In early 2024 I gave a talk to the Croydon group and in the Q&A session Jenny asked me "what do you think of nuclear power". I wasn't ready for that question - I think I waffled a bit, and in the end said that I would like to see a non-nuclear energy strategy but the numbers have to add up. As David MacKay said, I'm not pro-nuclear, I'm just pro-arithmetic. It made me think though that I need to come up with a better answer.
The government's Energy Security Strategy describes nuclear as "the only form of reliable, low-carbon electricity generation which has been proven at scale and returns more than 100 times as much power as a solar site of the same size ... we can only secure a big enough baseload of reliable power for our island by drawing on nuclear ... our aim is that by 2050 up to a quarter of our power consumed in GB is from nuclear". That would take the nuclear baseload to around 24 GW - eight power stations - and implies that our total generating capacity will be somewhere north of 100 GW. By comparison, demand in 2021 averaged 30.8 GW and peaked at 47 GW. At the time I write this - a morning in March 2024 - we have a nuclear baseload of around 10%, 46% wind and solar, 19% gas and biomass. The 19% is dispatchable power - that is, generators that can ramp up and down quickly as the grid balances supply and demand. If we move to a generation mix of renewables plus nuclear I don't understand where the dispatchable power is, unless we have a lot of storage. We're probably going to need a lot of storage anyway to cope with the unpredictability of wind and solar.
These are some of the common responses when the nuclear issue comes up for discussion:
We don't know how to deal with the waste this is ironic I think, because we're in a climate emergency because we don't know how to deal with the waste from burning fossil fuels. Proponents of nuclear power say that, yes the waste is nasty but there isn't actually very much of it, and glassification of high-level waste plus storage in a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) is an acceptable solution. I'm inclined to buy that argument. Government estimated in 2017 that around 650,000 cubic metres of material will be sent to a GDF. Most of this volume is intermediate and low-level waste. Our grand children may not thank us for this, but they might prefer it to an extra 500 gigatonnes of CO2 going into the atmosphere.
Nuclear waste lasts a long time this is undeniable, but we have already put into the environment poisons that last effectively forever, such as mercury, lead, and arsenic. (Tetraethyl lead for example is no longer legal in petrol but can still be added to the fuel used by propellor-driven aircraft).
I'd rather live next to a wind farm than a nuclear power station so would I, but this isn't comparing like- for-like. HInkley Point C is designed to deliver 3200 MW - that's the equivalent of 100 or so wind farms on a windy day, say 200 if we assume a load factor of 50%. That's a wind farm on every hill in the West Country.
Nuclear stations are expensive you might reasonably expect that 68 years after the opening of Calder Hall we'd be able to build a nuclear station as easily as we can build a coal station or an oil refinery, but Hinkley Point C which is now under construction comes with an estimated price tag of £35bn. This figure could reach £45bn when inflation is factored in. As a comparison, the cost of the London-Birmingham section of HS2 may be as much as £66bn.
What about Chernobyl? Chernobyl was a human-made disaster on a scale comparable with natural disasters like the Japanese tsunami. Historian Serhii Plokhy is his book 2018 Chernobyl - History of a Tragedy says "current estimates place [the ultimate mortality toll] between the 4,000 deaths estimated by UN agencies in 2005 and the 90,000 suggested by Greenpeace". Neither of these organisations can be considered impartial I think. Wikipedia has a longer discussion on this.
The annual mortality of human-made air pollution in the UK alone is between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths every year. Most of this pollution comes from burning fossil fuels (and wood).
And Fukishima? This is George Monbiot, writing in 2011 shortly after the disaster at Fukushima: I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology. A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.
One worker exposed to radiation has since died from lung cancer. The official total for the number of those dead or listed as missing from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami is about 18,500.
David MacKay in his last interview before his death in 2016 abandoned his neutral position on energy strategy and opted for nuclear plus carbon capture and storage (CCS): the former presumably for baseload power and the latter for dispatchable, on-demand power. There isn't really a place for renewables in this strategy, although CCS is unlikely to be 100% effective and wind and solar will continue to be clean. I'm prepared to go along with MacKay's strategy, although I'd be happy to be wrong.
Post: Category discussion topic tags nuclear.
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Originally posted in Second Nature 013 (SN013) in March 2024, with follow-up comments in SN014 and SN015. You need to subscribe to the newsletter to access back issues.