Over the last few years the nuclear industry has used concerns about climate change to argue for a nuclear revival. Although industry representatives may have convinced some political leaders that this is a good idea, there is little evidence of private capital investing in nuclear plants in competitive electricity markets. The reason is simple: nuclear power is uneconomical.
In an excellent recent analysis, "The Nuclear Illusion," Amory B. Lovins and Imran Sheikh put the cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant at 14¢ per kilowatt hour and that from a wind farm at 7¢ per kilowatt hour. This comparison includes the costs of fuel, capital, operations and maintenance, and transmission and distribution. It does not include the additional costs for nuclear of disposing of waste, insuring plants against an accident, and decommissioning the plants when they wear out. Given this huge gap, the so-called nuclear revival can succeed only by unloading these costs onto taxpayers. If all the costs of generating nuclear electricity are included in the price to consumers, nuclear power is dead in the water.
To get a sense of the costs of nuclear waste disposal, we need not look beyond the United States, which leads the world with 101,000 megawatts of nuclear-generating capacity (compared with 63,000 megawatts in second-ranked France). The United States proposes to store the radioactive waste from its 104 nuclear power reactors in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, roughly 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. The cost of this repository, originally estimated at $58 billion in 2001, climbed to $96 billion by 2008. This comes to a staggering $923 million per reactor -- almost $1 billion each -- assuming no further repository cost increases. (See data).
In addition to being over budget, the repository is 19 years behind schedule. Originally slated to start accepting waste in 1998, it is now set to do so in 2017, assuming it clears all remaining hurdles. This leaves nuclear waste in storage in 121 temporary facilities in 39 states -- sites that are vulnerable both to leakage and to terrorist attacks.
One of the risks of nuclear power is a catastrophic accident like the one at Chernobyl in Russia. The Price-Anderson Act, first enacted by Congress in 1957, shelters U.S. utilities with nuclear power plants from the cost of such an accident. Under the act, utilities are required to maintain private accident insurance of $300 million per reactor -- the maximum the insurance industry will provide. In the event of a catastrophic accident, every nuclear utility would be required to contribute up to $95.8 million for each licensed reactor to a pool to help cover the accident's cost.
The collective cap on nuclear operator liability is $10.2 billion. This compares with an estimate by Sandia National Laboratory that a worst-case accident could cost $700 billion, a sum equal to the recent U.S. financial bailout. So anything above $10.2 billion would be covered by taxpayers.
Another huge cost of nuclear power involves decommissioning the plants when they wear out. A 2004 International Atomic Energy Agency report estimates the decommissioning cost per reactor at $250-500 million, excluding the cost of removing and disposing of the spent nuclear fuel. But recent estimates for some reactors, such as the U.K. Magnox reactors that have high decommissioning waste volumes, decommissioning costs can reach $1.8 billion per reactor.
In addition to the costs just cited, the industry must cope with rising construction and fuel expenses. Two years ago, building a 1,500-megawatt nuclear plant was estimated to cost $2-4 billion. As of late 2008, that figure had climbed past $7 billion, reflecting primarily the scarcity of essential engineering and construction skills in a fading industry.
Nuclear fuel costs have risen even more rapidly. At the beginning of this decade uranium cost roughly $10 per pound. Today it costs more than $60 per pound. The higher uranium price reflects the need to move to ever deeper mines, which increases the energy needed to extract the ore, and the shift to lower-grade ore. In the United States in the late 1950s, for example, uranium ore contained roughly 0.28 percent uranium oxide. By the 1990s, it had dropped to 0.09 percent. This means, of course, that the cost of mining larger quantities of ore, and that of getting it from deeper mines, ensures even higher future costs of nuclear fuel.
Few nuclear power plants are being built in countries with competitive electricity markets. The reason is simple. Nuclear cannot compete with other electricity sources. This explains why nuclear plant construction is now concentrated in countries like Russia and China where nuclear development is state-controlled. The high cost of nuclear power also explains why so few plants are being built compared with a generation ago.
In an illuminating article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, nuclear consultant Mycle Schneider projects an imminent decline in world nuclear generating capacity. He notes there are currently 439 operating reactors worldwide. To date, 119 reactors have been closed, at an average age of 22 years. If we generously assume a much longer average lifespan of 40 years, then 93 reactors will close between 2008 and 2015. Another 192 will close between 2016 and 2025. And the remaining 154 will close after 2025.
But only 36 nuclear reactors are currently under construction worldwide -- 31 of them in Eastern Europe and Asia. Although there is much talk of building new nuclear plants in the United States, there are none under construction.
What these numbers indicate, Schneider points out, is that plant closings will soon exceed plant openings -- and by a widening margin in the years ahead. The trend is clear. From 2000 to 2005, an average of 4,000 megawatts of nuclear generating capacity was added each year. Since 2005, this has dropped to only 1,000 megawatts of additional capacity per year.
Even if all reactors scheduled to come online by 2015 make it, the projected closing of 93 nuclear reactors by then will drop nuclear power generation roughly 10 percent below the current level. Unless governments start routinely granting operating permits for reactors more than 40 years-old, a half-century of growth in world nuclear generating capacity is about to be replaced by a long-term decline.
Despite all the industry hype about a nuclear future, private investors are openly skeptical. In fact, while little private capital is going into nuclear power, investors are pouring tens of billions of dollars into wind farms each year. And while the world's nuclear generating capacity is estimated to expand by only 1,000 megawatts this year, wind generating capacity will likely grow by 30,000 megawatts. In addition, solar cell installations and the construction of solar thermal and geothermal power plants are all growing by leaps and bounds.
The reason for this extraordinary gap between the construction of nuclear power plants and wind farms is simple: wind is much more attractive economically. Wind yields more energy, more jobs, and more carbon reduction per dollar invested than nuclear. Though nuclear power plants are still being built in some countries and governments are talking them up in others, the reality is that we are entering the age of wind, solar, and geothermal energy.
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Comments
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Sean Casten Posted 5:59 am
29 Oct 2008
Add those together and you'll need something like 13 cents/kWh just for capital recovery. Cheap, indeed.
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David Roberts Posted 6:23 am
29 Oct 2008
grist.org
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anotherID Posted 6:38 am
29 Oct 2008
I would encourage everyone to take a look at the book Predator State, it describes how the conservatives have abandonded the free market.
Socialism for me and my preferred industries (like nukes) and capitalism for all the little people.
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Sean Casten Posted 7:35 am
29 Oct 2008
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David Bradish Posted 8:11 am
29 Oct 2008
I love these hit jobs on nuclear. Brown spends 15 out of his 16 paragraphs denigrating the technology, yet provides a few measly sentences saying wind and other renewables are better. For once I would like to see you guys provide a side-by-side, in-depth, realistic comparison of all technologies. Simply saying renewables are better doesn't do it.
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Sean Casten Posted 8:42 am
29 Oct 2008
I am personally not anti-nuclear. I am, however a firm believer that in a carbon-constrained world, we need to deploy the cheapest possible means of GHG control. If nuclear can compete on it's merits in that environment, fine. But let's not lose sight of the fact that no one builds nuke plants who isn't blessed with massive government subsidies - the capital risk, insurance risk and power merchant risk are simply too great. And in spite of all the subsidies we provide to the nuclear industry, the US has installed more GW of new wind in the last 10 years than nuclear (and more CHP than both combined). One can only conclude one of three things from those facts:
Power plant investors are stupid.
The subsidy to nuclear per MWh is lower than the subsidy to wind and CHP per MWh, skewing capital allocation accordingly.
Nuclear doesn't make economic sense today even with it's subsidies.
I presume you'd agree with me that 1 and 2 are patently false. If so, how does that leave any possibility other than 3?
Note that I'm not making any assertion about nuke vs. renewable vs. CHP comparisons based on some academic perspective. If you disagree with Lovins' data, that's fine, but you still have to confront the reality of market capital allocation. I'm also not categorically asserting that nuclear doesn't have a role to play in a carbon-constrained future. At the right carbon price, nuclear makes sense. I'm simply saying that the facts of deployment speak for themselves, and the reality of high cost capital recovery + enormous subsidies for nuclear power cannot be sugarcoated.
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KenG Posted 11:25 am
29 Oct 2008
Examples: It's criminal the way the Feds have managed Yucca Mtn but it is being funded by the nuclear plants electricity production. Even if it does cost $1B per reactor sometime in the future, that's only 1 or 2% of the lifetime value of the electricity produced.
Decommissioning - Yes the Brits are worrying over costs but in the US, decommissioning again is funded up front by the operating plants. Several US plants have been decommissioned and come in under budget. What reason is there to be concerned?
119 closed reactors? Yes, the small early prototypes have been closed. The large units are having operating life extended. It is expected that over 90% of the 104 US reactors now operating will operate for at least 60 years. A good number are already past 30 years.
Price Anderson - Will you please read the act instead of getting info from Wikipedia? Anything over 10.2 Billion would be covered by the taxpayers only if Congress specifically decides that. Even if Congress decides to pay additional damages, the nuclear industry can be assessed payments for as long as necessary to pay back the funds. That's what P-A says.
Finally, comparing renewables without storage to nuclear only makes sense until renewables get up to 20% or so of generation. After that you need storage. Storage may become feasible, but to date, no one has done it on a large scale, or operated economically.
Contrary to what many may believe, I'm not against renewables and I think conservation is absolutely essential. But if we don't at least start building the next generation of nuclear, we're putting all our eggs in a very leaky basket.
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Jon Rynn Posted 11:30 am
29 Oct 2008
The bottom line is that the private sector is much, much more interested -- like 30 times, if you look at this year's MW figures -- in wind than in nuclear.
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David Bradish Posted 11:34 am
29 Oct 2008
You said: Nuclear, like coal has promulgated a myth that it is cheap, on the basis that if you ignore capital costs, the variable costs are low.
The nuclear industry doesn't deny the fact that nuclear plants aren't cheap to build. We like any other industry like to point out that its operating costs are cheap. And that's the key data point that makes nuclear plants economical. We're not trying to portray a myth. We're trying to provide the information as objective as possible (pdf).
And in spite of all the subsidies we provide to the nuclear industry, the US has installed more GW of new wind in the last 10 years than nuclear (and more CHP than both combined).
And yet wind generation still hasn't provided more than one percent of the US' electricity. Here's an interesting stat for you. From 1997 to 2007, the US nuclear industry has increased its generation at its existing plants by 178 bkWh without building a new nuclear plant. In 2007, the wind industry generated a total of 32 bkWh (pdf). Even though the wind industry has installed more capacity over the past decade, the nuclear industry still generated more New output.
We can talk about CHP if you want, but CHP is basically an acronym for gas and coal plants (at least according to Lovins' data). I have gotten the sense from the Grist readers that they're not too fond of fossil-fuels. :)
3. Nuclear doesn't make economic sense today even with it's subsidies.
I disagree. Over the past year, 17 applications for more than 20 new nuclear reactors have been submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval. This is due, in all honesty, to the loan guarantee program which is also available to other non-emitting technologies like wind and solar. If new nuclear plants weren't economical, you wouldn't see utilities spending millions of dollars to submit just the application to build a nuclear plant to the NRC. Of course it remains to be seen when and if they all get built. But there's a strong tailwind for the utilities to build many of these new nuclear plants.
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Jon Rynn Posted 11:48 am
29 Oct 2008
Second, it's a little weird blaming the Feds for a private problem, disposing of waste. There are plenty of temporary waste sites, spread all over, a problem that wind and solar certainly don't have.
Third, Brown was, admittedly, talking about a worse case insurance scenario of a $700 billion dollar meltdown, which the nuclear industry certainly couldn't afford to clean up.
Fourth, he assumed a 40 year nuclear plant life, even a 60 year life plus very little additions to the nuclear fleet equals eventual diminishing percentage of electricity generation.
And finally, the nuclear industry has gotten around $60 billion in subsidies, renewables $10 billion over the last 60 years. Maybe we can agree that it would certainly be worth the money to do lots of studies looking into how much a national system of wind and solar (and geothermal) could potentially contribute to the electrical system.
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:01 pm
29 Oct 2008
It looks to me that the increase in generation for nuclear, from 2006 to 2007, was almost 20 bkwhrs, while for wind, from 2007 to 2008, about 16 bkwhrs. So it looks like wind is catching up. But Brown was talking about capacity, I don't know if there is a difference.
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Atomicrod Posted 5:53 pm
29 Oct 2008
Rather than checking to see how many nuclear power plants are scheduled to be shut down between now and 2015, he resorts to using a model based on at least two invalid assumptions (prior decisions to shut down plants at certain ages predicts the future decisions, and there will be no changes in technology, markets or law that will alter nuclear plant life expectancy) to COMPUTE that there will be 93 plants shut down in that very near term future. That model is grossly wrong based on announced plans. In fact, there is a possibility that several previously shut down plants will be restored to operation in that time period.
He also makes a big deal about the cost of uranium and uses skewed data to indicate that it is going up because of physical scarcity and production costs rather than complex market behavior and trading reasons. There is an enormous store of uranium in the world, but the markets for it are opaque and intermittent. At $60 per pound, it represents a fuel cost of only about 0.6 cents per kilowatt hour after all enrichment, fabrication, waste storage and producer profit margin. That cost is almost exactly the same as it was in 1960 without any adjustment for inflation. For comparison, in 1960, a barrel of oil cost less than $3.
