Despite Fukushima and the failure of the US “nuclear renaissance”, nuclear power still has plenty of fans in Australia. A question which opponents routinely ask is “where are the nuclear power plants going to go?”.
That’s obviously a difficult question, but there’s a subtly different, and even nastier, question behind it, namely “How should we decide where a nuclear power plant should go”. There are obviously all kinds of issues to be resolved. For example, should it be on the coast, and therefore potentially vulnerable to a tsunami? Should it be near or far from population centres?
If we in Australia made a decision to go for nuclear power, then decided to answer all these questions from scratch, it would take years, maybe a decade or more before we even picked a site (look how long we took over the much easier question of a site for the national capital). And, until we answered the siting question, any estimate of the costs of nuclear power would be a stab in the dark anyway. A plant located in the centre of the Nullarbor would be about as safe as you could get, but hopelessly uneconomic.
So, the obvious answer is; Look at what other developed countries have done when faced with the same problem. But it turns out there is a small difficulty. The answer, according to the US, Britain and every other developed country I’ve looked at, is “put your plant next to an existing one, so there won’t be any more trouble than you already have”.
Of course, it’s logically impossible that they always worked that way. But, as far as I can tell, the last time a new site was picked for a nuclear power plant in a developed country was in the 1970s, before Three Mile Island, let alone Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even supposing that experience were relevant, it’s lost in the mists of time – the decisionmakers involved are long since gone, and any records they left are probably buried in the archives.*
So, unless we can solve a problem that every other developed country in the world has chosen to duck for 30-odd years, we will never even get to the starting gate with nuclear power.
*Update It turns out to be fairly easy to retrieve material from the National Archives, for example, on the proposal, made in the late 60s and abandoned in the early 70s, to build a nuclear power station at Jervis Bay. Thanks to commenter Andrew for picking me up on this.
*Further update Contrary to the claim in the post, a Finnish company has announced a proposed site for a new reactor, though it is not clear that any proper approval process has been undertaken. I doubt that Finnish administrative processes will translate easily to Australia, but it looks like a counterexample to my claim.
John Quiggin 
Pick the waste depot first, and factor in transport risks. Once that’s settled, consider sites high enough to avoid tsunamis, and off we go.
@Hermit
“That may leave us the power of E = mc^2 as our only affordable round the clock fossil replacement.”
This annoys me as a physicist. The equation E=mc^2 has no more to do with nuclear power than with any other means of liberating stored potential energy. It’s putting the cart before the horse. The mass change occurs because of energy release, not the other way around. A U235 atom does weigh more than its decay products, but equally, a wound up spring weighs more than a relaxed one. You should have said;
“That may leave us the power of V ~ g psibar phi psi’ as our only affordable round the clock fossil replacement.”
@Sam
Fair enough. If there’s no heat sink then DI(NR)’s comment makes more sense. It was a genuine question.
@Sam
Huh?
Given their cynical astroturfing around the deployment of wind turbines, I suggest somewhere in the same street as the “Landscape Guardians” or their mates at the IPA… :-^
@Chris Warren
Yeah, but only a tiny amount more. If there’s 1J stored in the spring, it’s about 10^(-17) Kg heavier than when it’s relaxed.
Thanks PrQ. You’ve convinced the Nuke power is an option that really isn’t on the table in the short to medium term.
@Sam
But putting 1J in will emit more frictional heat than any mass-energy addition?
If heat (and sound) comes out, mass must have gone down somewhere?
So due to the different magnitudes of the two effects, I reckon a wound-up spring will weigh less than before?
Why a question mark? You’re making a statement? Winding a spring up means putting net energy in. This means the spring weighs more. The human doing the winding weighs less (and unless the winding is perfectly efficient, weighs less by more than the spring weighs more), but we’re considering just the spring here.
Equally, a charged battery has more mass than a flat one, and a cup of hot tea is heavier than a cold one.
@Sam
You are ignoring the large energy loss through heat and sound. This ensures that mechanical work can never increase mass.
Your “mass increase” is a partial concept and is refuted by full analysis – just like a Keynesian who thinks that more paper can resurrect capitalist growth.
If you really want to increase the mass of a spring – just shine a torch on it.
@Chris Warren
You’re embarrassing yourself. I’m done here.
Well, as I more or less said earlier, let us;
(1) Fully cost ( as well as possible) negative externalities,
(2) Fully cost life cycle costs including decomissioning and waste storage/removal,
(3) Remove all subsidies for all energy sources including subsidies for insurance costs, and
(4) Make democratic decisions as well as financial decisions about siting energy infrastructure.
