Making Europe's nuclear reactors safe could cost up to €25 billion

A European Commission report released in draft form yesterday says that there are many potentially huge and expensive problems with the safety of the majority of nuclear plants operating in the European Union.

"On the basis of the stress test results practically all [nuclear plants] need to undergo safety improvements," says the leaked draft. "Hundreds of technical upgrade measures have already been identified."

This survey was produced in response to the Fukushima accident in Japan last year.

It puts the cost of the safety upgrades at a total of between €10 and €25 billion, or €30 million to €200 million for each reactor.

134 nuclear reactors are in operation in 14 EU countries, of which 111, at 47 plants, have over 100,000 people living within a radius of 30km.

Most worryingly, the report finds that four reactors, located in two different nations, have less than one hour available to restore safety functions if electrical power is lost.

At the other extreme, four countries operate additional safety systems fully independent from the normal safety measures and located in areas well-protected against external events. A fifth nation is considering that option.

The draft report notes that two member states have still not provided information, but does not identify them.

The UK government commissioned its own report on existing British reactors in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, which gave them the all clear.

However the EU report points out that most UK reactors do not have an alternative control room that could be used in the event that the main one became unsafe.

A DECC spokesperson commented that there was no evidence that British nuclear reactors were unsafe, adding that "the Government is committed to the principle of continuous improvement".

The final version of the European report is to be published later this month, and the Commission will make its recommendations shortly afterwards, including proposing laws on insurance and liability to "improve the situation of potential victims in the event of a nuclear accident".

Environmental campaigners pointed out that, although it is comprehensive and devastating, the report misses out further risks in crucial areas, such as ageing technology, terrorist attacks or human error.

"If this exercise was serious, the Commission should be recommending the closure of unsafe or ageing reactors," said Rebecca Harms, co-president of the Greens/European Free Alliance at the European Parliament.

It's six months since the Fukushima nuclear disaster and Japan is charting a renewable energy future

This Sunday will be the six month anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, which is now emerging as being far worse than officials originally admitted. But in many parts of the world, including the UK, it has already slipped into distant memory, even as we remember the terrible events of 9/11/2001.

While the mainstream media has moved on - even in Tokyo itself - and there has been little reportage of developments in the area around the disaster, it is apparent that secrecy and cover-up continues to be endemic in the industry, and anger is widespread among survivors of the March 11 quake and tsunami disaster.

Almost six months after the catastrophe, tens of thousands of people still live in crowded shelters and temporary homes, many mourning loved ones, fearful of radiation, lacking information they can trust, and without jobs, homes or a clear idea about their future. 100,000 Fukushima Prefecture residents are still not able to return to their homes.

Some locations near the nuclear power plant are estimated to be contaminated with accumulated radiation doses of over 500 millisieverts a year, meaning return for residents is not likely to be imminent.

Shinji Sakuma, a farmer whose cows were slaughtered due to fears of radioactive contamination, is furious with the politicians he sees as "distant and disconnected from the reality of the disaster zone".

There is a 20-30km "stay indoors" zone around the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant, and schoolchildren are not allowed to play outside.

Within 50km, in a school in Koriyama, students are monitoring levels of radiation in the grounds, and finding pockets of high radiation where contaminated surface soil on the school premises was removed and buried.

Readings in the wider affected area of the level of radioactivity in the soil and sea show that three times as much iodine-131 and cesium-137 - 4,720 terabecquerels - was emitted than that formerly estimated by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the plant operator.

Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years, meaning that its radioactive emissions will decline only by half after 30 years and will affect the environment over several generations.

A soil expert from Tokyo university estimates that cancer or illness from Fukushima radiation will begin to show in 5-10 years. “This is a disaster affecting all residents of Japan”, he says.

A group of researchers from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Kyoto University and other institutes say that a total of 15,000 terabecquerels of radioactive substances is estimated to have been released from the Daiichi nuclear plant into the sea, affecting fish and other sea-life.

Moreover the Japanese education ministry has released the first comprehensive survey of soil contamination within a 62-mile radius, showing that more than 30 locations spread over a wide area have been contaminated with cesium-137.

The survey of 2,200 locations - conducted in June and July - found that 33 had cesium-137 in excess of 1.48 million becquerels per square meter, the level set by the Soviet Union for forced resettlement after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, Japanese authorities said.

This prompted Mamoru Fujiwara, assistant professor of nuclear physics at Osaka University, to say that residents from these locations "need to be relocated permanently", but no decision has yet been taken.

