Every year, the powerful British oil and gas company BP publishes its World Energy Statistical Report, the most detailed analysis on the matter. The last one, corresponding to 2018, came to light last June, loaded with data that show a conclusion: there is a huge discrepancy between the social and political demand for clear actions against global warming and the real rate of reduction of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Last year, global energy demand grew by 2.9%, and carbon dioxide emissions by 2%, faster than ever since 2010; the use of fossil fuels continues to increase, and only a third of global demand is covered by renewables.
Spencer Dale, chief economist of the BP group, assured during the presentation of the report that “with energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions growing at their fastest rate in years, the world is on an unsustainable path.” BP CEO Bob Dudley added: “The longer carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the more difficult and costly the adjustment will be necessary to bring net emissions to zero. Reducing them requires working on many fronts ”.
These phrases sound especially forceful because they come from senior managers of a multinational that has its business in fossil fuels, but like others, is already working on a difficult shift towards clean energy sources. The challenge is tremendous, because civilization is synonymous with energy: Europe consumes almost ten times more than Africa, and the United States somewhat more than all of Asia and Oceania combined.
Despite the fact that in developed countries there are different energy saving policies, consumption is clearly increasing and has no signs of decreasing. Spain, for example, spent 4% more in the summer of 2018 than in the previous year. The set of sources used for half a century – coal, oil, gas and hydraulic and nuclear energy – today produces around 80% of the world’s energy – in Spain the figure goes to 88% – and according to specialists they will not be displaced by new ones in at least a quarter of a century. According to the BP report, in 2018 coal generated 38% of the world’s energy, the same amount as when 81 countries signed the Kyoto protocol on climate in 1999.
In the short term, no new source is expected to be discovered, nor that a renewable one will reach a leadership position. For decades, all research in this field has focused on improving oil and gas production and extraction processes, reducing emissions and waste, creating energy storage systems, and looking for materials that are lighter and more resistant to corrosion and high temperatures. Lowering the cost of the production chain is a priority. In essence, it works to increase the efficiency of energy sources that we have been exploiting for a long time. This scenario has led many politicians – and even environmental groups – to conclude that, to combat global warming, we need more nuclear energy, whether we like it or not.
“Even researchers associated with the United Nations, unfavorable to this source in the past, now say that all plans to keep the planet’s temperature rise below 1.5 ° C depend on a substantial jump in the use of nuclear, ” says British-Canadian science journalist Leigh Phillips. The vice-president of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC), Thelma Krug, said last April in Madrid that “it would be interesting” to establish a world tax for carbon dioxide emissions, so that nuclear and renewables become “more competitive”.
The fear of nuclear energy is the great obstacle to its use as the main alternative to fossil fuels
But everything related to the energy obtained from the fission of atoms raises vehement criticism, and social pressure ends up promoting policies such as that of Germany, which plans to close all its nuclear power plants between now and 2022, despite the effort economic that it implies. The Ministry of Economy of that country estimates the cost of replacing nuclear power with renewables at 0.01 euros per kWh , which would mean 55,000 million euros in the next decade. To this must be added the 13,000 million a year that the State dedicates to renewables. Some institutions – such as the German Energy Agency and the Credit Bank for Reconstruction (owned by the government) – estimate that this cost will be much higher: around 250,000 million euros. And this in a country that ranks tenth in the world and first in Europe when it comes to the price of electricity.
Given these figures, it is clear that few countries have the money to switch from nuclear to renewables , let alone technological capacity. It is one of the reasons why more and more authorized voices qualify or change their position. From the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an organization founded in 1969 by professors and students at MIT historically skeptical of nuclear energy, they say that “if the current situation continues and more plants are closed, they will replace them. those of natural gas, which will increase CO2 emissions ”. In fact, it is estimated that if all the world’s nuclear plants were shut down, 6% more carbon dioxide would be released into the atmosphere. From MIT itself, a study came out last year – The future of nuclear energy in a world with carbon restrictions – which considers that “nuclear energy is key to decarbonize the economy and fight against climate change; without this technology, the cost of reducing carbon dioxide sufficiently would go up significantly. ” Does this imply that it is necessary to give carte blanche to the construction of nuclear power plants? At UCS they consider that before doing so, they have to make sure that they are much safer and cheaper than now. They have always been very expensive, and that is one of their weaknesses. “Several plants in the United States have recently closed because they cannot compete with shale gas, a cheap natural gas,” says Phillips.
On the other hand, despite the fact that the management of nuclear waste is managed safely and effectively, its complicated handling continues to be one of the main disadvantages of this energy source. But we must not forget that other energy sources considered renewable, such as solar energy, require the use of materials that can be harmful to the environment. For example, photovoltaic panels contain a material called TEDLAR, which is highly toxic.
The first generation of nuclear power plants, which emerged in the middle of the last century, was so expensive to build that half of them were abandoned while under construction. Those that came into operation faced huge extra costs paid by their customers on the electricity bill. Not surprisingly, in 1985, Forbes magazine called America’s nuclear industry “the greatest administrative disaster in business history.” And it’s gotten worse: Between 2002 and 2008, estimates of the budget needed to build a new plant went from $ 2 billion to $ 4 billion to $ 9 billion, according to a 2009 UCS report.
The proof that it is not a profitable business is that it suffers from a shortage of private investment, and that it has had to turn to governments for aid, loan guarantees and other forms of support. These subsidies have not been few: according to another UCS report, they have cost US taxpayers more than the market value of the energy they generated. This is one of the reasons put forward by critics of nuclear energy. They argue that an industry with more than half a century of existence – and that has received two public bailouts in the United States – should already be mature enough to stand alone. The predictions of the defenders of the nuclear, repeatedly exaggerated, have not contributed to its good image either.
