First a caveat: When it comes to electricity generation, I (Jason) am an agnostic. In other words, I try to evaluate energy sources on their own merits, from cradle to grave, and I try my best to keep ideology out of the analysis.
When we're talking about our energy future, it is essential to look at the big picture. We should evaluate each fuel source -- its pros, cons, and its potential for the future -- in light of all the geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges we face. We should develop a comprehensive plan that maximizes energy potential, minimizes risk, and makes room for new technological developments.
There are two things we absolutely must not do:
- turn reactionary decisions based on short-term situations into long-term policy, and
- base our energy future on wishful thinking. Speaking of coal and CO2 sequestration ...
Reactionary decision-making
In the early 1970s, this country had about 12 percent of its generating capacity in natural gas-fired power stations. Then the OPEC embargoes hit, and we legislated against using natural gas in power stations (the Fuel Use Act of 1979). The gas share of electric generating capability dropped to around 7 percent.
Then, after the Fuel Use Act was repealed in 1986, we went on a gas-fired power construction binge in the late 1990s. Today, we have more gas-fired generating capacity than we have coal-fired! However, because the price of gas is so high, those plants only account for about 12 percent of actual kilowatts generated. Hmmm ... 1970: 12 percent. 2007: 12 percent.
Also in the '70s, we were on a path to replace a significant amount of coal capacity with nuclear. Then Three Mile Island occurred. All the planned nukes were canceled, and we were back to relying on coal. Not only that, but the economics of the Clean Air Act of 1990 encouraged utilities to switch to western coal, because even though it had less energy per unit weight (a lower-quality fuel than most eastern coal sources), it was low in sulfur and less expensive, even when transportation costs were factored in. Power plants representing tens of thousands of megawatts switched to western coal, because it was cheaper in the short-term (based on regulated utility economics) than adding sulfur dioxide scrubbers or other alternatives.
So now we not only use much more coal, we use lower quality coal, with poorer efficiency, that emits more CO2.
The result of all these jumps and starts is that despite some interesting cycles in the trend lines, our energy source mix today looks remarkably like it did forty years ago.
Wishful thinking
The truth is that once you factor in the cost of reducing -- or perhaps "managing," or "containing" -- CO2, coal ceases to be the low-cost option for electricity production. With the coal and sequestration song and dance, however, it looks like we're going to repeat history: the power industry is rallying around CO2 sequestration as the savior of coal and believes we're going to solve our environmental and energy issues in one fell swoop.
It works only if you consider just one part of the overall problem. It's not just that there are huge technological challenges, or significant efficiency and economic penalties imposed by separating CO2, compressing it, transporting it, and injecting it deep into the bowels of the earth. No, as serious as those issues are, that's not what makes me, a chemical engineer, nervous.
Here's what makes me nervous: for the first time, instead of taking out large quantities of stuff from the earth, we will be deliberately putting in large quantities of stuff -- stuff we don't want. And we're putting it in deep, injecting it into the subsurface of the earth where the sun don't shine, so to speak. (This process is very different from landfilling, which is a surface operation.)
Plus, we are substituting a solid material (coal) for a gaseous material (CO2). Fundamentally, technologically, geologically, and ecologically, this is no apples-to-apples switch. These huge volumes of vaporous material will have to be monitored and contained for, well, forever. Kind of like spent fuel rods from nuclear plants.
Yes, sequestration makes coal similar to nuclear power. There is a residual waste stream that has to be managed beyond the timeline of quarterly reports and into forever. That's not a timeline that corporate America does well. And we're talking about a huge volume of CO2, as opposed to nuclear waste, which is, relatively speaking, small and easy to monitor and can be put where we can see it. Set aside for the moment the profound legal issues surrounding sequestration. Are today's sequestration sites tomorrow's sets for the 21st-century Poltergeist movie?
