11,000 nuclear reactors by 2100?

At its height, the French nuclear industry was commissioning a new reactor every two weeks. And that is just one country.

So one every three days world-wide is ambitious, but not ludicrous.

Given that China is commissioning a new coal powerstation every two weeks we have to do something. If colossal nuclear new-build seems implausible, it is not as implausible as building the equivalent output with renewables. Wind has a third of the capacity factor and less than half the lifespan of nuclear – for every 1GW of nuclear we would need to build more than 6GW of wind, not to mention appropriate backup and storage solutions on a massive scale.

The laughter from the “Nuclear Reaction” blog rings hollow. We need all the low-carbon energy we can get, and nuclear is one of the best gigawatt-scale solutions. Greenpeace’s continued opposition plays straight into the hands of the fossil fuel industry.

ColinG -

Please read the entire article before posting - don't just sling in a comment for the hell of it.

While France was commissioning, the rest of the World wasn't. The point is that there are insufficient global resources to support these plans.

Moreover, these plans will take resources - engineers, material, capital etc - away from renewables.

Richard, I did read the whole article.

My point is that France mobilised to replace nearly all of its electricity with nuclear in the space of about a decade. Obviously they had to create the infrastructure and train the people to do this. But they managed, and consequently now have one of the lowest carbon footprints per capita in Europe.

The implication of the article is that the nuclear industry will forever be stuck with a shortage of engineers and manufacturing facilities. This is the case at the moment, but there is no earthly reason why this should continue for decades, let alone until the end of the century.

Your point about it diverting resources from renewables is irrelevant. Low-carbon energy is low-carbon energy. We need to deploy whatever we can, on a large scale, with maximum carbon abatement at minimum cost. Nuclear power fulfils this requirement. You might as well say that wind power diverts resources and investment away from wave power. This is true, but it is because wind power is a cheaper and more effective way of abating carbon emissions.

In term of the optimum solution for abating carbon at lowest cost, we should deploy the following solutions (in order of cheapest first):
1) Efficiency measures (insulation etc)
2) Nuclear power
3) Forestation
4) Wind power
5) Carbon capture
6) Avoided deforestation

New renewables, other than wind, are expensive ways to cut carbon. Money spent on them is money that would be better spent on the other measures in the list. We still need them, but this is in addition to (rather than instead of) nuclear power.

See the following cost curve for carbon abatement.

http://www.berc.berkeley.edu/flyers/McKinseyQ.pdf

ColinG, all your post does is highlight what you can do with will and a blank chequebook. We managed to make nuclear bombs in the space of just a few years under wartime conditions? How? Because that is what the scientists were told to do and money or resource was no object. The USA put a man on the moon in just 10 years? How? You guessed it, because that is what the scientists were told to do and money or resource was no object. Does this not apply to renewables or energy efficiency?

You know, the carbon myth and nuclear always strikes a nerve. Your argument about carbon abatement being the only concern is absurd. It's like telling people to insulate their houses with asbestos because asbestos is a superior insulant and saves more energy. Yet we'll ignore the fact it kills people and has no disposal option. We'll ignore its true cost. Carbon is not the only concern and cost is not just about money. Nuclear waste is a very serious issue. We are talking about the most toxic substances known to man, ones that will last hundreds of thousands of years. If that's not enough, the fact the nuclear industry doesn't actually have any idea what to do with this stuff should sound the warning sirens. Burying it is not a solution, no matter how deep. Uranium supply is an issue; it's finite. The ever escalating cost of Uranium is an issue. You see, I'm supposed to swallow the nuclear pill, ask no questions and just sign off a toxic legacy onto my kids and my kids kids, all because “nuclear is carbon neutral” or “the only option”. The nuclear industry is going to have to try much harder because I'm not swallowing the pill.

