A Submission to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission
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Roman Oszanski A Submission to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission Preamble I have chosen not to follow the issues papers: their questions are more suited to those planning to expand the nuclear industry, and many of the issues raised are irrelevant if one believes that, based on the evidence, the industry should be left to die a natural death, rather than being supported to the exclusion of more promising technologies. Executive Summary The civil nuclear industry is in decline globally. [Ref charts on existing reactors, rising costs]. It is not an industry of the future, but of the past. If it were not for the intimate connection to the military industry, it would not exist today. There is no economic advantage to SA in expanding the existing industry in this state. Nuclear power does not offer a practical solution to climate change: total lifetime emissions are likely to be (at best) similar to those of gas power plants, and there is insufficient uranium to replace all the goal fired generators. A transition to breeder technologies leaves us with major problems of waste disposal and proliferation of weapons material. Indeed, the problems of weapons proliferation and the black market in fissionable materials mean that we should limit sales of Uranium to countries which are known proliferation risks, or are non- signatories to the NNPT: we should ban sales of Australian Uranium to Russia and India. There is a current oversupply of enrichment facilities, and there is considerable international concern at the possibility of using such facilities to enrich Uranium past reactor grade to weapons grade. {cite concern over Iran enrichment plant). Wasting funds on a declining industry would be a lost opportunity cost in combatting climate change. Money spent on encouraging a nuclear industry would be better spent on further developing the state’s use of renewables, and developing and integrated energy efficiency programme [cite factor four]. Both efficiency and renewables offer better opportunities to ameliorate climate change and reduce our carbon emissions. What’s more, they will generate many more jobs than large centralised power plants. Our electricity system is currently transitioning from an expensive, monolithic grid requiring baseload power plants (typically coal) to one of interconnected, distributed grids based on renewables and storage. This provides cost and reliability benefits, initially to remote settlements (as has been noted by the managers of the grids in Queensland, NSW and SA), but even for inner suburbs of Sydney [cite CSIRO study]. Economics dictate that the future grid will be based on renewables, demand management and either storage or peaking plant. We see this transition happening in Australia (much to the chagrin of the traditional baseload generators), and even France — often touted as a prime example of a nuclear- powered state — has announced that rather than replace a third of its raging nuclear fleet, they will replace their nuclear plants with a mix of renewables. [cite article] The Nuclear industry has a waste problem. They don’t have a long-term storage facility for high level waste, typically spent reactor fuel rods, which are currently stored on-site at existing reactors. The preferred industry solution is deep geological storage in a remote facility which would have to be isolated from the environment for periods of around 240,000 years. The best they’ve managed with their small test site US Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) was a few years. An accident has rendered that site currently unusable. “no final disposal facilities have yet been fully implemented for spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste. A lack of experience in the complete deployment of deep geological repositories, combined with the extensive periods required for the implementation of back-end solutions, have thus contributed to growing uncertainties about the costs associated with managing spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste.” —OECD Nuclear Energy Agency1 The other alternative is to process the waste in fast breeder reactors to transform the waste into more short-lived waste. Proponents suggest that SA should accept high level waste from around the world, and then fund the development of an Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) or a PRISM reactor to avoid the cost of looking after waste for 240,000 years. One has to ask, if these new 4th generation reactors are so useful, why isn’t the world already full of such reactors? Plutonium extracted during reprocessing of spent fuel (eg via the existing UK THORP reactor) is regarded as weapons usable, a clear proliferation risk.2 There are no commercial examples of these new “Generation IV” reactors, primarily because of concerns over proliferation, as they could be used as a source of plutonium.