Can’t say fairer than that. I am confident solar power (and other renewables to some extent) will win hands down in the long run. If I am wrong, the nukester-boosters can tell me that in 20 years time if I (and this blog) are still around.
The coal/solar hybrid has potential; solar can be retrofitted to existing power stations and the need for lengthy consultative approval process appears to be diminished. Importantly it has both sides of the table talking to each other with a common purpose, to reduce carbon emissions.
BilB pretty much mapped it out as I see things. Nuclear power will not get any cheaper while extaordinary things are in the pipeline for solar PV and storage technologies. The majority of homes will be able to generate most of their transport energy requirements as well as their household energy from rooftop PV.
Both Japan and Germany are getting on to their Geothermal potential and we know what happens when these two nations mean business. Australian geothermal has done some groundbreaking work but it could have progressed much further with more government support.
Most nuclear advocates seem to me to want BAU forever, not you Fran I know, but most of them fail to see that our highly industrialised society cannot continue and that plenty of cheap energy will not overcome the other limits to growth.
@Ikonoclast
I broadly agree Ikonoclast, but
a) “subsidy” is a very broad term. Construed too broadly, you’d have to axe R & D for not only for nuclear but also renewables. That would be retrograde. I’d narrow the “no-subsidy” rule to operating costs. General research from which an industry benefits ought to remain. Of course, whether one funds a specific piece of general research and how one goes about controlling the IP arising out of it are other questions.
b) Price-Anderson is not a subsidy. To date, no operator benefiting from it has gone within two orders or magnitude of the threshold. Price-Anderson requires the industry as a whole to look after its players, giving every plant operator an incentive to see that others don’t cut corners. It also means that the public is not exposed to risk of loss as a result of a plant operator declaring bankruptcy after an incident. The industry steps in to cover, and only in the case of truly catastrophic losses does the state step in. Of course, that’s always when the state steps in anyway.
It’s worth noting that the absence of a Price-Anderson style scheme for coal and gas and other harmful industries represents favourable treatment for those industries, and means that if one of them goes belly up after a mishap, that the state has to step in straight away, and there is no chance of recovery.
Price Anderson?
There are so many aspects to this.
For starters an Australian Nuclear Industry is unlikely to reach such a size for the cost of an accident to be absorbed by the small number of players. Even for Japan’s industry such an impost could be sufficient to sink the entire industry if the public does not step in
Click to access pe(kobayashi20110719)e.pdf
Another aspect is that by bringing the government into the liability loop introduces a conflict of interest from a disclosure point of view. Three Mile Island should have triggered a world wide program of containment building venting due to its hydrogen explosion, but as the US nuclear industry and the US government did everything possible to cover up the hydrogen event the world dig not get the message of the risk. Japan could well sue the US government over this deliberate coverup IMO.
Another issue is the changing face of insurance due to Climate Change. The changing cost of insurance alone could well move the economic viability dial from marginal to very bad for the Nuclear Industry within the development timeframe.
Comparisons to the coal and gas industry are indeed relevent, Homebush Bay being a good example
http ://www .rhodesremediation.nsw.gov.au/areahistory.html
But the costs appear to be nowhere near comparable, with Homebush Bay site cleanup costing $91 million on the face of it, but that may not be the full cost. A friend who is in the business was talking of a completely different figure at the time, but I don’t know the details of how that was made up.
“I’d narrow the “no-subsidy” rule to operating costs.”
Good, Fran, because this includes disposal costs, which in the case in point have a very long time horizon. The time horzison (decay period) is so long that any attempt to assign a monetary value in US$, UKPounds Euro, DM, SF, etc is not credible.
@Ernestine Gross
Not really. The material (if reprocessed in a “Fast” reactor) poses a measurable hazard for about 300 years. At that point, if not earlier, whoever was there might well have some better way of sequestering or dealing with the material. An escrow trust could easily take care of the maintenance costs in the interim. The US government has been collecting money for years from Westinghouse and has, as yet, left them to look after the material because they’ve failed to devise a facility.
I think the number of concessions to low carbon energy should be small but their impact should be blunt. Advocates of wind and solar sometimes say the carbon tax needs to be $40 not $23 hence the supplementary RET is justified. Coincidentally the gas lobby also say they need $40 to neutralise brown coal. I favour a floating CO2 price provided the distortions are removed, notably free permits and questionable offsets. In that regard Australia seems to have learned nothing from the EU’s mistakes.
