Affordable Power For The Future.

It is interesting and sometimes mildly entertaining to occasionally kick back and watch the cycle of arguments fielded by anti-nuclear activists in their eternal quest for the extinction of nuclear power. I have witnessed this both on the net and in my personal contact with acquaintances of the anti-nuke flavour. It is entertaining in the long haul, but frustrating in the short term. The cycle goes something like this:

Anti-nuclear activist (ANA): “Nuclear power is not a viable source of energy because of X.”

Pro-nuclear advocate (PNA): “Your argument is incorrect for the following reasons.” (Provides reasons).

ANA: “OK, I see your point, but it doesn’t matter because nuclear power is not viable on account of Y.”

PNA: “Argument Y is also incorrect on account of the following.” (Demonstrates fallacy of argument Y).

ANA: “Very well, but you haven’t considered argument Z.”

PNA: “What?? Very well then!” (Disposes of Z)

ANA: “Yes, you are clearly right about Z, but what about argument A?”

This sequence continues until finally we get back to:

ANA: “Yes, you are absolutely correct that argument W is without merit, but what about argument X??”

Presented in such terms, the sequence is obvious and childish, but I have seen supposedly intelligent adults hide behind that tactic when arguing against nuclear power. Actually, drop the ‘supposedly’. I know that some of these people, who include some very good friends of mine, are unquestionably of high intelligence. The cyclic nature of the debate with them is, I suspect, more of the nature of a religious dialogue than a scientific one.

As a tactic for presenting their case to the public, the anti-nuclear movement is clearly onto a winner. The pro and anti nuclear cases are generally presented in the media as single-issue isolated events, with the connections to associated issues rarely built into a rational whole. The general public is thus left with the impression that an ongoing scientific controversy exists over, say, the safe disposal of radioactive wastes, when in fact the technology for dealing with that particular ‘problem’ has been around for decades, and no competent scientist working in the field doubts it.

The actual period of the cycle has a direct relationship to the size of the anti-nuclear entity you are conversing with. The cycle of argument with an individual might be completed within an evening, or even go through several cycles in an evening. A debate on the net with a cadre of committed anti-nukes might last for days or weeks. When you consider the anti-nuclear movement as a whole, the debate surrounding one particular point might go on for months.

At the moment, the anti-nuclear movement is trying to make an issue out of the cost of nuclear power. Since this is the flavour of the moment for the antis, their chosen battleground on which they presently perceive headway might be made, I shall commence my series of posts on current nuclear issues addressing that topic.

So what is the cost of nuclear power?

This is not an easy question to answer currently in terms of dollars/kW. Unlike coal, the cost of fuel is not a major factor in the ultimate cost of the power delivered to the consumer. The fuel requirements for a nuclear power plant are so minimal that great increases in the price of uranium ore or enriched uranium fuel won’t really have much of an effect on the price paid by the end-consumer of the power generated. The largest cost input to nuclear power by far is the cost of constructing the plant in the first place. In this sense nuclear power plants are less like coal or natural gas power plants than they are like hydroelectric dams. The bulk of the cost is the up-front capital cost of construction.

There are many inputs into the construction of an asset as large and complex as a nuclear plant, but humans have been building them for five decades now, so we should have some experience to go by. Why is it currently so hard to pin down a ballpark figure for the construction of new nukes? Why has the anti-nuke crowd seized on this issue of late?

The anti-nuclear activists have seized on nuclear plant construction costs because the cost estimates for construction have lately gone through the roof. I recall back in 2005 when I started searching the net for information about nuclear power that at the time, firms like GE-Westinghouse were confidently predicting plant construction costs on the order of US$1000-2000/KW output. I believe the current estimates to be 4-6 times in excess of this. What the hell happened? The anti-nukes will happily inform the public of this increase, but rarely look to the reasons why.

The primary reason for the great increase in construction cost directly relates to the increase in price of the construction materials for the plants. The price for new nuclear power plants has gone through the roof because the price of the stuff they’re mainly made out of has gone through the roof. The stuff in question is steel and concrete.

In my previous post I stated that I’d be linking to sites and studies which have looked at these issues in more detail. In that spirit, please check out the following:

http://jkwheeler.podomatic.com/entry/2008-05-26T18_43_50-07_00

You can find a link to John’s site in the links section of this blog. I recommend following it and learning what you can from it. Now for a brief summary of the germane material inputs for nuclear power and other power sources based on the data from a study by Professor P.F. Peterson of UC Berkeley undertaken in 2005. Professor Peterson determined that for each megawatt of power output from a new nuclear plant, 40 metric tons of steel and 190 cubic metres of concrete are required. For the bulk of plant construction costs, take current prices for those commodities and multiply them by the number of megawatts of electrical power output. The price of plant construction, and by extension the ultimate cost of power from the plant, is determined by commodity prices over the period of construction. I’m sure we can all appreciate that these are difficult to determine in advance, especially in such turbulent times for the global economy.

Something that isn’t so subject to sudden alterations is the relative demand for those commodities by competing energy technologies. No matter the current price of concrete or steel, the amounts required for obtaining a megawatt of reliable power from a nuclear reactor, a wind farm, or a coal plant are (barring technological breakthrough) pretty much fixed.

The two non-nuclear examples provided in John Wheeler’s article are wind and coal. For an output of 1 megawatt of power a coal plant requires 98 metric tons of steel and 160 cubic meters of concrete. A wind farm requires 460 tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete (each of those wind turbines might look slender and graceful from a distance, but they are Behemoths in their own right, and you need a hell of a lot of them to provide the same level of power as a standard nuclear plant). This is not an academic exercise. The rise in price for basic construction materials over the past two years (driven by rising demand from China and India) has caused the UK to do an abrupt about-face on its plans for massive wind infrastructure to meet the government’s mandate for its renewable energy target. Sticker shock has even forced the cancellation of some new coal plants, and that’s before any carbon tax has been imposed on their operation. In contrast, major utilities in the US are determined to press ahead with their plans for a new nuclear build because they recognise that in spite of increasing costs, the alternatives are rising in price with the tide as well, and nuclear retains its comparative cost advantage. This will remain true no matter what the global financial situation may be four years from now, when the first suite of proposed new plants reaches the conclusion of their licensing procedure. The input price may go up, it may go down, it may go round and round, but nuclear still wins.

Given the above, it is no mystery why the anti-nuclear movement likes to harp on about the cost of new nuclear build… but doesn’t care to provide too many details as to just why this is.