Deconstructing the Nuclear Power Myths

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11 Jul 2005 13:02:24 -0000

 

Deconstructing the Nuclear Power Myths

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ISIS Press Release 11/07/05

 

Deconstructing the Nuclear Power Myths

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Peter Bunyard disposes of the argument for nuclear power: it

is highly uneconomical, and the saving on greenhouse gas

emissions negligible, if any, compared to a gas-fired

electricity generating plant

 

Peter Bunyard will be speaking at Sustainable World

Conference, 14-15 July 2005.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/SWCFA.php

 

References to this article are posted on ISIS members'

website http://www.i-sis.org.uk/full/DTNPMFull.php.

Details here http://www.i-sis.org.uk/members.php

 

Limitations due to the quality of uranium ore

 

A critical point about the practicability of nuclear power

to provide clean energy under global warming is the quality

and grade of the uranium ore. The quality of uranium ore

varies inversely with their availability on a logarithmic

scale. The ores used at present, such as the carnotite ores

in the United States have an uranium content of up to 0.2

per cent, and vast quantities of overlying rocks and subsoil

have to be shifted to get to the 96,000 tonnes of uranium-

containing rock and shale that will provide the fresh fuel

for a one gigawatt reactor [1].

 

In addition, most of the ore is left behind as tailings with

considerable quantities of radioactivity from thorium-230, a

daughter product of the radioactive decay of uranium.

Thorium has a half-life of 77 000 years and decays into

radium-226, which decays into the gas radon-222. All are

potent carcinogens.

 

Fresh fuel for one reactor contains about 10 curies of

radioactivity (27 curies equal 1012 becquerels, each of the

latter being one radiation event per second.) The tailings

corresponding to that contain 67 curies of radioactive

material, much of it exposed to weathering and rain run-off.

Radon gas has been found 1 000 miles from the mine tailings

from where it originated. Uranium extraction has resulted in

more than 6 billion tonnes of radioactive tailings, with

significant impact on human health [2].

 

Once the fuel is used in a reactor, it becomes highly

radioactive primarily because of fission products and the

generation of the `transuranics' such as neptunium and

americium. At discharge from the reactor, a tonne of

irradiated fuel from a PWR (pressurized water reactor such

as in use at Sizewell) will contain more than 177 million

curies of radioactive substances, some admittedly short-

lived, but all the more potent in the short term. Ten years

later, the radioactivity has died away to about 405 000

curies and 100 years on to 42 000 curies, therefore still

600 times more radioactive than the original material from

which the fuel was derived [3].

 

Today's reactors, totalling 350 GW and providing about 3 per

cent of the total energy used in the world, consume 60 000

tonnes of equivalent natural uranium, prior to enrichment.

At that rate, economically recoverable reserves of uranium —

about 10 million tonnes — would last less than 100 years. A

worldwide nuclear programme of 1 000 nuclear reactors would

consume the uranium within 50 years, and if all the world's

electricity, currently 60 exajoules (1018Joules) were

generated by nuclear reactors, the uranium would last three

years [4]. The prospect that the amount of economically

recoverable uranium would limit a worldwide nuclear power

programme was certainly appreciated by the United Kingdom

Atomic Energy in its advocacy for the fast breeder reactor,

which theoretically could increase the quantity of energy to

be derived from uranium by a factor of 70 through converting

non-fissile uranium-238 into plutonium-239.

 

In the Authority's journal [5], Donaldson, D.M., and

Betteridge, G.E. stated that, " for a nuclear contribution

that expands continuously to about 50 per cent of demand,

uranium resources are only adequate for about 45 years. "

 

The earth's crust and oceans contain millions upon millions

of tonnes of uranium. The average in the crust is 0.0004 per

cent and in seawater 2 000 times more dilute. One identified

resource, the Tennessee shales in the United States, have

uranium concentrations of between 10 and 100 parts per

million, therefore between 0.1 and 0.01 per cent. Such low

grade ore has little effective energy content as measured by

the amount of electricity per unit mass of mined ore [6].

