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Energy Policy 45 (2012) 12–17
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Energy Policy
0301-42
doi:10.1
n Tel./
E-m1 Pr2 G
1960s,
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journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enpol
Viewpoint
What will the Fukushima disaster change?
Steve Thomas n,1
Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU), Business School, University of Greenwich, 30 Park Row, London SE10 9LS, UK
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 23 January 2012
Accepted 5 February 2012Available online 3 March 2012
Keywords:
Nuclear power
Fukushima
Nuclear renaissance
15/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A
016/j.enpol.2012.02.010
fax: þ44 20 8331 9056.
ail addresses: [email protected], stev
ofessor of Energy Policy.
eneration 1 designs include the prototype and
Generation II designs include the vast ma
g those built in the 1970s and 1980s. Gener
a b s t r a c t
Intuitively, the Fukushima disaster should have a major impact on the future of the nuclear industry.
This paper argues that there are four possible answers to the question what will Fukushima change:
everything because the nuclear industry cannot survive another Chernobyl; the impact will vary
according to location; it is too early to determine the impact; and the nuclear industry was facing
serious problems that Fukushima will do no more than exacerbate. We focus on the last answer,
arguing that the new designs that were expected to be so attractive as to power a ‘Nuclear Renaissance’
were already failing. The promises that they would be safer, but simpler, therefore cheaper and more
buildable were unachievable and the Renaissance in the West had already failed. If the nuclear industry
is to have a future, it might be through a shift in locus from North America and Western Europe to
China, Russia and India. However, it is not clear that these countries can avoid the techno-economic
issues that have derailed the nuclear industry in the West. The prospect that the nuclear industry can
be saved by a radical new generation of designs is a long way off and still a remote possibility.
& 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
As the immediate concerns arising from the Fukushimadisaster are resolved, thoughts are moving on how this eventwill change the future for nuclear power.
There are at least four plausible answers to the question whatwill the Fukushima disaster change, some of which may appearcontradictory. They are as follows:
�
Everything; � Depends where you are; � Too early to say; or � Very little.Before we examine these four possible answers, it is importantbriefly to map out the context. Since around 2000, there has been agreat deal of publicity about a posited ‘Nuclear Renaissance’. Underthis, a new range of reactor designs would prove so attractive thatordering of reactors, which had been in decline for the previous 20years, would be re-invigorated, even in countries such as the UK, theUSA, Italy and Germany, which had seemed to have permanentlyturned away from nuclear ordering. These new designs, known asGeneration IIIþ2 would be evolved from existing designs. One of the
ll rights reserved.
demonstration plants of the
jority of operating reactors
ation III designs include the
first convert governments was that of the USA with its Nuclear 2010Programme, launched in 2002, under which one or more of thesenew designs would be in service in the USA by 2010. The USDepartment of Energy wrote:3
‘New Generation IIIþ designs y have the advantage ofcombining technology familiar to operators of current plants withvastly improved safety features and significant simplification isexpected to result in lower and more predictable construction andoperating costs.’
In short, Generation IIIþ designs would be safer, but simplerand therefore cheaper and less prone to cost over-runs. Thenuclear industry calculated that, to be competitive with naturalgas and coal generation, the overnight (excluding finance charges)construction cost of a nuclear reactor would have to be no morethan US $1000/kW of capacity. This was a target the nuclearvendors confidently claimed they could meet.
However, the Renaissance was slow to get under way and, wellbefore Fukushima, there were signs that, as far as ordering ofGeneration IIIþ designs in the West went, the Renaissance wouldbe still-born. There was a marked increase in construction startsfrom 2008 to 2010, but these were concentrated in a few
(footnote continued)
small number of plants ordered from the mid-1980s onwards that were designed
with the lessons of Three Mile Island fully incorporated. There are no strict criteria
for what constitutes a Generation IIIþ design and therefore, not surprisingly,
vendors all claim their latest design is Generation IIIþ .3 US Department of Energy ‘DOE Seeks Public–Private Partnerships To
Demonstrate ‘‘One-Step Licensing’’ of New US Nuclear Power Plants’ Press Release
R-03-272, November 21, 2003. /http://www.ne.doe.gov/home/11–21-03.htmlS
S. Thomas / Energy Policy 45 (2012) 12–17 13
countries such as China and Russia and generally involved earlierdesigns or designs not under consideration in the West.
