In Defense of Nuclear Power
Oct 23rd, 2008 | By Abhishek Bhatnagar | Category: CommentaryOntario sees a good amount of pro-nuclear-energy advertising every year. But we also see loads of anti-nuclear-everything protests here. At the University of Ottawa, I saw protests & pickets on the subject on almost a weekly basis. Most of them came from arts students who honestly didn’t know much about the subject.
To me, nuclear energy is one of those things that has been labeled bad only because of it’s association with nuclear weapons.
A world that is looking to combat poverty while reducing it’s natural-resource consumption is in an disagreeable state - at least so without the right technologies. None of the new clean technologies we have yet promise a large output for a small input. It’d be the greatest thing in the world if they did, but they don’t yet. And Coal energy is not at all sustainable for many many reasons. Hydroelectric and natural gas power have similar problems. While yielding decent amounts of energy, they cannot support the massive demand for it we have created and further foresee. At least not without ripping the nutrients out of every body of flowing water on Earth anyway. And of course small chemical plants are out of the question.
We fear nuclear weapons not because they are sloppy, but precisely because they are powerful. So if we applied the same technology to our energy concerns, would be result not be positive? Reprocessing can potentially recover large amounts of uranium and plutonium from spent-fuels. Our current technology does not allow for too much, but we can’t advance the study if so many keep objecting to further research. Many also consider spent-fuel storage to be another big problem, but this is exactly where the misunderstanding lies. The space we use for waste storage is not any more than that taken up by the waste produced by our current unclean technologies.
Another common concern is the high cost of operation. This is where subjectivity prevails. Building a nuclear power plant, maintaining safety standards, disposing of nuclear waste, all cost a lot of money. This would mean that governments that implement this system would have to lay out heavy subsidies. Many would of course be opposed to this, but considering what is on the line, I don’t think this is the worst option. The right side of the equation gives us large outputs of power, with no air/carbon pollution.
The only noticeable effects occur in governmental offices where large capital costs incur, and in research labs where loads of work needs to be done. The public enjoys a clean environment and high reliability. One beautiful scenario that comes to mind is of central African countries sharing a powergrid and splitting the costs to fulfil their hunger for energy. Of course thousands of these scenarios would be repeated around the world.
Now is one of those times in history, from when our decisions and choices will affect our long-term future. It is not immediately clear if nuclear energy is indeed the answer, but let’s not block it’s progress before we get conclusive results on it. Wind, solar, and other green techs are very fanciful, but it might be a while before we can get them to suit our exact needs. So while researching to feed our current needs, why don’t we shift over to a cleaner, more productive technology?
Last 5 posts by Abhishek Bhatnagar
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You’re completely ignoring the fact that, to many people, nuclear energy is inextricably linked to Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Most of the people I know who object to nuclear power do so on the grounds that they are worried about meltdowns and the like, and the idea of a nuclear plant leaves them with the idea that it’ll explode, and then the fact that it’s so powerful is a downside. I don’t agree, and think that proper safety standards will control this risk, but it’s a common issue that you’ve completely ignored in your analysis. (At least, it’s a major issue in the US)
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Ian Bushfield Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 10:39 am
One key point with those two accidents is they were caused by human error.
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Charles Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:02 am
I’m well aware, but there is the problem of their undue influence on most people. As I said, I think that proper safety standards make nuclear power safe enough for large scale use. However, most people hear nuclear power and think “I don’t want to live in the shadow of Chernobyl”
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Abhishek Bhatnagar Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Charles that’s true, but getting the public to accept nuclear power is another issue. I didn’t write about it because I didn’t want to get into the politics behind it. Like you said, “proper safety standards will control this risk”.
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katie kish Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:32 pm
this same sentiment is used when regarding genetically modified foods. there is scare and fear mongering injected into the public so automatically no one does the research and just goes with what everyone else seems to think. The accidents at those plants were caused by human error, not only that but they were caused by old reactors…. the new generation of reactors are far more reliable than the old ones. Just because some old technology has failed in the past doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t attempt to improve that technology and try new things.
