Bulls, bears and ignorant nuclear propagandists

Detailed response to a barrage of nuclear nonsense from Zion Lights.

This is a response to Zion Lights’ January 2024 article ‘Bulls and bears: a nuclear update’. Lights is a British nuclear power advocate who previously worked for self-confessed liar, climate denier and MAGA lunatic Michael Shellenberger. You can read more about Lights here and Shellenberger here.

Lights’ comments below are prefaced with her initials and placed in quote marks and in bold, and my responses are prefaced with my initials (JG ‒ Jim Green). I haven’t responded to everything in Lights’ article, which you can read in full here.

ZL: “In a world-first, 22 nations signed up to triple nuclear energy generation by 2050 at COP28 in Dubai this year, which illustrates how strongly the tide has turned in favour of the technology. Should they follow through on these commitments, the world could enter a new era of energy abundance and growth.”

JG response:

* 22 countries signed up to the nuclear pledge, 170 chose not to.

* The goal of tripling nuclear power by 2050 is laughable. David Appleyard, editor of Nuclear Engineering International, did the math: “Now 2050 still sounds like a long way off, but to triple nuclear capacity in this time frame would require nuclear deployment to average 40 GW [gigawatts] a year over the next two and half decades. The cruel reality is that’s more than six times the rate that has been seen over the last decade.”

* The nuclear renaissance of the late-2000s was a bust due to the Fukushima disaster, catastrophic cost overruns with reactor projects, and nuclear power’s inability to compete economically with renewables. The latest renaissance is heading the same way, i.e. nowhere. Nuclear power went backwards last year. There was a net loss of 1.7 GW of capacity.

* There were just six reactor construction starts in 2023. Only one outside China. One!

* The number of operable power reactors is 407 to 413 depending on the definition of operability, well down from the 2002 peak of 438.

*Nuclear power’s share of global electricity generation has fallen to 9.2%, its lowest share in four decades and little more than half of its peak of 17.5% in 1996.

* Over the two decades 2004-2023, there were 102 power reactor startups and 104 closures worldwide: 49 startups in China with no closures; and a net decline of 51 reactors in the rest of the world.

* Despite the drop in the number of operable reactors, and the sharp drop in nuclear power’s share of electricity generation, nuclear capacity (GW) and generation (TWh) have remained stagnant for the past 20 years due to increased capacity factors and reactor uprates (360 GW capacity in 2003, 374 GW in 2022; 2505 TWh in 2003, 2487 TWh in 2022). Thus it is possible, as Lights states (citing the International Energy Agency ‒ IEA), that nuclear power generation will reach an all-time high globally by 2025. If that happens, and it may not, it will be a pyrrhic victory for the industry, and it will be increasingly difficult to sustain, because of the ageing of the global reactor fleet. In 1990, the mean age of the global power reactor fleet was 11.3 years. Now, it is nearly three times higher at 31.4 years. The mean age of reactors closed from 2018‒2022 was 43.5 years. The problem of ageing reactors is particularly acute in two of the three largest nuclear power generating countries: the US reactor fleet has a mean age of 42.1 years, and in France the mean age is 37.6 years.

* Due to the ageing of the reactor fleet, the IAEA anticipates the closure of 10 reactors (10 GW) per year from 2018 to 2050. Thus the industry needs an annual average of 10 reactor construction starts, and 10 reactor startups (grid connections), just to maintain its current output. Over the past decade (2014-23), construction starts have averaged 6.1 and reactor startups have averaged 6.7. Former World Nuclear Association executive Steve Kidd noted in 2016 that “the industry is essentially running to stand still." In the coming years and decades, the industry will have to run faster just to stand still ‒ it will have to build more reactors than it has been just to replace ageing reactors facing permanent closure. Growth ‒ even marginal, incremental growth ‒ becomes increasingly difficult and Lights’ nonsense about tripling nuclear power is thus seen as the nonsense that it is.