If the distortions including RET were removed perhaps the need for loan guarantees and insurance indemnities would be less. The energy customers would be out there except this time the annual CO2 quota would be seriously tough with no freebies. Finance for wind and solar would not carry the risk premium of nuclear but they have the intermittency hurdle to overcome. It could work out better than some think with a tough umpire. Gillard wants to be everybody’s best mate with generous concessions on many levels that undermine the whole exercise.
I should point out Australia already had a Price Anderson type precedent when they said the Gorgon project was off the hook if any CO2 escaped from under Barrow Island.
http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/wa-and-commonwealth-to-share-gorgon-load-20090817-endr.html
@Hermit
I think the effective price (not necessarily the explicit one though this is tidier) should be around $(AUD2011)100 by 2020. If we had a clear trajectory to get to that, I don’t think the modest entry price would make all that much difference.
I don’t have a problem in principle with credits (off-shore or otherwise) — providing there is a sound methodology that doesn’t subvert the price of permits earned abating CO2e by other means. I’d like to keep protecting forests out of the trading system because that is something that should be done regardless of our action on abatement. Forests are for biodiversity, not carbon sinks. If a jurisdiction does protect the integrity of a forest, then great — presumably their overall net emissions will be lower and they can count that and boast about it at conferences. On the other hand if someone wants to raise a carbon farm with a new forest on land that had a commercial purpose and can account the whole exercise in tCO2 years sequestered, then that’s another thing. People could get an offset that reflected the amount sequestered by time. One tCO2e might be worth 1% of what one ton abated forever was.
Not a Price-Anderson — just a straight indemnity. The other gas producers or APPEA folks aren’t stepping up first. I’d be holding Gorgon or any successor company 100% responsible. I’d be levying them per litre of gas money to cover foreseeable releases at $100tCO2 — (or $10 on each ton actually extracted) paid into an account that would be reserved to pay for remediation.
@Fran Barlow
“An escrow trust could easily take care of the maintenance costs in the interim.”
I don’t think the actual problem can be solved by a piece of paper containing the terms of a contract with as yet unborn people.
As I said, the operating costs include the disposal costs and these involve a very long time horizon. The time horizon (decay period) is so long that no monetary value can be assigned to them at present. This implies that the maintenance costs ‘in the interim’ (ie the very long period) can also not be calculated.
The current greenhouse gas emission problem from a technology that isn’t all that old should make the problem easier to understand.
@Ernestine Gross
Either the time window is fairly short, in the grand scheme of things or the facts on the ground on which we base our negative externality also become less certain. Either way the calculus against becomes less impressive.
We probably should assue 300 years but in practice, we might well get off with 100 or even fewer.
OTOH, GHGs are really forever, this side of fab new technology.
@Fran Barlow
.
Your argument amounts to saying that the disposal costs for nuclear waste are to be carried by future societies (ie socialize these costs).
GhG emissions also have a long decay rate, hence the accumulation of GhG emissions over generations. This was my point.
And such is the news from Japan:
http://www.smh.com.au/world/radioactive-waste-at-fukushima-threatens-second-nuclear-catastrophe-20120527-1zcxu.html
@Ernestine Gross
The problem we have here is not one of principle but one of practice. We are ethically obliged, IMO, to refrain from benefiting ourselves by prejudicing the interests of the yet to be born, in ways that would create intergenerational inequity. I take that to mean that we should not knowingly hand over the biosphere in worse condition than we found it, and, subject to feasibility, ought to see what we can do to remedy past maladministration.
What hapens though when we must choose between competing claims? Certainly, based on what we now know, we may safely conclude both that sequestering radioactive hazmat, or emitting greenhouse gases meet the test of “prejudicing the biosphere”. If we are obliged to choose between these two things, which poses the greater hazard? Which is more likely to be amenable to remedy? When is the earliest time this remedy could conceivably arrive? Can the remedy be entirely effective in both cases? What costs would be involved?
The reality is that we have now something like 450 operating nuclear plants, all of which prodyuce hazmat. We could build FBRs which would reduce our emissions of GHGs without augmenting the full stock of hazmat — and indeed, these would reduce the length of time when the hazmat would need to be sequestered.
While we may think that there is little probablility that either cheap and effective sequestration of hazmat will arise in the next 100 years, or that the hazmat will be much less hazardous, that confidence will decay in something like a linear relationship with the hazmat and in an unknowable way with technological advance. Undoing damage to the atmosphere and all that relies on it however, is not so easy.
@Fran Barlow
Thank you for the lengthy reply. It does not disprove my argument.
You only consider ‘coal’ vs ‘nuclear’. I don’t.
