Anyone needing a good rebuttal to arguments in favor of reviving the nuclear power industry -- like this hopelessly amateurish, anachronistic and ill-informed screed on the SciFi Channel's technology page -- need look no further than a concise summary by Walt Patterson, an associate fellow at Chatham House in the UK.
The bad news is it's posted behind the Nature subscription wall at em>Nature 449, 664 (11 October 2007). The good news is Mr. Patterson's got a website with much of the arguments freely available. Plus I have a few spare moments to post the nub of his brief essay, titled "Fifty years of hopes and fears."
For three decades after Calder Hall, nuclear power plants fitted the traditional electricity system, in which a better power plant was always a bigger one farther away....
Traditional electricity networks are radial and one-way. They deliver large flows of electricity over long distances from huge power plants in remote locations. Such networks are inherently vulnerable to disruption, as widespread blackouts attest. Smaller-scale generation closer to users prefers two-way networks, linking loads and generation in optimized local systems. Such decentralized electricity offers higher performance and reliability, and lower environmental impact. It is gaining ground rapidly....
After half a century, nuclear power is the ultimate in tradition. It needs climate more than climate needs it. To avert catastrophic global warming, why pick the slowest, most expensive, most limited, most inflexible and riskiest option?
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A few questions:
(a) If decentralised electicity is so much better, why were grids built in the first place?
(b) Why would decentralised [renewables] be any more reliable?
(c) How much would baseload renewables cost? Is there any cheap and extendable storage solution?
(d) France has CO2 emissions 40% lower than the UK for essentially the same standard of living. Why?
To look at his site:
http://www.waltpatterson.org/nucamnesia.pdf
- The reason for the economic problems of British nuclear power especially was because of a one-off dose of very cheap North Sea gas. Yes, a scarce non-renewable fuel allowed to dump waste into the air can be cheaper. Now it's gone.
- Many of the problems in the 1970s came as interest rates went through the roof, favouring low-capital approaches. This also hits the economics of renewables.
- Increasing efficency is invariably given as an alternative. Has yet to actually reduce demand in any meaningful way. Amory Lovins ideas about CHP-as-saviour somewhat depend on sufficient Natural gas being available.
People talk about decentralisation in power (or at least dependance on centrally-produced equipment instead of power) as if it were some wonder-solution. I'm yet to be given a convincing reason why.
I'm not at all sure that renewables and reduced need for long range transmission go together. Many power generation schemes ilkey benefit from an economy of scaling effect. PG&E's proposed solar thermal peak load plant is sized at a few hundred MW. Lots of smaller plants more be more costly. Many good renewables sites are not located close to end users, especially wind, geothermal and tidal are only economic in certain locales, and long distance transmission is a requirement to make these sites viable.
Now I am agreed that Nuclear has a very long planning and construction cycle. I suspect that it will roughly maintain its slice of the energy pie. I didn't find the Sci-Fi site to be uninformed, just very simplistic. In any case any rational policy wouln't be an either or thing. An aggressive Nuclear program will only create a moderately sized wedge in the GHG problem. We need many wedges. It is silly to pit them against one another.
"We need many wedges. It is silly to pit them against one another."
Right on Big Tom.
'The reason for the economic problems of British nuclear power especially was because of a one-off dose of very cheap North Sea gas.'
But North Sea gas is no longer cheap and nuclear still can't compete. I note with no pleasure (as a UK taxpayer) that I will continue to pay for the cleanup of Dounreay until 2033 (that is the current estimate). Since the site started up in the 1950's and powerd down in 1994, it will take as long to clean the site as it was in operation. That does not sound like an attractive investment for the future, especially as the estimated cleanup costs for all stations have risen once again , to �73bn http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2188228,00.html
The private sector has still to actually put money up for new nuclear build - they might talk about it a lot, but we have yet to see anything, even though they could have done so at any time in the last 40 years. Actually, I'm fine with them trying to build a new reactor, as long as all build costs come from the private sector (and are transparent), as does all insurance. And they have to pay for all decommissioning and waste storage costs. And any power agreements have to be entirely at market rates. I suspect that such conditions might not be to the industries liking.
The grid was built the way it was because the idea at the time (in the 1950's) was that 'big is better', as well as the fact that having a large (mostly coal fired) power station in an urban area was simply unacceptable. Add to that the fact that most stations needed to be near coal supplies, and that capacity needed to be transferred over long distances meant that thats what we ended up with.
We still need a grid (indeed it needs to be updated anyway), but we can make it better. Its true that renewables are often in remote locations, but exactly the same point can be made with regard to pretty much all of the nuclear capacity. Smaller CHP's can be not only more efficient, but more responsive and cheaper to build, and can be powered by a variety of fuels. Storage for renewables is still difficult, but new technologies are coming along which make it much more viable.
Energy efficiency does work, but the British Government has been singularly lacking in attempting it. The new building regs supposedly make new builds 20% more efficient than previous structures, but since the general level of efficiency has been appalling, we are not greatly better off. There has been no push to improve even government owned buildings, and no real attempt to retrofit anything else (unlike the Germans). Even light bulbs seem to be a matter of personal taste at present. The sad fact is that it isnt seen as important; by government, by industry or by consumers.
We are going to need a lot of wedges, so lets start with the quickest, cheapest and most efficient first.
MikeB -
If you want a full free-market approach, then fine... [non sequestered, non-scrubbed] coal it is. *Anything* else requires regulation and subsidy. And £73 billion certainly sounds a lot, until you divide it by 100 or so years. I'm not sure either why an early experimental site should be taken as representative either - should I take data from 1980s wind farms as representative?
In the US, a small levy of no more than 10% on power generated has given a sufficient fund for all waste disposal and decomissioning. It's not the problem it is made out to be.
I suspect that if we doi follow the German approach, we'll see the same problems - lots of window dressing and nice-looking measures, but behind the scenes a resurgance in coal useage as Natural gas availability declines and flat or increasing CO2 output.