The one silver lining coming out of the Second World War was the promise that Nuclear Power
could bring boundless clean energy for a modernizing world.
But while nuclear did explode in popularity starting in 1954 with the World’s first
nuclear power plant in Obinsk outside Moscow, in recent years countries are starting to
all but turn their backs on this once energy savior.
So what’s going on?
You might be thinking about the Fukushima Nuclear plant disaster triggered by the Tōhoku
earthquake and tsunami that occurred in March of 2011.
Especially if you look at this graph showing nuclear power production over time.
(LINK).
But things get more interesting when you break this out by country.
As you’d expect, Japan completely shuttered its nuclear production, dropping from 280
TWh in 2010, before the disaster, to just 17, by 2012.
While they have been ramping back slowly, even as of 2021, their 61TWh of nuclear output
pales in comparison to their pre Fukushima levels.
But there’s much more to this story, if we look at the top Nuclear power producers
in the world, you’ll start to see a trend.
While the rate of nuclear adoption skyrocketed from 1965 to 1995, those curves have flatlined
in the past 25 years.
Now at this point, it’s worth mentioning that by sheer numbers, 2021 was the most prolific
year of nuclear energy production in history.
This was a surprise to me.
Nuclear power isn’t disappearing, not at all.
But the desire and interest to build new plants has been cooling to say the least.
Well that is, everywhere except China, in the same period from 1995 to 2021, China’s
Nuclear output has shot up from 12.8 to 407 TWh, making it #2, behind only the United
States.
The previous number two, France, has been quite stagnant, reaching its peak in 2005
at 451 TWh, and has been in decline every since.
But still over 70% of its total energy production comes from Nuclear power, the largest of any
country by far (LINK).
So it seems then, that the countries that have been doing Nuclear power the longest,
are losing interest, while the developing world is adopting it more and more.
So what’s going on here, does the old guard know something the up and comers don’t?
Well the key word here is “old.”
Here is a graph showing the Nuclear plants in France, as a function of how old they are.
Being a very early adopter to nuclear power, the average age of a nuclear plant in France
is over 34 years old, that’s almost as “young” as me.
These plants were built, when the levels of bureaucratic red tape were far lower than
they are today.
Also labor rates, and material costs were cheaper too.
This gets to problem number one.
It’s really expensive and time consuming to build a nuclear power plant today.
This is a major problem, because like everything in engineering, technology gets better over
time.
For nuclear power plants, their development is often expressed in terms of Generations.
Generation 1 plants were the early prototype plants that first appeared in the 1950's and
60’s like the Shippingport plant in Pennsylvania, and Calder Hall in the UK.
The last Generation 1 plant, the Wylfa nuclear power station in Wales, was fully decommissioned
in 2015, after 44 years of operation.
Gen 2 plants, consisting of pressurized water reactors (PWR) and boiling water reactors
(BWR), to name a few, were a marked improvement economically and in terms of reliability from
Gen 1 plants.
Gen 2 systems have 40 year operating lifespans, and came online in the 1960s..
They comprise a bulk of the world's 400+ commercial nuclear reactors, which should give you an
idea of just how aging our nuclear power infrastructure is.
The latest and greatest today are Gen 3 plants, which increase efficiency further, raise operation
lifespans to 60+ years, and critically, incorporate more passive rather than active safety systems.
One of the big concerns with nuclear power plants, and all things engineering really,
is what happens when things go wrong.
If your iPhone starts acting up, you reboot it.
No big deal, but if your car breaks down, it's a little more serious, but hopefully
you can safely pull over on the side of the road.
As a result, these products are refreshed often, but switch to aircraft, and the situation
gets more dire and consequential, and therefore aircraft R&D costs are crazy high, and models
operate for decades to recoup that cost.
It’s the same story for Nuclear power plants, where major meltdowns conjure images of the
end of times.
I should probably take a detour here and talk about challenge number two; the perceived
safety of nuclear power, and this is a big one.
But before I do, let me tell you about our sponsor
this week, Vinfast.
