TIME TO LOOK AGAIN

Oliver Stone just put out a new film promoting nuclear energy, titled Nuclear Now: Time to look again. So, just as he asks, let’s reassess the situation with the latest information. Last time I wrote about nuclear energy, I focussed mostly on older reactors and the problems we’ve faced historically. I also noted the highly anticipated reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland. Since then, updates from Olkiluoto and a couple of other new reactors have landed on my radar.

Finland - Olkiluoto

Olkiluoto has had a rough time, to be honest. Last time we checked in with the Finns, their latest addition to the power plant, and now the most powerful nuclear power plant in Europe, was fourteen years behind schedule and many billions of dollars over budget. Yet, seemingly against all odds, progress was made and the plant finally turned on, reaching criticality (the normal operating state of a nuclear reactor where a nuclear fuel chain reaction is sustained) on December 21st, 2021. Just weeks later, however, the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) reported a full-scale emergency shutdown (often called a SCRAM) of the reactor. And then again, another, just a few weeks later, on January 29th.

Remember, this reactor was the shining example folks have held up in every discussion over the last decade arguing for the robust safety and reliability of the coming nuclear power regime. This was not just a new reactor, engineered with fifty years of hindsight (with learnings from Chalk River, Kyshtym, Fermi, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Lucens, Surry, Peach Bottom, Lusby, Vandellòs, Sosnovy Bor, Waterford, Tokaimura, Oak Harbour, Paks, Fukui, Forsmark, Fukushima, Marcoule and other disasters and near-disasters), but it was also employing all new standards, tools, and tech. It uses the much-lauded European third generation pressurized water reactor design. This was supposed to be game-changing and finally usher in the 1950s dream of astonishingly clean, safe, cheap, and abundant electricity. And yet, Olkiluoto seemed to have significant trouble just getting the juices flowing. Tough start.

Electricity was eventually “test produced” to roughly 25% capacity at the reactor on March 12th, 2022. But then in May, foreign material was found lodged in the turbine steam reheater. The result was a three-month-long shutdown for repairs. Months later, when the reactor was finally reconnected to the grid, it had to be shut down once again due to a measurement error in a voltage regulator. So this was more than a tough start. And from there things only got worse.

In October of 2022, damage was discovered in some of the reactor’s water pumps and the troubled Unit 3 was shut down for investigation once again. And on the 28th of October authorities acknowledged significant cracks were found in all four of the reactor’s pump impellers. They announced in January of 2023 that new more robust impellers needed to be installed in all four pumps, and that full power could be expected to resume in February.

The reactor did get up and running, starting regular electricity production on April 16th, 2023. Only a month later the power company admitted:

During the years 2022-2023, several cases of signal failures in safety-classified temperature measurements have been detected. In February, it was found that some connectors of temperature measurements were missing either one or both of the required seals.

The regulator, STUK, followed this up with a report finding that, of the 108 connectors inspected, 29 had seals (essential to temperature measurements required for containing a nuclear accident) that were not damaged or faulty but missing entirely. They reported that:

As the incident was accompanied by inadequate guidance and the defect was detected in several locations, TVO concluded that the incident falls under category one on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES).

And that’s when the Spring thaw came. In May of 2023, abundant hydro power combined with ideal conditions for solar production and low demand for energy caused TVO to reduce energy production at the Olkiluoto nuclear plant. The negative market price of electricity across much of central and north-western Europe exposed the high and unsustainable cost of nuclear power within the modern alternatives regime.

Similarly, the phrase commonly cited during development was "power to about three million homes." That figure was allowed to be interpreted as something like energy for more than half of the Finnish population. No. Nothing of the sort. We eventually learned from the energy company that “full production” would mean this reactor (again, the largest nuclear reactor in Europe) will only meet the needs of 14% of this one tiny country. So an investment of only 18 years and $16B to provide very expensive power, that cannot compete with alternatives, would sustain just 700,000 people.

This can't be the model. This is the energy of the future and what every region needs? Imagine what a large city (say 10 or 20 million) or a small, underpowered nation such as Uganda (population 40 million) would take. Using Olkiluoto as a template, Uganda could go fully nuclear with 57 reactors at a cost of $900 billion dollars (just 2.51 quadrillion Ugandan shillings.) Even with all the nuclear engineering and construction companies in the world working concurrently, what would a realistic timeline be on 50 to 60 reactors? A century? Two? Yikes! Now consider that neighbouring nations, such as Congo, have more than twice the population and even greater need for power, as is true of an additional 100 million people throughout the region. What would all of East Africa or Southeast Asia require?

(I recall learning from a course in Environmental Science of serious discussion of developing nuclear to power tar sands extraction. Even a study from MIT argued for nuclear as a responsible, reliable, low carbon alternative to current practices. Of course, that industrial project alone would require not one or two but many reactors — and all for maximizing extraction of the dirtiest energy source known. This is the lugubrious hogwash we so love entertaining above the good sense of getting out of the fossil and toxic fuels business entirely and as rapidly as possible...)

To me, what we already know about this technology, combined with all of the above, doesn’t make this new era of nuclear power seem particularly cheap, abundant, safe, or clean (or even plausible). But maybe that was just the first new example and, like do many great things (a peach pie or a lasagna), the first take often looks the worst and makes everything perfect that comes after possible. Right? Right?!

United States - Vogtle

So, what have we learned about coming nuclear energy projects around the world? One nuclear project making the news is Georgia Power Company’s Plant Vogtle. It was the first nuclear project approved in the US since the miraculous collision between the 1979 film The China Syndrome and the accident at Three Mile Island that immediately followed its debut.

