Why does Amory Lovins say that the market is deciding against nukes?
One of the things that not many people seem to realize is that we had just enough deregulation in this country to scare the pants off investors who formerly treated utilities as stocks you could safely put in widows' and orphans' portfolios.
Even with the largess being showered on nukes in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EP Act 2005), there hasn't been quite the stampede to license new nukes that many hoped for. The feds are obviously ready to shovel money at the problem, but the utilities are nervous about state regulators and whether they'll stay on the reservation.
Outside of a few areas in the south, where there is fairly strong support for the existing nukes, companies looking to build a new one are terrified that the consumer backlash will kill them in the marketplace.
The utilities know that there has been such an incredible extravagance of wasteful electricity consumption built into the system today that there is huge potential for demand collapse if people got mad and decided to get even by going on a shopping spree with their local alternative energy contractor or, in the few states that allow it, by going to an AES (alternative electric supplier).
For that reason, I guess that where there is retail electric competition you will not see any nukes built, period.
I would also guess that outside those few areas in the South, even utilities not in a deregulated or partially deregulated market are not going to make the bet on nukes, simply because it would be too easy today for opponents to kill the project by destabilizing the utility with aggressive conservation and efficiency.
Demand for energy efficiency, conservation, and the currently lightly used green rate programs would explode the minute a utility outside of the South announced a nuke, and it would be fairly easy today to organize a boycott against any large industrial customers who agree to buy the plant's output.
What investors want before making the big $2 billion bet is a guarantee that customers can't leave the utility and take their demand to a competing generator who makes electricity from pig poop or wind or cogeneration or what-have-you (or decide to spend wildly on efficiency and conservation -- buying "negawatts").
But these technologies may be too far along to keep in the bottle; people aren't particularly motivated to choose them today, but that could change in a real hurry if the folks regulating Springfield Power and Light decide to let Mr. Burns build another nuke.
Moreover, since the currently waning deregulation frenzy, utilities have lost their main argument for stranded cost protections: they could at least argue with a straight face in the 1970s that it never occurred to them that they would NOT be the one supplying the demand they built the plant to serve.
But we're virgins no more on that score -- it seems really unlikely that a utility in America could argue with a straight face that its customers should be forced to pay for an unpopular investment in a nuke if they vote with their demand by going elsewhere (either to an alternative supplier or to aggressive "negawatt" consumption).
I think, and I think utility finance types worry -- that there are a number of people who would only need a small push to become rabid opponents of their local investor-owned utility. Once radicalized, the economics are not normal for these people any more, as the non-economic factors begin to play a larger and larger role. Thus they make dangerous opponents, because they don't act "rationally" according to the utility models.
In the end, the projected power costs for different methods of making electricity all assume that, to the customer, a kWh is a kWh is a kWh, which is likely not true (even though many anti-nuke folks rely on nuclear power now, often unbeknownst to them).
I think that a number of utility companies could find themselves in a very Iraq-like setting in trying to get a nuke built: in complete control of the administrative apparatus and able to win any set piece (legal) battle, but losing the war to the insurgents anyway.
The sad part is that this same level of ferocious resistance is not seen in the wars against coal plants -- thus, TXU has only to threaten to build 17 new ones, and it comes out smelling like a rose when it "compromises" that down to 3. Truly a Pyrrhic victory for environmentalists.
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Comments
View as Flat
Karen Street Posted 11:53 am
11 Jun 2007
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a different take than Lovins on where nuclear power is going in the US; We Support Lee says the NRC is Busy!
From Dr. Dale Klein (chairman of NRC):
* We've been told by industry to expect license applications for 27 new reactors in the next two years... and every day our Executive Director of Operations warns me to prepare for an even higher number.
Germany has been told by International Energy Agency and Deutsche Bank that German plans to close nuclear power plants are incompatible with reducing GHG emissions. Coal plants in Britain will be replaced by nuclear. Finland is getting another nuclear power plant. South Africa is looking at nuclear power. China plans about 300 GW by mid-century. Norway is looking at building a thorium nuclear power plant (Norway has large thorium reserves). France plans to build plants.
Lovins characterization of the lack of American and worldwide interest in nuclear power seems to miss some of the subtleties.
I'm writing from California, where 21% of our electricity comes from coal power.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Delay And Deny Posted 1:27 pm
11 Jun 2007
The problem with nukes during the 1970s was not technological. The best technology for building them was created in the 1950s and 1960s -- these smaller, simpler nukes, such as the New England Yankee in Connecticut, lasted over 50 years and provided safe clean (and small) amounts of power. I know about this plant because it was (in part) built and designed an acquaintance and welll know African American inventor, Dr. Alfred Bishop.
But us being America, we over engineered and bloated the technology until we ended up with Three Mile Island. One factor may have been that the people who built and we dependent on the existing grid of coal and oil, were also building the nukes (ok, you can take your tinfoil hat off now)!
France used a very simple design and used its highly centrist government to insure that the template was used in all of its nuke construction.
The are some really nice innovations being done today in the new Westinghouse headquartered in Britain with passive safety systems (things like having a giant tank of water on top of the core if the thing overheats! Very smart!).
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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amazingdrx Posted 4:59 pm
11 Jun 2007
It would further panic investors.
