Will nuclear energy replace fossil fuels? #AskAFuturist

Tim Panton (@steely_glint) asks: “Will nuclear energy replace fossil fuels? If so, will it be fission or fusion?”This is one of those questions that is hard to answer accurately without sounding like you are trying to fudge it. Because the answers are ‘yes, but only some’ and ‘both, but not at the same time’. And also, ‘it depends what application you’re talking about’, and ‘over what time frame?’

One of many

The first challenge in answering this question comes back to one of the five major trends I track that I see popping up in every domain I examine: choice. We live in an age of low-friction innovation, where building novel solutions to problems is easier than it ever has been. That does not mean it is easy, but it does mean that the turnover of new technologies is faster, and that the variety of technological solutions is wider.The adoption of these technologies is also easier and cheaper. With lower barriers to entry, people can afford to experiment more. And with lower innovation and production costs, suppliers can afford to support smaller niches.The result is that there is rarely one answer to any problem. It is impossible to say that nuclear will replace fossil fuels because LOTS of things will replace fossil fuels. Indeed, they already are. Check out this chart from the IEA’s 2019 World Energy Outlook report: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/installed-power-generation-capacity-by-source-in-the-stated-policies-scenario-2000-2040This is specifically for the power generation market – electricity, in other words. What it shows is that coal consumption has flattened, and oil is down, while gas continues to grow. Meanwhile, solar and wind are on incredible growth trajectories. Hydro and other renewables are also growing. In the IEA’s projections, nuclear is fairly flat. This is all over a 20-year time frame with projected global energy consumption continuing to rise.

Fission flat

These projections seem plausible to me. We might hope to see a faster decline in gas and coal offset by even more dramatic shifts to solar and battery storage. This is possible with large infrastructure investment in those countries with highly centralised grids. Given the noises about economic stimulus investment in the UK and elsewhere, we might just see some of this. But it is hard to see the nuclear picture being anything other than (largely) flat.This is not because there will not be new nuclear. But lots of reactors in places like the UK and France are ageing and well beyond their original design life. So even large-scale development will only hit replacement levels. There is some hope for smaller scale nuclear systems that might fit well into a more distributed grid infrastructure as a back up to primarily renewable generation, or that could be clustered to replace coal or ageing nuclear plants. Certainly, lots of investors, including governments, think this idea has strong prospects. But it is hard to see it growing at a rate that makes it a serious candidate for replacing the majority of fossil fuel consumption, even just for energy generation.

Commercial fusion?

Meanwhile, fusion research continues to make slow progress. It is hard to see it hitting commercialisation at any real scale in the 20-year IEA time frame. Even if the model is proven, it is unlikely anyone in the west would be able to build out a reactor within another decade. China is a different matter and there, practical fusion power might be a valuable alternative to the country’s enormous reliance on coal. But still, it is hard to see it making a serious impact in the next twenty years.

Renewables

Meanwhile, solar, wind, hydro and tidal power advance apace. As does the storage technology to offset their intermittent feed. Done at very large scale, these projects require very large investment – the sort that takes years to assemble or that has to be underwritten by governments. But done at smaller scale, they can be rolled out relatively quickly and cheaply. This feels like the best bet for a lot of fossil fuel replacement.Roughly two thirds of grid energy consumption in the UK is in residential and commercial venues, where small scale renewables and storage might present an opportunity to shift away from grid power for at least a proportion of usage. The shift to electric vehicles means that these sources might also power a lot of our transport. Only in large scale industry like steel manufacturing does small scale renewables and storage feel less practical – though I would be delighted to be proven wrong on this. Perhaps here is the opportunity for small scale nuclear? Single or clustered plants could be used to provide consistent, clean(er) energy to major consumers and the surround areas.

Looking beyond

In the longer term, fission feels like a dead technology. It is cleaner than coal but still leaves a lot of radioactive mess behind that we don’t have a good solution for. I do believe we will one day crack the fusion challenge, allowing us to generate a lot of energy in a small space. But remember: however sophisticated the heat source, nuclear fusion would still be used to make steam to spin a turbine. This is the same way we have been generating power for 140 years or so. Even the Romans were using steam to make stuff spin. It feels a little old fashioned. The sci-fi nerd in me wants something solid-state, more like Iron Man’s arc reactor. But sadly no-one outside of the fictional universe knows how that might work.So, will nuclear energy replace fossil fuels? Yes, but only some.

Future batteries: new ways to store energy

New materials open up incredibly possibilities for the future of energy storage, including supercapatteries and structural batteriesIf I say the word ‘battery’, I know the image that will pop into your head. It will probably be a little cylindrical AA, the type that powers toys or remote controls. Maybe, if you’re a car nut, it will be a big lead acid unit with the terminals on top. Either way, we think of batteries as discrete components: chemical reactions in a metal or plastic shell that deliver us power on the move.But what if they didn’t need to be?A battery is basically two electrodes in a chemical bath. OK, there’s a bit more to it than that. But once you take that fundamental simplicity into account, you begin to think: why couldn’t anything be a battery? What might future batteries look like?This idea was brought to life by a conversation with a researcher at the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre, Dr Richard Fields. Pointing to the giant new engineering campus being built across the road from the National Graphene Institute (NGI), Fields, a Graphene Application Specialist, asked why the slurry they were pouring couldn’t be the electrolyte, the chemical soup that makes up most of the volume of a battery. Maybe it could be integrated into the walls of the building?You wouldn’t want to do this with current battery chemistry, which relies on expensive and dangerous lithium-based electrodes. But we can foresee a time when the electrode material is cheaper, easier to manufacture at scale, and safer. Graphene and other single layer materials may have a role to play here, with graphene already being looked at as a modifier for lithium-based cathode materials giving them longer life and enhanced charging capabilities.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it's a supercapattery!

