Crunching the numbers on nuclear energy versus renewables
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The ignorance, either wilful or ideological, around nuclear energy that has reared its head in the media again this week does no one any good. ABC’s Insiders regular Andrew Bolt was doing it again Sunday. In a veritable cyclone of misinformation he claimed that to obtain 20% of power generation from renewable sources by 2020 was “impossible”, and if it was attempted using wind generation it would be at “huge, huge cost”, which would require a wind turbine spaced every 300 metres from Perth to Sydney. Oh, and nuclear power was essential and inevitable for Australia. Based on approximately 4500 kilometres of coastline, this implies that 15,000 turbines would be needed. Modern land-based turbines have a generation capacity of 2.5MW (sea-based can be 3.6MW), thus he is implying 37.5GW capacity, which is actually about 95% of the last published total power generation for all of Australia. But 20% of generation estimates for 2020 (arguable but approximately 50GW generated from about 65GW capacity, neglecting expected efficiency gains) is about 10GW. No one is suggesting that all renewable energy should come from one source such as wind (though it is the only renewable that is proven to be cost competitive with coal-without-CCS, ie. with dirty coal) but let’s even accept the implied 15,000 turbines, as wild as it is — even if it doesn’t strike one as impossible on our vast land and coastline, the longest of any country in the world. At about $1 million each, it amounts to about $15 billion without considering grid costs (much of which will be required whatever new energy sources are built). A large amount of money to be sure, but is this sum really a “huge, huge cost”? Of course, sensibly one has to look at what the differential would be if the power was obtained by other means. By comparison, the most recently completed and largest ever (750MW) Australian coal-fired plant at Kogan Creek in Queensland cost a reported A$1.1B. At these prices, without CCS or any provision for future CCS, 10GW capacity would cost $14.7 billion at 2005 prices. Allowing for the considerable inflation in the cost of building materials, particularly steel and cement, it doesn’t seem that coal power is much cheaper than wind even if adopting the most pessimistic estimates re wind turbines. Not to mention the likely doubling in the costs of coal power due to health and environmental impacts, according to an expert scientific report. Or the stupendous cost of CCS — more than $2 billion for UK plants, which capture at most 25% of the carbon output. Whichever way one does the sums, the nuclear option is more expensive and without factoring in insurance — usually only from government — and “stranded” end-of-life costs, also ultimately carried by government. While renewable energy costs are on a consistent downward trend, nuclear plants have a long-established history of “huge, huge” cost over-runs. This might explain why private financing for new nuclear power plants in the USA has proven almost impossible (though some states are trying hard; Missouri has recently suspended plans for its own Areva EPR) and why last year 42% of all new electrical generation capacity was in fact wind power. These financial facts kind of knock the wind out of certain arguments. One wonders how the “nuclear not solar or wind” champions such as Barnaby Joyce, an accountant no less, do their sums? Probably by total denial in the same way they do not want to be reminded that it was their government who lost the Australian expatriate Shi Zhengrong, CEO of China’s Suntech, which has just taken over Germany with the No.2 solar company and is closing in on the world No.1, the American company First Solar. Almost every single statement made by our Insiders’ commentator contained errors of fact. An ill wind indeed. As argued previously and as the nuclear industry continues to prove in Finland and elsewhere, while “nuclear power was worth trying. We tried it: its weakness proved to be economics, not safety. Now nuclear generation is just an impediment to sustainable electricity.” The author is an Australian research scientist. These are the author’s personal opinions and do not represent the views of any organisation or institution with which he is affiliated. |
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42 Comments
Ooohhhh, I predict some heated debate here.
I wish you’d used capacity factors in your numbers. Hard to compare otherwise. 10GW of wind will not generate the same GWh as 10GW of coal/nuclear.
Thank you, Evan. Obviously Michael James didn’t take on board my earlier admonition, largely directed at him, viz. ‘anyone equating nameplate turbine capacity with current (in both senses) consumption is talking through their hat.’
But the most breathtakingly asinine aspect of this piece is writing “Whichever way one does the sums, the nuclear option is more expensive” without citing a single quantified fact on nuclear, as a conclusion following a long discussion of wind and coal. And as I’ve said before but apparently have to say again, I’ll have far more time for nuclearphobes when they engage with the arguments of serious advocates like Barry Brook, rather than the likes of Andrew Bolt.
I also suspect there will be a great many ‘nuclear champions’ who are mightily offended by the description of the Howard government as ‘theirs’.
Evan (1.49pm). You are right. And the costings will raise hackles. I find it extremely difficult to pin down clear numbers especially leaving out grid infrastructure and even land purchase costs etc — almost certainly not included in those public figures for the Kogan Crk coal-plant. Prices for wind turbines have actually dropped 15% due to lower demand over the previous year — yet, much commentary then goes on to say that if a massive program is begun prices will go up due to capacity constraints (don’t the normal rules of scale-up apply? beats me.) Incidentally analysis for the recently (04-05) installed (ie. advanced design, 2.5MW) turbines show an average 36% capacity factor (US-DoE 2008”20% wind energy by 2030).