 

Below 50 parts per million, the energy extracted is no

better than mining coal, assuming that the uranium is used

in a once-through fuel cycle, and is not reprocessed, but is

dumped in some long-term repository. Apart from the self-

evident dangers of dissolving spent fuel in acid and keeping

the bulk of radioactive waste in stainless steel tanks until

a final disposal is found, reprocessing offers very little

if at all in terms of energy gained through the extraction

and re-use of uranium and plutonium in mixed oxide fuel

(MOX) [7].

 

To date, nuclear power has been built and subsidised through

the use of fossil fuels, which have provided the energy for

mining, extraction, enrichment and construction. Hence,

nuclear power cannot be considered to be free of greenhouse

gas emissions. Use of the next grade down could lead to a

greenhouse gas inventory every bit as bad as for a gas-fired

electricity generation plant, and considerably worse than

for a gas-fired co-generation plant, in which both

electricity and end-use heating are produced.

 

As Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith point out

in their document [6], the cumulative energy produced by a

nuclear plant compared with the energy expenditure shows a

relatively small net gain over the course of 100 years,

which incorporates the time needed to get a handle on the

costs of final disposal of the radioactive waste, including

the radioactively contaminated structural materials of the

reactor. Poor grade uranium will result in a net deficit of

energy. Hence a massive worldwide nuclear programme, based

on the use of poor grade uranium ores, will add cumulatively

to energy demands, rather than resolving them.

 

Gas-fired plants better than nuclear plants

 

On that basis, comparisons between the carbon dioxide

emissions resulting from the full once-through cycle of a

nuclear plant and an equivalently sized gas-burning plant,

indicates that with the poorer uranium ores, below 0.02 per

cent, the gas-fired plant comes out better, with lower

overall carbon dioxide emissions. Indeed, the efficiency of

a combined-cycle gas plant can now achieve efficiencies of

56 per cent, more than double that achieved for nuclear

power. With gas, the costs of electricity generation have

therefore reduced in real terms.

 

If that gas-fired plant were to be used in co-generation,

with the simultaneous production of electricity and useful

heat, it would win hands-down for all but the best uranium

ores, such as are in use today.

 

Quite apart from the relative paucity of good uranium ores,

if the world were to embark simultaneously on the

construction of nuclear plants to replace all coal-fired

power plants, that would require one gigawatt-sized

(electrical) nuclear reactor to be built every two and a

half days for 38 years. Total nuclear capacity, according to

Worldwatch's 1989 State of the World, [8] would be 18 times

greater than today, at an annual cost of $144 billion (1989

money).

 

In his 1990 report for Greenpeace [9] William Keepin came up

with similar numbers in terms of requirements but at a more

pessimistic annual cost. He pointed out that 5 000 nuclear

plants would be needed to displace the 9.4 TW of coal

equivalent estimated to be necessary in electricity

generation in the world by 2025. Again he figured on the

need to begin construction on a new plant every couple of

days, assuming a favourable six-year completion time. On the

basis of highly optimistic assumptions concerning capital

costs and plant reliability, total electricity generation

costs (1990 money) would average $525 billion per year.

 

Nuclear power has an appalling record for long drawn-out

construction times. The last reactor to come on line in the

United States took 23 years to complete. Fifteen years has

been the average time taken in many Eastern European

countries using USSR technology. In France, the average time

taken for construction to operation is 8 years.

 

We must also not neglect the considerable and

proportionately increasing impact of other greenhouse gases

to global warming. The use of nuclear power, even to its

best advantage, would not make a jot of difference to the

emissions of both methane and nitrous oxide since they are

primarily derived from agriculture and in particular from

deforestation in the tropics.

 

France — a test case

 

There are other costs in running nuclear power plants. Even

the nuclear industry now admits that the generation of

electricity that originates from nuclear power is not wholly

free of greenhouse gas emissions. France provides a useful

background to review the efficiency of power generation and

consumer preference. In 1999, France generated 375 TWh from

its nuclear stations. EdF (Electricité de France) estimates

that the cost in CO2 emissions of operating its nuclear

plants amounts to 6 g CO2 per kWh [10].

 

France's electricity board provides an estimate that

includes construction, removing the spent fuel, reprocessing

and the storage of wastes. On that basis the total CO2

emissions per year from the operation of its nuclear plants

amounts to 2.25 million tonnes. That estimate does not

include the mining and preparation of the fuel and hence is

not dependent on the quality of the ore.

