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Another problem with Nuclear
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I posted before about the pitfalls of Nuclear power. The FT highlights the largest. The cost of storage of waste.
Energy companies cannot be charged a fully commercial price by the government for disposing of nuclear waste without “killing the prospect” of a new generation of reactors, a government adviser will warn today.
The analysis will fuel opposition to the government’s contentious and aggressive drive to expand the UK’s nuclear capacity. Gordon Brown will today underscore his determination to attract investors to build reactors, at his summit with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president. The leaders are expected to agree to Anglo-French co-operation on nuclear skills and regulation.
The government has insisted that the utility companies now vying to build a fleet of nuclear power stations will bear their “full share” of decommissioning and waste disposal costs.
However, a costs analysis, published today, suggests that ministers cannot charge energy companies the rates already being paid by overseas utilities to have waste stored at Sellafield without jeopardising the entire new nuclear programme. Instead, the government would need to cap costs at about 6 to 12 per cent of this commercial value to make the new stations a viable investment.
The problem with Nuclear power is that is simply costs to much. All the debate from the pro-nuclear side is from a safety aspect they are rarely ever questioned on the cost aspect of it. WIth the simple “sure look at oil prices” arguement. By allowing the debate to centre on the safety aspect they get to highlight that it is indeed fairly safe.
Simon,
It’s all a bit more complicated that the FT, or indeed the Greenpeace International press release on which the FT article is based, is making out.
All nuclear waste must be returned to where it originated. The UK operates a ’substitution’ policy with Sellafield’s overseas reprocessing customers. Since internediate level waste is of much greater volume than highly active wastes, foreign customers agree to accept the radiological equivalent of their medium level wastes, generated from reprocessing at Sellafield, in the form of high level waste. The advantages are obvious: less sea transports of nuclear wastes and the customers are also saved the trouble and expense of having to construct their own final repositories for medium level waste storage.
For the UK, the advantages are that the total volume of medium level wastes belonging to overseas customers is relatively small, when compared to the UK’s own MLW, generated from their own power stations and from decommissioning old nuclear sites and materials. Also the UK charges the foreign customers a premium for storing their MLW material, estimated at £650m over a 12 to 14 year period (2003 prices).
The real cost of this waste storage is estimated at £87m. Jackson points out that the profit margin is of the order of £563m and that overseas customers are willing to pay that premium. His argument is that the £650m represents the true commercial price for nuclear waste disposal and that therefore, if the UK waste disposal services were ultimately owned and operated by the private sector, that should be the price charged to any new UK nuclear power stations for disposing of their nuclear waste. This would bring the cost of waste disposal from new build of four new stations in the UK to in excess of £8bn, or 40% of the stations’ worth over their expected lifetime of 60 years. The utility companies would prefer a 5% ratio. If they were charged at the real disposal cost then the figure for waste disposal would be closer to £1.9bn, Jackson says.
All Ian Jackson is doing is setting out the financial parameters for the negotiations on how waste will be valued and costed between the British government agencies, namely the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, and the utility companies planning to build the new stations. He’s the undoubted authority on this subject and his book on nuclear economics is due to be published shortly. It’s also only to be expected that the anti-nuclear lobby will seek to use his analysis to support their own agenda.
But from an Irish perspective, it’s all a bit academic since there is no proposal here to go the nuclear route for very good reasons - we don’t have the skilled workforce necessary, the national grid couldn’t accommodate a nuclear station of the size likely to be commercially available (1000 to 1600 megawatts); we certainly have nowhere to conditon any nuclear waste arising and since we can’t even bring ourselves to build a repository for nuclear orphan sources in this country a repository for MLW would be out of the question, and so on. In any case, the ESB announcement last week of a £22bn investment in renewables energy technologies over the next few years has set the course for us. Incidentally, any critical discussion and analysis of the ESB plan was, it appears to me anyway, completely absent from the weekend media. I think that’s a pity and more than a little worrying. The plan can hardly be that perfect, can it?