PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

How many countries are ready for nuclear-powered electricity?

A study of 126 nations suggests that many lack the capacity to safely deploy nuclear power on their own

2021-03-31
(Press-News.org) As demand for low-carbon electricity rises around the world, nuclear power offers a promising solution. But how many countries are good candidates for nuclear energy development?

A new study in the journal Risk Analysis suggests that countries representing more than 80 percent of potential growth in low-carbon electricity demand--in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa--may lack the economic or institutional quality to deploy nuclear power to meet their energy needs. The authors suggest that if nuclear power is to safely expand its role in mitigating climate change, countries need to radically improve their ability to manage the technology.

"Efforts to enhance institutional quality in these countries must be redoubled and could well be one of the things on which the future of nuclear power as a low carbon energy solution hinges," says co-author Michael J. Ford, a nuclear energy and public policy expert with Argonne National Laboratory who conducted much of this study while at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ford and his colleague Ahmed Abdulla, an expert in energy system design at Carleton University in Ottawa, assessed the relative nuclear power readiness of 126 countries using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to benchmark performance across nations.

While previous studies have evaluated the role that nuclear power could play in global decarbonization based on the low-carbon electricity needs of different countries, this research focused on developing a method to integrate economic risks and institutional risks into that evaluation.

The researchers analyzed 126 nations across a 15-year time period from 2001 to 2015, dividing them into three categories by grid size. Nations with bigger electric power systems--an installed generating capacity greater than 10 GWe-- were analyzed for their capability of installing traditional "gigawatt scale" reactors. Nations with very small electric grids (less than 500 MWe) were assumed to be best served by "micro-reactors" (producing 20MWe or less), and those in between were nations best served by a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) with an output of 20 MWe to 300MWe. SMRs and micro-reactors are emerging advanced nuclear power technologies that offer a more affordable way for countries to enter the nuclear energy market.

Once risk is taken into account, the study suggests that the vast majority (80%) of nuclear power would be deployed in richer countries with better institutions. Meanwhile, the vast majority of future low-carbon energy need (>85%) is in poorer countries with relatively weaker institutions.

Despite the weaker performance of many nations with rapidly growing energy demand, the authors note that these nations may still have the potential to develop nuclear programs if supported in developing an improved governance structure.

Several growing Asian and Middle Eastern nations--Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Oman, and Qatar--demonstrated above-median economic and institutional performance. These nations would be leading candidates for new nuclear development with SMRs and micro-reactors. Others, like Thailand and Saudi Arabia, are strong economically but weaker institutionally, requiring more attention in capacity building.

The authors argue that nuclear development programs must focus on reducing institutional risks, not just cost. "Nuclear power brings security concerns regarding proliferation and weapons development," says Ford. "This is why it's prudent to investigate institutional risk factors like corruption, regulatory quality, rule of law, and political stability--especially when we're talking about deploying nuclear power in new countries."

One way to increase nuclear energy capacity in higher risk nations is an arrangement known as build-own-operate (BOO). In this situation, a technology developer finances, builds, owns, and operates a power plant--effectively transforming the electric utility from an infrastructure owner to a land provider or power purchaser.

Abdulla suggests that the impact of this study on climate change mitigation expands beyond nuclear to other investments in large energy infrastructure, such as carbon capture and sequestration and even the large renewable energy plants that we will need to build when we get serious about decarbonization.

"It is time to develop new, improved energy system models that consider things like institutional quality" he says. "This would change where and how much nuclear power to deploy. It could limit its role in certain places while encouraging deployment in others, but the overall result will be a society that steers its resources more efficiently toward a low-carbon future."

INFORMATION:

About SRA The Society for Risk Analysis is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, scholarly, international society that provides an open forum for all those interested in risk analysis. SRA was established in 1980 and has published Risk Analysis: An International Journal, the leading scholarly journal in the field, continuously since 1981. For more information, visit http://www.sra.org.



