The debate over the size and scope of nuclear power’s role in our future won’t be settled any time soon, I suspect. Between the people who truly love the technology (or have a huge financial incentive to love it), and those who consider it the technological equivalent of the Ebola virus, we can safely assume that the verbal arm-wrestling over nukes will be an essentially permanent fixture of of our shared infosphere, kind of like nuclear waste, sad to say.
This came to mind in recent days as I read several articles related to nuclear power, starting with Is small the future of nuclear power generation?:
Distributed energy generation, hailed by most environmentalists as the future of sustainable electricity production, is about powering a country with hundreds, potentially thousands, of renewable and clean energy systems with some help from natural gas.
It’s efficient because power is generated where it’s used. It’s flexible because projects can be built quickly when needed. It saves money in the long run because there’s less need for expensive transmission lines that carry the power elsewhere. And if one generator fails, its relatively small size means it doesn’t threaten the stability of the entire system.
This, of course, is the antithesis of centralized power generation that relies on a dozens or so large nuclear and fossil-fuel plants. Proponents of distributed generation cite the massive size and cost of nuclear power plants as one reason, beyond safety and waste-management concerns, and the technology is unsustainable and far too risky.
Not so, argues one start-up firm from Santa Fe, N.M., which has high hopes of expanding the definition of distributed generation to include nuclear power.
Hyperion Power Generation Inc. has developed a garden shed-sized nuclear reactor that can produce enough heat to generate 25 megawatts of electricity for up to 10 years.
That’s enough energy to power 20,000 homes, but still tiny by current nuclear standards. An Advanced Candu Reactor, for example, is 48 times larger and a next-generation Areva reactor is 64 times larger.
Hyperion, which calls its reactor as a “nuclear battery,” licensed the technology from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It plans to sell the reactor for about $30 million (U.S.) and says there’s potential to sell 4,000 of them around the world by 2025.
Ignoring the silliness of the “nuclear battery” name, the basic thrust of this idea–smaller, decentralized, and likely diversified electricity generation is definitely where I think we’re headed. Just the need/desire to exploit local resources–wind, geothermal, wave/tidal–will push us in that direction, in addition to the savings mentioned above. But neighborhood nukes? Really? Despite the manufacturer’s claims of perfect security for thousands of these units dispersed around the US (or the world?), there’s still that nasty and expensive issue of managing forever the nuclear waste. Using nuclear power now amounts to putting a permanent tax on ourselves for the cost of managing and guarding that waste. That’s of the same degree of shortsightedness as building new, non-sequestered coal-fired power plants in 2009.
And then there’s the whole “where’s the evidence we can trust ourselves to manage nuclear materials on that time scale?” issue, as pointed out a pair of Independent articles this week.
Nuclear power station owners ‘allowed leaks’:
Nuclear power station operators unlawfully allowed radioactive waste to seep from a decontamination unit for 14 years, Chelmsford Crown Court has heard.
Waste leaked into the ground from a sump at Bradwell power station in Essex between 1990 and 2004, the Environment Agency claimed.
Magnox Electric Ltd, which had operated the station, denies 11 breaches of legislation governing the disposal of radioactive waste. Mark Harris, on behalf of the Environment Agency, told the jury that leaks were caused by a combination of poor design and a lack of checks and maintenance. He said the power station was no longer running.
IoS Investigation: Officials plotted Sellafield cover-up:
Top civil servants and nuclear administrators colluded to prevent MPs from challenging a massive sweetener to a private business taking over the running of Sellafield, internal documents in the hands of The Independent on Sunday reveal.
The documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, also disclose that the Government pushed through the handover at breakneck speed because it feared that the “unstable management arrangements” of the controversial Cumbrian nuclear complex risked its safety.
Yesterday, a leading Labour MP announced that he would try to get a parliamentary investigation into the revelations in the documents, which run to 140 pages and had been so heavily censored prior to release that many whole pages, and the names of most of the officials involved, have been systematically blanked out. Paul Flynn MP, a member of the House of Commons Public Administration Committee – which examines the performance of the Civil Service – is to ask it to inquire into what he calls “an egregious example of obstruction of parliamentary accountability”.
