Comments BILL HANNAHAN has made

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Sean, I agree that our views are close.

It is not clear that you distinguish virgin fossil carbon from recycled atmospheric carbon. The issue is the increasing concentration of CO2 resulting from the continual injection of new fossil carbon. Only that stream requires an atmospheric dumping fee.

I do not understand why you think the fossil carbon stream needs a different treatment than other harmful atmospheric emissions. A dumping fee equal to the best scientific estimates of the damage caused by each of these things works best. Those cost estimates can be refined as the science becomes more accurate.

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You like calling it a tax because people oppose taxes. It is really a toxic waste dumping fee. Nobody thinks companies should be able to dump toxic waste free of charge.

Call it a dumping fee and include all toxic wastes dumped into the atmosphere, CO2, mercury, cadmium, particulates, sulfur, NOx etc. Set the price equal to the best estimate of the cost of damage done. Rebate the money.

Most people would accept this if it was properly explained, Hansen has it right.

What's the alternative?

1...Implement a $100 billion / year R&D budget that pushes all technologies as hard and fast as possible. $100 billion / year is not much to solve the two biggest problems faced by 6.5 billion people, energy and climate change. The economic return for getting it right will be many orders of magnitude larger.

2...Build demonstration plants of every technology as it becomes possible. If the first one fails, build improved models until the technology is proven to be useful or not.

3...Publish all the data.

4...Eliminate all subsidies. Note that R&D and subsidies are two completely different things. With R&D there is always the potential for a dramatic breakthrough that will change everything. Not so with subsidies.

5...Include all external costs for all technologies.

6...Allow the cost of energy to rise or fall to its real value on a totally level field.

7...Allow a well informed private sector of individuals and corporations to select the best technology for mass production.

This process will produce the best solution, whatever it is, in the shortest time.

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I miss freedom.

Why should the government pick lifestyles? Just charge people the full cost of whatever lifestyle they choose, no more, no less.

We could start by charging the first generation cost of having more than two children. The full lifecycle emissions of a newborn infant are far greater than from an SUV.

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Deja Vu all over again.

It sounds like this technology is about where the VBR flow battery was in 1980.

http://www.alaska.edu/uaf/cem/ine/aetdl/conferences/2008P ...

28 years later VBR folded.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/1/6/0933/98148

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The carbon tax is a straw man.

Because is easier to make c&t look good comparing it with a tax.

The real solution is a set of toxic waste dumping fees with 100% rebate. The fees would be set to recover the best estimate of the damage done by CO2, particulates, mercury, sulfur, cadmium arsenic etc. now being dumped free of charge into the atmosphere.

People would get all that money back to spend on better technology that could be competitive on a more level playing field.

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We need a serious R&D program

What is surprising is that new wind is less expensive than delivered power from natural gas combined cycle plants. Yet the power industry has deployed 120,000 MW of new natural gas generation capacity since 1995. Capital costs for new gas turbine plants are less than half the cost of new wind capacity, but natural gas is so expensive that the plants operate less than 25 percent of the time. The capital recovery is spread over relatively few MWh.

The latest cost estimate for T Boon Pickens 4,000 MW wind project is $12 billion.

http://earth2tech.com/2008/06/10/cost-estimates-of-t-boon ...

Subtracting $2 billion for transmission lines (separate from the $3-6 billion for transmission lines to support wind power put up by ERCOT), the cost of the installed windmills is $2.50 per data plate Watt. Assuming a 35% capacity factor that is $7.14 per watt of production. The cost of wind mills to produce as much energy as a 1.5 GW nuclear plant with capacity factor of 90% is $9.6 billion.

But wind power is intermittent and subjected to wide spread common mode failure and seasonal variation. Wind needs conventional plants to stabilize the grid. Coal plants are designed for a 40 year lifetime and in 2007 the average age of a U.S. coal plant was 40.7 years. More gas plants will be needed to backup the windmills and stabilize the grid as coal plants are decommisioned. The cost of the gas plants and their emissions and the extra transmission lines should be added to the windfarms cost and emissions, but they are not included in the $7.14 per watt of wind power or the much lower wind cost quoted here.

From the Marky bill;

 FEDERAL RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY
21 CREDIT.--The term `Federal renewable electricity
22 credit' means a credit, representing one kilowatt
23 hour of renewable electricity, issued pursuant to sub24
section (d)....

A retail electric supplier may satisfy the require3
ments of paragraph (1) in whole or in part by sub4
mitting in lieu of each Federal renewable electricity
5 credit, a payment equal to the lesser of--
6 ``(A) 200 percent of the average market
7 value of a Federal renewable electricity credit
8 for the previous compliance year, as determined
9 by the Secretary; or
10 ``(B) 5 cents, adjusted on January 1 of
11 each year following calendar year 2009 based
12 on the Gross Domestic Product Implicit Price
13 Deflator.

COST RECOVERY.--An electric utility, the retail
19 electricity sales of which are subject to rate regulation,
20 shall not be denied the opportunity to recover the full
21 amount of the prudently incurred incremental cost of re22
newable electricity or Federal renewable electricity credits
23 obtained, or alternative compliance payments made, to
24 comply with the requirements of subsection (c).
25  

This is the price we pay for electing law school graduates instead of science and engineering graduates. They think that their laws can supersede natural law. It should be retitled the "Death for Poor People" bill.

These laws will further distort our energy systems leading to delay in development of good technology, higher prices, less reliability, and a lower quality of life here and all over the world. The people on the bottom rung of the economic ladder will suffer the most while our leaders pat themselves on the back at cocktail parties for doing such a great job.

I support the authors points 1 thru 7. The best solution is to level the field by adding all externalities, eliminate all subsidies and mandates, maximize R&D and let the market pick the best technology.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/1/5/132847/2209/#co ...

Instead of wasting our money propping up bad technology we should be spending it on the development of better technology while fossil fuel is still relatively abundant and cheap. Development is the expensive part of R&D and it is the part we have done very little of in the last 40 years, and we are just starting to pay for that.

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It's just boring.

You may have noted That the usual nuclear advocates tend to cool it and move on to other threads once these waste, leakage, safety, and storage issues begin to rear their ugly faces.

That is because waste is boring. Generating a lifetime supply of electricity produces less than 10 pounds of spent fuel, vs. 200,000 lb of toxic sludge and 2,440,000 pounds of CO2 from coal. Most of that 10 pounds is not waste, it is fuel for advanced reactors.

Uranium ore is slightly toxic and is found in deposits scattered throughout the earths crust. These ore deposits gradually erode to the surface where they travel throughout our environment carried by wind and water. This is how the seas became saturated with 4.5 billion tons of uranium.

When spent fuel is removed from the reactor it is 4,000 times more toxic than ore, that is, 4,000 times more toxic than the dirt in many wilderness areas and under many homes. If we isolate it 4,000 times better than nature isolates dirt we are safer right from the start. This is not a difficult engineering challenge.

To say that we have not found a solution to the waste problem is false.  The correct statement is that we have not implemented one of the many solutions available to us with respect to commercial nuclear waste. Military waste is being buried in ancient salt deposits that have existed for millions of years. Salt is a plastic material that is self healing and unaffected by radiation. My preference is deep seabed disposal until advanced reactors make recycling cost effective, because the mud is ideally suited to contain the waste. Even if some leaks into the oceans it will take hundreds of years for it to enter our environment by which time it is largely decayed to very low levels. Seawater is naturally radioactive with billions of tons of radioactive material, any leakage would not significantly risk human life.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm ...

The irrational fear over nuclear waste is a monument to the failure of our education system to teach people how to evaluate risk and balance it against benefit.

Uranium has a 4 billion year half life. Converting it into fission products will make the earth less radioactive for the vast majority of its remaining life than if humans had not evolved.

Nature generated over a dozen nuclear reactors 1.7 billion years ago in the uranium deposit at Oklo. For the last 1.699 billion years that site has been less toxic than it would have been had those reactors not formed, because the uranium they destroyed would still be making decay products like radon gas and lead.

http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml

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Pasteurization was once controversial.

Had the food been irradiated there would have been no fatalities.

"It greatly reduces or eliminates the number of disease-causing bacteria and other harmful organisms that threaten us and our food supply. Many of these organisms, including Salmonella, Escherichia coli O157:H7 (E. coli), Staphyloccoccus aureus (Staph), Listeria monocytogenes, Campylobacter jejuni and Toxoplasma gondii have caused many outbreaks of foodborne illness. When food is irradiated, the penetrating energy breaks down the DNA molecules of the harmful organisms. The food is left virtually unchanged, except that it is much safer because the number of harmful organisms is greatly reduced or eliminated. An added advantage is that food can be irradiated in its final packaging--fresh or frozen, which prevents the possibility of contamination in the distribution system, at the store, or even in the home, prior to the package being opened."

http://www.ific.org/publications/brochures/irradiationbro ...

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Snake Oil.

Explain how you would keep Al Queda from getting one of their guys a night job at a Pakistani nuclear facility and making all the Pollonium they want?

Drx, if the U.S. gives up nuclear power, explain how YOU would keep Al Queda from getting one of their guys a night job at a Pakistani nuclear facility and making all the Pollonium they want?

A simple, cheap, easy to build, unpressurized plutonium production reactor provides much higher quality weapons grade Pu than a commercial power plant.

Giving up commercial nuclear power does not make the world safer. It makes the world more dirty, dangerous and increases human suffering.

Would you close down all pharmaceutical companies to prevent a bio weapons attack?

I have seen the look on peoples faces when they have assembled their own PV module and harnessed the sun's energy for their family to use.

The electricity we use in our home is only 1/3 of the electricity that supports our lives. Where will the other 2/3 come from?

RE: transmission and distribution costs for renewables vs. nuclear.
Here - look at figure one.

Great reference Bob, a Rochard Test for energy bias, courtesy of Amory Lovins. People who believe that transmitting intermittent wind kWh's 1000+ miles costs no more than transmitting high capacity factor nuclear kWh's 50 miles, are sipping the Lovins Cool Aid. Nonbelievers see this as one more piece of evidence of Lovin's bias.

. I see Amory Lovins as the canary in the coal mine, with a reverse twist. When things are bad in the coal mine the canary dies. When our education system is failing, snake oil salesmen like Lovins thrive. Not that he is all wrong; the best snake oil has some active ingredients.

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More Q&A

Then it should be no big deal for nuclear plants to take out an all-inclusive insurance policy rather than having the taxpayers cover their rear ends, right?

Some people present Price Anderson insurance as a nuclear subsidy. Price-Anderson is not a nuclear power subsidy, it is a handicap that does far more harm than good. I support the repeal of Price-Anderson and treating nuclear power like all other industries.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/8/8/12426/33737/#co ...

More importantly: Denmark still exports over 90% of its wind turbines with profit in a market with a double digit growth

Many countries have been duped into thinking wind can solve their problem and Denmark is making money on their ignorance. I am sorry to see it happen to the U.S.

France has less CO2 emissions per capita then Denmark. But that simply doesn't change the fact that if the US wanted to half its CO2 output per capita as soon as possible, it can hardly reach this goal by heavily investing tax-money in nuclear power. ..

The question is, how can the US reduce its CO2 emissions as fast as possible and affordably.

Where nuclear power has been built on a large scale, CO2 has gone down. Not so for wind and solar.

"The researchers used hourly wind data, collected and quality-controlled by the National Weather Service, for the entire year of 2000 from the 19 sites. They found that an average of 33 percent and a maximum of 47 percent of yearly-averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable baseload electric power."

This is a deeply flawed paper. I submitted a review comment to the journal in February 2008 pointing out its many flaws. The journal [JMAC] is dragging out the review process. When it is published you will have an opportunity to comment on it.

The biggest need right now it to shut down coal burning.  We know how to create clean electricity for about the same price as coal (actually cheaper than coal if all cost were paid).  Americans won't particularly notice if coal plants are replaced by wind mills.  Except for those who get decent jobs building and installing those turbines.

You keep repeating this, so I will keep asking. Which countries have dramatically reduced CO2 output at an affordable cost, including all externalities and subsidies, using windmills and solar?

Get the manufacturing rate up for battery packs and the cost will drop to where we won't need rebates.

I agree. Get the manufacturing rate up for nuclear power plants and the cost will drop to where we won't need loan guarantees.

One of our biggest and least known mistakes was allowing Offshore Power Systems to close.

http://www.atomicinsights.com/aug96/Offshore.html

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Q&A

We know how to create reliable energy without either fossil or nuclear fuels.

Bob, please point out affordable commercial sized plants running at 90% of data plate rating all year round. Why aren't we building these by the hundreds?

France actually has too large a percentage of nuclear, that sometimes they have to export cheaply because they have too much power,

Denmark has ramped up to a whopping 150 watts / person of wind power, 10% of U.S. consumption rate, and they export half at firesale prices when the wind is blowing. They import nuclear and hydro when wind is calm. They have the most expensivde electricity in the  world, 40 cents/ kWh.

Then as renewable smart grid technology takes over, eventually the nuclear plants could be shut down and become waste repositories.

There are two levels of smart grid upgrade.

1... Stage 1. Add smart technology to existing conductors.

2... Stage 2. Stage1 plus construction of massive network of long distance high capacity transmission lines.

Stage 2 is vastly more expensive than Stage 1, and is only necessary if we try to incorporate large amounts of wind and solar. The added cost of Stage 2 should be rolled entirely into the cost of the wind and solar plants served, which would show them to be largely impractical, but wind and solar buffs want the cost spread  out over  all kWh's.

I like Stage 1 because it lets people know what the cost of electricity is in real time. That results in more realistic use of energy, for example if kWh's are 10 cents at night and 60 cents on peak consumers might make ice at night for cooling at peak times, true for industry as well as homes. The effect can be to lower average kWh cost.

Smart grid technology can smooth out the loads reducing peak power substantially, so that existing transmission capacity is sufficient in most locations, but not if we build massive wind and solar in the west and southwest.

Nuclear plants are close to load centers with short transmission lines that operate at high capacity factors. Applying smart grid with nuclear means relatively little new conductor capacity is needed.

Smart grid technology will help nuclear by leveling the load and raising nighttime electricity prices, allowing new nuclear plants to supply 80% or more with baseload plants.

Renewables like wind and solar will need lots of new transmission line construction. They will operate at low capacity factors, even with smart grid technology.

Power lines serving wind farms will be loaded at an average capacity factor around 0.3 while power lines from nuclear plants will be loaded at about 0.9 CF. the owners of lines serving windfarms will have to charge 2-3 times the nuclear plant rate/kw-mi. The average distance traveled for wind kWh's from Oklahoma going to the east coast, vs. nearby nuclear plants, would be over 1000 mi / 50 miles, 20:1, so the ratio of wind transmission cost to nuclear transmission cost would be 2.5 x 20 = 50:1.

That's right, exactly why I started pushing compromise.  Why do very few nuclear advocates care to even consider any compromise?

My recommendation is maximum R&D, level playing field, choose whatever is best.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/1/5/132847/2209/#co ...

Why doesn't everybody support this plan?

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Curious.

modularized mass-produced small reactors
Aka. Easily accessible Nuclear bombs.

How do you turn a small pressurized water reactor, with 5% uranium 235 fuel, into  nuclear bombs? The details please.

It would be easiest to just stop incentives to all technologies, place a carbon tax (or cap-and-trade), and let the market decide what technology wins.

You got it right on the first try Jessica, explain it to these guys. But Amory does not want nuclear to have a chance on a level playing field.

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Check your facts.

That reduction in demand lowers the cost of building the proposed supergrid. It reduces current carbon output of these building to near zero and has a residual life of 20 to 40 years. ...

The nuclear option will require acceptance of many multiples of the current nuclear power plants be sited, financed and approved by the public. Then it will require grid upgrades down the line to convert homes using natural gas and oil for heating to heat pumps or resistance heating ...

You honestly think that it would be easier to get the public to buy into the idea of ~400 new nuclear plants (which means new plants in everyone's back yards)

That is an interesting comparison. 1... Intense conservation with renewables.  2... Continued exponential growth with nuclear.  

Why not 3... Intense conservation with nuclear, that is what Hansen is calling for. If conservation can eliminate coal plants, existing nuclear plants and hydro will be generating over half of our electricity, natural gas generates the other half. That would be a huge drop in CO2 emissions. Mass produce 150 floating nuclear plants to displace the natural gas and the problem is solved without messing up anybody's back yard.

Our existing nuclear output is growing faster than wind and solar.

Most homes are wired with enough capacity to handle electric AC, cloths dryer, and stove. The advantage of ground thermal is that it takes less power to run due to the more optimum heat source/sink temperature. Smart grid technology can smooth out the loads so that existing transmission capacity is sufficient in most locations with nuclear but not if we build massive wind and solar in the west and southwest.

[build] wind farms in the windy parts of Texas and the Great Plains, small footprint geothermal, and concentrated solar spread across the southern edge?

Where are the demonstration plants proving deep well geothermal and CST will work in the south, and at what cost. What happens if deep well geothermal sets off the New Madrid fault and kills 1,000,000 people and causes $500,000,000,000 in property damage? Is geothermal insured for that loss?

It might not be the most efficient route, but we've already got the real estate to build HVDC lines. Everywhere is basically hooked to everywhere else now.

HVDC power lines are more efficient over long distance than AC lines, but their power handling capacity is not a great deal more than the best AC lines. Just because a right of way exists does not mean you can send unlimited power down that right of way. The advantage of HVDC lines is not as great as people think, that is why we do not have more of them.

Power lines serving wind farms will be loaded at an average capacity factor around 0.3 while power lines from nuclear plants will be loaded at about 0.9 CF. the owners of lines serving windfarms will have to charge 2-3 times the nuclear plant rate/kw-mi. The average distance traveled for wind kWh's from Oklahoma going to the east coast, vs. nearby nuclear plants, would be over 1000 mi / 50 miles, 20:1, so the ratio of wind transmission cost to nuclear transmission cost would be 2.5 x 20 = 50:1.

It will not and cannot produce "unlimited power" because we still live on a limited planet. It simply removes the power limit early allowing other resource limits to check the growth of the human race.

Exactly my point. Once we accept nuclear power our energy problem is solved. We can move on to other issues like population and food.

Pro nuke people seem to think that the public wants more nukes.  ....  It would take military intervention to build new nukes in a lot of the country.  

"Zogby Poll: 67% Favor Building New Nuclear Power Plants in U.S."

http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.cfm?ID=1515

"More than three times as many strongly supported nuclear energy than strongly opposed it. Two thirds of self-described environmentalists favor it"

"In mid 2007 a survey of 1150 people living within 16 km of nuclear power plants in the USA, but without any personal involvement with them,  showed very strong support for new nuclear plants.  Over 90% thought nuclear energy was important for future supply, 82% favoured it now, 77% said that new plants should definitely be built and 71% said they would accept a new plant near them."

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html#opinion

People who live near existing nuclear plants are more supportive than average Americans. Some of the new construction will be on existing nuclear sites, like the two plants in Texas.

Even if someone actually invented a safe reactor the majority of the public would not believe them

Dr. Hansen addressed this.

It is noteworthy that, even with the presence of poorly designed nuclear power plants in the past, and in some cases demonstrably sloppy operations, the waste from coal-fired power plants has done far more damage, and even spread more radioactive material around the world than all nuclear power plants combined, including Chernobyl.

Next generation plants are specifically designed to absorb a full meltdown. If airliners could be designed to crash without killing anybody, would you say they are too dangerous?

Frankly they are too safe. If we took irrational emotion out of the equation we would accept a small nuclear risk increase in exchange for lower cost and shorter construction times. We could cut into the 20,000+ deaths / yr from coal much faster.

