The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Bush administration in the United States may hold diametrically opposed views on whether global warming is really happening and the potential threat it poses to humanity. But they are both in their way providing succour to the world’s nuclear power industry, or at least what’s left of it.
Working Group III of the IPCC (see www.ipcc.ch) is charged with looking at mitigation options for climate change (the previously published reports of Working Groups I and II having examined likely levels of global warming and potential effects’ respectively). Working Group III has recently finalised its report and amidst the vast slab of verbiage (running to over 1000 pages) what might be interpreted as positive references to nuclear power may be discerned. For example, Working Group III comes to the less than startling conclusion that “Low-carbon energy supply systems can make an important contribution” to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This could be “through biomass from forestry and agricultural by-products, municipal and industrial waste to energy, dedicated biomass plantations,… landfill methane, wind energy and hydropower, and through the use and lifetime extension of nuclear power plants.”
Studiously avoided, of course, is the politically incorrect notion of proposing the construction of new nuclear plants. In marked contrast, US Vice President Dick Cheney, motivated not by global warming of course but by the USA’s more pressing concerns about lack of generating capacity, reflected in California’s continuing problems, does not have any such inhibitions.
Recent robust statements from Mr Cheney are among the most positive political affirmations for nuclear energy that the industry has heard in a very long time. He is heading a post-California-crisis interagency energy policy task force due to make its recommendations before the end of May. These are likely to propose the building of new nuclear plants, something not seen in the United States for a couple of decades and an idea that would have seemed far-fetched even a few months ago. The last orders placed for nuclear power plants in the United States, not subsequently cancelled, were as far back as 1974.
“If you want to do something about carbon dioxide emissions, then you ought to build nuclear power plants, because they don’t emit any carbon dioxide. And they don’t emit greenhouse gases,” Cheney pointed out in a recent TV appearance. He is also on record as saying that that the United States. must build a minimum of 65 power plants of average size each year to meet even the most conservative estimates of electricity growth in the next 20 years.
Another key development for the US nuclear industry occurred earlier this year when for the first time since the mid 1980s production costs at US nuclear power plants, which generate about 22 per cent of the nation’s electricity, dropped below those of coal-fired plants (1.83 c/kWh versus 2.08 c/kWh). Further evidence of the tide turning in favour of nuclear power in recent months is a recent opinion poll suggesting that two-thirds of US adults now support building more nuclear power plants, compared with 51 per cent in January 2001 and 42 per cent in October 1999.
In addition, what could turn out to be a landmark piece of nuclear legislation was introduced to Congress in March. This is the bipartisan Nuclear Energy Electricity Assurance Act authored by Senator Pete Domenici (New Mexico). It is a very comprehensive act, with wide ranging provisions aiming to support nuclear energy production, encourage new plant construction, assure a level playing field for nuclear power, address waste issues and improve the regulatory framework.
Among its many provisions, the act calls for the DoE to study opportunities to complete unfinished plants and to step up research on advanced reactor concepts, the “Generation IV reactor program.” It also authorises funding for NRC development of a regulatory framework to approve new reactor designs and for DOE to use the NRC Early Site Permit process for up to three demonstration sites to validate the NRC process, and to create a “bank” of locations that are pre-approved by NRC for nuclear plant siting.
The act also “Asserts that no federal funds can support domestic or international organizations that exclude nuclear energy from consideration in projects they support” – presumably a swipe at the World Bank’s non-nuclear lending policy. Intriguingly the act also aims to resuscitate the study of reprocessing, long since abandoned in the USA.
At hearings in early May Domenici commented “It’s unfortunate that millions of Californians have to sit in the dark before we, as a nation, begin taking a real look at all our options, including nuclear generated electricity, for fulfilling our growing demands for more electricity and energy.” His act goes back to an initiative outlined in a speech delivered at Harvard in 1997. On that occasion, he recalls, “the stage was pretty lonely when I called for a new national dialogue on nuclear technologies. The progress since then has been spectacular.” Of course getting from here to actually building new nuclear plants is not going to be quick or easy. But particularly well placed to benefit from all of this, should anything come of it, is Britain’s state-owned BNFL. As well as offering fuel and fuel services, BNFL has, in recent times, also become a formidable force in the world of reactor design, by adopting the nuclear orphans of the likes of Westinghouse and ABB. BNFL is, for example, now owner of the AP600 advanced PWR, which must be a strong contender for a future US reactor project, should such a thing ever come to pass. The AP600 is claimed to be constructable in 36 months (which is very fast indeed by nuclear standards) and figures of $1000/kW and 1c/kWh have been mentioned as achievable cost targets for this technology. BNFL might just be about to find itself in the right place, at the right time, with the right technology.