What have you got against nuclear power, anyway?

What have you got against nuclear power, anyway?

Sooner or later, at least one member of the audience that has turned out to see me present Al Gore's climate change slide show wants to know why I haven't included nuclear power in the list of technologies that can help cut our carbon emissions. The question is usually put by the likes of a retired engineer who actually understands the physics and technical aspects of nuclear power. I have to admit that I don't welcome the question, because it tends to lead to a drawn-out debate at what is already a longer evening that most attendees bargained for. But I do have an answer: time.



http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2007/08/what_have_you_got_against_nucl.php?utm_source=email-a-friend&utm_medium=email

by James Hrynyshyn

Sooner or later, at least one member of the audience that has turned out to see me present Al Gore's climate change slide show wants to know why I haven't included nuclear power in the list of technologies that can help cut our carbon emissions. The question is usually put by the likes of a retired engineer who actually understands the physics and technical aspects of nuclear power. I have to admit that I don't welcome the question, because it tends to lead to a drawn-out debate at what is already a longer evening that most attendees bargained for. But I do have an answer: time.

I've written before about some of the problems with nuclear power, without really scratching the surface. There are so many dimensions to the problem - waste storage, proliferation, construction capacity, the glacial pace of the regulatory context, and of course, economics - that it's easy to overlook the simplest drawback of all.

It's beginning to look like the industry really is on the brink on a revival, though, so we'd better come to grips with these issues soon. There's a campaign in New Zealand, where CO2 emissions have grown 50 percent since 1990, to make nuclear power a major plank in the country's future energy portfolio. The Philippines is making similar noises. The director general of South Africa's department of minerals and energy wants to put his country's large uranium deposits to work in domestic reactors in a big way. Last year, Toshiba bought 77 percent of Westinghouse Electric, which makes nuclear power plants, in anticipation of an industry resurgence. And the government of Kazakhstan wants 10 percent of that piece of the pie. (Now, that can't be a good idea...)

A look at the South African plan exposes the flaw in all these schemes. According to South Africa Press Agency report:

The draft document sets out a phased approach to creating a nuclear industry. This includes proposals up to 2010 of maintenance and enhancement of current nuclear infrastructure, research into advanced nuclear energy systems and promotion of uranium exploration and mining.

In the following years up to 2015, new nuclear power plants would be constructed. These would come into operation by 2025 and advance nuclear energy systems would be commercialised.

So, no new nukes until 2025. Back in the United States, it takes at least a decade and sometimes closer to 15 years to choose a site for a new 1 GW nuclear power plant, conduct the environmental assessment, hold the regulatory hearings, commission the project, build the plant, test it and bring it up to full power.

The U.S. government recently produced $10 billion in subsidies to help get 6 nukes built over the next decade. That's a lot of taxpayer clams for just half a dozen plants. The American nuclear industry only has the capacity to build two a year in any case. But these are side issues.

The real problem is that serious climate change, the kind that could send the planet into a rapid and intolerable regime shift, could be upon us in as little as 40 years. In order to mitigate some of that warming, we'll have to start bringing down our carbon emissions long before that. The reason I don't mention nuclear power in the list of alternative energy sources that can make a significant contribution to that goal is, even in the best-case scenario, we can't build enough nukes fast enough.

Again, realistically, we can't expect to see any new nukes online before 2017 or even 2022. By then, solar power (photovoltaics) could well be economically competitive not only with unsubsidized nuclear power, but oil, gas and even coal. Wind power is already cost-competitive, and there is enormous potential for improving energy efficiency between now and then. All those approaches, with a (very) little bit of biodiesel and ethanol and what have you thrown into the mix, and we might just be able to give ourselves a few years of breathing room to make the enormous changes in lifestyle, and technological breakthroughs, that a low-carbon economy will demand.

We could, of course, do all those things the environmentalist like, and still build more nukes, so they can help when they do finally come on line. But before we do that, we'd have to figure out how to:

1. Reduce the massive carbon emissions associated with mining and refining natural uranium, which is 99.3 percent U-238 and can't be used in your standard American light-water reactor until the U-235 content is upped from less than .0.7 % to something like 3 %. This is not an minor problem. In fact, some uranium refining might need a couple of coal-fired plants to supply the energy to refine the uranium. You could instead use straight U-238 in a CANDU reactor, but they use heavy water as a moderator and coolant, and again, producing heavy water is energy-intensive.
2. Safely bury the radioactive waste. The official plan is to stick it all in the Yucca Mountains in Nevada, but the transportation and sequestration details have yet to be worked out.
3. Secure a reliable supply or uranium. A recent report from the International Atomic Energy Association concludes: "The message is clear: long lead times will be the rule rather than the exception, and exploration will have to accelerate to ensure a stable supply of relatively low cost uranium." In other words, we don't have a reliable supply at the moment, not one to meet even modest industry growth rates of 1 to 3% a year. There is a virtually inexhaustible supply of uranium in seawater, but again, extracting it is energy-intensive, and we're back to square one.
4. Free the industry from massive government assistance. Nuclear utilities are the only ones who don't have to cover their own liability costs. How long with this be tolerated by investors in "clean tech" who are eager to see some return on their fuel-cell, cellulosic ethanol bacteria reactor, nanotech solar panel and tidal generator schemes? Not long, I suspect. This week's Nature, writing about new U.S. legislation that woul further assist the industry, notes that

Under the legislation, the federal government could be liable to pay back loans covering up to 80% of construction costs if the utility defaults. Not everyone thinks that this is the best course of action. "This is a huge risk for taxpayers," says Michele Boyd, legislative director at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group in Washington DC.

All things considered, we can't afford to embark on a path that leaves people with the misleading impression that we've solved the climate change problem. And nuclear fission, whatever its merits, simply can't replace enough oil, gas and coal-fired plants to make a significant difference, not in time to forestall catastrophic climate change.


Source: http://a4nr.org/library/globalwarmingclimatechange/08.15.2007-islandofdoubt