Nuclear can't help

Denialists suddenly flip their position when nuclear power enters the conversation.  Somehow, installing renewables is a leftist plot, but nuclear?  Ah, any red-blooded conservative can support it, and should.  The trouble is, it's very expensive.  And it takes a long time to build out.  Perhaps that's exactly why denialists like it.  While it's taking decades to be built, fossil fuel use can continue.

Finding a way to head off the galloping climate crisis, although it’s taxing the world’s best brains, leaves one clear and inescapable conclusion, reiterated not only by researchers but acknowledged implicitly by the industry: nuclear cannot help.

Last week the French builders of the nuclear reactors being built in the United Kingdom announced a startling rise in construction costs. The news came on the day a report was published which said nuclear generation worldwide is now hopelessly uncompetitive in cost compared with renewable power.

The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2019 also stresses that as far as climate change is concerned nuclear power has another huge disadvantage. Wind and solar power stations take only months to build before they produce power, so they quickly start to displace fossil fuels and save emissions of carbon dioxide.

Nuclear reactors, on the other hand, take at least five years to build − and very often more than a decade − and so the fossil fuel plants they are designed to replace continue to pump out greenhouse gases. With the need to cut carbon emissions increasingly urgent, this makes nuclear power the wrong solution to climate change, the report says.

The announcement by the French nuclear giant Électricité de France (EDF) of the rise in costs of the twin reactors being built at Hinkley Point C in the West of England put the cost of construction at up to £22.5 billion (US$27.9bn) an increase of up to £2.9bn ($3.6bn) from its last estimate in 2017.  With the construction of the station still in its initial stages, costs are expected to rise further before the first power is generated in late 2025 – even if there are no further delays.

Two similar pressurised water reactors close to completion in France and Finland have taken more than twice as long to construct as originally estimated and are still not producing power. Both projects have recently announced yet more delays.

[Read more here]


We can buy wind and solar "off the shelf", and they can be installed within a couple of years.  And their costs keep on falling.  If we have a grid diversified by generation type and geography, we need surprisingly little storage.  Eight hours would allow us to go to 90% renewables, and the last ten per cent could come from hydro, biomass, and power-to-gas.  We can easily transition to a 100% green electricity supply and we don't need nuclear to do it.