Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour.
The organization has exposed modern slavery, forced and child labour throughout the renewable energy supply chain, with evidence of state-imposed forced labour of Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim majority groups in China in the making and supply of solar panels and other renewable technologies.
It has also shone a light on the slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where cobalt is mined by workers for its use in rechargeable batteries for laptop computers and mobile phones.
“We have an opportunity to build an economy that isn’t coming from colonial lines and yet, right now, a green economy absolutely will be built on forced and child labour,” Forrest says.
“So the message really is, you cannot harm people in the name of saving the planet.”
Walk Free’s latest Global Slavery Index estimated that 50 million people were living in modern slavery – either in forced labour or forced marriage – on any given day in 2021.
It’s not cheaper. New nuclear power plants are so expensive to build today that even free fuel and waste disposal doesn’t make the entire life cycle cheaper than solar.
It is cheaper when you’re just talking about the actual construction, operation, and externalized elements of the fuel cycle. The reason they are so expensive is the massive difficulties and delays that come from getting the projects approved and the constant legal challenges to shut down construction once approved. If construction is delayed by an injunction, you still have to pay all the specialist until construction starts again.
Solar is only particularly cheap if the power goes directly in to the grid and doesn’t need to stored. Including the cost of grid scale storage bloats the price to be uncompetitive with natural gas.
Can you name an example? Because the reactor constructions that I’ve seen get delayed have run into plain old engineering problems. The 4 proposed new reactors at Vogtle and V.C. Summer ran into cost overruns because of production issues and QA/QC issues requiring expensive redesigns mid-construction, after initial regulatory approvals and licensing were already approved. The V.C. Summer project was canceled after running up $9 billion in costs, and the Vogtle projects are about $17 billion over the original $14 billion budget, at $31 billion (and counting, as reactor 4 has been delayed once again over cooling system issues). The timeline is also about 8 years late (originally proposed to finish in 2016).
And yes, litigation did make those projects even more expensive, but the litigation was mostly about other things (like energy buyers trying to back out of the commitment to buy power from the completed reactors when it was taking too long), because it took too long, not litigation to slow things down.
The small modular reactor project in Idaho was just canceled too, because of the mundane issue of interest rates and buyers unwilling to commit to the high prices.
Nuclear doesn’t make financial sense anymore. Let’s keep the plants we have for as long as we can, but we might be past the point where new plants are cost effective.