Nuclear Illusions Hinder Climate Efforts as Costs Keep Rising

The federal government also continues to fund efforts to develop “new” designs for smaller reactors that are proving far less economic than larger ones and will struggle to succeed. Two government showcase projects have already collapsed for lack of customer interest.

Stephanie Cooke,  12 Feb 2024 Energy Intelligence Group, Stephanie Cooke, Washington,  https://www.energyintel.com/0000018d-7a5e-d1ef-a5cd-fe7e077c0000

The price tag for new nuclear plants just got a lot higher — at up to £46 billion ($58 billion) for two French reactors under construction in the UK — but don’t expect that to deter enthusiasm for nuclear energy. According to former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, the world “will soon need to build the equivalent of about 50 large nuclear power reactors per year until 2050” to mitigate climate change. Moniz admits that’s a challenge, but nevertheless possible if nations “rethink how to build, regulate and finance nuclear technology.” Moniz comes from a long line of nuclear illusionists advocating grandiose goals for nuclear energy without any evidence to suggest they could be achieved, and much to suggest why they never will be.

In 1998, when the future of nuclear energy looked grim, a group of nuclear worthies convened in Paris for an International Conference on Preparing the Ground for Renewal of Nuclear Power. It was the fourth such attempt since the initial conference on the topic in 1979. In opening remarks later published, a former General Electric executive, Bertram Wolfe, proclaimed that “if one assumes nuclear energy will be needed to provide one-third of the world’s energy by the middle of the next century,” 100-200 new reactors per year would have to be added over the next 50 years.

Global warming was seen as a potential, though still-distant threat, but enough of one to argue for more nuclear energy as a “precautionary” measure against it, according to another speaker, Chauncey Starr, who had founded and presided over the US Electric Power Research Institute. Starr dismissed renewables as the “visionary goal” of an “anti-nuclear environmental community” embraced by politicians that “either suffer from the childlike innocence of the ignorant” or “knowingly engaged in political duplicity.” By 2060, hydro and renewables would “very optimistically” account for only 23% of worldwide electricity consumption, Starr predicted, and they would be heavily dependent on subsidies. He was off by several decades. That benchmark was surpassed in 2016, according to the 2023 BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

It was the nuclear crowd that suffered from ignorance, and illusionary ideas. One prominent industry executive at the time, Shelby Brewer, proclaimed in Paris that recent deregulation of US wholesale electricity markets would have “a positive impact on nuclear power” because utilities no longer subject to state regulated rates of return would be more likely to build new reactors. “Power generators will focus explicitly on price competitiveness, cost effectiveness and equity return — a new set of dynamics for the industry.” He wound up by declaring that “the salvation of US nuclear power lies with Adam Smith, not Uncle Sam.”

Real World Experience

In the real world, annual reactor construction starts worldwide since then were far from 200, 100 or even 50 — the highest number was 15 (in 2010). In the 14 years since, construction began on a total of 84 reactors of which 41 were in China, meaning that outside China, just three were started per year on average.

Deregulation was hardly the panacea Brewer predicted either. When reactors in US deregulated markets couldn’t compete against natural gas or renewables, operators were forced to turn to Uncle Sam for subsidies or shut down. Despite subsidies on offer for new nuclear power plants, only one was ever built — in the regulated state of Georgia — with ratepayers forced to foot the bill for financing and construction. The only other US reactor start-up, Watts Bar-2, was commissioned in 2016, but construction on that started in the 1980s, stopped, and then restarted.

The federal government also continues to fund efforts to develop “new” designs for smaller reactors that are proving far less economic than larger ones and will struggle to succeed. Two government showcase projects have already collapsed for lack of customer interest.

“In recent years the nuclear industry seems to have quietly changed its business model from making and selling products to harvesting subsidies for fantasies,” says Amory Lovins, adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, and cofounder and chairman emeritus of RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute). “A dollar astutely invested in influence campaigns, and sometimes corruption, seems to be able to yield on the order of $10-$100+ in subsidies — for as long as they last. So long as the band plays on, it looks like good work if you can get it.”

Compared with the industry’s past cheerleaders, Moniz appears relatively modest in what he proposes, and he admits that 50 reactors per year is a tall order, “two-thirds more than were built at nuclear power’s peak in the early 1980s.”

His ideas for overcoming the challenges are worn: A “new system” to “deliver standardized products rather than costly and risky one-off multidecade projects.” Including small modular reactors and advanced reactors, there are probably 100 or more designs around the globe in various stages of development. How do you standardize out of that? The only “new nuclear” in the West are the four multidecade projects in Finland, France, the US and UK — all exorbitantly over-budget and by definition economically highly risky. Of the six reactors in question, only two are generating power — one each in Finland and the US.

Airline Industry Model

Moniz looks to the airline industry for a model in the way nuclear plants could be built and regulated. Smaller reactors especially could be produced by “assembly-line methods” and new reactor designs certified by an “international body charged with issuing a single globally accepted generic certification for reactor designs.”

This overlooks the fact that the nuclear power industry is driven by geopolitics and its historic and symbiotic relationship with nuclear weapons. Competition is intense in reactor export markets, with supplier countries jealously guarding their areas of influence and seeking the means for continued influence over decades, as reactors are sited, built and then decommissioned.

The aviation industry is driven by real demand. People who want to fly don’t have alternatives to boarding an airplane; customers who need electricity have many other low-carbon options besides reactors. No airline wants a fatal crash, so it makes sense that pilots, especially if they’re flying to other countries, follow a universal set of norms, and that aviation authorities from several countries are often involved in certifying new aircraft designs.

“To ignore or pretend to ignore that there is so much difference is an insult to readers’ intelligence,” writes Yves Marignac of Institut negaWatt in an email. “To even consider the possibility that things could change so that the conditions for this international free, standardized, ‘orderbook’ approach can be met, furthermore in a timeframe that is consistent with objectives such as delivering on 50 large reactors per year soon, is wishful thinking pushed to a record high!”

Along with the announcement of Hinkley Point C’s massive cost increase came news that the first of two reactors wouldn’t be commissioned until at least 2029, and possibly as far out as 2031. This is not stopping plans for more nuclear power in both the UK and France, with London promising eight new reactors by 2050, and Paris calling for six reactors by 2035, with as many as eight more after that. These goals, billed as part of the “global solution” to climate change, are no more than a distant mirage.

As the two countries haggle over who pays the exorbitant costs at Hinkley Point C, the timelines will shrink, and the mirage will fade. Money will be wasted and global warming will continue. “The costlier and slower new reactors are, the less fossil fuel they can displace per dollar and per year, compared to a like investment in renewables and efficient use — thereby making climate change worse, not better,” argues Lovins. “Climate effectiveness requires that we count carbon, cost and speed — not just carbon.”

It’s time to close the curtain on illusionist theater in energy policy-making. It’s a show that’s long since run its course.

Stephanie Cooke is the former editor of Nuclear Intelligence Weekly and author of In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age. The views expressed in this article are those of the author.

February 14, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, spinbuster, USA