That’s the question I looked at a while back in this piece in the National Interest, which I was too busy to post about at the time. TNI’s headline, which I didn’t pick, is the more definitive ‘China Can Make Nuclear Power Work‘. The key point is that, when France embarked on a crash program to implement nuclear energy in the early 1970s, all the right ingredients were in place: a centralised state in which a skilled technocratic elite could push projects through without much regard to public opinion, the ability to fix on a single standardised design, low real interest rates and preferential access to capital, and the ability to fix pricing structures that eliminated much of the risk in the enterprise.
Over time, these factors were eroded, with the result that as the program progressed, the cost per megawatt of French nuclear plants tripled in real terms. As the Flamanville fiasco has shown, whatever the secret of French success 40 years ago, it has been well and truly lost now. And the picture is equally bleak for nuclear power in other developed countries. New nuclear power is far more expensive than renewables, even after making every possible allowance for the costs of intermittency, the various subsidies available, and so on. That’s why, despite the vast range of different policy settings and market structures in developed countries, the construction of new nuclear plants has been abandoned almost everywhere.
But China today looks, in many respects, like France in the 1970s, a technocratic state-capitalist society with the capacity to decide on, and implement, large scale projects with little regard to anyone who might object. If nuclear power can be made to work anywhere, it’s probably in China.
Obviously, pro-nuclear commenters like Hermit and Will Boisvert are welcome to have their say on this one.
John Quiggin 
It’s still pretty cheap in France once you get past the absolutely brutal construction and capital costs, and it’d be a shame if they were to drastically shrink it and become more dependent on coal power and imported natural gas like Germany. But we seem to be heading against nuclear power in most countries right now, so what can you do? I guess if down the line the political conditions change and we’re desperate for baseline alternatives, we’ll at least have new designs on the books even if all the expertise is gone.
China could probably pull it off, although it’s important not to overrate the central government’s power over local officialdom. One of China’s issues with policy implementation, in fact, is that they’re having a hard time getting the local governments to comply with new rules – the latter will often just ignore the central government unless the former goes after the latter’s top officials and local company executives. When you see a ton of infrastructure construction happening, that’s because local and central government interests are aligned.
In fact, I’d go far as to say that one of the biggest myths about the Chinese government is that the central government has complete centralized dominance over the political structure of the country.
Strangely the new poster boy for nuclear/wind/hydro might be the Canadian province of Ontario with 47 grams of CO2 per kwhe. Electricity ex-Hazelwood power station is about 1,350 grams of CO2 per kwhe. Note that Germany with several straight years of increasing emissions still has about 15% nuclear electricity. Germany as a country with ‘average’ geography seems to be showing strongly decreasing returns after 20-30% renewable penetration. As pointed about by Tim M South Australia with 30% wind and solar at least has decreasing emissions though I’d point out they may be slugged with high gas prices from next year.
Another game changer could be the Vogtle plant under construction in Georgia USA. It is going up fast, hiring plenty of local people and paying municipal taxes. Those interested should google it. Yet another major development could be prefabricated mini nukes or SMRs which admittedly are going slow under the ponderous US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Perhaps Russia or India will steal a march on the US. Finland’s next reactor will be from Russia.
Neither previous paragraph mentioned France or China.
There is quite a bit of food for thought in this little post. Why can’t nations like France do nuclear projects as well as they used to? One, is it different cost structures including regulatory costs? Two, is it loss of scientific and technological know-how? Three, is it loss of major project management know-how? I suspect it is largely the third item. Modern corporations (post 1980) are poor at large projects. The proof is in the pudding. They can’t build what old, statist enterprises built nor what dirigist-led consortia built. They can’t build what technocratic state-capitalist (dirigist) society had the capacity to build and still has the capacity to build in the case of China.
So let us reiterate the key likely finding IMO. Modern capitalist corporations are poor at large projects at least since about the beginning of neoliberalism and managerialism. I think the old industrial capitalists were better at least in relation to the thechnology they had available. The one important area where the old school might well have been much worse (and it is very important) is in the matter of worker deaths.
It would be interesting if anyone has done any empirical studies in this arena. Large engineering projects would be the best subjects for study. Has the failure rate of private megaprojects increased since say 1980 compared to pre-1980? I mean failure rate as measured by overall goal failure and by ancillary metrics on escalating costs, scheduling overruns, design flaws, poor execution, use of substandard materials, criminal charges and project deaths. A megaproject costs US$1 billion or more in today’s dollars.
Of course, it is rather pointless us having an opinion on China’s energy policy, nuclear energy or no. We can be certain that 1.351 billion Chinese don’t care about our opinion. More particularly, the 25 members of the 18th Politburo of the Communist Party of China don’t care about our opinion.
“It’s still pretty cheap in France once you get past the absolutely brutal construction and capital costs,”
Isn’t that like saying that intermittency isn’t a problem for wind power except on still days?
It’s becoming very clear that there are few safe places to put nuclear power stations. They cannot be placed safely anywhere near;
(a) populated areas;
(b) agricultural land;
(c) natural parks and wildlife preserves;
(c) coasts;
(d) estuaries and rivers;
(e) major hurricane, cyclone, typhoon or tornado zones;
or
(f) fault lines and geologically active areas.
Kinda cuts down where you can place them. Add in the needs for water cooling without polluting aquifers, ground water, rivers or inlets and safely disposing of radioactive wastes that persist for many 1,000s of years…. It gets hard to think of anywhere where it would actually be safe and economic to put a fission reactor.
@Ikonoclast
I’d like to see machines that cause CO2 to be emitted (perhaps you’ve directly or indirectly used one today) kept well away from the atmosphere. Basically I’d like to see 87% of the electricity industry and nearly 100% of the transport industry do their little carbon poos somewhere that’s not above the Earth’s surface. Oh yes I don’t want to pay more than double the present cost for all weather electricity and private transport.
“skilled technocratic elite”? In China? You might want to re-think that bit, or at least provide some references (or reference points), so that people can put you straight.
Ikono – you’re probably familiar with Merrow’s “Industrial Megaprojects”? The US$1bn+ projects fail at greater than 65%. The big difference pre and post 80s is that the project’s that would be failures on the financial indicators (like nuclear projects), have been better sifted out of the project pipeline.
@Hermit
What do we do with the nuclear waste?
(Can I please ask that any answer to this question only deal with existing technology rather than hopes for the development of things in the future)
@Megan
It comes out of a hole in the ground it goes back in a hole in the ground. Preferably in such a way that some of it can be re-used later. You realise that the 0.3 microgram of ionising material (half life 430 years) in most smoke alarms comes from reactors. If large storage facilities are abandoned due to societal collapse I think we’ll have more pressing needs like food than breaking open huge steel and concrete casks.
More info http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Nuclear-Waste-Management/Used-Nuclear-Fuel-Storage
@John Quiggin
That’s clever in a too clever by half kind of way. At the risk of teaching you to suck eggs, those increased costs only fall on the badly constructed new plant, and even there it doesn’t apply to their operations (unless and until they screw up there too). So operating costs are no higher than on the old plant, as new projects – once finished – no longer face the cost increases as those are over and have become sunk costs (unless quite the wrong plant was commissioned). The only relevance of the cost increases is to discourage the new projects from starting in the first place, not in throwing away their results once the costs have been sunk anyway (which is why it made sense to keep operating Concordes for years despite huge losses getting them working). But on the one hand, the same ignorance that leads to the higher costs prevents the planners seeing that they will be higher, and on the other hand that sort of insight tends to produce better planning that cuts the costs after all. So the only way that higher, earlier costs arising from earlier screwing up work through to higher operating costs is if there is also bad policy that saddles operations with the cost recovery that should sheet home elsewhere – bad policy resting on the sunk costs fallacy. And that is quite different from the operating issue of wind intermittency.
For what it’s worth, almost any country in that position has two complementary approaches worth trying:-
– For power generation itself and no more, go for a proven old technology like Magnox or CANDU (the latter of which is still around enough that it is realistic to buy it in and do skills transfers).
– For an industry that will be self sustaining, i.e. produce its own skills etc. without a strategically sensitive dependence on outside expertise, materials, etc., go for a few small research reactors that will work more as training facilities than anything else. The return in the sense of power capacity will take longer (and there will be more cost from the investment in the preliminary research and development reactors) until that can get set up in turn as a follow on, but the follow on will be almost quick and easy with many subsequent roll outs. (That’s where the CANDU came from.)
@Brett So that sort of says that there is no valid comparison between China and France?
I would be very pleased to read something that filled me with confidence about the safety and competence in the long term of nuclear waste management.
Unfortunately, this isn’t it (from yesterday):
In the case of nuclear waste the “Good News” stories are simply “Bad News” stories that haven’t happened yet.
We can’t seriously discuss MORE nuclear fission until we have a safe long term solution for the waste we already have produced.
My other question for pro-nuclear people is about CO2.
Could you please paint a general picture of how MORE nuclear power results in LESS CO2 on a worldwide level?
@John Quiggin
I was using that as a reason for France not to let their nuclear power supply go down any further, if possible. Once you’ve paid the capital costs, the power itself is cheap.
A larger fraction of world baseline power provided by nuclear reactors = less CO2 emitted because we’re using less coal and to a lesser extent less natural gas.
You’ll occasionally hear someone talk about the CO2 emitted in the construction of the plants, but that’s something you’ll have to deal with with any power source – those windmills and solar panels don’t get themselves out into the desert/plains, for example. And nuclear’s more centralized nature lends itself to more energy-efficient transportation and supply, such as by rail.
But like I said, I’m speaking as an ideal. In practice politics seems to have shifted against nuclear for a variety of reasons, up to and including the capital costs, so you just make your arguments and do what you can. We can eventually come back to nuclear later if we need to, although it will be more costly because all the engineers will have retired.
This is a recent and readily understood assessment of GHG generation over the entire life cycle of facilities
Against coal nuclear is impressive but advantages diminish against renewables.
The Carlsbad incident noted by Megan after an underground truck fire was barely detectable even to sensitive instruments. Nobody was hurt. Perhaps from now on we’ll need alerts for dangerous radiation events like sunbaking.
How nuclear can greatly reduce Australia’s emissions is by replacing coal fired generation. Hazelwood power station for example spews out 16 million tonnes a year of CO2 and is slated for closure in 2031. However it nearly got burned down from the outside when the surrounding brown coal deposit caught fire. For nearly two months that created respiratory distress for the citizens of Morwell.
What’s happened to calls to shut down Hazelwood? In fact as the Australian gas price increases the low cost brown coal stations are working as hard as ever. The slight dip in emissions from generators is from gas and black coal stations rather than brown coal. Let’s compare events
Carlsbad radiation blip – no effect on humans….shut it down.
Morwell brown coal fire – widespread respiratory distress and 17 more years of CO2… meh.
I think I’m seeing a double standard here.
@Megan
Disclaimer: not pro-nuclear, just not anti-nuclear. I favour a best fit suite of technologies to approach mitigation.
Nuclear power produces a tiny fraction per unit of sent out power of the CO2 emitted by resort to typical industrial scale technologies. In some settings, it is currently a useful tool, and may continue to be so given certain conditions. It’s also quite low footprint by other standards of interest to environmentalists — the embedded carbon cost of materials.
That said, the constraints on using this technology to decarbonise rapidly are significant — cost, technical difficulty, the timeline, political objection, the need for security around operation etc …
A technology-neutral evaluation is needed to determine the best fit solution for all energy markets.
I understand that nuclear hardly emits any CO2 in producing electricity compared to coal and gas.
What I wanted was a picture of how the oil, coal and gas does NOT get burned (ie: stays in the ground) when you have nuclear.
@Megan
Yes, I am not confident that full, whole of cycle CO2 accounting is being done in relation to nuclear power. All hydrocarbons used in mining, refining, processing and transporting nuclear fuel must be counted. All hydrocarbons used in building, commissioning and decommissioning nuclear power stations must be counted. All hydrocarbons used in processing, transporting and storing nuclear waste must be counted. All hydrocarbons used in cleaning up minor and major accidents must be counted. All hydrocarbons used in mass evacuations, re-housing and other activities related to major nuclear accidents must be counted.
I am fairly sure nuclear power still saves CO2 emissions after all the above costs but I am also fairly sure this saving is not nearly as high as proponents argue. And once we add in all the other costs and dangers of nuclear power (especially compared to the fact that renewables can do the job if we conserve energy as well) then nuclear does not get a pass grade for stationary power.
China has a very different way of seeing things. For starters, the figure I was told, is that 80% of Chinese bureaucrats have engineering based degrees and so are more likely to be comfortable with complex engineering solutions to problems.