1.1. Fukushima changes everything
After the Chernobyl disaster, it was often said that the nuclearindustry could not survive another major accident at a nuclearpower plant and it is now clear that while the two accidents arevery different in their cause, they are comparable in scale. At thetime of the Chernobyl disaster, the nuclear industry hoped thatthe disaster could be dismissed as being the consequence of a baddesign, not used outside the Soviet Union operated in an inexplic-able way that would not have been credible in the West. It wasargued therefore that it had little or no relevance to Westerndesign reactors. However, the consequences have been far-reach-ing both in the design of new reactors and the operation ofexisting plants. For new designs, once the scale of the disasterhad been absorbed, ‘passive’ safety became the requirement fornew designs. Such designs rely much less on engineered safetysystems to prevent major accidents in the event of a large failure,and much more on natural processes that do not require operatoror automatic interventions. All Generation IIIþ designs claim adegree of passive safety although, in practice, some rely muchmore on passive safety than others.4
For operating reactors, the phrase, ‘safety culture’, a rathernebulous concept, became the watchword.5 One of the responsesto the Three Mile Island accident was the setting up in the USA ofthe Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO). The morefar-sighted US nuclear utilities recognised that their future wasat the mercy of the weakest nuclear utilities and it was thereforein their interests to make sure that their peers all operated theirplants to a high standard. INPO quickly recruited all US nuclearutilities and instigated a system of peer review of operatingquality through plant inspections to improve safety culture. Thiswas widely seen as being highly effective in improving operatingstandards. After Chernobyl, this concept was internationalisedthrough the setting up of the World Association of NuclearOperators (WANO) carrying out a similar programme. The Inter-national Atomic Energy Agency also set up its own system ofplant inspections. Regardless of whether WANO and INPO havedone valuable work, the fact that a plant in as sophisticated acountry as Japan was unable to stand up to a natural event doesshow that while such organisations can improve overall stan-dards, they are by no means the complete answer to preventingpoor practice.
1.2. Fukushima’s impact will depend where you are
For countries where there has long been strong anti-nuclearsentiment, another major nuclear disaster was always going tohave a major impact. In Europe, Germany, Switzerland and Italyhave moved decisively since the Fukushima disaster to close theoption of new reactors and, for Germany and Switzerland, accel-erate the closure of existing plant (Italy’s plants were all closedafter a referendum in 1987). Other countries such as Spain,Belgium and Sweden, which have had nuclear phase-out policies,may well experience pressure to accelerate closure of existing
4 For example, the French EPR design, offered by Areva, is widely seen as
relying much less on passive safety than, for example, the General Electric ESBWR.5 For example, the UK government’s Health and Safety Executive defines
safety culture as follows. ‘The safety culture of an organisation is the product of
individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and patterns of
behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an
organisation’s health and safety management’ /http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/
books/hsg65.htmS
plants and countries such as the Netherlands may now notproceed with plans for new plants. Some countries, such as theUSA, the UK, India and France seem determined to proceed on thebasis that Fukushima has little or no relevance to them.
Equally, countries with sites vulnerable to earthquakes and/ortsunamis are going to find it much more difficult to convincesceptics that existing or future plants are able to withstand allpossible natural events. Risks to nuclear plants from othernatural disasters, like tidal surges, volcanoes, hurricanes will alsobe re-examined.
1.3. It is too early to determine Fukushima’s impact
The Three Mile Island accident was, by comparison withChernobyl and Fukushima, a very limited accident. There wereminimal releases of radioactive material, no casualties, no off-sitedamage and the accident was quickly brought under control.However, it was five years after the accident before investigatorswere able to get sufficient access to the core to find, to theirsurprise, that a significant amount of the fuel had melted. Clearlythe Fukushima plants are in a much worse state and the damageextends to four reactors, including spent fuel ponds, so, even withimproved access techniques, it is going to be years before acomplete picture emerges of exactly what failed and why. Therewill then be a process by designers and regulators of modifyingdesigns to improve their resistance to such failures. None of thedesigns that were able to take account of Chernobyl have yetentered service, 25 years after the disaster so it is unlikely thatnew, post-Fukushima designs will start to be available to build inless than a decade.
