The
recent burst of opinion polls on the topic of nuclear power are
merely advertising tools or the nuclear industry. Saskatchewan
residents soundly defeated the Uranium Development Partnership in
2009 with a mere 12% supporting the nuclear power option. (See page
105 of The Future of Uranium Public Consultation Process (2009).
Why
is this happening now?
The
uranium market is flat with no recovery. Only the emerging nations of
India and China – still locked in the industrial age - have planned
new builds while the more developed nations, United States, Europe
and even Eastern Canada are cutting back.
Why
fall out of love with nuclear power? Maybe because it is a financial
disaster – no nuclear power plant (NPP) has ever been built on time
or remotely close to budget; or maybe it's because nuclear power
plants can't get liability insurance (if they have an accident, the
public pays); or maybe it's because no one knows what to do with the
waste (deep geological repositories, otherwise known as “dumps,”
leak, e.g. this year at Carlsbad in the US); but maybe the real
reason people fall out of love with nuclear power is because it is an
entirely unforgiving technology. The fuel, once used, is highly
radioactive, essentially forever.
A
nuclear power plant is very needy:
1.
Electrical Needs
A
nuclear power plant (NPP) has to be in a grid with a steady-state
base load mode; it cannot respond quickly to changes in demand.
Hence, they are usually situated close to large industrial or urban
customers that have a consistent need for electrical energy from the
grid. For a province like Saskatchewan where the population is
relatively sparse and widely distributed, the current grid would have
to be entirely re-designed.
A
NPP is also a recipient of electricity, requiring electrical power
for start-up, for ventilation, for cooling systems and for emergency
procedures. The watchdog regulatory body for nuclear power, the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), requires each NPP to have
two completely separate electrical systems. Thus, the province would
still require a separate source of electricity for nuclear power and
customers when each NPP is shut down for routine maintenance.
2.
Water Needs:
Water
is used as a coolant in all steam-cycle power plants - coal, gas and
nuclear - but only in a NPP does its absence constitute a
catastrophe. IAEA regulations require each NNP to be sited next to a
body of water. The source is crucial - during the heat wave in France
in 2007, seventeen
reactors
had
to reduce electrical production or shut down entirely when they were
unable to obtain cool enough water.
Besides
the need for water that is cold, nuclear reactors require an enormous
amount of it. A typical, one-thousand-megawatt, pressurized water
reactor sucks in seventy-six
thousand litres of water per
minute
for cooling. Twenty percent of it is returned to the river or lake;
the rest is either recovered or blown off in the cooling towers.
In
addition to an operating supply of water, IAEA regulations require a
nuclear power plant to have an emergency supply of water that can be
made available at 110,000 litres per minute. For a NPP in a potential
drought area such as Saskatchewan, a dam would need to be built to
have a secured supply.
Each
NPP has cooling ponds for “spent” fuel – rods of extremely
radioactive broken bits of uranium and plutonium atoms. These
Olympic-sized swimming pools must be kept filled with constantly
circulating water. Water lost through evaporation must be replaced.
What
about staving off climate change?
Nuclear
power plants produce only electricity, only about 12 per cent of the
world’s electricity which is less than 2 per cent of the world’s
total energy use. They are only “green” when operating at full
capacity – which they usually do not – and their operational
“greenness” does not include the petroleum dependent mining,
refining and enriching of uranium, its transportation, manufacture of
the fuel rods, care of the waste and decommissioning.
Unforgiving?
A nuclear power plant can never be fully “stopped” - the fuel
rods whether partially used or “spent” must monitored forever.
