Will the Nuclear Power "Renaissance" Ever Reach Critical Mass?

An MIT report cautions that nuclear power has not yet been effectively employed to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions–and time is running out.

This month, Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor was supposed to begin generating power, a tangible sign of the revival of the nuclear industry outside of Asia after nearly 30 years of no new construction because of accidents, cost-overruns and other issues. Instead, the reactor won’t be completed for more than three more years, its price is nearly 60 percent more than anticipated, and it is mired in costly legal squabbles between the builder, Areva, and the Finnish utility, Pohjolan Voima.
In the U.S., since 2003, 17 applications for 26 new reactors have been filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but not one is yet under construction.

Despite dozens of new nuclear plants ordered or built in Asia in recent years, “increased deployment of nuclear power has been slow both in the United States and globally,” wrote the authors of a new Massachusetts Institute of Technology review of the state of nuclear power.

Those figures, say the authors of the report, an update on a similar report in 2003, mean that “even if all the announced plans for new nuclear power plant construction are realized, the total will be well behind that needed for reaching a thousand gigawatts of new capacity worldwide by 2050.”

One thousand gigawatts is the number the M.I.T. professors estimated would be needed to ensure that nuclear power provided 20 percent of global electricity needs as well as cut emissions of greenhouse gases from power plants. In the U.S., the number would be jumping from 100 to 300 gigawatts of nuclear-sourced electricity by 2050.

After all, once operating, nuclear power plants burn nothing and therefore emit no carbon dioxide as fossil fuel–burning power plants do. (There are, of course, significant greenhouse gas emissions associated with building and fueling nuclear facilities).

But the price of new nuclear power has “escalated dramatically,” according to the report, jumping by 15 percent a year to reach as much as $4,000 per kilowatt compared with $2,300 for coal-fired generation and just $850 for natural gas. And the industry is asking for at least $100 billion in federal tax subsidies and loan guarantees for the 26 reactors currently planned.

The situation is no better in Europe, according to Steven Thomas, a professor of energy studies at the University of Greenwich in London: Finland cannot complete its new reactor; the U.K. has yet to get started on any projects; and a new nuclear reactor in France, after 18 months of construction, is 20 percent overbudget and requires complete subsidy by the French government.

Scientific American