Part 1 of 3 Parts
There are four hundred and forty commercial nuclear fission power plants operating around the world today. They supply about ten percent of the world’s electricity. Their electrical output is roughly one third of the low-carbon energy sources. That is electricity that does not have to be provided by fossil fuel power plants. One major issue in world energy production today is the question of how much nuclear power production can be brought online to provide a significant percentage of the world’s energy requirements.
Derek Abbott is a Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia. He has recently completed an analysis of prospects for major expansion of nuclear power. The report on his work has been publish in the Proceedings of the IEEE. He reports that he has concluded that nuclear power cannot be scaled up to supply most of the world’s energy for a variety of reasons. He suggests that the world would be much better off investing in renewable energy sources that have a much better prospect of being scaled up.
The Abbot report notes that current global power consumption is about fifteen terawatts. The current total electricity being generated by commercial nuclear fission power plants is about three hundred and seventy five gigawatts. The report estimates that in order to supply fifteen terrawatts of electricity to the world from only nuclear power sources, about fifteen thousand nuclear reactors would have to be constructed and put into operation. In Abbot’s report, he explores the consequences of building, operating and decommissioning fifteen thousand nuclear fission reactors. Issues of concern include the amount of land that would be required, the production and disposal of spent nuclear fuel, the rate of serious accidents, risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons, the abundance and extraction of uranium and exotic metals that are needed to construct nuclear fission reactors.
Abbott told an interviewer that “A nuclear power station is resource-hungry and, apart from the fuel, uses many rare metals in its construction. The dream of a utopia where the world is powered off fission or fusion reactors is simply unattainable. Even a supply of as little as 1 TW stretches resources considerably.”
Other studies have addressed these and other issues. Abbott’s report has a nice summary of many of the concerns.
Land and Location
It is estimated that a single nuclear power plant requires about eight square miles of land to contain the nuclear power plant itself, an exclusion zone, an enrichment plant, ore processing and supporting infrastructure. Nuclear power plants need to be sited near a huge body of coolant water but at a safe distance from dense population zones and natural disaster zones. It would be very challenging just to find fifteen thousand locations on Earth that satisfy these requirements.
Lifetime
Nuclear power plants are generally decommissioned after forty to sixty years of operation. One major reason for this lifespan is the fact that neutron bombardment causes metals to become brittle due to the formation of tiny cracks on metal surfaces due to radiation. If nuclear power stations need to be replaced every fifty years on average, then if the world had fifteen thousand nuclear power plants, one power setation would need to be built and another decommissioned every day. Considering that it currently takes six to twelve years to build a nuclear power setation and up to twenty years to decommission one, this rate of replacement is obviously unrealistic.
Please read Part 2 next
