Climate Energy Politics

Explosive new ETH-report on nuclear power

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The original article can be read as “Schlumpfs graphic 125” in the online Nebelspalter of 23 September 2024.

The Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) is monitoring the development of nuclear energy. As part of this program, the SFOE commissioned a current report from the relevant specialist departments at our universities in spring 2023. In July 2024, Annalisa Manera, Professor of Nuclear Safety at ETH Zurich and Andreas Pautz, Professor of Nuclear Engineering at EPF Lausanne and Head of the Nuclear Energy and Safety Research Division at PSI (Paul Scherrer Institute), together with other employees, delivered the study “Technology Monitoring of Nuclear Energy” (see here).

What is important:

– According to a new ETH study commissioned by the Swiss Confederation, 415 nuclear power plants are in operation in 32 countries worldwide, 57 new plants are under construction – 27 of them in China and 7 in India.
– The average construction time for the latest generation of reactors is 7.7 years – in Japan, a plant was built in less than four years.
– The electricity generation costs of a new nuclear power plant tend to be lower than those of wind and solar power plants. In the case of renewables, however, system costs also play a role.

It is incomprehensible why this new scientific status report on all important aspects of nuclear technology was not prominently presented by the SFOE: Neither in a media conference, nor in a media release was reference made to the publication of this study (Alex Reichmuth has already addressed this in the “Nebelspalter”: see here). Obviously, the positive results of the report did not fall on the ears of SFOE officials.

Here I summarize the most important facts from the study in the areas of “Nuclear energy worldwide”, “Status and construction time of currently available reactors” and “Costs and economic efficiency”.

  1. Nuclear energy worldwide

In March 2024, 415 nuclear power plants with an installed capacity of 373 gigawatts of electricity (GWe) will be in operation worldwide – for comparison: our Gösgen nuclear power plant has a capacity of 1 GWe. This means that nuclear energy is still the largest single source of low-carbon electricity in OECD countries: 16 percent of the electricity mix comes from nuclear energy, 13 percent from hydropower, 10 percent from wind and 6 percent from solar.

57 nuclear power plants under construction

Nuclear power plants currently supply electricity in 32 countries. Most of the plants are located in the USA, followed by France, China and Russia. A further 57 nuclear power plants are already under construction, which will provide an additional capacity of 59 GWe. Of the reactors under construction, 27 are in China alone, which has the highest nuclear energy growth rate in the world. This is shown in the next chart, which lists all the countries where nuclear power plants are currently under construction:

Reaktoren Im Bau Welt
Source: Annalisa Manera / IAEA PRIS

The chart shows how much additional capacity in GWe is being provided by the nuclear power plants currently under construction in the various countries. In March 2024, China was in first place with 23.8 GWe – but the figure rose to over 30 GWe just a few months later. In second place, far behind China, is India with an increase of 5.9 GWe, followed by the two nuclear newcomers Egypt and Turkey, each with four plants with a total capacity of 4.8 GWe. However, new nuclear power plants are also being built in the UK, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Bangladesh, Ukraine, France, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and Slovakia.

50 percent more nuclear power planned in the EU

The EU Nuclear Energy Alliance was also founded in 2023. In this alliance, 16 European countries plan to develop an integrated nuclear energy industry and commit to increasing the share of nuclear power in the EU electricity mix by 50 percent by 2050. In addition, an alliance for small modular reactors was founded in the European Commission in 2024 with the aim of “maintaining Europe’s technological and industrial leadership in the field of nuclear energy.”

  • Status and construction time of currently available reactors

All new reactors currently available belong to the so-called Generation III/III+. Such plants are largely based on the same light water reactor technology that is also used in today’s existing plants. However, the new reactors are characterized by a radically improved safety philosophy, the design of which takes into account the lessons learned from the largest reactor accidents. By the end of 2023, a total of 38 large units of this generation will be in operation, and more have been ordered or put out to tender.

Again and again you hear the argument from nuclear opponents that the construction time for new nuclear power plants is getting longer and longer and would even take decades. For example, Jon Pult, Vice President of the SP, said this in the last Arena, see here (at 23:13). In response, the next graph shows the actual construction times of all 38 Generation III/III+ nuclear power plants completed by the end of 2023:

Bauzeiten
Source: Annalisa Manera / IAEA PRIS

Somewhat unusually, the construction time is shown here in months (100 months corresponds to a good 8 years). The x-axis shows the ten different reactor types that have been built to date in Generation III/III+. Two outliers stand out at the top: the EPR in Olkiluoto (Finland) with a construction time of 16 years and the V-428 in India, which took 14 years to build.

Average construction time 7.7 years

On the other hand, there is the ABWR type, which was built four times in less than four years in Japan. It is also striking that reactors built in China (highlighted in the graph) have construction times of only 5 to 7 years: With a well-established production chain, well-qualified personnel and few design changes, nuclear power plants can be built in this time. The average construction time for all plants is 7.7 years (the median is 8 years). Jon Pult is therefore completely wrong with his statement. It is pure scaremongering.

  • Costs and profitability

On this point, too, we keep hearing that nuclear power plants are too expensive and that there are therefore no investors for them. However, the report shows that the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of new nuclear power plants is estimated at 7 to 12 centimes per kilowatt hour according to the best scientific sources. This statement is based on a major PSI study that I commented on in January 2022 (see here). It shows that in terms of production costs alone, nuclear energy performs at least as well as wind and solar, and in some cases even better. However, if all the additional system costs required for volatile renewables are also included in the calculation, nuclear power is significantly cheaper.

When comparing the economic viability of nuclear energy and solar or wind energy, it is often forgotten how nuclear energy can generate massively more electricity from the same unit of power than the new renewables. This is explained in the summary of the study with a simple calculation: The EPR in Olkiluoto – the example with the longest construction time in Figure 2 – cost an enormous 11 billion euros due to this long construction time. However, this nuclear power plant generates a huge 12,000 gigawatt hours of electricity per year at 85% capacity.

Electricity from AlpinSolar is three times more expensive than Olkiluoto electricity

Olkiluoto is then compared with the AlpinSolar high-alpine solar plant operated by Axpo. The almost 5,000 solar modules installed on the dam wall of Lake Mutt at 2,500 meters above sea level produced 2.982 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2023. This means that 4000 such systems would be needed to generate the same electricity yield per year as in Olkiluoto. With AlpinSolar’s costs of 8 million francs, this would result in investment costs of 32 billion francs. Electricity from one of the most expensive nuclear power plants is therefore three times cheaper than electricity from AlpinSolar. And this is without taking into account the costs for backup, storage and grid expansion.

Nevertheless, the high capital costs, which are incurred all at once, remain one of the most important hurdles for investors in large nuclear power plants. These have to be overcome if new reactors are to be built. In the next article, I will describe how the nuclear energy industry is trying to provide an answer to this with the concept of the SMR (Small Modular Reactor) through to microreactors, and what misconceptions prevail about subsidies for nuclear power plants.

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