75% of Greens OK with Nuclear Power
Yes, this is a reader poll, and it is not a statistical representation of the public attitude of any country in particular. But it is striking that the 133 readers who did vote, were all doing so from a blog network called Green Options. Get it? Simply put, the public attitude towards nuclear power has undergone a seismic shift in recent years. This evidence indicates that this is not the same environmental movement that emerged in the early 1970’s.
But as consumed as I am with energy issues and the politics that surround them, I remain somewhat agnostic about nuclear power. Why is that? There’s no simple answer. Part of it is not wanting to reconcile the tensions between nuclear power as a low-carbon alternative with the ecological dangers of mining uranium and the big issue of transporting and storing nuclear waste. [If you want to know more about the specific dangers and problems facing nuclear power, Judith Lewis has written an excellent article in the most recent issue of Mother Jones addressing these issues in great depth.]
I would also argue that the reason I (and many other greens my age) are not particularly averse to nuclear power is because the pressing environmental issues that were building blocks to my own environmentalism were generally not related to nukes. I vaguely remember the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island. And I was in high school when the more serious accident at Chernobyl happened. But that’s it. There has not been a new nuclear power plant built in this country in 30 years, and for that reason nukes have faded away as one of the critical rallying issues of the modern environmental movement.
With that said, I recognize that nuclear power must be part of “the discussion.” I just want to be sure that the discussion happens, and that it is thorough, and geographically specific. In other words, nuclear power will not be the answer everywhere. One of my biggest concerns is the issue of water. And I will leave you with the words of Judith Lewis, who also holds that concern. She wrote in Mother Jones,
“Light water” reactors, used at the majority of the world’s nuclear plants, use water both to moderate the chain reaction and produce steam to spin turbines—2 billion gallons per day on average. Most of it returns to the adjoining river, lake, or ocean up to 25 degrees warmer, an ecological impact that could significantly interfere with nuclear power’s chances as a climate-change solution. Already, wherever a light-water reactor sits near a sensitive body of water, its intake pipes kill fish and its outflow distorts ecosystems to favor warm-water species.”
Mr. Hurst,
I’d use the propoganda phrase: “very slightly warmed” if your condenser’s flowrate was asymptocically close to 2×10^9 gallons per day.
Mr. Adams is fresher in the training program from which I guess this. Perhaps he can elaborate on my claim. I humbly ask him if he can. Really, though, I know it all depends on what you want it to be, and has implications for the efficiency and/or cost of the plant (any plant, nuclear or coal).
Ken, the allocation for nuclear waste is $0.001 per kWh, which is 0.1 cents per kWh. The accumulated fund stands at something like $30 billion.
Alexandra, just a note on your poll - you ask whether nuclear power is A solution to global warming, and my “yes” did not exclude other solutions contributing also. I felt that “maybe yes” would have implied doubt that nuclear can contribute.
Timothy, on water: Mother Jones’ quote in your article sort of implies that the water from the local cooling source is circulated through the reactor and/or the turbines. Neither of these is true. The river, lake or ocean water is used to cool the water that went through the turbines, through heat-exchangers. “super-heated” is an inaccurate description of the return cooling water (although correct for the turbine water); the outlet temperature limits are defined for the power station as part of the license in due regard of the local aquatic ecology. It’s that ecological limit that sometimes limits some nuclear power stations for a few days a year.
Nuclear plants use a lot of water, but all other thermal plants (including coal, gas, and renewable sources like geothermal and solar thermal) have the same issue. In terms of thermal efficiency, present-day nuclear plants are not much worse than modern coal plants, and advanced designs like the HTGR (pebble bed) reactor have efficiency levels similar to the best combined-cycle gas turbine plants. (They will have half the heat rejection, and therefore require half the cooling water, that current plants do.)
Nuclear waste is not expensive to store, or even to transport and dispose of. The entire Yucca Mtn. program (repository study, design, and construction as well as waste shipment and placement) is fully paid for by a fee of only 0.1 cents/kW-hr that is charged on all nuclear electricity. The overall cost of storing the waste on the plant site is even less. In summary, storing/disposing of nuclear waste, and isolating it from the environment is very inexpensive. The cost of isolating fossil fuel wastes from the environment, if we ever require it, will be much higher.
