There wave on wave imbued with power has heaved,
But to withdraw – and nothing is achieved;
Which drives me near to desperate distress!
Such elemental might unharnessed, purposeless!
As with oxygen, we notice electricity only when it fails. Vaguely aware that most of what we do would be impossible without it, we seldom have to wonder where it comes from, how it works or what we would do if it were no longer available. Yet its steady supply would astonish Mephistopheles.
Unlike almost all the other commodities we buy, which can be stockpiled and then delivered when we want them, electricity must be produced at the very moment of demand. This is because it is difficult and expensive to store.2 And if either too much or too little is produced, the voltage and frequency fluctuations will crash the country’s computers. If supply falls below a certain level, the whole grid collapses. So not only must it be made when we want it; it must also be made in precisely the quantities we demand.
This would not be too difficult if our demand remained constant. But it oscillates wildly. On a summer’s night in the United Kingdom, for example, we need less than 20GW of power-generating capacity (a GW is a gigawatt, or one billion watts). On cold winter evenings, when about half the population returns from work at around the same time, and turns on the lights, the kettle, the television, the power shower and the electric heaters, over 60GW has to be found. Exceptional events, which cause us to synchronize our behaviour more precisely, can push this even higher. During the 1990 World Cup semi-final, for example, demand rose by 1.6GW within a couple of minutes at half-time and at full-time, and by 2.8GW after the penalty shoot-out.3
Why? Because as soon as there was a break, most of the population got up to put the kettle on. 2.8GW is more than twice the ‘load’ of the biggest power station in the UK.4 Because our televisions and lights were burning already, the system was straining even before these extra demands were made. Someone had to ensure that the extra power was found at the very moment it was required, and not just some extra power, but a quantity matched exactly to the demand.
What this means is that the electricity companies must study the behaviour of their customers, chart their historical use of electricity, anticipate public holidays and national events, read the weather forecasts and the television schedules and study the ratings, and watch the penalty shoot-outs in order to determine when the entire country will lever its collective backside off the sofa.
To respond to these fluctuations in demand, they need constantly to be bringing power plants in and out of production. The ‘baseload’ – the 20GW we use all the time – is supplied by nuclear reactors and large gas-powered plants. As more electricity is required, coal-burning power stations and smaller generators are brought online. Some plants will be kept out of production all through the summer, and fired up as demand rises in the winter. Some are held in ‘spinning reserve’: operating, inefficiently, at just part of their load, but ready to be brought up to full power in seconds. A cable between France and the United Kingdom allows us to import 2GW of electricity when we fall short. Some factories strike special deals with the electricity companies: in return for a rebate, they agree to cut their demand when the system comes under strain.5
Most dramatically, the UK has three ‘pumped storage’ plants, which provide our only cost-effective means of storing power. They each consist of two reservoirs, one at the top of a mountain; one close to the bottom. When electricity is cheap, which means when demand is low, it is used to pump water from the bottom reservoir to the top one. When there is a requirement for a sudden surge in production, the gates of the top reservoir are opened, and the water pours through turbines back down to the bottom. The pumped storage plant at Dinorwig, in north Wales, can produce 1.7GW of power for five hours.6 It responds within fifteen seconds.7 I like to picture a man in a booth with his television on. As the match draws to an end, the phone rings. ‘It’s the last penalty. Open the gates.’ He pulls down a great red lever, and the water roars out of the upper reservoir just as the ball thumps into the corner of the net. I’m sure that in reality it’s all done automatically.
Seeing how this system works, I am struck by the thought that perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that electricity companies have been reluctant to invest in uncertain power sources such as wind and waves. The system is already so finely balanced that the instinct of anyone who runs it must be to minimize further complexity. But something has to be done, because this miracle is sustained only by burning vast amounts of fossil fuel.
In the United Kingdom, our electricity comes from the sources show in the table below. Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute estimates that while the carbon content of the energy we use in the home can be cut overall by 60 per cent by 2050, our electricity consumption can be reduced by just 16 per cent in the same period.8 This is depressing, especially when you realize that the institute’s timetable is twenty years longer than mine. But it assumes that nothing is done to suppress the growing demand for new and often bigger
fuel type |
percentage of electricity generation |
gas |
41 |
coal |
33 |
nuclear |
19 |
renewables |
3 |
imports |
2 |
oil |
1 |
other fuels |
1 |
Source: UK Department of Trade and Industry.9
electrical appliances. My belief – and I hope that I am not being unduly optimistic – is that a rationing system accompanied by either regulation or an effective public information campaign (telling people, for example, that large plasma TVs consume five times as much electricity as other models) would go some way towards reversing the current trend. I am going to assume that it’s possible to reduce the demand for electricity by some 25 per cent by 2030. This means that I must still find a way of cutting its carbon content by more than 80 per cent.
