What Is the Role of Nuclear Power in a Net Zero System?
ladies and gentlemen it's a real pleasure for me to be here tonight um especially as a fellow of the Royal Society because you probably all know that the very first meeting of the Royal Society was held following a meeting here in 1660 when Christopher Wren gave aggressive College lecture so he's with great pleasure that I'm here tonight and uh to talk about the the role of nuclear power in achieving Net Zero so as well as quite a bit on the uh the nuclear part of the topic I'm also going to be concentrating very much on just how big a challenge we have in actually trying to get to Net Zero in terms of our carbon related emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions because the requirements to simultaneously grow our energy Supply dramatically globally and still to decarbonize it is an absolutely immense challenge for us because you know fossil fuels still account for over 80 percent of of global energy so that's energy not electricity and I'll be differentiating between the two various stages in the lecture so we need to get on with achieving that massive decarbonization when we're actually constrained by other environmental issues and the availability of raw materials and the volatility of global politics which crop up during the talk so we live in a rapidly changing world we've got unprecedented geopolitics and we're not in control necessarily of our energy security our energy price or the material resources which affect both of those issues and that has loomed large in many of our Lives particularly since the war between Russia and Ukraine so climate change has been on our Radars for quite some time manifested often with extreme weather events from floods in bedfordshire here in in England through to California fires which made a great deal of news and more recently in the United States heavy snows and tornadoes tornadoes being more frequent events in in the states through to Austrian flood damage of the sort of damage that I saw in my locality in the northwest of England during storm Desmond in a huge pieces of Mountainside wash down devastating Villages two floods in South Sudan where they would not necessarily be expected so globally whether it be in Pakistan or Germany or Italy or elsewhere in the world we're increasingly seeing extreme weather events and not always but sometimes related to climate change so why do we really care about whether energy is low carbon or not because we're warming up the planet and for many years now scientists of advisors that greenhouse gas emissions are one of the causes and as a first world country we have an obligation to set an example but do we still care about this when we're choosing between hitting our homes and feeding our children so if we look at Global emissions you'll see from the slide that that China and the United States are by far and away the larger emitters closely followed by Russia and uh and India and we here in the UK in common with a number of other countries contribute about one percent uh to the overall Global emissions so it doesn't matter that we only emit one percent what matters is that we're a first world country we've benefited hugely from having the fossil fuel resources to bring our society up to the level that it currently is and we have an obligation now to do our best to try and mitigate for the future uh the damage that that would otherwise cause so if we look at worldwide electricity mix and we look at the role of nuclear power within that currently nuclear runs it just under 10 of the global World electricity mix so fossil fuels still account for very much of the majority of the global electricity Supply and Renewables in the form of wind and solar particularly even though there's been huge advances in recent years still contribute a relatively uh small part of the global electricity Supply in terms of nuclear fission around the world there are 438 plants currently running in 32 countries and the global power that they generate is just under 10 percent there are quite a number of plants under construction globally and many more planned or at least being being talked about and that's particularly so since the energy security issues posed by the shortage of gas as a result of the invasion by Russia on Ukraine so we'll come back to those figures because we're talking about only around 10 percent at the moment if we actually increase that to about 15 percent which is under discussion in terms of nuclear's contribution to low carbon energy then we'll be talking about at least doubling the amount of nuclear power plants that are there globally so if we take a slightly more detailed look uh United States has by Far and Away at just under a hundred of the number of reactors that are are running France too has a significant portion of reactors at just under 60 that that are running we ourselves are quite small in the overall scheme of things and some countries that don't have any nuclear plants do benefit from it Italy for instance gets around 10 percent of its electricity from the French nuclear Fleet and Denmark actually gets around 10 percent of his electricity from the Swedish nuclear power stations so some countries only have a very small number if some only have Singleton numbers um others here at the top United States France China Japan Russia Korea India Canada Ukraine ourselves at the moment Sweden Belgium have the largest number Germany in fact as of this week hasn't got any nuclear power plants running um so in terms of the low carbon contributors to the electricity Supply we're looking at nuclear power plants wind biomass solar Marine in various forms I just happened to show them turbines there and wind turbines biomass actually is not that clean in terms of of carbon emissions as you'll see in a minute so if we look at the carbon contribution of the major sources of electricity