Wasting time, Swedish style
If we think of Sweden at all, many of us in Britain may come up with an alphabet that goes something like Abba, Ikea, Volvo, and…er…that’s it. But a patronising attitude may be out of place. Sweden is far from perfect, but it can boast one of the most competitive and innovative economies in the world, and among the highest levels of education, healthcare and quality of life for its citizens.
Swedish experience in and plans for their energy sector may offer lessons for those concerned about the nuclear option in the UK, not to speak of pretty much anyone concerned about the future of the planet. And the lessons – from a country that generates half its electricity requirement from nuclear, and has what is probably the most advanced nuclear waste programme in the world – could be quite different from whatever it was that led the British Prime Minister to conclude that nuclear power is back with vengeance.
But before those Swedish lessons (and don’t worry, Lordi knows it’s easier than Finnish), a reminder of something I plan to do in contributions to this blog. That is, to take the five challenges identified by the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, starting this week with waste.
Most of us are likely to be too busy to actually to read the several hundred pages of analysis produced by the Commission (but if you can, start here). Here are some key passages concerning waste from their summary document The role of nuclear power in a low carbon economy (page 7):
There is a need to distinguish between the legacy impacts of decommissiong and waste management of existing nuclear capacity, to which the UK is already committed, and the impacts that would result from a new nuclear programme.
…The proposed new nuclear plant designs are expected to require much less expensive decommissioning…They are also expected to produce less waste by volume. Our evidence estimates decommissioning costs at between £220m and £440m per GW of capacity, but this is before long-term waste disposal costs.
A new-build replacement programme (10GW) would add less than 10% to the total nuclear waste inventory (by volume). Assessing the increase in radioactivity of the inventory is complex and depends on reactor design and use, and the time chosen for the comparison. Thus, ten years after removal the increase in activity could be a factor of nine, declining to a factor of 0.9 of current total activity 100 years after final fuel removal.
Here, for those who enjoy squinting at wee figures, are tables 11 and 12 from page 54 of the SDC’s Nuclear paper 5: Waste and Decommissioning:
The SDC continues:
… A dominant challenge of much nuclear waste is the period of hundreds of thousands of years over which it must be effectively isolated from people and the environment. This raises issues that are unique to nuclear waste, such as the long-term stability of our civilisation and climate, and the extent to which future technological advances may bring forward solutions so-far unknown.
OK, so where does Sweden come in? Two ways: what they’re doing with existing nuclear waste; and the future energy policy within which that sits.
First, waste. At present there are about 39 countries with a civil nuclear power programme. Of these eighteen or nineteen have taken a decision to opt for deep geological disposal of waste. A further ten or eleven countries have expressed a preference in this direction (SDC paper 5, page 26). Sweden plans to choose a site in 2011 and have its repository up and running by 2017 – which would make it the first in the world (Finland’s 500 metre deep project is due to open in 2020).
The challenges faced at the Swedish Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory are detailed in an article by Rolf Haugaard Nielsen for New Scientist: Nuclear waste: its final resting place (4 March 2006). I warmly recommend this article, available to subscribers only, to your attention. [UPDATE Noon, 1 June: we are advised the article cannot be posted in its entirety as a comment to this post under a fair use provision. A short extract may be posted, however, and this is included as comment #1 below]
Second, future energy policy. The Swedish government has set a target of freeing the country from oil dependence by 2020 and achieving a low carbon economy by around the same date. (see The Energy Policy of the Swedish Government, plus this, this and this).
But it is not using nuclear power to do this. Indeed, Sweden plans to phase out nuclear power altogether on the grounds that it is not sustainable. It’s a tough goal as Sweden currently gets around half of its electricity from nuclear power. In Britain we get 20% or less from nuclear.
Biomass will play an important role. The country has almost twice Britain’s land area, much of it covered in trees, and a population one eighth the size. But central to the Swedish strategy are efficiency and demand management – figuring out ways to deliver more wealth and better quality of life while extracting less resource out of the ground (as Spinoza said in rather different circumstances: “the meditation of the wise man is not on death, but on life”).
Britain doesn’t have Swedish sized forests. It does have the best wind and wave resources in Europe. For these reasons, and for others, says the Sustainable Development Commission:
the UK could meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets and energy needs without nuclear power, using a combination of demand reduction, renewables, and more efficient use of fossil fuels combined with carbon capture and storage technologies
Nuclear power, the SDC said, is therefore a choice not an absolute necessity.
Whatever choices are made for, or in, Britain (which will continue to reprocess Japanese waste), there are a couple of reminders in the news this week that the best laid plans don’t always gang alright. From France come reports – or claims – that nuclear waste from a storage facility in Soulaines is contaminating groundwater several miles away. The seriousness and significance, or otherwise, of this incident has yet to be demonstrated.
Meanwhile, in Russia the director of the Mayak nuclear waste processing plant, the nation’s largest, is returning to his post only three months after being dismissed for a breach of safety rules that led to the dumping of radioactive waste in rivers.
The Russian Prosecutor General’s office said that the director, whose name is Vitaly Sadovnikov, had sanctioned the dumping of tens of millions of cubic meters of liquid radioactive waste into the Techa river in 2001-2004, even though the facility had enough money to prevent it. Instead, Sadovnikov had spent the money on maintaining an office in the Russian capital and on lump payments to himself.
Of course, gross corruption like this could never ever occur in Britain, could it. But to be sure, an Äspö could help even more than the Russian version of an Asbo.
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May 31st, 2006 @ 4:30 pm
Nuclear waste: Its final resting place
04 March 2006
New Scientist
by Rolf Haugaard Nielsen
May 31st, 2006 @ 5:06 pm
A useful source regarding the state of the Swedish nuclear energy policy is available at
http://www.uic.com.au/nip39.htm .
May 31st, 2006 @ 5:52 pm
Caspar,
It looks like the agreement to phase out nuclear energy in Sweden that you mention is about to go by the wayside.
May 31st, 2006 @ 11:42 pm
“But it is not using nuclear power to do this. Indeed, Sweden plans to phase out nuclear power altogether on the grounds that it is not sustainable…”
In 1980 when Sweden held a referedum on phasing out nuclear power I was 3. Today Sweden has decomissioned just 2 (600 MWe) NPPs while uprating the others to cover the gap.
Is it just me or has Sweden been a little bit pregnate for 26 years.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf42.htm
May 31st, 2006 @ 11:52 pm
I assume that the “sustainable development commission” is actually the Sustainable Development Commission, I which case, if you read the report, as I have, and don’t just cherry pick quotes, you will find that another interpretation is that nuclear power can indeed help the UK to reduce is emissions of greenhouses gases.
Then again, everything in this post is innuendo. The IoP has told other people not to post without backing up their claims. How about applying the same rules to the three experts?
What on earth do we take by the comment “From France come reports – or claims…”?
June 1st, 2006 @ 12:00 am
PS I’ve read numbers varing from 1000 to 100,000 years for spent fuel to reach the radioactivity of the ore it was mined from. Does any know why the large range of values?
June 1st, 2006 @ 2:39 am
Starting with some brief comments, the plant decommissioning cost estimates seem quite high, about double what US experience suggests for LWRs. US experience suggests costs somewhere in the range of 200-500 million US dollars for a typical 1 GW plant. The US Nuclear Energy Institute projects an average cost of $320 million for the US reactor fleet.
http://www.nei.org/doc.asp?catnum=3&catid=278
As discussed in previous post comments, this translates into a per kW-hr cost of only ~0.1 pence. Overall waste management costs are 0.1 cents/kW-hr in the US, and shouldn’t exceed ~0.1 pence/kW-hr for new UK plants.
My primary comment concerns the following (SDC) statement:
“A dominant challenge of much nuclear waste is the period of hundreds of thousands of years over which it must be effectively isolated from people and the environment. This raises issues that are unique to nuclear waste…”
I take great issue with this statement. It is a clear example of one of the most fundamental misconceptions about nuclear power. Nuclear waste is NOT unique in terms of long-term health risks to future societies.
The only thing unique about it is the uncompromising, zero-risk standards that were (all of the sudden) applied to this one waste stream. It’s not that other waste streams can provide such absolute proof of no health risk thousands to millions of years from now. It’s that they’ve never even been asked the question. For all other waste streams, society has (long) decided simply not to care. Just bury it and foget it.
Nuclear power is, in fact, the only industry which has come up with a credible plan to isolate all of its wastes (toxic materials) from human contact until they become harmless. It is actually the ONLY industry whose waste problem is “solved”.
The waste streams from other energy sources and industries, including buried coal ash, fossil plant pollution that is dumped into the air (which settles out on the landscape later), chemical toxic wastes, and ordinary garbage, are all generated in infinitely greater volumes than nuclear waste. For that reason, they are virtually uncontained (as containing them would be impractical). These materials are also in much more dispersible forms, such as liquids or leachable solids, as compared to spent fuel which is in the form of an extremely concentrated ceramic (un-leachable) solid. And unlike nuclear waste, which steadily becomes less toxic with time, many of the toxins in these waste streams never decay away.
The health risks to future societies, hundreds of thousands of years from now, from all of these other waste streams, will be vastly greater than any posed by nuclear waste. A world devoid of precious hydrocarbons, with a radically altered climate, will also be a tremendous “gift” to future societies.
June 1st, 2006 @ 11:02 am
Dear Lenny (comment #2), thanks for the link to an informative paper. Interesting to note that “Both the Energy Commission report and that of an independent economist, W.D.Nordhaus, project that a full nuclear phase-out would increase Sweden’s carbon dioxide emissions by about 50% above the 1990 level”. This indicates the scale of the challenge the Swedes are up against if they really are serious about both a low carbon economy and phasing out nuclear power.
Dear Eric McErlain (comment #3), thank you for a timely and useful link to this insight into Swedish domestic political manoeuvring. I guess the Social Democrats, as the party of government, can continue to advocate their declared policy as to phase out nuclear, but making progress through the legilsature is surely likely be even harder (unless some future political re-alignment has unexpected results). The comments quoted from Centre Party leader Maud Olofsson indicate frustration that decommissioning nuclear has gone nowhere for so long. She also indicates annoyance at, among other things, slow licensing for small scale water projects, which suggests a continued to commitment to at least some parts of a “green” agenda. It would be fascinating to learn more about the Swedish political and economic struggles. Any Swedish experts out there?
Dear Daniel Work (comment#4), Sweden has a long standing nuclear programme that currently generates about half the electricity consumed in that country. Clearly, it will be very hard to phase that out, assuming that continues to be a goal. (As a side issue, I think they will have a very hard time actually going oil free by 2020. See my article on this in the July issue of Director magazine). Whatever timetable they do or do not decommission existing nuclear capacity, it remains the case - at least for now - that they are not planning to build new nuclear power stations to fill an “energy gap”. It also remains the case that they are relatively advanced in nuclear waste storage.
Dear Michael Kenward (comment #5), thank you for pointing out my error in capitalisation of SDC. With the best will in the world, these things sometimes happen in blogs. I have corrected the original post (in which it was correctly capitalised on the first occasion, but wrongly depicted in lower case on the second occasion) and I’ll pay more attention in future.
You say that I cherry pick quotes. Well, I certainly select some passages from the SDC report and not others. This is necessary when writing a few hundred words about a report that runs to perhaps tens of thousands of words if you include the supporting papers. But I reject the accusation of cherry picking. I have read the SDC report and supporting papers too, and it is an accurate and fair representation of their views and their conclusion to quote: “the UK could meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets and energy needs without nuclear power, using a combination of demand reduction, renewables, and more efficient use of fossil fules combined with carbon capture and storage technologies”, and to that according the SDC nuclear power is “a choice not an absolute necessity”. Indeed these are key and central points in their own summary.
It is reported from France that nuclear contamination has leaked into groundwater. What is one to make of this report? Well, perhaps investigate it to find out whether it’s true, and if it is to find out whether it could be serious or not. Another thing one could is consider whether it may or may not suggest that there could be issues that need more attention in the handling of nuclear waste in France, and whether there could be lessons for Britain and other countries here.
June 1st, 2006 @ 7:35 pm
I totally agree with Jim. What really is the problem with nuclear waste?
The used fuel are contained in spent fuel pools for 5-7 years and are then transferred to dry casks which sit on a concrete pad. There is no liquid in them so they can’t leak and the radiation is shielded from anyone. What’s the problem there?
Most countries have not determined a final resting spot for the used fuel but what does that matter? The used fuel isn’t going anywhere from the site, it’s not harming anyone. There’s no legitimate rush to get it somewhere.
If you put all the U.S.’ nuclear waste together it would fill a football field 6 yards deep. Space is not an issue. http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=2&catid=349
A great thing about the used fuel is that we can reuse and recycle about 95% of it.
We have all the time in the world to figure out what to do with the waste. So it takes 20 years for Yucca Mountain to open instead of 5 years. Big whoop. The money is already paid for by the industry. The space is already laid out onsite for the used fuel.
No one is being harmed, the money is already paid for and we have multiple options in dealing with it. So I ask in all honesty what is the problem of nuclear waste?
June 2nd, 2006 @ 3:13 am
I sure wish we had liquid-fluoride thorium reactors ready for Sweden. They’ve got cold seawater, and I’m sure they have thorium. They’ll need so little, we can just give them enough to last a few centuries. It will conveniently fit in a small room. Then they could sell all their carbon credits to other countries.
June 3rd, 2006 @ 3:14 pm
What the world calls “spent fuel” and “nuclear waste” is in reality a vast resource of untapped energy. Less than 10% of the useful energy is extracted from fuel that we now call “spent.”
Politicians and opponents of nuclear energy seem to overlook the fact that future applications of technologies that are available today will enable us to reclaim that energy. The result will be 100’s of years of power for the earth using today’s “slightly used” nuclear fuel and known uranium and thorium reserves. As a side benefit, it will greatly reduce the volume of the true “waste” that needs to be stored. Yucca Mountain, for example, would probably be the only repository that the USA would need for the next 100 years.
John
“This Week in Nuclear” Podcast
http://thisweekinnuclear.com
June 9th, 2006 @ 1:28 am
Swedish Power…
Some notes on Swedish nuclear power in a low carbon economy…….