For years my recommendation has been to push R&D for everything as hard as possible and use whatever works best. Why don't "renewable" supporters sign on to this policy?

When the sun runs out of gas and destroys the earth, earth will still have abundant supplies of uranium and thorium. If intelligent life exists than, uranium and thorium may provide the energy to go to the outer planets. Fission is our longest lasting renewable.

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Failure is not an option.

Moreover, improved (3rd generation) light water reactors are available for near-term needs.

Generation 3 reactors can produce an 80 year lifetime supply of electricity from 58 pounds of uranium, Gen 4 reactors use 6 ounces. Coal plants burn 1.4 million pounds of coal, producing 2.4 million pounds of CO2 to produce the same amount of electricity.

Seawater uranium can provide several hundred years of electricity using Gen 3 reactors.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-413193

Because of this, a portion of the $25B that has been collected from utilities to deal with nuclear waste justifiably could be used to develop 4th generation reactors.

A very insightful comment as fourth generation plants can reduce storage time from 130,000 years to 270 years (page 5).

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/TRS435_web. ...

Thus an R&D objective must be a modularized reactor design that is cost competitive with coal.

A good beginning would be to create facilities to mass produce Gen 3 floating nuclear power plants and as similar to Offshore Power Systems.

http://www.atomicinsights.com/aug96/Offshore.html

Another approach would be small reactor systems that can be mass produced in factories.

http://www.nuscalepower.com/pdf/NRC_preapp_mtg_072408_DES ...

Dr Hansen understands that nuclear power is the only proven technology that can produce unlimited amounts of clean low emission baseload power at an affordable price. To eliminate failure as an option we must push fission as hard as possible. If something better comes along that would be great.

I find this a formula for massive risk-taking that could - and should - be avoided.

What is the massive risk?

 We know that small scale renewables work, and that wind, water and solar power generating capacity has been increasing efficiency over time with minimal public investment.

Which countries get over half their electricity from these? Denmark has been pushing wind with enormous subsidies since the 70's. As a result they have the most expensive electricity in the world, about 40 cents/kWh. They make about 150 watts of wind power per person, 10% of the U.S. rate, and they export half of it because when the wind blows they cannot use it all. They import hydro and nuclear power.

Why assume that technologies that do not now exist, and all of which pose risks of catastrophic failures (or diversion of dangerous products) will be a panacea?

That would be high output wind, solar, cellulosic ethanol?

I have to believe that many of the pro-nuclear people who post on these forums are a) paid by the industry or b) somehow locked into the industry via their jobs or investments.

What is Dr. Hansen's secret connection?

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Put the shotgun away Gray.

The thing nearly had a meltdown in the 1970's, and it was only recently brought back on line.

It had a fire, not a meltdowm.

So you're saying, the bigger an industry gets, the more it deserves federal subsidies?

No, my recommendation is to level the playing field and eliminate all subsidies.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/10/8/163812/742#com ...

Do we have some common ground Gray?

Waste/Decommissioning finance issue.
Who's going to pick up the bill on that?
 

Nuclear waste, subsidies, accidents, R&D, cost overruns, what's next, the spotted owl? Changing the subject is a time proven debating tactic when you loosing on the subject at hand.

Write a story on each issue and we can talk.

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Your right Sean, Numbers don't lie.

Of that total, here's what we've installed just since 1995:
~200 MW of solar PV
~10,000 MW of wind
 

The increase in annual energy production for wind, solar and nuclear from 1995 to 2007 was;

Solar... 109 Gigawatt hours, equal to 4.36 minutes of output from a 1500 MW plant

Wind...  28,980 gigawatt hours, equal to 19.3 hours of output from a 1500 MW plant

Nuclear... 133,100  gigawatt hours, equal to 88.7hours of output from a 1500 MW plant

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1_a.h ...

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.htm ...

The increase in nuclear output is the result of power uprating of existing plants combined with increasing capacity factor despite the handicap of a decaying grid producing occasional outages forcing nuclear plants to throttle back or shutdown.

Since 1995 nuclear power increased output 4.6 times that of wind and solar combined. When the Browns Ferry data come it it will blow these numbers away. Data plates do not keep the lights on. If we ever get serious about closing coal plants we will build nuclear plants.

The nuclear subsidy per kWh is a small fraction of the income local state and federal government make from taxes on the sale of nuclear power, not so for wind and solar.

we obviously haven't figured out cost-effective ways of building new nuclear plants, even with ginormous subsidies.

How did we do it when fossil fuel was abundant and cheap, and most people never heard of  global warming? Streamline the regulatory process and build new plants the way Boeing builds airplanes.

http://www.nuscalepower.com/pdf/NRC_preapp_mtg_072408_DES ...

http://www.atomicinsights.com/aug96/Offshore.html

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Lets convert to metric.

3 centigrade degrees = 5.4 Fahrenheit degrees, not 11 degrees Fahrenheit.

Steven Chu  interview
"Should fission-based nuclear power plants be made a bigger part of the energy-producing portfolio?
Absolutely. Right now about 20 percent of our power comes from nuclear; there have been no new nuclear plants built since the early '70s."
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/10/03_chu.sh ...

Unfortunately the DOE chief serves as an accountant, not an engineer or scientist. The budget is only $25 billion, spent largely on military issues.

http://www.cfo.doe.gov/budget/09budget/Content/ApprSum.pd ...

Our energy program is determined by a group of gray haired law school graduates in Washington called Congress.

If we gave him $150 billion per year for the next ten years with instructions to solve the world's energy problems, I believe he could do it.

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It's not a tax.

It's a hazardous waste dumping fee.

By calculating a best estimate of the damage caused by each emission and charging it to the source as a dumping fee, we create the optimum level of effort to reduce the emissions. As the science improves the cost is refined.

C&T is focused on CO2 only, whereas the dumping fees would include all externalities, sulfur, mercury, NOx, cadmium particulates etc. Including all externalities, not just CO2, removes an advantage coal would retain under C@T.

That will insure that we build the best energy technology mix by creating a level playing field.

We still live in the age of fossil fuel. Solving the U.S. energy problem is not enough. We need a $100 billion per year R&D program to develop technology that will make clean energy cheaper than fossil fuel for the entire world. Toxic waste dumping fees can provide the financing for that R&D  project.

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Add up the externalities, level the field

Bill, how do you possibly calculate the cost associated with Manhattan, London, and most of Bangladesh (among many others) ceasing to exist above-water? So how do you assign the right marginal cost to charge to each ton emitted?

Good question, and it applies equally to the other position, "how do you set the right cap?"

I would estimate the cost to protect protectable shore line and the cost to relocate people from land that cannot be protected. For example if 500,000,000 people have to be relocated at a cost of $1,000,000 per person, including the cost of purchasing new land for them, that part of the cost would be $5E14. I would repeat this sort of calculation for all external costs of emissions, then total the external costs and divide by the number of tons required to produce those effects, and make that the dumping fee.

How would you select the right cap for C&T?

Also, I disagree that the marginal cost curve for economy-wide emissions reductions would be so steep. If the cap is set too stringent, the more the price goes up, the more investment goes into clean technology (because of the profit motive), and there are plenty of technologies waiting in the wings already.

If the cap is set too stringent too much money is spent on emission reduction, energy prices are too high, people cannot pay their bills and are forced go without food, medicine, heat. The pain, suffering and death would be worse than from global warming.

Add in our best estimate of externalities, level the playing field, let the marketplace choose the best mix of technologies.

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How many unions were there

Before capitalism.

But, to paraphrase Jefferson, given a choice of capitalism without unions or unions without capitalism, the latter would be much preferable.

Capitalism raised productivity enough that some people could enjoy the luxury of a union. Of course that was at the expense of those not in a union.

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Did he ever manage a company,

Or was he merly an academic?

I had a business management professor in college

who ended every lecture by saying failure is always management's fault.

You aren't going to build efficient cars without workers, shafting them for the sustained failures of their bosses helps absolutely no-one.

Do unions have no responsibility for the contracts they negotiated using strike tactics? You aren't going to build efficient cars with the retired workers who helped screw up their industry.

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Fear mongering is deadly and unethical.

Nuclear power's attraction is that, once in operation, it does not emit carbon dioxide. It does, however, raise enormous safety issues

Aside from irrational fear based on ignorance, what are the enormous safety issues? The routine operation of coal plants kills 20,000+ Americans each year, not including climate change.

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update42.htm

Maryland Power Plants Linked to 700 Premature Deaths Per Year

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2006/2006-02-15-02.asp ...

Children are being born with mercury damaged brains.

"Using national blood mercury prevalence data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we found that between 316,588 and 637,233 children each year have cord blood mercury levels > 5.8 μg/L, a level associated with loss of IQ. The resulting loss of intelligence causes diminished economic productivity that persists over the entire lifetime of these children. This lost productivity is the major cost of methyl mercury toxicity, and it amounts to $8.7 billion annually (range, $2.2-43.8 billion;"

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid ...

How many are killed and injured by nuclear each year? What is the risk from accidents (average fatalities / year) calculated for next generation plants that are designed to contain a full meltdown accident with no serious emissions? Provide a credible reference or stop spreading this unethical and deadly misinformation.

and produces toxic radioactive wastes that must be stored for thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years in ultra-safe containers -- a technological challenge that has yet to be overcome.

Spent fuel is only about 1000 times more toxic than uranium ore which exists in huge quantities with no engineered barriers, and spent fuel decays from that level unlike many conventional toxic materials. Spent fuel being transported will have been out of the reactor for several years, so the short half life fission products that do most of the radiation damage from a weapon, have decayed away. See page 5 of this document, page 18 of the pdf.

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/TRS435_web. ...

It is incorrect to say there are no solutions. There are many solutions to choose from, we simply haven not implemented one, and there is no pressing need to do so since an 80 year lifetime supply of spent fuel is less than 15 lb. my preference is deep sea bed disposal.

"The sub-seabed approach has been the subject of peer-reviewed research, and the program generated dozens of articles in prominent international scientific journals. Henry Kendall -- a Nobel laureate in physics, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists -- calls sub-seabed disposal a "sweet solution" and a "winner," labeling it the best of the alternatives from a technical standpoint.

A National Academy of Sciences panel called for further study of the sub-seabed approach, and a report last year by Robert Klett, a systems analyst at Sandia, concluded that "[all] analyses to date indicate that sub-seabed disposal would be a safe and economical method of [high-level waste] disposal and that predictions could be made with a high degree of confidence.""

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm ...

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Are you sure?

By the time we finished construction on even a quarter of the needed nuclear plants, we could have achieved the same 90% goal with renewables.

The U.S. completed 5 nuclear plants a year for 20 years at a time when fossil fuel was dirt cheap and most people never heard about global warming.

If renewable are so much easier and faster, why is SMUD projecting 81% fossil?

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Check out the big picture.

SMUD does not reveal their actual energy source mix but they "project" 81% fossil fuel.

http://www.smud.org/en/community-environment/Documents/Po ...

of which 62% is natural gas.

California's high energy cost and regulations exported high energy consuming industries. They import out of state energy when they buy energy intensive products from out of state and out of country.

If the U.S. or the world followed SMUDs model we would be out of gas immediately. On the other hand if California mass produced floating offshore nuclear power plants they would have abundant power with much lower cost and much lower emissions.

Communities that want 100% renewable energy should get it, and pay the full price, and suffer the intermittency. The next referendum would have a much different outcome.

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Regarding, The Epstein alternative

So where is the alternative? Where is the cost estimate, timeline, environmental impact statement, reliability study, grid study, permits etc?

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Newt needs to do his homework on Denmark.

He noted Denmark as an example of success in becoming energy independent -- though he didn't note that the wind energy industry there took off because the government subsidized it heavily in the early years. "They've had a strategy for 20 years, and it's been a system of consistently having more energy on the terms that they want it,"

Denmark has been pushing wind with huge subsidies since at least 1979. Denmark makes 20% of electricity from wind, but exports half of it due to intermittency, it has the most expensive electricity in the world, and releases 37% more CO2 per person than France by burning imported fossil fuel. Denmark is nowhere close to being energy independent.

http://www.industrie.gouv.fr/energie/anglais/politique-en ...

We should have emission fees to level the playing field and a massive (not a small targeted) energy R&D budget of $100 billion per year that pushes every technology as hard as possible.

It is interesting to me that we can come up with $400 billion to pay for a war or $700 billion for a bank bailout, but $100 billion to solve the world's energy and climate problem is out of the question.

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Just to be safe we should ground all the airliners

On Nov. 17, 1967, Air Force pilot Mike Adams
was flying X-15 No. 3 on a research flight and had
reached an altitude of 266,000 ft and a speed of 3,570
mph when the aircraft when into a spin. Adams
recovered from the spin but could not get out of the
inverted dive. He died when the aircraft crashed
northeast of Johannesburg, Calif. It was the only
fatality and aircraft loss in the program.

Fermi 1 unit operated at the site from 1957 to 1972. On October 5, 1966 Fermi 1 suffered a partial fuel meltdown.

There was no abnormal radiation release to the public, and no one was injured.

This reactor accident was attributed to a piece of zirconium that obstructed a flow-guide in the sodium cooling system. Four of the 105 fuel assemblies were damaged while two melted together during the incident, but no contamination was recorded outside the containment vessel.[3] Following an extended shutdown that involved fuel replacement and cleanup, Fermi 1 continued to operate until September 22, 1972. It was officially decommissioned December 31, 1975.

Thanks Dave, if this is the best you can do it should reinforce peoples confidence in reactor safety.

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Give me a reference.

RDM, please direct me to a high quality paper showing how

around 1 billion acres of abandoned farmland around the world (much of it not very good for crops)

can produce 10 tons of biomass per acre per year, but zero tons of edible food.

By the way, that is just over 1/7 acre per person, 1.5 tons per person per year.

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Not enough biomass

RDM  How many 1GW+ biomass power plants are running today? What does their power cost? How much land and water is required? How much energy is consumed to gather all that fuel, is it oil based diesel powered machinery?

Scientific American published A Solar Grand Plan.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

They proposed using biomass to provide reheat of the air in the proposed compressed air storage system. Using their numbers I showed in point 3 that all of the U.S. biomass would only meet 20% of their need with none left over for liquid fuel. Clearly biomass is a limited resource.

In my 02/29/08 501-510 (they do not allow a direct link) I wrote;

" And the modular solar power plants distributed across the vast Southwest U.S. and its one million square kilometers (which is larger than the combined land area of England, France, and Germany) represents a much less risk of exposure to terrorist or full scale military attack than the exposure of nuclear power plants to either terrorist or full scale military attack "  

It makes no sense to assume that terrorist will conduct the most ineffective attack imaginable. What percentage of terrorist attacks in the last ten years have been designed to minimize loss of life?

1     This is an attack I would expect.

Assume it is 2100 and this vision is fully implemented as proposed.

Assume that we are terrorists who hate Americans and have sworn to kill as many Americans as possible.

We will not drop a bomb on a field of solar collectors. We will use small shaped charges to drop every HVDC power line crossing the Mississippi river, into the Mississippi river. Most wind power is west of the Mississippi river, so it will also be cut off.

We will watch the weather channel, and pick a time when they predict that a huge mass of arctic cold air will flow down from Canada generating record cold temperatures from Maine to Florida. Or we will attack during a record heat wave such as the summer heat wave of 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_North_American_heat_wav ...

The eastern U.S. will be under blackout conditions for at least a week. That combined with extreme weather conditions will result in a death toll in the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands.

My questions are;

a)     Is this scenario possible? If not, why not?

b)     If it is, do you agree that utilities will not be able to buy insurance coverage for it?

2     " For the peak PV-CAES model, which we advocate for the 2010-2020 scale-up period to prove PV-CAES' potential. The size of the PV plant is 160-MW and the size of the CAES gas turbine power plant is 110-MW (130-MW of PV electricity production is dedicated to direct grid electricity distribution and 30-MW of PV capacity is dedicated to air compression at the CAES power plant)…. The aggregate heat rate (fuel consumption) for the 1,100 MWh of daily electricity delivered to the grid is only 1,732 Btu/kWh. This translates into a remarkable fuel efficiency of 197% (3412 Btu/kWh of electricity output / 1732 Btu of fossil fuel energy input). "  

It makes no practical sense to build solar storage for the 2010-2020 time span. Given the small fraction of energy solar will be producing, the sensible approach would be to feed all solar power onto the grid as it is produced and save all the expense and energy loss associated with storage.

The only good reason to build a solar storage demo plant would be to model how the GSP would work if  we got the vast majority of our energy from the sun.

In the future electric vehicles will probably raise nighttime loads to match or exceed daytime loads. We should model a solar power system to supply a steady load 24 hours a day including occasionally a few days of bad weather. That would require vastly more storage capacity, and the fraction of energy going through the CAES system would be very high, resulting in much higher fuel consumption / kWh and cost / kWh than claimed here.

Modeling a solar CAES system that only produces nine hours of steady power on a sunny day is not a realistic simulation and only serves to produce unrealistic cost and efficiency numbers like â€oefuel efficiency of 197%”.

3      " Land for food is of the highest priority. We have other land resources for energy production, therefore all land suitable for agriculture needs to be strictly allocated for food production; and  only land held in conservation reserve   should be used for cellulosic (natural prairie grass and switchgrass) biomass production. "  

I have flown across the U.S. many times and I see very little flat treeless unused land with substantial unused supplies of water.

 The fuel cost for the current fleet of natural gas turbines operating at 40% efficiency is 52.46 mills per kWh. Upgrading to 60% efficient machines would reduce fuel cost to 35 mills per kWh.

Nuclear reactor fuel costs 4.85 mills per kWh.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

By using expensive photovoltaic electricity to compress air, the solar system can reduce the natural gas consumption 23% below the best turbine. The natural gas fuel cost is reduced to 27.1 mills per kWh, which is still 5.6 times higher then the cost of reactor fuel, and the reactors do not emit CO2.

Natural gas provides about 20% of the U.S. 4000 TWh / year of electricity, 800 TWh / yr. If electricity consumption goes to 29,000 TWh as projected by the authors, and if 70% of that energy passed through a CAES system, it will be 20,300 TWh of stored energy / year.

That is 25.4 times the amount of electricity that is produced by natural gas today. The solar  CAES system needs 4,400 thermal Btu to make one kWh of electricity, 8.93 E 16 Btu to make 20,300 TWh, 13.1 times the amount of gas we are burning now.

 " The 23% reduction in fuel consumption by CAES power plants (23% lower than the fuel consumption of advanced combined-cycle power plants) is a VERY significant improvement. And the development of combined-cycle CAES plants will increase the reduction by another 20%. "  

60% efficient combined cycle gas turbines use a large fraction of the turbine energy to drive the compressor. Solar CAES uses solar energy to compress the air so that all of the turbine energy can go to the generator. A 50 MW CAES turbine will burn less fuel than a 50MW combined cycle turbine, so there will be less waste heat in the CAES turbine exhaust and therefore less energy available for extraction by the topping cycle.

Combined cycle gas turbines are 60% efficient when operating at or near their design point. I doubt that a combined-cycle CAES plants can achieve the additional 20% averaged over the wide range of pressure ratios required by using compressed air storage. Can you provide a reference?

 " And CAES for storage of intermittent PV and wind electricity opens the door for the use of biomass for electricity production. The biomass resource estimate that we use in the article (1.4 billion dry tons) is from the Perlack et al. 2005 study and the link to the study is below. "  

http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA436753& ...

I could not open that link but found the report at;

http://feedstockreview.ornl.gov/pdf/billion_ton_vision.pd ...