Secondly China sees issues from a national need perspective more than western governments do. China’s need for nuclear is not only for power to continue their economic and social restructuring, they also have a massive need to reduce the air pollution that is crippling their performance and building an immense future public health problem. So the public health issues of Nuclear Energy will seem minor to that created by a very dirty industrial sector.
I watched a program last night on the many great walls of China, and one thing came through loud and clear. When facing a great need the Chinese approach is to calculate how many people and how much resource is required to solve the problem completely. For instance it required 100,000 people 3 months to make a quite extensive wall section with rammed earth techniques. So once the Chinese Government believes that they have a safe reactor design they will assign how ever many thousand factories they need to build those reactors and install them.
An example of this technique that I heard about from a machinery supplier was that in order to make the metal housings for iPhones Foxconn purchased in one order 1500 machining centres (Computer Numerically Controlled fully automated milling machines), and I was told that they bought a similar quantity of 2 other brands, and placed them in a huge factory. They were getting a 30% reject rate on the produced housings but still they were able to meet the world demand.
The West just does not, cannot, work in this way. It is this vastly different approach to problem solving at a national level that makes JQ’s proposition is realistic. Another example that consolidates the suggestion can be seen in Brazil. The then Military government decided to use that nations agricultural resources to manufacture Ethanol to fuel the growing fleet of vehicles.
So no matter how inefficient it was at the beginning they persevered and became the world leader in ethanol fuel production and a world leader in ethanol use for transportation. Furthermore the reduction in fuel imports made it possible for Brazil to the first South American country to pay out their World Bank Loans (I believe).
The national interest approach works when there is a regime that can take a long term approach to problem solving, and there is a compatible solution to a national need.
I was attacked on the Nova website by a one neuron thinker who claimed that it would take 15 times the area of Victoria covered in solar panels to produce the electricity for that state’s needs. So I did the calculation back of the envelope style.
Victoria’s 238 billion square meters covered with 20% efficient panels would produce something like 94 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity annually, which would be 70% of the global electricity consumption for 2008 (the only single figure I could easily obtain). “bobl” was out by a factor of 30,000 in his attack on logical evaluation, a fairly average level of accuracy for the entire Jo Nova blog site.
But it raises the question of what would the national interest approach look like for Australia to produce our 234 billion kilowatt hours of annual electricity consumption.
If 2 systems were used then PV and CSP then 70% of the demand would be met by PV spread out across the nation to extend the daytime immediate access and CSP would service the night time demand from its storage and hybride features.
This would require 397 million square meters of panels or 397 square kilometers of plant area or a plant that would be 20 kilometers by 20 kilometers. But as there has to be space between the panels more like 40 kilometers by 20 kilometers to produce 70% of Australia’s electricity needs. This is roughly the area of the Hunter Valley Open Cut Coal mine.
Not so unrealistic is it. The energy required to dig that huge hole in the ground is way more than the energy and material resources required to manufacture 400 million solar panels from a raw material that is predominately sand.
The CSP aspect for the other 30% is similar except that the system efficiency for CSP is more like 15% versus PV’s (depending on which you choose but for a national system you would go for the best) is 22%. CSP requires an annual 1% mirror and plant replacement, PV is likely to be double that, but still not devastating.
The most salient difference between the Chinese government and the Australian government is that theirs is predominately engineering technical (production side of the ledger) and ours is predominately legal technical (overheads side of the ledger).
How much would that National interest cost?
At $200 per panel installed, to place 400 million panels over a 10 year period this would cost around 80 billion dollars, or 8 billion dollars per year (that would be a great industry to have to replace our soon to be disappeared car industry).
8 billion dollars is achievable from a 3.3 cents per unit (kilowatt hour) levy on electricity retail rates. Had such a levy been applied instead of the failed CPRS we would now been most of the way to solving a very significant part of our CO2 emissions and our electricity prices would have been lower and we would have been much of the way to having a national HVDC grid cable (around 4 billion dollars).
Not only would this approach have delivered lower electricity costs, it would have cost the government nothing, and the consequent infrastructure achieved would have been owned in common by the consumers (very similar to the old system that delivered low cost electricity to NSW for decades).
Click to access Energyweek00.pdf
The end result of all of the political stupidity and economic grandstanding is that we now pay double for our electricity and we do not have a solution to our CO2 emissions for stationary energy anywhere near reality.
