Nuclear energy is off the public agenda in Australia for now, and likely won’t reappear for a little while at least. But there are reasons to think it might come back at some time in the medium-term future. The key question as to whether we see it appear back on the public agenda is the shape of the emissions trading scheme. How steep will the cuts required be – or, alternatively, how high will the carbon price go? At $20 per tonne, nuclear probably doesn’t look all that attractive. At $50 per tonne, it starts to look much more interesting. A second question is whether the new low-emission technologies – my picks are solar thermal and geothermal, because they’re potentially reasonably cheap and supply power when it’s needed – actually start to work out in practice. The third area of uncertainty is the progress of carbon capture and storage technology. As many LP commenters have noted, progress has been far slower than its numerous proponents have expected. The final question is that of natural gas prices. Natural gas is going to be exported from the Australian east coast, so any new gas-fired electrical generation will have to pay the world market price for the stuff; and that’s pretty damn dear. At current US natural gas prices, the fuel to run a gas-fired generator will cost roughly $85 per megawatt-hour of electricity generated. If you have a look at the NEMMCO Australian electricity market data, that’s roughly double the average wholesale price of electricity in most Australian states. If natural gas stays at these prices, it’s no longer going to be a low-cost replacement for coal, and that makes nuclear look pretty appealing.
But, in any case, whether nuclear power will happen in Australia is a question that can wait for another day. Today, a round-up of some things that are happening around the world with nuclear.
There are two nuclear power plants under construction in the Western world at the moment, the Olkiuoto-3 plant in Finland, and the Flamanville-3 plant in France. Both are EPR plants being built by AREVA, the French nuclear giant. Olkiutoto-3 has struck extensive delays; originally scheduled to be completed next year, a sequence of stuffups mean that it’s now scheduled for completion in 2011. So you’d think TVO, the electricity company buying the reactor, would have been scared off by the whole experience. You’d be wrong. TVO has already put in an application to the Finnish government to build another reactor, and appear to be competing with two other companies to build a second new reactor in Finland. Meanwhile, construction has begun on the first Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor in China. While the approval process for new reactors grinds on in the United States, it appears companies are starting to get serious about it, and are signing contracts for some items that take a while to be produced, such as reactor coolant pumps.
While the application process for new, large-scale nuclear reactors in the USA grinds on, there are a couple of startup companies pursuing a fascinating concept – the small nuclear reactor. The EPRs and the AP-1000 are gargantuan construction projects that, because of their enormous scale, have to be largely assembled on the site. The complexity of these projects – particularly because they’re the first of their kind – makes for lots of opportunities for mistakes, which cost enormous amounts of time and money. You might wonder why it’s necessary to build these things on such a gargantuan scale – why not build 10 or 100 small ones, rather than 1 enormous example? There are essentially two reasons: if you have to build it in a large scale, you may as well build on a gargantuan one. Furthermore, the bigger your reactor, the more efficiently your reactor will turn heat into energy – but that’s a pretty minor issue, because fuel costs are such a small part of reactor operating costs.
But these companies are proposing to turn the economy of scale issue on its head. Rather than achieving economies of scale by building very, very large reactors, they propose to churn out small reactors in a factory by the hundreds, build them small enough that they can be carried to the desired site on the back of a few trucks, and have them up and running after a quick installation.
The most public of these startups is Hyperion Power Generation who are proposing a totally new type of reactor. While their website is vague on how their reactor works, their patent is a lot more explicit. Essentially, they intend to use a combination of uranium and hydrogen as their reactor fuel. The hydrogen acts as what’s called a “moderator”, keeping the reaction going. But – and here’s the clever bit – as the reactor gets hotter, the hydrogen dissociates itself from the uranium and the reaction stops, and thus the system cools down, at which point the hydrogen is re-absorbed…and the system controls itself without any moving parts. Stick a heat exchanger on the wall, and you can use it to heat water for a steam turbine. Voila – a nuclear reactor, easily transportable on the back of a truck, which can be buried underground and used as a heat source for five years at a stretch.
There’s another approach being taken by a more secretive American startup, NuScale Power. This company doesn’t even have a website of their own yet, just a little picture on their venture capitalist’s portfolio page. But it appears that they are working on a downsized version of a conventional nuclear reactor – if you can get past the jargon in this transcript. While NuScale’s design lacks the elegant simplicity of the Hyperion proposal, the basic idea has been in operation for 50 years, meaning there’s no doubt about the concept’s technical feasibility (as distinct from its financial feasibility).
As noted in many other contexts, lots, perhaps most startups fail. But if either of these companies succeed, one of the key objections to nuclear power – that it takes far too long to build compared to small-scale renewable energy options – goes away.
Finally, Tim Dunlop has a post about a fundamentally different type of nuclear reactor – a design known as an “energy amplifier”. This design uses thorium, rather than uranium as its fuel, which has the advantage of being very abundant, and having shorter-lived waste products than uranium fuel (they’re almost completely decayed in around 1000 years). As others have noted in the comments thread there, while this reactor has some nice features, you don’t need anything quite this radical to use thorium in a nuclear reactor (indeed, many existing reactors can be fuelled with a blend of uranium and thorium), and it would require a fairly long R&D period. So, while thorium might come into the nuclear energy picture soon, the energy amplifier is not something we’re going to see any time soon. It’s still a lot easier and cheaper than fusion power, or space solar power, to pick some of the more grandiose clean energy megaprojects that occasionally do the rounds.
