Passengers on Sully’s flight brace for impact (photo Warner Bros)
The nuclear sector in the West has brought the current crisis partly upon itself by doing the exact opposite of what is known to work in industry, writes Michael Shellenberger. To survive, it must embark on a radical new course: create one company, comparable to Boeing or Airbus in the aircraft sector, that will develop a standardized, efficient reactor design. At the same time, governments should work together to increase confidence in the future of nuclear power. The UK has a key role to play: it should scrap all its existing plans and start from a blank piece of paper.
The looming insolvency of Toshiba has set off a chain reaction of events that threatens the existence of nuclear power in the West:
- Britain’s plan to build six new nuclear plants in order to phase out coal by 2025 is now up in the air.
- Britain’s turmoil creates uncertainty for the French and Chinese nuclear industries — as well as for another Japanese company, Hitachi — that had won contracts to build other British plants.
- In response to Toshiba’s failings, one of India’s leading nuclear policy experts is calling for the government to scrap existing planswith Areva, Westinghouse and Russia’s Rosatom, and “Make Nuclear Indian Again” by scaling up the country’s indigenous design.
- Mitsubishi’s CEO told the Financial Timesthat the company is not considering a merger with Toshiba. The reason? Toshiba’s nuclear design “is a totally different technology” from Mitsubishi’s.
- A proposal by Southern Company to build a third nuclear plant based on Toshiba’s Westinghouse AP1000 design in Georgia is increasingly unlikely.
The Japanese and French governments will be compelled to act for economic reasons — their nuclear industries are too important to their economies to fail. The Japanese government has always played a strong role in shaping the direction of its industries, including nuclear, while the French nuclear industry is entirely government-controlled.
Even though it lacks its own nuclear industry, Britain is emerging as the strongest of the three nations because it has a significant number of planned nuclear plants that involve Japanese and French companies, and is a big player in a buyer’s market.
What is proven to make nuclear plants safer is experience, not new designs. Human factors swamp design
The new Conservative government of Theresa May has expressed more interest in industrial policy than prior Conservative governments, and has already begun talks with the Japanese government about the UK government coming in as an investor on two of its planned plants.
The question is whether anyone in the three governments will have the vision and strength to make the right choices. The right choices will be the most difficult ones because they will require standing up first to the nuclear industry and next to ideologues on the Left and the Right.
But crises bring opportunities and there are large ones for reformers within the industry and within governments to do what should have been done 40 years ago: standardize designs, reorganize and consolidate the industry, and implement a vision to scale up plants while bringing down costs.
But before doing any of that, policymakers and the public must understand why Toshiba and Areva failed.
Why Nuclear is Failing
- Lack of Standardization and Scaling
“Everything you described in your article was true for nuclear plants built in the 1970s,” an industry veteran told me.
In my investigation, I described how Toshiba’s Westinghouse AP1000 design was radically new — it had never been tested and indeed wasn’t even complete before construction began.
And yet when it came time to build two of them in Georgia and South Carolina, all parties were afflicted with a kind of historical amnesia.
“No one involved seemed to fully appreciate just how difficult it would be to build new reactors, especially the AP1000 — a ‘first of a kind’ design,” reports the Financial Times.
It’s not unusual for big construction and manufacturing projects to go over time and budget.
Consider the San Francisco Bay Bridge. After an earthquake in 1989 caused part of it to collapse, California officials decided to replace the entire eastern span.
Construction started in 2002 and was supposed to cost $1.5 billion. The project was afflicted with challenges. In 2009, steel rods flew off the span and hit at least two cars. Faulty bolts were discovered. The problems delayed the opening by four years and cost $6.4 billion — four times more than what had been estimated.
The 40-year obsession with innovative new designs is a consequence of an industry dominated by the engineers — the project architects — rather than by the construction firms
Or consider the Boeing “Dreamliner” jet aircraft. The FOAK arrived three years late, in 2011. Immediately things went awry. Engines failed along with fuel pumps, computers and wings. Lithium batteries caught on fire. The problems were so bad that the Japanese government launched its own investigation.
Now consider that building a nuclear plant isn’t like building a bridge or a jet plane — it’s like building a bridge and a jet plane at the same time.
Except it’s not. It’s much harder than that.
The reason has to do with scale. Where Boeing is making 10 aircraft per month — allowing everyone involved to become more efficient and produce planes faster — it takes nuclear plant construction companies up to 10 years to build one plant.
Boeing knows the importance of standardization. The company is losing money on every Dreamliner it makes, and says it hopes to make money after selling 1,100 of them. Thus, when faced with a rash of problems in 2012, Boeing didn’t give up on the Dreamliner design — it fixed the problems.
The response from the nuclear industry to such problems would have been to invent yet another nuclear plant design complete with promises of greater safety and lower cost. And yet what makes nuclear plants safer and cheaper to build and operate is experience, not new designs.
