Kalle reflects on Nuclear Power

Nuclear power has recently woken up again, in political attempts to gain votes from this. As if this idea for the future would be about “political values”, possible to awake from the dead. But an assessment of nuclear power through a lens of Strategic Sustainable Development (ABCD-in-Funnel, see previous reflections) clearly shows that this idea as an energy system has no future, remains to be dead for ever. With roots in the atom bomb business, it was not even intended for energy supply. It relies on linear processing of fuels, upstream the line consumed at the same pace as we use them on the middle of the line. With increasing impacts at huge and expanding costs downstream the line. It is the same for all categories of this hopeless industry, including its futuristic and naïve dreams of new and developed versions, that are simply not scalable eather. Which is easy to learn and understand. Doomsday is approaching for all of the dreams, in a fierce tempo. So nuclear power will be demounted, either with our heads held high, or crawling on our knees under the gallows. Two small but important exceptions to the rule will be discussed later, neither of which are about throwing huge amounts of good money after huge amounts of bad, the latter already caused by a plethora of technically poor and immoral decisions in the past.

More in detail:

Laws of Nature, mainly the principle of (i) Matter Conservation (matter does not disappear in chemical reactions, only non-measurable amounts do, in nuclear reactions…), (ii) second law of thermodynamics/entropy law (…but energy disperse in various processes..), (iii) mixing-entropy (…and the same is true with matter, with but mall insignificant exceptions…) gravity (…and the disperse, mixed, matter stays on Earth while heat energy is leaving it). So physically, value and purity can be expressed as a combination of concentration of pure matter (e.g. biomass and metals recycled in societies) and structure of matter (e.g. trees, croplands, houses and sustainable energy systems). These natural laws, directly transferred to logics, make the statement above indisputable – nuclear power is not part of future energy systems, and is as helpful for the future as perpetual motion machines. All types of nuclear power are run by a linear processing of fuels.

Costs The linear processing leads to inevitably increasing multidimensional costs at both ends of the line:

*Upstream the line, at the level of fuel extraction, reserves will keep declining at the same pace as we use them. Would this technology be expanded to replace fossil fuels, in order to have any significant role to curb climate change, that pace has to go up, and faster so the more it is expanded. So, for starters, this must increase our vulnerability and dependency on remaining supply from insecure deliveries in times of increasing geopolitical unrest. For instance from dictatorships, or a few democracies running the same debate and learning as we do.

*Downstream the line, the waste streams from the used-up fuels contain as much matter as the fuel and must go somewhere. And so must the inevitable consequences of an ever more complex industry to deal with not only management of the extremely dangerous waste and pollution, but also accidents, nuclear weapons, and waste on drift amongst terrorists and war lords. Which creates inevitably increasing costs from myriad ecological and social impacts as a hand-over to future generations. For eternal times. See more about that particular aspect further down.

Costs from the above reasons are exploding, because they must. Either ecological and social costs from not doing enough which is impossible to do, or real money-costs from attempts to do what we can do. So, more and more expensive technologies have been demanded over the years to prohibit new types of damages as they keep appearing downstream. And, not to forget, costs for geopolitical tensions from it all including, for instance, the US policing of Iran’s relationship to nuclear power. In spite of the escalating costs for technical fixes, statistics tell us that destructive mishaps will happen, no matter how hard we try to compensate for the inevitable damages following the linear fuel management. No insurance company will ever be able to, and therefor naturally refrain from, insuring this linear processing of nuclear fuels.

So, since there are no possible private market solutions, the remaining option for politics is precisely what we see in for instance Sweden today. Some politicians, for the sake of their indivual short term interests, attempt to deceptively force all grassroots to pay the full cost for the linear fuel management. Which, in a recent political declaration from the government, is called “a bank-guarantee”. And the public doesn’t see the inevitable consequences coming, would it all expand from costly and meaningless debates and political decisions, to much more costly failures of as meaningsless investments paid by the public. Many people may be lulled astray by the political reductionist rhetoric, where the arguments about relatively “foreseeable and safe nuclear energy” are simply flawed.

For starters, do we ever see any of the eternal free-of-charge flows from the sun, winds, sea-currents, hydro, geothermal processes take vacations , as nuclear power does, for months or even years?