Dr Merkel, for a “deluded leftist academic” you sure are keen on nuclear power
I like you lack of tribalism on this issue — independent thought is so rare these days. If there’s one thing that annoys me its the “nukes are bad” mantra you get at left-wing blogs, and the equally idiotic “nukes are good” mantra at right-wing blogs, and neither side can adequately explain why.
Anyone who thinks nukes should be ruled out completely really isn’t taking climate change or peak oil seriously. Nasty as it is, the alternatives are worse.
BTW, can you be a peak oiler nowadays and not be considred a total crackpot?
We’ll be damn lucky if natural gas stays at these prices. The odds are pretty good NG will be two or three times today’s prices within a few years.
I’d always understood the reason you built steaming power plants large is because the bigger the steam turbine the more efficient it is, the limiting factor being the size of the turbine shaft you can move to the site. That’s why there are no miniature coal power stations but plenty of gas and hydroelectric ones.
Of course if the small nuke ones are cheap enough they may not be as obsessed with thermal efficiency. Plus another advantage of small nuclear plants is that you can put them closer to the population centres – transmission lines cost more than people think, in both construction and in power losses.
I never thought the geological basis for Peak Oil is crackpot. I think it’s clear that, eventually, resources get fully exploited, and conventional oil is the one mined commodity that we’ve exploited more heavily than anything else. I don’t see any evidence to suggest that we’re reaching such a point with metals.
I’m not convinced the current oil price runup is proof of the Peak Oil hypothesis, however. Lots of commodities that nobody is seriously arguing we can’t produce more of – iron, aluminium, coal – have undergone similarly dramatic price rises.
Furthermore, I don’t think the economic consequences of peak oil, if it is happening now or soon, are anything like as dramatic as some people claim.
DD: you’re pretty much spot-on, but there is also an issue of construction cost; building a gargantuan nuclear plant isn’t much more expensive than a merely really large one.
I believe Hitachi also did some ‘micro-reactor’ design work too, but were prevented from installing a test reactor by the usual mix of politics.
Not wanting to hijack the thread but…
Neither am I. What’s happening now is runaway demand is colliding with inflexible supply. The supply is inflexible because most non-OPEC resources are close to being fully exploited, and OPEC resources are being kept in the ground and/or consumed locally.
Well, if oil prices keep rising we’re about to find out. With central bankers determined to continue the madness of “inflation targeting” in the face of runaway energy prices, we look set to have thumping great recession. That should bring oil prices down … for a while at least.
Anyway, back to nukes…
Robert – how do you price in the cost of insurance in case something goes wrong given that insurance companies won’t insure nuclear plants in case of an accident?
Chris,
Perhaps it should be less than the insurance price for the amount of damage done by acid rain.
Andrew – its not just a matter of comparing nuclear against coal, but it does need to be appropriately compared against the cost for solar, wind, geothermal etc. If you ignore the risk of nuclear accidents in costings, then its not an appropriate comparison.
Hey, how come you have no mention of pebble bed reactors, which are being actively pursued both in South Africa and China? They have many appealing features, and while individual modules won’t be all that high power, you can string a few together together to get a bigger single station. They would use gas turbines, which I think means no need to build them on the Australian coast and heat up sea water. The most significant feature, though, is that they have passive safety, so that even if the gas flow stops, it still can’t turn into a complete meltdown.
I am a little puzzled as to why they get little mention in most discussions of the future of nuclear. For those interested, this recent article is a good backgrounder.
Chris,
I added that in because most of the time when that is brought up the asker of the question is implicitly assuming that externalities of other forms of power are already included. The simple fact that much more damage has been done to the planet through coal (even without the AGW implications) than nuclear does not seem to dull enthusiasm for it as a power source.
I would have thought that the “micro-nukes” of Robert’s piece would have been easier to insure than the macro-nukes common today simply because the possible scope of damage is much less.
Snore. It’s so obvious the mainstream media & blogosphere are gonna keep hammering away at this stuff. Canada has them. France has them. Scandinavians have them. Americans have them…etc. etc…so why shouldn’t we? Rupert wants them…Mr. Walker is very interested in having them…Obama has shown interest in them…& McCain…and Hawke wants his dump…& Ferguson wants his trade…& enrichment…& other so called sensible politicians…blaaah, blaaah, blaaah…
They’ll keep harping on until you get so annoyed you go
“OK, do whatever ya want provided ya just SHUT THE F*CK UP”
somethin’ like that.
They have shares, they want to create jobs, they want to utilise the crap in the ground, enrich, create a MASSIVE underground dump, they want to build a missile system for Aussie too. Just get used to it. You’ll save yerself a whole lot of bother…& your blood pressure will stay sane.
Learn to luv nuclear, luv the dump, luv the BOMB.
SHOW ME THE MONEY…& JOBS…& MAD detante.
No mention of the pebble-bed reactor because there hasn’t been much news about it.
The PBMR website is here. They’re continuing to work on it rather hard. The key technologies they’re actually working on right now appear to be in the helium gas turbine, rather than the reactor itself. Helium gas turbines are novel, and I think might be proving a little bit more difficult than they’d hoped.
Some other people have suggested it might have been easier to use nitrogen, which would have allowed them to use standard gas turbine designs, at the cost of lower efficiency.