With a bit of will we could be achieving so much more. That will needs to be directed at deploying and developing real solutions that actually solve problems. We should not be creating insurmountable new ones. Nuclear is old technology that was born out of war. It was developed in a blank chequebook environment and retains that today. Nuclear has been proved time and time again to create more problems than it solves. As for building 11,000 reactors in 100, sorry 92 years, frankly that's wildly optimistic even by nuclear industry standards. However, past experience clearly shows that reality is rarely on the nuclear team.

Mbradshaw, you have a point regarding the “true cost” of each energy option. Fortunately the EU has already done a huge analysis of the true cost of each generating technology. The ExternE study calculated the external costs of each method electricity generation i.e. the impact on health and environment which is not normally accounted for in the market price of electricity.

This document shows a summary of results (you’ll find more detail online):
http://www.externe.info/externpr.pdf

It may surprise you to learn that nuclear faired very well. Considering its full lifecycle (including mining, operation, waste, and the potential of catastrophic accidents) it has less impact than biomass or PV solar. Clearly it has much less impact than coal or gas too. In fact he only method of generation which has consistently lower external costs is wind power. And realistically we cannot create a complete solution using wind power alone.

So why does Greenpeace favour using gas and biomass in preference to nuclear again? I think it is more to do with simply defending their credibility – having mistakenly opposed nuclear power for so long and having consequently encouraged the over-use of fossil fuel.

If you don’t understand why it is enormously difficult to produce a complete energy solution based on renewables (and why even Greenpeace's plan relies on fossil fuel for many decades to come), I suggest you read this:
http://www.withouthotair.com/

Prof Mackay's book gives a dispassionate appraisal of the requirements for getting the UK’s energy supply from low-carbon sources.

With renewables, the challenge is simply down to the fact that the energy is diffuse and dispersed over a huge area. Regardless of how much better the technology gets, the energy will always be diffuse. It needs windfarms covering an area the size of Wales (50 times as much wind hardware as Denmark); plus solar farms 5 times the size of London based in the Sahara; plus energy crops covering a significant percentage of our land area; plus wave generators covering most of the west coast; plus unprecedented development of tidal power; plus incineration of all waste for energy; plus conversion of all vehicles to electricity; plus conversion of all our lakes and lochs into pumped hydro schemes. And even with this, if there are more than a couple of calm days we run out of power.

No amount of research would provide the scientific breakthrough to make this easy. We know what is required. It is logistically difficult because of the laws of physics. Even with a huge cheque (an order of magnitude greater than the cost of equivalent nuclear capacity) it would take the best part a century to deploy this in the UK. The prospect of managing it across the whole world is truly daunting, and risks failure with catastrophic results.

It is hard enough to get a zero carbon solution even if you include nuclear as an “easy option” in the mix.

This is interesting: mini nuclear reactors power 20,000 homes (each).

The company plans to make 4000 of these small reactors by 2023. At that rate the WNA’s suggestion of 11,000 by 2100 seems a very conservative estimate.

Hi Colin

Oddly enough, I thought of you when I read that :-)

A few key points:

• The company claims to have a confirmed order of six reactors and they say the first reactor would be installed in Romania. Romania’s National Committee for Nuclear Control knows nothing about this.
• Despite the technology being presented as real, there's no prototype of this kind of reactor yet. It only exists on paper - and even then the design isn't yet finalised.
• There's no approval for the design or license - even for the prototype.
• This reactor doesn't solve the intrinsic problem of what to do with the nuclear waste: the company says: "…there are known ways of dealing with it [the waste]. For security reasons, we're not disclosing what will happen to it, but it's not going to just sit in some bucket somewhere. Recycling was 'baked in' to our reactor design from the beginning." ie the company's asking us to take them at their word, on blind faith.
• Hyperion provides no backup for their claims that the small units pose no proliferation risk. They don't say how they will prevent extra proliferation risks during the numerous transports, production or refuelling.
• Burying a nuclear installation is highly risky; if something goes wrong, there's not a lot that can be done to prevent spreading of contaminants. If there's damage due to an earthquake etc, the problem might not even be detected.

I'll leave it there for now...

Cheers,

Bex
gpuk