As environmental groups the world over agonize about whether to dance with the devil and embrace the undoubted low-carbon claims of nuclear power generation – at least as a bridging solution to a renewable-powered world – familiar arguments in favor of nuclear are once again emerging.
An article by Jonathan Ford in U.K. business newspaper the Financial Times yesterday appeared to outline the persuasive economic case for new nuclear.
The author argued, contrasting figures about the huge cost of building new nuclear facilities with the low energy strike price that can be generated by renewable energy projects is misleading.
Ford considered the hypothetical need to provide 1 GW of energy, with nuclear and offshore wind as the competing options. The writer started by pointing out a nuclear reactor generates energy at around 90% efficiency, twice the level achieved by offshore wind – and way beyond what PV can boast, but let’s stick to the hypothetical scenario for now. That means, said Ford, approximately twice as much generation capacity needs to be constructed for the renewable project.
Why did Toshiba and Hitachi give up?
Nuclear of course, has no intermittency concerns – or at least, we had all better pray it doesn’t – so the imagined offshore wind plant project also needs to factor in an hugely expensive, near-1 GW of battery storage too, to be ready for periods of low wind.
That would still leave the renewables project cheaper to construct than the nuclear option – for want of a better phrase – an outcome that somewhat undermines the writer’s economic claims for the latter. However, Ford then delivers his coup de grace, the fact nuclear reactors last at least twice as long as renewables projects. Which means, of course, the money spent on the hypothetical wind power installation has to be doubled, finally making it notably more expensive than a new reactor.
Which begs the question, why did Toshiba and Hitachi run for the hills when they contemplated the costs of bringing Britain’s next generation of nuclear plants to fruition, as Ford readily acknowledged at the top of his article.
As an exercise in persuading readers to dig below the headlines, the piece is a partial success. Simply comparing the strike price – in online auction site terminology the ‘Buy it Now’ guaranteed purchase price – of two energy sources is oversimplistic.
Who cleans up the mess?
However the writer is guilty, as so many before him have been, of ignoring the elephant in the room with nuclear. If an offshore wind farm – or a PV project, for that matter – fails, the cost is borne largely by commercial insurance providers through a policy the developer holds. It’s certainly true that the cost of such an event is not entirely contained, as there will be a minimal knock-on effect on future insurance premiums.
What nuclear proponents consistently fail to mention is the economic cost when a nuclear reactor fails. It is impossible to purchase a corporate insurance policy that will comprehensively guarantee to cover the costs incurred in the event of a reactor meltdown, or other failure that releases significant amounts of radiation into the environment. Who foots the bill? You and I, as taxpayers, via the government – often governments –affected.
Factor in the costs of a clean-up after a catastrophe such as Chernobyl or Fukushima, and there is no energy source that even comes close to the financial costs of nuclear, and that is not to consider the measures needed to deal safely with nuclear waste.
It may be unrealistic to argue the world will be able to run entirely on renewables without a single penny being spent on nuclear generation from today onwards, especially if we also want to keep other fossil fuels in the ground. Nuclear is a low carbon option and, it could be argued, may be a necessary evil until every roof in the world has solar on it – but don’t try and persuade us it is a cost-competitive option.
And when Mr Ford implies that the long life of nuclear facilities means they can be left to run and run at minimal cost, it is tempting to wonder which option he would prefer living downwind of – a 60-year-old nuclear facility or a wind or PV installation of the same vintage.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those held by pv magazine.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
Nuclear reactors are insured, up to a certain amount, which would more than cover the cost of any failure at a modern plant such as Hinkley C. Bringing Chernobyl into the argument is about as meaningful as bringing atomic bombs into it – it’s too different to compare.
If you want to compare the 1GW supply of nuclear, then for a wind based scenario you’d need:
About 2GW of wind
About 1GW and 2GWh of storage
About 900 MW of gas fired power
If in a warm sunny climate, with peak demands in the summer, then adding in solar will significantly improve the above mix.
The gas would probably provide about 20% of the energy, with the wind supplying about 80%. Emissions would be about 100g/KWh, which is good, but not as near nuclear’s 14g.
Left out seems to be that it takes ~10 years to put in the 1GW nuclear plant and about a year for the wind+storage or wind+solar+storage.
Paul
Mr. Hall you left out a few costs on the nuclear side. Solar panels will decay in efficiency and someday will pass beyond economic practicality. Then even if all you do is leave them standing they will continue to make SOME electricity.
