President Obama, Cut Dirty Nuclear Power From Your Climate-Change Talks

By Zoe Loftus-FarrenPhoto: Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

President Barack Obama is getting serious about climate change, a challenge that "poses a greater threat to future generations" than any other, he said in last week's State of the Union. In July, his administration announced an EPA regulation to slash carbon pollution from power plants. In November, he struck a pact with China on long-term emission reductions. And recently the White House unveiled a plan to cut methane emissions nearly in half by 2025.

Addressing climate change means, in large part, stepping away from dirty energy sources like coal and oil and toward cleaner sources. That’s a good thing. But it requires developing more energy elsewhere, including from one alternative source that has gotten scant attention in the mainstream press: nuclear energy, which poses its own serious environmental risks. 

The EPA’s proposed power-plant regulation provides a carbon credit to states for maintaining nuclear energy production at current levels: in other words, a carbon subsidy for maintaining the nuclear status quo. Following the release of the draft rules, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy made clear that the credit is meant, in part, to help the struggling nuclear industry. “There are a handful of nuclear facilities that, because they are having trouble remaining competitive, they haven’t yet looked at re-licensing,” she said at a roundtable discussion with business leaders in Chicago. If nuclear energy plants begin closing, she warned, “It’s a lot of carbon reduction that needs to be made up for a long period of time.”

Why Nuclear Power is Not “Low Carbon” » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

A False Promise
Why Nuclear Power is Not “Low Carbon”

by KEITH BARNAM

The UK government is committed to massively subsidising new nuclear reactors, based on the claim that they generate ‘low carbon’ electricity.

But what is the carbon footprint of nuclear power? I have trawled the literature and found that there is no scientific consensus on the lifetime carbon emissions of nuclear electricity.

Remarkably, half of the most rigorous published analyses have a carbon footprint for nuclear power above the limit recommended by the UK government’s official climate change advisor, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).

According to the CCC, if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change, by 2030 all electricity should be generated with less than 50 grams of carbon dioxide emitted for each kilowatt-hour (50 gCO₂/kWh).

Since all new generators have lifetimes well over 20 years, I believe this limit should be imposed on all new electricity supply systems here and now – and all the more so for those with lifetimes spanning many decades.

Note that thanks to long construction times for the EPR design and a forthcoming legal challenge, it’s entirely possible that the planned Hinkley C reactor will not be completed until 2030 or beyond. It will then be subsidised for the first 35 years of its projected 60 year lifetime – taking us through until 2090.

What is the carbon footprint of renewable electricity?

When comparing the carbon footprints of electricity-generating technologies, we need to take into account carbon dioxide emitted in all stages in the life of the generator and its fuel. Such a study is called a life cycle analysis (LCA).

There are other gases such as methane that are more dangerous greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. The most reliable LCAs take all greenhouse gases into account and present equivalent carbon dioxide emissions.

In a recent paper in Energy Policy, Daniel Nugent and Benjamin Sovacool critically reviewed the published LCAs of renewable electricity generators. All the renewable technologies came in below the 50 gCO₂/kWh limit.

The lowest was large-scale hydropower with a carbon footprint one fifth of the CCC limit (10 gCO₂/kWh). A close second was biogas electricity from anaerobic digestion (11 gCO₂/kWh). The mean figure for wind energy is 34 gCO₂/kWh, and solar PV comes in a shade under the 50g limit, at 49.9 gCO₂/kWh. Bear in mind that rapidly evolving PV technology means that this last figure is contantly falling.

What’s the carbon footprint of nuclear power?

Bombs Ahoy! Why the UK is desperate for nuclear power

Oliver Tickell

On the face of it, the UK government's obsession with nuclear power defies reason. It's very expensive, inflexible, creates 'existential' threats and imposes enormous 'long tail' liabilities tens of thousands of years into the future. But there is a simple explanation: it's all to maintain the UK's status as a nuclear WMD state.

The UK's civil nuclear programme is almost entirely motivated by the UK's wish to maintain its status as a nuclear WMD state.

