nuclear-news

Fuel problems for nuclear power, as the industry continues to languish in the doldrums

Slow and expensive. Yet despite the drive to reduce carbon emissions, nuclear has been languishing in the doldrums. The adoption of small HALEU reactors has, if anything, slowed. The first company with approval, NuScale, cancelled a power plant for Utah in November after costs surged. ‘Costs have kept growing for small modular reactors,’ says Bunn. Solar, wind and natural gas are really, really cheap right now. That’s nuclear’s biggest problem – it’s expensive.’

renewables are outmuscling nuclear. ‘Renewables provided something like 90% of all new electricity capacity [in 2023]

the risk sea level rises and storm surges pose to nuclear power plants at coastal sites. ‘The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report [2023] stated that renewables were ten times better than nuclear at CO₂ mitigation,’

Nuclear power expansion plans highlight fuel bottlenecks, BY ANTHONY KING 17 JANUARY 2024,  https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/nuclear-power-expansion-plans-highlight-fuel-bottlenecks/4018795.article

Nuclear energy shuffled into the spotlight in December with a declaration at the COP28 climate meeting to triple its capacity by 2050. The declaration lauded the role of nuclear energy in achieving global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Yet many industry watchers doubt this ambition can be achieved. ‘If I was a betting man, I would give ten-to-one odds against this happening,’ says Matthew Bunn, a professor of energy and foreign policy at Harvard University, US. Not enough new reactors are being built.

Meanwhile, the supply of fuel for nuclear reactors is complicated by a reliance on Russia at various points in the supply chain and often a lack of profit for commercial companies involved, which compete against state-backed enterprises in Russia and China.

Uranium is not the main constraint on the supply of nuclear fuel. ‘There’s plenty of uranium in the world,’ says Bunn. Everyone knows how many nuclear reactors are operating, and how much uranium they need. ‘So you would expect prices to be pretty darn stable,’ he explains. ‘That expectation would be wrong.’

Price surge

The price of uranium rose sharply towards $90 (£70) per pound in the second half of 2023, having hovered around $20/lb in 2017, and risen to over $40/lb after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The main drivers ‘are rising demand coupled with a lack of sufficient supply response,’ says Jonathan Hinze, president of UxC, a market research firm for the nuclear industry.

Kazakhstan is the world’s largest miner of uranium, with around 40% of total production. While some additional mines are expected there, ‘we really need to see more new mines in places like Canada, Australia and Africa,’ says Hinze.

Mining is only the start. The supply chain runs from a mine through three more steps; each is a market onto itself. Uranium is mined and milled into uranium oxide (U₃O₈), then shipped to facilities for conversion into uranium hexafluoride gas (UF₆), in preparation for enrichment.

Mined uranium is 99.2% U-238 and just 0.7% U-235. Enrichment plants use thousands of centrifuges to enrich U-235 to about 5%, as needed in a typical power plant. But enrichment brings in geopolitics. ‘Unfortunately, concentrating it to 3-5% for a commercial reactor uses exactly the same technology as concentrating it to 90% for a nuclear bomb, and it is an exponentially accelerating process,’ says Bunn.

After enrichment, UF₆ is converted to uranium dioxide (UO₂) and fabricated into fuel pellets and rods, designed for specific reactor types. The format required depends on who built the reactor, whether it’s a French, US, Chinese or Russia design. A pressurized water reactor generating 1GW of electricity, for example, might contain over 50,000 fuel rods with over 18 million pellets.

Conversion constraints

Kazakhstan is a behemoth in mining, with 13 active mines producing almost 19,500 metric tonnes in 2020. Australia produced 6200 tonnes, Namibia 5400 tonnes and Canada 3800 tonnes. But the Kazakhs rely on Russia for processing uranium into UF₆, with Russia holding almost 40% of global conversion market, ahead of China and Canada, with France some way behind.

‘Conversion is extremely constrained at the moment given recent plant outages and other operational challenges,’ according to Hinze. ‘The move by the West and other markets to reduce or eliminate reliance on Russia means that other producers must ramp up capacities to make up for the loss of Russian supplies.’

