Comments Atomicrod has made

Dan - I, too, have seen Back to the Future and chuckled a bit at the idea of any kind of fusion power plant ever powering anything on Earth that did not go boom. On the other hand, I used to OPERATE a FISSION based power plant that was one of a reasonably large series of plants built in rapid succession in 5 different shipyards in the United States. In a period of about 10 years, we about 90 identical power plants into submarines and put them out to sea. (SSN594 - 14, SSN637 - 37, SSBN598 - 5, SSBN608 - 5, SSBN616 - 19, SSBN640 - 12) Those were not automobile sized machines, but they were roughly the size that I advocate for distributed applications for small towns, large factories, mines, islands and commercial ship propulsion. They were not particularly "cheap", but they were also built by an organization that buys $600 toilet seats and $300 hammers. What I saw when operating my two plants - which, were close enough to identical that I sometimes forgot which ship I was on as I made my inspection rounds - was that there is a straightforward way to apply series production techniques to moderate sized fission power plants. Unlike fusion, which is imaginary stuff suitable for movie scripts, fission works fine, lasts a long time. The core on my second ship was installed in 1981 and lasted until the ship was decommissioned in 1994. That core was small enough to fit under my office desk. Even with a robust shielding container, it would easily fit inside my spare bedroom with plenty of room to spare. Every one of the 200+ cores that we have removed from US Navy ships are in a single, rather small, facility on the Idaho National Laboratory grounds. Now, can you tell me again why you think my goal of moderately sized, series produced fission power plants is so hard to achieve as to be equivalent to a "Back to the Future" style fantasy? Can you tell me why you think that a conservative company like B&W - with its more than 100 years in the steam power plant business - would be putting resources into a design like the mPower reactor? Even Westinghouse and GE have smaller designs that they are considering reviving. (IRIS and PRISM respectively). In addition, there are several venture capital backed firms (ex. Hyperion and NuScale). Toshiba is in the game with their 4S - which will come in two power outputs 10 MWe and 50 MWe, the Russians are putting their KLT-40 icebreaker power plants onto barges, the Indians have several models that produce less than 300 MWe, and the Chinese are building their 190 MWe HTR-PM to follow the excellent results obtained by the HTR-10 (10 MW thermal prototype operating since 2002 at Tsingua University.) Yep, I am a fantasizer all right. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 3 days, 23 hours ago 197 Responses
Amazingdrx - I've finally figured you out. I think you are a Chinese spy lurking on energy discussion threads trying to convince America to give up its prosperity and industrial capacity so that you can dominate the world in the coming decades. Energy is simply the power to do work - if you use less energy you do less work. That means you make less, you move less stuff, and you eventually devolve into mere subsistence. China is currently producing more than 200,000 engineering curriculum graduates each year who understand just how important it is to future prosperity to make things and move things. Perhaps that is why their economy has grown at a reasonably steady 8-10% per year for the past 20 years and why they currently hold almost a trillion dollars worth of American government securities. They have cash and they are using it to build their future - and to influence world decision making. As a career military officer and lifelong American patriot (I know that is not a terribly fashionable word) who has a deep seated belief in my neighbors and the principles of freedom laid out in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, I think it is important for us to grow and prosper. Otherwise, far too many people will come to believe that accepting an authoritarian form of government that restricts many basic rights is the only way to have a good job and live in a nice apartment. We need to regain our status as a shining example that there is a better way forward and we are not going to do that by "conserving" our way into a more balanced energy supply situation. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 4 days, 13 hours ago 197 Responses
Amory - can you explain what you mean by "baseload fallacy"? I am a reasonably numerate person who has a deep background in systems technology and understands the value of distributed systems. However, I have also been responsible at various points in my career for keeping the lights on and the computers humming. Are you trying to claim that the reliability of the individual units in a distribution system is not important? Are you willing to live on a grid composed of a distributed set of unpredictable, uncontrollable generators wired together? If so, can you tell me where such a grid exists - even as a test platform? With regard to your claim about land use - are you telling us that the recent Nature Conservancy study about energy sprawl is wrong? http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006802 Your paper on small reactors ignores the two designs that have the best chance of early introduction under our current regulatory system. Both NuScale (a venture capital financed company whose management includes some very experienced leaders) and B&W (a company that has been manufacturing small and medium sized reactors for more than 50 years) have developed evolutionary designs that use conventional light water moderation and the same fuel that is well established in the light water power plant market. The NuScale is designed to produce 45 MWe while the B&W mPower will produce 125 MWe in a version that uses air cooled condensers and about 134 MWe in the version that uses water cooled condensers. (http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sc=2054744) You also have exposed the limitations of your research in the small reactor area by falling for an Internet hoax about a rumored 200 kwe power system supposedly being proposed by Toshiba. I did some research on that, talked to a number of engineers and public affairs types from Toshiba and confirmed that there was no such system being discussed for commercial uses. You can find the stories here - http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/search?q=toshiba+200+kwe You are fighting a rear guard action - nuclear energy developments are happening despite your best efforts to confuse and obscure the technological advantages that it provides. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 4 days, 22 hours ago 197 Responses
Dan wrote: However, I think that we need to be mutually supportive of a variety of methods for producing power and solve the technical challenges each offers. This might not be a popular thing to say, but I have a hard time thinking of reasons why other energy producers would want to be mutually supportive of a technology that can leave them in the dust in any kind of fair competition. It is much easier to see why other energy suppliers would be terribly jealous of nuclear energy's natural advantages and do everything in their power to hamstring and restrict their competitor so they have a breath of a chance of prevailing in at least some sales competitions. It is also much easier for me to logically conclude that the natural allies for nuclear energy are the rest of the vast population of people who use energy and desire an abundant life enabled by having controllable power available on demand from a reliable grid supplied by reliable power plants. As a consumer, I hate the idea of "demand side management", that translates to me to some distant grid controller deciding that he needs to reduce demand instead of increasing supply. The only way to reduce demand is to TURN OFF POWER to a customer who has already decided he needs it by turning on a device or a light switch. Energy discussions are not just about science and technology; they are about sales, revenues and political power enabled by wealth. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month ago 197 Responses
Dan - interesting analysis. Here are additional options for producing 2.43 MW-hrs of electricity: Fission 0.3 ounces of commercial nuclear fuel in a second generation light water reactor (those 1960s vintage technology machines currently operating to produce 807 billion kilowatt hours per year.) Fission somewhere between 0.01 and 0.3 ounces of plutonium, depleted uranium, thorium, mined natural uranium, or used nuclear fuel in a fourth generation reactor using fast neutrons and liquid metal cooling, or molten salt, or high temperature gas with TRISO particles, or reduced moderation light water. When you fission those quantities of actinides, you will not consume any oxygen or produce any waste gases that need to be dumped into the atmosphere. All residues can be contained. If the reactor is sufficiently refined, like the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) that Steve Kirsch has mentioned on this thread, all of the used material can be safely stored for a few hundred years above ground until it has decayed to a level of radiation emission lower than the ore initially mined from the ground to produce the fuel in the first place. In contrast to devices that capture energy from the wind and sun which need to be very tall and touch either hundreds of millions of pounds of air or spread out over more than a dozen acres of land, the device required to produce 2.43 megawatts of electrical energy can be small enough to fit inside a two car garage. It can be controlled to produce exactly as much power as the humans who operate it want to produce. It can achieve a high level of reliability and only need new fuel every 30 years or so. (BTW - achieving that level of performance does not require cutting edge science with an unknown outcome. It does not even require much research, only solid engineering choices using known material properties. The US Army operated a couple of reactors at about that level of power output in places like Antarctica, Greenland, Wyoming and Alaska in the early 1960s. Our current generation of new submarines are loaded with enough fuel to operate for 33 years.) See why I get so enthusiastic about the value of investing in atomic energy? Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month ago 197 Responses
@Igmuska - You are confused about the Jevons Paradox - he recognized that increasing energy efficiency would lower cost per unit, thus allowing people to perform tasks at lower costs. Since there is always more work to be done, people would do more of the lower cost tasks, resulting in an OVERALL increase in the use of energy. Simple economic theory predicts that anytime the supply of a commodity increases to a position that is much greater than the demand, the price that consumers will pay per unit of the commodity will always drop because the suppliers will compete through lower prices to attract the customers. Of course, in a monopoly situation, economic theory can be overcome so that the single supplier can raise prices no matter what the supply/demand balance is. The key to lower prices is competition and plenty of supply alternatives. You are very definitely "uneducated" if you think that "nuclear generating corporations like Exelon, Entergy, FPL, Dominion Resources, Duke Energy are deeply indebted to foreign capital. They are traditional American companies often owned by "widows and orphans" looking for solid rates of return on invested capital. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month ago 197 Responses
Daniel Coffey produced a post (2:38 PM 24 OCT 2009) with some quotes that illustrate why it can be very frustrating for a nuclear trained person to try to reason with someone who is adamant that power sources like wind and solar energy can do the job of providing reliable energy. (When it comes down to it, the whole cost argument is goofy if one of the choices cannot even do the required job to begin with. Who cares if a plane costs more than an automobile if the mission is to get from New York to the UK in less than 6 hours?) Here are the quotes to ponder: "Note that the total US generating capacity for wind power is 31,300 MW as of the end of the 3rd quarter of 2009." Not much later in the same post he wrote: "Let's face it, 20% of US electricity is produced by nuclear, 48% from coal, 2% from renewable, and most of the rest from natural gas." So my logically driven mind asks - if we have so much wind energy CAPACITY, why is wind, which is only a portion of the "renewable" category, PRODUCING such a small portion of our electricity? Of course, the answer is that massive wind turbines can be profitably installed under current rules, regulations and tax structures, but they CANNOT be controlled by humans in such a way as to PRODUCE any more power than the weather will allow. They are wastefully IDLE or underused 70-80% of the time. Here is another couple of quotes to ponder: "Moreover, Sempra Energy, for example, installed a 10MW thin film solar project in Nevada. From go ahead to completion - switched on the grid - it took 6 months total. It requires one person to maintain." The concluding paragraph Daniel then stated: "I look forward to a better world, one in which stridency on all sides can give way to a commonly shared view that America needs to build more things, employe more people, and produce wealth more sustainably." Okay - so if a 10 MWe thin film solar project really can be completed in 6 months and requires only one person to be employed as an operator, WHERE is the "employ more people" part of the equation? That solar plant will only produce 10 MWe at the very peak of solar insolation; it will be a massive, weather exposed surface that will be IDLE or underused for 70-90% of its operating life AND it will only result in one employee who probably does not get much training. The contrast with the proven capability of nuclear energy plants to provide massive quantities of reliable electricity while also providing hundreds of jobs that pay wages suitable for raising a family is worth thinking about. Go and visit any one of the 50 or so communities where the local power plant is the anchor employer. Check out the schools, ball fields, cultural activities. Talk to the people who live there and find out why they are so supportive of the idea of building even more new nuclear plants in their communities. Then talk to the owners of the plants, read their annual reports and talk to the investors to find out why they like owning and operating nuclear power plants. Many in this thread have asked - if nuclear plants are so wonderful, why aren't more being built. There are a whole host of reasons for this, but here is something that many do not consider. The companies that are most qualified to build, own and operate new power plants already own the existing ones. In some cases they also happen to own a large quantity of coal and gas power plants that produce a major portion of their output and contribute to their bottom line. If (when) a lot of new nuclear power plants start coming on line, the available supply of electricity will increase. This will inevitably put downward pressure on electricity prices in areas where there is wholesale price competition. The revenues from existing plants will fall as a result of the "overcapacity" and there may even be pressure to completely shut down and decommission plants that have higher marginal costs like those that burn coal and natural gas. For the plant owners, this might mean a premature shutdown of a capital asset that will then turn from a revenue producer into a cost for decommissioning and disposal. For the fuel suppliers to those facilities, the shutdown will mean a huge loss of a revenue stream - the fuel suppliers to a power plant capture between 60-95% of the revenue generated at the facility. A significant reduction in fuel demand at power plants will lead to a drop in fuel prices, again slowing revenue for large, politically and financially powerful fuel suppliers. Now, do you understand a bit more about why building new nuclear energy facilities is not quite as popular in the business community as its technical advantages would lead one to expect? My mission is to try to get energy CUSTOMERS (including those large and powerful companies that manufacture cars, steel, aluminum, beverages, plastics, and airplanes or that engage in transportation activities) to understand the logic in the notion that increased electricity production is GOOD for them, but potentially a financial burden for the establishment power and energy business. That group has never learned from the high technology industry that creative destruction is the only way to survive. If the establishment will not move due to fear of the effect on their current position, then it is time for upstarts like NuScale, Hyperion and TerraPower to show the way. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month ago 197 Responses
RussellLowes made the following statement: "It was pointed out by STK that the MIT study said that nuclear could become economical, given more support and with carbon pricing. That study was done in 2003, and contained the ridiculous projection that reactors would cost only $1500 per kilowatt of installation. Amory, you said that estimates have tripled since then. However, we have seen estimates as high as $8,800 and $10,000 per kilowatt, much higher than a tripling. " I have pulled out the study from my library of documents. That statement is not true. Page 43 the 2003 MIT study titled "The Future of Nuclear Power" contains a table titled "Base Case Assumptions" that lists nuclear with an overnight cost of $2000 per kilowatt of capacity. It also makes a few additional assumptions that are not computationally favorable to nuclear energy: - return on equity investment of 15% for nuclear, but just 12% for gas and coal, - finance structure of 50% equity and 50% debt (at 8%) when coal and gas are structured at 40% equity and 60% debt (this assumption yields a significantly higher overall cost of money for nuclear than for coal and gas) - coal fuel cost of just $1.20 per million BTU - coal fuel cost escalation of just 0.5% per year - "high" price gas of $4.50 per million BTU escalating at a "high" assumption of 2.5% per year (there is also a low and moderate case run) (for a gas plant, as much as 93% of the cost of electrical power is the cost of fuel, so the fuel cost assumption is very important for competitive purposes.) - economic lifetime for all facilities of just 40 years (most nuclear plants operating in the US today will run for at least 60 years) - "high" case nuclear capacity factor of 85% - compared to an average over the entire US fleet of more than 90% for the past five years - "high" case coal capacity factor of 85% - which is pretty close to actual experience - "high" case CCGT capacity factor of 85% - which is about 2x the reality as measured in the marketplace over the past five years. Since gas has already experienced one peak of $13 per million BTU in just the first 5 years after the study was completed, what do you think the probabilities are that it will behave in the manner assumed? Coal prices have also increased much more rapidly than assumed - by the middle of 2008, the average price was well over $2.50 per million BTU on the spot market. In these days of spreadsheets, any moderately educated person can make the computations of how much electricity will cost over time once they make their initial assumptions. The key in the accuracy of the projection, however, is in the skill with which the assumptions are made and the closeness with which they approach reality. One thing that can be said about nuclear power plant costs is that the have not "tripled" since no one has actually built a plant in more than 30 years. The accounting has not been done so any discussion has to be about estimates. Since the news that we read includes numbers from vendors still engaged in price negotiations, there is at least some justification for assuming that the prices discussed are a bit on the high side. Why would a vendor who does not have a cost plus contract come in with a lower than necessary bid? Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses
@RogueIntellect - The situation at TVA is a little more complicated than what you described in your question, but your impression of the overall situation is not far from the truth. In the 1960s, the area served by the TVA experienced dramatic economic growth, partially due to the availability of low cost, reliable electricity. That attracted a lot of new industries, especially in manufacturing, along with a lot of new people to work in those industries. The lakes behind the TVA dams also attracted a lot of tourists and residents seeking to live on or near the water. With the economic growth came a rapid increase in electrical power demand. The leaders at TVA responded with new construction projects including an aggressive plan to build 17 new nuclear power plants. In the 1970s, after the Arab Oil Embargo, economic growth slowed and there was less immediate need for the new nuclear plants. In the late 1970s, a man named S. David Freeman was appointed to the job of running TVA and he worked quickly to replace the growth program with one more focused on conservation and making better use of existing power production facilities - which were largely coal fired. President Jimmy Carter, who had appointed S. David Freeman, had made a conscious choice to use more coal as a way to reduce oil imports. He discouraged further investment in nuclear power plants. One of the big justifications for the deferral of construction completion was that the units would provide an "overcapacity" that was not justified - many of the power companies in areas surrounded by TVA worked hard to get the Congress to pass laws restricting TVA's sales to its originally defined territory. They, reasonably enough, did not like the idea of competing for sales with a quasi government agency that did not have to pay federal taxes. A fire at the 1155 MWe Browns Ferry unit 1 caused a temporary shutdown at that plant. Later - in 1985, that fully licensed plant was shutdown for some additional repairs and not restarted - for about 22 years. It was recently refurbished at a cost of $1.9 billion and restored to service (May 2007). Watts Barr Unit 1 construction was stretched out (partially to keep the construction crew employed) for more than 23 years and was finally completed in 1996. Watts Bar Unit 2 is now being completed at a cost of about $2.5 billion. When TVA deferred construction activities at Bellefonte in 1988, Unit 1 was 90 percent complete and Unit 2 was 58 percent complete. Though the company requested a termination of the construction licenses for these units from the NRC in 2006, it has made some recent plans to take a new look at the site and determine if the plants can be completed or replaced with two new units built from the ground up. http://www.tva.gov/environment/reports/bellefonte3/index.htm A brief summary of TVA's nuclear plants can be found at http://www.tva.gov/power/nuclear/nuclear_fact_sheet.pdf, but the story of the agency is long and full of juicy political infighting details. Though the refurbishments and construction completion projects are quite a bit more involved than "just adding fuel" and the numbers provided above seem a bit scary, the investment is sound when compared to alternative ways of generating power. The $1.9 billion invested in Browns Ferry, for example, is expected to be fully paid back within just 3-5 years because of its low operating costs - less than $18 per megawatt-hour - in an era where electricity sells for a wholesale average of about $50 per megawatt-hour. The projects also provided some well paying jobs in an area of the country that needs places for skilled people to work and once the nuclear plants start operating they provide low cost, reliable electricity that attracts manufacturing employment. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast PS - there are also 2 fully completed 1100 MWe reactors owned by Exelon on the shores of Lake Michigan at a site called Zion which could be refurbished and restored to operation at an estimated cost of something close to $2 billion.On Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses
Amory Lovins at 12:26 PM on 17 October wrote the following: "Your belief that wind and sun were "dismissed by many generations of smart people as not worth the effort to capture" is incorrect. Both classes of technologies have been developed repeatedly to high levels of sophistication and wide levels of adoption in many cultures over the past few thousand years. See Butti & Perlin, A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980 (new edition now in preparation). Typically, these achievements were suppressed by discoveries of apparently cheap fuels -- wood for the Roman Empire, then coal, then oil, then gas. I think that sequence is about done." I am sorry, I should have been a little more clear in my choice of words. As Lovins described, many cultures over the past several thousand years have developed quite sophisticated ways of capturing the sun and wind. Those inventions have been overcome in the marketplace by such "cheap" and easy to capture fuels as wood cut from forests and hauled by human or animal power to the place of use, coal dug out of deep mines at a terrible cost in human lives and effort, oil found in remote deserts deep underground, and gas found several thousand feet underwater, extracted, purified and compressed through pipelines to deliver to customers. Yep, that widely distributed and freely available sun and wind was so successful in the marketplace that enormously wealthy companies were able to fool customers into quickly abandoning their inexpensive solar cookers and carefully fashioned sailing vessels so that they could be hooked on hydrocarbon products. Of course, the logic of that assertion fails a bit when one employs a bit of critical thinking to figure out how those fossil fuel pushers got so wealthy and powerful in the first place. My interpretation of history is that hydrocarbon suppliers succeeded by meeting a very human need for controllable power and light that allowed a market to develop. Even very poor people figured that it was worth it to pay for rather dirty and relatively expensive fuel products instead of waiting long enough for the sun and the wind to do similar tasks. Lovins also tries to imply that I must be a fan of central planning because I pointed out that the recent investment choices made by the financial community on Wall Street and in "The City" were short-sighted and dangerous to all of the rest of us. (By the way, I did not point to just American financiers with my comment. "The City" is the name given to The City of London, the financial district which, in combination with Wall Street, is a primary trading hub for international investment capital.) Nothing could be farther from the truth. The reason I like submarines is because I like distributed decision making and independent action. I operated two small companies during a 6 year break from military service and I ran a couple of enterprises as a teenager - mowing lawns and delivering papers. I even documented my free market philosophies by publishing an article in the Libertarian leaning publication called The Freeman. My article was titled "The First Atomic Age: A Failure of Socialism". (http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/the-first-atomic-age-a-failure-of-socialism/) Amory Lovins concluded his reaction to my criticism of his anti-nuclear polemic with the following: "As a lifelong technologist and innovator, and a student of nuclear power for 40+ years, I've come to a different conclusion than you have about its promise. However, I think that holding the beliefs and enthusiasms you do, you should simply invest your money in the nuclear enterprises and projects that you think look promising. I don't plan to, and I don't think taxpayers should be forced to." As a lifelong free thinker, entrepreneur, and formerly qualified operator of nuclear fission power plants who has actually graduated from a few challenging schools, I agree with his recognition that we have reached different conclusions about the promise of nuclear power. As near as I can tell, Lovins made up his mind about nuclear power at least 40 years ago while pretending to attend Oxford while actually working as a Friends of the Earth campaigner under the tutelage of David Brower (http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Amory:Lovins.htm). At that time, nuclear fission power plants had just begun to make inroads into the power plant market and average capacity factors were as low as 60% due to the need to do a lot of learning about reliability improvements and operator training. (Note: the link I inserted above claims that Lovins earned a master's degree from Oxford. According to a biographical sketch published by his own institute (RMI); he dropped out of both Harvard and Oxford. http://bit.ly/PwEVq) If nuclear energy knowledge and system development had stopped in about 1970, when Lovins first started writing in opposition to its development, perhaps he would be correct about his view of its potential. However, that is not what occurred. Based on what I know now, I happily follow his advise of investing in nuclear focused enterprises and have been doing so for quite a few years now. As a US taxpayer, I sure wish that he and his alternative energy establishment friends (Examples: GE, Chevron, BP, T. Boone Pickens, Ted Turner, FPL Group, Siemens and Vestas) would stop using their political power to force me to contribute, along with all other taxpayers, billions of dollars every year to support their hobbies with accelerated depreciation schedules, Production Tax Credits, feed-in tariffs, Renewable Portfolio Standards, and direct "stimulus package" expenditures on wind and solar power production deployments. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses
Amory - ALL competing energy sources have an incentive to slow and add cost to the deployment of nuclear energy. Even current operators of nuclear fission power plants that are in competitive wholesale markets have a financial incentive to hinder the cost-effective construction of new plants that might increase supply and lower prices for the output of existing plants. This is not unique to nuclear energy - gas suppliers often criticize coal, coal goes after imported oil, wind and solar go after coal. (Tim Wirth, John Podesta, Ted Turner, Al Gore, Aubrey McClendon, T. Boone Pickens and others have been working to develop a coalition between methane gas suppliers and unreliable alternative power sources since they believe that methane is the natural beneficiary that gets used when the wind dies down or the sun sets.) A financial interest in those energy sources certainly does not disqualify anyone from commenting on energy matters. As you have said, often those with financial interest have substantial technical expertise and experience that adds value to the discussion. I simply believe that economic interests should be disclosed so that readers can use that information as part of their critical thinking about the comment's accuracy and applicability. With regard to the German situation, here is an update from today's Wall Street Journal: (http://bit.ly/qRlDf) "Both Ms. Merkel's Christian Democrats and their new governing partners, the business-friendly Free Democrats, want to scrap a law that says all 17 of the country's nuclear plants must be shut down by 2022. In alliance negotiations this week, the parties struck a preliminary agreement to allow the reactors to run longer, at least until renewable-energy sources can fill the gap." One fact that I think is useful to know about the 2002 phaseout agreement is that Gerhard Schroeder, the Chancellor who negotiated the agreement, went to work for Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, within a month after he lost his reelection bid to Angela Merkelin December 2005. (http://bit.ly/2TVUNR) Here is another excerpt from the WSJ article: "To keep the power on without them, Germany might have to burn more coal and miss its goals to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions -- or become more reliant on its largest natural-gas supplier, Russia." Talk about a revolving door of employment! Energy is BIG business for profit. Controlling the supply of energy by spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about competitors is a part of what makes it sometimes outrageously profitable for the remaining suppliers. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses
Amory - you are correct that there are several reasons why renewables have been more attractive than nuclear to the Wall Street and "The City" investment community for the past decade or so. Forgive me if I get a bit off topic here, but I am not too impressed by the decision-making that particular community has imposed on the rest of us. Products like securitized mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, debt insurance, and private equity funds have put all of our savings and pensions (even my future government pension) at high risk that is not yet completely in the past. I really hate the fact that a single industry has received so much in the way of public funds that have suddenly made it so "profitable" (on paper at least) that it can return to practices of paying, in some particular cases, an average of $700,000 per employee in compensation. Citing investment community decisions over the past decade or so as a reason to continue investing in renewables like wind and solar - which have experienced some very interesting financial situations in the past couple of years - is not a convincing argument for me. I like atomic fission because I have lived for months at a time in a world totally powered by fission with few worries about unplanned unavailability of power. That world was an isolated little environment sealed up against some fearsome outside pressures, but it was quite comfortable. We had fresh water that we made out of "waste heat" and salt water. We had plenty of power to clean our atmosphere of any contaminants. We even made oxygen to replace what we consumed by separating H2O and throwing away the H2 - it was a dangerous waste product in our little environment. I also have close friends who have spent many years plying the ocean on fast moving "towns" with a large, busy airfield and 5,000 or so of their closest friends. Their environment - except for the aircraft - was also completely powered by fission plants that nearly always worked when scheduled. Can you point to figures that substantiate your claim that renewables receive less in the way of subsidies per unit output or per unit of total energy provided over time compared to nuclear? The studies I have read from the Energy Information Agency appear to dispute that claim by a wide margin. http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy2/pdf/execsum.pdf That study, performed by a non partisan, statistical agency of the US government indicated the following: Source - subsidy and support in dollars per megawatt-hour (mills per kilowatt-hour) Nuclear - 1.59 Biomass (and biofuels) - 0.89 Geothermal - 0.92 Hydroelectric - 0.67 Solar- 24.34 Wind - 23.37 Landfill Gas - 1.37 Municipal Solid Waste - 0.13 Renewables (average) - 2.80 Total (average) -1.65 Even with large hydro included in the renewable category, which skews the average a bit, renewables still receive about 2 times as much subsidy and support per unit output as nuclear. If I was to use the 1999 figures, it would be even more dramatic since the direct expenditures and tax expenditures for nuclear that year were ZERO, with a total "subsidy" of 740 million for research and development of advanced systems - mainly job protection for national laboratory employees. Yes, nuclear has received more in total dollars over the past 50 years than renewables. Unlike the wind and sun, which have been known by humans to be a source of power for many millennia - and dismissed by many generations of smart people as not worth the effort to capture, fission was not even discovered until 1938 and not proven to be controllable until December 2, 1942, when my dear mother was 9 years old. The return on nuclear energy investment has been impressive - we are now getting more than 800 billion kilowatt-hours per year of electrical power from atomic fission generation (in the US). That is about 20% more than the entire US grid produced in 1960, when there was only one nuclear power plant in operation. Even at just 5 cents per kilowatt hour, the value of that electricity is $40 billion per year, for an integrated value of many hundreds of billions over the past 4 decades. Because of the market damping effects of increased supply versus a demand that is growing more slowly, that new supply capacity tends to keep all other energy fuel prices a bit lower than they would otherwise be. (I think that is wonderful; energy suppliers, including coal, oil and gas interests and those who prefer to push wind turbines and solar panels are not so happy about that situation.) I like to think of our investment in nuclear like an investment in a potential basketball player. Over time, a guy like David Robinson received far more subsidy to develop his basketball skills than a guy like Danny DeVito would have received. A rational, numbers oriented person would believe that an investment in a 7' 2" muscular man like "The Admiral" would have a better chance of paying off in developing a great ball player than an investment in a chubby, vertically challenged guy. In my humble opinion, investing money into atomic fission technology is far more likely to pay off with abundant, affordable, reliable, clean energy than an investment in windmills or solar panels. I keep a tiny simulated fuel pellet on my desk for inspiration; it represents an object that has an energy value equivalent to 147 gallons of fuel oil using today's fission technology, but a potential energy equivalent of 3675 gallons of fuel oil using those fast reactors that STK has described. We are still at the very low end of the technological 'S' curves when it comes to capturing and using atomic fission. There is far less room for improvement for its competition. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses
Amory: My point in the ad hominem comment was to provide some background so that people would recognize that you have an economic interest in reducing the supply of energy, which by very basic economic theory, tends to increase its price and benefit all remaining suppliers whose sources have not been restricted. It may not be considered "fair" in college debating classes to mention such background, but I hardly believe that it is a logical fallacy to believe that people are often motivated by job security or economic interest. (I am clearly motivated by a desire for nuclear energy to succeed, though no one pays me now to be active in that pursuit.) You have assisted in my argument by pointing out even more of the energy establishment interests who have supported your work over the many years in which you have said good things about almost every energy source save fission. All of the companies that currently extract, transport and supply energy for sale into the market have at least some vested interest in keeping the supply under their control so that they can prevent "overcapacity" and reduce price competition. Even my own "day job" employers in the Pentagon who have hired your consultancy have a vested interest in using control over energy supplies for objectives other than providing world citizens with abundant, cheap, clean power. I am aware that you have hired former Navy nukes; I regularly speak with at least one of them whenever I attend the Energy Conversations held in Washington. I do not claim that my views about the economics of nuclear energy represent the majority viewpoint, even among my colleagues who have served on submarines. They have been told throughout their career that their nuclear fuel is very expensive, that replacing the fuel in submarine reactors can be so expensive as to lead to decisions to retire the submarine early, and that the training that they receive makes them so special that they deserve tens of thousands in extra pay each year. I have spent the past several years in positions that required me to do budgetary analysis for ship and submarine maintenance and new construction; no details are allowed, but I can say that the folklore I heard was not correct without understanding a lot of other contributing factors. You have been correct over many years that nuclear plants have tended to go way over budget and that they nearly always fail to meet their schedule projections. That is not a ding on fission technology; it is ding on the project management, institutional organizations, and perverse incentives when doing construction work for cost of service regulated monopoly utilities. Cost is a solvable problem; especially for nuclear energy where any nuke worth his salt can document hundreds of unnecessary cost increasing rules and policies that have been imposed by humans into the technology. I will never forget ordering two identical valves, one requiring nuclear pedigree, one not. The one with the paperwork cost 8 times as much as the one from exactly the same factory production line. You repeated your claim that there has been no private equity investment in new nuclear power plants in the very same comment in which you stated that you recognized that there were some startup companies "spending their investorsâ€™ money trying to develop other kinds of reactors". I may have a different definition of equity than you, but when investors put their money into a startup company that is specifically formed with the sole intention of developing and deploying new nuclear power generators like Hyperion and NuScale have been, that indicates that there are at least some people who are putting equity (not leverage) into building new plants. Of course, there are not any of these new reactors actually "under construction" and none of them have licenses actually under review by the NRC, but just because there is no meal on the table does not mean that there is not real money already being spent and cooks busy in the preparation rooms. That meeting I mentioned at the NRC was held because the rules that have been established so far have been written with the assumption that all nuclear power plants are large, light water reactors producing something close to a gigawatt of electricity. Those of us who believe that there are many applications for much smaller power plants - some of that thinking, by the way is influenced by your excellent work on the benefits of distributed power generation - recognize that some of the rules have nothing to do with safety but essentially put up a roadblock to small plants. (Econ 101 would call the rules an imposed "barrier to entry".) Even Chairman Jaczko recognized that the fee structure, for example, must be changed, otherwise it would stop any thought of smaller plants. Right now, every operating power reactor pays the same annual regulatory fee - $4 million per reactor. That is not terribly challenging for plants that make hundreds of millions to a billion per year in electricity sales, but it would be a 100% tax on a 25 MWe Hyperion or a 45 MWe NuScale. It would even be a bit of an issue for a 125 MWe mPower (a moderate reactor project being developed by B&W, a player with more than 50 years in the business that just happens to be a subsidiary of McDermott, a multi billion dollar energy services company.) In other words, it is not just startups that are intrigued enough to invest equity money. One more thing - the April 2009 German poll that you cited is somewhat less important than the September 27, 2009 ELECTION that affirmed a coalition that had specifically pledged to overturn the nuclear phaseout. Once voters figured out the cost of shutting down well run nuclear plants and buying the replacement power, they made a typically rational German decision. I am sure that you can find many renewable power experts that agree with you that the decision was a bad one. I am cynical enough about the way that money works to believe that part of the reason is explained by this quote from an October 7, 2009 article on RenewableEnergyWorld.com titled "Is the German Renewable Energy Industry in Jeopardy?": â€œA lifetime extension of the nuclear plants would slow, if not completely halt, the expansion of renewable energy in Germany,â€ said BEE spokesman Daniel Kluge. â€œThereâ€™s a simple reason for this: We have more and more renewable energy companies generating and delivering more and more electricity. So letting nuclear reactors stay on the grid longer will only lead to congestion, with too many companies generating too much electricity.â€ Kluge and others in the industry worry that renewable energy upstarts could be the ones bumped aside." Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses
@STK - slight correction and update on the German nuclear power situation. The Germans "said" in 2000 that they were going to shut down their nuclear plants after an average of 30 years of operation. They actually only shut down a couple of their oldest and smallest plants and still have 17 nuclear power plants that provide about 25% of their electricity. A couple of weeks ago, the Germans held an election in which the nuclear phase out was one of the few issues that separated the major contenders. Angela Merkel promised to try to form a coalition that could overturn the phase out plan while her opponent promised to follow through with the plan. Merkel won and now the coalition that is being formed is working on the details of a service life extension policy for the remaining nuclear plants. One bit of controversy is what to do with all of the extra profits that the plant owners will be making by selling power from their already fully depreciated plants. Along with recent decisions in Sweden, Italy and Belgium, this reversal of a phaseout in Germany means that there are no remaining countries in Europe that have an official policy in place to attempt to provide electricity in the future without using nuclear energy. http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091014-703772.html Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses
Henry - there are a lot of complex reasons why US utilities have avoided nuclear power plant construction projects for the past 30 years. Many of those same reasons apply to large coal fired power plant construction projects, which have also been pretty rare for the past 30 years. Part of the reason is that the rate in electric power demand growth slowed considerably in the 1970s from its historic trend of about 7% per year for the entire period between the end of World War II and the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. Utilities suddenly had more capacity in operation and under construction than needed. The existing nuclear plants are producing about 275 Billion kilowatt-hours more each year than they did in 1990 when the first wave of construction projects were completed. That is roughly the output of about 30 gigawatt class power plants operating 24 x 365. That has also mitigated the need to build large, capital intensive projects. From 1990-2004, utilities could make the easy decision to simply build new gas fired power stations as new capacity was needed. Methane extraction companies have convinced environmentalists and consumers that "natural" gas is "clean", but most importantly for utility decision makers it was also cheap (less than $3.00 per million BTU for that period) and they had convinced their PUC's to allow them to directly pass the cost of fuel directly to consumers. The vast majority of monopoly utilities were not exposed to any financial risk for rapid fuel price increases. That situation has changed. There is now one brand new unit under construction at Georgia Power's Plant Vogtle site (no safety grade concrete has been poured, but the earth is being moved), at least 4 EPC (engineering, procurement, construction) contracts in effect, and 17 license applications in progress at the NRC - each of which requires the investment by the applicant of $257 for every hour that the Commission staff spends in the review process. There are also at least 6 vendors that have announced small and medium sized reactor products ranging from 25 MWe - 330 MWe. Two of those vendors are funded by venture capitalists. There is also a very interesting company named TerraPower that is funded by Bill Gates that is working on something called a traveling wave reactor that could operate for several decades without any new fuel. We live in exciting nuclear times. Lovins is way out of date. Perhaps he should go back to school and actually complete a course of study; the business of anti-nuclear activism may be getting less lucrative in the near future. I could be wrong about that - the fossil fuel industry might spend even more money than it has for the past four decades trying to keep its nuclear competition tied up in knots like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses
Tasermons Partner wrote - "And that uranium, a relatively rare element, has skyrocketed in price." First of all, uranium is more common than tin. The price of uranium, according to Ux Consulting (http://bit.ly/1Bh0i8) is currently $45.00 per pound in the United States. That is almost exactly the same price as it was during the period from 1977-1982, when oil ranged in price from $15-40.00 per barrel. At $45.00 per pound for natural uranium, the fuel cost for currently operated reactors is approximately 0.5 cents per kilowatt hour including all enrichment, conversion, and fabrication costs. In comparison, the fuel cost for a plant burning today's "cheap and abundant" natural gas is about 3.4 cents per kilowatt hour. (Bloomberg reports that the spot price for natural gas is about $4.55 per million BTU and an efficient gas plant needs 7500 BTU to produce a kilowatt hour.) Even if uranium prices increased by a factor of ten, the finished cost of nuclear fuel would still be less than the cost of natural gas and the plants using nuclear fuel would be dumping nearly zero pollution (roughly 40 grams per kilowatt hour for the entire fuel cycle) into the environment while the gas plants will emit about 600 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour at the plant, plus another unknown quantity through the rest of the discovery, extraction and transportation part of the fuel cycle. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 1 week ago 197 Responses
Once again, I have had the "pleasure" of reading a recycled work about the economics of nuclear energy produced by the hand of a man who made the following comment about his career experience while talking with Amy Goodman on the July 18, 2008 edition of Democracy Now! "You know, Iâ€™ve worked for major oil companies for about thirty-five years, and they understand how expensive it is to drill for oil." I have a hard time trusting the economic figures provided by someone who has spent his career working for a competitor to nuclear energy. (Disclosure - I have a vested interest in the continued construction and operation of nuclear energy plants as a former Navy nuclear engineer officer, as the founder of Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. and as a publisher of an atomic energy focused blog and podcast.) There will be some who will point out that the US burns very little oil in our electric power plants today, but what they will fail to mention is that as late as 1978, when our nuclear plants were just coming on line and provided about 12% of our total electrical power generation (and rising fast - that figure was up from less than 1% just 10 years earlier), oil burning power plants still provided as much as 17% of the electrical power used in the United States. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0802a.html Oil burning power plants also provided more than half of the electricity consumed in France, a significant portion of the electricity used in Korea, and a major chunk of the electricity used in Japan. In each of those markets, as nuclear fission's market share grew, it reduced the consumption of oil for power generation, helping to provide low oil prices for more than 15 years between 1985 and 2000. The most important determination of price for commodities like oil, gas and coal is the balance between supply and demand - the completely new supply provided by nuclear fission power plants and nuclear powered naval ships that replaced oil burning power plants had a substantial effect on the overall supply of useful energy. Lovins and many of the commenters here dismiss the current performance of the existing nuclear plants here in the US, but I am old enough to remember that Lovins told us in the 1970s that nuclear plants were incredibly expensive and should not be built. Now those plants he fought are paid off, have several decades worth of life left in them and produce power for an average cost of 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour, generating hundreds of millions in profits for the investor owned utilities in competitively priced markets while keeping electricity prices low for consumers in those markets that are still under cost of service regulation. Last week there were two major meetings in Washington that also demonstrated that Lovins is either a liar or misinformed when he says that all nuclear plants are large and capital intensive projects or that no private money is being invested in the technology. One was a meeting held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled "Scaling Down Reactors: A Different Model for Nuclear Energy" (http://bit.ly/4b1gSI) and one was a workshop hosted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the topic of licensing issues for small and medium sized reactors. (http://bit.ly/3jIXyQ) Each of the meetings was well attended and included representatives from at least 6 American companies that are investing private money into near-term projects that will result in the construction of reactors in the 25-300 MWe power range within the next 10 years. Some may be generating power within the next 5-6 years at a cost that is lower and far more predictable than wind and solar. Those moderately sized nuclear plants will also produce an infinitely lower level of emissions than the fossil powered "micropower" that Lovins and his employers love to sell. Look closely at the plants that get included in Lovins's category of "micropower" and you will find an awful lot of diesel, coal, and natural gas being consumed as the fuel source. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Stewart Brand's nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago 197 Responses
Smigen - The materials left over from uranium mining are never more radioactive than the original rocks and sand from which they came. Nothing in the process adds radioactive materials, in fact, the opposite is true since the goal of mining uranium is to extract the useful radioactive material, concentrate it and ship it out for further processing.
Based on current market prices, the uranium under a single family owned estate in a large state that already encloses 147 active coal mines is worth close to $60,000,000,000. Certainly the owners of that estate will receive a fair portion of that if mining is allowed to proceed, but extracting the material safely and within current regulations will also require the input of both manual and creative labor from many people.
There will certainly be local effects - but that would also be true if Cole's Hill was simply rock or sand that is useful for road construction or concrete manufacture. I have no idea how many quarries or sand pits the state of Virginia encloses, but since I work in a high rise in Northern VA near National Airport, I can tell you that there is a whole lot of material in use above ground that used to be underground. The roads, bridges, high rises, and all of the other accoutrements of modern living have a large component that comes from open pit mining operations of one form or another.
It is certainly your privilege to fight to preserve pristine land, even if it does not belong to you. It is your privilege to determine that you would prefer to live in a more primitive, back to nature style similar to the way people lived in the 19th century before there was widespread electricity, running water, interstate highways, or even many railroads. I have spend many joyous hours sampling that way of life, some of them in your home state as I hiked along various sections of the AT. However, I would not choose to live that way all of the time and neither would most of the 300 million people living in the US today. If we did, about 80% of us would be hungry, thirsty, and either sweating buckets or shivering.
My family was not lucky enough to be in the 20% of a much smaller population who lived comfortably in the 18th century. I freely admit it - I like living now and having access to the comforts brought by the efforts of many hard working miners, plumbers, machinists, electricians, construction workers, truckers, and engineers.
Finally - I ask both you and Linda to quit the personal attacks that question my motives. I have told you at least once, but I will say it again - I am a professional naval officer and have never worked for the nuclear industry. I publish information sources on the web using my free time, freely available software like Blogger, and tools that I own for personal use anyway. I do this because I have been given the privilege of learning through excellent teachers paid by taxpayers and through the experience of serving my country in a specialized field where I have seen for my own eyes how a mass of material that could fit under my office desk supplied all of the energy needed to drive a 9,000 ton submarine around the ocean for 14 years without refueling or emitting anything to the environment that was not already there. (We warmed a tiny bit of the ocean temporarily as we passed through.)
NO ONE can pay me to say something that I do not believe. NO ONE gives me a list of talking points. NO ONE provides me with a playbook. In fact, many people in the utility industry find me rather irritating when I ask them why they continue to consume a billion tons of coal per year, accept the myth that natural gas extracted by "fracking" deep underground seams is clean, or scar beautiful mountain ridges to put up massive, 40 story tall wind turbines that are merely a sop to people who dream that the wind and sun - which have ALWAYS been around - are going to somehow produce more than about 2-3% of the power that we need to run the country we have today.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
On Virginia OKs uranium mining study posted 5 months, 1 week ago 29 Responses
Smidgen - As I told Linda, I do not sleep well at night. That fact is pretty well documented on line - you can see for yourself the date and time when many of my posts on Atomic Insights have been published and if you are really interested you can do some searching for my comments in other forums dating back to USENET days with my atomicrod@aol.com account.
I share your concerns about helping and educating others. I have worked as a camp counselor, a lifeguard, a teacher, a small business manager and as a professional naval officer - which continues to be the source of my current income. I am the son of a mom who was a union school teacher who grew up in the home of a single working mom and father who was a beneficiary of the GI bill who attended college only because he served as an enlisted sailor during WWII. Both my wife and I and our two daughters attended public schools. We live in a modest, rented house and our cars all have 90,000 or more miles on their odometer - mine is nearing 180,000 and gets 47 miles per gallon.
My comments are not from any industry playbook; they are from my heart. I honestly and truly believe that uranium and thorium are amazing gifts that provide the opportunity for incredible benefits for humanity. Each pound of either substance - which does need to be mined, but occurs naturally - contains as much energy as 2 million pounds of oil or three million pounds of coal. The waste products of fission weight just a bit less than the initial material and are so compact that they can be fully contained and stored.
Linda blames uranium mining for radon - the truth is that radon is an inevitable product of natural processes of decay. When land is mined for uranium, the amount of radon produced is dramatically reduced because that uranium is the SOURCE for the radon.
Virginia has an incredible uranium resource that should be profitably, but carefully exploited for the benefit of both the local population that will obtain immediate job creation and for the benefit of humanity that will gain access to a large new source of useful, clean heat that can produce electricity, motive force and industrial heat. As you mentioned, my home state of Florida has uranium, but it is a lot less concentrated and could not be profitably mined at current market prices.
Finally - I would appreciate less in the way of personal attacks and assumptions about my motives and lifestyle - especially from someone who uses a pseudonym and does not provide any information about their own sources of income.Â
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
On Virginia OKs uranium mining study posted 5 months, 1 week ago 29 Responses
Linda - You asked for information about an open pit mine that employed 500 people. According to its home page, the Rossing uranium mine in Namibia employed 1,175 people as of the end of 2007.
http://www.rossing.com/emp_humanpotential.htm
It seems to me that the responsibility for health documentation is a shared one - if an employee is in an enterprise with known health hazards then he/she has has the responsibility to follow the safety rules and to keep records of their own if they suspect that they have been unduly exposed. There are plenty of industries in the world where people have the potential for interacting with hazardous materials ranging from cleaning supplies to solvents to fertilizers to colorings for plastic products. Even office workers have been known to suffer ill health from sick buildings or fabric preservatives in improperly ventilated areas.
I am not in denial, but I really do not sleep very well knowing that the world is rapidly depleting its millions of years worth of stored hydrocarbon resources and dumping the residual waste products into the atmosphere when there is an available, lower cost alternative that produces NO atmospheric waste products.
Once again - I will agree with you that uranium mining would not currently be necessary if the developers of breeder and high conversion rate reactors had been allowed to continue their work in the 1970s-2000s. We would be well on our way to a closed fuel cycle with reuse of all of the material that is now considered to be "depleted uranium" or "spent nuclear fuel". However, that is not where we are at this point and uranium mining is still necessary and valuable. Since it is, I prefer for Americans be able to compete for the work and to obtain the revenue rather than automatically sending it somewhere else. That is true even though most uranium in the world market comes from such friendly countries as Canada and Australia.
Though I live in Maryland, I work in Virginia and have some knowledge of the state's economy.
I know there are plenty of people out of work who would certainly prefer a good stable employment opportunity to the alternative. I also know that there are a lot of people in areas not far from Coles Hill that gladly descend into underground mines every day to extract coal, despite the known dangers. I am not naive enough to believe that mining is without hazard, but that is true even if the mining is for sand and rock in a quarry. I would certainly be interested in how one can generate any energy at all without mining something like copper, gravel, iron, coal, uranium or thorium.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
On Virginia OKs uranium mining study posted 5 months, 1 week ago 29 Responses
Smidgen:
Actually there has been uranium mined in the Eastern United States. I spent many years living close to where it occurred. I also spent many happy hours swimming in the local lakes and encouraging my daughters to do the same. You see, my home state of Florida - a pretty densely populated state, by the way - is one of the world's primary sources of phosphate, which happens to occur in nature with a relatively large portion of uranium. The central part of the state has a large number of open pit phosphate mines. Back when I was a young lad and uranium was selling for about $40 per pound (when $40 meant far more than it does today) the phosphate miners determined that it was worthwhile to remove the natural uranium component from the material that they were mining.Â
http://www.dep.state.fl.us/geology/programs/hydrogeology/uran_iso_appl.htm
I have also lived for months at a time within just 200 feet of an operating nuclear reactor. I encouraged my son-in-law to enter the profession as well. (I tried with my daughter, who is also an engineer, but she did not want to be stuck operating the power plant of an aircraft carrier while having to also deal with pilot egos.)
The waste handling methods of the nuclear industry are FAR superior to those of the fossil fuel industry, its main competition in the power production business. All of the used nuclear fuel is safely being stored, nearly all of it right on the site where it was first generated. NONE is being stored at Yucca Mountain. There have not been any cases anywhere in the world where a person has been injured due to exposure to used nuclear fuel. That is because we handle it with care and use a very simple mantra of controlling time, distance and shielding to protect workers and the general public. In contrast, our competitors, the fossil fuel industry, simply build taller smokestacks or ash storage ponds and hope that dilution is the solution to pollution.
You are right about one thing - the internet has opened the floodgates of information. It is no longer controlled by the corporate media and subject to the fossil fuel advertising dominated corporate decision making that allowed enormous quantities of misinformation and scary stories about nuclear energy to be published without effective response from people who had access to better information.Â
If you think that VUI lobbying with a $1M is an example of influence peddling, what do you think that the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars spent by coal, oil and gas interests is?
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
On Virginia OKs uranium mining study posted 5 months, 1 week ago 29 Responses
Linda - I apologize for my carelessness in my response - I was addressing your comment.Â
While I understand your history with the uranium mining industry, I am confident that the people associated with Coles Hill will be good stewards and successfully avoid the effects that you describe. Technology has come a long way since the 1950s and 1960s. As I understand it, the deposit is mainly on the land of long time residents of the area. It is near their ancestral home. Based on the information that I have read, they intend to remain residents of that home while the mining takes place.
That is a pretty good indication that they intend to act responsibly. If nothing else, they deserve to be able to conduct a detailed study that can be reviewed by both interested and disinterested parties. You and Sue seem to be fighting against the very idea of a study - that indicates a certain predisposition to the answer and a strong rejection of knowledge. That position is not something I can understand.
Your analogy about battling cancer versus heart disease is not relevant. Cancer and heart disease are not competitive ways of achieving similar end products - coal and uranium are. Both are essentially sources of useful heat that can be converted into electrical power - surely one of the most useful and flexible products ever developed. They are also almost exclusive competitors; if you want reliable, low cost power, they - along with natural gas in certain areas - are your only real choices. If you make it more difficult to obtain uranium and force the supply down, you will shift the playing field a bit towards coal and gas. That is the inevitable result of making it more difficult to obtain uranium and taking what might be the largest deposit in the US out of consideration for extraction. Fighting against fission is fighting for fossil fuel combustion whether or not you want to admit it. Â
Finally - I would agree that we have plenty of uranium that is already above ground but that material is in a form that requires a more fully developed industrial base of recycling and fast reactors than we have in existence today. We could have been there by now, but anti-nuclear activists (some of whom were very definitely pro-coal, oil and gas activists as well) managed to convince a very lightly trained and experienced, self-proclaimed "nuclear engineer" to shut down the industry that could have made used nuclear fuel into a useful industrial scale input to our energy supplies. We will need mined uranium for quite some time as we expand the atomic industry and work to eliminate the emissions from coal, gas and oil.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastÂ
On Virginia OKs uranium mining study posted 5 months, 1 week ago 29 Responses
Sue - Unlike you, I cannot approach issues in isolation. I began learning about atomic energy at a young age, when I asked my dad - an electrical engineer who worked for utility with a lot of oil burning power plants - if there was any way to get electricity without needing smokestacks.
Of course, he could have taught me about wind and solar instead, but he realized I wanted electricity all the time, not just when the weather was right and the sun was shining.
With the technology we know, there are only two choices burning coal, oil or gas or fissioning uranium, thorium or plutonium. If you fight against fission, you are fighting for coal.
Of course I have a point of view and make that very obvious from my publication's name. However, do you think I make much money from my advocacy or that I depend on following someone else's lead in this topic? As we both know, you also have a point of view and do not approach this issue as a disinterested bystander.Â
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
On Virginia OKs uranium mining study posted 5 months, 1 week ago 29 Responses
Linda - If you are so concerned about water quality, what are you doing to stop coal mining and coal burning in VA?
Â
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
On Virginia OKs uranium mining study posted 5 months, 2 weeks ago 29 Responses
@Enviroperk - You reminded me of an important point about Mr. Casten's plan. The increased demand on natural gas supplies for electrical power production would lead to an inevitable increase in the price of natural gas for home heating and industrial production. Good for gas producers, bad for everyone else.
On How to shut down 93% of coal without building new plants or reducing power supply posted 6 months ago 27 Responses
Here is a better thought - use high temperature gas cooled reactors like the HTR-PM that is currently under construction in China to replace the boilers in already built steam plants. http://tinyurl.com/d55myg