The UK's proposed support package for the Hinkley C nuclear power station in Somerset is gigantic. Estimates of its cost range up to £100 billion or so.

Of course it's hard to put a precise figure on it, as the subsidies take so many forms, and many of the commitments represent a guarantee against unknown and unquantifiable eventualities. But to summarisethey include:

• a generous guaranteed purchase price for its electricity, at £92.50 per megawatt-hour - about double the current going rate - also inflation adjusted from now, and lasting for 35 years after it begins to produce power;
• £10 billion of Treasury guarantees on its construction cost;
• a guaranteed maximum exposure to the operator, EDF, on its waste management and decomissioning costs;
• the limitation of EDF's liabilities in the event of any major nuclear accident at €700 million, when nuclear accidents can impose costs in the $100s of billions;
• a variety of pump priming exercises to lubricate the nuclear supply chain, and direct support to Sheffield Forgemasters, a manufacturer of nuclear reactor vessels;
• a panoply of expenditures for nuclear R&D by way of research councils.

And all this just for a single 2.4GW power station that would generate just 20TWh of our 350TWh per year electricity usage.

France struggles to cut down on nuclear power

By Rob BroombyBBC News, Paris

Continue reading the main story

The Fukushima disaster led many countries to rethink their view on nuclear energy. Germany plans to abandon it altogether, but French President Francois Hollande also wants to cut nuclear output sharply - by a third in 20 years. It's a big ask in a country that now relies on nuclear for 75% of its electricity.

If fully implemented, the pledge would force the closure of up to 20 of the country's 58 reactors according to Professor Laurence Tubiana a former government adviser who the president asked to facilitate a national debate, paving the way for what they call la transition energetique.

This would be a huge step, but Tubiana describes it as a "logical evolution".

France realised that Japan had survived economically when all its atomic power stations were shut down because of its diverse energy mix. In Japan, before the disaster, nuclear power delivered about 30% of the country's electricity, but France is hugely dependent not only on nuclear, but on a single generation of nuclear power stations.

It is vulnerable to a "generic risk", according to Tubiana, where a problem with one reactor could force them all offline for the fault to be fixed. This would cause chaos.

She says the 20 reactors closed in the "transition" could be replaced by renewable energy, which she says would maintain French energy independence and be both "stable and secure".

So far, however, the government has only earmarked one power station for closure - the ageing plant at Fessenheim on the German border - which prompts some to question the government's commitment to Hollande's promise.

The Fukushima disaster prompted Germany to plan the closure of its nuclear power plants by 2022

There is evidently reluctance in cabinet. Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg is on record as saying that Fessenheim will be the only nuclear power station to close.

On a visit to China in December he reassured his audience that nuclear energy was a "sector of the future" and would continue to contribute "at least 50%" of France's electricity output.

Another member of Hollande's Socialist Party, the MP Christian Bataille, says the plan to curb nuclear was hatched as a way of securing the backing of his Green coalition partners in parliament.

He describes nuclear power as the country's "only national energy source".

COLUMN-Nuclear power is set to disappoint, again: Kemp

Tue Jan 21, 2014 6:02pm IST

(John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own)

By John Kemp

Jan 21 (Reuters) - Nuclear power is the energy dream that refuses to die, despite serious accidents at Windscale (1957), Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011).

Many of the arguments that were employed in favour of nuclear in the 1950s and 1960s as a solution to oil supplies running out are now being resurrected in favour of nuclear as a solution to climate change.

But the promise of safe, clean and reasonably priced nuclear power seems as far away now as it was 60 years ago. We are still waiting for the safe, cheap and reliable reactor designs that were promised in 1956.

PEAKING OIL

Back in the 1950s, plentiful and cheap energy from fissioning uranium and thorium was seen as the only alternative to fast-depleting fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.

Shell geologist M. King Hubbert is best known as the grandfather of "peak oil" for his theories about the imminent exhaustion of oil resources in the United States and around the world.

But he was also a strong advocate for nuclear power. The 1956 paper that made him famous explicitly linked it to peaking oil production ("Nuclear energy and the fossil fuels").

