Energy debate - Nuclear energy

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Students,

First of all, I would like you to present four facts:

1. The world population is still increasing. For the coming decades, experts expect a growth from 6 billion people now till 9 billion in 2050.
2. We run out of fossil fuels. Several studies predict that the peak oil production will be reached already within a decade from now.
3. Due to the climate change, we’ll have to limit the emissions of carbon-dioxide and other green house gases. Carbon-dioxide pollution will have a high price in the future.
4. Due to electric vehicles for transport, heat pumps for heating and other new applications, the energy demand might decrease, but the electricity demand will continue to grow.

Having these facts in mind, who of you think the price of electricity will go down in the next coming decades? And who think the price of electricity will go up?

For the latter group, I have a very interesting investment opportunity. Do you know what a consumer pays for electricity nowadays? About 22 cents per kWh. Do you know how much nuclear electricity costs? Only 5 cents per kWh. Much less then any other sustainable energy source in the world, now and in the future, and much less then coal-fired plants if carbon-dioxide gets a real price. Furthermore, the cost of nuclear electricity is almost constant in time. How is this possible?

The price of nuclear energy is dominated by the capital costs of the nuclear power plant. It is like buying a home and paying interest for your mortgage. If you have a fixed interest for 30 years, the absolute costs remain the same during that period, while the relative costs even decrease due to inflation and increasing salaries. As a result, it feels like paying less and less. It’s the same with nuclear energy. The costs are dominated by the loan needed to construct the power plant. Only 10% of the costs come from the uranium needed to fuel the reactor. So we have two conclusions: First, nuclear technology is a very good investment opportunity already now, and secondly, the price of the fuel (uranium) is not likely to influence this a lot! In a world with increasing electricity prices, nuclear energy is probably the best investment you can make.

But there is more: We can do much better with new reactor types. At the moment we utilize only 1% of the natural uranium found in the earth’s crust. That’s because uranium comes in two flavors (we call that isotopes). One that cannot be used in current day reactor types (the yellow pebble) and one that can (the black marble). Unfortunately, the yellow pebble is much larger than the black marble. The uranium isotope we can use in nuclear power plants occurs in natural uranium only with an abundance of less then 1%.

By the way: if this marble with a volume of say 1 cm3 would be uranium-dioxide made of the “good-isotope” uranium, do you know how much energy it contains compared with coal? The energy contents would be the same as 25,000 kg of coal, which would produce 90,000 kg of carbon-dioxide when burned. That’s the big advantage of nuclear energy: the mass of uranium consumed and therefore also the mass of the nuclear waste produced is always very small.

Back to nuclear: I told you already we can do much better. At TU-Delft, we do a lot of research to design new reactor types, so-called fast reactors that can also use the other 99% of the uranium.

What can these fast reactors do for us?

1. They can utilize all uranium found in nature and produce electricity for us.
2. They can destroy all the long-lived components in the nuclear waste.

What are the consequences if successful?

1. The remaining high-level waste will have a lifetime (required storage time) of less than 500 years. You can store it without any risk.
2. The nuclear waste will have a very small mass and volume. Only 0.5 grams for a Dutch family per year if all electricity comes from nuclear energy. The volume of the vitrified waste would be no more than a marble per year.
3. Enormous amounts of fuel sufficient to generate all the world’s electricity for many thousands of years. There is really no shortage of uranium then.
4. And for those who are not yet convinced: we can do the same trick with thorium. At TU-Delft we do a lot of research on the use of thorium as a fuel in nuclear reactors. Not only does thorium produce less long-lived radioactive waste, there is also much more thorium than uranium in the earth’s crust. With thorium we can fuel the world for tens of thousands of years.

Is this all long-term fantasy? Certainly not. The nuclear community has focused its research efforts and has defined six so-called Generation-IV reactor types. Some of these can produce hydrogen at high efficiency by so-called thermo-chemical water splitting, some of these can produce electricity at high efficiency with a gas turbine in a direct cycle, but they all are safe, very safe. And working in synergy, they can utilize all uranium with no long-lived waste production.

I invite you to join our team to do your thesis work at the Reactor Institute of TU-Delft. To be more specific at the department R3 of the faculty of Applied Sciences. And if you do so, you will enjoy real sustainable nuclear energy when you retire. That’s a promise!

For more information, please contact  j.l.kloosterman@tudelft.nl