Yucca Mountain is dead
Well virtually, with a $200 million cut of the budget this year and more promised by President Obama next. The waste management repository on which $13.5 billion has already been spent will not be able to survive on that and it only needs a bit of extra legislation for the tunnel in the side of a mountain in a barren and rather unattractive bit of the Navada desert, which had reached the final licensing stage for construction and operation, to become history. The problem is that President Obama has come down in support of the NIMBY (not in my back yard) position of Navada officials. There are plenty more suitable sites in the US but all are likely to face NIMBY from the local officials. Perhaps Yucca Mountain will re-emerge because it is a perfectly good site for the storage of 60 000 tonnes of spent fuel and high level radioactive waste but it seems that the US is currently ready to abandon the $13.5 billion spent on the project.

But it is not all bad news for now the Energy Secretary Steven Chu is talking about recycling because “it has the potential of greatly reducing the amount of waste”. Something we have been saying for years. He rejects “reprocessing” because that is still a dirty word in the US. But if you cut out the last separation stage of plutonium and depleted uranium in a reprocessing plant and use a bit of chemical juggling you can finish up with mixed oxide ready to be put back in today’s reactors to give you 25 to 30 percent more energy. That is the safest place for plutonium. The high level radioactive waste separated in the first stage decays to the same level of radioactivity as the uranium from which it came in the acceptable time of 100 to 300 years.

Further down the road you can develop – well we have already done the development work – fast reactors which will produce vastly more energy and burn most of the depleted uranium as well as plutonium..

But there is no time to sit around talking about it. The US currently stores spent (used) fuel at the sites of nuclear power plants. They have about 60 000 tonnes contained safely in large cylindrical containers and they can go on doing that for a year or two more. But they are accumulating around 2000 tonnes per year and that could increase with license renewals on existing reactors and plans for new plants.

The biggest advantage of a new approach is that when asked “what about the waste” they can say “we are recycling it.”

A strange obsession
It is difficult to understand the Government obsession with renewable energy. Mike O’Brien, the energy minister in a speech to the Renewable Energy Association on 26 March declared that renewable energy is an integral part of the Government’s strategy to deliver our climate change goals with a near 10-fold increase required to meet the 2020 target. This arises from the UK commitment to the 15% EU renewable energy target which in turn will require some 35% of electricity to be generated from renewables. Yet at the same time the Government is fully aware of the financial burden and practical limitations of that an increasing dependence on renewables will incur..

In a written answer in the House of Commons on 11 November last year O’Brien gave the costs of electricity generation in £/MWh as Nuclear £38, Coal £51, Gas £52, Onshore wind £72, Offshore wind £92, all on the assumption of a carbon price of ε35/tonne of CO2. It is difficult to imagine that anyone would deliberately choose to buy, electricity from off-shore wind farms at almost three times the price of carbon-free electricity from a nuclear power station – eespecially when the wind farms operate at load factors of only 27-28% compared with around 80% for a modern nuclear station – yet this is a burden the Government imposes on all of us, although affordability is one of the key aims of the Department of Energy and Climate Change policy We do not have a free choice. Electricity consumers are committed to support and subsidise renewable electricity through the Renewable Obligation which came into force in April 2002. This requires all electricity supply companies to source an ever growing percentage of their supply from renewable generators on pain of being subjected to a ‘buy-out’ price now at £35.76/MWh (it increases each year in line with the Retail Price Index). The share of electricity generated under the Obligation has grown from 3 per cent of electricity supply in 2002-2003 to 3.97 per cent in 2007 (of which 1.3% wind).

The renewable generators can sell their ROC certificates at the buy-out price either with or separately from the electricity generated, and in this way the value of a ROC is given in the OFGEM 2007 Annual ROC report as “worth” £52.95, up from £42.54 two years ago. OFGEM explains that the value of a ROC is made up of the buyout payment that is avoided by presenting the ROC, plus the portion of the buyout fund redistributed to the supplier that presented the ROC.

This cost is passed onto their customers by the electricity companies and is a subsidy we are all forced to pay for renewable electricity. It will continue to increase as the share of renewable electricity rises in line with Government policy.

The cost to the economy of the Renewable Obligation has already risen from £495 million in 2004-5 to £872 million in 2006/7 – when renewables were just under 4% of total electricity supply. The cost in 2035 of supporting 35% of renewable electricity, which by that time will be mainly from off-shore wind, was put by the House of Lords in their November 2008 report on the Economics of Renewable Energy at £6.8 billion – this would seem an underestimate. The Government however declares the figure will be no more than £2-2.5 billion – this, implausibly, is only about 3 times the 2006/7 cost for almost 9 times the production of renewable electricity. These costs will rise further as from 1 April the Government has decreed that the credit for off-shore wind should be increased from 1 to 1.5 ROC/MWh (but even this is not enough for the off-shore wind developers who are asking for 2 ROC/MWh).

