What is the more harmful public policy: Germany's stated intention to phase-out all of its nuclear generating capacity, or Western Australia's adamant opposition to allowing uranium mining on its territory? Discuss.
Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Environment, Energy, Politics, Economics, Uranium, Australia, Western Australia, Germany
Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Environment, Energy, Politics, Economics, Uranium, Australia, Western Australia, Germany
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WA's ban, if it were to somehow stay intact for multiple decades could actually pave the way towards the US moving to fuel recycling and possibly even towards incorporating a thorium cycle into the mix. If WA suffers ecnomically, tough for them.
The German phase-out will hammer that country's industrial economy. The current generation of solar and wind power is, as we all know, too inconsistent to provide more than an occasional cushion to the grid. A Germany that must de-industrialize to some extent is a poorer and eventually more radical Germany, as the money that fuels their Welfare State dries up and people look for scapegoats and possibly turn towards even more idiotic policies than what the Greens have stuck them with.
A weaker, poorer Germany is, in my opinion, nothing but bad news for Europe and the world at large.
In fact, I believe that one of the main reasons the nuclear phaseout was put in place was to effectively "discriminate" against nuclear energy by making the lifetime of investment return on a nuclear power plant less than its realistic engineering lifetime.
Utilities in Germany have invested billions of dollars in their nuclear power plants. The first few years of plant life are time in which the utility pays back the "mortgage," whereas the later years of plant life are the time in which the utility earns a profit, minus operating expenses, payroll, taxes, fees, and fuel.
The "phaseout" policy cuts the life of the plant off before its engineering life expires. In other words, profitable years of service are cut out.
The effect is similar to being forced to scrap one's car immediately after the note expires...and not being able to drive the car for some years while not paying a note on the vehicle. Can you imagine being forced, by law, to scrap a car after just 3, 4, or 5 years, when the actual serviceable life of the car is around 8-10 years? Defunct nuclear power plants have basically no real estate value but have decommissioning costs.
The German nuclear phaseout has the effect of encouraging utilities to build fossil-fuel power plants. In Germany's case, this means new coal-fired plants.
This brings Germany into conflict with the EC's carbon emissions reduction goals, as well as imposing the burdens of increased fossil fuel particulate emissions on Germany's health system, which is publicly financed. These are "hidden costs" of Germany's "nuclear phaseout" policy that are not accounted for by the policy makers.
The Western Australia policy, while shortsighted, allows the uranium to remain in the ground for another day when the policy gets reversed.
Before it's mined, the uranium in the ground is just a bunch of rocks that are counted in theoretical energy reserves. It's not a multi-billion dollar set of investments that engineers, banks, construction workers, and welders have spent years to develop.
The limits on extraction of the ore in Western Australia do cause some constraint in supply and tends to push up prices of uranium worldwide. However, a higher price makes it more profitable to mine slightly lower-grade deposits in other locations like Canada that would not be profitably mined at lower prices.
The other financial impact is the theoretical "opportunity cost" for Australian mining firms that can't mine the ore. This is similar to the theoretical "opportunity cost" that is routinely experienced by mining companies when ore prices [for any ore like gold etc.] are lower than is profitable for the mining company to extract the ore.
Both of these factors are relatively minor when compared with the major costs and hidden costs associated with the German policy.
To reiterate, the German policy has the following major negative impacts:
-decreases profitable service life of nuclear power plants
-forces utilities to invest money prematurely/unnecessarily in new fossil-fuel fired power plants
-reduces Germany's competitive advantage because profitability of utilities is reduced and because utilities' funds are tied up in unnecessary investments
-brings Germany into conflict with EC carbon emissions reduction goals
-imposes "hidden cost" of health impacts from fossil fuel particulate emissions on publicly-financed health care system
-imposes potential future costs if carbon emissions were to be taxed
One of the keys which Ruth brings out also is the destruction of invested infrastructure. In a way all wealth is the result of infrastructure (otherwise we would all be hunter-gatherers still). The more value that can be extracted from each infrastructure investment, the more wealth is available for future investment and development and to support our advanced lifestyles (eg. internet!).
I think there are some hopeful signs that the folly of this German policy is going to become sufficiently apparent that it is reversed, although the timing is getting tight, and the closure of the Bulgarian reactors recently shows that the tide is not turned yet.
One needs to look no further than the premature shutdowns of Kozloduy Units 3 and 4 in Bulgaria as evidence; removing 880 MW of safe, emissions free, low cost energy from service and replacing it with Russian natural gas. In the process Bulgaria was transformed from a net energy exporter to a net importer, and Russia's strangle-hold on the Eastern European energy supply was further solidified.
This transgression against humanity was accomplished to support an out-dated EU policy that ignores science in favor of the Green Party's agenda to rid the world of the "evils of nuclear energy."
John Wheeler
This Week in Nuclear
Unfortunately, with the stupid phaseout, all that doesn't even matter.
I wonder what would happen if the power utilities had the balls to go on strike and turned all nuke plants off right away. Should be interesting to see the Greens trying to talk away the resulting brown outs...
I lived for several years in Australia and am now in central Europe – so here are my tuppence. My understanding is that both positions of interest have mostly political roots (shock, horror! I know).
In Oz, Labour party controlled Western Australia does not want to kowtow to the Liberal federal government’s recent interest in Nuclear Power. My understanding is that the WA Labour leaders came to power with an anti-Nuclear stance being a central theme of their election. But the federal Labour party is now under some pressure to modify its own position, in particular the ridiculous three mines policy there.
In Germany it’s not too different; the current position is one of convenience so a coalition government could be formed. Positions are starting to change, but those in power (or those slowly conceding it) can be expected to want to save face.
This is no justification of the above, but merely my view. Is either position damaging? I don’t really think so since there have been recent news articles suggesting changing winds in both camps (google Austria-Nuclear and Germany-Nuclear and you’ll find several examples within the past few months).
So, I’ll pick item ‘C’ – the United States’ GNEP program, technological and leadership ambitions, etc. as stated in the DOE’s recently released GNEP strategic plan; contrasted against the US political will as manifested by real government spending commitments. [point being that the requested FY 2007 GNEP programme budget request of $250 million (which was/is being mostly denied) amounts to less than a single day’s activities in Iraq @ $100 billion/yr].
With regard to global energy policy, and in particular nuclear energy, the last thing the world needs now is US techno-political window-dressing without credible, tangible commitments.
Actually, the $2 billion that U.S. utilities will have spent by the end of this year preparing for new nuclear construction, and the large number of plants now in queue for licensing, is a pretty impressive commitment.
On the other hand, GNEP is about moving back to reprocessing, and whether this happens soon or 20 years later is about as important as whether Australia decides to mine the extra uranium now or 20 years later. There's plenty of uranium, and Yucca Mountain can hold a lot of spent fuel if the capacity cap is taken off, so we should make sure that it makes economic sense before we rush into building a big reprocessing plant.
And I agree, the items listed in my comment aren't really that risky in the near term (but then neither are the two items posed in the original question).
But I'm trying to look beyond... both beyond the next decade or two and beyond the US boarders to long-term, sustainable global nuclear energy development and deployment. And in that context, I think my concerns remain valid.
Finally, I would be careful about stacking the potential of Yucca Mountain up against reprocessing. Keep in mind that there are currently ‘zero’ licensed geologic repositories on the planet, while functioning reprocessing facilities have operated for some time in Japan, France, the Russian Federation, and the UK.