The return of nuclear power

Happily for nuclear power, there are new bogeymen in town. Flatulent cows and coal fires are heating up the planet, while dodgy regimes seem to control of most of the fossil fuels. As friendly Canada and Australia sit on plenty of uranium and nuclear power generation is relatively clean once the plants are up, the industry seems set for a comeback.

Forty countries are now revisiting, or contemplating, nuclear power. Russia announced this month that it expects to build as many as 42 new domestic reactors by 2030, twice the number it has running now. Its nuclear holding company, Rosatom, created in another fit of state-led industrial reorganisation, hopes to export another 60. Some of these will go to China, which has 11 reactors in operation and five more under construction. The plan is to increase Chinese nuclear generation capacity fivefold by 2020, and further triple it by 2030. In the US 30 new plants have been announced, and several developed countries are eyeing the replacement of existing reactors.

So a burst of activity similar to the 1980s, when construction on half of the world's 438 nuclear power stations began, seems likely over the next two decades. This should provide a solid future for the three East-West partnerships that will be competing with Rosatom: Areva and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, General Electric and Hitachi, and Westinghouse, now controlled by Toshiba.

Still, an industry that has to decide what to do with its rubbish for the next 100,000 years moves at a careful pace. In countries with experience of nuclear power, it takes around five years to plan, design and licence a new installation, and another five to actually build it. Standardised designs and new modular construction techniques will facilitate the process. But where nuclear power is a new consideration – as in most of the Middle East where President Sarkozy has been touting the nuclear skills of French industry – governments have to set up the regulatory regime before planning can even begin. A ten year boom may still be a decade away.

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