E3G

Is Nuclear Inevitable? Policy and Politics in a Carbon Constrained World

By Tom Burke

The question how long does it take you to build a nuclear power station has the same problems as asking about the costs. Honest answers are hard to come by. Average construction times have ranged from 60 months between 1965 and 1970 to 116 months from 1995 to 2000. Recently, it has improved greatly, it now only takes 82 months on average to build a nuclear reactor.

That is global experience. Britain’s is rather worse. The Advanced Gas Cooled reactors that we built in the ‘70s and ‘80s had a projected construction time of 78. Their actual average construction time was 170 months.

Of course, that is only the construction time. To this must be added several years for the detailed design work and the regulatory approvals. On past experience, the time from firm order to delivered electricity, all going well, will be at least ten years and possible a lot longer.

Just in case you think that we will do much better now let me tell you what is happening to the much touted new Finnish nuclear power station. When ordered in August 2005, its projected construction time was 48 months. By March 2006, this had risen to 54 months. By July of the same year it had increased another 6 months. And by October, 6 more. In other words, in a little over a year the construction time had increased 37.5% and the rate of increase was itself increasing. Don’t hold your breath.

All this matters because the non climate argument for new nuclear build rests on the fact all but one of our existing nuclear power stations will be coming out of service before 2020. Furthermore, a number of our existing coal fired power station will also be decommissioned in the next few years.
This prospect is so serious, according to one recently quoted ‘Whitehall insider’, that the lights could go out in 2015 ‘unless we act soon’. He clearly had not been listening to Vincent de Rivaz, the head of Electricite de France in Britain, one of the loudest of the nuclear renaissance hawks. Just the week before he had optimistically expressed the view that if an order was placed at the end of 2007 electricity could be delivered by 2017.

It is quite clear from simple mathematics that even if you could solve all the other problems satisfactorily, and even if you could find investors willing to take the risk, that new nuclear build in Britain cannot occur in time to replace the nuclear and coal fired power stations that will no longer be available.

So we will have to do something else. And if we are to do something else that does not involve increasing our dependence on gas, we will have to use coal or do even better than we are currently planning to do with the renewables. If we are going to use more coal in the carbon neutral energy system that we must have by 2050 – and remember we are going to have to increase our overall use of electricity greatly – then we will have to do so in a carbon neutral way. That is by using carbon sequestration and storage.

If we have a viable way to use coal in a carbon neutral way in the next few years, why do we need nuclear power, with all its risks and unsolved problems, at all?

We need that carbon neutral coal anyway. China has the most ambitious nuclear power programme anywhere in the world. They are proposing to build 40 nuclear power stations by 2030. Even if they do so, and there is very fierce competition in China for the materials and skills that would be necessary, this would still only supply 6% of their electricity.
Most of the rest will be supplied by coal. China is currently building coal fired power stations at the rate of more than one a week. Unless these stations, and those like them that will also be built in India, the USA and Europe, there is no chance that we can keep global temperatures below 3°c, let alone 2°c.
Carbon capture and storage is an imperative not an option if we are to have any hope of maintaining climate security. Nuclear power is simply a dangerous diversion from that task, here and in the rest of the world.

Over the last fifty years, we in Britain have invested over £80 billion in nuclear power to supply less than 20% of our electricity. We have to spend at least the same amount again to pay for the radioactive waste we have already created.

Imagine what David Hall could have done with that £80 billion. Imagine how much more secure our climate would be, and how much more competitive our economy, if he had been able to do so.

The Prime Minister may be having another bad dream, this time about a nuclear future, but there is no reason for us to join him in it.