Meanwhile, technicians are still struggling to bring the crippled reactors to a state of cold shutdown by January.

Japan's clean energy future

In the light of all this, Japan is likely to have no nuclear plants in the future, Japanese Industry Minister Yoshio Hachiro said this week, basing his statement on Japan's new Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's policy of not building new nuclear power plants and decommissioning old ones.

Noda has just replaced Naoto Kan, who stepped down following criticism of the way he handled the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.

"Public opinion is generally united in reducing (nuclear plants), instead of increasing them," Noda said.

Prior to the Fukushima disaster, Japan had a target of meeting half of its electricity needs from nuclear power by 2030, up from one third. Only 12 of Japan's 54 commercial power plant reactors are now in operation.

Just before resigning, Kan also advocated a zero-nuclear future for Japan, and passed a feed-in tariff creating incentives for large-scale renewable energy projects. "When I think of safety not being outweighed by risk, the answer is not to rely on nuclear," he said in an interview a week ago.

Renewables, including hydropower, currently supply about 10 percent of Japan's energy mix but this will now rapidly increase.

With the indomitable spirit that allowed the country to rebuild itself after its defeat and the nuclear horror of the Second World War, the country is set to turn its worst crisis since Hiroshima and Nagasaki into an opportunity.

Its new foreign minister Koichiro Gemba, whose own constituency is Fukushima, has announced a national drive for clean energy that will focus not just on satisfying national demand but on exports to help fuel the country's economic recovery.

"We have bullet trains and water. From now on, there will be environmental technology," said Gemba on Monday. He said these would include state-of-the-art solar batteries.

"I'm sure it will be Japan's strong field. We will promote it through economic diplomacy," he said.

It's no immediate consolation for those innocent victims of Fukushima's own Ground Zero, but it should serve as a lesson and inspiration for the rest of the world.

11 reasons to oppose nuclear power

I'm going to attempt to summarise the reasons why we should abandon nuclear power. I'll give a summary and then try and go into more depth.

1. The sourcing of uranium leaves a terrible legacy and can never be sustainable or carbon neutral. This is the elephant in the room that no one ever discusses.
2. Nuclear power stations can never be totally safe. Even though designers cater for every foreseeable event, it is the unforeseeable ones which have created the disasters of the last 50 years in Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island and many other smaller ones
3. Nuclear waste remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years. It already costs in the UK £3 billion or £1000 per person per year to look after the existing legacy. How can it be safe, responsible or cost-effective to bequeath this to a distant and unknown future population?
4. It is not carbon neutral, or low carbon, but emits in its life-cycle about 30% of the carbon of gas generation, not including mining and looking after the radioactive tailings that results
5. It is highly centralised and so more vulnerable than a decentralised system
6. The nuclear industry has a reputation for secrecy and dissembling of the truth. This includes information about safety and costs which invariably rise. We need a power supply from sources we can trust.
7. We can satisfy our power needs from a mixture of existing and almost market ready renewable technologies, implementing the smart grid, low- and zero-carbon building design and refurbishment, better planning, more efficient transportation and other energy and resource efficiency.
8. New reactor designs are commercially unproven and improperly costed.
9. Uranium supplies will run out within 70 years - sooner as more plants are built. Why not invest instead in developing the renewable technologies whose fuel we will be able to use for much longer into the future?
10. Many power stations are on the coast. They will not be safe in 50 or 100 or more years' time when the sea level has risen as the Antarctic ice cap and glaciers melt.
11. Renewable energy (the source of it, i.e. the fuel) is free, and there is plenty of solar power - which fuels the wind, the waves, the tides and biomass growth - to supply the energy needs of the planet many times over. This means operating costs are in general lower as there is no fuel requirement. If only resources and subsidies currently channeled into nuclear and fossil fuels were channeled into renewable energy technologies, we could easily meet our needs this way.

Below, find some notes supporting some of the above statements. I will hopefully add to these in future posts.

Safety

None of the four Generation III designs submitted to the UK regulators for pre-licensing assessment have been proven commercially; they are design concepts without working prototypes to test their safety.

Nuclear waste

Are we expected to believe our energy companies will be around in any time over a few decades hence, for thousands of years, to pay for the full cost of management of the new radioactive waste produced?

How many companies are here now that were here 500 years ago let alone tens of thousands? None.

Existing nuclear waste is currently managed by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Its 2010-11 budget is £2.8bn, of which £1.69 billion comes from the taxpayer via DECC. DECC's overall budget in this year is £2.9bn. This means that the cost of managing existing radioactive waste is a staggering 58% of the Department's total expenditure.