What the constant switching of designs does is deprive the people who build, operate and regulate nuclear plants of the experience they need to become more efficient.
Why then does the industry keep doing it?
- The War on Nuclear
To some extent, the 40-year obsession with innovative new designs is a consequence of an industry dominated by the engineers — the project architects — rather than by the construction firms.
But Boeing and Airbus are companies headed by engineers who don’t make the nuclear industry’s mistakes. Why?
The answer in part is that Boeing doesn’t have to deal with a powerful, $500 million annual lobby that does everything it can to deliberately make nuclear expensive.
NRDC, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, UCS, and myriad state and local groups have spent 50 years frightening the public with pseudo-science, suing utilities, subsidizing the competition, and winning regulations that do nothing for plant safety.
On the one hand, the nuclear industry responded brilliantly to these attacks. After the anti-nuclear movement landed a decisive blow against the industry in 1979, with the meltdown at Three Mile Island book-ended by the release of the hysterical film “China Syndrome” and “No Nukes” concerts, the industry got its act together.
Over the next 30 years the industry worked diligently to better train its workers and create a culture of safety that resulted in an extraordinary rise in plant efficiency from about 50 percent to over 90 percent today.
The overwhelming amount of harm caused by accidents are due to fear and panic, not radiation exposure
But the industry also responded by creating new and untested designs: Westinghouse’s AP1000 and Areva’s EPR.
The problem of serial design-switching is compounded by the vanishingly small number of nuclear plants being built. Just 60 plants total are currently under construction — most of different designs.
The Koreans, by contrast, prioritized efficient construction over innovative new designs, and are now leading the global competition to build new nuclear plants.
- Too much focus on machines, too little on human beings
Areva, Toshiba-Westinghouse and others claimed their new designs would be safer and thus, at least eventually, cheaper, but there were always strong reasons to doubt such claims.
First, what is proven to make nuclear plants safer is experience, not new designs. Human factors swamp design.
The same is true of aircrafts. What made air travel safe was many decades of training and experience by pilots, air traffic controllers, and regulators — not radically different jet plane designs.
In fact, new designs risk depriving managers and workers of the experience they need to operate plants more safely, just as it deprives construction companies of the experience they need to build plants more rapidly.
While Boeing has touted the Dreamliner as a kind of breakthrough, it was an incremental improvement on the same jet planes we’ve been flying on since the 1950s, and did little to change the procedures of pilots and flight attendants.
To be sure, continuous improvement of jet plane technologies has contributed to making flying safer than ever.
But the key factors were executive-level commitment to risk reduction, a company-wide safety culture, better emergency trainings, inspections and accident investigations.
Second, how do you make a technology that almost never harms anybody any safer than it already is?
Fossil fuels operating normally kill far more people than nuclear plants do when they malfunction.
And given such tiny health impacts, it’s simply not clear that making plants any safer is actually possible. Long time horizons and small sample sizes will likely make it impossible to ever know — scientifically — that newer plant designs are safer.
Advocates of new designs, including the EPR and AP1000, will acknowledge this point, but point to their enhanced safety, such as the EPR’s double containment dome, the AP1000’s back-up water system, or meltdown-proof fuel-coolant mixtures.
But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already ruled that all new nuclear plants will be subject to the Aircraft Rule.
And containment domes are not as large of an expense as is sometimes suggested. A 2012 Black and Veatch study estimated that for the AP1000 the reactor island was just 13 percent of total plant costs. And the reactor island’s actual share of costs would be lower given the $10 billion in cost overruns of the two US AP1000s.
If nuclear is going to survive in the West, it needs a single, large firm — the equivalent of a Boeing or Airbus — to compete against the Koreans, Chinese and Russians
The key takeaway from the Toshiba and Areva debacles is that the cost overruns due to construction delays from building a highly regulated FOAK nuclear plant swamp any savings from modestly smaller amounts of necessary equipment.
Finally, the overwhelming amount of harm caused by accidents are due to fear and panic, not radiation exposure.
What made Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima the three worst nuclear accidents wasn’t the radiation released. The fire at an innovative gas-cooled reactor in Windscale, England, in 1957, and the partial meltdown of a sodium-cooled reactor near Detroit in 1966, were both far worse than Three Mile Island.
What made the more famous accidents harmful was how local and federal governments panicked and triggered dangerous over-evacuations. What they should have done was told local residents to simply “shelter in place” — as is done for things like tornadoes — until the accident was dealt with.
Contrast that to the handling of jet plane accidents.
In the recent film “Sully,” based on a real event, an Airbus 320 loses both of its engines to bird strikes in just five minutes. With all power gone, the pilot has seconds to act. Can he make it back to La Guardia airport in New York? Or should he attempt a water landing in the Hudson river?
