I feel you have missed some things, though, mostly about the operational part.
"Nuclear doesn't need to be that expensive", but it is. It also takes a very long time to build a plant. And it can only be switched on once it's finished (unlike solar, where you can switch on one row of panels at a time).
We have the recent example of Olkiluoto 3, in Finland. The contractor went bankrupt. In Vogtle, in the US, the contractor, Westinghouse, went bankrupt. You point to South Korea, which is true, they have the industry knowledge, they build the same type of reactor all the time. But for instance, Europe is not South Korea. I analyse in further detail in this article the last 20 years of nuclear building in Europe: https://europeanperspective.substack.com/p/schedules-costs-and-risks-of-new
"We don't need to depend on dubious countries", but we do. Nuclear plants in Eastern Europe, which have been built under a soviet design, need soviet fuel and they had to buy it from Russia. It's been very difficult for western suppliers to provide fuel (not sure if that's solved now).
On top of that, most of the nuclear knowledge in the world comes from Russia, from the national company Rosatom. Rosatom is building nuclear in Turkey, are we OK with this? Look at Finland, they cancelled one plant in progress because 30% of the ownership was Russian.
Missing Rosatom and Russia's role is one of the main shortcomings I find in this article.
"We could build wherever", but we can't. You still need to find a location as far as possible from fault lines and possible earthquake-risk areas.
All in all, if I had a lot of money to invest, in Europe, and I wanted to generate electricity, I would not go for an option in which the continent industry doesn't have experience, or good track record, and that it would take many years to generate the first Kw (if it ever does).
Plus, decommissioning plants, which needs to be done, and it's extremely expensive and time-consuming. Calder Hall in the UK will be decommissioned one hundred years for now (if things go according to plan).
You completely missed a crucial aspect of reliability: how often nuclear plants are offline. This matters a lot when your grid relies on them and you don't (and really can't, practically) have a lot of redundancy. In the last few years, France's reactors have famously been offline for crucial months even as energy crises have ravaged Europe, throwing the electricity sector in the rest of Western Europe into chaos. Here in Sweden, we have four operational reactors and two of them were offline last week, during an unseasonable cold-snap. Electricity prices shot up 7x overnight. Even Finland's brand-new nuclear plant (TWO DECADES in the making and billions over budget) has been offline many times this year, again, shooting up prices.
People love to talk about how renewables are unreliable, but the inconvenient truth is that *all* power sources are unreliable. Including (and especially) fossil fuel generator plants. And nuclear is no exception. And the problem with nuclear power, especially, is that it is so expensive and capital-intensive to build and uneconomical to just switch on and off, so you aren't going to build more than your baseline load. So, when your reactor's down, you don't have a backup. When dozens are down (as in the case of France recently), you are in real trouble.
Nuclear power is no panacea: It take a very long time to construct, it's extremely challenging to finance, it requires a lot of complicated maintenance even to keep running (much less run with optimal safety), and it is vulnerable to extreme weather, too.
IMHO you missed as Rafa says - the ong building time of plants - and the operational cost - to live up to the safety requirements thats there currently. South Korea doesn't have the same requirements to live up to.
So either we "ignore what our experts in europe deemed important' - or we wait for Thorium (thats the same as molten salt reactors right?)reactors to actually be in production - and then with molten salt - safety requirements should be able to be relaxed - so it actually will be possible to do it cheaper than wind (or at same cost - but using less landscape space).
The biggest danger which your post ignores - is that IF we sit and wait for nuclear to reach be workable in europe/us - we'll be wasting a LOT of years in wind production capacity - so we should IMHO build wind (and for countries that use airconditioning because of sun - solar to match ) capacity NOW.. and those wind and solar live 15-25 years expectedly - and at that time - hopefully nuclear can be ready to maybe take over some of it.. we'll see.
The vast majority of nuclear plants are offline only for their scheduled maintenance and refueling, which is always arranged to coincide with periods of minimum demand. Some plants operate on 12-month cycles but most operate on 18-month or even 24-month cycles. This is why typically nuclear plants operate with over 90% availability. Solar in contrast - at least in Germany and Switzerland - achieves only 11% availability. In other words, you need to install 13 GW of solar energy (plus associated storage capacity) to replace one 1.6 GW reactor.