As wind generation, because of its intermittency, cannot be relied upon to meet peak power demand it must as the Lord’s report pointed out “be viewed largely as additional capacity to that which will need to be provided, in any event, by more reliable means.” This leads to the extraordinary conclusion, which the Government does not seem to refute, that the heavy cost of the investment in renewable generation capacity “will be largely in addition to, rather than a replacement for, the massive investment in fossil-fuel and nuclear plant required to replace the many power stations scheduled for closure by 2020”

To support 35% of renewable electricity (by that time mainly from wind), which will operate at an annual load factor of only around 30%, and cannot be relied upon to meet peak electricity demands, we would require, by 2020, to build roughly twice as much coal or gas-fired plant as would be otherwise needed – as well as pay some £7 billion in subsidy for the renewable electricity.

It might be claimed that the renewable electricity is carbon-free, but carbon-free electricity could be more cheaply, securely and reliably generated from nuclear power. One nuclear station alone, Sizewell B, commissioned some 13 years ago, generated almost twice as much carbon-free electricity in 2007/8 as all the UK wind farms combined - reliably, not intermittently, and for only a fraction of the cost. Between 21 October 2006 and 20 March 2008 Sizewell B operated continuously for 516 days. Again, the Government is well aware of this. Speaking to Chatham House last November on nuclear power O’Brien recognised it as the only low carbon, dependable baseload technology, which has provided the UK with a safe supply of electricity for decades.

EDF and EoN have warned the Government that the heavy cost of meeting the 35% renewable electricity target could restrict their ability to finance new nuclear plant. This echoes a similar warning in the Lords report that the promotion of renewables “which offer only intermittent supply” should not hinder investment in other low carbon options – notably nuclear power – and thereby risk power shortages.

The obsession with wind clearly does not make sense. Yet the Government announced last year that the Renewables Obligation is to be extended until at least 2037.

A hollow boast
A Press release of 30 March by the Dept of Energy and Climate Change announced that up to £10 million is to be made available to develop the next generation of offshore wind technology. The money comes from the Low Carbon Energy Demonstration Fund, part of the Environmental Transformation Fund, and is in addition to the financial support through the Renewable Obligation which has now been increased to 1.5 ROC/MWh for offshore wind.

Appended to this press release is a list of “Facts and Figures” the first of which declares that “The UK is currently No. 1 in the world for operating offshore wind farms, with 598 MWe capacity. We overtook Denmark in October 2008.”

Are we supposed to take pride in the fact that our energy policy has been so badly managed that we have now built more offshore wind plant – eexpensive and inefficient generators of electricity at 3 times the cost and 1/3 of the efficiency of a nuclear station – than Denmark, an anti-nuclear country with about 1/10th of our population?

But the press release withholds the fact that one of the consequences of the Danish reliance on wind power is that the per capita carbon dioxide emissions in Denmark are 1.7 times higher than that of Sweden, its Scandinavian neighbour, with about 50% hydro and 50% nuclear power, and 1.6 times higher than France with 80% nuclear power.

We had more cause for pride in 1956 when the Queen opened the Calder Hall nuclear power station and the UK could claim to be a world leader in nuclear power.


Wave power
For an island, surrounded by often tumultuous seas, the prospect of harnessing the energy of the waves to generate electricity has an obvious allure. Over the past 50 years many devices have been proposed – often of Heath Robinson complexity – and some have been tested but so far none have proved practical. The latest in this long line is Pelamis, a long hinged snake-like structure, devloped in Scotland, and with a first unit installed off the coast of Portugal. Unfortunately the hopes for this have so far not yet been realised. After failures of the bearings connecting the several units the device has now had to be brought ashore, after only two months at sea. The company is optimistic that the fault can be rectified, but there is a question over the future of the project at this time of economic recession.

This could also raise doubts about a second Pelamis unit ordered by E.oN, to be deployed next year off Orkney. The device, 180 metres in length, known as the P-2 is 50 metres longer than its predecessor the P-1, and should generate 750 kW.

Further units are planned for the northern coast of Cornwall in 2010. Other sites said to be under consideration are in Spain, France, Norway, North America and even South Africa.

It seems that for P-1 the problems of operating complex equipment in a saline environment were not fully appreciated. This must also raise questions about the longer term future of both wave technology and also offshore wind farms. With increasing frequency of gales and rising sea levels expected from climate change there could be doubts over the expected life and maintenance costs of the offshore plant – for which, as yet, there is little actual experience. Does anyone yet know what the life expectancy of an off-shore wind turbine will be?

