Mark Gilbert’s Blog

I read over the weekend that due to a merger by the two largest French gas companies, Gaz de France and Suez, gas prices could rise further than the 22% rise already imposed on British Gas customers only a few weeks ago.
This giant company would control nearly all the gas supply for France and Belgium and control almost 30% of the interconnecting pipeline through Europe. This would create a much less competitive market in Europe, and it is this which could lead to more price hikes in the UK.

Really with the problems we have with supply, the UK currently gets a large portion of it’s natural gas from eastern Europe and the former Soviet countries. With production in the North Sea declining faster than expected the situation is set only to get worse. The difficulty arises since the gas which is imported has to transferred through massive pipelines, increasing the costs.

So what’s the solution? Well one option which has fallen out of favour in many people’s eyes of late is nuclear. Currently nuclear power accounts for approximately 20% of the UK’s total power supply. It has massive advantages, it can produce a steady supply of energy without producing the usual CO₂ emissions that come from burning hydrocarbon fuels such as gas and coal.
The prices of uranium, which is the fuel used in nuclear reactors has stayed fairly constant for the last 20 or 30 years and so presents a more reliable source of energy than fossil fuels.
While there have been problems with nuclear fuel, the situations that arose with regard to the 1957 Windscale fire in the UK, Three Mile Island incident in the US in 1979, Chernobyl have killed massively fewer people than the oil and coal industries combined.

One of the largest problems with nuclear power is the highly radioactive waste produced, to which the only solution so far has been to store it underground for years until it breaks down due to radioactive decay.
Another criticism of nuclear power is that there is only a limited supply of uranium on earth, and this supply will run out soon. While this is true for uranium²³⁵ which is used in the current generation of light-water reactors, U²³⁵ accounts for only 0.7% of all the uranium on earth, the more modern breeder reactors use the much more abundant U²³⁸ which accounts for the other 99.3% of natural uranium. The Russian BN-600 reactor in Beloyarsk, Russia is currently the worlds only breeder reactor producing electricity.

Nuclear power could provide the UK with a long term reliable supply of energy, but the UK government abandoned nuclear power many decades ago. The UK’s nuclear reactors have been neglected of late by successive governments too afraid to make the tough choices and have the relevant sensible debates. Our most modern nuclear reactor, Sizewell B began construction in the 80’s, while Sizewell A is due for decommissioning next year. Sizewell B is due to be phased out in 2023 with no replacements on the board. The energy supplied by these reactors has to be replaced and by looking to gas or renewable sources such as wind power we are in for many more shocking energy price hikes like we’ve seen over the last few weeks.

Perhaps this is all of our own doing? Did we over-react to situations like the one at Chernobyl or Windscale? Maybe we wrote nuclear off too soon, perhaps with continuous investment we would be closer to the Holy Grail of nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion produces no CO₂ emissions, no radioactive waste and with no chance of a run-away chain reaction causing a meltdown would seem a very good source of energy. The by-product of the reaction is helium, and the fuels can be found in abundance. One of the fuels, deuterium, can be extracted from water, while the other, tritium, does not occur naturally but can be produced from lithium which is be extracted from the earths crust.

My granddad when he was at work spent some time working on the EFDA-JET project which is based in the UK. It is a fusion reactor which has been used to research optimisation of plasma stability and confinement. This has led to the design of the ITER which is a collaboration between a number of partners including the EU, Japan, USA, South Korea, Russia, China and India, and is a more advanced, larger version of JET. It will be capable of producing 500MW of fusion power. After much political debate, the go ahead to build ITER at Cadarache in France was given in 2005. ITER will take ten years to build and should operate from 2015. France is already one of the world’s most nuclear reliant nations since it has hardly any natural resources to speak of.

We should be watching the development of ITER very closely, as soon it may be the only way forward while avoiding massive energy bills. A UK Royal Academy of Engineering report in 2004 looked at electricity generation costs from new plants in the UK. It added on to it’s figures the cost of standby capacity for wind, as well as carbon values up to £30 (€45.44) per tonne CO₂ for coal and gas. Wind power was calculated to be more than twice as expensive as nuclear power. Without a carbon tax, the cost of production through coal, nuclear and gas ranged between £0.22/kWh and £0.26/kWh and coal gasification coming in at £0.32/kWh. When carbon tax was added, which was up to £0.25/kWh coal came close to onshore wind at £0.54/kWh, offshore wind is £0.72/kWh. Nuclear power remained at £0.23/kWh either way, as it produces negligible amounts of CO₂. Nuclear figures also included decommissioning costs.

We need more sensible debate on this subject, too often debates are hampered by the political arm flailing of green groups who whip up a storm over the environmental side of the issue which then distracts from the potential benefits of nuclear power.

Comments as always welcome

Cheers

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 19:14 and is filed under Personal, Politics, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.