Yes...but!

February 28 2006

Home > Columns >Yes...But! Year 6-17

"Our Energy, Our Future. It's time to talk about our Electricity Future." That's the title of a booklet we all received last week, courtesy the Government of Ontario. As I predicted last week the pamphlet concludes that "While nuclear power is expensive to build and maintain ( how true!) it can provide more stable prices over the long term." Oh yah? I think that calls for proof, because how nu-clear can give stability is no-clear to me at all, given that the final bill, the ultimate cost cannot be calculated, as it takes a million years to see the bitter end of a nuclear reactor. Although the price per Kilo Watt, at the intermediate stage, once a reactor is in operation, can be costed with some accuracy, both the expense to acquire the actual fuel, and its final disposal, are total unknowns. The only knowns there are the unknowns.
Take the basic fuel price. Thanks to the mishaps at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg Penna in 1979 and especially Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986, nuclear power production proportionally has declined, with the price of Uranium Oxide or "yellowcake" dropping from $43.00 (US) to as low as $7.00 per pound last year. Now there is a global nuclear renaissance, so prices have climbed to close to $40.00 per pound again and are expected to go higher. Much higher. No stability there.
The problem with uranium is the same as that with oil: both are finite. Naturally the oil companies first pumped those fields dry where production costs were low. With the cheap oil gone, oilsands are all the rage, where 2 units of fuel are needed to obtain 3 units of fuel, creating a lot of pollution in the process.
It also takes a lot of fuel to extract uranium from ore. If the ore is rich, more than 1 kilo per ton of rock, then generating electricity with nuclear power emits only 15-40% of the CO2 per kilowatthour (kWh) of a gas-fired system when the first two stages are taken into account. With grades lower than 1 kg uranium per ton of rock, carbon dioxide ( CO2) emissions rise rapidly as more energy is needed to make the pure fuel. Once the ore has less than 200 grams uranium per ton of rock, nuclear power no longer makes sense.
It so happens that most of the world"s known uranium reserves are in the form of such low-grade ore, where the energy used- all non-renewable, all hydro-carbon - to refine the uranium surpasses the amount of energy generated by a reactor.
There there is the amount of finite ore available. In 2004 some 440 power reactors were operating worldwide, requiring about 67,000 tons of natural uranium per year. The present reserves and resources are about 3.5 million tons, enough to last some 50 years at current consumption.
But now the world sees Nuclear energy as the Savior of the capitalistic World. All of a sudden every country wants to build these "western life-style-saving-generators." Projection are that a thousand new nuclear power plants with a combined capacity of 1500 GigaWatts will be built during the coming decades. This calls for an annual uranium need of some 250,000 tons. This means that the known uranium reserves and resources will be exhausted in about 14 years, making a $80 billion investment in the Ontario plants awfully risky. Uranium cakes will then shoot up in price, if they are available at all!. Stable Prices? Forget it. The upshot is that Ontario will again create costly concrete clusters, for which we, the rate payers, will be on the hook. Forever.
The only alternatives left are conservation, solar energy in the form of biomass, wind, hydropower and photovoltaic (PV) panels.
Take Biomass: Vegetable material from trees and crops can be converted directly into liquid fuels or can be gasified. So can household waste. One of my younger brothers was project manager for a $400 million incinerator in Rotterdam where all the garbage of some 5 million people was burned, producing a lot of electricity in the process at much less environmental cost than Toronto"s solution where day after day 130 trucks haul the stuff T.O. tosses out all the way to Michigan.
For years now I have had 10 solar Photovoltaics panels which convert light directly into electricity. Why not subsidize this sort of thing rather than expensive, polluting, unreliable nuclear power? With as much as 80 billion dollars projected to be used for extra power, why not make Ontario an example of responsible use of our quickly vanishing resources by rigidly enforcing energy efficiency, and preparing for a truly sustainable society.