This 2005 report claims that 190 million dry tons of biomass provided 2.9 E 15 BTU, (2.9 quad) in 2003, 3% of all U.S. energy consumption. The report claims that we can ramp up annual biomass collection to 368 million dry tons from our forests and 998 million dry tons from agriculture, for a total of 1.37 billion tons per year, equivalent to 2.09 E 16 Btu (20.9 quad), enough to replace 1/3 of our oil consumption.

If we convert all of that biomass to natural gas with a conversion efficiency of 85% it will have a heating value of 1.78 E 16 Btu / year. If we divert all possible biomass energy to the solar CAES system it can provide only 20% of the required heat.

The rest (4.2 times the amount of natural gas we are burning now) will have to come from natural gas or dedicated agricultural production.

With a nuclear powered grid we could use all the biomass for other applications such as making liquid fuel for difficult transportation applications such as aircraft, ships at sea and off road vehicles.

My questions are;

a)     Where do the authors propose to come up with the remaining 17 quad of required gas?

b)      What area of land is required to produce the additional amount of biofuel required to drive the CAES systems?

c)      Link to a map showing where all this unused land is.

d)     What will it cost to build all the new infrastructure for the new bio fuel system, power lines, pipelines, water lines, roads.

e)      What will the bio fuel cost?

f)     Is that cost included in the published cost estimate of 11 cents per kWh?

g)     How much water will be needed to grow and process all that biogas?

4     If we can produce that much bio gas in 2100 at an affordable price then the smart move would be to produce 29% more bio gas which would allow us to eliminate CAES completely and replace it with 60% efficient gas turbines. This would allow us to;

A) Eliminate the entire cost of the CAES system.

B) Reduce the size and cost of the solar collection systems by 70%.

C) Reduce the capacity of the HVDC power lines by 70%.

D) Provide a distributed array of gas turbines resulting in a stiff reliable grid, highly resistant to the threat of terrorism and natural disaster.

My question is; What are the authors thoughts on this change?

5     Under the solar plan the local utility will buy solar power at 11 cents per kWh corrected for inflation to the present.

Power from new nuclear plants is expected to cost about 5 cents per kWh until the plants are paid off, then much less, so the difference is at least 6 cents per kWh.

http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm

The U.S. consumes over 4000 TWh now. The authors project that it will be 29,000 TWh by 2100, letâ€^TMs assume an average of 10,000 TWh from now till then.

With a difference of 6 cents per kWh, the solar option will cost consumers $600 billion more than the nuclear option each year.

Over the next 92 years solar will cost consumers $55,000 billion more. That is 131 times the $420 billion subsidy called for in the paper. The subsidy is just the tip of the iceberg.

Assuming an average population of 350 million the average additional cost of solar will be $1,710 per year per person, $6860 per year, every year, for a family of four.

Poor people will not be able to pay these energy cost increases. They will need energy subsidies, so if you are rich or middle class get ready for a double whammy.

That $6860 per year per family is going to come out of other parts of their budget, health care, education, nutrition, heating and cooling. They will have to drive a cheaper, older and less safe car.

Expensive energy is dangerous and uncomfortable.

My questions are;

a) If congress proposed a bill to raise taxes on a middle class family of four by $6860 per year, every year, to pay for the marginal cost of solar, how far would it get?

b) Is it ethical to tell people solar is a one time cost of $420 billion spread over 12 years when actually that is a tiny fraction of the real cost?

6     With 20,000+ Americans dying each year from coal, and considering the threat of global warming, waiting 20 years for solar to reach take off speed does not seem reasonable.

The report claims that by 2020 the cost of reliable solar kWhâ€^TMs may drop as low as 11 cents per kWh, if the improvements in solar cell efficiency and energy storage and transmission line cost advance according to projections.

Let us start providing 11 cents per kWh for any low emission electricity sources now, wind, solar, nuclear, wave, tidal, sequestered coal, geothermal etc. This will speed up the reduction of carbon emissions dramatically, and if solar is a good way to go it will acquire its fair share.

My questions are;

a)     Do the authors support this recommendation?

b)     If not, why not?

7     I see no discussion of backup power plant capacity or its cost. Suppose a large winter cold front settles in over the desert SW cutting off most of the energy. The compressed air runs out.

My question is; What happens next?

  " why introduce nuclear risks unless we have no other option for energy. "

Realistically, what is the other option? Perhaps Green Freedom.

http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/pdf/Green_Freedom_O ...

In reality reducing U.S. emissions now is of minor importance. If we eliminated all of our greenhouse emissions tomorrow, the developing world will gobble up the savings in a relatively short period of time.

The most important goal for the U.S. should be to use our technical capacity to develop technology that is so inexpensive it can be implemented quickly all over the world.

Expensive boutique energy systems will not curtail world CO2 emissions. We need huge sources of cheep low carbon energy. This is why my energy paper recommends that the US increase R&D spending for non fossil energy sources from $2.09 per person per year to $200.00 per person, $60 billion / year. If some technology emerges that can generate more energy than fission at a lower price, that will be great.

It is amazing how people can compare theoretical idealized future wind solar and biofuel technology with reactor designs from the 1960â€^TMs and call it fair and balanced. How many new reactor designs has the DOE tested since the Ford administration? Even so, the nod goes to nuclear if we ever get serious about closing coal power plants.

A gold plated GSP will not solve the worlds energy problems.

--
Edited by BILL HANNAHAN at 02/29/2008 2:19 PM

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Anyone, I called for a totally level playing field

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/10/8/163812/742/#co ...

Do you have a problem with that? Do you support a totally level playing field? If you are right your system will be selected.

You did not include the cost of your backup power plants and the cost of their fuel supply and the carbon taxes on those backup plants and the cost of replacing the windmills every 20 years vs. 60 year lifetime for nuclear plant. If you're going to do a cost comparison make it fair and complete.

Sounds good, mature reactor technology can support 10 billion people for hundreds of years.
And your point?
 

Nuclear power is the only non fossil technology with the proven ability to supply unlimited amounts of reliable dependable electricity at an affordable cost.

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We need a serious R&D program.

Biofuels are not going to save us.

LILBOURN, Mo. - It's one of the newest buildings in this small agricultural town. Aligned between two city water towers, the 120-foot-long biodiesel plant gleams in the sun. The paint on its sign hasn't even chipped.
But weeds have begun to encroach on the Great River Soy biodiesel plant, which produced just 94,000 gallons over two weeks before it ran out of money and was shuttered.

It's a scene that has been repeated throughout the United States: Clovis, N.M.; Nevada, Mo.; Hartsburg, Ill.; Lamoni, Iowa; Evansville, Wis.; Greybull, Wyo.; Rock Port, Mo.; Belle Fourche, S.D. All were supposed to have biofuels plants operating or under construction by now. None do.  

http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/ ...

Brazil has found huge oil reserves offshore.  

The nine fields discovered in the last year are thought to hold 50 billion to 80 billion barrels of light crude -- more than four times Brazil's current proven reserves. With the find, Brazil could supply all of its own needs for nearly a century or become one of the world's top oil exporters.  

We should take a look off our shore.

http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2008/10/09/1976527-brazil-p ...

Now doubt Brazil would be happy to sell us their ethanol, especially since our biofuel market is collapsing.

Luckily we still live in the age of fossil fuel. We should have a $100 billion R&D program for when that age really does come to an end.

In fact we should accelerate that end by developing new technology cheaper than fossil energy.

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Just level the playing field.

It is easy to be antinuclear when you still live in the age of fossil fuel, especially if you can overlook the damage of coal.

20,000+ deaths per year.

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update42.htm

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2006/2006-02-15-02.asp ...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8739 ...

 500,000 brain damaged children.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid ...

Living in the fossil age we can compare proven technology with unproven technology as if they are equivalent.

Here is my recommendation.

We need a fully integrated energy plan for the future.  It is like a jigsaw puzzle with many interacting pieces. The candidates pick out one piece from the opponent's plan and say, "This won't solve our energy problem by itself, so there is no point in doing it". That argument could be applied to every piece of the puzzle. The problem is too serious to be playing such games.

There are 3 billion people around the world who want to join the middle class. If the U.S. could reduce its emissions to zero instantly, the savings would soon be gobbled up by the developing world.

The most important goal for the U.S. is to use our technical capacity to develop low emission energy sources that are less expensive than fossil fuel. People across the world will switch to the new less expensive sources quickly and voluntarily, not kicking and screaming.

SHORT TERM STRATEGY

1     Drill, drill, drill.  Drill in Alaska, drill offshore, drill wherever we have oil and gas. Each $10 per barrel that oil goes up costs Americans another $80 billion per year. Each 1 cent per kWh that electricity goes up costs Americans another $40 billion per year.

We need fuel to keep our economy going so that we can afford to develop the new technologies that the world needs.

2     Level the playing field so that we are forced to pay the true cost of energy from each source.  Eliminate all energy subsidies.

When you take a load of trash to the city landfill you pay a fee per pound of trash.  Humans have been using the atmosphere as a free waste dump since we gained control of fire. Atmospheric dumping of hazardous material is producing severe adverse effects on human health and global climate. We should charge an atmospheric dumping fee equal to the best estimate of the cost of damage done by the toxic waste being injected into our atmosphere. Low emission technologies will become more competitive on a level playing field.

3     Conservation is a strategy that is being implemented already due to rising energy costs, and it will increase. Improving insulation and using more efficient appliances make good sense.

Higher electricity prices mean less security lighting.  There'll be more muggings and rapes on college campuses and parking lots.  Homes will be colder in winter and hotter in summer.  More people on limited income will have to choose between paying for food, medicine or utility bills.

The cost of conservation includes increased human suffering and death. The sooner we develop clean safe abundant sources of inexpensive energy, the sooner we can minimize these costs.

INTERMEDIATE TERM STRATEGY

Use proven technology to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

1     Accelerate the mainstreaming of emerging technologies including hybrid, all electric and fuel cell vehicles.

 2    Mass produce floating nuclear power plants to increase our supply of clean emissions free electricity.  A company called Offshore Power Systems built a facility to do that in Florida during the seventies, but it was never put into production due to a downturn in the economy that stalled growth and canceled orders.

3      Convert most stationary applications of natural gas to electricity. Use our natural gas supply to displace imported oil.  Automakers can make dual fuel vehicles, gasoline / natural gas, quickly and cheaply.

LONG TERM STRATEGY

1     Increase R&D for energy by more than a factor of ten to $100 billion per year, 90 cents per day for each of us. Push every technology as hard as possible, build prototypes of everything as it becomes possible and publish the performance data.

Let the marketplace decide which new technology to build on a level playing field.

This is the most anti nuclear recommendation that is practical because it maximizes the probability of developing an option better than nuclear power.

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Dave, put your emotions aside, look at the facts.

That's what I did when I was antinuclear.

Fission is the only proven non fossil energy source with unlimited expandability at an affordable price.

Seawater uranium can support 10 billion people for several hundred years using proven reactor technology at a fuel cost per kWh lower than coal. Fuel reprocessing is not necessary. See this and the following comment.

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4558#comment-413193

If all U.S. electric power was generated from fission it would produce 10 - 15 pounds of spent fuel per 80 year lifetime. Spent fuel becomes less radioactive than uranium ore in 0.13 million years. See page 5 of this document, page 18 of the pdf.

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/TRS435_web. ...

Notice that fresh spent fuel is only about 1000 times more radiotoxic than uranium ore. Large quantities of ore are scattered throughout the earths crust with no engineered containment at all and EPA believes radon, a decay product of uranium, causes 20,000 deaths per year.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/b1ab9f485b098972 ...

If humans provide 1000 times more reliable containment than nature, it is safer than ore right from the start and goes down from there.

The best place to put it is under deep seabed mud. That is where the uranium would have ended up by erosion if humans had not evolved.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/8/10/83934/8341#com ...

Breeder reactors like the integral fast reactor can generate an 80 year lifetime supply of electricity on 6 ounces of uranium and produce waste that is less toxic than ore in 300 years.

When the sun runs low on fuel and swells up to engulf the earth there will still be abundant supplies of uranium and thorium here. Fission is more renewable than wind and solar.

We should begin mass producing floating nuclear plants immediately.

http://www.atomicinsights.com/aug96/Offshore.html

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That's a big improvement RDM

Now you're dealing with some facts, but you need references. I see a few problems.

Most coal plants are far from most forests. As indicated in my previous reference, transportation is a killer.

It will take a huge army of people and specialized equipment to collect this rate of material without destroying the forest. The equipment will run on diesel fuel due to its high energy density. Trying to haul huge amounts of ethanol into remote forests is impractical. The fuel requirements and emissions will be huge.

People will put up huge resistance to having their forests ravaged by this army, with its noise, air pollution and roads clogged with trucks and heavy equipment.

I need a well respected reference showing that 10 tons per year is possible on dry land.

What are the 200 million acres doing now, wildlife habitat, wetland, food production, natural forest? Who owns the land? Show me a map of 200 million acres of potentially productive land standing idle.

Restoring nutrients to level farmland is possible, but I would need a highly respected reference showing that it can be reliably and sustainably done on rocky hills and mountainsides with thin fragile topsoil subject to occasional heavy thunderstorms.

The biomass would better serve us making liquid fuel to displace imports from people who do not like us.

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Still avoiding your homework I see.

You seem interested in debating the nuclear vs. biomass paths.

No, I just used that as an example of a documented position.

I know my sector.

Educate us, share the references and calculations through which you were educated, provide the analysis that convinced you this plan is practical and affordable.

I have great concerns with any power source that leaves behind extremely toxic waste for generations, can be converted into a high-intensity bomb, can result in the death of huge numbers of people if something unforeseen goes wrong, and may emit low levels of radioactivity dangerous to human life.

I see it is you who would rather debate nuclear than biomass. I addressed the waste issue previously. Which nations use commercial power plants to make bombs, I know of none. It is much cheaper and faster with a simple plutonium production reactor. The Chernobyl reactor had a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity and no containment building. How can a modern plant kill huge numbers of people?

There is a growing body of evidence that low level radiation may be good for you.

http://www.jpands.org/vol13no2/luckey.pdf

http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/content/full/179/5/1137

The firebombing of Dresden killed more people than the Hiroshima bomb, do you forgo the usefulness of fire also?

On the other hand, under your system, the failure of the biomass crop could lead to massive power failure and widespread death to millions of Americans during a heat wave or cold spell.

Explain how this quantity of mass will be harvested, dried and transported to power plants, and how much energy these functions will consume. What will it cost?

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More details please

I have explained before (on two other posts) how it could produce the equivalent energy of 1,000 - 2,000 nuclear power plants (1 GW each). Water requirements are not significant. Any residual materials would either be used to make products or enrich soils. ...

Put simply, the approach combines sustainable management of existing forests along with planting 200 million acres of unused land to fast growing trees and grasses.

These are unsubstantiated claims not references. Provide reputable references that show;

How much biomass is required per year to produce this much energy.

We have 200 million acres of suitable land standing idle with sufficient water to support fast growing plants.

The land can produce this much biomass continuously without being depleted of nutrients or topsoil.

How this quantity of mass will be harvested, dried and transported to power plants, and how much energy these functions will consume.

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More details please.

Biomass + CCS is the core solution... No other technology is capable of doing this.  

In the U.S. we consume about 200 watts of biomass per person in the form of food. In addition we use 11,300 watts of energy per person from other sources.

How much land will it take to produce 11,300 watts of biomass energy for 300,000,000 people, how much water, how much potash? Where are all these resources sitting just waiting to be tapped?

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Stop hyping the waste issue.

If all U.S. power was generated from fission it would produce about 10 pounds of spent fuel per 80 year lifetime.

Spent fuel becomes less radioactive than uranium ore in 0.13 million years. See page 5 of this document, page 18 of the pdf.

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/TRS435_web. ...

Notice that fresh spent fuel is only about 1000 times more radiotoxic than uranium ore. Large quantities of ore are scattered throughout the earths crust with no engineered containment at all and EPA believes radon, a decay product of uranium, causes 20,000 deaths per year.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/b1ab9f485b098972 ...

If humans provide 1000 times more reliable containment than nature, it is safer than ore right from the start and goes down from there.

The best place to put it is under deep seabed mud. That is where the uranium will ended up by erosion if we do not use it.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/8/10/83934/8341#com ...

Breeder reactors like the integral fast reactor can generate an 80 year lifetime supply of electricity on 6 ounces of uranium and produce waste that is less toxic than ore in 300 years.

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A few points.

Existing cars can be converted to dual fuel gasoline / natural gas, for under $2,000. The manufacturers could mass produce huge numbers of well integrated dual fuel cars for less than that.

The manufacturers cannot mass produce huge numbers of electric cars due to lack of battery, motor and semiconductor mass production.

The cost increase for electric cars of comparable range speed and size is many times $2,000.

60% dual  cycle plants are very expensive, normally used in baseload applications. They don't like being throttle jockey'd and loose efficiency when run off design point.

A lot of natural gas is used in buildings for heating and industrial applications that could be converted to electricity, making the potential transportation supply larger than assumed here.

The mass production of floating nuclear power plants can provide massive supplies of low emission electricity without the intermittency problem.

http://www.atomicinsights.com/aug96/Offshore.html

Shifting as much NG as possible into transportation can reduce oil imports more, and more quickly than any other single thing that is practical in the short to intermediate time span.

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Bob is right.

The transition off of fossil fuel is a long distance marathon race and we are about 5 feet off the starting line now. It is a little early to be picking winners.

The ultimate winner may be some technology that has not been invented yet. That is why I propose a $100 billion per year R&D program to push every idea as hard as possible, and a level playing field without any subsidies so that the best technology will automatically move into the lead.

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a level field

" I have a major problem sending so much money overseas in order to purchase oil from folks who don't like us.  I'm on the very same page as you are here.  But I fail to see how increasing our rate of extraction is in our best interest. "

It reduces the flow of money overseas.

" Rather than speeding up the use of our own oil, why not put our emphasis on lowering our overall use?
We can't get much US oil to the pumps in the next ten or so years.  We can move from personal vehicles that get ~20 mpg to ones that get ~100 mpg in ten years. "

The manufacturers cannot ramp up that fast, the fleet does not recycle that fast, I still have my 1984 Supra with 200K. Personal cars are only about 1/3 of the issue, that still leaves trucks busses ships planes etc.

" We're going to have to get off petroleum sooner or later.  Why postpone the inevitable? ... Why not invest in America's future rather than flying a holding pattern? "

Bob, review my recommendation, $100 billion per year is over 20 times more than we are doing now. It will accelerate the change.

"Just take an objective look at the continuous string of 'incidents' at existing nuclear facilities and you will have to admit that what works great on paper falls a bit short in the real world.  Leaks, fires, spills, sleeping security squads, ....
I add to that the very high cost of nuclear, the long construction time, and the high public resistance, and I ask "Why bother? "

If humans were infallible nuclear power plants would be much cheaper and easier to build. No containment building, no triple redundant control system, no triple redundant high pressure injection system, no triple redundant low pressure injection system, no triple redundant diesel generators etc.

When human error or mechanical malfunction crashes an airliner people die. When a human error or mechanical malfunction crashes a well built nuclear plant stockholders shed a tear.

The public is warming up to nuclear and people who live near existing plants are more pro nuclear than the average population. People who live near wind farms are more anti wind than the general public.

"Solar and wind along with possible tidal and geothermal will do the job.  We just need to build them out and build adequate storage.  Private money will finance most of the implementation once we're over the major hurdles.  Nuclear can only be built with major contributions from our tax dollars. "

I support massive R&D to develop better technology. I do not support subsidies. Subsidies distort the market resulting in inefficiency that increases waste and lowers quality of life. The best technology will win out on a level playing field, do you support a level playing field?

