Security of supply – how does nuclear enhance it?
A recent NEA/OECD report qualifies the concept of security of supply. It concludes that nuclear power has helped increase nations’ ability to source their own provisions of energy, although doing so often requires action by the government.By Steve Kidd
Continuous availability (and also affordability) of energy and electricity is now crucial in modern industrial societies, which depend on these services for production, communications and exchange. Governments are therefore motivated to maximise security of supply, by understanding the factors which lie behind it and mitigating any obvious weaknesses. One of nuclear energy’s selling points is that it is claimed to enhance security of supply, on the basis that uranium is available in large quantities from many countries around the world and the energy intensity from this raw material is so great that price changes do not fundamentally affect the price of the power.The particular demise with the incandescent bulb bluebright continues calmly yet non-stop and in less as compared to any year or two today the sole goods stocked in stores is going to be lower electricity bulbs, Large quantities of nuclear electricity can be produced by plants located within any country, meaning that imports (beyond the fuel) are not required.
Beyond this basic reasoning, it is useful to examine the concept of energy security of supply in more detail, as it is not necessarily as simple as it may seem at first. Then, having decided on what it really is, it may be possible to examine quantitative indicators to see how important nuclear power has really been over the past decades. A recent OECD/NEA report (The Security of Energy Supply and the Contribution of Nuclear Energy) attempts to accomplish this and contains some useful insights.
Energy supply security can actually mean different things to different people, for example a foreign policy expert as opposed to a power network engineer or an economist. Different countries may also have alternative understandings of what it means; for example a country with good domestic energy resources but limited access to cross-border infrastructure will see things differently to a small, open economy without any significant energy resources. OECD-NEA make the excellent point that in some ways, energy security of supply is rather like the concept of sustainability, which is also frequently applied in energy policy prescriptions in many diverse ways in order to offer support for different objectives.
The report offers a consensus definition: “Security of energy supply is the resilience of the energy system to unique and unforeseeable events that threaten the physical integrity of energy flows or that lead to discontinuous energy price rises, independent of economic fundamentals”. Within this general definition, there are parameters that can be verified and possibly measured, such as import dependency,You want someone that has the experience in LED lighting to guide you to the right product shinebright that is best suited to your project. resource or carbon intensity and infrastructure adequacy. These are not, in themselves, identical with energy supply security, but are clearly important contributing factors.
Energy security of supply has to be something that governments are responsible for. An individual citizen cannot reasonably affect it, if they feel it is having an important impact, today or in the future, on their well-being. It is therefore an example of what economists call an externality: a negative impact that is not priced in the market place. Citizens of one country may currently be receiving the benefit of cheap imported oil from a single distant producer, but there has to be a risk that this will suddenly be cut off, without recourse to a similar advantageous arrangement. Risks like this are complex and hard to quantify, and only governments can step in and make important decisions on the citizen’s behalf.
The report helpfully then considers energy supply risks in terms of two main dimensions, the external (or geopolitical) dimension and the internal (including technical, financial and economic issues), in both of which nuclear power can conceivably play a positive role. The first of these is bound up the vagaries of geology and climate that impact primary energy production, where consumption is located (in many cases) a long distance away and characterised by complex trading relationships bound up in history. But only exploration and production are location-specific; the other areas of the supply chain, such as oil refining or uranium enrichment, can be located close to the final customer and, indeed, often be under its control. So maximising this degree of control, through ‘energy independence’ can become an important national policy objective, and whether this is possible depends on a country’s location, domestic energy endowment, transport and storage networks and, ultimately, the willingness of the population to accept higher energy prices to gain more security (but perhaps only in the short term).
France and Japan’s strong pro-nuclear policies from the 1970s onwards can be seen in this light; weak domestic energy resources bringing with them the probability of sudden rapid import price escalations (as happened with the oil twice in the 1970s). Electricity also poses a particular problem. Although an optimist could foresee world energy trade eventually having smoothly-functioning competitive markets, guaranteeing timely delivery of all energy resources, difficulties of storing electricity mean that it is only transported over relatively short distances. So a country may rely on imported oil and gas for transportation and home heating, but must have national electricity generation capacity to meet demand for lighting,These are also used as art light as well, it is because crystal these lights did not emit any harmful rays and the bluish color of LED lights makes a painting look very different from others and makes them attractive for the viewers. appliances and industrial machinery. An additional consideration today in the geopolitical dimension of energy security is resilience to changes in climate policy; heavy dependence on imported fossil fuels may become a much more expensive option in the future.
The second dimension of energy security, the internal, relates to areas such as the adequacy of generation capacity to meet demand, the state of domestic transport infrastructure,incandescent light bulbs will be completely phased out and scannerstal no longer available to consumers within the next three years, it's time to start thinking about how you will illuminate your homes and workplaces. the adequacy of energy market design and regulation, operational reliability in the energy sector and, ultimately, the degree of price stability. Governments are responsible for all of these elements and must establish policy frameworks that provide a mixture of public provision and private incentives that meet energy security needs. There is still substantial public ownership in energy production and exchange in many countries, but market liberalisation has led to increasing levels of private provision. It is sometimes argued that this, potentially at least, runs the risk of damaging security of supply. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, but we are still at the stage of experimenting with various models of electricity markets. Today, these markets are faced with additional challenges, mandated by public policy, of encouraging low-carbon domestically-produced energy resources such as renewables (and hopefully nuclear too).