However, as with Chernobyl, one of the most damagingaspects of Fukushima to the credibility of nuclear designers wasthat it was beyond ‘design-basis’, in other words, the designersdid not believe such a sequence of events was credible. The 9/11attacks had clear relevance to nuclear reactors and, in Europe andthe USA, designers now have to convince regulators that theirdesigns would stand up to an impact with a large civil aircraft. Itis impossible to know what new event sequences will now beseen as credible and therefore require mitigation measures to bedesigned into the reactors.
There has been a great deal of effort by some governments tore-assure the public and to be seen to be responding to the threat.Much of this seems premature. For example, within days of thedisaster, the UK government had asked the UK safety regulator towrite a report on its implications for the UK. A preliminary reportwas to be completed within a month and a final report within sixmonths. The implication that the main lessons will be clear beforethe Fukushima reactors have even reached cold shutdown isblatantly false and will damage the credibility of the reports evenif they are conscientiously and thoroughly carried out.
The European Commission also appears guilty of trying to gainpolitical capital with its ‘stress test’ plans. Soon after Fukushima,the Commission negotiated that member states would carry outstress tests at their nuclear plants. The term stress test hadachieved some common currency in the debt crisis through itsapplication to banks, but it was clear that nobody, least of all theEuropean Commission, had the slightest idea what a stress test toa nuclear power plant would entail.
The Commission also has no sovereignty over nuclear reactorsafety – this resides with national governments – so there mustbe suspicions that the Commission is trying at best to win somekudos for being seen to act and, at worst, to extend its sphere ofinfluence to reactor safety. As with the UK’s report noted above,unless there are significant consequences for existing reactors,not just a few modifications and perhaps the closure of one or twoplants that were near the end of their life, the stress tests will
S. Thomas / Energy Policy 45 (2012) 12–1714
probably be seen as public relations exercises, no matter howconscientiously they are carried out. If stress tests entail regula-tors thinking of a range of credible sequences and trying todetermine how existing reactors would cope, the problem is thatall the major accidents to date have been caused by eventsequences that were regarded as not credible.
1.4. Fukushima will change very little
There were strong signs that the Renaissance was failing, at leastas far as Generation IIIþ designs and for the West, well beforeFukushima. To understand the reasons for this apparent failure, it isuseful to go back to the promises made for the new generationdesigns, safer, simpler and more ‘buildable’, and cheaper. However,perhaps the most important issue behind the problems with theRenaissance is a fourth factor, obtaining finance.
1.4.1. Safer?
Determining whether the new designs are safer than theirpredecessors is beyond the scope of this article, but it is clear thatconvincing safety regulators the new designs meet their newrequirements has been a great deal more difficult than it wasexpected to be and it was only in December 2011 that the first ofthese designs completed a full generic safety review.6
A common perception concerning the failure to controlconstruction costs and times for nuclear power plants in the pasthas been that part of the problem was the designs were notfinalised before construction started and when the regulator cameup against features that did not satisfy it, this caused delays andextra costs. Since 1992, it has therefore been US policy to require‘generic approval’ for new reactor designs before any constructionwas started. This would mean that a utility wanting to build suchdesign that had generic approval had only to resolve site-specificissues, for example, those relating to cooling and local geologicalconditions. All major design issues would be resolved and couldnot be re-opened. Three designs achieved generic approval in theUSA in the 1990s, although none of these was actually built there.The UK has also adopted a generic design approval process for itsnew reactor programme. By contrast, France and Finland allowedconstruction to start on their Generation IIIþ reactors (both Arevadesigned plants known as the EPR7) with only approval inprinciple, not detail for the design. It may be that this hascontributed to serious cost and time over-runs experienced atboth the Finnish (Olkiluoto 3) and the French (Flamanville 3)plants (Thomas, 2010a, in press).
The US Nuclear 2010 programme launched in 2002 anticipatedthat at least one new design reactor could be on-line in the USAby 2010, implying that safety approval would take a couple ofyears but it was not until December 2011 that the process wascompleted for the first design. Whether the Fukushima disasterwill delay approval further or whether it will lead to newrequirements for plants in mid-process remains to be seen.
