Let them eat yellowcake

You have to do more than simply assert that renewables would be cheaper. Where is the evidence?

Companies like E.On are free to choose to invest in renewables or nuclear. In fact E.On is one of the major partners in the London Array. But they clearly also see nuclear as a cost effective option, without requiring subsidy.

At the moment the amount of electricity generated from “new” renewables which qualify for ROCs (Renewables Obligation Certificates) is similar to the output of a single new nuclear powerstation. Soon the cost of that ROC subsidy will rise to £1billion per year paid for by electricity consumers. Note, this doesn’t even include the cost of building and running the wind farms etc – it is only the subsidy that has to be paid on top to make them profitable.

At that rate if we had sufficient renewables to match the output of four new nuclear power stations those renewables would be costing £4 billion per year in subsidy alone. Over 20 years that would be £80 billion.

In comparison the cost of purchasing British Energy’s existing nuclear fleet, plus building and running a new fleet (which would operate for 40 to 60 years), is a good deal. That is why these energy companies want to invest more in nuclear than in wind.

And the argument that it would “only” save 4% on CO2 emissions is completely disingenuous. The same amount of electricity generated from wind power would do exactly the same. If you argue that nuclear has a negligible effect on emissions, then you are arguing that renewables are ineffective too.

In fact a 4% reduction cannot be dismissed, and there is no reason why nuclear could not be scaled up beyond our current level to save even more emissions. In contrast it would be very difficult to scale-up renewables beyond the level of our current nuclear fleet. If you phase out nuclear and replace with renewables then none of those renewables will be saving any carbon emissions at all. Plainly if you are concerned about climate change then any new renewables should be used to displace fossil fuel powerstations, not nuclear.

Bex, thanks for your lengthy response. Unfortunately you have constructed a straw man. I am not suggesting that nuclear is the _whole_ solution, but I am saying it should be _part_ of the solution. Any theoretical solution that you can propose using renewables + CHP + efficiency can be improved upon by including nuclear power for some of the generating capacity. This is an unavoidable fact. By excluding nuclear power from your options you greatly increase the risk that CO2 targets will not be met and ensure that air pollution will be higher.

And despite your dismissal of the risks from air pollution from CHP, it is a fact that fossil-fuelled and biomass-powered plant causes more damage to health and the environment than a nuclear powerstation, even when the fossil/biomass plant is operating within local pollution limits. Legal doesn’t mean harmless. Given Greenpeace’s opposition to incinerators, you should know this.

Air pollution is not only a problem for China, it is a massive problem in Europe. It causes over 300,000 premature deaths in Europe every year. In London roughly one person in 35 will die from air pollution. London has breached the legal limit every year since 2005. So local CHP brought into the city would only add to this problem. In comparison the health impact of nuclear power is utterly negligible.

Whether or not nuclear is used for heat & transport is immaterial. It is feasible that nuclear power could help with transport emission if, for example, we migrated to electric or hydrogen powered vehicles. But the point is, even if we didn’t, and instead relied on another (inferior) solution for transport such as biofuels and engine efficiency, those measures could still be used alongside nuclear. Similarly nuclear-CHP is feasible but certainly not necessary. (My mention of Switzerland’s nuclear CHP plant was simply to counter the fallacy that nuclear “only produces electricity”). Overall emissions would be lowered by using some nuclear instead of fossil-fuel for electricity, regardless of what other solutions may or may not be utilised.

If you particularly want to get domestic heating from nuclear power, and you don’t like the CHP district heating option, then the solution is to use ground source heat pumps. As you probably know these electrically powered pumps work like a reverse-refrigerator to extract heat from the ground. Every kW of electricity input yields about 3kW of heat output. Effectively this recovers all the heat that is lost at the thermal powerstation. It has the same or better efficiency as CHP and has the advantage that the powerstation can be distant from the user.

The “government and industry plan of a centralized scenario with ambitious nuclear build” that you allude to in your comment is in fact another straw man carefully constructed assuming a very high proportion of centralised gas generation (which is actually what the govt wants to avoid by using nuclear power). Yes, of course gas-CHP burns less fuel then centralised non-CHP gas powerstations. The point is that any solution involving gas-CHP combined with nuclear will produce less emissions and less air pollution than CHP on its own.

