The realities of nuclear energy

I'm on vacation in southern California at the moment, and couldn't help noticing the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on a road trip - I had to take a picture. You can see the outer concrete containment structure of one of the three generators here, each one rated at around 1100MW, and cooled by the Pacific ocean. After coincidentally reading an article in Scientific American about the nuclear industry, felt compelled to investigate a little further.

The average 1 GW nuclear power plant generates 10 tonne of nuclear waste a year, and as the industry hasn't worked out what to do with it yet, are either dropping the spent fuel rods in cooling pools or storing it in casks costing the government $3m a year for every 10 tonne. What about recycling the fuel? Attempts to recycle the fuel by reprocessing it in a dedicated facility have proven extremely costly, and estimated at $1m per tonne - that's $10m per year per facility. Therefore, the answer is storage.

The US industry had proposed to store it at the apparently geologically stable Yucca Mountain, however as the chief waste product is plutonium-239 with a half life of 24,000 years the details of developing a facility to store this safely for one million years are understandably quite complex - hence throwing the rods into a swimming pool until someone else figures it out!

Additionally, when these plants are decommissioned a huge amount of waste has to be disposed of, and it's not exactly clear how this will be done. In the US for example no nuclear power stations have ever been decommissioned, with the costs expected in the billions for each station. This is without even considering the possibility of a nuclear accident, and the horrendous environmental, social, and financial costs involved. Operators in the nuclear industry have of course not factored these into their costs, and will by default be carried by the tax payer - in what looks like could be the most heavily subsidised industry of all time.

There has been a resurgence in interest in nuclear energy recently, which on a simplistic level appears very attractive with zero carbon emissions. However, as always the devil is in the details, and for countries that are considering 'going nuclear' (like my home of Australia) these issues should be clearly understood, identified in the planning phase, and clearly factored into the project finances. With transparent and realistic project costs, nuclear energy would be alarmingly more expensive than wind energy, and it would be a tragic short-sighted mistake to defer these costs to our future generations to manage so that we can have 'cheap' electricity today.

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