Lester also does not mention the very obvious fact that wind and solar investors are not investing without a lot of help from the federal, state and local governments to provide somewhere around half to three quarters of the dollars that make the investment work. They have loan guarantees, production tax credits, accelerated depreciation allowances, and perhaps most importantly, Renewable Portfolio Standards. They also have an enormous army of lobbyists led by major industrial companies with a national capitalism mentality of privatizing the wealth while socializing the risk. When you press your representatives for subsidies for wind and solar, you are working - unpaid - for GE, Siemens, Kyocera, Sharp, BP, Shell, FPL, Boone Pickens, and many other companies that love to collect your tax dollars and tinkle down the benefits.
There are many private investors who are putting major dollars into doing the foundational work that will enable a new generation of new nuclear plants, both traditional large plants and smaller plants that have all of the characteristics that Lovins likes to tout for distributed power sources like CHP. Check that, they actually do his favorite sources - natural gas and coal - one better since they will not produce any emissions at all.
Investors in new nuclear power projects include major companies like Exelon, NRG, Southern Company, Progress Energy, Areva, Northrop Grumman, FPL, Entergy, Shaw Group, Westinghouse, McDermott, Hyperion and NuScale. They also include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Rod Adams (forgive my vanity in putting my name there, but heck, as a percentage of net worth, I am up there on the list), John Deal, Paul Lorenzini, Jose Reyes and George Chapman. While no ground has been broken - yet - there are a number of signed Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) contracts and there are components being formed. (Note: I am not providing links, but you can find out more about the projects using the above names as search terms.)
It takes time to build big projects, but we did not get into our energy crisis overnight and will not get out with quick fixes. Lester is absolutely correct that nuclear power has not attracted many Wall Street investors in the past few decades. I tend to think that is a ringing endorsement; we have all seen the fallout from the favored investments that are characterized by short term payoffs and ready cash out capability.
Nuclear power works; it competes very well against coal, oil and gas for reliable electrical and large vessel propulsion power. Wind and solar do not really produce the same product - they can only provide useful energy when the weather cooperates. Comparing them as energy sources to nuclear is like comparing a garden to a grocery store. Sure, it is possible to get cheap food out of the garden on occasion, and it is even possible to store enough food to survive. It is comparatively difficult work and not really economically viable for an entire society, especially as we are currently populated and structured. Gardens do not work for people who live in apartment buildings, for those who are physically disabled, or for those that live in non temperate climates. Neither do solar and wind.
I predict that at least one response to this post is going to include a comment about the need to control and reduce our human population, but I am not about to start making the kinds of choices that would be required to have a world population that is substantially lower than we have today any time in the next several decades. Though I kind of hope that growth slows, the overall number is not going to decline and the need for energy is not going to fit within the constraints of wind, solar and available fossil fuels.
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Atomicrod Posted 6:13 pm
29 Oct 2008
Your time frame for subsidies is carefully chosen to obscure reality. The real number for nuclear subsidies, broadly defined, is less than $15 billion but most of that was expended before 1970. It becomes your quoted $60 billion with an inflation correction. For the past 20 years or so, there have not been any direct monetary subsidies for operating nuclear plants, but the federal laboratory and university complex has demanded and received some amount of research money that some count as subsidies.
Though I would love for used nuclear fuel to be a private problem, the US government disagrees and has ALWAYS claimed a monopoly on the final disposition of materials used as fuel in a nuclear reactor. The entity that used the fuel has to pay a fee for the service of ultimate disposal, but so far none have received any service. Storing the material safely for an indefinite period of time is not difficult or even expensive compared to the value of the electricity produced. No one has ever been hurt by stored used nuclear fuel.
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vakibs Posted 8:12 pm
29 Oct 2008
Nuclear power might have problems : in economics, pollution, waste etc. Get people who work in this technology to write on it. There are a handful of nuclear scientists who don't believe in nuclear power's promise. But unlike the clueless people like above, they will think twice and look behind their backs before stuttering out any nonsense.
Get a nuclear scientist to write an anti-nuclear piece.. please !
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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vakibs Posted 8:31 pm
29 Oct 2008
Great to see David recognize that drinking water is going to be a severe problem in the future. And great that he recognizes the ability of nuclear heat towards water desalination.
About pony poots, I have no idea. There is no methane by-product in nuclear power, as far as I know. He is probably getting confused with CHP : burn 90% of fossil fuels along with a 10% of bio-crap and methane, and there you have all the green power to save the planet. Viola.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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amazingdrx Posted 11:57 pm
29 Oct 2008
Besides, who is going to want tritium in their drinking water?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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vakibs Posted 12:14 am
30 Oct 2008
You are up against the null hypothesis, which is in favor of nuclear power.
I will explain. You calculate the amount of energy required for nuclear plant construction + the amount of energy needed in mining the required materials + the amount of energy needed to lay down transmission cables + the amount of energy needed to start the nuclear reaction. This is the input energy.
Now you calculate the amount of energy produced by a nuclear plant in its entire period of operation. This is the output energy.
Is the output energy > input energy ? Of course. By thousands of orders of magnitude.
Now imagine a feedback loop where the output energy is pumped into the input. This creates a feedback with a huge gain factor (for people who understand control theory). The system should register rapid exponential growth.
If you understand science, this is how your brain thinks. Your null hypothesis on nuclear power will be that it should be quite economical.
To rebut that argument, you anti-nukes have to work hard. It is not sufficient to just show figures that nuclear electricity is expensive. You should also explain why it is expensive. Otherwise, you will not convince folks, you will be losing the game.
Of course, none of you dare to do this. Because deep down, you know that your argument holds no merit. Nuclear power has lower requirements on land + construction materials + capital expenses per MW of electricity produced than any sort of renewable power (wind power included). So please concede your defeat, instead of carping on crap.
Having said that, I respect your doubts and suspicions on nuclear power. You might fear nuclear accidents, radiation spills, nuclear proliferation, nuclear waste and what not. Let's have a meaningful debate there.
Low costs is not a strong-point for renewables in the debate against nuclear.
@amazing Dr X
Please double check on your physics. Nuclear reactors produce a lot of heat (at extremely high temperatures), all of which is essentially discarded currently. This can be easily redirected to several purposes - water desalination, biomass cultivation, Boron refinement and so on.
Today, this heat is just used to evaporate water (the clouds that you see on top of those dreaded cooling towers are water vapor clouds). A simple distillation mechanism would get that water to your taps. This is extremely pure water : will have no dangerous traces of Tritium (may be in your imagination).
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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Charles Barton Posted 12:25 am
30 Oct 2008
Then Slesser points to Lovins' second error:
Here is a quote from page 244:
"Over the next half-century, even if global economy expanded by 6 - 8 fold, the rate of releasing carbon by burning of fossil fuels could simultaneously decrease by anywhere from one third to nine-tenths below current rate. This is because of the multiplicative effect of four kinds of actions. Switching to natural gas and renewable energy, as fast as Shell Oil planners consider likely, would cut by one half to three quarters the fossil-fuel carbon in each unit of energy consumed."
They continue: 'The efficiency of converting that energy into delivered forms, notably electricity, could meanwhile rise by at least half, thanks to modern power plants and recapturing waste heat. The efficiency of converting delivered energy into desired services would also increase by about 4-6 fold' (Why?, How?) '. 'Finally the amount of satisfaction derived from each unit of energy might perhaps be doubled by delivering higher-quality services and fewer unwanted ones.'
The allure of this argument is indeed compelling for it banishes the doom and gloom merchants to their dismal cellars; but it is misleading, for there is one thing they have over-looked: human greed. The evidence is that when you get more from less, you just take advantage of the slack. Economists call this the 'rebound effect', and it is well documented. Is it significant that neither 'rebound effect' nor 'thermodynamics' appear in the index of a book that is astonishingly rich in allusions to energy?
http://www.feasta.org/documents/feastareview/slesser.htm
Slesser got one thing wrong. Lovins never earned a degree in physics, in fact he never earned any university degree at all, although he sometimes styles himself Dr. Lovins is only a honorary doctor. His claim to be the Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute is a big put on. Lovins controls the RMI, and he can call himself anything he wants, but that does not make him a scientist.
Lovins has founded an American cargo cult, and as Erric Hoffer once wrote:
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.
Lester Brown, David Roberts, and Joe Romm are Lovins' cargo cult's evangelists, spreading the word to that if we only worship the sun and the wind, and abjure the satanic reactors, abundant electricity will be ours.
Charles Barton
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amazingdrx Posted 1:01 am
30 Oct 2008
A big breakthtough would be needed to make nuclear power safe and competitive. Support R&D, instead of nuclear power in it's present fatally flawed form.
A simple easily defended position on nuclear power as well as other flawed, water wasting technologies..clean coal, fuel farming, geothermal, CCS, biomass combustion and so forth.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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vakibs Posted 1:07 am
30 Oct 2008
Several nuclear power plants already do desalination, and make money out of it. Newer designs of nuclear reactors explicitly state their desalination potential.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:17 am
30 Oct 2008
Sure that's ok in warships (they don't do that do they?) because the leaks can be hidden by military secrecy. But in civilian power plants I can't see taking the chance.
Besides which, the condensors would add cost and consumers would never trust the nuke water. Should they with all the tritium and strontium leaks into the water and aquifer from presently operating nuclear power plants?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:28 am
30 Oct 2008
Now that I've finished being grumpy, let me throw out a few ideas:
First, the relatively easy and fast building of wind farms is going to give them a big advantage over nuclear. It's just going to be easier to convince investors to put money into something lower risk, less complex, and something that starts getting a return on investment much faster than nuclear. This is probably why most nuclear development is being pushed by governments. In fact, that's probably another reason why the French successfully built it up, had they depended on the market, it never would have happened.
Second, I think that many governments will look at the alternatives and decide that even they will lean toward wind -- for instance, San Francisco is putting up a wind farm. It's easier for a smaller governmental unit to do than a big nuclear plant.
Third, although it probably deserves a longer treatment, the Stanford study was done by a professor and researcher who have been seriously studying wind for many years, and have published numerous peer-reviewed papers on it. They argue that a national wind network would provide baseload. As to who would pay for it, if it were up to me, Federal and local governments would put it up, but the same ideological impediments to a national nuclear system -- which if you look at France, seems to be an important componenent of their success -- might get in the way of a rationally-planned national wind system. So it might have to come together piecemeal.
Fourth, as per Brown's previous post, private investors are actually constructing transmission lines for wind. Again, it would probably be more rational for the government to rationally plan a grid, but who knows? And by the way, nuclear advocates should be pushing for a major upgrade and expansion of the grid, because nothing is going to be built without that.
Fifth, I think that there are legitimate concerns about uranium supply (check here, for instance), but that is beyond my technical ability. In general, a huge advantage of solar/wind/geothermal is that you don't have the geopolitical/economic problem of finding, obtaining, and shipping a fuel -- whether natural gas, oil, coal, or uranium. Which leads to
Sixth, a general appeal to the idea of resiliency. For instance, while there have been no major problems with spent nuclear fuel -- although Brown refers to over 250 incidents of loss or theft globally, so maybe I'm wrong about that -- but let's assume it's OK, we have to worry about the stuff for thousands of years. This is not a very stable situation. And of course there's the proliferation problem, of which Lester Brown asks, "who is going to be permitted to have nuclear power?" As you may have noticed, there's a lot of huffing and puffing over Iran's nuclear program. Will nuclear power only be OK for developed countries? So,
Seventh, I will continue, personally, to concentrate on the question of whether renewables could supply all energy needs of a future sustainable global economy, because more than worrying about the various technical arguments for or against nuclear power, it may be the case that the real choice will be made -- or even a combination of using both -- based on how usable renewables will be on a massive scale, and I don't think that the necessary work has been done to find out the answer to those questions.
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vakibs Posted 1:56 am
30 Oct 2008
Market mechanisms are notorious for thwarting any investment opportunity that requires them to wait. Thinking on short term profits is good, but is prone to financial boom and bust cycles, as we can all attest at this very moment. It is a shortcoming of our current economic system.
I would not want to leave the climate crisis at the mercy of market mechanisms, expecting a miraculous cure. Joe Romm has been as forthcoming as I am, in a recent blog.
About the 5th concern of Jon on nuclear fuel, it is utter bogus. I will be a very happy man if that is true; because it would mean breeder reactors will automatically become profitable. This is unfortunately not the case - Uranium prices are very low, and there is plenty of it there to last for several hundreds of years.
About the 6th concern, we need to rapidly modify our thinking on nuclear proliferation. As we stand today, nuclear proliferation is already happening amongst the worst regimes in the world. So far, our policy has been that we can restrict access to technology and nobody will dare poke into the nuclear pie. This thinking is quite inane.
We should be serious about the very real threat of a nuclear terrorist explosion. The only way to prevent it is by complete oversight on fissile material everywhere in the world. This can be achieved only by a functional international organization. Tom Blees has a nice suggestion on this in his book.
@amazing
I think the use of sea water for turning nuclear power turbines has been studied quite well. I don't know if there are any plants implementing these designs already. We need to subject the seawater to some treatment first of course, but we don't need fresh water to begin with.
By the way, fast reactors (such as IFR) have much less requirements on water, as they use liquid Sodium/lead coolants.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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ronwagn Posted 2:07 am
30 Oct 2008
The economic damage would be worse than anything we are now undergoing. The public must refuse to insure nuclear plants. That will put an end to them.
If nuclear plants were safe everyone would be for them. They are not safe or economical. They also encourage monopolies. Distributed energy sources are the way to lower prices. Competition not monopolies.
I have heard thorium nuclear plant proponents say that they are safe, but recently read that thorium is very rare. You have to prove safety, not just say something is safe.
