Nuclear deaths- not many, honest!

Just after the Fukushima disaster, the BBC’s  ‘Bang Goes the Theory’ popular science programme had a look at nuclear safety and health impacts. Based on presentations from Prof Gerry Thomas from Imperial College, it was suggested that only 122 people were known to have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster and that none would die due to Fukushima. Amongst others, the Nuclear Consult group of over 50 academics submitted a complaint, alleging that this was a biased, partial account.  The BBC subsequently admitted, on its complaints website, that ‘the figure 122 was presented as definitive whereas certainty is in fact lacking’, ’ But it added, ‘the programme was misleading in that respect, though not to a degree which might have amounted to bias in relation to the arguments about nuclear power’.www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp-reports/ecu/banggoesthetheory

That is a matter of opinion. A UN backed report in 2006 estimated that among the 600 000 persons receiving significant exposures (liquidators, evacuees, and residents of the most ‘contaminated’ areas), about 4,000 extra fatal cancers might occur and that among the 5 million persons residing in less contaminated areas with lower doses, an additional 5,000 cancer deaths might occur. These estimates were speculative, and later UN studies talked of stress playing a role in observed illnesses. However , it has been accepted that that there had been over 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident, although in nearly all cases that was treatable.  The debate continued. Independent studies claimed that the total death toll could be in the range of 30,0000-60,000 . See www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html  and  www.chernobylreport.org

Nuclear Consult persevered with their complaint via the BBC Trust and recently received a further response. This reiterated the view that ‘with regard to Chernobyl, the failure to mention known non-fatal health effects and the decision not to put the “observable” deaths into a wider context meant the audience would not be able to reach a reliable conclusion. This was not consistent with the stated aim of the programme to get to “the truth about the effects of radiation”, and would not have met audience expectations.

But it added ‘whilst the finding of inaccuracy in relation to the programme’s representation of the scale of health impacts from the Chernobyl fallout acknowledged the health impact was greater than the programme reflected, the programme’s broader

contention that in relative terms the impact was not as great as some people have

come to believe appears to have been well-founded.’

 It also found that ‘with regard to the prediction of zero deaths as a result of the Fukushima accident, Prof. Thomas was offering an informed judgement and not stating an established fact, and that she was qualified to do so as an acknowledged expert in the field of radiation and human health. The Committee noted that her conclusion was broadly in line with other informed opinion’. See ‘Sept’ 2012 on the BBC Trusts web site: www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/complaints_and_appeals/editorial.html

Does that includes the very cautious Stanford University study which concluded there would be between 15 and 1100 radiation related cancer deaths due to Fukushima, with their best estimate being 130 deaths, plus 24 to 1800 non-lethal cancers, with 180 being their best estimate? It noted that 600 people had died as a result of the evacuation. Given uncertainties about the location/exposure of evacuees and also the unreliability of the radiation impact model used for low doses, it said upper bound mortalities and morbidities could be increased to 1300 and 2500, respectively. http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/ee/c2ee22019a 

Some more recent estimates put the possible death toll higher: see Nuclear Monitor 758 www.nirs.org

However,  it will take time before any impacts show- it can take decades for cancers to present. This hasn’t stopped the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) from issuing preliminary findings last December, in which it  said that that so far no radiation health effects had been observed in Japan among the public, workers or children in the area of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant: it claimed that the doses of radiation received were low and no discernible health effect could be expected. It admitted that there were impact 

uncertainties at low doses, but did not recommend multiplying low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects. Six workers received total doses of over 250 mSv during their time tackling the emergency, while 170 received doses over 100 mSv, but none of these have shown ill effects so far. Amongst the general public, it says the largest dose thought to have been received by a Japanese child is 35 mSv.  Background level is around 2mSv, but the critics of the ‘low does is no problem’ view say that’s for external exposure: internally absorbed radioactive material is likely to have a much larger, longer term, impact. Time will tell.

