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Energy
What do we need from our energy supplies?
Timescales
Energy use
Energy sources
Supply and demand

Energy, Society and the Nuclear Alternative
On the face of it, nuclear energy has some considerable attractions. Uranium, the fuel on which almost all nuclear energy is based, is an enormous mineral resource. Significant amounts are found in a wide range of countries – unlike oil or natural gas. Use of nuclear energy does not require us to use up limited ‘fossil fuel’ reserves (mainly oil, coal and gas), reserves which have other very important uses.

Unlike energy sources, such as wind, solar or tidal power, nuclear energy does not depend on weather conditions or the time of day in order to produce an output. It has had an impressive safety record – only one incident, at Chernobyl in 1986, has had demonstrable off-site health consequences (the World Health Organisation calculates the death toll from the accident at around 50, most of these among the heroic emergency teams working on the site at the time of the accident or soon afterwards). And its use does not involve the production of large volumes of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, but also methane and nitrous oxide, which are associated with several other ways of making energy and which are believed to be causing climate change. In many areas of the world, notably the Asia-Pacific region, nuclear energy is developing quickly, and indeed in each of the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s nuclear energy grew at a faster rate than any of the other main ways of making energy – oil, coal, gas or hydropower. In that short period of time it grew to be the largest source of electricity within the European Union, and to produce about one sixth of all of the electricity the world uses. That represents more than the total amount of electricity that was being used by the whole world in 1956, the year in which the UK opened the world’s first commercial-scale nuclear power station.

Yet in many countries, including most of Western Europe, nuclear development has come to a pause. Concerns about the economics of new nuclear power stations, the possibility of a big accident, slow progress in dealing with nuclear waste and the historical link between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons have resulted in a loss of confidence among some sections of our communities.

This series of four booklets will attempt to look at nuclear energy in the wider context of a world ever more hungry for energy, yet presently dependent on limited supplies of fossil fuels and increasingly worried about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

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Energy
In countries like ours ‘energy’ has been a relatively low-profile issue for some years. After all, there were no major power cuts or disruptions to energy supplies during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Petrol prices went up and down (mainly up!) but this was more because of taxation policy – the underlying price of crude oil stayed low, apart from the odd spike, usually caused by tensions in the Middle East. In fact, the price of oil has not changed enormously in real terms over the last 150 years, with the exception of periodic ‘shocks’, the most serious of which occupied the period from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. Oil cost pretty much the same in real terms in the year 1999 as it did in 1989. Furthermore, in the 1990s the introduction of competition into power supply markets in many countries, including the UK, and the emergence of a new efficient generating technology called combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT), brought electricity prices down.

Low profile though it may be, energy is nonetheless a vital part of our lives. It comes in many forms – heating, lighting, sound, movement and electricity. We need it to extract raw materials for industries, to heat and light our houses, schools and offices and to run transport, communications and computer systems. At a more basic level, we need energy to build hospitals, then to manufacture and run life-saving machines, sterilise equipment, manufacture and deliver medicines and run ambulances.

Most important of all, we need large amounts of energy to produce and provide food – to manufacture and run farming machinery, to manufacture fertilisers, to irrigate land (perhaps the single biggest need for energy in many developing countries), to move food from where it is grown to where it is needed and to store it, for example, by refrigeration. And we need enormous amounts of energy to provide adequate water supplies – to clean our water, purify and sterilise it, pump it into our homes, and dispose of our sewage. Most people in the developed world may be able to take clean water for granted, but in other countries around the world there are more than 5 million deaths every year because the water is not fit to drink. (Source: Press release for World Water Day 2002, World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg 2002.)

Studies carried out by the United Nations in the 1970s showed that the higher the average energy use in a country, the longer the people lived, the lower were infant mortality rates and the richer people were.

Energy, in other words, isn’t just a matter of making life fun. Energy is a matter of making life possible.

And the demand for energy supplies is growing as the world’s population grows and as poorer countries improve their quality of life.

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What do we need from our energy supplies?
There are four main requirements that we demand from our energy supplies.

First, they must be reliable. For example, in much of Western Europe in the year 2000 there were protests about the price of petrol. Within a week the consequent disruption to supplies practically brought the countries involved to a standstill. About two thirds of ‘proved’ world oil reserves (known reserves which can be extracted profitably at today’s oil prices) are owned by just five countries in the Middle East, and over 70% of world gas reserves are in the Middle East and the Former Soviet Union. Many countries are nervous about becoming too dependent on imports from those areas.