"It appears that there exist within minable depths in the United States rocks with uranium contents equivalent to 1,000 barrels of oil or more per metric tonne, whose total energy content is probably several hundred times that of all the fossil fuels combined," Hubbert wrote.

"The world appears to be on the threshold of an era which in terms of energy consumption will be at least an order of magnitude greater than that made possible by fossil fuels."

On a time-scale spanning millennia, "the discovery, exploitation and exhaustion of the fossil fuels will be seen to be but an ephemeral event".

By contrast, nuclear offered an energy supply adequate to meet the planet's needs for thousands of years.

Writing in the 1950s, when the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to build ever-bigger nuclear weapons, Hubbert could not be unaware of the perils associated with splitting the atom.

Nuclear scientists were still learning to master the peaceful uses of atomic energy to build utility-scale civilian power reactors.

NUCLEAR POWER AT WHAT COST?????

With the never ending quest for more and more comforts for man, the energy requirements of our globe are growing up rather fast. The advances in science and technology have on one hand given us access to comforts and luxuries of life. At the same time it has given mankind the much needed insight into the various cycles of nature that maintain the balance so very essential for the very existence of life.

Rapid industrialization and inventions of motorized means of transport have revolutionized our lives. All this more or less through intensive use of fossil fuels has increased the pollution levels many many folds. The increased respiratory disorders among the populace, the greatly worrisome associated phenomenon of global warming and the limited fossil fuel resources of the globe has set the mankind thinking on the future course of action.

In this context, two new terms for energy resources have emerged. Firstly renewable/ infinite sources of energy such as sun,wind, ocean, hydro, bio fuels, biomass etc. and secondly clean sources of energy such as solar, wind, ocean, nuclear etc.. It does not require any rocket science to understand and conclude that future energy security of all nations must be based on the following considerations.

• The first and foremost requirement of a viable energy security solution is that it should be a clean source  capable of producing energy in a clean manner without any contribution to the biggest worry of  global warming. Surprisingly the much touted clean nuclear power results in up to 25 times more carbon emissions than wind energy when reactor construction and uranium refining and transport are considered.
• The source must be eternal and have the capacity to last for thousands of years so that the researches and technology development efforts can lead to an eternally valid solution like the invention of wheel. 
• All processes involved in utilizing an energy source for producing energy right from mineral stage to fuel extraction, power plant wastes and spent fuel disposal should be absolutely safe for humanity. In addition there should be zero chance of catastrophic accidents. In fact  Nuclear fuels are a curse on humanity from the stage of ore to fuel elements to waste.
• Lastly, the power production costs should be competitive with power from other sources. Nuclear power has always been touted as mankind’s finest invention to produce power at cheap prices without significantly harming the environment. However, a closer analysis reveals that it continues to remain one of the most expensive enterprises in the world, requiring constant subsidies and governmental support to ensure its continuous survival. Besides the manipulations regarding  ignoring costs of decommissioning, dismantling  and  nuclear waste disposal which are very very high, all governments and companies selling this technology are absolutely silent on the aspect of huge liabilities arising out of a catastrophic accident. A worst-case scenario study in 1997 by the Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated that a major accident could cost $566 billion in damages and cause 143,000 possible deaths. Another such study, by Sandia National Laboratories in 1982, calculated the possible costs at $314 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that would put both estimates close to the trillion dollar range today.
• The typical gestation period for a 1 GW nuclear plant is anything between 10-15 years many times involving further cost escalations and time over runs whereas a solar power plant of the same magnitude  could be functional in 1 year time. Imagine the value addition to the national GDP that will come through this 1 GW of power available for additional 9-14 years. This certainly is a win win situation for any nation.

In spite of all these facts about nuclear power regarding the cost of power, how clean is its implementation and the magnitude of catastrophe that can befall a nation in case of a major accident, it is not understood why people are enameled for nuclear power option when better sound options are available. Indian policy makers seem to be guided 

• Either by their whims and fancies 
• Or they are overawed by this complicated and sophisticated accident/catastrophe prone yet lucrative technology of taming atomic fission phenomenon.
• Or perhaps in their opinion solar technology cannot deliver because of its shear simplicity.In fact solar is simple and must be kept simple to retain its edge and that is the beauty.

