John Quiggin is an Australian economics professor at the University of Queensland. He recently posted an article on his blog that he intends to ultimately submit to the Southern Royal Commission considering the nuclear fuel cycle. The proposed submission contains his analysis of the best choices for nuclear reactor technology if Australia wants to add nuclear reactors to the national grid. The main question his article asks is whether there are commercial nuclear reactors currently on the market or projected to be available in the next twenty years that can be constructed and integrated into the Australian national electrical market as a good source of electric power generation.
Quiggin states that for a developed country like Australia, obsolete Generation II and early Generation III reactor designs are not appropriate. He also rules out reactors from " middle-income and less developed countries with inadequate safety standards." He explicitly mentions Russia and China by name as examples.
Quiggin focuses on Generation III + or the most recent Generation III nuclear reactor designs from the United States, European or Japanese companies. He says that any reactor design being considered should have "a substantial record of safe and economical operation." He warns against Australia considering the purchase of any "leading edge" or "first of a kind" designs because it is impossible to estimate the risks and Australia has no experience at all in operating and regulating a nuclear power plant.
Quiggin thinks that any reactor design under consideration should be able to document at least one hundred "reactor years of operation". This means adding up the years of operation of all reactors with the same design to arrive at a crude estimation of the risks associated with that design. He points out that one hundred reactor years of operation is actually quite modest. If Australia builds ten reactors with licensed life spans of forty years, then the reactor years for all ten over forty years would be four hundred reactor years. If there was one accident for the one hundred reactors years that he is calling for, then Australia could expect four accidents in forty years with ten reactors.
Quiggin states that there are no Generation III+ reactor designs commercially available that can satisfy even these modest requirements. He does go on to say that the Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor design might be able to qualify within a few decades. It is projected that under current plans there should be eight AP-1000 reactors operating by 2020. If these plans are carried out successfully in spite of the usual cost overruns and scheduling delays common for nuclear reactor construction, then more AP-1000s will be built and brought online. Hopefully, the one hundred reactor hours required by Quiggin could be achieved for the AP-1000 design "sometime after 2030."
The only possible competitors with the AP-1000 design are the EPR design from France's Areva and the Candu Canadian design. However, with only a few EPRs under currently construction and no Candus, they would take so long to reach the one hundred reactor hours benchmark that they cannot be seriously considered by Australia. Any totally new reactor design would take decades to be developed, tested, licensed, sold and operated for the required one hundred reactor years and is not even worth considering.
Quiggin points out that the development of regulatory agencies and rules as well as process of site selection will impose serious delays in licensing and construction of Australian power reactors. Even a very aggressive construction program by Australia could not bring nuclear power online before 2040 and that is an optimistic estimate.
I think that Australian time and money could be much better spent on developing alternative energy sources. Wind power currently provides over a quarter of the electricity for the state of South Australia and use of wind power is rapidly expanding. Solar power utilization has only recently taken off in Australia but its potential is huge. Australia has been exploiting hydro power for decades with much room for expansion. Geothermal power could provide as much as 9% of Australia's electricity by 2030. All things considered, it would be a waste of money and time to develop nuclear power in Australia.
