Double or Quits?

The Future of Civil Nuclear Energy

Malcolm C. Grimston, Peter Beck

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781853839085
• eBook ISBN: 9781136534171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Global energy demand is likely to rise substantially by the mid-21st century. At the same time, the use of fossil fuels may need to be severely curtailed to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Nuclear power is one of the few options that meet these conflicting requirements. However, its potential to do so is an issue of wide disagreement and high emotions, with balanced information hard to find. This text, the culmination of a two-year study, provides a dispassionate and objective assessment of the major disputes on the future role of this controversial fuel. Decisionmakers and their advisers, as well as proponents and opponents of the fuel, should find that this book provides clarification of the main issues influencing the future of nuclear energy: relative economics, public perceptions and the process of decisionmaking, nuclear research and development, waste management, reprocessing and proliferation, nuclear safety and nuclear power and the Kyoto Protocol. In the light of the many uncertainties in the field of energy, the relevance of these issues can only continue to grow.

1 Setting the Scene

The Energy Challenge

It is clear to many commentators that the world cannot continue along its current energy course. Among the many reasons why it cannot do so, perhaps two stand out. The first is the challenge of supplying enough energy for a world population that is not only growing but also increasing its average per capita energy use. Global energy demand is expected to rise to double or treble its present level by mid-century, while oil production from ‘conventional’ sources, which accounted for about 40 per cent of traded primary energy in the year 2000, may peak within two or three decades. Conventional reserves of gas will last rather longer, but by mid-century they too may be under heavy pressure, especially if gas supplants oil. Unconventional energy resources such as shale oil or methane hydrates may complement the conventional ones, but to what extent is not clear.

At the same time, there is a growing consensus among many climatologists and other scientists that emissions of greenhouse gases, of which carbon dioxide is the most important, must fall by some 60 per cent by 2050. This is essential if their concentration in the atmosphere is to be stabilized at double the preindustrial level, allowing climate change to be restricted to manageable proportions. Nonetheless, a doubling of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will still, by current calculations, have very significant environmental consequences.¹

Fossil fuels provide some 90 per cent of commercially sold primary energy in the world today.² Of the remaining 10 per cent, nuclear power provides about three-quarters of ‘input’ energy and hydropower almost all of the rest. (Once corrections have been made for losses in converting heat into electricity in nuclear stations, the present contributions of nuclear power and hydropower are approximately equal.) In addition there is the use, mainly in less industrialized countries, of non-commercial energy sources such as wood and animal wastes which accounts for an extra 10 or 15 per cent, a proportion likely to fall as more people gain access to modern energy sources.

A crude calculation, assuming a doubling of global energy use by 2050, normal improvements in the efficiency of fossil fuel use and a continuing shift from coal to gas, suggests that fossil fuels should be providing no more than 30 per cent of global energy in 2050 to achieve the required reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Sources which do not emit greenhouse gases (renewables and nuclear power) would have to grow by a factor of about 15 from year 2000 levels for this to happen or by a factor of 50 if nuclear power is excluded.

These rates of growth look unrealistic at present. Against this background a reappraisal of all approaches to providing energy is essential. This reappraisal must determine what actions are required in the near future to ensure that over the next decades sufficient supplies and types of energy will be available to meet both growing world demand and greenhouse gas emission constraints.

There appear to be four major options for addressing these challenges. They are:

• demand-side measures to reduce the requirements for energy;
• nuclear power;
• renewable energy sources;
• sequestration of carbon dioxide produced during the use of fossil fuels.

Although these options are sometimes seen as being in competition, this is by no means necessarily the case. Given the enormous uncertainties that lie ahead in the energy field, on both supply and demand sides, it is quite possible that some combination of all four will be needed. And while each has its attractions, each also offers its own challenges.

Measures to reduce energy use are in a different category from the other options. Improvements in energy efficiency have been a constant feature of technological development since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the question for the future is largely about the rate at which this improvement will continue. It is also generally accepted that reducing the use of energy is the most attractive option in terms of public perception – it is inconceivable that public campaigns could develop in opposition to energy reductions, in the way that one could foresee opposition to nuclear power, renewables or carbon dioxide sequestration.

