Last week, on the role of solar energy, Nobel Laureate Alan Heeger talked about the unjustified hype of nuclear energy solving the world’s energy crisis pointing out that we would need to build 1GW or bigger reactor every week from now to 2015 for nuclear energy to satisfy the world’s energy needs.

One cannot but honestly ask – beyond the hype and the glamour of nuclear energy, how feasible is it truly?

In an article titled “Nuclear Power: The Energy Balance”, Storm van Leeuwen and Smith point out that 440 nuclear reactors today, with a capacity of 363 gigawatts only provide for 6% of the world energy. The reactors need about 67,000 tons of natural uranium annually. Uranium, like petroleum is a finite resource. Once the high-grade uranium ores are exhausted, the energy required to extract and process the more common but much poorer grade ores for continuing use in nuclear reactors will result in the production of more CO2 than if fossil fuels were burned directly. Hence, a massive worldwide nuclear program will add cumulatively to energy demands, rather than solve them.

According to 2003 data from the World Nuclear Association, current uranium reserves are about 3.5 million tons, enough to last 50 years but only at present consumption rates. If large numbers of nuclear reactors were to be built to satisfy our ever-increasing demand for electricity, reserves of high-grade ore would be rapidly exhausted, leaving huge quantities of low-grade ores most of which would cost more energy to utilize than it would deliver in electricity. Even if useful uranium resources were found to be much larger than now estimated, it would only satisfy global demand for several decades and then the world would be left with huge quantities of radioactive waste with no source of energy to sequester it safely.

This analysis also estimates that if all of today’s energy needs (15,000 terawatt-hours) were met through nuclear energy, our nuclear fuel would last between 3 and 4 years.

Clearly, then, this solution is only a temporary solution. But that does not imply it is not feasible. Perhaps it might be one useful solution as we try to find a more sustainable solution. However, to ascertain its feasibility, we need to ask what the cost of this solution might be.

Perhaps one of the most extensive analyses on the cost of nuclear energy was provided by Peter Bunyard in an article for The Ecologist which can be found here. The article quotes an analysis by William Keepin in his 1990 report for Greenpeace: “5,000 nuclear plants would be needed to displace the estimated 9.4 terawatts of coal required for electricity generation in the world by 2025. With highly optimistic assumptions about capital costs and plant reliability, total electricity generation costs (1990 US dollars) would average $525 billion per year.” This compares quite unfavorably with the price of electricity at $0.03/kWh today.

Bunyard points out that the energy and financial cost of decommissioning of a nuclear plant is large as is the cost for disposal of the wastes – and this cost is not factored into most analysis used to define the cost of nuclear energy. In many cases – including plants in UK – this cost has prevented appropriate disposal of waste with the strategy used consisting of armed guards watching over the waste in secure buildings - Cumbria's Sellafield nuclear plant. Currently, this site stores over 10000 tons of highly toxic nuclear waste. Clearly, this is not a sustainable solution.

Even in the west, where most of today’s nuclear power is situated, the price of the power is often set through deceit and secret subsidies and numerous investigative reports have shown.

In the past and before privatization of the electricity supply industry, the U.K.s state-owned Electricity Generating Boards sought to maintain the fiction of nuclear power’s cheapness. They managed to convince successive governments, but not the Committee for the Study of the Economics of Nuclear Electricity (CSENE) who unravelled the distortions and assumptions used. In its 1981 report the committee lambasted the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) for using discredited accounting methods to promote nuclear power over other systems, such as holding to historic costs rather than inflation-adjusted ones. Since all U.K. nuclear power stations had experienced massive cost overruns, historic accounting minimized generating costs and prejudiced results favorably against other forms of electricity generation.

Year after year, in its annual reports, the CEGB declared nuclear power gave the cheapest electricity. In fact, the reverse was true as the industry was being hugely subsidised by coal-fired generation.
On 18/7/05, The Guardian reported the government paid a subsidy of £184m, for "spent fuel liabilities," in March to help prop-up British Energy, (already bailed out of bankruptcy in 2003). The £184m payment, or similar amounts, will be repeated every year to pay the costs of British Energy's contracts with BNFL. In effect, the company's shareholders will be able to get profits from the generation of electricity without having to pay the cost of disposing of the fuel afterwards. The payment will appear as operating income from customers in BNFL's accounts, whereas, although not revealed in BNFL's annual accounts published in June, it is in effect a direct payment from the taxpayer via British Energy.

Nuclear Energy is being presented as a clean alternative. How true is this claim?

In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published a report which considered several options to mitigate climate change, including global expansion of nuclear power. [8] (The IPCC consists of several hundred scientists and contributors, recognised internationally as experts in their field, and was convened by the U.N. and World Meteorological Society to assess climate change.)

The IPCC report assumed installed nuclear capacity would grow from 1995’s 330 GW capacity to about 3,300 GW in 2100, with a tenfold increase in nuclear reactors over this century. But they found there would also be a huge increase in spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste generated. The IPCC calculated if this plan was followed, it would lead to 6.3 million tons of accumulated spent fuel by 2100. They also analyzed the possibility of reprocessing, separating plutonium from the spent nuclear fuel, for use in Fast Breeder Reactors, burning plutonium instead of uranium as fuel.

Accumulated volumes of high-level nuclear waste for disposal would be around 200,000 m3 by 2100. Between 0.1 - 3 million kg/year of plutonium would be generated, depending on the mix of technologies used, resulting in a plutonium inventory of between 50-100 million kg. They concluded the security threat created by such massive amounts of plutonium were colossal. A nuclear bomb powerful enough to destroy a city requires only 10 kg of plutonium.

Program to develop fast-neutron breeders demand huge investment, not only of money, but of fossil fuels. While it would be unwise to claim breeders can never be a viable energy source, after half a century of failed attempts in the U.S. the U.K. France and Germany, the dreams appear to be pipe dreams. None of the developed countries is considering fast breeder technology for more power generation.

Clearly, then, nuclear energy – from a resource stand point – can at best be a stop gap solution to the energy needs of the world. From a cost stand point, it does not compare favorably with other alternatives today and as the British case shows, vested interests have often engaged in deceitful practices to present it as feasible. In any case, even in these examples, the costs do not include the cost of decommissioning, close down and disposal of nuclear waste – all of which are huge. An update on huge nuclear plant decommissioning costs was reported in The Guardian Weekly, 12/8/05, with Paul Brown, writing that costs of cleaning up more than 50 years of Britain’s nuclear waste had risen by £8bn to £56bn and will rise further.

In addition, the process results in the build up of millions of tons of radioactive and contaminated wastes that we still do not have a way of disposing.

Is this solution – that can at best provide us energy for 2-3 decades – worth the cost? Choosing nuclear energy as a solution seems neither practical nor ecological. And yet, without any clear public debate, political leadership seems to be pushing us in that direction.

We have to ask what the motivation for this may be!

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