A nuclear plant will take 5 – 10 years to construct and will create lots of carbon in the form of diesel exhaust, special alloy steel creation, cement creation, etc,etc. In short, a nuclear plant will be carbon free only as long as it is running and even then employees will still be driving gas/diesel cars to and from work for the 50 years it is running. A well managed commercial size solar installation can go from ground breaking to producing power in 18 months. And you don’t need to have highly skilled employees and a massive security presence on site 24/7/365 for as long as the plant is standing or there is radioactive material in storage.
A solar plant can be taken down as easily as it was up. If you do it correctly a 18% solar panel nearing the end of it’s effective life span can be replaced with a much higher efficiency panel (solar cell efficiency will only improve as time goes on) and the old panel shipped to a recycler for overhaul and reuse.
A nuclear plant will have to be torn down someday as well, but where do you put the radioactive steel and cement? No landfill in the world wants that stuff in their landfill and I guarantee that (NIMBY) will still be a thing in the year 2100. And that doesn’t even take into account the forever costs of protecting the high level nuclear waste that will be deadly for 50,000 + years. Short of some brilliant scientist solving the nuclear waste problem it will cost the power company more over time than it ever took in when the plant was operating. But the electric company will be long gone and all the costs will fall on the taxpayers and government.
Here’s the thing, when the nuclear plant is operating and money is coming in there will be many hands in the till. As soon as the money has to flow out of shareholder pockets back into the till to pay for decommissioning costs the shareholders will dump their stock, the company will tank and the taxpayer will foot the bill for a massive, eternal money pit. All you need to do is look at the radioactive cleanup of Enewetak (start by looking up “Cactus Dome) in the late 70’s or the ongoing cleanup of the radioactive mess at Hanford, Washington to see how bad the government is at cleaning up radioactive messes. In reality, the only real cleanup is done by mother nature over 100,000 years of radioactive decay.
Mr. Hall add these costs into you article and see what happens. I predict that if you do your equations will prove that it is impossible for any nuclear plant to return a profit when you factor in the entirety of its life. And who can say what the energy mix will look like even 10 years from now, it is entirely probable that taxpayers (through subsidies to the energy company) will be stuck with an enormous white elephant that produces electricity that cannot compete with already cheaper renewable energy.
P.S. For anybody with some scientific knowledge and some business acumen there will be literally millions of solar panels reaching the end of their effective life in the next 10 years and the number of aging out panels will explode exponentially after that. Figure out a way to get the valuable materials out of the cells or a way to overhaul and re-use the aged out panels and you and your partners will be trillionaires. Your great, great, great, great grandchildren will still find it impossible to spend all the money your inventions will generate.
Alex T is double counting. Either you firm your wind with storage or with gas. If it’s storage you need to up the nominal wind capacity, say by another GW. BTW, the cheapest storage by far today is pumped hydro, but let that pass. If you are using gas, there’s no need for batteries.
Not BTW, nuclear needs firming too, as does coal. The early pumped storage plants in OECD countries were built precisely as backup for nuclear plants. One technical problem and the grid loses over a GW of output. With wind and solar, the large number of independent generators means that mechanical failure is an insignificant risk to the system. Weather-based fluctuations can be predicted accurately, so your reserve can be cold not spinning.
Andrew Blakers’ simple 100% renewable scenario for Australian electricity uses only wind, solar, HVDC transmission, and pumped storage. The firming adds about 50% to the raw cost of wind and solar supply. It still works out cheaper than today’s thermal supply, a fortiori than a wholly hypothetical nuclear option. Add some expectations of progress in other but less proven technologies, and the cost can probably be lowered some more: P2X, V2G, demand response, CSP, grid batteries, biomass, geothermal … But the case is made just with the proven shortlist.
PS. The 90% CF of nuclear assumes that it runs as baseload. That is, the nuclear total is less than trough demand (summer nights in the UK and Germany, winter nights in Texas.) Meeting peak demand (say 2x trough demand) entirely with nuclear implies much lower CFs, and proportionately higher unit costs. Any sensible nuclear-heavy grid requires a lot of despatchable gas or storage – just like a wind- heavy grid. You either compare raw LCOEs or do a full system analysis.