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KenG Posted 2:14 am
30 Oct 2008
I don't think anyone will ever be interested in running seawater (or any kind of raw water) through a turbine. However, that's not how desalination works. You use the low temperature (150 degrees F or less) condenser water (which can be seawater, brackish water etc.) and reduce it's pressure so it flashes and can be re-condensed as distilled water.
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KenG Posted 2:21 am
30 Oct 2008
What is the measure of safety? If producing a significant portion of the US electricity for 50 years without harming a member of the public isn't proof, what will it take? For some people the answer seems to be that there can be no proof.
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vakibs Posted 2:24 am
30 Oct 2008
All your concerns are very valid. I think we should be very worried about all these dangers. But the conclusions that you have drawn are the opposite of what I would get.
Nuclear waste stolen and spread with dirty bombs could lay waste to cities.
At this very moment, there is a lot of nuclear waste going around at every place in the world, some of it in a shipment to its final destination in USA. We have no clue where they are !
A scarier piece of information : we have no clue of the exact whereabouts of even the fissile material inventory in the world - the kind of stuff that can immediately be made into a bomb, Hiroshima style.
If it chooses to do so, any moderately industrialized country can build a nuclear bomb within a few years.
Can you shut your eyes to all that and pretend that the problem will go away just by you avoiding nuclear power ?
You think you can put an end to nuclear power in the world, just by putting an end in the USA ? And do you think you can prevent nuclear bombs, just by ending nuclear power production ?
Please think seriously about these issues. Because the danger that they present is very real.
but recently read that thorium is very rare.
Uranium is already very abundant. Thorium is 3 times as abundant as Uranium. They will last us for several thousands of years. You don't have to trust me on this, go to wikipedia and check for yourself.
A final word about environment : Do you know about the ecological impact of massive wind farms or solar farms ? How much land, water and construction materials do they need ? what is their impact on local biodiversity ? Look at all these figures and then compare them to nuclear power. You might be a little surprised.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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Charles Barton Posted 2:25 am
30 Oct 2008
There are, however, some things that the investor would need to look at. The study says, in effect that you your base power is almost 5 times lower than your name plate power. Since windmills are running close to $2000 per kW of name plate power, that means that your base power will run @ $10,000 per kW, which is higher than current nuclear estimates.
There are some other problems. My review of wind data from the 17 sites suggests that wind speed falls at many of these sites on hot summer days. Those are also days of peak power demand in the South West. That means that your supposed base power source is going to be consistently unavailable on days of peak power demand. I'll bey that if you are an ERCOT manager, you won't like that. ERCOT does not count wind power that is consistently unavailable on peak summer days, as part of its peak power reserve. Why would they count power that is unavaliabe on days of peak demand, base power?
Of course the Stanford system would also require expensive expensive additions to the grid. So the Stanford study Study shows that for a price that runs 25% to 30% higher than nuclear, you can get about 100% of the power of nuclear, 85% of the time, but you don't get the power when you want and need it the most. You are an ERCOT manager, which would you prefer?
Charles Barton
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:26 am
30 Oct 2008
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:32 am
30 Oct 2008
This shows how important it is to think of the national power system as a system, I'm not sure whether, for either nuclear or renewable, or both, it's possible to do this in a market-based, or dominant market-based way.
For another instance, if you had panels on every roof, and geothermal heat exchange under every building, you'd have a pretty robust system, it seems to me. But that might have to be built up all together.
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Duggles Posted 2:42 am
30 Oct 2008
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Karen Street Posted 3:22 am
30 Oct 2008
My first take on Brown's analysis is remembering a discussion two friends had while driving in the mountains. One, who maintained that every 2nd car carried skis, told me that he couldn't persuade the other that a fair percentage of the other drivers were there for skiing. It's a world where last year's estimates for nuclear power expansion are woefully out of date, in both China and the rest of the world, where people I know and utilities and governments are increasingly pro-nuclear, where plans are being laid for new plants all over the world. Yet Brown uses the let's reason argument: let's figure out how many nuclear power plants will be closed down soon, without actually checking.
I find it safer to rely on reports that are first, peer reviewed, and then accepted over time. Brown does neither. Additionally, he uses my favorite argument, the economic one. If wind power is cheaper than nuclear power, certainly if it is half the price, then utilities opt for wind and this article needn't have been written. I have heard Brown speak powerfully about the dangers of climate change--it is my hope that he concentrates on that more, and let the market place decide if nuclear power is really too expensive.
One important reason for the increase in the projected cost of Yucca Mountain is increases in projections for use. But the price has not gone above the 0.1 cent/kWh we currently pay. Nor has the price of decommissioning US plants been increasing faster than the money we are paying into the fund every time we pay for a kWh or electricity.
Jon, look at the analysis done by groups like International Energy Agency, Energy Technology Perspectives, 2008, looking at what is needed for the 2.4°C goal, or IPCC. If you can find support for the idea that A) no one has figured out whether we can get there from here using just renewables (I find no evidence in peer review publications that we can get there from here with both rapid expansion of nuclear power and heavily subsidized renewables), B) the consequences of overshooting a tad on nuclear power are comparable to the consequences of failing to respond rapidly enough, and C) the problem is simply that the academic and policy establishment just haven't been working hard enough to figure this thing out, please show me where. All those groups shoe substantial expansion of renewables, so it's not an either-or proposal.
Otherwise, opposing nuclear power looks like opposing one of the large solutions; it looks like addressing climate change is OK, but only if my solutions, my input, are most important. Rather than opposing solutions laid out by respected (accepted by IPCC) policy groups, I would hope that we could support them. I would hope instead that members of the public work to extend policy discussions, find ways to add to the too short list, for example, by beginning a discussion among the public:
which carrots and sticks to behavior change would I accept (aimed particularly at reducing flying and driving)?
how do I want climate change paid for? Do I want to increase the cost of all the fossil fuels I use dramatically? General tax?
what are the advantages to limiting my fossil fuel use in my daily life and in vacations? Do I find that taking the train or bus (rather than plane or car) adds to my life in any way? Do I find benefits from moving into dense housing near city center?
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:40 am
30 Oct 2008
You said something in your comment that nobody has figured out how to use both nuclear and renewable to get carbon-free electricity -- is that true? There are several studies showing that the total output available from renewables is enough for all electricity demand, but those studies don't include storage or using national networks to create baseload, as in the Stanford study -- unless you know of other studies that do.
As to whether people are investing in nuclear, I guess we'll see. If I remember correctly, by the way, Brown is not calling for nuclear plants to be shut down, he's saying that they should run their course, but that renewables are a better bet in the long-run.
And finally, as to your questions, I think that Americans, in particular, need to answer the question, "What would you like the government to do to build a carbon-free society?" -- because individual actions will go only so far. The government must lay down rail lines and transit lines, probably must encourage density and mixed use, and probably must give help to any carbon-free technologies that will replace fossil fuels. So the focus should be on government actions.
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Karen Street Posted 4:01 am
30 Oct 2008
The reaction to the Stanford study from strong wind advocates in Science magazine was highly negative. It's important that we rely on information which is first peer-reviewed, and then accepted, by the community. It doesn't hurt to read a magazine like Science regularly, as over time one really begins to get that the public (this includes Gristmill) and scientific discussion differ.
Check out what National Academy of Sciences, or the various national labs (especially the directors, like Steve Chu, say about the potential of renewables. I remember reading an attack on Chu at this site, because Chu did not agree with the author. But national lab directors must keep the respect of the science and policy communities. When I find that my presentations differ from what those who are knowledgeable are saying, I change my presentations--pretty much, I've been the one who was wrong.
Severin Borenstein's analysis is highly respected. See http://www.citris-uc.org/CDS-March17 for his paper and his talk on the potential for the current technology solar panels in CA (where it is both sunny and not all that hot).
John Holdren is highly respected, a former president of AAAS, and founder of Energy and Resource Group at UC, Berkeley (he's now at Harvard).
The MIT "Future of" series is good, though the nuclear power one is woefully dated.
For nuclear power, David Bodansky's Nuclear Energy, 2nd edition, is published by American Institute of Physics, so physicists trust him to characterize accurately what is known and not known about nuclear power.
I found in my own process that while I have not given up my questioning attitude (lots of whys), I have learned many, many times that policy experts and scientists know more than I do.
Karen Street
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Charles Barton Posted 4:02 am
30 Oct 2008
Charles Barton
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Charles Barton Posted 4:15 am
30 Oct 2008
Charles Barton
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David Roberts Posted 4:25 am
30 Oct 2008
grist.org
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:44 am
30 Oct 2008
Charles -- It seems to me that storage is still a big issue, definitely.
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Charles Barton Posted 6:04 am
30 Oct 2008
Charles Barton
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Karen Street Posted 6:06 am
30 Oct 2008
The main point isn't what any one scientist or policy expert says, but how their ideas are accepted by the community over time. Check what National Academy of Sciences says about a reasonable rate of introducing wind power. There are a few people whose ideas tend to be widely accepted and respected by the science and policy communites, and we are safer citing those people.
It's also a question of our role as members of the public. Are we to pick which expert "is right", or are we to listen? The science and policy communities don't always get their respective understanding correct, but it has been my observation over the last 13 years, while I have been paying attention on climate change and energy choices and such, that those who have studied the issues most, and at a deeper level, are on the right track considerably more often than those who have not.
RealClimate is looking at this matter today: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/10/gre ...
Karen Street
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David Roberts Posted 6:33 am
30 Oct 2008
grist.org
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Sean Casten Posted 7:01 am
30 Oct 2008
Couple other points:
We agree about low variable costs. My point is simply that before we say that society must pay a high cost to subsidize capital to generate those low variable costs, we need to understand the size of that subsidy. I'm not convinced that nuke passes that test for new build construction given other alternatives, but welcome the debate.
I'm with you on the increased GWh from nuke in recent years, but I'm not sure it's material, nor particularly favorable on the industry. We had significant excess capacity in the nuclear industry 15 years ago, and have gradually ratchetted up plant capacity factor, facilitating the delivery of cheap marginal power from nuke. That certain has had it's benefits, and has very demonstrably kept price inflation down. As against that though, it implicitly means that nuclear plant developers were running plants well below full capacity, penalizing their investors in the process. (As bad as nuclear is in Lester's analysis, I believe it presumes something like a 90% capacity factor, which is well in excess of what the industry has hit until very recently.) That failure is more one of regulated utilities than nuclear plant operators per se, so I wouldn't make too much of it. But in any event, it's not meaningful to compare MWh growth from existing, underutilized assets to MWh growth from new build. Of course it's easier to run existing assets harder (up to a point). But that doesn't tell us anything meaningful about what we ought to be building next.
Finally, applications to the NRC don't equal new construction - let's not count those chickens as hatched, just yet. And yes, loan guarantees are available to other technologies, but this is a small (I believe 10%) of the total loan guarantee program. It's disingenuous to suggest that this provides equal incentives to all clean technologies.
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:05 am
30 Oct 2008
One of my concerns has been that the academic community has not put many resources into trying to figure out how much renewables could contribute to the electricity supply -- with an exception of Jacobson, for instance. Maybe it slips between the academic cracks -- which discipline does it fit under? Jacobson is mainly a climate scientist it looks like, but wind power should perhaps be the baliwick of a mechanical engineer. Then to discuss the entire country's energy needs, where does that fit in? Electrical engineering? Maybe there are some centers and institutes now, but publishing is still pretty narrowly defined, no? Anyway, end of academic rant.
I liked that realclimate blog post -- I went through a Wilhelm Reich phase, I have to admit.
And Charles -- I wish you would stay civil and stay here, even though I usually disagree with you. You should realize that as anti-nuclear as this site might be, it's probably more receptive than a majority of environmental sites. At least people argue.
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Karen Street Posted 7:51 am
30 Oct 2008
Jon, I am not clear why you think the academic community is not interested in renewables. Just one example: Chu agreed to (leave physics, where he has a Nobel Prize and) direct Lawrence Berkeley Labs if they created a Helios Project.
The national labs, universities, etc. don't have as much money as they need--everyone agrees that research has to be upped several times. More research $ are desperately needed. There have been problems with the current president/vice-president/political appointees. I haven not seen a corresponding problem with the science and policy communities somehow missing the point.
Sean, people are voting with their wallets for nuclear power. That's what all of the utility submissions for new nuclear power plants are about. That's what the Italian government's position that their nuclear power phaseout was a 50 billion euro mistake.
Read David Bradish's industry blog, http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/, or World Nuclear News, http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/, to get some idea of how rapidly investment in nuclear power is increasing.
Some of the US increase in recent nuclear power comes from adding capacity at plants, and some from increased capacity factor. By 2015 or 2016, it is widely believed by those in industry and companies investing in expanding their production capability, there will be new plants.
No one knows whether new nuclear power will be cheaper than new coal power until after some plants are built. We do know that the total cost of coal power, including pollution, including climate change, etc, is too high. All low-GHG solutions need to be invested in, and for some, this includes substantial research and tests.
Again, opposition to nuclear power appears to be declining in the public. Concern about climate change, on the other hand, is not yet commensurate to the dangers we face--almost no one in the US considered climate change worth voting on, even before the economic meltdown. Studies are showing that few understand how rapidly and radically climatologists want to reduce GHG emissions. Hopefully, the public will grow to understand this without feeling that it's too late to do anything. But these frequent anti-nuclear posts on Gristmill seem to be going against the flow of public understanding. I haven't met anyone in years who is shifting to being more anti-nuclear power.
I really do have a question, for the anti-nuclear posters: why not?
