Do we need nuclear?

UK Energy and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband recently unveiled the Government’s long-awaited National Policy Statements (NPSs), which promise an expansion of renewables, nuclear power and clean coal technology. Quoting the threat of climate change, he called for a transition from a system that relies heavily on high carbon fossil fuels, to a radically different system that includes nuclear, renewable and clean coal power.

One of the statements deals with clean coal as per which any new coal power station over 300 MW will have to demonstrate full carbon capture and storage (CCS) to be allowed.

However, environmental groups are unhappy about the ambitions to expand nuclear generation capacity. How does one justify building more nuclear power stations when there is no solution to radioactive waste and when international regulators are saying there are huge uncertainties surrounding the basic safety of new reactor designs, they ask.

Of late there has also been a global call for nuclear supplying ‘clean’ base load power. How necessary is this baseload?

Any modern electricity system doesn’t rely on any plant’s ability to run continuously; rather, all plants together supply the grid, and the grid serves all loads. All power plants fail, varying only in their failures’ size, duration, frequency, predictability, and cause. Not just renewables.

Intermittence of coal and nuclear plants also occur, except that it affects less capacity at once, more briefly, far more predictably, and is easier and cheaper to manage, point experts.

Instead of building a surplus which is left idle often, a better idea may be to go for diverse sources spread over large geographical areas but managed by a reliable, intelligent power grid.

Do we need to go for massive expansion of nuclear plants? Has anyone thought about the security implications, say during the transport of fuel? Especially in a country like India where waylaying and siphoning fuel from tankers is a well-known occurrence?