Nuclear plant operating costs are also very low, less than 2 cents/kW-hr, only 0.5 cents of which is the fuel cost. And this is the cost of fuel assemblies (which includes ore processing, enrichment and fuel assembly fabrication). The cost of the raw uranium ore is only ~2-3% of the total cost of nuclear electricity (i.e., about 0.1-0.2 cents/kW-hr). Thus, nuclear power’s economics is virtually unaffected by any increase in uranium ore cost. For this reason, limitations on long term ore supply are not an issue.
Anyway, the entire issue for nuclear power’s economics is the initial plant construction cost. In my personal opinion, nuclear is, and will be, at least somewhat more expensive than (conventional) coal, until coal is held to remotely the same requirements as nuclear (i.e., until it is required to sequester its wastes (incl. CO2) or pay a significant tax for the priviledge of dumping it into the environment. The small, additional cost for nuclear, however, is well worth it.
Finally, as for mining, uranium mining does have a measurable environmental impact, although the impact from present mines is much smaller than those of the old days. Uranium mining is probably the main, if not the only real, tangible impact from nuclear power overall.
However, given that renewables will not be able to provide all, or even most of our energy needs for the forseeable future (the most agressive goals under discussion are for them to meet ~20-25% of generation by ~2030), the salient question is what the environmental impacts of uranium mining are, per unit energy produced, compared to the overall impacts of the fossil alternatives (mainly coal).
It seems pretty clear that coal mining alone has a much greater impact than uranium mining. And for other parts of the production cycle, the differences get even more spectacular. Whereas the effects of coal mining are a tiny fraction of coal’s overall effects, uranium mining is probably most of nuclear power’s overall environmental impact. US coal plants alone cause ~25,000 deaths every single year, and are the leading single cause of global warming. Western nuclear plants have never had any measurable impact on public health over their entire ~40-year history, and they have negligible CO2 emissions (the same or less than renewables).
Folks, thank you all for jumping in on this and for your valuable comments. I have been learning a lot from this excellent discussion.
Timothy:
The cost associated with delaying a large, capital intensive project can be far more than what you might think, especially if the delay happens late in the project when most of the money has already been spent. Until the project starts up and begins producing electricity for sale, there is no revenue, but there are many costs that must be paid through ever increasing borrowing.
For example, the full operating crew must be assembled and trained well before the plant’s scheduled start up. If there is a delay, the payroll must still be met or all of the investment in the training will disappear. If the delay is too long, much of that investment will disappear anyway as important training modules need to be repeated or as some of the highly motivated people decide to seek more interesting work.
For some of the plants in the US where the construction process got tied up in the courts through repeated intervener suits over minor issues, the financing costs added up to about three times as much as the cost of the actual installation labor and equipment costs. The delays in the first US nuclear plant construction era were especially costly since many of them occurred near the time of Three Mile Island (1979) - some before, many after - which coincided with a period of high inflation and interest rates that reached as high as 18%.
I do not agree with the conventional wisdom that the capital cost of an atomic fission based heat engine is inherently more than the capital cost of a fossil fuel combustion heat engine since there are a number of simplifications that are possible with fission that are not possible with combustion. I do not want to clog up your comments with details - if you do not mind a little plug - please visit Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. to see just one possible example of what I mean. You can also find out some very interesting information about a more simple fission heat source at the Energy from Thorium blog.
Glad that you are hosting such an interesting discussion. Keep up the good work.
So we go nuclear, use up the world’s Uranium ores, then go desert/solar electric or will the fusion boys have pulled the rag by then and given us an alternative?
Why not develop and use all the renewable solar, wind, wave stuff at the same time just in case fusion still hasn’t arrived when the uranium runs out. We will have hedged our bets with a known, and survived another day.
[...] 75% of Greens OK with Nuclear Power e2 energy: “Coal & Nuclear: Problem or Solution?” Power Plant Efficiency Hasn’t Improved Since 1957 EIA Predicts 50% Increase in World Energy Consumption by 2030 Tags: China, HTR, HTR-10, HTR-PM, nuclear, pebble bed, Rongchen City Add a comment or question Recommend this post Share/Email Stumble It « Previous post [...]