Short-term decisions have long-term consequences
We have to recognize that the energy mix of the '70s does not serve us well in the 21st century. It is also true that coal isn't going away any time soon, and it behooves us to find more intelligent ways to use it (more about that some other time). Unfortunately, the electricity industry does not make revolutionary changes, and I might argue that, at least in my lifetime, it has hardly made any evolutionary changes. Because of its institutional structure, the best move King Coal can usually muster is to tread water and hope it all blows over one more time.
Why is this? One reason is that environmental regulation proceeds on a piecemeal basis rather than a holistic one. We legislated against natural gas after the OPEC embargoes. Then we pinned all our hopes on natural gas and built capacity like crazy people. Then all the nukes were canceled based on one accident, during which, by all accounts, the safety systems actually behaved the way they were supposed to, avoiding a truly calamitous event. Now sequestration is the answer. We keep regulating, legislating, and reacting to one-time events or one type of pollutant with short-term measures.
Instead, we should evaluate the problem holistically, and ultimately pay for a solution designed for the long haul.
Sequestration will not be the single savior for the coal industry, let alone the planet. We must look beyond single saviors and formulate a realistic policy that is not overly reliant on any one fuel, technology, or supplier. The question is whether we can look beyond simplistic solutions, muster the political will, and formulate -- and implement -- a coherent energy policy to keep our nation's economic engine running and our lights on.
The foundation of our vision of a coherent energy policy (articulated in the book Lights Out and discussed elsewhere on Gristmill) are as follows:
- Conceptual:
- Shift emphasis and money into the right side of the value chain and away from the left side -- in other words, don't focus as much on reducing consumption, but on managing consumption.
- Update the grid.
- Give consumers the tools to see/feel/understand/act on their consumption habits.
- Technological:
- Left Side
- Use nuclear to meet demand and manage CO2.
- Limit coal to "intelligent" coal.
- Fund a massive development program for storage.
- Continue to commercialize "renewables."
- Limit liquefied natural gas to strategic imports for distributed power networks.
- Right Side
- Enhance effectiveness of microgrids and drive that process from a market/consumer perspective.
- Left Side
- Regulatory/political:
- "Backstop" the backbone of the nation's electricity infrastructure.
- Unleash the power of technology and competitive consumer choices (the power of the market) on the retail side.
- Financial: Make sure that financial engineering never displaces systems engineering.
- Global: Secure all of the supply lines affecting our domestic electricity infrastructure.
- Social: Make electricity visible, understandable, and part of our everyday discourse.
And then there's the personal -- see Think: Less!
Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7
Two senators push to ramp up nuclear energy
Comments
View as Threaded
Biodiversivist Posted 9:55 am
27 Nov 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
Permalink
David Roberts Posted 10:18 am
27 Nov 2007
grist.org
Permalink
rycarson Posted 10:44 am
27 Nov 2007
Permalink
WineDrkSea Posted 2:45 pm
27 Nov 2007
Most obviously, while you are correct to point out analogies between sequestering CO2 indefinitely and radioactive waste, the fact is no one has successfully demonstrated long-term storage of large amounts of high level radioactive waste. See Mountain, Yucca. The cost estimates for the Yucca Mountain facility keep going up geometrically, while the opening date recedes constantly. All this for a facility, if it were ever to actually open, that would only be able to handle waste for the relative handful of nuke plants we have now for couple of decades at most. After that, it shuts down and we start the process over again.
Then there is the issue of fuel. I don't have the cites handy, but it's my understanding that there isn't enough world supply of uranium ore for nukes to be a major source of energy. Unless perhaps breeder nuclear reactor technology is used, which has its own set of problems: excess supplies of fissile plutonium, with attendant worries of nuclear proliferation and possible nuclear holocaust.
And, according to Amory Lovins at least, there is the issue of cost. Yeah, I know, dirty coal is cheap, but Lovins claims that, other technologies are better and cheaper, even if you don't count waste fuel disposal costs for nuclear.
Believe it or not, I'm not unalterably opposed to nuclear power. It may, and I think it probably will, be a small piece of the puzzle. But when it gets trotted out as a major answer to climate change, as it appears you have here, I do wonder if all the costs are being considered.