Sure, and that’s one of the beauties of putting a price on carbon and letting the market sort it out.
And we have all done the building of Nuke power stations from go to woe!? Hawke did it whilst reading a book from the 1950s!?And chewing gum features Ferguson,since he left school and worked as a clerk was building nuke stations in his spare time. And,,because I am a complete idiot about implosion scale theories,could anyone explain why a small little implosion will not be as damaging as a large one,given ,that the small one maybe eagerly placed on ,say a fault line,in a coal mine,next to a river bed!?And you all remembered your basic physics didn’t ya about how there is a difference between a nuke going off and say,TNT!? As for helium turbines,I cannot say,no an American organization that operates in Australia,politically,and has some good motives,sometimes,believes in what their guru says!Personally,and off subject, I would like to see helium applied to farm tractor economics.That is if it was at all possible to improve farm tractor fuel efficiency,mainly diesel,by applying the lift of helium to the pull and work dynamics of modern tractors,and do it soon.Helium balloons have been experimented with in solar arrays,but,by jingers,we cannot seem to be practical in Australia,when pressing problems of costs and efficiencies are driving the farm sector crazy.
Jacques – that depends on whether the regulation that is introduced allows companies to build and run a nuclear without adequate insurance or not. With no insurance if cleanup/compensation costs exceed the assets of the company, which is not unlikely, then essentially the government becomes responsible, giving nuclear power a free boost.
If you do require insurance, then I agree it would end up being properly priced. I think you’d also want some guarantees around disposal of nuclear waste as well – don’t want a company going bankrupt and then having the government to pay for waste storage.
I’m not against nuclear power per-se and I think Australia is well placed to use it in terms of resources and long term storage. I’d just like the full cost of it to be considered against alternatives.
I recently read an article about the Toshiba Nuclear Battery type micro-reactor.
Wikipedia article on the Toshiba S4 which produces 10MW of electricity.
There’s also a even smaller 200kW Lithium based one: Toshiba Micro-Nuclear Reactor
Sure building a massive reactor provides better efficiencies, but what use are they when they’re lost in transmission over great distances? Place the generators closer to the users and save the cost of distribution or create greater fault tolerances by making micro-grids of many small generators.
The same argument was used with AC vs DC distribution – although back then people didn’t want a stinking coal burning DC powerplant down the road next to the school.
No it isn’t.
The current high prices are because of European speculators investing in the paper barrel market.
They are betting either the US or Israel will bomb Iran and Iran will close the Straight of Hormuz, through which most of the worlds oil is shipped.
All the experts expect the price to come back down once the speculators get bored or decide its not going to happen and their capital is best used elsewhere.
In Merkel’s soft sell for nuclear power – topics like environmental hazards of uranium mining, effects on aboriginal culture, waste disposal, terrorism risks, surveillance, the cost of surveillance, proliferation of weapons and weapons materials, the necessary secrecy with its accompanying loss of civil liberties – well these are just ignored!
We’re supposed to be impressed, as usual, with this “hard” technical knowledge of the “experts”.
Well – of course they find that a lot easier to expound than they would if they tried to tackle thoss “soft” subjects – such as environmental issues, aboriginal issues, conflict resolution issues, civil liberties issues -
Dream on – nuclear technocrats…..
Christina Macpherson http://www.antinuclear.net
Stephen Lloyd: You are entitled to your view, but I do find it somewhat unbelievable that these “speculators” have bid up the price of crude from $10 to $135 over a ten year period. That is quite some con job.
All the experts? Really? Even Dan Yergin says oil is going to $150 now. Here’s another expert who disagrees with you. He is only the chief economist at the IEA.
Christina: in short, I think you’re utterly wrong about the “soft” issues.
In the long, the environmental impact of nuclear power pales into utter insignificance compared to the effects of fossil fuel power plants, and that includes waste disposal.
Just because I support the use of nuclear power doesn’t necessarily mean I support, say, Jabiluka. If the Mirrar people prefer to remain poor and mine-free, that’s their business. But I fail to see why uranium mining has any special impact on Aboriginal culture compared to the dozens of other mining projects currently going ahead throughout Australia.
As far as proliferation goes, if you want a nuclear weapon, you can get one without a nuclear reactor. South Africa built nuclear bombs back in the 1970s without needing one.
And (though I hasten to add that my academic expertise is in software engineering, not nuclear energy) I find your disdain for technical expertise disturbing. Isn’t it a good idea to actually understand the topic (including the social dimensions that you refer to) that you’re commenting on – or is ignorance to be prized? George Bush tried that on Middle East policy, and look where that got us…
I totally agree, but solar, wind, geothermal etc have environmental impacts that pale into utter insignificance compared to the effects of nukes, so surely we should try these first?
I’d a) disagree with that assertion (it’s not as simple as you might think, particularly if you start factoring value judgements like “spoiling views”), b) most of the green movement seems much happier with natural gas as a transition fuel than nukes, and they’re flat wrong on the relative environmental impacts, and c) you have to look at things in totality. If nukes are half the price (for the sake of argument), the environment might be better off overall if we spend some or all of the money we save on other things that help the environment.
a) I like the look of wind turbines, I think most people do … wouldn’t want to live next to one though, but I’d prefer that to living next to a nuclear power station.
b) Well, you know my views on that. If we replace coal with natural gas for electricity generation, and replace oil for natural gas for transportation, we’ll get to ‘peak gas’ about 30 years early.
c) Sure, but given the upfront capital costs of nukes are enormous, why not spend that enormous amount of money on solar thermal, geothermal, wind etc? We’ll never have to worry about fuel costs, resource depletion, waste disposal, accidents, radiation, proliferation … ever again.
