As a renewable energy advocate — as well as someone who wants to ensure the planet isn’t heated up by greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuels — I have something of an ambivalent relationship with nuclear energy.
I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet who will doubt that it is a carbon free, high density source of power which would work alongside other sources such as wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and hydro as a potential source for providing the power for the planet.
There are, however, many people on the planet who would doubt that it is safe, cost effective or, indeed, feasible in the timescale we need to avert a climate disaster. They will quote nuclear incidents around the world, the potential for a huge downside if there’s an explosion (Chernobyl comes to mind), issues with storage of spent waste, massive cost overruns on existing builds, environmental problems related to disposing of the water used for cooling and myriad of other problems that they have with the technology.
I will admit I am somewhere between the two of them. On the one hand I can see the potential of this as a great power source that has minimal input requirements (some radioactive materials and water to cool it), providing lots of carbon free electricity at the point of creation. But I am also conscious of the fact that if someone said to me ”You support nuclear power why not go live next door to a nuclear power plant?” I would probably hesitate to do that.
(Although, in fairness I would probably hesitate to go and live next to any sort of thermic power plant. A wind or solar farm, not so much. In fact I’m within a mile or so of a proposed solar farm where I live at the moment and I’m happy to support it.)
First the good news. Nuclear energy has been around for a long time. It has been successfully delivering power to many countries across the world with an excellent (but not perfect) operational safety record. The energy that is produced is very low in carbon, and reliable with almost zero air pollution as a result of using it. In many respects it is the perfect process to create power. The raw materials that go into creating energy from nuclear fuel are relatively small — especially when compared with the huge volume of gas, oil, and coal that go into other power stations as raw materials to create the energy. The efficiency of the power plants is relatively high (around 33 %) although, ironically, a gas plant is more efficient. Nuclear energy is more efficient than solar and wind which sit at around 20%.
The issue a lot of people have with nuclear power plants is, well, the nuclear fuel. There are different types of nuclear fuel which have different levels of radiation associated with them. But regardless of which type is used the end of the process of creating electricity from nuclear power results in a waste product.
The nasty bit of nuclear energy is the high level waste (HLW) which is the spent nuclear fuel that has been used and removed from the reactor. HLW is currently increasing by about 12,000 tonnes worldwide every year, which is the equivalent of a two-storey structure built on a basketball court or about 100 double-decker buses. For comparison, the amount of ash produced by coal power plants in the United States alone is estimated at 130,000,000 t per year. While ash is not as nasty as nuclear waste it does contain arsenic and other toxic materials. In 2010, it was estimated that about 250,000 t of nuclear HLW were stored globally.
However, the HLW in question accounts for a mere 1% of all the nuclear waste. The other types are intermediate level waste and — you guessed it- low level waste.
Low-level wastes include paper, rags, tools, clothing, filters, and other materials which contain small amounts of mostly short-lived radioactivity. It accounts for a little under 94% of all nuclear waste. (NOTE: Not all of that waste comes from nuclear power plants. Some comes from hospitals that handle nuclear isotopes for X-rays.)
Intermediate-level wastes includes resins, chemical sludge and metal nuclear fuel cladding, as well as contaminated materials from reactor decommissioning. It may be solidified in concrete or bitumen or mixed with silica sand and vitrified for disposal. This is around 6% of all nuclear waste.
Of course the big problem is that all of this waste needs safe disposal. But only a relatively small amount of it is actually life-threatening. (And by that I mean nobody really wants to be exposed to nuclear radiation, but if it’s going to happen you really want it to be the low-level radiation rather than the high level stuff. That stuff’s nasty and will kill you until you’re dead.)
At the moment all the HLW is concrete encased and securely stowed in various places around the world. Anecdotal data indicate that some of the older storage containers (and we’re talking ones that have been there 60 years or longer) are leaking but for the most part once they’re entombed in concrete (or vitrified in glass) they’re reasonably safe. Many of them are stored in deep, underground repositories. In theory this is ‘safe’ in as much as it is out of reach of the public and above the water table so the chances of radiation seeping into the environment is small.
The radioactivity of nuclear waste naturally decays, and has a finite radiotoxic lifetime. Within a period of 1,000–10,000 years, the radioactivity of HLW decays to that of the originally mined ore.
