A bit of googling on my part turned up only some statements that he made back 3 years ago.

He didn't deal with the financial aspect of new nuclear.  I'm not sure that we realized how expensive new nuclear would be back then.

And I don't think we realized that we could get our baseload from wind for about the same price as new nuclear while avoiding the problems with nuclear (which he does recognize).  The Stanford baseload study has only been out since 2007.

Wonder what he's thinking these days?

From the link Jon presented:

"The fear of radiation shouldn't even enter into this," he said in comparing nuclear and coal. "Coal is very, very bad." Chu, a physicist, repeated a claim of nuclear proponents that coal plants produce more radioactivity than nuclear plants--a contention based on coal containing trace amounts of uranium and thorium.

The same old false dilemna fallacy perpetrated by nuclear power advocates over and over again.  The choice is not between coal and nuclear power.  Neither are safe and cost effective.

One would have to assume that Chu understands basic reasoning, that makes the repitition of this lame talking point an intentional error, an attempt to mislead.  Not a good sign.

I figured he would be pro-fusion, but pro-fission in its present state?  With "friends" like this in charge of administration energy policy, we don't need Cheney.

He could at least conceded that a next generation waste neutralizing reactor is the better course for nuclear power, and put the building of present reactor technology on hold until an R&D experimental test program proves the next generation design.

Accept that compromise or admit you are nothing more than a nuclear power industry advocate Dr. Chu.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

...I've been immersing myself in those reports, first of all because I want to get an accurate as possible view of where GHG gases are coming from.  Do you know anyone who has already done that?  I'm pretty far along, but there are some inconsistencies, and I don't have access to IEA 2004, as you put it (unless you know of an online free copy).  

The lab Chu heads was originally involved in nuclear research, so I would expect a certain amount of bias from him.  I don't mean that he isn't an excellent pick, which he seems to be, I just think that environmentalists should be aware that he has a pro-nuke outlook.

At this point Chu is probably looking at solutions mostly through "scientist" goggles.  Soon he's going to have to add "economist" and "politician" filters to his specs.

Nuclear makes a lot of sense if you ignore 1) cost and 2) public opposition.

We can do the job without nuclear and most likely do it for less money if we leave out nuclear.  And almost certainly we can get there quicker.  And that's obviously a big issue....

You're a pro-nuke person?

Someone who has yet to understand that we can solve our energy problems without building new nukes?

Probably solve them faster and for less money by not including new nukes?

That's what I've been concentrating on, I plan to have a post at the beginning of the new year.

Phil,

Makhijani's book has not gone through peer review. I've never seen anything of Makhijani that has been peer reviewed, and would be interested in knowing if anything he has written has been so reviewed (after his PhD). He is not a nuclear physicist but an advocate.

Remember, peer means elite, not equals--some farmers tried to assert that farmers are peers of farmers and so could peer review one another's work.

I couldn't find Lovins article at the Ambio site. I did find Nov 08 preprint from Lovins' group saying it would be published in Ambio in November. Could you find the article at the Ambio site for me? I'm not sure that a pre-print, such as Lovins produced, is standard. In my experience, some magazines post online versions early, but the author does not.

Karen Street

This is peer reviewed.

"Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms"

CRISTINA L. ARCHER AND MARK Z. JACOBSON

JOURNAL OF APPLIED METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATOLOGY NOVEMBER 2007

(Abstracted Abstract)

.... Interconnecting wind farms through the transmission grid is a simple and effective way of reducing deliverable wind power swings caused by wind intermittency. As more farms are interconnected in an array, wind speed correlation among sites decreases and so does the probability that all sites experience the same wind regime at the same time. The array consequently behaves
more and more similarly to a single farm with steady wind speed and thus steady deliverable wind power.

In this study, benefits of interconnecting wind farms were evaluated for 19 sites, located in the midwestern United States ....  It was found that an average of 33% and a maximum of 47% of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric
power.

---

This tells us that connecting multiple wind farms we can rely on a minimum of 33% of overall measured output as 100% reliable.  If we had no electricity option other than wind we would need to build 3x as many turbines as our power needs.

(Linking wind farms from other geographic areas would increase the 33%, lower the 3x.)

Given that wind (best sites, best technology) can be produced for $0.05 kWh that would mean that we would need to spend a maximum of $0.15 per kWh to supply our needs.  (And the price of wind generated electricity is expected to fall.)

Of course we don't need to depend totally on wind.  

We have existing hydro, might as well use the nuclear that we have, solar thermal can provide well-priced peak power and solar PV is reaching grid parity.  

There are conservation and load shifting.

And quite promising are geothermal, tidal and even slow flow hydro is quite likely.

None of the above mentioned sources are as expensive as new nuclear.  And none of them bring the same safety/waste disposal problems to the table as does nuclear.

All can be installed much faster than we can build new nuclear, thus allowing us to more rapidly reduce our carbon output.

"...EVERYONE publishing analysis at his level is pro-nuke. There is no peer-reviewed analysis, so far as I know, that shows us getting there from here, without seriously expanded use of nuclear power."

Top level energy department leaders, meaning those in control of policy, all drink the nuclear coolade.  The National Renewable Energy Lab gets a pittance, all the big energy dollars go to the "rad lab" and similar research centers.

