The Hunter Memorial lecture 2007

Speaker: Dr Sue Ion, former BNFL Group Director of Technology

Dr Ion was President of the British Nuclear Energy Society between 2004 and 2006 and remains a member of its Executive Board. She is a senior contributor in matters of national Science, Engineering and Technology Policy and is a Vice President and Member of Council of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a member of the UK Council for Science and Technology.

She was a member of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council from 1994-2001 and Chairman of its Audit Committee. She is a non-Executive Director on the Board of the Laboratory of the UK Health and Safety Executive.

Dr Ion was BNFL's Group Director of Technology 1992-2006. Throughout the 1990s she directly managed BNFL’s UK R+D portfolio with an annual budget of £100M, overseeing capital investment programmes in excess of £300M and major rationalisation of the Group’s R+D resources. From 1997 she assumed functional accountability for the whole of the Group’s Technology portfolio including Westinghouse, during a period of tremendous change for the Company and the nuclear sector generally. She chaired the Group’s Technology Executive and Committees concerned with Government and Regulatory issues and remains an advisor to the Company in a consultancy capacity.

Sue Ion's background is in materials science/metallurgy. She gained a first class honours degree from Imperial College in 1976 and a PhD in 1979 before joining BNFL. She was appointed Visiting Professor at Imperial College in 2006 and has been a member of the Board of Governors at the University of Manchester since 2004.

She has extensive working knowledge of the nuclear fuel cycle, in particular fuel manufacture and reprocessing and recycle technologies. She represents the UK on a number of international review and oversight committees for the nuclear sector including the Generation IV International Advisory Committee, the IAEA Standing Advisory Group on Nuclear Energy and the Euratom Science and Technology Committee.

Dr Ion has held a number of non-executive directorships associated with technology-based businesses and consultancies.

Synopsis

For close to half a century nuclear fission has been providing reliable supplies of electricity to the UK, with virtually no emissions of carbon dioxide. Over that period, the UK nuclear industry has avoided the emission of over one and a half billion tonnes of CO2. Yet no nuclear plant has been built in the UK for over two decades even though many of the stations in our current fleet are now within a decade or so of the end of their lifetime.

Without new plants being ordered soon, the UK’s nuclear capacity will decline dramatically -just as considerations of supply security and climate change are becoming increasingly important.

Even with the plethora of Consultations, Reviews and White Papers we still seem some way from definitive decisions to replace the retiring UK nuclear fleet with modern systems. Yet elsewhere in the world, many countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, Finland and France are building new stations. Other countries such as the US, South Africa, and some nations which currently do not have nuclear (such as Indonesia and Poland) are making preparations for future nuclear stations.

Globally capacity factors for nuclear plants are higher than they have ever been – averaging around 85% and with the best stations achieving well over 90%. The economics of such stations compete well with other technologies – especially in the face of rising fossil fuel prices and the pricing in of costs for CO2 emissions – both of which stand to improve the economics of nuclear still further.

Waste volumes arising from modern plants are just a fraction of those of some earlier stations, and the technologies are in place to deal with them safely and effectively. And design lifetimes can be 60 years or more, which means that these plants will still be contributing electricity when today’s known oil and gas reserves may be long gone and when low-carbon power generation is likely to be virtually mandatory.

Development work is also underway today into more advanced reactor designs – for deployment beyond 2020 – such as the international Generation IV programme. Some of these systems have the potential to play a key role in a future hydrogen economy, through the use of their high temperature process heat in the direct production of hydrogen. There is therefore a potential synergy between such systems and the reduction of carbon emissions from the key transport sector.

The lecture will look at worldwide developments in nuclear fission systems and the designs most likely to receive serious consideration for UK deployment. It will set this in the context of the growing awareness in the UK that nuclear energy does indeed have a role to play in delivering the key political objectives of low carbon, safe, secure, affordable energy supplies.