The issue is usually the other stuff. The thousands of tones of intermediate level waste and low level waste that we don’t really want out and about in public
I would hope that there is some safe way of disposing of this — which accounts for almost 98% of all waste. Unfortunately the consensus seems to be that burying it in landfill is appropriate. Actually that’s unfair. It’s deemed to be ‘Near-surface disposal’ which is defined as ‘the disposal of waste, with or without engineered barriers, in:
- Near-surface disposal facilities at ground level. These facilities are on or below the surface where the protective covering is of the order of a few metres thick. Waste containers are placed in constructed vaults and when full the vaults are backfilled. Eventually they will be covered and capped with an impermeable membrane and topsoil. These facilities may incorporate some form of drainage and possibly a gas venting system.
- Near-surface disposal facilities in caverns below ground level. Unlike near-surface disposal at ground level, where the excavations are conducted from the surface, shallow disposal requires underground excavation of caverns. The facility is at a depth of several tens of metres below the Earth’s surface and accessed through a drift.’
There’s already several of these around the world — including one in Drigg in Cumbria operated by UK Nuclear Waste Management.
So let’s look at the other side to the nuclear puzzle: Development and building.
France has made a virtue of the fact that it runs a large percentage of the electric grid in the country from nuclear. They have 56 nuclear plants and have not had a single incident with these plants (but see below for maintenance problems). Their electricity was amongst the cleanest in the European Union from a carbon intensity point of view. This is hardly surprising. There’s virtually no carbon impact to nuclear generation. It is on a level with wind and solar for carbon intensity.
But there are a few downsides related to the actual design and building of plants.
Because of the nature of nuclear power stations there is a huge regulatory and safety burden on designers and construction. This is evidenced by the fact that the majority of nuclear power plants end up being delayed in their construction and costing a huge amount more than initially budgeted.
There is a case to say that the original timeline and budget were overly optimistic. But regardless of where you stand this has a knock-on impact on the price of the power that is produced.
Hinkley Point C power station is under construction in the UK. As of May 2022, the project is two years late and the expected cost is £25–26 billion, 50% more than the original budget from 2016. It is currently planned to be commissioned in June 2027 and has a projected lifetime of 60 years.
EDF — the company which will operate the plant — has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price — a “strike price” — for electricity from Hinkley Point C under a government sanctioned Contract for Difference (CfD). The price is £92.50/MWh (in 2012 prices), which will be adjusted (linked to inflation — £106/MWh in 2021)
In July, the UK Government secured a new pipeline of renewable energy for just £48/MWh. This means that Hinley Point C’s power is — at best — double the price of the other energy from the renewables pipeline and will most likely end up being much more expensive than that. For reference a strike price of £48/MWh produces wholesale electricity at a little under 5p/kWh. At the time of writing (mid September 2022) the highest wholesale electricity spot price this week has been 56.9p /kWh and the lowest has been 12.3 p/ kWh (ironically towards the end of the week when wind and solar combined to produce the majority of the power across the country.) So, overall nuclear can be much cheaper than gas — especially now that the gas price has gone through the roof. But it will never be as cheap as something like solar or wind power.
But sometimes price isn’t the issue. It’s reliability. With very few exceptions nuclear power is a dependable source of power. It’s not subject to the whims of nature and the fact that the day may be cloudy or still. Which means the premium you are paying for nuclear covers the fact that it is available 24/7/365.
Until it isn’t.
France is suffering from issues with some of its nuclear power stations now because they are scheduled for maintenance. In France over half of the country’s 56 reactors are shut for maintenance, due to routine inspections as well as corrosion issues. When you perform maintenance you power the station down and perform the work then power it back up. A planned nuclear generation outage is usually scheduled to coincide with a plant’s refueling cycle. U.S. nuclear power plants typically refuel every 18 to 24 months, mostly during the autumn and spring when electricity demand is lower.
Let’s ignore the fact that a lot of the maintenance is very dangerous involving working close to highly irradiated elements. The fact that the power station has to be powered off and back on again means it will unavailable for use for an average of 1 month although if major upgrades are needed a plant can be offline for 3 months or more. Grand Gulf power station in the US underwent an 89-day extended refueling and maintenance outage while plant operators completed a modernization of its turbine control system.
So a grid which relies on nuclear power for its baseload energy will suffer if the plant has to go off line. This situation can be compounded if the station is close to its end of life as many operators elect to decommission an older plant when it has to close for maintenance rather than lose money upgrading it for a remaining lifespan of two years or less.
