2020 starts with a clouded vision for nuclear power around the world.
The year ended with bad news for nuclear. World Nuclear News reported that 2019 ended with more shutdowns than start-ups. “Six power reactors were added to the grid last year and construction of three large reactor projects started, while nine units were permanently shut down,” according to WNN.
The positive news, hardly reason for joy, is that uprates for existing reactors added 212 MW of capacity during the year. Overall, global nuclear generating capacity was 392 GW at the end of 2019, down just a bit from 2018. Also, the United Arab Emirates said its first 1,400-MW unit of a $24 billion, four-unit station, will come on line during the first quarter of 2020. It’s the first Arab nuclear plant.
During 2019, Sweden’s Vattenfall utility closed the 852-MW Ringhals 2 unit as unprofitable, and said it will shutter Ringhals 1 this year. Two other units at Ringhals are planned to continue to operate, Vattenfall said. Germany also shut down the 1,468-MW Phillipsburg nuclear plant Jan. 2, part of Germany’s continuing retreat from atomic energy.
Then there is the long-delayed, long-troubled 1,600-MW Finnish Olkiluoto 3 project, under construction by a French-German consortium of Areva and Siemens. They have now pushed back commissioning to March 2021, from an earlier, far too optimistic projection for this April. Plant construction began in 2005. The end is not really in sight.
In Russia, the Ministry of Energy has pushed back the BN-1200, a 1,200-MW sodium cooled, fast breeder reactor project unit 5 to 2035. It will join two much smaller operating reactors, according to Nuclear Engineering International.
In Japan, Common Dreams reports, the government has delayed for five years planned removal of the damaged fuel from two of the four reactors that were destroyed by the 2011 tsunami that resulted in a massive shutdown of the nation’s nuclear generating base. The country has still not recovered from the accident and shutdown, and popular demands for a complete nuclear shutdown continue.
All of these negative developments have also clouded that role that nuclear can play in responding to global warming. Nuclear is a carbon-free source of electricity, long touted by nuclear industry advocates as a key part of the solution to changes in the climate driven by man-made carbon dioxide emissions.
But S&P Global recently wrote, “Nuclear power has an uncertain role in the future energy transition, both in the U.S. and abroad. Some see nuclear power as the best way to produce carbon-free energy in the near term and at the right scale to power entire societies. Others claim that the dangers involved in nuclear fission, as well as the economics involved, will lead to the abandonment of the technology in favor of renewables or natural gas.”
Noting the high investment costs of new nuclear, S&P said that “it would take far more investment worldwide in nuclear plants than is currently expected for nuclear power to significantly limit climate change, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Many countries, especially in the Arab world, are turning to nuclear power to supply growing populations, but many more developed sovereigns are also in the process of limiting their nuclear supply.”
— Kennedy Maize