Of course, what we should do is put a price on carbon and let the market sort it out, but if we’ve learned anything from the recent run up in oil prices, politicians with the courage to raise energy prices is the rarest of all commodities.
And we wait for Garnaut
While I have never had the irrational fear of nuclear power that my fellow travellers in the conservation movement have, I remain deeply sceptical of the economics of the matter. Up until now, it has been very very hard to get decent numbers on the costs of this technology, but suffice to say it has been very very expensive.
Nuclear power is very welcome in my view to compete as part of a low carbon future, as long as they don’t seek any special subsidies over and above any other low emission technology (including government R&D, and insurance). If I was a betting man, I would be putting my money on a mix of geothermal, tidal, biomass, solar thermal and wind beating affordable and safe nuclear to the punch.
IF Australia does not go down the nuclear path (which I think is probable), I can still see great opportunities for Australia as a safe storage site for high level waste. Speaking as a greenie, this stuff has got to be put somewhere safe, and the safest place in the world that I can think of is a couple of hundred meters down in the middle of our geologically inert continent. It would be a massively profitable enterprise for Australia, we could afford to go truly carbon neutral. And we have a moral responsibility to take back at least the uranium that we exported in the first place.
Of course, short-sighted and parochial greenies would consider this heresy. They’d much prefer it sitting in rusting drums on the coast of Scotland, right?
Christina;
Robert and others have canvassed these issues pretty extensively here and elsewhere. In terms of mining and impact on aboriginal culture you can look at Ranger and as Robert says, any minesite anywhere in the NT and most of WA.
Disposal, weapons proliferation and terrorism risks are directly and intimately related to the technology chosen, so in that case, ‘hard’ beats ’soft’ as a way of deciding.
I’d be interested to learn of ways in which nuclear power has led to a reduction in civil liberties.
“I’d be interested to learn of ways in which nuclear power has led to a reduction in civil liberties.”
ASIO files kept on anyone organising protests against them?
“most of the green movement seems much happier with natural gas as a transition fuel than nukes, and they’re flat wrong on the relative environmental impacts”
particularly when the plants are blown sky high…or should I say, when accidents happen. Fortunately accidents don’t happen w/ nuke plants…nor do they leak…or cost much when they are to be de-commissioned…and we can always trust future govts. to do the right thing. And terrorists.
Tho I do remember a man, was it in France?…who thought the plans for building these new generation beauties had a fatal flaw, possibly. Wish I could remember his name.
Don’t ya luv Robert the way the INFLUENTIAL are now getting on board the PEAK OIL thing in order to SELL various energy ideas that were once unpalatable…mebbe still are? Doubters adapting to the present CLIMATE eh?
And some like the Bush/McCain 08 ticket are even using the high war-oil price to call for Arctic & offshore drilling.
And Floridians & Californians who are great actors gasp in astonishment & shrug their shoulders & bleet: “maybe…but surely NO…but, but…energy independence…them damn love ‘em but hate ‘em Saudis…well yes…well maybe…check the polls”.
Let’s try anything that makes the established players even more WEALTHY…RIGHT?
You make some worthwhile points Robert…but I’m w/ trying the udder things first. I just HOPE that Labor doesn’t COP OUT. I’m feeling GREENER by the minute.
Tho that won’t matter if Rudd does a Blair/Iemma thing…playing traitor & such by grabbing the votes of the puppets on a string & in turn giving the middle finger to his own camp. I don’t think he will. It would be…sad.
“It would be a massively profitable enterprise for Australia, we could afford to go truly carbon neutral. And we have a moral responsibility to take back at least the uranium that we exported in the first place.”
Is that one of the reasons we dug the stuff up? Kinda like saying:
“We have a moral responsibility to the overseas consumers who ate our live exports & dead ones…and drank our piss…& got heart & other health problems. So lets collect all their poo & urine & separate what’s originally ours…& also grab all the leftover bottles, cartons & what’s left of the cattle & sheep & pig & chook & fish carcasses and have them shipped back to Australia so we can use heaps more carbon in the transporting of them…& then bury them deep w/ love & humility…KERCHING”
Still, one way to prevent moral responsibility jobs from cropping up is to not DO the act in the first place…;)
And now that we’ve done it, it’s fine if it’s just never going to be as safe left over there than in the ground here? Jeezus, where’s the logic?
Well I’m certainly not influential and I’ve never been a climate change doubter of any kind. I’ve also been ‘on board’ with the peak oil thing for two years now.
Regardless, the ‘good’ solutions for peak oil (efficiency, conservation, PHEVs, EVs, renewables etc) are the same as the good solutions for climate change. The ‘bad’ solutions for peak oil (coal-to-liquids, tar sands, oil shale, and to a lesser extent, biofuels) are also very bad for climate change. This is why Marn’s ideas about CTL are so dangerous.
nasking, if you want to get upset about something, go stand on a beach at Newcastle and count the coal ships. That’s the real tragedy.
You can vent your anger here:
Camp for Climate Action – Newcastle Sunday 13th July
Thanks for a comprehensive post Robert. I am grateful you are able to put in the effort to be so thorough.
