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2006 Nuclear Issues v28 02 |
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Written by Nuclear Issues
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Wednesday, 01 February 2006 |
Nuclear Issues is also available as a pdf download
Selling off the nuclear industry
It is reported that BNFL has now sold its Westinghouse nuclear fuel and
reactor division to the Japanese company Toshiba for $5.4 billion; this
is over four times the price paid when BNFL bought Westinghouse in 1999
for $1.1 billion and a year later BNFL/ Westinghouse took over the
nuclear fuel business of the Swedish/Swiss ABB group for a further $485
million. The Westinghouse division has consistently been by far the
largest profit contributor to BNFL group with operating profits of
around £80 million a year.
To sell such a profitable asset a time when an expansion of nuclear power production is expected in a number of countries, to meet the growing calls for reductions in carbon emissions and as doubts grow over the price and availability of oil and gas, may seen surprising. Toshiba, in explaining the high price they were paying, has forecast that the global market for nuclear power would grow by 50 per cent by 2020.
BNFL is a government owned company and the sale might be seen as another example of the Government’s allergic reaction to any possible association with or responsibility for nuclear power. An easrlier example is the requirement placed on British Energy by the DTI under the ‘reconstruction’ package that their half share in the American company AmerGen and their 82.4 per cent share in Bruce Power in Canada had to be sold within months. Under the conditions of a forced sale BE were fortunate to obtain about C$700 million for its Bruce asset. But since the sale Bruce power has reported profits before tax in 2003 and 2004 of C$286 and C$338 almost reaching the sale price, but the lease of Bruce runs for 18 years with a possible further extension of 25 years suggesting that future earnings will far exceed the relatively trivial sum obtained by the sale. The Westinghouse sale seems likely to repeat the pattern where the DTI gives up large future earnings for a modest cash payment.
It is difficult to see any other reason for this irresponsible policy than the overwhelming desire of the Government that it should be disassociated from any nuclear involvement overseas. If this policy of nuclear disengagement is being imposed by the DTI through the influence it can bring on companies such as BNFL it might explain the surprising failure of BNFL/ Westinghouse to make a bid for the recent Finnish power station through its Swedish subsidiary ASEAAtom.
This order was placed with the Franco-German Framatome ANP/Siemens for a 1600 MWe EPR and is being built at the Olkiluoto nuclear site for the Finnish power company TVO. But ASEA-Atom has previously supplied two 840 MWe BWRs to TVO’s Olkiluoto site where they have given an outstanding performance with capacity factors consistently greater than 95 per cent. An all Scandinavian partnership based on a continuation of the same very successful BWR system from the same supplier could have been seen as logical solution, especially as some of the electricity will probably end up in Sweden through the Nordic power grid.
The large gain of almost $4billion for the Government from BNFL’s sale of Westinghouse is in striking contrast to the loss of potential future revenue that will be a consequence of the DTI policy. Despite this the DTI politicians remain in place or take on new responsibilities, while John Taylor, then managing director of BNFL, who was responsible for and had negotaited the acquisition of Westinghouse in 1999 was forced by the DTI to resign some two years later as the scapegoat for the ‘scandal’ of falsification of some secondary manual control checks on the dimensions of some MOX pellets at the demonstration plant. Perhaps some ex-gratia payment should now be made to Taylor.
BNFL's far sighted shareholding in the modular pebble bed project in South Africa also passed to Westinghuse for sale to Toshiba. So the British nuclear industry is now no more.
US talking sense at last
The US government has announced a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). It says that it “.. will work with other nations possessing advanced nuclear technologies to develop new proliferation-resistant recycling technologies in order to produce more energy, reduce waste and minimize proliferation concerns.” In particular it will aim to reduce US dependence on imported fossil fuels by expanding the domestic use of nuclear power and by building new generation nuclear plants.
It’s a bit late in the day to start this but better late than never. France started a nuclear program to reduce its dependence on imported oil and gas back in the 70’s and has effectively reduced its energy consumption for electricity to 80% nuclear and 20% hydro. About the time that France was showing the way, the US was getting all paranoid about the postulated proliferation risk of separated plutonium and was seeking to deny the use of reprocessing technology to itself and others.
Now the US has come to realise that to make a sizable impact with nuclear energy it must use more than the 10% of uranium it digs out of the ground. To do this they are again talking about reprocessing and recycle of most of the nuclear fuel. They are still a little paranoid about pure plutonium being separated from the spent fuel discharged from reactors so they are proposing coprocessing in which unused uranium and plutonium are separated together.
