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Nuclear out of luck
The nuclear industry does seem to be having bad luck. Its flagship new projects, the European Pressurized water Reactors (EPRs) being built in Finland and France, are both well behind schedule and seriously over-budget, with a range of construction problems and errors pushing up costs and putting completion years away. For example the estimated final costs for Olkiluoto 3 in Finland have risen from €3 bn to €4.5 bn and the completion date has been put back from 2009 to 2012. The second plant, at Flamanville in France, is already 9 months behind schedule, and is not now expected to begin operation until 2013, rather than 2012 as originally hoped. The cost of the power produced by it will be around 20% more than planned – around €55/MWh instead of the €46 announced when the project was launched in May 2006.
Certainly a surprising number of a safety issues have emerged during construction; evidently more than 3,000 mistakes have made by the builders so far at Olkiluoto. See the quite striking poster summary from Greenpeace at www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/finland/fi/dokumentit/ol3SafetyPoster.pdf
Some of this might be put down to teething problems with “first of a kind” plants. But perhaps more fundamentally for the future, UK, Finnish and French nuclear-safety regulators have objected to aspects of the EPR design: “The EPR design, as originally proposed by the licensees and the manufacturer, Areva, doesn’t comply with the independence principle, as there is a high degree of complex interconnectivity between the control and safety systems.”
As World Nuclear News noted, some safety systems protect against the failure of control systems and so should be impossible for them to fail together, which means Areva must re-work the design if it is to get regulatory clearance – and before construction of EPRs in the UK.
Meanwhile the US nuclear regulator has objected to a key part of the Westinghouse AP1000 design: it said that it would have to be modified to receive approval for use in the US.
www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2009/09-173.html
The AP1000 is another candidate for UK deployment.The UK Health & Safety Executive is looking at both the EPR and AP1000 designs, and, according to media reports had identified possible problems which, if not progressed satisfactorily, would mean that H&SE “would not issue a design acceptance confirmation”.
www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/27/nuclear-power-reactor-designH&SE however pointed out that they were only part way through their assessment and that there were confident that any issues would be resolved.
www.hse.gov.uk/press/2009/e09110.htm
Some politicians also seem confident about the merits and viability of a major new nuclear programme. Gordon Brown told the CBI that “we will now build not 12 gigawatts of nuclear capacity but 16 gigawatts, a total for new building that is bigger than all our current nuclear capacity”. But with possible technical problems still unresolved, and with delays mounting, the prognosis for rapid deployment does not look too good.
The financing issues are also looking difficult. Although the UK government have insisted they will not subside the nuclear programme directly, the City Group economic consultants have concluded that nuclear can’t be financed just by private sector: www.citigroupgeo.com/pdf/SEU27102.pdf. In fact, although no direct financial support is being given, a range of indirect subsidies are in train. For example, government seems to be accepting to need to support a “floor price” for carbon in the EU Carbon Trading System of around £30/tonne, which would help make nuclear more economic, but would load consumers up with extra costs. The Times talked about an extra £227 on annual energy bills, although EDF put it lower. Even so, it’s likely to be politically difficult.
And more problems are looming. Plans for long-term nuclear waste disposal could come unstuck because of new evidence of corrosion in copper, a material that was to be used to seal waste underground. Examination of copper artefacts from the Vasa, a 15th-century galleon raised from Stockholm harbour, has shown a level of decay challenging the scientific wisdom that copper corrodes only when exposed to air.
www.karnavfallsradet.se/Bazment/191.aspx
The waste issue is likely to be made even tougher since, to improve their economics, the new nuclear plants proposed for the UK will have high fuel “burn-up”. This means that the fuel is enriched to a higher level and stays in the reactor longer, with more of the fuel being converted to plutonium and other radioactive by-products of fission. This in turn means that the spent fuel is hotter and more radioactive- which could present problems with plant operation, waste management, storage and disposal. Especially since, given that there are no plans for reprocessing, it will have to be kept on site at the nuclear plant for many decades (EDF has just suggested 60 years for the proposed new plant at Sizewell) before it goes off somewhere (as yet undetermined) to be kept isolated for 100,000 years or so.
All this makes it rather hard to accept the governments claim, in its recent the National Policy Statement (NPS) on nuclear, that it is “satisfied that effective arrangements will exist to manage and dispose of the waste that will be produced from new nuclear power stations” and that “as a result the IPC [Infrastructure Planning Commission] need not consider this question” when reviewing the plant planning applications.
This has drawn a lot flack. Four former members of CoRWM, the UK government’s first advisory committee on radioactive-waste management, including its chair Prof. Gordon Mackerron, noted that their 2006 report had only looked at “legacy” waste – the new wastes opened up new issues: “In the absence of a process or acceptable policy for new build wastes, they may remain on site indefinitely. It is quite possible that, as a result of sea level changes, storm surge and coastal processes, conditions at some of the most vulnerable coastal sites will deteriorate thereby making it increasingly difficult to manage the wastes safely. The problems presented by managing wastes in the very long-term will be both generic and site-specific. Consequently we find it hard to understand why the IPC, when considering applications for the development of individual sites, need not consider the question of waste management. Given the levels of public anxiety raised by the issue of nuclear waste and the burdens of risk and management that are imposed on future generations we believe consideration of safe management of wastes at each site should be a primary concern of the IPC.”
The NPS is a consultative draft. Whether the suggested block on discussion of waste by IPC will survive remains to be seen.
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