Karen Street
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Jon Rynn Posted 8:00 am
30 Oct 2008
Again, it's not "just" comparing the cost of, say, a kwhr of PV with a kwhr of wind vs. nuclear, although those comparisons are important. How would the whole society move toward various alternative scenarios, in much the same way that the IPCC has a set of climate scenarios. A similar issue developed in a discussion on a post by Tom Philpott about Vandana Shiva, that is, how would you model a global agricultural system that is local/organic? There's simply a paucity of good models, compared to, say, climate models. So I guess I'm saying that the same resources that go into climate models should go into "alternative society" models (and of course, the climate modelers should be getting 10 times the money they're getting as well).
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Karen Street Posted 8:20 am
30 Oct 2008
Also take a look at IPCC Working Group 3.
Karen Street
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JimHopf Posted 12:35 pm
30 Oct 2008
The biggest flaw in the current market is that the massive external costs of fossil fuels, i.e., global warming, air pollution (25,000 deaths/year) and foreign gas/oil dependence are not counted. All we have to do is tax and/or limit these three things. The result will be a reduction in the use of unsequestered coal and natural gas for power production (both very desireable). Then coal w/ sequestration, nuclear and renewables can freely compete for market share.
Will intermittentcy limit renewables to a small share, or are their practical ways to defeat the problem? Does wind really cost less than nuclear (even if things like large grid requirements and fossil backup are included)? Will coal w/ sequestration ever be competitive with either nuclear or renewables? We don't know for sure, and we don't need to figure it out (now, at least). The above policy will let all these (desireable) sources compete on merit, and should produce the desired reductions in CO2, air pollution, and energy imports at the minimum cost.
One thing that must be asked is why renewables' supporters claim that renewables are cheaper than nuclear, but then seem to do everything they can to avoid allowing nuclear compete. They steadfastly support Renewable Portfolio Standards, which mandate that large fractions of our power be provided by renewables, regardless of practicality or cost. If these sources were competative, no such laws would be necessary. How is it that utilities would not already jump at the chance to use renewables if they could provide that much power, at an equal or lower cost, given their enormous popularity.
It's clear that renewables are currently more expensive, at least vs. fossil fuels. But once again, if the goal is to get rid of fossil fuels, why and RPS as opposed to a cap-and-trade system that allows all non-emitting sources to compete fairly.
People were talking about wind power getting by on private financing, and saying that it's subsidies are equal to or lower than nuclear's. My personal view is that they are about equal. In any event, in such a discussion you can't ignore the gorilla in the room, i.e., the RPS mandates. Most windfarms being built are in response to these mandates. They are, in effect, an infinite subsidy.
Under this regime, renewables only have to compete (on price) with other renewables, and their construction does not imply anything with respect to their competitiveness with non-renewable sources (such as nuclear). When you only have to compete with other renewables on price, sure, you can do it with private financing. When nuclear or renewables have to compete with fossil fuels, however, they need subsidies (given that fossil fuels' external costs are not counted). If we had an explicit Nuclear Portfolio Standard, no nuclear subsidies of any kind would be necessary (duh).
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Atomicrod Posted 7:47 pm
30 Oct 2008
I would be less skeptical if someone could point to any reasonably sized village, town or city that gets even a large fraction of its power from the popular forms of renewable power so that we can all see what living there would be like.
In contrast, we have several existing models of what a society powered in large part by nuclear energy would look like. It is a matter of taste, but I like the lifestyle those places currently provide.
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Sean Casten Posted 10:40 pm
30 Oct 2008
I'm not sure what this proves. People are building nuclear plants once they convince utility commissions to set rates that guarantee equity returns. That doesn't prove anything more than that those utilities are good at convincing regulators to backstop their returns. Who is building nuclear plants without first guaranteeing government backstops for cost-overruns, uncapped insurance liabilities and overall equity returns to protect against merchant power risk?
That's damned near an unanswerable question since there isn't a jurisdiction in the world that doesn't heavily subsidize nuclear power, but at least in this country, there has been no net increase in nuclear GW capacity since 1990, while there have been many nuclear plants sold at pennies to the dollar on their book value after deregulation. That's a pretty good signal that the economics don't work on their own merits.
Re: your question "why not?", that's fair. In a world with a completely level playing field in which externalities were all priced in (including CO2), nuclear may well have a role to play. But so long as we are not in that world, evidence that utilities will buy expensive stuff doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:02 am
31 Oct 2008
There it is. Maybe the next administration will help out?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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amazingdrx Posted 12:17 am
31 Oct 2008
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.html
Build renewable distributed generation and storage smart grids now.
Clearly nuclear power needs more R&D before it is ready to contribute to the effort. Who knew these dangerous, expensive nuclear projects were going on worldwide? Sure we've heard of Putin's floating nukes, but this other stuff is under the media radar, spreading contamination and utility bankruptcy across the planet.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:06 am
31 Oct 2008
atomicrod, France certainly has a nice lifestyle, although I would hardly credit that to its nuclear electrical system. Denmark has about 20% from wind, I believe, and Spain does as well. But if a networked wind system could provide baseload (at 20%), then unfortunately we have to wait for continental-sized systems to be implemented to really see how well these renewable systems work, or at least, some of them.
JimHopf, I believe that one of the main things holding utilities back is simply that they are not familiar with the technologies. The risk is much greater -- if they want to put up a coal plant, nobody's going to get fired -- sort of like why people used to buy IBM, or now buy Microsoft. If they even put up a nuclear power plant, they could get fired if it doesn't go as planned, and wind and solar installations are even more risky.
This is why the government should, as they did in the case of nuclear power, help put up many wind and solar firms initiatlly, just to get engineers and managers comfortable with a fairly standard-operating-procedure way of doing it. Then, I think, they'd be much more receptive.
The other problem is that utilities like centralized solutions -- PV on roofs doesn't fit that model, which is why San Francisco and other cities are experimenting with CCA's that include putting panels on buildings.
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RDMiller Posted 4:01 am
31 Oct 2008
I'll give you an excellent example of what you asked for ("could someone point to any reasonably sized village, town or city that gets even a large fraction of its power from the popular forms of renewable power so that we can all see what living there would be like"): Burlington, Vermont
Burlington (a city of about 50,000) has been largely powered by the local 50 MW wood-fired electric plant since the early 80's. This plant has competed effectively with Vermont's only nuclear plant and cheap hydro over the past 25 years. It's been consistent, renewable, inexpensive baseload power.
Richard
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Atomicrod Posted 7:25 pm
31 Oct 2008
The plant was financed through a bond issue approved by voters in 1978. The initial capital cost was $67 million, $13 million less than the original budget estimate. Plant capacity is 50,000 kilowatts, so the initial cost was $1,340 per kilowatt in 1981 dollars. (At an average annual inflation rate of 3% that would be roughly $3,000 per kilowatt today. That inflation number is just a guess.) The plant employs 40 people as foresters, equipment operators, fuel handers and maintenance crew.
In 1989, the plant was modified to be able to burn natural gas supplied on an interruptible basis during the months of May-November when gas is typically cheaper because it is not in demand for home heating.
At full power, the plant consumes 76 tons of wood per hour. 70% of the fuel comes from whole tree chipping operations that capture wood from forestry harvesting operations. That wood is material - like tree tops, branches, and malformed trees - that is not useful for manufacturing processes. The wood is chipped in the forest and hauled to the plant using diesel powered trucks or locomotives.
25% of the fuel is waste material from other local sawmill operations that would otherwise be sent to a landfill, and 5% is urban non treated wood waste normally dropped off at the plant by local residents. The total wood fuel consumption is about 180,000 tons per year, enough to supply about 2400 full power hours (plant capacity factor of 27%). The primary reason for adding the gas firing capacity was to increase the plant's capacity factor so that the capital asset could be used a larger portion of the year.
When operating on wood fuel, the plant thermal efficiency is 26%, on gas it is 31% due to the higher firing temperature. The hourly fuel consumption using gas is 550 million BTU per hour, at the current gas price of $7 per million BTU, that gives a fuel cost of 7.7 cents per kilowatt hour when operating on gas. The station can also burn fuel oil or a combination of gas, wood and fuel oil. Here is a quote from the plant's wood fuel facts page:
"Consumes 180,000 tons of wood per year, which displaces 360,000 barrels of imported oil"
The plant uses 42,000 gallons of cooling water per minute, and also has a need for several thousand gallons per day of pure water for steam plant make up. (Note: Though steam plants are ideally closed systems that do not consume new water, operational reality is that steam plants inherently leak and need make-up water that is very pure initially and has corrosion control chemicals added. Boilers also require a regular water consuming "blow down" to reduce sludge build up. The water that leaks or used in blow downs has to be treated to remove the chemicals before it can be released to the environment.)
The smoke stack that provides part of the fuel waste handling system is 257 feet tall. The wood ash residue is sold as an ingredient in fertilizer and road base material.
Another useful fact comes from the DOE's biomass for electricity generation analysis page:
"Of the estimated total resource of 590 million wet tons, only 20 million wet tons (equivalent to 14 million dry tons, or enough to supply about 3 gigawatts of capacity) is available today at prices up to $1.25 per million Btu."
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
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amazingdrx Posted 12:38 am
01 Nov 2008
In fact waste stream biogas saves water from high nitrogen pollution and the atmosphere from methane and nitrous oxide GHG pollution. And it recycles waste into fertilizer.
It's way past time to get these energy issues right and get this energy re-evolution going. Obama is showing signs that he understands this, despite the careful campaigning that he is now engaged in.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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JimHopf Posted 9:13 am
01 Nov 2008
True enough, wood burners are a "renewable" source and nuclear is not (the fuel will last thousands of years, but it is not "renewable"). So, this means that wood burners are more desireable, right? Absolutely not. Wood burning is less desireable than nuclear in every respect. Far greater impact on the environment and far more impact/risk on human health. Wood is even dirtier than coal.
There's more to life than "renewability". If a source (e.g. oil or gas) is rapidly running out, that is a legitimate, significant issue. For nuclear, with a non-renewable but very long-term fuel supply, it is not a significant consideration.
One final thing, wood burning doesn't release radioactive "contamination"? Given that wood, like pretty much all substances, contains some level of radioactivity, I would say that it definitely does. In fact, I'm almost certain that wood burners release more radioactivity into the environment (in the plant's fly ash) than do (you guessed it) nuclear power plants.
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JimHopf Posted 9:18 am
01 Nov 2008
I have no problems with renewables getting R&D funding and some subsidies to help them get started, like nuclear got a long time ago. Outright mandates for a given (large) amount of use, I do mind. Especially when the distinction of what sources get support is completly arbitrary, and/or based on things like semantics (see my above post).
It's entirely possible that several windfarms are being built w/o mandates (but with subsidies), especially in the Great Plains. If they can compete anywhere, it's there. I still believe that many proposals, such as those in coastal states, are there because of mandates.
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JimHopf Posted 9:24 am
01 Nov 2008
You were referring to biogas, and not defending wood burning. My mistake.
About the disposal of all those toxic solar cells.... Sure it's smaller than the nuclear waste problem (per unit energy produced)?
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Atomicrod Posted 6:08 pm
01 Nov 2008
It does tend to confuse the discussion about environmental impacts of power production when solar thermal power plants or biogas fired conventional steam plants are considered.
Both of those, because of relatively low operating temperatures, will be less thermally efficient than most steam plants - including conventional nuclear plants. They will thus require relatively more cooling water and relatively more steam plant make up water than more efficient plants. They will require some regular cleaning to keep the heat collection systems working, so they will also need cleaning water that is not normally part of the steam plant water consumption computations.
Solar thermal Rankine cycle efficiencies will get even lower as soon as the sun goes down and they are working on stored thermal energy reservoirs that get colder and colder as energy is withdrawn.
Since advocates of systems like concentrating solar thermal plants (CSP) wax poetic about the "vast quantities" solar energy available in dry, desolate places like the Sahara or the American southwest deserts, I keep wondering where they plan to get the required cooling and cleaning water.
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RDMiller Posted 10:07 pm
01 Nov 2008
You're ideas about wood burning are from the stone age...sorry. Wood dirtier than coal? Wood has a greater impact on the environment than nuclear? I'd challenge you to prove either of these statements, based on current wood burning technology.
These are classic statements from folks who read something about burning wood 40 years ago. They have nothing to do with the current discussion.
Oh yes... please prove that last silly statement as well, about wood energy being more radioactive than nuclear. It gave me a good laugh anyway.
Richard
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Backcut Posted 12:01 am
02 Nov 2008
Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com
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amazingdrx Posted 1:12 am
02 Nov 2008
The lack of cogeneration efficiency in combustion based power generation and fuel and waste costs (in the case of nuclear) makes water recycling another deal breaker. Investors will avoid it.
The no-fuel cost economic advantage of renewables combined with cogeneration make water recycling financially possible. Oil based transportation costs for biomass, when it is used in central power plants, doesn't leave any room in the bottomline equation for water recycling.
Biomass used with waste in distributed solid oxide fuel cell/turbine cogeneration at 70+ % efficiency with no water use makes for a shorter path to the digestors and an overall better bottomline. The GHG offset produced and organic fertilizer and actual water recycling from the waste stream make combustion and nuclear backup energy sources obsolete.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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JimHopf Posted 10:27 am
02 Nov 2008
http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdf
Refer to Figures 9 and 10 on pages 35 and 36. External costs are quantified in economic equivalent terms (i.e., cents/kW-hr). Nuclear's external costs are only ~0.2 cent/kW-hr, far lower than coal and oil, but also lower than gas, solar PV and cogeneration (so loved by many here). Only wind and hydro are lower.
