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The Nuclear Option
I have been requested to write about France’s nuclear energy programme. It’s a huge subject, and I have already spent too many hourse researching it, so what I will do now is provide a brief summary and a number of links that I have found for those of you that are interested in finding out more.
For the surrender-monkey-lovers amongst you, you can also go read my third installment on the French campaign for the referendum for or against the EU Consititution: EU Constitution – France Votes (III) What if it’s no?
So here we go.
Nuclear energy in France is big:
France is the second largest producer of nuclear energy after the US, with 58 reactors (104 in the USA) on 19 sites.
Map of French nuclear plants (click on the “Nuclear” icon on the right)
More detailed map with the technical parameters of each nuclear plant (1 page pdf))
As this document (Nuclear Power in France – why does it work?) describes, nuclear energy was first developed at a leisurely pace in the 60s and given a massive boost when the oil crisis struck. A massive programme was launched by the public authorities in 1975, which led to the wholesale replacement of fuel and coal-fired power plants by nuclear ones.
(Source)
This was a fully centralised programme. EDF, the national electricity operator (then a monopoly) borrowed money with the sovereign guarantee of France to pay for it. It was built for the most part by French companies, but interestingly, it used a US technology (pressurised water) under license (developed by Westinghouse) because it was cheaper than the technology (using graphite) which had been developed so far in France. All 58 plants use the same technology, although the more recent reactors are more powerful than the earlier ones. All the companies involved in that effort were eventually consolidated into Areva, which is now the main industrial player in the sector and involved in the whole nuclear chain, from uranium mining to plant construction, and fuel processing and treatment:
EDF is the operator of all plants, but safety is regulated by an independent watchdog, the Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (website in French only, as far as I can tell). Environmentalists say (in French, again) that the watchdog cannot be considered to be independent as it is a government department and the State is the owner of EDF and strongly pro-nuclear… I am going into this debate here but provide various links below if you want to investigate further…
Thanks to the fact the all plants are identical, have been bought under a very long term plan (over 25 years) and are operated by a single entity, operating costs are quite low. The final cost of electricity per kWh also benefits from the fact that funds for the programme were borrowed using the very low rates that highly rated sovereign countries can obtain, and amortised over very long periods (initially 30 years, but the life of the older plants has been officially extended to 40 and it is likely that they will be further expansions). 5% interest rate over 40 years vs 8% over 20 years makes a huge difference, and the overall cost of electricity in France is very low. France exports electricity to all its neighbors, including the UK and Germany, and is competitive in all markets.
European Electricity prices in 2002 (click on picture for a bigger version, or on the link for the original)
Please note that, despite pretty much everything that you read in the financial press, EDF has NOT RECEIVED a centime from the French government in the past 25 years. Quite the opposite: it has regularly been “raided” by the government when there were budgetary crises (through special taxes or “dividends”), and it has also been used to fight inflation (by being forced to lower its prices regularly). It is a highly competitive electricity producer, and that’s the main reason why there are few competitors in France – it makes no sense to build new plants when you already have a massive supply of very cheap electricity.
I put out the following table in my previous diary on wind power:
Cost of production for various technologies, not taking into account externalities.
(my calculations from various sources which I’ll be happy to provide upon demand. I have modified some numbers somewhat to avoid giving out any confidential information when necessary)
The nuclear numbers come from this study made by the French Ministry of Industry (see a summary in English (pdf, 4 pages))
That table shows the importance of the interest rate hypothesis and thus the value in this industry of having a national player able to capture value on the financial markets by borrowing a lot cheaper than private operators.
On the emissions side, with nuclear making 80% of production and hydro another 10%, France’s carbon emissions are logically amongst the lowest in the industrialised world:
The other big advantage of nuclear is to avoid dependency on foreign supplies for electricity production. A good fraction of the uranium is imported, but it comes from friendly countries like Canada or Australia, as well as from some African countries with a “friendly” French presence like Niger. France thus produces 50% of its energy needs overall from domestic sources, versus 26% in 1973.
The last big topics are that of plant decommissioning and nuclear waste.
Two big reports on these topics have been published by independent bodies in recent weeks, so there is a lot of information available, unfortunately most of it is in French. The debate is quite lively here, but I have not found many references in the English speaking press. Here are the reports:
Parliament evaluation of nuclear waste management options (March 2005, in French)
Cour des Comptes report on decommissioning and nuclear waste (in French; the Cour des Comptes is the financial watchdog for all public entities, it is fiercely independent).