Britain, France and the Soviet Union had said back in the early 70’s that this was a perfectly viable alternative but after a huge International Fuel Cycle Evaluation had dismissed the proliferation risk of a properly safeguarded industry, they decided to continue with their conventional reprocessing industries. Now too Japan has gone the standard way and is just starting up its first commercial reprocessing plant.
But if the US want to develop its laboratory-proven UREX+ process then all well and good. They are also proposing new Advanced Burner (fast) Reactor (ABR) which would burn the recycled fuel efficiently without producing more plutonium than they were consuming. All fine as long as they use a high proportion of the fuel content of uranium rather than throwing it away as spent fuel waste. An important additional virtue of recycling the majority of the fuel is that the waste would be reduced essentially to fission products and would be much smaller in volume than the present plan to dispose of spent fuel elements. Thus the US declares that its repository planned for Yucca Mountain will be adequate for all wastes from all US (and many other) reactors for a very long time.
Very good. Now let’s get on with it. An Engineering Scale Demonstration reprocessing plant is planned for operation in 2011 to prepare the way for a full scale 2000 t/yr plant. An Advanced Burner Test Reactor of 100 to 150 MWe is planned to be operational by about 2014 leading to a second phase standard plant by 2023. Whether all this will be possible before the world descends into chaos remains to be seen but at least somebody is at last thinking in the right direction.
Expecting Disaster
Are we becoming more fearful and aware of risk? The answer for the Western World must be yes. A study “Expecting Disaster” (Center for Risk Research, Stockholm School of Economics, 1994) examined the conflict between two opposing attitudes which can be typified as for or against ‘progress’, a conflict which began in pre-history when the hunter-gatherers were displaced by settled farmers and driven to the edges of the ‘civilised’ world as technology driven social changes led to higher living standards but with a greater social complexity.
Overall technological progress has prevailed, but the opposition has never gone away and at times has even gained the upper hand. After the immense gains, fuelled by coal and then oil, which took us from the land-based medieval culture to our present high energy high technology society a backlash is now apparent, driven by fears that the hyperbolic increase in population exceeds the carrying capacity of the world and is causing irreparable damage to the environment for trivial gains in living standards or quality of life. Warnings and predictions of impending disaster are a powerful weapon to be used to slow down or reverse progress. Rather than a blessing technology is seen as a curse; the root cause of the problems we now face. Claims that these growing problems may be solved by technical advance are dismissed.
The topic of “science under threat” was addressed by Lord May, the retiring president of the Royal Society in his final Anniversary lecture (30 November 2005) when he referred to a “campaign by those whose belief systems impel them to deny or misrepresent the scientific facts”. This leads to a “retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamental unreason”. He argued that the values of enlightenment which have made the world a better place are being replaced by a belief system masquerading as scientific scepticism.
The conflicting views of the scientists/technologists and the fundamentalists of the environmental movement have come to a head over the two major, but now interrelated threats facing the world – global warming and the onset of peak oil. The latter, enforcing reductions in the combustion of hydrocarbons, could moderate the increase in carbon dioxide emissions which are driving climate change – or alternatively lead to a return to coal with an even greater release of carbon dioxide. The question is what, if anything, we can or should we do.
For the environmentalists the solution to both problems lies in a return to a ‘sustainable’ low energy society based largely on renewable energies, the replacement of globalisation by the promotion of localisation, and of ‘industrial’ farming (using oil based fertilisers, pesticides, mechanical cultivation and irrigation) by small scale organic farming. With reduced agricultural output this will necessarily lead to a return towards pre-industrial population levels, but the vital questions of where or how such a reduction might be brought about, and its consequences is ignored.
Climate change
Up to now it is climate change which, as the current disaster scenario, has attracted most attention as a focus of concern. Dramatic pictures of the melting of glaciers and arctic ice sheets have also raised the possibility that the influx of fresh water might slow down or halt the thermo-haline driven Gulf Stream which provides the UK with a temperate climate. The debate has been intensified by James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory, that the world is governed by a selfregulating system operating through myriad feedback systems and that if humanity acts to destabilise the system the earth will readjust in ways that show no regard for human welfare. In his new book “The Revenge of Gaia” Lovelock concludes that an abrupt and radical climatic shift is now unavoidable. Global heating – as he prefers to call it – is set to take its course. Rising sea levels will threaten billions; much of the world’s arable land will be flooded or turned to scrub or desert.
This bleak picture horrifies those who have always presented their low energy societies, based on a combination of wind farms, bio-fuels and organic food, as the route to a desirable, sustainable and happy future.