In a Crikey (or any lay) article there is a strict limit to what can go in. I wanted to give broad numbers based on figures that AB threw around to show that wind was not so out of the park cf. coal and that nuclear was just off the planet. Unfortunately and editorial cut was the sorry financial tale of the Finland Areva EPR. I know that Jim Green mentioned it in his article last week but the gory detail bears repeating again and again, and again so people like AB and Joyce and their ignorant/lazy followers get the message. So here is the cut paragraph:
As for nuclear there is simply no contest unless, like our least-favourite Insider panellist, one has eyes wide shut. The most evolved advanced model is the current French Areva EPR design under construction in Finland, though a minimum 50% blowout in costs and doubling in construction time [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environment/29nuke.html?pagewanted=all] (from 3.5 years to at least 7 years partly dependent on the armies of lawyers now involved in the disputes) may not fit one’s definition of “advanced”. Today Areva concede construction of a similar reactor would be US$8B (A$10B) for the world’s largest capacity reactor of 1.6GW. So to obtain 10GW would cost at least A$62.5B.
One option produces the most toxic substance known which lasts for 10’s of thousands of years and for which there is no proven safe way to store, and leads to proliferation of planet destroying weapons , and the other doesn’t.
Thought as much - I very nearly asked ‘has this article been edited?’, so little sense did it make initially. Should have known you were better than that.
Be that as it may, you’re also neglecting maintenance costs. Evan will have a better idea, but as alluded to in earlier discussion with Guy Rundle, I suspect the maintenance costs on 15,000 turbines will be significantly greater than for a few large coal or nuclear generators.
And no, the EPR does not qualify as ‘advanced’. For that, you’d need to be talking about Integral Fast Reactors.
I would suggest that most people that read Crikey could cope with Capacity Factor. Almost everyone I’ve raised it with has understood the concept.
I’m surprised that you cite a link between turbine design and CF. I would say that the turbine choice is only a minor factor in achieving generation availability; CF is largely determined by the amount of time that the wind blows.
Mark, As I said on the other thread, I’ve read through Barry Brook’s website and I re-iterate; he does not, and indeed can not solve the waste problem. I read an interview with Switkowski today where he admitted that there is not an operating waste dump yet, and it’s a political minefield. You can’t just wipe that away with a rhetorical statement and a flick of the wrist. Sure, technical solutions may exist, but the politics of the issue are untenable. Yes politics can be changed, but I strongly doubt the Aussie public will be swayed.
Wind maintenance costs aren’t that bad. Again, I’ve read an article about this recently but the sieve of my brain let that one fall through.
They’re actually outrageous in a nuclear reactor. Very serious materials problems going on in there; so expensive parts and highly trained techies. At a guess I’d say maintenance per kWh would be less for wind, but that’s just a guess.
If cars were made one-at-a-time, they would cost much more.
How much will costs improve with mass production? It will be instructive to watch how fast costs go down as China builds its repeat reactors.
We already have a paradigm in the “massive productivity gains” (ref) of the Liberty Ship building program of WW2, where 2751 ships were built 1941-45. (http://www.fiu.edu/~thompsop/liberty/photos/liberty_summary.html)
Mark D (2.24pm). Yep, but read my post above (written before I saw yours). Have a little consideration of the fact that the author does not get “final cut” or in fact, even to see the final version, prior to publication. Obviously in your and my opinion, it didn’t make any sense to leave out that paragraph on the explicit nuclear costings, but on the other hand I am sure the editor would say that I should have written the story tighter so cuts were not needed. Also note that my earlier article on nuclear power and the real costs was linked.
Also, just a note on your reference to Barry Brook etc. We need more Barry Brooks but I found his website a bit (a lot) super-geek and missing the forest for the trees. There was huge involved discussion about stuff that is essentially irrelevant (4th gen reactors, storage options, safety issues etc).
My tiny little goal writing for Crikey is to try to get some simple messages to a wider audience that might actually count. You know that hardly anyone reads these blogs (including this one) And Brooks’ blogsite was indigestible and unfortunately largely irrelevant. And Crikey almost requires articles to have a reaction against popular commentators/politicians etc. Incidentally I did not use AB’s name but they put it in. I have said before that we should all avoid giving him more oxygen and the ABC needs to find someone else…..(I failed utterly, but Crikey want to stir it up of course.)
Wrong on waste, Stephen Henry. Integral Fast Reactors eat the stuff.
Even if nuclear power were cheaper and safer than wind power, it would still be the most capital-intensive option, requiring the most long-distance cable and material transportation. Also a more concentrated point of failure due to catastrophes or hostility. Also inflexible for extending or setting up in new areas when needed and removing when an area no longer needs it.
I don’t think anyone suggests running a whole country solely on wind turbines, even with flywheel or other solutions to even out the wind’s intermittency. Rather, wind should be a key component of a diversified, distributed energy plan. The infrastructure is relatively small and flexible. All sorts of advantages beyond the number crunching.