The summary (15 page pdf, in French) of the document of the Cour des Comptes is as follows:
– risks linked to operations are well identified
– risks linked to waste management are well identified and managed. Decisions on long term storage are pending (they are due in 2006, see next report)
– decommissioning and waste storage are well estimated and amount to about 10% of production costs. However, the absolute numbers are quite high.
– current provisions by the 3 main actors of the sector (EDF, Areva and CEA, the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, which runs R&D and manages some of the older reactors) amount to 71 billion euros
– full transparency is required in the accounting of these provisions and their plans of use (these should be set in stone and not be subject to short term contingencies). Only Areva fulfills this requirement at this point.
As regards the long term management of nuclear waste, a specific agency, ANDRA was created by a 1991 law, with a 15 year mission to find a long term solution for nuclear waste. 3 axis or research were examined: (i) separation and transmutation (transforming nuclear elements into other, less noxious, elements by chemical processes and isolating the more radioactive ones from the rest) (ii) long term permanent storage of waste in deep geological layers and (iii) temporary storage of certain elements in the expectation that they can be processed at a later stage.
All 3 are expected to be pursued, and the choice of the site for long term geological storage, that of La Bure, in Eastern France, is close to being made.
The report proposes to pursue all 3 and sets a detailed plan over the next 35 years to organise it. It provides detailed estimates of the expected cost of the whole process and proposes to create a specific fund, to be funded by the nuclear industry, to pay for it over the corresponding period.
Other reports (such as this one, Lifetime of Nuclear Power Plants and New Designs of Reactors (in English, for once)) address the question of how and when to replace the existing power plants in the long term. France has now taken the decision to build a demonstration version of the “EPR” (European Pressurised Water Reactor), a new generation of reactor built on the same technology as the existing ones, with incremental improvements. It would be built by Areva and Siemens, and has also been ordered by Finland.
France is happy with nuclear energy and intends to continue using it on a large scale. It has workes so far because it has been run in a highly centralised way, with one operator with the full backing of the State under a very long term plan. Both the operator and the public supervisory body have a strong engineering culture with an emphasis on technical excellence and safety, and they are generally trusted, despite occasional lapses in transparency which are increasingly corrected nowadays.
The full costs of the programme appear to be mostly accounted for, and nuclear plants have provided cheap electricity to France over the past 20 years at no cost to the public purse.
If this appears too good to be true, well, maybe it is! I don’t claim full neutrality on this topic, being French, and an alumni of the same engineering school as many of the top people at EDF and Areva, but, as you may be remember, I am a big supporter of wind power and I still see a need for nuclear energy as the “base load”. Let’s be clear: it’s going to be nuclear or coal, and I will let Plan9 (from dKos) argue how much worse coal is!
That’s it for now.
To keep you busy, here are a few more links on the topic that I have found interesting, coming from both nuclear proponents and opponents (you know, fair and balanced and all that):
Nuclear energy today (OECD, 2005)
World Nuclear Association’s “Nuclear Energy made simple
LockerGnome encyclopedia on Nuclear Power
Office for Nuclear Affairs of the French Embassy in the US
EDF’s page in English on nuclear energy
Areva’s description of its industrial activities in the “nuclear cycle”
2004 Report on Nuclear Safety (114p, pdf, in French)
Breakdown of electricity production and CO2 emissions (click on the respective links for separate pop up windows.)
‘Learn more about Plutonium’ page (6 page pdf)
Sortir du nucléaire (getting away from nuclear energy) the French umbrella group of most anti-nuclear associations (in French only)
Greenpeace’s “End the nuclear threat”
Eole vs Pluton, a Greenpeace campaign comparing the costs of investing in nuclear energy or wind energy in the future.
I’m a bit too tired (long day) to grapple with Jerome’s (as always) lucid presentation in great detail. So pls forgive if this is a bit less focussed than I would like — I’m raising questions more than declaiming — and Jerome may be able to skewer some of these questions with Miyamoto Musashi-like finesse, a mere wave of his chopsticks.