Worst violation of the FSSD boundary conditions of sustainable design, if I were to pick one, is SP7, the Impartiality Principle. Would the proponents of new nuclear power understand what they are trying to do from their own selfish benefits, to the future of every species including mankind, it is a deception that I think merits to be called a “crime on life”. It is the perhaps worst violation of the impartiality principle we have ever seen. Any investment in producing new nuclear powerplants is a way of diverting money away from scalable energy systems where there are no costs from linear fuel processing. For the simple reason that there are no fuels involved. On the contrary, sustainable energy systems rely on eternal natural flows, the systems of which are scalable also regarding the needed metal reserves for their creation. Because, with new technologies in combination with new business- and governence models, the metals in use are not consumed or wasted. So, a mix of such systems are possible to develop into lasting and healing effects on climate, nature, societies, health, geopolitical relations and piece. How does a war on sun beams, winds, geothermal heat and other free-of-charge flows look like? For how long can it be politically feasible to lull the public and influencers astray this way?

Even more in detail, for those interested in the boundary conditions for sustainable re-design of sustainable energy systems:

SP 1: Uranium mining, with increasing concentrations of various isotopes at the site of mining. Like with the other SPs, this first step of the fuel cycle naturally will get even worse, if we were to increase such mining. Which is necessary if Nuclear would ever have any role to play in the future global energy-mix. Say that we would use nuclear to replace 50% of the world’s current fossil fuel use. That would imply to expand our current use of nuclear by a factor of at least 7. (Which, inherently, also implies an expanding dependency of purchase from dictators, see social boundary conditions below). How many of the nuclear proponents are aware of this? How many of them have calculated the uranium reserves in this context and compared the results with other energy options and their scalability within sustainability constraints? Many scientists have shown, independently of each other, that such calculations alone show that nuclear energy has no place in our attempts to manage climate change.

SP 2: New isotopes evolving from the nuclear processes, the worst example being Plutonium. This is not the least from the “fourth generation of nuclear power”. This is the most toxic element we are aware of, that has not existed at all in the biosphere for 0.5 billion years! (sic!)

SP 3: The mining areas have sometimes been named “national sacrifice areas”, barbed in and shut off from the future as they are. A fact that makes it easier to purchase the fuels from shaky dictatorships than from democracies, see above and further below.

SPs 4, 5, 6, 7, 8: Nuclear power, through its complex fuel cycle, complicated plants and statistically inevitable impacts on natural and social systems, builds on centralized management and control. This causes interactive “ping-pong” effects of violations of all social boundary conditions with structural violations of global (4) health, (5) influence, (6) competence, (7) impartiality and (8) meaning/making. Violations of each social boundary condition results in destructive impacts with contagious effects of more than one type. For instance…

(i) A reduction of self-reliance and control, and increased vulnerability of a centralized societal offering of energy, at all community scales and regardless the numbers and sizes of plants.

(ii) Nuclear power is inherently linked to nuclear arms, drifting of waste streams for instance plutonium amongst terrorist groups, and costs related to the policing of such. Look at the US-Iran conflict for instance. It is shown to be impossible to keep those two applications of nuclear fuel/waste separate from each other, they are impossible to manage as separate issues.

(iii) Leakages of isotopes from mines, plants and deposits. Those waste streams are impossible to get rid of at any reasonable cost even in the short run at our current nuclear power generation. With risks for diseases such as leukaemia’s at regional levels in conjunction with this industry.

(iv) It is impossible to safe-guard plants completely against accidents and meltdowns. So, it is not a matter of “if”, only “when” new accidents will happen. This is due to indisputable statistics that will, of course, be even worse in context of the planned expansion of this technology.

(v) Costs will remain impossible for future generations to pay, look at Fukushima as the latest example of this. The costs for large accidents of this kind are so high, were they to be fully paid for, that it is impossible to insure them on a traditional market. So the business model relies only partly on payable costs on markets, but mainly on costs paid by the general public and/or unpayable costs which are therefore transferred to our children, and the future of all species.

(vi) Mid-time storages of nuclear waste imply increasing costs as the waste-volumes keep increasing while we are still awaiting possible geological “solutions” of long-term storage, see next point.