Secure supplies are especially important in the case of electricity. Power cuts of very short duration indeed can be enough to disrupt complex computerised networks. Longer power cuts can result in the loss of a freezer full of food, a day’s production in the workplace or vital public transport links.

Second, they must be environmentally acceptable. By far the most worrying environmental threat is that of climate change, but there are many others – acid rain, the health effects of smoke, the risk of radioactive contamination, major local environmental disruption and threat to wildlife caused by a tidal barrage or a windfarm and so on. All sources of energy have environmental effects, and it can be a very difficult job comparing and evaluating them. The environmental implications of energy use are considered in the accompanying booklet Nuclear Energy in the Environment.

Third, they must be as economic as possible. Energy is an important cost to businesses and industry, and the more society spends on providing energy the less it has to spend on other things. Of course, governments may decide to tax energy use instead of taxing employment – we will come back to the importance of energy prices and taxation later – but it does nobody any good if the underlying costs of power production are higher than they need be.

And fourth, they must be socially acceptable. This is more difficult to define, but it involves such matters as safety, sensitivity to communities associated with a particular energy source, public acceptability and help for people who cannot afford their energy bills.

The real problem is that these four requirements are often in conflict with each other. To take one example, during the mid 1970s to early 1980s the oil price was very high by historical standards, and there were fears that supplies might be cut off. As a result, countries which had become dependent on imported oil for much of their energy needs feared that the reliability of these supplies could not be guaranteed. Some countries responded by offering major subsidies to their domestic coal industries. This helped to ensure secure supplies and was also good for communities in coal mining areas, but it was often expensive (since in many European countries the easy-to-mine coal had been used up), and it resulted in increased emissions of gases associated with acid rain and climate change.

Another conflict arises because we cannot store electricity and demand varies enormously through the year and through the day. To avoid power cuts, some power stations have to be kept ready to produce electricity at times of high demand which otherwise sit idle for much of the rest of the day (or even year). Electricity could be supplied much more cheaply if we did not run these stations, but the penalty would be prolonged power cuts in the early evening in the depths of winter. Energy policy is always a matter of compromise.

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Timescales
There is another challenge facing people responsible for energy policy. Many investments in the energy field are expected to last for a very long time and cost a lot of money to install. A modern nuclear power station might be expected to operate for 50 years and a major new gas pipeline will operate for a similar period, as will a tidal barrage.

But things can change very rapidly in the energy industry. Oil prices, which are still very important in determining general energy prices, tend to rise or fall with extraordinary speed. The power crisis in California in 2001 developed over a few short months, and, as already mentioned, the UK was brought to a standstill by petrol protests within a week in the previous year. Though the long-term effects are still hard to predict, the single day
11 September 2001 may have significant repercussions for some years (for example, tensions between the Middle East and the USA may lead to higher oil prices and interruptions in supply, or increased concerns about the security of nuclear power stations or gas pipelines). Almost the only thing we can say with any certainty about the far future is that it will be different from what we expect. Even great economists like Stanley Jevons, in his book The Coal Question, written in 1865, can get it wrong – he overestimated the amount of coal which would be used in the 1960s by a factor of more than twenty!

It is very difficult to take emergency measures to respond to short-term problems in energy supply, and even more difficult to know what sort of future they might bring. It is important to keep options open even if they do not appear to be needed on a day-to-day basis. But flexibility of this kind can be expensive.

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Energy use
… in the past
Energy use has varied through time. Before the Industrial Revolution, which began in the first half of the eighteenth century in the UK, the main sources of energy were what we call ‘renewables’ – wind, water, sunlight, wood and animals. These sources of energy are still vitally important to a third of the world’s population today.

The invention of the steam engine brought about the dominance of coal as a source of heat and motive power. It was followed by coal gas for heat and light, and from the end of the nineteenth century the use of coal to generate electricity began to become an accepted part of life. The first half of the twentieth century saw the development and use of oil for heating and electricity and, increasingly, as a transportation fuel. Natural gas was used in small quantities, but enormous new discoveries after the Second World War led to a major expansion of its use for heating homes, factories, offices and so on and, more recently, for electricity production. Nuclear energy was introduced in the 1950s, and now produces one sixth of the world’s electricity, more than the whole world was using when the world’s first commercial-scale nuclear power station, Calder Hall, opened in the UK in 1956.