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Energy policy must not have failure as an option.

Theoretical technology not demonstrated on a large scale often looks better then mature technology because we know the downside of the mature technology.

The most important thing Jeff Bingaman said in his interview is that

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/8/26/84242/0808

"It is presumptuous in my view to suggest that we know where we need to be in 2050"

We should not be trying to cherry pick technology; we should be creating a system that will automatically develop the best technology. Our debate should be how best to do that.

If we implemented the McCain energy program and the Obama energy program in parallel, each with full funding, it would still lead to disaster because they are both woefully inadequate.

We need a fully integrated energy plan for the future.  It is like a jigsaw puzzle with many interacting pieces. The candidates pick out one piece from the opponent's plan and say, "This won't solve our energy problem by itself, so there is no point in doing this". That argument could be applied to every piece of the puzzle.

There are 3 billion people around the world who want to join the middle class. If the U.S. could reduce its emissions to zero instantly, the savings would be gobbled up by the developing world.

The most important goal for the U.S. is to use our technical capacity to develop low emission energy sources that are less expensive than fossil fuel. People across the world will switch to the new less expensive sources quickly and voluntarily, not kicking and screaming.

SHORT TERM STRATEGY

1     Drill, drill, drill.  Drill in Alaska, drill offshore, drill wherever we have oil and gas. Each $10 per barrel that oil goes up costs Americans another $80 billion per year. Each 1 cent per kWh that electricity goes up costs Americans another $40 billion per year.

We need fuel to keep our economy going so that we can afford to develop the new technologies that the world needs.

2     Level the playing field so that we are forced to pay the true cost of energy from each source.  Eliminate all energy subsidies.

When you take a load of trash to the city landfill you pay a fee per pound of trash.  Humans have been using the atmosphere as a free waste dump since we gained control of fire. Atmospheric dumping of hazardous material is producing severe adverse effects on human health and global climate. We should charge an atmospheric dumping fee equal to the best estimate of the cost of damage done by the toxic waste being injected into our atmosphere. Low emission technologies will become more competitive on a level playing field.

3     Conservation is a strategy that is being implemented already due to rising energy costs, and it will increase. Improving insulation and using more efficient appliances make good sense.

Conservation sometimes comes at a high cost. For example sales of motorcycles and mopeds are exploding.  The motorcycle fatality rate per mile is seven times higher than for cars.  The fatality rate for bicycles is seven times higher than motorcycles. Econobox cars are less survivable in accidents than large cars built with the same level of technology.

Higher electricity prices mean less security lighting.  There'll be more muggings and rapes on college campuses and parking lots.  Homes will be colder in winter and hotter in summer.  More people on limited income will have to choose between paying for food, medicine or utility bills.

The cost of conservation includes increased human suffering and death. The sooner we develop clean safe abundant sources of inexpensive energy, the sooner we can minimize these costs.

INTERMEDIATE TERM STRATEGY

Use proven technology to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

1     Accelerate the mainstreaming of emerging technologies including hybrid, all electric and fuel cell vehicles.

 2    Mass produce floating nuclear power plants to increase our supply of clean emissions free energy electricity.  A company called Offshore Power Systems built a facility to do that in Florida during the seventies, but it was never put into production due to a downturn in the economy that stalled growth and canceled orders.

3      Convert most stationary application of natural gas to electricity. Use our natural gas supply to displace imported oil.  Automakers can make dual fuel vehicles, gasoline / natural gas, quickly and cheaply.

LONG TERM STRATEGY

1     Increase R&D for energy by more than a factor of ten to $100 billion per year, 90 cents per day for each of us. Push every technology as hard as possible, build prototypes of everything as it becomes possible and publish the performance data.

When someone says R&D most people only hear "Research". In truth Development is the really expensive part, and the U.S. has done very little of that in recent decades.

Build intermediate scale plants of all promising technologies, advanced nuclear, cellulosic biofuel, solar power, geothermal, coal with full sequestration. For those technologies that are successful in medium scale we should built at least one full scale commercial size plant.

We have yet to build a fully sequestered coal plant after years of talk. We need to try even if the first plant is a failure.

There are dozens of ways to split a uranium atom. What are the odds that a steroidal submarine reactor is the best? There are huge improvements to be made in nuclear power plant design and construction, yet we have not built a new experimental reactor since 1973.

2     Spaceship earth is less than 8,000 miles in diameter and covered largely by water. With the appropriate use of technology it could be a near paradise for 500 million to 1 billion people, without putting too much stress on the other species that share this planet, but we are over 6 billion, headed for 10 billion, with two thirds living in poverty.

Earth can never be paradise for 10 billion people, unless your idea of paradise is sitting in an air conditioned high rise apartment building, surfing the internet, eating insect pate. It will take a massive infusion of technology to provide a comfortable life for all those people while preserving whatever is left of the environment.

Population has to be on the table in any serious discussion of the future. The U.S. population has more than doubled since WW II. Had we stabilized it at that level we would have abundant inexpensive energy, water and food supplies.

CONCLUSION

The road of progress is paved with stones of failure. By spending 90 cents per person per day to push every technology as fast as possible, the best technologies and breakthroughs, whatever they are, will emerge as leaders in the shortest possible time. 95% of that money will probably be wasted on unsuccessful technology, but that is cheap insurance to assure that we get the best solution. Relying on a bunch of gray haired law school graduates in Washington to cherry pick technology is a formula for disaster.

The new technologies will tend to suppress rising energy costs. I believe the savings could surpass the annual R&D cost within 15 - 20 years, and save over $2,000 per year per person within 30 years, not to mention a large improvement in the environment and quality of life with this approach. 100 years from now energy will be cheap, clean and abundant.

A big R&D push will provide the U.S. with new products that are highly desirable all over the world, providing Americans with high paying manufacturing jobs and products to sell overseas to eliminate our trade deficit and strengthen the dollar.

I support nuclear power, yet this is the most anti nuclear recommendation possible because it maximizes the probability that some technology better than fission will be developed.

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These are dangerous ideas

Well said Sean.

The government's job is to promote regulations that keep the playing field as level and free as possible, not pick winners and losers.

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Lets stick to the facts

" How many pounds of coal and oil are needed to:

mine the pitchblende ore

grind up the ore to extract the uranium

separate out the radioactive isotope of uranium 235 (only .72% of natural uranium) "

Reactor fuel assemblys cost about ½ cent per kwh, of which a small fraction is energy content.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

The vast majority of the energy content is from the enrichment process. In an all nuclear powered world the energy would be provided by fission, so the coal content would be approximately zero.

" build the power plant (current money cost something like $11 billion) "

Wow, even Joe Romm has not found an $11B cost estimate, show me yours. A 1.5 GW plant would produce 7.1 E11 kWh over its 60 year lifetime, so construction cost using your huge number is 1.5 cents / kWh, of which the coal content is a negligible fraction.

" dispose of the nuclear waste (newest estimate is $90 billion, but since disposal has yet started nobody knows for sure. "

Deep seabed disposal would be very inexpensive and require little energy to dispose of a lifetime 15 pounds of waste that produced 1.1 million kWh. The coal content would be approximately zero pounds per kWh.

"Your selected numbers above are propaganda. "

Define propaganda. Is the truth propaganda if it is not consistent with your view of reality?

List the facts that you think are important that I left out.

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Repeal Price-Anderson

Imagine that the terrorist attack on 9-11 never took place. Instead, suppose that on a busy weekday morning at about 11 AM, a design defect in the floor attach fittings of a World Trade Center building caused a mid level floor to collapse on to the floor below it.

That started a chain reaction collapse that brought the building down. The upper floors tipped into the other WTC tower, triggering the same defect and bringing it down.

There is no evacuation because there is no warning, and 40,000 people die in 30 seconds.

A Boeing 747 takes off with a full load of fuel on a long international flight. One minute after takeoff it flies through the wake of another jumbo jet. The turbulence causes an undetected crack in the vertical fin to propagate, and the fin snaps off. The 747 yaws sideways, rolls onto its back and dives down through the roof of a large sports arena holding the national championship basketball game.

200,000 pounds of fuel atomizes on impact with the floor and erupt in an enormous fireball inside the building, consuming all the oxygen and incinerating 40,000 people on live HD worldwide television.

In 1997 the EPA determined that a human life was worth $5.8 million.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/funding.nsf/ef8d219bc45f08 ...

Corrected for inflation, that is $7.6 million now.

The loss in each case would be $304 billion for human life, plus the property loss.

The WTC did not carry this level of insurance. Should they have been prevented from constructing those buildings without adequate insurance?

The airlines do not carry this level of insurance, should the airlines be grounded for lack of adequate insurance coverage?

Suppose that a biogenetics scientist in a major pharmaceutical industry accidentally develops a virus that is more contagious than the common cold and more deadly than the HIV virus. He contaminates himself and his family, the virus spreads around the world and kills half the population. That would be a twenty five thousand trillion dollar loss. All the money in the world would not cover that loss.

Should we shut down the entire drug industry and go back to life without medicine because it is not insured for all possible accidents?

Dam failures have killed 8000 people in the U.S.

http://www.fema.gov/plan/prevent/damfailure/pdf/fema-94-i ...

In 1975 a single dam failure in China killed about 30,000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Dams in the U.S. are not insured for the maximum imaginable loss. Should we tear down all dams and give up our hydroelectric power, or charge much more per kWh to pay for insurance?

Coal plants are killing over 20,000 Americans each year. That is a $175 billion loss each year that the coal plants are not paying for, a virtual subsidy.

You are holding a wedding reception for 150 people in your home. An F5 tornado sucks your home and its contents up to 1,000 feet, grinds it into small pieces, and deposits the mess in a field 2 miles away, killing everybody.

The tornado loss is $1.14 billion plus the property loss. Are you carrying that much liability insurance on your house? If not, should you be denied the privilege of owning a home?

If we required every corporation and individual to obtain insurance coverage for the worst possible event no matter how unlikely, we would have no civilization at all.

The Price Anderson Act requires that the utilities provide $10 billion in insurance coverage without cost to the public or government and without fault needing to be proven.

http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf67.html

It covers power reactors, research reactors, and all other nuclear facilities.

It was renewed for 20 years in mid 2005, with strong bipartisan support, and requires individual operators to be responsible for two layers of insurance cover. The first layer is where each nuclear site is required to purchase US $300 million liability cover which is provided by two private insurance pools.

The second layer is jointly provided by all US reactor operators. It is funded through retrospective payments if required of up to $96 million per reactor per accident collected in annual installments of $15 million (and adjusted with inflation). Combined, the total provision comes to over $10 billion paid for by the utilities. (The Department of Energy also provides $10 billion for its nuclear activities.) Beyond this cover and irrespective of fault, Congress, as insurer of last resort, must decide how compensation is provided in the event of a major accident.

More than $200 million has been paid by US insurance pools in claims and costs of litigation since the Price- Anderson Act came into effect, all of it by the insurance pools. Of this amount, some $71 million related to litigation following the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.

American Nuclear Insurers  is a pool comprised of investor-owned stock insurance companies. About half the pool's total liability capacity comes from foreign sources such as Lloyd's of London. The average annual premium for a single-unit reactor site is $400,000.

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 brother, "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, losing 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.

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.

The Chernobyl reactor had design defects that, combined with gross operator error, allowed it to go rapidly to 100 times the design power level, creating a powerful steam explosion that tore the roof off the building and dispersed fuel. It could never have been licensed in  the US.

If it had an appropriately designed containment building for that reactor design, the release would have been minor.

Modern reactors have improved instrumentation and control systems, passive safety systems and strong containments designed to contain a full meltdown.

http://www.areva-np.com/common/liblocal/docs/Brochure/BRO ...

http://www.ans.org/pubs/magazines/nn/docs/2006-1-3.pdf

Nobody is going to build another Titanic, or a De Havilland Comet, or a Chernobyl reactor.

I cannot think of any industry that handles insurance coverage as well as nuclear power.

I support the repeal of Price-Anderson and treating nuclear power like other industries.

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Back to the subject

People who work in radiation areas spend a lot of time wearing protective clothing and a respirator. It may turn out that the gear releases some carcinogenic molecule not yet identified.

In some cases low level radiation may be beneficial.

http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/content/full/179/5/1137

Mining coal is demanding labor. Coal miners are very healthy when they start their first day at work, yet their life expectancy is well short of the national average. The risks of coal mining overwehelm the healthy worker syndrome by a wide margin.

Close a coal mine freeing up a thousand coal miners, convert 10 to uranium mining which is much safer, to make it energy neutral, and free up the rest for low risk jobs.

http://www.me.utexas.edu/~ans/Pro/lle.html

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FAIR AND BALANCED?

Joe, why did you skip the most important sentence in the report?

radiation doses were below the regulatory limits set by international standards.

Coal plants kill over 20,000 per year.

http://www.dirtykilowatts.org/Dirty_Kilowatts.pdf

Nuclear is our safest option for abundant baseload power.

http://www.dirtykilowatts.org/Dirty_Kilowatts.pdf

Recycling should not take place until it is economically attractive. We have enough uranium to use a once through system for hundreds of years. We are only talking about 5.4 ounces of fission products in 10-15 pounds of spent fuel per 80 year lifetime. We have centuries to develop a breeder reactor, but it could be done in a decade or two if we made a serious effort.

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Consider the big picture

The reason this debate will never end is that people have different goals. Is your goal to;

1     Maximize quality of human life.
or
2     Reduce emissions to some specified level without regard for its impact on people.

For those who choose number 1 a dumping fee equal to the best estimate of the cost of damage done by the emission is the way to go. Free market forces will automatically evolve a balance that provides the optimum quality of life possible using available technology.

For those who choose number 2 cap n trade sounds good but it probably won't work. People's lives will be hammered and we will have a new set of multimillionaires who made it big gaming the system selling carbon credits, but we probably won't hit the caps because many of the credits will turn out to have been overestimated.

Meanwhile in China there are 300 million middle class citizens and another billion who want to join them along with 3 billion other people around the world.

Shooting ourselves in the foot is not setting a good example for the world.

The sun delivers 23,000,000 watts per person, in the U.S. we use about 13,000 watts per person. Energy consumption does not cause climate change, greenhouse gasses do.

We should start a $100 billion dollar per year R&D program to develop low emission energy sources cheaper than fossil fuel so that more people can enjoy a comfortable life without wrecking the planet.

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Freedom of choice of technology

" You still haven't said what this cheaper form of transport, cheaper than rail, would be. "

Passenger rail has the highest subsidy to customer cost ratio of all the major transportation modes, yet it is struggling. This indicates that rail has the lowest performance in terms of desirability per dollar. Passenger rail would disappear on a level playing field.

Most people do not want to ride the train, they want others to ride the train so the road will be less crowded.

" study after study shows that the wealth of a community determines the health of a kid. "

hapa. That may be true. If unwealthy communities produce twice as many kids per capita than wealthy communities the civilization will eventually be dominated by unwealthy communities and collapse.

Why is it that people have not created a permanently sustainable civilization in 200,000 years? What changes do you propose make that happen?

My recommendation is a Bill of Rights for children. Each child is guaranteed;

1     At least one qualified parent.

2     A top notch education.

Under these conditions I think kids would do well regardless of their neighborhoods wealth or poverty. Poor neighborhoods would disappear in a generation or two.

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Now is the time

" If we are hellbent on drilling it at some point in time, then we should save it for when we need it. "

What is the going rate for Sperm whale oil? The price of crude oil will drop when we have alternative energy systems and cheaper substitutes from biofuel or made directly from CO2.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html?ref ...

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GET REAL

"  If you become a student of this practice, you will discover that you cannot disagree with a cost projection of $100 billion (not the currently projected $42 billion). It will be all borrowed money, both from public state and federal treasuries and private ones. These debts require not only interest payments, but also a return on principle, like a mortgage. ...

Construction, which won't begin for another several years, will take 10 years, more or less, to complete. Do you want to predict the construction costs 10 to 15 years out?...

Comparing "the train of the future" with the automobiles of the present is unfair. Planes and cars in the future will be more ecologically friendly."

http://venturebeat.com/2008/04/11/why-the-california-high ...

This is just another expensive boondoggle that will suck billions and billions of dollars over its lifetime to provide a subsidizied ride for a tiny fraction of the population. That is money not spent on more beneficial projects.

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Competition is the key to excellence

Jon, all the keywords are missing from your education plan.

Testing, freedom of choice, equality, competition.

" as oil prices rise, airline travel will become more and more expensive, as will intercity car travel. "

Washington to Boston on the Acela train costs $170 -  $250 plus a taxpayer subsidy of perhaps twice that. Greyhound makes the trip for $80 with no subsidy and they pay taxes.

With all the advantages of rail you point out why isn't it the reverse?

We could save a lot of tax dollars by buying the train passengers a free ticket on Grayhound.

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Education is the key

Jon, you have zeroed in on the focal point of our debate.  I believe that government monopolies breed mediocrity and that excellence comes from competition, and you believe the opposite.

Education is the key to everything.  

A recent study showed that U.S. children placed 29 in math and science, behind Croatia, Iceland and Latvia, see page 23 of the pdf.

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/15/13/39725224.pdf

Our kids graduate from school without really understanding how the world works.  That makes them vulnerable to bad advice, like Amory Lovins' snake oil.

My recommendation for education.  

Test the students at the end of each year.  When we test students we're really testing the teacher.  The teacher should get a grade based on how much their students' knowledge has improved.

Publish a report of the end of year that contains a list of all schools.  Each teacher would be listed along with the grades that they receive for each class that they taught.

Allow parents to send their children the school of their choice.  There would be no cherry picking.  When applications exceed capacity a lottery would determine who gets in.

The money goes with the child.  Parents can choose between public or private schools.

This system would point out which schools have the most effective teachers.  The best teachers would command much higher salaries in a competitive marketplace, and the ineffective teachers would have to find work elsewhere.  Public schools would compete with private schools on a level playing field.

The worst thing that could happen under this system is that there would be no change because the public schools are doing such a great job.

A similar system of competition within a framework of regulation can be created for the other markets you list.

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McCain is right.

It is interesting that with all these comments no one actually answered the questions.

Why should the federal government be in the passenger train business?

If government should be in the train business should it not be in every business, as in the former Soviet Union?

Why should tax payers all over the country provide artificially low ticket prices for a tiny fraction of the population living near an Amtrak station?

To know if an industry is being subsidized you must subtract government payouts from the fees and taxes generated by the industry. We are still waiting for that table.

"
...they're in favor of privatization of the rail lines, but when the DOTs begin to build to many privately built toll-roads, then all of a sudden they're worried 'bout the impact of privatization on transit. "

People don't like paying for the road twice. Eliminate the taxes and people could pay a reasonable toll and probably come out ahead.

"  why should the government be in the mail delivery business, door-to-door?  Why in the vehicle restriction business (via licensing preventing vehicle use by certain groups)?  ....  Why indeed in the military business (Oh, I forgot about Blackwater, sorry)?  Why is the government involved in maintaining the country's borders? What 'good' is served by the FBI and the CIA?  ....Finally, Bill, who pays your bills?  Are you just against Government involvement on general political principles, or would you benefit financially from government dis-engagement from Amtrak? "

I would eliminate the government's monopoly on mail delivery.

The railroads have been private and regulated for over a hundred years. Amtrak was private before the government took over, and it was supposed to be only for a short time.

I assume your questions about the military are a joke.

I pay my bills.

