I have a piece in the Guardian responding to the pro-nuclear film Pandora’s Promise. The core of my argument is that, in most countries, political resistance to nuclear power is no longer the primary problem – the big difficulty is with the economics. The key paras
he fact that the world has not turned to nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a matter of economics. In the absence of a substantial carbon price, nuclear energy can’t compete with coal and other fossil fuels. In the presence of a carbon price, it can’t compete with wind and solar photovoltaics. The only real hope is that, if coal-fired generation is reduced drastically enough, always-on nuclear power will be a more attractive alternative than variable sources like solar and wind power. However, much of the current demand for “baseload” power is an artifact of pricing systems designed for coal, and may disappear as prices become more cost-reflective.
To put the point more sharply, if we are convinced by the arguments of Pandora’s Promise, what would the makers of the film have us do? Stop protesting against nuclear power? Most of us did so decades ago. Abandon restrictions on uranium mining and export? The Australian government has done so already, with barely a peep of protest. The only remaining restrictions on exports to India relate to concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation, not nuclear energy, and seem likely to be dropped in any case. Give nuclear power a level playing field to compete against renewables? In the US at least, nuclear power is already treated more favourably than alternatives, leaving aside the massive subsidies already handed out in the 20th century. The same is true in many other countries that have sought, with limited success, to promote a nuclear renaissance.
Two of the leading environmentalists quoted as supporting nuclear power are Mark Lynas and George Monbiot. They have some interesting reactions to the recent announcement that EDF will build a nuclear reactor, Hinkley C, under a deal with the UK government. Monbiot sees it as a disaster, going for massively expensive Generation III technology when the alternative was to build an Integral Fast Reactor, a design with lots of theoretical advantages but one that has never been built (other breeder reactors have been expensive failures). Lynas, writing before the announcement has a more sanguine view of the cost. Lynas compares the “strike prices” offered by the UK government for various renewables, ranging from 100stg/MWh for onshore wind, to 305stg/MWh for experimental technologies like wave and tidal energy. Offshore wind (the only source without severe supply constraints in the UK context) comes in at 150 and large-scale solar at 125. These are guaranteed for 15 years from 2014. Hinkley has as strike price of 92.50, for 35 years from the estimated start date of 2023.
Depending on your assumptions about technical progress, that makes nuclear look like a reasonable option to place a bet on in the UK context. But the UK is a special case. On the nuclear side it has plenty of brownfield sites where a new reactor can be added, as well as a regulatory setup skilled workforce and so on. More importantly, the UK is densely populated, located at a high latitude (Edinburgh at 55N is on the same latitude as Moscow) and notoriously cloudy, due to the Gulfstream. Add to that a strong contingent of NIMBY denialists in the Tory Party and you’ve got a country with very limited prospects for solar PV or onshore wind.
Conversely, taking Lynas’ numbers and even ignoring the rapid technological progress in solar PV, it’s obvious that nuclear energy is never going to be a goer in Australia, where we have plenty of land, much more sunlight and no established nuclear infrastructure. The calculation will be different in different countries, but there won’t be many where nuclear comes out as the least-cost option, although it might be a good backstop in some cases.
John Quiggin 
The troubling facts in Australia are that we have very high per capita emissions, 6% nonhydro renewables and reluctance to pay more for electricity or accept reduced reliability. After 2020 several of Australia’s large coal fired baseload plants will need replacing but not by gas unless there is a no export policy. That puts us between a rock and a hard place.
I suspect that neither CCS nor Gwh scale batteries will become practical in the next decade. Barring some kind of technological breakthrough or public attitude shift (eg another nuclear accident) we could rapidly implement nuclear in the 2020s. Converting coal plant with modern steam boilers to small modular reactors as a heat source could be done at several locations, notably the Latrobe and Hunter Valleys. In the meantime wind and solar could be overbuilt so they help a fair bit even on dull days.
Can’t be done? I understand some 47 reactors were build in 1983. Germany still has 13% nuclear power, 22% renewables including hydro yet increasing CO2 emissions while the green energy levy raises about $30 bn a year. Time for realism.
If anyone has seen the film: What is the film-maker’s solution to the problem of nuclear waste?
AFAIK there isn’t one yet, and until there is nobody should be building new reactors.
@Megan
Hi Megan, I haven’t seen the film but from my knowledge of the guys who made the film I think they probably advocate Gen IV designs. In theory these reactors are supposed to consume most of the waste. I’m not a physicist but I think the idea is that most waste consists of atoms that are very large and still quite fissile, so they can be further broken down in a more advanced reactor. There is still waste but a lot less and typically decays over hundreds as opposed to millions of years.
It’s not just the UK that is special — The advantage of nuclear in Asia is that many of the rather large number of people living in the great Asian smog cloud for most of the year would probably like to be able to breath the air without coughing one day (obviously cheaper renewables would be better if they really could be used for everything). Given this, at least with coal and other such dirty stuff, unless you don’t believe in externalities, I don’t see why you shouldn’t add (a) the health costs of smog; (b) the immense cost of lower rainfall and hence poorer crop yields which apparently smog causes; and (c) all the other environmental problems that are currently more or less ignored.
The under construction Snowtown II wind farm that will be completed towards the end of 2014 in South Australia looks as though it will produce electricity for under 4.5 cents a kilowatt-hour. That’s pretty darn good compared to the average Australian wholesale price of around 5.6 cents a kilowatt-hour. The low cost of new wind power alone makes nuclear power an economic impossibility here.
I think that nuclear energy and weapons, as you mentioned before, are very dangerous and ought to be decommissioned. As you can see with certain countries like Iran, there is a connection potentially to be made between the technologies and products of nuclear energy and the production of nuclear weapons. While the UK already has such weapons, it doesn’t mean they should build power plants, they should act as an example and consume less energy and materials and transform their society for the better.
In terms of the dangers to people sn environments of nuclear energy and weapons, and how powerful groups exploit the ambiguities of the science, I located this article:
Nuclear denial: From Hiroshima to Fukushima
Charles Perrow
IT IS 5 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69(5) 56–67
“Today, the scientific community remains divided over the effects of low- level radiation, with a significant minor- ity of experts holding that low levels are essentially harmless, while the majority says that all levels are harmful to some degree (Beyea, 2012). Estimates of how many people will die as a result of radi- ation released from Fukushima range from none (UNSCEAR, 2013) to 1,400 people developing cancer as a result of just the first year of exposure to fallout in the contaminated regions outside the evacuation zone (Rosen, 2012).
The Fukushima disagreement is only the latest chapter in a 68-year-old story.”
“Most of these experts no longer contend that there is zero harm in low- level radiation, but rather that the range of uncertainty includes zero: In other words, low-level health effects may exist, but they are too small to measure. This view preserves the status quo, since there is no point in comprehensively measuring low-level radiation effects or taking aggressive steps to prevent harm. Nuclear denial creates scientific ambiguity that provides cover for gov- ernmental and commercial interests and allows nuclear power to continue expanding worldwide.”