Licensing fees and time requirements, public hearings, etc. within individual countries are also a driver toward larger plants. Why take 900 MWe for one licensing effort when you can obtain 1600 or more?
But arguing in the other direction – all plants experience unplanned trips or shutdowns. For smaller grids, the loss of more than 1000 MWe could result in unacceptable stability issues. Smaller plants arranged in a modular array at one site can cover each other during planned outages. The loss of any one would not seriously threaten the grid. There are also decommissioning issues to consider (again, typically individual licensing for each).
For developing countries in particular – the future seems bright for smaller reactor designs.
Ed: which brings up a salient point – these small nuclear plants, even if they turn out to be technically feasible (I’m referring particularly to the Hyperion here), would require a change in the regulatory approval model to be economically deployable. If you had to do a $100 million study to install each one, it wouldn’t be viable.
Particularly so if you’re deploying them individually, rather than a multi-module installation.
“if you want to get upset about something, go stand on a beach at Newcastle and count the coal ships. That’s the real tragedy.”
I can chew & count at the same time carbonsink. It is indeed sad…but having seen Maggie beat the mining lads over the head w/ the media shovel in the 80s & watched the gas being sucked from the North Sea all Hoover-like whilst towns across the land filled w/ the most depressed & dispirited beings I ever did see…until coal didn’t look like such a BADDY after all in the moment of desperation…i’m loathe to start that revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_and_conservation_in_the_United_Kingdom
N’
Garbage in, garbage out.
It has gone from $87 in february to $133 today. That’s 53% increase in 6 months. Thats speculating, not supply.
It’s a bubble, and it will burst, its only a matter of time. It might take a year or two even, but it’ll burst.
It’s precisely the reason the rest of the world scoffed at Rudd talking about taking the blowtorch to OPEC, OPEC supply isn’t the problem, its European speculators, and short of financial regulation, theres not a lot that can be done about them.
Searching for the term ‘oil price’ in google, I stumbled across this interesting article from the CATO institute. AGree with CATO’s political leanings or not, its an interesting article about why the price of oil wont reach $200 a barrel as predicted, and why the price will drop.
It also dispels the myth that oil price is price inelastic because of passenger car demand. (This also has implications for Tony Abbott’s claim that petrol can be left out of a carbon trading scheme because it is price inelastic, he suggested a carbon tax would not reduce passenger car demand)
Read the article
The CATO dude wrote:
carbonsink wrote (above):
Spot the difference.
A recession is the ultimate demand response and will certainly result in lower oil prices, in fact, in the current environment, its the only thing that will result lower oil prices, because supply will not grow.
That dip will be temporary however, as soon as the global economy recovers the price of oil will spike again, because right now we don’t have a viable alternative to oil. We simply don’t have a way of growing our economy without oil.
There was research released today showing that Australia’s oil imports were down 28% on this time last year. Believe it or not, economic theory appears to have won the day here – you put the price up and people buy less of it – even if it means they have to drive less to do it.
My pet theory about the rise in the oil price is that Conservation Foundations across the world, having lost all the battles on getting govts to do anything on climate change, have instead all started hedge funds and bought a s**tload of oil futures at very high prices. I’m surprised Spooner hasn’t come up with a cartoon along these lines yet.
We simply don’t have a way of growing our economy without oil.
That’s not really true. China and India don’t seem to, but we’re all about services these days.
Here we go again. Nuclear power will be too expensive and too late to address dangerous climate change, and it is too dirty. It is a distraction at best.
Solar panels and wind are here and now. I know what I like, and what is good for the planet.
John Howard said nuclear power was good. Ipso facto – it must be bad.
What are ya, wilful? Quiggin’s sock puppet!
We are all about mining coal and stuff, actually. Which requires lots of oil. Sure there’s a bubble in the oil price at the minute but there is also a natural and real price rise in response to growing demand set against falling oil discovery. If hedge funds are driving some of the current spike it’s in reaction to their sudden awakening to peak oil concerns. Not speculating for the sake of speculating.
As for the Cato article its US centric view meant it fell for believing that an American recession will solve the world’s oil supply problems. Repeat – China, India et al are growing and growing. Services and all.
(And I agree with wilful that we have a moral obligation to bury the nuclear material we sent to Europe or where-ever we sent it. Kerching or not.)
PeterC: compared to the natural gas you’re presumably planning to run as backup to your wind and solar, nuclear is so much cleaner it’s not funny.
Wind and solar are here and now (though solar, in particular, is so marginal it’s not funny. Last I checked, the world’s total solar installations generated roughly as much power as one nuclear plant). Energy storage isn’t. Until it is, intermittent renewables are sideshows. That’s why I’m putting money on (in the case of geothermal, actual money on) renewable options that can produce power on a reliable basis, like solar thermal with TES, and geothermal.
Sorry about the thread hijack Robert…
aussieoskar wrote:
Yes Kohler ran this story in his ABC-TV news slot last night. But what the ABC story you linked to doesn’t say is the value of the oil imports was up 17%. Tim Colebatch has the story in the today’s Age:
wilful wrote:
Yeah, mining services.
Australia is suffering a severe case of the Dutch Disease. With the dollar at 95c plus we are rapidly de-industrialising and transitioning from a mixed economy to a resources-only economy.
carbonsink: thanks for that – I’m going to post a story on that statistic within the next couple of hours.