If the government unloads Amtrak, Amtrak will start paying taxes instead of absorbing them. The deficit will be a bit smaller, that benefits all of us financially.

" Did you really think this through before you posted it Bill?"

Yes, what's your point?

" It doesn't help to stick one's head in the sand,.... when we have to face up squarely to what is coming down the pike and move to electric forms of transport. "

We agree on this. Since rail is much easier to convert it has a big advantage, so why can't it make it in the private sector?

" Every industry that's a natural monopoly, like trains, should be run by the government. "

Why? Most electric power companies are privately owned yet we enjoy some of the lowest electric rates on the planet. The rail industry has performed well and paid huge tax revenues over the last hundred years, what's the problem?

" Most people agree that we should not let the living Earth be destroyed or allow some populations to starve while others feast. These are the end results of turning all decision making over to market forces. "

The soviet government ran everything, look at their human rights and environmental record.

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That's a good start John

Put those numbers in a column and then provide a second column with the tax revenue on the sale of Amtrak tickets, the tax revenue on the sale of gasoline, oil, car parts and new car sales tax and registration fees.  Do the same thing for air and water transport.

If everybody stopped driving their cars, the cost of roads and highways would be borne entirely by the trucking industry.  The cost of food and clothing and the other things we buy would rise substantially.  People who drive subsidize the lifestyle of people who don't.

Please answer my questions.

Why should the federal government be in the passenger train business?

If government should be in the train business should it not be in every business, as in the former Soviet Union?

Why should tax payers all over the country provide artificially low ticket prices for a tiny fraction of the population living near an Amtrak station?

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Not exactly fair and balanced

The documents seem very one sided.  They discuss a potential downside of global warming in great detail, but they make no mention of the down side to their recommendations which is well understood.

 For example sales of motorcycles and mopeds are exploding.  The motorcycle fatality rate per mile is seven times higher than for cars.  The fatality rate for bicycles is another seven times higher than motorcycles.

Econobox cars are less survivable than large cars built with the same level of technology.

The cost in human suffering medical bills and lost productivity is not considered in these calculations.

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Interesting discussion

" On an output basis, this is all perfectly captured and incentivized.  But on a ton/year basis, we get pinched.  The facility installing the cogen unit is locally going to release more tons/year (since they're now making heat and power as opposed to just heat) even as their actions are causing GHG emissions to fall globally.  So directionally, they are treated as an incremental source. "

Adding a cogen plant will increase local fuel consumption and emissions.  However it will also reduce the plants electric bill by 5 to 10¢ per kWh, which is much more than the cost of fuel consumed to make that power, which in turn is much more than the fee on the emissions produced by making that power locally.  So even though the emissions fee will increase for dumping more harmful material into the environment locally, there is still a huge overall incentive to build the cogen plant.

" Assuming you agree that the point of any carbon policy is to achieve 80% reductions by 2050, how would you propose doing that with a carbon tax? "

The point of any carbon policy should be to maximize quality of life.  If an 80% reduction causes far more suffering and death than 50% reduction, because of its high cost, it is bad policy.  

That's why the fee on the dumping of toxic waste into the atmosphere should be set equal to our best estimate of the cost of the damage that it causes.

" Where we totally part ways is that I think electricity use should be limited, as it's extremely environmentally harmful to the Earth and other species, so my model of strict output limits with no exceptions probably doesn't work for someone like you who has other priorities like the economy. "

How about priorities like human suffering, starvation, disease?  Are you opposed to non emitting sources of electricity?  If cold fusion worked, would that be a disaster?

" But my model would produce the best results, the economy be damned "

You may think this is a trick question but I'm really serious, Want would your vision of the perfect world be like?

Before the advent of technology, population was controlled by starvation, disease, predation and exposure.  Do you really want to go back to that kind of world?

Humans developed technology to suppress those four mechanisms.  It has been very successful, and human population is exploding out of control.  We need to find ethical and humane approaches to replace those mechanisms.  

Abandoning technology and going back to the natural world is not something I would wish on the human race.

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I understand NB.

" The oil supply is loose, and demand is down, Bill. "

That is why I wrote

" It also shows the world that we're taking action on the high cost of energy, which will immediately curtail the substantial speculative part of oil cost. "

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Failure is not an option

People are just beginning to realize how much damage coal-fired power plants have been doing for several decades, and they are resisting the construction of new coal plants.

We have seen what happened to oil prices when the supply tightened up. As demand grows, excess generating capacity is gradually being used up, setting up conditions for electrical prices to skyrocket in the next 5 to 10 years in a similar way that oil prices have skyrocketed.

Put yourself in the position of a grid manager.  Your job is to maintain voltage and frequency 24 hours a day 365 days a year.  Reliable dependable baseload kilowatt hours are worth far more to you than intermittent unreliable kilowatt hours from wind and solar.  The author's analyses treats intermittent kilowatt hours as if they are equally valuable as reliable baseload kWh's.  

What are the other proven commercial sized sources of low emission reliable baseload kilowatt hours besides nuclear?  While nuclear power plants seem expensive by today's standards they will not be expensive by tomorrow's standards.

It is interesting how people can see enormous room for improvement in solar wind and other renewable technologies but assume that there is no room for improvement in our 1960s designed steroidal submarine reactors.  These analyses never take credit for the fact that the building of nuclear power plants can be streamlined by the application of mass production techniques, reducing prices dramatically.

Each 1¢ increase in the cost of kilowatt hours costs Americans $40 billion per year.  It would be in our best interest to put some serious money in research and development to streamline the construction of floating nuclear power plants, to develop the best possible source of reliable and dependable predictable low emission kilowatt hours.

Reducing U.S. emissions is not important. Developing a low cost replacement for fossil fuel that the entire world can afford should be our goal. Wasting money on mass production of impractical expensive systems is counterproductive.

We need a comprehensive solution.

The United States should have a three part energy policy, short term, intermediate term, and long term, all operating in parallel.

The short term policy is drill, drill, drill. For each barrel of new production we keep $100+ in this country, reducing the rate at which our money is the devalued.  It also shows the world that we're taking action on the high cost of energy, which will immediately curtail the substantial speculative part of oil cost.

The intermediate term policy is to rapidly implement proven technology that can reduce our energy consumption, and increase supplies of clean energy substantially.

The long-term energy policy should increase R&D to $90 billion per year (only 2.25 cents/kWh) and push every technology as hard as possible. That would include building at least one full scale commercial size plant of every promising technology. Actual performance data would give companies and individuals confidence to make rapid large scale investments in new, well proven technology.

We should create a totally level playing field by including all external costs and deleting all subsidies for every energy source, and allow prices to rise as necessary to meet the demand? This policy will automatically select the best energy system possible at the lowest cost.

Any one of these three approaches by itself is impractical.  We need all three running in parallel at maximum capacity to solve the world's energy problems.

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we may have an agreement

" Thing is, nuclear is a mature industry, over 30 years old now. It's been receiving massive subsidies for 30 years and has a record of massive cost overruns, safety violations, unexpected downtime, etc. Why, after 30 years, should we keep spending billions in public money on it? "

Wind power is over 300 years old and operates close to maximum theoretical efficiency.  Our steroidal submarine reactors split about 1% of the uranium mined to fuel them.  When was the last experimental commercial nuclear power reactor built in the United States?  The evolution of technology is not measured by the passage of time.

Americans spend about $400,000,000,000 a year on electricity.  The R.&D. money spent over the last 30 years is just a token, far less than the tax revenues government earned on nuclear power and other energy sources.

The world is still running on an abundant supply of fossil fuel and will continue to do so for many years.  If we wait until we actually run out of fossil fuel the cost in dollars and human suffering will be tremendous.

" On a genuinely level playing field, nuclear would vanish with nary a trace. Private capital won't finance it, so without gov't support, it's gone. "

This statement assumes that there is some better technology that can produce enormous amounts of reliable high capacity low emission baseload power at an affordable cost when fossil fuel runs out.  What is that technology?

Nuclear will only go away if there is a better technology to take its place, and I would be happy with that.  So let's all agree to call for a big R.&D.  push to develop the best technology, and a totally level playing field.

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good tip

" cogen and wind are both cheaper than new nuclear, which is why they're attracting billions in private investment and nuclear is attracting none. I'd prefer to ask questions that give some indication that I've at least glanced at the report. "

How many coal plants are being disassembled each week and replaced with cogen and wind.

Why are utilities all over the world still building coal plants instead of building cogen and wind?

Show us a cost estimate for a 1.5 GW solar cogen or wind plant. How many such plants are in operation now? Where can we review their actual performance, construction cost, O&M cost, reliability, emissions, capacity factor, life expectancy and cost per kWh?

How many coal plants have been torn down and replaced by negawatts? (see, I read it).  

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So where is the fundamental limitation?

To say that it is impossible to build nuclear power plants in large numbers is like saying that it is impossible to send a human to the moon; it ignores the fact that it has already been demonstrated.  

" Yet nuclear power's own myriad limitations will constrain its growth, especially in the near term. These include:

Prohibitively high, and escalating, capital costs ....

So what would be the cost of electricity from new nuclear plants today? Jim Harding, who was on the Keystone Center panel, was responsible for its economic analysis, and previously served as director of power planning and forecasting for Seattle City Light, emailed us in early May that his own "reasonable estimate for levelized cost range ... is 12-17 cents per kWh lifetime, and 1.7x times that number [20 to 29 cents per kWh] in first year of commercial operation."

At these rates a 1.5GW plant with a 0.9 capacity factor, would earn $3.4 billion in the first year, and $2 billion per year after that.

Operation and maintenance cost are about 2¢ per kWh,

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

and should be less for next generation plants because they're greatly simplified, with fewer pumps, valves, and less piping.  To be conservative lets assume that O&M cost doubles. The O&M cost would be $237million per year.

Even at the highest cost estimates the plant would pay for itself within 10 years, and then produce very cheap reliable electricity for another 50 years.

Show us a cost estimate for a 1.5 GW solar or wind array with reliable dispatchable power and a 0.90 capacity factor. Now show us a cost estimate for an array east of the Mississippi river with the same specifications. How many such arrays are in operation now? Where can we review their actual performance, construction cost, O&M cost, reliability, emissions, capacity factor, life expectancy and cost per kWh?

Show us a cost and reliability estimate of the required grid for moving the energy from where wind and solar sources are best to where most people live.

" Production bottlenecks in key components needed to build plants...

Twenty years ago the United States had 400 major suppliers for the nuclear industry. Today there are about 80. Only two companies in the whole world can make heavy forgings for pressure vessels, steam generators, and pressurizers. "

Before the first round of construction that were zero suppliers.  There's no reason we cannot build another supply chain.  Inherently safe plant designs do not require as much safety related equipment as older plants.

" Very long construction times "

We can dramatically reduce construction time and cost by mass producing floating nuclear power plants.

http://www.atomicinsights.com/aug96/Offshore.html

" Concerns about uranium supplies and importation issues "

This is a red herring; the uranium supply is effectively unlimited.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/2/75132/75324#com ...

" Unresolved problems with the availability and security of waste storage "

Nuclear waste is largely a political and educational problem.  The most rational solution for nuclear waste is deep seabed burial, but almost anything will work if carefully implemented.

" Large-scale water use Amid shortages

"few realize that electricity generation accounts for nearly half of all water withdrawals in the nation." At the same time, "existing nuclear power stations used and consumed significantly more water per megawatt hour than electricity generation powered by fossil fuels," "

This is another red herring, and even mentioning it completely destroys the author's credibility.  The author talks about water withdrawals, but fails to mention that almost all of that water is returned to the source, in sharp contrast to agricultural withdrawals, in which none of the water in returned.  The average reader does not understand the difference between water withdrawal and water consumption.  The author deliberately takes advantage of the readers limitation to mislead them.  This is totally unethical.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/2/75132/75324/#32 ...

Floating nuclear power plants will use the ocean as a heat sink, and can produce huge volumes of fresh water.  The authors vaunted solar thermal plants located in the desert will have a lower thermodynamic efficiency than nuclear plants and will require more fresh water per kWh than the nuclear plant.  That water will have to be diverted from other uses, or made from sea water, using energy, and transported into the desert using energy.  

The release of huge quantities of water vapor in the desert may result in increased cloud formation and reduced plant output.  The author does not mention these very real water problems with his proposed solution.  

" High electricity prices from new plants...

Nuclear power is therefore unlikely to play a dominant -- greater than 10 percent --
"

The author's conclusions are based on the assumption that there are other technologies that can produce reliable, predictable, controllable, baseload power at an affordable cost.  So why aren't we tearing down coal fired power plants and replacing them with this new technology?  Why are countries all over the world building more coal plants?  

Denmark has been pushing wind extremely hard since 1979, yet they get most of their electricity from fossil fuel and have the most expensive electricity in the world. Residential electricity in Denmark cost 1.92 DKK/kWh in 2007, 40 cents / kWh. In the U.S. it was about 9 cents / kWh.

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-SF-0 ...

Wind power in the state of California, was down to 4% on peak for several days during the 2006 heat wave.

http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Wind- ...

The entire U.S.  wind output was down 20% below average during the heat wave while the demand was 20% above average. Nuclear power was 10% above average because outages are scheduled for spring and fall when demand is low.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1_a.h ...

We should increase R&D to $90 billion per year (only 2.25 cents/kWh) and push every technology as hard as possible. That would include building at least one full scale commercial size plant of every promising technology. Actual performance data would give companies and individuals confidence to make large scale investments rapidly in new and proven technology.

This would accelerate the introduction of practical solutions and is much more sensible than providing feed in tariffs to mass produce expensive immature impractical technology that raises cost enormously while remaining largely dependent on fossil fuel, as Denmark and Germany have proven.

 This proposal maximizes the probability that we will develop better technology than fission, which makes it the most anti nuclear recommendation that is practical.

Reducing U.S. emissions is not important. Developing a low cost replacement for fossil fuel that the entire world can afford should be our goal. Wasting money on mass production of impractical expensive systems is counterproductive.

Research and development should not be considered a subsidy.  It is an investment in the future, like medical research. Our R&D investment over the last 30 years was barely a token amount; which is a major factor contributing to our energy problem.

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comment

" Doesn't this debate just prove that we should seek to end subsidies all energy sources? "

I agree.  Research and development should not be considered a subsidy.  It is an investment in the future, like medical research.

"  One of the big problems with costs of nuclear power has been precisely because we never settled on a standard design. It's counterproductive to propose building a smorgasbord, prototypes or not. It's easy enough to study and decide on a design up front. "

We do not have a standard design car, airliner, windmill or solar cell. If we had a one designed airliner and a design defect was detected the impact on society would be much worse that would be the case now.

Reactor design is still very primitive.  What are the odds that a steroidal submarine reactor is the best design?  The French succeeded because the energy density of uranium is 1 MW day per gram.

" As for floating plants, why on earth? "

There are several reasons.  Mass production of floating nuclear power plants will dramatically reduce man-hours and cost while improving quality.  It allows plant construction and site preparation to be done in parallel rather than in series.  It eliminates NIMBY problems.  Most people live within a few hundred miles of a shoreline, so transmission distances will be short.

I look forward to your publication.  

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McCain is on the right track.

" the public, too, would be very encouraged by a steep increase in the safety and storage categories. "

Given that there've been no major accidents in the last 20 years, while coal kills thousands each year there's not much room for increasing safety.

" But how many new manufacturing jobs can there be that aren't actually just mining construction jobs? "

Mining and construction jobs pay very well and there are also high paying manufacturing jobs making pumps valves motors and heat exchangers, control systems etc.

" Except that McCain's "advocacy" and "support" for nuclear power have him calling for a lot more than just R&D funding. The climate plan he unveiled this week includes "loan guarantees for the construction of new [nuclear] plants and a program to assist with the first-of-its-kind engineering needs," plus "measures to further encourage investor confidence [in the nuclear industry] through improved safety, expanded manufacturing base, and waste disposal solutions. "

Yep, that's what the D in R&D is for.

McCain is right about R&D. We should raise R&D to $90 billion per year, just 2.25¢ per kilowatt hour, to maximize our options. Existing nuclear power plants would earn $18 billion per year, enough to build at least one prototype of each new reactor design, and to finance the design and construction of a facility to build floating nuclear power plants.  

Wind and solar buffs want to spend big bucks implementing existing technology, which will take us down the road behind Germany and Denmark, to high energy prices, 30 - 40 cents per kWh.

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-SF-0 ...

 Each one cent / kWh increase will cost Americans $40 billion per year. R&D is cheap.

Fossil fuels are still abundant, and will be so for many years. They provide about 70% of our electricity, 85% of all the energy that supports our lives.

Joseph Romm says we don't need more R&D, we should start building expensive wind and solar now. If we follow that advice we will be in huge trouble down the road when fossil fuel is really running out. We may have to buy expensive floating nuclear plants from other countries, with severely inflated dollars. I would rather be selling those plants to other countries.

 A huge R&D program maximizes the probability that we will develop better technology than fission, which makes it the most anti nuclear policy of all. Our goal should be to create energy sources that are cheaper than fossil fuel, so the entire world can afford them

Actually the best thing McCain could do for energy would be to include a course in Energy Engineering in every high school curriculum.  That way future generations of Americans would be able to make decisions about energy based on facts and logic rather than fear and emotion.

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My position is the most anti nuclear of all.

" At the time AT&T was broken up, could you have predicted the transformations that have occurred with communications technology?  Why then do you think it is incumbent on us to predict the ultimate winners of the next two generations of energy technological development? "

How on earth did you come to this conclusion, it is the exact opposite of my position. Romm argues that we need 700 GW of reliable high capacity factor generation. I don't care if it comes from 100 huge plants or 100,000,000 small sources, as long as it is reliable and affordable.

"  My view is that the role of government should be to fix problems in market structure so the advantages and disadvantages of the various energy solutions can be seen much more clearly than they are seen now.  "

I agree completely if by that you mean level the playing field. In addition we should raise R&D to $90 billion per year to maximize our options. Wind and solar buffs want to spend big bucks implementing existing technology, which will take us down the road behind Germany and Denmark, to high energy prices. Each one cent / kWh increase will cost Americans $40 billion per year.

Fossil fuel is still abundant, and will be so for many years. They provide over 70% of our electricity, 85% of all the energy that supports our lives.

Romm says we don't need more R&D, we should start building expensive wind and solar now. If we follow that advice we will be in huge trouble down the road when fossil fuel is really running out. We may have to buy expensive floating nuclear plants from other countries, with severely inflated dollars. I would rather be selling those plants to other countries.

 My recommendation maximizes the probability that we will develop better technology than fission, which makes it the most anti nuclear of all.

" France built so many nuclear plants that they had to export power very inexpensively. "

So customers in surrounding countries get a break on clean cheap nuclear power, good for them. Fuel cost is only a half cent per kWh, so France does ok as well.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

If we build enough wind and solar arrays to achieve 99.9% reliability (8.7 hours of blackout per year), we will have excess capacity 99.8% of the time. When wind and solar conditions are good and demand is low during spring and fall, we could have two or three time the energy we are consuming. What will we do with all that energy?

" Glad to hear you favor eliminating Price Anderson. Your posting indicates you think the nuclear industry shouldn't have to insure against a worst case scenario.  What value do you think they should be responsible for?  "

The existing $10 billion is plenty.

" I'm also interested in your views on the link between nuclear power and weapons proliferation.  There's interesting testimony on this topic by Sharon Squassoni "

Here are some comments;

http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Technology/Grand ...

http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan ...

Additional comments on security and solar power are listed here.

http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan ...

http://science-community.sciam.com/profile/Hannahan/30000 ...

Nucbuddy, thanks for the fig leaf note.

