nuclear-news

Economics point to the failure of nuclear power

The West’s “nuclear renaissance” much bruited over the past decade, in part as a response to climate change, fizzled out well before the roofs blew off Fukushima’s first, third and fourth reactor buildings…..

 at the same time as the cost of new nuclear plants has become prohibitive … worries about the dark side of nuclear power are resurgent, thanks to what is happening in Iran…..

The dream that failed  The Economist, Oliver Morton, Mar 10th 2012 | THE LIGHTS ARE not going off all over Japan, but the nuclear power plants are. Of the 54 reactors in those
plants, with a combined capacity of 47.5 gigawatts (GW, a thousand megawatts), only two are operating today. A good dozen are unlikely
ever to reopen: six at Fukushima Dai-ichi, which suffered a calamitous
triple meltdown after an earthquake and tsunami on March 11th 2011
(pictured above), and others either too close to those reactors or now
considered to be at risk of similar disaster. The rest, bar two, have
shut down for maintenance or “stress tests” since the Fukushima
accident and not yet been cleared to start up again. It is quite
possible that none of them will get that permission before the two
still running shut for scheduled maintenance by the end of April…..

To the public at large, the history of nuclear power is mostly a
history of accidents: Three Mile Island, the 1979 partial meltdown of
a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania caused by a faulty valve, which led
to a small release of radioactivity and the temporary evacuation of
the area; Chernobyl, the 1986 disaster in the Ukraine in which a chain
reaction got out of control and a reactor blew up, spreading
radioactive material far and wide; and now Fukushima. But the field
has been shaped more by broad economic and strategic trends than
sudden shocks.

The renaissance that wasn’t

America’s nuclear bubble burst not after the accident at Three Mile
Island but five years before it. The French nuclear-power programme,
the most ambitious by far of the 1980s, continued largely undisturbed
after Chernobyl, though other countries did pull back. The West’s
“nuclear renaissance” much bruited over the past decade, in part as a
response to climate change, fizzled out well before the roofs blew off
Fukushima’s first, third and fourth reactor buildings…..
In liberalised energy markets, building nuclear power plants is no
longer a commercially feasible option: they are simply too expensive.
Existing reactors can be run very profitably; their capacity can be
upgraded and their lives extended. But forecast reductions in the
capital costs of new reactors in America and Europe have failed to
materialise and construction periods have lengthened. Nobody will now
build one without some form of subsidy to finance it or a promise of a
favourable deal for selling the electricity. And at the same time as
the cost of new nuclear plants has become prohibitive in much of the
world, worries about the dark side of nuclear power are resurgent,
thanks to what is happening in Iran…..
If proliferation is one reason for treating the spread of nuclear
power with caution, renewable energy is another. In 2010 the world’s
installed renewable electricity capacity outstripped its nuclear
capacity for the first time…… Barring major technological
developments, though, nuclear power will continue to be a creature of
politics not economics, with any growth a function of political will
or a side-effect of protecting electrical utilities from open
competition. This will limit the overall size of the industry. In 2010
nuclear power provided 13% of the world’s electricity, down from 18%
in 1996. A pre-Fukushima scenario from the International Energy Agency
that allowed for a little more action on carbon dioxide than has yet
been taken predicted a rise of about 70% in nuclear capacity between
2010 and 2035; since other generating capacity will be growing too,
that would keep nuclear’s 13% share roughly constant. A more guarded
IEA scenario has rich countries building no new reactors other than
those already under construction, other countries achieving only half
their currently stated targets (which in nuclear matters are hardly
ever met) and regulators being less generous in extending the life of
existing plants. On that basis the installed capacity goes down a
little, and the share of the electricity market drops to 7%.
Developing nuclear plants only at the behest of government will also
make it harder for the industry to improve its safety culture. Where a
government is convinced of the need for nuclear power, it may well be
less likely to regulate it in the stringent, independent way the
technology demands. Governments favour nuclear power by limiting the
liability of its operators. If they did not, the industry would surely
founder. But a different risk arises from the fact that governments
can change their minds. Germany’s plants are being shut down in
response to an accident its industry had nothing to do with. Being
hostage to distant events thus adds a hard-to-calculate systemic risk
to nuclear development…. http://www.economist.com/node/21549098

March 9, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general