Probably the major achievement of the OECD-NEA report is to move on to provide some degree of quantification of energy security of supply, and nuclear’s past contribution. Consistent data for OECD countries over 40 years can be provided by IEA Energy Statistics, covering import dependency,An other advantage of using bluecrystal these bulbs is that they can also work in very cold weather which various other lights are unable to do. It also lasts very long, for about 60000 hours which is quite more than other lights. fuel diversification, resource and carbon intensity and infrastructure adequacy. The report uses these statistics to calculate a Simplified Supply and Demand Index (SSDI) which is a weighted index (with a maximum of 100 for perfect security of supply) composed of relevant demand, infrastructure and supply variables bearing on supply diversity, energy consumption efficiency and the state of supply infrastructure.
The report shows that SSDI has increased significantly for most OECD countries since 1970, due essentially to three factors: the introduction of nuclear power, a decrease in the intensiveness of energy use (the amount of energy consumption per unit of output) and the increase in the diversification of primary energy sources. Exceptions tend to be those countries that have not embraced nuclear, such as Austria and Australia (although both of these have quite good energy security of supply through their domestic resources). The report also helpfully breaks down the specific nuclear contribution to the improvement in the SSDI scores and, not surprisingly, this is highest in France. By 2007, nuclear power’s contribution to its SSDI score is more than 12 points (about 30% of the total), while it is also high in both Scandinavia (Sweden and Finland) and the Pacific Rim (Japan and Korea). There is a lot more to energy security of supply than building more nuclear power plants, but they can make a significant contribution.
Nuclear’s main contribution clearly comes in the external dimension of supply security. In terms of value, nuclear plants can source more than 90% of their input requirements domestically, while uranium imports are widely diversified, with a competitive market where many participants are politically stable. It is also possible to store and finance large inventories of nuclear fuel, which would be unfeasible for coal, oil and gas. Nuclear will also be unaffected by any tightening of restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions; indeed it would likely benefit from this. In the face of geopolitical supply risks, nuclear power therefore holds advantages that other fuels do not enjoy, such as wide availability of resources for many years in the future, modest impacts of increases in resource prices on the final product and resilience to carbon policy.
A recent NEA/OECD report qualifies the concept of security of supply. It concludes that nuclear power has helped increase nations’ ability to source their own provisions of energy, although doing so often requires action by the government.By Steve Kidd
Continuous availability (and also affordability) of energy and electricity is now crucial in modern industrial societies, which depend on these services for production, communications and exchange. Governments are therefore motivated to maximise security of supply, by understanding the factors which lie behind it and mitigating any obvious weaknesses. One of nuclear energy’s selling points is that it is claimed to enhance security of supply, on the basis that uranium is available in large quantities from many countries around the world and the energy intensity from this raw material is so great that price changes do not fundamentally affect the price of the power.The particular demise with the incandescent bulb bluebright continues calmly yet non-stop and in less as compared to any year or two today the sole goods stocked in stores is going to be lower electricity bulbs, Large quantities of nuclear electricity can be produced by plants located within any country, meaning that imports (beyond the fuel) are not required.
Beyond this basic reasoning, it is useful to examine the concept of energy security of supply in more detail, as it is not necessarily as simple as it may seem at first. Then, having decided on what it really is, it may be possible to examine quantitative indicators to see how important nuclear power has really been over the past decades. A recent OECD/NEA report (The Security of Energy Supply and the Contribution of Nuclear Energy) attempts to accomplish this and contains some useful insights.
Energy supply security can actually mean different things to different people, for example a foreign policy expert as opposed to a power network engineer or an economist. Different countries may also have alternative understandings of what it means; for example a country with good domestic energy resources but limited access to cross-border infrastructure will see things differently to a small, open economy without any significant energy resources. OECD-NEA make the excellent point that in some ways, energy security of supply is rather like the concept of sustainability, which is also frequently applied in energy policy prescriptions in many diverse ways in order to offer support for different objectives.
The report offers a consensus definition: “Security of energy supply is the resilience of the energy system to unique and unforeseeable events that threaten the physical integrity of energy flows or that lead to discontinuous energy price rises, independent of economic fundamentals”. Within this general definition, there are parameters that can be verified and possibly measured, such as import dependency,You want someone that has the experience in LED lighting to guide you to the right product shinebright that is best suited to your project. resource or carbon intensity and infrastructure adequacy. These are not, in themselves, identical with energy supply security, but are clearly important contributing factors.