1.4.2. Simpler and more buildable
The rhetoric of Generation IIIþ was intuitively appealing. Thelegacy of the various reactor accidents was that more and moresafety systems had been bolted on to the basic design making thedesign more complex and, arguably, this complexity at best made
6 The US safety regulator has started reviews of four new reactor designs and
a review of a modified existing design. The Toshiba/Westinghouse design was
given design certification in 2006 but a year later, the vendor began submitting a
series of design modifications that required a further 5 years to evaluate. /http://
www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/design-cert/amended-ap1000.htmlS7 EPR stands for European Pressurised water Reactor in Europe but for
non-European markets, it stands for Evolutionary Power Reactor.
construction difficult and expensive and at worst, the complexityactually tended to reduce safety. It was argued that if these layerswere stripped away, a rationalised safety system could bedesigned that led to greater levels of safety but a simpler (andtherefore more buildable) design. While this logic was appealing,it is clear this vision was an illusory. A French government-appointed commission of inquiry into the problems at Olkiluotoand Flamanville and the lack of competitiveness of the EPR in callsfor tender for nuclear capacity found (Roussely, 2010):
‘The complexity of the EPR comes from design choices, notablyof the power level, containment, core catcher and redundancy ofsystems. It is certainly a handicap for its construction, and its cost.These elements can partly explain the difficulties encountered inFinland or Flamanville.’
1.4.3. Cheaper
The promise of construction costs of $1000/kW was soonrevealed to be a misconceived with the first order for a GenerationIIIþ design placed in 2003. The contract price for the Olkiluoto plantwas h3bn, then equivalent to about $2250/kW. Estimated costscontinued to escalate at a rapid rate and, by 2010, most seriousestimates were in the order $6000/kW (Thomas, 2010b). The ChiefExecutive of Areva, Anne Lauvergeon, acknowledged:8
‘The cost of nuclear reactors has ‘‘always’’ gone up with eachgeneration, because the safety requirements are ever higher.‘‘Safety has a cost,’’’
1.4.4. Finance
Despite their apparent gravity, the interrelated problems ofsafety, cost and complexity might not have been sufficient toderail the Renaissance. In the past, high costs were seldom abarrier to obtaining finance to build nuclear reactors becauseelectric utilities were monopolies and were generally able to passwhatever costs they incurred on to their consumers. Electricity isan essential purchase with low price elasticity so this made costpass-through a very secure guarantee to a financier. No matterhow badly things went wrong, banks always got their money back– electric utilities were the archetypal ‘blue chip’ investment. Thecost of borrowing was therefore commensurately low.
In the USA, by around 1980, economic regulators for energywere becoming impatient with utilities completing nuclearplants, which were often not needed, at way above their forecastcost and passing on all these extra costs to consumers. For smallutilities building a nuclear plant, this sometimes meant that whenutilities began to recover the costs from consumers, electricityrates increased massively. Regulators therefore began to preventutilities from recovering all their costs from consumers puttingutilities building nuclear plants at serious risk of bankruptcy anddefaulting on their loans. This had an immediate impact on banks’perceptions of nuclear investments and more than 120 firmorders for nuclear plants were cancelled at around this timebecause banks were unwilling to be exposed to this risk.
