'Clean' nuclear energy and a nuclear renaissance: hype and hyperbole

Despite Chernobyl and other hazards and problems associated with it, there has been a renewed drive by the industry to rebrand and market nuclear power as a safe alternative to the carbon fuels that are responsible for global warming. In refuting this claim, Praful Bidwai also takes issue with the industry's rosy projection of a 'nuclear renaissance'.

NO other industry in the world has painted as rosy a future for itself - only to belie the projection - as has the nuclear power industry.

When the 'Atoms for Peace' project was launched in 1953 by United States President Dwight Eisenhower, nuclear power was held out as the bright white hope for the world's energy economy. Nuclear power, it was said, would be abundant beyond belief and help the globe decisively overcome its dependence on fossil fuels. It would be safe, clean and self-sustaining. It would be appropriate, indeed the ideal, form of energy - not just for the industrialised countries with their highly centralised power grids, but even for Third World nations with their special needs for decentralised energy. Above all, nuclear power would be eminently affordable and universally economical - 'too cheap to meter'.

'The biggest managerial disaster in history'

By the late 1970s, however, nuclear power had revealed itself to be highly problematic, excessively hazardous, very expensive and extremely unpopular in the US, then and to this day the world's most nuclear power-addicted nation, with more than 100 reactors (compared to 59 in France). Two major accidents in the US - a reactor fire at Browns Ferry in Alabama in 1975 and a partial reactor-core meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 - sent shivers down the public's spine.

Three Mile Island, which released 43,000 curies of krypton into the atmosphere, and just stopped short of becoming a full Chernobyl-style catastrophic meltdown, brought about a considerable tightening of design norms, safety standards and licensing requirements in the US and Western Europe. Suddenly, Wall Street was no longer willing to finance nuclear power generation. No insurance company wanted to insure nuclear reactors. Project after nuclear power project was abandoned in the US. In 1983, the Washington Public Power Supply System abandoned three nuclear plants after sinking $24 billion into them. The next year, a new nuclear reactor at Shoreham in Long Island, completed at the cost of $5.3 billion, could not be licensed and had to be scrapped.

By 1985, Forbes magazine was calling nuclear power 'the biggest managerial disaster in history'. Soon, energy expert Amory B Lovins of the US-based Rocky Mountain Institute would term it the greatest failure in the industrial history of the world, which has lost more than $1 trillion in subsidies, losses, abandoned projects and other damage to the public. US environmental and consumer activist Ralph Nader famously described nuclear power as 'a menace'.

 And then, in April 1986, Chernobyl happened. The accident, which has claimed a death toll estimated at between 65,000 and 95,000, sent shockwaves throughout the world. New nuclear reactor construction went into a tailspin in both the West and the East. By the early 1990s, the focus of new nuclear power projects had shifted to Asia - primarily Japan, China, South Korea and India - but with a much-reduced momentum, and amidst public protests and resistance (except in China). The bottom fell out of the nuclear reactor manufacturing industry in the US and Europe.

Already brought to their knees by the absence of reactor orders for about three decades, US electrical engineering giants General Electric and Westinghouse hived off their nuclear reactor divisions and sold large chunks of them to Japanese corporations. Many Western European parliaments (e.g. Germany, Sweden, Belgium) passed laws imposing a moratorium on new nuclear reactors and phasing out existing ones - unless a reliable solution is found to the menacing problem of safely storing high-level wastes generated by nuclear fission for prolonged periods such as thousands of years.

This time-span is no hyperbole. Many components of nuclear wastes have extremely long half-lives: plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,400 years and uranium-235 a mind-boggling 710 million years. And about 10 half-life cycles must pass before the radiation hazard from a particular substance is reduced to an acceptable level. Science has not found a solution to the waste problem, which is now acknowledged to be thorny, if not intractable.

Under this trajectory, with its long history of accidents, regulatory setbacks and adverse economics, nuclear power seemed set by the late 1990s to enter a phase of terminal decline. By then, global nuclear power generation had achieved less than one-hundredth of the capacity expansion originally projected for it - despite generous subsidies, massive political support, and transfer of real costs from the operator to the public and from present to future generations.

The number of operating nuclear reactors worldwide has stagnated at 420- to 430-odd in recent years. And their contribution to global electricity generation has dropped marginally to about 13% of the total - less than 5% of world energy consumption as a whole. About a third of the world's inventory of reactors are due to retire in a decade or so. And only a fraction (about one-third) of those due soon for decommissioning is likely to be replaced by new reactors. This represents a crisis and the near-certain prospect of a decline.