* The International Energy Agency (IEA) has just released its ‘Renewables 2023’ report and it makes for a striking contrast with the nuclear industry’s malaise. Nuclear power suffered a net loss of 1.7 GW capacity in 2023, whereas renewable capacity additions amounted to a record 507 GW, almost 50% higher than 2022.

* Nuclear power accounts for a declining share of global electricity generation (currently 9.2%) whereas renewables have grown to 30.2%. The IEA expects renewables to reach 42% by 2028 thanks to a projected 3,700 GW of new capacity over the next five years in the IEA’s ‘main case’ (while the IEA’s ‘accelerated case’ envisages growth of 4,500 GW). To put those numbers in context, global nuclear power capacity is 372 GW. There is little to no chance of nuclear power regaining a 10% share of global electricity generation.

* Solar and wind combined have already surpassed nuclear power generation and the IEA notes that over the next five years, several other milestones will likely be achieved: in 2025, renewables surpass coal; also in 2025, wind surpasses nuclear; and in 2026, solar PV surpasses nuclear.

* An estimated 96% of newly installed, utility-scale solar PV and onshore wind capacity had lower generation costs than new coal and natural gas plants in 2023, the IEA states. (Wind and solar became cheaper than nuclear power about a decade ago and the gap continues to widen.)

ZL: “South Korea’s industrial growth is largely thanks to nuclear power. The country is the world’s fifth-largest producer of nuclear energy and is now undertaking a major export drive. After its success working with the UAE, South Korea has eyes on other nuclear-ready nations.”

JG response:

* Lights’ first comment is too idiotic to warrant a response.

* South Korea's nuclear industry has been rocked by industry-wide corruption scandals (see here and here).

* Other than the 2009 contract to supply four reactors to the UAE (also mired in scandal), South Korea's efforts to establish a nuclear export business have been entirely unsuccessful. The UAE project was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over-budget despite Lights’ claim to the contrary.

* South Korean utilities opted out of the Wylfa and Moorside projects in the UK (as did Japanese companies Hitachi and Toshiba) despite offers of billions of dollars of British taxpayer subsidies.

* The South Korean nuclear industry's business model is to sacrifice safety in order to reduce costs. The CEO of French nuclear utility Areva likened Korea's AP1400 reactor design to "a car without airbags and safety belts " (Nucleonics Week, 22 April 2010). Ironically, French utilities are likely to skimp on safety features with the envisaged EPR2 design following the catastrophic cost blowouts with EPR reactors.

* Another aspect of the corrupt South Korean nuclear industry's business model is to offer nuclear technology to countries like Saudi Arabia ‒ authoritarian states with an openly-professed interest in developing nuclear weapons and an openly-professed interest in linking the development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

ZL: “China is building nuclear reactors faster than any other country. Over the past decade, China has added 37 nuclear reactors, reaching a total of 55. During that same period, America - which leads the world with 93 reactors - has added two reactors. China has plans to build at least 100 more reactors and currently has 19 under construction.”

JG response:

* Yes, China is building nuclear reactors faster than any other country, which just proves how sickly the global industry is. In China, there were five reactor construction starts in 2023 and just one reactor startup.

* China’s nuclear program added only 1.2 GW capacity in 2023 while wind and solar combined added 278 GW. Michael Barnard noted in CleanTechnica that allowing for capacity factors, the nuclear additions amount to about 7 terawatt-hours (TWh) of new low-carbon generation per year, while wind and solar between them will contribute about 427 TWh annually, over 60 times more than nuclear.

* Barnard commented:

“One of the things that western nuclear proponents claim is that governments have over-regulated nuclear compared to wind and solar, and China’s regulatory regime for nuclear is clearly not the USA’s or the UK’s. They claim that fears of radiation have created massive and unfair headwinds, and China has a very different balancing act on public health and public health perceptions than the west.

“They claim that environmentalists have stopped nuclear development in the west, and while there are vastly more protests in China than most westerners realize, governmental strategic programs are much less susceptible to public hostility.