… in the present
Of the ‘traded energy’ (energy which is bought and sold, rather than gathered) used in the world, oil accounts for a bit less than 40%, with natural gas and coal each producing about 25%. The other 10% is divided between hydropower and nuclear energy, with windpower, solar power and other ‘new renewables’ producing very little at present. The amount of energy traded in the world is equivalent to between 9 and 10 billion tonnes of oil each year, but it is not distributed evenly. In the USA and Canada, on average each individual consumes the equivalent of about 6.5 tonnes of oil per year. In Europe it is about half of that amount, while in the poorest areas of the world people have access to less than one hundredth, or even less than one thousandth, of those levels. (Source: BP Stat Review 2003.) 2.8 billion of the world’s 6 billion people live on the equivalent of less than US$2 per day. Subsistence farmers struggling for a living in poor countries need energy to heat and light their homes and cook their meals, while wealthy people in industrialised countries want it to run their cars and chill their drinks. This imbalance is a key factor in the difference in the ‘standard of living’ between the world’s richest and poorest people – in the richer countries we are preoccupied with consumer goods and how to use our leisure time, whereas in the poorest countries the main concern is often the constant search for food and wood.

... in the future
In October 1999 a baby in Bosnia was officially welcomed as the world’s six billionth person. The five billionth person was born in July 1987, the four billionth in 1974. Estimates suggest the population will reach 7 billion in around 2012 and 8 billion by about 2025. Most of the population growth is in Asia, Africa and South America, where economies are growing rapidly and people are beginning to demand a fairer share of the world’s riches, including energy. In countries like South Korea and Thailand, with rapidly developing economies, energy use more than doubled during the 1990s.

As already noted, it is very difficult to make projections about anything in the energy field. Some estimates suggest that the world will be using up to one and a half times as much energy in 2020 as it did in 2000, and perhaps twice as much in 2050. In the short term, this energy will be provided in many of the poorest areas by burning wood, with all the accompanying ecological problems that this entails. Where they can afford it, some developing nations will use oil and gas, but in the longer term there are three options: coal, renewables and nuclear.

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Energy sources
Energy can be transformed into heat and light in a number of ways:

• by burning fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil), wood, waste and animal dung
• from the sun and the natural forces of waves, tides and the wind
• by splitting uranium atoms in a nuclear reactor
• by fusing hydrogen atoms together in another type of reactor (in theory)
• by using temperature changes below the earth’s surface.

In developing countries, wood is burned to provide heat and light – non-traded energy like this is believed to provide about 12% of the world’s total energy use. While in the UK, we use electricity to power light bulbs and cookers.

Coal
From the emergence of electricity in the early years of the twentieth century until recently, coal was used to produce most of our electricity in the UK. At the industry’s peak in 1913, there were several hundred deep mines in the UK and more than a million people were employed in them. However, coal production has declined rapidly in recent decades for a variety of reasons, including:

• the availability of cheaper alternatives for heating, transport and power production, notably the combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT)
• increasing competition from imported coal
• environmental concerns, especially about acid rain but more recently about climate change.

As recently as 1990, 68% of UK electricity was generated by coal. By 2000 this had fallen to 31%, and the downward trend is expected to continue. Most other European countries have also been winding down their coal industries – Netherlands closed its last mine in 1974, Belgium in 1992, and French coal production was drawing to a close by the early years of the new century. Output was also declining rapidly in Germany and Spain as government support for the industry fell. However, coal use in the USA has continued to grow slowly, and developing countries like China and India are using more and more coal to fuel their economic expansion. So in the 1990s the total amount of coal being used in the world did not change very much. At current rates of usage the world’s known coal reserves will last for over 200 years – this is known as the ‘reserves to production ratio’.

Turbine generator In most developed countries between a quarter and a third of energy use is in the form of electricity. In almost all cases, to generate electricity we have to make large wheels (turbines) go round. These then convert motion into electrical current. There are lots of ways of driving turbines. In a hydropower station, tidal barrage, wavepower machine or windfarm, the wheels are turned directly by water or air. In most ‘conventional’ power plants (coal, oil, gas or nuclear), water is boiled and the force of the steam turns the turbines. It is also possible to heat helium gas and use it directly to drive the turbines. The electricity is then distributed round the country via a network of large wires known as the ‘grid’.

Natural gas
Gas accounts for about a quarter of all the energy consumed each year in the world. Before 1990 we hardly ever used gas to produce electricity, but the 1990s saw a ‘dash for gas’ that resulted in 39% of UK power supplies coming from gas by the year 2000, an upward trend that is continuing. However, some commentators point out that it is more efficient to burn gas directly in the home than to use it to generate electricity, which results in considerable energy wastage even using the new combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) technology.