Mark D. I believe the critical thing in my statement was “under construction”. As you know the IFR is in deep freeze. That Tom Blees thing on Brook’s site is just what I was talking about. Clearly it would take a massive political and financial and time commitment to get any of these new reactors out into the real world. It is not going to happen or at least it will be irrelevant to the main issues for the next 20-30 years. So I consider all discussion of nuclear to be a gigantic distraction (esp. Australia but do you know that the last reactor France built was 1999).
Back to wind. I believe you are an engineer (?) so I wonder when you talk about maintenance of the turbines as an issue. Am I naively wrong when I tend to think of turbines as incredibly reliable? I often think about them when cruising at 10,000 metres above an ocean on the way to Europe — those gigantic turbines turning at speeds one does not want to think about much, powering a 400 tonne aircraft nonstop for 14 hours or whatever. And don’t these modern planes have an amazing “capacity factor” ie. they do not spend much time on the ground doing nothing. Forces and speeds way beyond anything found in these wind turbines. Of all the mechanical devices are they not one of the most reliable and least problematic? Now they have long-haul (trans-Atlantic) planes with only two turbines instead of 4.
Evan B. (2.52pm) You said: “I’m surprised that you cite a link between turbine design and CF. “
I think the problem is that there are figures out there about much older technology (in fact by definition more statistics/analyses will be available for the oldest installations) and so it will be easy for lazy commentators (like AB et al) to come up with published poor CF.
The latest turbines are not only more efficient at getting more energy out of the same wind but older designs actually often stop producing any power at wind speeds below about 12-14 mph. The new ones modify the angle of the blade as the wind speed slows and this allows them to keep working right down to 6 mph (I think it also helps at high wind speeds when the turbines risk damage.) So the CF should be quite a lot higher for these new designs (these are Danish I believe).
On the maintenance issue I came across this statement (by the company upgrading the Altamont Pass project): “Once the wind turbines are broken in they only need routine maintenance, such as lubrication of their bearings, every six months.”
Bolt doesn’t push the Nuclear option as a consequence of his belief that it is neccessary to mitigate climate change. He is a denier that climate change is happening. He pushes the Nuclear option, because to him it is the right wing, big business option. It is anti left and anti green. If Australia builds a Nuclear power plant the Right have finally beaten the Left on the issue. That’s why he pushes nuclear. He is a cultural and technological warrior for the right. Bolt sees everything through a political prism that splits every issue into right or left, green (anti business?) or dirty brown color that represents the big end of town’s way of doing things.
Wind turbines are a real threat to the concentrated oligopoly of monolithic power generators in this country. Wind turbines are very scaleable and can be done by small organisations or big ones. I think Bolt may have worked this out, that’s why he is so shrill about wind turbines. He is not alone.
Actually I’m a geophysicist, so by way of disclosure you could say I have a broad vested interest in the extractive industries (note I include geothermal in this, albeit I harbour doubts about it).
I got to thinking about wind’s ongoing costs when the Climate Institute came out with this Google Maps productionpurporting to show how many jobs are created by all the current and proposed wind projects in Australia. Drilling down into individual projects shows how many ongoingjobs are created by each project. I was surprised by how many there were - I too had thought wind turbines were pretty much ‘set and forget’. But apparently you need well over 1 person for every 10 MW of capacity. Naturally wind proponents take this as a selling point; thousands of green jobs in regional areas and all that. But of course these also represent salaries that have to be paid; hundreds of millions of dollars, every year. And so the question arises: what are all these people doing if not maintaining the turbines? Clearly it’s not just capital costs that have to be considered.
Which is of course the case with jet turbines. I reckon someone like Ben Sandilands could tell you exactly how vast is the army of engineers and technicians needed to keep all those turbines in the ‘incredibly reliable’ state you describe.
It’s probably too late for Australia to invest in nuclear - I have seen many forecasts suggesting that with the current use by the existing nuclear power station fleet that there is only 20-30 years of Uranium left. With the proposed rapid expansion of the nuclear fleet - one would assume we would be building these reactors with only 10-15 years of secured uranium - that would hardly seem an economically rational decision!
Also was we start to exploit lower grade uranium ores the energy cost to extract the uranium goes up rapid - making nuclear power very carbon intensive.
In addition, we need to factor in the costs of securing nuclear waste for thousands of years – how do you enforce contracts over such timescales?
Robert Garnett: If the reactionaries favour nuclear power on principle as a symbol of the right, maybe they also favour it as a way to leverage Australia’s uranium deposits.
Except would I be right in guessing that an Australian nuclear reactor would still need to import refined fuel the same way we import steel? Which would mean yellowcake exports make no difference to the price we pay for nuclear fuel, in the same way that we pay market price for steel. Is that correct?
It used to be said that a rational discussion could not occur about “sex, religion or money”. Now it seems to be “nukes, ideology or arithmetic”. So no change there then.
