Via Brad Plumer, this might be the most honest, good-faith argument about nuclear power I've read in the last, oh, year or so. You can read Max Schulz's pro-nuclear argument here, and then read the anti-nuclear side by Bruce Smith and Arjun Makhijani.
No surprise, I come down on the anti-nuclear side myself, but at least Schulz doesn't simply ignore or refuse to acknowledge the real risks of nuclear power (waste, proliferation, costs). And in his reply at the bottom of Smith and Makhijani's piece, he makes a reasonable argument that Smith and Makhijani are soft-pedaling the costs associated with wind's intermittency.
But cost is where the nuclear argument always hits the shoals and starts taking on water. Smith and Makhijani:
At first blush, these facts would seem to support the promoters of nuclear energy. But a shortage of low-or-zero-CO2 sources of energy is not the problem we face in confronting global warming. The scarce commodity is money. What will give the biggest bang for the global warming buck? A related question: What other problems may be created in the process of reducing CO2 emissions? [emphasis mine]
Schulz's reply is, to my eyes, so weak it's an indictment all by itself:
... observant readers will note that we use different figures. What gives? As with many points, determining these costs is open to interpretation.
Uh, OK. Thanks for that. Smith and Makhijani use pro-nuclear studies in their article which still quote a higher price for nuclear electricity than is currently available from wind. So you get all the hassles of dealing with radioactive waste, the permanent (if manageable) danger of a reactor failure, if spread globally the inevitable problem of nuclear technology going to countries we don't like, and you get to pay more to do it.
And with wind turbines, you kill a small fraction of the number of birds killed every year by American cats.
Somehow, the first option is preferred by almost all policymakers, and the second one is seen as a desirable-but-not-feasible scenario for the future.
‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science
Make the kids pay: The economic effects of climate change on future generations
Two senators push to ramp up nuclear energy
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GreenEngineer Posted 8:43 am
03 May 2007
When someone asked about nuclear power, that's how he framed his answer. He said he was not inherently opposed to nuclear power, but that the nuclear industry needed to internalize the full cost of construction, the cost of waste disposal, and the cost of liability insurance. All three of these items are currently heavily subsidized (and subject to other market distortions) by the federal government. If the nuclear industry could internalize these costs and still function, then he would consider nuclear power a serious and legitimate option.
Make the market tell the ecological truth. It's a powerful idea. It's too high level to directly inform policy, but it is a good "sniff test" for policy suggestions.
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Pangolin Posted 8:57 am
03 May 2007
In the '70s my brother was a reactor engineer for the US Navy. The stories he had to tell about nuclear reactor safety would curl your toes. So for many years I was categorically against nukes. Due to the global warming debate I have revisted the option and have come to an interesting conclusion. Nukes can work; but the US shouldn't be trusted with them.
The US decided in the late 60's to take a distinct course on nuclear power in order to promote the production of nuclear weapons. Of the available nuclear reactor designs two types, the thorium reactor and the molten salt reactor were unsuitable for the profitable production of plutonium.
A nuclear reaction once started can be sustained by thorium in a slow breeder cycle. The main problem with a thorium reactor is that it won't produce a plutonium isotope usefull for bombs. It will produce power with less waste than a uranium reactor.
The molten-salt reactor was developed for the much derided nuclear powered bomber. In several ways this reactor is superior to reactors like those used in 3-Mile Island. The molten-salt reactor actually burns nuclear waste especially plutionium. Also the reactor couldn't melt down because it was already molten. You place your reaction chamber above a pool of dry salts; if the reactor overheats it dumps into a dilution tank and shuts down every time.
The thorium reactor won't produce bombs and the molten-salt reactor requires relatively smaller containment chambers, can consume nuclear waste and eliminates the need for costly fuel rod manufacturing and reprocessing.
Instead we have is reactors that produce the maximum amount of nuclear waste, plutonium, in the form of fuel rods that have to be manufactured, stored and reprocessed continuosly. All at a profit. Pebble bed reactors just produce these wastes as softball sized "pebbles."
I'm convinced that our current nuclear power system was designed to produce maximum profits, maximum waste and therefore maximum plutonium for bomb production.
And they want us to build more. Every nuclear reactor everywhere in the world will be vehemently opposed politically by somebody. But there are other options.
Solar thermal plants like these and these can be made at the speed which we make autos. After all they are piston engine generators. Coupled with geothermal energy resources there is more than enough power available for everybody everywhere; right where they are.
You say the ground isn't hot enough to generate steam where you are? No worries, loop your heated ground water past the big solar mirrors, flash it into steam and pump it back into the ground for nighttime use.
