The news just in from Vietnam is that Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has approved the construction of eight new nuclear power plants in the country. Each plant will feature ‘at least’ four reactors and all will be operational by 2030.
So, that’s ‘at least’ 32 reactors built within the next 20 years. Good luck with that, Mr Dung, because you’re really going to need it. Thinking that a country can built that many nuclear reactors in such a timeframe leaps over some pretty huge assumptions.
Firstly, there’s the logistics involved. The nuclear ‘renaissance’ has a rather large bottleneck. There is just one company in the world, Japan Steel Works, that makes pressure vessels - the part of a nuclear reactor that contains the core and coolant system – for the international market. Right now, the company can make just ten of these vessels a year.
According to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, ‘55 reactors were in full planning at the end of 2009 and in the US over 30 licence applications are under active discussion’. Vietnam is going to have to join the back of a very long queue.
You should also note that ‘full planning’ and ‘licence applications’ and ‘active discussion’ are a long, long, long way away from ‘under construction’ and ‘operational’. Nowhere is talk cheaper than in the nuclear industry. This highly ambitious announcement in Vietnam may very well implode as the others have in the US, UK, Canada, South Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania and many other places.
If no other company starts producing the right kind of pressure vessels and quickly (and the collapse of funding for a pressure vessel production plant in the UK made this more unlikely), and if (that’s a big if) all the above 85 orders come in, at current production rates, Japan Steel Works could take eight and a half years to fulfil current demand. And yet Vietnam wants construction started on four reactors to begin in 2014 and with at least one completed by 2020.
Secondly there’s the cost. The first Russia-supplied plants will cost between 11 billion and 18 billion dollars says the Vietnamese government. That’s a massive margin of error and indicative of the wildly unpredictable nature of building nuclear reactors. Do we buy anything else with such wildly variable price tags? Would you order a meal in a restaurant whose menu told you it would cost somewhere between X and Y and very likely more? Two years back, Bulgaria planned to build just two, supposedly cheap, Russian reactors for 4 billion euros in Belene. Now the cost has been revised to between 10 and 12 billion euros (12 to 15 billion dollars) for just two reactors. Wake up, Vietnam!
Then there’s the reasons for building these reactors. Why nuclear power, exactly? ‘Vietnam's demand for power is expected to grow by 16 percent a year until 2015, according to government projections’. But have other alternatives been considered? How much energy could be saved with simple and cheap efficiency programmes, for example? How about renewable energy?
A recent World Bank study found Vietnam could produce more than 500 gigawatts of electricity from land-based and off-shore wind farms, 10 times the country's expected national demand in 2020.
…and yet the take-up of renewables in Vietnam is poor to say the least.
Cheaper, easier alternatives that are ready to go right now are available to the people of Vietnam and yet Mr Dung is committing his country to the expensive, difficult and long term nuclear option. Just why is that?