Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?
Posted by Prof. Goose on March 1, 2007 - 11:30am
[editor's note, by Prof. Goose] This is an updated/edited repost by Martin Sevior, Associate Professor, School of Physics, University of Melbourne. We thought this a worthy topic for discussion as nuclear power keeps coming up in many of our threads. The original post can be found here. (Forget not the reddit and digg buttons...)
In the middle of the last year it became clear to me that the Australian Government was interested in having a debate about Nuclear Energy for Australia. I decided that we, in the School of Physics, could make a positive contribution to the debate and organized a study group to investigate this. We constructed a wiki-based website (http://nuclearinfo.net) where we placed our findings. We went live in December, 2005 and have updated the website as we've learned more about energy issues and Nuclear Power.
In this post I draw heavily on that website and restrict myself to talking about light water fission reactors. There are a variety of different and more advanced reactor schemes that could be addressed in a future post. There are more details on our website on all of the topics covered here.
Nuclear Fission Basics
A nuclear fission reaction occurs when a 235U or 239Pu nucleus captures a neutron, splits into two smaller nuclei and releases 2 - 3 more neutrons. These neutrons can be used to initiate further reactions. From an energy standpoint, the significant feature is that the release is around 200 Million Electron Volts per reaction. A typical chemical process such as the oxidation of hydrogen, emits 20 electron volts per reaction. Thus nuclear fission provides around 10 million times more energy than chemical processes. This factor of 10 million sets the scale of Nuclear Power.
Natural Uranium consists of 99.3% 238U and 0.7% 235U. Conventional light water reactors utilize fuel with an initial 235U concentration enriched to at least 3.5%. The energy released from these reactors comes from the fission of 235U and 239Pu (which is produced via neutron captures on 238U). The heat from the reaction is used to drive steam turbines with a conversion efficiency of around 33%. Typically the fuel is loaded at 3.5% 235U and replaced once the 235U concentration has fallen to 1.2%. A 1 GW light water Nuclear Power Plant consumes 30 tonnes of fuel per year. A coal-fired plant of the same magnitude consumes 9000 tonnes of coal per day.
World Uranium supply
Given that this website is devoted to the study of peak oil, I think it's appropriate to first look at the prospects for using Uranium as fuel source for at least the rest of the next century. Uranium is not a particularly rare mineral. It has an average crustal abundance of about 2.7 Parts Per Million (PPM), which about the same as tin and zinc. There is an estimated 40 trillion tonnes of Uranium in the Earth's crust. To date we have mined less than one ten-millionth of this (as opposed to about half the world's conventional crude Oil). A typical 1 GW Nuclear reactor requires around 200 tonnes of natural Uranium per year. Current world consumption of Uranium amounts to some 65,000 tonnes per annum. Current world supply is around 40,000 tonnes per annum. The mismatch is maintained by the drawn-down of stocks and the use of fissile material available from the reduction in Nuclear Weapons in the USA and ex-Soviet Union. The combination caused a decade-long depression of World Uranium price. These stocks and secondary sources will be exhausted by the middle of the next decade. In early 2003 the price of Uranium was $23 per kg, it is currently at around $187 per kg. This price increase has triggered a rapid increase in exploration activity around the world. At $187 per kg, the price of Uranium Ore contributes about 0.37 cents per KW-HR to the price of Nuclear generated electricity.
Reasonably assured reserves (or proven reserves) refers to known commercial quantities of Uranium recoverable with current technology and for a specified price. The terms additional and speculative reserves refer to extensions to well explored deposits or in new deposits that are thought to exist based on well defined geological data.
As of the beginning of 2003 World Uranium reserves were:
- Reasonable Assured Reserves recoverable at less than $US130/kgU (or $US50/lb U3O8) = 3.10 - 3.28 million tonnes.
- Additional reserves recoverable at less than $US130/kgU (or $US50/lb U3O8) = 10.690 million tonnes.
As of the beginning of 2005 World Uranium reserves were:
- Reasonable Assured Reserves recoverable at less than $US130/kgU (or $US50/lb U3O8) = 4.7 million tonnes.
- Additional recoverable Uranium is estimated to be 35 million tonnes
The substantial increase (almost 50%) from 2003 shows the results of the world-wide renewed exploration effort spurred by the increase in Uranium prices which commenced in 2004. This increase in activity has continued through to 2006. Thus, the provable uranium resources amount to approximately 85 years supply at the current level of consumption with current technology, with another 500 years of additional reserves. It is worth noting that the numbers above do not reflect the considerable increase in Uranium exploration that has taken place in 2005 and 2006.
It is interesting to speculate on the ultimate size of the world Uranium resource, if it were to power light water reactors. This can be estimated by comparing the energy produced by a nuclear plant to the energy required to mine and refine the Ore. As one moves to lower grade Ore, the energy cost the mining and refining increases. However the total resource size increases at these higher dilutions. If we assume the rate at which the energy cost increases is inversely proportional to the Uranium concentration in the Ore we can estimate the ultimate size of Uranium resource if consumed in light water reactors. The Rossing mine in Nambia is a large, low grade Ore deposit. It produces around 3000 tonnes of Uranium per year. The energy cost of this process is 1 PetaJoule. Now 3000 tonnes of Uranium provides 15 GigaWatt-years of power which is about 470 PetaJoules of energy. So the energy gain from Rossing is close to a factor of 500. The grade of Uranium at Rossing is 0.035% by weight (about 350 ppm). Deffeyes & MacGregor have estimated the distribution of Uranium in different types of rock and show that shales and phosphates contain 8000 times as much Uranium as current Uranium Ore bodies at a concentration of 10 -20 PPM. These rocks are potentially minable with an energy gain of 15-30.
Consequently, unlike conventional Oil, Uranium resource exhaustion will not be an issue for the foreseeable future.
Energy Lifecycle of Nuclear Power
The performance of Nuclear Power can be compared to other energy sources by calculating the total energy required to build and run a Nuclear Power plant and comparing it to the total energy it produces. The following set of calculations is also taken from the independently audited, Vattenfall Environmental Product Declaration for its 3090 MW Forsmark nuclear power plant in Sweden. A more detailed description is here. Vattenfall have also made available the aggregated data set as a spreadsheet. You can download it from here. Vattenfall is a large European Energy utility that operates a variety of energy generation technologies including Nuclear, Hydro, Natural gas, Coal, Oil, Peat, Biomass, Wind and Photovoltaic. We chose this because it had been independently audited, and includes the entire lifecycle of the processes which includes the eventual long-term disposal of the waste. Sweden and Finland have perhaps the most developed nuclear waste disposal plans of any country.
The following table displays the source and the amount of energy required to produce 1 KW-Hr of electricity. The table includes the energy used in construction of the plant, mining the Uranium, enriching it, converting it to fuel, disposing the waste and decommissioning the plant. The plant is assumed to run for 40 years. There is an additional 0.026 grams of Uranium consumed in generating this one KW-Hr of electricity. This 0.026 grams includes the Uranium used to generate power and the Uranium consumed by the French Nuclear Power plants that produced the electricity that enriched the Fuel.
So the Plant produces 93 times more energy than it consumes. Or put another way, the non-nuclear energy investment required to generate electricity for 40 years is repaid in 5 months. Normalized to 1 GigaWatt electrical capacity, the energy required to construct and decommission the plant, which amounts to 4 Peta-Joules (PJ), is repaid in 1.5 months. The energy required to dispose of the waste is also 4 PJ and repaid in 1.5 months. In total this is less than 0.8% of the all the electrical energy produced by the plant.
Greenhouse Gas emissions
Although the processes of running a Nuclear Power plant generates no CO2, some CO2 emissions arise from the construction of the plant, the mining of the Uranium, the enrichment of the Uranium, its conversion into Nuclear Fuel, its final disposal and the final plant decommissioning. The amount of CO2 generated by these secondary processes primarily depends on the method used to enrich the Uranium (the gaseous diffusion enrichment process uses about 50 times more electricity than the gaseous centrifuge method) and the source of electricity used for the enrichment process. It has been the subject of some controversy. To estimate the total CO2 emissions from Nuclear Power we also use the work of Vattenfall.
Vattenfall finds that averaged over the entire lifecycle of their Nuclear Plant including Uranium mining, milling, enrichment, plant construction, operating, decommissioning and waste disposal, the total CO2 emitted per KW-Hr of electricity produced is 3.3 grams per KW-Hr of produced power. Vattenfall measures its CO2 output from Natural Gas to be 400 grams per KW-Hr and from coal to be 700 grams per KW-Hr. Thus nuclear power generated by Vattenfall, emits less than one hundredth the CO2 of Fossil-Fuel based generation.
Back of the Envelope estimates
There is a meme that the energy cost and greenhouse emissions of Nuclear Power are such that they require 7 years of operation to become carbon neutral because of the embodied energy in construction and the energy cost of Uranium mining. We find Nuclear to be much better than than that so I think it helps to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to estimate the reasonableness of our calculations. The Forsmark reactors, normalized to 1 GW output, have a total mass of about 1 million tonnes, most of which is steel and concrete. If we assign the total mass to concrete and 1 carbon dioxide molecule per molecule of silicon-dioxide , (a substantial over estimate,) we get less than 2 million tones of CO2 emitted directly from construction. A 1 GW coal-fired power station consumes 3 million tonnes of coal per year, emitting 10 million tonnes of CO2. This is over 5 times are much as the direct construction costs every year. Regarding Uranium mining, Australia has a large mining industry, which consumed 232 PJ of primary energy in 2005-2006. It generates output worth around $AUD 91 billion dollars in 2005-2006. Australia’s Uranium output is around 10,000 tonnes per annum with a financial value less than 2% of the total. If we can assign the energy cost of Uranium mining in proportion to the value of product, we get 4-5 PJ of primary energy required for Australia's Uranium production. That 10,000 tonnes is sufficient for 50 one GW reactors for 1 year of operation. This represents 1500 PJ of generated electrical energy. So mining accounts for much less than 1% of the energy output of Nuclear Power.
Nuclear Costs
The cost of generating power via nuclear energy can be separated into the following components:
- The construction cost of building the plant.
- The operating cost of running the plant and generating energy.
- The cost of waste disposal from the plant.
- The cost of decommissioning the plant
Quantifying some of these costs is difficult as it requires an extrapolation into the future.
Construction Costs
Construction costs are currently difficult to quantify but dominate the cost of Nuclear Power. The problem is that third generation power plants currently proposed are claimed to be both substantially cheaper and faster to construct than the second generation power plants now in operation throughout the world. The Nuclear Industry says its learned the lessons of economy-of-volume demonstrated by the French Nuclear Program, and that these will be employed for the new power plants. For example Westinghouse claims its Advanced PWR reactor, the AP1000, will cost USD $1500-$1800 per KW for the first reactor and may fall to USD $1200 per KW for subsequent reactors. They also claim these will be ready for electricity production 3 years after first pouring concrete. This should be compared to second generation plants which, in the U.S.A., had construction costs up to $6000 per KW and generally took more than five years to complete.
Meanwhile the Chinese Nuclear Power Industry has won contracts to build new plants of their own design at capital cost reported to be $1500 per KW and $1300 per KW at sites in South-East and North-East China.
The first Westinghouse AP1000 will be also be constructed in China. Newspaper reports are that the cost for the 2 twin units with a total of 4.4 GW capacity is between 5.3 - 8 billion dollars. That is in the range $1200 to $1800 per KW of capacity.
Operating, Waste Disposal and Decommissioning Costs
Operating costs are much easier to quantify and are independently verified as they relate directly to the profitability of the Utilities which operate them.
Since 1987 the cost of producing electricity from has decreased from 3.63 cents per KW-Hr to 1.68 cents per KW-Hour in 2004 and plant availability has increased from 67% to over 90%. The operating cost includes a charge of 0.15 cents per KW-Hr to fund the disposal of radioactive waste and for decommissioning the reactor. This fund is currently capitalized at $24 billion dollars. The Swedish Nuclear Industry has charged 0.13 cents per KW-Hr for waste disposal and decommissioning. Sweden has well developed plans for these which appear to be adequately covered by these charges. The US plans for waste disposal at Yucca Mountain remain highly controversial. It may be that the charges levied by the US NRC are insufficient.
Sensitivity Analysis of the cost of Nuclear Power
In our study we performed a sensitivity analysis of the cost of Nuclear Power. We employed a simple model which gives a reasonable guideline to the cost in US cents of electricity per KW-Hr based on various assumptions for construction cost, operating costs, interest rates and construction time. The plant is assumed to have a 1 GW capacity.
If we assume a 7% interest rate and 4 year construction period, US operating costs in the second best quartile, the cost of electricity production for plants that cost $1.2 Billion, $1.5 Billion and$ 2.0 Billion US dollars would be 3.3, 3.8 and 4.4 US cents per KW-Hr respectively. If the AP1000 lives up to its promises of $1200 per KW construction cost and 3 year construction time, it will provide electricity fully cost competitive with Fossil Fuel based generating facilities.
Safety of Nuclear reactors
The chain reaction that provides the power-source of nuclear reactors, is controlled by adjusting the neutron multiplication factor, k. The parameter k is the overall fraction of neutrons from one fission generation that initiate further fission reactions. If k > 1 the number of neutrons grows with time and more power is generated. If k < 1, the reaction decays with time and less power is generated. In a steady operation k is adjusted to be almost precisely 1. This is possible because round 1% of the neutrons in a reactor are emitted after a delay of a several seconds even though the typical cycle time between succeeding generations in a light water reactor is of the order of 10 milliseconds (these are initiated by prompt neutrons neutrons directly from the fission). The multiplication factor is adjusted by changing the configuration of control rods which absorb neutrons within the reactor.
In addition to this active control two natural processes provide negative feedbacks which stablize the reactor. The first of these is a negative temperature coefficient. As the temperature of the fuel increases, the vibrational energy of the 238U increases which increases the rate of neutron absorption. Thus k decreases and the reaction rate slows down. The second is what is called a "negative void coefficient". What this means is that if the water that is used to cool and moderate the neutrons decreases in mass (for example via steam bubbles forming voids), it no longer is an effective neutron moderator which also slows down the reaction rate.
So light water reactors are inherently stable to first order. Of course things can and do go wrong over the course of time. These are normally corrected by routine adjustments of the reactor parameters. However the worst thing that can happen is for a massive loss of core coolant via a catastrophic accident. If this happens the nuclear reaction will stop but the fuel itself will continue to generate heat from the radioactive decay of fission products. Without the cooling water, the fuel elements will eventually melt. Should this occur, the fuel is contained within the extremely strong shell of the containment vessel. The melt-down will destroy the economic value of the reactor, however the public remains protected. To prevent meltdowns, current second generation reactors employ multiple backup cooling circuits driven by active components like pumps and valves. These are active safety systems and modern reactors are projected to have 1 major core damage incident per 100,000 years of reactor operation.
In contrast, new designs such as the Westinghouse AP1000 employ principles of physics such as phase change and gravity to maintain cooling water in the event of a catastrophic loss. The design is simpler, smaller and safer and cheaper than current reactors. The American NRC estimates 1 major core damage incident per 2 million years of reactor operation for the AP1000.
There are been numerous reactor incidents over the years. Some more serious than others and most recently at the Forsmark complex cited above. However Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl catastrophe are the events that most people associate with Nuclear Power accidents. The Three Mile Island accident resulted in a contained melt-down. The Chernobyl event was the result of a fundamentally unsafe reactor design (the graphite-moderated, water cooled reactor has a positive void coefficient at low power as well as no containment vessel) together with a complete lack of safety culture. The following links provide excellent descriptions of the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl events.
The Three Mile Island accident caused the US NRC to re-evaluate Nuclear Plant designs and in many cases ordered changes. These changes were both expensive and time consuming to fix but have increased the safety of US plants.
It is a condition of entry to the EU that Chernobyl style plants be shutdown.
Nuclear Waste
Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) from a reactor is highly radioactive. The activity can be broadly divided into two classes. Fission products, (nuclei created from the fission process) and Trans-Uranics. These are nuclei that are heavier than Uranium and are created when 238U captures a neutron. Fission products are generally short lived while TransUranics can have half-lives in the range of tens of thousands of years.
Once the SNF has been removed from the nuclear reactor it is placed in interim storage at the reactor site. Usually this consists of putting the nuclear waste into large pools of water. The water cools the radioactive isotopes and shields the environment from the radiation. Nuclear waste is typically stored in these supervised pools between 20-40 years, although this could be reduced to 5 years. As the SNF ages the radioactivity decreases, reaching the point where can be placed in dry storage facilities. Throughout this time there is a great reduction in heat and radioactivity and this makes handling of nuclear waste safer and easier. However the TransUranic component of SNF must still be isolated from the environment for 100,000 years or more. The fission products typically reach background levels after 500 years.
After this "cooling off" period the high level waste can be handled in different ways. It can be reprocessed (which invloves extracting the Uranium and Plutonium) then disposed of permanently or directly disposed permanently in a geological repository. There is also very active research into "burning" the TransUranic's in either advanced reactors or accelerator driven subcritical assemblies. However this technology has not yet been developed to work on a large scale. Finally it could be left in dry casks for "interim storage". These are predicted to be safe and stable for at least 1 century.
The most advanced concepts of long-term disposal of Nuclear waste is for deep geological burial. The Nordic countries, Sweden and Finland are perusing solutions which employ multiple barriers to provide isolation from slow-moving groundwater. Finland has selected a site for disposal, Sweden is choosing between two locations for their facility. The earliest start up date for the repositories is 2020.
Nuclear Proliferation
The Uranium enrichment used for light water reactors is not sufficient for a Nuclear Weapon and while light water reactors produces hundreds of kilograms of plutonium during operations, the plutonium produced has too much 240Pu for a useful Nuclear Weapon. What happens is that the 240Pu builds up in a reactor with operation. In a light-water reactor, the 240Pu exceeds useful concentration (7%) after 4 months of operation. Nuclear fuel is normally left in place for over two years. After this time the 240Pu concentration is 25% which is well beyond the militarily useful range.
For this reason, light water reactors are called proliferation resistant. Normal operations preclude the production of militarily useful Plutonium. Abnormal operations are easy to detect.
Conclusions
Technically, there appear to be no show stoppers for a considerable expansion of Nuclear Power throughout the world. It is a low carbon energy source with abundant fuel supplies. The technology works and has much potential for improvement. Whether or not a large scale expansion eventuates depends on how it competes with Coal on economic grounds and with the public on political grounds. This in turn will be determined by the performance of the nuclear industry over the next few years as these purportedly cheaper and safer plants are built.
I think it is worth showing the final graph from M. King Hubberts' seminal paper "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels".
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Hit reddit, hit digg, hit your favorite link farm! :) Send it to slashdot, metafilter, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, etc.
Readers might like to know that sourcewatch describes the organisation Uranium Information Centre (also based in Melbourne) as "a front group for the Australian uranium mining industry. It campaigns for increased access to uranium and increased use of nuclear power around the world."
Several posters make reference to this site in the following thread.
The anti nuclear site linked to by sourcewatch (if true) makes interesting reading.
Yes (sorry, yeah), that's a fine piece of investigative work by Sourcewatch. Must've taken them all of five seconds to go to UIC's website and check out how they describe themselves:
Congratulations on uncovering their smokescreen.
They also go on to say:
Which is a level of accuracy almost completely eschewed by the type of anti-nuclear site you link to.
My point was simply to make that clear.
No one else linked to the UIC "about page".
In my view there is a difference between the somewhat nebulous "funded by companies involved in uranium exploration, mining and export in Australia" and the detail of former employees of said companies being staff of UIC.
The "about page" also has this;
"The Centre also subscribes to relevant journals, some of which provide authoritative articles and papers."
Either the peer reviewed literature is authoratative (at the time of publication) or are they wasting their money subscribing to non authoritative journals?
And when they say, "it is reviewed by someone expert in the subject matter", what does this mean? If it's not peer reviewed... is it Bruce in the room next door? He used to work for WMC!
What's your interest?
Do you dislike sourcewatch?
Are you a fan of nuclear?
Do you have shares?
And, as has been linked to at Energy Bulletin the distance between the mining industry and current Government Policy in Australia is curiously close.
(I did provide the disclaimer "if true")
Yeah Right:
You'd have to query the centre on exactly what they mean by this, but they do state above this:
Yeah Right:
Again, you would have to query the UIC on who exactly their experts are, but since they are funded by the uranium mining industry what makes you think they wouldn't have access to or use data from experts in nuclear power? Furthermore, if you doubt any of the information published on their site then take them up on their offer:
Yeah Right:
I have an interest in energy issues in general.
I have nothing in particular against Sourcewatch.
I am most definitely a fan of nuclear power.
I have no shares in the nuclear industry and have never worked for or earned money from any enterprise connected with it.
I would consider buying shares if I had money spare to invest.
Now, perhaps you would like to make clear what the UIC has to do with Martin Sevior and nuclerinfo.net, other than the fact that they are both based in Melbourne?
Yes, maybe that was a cheeky link.
Mr Seviors site appears to be geniune, and it was very astute of a member of one of the ~5 remaining functioning Physics Departments in an Australian university to anticipate the direction the PM would take the "nuclear debate" and set up this site.
The site is to be commended for its open exchange with Storm van Leeuwen and Smith, though I felt that it was a bit "apples and oranges" until about the second rebuttal. Ie SvL&S are taking a "whole of process" emergy approach, and its not clear (IMO) that Mr Sevior et al realise this in the earlier exchange (read it yourselves).
I was a little amused where we find that "Sevior contacted Dr. Roger Higgins head of Base-Metals operation for BHP-Billiton. He confirmed that the numbers listed in the document refer to the total energy usage of the entire operation. ie It includes all the energy used for all the mine outputs." But we have no idea about how BHP did the calculation.... ie does it inlcude the energy cost of manufacturing the acids brought onto the site etc, this is what I understand the SvL&S study is attempting to include.
Also, I feel the use of words like "need" in places where it could be meant "want" or "desire" indicates a simplistic projection of the status quo, indicating an underlying support or assumption of "growth" (surely not infinite?!). I would have thought a particle physicist might have shown less Newtonian thinking.
In any case, here in the bunyip democracy we have the situation that;
- The PM decides to have a "nuclear debate"
- Appoints ex Melbourne Uni physics graduate Ziggy Switkowski to investigate
- The report basically says "lets go nuclear"
- We later learn that three Melbourne business men spoke to the PM before the PM set up this process.
- The men in question are planning to set up a "Nuclear Power" company and inlcude former head of WMC (since bought out by BHP) Hugh Morgan and former Liberal Party treasurer Ron Walker
- the PM has denied any links between these events.
- Meanwhile, Hugh Morgan and other mining magnates gathered in Canberra for a presentation by the Lavosier Group.
Lets just say I'm sceptical about the transparency of some of these dealings.
Cheers.
