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Being carbon-free does not establish climate-effectiveness, By Amory B. Lovins

Most U.S. nuclear power plants cost more to run than they earn. Globally, the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2019 documents the nuclear enterprise’s slow-motion commercial collapse—dying of an incurable attack of market forces.

Yet in America, strong views are held across the political spectrum on whether nuclear power is essential or merely helpful in protecting the Earth’s climate—and both those views are wrong.

In fact, building new reactors, or operating most existing ones, makes climate change worse compared with spending the same money on more-climate-effective ways to deliver the same energy services. Those who state as fact that rejecting (more precisely, declining to bail out) nuclear energy would make carbon reduction much harder are in good company, but are mistaken.

If you haven’t heard this view before, it’s not because it wasn’t published in reputable venues over several decades, but rather because the nuclear industry, which holds the microphone, is eager that you not hear it.

Many otherwise sensible analysts and journalists have not properly reported this issue. Few political leaders understand it either.

But by the end of this article, I hope you will. For the details and documentation behind this summary, please see pp. 228–256 of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2019. A supporting paper provides simple worked examples of how to compare the “climate-effectiveness” of different ways to decarbonize the electricity system.

Nuclear power’s potential role in the global climate challenge

If the nuclear one-tenth of global electricity generation displaced an average mix of fossil-fueled generation and nothing else, it would offset 4% of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions. So in an era of urgent climate concern, should nuclear power continue, shrink, or expand?

In May 2020, a report by the International Energy Agency claimed that not sustaining and even expanding nuclear power would make climate solutions “drastically harder and more costly.”

To check that claim, we must compare nuclear power with other potential climate solutions. Here I’ll use only two criteria—cost and speed—because if nuclear power has no business case or takes too long, we need not address its other merits or drawbacks.

How should we compare different ways to provide electrical services in a carbon-constrained world? Our society built coal-fired power plants by counting cost but not carbon. Nuclear advocates defend their preference by counting carbon but not cost. But to protect the climate, we must save the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time, counting all three variables—carbon and cost and time.

Costly options save less carbon per dollar than cheaper options. Slow options save less carbon per year than faster options. Thus even a low- or no-carbon option that is too costly or too slow will reduce and retard achievable climate protection. Being carbon-free does not establish climate-effectiveness.

Since in reality money and time are both limited, our priorities in providing energy services must be informed by relative cost and speed. Lower cost saves more carbon per dollar. Faster deployment saves more carbon per year. We need both.

Buying nuclear power displaces buying some mixture of fossil-fueled generation, renewable generation, and efficient use. Nuclear owners strive to beat coal and gas while their allies often disparage or suppress renewables. Yet most US nuclear plants are uneconomic just to run, so many are closing. To keep milking those old assets instead, their powerful owners seek and often get multi-billion-dollar bailouts from malleable state legislatures for about a tenth of the US nuclear fleet so far.

Such replacement of market choices with political logrolling distorts prices, crowds out competitors, slows innovation, reduces transparency, rewards undue influence, introduces bias, picks winners, invites corruption, and even threatens to destroy the competitive regional power markets where renewables and efficiency win.

Yet many political leaders think climate’s urgency demands every option, including preserving nuclear power at any cost. So what is that cost, construed in the narrowest economic terms?

Costs of new nuclear power vs. competing options

Costly options save less carbon per dollar than cheaper options. Slow options save less carbon per year than faster options. Thus even a low- or no-carbon option that is too costly or too slow will reduce and retard achievable climate protection. Being carbon-free does not establish climate-effectiveness.

Since in reality money and time are both limited, our priorities in providing energy services must be informed by relative cost and speed. Lower cost saves more carbon per dollar. Faster deployment saves more carbon per year. We need both.