Captain Sully chooses the latter. He tersely announces, “Brace for impact,” at which point the flight attendants in unison begin a kind of creepy, hypnotic chant: “Brace! Brace! Heads down! Stay down! Brace! Brace!…”
The passengers comply. They are frightened, and some scream, but they stay seated. They tuck their heads and some put hands on the seat in front of them. In other words, they shelter in place.
And everyone survives.
How to Save Nuclear
- Consolidate or Die
Only two companies make large-bodied jet planes: Boeing and Airbus.
Large, complicated projects like building a jet plane or a nuclear plant require very large, upfront investments that only large, well-capitalized entities can back — like an electric utility, or Boeing, which invested $32 billion making the Dreamliner.
If nuclear is going to survive in the West, it needs a single, large firm — the equivalent of a Boeing or Airbus — to compete against the Koreans, Chinese and Russians.
There will never be as many nuclear plants as jet planes, especially not during a time of low overall demand for electricity. As such, economies of scale must be achieved more rapidly.
One of the keys is making both construction and operation as efficient as possible.
Many of the big global nuclear players offer to build and operate the plants. That’s what the Korean company, KEPCO, has done in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The four-reactor nuclear plant KEPCO is building is in UAE on-time and appears to be on-budget. In January, the UAE awarded KEPCIO with a 60-year, near-$50 billion contract to operate and maintain the plants it built.
The UK has key role to play here. It should scrap all existing plans and start from a blank piece of paper. All new UK nuclear plants should be of the same design
I was told by someone in the industry that KEPCO treated the construction part of the work as a loss-leader in order to get the more lucrative operation, maintenance and refueling contract — and perhaps to advertise its construction prowess to other nations.
The Airbus of nuclear should be run by someone with significant experience in nuclear plant construction — since that’s where the cost savings (and overruns) come from — not engineering.
To some extent, consolidation is already happening. In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse and Mitsubishi partnered with Areva, while in 2007, Hitachi partnered with the GE nuclear division.
Toshiba recently bought the construction firm hired to build the AP-1000 Vogtle plant, but with the latter deal, the consolidation came too late. It was done in response to, not in anticipation of, future construction and manufacturing delays.
Of course, consolidation on its own is not enough, as Areva learned. There must also be standardization, scaling and social acceptance. Consolidation is essential to achieve the repetitions required for cost reductions. And a planned scaling-up of nuclear is the key to achieving those repetitions.
- Standardize or Die
First, the new Boeing or Airbus of nuclear should build a single design. Standard-setting is a traditional role of government, and in the past has been a huge aid in helping industries consolidate, grow and achieve continuous improvement.
The UK has key role to play here. It should scrap all existing plans and start from a blank piece of paper. All new UK nuclear plants should be of the same design.
Second, the criteria for choosing the design should emphasize experience in construction and operation, since that is the key factor for lowering costs.
Reprocessing waste should be off the table. It is unnecessary and adds to the costs.
Some emphasis should also be on mass-manufacturing modules, something the Koreans are also pursuing.
But what both Toshiba and Areva failures underscore is that all new nuclear plants, however much they are going to be manufactured, are going to require construction according to the exacting standards of strict regulators, and it was that kind of construction that helped destroy not just one but two of the world’s largest nuclear companies.
What’s behind the crisis facing nuclear generally and Toshiba in particular is the utter lack of certainty about any future nuclear plant builds — including those under construction
Third, the plants should be constructed sequentially so that managers and workers in Airbus Nuclear can learn from experience.
Fourth, the firm should have strong financial incentives for reducing costs.
Fifth, the program should include a significant increase in funding to test alternative reactors.
The record here is clear: governments only invest significantly in demonstrating new nuclear reactor types when their nations are building new nuclear plants. And with good reason: people believe there is a future for nuclear.
It works the same way in reverse. Long before they had achieved their goal of shutting down existing plants, anti-nuclear activists avidly sought to cut funding for nuclear innovation. They won a big victory in 1982 when Congress cut funding for the Clinch River fuel processing project. And they won another in 1993 when Congress cut funding for the integral fast reactor.
Funding for the experimental molten salt reactor developed at Oak Ridge in the late 1960s was cut before it could ever become a test reactor. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission estimated that building one would cost $10 billion (in 2016 dollars), and noted that past tests usually cost twice what had been estimated.
A long-term, global build-out of standardized nuclear plants is the only way in which states will invest the billions needed to test radically different designs.
- Scale or Die
What’s behind the crisis facing nuclear generally and Toshiba in particular is the utter lack of certainty about any future nuclear plant builds — including those under construction.
Nations must work together to develop a long-term plan for new nuclear plant construction to achieve economies of scale. Such a plan would allow for certainty, learning-by-doing, cost declines and lower financing costs.
Risk and rewards should be pooled. Cost savings achieved through experience should be shared along with the cost overruns of the first few plants.