(no more from me on this topic)
!1 !2 !3 !4 !5 !6 !7 !8 !9 !10 !11 !12 !13 !14 !15 !16 !17 !18 !19 !20 !21 !22 !23 !24 !25 !26 !27 !28 !29 !30 !31 !32 !33 !34 !35 !36 !37 !38 !39 !40 !41 !42 !43 !44 !45 !46 !47 !48 !49 !50 !51 !52 !53 !54 !55 !56 !57 !58 !59 !60 !61 !62 !63 !64 !65 !66 !67 !68 !69 !70 !71 !72 !73 !74 !75 !76 !77 !78 !79 !80 !81
France made the right decision 30 years ago and is now 70% nuclear.
Nuclear is not an option, it is THE option
But i am sure it will take people 10 years to adjust to this way of thinking.
Let the debate continue
Wind turbines + pumped storage are competitive with nuclear + less pumped storage in many locations today. The future trends seem to favor wind. Nuke will be useful in low wind resource areas.
Alan
Just on account of geography, I don't understand where we could possibly put the vast quantity of pumped storage that would be needed to sustain the USA during a relatively windless July when the unmoving high just parks and sits over much of the country, as happens every now and then. And that's before we even consider the vast powers we've foolishly ceded to the small handful of NIMBY and BANANA Luddites, who have been blocking wind power along with every other conceivable power source.
It seems inconceivable that this could work on a scale large enough to make a substantial dent in overall energy supply.
Cheapest solution is to manage Great Lakes within natural ranges and lower them during calm spell (as well as Lake Winnipeg, build out 5 more GW of hydro in Manitoba). Also drain reserviors on Columbia River, etc.
Geothermal could be made into peaking & emergency power rather than baseload. Drill 4x more wells, add turbines and use resource 25% of the time, including during calms.
I can easily design limited pumped storage that can run for one month. Long tunnel with several thousand feet differential. Large upper reservior.
No high/calm hits the entire continent. Perhaps a majority of population but not majority of land area. Sea breezes peak in summer for example and there is no stopping them.
More in my incomplete plans (53% wind, 23% nuke, 20% hydro, -19% & +15% pumped storage, etc. when I post them here.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Ontario is looking at using disused mines.
Alan:
As a native Floridian, I wonder where you plan to find a "several thousand feet differential" in my home state? (The highest point in the whole state - which had a population of nearly 16 Million people in 2000 - is less than 400 feet above sea level.)
I also wonder how the people who live and work on the Great Lakes feel about your plans to make their levels fluctuate even more than they do currently.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Personally, if we react as a civilization in time, I would expect a mix of wind and nuclear with nuclear providing a guaranteed minimum base generating capacity and wind/solar providing everything over that. This would buy additional time to refine or develop new technologies to address the episodic nature of wind/solar power generation.
Timing is everything. I think the alternatives are there. The question, per the Hirsch Report, is did we start ramping them up soon enough?
True Poly,
A recent debate has been raging here in Sydney (Australia) about the problems of fresh water. Our dams are around 30% and falling. It is critical that we get new fresh water supplies since rainfall is less reliable. There are two proposed options:
1. Recycle sewage
2. Desalination.
Everything weighs toward recycling.
But, for the only point that matters, a desalination plant will be built.
The one point: public opinion on drinking someone else's toilet water.
The committee decided to go with the worst, desalination, option because there is no hope, without 10 years education, of getting the public to accept the other option. And the need is critical.
Now, when we get to nuclear power, a truly controversial issue. Just how long will it take to win the public over?
You forgot about water. France had to shut down reactors last summer because the intake water was too warm from excessive heat. They are ok in cold climates but much of the world population lives in hot areas with limited water resources.
It is a moot point anyways becusae you won't be able to build them fast enough to keep up with depletion.
No worries Mate,
We'll build a coal-fired power station right beside it to create electricity for a water-cooling facility.
Next problem to solve?
The answer to that is build them on the coast. That's where the Australian population is anyway.
(the seaside plants in France don't have to reduce power in summer, only the riverside ones)
They didn't generally need to shut down, it just decreased their output. The french shouldn't have gone quite so cheap on the cooling systems and then this wouldn't have happened, case closed.
The same thing would happen to any thermal plant (coal fired, for instance), and to a lesser degree to combined cycle natural gas, if you go cheap on the cooling systems.
The Union Of Concerned Scientists certainly do not seem to agree:
"New Report: Long Shutdowns Prove Nuclear Power More Dangerous and Expensive than Necessary
Neglect of Safety Costs Ratepayers, Stockholders $82 Billion"
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/new-report-long-shutdowns.html
"Nuclear Reprocessing: Dangerous, Dirty, and Expensive
Why Extracting Plutonium from Spent Nuclear Reactor Fuel Is a Bad Idea"
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/nuclear_terrorism/extracting-pluto...
At least some prominent Australians (such as Professor Stuart White, director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney) disagree with the positions put forth in the header article:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/more-threat-than-panacea/2006/10/0...
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Opinion/The-nuclear-power-option--expensive-i...
The Rocky Mountain Institute (Amory Lovins) doesn't care for it, not surprisingly:
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid305.php
Of course members of Greenpeace have some good points:
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1802.shtml
Finally, read the EIA's own paper on the matter:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuclearenvissues.html
The articles are all worth reading, regardless of your position on the pros or cons of nuclear power.
They're an explicitly anti-nuclear orgasation...
Most of what you're posting is either irrelevant (nuclear reprocessing via PUREX process) or just hatchet job anti-nuclear activism.
Duplicate post
For example Westinghouse claims its Advanced PWR reactor, the AP1000, will cost USD $1500-$1800 per KW for the first reactor and may fall to USD $1200 per KW for subsequent reactors.
Believe it when I see it. The French got it down to around $2500/KW with volume and state financing. I find it hard to believe that a nuke plant will ever require less investment than a coal burner ($1500/kw).
Inexpensive Chinese labor will make a difference.
Alan
Depending how long the Yuan remains pegged to the dollar
Are externalities of CO2 environmental degradation taken into account on those figures by TJ? They seem to always be forgotten, like New Orleans. On the Chinese labour (CAN. SP., sorry eh!) question, I thought you guys (assuming US citizenship by your (mis)spelling of the english word Labour) had enough to deal with in Mexican Labour and what are those things the Chinese are crashing into each other with? Looks like a wage increase there.
By the way is anyone else finding the section titled 'Energy Lifecycle of Nuclear Power' in the article confusing to the point of incomprehensibility?
Have fun, its P.O.
Black Bald.
Alan
Not to build a nuclear powerplant?
1. I don't think any country would welcome Chinese coolies being imported to build a high technology, security sensitive piece of kit
2. a lot of the cost is 'on site'. See 1. In fact the biggest single cost is the financing cost, which the labour price can't do much about.
3. For the manufactured bits, I am not convinced that the labour is the biggest cost.
You need a highly skilled, highly trained workforce. And this isn't something where you want your intellectual property being given to a country where IP is notoriously hard to protect.
Nuclear plants might have costs comparable to coal if the coal plant had to count the cost of waste disposal (CO2 GW mitigation) as the nuclear plant does.
Absolutely.
MIT pegged it at c. $100/tonne of carbon.
Their figure for nuclear power is 6.75 cents/kwhr. They think that could be lowered by 25%, over time.
That puts nuclear in the same range band as wind.
If you don't assume a price for carbon, then no technology makes sense other than supercritical steam coal fired. Which TXU more or less pointed out.
Valuethinker:
Like all economic projections, the MIT study had to make a lot of assumptions in order to compute the price of electricity from various power sources. Their methods were reasonable, but only as accurate as their ability to predict the future. Here are a couple of the assumptions that were made that have a big impact on the computed cost of nuclear power:
Capital cost of the plant - $2000 per kilowatt capacity
Construction duration - 5 years
Capacity factor - 85%
Plant lifetime - 40 years
Required return on equity - 15%
Interest rate - 8%
debt to equity ratio - 50/50
Small variations in each of the above changes the predicted number, so I dislike the idea that it is accurate to 3 decimal places.
On page 7 of the study, for example, there is an example of the kinds of sensitivity analysis that can be performed along with the resulting cost per kilowatt-hour:
Reduce construction cost 25% - 5.5
Reduce construction time 5 to 4 years - 5.3
Further reduce O&M to 13 mills/kWe-hr - 5.1
Reduce cost of capital to gas/coal - 4.2
I have reconstructed the economic model that MIT used based on the information in the report. You would be impressed by the effects of some other changes that are pretty well supported by actual experience like improving capacity factor to 90%, increasing plant life to 60 years, and shifting the debt to equity ratio to 80/20.
I am not worried about whether or not nuclear power can compete with fossil fuel economically. I do have a number of investments in various companies that should benefit by new nuclear plant construction and operation.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
This is very pesuasive.
But there seems to be a fly in the ointment. Always there seems to be the military option -- whether light-water reactors can be used to produce nuclear weapons or not, there seems to be a perception that they can, or at least that they can be used for cover of a parallel military program.
Is President Bush just blowing smoke up the collective anus of the American Public -- or does an Iranian nuclear power industry really constitute such a threat as to require its removal?
And perhaps Sweeden would like to make a little extra pocket change by storing the United States' spent nuclear waste for a few hundred thousand years? Personally, I would pay a little extra per KWh to have that stuff away from me
Yes any reactor design can be perverted to produce material for a weapon. The trouble is, this is only a first step, and by far the easiest. Actually making a weapon requires a great deal more technology and knowhow. It sill isn't clear if North Korea indeed has a workable weapon, nor are all experts even sure that India or Pakistan are true Nuclear Powers yet. (although this is a minority position)
Wouldn't say that's the case, the real trick is the industrial processes necessary to create the fissionable material, that's what kept proliferation limited to this point, bomb not so hard.
The Iranian nuclear program would not a threat had they been interested in lots of normal nuclear power plants under international supervision. If they ordered 6 AP1000's and really cared about getting those running first, and enrichment later, then there probably wouldn't be an issue.
They seem mildly interested in one nuclear power plant, whose fuel will be provided by Russia in any case, and rabidly interested in uranium enrichment on their own, despite the lack so far of resources and committment towards significant nuclear power resource for which this enrichment will supposedly be used for.
That's not an economic win.
However, it provides the fastest way towards a reliable nuclear weapon which could be deployed without testing.
I suspect they will enrich to reactor grade in the open, and divert to a secret facility for the next stage. Enriching to reactor grade, even though it's only 5% or so is very significant on the way to bomb grade. Not sure, but it could be at least half of the effort needed.
The U-235 bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 never needed to be tested, and technology is much better now.
That's a lot of propaganda, with little real information to back it up.
You might want to think about how easy it is to explain their homebrew nuclear ambitions in the context of their dislike of the West. We put a brutal regime in power, and it was only shaken out by religious fundamentalists that still run the country. They have committed quite a lot of nastiness towards us in the last 30 years, and were a wink away from being nuked or invaded in the last year. Israel is currently negotiating with the US over rights to bomb them.
Now, put yourself in their position - as a leader whose prime political draw is Iranian nationalism, rather than the religious fervor of those you serve, are you ready to give billions to a US corporation to do your nuclear work for you?
I'm not saying that they have no nuclear ambitions, I just think there are equally convincing arguments on both sides, and not a lot we can do to stop them either way.
In 1954 British and American intelligence (led by Kermit Roosevelt) overthrew the democratically elected nationalist government of Iran, and appointed the Shah of Iran as their henchman. He duly returned the Iranian oil industry to British control.
In 1941 (?) the British invaded Iran and overthrew the government in place. The country was partitioned with the Russians until 1945.
A heavily armed, suicidal terrorist organisation, the Mujaheddin e Khalq, destroyed the Iranian Parliament, killing the Prime Minister and over 100 members of the Parliament. 25 years later, that organisation, which is harboured in western countries and may be funded by the CIA and State Department, continues its attacks on Iranian citizens and the Iranian State.
The US has an official budget for 'Regime Change' in Iran, supporting groups eager to overthrow the regime. The US is backing Kurdish and Baluchi independence groups operating inside Iran.
Iranian Royalists are based in the US, and are habitual acquaintees and guests of seminars held by right wing think tanks known to be close to the Administration. There are at least 2 anti-regime tv stations operating in the US, beamed by satellite into Iran.
The President of the USA has described Iran as part of the 'Axis of Evil' and ignored an attempt by Iran to open up diplomatic negotiations in 2003.
US drones are widely reported to have been overflying Iran, and US and Israeli forces have been reported on the ground inside Iran.
The US backs Israel, which attacked Hizbollah in southern Lebanon last summer. Hizbollah is Iran's closest ally in the Middle East. Many commentators have noted that, in the Pentagon and Beltway, this was seen as a 'pre run' of a US air war against Iran.
US forces are based on every side of Iran: in Iraq, in Turkey, in the former Soviet Republics, in Afghanistan.
Even paranoids have real enemies. The Revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran is not a nice place: secret police, torture, rigged elections, suppression of dissidents.
But Iran is surrounded by the US and its allies, and the US has a distinguished history of meddling in internal Iranian affairs, not least through its client, the Shah.
What would you do if you were Iran? You'd build the bomb, and as quickly as possible.
Nothing else offers you security against American (and Israeli) attack or destabilisation.
This doesn't explain why nuclear powers should not use nuclear power. I think almost everyone is agreed that we would all like Iran to not be using nuclear power. That is much harder to accomplish when the US, China, and the EU are bidding up the cost of the natural gas and coal that is the only real alternative.
Why is nuclear a bad thing in a country that already has more nukes than it knows what to do with? The proliferation angle would seem to fall flat here.
It looks good, at least on the paper.
It is a pity that there is no mention of the environmental impact of uranium mining. Any idea of what our planet would look like after 5000 years of mining ?
"Consequently, unlike conventional Oil, Uranium resource exhaustion will not be an issue for the foreseeable future." I've heard similar statements from KSA on oil ;-)
Don't forget the pivotal role of breeder technology, which will be necessary to make any large scale expansion of nuclear power sustainable IMHO.
Consider this: if we could wave a magic wand and convert all nuke plants to breeders then existing spent fuel, which is currently considered to be waste, and the current inventory of depleted uranium could supply US electric power needs for CENTURIES without ANY additional mining of Uranium. I say we need GenIV reactor technology fast-tracked...
In the meantime, we should be aggressively building new reactors and, in parallel, electrifying our transportation infrastructure (urban light rail, long-haul freight rail, PHEVs, etc.) so we can use large-scale, non-carbon emitting nuke power to displace oil currently used in transportation.
I think we better hurry up...
The difference is that the statements from the KSA have to be taken on 'faith', and appear to contradict known geology.
Because uranium is distributed more widely than oil, and large deposits are in politically open countries (Canada & Australia, e.g.), it's safer to extrapolate.
There would be an environmental impact from uranium mining. But compared to coal mining it would be significantly to much better.
In any case, the current light water fuel cycle is by far the absolutely least efficient way to use uranium, and with some known and reasonably developable technology & capital, the required new raw uranium could be much less still.
And even then there's the more abundant thorium, which India is already pursuing.
In sum, I agree with the overall notion that nuclear fuel availability is NOT at all like petroleum. Petroleum has to have been made in specific geological conditions, and the globe has been highly prospected for petroleum.
Uranium isn't like that, and the operation of the mining industry in terms of 'proved resources' is even more conservative than US oil. This is because rocks do not flow, and you have to drill additionally to prove new reserves. So companies simply do not bother when they have enough future years of production already done. However, if they ever had a need, it is very likely that extended drilling from the known sites will hit uranium once more.
Petroleum prospecting by contrast can detect oil in much larger and remote ways.
Issues with nuclear will NOT be geological resource availability. That is the smallest problem by far.
Capital, complexity and security are the primary negatives for nuclear. The positives are very low CO2, and most importantly very high output.
i stopped reading there.. if anyone who tackles this subject doesn't take into account that even though on average uranium is as abundant as tin. he neglects to mention that there are different grades of uranium ore, it's not evenly spread out as he implys. most of it is unreachable to us because it's located too deep to mine for(due to the heat of the earth rock at a certain point becomes like taffy, but even before that it becomes too hot for man or machine to work) this hap hazard topic does a dis-service to this site as considered to it's objectivity.
Your objection is integrated into his quote: He notes "supplies practical at $50/lb"...
There is a dramtic price insensitivity of even normal fission nuclear power to the price of uranium. Put simply, you get a whole heck of a lot of energy out of uranium per mining/refining/enrichment, and there are exponentially(several orders of magnitude) greater amounts of uranium available to extract at higher prices. $50/lb is nothing.
The uranium market was flooded with military stock at the end of the Cold War to the extent that it basically shut down the uranium mining industry. It's only recently been recovering.
Based on a 50% efficient reactor and 90 terajoules per kg energy density of U235 (natural concentration: 0.72% of uranium), we can afford to dump (back of envelope disclaimer) roughly 7200 gallons of diesel fuel into mining, processing, and reacting every 1 pound of natural uranium and still get positive ROIE. U is 85% of the mass of U3O8, so let's call it a maximum effective price ceiling of $15300/kg of U3O8, at $2.50/gallon of expensive diesel fuel.
In reality, the article has numbers on mining.
The enrichment footprint for a typical reactor using gas centrifuges is about 700 kilowatts per gigawatt of power generated, in actual practice.
U308 is currently at $85/lb.
While 2G and 3G reactors could easily run the world electrical market for centuries, I think that breeders & 4G+ reactors in general should be fast-tracked for their own reasons, and the safer 3G+ reactors should be rushed to market internationally today to jump-start the industry. Mining is a destructive practice by any account, and waste disposal is trivial in something like an integrated fast reactor. I'm not saying that nuclear is an easy, painless solution. But it's certainly a lot easier and painless than coal.
Uranium is over $100/lb, I believe.
The Cigar Lake flooding has taken out 10% of the world's prospective uranium supply, until at least 2009. I think Cameco is due to make an announcement regarding, next week.
There's two reasons for this.
1) Not much environmental impact. It just doesn't take a lot of Uranium to run nuclear power, never has. Who knew. Besides, of course the people who know something about the subject...
2) If you assume breeders, no need to mine any additional Uranium for centuries, we have plenty sitting around being called "waste" by the anti-nukes.
So, to answer your question, it'd look about the same as without the 5,000 years of mining. For instance, at this point we could more or less use the Uranium in coal ash to run our nuclear program, the scale of the problem is very small to begin with. It's two orders of magnitude smaller with any sane fuel and waste policy.
Imago:
I think you might have missed part of the article. There was a discussion about the total energy consumption of the mining operation, which also relates to the impact of that activity on part of the environment.
If you are talking about the physical aspect of uranium mining which requires some amount of earth movement in some types of mines (in situ mining in the US requires drilling that has about as much impact as a series of water wells) that is implied in a round about way by the discussion of the amount of material needed. Compared to coal, oil or gas, there is far less material taken out of the earth for fission energy production; all the rest can be put back and the mine area returned to nearly its original condition.
I will grant that there are some areas of the world - like parts of the US Southwest - where the residues from previous uranium mining booms and busts have not been properly cared for. In an indirect way, the blame there has to be shared by the organized opposition to nuclear power. Their activities contributed to a drop in uranium prices that was so rapid that it put a number of operators out of business before they could clean up their mess.
Better management and the regulations that are currently in place lead me to believe that experience will not be repeated and we will eventually clean up the mess of the previous generation.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
I believe that when a reactor is stated as being 1000 MW (e.g. as modern reactors are), this is electrical output, and thermal output is that much higher.
AP1000 is 1117 to 1154 MWe (electricity) according to Westinghouse's specs.
http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/
This is utter rubbish.
All UK nuclear sites are listed as electrical output capacity.
Any halfwit engineer could have told you that Oldbury is a 450MW station.
And the AGR down the road at Hinkley (B) is a 900MW (electrical) IIRC.
I've never ever seen Nukes listed at thermal output capacity in any literature.
Andy
It's not utter rubbish. Maybe I should have said: "When nuclear is CORRECTLY included in a table of primary energy with coal, gas and petroleum...". Nuclear electricity is not primary energy in the same way that wind and hydro generated electricity is. So a table listing primary energy makes real primary sources of electricity look smaller than they effectively are (if you're thinking about useful work) which was my point.
I'm well aware what Oldbury is, a 435MW station.
Although off topic, I would like to say that as an expat in Houston, I miss the Anchor pub at Oldbury, and running and biking in the area.
Having been to Houston, (well, ok, San Antonio isn't that much different) I can only imagine how you must feel...sympathies on your geographic sorrows.
In reference to this startling image:
I refer you to the critical passage:
"Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels". Page 31
It's been 40 years later and complete breeding is nowhere near a standard practice.
Yes it is. Almost all of the weapons-grade plutonium used in the wolds nuclear arsenal comes from dedicated breeders.
Commercially, there has been no reason to breed as the cost of reactor-grade uranium is so low and much more could be recovered from reprocessing spent fuel.
From Wikipedia:
"However, to date all known weapons programs have used far more easily built thermal reactors to produce plutonium"
I appreciate Mr. Sevior's technical review and especially the update on uranium exploration and discoveries. On a technical level, the arguments for nuclear energy are indeed persuasive.
But let's remember that the industry's arguments have always been persuasive, from day one. From the beginning, nuclear power was going to be too cheap to meter; it was perfectly safe; the risk of catastrophic accidents was nil for all practical purposes; waste disposal and decommissioning posed no major hurdles. Those early assertions have, by and large, not proven to be true. Remember that just a few years before Three Mile Island, the US Atomic Energy Commission claimed a core meltdown could be expected only once in every million years of reactor operation. Now when we hear similar assertions we must decide: Should we trust the spokespeople and advocates again?
The industry argues that new plant designs are safe, and in theory I agree. The problem now is, as it has always been, those perfect engineering proposals are carried out by imperfect humans like you and me. There can be corruption and corner-cutting during the construction phase, incompetence during the operation phase, bribery and mishandling of waste during the disposal phase, and sabotage and terrorist strikes during all phases. What's more, "perfect" engineering can and does turn out to be flawed, and politics can meddle with the entire process. This historical account is very instructive: Searching for Safety, an excerpt from Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology.
Sevior notes that the Chernobyl power station suffered from a "complete lack of safety culture." If nuclear power becomes a global substitute for oil, what assurances do we have that nations around the world will establish and enforce an adequate safety culture?
What's more, no commercial nuclear plant has been fully and properly decommissioned. The projected costs of doing so (in money and energy) are so high that they represent a significant hit in net profit. It could well be that is why the Yucca Mountain disposal facility has not opened yet. Otherwise, the safety concerns for civilizations 10,000 years in the future would have been swatted aside like an insect.
Now some politicians are arguing for increased subsidies and tax cuts for nuclear. Why should nuclear get public subsidies when we are seeing promising breakthroughs every month in wind, solar, biofuels and other technologies that are far cheaper and safer? Wind farms can be up and running, from design to generation, in 6 months. It's tough for any conventional power source to compete with that, especially nuclear. Why choose one horse when there's a whole field of promising contenders? Better they should all compete without subsidies, and that includes the billions in subsidies going to the fossil fuel industry.
Government R&D, however, is a different matter and that should continue for all energy sources. The R&D budget for renewables should be greatly increased.
Wind farms can be up and running, from design to generation, in 6 months
I have concrete examples of 18 months from financial decision (money OKed) to commercial operation of a windfarm expansion and 32 & 36 months for brand new wind farms.