The “let’s face it folks, we either go coal or nuclear” is a familiar tactic from the nuke industry. The option of diversifying, i.e. not getting all our power from one monolithic technology — eggs in one basket! — in a large scale centralised distribution model, is ruled out implicitly by presenting this (ahem) Manichaean choice — Big Nuke, or Big Coal. The option of reducing our energy usage significantly — transforming the demand side — also goes unmentioned. Simply shortening the darned transmission lines by a factor of 2 — i.e. diversifying and localising power production — would be an enormous savings, as the lines are embarrassingly lossy.
Secondly I think the French nuclear industry works fairly well (so far) because it is a public utility and heavily regulated. If we imagine the privatised version which the US would almost certainly be insane enough to try, with no accountability, no public oversight, nuke corporations slipping their CEOs onto the NRC board, no public information available “for security reasons” — well, think “privatisation of British rail” except that the Potters Bar incidents would be a bit more costly. It may be that nuclear power is only (semi-)practical if it is a socialised endeavour, since its social risks are so high. What happens if the US, through its international tools, managed to crush the hated French “socialism” and pull an Argentina on France, destroying the economy and forcibly privatising all the assets? How “safe” would all those nuke plants be under fragmented private ownership, run strictly for profit?
I don’t see it as being self-propagating either — OK, so EROEI is 2 to 1, but do we really believe we could go on building more generations of nuke plants using only the energy from the present generation of nuke plants? (For one thing, eventually you run out of uranium). What I mean is that they do not really replace the megagallons of fossil fuel that were used in construction, even if they put out a theoretically equivalent wattage after 15 years or so in operation. I don’t believe in rechargeable NIMH-powered bulk carriers making the round trip to Oz to bring home the uranium ore to feed Generation N of the plants, if you see the problem… 🙂
Then comes the “Marburg Problem”, or “nuke plants left unattended” scenario. Sure, there are automatic systems, failsafes upon failsafes, deadman switches galore, and the darned things are supposed to shut down safely if everyone gets MegaMarburg III or Avian Swine Virus IV (fondly known as “flying pig flu”) and dies writhing on the control room floor. But failsafes have been known to fail. An unattended nuke plant, hot and running, is a serious event waiting to happen. Whereas an unattended, abandoned wind farm eventually stops spinning and then quietly rusts away, hurting no one.
I’ve noted before some of the issues with cooling water requirements, river levels, water temperatures etc. Given that we can expect the global warming curve to continue for the forseeable future based on what we’ve been doing over the last few decades, counting on a steady, faiap endless supply of cool fresh water for reactor cooling seems a mite optimistic.
It is easy enough to say that all the waste from our nuke plants would fit in a couple of large-ish buildings (kind of like “all the people on earth could stand on Zanzibar, so there’s no population issue”). [how large, btw? apartment buildings? or the hangars at Boeing Field?] But to get to that largeish building (which I don’t wish to live near, moi — do you? who will want to? or will they be located in the midst of slums, or aboriginal lands?), it has to be transported — a risky prospect. And once there, what do we do with it from now until eternity? I mean, we are pumping water 24×7 through hot ponds right now because we ran out of room to store the rods on dry racks and it’s too dangerous to transport ’em and there’s nowhere to transport ’em to. And the Yucca Mountain thing is toast, unless BushCo decides to do it based on falsified safety studies (why the heck not, they invaded Iraq based on falsified intelligence). Where is that apartment building located, and how is it cooled? Reliably? For the next how many hundreds of years? Anyway, the waste disposal issue is a perfect illustration of a cost which steadfastly refuses to be externalised. (Maybe we need to add “feral costs” to Daly and Cobb’s delightful coinage “feral facts.”)
But I think the strongest argument against the technology may, ironically, not be a technical and public-health argument — nor even an energy efficiency argument — but a “social health” argument. And for this I will have to dig out my dog-eared copy of John Adams’ Risk, in which I think he discusses this matter at some length. If I remember his argument accurately, in précis he says that the culture of nuclear power is a “security state culture,” i.e. that the plants are so potentially dangerous (as a terrorist target for example, or a wartime target), the fuel is so dangerous, the waste is so dangerous, the potential for fissile material to go astray is so dangerous, that a culture of centralised Statist control and “elevated security” is required to make such a technology “safe”. And this culture of secrecy, paranoia, the prohibition of public oversight and access, is a culture that lends itself to abuse and excess — an inherently anti-democratic culture.