The main problem I have with Sharon's comment is that she assumes there is some other technology that can replace fossil fuel at an affordable cost.

Reducing U.S. emissions is not important. Developing a low cost replacement for fossil fuel that the entire world can afford should be our goal. Wasting money on mass production of impractical expensive systems is counterproductive.

What are the many solutions, distributed or point source, that can provide 1.5GW of reliable dispatchable power 24 hours a day?

Show us a cost estimate for a 1.5 GW solar or wind array with reliable dispatchable power and a 0.90 (to eliminate the debate) capacity factor. Now show us a cost estimate for an array east of the Mississippi river with the same specifications. How many such arrays are in operation now? Where can we review their actual performance, construction cost, O&M cost, reliability, emissions, capacity factor, life expectancy and cost per kWh?

Show us a cost and reliability estimate of the required grid for moving the energy from where wind and solar sources are best to where most people live.

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level the field

"  Under any circumstance, nuclear should be forced to compete as one of many solutions to these problems, "

I agree, but what are the many solutions that can provide 1.5GW of reliable dispatchable power 24 hours a day?

Show us a cost estimate for a 1.5 GW solar or wind plant with reliable dispatchable power and a 0.90 (to eliminate the debate) capacity factor. Now show us a cost estimate for a plant east of the Mississippi river with the same specifications. How many such plants are in operation now? Where can we review their actual performance, construction cost, O&M cost, reliability, emissions, capacity factor, life expectancy and cost per kWh?

Show us a cost and reliability estimate of the required grid for moving the energy from where wind and solar sources are best to where most people live.

" Based on experts I've spoken to, many expect that current funding rates for funding Yucca will be insufficient to cover the full provision of the service.  "

Very improbable since the waste quantity and decay time diminishes as reactor technology improves. Burial in deep sea bed mud would be much cheaper. Adding another 0.1 cents per kWh would double the money supply and that is insignificant compared to the rate increase if we require fossil fuels to pay for the damage done by their emissions.

Start by accessing the $175 billion per year death fee for coal. That adds 8.8 cents to each coal kWh, add in the non fatal health effects of coal and call it 10 cents per kWh. Add a CO2 global warming fee of 3 cents per kWh to coal making it 13 cents per kWh. Assume coal now costs 4 cents per kWh at the buss bar, 8 cents per kWh delivered. With the new fees coal power will cost 21 cents per kWh.

Now let the utilities choose whatever they want to build that is less expensive than coal.

" There is a second and perhaps more important issue as well.  That involves the shifting of fuel cycle risks from the private investors to the public. "

I agree. It would be better if the government had given the industry the authority to develop the waste solution under appropriate supervision. Imagine what would have happened to the oil, gas and coal industries if they were required to pay the government to dispose of their wastes, including atmospheric dumping, which are actually produced in huge volumes vs. 20 pounds of high level nuclear waste per 80 year lifetime.

This is a golden opportunity for some country with well educated populace to acquire a huge cash cow by taking advantage of our irrational fear and offering to bury the worlds spent fuel. At 0.1 cents per kWh we would pay them $10,800 to bury our 20 pounds of fuel rods, which decay in a short span of geologic time. Meanwhile we are left with huge amounts of lead arsenic mercury cadmium etc, which have an infinite half life, and go into shallow landfills that will in many cases wash out in a very short span of geologic time, just as toxic as the day they went in.

" Price Anderson caps on nuclear accident liability create similar problems for the incentive structure of firms, and for the comparative economics of various energy choices by artificially reducing reactor operating costs. "

We should eliminate Price Anderson and treat the nuclear industry the same way we treat all other industries, corporations and individuals, none of which are covered for the worst event anyone can imagine.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/2/75132/75324/#co ...

Coal plants are killing over 20,000 Americans each year. That is a $175 billion loss each year that the coal plants are not paying for, a virtual subsidy.

http://michigan.sierraclub.org/traverse/coalproblems.htm

http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update70_data.htm ...

 " There are challenges to building complex, large scale capital and these exist well beyond the energy sector. "  

Agreed. That is why we should increase R&D to $90 billion per year (only 2.25 cents/kWh) and push every technology as hard as possible. That would include building at least one full scale commercial size plant of every promising technology. Actual performance data would give companies and individuals confidence to make large scale investments rapidly in new and proven technology. This would accelerate the introduction of practical solutions and is much more sensible than providing feed in tariffs to mass produce expensive immature impractical technology that raises cost enormously while remaining largely dependent on fossil fuel, as Denmark and Germany have proven with electricity costs around 30 cents / kWh.

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follow up

"
BILL HANNAHAN wrote: Power Point technology
What does that term mean? "

A high tech slide show sometimes used to depict someone's view of the future, often based on unproven assumptions that support the author's point of view.

" $1.6 billion times 100 years is $160 billion. Adding interest might bring the total to several trillion dollars. "

Good guess Nucbuddy. Assuming a present value of 30 billion, annual payment of .8 billion, 6% rate, the fund will be at 14,900 billion in 100 yrs. In reality the payments will grow rapidly as nuclear power grows.

http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_ca ...

When breeder reactors come on line the 80 year lifetime production of high level waste will go from 20 pounds of spent fuel from first generation reactors, to six ounces of fission products dissolved in a few pounds of glass, of which only 0.7 ounces will still be radioactive at end of life.

" Well also of course, Bill is BSing on the 95% capacity factor. "

 " Limerick Unit 2 led all Exelon units on the list with a gross capacity factor of 101.67 percent....  Byron Unit 2 in Byron, Ill.; LaSalle Unit 2 in Brookfield Township, Ill.; and Limerick Unit 2 near Pottstown, Pa. All had capacity factors greater than 100 percent, which means the generators produced more electricity than they are theoretically rated to produce by their manufacturers. "

http://www.exeloncorp.com/aboutus/news/pressrelease/power ...

Our 1960's design nuclear power plants rarely achieve 95%, but we are not comparing them with 1660's era solar power plants.

Next generation reactors take advantage of the lessons learned from first generation plants. They have reduced the number of components and use inherently safe systems vs. active safety systems. Capacity factor should improve.

Liquid fuel reactors will be continuously refueled eliminating refueling outages.

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Re Gar's proposal

I like everything except the subsidy, #5. If we charge the right price for dumping harmful waste into the atmosphere no subsidies are needed. The cost per kWh will ramp up as oil prices have until other options become practical and fill the gap.

Denmark and Germany are paying 20-30 cents per kWh

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/elecprih.html

due to subsidies for impractical technology, and get most of their electricity from fossil fuel.

At 20 cents per kWh a 1.5 GW nuc plant will earn $1.8 billion per year. If the plant cost a whopping $10 billion, it would pay itself off in less then 10 years, and then produce power for about 2 cents per kWh.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

Show me a cost estimate for a 1.5 GW solar or wind plant with reliable dispatchable power and a 0.95 capacity factor. Now show me a cost estimate for the same plant east of the Mississippi river.

Power Point technology is almost always better than proven technology, but in this case, 1970 nuclear reactor technology is a bargain even at the highest cost estimates.

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Fair and balanced?

" We would have to quadruple the number of reactors to 400, which would take decades ....

we have to deal with some 1.1 percent annual electricity growth, which means we'll need more than 600 nukes in 2050....

We import more than 12 million barrels of oil a day....

If 80 percent of that electricity comes from nuclear power, then that is -- very conservatively -- another 100 nukes....

To satisfy McCain's odd desire to be like the French and get 80 percent of our electricity from nuclear power in the coming decades would require building more than 700 (gw-sized) nuclear power plants by mid-century -- more than one a month... "

Wow, you convinced me Joseph, with electric transportation and growth we are going to need 700 GW of reliable high capacity factor generation by 2050!

" That's why I have little doubt that if we can move beyond the uninformed platitudes of people like McCain and ever really get serious about global warming and peak oil, then the realistic, affordable solution is at hand -- namely energy efficiency to avoid significant load growth, "

Joseph, you use the worst imaginable assumptions to calculate the required reactor construction, and then call for no growth because your proposed solar plan cannot handle it.

Don't look now but I think your bias is showing.

Most next generation plants will be in the 1,500 Mw range. The number of plants needed would be much less.

" Although we have been unable as a country to agree on even one storage site for our existing nukes' radioactive waste (Yucca Mountain), the McCain plan would require seven such sites -- "

The capacity limit is political, it can take any amount. Seabed disposal would be more sensible.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm ...

" Dontcha think the country could find a better use for that kind of money in the effort to avoid catastrophic global warming and the harsh consequences of peak oil -- "

I have yet to see a better plan. Joseph, what is your grand plan to provide 700 GW of production (not just data plates) to replace all fossil and nuclear power? Show us your cost estimate for 700GW of reliable, dispatchable, affordable, power, 365 days per year by 2050.

CSP? What is the cost with storage for worst case weather, how do you handle seasonal variation,  and how do you distribute it around the country without creating a terrorists delight that they could use kill millions?

http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan ...

" So, where would we get all our uranium from? "

We have affordable uranium to support 10 billion people at the U.S. level for 400 years without breeders, the supply is unlimited with breeders.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/2/75132/75324/#9

" the cost to build a nuclear plant is about the same as deconstruction costs the large amts of water used cost a lot  according to Lester Brown...as a matter of fact study Lester Brown Jean Polar Bear "

Show your calculations and references.

Water is no problem.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/2/75132/75324/#32 ...

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I used the reference for cooling tower.

"
http://greyfalcon.net/nuclearwater.png
You wouldn't happen to be using Open Loop Cooling for those evaporation numbers, now would you?
"

Middle of the page, 400-720 gal/MWhe. I used 500 gal/MWhe, 0.5 gal/kWhe, for a cooling tower. Of course I could have used 0.4 gal/ MWhe for open loop or 0.0 gal/MWhe for dry nuclear just below it. Thanks for the excellent reference.

When a nuclear plant withdraws a million gallons of water from a river, a million gallons of warm water goes back into the river, actually a little more since water expands when heated, but the same mass.

When a farmer withdraws a million gallons of water from a river to irrigate his corn, none of it comes back hopefully, because any runoff will be contaminated with fertilizer, salt and insecticide.

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Some comments

"Make nuclear industry 100% liable for waste disposal - including cost overruns. (Every other industry is.) "

That's fine if the government give back all the money it has collected for this purpose and gives the industry the authority to implement a good solution.

"Repeal other nuclear subsidies offered for new nukes."

What would they be?

"Ever nuclear reactor built now has some sort of political opposition. "

Earth is still flush with fossil fuel, real shortages and sky high prices will adjust opinion.

I was brainwashed by Ralph Nader and his disciples into thinking nuclear power was a bad idea. I took my first course in nuclear engineering to get the facts to support my antinuclear position. I encourage everyone who is antinuclear to take a course in nuclear power. We would be much better off if energy engineering was included in every high school curriculum.

"Nuclear power is that it can't gain private financing, due to it's risky/slow returns on investment. And without healthy return rates, it can't plow returns back into creating more growth. "

No problem on a level playing field, why are you so afraid of a level field?

" Supposedly, more nuclear fuel can be bred in fast breeder reactors using depleted uranium and thorium but not even the russians or chinese are using these technologies to significant extent."  

At what price does uranium become expensive?

If all our electricity was made with coal, a years supply of coal (14,200 lb) cost $218 in 2005 and is much higher now and climbing. A year's supply of natural gas (115,000 cubic feet) cost $850 in 2005.

 To make all U.S. electricity with current reactor designs, we only need 0.72 pounds / year / person.

For uranium to match the price of coal or natural gas, using current reactor technology, the uranium price would be $303 or $1,180 dollars per pound respectively.

Using breeder reactors we need 0.35 pounds / 80 year lifetime.

For uranium to match the price of coal or natural gas using breeder reactors, the uranium price would be $51,500 or $194,000 dollars per pound respectively.

The average American paid $1,100 for electricity in 2005. Uranium cost is a small fraction of what we pay for nuclear electricity, about 0.2 cents per kWh. Uranium price spikes have little effect on our bill.

These numbers come from this paper

http://www.nuclearcoal.com/ENERGY%20REV%20X1.pdf

based on calculations and references from this spreadsheet.

http://www.nuclearcoal.com/ENERGY%20CALCS%20REV%207.xls

My thanks to Jim Holm for hosting my paper on his site.

http://www.nuclearcoal.com/

Reports in the 1970's estimated the cost of extracting uranium from sea water at $1,500 to $2,000 per pound. R&D has reduced that to about $200 per pound, of uranium.

http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html

http://www.taka.jaea.go.jp/eimr_div/j637/theme3%20sea_e.h ...

http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/2006 ...

The oceans contain 4.6 billion tons of uranium, half of which is sufficient to support 10 billion people at the U.S. level for 400 years using first generation reactors and over 30,000 years with breeders. In reality the oceans are continuously supplied with uranium by the erosion of land, so the uranium supply is effectively unlimited.

We do not need breeders for a long time but we should move forward with breeder R&D to reduce mining and waste volumes.

Why are there no sea water uranium extraction plants?

Historically price has been under $60 / pound with a few big spikes.

http://www.uxc.com/review/uxc_g_hist-price.html

http://www.uxc.com/review/uxc_g_2yr-price.html

U3O8 is 85% uranium by weight.

Would you bet your life savings on uranium staying above $200 / lb? I don't think so, and neither do professional investors, however if sea water technology keeps improving the cost may drop enough to make it happen sooner than most people think.

Sea water uranium is very important because it puts a cap of $200/pound on the maximum sustainable cost of uranium for thousands of years.

Sea water uranium does not have to supply all of our uranium in order to cap the uranium price at $200/pound. It only has to replace the percentage of land based uranium sources that cost more than $200/pound, and that percentage is zero for the foreseeable future.

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Thanks for the correction

" Hmmm BILL, seems to be a huge rise in generation in 2007.  "Americans paid $327 trillion for electricity in 2007." "

Glad to see that somebody is paying attention.

Actually Americans paid $327 billion for electricity in 2006.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epates.html

" Coal's share of total net generation continued its slow decline over the past decade, from its peak of 52.8 percent in 1997 to 49.0 percent in 2006." "

Wow, the problem will be almost solved in 100 years if growth stops now, why worry?

" The Nuclear industry would have to fight like mad just to maintain the status quo....

SolarThermal, GeoThermal, on the other hand, they really don't have any meaningful production bottlenecks to speak of.  Competitive in open markets, with the ability to get private investment in spades, a relatively fast return on investment, and can be cited and built quickly. "

Here is my proposal.

Level the playing field and let the marketplace sort it out. Start by accessing the $174 billion per year death fee for coal. That adds 8.8 cents to each coal kWh, add in the non fatal health effects of coal and call it 10 cents per kWh. Add a CO2 global warming fee of 3 cents per kWh to coal making it a 13 cents per kWh. Assume coal now costs 4 cents per kWh at the buss bar, 8 cents per kWh delivered. With the new fees coal power will cost 21 cents per kWh.

Now let the utilities choose whatever they want to build that is less expensive than coal.

 They will start with natural gas turbines, driving the cost of natural gas sky high. Next they will build windmills and solar cells as fast as possible, but intermittent sources run into reliability problems when they become a substantial fraction of the total supply, and large scale storage is expensive and environmentally problematic.

Then they will build nuclear plants. At 16 cents per kWh our existing fleet of nuclear power plants will earn $126 billion per year. With that kind of income the nuclear industry can afford to build new foundries for large forgings and facilities to mass produce floating nuclear plants. Each new 1.5 GW nuclear plant can earn  $1.9 billion per year, paying for itself in just a few years. There are no limitations on nuclear scalability at that price.

If you really hate nuclear then join my call for a massive increase in R&D. It gives us the best chance of finding something affordable that is better than fission.

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It's not a tax

The problem is with the word tax. It is a fee on the dumping of toxic harmful waste into the atmosphere. Imposing fees on the dumping of toxic waste encourages people to shop around for better options.

Unfortunately we have doled out R&D money with an eye dropper for several decades, so there are limited options to transition to. Using the fees to accelerate the development of new options would be a good idea.

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Energy consumption is not the problem

Emissions are the problem.

The solar power intercepted by the earth is 175,500,000,000,000,000 watts. Dividing by earth's population, 6.5 billion, reveals that earth receives 27 million watts of solar power for each human on the planet. That's not just at high noon on a clear day, that's 24 hours a day every day.  

The 11,300 watts that support our lives equals 0.04% of our share of solar incidence.

Developing energy sources that are low emission and cheaper than fossil fuel is the best way to reduce emissions.

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The premise is faulty

Calling for more R&D does not mean we are betting our future on an improbable breakthrough like cold fusion. The vast majority of the money would be spent on evolving existing technologies. Better batteries, fuel cells, reactors, solar cells etc.

We should spend $90 billion on R&D to push every technology as hard as possible and build demo plants of everything.

Adding 2.25 cents per kWh would pay for it.

Denmark and Germany are paying 20 to 30 cents per kWh by forcing the implementation of expensive impractical technology, without solving the world's emission problem.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/elecprih.html

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Now is the right time.

I always thought it was crazy to pump our domestic oil while foreign oil was abundant and cheap.

I believe that genetic engineering will eventually develop relatively inexpensive technology to make renewable liquid fuel.

The gentleman pointed out that we should not drill IN Alaska. Our offshore deposits are orders of magnitude greater than onshore resources.

We should develop our offshore oil now to maximize their benefit by reducing the price of oil and our trade deficit, and making us independent of our enemies during this transition.

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Wind kWh's are not the same as conventional kWh's

" Compare the options.  This is an article containing a graph from "The economist" from 2004, no advocate for wind power.

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2005/7/10/192721/947
"

The problem is that wind is not reliable or dispatchable, it is intermittent and unpredictable. Conventional power plants provide voltage and frequency stability to the grid, while windmills subtract stability from the grid.

http://www.eon-netz.com/Ressources/downloads/EON_Netz_Win ...

Windmills need conventional backup plants so the only savings is the cost of fuel not consumed when the wind blows.

So, when you look at the graph from "The economist" you should compare the total cost of wind with the fuel cost of nuclear.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

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Just level the playing field and stand back.

This interview is another great argument for taxing emissions at the best estimated cost of the damage they do and using the money for energy R&D and construction of  demo plants of every possible technology.

It will not result in the perfect solution that pleases everybody, but it will result in the best outcome in the shortest time, within the limitations of reality.

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Grow up

" Just because "the most primitive people" (a slur on said people to be sure) "

LS
The word primitive is not inherently good or evil though it can be used either way. Your delight in misrepresenting peoples intent in an attempt to embarrass them is a cheap shot that reflects on you, not them.

The quality of life for the average person living under capitalism is far better then the average person living under any other ism.

The explosion of technology did not occur because of capitalism, rather the ism's were enabled because technology gave people the spare time to dabble in such things.

For billions of years life has been regulated by four natural feedback control mechanisms.

Starvation

Disease

Exposure

Predation

Nobody wants to starve to death, freeze to death or be eaten by a grizzly bear. Primitive humans used their magnificent brains to develop technology to suppress these feedback control mechanisms, e.g. weapons, medicine, the control of fire, clothing, farming.

As a result the population has been exploding in what engineers call "open loop mode" ever since.

Exponential growth cannot go on forever, feedback mechanisms will arise, and they will fit in one of two categories, natural or unnatural.

Our goal should be to develop a set of unnatural control mechanisms that are ethical and humane. I believe this could best be done in an environment of democracy and capitalism, opinions may vary.

Unfortunately this subject is more radioactive than fresh spent reactor fuel, so we may have to learn to live, or die, with the natural feedback control mechanisms.

