Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me to give evidence to your distinguished committee.
I would like to give you a brief overview of the world situation of the nuclear industry. The term “nuclear renaissance” has been extensively used, including around the table you're sitting at, and I would like to sum up our analysis that we published in the “World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2009”, as released by the German government at the end of August 2009.
Currently, we have 435 reactors listed as operating in 31 countries. That is nine less than in 2002. These reactors provide about 14% of the world's commercial electricity, which is equivalent to about 5.5% of the commercial primary energy or 2% of the final energy. That's what we're talking about: 2% of the final energy. By the way, these figures on the world scale are very close to the figures for Canada, where the respective figures, I believe, are 15% for electricity, roughly 6% for primary energy, and 3% for final energy.
Over the last two years worldwide, not a single nuclear reactor has been started up. In fact, the last new reactor to start up was the Cernavoda 2 reactor in August 2007--by the way, a CANDU reactor--after 24 years of construction. Since 2007 not only has there has been a decline in the operating units, but also a decline in the installed capacity. This has to be put into perspective with competing technologies. Particularly remarkable is wind energy, which has connected more than 25,000 megawatts to the grid in the last year alone, or even solar photovoltaics, with over 5,000 megawatts.
Now, where are we going from here? According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 53 units are under construction in 15 countries. But 37 of these units are in 4 countries alone, that is, China, Russia, India, and South Korea. Those countries have not historically been very transparent about the status at their construction sites, so it's very difficult to actually get an idea of whether they're on time and on budget. However, we know enough about half of the units listed as being under construction; most of them encountered significant construction delays. The remaining units started construction within the last five years, which means it's kind of early to judge whether they're on time because they have not reached projected start-up dates yet.
Thirteen out of these 53 reactors--that's roughly a quarter--have been listed there for 20 years or more. I'm stressing this because I think the time factor--and one of the witnesses stressed this before--is indeed crucial. Thirteen units have been listed there for over 20 years. The record holder, by the way, is the Watts Bar Unit 2 that has been listed under construction in the United States since 1972. It's now scheduled to be completed and connected to the grid in 2012. That's 40 years later. Those are long, long lead times.
The average age of the world nuclear reactor fleet is 25 years. There's hardly any experience with operating units beyond 30 years and there's practically none with operating units beyond 40 years. In fact, there are only two reactors currently operating in the world that operated for longer than 40 years.
However, if all the units that are currently in operation reach the age of 40, it would still mean that a very large number of units have to be replaced over the coming years. It would be over 40 units until 2015, or in other words, one every six weeks. There would be an additional 190 units in the following decade, until 2025, which is one every 19 days. This might be interesting to compare with the fact that over two years not a single new reactor was brought online.
A number of massive barriers are in the way for any significant new build scenario. We have looked at them in some detail in the report. Let me briefly mention them.
Of course, first, there are the economic and financial costs. My understanding is that my colleague Steve Thomas will be giving evidence on this in another session of your committee. He was one of the economics and finance experts on the team for the “World Nuclear Industry Status Report”.
The second severe barrier is the manufacturing bottleneck. One has to take into account the fact that there is currently one provider for some of the large forgings components, particularly for components like reactor pressure vessels for units like the EPR, the European pressurized water reactor, and that is Japan Steel Works, which is, as the name indicates, in Japan.
In my personal opinion, the most serious problem, and a barrier for any kind of substantiated renaissance, is the skilled workforce gap. This is a situation that all nuclear industries around the world have to confront. Already around the table we've heard of some of the problems. It's by no means significantly better in a country like France, which is confronted with an aging workforce and where roughly 40% of the utility's operating force will be eligible for retirement by 2015. That's a very major challenge for management.
Also, in most countries, public opinion remains overwhelmingly critical toward nuclear power.
Finally, we have the have the traditional issues. We have the proliferation risks that have not gone away, the nuclear safety issues, and the radioactive waste management problems.
A new analysis provided by the Swiss think tank Prognos for Germany's Federal Office for Radiation Protection, which was released on October 14, 2009, confirms the analysis of the “World Nuclear Industry Status Report”. I would recommend that the committee have a closer look at the results. I'll give you just a couple of lines on it. The scenario envisages a decline in nuclear reactors around the world, by 22% until 2020, and by 29% until 2030, as compared to the base situation in March 2009.
I believe that nuclear power currently is in competition; rather, there are decentralized, small, hyper-efficient renewables such as micropower and combined heat and power, and not primarily with coal or gas plants. I think this is a kind of conservative thinking that is still around and is not future oriented.
Climate change challenges need an affordable and fast response. Nuclear has been shown to be very expensive and by far the slowest option to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The cheapest and fastest remains efficiency.
If Canada, for example, had a per capita electricity consumption corresponding to the average EU consumption, it could very easily phase out not only fossil fuels but nuclear power as well. An interesting analysis recently published by Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute shows that efficiency, renewables, and micropower have by 2 to 20 times more carbon mitigation per dollar invested than nuclear power does, and that 20 to 40 times faster.
Thank you.