Is nuclear energy the way to deal with the climate crisis? | Nuclear Energy News

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As the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) comes to an end and countries are preparing to spend more money to decarbonize their economies, the debate over the role of nuclear energy in achieving zero goals is heating up.
Nuclear power plants have been around since the 1950s. The technology is fairly basic: atoms split and the energy released heats the water to generate steam to generate steam that moves the turbines.
Of course, when things go wrong with this twentieth-century technology, it can be terribly wrong because of nature or human error. Chernobyl. Fukushima. Three Mile Island.
Nuclear power is also known for cost overruns and is relatively more expensive compared to renewable energy sources like the sun and wind.
But some countries are taking up nuclear energy in a big way. China – the world’s largest carbon emitter – plans to build at least 150 nuclear reactors in the next 15 years, Bloomberg News reported.paywall). That’s more than the whole world has built in the last three and a half decades.
French President Emmanual Macron said this week that his country will “revive the construction of nuclear reactors for the first time in decades” to achieve its zero goal.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told COP26 listeners that the U.S. is “nuclear” within its clean electricity plans.
There are also businesses that throw their weight behind nuclear power. Through TerraPower and PacifiCorp, billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are advocating for a type of advanced small modular reactor (SMR) known as the “fast” Natrium reactor.
The UN is also providing its support behind SMR and advanced reactor technologies, praising its benefits in a summary of the latest technologies (PDF).
So should countries go nuclear to save the planet?
Allison Macfarlane is a professor and director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. Prior to that, he was chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
He wrote an article on Foreign Affairs (paywall) on the subject of nuclear energy and climate goals this summer. His arguments caused some significant setbacks (paywall) when world leaders descended on Glasgow (Scotland) for COP26.
Macfarlane does not describe himself as an advocate or detractor of nuclear energy, but rather as an analyst who prefers to provide a “measured analytical answer” to questions about nuclear energy.
Recently, Al Jazeera Digital Managing Business Editor Patricia Sabga shared her opinion on building more nuclear power plants to deal with the climate crisis.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Patricia Sabga: Proponents of nuclear power say it has a bigger role to play in decarbonisation plans. Does the world need more nuclear power plants to deal with the climate crisis?
Allison Macfarlane: Almost 19 percent of the power [in the United States] right now it produces nuclear energy. That’s carbon-free. That’s really helpful. We don’t want to turn that off right now. But I live in a pragmatic and realistic world. And I don’t think, at least for the next 10 or 20 years, that nuclear power will have a big impact on reducing carbon emissions because we can’t build new power plants fast enough.
PS: And why is that? Why can’t we build new plants fast enough?
MORNING: It’s hard. They are mega projects and require a level of quality control and program management that does not exist in many other industries. And while people may be encouraged to make some of the newest reactor designs easy to produce in factories, if we look at existing reactors that are produced in factories, such as those under construction in Georgia, the Vogtle plant. [where two additional reactor units are under construction] – the experience in the workshops has not been good.
He built modules for the Georgia plant during the years when the factory was badly built. They were badly welded and had to be re-welded at the reactor site. This plant led in large part to the failure of Westinghouse.
We can’t build new plants fast enough.
PS: You mentioned newer reactor designs. What are these designs and what are their challenges?
MORNING: First, many of them are not new. Many of these designs are 70 years old or older. But with that in mind, there are new types of twists in some of these designs.
Many of them exist only on paper, or as small-scale models. And the way you work in engineering is that you design something – now computer-assisted – and then you build a mock-up. When you build a mockup, you see that you are wrong in the design of your computer, so you fix that. Then you need to build a full scale design. And when you scale it again, there will be things you did wrong in the mockup, and you’ll have to fix that.
So in the case of many of these designs, we are still in the computer model phase. We have not taken any other steps. And those steps take years. And when you get to a full-scale model, that’s really expensive. Where does that money come from?
PS: Let’s talk about expenses then. In terms of cost, how does nuclear accumulate to say wind or sun?
MORNING: It is significantly more expensive. Of course, it depends on what sun you’re talking about. But if you look Lazard’s final analysis equalized energy costs [an analysis that takes into account how much it costs to finance and build a power plant and to keep it running throughout its lifetime and then divides that cost by how much energy it kicks out each year] and you look at the photovoltaic sun [photovoltaic] the scale of availability, and wind, are significantly cheaper than nuclear.
That’s not true on a photovoltaic solar roof. It is as expensive or perhaps more expensive than nuclear.
These plants are very expensive to build.
PS: Why is nuclear so expensive compared to wind and solar scale?
MORNING: Expenses are dominated by capital costs to build the plant. These plants are very expensive to build. I think we get at least $ 14 billion for Vogtle plants in Georgia. That’s the capacity to generate a thousand gigawatts. They are very expensive to build and take a long time to build. And so you not only have the cost of capital to build the plant, but also the cost of capital interest, which becomes a high cost.
That’s what really hurts nuclear. Now they say they will be cheaper about small modular reactors. But because no one has ever built one, and since no one has set up supply chains to build them and exploit them, we really don’t know how much they cost.
PS: You wrote an article in July on Foreign Affairs. Then you were criticized by Armond Cohen [of the Clean Air Task Force] and Kenneth Luongo [of the Partnership for Global Security] Comparing the cost of living of a nuclear power plant with the cost of living of wind and solar, because wind and solar are not “always running” energy generators, while nuclear.
MORNING: There is a point that wind and sun are intermittent, and nuclear is not. I think the bigger question is, how important is intermittency now?
Ten years ago, it was a very big thing. It’s becoming less of an agreement, in my opinion. The interesting thing is that when you talk to service companies, they are really interested in loading the plants in a row. [responding to surges and ebbs in power demand]. They’re really focused on dealing with the intermittent. But that means they need a plant that can grow up and down quickly. Nuclearists can’t do that. The current nuclear fleet cannot do that. They are on or off, and it takes a long time to climb the full scale.
PS: What happens when you consider energy storage because it’s still expensive? There is still no sun and wind to be reliable 24-7. Is it a big concern?
MORNING: This is a legitimate concern. But there are storage options you can buy right now and build in the coming years. But that ability to have things available in fast, low-cost construction, removed right now, doesn’t exist. [for nuclear energy], especially for these advanced reactor designs.
They say they will be cheaper about small modular reactors.
PS: What about reproductive concerns? Do you think they should discuss whether nuclear energy should be part of a new energy mix to respond to the climate crisis?
MORNING: Absolutely. We need to consider reproduction and the link to nuclear weapons when we think about nuclear energy. We should work to abolish nuclear weapons. That means getting rid of them. But we have to be careful. To this end, an international structure has been set up through the International Atomic Energy Agency and the guarantee agreements under the countries.
So there is a structure. It has been in force for many, many decades. But we need to be aware of that. Light water reactors in many countries today do not pose a significant risk of proliferation. But some new designs that are being talked about could create materials that can be used directly in nuclear weapons. So we need to be very careful with these, and better understand the effects of reproduction, and make sure that there are guarantees that the materials will not be diverted.
PS: What role do you see nuclear energy playing in the future of energy, not only in the United States but also around the world?
MORNING: Today, it plays a fairly important role in electricity production in some countries. I imagine it will continue for many decades to come. And then we’ll see what happens. I do not know. I don’t have a good crystal ball. I can say that we are experiencing a tremendous change. I don’t know if there is a will to move away from fossil fuels globally enough seriously and quickly enough. We have to do it yesterday. And nuclear power would be part of that mix if we were potentially really serious. But it means a lot of money. So someone has to pay for that.
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