At almost the same time, thousands of kilometres away, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station failed in ways that still reverberate. Safety systems that were supposed to be independent failed together, leading to fuel melting and hydrogen explosions that destroyed four reactor units and released radioactivity to the air and ocean. It took months to stabilize the damaged reactors and bring them to a cold shutdown, and site remediation will continue for decades. The cascading consequences crippled Japan’s nuclear sector and generated economic, social and environmental damage far beyond the plant fence line. The cost of the accident is incalculable but runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars. It ruined the Tokyo Electric Power Company.

The contrast is not just about two technologies; it is about two ways of structuring risk. The Rugby turbine failure remained a localized engineering incident, largely managed internally by the project owner and manufacturer. Fukushima produced losses at least five orders of magnitude larger than a single windturbine crash, and it did so in a way that pushed financial burdens across the Japanese state, its taxpayers and future generations.

Energy systems like the one in Fukushima, built around a small number of very large, colocated units, running near full output with critical safety functions sharing common failure modes, and overseen by a regulatory culture that discounts lowprobability, highimpact events, is not just vulnerable. It is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Biomimicry – the practice of learning from and emulating nature’s strategies – offers a vocabulary for understanding why. Nature has had billions of years to experiment under uncertainty. Complex living systems endure not because they avoid shocks, but because they are built to absorb them. In healthy ecosystems, risk is not eliminated; it is distributed, diversified, buffered and constantly managed. Redundancy, modularity, diversity, continuous feedback and slack capacity are not poetic metaphors but survival rules. Those same rules can be applied directly to how energy systems are planned, financed and operated.

Nature has had billions of years to experiment under uncertainty. Complex living systems endure not because they avoid shocks, but because they are built to absorb them. 

For a decarbonized power system, this means grids and portfolios that can lose parts without losing the whole; that can reconfigure under stress; that favour many small, distributed investments over a few gigantic, centralized bets; and that can learn and adapt quickly from minor failures rather than waiting for rare, systemwide disasters. It also means staying within biophysical boundaries – emissions budgets, land and water limits, ecological constraints – that make life and prosperity possible in the first place. In that sense, the distinction between nuclear and renewables is not just about carbon intensity or levellized cost; it is about whether a technology encourages risk to be concentrated or distributed.

Nuclear power, by virtue of its scale, complexity, slow learning curves, security requirements and tailrisk profile (or rare disasters), tends naturally to become centralized. It also has a very low tolerance for failure. Wind and solar, with their modular hardware, high unit counts and rapid learning cycles, tend to embed values of decentralization, resilience and acceptance of small, noncatastrophic failures as a price of innovation.

If the goal is resilience and affordability in an era of climate chaos, then energy systems can no longer be imagined as just a string of independent megaprojects. Nature shows us how to structure risk so that failures are local, bounded and recoverable. Yet our most sophisticated infrastructures still concentrate risk in a handful of giant nodes. Energy technologies can be more or less safe, but the deeper question is whether the systems we build behave more like living ecosystems or more like brittle machines.

A living system is diversified, adaptive, repairable and resilient. That is the kind of grid we need now, and it is the one that becomes possible when engineers, planners, regulators and investors start taking their cues from nature.

Ralph Torrie is director of research at Corporate Knights. 

The post Rethinking risk in the age of climate chaos  appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The plant – operated by CertainTeed Canada, a division of the French construction giant Saint-Gobain – will transition from the use of fossil fuels to clean power provided by Hydro-Québec and increase its use of recycled materials to cut its reliance on incoming shipments of virgin gypsum.

Such carbon-reduction initiatives are becoming increasingly common among industrial operators, data-centre developers and electrical utilities, all of which are pushing to find efficiencies to cut their emissions in response to regulatory, consumer and investor pressure. Cities, countries and corporations are looking for ways to get ahead of the climate crisis, with a range of measures driving green trends behind the scenes.

Herewith, Corporate Knights’ annual survey of important trends for 2025:

More cities will be designing for extreme heat

The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record, and there’s every reason to expect more of the same this year, with similar results. A growing number of urban regions that now endure extended periods of extreme temperatures are looking at responding more proactively to deadly heat waves. As Corporate Knights reported last year, several city regions have appointed “chief heat officers” to spearhead a range of measures, from public health initiatives to safety practices for firms with outdoor employees, and many more municipally driven extreme-heat strategies will roll out 2025.

Indeed, planners, designers, landscape architects and municipal governments are stepping up their efforts to alter or adapt the built forms in cities in 2025 to mitigate the urban heat-island effect. From the construction of shade structures in public spaces to the use of light-coloured exteriors on buildings and white paint on paved surfaces, expect to see more of them in urban centres around the world. Many cities are also adopting more aggressive approaches to tree planting on streets, along bike paths and in parks, creating more green corridors and replacing hard impervious surfaces.

More new builds will also have fewer staircases. Some North American jurisdictions (British Columbia and Washington State, among others) are easing up on fire codes to allow single-stair apartment buildings, which are commonplace in much of the world. This reform provides a range of benefits, not least of which is cross-ventilation within individual apartments, reducing the need for air conditioning.

Power-hungry data centres face a reckoning

The Canadian government’s decision, late in 2024, to incentivize major pension plans to invest up to $15 billion in “green” data centres is the latest piece of evidence about the growing recognition of artificial intelligence’s heavy carbon footprint. The program is aimed at encouraging data-centre developers and tech giants to use low-carbon electricity to power the huge amount of cooling required to allow these vast server farms to operate safely.

There have been several recent developments on this front, including Microsoft’s move, announced in September, to purchase 20 years of electricity from a refurbished reactor at Three Mile Island. “The agreement is intended to provide the company with a clean source of energy as power-hungry data centres for artificial intelligence (AI) expand,” the BBC reported.