“By exploiting the peaceful uses of the atomÑin medicine, earth removal, and later in nuclear power plantsÑnuclear deniers embarked on an ambitious pro- gram to dissipate fears about things nuclear and gain acceptance for nuclear weapons. One element in the Òfriendly atomÓ program was Project Plowshare, in which atomic explosions would enlarge harbors and the Panama Canal.”
“. In 1953, an American anthropologist working for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission showed that Japanese children who were exposed to fallout were not only smaller than their counterparts but also had less resistance to disease in general and were more susceptible to cancer, especially leukemia. The report was censored (Johnston, 2011). But there would be more.”
” A study published in 2002 looked at the health effects on children in the two years fol- lowing the closing of eight US nuclear plants in 1987. Strontium-90 levels in local milk declined sharply, as did death rates of infants who lived down- wind and within 40 miles of the plants, suggesting a link between low-dose radi- ation from gases emitted by the plants and early deaths (Mangano et al., 2002).
The research task is daunting. Chil- dren are the most vulnerable population, and the biggest risk is childhood leuke- mia, so most studies focus on this. But since the disease is rare among children, a doubling of the tiny number of expected deaths is still so small it is hard to detect. In 2007, a German study found increased rates of childhood leu- kemia in the vicinity of all 16 nuclear power plants in Germany. Children who lived less than 5 kilometers (about 3 miles) from a plant were more than twice as likely to develop leukemia as children who lived more than 5 kilo- meters away”
“The denial that Fukushima has any sig- nificant health impacts echoes the denials of the atomic bomb effects in 1945; the secrecy surrounding Windscale and Chelyabinsk; the studies suggesting that the fallout from Three Mile Island was, in fact, serious; and the multiple denials regarding Chernobyl (that it hap- pened, that it was serious, and that it is still serious).”
“Ambiguities about radiationÕs effects have at times appeared to be purposeful. Vast investments are at stake in both the weapons and the nuclear power industries, and there is enough ambigu- ity about low-level radiation and its social acceptance to keep government- sponsored grants flowing to scientists.”
Charles Perrow is an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and a visiting pro- fessor at Stanford UniversityÕs Center for Inter- national Security and Cooperation. An organizational theorist, he is the author of six books, including The Next Catastrophe (Prince- ton University Press, 2011) and the award-win- ning Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton University Press, 1999). His current research focuses on the insti- tutional and organizational aspects of global warming.
I don’t think Republican politicians in the Deep South of the US would have dared structure a deal as favorable to the private sector (state-owned foreign private sector, to make it even more weird) as the one at Hinkley Point. That looks like sheer lunacy apart from the all the other issues surrounding the plant. I’m tempted to conclude that Tory politicians simply loathe British electricity users.
While discussion of nuclear power remains “on the table” the whole energy sector becomes fragmented. Take it off and it becomes a clear choice between renewables and fossil fuels.
Typical of the discussion amongst chatterers is John Howard who, after reading one book, gave his expert opinion on climate change. He then extolled the virtues of nuclear
without reading any book, apparently.
This is wilful and deliberate ignorance by John Howard for political gain.
@ZM The problem with nuclear weapons are
1 they exist
2 decommissioning would have to be simultaneous and on a global scale
3 they are a cheaper form of deterrence compared with maintaining armed personnel
@conrad
These advantages apply equally to renewables and, for that matter, to gas. So, they don’t provide any additional argument in favor of nuclear in countries that don’t have the special constraints of the UK
If I recall the Pandora movie showed dry cask storage of nuclear waste. Those steel and cement casks can weigh 35 tonnes and would require a serious effort to move or break open. Ironically having pioneered Gen IV nuclear that ‘eats’ waste America is now losing the commercialisation race to Russia and China. The UK has a lot of plutonium that could have been used in a Gen IV reactor but the expensive French designed Gen III reactors were chosen instead. I think that had a lot to do with the financing arrangements. Still they should produce stable priced power at 90% capacity decades from now. Gas would not be price stable and absent energy storage wind power could not achieve 90% capacity per machine.
Nuclear power is old technology; dangerous and uneconomic. It is a proven failure.
Solar power has been installed in the soggy English midlands for a pound a watt at the Wymeswold solar farm and at a 5% discount rate produces electricity at a lower cost than the minimum guanteed price for electricity from Hinkley C, so I really don’t know what they were thinking with going ahead with that project. It’s not as if solar power is going to suddenly get more expensive.
Oh I forgot. I was only going to write in numbered lists and circular diagrams from now on.
1. No, the sun does not shine at night. (Odd how many people seem shocked by this fact. One would think it would be common knowledge.)
2. Solar power that is cheaper per kilowatt than nuclear kills the economic case for nuclear by pushing down the average cost of electricity during the day.
3. Wind that is cheaper than nuclear kills the economic case for nuclear by pushing down the average price of electrity 24/7.
4. When it comes to making money by selling electricity to consumers, a kilowatt-hour of wind and a kilowatt-hour of nuclear are basically economically the same. The fact that nuclear runs 24/7, or rather 19.68/5.74, does not give its electricity a higher market value than electricity from wind.
5. Wind power is not good for providing grid stabilisation services or ancillary services as we call them in Australia. The solution for this is simple. Don’t use wind for ancillary services. It’s fine for selling electricity to consumers which is by far the largest part of the electricity market and complaining it’s not good for ancillary services is like complaining that steel wool is not good for polishing your car. It’s not supposed to be!
This scientific article is freely available for anyone who is interested in whether a global 100% renewable energy is possible.
One of The authors (Jacobson) went on Letterman to try to build support, you should google it and watch the YouTube, it’s funny and good.
“Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials”
Mark Z. Jacobson a,n, Mark A. Delucchi b,1
a Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4020, USA
b Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA
The trouble is that nuclear politics is that it’s not about what works best, it’s a kind of political football to kick around and most players are not that interested in shooting for goals.
For the climate obstructionist Right it’s been a means to distract and divert attention from the realities of here and now and making it about could be’s, should be’s and maybe’s. A lot like Carbon Capture and Storage. Or soil carbon and tree planting; it’s about the creation of excuses for failure to commit to action on emissions, allowing them to appear to be acting but without actually doing anything. In the hands of climate obstructionists – our government for example – it’s gratuitous greenie bashing. “If Greens think climate matters that much they would be pushing nuclear” is a look-over-there distraction and diversion from “We aren’t pushing for nuclear because we don’t think climate matters”.
But it’s not simply point scoring on greenies, it’s a clever way to diffuse the rumblings in the ranks of the Right, a kind of “We would push for nuclear except the greenies are stopping us” argument, that has built into it an implicit suggestion of “If climate change really is real and we can’t avoid having to address it we can always build nuclear“, which, like the suggestion of CCS, opens the way for business as usual without constraints until then. No actual persistent effort to pave the way for that is intended but it may be intentionally implied.