NUCLEAR POWER - THE FUTURE FOR INDIA ????

Recently the Russian ambassador, Alexander Kadakin made a statement that Nuclear power is the future for India and contended that even if India buys all the oil in the world it will not suffice even for its energy requirements in the near future.The statement is nothing but a weak attempt to look after the interests of the nuclear cartel of nations, Russia being one of the major seller of this technology.

Yes it is a fact that even if India buys all the oil in the world it will not suffice even for its energy requirements in the near future. But will some sane person attempt to answer a simple fact if India utilizes a small fraction of all the  solar energy falling on its geographical area what will be the situation? This will never be answered by nuclear energy technology sellers and it is for the polity/policy makers of countries like India to understand who are fortunate enough to receive tremendous amounts of solar energy because of favourable geographic position.

To day the cost of building and operating a mid sized nuclear power plant ( say 500 MW ) is about 15 billion dollars and it takes about 15 years if all goes well to actually produce power from these plants. The pros and cons of going ahead with nuclear energy have been debated over the last few decades all over our globe and in fact nuclear power is our worst enemy. It is a curse that will perhaps continue to pester humanity and thrust towards renewable energy sources will keep on languishing till the world runs out of all kinds of fuels and  is left with no other alternative than to make use of renewable energy sources.

Let us for a moment forget all the thorns attached with nuclear energy. Let us buy the cost effectiveness logic given by the protagonists of nuclear power to provide weightage to their technology and logic by ignoring many aspects of cost calculation. True cost analysis of nuclear energy should cover capital cost, fuel cost, running cost, arrangements for stopping theft and pilferage of nuclear material, safety against terrorist groups, full arrangements for full compensation in case of a blow out for immediate damage/losses and losses resulting in even after two or three decades, decommissioning cost of a life expired plant and management of nuclear wastes and above all vulnerability to political and economic blackmail by the fuel suppliers and even the cost of transmission and distribution infrastructure and accompanying power losses. In fact the cost effectiveness of nuclear energy is a fraudulent myth being propagated solely by nuclear power technology sellers to get the best out of (wrong and out of sync with the realities of 21st century) investments made by them in research, technology and infrastructure development over the years. These guys are by design comparing the costs for a central mega power generation plant with huge transmission and distribution infrastructure whereas for solar the punch line is " solar is simple, keep it simple to retain its edge ".

The quick response capability of solar power should outweigh everything in a developing country like India. Compare the value addition the solar energy route will provide vis-a-vis the nuclear energy route. If a country opts for a 15 billion nuclear power plant, the money deployed annually will not yield any result for 15 years and any addition to the economy as a result of this plant will accrue from 16th year onward.  In the case of solar option, the 1 billion dollars spent will produce a capacity of 35 MW in the first year itself and 35 MW getting added to the power generation capacity each subsequent year available for use. In fact it means that the country will have on an average an additional power generation capacity of about 250 MW for all these 15 years. The impact of cumulative and snow balling effect of value addition to the industrial output or to the comforts of the citizenry as the case may be on the march to prosperity will be tremendous and cannot  be ignored by any true planner or ruler. 

NOW NUCLEAR POWER PLANT THROUGH SUPREME COURT JUDGEMENT

The government of India, a government sans governance and the ruling polity has always been objecting to the judicial activism of the Indian courts in all matters relating to governance and felt that it was intruding into the government domain even though it was absolutely necessary in the light of total inaction by the government in all matters of public interest and welfare. It was most surprising to see the apex court proclaiming that fear of nuclear disaster has no basis. It should be appreciated that science and technology is as bankrupt as it was fifty years back and tries to fix up the faults as are thrown up by accidents and occurrings from time to time. The safety teams are playing around with collation of statistical data of functioning of a multitude of components, mechanical behaviour and failure of structures and the materials and trying to overcome these through redundancy and reliability.