Congratulations politicians and economists for your massive failure. Performance score D-
Ikonoclast, we know that carbon emissions from producing uranium or finished fuel rods can’t be too large because of their low price relative to the energy extracted from them and we know the carbon emissions from the materials used in the construction of nuclear plants can’t be that high from the relatively low prices that need to be paid to get the materials on site. If it cost more than $80 worth of fossil fuels to produce a kilogram of uranium Australia wouldn’t be selling it at that price.
“It’s still pretty cheap in France once you get past the absolutely brutal construction and capital costs”
You probably want to add the brutal costs of deconstruction also, which I believe have generally not been anything like the cost of the bonds initially put forward that were supposed to cover this (which are now future liabilities of the State in many cases)
I agree with you about China incidentally — the most centralization probably happens at the provence level. The top level of government is really only responsible for the military, international affairs, a few crazy projects (dams, going into space), and making sure the provences don’t get too out of line.
Megan, if I install solar panels on my sister’s roof then the electricity they produce reduces demand for grid electricity. Now my sister’s grid electricity is produced from coal, gas, hydroelectricity, wind power, and a tiny bit of oil. Since wind and hydroelectricity have little or no fuel cost their output won’t be reduced as a result of the solar panels. Once they are built the electricity they produce is almost free. However, as coal, gas, and oil power have fuel costs their output will be reduced as it costs money to run these plants. And since the output of these plants is reduced less fossils are required to run them and less fossil fuels are taken from the ground. These fossil fuels can become stranded. That means no one can make money from taking them out of the ground and so they get left there.
If I built a nuclear power plant in my sister’s back yard then the effect is similar, except it would cost me a lot more money than solar panels and my sister would probably be a bit cranky with me.
A couple of oddities on indirect CO2 in the nuclear fuel cycle. Original plans to expand SA’s Olympic Dam copper-gold-uranium mine involved building a 250 MW gas fired power station and drawing even more power (eg to run a coastal desalination plant and pumping station) from the existing grid. Turning the underground mine into a huge open cut would involve 19 billion litres of diesel over the mine life. In fact BHP lobbied the Gillard government to kill plans to axe the mining diesel rebate of about 18c per litre. Other FF inputs include oil and gas used in ANFO explosive. All knocked on the head so SA loses out on its biggest ever project. BHP now say they will consider using conveyor belts not trucks and may spray acid (heap leaching) on piles of ore not elaborate processing. BHP also say they must mine coal to help the world’s poor people.
Perhaps somebody can think of another way of supplying power around the clock to the mining industry. A happier story is that an Australian developed laser process, the Silex method, may save 75% of the energy input needed for centrifuge enrichment of uranium. At Paducah Kentucky the plant will be downsized and jobs lost because of this radical innovation. Swings and roundabouts.
@Megan
1. All/more applications reliant on grid electricity now source their power from nuclear rather than coal or gas. This reduces demand for coal and gas, prejudicing the viability of coal or gas mining in marginal areas and if the impact is great, then perhaps even in quite rich seams.
2. As the proportion of vehicle miles powered by the grid increases, the oil required to drive those vehicles declines, but instead of transferring this to coal, it transfers to a low carbon source.
3. In some places in the developing world e.g. Nigeria the bulk of the electricity is produced by burning oil. This is even more CO2-intensive than coal.
4. Some dedicated industrial applications that are energy-intensive, such as smelting lend themselves especially well to nukes. Swapping Hazelwood for a nuke plant would make for cleaner air as well as lower CO2e. Running desal fom nukes would be a good idea.
@ John Quiggin, on the economics of the French nuclear build.
Your article’s characterization of France’s nuclear build seems to rely on Arnulf Grubler’s research, which is problematic. His estimate of the capital cost inflation during the course of the build, a factor of 3 to 3.5, has been criticized by other researchers like Charles Komanoff. A 2013 paper by Rangel and Leveque, citing new and much more extensive data from the French Cour des Comptes report, puts the cost inflation factor at 1.5. So the later cost blowout of the French nuclear build turns out to be not so much. The Cour des Comptes put the average capital cost over the entire 20 + year build at roughly EU 1600 per kw in 2010 EUs, about the same as a wind turbine.