That nuclear requires actual and long running bipartisan commitment based on foresight and planning seems a given but for the LNP the nuclear football game isn’t about building a strong commitment to address emissions using nuclear, it’s about undermining the commitment of others to address climate by others by any means.
Climate science denial and obstructionism remains the biggest political obstacle for nuclear, undermining support for it in ways that anti-nuclear activism could never do; by offering a cheaper do nothing option the most influential voices that would push for nuclear – commerce and industry – are diverted and muted and subsumed into a broader obstructionist agenda. No amount of anti-nuclear rhetoric could get them to shut up about it if a commitment to act on climate was bipartisan. But the LNP keeps offfering a do the least at lowest cost option. It’s dismaying to know that Australian Business can be bought off from doing what’s needed at some cost by an offer to do nothing for cheaper.
As much as it’s about scoring points on the Greens, gratuitous mention of nuclear is a way for Abbott’s climate science deniers to mute the voices of those who think the problem is real within their own ranks. Those on the Right who do accept the reality and seriousness of climate change are reassured that there is always something that can be done if it comes down to having to do something, but, conveniently, it’s those pesky greenies that are stopping them. Which makes the Abbott clique far more machiavellian than most people imagine.
Well, they can’t even bring themselves to say what they really think and intend – sticking consistently to being contradictory at every utterance, whilst remaining absolutely clear and obvious in every action and decision. They can and do blame greenies for that too; they can encourage the hard core deniers that debate is too toxic to allow them to speak their minds, that it is green political correctness forces them to say they don’t dispute the science and prevents them presenting views – I suspect views that are along the lines of mentor John Howard.
In other words they won’t say what they think and where they stand – as a political tactic to avoid having to justify and defend their position in open debate. In other words they are treating Australian democracy and Australian voters with patenalistic contempt.
@JQ
“Add to that a strong contingent of NIMBY denialists in the Tory Party and you’ve got a country with very limited prospects for solar PV or onshore wind.”
I think it would be better to say the Conservative Party, which, I’ve been schooled to know, were Burke-ian liberals, rather than Tory traditionalists.
The term Tory was an expression used for the Irish who ad had their relaigion outlawed and land confiscated and often turned to crime to live. The UK Conservative party do not deserve that term in my view.
@Ken Fabian
I wouldn’t disagree much with what you put above. It really is a kind of ‘unicorn’ argument because it would be utterly astonishing for anyone to claim that the opposition of Green parties to the rollout of nuclear power made a snowflake-in-hell‘s bit of difference to energy policy. Why would nuclear power be the only thing that we get a veto over? Has our opposition ever prevented a single nuclear power plant in any nuclear power-using country from being built? I don’t recall it if so.
Nuclear power is controversial because lots of non-Greens are troubled by it and also because those with fossil hydorcarbon power assets aren’t all that keen either.
As people know, I happen to believe that most of the problems with nuclear power could be managed sufficiently well to make nuclear power a plausible contender for a place in the energy mix in most countries — including here. Accordingly, I believe that my party’s position is at once wrong in principle and tactically unwise. We’d be better off demanding a complete review of all the options for low-footprint energy infrastructure and decalre that we will support the mix that best meats the important feasibility criteria — environmental, financial, schedule and mission feasibility. I suspect that in Australia, a properly conducted review would reveal that the rate at which nuclear power plants could be rolled out, and the constraints in forcibly retiring existing fossil HC capacity would in practice rule it out on schedule feasibility grounds.
It would probably fail mission feasibility too — since plainly, a whole security appratus around the plants and their hinterlands would have to be set up, local planning and approval processes would need to be over-ridden and this cultural cost would be unacceptable. Then there’s the relative financial cost of the initial plants and the current concern on the right with “debt”. Also, who is going to force cliosure of the coal plants to make the space needed for commercially viable nuclear plants — or will the state risk ‘crowding out’ business?
Right now, the opposition of my party while genuine, is moot, and yet as you say it’s seen as a way of implying that we aren’t serious about abatement, or are anti-technological (which is rich coming from folk who favour coal plants and oppose FTTP). If we simply adopted a technology-neutral position, the defenders of coal and gas would have to argue the case for nuclear themselves explaining why and how that could happen.
As I have written, there is no need for nuclear, people need to reduce their energy usage and acquire needed energy via renewable technology. Nuclear is very dangerous – this is how the energy is produced in the first place. If fusion is ever possible in a scalable way that *might* be safer, but it might not, I don’t know.
This is a link to a Ted talk debating nuclear v renewables.
The participants are mark Jacobson, the Stanford professor I mentioned earlier, and Stewart Brand, who I had to partly study at uni for a masters studio subject called The Architecture of Wishful Thinking, looking at the idea of utopia in western thought, and western architectures responses to utopia, nature and technology. Stewart Brand is a fairly loopy 60s libertarian systems thinking sort of bloke in my view, so I would recommend taking his contributions with several grains of salt. You can google him if you don’t think he can be that bad.
oh dear:
What amazes me (though it shouldn’t) is how our culture cannot achieve anything now except BAU with fossils and the now standard corporate oligarchic domination of everything. Our entire socio-political system is complely ossified and cannot do or even imagine anything different.
Given this complete ossification in a BAU mode which is destroying the biosphere, all natural capital and much social capital, it is clear that our culture and civilization (Western Capitalism and maybe Eastern too) is destined for extinction in every sense. When you can’t adapt to reality you die out.
Ikonoclast, there are lots of people who are trying to think and do differently. In my town there’s a sustainability group, a local food production and community cooking etc group, a transitions town group and so forth.
Is there much like that happening in your area?
BREE’s Energy in Australia 2013 tells us (p114) that transport accounts for 38% of final energy use. Their preferred energy unit is the petajoule where 1 PJ = 278 Gwh noting that thermal to electrical energy conversion is generally less than 40% efficient.
Even if we can decarbonise electricity production there is still the thorny problem of petroleum dependence. If I recall other websites Australia was about 70% self sufficient in oil about year 2000 and some (Aleklett et al) speculate world oil production could be down perhaps 30% by 2030 with Australia’s output proportionally worse. Others including reports under the auspices of Harvard University say oil production will be higher due to fracking, tar sands etc. The plug-in hybrid car (example the pricey Holden Volt) could enable battery powered car travel for short journeys so expensive liquid fuel is only needed for longer trips.
Low carbon electricity could charge those batteries particularly away from peak demand times. It could also help make synthetic fuels like methanol using hydrogen from water electrolysis in conjunction with organic carbon. Prima facie it means a huge 60% increase in electricity consumption since our 62% vs 38% stationary vs transport energy split now becomes subsumed under 100% electricity. Can battlers afford electric cars? Again how this can be done without nuclear is a puzzle.
BTW I understand some of Australia’s energy czars will be quizzed on ABC Q&A tonight. If they don’t squirm the questions won’t have been hard enough.