In contrast Lovelock believes that we need a hi-tech strategy to enable a controlled, rather than a disastrous, retreat from our present over-populated world with its now unavoidable increase in global temperatures.
“Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing so we need the security of a powered descent.” Under these circumstances many of the Green policies are pointless or positively harmful. In particular Lovelock insists that it is folly to reject nuclear power – a source of energy that generates electricity free from carbon emissions that is both efficient and available. Without this recourse to science and technology we face a “global decline into a chaotic world ruled by brutal warlords on a devastated earth.”
Peak oil
A very similar conclusion is reached in a recent book by an American author J H Kunstler, “Long Emergency”, which gives an apocalyptic account of the combined effect of global warming and a decline in world oil and gas production. He warns that this “represents an unprecedented economic crisis that will wreak havoc on national economies, topple governments, alter national boundaries provoke military strife and challenge the continuation of civilized life”.
Rather than a sharply defined peak we may already be entering a bumpy plateau with recurring price rises inducing consequential recessions to damp down demand and price. The longer production stays on this plateau the steeper and more catastrophic the eventual decline. A peak will only be detected once it has passed. It would be sensible, (although, pessimistically, unlikely) if, through world trade talks, some rational system of sharing could be introduced rather than an otherwise inevitable rationing by the price demanded by the oil producing countries before restrictions on supply push the stronger countries to seize by force what they need.
In this Kunstler sees America as most at risk. The extended suburban life, based on what he describes as the Wal-Mart economy, and the transport system of interstate highways, is wholly dependent on plentiful supplies of cheap oil and will simply not be viable if this oil is no longer available. Industrial farming also depends on oil, while with the simultaneous onset of climate change water may not be available for irrigation. Thirty three per cent of all crops in the U.S. are grown on irrigated land. A sea level rise of ten metres would flood about 25 per cent of the U.S. population with the major impact in the Gulf and East coast states. With warmer oceans the number and severity of tropical storms and hurricanes will increase. It is not only America that will be challenged to produce enough food for its own domestic needs by the combined effects of climate change and oil shortage; this will be a world problem. “As regions are stressed by food and water scarcity, by droughts, floods and other weather-related calamities that will destroy homes and communities, those that retain military capability will be tempted to compete for survival by means of aggression.”
Like Lovelock, Kunstler in assessing possible alternatives to oil dismisses wind, solar power and biofuels but is prepared to accept that “nuclear power may be all that stands between what we identify as civilization and its alternatives.”
Security of supply
Unease over the reliability of future energy supply has now been highlighted by President Bush in his State of the Union speech, pointing to America’s addiction to oil, which increasingly will have to be imported from unreliable sources. For the UK the evidence that Russia is prepared to use its gas supply as a political weapon has jolted the previous complacent view that our increasing need for gas imports was secure. Lurking in the background of these concerns is the more alarming concept that world oil production has already, or shortly will, reach a peak at a time when oil demand is only seen as increasing.
It is the growing awareness of the two threats by the Government which must account for the need for the new Energy Review. Although carbon emissions in the UK fell in the years after 1990 this was an effect of the ‘dash for gas’ when a number of older coal-fired power stations were replaced by gas-fired CCGT units. Now as nuclear production falls carbon emissions are rising.
Although much is claimed for renewable energies, endorsed in the previous Energy Review, in reality they are falling far short of expectation. The possibility that wind, solar power etc will supply anything approaching 10 percent of electricity by 2010 is remote.
Despite all the emphasis on increasing efficiency of energy use, energy consumption continues to rise. The talk is now of the large contribution that could come from tidal and wave power. Tide mills were built in Roman times for grinding corn and adopted by some monasteries. But large schemes are either impracticable or uneconomic. Harnessing the Severn barrage was first proposed in 1840, reconsidered by commissions in 1943 and 1978, and dismissed. The concept of underwater turbines (like wind turbines but with the blades moved by tidal currents) has now reached the stage of prototype testing. The DTI has already committed in excess of £20m towards research and development of wave and tidal energy technologies over the last 5 years with a further £50 million for a Marine Renewable Deployment Fund. Of this up to £42 million is allocated towards supporting a number of larger scale precommercial demonstration wave and tidal farms. Optimistically it is believed the first large-scale marine generation farms could begin feeding into the national grid within three years.