All these exercises were carried out before commissioning power plants at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima but as providence will have it some new unknown factors came into being and these catastrophic accidents occurred. Let us all understand that nuclear energy safety has been a false promise and will continue to be the same for all times to come. Humanity has suffered heavily because of ironic claims of 100% safety but we in India seem to be none the wiser from the experiences of others. These ominous words contained in the judgement "Nobody on this earth can predict what would happen in future and to a larger extent we have to leave it to the destiny" should not be taken lightly as the stakes are not the same as that of an automobile accident. The decisions must be weighed in the light of the quantum of risks of catastrophic accidents in nuclear power plants. 

There has got to be something horrendous in nuclear power play. We must try to analyse why even the so called masters of nuclear power technology are themselves shying away from this energy. No new plant has come up on the soil of USA since 1980. Germany and Japan have decided to phase out all nuclear energy. So much so even the French have decided to go in for reductions in their dependence on nuclear energy.

While nobody can deny the requirements of energy for the sunny future of the masses of India as brought out in a report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which highlights that to sustain rapid global economic growth, it is necessary to double the supply of energy and tripling supply of electricity by 2050. Further, it is stated billions of poor people need energy and other life-saving and job-creating technologies.” But today we have better alternates available to realise our aims. It will be criminal to bank upon a technology which is in an obsolescence phase because of thorns attached to it and not in sync with the vision and aspirations of 21st century. India does not need nuclear power for its energy security. Let us hope that wisdom prevails on Indian rulers and polity.

ENERGY SECURITY THROUGH NUCLEAR POWER : A BANE OR A BOON FOR HUMANITY

The story of  immense energy locked up in an atom and its release during fission and fusion processes is about seventy year old and has been a talk of thinkers, philosophers, scientists and leaders for use in  military, energy and medicine fields. In the early second half of the last century, we were given to understand that the catastrophic effects were associated only with the military application of nuclear bombs and if we allowed science to develop as a good servant instead of its being the master, nuclear sciences could well be the game changer for humanity for all times to come. Slowly the overall deleterious concerns of playing with the nuclear sciences came to light. The concept of energy security through nuclear power emerged as a bane  rather than a boon to the humanity. The rhetoric of a few world leaders, a few powerful lobbies and  industrial cartels with vested interests and ulterior motives not withstanding. "I do not know with what weapons the third world war will be fought but the fourth world war will definitely be fought with bows and arrows" These ominous words from none other than A. Einstein, the man behind the concept of nuclear energy, though said in the context of an atom bomb hold equally well for mankind's efforts to utilise this energy for peaceful uses, the much touted nuclear power. We have to understand that controlling such an enormous energy giving reaction with our limited knowledge of nuclear physics, mechanical sciences, material sciences, causes of accidents along with the uncertainties of nature and allied phenomena  with 100% surety is nothing but a mirage. It will only be prudent on the part of mankind not to sit on thousands of these ticking catastrophic bombs of self annihilation just for the sake of energy security and that too for the coming few decades ( In the light of limited availability of nuclear fuels ), particularly when our planet has been bestowed with eternal and absolutely safe energy sources like sun and wind. If we are destined to fall back upon the use of renewable energy sources for all our energy needs after six or seven decades, is it not worthwhile to do it right now and be done away with the risk of destruction of mankind.

NUCLEAR FUELS ARE A CURSE ON HUMANITY

Today Energy security is the topmost priority requirement of the mankind and how to achieve this is the hottest topic of debate in all countries on our globe. While everybody seems to agree  to the idea of having clean energy so that global warming is controlled as a first step and subsequently reversed, a fierce battle is going on about the route to be adopted for this clean energy. The candidates for clean energy are nuclear, and renewable energy sources like hydro, solar, wind, ocean, geothermal etc. etc.. The major criterion for  any clean energy are 

• Involvement of clean and safe processes for making available energy source at the power plant
• Power producing  process to be safe, least accident prone and incapable of being catastrophic under any conditions
• Wastes and by products resulting from the process should also be safe and clean

It does not require rocket science to understand that all renewable energy sources measure themselves adorably when subjected to the rigours of all criterion postulates mentioned above but can we say the same about nuclear energy. The answer is a big emphatic no to all the three criterion.