Steam turbines require high grade steam but stirling generators only require that the hot side is sufficiently hotter than the cold side. That means that you can extract usefull power when your hot water is only 95 degrees celcius and it's negative 20 celcius outside with a wind.
The technology to do this without nukes exists. The will to actually build the units is lacking.
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GRLCowan Posted 12:34 pm
03 May 2007
There's plenty of plutonium in that spent fuel, but it's not weapons-grade; it does not have the necessary high degree of purity in the 239 isotope. Due to the long residence time needed to get nearly the maximum energy yield per pound of fuel, or as nuclear people say, due to the high burnup, much of the plutonium-239 that was produced in it was burned up, yielding some of the energy, before the fuel left the reactor. Much of the rest was converted to the 240, 241, and 242 isotopes.
Despite these heavier isotopes' high concentration, it is, in theory, potentially weapons-usable, but testing the theory has, to every known nuclear weapons proliferator, seemed like a long way around compared to just using a low-burnup low-temperature reactor, or going the reactor-independent Hiroshima route.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
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glowingsponge Posted 1:49 pm
03 May 2007
In the SF Bay Area, where they are especially leery of allowing any kind of serious public debate on energy issues, we were given the usual out of town experts, in this case all of them on the "antinuclear side" were from NRDC, who were pushing the same eco soft line about letting the market decide. Its a really great line, but since when have we ever seen a politician ever not play for pork? I don't care what party your from, you imagine those lobbyists all agreeing to miss pork even on friday?
Yes, it would be nice that everybody played fair, and we were all given some kind of equal time in the public's eye. Unfortunately, anyone who has spent more than a bit of time two decades ago on this issue knows what's up with the game being played today.
As an analyst that watched over 20,000 nuclear stories last year, WE ARE being led down the same bridal path by the media that they did with Iraq!
We are all supposed to be far more sophisticated today online when it comes to being hip, but the buz flies blow both ways. I can bet you, if you spend more than a few minutes looking around, you will find sites all over the place calling Patrick Moore the founder of Greenpeace, or even worse, how Greenpeace is now pronuclear... The real problem is that nearly 90% of most news stories covering nuclear issues are localized, so what's happening in Texas is a whole different can of worms than what's up in Vermont, or California.
Yesterday, for example there was nearly a dozen pronuclear articles in papers across the country, nearly all of them with basicly the same localized nukes are "the only sollution that can save us" spin.
Where are you gonna read a story that asks the question "Would you buy a used nuclear car from George Bush after what he did to this country with Iraq?" For every news story that makes an attempt at balancing the issue, there are 10 going full blast with their "nuclear doesn't produce any CO2 gasses lie." Oh, no, you mean they do? Yes, and there are real bonified studies, never before done in the U.S. to prove it!
Here's the problem, as we really do start to get close to having a serious public debate about the issues, the leadership of both the democrats and republicans have already made up their pork barrel minds. We are all supposed to be simpletons, just like Homer Simpson and never blink once that there might be other options that have been cut out of the global warming option frame, now so totally linked with the climate change debate, you would think that pronuclear activists really gave a shit about the issue, rather than just using it to promote their latest hot nuclear models.
When Europe had a serious debate on global warming they came up with 17 different options on how to deal with the crisis. Hmmm.. Nuclear was number 16, right above Coal, at the bottom. Are we gonna hear about this in our 8 second sound byte culture? Its not time to be fair about the nuclear option, it never has been. They are gonna frame the debate Nuke R Us... simple and sweet.
If you don't take them on and make far more serious demands, we will end up once again with a whole new generation of reactors, using the same line as last time. The only problem is that we've all forgotten they used the same line on the public 40 years ago as the answer to coal as they are doing this time. Why is it that coal is doing better now in the big mix than they were 40 years ago? Let's have the nuke industry have a show down at the okay corral, with the winner taking home the contract. Hmm. they won't even show that one either will they.
On Feb. 11th, 1985, Forbes magazine called the nuclear industry the greatest financial disaster in American history! And you wanna make a deal with the Kenny Lay's best buddy? Since when do we have the full story of what happened in California, let alone the costs!
For most of the last 30 years renewables and energy conservation have been the public's most popular energy sollutions, Yet renewables aren't taken seriously outside of a few regions of the country. Why could Texas with less than half the population of California use just as much energy?
Why, In California, we actually got an answer to this in the middle of the 2001 energy invasion from Texas. The folks that own power plants and sell us power will do everything in their power to oppose renewables and conservation cause its not in the interest of their bottom line. Or even worse. Here's story of how they actually killed the popular programs when nobody was looking...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle ...
