Well, surprise surprise. After losing a court case where Greenpeace successfully argued that the government didn’t meet the requirements of its own legislation to consult on the issue, Gordon Brown’s government has conducted the mother of all consultation programs, and, to the surprise of no one, come back with the same answer it started with. Britain is going to invite power companies to build a new generation of nuclear power plants..
Their white paper, and the report from that consultation, are here; frankly, the most interesting part of the whole thing is the white paper – the public consultation documents tell you that some people support nuclear power, and others are opposed. Well, strike me down with a feather…
In any case, the key parts of the policy are as follows:
- Energy companies will be invited to make proposals for new nuclear power stations.
- Three reactor designs will be assessed first for regulatory approval. According to the report, there are four credible possibilities for this – AECL Canada’s Advanced CANDU Reactor, AREVA’s (the French nuclear company) EPR, and two American/Japanese designs – Westinghouse AP-1000, and the GE ESBWR. The idea is to standardise reactor designs, and separate reactor approval from site approval. This mirrors the new approach that the American NRC has taken.
- The number of nuclear power stations will essentially be left up to the market to decide.
- Nuclear waste will ultimately become the responsibility of the UK government, with the energy companies paying a fee for this service. The UK will continue its reprocessing program, with residual waste to be disposed of in a geological repository. Temporary storage can be done in dry casks, for as long as is necessary.
- Decommissioning will be provisioned for by reactor operators.
I don’t have an issue with any of this. But, despite the length of the White Paper, it’s only half a policy at the moment. The most crucial part of the whole policy is currently missing – if there will be any additional incentives to establish nuclear power beyond the European emissions trading scheme. Buried in the document is this magic phrase:
We will also keep open the option of further measures to reinforce the operation of the EU ETS in the UK should this be necessary to provide greater certainty for investors.
Until the nature of those “further measures”, if any, are established, it’s impossible to judge whether building more nuclear plants in the UK is a sound idea or a government boondoggle. At the very least, whatever the nuclear industry gets, geosequestration and renewables should get the same deal.
In any case, at least one social democratic government in an English-speaking country has decided that the risks of geosequestration not working, and the risks of the renewable alternatives proving too costly, are high enough not to rule out nuclear power. The parallels for Australia, which is largely betting on carbon sequestration as its greenhouse saviour, are obvious.
It seems blatantly obvious to me nuclear energy simply must be considered, but its many (not all) social democrats who simply refuse to even countenance putting it on the table for consideration. It is the kind of blind and dogged adherence to ideology in the face of all contrary evidence that many on the left accuse others of committing.
It seems obvious to me that a teacup of radioactive waste that can be handled and controlled is better than a truckload of CO2 that can’t be handled or controlled easily. Solar and wind are a great supplement, but they are not (yet) a replacement, and suffer more problems for future development towards base load use than does CC&S. Nuclear simply must be debated as an answer, to refuse to even consider it is blindness of the first order.
‘Nuclear simply must be debated as an answer, to refuse to even consider it is blindness of the first order.’
In what way has nuclear power not been ‘debated’ or ‘considered’? Over the last two years it has been debated plenty. Robert has done so himself in the pages of the Quarterly Essay. What makes pro nukers angry is that people won’t immediately convert to their point of view just because the nuke lobby has learned to say ‘greenhouse’.
Presumeably there was no green paper preceding the white paper decision whereby the issue of whether to have nuclear power at all got a run with the public. Also it might have canvassed the alternative of source material – uranium or thorium.
I tend to agree with Stephen Lloyd. I just wish the Brits had taken a more principled step in opting not to remain a nuclear armed state. Or did Mr Brown just decide on a Trident replacement for the good of the public. What hope dissuading Iran and others if the big boys won’t follow the UN call on getting rid of their nuclear arsenals.
“Nuclear simply must be debated as an answer, to refuse to even consider it is blindness of the first order.”
The nuclear debate has been ongoing for years.
One would have to be bereft of all five senses not to be aware of all the pros and cons associated with adopting this form of energy.
The cons still outweigh the pros and, the nuclear energy industry has only cynically latched on to global warming as a marketing/lobbying tool.
This is the idea behind a carbon tax, which John Humphreys mooted recently.
Sure, but that doesn’t make them wrong on the point that nuclear produces the same amount of power with a tiny fraction of fossil fuel’s lifecycle CO2 emissions.
It’ll be another industry that ties up more money via subsidisation and will work to marginalise future, superior technologies, as Coal currently does. Meanwhile the dragon and the elephant build Melbourne-sized amounts of infrastructure a month. Each.