Attempts to find technological fixes to the crisis of nuclear power through higher, more complex routes like fast-breeder reactors - once tomtommed, especially in France, as the most elegant way of generating electricity while producing even more fissile fuel than is consumed - have all failed. Nuclear power seems to have exhausted its innovation potential and now stagnates as a 60-year-old 'mature' or 'post-maturity' technology without a future.

Global 'nuclear renaissance'?

However, two factors emerged at the beginning of this century which held out the potential of transforming the prospect of nuclear power. The first was the rise to power of deeply conservative political currents in some Western countries such as the United States, which wanted to give a boost, even if an artificial one, to nuclear power as a solution to the energy crisis amidst growing global depletion of fossil fuels. President George W Bush launched the biggest initiative to promote nuclear power since the 1950s, primarily through loan guarantees that would finance 80% of the capital cost of nuclear reactors.

The second factor was the growing temptation to look for 'soft' options in resolving the climate change crisis, on which public awareness has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade. These options would focus on shifts or switches in existing technologies, rather than new, renewable and inherently green technologies. The switch would permit the world, the developed countries in particular, to continue with their existing patterns of consumption while to a certain extent mitigating the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Besides 'futuristic' technologies like carbon capture and sequestration, or using giant mirrors to reflect sunlight away from the earth, nuclear power would play a significant role in this approach - if only because fission does not directly produce greenhouse gases. Although an overwhelming majority of environmentalists, climate change experts and activists argue against nuclear power, it has found support among a minority of scientists and many politicians and policy-makers, especially those in search of shortcuts, half-measures and less-than-radical, long-term and sustainable solutions to the climate crisis based on low-carbon development and an altered relationship between natural resources and consumption, based on real human needs, as distinct from market demand.

At any rate, these two factors together were meant to produce a global 'nuclear renaissance', a second Golden Age for nuclear power generation, beginning in the First World, with hundreds of new reactors being added to the global total, or at least replacing the 120 to 130 old ones which are due soon to retire as their useful economic life ends after 40 years of operation. In 2005, Bush announced generous annual $18.5 billion loan guarantees for new reactor construction. In 2006, the G-8 summit of major developed countries at Hokkaido in Japan, to which emerging economies like China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa were invited as observers, also made a ringing declaration of a 'nuclear renaissance' and pledged to promote it vigorously.

Five years after Bush's loan guarantees were announced, not a single new nuclear plant has been licensed. In a decision that disappointed many of his supporters, President Barack Obama not only continued with Bush's loan guarantees, but also nearly tripled it in his budget request to Congress to $54 billion. In February 2010, Obama announced guarantees of $8.3 billion for the first nuclear power station that may be built in decades in the US - two reactors in Georgia. Whether these actually get constructed remains to be seen. But it is indisputable that there has been no 'nuclear renaissance' in the US.

That is also true of Western Europe, where only two new reactors are under construction post-Chernobyl. One is in France, where nuclear power enjoys much state support and subsidy. The other, more interesting, project is at Olkiluoto in Finland, where it is meant to follow market-based principles with no subsidies or hidden costs. As discussed below, the Olkiluoto reactor has run into trouble. But even if it is rescued, there is unlikely to be a 'nuclear renaissance' in Western Europe.

Obstacles

In recent years, the nuclear industry has done its utmost to exploit the climate crisis by promoting nuclear power as a 'low-carbon' solution and as a safe, affordable and appropriate source of energy. But the prospect of nuclear power has run into a number of obstacles: high and rising costs; uncertainty of financing due to high risks and investor shyness; long delays in licensing and construction; and numerous safety issues. These issues pertain to hazards to occupational workers and neighbouring populations; the as-yet-intractable problem of safe storage of high-level wastes; and potential for catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl. Not to be discounted is the possibility of nuclear proliferation and the high security risk posed by nuclear installations as targets of attacks with conventional weapons.

Not least, the prospect of nuclear power expansion has come up against social and political barriers, represented by popular resistance to the siting of hazardous atomic installations, which local communities do not want in their neighbourhood. In many societies across the world, nuclear power can only be promoted as an adversarial project against people's preferences and by stoking suspicion, sullen antipathy and outright hostility.

The nuclear industry has proved a poor learner in controlling costs and reducing the gestation time of power projects. Several studies, including a famous one by MIT researchers, suggest that nuclear power is 30 to 75% costlier than electricity from gas, coal or wind. And the cost differential is not narrowing. It took 60 months to build a nuclear reactor in the late 1960s. This period almost doubled to 116 months between 1995 and 2000. (The average for the 1995-2005 period was 99 months.)