Of course wind and solar will need maintenance and upgrades. But it’s far easier to bring a wind turbine off-line and repair/ replace it, or deal with a cracked or degraded solar panel in a farm of thousands, without needing to take the whole wind or solar farm off line.
The other thing to remember with nuclear is that the output is not instantly variable. You cannot scale it up and down quickly according to time-of-day requirements. With nuclear power you still need peaker plants to deal with sudden surges. Nuclear can ramp up and down gradually to deal with anticipated peaks and troughs but it cannot react quickly like, say, a storage battery. Which means that even with nuclear power you’ll still need an alternate form of peak power which — it the moment — is gas. Over time this should be battery storage or some other quickly scaleable renewable such as stored thermal energy.
But let’s look at the latest entrant to the nuclear power generation field, the small modular reactor (SMR)
On the face of it these are the ideal implementation of nuclear reactors. They are manufactured off site — often en masse — and shipped to the location.
As the name suggests they are smaller than the conventional reactors and — as such — produce lower output. A typical SMR produces around 300 MW whereas Hinckley Point C is scheduled to produce 3200 MW when operational. The theory with SMRs is that they can be built quicker, deployed quicker and- because of their design — they are safer than conventional designs and cost less. This is very appealing to many as it counters one of the problems with full nuclear reactors that they are slow to deploy.
From a safety point of view SMRs have many advantages over full size reactors. Firstly their design has many more in-built safety functions — many of which are based on physical laws themselves rather than mechanical, technical or human interaction. An example of this is a plug in the bottom of the reactor which will dissolve in times of nuclear meltdown allowing the reactor fuel to drain out and lose critical mass. (Of course there’s a question about where this reactor fuel is draining to. But we’ll gloss over that for a moment).
Smaller reactors have less need for nuclear fuel. This means less is available to cause an incident at each site. In fact some SMR designs are termed ‘breeder reactors’ which means that the initial fuel that is used to start the reaction creates a different type of nuclear waste which can, itself, then be used as fuel further down the line.
Because they are cheaper to build the strike price for power from an SMR is lower. But this comes with a caveat. The only way SMR’s are cheaper is if they are developed and deployed en masse. Making half a dozen and putting them in across various parts of the country won’t result in cheaper installations. Making hundreds of them will. They are replacing economies of individual scale (a few large sites) with economies of production scale (lots of small sites). Without these economies of scale the cost of SMR’s is not radically lower than full-size reactors and the generated electricity is more expensive than renewables.
If we consider the carbon footprint of nuclear power generation the generally accepted wisdom is that the generation is low to zero carbon. However the carbon footprint of the power station itself is far from zero. Plus there is an embedded carbon footprint related to the mining and extraction of uranium ore. Over the lifetime of the reactor this amounts to 9–37 times more than renewables: (https://twitter.com/aukehoekstra/status/1089099390743130112?s=21&t=9vI9vXxI0b2qwQvgQ14zWw)
But when we look at Nuclear power plants we have to consider the other elephant in the room when it comes to the actual plants — terrorism. When I was a young man the thought that anyone would hijack a plane (or four) and deliberately crash them into buildings was considered outrageous and unthinkable. After 9/11 that become a stark reality.
The people behind this atrocity (and other similar suicide bombings) have made it clear that people are willing to sacrifice their lives, and those of others, for their cause.
It does not take a great leap of thinking to realise that a large nuclear reactor — or, indeed, any of the small modular reactors that might be put in place — would make an ideal target for someone with the right mindset, money, and planning skills.
Sure, they could crash a plane into one of the coal- powered stations or the gas peaker plants around the world. That would be a calamity and a big problem. But other than some pollution and localised damage the impacts would be relatively short term.
Flying an airliner into Hinckley Point C would be a completely different state of affairs. If the aircraft managed to penetrate the protective layer of the reactor chamber the resulting release of nuclear radiation would be devastating for the nearby community. Depending on the size of the reactor and the level of damage the release of debris might be relatively contained. But the area in which it is contained would become unliveable for decades (think Chernobyl) and the resulting contamination of water supplies etc. might have a longer term effect on adjacent areas.
Sure, this is a relatively low percentage problem. I mean we already have, literally, hundreds of nuclear power stations across the globe and this hasn’t happened yet. But we had literally thousands of high-rise buildings across the globe prior to September 11th and not one of them had been deliberately hit by an airliner until two of them were hit within 30 minutes of each other. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t happen in the future.