“Conversely, taking Lynas’ numbers and even ignoring the rapid technological progress in solar PV, it’s obvious that nuclear energy is never going to be a goer in Australia, where we have plenty of land, much more sunlight and no established nuclear infrastructure. The calculation will be different in different countries, but there won’t be many where nuclear comes out as the least-cost option, although it might be a good backstop in some cases”.
This. Australia should be exporting uranium to places where nuclear is a genuine low cost, low risk, low greenhouse gas option, i.e. densely populated northern europe, and not planning on using it here where it will never be cost competitive (or accepted by the community).
@ZM
Not that I am aware of. In any case, community groups are largely the haven of the marginalised and ignored. Most community groups are pretty much powerless unless linked to the Liberal Party, Labor Party (our two right wing parties) or to corporate business power. I view the whole situation of modern civilisation to be totally hopeless and unsalvageable. I know that to be the objective reality from simple quantitative analysis. I never resile from ackowledging objective reality even if it is hopeless. I know few agree with me.
@Ikonoclast, I think it is less salvageable if people who are concerned give up altogether. Community protest has made quite some difference here over the last couple of years in terms of planning issues, the council ad put forwards a plan for a gym/aquatic centre on green space near town and wide community anger stopped that going ahead, a group from another town tried to get planning permission for a new pokies venue and community protest and council support took the matter to VCAT and won, a new building was being built that didn’t meet the heritage requirements and a group of objectors took it to VCAT and forced alterations on the design, and so forth. There’s a lot of bad news, but not only bad news, at least at the community level.
Both Tesla, with their Supercharger Network and Toyota, with their hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, will rattle the cages.
Nuclear, gas, coal are all well out of date because they are part of the energy-from-boiling-water technology. The age of steam has well and truly passed its use by date.
@rog
“The age of steam has well and truly passed its use by date”
So solar thermal and geothermal and various bio* technologies are off the agenda then?
In the real world in all real electricity grids, spinning turbines perform an essential function of stabilizing frequency and dealing with transients. You don’t need to believe me – read the AEMO all renewables study.
This is not going to change any time soon. If those turbines are not made to spin by hydro, they will be made to spin by steam (or possibly super critical CO2 in the future from high temperature heat sources) and in the vast majority of locations around the world that means fossil fuels or nuclear. Take your pick.
It is completely unrealistic to expect to do away with thermal generators any time soon.
” I view the whole situation of modern civilisation to be totally hopeless and unsalvageable.”
If you really think this, why do you waste time commenting here? Shouldn’t you just focus your attention on your own personal projects, family and so on?
To be clear, I’m not saying you should stop. I’m saying that the fact that you keep commenting implies a contradiction in your attitudes that you need to confront.
Actually, I understand that water has compelling advantages as a working fluid in heat engines, acct high specific heat capacity, fairly low molar mass, decent stability, easy handling, and negligible toxicity. The fact that it’s literally cheaper than dirt turns out not to be a huge benefit: it’s not significantly cheaper for these purposes than pentane, say, or ammonia.
@ John Quiggin, on nuclear in the US.
John, I’m afraid your Guardian piece grossly mischaracterized the political and financial support for nuclear power in the U. S., especially by suggesting that it receives more support than does wind and solar. The facts show just the opposite.
Your Guardian piece:
“The really big developments were in the US. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, passed with bipartisan support and building on earlier initiatives of the Bush Administration, offered the nuclear power industry a range of incentives and subsidies that the developers of wind and solar power could only dream of. It includes authorising cost-overrun support of up to $2bn total for up to six new nuclear power plants, the extension of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act through 2025, and huge loan guarantees.
–The cost overrun support you refer to (for the first six reactors, not plants) applies only to overruns that are caused by 1) a failure by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to comply with the scheduled timetable of regulatory actions needed for the project to proceed, or 2) lawsuits that prevent the plant from commencing operations. It explicity does not cover overruns caused by the operator’s failure to comply with regulations, or by any event within the operator’s control, or by “normal business risks.” So the projects only get a (partial) reimbursement of cost overruns if the overruns stem from delays in government regulatory or judicial proceedings
–The Price-Anderson act has been around for 50 years. While it’s true that Price Anderson caps the nuclear industry’s liability in civil court actions at about $12 billion, it also explicitly empowers Congress to go back and assess the industry as much money as it wants to, after the fact, to pay for nuclear accidents. So Price Anderson explicity does not cap the total payout the nuclear industry may be liable for in the case of a nuclear accident.
–So far not a dime of nuclear loan guarantees has been finalized. The Vogtle project has been negotiating for a loan guarantee, but may not get it. The V. C. Summer plant isn’t even negotiating for a loan guarantee. Nonetheless, both projects are going forward, without loan guarantees but with billions of dollars of privately-raised funds already having been spent. Wind and solar generators are also eligible and have so far received $25 billion in loan guarantees and direct loans from the government, so the loan guarantee program benefits wind and solar far more than it does nuclear. (http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-12-EnergyTechnologies.pdf)
–The Enegy Policy Act of 2005 provides for new nuclear generation to get a (currently) 2.3 cent per kilowatt-hour tax credit for its first eight years of operation. That tax credit is limited to the first 6 GW of new nuclear build. All wind and solar generators are also eligible for the tax credit, with no limit on the gigawatts, so the tax credit benefits wind and solar far more than it does nuclear.
–In the last few years federal government support for renewables dwarfs that for nuclear. (http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-12-EnergyTechnologies.pdf) In fiscal 2013 renewables and efficiency got 51 percent of DOE direct spending, compared to nuclear’s 22 percent. Renewables got 45 percent of tax preferments from the federal government, while nuclear got just 7 percent.
–There are lavish subsidies and tax credits for renewables at the state level, which nuclear does not get. Dozens of states have renewable portfolio standards legally requiring utilities to buy and build wind and solar, but only one state, Ohio, includes nuclear in these standards. Wind and solar are being built in the US only because the law requires it and federal and state subsidies fund them.
–At the same time there is indeed a pronounced hostility to nuclear power at many levels of government. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid engineered the closure of the Yucca Mountain waste repository, in violation of the law authorizing it; as a result of that and a court order regarding waste confidence strictures, the NRC’s licensing proceedings have been indefinitely halted. Several state governments legally ban new nuclear, and several governors are actively campaigning to shutter nuclear plants in their states.
So John, you’ve gotten things exactly backwards: in the US, wind and solar get political and financial support from government that nuclear can only dream of.
@ John Quiggin, on the global nuclear build.
“The UK is a special case”
From your Guardian piece, “the fact that the world has not turned to nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a matter of economics.”
John, there are currently 68 reactors under construction in Finland, France, the United States (5, not 4 as you mistakenly stated in your Guardian piece), Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, China, India, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and some others, with dozens more in planning for 2020 and further hundreds by 2030. That’s a lot of special cases!