That way, instead of simply transferring our dependence from one CO2 emitting fossil fuel that is produced by damaging large swaths of land through strip mining and mountain top removal to another CO2 emitting fossil fuel with a demonstrated history of extreme price volatility and known environmental hazards that are increasing with increasing use of technologies like 'fracking', you eliminate CO2 from the equation with a zero emission fission reactor.

Of course, if your real motive for being an environmental activist is to promote the use of natural gas to enrich companies like ExxonMobil, Shell and Mesa Power (owned by T. Boone Pickens), you probably will not think much of my plan or the one advocated by Jim Holm at coal2nuclear.com.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
On How to shut down 93% of coal without building new plants or reducing power supply posted 6 months ago 27 Responses
HAPA - As I said, I am a reluctant supporter who does not like the idea of providing government money to large corporations. I came to my support of the loan guarantee program after a series of discussions over a several year period of time - in my mind, that qualifies as reluctance.
For example, here is a quote from a post I made back in Jan 2006:
(Ref: http://www.atomicinsights.com/AI_01-25-06.html)
"I share your frustration about the subsidies provided to the nuclear power industry, but those are more a factor of our political system and the fact that companies like General Electric, Westinghouse and monopoly utility companies have a long history of demanding and receiving taxpayer dollars. That is not nuclear fission's fault, those companies look for and often receive subsidies for all of their development work."
With the current energy situation and the changes in the financial market since 2006, I stand by my decision to support an expanded loan guarantee program as a way to enable nuclear fission plants to be developed and to put Americans to work in a meaningful enterprise that offers a reliable, clean source of power for another couple of generations.
BTW- sorry you cannot sleep but I am happy to have contributed to your entertainment.
Rod Adams, Publisher, Atomic InsightsOn Gore vs. Hansen: Enviros take sides in debate over House climate bill posted 6 months ago 57 Responses
HAPA - I happen to have a negative view toward nuclear subsidies as well. I am a reluctant supporter of well designed loan guarantees. As has been often repeated, typical investment bankers have been somewhat reluctant to fund large scale, long term nuclear construction projects because the risk/reward profile does not suit their desire for rapid returns that can generate large bonuses and fees. Well designed programs to enable nuclear plant construction should have essentially the same impact on taxpayers as a well designed home loan guarantee program. My example is the VA loan program, which has always been self supporting because it charges adequate fees and serves a customer base that is likely to repay the money and not need any bailout.

Based on what I know about the proposed nuclear power plant projects and the people who are running them, I expect that they will also be solid investments with good prospects for loan repayment as long as the operators are able to overcome natural and man-made obstacles to their success.

With regard to the mechanism of cap and trade versus a tax, it is quite clear to me that the trading mechanism is flawed because the price of polluting will vary widely and because the current plan is to give away the right to pollute to the organizations that have already done the most damage to our shared environment with the size of the gift being directly proportional to the previous damage done. That is what you get when you allocate credits based on historical emissions levels.

With the acid rain trading program, the mechanism was responsible for the choice of compliance path - there was no mandate to install emissions control equipment so the utilities opted for fuel switching as a cheaper method of compliance.On Gore vs. Hansen: Enviros take sides in debate over House climate bill posted 6 months ago 57 Responses
Laurie and Allan - thank you for sharing your expertise. Do you have a web site or articles published with more of the technical details of the argument summarized above?
One of the infrequently discussed aspects of the acid rain cap and trade system was that it contributed to a significant rise in CO2 and fly ashÂ emissionsÂ because the low cost way to meet standards was to increase the transport of low sulfur, but also low energy density coal from the Power River basin. That coal source is often thousands of miles from the population centers and the established coal plants. Low energy density (7,000 BTU per ton vice 10,000 for anthracite) means that the coal trains need 30% more car loads to deliver the same quantity of energy.
For those plants that did install scrubbers so they could continue burning eastern coal, the plants had to increase the amount of coal burned for the same electrical power output to cover the increased energy requirements of their newly installed equipment.
Of course, the sulfur scrubbed from the emissions stacks did not magically disappear. Instead of being distributed into the atmosphere, it is simply combined with other chemicals and put into slurry ponds near the coal facility. Though the industry publicizes recycling programs for the sludge that results, only a tiny portion of that material is currently being recycled. Though certain components of the sludge have some value, there are also a lot of contaminants from the fly ash that make most potential customers a bit wary of using it.Â http://www.tfhrc.gov/hnr20/recycle/waste/fgd1.htm
People who point to the "success" of the acid rain focused cap and trade as a model for CO2 cap and trade do not give me much reason for optimism about its long term positive effects. A straightforward tax on emissions seems to be a much more viable and direct way to discourage atmospheric waste dumping.
Rod Adams, Publisher, Atomic Insights
On Gore vs. Hansen: Enviros take sides in debate over House climate bill posted 6 months ago 57 Responses
Salzman - If someone was proposing to use the same technology as was used at West Valley, you might have a point. That is not at all what either Kirk or I advocate.
If the people designing and building nuclear power plants were stupid or brainwashed, you might have a point. However, most of us are quite good at what we do and we are also pretty dedicated to our job and motivated by the potential we have for making the world a better place. Feel free to ascribe whatever motives to wish, but rest assured that we are not faceless tools who will accept your diatribes without response.
Going back to the main point of the initial post which compares the positions of Al Gore and his followers with Dr. James Hansen and his supporters. I agree with Dr. James Hansen that replacing coal burning in power plants is an important goal which would be made much easier with a straight TAX on carbon than with a convoluted, politically determined "cap and trade" system.
I also agree with his analysis that both Gen III and Gen IV reactors offer potential solutions enabling that goal. Here is what he said in his January 2009 open letter to President Obama:

Moreover, improved (3rd generation) light water reactors are available for near-term needs. In our opinion, 4th GNP deserves your strong support, because it has the potential to help solve past problems with nuclear power: nuclear waste, the need to mine for nuclear fuel, and release of radioactive material. Potential proliferation of nuclear material will always demand vigilance, but that will be true in any case, and our safety is best secured if the United States is involved in the technologies and helps define standards. Existing nuclear reactors use less than 1% of the energy in uranium, leaving more than 99% in long-lived nuclear waste. 4th GNP can “burn” that waste, leaving a small volume of waste with a half-life of decades rather than thousands of years. Thus 4th GNP could help solve the nuclear waste problem, which must be dealt with in any case.

The point is that Hansen recognizes that the obstacles associated with deploying new nuclear power plants are solvable by science and engineering. What he does not clearly state, but implies, is that solving intermittency challenges of wind and solar cannot be solved no matter how much science and engineering are applied - the weather will always be unpredictable.
Rod Adams, Publisher, Atomic Insights
On Gore vs. Hansen: Enviros take sides in debate over House climate bill posted 6 months, 1 week ago 57 Responses
MWILDFIRE - An honest "show me" attitude is quite refreshing, but I do not want to take the conversation way off topic here. Both Kirk and I have published extensively on the topic and have solid answers to your questions on our respective blogs - Kirk's is Energy from Thorium, mine is Atomic Insights. We both have search enabled on our sites - please read and ask clarifying questions.
I will answer your question about waste disposal - we know how to store it safely and we have been doing so for more than 50 years without a single known incident of death or even injury being caused by accidental exposure to used nuclear fuel. Protection is a simple matter of applying a mantra that all nuclear workers learn very early in their career - use time, distance and shielding. Minimize your exposure times, stay away from concentrated sources and put shielding between you and the source.
When we get tired of simply storing the material, we can recycle it into new fuel and other beneficial uses.
Just because you have been taught, often by people with strong economic motives for discouraging the use of atomic fission as a replacement for fossil fuel combustion, that there is no long term solution for used nuclear fuel does not mean that your education on the topic is complete or accurate.
Rod Adams, Publisher, Atomic Insights; Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
On Gore vs. Hansen: Enviros take sides in debate over House climate bill posted 6 months, 1 week ago 57 Responses
James Hansen is far more correct than Al Gore on this issue. Perhaps that is because he is an honest scientist with an impressive record of achievement who reveres the truth rather than an opportunistic politician/businessman/salesman who appears to revere financial rewards here on earth. Hansen is a career government scientist with a modest middle class lifestyle while Gore lives an expansive, carbon intensive lifestyle with major investments in the kinds of energy companies that will directly benefit from the bill. It is no surprise to me that a number of "environmental" groups and spokesmen favor the Waxman-Markey bill in its current form. They have been representing the interests of companies like GE, Siemens, Shell, and Vestas for decades.

I am one of those witches who is "desperately" looking for a silver bullet. I strongly believe that supplying clean, reliable, affordable energy is a respectable calling. I have dedicated a significant amount of time to sharing what I know about the amazing, natural qualities of heavy metal fission.
It is a process that produces vast quantities of controllable heat with tiny material inputs and almost miniscule waste volumes. It is well known that we can turn that heat into electricity, but we have also proven that we can used the heat directly for industrial processes that otherwise would consume gas, oil or coal and we have shown that we know how to push very large ships around the ocean using the same kind of heat to power conversion process. Those ships would all otherwise be burning oil and creating a greater demand for that already high demand, high profit product.
In the fifty years that the US has used commercial quantities of atomic fission, we have produced a grand total of 60,000 tons of waste material. A single coal fired power plant takes about 2 days to produce that amount of material.
All of the atomic fission byproducts are carefully stored and inventoried in containers that keep the material out of our common environment. Coal power plant waste is immediately released via tall smokestacks to our shared atmosphere or piled up in enormous, unrestrained piles or uncovered ponds with earthen dams that have a history of failure.

In just a brief period during the 1960s and 70s we started enough nuclear projects to eliminate coal from the US electrical power market. Unfortunately, about 60% of those projects were cancelled, partially as a result of pressure from people like Salzman and partially as a result of protective action by the coal and gas industries that pointed out an "oversupply" situation that was threatening their very existence. Fortunately, we did complete enough of the started projects that we now produce more than 800 terrawatts-hours of electrical power each year with fission, more than 20 times as much as wind and solar combined.