In a subsequent report, the World Health Organisation repeated the ‘low risk’ claim. It calculated that in the worst hit areas there could be an increase in solid cancer risk of 4% for females exposed as infants. In Japan, 29.04% of females develop solid cancer by the age of 89, so an increase in that risk of 4% would raise it to 30.20% among females in the most exposed population, with breast cancer risk rising 6% in females, raising the risk for the exposed group from 5.53% to 5.86% by the age of 89., while the risk of leukemia in males might rise  by around 7% in males exposed as infants, raising the risk for the exposed group from 0.6% to 0.64% by age 89. The risk of developing (treatable) thyroid  cancer was estimated to have risen by 70% in females exposed as infants but with "little risk apparent after the age of 20." The overall thyroid risk estimate was raised from 0.75% to 1.27% by age 89. Given these figures, it concluded that  ‘no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated’.

www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/fukushima_report_20130228/en/index.html

We will have to wait a few decades to find out if they are right.. UNSCEAR is to do further studies, including, in 2014, a review of the epidemiology of low-dose radiation risks and WHO did recommend long term monitoring. Like UNSCEAR, WHO's used  the linear ‘no-low threshold’ method of gauging health effects, which on one hand, the industry sees as overestimating impacts from low doses and on the other some scientist feel underestimates the impact, for example of ingestion of  radioactive material, even at radiation levels below (external) background. So there are unresolved scientific disputes, and despite the continued assurances from UNSCEAR and WHO  that all is well, we still don’t know for certain yet, but sadly ‘zero’ deaths seems optimistic.

Austerity and energy

If you want a pretty terrifying read see "Perfect Storm: Energy, Finance and the End of Growth"  from Tim Morgan of  Tullet Prebon Research, a London  finance outfit. It sees the debt crisis being made even worse by an upcoming energy crisis, due to the declining ‘energy return on energy invested’ (EROEI) of conventional fossil and nuclear fuels, and the implications of this for economic growth. The global EROEI is he says now down  from about 40 in 1990 to 17 in 2010, may decline to just 11 by 2020.. He talks of the need for ‘social, political and cultural adaptation to “life after growth”.’And this from, in effect, a Banker...

However, he doesn't pay much attention to renewables, other than saying CSP is worth looking at. His data shows that biofuels and shale gas are all hopeless in EROEI terms, as is PV solar, well below his EROEI cut off point for profitability of 15, and wind is not much better- he puts it a just under 15.

There are higher estimates. For example, Gagnon’s study 'Civilisation and energy payback' in Energy Policy 36 (2008) 3317-3322 and Danny Harveys excellent work on EROEIs.  Gagnon quotes EROEIs  for wind power, with 35% load  factors, of ~18 for Offshore and 34 for Onshore. Harvey’s 2010 book ‘Carbon Free Energy Supply’ ( Earthscan) , using more recent data, puts the EROEI for wind at 40-80, and it’s likely they will improve on that with new technology.

It’s worth noting however that hydro does much better, with EROEIs of 200 or more, due to the long life of the plant. Nothing else can compare. Harvey puts CSP at 8-40. But PV is now getting better (Harvey puts it at 10-25) with new less energy intensive cell technology, and wave and tidal stream power may follow the path of wind to lower EROEIs, while nuclear will get even worse, as lower grade fuel has to be processed. Gagnon puts current PWRs at 14-16, while Harvey quotes 17-19 for the current world average uranium ore grade of 0.2 - 0.3%, but for an ore grade of 0.01%, it drops to 5.6 for underground mining and to 3.2% for open pit mining, and could be as low as 2 for in situ leaching techniques. So nuclear could become even worse than coal which Harvey quotes as 5-6.7 and even gas plants, at 2.2. Renewables can do much better than that, not least since they don’t need fuel. They offer power sources for a new and sustainable economic and energy system. If we are to return to some sort of growth, that may be where it will be. So maybe our banker friend, and the rest of us, can breath easier. www.tullettprebon.com/strategyinsights/index.aspx

Tim Morgan is not the first  to warn of industrial and economic collapse due to falling EROEIs. See  for example 'Energy and the Wealth of Nations’, Charles A. S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard, Springer, 2011. And of course Barry Commoner said it all in the 1970s, though he put it in terms of capitalism running out of capital faced with the increasing cost of energy technology.  Proponents of simpler conserver lifestyles, like Ted Trainer, who don’t see renewables being able to support anything like current ‘Western’ living standard, also say similar things. And it certainly wouldn’t hurt (much) to adopt a more sustainable approach to consumption, as Tim Jackson has argued in his seminal  ‘Prosperity without Growth’.

Some say this will be forced on us. For example in his 2007 World Energy and Population (WEAP) blog report, Paul Chefurcha said that oil would peak round about now, while gas, and then coal, would peak around 2025. Shale gas and oil may extend that a little, but, more interestingly, he also claims that nuclear won’t get off and running and although renewables will, their growth will stall and collapse around 2090 or so, since there wont be enough fossil/ nuclear energy or the high level of technology and manufacturing capacity needed to sustain expansion. The result is further societal and population collapse.