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Steroid hormone could reduce risk of preterm birth for high-risk single baby pregnancies

2021-03-31
Taking progestogens - steroid hormones - during pregnancy could reduce the risk of preterm birth in high-risk single baby pregnancies, research has shown. Although these compounds have been in use for some time, results of individual clinical trials investigating their effectiveness in preventing preterm birth have been conflicting, and so further evaluation of the research evidence was needed. University of York researchers led the Evaluating Progestogens for Prevention of Preterm Birth International Collaborative (EPPPIC) project, a systematic review which brought together and re-analysed datasets from 31 clinical trials of progestogens, including more than 11,000 women and 16,000 babies ...

Preconditions for life already 3.5 billion years ago

Preconditions for life already 3.5 billion years ago
2021-03-31
Microbial life already had the necessary conditions to exist on our planet 3.5 billion years ago. This was the conclusion reached by a research team after studying microscopic fluid inclusions in barium sulfate (barite) from the Dresser Mine in Marble Bar, Australia. In their publication "Ingredients for microbial life preserved in 3.5-billion-year-old fluid inclusions," the researchers suggest that organic carbon compounds which could serve as nutrients for microbial life already existed at this time. The study by first author Helge Mißbach (University of Göttingen, Germany) was published in the journal ...

Pathways leading to the extramedullary development of tissue-resident lymphocytes found

Pathways leading to the extramedullary development of tissue-resident lymphocytes found
2021-03-31
Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS), teamed up with scientists from Aix Marseille University, discovered that hematopoietic progenitors possessed the differentiation potential to type 1 innate lymphoid cells (ILC1s) in adult liver, and dissected the regulation mechanisms of such cell differentiation, revealing the pathways that lead to the development of tissue-resident lymphocytes. This study was published in Science. Hematopoiesis occurs at different sites following the development of human body. After birth, the bone marrow (BM) has long been known to be the main hematopoietic organ ...

Choose life: Why patients in China refuse standard treatment for a type of heart attack

Choose life: Why patients in China refuse standard treatment for a type of heart attack
2021-03-31
ST segment-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) is a particularly severe type of heart attack associated with a high risk of mortality or long-term disability. Clinicians can reduce a patient's chances of unfavorable outcomes by performing a procedure known as percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), which combines coronary angioplasty--in which a balloon is inserted into a blocked artery of the heart to clear it--with stenting--inserting a tiny tube into a blocked artery to keep the line open. But studies in China have found that many patients with STEMI choose not to undergo PCI and that women with STEMI, in particular, have a reduced likelihood of undergoing guideline-based ...

Micro-environmental influences on artificial micromotors

2021-03-31
By harvesting energy from their surrounding environments, particles named 'artificial micromotors' can propel themselves in specific directions when placed in aqueous solutions. In current research, a popular choice of micromotor is the spherical 'Janus particle' - featuring two distinct sides with different physical properties. Until now, however, few studies have explored how these particles interact with other objects in their surrounding microenvironments. In an experiment detailed in EPJ E, researchers in Germany and The Netherlands, led by Larysa Baraban at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, show for the first time how the velocities of Janus particles relate to the physical properties of nearby barriers. The team's discoveries could help researchers to engineer micromotors which ...

More support needed for two children in every class with hidden language disorder

2021-03-31
Children with a common but regularly undiagnosed disorder affecting their language and communication are likely to be finding the transition back to school post-lockdown harder than most, according to a team of psychologists. Two children in every class of 30 are estimated to have Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (around 8%), yet public awareness, diagnosis and referral to speech and language therapists all remain low in the UK. DLD is a condition where children have problems acquiring their own language for no obvious reasons. Unlike temporary language delay (which reflects the natural variation of age at which children learn to speak and communicate), DLD is a lifelong condition with significant impacts for individuals in childhood and in later life, in particular their ...

Carbon-neutral 'biofuel' from lakes

2021-03-31
Lakes store huge amounts of methane. In a new study, environmental scientists at the University of Basel offer suggestions for how it can be extracted and used as an energy source in the form of methanol. Discussion about the current climate crisis usually focuses on carbon dioxide (CO2). The greenhouse gas methane is less well known, but although it is much rarer in the atmosphere, its global warming potential is 80 to 100 times greater per unit. More than half the methane caused by human activities comes from oil production and agricultural fertilizers. But the gas is also created by the natural decomposition of biomass by ...