Unsurprisingly, Russia also holds a significant share of the enrichment stage, with 46% market share in 2018. The state company Tenex supplied 30% of enrichment services to EU utilities in 2019, according to a recent report from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University in New York, US.

‘Russia is fairly important in the conversion market, but doesn’t have to be,’ says Bunn. There is under-used conversion capacity in several other countries. ‘[But] Russia is hugely important in the enrichment market.’ Enrichment is tougher to change, and is partly a legacy of the Cold War, when Russia ran huge facilities for its civil and military nuclear industry.

Even the US imports enriched uranium from Russia, which started with a programme dubbed ‘megatons to megawatts’ that saw large amounts of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium converted into fuel for US power plants. This ran from 1993 to 2013 and is viewed as one of the world’s most successful non-proliferation endeavours.

The US government privatised its enrichment facilities, creating the United States Enrichment Enterprise in 1992, reborn as Centrus in 2014 following bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Soviet uranium processing facilities continued operating. ‘They had these huge enrichment plants with not much to do, so they offered low prices and got a lot of business,’ says Bunn. ‘Because Russian enrichment was cheap, we all got dependent on Russia.’

Rosatom (Russia) is the biggest enrichment services provider, followed by Urenco (UK, Netherlands, Germany and US) and Orano (France). ‘Urenco, for example, did not expand its capacity, because there was no profit incentive,’ says Bunn. ‘The market was oversupplied with enriched uranium.’

Changes are afoot. In October 2023, Orano said it plans to increase its enrichment capacity in the south of France by nearly 30%, to reduce the dependence of its customers on Russian supplies.

Chinese demand

China, however, has built up substantial conversion and enrichment capacity, exceeding its civilian needs. ‘The Chinese have been expanding their capacity like gangbusters because these are state-owned companies. They don’t have to worry about the profit situation,’ says Bunn. ‘They worry about cut-offs of foreign supply and being self-reliant.’

Some of this enriched uranium will be used to produce weapons, some may be exported. For uranium, China has adopted a three-market strategy: investing in domestic uranium mines, buying mines overseas to send uranium back to China, and buying supplies on international markets.

Between 2010 and 2020, China built 36 new nuclear reactors, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The building of nuclear power plants in China has slowed more recently, says Bunn: ‘They’ve built a heck load of electricity plants and have more electricity than they need.’ Another drag is that new plants can attract public opposition and the Chinese authorities take protests into account when evaluating the performance of local government officials, Bunn adds.

While Western powers discuss moving away from an overreliance on Russia for conversion and enrichment, they are loath to swap for dependence on China. ‘The world outside of Russia and China is quickly moving away from supplies from these nations,’ says Hinze. ‘However, these moves mean that costs of nuclear fuel are rising and supply chains are becoming tighter.’

Russian reactor reliance

Russia has also been also a major exporter of reactors in recent decades. There are Russian reactors operating in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia and elsewhere. More are being built, for example in Turkey, Hungary, Bangladesh and Slovakia. ‘Russia even offers build and operate contracts, where they will come and build you a reactor without you paying a penny,’ says Bunn. ‘They’ll operate the reactor and make the money back on electricity sales over the decades.’ Russia will also take back spent fuel. It’s state company, Rosatom, has large projects with Iran, South Africa and Egypt, among others.

This can render countries reliant on Russia for the operation and/or maintenance of their reactors. And, since each type of plant requires specific fuel assemblies, Russian-designed reactors traditionally use Russian-made fuel. ‘Russia is going to be a big player in nuclear markets for a long time in the future,’ Bunn predicts.

A recent analysis examined Russia’s nuclear energy diplomacy in the context of the war in Ukraine. Since Rosatom is fully owned by the Russian state, it can be used to exert political pressure and project power globally. ‘For most Western-aligned states, it will be inconceivable to enter into any type of new dependence or even non-dependent cooperation with Russia in the nuclear energy sector,’ the authors note.

Nonetheless, alternatives are emerging. In September 2023, US nuclear services provider Westinghouse delivered the first fuel assemblies for Russian-designed reactors in Ukraine from a fabrication facility in Sweden. Ukraine praised the move as the end of the Russian monopoly in this section of the nuclear fuel market.