Coal contains an average of 24.1 kilograms of carbon per gigajoule of energy, while natural gas contains just 14.6 kilograms.10 So, if all else were equal, burning gas rather than coal would produce about 40 per cent less carbon dioxide for every watt of electricity it generates. But coal is even worse than this suggests. A modern gas-burning power station turns about 52 per cent of the energy its fuel contains into electricity.11 The best coal-fired generators have an efficiency of just 40 per cent.12 Partly because we still use coal, and partly because some of our gas turbines are of rather antiquated designs, the average efficiency of power stations in the United Kingdom in 2004 was just 38.5 per cent.13
Plainly, one significant step towards a lower-carbon economy is to swap the two fuels. This, though not for environmental reasons, has already happened to a large extent in the UK. In 1970, we consumed 176 million short tons of coal (a short ton is 2000lbs), and in 2003 just 69 million.14 The switch to gas is one of the major reasons for the reduction in the United Kingdom’s carbon emissions: without it we would have had little hope of meeting our obligation, under the Kyoto Protocol, to produce 12.5 per cent less carbon in 2012 than in 1990.
Unfortunately, after a couple of decades of substitution in the rich nations, it looks as if we are starting to travel in the opposite direction. In 2025, according to the US government’s Energy Information Administration, the United States will burn 40 per cent more coal than it does today.15 China intends to treble the electricity it produces from coal by 2020.16 The British government expects – if the market has its way – a major expansion of coal burning in the UK after 2020.17
It is not hard to see why the world is returning to the Coal Age. Natural gas supplies in North America have already peaked and are going into decline.18 In Europe, wholesale gas prices tripled between 2003 and 2006.19 This is partly because North Sea gas has also begun to diminish; and partly because the government of Russia temporarily restricted supplies to Eastern European countries,20 while the gas companies that control the pipelines have been limiting the supply to Western Europe.*21
Some people are concerned that global gas supplies could soon follow North America’s over the brink and into decline. The UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, for example, citing an organization called the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, predicts that ‘the global gas production peak will occur by 2020–2030.’22 I find this unlikely.
The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution expects that ‘global production will not peak until 2090’,23 though the expert it cites, Professor Peter Odell, has made predictions about the oil price which have proved to be optimistic.24 Shell proposes that known gas reserves will be much bigger in 2020 than they are today,25 but I have learnt to be wary of the oil companies’ projections. Perhaps a more reliable prediction is the one made by the Geological Society of London. Within the next fifty years, it suggests,
oil will probably experience a supply peak… while natural gas will not… although projection of historic growth rates suggest production constraints may arise around mid-century.26
Coal, by contrast, faces no such restrictions. The International Energy Agency says the world currently has around 1 trillion tonnes of recoverable coal – enough for 200 years of production at present levels.27 The Geological Society points out that a price increase of only $10/tonne would, in effect, double the world’s economic coal reserves.28 The Norwegian oil company Statoil estimates that under the Norwegian seabed alone there are 3 trillion tonnes of coal, though at the moment there is no viable means of extracting it.29 Ninety per cent of the remaining energy reserves in the US are coal.30
There are means of increasing the security – and therefore the economic longevity – of our gas supplies. The most effective is an increase in the amount of storage. In the United Kingdom, for example, we store only fourteen days’ supply, by contrast to a European average of fifty-two days.31 This means that our gas supplies are less reliable than other people’s, which increases the pressure – from bodies such as the Confederation of British Industry – to switch to other kinds of fuel. Yet we have plenty of potential reservoirs, in the form of salt beds and old, depleted gas fields under the North Sea. You can store gas simply by pumping it back into the rocks. This is already done on a small scale in the Rough gas field in the southern North Sea,32 and on a larger scale in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York State.33,34
I am not suggesting that burning gas will save the biosphere; simply that a return from gas to coal will greatly accelerate its destruction.