Scientists pinpoint our most distant animal relatives

Scientists pinpoint our most distant animal relatives
2021-03-31
Scientists from Trinity College Dublin believe they have pinpointed our most distant animal relative in the tree of life and, in doing so, have resolved an ongoing debate. Their work finds strong evidence that sponges - not more complex comb jellies - were our most distant relatives. Sponges are structurally simple, lacking complex traits such as a nervous system, muscles, and a though-gut. Logically, you would expect these complex traits to have emerged only once during animal evolution - after our lineage diverged from that of sponges - and then be retained in newly evolved creatures thereafter. However, a debate has been raging ever since phylogenomic studies found evidence that our most distant ...

Findings offer 'recipe' for fine tuning alloys for high-temperature use

Findings offer recipe for fine tuning alloys for high-temperature use
2021-03-31
Superalloys that withstand extremely high temperatures could soon be tuned even more finely for specific properties such as mechanical strength, as a result of new findings published today. A phenomenon related to the invar effect - which enables magnetic materials such as nickel-iron (Ni-Fe) alloys to keep from expanding with increasing temperature - was reported to have been discovered in paramagnetic, or weakly magnetized, high-temperature alloys. Levente Vitos, Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, says the breakthrough research, which includes a general theory explaining the new invar effect, promises to advance the design of high-temperature alloys with exceptional mechanical stability. The article was published in the Proceedings ...

Biodiversity is positively related to mental health

2021-03-31
The higher the number of plant and bird species in a region, the healthier the people who live there. This was found by a new study published in Landscape and Urban Planning and led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (SBiK-F) and the Christian Albrechts University (CAU) in Kiel. The researchers found that, in particular, mental health and higher species diversity are positively related, whereas a similar relationship between plant or bird species and physical health could not be proven. The study led by researchers from iDiv, SBiK-F and CAU provides ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Underserved youth less likely to visit emergency department for concussion in Ontario, study finds

‘Molecular shield’ placed in the nose may soon treat common hay fever trigger

Beetles under climate stress lay larger male eggs: Wolbachia infection drives adaptive reproduction strategy in response to rising temperature and CO₂

Groundbreaking quantum study puts wave-particle duality to work

Weekly injection could be life changing for Parkinson’s patients

Toxic metals linked to impaired growth in infants in Guatemala

Being consistently physically active in adulthood linked to 30–40% lower risk of death

Nerve pain drug gabapentin linked to increased dementia, cognitive impairment risks

Children’s social care involvement common to nearly third of UK mums who died during perinatal period

‘Support, not judgement’: Study explores links between children’s social care involvement and maternal deaths

Ethnic minority and poorer children more likely to die in intensive care

Major progress in fertility preservation after treatment for cancer of the lymphatic system

Fewer complications after additional ultrasound in pregnant women who feel less fetal movement

Environmental impact of common pesticides seriously underestimated

The Milky Way could be teeming with more satellite galaxies than previously thought

New study reveals surprising reproductive secrets of a cricket-hunting parasitoid fly

Media Tip Sheet: Symposia at ESA2025

NSF CAREER Award will power UVA engineer’s research to improve drug purification

Tiny parasitoid flies show how early-life competition shapes adult success

New coating for glass promises energy-saving windows

Green spaces boost children’s cognitive skills and strengthen family well-being

Ancient trees dying faster than expected in Eastern Oregon

Study findings help hone precision of proven CVD risk tool

Most patients with advanced melanoma who received pre-surgical immunotherapy remain alive and disease free four years later

Introducing BioEmu: A generative AI Model that enables high-speed and accurate prediction of protein structural ensembles

Replacing mutated microglia with healthy microglia halts progression of genetic neurological disease in mice and humans

New research shows how tropical plants manage rival insect tenants by giving them separate ‘flats’

Condo-style living helps keep the peace inside these ant plants

Climate change action could dramatically limit rising UK heatwave deaths

Annual heat-related deaths projected to increase significantly due to climate and population change

[Press-News.org] How many countries are ready for nuclear-powered electricity?
A study of 126 nations suggests that many lack the capacity to safely deploy nuclear power on their own