Job creation
One of the supposed advantages of wind power is the claim, for instance by the Green party that wind power could provide 200,000 extra jobs by 2020 “far more than in coal or nuclear.” Job creation is also seen as an advantage of renewables by the Government. There is however the cautious view that more productive employment could be found in other sectors of the economy.

But it is far from obvious why job creation should be considered “a good thing”. All the advances of technology have been to use energy to replace burdensome work. Do we want to go backwards? Stage coaches would be more labour intensive than trains, but there are no calls for their return. Why then should priority be given to wind, a less efficient and economic means of providing reliable electricity supply than nuclear power.

Even if job creation were to be an important factor in determining energy policy there are other opportunities which would be far more labour intensive than wind power. It could be possible to utilise many of the exercise machines in gymnasia and health farms to generate electricity. The output from several establishments could possibly be combined to support local micro-generation systems. Other opportunities could come from a modern design of tread mills, to be operated by those convicted of minor crimes as part of a community service programme. This would have the double advantage of easing the burden on prisons and providing useful energy.

Ancient myths
In seeking to understand the priority accorded to ‘renewable’ energies in the UK, the EU and throughout the Western world, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this arises from the power of ancient myths to influence modern thinking and behaviour, and to overturn seemingly logical conclusions.

In their careful and thorough examination of the economics of renewable energies the House of Lords committee showed that these – particularly wind, wave and solar – are intermittent and require back up, are more costly, and depend on government support. “Wind generation should be viewed largely as additional capacity to that which will need to be provided, in any event, by more reliable means; and the evidence suggests that its full costs, although declining over time, remain significantly higher than those of conventional or nuclear generation.” Yet despite this the committee recommended more and more focused research into more effective ways to reduce carbon emissions and even suggested a substantial annual prize for the best technical contribution as if there were some magical, hidden solution waiting to be discovered. But intermittent, diffuse energies will always be more expensive to harness than the more concentrated forms in fossil and nuclear fuels.

The term ‘renewable’ however carries with it the powerful mythological associations of renewal, rebirth and resurrection which place it firmly in the realm of the ‘sacred’ (Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return). Renewable energy must therefore, unquestionably, be preferred to the ‘profane’ method of generating electricity by burning fossil fuels (even though these are but ancient biofuels), and above all over nuclear power where the splitting of atoms – the fundamental components of matter – by a new Prometheus can be seen as a sinful intrusion into the realm of the gods. Radioactivity is equated with the waste land of the wounded Fisher King of Arthurian legend. So wind has priority over coal; coal over nuclear.

Burning coal however releases carbon dioxide, so, faced with fears of climate change reliance is now to be placed on the unproven proposals for carbon capture and sequestration despite the certainty of a far higher cost and lower efficiency. They would also require burying many millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from new coal-fired power stations. These proposals have (so far) been received with passive acceptance. This is in striking contrast to the fears, hostility and opposition to plans for the burial of a comparatively minute quantity of radioactive waste. Yet the first is a potentially toxic gas which will have to be isolated for ever; the second a solid, which can be encapsulated in glass, most of which will have decayed to natural levels after a few hundred years.

Floating nuclear power plants
Rosatom has a second order for floating nuclear power plants for the far northeaster coast where there are very remote communities sitting on valuable resources. The latest order is from the Elkon organisation which is developing a large uranium deposit said to be capable of producing 5000 te of uranium. It is located at Yakutia in the far north of Siberia. They will use a small reactors of 18 MWe capacity known as ABV-6M which has been specially developed for such applications.

A larger reactor of the type used in Russian icebreakers is being used in the first floating plant which is being built at Severodvinsk and is due to be ready for floating to a site by May 2010. These will have a capacity of 40 MWe but some of the output is expected to be heat. Rosatom is hoping to build about ten floating plants.

Electricite de France is reported to be interested in working with Elkon on the production of uranium.

Italy and France collaborate
Following a recent agreement signed by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and President Nicolas Sarkozy, Italy is going to work closely with France on its new nuclear programme. Having admitted that the Italian people were badly led astray by a referendum in 1987 which closed down all nuclear plants, the Berlusconi government is now promising new support for a programme which aims to have 25% of electricity from nuclear power by 2020.

Two memoranda of understanding were signed by the two state utilities, ENEL in Italy and EdF in France. The two groups will form a joint venture that will carry out feasibility studies for the construction of at least four of the large 1600 MWe European Pressurized Water Reactors (EPR) in Italy. ENEL will have a majority stake in the projects and take the electricity. But they will also be open to third party participation after ENEL and EdF.