“And finally, western nuclear proponents complain that NIMBYs block nuclear expansion, and public sentiment and NIMBYism is much less powerful in China with its Confucian, much more top down governance system.

“China’s central government has a 30 year track record of building massive infrastructure programs, so it’s not like it is missing any skills there. China has a nuclear weapons program, so the alignment of commercial nuclear generation with military strategic aims is in hand too. China has a strong willingness to finance strategic infrastructure with long-running state debt, so there are no headwinds there either.

“Yet China can’t scale its nuclear program at all. It peaked in 2018 with 7 reactors with a capacity of 8.2 GW. For the five years since then then it’s been averaging 2.3 GW of new nuclear capacity, and last year only added 1.2 GW …”

ZL: “Last year India brought its indigenous reactor design online at Kakrapar Atomic Power Project. India currently has 22 operable nuclear reactors, which produce around 3% of its electricity. India has ambitious plans to build more reactors - aiming to commission a new reactor every year.”

JG response:

* India has always had “ambitious plans” to build more reactors but it has never realised those ambitious plans and probably never will. Nuff said.

ZL: “Japan has changed its mind about nuclear power. After shutting down nuclear power plants following the 2011 tsunami (which caused a power plant meltdown, which didn’t harm anybody but did turn people against the form of electricity generation), in December 2023 Japan's nuclear power regulator lifted an operational ban imposed on Tokyo Electric Power's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, and announced that other power plants would be reopened.”

JG response:

* Of the pre-Fukushima fleet of 54 power reactors in Japan, 12 are now operable, more than 20 have been permanently closed, and the fate of the rest remains in limbo. Takeo Kikkawa, president of International University of Japan, believes that a maximum of about 20 reactors will be operable by 2030.

* The claim that the Fukushima disaster “didn’t harm anybody” is a disgusting lie for which Lights should apologise. The World Health Organization estimates that for people in the most contaminated areas in Fukushima Prefecture, the estimated increased risk for all solid cancers will be around 4% in females exposed as infants; a 6% increased risk of breast cancer for females exposed as infants; a 7% increased risk of leukaemia for males exposed as infants; and for thyroid cancer among females exposed as infants, an increased risk of up to 70% (from a 0.75% lifetime risk up to 1.25%).

* Lights’ claim that the Fukushima disaster “didn’t harm anybody” also ignores the 2000 (or more) indirect deaths.

* Lights’ claim that the Fukushima disaster “didn’t harm anybody” also assumes that no harm was inflicted on the 191,000 evacuees from the disaster. Needless to say that is a disgusting lie ‒ the suffering of Fukushima evacuees has been immense and it is ongoing.

* Lights’ claim that the Fukushima disaster “didn’t harm anybody” also ignores the harm resulting from Fukushima’s trillion-dollar hit on the Japanese economy. In a 2019 report, the Japan Center for Economic Research estimated that the total cost of the Fukushima accident, including compensation, decontamination and decommissioning, could reach ¥81 trillion (A$831 billion). Indirect costs ‒ such as replacement power for shuttered reactors, and lost tourism revenue ‒ also amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. Direct and indirect costs combined far exceed A$1 trillion (and Chernobyl was also a trillion-dollar disaster). See also Michael Barnard’s analysis, ‘Fukushima’s Final Costs Will Approach A Trillion Dollars Just For Nuclear Disaster’.

ZL: “France has long been a nuclear behemoth. In 1974, due to the oil crisis, French PM Pierre Messmer instigated a plan to build nuclear power plants en masse. There was a saying at the time: “In France, we do not have oil, but we do have ideas.” The idea was to build 52 new reactors between 1975 and 1990, with which France decarbonised its electricity grid and massively expanded their engineering and construction expertise. Now, with many of its ageing reactors in need of replacement, President Macron has announced six new reactors and begun a recruiting drive for workers to get them built - but there is currently a debate taking place regarding whether the aim should be 14 new reactors instead of six.”