This particular doom scenario seems unlikely, or, rather, unnecessary.  If we invest our remaining fossil (and fissile) fuel in building up renewables capacity, we will create a base for further renewables growth, up to maybe a sustainable steady state, which will then only need small energy inputs for upgrades and replacement. However it could also provide a surplus, to allow for more growth, if that’s what we want/need, up to the final planetary limit of renewable energy availability, which is some way off, even given land use constraints. There is an awful lot of desert for CSP/CPV and sea for offshore wind, wave and tidal.  The only (!) uncertainty is- will we invest fossil energy in this, or just burn it off, for no long-term benefit.  Chefulka is not confident.  He thinks we are doomed by our willful short termism and greed for more. Certainly, as the WEAP study makes clear, and  as the Optimum Population Trust also always says, what would help, is less economic growth  expectations, or at least less people!   www.paulchefurka.ca/WEAP/WEAP.html

Maggie's energy failures

The media have been running various versions of the history of Margaret Thatcher’s rule, but few have focused on her impact on energy policy, apart that is from the obvious issue of the Miners strike- which was predicated by her decision to, in effect, close down the UK coal industry.  A brutal, divisive episode. The government won by using brute state power, aided by Thatcher’s commitment to nuclear  power, which, as the leaked Cabinet  minutes at the time revealed, was seen as having ‘the advantage of removing a substantial portion of electricity production from the dangers of disruption by industrial action by coal miners or transport workers’. 

Some mention has been made of the impact of the initial privatisation and subsequent liberalisation programmes on the electricity industry, and occasionally it’s noted that many of our current woes can be traced back to that- the attempt to create competition has lead to a new set of powerful players, mostly non-UK owned, operating in a deregulated market.  Presumably French domination was not what she had in mind.

Thatcher’s privatisation programme in fact presented her with problems back then. It collided head on with her nuclear commitment - she wanted to expand nuclear power dramatically (with 10 new plants proposed), but the city bankers made it clear that she couldn’t sell off the various chunks of the old nationalised CEGB if they contained nuclear plants. Much less get backing for new ones.  And she certainly didn’t want the state to pay for a big expansion. So the old plants were initially withdrawn from sale, and the expansion programme cut back to just one plant, Sizewell B. That was eventually sold off  (very cheaply) along with some of the old plants (even cheaper) to form part of a new private company British Energy. (It later went bust and had to be bailed out). So labeling her as ‘the plutonium blond’ (as she was sometimes called at the time) was not only rude/sexist, but also perhaps in the end less than accurate- she failed to secure much of a future for nuclear.  Put simply privatisation and market forces killed off nuclear- at least for a while. Not what she initially had in mind.  With British Energy later being taken over by EDF!

Some of her other policies also suffered from being hijacked by her enemies   In a speech to the Royal Society in Sept 1998, she referred to  ‘the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability.’ She went on  ‘We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century.’

Looking at programmes that had dealt with earlier environmental problems, like the London Smogs, she concluded in almost eco-modernist terms, ‘even though this kind of action may cost a lot, I believe it to be money well and necessarily spent because the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other.’

However she subsequently seemed to shift her views, as the climate issue was taken up by progressive groups. In her 2002 book Statecraft, we read  ‘The doomsters’ favourite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else. Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism. All this suggests a degree of calculation. Yet perhaps that is to miss half the point. Rather, as it was said of Hamlet that there was method in his madness, so one feels that in the case of some of the gloomier alarmists there is a large amount of madness in their method’. 

So looking back, although she did beat the miners, you could say many of her other energy policies led to outcomes she didn’t really want. And even on coal, we are now importing it from Russia and Columbia!

To that extent, David Cameron seems to following in her footsteps, trying for a massive nuclear expansion, but faced with increasing problems, with (mostly) state owned EDF seeking subsidies and market support guarantees before it will build (and profit from) nuclear plants in the UK, and a chaotic energy market dominated  by a range of overseas players. Gas is being imported at £10 bn a year from Qatar and escalating energy prices are being imposed on beleaguered consumers, many of them paying for power from French and German owned plants.