The nuclear debate, if it has to be had once again , its that nothing new has changed. The arguments in the fight are now classic, and go back decades. The man who was considered public enemy #1 against the nuclear power industry a generation ago, Amory Lovins is at it again with the current roundtable debate being held over at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists site. Have you seen him or Helen Caldicott on with the same kind of footing that the Judas of Greenpeace has (patrick Moore) been on?
http://www.thebulletin.org/roundtable/nuclear-power-clima ...
One of Greenpeace's strongest spokespersons, Harvey Wasserman has published his latest arguments here. You seen him on NPR lately?
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2007/1535
In one of the most important shifts in the issue, we now find the Council on Foreign Relations putting out a report questioning the Bush push and its wild eye'd claims that nukes can solve everything, including the two faced bigotry of our Iran no-nukes strategy.
http://www.upi.com/Energy/Analysis/2007/04/23/analysis_re ...
In one of the better peaks at the problems of our fearless leader's agenda, we now have the Institute of Policy Study's (and other groups like the GAP) analyisis of Bush's Faustian plutonium economy with the GNEP carrot to build nukes all over the world.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-04/ifps-wgc04 ...
Then we have those bloody pro nuclear Greenpeacer's with their just released report on the economics of nuclear power. Damn, if they have turned pronuclear, what a job they did on Blair's attempt to push a new generation of nukes there, with their lawsuit that killed the whole UK push dead in the water. Have you heard the latest? The UK is now awash in a huge scandal over missing body parts of former nuclear workers.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/press/reports/the-economics ...
If really wanna know what's up on this issue, there are resources. If you wanna take a peak at the daily broadside of nuclear news worldwide. You should go to the republican state of Nevada's official website where they have been fighting to kill Yucca Mtn for the last 15 years, where you will find all the nuclear news in english, plus if you look closely an RSS feed to make it go down a bit more smoothly.
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/whatsnew.htm
A cheap car salesmen always wears power blue ties and looks just like someone all of us Mad Magazine fans enjoyed as a kid... Let me tell ya about a deal I got in the back lot...
You buy, it you will be trapping us all into the Texas styled power contracts that IBM thought were gonna make them rulers of computers, until microcomputers came along.
Just think of it this way, why rent your electricity from snarky rich dinasaurs when the next generation of micropower technology is just around the corner that will allow you to own your power source. Micropower, if it isn't waylaid by the hysterical utility types who are terrified of the coming economic groundshift away from billion dollar baseload power plants that keep them in blue ties and Hummers, is gonna be the coolest thing coming!
Hang onto your hats ya'll haint seen notin yet!
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Karen Street Posted 2:26 pm
03 May 2007
Still, intermittency remains a challenge. For instance, there are many times when the wind falls off after sunset, but electricity is still needed. The problem can be overcome in two ways. The first is to invest in some form of storage....
The most immediately available form of storage is pumped hydropower. Wind and solar electricity can be used to pump water into existing reservoirs, from which hydroelectricity could be generated during periods of insufficient sunlight or wind.
First, there is big energy loss in that process, so it is generally limited to cheap energy (eg, nuclear at night). Second, it's hard to imagine the time this half century when a glut of solar electricity means spare capacity.
It's also startling to read in their analysis that efficiency always has a negative cost. Yes, compact fluorescent bulbs cost less over their lifetime than do incandescents, but many of us are sort of hoping that society will pay for efficiency even when it costs us. Even if a hybrid car, for example, costs more than (dirty, filthy fossil fuel driven) regular cars over their entire lifetime, cap and trade or greenhouse taxes could encourage us to pay that extra cost.
I also wonder about claims that nuclear power is too expensive. If that were true, then no more of these articles need be written. Nuclear is more expensive than dirty coal, which produces 8 Chernobyls/year, just in the US, many, many times that around the world. But so are wind and solar. There are other ways to subsidize wind and solar: mandating renewables. We may want to do this, but please, don't keep telling us that wind with inefficient (dirty, filthy) natural gas backup (in most locations, hydro in others) and solar are cheaper than nuclear.
Yes, they used the pro-nuclear numbers -- the before in the before and after analysis.
Why is nuclear waste only a concern when it comes from nuclear power? Coal power produces much more nuclear waste while the plant is operating than nuclear does over its lifetime.
Why assert that if any more nuclear power plants are built, really it needs to be much more than 1,000 GW (adding 700 GW more means building about 500 new plants)? More is better, but why insist on it? Where is the comparable analysis for all other methods of reducing GHG?
There is more that could be said. But geez, storing solar with hydro.
