Nuclear waste defies disposal

Source: The Ecologist

There are many who argue that the only way to de-carbonise our economies is to go nuclear.  But there are problems.

The first is the cost.  According to Lazard's calculations, the average cost of electricity from a new nuclear plant in the US would be $150/MWh, and that does not the cost of decommissioning, the benefit of Federal loan guarantees, or the cost of government insurance, as nuclear plants can't get private insurance because of the "fat-tail" risks.  Meanwhile, the average cost of wind is $42.5/MWh and of utility-scale solar is $41/MWh.  So nuclear is 3.6 times as expensive as wind or solar and that's after all the implicit subsidies.  Second is build-out time.  Nuclear power plants take more than a decade to complete.  Most plants in the West (where safety standards are high) are several years behind schedule and multiples of the original cost estimates over budget.

We need to de-carbonise our economies as fast as possible.  In the time taken to build a nuclear power stations we can build 3 or 4 comparable wind or solar farms.  For the same cost*.  Adding 12 hours of storage to "firm" variable output from renewables will within 5 years add just $11/MWh to the cost of wind or solar.

And finally, of course, there's the problem of toxic waste.  And that problem isn't going away:

The nuclear industry, and governments across the world, have yet to find a solution to the nuclear waste legacy, the highly dangerous radioactive remains that are piling up in unsafe stores in many countries.

A report commissioned by Greenpeace France says there is now a serious threat of a major accident or terrorist attack in several of the countries most heavily reliant on nuclear power, including the US, France and the UK.

The report fears for what may be to come: “When the stability of nations is measured in years and perhaps decades into the future, what will be the viability of states over the thousands-of-year timeframes required to manage nuclear waste?”

The estimates of costs for dealing with the waste in the future are compiled by government experts but vary widely from country to country, and all figures are just official guesswork. All are measured in billions of dollars.

To give an example of actual annual costs for one waste site in the UK, Sellafield in north-west England, the budget just for keeping it safe is £3 bn (US$3.9 bn) a year.

It is estimated that disposing of the waste at Sellafield would cost £80 bn, but that is at best an informed guess since no way of disposing of it has been found.

The report details the waste from the whole nuclear cycle. This begins with the billions of tons of mildly radioactive uranium mine tailings that are left untended in spoil heaps in more than a dozen countries.

Then there are the stores of thousands of tons of depleted uranium left over after producing nuclear fuel and weapons. Last, there is the highly radioactive fuel removed from the reactors, some of it reprocessed to obtain plutonium, leaving behind extremely dangerous liquid waste.

Hundreds of ageing nuclear power stations now have dry stores or deep ponds full of old used fuel, known as spent fuel, from decades of refuelling reactors.

The old fuel has to be cooled for 30 years or more to prevent it spontaneously catching fire and sending a deadly plume of radioactivity hundreds of miles downwind.

Some idea of the dangerous radiation involved is the fact that standing one metre away from a spent fuel assembly removed from a reactor a year previously could kill you in about one minute, the Greenpeace report says.

Although the environmental damage from uranium mining is massive, the major danger comes from fires or explosions in spent fuel stores, which need constant cooling to prevent “catastrophic releases” of radioactivity into urban areas.

There are now an estimated quarter of a million tons of spent fuel stored at dozens of power stations in 14 nuclear countries.

The report concentrates on Belgium, Finland, France, Japan, Sweden, the UK and the US. What happens in Russia and China is not open to public scrutiny.

All countries have severe problems, but those with the most reactors that have also gone in for reprocessing spent fuel to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons face the worst.

The report says of France, which has 58 reactors, a number of which are soon to be retired: “There is currently no credible solution for long-term disposal of nuclear waste in France; the urgent matter is reducing risks from existing waste, including spent fuel.”

In the 60 years since the nuclear industry began producing highly dangerous waste, some of it has been dumped in the sea or vented into the atmosphere, but most has been stored, waiting for someone to come up with the technology to neutralise it or a safe way of disposing of it.

[Read more here]

If nuclear were feasible, I would grit my teeth and support it, because unrestrained global warming will be so catastrophic for the world.  But I just don't think it is.  It's uneconomic; it would take too long to build; and it's horribly unsafe.


* Within 5 years, adding 12 hours of storage to make  variable output from renewables "firm" will  add just $11/MWh to the cost of wind or solar, if the batteries are added while the wind or solar farm is constructed.