But even if we continued to produce most of our electricity from burning fossil fuels, we could, in theory at least, cut carbon emissions by 8035 or 85 per cent.36 The technology which would make this possible is called ‘carbon capture and storage’.
This means stripping the carbon dioxide out of the fuel either before or after it is burnt, and burying it in the hope that it will stay where it’s put. Like so much to do with the electricity industry, it sounds ridiculous. But in some places it is already happening.
Already, Statoil scrubs 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the gas it extracts from the Sleipner field in the North Sea, and pumps it into a saline aquifer (a pocket of salt water) under the seabed.37 BP is doing something similar in Algeria.38 (The carbon dioxide is an impurity which reduces the value of the natural gas.) Since 1954, a Canadian company called EnCana has been using carbon dioxide to flush the remaining oil out of a depleted reservoir in Saskatchewan. Though at first EnCana had little interest in what happened to the gas, about three quarters of it has stayed underground.39
There are several means of extracting carbon dioxide from the exhaust gases of a power station. The most likely technology has been used for other purposes for over sixty years.40 It’s called ‘amine scrubbing’. The gases are bubbled through chemicals called ethanolamines, which absorb between 82 and 99 per cent of the carbon dioxide.41 The chemical mixture is then heated to release the carbon,42 which is piped away for burial, so that the amines can be re-used.
After the gas has been captured, it is compressed and then pumped down a pipeline and into an underground store. Several kinds of geological feature seem capable of holding it almost indefinitely. Below is a list of the world’s possible reservoirs and the amount of carbon dioxide they could hold.
reservoir |
global capacity (billion tonnes) |
old oil fields |
125 |
unmineable coal seams |
148 |
old gas fields |
800 |
saline aquifers |
400–10,000 |
Source: UK Department of Trade and Industry.43
The wide range of the figures for saline aquifers is rather worrying. The world’s power stations produce around 10.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.44 In principle, if the higher estimates are correct, you could store all the carbon our electricity generators will produce in the next twenty-four years several times over. But, as I will show in a moment, even doing it once is difficult.
There are good reasons to suppose that once carbon dioxide has been properly buried in the right sites, it will stay where it is put. Most of the natural gas reservoirs we exploit today have remained stable for millions of years. The IPCC says that after 1,000 years, less than 1 per cent of the carbon dioxide buried in appropriate reservoirs is likely to have escaped.45
A fortunate property of carbon dioxide helps to keep it where it is: at 800 metres or more below the earth’s surface, the pressure turns it ‘super-critical’: it behaves more like a liquid than a gas.46 According to the International Energy Agency, about 80 per cent of the world’s oil fields, into which some of the gas could be pumped, occur at depths of over 800 metres.47 Capturing and burying carbon dioxide costs anywhere between £12 and £160 a tonne, depending on whose estimate you believe.48 Capturing carbon from coal-burning power stations costs more than capturing it from gas generators, as coal contains more carbon per tonne. Altogether, power stations in the United Kingdom produce 172 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.55 A table in Chapter 7 compares the costs of saving carbon by all the different means I discuss.
When I first heard about this technology, I reacted with hostility. My first thought was that it couldn’t possibly work: the gas would surely leak from the aquifers. This fear has now been laid to rest. Then it struck me that the energy (and therefore the carbon) costs of extracting, compressing, transporting and burying it would outweigh any savings it permitted. But the IPCC maintains that while a power plant would need to burn between 10 and 40 per cent more fuel to cover these energy costs, the net carbon saving would still be 80–90 per cent:56 the carbon dioxide from the extra gas or coal it burnt could also be buried.
Then I expressed the concern that the promise of carbon capture and storage could provide an excuse for the fossil fuel companies to pursue their business as usual. Surely a much safer means of dealing with fossil fuels is to leave them in the ground? But this argument was countered in an interesting fashion by Jonathan Gibbins at Imperial College, London. The rules required to keep fossil fuels unmined, he maintained
probably have a much lower reliability and… longevity than geological storage. Storage also requires a one-off effort up front, not sustained dominance of global policy.57
In other words, once you have buried your carbon dioxide, you can more or less forget about it; but if valuable assets remain under the ground, you will need constant enforcement to prevent them from being extracted. Carbon capture and storage is more politically stable than economic restraint.
But there are three arguments against it which do bear some weight.