JG response:

* The only current reactor construction project in France is one EPR reactor under construction at Flamanville. The current cost estimate of €19.1 billion (A$31.6 billion) is nearly six times greater than the original estimate of €3.3 billion (A$5.5 billion). (Lower cost estimates cited by EDF and others typically exclude finance costs.)

* Construction of the Flamanville EPR reactor began in Dec. 2007 and it remains incomplete over 16 years later.

* The last reactor startup in France was in the last millenium (1999).

* French President Emmanuel Macron said in a 2020 speech that without nuclear power there would be no nuclear weapons, and vice versa.

* France's nuclear industry was in its "worst situation ever", a former EDF director said in 2016 ‒ and the situation has worsened since then.

* Areva went technically bankrupt and was bailed out and restructured by the French government in 2017.

* EDF was lurching towards bankruptcy, with debts of €64.5 billion (A$107 billion) as of early 2023, before it was fully nationalised. In addition to its massive debts, EDF has a “colossal maintenance and investment programme to fund” as the Financial Times noted in October 2021.

* And EDF is on the hook for the dramatically escalating costs of the twin-reactor EPR plant it is building in the UK.

ZL: “The UK has announced plans to build a new large-scale nuclear power plant, which could quadruple energy supplies by 2050.  The UK generates about 15% of its electricity from nuclear energy, but most of this existing capacity will be retired by the end of the decade. Électricité de France (EDF) recently announced that they are planning to expand the lifetimes of some of these reactors. As well as going big, the UK is investing in small modular reactors (SMRs) funding six companies to advance SMR technology. These are GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy International LLC, Holtec Britain Limited, EDF, NuScale Power, Rolls Royce SMR and Westinghouse Electric Company UK Limited.”

JG response:

* The first sentence doesn’t make any sense.

* Yes, a number of ageing reactors have already been closed and others will follow in the coming years. Nuclear power accounted for over 20% of electricity production in the UK in the early 2000s and now it has fallen to below 15%.

* The last reactor startup in the UK was in the last millenium (Sizewell B in 1995).

* The only reactor construction project is the twin-reactor EPR plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset. In the late 2000s, the estimated construction cost for one EPR reactor in the UK was £2 billion. The current cost estimate for two EPR reactors under construction at Hinkley Point is as much as £46 billion (A$89 billion) or £23 billion (A$44.5 billion) per reactor. That’s 11.5 times higher than the estimate in the late 2000s! This is an example of the Golden Rule of Nuclear Economics: Add a Zero to Nuclear Industry Estimates.

* EDF said Hinkley Point would be complete by 2017 but construction didn’t begin until 2018. If the reactors are ever completed, it won’t be until the 2030s.

* The UK National Audit Office estimates that taxpayer subsidies for Hinkley Point ‒ primarily in the form of a guaranteed payment of £92.50 / MWh (2012 prices), indexed for inflation, for 35 years ‒ could amount to £30 billion (A$58 billion).

* The UK has no SMRs and it is doubtful if any will ever be built despite the hype.

ZL: “The US has also changed its mind. Recent federal and state policies have recently provided support for nuclear power. In 2022, President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) created a tax credit for all existing reactors, designed to top off power plant revenues without overpaying. On a regional level, several states have chosen to keep their nuclear plants online. Congress also passed two pieces of legislation to help keep power plants running. Together, these policies have saved several reactors from closing and will keep America’s existing nuclear fleet online for another decade. The federal policies also include funding to build the next generation of SMRs. These include Bill Gates’s TerraPower, which received $80 million in federal funding from the US Department of Energy (DOE) in 2020 to support the development of its Natrium nuclear reactor, and NuScale Power Corporation, an American company that is developing SMRs, with HQ in Oregon.”