Cameron’s attempt to go green has also mostly come unstuck. Following Maggie, he has backed short-termists competitive market approaches.  So we are moving from one hopeless competitive market support scheme, the ROC trading system, to another, a new competitive contracts system for new low carbon projects, which could halt all but the most commercially viable renewables projects, and also, perversely, make life hard for new nuclear, since its CfD subsidy can’t be too much more than renewables.  So to raise the £50-100bn needed, EDF and the others (Japanese and maybe Chinese companies)  may have to be offered other subsidies and market guarantees. Cameron is also trying to kick life into the EU moribund Emission Trading System by setting up a unilateral carbon market floor price, backed ultimately by UK taxpayer and bill payers. At the point when the EU ETS carbon price has just fallen to an all time low of below  €2.6/tonne Carbon, this guarantees that carbon credits will be worth £16/tonne C!

Tragically, Cameron and the UK are not alone.  Japan does not seem to have learnt the lesson from Thatcher’s liberalisation attempts. Its new Liberal government is trying to do the same thing, in the hope that the market power of the big energy utilities can be tamed. As in the UK, the result could be that Japan too will go from bad to worse. Big profits for some, increasing prices for the rest and a failure to tackle the increasingly urgent issues of energy security and climate change.  

Thatcher didn’t invent free market economics, but part of her legacy is that it is now almost impossible to think about going beyond reformist attempts to deal with what are politely called ‘market failures’. Anything more structural is seen as Stalinism! So at best we get more regulation, at worst just endless technocratic adjustments to market systems, to the point where the Washington Post was moved to say that we should stop micro-market meddling and instead should be ‘putting a price on carbon emissions that is simple, predictable, aggressive and comprehensive, and then getting out of the way’. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/europe-is-becoming-a-green-energy-basket-case/2013/04/21/4b1b81d0-a87e-11e2-b029-8fb7e977ef71_story.html

Thatcher archives: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346

Shale gas battles - and local power

Shale gas is the way forward, the boom it will create can fund the shift to renewables and it will provide the power for CCGTs to back up variable wind. That’s one view (maybe DECCs), although there are more extreme variants (maybe the Treasury’s)- it will avoid the need to bother with renewables, if linked to CCS.  A rival to both these views (from fundamentalists greens) is that as a fossil fuel, with environmental and safety issues surrounding fracking, it had no place in a green energy mix. We should be cutting all fossil fuel use-via renewables and energy efficiency. A new dash for gas will just delay that. A pragmatic green variant on that is the vjew that, if we need gas to backup wind, then what’s wrong with AD biogas?

However, really it’s more complex than any of these views suggest  (the academic view!)   It is not clear how much shale gas there is, or how much it will cost, or whether we will need a lot of backup for wind beyond what exist, given a bit of replacement of old plants. After all there is storage, smart grid DSM, imports via interconnectors. If we ignore or limit all these, then yes we may need more CCGT and more gas  at some point, but not for a while- after 2030 maybe. We would also need more CCGT if we opted for wind –to-gas, i,e. hydrogen production from excess wind, but again not maybe until after 2030.

Then again all this sits in a wider frame of the debate over electricity v gas.   DECC seems to want is to phase out most of the use of gas for heating, replacing it with (excess) electricity from wind and nuclear, powering heat pumps.  You can see why the gas lobby may want to  fight back and call for more electricity from gas.  Some greens would also  like to see ‘green gas’ being the main distribution vector, not electricity - since it can be stored, and the gas main already transmits four times more  energy than the power grid, with lower loses.   They would also like to see heat being piped around from biomass fired CHP plants

Ah, but then we come to the reality check (the pessimists view). There may not be enough green gas around to do much of this, given land use and cost constraints, and renewables may not expand enough to matter much. Nuclear neither.  So, as old coal and gas and nuclear plants close, we will need some new gas plants and shale gas to run them. 

More positively (the optimists view) all these problems could be resolved if we just accelerated renewables, CHP/DH and energy efficiency. Wind, wave and tidal can provide most of the power. Biomass, geothermal and solar fired CHP/DH, with backup heat stores, can help balance variable wind and replace gas for heating. Efficiency and smart grids can tame (and retime) demand. And to top up we have wind to gas and supergrid imports. The only issue then is can we move fast enough. But that still leave open the question of  how many CCGT we would need!. Maybe not a lot. Unless you want them for insurance-, and to leave shale gas where it is, as a strategic reserve!