âOne would have to be bereft of all five senses not to be aware of all the pros and cons associated with adopting this form of energy.
The cons still outweigh the prosâ¦â?
It is risky to weigh nuclear âpros and consâ in a vacuum. Such consideration must be put in context to produce a relevant decision or opinion. The context is different for individual countries, states and regions depending on myriad variables.
I strongly agree with Robert. Nuclear must not be given special treatment with respect to subsidies. But I think additional work is required to define what a âfairâ or âsameâ distribution of subsidies means. The simplest approach is to hand out none, put a price on carbon and roll the resulting revenue into some other economic sector (say improving the public transport infrastructure). But if this wonât work, should they be dolled out on a per kilowatt of energy production, per kilowatt of energy capacity (the least practical since there is a huge difference between capacity and actual generation, particularly for intermittent sources), or completely independent of energy generation. If the latter, how are the funds to be distributed; per lifecycle carbon dioxide production per kilowatt generated or some other innovative scheme?
The point being, nuclear will remain competitive within all scenarios or the technology will not be deployed.
âWhat makes pro nukers angry is that people wonât immediately convert to their point of view just because the nuke lobby has learned to say âgreenhouseââ?
Not really. What frustrates me most is that a large portion of the public (and more than a few politicians) refuse to consider nuclear on-par with other sources of energy; that uninformed indignation and casual dismissiveness are given equal weight with objective reasoning and logical discussion; and that the ârisksâ of the technology are so completely overemphasised compared to those of other energy options.
And it should come as no surprise that any Australian nuclear discussions are framed by carbon emission abatement. There is simply no reason to adopt any source of electricity generation in Australia other than coal; except in the context of climate change mitigation. The same accusation could be made of wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and biomass, and it would be correct. So?
Today, in Australia, it is easy to quickly âwinâ an argument from the anti-nuclear perspective â particularly in any sort of public forum. Give a big laugh, lay out a few choice phrases, (âToo expensive, too little, too lateâ? is popular at the moment) and then belittle or outright insult the pro-nuke as being part of the money hungry, big business, âpro-nuke lobbyâ. That would do it in about 99% of all discussions Iâve seen, heard, or been a part of (public or political context).
But is this wise in the long term? A realistic review of Australiaâs current energy balance and our ongoing construction of fossil fuelled energy production facilities such as the recently commissioned Kogan Creek in Queensland, despite ongoing renewable project deployments, supports another tact.
Finally, plant deployments in the 15 to 20 year timeframe are not too late. How can we say such a timeframe is acceptable for carbon-sequestration (where there is very credible doubt that the technology will even work, let alone be cost justified), but then completely unacceptable for nuclear technology?
Nuclear must be kept on the table until we can demonstrate our ability to meet any desired goals without it being included â with renewables, efficiency improvement and conservation programmes â in a long term, diversified energy strategy. A real debate is yet to come â particularly within Australiaâs political left. Peter Garrett himself called for such a discussion in a Sydney Morning Herald article sometime in, I think, 2005 following Bob Carrâs toe-dip in the nuclear pool. [Then it was all hijacked by Howard and here we are.] We are still waiting for a left-led discussion à la the UK and our emissions continue to climb.
Thorium is an interesting option for the future, but it’s not here right now.
The most realistic near-term possibilities involve using it as an adjunct to uranium, not on its own; pure thorium-fuelled reactors are paper projects – something that I hope is pursued, but they’re a ways off.
Tim: I don’t get angry at people disagreeing with me on nuclear. One thing that does really get my goat is when they make flat-out nonsensical claims.
As Ed said, the debate really hasn’t started yet in Labor ranks in Australia, who are essentially betting everything on CCS and haven’t considered the possibility that it won’t work, or it will be prohibitively expensive.
Jacques: I was speaking specifically in the context of the UK, which has already committed to the EU emissions trading scheme rather than a carbon tax.
Robert, I was referring to Stephen Lloyd rather than you. I fully concede that there are plenty of anti-nukers who resort to spurious ‘if they build a nuclear reactor in your neighbourhood, everyone will get cancer and babies will be born with two heads’ sort of arguments.
However, I detect in yourself, Stephen Lloyd and Ed an attitude of ‘why can’t my rational insights into objective fact defeat those ideologically blinkered knee-jerkers who disagree with me.’
Remember large chunks of the liberal-left in Australia spent the last decade calling their fellow Australians infantalised rednecks because they voted for John Howard instead of self-evidently wonderful ‘progessive’ policies.