The figures do not specifically include a wood-fired power plant, but Figure 10 estimates the external cost for modern large wood-fired industrial boilers (the type that would be used to generate the steam for such a power plant). Figure 10 states that wood-fired boilers have external costs of ~0.7 cents/kW-hr of thermal energy. Given a power plant thermal efficiency of ~40-50%, this would equate to an external cost of ~1.5-2.0 cents/kW-hr of electricity. Better than coal, but not as good as gas and nowhere close to nuclear.
As for release of radioactivity, emissions from nuclear plants are completely insignificant. Given that most materials, including wood, have some level of radioactivity, anything that puts any significant amount of fly ash into the air will end up releasing some amount of radioactivity into the environment; more than a nuclear plant. Coal plants, for example, put out ~100 times as much radioactivity than nuclear plants (http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain ...).
Wood, like all bio materials has a measurable amount of Potassium-40. And yes, there are radioactivity emissions from biomass plants, and it's an issue that's being studied. Check out the abstract for this scientific study for a straw-fired boiler at the link below. The study is actually measuring radioactive "fallout" from the stack (soot) emissions from the boiler.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/gt3t701425823472/
I'm not saying that radioactivity emissions from wood plants are remotely significant. I'm just pointing out that such emissions from nuclear plants are not an issue either.
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RDMiller Posted 8:17 pm
02 Nov 2008
I looked over the report you specified.
The results for biomass, as you point out, are still quite low. Yes, if you use only the parameters from their research, wood is higher than nuclear. But this is a shallow argument because it is focusing on only one element of biomass versus nuclear energy (i.e. the cost of externalities as defined by those researchers) and even this factor is hardly significant. There are other externalities not included.
It focuses only on conventional wood burning technology. Newer technologies (like advanced pyrolysis) would bring those numbers down to, or under, the numbers for nuclear... even given the parameters of the research.
It did not compare the full environmental costs of uranium mining as compared to sustainable forestry. Had this been factored in, the nuclear external costs would be much higher.
It did not factor in the long term costs of storing nuclear. Again, this would drive the nuclear numbers far higher.
It did not factor in the costs of keeping nuclear material contained and safe from exploitation for military purposes... another huge cost factor.
Finally, it did not factor in the contribution that could come from a carbon-negative biomass system.
As far as radioactivity is concerned, as you mention, even if the small amount of radioactivity in the emissions from a conventional wood burning plant are higher than from a nuclear facility (and many would argue that this is not true), we all know that the big concern with nuclear is the radioactivity of the waste material. As far as I know, there are no reported deaths from contact with wood ash... even a rather large pile of it. On the other hand, I'd prefer to keep considerable distance between me and a nuclear waste pile.
Jim... there's a reason new wood-fired facilities are being built left and right throughout the US and Europe, but hardly a nuclear plant. Someone's looking at the economics and making the choice for biomass.
Richard
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vakibs Posted 9:37 pm
02 Nov 2008
It did. Uranium mining is harmful, and these effects are factored in that report's calculation.
# It did not factor in the long term costs of storing nuclear. Again, this would drive the nuclear numbers far higher.
There are no external costs in storing nuclear waste. All the waste is safely isolated; nuclear industry claims total responsibility for all the waste that it emits. In fact, these costs are already present in the internal costs of nuclear power.
# It did not factor in the costs of keeping nuclear material contained and safe from exploitation for military purposes... another huge cost factor.
By no means is this a quantifiable external cost. It is purely a political decision to avoid nuclear weapons. The only way forward is a complete global nuclear disarmament.
Now Richard, your arguments are not valid even against 2nd generation nuclear power. You should definitely be aware of 4th generation reactors - which
# Do not require any Uranium to be mined, for several hundred years.
# Do not produce any long term nuclear waste.
# No radioactive material can be isolated outside the reactor for military purposes, because it will be in a red-hot condition mixed with impurities.
As far as I know, there are no reported deaths from contact with wood ash... even a rather large pile of it. On the other hand, I'd prefer to keep considerable distance between me and a nuclear waste pile.
Please cite references on those reported deaths due to contact with nuclear waste. All nuclear waste is currently stored inside the reactor building itself. This will be particularly true for 4th generation reactors; the radioactivity of all waste will fall below natural levels after 200 years, when it will be completely harmless.
Jim... there's a reason new wood-fired facilities are being built left and right throughout the US and Europe, but hardly a nuclear plant. Someone's looking at the economics and making the choice for biomass.
There are two factors which favor wood / fossil fuel / biogas facilities over nuclear plants (1) They require fewer legislation bottlenecks over nuclear plants, so it is faster to set them up. This advantage will not be valid for much longer, as the environmental costs of these facilities will mandate tougher legislations in the future (2) They can be built for smaller sizes : and thus it is easier to find capital to invest in them - this advantage will not hold for much longer, as power production will definitely become a public sector undertaking in the future.
Please read the book of Tom Blees : Prescription for the Planet, for a more in-depth analysis.
Now I have to confess that I like biomass, especially for its potential to be a carbon-negative power source. For this reason, we should not close doors on biomass. Along with plasma converters, these technologies will be critical in the future for reducing the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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amazingdrx Posted 10:01 pm
02 Nov 2008
That's common ground for different energy scheme backers. Let the scientists and engineers do the work and see what they come up with. Then decide.
Solar PV cells will be recycled in solar furnaces eventually, and manufactured thast way too. no carbon footprint. It's a decades long path, not an instant snapshot. A solar PV cell manufactured with coal powered electricity? that snapshot puts a smudge on solar.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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RDMiller Posted 11:10 pm
02 Nov 2008
You can continue to make your claims for the safety and low costs of nuclear energy until you're blue in the face, but it won't change the realities that TODAY, nuclear is considered too expensive to expand (at least in the US), remains riddled with waste disposal problems, is prone to devastating damage from attack by military means or natural events, causes serious environmental damage when mined, and may be causing damage to humans from low level radiation.
There could be solutions to these issues, and for this reason, I remain open to the nuclear energy possibility.
What is a fact is that biomass energy is being expanded at a rapid pace and is demonstrated to be low cost, safe and renewable. Nuclear is just not there yet.
Richard
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vakibs Posted 11:44 pm
02 Nov 2008
30% of the American people believe that different life forms have just popped out of the sleeve of God, one by one, and that there is no link connecting them.
50% of the American people don't believe that global warming is happening. About 90% of them believe that it is not serious enough.
When your appeal to the experts did not work ( there's a reason new wood-fired facilities are being built left and right throughout the US and Europe, but hardly a nuclear plant.) you have resorted to an appeal to demagogues ( nuclear is considered too expensive to expand (at least in the US). This is not an effective debate strategy.
There is enormous peer-reviewed literature on the potential of nuclear power, and all of it has been tested experimentally for several decades. When mentioning the IFR design, I am not talking about General Spock's spaceship, but the largest research project funded by the US government. If you don't believe in the US government, India and Russia have their own advanced fast reactor programs all of which are converging on something like the IFR design.
This is not rocket science, this is common sense. If you want to criticize these power plants on the issues of safety (these plants are passively safe, no meltdown is possible according to physics) nuclear proliferation (isolating red hot plutonium out of a million impurities is practically impossible) or waste (they don't produce any waste at all), you should first learn the basics about the designs. Repeating something ad nauseum will not make us better human beings, but only better zombies.
So I will refrain from doing that.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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RDMiller Posted 12:18 am
03 Nov 2008
I know you're frustrated that many just aren't buying your arguments. I know you believe strongly in the advantages of nuclear and want others to believe as you do.
As I've said numerous times, there may well come a time when nuclear energy proves itself as safe and low cost. But wish as you will, that time isn't here yet. You'd have a better time arguing your positions if you acknowledged this fact first.
Richard
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vakibs Posted 12:40 am
03 Nov 2008
But the majority of anti-nuclear activists oppose nuclear power due to strong valid reasons. They feel strongly on the issues of nuclear waste, nuclear radiation and the symbiotic existence of nuclear power plants with the nuclear weapons industry. My task is to win the hearts of those people by explaining the facts in favor of nuclear power. To do this, I have to work not only on a logical plane, but also on an emotional plane. None of this would be easy. But in front of the daunting challenges that we humans are facing now - global warming, water wars, market volatility due to energy prices, terrorism and unequal wars : I think reason has a good chance to win.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:05 am
03 Nov 2008
And Vakibs, about being against nuclear power, you are right that most opponents are worried about waste, etc., and you also might know that a significant percentage of people who consider themselves "environmentalists", at least those of us who "came of age" in the 1970s, such as yours truly, perhaps had some of our first or most intense passions raised about environmental issues around the issue of nuclear power (Diablo Canyon in California in my case). It was seen as a real threat to our survival.
In other words, it wasn't even waste, etc., that was the core issue, it was the problem of meltdown. Brown raises that issue here by discussing the possibility of a $700 billion meltdown (not the financial one), although I guess I'd have to say that the arguments against nuclear power usually don't include meltdown. But I thought I'd raise that 600-pound gorilla by way of explanation, perhaps, as to some of the more "emotional" arguments against nuclear power.
That said, I'm glad that we can (pretty much) discuss nuclear power in a rational and civil way.
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BILL HANNAHAN Posted 6:01 am
03 Nov 2008
I am curious to know what you think now. If Diablo had not been built that money would likely have gone into two or three new coal plants, killing dozens to hundreds per year.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2006/2006-02-15-02.asp ...
arguments against nuclear power usually don't include meltdown. But I thought I'd raise that 600-pound gorilla by way of explanation, perhaps, as to some of the more "emotional" arguments against nuclear power.
Exactly what is the issue with meltdown, aside from irrational fear based on lack of accurate education?
Imagine that we have a time machine and could go back to one week before the TMI accident. We describe the scenario to Ralph Nader and ask for a prediction. He would predict thousands of fatalities based on early AEC studies that enveloped the worst case by effectively assuming that a reactor core was dumped in an open field with no containment at all.
Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient of reactivity which allowed it to go rapidly to 100 time maximum rated power, resulting in a powerful steam explosion. It had no containment building, allowing 1/3 of the core to be ejected from the plant. Those characteristics were never allowed in the U.S.
The death toll is less than from a major airline crash. In the long run thousands of lives may be shortened if the Linear no Threshold theory proves correct, or thousands of lives may be extended if the radiation hormesis theory proves correct.
http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/content/full/179/5/1137
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/radioadaptive/inthorm.html
Next generation reactors have a massive containment building with passive safety systems and a core catcher to contain and resolidify a melted core. See page 50.
http://www.areva-np.com/common/liblocal/docs/Brochure/BRO ...
Even if very low probability, commonmode
failures result in core damage (estimated
to be 3 _10-8/yr), the presence of a
designed core catcher (BiMAC) and a diverse
flooding system for the lower drywell
will terminate any containment degradation.
This, along with the PCCS, results in
a containment that will not fail in the event
of a severe accident.
http://www.ans.org/pubs/magazines/nn/docs/2006-1-3.pdf
The Wright Flyer killed more people than TMI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Selfridge
Had we nipped aviation in the bud think of all the lives we could have saved.
Wait a minute, airliners are over forty times safer than cars,
http://www.airlines.org/economics/specialtopics/Airline+S ...
if we eliminated the airliners many more people would have died in cars.
The core meltdown is an extremely improbable accident that would result in no loss of life, so why is it the 600 lb. gorilla?
People are dying in large numbers because our education system has failed to teach us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Things Everybody Should Know About Energy
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:41 am
03 Nov 2008
by the way, just to throw out yet another problem, nuclear was very unpopular in the 1970s partly because it was another centralized solution. As you can see at Grist here, the centralized nature of some renewable strategies, such as solar thermal or even some wind farms, also are criticized on that count.
So basically, I think it's healthy to air out all of these issues (and also, for the record, if I remember correctly, Lester Brown is not advocating shutting down nuclear plants, he's arguing that no new ones should be built). But nuclear carries a lot of baggage; it might still be the case that nuclear is some sort of part of a solution -- even if it's only medium term -- but it obviously needs to be debated extensively.
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vakibs Posted 7:56 am
03 Nov 2008
What you have said is reasonable. It is very difficult to assume that you will subscribe to a pro-nuclear position, after those formative experiences in the anti-nuclear protests of the 70s. So is the case with several other people on grist, or off grist - such as Lester Brown.
Being supportive of nuclear is not a very intuitive choice. On the face of it, the threat of nuclear meltdown looms large. The energy (r)evolution report of Greenpeace starts its section on nuclear power withh a distinctly underwhelming picture of a rusty signboard of Chernobyl. Human psycho-visual system is very funny, we all see stuff that we want to see. Demagogues (politicians , biased media and activists such as greenpeace) exploit this by drowning us in evocative imagery.
I don't think it will be easy to beat these images. But try we must.
As the facts stand, nuclear power
Has passive safety features, where the laws of physics rule out the possibility of a meltdown
Has a solution for nuclear waste; reactors such as IFR will produce no longterm waste
Has the lowest construction costs and environmental costs, due to its minimal land and water use.
As environmentalits, we should seriously consider its promise in resolving our problems. It is just commonsense, as simple as favoring public transport or dense urban living or energy efficient light bulbs. We should prefer power systems with the least environmental impact.
It will take us some time to get used to the fact that wind/solar systems create more waste than nuclear power systems. But this is true. And some of the solar waste is even toxic. Large wind / solar power installations also disrupt biodiversity. And Combined Heat and Power is a great thing, if not for all the fossil fuels that are slid underneath the carpet of its power production.