In Europe, the introduction of competition to electricitymarkets had a similar impact. In a competitive market, utilitieswhose electricity was too expensive would go to the wall. Thishappened in the UK in 2002, when the privatised nuclear utility,British Energy, collapsed and the UK government chose to rescueit at a cost to taxpayers in excess of £10bn9. No nuclear powerplant has ever been ordered that would be exposed to a compe-titive electricity market and in the USA, the new nuclear power
8 Nucleonics Week, ‘Lauvergeon: French lost UAE bid because of expensive
EPR safety features’ January 14, 2010, pp 19 See /http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2003:180:
0005:0028:EN:PDFS
S. Thomas / Energy Policy 45 (2012) 12–17 15
plants most likely to be built are in states where electricityremains a monopoly industry and the economic regulator willallow cost overruns to be passed on to consumers.10
If banks and electricity consumers are not willing to be exposedto the risk of construction cost overruns, who can take that risk?One option being pursued in the USA is federal loan guarantees.Under these, if the utility defaults on its loan, taxpayers repay thebank. This not only reduces the risk on the bank, it reduces theinterest rate to one close to the government interest rate becausethe bank is effectively lending to the government. Loan guaranteesseemed to be an effective way round the problem of finance, butissues are now beginning to emerge. First, there is a fee associatedwith a loan guarantee that, in the USA, is related to the riskiness ofthe loan. So, for example, the loan guarantee fee asked for a plant,Calvert Cliffs, that would operate in the competitive PJM electricitymarket was reported to be 11.6 per cent of the sum borrowed. Bycontrast, a plant that would operate in a monopoly electricitysystem with a high likelihood of cost pass-through to consumers(Vogtle) was reported to be charged only about 1.5 per cent(Thomas, 2010b). As a result, the Calvert Cliffs project is unlikelyto proceed while the Vogtle plant is likely to go ahead. Anotherproblem is that loan guarantees protect the bank but not theutility. If costs do not overrun, the utility gets a cheap loan, but ifcosts do overrun, it will have to go to the market to borrow moneyto save a failing project, most likely at very high rates of interest. Athird problem is that the pressure on governments to reduce theirdebts – loan guarantees count against national debt – will make itpolitically much more difficult to get approval for loan guarantees.
2. What future for nuclear?
The ‘Nuclear Renaissance’ was failing long before the Fukush-ima disaster because of techno-economic failings. The USA and theUK are the key markets nuclear needs to capture if it is to have afuture in the West. Whether orders will be placed in the UK andthe USA remains to be seen, but it seems likely there will be nomore than a handful in the USA and one or two in the UK, placedbecause the national governments lack the courage to acknowl-edge that their nuclear policy was misconceived. If any orders areplaced, all it will prove is that governments can get a few nuclearpower plants built provided the costs and the risks fall squarelyon the public, either through cost pass-through to electricityconsumers or through loan guarantees underwritten by taxpayers.
Two possible ways back for nuclear are worth examining:nuclear power will be revived through orders in new markets,supplied by the non-traditional vendors; and radical new designs,perhaps Generation IV, will provide a way back.
2.1. New markets and new vendors
Of the 37 reactors on which construction work started between2008 and end 2010, 24 were sited in China, 6 in Russia and 3 inKorea. India has massive plans, and Westinghouse, Areva, GE andthe Russian vendor, Rosatom, each claim to have agreements tosupply India with several reactors. Orders on which constructionhas yet to start are reported to have been placed for Turkey(Russia), Vietnam (Russia and Japan) and UAE (Korea) and inEastern Europe (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Lithuania),there is strong political commitment to order new reactors. Forthese new markets, there will often be a requirement for a bidfrom a ‘national team’ that can supply not just the equipment, but
10 Nuclear Intelligence Weekly ‘Vogtle’s Potential Cost Overruns Passed to
Ratepayers’ 8 August 2011, pp 8–9.
also finance, construction management skills and training. The2009 order from UAE, awarded to a Korean team fought off bidsfrom French and Japanese teams, while a team from Russia wasthe only one willing to meet all the requirements asked for byTurkey.
In terms of vendors, Korea and Japan have entered the exportmarket for nuclear reactors for the first time in 2009, while thereis interest in some countries, especially South Africa and SaudiArabia, for reactors supplied by China. There must be doubts, afterFukushima, whether it will be politically feasible to continue tooffer a national capability to supply reactors. Russia, which has fora long time supplied reactors to countries within its sphere ofinfluence (Eastern Europe before 1990) or under political deals(China and India) is moving to compete in more open contests,such as Turkey, Vietnam and Eastern Europe. In the past fewyears, Russia has probably been the world’s leading exporter ofnuclear power plants, albeit with only a handful of orders.
China, India and Russia are clearly the key markets andvendors. China and India have the scale to absorb large numbersof new reactors, but there are question marks against both. Bothhave long had hugely ambitious plans for nuclear that have failedto be realised. Russia’s significance is probably more as a supplier,and, in the past, Russia has concluded supply deals, for example,in Iran, India and Turkey, that no other vendor would haveconsidered.