Costs did rise somewhat during the course of the build, but I think that’s not because the French construction policy was an unsustainable mixture of unique ingredients but because it was abandoned for idiosyncratic reasons that had nothing to do with economic fundamentals. The factor’s Grubler includes are 1) the abandonment of standardization with model changes, especially toward the end of the build with the switch to “a radically new, entirely French design…that did not allow any learning spillovers in design or construction.” He also blames the politically motivated shift towards domestic sourcing of higher-priced French components and, after 1981, a deliberate policy of stretching out build times so as to keep skilled workers and managers employed as the pace of construction starts slackened.
So the coherent French nuclear build policy—1) low-cost State financing; 2) a standard design repeated en masse to leverage economies of experience and series; 3) a state-run construction and management consortium that was able to capture those economies institutionally—seems to have worked well as long as it was followed. When it wasn’t, costs rose.
Costs have indeed exploded with the EPR build at Flamanville, but that build shares no features of the earlier successful policy: it’s a one-off; major design features have been changed during the build; it’s financed by the bond market and equity partners; and it’s being built by an ad hoc motley of inexperienced subcontractors instead of an experienced state construction firm. So it’s not a problem of “lost secrets”, just a failure to follow through on obvious, common-sense principles of public infrastructure procurement. (Also, the EPR is by far the priciest Gen III reactor on the market.)
–You seem to feel that the French model is no longer feasible because it presupposes a state-led consensus on financing and building infrastructure, which is now apparently impossible; nuclear is thus scotched because it is not attractive to private investment. Your argument seems to be, “we’ve got neoliberalism, and nuclear doesn’t comport with neoliberalism—so too bad for nuclear.” I just don’t understand why a social democrat would take a position like that. Surely the left should be arguing against neo-liberal market-based policies for clean energy infrastructure; we should demand cheap state financing and systematic state planning to support all clean energy technologies. Certainly you support that for wind and solar, which would not be built anywhere without state subsidies, preferments and mandated quotas. Why not for nuclear?
@ John Quiggin on the politics of France’s nuclear build.
Grubler’s and your explanation that France’s nuclear build was the doing of an overweening technocratic state “without much regard to public opinion” strikes me as wrong-headed. Which France are we talking about? The France of 1968? The France that underwent profound electoral regime change from Gaullist to Socialist during the course of the nuclear build? The France where massive strikes by farmers, transport workers, public unions etc regularly paralyze the capital and force reversals in technocratic policy? The notion of France as a dirigiste state where technocrats pay no mind to the rabble is a cliché that’s been out of date since Bonaparte’s day.
In reality, France’s nuclear build was a garden-variety democratic consensus. It was prompted by the trauma of the oil price shocks of the early 1970s, which crippled France’s oil-powered electricity system as much as transport. And by no means was it unique to France. Many other Western democracies initiated large-scale nuclear builds in the 1970s and 1980s because of fossil-fuel price shocks, including Germany, Sweden, Japan and Britain.
So no, you don’t need a dirigiste technocracy to build nuclear power—just normal democratic politics, with a modicum of rationality.
@ John Quiggin
“New nuclear power is far more expensive than renewables, even after making every possible allowance for the costs of intermittency, the various subsidies available, and so on.”
What data are you basing that on? Does it really apply to all renewables? And account for all the subsidies? And does it account for the off-loaded “costs of intermittency” when wind and solar will be at, say, 70-80 percent grid penetration, as nuclear is in France? No grid anywhere has anything like that level of intermittent penetration—how do we know what the system costs of transmission, backup and storage will be if we comprehensively decarbonize the grid with wind and solar?
And as I have pointed out before, the claim is certainly false in China, which is the best test case because they are building both nuclear and renewables systematically and at large scale. Capital costs, LCOEs and feed-in tariffs are substantially lower for Chinese new nuclear than they are for Chinese wind and solar.
–“the construction of new nuclear plants has been abandoned almost everywhere”
That claim seems way too pessimistic. 70 nuclear reactors are currently under construction in China, India, Russia, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, Belarus, Brazil, Pakistan and, in the developed Western democracies, in Finland, France, Japan (yep, still building some), South Korea and the United States. Turkey, Iran, Britain, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia have all announced major systematic nuclear builds.
Five Western Democracies building one each nuclear reactor does not amount to any kind of resurgence, Will Boisvert, and certainly qualifies as “abandoned almost everywhere” in the context of “nuclear is the energy source for every nation”.
