nuclear-news

Recent weeks have seen a coordinated campaign by two of the sector’s top agencies to claw back support for a technology that is struggling to remain economically viable and is in danger of being sidelined in discussions over future energy pathways in Europe and North America.

In the U.S., the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) kicked off proceedings in an apparently low-key fashion. With little fanfare, the Institute’s website had a facelift in early March, dispensing with its former staid design and adopting a more modern look with bold type and plenty of video.

In the place of headlines about developments in nuclear technology, the NEI’s site now plays inspirational messages over images of children, cityscapes and electric cars. “Carbon-free. Available 24/7. Powering communities,” it says. “Vital to our clean energy future.”

Soon after, the NEI began talking up its annual briefing for the financial community, which, for the first time, was being streamed live on Facebook.

Ominously for an industry where new developments always seem plagued with delays, the livestreaming event started late due to technical problems.

Once underway, NEI president and CEO Maria Korsnick lost no time in stating the case for ongoing nuclear energy support. . …..

OECD’s nuclear group weighs in  Less than 24 hours after the NEI event, the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) took the helm of the industry’s communications machine with the launch of a major report.

The Full Costs of Electricity Provision was unveiled by the NEA’s director-general, William D. Magwood IV, and senior economist, Jan Horst Keppler, along with NEI’s senior director of policy development, Matthew Crozat, and nuclear advocate Kirsty Gogan. …..

A glance through the 214-page document shows it to be a serious attempt by the NEA to reframe the parameters of current energy policy discussions and head off one of two major threats facing the sector. 

While nobody disputes nuclear power’s ability to deliver significant quantities of baseload, [?] carbon-free  energy, the industry has long wrestled with safety concerns and more recently found itself outflanked by the economics of Western electricity markets.

It is likely that the nuclear sector has learned to take safety accusations in its stride. For years, advocates have been claiming that nuclear power is safer than any other form of electricity generation (although Greenpeace disputes this).

Those arguments didn’t stop nations such as Germany or Italy from turning against nuclear in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, however.

And more recently, nuclear plant operators in Europe and, particularly, the U.S. have been worrying over an even bigger concern: cost. In markets such as the U.K., new nuclear is looking increasingly pricey next to renewables.

Last September, for instance, offshore wind — theoretically one of the most expensive forms of mainstream renewable energy generation — undercut the strike price for the U.K.’s Hinkley Point C project by almost 38 percent.

Given that offshore wind is expected to continue falling in price and is being built at the moment, unlike nuclear, the economic case for new reactors in the U.K. appears to diminish by the day, even though the government has  restated its commitment to a diverse energy mix.

Similar challenges face nuclear elsewhere in Western Europe. Only two commercial nuclear reactors, Flamanville 3 and Olkiluoto 3, are under construction in the European Union. Both are massively delayed and over budget. But the situation in the U.S. is even worse.

In America it is now no longer economically viable to keep existing plants running, let alone build new ones.

The dire situation facing reactors in U.S. markets flooded with cheap gas and renewables is prompting desperate measures from plant owners in states such as Minnesota and New Jersey. And the NEA report is designed to force a rethink in how these markets are set up. …… Its main finding is that the external costs of the normal operations of electricity generation exceed the costs of other phases of the life cycle of electricity generation, as well as the costs of major accidents, “by at least one order of magnitude.”

…… The problem is that the NEA’s clear interest in promoting nuclear energy somewhat taints the impartiality of the report, opening it up to criticism from observers.

….A one-sided interpretation?    Amory Lovins, the notoriously anti-nuclear Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) chief scientist and co-founder, pulled no punches over the NEA’s attempt to calculate all-in energy costs. A large body of literature, with widely varying quality and independence, has already done this, he said.

“NEA endorses a one-sided interpretation of that literature,” he said. “The workshop that framed and steered this report was co-chaired by two well-known nuclear advocates, making NEA an extension and official endorser of the nuclear industry’s main advocacy group.”

He offered up a long list of potential flaws in the report, including selective citations, assumed rather than observed technology costs, no analysis of financing cost, no mention of risk premiums or construction times, the use of old pricing data, and factually incorrect claims.

Some points of the analysis are largely or wholly correct, but most sections and the broad conclusions are not, he told GTM. “They will be credible only to the credulous or already-committed,” he said. …