Karen Street
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feonixrift Posted 2:32 pm
03 May 2007
Building plants that rely on resources which may become unavailable under increased climate strain doesn't seem too useful to me.
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Gar Lipow Posted 2:42 pm
03 May 2007
If wind is 4-6 cents per kWh then the cost of power losses with pumped storage are .8 cents to 1.2 cents per kWh. (Add another mill or two of pumped storage capital costs.) So wind with pumped storage ranges from 2 cents less per kWh to half a cent per kWh more than nuclear power plants. Over all that sounds like it would average less. But of course in a market where all energy sources are subsidized, and where some of the subsidies (such as the Price-Anderson act) have values which are hard to pin down, the least cost option does not always win.
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GRLCowan Posted 3:16 pm
03 May 2007
If the concentration did not decline with depth, I'd be sitting here typing to you a dead man. Or a magma man, perhaps, since not much of the planet could yet have frozen.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
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Pangolin Posted 3:47 pm
03 May 2007
So lets use the uranium where it is; in the ground. It's much more reasonable to send water down to the hot rock heated by radioactive decay to be heated than to bring the rock up and accelerate that decay.
There is very little political opposition to deep rock geothermal energy. The plant at the Geysers in Calistoga California operates with not a complaint once they switched to a closed cycle system. Heck it even recycles Santa Rosa wastewater into clean power. How sweet is that?
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:25 pm
03 May 2007
With the raw assumption that the nuclear waste is successfully put in storage WITHOUT exposure.
Which is a pretty LARGE assumption.
From the way you are phrasing it, it's as if they just make an openair pile of them out back of the plant.
Furthermore, the numbers you are using are rather suspect.
First off they are using projections for the coal out to 2040.
Likewise, they do a "per capita dosage" to effectively disguise the localized radiation.
Then they get to play games with the proximity of coal to urban centers, and generalize that.
Where are nuclear stations tend to be a lot more isolated.
If you're going to use numbers, atleast use ones which don't intentionally misrepresent the facts.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:02 am
04 May 2007
again.
Lester rocks!! The only guy to include liability insurance in nuke costs. Accept the compromise, end the debate, such as it is.
And no floating chernobyls please?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Karen Street Posted 12:38 am
05 May 2007
Re reducing nuclear power during a drought -- all nuclear, coal, biomass, and natural gas plants should be sited with this concern. A bigger concern is the loss of hydro power.
Re Lester Brown, um, nuclear power costs are internalized. This is not true of any other power source. To some extent, we should cap GHG emissions at a low level, and then let the market decide. We should also subsidize the heck out of R&D for solar, geothermal, carbon capture and storage for coal, etc. More minor subsidies for other energy sources.
Re energy subsidies, and Price Anderson,
The Price-Anderson Act requires the nuclear industry to obtain maximum insurance ($300 million/plant), and to be able to contribute up to $96 million for more expensive accidents at any US nuclear power plant. Any expenses in a nuclear accident above $10 billion would be paid by the federal government. As of now, $151 million have been paid for industry claims ($70 million for Three Mile Island, and the rest?)
Why is nuclear waste only a concern when it comes from nuclear power? Coal power produces much more nuclear waste while the plant is operating than nuclear does over its lifetime.
With the raw assumption that the nuclear waste is successfully put in storage WITHOUT exposure.
Which is a pretty LARGE assumption.
From the way you are phrasing it, it's as if they just make an openair pile of them out back of the plant.
Furthermore, the numbers you are using are rather suspect.
First off they are using projections for the coal out to 2040.
Likewise, they do a "per capita dosage" to effectively disguise the localized radiation.
Then they get to play games with the proximity of coal to urban centers, and generalize that.
Where are nuclear stations tend to be a lot more isolated.
If you're going to use numbers, atleast use ones which don't intentionally misrepresent the facts.
Yes, per person exposure matters. The per person exposure is so high for coal because many hundreds of thousands of times as much coal is used as uranium. Add a few uranium, thorium, potassium-40 atoms added to the mix, and smaller amounts of daughter products of uranium and transuranic elements, and radioactivity becomes significant. Not compared to the other sins of coal, but compared to producing an equivalent amount of nuclear power.
From Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger:
For comparison, according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants. For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown.
I suspect that in the next 5 - 10 years, all but the die-hards antis are going to say, "we goofed on nuclear." We can only hope that it isn't too late.
Karen Street
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amazingdrx Posted 3:40 am
05 May 2007
Nuclear disaster or climate disaster. We don't have to accept either. Just go wind, water (wave, river, and ocean current), solar, and biogas. Along with conservation in the form of EVs, geothermal heating/cooling, and heat pumps.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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