The bottom line is that there are many people in this world who value money more then your safety or mine, and at least some of them wind up in positions of incredible power, whether in government or in corporations that oversee or actually run things like electricity plants.
But I digress.
Let us assume, for the moment, that we can overcome all of these management and oversight issues. We figure out, somehow, a way to hire only those people people with the highest standards and deepest commitments to the common good for critical positions regarding electricity generation. And those people do a perfect job of managing that vast, interlocking, set of agencies and companies. What will nuclear power cost us then?
As Joe Romm points out in Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power, the economics of nuclear power ain’t a pretty picture, either:
A new study puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates!
This staggering price is far higher than the cost of a variety of carbon-free renewable power sources available today — and ten times the cost of energy efficiency (see “Is 450 ppm possible? Part 5: Old coal’s out, can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?”).
The new study, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power [PDF], is one of the most detailed cost analyses publically available on the current generation of nuclear power plants being considered in this country. It is by a leading expert in power plant costs, Craig A. Severance. A practicing CPA, Severance is co-author of The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger 1976), and former Assistant to the Chairman and to Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission.
This important new analysis is being published by Climate Progress because it fills a critical gap in the current debate over nuclear power — transparency. Severance explains:
All assumptions, and methods of calculation are clearly stated. The piece is a deliberate effort to demystify the entire process, so that anyone reading it (including non-technical readers) can develop a clear understanding of how total generation costs per kWh come together.
I haven’t yet read the 37-page report, linked in the quote above, but I suspect it’s safe to say that the infowar over nuclear power will play out pretty much as one would expect: Nuke lovers will bash this report as being deeply flawed and presenting a wildly high estimate of the costs of nuclear power, and nuke haters will consider it proof that “nuclear power just doesn’t make sense/work/can’t compete with renewables”. Lather, rinse, repeat.
(Note: As I was writing this, Joe posted the follow-up to the above article, Warning to taxpayers, investors — Part 2: Nukes may become troubled assets, ruin credit ratings.)
So, where does this leave us? Have we done nothing more than execute a perfect plot loop[1], fueled by a few billion keystrokes in print and online, and come back to where we began? Not entirely, as we’re now talking more openly about the wisdom of using nuclear power (or coal or wind or …) as well as the notion of decentralizing and diversifying electricity generation, something I’ve been yapping about for nearly four years on this site, and other people have likely been pushing for a lot longer than that. That’s not as much progress as I’d like to see, especially given the proximity of nasty things like peak oil and the growing impacts of climate chaos, but it’s inarguably progress nonetheless.
Having learned nothing from my prior attempts at crystal ball gazing, let me end this post with some predictions:
- The debate over nuclear power will continue to expand to include “nuclear batteries” and a more explicit discussion of economics, possibly even including questions over the supply of nuclear fuel. Here in the US, the main focus is mainly on safety issues, including the proliferation of nuclear material and safe storage of waste.
- The proliferation issue will be solved (or we’ll simply convince ourselves it’s been solved) in not much longer.
- The waste issue will be an enormous mess essentially forever.
- The nuclear option will only be rejected after at least one, likely several, spectacular failures. I’m not talking about core meltdowns, but economic and failure-to-build-out-quickly-enough catastrophes. The companies that build reactors and do everything else in the nuclear power food chain are too well financed to be simply turned away. They will continue to get their government financial incentives, they will build some more plants, but they will be very expensive and nowhere near what we need to replace the massive installed base of coal-fired plants. Nuclear power will indeed help us reduce CO2 emissions, but only at a high cost and to a very limited extent.
- Anyone (like me) who points out the reductions in CO2 emissions and cost savings possible from plain old conservation will continue to be labeled a wacko tree hugger.
[1] A plot loop is a phenomenon in fiction where some seemingly big, important set of occurrences takes place, but then turns out not to matter when the story continues on as it was pre-loop.
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