Even if the government’s numerical ‘aspirations’ were met (10% by 2010, 15% by 2015 and 20% by 2020) the question of how the remaining 80-90 percent of UK electricity will be generated, if energy usage is not to be very drastically curtailed, has yet to be answered. Fuel imports will rise with up to 80% of gas being imported as well as oil and, having closed down our own mining industry, even coal. Apart from energy security considerations the effect on UK balance of trade could be severe.
Time
Although they forecast the risks facing our high enrgy society, for some these apocalyptic scenarios of impending disaster have come too soon. More time is needed to develop and establish the renewable energies as reliable and practical sources. To balance there are claims that it could take up to 15 years to bring a nuclear station into operation, given the delays in planning procedures, site approval, licensing of designs, public inquiries, and long construction times. This is alarmist. Construction times of around five years have already been demonstrated. Building a new station on an existing site which already has a nuclear site licence should ease any siting problems, while after three lengthy nuclear public inquiries since 1978 (Windscale, Sizewell, and Hinkley Point) there is no need to go over the same ground once again. All possible objections and risks have been thoroughly explored with cross-examination of witnesses from both sides – and rejected.
What about the waste?
Attitudes to waste provide an example of the way in which the promotion of risk is used to oppose new developments. The Government has declared that there must be a ‘solution’ to the waste ‘problem’ before a new programme of nuclear stations is approved. This gives the power of a veto to those opposing nuclear power who exaggerate the quantities and risks of nuclear waste – lumping all wastes together to fill a number of Albert Hall units of measurement, while ignoring that, in these same popular units, the high level waste would only fill car loads. At the same time extreme and improbable geological changes (new ice ages etc) are called on as objections to safe disposal of waste by deep underground burial which might adversely affect our descendents in some far distant future.
On the other hand the waste from burning fossil fuels is freely discharged into the atmosphere. Although the consquent increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is an immediate threat to us and to the next generations, the substitution, wherever possible, of gas, oil and coal by nuclear power is strenuously opposed by those who claim to seek the protection of the environment.
Although little can be done about the carbon emissions from burning oil or gas there are proposals to develop clean coal technology in which the carbon dioxide will be extracted from the flue gases after combustion or separated from the gas stream in a pregasification of coal and then isolated underground. But these have yet to be demonstrated as a practical measure at an acceptable cost. With two atoms of oxygen added to each atom of carbon every ton of carbon burnt produces 3.7 tons of carbon dioxide to be separated out and disposed of. Unlike the very much smaller quantities of radioactive waste, carbon dioxide does not decay over time but will remain a potential threat for ever. Despite this there are suggestions that carbon dioxide could be sequestered in disused coal mines, in depleting oil and gas fields, or under the sea bed, disposal routes which would not be allowed for nuclear.
Transport
A major problem if peak oil starts to bite will be in the road transport sector, where consumption in the UK continues to grow and now takes about 60 per cent of all oil (up from 31 percent in 1970). If rationing by decree or price is ruled out the only solution is in the development of more efficient internal combustion engines and of electric or hybrid vehicles, together with a much greater investment in public transport systems, light rail networks etc, subsidised if necessary to encourage a move away from oil driven vehicles. This will require an increased generation of electricity. To meet this an expansion of nuclear power now seems inevitable, not only in this country but probably for much of the rest of the world. The consequences will require significant international planning and cooperation with a much greater role for the UN IAEA.
Wasted wind
Denmark is rightly regarded as a leader in the development and generation of windpower, which generates about 18-20 percent of the country’s electricity, but it has now been shown that not all the benefits fall to the Danish consumer who pays the extra costs of wind electricity. Over half (55 percent) is exported to neighbouring countries often at a very low price. According to an analysis published in the respected weekly Weekendavisen 4/11 and 11/11 2005 the true fraction of windpower in Danish consumption is only 8.2 percent.
As is well known wind power is only generated when the wind blows and this does not always match the peak periods of electricity consumption. Since priority is given in Denmark to production from CHP plants, mostly fired by natural gas, the surplus wind power has to be sold into the Nordic grid often at the very low market price prevailing at off-peak times. The benefits of carbon dioxide free electricity at a low cost are then enjoyed by Denmark’s Scandinavian neighbours, while the extra costs are borne by the Danish consumer. These extra costs have been estimated at several hundred million DKr a year.
The only external link available to the UK is the cross-Channel cable to France, but this is mainly taken up importing French nuclear electricity. The variability of wind would then somehow have to be accommodated within the UK system. Given the requirements under NETA for the electricity supply companies to make firm bids for their output in advance it is not obvious how this might be managed. The services of a good meteorologist will be worth his or her weight in gold. |
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