This agreement supplements the one that allows ENEL to participate in French projects. They already have a 12.5% stake in the EPR under construction at Flamanville in France and expect to conclude a similar agreement on EdF’s second EPR planned for a site at Penly.

The two countries have generally good experience of working together in the nuclear field. Italy was an active partner in the building of the Superphenix fast breeder reactor in France and although that suffered from stupid French politics it was a good experience technically.

Italy was an early pioneer in nuclear energy at one time coming third after Britain and France in the amount of electricity produced. But in a mad period after Chernobyl everything was turned upside down. We hope that Berlusconi survives long enough to see the restoration of Italy because the country needs the power.


Rosatom and Siemens
A formidable new alliance has been formed between the Russian nuclear power company, Rosatom, and Siemens in Germany. The two have worked together on various project in the past but the new organization will aim to actively market the Russian VVER line of successful pressurized water reactors. The Russian have been working hard on this design which now incorporates all the latest Western standard of safety. They have sold the system to the Chinese and Indians as well as in various East European countries but with the reputation and support of Siemens they hope to become the leading world supplier of nuclear power plants. Areva, the French company which broke of its relations with Siemens in January, is certainly taking the new prospect of a rival seriously and have warned Siemens that it is in breach of a contract which still exists between the Areva NP and Siemens.

The Russian-German alliance certainly has high powered support from the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimier Putin, and from the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. A likely early project is the proposed Baltic nuclear power station in Kaliningrad, the tranche of Russian territory separated by North East European states. The involvement of German interest in this project would help to dispel concerns of neighbouring states.

Rosatom would bring full nuclear fuel cycle capability to the new organisation. This is something which Siemens has lost due to the inactivity of the German nuclear program in recent years.

An amusing, and completely unrelated, aspect of the deal signed on March 4 was the comparison in height between Siemens President and Chief Executive Officer, Alexander Lokschin – who is a very tall man – and Rosatom director general, Sergei Kiryenko, who is rather petite and barely reached the shoulders of Lokschin. But we are sure that this will not affect their working together.

The thoughts of Minister O’Brien
It is encouraging to know that the Government at last has seen the need for new nuclear stations, but these extracts from a speech by Mike O’Brien, Minister at DECC, to Chataham House on 18th November last year, are rather disconcerting if they are indication of the government policy.

“…does nuclear crowd out renewables? There is room for both. On renewables we have pledged a massive tenfold increase. There is no similar deal for nuclear.” It is more likely that, as the power companies are faced by the requirement to earn ROC’s or pay the buyout price, nuclear will be crowded out by renewables. The capability to build new nuclear stations will be limited by the compulsion to build off-shore wind or other renewables as well as committing to carbon capture and storage which will certainly be expensive – if it is ever shown to be feasible.

Our modeling shows that, in most scenarios, we are on track to have around the same amount of nuclear in our mix in 2025 as we do currently. Hardly an ambitious programme, and too little too late.

but we do need to replace the energy we now generate from nuclear with new nuclear. This was the slogan adopted by British Energy in the days before the company was forced into “reconstruction” by the Government electricity pricing policy. If only we had adopted that policy then the country would be in a much stronger position now.

The French are ahead of us now – they will be for years to come. But starting later has benefits. We can absorb the know-how from others, build new expertise and in time be seen by the world to be the best.

Starting later is normally regarded as a handicap, not the road to success. To be seen as the world’s best we should now be contributing to the development of more advanced reactor systems and new methods of reprocessing to re-use the uranium discharged from present generation of reactors. At present we are partners in the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) on the same basis as countries such as Jordan. Instead our boasted expertise is in shutting reactors down and decommissioning them – hardly on course to be seen as the world’s best.

It is an ambitious vision for a nation which has not built a new nuclear power station for so very long. Only too true.

UK nuclear is beginning a renaissance. We can but hope.

Sellafield sites
RWE npower, the German owned UK utility, has acquired options on two sites in Cumbria. Both are located on coastal farmland, one is close to the Sellafield site. The utility group is said to have begun discussion with local groups on possible nuclear power plant projects. RWE npower has entered the two sites into the government’s Strategic Sitting Assessment.

RWE npower and the UK subsidiary of the other German energy group E,ON UK, have also recently formed a joint venture which is seeking to buy land from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority at Wylfa, Oldbury and Bradwell. They are talking about installing at least 6 GWe of capacity.

Meanwhile Electricite de France is seeking to build four large EPRs at British Energy sites in the UK. Although E,ON had previously signed an agreement with the French supplyer, Areva, which would alow it also to use the EPR design there may be some friction caused by the recent split between Siemens and Areva and the German group may favour the Westinghouse AP-1000.