The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has issued a consultation document on its strategy. But it does not even mention recycle. This should be a consideration for anybody dealing with waste. And in the nuclear case it is so obvious and beneficial. We urge our readers to contribute to the consultation (write to Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Herdus House, Westlakes Science & Technology Park, Moor Row, Cumbria, CA24 3HU or
before 24th November). Tell them about recycle.We fully realise that the NDA is restricted by government policy but in a case like this they should be seeking to change it.
The consultation document talks about finding safe long term storage for spent fuel until we have a repository where we can throw it away. It says that as soon as they complete their present contracts they will “cease reprocessing at THORP.” But we should using the THORP plant, which we used to be so proud of, to extract the plutonium and the vast energy potential that it represents. If they hate the word reprocessing so much let them call it the Thermal Oxide Recycle Plant. By incorporating the Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) – which the French are now getting to work – they can go all the way to producing fuel for reactors. The best place for plutonium – and the associated americium – is back in a reactor where no terrorist will dare to tread. It will be reduced to fission products with a relatively short half life and they can be put in safe long term storage in blocks of glass. In one to three hundred years they will be less radioactive than the uranium from which they were produced.
The operators of nuclear power plants will have to be persuaded to use MOX fuel but since Electricite de France now owns British Energy they might be sympathetic. After all they have been doing it in France for years and making a good profit. But we only have one PWR at Sizewell B.Yes. But as we have pointed out several times you can use MOX in an Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR). Look back to 1980-81 when the last run of the Windscale AGR before they started pulling it apart included some plutonium fuel.
(We trust that the NDA still has the AEA reports from 1981 and that they have not burnt them all.) This proved the technical possibility but at that time uranium and enrichment prices were so low that MOX fuel could not compete with new fuel. But now 30 years later the price of uranium is ten time higher and the price of enrichment is ten times higher.
You will not be able to use all the plutonium in one MOX recycle but it still produces an eight fold reduction in the amount of spent fuel. (It takes the plutonium from eight spent fuel elements to make one MOX element.) That should be enough to start with but of course we can go so much further if we re-invent the fast reactor. This would start to make inroads into the large stockpile of depleted uranium which the DNA is storing in rows of drums in a warehouse at Capenhurst. The energy potential of this uranium is vast.
An alternative to the fast reactor to produce the necessary flux of fast neutron is a fusion reactor.
The DNA is not only considering spending money on safe long term storage of spent fuel. They have nearly 100 te of plutonium already separated for which they say they need a new store. This is crass stupidity.We don’t want to store it we want to use it. Now.
We are doing it for the Japanese why can’t we do the same with British material. Recycle is a win, win, win, win situation. The first win is to be able to tell the public that we can recycle nuclear “waste.” The second win is that it produces 25% to 30% more energy which we desperately need. The third win is the reduction in the volume by a factor of eight. The fourth win is that the fission product waste left would be no more harmful than uranium after only one to three hundred years.
We know that government policy currently rejects reprocessing but the government is wrong and needs to be told so. The NDA should be out selling the skilled services it has at THORP. It should have paid off the cost of building the plant with its foreign contracts so now they can offer reprocessing (recycle) at a much lower price. In the next year or so the US will have to start recycle having abandoned Yucca Mountain so there are some good potential contracts to get started on. The French are showing the way with spent fuel from 58 PWRs going to La Hague for reprocessing andMOX recycling leaving them with no large surplus of separated plutonium.
Dealing with the waste
The whole waste ‘problem’ is largely of our own making. This can be clearly seen by the experience in Sweden and Finland. In Sweden the first proposals which sought to bury the waste deep underground in a remote rural area aroused fierce opposition particularly among the small number of local inhabitants who by self-selection, since they had chosen to live in a rural area, were not particularly enamoured of industrial urban developments.