I appreciate the running debate in these comments ... the back and forth is thought provoking and good to see ... three thoughts for consideration ...
One ... if we pull back up to the top level of the debate, a driver of the argument is basically that we are missing game changing sources of energy due to inappropriate comparisons (and metrics) which reinforces inappropriate actions/beliefs. I wonder if we quantified the life cycle costs removing all subsidies & cost effects of regulatory burden; added back "clean up" or site retirement; adjusted for replacement capital needed; and set appropriate long term capital costs --- could we compare these different energy sources on a comparable 80 - 100 year timeline. Hypothetically picking the year 2100 ish (this is the IPCC reference point & also the reference point for much of the global population calculations), we might be able to put this thinking onto a footing that makes comparison more balanced.
It seems to me that a significant part of the argument (not Tomas's alone BTW ... Lomborg and a few others are attempting to focus the policy effort similarly - see The Smartest Targets for the World as an illustrative approach for evaluating policy and selected initiatives), is that once we understand these comparisons, then the levers we pull - subsidies, regulations, education & training, standardization & productivity, financing costs / partnerships - would be directed differently.
Two ... I have instinctively feared that the policy direction we have been moving in is incorrect - not because climate change or human energy needs are the wrong issue - but because we are not working to the allocation of resource which strategically gets to a balanced outcome for humans (I don't have that answer). Our debates are not "human focused". It would be helpful to remove the "social / political" dogma (both sides) from this and go about finding the best way to create a global direction which relies on human initiative. Focus us on a positive mission (land on the moon, cure cancer). Once we have at least a directional sense of this, the debates on the details become more a matter of levelling the field so that different "how to" approaches can compete (ie 4 years to build a reactor vs 10 .... or something like the speed of the Covid vaccine development because the "how to" changed). Further, many of the debates I read are positioned in a binary manner - either / or. This is critically wrong when it comes to climate solutions and energy freedom for humans. Is there not a way of defining this in a "non zero sum" manner (credit to Robert Wright for the term) ? Directional approaches always require learning which means adjustment when we don't get the outcome we expect - and most plans are wrong before they are put to the test - so adaptation/innovation in pursuit of a direction would be more constructive and powerful.
Third, if we can imply in a quick sentence that the world needs to spend trillions (say 25% of global GDP equivalent), then the allocation of resource becomes pretty critical and a mission focus would move the needle. The arguments always seem to point to a "if you don't achieve XXX, by this date, we are doomed". Nothing is framed in learning stages or achievable actions that add up. Even in this article, the reference to 15,000 plants could power the world ... ok I get why its there ... but assuming the $20 billion number per plant can be used, that's $300 trillion. I can't get my head around that just the same as I can't get my head around the numbers for solar / wind / EV / etc. The point being that the mission can be understandable but how do we break it down to get a sense of the policy alternatives that need real understanding to be implemented.
As always ... thank you for the great work and to the group for running with it ... from somewhere where it is Minus 35 degrees today :))
You say Nuclear plant life can be extended, but do not consider the cost of that extension. Koeberg in South Africa cost over R20 billion to extend its life and there are big queries that we have not been told the true costs (and it is far over time as well).
Nuclear safety also depends on good quality of staff. Another problem we are having is South Africa is losing skills to run our nuclear plant (Koeberg).
You underestimate the cooling issue. Nuclear plants have to be on the coast or on a large dam. One problem they had in France was there was insufficient cooling during a drought. The loss of the Kakhovka reservoir means that the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is unable to operate, even if the war situation allowed it. Because the dam was needed for the nuclear plants maybe one should add the loss of life for the dam breaching to nuclear deaths.
The other issue with nuclear is it goes back to a centralised supply philosophy. A renewable decentralised grid is more resilient. I saw an article by someone in Ukraine to that effect.