What dingbat ever named us H. Sapiens Sapiens?
An adviser to the current Obama administration from back in the Clinton Non Proliferation agenda was quoted by Brian Toohey on Insiders about a month ago.
The simple point was that a massive ramp up of nuclear with only a tiny fraction of leakage of fissionable material was an extremely risky global security proposition.
This should rule out nuclear without even asking the economic question. Unless of course you want the stuff for one of those dual use b*mbs. Handy for a deputy sheriff I suppose. But still quite MAD.
Michael, I believe that your cost estimates for wind power do not include the cost of building and operating gas turbine electricity generators, for when the wind is too low or too strong. Looking at data collected from UK’s wind turbines shows that they generate their rated capacity around one third of the time; so conventional gas turbines must be used the other two thirds of the time, assuming that the electricity is baseload. So cost estimates for wind power must include alternate and more conventional power generation equipment.
Electricity power generators with low power generation capacity also have greater losses from transmission distances; which requires wind power turbines to be located near consumers, to be most effective. This is easier to arrange in the UK than in Australia, with only a small number of cities.
Denmark has a lot of wind power generators, but the electric power they produce is mostly sold to Norway, which uses that power to pump water back up into hydro-dams, which they use for hydroelectic power; like giant batteries. This is a good use for wind power, due to its intermittent supply, but Australia has limited possibilities for this - tho there may be some capability in the Snowy Mountains for a similar system. If the wind doesn’t blow, or is too strong, less water is pumped into the dams, and this can balance out over weeks.
The cost of wind power generation is more complicated than you initially indicate. Think of remote farms. In the early part of the twentieth century, some stations used windmills to generate power. But this was so unreliable, that currently, nearly every remote station uses a diesel electricity generator. You’d be hard pressed to find any relying on wind generation, and large scale use, except for special situations, will also face major problems. Still, it is worthwhile building a small capacity, for research purposes. The UK data now available, is worse than was predicted by researchers.
James Mac, I would say that would be quite correct.
The cost of uranium in the nuclear power generation equation is somewhat irrelevent. The capex costs of the plant, the environmental issues of cooling water requirements and of course the vexed question of waste are far more important in the scheme of things.
However, those who bang on about the difficulties of nuclear fail to acknowledge that France used to burn bunker C oil in conventional boilers to produce most of their electricity. In the late 70’s bunker C in Oz went from $30 per tonne to $350 dollars per tonne. The price hike in France was no different except it was measured in Franks. Suddenly the nukes were economic and now France produces over 80% of their power using nuclear power plant.
I have yet to hear a lucid explanation from the anti Nulear protagonists on why France was wrong. This is not to say I think we should rush out an go nuclear there needs to be a little thought put into it first, but wind power and nuclear reactors are not mutually exclusive. One things for sure though, nuclear power generation is a lot more advanced and economic than carbon capture and sequestration which is Mr Rudd’s and Mr Fergusons favoured option. Alas Liquid CO2, which in it’s gaseous form is heavier than air and quite poisonous travelling in pipes across the country will be no less of a PR problem than a few special trucks moving nuclear waste once a month.
Thanks Robert for the clarification.
And on CCS I agree; with little more than theory it’s hard to be confident that CCS has anything more going for it than commercial hopes for Australian coal. In which case, more power to it (excuse the pun) but not if that means being singled out for an extraordinary taxpayer boost.
My next question is based on CAVITATION’s point. Don’t you think Australia’s geographic dispersion makes the transmission problem of one almighty nuclear reactor prohibitive? And doesn’t that favour a blend of small, scaleable solutions, including wind with flywheel storage or similar, solar, and whatever else innovation brings, maintainable by regular engineers and tradesmen and backed up by standby gas generators? All without any single point of failure, and so scaleable that even local governments can manage it if necessary?
Yikes, don’t everyone stop just because I ask a dumb question. It was just getting interesting.
“Clearly it would take a massive political and financial and time commitment to get any of these new reactors out into the real world.” (@Michael James, 4:05pm)
This is the sort of statement that makes me tear my hair out. ‘Massive political and financial and time commitment’ is EXACTLY what renewable energy advocates say is needed if we’re going to make any sort of significant dent in CO2 emissions. Yet if you want to ramp up and advance a technology that’s been producing electricity reliably, in bulk for the last fifty-plus years, suddenly it’s all too hard?
Hugh S: There was basically nil uranium exploration for several decades up until a few years ago. There’s still a lot of high-grade stuff out there to be found yet.
James, It’s economies of scale. Large, central power plants are more efficient than lots of little plants. Power transmission losses are also less for high voltage, high ampage electricity than for low.
Think of this example: you want to boil a kettle of water. You can do this by putting the kettle on a gas ring, and boiling the water that way. Or else you can get two hundred boxes of matches, and use all thousand matches to boil the water, lighting them one by one. The first way is always going to be more efficient than the second.
