Hope springs eternal for that Nuclear Revival.
I wish them luck. In the meantime, we need to be building solar, wind, and battery storage as fast as possible, because there is no climate solution that does not rely on massive expansion of clean energy.
Nuclear-energy officials arrived in Brussels this week amid a growing wave of public support for atomic power. They left humbled by the tepid reaction of bankers assessing the price tag of their ambitions.
The International Atomic Energy Agency convened a summit to build momentum for a low-emissions technology that many expect will be critical for hitting climate targets. A group of mostly Western countries pledged to triple nuclear generation by 2050. But lenders balked at the eyewatering cost of doing so.
“If the bankers are uniformly pessimistic, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said Thursday after listening to a panel of international lenders explain why they’re unwilling to provide the $5 trillion the industry needs by mid-century.
“The bankers are calling for a proven business case,” said Jozef Sikela, the Czech Republic’s industry and trade minister. “We need to find a way to make it predictable, stable, bankable and affordable.”
Projects in Western economies have been plagued by construction delays and ballooning costs in recent decades. The newest reactor in the European Union — Olkiluoto 3 in Finland — started generating power last year, more than a decade late and three times over budget. Similarly in the US, Southern Co.’s Vogtle facility came in seven years behind schedule and $16 billion over estimates.
“The project risks, as we have seen in reality, seem to be very high,” said European Investment Bank Vice President Thomas Ostros. While the world’s biggest multilateral lender won’t close the door on nuclear, it recommends that countries needing power quickly focus on renewables and energy efficiency, he said.
China and Russia are building the most reactors. But their state-owned model of development is at odds with the European and US emphasis on private capital. That will likely need to change if Western economies want to maintain nuclear’s market share.
“We need state involvement, I don’t see any other model,” Ostros said. “Probably we need quite heavy state involvement to make projects bankable.”
Ines Rocha, a director at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, and Fernando Cubillos, a banker at the Development Bank of Latin America, also said their lending priorities lean toward renewables and transmission grids. “Nuclear comes last,” Cubillos said.
Potential new investors could include sovereign wealth funds or philanthropists, according to Charles Oppenheimer, who advocates for nuclear energy at The Oppenheimer Project.
“If it’s a safe and secure investment with a predictable return, there’s a huge amount of capital,” said the grandson of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the US physicist who ran the Manhattan Project. “What is lacking generally is capital for that risky build.”
Europe and the US have been trying to engineer nuclear out of its malaise, proposing a new generation of smaller reactors that can be factory-made and assembled on-site. Theoretically, that approach could cut costs, but has yet to be proven.
Michigan is among the handful of U.S. states looking toward nuclear power to achieve clean energy goals.
While nuclear power could expand its role in the generation mix, unresolved obstacles remain, according to a study presented to the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC).
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and state lawmakers had directed an outside consulting group, ENERCON Services East, to study the feasibility of nuclear power in Michigan. The study considered the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear energy and included evaluations, conclusions and recommendations on design characteristics, environmental impact, engineering and more.
Disadvantages cited in the study included high upfront capital costs, lengthy project development timelines, community concerns and no national resolution to the issue of permanent disposal of spent nuclear waste.
Despite tax credit benefits, the “initial cost of [First-of-a-kind] nuclear deployments is expected to be substantial for the first movers, with followers positioned to reap the benefits from lessons learned and increased supply chain efficiencies leading to lower costs for follow-on deployments,” study authors said.
To remove this roadblock for first movers, Michigan could consider pooling financial support with other states interested in adding nuclear power, the authors said.
Some of those costs of building new nuclear projects could be recouped through long-term economic impacts in local economies and increased tax payments, the authors also said.
Development of small modular reactors, which are considered suitable replacements for fossil fuel plants, have drawn interest from 15 EU member states, but are still at least a decade away from conceivably being put into serial production.
China and Russia, meanwhile, already have them in operation.
“This is definitely late,” said Fatih Birol, executive director at the International Energy Agency. “I wish we wouldn’t have seen such decline in nuclear power, especially in Europe.”
Amory Lovins in Bloomberg Law (2021):
Does climate protection need more nuclear power? No—just the opposite. Saving the most carbon per dollar and per year requires not just generators that burn no fossil fuel, but also those deployable with the least cost and time. Those aren’t nuclear.
Making 10% of world and 20% of U.S. commercial electricity, nuclear power is historically significant but now stagnant. In 2020, its global capacity additions minus retirements totaled only 0.4 GW (billion watts). Renewables in contrast added 278.3 GW—782x more capacity—able to produce about 232x more annual electricity (based on U.S. 2020 performance by technology). Renewables swelled supply and displaced carbon as much every 38 hours as nuclear did all year. As of early December, 2021’s score looks like nuclear –3 GW, renewables +290 GW. Game over.