The cost of looking after the waste for each new power station is estimated to be about £1 billion.

Uranium mining

The World Nuclear Authority admits that in "emerging uranium producing countries" there is frequently no adequate environmental health and safety legislation, let alone monitoring.

It is considerately proposing a Charter of Ethics containing Principles of Uranium Stewardship for its members to follow. But this is a self-policing voluntary arrangement. Similarly, the International Atomic Energy Agency's Safety Guide to the Management of Radioactive Waste from the Mining and Milling of Ores are not legally binding on operators.

To produce enough uranium fuel - about 25 tonnes - to keep your average (1300 MW) reactor going for a year entails the extraction of half a million tonnes of waste rock and over 100,000 tonnes of mill tailings. These are toxic for hundreds of thousands of years.

The conversion plant will generate a further 144 tonnes of solid waste and 1343 cubic metres of liquid waste. To supply the number of power stations worldwide expected to be online in 2020 would mean generating 50 million tonnes of toxic radioactive residue every single year.

Uranium mining has often been a disaster for indigenous peoples. this includes as just one example the people in Niger around Areva's mines. The area has suffered conflict for ownership due to the huge profits involved, and the water table has dried up leaving cattle dead and farmers destitute. Radioactive contaminated goods have been found in street markets in villages.

British Energy is responsible for purchasing uranium in the UK.

Costs

Insurance: Nuclear plant operators have limited liability in the case of an accident. Any cost over £700m is covered by the taxpayer. Are taxpayers prepared to take on board the full insurance liabilities, which in the case of Chernobyl have already run to several tens of billions?

The cost of the new generation plant being constructed in Finland, which was alleged to be cost-effective and show what could be done by the new generation designs, has soared during the construction phase.

The same is true of its sister plant in Flamanville in France, now under construction.

Nuclear is not low carbon

Nuclear power produces roughly one quarter to one third of the carbon dioxide as the delivery of the same quantity of electricity from natural gas.

This is according to the Integrated Sustainability Analysis (ISA) by The University of Sydney, which concludes that the greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity of nuclear power varies within the range 130-160 g/kWh.

A second estimate (below) by Storm van Leeuwen and Smith (SLS) is higher because it reflects best practice, especially for waste treatment and disposal, and because the reality of errors and problems in the nuclear cycle typically raises the energy cost well beyond the planned level. ISA’s estimate includes all GHG emissions from the nuclear cycle.

Breakdown:
Construction: 12-35 CO2 g/kWh
Front end: 36 CO2 g/kWh
Back end: 17 CO2 g/kWh
Dismantling: 23-46 CO2 g/kWh
Total: 88-134 CO2 g/kWh

To compare: GHG emissions from gas-fired electricity generation are about 450 g/kWh.

By contrast, the U.K. Government’s 2007 Nuclear Power Consultation accepts industry estimates that, across its whole life-cycle, nuclear power emits 7 - 22 g/kWh.

Additionally, no one can convince me that the mining and the care of the huge piles of tailings at uranium mines is carbon-free. It takes a lot of – almost certainly fossil-fuelled - energy to move that amount of rock and process the ore. But the carbon cost is often not in the country where the fuel is consumed - certainly in the case of the UK. So that's why it's called ‘carbon free’.

The threat of rising sea levels

The Met Office has said that rising sea-levels, increased wave height and increased storm surge height must all be considered in the planning of the UK's future nuclear stations.

Their report was commissioned by British Energy. It concludes future power plants will need to be further inland and may need added protection.

At Sizewell in Suffolk, for example, site of Britain's most modern reactor, the prediction is for the most severe storm surges to be 1.7 metres higher in 2080 than at present. But that's only if the Greenland ice sheet doesn't melt. If it does, much of it will be underwater.

At Dungeness in Kent, the storm surge increase could be up to 0.9 metres. Already this plant, which is sited on land only two metres above sea-level, is protected by a massive wall of shingle which needs constant maintenance in the winter. Waves erode so much of it that it needs to be topped up constantly with 600 tons of shingle every day.

Renewable alternatives

Britain doesn’t need to build major new power stations to keep the lights on and maintain security, according to, for example, this report by independent consultants Pöyry.

Space and water heating counts for 83% of domestic energy use and about the same for office use. Together, offices and homes account for around 35% of UK energy use. Ie, 28% of total UK energy use.