In many energy-related technology areas, unit costs fall as technology capacity doubles. The fall has been an impressive 32% in solar photovoltaics, 34% in combined cycle gas turbines and 17% in wind generation. But the learning rate is a poor 6% in nuclear power, where no major technological breakthroughs are expected.

Finland is the only member of the OECD developed-country group where new nuclear construction has been launched within a liberalised economic environment. There, the Olkiluoto-3 (OL-3) project - based on the European (and now pompously renamed) Evolutionary Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR), designed by the Franco-German company Areva - has run into a serious safety and financial problems, with construction running into a three-year-long delay and a cost overrun of 60% or _2.3 billion beyond the original budget. This will lead to an additional indirect cost burden of _600 per person in Finland. 

French, Finnish and UK regulators have raised questions with Areva over the control and instrumentation systems of the EPR. 'In carrying out individual assessments, we have all raised issues regarding the EPR control and instrumentation systems,' said France's ASN, the UK's HSE and Finland's STUK. The issues centre primarily on ensuring the adequacy of the safety systems used to maintain control of a plant if it goes outside normal conditions, and their independence from the control systems used to operate the plant under normal conditions. The Finnish nuclear safety authority has reported as many as 2,100 quality and safety issues in the reactor.

At stake is the soundness and economic viability of the EPR as an advanced Generation-III+ reactor (along with the Westinghouse AP-1000 design). Contrary to the promise that the OL-3 would follow 'market principles' of funding, it borrowed subsidised and low-interest loans. It has nevertheless run into financing and construction problems.

Meanwhile, the AP-1000 design too has fallen foul of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has raised questions about its containment and construction standards. If OL-3 ends up with an even bigger construction bill and higher generation costs, it will set yet another negative example for the global nuclear industry. If it is scrapped, the consequences would be far worse.

Nuclear power plans

Meanwhile, only a handful of big countries like China, Russia and India have announced plans to significantly expand nuclear power generation. China and Russia propose to add 40,000 MW of nuclear power electricity capacity to their grids within the next decade. India has set a target of installing 20,000 MW in nuclear capacity by 2020, up from the present 4,120 MW. These goals may look impressive, but they may not mean much.

Russia has not built a single new reactor since Chernobyl. And it does not seem likely, given its gas and oil resources, that Russia will invest huge amounts in nuclear power and build new reactors at the furious pace of four a year. As for China, even with the addition of 40,000 MW, nuclear power will remain much smaller in China than in South Korea, not to speak of Japan. The share of nuclear power in China's electricity generation will only rise marginally from the present 1.6% to under 5% by 2025 - hardly the kind of spark that will kindle a global nuclear renaissance.

Among the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), India seems the keenest to promote nuclear power - witness the zeal with which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pursued the nuclear deal with the US after it was initialled in 2005, to the point of risking the survival of his government in 2008, and the paeans the government sings to nuclear power as the key to 'decarbonising the energy economy'.

The US-India nuclear deal, endorsed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers' Group, will allow full civilian nuclear commerce with India although it possesses nuclear weapons and has refused to sign any nuclear restraint/disarmament agreement. All countries can freely export civilian nuclear plant technology and equipment to India. The primary rationale and objective of the nuclear deal are political and military - rooted in an effort to seal a close 'strategic partnership' or alliance between the two countries, under which India would make a decisive break with the legacy of Non-Alignment and independent foreign policy-making. But the deal was presented as a means to long-term energy security, through the promotion of nuclear power. In reality, there is no evidence of any such plan. This was more an afterthought and an attempt at putting a 'green' spin on the deal. Under the agreements that India has signed or is about to sign with the US, France and Russia, it plans to install a total of 63,000 MW in power capacity by 2030.

India has identified several locations where nuclear power 'parks' will be established: Koodankulam in Tamil Nadu, where Russia has been building two reactors of 1,000 MW each, Jaitapur in Maharashtra (to be allotted to France for a possible total of six 1,600-MW reactors), Mithi Virdi in Gujarat and Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh (possibly for US reactors), and Haripur in West Bengal (for Russian reactors).

However, India has a long history of setting targets and not meeting even a fraction of them. Going by past plans, and by spending budgets of the order of $1.5 billion a year for 50 years, India should have had over 50,000 MW in nuclear power capacity by now. It has less than one-tenth of that. The Department of Atomic Energy, which runs India's nuclear power as well as weapons programmes, has never met the targets it itself sets. It does not complete projects on time.

The last 10 nuclear reactors the DAE built went 300% or more over budget. According to DAE plans, India should have had a nuclear power capacity of 8,000 MW by 1980. In that year, the actually installed capacity was 540 MW. Similarly, a target of 43,500 MW was set for 2000. But the installed capacity in that year was only 2,720 MW.