 

On the other hand, the Öko-Institute of Germany, taking the

full fuel cycle costs into account, comes up with an average

figure that is nearly 6 times higher — 35 g/kWh — compared

with EdF's, in which case the total CO2 emissions would

amount to 13.125 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent [11].

 

In 1990, France emitted 144 million tonnes of CO2

equivalent. Therefore, nuclear power's contribution to the

total emissions amounted to 1.6 percent on EdF's estimates

and 9.1 percent, according to the Öko-Institute, both

numbers being significant and far from trivial.

Nevertheless, banking on the naivete of the public, the

nuclear industry exaggerates the advantages of nuclear power

in terms of avoided greenhouse gas emissions by comparing

its relatively low emissions compared to a coal-fired plant

of the same generating size. On that basis, nuclear power

comes out 300 times better than coal [12].

 

As Mycle Schneider, director of WISE (World Information on

Safe Energy)-Paris, points out, those seemingly low

percentages of carbon dioxide emission from nuclear power

plants hide an elemental truth, that the use of nuclear

power in France has to be augmented, because of consumer

preference, by the use in the home of natural gas-based

heating systems, both for hot water and space-heating. For

home-heating purposes electricity from whatever source is an

expensive and inefficient option, and basically the public,

let alone industry, prefers to turn away from it.

 

In an average French household, aside from transport, two-

thirds of the energy consumed is for heating and just one-

third for electricity. Consequently, if we are going to make

any comparisons as to the carbon-economy of nuclear power

versus fossil-fuel systems, we should do so only by taking

the end-use preferences into account.

 

First, the differences of any one system lie in its

efficiency to provide end-use energy whether for heating or

electricity

 

Nuclear power stations are built away from population

centres

 

They are relatively inefficient from a thermodynamic point

of view, losing as much as two-thirds of the energy produced

as heat to the immediate environment (a body of water or

cooling tower).

 

The one-third remainder of electricity must be transmitted

into a central grid system, where the losses can amount to

as much as 10 per cent

 

The net result is that about one quarter of the energy

originally released gets to the consumer.

 

If the consumer were to obtain both electricity and heating

from a single co-generation system; the efficiency returns

can amount to as much as 90 per cent of the original energy

and, therefore, some three to four times better than if

nuclear generated electricity were to be the sole source of

energy in the home.

 

A proper evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions therefore

demands that the method of production gets taken into

account when estimating the total release of greenhouse

gases. Both coal and fuel oil used in a co-generation plant

are still inferior by a factor of two to a nuclear

power/natural gas combination in terms of greenhouse

emissions. But that figure is already far-removed from the

300 times advantage so heralded by the nuclear industry and

its supporters.

 

Meanwhile, a natural gas co-generation system is level-

pegging with the nuclear power/natural gas combination again

in terms of emissions, while being far cheaper to the

consumer simply because of the three fold better efficiency

in delivering end-use energy. And what about a co-generation

system based on biogas? The Öko-Institute estimates that it

emits seven times less greenhouse gases in providing end-use

energy compared to a nuclear power/natural gas combination

[11].

 

Although concern over the consequences of accidents, such as

at Chernobyl or Three Mile Island impinges on the issue, the

high, uneconomic cost of nuclear power, more than any other

factor, has brought about the industry's failure to make its

mark as a major source of energy in the world. Increasingly

too, local `embedded' generation, such as from a wind farm,

or a co-generation plant, is becoming an important

competitor against the notion of single large power plants

attached to a central grid. In a world ever more competitive

in terms of reducing cost, an inefficient, high capital cost

nuclear power plant is increasingly an anachronism.

 

If nuclear power were the answer to a cheap source of

energy, why has there been a massive turning away from

nuclear power since the 1970s? In the United States, where

nuclear technology originated, all civilian nuclear reactors

were ordered in the ten-year period between 1963 and 1973,

all with huge subsidies from the federal government,

including so-called turn-key contracts. No new ones have

been ordered since 1973, six years before the accident at

Three Mile Island, and a string of cancellations in the

1970s and 80s plus permanent shutdowns meant that total

electricity generated by nuclear power went down rather than

up. In 1989, the cancellations and shutdowns exceeded those

coming on stream by a considerable margin, 4 GW compared to

10.4 GW.

 

 

 

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