‘The key question now is how fast Westinghouse can scale up, given that there’s a bunch of countries with Russian-designed plants,’ says Bunn. Others, too, are moving to support domestic fuel supply. Saparro 5 is a group of five nations (Canada, Japan, France, the UK, and the US) that aims to establish a resilient uranium supply market free from Russian influence ‘and the potential to be subject to political leverage by other countries’. It announced plans at COP28 to jointly invest at least $4.2 billion to boost enrichment and conversion capacity over the next three years.

Meanwhile, there are efforts in the US Congress to formally ban all Russian uranium imports by 2028. One sticking point of such efforts has been HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium), which is enriched with uranium-235 to between 5% and 20%. ‘Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia was the only place with a plant licensed to produce material above 5% enrichment,’ says Bunn. The UK’s Civil Nuclear Roadmap, announced on 11 January, promises up to £300 million of investment specifically to develop HALEU fuel production, ‘with the first plant aiming to be operational early in the next decade’.

Advanced reactors, including in the US, are being developed to run on such fuel. These reactors would be ‘smaller, more flexible and less expensive to build and operate,’ according to the US Department of Energy. In the US, Centrus Energy says it is pioneering HALEU to power existing and future reactors. Bunn says the company is well positioned now to seek additional subsidies from the US government to expand its enrichment capacity.

Slow and expensive

Yet despite the drive to reduce carbon emissions, nuclear has been languishing in the doldrums. The adoption of small HALEU reactors has, if anything, slowed. The first company with approval, NuScale, cancelled a power plant for Utah in November after costs surged. ‘Costs have kept growing for small modular reactors,’ says Bunn. Solar, wind and natural gas are really, really cheap right now. That’s nuclear’s biggest problem – it’s expensive.’

Others too say that renewables are outmuscling nuclear. ‘Renewables provided something like 90% of all new electricity capacity [in 2023], and that’s because of the very great difference in cost,’ says Paul Dorfman, chair of the nonprofit Nuclear Consulting Group and visiting fellow at the University of Sussex, UK. ‘And in the context of climate change, nuclear plants take too long.’ He cites UK government findings that it takes up to 17 years for a nuclear reactor to be readied for operation.

A 2021 report authored by Dorfman also warns of the risk sea level rises and storm surges pose to nuclear power plants at coastal sites. ‘The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report [2023] stated that renewables were ten times better than nuclear at CO₂ mitigation,’ Dorfman adds. ‘It is clear renewables will do the heavy lifting and nuclear is marginal, if not problematic.’

In the decade before the Fukushima nuclear incident in Japan in March 2011, on average about 3GW of nuclear power generation was being added each year. To meet the COP28 target, factoring in how long it will take to build the plants, ‘we’d have to build on the order of 30-50GW every year from now to 2050,’ says Bunn. ‘That means convincing people that nuclear energy is ten times more attractive than it was before Fukushima. That’s a heavy lift.’

January 21, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | ENERGY | Leave a comment

Reducing energy demand- technologies are available, scalable and affordable today

 Economic growth relies in part on affordable and reliable energy. Demand
for energy is set to rise by up to a third between now and 2050 to support
a global economy that will be twice as large and a population of 2bn more
people. This surge in population and productivity will be most concentrated
in emerging markets, which makes the energy transition even more
challenging.

We have to change the very nature of our energy system, from a
predominantly fossil fuel-based economy to one based on low-carbon energy
sources. Crucially, we must do so while ensuring energy remains affordable
and secure for all.

The conversation has concentrated on the supply-side.
Governments and energy companies are rightly focusing on how to increase
the supply of low-carbon energy sources and boost transmission
infrastructure. Despite this, we are nowhere near reaching our climate
goals. And there is another side of this debate that has received far less
attention.

Energy supply is critical, but what about energy demand? Demand
is something everybody — individuals, businesses and governments alike
— can take action on. By reducing the intensity of our energy demand (by
one definition, the energy used per unit of gross domestic product
generated) we can do more with less.