With nuclear power, Australia will wait for 3rd and 4th generation power stations to go on line elsewhere in the world. We will pick this option up (if we need to) once the first 50 or so are built. These are being planned by international consortiums, and will be cheaper and safer than existing nuclear power stations. One version uses Thorium (instead of uranium), which is safer still - being impossible to convert into a nuclear weapon.
Also, coal fired power stations in Australia produce very cheap electricity, in comparison to elsewhere in the world. Even if CO2 sequestration increases the generating cost by 25% (which is a figure that has been bandied about), the power will still be cheaper than the alternatives. Solar might eventually compete. Nuclear 3rd/4th generation power will also be competitive by then. Australia has many choices, so we dont need to worry too much, nor rush into things. The USA, China and India will go nuclear, since they already have a nuclear infrastructure, and want to keep their nuclear weapon arsenal, and have to manage the nuclear waste from that in any case, so waste from power generation will reduce the military costs. Europe will probably do so too, for the same reasons. Australia, with its small population, and relatively low industrial base, can afford to diversify, but I suspect that electricity will be generated by nuclear stations or perhaps solar depending on technology developments, in 20 to 40 years.
We also have plenty of natural gas, which will tide us over, and can substitute easily for oil, should the ‘peak oil’ scenario eventuate.
I’ve been away for a while. Lots to reply to.
Roger 2:59. You can’t mass produce nuclear reactors. They’re a site specific bit of kit. In any case, mass produce doesn’t include 100, 1000. You’d need 10s of thousands to bring the individual component costs down.
Poor option using the Liberty ships as an example. In Mech Eng lectures they were the classic example of failed manufacturing. Do a google search for ‘brittle transition temperature +Liberty ship’. Got the metallurgy badly wrong.
Mark 3.04 How many fast breeders are running in commercial operation right now? None? Oh.
Also, they don’t consume all radioactive products, just more of them. Not zero waste. Also, you still have to get rid of the reactor at the end of life, which will be a 300,000 tonne radioactive piece of concrete.
Cavitation 7.06 Your assumptions aren’t very right. There’s no inherent need to build a matching turbine for each MW of wind energy. At the moment, wind penetration is very low, so the changes in grid supply are minimal; much less than the changes in demand. Hence, we have the flexibility in the grid (through storage, mostly pumped hydro) to absorb these changes quite easily. Current analysis suggest this applies up to 20% wind penetration in Australia. The UK have more peaking plants, and a paper recently suggests this goes all the way to 30% penetration.
Cavitation, I think this is part of the the problem:
“With nuclear power, Australia will wait for 3rd and 4th generation power stations to go on line elsewhere in the world. We will pick this option up (if we need to) once the first 50 or so are built. These are being planned by international consortiums, and will be cheaper and safer than existing nuclear power stations. One version uses Thorium (instead of uranium), which is safer still - being impossible to convert into a nuclear weapon. “
When will these reactors be built? Once they’re past proof of concept and the design costs have come down, then Australia jumps on board. Let’s say 10 years. Being generous, lets say Australia can start their own nuclear industry and build 25 reactors in 10 years. This is the recommendation from the Switkowski report. So, in 20 years, we’ll have 25 reactors, which (again the SRept) will reduce GROWTH in CO2 emissions by 18%. The AGW horse has well and truly bolted by then. We’re all dead and the oceans have boiled.
Mark, you’re pretty blinkered against the cons of nuclear. Too slow, too expensive, politically impossible. Repeat. Despite your protestations that it ‘could be fixed’ it won’t be. Our system of Government would have to change, ditto the laws of economics. I know you love the technophile solution, but it’s not going to happen. We can debate it until the cows come home, but the obstacles in the path of nuclear are virtually insurmountable.
James, the grid question is a complex one. There are ads and dis’s to both centralised and decentralised generation. The Australian east-coast grid is reportedly the longest in the world, which brings all sorts of technical weirdness. Dispersed generation at distant loads (like Broken Hill mining ops) will make a huge difference; but in the other direction a nuclear industry would probably be quite centralised (and it will need to be a lot more than 1 plant, more like 10-25, each at a GW or 2). Can you put this near the biggest loads? Who knows? Cities and industrial centres are the big loads, but will the population there tolerate it? I sincerely doubt it.
Evan, I’m not blinkered, but if I’m advocating something it’s hardly incumbent on me to put the negative case, particularly when the likes of yourself can do that quite ably. I just think it’s more constructive to talk about what should happen rather than what will happen. I’m not totally politically naive - I wouldn’t be putting any money on reactor construction starting in Australia in the next 10 years. As things currently stand, we’re all going to find out first hand whether wind, other renewables and CCS are up to the task of making a sufficient dent in AGW. My opinion is that they are not, that they won’t even reach the equivalent of the 25 nuclear reactors in 20 years that you say will still lead to the oceans boiling (speaking of things that ain’t gonna happen). Without a significant boost from nuclear, the world will undershoot even the low CO2 reduction targets we end up setting for ourselves, and overshoot 2C temperature rise globally. Keeping the nuclear ingredient out of the mix is a recipe for failure.