There are thousands of people who opt to drive, instead of fly, because they believe it to
be safer, but the data couldn’t be further from the truth.
Your odds of dying in a car crash are 1 in 98 in a lifetime.
Accounting for the same number of miles, your odds of dying in a plane crash in your lifetime,
are just 1 in 7,178, according to USA Today.
(LINK).
The logical fallacy at play here, is the exact same one, and it just might be the biggest
challenge for Nuclear Power.
It’s the availability heuristic, which says that some memories are easier to conjure up
than others.
The lasting impression of seeing a horrific plane crash is so utterly infrequent that
it's often never forgotten.
In contrast, you’ll probably see a car crash sometime this week, and as a result, it barely
even registers.
It’s a consequence of our lizard brain’s evolution, where it can be advantageous to
create shortcuts to arrive at decisions quickly.
To talk about nuclear power, is to talk about all the great disasters in nuclear history.
Try this experiment, if you close your eyes, and hear a few random words, then Nuclear
power, odds are you're picturing the horrific events of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or
Fukushima.
The two are so inextricably linked in our minds, it can be hard to separate.
But what does the data say?
Per unit of energy created, you’ll see that Coal Oil and Natural gas are by far the most
dangerous forms of energy.
So when you think of death and destruction, maybe you should be picturing fossil fuel
power plants, because nuclear barely even registers, and this is including the big disasters
we all remember.
But deaths caused by spewing pollution, take time and just don’t leave as lasting an
imprint.
Ok so people have an irrational and untrue fear of the actual dangers Nuclear poses,
but let’s get back to the technology itself.
Most of our Nuclear power plants today are aging Gen 2 plants, well past their prime.
But the good news is the World isn’t ready to give up on Nuclear power just yet.
There are 5 Gen 3 reactors either in operation or under construction around the world.
Two in Taishan China, one in Olkiluoto (pronounce), Finland, one in Flamanville, France and Hinkley
Point C, in Somerset, England.
These plants are generally referred to as ERPs, or European Pressurized Reactors, or
internationally as Evolutionary Power Reactors.
For more countries to start building next generation nuclear reactors, it's vitally
crucial that these five succeed.
So how’s it going?
Well this is where things go a bit wrong.
Starting with the Flamanville France plant, since the first concrete pour in December
2007, it’s been one problem after another.
In April 2008, the French nuclear safety authority reported that a quarter of the welds inspected
weren’t within spec, and that cracks were found in the concrete base.
In August 2010, the same authority reported further welding problems on the secondary
containment steel liner.
In June 2015, multiple faults in cooling system safety valves were also discovered.
From an original estimate of 3.3 Billion Euros, by the time the plant begins operations optimistically
in 2023, it will have cost 12.7 B Euros.
What has happened to our ability to build things?
I was recently in New York City, and visited the empire state building, where back when
it was built, workers were walking around hundreds of feet in the air, with no safety
equipment, throwing hot rivets around like some sort of crazy video game.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for safety regulations, and improved working conditions,
but I do wonder.
You can’t even get on a single story building today without liability insurance, and a safety
harness, it just makes me wonder if a lot of the great things we’ve been in the past,
would even be possible today.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, so sound off in the comments.
To end on a high note lets talk about what’s happening in Finland, where their gen 3 nuclear
plant at Olkiluoto is both on cost and on budget!
No I’m kidding, it’s neither.
While construction originally started August 2005, and was planned to complete in 2012
at a cost of 3.7 B Euros, it ended up costing over 8 B Euros, and plans to be online in
July of 2022, over 10 years late.
Now while that’s not exactly good news, the Finnish plan to handle one of the key
drawbacks of Nuclear Power really is, and that is what to do with the Nuclear waste.
Finland isn’t just building the largest Nuclear Reactor in Europe, they’re thinking
about the entire lifecycle of Nuclear energy.
While spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed, re-enriched and returned to energy production,
big surprise, today it isn’t.
Any guesses why?
Of course it comes down to cost.
