Why no to nukes

George Monbiot, noted environmental journalist, is mostly right. However, in supporting nuclear power as a solution to global warming, he is wrong, and here’s why.

• nuclear does nothing to reform the grid to work off a range of highly variable and local resources 
• nuclear plants are expensive and often run massively over the budget in both time and cost
• expanding nuclear will run out of affordable fuel fast
• mining is extremely dirty and harmful to the environment as well a health and safety hazard to miners and anyone in the proximity of a mine
• the link between nuclear power and weapons
• waste disposal – a massive intergenerational problem
• risks of accidents – far higher if nuclear proliferates into countries with a poor track record of managing large-scale complex systems 
• decommissioning cost

In the UK context, Monbiot is also wrong for reasons that apply to local economics; I do not go into that here since that does not apply to South Africa.

Let me elaborate on the factual basis for my points.

Less-Discussed Points

Renewables require a grid (more correctly, grid plus transmission network) that works reliably with highly variable sources of power. Photovoltaics (solar panels) only produce power during daylight hours (and that is highly reduced by cloud). If wind turbines are widely distributed geographically, overall they provide a reliable source of power but not all at once. Home-based solar can give households incentives to manage power better with smart meters that discourage wasteful behaviour. It takes time to get all this working but it also takes time to do a significant-scale nuclear build. Superficially, nuclear looks easier since it replaces coal or gas power by the same type of centralized generation but with a different fuel source. But it has no requirement of a reformed grid, needed for renewables.

Building nuclear plants is complex, costly and frequently runs into massive time and cost over-runs. This has recently happened even in France, a country that can claim extensive experience with nuclear power. In a country with little or no experience of managing nuclear power projects, the risk of major cost and time overruns is even higher. South Africa’s latest coal plants, Medupi and Kusile, have run into problems of this nature and while a big coal plant is a very complex and specialized project, it is not as difficult as nuclear.

Relatively static level of nuclear gneration

The World Nuclear Association estimates there is a 90-year supply of uranium, allowing exploitation at up to 3 times current pricing. That looks promising but the key is that this estimate is based on current rate of use – which has not changed much over the last 20 years. Ignoring military use (which in recent years has been declining and I hope that continues), currently about 11% of all electricity worldwide uses nuclear. Triple this to 33% and that 90 years drops to 30 years, meaning that the most recent plants will be built well after the point where they can be fuelled for their entire lifetime.

While more expensive uranium could be mined, that takes me to the next point. Uranium is mined in several grades, from high-grade ore that’s 20% uranium in Canada to very low-grade ore in Namibia that is 100 parts per million or 0.01%. The lowest-grade ore results in 99.99% of the material mined being waste and, even in Canada, which has the highest-grade ore, there are problems with toxic radioactive waste leaching into the environment.

Those are the less-discussed issues. Now on to the more commonly discussed issues.

Commonly-Discussed Points

There is a close link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Though there are very big differences in the technologies, research for weapons attracts a lot more funding than energy research. For this reason, nuclear fuels that are most similar to fissionable material needed for weapons have had the most attention. For example, thorium is far more plentiful than uranium in nature, yet has not made much progress into commercial-scale reactors despite a growing amount of research.

Then there is the issue of waste disposal, a massive problem for thousands of years into the future; the Union of Concerned Scientists summarizes the issues.

I need not elaborate on the risks of major accidents – Fukushima is the latest. If that could happen in one of the world’s most developed countries with a strong track of engineering and delivering major infrastructure projects, it is foolish to believe that the risk is not higher if nuclear plants proliferate in countries with a poor track record on such projects.

Finally there is the issue of decommissioning. France, the poster child for nuclear, with 75% of its electricity from nuclear plants, is planning to drop reliance on nuclear to 50% with a shift to renewables. While the Macron government has since slightly scaled back this ambition, it is widely agreed that French nuclear power is in trouble. Opinions vary on actual cost, but decommissioning nuclear plants is expensive. And it is a non-productive cost.

Eskom – Restructure or Destructure?

The Government proposes to restructure Eskom into three entities:

• generation
• transmission
• distribution

What is not clear is what problem this is meant to solve. Eskom’s problems are many and deep. The most obvious are:

• failure to diversify away from coal – a sunset technology not only because of climate change but the massive pollution it causes in the vicinity of mines and the other toxic pollutants it emits like heavy metals
• massive crisis in municipal debt – many are so far behind in paying Eskom that they have no way of recovering
• unsustainable payroll –  there are estimates that Eskom has as many as 30,000 more employees than it can afford; the exact number is under question but it is likely to be large
• inability to manage large generator projects – not only is Eskom investing in massive coal plants when this is the worst possible time to do so, but they have had massive cost overruns and are not operating reliably many years after they should have been commissioned

Which, exactly, of these problems does the proposed restructuring solve?

None of them.

Instead, it creates a new problem. If you split distribution of electricity from production, the distribution entities have an incentive to under-invest in maintenance as their business does not suffer as much as the producer if parts of the network fail. This is exactly what happened in Australia when this sort of split occurred. A similar example is the split of the British rail system where the rail network was no longer owned by the train operators and maintenance was neglected.

So what is the alternative?

The simplest is to keep Eskom as it is and lay off a large part of the workforce. But politically this cannot fly as mass job losses is not a plan any party will sell at election time. We also need to consider the effect on the workforce.

A better plan is for Eskom to stop resisting large-scale deployment of small-scale solar power. A rapid roll-out of home-scale and small business solar could add a gigawatt to the grid in a short timer – as little as 6 months. Two things hold this back: inadequate support of exporting excess power to the grid and municipal reliance on profits from sale of electricity. Both of these can be addressed – and I will in a separate article.

Eskom should split as follows, to enable this:

• bulk generation and distribution – what Eskom does now but with a reduced workforce
• RDP solar – installation of a solar panel on every RDP house, with an initial target of 1-million homes, to be funded by a combination of government subsidy and cost recovery of a share of the electricity generated for the first 5 years
• public institution solar – schools and tertiary institutions should be encourage to go solar, with a mix of subsidies for the less wealthy and private funding for the well-funded insitutions
• home solar – no subsidy; those who can afford to buy solar should be permitted to feed into the grid with a feed in tariff equal to their municipal electricity tariff

Each of these could be one separate company, or be further split if geography makes a smaller entity more viable. In the initial stage, the former Eskom company would be the sole provider where government was involved to eliminate the time delays and corruption of the tender process. Once we have the first gigawatt installed, this can be opened up to competition.