A second attempt focused on a location where previous mining activities had been closed down.With the possibility of regenerating a now depressed community this gained some, but not a majority, of local support. The final choice was between the established nuclear power sites at Oskarshamn and . Forsmark, where the contribution of the nuclear industry to their growing prosperity is valued and recognised by the local communities. This led to the hitherto unimaginable situation where the two communities were competing to host the repository. It was finally placed with Forsmark and preparatory work is now proceeding. As a consequence in Sweden the issue of ‘what about the waste’ is largely defused. The experience in Finland was similar. Posiva, the agency charged with finding a waste disposal site, spent some years going around the country, stirring up alarm and opposition wherever they went, before settling on the obvious choice of the power station site Olkiluoto.
We seem to be making the same mistake. Placing a repository in an hitherto unspoilt remote location will always, and quite rightly, arouse opposition.Asite at Sellafield, next to the reprocessing plant, would have been most sensible, but unfortunately this was rejected on possibly dubious arguments that the geology of the area might not be perfect.
The responsibility with dealing with the waste should rest with the industry which has produced it, not shuffled off to a separate agency.
Spending some years searching the country for a suitable geological site may provide a pleasant and remunerative occupation for the NDA, but as experience in Sweden and Finland has shown it will not provide a solution.
Vietnam going for 14 The latest country to announce a large nuclear power programme is Vietnam. A plan released on 23rd June includes 14 reactors by 2030. Initially the programme is likely to use Russian plants of around 1000 MWe until 2025 and then the size may be increased to 1500 or 1600MWe. By 2030 they could be producing 10% of the country’s electricity.
The programme has the blessing of Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and has also been approved by the National Assembly. The first unit will be sited at Phuoc Dinh in Ninh Thuan Province and should be operational by 2015. A second unit will follow by 2021 and two more in 2023 and 2024.Another four units are planned for a site at Vinh Hai to come on line between 2021 and 2024. Vietnam hopes to gradually raise the domestic input of the projects to 30% or 40%.
Looking back and forward
Let’s go back ten or so years. We could have had Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C for roughly half the price being quoted today. And today we would have two stations each producing at least half a billion pounds worth of electricity per year. But what did we do? We built gas fired stations to use up the natural gas coming from under the North Sea.
Today we are paying ten times as much for gas - if we can find it.
What are the lessons? First: one should not be afraid of the high capital costs of nuclear power. Second: fossil fuel prices are bound to rise while nuclear fuel costs remain stable and a low proportion of the generating costs. So what do we want to see in the next ten years? New nuclear stations which will have cost half the price being quoted at that future time. And two stations producing about two billion pounds worth of electricity.
Fortunately we have Electricite de France (EDF) willing and able to provide the upfront money. We have to look back twenty years to see why EDF can afford to be so generous. They built 58 PWRs and now produce nearly 80% of their electricity from low cost, and clean, nuclear power. They had no coal, no oil and no gas and so “no choice” in the words of Walter Marshall. Their annual accounts looked terrible at the time with massive debts. But now that has been paid off and they are laughing all the way to the bank. They could even waste a huge amount of money abandoning the SuperPhoenix fast reactor.
The French can even be saved the cost of nuclear fuel if only our government will change its policy.We have enough separated plutonium – about 100 te – to fuel two large PWRs for their entire 60 year life. The reprocessing costs have been paid and it only requires getting the Sellafield MOX Plant operating – something which is now being done by the French. They will not have to buy any uranium at nearly ten times the price of ten years ago and no enrichment cost also up about ten times on a few years back. In the UK we can only look enviously at the French determination to capture one quarter of the expanding world nuclear market. To the shame of the last government, influenced by the environmental lobby and the anti -nuclear prejudice of key ministers, they sold off our nuclear companies and in effect destroyed British Energy, which has now been taken over by EDF.
There could however still be an opportunity to strike into new territory by developing the advanced technology that will be needed for the coming era of the fast and high temperature reactors. This could include the development of new reprocessing technologies and advanced fuel cycles, as well as more advanced uranium enrichment processes such as laser enrichment.At one stage we were making effective progress with the fast reactor at Dounreay, but this was abandoned by an earlier Conservative government.