Well as a consumer I don’t think we’ve given the renewables much of a boost. A few years ago my electricity retailer changed the “100% renewable” home deal to 25%, but said this was “greener” because all of that 25% was “GreenPower Accredited”. That just means from a renewable source built in the last 12 years; GreenPower regards any windfarm older than 12 years the same as a coal station.
Either that’s a pretty lousy long-term investment return for a wind farm after the 12 years expires and consumers are told the generator is no longer kosher; or else 12-year-old wind farms really are pulling their weight in the market alongside coal plants. If the latter is true then the running costs can’t be that high.
Thank you Michael James for your title, “Crunching the numbers…” as we sorely need to face the hard facts when facing such a serious problem as AGW. And thank Mark Duffett for correcting our wishful thinking.
Yet we keep hearing quite religious assertions of faith, such as today’s comment that nukes would be “Too slow, too expensive, politically impossible. ” If such belief is widespread, we (and the climate) need our experts to bring hard facts and clear numbers to bear on it.
How slow? Engineers might tell us how long this or that design would take.
How expensive? Economists might study each situation and report.
Politically impossible? Well, time, events and the ballot box will answer that one.
Come on Roger, do some reading. It’s not a religious assertion, it is a reporting of the facts contained in the Switkowski report, commissioned by the Howard government. I can’t find the original document online, but there are plenty of summaries around, including Ian Lowes Quarterly Essay.
Switkowski estimated it would be 10-15 years before a plant would be built, then another 10-15 for the plant to have offset the carbon created in construction. So in 25 years it will start to reduce emissions. The same report estimated that 25 plants would reduce GROWTH in emissions by 18%.
The expenses were also analysed in the same report. A subsidised set of 25 reactors would create electricity more expensive than wind.
As always the politics are impossible to judge, but do you seriously think any electorate will vote for a 25 nuclear plant plan?
Precision requires me to quote from the Switkowski UMPNER report, “All up, the period for planning, building and commissioning the first nuclear power plant, including establishing the associated regulatory process, is somewhere between 10 and 20 years.” That’s for the first one.
If a correspondent says he is quoting from a report by the Australian Conservation Foundation, we can take into account the authority of the source. Assertions which are unattributed are of no more guiding value than religious chants to the faithful.
Evan Beaver says in one post that politics will never change, and in another says that politics are unpredictable. However, historians always seem to be able to attribute causes to changes in public opinion. We know why the American public of 1939 came to be backing the mass production of Liberty Ships in 1941. The resulting economy of scale is still used as a textbook lesson for economists and presents a solution to the current problem.
BTW - Building a modular reactor takes 3 to 4 years from first concrete to first electricity. (Michael Angwin, UIC)
Robert Garnett (4:51 pm), you are absolutely correct about AB. But that is why the public argument about nuclear should not be on contestable, ideological grounds (safety, nimbyism, waste storage) but on its most vulnerable aspect: sheer cost. Instead, just like a lot of this later blog the discussion has been hijacked by all sorts of stuff that is just distracting noise. Thorium (not even a prototype in operation to my knowledge), 4th gen., pebble reactors, breeders, IFR etc. — this stuff takes decades to develop and I believe the conclusion in the US has been and will be that it is not the future. The one incontestable fact about nuclear is that it is horrendously expensive. Minimum A$10B for the latest buildable design from France.
Which brings to me those arguments along the lines of “if France gets 80% stat. power from nuclear why can’t we?”. Since a lot of bloggers are clearly not reading the linked earlier Crikey article that addressed exactly those points, I will repost some of it here.
Unlike us and many other countries France has no good coal — it has some dirty brown coal and I suppose could have gone the awful Victorian route — and oil was costing a fortune in trade deficits and so they judged that they could create a winning export industry based on nuclear and solve their energy problems at the same time. I have lived a decade in France and wish we could be like them in many ways. The ability to look far into the future, plan meticulously for it and then consistently pursue it — across changes of government etc — and have the public largely supportive. But we are more like the bumbling Brits only worse and more hapless. I would have been happy if Australia embraced nuclear power and built a serious industry which means refining the fuel, reprocessing and storing the waste, designing, building and exporting our own reactors. We cannot even do that with iron ore or timber (where our “skill” only goes far enough to turn it into cheap woodchips exported to those who can do clever value-added things to it; we have a net multibilliondollar timber products trade deficit — a shameful disgrace for a country the size of Australia). Some bloggers have criticized statements that it is all too politically difficult — but this is the horrible reality, and if we were ever going to do it, it made sense in the 70s not at the endgame, now or the next 20 years! And don’t just blame the politicians, we get the politicians we deserve.