Nuke technology is the ideal excuse for a totalitarian policing style and intrusive surveillance, in other words. I will see if I can dig up his original argument — I remember it as being very interesting when I read it a few years ago. NB Dr Adams is not exactly your red/green ecolefty — he’s been published by the Cato Institute now and then 🙂
Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 12 2005 6:07 utc | 15
The liability insurance issue may be shrugged off — “oh, what a foolishly litigious society we live in!” — and I have some sympathy for that point of view, having seen the insane lengths to which ordinary activities are constrained and liberty curtailed in the US in the name of lawsuit-proofing.
However — and it is a big However too — the inability to get liability insurance is relevant. When we assess risk there are two factors to take into account. One is the statistical chance of the risk event actually taking place. The other is the severity or cost of its outcome.
In other words, we have to multiply or otherwise factor the two things together to get a “comfort zone” which an underwriter, or a neighbour, or we as voters, would want to inhabit.
If the odds against my dropping the glass of water I am carrying across the kitchen are, say, 10,000 to one (I can carry a glass of water across the kitchen 10,000 times before I drop one), that seems a very slight risk. But one of the reasons it seems very slight is that the consequences are very slight. If I were carrying a flask of plutonium dust across the kitchen, 10,000 to one odds against dropping it suddenly seem not so great. 100,000 to one would still make me pretty nervous about carrying the damn thing. A million to one wouldn’t feel a whole lot better. Basically, I don’t want to carry the damn plutonium across my kitchen at any odds, because the magnitude of the consequences of dropping it is too extreme.
When risk is imposed on people, as when a nuke plant is sited in a lower-income neighbourhood or next to your family farm or on the river that you swim and fish in [somehow they are never located in the middle of wealthy trophy-home suburbs, ya know?] the risk factor (as seen by insurance agencies or by locals) is some amalgam of the worst-case outcome (its cost in horror, in death, in money, in long-term devastation) and the odds against that outcome occurring. Nuke plants can have safety standards that are “very high” and yet still be, and feel, “risky” because of the extraordinary, extreme permanent potential costs of a failure.
I think the reluctance of underwriters to accept the potential magnitude of the risk is relevant. There is no way they can get a premium high enough to hedge against a negative outcome that is potentially damn-near-infinite in monetary terms (suppose Chernobyl had been San Onofre), without gutting the whole financial model for building nuke plants (you could never afford to build one if you had to pay realistic premiums to hedge against a major event).
Those who are familiar with the technology and work with it on a regular basis become complacent in a sense — they construct odds like 100,000 to one and a million to one, and they feel frustrated with the lay person who stubbornly refuses to feel “safe” with the technology despite these “good odds.” But from the layperson’s point of view, having a nuke plant (or anything else particularly lethal and complicated) situated near one’s home and family is rather like having an armed man walk into the living room and point a loaded and cocked gun at your child’s head. No matter how the man assures you that he has very steady hands, he has no intention of hurting your child, and the odds are better than a million to one against his having a nervous twitch or other involuntary event that would cause him to actually pull the trigger — you as the parent of that child are not going to be much mollified. The magnitude of the risk is such that the odds are irrelevant, and you are quite likely to be outraged that this risk has been imposed on you in the first place. If you are a NIMBY you will demand that he take his gun and go play someplace else, point it at someone else’s kid. If you are more socially minded you may want to know why he is allowed to go around pointing this gun at anyone, period.
All technology has risks, yada yada yada. A wind farm tower might collapse and kill someone. A big solar array might, I suppose, somehow lend itself to assisted suicide if an interloper were rash and foolhardy enough. A para stirling dish could blind or burn someone. A poorly designed woodstove can kill you with monoxide buildup. Your biogas digester might prove explosive if you were really incompetent. A major chemical spill — Bhopal for example — can be nearly as lethal as a nuke plant disaster. And it can be quiet and sinister too: some chemical compounds are nearly as insidious as radiation, some cause genetic damage, some take years to kill you. But in general, chemical oopses are a bit easier to “clean up” afterwards.
Seems to me that if we want “safety” we can either choose to play with safer toys, or we can place our trust in a rigid technocratic management structure that is vulnerable to (a) political corruption, (b) social collapse, (c) slow degradation of quality and standards due to complacency over time, (d) unexpected consequences and unforeseen failure modes (bad O rings that take down space shuttles for example). My preferred choice would be to play with safer toys. If this meant having electricity for only 12 hours out of 24, I could live with that.