This project, southeast of Augusta, right along the Savannah River separating South Carolina from Georgia, began construction in 2009. At the outset the project came with an expected cost of $14 billion and completion date pegged at 2017. In 2015, after problems with construction and its Lego-like modular form mysteriously failing to enable the promised faster, cheaper, and higher-quality result, the power company and construction contractors sued one another over delays that added $3 billion and three years to the project. With completion still nowhere near, the company responsible for the project, Westinghouse Electric Company, filed for bankruptcy in 2017 — due to liabilities hitting almost $10 billion and stemming from problems with two other nuclear construction projects. (Apparently they also hired unlicensed mechanical and electrical workers to produce blueprints for their nuclear plants without seeking sign-off from professional engineers. That did them no good either. Zoinks!)

But the project at Plant Vogtle was salvaged in 2018 — along with a new expected price tag of $25 billion. In 2021, Georgia Power was forced to acknowledge a cascade of delays, with monitors charging the power company and contractors with doing sloppy work while rushing to meet an unrealistic schedule. This further pushed back its start date and brought the cost of the project to double the original estimate. As costs climbed above $30 billion in 2022, Georgia Power’s co-owners, Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and Oglethorpe Power Corp, sued the company for $695 million for reneging on its obligation to absorb cost overruns. As nuclear fuel was loaded and power began being generated, the cost to owners climbed to $31 billion, with significant implications for the cost of energy produced at the facility. However, just seven years over schedule and many billions over budget, America’s newest pair of reactors are now looking good to go. So the US appears to be following the course set by Finland and this new era for nuclear. What about elsewhere?

United Kingdom - Hinkley

At the same time as the US and Finland, England also embraced the pressurized water reactor revolution and started development at Somerset, in the country’s southwest. Hinkley Point C would be the UK’s first nuclear power plant undertaken in two decades, with a completion date of 2023 and a cost of £10 billion (or $16.8 billion).

In 2013, energy analyst Peter Atherton from Liberum Capital, a London-based investment bank, assessed the project. He offered that, "Having considered the known terms of the deal, we are flabbergasted that the UK Government has committed future generations of consumers to the costs that will flow from this deal," and concluding that the project was “economically insane.”

In 2015, state-owned Électricité de France (EDF) and the state-owned China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN) signed a strategic investment agreement for the construction and operation of the nuclear project at a cost of £20 billion and with a completion date of 2027. Construction began the following year and the first concrete was poured on site in 2017.

That same year The Guardian called Hinkley Point C the most expensive power plant in the world and a ‘dreadful deal’. They cited Tom Burke, former environmental policy adviser to The British Petroleum Company (BP) and visiting professor at Imperial and University Colleges, saying that “Nuclear simply doesn’t make sense any more.” The UK’s National Audit Office felt similarly and also came out with a report on the reactor project in 2017. The take-away:

The Department [for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy] has committed electricity consumers and taxpayers to a high cost and risky deal in a changing energy marketplace. Time will tell whether the deal represents value for money, but we cannot say the Department has maximised the chances that it will be.

In 2019, China General Nuclear, and three other companies, were added to the US Department of Commerce’s “Entity List”, making it illegal for any US companies to sell products to the company. The Department of Commerce explained “the four Chinese entities had engaged in or enabled efforts to acquire advanced U.S. nuclear technology and material for diversion to military uses in China” and thus “acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interest of the United States.” (Despite this, CGN still has roughly a hundred engineers working on the Hinkley Point project...) Of course, the intrepid energy companies persisted and by February of 2023 the project announced a current cost inflation amounting to £32.7 billion (or $54.86 billion). Completion is still pending.

So what does all this mean?

Well, to start, notice that Oliver Stone tells us the time to take another look at nuclear, as a viable option to address our runaway carbon footprint, has finally arrived. But with the above examples alone we can see discussions, planning, tremendously significant multi-party investment, and even construction was in the works almost two decades ago. And, too, it seems most governments around the world positioned to do so gladly endorsed the 21st century nuclear revolution around that same time, back in the early 2000s. Go look anywhere you like. More than that, the World Nuclear Association (WNA) reports that:

About 100 power reactors with a total gross capacity of about 100,000 MWe are on order or planned, and over 300 more are proposed. Most reactors currently planned are in Asia, with fast-growing economies and rapidly-rising electricity demand. Many countries with existing nuclear power programmes either have plans to, or are building, new power reactors.

They tell us Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, France, India, Iran, South Korea, Russia, Slovakia, Turkey, the UAE, the UK, and the US all have projects (some with many projects: China alone has at least 23, India has 8) scheduled to be connected to the grid in just the next few years. Even more, another “30 countries are considering, planning or starting nuclear power programmes, and a further 20 or so countries have at some point expressed an interest.” The WNA notes reactors proposed for Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan; with provisional plans existing for Algeria, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Morocco, Nigeria, Philippines, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Thailand, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.

It seems Oliver looks at all of this (400 new reactors in the works across every continent and in countries big and small, rich and poor -- and the doubling of the number of the nuclear reactors on Earth in just a few decades) and sees a world not yet considering nuclear as an option. And he talks like he's some kind of black sheep offering of a radical, world-changing solution, when nuclear (with its massive, centralized, and extraordinarily expensive power production) remains the steely status quo.

For me, the absurdity of his premise is reason enough to disregard the film. Still, if you’re willing to overlook the entire subtext of the documentary (though I don’t know why you would), you still have all your work ahead of you to show the newest nuclear reactors are safe, reliable, cost-effective solutions providing abundant and inexpensive energy. Where are the examples? Where?