Wind is not subsizdized in Denmark f.ex. Operators of windfarms actually now PAY for the right to setup windfarms (offshore) - and also pay their share of the "grid expansion" costs.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, Tomas. I agree that freedom is the main advantage of liberal democracies, particularly if you define freedom broadly. I also agree that "Western World" doesn't quite capture it (though Australians -- I'm one! -- are certainly used to thinking of themselves as part of the Western World) because it throws the focus on geography and history rather than on something more universal. Freedom certainly fits the "universal" bill, but it's vague, means somewhat different things to different people, risks alienating (or at least irritating) many of your readers, directs attention to the ADVANTAGE (as you say) of that type of system rather than the nature of the system itself and commits the sin of using a value-fraught word when what is needed is a neutral one.
Whoa, I considered myself pro-nuclear before reading this article, not sure if this was appropriate compared to now!
I am very happy that we have a few state actors with continuous domestic plant construction programs again, this is also important to allow newcomers to buy their new reactors from experienced vendors without intolerable delays and overruns. Pakistan, UAE and hopefully Turkey and Bangladesh are real success stories enabled by Chinese, Korean and Russian baseload of domestic construction. Lets hope France can become good again, we need a strong European NPP supplier too. Very happy about many European NPP plans, this has the potential for economics of scale for the first time since the 90s.
Great article, Tomas. I appreciated having it all in one article and so well thought out. One thing I was selfishly wishing you would have added was more in depth exploration of Three Mile Island hoax/exaggeration and how the debut of The China Syndrome movie the same week fed into the hysteria. I try to tell this story succinctly to my students about how media themes can be self fulfilling but I’m not as good of a story teller as you are. So it would have been nice to see a few paragraphs about three mile island instead of just passing mention. I completely understand why you chose Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples, as they are more illustrative to your thesis. But selfishly I love the eye opening look I get when I tell students about Three Mile Island hysteria. I also wonder if the olde age of the US Congress maybe over represents three mile island as a reason why nuclear is risky.
This comparison and the global promotion of electricity generation via nuclear power should have happened in early 2000, rather than now. China should have been helped to scale up reactors rather than coal plants... The thing is that electricity generation via nuclear power is a complex and heavily centralized infrastructure that does require investments for decades and stable/consistent political support over that same time, so countries where plans are made for decades (like China, Russia and few others) or where the states are rich and strong with monetary sovereignty still there like Japan or South Korea.
If the political landscape and/or stability are much less consistent over decades (like in Europe), how could we expect to have a government committing on huge upfront budget, while the return on investment will only start to show a decade later.
With similar budget a liberal or a right-wing government would get quicker real results (to boast about, before next election) by going for the more decentralized option to incentivize national R&D on solar heat, solar PV and wind power, while supporting lower-cost manufacturing production (and material extraction) in the border countries to the EU (north-Africa), trading energy infrastructure development funds and jobs there against better control of the immigration for instance...
I’m an MMTer, which means I believe fiat-currency governments need not incur ‘cost’ when they fund public purpose. In fact it is the whole point of a fiat currency. On the other hand, you can use private capital if you want to but it begs the question why?
Canada and its CANDU technology doesn’t get much attention or recognition. Ontario is currently struggling with building more of its proven CANDUs or new ‘small’ (300MW) GE-Hitachi reactors based on ‘proven’ components.
As an ex-engineer, I am convinced of the need to establish proven technologies that can be built quickly and reliably vs new, unproven designs. At the same time there is a need to innovate. It’s a difficult issue.
No mention of fusion - no complaints - I always wonder how we will ever get the energy out. At the end of the day, all nuclear reactors share exactly the same steam turbine technology with coal fired plants. The trick is how you get the energy to the stream turbine.
Thanks for this very detailed article.
I feel you have missed some things, though, mostly about the operational part.
"Nuclear doesn't need to be that expensive", but it is. It also takes a very long time to build a plant. And it can only be switched on once it's finished (unlike solar, where you can switch on one row of panels at a time).
