No, No, NO!

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) – about the last organization in the UK to have ‘nuclear’ in its name – is considering abandoning the Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP). This is the £600 million pound plant built by former BNFL which was to have been used for the recycle of the small component of nuclear waste that has a 24 000 year half life. It would have converted plutonium and depleted uranium into mixed plutonium/uranium oxide (MOX) fuel. Originally the plant had orders from the Japanese but BNFL blotted its copy book with some false records produced in a quality control operation in an earlier prototype plant. Recently a plant in the south of France called MELOX delivered a second large batch ofMOX for Japan. The SMP has meanwhile been completing small orders from Switzerland and Germany.

Why not from the UK?We have the Sizewell B PWR and several AGRs in which the recycle of MOX would be profitable. There would be a great advantage in diminishing the stockpile of separated plutonium that we already have from reprocessing activities at Sellafield. It has been estimated that there is enough plutonium to fuel two giant 1600 MWe EPRs or three 1000 MWe AP-1000s for their entire 60 year design life times. That’s a heck of a lot of energy just waiting to be used. Inside a reactor producing power is the safest place on earth to recycle nuclear waste. Of course you would still produce some spent (used) MOX fuel but it would only be one eighth of the volume of the uranium fuel used at the outset. And you can still recycle again in today’s reactors or use it in re-invented fast breeder reactors.

There are questions about the economics. Well put them to the French and Japanese who are pushing ahead with recycle of waste. They do not share the pessimism of the British which is based on figures produced ten and more years ago when uranium and enrichment costs were ten times lower than today and oil and gas prices were only a fraction of today’s cost.

They object that they would need to spend some more money on the SMP. Well spend it then, though we don’t know what on. It was perfectly adequate when visited shortly before commissioning.

There is the question of americium-241 produced from the decay of plutonium. This is a strong gamma ray emitter and reduces the amount of plutonium. But this is nothing new. It can be chemically polished from the plutonium or one can put up with the extra radiation. Either way there is an incentive to get a move on with the recycle.

The best hope is that the French will produce some more common sense on the question of recycle. They now own the utility British Energy and Areva from France is part of the NuclearManagement Partners consortium which won a contract to manage Sellafield for the next five years. Will this be enough to hold back the NDA who are just waiting for THORP to complete its last few reprocessing orders before they start pulling that plant down.

Over 90 percent
In a survey of nuclear performance byMichael Blake in the publication Nuclear News he reveals that the 104 reactors in the US achieved a remarkable 90.6% capacity factor for the past three year period. The analysis looks at three year intervals because many reactors now shut down for fuelling only once every 18 months or two years.

In fact for the two previous periods of three years the average capacity factor was 89%. This compares with a low for the period 1982 to 1984 of 59.71% and since then there has been steady improvement to the latest record level. The top quartile of reactors actually achieved 91.13% and the bottom quartile was only 87.82%.

These figures show the effect of a determined effort by US operators to achieve excellence. It is worth comparing with the performance of off shore wind generators presented below which is a dismal average of 25%. And the 75% of time that they were not available was unplanned.You cannot tell when the wind is going to blow or not blow. By contrast the 10% of time when nuclear plants are not available is mostly for planned maintenance which is carried out at times of low demand. Only about 1% to 2% is due to unplanned shut downs.

Jordan getting ready

The first quarter in 2011 has been suggested as the date by which Jordan will have selected the site for its first nuclear power plant and by that date it will probably have chosen the technology to be used. Under the plan Jordan expects to be producing nuclear electricity, possibly with some nuclear desalination, by 2018.

Legislation was passed in 2008 setting up an independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission which separates the regulation of nuclear power from the Jordan Atomic Energy Commission. Four commissioners have been appointed.

European nuclear safety directive
One of the last acts of the present European Parliament’s committee responsible for energy was to approve a report on the Commission’s proposal for a directive setting up community framework for nuclear safety. This has been an item of uncompleted business over a number of years. The vote in committee was greatly assisted by the sub-group of the European Nuclear Energy Forum on harmonisation A cross party group of members, led by Spanish member Arego Vidal Quadras, brought forward a series of amendments based on the views of the EF sub-group, and all of these were approved by the committee.