Here’s an interesting article on going Nuclear…the comments are worth reading:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/05/the-nuclear-option.html
(The Nuclear Option: Judith Lewis, Mother Jones, May/June issue 08)
I haven’t looked up any stats, but I seem to remember Tip Costello saying that even despite the mining boom, the majority of cash in the economy is still from the banking and financial services sector, at the time he said that all the financial analysts on the news shows seemed to concur?
I would imagine that cash he was referring to was a combination of credit and super?
I agree that we shouldn’t rule out new forms of nuclear, and it would be particularly unwise for the environment movement to take a position for or against thorium until more is known.
However, I don’t think you’ve really addressed the proliferation question Robert. It’s all very well to say that South Africa got the bomb without nuclear power, but they spent bucketloads to do it – not so easy for a terrorist organisation for example.
How enriched is the uranium these small plants would use? If it’s highly enriched then opening thousands of them all over the place pretty much makes guarding them (and the supply lines) impossible and tells terrorists they can have a dirty bomb any time they want. If its not that enriched then maybe they’ve got more legs.
I’m interested in who is going to write the specifications for the handover between civilisations, given that the duration of the half-life of some nuclear waste products is longer than the duration of any known civilisation to date.
Helen: If its half life is that long, it’s not very radioactive.
Bury it deep enough (and most plans for geological disposal involve burial several hundred metres down), and the amount of radioactive material between the waste canister and the surface is greater than the amount of radioactive material in the canister itself.
feral sparrowhawk: about the same levels of enrichment as a light water reactor, around 5% or so. You can’t make a bomb out of that without further enrichment, however hard you try. You could, theoretically, use them to breed plutonium and reprocess to extract it, but that’s a job for a nation-state, not a terrorist group.
Dirty bombs are an empty threat. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (the ones who do the doomsday clock) did an article about precisely this a few years ago. The only people who will die of radiation exposure because of one are the bombers themselves, most likely before they ever get to set off the bomb.
Helen,
Considering quite a lot of Australia’s rock has been around nearly as long as the Earth has had solid rock provided we can store it far enough down the risks of it being exposed during the remaining life of the planet are pretty damn small.
.
Robert,
It is easy to get kilometres down if needed. The sorts of sums that would be available for such a facility make additional distance down easy to achieve.
One thing the nuclear lobby has failed to address are the questions; where are all the personnel to run the things going to come from? How long does it take to train a person to operate these plants? Who’s paying for the training? What QA would be needed?
Then there’s the safety inspectors… and the admin etc that goes with it. Or will it all be privatised in the name of ’small government’?
People really should stop insinuating or claiming that Robert Merkel or anyone here (as far as I know) is part of the ‘nuclear lobby’ or otherwise potentially benefiting in any way from a nuclear industry in Australia.
Regarding proliferation, can someone walk through the logic with me one more time? Dozens of countries, including plenty less stable ones, with less professional policing and security apparatus than Australia, have successfully kept fissile material out of the hands of those evil terrists for decades. If Australia had nuclear power, using it’s own uranium, precisely how would the terrorists be able to slip through our wide open defences?
We are certainly no more likely than any other country to acquire nuclear weapons just because we’ve got power plants. Somehow the Japanese have resisted this temptation quite well until now.
And as for it being a target of a terrorist attack, well anything’s possible, but given the number of substantial terrorist attacks on Australian soil (erm, zero) why is this seriously considered? There are plenty of softer targets that would do as much or more damage.
The real reason this is raised is because it’s the topic de jour and it’s a specious reasoning with no intellectual credibility, but is something that would resonate with the tabloid readers.
People who don’t like a nuclear waste dump need to answer what we do with the waste otherwise. Just leave it around in rusting drums seems to be the blithe answer.
For the record:
I own a couple of thousand dollars worth of shares in Compass Resources, which is looking for uranium (amongst other metals) in the Northern Territory. The establishment of a domestic nuclear power industry would make SFA difference to the value of my investment, except possibly in slightly modifying Australian investor sentiment on anything nuclear related. Furthermore, my super fund almost certainly invests in BHP, which owns Olympic Dam, and RTZ, which owns 68% of Ranger. I haven’t checked. But then, so does just about everyone’s.
Professionally, my research is funded by government grants, and is on software reliability. My only contact with the nuclear industry in this role was that I once reviewed a paper reporting of a case study of testing a device used in a nuclear power plant. My co-reviewers and I ended up rejecting the paper because it wasn’t sufficiently novel.
That’s my entire professional and financial connection to the industry.
Robert, I apologise if that is how my comment was interpreted as it was certainly not directed at Robert, nor anyone else posting or commenting on this blog. I was thinking more of people like Ziggy. You know, the nuclear power is a panacea crowd. The hey let’s open a new power station every day for the next 40 years type of solution. They never outline staffing or training estimates.
Tony D: on the workforce and regulatory issues, you can dig up copies of the Switkowski Report from the PANDORA archive of the previous Prime Minister’s website at the National Library of Australia (too lazy to google myself).
If I recall correctly, it did have a good deal to say about the regulatory and staffing issues.
The short version is that renewable energy doesn’t build or operate itself either.
Robert @44
I think there is something funny about your facts. Last time I looked, nuclear power generated nasty nuclear radioactive waste. Sure you can bury it, but the point is we don’t need it, or the nuclear proliferation risk that accompanies it.