Unless you are suggesting an all-clean renewables scenario (ie. without any biomass and without any fossil CHP) the inclusion of some nuclear power will always result in less air pollution. And even compared to the all-clean renewables scenario (which is frankly impossible in the UK at the moment) nuclear would not actually increase emissions because the emissions from nuclear are similar to the cleanest renewables (wind and hydro).

And by the way I would dispute your implied suggestion that it is feasible to produce enough biogas to run CHP for the whole country. On that scale CHP would always rely primarily on fossil fuel. Your CHP plan is a permanent tie-in to natural gas at a time when we should be planning to decommission most of our gas infrastructure.

Furthermore, given that we will certainly have to use some fossil fuel for electricity generation for the foreseeable future, it makes more sense to use it in large centralised powerstations because it is easy (or at least feasible) to add carbon capture to large plant. By going down the small-scale CHP route you make it virtually impossible to capture the carbon effectively. Gas or coal with carbon capture has lower emissions than CHP without carbon capture. Hence large powerstations are a better medium-term proposition. Naturally, large-scale CHP with carbon capture would be even better. (But, correct me if I’m wrong, that is not what you are proposing when you talk about decentralised solutions.)

Regarding your point on China, of course it is not possible to replace all of China’s fossil fuel powerstations with nuclear in the foreseeable future. But it is even less possible to replace them with renewables and CHP. In the medium term they will have to use carbon capture, or essentially we’re doomed.

The European countries with the lowest emissions per capita compared to their energy usage (e.g. Sweden, France, Switzerland) generally use a combination of nuclear and clean renewables (mostly large hydro). Those with higher emissions (e.g. Denmark, Ireland) are non-nuclear and end up using fossil fuel for electricity along with intermittent renewables, hence higher emissions. It is manifestly obvious that nuclear power is one of the major components of a successful low-carbon future. To deny this is to support the continued over-use of fossil fuel.

I find it breathtaking that you continue to imply that supplying 20% (or possibly 40%-50%) of UK electricity from a low carbon source (i.e. nuclear) is not worth doing. Nothing else comes remotely close to achieving this level of carbon reduction at the moment. And in fact you want to squander renewables development to replace nuclear instead of developing both.

I HAVE to ad my voice to WesH & ColinG's.

NOT to include Nuclear energy as part of this nation's future energy generation scenario is flawed, and as the clock ticks we move ever-closer to the time when the penny will drop, by then it may be too late.

OI GREENPEACE WAKEY! WAKEY!