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Abundant energy is more humane

" If there is this "clean, abundant, safe and extremely cheap" energy source out there just waiting for us to discover it, why do we need an expensive research and development program (such that no other government can fund it) to make it happen? "

LS, you answered your own question. We need this "very inexpensive" (compared to Jon's plan) R&D program to maximize the probability that we will discover it first so that we can sell it to other countries rather than buying it from another country.

Remember, our dollars are not worth much these days because we do not have as much to sell as we used to when we were the most innovative and productive nation on the planet.

" Who is the "we" who needs those huge sources, "

The human race.

"  and why do "we" need those sources?  Wouldn't it be healthier just to live a low-energy lifestyle? "

No. Energy can be abundant and cheap or limited and expensive, limited and cheap is not an option. Abundant energy can be used to reduce the environmental impact of each human,  for example treating drinking water with UV rather than chlorine, eliminating coal plants, preserving land and water for food production.

There is still the quality of life vs. quantity of life issue. You can plot those parameters on a graph, actually a family of curves with each curve depending on the level of technology assumed. By improving the technology you can shift the population up to a higher curve, not that I offer that as an excuse for overpopulation, just a humane thing to do under the circumstances.

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It's time to get serious about R&D

The probability that we have now discovered all of the best ways to produce energy is essentially zero. It is very likely that 100 years from now energy will be clean, abundant, safe and extremely cheap.

Each one cent increase in the cost of a kWh of electricity costs every man woman and child in the U.S. $132 per year. With 300 million Americans it is a $40 billion / cent cost increase. That is why mandating the use of impractical expensive energy systems like wind biofuel and existing solar technology is impractical.

In reality reducing U.S. emissions now is of minor importance. If we eliminated all of our greenhouse emissions tomorrow, the developing world will gobble up the savings in a relatively short period of time.

The most important goal for the U.S. should be to accelerate the use of our technical capacity to develop technology that is so inexpensive it can be implemented quickly all over the world. People will make the switch quickly and voluntarily, not kicking and screaming.

Expensive boutique energy systems will not curtail world CO2 emissions. We need huge sources of cheap non-carbon energy.

This is why the U.S. should increase R&D spending for non fossil energy sources from $3.00 per person per year to $300.00 per person, $90 billion / year.

We should be pushing every technology as hard as possible and building demo plants of each as it becomes possible, to accelerate the development of cheap clean abundant energy.

A gold plated wind, solar or bio fuel plan that is barely affordable in the U.S. will not solve the worlds energy problems.

Accelerating the development of cheap energy systems is the greatest and cheapest gift we can provide for future generations.

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Show us your math

JMG, here is a quote from your first reference.

" For example, the energy input required from mining and processing uranium ore to its use in a power plant that costs huge amounts of energy to build and operate cannot be offset by power production in a high growth scenario. "

Nuclear reactor fuel assemblies costs 0.485 cents per kWh in 2006.
Coal cost was 2.32 cents per kWh, 5 times nuclear.
Natural gas was 5.25 cents per kWh, 10.8 times nuclear.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

If it takes so much energy to make fuel assemblies, how can they make them so inexpensively.

If nuclear plants sell their electricity for 6 cents per kWh, which is a huge bargain compared to gas, the income to fuel cost  ratio is 12.4

Where is the spread sheet with the reference's  assumptions and calculations?

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Wind does not replace coal

In 1979 the government of Denmark initiated a 30% subsidy for the cost of building windmills. In 1999 they guaranteed wind power producers 85% of retail, 9 cents per kWh, for all the power they could make. They imposed a tax on fossil fuel to provide an additional 3.8 cents per kWh to wind producers.
Compare that with the cost to make electricity in the U.S. in 2006; hydroelectric 0.9 cents per kWh, coal 3.0 cents per kWh, natural gas turbine 5.8 cents per kWh, nuclear 1.9 cents per kWh.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

Denmark has the, ideal combination of optimum factors for wind.
A population committed to wind power
A government committed to wind power
High energy prices
Low energy consumption
Large price guarantees
Large government subsidies
A small country with short transmission distances, each person lives within 50 miles of a shoreline
Surrounding water creates mild winters and summers
Excellent wind conditions for land and sea based wind farms year-round
Mature in country wind turbine industry

Denmark's huge wind subsidies have resulted in the highest electricity prices in the world, 29.5 cents per kWh in 2005, vs. 9.5 cents per kWh in the U.S.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/elecprih.html

Denmark also imports substantial amounts of nuclear power.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf99.html

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Provide an effective solution

The U.S. population is past 300 million headed for 350 million, due largely to immigration, legal and illegal.

After WWII the U.S. population was 150 million. Had we stabilized it at that level we would need half as much oil, gas, electricity, water, fertilizer etc. Our roads would be half as crowded. We would have more natural forests and grasslands. We would have large areas of farmland in reserve for use during drought, volcanic eruptions etc. Our global warming impact would be half what it is now.

The U.S. calls itself a super power, but if you look at a globe you will see that it is not big enough to be the world's safety valve, or even North America's safety valve.

The best way to stop the wall is to present a more effective solution that will actually work. For example;

Throw people in jail for hiring illegals.  

A national ID card and driver's license.

Require people to pay the full first generation cost of having more than two children.

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Why all the pessimism Joe?

"Romm's Rule says that for any new energy technology that is not yet commercial (and in this case we have a "concept" for which the patent was still pending in November), take the inventor's highest projected cost and double it. Also, flip a coin, and if it comes up heads the technology will never be commercialized"

Early solar cells cost $28 / watt. Applying Romm's rule we should have abandoned that idea decades ago, also transistors, lasers, gas turbines etc. Think of all the R&D money we would have saved.

Imagine a nuclear powered aircraft carrier that can make fuel for its jets and support ships out of thin air. This technology will be developed by the DOD and civilian applications will get the scraps that fall off the table, as it was with civilian nuclear power, even though the civilian applications will be much more beneficial than the military ones.

The world contains abundant raw materials for making steel, concrete and reactor fuel. We can gear up to mass produce any number of floating nuclear power plants  and floating nuclear gasoline plants we want.

We don't need any yucca mountains. Deep sea bed disposal of spent fuel mimics the natural process in which millions of tons of uranium ore wash into the sea each year, and converting uranium into fission products will make the earth less radioactive in the long run.

The analysis makes no mention of a price on CO2. a carbon tax or cap n trade would make the economics more attractive.

In a decade or so the world is going to be flooded with tiny cheap econobox cars burning liquid fuel. An econobox getting 60 mpg burning $4.60 / gal recycled CO2 will cost no more to run than a 30 mpg car burning $2.30 fossil carbon, which is less than most people pay to drive today.

We should be moving full speed ahead with this idea.

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A couple more links.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/02/los-alamos-deve.h ...

http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/GreenFree ...
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/02/los-alamos-deve.h ...

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Energy use is not intrinsically harmful.

"What if electricity was twice as expensive to the consumer per unit but they used half as much in their homes? Perhaps an increase the price of energy will nudge us towards using it more wisely."

Scatter, only one third of the electricity that supports our lives is used in the home. It is widely believed that the use of energy is bad for the environment, and any reduction in energy use is therefore good.

In reality the sun delivers 27 million watts of energy to the earth per person. Our energy use is insignificant, it is the emissions from some sources that are harmful.

By developing a source of abundant cheap clean energy we can do things to reduce environmental impact like;

Use UV light to purify drinking water instead of chlorine.

Desalinate massive quantities of sea water instead of damming and draining streams and rivers.

Eliminate the pressure to use up our precious top soil, water  and phosphate deposits on  a foolish attempt to generate biofuel, thereby sacrificing future generation's food supply.

Most importantly, people will quickly and voluntarily switch to a clean source of energy cheaper than fossil fuel.

Solar is the most expensive energy source yet devised by man and wind is second. When people become aware of their true cost, resistance will be high and our dependence on fossil fuel will be extended, as in Denmark and Germany.

"Nuclear is not the only way forwards."

I think nuclear would do well on a level playing field but the N word does not appear in my four point recommendation. If a less expensive technology evolved that would be great.

Trock did a great job expanding on point 1    Place a substantial world wide tax on CO2 emissions.

Point 2, Use the money to increase R&D funding for low emissions energy sources 100 fold. This is the most important step in creating energy sources cheaper than fossil fuels. U.S. spending on energy R&D is trivial in comparison to the magnitude of the problem.

People who call for big subsidies of their pet projects are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

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the reality of solar

 Electricity would cost a comfortable 5 cents per kilowatt hour.

Ha, that's a joke. The authors claim that by 2020 solar might get down to 10 - 15 cents per kWh in today's money. Now it is much higher than that.

Solar today is at about 15 c/kWh in the desert, and all we need is something like 10; but we think we can get to 6, with time and money - so 10 c/kWh fully dispatchable (or 15 c/kWh, worst case).

http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan ...

The authors ducked the tough questions on the Grand Solar Plan.

1 Let's assume it is 2100 and this vision is fully implemented as proposed.

Assume that we are terrorists who hate Americans and have sworn to kill as many Americans as possible.

We will not drop a bomb on a field of solar collectors. We will use small shaped charges to drop every HVDC power line crossing the Mississippi river, into the Mississippi river. Most wind power is west of the Mississippi river, so it will also be cut off.

We will watch the weather channel, and pick a time when they predict that a huge mass of arctic cold air will flow down from Canada generating record cold temperatures from Maine to Florida, as happened a couple of weeks ago. Or we will attack during a record heat wave such as the summer heat wave of 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_North_American_heat_wav ...

The eastern U.S. will be under blackout conditions for at least a week. That combined with extreme weather conditions will result in a death toll in the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands.

a) Is this scenario possible? If not, why not?

b) If it is, do you agree that utilities will not be able to buy insurance coverage for it?

2 Under the solar plan the local utility will buy solar power at 11 cents per kWh corrected for inflation to the present.

Power from new nuclear plants is expected to cost about 5 cents per kWh until the plants are paid off, then much less, so the difference is at least 6 cents per kWh.

http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm

The U.S. consumes over 4000 TWh now. That number is projected to be 29,000 TWh by 2100, let's assume an average of 10,000 TWh from now till then.

With a difference of 6 cents per kWh, the solar option will cost consumers $600 billion more than the nuclear option each year.

Over the next 92 years solar will cost consumers $55,000 billion more. That is 131 times the $420 billion subsidy called for in the paper. The subsidy is just the tip of the iceberg.

Assuming an average population of 350 million the average additional cost of solar will be $1,710 per year per person, $6860 per year, every year, for a family of four.

a) If congress proposed a bill to raise taxes on a middle class family of four by $6860 per year, every year, to pay for the marginal cost of solar, how far would it get?

b) Is it ethical to tell people solar is a one time cost of $420 billion spread over 12 years when actually that is a tiny fraction of the real cost?

The countries pushing renewables the hardest have the highest energy prices and generate most of their electricity from fossil fuels.

Denmark is in the lead at 29.5 cents/kWh, due to its huge push in wind power since 1979. Germans pay 21 cents/kWh, and it has recently put up a huge subsidy for solar, over 40 cents / kWh. It will be interesting to see what happens, my bet is that in a few years it will push them into the lead in the race for most expensive electricity in the world. Netherlands pays 25.8 cents/kWh, due to their huge wind subsidies.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/elecprih.html

France is among the lowest in electricity cost and emissions in Europe because it is 80% nuclear.

3    I see no discussion of backup power plant capacity or its cost. Suppose a large winter cold front settles in over the desert SW cutting off most of the energy. The compressed air runs out.

a) What happens next?

4 The proposed solar system will burn large quantities of natural gas or equivalent to reheat the compressed air.

From previous comments;

"Adding this 300 Btu/kWh to the CAES power plant fuel consumption of 4,100 Btu/kWh gives us total fossil fuel consumption of 4,400 Btu/kWh.

The end result is fossil fuel efficiency of 3,412 Btu out / 4,400 Btu in, which is a 78% efficiency...

our net energy efficiency is 48%, which is somewhat less than what you calculate using Succar's compression energy estimate. Regardless of how you cut it, PV-CAES improves the efficiency of simple-cycle peak gas turbine power plants by 55-60%. And in terms of fossil fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions the improvements are even greater."

Natural gas turbines have demonstrated 60% efficiency.

http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=54943

Since the authors assume big improvements in solar and CAES efficiency, it seams barely fair to compare it with proven state of the art gas turbines.

At 60% efficiency the turbine will need 5,687 Btu to make one kWh of electricity.

The solar - CAES system needs 4,400 thermal Btu to make one kWh of electricity.

The reduction in fuel consumption from using solar and CAES is;

(5687 - 4400)/5687 = 0.226 = 23%

Not the 66% savings claimed in the paper.

5 The fuel cost for the current fleet of natural gas turbines operating at 40% efficiency is 52.46 mills per kWh. Upgrading to 60% efficient machines would reduce fuel cost to 35 mills per kWh.

Nuclear reactor fuel costs 4.85 mills per kWh.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

By using expensive photovoltaic electricity to compress air, the solar system can reduce the natural gas consumption 23% below the best turbine. The natural gas fuel cost is reduced to 27.1 mills per kWh, which is still 5.6 times higher then the cost of reactor fuel, and the reactors do not emit CO2.

Natural gas provides about 20% of the U.S. 4000 TWh / year of electricity, 800 TWh / yr. If electricity consumption goes to 29,000 TWh as projected, and if 70% of that energy passed through a CAES system, it will be 20,300 TWh of stored energy / year.

That is 25.4 times the amount of electricity that is produced by natural gas today. The CAES system will require 13.1 times the amount of natural gas or natural gas equivalent we are using now.

a) How much land will be dedicated to producing that much bio gas?

b) What will it cost?

c) Is that cost included in the published cost estimate of 11 cents per kWh?

If we can produce that much bio gas in 2100 at an affordable price then the smart move would be to produce 29% more bio gas which would allow us to eliminate CAES completely and replace it with 60% efficient gas turbines. This would allow us to;

A) Eliminate the entire cost of the CAES system.

B) Reduce the size and cost of the solar collection systems by 70%.

C) Reduce the capacity of the HVDC power lines by 70%.

D) Provide a distributed array of gas turbines resulting in a stiff reliable grid, highly resistant to the threat of terrorism and natural disaster.

a) What are the thoughts on this change?

6 With 20,000+ Americans dying each year from coal, and considering the threat of global warming, waiting 20 years for solar to take off does not seem reasonable.

The report claims that by 2020 the cost of reliable solar kWh's may drop as low as 11 cents per kWh, if the improvements in solar cell efficiency and energy storage and transmission line cost advance according to projections.

Let us start providing 11 cents per kWh for any low emission electricity sources now, wind, solar, nuclear, wave, tidal, sequestered coal, geothermal etc. This will speed up the reduction of carbon emissions dramatically, and if solar is a good way to go it will acquire its fair share.

a) Do you support this recommendation?

b) If not, why not?

http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Technology/Grand ...

http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan ...

The authors provided no answers to these critical questions, clearly indicating that the plan is not practical.

The federal investment would be $400 billion over the next 40 years ($10 billion a year) to deploy renewable technologies and suitable transmission infrastructure.

That is just the tip of the iceberg. The increased rates will cost Americans an additional $600 billion per year.

As for the nuclear power industry, it receives about $9 billion in taxpayer subsidies each year

Most of that is defense related.

The budget request for commercial nuclear power is about $2 billion.

Nuclear power produces about 20% of our electricity, so lets eliminate that huge $2 billion of pork and make nuclear power stand or fall on its own merits.

While were at it lets give back the $5 billion in taxes  collected by local state and federal government agencies on the sale of nuclear power.

And nuclear power is one of our cheapest sources of electricity, O&M cost 2 cents / kWh.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

So lets add two cents / kWh of nuclear power sold, to be used for nuclear power R&D and to back loan guarantees in support of new nuclear plants construction.

That would be $15.8 billion / year.

P.S.  Don't try this approach with so called "renewables", the cash flow would be pitiful.

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where is the data?

The nuclear subsidy number is pulled out of thin air with no references. Show us an itemized list of the subsidy costs of commercial nuclear power to the tax payer.

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we use a lot of water

This 560MW natural gas power plant over here eats up 1200 million gallons of water.

Wow, for a minute there I thought maybe you found the cure for sea level rise, until I looked up the quote.

"Each day, roughly 1.2 billion gallons of water are cycled through the power plant."

A nuclear power plant releases about 2 kWh of heat for each kWh of electricity produced. For the worst case example lets assume all our electricity comes from fission and all the heat goes into evaporating water.

The average American lifestyle uses 1,550 watts, 37.2 kWh / day. The waste heat would be 74.4 kWh / day. 1 kWh = 3,412 Btu, so the waste heat is 254,000 btu/day. It takes about 1,100 btu to evaporate 1 pound of water starting at 80 deg, so the worst case evaporation rate is 230 pounds per day, 27.6 gallons per day. Since most of our electricity comes from steam plants we probably evaporate a substantial fraction of this now.

In year 2000 the U.S. used 408 billion gallons of water per day.

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/waterproperties.html

Assuming a population of 295 million that is an average of 1,338 gal / day / person, of which the worst case evaporation rate would be about 2%.

This is a drop in the bucket compared to the water needed to grow a substantial amount of bio fuel, even cellulosic bio fuel.

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INTERESTING FACTS

Splitting 5.4 ounces of uranium atoms will release as much energy as burning 1,100,000 pounds of coal which would release 2,400,000 pounds of CO2.

That is enough heat to generate a lifetime supply of electricity for an average American.

The 5.4 ounces of fission products are less radioactive than uranium ore in 300 years.

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Dump economics

Bill Hanahan -- I can see where carbon taxes might help with cargo ship emissions, but not with pollution being exported (i suppose you could have carbon taxes in China?) or abandoning domestic inftrastructure

Exactly right Jon.
If you take a load of trash to the city dump, you pay a fee to dump your load. If the dump has a back gate that is standing wide open, unguarded, business at the front gate will diminish as people learn about the back gate.

The Kyoto treaty had more back gates than front gates. Polluting industries and their jobs move to where the back gates are. It has to be a worldwide treaty. If the vast majority of countries agree to participate they can apply heavy pressure on the malingerers. Otherwise, batten down the hatches and prepare for global warming.

There is one other option. Develop clean, safe abundant sources of energy that are cheaper than fossil fuel. People will voluntarily switch as quickly as possible. That is why I support expanding funding of R&D for new energy sources 100 fold.

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water from gas

Actually it is about one gallon of water / gallon of gasoline burned.

http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/how-to-turn-8-p

But it takes 3,000 gallons of water to grow the corn for one gallon of ethanol.
On FutureGen "clean coal" demonstration plant slated for Illinois posted 1 year, 11 months ago 26 Responses

More Cost Data

I added some transmission cost data to my previous remarks.

3   

Figure 3 shows that,
while the guaranteed power generated by a single wind
farm for 92% of the hours of the year was 0 kW, the
power guaranteed by 7 and 19 interconnected farms
was 60 and 171 kW, giving firm capacities of 0.04 and
0.11, respectively. Furthermore, 19 interconnected wind
farms guaranteed 222 kW of power (firm capacity of
0.15) for 87.5% of the year, the same percent of the
year that an average coal plant in the United States
guarantees power.

A distributed array off 19 windfarms spread over the best wind territory of the U.S. can only guarantee 15% of rated output 87.5% of the time, and the downtime is not predictable, but most likely to occur at the worst of times.

