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2006 Nuclear Issues v28 05 |
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Written by Nuclear Issues
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Monday, 01 May 2006 |
Nuclear Issues is also available as a pdf download
Recycling the waste
One answer to the often repeated question – But what about the waste? –
is to reuse it. The outline of a future system is given in an article
in the March issue of the IAEA bulletin by Burton Richter (Nobel Prize
in physics 1976 and a former director of the Stanford Linear
Accelerator).
An alternative to once-through fuel cycles, in which some 96 percent of the original uranium in the fuel is discarded as waste, is reprocessing. The separated plutonium can be mixed with some of the recovered uranium and use as Mixed Oxide fuel (MOX). The surplus uranium can be fed to an enrichment plant. The fission fragements and minor actinides could be vitrified for eventual emplacement in a repository.
The next question is what to do with the spent MOX fuel. The plan is to store it unreprocessed until fast reactors are deployed commercially. These reactors can burn a mix of plutonium and uranium-238 and also, in principle, burn all the minor actinides. This makes it possible to create a continuous recycling programme.
The plutonium from the spent MOX fuel is reprocessed; all the plutonium and minor actinides go back into new fuel, and so forth. In principle nothing but fission fragments go to a repository and these only need to be stored for a few hundred years.
Such a continuous recycling system must however await the commercial deployment of fast-spectrum reactors. This should come if the international research effort on the so-called Generation IV reactors is brought to a successful conclusion. The programme includes both gas-cooled and sodium cooled fast reactors which could burn minor actinides and transmute long life fission products. It might also be possible for actinides to be burnt in some of the other systems being studied or even in Light Water reactors.
Meetings of the international GIF group began in 2000; the member countries now include Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Euratom, France, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.
Lessons from Sweden
The experience of Sweden, where about half of the country’s electricity is generated by nuclear power, punctures many of the myths, now being busily promoted at the time of the Energy Review by the veterans of the anti-nuclear movement and echoed by often ill-informed commentators in the media, and those politicians who claim that nuclear power is uneconomic; that a new programme would require large Government subsidies; that the costs of disposing of the waste are so high that again subsidies would be required; and that no commercial company would invest in new plant nuclear plant.
In Sweden the basic cost of nuclear power including capital charges is about 15-18 ore/kWh (1-1.3p/kWh). This includes all the costs of waste and spent fuel disposal in underground repositories and the final decommissioning of the stations (assessed separately for each station) which averages 1 ore/kWh (0.07p/ kWh). In addition far from supporting nuclear power with the subsidies claimed as essential in the UK, the Swedish government has imposed a nuclear tax now set at 122 400 kronor per installed thermal MW per year which amounts to just under 0.4p/kWh. With nuclear generation of some 75 TWh/year the electricity consumers are subsidising the government for the nuclear electricity they use at around £300 million a year.
The Swedish government, largely for the political necessity of maintaining a coalition, still holds to the results of a referendum held in 1980, shortly after the melt down at the Three Mile Island nuclear station in 1979, which determined that the country’s 12 operating nuclear power reactors, should not be replaced but shut down by 2010 assuming alternative sources of power, preferably from renewables, are available by then. Already one of the two reactors at the Barsebäck nuclear station in Southern Sweden has been prematurely closed – resulting in an increase in imports of coal-fired electricity from Denmark.
But times have changed and faced with the threats of global warming and impending shortages of oil and gas public opinion has moved on. According to a poll at the end of last year 33% would accept that nuclear production should continue; 17 % would go further and support construction of new stations. For opponents 24 % would have the stations closed at the end of their lives while only 9% call for all the stations to be closed as soon as possible. More significant are the findings for the political parties. Even 47% of the ruling Social Democrats would accept a continuation of nuclear power with 34% against. Within the opposition Moderate party 69% support nuclear power with only 21% against. The continued opposition of the government can be explained by the need of the ruling Social Democrats on the support of the Green party where as would be expected 69% want a nuclear shut down with only 15% in favour.
The Government could also be reluctant to loose the useful contribution of £300 million a year from the nuclear tax, so a temporary compromise solution has been found. While still forbidding construction of new reactors the government has accepted that the power output of existing stations can increased and that their operating lives can be extended to a total of up to 60 years.