(4th generation) nuclear power is a sane environmental choice. It is like a medicine, it might taste bitter when you gulp it down, but it will cure the diseases that mankind is imposing on themselves.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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Sean Casten Posted 8:29 am
03 Nov 2008
That said, I agree with Jon that there is a big difference between asking to shut down existing nuclear plants and making a decision to build new ones. That latter decision has to be based on economic considerations, and on this question, I think Lester and Amory raise some very reasonable criticisms that the economics simply don't work.
Note that this is not to say that they shouldn't be built. Lots of uneconomic things don't get built all the time - and so long as that is built by at-risk capital, that's OK. But when we start talking about committing massive public resources to these investments, we do have to ask whether that is the best use of those resources - not necessarily on the grounds of "should we prefer technology X or Y?": nuke vs. wind, etc. But we should ask whether any given technology, net of all existing subsidies imposes a cost on society that cannot be more efficiently used elsewhere.
This, ultimately is my big beef with nuke. If you provide loan guarantees, limit insurance liabilities, fund disposal costs through income tax and then have regulated utilities build plants with ratepayer-guaranteed capital, nuke may well look good against other options. But by that test, fueling a power plant with cyanide-laden $100 bills looks good. So let us not pretend those subsidies aren't there, ask the honest question and then make a decision about whether or not to subsidize. Better yet, let us then make a decision how to price in the externalities and let at-risk capital place bets as appropriate.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:23 pm
03 Nov 2008
And the astronomical costs pretty much seal the deal. No, we are the reasonable side in this dispute.
Calling for R%D to prove nuclear power can be designed and built that overcomes past problems is more than reasonable. It's a second chance for nuclear power.
But many nuclear advocates will not even admit there are any real problems. This is not helpfull, especially when they paint our side with the broad brush of the psychoanalytic fallacy. It's all in our heads eyyh?
Drop the nonsense and support the serious scientists and engineers who want to try and make nuclear power viable and competitive without subsidies and liability loopholes and endless excuses instead of really dealing with problematic waste and contamination.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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JimHopf Posted 3:58 pm
03 Nov 2008
Nuclear plants are required by law to set aside funds that will fully pay for the entire nuclear waste program, i.e., a program that will ensure complete confinement of all wastes for as long as they remain hazardous (an amazing requirement that is only applied to the nuclear industry). And yet (due to the tiny volume of the waste) the entire program can be covered by a charge of only 0.1 cents/kW-hr, that is already included in the cost of nuclear electricity.
The govt. continually audits the waste fund to ensure that the 0.1 cent charge is sufficient. The endless political delays on pemanent waste solutions (e.g., Yucca Mtn.) only increase the adequacy of the fee, due to the effects of compounding interest. Storing waste at the plant site, for decades, costs even less money (~0.025 cents/kW-hr).
All plant decommissioning costs are covered in a similar fashion, by a fraction of a cent charge that is also already included in the power price. In both cases, taxpayers pay nothing. No subsidy.
There is no "proliferation" external cost associated with new nukes in the US. Building new plants here will have absolutely no impact on proliferation, period. Spent fuel is less useful for making weapons than the raw uranium ore that lies in the ground all over the world. Stealing spent fuel and reprocessing it is the most difficult approach anyone has ever imagined for obtaining fissile material. All other methods are easier, and that is what groups/nations will use (and have used, e.g., Iran) if they try to build a weapon. Whether new nuclear programs in developing nations are a proliferation risk is more arguable.
As to the fearsome meltdown event, not only is the probability negligible, but even the consequences of a worst-case meltdown are much smaller than the ANNUAL consequences of coal burning. Even the anti-nuclear Union of Concerned Scientists (begrudgingly) acknowledges this. It's been over 40 years now, and Western nuclear plants have yet to kill a single member of the public, and have never had any measurable public health impact (while coal plants go on killing 25,000 people every single year along with being the leading cause of global warming). If this (Western nuclear) safety record is not good enough, nothing ever will be.
Studies like the ExternE project account for all such (potential external) costs, covering all parts of the generation process. And all such studies come to similar conclusions. Nuclear power's overall external costs are minimal, tiny compared to fossil fuels and similar to renewables. The point is we need to move away from fossil fuels, and either alternative (nuclear or renewables) is just fine.
Right now there is almost 100 GW of new nuclear capacity in various stages of planning or construction. Wood burning contributes an insignificant (< 1%) fraction of power generation in the US and Europe (compared to nuclear's 20% and 30%, respectively), and there are no signs or plans for this to change. The new plants in Britain are being built with no public subsidy, a very far cry from the very heavily subsidized renewable sources.
As for nuclear's economics, I go back to my earlier post. Just tax or limit air pollution, foreign energy imports and CO2 emissions (i.e., basically require clean energy) and then let the market decide what to build. That is the answer to all such economic questions.
And yet, such fair competition is exactly what nuclear foes assiduously try to avoid. Instead, they try to ban or put endless roadblocks in front of nuclear, have the govt. lavish huge subsidies on all clean sources except nuclear, or (better still) have outright mandates for use of renewables for large fractions of power generation. As long as they continue to support such policies, people with critical thinking skills should not listen to anything they say concerning nuclear's economics relative to other clean sources.
The only potential argument would be if nuclear were far more heavily subsidized than other clean sources, but the opposite is true. For a long time now, both (clean?) coal and renewables have gotten far more R&D money than nuclear, and the direct (operating) subsidies for renewables are far higher than any for nuclear, on a per kW-hr basis.
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amazingdrx Posted 4:35 pm
03 Nov 2008
The whole industry is a complete mess of non-regulation and revolving door administration of nuclear agencies.
The corporation for development of new facilities is some sort of corporate/government clone.
This whole mess needs to go back to the drawing board if it is ever even capable of treating the waste and contamination already produced.
Education and honesty about the complete disaster that is the present nuclear industry will have to rule before new nuclear systems can be developed and tested. The mistakes of the past have to be admitted and aknowleged or they will be repeated.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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vakibs Posted 7:59 pm
03 Nov 2008
When I hear this pure unadulterated nonsense about nuclear power being expensive, repeated umpteen times, I am at an utter loss for words.
You can dissect the costs of nuclear power : construction costs + fuel costs + land lease costs + operating costs + decommissioning costs + waste management costs and so on.. We have a lot of data on each of these costs. None of this is mysterious. When you add up all of these you get the internalized-costs of nuclear power. As reported by varied kinds of studies, nuclear power is always the cheapest or the second cheapest source of electric power. Only big hydro projects end up being slightly cheaper. All fossil fuel power plants have high fuel costs (nuclear fuel costs are bare minimum). All renewable technologies have much higher construction costs than nuclear.
When you want to consider external costs (risks to the environment, society etc), again nuclear ends up being at the bottom of the list, as studied by the ExternE report. Only wind power has lower external costs.
All kinds of objective studies report nuclear power to be about the cheapest source of electricity. Good case study : France (with 80% nuclear + 20% hydro) has about the cheapest electricity prices in Europe. Czech republic has even lower nuclear electricity prices. Denmark, the blue-eyed boy of wind power, has the highest prices.
None of this is surprising. If you want to repudiate the fact that nuclear power is cheap, the task is easy. Take a paper and pencil and dissect the costs of nuclear power. Get the corresponding costs for any renewable competition. It is easy to see that the requirements (land+construction materials etc) are lower for nuclear.
Don't hear me wrong. I am not against energy efficiency mechanisms, or careful use of extra heat during electric power generation. Both of these are as compatible with nuclear power as they are with renewables.
But I am strictly against comparing any power dependent on fossil fuels with nuclear energy.
It is utlimately upto the American people to make a wise decision on the future of energy. Whether they like it or not, Russia, India, Japan and China (not to mention France) have already realized the potential of nuclear power. Unlike USA, they don't have private utilities and stupid legal loopholes to delay the construction of nuclear plants.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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RDMiller Posted 8:18 pm
03 Nov 2008
At least get the basic facts right. Your numbers do not reflect reality. This leads me to believe anything you say is suspect.
In 2007, nuclear provided around 8.5% of total US energy; biomass around 3.5%.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/renew_energy_ ...
You then say "there are no signs of an increase in the use of biomass for energy." Come on, Jim. Wake up. There's been more venture capital invested into the use of biomass for energy in 2008 than was invested in genetics or the Internet. New biomass plants are being built at the highest pace in 50 years. And wood stove and wood pellet sales are off the charts... dealers can't keep up.
Now let's see... how many nuclear plants are being built here in the US?
Richard
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RDMiller Posted 8:47 pm
03 Nov 2008
I know you believe nuclear is the cheapest source of power in the US, but this is simply an untrue statement. Anyone with even a little knowledge here knows this is a distortion of fact. This is why other statements you make become suspect.
Yes, it could well be true that nuclear provides the cheapest source of pure electricity. But this is often a meaningless number, as homes and businesses don't pay their bills directly to nuclear facilities... they pay energy bills.
If I have to heat my home or business, I don't want to pay for nuclear... it's far too expensive. I want passive solar first and foremost, then biomass. I'll even take natural gas well before nuclear.
If I want to power my car or truck, I don't want nuclear (i.e. electrically powered)... it's too expensive. Yes, electrically-driven vehicles will become cheaper to buy and operate within 20 years, but not today. My guess is a vehicle powered by cellulosic ethanol will be considerably less expensive to operate than one driven by electricity... at least in the next 10 years.
So please, Vakibs... stop distorting facts. If you want to say that nuclear is the cheapest source of electrical energy when used to power items that can only be powered by electricity, then that is probably a true statement. But even with this, biomass, coal and natural gas are close behind... so close that this statement of yours wouldn't really be that significant. And as noted in my last post, this contribution of nuclear (about 8.5% of all US power) is not that really that big to begin with.
Richard
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vakibs Posted 9:20 pm
03 Nov 2008
I have never paid an electricity bill in the USA, though I have lived there for about 8 months. I don't know what all goes into the electricity costs. From what I read (especially over the deregulation debacle in California etc) most of your electricity bill has no direct relation to the cost of generating electricity.
What I am talking about are simple factors that make up the generating cost of electricity. They can be easily dissected, and cross-checked against different sources of power production. I will place all my bets on nuclear power to be among the cheapest sources, once such an analysis is done.
Similarly, the fact that no nuclear plants are being built in the USA has no logical relation to the potential of nuclear power. It is your choice as American people - to allow or disallow nuclear power. Other nations are making wiser choices, and at the same time paying cheaper electricity bills.
My guess is a vehicle powered by cellulosic ethanol will be considerably less expensive to operate than one driven by electricity... at least in the next 10 years.
This is utterly false. Electric vehicles are much more fuel efficient than ones driven by ICEs. Coupled by the fact that electricity rates are much cheaper than gasolene/ethanol rates, it is an obvious fact that electric vehicles will save your money. In fact, many people are buying PHEVs/hybrids for this very reason - their investments are expected to pay off in 10 to 15 years. Some will say even earlier, with gas prices expected to rise further in the future.
Make no mistake, I think there is a future for cellulosic ethanol. I have earned some brickbats on grist for my support. I think we need biofuels to buffer the oil-shocks and ease the transition into future. But they are useful only in the mid-term. They have no place in long-term future, where all transport will be electric, or driven by fuel cells.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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RDMiller Posted 9:35 pm
03 Nov 2008
I said: "My guess is a vehicle powered by cellulosic ethanol will be considerably less expensive to operate than one driven by electricity... at least in the next 10 years." This is a guess on my part... not a fact, because no one can know the truth of this yet.
You came back and said it was false. Since when do you know the future? What you should have said is, "it's my belief this will not be the case." Come on, Vakibs. Debate with some truth to your words or don't debate at all.
Then you go on again and talk theory (about efficiency) versus fact (in terms of what people actually pay). The FACT is, it's more expensive today to operate a hybrid or electric vehicle than a gas driven one.... especially with today's gas prices. If cellulosic ethanol came in to the market at today's gas prices, it would clearly be less expensive TO ME AND YOU to operate now in the US. In 10 years, who knows. Arguments could be made either way.
I am glad the first few paragraphs of your post represented a change from your earlier statements. Now you are saying "nuclear power should be cheaper than alternatives." OK... that's a fair statement regarding your hopes. But let's be clear, nuclear is far more expensive today than other sources of power here in the US for anything other than direct usage of electricity.
Richard
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vakibs Posted 10:11 pm
03 Nov 2008
The average mileage of a gasolene car (or an ethanol car) is 33 miles (53 kilometres) per gallon. Since gasolene is costing around 260 cents per gallon in the USA, in money terms it would be 4.9 cents per KM.
Electric vehicles are half as expensive as gasolene vehicles, and this is about today. You can work out on how long it takes for an electric vehicle to pay for itself.
I believe that (I qualify my statements as you have requested) this disparity will rise further in the future due to rise in gas prices.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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RDMiller Posted 10:42 pm
03 Nov 2008
In your previous post (now further backed up by your latest post), you said you thought the payback time on a PHEV or hybrid car was 10-15 years. I'm guessing (others can chime in here) that this was based on gas at $4.00 per gallon... not $2.50. But even so, come on... who holds onto a car for 10-15 years! This isn't a nuclear powered submarine. People change their cars after 3-5 years or so. In other words, it costs them more (today) to go the electric route than the liquid fuel route.
I'm not saying there aren't many other reasons to choose a PHEV or hybrid, but saving money because the car might be powered by a nuclear facility isn't one of them.
Richard
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Karen Street Posted 11:51 pm
03 Nov 2008
Vakibs talks about the operating cost of electric/PHEV cars, and it is true that the operating cost is competitive. The capital cost in the absence of a technology breakthrough is currently too high.