(vii) The technologies of long-term storages are still not geologically solved to withstand geological changes of conditions over several ice-ages of erosion. While the mid-term storages keep growing…

(viii) A safe policing of a world that has nuclear energy as any part of its energy system, is impossible to imagine. As the world looks today, it’s even getting worse than during the cold war of the previous century. It is now debated more openly, if this or that country ought not develop nuclear arms too. “Since other countries have it”. A rhetoric question is: does the Nuclear power industry have any responsibility for these developments? Or is it an isolated problem amongst dictatorships having nuclear arms and/or bombs and isotopes in their possession?

–It’s not about risks. So, again, the above violations of boundary conditions for sustainability imply inevitably increasing impacts and costs at both ends of the fuel-cycle. Since the impacts are already over us and will increase due to violation of boundary conditions for sustainability, directly evolved from natural laws, it is simply wrong to talk about risks. For as long as we keep violating robust, scientifically peer-reviewed, boundary conditions of what can be in the future, and just postpone what needs to be done, it will gradually get worse all the way to a bitter end. That there is a real uncertainty as regards exactly when the bitter end will be here, is no excuse for a delayed dismantling of nuclear power. The only sound conclusion is, of course, the other way around.

-Two mid-term excuses: (i) The first is to, as temporarily as possible, keep the nuclear energy we have developed an (unjust) dependency on, so that wheels can continue spinning for a greening of societies including developments of other energy systems. (ii) The other is to develop technologies for the mixing of Thorium fuel into the waste of previous nuclear power in order to heavily shorten the half-lives of radiation from the waste we have already created. Thorium is a subcritical isotope. It means that energy production cannot run itself but needs supply from an external proton-radiation source to keep running. Which makes it non-dangerous regarding nuclear meltdowns, as well as useless for nuclear arms. So, why is this fuel not in use? Because the fuel cycle is inherently very complex and expensive. Money again. So, if nuclear power will disappear anyways, ‘consciously fast and in pride’ (like in Germany), or ‘crawling on our knees under the gallows’, why mentioning Thorium at all? The answer is, again, that this fuel, when mixed with nuclear waste from the old-timer industry, has the potenital of cutting down half-lives of radiation from our waste-deposits from a few hundred thousand years to a couple of hundred years. This can be regarded as a sort of pay-off to future generations from the abusive energy- and nuclear-war “party” that has been going on during a few decades of human history. This is not a hopeless dream. The technology has already been used in India, and is currently under development in Norway where experiments with pilot reactors look promising.

-Which violated boundary condition is the worst? Again, I would suggest the 7:th. Based on the ‘inevitability’ of the above impacts and costs of linear processing, it has been possible to foresee the disasters we saw – Hiroshima and Nagasaki, through Harrisburg and Chernobyl, myriad of “almost disasters” all over the world of nuclear power plants, to Fukushima only to mention the most well-known and costly. But it has not been possible to implement economic models where this industry has been anywhere near being able to be paying its own full costs. On the contrary, the economic system around nuclear power has been designed as a sharing of profits amongst owners, and a sharing of costs amongst grassroots and future generations of all life who have no say. We demand of thousands of years of future generations of all species, including ourselves, to pay their dues for our exceptionally short nuclear party in the history of mankind, meaninglessness to them, but without letting them have a say. It’s about eternal worries, long after the doomsday of the last nuclear plant, concerning…

waste deposits,
nuclear arms and the political policing of such,
cold wars based on the above
nuclear arms used in real life wars
plutonium drifting amongst terrorists
national sacrifice areas after mining for uranium
geopolitical and social tensions and policing of the above.

-But what can the nuclear industry do and what can we expect from them during the inevitable greening of energy systems? The maybe best read on this is published by Senior Lecturer Töive Kivikas, in his book from 2009 “Vad du vill men inte vågar” (‘What you want, but don’t dare’). It is the story about his turnaround of the nuclear power plant Studsvik in Sweden. The company was on the brink of bankruptcy when the board invited Kivikas to become its CEO. He realized that the company could turn its business goals, from competing amongst other nuclear power plants, to providing advisory services in this business. Including the sales of knowledge on how to take care of the damage already created by this industry, and how an orderly dismounting of nuclear energy could look like. During his period of leadership, he transformed the company to a Swedish business winner of the year.