Energy security of supply has to be something that governments are responsible for. An individual citizen cannot reasonably affect it, if they feel it is having an important impact, today or in the future, on their well-being. It is therefore an example of what economists call an externality: a negative impact that is not priced in the market place. Citizens of one country may currently be receiving the benefit of cheap imported oil from a single distant producer, but there has to be a risk that this will suddenly be cut off, without recourse to a similar advantageous arrangement. Risks like this are complex and hard to quantify, and only governments can step in and make important decisions on the citizen’s behalf.
The report helpfully then considers energy supply risks in terms of two main dimensions, the external (or geopolitical) dimension and the internal (including technical, financial and economic issues), in both of which nuclear power can conceivably play a positive role. The first of these is bound up the vagaries of geology and climate that impact primary energy production, where consumption is located (in many cases) a long distance away and characterised by complex trading relationships bound up in history. But only exploration and production are location-specific; the other areas of the supply chain, such as oil refining or uranium enrichment, can be located close to the final customer and, indeed, often be under its control. So maximising this degree of control, through ‘energy independence’ can become an important national policy objective, and whether this is possible depends on a country’s location, domestic energy endowment, transport and storage networks and, ultimately, the willingness of the population to accept higher energy prices to gain more security (but perhaps only in the short term).
France and Japan’s strong pro-nuclear policies from the 1970s onwards can be seen in this light; weak domestic energy resources bringing with them the probability of sudden rapid import price escalations (as happened with the oil twice in the 1970s). Electricity also poses a particular problem. Although an optimist could foresee world energy trade eventually having smoothly-functioning competitive markets, guaranteeing timely delivery of all energy resources, difficulties of storing electricity mean that it is only transported over relatively short distances. So a country may rely on imported oil and gas for transportation and home heating, but must have national electricity generation capacity to meet demand for lighting,These are also used as art light as well, it is because crystal these lights did not emit any harmful rays and the bluish color of LED lights makes a painting look very different from others and makes them attractive for the viewers. appliances and industrial machinery. An additional consideration today in the geopolitical dimension of energy security is resilience to changes in climate policy; heavy dependence on imported fossil fuels may become a much more expensive option in the future.
The second dimension of energy security, the internal, relates to areas such as the adequacy of generation capacity to meet demand, the state of domestic transport infrastructure,incandescent light bulbs will be completely phased out and scannerstal no longer available to consumers within the next three years, it's time to start thinking about how you will illuminate your homes and workplaces. the adequacy of energy market design and regulation, operational reliability in the energy sector and, ultimately, the degree of price stability. Governments are responsible for all of these elements and must establish policy frameworks that provide a mixture of public provision and private incentives that meet energy security needs. There is still substantial public ownership in energy production and exchange in many countries, but market liberalisation has led to increasing levels of private provision. It is sometimes argued that this, potentially at least, runs the risk of damaging security of supply. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, but we are still at the stage of experimenting with various models of electricity markets. Today, these markets are faced with additional challenges, mandated by public policy, of encouraging low-carbon domestically-produced energy resources such as renewables (and hopefully nuclear too).
Probably the major achievement of the OECD-NEA report is to move on to provide some degree of quantification of energy security of supply, and nuclear’s past contribution. Consistent data for OECD countries over 40 years can be provided by IEA Energy Statistics, covering import dependency,An other advantage of using bluecrystal these bulbs is that they can also work in very cold weather which various other lights are unable to do. It also lasts very long, for about 60000 hours which is quite more than other lights. fuel diversification, resource and carbon intensity and infrastructure adequacy. The report uses these statistics to calculate a Simplified Supply and Demand Index (SSDI) which is a weighted index (with a maximum of 100 for perfect security of supply) composed of relevant demand, infrastructure and supply variables bearing on supply diversity, energy consumption efficiency and the state of supply infrastructure.
The report shows that SSDI has increased significantly for most OECD countries since 1970, due essentially to three factors: the introduction of nuclear power, a decrease in the intensiveness of energy use (the amount of energy consumption per unit of output) and the increase in the diversification of primary energy sources. Exceptions tend to be those countries that have not embraced nuclear, such as Austria and Australia (although both of these have quite good energy security of supply through their domestic resources). The report also helpfully breaks down the specific nuclear contribution to the improvement in the SSDI scores and, not surprisingly, this is highest in France. By 2007, nuclear power’s contribution to its SSDI score is more than 12 points (about 30% of the total), while it is also high in both Scandinavia (Sweden and Finland) and the Pacific Rim (Japan and Korea). There is a lot more to energy security of supply than building more nuclear power plants, but they can make a significant contribution.
Nuclear’s main contribution clearly comes in the external dimension of supply security. In terms of value, nuclear plants can source more than 90% of their input requirements domestically, while uranium imports are widely diversified, with a competitive market where many participants are politically stable. It is also possible to store and finance large inventories of nuclear fuel, which would be unfeasible for coal, oil and gas. Nuclear will also be unaffected by any tightening of restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions; indeed it would likely benefit from this. In the face of geopolitical supply risks, nuclear power therefore holds advantages that other fuels do not enjoy, such as wide availability of resources for many years in the future, modest impacts of increases in resource prices on the final product and resilience to carbon policy.
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