Other countries, including the Czech Republic and even Jordan, are already taking up the challenge. But who is there here to take the initiative and provide the finance to establish a new nuclear research centre? The Government seems instead to be totally committed to the intermittent and low energy density technologies of wind and wave.
l’Equipe France
In response to a request from President Sarkozy, Francois Roussely, the honorary president of EDF, has set out the views of EDF on the development of nuclear power in France.
Most of the document is taken up with a discussion of the French nuclear power industry which employs some 200,000 people directly and indirectly.
The 4 major companies are: EDF which with 58 reactors in France and now 15 in the UK has, since the 1970’s, accumulated an unrivalled experience of over 1000 reactor years of operation: AREVA for all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle, the supply of steam generators and the reactor island as well as in the service and maintenance of the stations; it estimates that it meets some 20% of the present world market for the nuclear fuel cycle and services: ALSTOM, now one of the world leaders for the supply of the conventional electrical generation island for PWRs and BWRs, meets about 30% of the world market: and BOUYGUES et VINCI for civil engineering. These main companies are supported by some 20 smaller companies in which about 200 specialist nuclear workers play an essential role. In addition the group GDF-Suez now owns and operates 7 stations in Belgium.
This industrial effort is backed by the research organisation the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux energies alternatives (CEA), the safety organization ASN (Autorité de sûreté nucléaire), the radioprotection institute IRSN, and ANDRA for the management of nuclear wastes.
The immediate and most pressing problem to be faced is the delays and cost increases now being experienced at Olkiluoto in Finland and Flamanville-3. EDF points out that it is AREVA’s responsibility to analyse the causes and ensure that the experience gained can be applied to the new stations expected for Penly-3 and in the UK. Other tasks are to ensure that lifetimes of over 50 and preferably 60 years can be achieved. EDF also points out the need to improve the operating performance of the French stations where, contrary to the general world experience, load factors in recent years have been falling, not rising.
The future for French exports is seen against the expectation of a nuclear renaissance with the present world nuclear capacity expected to increase from some 375 GWe in 440 operating reactors, with the construction or replacement of between 175 to 520 GWe by 2030. To meet the 2030 expectation the present rate of new construction, now of the order of 10 GWe/year, could be doubled or tripled. In this, with a determined effort, France could have the ambition to take a quarter of the market amounting to some 5 to 6 GWe a year. To this market the French now offer the EPR, a 3rd generation 1500 MW PWR as its principal export model. But Roussely expressed concern over the complexity of the EPR design, with the redundancy of a number of safety features, the containment and the core catcher, which have added to the cost and in part explain some of the difficulties in Finland and Flamanville. EDF then proposes to seek an optimization of the design, working together withAREVAand the safety authoritiesASN to ensure that safety is not compromised. Roussely also recognizes the need for a wider variety of stations of different outputs to meet the requirements of different countries. To this endAREVAhas developed ATMEA 1, a 1000 or 1150 MW PWR in cooperation with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.Arange of smaller reactors is also being developed in cooperation with foreign partners.
To achieve its expansion at home and overseas Roussely urges that the State should take a more active role with the formation of a Ministry or Secretariat General of Energy to ensure the financing and execution of the programme and to provide an organization that could, in the name of all, discuss with potential clients how their needs might best be met.
For new projects EDF would, when appropriate, take a central role as “l’architecte ensemblier de l’Equipe France”, organizing the progress of construction. This will require a closer cooperation between EDF and AREVA which offers the whole range from the design and construction of the nuclear island to the fuel cycle services from the mine to reprocessing. The two, largely state-owned companies, are already closely linked – AREVAis the principal supplier to EDF and EDF isAREVA’s largest customer. The report also considers the financing of nuclear stations where the principal factors are the costs of construction and the interest rates. Construction costs can be brought down by reducing the construction time, standardisation of design, and the construction of several units on the same site.
The importance of research requires a strategic national plan devised by government and the main industries to be carried out in the main by the CEA. The report refers to the Astrid project. Astrid (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration) is a 600MWe prototype which could be developed by about 2050. It will have a high fuel burn-up including the minor actinides in the fuel elements. The Astrid programme includes development of the reactor itself and associated fuel cycle facilities. Cooperation with other countries is also being sought.