Governments should invest directly or provide low-cost loans. While this will inevitably be decried by anti-nuclear groups, the truth is that the U.S. and Europe have been subsidizing wind and solar for decades. In Illinois and California, subsidies for wind and solar have played a key role in threatening nuclear plants with premature closure, undermining clean air and climate goals.
Some basic fairness is in order. This starts with investment and financing as well as support for nuclear plants at risk of premature closure due to our discriminatory subsidy regime.
Others might wonder why nuclear energy should be supported when Boeing and Airbus flourished without government help. But the truth is that they didn’t: last year the World Trade Organization says Boeing and Airbus received billions in government subsidies — up to $22 billion worth for Airbus alone.
The truth is that human beings around the world have been victimized by fake news about nuclear power since the late 1960s. When most people learn the basic facts about nuclear they become far more supportive of it
UK Labor leaders have already called for direct government investment to save the plants:
“The delay we’re seeing under the Tories is leaving thousands of nuclear workers uncertain about their future,” the shadow Labor secretary said on Wednesday. “Public investment in nuclear energy would bring huge benefits through the nuclear supply chain and energy security.”
Plus, financing is the key to opening up the global market — something that is in the entire industry’s interest.
Vietnam recently cancelled plans to build nuclear plants and is now planning to build coal plants instead. Someone close to the situation told me that had foreign nations financed the nuclear plants, they would have gone forward.
And the quantities of financing — not development aid — are trivial considering the potential benefits to nuclear supplier nations, especially when the financing is spread out over 30 years and is shared by UK, Japan, France and the United States.
And such financing would offer a decisive advantage to the Airbus of nuclear over its competitors, allowing it to win contracts and provide the certainty everyone in the industry needs.
For such an effort to work, it would need widespread support that lasts for many decades. That will require that national governments work together to increase public demand and social acceptance of nuclear. Toshiba and Areva show that declining social acceptance drives demand for unnecessary regulations, as well as the industry’s constant changing of designs.
Japan’s nuclear industry cannot survive so long as public opposition is preventing the restarting of shuttered nuclear plants.
The Japanese government and industry leaders must overcome their shame and seek help from allied nations in overcoming the public’s continuing radiophobia in response to Fukushima.
What’s needed is an independent, serious and sustained effort by health and medical professionals to help Japanese and other publics to overcome fears based on grossly unscientific information.
When you consider that the nuclear industry has for 40 years often done the exact opposite of what’s known to work, it’s a small miracle that nuclear is still 11 percent of global electricity, instead of zero
France, Canada and most recently Vietnam all show that this can be done.
And as an analogy, there is much more to be learned from efforts to increase support for vaccinations among skittish parents. There is an aggressive and effective effort to educate the public about vaccines that, for the most part, still works. In response to a recent measles outbreaks, for example, California started requiring students be vaccinated to attend public schools.
If millions of parents will inject their children with the polio virus because they understand that it is a weakened version of the one that cripples and kills, they are capable of understanding that nuclear plants are the safest and cleanest way to make electricity.
The truth is that human beings around the world have been victimized by fake news about nuclear power since the late 1960s. When most people learn the basic facts about nuclear they become far more supportive of it.
And yet neither governments nor industry have ever, in the 50 years of nuclear energy, made a serious effort to provide those facts.
What that means is that there is enormous potential to touch hearts and change minds, just as many of ours were upon learning why nuclear is essential to mitigating climate change.
Now Change
The crisis that threatens the death of nuclear energy in the West also offers an opportunity for a new life.
When you consider that the nuclear industry has for 40 years often done the exact opposite of what’s known to work, it’s a small miracle that nuclear is still 11 percent of global electricity, instead of zero.
Everything that’s wrong — the proliferation of designs, the delay in project starts, efficient Korean competitors, low demand, low social acceptance — is something that can be made right.T
Toshiba and Areva are not the only two companies capable of exercising the leadership required to save the world’s most important environmental technology from being consigned to the long-term waste repository of history
We can learn from the Koreans. We can standardize design. We can finance the necessary scale. We can go back to Vietnam with a better deal. And we can increase public acceptance.
Policymakers have a special role to play. They must seek out reformers and change agents within an industry that is dominated by the same kind of thinking that led to today’s crisis. They must reach out to their counterparts in other nations. And they must stand up to ideologues peddling pseudo-science on the Left and pseudo-economics on the Right.
Ultimately new leadership with a new vision and plan must emerge from within the nuclear industry. Toshiba has seen a succession of leaders pitching what is fundamentally the same approach. It’s not clear that Areva has yet learned the lessons from its EPR debacle, or whether anyone has really started to clean house.
But, happily, Toshiba and Areva are not the only two companies capable of exercising the leadership required to save the world’s most important environmental technology from being consigned to the long-term waste repository of history.
