Dismal future prospects for the global nuclear industry

Nuclear Power Is No Fix for Climate, Energy Intelligence, M.V. Ramana, 27 Nov 15

“……….Future Prospects These trends will likely continue for the next decade or more, because of the changing dynamics of the electricity market and the likely presence of cheap natural gas and declining costs of renewable power. That latter factor has also complicated the public perception of nuclear power, whose days of being popular are long past. (Well before Fukushima, for example, and well after Chernobyl, a 2005 survey done for the IAEA found that about 60% of the public opposed building new nuclear power plants.) Because of the declining costs of renewables, even those who see themselves as environmentalists and are most concerned about global warming generally do not see nuclear power as necessary for mitigating climate change.

The nuclear industry and its supporters have adopted a number of strategies to counter these trends. These include developing new reactor designs that are advertised as capable of overcoming the safety and cost problems, and aggressively marketing these as well as older reactor designs in countries around the world, especially developing countries, many with little or no nuclear capacity or domestic expertise. The industry and its supporters have also attacked renewables as incompatible with the modern grid because of the intermittency of wind and solar energy.

These attacks point to deep economic reasons for antagonism between the nuclear power and renewables industries. In countries with privatized electricity sectors, nuclear power plants are, and given their high costs, can only be, owned by large electric utilities that profit from monopolies over power supply. Renewables, especially if rooftop solar installations generate a significant fraction of residential electricity consumption, pose a threat to their economic interests. This antagonism is most visible in the US and Japan where utilities have lobbied extensively against tax credits to renewable energy generators and net metering of distributed solar power. As electricity from renewable sources falls in price, this trend will likely only intensify.

Can nuclear power grow as rapidly as desired by those advocating it to mitigate climate change? For that to happen, nuclear power would have to increase its share of global generation relative to sources that are proving more economically competitive, such as natural gas and renewables — and that in turn would require vastly accelerated and expanded reactor construction at prices that make sense relative to these other sources. All of this is quite apart from the other well-known and widespread concerns about nuclear power: the potential for severe accidents, the linkage to nuclear weapons and the production of long-lived radioactive waste. These challenges will not disappear and indeed may only grow worse, which is why nuclear’s prospects as a significant climate change mitigator are feeble to nonexistent.

M.V. Ramana is currently with the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, where he has been assessing nuclear power programs around the world. Ramana is the author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India (Penguin Books, 2012). This article is adapted from a forthcoming chapter by the author in “Palgrave Handbook of the International Political Economy of Energy: Part IV–Energy Transitions,” edited by Florian Kern. http://www.energyintel.com/pages/worldopinionarticle.aspx?DocID=906841