Nuclear Monitor #931
Jan van Evert, reporter WISE-Netherlands
Recent reports have investigated all the aspects of nuclear energy and concluded among other things that it is too expensive and that building nuclear power plants takes too long. This may not be a surprise, but there are more problems that have been ignored in most studies of nuclear power impacts on climate.
The German Heinrich Böll foundation has calculated that the cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant has risen by almost half over the past 15 years, while for example, they have fallen significantly for the generation of wind (- 63%) and solar energy (-83%). The German Fraunhofer foundation for solar energy systems published a cost comparison that shows that nuclear power is one of the most expensive energy sources.
The cost of electricity for a nuclear power plant ranges from 13.6 to 49 eurocent per kilowatt-hour (kWh), whereas solar power only costs between 4.1 and 14.4 cents/kWh. Wind power has a comparable price ticket. That means that nuclear power is approximately 3,5 times more expensive than the other two sources.
The 2024 mean cost of electricity for a new nuclear plant in the United States is about 18.2 cents/kWh. That is a lot more than the 5 to 6 cents/kWh price tag of onshore wind and utility-scale solar power. Thus, new nuclear electricity in the USA is three to four times the cost per unit of electricity of new wind and solar. A good portion of the high cost of nuclear power is due to its long planning-to-operation time. On top of all this, the cost of operating existing nuclear reactors has increased so much that many existing reactors are shutting down early or have to be subsidised.
The cost for the disposal of radioactive waste is also driving up the total costs. The German government estimates that the total cost of nuclear waste disposal will be around 170 billion euros by 2100. This cost is not included in the price tags mentioned above. Returning to nuclear power would be very difficult for Germany. The law would have to be changed to achieve that and the decommissioning process of all nuclear power plants has passed the point of no return. In the USA alone, about 500 million dollars is spent yearly to safeguard nuclear waste from about one hundred civilian nuclear reactors. Such waste must be stored for hundreds of thousands of years.
The second most important aspect to be considered is building time. The time to construct a nuclear reactor depends significantly on regulatory requirements and costs. It has increased to 12 to 23 years worldwide and to 17 to 23 years in North America and Europe. This is much longer than the time needed for wind and solar power. The result of this is that the longer the time lag between the planning and operation of a nuclear power plant, the more CO2 emissions from existing coal and gas fired power plants. This problem is conveniently ignored by pro-nuclear lobbyists.
But even when a nuclear reactor is up and running, it indirectly emits more CO2 than it seems. The background grid, which consists primarily of fossil fuel powered plants, emits pollution when a nuclear plant is down for maintenance, fuel rod replacement or refurbishing. The total opportunity-cost (background-grid) emissions due to nuclear not operating during one of these periods average to 64 to 102 grams of CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. These emissions are higher than the lifecycle emissions of nuclear power.
On top of this, nuclear power plants contribute to global warming and air pollution in even more ways: heat and water-vapour emissions during the operation and carbon dioxide emissions due to the covering of soil or clearing of vegetation during the construction of a nuclear plant, uranium mine, and nuclear waste site. Each of these categories represents an actual emission or emission risk, yet all of these emissions, except for lifecycle emissions, are incorrectly ignored in virtually all studies of nuclear power impacts on climate.
If we add up all direct and indirect emissions from nuclear power, the total is 78 to 178 grams of CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour of electricity. These emissions are 9 to 37 times the estimated emissions from onshore wind.
All together, there remains not a single reason to build new nuclear power plants. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also concludes that the economic, social and technical feasibility of nuclear power have not improved over time:
“The political, economic, social and technical feasibility of solar energy, wind energy and electricity storage technologies has improved dramatically over the past few years, while that of nuclear energy and Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage (CCS) in the electricity sector has not shown similar improvements.”
Sources:
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSStillNMN/StillNMN.html
https://www.enbw.com/unternehmen/themen/klimaschutz/kernkraft-kosten.html