The first one is that almost all the cost estimates I’ve read are accompanied by a second and lower set of figures: for a process called ‘enhanced oil recovery’. The basic mechanism is the same – you inject carbon dioxide into old oil fields – but in this case you do it partly in order to squeeze the dregs out of them (as EnCana has done in Saskatchewan). The gas dissolves in the oil, reducing the oil’s viscosity. As it is forced through the reservoir, it drives the oil into the production wells.58 The money this makes explains why enhanced oil recovery costs less than straightforward carbon burial. Less of the carbon dioxide stays underground, as some of it will escape with the oil. And more oil than was otherwise available comes to the surface. A report for the US Department of Energy suggests that carbon dioxide injection could effectively quadruple the country’s oil reserves.59 As most oil is used in vehicles, and there is no viable means by which the carbon they produce can be captured and buried, there’s a danger that using carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery could increase its concentrations in the atmosphere. If burying carbon is to be used as a means of tackling climate change, it cannot also be used as a means of recovering oil.
The second argument is that capture and storage helps to revitalize the coal industry. Already, on the strength of nothing but speculation about what might one day be possible, the industry’s boosters have managed to drum the words ‘clean coal’ into our ears. While the carbon dioxide from coal-burning power stations might one day be buried, in every other respect coal is likely to remain one of the world’s most destructive industries. If you doubt me, try standing on the edge of an open-cast mine and saying the words ‘clean coal’.
In the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States, the coal companies, always innovative when it comes to planetary destruction, are now using a method of extraction they call ‘mountaintop removal’. They simply blast the tops off the mountains and bulldoze the rubble into the valleys, turning a fissured sierra back into a plateau. Already they have buried 1,200 miles of streams.60 When I tell my friends that if I were forced to choose between nuclear power and coal, I would pick nuclear, they go berserk. I invite them to take a look at some pictures of the mines in West Virginia.61
But, at the risk of playing the same speculative game as the coal barons, I should point out that there is a technology which could one day realize the promise of clean coal. This is called ‘underground coal gasification’. Holes are drilled into a coal seam and air and steam are pumped into it. The coal is ‘gasified’, releasing methane and hydrogen, both of which can be burnt in power stations. Carbon can be extracted from the gases either before or after they are burnt. The technique requires no major excavations, no tailings or slag heaps, and no children breathing dust in narrow galleries.
It has been practised since the 1950s in Uzbekistan and tested, with some success, in Australia, Spain, China, the United States and the United Kingdom. It’s now possible to gasify seams as far as 600 metres below ground.62 The deeper it is done, the better, as it is then less likely to contaminate freshwater aquifers.63 Like all coal burning, it releases other pollutants, such as sulphur and nitrogen oxides and heavy metals, so these too need to be stripped out of the gases which emerge from the boreholes. The costs are comparable to burning coal in a modern power station.64
But it is critical that underground coal gasification is used only with carbon capture and storage. Otherwise, because it can be applied to seams too narrow to dig, it simply opens up even more coal than was otherwise available. In the United Kingdom, for example, eleven times as much coal can be exploited by underground gasification as by mining or quarrying.*
The third viable argument against carbon capture and storage is that, like almost anything we choose to do, it prevents other options from being pursued. In this case, it means that the waste heat from electricity production will not be available for warming our homes. This is because capture and storage makes economic sense only in very large power stations, while ‘combined heat and power’ (which I will explain in Chapter 7) makes economic sense only in smaller ones.67
But even if we decide that catching and burying carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning is the best way of decarbonizing our electricity supply, it cannot be used everywhere. A power station has a life of about forty years.68 Unless it has been built with carbon capture in mind, the necessary equipment is difficult to bolt on. The plant should be built within 500 kilometres of the place where the carbon will be buried, because the transport costs increase with distance. Enough space needs to be left to fit the extra pipes and valves and build the capture plant.69 It simply won’t be possible in many of the world’s power stations, including many of those being constructed now. Partly because of this, but partly because of the time taken to design, develop and test the new technology, the International Energy Agency (IEA) believes that
Large-scale carbon capture and storage is probably ten years off, with real potential as an emission mitigation tool from 2030 in developed countries.70
At first sight, in other words, it appears to be too far away to make a major contribution to meeting our target. But as I will show at the end of this chapter, estimates like the IEA’s could be unduly pessimistic. I have come to believe that this technology, alongside others which have been judged ‘too far away’, can, with sufficient political commitment, be widely deployed long before 2030. The difficulties I have encountered while investigating the other technologies have persuaded me that carbon capture and storage – while it cannot provide the whole answer – can be and must be one of the means we use to make low-carbon electricity.
