As storms and gales and torrential rains sweep over us shivering in Cape Town, my thoughts have turned again to nuclear power.
My thoughts have not turned to solar panels. Nuclear power is by far our best source of electricity if we are ever going to have a prosperous and growing economy. It has the best safety record of all energy technologies and the least waste problem; it is always economical and often provides the cheapest electricity; there is enough nuclear fuel in the ground and the sea to provide the whole world with nuclear electricity for thousands of years.
Our only nuclear station, Koeberg, has been a resounding success. But when are we going to have more? “SA nuke power plan hots up”, was the headline in the Sunday Times of last week. I thought, “Oh, dear! Here we go again. Yet another announcement of the coming nuclear expansion, which never seems to come.” The same cycle of nuclear expectation and then nuclear disappointment is happening in other countries too, such as the UK and the USA. Why does nuclear take so long? It didn’t in the beginning.
In 1952, the British government decided to make electricity from nuclear reactors. (Their original purpose was to make weapons-grade nuclear fuel, which is quite different from the fuel in a power reactor). In 1953, they began building the world’s first commercial nuclear power reactor at Calder Hall in the northwest of England. In 1956 it was opened by Queen Elizabeth and then began putting electricity into the national grid.
It made cheap, safe, reliable electricity for 47 years until it was shut down in 2003. Four years from concept to commercial operation! Today it would take fifteen years to get Calder Hall on the grid, if it were allowed at all, which it probably would not be.
Much safer designs
Calder Hall was revolutionary and successful, but by today’s standards it was not a good design. It used magnox fuel, which is not nearly as safe and efficient as modern nuclear fuels. It had no nuclear power experience anywhere to draw upon and limited knowledge of the physics and engineering of nuclear reactors. Today, we have much safer designs of reactors and fuels, a vast experience of building and operating nuclear power plants over the last 60 years and a superb record of nuclear safety, but now it takes far longer to build nuclear power stations. Why?
The reasons are political, based on wrong public perceptions, and financial and legal, not technical. On pure engineering, South Africa could have a new nuclear power station in five years, but excessive regulation, political obstruction and green propaganda would ensure it took far longer. The main tactic of the green anti-nukes is to cause as much delay as possible. Another chief culprit in nuclear delay is the nuclear industry itself: it is hopeless at public relations and far too modest about its wonderful product, which it does little to promote – the exact opposite of the “renewable” lobby.
Again and again, it surrenders to expensive demands for more nuclear safety, when nuclear is already by far the safest form of electricity. It fails utterly to counter the wrong arguments the nuclear opponents use against it, on waste, accidents and cost. Let me go through some of them.
Lasts forever
On waste, the anti-nukes say that nuclear waste is uniquely dangerous because it lasts “for 24,000” years – or some such figure. In fact every single energy technology, including solar and wind, leaves waste that lasts forever – not for millions of years but forever. So what? How could it be otherwise?
Of the 116 or so elements on Earth, 80 have stable atoms, meaning they last forever. (There are about 29 essential elements in the human body. You will die but the elements in your body will never die. When you breathe in, you are taking in oxygen atoms that were breathed out by dinosaurs 100 million years ago.)
Each of these elements can be “deadly” under certain circumstances. Unstable atoms are radioactive, which means exactly that they do not last forever; they break up, releasing radioactivity. The shorter the half-life, the more radioactive. If a radioactive material has a half-life of five million years, it is very feebly radioactive and quite safe; if it has a half-life of five minutes, it is extremely radioactive and very dangerous. Long-lived radioactive materials are nothing to worry about. All nuclear engineers know this perfectly well but never explain it to the public.
Quite the opposite, they pander to wrong public perceptions exploited by politicians who usually have no training in physics and know nothing about nuclear science. So in Sweden, France, Switzerland and elsewhere, nuclear staff have been forced by stupid politicians to build extremely expensive and wholly unnecessary deep underground storage facilities for storing nuclear waste for “10,000 years”. This is absurd.
For centuries to come
After a few centuries, the waste will be less radioactive than the uranium ore in the ground that the nuclear fuel came from. In fact nuclear waste, being tiny in volume, chemically stable and already collected as it leaves the reactor, can be stored easily, safely and cheaply. Our nuclear waste facility at Vaalputs in the Northern Cape is ideal for all our nuclear waste for centuries to come. Nobody ever calls on the solar power industry to produce storage facilities for storing the deadly toxins from their solar panels, like cadmium, which last for thousands of millions of years. If they did, the solar industry would ignore them.
In the newspapers recently there was another round of dire warnings about safety at Koeberg from the usual anti-nuke brigade, who are obviously panicking about Koeberg’s excellent safety record since start-up 40 years ago, and the prospect of another 20 years of cheap safe electricity from Koeberg now that the steam generators have been replaced. Koeberg uses pressurised water reactors (PWRs), the most common form of power reactors around the world. They have an almost perfect safety record.