The greater reliability and productivity of nuclear power compared to renewables means these new reactors will have an outsized impact on decarbonization. Those 68 reactors now under construction, with a capacity of about 70 gigawatts and an average capacity factor of 85 percent, will produce 521 terrawatt-hours of low-carbon electricity per year—as much as the world’s entire fleet of wind turbines did last year.
Wait, this just in—in the last two months China and Belarus started construction on another 4 new reactors with a capacity of 4.4 Gigawatts, so add those to the tally. These 4 reactors all by themselves will produce as much low-carbon electricity as Germany’s entire current stock of solar panels.
So John, much of the world is indeed turning to nuclear power, and that new nuclear capacity is making enormous contributions to the fight against global warming. But we need to speed up the nuclear build even further. Environmentalists can help by 1) Speaking out against the political bans and phaseouts of nuclear power in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and, ahem, Australia; 2) Calling for the reopening of shuttered nuclear power plants in Germany, Japan and the United States. Maybe you could add your voice to the pro-nuclear chorus, on platforms as prominent as the Guardian.
@John Quiggin, on the costs of nuclear versus wind and solar:
John, it’s just not true that nuclear can’t compete with wind and solar. China is an excellent test case, because it has big systematic rollouts of nuclear, wind and solar. There, new nuclear get’s an official price of 0.43 yuan (6-7 cents) per kwh, while wind gets 0.51 to 0.61 yuan and solar gets 0.75 to 1.15 yuan. And those prices don’t count the costs of extra transmission from distant places, or of backup for the long periods when wind and solar knock off.
Even the Hinkley C deal, which I agree is a terrible rip-off, is still fetching a cheaper price than wind and solar.
When nuclear is deployed systematically on a large scale, economies of scale and experience make it pretty cheap.
Even though nuclear doesn’t cost more, it really ought to because it delivers a much better quality of power. It’s the most reliable electricity in the business—24/7, night and day, calm or windy, frequently running flat out with no interruptions for a year or more. Electrons aren’t all the same, it really matters whether you can get them when you want them. Power on demand is why people happily paid extra for steamboats that could travel when sailboats could not. Is it your contention that a superbly reliable generator should enjoy no cost premium whatsoever over a chaotically intermittent generator that will frequently cease to function for hours to days on end?
@John Quiggin, on Chernobyl casualties.
John, your Guardian piece cited figures from 4000 to 500,000 as “conservative” estimates of Chernobyl deaths. The 500,000 figure is a ludicrous overestimate and you should not have included it.
I tracked the figure through your Guardian citation and thence to a 2006 statement by the National Commission for Radiation Protection of Ukraine, a quasi-governmental source. Unfortunately, the orginal Guardian article on this figure misstated the Ukrainian findings, which were themselves a grossly misleading interpretation of the actual data. Here’s the original Guardian article from 2006 http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0325-05.htm and the full Ukrainian report from 2006 http://chernobyl.undp.org/english/docs/ukr_report_2006.pdf
In 2006, the Guardian’s take on the NCRPU findings was, “up to 500,000 people may have already died as a result of the world’s worst environmental catastrophe [Chernobyl],” which in 2010 the Guardian reprised as “the Ukrainian national commission for radiation protection calculates 500,000 deaths so far”, implying that 500,000 people had already been killed by the Chernobyl radiation, a figure you then reiterated in your piece. But that’s not what NCRPU actually said. What they said was “”At least 500,000 people – perhaps more – have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine,” said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine.”
What Omelyanets is subtly and misleadingly saying is not that 500,000 people died of radiation, but that, out of a group of 2 million plus people categorized as “victims of Chernobyl”, 500,000 had died of all causes. His statement does not mean that all those 500,000 died from radiation, or that most of them died from radiation, or that any of them died from radiation. All it means is that out of 2 million people, 500,000 died over the course of 20 years.
If we drill into the full report we see just how misleading these formulations are. The 2 million people are those registered in the Ukrainian government’s registry of Chernoby “sufferers,” who include 230,000 liquidators, 50,000 people evacuated from the exclusion zone, 1.6 million people living in contaminated areas, and 428,000 children of all the groups above. To get into that group of “sufferers” you don’t have to be dying, or sick, or to have ever been anywhere near Chernobyl in your lifetime, or to have ever been exposed to fallout.
So that’s a group of 2.3 million people, overweighted with liquidators, mainly blue-collar men who by 2006 were on average in their late 50s. Is it surprising that hundreds of thousands had died over the course of 20 years? No, not at all; if you gather any group of 2.3 million people with a demographic distribution skewed towards aging blue-collar men, hundreds of thousands of them will certainly die over the course of 20 years, no fallout necessary. So you see, contrary to the Guardian’s misinterpretation, the NCRPU formulation does not in any way show an effect of radiation.
When we look at some of the particulars of the Ukrainian report, we see how weak any imputations of radiation effects are. For example, the data in the report show that the liquidators have an elevated risk of cancer compared to the general population. But the data also show that civilian evacuees from Chernobyl (who got the highest radiation doses) and people still living in highly contaminated areas have much lower cancer rates than does the general Ukrainian population living in uncontaminated areas.
The report makes much of a rise in infant mortality, including stillbirth after Chernobyl. But that rise didn’t commence until 1990, five years after the accident. In the period 1985 to 1990, infant mortality rates actually fell, according to their data. The thing is, pre-natal radiation exposures were much higher in 1986-1990 than they were after 1990; that’s because natural radioactive decay and weathering would have drastically lowered ambient radiation levels from fallout. (In Fukushima, ambient radiation levels have fallen by two thirds in the two year since the period right after the accident.) The report suggests that the rise in infant mortality was linked to Chernobyl radiation, but prenatal radiation exposures were high in 1986-90, when infant mortality was falling, but much lower after 1990, when infant mortality was rising; the proposed link between radiation and infant mortality therefore makes no sense.
The report also highlights a rise in total death rates per capita in Ukraine after Chernobyl. Is that a sign of Chernobyl mortality? No, it’s far more likely due to the social and economic upheavals of the period, and even more so to sheer demographics. Over the same period the birth rate in Ukraine was falling precipitately, which means that the average age of the population was increasing. An aging population is automatically going to show an increasing per-capita mortality rate, all other things being equal, even if mortality risks don’t change at all.
So you can see why the Ukrainian figure of 500,000 deaths is dismissed by the scientific consensus, even on the (semi) responsible wing of the anti-nuclear movement. Lisbeth Gronlund of The Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, puts the total Chernobyl death toll at an eventual 27,000. But her estimate, like all estimates in that range, is a conjecture based on imputing cancer risk factors derived at high doses to millions of people who received tiny doses. How tiny? The Ukrainian report puts the average dose from Chernobyl fallout at 2.5 millisieverts over 20 years; that’s as much as the extra radiation as you would get living in Denver for 6 months. It’s just not plausible that such tiny doses would cause any perceivable health effect.
