Historical research guide · 0831 · 2012
Nuclear energy: Status and future limitations
Michael Dittmar
In one minute
Michael Dittmar is a particle physicist at ETH Zurich who works at CERN, and he spent several years reading the nuclear industry’s own books — the IAEA and OECD Red Book, the World Nuclear Association, the International Energy Agency — to answer a plain question. How much of the world’s energy does nuclear fission actually supply, and what would it take to supply more? His answer here is that fission makes about fourteen per cent of the world’s electricity, that electricity is itself only about sixteen per cent of the energy people finally use, and so nuclear’s share of the whole is small. He then sets out what he counts as unsolved. Reactors cannot follow demand, so they run flat out even when nobody wants the power, and a grid leaning on them needs storage behind it. The highly radioactive waste has had no final store for forty years. Uranium is finite. His conclusion is blunt: fission as it is built today is part of the energy problem rather than the answer to it.
Connection
Chapter 1 is about how to score a programme by its unsolved engineering rather than by its press releases, and this is that method applied to the largest energy programme humanity has ever run. Chapter 12 has to answer Dittmar directly, because his sharpest paragraph is about fusion timelines — and the answer the site is built on is that the architecture he audits, the deuterium-tritium tokamak fuel cycle, is not the only architecture on the table.
From the source
Nuclear fission contributes only about fourteen per cent of the world’s electric energy mix, and electric energy is itself only about sixteen per cent of end energy use, so on Dittmar’s reading the contribution of nuclear fission to the total energy people actually consume is essentially negligible — a little over two per cent.Abstract, second sentence; the arithmetic is set out in the companion preprint, Chapter I, Summary Part I
The least-known limitation is an operational one. Nuclear plants cannot provide power according to need: they have to be operated at full power also during times of low demand, so regions with a large nuclear contribution need backup hydropower storage systems to absorb what the fleet produces anyway.Abstract, third sentence
Two better-known problems have gone without a solution for at least forty years, in Dittmar’s account: the final safe storage of the accumulated highly radioactive waste, and the fact that uranium itself is a very limited and non-renewable energy resource.Abstract, fourth sentence
The fuel arithmetic is where the limitation bites first. Operating the roughly 370 gigawatts of electrical capacity then installed requires about 65,000 tonnes of natural-uranium equivalent a year, while over the preceding decade the world’s mines produced on average about 40,000 tonnes a year, the difference being made up from secondary stocks — civil and military stockpiles and reprocessed material — which the Red Book 2007 and the World Nuclear Association data indicated would be essentially exhausted within a few years.Companion preprint, Chapter I, Summary Part I, arXiv 0908.0627v1
The build rate is tested against the retirement rate, which is the test a renaissance has to pass. In 2009, 48 reactors totalling about 40 gigawatts of electrical capacity were under construction, only about a tenth of them in the OECD countries that host about 85 per cent of the existing fleet, while roughly a hundred older reactors of slightly larger combined capacity were reaching retirement age over the same period.Companion preprint, Chapter I, Summary Part I, arXiv 0908.0627v1
What to watch: Dittmar’s hardest paragraph is about fusion, and he states it as a claim about people rather than plasma — that enormous amounts of human resources, which he argues are urgently needed to find a still unknown path to a low-energy future, are blocked by what he calls useless research on fusion energy; in the companion chapter he puts it as commercial fusion power being not fifty years away but always fifty years away. He is auditing one architecture, the deuterium-tritium tokamak with its lithium breeding blanket, and the measurements that would answer him are named in his own Fusion Illusions chapter: a machine that breeds more tritium than it burns, and a first wall that survives fourteen-million-electronvolt neutrons for years.Abstract, fifth sentence, and the companion preprint, Chapter IV, Summary, arXiv 0911.2628v1
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2011.05.040How to cite it
Michael Dittmar (2012) Nuclear energy: Status and future limitations doi:10.1016/j.energy.2011.05.040