These aren’t the only changes coming to batteries. Richard and I discussed the prospects for the ‘supercapattery’, a hybrid between a battery and a supercapacitor. Supercapacitors store energy as an electric field. This means they can’t store it for as long as a battery, or store as much. But they can be charged incredibly quickly, and discharged very fast, providing a big squirt of energy when needed. Because they don’t rely on chemical components that degrade over time and use, they can also last an incredibly long time. Combine a supercapacitor and a battery and you can create a device that charges quickly, stores loads of energy, and has a very long lifespan - potentially millions of cycles rather than tens of thousands for a battery.Build a supercapattery into a house and you would have an incredible reservoir of energy on tap that could store all the renewable energy you could generate. You might be able to do away with wiring as well, depending on the design. Imagine sheet electrodes in a solid battery panel behind the plasterboard. Want to add a socket? Just plunge a pair of connections through the wall to link up with the sheets inside.OK, this last idea might be a little far-fetched – Fields and I were going off at excited tangents at this point. But it’s important to think like this about the future of energy and future batteries. Our demands on the energy network are changing incredibly rapidly, so our approach to servicing them needs to be equally radical. We need to reshape the way we generate, store, and distribute energy over the next twenty years to support changing demand and the needs of the environment, in terms of carbon release, air pollution and more.One of the ways we do that is to stop thinking about batteries - and other components of the energy infrastructure - as being discrete items. Just as with Tesla's solar roof tiles, with the application of a new range of materials and manufacturing techniques we can increasingly make energy generation and storage part of the function of another structural component.

If The State Can't Keep the Lights On, Who Will?

The Daily Telegraph covered Britain’s energy shortage recently with the headline “Britain could face blackouts if the wind doesn’t blow”. Clear about where the responsibility lay for the small margin between our generating capacity and consumption, the article went on to state that “the margin has eroded in recent years as environmental regulations force the closure of old coal-fired power plants.”

In case you didn’t know, since I wrote this piece last year, the forecast margin between our peak consumption and demand for electricity has fallen to 1.2%. To cope, National Grid has taken a number of emergency measures to boost this to 5.1%, such as paying large consumers to reduce their usage at peak times. But as The Guardian pointed out last year, “The now dismantled state-owned Central Electricity Generating Board at one time used to argue that a minimum capacity to cope with peak demand should not be less than 25%. “#How did we get into this situation? Well you could point to environmental legislation: the EU Large Combustion Plants Directive has played a role in the recent closure of coal and oil-fired power plants. But few would argue with the reasoning behind it — to cut emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. As the DEFRA website puts it: “These pollutants are major contributors to acid deposition, which acidifies soils and freshwater bodies, damages plants and aquatic habitats, and corrodes building materials. Nitrogen oxides react with volatile organic compounds in the presence of sunlight to form ozone that can adversely affect human health and ecosystems.”Those evil Eurocrats. Who would want to stop that?Of course it is not only coal and oil fired power stations that have shut, or are scheduled to shut. By my count (using this source and news stories), two nuclear stations have closed already and a further six are due to close in the next ten years.Is this more green Eurocracy?Nope. The LCPD doesn’t apply to nuclear power stations. So what do these stations that are closing or scheduled for closure have in common with the coal and oil plants that have shut?Age.The newest of these plants began delivering power to the grid in 1988, 27 years ago. The oldest? 1967.When companies say that they have had to shut their plants because of environmental legislation, what they mean is that the technologies at the core of these stations is so old that it is uneconomic to control their very harmful pollution. The reason we might not be able to keep the lights on is this: whether or not the wind blows, we simply haven’t built enough generating capacity in the last twenty years. Now what happened twenty years ago that might mean we stopped building so much generating capacity? Privatisation.This isn’t a tirade against privatisation — I try to stay away from the ‘big P’ politics in this blog. Rather it is a statement of fact: the state no longer has the powers it needs to keep the lights on for its citizens.It’s not for lack of trying. Take the first new nuclear plant to be built in the UK, scheduled for completion some time in the mid 2020s at Hinkley Point in Somerset. The government has had to guarantee the operator of this plant a minimum price of £92.50 per megawatt hour, inflation linked, for 35 years. Similar prices have had to be provided to renewable energy companies to support their investment. Yet every year the margin of safety seems to fall.It appears the private sector doesn’t want to take the risk on the long term returns a power station might provide. The government doesn’t seem to be able to offer sufficient guarantees to the private sector to make it attractive. And even when it does, it faces challenges over state aid rules.None of the scenarios for future energy produced recently by National Grid suggest the construction of more than one gas turbine plant. There’s notionally more nuclear capacity planned but only one of National Grid’s scenarios shows anything like the total capacity proposed being available. It seems likely that only a couple of these stations will be completed and most likely not before their predecessors are due to be shut down.So where’s the light at the end of the tunnel? Who is going to build the generating capacity to keep the lights on?Firstly, it’s bad news for the Telegraph: wind power walked away with the biggest subsidies in the recent ‘Contracts for Difference’ auction, meaning new on and offshore plants will be constructed. But this only accounts for about 2GW of capacity, and I estimate we’re losing more than ten times that between 2012 and 2023. The total budget for the CfD programme (around £325m) is a fraction of what might be needed to support this scale of generation.What’s going to make up the difference?Well we already import energy from Europe. And most scenarios produced by National Grid recently suggest this will continue.But the big increases? It looks like it’s going to have to come from us folks: small scale generation. Combined heat and power. Community waste projects. Solar panels on your roof and batteries in your basement(Elon Musk will be delighted). And, of course, the continuing decline in demand.This all presents a big challenge for the grid, which wasn’t designed for energy storage or distributed generation and will need major investment to transform. A level of investment the private sector will bear? That’s a post for another day.