Already upgrades amounting to 460 MWe have already been carried out. Now all three reactors at the Forsmark nuclear power plant are to be upgraded. When completed by 2010, the increase in capacity of 410 MWe will increase power output of the plant by 3.3 billion kWh per year at a cost of 2 billion SEK. Similarly the owners of the Oskarshamn station, E.ON Sweden and the Finnish power company Fortum, (also an important partner in the new Finnish nuclear station) are to increase the capacity of the OKG-3 reactor from 1200 MWe to 1450 MWe giving an increased output of about 20 percent from 9 to 11 TWh/year. The work will be carried out in 2008 at a cost of billon SEK. This will extend the operating life of the station to 60 years. Westinghouse (now sold off by BNFL) will renew some of the internal parts in the reactor and upgrade all safety functions. Alsthom is to adapt the turbine equipment and the electric power system to a higher power output.
Taken together with work already carried out of 460 MWe the new extensions of 1296 MWe, when completed, will bring the total increase in capacity to 1756MWe, the equivalent of two medium sized stations. One assessment summarises the new extensions as
| Unit |
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Output
today
MWe |
Planned
extension
MWe |
Output after
extension
MWe |
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| Forsmark |
F1 |
968 |
170 |
113 |
| |
F2 |
964 |
170 |
1134 |
| |
F3 |
1155 |
200 |
1355 |
| Ringhals |
R1 |
835 |
38 |
873 |
| |
R2 |
872 |
80 |
952 |
| |
R3 |
915 |
128 |
1048 |
| |
R4 |
915 |
208 |
1123 |
| Ok’hamn |
O1 |
470 |
22 |
492 |
| |
O2 |
605 |
30 |
635 |
| |
O3 |
1160 |
250 |
1410 |
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| Total |
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8464 |
1296 |
10160 |
But it is difficult to see any alternative. With roughly 50 percent electricity from nuclear and 50 percent hydro Sweden is justly proud of having one of the lowest percapita emissions of carbon dioxide in Europe. Any increase in fossil fired generation would be opposed and there are also taxes on emissions of carbon, nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxides. As in most countries, including the UK, there is talk of increasing output from wind turbines and other renewables, but growing doubts that these will ever make any significant contribution to electricity generation. In Sweden the present windpower output amounts to less than 1 percent of Swedish electricity.
With the example of Sweden before us for all to see it is hard to understand how the entirely false beliefs in high costs and need for subsidies for nuclear power still persist in this country, at a time when a reduction in per capita emissions of carbon dioxide are supposed to be a high government priority.
Nuclear proliferation
The problems of nuclear proliferation - “the peaceful atom and the military atom are Siamese twins” – having been held in abeyance for the nuclear weapon states during the Cold War (and also between India and Pakistan) by the absurd but apparently effective principle of MAD (mutually assured destruction), and for the non-weapon states by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, are now starting to reappear as the NPT itself shows signs of unravelling. Subjective assessments are replacing treaty obligations. These problems have now come to a head with the international concern over Iranian determination to proceed with the enrichment of uranium, ostensibly for fuel for its own nuclear power programme.
The focus on Iran, with implied threats of preemptive military action or international sanctions, should not obscure that this will not be a unique situation as more countries, with differing degrees of acceptability to the western ‘democratic’ norm, decide to ‘go nuclear’. At a time of increasing world energy demand nuclear energy is emerging, as a solution to the two opposing problems of climate change from an ever-increasing burning of fossil fuels, and petroleum shortages, as the date at which world production will peak inevitably moves closer. It is estimated that, unchecked, global energy consumption will be almost 60% higher in 2030 than it is now, and will double by mid-century. Nuclear power construction is already expanding rapidly in China and India; stations are under construction in Canada, Finland, France, Iran, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, and Ukraine, with plans for a substantial revival in the US. there are serious proposals for new plant in a number of countries ranging from Poland and Turkey to Mexico and the Argentine.
As more countries turn to nuclear power the problems of Iran will re-emerge sooner or later in some or other form in other countries. What is required is not specific threats or inducements based on assessments of intention but a serious reconsideration of the whole issue of nuclear proliferation and the role of the IAEA. Increasingly it now seems that immediate ad hoc political, commercial, and energy supply concerns take precedence over the long-term problems of nuclear proliferation.