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There`s several other key issues you gloss over to downright ignore in your gung-ho pro nuclear stance:
1. We have finite uranium in this world. It’s usually in places that are difficult and environmentally damaging to mine and will only rise in price as it becomes more scarce (further defeating the cost analysis).
2. The best idea we’ve had so far for the waste is burying it. Unfortunately, humans don’t have a good history of long-term structures (at least we have nothing on par with the half-life of the waste), so this will be a compounding issue over several millenia. Also, consider giving nuclear plants to unstable countries in Africa, even if they could prevent the facility from falling into the wrong hands, or prevent under-trained staff from causing a meltdown, there’s still a lack of expertise in those countries on how to safely store the waste.
Note: We absolutely cannot blast waste into space until we have a 100% track record of getting stuff there (imagine raining down waste over half the planet).
3. The cost is significantly more than is reasonable. By pushing for further solar panels (why doesn’t every house have panels on it’s roof?) and wind generation (which could be widely spread here in Alberta), or even tidal and geothermal, we can reduce emissions from all of those fields.
Nuclear energy, though efficient and non-emitting, is too expensive and potentially too dangerous (in inexperienced hands) to pursue.
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Rodrigo Neely Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Ian,
Don’t you think that the damage being done by our current energy production is worse? Do you honestly think that people in the first world will reduce their energy consumption to accommodate wind and solar- which are not efficient enough to match our current energy usage?
In all honesty, I’m not dogmatic about this issue. I would love to see the first world genuinely put the planet first, but it seems that without nuclear our options are do what we are doing now, or tell people that they have to use a lot less power.
I sincerely think that the global warming issue is ambiguous enough that in a democracy, people will go ahead and keep doing harm until it is far beyond too late, to keep their current energy usage.
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Abhishek Bhatnagar Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:04 pm
1. Uranium is indeed finite, but so are our other resources. Hydroelectric plants do lots of damage to the rivers/water bodies they are built over. Much more than caused by uranium mining. The clay that is blocked by damns deprives river banks further down of rich minerals which give life to new forests. Other thermal plants produce as much waste as nuclear plants, but their waste is not controllable, so it affects the environment directly. And also you have to remember, nuclear energy is so new, our methods of recovering and using uranium/plutonium are not very refined. So there is room in the future for lower consumption.
2. No one suggests we bury our waste over the millenia. Like I said in the article, reprocessing can recover large parts of the uranium, but this is again one of the those things we need to further research to improve efficiency.
If Africa sets up such plants, training and security will all be the preamble. I’m trying to speak of what nuclear energy can do for us beyond all the politics.
3. Those other techs would of course be the first option. But you have to realize that even if every house in North America had a solar roof, the energy generated would not nearly suffice. If we cleverly enough implement a mixture of many such technologies around the world, perhaps we can come close to our current usage, but there is still no room for growth, as we currently forecast.
It’s easy for people on first-world countries to sit and contemplate solar and wind energies, but there is an emergency where energy is needed. If day after day we hypothesize our plans for them but never actually do anything, we’re not going to get anywhere. Currently no country in the world has a solid plan for implementing the houses on every roof, and wind mill on every street plan. While we come up with that, which will take at least a decade, the problem of low-energy keeps escalating.
Nuclear energy is indeed dangerous in the wrong hands, but not utilizing it for that reason is very silly. It is also expensive for the governments to setup, but the fuel it requires is quite cheap.
Thanks for the support Rodrigo, I think your line…
“In all honesty, I’m not dogmatic about this issue. I would love to see the first world genuinely put the planet first, but it seems that without nuclear our options are do what we are doing now, or tell people that they have to use a lot less power.”
… is a good way of putting the matter. People are much to quick to dismiss the topic without any good arguments, and that’s the problem.
