OPINION | JEREMY GORDON
Jeremy Gordon is an independent communication consultant with 18 years of experience in the international energy industry. His company Fluent in Energy supports partners of all kinds to communicate matters of clean energy and sustainable development.
Keep young and beautiful
The drive to maximise reactor lifespans may be doing the industry a disservice. Instead of eking out every last minute, perhaps we should embrace innovation and renewal as a way to sustain the nuclear sector
THE UNIT: Illustration copyright Alexy Kovynev
are, these inter-generational lifespans make a poor basis for a thriving and innovative industry. The assumption in the last century that a nuclear power plant would last about 40 years was based on the typical lifespan for other large baseload plants of the time – coal-fired power stations. However, the engineering that went into nuclear plants was understandably considerably more robust while the skills of today’s engineers have been well used to keep them going. They have been remarkably successful in squeezing out every ounce of extra performance using materials, technologies and analysis that didn’t exist beforehand and had perhaps not even been dreamed of when these installations were designed and built. It has been a brilliant way to get more value from existing assets. This kind of long-term operation is exactly the right
As a young man my grandfather worked here as a reactor operator and he once saw the old bloke who started up the plant
ORKERS TODAY HAVE BEEN
fortunate to inherit most of the world’s current nuclear fleet from the previous generation. It is by applying impressive ingenuity that it has become commonplace for them to extend the service
lives of these reactors to 60 or even as much as perhaps 80 years. However, as impressive as these engineering feats
14 | August 2022 |
www.neimagazine.com
thing to do in the 2020s for reasons of both economics and environment. Numerous reports have shown that the long-term operation of nuclear plants is the cheapest way available to add low-carbon electricity generating capacity. It is as cheap as the cheapest renewable energy generation – offshore wind – on a levelised cost basis, even without considering the potential supplementary benefits of nuclear power like its reliable despatchable power and support for grid stabilisation. It’s also a fact that when a nuclear power plant is closed it is not necessarily clean renewables, but often gas that fills the gap. In this industry we already knew this would be the case, but ultimately experience has borne that out. This reality is doubly important in 2022 as security of energy supply becomes more pressing, prices keep on climbing
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