The thrust of the argument here is that China is as primed to accept large scale adoption of Nuclear in similar circumstances as France was when it installed most of its. I for one agree with that evaluation.
Talking about France during the period of introduction you are not recognising that national feeling in France was very much in support of the nuclear programme and that was only eroded by Nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific and the global reaction to them.
Apart from that the one French plant still to be completed at Flamanville costs have run out to be some 6 billion dollars per GWe, nearly 3 times the original estimate. Again supporting JQ’s argument.
@Will Boisvert
Give it up Will. You are wasting your time. No modern, educated informed person of any sense wants to live near a nuclear power station: and with good reason as Chernobyl and Fukushima show. So you are flogging a dead horse. The rest of us (the great majority) assessed this accurately some time ago and we have moved on.
Will Boisvert, you wrote that Japan is still building some nuclear reactors. Construction of the Oma (Ohma) nuclear plant which began in may of 2008 is now continuing, so that’s one. What are the names of the other nuclear plants that are under construction? There must be at least one more for Japan to still be building some.
Here is an article on the Oma nuclear plant from yesterday’s Asahi Shimbun:
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201404040046
@Brett
No disagreement with that. Early closure of existing nuclear reactors seems like a bad idea in most cases.
@Will Boisvert
My comment was referring to the developed countries. So, to take your list (going from memory, so may have minor errors)
Finland: One reactor under construction, way over time and over budget, one more planned
France: One reactor under construction, way over time and over budget, no more planned
Japan: One nuclear reactor under construction, most existing reactors facing permanent closure
US: Five reactors under construction, over time and over budget, no more planned
South Korea (according to Wikipedia) four reactors under construction, four more planned
UK: One super-expensive reactor planned for political reasons
I’m no expert on South Korea, but it seems plausible that it shares many of the characteristics of China that I identified. I also know too little about Finland to comment. In all the other developed countries you mention, nuclear power is a dead duck, for the reasons I explained in the post.
@BilB SNAP!
@Will Boisvert
Just to note that I’ve read Komanoff, and I don’t think his analysis leads to a fundamentally different conclusion.
@Will As regards your political point, there have been political developments since the 1970s that I regard as favorable (less technocracy, more citizen empowerment in infrastructure planning) and as unfavorable (market liberalism in general and as applied to electricity). Both have been bad for nuclear power.
Obviously, I would like to roll back market liberalism, but, optimistic as I am, I can’t foresee massive changes over the next decade, which is the outer limit of the time we have to substantially decarbonise electricity generation. So, whatever appeal nuclear power might have in a different world, it is a red herring in the one we actually live in.
If nuclear power once worked in France, where is there data on how much it cost for them to clean up all the tritium leakage into groundwater and store waste from their reprocessing plants?
Well an apparently rigorous poll (sample size 1200) by the SA Chamber of Mines found nearly 50% support for nuclear. An earlier self response poll by the online Adelaide Advertiser found nearer 60% support. Personally I’d rather live near a nuke than in the acrid air of Morwell Victoria next to Hazelwood. I note on the ABC when Kevin McLeod was building his man cave on the Somerset coast he popped over to Hinkley B power station for some materials, also taking time to walk on the top of a reactor vessel.
Australia produced about 6% non-hydro renewable electricity in 2012. I’m not sure what it would take to multiply that several times over. Meanwhile both domestic gas and imported oil are going up in price and we may need more electricity to take over their roles. I fear what lies ahead is a decade of barely changed coal burning and hand wringing that things are not as some would like.
This discussion led me to check the news on the Olkiluoto plant in Finland. Apparently, there is now no official projected completion date, and there is speculation that the project may be abandoned in its incomplete state. And this is in what appears to be a generally pro-nuclear country, which would still like to build more plants.
“Australia produced about 6% non-hydro renewable electricity in 2012. I’m not sure what it would take to multiply that several times over.”
On past experience, you won’t take this advice, but why don’t you read the CCA report on the renewable energy target? Reaching 41 000 GWh by 2020, as recommended, involves tripling the levels of 2011, which is pretty much what you are asking about. The answer to what it would take, in economic terms is “not very much”. For consumers, the answer is probably a net benefit due to downward pressure on wholesale prices.
The big problem is the likelihood that the Abbott government will water down the target to protect the economic interests of the fossil fuel generators.