The initial step to address proliferation came with the President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposal to the United Nations General Assembly on 8th December 1953 for an internationally protected pool of fissile material which led to the formation of the International Atomic Energy Agency as an agency of the UN to facilitate access to the peaceful benefits of atomic energy to those countries who accepted the Non Proliferation Treaty. In return the NPT countries were required to submit to the IAEA safeguards system to ensure their compliance with the treaty. This made a division between the Nuclear Weapon States (originally France, UK, USA, USSR and later China) and the Non- Nuclear Weapon States who include all the other IAEA members with the exceptions of India, Israel, and Pakistan who have, in defiance of the UN Security Council developed their own nuclear weapon capability, while still remaining within the IAEA. North Korea which has also developed nuclear weapons has withdrawn from the IAEA.
While providing assurance that nuclear energy is not being misused for weapon purposes by the NNW States the NPT also included a binding agreement in which all five of the NW States committed themselves to move towards nuclear disarmament. This has not happened. Although there has been some reduction in the number of nuclear warheads the five NW States still hold nearly 30 000 nuclear warheads between them and all have continued to develop new weapons and upgrade their own nuclear arsenals (although the conditions under which the UK might unilaterally resort to their use are quite impossible to imagine – which makes any impending decision to upgrade them inexplicable). A further blow to nuclear disarmament came when US Senate rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty. This failure by the NW Sstates to disarm is a serious and fundamental weakness of NPT. One cannot insist that all others give up smoking while dangling a cigarette in one’s lips.
NPT has also been undermined by the apparently tacit acceptance that some countries - India, Israel and Pakistan – which have developed nuclear weapons outside the NPT although still remaining as members of the IAEA. (N Korea which has also developed weapons has left the NPT) A request by the UN Security Council in 1981 that Israel should submit all its nuclear facilities to IAEA safeguards has been ignored and no further action taken over the past 25 years.
Cooperation with India
India is not a member of the NPT, yet despite having developed and demonstrated its nuclear weapon capability it been offered an extensive cooperation agreement with the US. Under the proposals, yet to be ratified by the US Congress, India, while placing some of its reactors under IAEA safeguards for a limited period up to 2014, will still be allowed to continue to operate eight reactors outside the safeguards regime and extract the plutonium they produce. Discussions continue over a phrase under which the agreement would cease if India conducted more nuclear tests.
There are of course benefits for both sides. India will gain access to and technical support as well as supplies of enriched uranium from the US for its rapidly expanding programme. While for the US there is the expectation that the agreement will create up to 27 000 jobs per year in the US nuclear industries over the next ten years. There are also hints of wider political gains for the US which, reluctant to see closer ties between India and Iran, has used the offer of nuclear cooperation to persuade India to withdraw from the so-called Peace Pipeline project to supply Pakistan and India with natural gas from Iran. India has also supported the US led criticisms of Iran. A rapidly expanding nuclear programme would also alleviate India’s requirements for oil and gas.
Following the US-India agreement other countries in the 46-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group are now preparing to abandon the restrictions on supplying nuclear material and technology to countries outside the NPT. They also see India as a lucrative potential market. Australia is considering sales of uranium while France would be prepared to build 3rd generation nuclear stations and also transfer the technology. Russia has already supplied power reactors, together with a lifetime contract for fuel. A proposed agreement with France has so far been stalled over India’s refusal to accept a clause that the cooperation should be only for “peaceful non-explosive uses”.
It can then be argued that the US-India agreement undermines NPT by letting India have its cake (nuclear weapons) and eat it, - by giving it access to nuclear fuel and technology - thus giving India de facto recognition as a Nuclear Weapon State. Critics claim that the agreement will encourage a new nuclear arms race in South Asia. Pakistan has already said that the agreement with India undermines the nuclear balance the two countries is seeking comparable treatment. The US government however maintains that India is a democratic state which has always managed its nuclear technology responsibly and would not use the agreement to boost its weapons arsenal.
Now Brazil
Brazil’s announcement that it too has now developed a centrifuge uranium enrichment facility has been accepted without incurring any of the censure directed towards Iran. This brings the number of countries with uranium enrichment capability to 10. Like Iran, Brazil insists that its facility will be used only for low-enriched uranium and that it will supply up to 60 percent of the requirements of its own nuclear power plant, saving $11 million/year. Like Iran, Brazil as a signatory of NPT, is entitled to pursue peaceful developments and although, again like Iran it initially withheld its enrichment plant from IAEA safeguards inspections, this time on grounds of commercial secrecy with claims the its technology is 25 percent more efficient that current operations, Brazil has now agreed that the IAEA can ‘monitor’ the operations. The difference is that unlike Iran, Brazil’s assertion, that the plant will only be used to produce low enriched material, and that it has no weapon intentions, is accepted.
