A Letter to My MP for Zero Carbon Britain Day

You could write one too....

Dear

I see that Saturday was Zero Carbon Britain Day. I believe we have to attain zero carbon if we want to keep the world as it is, but I don't think those campaigners' plan will do it. In all the talk of renewables and conservation, please don't lose sight of the current efficacy and future potential of nuclear power.

I don't want to live in a country where firms lay off workers and where poor people sit in the dark when the price of electricity goes up at evening peak, or because the wind has fallen. But I am still convinced -- for all the reasons we know so well -- that Britain and the world have to give up emitting  carbon dioxide to generate electricity. Renewables are fascinating, but they can't bridge that gap -- the numbers don't work now and still don't work even if we cover the country with wind farms and make big technical improvements in solar technology. The sad truth is that energy policy has much the same cruel arithmetic as dieting. Pure renewable solutions are like fad diets -- they sound great and seem plausible, but they just won't deliver the calories.

Conservation sounds cosy and tidy, and it's central to any pure renewable scheme, but, on the scale we'll need, it's just a polite way to describe the darkened homes and factories that will result from high prices at peak times and seasons: A feed-in tariff of 44p/unit is just a glimpse at the true peak price of renewable energy. If we want to avoid that then we must choose between stumbling into dependence on fracking shale gas with its gross environmental negatives, or much more nuclear power.

I expect you get all the lobbying you want from current nuclear power sellers. And I don't quarrel with what they are selling -- it's the right thing to do now -- I just want you to be aware that we as a civilisation can do much better. All of the problems with current nuclear technology can be substantially mitigated or removed. Few green campaigners will tell you this, because they want society to change -- energy starvation is their tool to wind down the current world. And lobbyists from Areva and Westinghouse won't tell you because they have a "razor and blades" (current reactors and fuel assemblies) model to sell. So I'm telling you here!

• Fission reactors can be intrinsically safe. The "P" (for pressurised) in "PWR" explains some of what went wrong at Fukushima. Current designs manage that risk much better, but replacing water with molten salt or liquid metal coolants avoids the need for high pressure altogether. Liquid core designs won't have fuel cans that can generate explosive hydrogen; and when cooling pumps fail, liquid cores can flow into flat pans to cool safely in containment.
• We don't need to make plutonium and risk weapons proliferation. The current uranium fuel cycle arises from the mad dash for bomb fuel in the 40s and 50s. The natural conservatism and government direction of the nuclear power industry since then has kept it unchanged, even though we struggle to consume or keep safe the plutonium that's being made. The alternative thorium/uranium breeder cycle makes much, much less plutonium, and the fuel it creates for reactors is too contaminated to build a bomb. Local reprocessing means we don't have to move fuels around the country.
• Nuclear fission power can be sustainable at modest cost for a very long time. We currently consume a rare isotope -- just half a percent -- of  the mined uranium, in fragile fuel rods that have to be scrapped before they've consumed even that sad expensive fraction. Liquid cores don't need manufactured fuel rods,  breeder cycles can create fuel from bulk uranium or thorium, and thorium is three times more common than uranium. There are many millions of tons of easily available thorium, and each ton could power a large reactor for a year.  
• Nuclear waste is much more manageable than we have been told. Thorium cycle liquid core reactors could run continuous reprocessing to avoid creating the transuranic elements that make waste active for tens of thousands of years. Without transuranics, the residual fission product waste decays much faster, falling to the radioactivity level of mined ore in hundreds rather than thousands of years, and the volumes are in the order of hundreds of kilos per reactor per year. We can deal indefinitely with that.

These ideas and others like them have been around for a while. They're sound, tested at some scale and they look economical. It's not really a surprise that sixty years of  nuclear engineering and new tools like computer modelling have produced improvements over reactors that were designed by hand to power warships and make plenty of plutonium.

What we don't have is money behind these ideas. This is a classic market failure. The key design choices are long out of patent -- the only way to make money now will be to invest in the work to scale these ideas to commercial sizes. There are limits to what legislators and the government can do here, but I would like to make a few suggestions:

• Support current nuclear plans. They're not ideal, but they're better than the alternatives.
• Ask questions. Where is our British nuclear direction? Are we content to buy French and American reactors for ever? Is this a global market we want Britain to abandon? Does that help re-orient the British economy to manufacturing?
• Lead your constituents and your colleagues to expect and demand a big contribution from nuclear power and nuclear engineering.
• Think about the billions going to fusion research at ITER and elsewhere. That's good quality, exciting, research, but perhaps we should also be able to fund smaller budgets to look at next-generation fission and reprocessing. Britain has excellent traditions of research in chemical and nuclear engineering and, unlike fusion, we know, before we start, that it will work. 

This issue won't go away in our lifetimes -- I'm writing because I think it's important for my children and their children. It won't be resolved either. I hope you will consider my views as the debate goes on.

With Regards


Fat Tom