By the way, Salzman, I have never worked for the nuclear industry. I learned my nuclear trade as a professional naval officer and continue to work for all of you. My career has no dependence on the success or failure of the commercial nuclear power industry, but I believe that the future prosperity of the nation for my children and near future grandchildren is very dependent on expanded use of heavy metal fission as a fossil fuel replacement.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
On Gore vs. Hansen: Enviros take sides in debate over House climate bill posted 6 months, 1 week ago 57 Responses
Sue:
It is important to remember that Virginia has approximately 147 coal mines within its borders and a number of large coal fired power plants. Each of those facilities represent a source of potential environmental damage at least as large as the single uranium deposit.
The owners of the land where the uranium was found are members of a family that has owned and farmed the land for generations. They intend to continue living in their family home, which tells me that they will be quite careful in extracting the tremendous energy value out of the land.
With your reporting of the amount of uranium located there, you mentioned that it could supply all of the nuclear power plants in the United States for 2 years. What you did not mention was that was under the assumption that we never improve our utilization of uranium from its current wasteful, once through cycle. If the 60,000 tons of uranium was fissioned in breeder reactors, it could very well supply the entire US electrical power demand for 25 years or more.
In my mind, that is a quantity of energy that is worth exploring.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights.
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
On Virginia OKs uranium mining study posted 6 months, 1 week ago 29 Responses
Care to provide the computation?
@amazingdrx - you wrote:
"Each cask has the potential for 300 times the contamination from chernobyl."
Since a significant portion of the core at the Chernobyl power station burned up and vented to atmosphere, I have some difficulty believing this statement considering the fact that it takes about 9 casks to contain the core material from a large light water reactor.
Can you tell me how exposing the solid, corrosion resistant fuel material from one cask (1/9th of a light water core) - assuming for a moment that I believe that the cask can be readily penetrated - could possibly release 300 times the contamination from Chernobyl? The math just does not work for me, but perhaps you are younger and learned "new math" that got developed after I graduated.
BTW - though the bumpers are only front and back, the casks are also tested with side impact collisions. The test I saw was set up to simulate a rail car at a road crossing with a full speed impact from a tractor trailer. I think, but I am not sure, that test provides more risk of container damage than a collapsing bridge.
The cask in the test video I saw came through with "flying" colors - no breach was found when the container stopped flying through the air after being hit.On Turkey's only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 34 Responses
Amazngdrx - Facts need some checking
Not surprisingly, your Price-Anderson number is not exactly accurate, even though you provided a pretty good link.
You wrote:
"The Price-Anderson Act requires only $5.55 million in liability coverage to protect the 700 people and their property within a 5 mile radius of the plant."
You cherry picked the phrases you wanted out of the linked document, which goes on a few paragraphs later to state:
"Based on past exemptions granted by the NRC, the maximum amount of property insurance that should be required for a 10 MWe 4SNPF would be on the order of $180 million. Galena should seek to confirm in discussions with the NRC that it would be possible to obtain an exemption for the Galena 4S NPF that would reduce the amount of property insurance coverage required for the facil-ity to $180 million, or less, due to its small size."
Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea what the liability insurance situation today for the diesel generators and the multimillion gallon tanks required to provide electricity and heating oil during long winter months without fuel deliveries? Do you think there might be a chance that diesel fuel could ignite and cause death and destruction, or does that never happen?On Turkey's only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago 34 Responses
I am not asking for blind trust
@spaceshaper - in response to my comment about the critical nature of Joe's commentary - without his having ever been in the trenches or responsible for real power production - you wrote:
"Just trust us, we're the experts" is not the most compelling response to serious critiques of one's favorite technology, particularly when so much rides on its success or failure, and for so many people. More substance and less camouflage please, or get comfortable with being ignored.
I cannot expect you to know much about me or about how I communicate with people about nuclear power, but please understand that I cannot put everything into a single comment response to a post. If you want to learn more about the substance of what I talk about, please feel free to read some of the material on the sites that I pointed to. With the exception of a few guest columns on the old Atomic Insights - before moving to a blog format - I take personal responsibility for the information and stand ready to answer questions. (You can glean that from the comment stream.)
I am not an "expert" on atomic energy, but I know a few of us that are working toward that status - we might not reach it before we die, but we are trying.On Turkey's only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago 34 Responses
So don't do that
Joe:
Thank you for the useful post documenting some of the actions that must be avoided if one is going to produce power reliably and economically with any capital intensive new production facility.
In order to make a go in a competitive industry, you have site the facility in the right location, hire competent workers, provide them with complete, workable designs, purchase the right material, obtain the right permissions at the right time, monitor quality, keep an eye on the competitive landscape, and keep the project on schedule and on budget.
Most of those statements hold true no matter what the technology is, even if you are simply attempting to make already efficient buildings more efficient.
It is pretty easy to be a technology critic if you have spent your career in policy making and writing research papers about other people's efforts. It is also pretty easy to provide seductive advice when you will not be held accountable when the lights or the heater cannot be switched on when necessary or when factories have to routinely interrupt production when the weather changes.
Whether or not you choose to accept this reality, however, there are some extremely competent people out there whose professional experiences are far different from yours. At least some of them will have more positive experiences with some of the proposed ways to capture the useful heat energy that comes from atomic fission.
If the people actually in the game who have responsibilities to serve actual people are not asking for much help other than to let them go about their business in a reasonably efficient manner - the proper response would be to cheer them on and hope that they do not encounter any show stopping obstacles that could have been avoided. Asking real producers to wait until all else has failed is NOT a good strategy. Even for competent people, implementing any kind of major technology is a huge undertaking that requires doing a whole lot of homework and making some intelligent investments years before the first kilowatt can be supplied to meet customer demand.
One difference between you and I is that I am not satisfied with the way that the inevitable customer demand for power is being met TODAY. If you do not like burning coal, oil, and natural gas, you KNOW that we have to build reliable new production facilities and cannot rely on conservation and renewables. That path simply locks us in to continued dependence on billions of tons of coal each year, plus trillions of cubic feet of natural gas even if the totals never increase or even manage to eek out some slow decrements as efficiency encouraged by ever increasing prices and rapidly depleting supplies kicks in.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights (on the web since 1995)
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast (2006)
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. (est. Sept. 1993)On Turkey's only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour posted 10 months ago 34 Responses
All steam plants need make up water
Bob Wallace wrote:

Closed loop. Very little water loss, you're not blowing off steam.
You won't have a significant heat loss on the 4 km risers. They're coming up through solid ground which is a pretty good insulator.
Projected cost to generate about $0.10 per kWh, pretty much in line with wet sites.
All steam plants need a substantial amount of make-up water. They are closed loop systems, but they have valve leakage, pump shaft seal leakage, blowdown requirements, etc. A relatively small, tight steam plant might still need several thousand gallons per day of pure make up.
In addition to the closed loop part of the steam plant, you also need to consider the heat sink. If the geothermal plant is located near a body of water, it can use that for the condenser if the local regulations allow for it. (Of course, that option leads to the same charge of "cooking" the small fish population that is currently being levied against Indian Point Nuclear Plant on the Hudson River.)
If there is no local body of water, the geothermal steam plant will need a cooling tower type solution. That implies a significant water loss for an evaporative cooling tower or an efficiency and cost penalty for using a closed loop tower.
Your comment about the insulation effects of the ground through a 4 km long pipe exposes a technical optimism that is not shared by people who have actually operated steam plants that use carefully designed and applied insulation, but keep on smiling smugly.
Finally, your cost per kilowatt hour did not answer my question. I asked for the capacity in kilowatts of the turbines that can be served by the three $5 million dollar holes that you mentioned. (BTW - do those numbers include the piping and valves or is that extra.)On Responding to Heritage's staggeringly confused 'rebuttal' posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 30 Responses
How much per unit power output?
Bob Wallace wrote:

Capital costs? Five million per hole, three holes per turbine. Expected hole life 20-30 years. Return and reuse in 50-100 years.
Want bet that hot rock geothermal doesn't threaten your long term investment in new nuclear?
So far my answer would have to be yes, I'll take that bet in a heartbeat. Care to tell me how big a turbine you can supply from those three $5 million holes, where the water comes from, what your cooling supplies look like and what the steam turbine inlet temperature is once you have moved the steam up a 4 kilometer long pipe to the surface?
I used to operate steam plants for a living. Our piping lengths were measured in tens of feet, yet we still experienced a significant amount of temperature difference between the heat source and the turbine inlet. Because of the effects of condensation, our systems required traps along the length of the pipe to allow the water to leave the system since turbines like dry steam, not wet steam.
All of the money that I have invested in my projects that has not come out of my own pocket is what is commonly known as F&F (friends and family). The numbers might not impress you, but for us they are really important quantities that represent a substantial commitment. I like my friends and love my family.
The only kind of assistance that I have ever advocated for nuclear fission projects is a more reasonable approach to licensing that does not hit applicants with an uncontrollable, up front cost of $258 per bureaucrat hour at the NRC and a reluctant acceptance that loan guarantees may be required, but do not have to cost the taxpayers any real money. I firmly reject the notion that the insurance pool set up and mandated by the federal government represents a subsidy, since it has never cost the taxpayers a dime and never will.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.On Responding to Heritage's staggeringly confused 'rebuttal' posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 30 Responses
Willing to take that chance
Bob Wallace wrote:

Just think what would happen to your invested dollars in the XYZ reactor if hot rock geothermal pans out. That would mean a quickly installed, close to point of use, 24/365 electricity producer offering power at 2/3rds to half the price of your plant. Can you say "bankrupt"?
I can certainly say and spell bankrupt, but I am not at all worried about hot rock geothermal as a competitor. I know enough about the challenges of drilling holes more than 2 miles deep into the earth and running high pressure water and steam piping to recognize why this phantom power source will remain a thing of discussion rather than a reality. If people are concerned about having adequate numbers of trained people and capital equipment to exploit nuclear fission, they should take a hard look at the manpower and capital challenges in the deep drilling occupations.
Moderately sized fission power plants can serve many market needs that would NEVER be possible with geothermal. For example, fission has proven itself as a reliable propulsion power plant for moderate sized to enormous ships over a 50 year period of at sea operations powering submarines, aircraft carriers, and ice breakers. 6% of the world's oil is currently burned on ships at sea - you think those will ever be powered through geothermal?
As a guy who has written incident reports and investigated "close calls" on real plants, I have a much better concept than most about the difference between routine human errors of no lasting consequence and dangerous accidents that result in human injury or death.
There were more people killed in a sugar dust explosion in the US state of Georgia last year than have been killed in nuclear power plant operation in 50 years all around the world outside of Chernobyl. Even at that enormously famous power plant, the total number of named people that can be attributed to specific exposures to fire and radioactivity from that accident is less than 60. I am not trying to say that radioactive materials are not hazardous, just that we know a great deal about how to handle them and keep the public safe.
There is certainly significant financial risk associated with investing in nuclear power if you do not know what you are doing. I am vain enough to believe that statement does not apply to me, but also versed enough in the ways of the world to recognize that there are many things that could make me fail miserably. Knowing the challenge that the world faces with regard to supplying reliable energy for 6 billion people, I am quite willing to invest heavily into developing the known capabilities of fission.
Finally - your comment reveals that you and I have a fundamental disagreement about the definition of "cheap". You wrote:

Of course if we were comparing the cost of new nuke replacing currently cheap coal, which we are considering, then the number might be more like 4x.
I do not know anywhere that is burning cheap coal. Just because the polluter does not pay the full freight of his or her damage does not mean that the costs are not being incurred by society as a whole. Burning raw coal is a deadly, dirty, nasty, habit that puts all of human society at risk. The planet will survive even if we burn every last bit of stored hydrocarbons, but humans may not.
Besides, even if you exclude external costs and simply look at the current production costs for the average coal fired power plant in the US - the land of some of the world's cheapest coal - they are nearly 30% higher than the average production cost of existing nuclear plants. If you add the costs of even a moderate attempt to control and handle the waste dumping from those plants, cheap takes on an entirely new meaning.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.On Responding to Heritage's staggeringly confused 'rebuttal' posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 30 Responses
Successful nukes threaten establishment interests
Joe Romm wrote:

"And still, they can't really dispute the conclusions. They can only try to blame environmentalists (i.e. the public) for supposedly slowing down the construction of nuclear power plants and running up the costs. "
As I have said in several different forums today - I do not dispute the projected numbers that Severance has produced. They are as accurate as anyone else's predictions of the future. It is possible that power from new nuclear power plants will require an electricity cost of 25-30 cents per kilowatt-hour. (As an aside - can you tell me which year dollars were used? I must have missed that in the study.)
There is plenty of blame to go around for the experiences of the First Atomic Age. There were management mistakes, a lack of understanding of some of the challenges of scaling the plants up from the 60 MWe Shippingport reactor to the 1350 MWe reactors at the South Texas Project, there were rapid shifts in regulations, and there were some weaknesses in safety culture and operator training.
The fact remains that heavy metal fission is a reliable source of concentrated heat that can be used in industrial processes, in thermal power plants, and for motive force. The material inputs needed are orders of magnitude less than those required by fossil fuel combustion. The raw materials are readily available in many friendly countries. The waste products are also highly concentrated and readily isolated from the environment.
The production costs of currently operating reactors average about 30% less than the production cost of currently operating coal plants. Compared to "clean natural gas" the production cost for nuclear would have to be multiplied by a factor of 3.8 to equal the production cost for gas fired generation.
In fact, the marginal cost of running the plants is nearly zero since they cost just about as much to own when they are not running as when they are. That is dramatically different from the competitive coal and natural gas plants that represent 70% of the electricity produced in the US.
We have been handling waste safely on site for more than 50 years. No one has been hurt and no hazardous material has been released to the environment. Dry casks require little attention and will last for at least a century without deterioration. If used fuel recycling is still not common at the time that the casks need replacement, moving the solid ceramic material after 100 years of radioactive decay will be a simple matter. I would gladly host a container or two in my own backyard and would have no problem living in the same town as the entire US inventory of used fuel - it would take up less space than a football stadium.
Fission's main problem, and the reason that it will always be opposed by some people, is that it threatens many establishment interests. It has the demonstrated potential to rapidly increase the world's energy supply and puts a lie to the notion that energy is a rare and valuable commodity that is rapidly being depleted.
In a world where fission is treated in a way commensurate with its real risk, a vast portion of the capital assets of some very powerful groups lose tremendous value since they are based on an idea that energy is scarce. When I mention "fossil interests" I am not just talking about Big Oil, but about King Coal and that ever popular Clean Natural Gas (which happens to be an integral part of Big Oil in many cases).
The big players in the fossil fuel world (including the banks, transportation industries and governments) quietly cheer when opposition groups propose rules that restrict new energy sources and increase the price at which they can sell their dirty commodities.
You dispute the notion that there is such a thing as "Big Green", but the majority of the subsidies flowing out to green energy are flowing into the coffers of companies like GE, Shell, Chevron, Google, Siemens, Sharp, Kyocera, FPL, BP (the company formerly known as British Petroleum) and BP Capital. They are the ones that operate large renewable divisions, even though their renewable investments are dwarfed by other portions of their energy portfolios. They often spend more money promoting renewable energy than they spend developing it. There are also vast government bureaucracies built on the notion that we need to "solve" the energy crisis. As you know very well, they are often manned by people who prefer to spend their careers in comfortable jobs with good retirements figuring out ways to treat the symptoms rather than healing the addiction.
Nuclear fission is up to the challenge of pushing its way into the market. There is no other energy choice that can match its cleanliness, safety, and long term investment performance. Nuclear may not have been a darling on Wall Street in the past 30 years, but I am not particularly impressed with the long term performance of the investments that have been favorites with quarterly profit focused bankers. I am pretty sure that most of the world's striving populations - the ones that have not received bailouts and have not claimed that they were too big to fail - would agree.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.On Responding to Heritage's staggeringly confused 'rebuttal' posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 30 Responses
Surprise - David Roberts and I agree
Dave Roberts and I are in complete agreement here - coal is a dirty fuel that produces a lot of dangerous waste products in addition to CO2. Even if - and that is a BIG IF - it became possible sometime in the future to capture and sequester CO2, coal burning in power plants would still be an environmental problem, especially on the scale of billions of tons per year.
All that material has to be dug out of the ground, processed, cleaned, transported, burned. The waste products, including air polluting gases and land and air polluting ash have to be put somewhere beside inside human and animal lungs and into water supplies. There is simply no way to do all of that "cleanly".
An interesting development occurred recently in the energy discussion. Virginia Beach, VA, a city located in the Tidewater area, where there are several coal fired power plants and a very large coal export port, recently passed a resolution opposing a study to determine if it would be possible to safely mine uranium from Coles Hill, a deposit that apparently includes more than 60,000 tons of uranium valued at approximately $10 billion located about 200 miles from VA Beach.
The weird thing here is that Virginia is home to more than 140 coal mines and enough coal fired power plants to provide 38% of its electrical power, but it has people in leadership positions who believe that uranium mines have to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that they will not release any naturally occurring radioactive materials to the environment.
It seems to me that the only people who should worry about uranium mining in a carefully regulated environment are the people who sell coal. That single uranium deposit in Pittsylvania County, with its 60,000 tons of uranium, contains the same potential energy as 180 Billion tons of high quality Appalachian coal. If Coles Hill uranium was used in efficient breeder or converter reactors, it could provide as much heat energy as 180 years worth of current US coal production.On Tennessee ash spill more than three times larger than originally thought posted 11 months ago 7 Responses
Drive-by observation
Ted:
Though I do not have an inside source like David, I drive by the Capitol Power Plant almost every day and have for several years. Since traffic on the Southeast-Southwest freeway is often moving quite slowly, and since I was in a car pool for much of that time, I have watched the plant morph a bit during the past couple of years.
It used to be possible to actually see the coal being loaded up the conveyor that is clearly visible from the highway, but that seems to be decommissioned in place these days. I have not seen any of the black stuff moving in at least 8-12 months.
There was also a fairly extensive modification of the cooling system with several compact new towers added on the west side of the plant.
In the past couple of weeks, when the temperature dropped down into the teens, the plant was pouring out a lot of steam from the cooling towers and white clouds from the stacks. Since it is mostly a heating and refrigeration plant, the increased rate of visible steam from the plant during a cold snap is not surprising.
There is a brief mention of the project in The Hill (http://tinyurl.com/aywogd) that does not indicate that the conversion to gas was limited to the portion of the fuel attributed to the House of Representatives.
What is the date of the projection of 2009 emissions that you quoted? Was it before the approval of the conversion project - which was apparently sometime in the last quarter of FY2007?On Climate youth activists target the Capitol Power Plant posted 11 months ago 6 Responses
Winners and losers
David Ahlport wrote:

Nuclear power has gotten more than half of all R&D subsidies for the past half century, and individually for each year for the past decade.
And yet it still can't even provide it's own private capital financing. Much less private R&D financing.
There is no doubt in my military mind that it is easier to finance a natural gas plant than it is to finance a nuclear plant. I ought to know; I have been trying to obtain financing for moderate sized, passively safe atomic turbines for more than 15 years. (Google Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. for more details.)
The difficulty of financing atomic combined cycle turbines has nothing to do with a computation that they are too expensive to be competitive; the real reason is that the machines have the potential to be disruptively competitive, turning gas from a wonderful profit center for major oil companies back into an expensive liability. They also have the potential to overturn a number of other apple carts pushed by powerful people.
Just imagine for a moment that it is possible to take the best characteristics of a combined cycle gas turbine and mash it together with the best characteristics of a nuclear steam plant. The combination would provide a reliable, low capital cost, rapid construction, thermally efficient machine along with a zero emission, energy dense, low cost fuel source that could operate for years to decades without being connected to a fuel pipeline.
Who loses in such a scenario? The very first losers would be the people who normally capture about 93% of the cash flow from a natural gas fired power plant - the companies that supply the natural gas. (Names of such suppliers include ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, Chesapeake Energy, Anadarko, Gazprom, Aramaco, Petrobras, etc.) The next losers would be the companies that finance those major fossil fuel suppliers - mostly Wall Street and City of London financial institutions. The next losers would be coal producers. Next would be equipment suppliers for items like scrubbers, locomotives, coal cars, pipeline, tankers, barges, crushers, drilling equipment, wind turbines, steam turbines, cooling towers, and off-shore service vessels.
Who would win - everyone who buys electrical power and everyone who breathes the air.
In my discussions with venture capitalists, bankers, and angel investors over the past 15 years, the real stumbling block has been the fact that the potential losers are very knowledgeable about the energy industry. They are focused on protecting their current wealth and power.
In contrast, the potential winners are a much more diffuse bunch of people focused on many other activities and industries other than energy. The serious potential investors have asked how we can protect ourselves against destruction by the powerful players and how we can assure a steady source of revenue akin to that captured by fuel suppliers in conventional plants when our plants will not need much new fuel.
Hard questions to answer, but they are not the obstacles that professional anti-nukes often pose as being a problem. We have good solutions to all of those issues (used fuel, safety, operator training, containment, security, etc.).
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
On End of year musings on coal and its competitors posted 11 months ago 33 Responses
Solar thermal will consume water
@amazingdrx - I agree that solar PV systems, wind and biogas burned in combustion turbines do not consume water. Solar and wind tend to be incompatible with trees, so they are usually built in areas where there are no trees. If there are trees in a location deemed useful for wind or solar power production at least some trees will have to be terminated to allow that area to be exploited for energy production. (Here is a good series of photos taken during the construction of a large wind farm.)
It does tend to confuse the discussion about environmental impacts of power production when solar thermal power plants or biogas fired conventional steam plants are considered.
Both of those, because of relatively low operating temperatures, will be less thermally efficient than most steam plants - including conventional nuclear plants. They will thus require relatively more cooling water and relatively more steam plant make up water than more efficient plants. They will require some regular cleaning to keep the heat collection systems working, so they will also need cleaning water that is not normally part of the steam plant water consumption computations.
Solar thermal Rankine cycle efficiencies will get even lower as soon as the sun goes down and they are working on stored thermal energy reservoirs that get colder and colder as energy is withdrawn.
Since advocates of systems like concentrating solar thermal plants (CSP) wax poetic about the "vast quantities" solar energy available in dry, desolate places like the Sahara or the American southwest deserts, I keep wondering where they plan to get the required cooling and cleaning water.On The flawed economics of nuclear power posted 1 year ago 106 Responses
Burlington VT renewable model
@Richard - Thank you for the pointer. I have just spent a little time learning more about the Joseph C. McNeil Generating Station in Burlington, VT. If that is a good renewable energy model there are some interesting lessons to be learned.
The plant was financed through a bond issue approved by voters in 1978. The initial capital cost was $67 million, $13 million less than the original budget estimate. Plant capacity is 50,000 kilowatts, so the initial cost was $1,340 per kilowatt in 1981 dollars. (At an average annual inflation rate of 3% that would be roughly $3,000 per kilowatt today. That inflation number is just a guess.) The plant employs 40 people as foresters, equipment operators, fuel handers and maintenance crew.
In 1989, the plant was modified to be able to burn natural gas supplied on an interruptible basis during the months of May-November when gas is typically cheaper because it is not in demand for home heating.
At full power, the plant consumes 76 tons of wood per hour. 70% of the fuel comes from whole tree chipping operations that capture wood from forestry harvesting operations. That wood is material - like tree tops, branches, and malformed trees - that is not useful for manufacturing processes. The wood is chipped in the forest and hauled to the plant using diesel powered trucks or locomotives.
25% of the fuel is waste material from other local sawmill operations that would otherwise be sent to a landfill, and 5% is urban non treated wood waste normally dropped off at the plant by local residents. The total wood fuel consumption is about 180,000 tons per year, enough to supply about 2400 full power hours (plant capacity factor of 27%). The primary reason for adding the gas firing capacity was to increase the plant's capacity factor so that the capital asset could be used a larger portion of the year.
When operating on wood fuel, the plant thermal efficiency is 26%, on gas it is 31% due to the higher firing temperature. The hourly fuel consumption using gas is 550 million BTU per hour, at the current gas price of $7 per million BTU, that gives a fuel cost of 7.7 cents per kilowatt hour when operating on gas. The station can also burn fuel oil or a combination of gas, wood and fuel oil. Here is a quote from the plant's wood fuel facts page:
"Consumes 180,000 tons of wood per year, which displaces 360,000 barrels of imported oil"
The plant uses 42,000 gallons of cooling water per minute, and also has a need for several thousand gallons per day of pure water for steam plant make up. (Note: Though steam plants are ideally closed systems that do not consume new water, operational reality is that steam plants inherently leak and need make-up water that is very pure initially and has corrosion control chemicals added. Boilers also require a regular water consuming "blow down" to reduce sludge build up. The water that leaks or used in blow downs has to be treated to remove the chemicals before it can be released to the environment.)
The smoke stack that provides part of the fuel waste handling system is 257 feet tall. The wood ash residue is sold as an ingredient in fertilizer and road base material.
Another useful fact comes from the DOE's biomass for electricity generation analysis page:
"Of the estimated total resource of 590 million wet tons, only 20 million wet tons (equivalent to 14 million dry tons, or enough to supply about 3 gigawatts of capacity) is available today at prices up to $1.25 per million Btu."
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic InsightsOn The flawed economics of nuclear power posted 1 year ago 106 Responses
Need for a renewable model
@Jon - you have brought up an interesting point with regard to renewable energy. There is a paucity of models for what society would look like if powered solely from renewable energy.
I would be less skeptical if someone could point to any reasonably sized village, town or city that gets even a large fraction of its power from the popular forms of renewable power so that we can all see what living there would be like.
In contrast, we have several existing models of what a society powered in large part by nuclear energy would look like. It is a matter of taste, but I like the lifestyle those places currently provide.On The flawed economics of nuclear power posted 1 year ago 106 Responses
Who pays for the "national wind network"
@Jon Rynn - one of the major points that Lester seemed to be making was that nuclear power needed too many subsidies to survive, while private money was all that was needed for wind and solar. If that is the case, who is going to pay for the transmission infrastructure required? In case you have not learned this in school, there are times when the entire country is dark and little wind is stirring - don't you think we really need a world wide grid or massive electricity storage systems to "eliminate" the intermittency problem?
Your time frame for subsidies is carefully chosen to obscure reality. The real number for nuclear subsidies, broadly defined, is less than $15 billion but most of that was expended before 1970. It becomes your quoted $60 billion with an inflation correction. For the past 20 years or so, there have not been any direct monetary subsidies for operating nuclear plants, but the federal laboratory and university complex has demanded and received some amount of research money that some count as subsidies.
Though I would love for used nuclear fuel to be a private problem, the US government disagrees and has ALWAYS claimed a monopoly on the final disposition of materials used as fuel in a nuclear reactor. The entity that used the fuel has to pay a fee for the service of ultimate disposal, but so far none have received any service. Storing the material safely for an indefinite period of time is not difficult or even expensive compared to the value of the electricity produced. No one has ever been hurt by stored used nuclear fuel.On The flawed economics of nuclear power posted 1 year ago 106 Responses
Atomic Economics
Like his mentor and primary source, Lester does a fine job of ignoring reality and cherry picking his data to provide the story he wants to tell.
Rather than checking to see how many nuclear power plants are scheduled to be shut down between now and 2015, he resorts to using a model based on at least two invalid assumptions (prior decisions to shut down plants at certain ages predicts the future decisions, and there will be no changes in technology, markets or law that will alter nuclear plant life expectancy) to COMPUTE that there will be 93 plants shut down in that very near term future. That model is grossly wrong based on announced plans. In fact, there is a possibility that several previously shut down plants will be restored to operation in that time period.
He also makes a big deal about the cost of uranium and uses skewed data to indicate that it is going up because of physical scarcity and production costs rather than complex market behavior and trading reasons. There is an enormous store of uranium in the world, but the markets for it are opaque and intermittent. At $60 per pound, it represents a fuel cost of only about 0.6 cents per kilowatt hour after all enrichment, fabrication, waste storage and producer profit margin. That cost is almost exactly the same as it was in 1960 without any adjustment for inflation. For comparison, in 1960, a barrel of oil cost less than $3.
Lester also does not mention the very obvious fact that wind and solar investors are not investing without a lot of help from the federal, state and local governments to provide somewhere around half to three quarters of the dollars that make the investment work. They have loan guarantees, production tax credits, accelerated depreciation allowances, and perhaps most importantly, Renewable Portfolio Standards. They also have an enormous army of lobbyists led by major industrial companies with a national capitalism mentality of privatizing the wealth while socializing the risk. When you press your representatives for subsidies for wind and solar, you are working - unpaid - for GE, Siemens, Kyocera, Sharp, BP, Shell, FPL, Boone Pickens, and many other companies that love to collect your tax dollars and tinkle down the benefits.
There are many private investors who are putting major dollars into doing the foundational work that will enable a new generation of new nuclear plants, both traditional large plants and smaller plants that have all of the characteristics that Lovins likes to tout for distributed power sources like CHP. Check that, they actually do his favorite sources - natural gas and coal - one better since they will not produce any emissions at all.
Investors in new nuclear power projects include major companies like Exelon, NRG, Southern Company, Progress Energy, Areva, Northrop Grumman, FPL, Entergy, Shaw Group, Westinghouse, McDermott, Hyperion and NuScale. They also include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Rod Adams (forgive my vanity in putting my name there, but heck, as a percentage of net worth, I am up there on the list), John Deal, Paul Lorenzini, Jose Reyes and George Chapman. While no ground has been broken - yet - there are a number of signed Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) contracts and there are components being formed. (Note: I am not providing links, but you can find out more about the projects using the above names as search terms.)
It takes time to build big projects, but we did not get into our energy crisis overnight and will not get out with quick fixes. Lester is absolutely correct that nuclear power has not attracted many Wall Street investors in the past few decades. I tend to think that is a ringing endorsement; we have all seen the fallout from the favored investments that are characterized by short term payoffs and ready cash out capability.
Nuclear power works; it competes very well against coal, oil and gas for reliable electrical and large vessel propulsion power. Wind and solar do not really produce the same product - they can only provide useful energy when the weather cooperates. Comparing them as energy sources to nuclear is like comparing a garden to a grocery store. Sure, it is possible to get cheap food out of the garden on occasion, and it is even possible to store enough food to survive. It is comparatively difficult work and not really economically viable for an entire society, especially as we are currently populated and structured. Gardens do not work for people who live in apartment buildings, for those who are physically disabled, or for those that live in non temperate climates. Neither do solar and wind.
I predict that at least one response to this post is going to include a comment about the need to control and reduce our human population, but I am not about to start making the kinds of choices that would be required to have a world population that is substantially lower than we have today any time in the next several decades. Though I kind of hope that growth slows, the overall number is not going to decline and the need for energy is not going to fit within the constraints of wind, solar and available fossil fuels.On The flawed economics of nuclear power posted 1 year ago 106 Responses
Nuclear Power is less expensive than you think
There are many ways to compute the cost of a power source, and most of them are subject to a number of assumptions that cannot be verified until a project is actually complete and the fuel is actually purchased or the weather regimes are actually measured.
Until that happens, there is a lot of guesswork involved.
Nuclear power is often projected as getting increasingly expensive in the future, while wind and solar are often projected as being cheaper sometime in the future. Kate Sheppard seems to buy into that model of future costs.
When we take a look at current costs for operating power plants, there is a completely different picture. In the US, for example, essentially all operating wind and solar plants receive direct government subsidies in the form of production tax credits that amount to more for each kilowatt-hour (1.9 cents) than the total operations and maintenance cost for an kilowatt-hour produced in an average nuclear power plant (1.76 cents). That nuclear kilowatt-hour is available for an average of 7900 hours per year on a planned schedule while kilowatt hours from wind and solar are dependent on the weather.
The subsidies for the wind and solar plants do not stop with the PTC. Many states have additional subsidies and an increasing number also have renewable portfolio standards that REQUIRE a utility to purchase a certain amount of power from wind and solar plants no matter how much it costs.
When I provide the cost per kilowatt hour for operating nuclear power plants, I often get an immediate response from anti-nuclear activists who shout that I have ignored the capital costs from the mostly fully amortized (paid off) nuclear plants.
That is a true statement, but think about it for a moment - how did those plants get paid off? How long did it take? How many years worth of operational time - at low operating costs - are left on the plant?
In rate regulated markets, where about half of the plants operate, those low costs directly benefit consumers. (That average cost of 1.76 cents per kilowatt hour includes the following: purchasing of uranium, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication services along with storage and shipment costs, and inventory (including interest) charges less any expected salvage value, labor, material & supplies, contractor services, licensing fees, and miscellaneous costs such as employee expenses and regulatory fees.)
In addition to a low total operating cost, nuclear plants also provide significant resources to their community by paying local, state, and federal taxes amounting to tens of millions of dollars per year for each reactor.
Finally, they provide excellent, long term, often union employment. The average nuclear plant in the US employs a permanent labor force of between 400-600 people with an average salary of $65,000. There are no multi-million dollar executive salaries in that number to bulk up the average.
Talk to people who live new wind and solar installations and find out what kind of impact they are making for their host community. Then talk to one of the many communities near operating nuclear plants and find out why they are often very excited about the possibility of hosting more.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn Environment America says McCain's nuclear expansion would be 'an economic disaster' posted 1 year, 1 month ago 9 Responses
Environmentalists who do support nukes
James Lovelock, Bishop Hugh Montefiore, Patrick Moore, Bruno Comby, Gwyneth Cravens, Rod Adams.
Sure, "no one" knows me. Check my background and my volunteer activities and you can verify that I do support efforts to minimize human impact on the environment.On French independent nuclear commission reports four malfunctions in four plants in 15 days posted 1 year, 3 months ago 43 Responses
Venture-funded new nuclear plants
One of the mantras of the anti-nukes is that nuclear power plants are so expensive that no capitalist will touch an investment in them. There is a lot of evidence disputing that urban legend. Here is just one example:
On Friday, August 1, 2008, I spoke to two of the founders of NuScale Power, a venture-funded start-up company that is commercializing a 45 MWe natural circulation light water reactor developed initially as a research project at Oregon State University. The funding source is CMEA Ventures.
NuScale is following the path that has been established by many important technology startups - do the initial research and development in a university environment where there are plenty of active minds with great ideas. When a proper foundation has laid and lots of good, hard discussion has taken place, move towards a real product that can be put into the marketplace to solve real world problems.
Paul Lorenzini and Jose Reyes are serious, dedicated people with a real opportunity to change the world. You can hear our conversation at The Atomic Show #100 - Nuclear Power on a New Scale - NuScale Power.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.On French independent nuclear commission reports four malfunctions in four plants in 15 days posted 1 year, 3 months ago 43 Responses
Please - don't get all technical on us
Jon Rynn wrote:
"This happens every time an anti-nuke piece comes out. It probably doesn't hurt to figure out counterarguments, but they can get rather technical, and most of us aren't very technical. I just went on a radio show with Harvey Wasserman, he's one of the best sources for anti-nuke arguments. "
Sorry, Jon, but some of us believe strongly that energy supply choices have to be made with detailed technical understanding of the various alternatives. We actually believe it is important to understand that you could cover every inch of what is now New York City with the most efficient solar cells on the market, and you would still not provide 20% of the city's current power needs. (Unlike amazingdrx who likes to state that solar does not take up any room.)
We also like to look at statistics that show that even in that wonderful haven of renewable bliss - Germany - there are plans to construct 25 additional coal fired power plants; unless, of course, Angela Merkel successfully manages to build a coalition strong enough to overturn the silly decision to begin shutting down very safe and well operated nuclear plants.
Here is an emotional argument for you from a pro-nuke. I am a father of two, hoping to be a grandfather someday. I have spent the last 30 years learning the technical details of an amazing technology that has proven to be safe, clean, reliable and low cost compared to all other alternatives. I get ANGRY when idiots who do not want to do math, never bothered to finish school (Amory Lovins) and want to keep the coal, oil and gas bandwagon going for a few more years keep repeating stupid statements.
I also get really angry when people imply that I am some kind of tool for a faceless industry. I freely admit that I expect to profit from a vibrant and growing nuclear industry, but my current and past income has been as a professional officer in the US Navy. I spend time in discussions like this and in sharing as much of my nuclear knowledge as I can in hopes of raising awareness and interest in a very important - but somewhat technical subject.
Clean enough to run inside a sealed submarine. Green enough for me.On French independent nuclear commission reports four malfunctions in four plants in 15 days posted 1 year, 3 months ago 43 Responses
Ahh - I see an economic motive here
Charles Barton has helped me to understand why Joseph Romm is so positive that people should be made to fear all doses of radiation, despite many decades worth of evidence showing that sufficiently low doses pose no health risk.
In a comment where Charles was quoting Joseph, there is this tidbit of information about Joseph:
"My uncle was a nuclear physicist at MIT and then my family started a Radon gas testing company, which they later sold. I am quite familiar with the literature -- and yes, everybody should get their home tested for radon."
In general, Radon gas testing companies operate about like asbestos removal companies - they provide a service that can be useful, but when they have difficulty getting enough paying customers to care, they resort to scare tactics in their marketing material.
As the companies attempt to grow, their marketing material becomes less and less factual and more and more scary about the unseen dangers of evil Radon lurking undetected. Why without their services, that 100 year old farm house that your family has been inhabiting for generators might be what is killing them. After all, some of your family members might have died of OMG - cancer. Everyone should be paying Radon testing companies - like the one that Joe's family owned - to get their homes tested, preferably as often as possible. Otherwise they are just letting their families get exposed and risk the big C. Heck, maybe it should be mandatory for all homes to be tested. We cannot have uninformed people making choices about their family health. Besides, if they do not want to pay to get their homes tested, what will the Radon testing companies do with all of their fancy equipment and employees? (Please read the dripping sarcasm there.)
If you do not believe this is how radon testing companies operate try Googling "radon testing" and reading some of the links.
I know we should not joke about cancer, it is a horrible way to die. Like most people who have been around a while (I am nearly 50) I could produce a list of close relatives and friends who have died from the disease. It is a much longer list than I would like. Some of the people were quite young and all of them had painful and tragic deaths.
However, I also realize that cancer affects about 30% of the humans who inhabit this planet. It tends to be more prevalent in rich countries with long life expectancies - many very poor people simply do not live long enough to die from cancer.