As to the absurd timescales thrown about (and please let us not treat Switkowski as god on this, he had an agenda the size of his own ego), I wrote:
“Then there is the myth that nuclear provides a quick off-the-shelf solution. I was living in the UK during their last attempt to build a new nuclear power station but I was gone for a decade (in France) and returned again by the time Sizewell-B was finally built — in 1995 the last one to have been built in the UK. It took about 14 years and anyone who thinks it would be any easier in Australia is kidding themselves. In the US the last completed plant was begun in 1977 and opened in 1996.” And as it happens the last one built in France was in 1999. Again addressing the political reality I said: “pop quiz for Peter Costello: are we more similar to the UK and USA or France?” Answer that honestly and you have your answer on the real time it would take us to build a nuclear reactor in Australia.
I don’t think Nuclear power is off the shelf either. The notion however that we have to be like the French to have a nulear industry is a bit shaky. Before electricity provatisation and corporatisation we had a similar setup to France, large publicly owned utilities that had the horsepower to develop quite sophisticated and reliable systems based on coal, augmented by limited hydro, gas and oil. Now that those organisations are gone thanks to the market economists and their friends at the merchant banks, we no longer have orgnisations with these capabilities. However when one contemplates broad band debacle that privatisation has caused, the approach adopted by Rudd has been to form a government owned company. The same would have to be done to get nuclear up. No private company will take the risk. Government will have to do it if it is to be done. Just like the government did with the development of Brown Coal in the Latrobe Valley. A lot of rubbish is is put around about brown coal. The two latest stations Loy Yang A and B are world class in their design, construction and operation. The coal itself whilst having large qauntities of moisture is extremely low in ash and sulphur which makes it very clean. I the CO2 could be captured cheaply there would be no one rubbishing them. Much of the technology of coal fired power stations is exactly the same as a Nuclear station. Instead of combustion providing heat a nuclear reaction does it.
Nuclear power isn’t rocket science any more. The first reactors had to be designed by “hand” with very few people having access to the sort of computing power now available to every design engineer and draftsman. The early reactors used analogue computers for control and relays for their safety systems. Process control and safety sytems have advanced in huge steps since then which allow much more sophisticated control and on-line modelling of the plant to improve efficiency and more importantly safety. Things have moved on sustantially from the 60’s and 70’s.
This does not make the establishment of a safe and reliable nuclear industry a trivial exercise. Five to ten years would be required to establish an effective organisation capable of starting the design, procurement erection and commissioning of a single modern reactor. The time frame for the plant itself another 10 to 15 years. This puts nuclear power out to 2020 at the earliest, with 2025 to 2030 being much more likely. Such a time frame provides a great window of opportunity for other technologies.
Robert Garnett (10.15am today). I don’t think I disagree with anything you have written. I have previously (Crikey article previously referenced above) given similar time scales for implementing a nuclear industry, ie. almost certainly not before 2025-2030. And of course the point is that if the same resources were put into a mix of renewables we would get there sooner and feasibly create an export industry (zero chance of that for nuclear, IMO).
We have got to consign nuclear to the past and not allow it to distract us from the future options. To be fair to the present government there are a few signs that Wong and Rudd have moved in this direction in the last 6 months. (partly, big Coal and LNG overplayed their hand). I do not really care if they want to put some limited resources ($100-200M pa) into CCS for political reasons, as long as they properly support where the true future lies. For all the arguments about its flaws, the RET is a move in the right direction.
Peter Kemp writes: Re. “Crunching the numbers on nuclear energy versus renewables” (27 August, item 13). Michael James accuses proponents of nuclear energy of bias but he is pretty one eyed himself.
The stated capacity of a wind generator is related to an optimum wind speed which is rarely achieved over a large portion of our coastline at any one time and in fact may not be achieved anywhere on some occasions. This is not to say that I disapprove of wind power, on average it can be a profitable business, but it is on average and there will inevitably be times when it does not serve the community adequately.
The same comments apply to solar power except the periodic lack of capacity is somewhat more predictable.
Both the above and other “green power” sources would be much more viable with a method of storing energy in some form. At present this is problematic for short periods and rapidly gets worse as the time span increases.
I suppose Mr.. James would approve of carbon sequestration but has he done the sums here. One generator at Eraring (~ 5% NSW peak usage) needs 60Kg/sec coal. Let’s say 30% ash and 10% volatiles this leaves 36Kg/sec carbon. When combined with oxygen This makes 132Kg/sec or 7920Kg/minute CO2 let’s say 7tonnes/minute. This would fill a B double tanker in six minutes after it is liquefied. In short I believe carbon sequestration is not practical except for new plant built in suitable geological areas and even then it will take 30% (good guess) of the output to make it happen. I worked at a power plant in Vietnam for a period and they weren’t even using their sulphur scrubber which doesn’t use much power at all.
The health effects of coal power is not in the public eye but when the total fuel cycle is considered it is orders of magnitude worse than nuclear even when you include Chernobyl which had a badly designed old fashion reactor operated in a way that was forbidden by its designers. Modern designs are passively safe. With regard to proliferation the genie is already out of the bottle and in any case selling our uranium offshore is surly less certain than using it ourselves. The problem of so called nuclear waste (including existing stockpiles) may recede in 15-20 years if new reactor designs live up to promise.