I would like examples of shorter than these impressively short build-outs.
Thanks,
Alan
Six months is impossible if you have to order equipment. Six month field construction sounds about right.
I meant the construction phase... this Science Friday show interviewed a Kansas farmer who leased his land for turbines. He describes (at minute 24:00) the utility decision to purchase made in December, construction beginning March, construction completed by mid-summer, commissioning in October.
From ordering turbines to commissioning generally is said to take a year. If you include financing and permitting it can be longer. The construction phase of offshore wind can take 2-3 years. Here are a few land based examples:
SgurrEnergy Timeline -- one year from ordering to commissioning
AES Corporation: Six to twelve month construction period
FPL Energy Stateline Energy Center completed in nine months
Ripley, Ontario, Canada projects - construction 6-8 months, commissioning within 10-12 months.
Lawrence, what worries me about Yucca Mountain is the safety concerns with transporting poisonous waste. We seem tohave toxic chemical spills regularily from trucks and trains.
I think the focus on nuclear powere as opposed to renewables is the function of the way we organise our economy. Wind and solar could significantly reduce utility company income , but on the cost plus basis of the price controls on utilities the higher the cost the higher the income to the electric company. So they really like nuclear energy because of the high costs adding to their rate base. And deregulation can't fix the problem-safety and national security concerns serve to restrict a free market, and the utility companies love it that way.
But, remember " We're not peasants, we're an Anarcho-Syndicalist Workers Collective".-from the Monty Python movie, "the Holy Grail"
My concerns with nuclear tend to primarily rest on the evils of the input material (U mining and processing and manufacture and delivery) and the output material (waste, short term storage, delivery, long term storage).
Mining: we can tour areas of Canada that remain horribly polluted by U mining activity. Mining is an inherently dirty business; U is a particularly nasty pollutant.
Security: one doesn't need to collect enriched U or Plutonium in order to create a weapon. A "dirty bomb" - just a conventional explosive like an I.E.D. but packed with radioactive and poisonous material (and not all that much) could be constructed by any group familiar with explosives - all that remains is obtaining access to materials and there are enough crooked people and lax jurisdictions in the world to make that a real concern.
Waste: there are no proven solutions. Period. The nuclear industry and its waste are a new issue, one with a current lifespan of but a tick on the geological clock. Humans have never engineered anything that has remained hermetically sealed for thousands of years. Could we? Perhaps, but we've no control over what the planet will do, or our successor societies.
We humans have arrogantly proclaimed our ability to master the world and nature, and in most cases within a generation have come to learn just how wrong we are.
- decimated fish stocks
- made extinct species
- were on track to destroy the very protector of life on earth, the ozone layer
- pesticides for the betterment of humankind ended up destroying key links in the food cycle chain
- climate change, where "industry" has proclaimed for decades that there is no issue (rather like the nuclear industry makes its own proclamations)
And so on.
An energy source which produces, in every plant, enough material to poison every living creature on the planet, each year, is one that ought to be treated with more than just arrogant engineering certainty.
That same engineering certainty brought us the Titanic, the Hindenburg, the World Trade Centers, Three Mile Island, the Japanese plants and their fatalities, the Kursk, New Orleans, well, you get the picture.
How about we apply our brains first to reduction, not production?
One very special thing about radioactive material - this stuff is active, i.e. will slowly emit radiation which will damage any container. It is much harder to seal away than other materials.
There are no solutions that are currently politically acceptable, in this era of cheap oil and gas and the acceptance of rapacious pollution by coal. You have to keep in mind the very small volume of the waste. We already know how we can eliminate the long term waste.
Lets look at the volume of waste involved.
As a reference case, take 1,000MW of continuous generation for 1 year. The approximate amount of spent fuel, with the present once-through fuel cycle, after 1 year is approximately 100 tons, or 90720kg. With density of Uranium at 18900 kg/m3, this waste will occupy a volume of 4.8 cubic metres. This is a cube 1.7m a side (5.5ft).
Now, if we had a breeder cycle, where close to 100% of the energy content in the Uranium is consumed (instead of the current fraction of 1%), then your waste volume would be reduced roughly 100-fold to one ton resulting in a cube of waste 1.2ft each side!
Just let that sink in for a minute: 1,000MW of 24x7 power for an entire year leaving waste that would fit in a space the size of a microwave oven!
Now, compare that to a 1,000MW coal plant after 1 year of operation:
6,000,0000 tons of CO2
44,0000 tons of SO2
22,0000 tons of NOx
320,000 tons of ash
400 tons of heavy metals (arsenic, mercury, etc.)
and, here's the kicker:
5.2 tons or Uranium
12.8 tons of Thorium
All that vs. a cube of waste that would fit on your desk (not that I recommend doing that) with no CO2 emissions... Nuclear waste, especially from advanced reactor technology, is NOT an issue folks in comparison to the alternatives.
We can handle millions of tons of shit into the environment, yet handling a tiny cube of waste is impossible to handle? Something ain' right with that logic.
What am I missing? Isn't it self-evident that advanced nuclear is the only option for our future as a modern, prosperous industrial society, just as M. King Hubbert anticipated?
Too many zeros flying around: sorry about the typos!
The above should read:
6,000,000 tons
44,000 tons
22,000 tons
320,000 tons
400 tons
Steve, I think you're "misunderestimating" the nuclear waste stream volume. As noted above, hot waste embrittles its containment, which causes it to fail in mere centuries. But in the meantime, isotopes that emit heavy particles (like Pu239 alphas) migrate right into their containers, via the recoil associated with decay. The resulting crumbling mess of concrete, steel, and chalcogenide glass is all too hot to bury without a new, larger container to isolate it from the environment. And the cycle repeats every few centuries, until the requisite dozen or so millenia are up.
As a materials scientist who has done plenty of accelerated-aging modeling and testing, let me say that I have very little faith in extrapolations of physical chemical processes that extend by SEVERAL ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE the duration of any and all actual tests. Our technological wizardry seems to spawn as much hubris as it does quality-of-life enhancement, maybe in direct proportion. Only unlike DDT or dioxin or CO2, there's nothing Ma Nature can do to make Americium or Plutonium nontoxic to her creatures. We'll just have to wait it out.
Please understand that I'm no Luddite, and I agree that there's a place for "nucular" in our future. But like all the power-generation schemes tossed around daily on this site, fission generators are in practice enablers of our unsustainable way of living, not a way into any kind of future that I'd like my kid to see. We'll be powering down soon enough anyway, with or without more nuke plants: There's no other way. So if those new nukes can give us a more graceful descent, terrific, but history suggests that they'll end up as dinosaurs, relics remembered more for the proliferation and dirty bombs that they spawned than for the extra hours they kept our TV's running.
A very rational comment.
Then why dont the fuel cladding crumble in the reactor and during decades of storage?
How manny alpha decays is there in common decay chains? There surely ought to be a lot for a nuclei to meander out of a fuel pellet, thru the cladding and then into the containmnet vessel.
Very clever. Of course you can't use actual nuclear waste (fission fragments) in your scenario, because the numbers for them aren't scary. Instead you use Plutonium (also known as fuel, to the layman), relable it as "waste", and then claim that we can't contain it for however many thousands of years.
A few problems with this.
1) It's totally illegitimate. Fuel is not waste, no matter how much you want to think otherwise.
2) The actual waste doesn't have this problem. The problem you are describing is a problem unique to alpha emitters, which pretty much means....fuel, not the fission fragments which are generally beta and gamma emitters.
3) The fuel lasts a long time, if it didn't, considering that it all arrived on the planet 4 billion years ago, there'd be none left today for us to use. Fission fragments generally do not. Nuclear fuel can be radioactive for billions of years, nuclear waste (fission fragments) becomes less radioactive than the rock the Uranium came from in about 300 years.
4) For the nuclear fuel (say, plutonium), we know it can be contained for 4 billion years, because that's what happened to the rock we plucked it from. We dug the stuff up, so it's hard to say that we have to somehow prevent it from ever getting back into the environment that we took it from. In the case of Plutonium, it is very similar to U-235, so should be treated fairly similarly.
5) As for containing things for 300 years, your average landfill can manage that with no trouble. It's not hard at all to dig around and find things that are 300 years old, friends from China tell me this happens almost every time they put a shovel into their backyards. It's REALLY hard to claim that we can't contain something for 200-300 years, because the contrary evidence is overwhelming.
So basically, to make a long story short.
1) The waste is not generally alpha emitters, so it doesn't have the problems you describe.
2) The alpha emitters we do have are almost all fuel, and could be destroyed by the reactors themselves.
3) Even if you don't believe #2, the alpha emitters, being fuel, were dug out of the environment, so it's hard to claim some horrible result if some of them leaked back into the environment in the distant future. The trans-uranics are veryy similar to Uranium itself, and so could be treated similarly.
Good anti-nuke reasoning though. It's like claiming we can't burn oil because there is no way to store oil underground for millions of years without it leaking into the water. It falls apart for exactly the same reasons. In both cases the argument is so illogical that it's almost hard to know where to start.
1) Car exhaust is not oil.
2) The oil came from the ground, so clearly it didn't leak into the water in the millions of years since it was created. Therefore such storage is clearly possible.
3) Oil leaks from its reservoirs all the time quite apart from any human actions, yet we're still here. What's the problem with this again?
The ONLY reasonable basis for this sort of reasoning is a claim that gasoline (Say, Plutonium) is somehow fundamentally different from oil (Say, Uranium), and though the environment can tolerate billions of tons of oil leaking over the years, it can't tolerate ANY gasoline, not even a ton or two spread out over millenia.
nelsone:
Fortunately, Ma Nature has help in this matter. Human beings have a way to turn Americium and Plutonium into much shorter lived nuclides and to convert them from alpha emitters to something that decays with by beta, gamma or positron emission.
All we have to do is to expose those materials to neutrons. The best source of massive quantities of neutrons is inside an operating fission reactor - if we simply recycle all of the heavy metals (actinides) back into reactors they will eventually fission and become short lived materials. When they do, they will release heat that will be converted into electricity.
I happen to enjoy living in a comfortable home with running water, lights, air conditioning, and electronic entertainment. I very definitely want to ENABLE as many people as possible all over the world to experience this kind of lifestyle. I believe that my understanding of nuclear fission power offers me an opportunity to help that happen.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Steve,
large scale use of breeder reactors is an illusion.
The US tried and failed.
The French tried and failed.
The Germans tried and failed.
The Japanese tried and failed.
Maybe we should ask a one of the many more technologically advanced nations to do the job?
There are some new projects under way, but hey, even it it all starts to work miraculously, we have a new problem: Breeder reactors are much more dangerous for proliferation.
Darn!
Davidyson
Breeder technology is more complex, hence much more expensive. Simple economics has dictated that, with a cheap supply of Uranium and only ~100 tons of spent fuel per year / 1GW reactor, and cheap competition from fossil fuels, that there is simply no economic necessity to go to breeder technology. The technology is simply not cost competitive at this time.
To date, there has been no economic incentive to get truly serious about breeder technology. Pointing to past cancelled projects as proof that breeder technology will never work is as specious an argument as they come. Nothing I have read has indicated that the technology won't or can't work. It is all a matter of economics.
I am suggesting that in a peak oil world, that outlook re breeders should change because of our need to find environmentally friendly, massive alternative energy supplies to replace oil. Breeders will be a necessity in any future with a significantly larger nuclear component because:
1) it solves the nuclear waste problem
2) solve the scalability problem (i.e. issues with Uranium supply in any huge nuke ramp-up scenario).
With regard to proliferation:
a) fuel cycles can be designed to make Pu impossible to be used for nukes.
b) Last time I checked, the USA already had nuclear weapons, so what is the risk of fuel reprocessing in USA anyway? We not talking about bars of weapons-grade Pu being shipped about all over the coutryside, just ready for terrorists to pick up! Some GenIV designs have the fuel reprocessing contained within the same reactor complex so it never leaves the site.
The anti-nuclear set compare the technology, present and any future possibilities, against perfection while ignoring the massive crimes against the environment that go on EVERY SINGLE DAY with coal plants; and, we have a ticking time bomb with peak oil and its implications for the petro-based world economy and geopolitical tension including terrorism and war. Give me a sustainable nuclear energy economy any day if it displaces these MUCH more serious problems.
We have to compare future nuclear technology options with the alternatives my friends.
Build n-plants and close coal plants ASAP (move toward non-co2 baseload power), pump massive resources into GenIV research and start breeder implementation within 20 years, while doing all that we can NOW to conserve energy and ramp-up all forms of renewables!
Well, breeder reactors simply aren't ready yet. The problem with breeders is the optimal fuel cycle for breeder reactors are fluid fuel reactors, but the ones that got the most funding were solid fuel reactors. Liquid metal reactors just wont ever fly on economics.
Another problem with breeder reactors is assuming that you need a high breeding ratio. You only need a breeding ratio of 1 unless theres a dearth of fissile material, and we've illustrated we have enough fissile material to last LWR regimes for thousands of years. Probably the best breeder reactor designs I've seen are the liquid fluoride and liquid chloride reactor regimes. No fuel fabrication, online processing, excellent neutron economy, high uptime...
But the big question is if they can be competitive with LWRs. While I like these reactors and would love to see them compete with the LWR, if the economics arent there, the LWR is good enough to serve us until solar becomes cheaper than nuclear.
Actually, as an engineer myself, I have really been amazed at how few engineering disasters there have been when compared to the vast numbers of things that generally work as designed. Even the disasters you refer to had a good percentage of the problem caused by operators, terrorists, politicians, etc. rather than inadequate design.
Will technical solutions have some problems? Of course. Should we conserve to the greatest extent possible? Of course. The question is what are the best realistic alternatives to address peak oil and global warming. Nuclear has to be a big part of the mix.
Drwater:
"Even the disasters you refer to had a good percentage of the problem caused by operators, terrorists, politicians, etc. rather than inadequate design."
Cough... Surly the fact that an engineered "thing" will be used in a world full of "operators, terrorists, politicians, etc." ought to be part of the design process.
In my area, software, we have a special threat to deal with worse than all these put together... Users!
:>
Nuclear is 4% of the world's energy supply, c. 8% of its electricity supply.
Scale it up massively. Build 1500 3rd generation reactors, or 30 a year for the next 50 years, a number well in excess of the current ability to produce reactors*. Replaces the 450 or so existing civilian power reactors and adds 1000 net new ones.
You get to maybe 10% of the world's total energy demand (3G reactors are 1350MW say, v. 800MW say for the current average, but demand will be a bigger number as well). 20-25% of electricity supply.
Useful, worth having.
Decisive? No.
* work on civilian reactors began in the late 40s, and the first commercial one was 1959 (British) and 1964 (Shippingport PA), I believe.
Almost 50 years later we still use pressurised light water reactors (or boiling water ones) for 80% of our electricity (bar the British gas cooled system, and the Canadian heavy water system).
The '3rd Generation' is really a scaling up of the 2nd Gen, with some better passive safety features.
So colour me sceptical that we will have much moved beyond that into the '4th Generation' by 2050. We probably wouldn't see its introduction much before 2030.
Good point. Nuclear just isn't as big a deal as many make out.
And it will suck government R&D money and subsidies. Building 8 new reactors in the UK could fatally end all the other government programmes to aid global warming.
I suspect on an 'avoided cost' basis,
- insulating the 9 million UK houses with cavity walls but no insulation
- making sure every UK house has loft insulation
- building the feasible offshore windmill farms
- converting 1 million homes and offices to heat pump technology
- doing something to preserve the Indonesian and Brasilian and Costa Rican rainforest, by paying locals to conserve them (the Stern Review estimates this to be the cheapest solution of all-- less than $30 per avoided tonne of carbon emission)
might do more for global warming.
The reality of course is we need all of the above.
But nuclear is a 'silver bullet' solution, and one that the arch techno-fiends tend to centre around-- it also provides fertile material for the 'green v. practical real world' debate.
It's highly complex technology that requires the maintenance of technical sophistication and learning for decades*, it has huge legacy and proliferation and terrorism issues, it's a huge burden to lay onto future generations (but not necessarily a worse one than the CO2 we might emit instead).
I am sure if we spent that level of subsidy and R&D on carbon sequestration, we could sequester the CO2 emissions of the world's thousand largest fossil fuel stations (or more).
That's not a trivial number. I think the US SO2 trading scheme is 289 stations (it might be 450 now) so we can presume those are all the SO2 emitting large plants in the USA. 289 stations, in a country with 25% of the world's GDP, over 20% of its CO2 emissions.
Fossil fired electricity is something like 40% of world CO2 emissions.
Cap the carbon on those stations, and the equivalent ones in Europe, and get the Chinese started down the road, and we have done a lot more than building 100 new nuclear reactors in the USA.
This all underlines that there are no 'silver bullets'. Not compact fluorescents, not plug in hybrid electric vehicles (although they would have a big impact).
Certainly not wind or other renewables (in and of themselves). Nor carbon sequestration (in and of itself).
What there is is a portfolio of possible solutions, and we will probably need them all.
* I don't say this frivolously. There is a programme to video interviews with the leading designers and builders of atomic weapons in the USA. If the day ever comes when the US needs to replace its atomic arsenal en masse, much of the expertise will have been lost.
I can tell you from 100 engineering projects that the written documentation is never good enough to tell you *how* to do something really tricky.
Valuethinker:
Numbers are very useful in debates. Accurate numbers, though, help one reach better conclusions. You might want to try it sometime.
For example, in 2003 total world electricity production was 14,781 billion kilowatt-hours while nuclear electricity production was 2,523 billion kilowatt-hours. I realize that the math may get a little complicated here, but my answer is that more than 17% of the world's electricity was produced by nuclear plants in 2003. That is slightly more than twice what you reported. (Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/pdf/world.pdf)
In the US, 103 reactors produce almost exactly 20% of our electricity. Simple math would indicate that an additional 2.5 times as many reactors (250 or so) would produce another 50% of our electricity, allowing us to completely replace today's coal fired power plants.
We could build these plants a bit faster than you might think if we put our minds to it. The 103 plants operating today were built in a period of about 20 years, and if we had not halted construction we would already have the needed plants by now.
Since US coal plants represent something like 10% of the world's CO2 emissions, I happen to think that would be a pretty significant contribution.
Of course, if you happen to own coal mines, coal transportation railroads, coal scrubber manufacturing capacity, or coal mining equipment design capacity you might not be too happy about seeing the value of your investments disappear.
Humm, maybe there is a reason why anti-nuclear groups never had a problem raising cash.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Hi mw,
re: "And so on..." Don't forget the bees...(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/business/27bees.html)
re: "How about we apply our brains first to reduction..."
Perhaps establish a principle of (at least) considering reduction (conservation) and new production in tandem, necessarily linked, both in theory *and* practice.
If memory serves me correctly, the Yucca site was covered by glaciers some 22 - 25 thousand years ago. Could be again.
That site is supposed to last that long.
Then what?
Human arrogance with respect to the planet is something that we fail to fully take into account when devising policy. For all our technology we still know so little. One thing we know with certainty is that we have no ability to predict climatic conditions out 1,000 years.
Do we have a responsibility to think about those future generations? Absolutely. We now have an ability to screw up the planet on a global scale that previous generations never had.
Future generations have a responsibility for themselves. They should be able to manage the very small volume of waste with ease.
The notion that nuclear waste is some evil that must be stored for eternity is flawed and contributes to ill conceived ideas like geologic repositories. Above ground storage is sufficient, and one can easily assume that a century or two from now there will be other plans for said 'waste.' which includes reprocessing for fuel, extracting fission platenoids, or continued low cost above ground dry storage.
"Future generations have a responsibility for themselves. They should be able to manage the very small volume of waste with ease."
Well that does it. I abandon my willingness to consider some nuclear.
Not that you ever would if one of my comments cements your opinion.
But its important to consider that the best way to serve the far future is to work for a wealthier, more productive near future. The cost/benifit ratio of nuclear power is clear and the dangers of nuclear waste are often exagerated into ludicrous hyperbole.
Here you are, an expert and ever present advocate of nuclear power, reduced to a line of argument which essentially says that we have the right to impose unnatural risks and costs on our progeny, and that those risks and costs are their responsibility or problem. You support this position with the notion that the far future will be served by the pursuit of more wealth and productivity in the near future.
Well I guess we might conclude that entropy is little more than a passing idea. Obviously we can bootleg our way onto the perpetual motion machine.
I have actually gotten up at public meetings and declared that we should keep an open mind to the nuclear option. I have been prepared to ignore the unsubtantiated claims of a high eroi for the nuclear option as well as the fabricated argumentation to support its economic viability, despite the evident wastefulness of choosing a technology with such high opportunity costs.
I was prepared to consider seriously a limited amount of investment in nuclear for two reasons: one, it does appear to be a way to maintain certain illusions that might help keep the fascists at bay while large numbers of people experience declining income as peak oil/gas begins to bite vigorously; and two, there is merit in my view in maintaining the expertise which exists in the industry, in case some breakthrough occurs.
However, these latter arguments are overwhelmed by the truth revealed in your comments. I suddenly understand the metaphor contained in the myth of the snake and the apple.
Why do you have trouble with the idea that the waste problem is quite manageable today because the volumes are small, that technological progress will continue (unless we commit collective suicide as some here apparently would have us) and that the more technologically capable people of the future will be able to manage the problem even better than we can today? Are there any holes in that logic?
All the spent fuel that we are producing now still contains enormous energy and the people of the future will be glad to reprocess it to exploit this. It is better that we not bury it today because we do not yet have commercial facilities to eliminate all the long lived wastes. So it is better to leave it to people who we can reasonably assume will have solved that problem. We already know how to do it technically today.
Do you also consider the EROEI of 93 for fission plants documented in the article leading this thread as an "unsubstantiated claim"?
"Are there any holes in that logic?" Do you mean aside from the absence of knowledge of the future? Well, there is of course past experience, wherein we can note that things can take a turn for the worse from time to time, sometimes lasting for centuries.
"Do you also consider the EROEI of 93 for fission plants documented in the article leading this thread as an "unsubstantiated claim"?
Yes. Interestingly, two of the three links in this section lead nowhere and the third to a single page of decontextualized data. When you can provide real information for the entire nuclear energy subsystem, as well as an inventory of impacts on the larger economic system, and do so in the context of declining oil/gas supply, then get back to me.
That you're so dismissive of this notion implies you really dont understand the issue. Every decision we make imposes risks and costs on our progeny; Understanding opportunity cost is just as important as understanding explicit cost.
Looking at all the environmental problems this planet faces, it's pretty hubristic and a great strain of logic to simply say future generations can simply clean up our shit, in fact history provides abundant examples how that doesn't work very well, see Jared Diamond to start.
One can't argue the fact that nuclear works, but here in the US, which needs a significant readjustment to how we do most things energy wise, nuclear at this point simply continues our bad habits. Let's cut our energy use by 50% and then talk about nuclear.
Right. Your discount rate is negative?
For what reason would we want to do that? It doesn't make us wealthier, more prosperous, more comfortable, or more likely to survive.
Oh contraire my friend, I believe it's the only way to do all four things, I just discount many of the things you use to value such things.
