Nuclear power down for the count

One example of the gap between Generation IV rhetoric and reality was Transatomic Power's decision to give up on its molten salt reactor R&D project in the US in September 2018 - just weeks before the public release of the New Fire propaganda film that heavily promotes the young entrepreneurs who founded Transatomic. The company tried but failed to raise a modest US$15 million for the next phase of its R&D project.

An article by four current and former researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Engineering and Public Policy, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in July 2018, argues that no US advanced reactor design will be commercialised before mid-century.

Further, the Carnegie authors systematically investigated how a domestic market could develop to support a small modular reactor industry in the US over the next few decades - including using them to back up wind and solar, desalinate water, produce heat for industrial processes, or serve military bases - and were unable to make a convincing case.

Long-time energy journalist Kennedy Maize recently argued in POWER magazine that Generation IV R&D projects are "longshots" and that the "highest profile of the LWR apostates is TerraPower ... backed by Microsoft founder and multi-billionaire Bill Gates. Founded in 2006, TerraPower is working on a liquid-sodium-cooled breeder-burner machine that can run on uranium waste, while it generates power and plutonium, with the plutonium used to generate more power, all in a continuous process."

TerraPower recently abandoned its plan for a prototype reactor in China due to new restrictions placed on nuclear trade with China by the Trump administration.

Cost blowouts

The Bright New World lobby group might have cited some other pyrrhic wins in 2018. The French government abandoned previous plans to reduce nuclear power to 50 percent of total electricity generation by 2035 (compared to 71.6 percentcurrently) but still plans to shut 14 reactors by 2035. Cost estimates for two French-built reactors ‒ one in France and the other in Finland ‒ have increased by a factor of 2.5‒3and the reactors are the best part of a decade behind schedule.

The Vogtle reactor project in the US state of Georgia came close to being abandoned last year but it was rescued despite multi-year delays and monumental cost overruns (the estimate for two AP1000 reactors has doubled from US$14 billion to US$28 billion).

The current cost estimate for Vogtle reactors #3 and #4 is an order of magnitude greater than Westinghouse's 2006 estimate of US$1.4-$1.9 billion to build one AP1000 reactor. To find another blowout of that magnitude you'd need to go back to … Vogtle #1 and #2! Built in the 1970s and 1980s, the cost of the first Vogtle twin-reactor project skyrocketed 13-fold, from US$660 million to US$8.7 billion (around US$18 billion in today's money).

The only other reactor construction project in the US - a twin-reactor AP1000 project in South Carolina - was abandoned in 2017 after the expenditure of US$9‒10.4 billion. That disaster bankrupted Westinghouse and almost bankrupted its parent company Toshiba. So much for the nuclear renaissance.

The Era of Nuclear Decommissioning

In many countries with nuclear power, the prospects for new reactors are bleak and rear-guard battles are being fought to extend the lifespans of ageing reactors that are approaching or past their design date. A new era is approaching ‒ the Era of Nuclear Decommissioning ‒ following on from nuclear power's growth spurt from the 1970s to the 1990s then 20 years of stagnation.