Nuclear Power

Nuclear Power

Nuclear Power

Introduction

The performance of Nuclear Power can be compared to other energy sources by calculating the total energy required to build and run a Nuclear Power plant and comparing it to the total energy it produces. The following set of calculations is also taken from the independently audited, Vattenfall Environmental Product Declaration for its 3090 MW Forsmark nuclear power plant in Sweden. A more detailed description is here. Vattenfall have also made available the aggregated data set as a spreadsheet. Vattenfall is a large European Energy utility that operates a variety of energy generation technologies including Nuclear, Hydro, Natural gas, Coal, Oil, Peat, Biomass, Wind and Photovoltaic. We chose this because it had been independently audited, and includes the entire lifecycle of the processes which includes the eventual long-term disposal of the waste.

UK electricity production is 398 billion kWh gross, from 83 GWe capacity. Net imports are about 8 TWh, from France. Annual final consumption is 343 TWh, or about 5660 kWh/person. This paper discusses that we should make nuclear power a larger part of our power supply.

Discussion

In 2006 UK nuclear plants generated 19% of UK electricity (69 billion kWh of some 380 billion kWh net), compared with 36% from gas and 38% from coal. In 2007 this dropped to 15% (57.5 TWh) and in 2008 it dropped further to 13.5% (52.5 TWh) due to problems with some old plant. There are 19 UK reactors totalling 11 GWe capacity. In addition, about 3% of UK electricity demand is met by imports of nuclear power from France, so overall nuclear total in UK consumption is normally about 22%. Sweden and Finland have perhaps the most developed nuclear waste disposal plans of any country.

The following table displays the source and the amount of energy required to produce 1 KW-Hr of electricity. The table includes the energy used in construction of the plant, mining the Uranium, enriching it, converting it to fuel, disposing the waste and decommissioning the plant. The plant is assumed to run for 40 years. There is an additional 0.026 grams of Uranium consumed in generating this one KW-Hr of electricity. This 0.026 grams includes the Uranium used to generate power and the Uranium consumed by the French Nuclear Power plants that produced the electricity that enriched the Fuel.

So the Plant produces 93 times more energy than it consumes. Or put another way, the non-nuclear energy investment required to generate electricity for 40 years is repaid in 5 months. Normalized to 1 GigaWatt electrical capacity, the energy required to construct and decommission the plant, which amounts to 4 Peta-Joules (PJ), is repaid in 1.5 months. The energy required to dispose of the waste is also 4 PJ and repaid in 1.5 months. In total this is less than 0.8% of the all the electrical energy produced by the plant.

Nuclear Costs

The cost of generating power via nuclear energy can be separated into the following components:

The construction cost of building the ...