Skip to the content

IOP A community website from IOP Publishing

environmentalresearchweb blog

« Energy-Water-Climate Nexus (Brussels Workshop Summary) | Main | Glaciers Online »

Climate change to hit energy projects?

The use of nuclear power and/or renewable energy is seen as part of the response to climate change, but climate change may have a negative impact on some of these energy sources, limiting the contribution they can make.

Most of the UK’s nuclear plants are on the coast, so as to get access to sea-water for cooling. In future, some of these sites may be inappropriate as locations for new plants, as has been proposed, due to the risk of flooding and storm-sea ingress. The Nuclear Consultation Group, which includes leading UK experts in the field of environmental risk, said, in response to Governments new Criteria for the Siting of proposed new nuclear plants, that ‘the Strategic Siting Assessment process is flawed and inadequate. It is inconceivable that the selection of sites on vulnerable coasts in southern England represents good sense’, given that ‘the risks from climate change in the form of sea level rise, storm surge and coastal erosion at the favoured sites are serious and increasing over time’. It noted that the Flood Hazard Research Centre at Middlesex University had concluded that there could be problems at four of the favoured sites, Bradwell, Hinkley, Dungeness, and Sizewell.

Nuclear Consutlation Group member Prof. Andy Blowers, writing in the TCPA journal, said the new UK siting criteria amounted to nothing less than a means of trying to justify putting a new generation of power stations and spent fuel waste stores on existing coastal sites, most of which are likely to become submerged during the next century under the impact of sea level rise and storm surges. It’s the on-site spent fuel stores, expected to hold old fuel for 100 years, that he felt were particularly worrying.

It’s not a trivial issue. Climate Scientists are now predicting that sea levels could rise by 1 metre or more by 2100, and maybe up to 2 metres, and with increased storm surges likely as well, that could pose threats to many locations around the world- the UK included. The Institution of Mechanical Engineering, which recently published a report on ‘Climate Change, Adapting to the Inevitable’, said that coastal sites like Sizewell might have to be abandoned or relocated in the long term.

Dr Colin Brown, IMechE’s director of engineering commented: “The Sizewell B nuclear plant has been built on the Suffolk coast, a site that has been earmarked for the construction of several more nuclear plants. However, Sizewell will certainly be affected by rising sea levels. Engineers say they can build concrete walls that will keep out the water throughout the working lives of these new plants. But that is not enough. Nuclear plants may operate for 50 years, but it could take hundreds of years to decommission them. By that time, who knows what sea-level rises and what kinds of inundations the country will be experiencing?”

Sea level issues are not the only climate related problem that may impact on nuclear projects. In continental Europe, the USA and elsewhere, many plants are located near rivers, but climate change could make this problematic too. Recent episodes of excessively hot summer weather in France led to nuclear plants being closed since the exit cooling water temperature was higher than environmental regulations allowed. Longer term, getting access to cooling water in summer could be a major issue in many countries.  This could well become another key issue in reactor location and design.

Changing climate and weather systems could also undermine the viability of some renewables to some extent. Changing rainfall patterns will have a significant impact on the amount of energy that some hydroelectric plants can generate. Increased temperatures may also lead to more evaporation in some locations. And changed wind patterns may also mean that in some locations wind turbines will not be able to produce as much energy are expected. A recent preliminary study in the Journal of Geophysical Research suggested that average and peak winds may have been slowing across the US midwest and eastern states since 1973, a 10% decline in average wind speed being noted over the past decade. Climate modelling has evidently suggested a further 10% decline in wind levels could occur over the next four decades, although this has not been confirmed, and in any case it may not be a general trend. However, it seems possible that, if temperature differentials between the poles and the equatorial regions decrease, then so will wind flows.

Given that waves are the result of wind moving over the oceans, then if wind flows are reduced, wave energy will also be reduced. Tidal flows should be unaffected by climate change, while direct solar generation may actually benefit, but the impact of changing climate and weather patterns on biomass as an energy source may be more complex.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers report is at: www.imeche.org/NR/rdonlyres/D72D38FF-FECF-480F-BBDB-6720130C1AAF/0/Adaptation_Report.PD

Tags:

Posted by Dave Elliott on June 20, 2009 12:31 PM |

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.iop.org/mt4/mt-tb.cgi/3268

Comments (2)

  • 1 DennisA June 26, 2009 8:35 AM

    "Climate Scientists are now predicting that sea levels could rise by 1 metre or more by 2100" This statement is inaccurate in more than one sense. It is not Climate Scientists but Climate Modellers who are "predicting" sea level rises of this magnitude. In fact models cannot "predict" anything, they can only offer projections from simulations. If the data going into the models is flawed, then the output will also be flawed, GIGO, (garbage in, garbage out).

    The basis for the current claims would seem to be suspect:
    GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L01602, doi:10.1029/2006GL028492,2007
    On the decadal rates of sea level change during the twentieth century, S. J. Holgate,Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Liverpool, UK

    Abstract
    Nine long and nearly continuous sea level records were chosen from around the world to explore rates of change in sea level for 1904–2003. These records were found to capture the variability found in a larger number of stations over the last half century studied previously. Extending the sea level record back over the entire century suggests that the high variability in the rates of sea level change observed over the past 20 years were not particularly unusual. The rate of sea level change was found to be larger in the early part of last century (2.03 ± 0.35 mm/yr 1904–1953), in comparison with the latter part (1.45 ± 0.34 mm/yr 1954–2003). The highest decadal rate of rise occurred in the decade centred on 1980 (5.31 mm/yr) with the lowest rate of rise occurring in the decade centred on 1964 (−1.49 mm/yr). Over the entire century the mean rate of change was 1.74 ± 0.16 mm/yr.

    Nothing particularly catastrophic there then...

    In 2007, Len Smith, a Professor in Research Statistics at the London School of Economics, warned about the “naïve realism” of current climate modelling. “Our models are being over-interpreted and misinterpreted,” he said. “They are getting better; I don’t want to trash them per se. But as we change our predictions, how do we maintain the credibility of the science?” Over-interpretation of models is already leading to poor financial decision-making, Smith says. “We need to drop the pretence that they are nearly perfect.”

    He singled out for criticism the British government’s UK Climate Impacts Programme and Met Office. He accused both of making detailed climate projections for regions of the UK when global climate models disagree strongly about how climate change will affect the British Isles.

    Smith is co-author, with Dave Stainforth of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Oxford, of a paper published in 2007 on confidence and uncertainty in climate predictions (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2007.2074). It is one of several papers on the shortfalls of current climate models.

    Some authors say modellers should drop single predictions and instead offer probabilities of different climate futures. But Smith and Stainforth say this approach could be “misleading to the users of climate science in wider society”. Borrowing a phrase from former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Smith told his Cambridge audience that there were “too many unknown unknowns” for such probabilities to be useful.

    Policy-makers, he said, “think we know much more than we actually know. We need to be more open about our uncertainties.”

    From issue 2617 of New Scientist magazine, 16 August 2007

    On such uncertainty and unknowns are our future energy policy decided and our living costs and manufacturing costs heavily inflated. China and India must be delighted.


  • 2 Flash July 5, 2009 7:10 AM

    Cool!

Post a comment
Your comments