The government announced last week that the Sizewell C nuclear power plant in Suffolk would finally be given more than £14bn investment for its construction. It also announced that Rolls Royce would be awarded a government contract for Europe’s first Small Modular Reactor (SMR) programme. Given that Labour is only grudgingly being forced to U-turn on welfare cuts and departments are fighting for scraps from the Treasury, this investment was a major win for energy secretary Ed Miliband, who first proposed the Sizewell C site for a new nuclear plant in 2009.
Predictably though, the announcement drew criticism from opponents of nuclear energy, sadly including the Green Party, who argued that investing in nuclear rather than renewables makes no sense because the plants take too long to build and are more expensive.
Well, firstly, the government is also investing in renewables – one of the few areas where Labour actually seems to be improving on the previous Tory government – but it’s nonetheless worth examining the case for nuclear energy, and whether Sizewell C is really a good use of public money.
Nuclear capacity to double by 2050
The UK’s Climate Change Committee recommends that nuclear capacity doubles by 2050, alongside massive increases in renewables capacity.
Nuclear is recommended partly to provide extra resilience to our energy system and reduce the intermittency resulting from the fact that the sun doesn’t shine at night, and the wind doesn’t always blow, or sometimes blows too much, both of these meaning that renewable electricity generation doesn’t always match demand.
While solutions like battery storage facilities can address much of the issue, they’re costly additions and may not be appropriate everywhere. Nuclear plants, on the other hand, generate a consistent supply of energy 24/7, so can help provide stability to the grid.
Most of Europe’s current nuclear plants were built in the 1970s and 1980s and are now approaching the end of their operational lives. Sizewell C claims its plant will operate for over 60 years, which isn’t unreasonable. This is significantly longer than the lifespan for windfarms, which typically last 20-30 years.
Another benefit is that while nuclear plants, such as Sizewell C, come with high upfront costs, making it difficult to attract investment, once they’re built they generate electricity very cost-effectively.
France generates almost 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear
Contrary to the historical alarmism, the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) from nuclear, which looks across the whole operational lifetime, is roughly on a par with onshore wind and solar, between $60 and $100 per MWh. France, for instance, generates almost 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear, but doesn’t have especially high prices.
As for the argument that nuclear plants take too long to build to help us reach net zero, that isn’t strictly true. Once construction begins, they tend to be completed within six to eight years as a global average. Of course, some projects have long overruns, like Hinkley Point C in Somerset, but Sizewell C could easily be operational by 2035. And even if construction times are longer than for solar or wind so, as mentioned above, is the lifespan.
We should have been building nuclear plants 15 or 20 years ago, but myopic governments didn’t invest. Reviving the industry now though should still allow time for it to contribute towards net zero targets, and we ought to be thinking long-term about maintaining clean energy systems beyond the 2050s.
An important factor to compare about different forms of energy generation is their environmental impact. Firstly, all energy sources currently come with embedded carbon emissions from their construction, and from the extraction and transport of raw materials.
Then, nuclear energy has life-cycle emissions just as low as wind and solar, and significantly lower than hydro power. On most other environmental metrics too, the impact of nuclear is about level with wind and solar.
Some renewables do catastrophic harm to freshwater ecosystems
On some crucial measures, such as land use, nuclear is significantly more efficient than renewables (notwithstanding that other land uses can be incorporated amongst wind or solar arrays). Some renewables, like hydroelectric dams, do catastrophic harm to freshwater ecosystems, particularly migratory fish populations, which may take decades to fully recover after dam removals.
Nuclear doesn’t have anything like this impact, yet it seems to be more demonised by some environmentalists. The disposal of radioactive waste is the trickiest problem associated with nuclear energy, which of course isn’t an issue for renewables. Traditionally the solution has been to just sweep it under the rug, or rather, store it in temporary facilities for the next generation to worry about.
Most countries have ambitions for permanent burial in Geological Disposal Facilities but so far, no such facilities exist. Now though, other options are becoming available.
Conventional reactors only fission around five per cent of the uranium loaded into the reactor core, or approximately 0.6 per cent of mined uranium. The rest is typically discarded as waste. The latest generation of reactor designs, however, include fast neutron reactors, which can convert uranium-238 into fissile plutonium-239 fuel. These fast neutron reactors could therefore utilise spent fuel from conventional reactors.
Far more energy could be generated than previously
The new fast breeder reactors generate more fissile material than they consume, which can then be used to fuel other reactors. This doesn’t negate the issue of storing waste, but it means that far more energy could be generated per unit of fuel than previously.
The issue of waste, the higher capital cost and longer construction time mean that nuclear shouldn’t be seen as the primary, or even a large, part of a future clean energy system. In Britain this should still be based mostly on wind, complemented by solar in the south and east. But nuclear is a perfectly legitimate way of boosting the capacity of low carbon energy and stabilising the grid.
It certainly makes no sense for environmentalists to be whinging about it when we’re still getting 30 per cent of our electricity from fossil gas and 14 per cent from burning biomass, to say nothing of our non-electrical primary energy sources – and especially when much of the opposition is based on exaggeration and fearmongering.
While this government rips up planning regulations, plans airport expansions and refuses to renationalise water companies, there’s no shortage of real issues demanding our attention.
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