um if we take the figures from the International Panel on climate change of 2014 then nuclear and wind have the lowest grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour generated uh with hydro and solar relatively low biomass has very significantly more at 230 compared with 12 or 11 in terms of the grams of CO2 emitted so without carbon capture and sequestration then biomass actually is still contributing to the carbon contribution gas and coal obviously have very much more at 490 and 820 grams of CO2 more recent estimates have actually been made by the United Nations economic commission for Europe and they're giving slightly better figures for for nuclear compared with wind and hydro but basically Hydro nuclear and wind are the lowest forms of electricity generation in terms of carbon contribution sometimes people don't realize that that nuclear energy has benefits that are additional to those from a generation of electricity and nuclear reactors are responsible for a number of the essential isotopes that surgeons use to both diagnose and treat conditions such as cancer iodine one through one is they used to treat thyroid cancer strontium 89 bone and prostate cancer and not on the slide but an up-and-coming isotope called actinium-225 is also showing rate promise for prostate cancer treatment and they're used in pet scan Diagnostics and in bone synthonography so they're needed on a daily basis this is just an image showing someone with prostate cancer that's detected by the use of molybdenum 99 which decays to technicium 99m to enable the image to uh to be seen and these are are needed daily and so molybdenum 99 is needed to be imported for countries that don't have reactors that generate it every week most of the world's molybdenum at the moment comes from places like Australia who doesn't have any power plants but has a research reactor that generates this material um radioisotopes are also used to power some of our most extensive space missions radioactive power sources have powered the Curiosity Mars Rover for 10 years Voyager which is NASA's longest live Mission actually has been up there for 45 years in space powered by radioactive power source so that's just an extra feature that happens to come from nuclear power quite a lot of the talk that follows now is about the UK's specific position with respect to nuclear energy and its its role in The Journey towards net zero so in terms of our existing power stations here in the UK we generate uh generated last year and still run it's about 15 of the electricity for the UK and what I'd like you to note is the extensive Reliance that we still have on gas on a yearly basis here in in the UK and that's our our main sources of Renewables wind and solar and and hydro are still relatively modest contributors in spite of the Investments that that have been made SO gas is still a key player and a key pillar of the UK's Energy Mix and it's particularly important for electricity generation as well as its wider use for for heating our homes and maintaining some of our key industrial processes and it's likely to remain so well into the future as you will see from some of the later slides but it's beset with geopolitics now way back we used to have a very significant quantities of oil and gas from the North Sea so we were self-sufficient but from the middle of the 2000s 2000 the decade between 2000 and 2010 we've become netting forces of both oil and and gas at the moment we only get about 40 percent from our domestic fields we import 31 from the European pipelines and we import 22 from LNG tankers that come mainly from the the Middle East so we have huge demand for gas and we're we're net importers which is why we're we're very beholden to uh geopolitical events that disrupt those supplies uh storage uh we're not too good on that either there's a lot of press associated with why on Earth don't we have better storage for the gas that we need and these are just some of the the headlines back in 2021 even before the Ukraine war but this gives an indication as to why we were so vulnerable here in the United Kingdom we have much less gas storage capacity than most of the other European nations um you know Italy at significantly more than than us Germany not far behind and even countries like Austria and the Netherlands with much smaller populations than us have significantly better gas storage to be available as and when it's needed I'm not commenting particularly on it other than to state that that's that's the way it is now uh I'd recommend to you I'm going to recommend to you two apps that you might use to look at where our electricity comes from it tells you what's generating it at the time this one is from an open source called electricitymaps..com and if you you can download it onto your phone as an app or onto your your PC and it basically throws up a map of the world and the countries that Supply the data enable the the app to color the the country that you're interested in so green is low carbon round black is high carbon back in October um we were brownish Germany was slightly Browner and that was due to the fact that we were burning 61 gas at that time and Germany was burning 30 coal France is mainly green always because of the amount of nuclear power it has on its grid and Norway mainly green because of high row Sweden was about 50 50 hydro and nuclear to keep it pretty much green Poland is nearly always black well it's all yeah it's always black because its main power sources is coal um but electricity demand varies widely during 24 hours and particularly during the winter um and that means that our ability to keep our lights on and our homes warm heavily depends upon us having gas available this was a shot taken in in January this year nuclear runs all the time when the reactors are on as do the biomass sources they normally only put coal extensively on the grid when we're