Please read the article on the latest news from Japan, referenced above, to get information on what happens ‘in practice’. Not good.
The problem with the nuclear fuel cycle is that the time scale involved is ten times a human lifetime – going to the moon is trivial in comparison to dealing with political and social problems around dealing with the waste of fission power plants…
Inconveniently, the long time scale of the GHG issues are, IMHO, also at the core of our failure to deal with them so far.
So, back to topic – I recall from sometime in the mid 80’s or early 90’s there was an advertising campaign in local papers that was (very) faintly boosting the idea of a fission power plant in the western districts of Victoria (Ballarat?)
It was not a government driven thing – I remember looking up the name of the group doing the advertising and thinking it was mining related?
I may even have kept a clipping but half a dozen house moves later I have no hope of finding it 🙂
While perhaps not directly related to the topic at hand, I will mention that on Friday Germany’s solar PV had a peak output of over 22 gigawatts. Yesterday at noon the whole of Australia used 22 gigawatts. Germany’s PV could power our entire continent. Or at least it could on a sunny weekend.
Hi Happy Heyoka. I don’t know who would want to build a nuclear power plant in Western Victoria, but they’d have to be kind of nutty to think they could compete with Victoria’s coal power which is very cheap by world standards, if you don’t count externalities such as it killing people.
One thing I sometimes wonder about when I hear claims of how nuclear power is cheap, is why no company has ever made a serious offer to build a nuclear power plant in South Australia which has always had Australia’s highest electricity prices. After all, if a company could build a nuclear power plant that could produce electricity at an all up cost of under 7 cents a kilowatt-hour they should be willing to pay to build one in SA, but for some reason, as far as I’m aware, no nuclear power company has ever made South Australia such an offer.
I just read an piece in Nature on Fukushima that parallels this discussion or at least the point of John’s original post that safe or not, reactors have to be placed in a real location to work.
Two independent assessments of the radiation risk both to the workers who battled to contain the reactor failure, and to the general public conclude that few people will develop cancer as a consequence and those who do will never know for sure what caused their disease. 167 workers received radiation doses that slightly increases their cancer risk, and the public was largely protected by quick evacuations. However,
http://www.nature.com/news/fukushima-s-doses-tallied-1.10686
Ernestine – in principle some fourth generation nuclear reactors could be net consumers of nuclear waste rather than net producers. If you really hate the prospect of long lived nuclear waste then you ought to be keen on a technology that can get rid of it. As far as I know there are no solar or wind technologies that produce negative nuclear waste. If fact there isn’t really anything that can do it other than fourth generation reactors. And the current stockpiles of nuclear waste have several hundred years of energy that could be used as the waste stream is reduced.
TerjeP, I am quite happy with: “So, unless we can solve a problem that every other developed country in the world has chosen to duck for 30-odd years, we will never even get to the starting gate with nuclear power.”
>The answer, according to the US, Britain and every other developed country I’ve looked at, is
> “put your plant next to an existing one, so there won’t be any more trouble than you already
>have”.
Last year, a new nuclear site was chosen here in Finland:
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Fennovoima+chooses+Pyh%C3%A4joki+on+west+coast+as+location+of+new+nuclear+plant/1135269632876
Ernestine – if nuclear waste isn’t one of your concerns then I don’t know why you were making an argument on the basis of nuclear waste. However if it was one of your concerns then surely you would have to give a very big bright positive green tick under the heading “long term nuclear waste issue” for forth generation nuclear reactors and a meek weak puny depressing disappointing grey tick under that heading for solar and wind generators. Under the heading “clarity on where to build it” you might put something different. I wouldn’t but you might.
One might claim that they have also failed to decide on what colour to paint new nuclear power plants. However I doubt whether location or colour has been the decisive issue.
That said the logical place to build a nuclear plant in Australia, if we were to do so, would be Jarvis bay. There is federal territory set aside for it already so there would only be one layer of government concerned. It isn’t far from existing transmission corridors. And it’s proximity to Canberra makes a bold political statement. In terms of how to decide that this is where it should happen the usually mechanism for such decision making is parliament. I’m not sure why we would use any other mechanism.
Nuclear as it stands is however probably not a good investment. It still generally costs too much. We need to open up to the possibilities but also be realistic in terms of expenditure. That said it would be less stupid than some of the current crop of green initiatives.
Based on the principle laid out in JQs post, surely it’s obvious that our NPP is going to be in Sydney – @ Lucas Heights.
Enjoy Sydney-ites!