Peak oil
A leaked report from the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank for the German military, warns of the political and economic consequences if demand for oil exceeds supply.With signs that shortages are already appearing, the full consequences and impact on security could appear in 15-30 years time Apocalyptic in tone, this report from an authoritative military body goes much further than previous peak oil warnings in suggesting that democracy itself could be at risk as ideological and extremist alternatives replace existing forms of government leading in extreme cases to open conflict. Industrial society is based on oil. As some 95% of all industrial manufactured products depend on oil, price shocks could be expected throughout the whole industrial supply chain. The global economic system and market oriented national economies could collapse, to be replaced by controlled economies with government rationing and allocation of imported goods, the setting of production schedules and coercion measures. Investment will decline and debt service will be challenged, leading to a crash in financial markets, accompanied by a loss of trust in currencies and a break-up of supply chains – because trade is no longer possible. This would in turn lead to the collapse of economies, mass unemployment, government defaults and infrastructure breakdowns, ultimately followed by famines and total system collapse.
The proportion of oil traded freely will fall as more oil is traded through bi-national contracts. Shortages will lead to strong global competition for a declining resource. The relative importance of the oil producing countries especially in theMiddle East and North Africa will increase, leading to serious political and economic crises. States dependent on oil imports will be forced to adopt more pragmatic policies with regard to the oil producers as political priorities will be subordinate to the overriding concern of securing energy supplies. As an example Germany’s support for Israel could be reviewed in the light of appeasing the Arab states. Relations with Russia which supplies 35% of German oil imports and 37% of natural gas imports could be of particular concern.
The emergence of this report reinforces claims in the Guardian that the Ministry of Defence together with the DECC and the Bank of England is carrying out a similar review - claims which are denied by the DECC which publicly still continues to deny that oil and gas supplies are at risk.
It is not surprising that the military should be particularly concerned about oil shortage.
Military operations are highly dependent on oil. One comment on the German report suggests that the US military with its global network of bases, and operations in Afghanistan and Iraq is the world’s largest single oil consuming entity.
German life extensions
Whether this was the intention or not it is clear that the leaking of the Bundeswehr report, emphasising the precariousness of Germany’s dependence on foreign oil, will lend powerful support to Angela Merkel’s controversial proposal – yet to be ratified by Parliament - to allow a life extension for Germany’s 17 nuclear plants, which would otherwise have had to be shut down under the agreement with the previous government after operating for an average lifetime of 32 years. Stations built before 1980 will now be allowed to operate for a 40 year total lifetime and newer stations for up to 46 years. Merkel’s proposal is fiercely contested by the political opposition and environmental lobbies, and could be defeated.
In return the nuclear companies are to pay € 15 billion to fund new research into renewable energies. In taking money from nuclear power generators – in effect a tax on nuclear power - Germany is following the example of Sweden which already taxes nuclear electricity at about 0.67 euro-cents/kWh. This exposes that nonsense of the Government’s often repeated mantra that nuclear power must not be subsidised. The opposite is the case - nuclear power is seen as a lucrative source of revenue.
CPR-1000 critical
The first 1000 MWe unit designed by China Guangdong Nuclear Holding Corporation (CGNHC) went critical as Ling Ao-3 on the 10th June. It follows 300 and 600 MWe indigenous designs and is similar to the two Framatome (now Areva) units operating at Ling Ao.
Ling Ao-3 is due to start commercial operation in October. Cold functional testing of another unit – Ling Ao-4 – started in May and will follow closely. CGNHC now claims to be building more CPR-1000 units at four sites in China.
Illusion of alternative energies
The need for nuclear power will never be fully accepted as long as there is a widespread, but misplaced, belief that the energy requirements of a modern industrial society can be met by the so-called green alternative energies – wind, solar, waves, biomass, fuel cells.