really short of Supply wind as you can see is is variable if it's there it will be taken if it's a low wind then we just have to take more gas in the winter even on a sunny day there is uh is not very much solar even though we have quite a lot of investment made in in solar solar energy so I'd like you to just remember the fact that we're our peak in store capacity are keeping drawdown is around about 40 gigawatts because we're going to come on to why is that important because this this is the maximum amount of nuclear that can be generated and wind as I said is variable depending on how much there is uh this is just another way to show it and why it's important on the 29th of November this is another app that you could get from the National Grid it's called ESO Nat grid and it gives the Great British written generation mix on the 29th of November we were wholly and totally dependent on 66 gas 13 nuclear um three percent wind it wasn't a very windy day yet on the 10th of January it was a very windy day so we had 51 wind again 13 nuclear and only 12 gas but it means the gas stations have got to be there and available to come on quickly in order to make sure that we we don't lose Supply so it's it's hard for our planners and our grid to run with a huge amount of of wind on the on the grid and to also maintain the gas stations available to run and in some cases keep the coal stations on hot standby for times of low gas even in the summer it's not always possible to rely on a lot of wind and a lot of solar August last year happened not to be all that windy and not all that Sunday and the overall scheme of things so we were still heavily dependent on gas which you wouldn't necessarily be expected but if we go back to energy and not just electricity electricity is really embedded in this part of the talk in the energy Supply if we're decarbonizing then we're going to decarbonize transport and decarbonize our residential homes um heavily dependent upon oil petroleum products heavily dependent upon gas as is our business so if we're going to move to electricity for cars and heat pumps for for homes then we're going to double at least the demand on the grid so that 40 gigawatts install capacity has got to be up towards 80 gigawatts install capacity to maintain the power that that we actually need so it's going to be a big ask and a big challenge to uh to get there now committee on climate change in many of its reports has indicated that we we ought to be able to do it with the technology that is available um whether that be wind solar nuclear biomass with carbon capture and sequestration um but it it it relies on a concerted effort an action by all because this is the power bit at the moment the 40 gigawatts and you're going to try and decarbonize a chunk of Industry our homes and our transport sector so it is a massive ask to try and do that and is it really possible or will the lights go out as we try um because there's a huge engineering challenges in order to get us to where we need to be now back in 2010 the Royal Academy of engineering put together a report called generating the future and it was to try and see what we needed to do at the time to get a 80 reduction in our carbon emissions which is is where we were targeting at the time and so it suspended judgment in terms of cost I just said assume that the money will be available to do it what is it physically possible to build to enable us to hit that Target and at the time uh it uh did the analysis and engaged with the industry to do it it was felt that we could build many more large onshore Tech turbines we would need to build the equivalent of 38 London arrays which are the big wind farms in the in the Big Win Farm in the Thames Gateway we'd need a lot more in the way of solar voltaics we'd need wave machines that were a bit like palami sway machines we'd need Title stream in terms of turbines we'd need a barrage many more Hydro schemes and we would still need either nuclear or fossil with carbon capture and sequestration large plants and we would need to reduce demand in order to meet that so it was a huge engineering and Industrial challenge so how have we done this column was the indicator of the amount that we thought it was possible to to build this column which is a bit lower uh quite a bit lower for some of the Technologies is what the average amount actually produces and this says what we've built so far so we were aiming to build the best part of um of 60 plus gigawatts of wind technology and in fact we've only got on the grid as we speak today around 25. so in the intervening years we we are only crawling our way to what is required in terms of renewable technology and we haven't built any nuclear power stations or fossil plants with carbon capture and sequestration so we're a long way short of what we actually need to uh to build National Grid more recently has started to do some analyzes of you know how can we start to look at how we all get there and they've done some analysis that they called a day in the life of 2035 and this particular diagram from from their publication is about a day in the winter in 2035. and it will show you that they're assuming that we will still have eight to ten gigawatts of of nuclear which is by no means certain which I'll come on to in a minute we will have carbon capture and sequestration on fossil plants which we haven't got and we will we will have built by 2035 over 80 gigawatts worth of wind power and we've currently only got 25. so it's a huge ask but the other thing to note from this is the amount of actual um uh energy that and electricity you get from your quite modest eight to ten gigawatts of nuclear you're actually getting 220 gigawatt hours of of energy and in terms of your offshore wind in spite of the large amount that you have built you're only getting roughly the same amount as you would with the the Nuclear Station