The directive is by no means the final word, but after several years of negotiations it can be seen as a good starting point towards European standards. Of note is the paragraph on the sharing best practice among regulatory authorities.

As is usual when nuclear issues are under discussion, the Greens did everything they could to prevent the approval of a directive. They did their best – unsuccessfully – to reject the directive entirely and when that was unsuccessful, to propose to postpone the vote. Again, they were unsuccessful. It is disturbing that the consistent attitude of the Greens is to obstruct measures to improve safety and to create an atmosphere where the public are led to believe that safety standards are declining.

In seeking to undermine this directive, they advanced the opinion that “as a general trend the safety margins of nuclear facilities decrease as they approach the end of their design lives”. It is easy to see how this can be accepted by a public with little detailed knowledge of how the safety system operates. It is, of course, all part of a persistent effort to create alarm and fear. Fortunately, in this case their efforts were thrown back in their faces, but they never stop trying.

The European Parliament elected in 2004 comes to a formal end in July. It has been notable in being the first Parliament since 1989 to take a positive view of the role that nuclear power has to play in achieving the EU objectives of security of supply, lower carbon dioxide emissions and competitive costs. It is to be hoped that the next Parliament will build on this work.

Off shore wind
A press release from the DECC of March 30 states that seven offshore wind farms with a capacity of 598 MWe are now in operation with a further five under construction adding another 444 MWe to give a total capacity of 1042 MWe in operation by the end of this year. Another eight projects, totaling over 3 GWe of generating capacity, have been consented and are in pre-construction.

Looking further ahead the Government, to meet its commitment to generate some 30-40% of electricity from renewable energies by 2020, plans to rely on offshore wind and suggests that a further 5000 -7000 offshore wind turbines of 3.6 -5 MWe should be built. To this end they have made £92 million available under the Offshore Wind Capital Grants scheme, with a further £10 million from the New Opportunities Fund to give a total of £102 million for the first three rounds. Of this £62 million has already been distributed under the first two rounds. This is in addition to the large subsidies paid through the Renewable Obligation certificates for the electricity generated.

This confidence in offshore wind may be misplaced. The performance of the UK’s first seven offshore wind farms has so far not lived up to expectations, with one exception the average annual load factors have been around 25%. The following figures give the annual percentage load factors for offshore farms that have been operating for at least a full year. (from the BERR Offshore Wind Capital Grants Scheme, and REF Renewable Energy data)

                                                          2003    2004    2005    2006    2007

Barrow – 30 x 3 MWe                                                                              25.1

Blyth 1 – 1 x 2 MWe                              16.2      26.5     8.8        2.1       0

Blyth 2 – 2 x 2 MWe                                -           -           -            -       -

BurboBank – 30 x 3 MWe                                                                        24.0

Kentish Flats – 30 x 3 MWe                                                         28.8     25.0

North Hoyle – 30 x 2 MWe                                 29.6      36.1     35.8     35.0

Scroby Sands – 30 x 2 MWe                                            29.0     24.5     27.6

Government statistics give the offshore wind generation in 2007 as 783 GW hours with a load factor of 25.6%. This is minute compared with the total electricity supply of just over 400 000 GW hours

The BERR reports show that the best performing site, North Hoyle, 4-5 miles of the north coast ofWales with 30 x 2 MWe Vestas turbines, was built in 2003 for a total cost of £81 million – £1.35 million per installedMWe – and with a capital grant of £10 million. For the year July 06 - June 07 the average availability – time free from faults and capable of operating was 87.4% , but with the variations in wind speed the total generation of 184 737MWh gives an average load factor of 35%with lows of 15%in the summer months and a peak of 62% in January 07. Operating costs for the year were 1.51 p/kWh. (www. berr.gov.uk/files/47340)