That's why we need a new regime at the DOE.  Big reform is necessary.  Revolving door nuclear energy and weapons industry insider and DOE administration has given us this leagacey of waste, massive contamination, and leaky and vulnerable  reactors.

Admit that a new generation of waste neutralizing reactor design is needed and that R&D will take at least 10 years Karen.  Chu should admit that too.  No more nuclear power of the obsolete problematic mode presently deployed should be built.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

that Phil links.

There's a ton of good stuff in there.  

One of Lovins' points that isn't made often enough is the very long time that nuclear plants have to operate before they pay themselves off and return gains to the investors.  Decades.

This very long time frame makes investing in new nuclear very risky.  One takes the chance that a less expensive power won't enter the market 5 - 10 - 20 years down the road and destroy the nuclear plant's revenue stream.

All that needs happen is for something like dry rock thermal (projected to be ~$0.10 per kWh)or relatively inexpensive storage to be developed and sales from more expensive nuclear plants would be impossible.

Intelligent private money is not going to fund nuclear.  

Imagine if fusion works sometime in the next couple of decades.  Or superconduction approaches ambient temperature, making supeconducting electromagnetic energy storage more affordable.  That makes fission worse than obsolete.

I smell another bail out if we go nuclear like Chu wants to.  Then there is still the huge waste problem.  I wish Chu and friends would check out the problems with "glow trains", the deadly dangerous method of hauling nuclear waste in casks on trains.

And actually smart grid technology already features built in inexpensive storage, plenty to make renewables do the job baseload does now, a lot more reliably.  That makes nukes obsolete yesterday.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

"...I'd guess that about 1/4 of the anti-nuclear power people I know won't change ever, and most of the others have shifted or are showing definite pre-shift understandings.)"

You're dreaming.  Nuclear dreams, hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

The big problem with peer review is time.  What are most articles up to now, 2 years, 3 years, published after submission?  There are various and sundry reasons for this, but some stuff should get out there before peer-review, and then, ideally, it should go into peer review at the same time.  Isn't there something called "Physics Letters" or something in which people just put stuff before peer review?  Maybe that would work for other things too.  There is no reason to wait 2 or 3 years to start to cogitate on ideas.

As far as why other people aren't following Jacobson's lead, again, there may be some institutional barriers in that much of this work does not fit neatly into academic boundaries, but also perhaps other researchers simply aren't interested in following up on Jacobson.  After all, I believe Hansen was something of a lone wolf on climate change for a while, until everyone else caught up with him (and off topic, the earlier issues of World Energy Outlook are free).

of peer-reviewed work.  There have been many studies, including Jacobson and Archer on wind, showing that there is plenty of energy from wind and solar to power us electrically.  Or are those not valid either?  If they are valid, then the question is intermittency and the engineering question of whether we have the resources to build enough equipment to capture the wind and solar.

Even in the case of intermittency, I suppose it would always be possible to simply build enough batteries  -- sure, you could argue that cost would be an issue, but the technical feasability of such a system doesn't seem impossible.  So to some extent, in both the case intermittency and the feasability of building, we have engineering questions.  Why not at least model what such a society would look like?  It might require a decent amount of resources, and teams of both engineers and scientists, but climate modeling also requires resources.

I don't know whether this is relevant, but the peak oil activists seem to have been way out in front of academia and the press (I have no idea how academia is handling the issue of peak oil).  The main peak oil activists had been,first, engineers, and then journalists.  So it is not inconceivable that a similar process could take place in terms of redesigning the society to be carbon-free and sustainable (and as always, thanks for links to the literature).

"Peer review doesn't make something correct. All it means is that it is entered into the scientific and policy discussion--apparently, the work of  Lovins and Makhijani work is directed at the public.
Jacobson's ideas on wind power were widely attacked as too optimistic in Science magazine a few years ago by other pro-wind advocates, such as David Keith."

It sounds to me that you have a strong pro-nuke bias that you are defending.

You complain about no peer-reviewed data and I post some.  So you then extend your argument to "peer review is sometimes wrong" and seemingly dismiss the offering.

A valid dismissal would involve pointing out flaws in the paper.

Further you attack Archer's and Jacobson's 2007 paper on the basis that Jacobson's ideas were attacked "years ago".

I smell a rat....

If you had read the Lovins et al. paper that Phil linked you would know that there are supporting findings for Archer and Jacobson from other researchers.  Their findings are not unique.

Let's set a higher standard, please.  Read the stuff presented and point out what you feel to be the weaknesses rather than dismissing it because it doesn't support your personal beliefs.

Yes, I am picking on you.  (But it seems that you play a spokesperson role, so it comes with the territory.)   

"Remember, peer means elite, not equals--some farmers tried to assert that farmers are peers of farmers and so could peer review one another's work."

Sorry, that's bogus.  A peer is a person who is of equal standing with another in a group.

Within (probably all) branches of science there are "more respected" peers and "more respected" journals which have higher standards of publication.  

In my field there are journals which one reads with feelings of trust and ones which are best read with strong skepticism goggles in place.  But all are written and edited by peers.

Having grown up on a farm I can assure you that farmers are "peers" when it comes to things farming.  Plumbers and dentists are not farming peers.  Farmers don't ask roofers or investment bankers which variety of seeds works best in the local soil.

Of course, one learns which of your peers to trust and which to ignore....