AT the end of last month, I miraculously found an hour that was not attenuated by three or four items on the to-do list, and attended a webinar by Lux Research, with the title “The future of nuclear fission: Picking suitable applications to maximize outcomes.” The findings of the analysis presented were completely unexpected, even for me, and it has taken a few days to digest it all and confirm the facts.
In a column I wrote last week on the nuclear topic (“Assessing recent nuclear rhetoric,” Sept. 1), I offered the forecast that the Philippines might see a nuclear power plant sometime in the mid-2040s, and might see the benefits in the form of significantly cheaper electricity sometime in 2060s or 2070s. The findings of Lux Research confirmed that forecast is probably accurate, and in fact, raised the possibility that the actual date the Philippines might deploy nuclear power could be “never.”
First of all, allow me to explain where this is coming from, and why the prognosis was a surprise. Lux Research is a business consultancy firm headquartered in Boston, with offices in Tokyo, Singapore and Amsterdam, and it focuses on technology, innovation and the growth thereof. As such, it tends to default to strong optimism toward technology solutions, and its various webinars and reports reflect that; some of the topics covered in the past two years or so include battery storage developments, electric vehicles, sustainable aviation fuels, hydrogen development, carbon capture, waste-to-energy, artificial intelligence in various applications, "smart" grids, distributed energy resources and virtual power plants and, of course, developments in nuclear energy.
Given that nuclear energy as seen as the most familiar climate-friendly version of baseload generation available, and that about two dozen countries have signed a pledge to triple nuclear capacity in the next 25 years to help the transition away from fossil-fueled energy, I signed on to the webinar expecting to hear to a very positive outlook for the nuclear sector. I also expected to disagree with a lot of it, but that’s beside the point; reason dictates that one set aside preconceived notions and listen to new information with an open mind before drawing conclusions.
What was presented, however, was an eye-opening and decidedly less than encouraging prognosis for nuclear development over the next couple of decades. And that prognosis was based precisely on the reasons that I have long held are the most formidable arguments against developing it, especially here in the Philippines where we have to start from scratch. As I said at the beginning, I was startled by this, and had to do a bit of follow-up research to make sure I had not misheard it.
According to my notes, there were five main points highlighted by the forecast. First, nuclear capacity growth will not scale up as quickly as the political (as opposed to practical) targets say; the Department of Energy (DOE) is frankly dreaming if it thinks the Philippines is actually going to see an operational nuclear plant by the 2030s, as its current plan suggests. Lux Research forecast that on a global basis, planned reactor closures will not be offset by new capacity additions for at least 25 years, and this is backed by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) data, although for understandable reasons it avoids drawing attention to it.
It is not that there aren’t reactors being built; China is working on several, Bangladesh is about to start two units of the four at its new, Russian-built Rooppur nuclear plant, and there are projects ongoing in the US, UK and Finland, although these latter three have become financial and technical nightmares. But the number of new plants under way is relatively small, they are only possible through massive state support, and any additional ones, because of the tricky economics of nuclear power on the front end, are also going to require substantial state backing. The DOE’s pretension that nuclear can somehow happen entirely through private investment so as not to step afoul of the legal proscription of state ownership of generation assets codified in the Epira law is naïve at best.
Second, the presumption that “advanced” nuclear power, that is, small modular reactors (SMRs) would break the nuclear economic barrier has not been borne out in actual real-world development, at least not yet, and probably not ever. “Advanced nuclear economics are driven less by reactor type than by financing, project scale, construction execution and system integration,” Lux Research said. “Smaller or newer designs do not automatically produce cheaper energy.”
Third, the most economical form of nuclear energy — with the caveat that it is only economical with considerable state participation — are conventional, large reactors built to provide baseload power; they are absolutely useless for any other purpose, such as mid-merit, peaking, or reserve power needs. SMRs have potential applications as cogeneration projects serving industrial clusters or as embedded generation within distribution utilities’ networks, but because the promised economics of SMRs likely cannot be realized, they are going to inevitably only be suitable to what Lux Research called “premium off-takers,” i.e., customers for whom reliability is far more important than energy price.
Fourth, if a country is to dip its toes into nuclear development, then multi-unit plants — not multiple plants, but one or two plants with more than one reactor each — are a must for reducing costs on a per-unit or per-megawatt basis. The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is consistently lower for multi-unit plants rather than single ones. That is another nail in the coffin in the ridiculously stupid advocacy for resurrecting the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) on the one hand, and on the other, completely derails the DOE’s current development timeline, which foresees a single-unit plant (whether it’s the BNPP, or more likely a new one) as the future first nuclear plant for the Philippines.
Finally, microreactors (smaller than SMRs, up to about 25 MW capacity), which have been floated as a solution for embedded generation (Meralco has been studying these) and generation for remote, disconnected islands are and will remain a niche solution with costs that are prohibitively high. Fine, if there are no alternatives and the government is willing to absorb the costs, or they are serving a market that can tolerate the high costs (one example I can think of is Balesin island, aka the plutocrats’ playground), but they are not at all a viable solution if the intention is to follow the legal directive that electricity should be provided at the “least cost.”
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Bluesky: @benkritz.bsky.social
Website: www.badmannersgunclub.com