts to decommission plants early will fail. But one more disaster, anywhere in the world will be the end for all of them.