Jon, Greenpeace???? Does IPCC cite Greenpeace as a reliable source? If not, should we?
Sean, lots of energy sources get loan guarantees, and there is only a cost if there is a default. Part of this is to compensate for the inability of some utilities to collect money during construction, sort of like saving for the Prius while it's being built. There are other ways that our current system skews decision-making, and loan guarantees can help balance it. Also, you cite Brown and Lovins, but are these sources acceptable to and accepted by IPCC? If not, should you use them?
Again, some questions:
can you find evidence in the major reports, acceptable to and accepted by IPCC, that show a path without expanded nuclear power?
is it the work of members of the public, like the writers for Gristmill, to eliminate solutions found by experts, or to add to them? Is it the work of members of the public to pick and choose reports to cite? For example, is Brown's initial post based on peer-reviewed work accepted by the science and policy community over time?
why work so hard to pick and choose which solutions to accept? There is such a disconnect between what the experts are talking about-we're in real trouble here, and there is no path without terrible consequences, now we can only try to prevent some of the worst of the worst consequences-and the public discussion-we have so many solutions that we can pick and choose among them.
I asked this below-are any of these arguments convincing those neutral or hostile to your thinking, or are they arguments that only work for those who are anti-nuclear power? If the arguments are not persuasive, should they be given up?
It's hard to consider changing one's own life. Some find giving up flying especially hard, for others it's driving. It's hard to consider creating policies that will provide sticks and carrots to change our behavior. But that is where the work of the public will be most effective, finding ways to extend policy makers recommendations.
I am discouraged. We will see awful environmental problems, increasing year by year, between now and 2030. We can prevent none of these. It's too late for that. We can only work to mitigate future destruction to human health and society, to other species. Meanwhile, some here argue against many of the most effective solutions. To me, such arguments, where I cannot find support in the science and policy community, just mean more delay. To me, these arguments mean more death.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:49 am
04 Nov 2008
Karen, I think that any discussion of various alternatives to fossil fuels is a good thing. It's a short path to sectarian thinking if you start to worry that the deluded thinking of people here will lead to catastrophe -- the people here are not the problem, in my humble opinion. And frankly, if you look at some of Joe Romm's posts, he gets uncomfortably close to what I would call sectarianism, so it's not necessarily a problem of political viewpoint.
To pull back a bit, the "technical question" that frustrates me about the environmental community is not the choice of carbon-free electricity, it's the hesitancy to advocate rail in all of its forms, and to try to tackle the problem of sprawl (despite rantings of various conservatives, environmental organizations are very paternal about suburbia). I think that the difference between a car-dominant and rail-dominant world will be much more important than the difference between, say, a nuclear-dominant electrical and wind-dominant electrical society -- and a rail-dominant society will need more electricity.
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Backcut Posted 1:02 am
04 Nov 2008
I just think that with more research into future forms of power will yield the clean and abundant energy we need.
Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com
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vakibs Posted 1:23 am
04 Nov 2008
Yucca mountain is the quintessential pork-barrel project. It exists to siphon money to the nuclear industry from the public exchequer. Oppose Yucca by all means, but safety is not the issue.
The reason to oppose is that we don't need Yucca mountain. Any spare money we have should be spent on building 4th generation nuclear plants (IFR) which obviate the need to store long term nuclear waste.
An interesting newsflash about the shipment of nuclear waste : it is already happening for about several decades under the Atoms for Peace program - nuclear waste from all over the world is arriving in shipments to its final destination in the USA !
@Jon
Brown is duped by Lovins. We should call a spade a spade, and a lie a lie. Lovins is a professional liar, though I should admit his lies are quite musical to the ears.
@Karen
For anything decent for the environment, capital costs are high. Think of capital costs as the amount of time one spends wooing a girl that one loves. Good girls are worth the wait :)
Electric cars, energy efficiency systems, public transport, nuclear power plants .. they are all worth every penny that is spent in building them.
@Richard
I never stop being amused by the culture of waste in the USA. No one needs to buy new cars every 3 years and trash old ones. Considering that most of the components come from China or India, coal electricity lurks behind your shiny new car. Repetitively buying new gadgets is a capital offense against the environment.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:38 am
04 Nov 2008
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Sean Casten Posted 1:57 am
04 Nov 2008
The current US nuclear fleet runs at about 90% capacity factor, although this has increased signficantly in the last 10 years. Again, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the future will look like the best that the industry has been able to accomplish rather than their historic average. That implies that this $705 will cost $705 / (8760 x 0.9)= 9 cents/kWh just to recover the capital costs of the power plant. Add in another penny or so for the fuel and operating costs, 3 cents for transmission and distribution charges to get the (remotely generated power) to the customer load and another penny or two to pay for disposal charges and you're up to about 15 cents/kWh. No matter how you slice it, that isn't cheap... and that's with a lot of pretty industry-friendly assumptions built into the math.
Current US average retail rates for delivered electricity are just shy of 9 cents right now for comparison - which means that a committment to 15 cent nuclear power will require either (a) a massive increase in electric rates or (b) a requirement that nuclear plant investors sacrifice equity returns in favor of cheap electricity. Neither of those are consistent with nuclear power being cheap.
Don't get me wrong - it is cheap to run if you're willing to sacrifice capital recovery, and if we are willing to pay 7 - 8 cents/kWh for the environmental benefits of nuclear, it will likely get built... but so will a lot of other stuff that is cheaper. I don't know where you're getting data that suggests that nuke is in the top 2 on the economic meter, but I rather doubt they'd stand close scrutiny.
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Sean Casten Posted 2:04 am
04 Nov 2008
Re: IPCC, I take your point that we don't gain by ruling out options, and further that nuclear has a big carbon benefit. My point isn't to bash nuclear, but simply not to ignore it's warts. Specifically:
It's bloody expensive.
It's almost too slow to matter.
This latter point is oft-overlooked, but the reality is that building a nuke plant has historically taken 5 - 10 years. So to your question about IPCC reports, I'd ask you how much time we have? Most of those reports say we better move quickly to get the GHG concentration down, and there is no nuclear path that leads to quick reductions. Is it possibly part of a long-play? Perhaps. But in the short term, it basically doesn't matter - any more than coal with carbon-sequestration matters. By all means, let's focus on R&D to get the costs down, let's make targetted bets on the future and let's not put all our eggs in one basket. But when I look at a technology that is (a) expensive and (b) not able to do anything to quickly lower GHG emissions, I don't see the logic for making nuclear a core piece of our climate policy going forward - especially when there are so many options, from efficiency to renewables that are universally quicker to deploy and in many cases cheaper.
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Karen Street Posted 3:28 am
04 Nov 2008
Your nuclear power estimate sounds pretty cheap to me.
Current retail costs in the US reflect cheap dirty old coal power plants (lots and lots and lots), hydro, nuclear power plants with the capital costs paid off, etc. New power will be more expensive than old power.
People are expecting new nuclear power in the US (not counting restarting construction on two older plants) by 2015 or 2016. I believe that after the first couple of plants are built, construction time is expected to be closer to 4 years. Here in California we are heavily subsidizing solar panels, and by 2017 hope to have less than half a nuclear power plant's worth of electricity from all those solar panels. So which can be built faster?
Again, though, if nuclear power does not make economic sense, why do you have to convince the public? Utility managers are not going to pick more expensive low-GHG options over cheaper ones without good reason or without a renewables mandate. Basically, we'll know within a decade if nuclear power is too expensive or not, compared to other low-GHG options. But this kind of post is not going to convince utility managers.
Again, you still haven't explained why you aren't using IPCC and the reports IPCC depends on.
Oh well, sorry about repeating myself, making exactly the same points.
Karen Street
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Sean Casten Posted 4:09 am
04 Nov 2008
Nationally, transmission and distribution costs about $1400/kW of load at the end of the wire. If you run that at the same amortization schedule as the generation capex, you get those 2 - 3 cent numbers. I'm not sure you can make a case that nuke requires more or less than other central options, as they are all remote. But in any event, that's my bogey.
Your point on T&D line loss numbers is well taken, and additive to my math. Our national ~9% line losses in transmission and distribution not only imposes an operating cost on the distribution service, but also requires that upstream assets be oversized (e.g., you need to build 1.09 kW of remote generation to have enough capacity to serve 1 kW of load). This, of course, is equally true of remotely-sited renewables. In truth, the factor is closer to 1.25 - 1.30, because you also need to add in reserve margin for reliability. In all cases, I've not added into the math I did quickly for vakibs, so the calculus for nuclear is even pricier than it appears above.
You are right that current average costs are weighted down by old, amortized plants, and indeed, nuclear is far from alone as a new-build technology that will raise rates against this average. But many opportunities exist that would lower GHG and lower the cost of power (we've identified 200 GW of potential from CHP and waste heat recovery, and I've seen pretty compelling data on geothermal and biomass as well). I don't think we need to stipulate who the winners ought to be - simply that in a world with a level playing field and an incentive to lower GHGs, nuclear is unlikely to be the first choice.
I think you misunderstand how utilities make money. They are compensated, through modern rate law by a commission who gives them a "fair" return on invested capital. If they can convince a commissioner that something really expensive is a good idea, they make more money than if they instead simply invest in the cheapest source of new generation. It's a massive regulatory failure, but the result is that if regulated utilities are investing in a given technology with gusto, the one thing you can be virtually certain of is that - paradoxically - it is not the cheapest way to serve new load, as they don't have any economic incentive to build such generation. Non-regulated investments are a totally different matter... which is why virtually all of our existing nuke fleet has been built by regulated utilities.
Four years to construct is a dream. Wonderful if it happens, but no investor today is going to commit to massive investments in nuclear on the presumption that they will be built that quickly. Models and spreadsheets may be projecting something faster - but until we've actually seen the market build them that quickly, and powerplant investors deploy capital on the presumption that they can be built that quickly, it is simply an undefendable assumption in a spreadsheet.
Finally, I don't mean to dodge the IPCC reports. I'm simply noting that the really important part of the IPCC report is on the GHG side of the ledger. How deep and how fast do we need to reduce GHG concentrations to avert disaster. What they have to say about which technologies ought to be a part of that mix is a lot less interesting to me, only because I don't think anyone is capable of making that prediction. Let us get the right signals in place, reward GHG reduction and penalize the reverse and then see how things shake out. I generally agree that nuclear is almost certainly a part of that mix - my ranting here is simply because in the present debate, it has a prominence that seems to willfully disregard it's economic and construction problems.
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vakibs Posted 4:26 am
04 Nov 2008
The "report" of FERC that you mention spends a lot of time on the rising prices of natural gases, which are alarming indeed. Should be a cause of alarm for any industry dependent on natural gas for power generation, don't you think !
About the increase in construction costs, mentioned in pages 6 to 9, they affect all types of power plants. In fact, wind and solar power installations need more construction materials than nuclear. The reason why the FERC-lord concentrated only on nuclear power on the page 7 is because he didn't even consider renewables as a reasonable alternative. Nuclear has more construction costs than only one source - natural gas plants. This is exactly to whom the FERC-lord has sold his soul, for the sake of some natural gas royalties.
The interesting joke is on the page 11, where the pink bar (estimated 2008 costs) are lower for wind, geothermal and solar.. than for nuclear. This is more so when you see the yellow bar (2003 costs) are quite low for nuclear. There are two things hidden under this lie (1) wind has a capacity factor of around 30%, so you have to essentially multiply by 3 the estimate for wind (2) there is absolutely no data to support why solar/wind/geothermal would be less affected by construction costs than nuclear (Considering their low power density, they would need more cement, wouldn't they ?). In fact experience shows otherwise, several investors are pulling off funds from renewable technologies amidst market blues.
Now, for some serious business. The internal costs for nuclear power are well-known, and reported by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in comparison with several other sources of power. Practical costs of nuclear power are also well known, as paid by consumers in nuclear powered countries. I live in France, and we pay 3 cents per KWH here.
Don't get me wrong - it is cheap to run if you're willing to sacrifice capital recovery, and if we are willing to pay 7 - 8 cents/kWh for the environmental benefits of nuclear, it will likely get built...
This is a disingenuous black lie. Nuclear needs no public subsidy to get built. Guess what ? The dark side of the force is already planning to use nuclear power : to get oil from the tar sands and make money out of it. Why did they choose nuclear power and not some wind power to do the job, if nuclear is supposed to be so very expensive ?
The 3rd generation nuclear plants that are in proposal such as the AP-1000 are essentially simplified versions of the current 2nd generation plants. They have fewer valves and pipes. They should take less money to build, and less time as well (since we have a lot of industrial experience over the years). The AP-1000 reactor is being quoted at 1.2 billion dollars per GW. If you don't trust the numbers in USA, you can look at the equivalent numbers of the new ABWR reactors constructed in Japan. They tally superbly well.
In fact, 4th generation reactors (such as the IFR) will be even cheaper. Because of passive safety systems, the need for external safety valves will be gone.
None of this is to assure you that electricity prices in the USA will fall down : they might indeed remain sky-high, with your deregulated industry swamped with private utilities, it is quite possible.
You should refer to my earlier comment on the "null hypothesis on nuclear power". Intuitively speaking, we expect nuclear power to be cheap : the reason is its extremely high power density. If this is not cheap, it means there is something quite weird. It is imperative for anti-nukes to explain why nuclear is expensive; this takes more than quoting from a FERC-lord. This means dissecting how the comparative construction costs (or distribution costs) will be cheaper for wind/solar than for nuclear. Nobody has ever come up to me with an explanation why, becuase such an explanation is impossible to find.