But we are not doing nearly enough on
this front. The International Energy Agency estimates that the world needs
to improve energy intensity by more than 4 per cent a year between 2020 and
2030, and almost 3 per cent annually thereafter, to reach net zero by 2050.
Last year, we only managed 1.3 per cent.

First, we need to find ways to save energy.

For instance, artificial intelligence innovations in heating,
ventilation and air conditioning of offices could achieve a 25 per cent
drop in consumption. Second, we need to focus on energy efficiency: using
less energy to perform the same task or produce the same product. For
instance, retrofitting buildings can reduce energy consumption by 45 per
cent. Finally, we have to find value chain collaborations. That means
different businesses along the value chain working together to drive change
in the wider energy system. Recovering heat from industrial plants, for
example, could reduce energy consumption by around 25 per cent, as seen in
the use of waste heat from sulphuric acid production in Sweden. These
technologies are available, scalable and affordable today.

 FT 7th Jan 2024

https://www.ft.com/content/bc2ba5ae-ac4c-4ea8-b7b2-160c5b8aaaa1

January 10, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | ENERGY | Leave a comment

‘The potential is extraordinary’: Business action on energy efficiency could save $2tr a year, new research claims

Business Green  Michael Holder, 08 January 2024

World Economic Forum and PwC report sets out host of energy efficiency actions it claims are ‘doable today, at attractive returns with no need for new technology’

A suite of “doable today” business actions that would slash demand for energy could unlock annual savings of at least $2tr a year across the global economy, while helping to boost growth, save companies cash, unlock competitive advantages, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

That is the conclusion of major new research published today and backed by over 120 CEOs of global corporates, which sets out a host of near-term actions businesses can take to reduce energy demand across their buildings, infrastructure, and transport use.

Drawn up by consulting giant PwC in collaboration with the World Economic Forum (WEF), the research contends that if cost effective energy efficiency measures were taken by companies by the end of the current decade, and better supported by effective policy frameworks, it could unlock a major acceleration in the net zero transition.

The research, which comes ahead of next week’s annual global WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland, argues “the potential of demand-side action is extraordinary”, and details a host of measures it claims are “doable today, at attractive returns with no need for new technology”.

Recommended measures include retrofitting buildings with insulation and other efficiency and green energy measures, electrifying transport systems, and harnessing artificial intelligence to optimise factory-line design to unlock efficiencies. The report also recommends deeper collaboration between businesses across value chains in order to unlock further efficiencies, as well as “industrial clustering” to share clean energy sources and maximise the benefits of efficiency initiatives.

The research argues energy efficiency measures remain an “under-addressed” component of the net zero transition, which can deliver substantial energy and emissions savings.

It claims proven measures could deliver a short-term, cost-efficient reduction in energy demand of almost a third – 31 per cent – shared across the buildings, industry, and transport sectors, and avoid the need to construct almost 3,000 extra power stations.

Moreover, these efforts would support the UAE Consensus agreed at COP28 in Dubai last month, which saw hundreds of nations commit to tripling renewable energy capacity and doubling the rate of energy efficiency improvements worldwide by 2030…………………………………………………………………………………..

 today’s report warns that awareness among companies of the potential for energy efficiency to benefit their business, achieve cost savings, and support emissions reduction efforts remains low, as it called for more supportive government policy to help drive progress.

As many as 47 per cent of CEOs on the WEF’s International Business Council surveyed for the report cited a lack of supportive regulation as a barrier to effort to reduce energy demand.

Chair of the Council Ana Botín, who is group executive chair at Spanish banking giant Santander, said businesses had a “vital role to play” in slashing energy demand worldwide, and stressed that firms could do so without decreasing economic output.

“Reducing the amount of energy needed to manufacture products and deliver services is something we can act on now,” she said. “Although progress is being made, there is a lot more to be done, and the fact is that our energy demand continues to rise at unsustainable rates.

“It is crucial, therefore that we work together with governments and regulators across both developed and developing markets to help accelerate progress on this issue.”  https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4161032/potential-extraordinary-business-action-energy-efficiency-save-usd2tr-research-claims

January 10, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | ENERGY | Leave a comment