As we've discussed elsewhere, the nuclear industry is heavily subsidised - hidden or otherwise. If companies see it as a cost effective option, it's only because taxpayers are paying for it. And, as explained below (reposted from the original comment), a nuclear scenario for the UK leads to an increase in emissions in the total system, compared to a decentralised energy scenario. Because nuclear power just can't displace the majority of our fossil fuels. A decentralised system based on efficiency, renewables and CHP can. Original comment: Sorry for the length of this but I'm trying to respond to all your comments across the site in one go, as they all repeat the same myths. I’ll answer your points on air pollution below but first off, I have to point out that you haven’t provided a credible alternative to our energy solution. We’ve clearly explained how renewables + efficiency + CHP can lead us to a low emissions energy system, using CHP as a transition to 100 per cent renewables, providing heat and electricity for the whole of the UK. Initially CHP would be partly fossil fuelled and it would then go on to use zero carbon fuels like biogas. Over time more, renewable heat like solar and geothermal can also be introduced into the district heating networks – as they have done in the 100% renewable district in the city of Malmö, Sweden. As I’ve said before, a replacement programme of ten nuclear reactors in the UK that the government's endorsed will only meet about 3.6% of our total energy needs - because they won’t provide heat. Around half our energy need is for heat (mainly gas based), while the next biggest demand is for transport (mainly oil based). Electricity generation is the smallest portion, and any new nuclear would be a small portion of that, making its role in tackling climate change / ensuring energy security almost irrelevant. That's why the nuclear plan causes much more air pollution overall, for the total system; it can't possibly displace the majority of fossil fuel use, and leaves us running on the same kind of wasteful and polluting coal plants we have today. (Don't forget, the same ministers and companies that want to build new nuclear plants are also proposing the horde of new dirty coal plants across Britain – the most polluting power plants of all.) According to our report, a UK energy scenario with high levels of decentralised energy using CHP and big renewables leads to less fuel burn over all than the government and industry plan of a centralized scenario with ambitious nuclear build. Less fuel use means less overall air pollution. Your answer to that is that you want nuclear combined heat and power. No one in the nuclear industry or government is proposing that anyway – they wouldn’t dare propose to put them near to densely populated areas. But even if they did, you still haven’t explained how you’ll get rid of fossil fuels. Are you suggesting we’ll be able to displace all our fossil fuelled power plants and all our individual boilers with nuclear CHP? Do you have an estimate for how many nuclear plants you’d need to do that? (In China, with the most ambitious nuclear programme in the world, they will still only generate a couple of percent of their electricity from nuclear when and if they built all 30-40 reactors that have been mooted there. Most of the rest of their electricity will still be coming from coal.) How can the UK possibly get enough nuclear power to displace all our fossil fuel needs? Specifically, how are you going to find the enormous funds required to build small nuclear power stations near every town and city (the smaller ones you suggest, which won’t benefit from the economies of scale)? Where will you find the sites fit to host N nuclear plants? How will you persuade local residents across the UK to accept nuclear power and/or nuclear waste sites in the outskirts of their towns and cities? If you don’t want the nuclear plants to be close to urban centres, how will you fund the phenomenal costs of piping heat from, say, Sizewell to London? How will you find the nuclear engineers to build all the plants (there’s already a huge skills shortage)? How will you persuade the government that the building of your nuclear plants won’t run massively over time and over budget like every other nuclear construction project (the average nuclear power station is finished four years late and 300 per cent over budget)? How will you transport all the radioactive wastes between the sites without putting the public at an unacceptable risk? How will you protect every plant and transport route from contamination / accident / terrorist attack? How do you propose to make nuclear power a globally applicable solution (at the moment, some countries, like Iran, are being told they aren’t allowed to have it)? For nuclear power to realistically meet our future global electricity demands, 2000 - 2500 reactors will need to be constructed between now and 2075 - an impossible task. How will you guarantee the weapons grade plutonium doesn’t get into the wrong hands? How do you plan to get rid of the significant fossil fuel use in the nuclear lifecycle (mining, transport, energy use around facilities, waste storage)? And, if you agree that nuclear CHP will never fill the gap alone and you want renewables in the mix, how do you envisage stopping nuclear from undermining renewables as global experience and technical grid limitations both show it does (nuclear and renewables may both be able to run on the grid as long as both are making relatively small overall contributions, but both can't expand beyond a certain point without there being operational conflicts)? The nuclear industry itself says there is a conflict between nuclear and renewables and has lobbied to get the European renewable energy target weakened. Vincent De Rivaz, the CEO of EDF Energy stated at the Adam Smith Institute in March that if the UK actually started to make significant progress in meeting its Renewables Obligations, the economic viability of the new generation of nuclear power plants would be undermined and nuclear would be marginalised. The case for decentralised energy based on renewables, CHP and efficiency has already been made and proven – in countless reports and in other countries. Why would you want to use an outdated technology that is more expensive and more dangerous? I’m guessing you’re going to say because of particulates/air pollution (and you are right that air pollution is a big concern and a killer, especially in places like China). But, for all the reasons above, nuclear allows continued and even increased air pollution because of its undermining effect on energy efficiency measures – the nuclear option is more likely to lead to more air pollution than a system of decentralised energy based on gas / biomass / biogas CHP. And going nuclear can’t lead us to a 100% renewables scenario. Decentralised energy can. All the new nuclear in China is barely going to touch the air pollution problems there. On your comments about CHP and particulates, larger CHP falls under IPPC requirements, and these control emissions to air. (And, as from the start of this year, some large CHP plants are covered by Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD), specifically targetting NOx SOx and particulates.) Before a CHP plant can be built, modified or continue to be operated, emissions to air are mapped, taking into account all existing sources of emission (not just those of the new/existing plant – let’s not forget that cars and lorries are a major source of air pollution too) to ensure local air quality standards are met. If the model shows that the emissions "on the ground" get near to breaching the local air quality standards then the plant will not be built or, if it exists, allowed to continue to operate unless its output is restricted/other measures put in place. Then there’s the fact that a decent sized gas-fired CHP plant will displace many hundreds or thousands of individual gas-fired boilers. Therefore, it can actually improve local air quality, because: - a large heat plant will be sized more closely to actual heat loads than individual boilers, which are typically oversized to meet peak demand load. (A district heat plant overcomes this problem by having in-line boilers that are switched on or off progressively as demand for heat fluctuates throughout the day or the year.) - a large CHP plant will burn gas more efficiently than the combination of all those numerous small boilers and the power plants providing the equivalent heat and electricity. - it’s cost effective and quick to add emissions cleaning equipment to large plant, or to switch it to cleaner fuels as they become available, but not with many small ones like boilers. - the maintenance of large plants will be more effectively managed than individual boilers, impacting on the efficiency and cleanness of gas burn. I hope that answers all of your points. And sorry for the delay. As you can imagine, we don’t have the resources to post dozens of comments on the same point – unlike some well funded industries… ;-) Cheers, Bex gpuk