Oh, I think I understand the issue. On the other hand you appear to lack perspective, as well as suffer a limited grasp of the opportunity costs bearing on the nuclear option. I taught my kids from a very young age how to manage risk. That doesn't entitle me to burden them with risks that forever limit their freedom of action.
I think the point is that every generation passes on both benefits (improvements in technology and accumulated wealth) and problems (pollution, etc.) to the next generation, and the next generation has to take some responsibility to put some of their wealth towards solving their problems. Our generation didn't totally invent pollution, we inherited it from our parents and have made great progress at cleaning up polluted lakes, rivers, and even the air. Then this global warming thing came along...
The question is not whether we're going to leave the next generation some problems, but rather which sorts of problems we'll leave them. Hmm, which is worse, a mountain somewhere that will kill people if they get too close to it, or a planet that's 10 degrees C warmer globally? It's not a rhetorical question, it's one we need to seriously debate, but keep in mind that there is no 100% problem-free alternative.
Well, my kids tend to leave our living room in total disorder... because their parents can clean it up much easier...
Also, it's not a nuclear-or-total-global-warming question.
It's a question of "high-tech nuclear with so far unsolved problems for a couple of decades or conservation and wind and solar and population control and a steady-state economy forever".
Cheers,
Davidyson
Thats ridiculous. No one, when its put to them with the real implications, will willingly choose 'steady-state economy' and nuclear doesn't have any more unsolved problems than wind or solar.
I see two distinct possible futures to consider:
1. Civilization continues to progress and advance, building technology and wealth. We can't know what capabilities they'll develop, but we have to guess which will be easier for them to take care of: thousands of tons of nuclear waste, or an atmosphere filled with trillions of tons of CO2. I guess we can't really know, perhaps they'll invent some great CO2 sequestration device?
2. Civilization declines and humans return to a primitive state. A mountain full of unmaintained nuclear waste storage could spell death for any humans who wander too close to it, but it's unlikely to affect the world overall. A bit of global warming might actually be helpful to our descendants in the northern latitudes, but it could cause death to populations in equatorial regions if it becomes unlivably hot there.
Sorry to see that you face life with such limited imagination. See Davidyson above for perspective.
The earth will do what it will do, and there is nothing we can do to stop that.
Earthquake today just north of Yucca Mountain area - the large gray area to the south is the air force test range for nukes and encompasses the Yucca Mountain site.
Quake details
I happen to monitor seismic activity and quite coincidentally this showed up in my RSS feed this morning just after posting earlier. That caused me to go looking for more.
Here's a NV state website which details a 5.6 quake and a swarm of others, not 50 miles from the Yucca proposed site.
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/quake/quake1.htm
What was once glaciated area is desert-like and will undoubtedly look much difference in time as the earth does its thing.
Hi Bob,
What worries me about safety concerns is that they depend on what the economy is willing to spend...if it tanks so do concerns about safety.
Interesting point about why the electric co.'s like what they like.
By the by, we may not be peasants but then as Monty says "no one expects the Holy Spanish Inquisition" peasant, nobleguy or even those idealistic lowly Anarcho-Syndicalists
Black Bald
oops!
Think about this a little more carefully. Wind works when the wind blows, and not otherwise. Unless you want to build a new great lake by hand, we're not going to have enough pumped storage to get through a relatively unwindy july. The biggest problem with wind is not its expese (say, $0.04/KWh), but rather that the electrical grid needs to shuffle power around the country based on the weather, and miraculously come up with additional power when the majority of the continent has lighter than usual wind. This is not an uncommon case, weather systems easily cover half the US on a regular basis. Solar has exactly the same problem.
Look at it this way. I pay about $0.20/KWh for electricity that I KNOW cost around $0.04/KWh to produce. The actual cost of making the power is only 1/5 of the cost of the whole system. Wind makes the whole rest of the system (the majority of the difficulty) MUCH more difficult, and then produces the power (the easy part) about as well as anything else. Think about that for a moment.
It is very hard to imagine how a small group can be self sufficient with wind given that there is no reasonable means to store energy, and your neighbor's windmill won't be working if yours isn't. Say what you like about pumped storage, giant batteries, huge worldwide power grids, whatever, but you're taking 80% of the problem and making it HUGELY worse, it won't be easy.
And reality seems to bear this out. There are countries that get 50% of their power from nuclear, there is NO country that gets 50% of its power from wind. Denmark doesn't even come close to qualifying given the quantity of power it trades with its fossil fired neighbors.
Very quick note. New Zealand has said that their grid can accept 35% wind "without further study" and no major changes.
Likewise, one cannot use much more than 55% nuke in a grid (the French sell power ALL night, and buy it back during the day to get their high #s). Swiss hydro, Luxembourg pumped storage, German coal, etc. "make it work".
You overestimate the issues of July demand with minimum (NOT zero) wind.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Alan:
I have served on two ships that used 100% nuclear to supply their grid. Admittedly, they had small grids, but there is no technical reason to limit the portion of the power on a grid by nuclear power.
The plants cannot all be enormous, high inertia baseload plants, but it is quite possible to build smaller, more responsive plants. Fission itself is a reaction that can respond very quickly and produce an incredibly wide range of power.
One of the really cool things about nuclear power in general is that the reactor keeps itself warm for a while after the reaction is shut off - with clever design, this makes it really simple to put a plant into "hot standby" on a grid so that it is ready to roll when the power demand increases as people wake up.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Cannot use doesn't mean it isn't reasonable. The cost of nuke is the cost of building the plant, at which point you might as well run it at 100% whether people are using it or not. Make hydrogen or aluminum with all the extra electricity or something.
All forms of energy have liabilities and risks.
Two points:
First, and most important; you are either pro coal/anti nuke, or pro nuke/anti coal. If you think the billions of tons of waste ejected annually, including many of tons of nuclear material, is better than the far smaller amount of nuclear waste that is carefully segregated from the public, then you are firmly in the former camp.
Second, the nuclear issues you mention are either scarecrows or fading:
waste; there are many repositories that will work fine. Yucca mountain bears the burden of trying to prove that no waste will leave in 10,000 years because the wastes themselves will be dangerous for 1 million years. But, surely there is some level of leakage, occurring thousands of feet below grade, that is not life threateining? People forget that we are exposed to ratiation every day, both natural and man made. Another problem is our ability to measure extremely low levels of radiation.
TMI: the accident at TMI killed the nuclear industry in a low and falling cost fossil fuel environment, but did not kill any person, whether worker at the plant or nearby, and did not pollute the area. Contrast this with the number of fossil fuel workers killed every year, eg coal mines and refineries, and also contrast the radiation exposure of fossil fuel workers, eg ng radon exposure.
Cost: we are moving from a cheap fossil fuel environment to a dear one, in which all forms of non-fossil fuel competitors will look better. Uranium has also surged lately, but uranium remains one of the least significant costs for nukes while coal, also surging, remains the highest cost for coal fired plants.
IMO nukes will stage a comeback, sadly too late to help mitigate the worst effects of fossil fueled GW.
Another anti nuke pro coal poster is worried that nukes would harm the planet, apparently feeling that our fossil fuel consumption has not.
jkissing, I usually find what you say to be sensible, but this is pure BS. There are more than these two alternatives.
In fact my main reservation about nuke power is that we have handled coal so badly, why expect that we should handle nuke power any better? Coal is technically very easy, with major pollution problems. My distinct impression is that none of the pollution problems of coal are intractable at all, just a matter of utility industry intransigence and greed. Nuke power is technically very difficult. There are many reasons why we might end up handling it badly, especially on a major ramped up worldwide scale. And it is foolish to think that badly handled nuke industry in, say, Nigeria, would not affect us in the USA.
Ridiculously simplistic statement.
Not on the same scale. Only nuclear competes with coal. Every time a nuclear power plant has been delayed with activisim and the like, rising demand has been met with natural gas or coal.
Yeah, but 'correlation is not necessarily causation'
The people who oppose both usually don't share your assumption that the continued growth or even status-quo in our energy use is written in stone. Some have managed to sharply reduce and even cut off their use of dirty energy sources, others are working towards it.
Neither Nuclear or Coal is adequate, but the opponents of them are in a crossfire. Just because you hate one sniper, doesn't make you love the other one, nor does it make you responsible for the violations of either one of them.
I think this 'Greens are really Pro-coal' line is a brilliant bit of misdirection by the Nuclear Lobby which is in full-swing to take advantage of peak oil. They owe you their thanks for spreading it along. You'll get to join their 'Energy-Monopoly Fan-Club' as a bonus!
This is total fantasy. Human civilization will continue to grow its energy consumption until it approaches the solar flux simply because human desires are unlimited.
No one willingly reduces their energy demand in an isolated system. The places where it has happened coincided with large transfer of energy intensive industries to some developing economy.
Is this tone really necissary? Its simply an obvious truth that whenever nuclear plants are shut down, blocked, or delayed, demand is met one way or another; And the cheapest way to do that is coal.
Their priorities are misguided at best.
Hi Dezakin,
Interesting point (and pivotal): "No one willingly reduces their energy demand in an isolated system."
1) Are you speaking here about countries? Or smaller groups?
2) So, this means...no one ever *will* in the future? Nothing can persuade them otherwise?
3) It seems people do this somewhat voluntarily, do you think? Say, for example, parents in leaving something (inheritance) for children. True, it's often the "means of production" for the parents that is passed on. Perhaps not always, though. Just trying to think of examples.
Its largely an observation on the global economy, or any hypothetical economy that doesnt have an outside partner to trade with.
Not ever. Never with the exception of the ocassional recession which is just reshuffling of excess capital, after which energy demand growth continues on upward. Society will get more efficient at using energy and all that will mean is people will want more widgets/cars/spacecraft/intergalactic freigters or whatnot.
Coal is a clear, present, and long term danger and we are experiencing its ill effects every day. Ironically, it has done much more radiation damage than nuclear has. Nuclear is a potential danger. In certain low probability scenarios, it could kill a lot of people. Coal is killing a lot of people, will continue to, and its effects will be near catastrophic as global warming kicks in.
I think it comes down to certainty of bad effects with coal vs. low probability of bad effects with nuclear. Nuclear could kill and harm tens of thousands of people but at least those effects would be localized.
Prudence dictates that we stop building coal plants now with plans to shut existing ones down over time. At the same time, go full speed ahead, ramping up nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, wave, and maybe a little biomass with sequestered co2.
This from a former anti nuclear activist with the requisite "STOP NUCLEAR NOW" on his bumper sticker. Yes, there doesn't appear to be a free lunch. Yes, nuclear has risks, some of them quite deadly. But coal has already proven itself to be far, far worse with certainty of ill effects, not just low probabilities.
P.S. If we can figure out a way to successfully and safely sequester coal, then let the power companies go for it, assuming they still think it worthwhile when confronted with carbon taxes.
Since your remarks are just a rehashing of the usual shibboleths against nuclear, I will deal with them in point form:
"Too cheap to meter" what Lewis L. Strauss, in 1951 to a meeting of the National Association of Science Writers said was "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter..." it is still unclear if he was referring to the potential of nuclear energy as it was being considered at that time, or he was reaching into a future only imagined.
At any rate it was never a working prediction of the nuclear industry, then or now.
Yes, in fact they have been. Nuclear power has an enviable safety record. As to the two "disasters:" at Three-Mile Island the containment system worked, and the death toll and health issues from Chernobyl have been far, far less terrible than predicted, and well within the range of other well known industrial accidents of similar magnitude.
This is true of all human endeavors. I am always amused when critics of nuclear energy blithely assume that somehow we can change the whole world attitudes on energy usage, but take it as a given that the nuclear industry can never be trusted to behave in a responsible manner.
This, of course oversimplifies the issues at this plant, which were systemic starting from its design and assumes that all nuclear power stations are equally vulnerable and this is simply not the case. Frankly I am just appalled by the extreme arrogance of the last statement that assumes that we are even in a position to ask this. Events have proven that others simply don't give a fig what we think about this and don't feel they have to ask our permission.
True but many non-commercial installations have been.
I wonder what the "hit in net profit" would be if a coal burning power station were forced to return the entire affected area of their sites to greenfield status? Oh yes, they don't have to.
Other than the fact that this statement demonstrates a desperately flawed view of the controversy there. I can only add that decommissioning costs elsewhere is not part of the debate.
The breathtaking hubris underlying this statement beggars belief. 10,000 years. In ten thousand years it may well be that our progeny will see us a little more than painted savages. At any rate the waste problem can (and no doubt will) be eliminated for all practical purposes once proper reprocessing is brought on line.
I will not address the issue of alternate energy schemes in detail, other than to say that they they rely on sources that are too nebulous, or too small to satisfy projected energy needs, and ultimately will not have to compete with nuclear but with coal.
The breathtaking hubris underlying this statement beggars belief.
Not breathtaking hubris, just my perception of the simple political reality. Look at the global warming debate. As a society we're having a hard time giving the 100-year time frame -- our grandchildren -- any serious consideration. The discount rate for 10,000 years in the future is effectively infinite as far as our economic and political systems are concerned. In other words, our economic and political systems don't give a fig about people 10,000 years from now.
Frankly I am just appalled by the extreme arrogance of the last statement that assumes that we are even in a position to ask this.
That is exactly the point: No one is in a position to ask. Any nation is free to implement nuclear energy irresponsibly and cause another Chernobyl. Any nation is free to dispose of nuclear waste in an irresponsible manner. The negative impacts, of course, do not respect national borders.
In other words, our economic and political systems don't give a fig about people 10,000 years from now.
And we shouldnt! The reason is, discounting works. The only argument is deciding the rate.
Nor should they. It is the assumption that we can which makes it hubris.
Since you agree that's the case, shouldn't we sell them good, safe reactors, rather than have them try to develop their own?
And please give Chernobyl a rest, It wasn't anywhere near the disaster that Bhopal was, yet I don't hear cries to shut down the whole chemical process industry everywhere in the world and make it an international crime to build a refinery.
And exactly what are YOU going to do to stop these other nations? Use force? It seems to me that the majority here on this blog react in sheer panic when the idea of using force against North Korea for actually trying to produce nuclear weapons is brought up. Or the same reaction occurs when we try to reign in the Iranian nuclear program. My gosh, people here even excuse the Iranian nuclear power program and then out of the other side of their mouths decry any American nuclear programs. The hypocrisy on this topic is mind boggling!!
There is no possibility of stopping the spread of nuclear power short of the threat to use force and actual use of force to make that threat real.
Read that statement. Until you grasp that statement in its entirety, all your Greenpeace style posturing against nuclear power is just irrational gibberish. We are homo sapiens and the one thing we respect is political power, and political power, as Mao reminded us, comes from the barrel of a gun.
Iran is proving this in spades even if they really do just want peaceful nuclear power. Iran absolutely believes there are no serious consequences to proceeding down this road. And do you know what? Their perception is true so far!
So tell me again how you are going to guarantee to stop nuclear waste leaks all over the globe, Laurence Aurbach. I eagerly await your reply, because if you have no answer, I do, whether you like my answer or not.
Thank-you GreyZone, it had to be said
You guys are just amazing.
Like Text messaging on Viagra. Hoo-rah!
Threat of Force and actual force has been working real well for Israel, eh.. and for us, of course.. we showed em!
"The Motto of the Industrial Revolution seems to have been 'If brute force doesn't work, you're not using enough of it.' "
W'm McDonough
So tell me again how you are going to guarantee to stop nuclear waste leaks all over the globe, Laurence Aurbach.
Sorry, you're arguing against a straw man. I agree that Iran is proving nations will forge ahead with nuclear energy whether or not the UN security council or anyone else wants them to, and whether or not they proceed in a responsible or irresponsible manner. What I am saying is that there is a very real potential for very bad consequences especially given the current climate of international chest-beating and eviscerated diplomatic initiative.
LA makes a lot of sense here. I agree with his concerns but I suspect that rather than let the lights start going out, TPTB will gulp and build some nuclear plants ... in your backyard.
Yeah right, the American empire has proved great in stopping nuclear proliferation, lets just nuke em before they get them - Yeee-fucking-haaaaahh - sometimes I forget this is an oil industry blog.
Try giving Oppenheimer's farewell address at Los Alamos a try, and then go to Einstein, Bohr, and others who all thought, and as time has proven rightly, that it would be impossible to militarily halt proliferation -- what did they know compared to the geniuses of our military-industrial complex?
For a more contemporary view try a recent column by Pat Buchanan:
WAKE UP AMERICA!!
"There is no possibility of stopping the spread of nuclear power short of the threat to use force and actual use of force to make that threat real."
Grey Zone, you may see no possibilities, which makes you a loyal son to the Imperial Ideal.. 'a taste of the lash is what they understand!', combined with, 'If we want it, let's take it, and to hell with the consequences..' China has outgrown Mao, so should you.
There are possibilites, if you want to seek them out. A direction to start in is making other options more appealing.. use the carrot, not the stick.. The fact that we're trying to dictate to other countries about restricting EITHER Nuclear Power or Weapons, while eagerly boosting up our own is only going to have the effect of uniting more of the 'outside world' (We might actually be the ones out in the cold, at this point).. against us. We already seem hypocritical and ridiculous enough.. this is just icing on the cake. You think its perverted that Nuke Opponents at home are championing Iran's 'Sovereignty' in their own backyard. I think that may be a bit Ironic, but the real perversion is in hamhanded US Foreign Policy actions..
oh, and as far as North Korea goes.. if that one comes to violence, it would serve us right.. a starving nation, histrionic dictator with a clear and present nuclear program and activity, and we let him smoulder for 4 years while we chase 'ghost nukes' in Iraq? Yes, I cringe at the thought of spending more public school nursing and library programs to 'bring Kim in line', when we had fricken thousands of days of opportunity to stave off (typo was 'starve off') this clearly developing crisis! F-ing insanity!
Bob Fiske
'Violence is Resourcelessness'
We should not be leaving 10,000 year waste.
However, known technology can eliminate and burn the transuranics, in which case the waste could have 200-500 year lifetimes.
In that period the storage facilities will be extremely well protected and geologically safe.
mbk;
Just because the tech is Known, doesn't mean it will be built (to scale), will be 'economically viable', will be convenient.
There is no justification in leaving this kind of concentrated toxicity to our descendants.. if it is going to be a valuable feedstock, then it is up to us to solve that problem before we ramp up such an industry.. I had to deal the the toxicity of far less than a gram of lead that found its way into my daughter's body, because our Nation was too short-sighted and 'Market Driven' to pull that shit out of paint when the rest of the western world did it, around the 20's. Now, we're being as stubborn and selfish around climate change, unwilling and unable to look far enough into the future to envision what kind of problems we seem to be planting for our kids, let alone the 7th generation or the 700th. Unwilling to pay for any ounce of prevention, when there's a pound of cake to be had. We chalk such things up as 'Human Nature', when I think it's much more a function of our particular culture. We set the bar on the low side, and then jump on the chairlift and get a free ride over it anyway..
Bob Fiske
Little Big Man
Do you hate them? Do you hate the White man now?
Old Lodge Skins
Do you see this fine thing? Do you admire the humanity of it? Because the human beings, my son, they believe everything is alive. Not only man and animals. But also water, earth, stone. And also the things from them... like that hair. The man from whom this hair came, he's bald on the other side, because I now own his scalp! That is the way things are. But the white man, they believe everything is dead. Stone, earth, animals. And people! Even their own people! If things keep trying to live, white man will rub them out. That is the difference.
Little Big Man
- Thomas Berger (novel) and Calder Willingham (screenplay)
I understand your point, but truly the best is the enemy of the good.
If it's the choice (and it is) of concentrated toxicity with significant potential solutions, versus highly distributed irremediable toxicity (global warming), the concentrated toxicity is better. This is prevention. The point is that for 200 to 300 years, existing waste repositories ARE indeed extremely secure and safe. Not sure about 10,000 years. But 100 years of global warming might be the end.
Really. Preventing potentially catastrophic climate change is much much much more important than nuclear waste.
It would be nice if solar and wind could do it all, but they can't, at least not now, and we have to do something NOW, and big.
The numbers don't work if you don't include nuclear.
We live in an era of consequences and hard, quantitative facts.
If we want to do absolutely nothing to harm our ancestors, drinking Jim Jones's koolaid is the only solution.
Clearly the consequences of our actions will be some complicated tangle of harm and help. Cowardly escape is hardly the way to optimize one's contribution.
The whole notion of action is somewhat paradoxical. The basic problem is, who is it that acts? Most of the actions here are collective. We are each members of a variety of communities, and in some sense it is those communities that act. No individual builds a power plant, or hardly. So one needs to look at actions as complex networks that span overlapping hierarchies of communities.
We, as the planetary human community, have remarkable freedom to go down any of a wide variety of paths. Each individual's freedom is highly constrained by circumstances formed by the behavior of the other 6 billion members of that community.
It's up to us to raise our children and to mold the various social and technical systems that will let them survive and raise their own children in turn. To abdicate that responsibility is to do our descendants the gravest harm.
Seems to me that it should be a big help just to get a clear picture of the alternatives that we face. Part of the challenge is to understand how alternatives are a function of who is doing the acting, i.e. which community. Since communities nest inside each other and overlap with each other, it can get quite confusing.
But we, humanity, most certainly face a decision about what level of nuclear technology we want to engage in. And of course we also have to decide how much carbon dioxide etc. we want to send into the atmosphere.
We also face a decision about what population levels we want to plan for. Of course, the non-human communities on the planet and in the solar system (e.g. asteroids!) have their say as well! And, too, how much should we consume - how big a house or car, etc.
Backing down from the global scale, it is a nice puzzle to try to see what choices various smaller scale communities might have. How can one nation act to influence consumption or technology choices? Nations constrain each others actions so tightly, it seems that any individual nation is powerless. And yet, the collection of nations has no such constraint and has considerable freedom. I am not proposing any kind of global government to somehow represent the global community. How a community acts ... well, communities DO act, just as individuals do, despite the fact that nobody understands exactly how it happens.
I wish I could think through all this stuff more clearly. But my main point is - the technology is only half the problem. How communities act, that is the crucial other half. Action Science by Chris Argyris et al. looks like it may have some useful ideas on how to steer organizational behavior.
Hi DV8,
re: "I am always amused when critics of nuclear energy blithely assume that somehow we can change the whole world attitudes on energy usage, but take it as a given that the nuclear industry can never be trusted to behave in a responsible manner."
Perhaps these problems are part and parcel of each other.
re: "True but many non-commercial installations have been."
Just "for the record", there have also been deaths in non-commercial reactors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents
re: "10,000 years. In ten thousand years it may well be that our progeny will see us a little more than painted savages."
This is an interesting possibility. Another idea I've pondered, is the concept that we consider slavery unethical (as well as illegal) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery). Are we consigning some significant portion of future humans to slavery, or, at the least, "tax slavery", as they have must work (one way or another) to keep wastes confined, under pain of severe (life-threatening) consequences?
re: "...alternative energy schemes...ultimately will not have to compete with nuclear but with coal."
This seems to be an important crux in the argument regarding energy production.