Gas is much cleaner than coal so it can provide us with a transition energy source until a mix of renewables comes on line – both large scale and distributed.
You can install renewable solar energy to power a house for the cost of an average car. I can’t buy a CCS or nuclear pipe dream to do this. Nor would I want to.
Germany put enough solar on their roofs last year to match a coal fired power station with a lot less sun than us, but I guess we are just to damn busy digging up coal to send to China and India.
And you haven’t addressed my key point – nuclear, if we were to start now – would come on line in 10 to 15 years – so it would far too late to address dangerous climate change.
PeterC: and they used up most of the world’s available polysilicon to make those solar panels.
And you’re not factoring in energy storage. Do that, and you’re looking at double or triple the cost, and would take you at least as long as nuclear plants to implement widely enough to make a real difference.
No matter what we do, we can’t fix our energy problems overnight, and claiming that small-scale renewables can completely ignores the complexities of the problem.
Two things.
Firstly, if it’s nasty, it won’t be for long. Highly radioactive material has a short half life. That’s how radioactivity works; the two things are inversely related.
Secondly, the danger of proliferation is about plutionium, a side effect of having U238 in a reactor during fission. This is utterly ridiculous because plutonium is a difficult material to work with weapons-wise. It’s used in implosion devices, which require a *lot* of work to design, test and make. Outside the range of terrorists anyhow.
By contrast, U235 can be used by just about anyone to make a gun-mechanism bomb. All you need are the smarts to line up two lumps and shoot them together hard enough.
If we used breeder reactors then we’d have less uranium and plutonium lying about, less waste in general, and we’d get several orders of magnitude more energy from the same fuel.
Robert, we can buy and install panels and plug them immediately, and we can reduce consumption by greater efficiency (which also saves money). Both these measures directly and immediately reduce carbon emissions. Compared to 10 to 15 years to commission dirty nuclear, that some pretend is clean?
I am also factoring in energy storage – this is where our $1b R&D money should be going rather than CCS and nuclear (both dirty, too long to implement and too expensive).
How about fuel cells, lithium batteries, capacitors, heat exchange reservoirs? All feasible at a local (suburb or street) level. But being total ignored by the fossil fuels and nuclear pundits, and our politicians. They were looked back in the 90s by CSIRO and others, but since abandoned – possibly under pressure from the fossil fuel lobby. Who killed the local storage initiative?
By the way, even the United States has their Million solar roofs which puts them into a world leadership position along with countries like Germany.
Pity we are so busy pretending that coal can be made clean and burning and exporting it like there is no tomorrow. A prospect that is becoming alarmingly real.
And Rudd/Garrett have put a brainless means test on the solar rebate, and Victorian Labor have announced a Clayton’s feed in tariff. I give Australia 0/10 on this for action and 8/10 for hyperbole and rhetoric.
Peterc:
How long does it take to construct a nuclear power plant, and how long does it take to construct the number of solar cells or wind turbines required to generate the same amount of energy in any given year?
Comparing apples and oranges is just fine, but let’s make sure we’re comparing a gigawatt-hour of apples to a gigawatt-hour of oranges.
How much will it cost to build, say, the 1200 or so wind turbines required to replace one single coal-fired power plant in lieu of a single nuclear power plant? How much steel and concrete will be required? How many years will it take? What environmental impacts and whole of life cycle green house gas emissions will there be?
Let’s have a quantitatively realistic comparison between nuclear energy and alternative energy systems, gigawatt hour for gigawatt hour.
Robert: A very good post overall, excellent work!
Robert here, and other sources, have helped convince me just how dubious photovoltaic is as a substantial energy output in this century. I would look to a range of other more promising renewable energy sources. As I already stated, I don’t believe full cost accounting would support nuclear power, but that’s the only substantive reason why it shouldn’t be adopted in Australia. There are cheaper carbon free power sources, but the main issue is their reliability in providing baseload power, which nuclear is very good at. I’m told this is important, I don’t really understand just how important it is. I would like to see as much research and government support for geothermal and tidal as there has been historically for nuclear.
Peterc, Luke;
This is just the sort of question markets are fairly good at sorting out — ie, which option is cheapest?
Electricity has the fairly useful property that it’s about as close to the abstract concept of a commodity good as you can get. Electrons are economically and physically indistinguishable. That means the mass action of consumers and profit-seekers can sort through all the accounting issues, timing issues, market issues etc etc to sort out the mix of winners.
It might be nuclear. I think that in the medium term it is. It may be distributed solar-and-wind. Or some mix. Or neither.
Luke, good questions.
I think if you measure the full costs and inputs to nuclear plants, including fuel processing and transport, and the eventual decommission of the plant, solar would work out cheaper. It is a lot easier to recycle silicon.
Then there is the time – solar and wind can come on line fairly rapidly – if you look at German and Californian examples – both large scale and distributed. A mix makes good sense.
Ziggy Switzkowski’s (pro nuclear) estimates of commission new nuclear power stations is 10-15 years – which is far too late to address dangerous climate change.
Wilful – “baseload” is a term that describes the minimum output of coal fired power stations – which can’t effectively be “turned down” past that amount of power, unlike gas which is much more scalable and can be turned off – which is why there are now gas stations in Melbourne and elsewhere that only turn on when peak demand exceeds supply (e.g. on very hot days), then they are turned off when not needed.
