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London Eye: Government Must Act Now Over Ageing Nuclear Plants

Posted on: Wednesday, 6 July 2005, 12:01 CDT

SIX major powers last week agreed that the pounds 7bn ITER nuclear fusion project is to be built on a site in the south of France. ITER, the International Torus Experimental Reactor, will use a furnace many times hotter than the centre of the sun to produce clean nuclear power. And it could prove to be the most important development of the century.

But this news also makes it more urgent that the government does not continue to dodge the issue of what is to be done about replacing our existing ageing nuclear power plants. These are based on fission (splitting heavy atoms, instead of fusing light ones) and currently supply one-fifth of our power (total needs for which are around 60,000MW).

The government's position, as set out in the 2003 White Paper, is that nuclear remains an option for the future. But for the time being it wants to pursue the alternative of developing renewable sources, such as wind power.

Few believe this is any longer a tenable position. And the prospect of much cheaper fusion-based nuclear technology coming along means that every year that is now allowed to slip by without starting a nuclear project based on existing technology will result in such a project becoming less financially viable.

This is because of the high up-front cost of building a nuclear plant. These high costs require that the capital invested should be recouped over the plant's life-cycle (50 or 60 years). But many believe that by the end of such a period clean fusion-based power will be widespread, with costs undercutting fission-based power so much that the atom-splitting plants will have to close down.

No one is yet saying that the time has already come to abandon fission-based nuclear stations and wait for fusion. In fact one of the authorities on the subject, Professor Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, firmly believes that another round of building fission-based nuclear power plants is needed. But he adds: 'It may prove to be the last such round.'

In the Nineties Sir Chris took time off from his duties as an Oxford professor to become Director-General of the CERN nuclear particle accelerator in Geneva. Now he is the director ofthe UK Atomic Energy Authority with responsibility for JET (the Joint European Torus).

JET is the precursor of ITER. It was set up in 1983 at Culham, a village near Oxford, and by 1991 had proved to the world that it was possible to produce 2MW of power by the fusion method.

It was JET's success that made the world's scientists sit up and take notice of the prospect that fusion could be used on a commercial scale. So it can be said that Britain has made a major contribution to this international development.

But the nation that was most enthusiastic about pushing ahead with fusion was, and still is, Japan (which has no indigenous coal or oil). Japan was even willing to pay half the costs to have ITER set up on one of its islands. The EU only finally won the argument by also agreeing to pay half the cost and accepting that a Japanese scientist will be in charge.

ITER remains an international project in which the EU and Japan are involved along with China, Russia, South Korea and the United States. But once ITER is up and running each of these countries will very likely want to develop the technology further by building their own fusion plants.

The cost and outward appearance will be the same as existing power plants, vast buildings surrounded by cooling towers. The difference will lie in the furnace and the raw fuel, a combination of deuterium (heavy hydrogen extracted from sea water by a process similar to that used by the Germans at the Hydro plant in Norway during the war) and lithium.

Will British Energy, the publicly stock market-quoted group, be directly involved? It owns eight of the most modern of the UK's nuclear plants but expects to have to retire five of these within nine years. One of the first to go could be Heysham 1 on Morecambe Bay. Eventually it will be left with only three: the more modern Heysham 2, Sizewell B on the Suffolk coast and Torness in Scotland.

British Energy is unlikely to be in a position to build another nuclear plant. But it could well find itself positioned as 'best- experienced' operator of one. After restructuring it now has a promising 'born-again' financial status (plus new top management including Adrian Montague as chairman).

Likewise, there is no prospect of the stock market being ready to finance a new nuclear company. So, with the government adamant that it will not use taxpayer's money to build nuclear plants, British industry is now facing a future in which by 2015 power cuts could become a regular event.

One solution could be to build more coal-fired power plants.

Interestingly enough British Energy has itself recently bought a coal-fired UK-plant as part of its new policy of achieving a more balanced portfolio.

Adding to the government's dilemma over the nuclear issue is that there are sceptics in the scientific community who argue that fission will never happen. They say it always has been, and always will be, something that 'will be achieved in 25 years'. If they are right it will make the failure to go ahead with new nuclear plants based on present technology all the more painful.

There is no point in waiting for ITER. Construction will not start until next year and it will take 10 years to complete.

Even then it will only be seen as a prototype and produce at most 500MW of power (equal to the output of a small gas-fired power station).

However, if all does go as planned, this output of 500MW will be produced with an input of heat equivalent to only 50MW.

This 10 to 1 ratio of output to input is too good for the world to ignore. But waiting for it to happen is too much of a high-risk policy for British industry

Source: Daily Post; Liverpool

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