Qs: What is your sense of "compete"? Is the economic system currently set up to deal with implementing production that fulfills the criteria we want it to? For example, "clean", not contributing to CC ("green"), scaling up to meet current (?) demand, etc.? So, is your basic argument that 1) We have two realistic choices, coal and nuclear;and 2) Nuclear is preferable for reasons of (...?)
wow, just wow. A few minor points.
1) Nuclear is the ONLY energy source that is essentially unsubsidized. Coal gets to kill people for free, oil gets military adventures picked up by the tax payers, as well as the ability to kill people for free, pollute everything, and have all shipping lanes patrolled by the navy. Wind and Solar get MASSIVE direct subsidies. The subsidies to wind are larger than the total cost of producing energy through nuclear. If nuclear got the same subsidies, it would make money even if it gave away the electricity for free. Nuclear needs to account for all its waste, which the companies pay for, and have no environmental impact, as well as insuring agains the possibility that someone might eventually be hurt by nuclear power somehow, for which huge sums of money have been set aside. Compare this to coal that pollutes and despoils for free, and kills 100,000 people a year in the US alone, without paying one red cent to anybody.
2) The technology was always the best way to go, no argument there. How many people were killed by TMI (the worst nuclear disaster in US history), compared to, for instance, the worst coal mining disaster in the last 12 months? The coal mining disaster is bigger, and has been for any twelve month period in recent history (say, going back about 100 years) unless I miss my guess.
The initial assumptions have been proven to be absolutely true, but people look back and think they were false.
Assumption: It's safe.
Reality: Never killed anyone.
Assumption: It's cheap.
Reality: Currently the second cheapest electricity money can buy, even including all the lawsuits and the fact that coal kills people for free as part of its general business model.
Assumption: Waste isn't a big problem.
Reality: Waste has never caused a problem of any form. No spills, no injuries, no nothing.
Hmmm, seems like the assumptions have faired pretty well over the years, no?
1. the industry will not build 3rd generation reactors without subsidies.
The UK government has made this plain in its new nuclear power review.
Private stock and debt markets will *not* finance a nuclear plant without substantial guarantees from the government.
The Bush Energy Act explicitly recognises this by providing subsidies of the same magnitude as those received by wind power, for new nukes.
2. the existing nuclear industry is the product of massive government subsidies. The Price Anderson Act, without which no nuclear operator could operate.
Massive R&D subsidies to create the technology. The entire history of the nuclear industry is one of government R&D.
In the case of Sizewell B (PWR-1000MW in Suffolk) the electricity billpayer forked out over £4bn via the Non Fossil Fuel Obligation surcharge, during the 1990s.
Massive subsidies to deal with nuclear waste. The present value of the civilian liability for nuclear waste in the UK is £70bn, that will be carried by the UK taxpayer: over £2000 for every taxpayer.
Dude, you have your figures all wrong.
PA is perhaps a minor subsidy. It wouldn't be needed at all if people couldn't sue nuke plants for even the hint of a possibility that they might have been exposed to radiation, even without being able to show any health problems. Compare to coal, even if coal kills you, you can't sue anybody. If coal had to pay for killing people, it'd need the same thing, and would be FAR more expensive. The same is true of every fossil fuel.
Solar gets huge research subsidies too. Who do you think is designing all these new quantum dot and thin film solar panels?
The markets will not finance a new nuclear plant because they know that with about 90% certainty the government and NIMBYs will prevent it from ever operating. Why would you pay a billion dollars for a thing that you know a politician iis going to bulldoze for cheap political points as soon as the winds change? If the Gov guarantees that it will not prevent the plant from being built, or delay its construction, then there isn't a problem here. This is essentially what the US energy plan did, and now groups are preparing to build new nuclear reactors.
In short, the only reason the nuke industry needs government guarantees (including PA, which has never yet paid out a claim but has collected billions in premiums from the operators) is that the government has a 40 year history of screwing them over. Finally they said enough is enough, we won't build any more reactors unless you agree to pay for the losses should you decide to unilaterally demolish our iinvestments for cheap political points. This is an entirely reasonable position given history.
In the US, the nuke plants paid huge sums into a fund to deal with the waste, and were forbidden from dealing with it on their own. The government has taken their money for decades, and has yet to accept even a single canister of waste. Much of the money was spent on a giant hole in Nevada, which Nevada was happy to see built as long as it was producing jobs, but was horrified to learn that the Gov. actually intended to store waste in this multi billion dollar pork project, and has managed to prevent the actual use (but not the continuing construction) of this thing for years.
I'd like to say that I think Nuclear Energy in the form of fission or fusion reactors or in the form of solar cells and wind farms and hydro that harvest energy from a fusion reactor thats safely far away is important. A lot of people don't realize that so called clean energy is simply using a nuclear reactor that's NIMBY.
I am a fan of renewable sources and run of river hydro. But I cannot see how they can provide the concentrated energy needed for a industrial nation. People focus on transportation and what I call personal energy use but a large part of our energy esp electricity is used for industrial processes such as metal refining and concrete manufacture the list.
So the real problem we face is how to provide a source of concentrated energy for manufacturing this is where the problem of pollution lies.
We can either use coal or nuclear or a big hydro dam. All have their drawbacks. Distributed renewable energy wind/solar does not solve the problem without major technical improvements.
For wind/solar to work we would need superconducting long distance electric lines and a efficient storage mechanism for electricity. We don't have these but if we do one day nuclear probably will still be needed to balance the electric supplies probably less than we need right now but its still needed.
At the end of the day the debate over nuclear power is meaningless since we have a stark choice nuclear or coal.
What we should be doing is pushing forward for the safest cleanest and smallest nuclear plants we can get and force a requirement that the electricity they generate is not used for frivolous purposes like air conditioning. Instead they should be used to manufacture solar cells and windmills foremost and for key industrial processes second.
But of course we will screw this up and probably burn through our uranium supply keeping fat Americans cool in summer.
For wind/solar to work we would need superconducting long distance electric lines and a efficient storage mechanism for electricity. We don't have these...
We have 1) HV DC lines that have acceptable losses (perhaps 5% per 1000 miles, I have seen different #s "depending") and capacity limits around 10 GW and 2) Pumped storage plus hydro that can be scheduled for wind/solar times. Wind/solar CAN work with these.
Alan
_
In a supporting role yes as the sole source of energy I don't agree. It would be a tall order to determine if HVDC and wind/solar combination is suitable for all locations. A simple look at the population spreads and growth would suggest that no its not feasible as the only source.
If we could start over and build cities around HVDC/Wind Solar that yes but thats not going to happen soon.
Nuclear are Coal are a must debating will simply cause more coal plants or risker Nukes to be built.
The answer is to tie the needed Nukes or coal plants to a strong wind/solar initiative along with pouring money into superconductors and electric storage for the long term.
Put it this way if we had good high temperature super conductors and a reasonably cheap compact way to store electrical energy its obvious that we could combine this with low impact harvesting of solar/wind resources and power our society.
Fighting Nukes simply mean more coal. Its going to take a long time to get to a renewable society say 50-100 years and I'm sure during that time period we should get fusion finally working to replace fission reactors. If we don't need them in 100 years or probably more likely only need a few then fine but thats a decision that will be made long after we are gone. For the next 25 years at least we better build a lot of Nukes and tie them to the creation of the renewable energy network. Once we have a good wind/solar network in place then we can decommission the Nukes.
Or we can simply burn coal and finish destroying our planet.
We are not going to transition from a wasteful arrogant society into one that respects the planet overnight.
We have to make tough choices and the most important one is to keep society going and stop the carbon fuel usage. This means Nukes. The critical decision is to tie the Nukes to creation of non-carbon renewable sources so we don't hit the wall again in 50 years.
I'm not pro nuclear in the least I wish we had made better decisions in the past but we didn't and we are left with the choice of producing localized nasty radio active pollution or destroying our planet with coal fired plants.
In the interim build out the renewable network and pour money into research on it plus a real fusion push.
Maybe we need fusion maybe not but we should give our children the choice. I think they are a must to wean us off fission reactors since we probably will use the renewable plus fission.
The real travesty is that fusion research had been such a political issue. I think we could have had fusion now if we had really supported it.
Understand that solar and wind sources on a large scale will have a impact on climate/flora/fauna just as dam's effect rivers. Either fusion or a very low population are the only way I can see to have a modern society with the minimum impact.
With fusion we could even build food production towers and caverns that used artificial light leaving more land in its natural state. The idea is that where we disrupt the land we utilize it 100%. Fusion is the only route I know that results in the creation of compact closed resource cycles that don't impact the natural surroundings. Thus long term our cities and towns should be like closed space ships impacting their surroundings only with their footprint and waste heat.
The real travesty is that fusion research had been such a political issue. I think we could have had fusion now if we had really supported it.
Unfortunately I think that's not true.
Fusion is hard for very difficult and fundamental scientific reasons, and may be too hard permanently.
The primary one is that you have to force two positively charged, and repelling nuclei against each other. With fission, you use a neutron which can barrel straight into a nucleus unperturbed.
Fusion is still worth trying, but it ought to be considered a longshot. The greenhouse effect is changing now, and we need fission now.
Maybe 200 years from now we won't need fission any more and it can be retired. That will be great. I suspect that the more likely replacement would be extensive engineered geothermal with some wind, not fusion.
As long as I have been looking into this (about 1970) a commercial nuclear fusion reactor has been forecast to be 50 years away.
It still is.
We do have a market tested, high quality fusion reaction available to us, though, about 4 billion years of operating experience. Indeed 95% of the energy we use now is derived from it either directly over via coal and oil and gas.
It's called the Sun.
It's not the inability to transmit electricity over long distances, but it's the idea that the grid would rapidly need to become a fully connected graph. To put it another way.
On any given day we know that we need to move power from Ontario in Canada to New York. There are a few giant lines, and it works fine. If, however, on any given day we need to move power from the windy place to the not windy place, well then every place needs to be connected to every other place, meaning FAR more lines criscrossing the country. One idiot hits the wrong button and we're back to the great blackout of a few years ago. This is to say nothing of the expense of the situation.
Moving power from point A to point B is easy. For wind, the users (Point B) remain fixed, but point A moves all over the country as weather rolls through, and this makes the problem hugely more difficult. This is BTW, the majority of the cost and difficulty related to the electricity you use every day, only a small fraction (say 20-50% might be typical) is to pay for the actual generation.
As for pumped storage, lets get some numbers on how many gallons. I'm not optimistic. When you think that we've dammed virtually every river in the country and it provides 5% of our power, are you planning to have a pumped reservoir that can provide 20x the water flow of every river in the country for a week straight to get us through a heat wave? If so, then I guess you'll be building a great lake by hand, have you picked a site and calculated a cost yet?
From a purely technical perspective I have no great objections to nuclear power. I do, however, have major concerns in the following areas:
1. Human factors. It's an industry with a a variety of significant risks, being run by human beings in a system that seeks to maximize profits. That's a recipe for problems.
2. Mining. Uranium mining is an environmental evil second only to coal mining. Prospectors in Ontario, Canada are already staking uranium claims in residential areas.
3. Complexity and time phasing. It's no secret that I think PO is going to trigger a decline of industrial civilization, probably starting over the next 20 years. If our technological base loses integrity as a result, nukes could prove to be unmaintainable. As well, we could easily start losing integration just after we've constructed a whole lot of nukes.
As a post said yesterday, if you ignore everything but the physics it works perfectly.
Mining 200 tons of Uranium per reactor per year has got to have a lot less impact than the 3,285,000 tons (9,000/day x 365) per year of coal required by a comparable coal fired plant.
I don't know the numbers. But the coal you pull out of the ground, you can pretty much toss into the furnace. Of course, with methods like strip-mining, there is a lot of other material removed to get to the coal. Still, I bet that the amount of coal produced must be up around 20% of the total material removed in mining.
Uranium, on the other hand, does not occur in pure form but as one component of rock. So, to get that 200 tons of uranium, one needs to start with a much larger quantity of ore. Then of course there will still be other material removed to get to that ore. An additional cost is all the resources used to chemically process the ore to extract the pure uranium.
Not that I am any fan of coal, but still, if we want to compare accurately, it's important not to skip over these large factors.
One way to make an accurate comparison is to look at the cost/unit energy. Uranium, now approaching $100/lb, if far cheaper than coal (1/100?) on this basis. So, look past the fuel cost and look at the overall cost... nuke plants are much more expensive to build. Surging coal costs are seriously affecting overall cost of coal plants, while surging uranium has little effect on nukes. IMO we have reached the point that nukes are cheaper than coal, explaining why both investors and several potential southern states, and their communities, are becoming interested in nukes.
INvestors are not going to build nukes on account of GW, even though society should be interested on this basis. You can be assured that if nukes are built the investors are convinced that overall nuke costs are cheaper than coal, even though coal's hidden pollution costs are not just massive but unaffordable, certainly to gom communities.
From the main article:
10,000/50 = 200 tons per reactor per year
That’s the volume of ore that is mined, not the volume of fuel.
After all:
No, I am wrong. 200 tons is the volume of the resulting metal? or yellowcake? So if the concentration is .1% that's 200,000 tons of original material per reactor. Still a lot less than the coal. And it is not transported hundreds or thousands of miles.
Most uranium is now mined by in situ extraction methods and the slurry is processed to yellowcake at the mine head with very little tailing. At any rate there is enough good uranium trapped in used fuel rods to last us 500 years (at present consumption) if we would start to reprocess seriously.
Even from a technical perspective, nuclear power, fission and most definitely fusion poses significant difficulties. The so called advanced GEN IV plants, on which any long term nuclear future will depend in my opinion, have not been built and operated at scale. Therefore, we don't know all the "SURPRISE" issues which will arise that will compromise safety.
On several other fronts nuclear does not make sense as well.
1. Assuming the GEN IV or other advances do pan out, they will not be able to compete on price with more easily handled energy "sources" like efficiency and many of the renewables.
(i) wind
(ii) some forms of biomass
(iii) geothermal in many areas
(iv) concentrating solar thermal eventual long term costs.
(v) concentrating PV eventual long term retail costs
(vi) wave/tidal eventual wholescale costs
(viii) they are definitely not applicable for islands where ocean thermal will be viable for the relatively small loads.
2. They are national security risks from sabotage and destruction in conventional warfare or simple terrorism.
3. They perpetuate the inefficient centralized energy structure of the present system.
4. They, in my opinion even in the present operations have deleterious health effects almost as bad as coal thanks to effects of radiological damage from biological internal radionucliudes unique to anthropogenic sources. Strontium 90 and Plutonium, particularly 239 and aerosolized uranium especially depleted come to mind. I will state for clarity and fairness that this opinion is disputed enthusiastically by some.
5. They are slow to ramp up in comparison to the alternatives.
6. They are among the most complicated of the energy sources with the greatest demand on supporting infrastructure which may not be at levels expected if things get difficult and chaotic.
7. They are a significant liability for future generations varying from at least 10 generations upwards by orders of magnitude dependening on assumptions of technology utilized. In other words, waste issues for at least 500 years (500 is too long!!!!!) and possibly ad infinitum on a human timescale.
I could give more but will stop here. For all those negatives listed, the single positive is large amounts of CO2 free power that can already be supplied by alternatives if they are given a fair chance.
You seem to forget that its not just price.
Its capacity. There is no way that we can produce enough biomass to replace all the major coal fired plants in the world. In the UK hydro is just 3% of generated power, and wind is just 0.2%
At best they are bit players, at worst they are a distraction. I live in an industrial society, not a low power utopia like some people seem to think is a good idea.
And the world has decided that it quite likes large quantities of electricity, so its going to find some way of procuring it. Nuclear is by far the best option as it has both capacity and reasonable cost.
Andy
There is no need to produce enough biomass to replace all the coal fired plants. The combination of the sources I mentioned (including efficiency by the way) is enough however.
Are you saying that for instance wind can't realistically produce 20 - 30% of electricity supply? It is already 6 - 7% in Germany, a highly industrial, densely populated country with a comparatively weak resource and they have not even started the offshore push as yet potentially taking the total to 20 - 30%. In the U.K, wind is already at or just slightly over 1% and the offhsore push is just starting. Wave and tidal in the U.K can realistically add another 10 - 15% of supply meaning that you have to find another 40 - 60% of supply. Efficiency can conceptually supply 20% and if we get really aggressive 30 - 40% is not out of the question. That should take care of any load growth.
If we add the enormous potential of rooftop solar heat and rooftop PV, another 10 - 20% of supply is very possible. Now the beauty of all these varied renewables is that they don't all peak in phase with each other meaning that if enough geographic and technology diversification is utilized, storage needs are minimized and nat. gas, gasified biomass becomes much more feasible to cover the variations. This assumes an industrial country in a temperate climatic region.
Now what happens when we go south and add concentrating solar thermal. This technology in a desert or high direct insolation area is good for constant predictable output with cheap salt heat storage meaning that with enough of these plants linked by direct current grids, base load is assured.
I have not mentioned geothermal that is base load capable, ocean thermal that is also base load capable for islands and equatorial maritime countries etc. etc.
Calling these technologies bit players and a distraction is disingenious in the extreme. Three of these on their own are capable of providing energy on the scale consumed by humankind. Combined, they are next to unbeatable.
i concentrating solar thermal
ii wind
iii ocean thermal
The others are quite large in their own right being in the range of 1/10 an order of magnitude of present human consumption and are thus by no means bit players.
I will argue ad infintum that the claim that it is either nuclear or coal is bogus!!!!!! It is a matter of our priorities.
Not at cost. Only nuclear competes on price.
It still remains that whenever nuclear plants are blocked, its coal that fills the void.
There is room for optimism for advancing in concentrating solar and wind (though not ocean thermal at all) but today nuclear is the most obvious choice for displacing coal. All otheres are far less proven, and require significant infrastructure change to ramp up.
Dezakin,
The advanced nuclear cycles and technologies needed to carry it forward on the timescales you mention will not compete on price with existing and emerging renewables that are rapidly declining in price. It has already failed against wind and arguably some biomass, geothermal and hydro. It is only a matter of time for concentrating solar (both PV and thermal)
I agree that compared to wave and tidal, existing and near term nuke designs are more proven. That however does not apply to the future designs that will be necessary. The primary issue with wave, tidal and ocean thermal is they have not yet been scaled simply because of our past priorities. Given time, I have good reason to believe after the inevitable shakeout, winning marine designs will approach wind today.
Unlike you, I believe for maritime tropical countries, there is considerable room for OTEC optimism in the 10 - 100 MW range especially if combined with coproducts like fresh water production. I do not advocate plantships as that I see as non-viable.
We will probably never see eye to eye on nuclear simply because of different priorities and values. For example, I do not believe even advanced cycles that reduce waste issues to 500 years (that is 8 - 10 generations of care) is an acceptable legacy to leave for progeny.
I don't know what the pricing will be in twenty or fifty years, but I'm fairly confident that nuclear will still be cheaper baseload than any solar or wind arrangement for the near future.
There aren't any future designs necissary in the scope of the conversation. 250000 years of fuel ought to be enough for us to go to the next stepping stone (probably significantly soonser), and I'll not muddy the waters by making policy suggestions as to what that might be. The future will decide on that as the needs arise.
No way. Anyone that understands the delta T knows theres no way to make that dog fly.
Thats because you dont understand opportunity cost and discounting, or for some reason you just dont believe it.
New nuclear, based on what I understand if all hidden subsidies and incentives are removed and left to stand on its own feet will not produce electricity below about US 7c per KWH and that is being optimistic. That is already the high end for wind, biomass, geothermal and small hydroelectric without subsidy. Wind with subsidy ranges from $0.03 to $0.06 per KWH. Look at the experience of the Finnish plant so far. Already way over budget and delayed by at least a year. In other words, it already is more expensive than many existing low or no carbon sources.
Let me give an example of what nuclear is going to be facing within 10 years, the planning horizon for the first set of new nuclear plants.
1. Right now, there are companies offering for sale concentrating PV installed for just about US $3 per watt working out to about US $0.06 per KWH in good areas. The only question mark is speed of scale up. One company already have 200MW of supply agreements and 1GW per year in 5 years is not out of the question. This I stress is just a single company.
2. In 10 years, concentrating solar thermal with heat storage for baseload will be in the range of $0.07 - $0.10 per KWH.
3. Efficiency will cost $0.01 - $0.03 per KWH for good projects capable of slashing 20 - 30% of existing demand. Efficiency can be considered as it reduces the need for additonal plants.
I could give more examples. Others have already chimed in nicely upthread on the uranium supply issues and your ludicrous assertion of 250,000 years of mining and the effects of environmental contamination over such timeframes.
As stated before, we have different values placed on the future of our progeny and it makes no sense debating on this . 500 years is longer than the United States has existed as an independent country for example.
One closing comment, delta T is very important but it is not the whole story. For example, the delta T for OTEC causes a CARNOT limit of around 7% leading to a practical efficiency of around 3%. However, given that desalination and other value added outputs can be associated with OTEC and that relatively non exotic materials, technologies etc. are utilized, it is anticipated that in tropical areas, electricity costs will be in the region of $0.08 - $0.12 per KWH. This is cheaper power than the 10 - 50 MW range steam and diesel plants can provide in the principal areas that OTEC is applicable.
You know, I could just make stuff up too. I don't know where you're getting your figures from. Then I can post estimates that contradict your figures (which I did before) and then you can reject the estimate (for some reason or other) and post citations from your favored source which I can reject for some reason.
Then we can argue over the true value of subsidies of nuclear versus other renewables. If they can compete for baseload, fine. I don't believe they can, and think that painting it in another light is overoptimistic.
And still cheaper than alternatives. Look at Italy where they scrapped their nuclear power plants and face some of the highest import rates in europe and Denmark where they're so gung ho on wind and have some of the highest electric rates in europe.
Look I have high hopes for improving economics for solar and wind, but I'm unconvinced that they are ready to compete with nuclear for baseload.
Oh come on, dont attack this strawman. I said several times I dont expect nuclear power to go for full extraction of uranium on light water reactors for a quarter million years. Its an illustration that fuel supply concerns are moot.
Again, you don't understand opportunity cost and discounting. Simply, we plan for today first, tomarrow second, and 500 years in the future way down the list. Don't plan for next week before planning for tomarrow.
Solar may be a dark horse 50 years from now and get super cheap with some fantastic battery technology, or something. I don't know, and I wouldn't bet on it, but it might happen.
I can understand just extrapolating for unknown technologies. Sure, computers are getting faster, maybe they'll continue to get faster, it's complicated and hard to say for sure, but perhaps. Solar cells are getting better, and are pretty recent, so ditto there. There isn't much experience here, so there's not much more that can be done other than to ask the nerds what's the best possible, and assume we maybe reach 70% of that someday. I can understand this, and it's (on a certain level) reasonable.
Windmills however, we've been building windmills for what, 500 years? The next time someone claims that there's going to be a dramatic breakthrough in windmills, will someone please laugh in their face? Please, can we at least do that.
Well wind turbines may be competitive for an intermittent power source because construction and maintenance costs of a wind turbine scale a bit more than linear function of the turbine size, while power output scales roughly geometrically with the turbine size. Or so the argument goes, and wind turbine sizes have been steadily rising for years so there must be something to it.