Other developers are anticipating the arrival of small nuclear reactors as a means of providing low-carbon electricity, although these modular plants are still 10 to 15 years from coming online.

As data centres pop up in urban areas, some architects and critics have called out the monolithic and dehumanizing design of these “anti-monuments,” while data-centre developers are looking to reduce embodied carbon, using modular construction techniques and even employing green materials like cross-laminated timber.

Such changes reflect the data-centre industry’s awareness that increasingly stringent regulation is on the way. Starting in fall 2024, the European Union is targeting data centres with tougher regulations, including the disclosure of energy and water consumption. Other jurisdictions, including Australia, Singapore and a growing number of U.S. state governments, are following suit with their own regulations.

Giant ‘grid’ batteries are making renewables more viable

As wind and solar installations account for an ever-larger supply of renewable electricity, some utilities and systems operators have realized they need to figure out how to make better use of these low-cost/low-carbon sources. Systems operators for decades stored power behind hydro dams, using the renewable electricity to pump water up into reservoirs.

But in recent years, so-called long-duration energy storage (LDES) has become an increasingly viable low-carbon alternative. Citing International Energy Agency forecasts, The Economist reported in November that grid storage has become the fastest-growing energy technology, with 80 gigawatts forecast to be added in 2025, three times the level achieved in 2021. (For comparison, Canada has electricity capacity of 149 GW nationwide.)

The idea behind grid storage is to create what are effectively giant banks of batteries that can be recharged with renewable power when the wind blows and the sun shines. These batteries can then be discharged over the course of eight or 12 hours, thereby providing backup low-carbon power to the grid at scale.

China has the world’s largest supply of grid-storage capacity, but other jurisdictions will be racing to catch up over the next decade.

In the United States, California leads the pack, announcing the procurement last year of two gigawatts of 12- to 24-hour LDES, to be built out in the 2030s. Which is critical, since California requires solar and energy storage in new homes.

Elsewhere, Australian authorities are also commissioning several LDES projects, typically providing hundreds of megawatts of capacity using various technologies, including a 200-megawatt compressed air system with eight hours of capacity, developed by Toronto-based Hydrostor.

Tariffs will help fight climate change

At a period when the incoming Trump administration has threatened large-scale tariffs as a means of driving investment into the United States, the European Union’s carbon border tax, or “carbon border adjustment mechanism” (CBAM), adopted in 2023, will become a hot topic of diplomatic debate as the 27-nation bloc spends this year preparing for the launch in 2026.

An EU innovation, CBAMs are essentially carbon levies on imported goods and commodities, designed to mitigate against carbon “leakage,” or the problem of importers in high-regulation regions bringing in materials from countries with lax carbon policies. A few jurisdictions, such as Brazil and the United Kingdom, have followed suit, while the Canadian government is considering its own version, although, like so many trade-related files, this one is up in the air.

Not surprisingly, this policy approach received a good deal of pushback last year from Brazilian and Indian steelmakers. It seems likely that the chorus of objections will grow louder this year as EU member states ramp up their CBAM regulations.

Either way, CBAM will play a key role in 2025 in aligning trade policy with the broader climate targets.

Given the anticipated political headwinds facing climate policy, 2025 may be the year in which rapidly maturing climate technologies and resiliency solutions will be called upon to prove their own significance in combating extreme weather and intensified stresses on our energy systems.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist, author and editor. He writes about cities, climate and cleantech.

The post Four climate-saving trends for 2025 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Like many in the environmental movement, I long thought of political conservatives as a nemesis for the environment. I came by this association honestly: from my grandfather, who co-founded the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the predecessor to the left-leaning NDP, to my mother, who once told me that if we elected the Progressive Conservatives in the 1988 federal election, they would chop down all our trees. 

Later, however, after I co-founded Corporate Knights magazine and launched a survey, asking leading environmentalists who had been the greenest Canadian prime minister and U.S. president in history, I was surprised that on both counts, conservative leaders won the green star: Brian Mulroney and Theodore Roosevelt. I remember how moved Mulroney was, when I contacted him to inform him of this recognition from what were normally hostile quarters (reportedly, he considered his “Greenest Prime Minister in Canadian History” award as his most cherished honorific). I was also moved by how prominent environmentalists, including David Suzuki and Elizabeth May, took to the airwaves when Mulroney was crowned the greenest PM, free of any enmity for him, to celebrate the genuinely good things he had done on acid rain and for the ozone layer. It was a nice example of love triumphing over hate.

If there is one thing we know, it is that the environment cannot be a political football. It has to be a trans-partisan issue in which every party and leader can imagine themselves as heroes, especially now in these times that require heroic and sustained climate action.

My old boss Ralph Nader formed the Critical Mass Energy Project in 1974 as a national anti-nuclear umbrella group, which was largely successful in stopping the expansion of nuclear power. Many environmentalists oppose nuclear energy because of the radioactive waste that sticks around for thousands of years. I was always skeptical about nuclear power because of the high costs (due in part to a web of regulatory requirements), but I was also rankled by how the nuclear lobby dismissed renewables. While I still don’t think building new nuclear is the way to go (it takes too long and costs too much), I am in favour of extending and keeping existing emissions-free nuclear online (see Eugene Ellmen’s exploration of the topic).

Many people were involved in the creation of Canada’s carbon tax, including myself. I co-authored a $100-billion carbon tax plan in 2007 launched alongside members of Parliament from three of Canada’s four national parties (guess who was missing), which almost immediately inspired John Baird, then the Conservative environment minister, to coin the attack line “a tax on everything.” Later, at a meeting of decision-makers in Winnipeg, I put forward the idea for a made-in-Canada carbon tax where the money stayed in the provinces, which was welcomed by Gerald Butts, the future principal secretary to the current Liberal prime minister, as “bad policy but good politics” and in 2018 became the law of the land.