On this point the US, supported by the EU-3 (France, Germany and UK) has no doubts. It asserts that the purpose of Iran’s enrichment programme is to make nuclear weapons that will threaten other states (Israel in particular). While many observers think this might be true, this is a subjective judgment. Hans Blix has commented “whether the production of a gram of low enriched uranium, possibly leading to the development of a nuclear weapon in 5 to 10 years, can today be characterized as a “threat to the peace” “ can be questioned.
Blix also points out that Iran’s insistence that it only seeks to assure the supply of fuel for its nuclear power plants and has a right to do so is supported by the experience of gas supplies to Ukraine. But he also observes Iran’s indigenous uranium resources are insufficient to make the country independent of imports for its planned nuclear power programme. Iran will not attain self-reliance in nuclear fuel.
Why join NPT?
As a signatory of NPT Iran has the right to produce low enriched uranium for peaceful purposes. The problem arises from mistrust and the suspicion that having developed enrichment technology Iran intends, despite its denials, to go on to produce high enriched weapons grade material. But as a signatory of NPT Iran can see itself as deprived of the security from nuclear threat which the NPT should offer. It is surrounded by or even threatened by nuclear weapons states - Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia and China - and with American bases in the Gulf States, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Kazahkstan, and Uzbekistan. It sees the US planning joint military exercises with Turkey. Iran then believes that the US is, as for Iraq, set on regime change.
If the principle of MAD were to apply in that region there is a case for suggesting that a more stable situation might be reached if Iran were in possession of nuclear weapons. More sensibly, as Dr Blix has suggested, if Israel and all other countries in the Middle East, including Iran could be persuaded to refrain from any future enrichment of uranium and production of plutonium, the whole region would take a step towards a more peaceful order. Assurances of security for Iran together with offers of cooperation might defuse the situation. There is the example where all 33 states in Latin America and the Caribbean are parties to the treaty of Tlateloco under which they bind themselves not to acquire or possess nuclear weapons or to permit their storage or deployment on their territories by other countries. Unfortunately this does not seem likely for the Middle East.
Possible solutions
One way forward could be to implement proposals put forward by Dr ElBaradei to set up a reserve fuel bank under the control of the IAEA to provide assurance of supply for peaceful nuclear uses and remove the incentive for each country to develop its own fuel cycle. This could lead to multinational arrangements whereby the IAEA could ‘monitor’ (as in Brazil) or have ‘oversight’ and ultimately some degree of ‘control’ over national facilities for nuclear fuel. This might seem utopian; there could be many difficulties over the terms monitor, oversight and control as well as problems of responsibility for operations. Yet such proposals are now to be considered at the G8 countries summit meeting in July in St Petersburg on global energy security. The draft communiqué for this meeting welcomes an initiative put forward by Russia “to establish international centers providing nuclear fuel cycle services under the IAEA control. Such centers should provide nuclear fuel cycle services, including uranium enrichment and spent nuclear fuel management, as well as to assure training and certification of nuclear energy specialists.” As a part of a wider international acceptance it might then be possible for Iran to operate its own enrichment plant under the oversight of the IAEA with similar nondiscriminatory arrangements for sensitive nuclear facilities in other countries.
It is interesting to note an early precedent. The supply the fuel services through the IAEA was discussed in 1964 by the Swedish utility company AKK/OKG then building its first nuclear power station. Although the proposal met with strong objections from the Swedish government which at that time was considering the weapon option the situation changed when USA at the Geneva Conference in September the same year offered to supply toll enrichment on economically very attractive conditions which resulted in a contract with the USAEC in 1967.
Another proposal which has been discussed is a Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty under which signatories would commit themselves to stop any further production of fissile materials for weapon use. Since the NW States have informally stopped (having enough in stock to recycle in new and improved weapons under development – in breach of NPT) the FMCT is aimed at India, Israel, N Korea and Pakistan. This seems to be little more than an attempt to freeze weapons grade material at it s present levels. It does nothing to assist the aims of NPT for an eventual total nuclear disarmament. The scope of the FMCT is also limited by the refusal, so far, of the US to consider any measures of verification which would surely make the whole initiative pointless.
The problem is that it is the existence of nuclear weapons which encourages the pursuit of them. They are seen as a source of global influence, and are valued for their perceived deterrent effect. There is also the need to ensure that WMD and their components do not fall into the hands of terrorist groups. |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 19 June 2006 )
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