But theres got to be the sweet spot limit somewhere. For some reason I have doubts we'll see 500 megawatt mile high wind turbines. Theres a sweet spot for largest economic size and we havent reached it yet for offshore, but I notice that onshore wind platforms aren't nearly as large.
As it currently stands, I would say its too immature from a competitive price perspective to suggest it has any hope of displacing coal.
Sheldon H:
Can you explain to me how biomass prices are declining? I have read a number of articles recently in publications like Forbes and the Wall Street Journal describing a number of factors that lead me to believe that they are increasing in price at a rapid rate:
The price of farm land in Iowa has been increasing at double digit inflation rates.
The cost of corn increased by more than 50% in 2006.
The cost of financing ethanol plants has increased due to some recent defaults.
The cost of soybeans has increased as farmers switched land from soybeans to corn and reduced the supply of soybeans.
The cost of fertilizer has increase substantially during the past three years.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Hi Glider G
Good! that should drive the silly bastards back to the city where they belong and off number one Agi land.
To be serious, I am first for wind/hydro (I think Alan has a lot of good stuff to say here) second for nuclear, third for coal gasification. I think there will be a constantly changing mix of energy sources which as long as it leads to renewable/friendly sources and does not spin into political/economic driven items (like taking petroleum and changing it into biofuel)things may work out okay.
Second I am really really for rail,(light rail, streetcars, rapid transit, heavy rail with diesel, heavy rail electrified.) I think there would be a 4 to 8 reduction in the need for new energy if we did that (Where is my source? I'm afraid it is from my own organic computing device using input received and I'm afraid the reader will have to decide if it is just gigo or not.
Hi, I'm a first time commenter, so please forgive if this has been answered before: When calculating EROEI, are maintenance & downtimes also included in calculations? Whether nuclear or wind or whatever, parts break and sometimes replacement costs can exceed original costs (ask car owners who have vehicles in the 250,000+ mile range).
On top of this, most things designed today use petroleum-based lubricants, etc..
When calculating EROEI, are only initial energy costs considered?.. or are ALL lifecycle costs also included?
Thanks.
Good questions. As far as I can see, interested parties and their fervent advocates like to choose the data that best fits their beloved technology.
One has to particularly be on the watch, imo, for claims of high eroi for a technology, which don't address the matter of the rate of change in the eroi's of the energy inputs required to produce and reproduce the specific technology, and which don't address the matter of the changing energy requirements to maintain the flow of materials required to produce and reproduce the specific technology.
In the end, it is a very difficult calculus, which is probably why many satisfy themselves with the dollar cost as a reasonable proxy for the energy cost. This is not an energy theory of value, only a kind of rule of thumb that allows the market mechanism to play a role in the investment decision process.
Problems obviously arise from bad market design. We are now beginning to have to deal with the costs, for example, of a market whose regulations did not constrain greenhousegas emmissions, and others, such as autos and housing, whose regulations did not require higher fuel consumption efficiencies.
In the end, I believe, we require eroi analyses to inform the market design process and to inform the private and public sector investment decision process. So, as a tool, the quality of eroi analysis is a critically important issue. Which, as I said, is why I think you have posed important questions.
All are included. Except possibly the energy cost for launching spent fuel into interstellar space by a sufficiently paranoid society.
Not to worry, thats just chemistry. Run any carbon and hydrogen source (can crack that out of limestone and water) over the right catalysts and you can make whatever plastics or lubricants you want.
I would sure love to see a politician say they were going to double the number of nuclear plants in the US and phase out coal for electricity generation.
Good luck! I'm not hearing that conversation starting anytime soon.
This gravity-powered aircraft is pretty cool, and could play a role in our energy-challenged future:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IsaMc9mpLI&NR
Don't know if this was posted before, so I thought I'd add it to the overall TOD discussion. :o)
-best,
Wolf Read
The video makes no sense. I am sure that the weight of the necessary compressed air would more than outweigh the lift of the helium.
The website for this idea (if it is not a joke) makes a different claim. They claim they will use a proprietary low-boiling-point-liquid which is vaporized into a low density lighter-than-air lifting gas using the heat in the air near the surface. At high altitude, the process would reverse, and the gas would liquify. That idea would work, except for the minor fact that no such liquid/gas exists.
A few stadium blimps are one thing, but a fleet of enough large airships to make a difference is another altogether. Where would all that helium come from at any affordable price? Since it's extracted only as an impurity in natural gas, you get what you get, supply is going to be very, very inelastic to price. And "if" gas peaks, aren't we looking at a helium peak?
The video, as described, is "snake oil" insofar as it describes a perpetual motion machine.
It will take some measurable amount of energy to "initialise" the aircraft i.e. fill its tanks with the gasses at the necessary pressures. This is stored energy, so far so good.
On each ascent cycle there will be energy losses from the aircraft system system due to aerodynamic drag heating, mechanical friction in the compressors and associated plumbing, radiative, convective, and conductive loss of heat energy from the lifting gas stores as they are recompressed on the decent phase of the flight etc.
Since the design does not suggest a replacement source for these losses the energy stored in the aircraft will be dispersed to the environment.
Nice video animation however... :)
Could they not make commercial fuel preloaded with enough 240Pu so that plutonium would never be weapons grade?
They could, but it's harder than you think. It's extremely difficult too separate PU-240 from PU-239 (say, 3x harder than separating U-235 from U-238), so you could make something preloaded with lots of PU-239 and PU-240 (say, plutonium from a previous long reactor run), but then maybe some of the benefit is lost as you've added a lot of PU-239 as well.
Interesting idea though.
I am willing to concede, for the sake of argument, the safety of nuclear power, IF the proper procedures are followed.
Let us also concede, for the sake of argument, the adequaacy of supply. And let us concede, for the sake of argument, that the stuff can be safely stored and disposed of.
Here's what I don't concede: how can it be guaranteed that in conditions of societal decay that the conditions of the IF will be met?
For nuclear to replace any significant portion of what we will lose from oil and gas depletion will require an enormous expansion of the nuclear industry. This as a time when there is likely to be retrogression in our ability to maintain the current oil-age infrastructure.
So nuclear is a huge gamble: it depends on our ability to maintain oil-age infrastructure despite the decline in the oil and gas that underpins it, and in fact presumes to be able to replace it in supporting that infrastructure.
If the nuclear gambit fails, it fails disastrously. It is one more attempt to continue business as usual. I believe we are going to be forced to scale back. And I think that the less damage we do the earth, the the more we'll have to fall back on when we finally realize (after much suffering -- the only way we learn) that's we have to do.
In those circumstances the power-producing nuclear reactor would be even more valuable, and it seems that signifiant effort would be devoted to maintaining it.
Paint a picture for me here. Are you worried about a mad max style future with the neo-savages occasionally poisoning themselves getting into spent fuel casks?
Really, all of society will have much larger existential problems than what to do with spent fuel in that picture.
Our modern high technology and high resource consumption society is a rather extreme outlier in the spectrum of cultures that have existed on this planet. It is a very plausible guess that we will return, over the next few centuries, to something much more usual.
The big difference may be that, unlike any cultures of the past, these future low tech cultures will have nuclear waste to deal with. Not just nuclear waste of course, but other chemical waste, and also many fewer species of plants and animals, etc.
Many people, of course, believe that somehow we have transcended the past and somehow become supernatural. Maybe it was Newton and Descartes, folks like that, who broke through the constraints of nature and freed humanity forever.
We're facing a high stakes gamble!
You're obviously operating with a different definition of 'plausible' than me. The notion of civilization deindustrializing is incredibly naive. The trend has been consistantly more technological capacity for centuries, and there are no signs that that is about to be reversed any time in the next thousand years.
But assuming it was a realistic possibility, nuclear waste will be the least of the problems of human neo-primitives... A few tens of thousands of tons in isolated areas kill a few dedicated fools every couple of decades pales in comparison to the sheer brutality of day to day life without the creature comforts of modern civilization.
Actually, your position that because we have always done it this way, it always will be this way, is an extraordinary lapse in logic. No scientist, let alone anyone with any training in logic, would make such a silly pronouncement.
I'm afraid your statement exposes your immense naivete. Many, many civilizations have risen to certain apogees of attainment, each one of them asserting their primacy, each one beating their hairy, egotistical chest, proclaimed to all who would listen, WE, we of Egypt, WE the Hittites, WE the Sumerians, WE the Alexndrians, WE the Persians, WE the Ottoman, WE and WE alone have reached perfection and thus our BRILLIANT civilization will last for two, three, maybe even four, thousand-year Reichs.
Oh and about your comparison of the respective problems we will face in future, I guess your argument is: Don't argue with me because life without nukes will be so crappy why go on living.
That is so sad. Modern civilization. Sigh. Oh, that we may be forced to live without 500 channels of cable, or that we give up our national health care system...wait, we don't have one here in the U.S. Or that we give up all of the diseases that are created by the very civilization that purports to treat these plagues.
Yes, poor hapless savages. Don't they know better?
You're confusing national political power with technological advancement. Civilization as a whole has been on an upward trend of capability for thousands of years.
Whenever I see someone rephrase arguments to their liking its allways the construction of a strawman. What I was saying is that if civilization imploded, nuclear waste wont be a problem for the survivors that will even register as something to worry about.
This is an illusion. It is a function of what you choose to measure. If we look around at our greatest successes, and measure that past against those, then of course the past will not score as highly, and it looks like all of history is inexorably leading up to the situation in which we find ourselves, and surely will continue to head in that direction.
I've been reading Peter Ackroyd's Life of Thomas More recently. Another way to look at things is to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone like Thomas More and to survey from that perspective how the following centuries unfolded. I.e. use as a measuring stick the features of the culture that those folks took greatest pride in. From many such perspectives, our present age can look like an utter disaster.
Or another way: look at things from the perspective of less privileged people who are alive today. Compare the life today of someone at say the 20th percentile in e.g. grams of protein per day, compared to someone maybe 300 years ago again at the 20th percentile.
For example, look at weapons technology. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that now we have land mines and cluster bombs and machine guns and plastic explosives and all the rest? Look at the percentage of the population that dies through violence, how has that changed over the centuries?
The idea that somehow we have such great forward momentum that progress in the future is assured, to me that is pathologically irresponsible. Ultimately I guess it is a matter of religious conviction, but my belief is: We make the future through our actions.
'Pathologically Irresponsible'
That's the key-phrase I've been looking for..
DEZAKIN..
'In other words, our economic and political systems don't give a fig about people 10,000 years from now.'
And we shouldnt! The reason is, discounting works. The only argument is deciding the rate.
~
If deciding the Rate is really paramount, than is this decider even obliged to 'give a Fig' about people 2 years from now, or even NOW? Sounds like Not Really.. my waste is Their Problem.
It seems quite fasionable here to ignore or disbelieve basic economics.
Don't try to plan for next week before trying to plan for tomarrow. But I'm sure the analogy will be twisted into more misunderstanding...
I prefer the older formulation of this logic.
[quote]
We've agreed that we're whores, now we're just haggling over the price.
[/quote]
Lets just throw out for a minute that nobody is going lose a pound of flesh just so they don't have to do so tomorrow. So what is it, an ounce today to save a pound tomorrow, where is the line. Thus, we arrive at one of my favorite statements, as noted above.
I think the thing that's getting overlooked are the exceptional things about the age we live in -- the oil age. Cars, planes, electricity, air conditioning, plastics, global markets in everything, and a 6.5 billion population based on mechanized and chemical agriculture. Even if we find a replacment for that energy supply, we cannot go on as we have because we have diminished the planet in so many ways. A replacement would simply allow us to continue with this diminishing and make attaining sustainable future all the more difficult.
So a solution to the energy problem would not be a solution, but a problem. In that sense I'm an optimist. I don't think there is a solution to the energy problem that doesn't involve scaling back and learning to live with limits that we should be (and are) learning about.
There has always been a technological fix -- let's concede that for the sake of argument. Does it follow that there always will be? Or is it possible that we do live in a very special time, a time in which new conditions prevail, and that the fix needed might require our bringing ourselves under control as a species? Is that conceivable?
P.S. If one doubts that our time is unique, just draw some graphs over the last hundred years -- population, energy consumption per individual, plus, well, you pick some things. The only way this could be an ordinary time would be for those graphs to continue zooming up. But they can't.
I notice that opponents of nuclear tend to
1) downplay the magnitude of the clean energy gap
2) suggest unproven technology is being held back
3) ignore the hazards of non-nuclear energy
I'll give examples of 3). In Australia there is much talk of generating steam from hot granite but it turns
out that the steam contains small (admittedly trivial) amounts of radon. But geothermal is not nuclear so that makes it OK. Underground reservoirs of sequestered CO2 could escape and kill people, but it's not nuclear so that makes it OK. Energy storage devices like flywheels could disintegrate or sodium-sulphur batteries could explode. They're not nuclear so that makes it OK.
There are undoubtedly more examples but you get the drift.
Boof;
Let me take some of those on, from my persp.
1) Magnitude of the gap.
Yes, I downplay that. Partly, because I don't think this level of demand will hold, so what can I, or Should I do about it? It represents fuel sources we've flooded ourselves with for decades now. I don't expect the alternatives to come up to the Cubic Mile of Oil that we now consume, and I don't even expect us to fill the gap with Nuclear, tho' we may try. Coal will probably boom alongside Nuclear, but the concurrent energy price changes will also be happening, and probably help to 'inspire' an urgent action to cut the fat out of every energy draw concievable. Nighttime Lighting of streets and parking lots, redundant travel (I bought a Maine postcard in Maine once, which was produced in Germany and distributed from Australia.. back to Maine. I don't know if I had the heart to even send it to anyone.)
So, do I 'downplay' the gap, or just expect the demand to downsize, boosing Renewables' percentages for free!?
( I'm also expecting a population decline.. don't know if it'll be obvious or exciting.. I think for example, that pop's hit by disasters [eg Tsunami] won't rebound as they would with more energy avail to produce food..)
2) Unproven Technology - Like Fusion? I have to wonder if it has been 'held back', or is it just unmotivated? Fear of Success? Do you think that there might be some correlation between the percentage of PV we have feeding the US grid, and the percentage of R+D funding solar has received next to Ethanol or Nuclear research (and Insurance coverage)?
3) Hazards -
John Hammond: "All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked."
Ian Malcolm: "Yeah, but John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists."
Exploding Flywheels and Batteries? And you think nobody is going to say anything about those safety features, just cause they're not nuclear? (Just don't hire BP to do your maintenance..) (you can put flywheels underground) You can't build Wind Turbines until you've pleased the Audubon Society, and you can't (Legally) solar-tile someone's roof without a $150 OSHA harness dangling off your tush. But here, they're trying to keep hundreds of Tons annually of concentrated, radioactive waste in hardened (so far) containers, cooling pools, fenced in 'Security Zones', and cave-systems where they'll have to remain secure for some 20 times the stretch that we've had written history? We're only a few decades in, but we're asking the next 6 civilizations to keep tabs on the tablescraps from our great picnic, and meanwhile, spicy little bits are already washing up on the coast of Scotland, cracks and leaks show up in aging equipment even here in the 'clean and white' US.
The thing that worries me the most about Nuclear these days, is the amount of Assurances I am hearing that 'It's all OK now'..
"SMITHERS: (chuckles) Let's learn more about nuclear energy, shall we? Lights.
The room is cast in darkness and a show begins to play.
The title is: NUCLEAR ENERGY: OUR MISUNDERSTOOD FRIEND
NARRATOR: When most people think of nuclear energy, they think of this.
There is an explosion on screen and the children scream in happiness.
NARRATOR: But when we talk about nuclear energy, we really mean this.
There is a weird picture shown with people using various technological appliances.
NARRATOR: But what exactly is nuclear energy? I don't know, but I know someone who does.
Question marks fill up the screen.
NARRATOR: Smilin' Joe Fission.
Joe Fission is a cartoon character resembling a cowboy but with an atom as his stomach.
JOE FISSION: Hi, there, energy eaters. I'm Smilin' Joe Fission, your atomic tour guide to the strange and exciting world of nuclear power.
Joe Fission walks over to three red things that have faces.
JOE FISSION: And these are rods of uranium 235. Hi, Rod.
RODS: Hi. Hey. Good to see ya.
JOE FISSION: Hey, you guys look hot.
The rods sweat.
RODS: Of course we're hot. We're radioactive.
JOE FISSION: Uh-oh. Well, how 'bout a dip in the pool?
RODS: Yeah, last one in's a rotten rod.
They all rush towards a pool that has just mysteriously appeared there. They jump inside.
JOE FISSION: The rods make the water so hot it boils.
True enough, the water boils.
RODS: Ow! Ouch! Ow!
JOE FISSION: And the steam spins turbines that generate energy.
A shot of turbines and a worker. Arrows go up and down ont he screen. Bart's silhoutte is suddenly there.
MRS. KRABAPPEL: Bart, sit down!
Bart sits down. On screen, a bunch of small blue evil-looking balls walk by Fission.
JOE FISSION: Uh oh. Whoops. Looks like there's a little leftover nuclear waste. No problem. I'll just put it where nobody'll find it for a million years.
He slides them under a carpet with a broom.
One of them manages to escape and laughs but Fission kicks it off the screen.
JOE FISSION: So now you know the whole true story of nuclear energy, our no longer misunderstood friend. So keep on smiling.
THE END. The children applaud as the lights come on.
SMITHERS: Now, let's have even more fun.
Smithers slides open a curtain which reveals a door. It says: DANGER, SEVERE RADIATION. It opens to reveal another, which says: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK. It opens to reveal another which says: ENJOY YOUR VISIT. Finally, it opens to reveal a hallway of sorts.
http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/simpsons/season1/thesimpsons-103.htm
Boof:
The funny thing is that a large portion of geothermal energy IS nuclear energy from the decay of uranium and thorium and - quite likely - from a natural fission reactor in the earth's core.
Here is a link that you might find interesting:
http://understandearth.com/
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Once again the techno-fantasists flog their dystopic wares.
First of all, let me remind everyone about the the Limits to Growth, the update. Their forecasts indicate that even if we found FUSION and were able to magically implement it world-wide with a snap of our fingers, civilization would crash within one hundred years. The LAST thing we need is to put together a massive program of nuclear fission powered plants that would add to that crash umpteen millions of tons of radioactive detritus. This is pure insanity.
Of course we could build nuclear fission plants; no one is denying that. The problem is broader and, perhaps, more difficult for the scientific community to appreciate, and because of its unfortunately limited vision, it finds itself incapable of the deeper thought necessary to consider the universe in a holistic way. For a carpenter, every problem is solved with a hammer and for a physicist the solution is a nuke.
My guess is, given the fact that nuclear power plants have not already become dominant, they will never become so. I mean, where are they? Why are we even using oil at all if nukes are so damned good? It seems that if your arguments were true, then we would be producing energy that would be "too cheap to meter." Ah, yes, remember that old chesnut?
The sad truth is the nuclear power industry has never had a good argument for its own existence. It is dirty, expensive, and profoundly dangerous.
It can only exist with the subsidy of not only the government, but cheap fossil fuel.
No matter what the nuke shills tell you, nuclear power is an astonishingly bad investment in humanity's future (if you an call the destruction of the planet an "investment"). Only those people who cannot think outside of their narrow discipline, and those who are more concerned about money than the future of the planet and, by extension, the human population, are flogging this poisonous and rather illogical path.
In other news, we have a nearby fusion furnace cranking out yottawatts of energy (maybe fractional yW, not sure) with pretty good reliability. I've heard a rumor that it's at a "safe" distance radiation-wise, and we are making use of zero-point-oh-oh-oh-nothing of it currently.
Back when I took the extra-credit Energy Crisis class in 1970, one of the items presented was a calculation extrapolating our exponentially increasing energy usage history: within 200 years the entire planet will glow dull red from dissipated waste heat.
Hello Cherenkov,
I'm wondering if you could share your idea of "silver bullets", (replacements for oil), (and apologies if you have already, elsewhere.) Or, if not replacements, what your ideas are.
*** We need to talk about Thorium as an alternative to Uranium ***
For example, see Energy From Thorium at http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/.
From the Introduction section: "Thorium, if used efficiently, can be converted to energy far more easily and safely than any other energy source of comparable magnitude, including nuclear fusion and uranium fission."
There can be no comprehensive discussion about nuclear energy without mention of the possibility of using Thorium. Can TOD notify Martin Sevior so he can familiarize himself with the concept as well?
Any policy maker who even attempted to read a discussion such as this has been would throw up his hands and ask "Who's my Daddy?"
When in doubt, ban the messenger.
Regarding your article "Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?" (2007-03-01), there is absolutely no need for nuclear power in Australia because there is a simple, practical technology that can deliver huge amounts of clean energy without any of the headaches of nuclear power.
I refer to 'concentrating solar power' (CSP), the technique of concentrating sunlight using mirrors to create heat, and then using the heat to raise steam and drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station. It is possible to store solar heat in melted salt or other substance so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1985 and half a million Californians currently get their electricity from this source. CSP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.
CSP works best in hot deserts and, of course, these are not always nearby! But with transmission losses at only about 3% per 1000 km, it is entirely feasible and economic to transmit solar electricity throughout Australia from the Australian desert using highly-efficient 'HVDC' transmission lines. A small portion of the Australian desert would be sufficient to meet all of the country's needs for electricity. A recent report from the American Solar Energy Society says that CSP plants in the south western states of the US "could provide nearly 7,000 GW of capacity, or ***about seven times the current total US electric capacity***" (emphasis added). The solar resource in Australia must be substantially more.
Waste heat from electricity generation in a CSP plant can be used to create fresh water by desalination of sea water: a very useful by-product in arid regions.
In the 'TRANS-CSP' report commissioned by the German government, it is estimated that CSP electricity, imported from North Africa and the Middle East, could become one of the cheapest sources of electricity in Europe, including the cost of transmission. A large-scale HVDC transmission grid has also been proposed by Airtricity as a means of optimising the use of wind power throughout Europe.
Further information about CSP may be found at www.trec-uk.org.uk and www.trecers.net . Copies of the TRANS-CSP report may be downloaded from www.trec-uk.org.uk/reports.htm . The many problems associated with nuclear power are summarised at www.mng.org.uk/green_house/no_nukes.htm .
This [quote from this] article is adapted from a talk that Caltech vice provost and professor of physics and applied physics David Goodstein presented at an April 29 program of the Institute support group, the Caltech Associates. Goodstein’s new book, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, was published in February by W. W. Norton:
"In recent years, the debate over nuclear power has revived, with proponents maintaining that we can find environmentally sound and politically acceptable ways to deal with the waste and security hazards. But even assuming that to be true, the potential is limited. To produce enough nuclear power to equal the power we currently get from fossil fuels, you would have to build 10,000 of the largest possible nuclear power plants. That’s a huge, probably nonviable initiative, and at that burn rate, our known reserves of uranium would last only for 10 or 20 years."
This has been addressed ad-nausium as being false.
Dezakin
Have you ever been inside a nuke in the core
area?
Have you ever spent two days getting through
the red tape of medical,psych,and background
checks?