and you will also see that grid are assuming we will be able to import via interconnectors 400 gigawatt hours which is by by no means certain because Nations that are short of powerful the domestic Supply have a horrible habit of making sure their their own population is properly served rather than fulfilling contracts that may or may not be in place so it's assuming that if there's low renewable outputs if there's not much wind and there's not much solar then we're going to rely heavily on carbon capture and storage which again we have done very little to uh to invest in as well as some base load nuclear power so it's a huge huge challenge that we're trying to uh to to meet so government uh various governments from the uh first decade of this Century have indicated that they are in in favor of allowing new new nuclear power stations to be built in the UK but they haven't necessarily followed that through with policy um or or action we've had the ten point plan for the green Industrial Revolution which was emphasizing much more on renewable Technologies like wind and solar but also mentioning uh that new nuclear was important in the days of Boris Johnson we subsequently had as well as the 10-point plan an energy white paper and a British energy security strategy last year which re-emphasized the importance of nuclear energy in the UK's energy security landscape so to be secure with our energy nuclear was deemed to be necessary and they required 24 gigawatts of generating capacity by 2050 in order to help us get to where we need to be with with Net Zero the expectation was also that the cost of nuclear energy would be significantly reduced from what it what it is today and that we would do that with more novel designs and a different sort of Technology so nuclear energy as far as the the government of the Day in the UK is concerned they would like it to continue to be a major contributor to the UK's low carbon electricity but but how long is that going to be for because most of our existing stations will be gone this decade they will have retired um Hisham and Hartlepool were due to retire in 2024 they've just been given to your life extensions each but all of the um what's called Advanced gasket reactors which are the Mainstay of our nuclear power in the UK and have been for many decades they will all retire by um 20 the late 2020s and only size will be of the existing nuclear reactors will will exist it's kind of a bit unfortunate with hindsight that we chose this type of Technology back in the 60s and 70s through the Mainstay of our nuclear power because they have shorter lives than the global standard which is a water cooled reactor like the one at uh at size well B these were developed by the Americans and then exported globally and most of the the rest of the world runs on on water cooled reactors we didn't and uh therefore we now need to build some new ones in order to maintain our supply of nuclear energy so originally we had Ambitions for new build EDF uh the company which supplies quite a bit of electricity in the UK French company were going to deploy French technology at Hinckley point in Somerset and uh size will sea in Suffolk Westinghouse the American company was going to deploy their latest designs at moorside in Cumbria and Hitachi were going to supply their designs at wilfer on Anglesey these two projects fell by the wayside partly as a result of government interactions and and cost concerns so the only one that is currently underway at the moment is the epr the EDF built technology at Hinckley point but what was the rest of the world doing well even before the Ukraine the United States and France United States have begun a major push for new nuclear power stations to be built in their respective countries and for the technology to be built um to be developed in America and and in France so they've made very serious policy interventions whether they be very large grants and Loans to let get companies underway or whether it's just a commitment to build more this is uh president mackerel in front of his uh his Workforce outlining plans to have sorted out another six or eight large reactors on the French grid and to start the journey before 2030.
so after the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been very significant additional steps taken elsewhere in countries that already have nuclear power plant by extending their lives or ordering new ones or new countries that didn't have power plants to uh to start with so EDF has teamed with Italian Partners on small modular reactor development this reactor which I'll say a bit more about bwrx 300 or 300 megawatt unit developed by GE Hitachi has been selected for Estonia as their first Power Plant contracts have been signed with Westinghouse for plants in Poland and the Czech Republic the Czech Republic is also looking at small reactors Canada has ordered a new small modular reactor and is working with Poland to deploy there a poll has given record support for Japanese reactor restarts and citing permits requested for slow back plans French ministerial Council has prepared for the new nuclear build and passed that it's gone through the French equivalent of Parliament and the parties in Spain have already indicated that they wish to see nuclear plants go forward and there's been changes to Swedish law to enable new nuclear power plants to to be built so why is it such a problem and why does it seem to be a particular problem here and it's because of the the vast amount of cash that you need for the power plants before you actually get the electricity from it so a huge amount of money billions you know and that's been quite a challenge here in the UK particularly for the ones that that we've chosen but it's quite often that well it's down to the capital that you have to borrow and it's financing over the years of build before you get any of the uh the power