We have the recent example of Olkiluoto 3, in Finland. The contractor went bankrupt. In Vogtle, in the US, the contractor, Westinghouse, went bankrupt. You point to South Korea, which is true, they have the industry knowledge, they build the same type of reactor all the time. But for instance, Europe is not South Korea. I analyse in further detail in this article the last 20 years of nuclear building in Europe: https://europeanperspective.substack.com/p/schedules-costs-and-risks-of-new
"We don't need to depend on dubious countries", but we do. Nuclear plants in Eastern Europe, which have been built under a soviet design, need soviet fuel and they had to buy it from Russia. It's been very difficult for western suppliers to provide fuel (not sure if that's solved now).
On top of that, most of the nuclear knowledge in the world comes from Russia, from the national company Rosatom. Rosatom is building nuclear in Turkey, are we OK with this? Look at Finland, they cancelled one plant in progress because 30% of the ownership was Russian.
Missing Rosatom and Russia's role is one of the main shortcomings I find in this article.
"We could build wherever", but we can't. You still need to find a location as far as possible from fault lines and possible earthquake-risk areas.
All in all, if I had a lot of money to invest, in Europe, and I wanted to generate electricity, I would not go for an option in which the continent industry doesn't have experience, or good track record, and that it would take many years to generate the first Kw (if it ever does).
Plus, decommissioning plants, which needs to be done, and it's extremely expensive and time-consuming. Calder Hall in the UK will be decommissioned one hundred years for now (if things go according to plan).
You completely missed a crucial aspect of reliability: how often nuclear plants are offline. This matters a lot when your grid relies on them and you don't (and really can't, practically) have a lot of redundancy. In the last few years, France's reactors have famously been offline for crucial months even as energy crises have ravaged Europe, throwing the electricity sector in the rest of Western Europe into chaos. Here in Sweden, we have four operational reactors and two of them were offline last week, during an unseasonable cold-snap. Electricity prices shot up 7x overnight. Even Finland's brand-new nuclear plant (TWO DECADES in the making and billions over budget) has been offline many times this year, again, shooting up prices.
People love to talk about how renewables are unreliable, but the inconvenient truth is that *all* power sources are unreliable. Including (and especially) fossil fuel generator plants. And nuclear is no exception. And the problem with nuclear power, especially, is that it is so expensive and capital-intensive to build and uneconomical to just switch on and off, so you aren't going to build more than your baseline load. So, when your reactor's down, you don't have a backup. When dozens are down (as in the case of France recently), you are in real trouble.
Nuclear power is no panacea: It take a very long time to construct, it's extremely challenging to finance, it requires a lot of complicated maintenance even to keep running (much less run with optimal safety), and it is vulnerable to extreme weather, too.
You missed insurance cost in your analysis.
IMHO you missed as Rafa says - the ong building time of plants - and the operational cost - to live up to the safety requirements thats there currently. South Korea doesn't have the same requirements to live up to.
So either we "ignore what our experts in europe deemed important' - or we wait for Thorium (thats the same as molten salt reactors right?)reactors to actually be in production - and then with molten salt - safety requirements should be able to be relaxed - so it actually will be possible to do it cheaper than wind (or at same cost - but using less landscape space).
The biggest danger which your post ignores - is that IF we sit and wait for nuclear to reach be workable in europe/us - we'll be wasting a LOT of years in wind production capacity - so we should IMHO build wind (and for countries that use airconditioning because of sun - solar to match ) capacity NOW.. and those wind and solar live 15-25 years expectedly - and at that time - hopefully nuclear can be ready to maybe take over some of it.. we'll see.
The vast majority of nuclear plants are offline only for their scheduled maintenance and refueling, which is always arranged to coincide with periods of minimum demand. Some plants operate on 12-month cycles but most operate on 18-month or even 24-month cycles. This is why typically nuclear plants operate with over 90% availability. Solar in contrast - at least in Germany and Switzerland - achieves only 11% availability. In other words, you need to install 13 GW of solar energy (plus associated storage capacity) to replace one 1.6 GW reactor.
I appreciate the running debate in these comments ... the back and forth is thought provoking and good to see ... three thoughts for consideration ...