Permalink
nycowboy Posted 1:22 am
28 Nov 2007
Coal in contrast is relatively safe. Global warming's impact on the planet will be relatively minor compared to even the results of one nuclear meltdown -- see Chernobyl.
In the near term, I'm for keeping coal (without CARBON SEQUESTRATION) as the base source of power in our electric grid, with using renewables and conservation as the primary way to address increasing demand for energy.
Farther on, as renewables become better embraced, then we can start shutting down both nuclear and coal plants. Oil and natural gas, combined with several massive new pump-storage plants can provide peak energy in that future, with eventually a massive network of renewables, partially decenteralized and owned by homeonwers.
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 2:25 am
28 Nov 2007
It uses dirty coal, natural gas, oil, nukes, and the grid we have now in the transition to a new distributed renewable energy future. Eventually shutting down nukes and coal and replacing most oil use with renewable electric powered transportation.
Along the way coal power plants can be converted to natural gas and some nukes can be converted to nuclear waste processing plants.
Where would that natural gas to replace coal come from? From conservation, efficiency gains, and bacterial conversion of coal to natural gas underground. And this all fits well into biogas conversion from the waste stream, a renewable source of natural gas that saves methane release (23 times worse than CO2 as a GHG) from human waste, manure, and fertilizer run off.
Forget clean coal, it is a diversion by the coal industry, nothing more. In your advocacy for diverse sources of energy to solve energy and climate problems, it is important to choose the right sources. Sources that work together, to design a symbiotic solution where gains in one area make further gains possible in other areas.
No new nukes or coal plants ought to be built, but the ones we have now should fill in the gaps (until the new grid supports itself)in a distributed renewable, internet enabled smart grid that conserves, generates, and stores energy in conjunction with plugin vehicles, industrial energy use timing, and geo heat exchange heating/cooling.
Trying to clean up oil, coal, and nuclear power by retrofitting add on solutions just creates excuses to continue the status quo energy policy.
Lovins pointed out recently that our vehicles have 7 times the energy use of the entire grid. So if those vehicles are plugin hybrid, would other forms of storage be needed? How about if heating/cooling loads were reduced drastically by geo heat exchange and used as a form of storage by storing heat or cold during peak wind and solar energy production periods?
A distributed grid takes far less transmission capacity, rendering the present capacity more than enough. A fraction of the money not spent on a huge grid transmission increase and stabilization effort using centralized generation (trillions), including building clean coal and new improved, safer nukes, would be enough to convert to an internet enabled, switchable grid that could facilitate those conservation and storage improvements.
And that would completely backup a grid mainly powered by distributed wind, solar, wave, and water power, with biogas/natural gas solid oxide fuel cell/turbine cogeneration facilities (2 to 3 times the efficiency of present power plants). These installations can be much smaller than centralized power plants and more widely distributed, giving each local area and region it's own stable power system. Making for a safer more reliable grid.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
Permalink
GRLCowan Posted 2:30 am
28 Nov 2007
So it's no surprise that Greenpeace researchers quietly but routinely get on board the nuclear icebreaker Yamal, sometimes spelled Jamal. Since fission-generated radioactivity declines with time, there is more dangerous radioactivity in such a ship's reactor than a full Yucca Mountain would ever contain.
People correctly perceive this radioactivity as nonthreatening when it's their own skin that must be put either in its proximity, or in fossil fuels', just as they would not prefer to get on a wind-powered boat if instead they could ride a fossil-fired diesel one.
The Makansis must have been trolling, or very stupid, when they said US power looks the same as 40 years ago. BP stats show 1966 US nuclear electricity production was 1.3 "Mtoe", 1.3 Million tonnes of oil equivalent, and in 2006, 187.5 Mtoe. Has US electricity production in general increased 140-fold in that time?