out um and it's that's what dominates the uh the cost of the power station uh if you're borrowing at nine percent um then it costs very significantly more than if you're borrowing government rates at two percent Hinckley point the finance was borrowed at nine percent rather than than two percent but it's it's not just that it's it's the reactors themselves you'll see the reactors the actual nuclear bit is only about 15 of the total cost the structure and the shielding the concrete and the rebar that go around all all the reactor and everything that it hangs with is by far in a way the thing that that influences the cost of the uh the power plant and the time that it takes to to build um and and that's why it's proving to be so difficult especially here because Hinckley point of of all the reactors that uh that could have been chosen um in terms of design the epr is probably uh the most complex and difficult to build um on site of the available proven uh designs it this is the base map for the Hinckley power station before all of the reinforcement was put around it to give you some idea of the concrete rebar and the base mat it's a huge enormous civil engineering challenge to uh to build uh to build this particular design of of plant this is a a more recent picture with the shielding all up around it's a photograph that the EDF released in terms of the construction site and this is the pressure vessel that holds the actual fuel for the reactor being delivered to site at the end of February this year so the pressure vessel will be being installed into the shielding that were shown on the uh the earlier slide big challenge but just to give you an idea um some of the other large plants are not quite such a big challenge Westinghouse is AP about 1000 design was built at the vocal site in in Georgia these are units four and three on that site um and it's an easier plant to construct because of the modularity that has been in in the design of the plant so they're easier to build but it also gives you an idea of the size of the the pressure vessels these are people here and this is the thing that was on the barge going out to the Hinckley Point reactor so you could fit uh you could probably fit four pressure vessels in this room for neoclare reactors and each one would be generating over a thousand megawatts of electricity so the power density in a modern reactor is incredible really in terms of the space that it takes up given the power that it actually generates so what next for us well Rolls-Royce have been working significantly for a number of years on their small module reactor Now by small it's still 400 and 50 to 480 megawatts so it's not very small but it's smaller than reactors like Hinckley point or the votal plants in the United States at over a thousand megawatts but what they have done is actually design a power station rather than just a a nuclear reactor it's all been relatively easy for a long time now to modularize the the nuclear reactor itself it's how do you modularize the rest of all the concrete shielding um and all the the other things that are needed to have a functioning power station so they've built a fully functioning so they haven't built they've designed they're fully functioning power station with a great deal of modularization and Factory build in all of the of the design elements so it means that you can test off off-site you can build most of your modules off-site and quality control them before shipping them for the final assembly on site which is why it is so attractive and has received a lot of interest for um the uh the design that they've come forward with it means that you'll be able to maintain a you know a very high quality product and reduce on-site disruption because the bigger units have a great deal of on-site disruption while you're actually building on on site um and you know the extent of modularization means that it will transform what would have been a very large complex infrastructure program into a factory build commoditized product so that's why it has the advantages that it it has and is likely to lead to a significantly less costly Nuclear Power Plant so in terms of our Ambitions for new build what might we see now um we we are we still may see EDF deploy more French eprs because the government has several times announced that uh size well will be a copy of the Hinckley Point reactor Westinghouse May welcome back into the UK with uh ap1000 which has not just experience in the United States but also in in China we may see the General Electric 300 megawatt unit that's this one here and all the Rolls-Royce small modular reactor um our own UK design um we might but um probably I don't know maybe maybe not we'll see the other American design the new scale small module reactor of the available light water reactors internationally the new scale designs had very significant support from the American government and they're moving to build their first one on a site in in Idaho so these are the the water reactors that are available today are well proven in terms of design maturity or already built and validated somewhere else globally and that's important it's really important that you're not just building a PowerPoint design thing that you're actually building a unit that has very significant validation and verification on evidence that you can build it safely it will run safely and that The Regulators will be comfortable with it but what about the future what what might it hold for the longer term because there's a lot of talk now about not just small module reactors but Advanced modular reactors and these generally are base you know there's not a lot new in the nuclear World in terms of the base technology many of these Concepts were conceived back in the 1950s and and 60s it's just that they've never been brought to commercial reality globally not just uh here in the UK so there are a