According to very detailed and extensive studies, including the seminal work by Dr. Bernard Cohen, radon concentration in homes is not closely related to cancer rates unless cigarette smoking is also involved.
Sure, there is plenty of literature about radiation out there that can scare you, but "literature" is a very good word to use for some of the material. Much of it is economically motivated fiction even when it comes from supposedly unbiased sources like the bureaucrats who have been defending their radiation protection jobs for decades.On French independent nuclear commission reports four malfunctions in four plants in 15 days posted 1 year, 3 months ago 43 Responses
Certainly no pittance
Greentiger:
You are right - 1% of 11 billion is more than $100 million and that is a lot of money for investing in alternative energy sources.
It can buy the majors a lot of friends and supporters. Look at how popular BP has been in the green community with its somewhat larger investments in alternatives and its much larger advertising budget proclaiming its "green" message of being "Beyond Petroleum" with that nice green and yellow sunburst logo.
What I get from ExxonMobil's quarterly numbers is that 99% of that $11 billion is NOT being spent to solve our oil addiction.
Don't forget that the number is post tax profit - that is what is left over after all of the bills have been paid. The number that is truly astounding is that ExxonMobil's quarterly revenue was $138 BILLION and that company has only about 2-3% of the oil and gas market.
I also found it interesting to note that ExxonMobil's post tax profit margin was almost 9% and that they achieved their record profits in a quarter where their production actually fell by 7% over the comparable quarter last year.
The company directors also determined that of all possible investments that they could make one of the best was to spend $8.8 billion purchasing about 1.9% of the outstanding stock in the company. That was quite a bit more than they spent on exploration and development of new energy sources.
The amount of money that all of us are spending on our fossil fuel addiction is incredible, but your comment indicates that you believe it is okay as long as alternative energy suppliers get a few crumbs of investment dollars.
Rod Adams
Publisher - Atomic InsightsOn ExxonMobil rakes in record cash, spends only 1 percent on alternative energy posted 1 year, 3 months ago 11 Responses
Contamination - scary word for a minor event
Joseph:
In a world where cities with millions of inhabitants choke on the deadly waste products from fossil fuel combustion, why should I be afraid of nuclear power just because people occasionally get contaminated with a bit of radioactive material?
In none of the four incidents that you mention did anyone receive a dose that will have any effect on their health.
Radiation is a natural part of our earthly environment. Humans have evolved in a radiation field with natural background exposures that vary from a few hundred millirem per year to a few thousand. In the high dose areas, the exposure is often a result of concentrations of naturally occurring radioactive materials like uranium, thorium, radon, and radium and drinking water that has been "contaminated" with that material forever. Detailed studies conducted over many years have not shown any negative health effects for the populations in those high dose areas. (See, for example http://www.radscihealth.org/RSH/Data_Docs/index.html)
You also materially misstate the difference in cost between a once through cycle and a cycle where fuel is recycled. The 15-20% cost premium is just for the fuel portion of the costs, not the entire final cost. In the US, for example, the average production cost from a nuclear plant is about 1.76 cents per kilowatt hour.
Of that, about 0.46 cents represents the cost of the fuel in our once through cycle. If we were to recycle, studies have indicated that the fuel cost would increase by about 15-20% to a level of 0.55-0.6 cents per kilowatt hour. The rest of the costs would not be affected - you would not have to pay your operators more, pay your bankers more, or pay more for the parts and maintenance on the plant.
I cannot understand your assertion that moving from 20% of our electricity to 80% of our electricity would require the construction of 500-700 new plants. Let's both agree that we need to implement efficiency and conservation programs to keep the rate of electricity consumption growth low - no matter how we decide to produce the power to supply the demand that remains.
Under that construct, all we need is about 250 - 300 plants. The math is simple; we have 104 plants today that are producing about 800 terawatt hours of electricity each year. The total US consumption is about 4000 terawatt hours each year. The new plants that are being proposed are a bit larger than those that are currently operating, so they should be capable of producing about 10 terawatt hours per year each compared to the 8 per year in current plants.
4000 x 0.8 (80% of current demand) - 800 (already nuclear) = 2400 terawatts of new nuclear production needed.
At 10 terawatt-hours per plant that is 240 new plants. 300 new plants would allow for some reasonable growth in electricity.
There was a time in US history when we commissioned 15 new nuclear plants per year for two years in a row and that was when we still used slide rules and paper drawings and did not have a single CNC machine tool in the country.
Rod Adams
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Producer, The Atomic Show PodcastOn French independent nuclear commission reports four malfunctions in four plants in 15 days posted 1 year, 3 months ago 43 Responses
Back up is not "bought and paid for"
David:
One phrase that you use demonstrates the weakness of your argument. You stated that "there's sh*tloads of backup for our current sources, already built and paid for."
The problem with that statement is that most of the quick response back-up power is made up of simple cycle gas turbines or diesel generators. In both cases, the cost for the fuel used when the back up must be turned on represents in excess of 90% of the total cost of the power. When the primary sources fail, the cost of replacement power is considerable.
That is why we nukes harp on the capacity factors that nuclear plants regularly achieve - the average for the US is in excess of 90% and the rate of unplanned outages is extremely low. That means that the need to purchase replacement power is also very low and reasonably predictable. If you have a weather dependent source - like a wind turbine - you are often left at the mercy of the market if you have to purchase power right away to make up for a drop in production.
A very current case in point is the electricity supply situation in Texas, where there has been a well publicized increase in the amount of wind and gas fired generation in the past 15 years. Unfortunately, the existing grid does not handle or distribute the variations in available power very well. At times, in order to stabilize the grid, ERCOT is buying power for as much as $2-$4 per kilowatt-hour! (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121279439094653563.html?m ...)On What should I ask the efficiency guru about nuclear power? posted 1 year, 5 months ago 67 Responses
Look at Lovins's definition of micro-power
David:
Lovins claims about micropower and efficiency is based on some interesting assumptions. One is that "micropower" includes power plants up to 50 MW in capacity. That may sound like a small plant in the utility world, but 50 MW is enough power to push a 15,000 ton ship at speeds of 20 knots or more.
If supplied by diesel fuel 50 MW would burn about 67,000 gallons per day.
A lot of "micropower" machines are being installed in both the developing and developed world. For the developing world, they are the work horses, for the developed world, the fill in places where the grids are not strong or where the grid needs some help during peak hours.
They are often quite polluting and certainly contribute to overall greenhouse gas emissions. I think that RMI is lying by including them on a graph titled "Low or No Carbon World Wide Electrical Output" (http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid467.php)
Look hard at that graph and notice the dividing line between "projected" and actual. In the part of the graph based on actual performance, before the guesswork takes over, look at the very thin line for wind, the complete absence of solar, and the inclusion of biomass and waste (which are often very dirty incinerators and wood burning power plants at lumber yards and paper mills.)
Private capital is certainly putting money into companies focused on nuclear development. Take a look at the recent stock performance of British Energy, EnergySolutions, Toshiba, Constellation, and Curtis Wright. Look at Mitsubishi's recent announcement of investing half a billion in a plant to produce heavy components. Even VC's are getting into the act with recent initial financing rounds for NuScale and Hyperion.
Lovins has a 30+ year history of advocating a path of "anything but nuclear" (my words). In his famous "The Road Not Taken" article from Foreign Affairs in 1976 he spent several paragraphs extolling the virtues of new coal plant technology! (http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2007/12/blast-from-pas ...)
If you want to know more about Lovins, please visit the Atomic Insights blog and do a search on his name. You might think that the view is slanted, but I try to back up my commentary with verifiable research.On What should I ask the efficiency guru about nuclear power? posted 1 year, 5 months ago 67 Responses
No desertion is happening
Amazingdrx:
You are lying when you claim that "every energy expert" is deserting nuclear power. Your claim about financial institutions is also demonstrably false - where do you think that the utilities who have license applications and orders on the books are finding their money?
The utilities that have done honest analysis with the help of qualified experts have often determined that nuclear is their best option. It does not win in all locations but it does in enough places to make a real difference.On Bite-sized version of longer nuke study is on Salon posted 1 year, 5 months ago 5 Responses
Your article ignores fossil fuel cost increases
Joseph:
The problem with your article from an economic analysis point of view is that you have focused on the increases in the projected costs of nuclear plant construction while ignoring the very obvious increases in the current and future cost of purchasing fossil fuel.
Even with a very efficient gas turbine combined cycle plant using natural gas, the cost of fuel represents nearly 85% of the total cost of operating the plant. In 2000, the average price for natural gas sold to electric power producers was $4.38 per thousand cubic feet (roughly the same as a million BTU) and it dipped down to $3.68 in 2002.
Because of changes in the way that the EIA computes gas prices, the current price of natural gas for electric power producers is not available, but the commercial price for March 2008 is listed as $11.96. That is a HUGE increase above the 2000 price and has a large effect on the cost of electricity from both existing and future gas plants.
Historically, March is a cheap time of year to buy natural gas since the weather is mild. Who knows what gas will cost in 15, 20 or 50 years when any new nuclear plant ordered today will probably still be operating?
What is not as evident is that even coal prices have increased rather dramatically since 2000. While uranium prices have also risen, the cost of uranium represents only 13% of the O&M cost for a nuclear plant. (Aside: Uranium prices spiked as high as $135 per pound last summer. Today, the spot price is down to $59 per pound. Just imagine the sigh of world relieve if by some miracle the price of oil follows the same curve. I consider it pretty unlikely.)
Conservation is not a competitor to nuclear power; if effective programs are implemented that will simply allow the combination of nuclear power and conservation to shut down more coal and gas plants quicker. After all, we have about 1.2 Billion tons of coal consumption per year in the US alone to replace if we are going to attack climate change.
Wind and solar power are also not competitors to nuclear power. Though you call them "new" industries, humans have known that there was usable energy from the sun and the wind for thousands of years.
The millions of really smart, innovative and motivated engineers who have lived and died during that time have also recognized that there are known limitations to the amount of that energy and our ability to efficiently collect and store it for those known times (night and still, muggy days respectively) when those sources are simply NOT AVAILABLE.
In contrast, nuclear fission is a very recent discovery that has been recognized by technical people around the world as a vast, controllable, clean energy source. We are still operating many plants that were designed within 20 years after the initial laboratory demonstration that a self sustaining chain reaction was even possible! How can you call that a mature industry? The nuclear industry is at the same stage now as the computer industry was when Big Blue had 80% of the market and the only people who could buy computers were Fortune 500 companies.
Established business people (including their cheerleaders at The Economist) have been far less accepting of the potential for nuclear power, partially because it is hugely threatening to the profitability of all other energy sources. If you are even dimly aware of business and technical history, you will know that the fossil fuel industry has played an influential role in business, military and political decision making for about 150 years. Powerful people do not give up that power without a fight and sometimes they play dirty by using surrogates like the "green" anti-nuclear movement.
Unlike many other new, disruptive technologies, nuclear fission, by an accident of history, was discovered at a time when it was possible for the government to declare complete ownership of all knowledge and material. Entrepreneurs were not invited in during the First Atomic Age.
That is changing.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Host, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
One more thing - if fission power plants cannot be designed to follow loads, please tell me how my submarine was able to operate on a single reactor at speeds from 0 to in excess of 20 knots and back again with just a couple of minutes between the two.On Bite-sized version of longer nuke study is on Salon posted 1 year, 5 months ago 5 Responses
Aristole's scientific logic
I find it very telling that Canis and his fans point to Aristotelian logic. From a scientific point of view, Aristotle got quite a few things wrong because he believed that people should be able to reason out truths through the use of their minds without actually observing reality. Take a hard look at the Science section of the Wikipedia article about Aristotle at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotel.
If you do not have the time to read that, here are a couple of Aristotle's "beliefs" that were later proven to be false by observations and measurements (the testing portion of the scientific method).
Women have fewer teeth than men.
The earth is the center of the universe.
Please do not misunderstand me. I happen to agree that observations and measurements of CO2 and the world's climate support the idea that its concentration in the atmosphere matters and that its concentration is increasing as a direct result of human consumption of fossil fuels.
However, I depart from agreement with Dave Roberts and amazingdrx because measurements and observations of reality have led me to an understanding that nuclear fission can provide a way for human society to continue developing and consuming energy without changing the planet's climate.
If it is clean enough to operate inside a sealed submarine, it is clean enough to use as a major energy source.
If it is cheap enough to allow utilities to sell overnight power for $17.00 per megawatt hour, it is cheap enough to compete in the open market.
Rod Adams,
Editor, Atomic InsightsOn Lindzen: dishonest; News anchors: stupid posted 3 years, 4 months ago 20 Responses
Still Atomic Rod
Amazingdrx:
It took me a while to find some better sources than the FUD site that you linked to in response to my technical question about how a gaseous uranium enrichment plant could release plutonium.
Knowing what I know about the process used at the plant - at least for the past 30 years or so - I simply could not figure out where plutonium could possibly come from. There are only a very few sites in the world where there is even a tiny possibility of finding plutonium mixed with natural uranium - like the Oklo site in Gabon where there was a natural fission reactor several million years ago.
I finally found out that there were apparently some shipments to Paducah of recycled uranium from Hanford production reactors that MIGHT have contained a tiny amount of plutonium contamination. The only source that I found with a quantification of the possible amount that could have been released was a letter to the NRC quoting a figure of 328 grams. The letter was part of a filing about a new enrichment plant and can be found at http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/ml033170151.pdf
I know that some people are terrified by any release of Pu, but since I know that hundreds of multi kilogram warheads were tested in the environment during the time when Paducah could have been handling Pu - 1950s and early 1960s during atmospheric bomb tests - I have less concern about a possible release of a few hundred GRAMS.
One more comment before I go. How can anyone possibly consider that SOLAR energy collection is anything NEW? Humans have been smart enough to realize that the sun provides useful energy for as long as there have been humans on the planet! We have been collecting it and using it for heat and light whenever possible.
On the other hand, we did not even know that fission was possible until the late 1930s and we were not sure about how a controlled reaction could release energy until the 1940s. By the mid 1950s, we were using primitive nuclear power plants hooked to well proven steam plants to drive submarines around the ocean, and by the 1980s, there were enough nuclear power plants either built or under construction in the US to provide more electric power than the entire country used in 1960.
Meanwhile, humans have still not figured out how to collect solar energy at night, in a well shaded area, or on cloudy days. I have no problem with using solar and wind power if they are available, but I am dedicated to working on ways to use atomic power to meet demands that unreliable, diffuse energy sources cannot possibly serve.On No nukes is good nukes posted 3 years, 5 months ago 62 Responses
How do you get plutonium from enrichment?
Amazingdrx:
You have made a bold statement. Would you care to explain the process that allows a uranium enrichment plant to produce and release plutonium to the environment.
I am sooooo confused.On No nukes is good nukes posted 3 years, 5 months ago 62 Responses
The New Great Game continues; nuclear can win
Dave:
Thank you for your dismissal, but, if you do not mind, (and even if you do) heavy metal (uranium, thorium and plutonium) power is going to remain in "The New Great Game" for a very long time. If we are reasonably smart about it we might even win a substantial portion of "The Prize" in the coming years.
Forgive my vanity, but I think there are some of the world's most intelligent people working on our side who are operating and developing some of the world's most disruptive energy technology.
Some of you may not get my allusions. If you are a student of technical and business history you might recognize that the phrase "The New Great Game" refers to the territorial struggles over oil producing regions in the Middle East that has been going on for the past 60-80 years, and you may even recognize that "The Prize" is the title of Daniel Yergin's seminal 1991 book about the petroleum energy business. (The subtitle of "The Prize" is - The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power.)
You might think that the anti-nuclear movement is an environmental quest, but I have found that a good deal of financial assistance and technical direction comes from the fossil fuel industry. The thought leaders in that very rich and powerful industry have a lot more to lose by allowing nuclear power to flourish than people that like clean air and water and reduced human impact on the planet. Would you like finding out that you are helping them to do their work?
In my former life as a nuclear submarine engineer officer, I lived by the mantra "remain undetected". That is a pretty good mantra for an environmentally aware human, it is very close to the mantra of backpackers on the Appalachian Trail "zero impact hiking". We were able to follow that mantra because we had a power plant that did not produce any gaseous emissions, and operated on an amazingly tiny quantity of fuel. We could stay underwater for months at a time, and the plant that powered my 9,000 ton submarine ran for 14 years on a couple hundred pounds of fuel.
Studies that assign green house gas emissions to the nuclear fuel cycle completely ignore the Canadian example of using natural uranium and the French example of using nuclear generated electricity to run enrichment plants. Those who believe that only U-235 is fission fuel are ignoring the fact that thorium was the fuel for the final core of the Shippingport reactor and that U-238 fissions just fine on the second neutron that hits it.
The authors of the study that you think leads to "game over" are well known as anti-nuclear activists and have been pushing their point of view for quite some time. If you are the kind of person whose decisions can be made without further research into what others might think, there is little possibility that anything I can say here would matter.
If you are interested in learning why some of us disagree with Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith you can feel free to Google for Rod Adams, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc., Atomic Insights, or the Atomic Insights Blog. from those sources you can find hundreds of links to others with differing points of view on the matter. (I did not want to put in any links, just in case that action offends or leads to people believing that my contribution is simply spam.)
On No nukes is good nukes posted 3 years, 5 months ago 62 Responses
Choosing nuclear backyards
John Fish Kurmann:
The thought of having an immense backyard is actually kind of cool. I hope it comes to pass.
Actually, I know of at least one area where there are hundreds of people who have paid a healthy premium to locate their home on a lake that is literally the backyard of a nuclear power plant. That plant is currently storing all of the used fuel that it has ever used so I guess it also meets that criteria.
The lake is Lake Anna, about an hour and half outside of DC. The lake was formed by damning a small river to provide the cooling water for the Lake Anna Nuclear Power Station. The shores of the lake are now populated with expensive waterfront homes. http://www.lakeanna.org/Area.htm
Even if there are some people that are not aware of their surroundings, ever single owner made the a decision to buy a home in the backyard of a nuclear power plant since the lake did not exist before the plant construction started and since the power company did not begin selling off lots until well after the plant began operating.
The local population has been discussing announced plans to expand the station capacity. OF COURSE there are detractors, as would be expected from any large construction project. The general feeling, however, is that the existing plants have been good, quiet, clean and responsible neighbors that provide well paying jobs and help support a healthy tax base.On Kevin Drum blows it by repeating the conventional wisdom posted 3 years, 7 months ago 26 Responses
No contracts (yet)
Amazingdrx - no, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. has not yet signed any contracts, nor do I think I ever implied that we have.
We do have a conceptual design that is aimed for commercial ships, remote power systems and island nations. If all goes as planned, the first prototypes will be completed within 6 years. (It could be much faster, but we have to work through the slow and very expensive NRC processes.)
The much smaller machines for vehicles like buses, airplanes, and trains are admittedly much farther into the future.On Kevin Drum blows it by repeating the conventional wisdom posted 3 years, 7 months ago 26 Responses
Please - in my backyard
I can honestly say that I would have no difficulty at all putting a nuclear plant in my own backyard - I have lived within 150 feet of a reactor for months at a time.
I would also not have any problem living very near to a used fuel storage area that used currently standard methods of storage - letting the used fuel cool in a carefully monitored pool and then moving it to well engineered containers that are designed to last for a hundred years or more.
There are no plans to bury the waste near anyone's well. If I have my way, we would not bury it at all, since used fuel still contains more than 95% of the initial potential energy. I would follow my father's dictum of reduce, reuse, and recycle and work to improve fuel economy, find ways to use the rare and unique materials created by the act of fission and then recycle all potential fuel back into the fuel inventory.
I also live in this world and like it very much. I have two grown daughters and am looking forward to gifting their children a cleaner and more prosperous world than the one that I came into more than 40 years ago.
I resent your implication that nuclear trained people are somehow not of this world.On Kevin Drum blows it by repeating the conventional wisdom posted 3 years, 7 months ago 26 Responses
Questioning amazingdrx understanding of reality
Amazingdrx wrote:

That's old information. Distributed storage in the form of 100s of millions of electric cars and solar and wind powered homes with battery backup change that whole lame objection. Not to mention utility scale superconducting energy storage rings, a technology that could really take off given some funding.

If I was a middle school student and had no understanding of how the world really works and I read the above, I would start looking for all of those electric cars.
However, I am in my mid 40s, have spent 25 years working in a number of different cities all over the US and commute more than 40 miles each way to work every day. I have NEVER seen an electric car on the highway and can count on one hand the number of electric vehicles that I have seen outside of the fence of a few electric utilities that have them as promotions.
Amazingdrx likes to pull his number out of thin air - he takes conservative estimates of nuclear plant costs and adds billions to them and then takes the most optimistic estimates of large scale (90 meter blade) wind turbines and writes as if the same numbers on a per MW basis apply to home scale turbines.
BTW - Amazingdrx, do you know the name of the company that receives the most benefit from wind turbine subsidies in the US? You might be amazed to find out that it happens to be GE, which is also a potential recipient of nuclear power plant subsidies.On Kevin Drum blows it by repeating the conventional wisdom posted 3 years, 7 months ago 26 Responses
Not holding my nose
Dave:
I have to take serious issue with your characterization of nuclear energy as the least worst option that requires holding one's nose as if it really stinks.
The oil, coal, and gas interests love the fact that people like you feel that way about the only alternative energy source that can actually replace their products rather than simply slow the growth in their use.
I will grant you that it might take 10 years before new nuclear power plants begin making more dents into the market share of those fossil fuels, but consider what history has shown can happen.
It took about ten years to move from the prototype reactor built for the USS Nautilus to the point where the commercial nuclear power plant industry in the US began in earnest. Ten years after that, enough projects had been started to eventually result in the power plants that are now operating and supplying more than 780 Gigawatt-hours of emission free electricity every year.
If there had not been some serious and well funded opposition, plus some fears of "overcapacity" the industry would have simply continued building and learning hard lessons, pushing the coal industry into the margins by now. Three Mile Island did not stop the orders - it is not possible for an event that occurred in 1979 to cause orders to stop in 1976 - which is when the last nuclear plant order occurred in the First Atomic Age in the United States.
People can also point to experiences in France, Sweden, and South Korea to see just how quickly fossil fuel can be pushed out of the electricity supply market if there is a consistent effort. You can also look at the US submarine force and aircraft carrier fleet for other examples of nuclear power completely eliminating a large market for fossil fuels.
Sure nuclear plants require investments, but they also provide power that replaces the need to burn fossil fuel. They are the only power source that I know of that is a way to eliminate, rather than manage a fossil fuel addiction.
Of course, there are many individual addictions to fossil fuel that cannot be eliminated all at once, but it is never too early to start the process.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
www.atomicinsights.com
www.atomicinsights.blogspot.com
Co-Host of The Atomic Show Podcast
http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.comOn Kevin Drum blows it by repeating the conventional wisdom posted 3 years, 7 months ago 26 Responses
Nuclear Power for the Rest of Us
Dave:
Though I have been a uniformed public servant for nearly 29 years with the last 5 of them being in the sausage factory known as Washington, I find myself in strange agreement with the gist of your post.
I am convinced that many politicians and bureaucrats love big industry and particularly love the coal, oil, gas and traditional nuclear industry. The flow of money is pretty incredible.
However, my professional experience let me into a rather silent world that provides a beacon of technical hope that is not apparent to most people.
I spent about 7 years of my career in training and serving as an engineering officer on board nuclear submarines. That experience made me realize that it is an historical accident that makes people believe that nuclear power plants have to be enormous and controlled by huge corporations.
You see, our plant was rather tiny - I could do a detailed tour in less than an hour and I knew almost every component by name and operating history. I also had the opportunity to meet some Army nuclear plant operators that had operated even smaller plants in places like Greenland, Antarctica, the Panama Canal Zone, and Alaska.
I have invested a good portion of my free time in the last 15 years working on designing small atomic engines that can be sized to supply power to ships, villages, islands, factories, commercial buildings, college campuses, shopping malls, and even neighborhoods. We are making good progress toward a project to build our first prototype.
Someday, we might even learn enough about the engineering - though experience - to make them small enough for individual homes.
Of course, our progress has been a little slow. There are plenty of people that have made a career out of telling you that only certain countries and certain companies should be trusted to safely operate atomic power plants. However, a man with a questioning attitude might wonder just what motivates those people to be so opposed to a reliable, inexpensive, emissions free, NON FOSSIL FUEL alternative that is safe enough to enclose inside a submarine full of people.
I have found bits of evidence during our struggle to emerge as an alternative power supplier that many of the financial supporters of the anti-nuclear industry obtain funding from fossil fuel energy interests.
Rod Adams
President and CEO, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
www.atomicengines.comOn Nuclear energy and power devolution posted 3 years, 7 months ago 4 Responses
Sources for my figures on production costs
rh asked me to post sources for my production cost assertions. Here they are:
For nuclear power:
http://www.nei.org/documents/U.S._Nuclear_Industry_Production_Costs_1981_2004.pdf
Here is another source that provides the same information, just in case you completely discount the NEI:
http://www.cameco.com/uranium_101/electricity_sources/
Full disclosure, it appears that I was incorrect in my initial post. I put the O&M cost of nuclear at 1.67 cents, the above two put it at 1.68 and 1.69 respectively.
For the NYMEX price of natural gas (updated each day):
www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/energyprices.html
My calculation included a CCGT heat rate of 8,000 BTU/kw-hr.
You might also be interested in a fuller development of my idea that nuclear power is, indeed, cheap enough so that meters are not really necessary.
http://www.atomicinsights.com/AI_03-09-05.html
It nuclear plant economics would actually work better if people could simply pay a monthly fee for a certain amount of capacity to use electricity and then use as much as they wanted - if all of their power came from nuclear plants.
Think of it more like paying for a high speed internet connection. The capital cost is pretty high, but the variable operating cost is pretty darned low.
Rod AdamsOn Is the world ready to waltz with nuclear again? posted 3 years, 11 months ago 10 Responses
RMI thinks natural gas is cheaper???
Greenenergygirl:
According to the discussion at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) link that you provided to "prove" that nuclear power is more expensive than solar, I found the following statement:
"True, nukes don't produce carbon dioxide--but the power they produce is so expensive that the same money invested in efficiency or even natural-gas-fired power plants would offset much more climate change."
Accoring to reliable statistics used by the financial community, the average cost of operating a nuclear power plant in 2004 was about 1.67 cents per kilowatt hour that costs includes all operating costs - fuel, personnel, decommissioning allowance, and fuel storage fee.
At the prices listed on the New York Mercantile Exchange yesterday, natural gas costs more than $14 per million BTU which translates to a FUEL cost of more than 11 cents per kilowatt hour in a modern natural gas fired power plant. That price ignores all of the other costs of operating and maintaining a power plant.
As an investor, I would consider that RMI's advice is suspect. As a critical thinking, I wonder if the support that the natural gas industry has provided to RMI over the years has anything to do with their number free statements that sound a bit more like marketing than fact.
Oh, BTW, gas fired power plants still emit 2/3 of the CO2 that is produced when burning coal. Nuclear power plants are clean enough to operate inside sealed submarines - something that the US has been doing for more than 50 years. I ought to know - I have spent more than 2 years underwater within 150 feet of an operating plant. I was even in charge of the department that operated the plant for 6 three month periods.
Therefore, as a very concern environmentalist, I challenge RMI's advice that gas is cleaner than nuclear power. I would like to ask Amory Lovins (RMI's founder) to live for three months sealed inside a small ship powered by gas!
Rod AdamsOn Is the world ready to waltz with nuclear again? posted 3 years, 11 months ago 10 Responses
American pebble bed reactors
Interesting story. While I partially agree with your concluding remarks, I do not share your reluctance to embrace nuclear technologies - they hold tremendous potential for solving problems caused by fossil fuels. There is no wonder why fossil fuel producers are not keen on embracing their strongest competitor.
Here is my full disclosure - I founded Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. in September 1993 with the mission of designing and developing pebble bed reactor heated closed cycle gas turbine power plants.
We believed that the time was right to build plants that could compete in the markets that were being served by large diesel engines and combustion gas turbines - specifically the commerical shipping market and the market for distributed power plants.
By 1996, we put the company to sleep - with oil at about $10-12 per barrel and natural gas at $1.80, our economics were not compelling enough for anyone to take a chance with an "unproven" technology. Our protestations that oil and gas prices were in a temporary slump fell on deaf ears. You can find some of the articles on the subject that we published during that period on our web site at www.atomicinsights.com. The team focused on other employment opportunites, but kept a watchful eye on the energy markets.
In the past three to four years, the market has begun to turn and we have begun the process of waking up our tiny little company.
The Chinese, South Africans, the French and even some Americans believe that the technology has great promise. The conventional nuclear plants have a place, but they cannot serve all needs.
Rod Adams
Founder and President, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.On Is the world ready to waltz with nuclear again? posted 3 years, 11 months ago 10 Responses
Uranium mining
Jeff:
Your information about uranium mining is several decades out of date. I will grant you that in the 1950s and 1960s and perhaps a little into the 1970s, there were some problems in uranium mining similar to those that you describe. The industry was very young and uranium mining in the US was like a new gold rush with few regulations, little understanding of the potential hazards and some history of exploitation of native people.
However, those mines are all closed now. Essentially all uranium mining in the US - what little we do - is done using the In Situ Leach (ISL) mining method that does almost no surface damage and which is very well monitored and regulated.
More than half of the commercial nuclear fuel produced in the US over the past 10 years has been manufactured using material recovered from decommissioned nuclear bomb warheads - that represents 10% of the electricity in the US from a literal swords to plowshares program.
Canada and Australia are two of the major uranium mining countries and they have excellent safety records. Certainly none of the miners in those countries are exploited Native Americans.On Lewis on nuclear posted 3 years, 12 months ago 9 Responses

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