One ... if we pull back up to the top level of the debate, a driver of the argument is basically that we are missing game changing sources of energy due to inappropriate comparisons (and metrics) which reinforces inappropriate actions/beliefs. I wonder if we quantified the life cycle costs removing all subsidies & cost effects of regulatory burden; added back "clean up" or site retirement; adjusted for replacement capital needed; and set appropriate long term capital costs --- could we compare these different energy sources on a comparable 80 - 100 year timeline. Hypothetically picking the year 2100 ish (this is the IPCC reference point & also the reference point for much of the global population calculations), we might be able to put this thinking onto a footing that makes comparison more balanced.
It seems to me that a significant part of the argument (not Tomas's alone BTW ... Lomborg and a few others are attempting to focus the policy effort similarly - see The Smartest Targets for the World as an illustrative approach for evaluating policy and selected initiatives), is that once we understand these comparisons, then the levers we pull - subsidies, regulations, education & training, standardization & productivity, financing costs / partnerships - would be directed differently.
Two ... I have instinctively feared that the policy direction we have been moving in is incorrect - not because climate change or human energy needs are the wrong issue - but because we are not working to the allocation of resource which strategically gets to a balanced outcome for humans (I don't have that answer). Our debates are not "human focused". It would be helpful to remove the "social / political" dogma (both sides) from this and go about finding the best way to create a global direction which relies on human initiative. Focus us on a positive mission (land on the moon, cure cancer). Once we have at least a directional sense of this, the debates on the details become more a matter of levelling the field so that different "how to" approaches can compete (ie 4 years to build a reactor vs 10 .... or something like the speed of the Covid vaccine development because the "how to" changed). Further, many of the debates I read are positioned in a binary manner - either / or. This is critically wrong when it comes to climate solutions and energy freedom for humans. Is there not a way of defining this in a "non zero sum" manner (credit to Robert Wright for the term) ? Directional approaches always require learning which means adjustment when we don't get the outcome we expect - and most plans are wrong before they are put to the test - so adaptation/innovation in pursuit of a direction would be more constructive and powerful.
Third, if we can imply in a quick sentence that the world needs to spend trillions (say 25% of global GDP equivalent), then the allocation of resource becomes pretty critical and a mission focus would move the needle. The arguments always seem to point to a "if you don't achieve XXX, by this date, we are doomed". Nothing is framed in learning stages or achievable actions that add up. Even in this article, the reference to 15,000 plants could power the world ... ok I get why its there ... but assuming the $20 billion number per plant can be used, that's $300 trillion. I can't get my head around that just the same as I can't get my head around the numbers for solar / wind / EV / etc. The point being that the mission can be understandable but how do we break it down to get a sense of the policy alternatives that need real understanding to be implemented.
As always ... thank you for the great work and to the group for running with it ... from somewhere where it is Minus 35 degrees today :))
You say Nuclear plant life can be extended, but do not consider the cost of that extension. Koeberg in South Africa cost over R20 billion to extend its life and there are big queries that we have not been told the true costs (and it is far over time as well).
Nuclear safety also depends on good quality of staff. Another problem we are having is South Africa is losing skills to run our nuclear plant (Koeberg).
You underestimate the cooling issue. Nuclear plants have to be on the coast or on a large dam. One problem they had in France was there was insufficient cooling during a drought. The loss of the Kakhovka reservoir means that the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is unable to operate, even if the war situation allowed it. Because the dam was needed for the nuclear plants maybe one should add the loss of life for the dam breaching to nuclear deaths.
The other issue with nuclear is it goes back to a centralised supply philosophy. A renewable decentralised grid is more resilient. I saw an article by someone in Ukraine to that effect.
Here are the links: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/01/17/hope-springs-renewable/
https://www.dw.com/en/french-nuclear-plants-break-a-sweat-over-heat-wave/a-62806646
Wind is not subsizdized in Denmark f.ex. Operators of windfarms actually now PAY for the right to setup windfarms (offshore) - and also pay their share of the "grid expansion" costs.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, Tomas. I agree that freedom is the main advantage of liberal democracies, particularly if you define freedom broadly. I also agree that "Western World" doesn't quite capture it (though Australians -- I'm one! -- are certainly used to thinking of themselves as part of the Western World) because it throws the focus on geography and history rather than on something more universal. Freedom certainly fits the "universal" bill, but it's vague, means somewhat different things to different people, risks alienating (or at least irritating) many of your readers, directs attention to the ADVANTAGE (as you say) of that type of system rather than the nature of the system itself and commits the sin of using a value-fraught word when what is needed is a neutral one.
