1999: Nuclear Energy nears peak...faces slow slide into oblivion.

[NNadir]

My, my, aren't these fellows knowing. Latest jet engine technology?

Christopher Flavin and Nicholas Lenssen

Two decades after the world's first major nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, the nuclear industry is experiencing a meltdown of historic proportions. After growing more than 700 percent in the 1970s, and 140 percent in the 1980s, nuclear generating capacity has increased less than 5 percent during the 1990s so far. (See Figure 1.) In the last decade, nuclear power has gone from being the world's fastest growing energy source to its slowest, trailing well behind oil and even coal. In 1998, world nuclear generating capacity fell by 175 megawatts.

As the world approaches the 20th anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident on March 28, global nuclear capacity stands at 343,086 megawatts, providing just under 17 percent of the world's electricity. Both of these figures will likely turn out to be close to the all-time historical peak-and less than one-tenth the 4,500,000 megawatts that the International Atomic Energy Agency predicted back in 1974. The Worldwatch Institute projects that global nuclear capacity will begin a sustained decline by 2002 at the latest, and the U.S. Department of Energy projects that it will fall by half in the next two decades...

...Nuclear power's biggest problems are economic: it is simply no longer competitive with other, newer forms of power generation. The final 20 U.S. reactors cost $3 to $4 billion to build, or some $3,000 to $4,000 per kilowatt of capacity. By contrast, new gas-fired combined cycle plants using the latest jet engine technology cost $400-$600 per kilowatt, and wind turbines are being installed at less than $1,000 per kilowatt...

...Orders for new reactors have largely dried up. (See Figure 2.) The few remaining nuclear companies, including France's Framatome and Germany's Siemens, are surviving on maintenance work, and government-sponsored contracts to refurbish Eastern Europe's decrepit reactors. If new business does not turn up soon, there may be little nuclear construction capacity left. In light of the long lead times in nuclear construction, the decline of nuclear power in the early decades of the new century has become virtually inevitable. The U.S. Department of Energy, successor-agency to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, now projects a sharp decline in nuclear power generation in the next two decades.

Nuclear industry supporters argue that given recently heightened concern about fossil fuel-induced climate change, the timing is tragically ironic. Existing nuclear plants do displace the emission of large quantities of greenhouse gases from coal-fired plants, but few governments are seriously considering nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1646

They offer us a table, confidently predicting the decline in world-wide nuclear capacity from then until now:

1999 339
2000 335
2001 331
2002 327
2003 323
2004 319
2005 315
2006 310
2007 306

Now let's deal with something called reality:

In 1999 nuclear power produced 2,393.13 billion kilowatt hours, or 8.62 exajoule of electrical energy.
In 2000 nuclear power produced 2,449.89 billion kilowatt hours, or 8.82 exajoule of electrical energy, 2% more than 1999.
In 2001 nuclear power produced 2,516.67 billion kilowatt hours, or 9.06 exajoule of electrical energy, 6% more than 1999.
In 2002 nuclear power produced 2,517.76 billion kilowatt hours, or 9.06 exajoule of electrical energy, 5% more than 1999.
In 2003,2, nuclear power produced 2,619.18 billion kilowatt hours, or 9.43 exajoule of electrical energy, 9% more than 1999.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

Basically, the "peaked," "dying" industry produced 0.81 more exajoules of electrical energy (almost 2.5 exajoules of primary energy.) than it did when these fellows announced it was about to die because of economics.

They prattled about renewable energy, how solar is an alternative to nuclear, the usual tripe that would get you to fail out of engineering school. Ironically in 1999, when they were writing the entire world production from non-hydro renewables was 221.43 billion kilowatt-hours or 0.81 exajoules, exactly the amount by which nuclear would increase between 1999 and 2003. By 2004 (a year further along the growth curve than was available for nuclear), renewable energy had increased to 334.27 billion kilowatt-hours, to 1.20 exajoules. Thus the increase in that period for all renewables except hydro was 0.39 exajoules, or less than half of the nuclear increase.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table17.xls

We still have people predicting the imminent demise of nuclear energy and the rise of the renewable nirvana.