The world has discovered enormous gas reserves in the last few years – proven reserves are about twice the size of those of 20 years ago. The global reserves-to-production ratio is now about 60 years, and has actually been increasing over the last 20 years or more.

However, as is also the case with oil, supplies are not infinite, and some experts argue that eventually what is left should be reserved for use in the chemical industry and as a transport fuel. In any case, as reserves run short, the price is likely to rise, promoting the use of other fuels.

Furthermore, the UK’s own North Sea reserves are running short, making the UK a net gas importer by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century and a heavy importer soon afterwards. Most major economies are net importers of energy, but the UK is unfortunately at the end of the long pipelines bringing gas into Europe from the Former Soviet Union and the Middle East and therefore especially vulnerable to shortages or damage to distribution networks.

Oil
Throughout the twentieth century, oil has been in increasing demand both as an energy source and as a raw material for industry (it is used to make plastics for example).

But our oil supply has a turbulent history. In the 1950s most of Britain’s oil requirements came from the Middle Eastern states through the Suez Canal. The decision of the Egyptian government to nationalise the Canal in 1956, and the attempt by Britain and France to prevent this, led to one of the biggest international incidents since the Second World War, opening a rift between Britain and the USA and resulting in a humiliating climb-down.

By 1973, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a grouping formed in 1960 and now made up of 11 countries (mainly from the Middle East and Africa, plus Venezuela and Indonesia), controlled 65% of non-communist world production. In that single year it quadrupled its prices and threatened to cut off supplies. This caused an economic recession and many countries were forced to look elsewhere for oil – the UK was relatively lucky with the beginning of production from the North Sea. Most countries also tried to establish a more balanced energy programme which avoided relying too heavily on any one source or supplier (France, for example, had been getting more than two thirds of its energy requirements from imported oil in 1973), as governments became wary of remaining too dependent on imported oil for energy.

The high oil prices of the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s resulted in large numbers of oil-fired power stations being shut down across Europe. As a result, oil is now a very minor part of power production in most developed countries, although it is still the main source of energy for running cars, buses, lorries and so on. The reserves-to-production ratio has remained at about 40 years for some time, declining slowly in the years around the turn of the millennium.

Nuclear
Nuclear energy is the newest of the major energy technologies, and globally it has been the fastest-growing of the major sources of electricity in every decade since the 1970s. In the 1990s its use increased by over 25%. In France, so badly caught out by the 1973 oil shock, nuclear energy now provides about three quarters of electricity production. Other countries with high proportions of nuclear-generated electricity at the start of the twenty-first century included Lithuania (78%), Belgium (58%), Ukraine (46%) and Sweden (44%). In the UK as a whole nuclear energy accounted for more than 20% of power production, and in Scotland the figure was over 50%. The USA, with over 100 reactors, had the world’s biggest nuclear industry, and nuclear energy was also important in Germany, Switzerland, Finland and Japan (Source: IAEA PRIS database).

Uranium reserves will last at least a century and probably much longer, as little effort has been put into exploration in recent years and so we can assume there is a lot still to be discovered.

The rate of building new nuclear power stations has decreased in most areas of the world (the Asia-Pacific region being the main exception), as assumptions made in the 1970s that fossil fuel reserves would run short and prices rise, have turned out not to be correct. Public concerns have also grown as a result of accidents at Three Mile Island (USA, 1979) and Chernobyl (Ukraine, 1986). Some countries such as Sweden and Germany took decisions, in principle, to phase out nuclear energy over a period of many years.

The world’s first commercial-scale nuclear power station was opened in Britain at Calder Hall in 1956, and continued to operate until 2003. In all, eleven of this earliest kind of nuclear power station – ‘Magnox’ – were built in the UK, followed by seven ‘advanced gas-cooled reactors’ and one ‘pressurised water reactor’, as well as a variety of experimental reactors and prototypes.

Renewables
Fossil fuels produce about 90% of the world’s commercially traded energy, but it’s the rich, energy-hungry, industrialised nations which use almost all of that energy. In developing countries, where each person uses only a fraction of the energy we do, the story is different. Firewood, wind, sun, flowing water and animal and crop residues are the main energy sources for half of the world’s population. More people in the world depend on wood than any other source of energy.

Renewables – so-called because the energy source ‘renews’ itself rather than relying on limited fuel reserves – share two enormous advantages. They won’t run out, and generally (with exceptions such as wood) they do not produce wastes, especially atmospheric pollutants such as carbon dioxide, smoke particles or gases associated with acid rain.

Many governments, including the UK, have active policies to boost renewables, for example, offshore wind in the UK.