Editor’s Note
Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) is an award-winning author and environmental policy expert. For a quarter-century he has advocated solutions to lift all people out of poverty while lessening humankind’s environmental impact.
Michael is coauthor of visionary books and essays including “The Death of Environmentalism,” Break Through, An Ecomodernist Manifesto, “Evolve,” and Love Your Monsters. He writes for publications including Scientific American, The New York Times, and the Washington Post.
This article was first published on The Energy Collective, our sister-publication in the U.S.
[adrotate group=”9″]
Well, so somebody should again provide huge subsiday for nuclear to allow it to scale in the hope that this time, after many unsuccessfull tries, the prices for nuclear sohehow come down and closer to market prices. But wha should someone do this today when cheaper and more clean options are available? This does not make much sense.
Mike,
Another excellent article. Please explore the impact of constructing under a COL and with having NRC on site. Design changes had huge impact and documentation requirements caused massive rework for being non compliant. Adding the 85% of workers with zero nuclear experience having to embrace Westinghouse’s version and many seniors who viewed this as their retirement boost, if it lasted long enough, youbget a more complete picture of the causal basis for delays and cost overruns.
The problem of nuclear plants is simple, they use too big (1000+ MWe) reactors. The industry have to return to, at least, an order of magnitude smaller scale of reactors. In that scale they have the chance to standardize, learn from errors, build modular, design and test new models, …
There are not only Boeing and Airbus, there are also dozens of companies producing successfully a bit smaller jet planes (up to 100 persons) and hundreds producing private jets, sport aircrafts, military aircrafts, etc. There is a whole ecosystem of aircraft production, the forest containing not only few huge grizzleys but also smaller bears, wolfs, linxes, foxes, wild cats and weasels. That is missing in nuclear industry, they have no place to buy new and proven design ideas, seasoned professionals and construction expertise.
I think the same. The demise of nuclear industry begun when oversized, overcomplicated plants were started to be built, which are just built long enough to prevent the builtup of any learning by doing knowledge. I agree with the author in standardization, and gaining experience, but the way to achieve it is not through consolidation, but rather scaling down.
Nuclear plants should rather built in the 200MW-400MW range than in the 1GW – 1.6GW range.
One important aspect is, that there should be a global insurance company, which provides security behind nuclear plants. Plant operators should pay an insurance fee to this company, which in turn does risk analysis, recommend preliminary actions, accident management, after-accident activities etc. It must be global to be able to handle the case of low probability/large financial damage combination. Also to provide expertise in case of accident management.
Regarding the anti-nuclear movements. I think it would be just time to hit back.
Nuclear industry should spend in media on character assassination of prominent green activists, make the population see that they are actually lying, that they are more like religious fanatics and don’t care about either the future of the planet, and even less with the people’s fate on it. It is always much easier to incite hatred against something than defending against it.
Delusional article. Even if nuclear would get the 100 points long list of incredible support from all sides the author wants, it could still not compete with renewables plus storage.
Renewables plus storage would not be competitive with new nuclear. Storage is just too expensive to deal with lulls in wind/solar during the winter in northern Europe.
Nobody sees any need for storage in ther german grid till 980% renewables. So what do you talk about?
Just because Nigel West wants renewables to need storage does not mean they need storage in practice. Grid extensions do the job as well, and then there are enough storages in the Alps and in scandinavia which can be used first and provide both sides with additional earnings. All of this well below the costs of nuclear.
Forget what just Germany and Norway/Scandanavia can do alone. This started elsewhere over you implying that a huge Supergrid covering all of Europe with near 100% renewables would not need conventional generation back-up, or storage. You often quote the Czisch report to support that claim – but actually it says pumped storage is needed – I’ve read it. That would cost trillions to cover the winter lulls across all Europe.
There is not enough existing pumped storage for the whole of Europe in Scandanavia and the Alps. Grid extensions are just wires – they need reliable generation at the other end.
Germany is just making things far too complicated as ever promoting a near 100% renewables Europe and trying to impose that on other countries.
Good luck with that as the UK and France will not be playing ball.
Well obviously you did not read it. It allows the optimisation process to use pumped storage, but the optimisation process did not use new pumped storage, and did not even use existing ones to full extend. But this was not the topic here.
Forget winter lulls about whole europe. The ones ferdinand try to cite for this january were accompanied by enough wind power production in europes north, east and west. It was a lull in central europe, correct, but that’s by far not all europe. France is already changing direction in energy production. Nuclear is too expensive. UK trys their luck in both ways, trying their luck once again in Hinkley Point C, at extremely high costs as it seems. While Moorside looks like a dead horse, with both engie and Toshiba trying to retreat and selling each other the Shares of the project as it looks like from rumors.
I know it is bad for the nuclear fanboys that the promised blackouts in germany do not show up since 2011. And that more and more variable generation can be integrated without any problems. Other nations can see this way how far this way is safe for sure, and they can see the shrinking costs for this way.