number that we might see going forward globally this one in the center is receiving a significant amount of attention it's called a natrium and it's being going to be built first in the United States by Terror power and General Electric and it's heavily supported by funds from Bill Gates so big a lot of private sector funding as well as U.S government funding and it's a 345 megawatt unit but it also has a gigawatt scale energy storage system associated with it so it can store up to 500 megawatts of possible electrical outputs for five to six hours so it has a big advantage in that not only is it going to generate electricity it will also store electricity which will then be available um at a later point or heat for industry to use it's four times more fuel efficient than the current light water reactors and it uses 80 percent less what's called nuclear grade concrete so from a point of view economics it may well prove to be and economic possibility these are the two prism and Arc these are also out of the General Electric stable and are based on technology that was developed back in the 1960s again sodium cooled fast reactors um Westinghouse are looking at a lead cooled fast reactor and they're also developing a high temperature what's called a micro reactor this these reactors are only two to five megawatts in size and they're mainly for off-grid applications like somewhere remote where it's difficult to supply grid power so these are big companies investing heavily in non-light Water Reactor systems that we may well see other systems that may well come to pass are molten salt reactors a company called multex initially in the UK has been working on a molten salt reactor which has the added advantage of not only producing electricity but it can also produce heat because of the the molten salt that is used as coolant or we have high temperature reactors being developed by X energy and there was a UK company urenko who was that was developing a small micro high temperature reactor but it's now been absorbed into a Canadian company Ultra safe nuclear Corporation um it was pity because it was a very good technology designed and developed here in the UK but it's now been absorbed into USNC for them to take forward and they're engaged in in Canada in looking at how to take that one forward so they're just they're different they're they have additionality as well as electricity generation and their modern versions of designs that were conceived many years ago UK had high temperature reactor back in the 1960s it was at uh it was at winfreath in Dorset and it was called dragon and it was one of the first reactors of that type built globally but the technology was never taken forward seriously at the time and we're only now just seeing high temperature reactors come back into favor because they will give heat as well as electricity as part of their their outputs so what do we need to do well it's uh big question it's not rocket science either it's we need to use fewer bits we need to take less time we need to borrow the money cheaply and we need to build more of the same type so that you get the economies can can of scale and the economies of repetition and in many countries there are governments of the day set the energy policy and make it easy for technology to move forward and Once Upon a Time our government set energy policy and once upon a time we had a central electricity generating um grid the cgb that actually developed many types of electricity generation to keep our lights on and invested for the future because energy was too important to National Security and security of energy supplies to just leave it to the international marketplace but that's what we're doing at the moment we're leaving everything to the international marketplace and hoping that companies will come along and develop the technology in the UK and deploy the technology in the UK meanwhile the rest of the world is moving along and they're all putting orders into the system and so if we're not careful we're going to be at the back of the queue for supply chain and for companies willing to come and build in the UK I mean things are moving along a little in that we have now got green label backing um for nuclear technology and this is similar to that that's been granted in the European Union where the EU has recently given nuclear technology um what's called a transition it's called as a transition technology to allow countries like France and Poland to invest in nuclear power plants and to you know help the negativity in in Germany so countries that want to can invest in nuclear energy but you don't have to and it's they've grown it to transition status so here in the UK for consultation we've got green label backing Canada already had that which is why Canada was able to get private sector investment easily for deployments of the small modular reactor the General Electric one in Canada and Great British nuclear has been set up and was launched at the time of the budget on the 15th of March when Jeremy Hunt presented his statements in Parliament but does nuclear have a little bit of additional functionality in terms of can it be coupled with hydrogen to give us a different energy Vector that will help and the advantages that it has over the other renewable technology is the heat output because it gives stable electricity which allows electrolyzers to generate more efficiently generate hydrogen more efficiently if there's heat as well it's the only clean energy source that gives low heat low carbon heat as a primary output and heat can make the electrolysis process if more efficient and thus cheaper and the advanced reactors which have high grade heat can actually give us thermochemical processes and that could be the most efficient way to produce hydrogen but there's none of these deployed as yet globally or here in the UK and efficiency wise there'd be cost