Buying nuclear power displaces buying some mixture of fossil-fueled generation, renewable generation, and efficient use. Nuclear owners strive to beat coal and gas while their allies often disparage or suppress renewables. Yet most US nuclear plants are uneconomic just to run, so many are closing. To keep milking those old assets instead, their powerful owners seek and often get multi-billion-dollar bailouts from malleable state legislatures for about a tenth of the US nuclear fleet so far.

Such replacement of market choices with political logrolling distorts prices, crowds out competitors, slows innovation, reduces transparency, rewards undue influence, introduces bias, picks winners, invites corruption, and even threatens to destroy the competitive regional power markets where renewables and efficiency win.

Yet many political leaders think climate’s urgency demands every option, including preserving nuclear power at any cost. So what is that cost, construed in the narrowest economic terms?

Costs of new nuclear power vs. competing options

On 7 November 2019, the eminent 170-year-old financial house Lazard published its 13th annual snapshot of relative 2019-$ prices for different ways to generate a megawatt-hour of electricity. The analysis is authoritative though imperfect.  …….

Lazard’s comparison between new electricity resources is stark:…… 

New nuclear plants will save many-fold less carbon per dollar than competing carbon-free resources, in proportion to their relative costs. And new reactors’ expected performance must be tempered by historical experience: of the 259 power reactors ordered in the US, by mid-2017 only 28 units or 11% had been built, were still competitive in their regional markets, and hadn’t suffered at least one outage lasting at least a year.   

Should existing nuclear plants keep operating?

Today’s hot question, though, is not about new US reactors, which investors shun, but about the existing reactors, already averaging about a decade beyond their nominal original design life. Most now cost more to run—including major repairs that trend upward with age—than their output can earn. They also cost more just to run than providing the same services by building and operating new renewables, or by using electricity more efficiently.

So let’s go step by step through an eyechart about nuclear operating costs—which exclude original construction and financing costs (all sunk and usually amortized), but include those costs that need not be paid if the plant is closed…………..

closing a top-quartile-cost nuclear plant and buying efficiency instead, as utilities could volunteer or regulators require, would save considerably more carbon than continuing to run the nuclear plant. Some modern renewables too can now rival efficiency’s cost and could compete for that opportunity.

Thus, while we close coal plants to save carbon directly, we should also close distressed nuclear plants and reinvest their large saved operating cost in cheaper options to save carbon indirectly. These two climate-protecting steps are not alternatives; they are complements.

Replacing a closed nuclear plant with efficiency or renewables empirically takes only 1–3 years. If owners don’t give such advance notice—a common tactic to extort subsidies by making closure more disruptive—more natural gas might temporarily be burned, but then more than offset over the following years by the carbon-free substitutes. California’s biggest utility will therefore replace its well-running Diablo Canyon reactors with least-cost carbon-free resources to save money and carbon and to help the grid work better.

To get these outcomes, we must track not just carbon but also money and time. Investing judiciously, not indiscriminately, saves the most carbon per dollar. What about per year?

Which technologies are faster to deploy?…………….

Global carbon-free electricity is now less than one-third nuclear. Counting also carbon-free production of non-electric energy—biofuels and modern renewable heat—nuclear power struggles to sustain less than one-fourth of the world’s carbon-free final energy use. Why pay more to revive it at the expense of faster and cheaper competitors? Sustaining uneconomic reactors would not only divert public funding from more climate-effective competitors but also constrain their sales and degrade the competitive markets where they thrive. Slowing and blocking the fastest and cheapest climate solutions harms climate protection.

How high can US nuclear subsidies go?

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the climate-effectiveness of continued nuclear operations is not discussed; the conversation focuses solely on carbon, not on cost or time. Indeed, the industry’s immense lobbying power has now hatched a brazen new way to make taxpayers or customers pay for existing nuclear plants and disadvantage their most potent supply-side competitor (modern renewable power), and reduce and retard climate protection while claiming to increase it. Rarely have so many been so deceived so thoroughly, for so long, at such cost.……..https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2020/09/13/nuclear-reactors-make-climate-change-worse/