> they can see the shrinking costs for this way.
Tell me, how much do domestic consumers pay in Germany for electricity today? Is it not 30 Eurocents/kWh? And prices have increased by 50% since 2006. Whereas in the UK they pay half that at about 12p/kWh for domestic electricity. France even less too.
So other nations can indeed see just how costly Germany’s Energiewende experiment really is – and it’s only just started. Oh, lets slap on even more surcharges by building a ‘supergrid’ too and ignore the risks to supplies of not having back-up because it is too costly and might destroy the ‘supergrid’ case.
I pay 24ct/kWh. Including plenty of taxes, whoch you don’t pay in UK. Whily you pay the support for varios kinds of generation by taxes, as far as I remember (I did not check this) Prices in France rise, since EDF loses money, here they stay about constant. Industry prices here are lower than in UK, and especially for large consumers in industry they are also lower than in France.
Since most of the costs for Energiewende are costs to develop technologies to become competitive (the times when Sopar power cost 50ct/kWh and more will never come again) So the costs for electricity in germany will fall in the future. Whille electricity costs in France will rise since at some thime EDF has to start to collect the money neccesary to decomission the existing nuclear fleet. And in UK it will rise due to the extremely expensive nuclear projects like Hinkley Point.
Average domestic price in Germany is a whopping 29.16 Euroct. – see cleanenergywire.org factsheet. So, joint highest in the World with Denmark. South Australia has the same problem too, high renewables and the highest power prices in Australia. So there is absolutely zero evidence of renewables lowering bills.
Also since 2006, German domestic energy prices have only gone one way – that is up. Renewable subsidies currently stand at 23.6% of the bill – and that is for 30% renewables generation last year. So completely wishful thinking to try and claim domestic charges will go any way other than up from here as renewables growth increases.
The reason German industrial prices are low is because domestic consumers unfairly carry much of Energiewende burden effectively subsiding industry.
Hinkley Point will increase a household bill by not more than 3% according estimates so is no problem, and good value for clean reliable and long-term power. Follow on new nuclear stations will be cheaper too.
Well strike price for Hinkley point is above Wholesale Privce + costs for renewables for households, it is as well much higher than payments for new solar or wind generation in germany.
Support for higher cost solar or wind power will most likely have ended before Hinkley Point will deliver the first kWh, if it will ever deliver any. So ggod luck with your expensive power generators.
Helmut, I do not have a problem with renewables as part of the generation mix. It’s good to see prices coming down on the continent for offshore wind and I hope this happens in the UK offshore sector too – although that remains to be seen for deep water projects.
I also want to see new nuclear costs come down too.
What I do have a problem with is claims nuclear and CCGTs will not be needed in future and can be replaced with nearly 100% renewables. Only green extremists really believe this propaganda.
Helmut, of course the lights have stayed on in Germany – so far. But only because there is reliable back-up in the form of a huge 50GW fleet of dirty coal stations and 8 GW of nuclear to keep the lights on when the wind is not blowing and the sun not shining. France and Poland have reliable nuclear and coal to help Germany too.
Importantly, Germany’s grid operator is required to review supply security each year and will procure reserve capacity in the form of dedicated power stations to back up the grid if needed.
Well it’s neither 50GW coal power, nor are the imports from france available if it#s cold – france relies on imports from germany when demand is high.
And yes people in germany take good care how to keep the power generation safe and reliable, thats why renewable generation is expanded and nuclear closed down. And its only 5-7 GW nuclear power generation here at the moment, the other nuclear power stations are broken, falling apart after 25-35 years of operation, like the ones in neighboring countries too. Accidentally the power generation of nuclear is about identical to the constant 5-7 GW power export of germany the last months. Export did not change significantly when renewaple power generaton exceeded 56GW the last days.
According Fraunhofer, installed hard coal and brown coal capacity in Germany is around 50GW – why are you disputing facts? Furthermore, a new 1600MW capacity coal fired power station was opened in Hamburg in 2015 – so much for Germany closing coal! Meanwhile the UK is well on the way to closing all it’s coal fired stations.
It’s well known too that wind turbines start to fail before 15 years of use. Whereas nuclear stations run for in excess of 40 years.
France’s imports from Germany this winter are exceptional and due to inspections of nuclear plants.
it’s 48 GW as you now, and falling this year. And 2015 is some while ago, a plant wher planing strted more than a Decade ago, and where it is sure now that the plant will necer ever earn it’s costs.
Wind power generation lasts much longer than 15 years, since it’s simplr in design than nuclear you can keep it alive longer. In caifornia the first turbines from the 1980’s are still working, and just replaced by new ones because they harvest multiple times more energy, not because the old ones do not work any more. The older ones decomissioned in germany to be replaced with new ones are sold for a second life to Africa and eastern europe. I have never heared this happening with a nuclear power station.