Have you ever donned the rubber suit,boots,
and gloves? The goggles and respirator?
Have you ever been issued a personal radia-
tion gauge?
Have you ever been told you weren't going
into a really hot area,simply a toasty one?
Have you ever been one of the expendibles?
peace
Do you have anything even remotely related to the topic to contribute?
I think you should get up close and personal
with a reactor sometime.
peace
Pogo;
Clearly, getting exposed to radiation is 'off-message' in a discussion about nuclear power. Really, bro.
Bob
'Sometimes Money trumps.. peace' GW Bush.. last week
Pogo:
I have been there and done that a number of times. So have many of my friends. My son in law is now a nuke and I have not yet given up trying to convince my daughter that her MechE degree would be a great start in a wonderful career.
What is your point?
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
"addressed ad-nausium (sic) as being false"
Is there one bloody factoid related to nuclear that anyone agrees on? One that is not demonstrably false in the eyes of many many beholders?
Policy makers will decide this one based on who does the best job stuffing their pockets.
Picking up an unshielded spent fuel rod just out of a reactor will kill you very, very fast, if you can even get close enough to touch it before it kills you.
This little factoid and others like it inspire much fear, which leads to irrational arguments.
Petroleum and natural gas are 30 times more expensive than uranium, and are heavily taxed; thus, for many years, they have been doing, as you say, the best job of stuffing policymakers' pockets.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.html:
oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
I'm not going to take a stand on this issue, because I've seen too many conflicting assertions and haven't had the time to sort it all out to my satisfaction. However, I would like to try to clarify one point of the discussion.
There is this perception that we are faced with an either/or choice between coal and nuclear. But it has not been made clear, by those asserting this position, whether this is a statement of technical reality or political reality.
Are you saying that it is not possible to quickly deploy enough renewables and to sufficiently address intermittency issues?
Or are you saying that a combination of psychology, financial pressure and special interests means that our civilization is so irrevocably stuck in the "big central plant" paradigm that we will necessarily apply solutions only of that sort, and thus it's either coal or nukes?
Both positions are worth considering and arguing. But they are very different, and we need to be clear what we're talking about.
You've asked a fair question, I will answer for myself and I think many others on the pro-nuke side. I'm not against developing renewables (or conservation for that matter). About putting all our eggs in the renewables basket I am concerned that:
1. The intermittency issue will prevent them from replacing more than about 20% of our electric power, according to some utility industry insiders. That remains true even if you conserve, you cannot simply add, say, 10% conservation and 20% = 30%; it's 20% of whatever demand is left after you've reduced it.
2. The diffuse nature of the obvious renewables would require an enormous land (or sea) footprint, versus nuclear or coal plants. It's true that for wind the land can still be used for another purpose, but wind is the worst in terms of footprint. This isn't true for concentrated solar thermal, though; for solar you'd have to go for PV on existing structures, which is a very expensive source of power.
3. Renewables are still too expensive. Although wind, with subsidies, is cost-competitive with NG, this is largely due to NG becoming very expensive. Solar thermal is still extremely expensive, and PV is even worse. Costs may come down, but while we wait for that, we burn coal.
Issue (1) is IMO the killer issue. Utilities need reliable baseload sources, and they need to have dispatchable sources that are available when demand requires, regardless of weather conditions. Unless the intermittency issue can be solved, utilities will at best have to build both a renewable source and a fossil "backup" source, adding yet more to the cost. The intermittency solution will itself be expensive, both in dollars and in energy losses. Yeah, where the geography favours it, pumped hydro or compressed air can be used to smooth out an intermittent source. That won't scale if we tried to build out an all-renewable answer to our power needs, though, at which point we are either building and maintaining banks of flywheels, building and frequently replacing banks of batteries, or waiting for some techno-breakthrough to deliver a solution e.g. ultra-capacitors.
So, while we wait for a breakthrough, what do we do? You need look no further than the past 30 years in the US; with the door closed to nukes, we've continued burning coal. I can't help wondering what our GHG emissions would be like today if, 30 years ago, we'd done what France did. We could have 50% of our power from nukes today, instead of from coal.
Edit: I didn't answer your question about centralisation versus decentralisation. Centralisation isn't just a matter of evildoers having it over on the rest of us, the reasons for it tend to mirror the above issues for renewables:
1. People need power when/where they want it, not when/where they can get it. You cannot reasonably decentralise fossil or nuclear energy - it would be extremely dirty (fossil) or extremely dangerous (nuclear), yet these are the only sources we have that do not suffer from the intermittency problem.
2. Most people don't occupy the land area to meet their own needs with renewables. Think people in apartments in big cities. Nor do I want to see people "spread out" to cover the land evenly - that would mean the end of our remaining open spaces, and still it wouldn't be enough.
3. There are huge economies of scale to centralisation. I've looked at meeting my own power needs with PV, and I can't get within a factor of 3x the already-painful prices PG&E charges me.
DoctorDoom:
I was with you up until you said that decentralized power is not reasonable because nuclear power is "extremely dangerous". My experience is different enough that I must comment.
In my younger days, I served as an engineering officer on two different submarines. I lived within 200 feet of a plant that supplied our ship with all of the power that it needed for light, heat, air conditioning, cooking. fresh air, distilled water, and propulsion. Even using 1950s gen technology, that plant was plenty safe enough to be surrounded by people.
There have been some advances since those plants were designed (both of my boats were "41 for Freedom" subs built in the early 1960s). One of the neatest ideas is the high temperature "pebble bed" reactor that has proven its ability to withstand a complete loss of coolant without any damage at all. the core materials are designed for the high temperature. The big advantage that the pebble beds have over the LWRs that powered my subs is not that they are safer, but they are safe with a lot less effort and cost.
I liked the high temperature pebble bed technology so much that I formed a company called Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. We plan to build plants suitable for distributed operations - we even toy with the idea of calling them backyard nukes.
We plan to take advantage of the economy of scale by building hundreds to thousands of machines on an assembly line instead of building a small number of central station power plants. We have certainly not yet succeeded, but there are plenty of analogs in other industries.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
Rod, I've read your blog from time to time, so I know where you're coming from. As strong a proponent of nuclear power as I am, I must respectfully disagree with the idea of powering civilisation using widely distributed and/or mobile small-scale nukes. Perhaps you would be good enough to address these concerns?
1. Small nukes have an excellent safety record, at least in the US and UK, because of the training and discipline of naval personnel. It seems doubtful we could expect the same from, say, the merchant marine. Even the very professional Soviet navy had some terrible accidents.
2. Widely distributed and/or mobile nukes would be attractive targets for bad guys, would they not? Naval vessels are heavily defended. What sort of security would be needed for small-scale nukes?
3. I contend that a single 1GW plant would produce power at lower cost than 10 100MW plants, which would be better still than 100 10MW plants. Staffing costs wouldn't scale down as the size of the plant did, for one thing.
4. Although I see this is still a subject of some debate, I continue to believe we need to be looking at breeder reactors if we're going to make a go of nuclear power. I'm less certain of obtaining uranium from extremely diffuse source. Plus, the idea of digging up tons of energy-rich material and then tossing 99% of it away just rubs the conservationist in me the wrong way. Breeders would require large-scale, centralised facilities.
I'm not Rod Adams, but I'll answer. Reprocessors-and-breeders are ... well, to a certain degree, they are elegant in principle. Not as elegant, to my way of thinking, as mining natural UO2 and putting it in a heavy water reactor.
With respect to this latter practice, virtually everyone reading this has uranium that is not "extremely diffuse", that in fact is highly concentrated, a few metres or tens of metres below his or her chair.
Uraniferous black marine shales are energetically equivalent to more than their own volume of petroleum; country rock is as energetic, with respect to once-through no-enrichment fission, as the Alberta tarsands are with respect to tar-burning.
The elegance of breeders may ascend from the realm of principle, and government research, into commercial actuality if reprocessing becomes neat and easy. One cannot burn uranium or thorium all up, using only its own neutrons, unless one diligently cleans neutron-hungry ashes out throughout the process.
But you can't expect fossil-fuel-taxing governments to make this work. You can expect them to encourage the nuclear scientists they employ to study the matter, and study it, and study it, and study it, and study it ...
Only when governments' conflict of interest in nuclear energy has been ended will there be some chance of their developing a genuine interest in breeders -- but when that has happened, they'll allow private outfits to do their own nuclear-energy research again. So until that happens, I'm not a breeder fan.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.html :
oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
DoctorDoom:
1. The training and discipline of US Navy nukes is certainly part of the reason for success, but another part is the fact that smaller plants by nature have less stresses and an easier time in decay heat removal. They are also simple enough to fully grasp and small enough for a good walk around inspection that takes a single person a reasonable amount of time to accomplish. As a former Engineer Officer on a submarine, I had a good crew of smart young people working for me - I was 27 when I got the job and only had a couple of people in my department who were older than I was. It did not take harsh discipline for these men (unfortunately, we still do not allow women on US submarines) to do their jobs correctly. Our training programs can be duplicated - the cost recovery is there when you look at the competition.
2. Nukes by nature operate inside vaults called shields and containments. Small nukes can go one better and be installed underground. Are you worried that the bad guys will frequently succeed in stealing money from locked bank vaults? Why do you think we would not be able to protect a small plant? Even a 10 MW electrical power station can generate $8-16 Million worth of electricity each year depending on the local selling price.
3. I disagree. I happen to perform economics computations for my day job. The economy of mass production can overcome the economy of scale. The machines that we plan to build will use components that are already in series production. Because of the passively safe nature of small pebble bed reactors, little of our system outside of the reactor can have an effect on reactor safety.
4. Breeders or high conversion ratio reactors do not need to be overly large. The very first electricity from a reactor came from a tiny experimental breeder.
If conversion takes place inside the reactor, there are ways to design around any need for recycling or reprocessing - the burn-up can be improved to 5-10 times compared to current values. I know that there is a perception that fission products are neutron absorbers and stop the reaction, but the reality is that factor is rather small over the life of the core.
If you know that most fission products are radioactive because they have too high of a neutron to proton ratio, you can understand why most fission products do not absorb neutrons. There are only a couple of isotopes of significance that do, and all but one of those are short lived and only have temporary effects. There is only one isotope that actually causes a loss of reactivity as the core ages, and that effect is quite small compared to other influences. (I may have studied English as an undergraduate, but I am pretty well versed in nuclear engineering.)
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
OK, one more point. I want to highlight an issue that's mostly been overlooked in the discussions so far:
Nuclear, like coal, is a not a good option for distributed generation. It absolutely relies on a continuation of the large, centralized plant and grid distribution approach to energy supply. There are many problems with this approach, some of which Grist's David Roberts captures succinctly when he says
In addition, central plants and grid distribution of primary energy is much less secure against technical failure or intentional attack.
Most compellingly, however, distributed generation allows for the possibility of cogeneration, using what would otherwise be waste heat, and thus offsetting the combustion of fuel (or the use of additional electricity). As another poster pointed out, nuke plants are only about 30% efficient, in line with other central plant technologies. Fuel cells burning gaseous hydrocarbons (natural gas, biogas, or coal gas) can get up to 50% electrical efficiency, and capture nearly all the waste heat. Total efficiencies can reach 90%.
Even if we forget biogas and just use fossil fuels, tripling the efficiency on the supply side is a hard option to ignore. Combined with other benefits (reduced grid maintenance, enhanced security), distributed generation is a fundamentally better way to supply energy to fixed installations.
Small nuclear plants down to the household size are quite feasible. Also thermonuclear batteries for smaller usage.
I disagree with the concept that nuclear has to be big and centralized.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip60.htm
I'm just saying the argument that they require a massive central grid is false.
Hmm nuclear powered submarine anyone ?
Right... In a culture where many people can't turn on a computer without help, and most can't program their VCR, you suggest letting them all have their own personal nuke pile. Sure. Just stop the planet first, so that I can get off.
The economics of nuclear reactors are such that the costs are prohibitive. Nuclear submarines and other very small reactors can be made small because they run on highly enriched uranium... Not a fuel you want to ship to anyone that feels like experimenting with nuclear weapons design.
GreenEngineer:
I challenge your assertion just like I have often challenged David Roberts - there is nothing technical that prevents nuclear fission reactors from being made small enough to be distributed power systems.
The first real power producing nuclear plants in the world were squeezed into submarine hulls and about 400-500 more of those small plants have been produced over the years.
I like the idea of small, distributed nuclear plants so much that I started a company to build them - Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
We think that backyard or basement nuclear plants with cogeneration heat recovery systems are extremely intriguing. (Of course, we are initially aiming for customers with larger than average backyards and basements - it is easier to build mini reactors and then to move down to micro reactors. We kind of like the computer industry model - IBM mainframes led to Digital VAX mini computers to WINTEL micros.)
Sure, we have not yet built any plants because there are plenty of hurdles that we still have to overcome, but we are making progress. I spend quite a bit of time in discussions with people so that they understand as much as possible about what we are trying to do.
Feel free to ask any questions.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
Co-gen makes great sense, but let's be clear that executing on your vision with fossil sources is just a way to stretch them further, it's not a "solution". As for non-fossil sources, many of us have doubts that bio-mass sources can supply enough energy to meet even greatly reduced needs. We just don't have the land to give over to that, plus the energy efficiency of bio-sources is poor compared with even solar PV, let alone solar thermal. To the extent that more land has to be put into energy production, it makes more sense to carpet deserts with CSP than it does to trade food for fuel.
This might be a futile request, but it seems like things are getting out of hand (and not just today):
If you are making a claim, please provide reliable data and your source. Calling people names or using thundering adjectives to describe your position obfuscates the material reality we are all trying to understand.
We should be striving to advance our understanding of energy issues, not trying to win a shouting match or make our colleagues feel inferior.
thanks for this Seth, you're absolutely correct.
What are you going to do when you have passion but the facts are all against you?
Am I the only one on site who doesn't understand this from 'Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs', the lead article?
Text seems to bear no relationship 'for me' to the chart am I missing a lot here? And How?
Yes, you are missing a lot.
What the table represents is simply how much energy from other sources (coal, oil etc.) is needed to produce 1 kwth of nuclear electricity. The bottom line is that 1 kwth of nuclear takes 0.0107 kwth of energy from those sources or the overall EROEI is 93:1.
Thanks LevinK for taking the time to illuminate my darkness. Now why didn't Mr. Sevior put it so clearly for gorillakind? Darn those prima donnas. Enjoyed the article though, and better since explanation.
Black Bald.
This is a response from a discussion I had on nuclear energy where I propounded the idea of using Natures flows rather than the stores. I have had many arguments with nuclear power people and never got a satisfactory answer to the waste problem other than them wanting it to be a somebody elses problem.
Anyway this is what I wrote then:
Natures flows are what the ecosystems of the planet have used for the last billion or so years to sustain life on the planet. We are all solar powered as we have self assembling nano machines called plants that make all food from solar energy and raw materials. The only long term sustainable way forward is to fit in with this and also get enough energy, and there is still plenty to go around, from systems that are not stored energy. Fossil fuels are concentrated solar energy that are convenient and easy to transport and use. Uranium is store of energy that can be released - when it is gone that is the end of it. Even thorium, if you take a long term view is limited eventually. You have to take a really really long term view to find the end of solar energy.
We can only do this by becoming vastly more efficient in the way we use energy. We need to find ways to get along doing the same things we are doing now with lots less input. It can be done it just requires changes - ones we in the first world are reluctant to make because for some reason our lifestyles are non-negotiable. We are exporting this non negotiable, highly wasteful lifestyle to other countries like China where up until now they have been quite energy efficient consuming only a tenth or a twentieth of the per capita energy of the USA or Australia.
You cannot build enough nuclear reactors to give each person in the world the lifestyle we have now. So therefore the nuclear/clean coal route of increasing supply at all costs will always only be for the first world leaving billions much as they are today without energy and scraping as best they can with what they have while we in the First World continue to use most of the Earth's energy. This will continue until the last one runs out then we will all be stuffed.
If we do not go down this route and make wholesale changes to the way we use energy and make big cuts ourselves, while still preserving most of the advantages of our first world lifestyles, we can adapt to working within what energy is given to us from the sun and not drawing on limited stores and/or creating millions of tons of waste that has to be guarded for longer than humans have been farming.
Another advantage of this is that in using less energy and resources we can export this lifestyle model and it just might be sustainable for more than just 20% or so of the world's population. The Earth might, at this level, have enough to sustain 50% or 60% at a reasonable level of lifestyle rather than grinding poverty.
Now I mentioned Iran only because it highlights the fundamental problem of nuclear power ie: its inseperable dark side of nuclear weapons. If nuclear power is to be the climate change saviour that you think it could be then it will have to be rolled out to countries worse than Iran with all the attendant problems.
It would be far better for all concerned if nuclear power was just phased out, the waste we have generated up till now stored somehow, and then we just got along with what we have. I do close my mind to nuclear power as a solution to climate change much like I close my mind to murder as a solution to personal problems. Sure killing the person would solve the issue I have with them however killing comes with so many other problems that it is not really a solution in the first place only a diversion.
I am not an "environmental fundamentalists" as you are insinuating. I guess this is a desperate attempt to belittle my arguments by pidgeon holing me with fundamentalists that do not think about what they say but only hold positions because of some predjudice. I am against nuclear power so vehemently because it only leads to a continuance of the unsustainable party that we find ourselves in at the end of the brief fossil fuel age. We took at quick and easy turn with the Industrial Revolution that has brought us many advantages which I will be the first to acknowledge and use as I am using one right now. We now need to find the wisdom to use that technology to make another turn to working with Nature again but this time at a much higher level using much more of the sun's output in many different ways.
The alternative is to arm ourselves to the teeth with whatever weapons we can make and fight over the last remaining energy resources until there is nothing left. That is what is happening now and the drive for nuclear power and clean coal is only a mad attempt to continue this stupidity because we lack the imagination to think that there is any other way.
They're both beyond the scope of worthwhile conversation. When you start discussing thorium resources you're talking breeder reactor regimes, where the energy return is so massive that you can use the average crust for ore. That leaves you with at least 160 trillion tons of fertile fuel, used at 1 ton per GW/year. Thats enough to run 10 million reactors for some 16 million years. You cant really burn it faster than that without heating the planet up from just the waste heat, because thats the same neighborhood of power as the solar flux.
Of course you can. Its not a great technical challenge to build 2000 to 20000 reactors, and its not even a giant share of the global economy.
Its not a great technical challenge to build 2000 to 20000 reactors,...
It WOULD be a great technical challenge for the US to build 4 new nukes/year in a dozen years. Twenty years is about as soon as we could ramp up again to 4/year without economic waste (a la canadian tar sands).
Best Hopes for rational planning,
Alan
It might be a logistical challenge to do that, but thats not what I said.
I'm not even sure how big of a challenge it would be, but I suspect it wouldn't be nearly as difficult as you're painting it if there was the mandate. The tar sands is a different beast entirely.
Dezakin - "When you start discussing thorium resources you're talking breeder reactor regimes, "
Sure and when you talk breeders you are talking plutonium and lots of it. Good luck stopping nuclear weapons then.
"Of course you can. Its not a great technical challenge to build 2000 to 20000 reactors, and its not even a giant share of the global economy."
Considering the problems Iran is having building one how are they going to build the 20 or 30 that they would need? And how are you going to make sure that they dispose of the waste properly. Do you think they should be able to build breeder reactors? 20 000 reactors is 600 000 tons of spent nuclear fuel a year to store or reprocess. Yucca Mountain can store 17 000 tons so you would have to build 100 or 200 of them a year to store the waste.
Even if you could strip mine the entire Earth's crust for Thorium would a wise and sane civilisation do it? There comes a point when we have to take a step back and have a look at what we are doing. We have an unlimited amount of energy falling on our heads for free that we do not have to dig for. We just have to change a bit to accomodate it - seems impossible doesn't it.
Nuclear weapons are orthoganal to breeder reactors. Most of the plutonium from weapons programs have been bred in thermal reactors.
Sticking spent fuel in cooling ponds untill it can be put in dry cask storage is storing it properly.
Anyone who finds the economics of breeder reactor regimes superior should pursue them. I have my doubts that breeder reactors will compete with light water reactors any time in the near future, but I have hopes for some molten salt reactors. If they dont, light water reactors will serve us fine.
Or you could be rational about it and store them on site in dry storage casks. Yucca and other geologic repositories are political solutions to nonproblems.
Why the strawman? Its an illustration that nuclear fuel isn't set to run short anytime in the near or far future, not a position of policy advocacy. I expect we'll eventually get solar power as the cheapest energy source sometime in the next century, and nuclear power will fill the role for deep space and the like. Thousands of years in the future is beyond the scope of reasonable speculation.
Maybe I missed it up thread but why hasn't anyone said, "You guys are arguing about how many angels can dance on the heas of a pin, The reality is that you inherently believe the status quo can be mainatined whether you say it or not...and it can't be." Well, I'm saying it.
Poplulation growth and resource depletion are going to doom all of these great ideas within less than a generation. Now, if someone had indicated that these proposals were a short-term stopgap until society changed its voracious appetite and growth, I might agree with some of the ideas suggested. But, that isn't going to be the case. Significant resources will be plowed into a sink hole that could have been used in more productive ways.
Here's one "productive" way; scrap the entire education system, which is mostly PC/BS anyway, and focus the curriculum upon post peak living skills. Oh, how naive can you be Todd.
Todd; a Realist
I agree, Todd. Most people trying to come up with strategies for peak oil tend to assume that there is some kind of "solution" that will enable some semblance of "business as usual", perhaps at a (temporarily) lower consumption level or even with only a small blip of a few years, until the new energy regime is in place. They don't seem to realise that growth (in population and standards of living, aka consumption) will trump any solution. Why do we have innumerable discussions about this one particular symptom (energy depletion) as though life could somehow continue, as-is, if only ... ?
Tony
Hi Todd,
You say:
You likely skimmed past my post (no blame there) but I think I said, in that post what you longed to see? You may have also missed my request a couple posts ago on needing info. I assume you read the lead article?
I said:
If you can explain my previously mentioned quandary it would be appreciated and if you do, though no angel, I will try dancing with delight on the end of that pin...ouch!
BBG,
I read what you had posted but I certainly did not read it as anything other than attempting to maintain the status quo.
What I am arguing is that it doesn't matter where the energy comes from (sic). I am arguing that the meme or paradigm or whatever of society is flawed and inherently doomed.
Let me use Alan's light rail as an example. The underlying assumption is that light rail is needed so that people can get to jobs in a low energy environment. My belief is that these people will not have jobs to go to because they produce nothing of substance. If we accept that the US economy is 65% consumer driven, how much of this consumption is necessary? My guess is, maybe, 20% for things like food. No one needs to consume above their survival level.
I was born in 1938, towards the end of the Depression, and that colors my thinking. Few were consuming anything beyond necessities. I know in my parents case that food and paying their rent was their entire focus. They weren't buying the stuff that constitutes consumer buying today.
But further, I believe all efforts will fail until population growth and resource depletion is seriously dealt with. It's late for me and I don't want to get into these topics tonight. These are the elephants in the room. Maybe another day.