That’s why the most authoritative report on Chernobyl, by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Airborn Radiation, refuses on prinicipal to calculate vast unmeasurable casualty estimates. They stick to what empirical data actually shows about elevated cancer rates and other health effects. And their comprehensive study indicates that, aside from a thyroid cancer epidemic that killed perhaps fifteen people, there’s no clear evidence of any health effect at all among the general population from Chernobyl. I wish you had seen fit to discuss this report, which really embodies the scientific consensus, but you did not.
John, I know that the 500,000 figure is just one number in your piece, but it’s a very important number. With that one number you inject into the debate, and implicitly endorse, a grossly exaggerated assessment of Chernobyl’s damage, based on a garbled journalistic misstatement of a faulty report that’s drastically out of step with the scientific consensus. And it doesn’t help that you’ve included a low-ball estimate of 4,000 in the same sentence as cover. If I were to write, “conservative estimates of anthropogenic global warming range from several degrees centigrade this century to none whatsoever,” you would rightly cry foul, because the former number is the scientific consensus while the latter is nonsense from ideologues.
You can see why the Pandora’s Promise folks get testy when they see environmentalists repeating these nonsensical scare-statistics in the newspapers.
@Will Boisvert
“At the same time there is indeed a pronounced hostility to nuclear power at many levels of government. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid engineered the closure of the Yucca Mountain waste repository, in violation of the law authorizing it; as a result of that and a court order regarding waste confidence strictures, the NRC’s licensing proceedings have been indefinitely halted”
This is about the effects of nuclear weapons testing and nuclear waste storage on real living people, not just as an abstract argument.
I only recently had to briefly research this for an argument at Crooked Timber about utilitarianism. A commenter complained that students who were repelled by utilitarianism by reading an Ursula Le Guin story called Omelas but inconsistently then were in favour of Yucca mountain waste repository on utilitarian grounds.
In briefly researching it I found this information, which you may or may not care enough about to let it affect your advocacy of nuclear power, it would depend on your conscience.
It is called “A Wetern Shohone Perspective on Yucca Mountain”
“The Western Shoshone Native American tribe is asking, “How did the US obtain ownership of Yucca Mountain from the Western Shoshone Nation?” The Western Shoshone people have been asking similar questions of the US since they signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley in 1863. The Department of Energy pattern of argument in addressing Western Shoshone concerns seeks to minimize any assertion or assumption of existing ongoing rights. To the contrary, historical evidence provides fact of lawful ownership to Yucca Mountain by the Western Shoshone Nation.”
“Still, more abuse of the Western Shoshone people and land are the result of negligence by the US in the development and testing of weapons of mass destruction. In the 1950?s the US occupied a vast expanse of Western Shoshone lands that now comprise the Nevada Test Site 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas for use as America’s nuclear proving ground. During the period of nuclear weapons testing from 1951-1994, the US detonated 904 full-scale nuclear weapons tests, 24 in collaboration with the United Kingdom. The Western Shoshone Nation with the help of American supporters engaged in active protest against nuclear weapons testing and the MX inter-continental ballistic missile system planned for the Great Basin. The MX missile system was cancelled and full-scale nuclear weapons testing ended at the Nevada Test Site.”
“Collaborating with researchers from Marsh Institute at Clarke University, funded by the Center for Disease Control and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Nuclear Risk Management for Native Communities project reviewed the Department of Energy, Off-site Radiation Exposure Review Program. What they found was that the Department of Energy study used a shepherd lifestyle to model Native Americans, but that the shepherd lifestyle did not accurately replicate the Western Shoshone or Southern Paiute people’s lifestyle. Based upon lifestyle differences alone the Nuclear Risk Management for Native Communities project found that Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute people were exposed to radiation through unique exposure pathways that included diet, shelter and mobility. Radiation exposure risk for adults are as much as 15 times greater than non-Native American communities downwind, as much as 30 times greater risk for children, and as much as 60 time greater risk for inutero exposure.
Politically weak, socially and economically isolated the Western Shoshone people are vulnerable to exploitation. For the Western Shoshone Nation the stakes are mortal. The abuse continues as the Western Shoshone Nation is targeted for the disposal of nuclear waste from 115 nuclear reactors at 75 sites in 30 states. From the Western Shoshone perspective, nuclear waste streams from the reactor communities would become a river as they enter the Western Shoshone country, placing a disproportionate burden of risk upon the land and people of the Western Shoshone Nation.”
@ Ronald Brak, on Wymeswold vs. Hinkley C.
Ronald, you don’t cite any source for Wymewold’s electricty price. I looked up your estimate of Wymeswold costs at Clean Technica. You arrive at your low estimate by assuming a cost-of-capital of 5 percent for the solar plant. (You also amortize the costs over 36 years, although the BBC puts the plant’s lifetime at 25 years.)
The low interest rate assumption really makes the difference between Wymewold’s cost and Hinkley C, which I agree is a rip off. The Hinkley C terms guarantee EDF a return on capital of about 10 percent a year. If its cost of capital were 5 percent per year Hinkley C would be substantially cheaper than your Wymewold estimate.
Another problem with the Hinkley deal is that the EPR currently has a monopoly on the UK reactor market—that’s because none of its American or Japanese competitors are licensed in the UK. That’s deeply stupid—American and Japanese models have already passed exacting licensing procedures in their home countries and should be licensed immediately in the UK; the balkanization of nuclear regulation is a terrible and costly hindrance. The American and Japanese models all have current or recently completed builds at much lower prices than the EPR.
There are other reasons why Hinkley might be better for Britain than Wymeswold. With a 34 MW capacity and 12 percent capacity factor, Wymswold produces on average 4 MW of power from a land footprint of 150 acres, according to the BBC. Hinkley, with 3200 GW operating at 90 percent capacity factor will produce an average power of 2880 MW, from a constructed land footprint of less than one square mile. For a Wymeswold to produce as much electricity as a Hinkley C, it would have to cover 108,000 acres, or 168 square miles of farmland.
You can see why the British, especially environmentalists concerned about food production and wildlife habitat, might not relish the prospect of having so much of their green and pleasant land paved with solar panels—especially since they will need the nuclear plants anyway for those extended periods of simultaneous cloud and calm that Britain experiences.
@ ZM, on the risks of nuclear power.
The Charles Perrow article you quote on the risks of nuclear power is very misleading.
–CP cites Alex Rosen’s estimate of 1400 Fukushima deaths among contaminated populations outside the evacuation zone, based on just one years radiation exposure. I read Rosen’s paper and it’s a fiasco of errors and cherry-picking. But to stick to the 1400 figure, it’s based on a guesstimate from the French nuclear safety agency that was done in May of 2011, when the crisis was still in full swing and no systematic dosage surveys had been done.