You could argue that if Carbon Capture and Storage  was ready then maybe we could think about more gas and even shale gas, but it does not look very likely for some while. The UK first attempt at finding a competitor for its £1bn CCS prize failed miserably. It ‘s now having a second go.  European plans for  CCS have also been much delayed and, if they do finally get going on a significant scale, will require a network of 22,000 kilometres of CO2-pipelines to be built across Europe, to transport 1200 million tons of CO2 per year by 2050, at a cost of €50 billion. This is conclusion of an international consortium of companies and research institutions, CO2Europipe,

Nevertheless it if often claimed that that without CCS, fighting climate change will be much harder . James Smith, chair of the Carbon Trust and former chair of Shell UK, wrote in the Guardian (17^th Dec) that, around the world,  ‘like it or not, relatively cheap coal and gas will be the major fuels for the next few decades in generating electricity. Unless CCS is used to stop the resultant carbon dioxide getting into the atmosphere, man-made climate change cannot be contained’.

However, Brad Page from the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute  says that it’s unlikely there will be 130 in CCS projects in operation globally by 2020, the number his organisation. But there might be some: ‘ I think you’ll see by 2015 16 plants’ and ‘ we’re probably on track for 20 by 2020’.

According to Vaclav Smil ‘To sequester just 25% of carbon dioxide emitted in 2005 by large stationary sources of the gas (9.6 G cu m at the supercritical density of 0.468 g cu cm), we would have to create a system whose annual throughput (by volume) would be slightly more than twice that of the world's crude-oil industry, an undertaking that would take many decades to accomplish.’ (Nature 453, 154 8 May 2008)

Should we really bother? Why not get stuck into the renewables and energy efficiency?

It is true that, despite having the best wind, wave and tidal resources by far in the EU, we are lamentably behind in developing them. While the leaders are at 30 and 40%  (of total energy coming from renewables) we are at about 4%, only just beating Malta and Luxembourg.  See www.eurobserv-er.org/pdf/press/year_2012/RES/English.pdf

It’s embarrassing and shameful. But if the government doesn’t want to, then maybe we had better do it ourselves. That is what is helping push to government on in Germany; they are now 600 local energy co-ops there. We could do the same. Last year’s report ‘Co-operative Energy in the UK’ written by Rebecca Willis and Jenny Willis provides some inspiring UK case studies, http://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/renewableenergy_0_0.pdf

Also see the  ‘Community Energy: Manifesto for a Community Energy Revolution’ at   http://www.co-operative.coop/Corporate/CSR/downloads/community_energy_manifesto_2012_the_co-operative.pdf   

And 'Community Energy in the UK' by Seyfang, Park and Smith (2012) http://www.3s.uea.ac.uk/publications/community-energy-uk

Also The Rough Guide to Community Energy
http://www.roughguide.to/communityenergy/


Finally from  Germany: http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/20593576/937211628/name/Energy_Cooperatives%20DGRV%202012%20how%20to%20Establish1%2Epdf

Our nuclear legacy

 

 The UK has 112 tonnes or more of UK (and Japanese and German) plutonium (Pu) stored at Sellafield. 84 tonnes of it is ours.  Germany has said they don't want theirs back, and the Japanese probably won’t need any more either; we used to convert it to Mixed  Oxide (MOX)  fuel for them (Pu/U239). But the MOX fabrication plant was a disaster  (it rarely worked) and has now been closed.

 Options for using the plutonium are: 

1. Convert it to MOX and burn that in converted old conventional UK nuclear plants (the proposed new UK plants are not at present licensed to use MOX). DECC says that ‘if all our plutonium was converted to MOX fuel it would be about enough to power two reactors for about 60 years utilising a 40% MOX core’. That's just once through, no breeding. But that would mean building a new maybe £1bn MOX plant and spending a lot of money on conversion and subsequent clean up (it would generate a lot of waste, including more Pu!) See  2 below. Building a new MOX plant just for the ~100 tones of Pu would be silly, if we weren't going to make more (which would mean a new multi billion reprocessing plant to replace THORP, which is due to close soon) and then breed more Pu from spent fuel. But at present, to save money, the spent fuel from the proposed new plants is not going the be reprocessed, just stored, so, with the existing plants mostly all closing soon, there wont be any new UK Pu sources.

 2.  Try to find someone else who still wants to buy MOX.   MOX is a dodgy thing to transport- an ideal terrorist target!  And selling it would not be commercially viable. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority says the cost of constructing a new MOX fuel plant in the UK and operating it for about 30 years ‘could be expected to be around £5-6 bn’, with the resulting MOX fuel being worth ‘in excess of £2 bn', so it’s sale would not offset the cost of its manufacture.

