[NukeNet] The limits to nuclear: McCain shouldn’t try to follow French disaster

[Kay Cumbow]

http://energy.probeinternational.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-economics/the-limits-nuclear-mccain-shouldn-t-try-follow-french-disaster

Nuclear Economics

<http://energy.probeinternational.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-economics//nuclear-power/nuclear-economics/the-limits-nuclear-mccain-shouldn-t-try-follow-french-disaster>The 
limits to nuclear: McCain shouldn't try to follow French disaster
Lawrence Solomon
13 May 2008
National Post

The U.S. doesn't have a market for the nighttime power surplus that nuclear 
inevitably produces.

"If France can produce 80% of its electricity with nuclear power, why can't 
we?," asks U.S. presidential candidate John McCain. Nuclear power is a 
cornerstone of Senator McCain's plan to combat climate change, which he is 
unveiling this week.

McCain thinks he is asking a simple rhetorical question. As it turns out, 
he is not. His question is technical, with an answer that will surprise him 
and most Americans. Nuclear reactors cannot possibly meet 80% of America's 
power needs -- or those of any country whose power market dominates its 
region -- because of limitations in nuclear technology. McCain needs to 
find another miracle energy solution, or abandon his vow to drastically cut 
back carbon dioxide emissions.

Unlike other forms of power generation, nuclear reactors are designed to 
run flat-out, 24/7 -- they can't crank up their output at times of high 
demand or ease up when demand slows. This limitation generally consigns 
nuclear power to meeting a power system's minimum power needs -- the amount 
of power needed in the dead of night, when most industry and most people 
are asleep, and the value of power is low. At other times of the day and 
night, when power demands rise and the price of power is high, society 
calls on the more flexible forms of generation -- coal, gas, oil and 
hydro-electricity among them -- to meet its additional higher-value needs.

If a country produces more nuclear power than it needs in the dead of 
night, it must export that low-value, off-peak power. This is what France 
does. It sells its nuclear surplus to its European Union neighbours, a 
market of 700 million people. That large market -- more than 10 times 
France's population -- is able to soak up most of France's surplus off-peak 
power.

The U.S. is not surrounded, as is France, by far more populous neighbours. 
Just the opposite: The U.S. dominates the North American market. If 80% of 
U.S. needs were met by nuclear reactors, as Senator McCain desires, 
America's off-peak surplus would have no market, even if the power were 
given away. Countries highly reliant on nuclear power, in effect, are in 
turn reliant on having large non-nuclear-reliant countries as neighbours. 
If France's neighbours had power systems dominated by nuclear power, they 
too would be trying to export off-peak power and France would have no one 
to whom it could offload its surplus power. In fact, even with the mammoth 
EU market to tap into, France must shut down some of its reactors some 
weekends because no one can use its surplus. In effect, France can't even 
give the stuff away.

Not only does France export vast quantities of its low-value power (it is 
the EU's biggest exporter by far), France meanwhile must import high-value 
peak power from its neighbours. This arrangement is so financially ruinous 
that France in 2006 decided to resurrect its obsolete oil-fired power 
stations, one of which dates back to 1968.

France's nuclear program sprung not from business needs but from foreign 
policy goals. Immediately after the Second World War, France's President, 
Charles de Gaulle, decided to develop nuclear weapons, to make France 
independent of either the U.S. or the USSR. This foreign policy goal 
spawned a commercial nuclear industry, but a small one -- France's nuclear 
plants could not compete with other forms of generation, and produced but 
8% of France's power until 1973.

Then came the OPEC oil crisis and panic. Sensing that French sovereignty 
was at stake, the country decided to replace oil with electricity and to 
generate that electricity with nuclear. By 1974, three mammoth nuclear 
plants were begun and by 1977, another five. Without regulatory hurdles to 
clear and with cut-rate financing and a host of other subsidies from 
Euratom, the EU's nuclear subsidy agency, France's power system was soon 
transformed. By 1979, France's frenzied building program had nuclear power 
meeting 20% of France's power generation. By 1983 the figure was about 50% 
and by 1990 about 75% and growing.

Despite the subsidies, the overbuilding effectively bankrupted Electricite 
de France (EdF), the French power company. To dispose of its overcapacity 
and stay afloat, EdF feverishly exported its surplus power to its 
neighbours, even laying a cable under the English Channel to become a major 
supplier to the UK. At great expense, French homes were converted to 
inefficient electric home heating. And EdF offered cut-rate power to keep 
and attract energy-intensive industries -- Pechiney, the aluminum supplier, 
obtained power at half of EdF's cost of production, and soon EdF was 
providing similar terms to Exxon Chemicals and Allied Signal.

These measures helped but not enough -- in 1989, EdF ran a loss of four 
billion French francs, a sum its president termed "catastrophic." The 
company had a 800-billion-franc debt, old reactors that faced expensive 
decommissioning, and unresolved waste disposal costs. To keep lower-cost 
competitors out of the country, France also reneged on an EU-wide agreement 
to open borders up to electricity competition.

France's nuclear program, in short, is an economic disaster, and a 
political one too -- 61% of the French public favours a phase-out of 
nuclear energy.

"Is France a more secure, advanced and innovative country than we are?," 
McCain also asked. "I need no answer to that rhetorical question. I know my 
country well enough to know otherwise."

But McCain does not know France well enough to know why nuclear power's 
negative record over there says nothing positive about what it can do for 
people over here, on this side of the Atlantic.


This article is fourth in a series:
<http://energy.probeinternational.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-safety/apocalypse-now>Apocalypse 
now
<http://energy.probeinternational.org/energy-probe-news/warmed-over-nukes>Warmed-over 
nukes
<http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=377575>Burning in the dark


Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The 
Deniers.


<http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0980076315?ie=UTF8&tag=probeintern-20&linkCode=as2&camp=15121&creative=330641&creativeASIN=0980076315>
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