Certainly much can be done in terms of improving the efficiency of energy conversion and end-use. However, there are paradoxes in this field. The rate of take-up of improved technology and techniques has historically often been disappointing, even when the expected payback period is short. The experiecne of the 1970s and 1980s suggests that legislative measures can help, although they are sometimes unpopular politically.

Further, there is a vigorous debate over the extent to which improvements in energy efficiency result in reductions in energy use. As improvements in energy efficiency (taken alone) reduce the effective cost of using energy, one expected result of improved energy efficiency would be to make economic activity more attractive. This in turn would have implications for total energy use.

There is considerable dispute over the extent of these ‘rebound effects’. Some commentators observe that the steady improvement in energy efficiency over the past two centuries has been accompanied by enormous increases in the total amount of energy used, and offer an analogy with the introduction of the jumbo jet. It was believed that larger aircraft would reduce the number of flights required. In reality, larger planes resulted in a fall in the unit cost of air travel, allowing more people to fly. The result was an increase in the number of flights as well as in the carrying capacity of each individual flight. For these commentators, attempts to improve energy efficiency will promote economic growth, but will be unlikely to result in major reductions in energy use.

Other commentators argue that the size of the rebound effects is likely to be small. In a modern ‘post-industrial’ economy in which many people live in comfortably warm conditions and do not have major needs for basic commodities, the energy implications of an effective increase in income (caused, for example, by people saving money because of measures to use energy more efficiently) are modest. Rebound effects may therefore be no greater than 10 per cent of the improvement achieved in energy efficiency, i.e. an improvement in energy efficiency of 10 per cent would result in a 9 per cent reduction in energy use.

It is not the role of this study to adjudicate between these positions. However, two observations may be appropriate. First, if the price of energy is increased to ‘compensate’ for improvements in energy efficiency, so that on balance people still have to pay the same amount for the energy services they consume, then the rebound effect should be neutralized and genuine reductions in energy use should be possible. But the thrust of liberalization in industrialized economies in recent years has been to reduce the costs of energy production, so allowing for price reductions in the market place. Second, even if there should be major improvements in energy efficiency, it is extremely difficult to believe that these improvements alone can come close to compensating for the enormous projected increases in global demand for energy services over the next decades.

Renewable energy sources generally do not release greenhouse gases or other noxious wastes, and are not fuelled by limited reserves that have other beneficial uses. However, there is much debate about the degree to which they could be deployed in practice. They tend to require large amounts of machinery, spread over large areas of land or sea, owing to their low energy density. This has obvious environmental consequences, both during the manufacture of the machinery and through its installation and use. Some of the renewable sources are also intermittent, either predictably (tidal power) or unpredictably (wind power). This is a serious issue in the absence of a largescale way of storing electricity, especially if intermittent renewables were to provide more than about 20 per cent of electricity supply. There are also question marks over the costs, especially of installation, of some options, although considerable progress has been made in reducing them in recent years.

At present, direct carbon dioxide sequestration – capturing carbon dioxide from waste gases and storing it underground, in deep oceans or in the form of solid carbonates – appears to be a very costly option, adding perhaps between 40 per cent and 100 per cent to electricity generation costs. (Indirect sequestration in carbon ‘sinks’ such as forests is cheaper but is controversial.) There are also questions associated with how secure the final stores will be: is there a danger that carbon dioxide might escape into the atmosphere and, if so, when? Further-more, it is not clear how efficient the process might be, especially if applied to flue gases with a relatively low proportion of carbon dioxide, such as those that come from conventional coal-fired or gas-fired power stations. The current state of knowledge and experience is too limited to make a firm assessment of sequestration’s potential contribution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

This book acknowledges these uncertainties, but its main purpose is to focus on the benefits and disadvantages of civil nuclear power as a source of electricity. Its particular objective is to consider what actions are necessary, in practical terms, to keep the option of further investment in new nuclear reactors open, even in those countries where it looks unattractive today.

