By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Another excellent article by Kathryn Porter:
Iwrite a lot aboutwhat isn’t working in the energy transition– so what do I think will work?
The answer is nuclear power. Not fusion, but regular fission power. Nuclear has a number of key advantages, not found all at once in any other source of energy. Nuclear produces no carbon dioxide emissions in operation, it has a very high energy density in that a lot of energy is produced from a small geographic footprint, and it is not intermittent. Less well-known is the fact that nuclear power stations actually can “load-follow” – this means they can vary their output in response to changes in demand.
Of course, there are downsides. Nuclear has a very high capital cost and an extremely stringent regulatory regime, and there are the issues of nuclear waste and public acceptance.
The UK Government has spent a lot of time and effort trying to design incentive schemes to encourage private investment in the sector, with minimal success. It has launched Great British Nuclear to kick-start interest in small modular reactors (SMRs) and expects to co-invest in these projects. But the fact is that nuclear power is beset by large and unquantifiable risks, which mostly come from government itself. The entire German nuclear power industry was recently ordered to shut down, for instance, in the wake of the Fukushima powerplant incident: this despite the fact that no health effect to anyone from Fukushima radiation “is ever likely to be discernible” according to the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Every new nuclear project faces interminable legal action from anti-nuclear activists. There are legislators in every Western nation who make no secret of their opposition to nuclear energy, though some of these have changed their stance after realising how helpful it is in meeting net-zero goals.
In this kind of environment, it’s reasonable that the private sector should be reluctant to take on political risks. The government should go beyond incentive schemes and simply pay for new reactors, particularly large ones, out of public funds. I am not an advocate for widespread state ownership in the energy sector, but in the same way that we do not expect the private sector to finance physical security – the military and police – we should not necessarily expect it to fully finance energy security. It would be more efficient, and potentially cheaper for consumers, were the Government to get over its squeamishness about putting large infrastructure on its balance sheet and ensure that more reactors are built.
The issue of regulation is also possible to improve. Since Fukushima,despite the fact that basically no health consequences occurred, regulation has become even more risk averse. For example, the existing UK Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors may be forced to close early (some already have) because of the risk that a single control rod may fail to deploy in the event of an earthquake of a magnitude never experienced in the history of the UK. Not only can these reactors be safely shut down if fewer than a fifth of the fuel rods deploy, there are also two further shut-down methods should this fail. It’s no wonder that nuclear power is the safest form of generation with the lowest number of deaths per unit of energy generated.
The issue of waste also turns out to be a lot less thorny than expected. Most of today’s waste problems date back to the early days of nuclear power when waste was not handled correctly. The cleanup from this is an ongoing challenge. Modern reactors produce less waste, and the protocols for correct handling are now established. According to government data, the total mass of radioactive waste in stock and estimated to be produced in the UK over the next 100 years will be around 5.1 million tonnes. In contrast, around 5.3 million tonnes of hazardous waste come from UK households and businesses every single year.
When it comes to public acceptance, the best place to start is on the sites of previous reactors since the local population is used to living next door to nuclear power which has been a source of jobs.
There are significant opportunities for both large and small nuclear reactors. Despite the hype, SMRs are still some years away from being available commercially, and we can’t afford to wait. We should hurry up and build some more large reactors.
The most promising large-scale technology is the APR-1400 advanced light water reactor developed by Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO). Six of these have been built in South Korea and the UAE, with another due to open soon. They have been delivered broadly on time (in eight years) and with modest cost overruns. Another option is the European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR) which EDF is building at Hinkley Point C and another of which recently opened at Olkiluoto in Finland. Unfortunately, the three EPR projects in Europe (the other being the flagship development at Flamanville in France) have been beset with massive delays and cost over-runs. It’s a similar story with the Westinghouse AP1000, another pressurised water reactor which has just been completed at Vogtle in Georgia with a second unit due next year.
A further option would be an Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR). These were built on time – in just five years – and on budget in Japan before the Fukushima incident. While ABWR supply chains may be stale, they could be refreshed if multi-site orders came in.
SMRs provoke a great deal of interest, for good reasons. Companies such as Dow Chemical are exploring their use to deliver high temperature heat to their facilities: on-site nuclear is one of the more credible options for zero-carbon high temperature industrial processes. Dow is working with X-Energy to deploy an SMR at its UCC Seadrift Operations site in Texas, by about 2030. The companies hope to start construction in 2026.
Again, as ever with nuclear, the main hurdle is regulatory. US developer NuScale recently secured certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) but said the process ran from 2008 to 2020, cost half a billion dollars and generated two million pages of documentation. And that certification is only applicable in the US – NuScale would have to go through it all again if someone wanted to deploy its technology in the UK or elsewhere.
The UK Government has said it wants to co-operate with trusted national regulators, and this would be a good place to start – if the technology is good enough for the NRC it should be good enough for the UK and vice versa (of course, site-specific approvals must still be on a case by case basis).
The main British contender in the SMR space is Rolls Royce which was assumed to have an advantage given its role in nuclear submarine propulsion. Unfortunately, small civil reactors are quite different to military ones which run on high-enriched fuel, so there was less to leverage than expected. The company is on the slow road to UK design certification.
SMRs are essentially small versions of conventional nuclear technologies. The idea, which has also been trialled by Westinghouse for large-scale projects, is to build as many components as possible off-site using a modular approach, with reduced on-site engineering. An even more interesting prospect is a fully plug-and-play, transportable “micro-reactor” plant with virtually no on-site engineering. Again,Westinghouse is at the forefront, with a micro-reactor it expects to be built and fuelled fully off-site. The product, named eVinci, would run for around eight years before being taken away for re-fuelling, leaving no waste behind. It uses a novel passive cooling technology. Recently the company successfully produced a prototype of one of the main design components.
If micro-reactors work, their potential would be huge. They could be installed at industrial sites to generate electricity, and potentially produce hydrogen to fuel very high temperature operations such as glass-making, where the temperatures are difficult or expensive to achieve other than through combustion. They would also be ideal in various off-grid locations which currently rely on diesel generators.
Unlike these proven fission technologies, I am less optimistic about fusion. Recent “breakthroughs” have misled the public as they ignore the vast amounts of energy required to power the plant. The technology needs to improve by orders of magnitude before more energy comes out than goes in. It’s also worth noting that people talk about fusion power as though it would be free from the radiation and waste problems of fission: this is emphatically not the case. Worthwhile fusion power has been supposedly imminent for more than half a century, and it’s liable to be a very long time before it arrives. We should not put off building fission capacity to wait for it.
Fission power makes Net Zero actually possible to achieve, and has the huge benefit of being an established technology that fits very well with the way our electricity grids were designed to work. There is no need for backup generation, extra power lines, or additional balancing costs, all of which are needed when intermittent renewable generation is installed.
In 1956, the first civil nuclear power station in the world was built at Calder Hall in Cumbria with the nearby homes in Workington being the first to receive electricity generated from nuclear power. It ran for 47 years generating enough power to run a three-bar heater for 2.85 million years. We need to rediscover that same ambition and power up our nuclear sector once again.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/01/nuclear-power-green-energy-tech-net-zero-miracle/
If we do rollout large amounts of nuclear, then clearly wind power is a dead end technology, and we should put a stop to all new projects, as they will be superfluous.
Although nuclear reactors can vary their output, as she points out, to merely act as a back up for intermittent renewables would totally destroy their economics.
It would be absurd to spend hundreds of billions on both wind and nuclear, when the latter could do the job on its own.
There is, by the way, an easy solution to the problem of environmental activist opposition to nuclear – simply tell them the choice is nuclear or gas!