We make the assumption that we could not possibly live with electricity in smaller doses or for fewer hours out of the day, and therefore we must put our faith in big government, big technocracy, megaprojects, and lethal technologies. Me, I think this is Easter Island thinking 🙂
Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 12 2005 18:24 utc | 20
Good one Colman. Yep, like cold fusion and cost-effective hydrogen — it’s always just a few years away.
Meanwhile, appropriately enough, The indefatigable Helen Caldicott pleads against nuke plants as a “green” power source — as she has been an anti-nuke campaigner for years this is not surprising, but she makes some quantitative assertsion here which bear consideration:
At present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world. If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 large, 1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the US since 1978, this proposal is less than practical. Furthermore, even if we decided today to replace all fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear power, there would only be enough economically viable uranium to fuel the reactors for three to four years.
The true economies of the nuclear industry are never fully accounted for. The cost of uranium enrichment is subsidised by the US government. The true cost of the industry’s liability in the case of an accident in the US is estimated to be $US560billion ($726billion), but the industry pays only $US9.1billion – 98per cent of the insurance liability is covered by the US federal government. The cost of decommissioning all the existing US nuclear reactors is estimated to be $US33billion. These costs – plus the enormous expense involved in the storage of radioactive waste for a quarter of a million years – are not now included in the economic assessments of nuclear electricity.
It is said that nuclear power is emission-free. The truth is very different.
In the US, where much of the world’s uranium is enriched, including Australia’s, the enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50per cent of global warming.
Also, this enrichment facility and another at Portsmouth, Ohio, release from leaky pipes 93per cent of the chlorofluorocarbon gas emitted yearly in the US. The production and release of CFC gas is now banned internationally by the Montreal Protocol because it is the main culprit responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion. But CFC is also a global warmer, 10,000 to 20,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel at all of its stages – the mining and milling of uranium, the construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste.
In summary, nuclear power produces, according to a 2004 study by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, only three times fewer greenhouse gases than modern natural-gas power stations.
OTOH, natural gas is also running out. so the comparison is perhaps not a cheery one.
Chernobyl 19 years later
Following acute international pressure, the Ukrainian government closed the last working reactor in 2000. The plant’s activities revolve these days around maintenance of the concrete ‘sarcophagus’ that covers the ruins of the explosion.
While radiation levels are not excessive at present, the precariousness of the structure has compelled the government to approve construction of a new safe confinement surmounting the old concrete block.
The project has already kicked off, but ”the overall cost of the task is 1 billion, 91 million dollars,” Igor Vasilevich from the Ministry of Fuel and Energy told IPS. ”We had donations from several developed countries, but it’s far from enough.”
In line with dominant international interests, most current government efforts are directed at increasing nuclear safety levels. But there is also a costly social dimension to Chernobyl.
Ukraine had to outgrow two separate Chernobyl traumas: the first following the explosion, the second when mass media gave a true account of its consequences. It is estimated that around six million people have been affected in some manner. Even a close estimate of the number of deaths will probably never be reached.
Up to 50 were reported dead as a result of immediate exposure. Other estimates range from 250 to a few thousand.
But many continue to face grave health problems. The most dramatic is the situation of the so-called ”children of Chernobyl” who grew up in contaminated areas and now suffer from thyroid cancer.
Such vague, hard-to-quantify costs. Death that comes very slowly, or a lifetime of ill health and dependency on an already overburdened medical system. Evacuated villages — villages of illegal squatters defying the background count. Depression and alienation among the relocated. And a quantified estimate of $1Bn plus change for continuing the containment project. And that’s after 20 years and how many billions already?
Single-failure costs are very, very high with this technology.
When we consider that we could cut demand by half simply by aggressively phasing out inefficient technologies, and probably more deeply by cost increases and punitive taxes on above-baseline consumption — I dunno, the notion that “we cannot consume less and the only way we can go on consuming the same is to build 2000 nuke plants, so bring on the bulldozers!” seems irrational somehow.
I’m most interested in Caldicott’s claim that there is only enough uranium for 3 or 4 years of a burn rate sufficient to match our present fossil fuel consumption. I wonder what figures this is based on… I wonder if she answers email, ‘cos if this is true then the whole “nukes will save us” line seems dead in the water before it even gets started. You need 40 years to get a 2:1 payback on these plants. If you run out of fuel at year 4 or 5 then it’s a dead, stinking loss.
Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 15 2005 18:31 utc | 40
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