I have to add my voice to ColinG's. The main problem I have in debating issues like this with people who take an anti-nuclear stance is that they don't address the issue head on. They don't like the idea of long lived nuclear waste but rarely focus on that part of the arguement. Ben presents very few actual arguements against nuclear even though the arguements against are simple: Nuclear plants are technologically very complex which leads to increased cost. Nuclear waste products are difficult to handle and store which against increases cost. Loss of containment accidents are potentially extremely hazardous. There are however solutions to these problems in research. The most attractive of which are Pebble Bed Reactors (PBR's). Which contain the fuel in such a way as to help prevent loss of containment and also make the waste easier to handle. I would agree that the current handling of the UK's nuclear generation has been very poorly handled. It is not acceptable that we have old plants operating beyond their expected life span, it is not acceptable that nuclear waste is transported around the country to be reprocessed, it is not acceptable that mismanagement has vastly driven up the cost of nuclear energy and that the taxpayer has to foot the bill. This however is the fault of the industry and not the fault of the nuclear concept. Your arguement that CHP is the future is certainly helpful as it is clear that the main cause of the energy crisis is the woeful lack of efficiency in our usage. I agree with Colin though that nuclear could accomodate this vision. I think that the fundamental problem still comes down to cost. Nuclear is an option which has been avoided for the last twenty years because it is very expensive (even from my pro-nuclear stance you'll get no arguement from me there), I don't feel that nuclear is playing on a fair playing field though because the fossil fuel industry hasn't had to pay to handle it's waste which it simply pumps into the atmosphere. Imagine the cost of a coal fired station if it had to capture and contain all that CO2. Now that fossil fuels are accelerating in cost (with no sign of slowing), nuclear is becoming comparatively cheap. This is why companies like E-On and EDF are looking at building new plants. I think Greenpeace would be doing the world a massive favour if it changed it's stance on nuclear to be more realistic. If they said they didn't approve of the current system but laid out a better plan which was safe and cost efficient they would have much better credability than using the old pro-renewables arguement which doesn't add up. Whilst I'm in favour of renewables I can't ever see them being able to provide 100% of our energy needs. I still find it unimaginable that with CO2 emissions increasing year on year, and with the effects of global warming becoming more apparent that environmentalists refuse to acknowledge the nuclear option and instead allow fossil fuel plants to be built instead. The public are far too easilly scared away from nuclear and so we end up with fossil as the default option.