Unfortunately, the carbon tax (as our director of research notes) is tailor-made for dividing people, which certain politicians (not just conservative) have gone to town on. And many of the biggest polluters managed to insert fine print that exempted them from paying much at all. It’s little wonder that many big polluters, from Exxon to Suncor, supported a carbon tax, and environmentalists were slow to appreciate this. Although it seemed like a wonderful idea to many political stripes at the time, the love affair with the carbon tax has not panned out, partly because it is individualist and punitive in nature and does not tap into the cooperative “build it together” spirit that is required to lay out the solutions to power a climate-friendly civilization. 

Not all shibboleths are long-held. Some are being formed as we speak, as the meat-industry lobby foments the belief that plant-based foods are too processed and expensive to be an effective climate solution. More on that in our “plant power” package.

For the sake of the planet, it’s time for all of us to shed the shibboleths that no longer serve the higher good, to come together in protecting the only home we have from spiralling into climate chaos. 

Rather than ostracizing, demonizing or lionizing, the path forward for climate action can be more inclusive, open-minded and clear-eyed, but focused on the practical nuts and bolts and love of the future we can build together.

Toby Heaps is the co-founder and publisher of Corporate Knights.

The post Publisher’s Note: The times call for heroic climate action – and shedding long-held beliefs appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The federal government considers nuclear energy—including small modular reactors (SMRs) that are touted as easier to build and run than traditional nuclear plants—as key to meeting energy needs while aiming for net-zero by 2050.

In Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s 2023 budget in March, investments for nuclear power and SMRs were included alongside hydropower and other “non-emitting electricity generation systems” eligible for a $25-billion, 15% tax break from the Clean Electricity Investment Tax Credit.

And Trudeau has since made multiple public statements in support of nuclear energy. “Nuclear is on the table, absolutely,” he said, during a speech in British Columbia earlier this month. And at a University of Ottawa visit, he said investment in nuclear and SMRs is something Canada is “very, very serious” about, reported the Canadian Press.

“We’re going to have to be doing much more nuclear over the coming decades,” Trudeau said.

But on April 25, anti-nuclear activists and a cross-partisan group of MPs held a media conference on Parliament Hill, urging Ottawa to rethink its stance on nuclear and calling the energy source a dangerous distraction from climate action, reported CBC News.

Speakers in the group said Trudeau and his cabinet are getting bad advice about nuclear energy.

“The nuclear industry, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, has been lobbying and advertising heavily in Canada, trying to convince us that new SMR designs will somehow address the climate crisis,” said Prof. Susan O’Donnell, a member of the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick (CRED-NB). The reality, she added, is that SMRs will produce “toxic radioactive waste” and could lead to serious accidents while turning some communities into “nuclear waste dumps”.

Moreover, there is “no guarantee these nuclear experiments will ever generate electricity safely and affordably,” O’Donnell said, since SMRs are still relatively untested.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May called government funding for nuclear projects a “fraud.”

“It has no part in fighting the climate emergency,” May said. “In fact, it takes valuable dollars away from things that we know work, that can be implemented immediately, in favour of untested and dangerous technologies that will not be able to generate a single kilowatt of electricity for a decade or more.”

Liberal MP Jenica Atwin, New Democrat Alexandre Boulerice, and Bloc Québecois MP Mario Simard also attended the media event, the National Post reports. Atwin, who was first elected as a Green in 2019 before crossing the floor, “is the only Liberal to publicly break ranks so far, but said she has had conversations with colleagues who appear to be ‘open-minded’ to learning more about her concerns,” the Post says.

Advocacy groups like the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA) have also pushed back against SMRs, arguing they “pose safety, accident, and proliferation risks” akin to traditional nuclear reactors. CELA urged the federal government to “eliminate federal funding for SMRs, and instead reallocate those investments into cost-effective, socially responsible, renewable solutions.”

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says renewables will “lead the push to replace fossil fuels” but that nuclear can help in countries where it is accepted. As of 2022, there were only three SMR projects in operation—one each in Russia, China, and India, CBC News reported.

Canada’s first SMR passes pre-licencing

In Ontario, which currently produces 60% of its electricity from conventional nuclear stations, plans for one such SMR passed a regulatory checkpoint in March. Slated to be Canada’s first new nuclear reactor since 1993, the BWRX-300 is being built by Ontario Power Generation (OPG) and North Carolina-based GE Hitachi.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) said it found “no fundamental barriers to licencing” the BWRX-300 after a pre-licencing vendor design review. As an assessment requested by the developer, the design review makes a preliminary identification of shortcomings. It is an integral part of the regulatory process, aimed at providing feedback to the vendor about “how it is addressing Canadian regulatory requirements and CNSC expectations in its design and design activities,” a CNSC spokesperson told The Energy Mix in an email.

The BWRX-300 is the first SMR to pass such a review, reported the Globe and Mail. It is also expected to be North America’s first grid-scale deployment of an SMR. The CNSC nod of approval is a checkpoint in OPG’s plans for the Darlington New Nuclear Project (DNNP), which will bring the BWRX-300 SMR to the existing Darlington nuclear station in Bowmanville.

Darlington is Canada’s second-largest nuclear facility by energy output, capable of meeting around 20% of Ontario’s current power demand. It is also the only site in Canada licenced for a new nuclear build with an accepted environmental assessment, thanks to a prior application process from 2006. The project that underwent assessment was cancelled in 2014, but OPG maintained the licence and resumed planning activities for the site in 2020, with operations set to begin in 2028.

It has no part in fighting the climate emergency.

 

– Elizabeth May, Green Party leader

CNSC staff concluded in their review that GE Hitachi “understands and has correctly interpreted the intent of regulatory requirements for the design of nuclear power plants in Canada” and that they “did not identify any fundamental barriers to licencing.”

The review is not binding on the commission and does not involve the issuance of a licence, but its completion does give OPG “a head start on licencing,” said GE Hitachi spokesperson Jonathan Allen.