[ref??] Neither solution deals with a fundamental problem of safety: how would we transport the high level waste to outback SA? All commercial transport would pass through densely inhabited areas such as Pt Adelaide. A separate military transport under armed guard would be a very expensive solution. Recommendations: (a) stop the export of uranium to non NNPT signatory states (eg India), or those states with a history of black market traffic in nuclear materials (eg Russia); (b) do not expand the nuclear industry in this state; (c) to tackle climate change, fund the expansion of renewables, particularly solar thermal with storage; energy efficiency programs for industry and domestic dwellings, and support the development and addition of storage to the grid; (d) continue the ban on the import of high level nuclear waste and the facilities for the processing of such waste in SA; (e) reject any proposals to establish a high level international waste dump on traditional indigenous lands. More detail in the Appendices. 1 OECD Nuclear Energy Agency The Economics of the Back End of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2013/7061-ebenfc.pdf 2 House of Commons, The Environment Committee, First Report, 12th June 1985, Volume 1, Page 281.Source: CEGB Evidence to Sizewell B Public Inquiry Appendix 1: The Nuclear Industry The Nuclear Industry is in decline globally. The most recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report 20143 includes these highlights: • Declining role. Nuclear power’s share of global commercial primary energy production declined from the 2012 low of 4.5 percent, a level last seen in 1984, to a new low of 4.4 percent. • Aging. The average age of the world’s operating nuclear reactors to increase and by mid-2014 stood at 28.5 years. • Construction Delays. At least 49—including three quarters of the Chinese projects—of the total of 69 construction sites have encountered delays, many of them multi-annual. Construction of two units in Taiwan was halted. • Project Cancellations. Several projects have been cancelled and new programs indefinitely delayed, including in the Czech Republic and in Vietnam. • Operating Costs Soar. Nuclear generating costs jumped by 16 percent in real terms in three years in France, and several units are shut down in the U.S. because income does not cover operating costs. The economic survival of nuclear plants is also threatened in Belgium, Germany and Sweden. • Renewables vs. Nuclear. In 2013 alone, 32 gigawatts (GW) of wind and 37 GW of solar were added to the world power grids. By the end of 2013, China had 91 GW of wind power and 18 GW of solar capacity installed, solar exceeding for the first time operating nuclear capacity. China added four times more solar than nuclear capacity in the past year. And Spain generated more power from wind than from any other source, outpacing nuclear for the first time. It is also the first time that wind has become the largest electricity generating source over an entire year in any country. Spain has thus joined the list of nuclear countries that produce more electricity from new renewables—excluding large hydro-power— than from nuclear power that includes Brazil, China, Germany, India and Japan. 3 http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industry-Status-Report-2014.html This infographic summarises the situation: (source http://www.statista.com/chart/2584/age-of-nuclear-reactors)/ The fleet of raging reactors will soon need refurbishment or replacement, and the cost of new reactors continues to rise, with construction delays and long lead times. As the costs of renewables are on a downward trend (solar PV is already directly competitive with coal- fired generation for household use in many parts of the world, including Australia), the economic trend doesn’t favour nuclear. As the Union of Concerned Scientists noted in its 2011 report NUCLEAR POWER: Still Not Viable without Subsidies4, “The findings are striking: since its inception more than 50 years ago, the nuclear power industry has benefited—and continues to benefit—from a vast array of preferential government subsidies. Indeed…subsidies to the nuclear fuel cycle have often exceeded the value of the power produced. This means that buying power on the open market and giving it away for free would have been less costly than subsidizing the construction and operation of nuclear power plants. Subsidies to new reactors are on a similar path. “ If Nuclear was actually an effective solution to greenhouse gas emissions, it might be worth subsidising. But this claim is dependent on ready access to high grade Uranium ores. 4 www.ucsusa.org/sites/.../nuclear power/nuclear subsidies report.pdf As Associate Professor mark Diesendorf notes in his article for The Conversation5: In a study published in 2008, nuclear physicist and nuclear energy supporter Manfred Lenzen compared life-cycle emissions from several types of power station. For nuclear energy based on mining high-grade uranium ore, he found average emissions of 60 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity generation, compared with 10–20 g per kWh for wind and 500–600 g per kWh for gas.