--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
Permalink
Tasermons Partner Posted 2:59 am
28 Nov 2007
Coal contains low levels of uranium, thorium, and other naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes whose release into the environment leads to radioactive contamination. While these substances are present as very small trace impurities, enough coal is burned that significant amounts of these substances are released. A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could release as much as 5.2 tons/year of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons/year of thorium. The radioactive emission from this coal power plant is 100 times greater than a comparable nuclear power plant with the same electrical output; including processing output, the coal power plant's radiation output is over 3 times greater.[
Permalink
GRLCowan Posted 3:16 am
28 Nov 2007
Anyway, it's near there. What does uranium cost, something like $50 per million BTU? Neglecting enrichment, of course, since not all reactors require enriched fuel.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
Permalink
Jon Rynn Posted 11:34 am
28 Nov 2007
In reference to Jason's call to restrain financial engineering (very well articulated in his book, Lights Out, which, by the way, makes a great gift), it seems to me that the easiest way to avoid the vulture-like behavior that seems to accompany financial engineering in the electrical industry, it would be best if the Federal government (perhaps with help from states/localities) just took over the grid, thereby avoiding a huge amount of hanky panky. Then, it would be a question of encouraging supply and making demand more efficient, instead of gaming the distribution system.
My third point has to do with Sean Casten's cogeneration work -- wouldn't it make more sense, if you must keep coal around, to shut down all the centralized coal plants, and put smaller ones a la Casten near their customers so that you could use the waste heat? Wouldn't that immediately cut coal use (and carbon increase) by two-thirds?
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 6:12 pm
28 Nov 2007
That's why natural gas makes more sense for distributed cogeneration, the pipelines are already there.
By going to geo heat exchange for heating, enough natural gas will be saved to replace coal. And by using geo heat exchange for cooling, grid load will be reduced, that will save coal and gas too. Cogeneration heat will save gas as well.
Add biogas from waste to the natural gas and conversion of coal underground to natural gas, and the renewable grid would have backup without coal or nukes.
These types of solutions that work together use efficiency gains and conservation that reduce total energy use without harming the economy. In fact they make energy cheaper and domestically produced to boost our failing economy. Hampered by huge debt from oil and oil wars and energy inflation driving inflation in every other sector.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
Permalink
Jon Rynn Posted 10:51 pm
28 Nov 2007
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 1:18 am
29 Nov 2007
I also saw a story on the science channel about a high rise that uses geo heat exchange cooling by circulating chilled water cooled by ocean water. There was a "Dirty Jobs" segment on a cooling system for a nursing home using a geo heat exchange system. Wells were drilled then a loop of plastic pipe with the circulation fluid inside was put down each well with all the pipe loops connected to circulate cooling through the building.
The coal to biogas conversion concept is kind of short on information so far. Not sure how much gas is produced or how fast. Clean coal, fuel farming, and nuke subsidies ought to be diverted to R and D on geo heat exchange heating/cooling.
There should be stats on the amount of gas used for building heat. That could be replaced by either heat envelope geo heat exchange or heat pumps extracting and elevating geo heat.
Warmer areas where winter temps only get down in the 30s could easily use heat envelope systems, for colder regions heat pumps might also be needed. Heat envelope systems have mainly been built with a double wall circulating ground and solar heated air between so far.
Here in the cold north, the ground maintains it's 55 degree heat with about a 10 R factor of soil over it. That is the principle behind an underground home. Bringing that 55 degree heat up around a conventional above ground home with circulating anti freeze solution under an outside insulation layer of about 2 inches of rigid foam insulation should be feasible. The question is how big would the heat exchange area have to be and how much flow would be needed.
And there is always solar heating and heat storage that would work with geo heat exchange. Evacuated tube hot water heating works well even in northern climes.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
Permalink
Jon Rynn Posted 1:27 am
29 Nov 2007
Permalink
wolffboy Posted 5:31 am
01 Dec 2007
"by all accounts, the safety systems actually behaved the way they were supposed to"
I take it the accounts your consulted did not include the NRC (try http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets ...) or the President's Commission on the accident (try http://www.pddoc.com/tmi2/kemeny/account_of_the_accident. ...), either of which would have made clear that this statement is false.