These are not only very costly but suffer from severe limitations to their availability and reliability, in particular as secure sources of electricity. These limitations include:
• Available resources – Those of the alternatives which rely on adequate supplies of rare elements such as platinum, palladium, gallium , indium and lithium may find that known sources of supply are limited. Resources of indium for thin film solar-voltaic panels could be exhausted within 13 years. China, now the source of over 95% of the rare earth neodymium, used in the magnets for wind power turbines, has imposed restrictions on the export of these elements.
• Intermittency – Modern society requires electricity to be available on demand at all times. Solar and wind are only available when the sun shines and the wind blows. Over the course of a year photovoltaic systems are only fully available for only about 12-19% of the time; wind for between 20-40%. As an alternative to back up supply from fossil fuels it is argued that interconnection over a wider area could be a means of evening out intermittency. But this requires a degree of coordination between different countries that may not be available and agreement over the price of surplus wind. Another alternative is the possible development of energy storage with compressed air, batteries, molten salt heat storage, etc but these, even if an adequate solution is found, would involve some energy losses and add to the costs. Energy density – The energy density is the amount of energy per unit of mass or volume. Coal provided twice that of wood, petroleum twice that of coal. As a consequence wood fuel was displaced by coal, and coal is now being displaced by oil and gas. A consequence of low energy density is that larger amounts of material or resource are required to provide the same amount of energy than for a denser alternative.As alternative energies are less dense than fossil fuels larger amounts of land are needed. A 1000 MWe coal plant occupies 1- 4 sq km; the same output from a solar array requires 20 - 50 sq km; a wind farm 50 - 150 sq km; and for biomass some 4000 - 6000 sq km.
The above comments, taken from an American publication the Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises (which does not seem to have heard of nuclear power) shows that the alternative energies have little to offer. But this has not dampened the enthusiasm for wind and wave power of Chris Huhne the Minister for Energy and Climate Change. On 5th July, announcing grants of £10 million to UK companies he said “Offshore wind will be very significant in the energy mix as we move to low carbon, sustainable energy supplies. The UK has a wealth of natural resource and coast lines for offshore wind.We are already world leaders in building offshore wind but we must do much, much more. Offshore wind will be very significant in the energy mix as we move to low carbon, sustainable energy supplies.” To claim world leadership in an expensive and unreliable technology may just imply that this is a competition that other countries may be too sensible to enter.Afurther claim by Huhne that “These investments can …. help lower costs to consumers.” is quite clearly wrong. On the DECC’s own figures offshore wind is some two to three times more expensive than nuclear electricity.
This view seems to be based on the assumption that the subsidies to alternative energies through the Renewable Obligation, paid for by the consumer, do not count as a part of the cost, as Huhne seems to believe when he stated that “Thanks to the Renewables Obligation onshore wind has become cost-competitive.”
Why subsidise wind ? (2)
The news that theMafia are involved in the rapid growth of wind farms in Sicily is hardly surprising. The large subsidies paid to wind developers make the renewable industries a target for corruption and money laundering.Attracted by the prospect of generous grants designed to boost the use of alternative energies, the so-called "eco Mafia" has begun fraudulently creaming off millions of euros from both the Italian government and the European Union. As an Italian campaigner has pointed out "Nothing earns more than a wind farm… anything that creates wealth interests the Mafia." But it is not just Italian criminals who have spotted the potential for corruption. Recent research by Kroll, the international corporate security firm, has discovered examples all over Europe of so-called "clean energy" schemes being used to line criminals' pockets. "A lot of people want to jump on board a sure-fire revenue spinner. I wouldn't say the entire sector is corrupt, but there is a small percentage of corrupt projects." In attempting to meet the EU target for renewables, large sums are given out in loans and grants, amounting it is said to an average of €5 billion (£4.1 billion) a year. This allows wind farm developers to claim generous premiums for every unit of electricity they generate, costs which ultimately are met by the electricity consumer.
If wind farms cannot compete with other forms of electricity generation, and in particular with nuclear power which is also a carbon-free source, they should not be subsidised. The subsidies are an unnecessary burden on the consumer. They should be abolished.