I think the objective is low carbon not ‘renewable’ or whether the electricity was transmitted through purple wires or some other attribute. Note that ‘renewable’ for CER purposes includes heat pump water heaters 80% powered by coal fired electricity, methane vented from coal mines (coulda sworn it was a FF) and dry rock geothermal heated by radioactive decay.
I conjecture that the “downward pressure’ on wholesale electricity prices will never exceed the 3c-4c per kwh in LGC payments. In other words recipients are handing back some of the subsidy to stay in business. I suggest we test this and also the effect on retail prices by dropping the RET for a while.
Hermit, look at South Australia. You may be familiar with that state. It gets over five times as much as 6% of its electricity from wind and solar alone. Using a 5% discount rate the Snowtown II wind farm will produce electricity for about 4.5 cents a kilowatt-hour or less. This year South Australia may get 5% of its electricity from rooftop solar, which is the cheapest source of electricity available to Australian households. South Australia’s wind and solar power have reduced wholesale electricity prices and improved grid reliability and their capacity is continuing to expand. There is nothing particularly special about South Australia’s wind and solar resources so obviously an expansion of renewable capacity across Australia can be done quite easily and it obviously can be done at a low cost and the cost is obviously going to continue to decline.
@Ronald Brak
I have to say that Hermit is my favorite example of derp. He purports to engage in argument but in reality everything he writes amounts to “I believe what I believed ten years ago, and nothing is going to change that”. So, while I’m confident he would have declared SA’s shift to renewables impossible (just as he does for Australia generally), I’m equally confident that, when Australia is getting 30 per cent of its electricity from renewables (hopefully in 10 years or so), his views won’t have shifted in the slightest.
Yes, I recently ran into large slabs of derp when discussing Charles Mann’s latest piece on carbon capture for coal plants. My argument that currently conventional coal has difficulty competing with renewables so coal with carbon capture would never be competitive was pretty much met with, “I don’t believe China can build enough renewable capacity to make a difference, therefore, ipso facto, they will continue to build coal plants at the current rate for decades.” It really seems that a lot of people just don’t like new renewables and so edit them out of existence. And this is how we end up with “official forecasts” that increased investment in renewables will simply stop for no adequately explained reason in a couple of years making the future safer for coal and gas. Or maybe they just think wind and solar will get tired by that point and will need a rest?
Actually there is a lot of evidence around that prospecting for more oil and gas reserves (and then producing this new stuff) is getting very, perhaps prohibitively, expensive in both dollar and energy terms. Steve Kopits’ hour long presentation is well worth watching.
http://energypolicy.columbia.edu/events-calendar/global-oil-market-forecasting-main-approaches-key-drivers
This ties in with the idea that peak oil is of course “peak production” and that all the easy to find and produce (most profitable) oil was produced before the peak. The expensive and hard to get stuff comes after the peak. The costs of hydrocarbons (financial and energetic) on the economy get much steeper after the peak. This indicates IMO that the breakover from hydrocarbons to other sources with a better cost basis ((financial and energetic) could be very rapid if deployability is rapid and scalability feasible.
Of course, I see a number of other problems, probably because of my cynical and pessimistic priors. But this is not the place for repeating my priors. It might be too derp-ish of me.
Paul Gilding states that we have passed the tipping point and fossil fuel industry is a dead man walking
You can’t explain the Flamanville cost overruns by a general decline in the competence of French engineers and project managers. The Millau viaduct, with the world’s highest deck, was built on time, within budget, and (Qatar and Brazil please note) with no worker deaths. It’s beautiful too. The high-speed rail tunnel under the Pyrenees was also built on time by the same company, Eiffage. (It then had to wait 3 years before the Spaniards got their act together and finished the much easier line to Barcelona). The LGV-Est to Metz was also finished on time – I didn’t hear about cost overruns. It does look as if there’s something specific to nuclear that gives it a negative learning curve, as Arnulf Grubler argues.
Where is the evidence that China is actually building its current wave of nuclear plants cheaply, safely and on time? Note the second condition – the plants have to be certified by a newly empowered regulator. According to Mycle Schneider’s World Nuclear Report– he may be biased but he’s certainly well-informed – China is proceeding with the 28 reactors it started before Fukushima, but didn’t open any new construction sites in the first half of 2013. If you contrast this with the regular increases in wind and solar targets, it looks as if the Chinese leadership’s commitment to nuclear is conditional and hedged.