BTW, let me retract the suggestion that you need a third GW of wind to match a GW of nuclear. The LCOE is calculated for the same total in annual Gwh, just correcting the nominal installation capacity for the capacity factors (2x). You need backup for both. More for wind than nuclear? Not obviously. The flat output of nuclear is a worse match to cycling demand than wind as between seasons, and a worse match than solar to daily cycles. Again, you really have to run the numbers. The equation is complicated by the fact that it is very cheap to overbuild wind and (in sunnier countries) solar to reduce the residual demand for firming.
Old world thinking. Like we will still have only centralized production fullfilling traditional demand variations.
In the new world the demand will become flexible as well, absorbing most of the renewable production fluctuations. With each million EV’s there will be distributed storage an order of magnitute larger (more than 25GWh storage on an average daily consumption of 5GWh). The main driver should be demand-supply driven price variations. In times of wind and sun the energy will be dirt cheap, on cold calm nights the energy will be more expensive than nowadays.
Stop comparing renewables and nuclear on old world scenarios. Nuclear is dead.
The other cost not mentioned is the cost of decommissioning at the end of the nuclear plants life. To say this cost is significant is a massive understatement. It is yet another case of our generation handing a massive problem to successive generations.
The claim that nuclear energy is 90% efficient is preposterous. With a planned thermal capacity of 9048 MW and a planned electrical capacity of 3260 MW, that is a thermal efficiency of 36%. This is worse than coal and much worse than gas.
I didn’t see any mention of the running costs (including nuclear fuel) for both scenarios. Doesn’t the fluctuating cost of uranium and the disposal of the waste and the end of the process make nuclear more expensive?
I would like to introduce all of you to Thorium and the LFTR technology for Nuclear with a Molten Salt Reactor. It is not a solid fuel reactor but a liquid fuel reactor and does not have it’s system under pressure. Please look up the various videos with Kirk Sorensen and allow yourself to be re-educated in the possibilities of Nuclear.
Ah, future tech. But in the future we will have fusion as we were taught 40 years ago.
Another elephant in the room, in my opinion, is that nuclear is the least suitable bedfellow for renewable generators. It may not be intermittent but it is also non-dispatchable, making it much less useful in the energy mix than renewables combined with storage.
Also, please fill me in here, does the cost of nuclear include the FULL cost of decommissioning, including safe and permanent disposal of all of the waste, also including the contaminated buildings and surroundings to the nuclear reactor?
“The writer started by pointing out a nuclear reactor generates energy at around 90% efficiency, twice the level achieved by offshore wind”
I don’t have access to the original, but I strongly suspect he is referring to the capacity factor, not the efficiency. In efficiency terms, a nuclear reactor is somewhere between 35 and 40%, whereas a wind turbine is well over 95%. In capacity factor terms, nuclear is around 92% and offshore wind somewhere in the 60 to 70% range depending on siting.
He is apparently using outdated figures for the wind CF, as they are subject to rapid change and its quite common for nuclear proponents to use outdated figures either knowingly or not.
“the fact nuclear reactors last at least twice as long as renewables projects. Which means, of course, the money spent on the hypothetical wind power installation has to be doubled”
Either Mr. Ford has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to the economics, or he is being deliberately misleading.
The actual *financial value* of cash flows in the future is subject to the change in value of money. If someone offered you $100 per week income in the 1950s you’d be rich… for a while, and by the late 1970s you’d be doing quite poorly indeed. Likewise, the value of the future cash flows from the generator decrease over time. That means the value of the “second half of the life” he’s referring to are largely worthless.
One can see this easily by using an LCOE calculator like the one found here:
https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech-lcoe.html
If you enter the page (scroll down a bit) it should be set to 20 years. Click in that field and press return to force an update. Scroll down and note the “Simple Levelized Cost of Renewable Energy (cents/kWh): ” is 10.7 (the label is a bit confusing as this is actually set up for a gas plant). Now go back to the top of the form and change the period to 40 years, and you’ll find the price has decreased to 10.0.
In other words, doubling the lifetime of the generator does not double its economic performance, it increases it by about 7%. This is not true of the nuclear case as the fuel costs are vanishing in comparison to the values in the default, but if one changes the inputs properly (capital ~7000, heat numbers to 0, capacity factor 90) you’ll find the best-case scenario is about 50%.
In other words, applying the same math your bank teller will when applying for a loan, Mr. Ford’s own numbers demonstrate precisely the opposite of what he claims. This sort of sophomoric economic practice is precisely how the industry ended up where it is today.