3. Build a new MOX-using plant: the Canadian CANDU has entered the fray as an option. That means we would have to build a new MOX fabrication plant, and maybe, unless  the CANDU plant  was just for interim use once through, a new reprocessing plant to keep it fed.

4.. Burn the Pu  in a new-build fast reactor  like PRISM, once through, without breeding more. GE say they could burn it all off in 5 years. But this is untried technology, which would also create new wastes.  PRISM is quite small (600MW), but  no one has yet offered a price  that I know of, but we must be talking £4-5 bn.   Pity in a way not to get the full value of  the Pu by breeding, just a bit of expensive power for a short while  But it would get rid of the Pu.

5.  Burn the Pu in a fast breeder- to get the full value. And extract fresh Pu  from spent fuel . But that opens up all the problems of a long-term (100s of years) plutonium economy- more and more of it circulating and more wastes being produced. And you would need a new multi £billion reprocessing plant or two (or three)!  France, the UK, US all gave up on Breeders some while back. Japan too. Too expensive, risky and proliferation prone. Russia though is still keen. And China.

6.  Build a Thorium fired reactor which would need Pu to make it work (Thorium is not fissile). Molten flouride salt systems look promising but are a long shot: we are maybe  a decade away from knowing  (e.g from China’s efforts) if that’s a viable option. Guess the cost!! Especially if you as wanted to continue into the future- you’d need fresh Pu from somewhere (i.e. new conventional reactors and reprocessing plants).

7. Just carry on storing it!  Its continued long-term storage for about 110 years would cost about £8bn and then it would still need to be dealt with.  Rendering it less proliferation  risky e.g. by mixing it with more radioactive materials (i.e undoing reprocessing!)  might cost  £5-7bn - the so called 'immobilize & dispose' option, making it is hard to steal for Pu extraction. 

There are no good options. 7 appeals to some nervous eco-people,  6 to nucleholics. DECC likes 2 but may try 3 or 4 or even 1. 5 seems too big for anyone to think about. We shouldn’t have produced it! It was initially done for to make bombs, then for fuel for Fast Breeders. What now? Back to Breeders and a big expansion of reprocessing?

Reprocessing has added vastly to the nuclear wastes we also have to deal with.     So will the decommissioning of our old nuclear plants. And if any new ones are built, they will add to the pile. Some of the low level waste seems to be destined for landfill sites. In theory, a ‘final’ deep geological waste repository for the high level wastes will be built somewhere by 2040- or perhaps a bit earlier, if a willing community can be found to take it (and lots of cash). But that will be earmarked for the existing wastes. The wastes from the news plants will have to be stored somewhere - until 2130! Probably on site at the new reactors. Since, to cut costs, the spent fuel from these plants is not, on current plans, going to be reprocessed, it will still contain plutonium, and be classified as high kevel waste.  And since, again to improve the economics, the new plants will adopt a ‘high burn up’ strategy, the spent fuel will be much more radioactive.

We’ve got a lot of problems ahead... and they will be made even worse if we build new plants. Unless, that is, you believe new Molten Salt Thorium reactors can be used at some point to burn up some of the wastes. That’s a very long shot - decades away at best with unknown costs. What we do know is that the planned clean up will cost at least £90 bn and probably a lot more. Why did we ever go down this route? And should we contemplate yet another costly round, with Thorium breeders, as a possible way out?  Double or quits?! That depends of on whether you see nuclear as just a dead weight from the past, or as having bright new future, and redeeming itself.

Pugwash report

 

The Pugwash High Renewables Scenario   

It was with some trepidation that I accepted the invitation to help Pugwash with its 2050 UK  Energy Pathways project.

Firstly I was asked to produce a ‘low nuclear’ scenario, to go alongside its planned High Nuclear and Intermediate nuclear scenarios. That made me worry about the mindset of the British Pugwash group! I said no, it had to be a non-nuclear mix, since, unlike the UK, that was what many countries around the world were now aiming for, or already enjoyed.  So we agreed instead that I should produce a High Renewables scenario.

Secondly, I was asked to run it through DECCs Pathways 2050 Calculator.  I said I wasn’t a great enthusiast or practitioner of modeling, but NATTA member Dr David Finney helpfully stepped in and so we tried. 