-The economic competition, more in detail, between nuclear on the one hand, and sustainable energy (without any fuels) on the other. Still, a few of the above escalating fuel-cycle costs have been paid by the industry. This should be compared with the corresponding costs for energy from the sun, winds, hydro, sea-waves, sea-currents, geo-thermal. They build on eternal energy flows that are not only cheaper, but free of charge. The sun keeps shining, the winds keep blowing, sea-waves keep rolling in, sea-currents keep streaming, geothermal heat keeps water boiling, regardless of if we put propellers or turbines in the way of the flows or not. This inherently implies an uphill competition for nuclear, which must continue to be steeper and steeper. So, the cost-curve development has been systematically decreasing on the learning curve for the renewable energy systems, so far mainly sun-energy and wind-power, while costs have been inevitably increasing for nuclear power. And the difference will keep growing in advance of the eternal free-of-charge flows. Many years ago it was already cheaper to implement renewable energy anew. And recently, it has been shown that the difference is so vast that it is better even for owners of nuclear power plants to simply shut them down and re-invest in modern renewable technologies instead.

A selection of the most used arguments for nuclear power (See answers after each argument the above systemic perspective turns all the arguments to their opposites).

Proponents of nuclear power are typically comparing todays sun- and wind-power with futuristic (and impossible) dreams of nuclear energy. (As if developments of new sustainable energy systems, with a mix of such counting also energy storages attached to intelligent grids, would stand still. Again, the cost curves have already crossed, since decades in fact.)
Reliability of nuclear energy supply is claimed to be safer and “possible to foresee”. (Taking the whole fuel cycle into account it is already proven to be the opposite way around – winds, sun, waves, geothermal, hydro, sea-currents – are, unlike nuclear power, not in the habit of taking vacations for months and even years because of technological “mishaps” including geo-political tensions and war).
The grids are said to be better off, with the claimed “safe and even” flows of energy from nuclear power. (The grids will also be better off without nuclear, if equipped with a more diversified energy supply as more and more eternal energy flows from different sources, including energy-storages, are added to the grid).
Metal-reserves are claimed to not suffice if we are to build all the plants, batteries and technical systems needed to capture eternal flows. First, it seems all too easy to forget that uranium is a mined material and, on top of that, consumed in each fuel cycle. Second, the metals used to produce tomorrow’s energy plants can be recycled into non-radioactive fractions, by close to 100%. More and more sophisticated engineering and business models also demonstrate higher energy-density solutions with lower and lower metal demands per unit produced energy, at the same time as technical- and business- developments clearly demonstrate that these technologies are, unlike nuclear power, scalable. And third, what if we would fail to stay within boundary conditions of sustainability that are logically deduced from laws of nature? Would this mean that we have no other option than building a society with nuclear power as an essential element, and then let civilisation go under in a planned way after a short and foreseeable future? As if going under in a planned way would be any better than hoping for miracles for nuclear technologies running in the face of natural laws? In fact, even this strange take on the whole problem has been presented as a proposal by the father of the “Gaya-theory”, James Lovelock. A world’s famous analytical chemist, he was clearly still ignorant as regards systemic, systematic and strategic planning. But it is still an interesting point worth mentioning, fatalism is already looming in the horizon…

In a coming reflection I will discuss also fusion power as another impossible dream for the future, so there are no hopes there either.

Conclusion

Every penny we spend on any type of new nuclear power, implies a wasted penny for the development of energy systems that are already cheaper, faster to build, scalable, safer, more delivery-reliable, easier to implement with regional self-reliance, while serving as gatekeepers for geopolitical cooperation and piece. To keep the nuclear power plants we already have, for an as short period as possible to keep societal wheels running, is another thing. All while contemplating Thorium fuel to pay our debts to future generations. While, of course, making economic use also of energy produced that way. All other ideas of nuclear are about throwing huge amounts of good money after huge amounts of bad, the latter caused by a plethora of technically poor and immoral decisions in the past.

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