comparative and competitive with carbon capture and sequestration on fossil plant but without the carbon emissions that you still get from that so nuclear power modern plants are coupled with potential electrolyzers for hydrogen generation uh so in concept space you could have a high temperature gas cool reactor both generating electricity and producing hydrogen and supplying hot gas to industry or steam hot steam to uh to Industry um it's a possibility and it's being investigated in the United States down by some of the petrochemical companies that exist there as a means to enhance their processes okay but there are many many designs on offer globally some are just PowerPoint presentations some have a a lot in the way of validation and verification and what we've got to do is be careful that we actually have the machines that are validated and verified with a lot of work on underpinning them so what about Fusion I just want to say a few words about Fusion towards the end here because it's been under development for many years with huge massive potential to be a a really beneficial clean source of of energy and here in the the UK we've had the the jet program European program at the column laboratory in Oxfordshire for many years and we're seeing investment now in the Next Generation step project again which is government funded but we're also seeing private sector companies like first light Fusion look at not just Tokamak energy Fusion Energy which is uh this sort but projectile and laser-based Fusion Energy and making very significant steps forward with these uh with these Technologies and last December we saw the news of the major Fusion breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States the national ignition facility which gained energy and it it proved that the technology was was going to uh to work but there's a huge amount of engineering associated with delivery of that sort of of technology and these are shots of the Lawrence Livermore laboratory with views into the target chamber the beam lines on the top of the uh of the reactor vessel The Vessel itself technicians loading the uh the tiny targets which are about as you know slightly less than the size of my thumb so huge amount of engineering and incidentally they used the set of nif on one of the Star Trek films they used it as uh they step the basis for the warp core on the on the prize but both Fusion Advanced Fusion systems and advanced nuclear systems would do well to listen to the words of the very wise Admiral Admiral rickover who was the man who was the basis of the American submarine program which then translated into the very successful reactor build program that the United States had and he wrote a memo and in that memo which you can get the full copy of it on Google if you choose to get excited he basically said um an academic reactor or a reactor plant almost always has the following characteristics it's simple it's small it's cheap it's light it can be built very effectively and quickly and it's very flexible it's an Omnibus reactor and very little developments required and it'll mostly use off-the-shelf components but it's in the study stage it hasn't been built and on the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics it's being built now it's behind schedule it requires an enormous amount of development on apparently trivial items corrosion in particular is a problem it's very expensive it takes a long time to build because of the engineering development programs it's large it's heavy and it's complicated so the whose message is still hold good to this day and those making proposals for Innovative Concepts need to recognize the amount of work that has to go into either an Advanced Vision system or a fusion system because it all has to be underwritten by Decades of development and by The Regulators who look after our safety and operator internationally so what's the role for nuclear power in achieving Net Zero will the lights go out without it well I hope that you'll gather from uh the talk that I've given tonight first of all achieving that zero is a massive engineering challenge and we have a huge Journey still to go and nuclear energy can and should play an important part along with the other renewable sources of energy in helping us to uh to get to to Net Zero if I take the words of the United Nations economic commission for Europe which highlights nuclear Energy's green credentials it's got the lowest life cycle carbon intensity of the electricity generating technology today it's got the lowest life cycle land use of any electricity generating technology and it's got the lowest impact on ecosystems of any electricity generating technology so thank you very much for listening and I'm happy to take questions [Applause] before we go online for any questions I'd be interested to take any questions from physical members of the audience uh let's go over here yep that was uh very nice thank you very much um which do you think is the way to go is it going to be big nuclear actors or small nuclear actors I I think we'll actually need a combination of them both um because I think the requirements for the amount that we need is such that we we need both Technologies in order to get them built and to deliver the 24 gigawatts that we need in time and also for uh the enhanced Global Supply the small ones give grid greater flexibility so have benefits that way as well as with the other benefits that they have but I actually think we'll we'll need to we'll need to build both is there a problem regarding Waste Management of nuclear Fuel and also how does it compare and cost wise with solar energy and in terms of of solar energy um it for the uh modern systems uh when you take all the processes uh into account that are required then they'll be comparable with um wind technology which is actually cheaper than uh than solar technology in terms of the