We'd better think about the consequences
We'd better think about the global senses
The time went out yeah eh, the time went out
What about Chernobyl?
What about radiation?
We don't know, we don't know
(Time is ticking out, the Cranberries, 2002)
Nuclear power’s (very) uncertain future
Of all of the analytical challenges in pondering the future of clean energy, and the clean economy, the role of nuclear power is particularly vexing. For solar power, wind, associated batteries and other elements, there is not absolute uniformity on cost projections - but the range between the highest and lowest plausible estimates is reasonable - a factor of two or three in the short term, a bit more longer term. There is no such alignment on the long-term cost of nuclear power.
This is true because of the long-term nature of investments (decades, not years), because of the touchy, explosive nature of the fuel, because of the as-yet-unconstrained thoughts on long-term costs of radiation leaks and the ilk, and storage of spent fuel, and potential for creating weapons-grade materials. And it’s because, until very recently, effectively all development occurred either in national laboratories or inside the labs of very large corporations. Only recently have some startups attempted to touch this, the dangerous third rail of clean power.
It’s clear that nuclear power will be an important contributor to the post-fossil-fuel future. What is less clear is under what circumstances; what has to be true for these to emerge; what the long-term costs will look like. Uncertainties notwithstanding: nuclear power should return.
The day nuclear power (nearly) died
Monday, 11th April 2011, I was at work in the high-tech district of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. I’d installed an app on my phone to monitor earthquakes, since Taiwan has perceptible ‘quakes at about one nearly every week. A cute feature of the app was that it made my phone vibrate more for larger earthquakes. That afternoon, my phone shook. Frequently. Rattling on my desk. Finally, it shook so much that it flew off my desk. Japan had experienced a 9.1 magnitude quake. A 9.1.
In Taiwan and in Japan, I’d been through several magnitude 6.1 or 6.6 quakes. Some were pretty scary. Living in California, I’ve been through several, including the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 (magnitude 6.9), which killed 63 people, injured thousands, and flattened a freeway in Oakland and houses across part of San Francisco. The 12-storey building I was in started to fall to pieces, which was unfortunate for me, as I was on the 12th floor.
Here’s the thing: each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in the measured amplitude, but 32 times more energy release. From 6.9 (Loma Prieta) to 9.1 (Fukushima) is 200 times more amplitude - the shaking movement up and down. It’s a 10,000 fold increase in energy. A 9.1 is unimaginable.
No wonder the national iconic art piece in Japan is Hiroshige’s depiction of a vast wave, a tsunami.
The night of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, our neighbor in Taipei came over. We drank more whiskey than is healthy. He’d been a senior planning engineer at the four-reactor complex north east of Tokyo that was battered by the events of that day. I remember him repeating: “poison the reactors” - pour on salt water, by any means. It was too late. Three of the reactors had gone into full meltdown. (Later, he showed us phone videos taken inside Fukushima after the earthquake and - astonishingly - as the vast waves of the tsunami rushed in.)
A lot ended that night. Japan’s reliance on nuclear power - which had grown alongside its shinkansen bullet trains. Taiwan also subsequently decided to shutter some of its own nuclear power plants (they were very nearly the same as those built at Fukushima, also beside the sea, and also in a seismically active area). A lot of other countries started looking with far more scepticism at their nuclear power plants and plans. France, whose nuclear power plants took that country to the highest reliance on nuclear anywhere and where those plants were key to the growth of high-speed rail there, is considering moving away from nuclear power generation. The biggest firms designing and building nuclear power plants quickly found themselves in dire straits.
How much nuclear power should we use in the future, particularly as we build the fossil fuel-free future? The answer is complex and nuanced, controversial and full of challenges.
The return of Nuclear Power
(work in progress)
Listen to some critics of nuclear power and you’ll hear the arguments that, post-Chernobyl and post-Fukushima, we can never go back to nuclear power. Listen to proponents and you’ll hear assertions as strong as the belief that it is infeasible to build a post-fossil-fuel world without nuclear power. The nuanced point seems to be: we definitely cannot go back to nuclear power as it was implemented in Russia in the 1980s and even to some of the practices inside TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company responsible for the Fukushima plants. We still must also be wary of global proliferation of Uranium, even enriched “only” to the levels needed for nuclear power plants.
Even the cost and risk models for nuclear power are greatly variant from those for other energy types: the risk model, obviously, because public perceptions are shaped by catastrophes, such as Fukushima, Chernobyl and (less catastrophic) Three Mile Island. Yet, by many measures, even these and the long-term creation of nuclear waste put less radiating materials into the environment than do the by-products of burning coal. There is something odd about how humans deal with risk: we’re transfixed and terrified by rare but horrific events - plane crashes, for example - but tend to be far more casual about persistent, background risks that are statistically more dangerous - car crashes, to pick the most obvious comparison, kill immeasurably more people than plane crashes.
Can the coming decades bring forward innovations in nuclear power that at once enhance safety and lower the operating costs? That seems to be feasible on paper, and a few startups firms and government labs are, indeed, pursuing that approach.
Comparative Costs
A utility CEO is quoted as saying that new nuclear plants in the USA are not economical, because of the low, relative costs of natural gas for new power plants. Even in his careful remarks you can see the incompleteness of the analysis:
His cost analysis of nuclear power MUST include decades of financing and insurance against the (relatively low, but still non-negligible) risks of nuclear catastrophe. These, for him, for his company, are not external costs.
His cost analysis of natural gas necessarily excludes as external the costs to the rest of the world for damage caused by the fumes, gases, particulates that the plant would create.