Here begins the section of the book I have been dreading most: a discussion of nuclear power. I hate this topic partly because it is charged with more anger than any other; partly because every fact is fiercely contested. However much reading you do, you still don’t know what or whom to believe.
The particular problem environmentalists face is that the movement itself arose partly as a result of concerns about nuclear energy, which were closely linked to fears about nuclear weapons proliferation. Anything which suggests that you are giving serious consideration to nuclear power risks being perceived as an attack on environmentalism. Indeed, so large does this issue loom among the greens that climate change is often subordinated to it. Several organizations have published reports showing that there is no need to build new nuclear power stations as the old ones become redundant, because renewable energy can fill the gap.71,72,73 The danger is that we end up replacing nuclear power rather than replacing fossil fuels.
The link between nuclear electricity and nuclear weapons is a real one. There is a grim symmetry in the technology’s development. In the first nuclear nations, nuclear power generation was a by-product of nuclear weapons development. In the later nuclear nations, nuclear weapons development was a by-product of nuclear power. Every state which has sought to develop a nuclear weapons programme over the past thirty years – Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq and Iran – has done so by diverting resources from its civil nuclear programme.74,75 The more nuclear material the world contains, the more weapons it is likely to develop, and the more widespread they will become.
When considering all the other technologies I will discuss in this book, you can judge them by three criteria: environmental impact, feasibility and cost. But in this case we have to consider another factor. How do you rate the threat of climate change against the threat of nuclear war? One is certain to happen – indeed is happening already. The other is just as devastating – perhaps even more so – but less certain. Any one contribution to the world’s stockpile of nuclear materials might not make any difference to the possibility of war, though the total increase in volume appears to make it more likely.
One fact which does seem pretty certain is that every nuclear power station leaks radiation into the environment. As well as their routine emissions into the air and the sea, the nuclear generators are surrounded by dumping scandals. In the United Kingdom, for example, hardly a year goes by without some new and terrible revelation about the nuclear complex at Sellafield in Cumbria. In 2004, the European Commission took the British government to court over Sellafield’s refusal to let its inspectors examine one of its dumps.76 (You may remember that we went to war with Iraq over something like this.) It’s hardly surprising that the complex wanted to keep them out: in 2003 they discovered a pond containing 1.3 tonnes of plutonium, which had been sitting there, unacknowledged and unchecked, for thirty years.77 In 2005, investigators found that a pipe at the complex had been leaking, undetected, for over eight months, spilling nitric acid containing some 20 tonnes of uranium and 160 kilograms of plutonium.78
In 1997, the operators of the power plant at Dounreay on the north coast of Scotland admitted that for many years they had been dumping its waste into an open hole they had dug above the crumbling coastal cliffs. The shaft had already exploded once – in 1977 – scattering plutonium over the beaches, but the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which runs the plant, hadn’t bothered to tell anyone.79 The authority promised that there would be no more cover-ups. But less than a year later it was forced to admit that it had dug a second hole in the cliffs, into which it was still dumping unsealed nuclear waste.80
There are two reasons why cheating is so common in the nuclear industry. The first is that it is much cheaper to handle radioactive materials badly than to handle them well. The second is that the nuclear operators have the perfect excuse – security – for withholding inconvenient facts from the public.
The release of radioactive materials, Among them the most toxic element on earth (plutonium), into the environment is, of course, dangerous for human beings. The number of deaths it causes is as controversial as every other set of facts about nuclear power. But it seems likely that, as a result of both routine and accidental discharges, some people die of cancer in most nuclear nations every year. A meltdown or a successful attack by terrorists, though improbable in the rich nations, would kill more: the estimates for grave illness caused by radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 range all the way from a few thousand to several million. It is probable that several thousand people will die prematurely as a result of the accident.81 But the grim moral accountancy which must inform all the decisions we make obliges me to state that nuclear power is likely so far to have killed a much smaller number of people than climate change.