Then a demand to free the grid could be made, allowing renewable energy generating customers to sell their kwh to like minded consumers of renewable energy. One could put power into the grid to charge up your own car remotely for instance. Or members of renewable energy coops could transport power to one another.
As the cost of capital goes up and up for nukes and coal plants, distributed renewable generation and storage would drop in price as mass production efficiencies took hold and home and business owners rushed to capitalize on this new source of revenue.
Time to take the big sleep old line corporate polluters. You're time has almost passed.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Charles Barton Posted 12:14 am
12 Jun 2007
Charles Barton
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sunflower Posted 1:46 am
12 Jun 2007
I can not touch the price of efficiency.
Competing with the price of civilian nuclear is easy.
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:23 am
12 Jun 2007
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a different take than Lovins on where nuclear power is going in the US
Oh really?
Sole U.S. Company That Enriches Uranium Is Struggling to Stay in Business
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:25 am
12 Jun 2007
http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/Products_&_Service ...
Catch up on the latest in nuke building from today's Westinghouse.
Shed the old thinking -- Japan and France already have!
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:28 am
12 Jun 2007
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclearnow.ht ...
Sooner or later the world will go for nuclear energy in a big way. If this is to be done in a technologically and economically optimal way, the changes will begin soon. Indeed it was a tragedy that ignorance and fanaticism prevented the good start on nuclear energy made in the 1960s from continuing. If it had, the US would already be in compliance with the Kyoto targets for CO2 emission. Perhaps the Sierra Club has been the largest single cause of more CO2 in the atmosphere. It has had a choice of what to recommend, but the utilities really haven't had much choice of what sources of energy to use.
This page is updated from time to time, when I notice something relevant. However, I don't scan the literature systematically and often miss items I'd cite if I noticed them. The Nuclear Energy Institute web page is up-to-date on nuclear energy projects - at least in the U.S.
2006 March: The February Physics Today has an informative article on new nuclear power plant projects. It says "In the US and the UK, governmental preparations are under way that may lead to 15 new reactor orders by 2007." Alas, I fear 2007 is an exaggeration. The article also mentions reactor projects in France, Finland, Japan, China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and South Africa. The article has a somewhat grumpy tone, and the expert consulted is from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which was anti-nuclear in the past.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:32 am
12 Jun 2007
Here's the very cool A600 from Westinghouse:
http://www.ap600.westinghousenuclear.com/
The AP600 is an advanced 600 MWe nuclear power plant that uses the forces of nature and simplicity of design to enhance plant safety and operations and reduce construction costs.
Also:
The Westinghouse AP600 design simplifies plant systems and significant operation, inspections, maintenance, and quality assurance requirements by greatly reducing valves, pumps, piping, HVAC ducting, and other complex components. The AP600 safety systems are predominantly passive, depending on the reliable natural forces of gravity, circulation, convection, evaporation, and condensation, instead of AC power supplies and motor-driven components.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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Charles Barton Posted 6:01 am
12 Jun 2007
Charles Barton
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Billhook Posted 6:21 am
12 Jun 2007
I won't repeat your error of trying to speak for other countries' outlook on nuclear power,
as your information is just patently wrong about my country.
Here in the UK I haven't seen ANY public discussion
of replacing coal power with still more nuclear fiascos,
let alone any official decision to do so.
What Blair, (who used to be anti-nuclear before getting bought),
has done for the industry is a delight.
Admittedly, when it went bust he baled it out with £400Mn of taxpayers' money,
but since then, as a lame duck PM he's had the hubris
to try and push the replacement of old nuclear stations onto an unwilling public.
It is now becoming crystal clear just why, in Blairs decade of power,
sustainable energy has received such paltry govt. support -
those energies' success will be nuclear power's demise.
So, far from your nonsense of the UK "replacing coal with nuclear"
it is looking increasingly unlikely that we shall even renew the nuclear plants we have.
Given that their decommissioning is expected to cost over £60Bn,
our 60Mn population will pay over £1,000 of tax per head to do so -
and you really think we want more of them ?
In reality, the global nuclear industry remains just one bad accident from global abandonment.
It is the classic C20 titanicist folly, and it has had its day.
I suggest you get over it.
Regards,
Bill
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Karen Street Posted 7:00 am
12 Jun 2007
The article surprisingly says that British plans for natural gas use will help keep Putin happy:
Gas-fired power stations are expected to be the dominant form of electricity generation in the future as Britain builds pipelines from the Continent and port terminals to handle liquefied natural gas shipments. As atomic reactions replace coal as a source of energy, nuclear is expected to account for 20% of Britain's power needs on a continuing basis. Hopes that renewables will be able to make up 20% of the energy mix are now reckoned to be dubious.
Good about the coal, too bad about the incredible use of natural gas.
How did Britain anticipate getting 20% of its energy from renewables?
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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amazingdrx Posted 7:27 am
12 Jun 2007
Nuclear power is a dead end.
Get on board the conservation and renewable distributed generation and storage juggernaut. It's going to be an exciting, booming ride.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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FuriaFubar Posted 2:17 pm
12 Jun 2007
http://www.xanga.com/furia_fubar
All the Best,
Furia -
http://www.xanga.com/furia_fubar
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