While it can be, optimistically, expected that the many of the faults listed – gear box problems feature prominently – are initial teething troubles and that future performance will improve the fact that those sites with the larger 3 MWe turbines show lower load factors suggests that the future expansion with even larger 5 MWe turbines may throw up more problems. And if the warnings of St Mathew on the folly of building on sand are taken seriously there could also be difficulties with some of the offshore sites. (Mathew 7 v 24-27). Proposals for the future development of completely novel vertical axis wind machines of much larger power output could indicate fears that the present horizontal axis designs may not prove satisfactory. With offshore wind farms still at a preliminary stage of development it would be unwise to rely for a substantial share of electricity on a technology which still has to be fully proven.

The difference between the highest and lowest performers, North Hoyle and Burbo Bank seems to be due to technical faults. The average wind speed at North Hoyle of 8.7 m/sec was slightly lower than the 9 m/sec at Burbo Bank but the availability of the newer 3 MWe Vestas V90 turbines at Burbo Bank was only 67% compared with 87.4% of the 2 MWe Vestas V80 turbines at North Hoyle.

A potentially more damaging uncertainty than the variation in load factor is the extent of the operating life of an offshore turbine, particularly under the more severe weather conditions and rising sea levels that might be expected as a consequence of climate change. It seems to be generally assumed that the expected lifetime of an offshore turbine will be about 20 years. But until we are nearer that time – ie by 2015 – a 20 year life is not something to be relied on. Even if a 20 year life were achievable it contrasts poorly with the 50 - 60 year life achieved for many nuclear power stations, which can also operate with load factors of 80-90%.

The Government may believe that it has little to lose. As the Lords report on the economics of renewable energy 2 nuclear issues pointed out intermittent wind energy has to be supported by back up fossil fuel supply, so if the output from the offshore wind farms is lower than expected the difference can always be made up by a greater output from the backup plant. This however will lead to an increase in carbon emissions negating the whole purpose of the wind power programme.

The latest announcement from the DECC is that the one GWe LondonArray, off the Kent and Essex coast, is now to go ahead and is expected to come into operation by 2012. It will be “a flagship project in our drive to cut emissions by 80% by 2050 and meet future energy needs”. Yet the Government itself knows and accepts that carbon-free electricity can be generated more securely and at a lower cost from nuclear power, and without the additional carbon emissions from the back-up plant that must be brought in to support the variable wind output. And by 2050, even assuming a 20 year operational life can be obtained, the “flagship” will have sunk beneath the waves – the turbines of the London Array may have had to be replaced at least twice; a nuclear station built in 2012 would by 2050 still be in operation with perhaps 20 years of further life to come.

But why gamble on the hope that offshore wind farms may be built and operate as planned for a 20 year life rather than rely on the assured performance of nuclear stations to deliver a secure predictable and reliable electricity supply at lower cost and without the need for backup supply which will, most probably, come from fossil stations with the atendant increase in carbon emissions.

Deliberate deception

Every announcement of a new wind farm project includes a statement that it will supply the electricity needs of an impressively large number of households. The latest example is the 1 GWe London Array which a DECC press release of 12th May tells us “will be the biggest offshore wind farm in the world, generating enough electricity to power a quarter of Greater London’s homes”. This in itself is an exaggeration and seems to be based on an unrealistic expectation of the load factor that might be achieved. On the still optimistic assumption that this could be around 28.5% (2500 hours) the annual output of the LondonArray would be 2 500 000 MWh.With the average household use of 4.39 MWh of electricity per year this would in theory be equivalent to the consumption of 570 000 households. But, as council tax returns give the number of London households as 3.3 million, the 570 000 homes is only 15% of Greater London homes not the 25% claimed.

This is only a minor quibble, the greater deception comes in the implied assumption the electricity from the London Array will, on its own, be sufficient to power a quarter of households. As with all intermittent sources there will be periods when the output from the London Array will fall to zero; in summer months the output may be only 10-20% of the full capacity rising perhaps to 60% in the windier winter months – when of course domestic demand will be higher. As the House of Lords Committee on Economics of Nov 2008 pointed out in their report on the Economics of Renewables – wind generation needs to be viewed largely as additional capacity to that which will need to be provided, in any event, by more reliable means (paragraph 230). To imply that the London Array – or any other wind farm – will on its own power a given number of homes is a deliberate deception.

