To Dream The Impossible Dream

July 4th, 2007

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Posted by ChrisG at 8:26 pm

The Government’s massive and all-involving consultation process over the promised new generation of nuclear power stations (suppported wholeheartedly by the Dour One) was launched with not much fanfare in May with the publication of this weighty document (PDF, 1.8Mb). Anyone interested in getting involved in Gordon’s first Big Conversation might want to take a look at this report from the Oxford Research Group.

In it, the authors point out that, in a world based on the presumption of increasing energy demands, the massive, capital-intensive resource requirements of a nuclear programme able to make a contribution of any significance to the ‘energy mix’ makes a global nuclear renaissance an economic and ecological impossibility.

Taking an average reactor size of 1,000 MWe, between 2,000 and 2,500 power reactors will be needed worldwide. If we take 2,250 new reactors, then between now and 2075 nearly three new reactors a month would need to start delivering electricity to their respective grids. Moreover, because of the limited lifespans of nuclear-power reactors old reactors will have to be replaced. Lets say it will be fifteen years until a new reactor is delivering electricity (2022), but that an additional 250 reactors would be required to replace the aging fleet. This means that nearly four new reactors would have to begin construction each month from now until 2075.

But even if such a nuclear resurgence was successful at any scale, it would hugely increase the possibility of global political instability. This risk would derive from the need to develop new advanced reactor types based on the plutonium (as opposed to uranium) fuelled breeder reactor model. Such an evolution of reactor design is necessary because of the increase in demand for (decidedly non-renewable) uranium that would accompany any expansion in the number of nuke plants worldwide. Breeder reactors are another of the nuclear industry’s saviour technologies on the back of which vast amounts of public money have been wasted in subsidies. Nuclear promises have time and again relied on the heavy promotion of such ’solutions’ in order to scare up enough cash to keep the industry clanking along. Supposed to, in effect, produce more nuclear fuel than they use, the previous generation of fast breeder reactors was in fact a colossal failure, in France, Japan, Germany, the UK and the USA. What needs to happen between now and 2030 is for the industry to make the technology work. Otherwise the (debatable) estimate of 85 years of uranium at current levels of demand will see the industry collapse worldwide.

If the industry manages to buck its longest trend, and produce technology that attains the performance targets set for it, then the risks of instability follow on directly from the amount of plutonium that will be made available. Leaving aside the issue, dear to our hearts here at SW, of the inherent injustices of nuclear waste production, the likely proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possibility of weapons material being readily available to anyone interested in a bit of asymmetrical advantage would only increase already recognised dangers. What the ORG report asks us, despite the language of cost-benefit analysis that frames it, is to consider questions that cannot be reduced to risk calculations: is a world powered by a massively expanded programme of breeder reactors the sort of world we would wish to live in?