Let us now examine the story of energy from nuclear power plants rigorously.

• Nuclear fuel mining: The troubles start right from the stage of the mining of uranium ores to their crushing, leaching to make what is known as natural Uranium. The miners are subjected to toxic effects and the mines are left with toxicity on the surface which otherwise was lying dormant deep under the surface of earth.Uranium mining is a very inefficient process and generates vast amounts of toxic waste.In fact uranium mine tailings leave vast amounts of toxicity.
• Fuel enrichment: Natural Uranium is about 99.27% of U-238 and 0.72% of U-235, the fissile isotope which is used for nuclear reactors of power plants and nuclear weapons. What is left behind is called depleted uranium ( DU ) containing about 0.2 to 0.4% U-235 and the balance U-238. DU has a density of 19.1 g/cc and is used for defensive armour and armour piercing projectiles as also the so called Dirty Bombs. DU contamination occurs when these products are employed during a war and produces lingering toxic effects on humans and land area.
• Nuclear power production: Apart from the ever imminent lurking danger  of  a catastrophic  accident, as probability theory cannot be relied upon for assessing the safety of a nuclear power plant in the light of big chunks of deficiencies in our knowledge of nuclear physics, mechanical sciences, material manufacture and subsequent behaviour in different conditions and the vagaries and severity of natural calamities and disasters. Also we have to understand that technology can never be a guarantee to safety.
• Wastes and by products: The spent fuel and its disposal are the biggest cause of concern for the humanity and even though the world has been producing nuclear power for well over fifty years, no viable solution has been found. Solutions to the problem of managing Nuclear waste and its safe custody are the topics that are bothering the strongest exponents of nuclear power for the costs involved and effectiveness of these solutions.

NUCLEAR POWER:
S t i l l   N o t   V i a b l e   w i t h o u t   S u b s i d i e s
Doug Koplow


Chapter 1. Overview 11
1.1. An Introduction to Subsidies 11
1.2. Framework for Evaluating Current Subsidies to Nuclear Power 12
1.3. Categorizing the Subsidy Values 13
Chapter 2. A Review of Historical Subsidies to Nuclear
Power and Their Drivers 17
2.1. Key Financial Risks: Capital Costs and “Long-Tail” Operating Risks 17
2.2. Fifty Years of Subsidies 19
Chapter 3. Output-Linked Support 23
3.1. Payments Based on Current Output 23
3.2. Purchase Mandates for Nuclear Power 23
Chapter 4. Subsidies to Factors of Production 25
4.1. Subsidies to Reduce the Cost of Capital  25
4.2. Subsidies to Reduce the Cost of Capital Goods 43
4.3. Subsidies to Labor 48
4.4. Subsidies to Land 50
Chapter 5. Subsidies to Intermediate Inputs 55
5.1. Subsidies to Uranium Mining and Milling 55
5.2. Subsidies to Uranium Enrichment 62
5.3. Subsidies to Cooling Water Used at Nuclear Plants 72
Chapter 6. Subsidies to Nuclear Security and Risk Management 77
6.1. Insurance Caps on Accident Liability 77
6.2. Regulatory Oversight 85
6.3. Plant Security 86
6.4. Nuclear Proliferation from the Civilian Sector 87

Chapter 7. Subsidies to Decommissioning and Waste Management 91
7.1. Subsidies for Reactor Decommissioning 91
7.2. Nuclear Waste 96
Chapter 8. Total Subsidies to the Nuclear Power Industry
and Related Policy Recommendations 103
8.1. Total Subsidies to Existing Nuclear Reactors 103
8.2. Total Subsidies to New Reactors 107
8.3. The Industry Is Seeking Greatly Expanded Subsidies
for New Reactors 108
8.4. Policy Recommendations 110
References 115
Appendix A: Total Subsidies to Nuclear Reactors (Overview) 129
Appendix B: Understanding Subsidies 133
Appendix C: Abbreviations Used in This Report 135