Author: Richard Jones

It’s easy to be ambivalent about nuclear power, as my last post illustrated. Nuclear power does provide a low carbon source of energy at scale – if we are serious about decarbonising our energy systems we are going to need a new wave of nuclear power stations, not least to replace an earlier generation of ageing reactors. But nuclear enthusiasts seriously underestimate the scale of the problems that need to be overcome to achieve a large scale expansion of nuclear power. Civil nuclear power has a troubled history everywhere; in Japan consequences of the Fukushima disaster are very much part of current affairs, whose repercussions have spread to countries like Germany. To move beyond this troubled history, to a future in which nuclear power does provide safe and affordable low-carbon energy, we need to understand how this technology got to its current state.

The way in which the technology of civil nuclear power has unfolded was not inevitable; it was the result of the specific circumstances in which it was born and developed. In this sense nuclear power is a great example of the way in which technological trajectories are not pre-ordained; there are many possible paths that nuclear energy could have gone down. What has happened is an example of “technological lock-in” – the particular historical environment in which nuclear power was born put the technology on one particular trajectory, from which it is difficult to make a big jump (as argued in this article by Robin Cowan). This is important because it explains why the current state of the technology is probably not the best place to be given the problems we need to solve.

We can’t understand where we are with nuclear power without appreciating its roots in military technology. Continue reading “Moving beyond nuclear power’s troubled history”

One slightly dispiriting feature of the current environmental movement is the sniping between “old” environmentalists, opposed to nuclear power, and “new” environmentalists who embrace it, about the relative merits of nuclear and solar as low carbon energy sources. Here’s a commentary on that dispute, in the form of a pair of graphs. In fact, it’s two versions of one graph, showing the world consumption of low carbon energy from solar, nuclear and wind over the last forty years or so, the data taken from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013.

The first graph is the case for nuclear. Only nuclear energy makes any dent at all in the world’s total energy consumption (about 22500 TWh of electricity in total was generated in the world in 2012, with more energy consumed directly as oil and gas). Although nuclear generation has dropped off significantly in the last year or two following the Fukushima accident, the experience of the 1970’s and 80’s shows that it is possible to add significant capacity in a reasonable timescale. Nuclear provides the world with a significant amount of low-carbon energy that it’s foolish to imagine can be quickly replaced by renewables.

The second graph is the case for solar. It is the same graph as the first one, but with a logarithmic axis (on this plot constant fractional growth shows up as an increasing straight-line). This shows that world solar energy consumption is increasing at a greater than exponential rate. For the last five years, solar energy consumption has been growing at a rate of 66% a year compounded. (Wind-power is also growing exponentially, but currently at a slower rate than solar). Although in absolute terms, solar energy is only now at the stage that nuclear was in 1971, its growth rate now is much higher than the maximum growth rate for nuclear in the period of its big build out, which was 30% a year compounded in the five years to 1975. And even before Fukushima, the growth in nuclear energy was stagnating, as new nuclear build only just kept up with the decommissioning of the first generation of nuclear plants. Looking at this graph, solar overtaking nuclear by 2020 doesn’t seem an unreasonable extrapolation.

The case for pessimism is made by Roger Pielke, who points out, from the same data set, that the process of decarbonising the world’s energy supply is essentially stagnating, with the proportion of energy consumption from low carbon sources reaching a high point of 13.3% in 1999, from which it has very gently declined.

Of course, looking backwards at historical energy consumption figures can only take us so far in understanding what’s likely to happen next. For that, we need to look at likely future technical developments and at the economic environment. There is a lot of potential for improvement in both these technologies; not enough research and development has been done on any kind of energy technology in the last few years, as I discussed here before – We sold out our energy future.

On the economics, it has to be stressed that the progress we’ve seen with both nuclear and solar has been the result of large-scale state action. In the case of solar, subsidies in Europe have driven installations, while subsidised capital in China has allowed it rapidly to build up a large solar panel manufacturing industry. The nuclear industry has everywhere been closely tied up with the state, with fairly opaque finances.

But one thing sets apart nuclear and solar. The cost of solar power has been steadily falling, with the prospect of grid parity – the moment when solar generated electricity is cheaper than electricity from the grid – imminent in favoured parts of the world, as discussed in a recent FT Analysis article (£). This provides some justification for the subsidies – usually, with any technology, the more you make of something, the cheaper it becomes; solar shows just such a positive learning curve.

For nuclear, on the other hand, the more we install, the costlier it seems to get. Even in France, widely perceived to have been the most effective nuclear building program, with widespread standardisation and big economies of scale, analysis shows that the learning curve is negative, according to this study by Grubler in Energy Policy (£).

What is urgent now is to get the low-carbon fraction of our energy supply growing again. My own view is that this will require new nuclear build, even if only to replace the obsolete plants now being decommissioned. But for nuclear new build to happen at any scale we need to understand and reverse nuclear’s negative learning curve, and learn how to build nuclear plants cheaply and safely. And while the current growth rate of solar is impressive, we need to remember what a low base it is starting from, and continue to innovate, so that the growth rate can continue to the point at which solar is making a significant contribution.

I have a post up on the blog of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute – The failures of supply side innovation policy – discussing the connection between recent innovation policy in the UK and our current crisis of economic growth. Rather than cross-posting it here, I tell the same story in four graphs.

1. The UK’s current growth crisis follows a sustained period of national disinvestment in R&D

Red, left axis. The percentage deviation of real GDP per person from the 1948-1979 trend line, corresponding to 2.57% annual growth. Sources: solid line, 2012 National Accounts. Dotted line, March 2013 estimates from the Office for Budgetary Responsibility.
Blue, right axis. Total R&D intensity, all sectors, as percentage of GDP. Data: Eurostat.

Continue reading “Innovation policy and long term economic growth in the UK – a story in four graphs”

At the end of last year, the Nuffield Foundation for Bioethics published a report on the ethics of emerging biotechnologies, called Emerging Biotechnologies: technology, choice and the public good. I was on the working party for that report, and this piece reflects a personal view about some of its findings. A shorter version was published in Research Fortnight (subscription required).

In a speech at the Royal Society last November George Osborne said that, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, it is his job “to focus on the economic benefits of scientific excellence”. He then listed eight key technologies that he challenged the scientific community in Britain to lead the world in, and for which he promised continuing financial support. Among these technologies were synthetic biology, regenerative medicine and agri-science, key examples of what a recent report from the Nuffield Council for Bioethics calls emerging biotechnologies. Picking technology winners is clearly high on the UK science policy agenda, and this kind of list will increasingly inform the science funding choices the government and its agencies, like the research councils, make. So the focus of the Nuffield’s report, on how those choices are made and what kind of ethics should guide them, couldn’t be more timely.

These emerging technologies are not short of promises. According to Osborne, synthetic biology will have an £11 billion market by 2016 producing new medicines, biofuels and food – “they say that synthetic biology will heal us, heat and feed us.” Continue reading “Fulfilling the promises of emerging biotechnologies”