Providing 40% of this by passive solar, solar water heating, heat pumps, domestic CHP, and woodchip/pellet boilers, would account for a significant proportion of the amount of power requirement as that required to compensate for the loss of old nuclear power stations.

It would have almost as great an impact in a shorter time scale and far cheaper but with little environmental impact than building new nuclear power stations, as well as creating more, sustainable jobs.

How we can do without the nuclear renaissance

Japan, the only country to have experienced not one but two atomic weapon blasts which devastated two major cities, has now suffered what is probably going to become the third worst civil nuclear disaster in the world.

Many voices are lining up to say that this is the nail in the coffin for nuclear power. There have been anti-nuclear demonstrations in Germany and Greenpeace is calling for the phasing out of all existing power stations. They say nuclear power is simply too dangerous.

Those on the pro-nuclear side have in the last few days been consistently underestimating the way that events have actually unfolded. My inbox has been filled with nuclear pundits offering their prognoses which have been proved invariably wrong.

Nevertheless even some environmentalists such as Mark Lynas are arguing that we still need nuclear power and that it's worth the risk because the alternative - runaway climate change - is unavoidable without it.

Nuclear or renewable future?

Japan imports 90% of its oil and has used nuclear power to help fuel its economic success with a measure of energy independence. Up to now, the Japanese public have largely trusted the authorities.

The terrible consequences of the tsunami, the attendant economic collapse, the lack of services, electricity and food, and the terrifying prospect of an invisible enemy in the air or in the food around them has shattered this trust.

Hideki Ban, a Japanese antinuclear movement activist and leader of the Citizen's Nuclear Information Center (CNIC), commenting on the disaster, said at the weekend in an interview with an Italian newspaper "By an accident of this magnitude it is very likely (and is also our hope) that the close dependence of Japan on atomic energy will come to an end."

Yet would Japan be able to power all of its needs with renewable energy? And if it can, how long will it take to build the generation capacity? It would not do so with solar photovoltaic and wind power alone. However, it is an island and there is no shortage of marine energy or geothermal energy, whose effect could be magnified by the use of combined heat and power and heat pumps, or of food and crop waste for anaerobic digestion.

All new buildings to replace those lost could be constructed to become zero energy using the Passivhaus standard. If Japan can achieve energy security using renewables, then certainly so can the rest of the world.

And if it can't, then presumably the rest of the world cannot successfully tackle climate change either.

Mark Lynas argues that if we abandon nuclear power then in the immediate term coal will take up the slack. Without any proven (at scale) carbon capture and storage, this could well accelerate global warming.

The renewable vision

But it doesn't have to be like this. Large-scale deployment of anaerobic digestion, solar thermal power plants, marine energy and wind power linked by high-voltage supergrids can power economic revival.

The map right shows where it has been calculated that six large solar thermal plants situated in the hottest spots on the planet could power the whole world with such supergrids.


The European Desertec project is one such example of a project that could revolutionise North Africa and Europe and the Middle East.

The far east could have just such a super grid.

Is it feasible? Is it affordable?

What really brought nuclear power to a halt after the Three Mile Island disaster in America was the refusal of insurance companies to foot the bill for new construction given the potential damage to them were there to be another accident.

The same reaction is extremely likely again, in many countries of the world.


All renewable energy technologies carry far less inherent risk but more up front costs. If they are more expensive in capital terms, they are less expensive in terms of their running costs, security requirements and insurance requirements.

What the fulfillment of this dream requires is the political will and about the same amount of capital as it will take to build nuclear power stations and maintain their security and insure them against disaster in the future.

The health risk

Nuclear power is inherently dangerous. The whole supply chain including mining in countries like Niger promotes environmental desolation and conflict.

Mark Lynas argues that there have only been 50 deaths as a result of the Chernobyl disaster and this is an acceptable price.

But that is not the whole picture. There has been a great increase in thyroid cancers as a result of the ingestion of caesium-137, which can remain in the environment and food chain for 30 years.

Several of my friends around where I live have for many years received visitors from the Chernobyl area - children badly affected by radiation with terrible deformities. They come for holidays. It is awful to see them.

According to the World Health Organisation, an expert group from the US National Academy of Sciences has concluded that "there may be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime". These groups contain 630,000 people.

Those who argue that all of this is an acceptable price to pay to tackle climate change have not seen the suffering themselves close to hand. If it was happening to them or their family, friends and neighbours they would not be so gung ho about it.

It's time to say no to the nuclear lobby. We don't trust you any more.