The worst ever accident in a PWR was at Three Mile Island in the USA in 1979. It was caused by a faulty valve and then operator error; both mistakes have been thoroughly studied and remedied against by the world’s nuclear power operators. The fuel was damaged and there was a release of radiation – which harmed nobody. No member of the public has ever been harmed by an accident in a PWR.
Modifications
Koeberg uses a bog-standard French PWR design of Generation 2. Koeberg was safe when it was built in 1976 and is much safer now following a large number of modifications. Yet some anti-nukes say that Koeberg needs very expensive safety refits such as a core-catcher. This is a means of collecting the molten radioactive debris in the event of the reactor core melting down completely and burning down through the reactor vessel, which has never happened in the long history of PWRs.
New reactors in the USA and South Korea do not have core-catchers, nor should they. Excessive expenditure on extremely unlikely events is wasteful and indeed harmful.
There is a slight chance of an aeroplane crashing into a school and killing a lot of children. Do you think we should spend hundreds of billions of rand covering every school in South Africa with a massive reinforced concrete dome strong enough to resist the impact of a big aeroplane? We all know this is absurd. The money could be far better spent in other ways to protect children − for example, by replacing pit latrines. Similarly, money spent on silly extra safety measures in the world’s safest energy technology is wasteful and harmful.
Nuclear power has shown that it can produce plentiful safe and cheap grid electricity; solar and wind have shown that they cannot. France from the 1970s had a wonderful record of building nuclear power reactors on time and on budget, and delivering among the cheapest power in Europe. Then France lost her way because of complacency and surrender to green politics.
Expensive disaster
Solar and wind have proved an expensive disaster in every country that they have been tried for grid electricity, such as Germany, the UK, the USA, Denmark and Australia. Right now, if we bought proven reactor designs from a vendor with a recent record of building reactors on schedule and on time, such as Russia, South Korea and China, and maybe Japan, we could produce the cheapest electricity possible for us in future.
Nine years ago, the South African government decided to begin procurement for 9,600 MW of new nuclear power from vendors around the world. Almost immediately the process got bogged down in legal arguments, complicated procedures and of course the usual aggressive delaying tactics from the anti-nukes and the usual passive incompetence from the nuclear section in the government.
Over and over again, the anti-nukes told us that 9,600 MW of nuclear would bankrupt the country and cost R1 trillion – or any other huge sum you could think of. The procurement process came to a halt in 2017 by a decision of the Western Cape High Court, which told us that the correct procedures had not been followed (which I am not competent to judge) and that the money for the nuclear build would have to be taken from the public “through taxes and increased electricity charges” and would affect spending on “education, social assistance of health services and housing”. This is nonsense.
Eskom bonds
The high capital required for the first plants could be raised by Eskom bonds, as in the past, which have a low cost of capital, and when they started getting revenue from selling electricity, they could help finance the later ones. The money would not be taken from taxes with a well-run nuclear program. The price of electricity from nuclear would be lower than that from other forms of electricity and much lower than that from solar and wind. The world bears testimony to that.
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are now much talked about. They have many advantages, such as factory manufacture rather than site manufacture, but they are not a magic pill. Many SMR designs have helium as a coolant and nuclear “pebbles” as fuel. These are passively safe, meaning that a bad accident is impossible for them.
Whatever errors the operators might make or whatever equipment might fail, the fuel can never get hot enough to cause damage. Many designs are being proposed, including a South African one of a small, simple pebble bed reactor that could produce 100 MW of heat or 35 MW of electricity, ideal for factories and small towns. Initially the SMRs would be more expensive per kWh than the big existing reactors, but if enough of them were built the price would come down: economy of numbers rather than economy of size. SMRs could have a huge niche market, especially for African countries, which now have a low electricity demand. But of course, they would all require complicated, lengthy regulation before they can start.
Let’s hope so
The ministry of energy has now been separated from minerals, which is a good thing. The new Minister of Energy and Electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, has announced that the procurement of 2,500 MW of new nuclear is now going ahead. (This was the Sunday Times story.) Let’s hope so. 2,500 MW is a good first step, better politically than 9,600 MW. But already the greens are trying to scupper it. I see that the DA shadow minister of energy, Kevin Mileham – the one man who could persuade me not to vote DA – is already warning against it.
We have not had load-shedding for six months, perhaps thanks to Ramokgopa, partly at any rate. Our ageing coal fleet seems to have been put in a better state of repair. But our present electricity supply is still precarious, and it cannot hope to meet the greatly increased demand that is essential for economic growth and the ending of mass poverty and unemployment.
Coal is not an option for the future. Gas is good but we have precious little of it. Solar and wind are good for off-grid applications but useless and horribly expensive for the grid. (Imagine trying to get solar power now in Cape Town with over two weeks of rain and dark skies. Batteries? You must be joking.) Nuclear is our best option, but it takes time. So we must start as soon as possible. Go, Ramokgopa, go!
[Image: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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