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Brian D Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Ian speaks for me on this as well (we’ve brought this up in person before), but I’d like to submit more detail on his third point, cost — the one I think has the most “push” (since it cannot be confused with the often-marginalized-as-extremist environmentalism) — as well as add two more. I’ll do the latter first.
Nuclear plants are centralized, high-density, high-risk locations. Although all accidents to date have been due to human error (and some, such as Three Mile Island, didn’t hurt any of the public), you have to consider the current world political zeitgeist. Any centralized, high-cost target is an appealing choice for terrorist strikes. Not only do you disrupt power for everyone connected to it, but you also risk irradiating everyone nearby if you breach containment (i.e. with a plane crash). This is not the case if you use renewables, particularly if they’re distributed.
Also, an extension of Ian’s second point in the light of your rebuttals (which are incorrect, by the way — the McCain campaign’s suggestion of building 40+ nuclear power plants actually requires using more Yucca-Mountain-style burying for all time, and he’s not “nobody” in nuclear advocacy), encouraging nuclear power in multiple nations essentially encourages nuclear proliferation, albeit in the packaging of consumer electricity. I would have assumed that Edger’s readership would have learned the lessons of Sagan.
Finally, let’s get back to cost, specifically return-on-investment costs and operation costs. In a nutshell, these are strictly uncompetitive even after government subsidies (remind me why the United States subsidizes an industry that can’t remain competitive… despite having a 20% market share in electricity production? Last I checked they were STILL asking for more handouts). Ballpark figures from the EIA put coal at costing around 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, and power companies consider increases to this price too costly to even consider looking into (such as carbon capture/sequestration). Nuclear power costs around 14 cents per kilowatt-hour to produce. How can it remain competitive if more than 9 cents is too expensive?
There’s also the return-on-investment factor. Nuclear plants take around 10 years after their initial commissioning to come online. That’s a LONG time before it starts generating power, and thus money, for those supplying the initial capital. This takes so long, and costs so much, that Warren Buffet wrote off plans for nuclear plants after having sunk $13 million in research and feasability studies. (link)
To put it in a single line, In May 2001, the Economist reported (here, subscription required) that nuclear power had fallen out of favor because it simply was “too costly to matter.” In 2008, nuclear power is nearly three times the price it was when the Economist wrote that.
More details on nuclear power’s costly problems — and its shortfalls in its other claims — can be found here; be sure to check the sources as well.
The real winners coming up are solar, wind, geothermal, and above all else efficiency. (It’s cheaper to save money than to spend it). Despite all this posturing, I’m not opposed to nuclear, but I cannot see how it can compare to any of the others in terms of safety, energy independence, and job creation.
(For the record, I note that some folk here seem to think that solar is always photovoltaic. It isn’t. Concentrated solar thermal power is here NOW (and in fact has been around for a very long time) and gets around *all* of the serious solar drawbacks. It’s highly efficient (both in terms of power generation and costs), capable of generating 24/7, and easily expanded. If you think you’ve never heard of it, you probably just don’t know the name — they’re traditionally built like arrays of mirrors reflecting heat into a tall tower with circulating molten salt that pipes itself into what is essentially an underground thermos, where it’s stored until it’s used to drive a heat exchanger. The US used to be a pioneer here, but cutting renewable research subsidies canned that, and now you find them mostly in Europe. They’d also work well in Africa.)
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Rod Adams Reply:
October 25th, 2008 at 6:10 am
Brian - I congratulate you on you successful studies at the school of Lovins; it is not your fault that the information provided to you about nuclear economics has been skewed to the point of complete falsehood.
Currently operating nuclear power plants receive NO subsidies from the government. In order for me to believe that they do, you would have to show me the lines of accounting that show money moving from the treasury to the industry. What is really happening is that there are a large number of taxes and fees being paid by the industry that completely pay for the cost of regulators and that subsidize a number of government employed scientists and engineers who are having lots of fun playing with geology studies at Yucca Mountain without any progress toward meeting their contractual obligation to accept used fuel. (Don’t even get me started on why the utilities signed the contracts - they were given no choice by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1992.)