Attached to nuclear material is also a secondary issue — once which is very real at the moment and steps are being taken to manage it; nuclear proliferation. Fissile material needs to be processed to bring it to a level of potency at which it can serve as nuclear fuel. There are a small number of countries in which this can happen. The reason for this is simple; if it is processed beyond a certain level of potency it then becomes weapon-grade material for use in a nuclear bomb. There are certain countries around the world that have been deemed unsafe to process their own nuclear fuel — North Korea and Iran, for example. But both of these countries have nuclear power stations. Which means they need the nuclear fuel. At the moment there is a complex process by which fuel is provided to them and the spent fuel is catalogued and returned to ensure they do not take the fissile material and refine it themselves into weapons grade material. The last thing this planet needs at the moment is more countries with the ability to build nuclear weapons (There is a case to say nobody needs the ability to build nuclear weapons but that’s not what this particular article is about)
This is another problem with nuclear power. The raw material to make it work is incredibly dangerous at all stages of the process. We’ve talked about the waste management earlier on. But the basic fuel used to make a nuclear reaction has to be managed carefully to ensure it is appropriately secured, catalogued and doesn’t fall into the hands of the wrong people. Like it or not a coal, gas or other fossil fuel powered station does not have to be kept out of the hands of North Korea for fear of it being turned into a bomb. Neither do wind turbines, hydro-power dams and solar arrays.
So let’s summarise the pros and cons of nuclear power
In the Pro column
- Scaleable energy provision, ideal for baseload.
- Non intermittent — works 24/7
- Low carbon electricity.
In the Con column
- Relatively expensive energy
- Long installation timeline
- Can’t be used for peaking spikes.
- Not as reliable as expected due to maintenance and unexpected outages.
- Dangerous by-product which needs top level management.
- Prime terrorism targets
- Nuclear proliferation issues.
On the face of it the cons outweigh the pros for nuclear as far as I’m concerned.
But wait, I hear you cry. We can mitigate some of these problems: Newer designs are coming on-line that have fewer maintenance issues. There are smaller reactors that can be brought on-line quicker (SMRs). The nuclear waste issue is just a matter of getting the right level of storage and ensuring everything is secure.
I agree. But I also am aware of the people who cry “But wait, hydrogen can be used to power small vehicles. We can spend a fortune on infrastructure and subsidise the cars to make them affordable and… and.. and”
It doesn’t remove the fact that using hydrogen for personal vehicles is energy-wasteful and proportionally expensive.
In fact I would go so far as to say that nuclear energy is the passenger car FCEV of hydrogen uses. It’s an idea championed by a few based on a couple of sound-bite benefits and ignoring the downsides.
With FCEVs it’s “400 mile range and refill in 3 minutes”. They ignore the downsides to it which make it not practical (lack of infrastructure, inefficiency of the process, use of fossil fuels as a primary source).
With nuclear it’s “Constant base load, non intermittency and zero carbon”. In fact Forbes Magazine stated that “Nuclear Power is the only truly scalable, reliable, low-carbon energy source proven capable of eliminating carbon emissions for the power sector”
Whilst this is true comments like this ignore the downsides that affect practicality. Sure, there are countries that have made nuclear work — France is a great example. Just as there are countries that have made FCEVs work - Toyota are really successful in Japan with them.
But in neither of these cases have the underlying problems been remedied.
If you box nuclear in under tight criteria and say “As a source of reliable power with a low carbon footprint that is low pollution and safe to the immediate area it is one of the best sources of power around” you’d be right. But that’s a little like boxing fossil fuels in and saying “as a source of immediately available, scalable, non-radioactive energy it is one of the best solutions around”
Both statement are 100% true. But both statement ignore factors outside the tight little box you’ve defined.
The problem is that — despite the shortcomings — it fulfils a specific need that cannot be done with any other non-renewable power source. It solves the intermittency issue with renewables.
In the UK we’ve just come through a period of very low wind power. The last few weeks have seen wind produce less than 10% of our energy in total. The phrase ‘becalmed’ has been bandied around in the media. With traditional renewables the answer is ‘Storage’. But storage only works in a relatively short term basis. If you take all the battery storage on the planet and presume it can be used to run the globe in the absence of electrical energy you will find that it can run the world’s grid for something ridiculous like 6 minutes in total.