Is that the best you can do, splitting hairs over 48 or 50 GW? When Germany’s
coal fired capacity is five times the UK ‘s coal fired capacity as much has been replaced by CCGTs.
How embarrassing too for Germany and the Energewende still building coal plants!
“has” means past. the wave of closures is sheduled and will come. And no new capacitty is coming. The non built of coal fired plants was caused in UK by the availability of chap Gas, which was all burned in a haste and is missing now. On the other hand the UK coal fired plants remained among the lowest efficient and most dirty around.
About this UK did not care, since it hurt scandinavia more than UK. Now coal is closed down in UK because the plants fall apart ant there is no possibility to retrofit them to todays EU standards. Maybe they will be fired up again after brexit, when UK can cancel the EU emission requirements.
Nigel keep telling alternative facts? Ther is no “still building coal plants”, no wave of plans for new and additional coal capacity as you want people to believe., There is only a wave of retireing plants.
UK has not opened a new coal-fired plant since the 1980s, unlike Germany in 2015. Fraunhofer data shows German coal capacity has remained largely unchanged for over 10 years – needed to back-up renewables – so a wave of closing coal plants is a myth. Indeed the oldest lignite plants can’t be fully decommissioned now either as they need to be placed in a ‘security reserve’ as cover for intermittant renewables and closing nuclear.
Helmut, UK built CCGT plants because they were cheaper and quicker to build and operate than new coal. CO2 emissions from CCGTs are half those of coal too. With North Sea gas declining, plenty of gas is available to the UK from diverse sources to run CCGTs via pipelines and LNG imports.
The remaining coal plants have mostly been retrofitted with FGD so they are not ‘dirty’ and there is no issue now with SO2 emissions and Scandanavia. Also coal-fired running hours are limited. UK Government has said it wants to see all coal plants closed by 2025 and replaced by CCGTs. So worn out coal plants will not be fired up again after Brexit.
Germany should be doing the same too, closing lignite and replacing with CCGTs. If Germany had done this decades ago their CO2 emissions would be much lower now.
Nigel, the CCGT-Fleet in UK was built when there was plenty and cheap north sea gas, and it was the cheapest option then. Before the gas was available coal power plants have been built because they were the cheapest option then.
And I remember the problems very well to peruade UK to implement at least a little filtering of the coal power plants. Without EU that would never have worked. So who knows what comes next when there is no pressure on UK any more.
phase out of coal is under way in germany, partly in paralel with nuclear phase out in the main part after it. No new CCGT-Plant will be neccesary anyway, the existing fleet looks sufficient. Gnereation for very few hours per year might be added in the future, but CCGT is too expensive pe kW capacity for that task. You can monitor the coal capacity if you like and see the decline.
Yes, more standardisation would be good. Also a mature and stable design with well bounded risks, good commercial arrangements, schedule and cost plan, and financing arrangements are as important to success as a standard design.
After a few FOAK standardised plants are commissioned, the following ones should go smoothly to budget and schedule.
To achieve this though there are considerable issues to work through, e.g:
1. There would be differing views on whether to choose, PWR or ABWR technology, or Candu for that matter?
2. France would have to be involved but given national issues and industry champions, would EDF collaborate on one design? France is protective of key industries.
3. How would purchasers feel limiting choice in terms of knowing the deal was a good one?
4. By the time a new standard design was ready would the Koreans and Chinese be too far ahead to catch-up?
5. One big reason why designs are not fully standardised is because each country has a regulator with different safety requirements, and different engineering standards. So unless they consolidate, ‘standard plants’ may still have to be extensively re-engineered from country to country.
However, it could be done as many PWR plants were designed around Westinghouse’s SNUPPS – standard nuclear unitised power plant system. Indeed Sizewell B is based on a modified SNUPPS design. Shame only the one was built – but that is another story.
I was involved with the SNUPPS design here in the U.S. and also with Sizewell B. It was “anglicized” and ended up costing twice the price and took 12 years. So much for standardized designs.
The new designs were developed because existing designs showed to be not safe after expensive accidents.
E.g. what about an attack with a remote controlled drone or plane etc.
So the necessity for new designs may only stop with a true gen4 design which is situated under the ground. Below 3 meter armed concrete.
The idea that the exclusion zones are far too large is contradicted by recent research showing significant increased perinatal deaths in areas just outside the Japanese exclusion zone!
Bas,
I would phrase it that the latest western designs are even safer.
Placing just the nuclear island of a large 1600 MW PWR power station under ground as you suggest would be very expensive requiring massive excavations. It’s not necessary either. The EPR has a massive metre thick double wall RC containment structure designed to withstand an aircraft crash. Could be done though – turbine halls of pumped storage plants have been built in mountain sides.
Small 50MW modular reactors would be suitable for placing underground though.
