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.

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.

Nuclear safety compromised in US newbuild

US regulators have ignored expert safety advice in an attempt to cut corners and fast track the completion of a $4 billion nuclear fuel facility currently under construction near Aiken, South Carolina.

The accusation is reported in the September issue of The Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE)'s The Chemical Engineer magazine. The technical reviewer said " I’ve never seen such a crazy system.”

Nuclear disarmament treaties have resulted in a large surplus of weapons-grade plutonium. The US government has initiated moves to build and operate a mixed oxide fuel fabrication facility (MOFFF) that will convert recovered plutonium into fuel rods for use in civil nuclear power generation.

However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has ‘hushed up’ a highly critical assessment of the plant’s engineering by its top independent reviewer according to Adam Duckett, a senior reporter on The Chemical Engineer.

The claims are made by Dan Tedder, Emeritus Professor of Chemical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Tedder, who was hired by the NRC as an independent technical reviewer in April 2007, told The Chemical Engineer that basic chemical process design information was incomplete and presented serious safety implications.

“When they go operational there will be safety problems”, says Tedder. “The documentation provided in the license application is very superficial and lacks the type of technical depth I would expect. It isn’t consistent with reasonable and generally-accepted good engineering practice – I’ve never seen such a crazy system.”

Whilst the NRC has refuted the accusations as “baseless”, it has refused access to the disputed documents on the grounds that they are designated ‘Proprietary or Official Use Only-Security Reacted Information’, a move that does little to allay concerns over the safety of the MOFFF plant.

The issue has highlighted the need for competent professional chemical engineers in the creation of new nuclear facilities, says IChemE’s director of policy, Andrew Furlong: “This unfortunate episode raises some serious questions. Tedder’s claim that basic information – including process flow diagrams and energy balances – is either flawed or incomplete deserves further scrutiny. It is critically important that chemical engineers working to the highest possible technical and professional standards are involved in every stage of the design and construction process.”

The Chemical Engineer

Fire at nuclear plant put out

A fire started at Vattenfall Europe's currently closed Kruemmel nuclear plant in northern German but was quickly put out by the plant's own fire brigade on Monday, the operator and local government said [report from Reuters].

No radioactive substances had been released and all relevant authorities had been informed, Vattenfall said in a statement.

The 1,402 megawatt plant, which is jointly operated by the Swedish/German utility Vattanfall utility group and by Germany's E.ON has been closed since June 28, 2007 when a fire at a tranformer substation caused a short circuit.

The Social Affairs Ministry in the northern state of Schleswig Holstein, which supervises nuclear safety, said the incident took place around 0700 GMT and was resolved shortly after 0800 GMT.

The internal fire brigade had dealt with the fire so there had been no need to involve public fire fighters, it said. There were no injuries.

Vattenfall confirmed the details in a statement, saying there had been a smouldering fire at a ventilation system.

Germany is in the process of phasing out nuclear power by 2020 under plans agreed by the previous coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens.

The plans are being contested by the conservative parties CDU/CSU, which are currently in a coalition government with the SPD. Each safety-related incident is helping to weaken their arguments and reignite fears over the safety of the technology.

A statement from the ministry said the cause of the fire had not yet been determined but its experts were investigating at the site.

The 24-year old Kruemmel reactor is about 20 km (12.43 miles) southeast of Hamburg on the River Elbe.

Adjacent Brunsbuettel, another nuclear plant operated jointly by Vattenfall and E.ON, with 806 megawatts of capacity, also remains shut since the incidents last summer.

Environmental organisation Greenpeace called for the permanent closure of the two plants.

"The latest fire at Kruemmel shows that reactors cannot be operated safely," it said in a statement, adding that power markets were managing without the supply.

Utilities say they need to prolong nuclear operations to win time to meet increasingly ambitious goals for curbing emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide.