Conviction Politics vs Arithmetic

Green politicians are well named: they are inexperienced and untested by reality. We were all green once and we had, still have, ideas of how to make the world a better place.  Long may that be so but the more seasoned members of society reckon these ideas should be quantified before they become policy.   

Two camps of Greens, and like-minded parties in Germany and Scotland, oppose nuclear generation of electricity: those with rational concerns that can be addressed and those with only visceral objections with whom reasoning is pointless. When, last month, Nicola Sturgeon ruled out nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels in Scotland, she was rejecting the price of nuclear based on Hinkley Point C which is indeed extortionate. The price of electricity from the small, generation IV, Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs), however, is projected to be about one third of EDF prices. She needs to do the arithmetic. 

When 3,000 Greens were surveyed, 47% were in favour of replacing decommissioned nuclear plants with new ones, 32% were against and 21% did not know. Most of the objections concerned safety (Fukoshima for example) and waste disposal, not nuclear generation of electricity per se. After considering the substance of these two objections, the alternatives for the dunkelflaute days when the sun don’t shine, the wind don’t blow and renewables don’t deliver are reviewed.  The question for the rational Greens is whether the potential problems with generation IV nuclear are more or less than the potential problems with the alternatives. 

“As of October 2021, there are 441 nuclear reactors in operation in some 30 countries around the world. In the United Kingdom, 13 nuclear power reactors.” Getting to net zero carbon energy and nuclear safety are global, not purely national, issues. Little Britain should not be making up its own nuclear safety rules based on minimal, if any, experience of the latest technologies. The US and Canada nuclear regulators , NRC and CNSC,  are co-ordinating their nuclear regulatory systems and have completed their first collaborative project and the UK’s ONR should be part of that. 

The UK government’s (February 2020, p.3) review of new nuclear generation options stated: “In addition to electricity generation, AMRs use cooling systems or fuels that can offer additional benefits, including high temperature heat for hydrogen production, industrial process heat, desalination and the re-use of spent fuel to minimise waste. These applications could play an important role in decarbonising industry, heat and transport.” Advocates of CCS claim burying carbon underground would be easy enough.  If so, that would also be the case for AMR waste. 

Moving on to the alternatives, hydrogen is widely seen as a replacement for fossil fuels, e.g. kerosene, and also as a means of storage. “Long-range jets powered by zero-emission hydrogen used at scale globally are, by some estimates, 30 or 40 years away”.  Some see “sustainable aviation fuel” (SAF) and ‘electrofuel’, made from green hydrogen and captured CO2, as replacements for kerosene. Costs are five times kerosene and they are net zero carbon in the sense that they return captured carbon.  It might be better to use fuels that do not emit CO2 at all. 

We need to see the arithmetic for the more general use of hydrogen but it could not be used as a replacement for natural gas in general domestic use. By 2050, energy supply will be almost all electricity, including the generation of hydrogen and charging batteries. Maintaining the gas network for occasional domestic use on dunkelflaute days would not be economic especially as the natural gas network, much of it antique, would need conversion.

Hydrogen and batteries are the two most quoted candidates for electricity storage. Batteries are good for road transportation and shipping but not suitable for shortfalls in renewables. Ten successive dunkelflaute days would require a storage capacity of 14 TWh at a cost of £4.5trn – more than four times the UK public sector spending for 2020/21- based on the (published) construction and other costs of the 640 MWh storage system planned for the Thames Estuary. Similar arguments apply to fuel cell technology. 

In short, both hydrogen and batteries can make some contribution to storage, i.e. shifting renewable surpluses to deficits, but nowhere near enough. We will need to supplement renewables with constant power (“baseload”) which reduces electricity deficits and increases surpluses. If government statisticians have not yet calculated the optimal baseload percentage of average energy needs, they should have.  And they should have shared the arithmetic with us.  My guess is that 30% feels about right. Furthermore, the constant output required for baseload would probably be best suited by low cost nuclear, given the volatility of fossil fuel prices. 

Renewables plus hydrogen storage plus baseload will still leave a shortfall on dunkelflaute days. The candidates to cope are surplus electricity trading, biomass with CCS (BECCS), and gas or oil with carbon capture. 

Trading surpluses is valuable for filling Grid shortfalls if UK weather patterns complement those of our trading partners, i.e. Norway, the Low Countries and France. If they match, however, importing and exporting will not help, We have enough data to establish the extent of complementarity and the arithmetic should be published. Current practice is not encouraging as in 2019, the UK imported 35% of its energy needs, with Norway being the source of 57% of the imports. Hardly any is exported. 

BECCS requires burning the stuff that removes CO2 from the air (vegetation) in order to put it back and in the process removes the agricultural land the world needs for food production. Full-scale Drax BECCS would be more expensive than Hinkley Point C which is Ms Sturgeon’s objection to nuclear. BECCS is not so much a means of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere as cash from the government.  

With current and known technology, it looks like oil and gas are here to stay with carbon capture either at the time the electricity is generated (CCS) or direct air capture independently (DAC). 

19 pilot DAC plants are currently operating worldwide and 70 CCS projects in Europe, 14 of which are in the UK. This makes Ms Sturgeon’s objection to new offshore oil and gas recovery somewhat surprising. Mapping net zero energy requirements has many uncertainties but lead times are such that choices have to be made now. The enthusiasm for AMRs in the US and Canada indicates we should be taking them more seriously that we seem to be doing.

Despite the rhetoric, Germany is re-considering nuclear because of worries about dependency on Russian gas and the Scottish government remains open-minded: “We are aware of increasing interest in the development of new nuclear technologies such as Small Modular Reactors. We have a duty to assess this and all other new technologies based on safety, value for consumers, and contribution to Scotland’s low-carbon economy and energy future.”

Just do the arithmetic.