However, the pre-licencing review also revealed “some technical areas that need further development,” CNSC said. The commission will require OPG to supply further details on severe accident analysis and the engineered features credited for mitigation. OPG must also demonstrate that the reactor’s design meets the requirement for two separate and diverse means of reactor shutdown (or an alternative approach) and provide further information “on the protective measures for workers in the event of an out-of-core criticality accident.”

“From the list of areas needed for further development, it looks like [GE Hitachi] has some work to do,” said Allison Macfarlane, director of the University of British Columbia’s public policy school, who chaired the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) between 2012 and 2014.

BWRX-300 raises safety questions

But Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told The Mix he has concerns about the design. He pointed to a joint CNSC-NRC review that identified several issues associated with reactor containment, including a potential for “reverse flow” of steam from the containment back into the reactor vessel under certain accident conditions. The review also found that the reactor’s reliance on isolation condensers may not always be effective to remove heat from the reactor during loss-of-coolant accidents.

“The consequences of a failure of isolation condensers is apparent from the fate of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1, which experienced a core melt only hours after the system was lost,” Lyman said, citing the 2011 nuclear disaster in Ōkuma, Japan.

He added he is “extremely skeptical” that the BWRX-300 design will mature quickly enough to allow CNSC to make a meaningful determination of its safety in time for the anticipated 2028 start date. SMR designs need to undergo further testing and analysis before they can be considered safe, and yet vendors are rushing to deploy new, untested reactor designs without going through the necessary stages of technology development, including testing of full-scale prototypes, Lyman said.

“History has shown that shortcuts in this process are an invitation to disaster,” he added.

SMRs fall under the same Class 1A Nuclear Facilities Regulations as traditional reactors, so they do receive the same level of CNSC scrutiny. With its mandate to ensure the safe conduct of nuclear activities in Canada, the commission “will only issue a licence if the applicant has demonstrated the reactor can be operated safely,” the spokesperson said.

Next steps for the DNNP include a CNSC assessment, already under way, to review OPG’s licence application. This will result in a Commission Member Document that offers results and recommendations to an independent commission. Then there will also be two public hearings. The first is slated for January 2024 and will consider the applicability of the previous environmental assessment to the BWRX-300. A separate, future hearing will determine whether to issue a construction licence for the DNNP.

“It is the independent commission who will make the decision as to whether the licensee or applicant is qualified to carry on the proposed activities and in a safe manner that protects the public and the environment,” the CNSC spokesperson said.

This article by The Energy Mix is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

The post Are small modular reactors a dangerous distraction from climate action? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Proponents of nuclear power argue that we will need it to meet our greenhouse gas emissions targets. But to paraphrase Australian feminist and activist Irina Dunn, the world needs nuclear energy to address climate change like a fish needs a bicycle. 

It’s a bad fit given our need to dramatically and quickly reduce our greenhouse gas pollution at the lowest possible cost.

Nuclear is no bargain, as the skewed ratio of nuclear shutdowns to start-ups worldwide amply proves. Of 13 nuclear reactors scheduled to come online in 2020, only three actually did. The others were all delayed. In the U.S., we see a growing lineup of nuclear operators looking for bailouts, while in Ontario, only the willingness of our governments to absorb huge cost overruns has kept nuclear afloat.

Nuclear energy’s heavy costs and long timelines matter because we all know we’re at the 11th hour on climate action. If we don’t drastically reduce emissions now, we stand no chance of keeping warming to even an uncomfortable 1.5°C. So what’s Ontario’s plan? Increase gas plant use by 500% or more by 2040 while new and rebuilt reactor projects are underway. This may be just about the most backward approach we could take at a time when Ontario is nowhere near meeting even the Ford government’s unambitious climate targets.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) recently announced it’s teaming up with U.S.-based GE Hitachi to develop a $3-billion reactor that will not be particularly small (300 megawatts) or in any way modular (this remains a completely custom product). The result is that the projected cost, according to the Canadian nuclear industry itself, of power from this reactor will be an astronomical 16.3 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) – at a time when the global average cost of new solar and wind energy is hovering between 3 and 7 cents per kWh. And the currently unapproved reactor likely won’t be operational until 2030 at the earliest.

Currently, OPG charges 9.6 cents for power from its reactors. That’s after Ontario ratepayers and taxpayers spent years paying off the enormous debt racked up by our nuclear projects, which essentially bankrupted the old Ontario Hydro. This is roughly double what Alberta is now paying for solar energy, and almost double what Quebec has offered to charge Ontario for power from its vast waterpower system. And OPG acknowledges that its price for nuclear power will have to rise to 13.7 cents per kWh to pay for the rebuilding of reactors at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, east of Toronto. In 1975, Ontario Hydro estimated the cost of building the Darlington station would be $3.2 billion. The actual cost was $14.3 billion.

Nuclear is no bargain, as the skewed ratio of nuclear shutdowns to start-ups worldwide amply proves.

The nuclear industry’s answer to its long and troubled history of massive cost overruns, premature shutdowns and accidents is to promote a new type of “friendlier” nuclear – small modular reactors (SMRs). But to date they’re all in the development or research stage. 

This fall, the U.K. government announced at the UN climate summit in Glasgow that it was handing luxury car manufacturer Rolls-Royce more than £200 million to develop its SMR technology. Given the massively over-budget and years-late Hinkley Point conventional nuclear project, it’s clear why the British government is eager to change horses. But with offshore wind power now costing Brits half of what power from Hinkley will cost, it’s not surprising that there is no big rush by the EU to follow in Britain’s footsteps when it comes to its investments in SMRs. 

Nuclear has already shrunk from 26% to 17% of the European Union’s power supply since 2015. Germany continues to work its way toward a full nuclear phase-out and is integrating ever-higher levels of renewable energy into its grid. Germany, like all countries that have used nuclear power for decades, will have to find a home for millions of tonnes of radioactive waste, but at least they won’t continue to produce it as the British and Canadians seem determined to do.

Ontario’s dedication to nuclear power is unnecessary. Quebec keeps offering to supply its neighbour with power at a third of the cost of juice from OPG’s dream reactor. Ontario has enough transmission capacity right now to triple its electricity imports from Quebec and could also dramatically increase its interprovincial transmission capacity, using Hydro One’s existing transmission corridors, at a very small fraction of OPG’s budget for its various nuclear projects. 

In addition, Hydro-Québec’s hydroelectric reservoirs can act like a giant battery for our wind and solar energy. By integrating our wind and solar energy with Hydro-Québec’s reservoirs, we can convert our intermittent renewable power into a firm 24/7 source of baseload electricity supply for Ontario. The previous Liberal government made two smallish deals with Quebec to purchase their surplus water power and storage. In 2020, Ontario’s net electricity imports from Quebec amounted to just 3% of our total. 

But that’s just one way to store intermittent renewable power. We are seeing rapid advances in battery technology, and costs for battery storage are sliding down the same cost curve that solar and wind already have. We have the potential to use our electric vehicles’ (EV) batteries to store surplus wind and solar energy and to provide this power back to our electricity grid during peak demand hours to help phase out our gas and nuclear plants. After all, our cars sit idle for 95% of the hours of the day and we don’t want our EVs to be an underused resource in the battle against climate change.

With the cost of renewables continuing to drop, we can get far more climate bang for our buck by investing in energy efficiency, wind and solar energy, two-way chargers for our EVs, and by expanding our east–west electricity grid – rather than sticking with high-cost nuclear and polluting gas plants. The last thing we need now are costly and delaying distractions from real action on climate. 

Angela Bischoff is the director of Ontario Clean Air Alliance.

The post We don’t have time to wait for the emissions-reduction nuclear power could bring appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“Canada can be a world leader in this promising, innovative, zero-emissions energy technology, and this is our plan to position ourselves in an emerging global market,” Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan said in a statement.

The governments of New Brunswick, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta, together with the federal government, advocate that small modular reactors (SMRs) are essential if Canada is to achieve a net-zero economy by 2050. According to the feds’ 2018 Call to Action report on the mini nuclear reactors, “SMRs are a reliable, clean, non-emitting source of energy, with costs that are predictable and competitive with other alternatives.” 

The first problem with these claims is that SMRs don’t yet exist and aren’t expected to exist for a decade, making these claims dubious. It’s not the only questionable claim made by proponents.

Are SMRs a clean, zero-emission source of power? 

Nuclear reactors emit much lower concentrations of carbon than fossil fuels, so one could claim they are zero-emission. But they have their own, uniquely harmful, emissions. From thousands of tonnes of spent fuel to hundreds of thousands of tonnes of mine tailings, nuclear power leaves a radioactive trail that is an immediate threat to waterways and water tables and is lethal for hundreds of thousands of years. SMRs will only add to that.

In 2010, Ad Standards Canada ruled that an ad claiming CANDU reactors were emission-free was “inaccurate and unsupported.” The Power Workers’ Union was expected to remove all ads containing the “emission-free” statement and to qualify any future claims. 

In response to concerns raised about SMR waste, Minister O’Regan said the federal government is working to ensure that Canada has “a clear plan in place for the safe, long-term management of all of our nuclear waste, including any future waste from SMRs. At the same time, we’ll continue to look at new and innovative technologies that can reduce or eliminate waste.”

After 70 years, the nuclear industry still hasn’t found a way to keep habitable environments safe from spent fuel for anything close to the time frames required for it to be harmless. There have been many plans in the past and there are current plans but all have one thing in common: they are unfit for purpose.

Some SMR technologies promise to use CANDU spent fuel in the SMR, claiming this will reduce both the radioactivity and quantity of the spent fuel. This claim is theoretical, based on proprietary data, and a report published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said doing so would be “playing with fire,” noting that the process, called pyroprocessing, will exacerbate the spent fuel storage and disposal challenges, not mitigate them. 

Will SMRs be safe?

Canadians have been lulled into a sense of security about nuclear reactors, and for good reason: the Canadian CANDU reactor design is hands-down the safest in the world. However, fissionable material in a self-sustaining chain reaction is never entirely safe. Though a nuclear reactor has layers of controls, the control must be continuous and flawless. Accidents happen – equipment failure and human error have been the causes of all nuclear accidents. And, as Fukushima demonstrated, natural disasters can precipitate both.

Unlike CANDU reactors that use natural uranium as fuel, SMRs will require fuel that has been “enriched,” increasing the concentration of plutonium. Since plutonium is the “active ingredient” in nuclear weapons, the potential for nuclear proliferation increases, and SMR fuel production and transportation will require increased security. Concerns over safety are not limited to the actual fuel and its reactions. Many of the SMR designs being considered in Canada have a much higher operating temperature than existing reactors, and some have a much more corrosive environment. The materials required to house the reaction, the reactor itself, do not exist yet and their development is in its infancy. 

Will SMRs be a cost-effective source of power?

Projects for constructing and refurbishing nuclear power stations have a solid track record for coming in years behind schedule and billions over budget. It appears that SMRs are following the same trajectory: NuScale Power, an SMR development firm based in Portland, Oregon, may be the closest to having a functioning, approved SMR. To date, the U.S. government has invested $1.6 billion. In 2015, the estimated total development cost was $3 billion; today it is $6.1 billion. In 2008, NuScale predicted that its SMR would be online in 2016; today, it predicts that it will be 2029.

Nonetheless, SMR proponents have suggested that the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for SMRs will be on par with renewables. However, there is a plethora of independent, peer-reviewed papers that indicate much higher costs, including a recent Canadian report that concludes the LCOE of an SMR could be 10 times the cost of wind, solar or diesel. With the costs of renewable energy quickly plummeting, and given the rapid evolution of renewable generation and storage technologies, it’s unlikely SMRs will be competitive. 

A range of power-generation and storage technologies that are clean, emissions-free, safe and low cost, is imminent. Within 10 years, these technologies will be widespread, fully incorporated into all levels of society, and deployed to all regions – all before the first SMR comes online. In all likelihood, by the time an SMR comes to market, there will be a more economical and environmentally responsible alternative in place.

While the rhetoric is persuasive, the case for SMRs doesn’t stand up to objective scrutiny. Allocating climate-change funds to them is a travesty. 

Rick Cheeseman is author of SMR Facts & Fictions / PRM Faits et Fictions. He has degrees in Physics and Education and has worked in the nuclear industry.

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At the same time, at this time, it appears that we need it. How much and for how long is up for debate, as is the decision to extend the life of existing plants or build new ones. But to abandon nuclear “cold turkey” as we enter the most crucial stages in the global fight against climate change would be like cuffing a boxer’s hands before he enters the 12th round of a title match.

Nuclear power seems just as polarizing as ever. On the one hand is an industry that continues to tout fission reactors as the golden standard for clean energy production, despite past failings and repeated claims of a renaissance that simply hasn’t happened. If we don’t embrace aggressive development of nuclear power the climate fight will surely be lost, they argue.

On the other side are environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, who see nuclear power as the evil of all evils. They hold the seemingly contradictory positions that we can avoid the worst impacts of climate change while at the same time phasing out nuclear before the next Fukushima hits – or worse. They correctly point out that continuing to generate nuclear waste is unethical as there’s still no credible way to safely and securely store such waste for the thousands of years required.

While most on both sides refuse to bend, some have been willing to take the rational middle ground. They include journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot, an occasional contributor to Corporate Knights, and fellow eco-activist Mark Lynas, author of Nuclear 2.0: A Green Future Needs Nuclear Power. Both have ruffled the feathers of anti-nukers for the past few years by publicly supporting nuclear power, and they’ve been called many nasty things as a result.

“I don’t understand why the nuclear question needs to divide the environment movement,” wrote Monbiot in a May 2011 column in the Guardian. His position is simple: Keeping our climate livable means eliminating dependence on fossil fuels by embracing all forms of low-carbon energy. Nuclear has its problems, and the industry should be viewed with suspicion, he says, but given a choice between it and coal, splitting atoms for energy must be part of the answer.

It’s easy to put passion ahead of reason in the debate. Anti-nuke greens stoke nuclear fears even though nuclear risks, from a health perspective, are tiny compared to coal risks. Forget the long-term health impacts of climate change; millions of premature deaths over the years from pollution deemed carcinogenic by the World Health Organization can be traced back to coal generation and mining. A NASA study published in March calculated that nuclear power has prevented 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths as well as 64 gigatons of greenhouse-gas emissions that would have otherwise been caused from generating power from fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, as Monbiot points out, “Scare stories about nuclear power are a gift to the coal industry,” because countries that stop using nuclear usually start burning more coal.

Still, just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean the potential for a mass-killing, population-displacing, economically devastating release of radiation close to a large city doesn’t exist, or that we don’t have dangerous stockpiles of waste to manage for what amounts to forever on the human timescale, even if all plants are shut down tomorrow. Is complacency on this point a responsible position to take?

Can new technologies, from small waste-fed reactors to thorium fuel to fusion power, place nuclear under the same halo that graces renewables? Many environmentalists remain skeptical, given the industry’s past track record, but we explore these technologies here.

Ultimately, as the cost of renewable power production falls and the availability of cheap natural gas rises, the fate of nuclear power may simply come down to pure economics, as Vermont Law School research fellow Mark Cooper points out here.

Under Cooper’s assessment, good or bad, an industry hopeful for growth may instead find itself struggling with its own decline.

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If nuclear power is to remain an important supplier of clean energy, many believe it has no choice but to shed its dirty image. This means the industry must show that accidents like Fukushima, however improbable, are virtually impossible; that waste can be safely managed over the long term, and even eliminated; and that nuclear power can be produced competitively on an open and level playing field with other energy sources, including natural gas and renewables.

“For nuclear to gain significant share, it must change,” according to a report from clean technology consultancy Kachan & Co. “There has never been a better time for mavericks to come forward with safer, better, less costly ways to split atoms, or, in the case of the elusive but reachable notion of fusion, to meld them together.”

Below are some technologies and approaches to nuclear development that could boost the industry’s fortunes – if they work.

Fast Neutron Reactors

The world’s largest stockpile of plutonium is currently stored in the United Kingdom, which over the decades has extracted about 118 tonnes of the dangerously radioactive substance from used nuclear fuel.

The U.K. government and its Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which manages the stockpile at great public expense, are now trying to figure out what to do with it. One option in the running is to build a new generation of nuclear reactor that can safely burn that plutonium directly as fuel, leaving behind a dramatically lower volume of waste that would remain highly radioactive for just hundreds rather than thousands of years.

The prospect of permanently reducing stockpiles of fuel waste and generating emission-free electricity at the same time may seem too good to be true. But that’s exactly what a joint venture between General Electric and Hitachi is aiming to do with its PRISM fast neutron reactor.

“The genesis of the PRISM concept occurred (in 1981) when I was still in college drinking beer,” explains Eric Loewen, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s chief consulting engineer.

The reactor builds on the Experimental Breeder Reactor II, which began operation in 1964 and was run successfully by the U.S. energy department’s Argonne National Laboratory for 10 years. Loewen says a PRISM “power block” – composed of two side-by-side reactors with total output of about 600 megawatts – was designed so that it could be built less expensively in a factory, the same way GE builds jet engines and locomotives.