There is plenty of space for a nuclear power plant near Lucas Heights. It’s not a bad option but politically more tricky.
@Ronald Brak
I think SA’s resistance to nuclear can be attributed to the eminence grise effect of former premier Mike Rann and the fact the gas lobby seems to have got at Weatherill, Redmond and Koutsantonis. Now the gas lobby has succeeded the public has little choice but to pay hefty power price increases. SA is unique in that in not only had the Maralinga A-bomb tests but also has the world’s largest uranium deposit at Olympic Dam. That mine needs another 650 MW of reliable power to expand which is beyond SA’s capacity under the current generation mix.
I expect SA to undergo an economic slowdown due to high energy prices, a dry summer and car subsidy/defence funding fatigue by Canberra. Therefore if the SA public shuns nuclear power they will have a subdued economy by choice.
When;
(a) large quantities of highly dangerous, reactive and unstable materials need to be assembled in one spot for any engineering, technological or commercial purpose; and
(b) this purpose could be achieved by another method requiring a lesser or no concentration of highly dangerous, reactive and unstable materials; then
(c) the second method is invariably preferable on safety, cost and system robustness grounds.
The fixation various parties have with nuclear power cannot be explained logically.
Speaking of logic how did you make the leap to your statement at (c).
Terje,
If nuclear power is “probably not a good investment” why would sighting a plant at Lucas Heights be “not a bad option”?
Using your criteria a better option would be to not build a plant at Lucas Heights.
Hermit, it only takes three years to build a combined cycle gas power station of that size. There are also agreements between BHPB and the geothermal companies to buy that power when it become available and onsidering the time it’s going to take to remove the overburden I think there is a good chance of that happening.
There’s nothing to stop BHPB installing it’s own solar array and wind turbines either.
TerjeP, your argument, addressed to me, is irrelevant to my initial point on disposal costs. My second reply indicates that I do not wish to derail the thread and I made it quite clear that I have nothing to add.
@Salient Green
BHP’s plan was to build a gas pipe to Roxby Downs and a 250 MW power station, the other 400 MW coming from the SA grid. However gas prices will rise rapidly in southern Australia and can expect to double perhaps in a decade. Now BHP are saying the Olympic Dam expansion may go on hold. Evidently they don’t think onsite wind and solar can power a 24/7 industrial operation. The mine expansion was the one bright star on the SA economic horizon.
Hot dry rock geothermal was supposed to be feeding the SA grid as long ago as 2009. So far zilch. Arguably the uranium mines and the geothermal prospects are all based on the same large slab of granite, radioactive decay being the source of heat for geothermal. SA is facing a very sobering reality check in the next year or so, particularly if the desal plant has to work hard.
Let’s see, in one reality South Australia’s electricity outlook is all doom and gloom, and in another South Australia’s wholesale electricity prices have dropped, CO2 emissions have dropped, Solar PV is being installed because it’s cheaper than grid electricity, and its two coal power plants are being put in mothballs. Two reasonably large mothballed power plants are things that make it kind of impossible for a state of 1.7 million to be hard up for electricity. I guess I’m just lucky to be living in the second reality and not the first one. I don’t know what they’re doing in the first reality, but what ever it is, they’re obviously doing it wrong.
Rog – a good location in purely technical terms if you were going to build one. On the economics a coal fired plant close to a coal field, such as the Bayswater plant, makes much more sense. Sorry I thought my position was pretty clear but perhaps not.
@TerjeP Thanks Terje. My point was that the location of this bad investment (nuclear power) is irrelevant.
Well argued Ronald. Wind and solar provide a third of SA’s power and installations of both are still going ahead full steam.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/mixed-greens-wind-and-solar-provide-13-of-power-in-sa-69923
The outlook for world resource demand is far more important than electricity prices for BHPB.
So South Australia got 34.5% of electricity from wind and solar in the March quarter. I didn’t realise it would be so high so soon, Salient Green. Thanks for the info.
@TerjeP
There is no leap to point c. If you think logically you can deduce that;
(1) If there are two ways of doing something (as in my points a and b); and
(2) One way (b) involves materials and methods that are safer and more stable then clearly the system will be safer and more robust. That is essentially a truism.
(3) Any complex structure or system with a good score on safety and robustness will generate lower maintenance, lifecycle and insurance costs. Up front costs will also be lower in most cases presuming it is not over-engineered and does not use very “exotic” materials and methods. In fact, the need for (relative) over-engineering and expensively “exotic” materials and methods usually goes hand in hand with the use of highly dangerous, reactive and unstable materials.