JG response:

* In the US, the only current reactor construction project is the Vogtle project in Georgia (two AP1000 reactors, of which one is complete). The latest cost estimate of $34 billion is more than double the estimate when construction began – $14-15.5 billion.

* The V.C. Summer project in South Carolina (two AP1000 reactors) was abandoned in 2017 after the expenditure of around $9 billion. US nuclear giant Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy shortly after the abandonment of the South Carolina project, and its parent company Toshiba only survived by selling off its most profitable assets.

* In 2006, Westinghouse said it could build an AP1000 reactor for as little as $1.4 billion, 12 times lower than the current estimate for Vogtle. Another example of the Golden Rule of Nuclear Economics: Add a Zero to Nuclear Industry Estimates.

* The US nuclear industry is riddled with corruption.

* No SMRs have been built in the US (unless you count small reactors built decades ago ‒ and shut down decades ago). The biggest SMR news in 2023 was NuScale Power’s decision to abandon its flagship project in Idaho despite securing astronomical subsidies amounting to around US$4 billion (A$6.1 billion) from the US government. NuScale has recently sacked 154 employees and will likely go bankrupt. NuScale executives sold stock while the stock price was still high, and a class action is likely to hasten NuScale’s bankruptcy. The stock price is now less than one-fifth of its Aug. 2022 peak.

* NuScale’s most recent cost estimates were through the roof: US$9.3 billion (A$14.1 billion) for a 462 MW plant comprising six 77 MW reactors. That equates to US$20,100 (A$30,600) per kilowatt and a levelised cost of US$89 (A$135) per MWh. Without the Inflation Reduction Act subsidy of $30/MWh, the figure would be US$129 (A$196) per MWh. To put that in perspective, the Minerals Council of Australia states that SMRs won’t find a market in Australia unless they can produce power at a cost of A$60-80 / MWh.

* Lights mentions NuScale and helpfully informs us that it is headquartered in Oregon … but doesn’t think any of the above information worth noting!

* The pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute noted in a November 2023 article that efforts to commercialise a new generation of ‘advanced’ nuclear reactors “are simply not on track” and it warned nuclear advocates not to “whistle past this graveyard”. It wrote:

“The NuScale announcement follows several other setbacks for advanced reactors. Last month, X-Energy, another promising SMR company, announced that it was canceling plans to go public. This week, it was forced to lay off about 100 staff.

“In early 2022, Oklo’s first license application was summarily rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before the agency had even commenced a technical review of Oklo’s Aurora reactor.

“Meanwhile, forthcoming new cost estimates from TerraPower and XEnergy as part of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Deployment Program are likely to reveal substantially higher cost estimates for the deployment of those new reactor technologies as well.”

ZL: “Sweden has jumped on the nuclear bandwagon. In 1980, Sweden voted to get rid of nuclear power, but now the country aims to build two new nuclear reactors by 2035. The plan is to have 10 new reactors by 2045, some of which may be SMRs.”

JG response:

* There is no nuclear bandwagon outside of Lights’ imagination.

* It is unlikely that any new reactors will be built in Sweden. Estimates from the state-owned Swedish energy company Vattenfall show that levelised costs will be twice as expensive as previously assumed and about three times more expensive than wind power. The estimates apply both to conventional reactors and SMRs.

ZL: “Canada has made major announcements for new large nuclear builds, SMRs and medical isotopes.”

JG response:

* Announcements are cheap, reactor construction projects are not. Talk of new reactors in Canada has been going on for many, many years without a single reactor construction start.

* No reactors are under construction in Canada and none have come online since the last millennium (Darlington-4 in 1993 ‒ five years behind schedule and billions over-budget).

* Reactor lifespan extension projects have been subject to delays and cost blowouts.

* In May 2000, Canada’s AECL completed construction of two MAPLE reactors for medical isotope production, but they never operated due to technical problems with safety significance. (As discussed elsewhere, Lights doesn’t know what nuclear medicine is.)

* Canada has no SMRs and it is doubtful if any will ever be built despite the hype.