I do not see much rdeuced costs in building 32 smaller caverns for 50 MW plants instead of a big one for 1600 MW plant. But I do not see much use in both desighns either, since there are more cost efficent options. Which are preferable even when the risks and waste problems of nuclear are ignored.
Times have changed.
Mere speculation on SMRs from someone with no knowledge of the costs of SMRs. SMR proposals are under development and potential designs are being considered. It’s too early to know, e.g., what the economics of SMRs would look like, what size they would be and how they would be installed.
Rolls Royce is a UK company with a proposal likely based on a version of their PWR reactor used to power UK nuclear submarines.
Good article and well reasoned. A modular, assembly-line approach to production would certainly cut costs and allow experience to dictate design engineering improvements. That appears to be happening in the world of SMRs. It’s really a shame the world didn’t adopt CANDU because if it had, TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima would have been either non-events or significantly less serious.
A modular approach is possible for large nukes too. But limited by the size of modules that can be transported from factory to site.
In the 1950s the UK was in a hurry to build Magnox stations. They achieved a shorter construction programme by spanning the nuclear island and conventional island with a huge shipyard gantry crane. That allowed multiple work faces to assemble sections, e.g the reactor, concurrently which were then craned into place. It’s similar to how modern ships are built out of modules that are craned in and then welded together.
A shorter schedule from first structural concrete to commissioning means a lower cost plant.
There are a lot of declarative statements which are supported by any supporting factual data here. Other assertions are conjecture or anecdotal. The assertion that the human role is more important than design features is not accurate as most every PRA study ever done shows a significant impact due to human reliance. The point is not whether to automate certain functions but to eliminate the dépendance in human performance. There is some truths in the article but not a complete picture.
I’ve spent 44 years in the nuclear industry in both reactor vendor and EPC company roles for both domestic and international applications. The assertion that the AP1000 was to innovation is simply not the case as the difficulties have been in project execution, some regulatory impacts and supply chain. The assertion of standardization applies only when replicate units are sequentially built side by side e.g. Kashiwazaki where construction was completed in 36-42 months. A significant degree of modularization was employed there.
A perfect article underlining the most crucial points.
Having spent the greatest part of my working life in the nuclear reaserch field, I have often been astonished seeing how the nuclear industry reacted to critics to the performances of the nuclear plants. Instead of been proud of their work they replied as if there was a need of justification.
Not speaking of reactions to accidents during which all kind of misinformation was expressed.
Unfortunately,I am pessimist on the possibilitty,in the near future,that your wise suggestions will be folowed in the western coutries because public opinion is convinced that with sun and wind everything is made and I do not see any political person willing to face such opinion. Perhaps in the long term…..
There was a time during the 60s and early 70s when Government took proactive measures in civic affairs, whether it was driver education, home safety, the environment or the need for major infrastructure projects. In Canada, and in my province of Ontario, that included educating the Public concerning the need for nuclear energy and the important role it would play in the provinces energy future. Ontario grew to have some of the lowest electrical rates on the planet because of its commitment to hydro and nuclear. Since that time, “alternative facts” have dominated the discussion. Despite and enviable nuclear record, the province has allow disinformation to crowd the discussion, and the nuclear industry has been left to fend largely for itself. We throw billions of dollars at solar and wind energy which is excess to this provinces energy needs, and is sold to our American neighbors at substantially less that the cost of production. Some of these green solutions pave over prime farmland, as in southwestern Ontario. Rather than supporting our home-grown industry, the Government imports windmills, and our energy costs have soared. All of this was predicted, and it’s not hard to connect the dots. However, as long as we have politicians pandering to uninformed public opinion, and that opinion fuels public policy in a congratulatory loop, it’s hard to be optimistic.
Standardization is indeed key, but unfortunately impossible under the unique nuclear regime of third-party liability. Throughout the world the nuclear operator is strictly liable, without any exceptions, not even force major, for third party damages.
As such it is impossible for nuclear plant constructor to “own” a design. Once a power station is commissioned, ownership and responsibility of the design falls to the operator. To 100%. No exceptions.
The only way for a nuclear plant constructor to retain design ownership is the UAE model. The constructor also operates the plant under some sort of joint legal ownership holding.
Another problem for nuclear is that the underlying safety philosophy dating back to the late 50s/early 60s has not been revisited and has remained unchanged. Unlike back then, a core melt-down is no longer a black swan event. Today we have the tools to construct a nuclear power plant that will not emit under any circumstances any appreciable amount of radionuclides given a complete core melt-down.
To be exact, nuclear safety should be turned on its head. Instead of trying to prevent the unpreventable (a core melt), embrace it! Declare and design the nuclear power station such that a complete core melt is its ONLY safe state from a regulatory point of view!
Suddenly all of that gold-plating of paper that is 70% of nuclear cost is unnecessary.