In addition, since the operating costs of nuclear power plants is at least 20% less than even cheap coal (and about 1/3 of the cost of the ever popular natural gas) nuclear plants generate vast revenues that have resulted in the plants being completely paid off even though they can operate for another 20-40 years. In fact, they are so well maintained that the owners are already figuring out the refurbishment schedules that will let them operate for another 20 years after that. The large plants in operation today provide their owners with about a million dollars a day in PROFIT after taking into account all expenses. Those expenses include internalizing ALL of the costs of future decommissioning, fuel storage, generous salaries for 400-600 permanent workers, plant maintenance, income taxes, property taxes (nuclear plants in some areas provide 30-50% of the local tax base and emergency planning.
Yes - the nuclear plant construction industry - which was decimated by 30 years worth of opposition led by their fossil fuel oriented competition is asking for a certain level of government assistance in the form of loan guarantees. They have worked really hard during those decades to design much improved technology to answer the remaining questions about safety and reliability. There are some excellent products out there that can provide reliable, clean, on demand power at reasonable costs IF they are allowed to build steadily and IF they are allowed to operate without unreasonable restrictions.
It is possible to make any kind of construction project uneconomical - all you have to do is let the project get good and started with lots of money flowing out the door for materials, equipment and labor and then come in and tell the project to wait a while for its next approval. The money keeps flowing out, the loans pile up, and no income gets generated.
The only way my economic models for future power costs from nuclear power can produce the 14 cents per kilowatt hour result that you state is if you made the assumption that the actual plant construction goes on for more than 7 years, the interest rates go up to 15-20%, the materials costs escalate at 12% per year, and components inflate at more than 15% per year. Sure, those things can happen, but a well managed project should avoid many of the pitfalls as long as outside groups are not allowed to interfere after the initial license is granted. There is a reason why the industry has asked for such a detailed process with public commentary BEFORE they start turning dirt and why it will take the NRC about 45 months to approve the first application.
If you really want to learn more about nuclear economics, I suggest that you expand your reading list to include materials other than those originated by the “chief scientist” of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a man who has been professionally engaged in fighting nuclear power since he permanently dropped out of college in the early 1970s to become a full time campaigner for David Brower’s Friends of the Earth.
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katie kish Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:28 pm
All the energy we currently use is finite. The only things that aren’t is solar energy and wind energy. But wind energy is pretty hard to generate given the amount of factors that have to be considered… solar energy is the way to go IMO, but it’s not ready. I think Nuclear energy is totally the way of the future. And it’s not too expensive. The initial costs are expensive to make generators and plants that won’t explode…but after that, its really not expensive at all. The operating costs are disgustingly low, and there are zero emissions. ZERO!
Currently the known reserves amount to about 85 years supply at the current level of consumption with an expected further 500 years supply in additional or speculative reserves.
Also… advanced technologies are being developed which are far more efficient in their use of Uranium or which utilize Thorium which is 3 times more abundant than Uranium. If perfected these technologies can make use of both the spent fuel from current nuclear reactors and the depleted Uranium stocks used for enrichment. Taken together these provide enough fuel for many centuries of energy production. This will mitigate the demand for newly mined Uranium.
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Agree wholeheartedly with the pro-nuclear power sentiment expressed here. The anti-nuclear sentiment, I think, is largely a product of popular culture: Science fiction especially (don’t get me wrong, I love sci-fi).
Most people don’t seem to realize there have been more nuclear meltdowns on “The Simpsons” than in reality. The degree to which pop culture can skew personal politics is frightening, considering the benefits that a focus on nuclear power would have on the (US) economy: I can see a wave of new jobs, cheaper energy, and more time to focus on alternative energy than if we continue to exhaust fossil fuels.
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