The only concept that really matters for electricity supply is matching supply with demand so some storage or other clean supply (geothermal or distributed wind) would be needed typically at night when concentrated and distributed solar are not producing.
Our house has batteries, but I don’t think masses of lead acid batteries in every house is the way to go. They are expensive and only last around 10 years. Better we develop localised storage that is cleaner and more efficient than lead acid batteries.
peterc, I know what baseload is, and I know it cannot be provided by PV or wind, or hydro, due to lack of reliability. Nuclear is the best baseload power currently used, because it’s highly reliable and there’s little marginal cost in turning it on. Gas is too expensive for baseload, it isn’t much used for that, at least in Victoria, it’s quick to turn on so is good for peaking power.
What I am unsure about is the minimum realistic level of baselaod that is required, how much uncertainty/risk is really allowable.
Geothermal and tidal would provide excellent baseload.
Wilful, you are still confusing baseload with the minimum supply required for a grid, they are actually different things. Baseload is higher than minimum supply, which is why people were encouraged to use it with its lower price. Until lots of people did this and they had to “crank up the baseload” to meet the (new) supply requirement.
Baseload relates to the minimum economic output of coal fired power stations, not the demand minimum.
Wind can meet this requirement if the wind farms are geographically dispersed; the wind is always blowing somewhere.
Wind can meet this requirement if the wind farms are geographically dispersed; the wind is always blowing somewhere.
I’m certainly no expert, however I believe wind is, what, about 20% reliable? Coal is ~80% and nuclear 90%+. Just roughly. And that wind should as a rule of thumb never exceed about 20% of the total mix of the energy system, it’s just too unreliable. An entirely nuclear system would have a lot of wasted capital spinning around, while a coal system such as ours has roaring burners consuming coal without actual electricity production. Sees like there is no one approach, a mix is desirable.
“Geothermal and tidal would provide excellent baseload.”
Geothermal, sure, but not tidal. Tidal energy is intermittent, but it can be scheduled, which makes it superior in that respect to wind and solar in most locations. To provide baseload, you still need storage.
wilful – you used the word “reliable” but I think you mean capacity factor, the ratio of the actual annual energy output to the theoretical maximum output of a generator running at 100% for a year. It can be argued that wind turbines are reliable because they are available to generate power over 95% of the year. But they don’t. Worldwide average capacity factor for wind turbines is about 24%. You are correct that about 20% is the rule of thumb for wind energy penetration.
“the wind is always blowing somewhere.”
Peterc – The wind may always be blowing somewhere, but it may not be blowing where it counts. If you think you’re going to build enough wind capacity that there is excess wind energy available wherever the wind is blowing, and build the transmission system to move that energy to where it can be used, you’re dreaming. The costs and materials required are much too high. Better to build wind turbines in the best possible locations – where there is a good seasonal correlation between the energy produced and the load – and hope for cheap storage. Even then, I don’t think there is an economic advantage over nuclear energy with all costs in.
All of south-eastern Australia is influenced by the same weather patterns, sometimes for many days on end. It can be perfectly still for a long time. I would be interested in the size of the battery that could deal with that. Pumping hydro may be part of the answer, but I wouldn’t go investing in too much more wind based on that possibility.
Tens of thousands of dollars per household, wilful. Have a look here and do some calculation.
SUBSIDIES.
Almost like a swear word these days, and usually, never used correctly, either in understanding what they are, when are used or why. To wit:
Everything is subsidized. There has never been a major invention or discovery that was either initiated witout subsidies or applied for practical use without them. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
This is especially true of the electrical generation systems. CATO Institue-type demogery aside, those that diride subsidies have not a clue about either political economy nor history.
There is not a wind turbine build or a solar cell stamped out that would be there without massive subsidies. I am pro-nuclear, perferably publically owned (and ergo opposed 100% to the current privatization rip-off proposed by the NWS gov’t) and regulated. In the world, every electrical grid was built either directly as gov’t expense and ownership, nationalized as such, or highly regulated and subsidized, wither through same public grant R&D or payments for right-of-way for plants and lines.
My advice: get over it!
I am NOT opposed to subsidies to wind power or solar power based on ’subsidies bad’. I oppose it because we should be subsidizing technologies that make sense, like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. I’m opposed to subsidies for wind power and solar if it’s discussed as if they do NOT get them (which the do) and nuclear power plants, which mostly, actually, get little or no “subsidies”. Most nuclear subsidies have long since been relegated to history…1950s through 1960s.
In my opinion, gov’ts, ESPECIALLY the Aussie one, with it’s abundent uranium and thorium reserves and a population that 99% lives within 100 miles of the cold oceans that surround it, would be IDEAL for LFTRs or any nuclear plant.
David
Here is a
[link]to some promising (and some of them real and working) technologies for distributed energy storage.
Some of these are running right under our noses in Australia, such as the Vanadium Redox cells in King Island where they are used to provide power backup (“baseload”) to the island’s windpower.
These are the sort of technologies that can supplement renewable energy. We should be researching and investing in them, rather than unproven CCS pipe dreams and proven dirty nuclear.
This is the direction the Latrobe and Hunter valleys should be going in – a government with real vision would set up Solar, Wind and Distributed Energy Storage Institutes rather than wasting money on trying to “clean” coal.