Doing so is much more expensive, than just discarding the spent fuel, and buying more.
This lack of incentivization to recycle, is a huge source of most of our problems.
Instead we ship out spent nuclear fuel, that’s still highly radioactive and dangerous for
thousands of years, to be stored in special containment systems.
But this poses all sorts of issues, because it requires regular inspections, security
measures, to prevent any would-be nerdowells from doing all sorts of harm, or natural disasters
like what happened in Fukushima.
It’s estimated that about 250,000 tons of nuclear waste is already in some sort of containment
around the world, and this number is only going to increase.
Posiva, a joint venture between the two Finnish Nuclear Power plant providers, Fortum and
TVO, is building the world's first and best permanent nuclear waste facility deep underground.
The Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository 5 km from the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant.
This spiraling underground tunnel network reaches down 520 meters and allows spent nuclear
fuel to rest permanently, without any active safety systems or human intervention.
Radioactive waste is housed in boron steel canisters, encased in corrosion resistant
copper capsules, and buried permanently without the need for any further intervention.
What I love most about this approach, is that the entire project is funded with tariffs
on the nuclear energy produced, which is finally a step in the right direction of true lifecycle
costs.
If you want to see a deep dive on this crazy megaproject, leave me a comment, but put simply,
Finland hopes to become the archetype of how to handle waste, and inspire other countries
going forward.
Plus we have a video planned on another crazy cool concept for nuclear waste, so consider
subscribing.
So let’s recap, is nuclear energy safe, absolutely.
It is one of the safest forms of energy production in history.
Do we have answers for how to handle the waste, I’d say yes.
Yes the Gen 3 European plants are proving to be wildly expensive, but the more we build
the better it’ll get it.
Unlike Europe, China is building Nuclear power plants at much lower costs, largely due to
lower labor rates, and less stringent red tape.
Asia then, is kind of like Europe and North America was 40 years ago, and with countries
like China and India increasing their appetites for electricity, it will be vitally important.
Here is a graph of the countries with the largest electricity consumption per capita.
Surprisingly, the United States is only 11th on this list.
This is largely due to heating homes in the winter, in countries where natural gas is
just too expensive.
As a result most homes have heat pump heating, which uses electricity.
But here’s the thing, much of the world is developing, with rising wages, quality
of life, and the rise of electric vehicles.
As a result, I expect electricity consumption around the world to increase at a staggering
rate over the next 10 years.
If we instead look at the world's most populous countries, you’ll see many, especially India,
use a very small amount of energy per capita today.
In the US 12,000 kWh are consumed per person per year.
If India consumed just half as much as the US, and China increased its consumption from
around 4000 kWh/per person/year, to 8000, or two thirds that of an American, that would
contribute to an increase in world consumption from 23,000 to 36,000 TWh a 56% increase.
And that’s just two countries.
This is the greatest argument for deep investment in nuclear energy.
Even today, low carbon energy sources like nuclear, hydro, wind and solar, only contribute
15.7% of the total mix.
Gas, coal and Oil, is 84%.
To be against Nuclear power, at least today, just doesn’t make any sense.
I want to see tons of new wind, hydro and solar power come online, but let’s remember
what we’re up against.
We shouldn’t think about this as either or.
We should be investing in all the solar and wind we can muster, and also be building every
nuclear power plant we can.
In the operational 60 year life of a Gen 3 nuclear power plant, we will have all sorts
of new breakthroughs and maybe then we can have a discussion about moving on from nuclear
fission reactors.
But today, with how dirty our current grids are, for reliable, stable, clean energy, Nuclear
power still reigns supreme.
Maybe Nuclear Fusion reactors will be ready by then.
Maybe molten salt Thorium reactors will become mainstream, or how about small modular reactors?
These are really interesting, because if construction complexity and costs is the big problem with
new nuclear plants, small modular reactors just might be the key.
By the way, we have videos on all three of those topics, which I think you should definitely
check out right now.
I’m Ricky with Two Bit da Vinci, and if you think I’ve earned it, consider subscribing,
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