When the true cost of carbon sourced electricity is realized I suspect nuclear power will become economical, if not politically acceptable, and some “green power” sources will be very profitable albeit with their inherent limitations.
Nic Maclellan writes: Peter Kemp (yesterday, comments) asserts: “The problem of so-called nuclear waste (including existing stockpiles) may recede in 15-20 years if new reactor designs live up to promise.” If nuclear promises were rolled in gold, we’d all be rich. But as governments make complex investment decisions on energy systems to replace coal and other fossil fuels, let’s look at results on the ground, rather than spin from the nuclear industry.
Kemp seems to be suggesting that reprocessing nuclear waste for use as reactor fuel is the way forward, and that any problems of using plutonium or a mixed oxide of plutonium and uranium (MOX) will be easily overcome. But where’s the real world evidence for this assertion?
Take Japan’s efforts to get a reprocessing plant working at Rokkasho in Aomori prefecture — an expensive and dismal failure. When the plant was first approved, it was supposed to be completed by December 1997. In January this year, the completion date was postponed again - for the 16th time! At the same time, Japan’s Monju fast breeder reactor, which began construction in 1985, has been out of action since a sodium leak caused a fire in the plant in 1995.
Even the target date for commercialisation of Japan’s fast-breeder reactors is 2050 (a bit longer than the 15-20 years Mr. Kemp promises).
The other problem is the cost and safety of transporting plutonium and MOX across the world’s oceans. Japan has over 38 tonnes of plutonium stored in Europe after its commercial nuclear wastes were reprocessed in France and the UK. But developing countries around the world — including our Pacific island neighbours — are deeply opposed to shipments of plutonium and MOX fuel through their waters and fishing grounds.
Long-term storage of plutonium is a major economic, environmental and security problem, and labelling it “so-called nuclear waste” is a childish attempt to avoid a serious challenge. What are future generations going to do with tonnes of toxic material, which lingers for tens of thousands of years?
Michael R. James writes: Intermittency of wind power is not an insuperable problem, though it would benefit from a, dare I say it, holistic approach — i.e. if the overall grid and power sources (say, for the east coast) were fully integrated. Snowy Hydro could feasibly be used to store excess power from Wind and Solar. But it will be a long time before that would be required. The newest wind turbine designs use blades whose angle to the wind is adjustable allowing operation at wind speeds well below the point at which older designs simply stop producing any power. This achieves Capacity Factors of 36% (US Depart. of Energy report on “20% of energy by 2020”).
No, Peter Kemp I would not approve of Carbon Capture and Storage (see my earlier article). CCS is wholly a political distraction because several laws of thermodynamics make it impossible to be economic.
But the most important point, that was unfortunately lost from my article last week, is just how horrendously expensive the nuclear option is. The most evolved advanced model in production is the current French Areva EPR under construction in Finland, though a 50% blowout in costs so far and doubling in construction time (from 3.5 years to at least seven years) is typical of nuclear projects over the decades.
Today Areva concede construction of a similar reactor would be US$8B (A$10B) for the world’s largest capacity reactor of 1.6GW. So to obtain 10GW would cost at least A$62.5B. Note also that although Areva is French, the last completed nuclear power installation in France was in 1999. Also note that all power sources have to go offline at times so those who worry about wind intermittency, just imagine the impact of a 1.6 Gigawatt source going offline!
Never mind distracting issues in the arguments over nuclear power like waste, safety, site location etc., the sheer cost should be the decisive factor for Australia and indicates to anyone with an open mind that the renewable energy industry is the one worth supporting.
I’m flabbergasted that you guys keep talking as if energy storage is a far off thing that we can all hope will be invented soon.
It exists, and is on the grid right now. This is not fairy tale stuff, and is in fact a component of almost every grid in the world!
For starters there’s pumped hydro.
There’s 80MW at Bendeela
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendeela_hydroelectric_pumping_station
160MW in the Kangaroo Valley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_Valley_hydroelectric_pumping_station
So there’s 240MW of despatchable supply, working from seconds to hours scale.
The east coast grid is fairly well integrated also. There’s some capacitance weirdness over long distances but otherwise you can balance supply and demand pretty easily.
Individual plants can also improve their reliability with parallel storage. Start here:
http://www.electricitystorage.org/site/technologies
To get up to speed on storage technologies.
Slightly off topic, but if we now have the longest grid in the world (especially in a north-south direction), it’s not just capacitance effects we have to worry about. I hope the people in charge are across geomagnetic induction effects, and are suitably braced for the next peak in the solar cycle, if and when it turns up circa 2013. If not, bad stuff can happen.
Interesting idea Mark. In the past the Earth’s poles have switched around, pretty sharpishly as well. Wonder what that would do to a big electrical grid also? Let alone the planes, GPS, etc etc