Que gran artículo Tomás. Gracias
Whoa, I considered myself pro-nuclear before reading this article, not sure if this was appropriate compared to now!
I am very happy that we have a few state actors with continuous domestic plant construction programs again, this is also important to allow newcomers to buy their new reactors from experienced vendors without intolerable delays and overruns. Pakistan, UAE and hopefully Turkey and Bangladesh are real success stories enabled by Chinese, Korean and Russian baseload of domestic construction. Lets hope France can become good again, we need a strong European NPP supplier too. Very happy about many European NPP plans, this has the potential for economics of scale for the first time since the 90s.
Great article, Tomas. I appreciated having it all in one article and so well thought out. One thing I was selfishly wishing you would have added was more in depth exploration of Three Mile Island hoax/exaggeration and how the debut of The China Syndrome movie the same week fed into the hysteria. I try to tell this story succinctly to my students about how media themes can be self fulfilling but I’m not as good of a story teller as you are. So it would have been nice to see a few paragraphs about three mile island instead of just passing mention. I completely understand why you chose Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples, as they are more illustrative to your thesis. But selfishly I love the eye opening look I get when I tell students about Three Mile Island hysteria. I also wonder if the olde age of the US Congress maybe over represents three mile island as a reason why nuclear is risky.
This comparison and the global promotion of electricity generation via nuclear power should have happened in early 2000, rather than now. China should have been helped to scale up reactors rather than coal plants... The thing is that electricity generation via nuclear power is a complex and heavily centralized infrastructure that does require investments for decades and stable/consistent political support over that same time, so countries where plans are made for decades (like China, Russia and few others) or where the states are rich and strong with monetary sovereignty still there like Japan or South Korea.
If the political landscape and/or stability are much less consistent over decades (like in Europe), how could we expect to have a government committing on huge upfront budget, while the return on investment will only start to show a decade later.
With similar budget a liberal or a right-wing government would get quicker real results (to boast about, before next election) by going for the more decentralized option to incentivize national R&D on solar heat, solar PV and wind power, while supporting lower-cost manufacturing production (and material extraction) in the border countries to the EU (north-Africa), trading energy infrastructure development funds and jobs there against better control of the immigration for instance...
I did some searching on why we don't have a larger share of nuclear energy today and if that might change in the future.
What I found was that reactors will (continue to) be large (https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why-small-modular-reactors-cant-compete-with-renewable-energy/)
and
that the share of nuclear energy is likely not going to go up in the future (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-nuclear?tab=chart)
(https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/06/nuclear-energy-free-market-capitalism-arent-compatible/)
Looks like Solar and Wind are going to be dominant in a non fossil future and Hydro and Nuclear will belong to the rest.
(https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewables-nuclear-line)
(https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source)
Great article, thanks for sharing it publicly
Great article.
I’m an MMTer, which means I believe fiat-currency governments need not incur ‘cost’ when they fund public purpose. In fact it is the whole point of a fiat currency. On the other hand, you can use private capital if you want to but it begs the question why?
Canada and its CANDU technology doesn’t get much attention or recognition. Ontario is currently struggling with building more of its proven CANDUs or new ‘small’ (300MW) GE-Hitachi reactors based on ‘proven’ components.
As an ex-engineer, I am convinced of the need to establish proven technologies that can be built quickly and reliably vs new, unproven designs. At the same time there is a need to innovate. It’s a difficult issue.
No mention of fusion - no complaints - I always wonder how we will ever get the energy out. At the end of the day, all nuclear reactors share exactly the same steam turbine technology with coal fired plants. The trick is how you get the energy to the stream turbine.