Thirdly, I was aware that there were already many dozens of studies based on achieving 100% renewable futures, including some for the UK, Germany, Denmark, the EU as a whole, the US, Australia and the world – I’ve counted 60 or so. More are emerging. Why do another? But we did and it has I hope been a worthwhile exercise.

Much as I expected, it proved to be relatively easy to meet projected electricity demand by 2050 from renewables, mainly offshore wind (76GW) and onshore wind (30GW) but also wave and tidal stream, biomass and geothermal CHP and solar PV, plus hydro. I based our scenario on an existing one from Poyry which generated 94% of UK electricity from renewables by 2050 although we cut its offshore wind allocation by a half, to be cautious.  

Heat was relatively easy too, given that we assumed a significant energy saving programme, cutting demand by 40% by 2050. That of course is much lower that Germany’s energy saving plan (a 50% cut by 2050), but we wanted to be cautious. On the heat supply side, along with solar and geothermal CHP/DH, biomass-fired CHP and district heating then played a key role, which meant that although we would use a lot of food and farm wastes and forestry residues, we needed quite a lot of land for biomass fast-growing SRC and the like, about 10% of UK land area, with consequent changes in farming practice and possibly diet.   

We wanted to avoid biomass imports, so dealing with transport demand was harder. The DECC calculator would not let us replace fossil fuel with hydrogen produce using excess electricity from wind- it just exported it all. That was fine, up to a point. It meant the UK would earn £15 billion a year by 2050 from selling it, but it would require more interconnectors; we included 15GW worth.

What we would have preferred is to be able to convert some of the excess wind derived electricity to hydrogen, use some of it of it for transport (rather than oil) and store the rest for electricity generation when the wind input was low. That was because, although we had included some storage and some demand-side management, plus interconnector imports, we were worried about the needed to back up renewables when they were not available and demand was high.  It turned out that we didn’t have to worry. With its large wind element, our scenario happily passed the DECC Calculators  ‘stress test’, meeting demand peaks even when the proportion of wind etc was low.  It just meant we couldn’t export any excess then.

I have to admit to being surprised. The Poyry scenario had found that by 2050 there would be a need for 21GW of fossil backup plant.What this outcome suggests is that, if we could use the wind-to-gas idea, which is now being pushed hard in Germany, then we could get to 100% renewables fully backed up with no need for any fossil input at any time.

Leaving that aside, what we do have is a Pathway which reduces emissions by 82%, meets demand at all times and has a capital cost that is slightly lower than the rival Pugwash scenarios, with, unlike them, no biomass imports, very little CCS and no nuclear.  The details are in the report.

Pathways to 2050: three possible UK energy strategies:  http://www.britishpugwash.org/

Nuclear Overview

 Given the very positive prognosis for renewables reported in my last Blog, I thought I would take a new look at the state of play with nuclear power. Judging by several critical, independent reports, it’s pretty grim. The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2012 portrays an industry suffering from ‘the cumulative impacts of the world economic crisis, the Fukushima disaster, ferocious competitors and its own planning and management difficulties’.

Key results of the assessment include:

• Only seven new reactors started up, while 19 were shut down in 2011. On 5 July 2012, one reactor was reconnected to the grid at Ohi in Japan followed another on the same site. However, it remains highly uncertain how many others will receive permission to restart operations in Japan.

• Four countries announced that they will phase out nuclear power within a given timeframe- led by Germany.

• At least five countries have decided not to engage or re-engage in nuclear programs.

• In Bulgaria and Japan two reactors under construction were abandoned.

• In four countries new build projects were officially cancelled. Of the 59 units under construction in the world, at least 18 are experiencing multi-year delays, while the remaining 41 projects were started within the past five years or have not yet reached projected start-up dates, making it difficult to assess whether they are on schedule.

• Construction costs are rapidly rising. The European EPR cost estimate has increased by a factor of four (adjusted for inflation) over the past ten years.

•  Two thirds of the assessed nuclear companies and utilities were downgraded by credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s over the past five years.

•  The assessment of a dozen nuclear companies reveals that all but one performed worse than the UK FTSE100 index. The shares of the world’s largest nuclear operator, French state utility EDF, lost 82 percent of their value, that of the world’s largest nuclear builder, French state company AREVA, fell by 88%.