Boon of Burden?

"Domestic consumption is however only about one third of total electricity consumption. In relation to the present UK electricity supply of 400 000 GWh the estimated 2 500 000 MWh of the London Array would amount to only 0.6% of total supply.

But at what cost? In addition to the figure of £92/MWh for offshore wind given by theMinister,Mike O’Brien, last November there is the subsidy of 1.5 ROC’s perMWh.With the ‘worth’ of an ROC (the buyout payment plus the share of the buyout fund redistribution) given by OFGEM as £52.95 in 2007 (up by just over £10 from two years earlier) the ROC subsidy which the London Array could collect when fully operational could be up to £100/MWh, to give a total cost to the consumer of almost £200/MWh.

This is an absurd price to pay when carbon-free electricity can be obtained, securely, not intermittently, from nuclear power for one/fifth of the cost, at £38/MWh (O’Brien’s figure), and without the need for additional back up fossil fuel supply. On these figures how can any further expansion of the offshore wind programme be justified?

When they become aware of these costs will the DECC’s hypothetical quarter of Greater Londoners regard the London Array as a boon, or a burden imposed on them by the Government’s strange obsession with off-shore wind.

What about the waste? ........... recycle it

This would be the most acceptable answer for most kinds of waste so why not nuclear waste? We know how to do it. It can now be done economically.And we get 25 to 30 percent more energy. Much better than CO2 waste from burning carbohydrates where all we can do with the 9 billion tones of it each year is discharge it into the atmosphere.

The French have been recycling nuclear waste for years. They put up with a slight economic penalty when uranium prices were exceptionally low. Today they are doing it and still producing the cheapest electricity in Europe. So cheap that they make a profitable income exporting large amounts of electricity to all their neighbours – including the British.

The Japanese are just getting started on recycle. They are using a useful stockpile of plutonium from reprocessing over the years in the UK and France but now they are – slowly – commissioning a commercial sized reprocessing plant in Japan and have a MOX fabrication plant as well.

The Germans, Swiss and Belgians have also safely undertakenMOX recycle with material from reprocessing in France and the UK but they have now adopted the crazy US attitude that reprocessing is a dirty word.

The US have the largest potential for recycle with 26 000 te of spent (used) fuel stored at 104 power plant sites around the country. But they decided back in the era of President Carter that reprocessing was a proliferation risk. They were proved wrong by a huge International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE) which took two years to complete and concluded that both recycle and throw away fuel cycles were safe. But still the Americans store spent fuel hoping eventually to dump it in Yucca Mountain. That possibility now looks dead. So now is the time to look again at recycle.

And the UK? We have gone 90% of the way to recycle but stopped at the one point where one could possibly say the risk of proliferation is slightly higher. That is with separated plutonium from reprocessing. Why are we not completing the recycle by putting plutonium into an operating reactor where it would be completely safe?

French not perfect

In case you think we cannot say anything bad about the French we will remind you of their moment of madness. They abandoned the fast breeder reactor just as they had completed building an impressive 1200 MWe plant. This would have allowed them to go ahead with virtually complete recycle of used fuel rather than the eightfold reduction they are achieving with one recycle of MOX. At the time the electricity from the fast reactor was estimated to cost about twice as much as that from their 50 odd light water reactors. But today that factor of two would be nothing compared with other energy prices.

Nuclear ships

A report by the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee on 1st June on carbon dioxide and other emissions from shipping quotes a recent study for the InternationalMaritime Organization (IMO) which estimated that international shipping was responsible for annual emissions of around 843 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2007, or around 3% of total man-made carbon emissions. This puts "international shipping" just after Germany and just before the UK in a league table of emissions sources. Shipping emissions are reported to have doubled since 1990 and by 2050, in the absence of regulations to limit them, they are projected to grow by a factor of 2.4.