Cheating, because it is so much cheaper, also governs the intentional disposal of nuclear waste. In theory, it can be buried safely. I found the technical report produced by the Finnish nuclear authority, Posiva, convincing.82 The spent fuel is set in cast iron, which is then encased in copper and buried at the bottom of a borehole. The hole is filled with saturated bentonite, which is a kind of clay. Posiva’s metallurgists suggest that under these conditions the copper barrier would last for at least a million years.83
The danger is that Posiva’s good example is used as a Potemkin village by the rest of the industry: a showcase project which creates the impression that the problem has been solved but behind which all the usual abuses continue. The government of the United Kingdom still has no plans for the long-term disposal of its nuclear waste. This seems to breach the most fundamental environmental principle, one that children are taught as soon as they are old enough to understand it: you don’t make a new mess until you have cleared up the old one. One of the reasons for this omission is that the government body responsible for finding a place to bury the waste squandered all public confidence by choosing a site (Sellafield) for political rather than geological reasons.*84 In the absence of a better plan, British Nuclear Fuels has been toying with the idea of postponing the decision: leaving the waste in domes just under the surface of the earth until someone in some future generation works out what to do with it.85
In the United States, workers at the agency responsible for testing the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, into which the federal government intends to dump all the nation’s nuclear waste, falsified the rates at which water percolates through it. An employee of the US Geological Survey admitted that
I keep track of two sets of files, the ones that will keep QA [Quality Assurance] happy and the ones that were actually used.86,87
The purpose seems to have been to make the site seem safer than it is. It now looks as if Yucca Mountain is an unsuitable repository.88
The enormous cost of waste disposal and the decommissioning of power plants is one of the reasons why nuclear power keeps guzzling public money. In the United Kingdom, cleaning up our nuclear sites will cost £70 billion.89 Because the anticipated price has risen steadily over the past ten years, it would be fairer to say ‘at least £70 billion’. Even before this spending begins, the government has been quietly handing over our money. In 2002, it lent British Energy £650 million.90 In 2005, a leaked document revealed that it had given the company a further £184 million.91 The public was never officially informed.
Nowhere is there a nuclear power station which does not rely on subsidies of one kind or another. Even the famous Olkiluoto reactor in Finland, which is the only nuclear power station currently under construction in Europe, and the only one being built anywhere without government money, now seems to be a loss leader underwritten by the French company Areva, in order to create the impression that the technology is commercially viable.92
A further hidden subsidy, whose actual cost is impossible to account, is the insurance cover the state provides. The financial risk of a nuclear accident is so high that commercial insurers won’t cover it. Three international treaties limit the nuclear operators’ liability:* the state will pick up the bill instead. In the United Kingdom, the government will cover any accident costs greater than £140 million.94 In the United States the figure is $200 million;95 in Canada, a mere CAD$75 million.96 But the European Parliament estimates that the cost of a large-scale nuclear accident ranges anywhere from €80 billion to €5.5 trillion.97
In 2005 the economic consultancy Oxera calculated that replacing the United Kingdom’s nuclear power stations, most of which need to be retired by 2020, would cost around £8.6 billion, excluding insurance and other guarantees but including future decommissioning and waste disposal. About £1.6 billion of this would have to come from the government.98
Any electricity which is more expensive than the cheapest kind on the market is likely to need government support if its operator is not to go out of business. This applies to renewable power as much as to nuclear energy. But a study in the United States shows that during the first fifteen years of the development of the two industries, nuclear power received forty-four times as much government money as wind power.99
I think there are two reasons why governments have been so generous to nuclear power. The first is that it was used – especially, in 1953, by President Eisenhower – as a demonstration of the potential for disarmament. He believed that the nuclear sword could be beaten into the nuclear ploughshare.
It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.100
His programme (‘Atoms for Peace’), which had the unintended consequence of equipping non-nuclear nations with the fissile materials they could use to make nuclear bombs, was enthusiastically adopted by the other members of the UN Security Council, perhaps because it afforded them a degree of political cover for their own expanding weapons programmes.
The second is a perverse effect I have noticed when investigating other development projects:101 that big, expensive schemes often find more favour with governments than small, cheap ones. This is partly because a small number of large projects is easier to administer than a large number of small ones. But it is also because the bigger and more expensive a project is, the more powerful the lobby which demands that it be approved. Nuclear power stations can be built only by large construction companies, and large construction companies swing more weight with the government than the small operators hoping to install wind turbines.
