Johnson has told industry figures that he wants nuclear power to meet 25% of the UK’s energy demand by 2050, up from 16% today. That would mean roughly 30 gigawatts (GW) from a source that is currently set to shrink to 3.6GW by 2030, as all but one of the UK’s eight plants are due to be decommissioned by the end of the decade. Sunak is reported to be unhappy with the £13 billion price tag attached to eight new nuclear reactors. But Open University’s professor of energy William Nuttall argues new reactors are worth the upfront cost for the part they can play on an all-renewable grid: Nuclear power generation can be dialed up to cover gaps in supply from renewable sources, a job that coal and gas generators are often called upon to do now. Another low-carbon way to do this is to build batteries big enough to store the electricity generated by green sources.
More bang for your buck with batteries?
While the falling costs of solar and wind energy continue to exceed expectations, nuclear construction projects remain expensive behemoths with “a history of cost overruns … around the world” argue MV Ramana and Xiao Wei, experts in security and energy supply at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Bill Lee and Michael Rushton, lecturers in nuclear energy at Bangor University, are unconvinced. They argue that battery technology simply isn’t advanced enough to do what reactors are already capable of doing within the vanishing window of opportunity to avert catastrophic global warming. They argue that balancing supply represents just a fraction of nuclear power’s potential contribution to decarbonization. The government has also nudged the industry regulator to begin the approval process for Rolls-Royce SMR’s small modular reactor design. Rolling out lots of electric vehicles could squeeze the supply of batteries even further, potentially even increasing their cost. The company announced in 2020 that it hoped to bring 16 of these reactors — which are much smaller, cheaper to build, and typically generate one-third of the energy of a traditional nuclear power plant — online by 2025. “Because they burn the fuel more efficiently, this new generation of reactors also produces much less nuclear waste,” say Lee and Rushton. They believe that: And that’s not all, they say. Take heating in buildings, for example. Heat cooler than 400°C can be extracted after the turbine, and pumped into district heating systems, replacing fossil fuels like natural gas. This is a process that is already carried out daily from municipal waste incinerators across Europe.
Future threats and opportunities
Not everyone is convinced that nuclear power is a reliable tool in the effort to slow global warming and shore up energy supplies though. Paul Dorfman is an honorary senior research associate at UCL’s Energy Institute. He argues that “nuclear energy is, quite literally, “on the frontline of climate change – and not in a good way”. “Nuclear power is often credited with offering energy security in an increasingly turbulent world, but climate change will rewrite these old certainties,” Dorfman says. “Nuclear power plants must draw from large sources of water to cool their reactors, hence why they’re often built near the sea,” Dorfman highlights. “Two in five nuclear plants operate on the coast and at least 100 have been built just a few meters above sea level. In a world made increasingly turbulent by climate change, that’s a problem, Dorfman argues. “A recent US Army War College report also states that nuclear power facilities are at high risk of temporary or permanent closure due to climate threats – with 60% of US nuclear capacity at risk from future sea-level rise, severe storms, and cooling water shortages.” Could nuclear fusion save us? It wasn’t so long ago that Boris Johnson’s Conservatives were bullish about the prospect of a reactor being able to harness the power within stars by 2040. Thomas Nicholas, a Ph.D. candidate in plasma science and fusion energy at the University of York, set the record straight in 2019: “Unlike current nuclear power plants — which split atoms in a process called fission — nuclear fusion binds atomic nuclei together. This releases much more energy than fission and produces no high-level nuclear waste.” Because of the embryonic status of fusion research (what many hailed as a recent breakthrough still puts the world on track for possible demonstration fusion power plants by the 2050s), Nicholas argues that: This article by Jack Marley Environment + Energy Editor, UK edition, is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