However, the renewables also share some disadvantages. First, the source of energy – water, air or sunlight – is much more ‘dilute’ than fossil fuels such as coal or, even more so, nuclear fuels such as uranium. This means that it will always be necessary to use large amounts of machinery spread out over large areas of land or water to collect meaningful amounts of energy, with potential economic and environmental drawbacks.

Second, many of the renewables are ‘intermittent’ – they do not produce energy on demand. In the case of tidal power and solar energy, it is reasonably easy to predict when the energy will be available, but there is no guarantee that this will be when the electricity is needed. Solar power is no use in covering the peak electricity demand in the year which in northern Europe tends to be in the early evening in late January but it is very well suited to covering the growing demand for air conditioning in the summer. With wind power the problem is even worse – it is not possible to predict more than a short period beforehand whether there will be wind of the right speed to make electricity, or whether a lack of wind (or wind which is too strong) will prevent any production at all. As Denmark discovered, this can become a significant problem if more than about 15% of electricity is produced from the wind, since some back-up plant must be kept available to be switched on quickly if the wind drops. It would be a less serious issue if we could store electricity in large quantities, and research is going on into ways that we might do that (for example, by using surplus electricity to make hydrogen, which we could burn when the power was needed). However, there is no guarantee that this research will result in practical or cost-effective technology.

As a result, it is by no means certain how much energy could in practice be obtained from renewables (though the actual total amount of energy present in nature is enormous). At the start of the twentieth century only hydropower was contributing significant amounts of electricity in the UK, and renewables in total (including hydro) were only responsible for about 5% of the market (Source: Energy Paper 68). In a White Paper in 2003, the UK government confirmed that it wanted 10% of UK electricity made by renewables in 2010, and expressed a hope that the figure might be 20% by 2020. In order to achieve this, a major expansion of other options would be needed, as sites for large-scale hydropower have been more or less exhausted in the UK. Enormous subsidies have been offered to cover the higher costs involved in other alternatives.

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Supply and demand
Of course, before thinking about how to make vast amounts of energy we should make quite sure that we are using what we currently produce as efficiently as possible.

Industrial processes generally become more efficient over time. This is especially true in those countries where companies try to cut waste and invent more effective techniques so that they can make more profit.

At the start of the Industrial Revolution, 200 years or more ago, only about 2% of the energy stored in coal could be converted into useful mechanical energy by the early steam engines – all the rest was wasted. Now the most efficient power stations, the combined-cycle gas turbines, are 60% efficient, and combined heat and power plants, which produce both electricity and heat, can be even better. The ‘energy ratio’ of the UK economy – in other words, the amount of energy it takes to produce a unit of ‘economic output’ – almost halved between 1970 and 2000.

However, some of this reduction was because of the decline of heavy energy-intensive industries like steelmaking and motor car manufacture, and the growth in their place of lower-energy service industries. In the second half of the period, improvements in the energy ratio were less impressive, averaging only 1.3% per year during the 1990s.

It is possible that more focus on research and development of energy-efficient technologies, improved labelling of goods to show how much energy they will consume, tighter building regulations and so on may increase the rate at which the energy ratio improves. However, this is another area in which the different aims of energy policy come into conflict. There is very strong evidence that the most important factor in determining the energy ratio in a developed country is the price of energy. High energy prices persuade people to go through the expense and inconvenience of installing energy-saving measures such as cavity wall insulation. If energy prices are low people tend not to bother – especially if they are paying their energy bills by direct debit and so seem to pay the same each month however much they may consume. So if we want to be sure of improving energy efficiency we should increase energy prices, perhaps by increased taxation. However, most governments do their best to cut energy prices as this is usually more popular with energy users, domestic and commercial alike.

Furthermore, improving energy efficiency can have surprising effects. Back in 1865, Jevons observed that the introduction of new, more efficient steam engines initially decreased coal consumption, which led to a drop in the price of coal. This meant not only that more people could afford coal, but also that coal became economically viable for new uses, which ultimately greatly increased coal consumption. These ‘rebound effects’ are well established, and mean that at least some of the benefit of improved energy efficiency is taken in greater economic activity – in other words, greater prosperity and better lives for those affected – with an associated increase in the demand for energy services. This is a very good argument for improving energy efficiency, but it also means that reductions in energy consumption will not be as great as might be expected at first sight.

And even if we do manage to control energy use in the developed world, we can hardly turn to the two billion people in the world who do not have access to electricity and tell them to save something that they don’t have. The most likely future trend of all is that global energy demand will continue to grow, and grow rapidly, over the next half century.