Nuclear has beens

Nuclear power was at one time touted as the brave new energy option, and attempts are still made to promote it as a non-fossil energy option, but it is nowadays facing major problems and a slow down around the world. For example in the USA, old plants are unable to compete with gas and renewables and only one new plant is under construction.  Some see that as a big problem for the US: ‘Losing a low-carbon source of electricity like nuclear power is going to make decarbonisation even harder than it already is. Nuclear has risks, it’s not a perfect technology, but there have to be trade-offs.’ So said the US Union of Concerned Scientist, looking at the case for public subsidies to keep some old  uneconomic nuclear plants going a bit longer.

That view wasn’t well received: patching up old potentially unsafe plants was a poor use of money, which could be better spent on renewables and energy efficiency upgrades. That was the answer to climate change.  It’s a familiar argument: old or new, nuclear is risky and expensive, and also slow to deploy.  It is not zero carbon. Given that energy is needed for uranium mining and fuel processing as well as waste handling, nuclear CO₂ emissions have been put at between 10 to 18 times greater than those from renewables. And investing in it

undermines better, faster, ways of dealing with climate change – so it has no place in the energy future.

The nuclear lobby however has been fighting back, trying to convince us that nuclear will get cheaper and safer, and that, as US climate scientist James Hansen and others claimed: ‘without nuclear, our action on climate will be more difficult, more expensive, and more likely to fail’.  Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are seen as a key way ahead . None exist yet, so its hard to say, but the prospects do not look that good compared to renewables, which seem to be accelerating ahead.

While we wait to see what happens on SMRs, the nuclear lobby has being trying to rewrite history by arguing that the German policy of a nuclear phase out out combined with renewable expansion was a mistake, since, they say, it has led to more coal being used, and so more deaths due to the emissions. It is true that burning coal kills more than any other energy option and certainly its use must stop - fast. However, sadly, you can’t do everything all at once, you have to wait for the political driver. Germany did well to respond quickly to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, so that renewables have boomed, more than replacing the lost nuclear output with zero carbon supply.  Now it needs to phase out coal too. And that’s in hand, with the climate issue now a major driver. Admittedly it’s tragic that it’s taking such a long time to phase out coal, but arguably the main reason for that is that is not because Germany backed renewables and cut nuclear, it’s more to do with coal derived power offering lucrative energy export opportunities- dumping excess coal derived power.

Although that’s not how some see it - the simple oft repeated conventional view is that phasing out nuclear has meant more use of fossil fuel, more emissions and higher costs. The reality is more complex. Energy costs certainly have risen from all sources, not just renewables, but, given the expansion of renewables, emissions from the power sector have fallen- although the use of fossil fuel in other sectors, including transport, has undermined that. Adding new nuclear back in doesn’t seem likely to help with that much, unless you think SMRs will be cheap, and widely acceptable.

SMRs do seem to be the last ditch option for nuclear, unless you believe that fusion will come to the rescue and do so soon, as the UK’s pioneering  First Light fusion developers have suggested it can. However, that seems a very long shot, and for the moment, looking globally, the prospects for nuclear do not seem good. Global nuclear capacity stood at 392 GW net at the end of 2019, supplying around 10% of global power, down slightly on 2018, with 6 new reactors added, but nine shut down. Russia is still pushing nuclear hard and China may continue its expansion, although its state-led nuclear programme is small compared with its renewables programme.

Overall, in many global projections, even relatively conservative ones like that from the US EIA,  nuclear continues to fall, while renewables roar ahead, and in more radical scenarios nuclear is wiped out entirely.  Given the seemingly endless delays and rising cost of some of the current projects and programmes, that does not seem surprising. Instead of the growth hoped for by the nuclear lobby, we are likely to see continued closures. Hastened by the continued and ever more rapid expansion of low cost renewables.

This is very much the view taken in my new book ‘Renewable Energy- can it Deliver’, out soon. It looks to renewables romping ahead as costs fall – although to get emissions down, demand also has to be tamed. That may be hard, but not impossible.  Demand for power has been falling in many IEA countries, in part due to the use of new more efficient technologies, but even if demand stays high, renewables should be able to meet it, if proper support is given, and not diverted into nuclear. 

It is conceivable that new nuclear technologies may emerge to cut cost and reduce risks and waste, but that is what the nuclear lobby has been promising for decades. As renewable costs continue to fall dramatically, trying to sustain the nuclear conviction looks likely to get even harder.  Certainly, for moment, in addition to all its other problems, it just looks very expensive and in any case unnecessary- as Amory Lovins says, there are many better and faster to deploy renewable energy options for meeting energy needs and dealing with climate change.  

As a last ditch argument, some nuclear lobbyist say that we will need some nuclear to back up renewables, but the reality is that varying the output of nuclear plants regularly and rapidly is economically and technically problematic. So it can’t easily be used to balance variable renewables. There are however plenty of other options for that- flexible balancing and storage systems that do not involve the risks associated with nuclear. Or the need to curtail renewables when demand is low and supply high.  Basically, we don’t need nuclear- large, costly, inflexible nuclear plants just get in the way of renewables and the newly emerging more flexible power system they need. Although small nuclear plants might at some stage be more flexible, their costs and risks are very uncertain. Hopes for new tech cost reductions and new roles does rise eternal amongst supporters, but for most others, about the best that can be said of SMRs and nuclear in general, including fusion, is that we might need it at some point to produce power for long distance space flight and for habitats in the outer solar system. But not on Earth, given its vast solar energy resource.