The May, 2011 French estimate that Rosen cites posited 200 millisievert average doses among 70,000 people. But since then, really systematic dosage surveys have been done by the Japanese authorities and the World Health Organization. The results are drastically smaller than Rosen’s estimate.
WHO estimates that the highest dose in all Japan was 25 mSv over the first four months after the accident. Extrapolating to the whole year, that would be 75 msv, but that’s still much too high, because the bulk of the dose occurred in the first few weeks of the spew, radiation exposures would have dropped markedly over the rest of the year. And that highest dose category of 12-25 msv was incurred by just a few thousand people, not 70,000. Going by WHO’s careful dosage estimates, the 1400 figure is too high by an order of magnitude and probably much more. All of this information was available to Perrow when he wrote the article, but he apparently ignored it.
–CP cites the KiKK study purporting to show a doubling of leukemia rates in German children near nuclear plants.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell us that the KiKK authors explicitly stated that linking the leukemia to radiation exposure was “implausible,” because the radiation exposures from the plants were one one-thousandth of the natural background radiation. In a follow-up paper they noted that analyzing the data with a different statistical technique—standardized incidence ratios instead of odds ratios—made the leukemia increase statistically insignificant. There was an association only for leukemia, not for all cancer.
What’s going on with the KiKK study is simple—they pared away the study population until it was so tiny that statistical flukes threw up a spurious correlation. They narrowed down from all children, where there was no association between nuke proximity and leukemia, to children under five years of age, and narrowed down the study area from 70 km from the plants, a radius where there was no association, to just 5 kilometers. That brought the number of leukemia cases down enough that it could be seriously affected by a statistical fluke, which amounted to all of 10 extra leukemia cases over a period of 23 years. But when you look at a larger area with a larger and more statistically stable study population, that correlation evaporates. For example, when you broaden the area to 30 km from the plants, there are no excess cases of leukemia at all according to the KiKK data. Pretty scary, huh?
If CP had discussed the Kikk study in detail and context he couldn’t have used it to frighten people, but he chose not to do that.
–CP cites a Joseph Mangano study purporting to show declines in infant death rates after US nuclear plant closures. Mangano does reams of these studies, always by the same method of data-mining: he enters huge amounts of data on health stats into a spreadsheet, then pares away and rearranges and cherry-picks the stats until he hits on a spurious correlation.
You can see him doing it in this study. Why those eight plants? Is a forty-mile study radius justified on theoretical grounds, and is the study category of “downwind” really precise and stable, or just an excuse to cherry-pick the counties with the highest cancer rates? Why 1987—could it be because strontium-90 levels were declining anyway because of the tapering off of exposures from the Chernobyl deposition (easy to measure but far too small to matter)?
It’s all just data-mining for spurious correlations. We know that’s how Mangano operates because he’s been caught several times fraudulently manipulating his data sets—Scientific American caught him doing it here. (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/06/21/are-babies-dying-in-the-pacific-northwest-due-to-fukushima-a-look-at-the-numbers/)
It says a lot about Charles Perrow’s integrity that he would cite a known fraud like Mangano.
Charles Perrow is a sociologist who made his name dilating on silly disaster scenarios. He doesn’t understand radiation science or statistics. He’s just scare-mongering in the Bulletin piece by citing dubious and fraudulent evidence, misrepresenting his sources and concealing crucial details and context, as well as ignoring consensus scientific findings that refute his claims—because the scientific consensus is all part of the conspiracy, you see.
That’s how anti-nuclear alarmists bamboozle people.
@Will Boisvert,
Are you the same fellow who published this ten or so years ago?
“So if we believe that genes outweigh environment, it’s because we’ve grown disenchanted with the environment. We used to meet people, learn new ideas and gain practical experience, all from interacting with the environment. Nowadays the environment is for suckers. We’re told that everything we learn today will be obsolete tomorrow. Entrance into college is based on your scholastic “aptitude,” which is unaffected by whether you grew up in Beverly Hills or South Central. We live in a “winner-take-all society,” so there’s no longer a payoff to solidarity or mutual aid. When you reach your benefits cutoff, or your portfolio tanks, you have only your personal responsibility to back you up. Genes didn’t matter so much when we thought the environment provided skills and friends and social institutions we could count on to transform our life circumstances. Now we know better. The environment passeth away. Genes abide.
One wishes Fukuyama would probe these attitudes, instead of tacitly endorsing them and wringing his hands over the consequences. He ends his book with a sensible call for thoroughgoing government regulation of biotechnology. But he should go further and look at the failure of Davos-stage liberal democracy to live up to the ideals he claims it embodies. Biotechnology hype simply mirrors a world that aggrandizes a Nietzschean few and humiliates millions. Unless we learn to treat people as ends and not means, the posthuman future will follow from an inhuman present.”
“Charles Perrow is a sociologist who made his name dilating on silly disaster scenarios. He doesn’t understand radiation science or statistics. He’s just scare-mongering in the Bulletin piece by citing dubious and fraudulent evidence, misrepresenting his sources and concealing crucial details and context, as well as ignoring consensus scientific findings that refute his claims—because the scientific consensus is all part of the conspiracy, you see.
That’s how anti-nuclear alarmists bamboozle people.”
According to a linked in profile for a fellow with your name, he is not a scientist but a self employed writer seeking business deals, consulting opportunities etc.
Are you that Will Boisvert or one who is a trained nuclear scientist?
You have not quoted your sources nor cited the reports from where you take your claims and their authors. This in not sufficient in my opinion, to encourage trust in your great advicacy of nuclear power. Charles Perrow wrote a proper article with citations etc, published in a reputable publication (unless you have a reason to think the publication is not reputable?).
“Data-mining for spurious”…
You’re calling Watts Bar a new power plant? That’s pretty desperate isn’t it? It was 80 per cent finished in 1988. By that standard, George Bush Sr is a rising star in politics.
If you want me to take you seriously, this kind of silly nitpick doesn’t help.
FWIW, I think it would make sense, for purely rhetorical reasons, to remove Australia’s ban on nuclear power – obviously this would have no practical effect.
More practically, I agree that the rapid phaseout of nuclear power in Germany and other European countries is a dumb idea. However, I do enough complaining about German policy in other areas, so I’m not going to waste my breath on it.
You can work out the cost premium for renewable electricity in Australia by looking at the value of Renewable Energy Certificates. IIRC, they currently go for around $40-$50/MWh (=4-5c/KWh). The long run average pool price is, from memory around $60/MWh, so you’re looking at around $A100/MWh
That’s about 60 pounds sterling at current (high) exchange rate, which means we’d need to a lot better than Hinkley C. In fact of course, we’d face much higher costs on every front.
Will Boisvert: With regard to, “Even the Hinkley C deal, which I agree is a terrible rip-off, is still fetching a cheaper price than wind and solar.”
1. I don’t know what it costs to install rooftop solar in the UK at the moment but at Australian costs, a 5% discount rate, and a 10% load factor, point of use solar provides electricity at a lower cost than Hinkley C’s minimum price plus distribution charges.