Don’t make the same mistake when you argue for nuclear power. Clearly it is part of the debate if we are debating it, and there has been plenty of debate on the left about nuclear since the end of World War 2. But if not even Australian right wingers are sold on nuke power why should the left be obliged to embrace it?
Just as a matter of interest, scientists at the University of Kassel suggest that Germany could be 100% supplied by renewables by 2050. The project links wind, solar and biogass and involves storing wind and solar energy by pumping water up a hill.
The project only covers electricity for 12,000 homes in the demonstration phase but they reckon it can be scaled up. I didn’t detect any information on costs.
Brian: interesting. There’s some other interesting energy related links I’d like to put into a post. This Scientific American proposal for an enormous solar power grid for the USA, the inventor of the Super Soaker water pistol has proposed a fundamentally new type of heat engine, and finally there’s the Tata Nano, the new $2,500 car that’s just been unveiled in India.
“Pumping water up a hill” to store energy is, of course, exactly what everyone has already been doing with their dams for a century to meet peak demand.
Large-scale hydro sites are pretty well all exploited in the developed world – there’s not a lot of scope for expansion (plus hydro has environmental problems of its own – vide Franklin river, Three Gorges dam, etc). The problem of energy storage is what really makes large scale solar, wind and tidal power infeasible.
As an aside, that “new heat engine” doesn’t seem to promise much – 60% efficiency after the solar heat is concentrated by mirrors is achievable with old fashioned steam boilers and turbines. It’s concentrating the heat that’s the economic problem; life would be so much easier without the the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Nope, nuclear seems to be the only viable option at the moment if we want lots of electricity at the right time without CO2 emissions. We should certainly spend money on trying to develop better alternatives, but in the meanwhile lets use the tool we’ve got.
DD: I don’t think so – the highest efficiency steam turbine I’ve heard of is just under 50%. Furthermore, this probably scales down a whole lot better than steam turbines do.
Bloody Carnot cycle
I probably come under the ‘uninformed’ banner. But I am concerned that we trade one waste product for another, one that goes on being dangerous for thousands(?) of years. I can accept that we will probably have to use nuclear power but am concerned that it will be held up as the answer to all our problems while not enough research/money is put into other areas.
Debbieanne: it’s a fair question. My view is that we are trading one very difficult waste handling problem with a much easier one.
Firstly, aside from global warming issues, the waste from fossil fuel power stations, not to mention transport, kills people in the hundreds of thousands around the world each and every year. I don’t have specific figures for coal in Australia, unfortunately, but in the USA the figures I’ve seen are in the order of 20,000 premature deaths annually because of coal pollution. Deaths from all air pollution in Sydney are apparently well in excess of the road toll.
The second point is that nuclear waste doesn’t pose the same risks over thousands of years. Essentially, half-life is a measure of the rate at which a radioactive substance decays. The faster that happens, the more radioactive (and thus dangerous) it is, At the other end of the scale, uranium has a half-life of billions of years; its level of radioactivity is consequently not very dangerous at all. This is rather handy, because there is uranium all around us – in our soil, in the stone we make our buildings out of, even in the food we eat and the water we drink. Anyway, back to the point of the story. When spent fuel is taken out of a nuclear reactor, it is radioactive as hell. The short half-life radioactive substances in the waste release so much radioactivity that the spent fuel rod will kill you within a couple of minutes if you stood anywhere near it. However, the point is that they’re short-lived. Within a few decades, it’s about 100 times less radioactive than it was – still dangerous, mind you, but a lot less so. By 1000 years, pretty much all of the short-lived stuff has gone away; the major radioactive components left are plutonium and technetium (I believe they’re the major ones, Ed could probably correct me), which have half-lives in the order of tens of thousands of years. But, at that point, the spent fuel is not that much more dangerous than the original ore – that is, not very dangerous at all.
Say you’ve buried the waste in a geological repository several hundred metres below the ground. It’s not going to kill anybody, or anything, down there. The question is, then, how it might travel closer to the surface. Aside from a volcanic eruption (unsurprisingly, waste disposal repositories have not been proposed for volcanic areas) the most obvious way is through water movements. Places proposed for repositories are selected for minimal ground water, and the waste is encased in things to prevent ground water getting to it. But let’s assume for a moment that all that fails. The thing to keep in mind then is that most rocks contain some level of radioactive material in them. In the process of getting to the surface, the water will pass by comparable levels of radioactive substances in the process of getting to the surface as it did passing through the waste repository.
I’ve really only got one remaining concern about nuclear power, and that is that it is too bloody expensive.
Introduce a decent carbon tax, let the market sort it out. Just DO NOT subsidise them (including their risks). Then we’ll see how many nuclear stations get built.