Part One of Two Parts:
I recently posted several articles with reasons that nuclear power was not a good low-carbon energy source for fighting climate change. (Climate Change 1, Climate Change 2, Climate Change 3 ). The recent Paris accord on climate change mitigation has thrust the subject of reducing carbon emissions back into the headlines. One group suggested that we should build a hundred reactors a year until 2050. That would be about thirty five hundred reactors.
I thought that today, I would share a list of arguments against nuclear power by Derek Abbott, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia. (Australia does not use nuclear power but it does mine and export uranium. There are serious economic interests pushing nuclear power in Australia.) Abbott was responding to calls for massive building programs for nuclear reactors in response to climate change. In order to replace all energy generation with nuclear power, Abbot says that about fifteen thousand nuclear reactors would have to be built to generate the fifteen terawatts that are consumed globally.
1. Land and location: About eight square miles are required for a nuclear power station, its exclusion zone, its enrichment plant, ore processing and supporting infrastructure. The location has to be near a huge source of cooling water and away from areas with large population and/or risk of natural disasters. Finding locations for fifteen thousand reactors that would meet these criterion would be very difficult if not impossible.
2. Lifetime: Nuclear power reactors are licensed for forty to sixty years. They have to be decommissioned after that because neutron bombardment makes the metal in the plant brittle. Assuming about a fifty year lifespan for an average power reactor, with a fleet of fifteen thousand reactors, one reactor would have to be decommissioned and one reactor would have to become operational every day. Currently, up to twelve years is required to plan, license and construct a nuclear power reactor. It can take up to twenty years to decommission a nuclear power reactor. These time requirements could not provide for the "one a day" scenario.
3. Nuclear Waste: After sixty years of use, there is still no agreed upon "best" method for waste disposal. There is no permanent geological repository for the existing seventy thousand metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and more is being produced every day. A typical power plant can produce twenty metric tons of waste per year. For fifteen thousand reactors, that would be three hundred thousand metric tons of spent nuclear fuel per year. In other words, each year over four times the total amount of currently existing waste would be produced. This would be impossible to deal with.
4. Accident rate: Over the sixty years of nuclear power, there have been eleven accidents where a reactor core partially or completely melted. These accidents cannot be anticipated with standard risk assessment methods because of the complexity of a nuclear power plant. These eleven accidents occurred in about fourteen thousand reactor-years of operation. Calculating these accidents for fifteen thousand reactors, that would mean about one partial or complete core-melt per month somewhere in the world.
Please read Part Two.
Derek Abbott:
