Is nuclear power a rich country’s game?

How will smaller economies absorb the cost of accidents?

A major technology breakthrough might one day allow modern power grids to be based primarily or entirely on solar or wind energy. But until we figure out how to make more efficient, longer-lasting, higher-density solar systems or grid-scale batteries in less environmentally problematic ways, we will need plentiful, safe, compact and low-pollution power.

Land is also a resource.

Photovoltaic solar panels need to be replaced every 25 years or so, their production is environmentally problematic, they are difficult to recycle, and they consume a lot of space. They are useful in many applications, but they cannot yet provide grid-scale power in more populous regions.

Nuclear energy offers abundant electricity with no carbon emissions and very little pollution. Nuclear also enjoys, by three orders of magnitude(!), fewer fatalities due to pollution and accidents.

This research does not include the Fukushima disaster’s 573 deaths, nor the unquantified deaths due to heightened cancer risk from greater environmental concentrations of radiation, but that would not significantly change the comparison with fossil fuels. This does reflect deaths across the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle (mining, extraction and processing).

These characteristics alone make nuclear energy attractive from a technology point of view. They might even be sufficiently compelling to some governments to support the sector. The industry already enjoys one form of support: the government’s implicit reinsurance policy that covers the costs to clean up major accidents.

This first-order analysis of nuclear energy suggests it is an attractive power source that combats pollution and supports economic growth, especially in lower-income regions that suffer from significant air pollution. But as we shift from a business-as-usual analysis and fully bake in the catastrophic costs that occur every few decades, the picture becomes more complicated.

Paying for accidents

The problem with nuclear energy in smaller economies is the cost of addressing its large and extraordinarily expensive accidents, ones that economies in those regions cannot absorb.

Japan can afford to store radioactive wastewater indefinitely. Can Nigeria?

For example, Japan’s 2012 Fukushima Daichi nuclear accident is estimated to cost $200 billion — $500 billion in cleanup, evacuations and other outlays. Japan’s annual GDP is $5 trillion, so total multiyear cleanup costs would represent about 4–10% of Japan’s annual GDP.

Cleaning up an oil spill in Brazil. Imagine this process with cesium-127 contamination.

Even after adjusting for lower price levels for labor, consider the cleanup costs of a Fukushima-sized accident on economies like those of India, Bangladesh, Nigeria or even Brazil. Consider further the fact that these are less developed countries with weaker safety standards and more lax regulatory regimes than those of advanced economies like Japan.

Barring new designs that significantly de-risk these — and it is claimed that newly-developed passive safety features can — I suspect that increased adoption of nuclear power will not be the no-brainer in smaller countries that its proponents claim.

Open Questions

I would love to better understand three aspects.

1. What is our true level of understanding and comfort around new “passive safety” features. How proven and robust are these design features, and how confident are we these will translate into real-world improvements? How likely to offset these improvements are the new, unexplored risks of novel plant designs?
2. What is the true toll on public health of nuclear accidents? Is the diffuse effect of cancer risk being counted in the same way as fossil fuel pollution? Where are these studies?
3. Like the above, what is the true public health toll of nuclear waste disposal and storage? Have there been any successful programs to store this waste in third countries (e.g., the US, Mexico and Canada sharing a nuclear waste depository)?