4   

A final benefit of interconnecting wind farms is that
it can allow long-distance transmission from a common
point, where several farms are connected, to a highload
area to be reduced with little loss of transmitted
power. Suppose we want to bring power from N independent
farms (each with a maximum capacity of, say,
1500 kW), from the Midwest to California. Each farm would need a short transmission line of 1500 kW
brought to a common point in the Midwest. Between
the common point and California, the size of the transmission
line would normally need to be N _ 1500 kW.
However, because geographically disperse farms cause
slow winds in some locations to cancel fast winds in
others, the long-distance transmission line could be reduced
by 20% (to N _ 1200 kW) with only a small loss
(2% with N _ 19) in overall delivered power (Fig. 3).

Suppose California considered building a 1,500 MW nuclear plant in Amarillo Texas. They would need to build a 1500 MW transmission line to California. It would be at full capacity 90% of the time and zero 10% of the time during refueling and maintenance outages. The nuclear plant would cost about $5 billion, and the transmission line to California would cost about $1.47 per kWmile, $2.5 billion, total cost $7.5 billion.

http://www.oatioasis.com/AZPS/AZPSdocs/APS_Tran_Seminar_0 ...

Note that the transmission line cost, $1.47 per kWmile, does not include the cost of land. That could raise the total cost quite a bit, depending on the details of the route.

Or California could simply build the nuclear plant in California and save the transmission line cost and line loss.

To replace a 1500 MW nuclear plant with "reliable" wind power we need to install 9,000 MW of wind turbines. At $1.50 per Watt they will cost $13.5 billion, and we will need to replace them in 25 and 50 years, whereas the nuclear plant will last 60 years.

Each of the 19 wind farms would have a data plate rating of 474 MW.
To connect these farms to a central point will require on average 100 miles of 474 MW transmission line. At $1.47 per kW mi, the collection grid will cost $1.3 billion.

The 9,000 MW wind array could limit its transmission line capacity to California to 7,200 MW in exchange for a 2% loss, so they would have to build 5 transmission lines like the one for the nuclear plant, at a cost of $12 billion. The total cost to replace one nuclear plant with "reliable" wind power is $26.8 billion.

5    One of the biggest drawbacks of wind power is the daily and seasonal variation in power output.

http://www.energyprobe.org/energyprobe/articles/EPreviewo ...

An unbiased researcher would highlight these weaknesses in the narrative and graphically. These authors do not mention the problem and the report homogenizes  a year of data in such a way that the graphs completely hide these factors.

 Lets stop pretending that wind can be reliable. It is distorting our perspective on energy and it is going to get people killed if we act on that belief.  

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reliability

It is not the AMOUNT of wind capacity that brings reliability, but the distribution.

Well, how about the entire state of California, down to 4% when electric loads peaked during the 2006 heat wave.

http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Wind- ...

How about the entire U.S. , wind output was down 20% below average during the heat wave while the demand was 20% above average.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1_a.h ...

That is based on monthly averages. I would love to see a detailed graph of total U.S. wind output for one year, with one minute, or at least one hour resolution. I'll bet there are times when it is less than 10% of data plate rating.

My paper comes with a spreadsheet with all references and calculations. The internet is loaded with summaries of conclusions like this one, but I have yet to find a report of this type that provides all the data and calculations for review.

Even Amory Lovins released some spreadsheets, which revealed that his statements were not supported by the data.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/19/13959/922/#5

When wind conditions are good Denmark sells kWh's to its neighbors at fire sale prices, and when wind is bad the buy reliable kWh's at a higher price.

60 years for nuclear
25 years for wind
And you dinged wind for 1/3rd capacity twice
Effectively making it 1/9th capacity
Huh.

The lifetime ratio is 2.4 years of nuclear / year of wind. I dinged wind once for capacity factor of 0.3 and a factor of 3.0  for unreliability .

If a hydro reservoir receives only enough water to run the electric turbines at an average capacity factor of 0.3, you still have the option of cranking it up to 100% during the load peak,  and back to say 0.2 the rest of the time, not so with wind, as in the California example, 4% wind on peak.

Put in whatever coefficients you think are fair and show us what you come up with.

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Ralph Nader gets my vote.

By scaring Americans off of nuclear power, coal surged ahead, killing 20,000+ Americans each year, more than Osama has killed in his whole life.

http://www.cleartheair.org/dirtypower/docs/dirtyAir.pdf

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Please explain

If it came down to coal or nuclear, I'd go nuclear but that is not the choice at hand. Your arguments mostly depend on future, unproven technologies and also don't solve all problems.

Bio,
That is an ironic statement, because in reality fission is the only proven technology that can replace coal at this time at an affordable cost and with the required level of reliability.

I would like to see your proposed design to replace coal using well proven technology, with a cost estimate, including the cost of backup energy sources, and a reliability analysis. I agree with you on this.

Until a given piece of technology passes the commercial viability test I don't much care to fantasize about it.

We can have abundant clean affordable energy for 400 years using safe well proven fission technology. Beyond that will require some R&D.

You give no examples, what do you see as the # 1 problem?

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Ethanol or snake oil?

Lovins book is impressive in its volume. I decided to take a close look at the aviation section to see how he could make such unbelievable claims.

If Amory Lovins can show Boeing how to reduce fuel consumption by 2/3 without sacrificing safety, performance or cost I am sure Boeing would be happy to make him a multimillionaire in exchange for that information. His statement that it can be done with known materials and technology is not credible.

A review of the attachments to his book shows that Lovins has combed research papers for ideas to improve aircraft performance. He assigned each one a generous fuel reduction factor. Here they are, with improvement factors.

Blended Wing Body, (BWB), 20%

Ultra Efficient Engine Technology, (UEET), 24%

Boundary Layer Ingestion, (BLI) and Active Flow Control, (AFC), 5.5%

"Filling the wake" and eliminating flaps, 3.9%

Improvement from a 2010 to a 2025 vintage, 20.7%    Very fuzzy language here but apparently improvements based on the use of even lighter materials in the future to reduce empty weight and fuel load.

Air traffic control system efficiency improvements, 11%   Clearly not an aircraft efficiency factor but he rolls it in here as if it is.

Load factor improvement, 5.1%  Another factor not related to aircraft efficiency.

These factors should be called "Potential 25 Year Beyond State of the Art Efficiency Factors". Amory Lovins deliberately mislabels these things as   "State of the Art" (SOA) , aircraft technology.

The casual reader is lead to believe that all of these concepts have been fully researched and developed, and are gathering dust on a shelf because the manufacturers are too lazy to implement them.

He assumes that we can scrap the entire existing fleet of planes and replace them, overnight, with a new fleet having all the new technology, then he calculates the difference in energy consumption, and says that this is the amount we are wasting. He wants to pressure airlines to scrap existing planes before they are worn out because his spreadsheet says that will save energy. He does not give credit for the energy consumed to manufacture existing planes, and he does not take a penalty for the energy consumed to make the new ones. He uses these same techniques for his other analyses as well.

The reality is that Boeing and Airbus are in a fierce fight for market share and they are doing everything possible to reduce fuel consumption without cutting margins so thin as to get a bunch of people killed.

A carbon fiber airbus fin snapped off a few years ago near New York City killing all aboard, and their new jumbo jet wing snapped during testing, below the design limit, they are not leaving any efficiency on the table. Boeing is swamped with orders for its newest plane, and is producing them as fast as possible.

BWB planes are slower then conventional airliners, trips will take more time and airlines will have to buy more seats for the same capacity factor.

For the past few hundred years technology has been emerging at a rapid pace, and will continue to do so. Amory Lovins will take credit for any of these technologies that pan out and will blame engineer's lack of creativity for those that don't, but the reality is that the progress of aviation is proceeding as quickly as possible and will not be affected by trendy reports out of Aspen.

Lovins may be the greatest snake oil salesman of our time. Of course, the best snake oil has some active ingredients, usually corn ethanol.

Humans have gone from wood to coal to oil.

Converting 13 ounces of uranium to fission products will release an 80 year lifetime supply of energy, not just electricity, for one average American. They will be less radioactive than uranium ore in 270 years.

That is the next big step.

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The price is going up

  the installed cost of an onshore wind project is projected to increase from an actual cost of Euro 1540/kw in 2003 to a forecasted cost of Euro 2940/kw by 2013. For an improving technology in a growing marketplace, this cost trend is clearly opposite of what should be expected. ...

also stated by Vestas was that players in the offshore wind industry have learned from their previous projects that they substantially underestimated actual costs and implementation risks (e.g., bad weather or heavy seas limiting installation productivities), and are now building "more realistic" contingency cushions into the economic projections of upcoming projects.  

http://www.cleantechblog.com/2007/12/offshore-wind-report ...

That's $4,330 U.S. dollars / kw of onshore wind. Assuming a .35 capacity factor, the cost / kw output is $12,370.

The cost for an average 990MW of output, equal to a large coal or nuc plant, is $12.2 billion. With luck they will last half as long as a nuc plant.

The cost of offshore windfarms will be much higher than the price quoted above, probably about double. That might explain this.

 On 5 December 2007, the German Cabinet presented its final draft of the Renewable Energies Act (EEG):

Initial feed-in tariffs for offshore wind energy projects are supposed to be raised from 9.1 ct/kWh at present to 14 ct/kWh if the respective wind turbines are commissioned by 31 December 2013.

http://www.repower.de/index.php?id=348&uid=1602&L ...

This is in euros, so figure 20.58 cents / kWh U.S.

If U.S. nuclear plants got the same deal they would raise an additional $162 billion per year.

Good luck Brits, hang on to your wallets.

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BICYCLE SUBSIDY

As I zoom past the cars stalled in traffic going down Canyon Drive, I think: these guys should be paying me by the mile for not putting one more car on the road.

They pay for the road;

That you are zooming down.

That hauls your food and supplies to stores.

That provides you with police, fire and ambulance service.

With the bicycle lane that was another car lane, and could be again.

Etc. etc.

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Thanks for finding this great description Dave

This reinforces my belief that cap and trade will be a game that favors well connected polluters, and make it harder for new technology to penetrate the market. It will have a much worse benefit to cost ratio than a simple tax on emissions.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/5/102441/300#com ...

Clearly it must be a global policy with minor leakage to succeed.

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Back to basics

The driving force is our belief that greenhouse gas emissions are altering the climate in a way that has a net harmful effect. We want to encourage people to make decisions that minimize this damage.

The most simple, direct and transparent way to do that is with a tax on emissions equal to the cost of the damage they do. This will encourage people to choose less damaging alternates, and we can use the tax money to develop better technology.

Now there is great uncertainty in the net cost of the damage done, so start out at say 1/3 above the lower end of the range, and as the analysis tightens up the tax rate will become more accurate. The rate could be tied to a scientific calculation that would automatically adjust each year without a political vote, similar to the consumer price index.

Cap and  trade is a game whose rules have not been written. No matter what the rules end up being, tens of thousands of very bright people will dedicate their lives to nonproductive gaming of the system to make money.

There is no way cap and trade can be more accurate than the above proposal, and many ways it could be worse.

Under cap and trade consumers could find themselves spending $1000 on impractical technology to prevent $200 worth of environmental damage, or just the opposite.

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More supply vs. demand

GreyFlcn writes;

What do we really want?
The energy, or the services derived from it? A compact flourecent lightbulb, for instance, connected to a predominantly coal powered grid. What we want is light. Now which would be simpler, quicker, and cheaper? Replacing the coal plants, or replacing the lightbulb?

Grey, we should work both sides of the supply - demand equation. As you point out there is some low hanging fruit on the demand side, but in the long run the big gains will be supply side.

My recommendation is to tax emissions at a rate that fairly represents the cost of the damage they do, and provide  sources of cheap, clean, carbon free energy, so that people will rapidly and willingly move away from expensive fossil fuels.

We should price coal fired electricity at the appropriate level, including the cost of the death of 20,000+ Americans each year, a silent 9/11 attack every two months.

See Page 12 of;

http://www.cleartheair.org/dirtypower/docs/dirtyAir.pdf

This will make buying CFLs, and all other conservation measures, more cost effective now, a more logical choice. More people will apply conservation measures more quickly.

At the same time it instantly makes it easier to attract the huge amounts of investment money to build low emission energy systems quickly.

Forcing or incentivising (with tax breaks, rebates etc.) people to replace their light bulbs and implement other conservation measures, without pricing emissions accurately, actually makes it easier to continue our addiction to coal.

Reducing U.S. emissions now is of minor importance. If we eliminated all of our greenhouse emissions tomorrow, the developing world will gobble up the savings in a relatively short period of time.

The most important goal for the U.S. should be to use our technical capacity to develop technology that is so inexpensive it can be implemented all over the world.

A recent study showed that U.S. children placed 29 in math and science, behind Croatia, Iceland and Latvia, so we better solve this problem quickly before we lose the intellectual capacity. See page 23 of the pdf.

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/15/13/39725224.pdf

One of the sample questions is on the greenhouse effect, page 18 of the pdf. Does everybody know a correct answer? Are you smarter than a 15 year old? Post your answer here, lets see what readers think.

We should increase R&D for non fossil energy systems from $2 per person to $200 per person, $60 billion per year. I believe the savings from this level of research would reach break even in 15-20 years and save over $1,000 per year per person within 30 years.

And by the way, you know whats better than bio-CCS?
Maintaining Forrests in Tropical regions, like the Congo, Amazon, and Indonesian rainforrests.

Right. If destroying a rainforest releases an enormous amount of CO2, and if an appropriate fee was charged for those emissions, then the only activity that would enable that act would be something with a much larger benefit. The forests would be well protected.

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OOPS

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.

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Real carbon neutrality or fake carbon neutrality

Why do people who claim to be serious about global warming use such deceptive and misleading language, and why do other people who claim to be serious about global warming find it acceptable?

Lets look at a few definitions.

CARBON CREDIT

Real definition. A technology that extracts a specified amount of carbon from the atmosphere each year and buries it in a way that will keep it SAFELY isolated for at least several hundred thousand years. In the case of coal it should also extract and isolate equivalent amounts of sulfur, mercury, arsenic, uranium, cadmium etc.

Fake definition. An energy source that produces somewhat less carbon per unit energy than the politically incorrect source being "offset", or a technology that removes some carbon for a  short time, like growing trees.

CARBON NEUTRAL

Real definition. When a person or organization buys enough real carbon credits to offset all of the carbon their existence creates.

Fake definition. When a person or organization buys enough fake carbon credits to match some of the carbon their existence creates.

You can fool most of the people some of the time but you cannot fool mother nature.

The subject of this post is carbon dilution and political correctness, not carbon neutrality.

This is why we should simply tax carbon and other emissions at a rate that fairly represents the harm that they do, and use the money to develop technology that can effectively resolve the problems.

The carbon credit and cap and trade business will become a magnet for people with the knack to sell third rate technology at first rate prices, we will have a whole new set of multimillionaires, but nature will not be satisfied.

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Exactly what would you do

Mr. Romm

After reviewing your essay and links I have a good idea of what you are against, but no idea of what you are for.

Give me the cliff notes version describing what Emperor Romm would do to resolve these issues.

For example, here is my recommendation for the electricity sector;

1    Eliminate all subsidies.

2    Add a conservative cost estimate to each source for all externalities, CO2, particulates, mercury, cadmium, sulfur, NOx, radioactivity, bird kills, water pollution, noise, intermittency, waste disposal etc.

3    Increase R&D spending for non fossil energy sources from $2 per person to $200 dollars per person, $60 billion / year.

4    Push every technology as hard as possible, build prototypes of everything.

5    Build one or two full scale commercial sized plants for each promising technology. Publish all of the data including construction cost, operation and maintenance cost and energy production figures.

6    Stand back and let the marketplace choose winners and losers.

We are not smart enough to pick winners and losers now. Our  goal should be to create a SYSTEM in which the best technology, whatever it is, is developed and implemented in the shortest possible time.

http://www.endofglobalwarming.com/energy_facts.htm

A correction and some coal facts

I have discovered an error in my analysis of Gar's system. The revised sections are below. The full review has been posted at.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/3/12/63111/0928/#37 ...

If the U.S. was using the proposed system in 2006 and we started july with all the pump storage units charged to 100%, they would have been empty in 2 days, and remained so for the rest of the summer. We would have had nationwide blackouts during a massive record heat wave and they would continue till fall. I believe the death toll would have numbered several hundred thousand.

5    The U.S. consumes an average of 1,600 watts per person. The proposed storage system is sized for 12 hours with a 1.5 safety factor, 18 hours of energy storage, priced at $10 / KWh. However the author did not include the capital cost of the energy conversion equipment and balance of plant, $602 / KW.

This is a $431,000,000,000 error.

The author uses a cost of $1.0 billion per 2000 KM in his spread sheet. He has eliminated the cost of conversion stations to boost the AC to HVDC and back to AC at the other end of each line. He has also eliminated the  cost of line losses.

This is an $85,000,000,000 error.

It appears that this price does not include the cost of land for right of way.

Correcting for the two errors total system cost is $3,000,000,000,000.

Pangolin said;

If we can provide the current per capita power consumption at $25K per head without fossil fuels or nukes that is a bargain that should be pounced upon. That's about the original value of my car.

It seems like a lot of money to me, $100K for a family of four, and that's just the construction cost. You have to pay an electric bill in addition to that. Denmark and Germany still get most of their electricity from fossil fuel yet they pay 25 - 30 cents per KWh for their enormous subsidies of wind and solar.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/elecprih.html

As I'm not an engineer I would send you to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District for data on how these things are done. All I know is that they have managed to increase their percentage of green (no coal, nukes) power in their mix every year while managing a rapid population increase...

Wind and solar power installation is a daily activity in California and receives little comment except for celebration of new systems. New sources come online almost every single day.  

Ok, I looked at it.

New wind and solar may get most of the press but they account for only 2 - 3 % of your power.

http://www.smud.org/community-environment/images/powercon ...

60% comes from natural gas, 23% from hydro and 4% from coal.

Nuclear power is tainted. (see anti-nuke factsheet The existing nuclear power industry is not clean and has no plans for clean operation. It's not really a matter of dispute. A dirty nuclear fuel chain is more profitable than a clean(er) one and has remained the status quo to date. You can suggest the US moves to a thorium fuel cycle but I wouldn't hold dinner. The profit is in holding the poison over our heads as a threat.

That anti nuclear fact sheet is a real hoot. Where are the facts? This thread is about wind, but lets look at their #1 fact.

1.    It doesn't take an accident for a nuclear power
plant to release radioactivity into our air, water and soil.
All it takes is the plant's everyday routine operation,
and federal regulations permit these radioactive releases.

Guess what, every time you exhale you release radioactivity into our air, water and soil.
You and I and everybody else are walking leaking nuclear waste repositories.

Here is a fact. Coal plants kill over 20,000 Americans each year.

http://www.cleartheair.org/dirtypower/docs/dirtyAir.pdf

They are killed by mercury, sulfur, cadmium, arsenic, particulates etc. Coal plants also release radioactive materials. The population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants per unit energy.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain ...

But the risk of the radiation from coal plants is tiny compared to that of the other toxic materials.

SMUD gets 4% of its energy from coal plants. Those coal plants release 4 times more radiotoxicity into the environment on your behalf than if SMUD was 100% nuclear. More importantly, the non radioactive toxic emissions from that 4% injure and kill far more people than the emissions from a 100% nuclear system would.

Had the U.S. continued with the expansion of nuclear power that started in 1970 all that natural gas being burned for heat in power plants, homes, shopping malls and factories could be diverted to transportation. That would dramatically reducing oil imports and the flow of cash to the mid east, while improving air quality and our security until battery or hydrogen technology becomes practical and widespread.On Is wind worth it? posted 2 years ago 72 Responses