Although small this is a significant addition to global emissions, but the international nature of the industry complicates the attempts to regulate any reduction as oceangoing ships buy their fuel from locations all around the world, and burn it (thereby emitting CO2 in journeys between different countries; this makes it difficult to measure and attribute and control their emissions.

In considering the technical measures by which emissions could be reduced the Parliamentary committee, unsurprisingly, gives pride of place to wind assisted schemes, sky sails – “essentially large kites which run out in front of the ship in order to maximise the pull on the ship”– as well as wind turbines, these devices it is claimed could save from 13% up to 57% of the fuel.

Other suggestions included the recovery of waste heat from engines to heat crew quarters, new materials to coat hulls and reduce friction in the water, improved energy efficiency of onboard electrical systems and reduction of speed. Yet the only available, proven technology, nuclear propulsion, is dismissed, quoting a view from the Chamber of Shipping "There have been nuclear cargo ships in the past but I think that has proven not to be acceptable.”

Despite this cavalier view there is considerable experience of nuclear marine propulsion. Past nuclear merchant ships include the US Savannah 1962 – 1972, the German Otto Hahn, launched in 1964 which began operations in 1968, the series of nine Russian icebreakers starting with the Lenin in 1959, as well as the Russian merchant ship Sevmorput operational in 1988 which is now being converted into a nuclear powered oil drilling vessel. There are in addition numerous nuclear powered naval vessels, submarines, aircraft carriers etc. There were over 400 nuclear-powered submarines operational or being built at the end of the Cold War in 1989; today the number is reduced to about 160.

The Otto Hahn in its first four years of operation before her reactor was refueled had covered some 250 000 nautical miles on 22 kilograms of uranium, but in 1979 its nuclear propulsion plant was replaced by a conventional diesel engine. In nine years, she had traveled 650 000 nautical miles on nuclear visiting 33 ports in 22 countries.

Despite this experience a recent study at Newcastle University in 2007 for AEA Energy and Environment concluded that nuclear-powered ships would be expensive to operate, not because of the fuel itself but because of the infrastructure required and waste disposal costs.With public perception and doubts of safety and general fears of nuclear technology nuclear propulsion was not seen as an attractive technology to ship manufacturers.

It was however recognized that while this and other technologies are not currently viable options for reducing carbon emissions from commercial shipping they could become attractive in the future with rising fuel prices, and a favourable regulatory climate. A comparison undertaken between a nuclear and fossil fuel propelled ship showed a gas turbine would emit about one million tonnes of CO2 and fifteen thousand tonnes of other gases per year. In contrast the nuclear powered ship would produce a few tons of solid spent (used) fuel per year, of which the greater part could be recycled leaving less than a ton per ship-year that will be confined for long-term decay. This Newcastle study also refers to the experience of a French submarine with a 48MWreactor which needed refueling only every 30 years.

The increase in oil prices also favours nuclear propulsion. A report published in the Journal of Marine Technology in 2002 put the fuel cost for a gas turbine ‘Fastship’ at 34.6% of the operating cost compared with the nuclear fuel cost of only 5%. It further noted that if the gas cost were to increase by 30% then all profitability from the trip would disappear; if uranium costs doubled the operational cost of a nuclear ‘FastShip’would rise by less than 1%.

The House of Commons committee was rightly concerned about what can only be called the passivity of the shipping industry. They were told by the Chamber of Shipping that "the shipping industry is absolutely committed to reducing its carbon footprint", but that "in absolute terms, emissions from shipping will grow steadily for the foreseeable future". The House of Commons committee “deplored” the delays in reaching a global agreement to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from shipping and urged the government together with the European Union to achieve swift practical action.

The Committee noted that the Department of Transport has already commissioned a Shipping Emissions Abatement Techniques Review and recommended that “the Government encourage more research into technologies which offer a genuine alternative to fossil fuels: If shipping is to be decarbonised it needs truly alternative propulsion systems.