Political Branding of Nuclear and Gas as Green By EU

By Ian Page – 2022.01.03

The politics are confusing but the classification system to be used by the EU for evaluating energy sources slipped out on Jan 1 when no one was interested!

It's a draft but if accepted would allow green investment funds to go into nuclear and gas.

There are caveats. Gas must release not more than an unspecified amount of CO2 per Kwh, nuclear must have plans for effective storage of waste.

Note my BOLD weasel words which imply either flexibility or more negotiations depending on your level of cynicism'

However, for nuclear, given that only Finland has a plausible active solution for nuclear disposal (the US, the UK have failed) I had to look up France which has the biggest feet of nuclear in Europe, ambitions to build more despite the disaster of their gen 3, and is probably the main player behind the classification of nuclear as green.

Their solution is Cigeo- Wikipedia is more informative than the Cigeo site. This is a 25 billion euros tunnelling activity for 250 km of tunnels, storing vitrified waste that can be retrieved for 100 years in case it is later then sealed in perpetuity.

Notably this project has not stored anything yet and does not include decommissioning costs for the 50 or so French nuclear sites. It assumes funding from the commercial operations of the nuclear plants, which in turn assumes that the sites will be commercially viable as lower cost renewals appear.

The costs are probably optimistic based on UK experience. The Nuclear decommissioning authority which is responsible for both waste disposal and decommissioning sites estimates " figures somewhere between £99 billion and £232 billion " These estimates rise each year currently at 124 billion spread over the next 120 years "or so" and mostly funded out of taxation, with some input from commercial operations until nuclear sites are closed.

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Cigéo[edit]

After 20 years of exploratory research, ANDRA intends to file in 2019 a request to build Cigéo (French: Centre industriel de stockage géologique), which will store underground the most radioactive waste from French nuclear power stations. The project is estimated to cost 25 billion euros. The Nuclear Safety Authority has confirmed that the rock has not moved for several million years, although it wants a solution to be found to the problem of bitumen deposits.[1]

The future storage centre would have an area of 600 hectares, for 250 kilometres of galleries. It is proposed to store 70,000 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste and 10,000 cubic metres of long-lived high-level vitrified waste.[1] The French nuclear energy industry produces around 13,000 cubic metres of toxic radioactive waste every year.[2]

Retrievability[edit]

French law stipulates that for the first few hundreds of years the stored material must be safely retrievable, insofar as future Frenchmen may find it useful. The storage facility is therefore being designed for this purpose.[3]"

GAS

Classifying gas as green is actually worse! To have a chance it would have to eliminate fugitive gas emissions in the whole supply chain from drilling through wells distribution pipes, and capture all the CO2 generated by combustion and store it effectively.

While carbon capture is a mature technology, it is very easy to classify a gas fired power station as "CCS ready" without actually doing any capture. In addition, the technologies for capture actually capture only a proportion of the CO2 and also increase the consumption of gas for a given energy output by about 30%. 

I find it hard to understand why carbon capture, which is a very mature technology for removing CO2, water vapor and nitrogen from natural gas  and is used widely in its production, and should not be so different  for removing similar concentrations of CO2 from water vapor and nitrogen, gets so much attention and government funding for research. I suspect it's to give the impression that the gas industry is doing something. The key issue is not research, which given the thermodynamic headroom, and lack of radical new ideas, is unlikely to be a good use of funds, but scaling to get some cost reduction, and setting a carbon tax level that ensures that the CO2 is captured and stored.