2.1.1. China
China is clearly vital to the future of the world nuclearindustry, making up the majority of recent orders. However,nuclear is far from vital to China. Even if it fulfils its mostambitious medium-term plans, it will still be only getting about10 per cent of its electricity from nuclear.
Most of the orders China has placed recently have been for adesign derived from a French design, itself licensed from Westing-house, of the mid 1970s. It is this design that countries like SouthAfrica see as offering an affordable way to new nuclear capacity.There is a widespread assumption that reactors of the old designwill be much cheaper than modern designs but this is puresupposition. There is also no evidence that China sees export ofnuclear reactor as a priority, especially if for its home orders, it ispursuing a more modern design.
It has ordered some Generation IIIþ plants, four WestinghouseAP1000s and two Areva EPRs. There are expectations that neworders for China will increasingly be dominated by the AP1000,with increasing local content and the orders for the EPR will not befollowed up despite strong attempts by the French government.
The recent pace of ordering, construction started on ten unitsin 2010, appeared to be faltering even before Fukushima. In 2011,no construction starts took place and while this might have beenpartly due to Fukushima, if the pace of the previous year had beenmaintained, another two or three plants might have startedconstruction in 2011 before Fukushima. How far this is due tostrain on the capability of China in terms of skills and productionfacilities and how far it is due to concern about safety of the olddesign and the cost of the AP1000 is not clear.
2.1.2. India
India is a very different case to China, complicated by itsrefusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and concernsabout its laws covering the liability of reactor vendors in theevent of an accident. These issues are complex and are notexamined further in this article, but they do remain seriousobstacles to countries wanting to export reactors to India. A dealwith the USA in 2005 allowed foreign vendors to enter the Indianmarket and in the next four years India announced deals for
S. Thomas / Energy Policy 45 (2012) 12–1716
37 GW of new nuclear capacity with Rosatom (ten WWERs),Areva (six EPRs), Toshiba/Westinghouse (six AP1000s) andGE-Hitachi (six ABWRs) as well as plans for six new Indian-supplied CANDUs. If these were built, it would increase India’snuclear capacity by a factor of nearly ten.
India’s existing plants nearly all use Canadian CANDU technol-ogy and there are strong internal forces that would like to seeindigenous designs of reactor pursued, rather than importedreactors. The outlook for India is therefore highly uncertain andthere can be little certainty that it will emerge as a major marketfor nuclear power plants. It is also a long way from being in aposition to offer reactors for export.
2.1.3. Russia
There were six new reactor construction starts in Russia from2008 to 2010 and Russia is also reported to have won or expectedto win, contracts to supply reactors to Turkey, Vietnam, China andIndia. It remains to be seen whether the flow of orders for a homemarket will be maintained. Russia claims its new design of reactorAES-2006 should be regarded as Generation IIIþ but until it isevaluated thoroughly by a Western safety regulator, it is hard totest assess this claim. The major barrier for Russian reactorexports, especially in the West, may still be the stigma thatattaches to Russian technology as a result of Chernobyl, despitethe fact that the technology it offers now is totally different to thedesign built at Chernobyl.
2.2. New designs
The question the nuclear industry must face up to is whetherthe current designs of reactor, based on using ordinary (‘light’)water as coolant and moderator are a blind alley. The questionraised by Three Mile Island and re-emphasised by Fukushima, waswhether light water reactors could be designed that could beguaranteed to stand up to a loss of coolant accident and loss ofpower, but would also be economically viable. Much of the designmodification since Three Mile Island has been aimed at addressingthis issue and these additional safety provisions have probablybeen some of the continuing real increases in construction cost.
In 2001, a group of the major nuclear design nations, includingthe USA, France, Canada, Korea, Japan and the UK set up theGeneration IV International Forum (GIF). Subsequently, Russiaand China joined GIF. GIF is ‘a cooperative international endea-vour organized to carry out the research and development (R&D)needed to establish the feasibility and performance capabilities ofthe next generation nuclear energy systems’.11 There were fourmain objectives for the new designs:
�
Sustainability: this includes efficient use of natural resourcesand minimisation of waste; � Economics: the designs would be cheaper than the alternativesand would entail no more economic risk than other generationoptions;
� Safety and reliability: the designs would have a very lowprobability of core damage and would eliminate the need foremergency off-site responses;
�12 US DOE Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee and the Generation
Proliferation resistance and physical protection: the designswould minimise the risk of diversion of materials for weaponsor terrorism purposes.