2. German installation costs are even lower.
3. It’s not really the cost of solar now that is relevant for comparison but what it will be around 2023 or when ever it will be when Hinley C comes on line. There are no reasons why the UK cannot soon match and then beat Germany’s current solar installation costs.
4. I am aware that the sun doesn’t shine at night. I am only making the case that the cost of solar power alone makes nuclear power uneconomic, not that the UK should be 100% solar powered.
5. In case you don’t think rooftop solar at a 5% discount rate and 10% load factor is an appropriate comparison to make I will compare an existing UK solar farm using a 5% discount rate to Hinkley C using a 5% discount rate.
6. Wymeswold solar farm in the English Midlands cost one pound a watt and operates at a load factor of 11.8%. Its lifespan is expected to be 36 years. Using a 5% discount rate and an estimated annual operating cost of 1% of the total capital cost gives a cost per kilowatt-hour of about 6.8 pence.
7. Hinkley C will cost 18 billion pounds for 3,200 megawatts and apparently has an expected lifespan of 60 years. I will assume its load factor will be 90%. I will assume one pence per kilowatt-hour for operating costs and half a pence for waste disposal. I will assume that at the end of its lifespan the plant will be magiced away by Harry Potter and ignore decommissiong costs. I will also ignore the costs off security and government oversight and inspections. I will ignore the large difference in capital costs caused by solar capital becoming operational within months as opposed to being tied up for a decade or more during the construction of Hinkley C. I will ignore insurance costs for now, but I will come back to that later. I will ignore any other costs. Wiith a 5% discount rate this gives electricity from Hinkley C a cost of about 6.5 pence.
8. Since I gave Hinkley C so many breaks the actual price may well be above Wymeswold’s 6.8 pence, but I won’t worry about that and will go with the 6.5 pence figure.
9. Insurance for nuclear power is expensive. A study on the actual cost of insurance for Germany’s nuclear power ranged from a minimum of about 12 pence a kilowatt-hour to much higher.
10. The costs of insurance do not go away if you ignore them.
11. If it is assumed that because Hinkley C is modern its insurance cost will be half the German minimum the cost of its electricity will come to 12.5 pence per kilowatt-hour.
11. Perhaps you may argue that Hinkley C could be insured for less than half the German minimum estimate. But what is absolutely certain is that the cost of insurance will not be less than 0.3 pence per kilowatt-hour.
12. Therefore solar power in the UK is currently cheaper than electricity from Hinkley C.
13. As solar power is continuing to fall in cost it will be much cheaper than electricity from Hinkley C by the time it comes online.
14. If you can see any errors I have made, please point them out.
15. If you can’t find any errors, please acknowledge that you were wrong. Something along the lines of, “Whoops! I was clearly wrong to think that nuclear power from Hinkley C was cheaper than solar power. I will let everyone know that I was wrong about this,” will be fine.
As regards Chernobyl fatality estimates, the Guardian sub-editor changed my text without consulting me. I suggested a range from 4000 (WHO) to 30 000 (UCS, rounded) as plausible.
Nuclear won’t even get onto the table as a possibility in Australia until the LNP drops it’s BS position on climate and puts it there themselves. Arguing the relative costs of nuclear compared to renewables is a pointless exercise for Australians who seek adequate action on emissions – but it looks like a valuable exercise if delay of commitment to emissions reductions is your goal.
Nuclear advocacy continues to be deeply damaged by it’s history of squaring off against environmentalists. Now it finds it needs environmentalists on side – but it seems to be trying to do so by being relentlessly critical of green politics and renewables! Like that’ll win them over and convince them!
During the recent election I tried to take a few nuclear advocates to task for failing to address climate policy obstructionism as something that is inherently anti-nuclear. I did see a couple of articles critical of Abbott on climate after that but somehow they seemed to inevitably transmute into criticism of The Greens. Sigh. They seem to be treating the Right’s climate science denial as so rock solid that it’s impervious to criticism and therefore attacking it is pointless – more or less the reason I got for why they go all out to attack The Greens over opposition to nuclear but were not attacking the LNP over climate policy obstructionism. The biggest impediment to nuclear is not worth the effort?
But I suspect that pro-nukers’ unwillingness to go after the deniers actually has more to do with so many advocates of nuclear being climate science deniers themselves; making it about climate science and climate politics would alienate too many rusted on, staunchly anti-environmentalist supporters of nuclear. I think that siding with that kind of pro-nukers – or tip toeing around them – can only damage the nuclear cause; it raises questions about their sound judgement for one thing.
The political reality is that the allegedly nuclear friendly political Right cannot bring itself to commit to nuclear because that will be antithetical to it’s position on climate and emissions and nuclear advocates remain reluctant to call them out on it. Business voices, that could and would advocate strongly for nuclear still prefer to not deal with the climate problem at all so they will not rock the LNP boat. But when the LNP no longer offers a do nothing option those voices will start getting louder.
I think the golden moment for nuclear was a decade ago and it was lost when the the corporatist Right chose lies about climate to defend fossil fuels whilst being unwilling to use the truth about climate to promote nuclear.
@John Quiggin @45
AFAICT the UCS estimate was 50,000 deaths by cancer, why round down from that to 30,000 overall deaths (the article did not specify cancer deaths).
The Guardian editor linked the replaced estimate to an article looking at how numbers of deaths related to the Chernobyl calamity vary greatly depending on who is doing the studies, and because there has been no co-ordination to synthesise different numbers collected by different agencies under different jurisdictions.
That actually sounds reasonably sensible doesn’t it?
The UCS estimates of cancer deaths from the Chernobyl accident appear to be based on the notion of collective very low radiation dose to very large populations. UNSCEAR and ICRP both reject this as invalid methodology.
The onus is on UCS (and others) persisting with such methods to provide a convincing account of why they reject the UNSEAR and ICRP positions. They don’t.
The problem is that the bodies are proving remarkably difficult to find. A 2012 study Radiation and the Risk of Chronic Lymphocytic and Other Leukemias among Chornobyl Cleanup Workers published in Environmental Health Perspectives claimed to have identified 19 excess Leukemia cases among 110,645 cleanup workers. The “liquidators” incurred a much higher radiation dose than the general population.
@ quokka, The Guardian linked the difficulties in finding “bodies” to the state of turmoil in the areas affected following the breakdown of the Soviet Union
@John Quiggin
People who are terminal, in one sense or another, do not stop talking and communicating, at least not until they slip into a coma. A view of ultimate existential hoplessness is not incompatible with a view of immediate existential action, be it private projects and public comments. It creates a painful tension for sure but I still engage in both as that is my instrinsic nature. I think people who are living with too many fond illusions need to confront their prediliction for fanciful and unrealistic hopes. It is that prediliction as much as anything which has led us too far down the blind alley of late stage capitalism, corporatism and endless growth ideology.