In contrast, it says renewable energy development has continued with rapid growth.   Installed worldwide nuclear capacity decreased again in 2011, while the annual installed wind power capacity increased by 41 GW in 2011 alone. Installed wind power and solar capacity in China grew by a factor of around 50 in the past five years, while nuclear capacity increased by a factor of 1.5. Since 2000, within the European Union nuclear capacity decreased by 14 GW, while 142 GW of renewable capacity was installed.

http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/

To balance that assessment I looked at the World Nuclear Association’s web site, and their views on the long term potential for nuclear. A key issue must be uranium reserves- if they are not sufficient then there is no future economic or otherwise for nuclear.    They reported that the World uranium resources are ample to meet requirements for the foreseeable future but timely investment in facilities will be needed to make sure production keeps pace with growing demand, based on a new edition of the ‘Red Book’, the Nuclear Energy Agency’s  biannual Uranium Resources, production and demand  survey.

It said that total identified uranium resources had increased by over 12% since the last edition, although lower cost resources have decreased significantly because of increased mining costs. However, the total identified resources stand at 7,096,600 tU recoverable at costs of up to $260 per kg. An additional 124,100 tU of resources have been reported by companies but are not included in official national figures. So-called undiscovered resources - resources expected to exist based on existing geological knowledge, but requiring significant exploration to confirm and define them - currently stand at 10,400,500 tU.

It noted that 440 commercial nuclear power reactors were in operation around the world at the end of 2010, representing 375 GWe of capacity and cumulatively requiring 63,875 tU per year. By 2035, the report found, this can be expected to grow to between 540 GWe of capacity requiring 97,645 tU and 746 GWe needing 136,385 tU.

It claimed that currently defined uranium resources are "more than adequate" to meet the high case demand to 2035, but not without "timely investments" in uranium production facilities. ‘Significant investment and technical expertise will be required to bring these resources to the market and to identify additional resources. Sufficiently high uranium market prices will be needed to fund these activities, especially in light of the rising costs of production’. Secondary sources of uranium (stockpiles of natural and enriched uranium, downblended weapons-grade uranium, reprocessed used fuel and the re-enrichment of depleted uranium tails) will still continue to be required, although their role is expected to decline post-2013 when agreements between Russia and the USA to downblend ex-military highly enriched uranium for use in nuclear fuel expire.

Well if we really do get to 764GW by 2035, then, at say an averaged 100,000 tU per annum over that period, we would then have about 30 years worth left, assuming no further nuclear plant expansion or new uranium finds.  Using lower grade, higher cost ores might extend that a bit, but mining and processing it would increase the production of CO2, assuming that fossil fuels had to be used for this energy. And using nuclear energy for this would just exhaust the reserves faster.  It doesn’t sound like nuclear fission has much of a long-term future, unless new breeder technologies and/or thorium based systems are developed, or, perversely, we use renewables to provide the power for uranium fuel extraction and processing!  Otherwise, 2070-75 or so, and then that’s it…

So what about thorium? I turned to the Weinberg Foundations website, which was set up to support the idea.  It would be cheaper, safer and cleaner. www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/  But I also looked at a briefing by Oliver Tickell. That challenges the idea that thorium as fuel might provide a viable alternative to reactors using uranium. This he said had become something of a rallying cry for those who  assert that conventional nuclear technologies are in terminal decline – including a handful of environmentalists who believe that thorium could provide some kind ‘silver bullet’ solution to the nuclear industry’s woes.

He says that they are deluded and highlights many drawbacks facing thorium reactors, including

·      the very high costs of technology development, construction and operation;

·      marginal benefits for a thorium fuel cycle over the currently utilised uranium /                             plutonium fuel cycles;

·      serious nuclear weapons proliferation hazards: the molten salt reactor (MSR) technology promoted for thorium could be used to produce fissile uranium and plutonium at very high purities well above ordinary ‘weapons grade’;

·      the danger of both routine and accidental releases of radiation, mainly from continuous ‘live’ fuel reprocessing in MSRs;

·      the very long lead time for significant deployment of MSRs of the order of half a century – rendering it irrelevant in terms of addressing current or medium term energy supply needs. It claims that it  ‘will not be deployable on any significant scale for 40-70 years.’

http://www.claverton-energy.com/thorium-no-silver-bullet-for-nuclear-industry.html

Well, so it could be that they might  possibly be ready when the uranium runs out!  But  at what cost? And with what safety and security implications?  See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7427/full/492031a.html

 Overall, on the basis at least of this survey, I don’t see much a future for nuclear.