Energy-hungry nations like China India France Germany have so few solutions to their base load power needs other than nuclear.
Germany has 17 nuclear power plants. India is committed to a 20-year US$175 billion plan to double its nuclear power supply. China has plans to build 27 new nuclear power stations. There are 62 nuclear power stations planned to be built around the world at the moment. 10 are in Russia 5 in South Korea 5 in India. China and India are suspending all pending licences while there is a safety review. No-one seriously expects they will not ultimately go ahead.
There are 443 nuclear power plants in the world.
If they were replaced by coal-fired power plants using existing technology an extra 2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases would be emitted per year.
If they were replaced by gas-powered plants an extra 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases would be emitted per year.
A huge global turn to gas would drive up the price of gas.
If western Europe the US Japan and Australia left the nuclear power field but China India and Russia and other high-growth nations resumed their nuclear power programs after a short pause the result would be very economically unbalanced in favour of the nuclear countries.
If China’s reactor building plan goes according to planby 2020 it will require the present world output of uranium (now 60000 tonnes a year) to increase by 7000 tonnes a year. The only obstacle to increasing nuclear power’s role in China is the availability of uranium.
BHP Billiton (owns the world’s largest uranium depost at Olympic Dam and Yeelirrie in WA).
Australia has the world’s largest known recoverable uranium reserves about 31% of the global total.
Nuclear plants are enormously expensive to build. Their advantage for countries heavily dependent on imported fuel is that once they are built they do not cost very much at all to run. You only have to look at what is happening to oil and gas prices to understand why China and the rest might want to broaden their fuel bases. Countries that are non-self-sufficient in energy will always want to diversify their energy portfolios and there aren’t many alternatives. The Japanese disaster might even end up accelerating the development of nuclear power.
The Fukushima tragedy will end any talk that Australia might embrace a nuclear future. Australia is not among the ranks of the under-resourced in energy sources. We have a wide range of choices: high quality sunlight wind wave geothermal gas coal.
Local uranium producer Paladin Energy chief John Borshoff has been a strong advocate for nuclear in Australia but admits the debate is now lost.
In places like Australia where we have no nuclear energy the debate is dead. In places where they were debating building for the first time the debate has probably been set back a year or two. In places like China and India it will probably only be a couple of months. Two of the US utilities planning new reactors are still moving forward. The Japanese have no option but to stick with nuclear. If it doesn’t import uranium it is going to import more coal and gas which is more expensive.
Australia exports about a third of its uranium to Japan.
The biggest question for the uranium sector will be whether demand which has been skyrocketing will continue to expand.