In addition to tackling the waste issue, PRISM is also being touted as an inherently safer technology than conventional fission reactors. For one, it uses sodium instead of water as a coolant, meaning no pumps or backup generators are required for keeping the fuel cool if the grid unexpectedly goes down. This passive sodium cooling system “can remove residual heat from the core forever,” says Loewen, pointing out that backup systems for conventional reactors typically last only seven days or less. And the price tag? “We feel very comfortable it’s going to be cost-competitive,” he says.

GE Hitachi isn’t the only company pursuing fast reactor technologies that can consume used nuclear fuel. Others include General Atomics and TerraPower, which counts Bill Gates as an investor.

Modular

PRISM could be called a modular reactor because it is designed to be built in a factory setting and has a relatively small output compared to today’s conventional reactors, which are generally 1,200 megawatts or more in size. But a true modular reactor is defined as one under 300 megawatts.

For decades the trend in the nuclear industry has been to build reactors larger and larger on the belief that savings could be achieved through economies of scale. The problem is that projects became more complicated, delays and cost overruns grew more common, and the price tag for reactors was often larger that the market capitalization of the utility that was purchasing it.

It made nuclear plants a risky bet, and put more pressure on governments – i.e. taxpayers – to backstop them as a way to attract private-sector investment. For utilities, larger reactors meant larger points of failure on the grid, and much bigger problems if something went seriously wrong.

Several years ago this trend got thrown in reverse. Major industry players such as Babcock & Wilcox (Generation mPower) and Westinghouse, as well as newer entrants such as NuScale Power and Gen4 Energy, began realizing that small was smart and could be done economically, safely and more securely.

Instead of achieving savings through economies of scale, costs would be reduced by standardizing components and manufacturing smaller reactors in a controlled factory setting. The reactors would be delivered to a site almost fully constructed.

For utilities and the governments that have historically backed them, the idea of developing and financing bite-sized amounts of nuclear power as needed is a more attractive and politically acceptable option than swallowing massive cost and risk at one time.

NuScale, for example, has designed a reactor that measures just 65-feet tall and nine feet in diameter and can generate 45 megawatts of power. Gen4 Energy’s reactor generates 25 megawatts and comes with enough fuel to operate 10 years, after which the entire 20-ton reactor is removed and replaced like a big battery. Both are built within an underground vault to improve safety and security.

Many of the modular reactors being proposed use the same enriched uranium fuel as conventional light-water reactors, meaning they don’t address waste management issues as fast-neutron reactors do. Some, such as Flibe Energy, are choosing instead to use the radioactive element thorium, based on a fuel cycle developed in the 1960s but passed over because it couldn’t be weaponized like uranium.

Flibe says thorium is four times more common than uranium and that 6,600 tons of thorium can provide the energy equivalent of 65,000 tons of uranium. Using the company’s reactor technology, a plant would generate 4,000 times less mining waste and up to 10,000 times less nuclear waste than a conventional light-water reactor using enriched uranium.

Another bonus: Most of the nuclear waste produced (83 per cent) safely stabilizes within 10 years. The rest stabilizes in about 300 years. Again, this does nothing to address existing nuclear waste stockpiles resulting from the past use of uranium fuel.

Fusion

Our sun is a massive fusion machine with a gravitational pull so intense that the temperature it reaches is hot enough to fuse hydrogen nuclei into helium, releasing so much excess energy that it can sustain life on Earth from 150 million kilometres away.

Humanity has been able to replicate this process in a two-stage thermonuclear bomb, with devastating consequences. The challenge is to achieve fusion in a controlled way to generate clean power with near limitless supply.

It’s not as if we haven’t tried. The fusion pursuit has been ongoing since the 1950s, and over the decades some have even claimed success – and later been proven wrong. Remember cold fusion?

National and international efforts since the 1980s include the $20-billion-plus International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project located in France. It is targeting the commercial production of electricity via a nuclear fusion process by 2040.

The elusive goal for all these projects is to achieve net gain, which is essentially getting more power out of a fusion reaction than it takes to sustain it. Ideally, for such a reactor to be commercially viable, one unit of energy supplied should deliver back more than 10 times and up to 40 times the energy.

“Fusion is hard,” says Doug Richardson, chief executive officer of Vancouver-based General Fusion, one of several startups trying to do fusion power faster and at less cost than the ITER project.

Richardson says his company hopes to demonstrate “near” net gain in a controlled way sometime over the next year and believes a commercial plant that supplies clean electricity to the grid is possible within 10 to 15 years. Among its investors are Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and Canadian oil firm Cenovus.

Hopes for fusion have been raised in recent years because of the ITER project, says Richardson, but also because of the number of startups entering the field – such as Tri-Alpha Energy, Helion Energy and General Fusion – and the progress being shown by individual countries.

“In Japan, Korea and China, they are driving forward with great gusto. They’re going for it,” he says. “Certainly, if you look at China in the last year alone, they’ve made a commitment to make fusion happen (before 2030). It’s amazing the speed and money they’re putting into it.”

So why is fusion better than fission? Run-away reactions and meltdowns simply can’t happen with fusion plants. And its main byproducts are helium, a harmless gas, and a short-lived radioactive material called tritium.

It turns out tritium is one of two hydrogen isotopes needed to fuel a fusion reaction, so it can be captured and reused. The other isotope is deuterium, which is easily found in seawater. And we have lots of that.

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The bold claim seemed aimed at blunting a tsunami of bad news about the economics of nuclear, but the effort was based on erroneous assumptions and contradictions and is unlikely to revive the prospects of power by fission.

Their premise is that it is environmentalist opposition, not poor economics, that has stalled nuclear power development in market economies, and it is based on the misconception that nuclear power is “cheap” and a hope that “innovation and economies of scale can make new power plants even cheaper than existing plants.”