So how much does it cost? The only honest reply is that I haven’t the faintest idea. To explain why, the table below shows some estimates. They are all for the wholesale price of electricity from nuclear power. The average wholesale price of electricity at the end of 2005 was roughly 3.6 pence per kilowatt hour. This may be anomalous: at the end of 2004 it was 2.1 pence per kilowatt hour.102
Source |
price per kilowatt hour of electricity |
Nuclear Energy Institute103 |
1.7 US cents (1.0 pence) |
Royal Academy of Engineering104 |
2.3 pence |
British Energy and British Nuclear Fuels105 |
2.5–3.0 pence |
UK government (in 2020)106 |
3.0–4.0 pence |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology107 |
7.0 US cents (4.0 pence) |
New Economics Foundation108 |
3.4–8.3 pence |
I conclude that the price of nuclear power is a function of your political position. If you don’t like it, it is expensive. If you do like it, it is cheap. But perhaps there is an easier means of determining whether or not nuclear power is commercially viable. There is no law against building nuclear generators in the United Kingdom. We have a deregulated market in electricity, which encourages suppliers to find the cheapest means of producing it. So if – as the Nuclear Energy Institute suggests – nuclear power is cheaper than its competitors, you would expect companies to be replacing redundant plant of other kinds with atomic power stations. But the last one to be built in this country was Sizewell B, whose planning application was submitted in 1981, and whose construction commenced in 1988.109
Three more big questions about nuclear power remain. The first is whether there is sufficient uranium (the principal nuclear fuel) to keep the industry going. This is a difficult question to answer, because it depends on several unpredictable factors. One of them is the amount of money people are prepared to pay for it. This might sound odd, but it applies to every mineral: the more it is worth, the more there is. Seams which were previously too expensive to mine become exploitable as the price rises. Another is the level of geological knowledge: it is never easy to determine how much of the total global reserve has already been identified. A further factor, peculiar to the nuclear industry, is whether or not spent uranium fuel will be reprocessed and used in fast-breeder reactors. The answer to this question is that we should hope not, as these activities expose us to peculiar dangers. Fast-breeder reactors use more concentrated nuclear fuel, which means that accidents could be more dangerous than accidents in other kinds of fission reactors. Reprocessing, or so the perennial mishaps at Sellafield suggest, increases the spillage of radioactive materials into the environment. It also separates plutonium from the other wastes, providing greater opportunities for the proliferation of weapons or for seizure by terrorists.110
The World Nuclear Association claims that known reserves of uranium in the ‘lower cost category’ amount to around 3.1 million tonnes. At current rates of use, they will last for half a century. It points out that ‘this represents a higher level of assured resources than is normal for most minerals.’111 A widely circulated and detailed paper by the energy analysts Jan van Leeuwen and Philip Smith estimates that if all the world’s electricity was produced by nuclear power plants, uranium supplies would last for 6.8 years.112 But the British government’s advisers, the Sustainable Development Commission, after examining the issue in great depth,113 concluded that
On current predictions, there are no major concerns over the long-term availability of uranium…. in the past uranium reserves have been consistently underestimated… there is probably enough uranium at a reasonable price to match future demand.114
As this is an inconvenient finding for the Commission, which fiercely opposes nuclear power, I am inclined to trust it.
Uranium, like coal, is extracted in open-cast mines. Because there is less of it, and less fuel is used per watt of power, the mines take up a much smaller proportion of the planet’s surface than coal quarries. But the spoil and tailings – the rocks left behind when the uranium has been extracted – are more toxic.115
Closely associated with this issue is the second big question: how much carbon dioxide is saved by using nuclear power? The reason these two issues are linked is that the poorer the quality of the uranium ore, the more energy is required to mine and process it.
The Sustainable Development Commission does not address the question about the impact of low-grade uranium on carbon emissions, perhaps because it believes it will not arise.116 The World Nuclear Association claims that with uranium ore of the grades used today, nuclear power consumes about 1.7 per cent of the energy it produces.117 This includes the energy costs of building and decommissioning the plant and disposing of the waste. If a ‘very low grade ore’ – containing just 0.01 per cent uranium – was used, the energy cost would rise to 2.9 per cent of the total output, because more energy would be required to separate the uranium from the ore.118 If this is true, then all our electricity problems are solved: even with low-grade ores, we could cut our carbon emissions by 97 per cent. But the figures produced by the industry’s critics are wildly different. Van Leeuwen and Smith maintain that using ores which contain 0.02 per cent of uranium or less consumes more energy than it produces. Their charts show a net energy production from ores containing 0.01 per cent uranium of between minus 200 per cent and minus 500 per cent.119
In both cases the figures look – to my layman’s eyes – well-sourced. By this I mean that references are given, and those references lead back to real papers.120,121 To claim to know which – if any – account to trust would be to feign an olympian knowledge I do not possess.
