Throwing Cold Water on Nuclear Hype

February 5th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 2:20 pm

When the Government recently decided to ’support’ a new generation of nuclear power stations (should anyone wish to build them), one of the spats that ensued involved the vulnerability of the new stations to flooding, should we see a rise in sea levels over the next few decades.  This is ony one dimension of the problem: the necessity of siting nuclear power stations near large bodies of water for use in the reactors’ cooling systems is one of the issues where the consequences of a potential world-wide expansion of nuclear power generation are particularly serious. First, there is the problem of finding sites with suitable access to water for all the thousands of new reactors which would need to be built to make any impact on the level of global carbon emissions.  Secondly, there is the question of whether the water is going to be there for them in the first place.  In October 2006, the Met. Office’s Hadley Centre produced research which suggested that the amount of global land surface affected by drought could increase by up to 25% by the end of the century.

Dr Eleanor Burke, with colleagues from the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change, has undertaken the first-ever projections of global drought which is published on Thursday in the Journal of Hydrometeorology.  Results show that areas under extreme drought could increase to 30% from today’s figure of 3% and up to half of the land surface might be influenced by moderate drought at any one time.

The long-term span of this projection might cause readers to shrug at this point – after all, the first new reactors in the UK are going to be ready in about 20 (ish) years, aren’t they?  But water shortages have been taking big bites out of nuclear generating capacity in some areas of the USA and Europe for a couple of decades now.  For an update on the current situation, see this report, in which a representative from the UN Environment Programme comments on the extent of the problem:

“Currently, at least 24 nuclear plants in the south-eastern United States face shutdown or drastically limited operations because severe drought conditions have lowered the levels of lakes and rivers that supply cooling water – that’s 23% of the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants. Last year in Italy, the River Po ran so low there were plans to shut down power plants there.”  

Water shortages (which, as the EU report mentions, can only be exacerbated by the rush to biofuels) can only have severe operational consequences for nuclear power’s much vaunted capacity to keep all those lights from going out, the severity of which could only increase the more dependent a given nation becomes on nuclear generation.