Lewis Strauss, one of the early presidents of the US Atomic Energy Commission, said in a 1954 speech that a day would come when nuclear power would make electricity “too cheap.” Much later, in the 1980s, the holy grail of the defenders of this energy source appeared: controlled fusion, which was said to be a commercial reality in twenty years. But we still don’t even know if such a commercially viable reactor can be built.
One thing is clear: energy sources capable of helping in the fight against climate change – essentially renewables and nuclear – are expensive and need heavy public subsidies. Can we lower its cost? And if nuclear power plants become a short-term and urgent response to global warming, will we be able to deploy new, safer and more sustainable plants at the necessary pace in the coming decades?
The so-called Generation IV reactors could be the solution. According to the US research institute Third Way – which analyzes policy and energy issues and is funded by the Democratic Party and other center-left organizations – at the beginning of 2018 in the United States alone there were 75 projects to build these reactors , safer, more sustainable and efficient theory. Its main distinguishing feature will be to have a sustainable closed fuel cycle for the reactor: that is, the spent fuel can be recycled to be used again.
In addition, it will improve the energy efficiency of nuclear material so much that the radioactivity of the waste will be shortened from millennia to centuries. They work on different types of these new reactors , with differences in terms of the temperature at which they operate, the type of refrigerant … Most are in the design phase, and among the most advanced is the prototype built by the National Corporation China’s Nuclear, a very high temperature reactor (VHTR), which reaches 1,000 ºC and is cooled with helium. Apparently, it reaches a power of 210 megawatts (MW), a fifth of the nominal power of a standard nuclear power plant. According to Chinese sources, it will be connected to the country’s power grid later this year. Another theoretical model at an advanced stage is the sodium-cooled fast reactor – water is common – with prototypes under development in the United States, Europe and Russia. It is the adaptation of an old concept, which emerged in the 1950s from the investigation of aircraft reactors. The American company Terrapower – which has Bill Gates as one of its main investors – has created one of these devices, powered by depleted uranium.
In 2015, the company signed an agreement with China to build a 600 MW prototype there that would be active in 2022, but the trade restrictions imposed by President Trump on the Asian country compromise the project. In any case, it is yet another example of Chinese interest in nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels.
Another variant of the promising Generation IV is the molten salt reactor. It is the safest as it can cool down even if the system loses almost all of its power. The Canadian company Terrestrial Energy wants to build a 190 MW prototype and the first reactors before 2030, at a cost that, they say, will compete with that of natural gas.
We cannot conclude this review of nuclear reactors under development without talking about the modular reactor or SMR , a reduced version of the current ones. Its compact size allows it to be installed as if it were a prefabricated house in remote or difficult-to-access regions, or to use it to supply energy to small communities or industrial estates. The American company NuScale Power is about to finish the construction of a 60 MW prototype, and has signed an agreement to install twelve of its small reactors in the west of the country, to serve a group of fifty public utilities. . The advantage of this approach is that it reduces the very high initial costs, since reactors are created that can be built in series rather than custom.
International experimental thermonuclear reactor (ITER), under construction in Cadarache (France).
What is the current situation?
The vast majority of the power plants in operation are Generation II –built up to the 1990s–, and very few are Generation III, more secure. There are some 450 reactors operating in 30 countries and provide more than 10% of the world’s electricity , and a further 100 are planned to be built, mostly in Asia and in countries with rapidly increasing electricity demand, such as the United Arab Emirates.
Generation IV reactors are expected to enter service in the next decade, but the traditional inaccuracy of forecasts by nuclear power experts invites skepticism. In the much longer term, we are faced with the great hope: nuclear fusion, in which two nuclei of light atoms, usually hydrogen and its isotopes (deuterium and tritium), come together to form another, heavier nucleus, which releases energy. It is the same that happens inside the Sun, where the fusion of hydrogen nuclei forms helium, which generates energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation, which reaches us and we perceive it as light and heat. Nuclear fusion has many advantages: heavy hydrogen is cheap, an almost inexhaustible and non-radioactive element; Unlike fission reactors, the nuclear reaction is not a chain reaction, and it cannot get out of control; and the waste produced has a low and short-lived radioactivity. But we still do not know how to build reactors that maintain the enormous pressure and temperature that nuclear fusion requires for the time necessary to make it viable as a source of energy, despite the fact that there are many projects underway.
The largest investment to date in nuclear fusion is the international experimental thermonuclear reactor (ITER), under construction in Cadarache (France) since 2010. 35 countries participate, but delays and cost overruns are constant. The first experiments should have been done in 2018, and now we are talking about 2025; it has already cost 22,000 million euros – about 10 billion were expected – and monopolizes many of the public resources devoted to research on energy sources. In fact, there are already those who ask for its cancellation. It is not the only project destined to bottle a star. Some private companies also participate in the race.
Will any of these ideas succeed? Social fear of nuclear energy means that governments do not allow the construction of prototypes on their floors: only China and Russia are betting on it. On the other hand, there is a reasonable fear that the expected costs will multiply, because it has always happened.
In any case, our energy future remains to be solved, and the problems are multiple. Renewables need an efficient energy storage system; nuclear, produce few high-level waste. But if we want to reduce CO2 emissions in a relatively short time, we will have to make use of all those energy sources that do not produce it , as long as we have sufficient security.