of the waste um it's true that uh countries that were early developers of nuclear power have what's called a legacy waste from the early days of nuclear power but once fuel is removed from a reactor then there are robust processes for containing it and then uh storing it prior to emplacement in geological repository so countries that didn't have an existing development program countries like Sweden Finland are well along the way to having their fuel packaged and and geologically contained because the amount of fuel that you use over the course of a reactor the volume is not large here in the UK um if we build a new Fleet of nuclear power stations we will only add 10 to the volume of the waste that we already need to manage and consign okay I'm going to take uh at least one question online a special shout out to Andrew Patterson who has been particularly active in the Q a uh by which I mean he's not only asking questions he's also giving the answers so um can I see the answers that he's given them please um I am going to pick up one of his questions before I do that I wanted to just pick up one by Jill and um she asks is there enough uranium globally for all the proposed nuclear power plants is it available from friendly Nations and how long will it last when we reach Peak nuclear most of the uranium that's available globally um is in Canada and Australia which are generally viewed as countries that are are favorable from a geopolitical standpoint Kazakhstan also has significant quantities of of uranium um she's quite right to ask that question because for a large expansion of nuclear power then at some point we will need to re-look at recycling the uranium that comes out of nuclear reactors most of the uranium that sits in a nuclear reactor is not used up and can be recycled and reused particularly in the next generation of reactors the fast reactors that I was talking about during the course of the uh of the lecture so a Resurgence in Faster technology will mean it's self-sustaining and therefore we won't be dependent upon supplies of nuclear of uranium will we'll have hundreds of years worth of supply I think did you have a question sir yeah thank you for Professor for a wonderful historic lecture I'd like to ask you if you wouldn't mind to expand a little bit on your comment about why Germany hasn't um advances nuclear program apart from the old historical reasons well the historical reasons still held good Germany has an interesting Coalition from uh green party in Germany which historically has been not a in favor of of nuclear power and post Fukushima Germany decided to shut down its entire nuclear Fleet it kept the last three on as a result of uh and they were perfectly good reactors that could have lasted another 20 20 30 years but politically a decision was taken in Germany to uh to close those down so it's politics in Germany German industry would not necessarily be in favor of that but the politics in Germany have dictated that they no longer have operating nuclear plants on on their soil somebody had asked online whether the your materials were available online I should just take this point to emphasize that if you're new to Gresham College everything is available online on the website so the slides there's a thing called a transcript which isn't quite a transcript but it's usually got very useful notes from the speaker and the uh recording is available usually via YouTube after a few days um I have a question here from Stephen Roderick Who's online he says what's the key component of solar that gives it a carbon emission greater than that of nuclear hydro and wind that I'm afraid I don't know it was a bit of a puzzle wasn't it yeah it's just it's it's in the it'll be in the um the chemical processes the manufacturing processes and the materials that are used to produce the uh the cells yeah it's the through life and it's the thriller it's the life cycle cost probably take one more a physical question this gentleman here yeah hello my name is Graham I'm a public affairs consultant in the energy space the government as you probably know has hit a target of 25 of electricity coming from Nuclear by 2050 with all those stations going offline by 2030 do you think that's a realistic Target or is 25 too unambitious could it be higher uh it's not 25 it's actually 24 gigawatts which maybe less than 25 by 20 20 50. it really depends on what the final grid demand will be uh yeah it's hugely ambitious um but it's why if we go to a combination of large reactors um like the ap1000 or the epr and small module reactors then it is entirely possible to build that number by 2050 but we'll probably only see um between 8 and 10 gigawatts by 2035 which was the Assumption in the National Grids analysis but when you start now when he's got a wiggle on so that leads me to perhaps our final question which is from Adrian bull online and he says um if we were going to follow the example of another country in terms of how they've developed nuclear what should our role model be [Music] um well I I guess I would use the model of the UK all those years ago in the early days of of nuclear power oh okay old UK yes um where um we had a sensible balanced mix of Technologies for our our electricity I mean if you're asking me to uh to pick I would say um somewhere between 25 and 30 percent um and the majority of the rest renewable technology other renewable Technologies wind solar with some hopefully developed carbon capture and sequestration on fossil to make up the balance so that's a balanced energy policy is what we should have so we've run out our ladies and gentlemen the pressures of online mean that we need to stop um I'm going to give the final word to the great Andrew Patterson who's been contributing so heavily online and he says note I am a long time fan of Dame Sue she is top shelf all the way well that's very nice [Applause]
2023-04-28 23:18
