Do we need nuclear?
Hi, I'm new to this forum. While I'm impressed by all the informed discussion about nuclear power, I want to just take a moment and suggest that we're all talking about this based on the wrong premises.
I'm going to take a moment to explain my background. I became politically engaged not quite 2 years ago when I felt like global warming was threatening us all and nobody was doing anything about it. I now consider myself an environmentalist, and for the purposes of this discussion, a luddite. I live in Ontario, Canada. We get almost 50% of our electrical supply from nuclear and more than 20% from coal.
Like most Ontarians, I find nuclear power both familiar and frightening. The fact that waste is stored on site is not reassuring to me. It is a constant reminder that we still haven't figured out what to do with it 20-30 years down. All our reactors were supposed to last for 40 years and they've died after 25. All were over budget. All had serious construction delays. They are strikingly unreliable. They have required expensive refurbishments to keep them hobbling along. None are insured. None have ever had a full environmental assessment. We all have a special item on our energy bill related to the "stranded debt" from nuclear costs. Recently we discovered that our Pickering reactors are located directly over the point where 2 fault lines cross, in the most geologically active area of the country. During the big blackout a few years back, only 2 reactors did what they were supposed to. The rest required intervention to prevent a meltdown. We have never allocated any money for decommissioning or waste disposal, nor is there any money set aside in case of a nuclear accident. Our first nations people who live in communities where the uranium is mined suffer from horrifying rates of cancers, while our governments bend over backwards trying to claim that the cancers are unrelated. There are projected costs of monitoring the waste for centuries. I would say that the overall costs of nuclear have been unacceptably high.
Still, I became engaged in energy issues through my concern about global warming, and wanted to be open minded about all potential solutions. Getting rid of the coal was the priority.
Unfortunately a large part of the coal is used to balance out the nuclear. Nuclear is not dispatchable. The more of it you have, the more you need something to address the peaks in demand. This has been traditionally delivered by fossil fuels. If you level off peaks with storage mechanisms (flywheels, pumped hydro, compressed gas, flow batteries, whatever) you get into additional costs. These same storage mechanisms can be applied to renewable generation (particularly wind) instead to get reliable power without the same risks.
But the real issue I wanted to introduce is the question of why it is we want all this energy anyway. Ontario was blessed with cheap, abundant and safe electricity from Niagara Falls. Our electricity utility is still called "Hydro One" and many Ontarians still imagine that most of our power comes from water. Cheap and abundant energy built up a manufacturing base in the province that quickly absorbed all the power and was hungry for more. Nuclear reactors were developed on the hope of producing power "too cheap to meter".
Instead today Ontarians are still paying for reactors that have died while we use 60% more energy than the average New Yorker. Canadians as a whole use double the electricity of the average Englishman and triple that of the average Italian. This is not because of our harsh weather or long distances. Few Canadian homes are electrically heated, our cars are not electric. The enormous demand comes from inefficient industry, and increasingly from air conditioning. Italy has a hotter climate and a similar industrial base. We have no excuse.
I was born in Brazil and still have family there. They are upper-middle class people who live in houses such as I only wish I could afford. None are air conditioned yet they are comfortable inside. Canadian houses are stupidly designed to sop up all that "cheap" energy.
My point is that the construction of large generation projects automatically creates the need to sell electricity to pay for the construction. You develop a lot of dependent users. Nuclear power plants are especially guilty because they take 10+ years to build, and cannot come online gradually. They are either on 24/7 for months, or off. During the construction time you get no energy, then suddenly you have this surge that you need to sell urgently. So developing the demand for the upcoming nuclear surge often means resorting to running coal plants full out in the interim.
If we really want to tackle global warming, I would assert that what is fundamentally needed is a rethinking of our energy pathways, and a serious reassessment of how much energy we need. We need to stop thinking about filling a demand of x megawatts. California's program of increasing standards in refrigerators has "generated" as much energy as the entire US nuclear fleet. And they are by no means scraping the barrel.
We have buildings here that are refrigerated in the summer to the point that some workers actually have heaters on as well for comfort. We have many restaurants that find it appropriate to air condition the sidewalk patio.
While I've always been concerned about the risks of nuclear power, I would be willing to consider it if vital services depended on it. But it's very difficult for me to justify telling first nations people that we need to keep mining uranium on their lands so that we can enjoy a coffee on an air conditioned patio. If we continued to use nuclear at current rates (not even an expansion), at the most optimistic assessment, the current technology could provide power for 3 generations. The waste we would leave behind for 250.
There is rather a lot that I would be willing to do to avoid that. I haven't air conditioned for 2 years. I hang dry my laundry. I'd be willing to set a timer on my washer so that I could use electricity at night when the winds are best. I would frankly be willing to wash clothes by hand. Does anybody really need an electric can opener? Nose hair clipper? Standby mode for television?
There's been a lot of talk about the expense of solar. The advantage of solar PV is that it matches peak demand almost perfectly. It produces power when we're otherwise forced to resort to firing up our coal plants. If you put a value on GHG emissions and health/environmental costs, it starts looking pretty good. And in my opinion, if you can afford air conditioning, you should be able to afford powering it up in a way that doesn't load up a lot of nuclear waste problems and transmission costs on the rest of us.
In Ontario, we have a plan to rebuild our entire nuclear fleet. It is not my experience that "environmentalists" make the process more onerous. Quite the opposite. All kinds of regulations are routinely squashed to make way for nuclear and ignore its hazards. We live in a curious place where we need a full environmental assessment for a speed bump, but no environmental assessment is required for a nuclear plant and a court has recently ordered a first nations community to cease protesting and allow mining operations on their lands.
The best, most compelling argument for nuclear is that it replaces coal plants. The reality is not that simple. For one thing, nuclear is no more dispatchable than wind and far less correlated with peak than solar. For another, a coal plant goes up in a year or two, whereas you need to count on 15 realistically for nuclear. In the meantime, you're probably using increasing amounts of coal. If instead you put the money into conservation initiatives, after 15 years you would have less demand than you started with and money in the bank, plus you've emitted a lot less. You could even charge more for energy to cover your investment. People would pay more per kilowatt hour, but their energy bill would still be lower on average, because they would use less.
If you absolutely need to invest in generation, wind goes up in less than a year and is far more scalable. There are a lot of smart ways of balancing it, from dispersion to energy storage to cost incentives that drive the price down when a lot is generated.
If you want to address global warming, the smart money is on conservation first, renewables next. I don't imagine there's any role for nuclear, but if there is, it's very limited.