The third big question is this: assuming, for the sake of argument, that nuclear power really does provide electricity that is largely carbon-free, can it be delivered quickly enough to meet our target?
At first the answer appears to be ‘no’. In his submission to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, the environmental analyst Tom Burke argued that if the British government had decided to build nuclear power plants in 2005, the earliest date by which the first plant could be operating would be 2021.122 The sixteen years would be needed to obtain finance and planning permission and to design and build the plant. Similarly, the British government found that if the Advanced Passive 1000 reactor (the most likely model) were to be used, a new nuclear programme would take at least twenty years to come to fruition.123
But if this demolishes the case for nuclear power, it also demolishes the case for offshore wind farms, new railway lines, better car engines and almost everything else we might seek to develop. If we are to install a large number of new wind farms, for example, we’ll need some major new connections to the national grid. The Scottish and Southern Energy Group is currently trying to build a new power line across Scotland for this purpose. I asked it how long it thought this would take.
We began the process for this project in 2002. We applied for the consent in 2005. We anticipate that the work will take at least four summers. What we don’t know is how long the consent-granting process will take; a public inquiry, should there be one, would obviously add a considerable length of time to this. In short, if we started next summer and all went to plan, the project would have taken seven years; but with uncertainty over the length of the consents process, it could be longer.124
According to Professor Nick Jenkins of Manchester University, a line of this kind can be expected to take ten years.125 Alongside this process, of course, the company needs to obtain permission to build the wind farms, and this, being controversial, can also take years.
But when a country really wants something to happen, the usual constraints can be swept aside. In his book about the US automotive industry –Taken for a Ride – Jack Doyle shows how the car manufacturers responded to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
From a standing start in late 1941, the automakers converted – in a matter of months, not years – more than 1,000 automobile plants across thirty-one states… In one year, General Motors developed, tooled, and completely built from scratch 1,000 Avenger and 1,000 Wildcat aircraft… GM also produced the amphibious ‘duck’ – a watertight steel hull enclosing a GM six-wheel, 2.5 ton truck that was adaptable to land or water. GM’s duck ‘was designed, tested, built, and off the line in ninety days’… Ford turned out one B-24 [a bomber] every 63 minutes… Barely a year after Pontiac received a Navy contract to build anti-shipping missiles, the company began delivering the completed product to carrier squadrons around the world.’126
If our governments decide that climate change is an issue as urgent as the international crisis in 1941 – in my view a reasonable comparison – they could turn the economy around on a sixpence. Planning objections would be ignored, incentives and regulations would be used to make companies move as swiftly as General Motors and Ford responded to the war. Wind farms, powerlines and nuclear power stations – if this is what we want – could all be built in much less than a decade.
With this in mind, I think we can reassess the International Energy Agency’s pessimistic assumptions about carbon capture and storage.
While many of our existing power stations cannot be retro-fitted with the necessary technology, most of them are already on their way to the knacker’s yard. In the United Kingdom, which seems to be fairly typical, we need to replace nearly 50 per cent of the electricity generating capacity we possessed in 2000 by 2018, and 90 per cent by 2030.127 This is an important fact to remember throughout this discussion: we are not talking about demolishing useful plant, but about replacing power stations which are already becoming redundant. On the other hand, carbon-capture and storage technology – while demonstrated – is still immature. It has not yet been tested on the scale I am talking about. But if it can be shown to work in all cases, there is no good reason why every new power station burning fossil fuel that we built between now and 2030 could not be designed to remove and bury its carbon.
Despite all the uncertainties I have encountered, I think I have grounds for making my decision. Because of the industry’s record of corner-cutting, because of its association with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and because of the unresolved questions about waste disposal and the energy balance, I will provisionally place nuclear power second from last in my list of preferences, just above generation using coal from open-cast mines. And I will propose carbon capture and storage as a partial solution to the problem. The current state of the technology and the replacement rate of power stations suggest that, with sufficient political will, gas-fired power stations fitted with carbon capture equipment could provide roughly 50 per cent of our grid-based electricity by 2030.
A greater contribution than this, however, is unlikely, so to reach my target I will have to look elsewhere. The obvious alternative is renewable energy. But how much of our electricity can it supply, and at what cost?