The world already invests annually $0.3 trillion each, mostly voluntary private capital, in energy efficiency and renewables, but about $0.015–0.03 trillion, or 20–40x less, in nuclear—mostly conscripted, because investors got burned. Of 259 US power reactors ordered (1955–2016), only 112 got built and 93 remain operable; by mid-2017, just 28 stayed competitive and suffered no year-plus outage. In the oil business, that’s called an 89% dry-hole risk.
Renewables provided all global electricity growth in 2020. Nuclear power struggles to sustain its miniscule marginal share as its vendors, culture, and prospects shrivel. World reactors average 31 years old, in the U.S., 41. Within a few years, old and uneconomic reactors’ retirements will consistently eclipse additions, tipping output into permanent decline. World nuclear capacity already fell in five of the past 12 years for a 2% net drop. Performance has become erratic: the average French reactor in 2020 produced nothing one-third of the time.
China accounts for most current and projected nuclear growth. Yet China’s 2020 renewable investments about matched its cumulative 2008–20 nuclear investments. Together, in 2020 in China, sun and wind generated twice nuclear’s output, adding 60x more capacity and 6x more output at 2–3 times lower forward cost per kWh. Sun and wind are now the cheapest bulk power source for over 91% of world electricity.
First establish what is needed.
Then how it can be accomplished.
Then how to accomplish it. Work on the problems, not use them as excuses.
Saving the world is inherently cost effective.
Wishful thinking, and love of money, will kill us.
I think we’ve established that we need to reduce carbon emissions ASAP, and defer anything that doesn’t meet that goal. We have to take into account
– opportunity cost
– carbon payback period
– dependability of the solution
For arguments’ sake, we might assume that efforts to promote nuclear power do not impact the ongoing quick addition of wind/solar/geothermal/storage, both in terms of finances (that direct Oppenheimer funding?) and construction (w/s/g/s have different labor footprints, I think).
It’s possible that the carbon payback period for nuclear might be high enough that it even makes the problem worse in the near term.
Wind, solar and storage have reliable scheduling and budgeting turnaround, but any given NPP project may suffer from the same budget overruns and delays we’ve seen in recent times.
Thomas Ostros, Vice President of the European Investment Bank, had previously spent 17 years as member of parliament and minister in the Social Democrat party, which, along with their allies, the Greens, had been instrumental in closing several reactors, imposing heavy taxes on nuclear power (so it recieved no competitive benefit from carbon taxes), and reducing nuclear’s share of Sweden’s power from ~45% to below 30%. With power demand rising, nuclear was one reason for the SD and Greens losing the last election – the new government has axed previous restrictions on reactors, and proposes to build 2 more this decade, 10 by 2040.
Finland is the only country where the Green party has abandoned opposition to nuclear. The giant Olkiluoto reactor there famously took nearly 2 decades to build – but shortly after it started work, both power prices and power emissions dropped noticeably. In the last 2 years, nuclear went from 25 to nearly 40% of Finland’s power, and emission intensity halved. The increase in nuclear production is about double what Denmark, the wind pioneer, managed with wind over the same period. Czechia, which already gets a third of its power from nuclear (and slightly more from coal), has just dropped its plan to build a one gigawatt reactor – it’s going to build four, instead. Exports to Germany, which single-handedly caused much of the drop in world nuclear capacity by closing all its reactors, should help to pay them off.
2022 was the worst year ever for French nuclear – half the plants down for maintenance, net imports instead of exports, % of power down from ~70% to below 60%. Things are looking up now, but it’s a moot point whether the French industry can take the lead in new build. South Korea, which, like France, got rid of an anti-nuclear administration a few years ago, and has a much better recent record in construction, wants to eat their lunch.
There isn’t a lunch to eat. It’s more like the leftovers the night after an “all that you can” eat shrimp buffet.
“We need state involvement, I don’t see any other model,” Ostros said. “Probably we need quite heavy state involvement to make projects bankable.”
In which case, there is literally no requirement whatever for bank involvement. Their sole interest will be to provide cash flows for their own profit. Given our time lines, nuclear projects are getting to be outside any effective response anyway so let’s focus on what we CAN do this year, next decade and beyond rather than pour billions into these fantasy games.
Or, just maybe, a long history of overly-optimistic claims* with respect to scheduling and budget has left them thrice shy.
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*Bankers won’t fall for cherry-picking the successes after the fact to mask the overall financial failure rate of NPP projects.