Timescales

Decision-making in the energy field is further complicated by the fact that it has to deal with contrasting timescales. On the one hand, things can change very rapidly – within a year (the world oil price trebled between mid-1999 and mid-2000), a month (the electricity shortages in California late in the year 2000 appeared quite suddenly), a week (the transportation fuel crises in much of Europe in September 2000) or even a day (11 September 2001 underlined the danger of terrorist attacks on energy installations such as nuclear stations or large power dams). However, even quite radical changes are often eversed, sometimes just as quickly.

Action is required today, or very soon, in order to make a radical difference to the energy options available in 2050. Some of the decisions taken now in the energy field can have implications for many decades, if not longer. There is often a long period between the emergence of a new concept and its availability for commercial exploitation. In many industrialized countries, a decision taken today to build a nuclear power station may well be followed by some years of planning and regulatory activity, a construction phase lasting up to six years and 50 years of operation. The installation of a new gas pipeline or a major hydropower or tidal facility may have similar time horizons. In a competitive power market in which investors generally prefer a quick return and are averse to economic risk (which inevitably increases as timescales lengthen), the time gap between the emergence of a new concept and its commercial availability is accentuated.

Timescale is perhaps an especially important issue in the case of nuclear power, for two reasons. The first is the age profile of the world’s nuclear power capacity. If the average lifetime of a nuclear power reactor is taken to be 40 years, it can be seen from Table 1.1 that more than one-third of present installed capacity will come to the end of its operational life before 2020 and that a further 51 per cent of current capacity will do so between 2020 and 2030. Even if all projects currently described as ‘under construction’ are completed, they will add only a further 26,500 MW, giving a total of about 70,000 MW in operation in 2030 (assuming some life extension). This is a mere 20 per cent of current installed nuclear capacity.

The ‘lost’ 80 per cent of this capacity will have to be replaced. There should be no assumption that nuclear power will necessarily be replaced by nuclear power, but if it is not, then the replacement may have to be fossil-fired (with or without sequestration of carbon dioxide, and in either case with some implications for resource management and greenhouse gas emissions).And if it is not fossil-fired, it will have to be achieved by renewables or by energy-demand reductions. In either of these cases, supporters of nuclear powerwould argue, an opportunity would have been lost. Instead of using renewables or demand reduction measures to replace use of fossil fuels, thereby reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, they would simply be used to replace one low-carbon source of energy services with another, with no net atmospheric benefit.

Table 1.1 Age profile of world nuclear power capacity, 2001

Age (years)	Capacity (MW (e))	Percentage of total
0–10	41,800	11.9
10–20	179,800	51.0
20–30	117,200	33.3
30–40	13,200	3.7
40+	400	0.1
Total	352,400	100.0

Source: IAEA (2002).

The second reason arises from the relative inflexibility and irreversibility of investment in very large plants, such as traditional nuclear stations. In competitive markets there is considerable advantage in being able to change the mix of fuels used for power generation as rapidly as possible in response to changes in market conditions. The very high initial investment necessary to build a traditional nuclear plant (or other large project) in effect ties the operator to the technology to a much greater extent than would be the case, for example, with a relatively small-scale gas-fired plant. Yet reductions in the costs of nuclear investment may be highly dependent on ordering a series of four, six or even eight plants. The trade-off between costs and flexibility is an awkward one for large plants of any description, and perhaps traditional nuclear reactors in particular. The development of modular approaches to nuclear power generation, which are based on much smaller units, may help to address this issue.

Different Futures

In view of the above uncertainties and timescales, the only rational approach is to keep as many options open as possible. If the future is uncertain, we have to plan for many different futures, accepting that in hindsight some resources will appear to have been wast...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• About the authors
• 1. Setting the scene
• 2. Public perceptions and decision-making in civil nuclear energy
• 3. The relative economics of nuclear power
• 4. Radioactive waste management, reprocessing and proliferation
• 5. Nuclear safety
• 6. Nuclear energy research, development and commercialization
• 7. Nuclear power and the Kyoto Protocol
• 8. Recommendations and conclusions
• Glossary