Nuclear News

‘Nine new UK Nuclear Plants’

BNFL and British Energy seem to have sunk their differences over reprocessing and are collaborating on the development of the Westinghouse AP 1000 upgrade of the Pressurised Water Reactor. In parallel, BE is looking at a CANDU upgrade. The Guardian (Feb.27) reported that this could be the start of a ‘£9bn’ programme that would lead to 9 new nuclear plants being built in the UK, but economically that seems rather unlikely for the moment - even given the PIU’s recommendation that new nuclear projects should benefit from the newly emerging carbon credit system. Instead it looks more like a kite flying exercise, putting down a marker for a programme they would like to see at some point in the future. Even so its an indication of what might be in store.

Nuclear Subsidies Grow

In Renew 134, we noted that the level of UK R&D support for nuclear, including fusion and ‘support for the former USSR’, was planned to expand, so that by 2003/4 it would reach £52.3m- half the total UK energy R&D budget. We can hardly begrudge support for research on ways to clean up the ex-Soviet nuclear messes, and we definitely need work to find ways to deal with the 500,000 tons of nuclear waste that the UK will produce over the next century. But the R&D budget is only part of the story. In fact, Government funding to the UK nuclear industry has been provided primarily in the form of grant and grant in aid to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). According to the Minister for Energy, responding to a Parliamentary Question last year, ‘this funding has been primarily to enable the UKAEA to discharge historic nuclear liabilities arising form past civil nuclear research programmes and to decommission those research facilities and restore sites to normal use - with the exception of funding in respect of the UKAEA nuclear fusion research programme at Culham which complements the UK’s participation in the European Union's Framework Programme V’. He reported that, in the period 1999-2000, the DTI (Department of Energy prior to May 1992) provided grant/grant in aid to the UKAEA as shown in the table below.

Source: Government Expenditure Survey

So what do we get for our money in energy terms? Currently the UK has about 12.4 GW of nuclear plant, supplying around 25% of its electricity. The peak output was in 1998 with 90,590 GWh, or 29% of UK electricity, although the 1997 output of 89,341 GWh was actually 31% of electricity, due to lower output from other sources. The peak capacity was 12.956 GW in 1998/99, but this is now falling as plants are retired.

The latest twist in the funding game has been the governments proposal to hive off the liabilities that have been accrued by BNFL (£35bn, £28bn of which are linked to historic liabilities) and the UKAEA (£7bn) to a new Liabilities Management Authority (LMA). Announcing the proposal, Secretary of State Patricia Hewitt noted that ‘the early years of the industry created substantial liabilities in the form of wastes that needed to be treated and plants that needed to be decommissioned’, which were public sector responsibilities. With the government taking over these liabilities, the way forward for privatisation of BNFL could be a little clearer. An earlier attempt to establish a ‘public private partnership’ arrangement was abandoned, following the debacle over the falsification of the data on the MOX shipments to Japan. And since then the finances of BNFL had begun to look decidedly insecure. Technically, according to the Guardian (14th Dec) it is bankrupt, with a £1.7bn gap between assets and liabilities. The DTI says that it will be at least two years before privatisation will be re-considered, by which time the LMA should have lightened its load, although the LMA proposal has attracted strong opposition and it seems the government has now decided not to push ahead with it rapidly.

Wind beats Nuclear

The EU EXTERNE study of the environmental costs of energy generation suggests that, although nuclear power is better than coal (by a factor of around 10-20) and gas (by a factor of 2-5), nuclear plants had 3-4 times more overall environmental impact than wind, over the complete fuel and life cycles for each technology. That’s hardly surprising given that nuclear fuel fabrication is an energy intensive activity, whereas the winds come without any energy costs.

 

 

We noted in Renew 133, the following figures, presented in terms of additional environmental costs, for the so called environmental externalities, including health effects and climate change impacts. The current price for electricity is assumed as 4 US cents/kWh, and the extra external costs are put at 2-15c/kWh for coal, 1-3c for gas, 0.2-0.7c for nuclear, and 0.05-0.25c/kWh for wind, varying with country. In France, for example, most of the energy used for nuclear fuel fabrication will come from nuclear rather than coal, so there would be less emissions. But taking average figures, EXTERNE presents the data shown in the chart. These figures should be added to the direct cost of generation (the EU average is 0.04 euros/kWh, around 2.5p/kWh).

That makes oil and coal look bad, given that their external costs translate to about 3.5p/kWh, but wind looks good, with an external cost of only 0.6p/kWh. Nuclear comes out as 4 time worse than wind. Sounds convincing, but is there enough wind? Well, the European Wind Energy Association predicts that by 2020 offshore wind could provide up to two-thirds of Europe’s electricity .

Waiting Game

Energy Minister Brian Wilson was asked, in a Parliamentary Question on 29 Nov last year, whether the new Consultation of the future plans for nuclear waste disposal meant that there would, in effect, be no decisions on nuclear power until after that exercise was complete - in 2006. He replied ‘In our view, there is no sequential arrangement that nothing will happen in the nuclear industry until the waste report appears. Clearly, it is desirable to get answers on waste in a shorter time frame, working both nationally and internationally, but no one currently is making proposals for nuclear power stations. However, they may at any time and they certainly are not prevented from so doing.’ He concluded ‘If there is to be nuclear new build in this country, the time scale for working up those proposals and having them properly considered long before construction would itself be substantial. If such developments are to happen- that is a commercial judgment for the companies involved - here is no reason to suppose that they would happen sequentially; they could happen in parallel’.

Russian Nuclear Push

Russia plans to build at least four nuclear reactors at home and others in China, Iran, India and ex-Soviet republics as part of an ambitious plan to revive its nuclear industry. "Russia’s nuclear power industry is now coming through what can be called the post-Chernobyl renaissance," Nuclear Power Minister Alexander Rumyantsev. Last year, Russia launched its first plant since the Chernobyl catastrophe, a 1000 MW plant at Rostov, to be followed by three others. Russia has also signed contracts to build plants in China, India and Iran. However, despite plans to accept spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing and storage, Russia has so far failed to break into this market, which is dominated by the UK and France.