Hemp is sometimes advanced as a great biofuel. Maybe guys who write the kind of crap I linked should stop smoking so much of it.

As for France, this year they've announced the plan to construct a new reactor at Flamanville, a 1600 MWe EPR. They have announced plans as well to upgrade, beginning in 2020, their entire reactor fleet to new EPR's, building several reactors a year from that time on and decommissioning the old ones..

[oblivious]

1. 1200 tons of radioactive waste a year - some seeping into the groundwater

Radioactive Champagne in our future?

Raise a toast to the French nuclear industry, whose low-level radioactive waste is leaking into groundwater less than 10 kilometres (6 miles) from the famous Champagne vineyards.

Problems at a radioactive waste dumpsite in Soulaine were reported by its operator, ANDRA, to the French nuclear safety authority on May 24th, 2006. According to their report "the wall of a storage cell fissured" while concrete was being added to a recent layer of waste.

...Once full, the dumpsite will be one of the world’s largest with over 1 million cubic meters of waste, including plutonium.

Greenpeace research released last week showed levels of radioactivity leaking from another dumpsite run by ANDRA in Normandy -- at up to 90 times above European safety limits. That waste has seeped into underground water used by farmers, with contamination spreading into the countryside and threatening dairy production.

The Champagne site will receive a total of 4 thousand terabequerels of tritium -- more than three times the amount of tritium waste as the dumpsite in Normandy.

...Today EdF's nuclear reactors produce 1,200 tonnes of highly radioactive waste every year. The waste expected from the new reactor would be the most hazardous waste ever produced in a French nuclear power reactor.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/radioactive-champagne-30-06-06

[NNadir]

2. Um, the world's concentration of tritium has been falling as nuclear power

increased.

Compared to air pollution, global climate change, and about one zillion other risks, tritium from nuclear power plants is a non-issue. I have calculated that while it is likely that over 1,000 people died from tritium on earth in 1963 because of weapons testing, around 10 are likely to die 40 years later, after the major expansion of nuclear energy worldwide.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=2463434#2465393

Greenpeace consists entirely of a bunch of poorly educated luddites with trust funds. They are clueless about science and if they knew any they would not be speaking about tritium. In fact if these clueless assholes spent one ten thousandths of the energy they devote to misunderstanding nuclear energy to understanding fossil fuels, they might, their enormous ignorance aside, actually make a difference.

Greenpeace can tell you all about a fissure in a storage cell in a nuclear plant, but they don't give a flying fuck about more than 200,000 people killed in China when the Banqiao dam collapsed. They will cry to the skies if someone finds an atom of tritium somewhere in France that may have come from a nuclear power plant, but ten thousand people could be burned to death in coal mines in a given year and you hear not a whimper from them. They will build thousands of websites talking about a leaky pipe in Sellafield, but millions of people around the world can die from air pollution and they say very little.

You are ready to pop up with a gasping complain about 1200 tons of harmless waste. Where is you concern for 7 billion tons of fossil fuel waste? Do you know about it? Have you heard about it? Does it concern you?

It is relatively easy to establish through many examples that if you are anti-nuclear energy, you are pro-fossil fuels. There has never been a nuclear power plant that has shut because of public opposition that was not replaced by fossil fuels. Not one.

Neither has there been a single person killed in France, or the United States, by so called "dangerous nuclear waste." Not one. On the other hand, millions of people have died from fossil fuels, habitats have been destroyed, governments perverted, health comprimised, children injured: The atmosphere itself may not survive fossil fuels.

There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

[Odin2005]

3. "poorly educated luddites with trust funds" Exactly.

They are nothing but naive, coddled, upper-middle class people who live in a idealistic fantasy land created by luddite ideologues.