Permalink
GRLCowan Posted 6:26 am
01 Dec 2007
Google (serpentinite carbon sequestration). Too many hits, but I liked this one.
It can require further research and funding, and then require further funding and research, or it can be happening already, unfundedly, with no-one's permission, and with post-capture costs of nothing a year.
This forum will not continue to prefer the former sort of approach, and will not express that preference through loud, devoutly maintained ignorance of the latter kind.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
Permalink
Jon Rynn Posted 7:44 am
01 Dec 2007
Another article, from MIT, written in 2002, said that the mining required to get the minerals to lock in the carbon would be 8 times greater than the mining needed for coal, and that "Cost estimates used by the proponents of mineral sequestration are $70 per tonne of CO2 sequestered if one scaled up current laboratory processes. Eliminating pre-treatment and solving the dewatering problem would reduce the cost to $30 per tonne of CO2 sequestered.", but also that transport could double that.
My chemical literacy ain't much better than my grammar, but it seems to me that it's still problematic, and that switching to solar/wind/geothermal would be much better.
Permalink
GRLCowan Posted 12:51 pm
01 Dec 2007
--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
Permalink
BILL HANNAHAN Posted 7:22 am
02 Dec 2007
These huge volumes of vaporous material will have to be monitored and contained for, well, forever. Kind of like spent fuel rods from nuclear plants.
Actually, nuclear power produces small volumes of waste with short geologic lives.
Converting 5.4 ounces of uranium into fission products will release enough heat to generate an 80 year lifetime supply of electricity for an average American and displace the burning of 1,140,000 pounds of coal and prevent the release of 2,440,000 pounds of CO2. Less than one ounce of the fission products will still be radioactive at end of life.
Look at the graph on page 5 of this report, page 18 of this PDF.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/TRS435_web. ...
The top line shows that unprocessed spent fuel decays to the level of uranium ore in 130,000 years. Notice that the scales are logarithmic, it looses 90% of its toxicity in the first 500 years.
The thick black line shows that the toxicity of fission products drops 90% in the first 90 years and drops below uranium ore in 270 years.
But only 5% of spent fuel is waste (fission products), 95% is unburned fuel. Imagine that coal burning power plants burned only 5% of their fuel and passed the rest up the stack with the combustion products. Would you;
A _ Collect the unburned fuel and exhaust products, put then in an expensive container, and bury them under Yucca Mountain.
B _ Bury the combustion products and recycle the unburned fuel.
That is our choice with nuclear power. Option A can meet our needs for several hundred years but option B makes more sense in the long run.
WineDrkSea said;
I don't have the cites handy, but it's my understanding that there isn't enough world supply of uranium ore for nukes to be a major source of energy.
The oceans contain 4.6 billion tons of uranium, half of which is sufficient to support 10 billion people for over 30,000 years.
http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html
In reality the oceans are continuously supplied with uranium by the erosion of land, so the uranium supply is effectively unlimited.
nycowboy said;
Coal in contrast is relatively safe. Global warming's impact on the planet will be relatively minor compared to even the results of one nuclear meltdown -- see Chernobyl.
Actually, routine emissions from US coal plants kill 23,000 Americans each year, a silent 9/11 attack every two months.
See Page 12 of
http://www.cleartheair.org/dirtypower/docs/dirtyAir.pdf
Two teenage brothers are home alone. They break into the liquor closet and find a half gallon of tequila. The older boy challenges the younger boy, "Bet you can't drink the whole bottle". "Yes I can" says the younger boy, and proceeds to start chugging. He passes out without finishing it, loosing the bet, and within the hour looses his life.
This establishes that 64 oz. of tequila is a lethal dose. The Linear No Threshold (LNT) model says that if 64 people each drink one ounce of tequila one of them will be dead within the hour.
This is how we calculate the risk of low level radiation.
Remember when the cigarette company executives testified before congress that smoking was risk free? A few years of research proved them wrong, because the effects of smoking are large enough to be easily statistically detected.