Climate-friendly claims

What about the global nuclear industry's claim about 'decarbonising' the energy economy and contributing to the fight against climate change? This is based on dubious assumptions and extravagant claims. Nuclear power only generates electricity and is irrelevant to other sectoral uses of energy such as transportation and heating, etc. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency's global energy scenario, the contribution of nuclear power consumption would still be under 10% even if nuclear power capacity were to be doubled by 2050. Even such a massive expansion would help reduce carbon dioxide emissions by only 4%.

What the world needs is not marginally reduced emissions, but deep cuts in them - 40% by 2020 and 95% by 2050. Nuclear power cannot significantly contribute to bringing about  these reductions.

In order to make a substantial reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from power generation, an infeasible number of nuclear reactors would have to be built by mid-century. According to a report from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (US), between 1,900 and 3,300 nuclear plants would need to be built worldwide by 2050, in conjunction with renewable energy measures, in order to stabilise carbon emissions at their 2000 levels. Realising this scenario would mean building about one reactor each week for the next 40 years. The rate of construction for the past decade and more is 3 to 4 reactors a year.

Researchers from Princeton University have hypothesised 'a less ambitious scenario in which about 700 large nuclear plants would need to be built by 2050 - two every month - in order to reduce the expected increase in carbon emissions by 15%. An additional 300 plants would be needed just to replace the current fleet that will retire over the next few decades. Even this number would be difficult to build by 2050. In addition to the construction of nuclear plants, this huge amount of nuclear capacity would require about 11-22 large enrichment plants, 18 fuel fabrication plants and 10 more disposal sites the size of Yucca mountain.' This too is infeasible given the nuclear industry's capacity and its record.

The global nuclear industry cannot quickly raise the pace of construction from 3-4 reactors a year to 25 or more. In particular, because of the 30-year-long hiatus in the US in new reactor construction, it would be impossible to move to high rates of construction without exorbitant subsidies.

Nuclear power expansion also carries a significant risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons: the scientists and engineers who gain expertise in these technologies could use it for military purposes. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons production share a good deal of infrastructure.

Greenhouse gas emissions

It is of course true that nuclear reactors, which produce energy based on the fissioning of uranium atoms, do not directly emit greenhouse gases (GHGs). But each step of the so-called nuclear fuel cycle, right from uranium ore mining and processing, to fuel fabrication and reactor construction, from spent fuel reprocessing to eventual decommissioning and waste storage, involves emissions. Therefore, nuclear power can only make a modest contribution to containing or reducing GHG emissions.

In practice, the experience of countries like Japan suggests that overall GHG emissions can rise sharply (threefold in this case) even as nuclear power capacity increases by 40,000 MW (as it did in Japan between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s). The life-cycle emissions per kilowatt-hour from a nuclear power plant in the US are estimated at 16-70 grammes per kWh of carbon dioxide. This is much lower than emissions from coal-burning (about 1,000 grammes per kWh). But it compares poorly with biomass (29-62 grammes), wind (11-37 grammes) or hydroelectricity (17-22 grammes).

This should put to rest the claim that nuclear power is the least emissions-intensive energy technology available. Renewables are already on the market and growing. Besides, the promise of energy efficiency enhancement in many industrial and domestic appliances remains attractive. Numerous measures to improve energy efficiency are now available.  According to Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, 'each dollar invested in electric efficiency displaces nearly seven times as much carbon dioxide as a dollar invested in nuclear power, without any nasty side effects'.

Nuclear technology's future does not appear bright. Nuclear power will only become more polluting in the future since increased nuclear production will decrease the supply of high-grade uranium and much more energy is required to enrich uranium at lower grades. At the same time, the International Atomic Energy Agency has already acknowledged that current uranium resources are not sufficient to meet increased demand in the future. A report from the Oxford Research Group predicts that in 45 to 70 years, nuclear energy will emit more carbon dioxide than gas-fired electricity. So much for contributing to the fight against climate change.                                

Praful Bidwai <praful@bol.net.in> is a New Delhi-based columnist, social science researcher, and activist in the environmental, human rights, peace and global justice movements. A Fellow of the Transnational Institute, he is co-author, with Achin Vanaik, of South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament (Oxford University Press, 2001). He has just written An India That Can Say Yes: A Climate-Responsible Development Agenda for Copenhagen and Beyond. The book is published by Heinrich B”ll Foundation, C-20, FF, Qutub Institutional Area, New Delhi 110016.

*Third World Resurgence No. 235, March 2010, pp 5-9