Don't get me wrong. I like wind and solar power. (But I hate fossil-fuel driven CHP plants). I am completely confident that a pure solar energy plan is feasible. It is even economically profitable. But it is way short of being the optimal plan - either in terms of economics, or in terms of environmental impact.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:30 am
04 Nov 2008
Second, France's nuclear network was built by the government, so they're not a good example of building without public subsidy. As I've argued before, the lesson from France is that the electrical industry should be run by the government.
Third, if solar is doable, then let's do it. "Optimal" is a difficult word to use here, I think, because one has to figure out what "optimal" means. If it means how much something costs at a particular point in time, externalizing all kinds of costs maybe, that's different than a solution that is stable and resilient for thousands of years. That's why I'm not even that concerned about how expensive an electrical source is, within reason. The question is, can this source be used for a very long time, reliably, repeatedly, safely, without screwing up some other part of the system? Solar and wind seem to be better in those terms; although Lester Brown in the post is attempting to use just those economic arguments that I just ignored.
Fourth, there is a difference in talking about what we have now and what we will have Real Soon Now. I prefer to just use what we have now, which is hard enough to predict, much less what will occur Real Soon Now (for instance, I continue to be skeptical of hybrids/electric cars just for this reason). I'm pleased that you are keeping us up-to-date, for instance, on fast breeders and nuclear techology, but if you're going to compare Real Soon Now's, we should also get into solar/wind/geothermal Real Soon Nows, which would be a whole other conversation.
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vakibs Posted 5:50 am
04 Nov 2008
This essentially means it has the least requirements on land, water and minerals for producing an equivalent amount of power (say 1 GW). This automatically translates into the least impact on biodiversity of our planet.
As an environmentalist, this is my underlying optimization principle. This is why I prefer dense urban living over suburban sprawl. Or why I prefer public transport over private vehicles.
Nuclear power is a very good candidate to be considered, based on this definition.
My definition of optimality is not based on economics. There is only one consideration for economics, which is that if a power source is cheap it will achieve the most rapid transition from fossil fuels, and there by prevent climate tipping points. Nuclear power happens to be also amongst the cheapest power source that we have at this moment. This makes it a double plus for nuclear.
However, I think we should judiciously exploit land resources that we already have, for power production. This means we should use photovoltaic panels on every roof, windmills on agricultural lands, small hydro projects, methane burners in livestock sheds, and sustainable forestry. I support all of these power sources, even if they end up being more expensive than the nuclear option. Most of all, I support energy efficiency wherever that is possible.
What I don't support is continued fossil fuel use (even in CHP plants), massive solar CSP plants, massive offshore wind installations etc. These are detrimental to the biodiversity and I think they should be avoided when we have better alternatives.
About me calling Mr Amory Lovins a liar, I have to stand by that. Please excuse me for my childishness, but I am seriously displeased by the misinformation that some environmentalist groups are spreading, either out of ignorance or out of pure malice. I don't know which is true for Mr Lovins. He has a track record of supporting fossil fuels : coal over nuclear power, doing consultancy for natural gas industry, supporting Hydrogen vehicles .. All these symptoms indicate that he is on the dark side of the force.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:15 am
04 Nov 2008
I think with the exception of nuclear I have to agree with almost everything you say -- I have one question, why is offshore wind bad for the environment? At any rate, I think it's fine that we have some areas of disagreement, and that we can agree on a whole slew of solutions. But the supporters of the priority of wind/solar need to do some more homework (hopefully funded, that would certainly help) to show how solar/wind can be "optimal", from an ecosystem point of view.
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JimHopf Posted 3:02 pm
04 Nov 2008
The subject matter that we were talking about (and I was commenting on) was, specifically, the use of nuclear and wood for electric power generation.
Nuclear provides ~20% of US electricity generation. In Europe, the figure is over 30%. As shown in the top section of the EIA table linked below, nuclear generates over 800 billion kW-hrs annually (as of 2006), out of ~4 trillion kW-hrs generated from all sources (i.e., about 20%).
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html ...
The same table shows "other renewables" (which includes wood) as generating ~96 billion kW-hrs, which is just over 2% of the total. To determine how much is actually generated by wood, I went to the table in the link below, which shows that wood was used to generate almost 40 billion kW-hrs in 2006, which is ~1% of the total.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/renew_energy_ ...
At present, there are over 30 new nuclear plants, with a collective capacity of ~40 GW, currently being planned in the US. This drawfs any plans for wood-fired electricity capacity. Wood is used more in other (non-electric) sectors of the economy. In that sense, it is not really competing with nuclear.
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JimHopf Posted 3:29 pm
04 Nov 2008
As with all nuclear "issues", people's fears over waste transport are not warranted, based on the facts/record. Any public health risk from nuclear waste transport is negligible compared to the risks we've been routinely living with from general hazardous material shipments.
Even at the height of any (future) nuclear waste shipping campaign, there will be thousands of hazardous chemical containers on the roads/rails for every container of spent nuclear fuel.
On top of that, those chemicals are shipped in thin-walled, easy-to-breach containers, whereas the spent nuclear fuel is shipped in extremely robust containers with several inches of solid steel, that have been tested to show that they can withstand the most extreme accidents (fire, drop, collisions, etc..) that may occur. It is also true that much more precaution and care will be taken with the nuclear shipments.
Finally, while nuclear waste is in the form of solid ceremic pellets sealed within metal tubes, the chemicals are often in the form of liquids or gases that would disperse over a wide area if the (thin-walled) container were breached. The fact is that many of these chemical shipments would actually have a far greater health/environmental impact if breached than would a breach of a nuclear canister (if that were indeed possible, perhaps only by an attack with a specialized weapon). Due to the form of nuclear waste, it is actually doubtful that any people would die even from such an extreme terrorist attack, as the waste would not disperse over any significant area. We would just clean it up. They've got infinitely better targets to attack.
To summarize the above, chemical shipments we have always been living with are thousands of times more numerous, less carefully shipped, shipped in thin-walled, much easier to breach containers, are in a much more dispersible form, and would (in many cases) have a greater impact if breached. For all these reasons, it is clear that our current chemical shipment risks are thousands of times higher than any associated with nuclear waste shipment.
And once again, these facts/arguments are backed up by the record (history). Whereas chemical spills (and assicated impacts/evacuations, etc..) are common, there has never been a significant release of radioactive material, or any resulting deaths or health effects, over all the decades that such nuclear shipments have been made. A total of ~70,000 metric tons of spent fuel (nuclear waste) is slated to be shipped to Yucca Mtn., over several decades. In Europe, they have already shipped 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste, to various destinations. And over all those shipments, there has never been a release of radiation, and there have been no deaths or any other effects.
As with nuclear in general, what we have here is a case of a perfect safety record being not good enough for some reason.
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JimHopf Posted 3:50 pm
04 Nov 2008
The small amount of money given back to utilities is negligible compared to the amount of money that the govt. took in for Yucca but then spent on other things (i.e., put into the general fund). Thus, the 0.1 cent fee has primarily been just been a nuclear power tax (i.e., a negative external cost).
The money damages given to the utilities are not a refund of their waste fund contributions. That would be a much greater sum. The damages are merely to cover their (relatively small) costs of storing the waste on site for a long time, due to the delays in the Yucca project.
And besides, my arguments show that even if (hypothetically) the govt. had to give all the money it has collected back to the utilities, and then had to build the entire repository on its own dime, the resulting "subsidy" would only be ~0.1 cents/kW-hr (i.e., negligible).
Decommissioning costs are not understated! We've decommissioned several plants now and have a good idea of what it costs. The govt. continually audits and monitors the plant decommissioning funds (and the associated annual contributions) to ensure that the entire process will be completely paid for. Once again, no taxpayer liability, no subsidy.
US nuclear plants have not created any "contamination". The land air and water around plants are all continually and rigorously monitored, and no members of the public are exposed to more than a tiny (~0.1%) fraction of natural background radiation levels. After the plant is closed, the area must be cleaned up so that radiation levels are not significantly higher than natural background, and so that even a person living right on that spot would have no measurable health risk. And all this is fully paid for by the utility.
US nuclear plants been generating a significant fraction of our electricity (20% for some time now) without emitting air pollution or CO2, and without having any measurable impact on public health. This compared to fossil fuel plants which cause 25,000 deaths every single year and are the leading cause of global warming. How this amounts to a "disaster" is beyond me.
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amazingdrx Posted 4:09 pm
04 Nov 2008
The first reactor decommisioned lies in an unlined landfill trench in South Carolina, the resulting contamination running into the local watershed and down the rivers into the ocean.
Leaks are all over the place, covered up, not "carefully monitered".
Your analysis sounds good, but it is pure propaganda.
Why should we the taxpaters and rate payers give the industry another chance when all it offers up is lies and coverup. Past mistakes have to be admitted before they can be remedied.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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RDMiller Posted 8:25 pm
04 Nov 2008
How about coming back to reality. I know it's painful, but it does make for a more useful discussion.
Your 30 planned nuclear plants mean little until any of them are built. A good case could be made that few, if any, will.
I realize you want to make it sound like nuclear produces a major portion of our power and cannot be done without, but the facts show otherwise. Fact: nuclear produces well under 10% of US energy. Fact: plans are on the table to eliminate it completely over time.
With Obama in now, expect to see a continuing rapid expansion in the use of biomass for energy (mainly through cellulosic ethanol). With the plans I am aware of, it should be about 10 years before biomass produces more energy in the US than nuclear.
That said, I will say once again that I am not opposed to nuclear energy. But it has a long way to go to prove it is cost effective and safe.
Richard
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Karen Street Posted 12:49 am
05 Nov 2008
President Obama mentioned support for nuclear power in his acceptance speech at the convention. Climate change is listed as one of the top 3 national security issues by his top security advisor. I have heard NO one at that level who believes we can address climate change without expanding nuclear power. I have heard NO discussion in any kind of academic setting, any peer reviewed policy setting, that sees us addressing climate change without expanded use of nuclear power.
Richard, who for some reason is focusing on nuclear power's contribution to the supply of energy rather than electricity, believes that little new nuclear power will be built and there will be shutdowns soon. At the McCain rally last night, there was announcement after announcement of states won by McCain and music instead of TV coverage. Maybe some in the crowd were surprised by the concession speech. Ditto for those who have missed all the announcements over the last couple of years of plans for new nuclear power here and around the world, and massive investment in capital and labor by companies selling reactors and parts. In Germany, the numbers opposing closing the nuclear power plants at 32 years, half or less of their expected lifetime, is now equaled by those who support keeping them open.
Vakibs, who seems to me quite good at keeping his cool, expresses anger at Lovins. There are many reasons why people might say what they say. Many just plain find it difficult to say, "I was wrong." Monbiot said it, but other people and groups whose persona is tied to anti-nuclear power, and in some cases there is a fund-raising tie as well, may find it harder to shift. Some will be able to say that the NRC has improved oversight, so nuclear power is now acceptable. Others will say that better policy analysis shows that nuclear power is needed because of the greater dangers of climate change. Or that the companies got their act together and the economics are not as bad as was feared. Those of you who are anti-nuclear might consider in which way you will explain your change of heart. I truly expect that by 2015 or earlier or much earlier or much, much earlier, people will have begun to "get" the dangers of climate change. Opposition to nuclear power will go the way of lower capital gains tax to fix an economic meltdown.
Karen Street
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RDMiller Posted 4:07 am
05 Nov 2008
I don't believe I ever said anything about shutdowns of current nuclear plants. I also didn't say I expect no new ones to be built... only that a good case can be made that none (or few) will. It's hard to say how this will unfold.
As far as your question goes as to whether any "expert" has laid out a peer-reviewed plan for a sustainable energy future without nuclear, I don't follow those folks thoroughly enough to answer this. But I suspect there are plenty of folks like that who do lay out a long term energy future for the US that includes only a relatively small amount of new nuclear. I'll bet there are folks here at Grist that can verify this with specific links.
Richard
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Bob Wallace Posted 9:59 am
05 Nov 2008
OK, let's say I am convinced by the pro-nuclear crowd that there is money to be made by investing in a state of the art plant. I'm looking at 10-15 years before I start seeing any return on my investment. I've already penciled that time lag into my expected rate of return.
I'm about to write that check with all the big numbers when something occurs to me....
I don't see people including in their calculations the new technologies that might (and most likely will) appear during that time frame. Returns are being compared to current state of the art methods of generating electricity, not what might be around further down the road.
Looking back at the last year or so we see solar panels rising in efficiency from less than 20% to just under 40%.
Just announced was an inexpensive coating technique for panels that allow them to capture essentially 100% of light striking their surface - no more tracking.
We've got apparent breakthroughs in concentrated solar which allows for hundreds of suns to be focused on a small amount of silicon, drastically driving down the cost.
There are companies such as NanoSolar who have figured out how to inexpensively "print" solar onto plastic rolls.
Geothermal is receiving a lot of attention with expectations of 24/7/365 baseload at $0.07 per kWh.
There's a large scale compressed air storage facility being constructed in the MidWest and a pump-up hydro storage facility being drilled into the earth in the East. Both ways to store inexpensive electricity from wind and give it more baseload functionality and to shift solar/wind electricity to when it is more in demand.
How many of those developments could have been predicted a couple of years ago?
How much would I be willing to bet that other developments won't surface during the next decade that would absolutely price my nuclear facility completely off the table?
Somehow I think that I'd go for a shorter term return rather than bet enormous amounts, long term against new technological developments.
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