But the evidence shows that nuclear power has always been substantially more expensive than the alternatives and there is nothing in the historical or contemporary record to suggest that it will be less costly than low-carbon alternatives in the foreseeable future. The climate scientists who claim “much has changed since the 1970s” have not noticed the collapse of a nuclear renaissance caused by exactly the same problems that scuttled the nuclear sector in the 1980s – a tripling of the estimated costs and design and construction problems.

What if nuclear had a fit?

One of the most frequently used instruments for stimulating deployment of innovative clean energy technologies is to offer a feed-in tariff (FIT) to developers. A FIT sets a price that will be paid for power from a specific technology for a set period of time. The objective is to provide sufficient incentive to stimulate early deployment of the technology with the hope that improved learning and economies of scale will drive costs down. A FIT rate therefore provides a useful framework for thinking about stimulating deployment of technologies.

The starting point for setting a FIT rate is the direct economic cost of deploying the technology, but other costs have to be recognized. For example, there is the cost of integrating the resource into the electricity grid (systems costs). Social costs are not generally reflected in tariffs, but losing track of them for long-term decisions can create large hidden subsidies.

In his column, Porter cites cost estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) of 10.84 cents per kilowatt-hour for new nuclear power capacity. Based on this, he argues, nuclear costs are right in middle of the pack of low-carbon alternatives. However, he then notes that the British have committed to pay a guaranteed 14.9 cents per kilowatt-hour, adjusted annually for inflation as part of a 35-year power purchase contract (in effect, a FIT), for power from its proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point. This latter figure would make nuclear power more costly than onshore wind, gas with carbon capture and even solar photovoltaics in some places. It would barely be cost competitive with coal equipped with carbon capture technology.

But comparing costs for nuclear reactors not likely to be online for 10 years to the cost of alternatives that can be brought online in just a year ignores the strong downward trend in the cost of renewable-energy technologies and the opportunities today around energy efficiency.

Costs for renewables have fallen dramatically over the past two decades, and financial analysts, regulators and energy consultants expect them to be substantially more affordable a decade from now. At the same time, most studies exploring electricity options fail to include efficiency. The National Research Council, McKinsey & Company and many others cite the U.S. potential to decrease electricity demand by 20 to 30 per cent at a cost of about 3 to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. This large potential is not surprising given that the U.S. consumes about 50 per cent more electricity per dollar of income per capita than Germany. When weighed against this, nuclear power at present is a very expensive way to reduce carbon emissions and its cost disadvantage is likely to grow over the next couple of decades.

Systems costs

Renewables such as wind and solar require more transmission and complementary power to manage their variability, which increases the challenge of managing the grid. However, very large nuclear reactors also impose large transmission costs and a tremendous demand for spare capacity for times when reactors are unexpectedly and suddenly taken off line, or taken out of operation for maintenance and repair.

Moreover, the revolution in information and control technologies has advanced management of the grid to the point that several nations have already integrated up to 25 per cent renewables into their power mix. Advances in technology and design have made low-speed wind generation economically viable, and raised North Sea wind farm load factors to the range of 40 to 50 per cent. Utility-scale solar power with storage that allows it to be dispatchable is being sold in parts of the U.S. at a cost of 13 cents per kilowatt-hour. Distributed resources, such as efficiency and solar PV, actually reduce the need for distribution and transmission capacity.

A recent study by Citigroup argues that even at the high end, the overall cost advantage of renewables is not eliminated by the cost of integrating them into the system. Intelligent deployment and management can make renewables cost competitive with natural gas and therefore much more attractive than nuclear.

Social costs and benefits

The “nuclear is unavoidable” advocates are forced to confront the Fukushima accident and they do so by taking a very narrow non-economic view of total social costs, plowing into the debate about which technology kills more people – coal or nuclear. The primary impact of accidents is not death, however; it is economic disruption, social dislocation and psychological despair. Tokyo Electric Power did not go instantaneously bankrupt because the accident at Fukushima killed people. It went bankrupt because it created a social economic catastrophe and a clean-up problem that is beyond the capacity of any single company to deal with. The social cost of carbon in the long-term climate view is caused by the same underlying factors. It flows more from economic disruption and social dislocation than disease and death.

The problems of nuclear accidents and nuclear waste highlight the very large implicit subsidy that nuclear power has enjoyed in the U.S. and that cannot be ignored. Public policy has socialized the cost of nuclear accidents by capping the liability of utilities at a figure that is far below the damages that would result, while the public sector has taken responsibility for the long-term handling of nuclear waste.

Indeed, given the fact that there was as much dangerous radioactive material in waste storage at Fukushima as in the reactors, the climate scientists’ claim that we must view “safer nuclear systems” as “essential to any credible effort to develop an energy system that does not rely on the atmosphere as a waste dump” does not ring true. Shifting to a technology that treats the earth as a waste dump instead of the atmosphere makes little sense when there are alternatives that treat both the air and the land much more gently. Waiting for a nuclear technology that does not produce waste is an unacceptable answer, not only because nuclear advocates have been talking about it for decades, but also because the climate scientists calling for such solutions are the same ones insisting immediate action is needed.

When social benefits, like macroeconomic impacts, are considered, nuclear also does not fare very well. Efficiency and renewables exploit local resources and have bigger employment multipliers, although the differences are not nearly as large as the mythology on both sides would have it.

The bottom line

If the direct costs of low-carbon alternatives were roughly equal, the systems costs might tip the balance toward nuclear power, but social costs would tip it strongly back toward efficiency and renewables. Given the rapidly falling cost and potential of efficiency and renewables, the speed with which they can be deployed, as well as the availability of gas as a transition and complementary resource, the economically rational path for the next quarter century is crystal clear: New nukes aren’t necessary.

Shifting the debate to focus on an expensive, slow-to-build and inflexible “climate” solution like nuclear power, at least at this point in the game, is counterproductive when so many better alternatives are available to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution.

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