Fukushima accident triggers reappraisal of nuclear power

The unprecedented Fukushima nuclear power accident is the worst since Chernobyl and is causing a significant reappraisal of plans to develop nuclear power everywhere in the world.

The latest news is that a third reactor has lost its cooling system. A second explosion has injured 11 people, one of them seriously.

The authorities have so far categorised it as a level 4 event on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale - an accident with local consequences, where there is a minor release of radioactive material, unlikely to result in implementation of planned countermeasures other than local food controls.

Radiation levels and secrecy

However, independent journalists from the Japan Visual Journalist Association (JVJA) and Ryuichi Hirokawa, editor-in-chief of DAYS JAPAN (magazine), went on Sunday to Futaba Town where the Fukushima Daiichi reactors are located to undertake independent monitoring.

Hirokawa said measurements taken near the high school at Futaba were higher than when he had taken measurements approximately 200 meters from unit 4 at Chernobyl shortly after that explosion.

He added, "At the front of the Futaba Town Hall, all our three radiation monitors went off scale and became inoperable (we could not take measurements). At the entrance of the hospital, stretchers were turned over, many things were scattered, a feeling that evacuation had been undertaken in a very rushed way."

Yet, a statement today by the International Atomic Energy Agency said "Radiation dose rate measurements observed at four locations around the plant's perimeter over a 16-hour period on 13 March were all normal."

These discrepancies in reports do not inspire confidence. Secrecy is a major issue in public confidence about nuclear power. In 2002 a scandal about widespread falsification of safety documentation lead to the shutting down of all of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s 17 nuclear reactors.

It will probably be some time before we find out exactly what has transpired, and there may be more explosions. However, the fact that there is now a 12 mile exclusion zone around the site gives some idea of its seriousness.

Security against earthquakes

Masashi Goto, the designer of the containment vessel at the Fukushima plant, a former employee of Toshiba, held a press conference on 13 March with the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center in which he catalogued how the industry in Japan had been warned about the vulnerability of its reactors to earthquakes and ignored the warnings.

He said that the intensity of the quake in 2008 which cracked the reactor cooling towers at the Kurihara Nuclear Power Plant, spilling wastewater and damaging the reactor core, exceeded the design capability of the vessel to withstand it by almost three times, and that the only reason why a major disaster did not happen on that occasion was pure coincidence.

Reuters reports that even faithful workers have had their trust shaken. "The company has been saying such a thing would not happen and the plant was fine even after 40 years in operation...It only raised my distrust of TEPCO." said Mikiko Amano, a 55-year-old woman who had been recently evacuated from her home close to the quake-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.

Four plants have been shut down since the first Fukushima explosion, closing 20% of Japan’s nuclear capacity. 34% Japan's history comes from nuclear power. Even Tokyo Electric Power has called it "a considerably serious situation."

Doubts over the reactor type

The Fukushima plant is a General Electric Mark I reactor. There are 23 of this type in the U.S. It is a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) of which there are 192 in the world, some still under construction.

The design has been criticised by nuclear experts and even Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff for decades as being susceptible to explosion and containment failure.

As early as 1972, Dr. Stephen Hanuaer, an Atomic Energy Commission safety official, recommended that the pressure suppression system be discontinued and any further designs not be accepted for construction permits.

Shortly thereafter, three General Electric nuclear engineers publicly resigned their positions citing dangerous shortcomings in the GE design.

An NRC analysis of the potential failure of the Mark I under accident conditions concluded in a 1985 report that Mark I failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely.

In 1986, Harold Denton, then the NRC's top safety official, told an industry trade group that the "Mark I containment, especially being smaller with lower design pressure, in spite of the suppression pool, if you look at the WASH 1400 safety study, you'll find something like a 90% probability of that containment failing."

A statement issued by the Japanese Citizens' Nuclear Information Center expressed concern for the people living in the vicinity of Japan's nuclear power plants and called for a phasing out nuclear energy.

"Last December the Japanese government began a review of its nuclear energy policy," said Philip White its international liaison officer. "The review was commenced in the spirit of essentially confirming the existing policy. That approach is no longer viable. The direction of the policy review must be completely reversed."

The industry is countering that at least a major explosion of the containment vessel itself has been avoided. This is not 3 mile Island or Chernobyl, they say.

However, the accident is without precedent, and so were these others. The industry can only prepare within its economic constraints for probable accidents, and it is the improbable ones which are the most catastrophic.

Countries around the world are now commencing an evaluation of nuclear safety - India being one of the first to announce this move.