60 years of studying the effects of radiation has still not proven low level radiation to be harmful or beneficial. We can say with absolute certainty that the health effects of low level radiation are very small compared to other risks we accept without much thought.
Google "radiation hormesis" for an interesting debate, or try this.
http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/content/full/179/5/1137
The Chernobyl accident exposed millions of people to a small dose of radiation. The estimates of the number of deaths from Chernobyl over the next 40 years range from 4,000 (IAEA), to 100,000 (Greenpeace), based on the LNT theory.
If radiation hormesis turns out to be valid the Chernobyl accident may prevent thousands of cancer deaths.
GRLCowan wrote;
Ah, but coal costs only about $2 per million BTU
(Is that an accurate coal price? I know it has been rising.)
Anyway, it's near there. What does uranium cost, something like $50 per million BTU? Neglecting enrichment, of course, since not all reactors require enriched fuel.
I don't think so GR. Fuel costs are;
GAS 5.2 CENTS / KWH
COAL 2.3 CENTS / KWH
NUCLEAR 0.49 CENTS / KWH
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...
The nuclear fuel cost quoted here is for fuel assemblies ready to go into the reactor, of which the cost of uranium is a small fraction. It includes the fact that today's reactors split only about 1% of the uranium mined to fuel them. Breeder reactors would consume much less uranium per kWh.
Splitting 1.1 grams of uranium will release 1 million watts of heat for 24 hrs.
wolffboy does not believe;
"by all accounts, the safety systems ( at TMI) actually behaved the way they were supposed to"
Yes they did. The problem arose when the operators turned them off. The TMI reactor base matt is 20' thick steel and concrete, and it is built on solid bead rock. It would almost certainly have contained a full meltdown, but that was not part of its design basis.
Modern reactors are designed to contain and solidify a full meltdown using passive cooling systems. The only injury would be to the stockholders portfolio.
See page 50 of;
http://www.areva-np.com/common/liblocal/docs/Brochure/BRO ...
"... It is 11 times more likely for the largest asteroid near the earth to impact the earth over the next 100 years than for an ESBWR operational event to result in the release of fission products to the environment"
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/nuclear_energy/ ...
http://www.ans.org/pubs/magazines/nn/docs/2006-1-3.pdf
A lot of people are suffering and dying because of out irrational fear of the N word, we need to get over that.
Permalink
GRLCowan Posted 8:31 am
02 Dec 2007
... "Yes I can" says the younger boy, and proceeds to start chugging. He passes out without finishing it, loosing the bet, and within the hour looses his life.
Loses, losing, loses. Don't be a looser, Bill.
A _ Collect the unburned fuel and exhaust products, put then in an expensive container, and bury them under Yucca Mountain.
B _ Bury the combustion products and recycle the unburned fuel.
That is our choice with nuclear power. Option A can meet our needs for several hundred years ...
Engineers fall into semantic traps. Mousetraps are cruel and unaffectionate; switching to better mousetraps, or cats, isn't something we need to do, it's something we want to do, and will do. Nuclear power is at least a better mousetrap -- everyone here knows that, it's obvious from the multiplicity of arguments against it -- and really it's more like a very skilled cat that kills mice without cruelty. We don't have to need it to want it. And Option A can meet our enlightened wants for many thousands of years.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
Permalink
BILL HANNAHAN Posted 3:28 pm
03 Dec 2007
G.R.L. Cowan said;
Loses, losing, loses. Don't be a looser, Bill.
Egads, I must be "loosing" my mind, thanks for the "spell" check GR.
Permalink
Nucbuddy Posted 12:42 am
04 Dec 2007
Actually, Northern Wisconsin has ground temps of about 42 degrees.
http://www.geo4va.vt.edu/A1/A1.htm
...And, in the winter, that is only if you are 30 feet down (see link for soil-temp swing graphs). At 10 feet of depth (depending upon how wet the soil is, since wetter soil conducts heat better), the winter ground-temp is about 32 degrees.
Permalink