Six basic design concepts were identified all except two ofwhich were radically different to any plants built to date. A‘roadmap’ published by GIF in 2002 foresaw that these designs
11 /http://www.gen-4.org/S
would be ready for deployment between 2020 and 2030.12 Thetwo more familiar concepts are the sodium cooled fast reactorand the helium cooled high temperature reactor. These tworeactor concepts have been pursued since the earliest days ofthe nuclear industry, but prototypes and demonstration plantshave been expensive and technologically problematic. The mostrecent attempt to commercialise helium cooled reactors ended intotal failure in South Africa in 2010 (Thomas, in press). There islittle evidence of serious advances on the other four concepts andtheir commercial deployment looks at least as far away as it didwhen GIF was launched.
The latest concept to attract interest is Small Modular Reactors(SMRs) with output up to about 300 MW13. Most of the newproposals would use light water reactors. None of the newdesigns has much form interest from buyers and the designsappear several years away from being fully developed enough tosubmit to safety regulators for a thorough review. On pastevidence, the chances that any of these new designs will becomecommercially available seem low.
3. Conclusions
Nuclear power has been written off many times since ThreeMile Island yet, despite the crushing blows it has suffered –serious accidents and continuing real increases in costs – it hasretained and even strengthened its support, particularly at thehighest political levels. This is undoubtedly partly the result of thesevere challenge offered by climate change.
The nuclear industry should face some difficult questions as towhy, yet again, it has promised so much from new technologieswhen they deliver so little. The promise that Generation IIIþdesigns could be safer, but simpler, therefore more buildable andcheaper has been shown to be hopelessly inaccurate. The nuclearindustry needs to examine whether this was self-delusion orpublic deception. Neither explanation is flattering to the nuclearindustry, and claims for future generations of nuclear powerplants must surely be more critically challenged before largeamounts of public money are invested in them.
Nevertheless, it would therefore be naive to assume that evenas severe a setback as Fukushima will mean that nuclear powerwill disappear off the agenda. However, it does seem likely that itwill be the final straw for the Nuclear Renaissance, a trend thatwas probably doomed even before Fukushima.
However, in perhaps 10 years, with a new set of designs toutedas solving the problems of the past, it would not be surprising to seeyet another attempt to re-launch nuclear technology. An importantfactor will be the success of Germany and perhaps Japan inmarkedly reducing their dependence on nuclear power through amixture of energy efficiency and renewable technologies.
Before Fukushima, there was evidence that the locus of thenuclear industry, markets and vendors, was moving east, withChina, India and Russia emerging as the new driving forces for theworld nuclear industry. These countries do not have as open andaccountable processes for the nuclear industry as those in theWest – these are hardly beyond reproach – and the designs beingoffered generally fall short of the standards required in the West.Despite the optimism for the nuclear industry in these markets,there are still significant question-marks about whether thesecountries will be as important players as they are now seen. Itmay be that the availability in these countries of lower cost
IV International Forum (2002) ‘A Technology Roadmap for Generation IV Nuclear
Energy Systems’ GIF. /http://www.gen-4.org/PDFs/GenIVRoadmap.pdfS13 See for example /http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.htmlS
S. Thomas / Energy Policy 45 (2012) 12–17 17
skilled labour and less stringent safety standards will not beenough for them to escape from the techno-economic issues thatseem likely to kill the Nuclear Renaissance in the West.
References
Roussely, F., 2010. ‘Future of the French civilian nuclear industry’ Translation fromthe French at /http://www.psr.org/nuclear-bailout/resources/roussely-report-france-nuclear-epr.pdfS.
Thomas, S., 2010a. ‘The EPR in crisis’ PSIRU, London. /http://www.psiru.org/reports/epr-crisisS.
Thomas, S., 2010b. ‘The economics of nuclear power: An update’ Heinrich
Boell Foundation, Berlin. /http://www.boell.de/downloads/ecology/Thomas_economics.pdfS.
Thomas, S., The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor: An obituary. Energy Policy, doi:10.1016/ j.enpol.2011.01.066, in press.