Obviously that’s an extreme situation. But it does highlight a key issue that can arise if you rely on renewables: If the source of your renewable energy is not dependable then the power is not dependable. Which means you’ll always need some way of managing the baseload.
I’ve written before about how baseload requirement can be dealt with through time-of-day tariffs and load shifting (Basically if you use storage batteries to cover your needs when the peak power requirement is there (4pm — 7pm) it becomes less of a drain on the grid, and the need for peaker plants decrease. But, again, this needs some sort of constant power source which can be relied upon to provide the baseload energy requirements for the country (or the globe).
The science on whether we can remove intermittency from the grid through renewables is not settled, yet. There are those (usually fossil fuel or nuclear supporters) who say it cannot be done. There are others such as Auke Hoekstra who have been studying this problem for over a decade who think that with appropriate usage of time-shifting and energy flexibility this can be achieved. (https://twitter.com/aukehoekstra/status/1089099393968545793?s=21&t=9vI9vXxI0b2qwQvgQ14zWw). Unfortunately in all cases the science is looking at future tech and solution which can only be modelled but not determined empirically. By that I mean there’s no way of guaranteeing that if we remove nuclear and fossil fuel from the mix, optimise the system with renewables and put storage in place there won’t be a situation where the system falls down. All we can say for sure is that in a computer modelled situation this will work.
That’s fine for someone who will suffer the inconvenience of not having a fully charged electric car or e-scooter when they awake in the morning, less so for someone in a hospital relying on a ventilator to survive without electricity to power it.
As I’m writing this article I’ve flipped back and forth numerous times about whether I support nuclear power. If I look through the lens of safety, environmental impact and waste storage the answer is a resounding no. But I’m also aware that several of those criteria apply to renewables as well.
If I look at it from the point of view of reliability, and dependability the answer is absolutely yes.
If I look at it from the point of view of cost the answer is no. The cost to build and the cost of energy related to nuclear power is much higher than renewables.
If I look at it from the point of view of reliable energy security the answer is yes.
If I look at it from the point of view of national energy security the answer is no (Who owns all the nuclear fuel? Are we swapping one raw material that causes wars — oil — for another one — uranium?)
If I look at it from the point of view of land usage the answer is yes (Nuclear power plants are relatively small compared with their energy output. They’re much smaller than, say, wind farms or solar arrays).
If I look at it from a the point of view of national safety and terrorism potential the answer is no.
What’s really concerning me most, though, is the fact that we have the best minds in the world working on nuclear energy and yet — in the nearly 80 years since nuclear energy became a thing (I’m counting the Manhattan Project as a starting point) — we have not yet discovered a safe, cheap and reliable way to solve the issue of radioactive waste. While the level of nuclear waste is minuscule compared with the level of waste from other fossil fuels, the potential impact of issues with storage is a factor higher than with, say, coal ash or an oil spillage. If a tanker spills oil into the ocean and that oil reaches a beach it is a disaster that — with money and enough volunteers — can be cleaned up. As Chernobyl has taught us if something similar happens with nuclear material the impacts are much, much, bigger and longer-lasting.
If you look on the internet there are those who will say — quite rightly — that if we had devoted the money we have spent on gas and coal over the last 20 years and used it to build nuclear power stations we would have energy security in this country. What they don’t say is what else we would have: Thousands of tonnes of high-level nuclear waste and hundreds of thousand of tonnes of intermediate and low level waste, with no reliable, safe way of storing it for the long term.
Nuclear power is like the pricey builder who comes to remodel your house. He’s profligate with his time and expertise, happy to do anything you want at any time of the day or night, has provided a number of ideas and shortcuts to help you remodel quicker, been very tidy during the renovations, and kept himself to himself in his Transit van when on his breaks.
But when he finally goes you find there’s a room you can never use because the walls are coated in toxic mold and excrement and a nest of poisonous snakes guard the doors.
If you’re looking at this from the point of view of an energy source that has the best solution to provide the most reliable source of energy with the lowest carbon footprint in the most reliable way then nuclear is the one you want.
But — even if the plant has 100% safety record — there is still the underlying issue that we have a lot of deadly waste product that we have no way of dealing with effectively.
So I guess the question is: do we build the house with the good’ish, but cheap, builder and take longer to do it knowing we’ll get a building we can use 100% of the time. Or do we take what’s being offered, get it done quicker (but at a higher cost) and end up with a room we can never use?
There are no perfect solutions. Just solutions.
What do you think?