Todd
Even with 40% unemployment, there is still lots of things that need to be done. Medical care (even @ reduced levels), police, prisons & courts, food manufacturing (a major industy still in New Orleans; coffee roasting & packaging, hot sauce, mayonaisse, candy, sugar refining, rice milling, rum distilling, beer brewing, canning), gov't make work jobs (WPA or equilavent), insulation retrofits, house maintenance, basic services like water & sewage & electricity and, of course, public transportation.
And even unemployed & retired people still need transportation.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Hi Todd,
Very pleasant to hear from someone older than I am (65 this year and so born at that pivotal point in history the battle of Stalingrad) and while I will bow to your slightly more ancient years, it will be only slightly, as I don't think our differences in opinion are much greater than our years.
If you have time to look at my website (it's on my personal page) I think you will realize that I do not wish to maintain the status quo. For a minor instance, I grow a garden because I love the look of it and the feel and smell of it and not just to eat it, though I do enjoy that aspect as well. Judging by the number of 'low maintenance horror gardens' grown today that are used by realtors to sell in any season, my attitude there could be considered contrary to the status quo.
About why I am on the Oil drum site? It's because, if 'they' are good at what they do I will find out how big a garden I can grow. As well that slide, if it is immediate, limits what I can do to only my family and maybe immediate friends, so I hope we have some leeway, I hope a lot. But also of importance, it gets lonely and one feels impotent thinking all these thoughts alone. By the way, what is the general consensus about the timing of P.O.? I would value your opinion.
As far as society being doomed I say fine let's get on with it. It's time for a change. We are likely to be powerless to stop what is coming at us but possibly if we embrace P.O. then society, at least what there is left of it, might be changed for something better. (Pretty Pollyanna stuff huh? or again maybe 'The Fiery Furnace Purge' sort of thing?)
My guess is that even with 'Alan's light rail' we won't be in any position to be worrying about overconsumption.
Elephants foresooth and now an aging and bald gorilla. Some are double doomed! but even so I hope we can talk about that another day.
Rest well,
Black Bald.
Hi Todd,
re: "curriculum upon post peak living skills"
Have you made a list or written about these? (What do you include?)
Aniya,
Actually I have thought a lot about this for a long time because I live in the boondocks where reality slaps you in the face. For example, I've been snowed in this week.
It's too late to start something tonight but I'll try to post something this weekend. Ok?
Todd
Aniya,
You might find this interesting,
'The Post-Petroleum SURVIVAL GUIDE AND COOKBOOK - recipes for changing times' by Albert Bates.
WWW.newsociety.com ( Ph. 1-800-567-6772)
ISBN-13: 978-0-86571-568-4; 2006
He has that thing I think we will all might just need, a sense of humour.
per the book:
Sit down and be quiet
you are drunk, and this is the
edge of the roof.
-Rumi
Thanks, Black and Todd,
Todd, looking forward to your thoughts and references whenever you have time to share them.
Prof Goose uses the awful phrase "at current consumption levels" then doesn't follow that up with an estimate at growing consumption levels. For example, his 85 years of proven reserves reduces to 50 years, if growth of consumption is 1.5% per year. If there is a big drive to nuclear and growth jumps to 3%, the proven reserves would last for 40 years. This assumes that the production could grow in line with demand, until the end of the resource. As we all know, this is unlikely. So peak uranium, based solely on known proven reserves may be only a few decades. The 35 million tonnes of additional reserves (which I suppose cannot be guaranteed to become proven reserves) would last only 159 years, at 1.5% growth, rather less than the 500 years that Prof Goose cites, with peak coming well before that.
Even aside from all of the other considerations of nuclear, it is clearly an unsustainable energy source and so shouldn't even be considered for expansion. Have we learned nothing from the peak oil experience?
Just to be clear, Professor Sevior is the author of the piece, not me. You'll have ask him about the phrasing there...
Those reserve numbers are for resource recovery at very low prices. They would go up by many orders of magnitude if the price does the same. The actual price of fission fuel is such a small part of the cost of fission energy that the price of the fuel could go up by orders of magnitude without significantly affecting the cost of electricity. In a post a few weeks ago Dezakin made a convincing case that there are a trillion tons of recoverable (i.e. still yielding a high EROEI) Uranium in the world.
And then there is Thorium. It is three times as plentiful as Uranium in the crust and all of the principle isotope can be used as fission fuel as opposed to only .7% of Uranium. That is more than 400 times the available energy. There is no shortage of fission fuel. Find another objection.
How many thorium reactors are in operation or are planned? Uranium seems to be the primary fuel for fission reactors. It is unsustainable.
If (if, if, if) thorium becomes the primary fuel for fission reactors then we can do the calculations for that. If it turns out that we can continue to grow nuclear energy for thousands of years, then I'd concede that a future potential shortage of fuel wouldn't be an issue (because thousands of years is long enough, for now). There are other considerations that have been mentioned (such as the long term storage and security of radioactive waste), and other issues related to continuing to believe that the only problem the world has is energy.
By any reasonable definition, Uranium is sustainable. Get over it. And it has a very high EROEI. Get over that, too.
We are facing a problem than many think will lead to the death of most of mankind. We do not have to accept that future. As much as I might want a world populated by a billion or less people, I am not about to help us get there in the lifetime of my children.
Fission power can be scaled to supply most of the world's electricity at higher levels than we have now. Over time, it can supply most of the world transportation needs directly through battery and plug in hybrid vehicles. And it can provide the power to transform the abundant low grade hydrocarbons that still exist into chemical feedstocks and to the liquid fuels that we would still need for a fleet of high efficiency hybrids, for at least a century. Computer and communications technology seem poised to redefine our lives to require a great deal less travel.
It is not unreasonable to think that the world could build thousands of reactors in the next fifty years. We do not face the imminent end of civilization, if we do not choose that future, as much as some may long for it. I think this is a much more attractive and hopeful vision of the future than those put forward by those like you who so vociferously oppose nuclear power.
I don't need to get over it. You've seen the figures in this article and the calculations that include modest growth. What can we conclude? That uranium in an unsustainable fuel. Belief in recoverable reserves doesn't constitute a calculation.
Then support a lower energy world and sustainable sources of energy, not unsustainable sources. Why do you think supporting higher energy use will help your kids. And what about their kids and their grandchildren?
Thousands? In 50 years? Given the fact that there are only 450 reactors in the world now, and the lead time in building them, it doesn't seem too reasonable. But are you talking about growing consumption by a factor of 3 or more? In that case, the lifetime of the uranium resource would plummet.
Support sustainable, not unsustainable, power sources.
Its sustainable for hundreds of years in any reasonable growth scenario. We're not going to build more reactors than we have waste heat rejection capacity for the planet, at least not on the planet.
Do we need to run the numbers again for you?
Because human desires are unlimited and most can be met as functions of energy. The more energy we have at our disposal the more of our desires can be met. Crippling civilization for some aesthetic purpose wont bring future generations any happiness or prosperity.
Its like economic growth is some theoretical concept that hasn't really happened in your world. We've constructed nearly 500 reactors with the R&D sunk costs over the past fifty years with a global economy less than a quarter of todays economy. Building another 1500 isn't exactly a huge stretch.
Okay, again... the resource for 2000 1GW reactors each consuming roughly 200 tons of uranium per year will only last light water reactors some 2.5 million years, and thats only with the once through fuel cycle. With reprocessing and mox, that goes to 10 million years. Its basic arithmetic.
Yes please. According the the "additional" reserve figures in this article, modest growth shows 100% depletion in 150 years. This is a long way from the "hundreds of years" that you hope for and decline will start earlier than that. And this assumes that the figures are accurate for recoverable uranium. You only get to "hundreds of years" if growth remains modest, production of uranium can increase continuously for that length of time, and the highly optimistic estimates of recoverable resource are correct. Please do show me the numbers proving that nuclear is absolutely, definitely sustainable for hundreds of years. If you can't why go down an unsustainable route (not that hundreds of years is sustainable)?
But more energy doesn't guarantee that more desires can be realised, it's certainly a requirement, but not the only one. All other resources required to continue satisfying more desires, must also be there. This will include fresh water, topsoil, suitable climate, as well as other minerals, and so on. What this "solution" relies on is, apart from wishful thinking on the fuel resource, continuing availability of all other resources at whatever rate is demanded. Do you think that is likely for "hundreds of years"? If any of the critical limits is hit before the uranium limit, would that be good for your descendants (and maybe you) or not?
Most of the existing ones may be nearing the end of their useful operating life (this is certainly true in the UK). It takes 5-10 years to get through the planning process. It takes resources (not just money) to build reactors. Building a couple of thousand reactors over the next 50 years is a big ask, in my opinion. Is this another bit of wishful thinking on the part of the nuclear supporters, or have the numbers actually been run on the possibility and likelihood of such a construction project?
2000 1GW reactors produce a maximum of 17,520,000 GWh each year (probably much less to account for maintenance, etc). According to the EIA's 2006 World energy outlook, world energy consumption is expected to be 722 quadrillion BTUs, by 2030. That's 211,544,000 GWh. So, 2000 1GW reactors could only supply 8% of that energy. And they could only do that indefinitely if there is 1 trillion tonnes of uranium available (that number is a belief, only). If those 2000 are increased to try to make a bigger dent in the energy supply, so the fuel consumption grows, exponentially, then those 2.5 million years drop to hundreds of years (again, only if there is a trillion tonnes of recoverable uranium and only if it can be recovered at the required rates).
As far as I can see, the numbers don't add up and even this relies on the highly optimistic resource projections being true and practical.
Uranium is unsustainable, quite apart from the other considerations.
Matt Simmons says we need a mitigation plan that is on the scale of what the world did to fight World War II. Not some little Manhattan or Apollo project. Total mobilization of every available resource. Dramatic conservation. Rapid development of such technologies as wind and solar as fast as they can be scaled. But during this time we will also need to cut back on coal because of global warming.
So we have two choices. Shift to an electricity based world on a foundation of fission fuel, our most plentiful energy source, or let the majority of the world's people die or live in misery like the world has never known. What are you going to do with those inconvenient four billion people that will have no chance if we lose oil and gas and we have to give up on coal and fission?
The suburbs may disappear in the future you are trying to create but they will not be replaced by bucolic rural life. People will have to concentrate in wretched, increasingly high density megacities. We will need even more intensive large scale agriculture, because these organizations can marshal and employ resources more efficiently. The law of the jungle will rule in rural areas. Unless we can get rid of those inconvenient four billion. I do not find that a very attractive prospect.
Then there is the possibility of another future using supernova energy, from the blast that created our solar system. It is abundant, highly concentrated and clean. But to many it is scary. So, do we give up? Do we scorn civilization because some think it is not worth saving?
OK, let's go full pelt into fission, electric vehicles and the like. Let's say we manage to compensate, somehow, as oil declines. What happens if all of these optimistic projections on uranium supply and the contribution from nuclear don't pan out? What do you do with the extra 3 billion people?
Nuclear is unsustainable. It doesn't matter, if we go for it, in terms of saving people, there'll just be more people to hurt, when we come to the end of the line (either in peak uranium, peak fission or peak some other resource).
Wouldn't it be better to start dispersing the cities, building up bio-intensive horticulture, and anything else we need to do to get to sustainability? Why are you desperate to put off that fateful day when humans realise that the earth is finite and there is no more growth to be had? Isn't it better to deal with it now than in 10 years, 50 years or 500 years? Again, nuclear is unsustainable and we don't know how long it can be supported by the earth's resources; all predictions are guesses. The guesses in this article suggest a little over a century at best, if growth is taken into account (though it wasn't in the article). If we keep the party going, there could be 10 billion or more of us by then.
It doesn't matter whether the civilization we have is worth saving, because the civilization we have can't be saved. It is unsustainable.
For an extreme analogy: Why not kill yourself now and get it over with?
And for those of us with vision, many of us see humanity expanding beyond earth in several centuries.
You are fundamentally incapable of reading the post if you really think that was the conclusion. Here:
Its shameful that you couldnt even read that at the top of the page.
Dezakin, I didn't say the conclusion was a resource lifetime of 100 years (the article didn't include the calculation). Running the figures from today's uranium consumption, including some modest growth, as people here seem to want nuclear to expand, and using the higher "additional" resources estimated figure, we get a lifetime of about 150 years and a likely peak well before that.
On the light water reactors, I've already posted that 2000 of them would supply only a tiny portion of projected demand.
I don't feel shamed at all.
As for your "extreme analogy", it is completely meaningless. Are you saying we should just ignore our limits and somehow miraculously overcome them because the consequences are too horrendous for you to contemplate?
It takes more than vision, it takes a tremendous amount of energy, resources, and ingenuity. Just because you would like to see something doesn't mean that it will ever be practically possible. (By the way, I used to think exactly the same but I now think it is highly unlikely)
Well then we are just back to your scenario, a big collapse and die-off. But at least we tried to avoid it rather than embracing it.
It is nice to dream about a world that is not populated so far above its no-tech carrying capacity. But we do not live in that world. If we are going to avoid the big catastrophe, we need to embrace our most plentiful energy source, which happens to have almost no carbon footprint and has an otherwise low environmental impact because the energy release of the basic reaction is so many times higher than that of any other source.
If the big die-off is going to happen because of the decline of oil and gas and because we can no longer burn much coal, it is going to happen in the next generation or two. The blood is going to be on our hands. I for one am not going to be too afraid to make some hard choices and therefore be guilty of letting it happen.
Yes, my scenario preserves the world’s current too large population. Population growth from births has ended in most of the developed world. I think it is fair to say that development is the one proven strategy for eventually reducing the world’s population that is ethically acceptable to most people now.
I think that the opponents of fission power need to acknowledge that their choice makes the big catastrophe inevitable. Paint a credible scenario where we give up oil, gas, coal and nuclear in the near term, yet do not have a big collapse and die-off.
That's only my scenario if we don't alter course and accept the earth's limitations. Trying to meet the bulk of our energy needs (and if it is not the bulk, then why even bother going down this route?) with nuclear is not a way to avoid the earth's limits and so will never succeed in that aim. Why can you not accept the earth's limits?
Indeed we don't and you want to keep that going for as long as possible? Tech doesn't have to be high, it can also be low. I happen to think that the world could carry the present population and probably a bit more, but the enablement for that would be low tech. I realise that many people will not wish to live a different lifestyle. In which case they must accept a collapse, if not in their lifetimes, then in the lifetimes of one of their descendants that may be only a very few generations away. I'd rather not accept that inevitability.
Our most plentiful energy source is the sun, and it's related source, wind. Uranium mining and processing doesn't have no carbon footprint and uranium recoverable resources are only guessed at plentiful.
Continuing business as usual is not a hard choice, it's the easy choice. I'd like us to make the really hard choice of accepting earth's limitations and adapting to that reality.
I hope you're right but, from the figures I've seen, that's not true. It's true in the EU (10 births versus 10.1 deaths per 1000 population) but more than offset by the US (14.14 births versus 8.26 deaths), in the latest CIA World Factbook estimates. And the EU is going through some rapid expansion of countries, so that may not be a reliable figure, as yet.
It's inevitable only if we don't acknowledge the earth's limits. Even fission doesn't alter that reality.
Whether it's credible or not depends on the acceptance I mentioned earlier. We have to figure out how to live on less energy, at no growth, with that energy being supplied by renewable resources, at or below their renewal rate. It will mean a big change to economies and societies. That means hard choices. If we don't make those hard choices, can you really see developed and currently developing nations happily continuing life as normal (i.e. as today) indefinitely into the future?
Shift to an electricity based world on a foundation of fission fuel, our most plentiful energy source, ...
Um, WRONG on several points.
1) Nuclear is NOT our most abundant resource, and it is probably not even our cheapest non-FF source of elecricity.
2) New nukes are the "back of the line" energy source. Slow to build, slow to increase production. Just to get back to 4 new nukes/year in the US (and 15-20 world-wide) will take ~20 years unless you want to blow the economics of new nuke.
Nukes will, and IMO, should be a secondary new energy source. Secondary to wind (ready to roll NOW!) and right along with other secondary sources like solar thermal, solar PV, geothermal, and new hydro.
If we wait for nuke to save our bacon, we will die waiting.
Alan
You're being deliberately obstinate and mixing reserves with recoverable resources. Reserves change with the spot price and are of negligable importance for the topic of uranium sustainability. If you will note the reserve base for uranium is growing.
The resources avaliable are estimated the order of 1 billion tons with ores that are of the same concentration being mined today.
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution
Its reasonable given the massive energy return on uranium mining to assume that recoverable uranium ore is well on the excess of 1 trillion tons. Lets say that it turns out theres ten thousand times less avaliable because for some reason you dont believe the resource estimates... that there are only 100 million tons.
Then you only have 500000 GW years of fuel in the once through fuel cycle. If we ran the entire global economy off that we would require some 20000 1GW reactors and exhaust the fuel supply in 25 years...
But it doesnt. With uranium extraction reprocessing you double the resource base, and quadruple it if you are using heavy water reactors. So you can get 100 years without new engineering at all. With MOX fuel bundles you multiply that again. And with this eight to sixteen fold multiplication of the resource base you have more energy economic recoverable ores, leading to another multiplication from simple higher energy payback... but for some reason you dont believe these resources exist in spite of evidence and assessments that clearly indicate they're there.
And we've had experience designing breeder reactors that work. The most promising breeder reactor design is the molten salt reactor from the mid 60s. One of these requires only 1 ton of uranium or thorium per GW year. You only have to have one of these assumptions to be true to have nuclear fuel lasting hundreds of years into the future if not tens of thousands.
But I suspect you'll just ignore the numbers and assesments that clearly indicate there are at the least tens of billions of tons of fuel avaliable for nuclear power production.
You think that its unsupportable with a global economy many times larger to do basic engineering that we've allready done some five hundred times allready? Here, I'll spell it out more simply:
Not having any engineering experience in 1950 and with less than 1/5th the global economy we built 500 nuclear power plants in fifty years without any serious strain on the global economy.
An isomorphic project proportional to the size of the global economy should easily be feasable. We're devoting proportionally less resources of the global product to a solved engineering problem.
This is a stupid stupid stupid argument. Everyone thinks as soon as they learn the power function they can see the end of the world and trace out curve fitting as malthusian inevitability. We aren't going to have exponential energy growth on the planet simply because we'll be baked in the waste heat at some hundreds of degrees centigrade after hundreds of years of energy demand growth.
What this doesn't mean is 'aha! see I told you its unsustainable.' As you seemed to indicate in a response to another post. It means that any exponential curve fitting for a growth model is just dumb and all energy demands must flatten out where you have limits on waste heat rejection.
You're trying to see through the veil of willful ignorance. The numbers have been laid out several times.
Dezakin,
Actually, I'm pretty sure you're right on the resource estimates. What worries me is that they are estimates. You are proposing building a small, but significant, part of our energy mix on estimates. All I'm saying is that for the resources we now know about, with very high confidence, nuclear will be fairly short lived. Now you are saying that pro-nuclear supporters have a very high confidence level that recoverable supplies are way beyond the currently known supplies. That's fine, but it is still a fingers crossed strategy.
Given your figures, you're right, nuclear is sustainable far into the future. But it will only ever provide a small portion of our energy needs, given what you say about waste heat. If the waste problem is sorted first, then I'd probably acknowledge that nuclear would be a good solution to providing a small but significant part of our energy needs, in a mix including mainly renewables, in a reliable manner.
However, this does not prevent an energy crisis and so is not a total solution, nowhere near. I would rather we concentrated on adapting to earth's limits than heading off in the direction that some people here think is the ultimate solution to all our problems.
Look, I'm being rather belicose here and I realize why. You're trying to argue about things you don't understand yet. It doesn't mean that you're incapable of understanding them, but its incredibly frustrating...
The 'waste heat rejection problem' doesn't apply to nuclear alone, it applies to any energy regime. You cant operate terrestrial civilization on substantially more power than the total solar flux. Energy demand growth, whether on renewables or nuclear, runs into the thermal wall at around 10^16 watts. Your only option there is to move your energy intensive industries into space where I can only imagine most of the power will come from the sun.
But nuclear power can provide us with substantial power untill solar becomes more cost competitive, for a good century or two. After that its just to fuzzy to predict.
OK, Dezakin, sorry to frustrate you so much. I read about this stuff and it goes in at the time, but old age reduces the memory capacity enormously. :-(
I would still ask why not shift to more sustainable, less dangerous and more reliable (in terms of annual resource requirements) energy source?
You believe in certain resource estimates, others argue for much lesser economic (in energy terms) resources, so we just don't know for sure. I suspect you're right on resources but it seems a big bet to me. And if we don't use that energy to move to a completely different societal/economic arrangement, it just seems mad to move further down a nuclear path (whether you take the safety/security concerns seriously or not). Let's put the resources into wind and solar and move away from all non-renewable resources.
Is the only argument against a renewable route that we'll have to accept a lower energy world? Well we'll have to anyway, so we shouldn't be trying to avoid it (since it is unavoidable). The only alternative is to place absolute faith in human ingenuity and go full steam ahead with trying to keep the party going.
These are two questions that look like one.
Why we shouldn't (or should) is a question that has a subjective answer depending on your philosophical or political worldview. I argue that we shouldnt because we can give people higher standards, more leisure and pleasure from higher energy budgets, while others will have more spartan ideals.
Why we wont is just because humans have unlimited desires that are functions of energy, and no matter what we should do we will pursue growth of an energy budget wherever possible.
No, our current energy budget for civilization is around 10^13 watts, where the total energy avaliable from windpower is around 10^14 watts and from the solar flux is 10^16 watts... theres enough avaliable energy to experience 1000 fold growth in our total energy budget. The argument against renewables is cost. We don't have top down world government that can legislate by absolute fiat and if we dont pursue options that are cost competitive with coal, coal will just be used anyways.
The other problem is if renewables are too costly in the short run, the infrastructure shock will be massive enough to cause the bulk of humanity substantial pain. Now, Alan and some others believe wind is competitive today with nuclear and even coal, while I have serious doubts. If they're right theres no problem at all. I just would prefer to have nuclear licensing streamlined and kept in place in case wind and renewables can't deliver in the short run.
Desakin,
You seem to be saying that because the sun provides us enough power to continue the party indefinitely, we'll always be able to make use of more power, no matter how much we draw (assuming it's possible). And whatever other resources we use is irrelevant, somehow we'll figure it out.
Well the available solar and wind energy is already fully utilised in other ways by our planet (not intentionally, of course) but there is probably enough leeway for us to divert some of that for our own intentions. It seems reasonable to keep that as low as possible and reduce our use of other resources as much as possible (to the renewal rate, which will be zero in some cases).
Just because we want to do something doesn't mean we can do it. From the sounds of it, you're happy for us to stretch the limits, regardless of whether or not that is sustainable. That's a valid position, just one I'll never agree with.
As far as nuclear resources are concerned, I constantly read of very varied estimates of the resource base, sometimes sounding as reasonable as you do. Heading down an unsustainable route, becoming more dependent on an unsustainable resource, just seems like the wrong strategy to me.
Tony
Hi Dezakin,
This point you make (again, here) seems crucial to the argument. I wonder if you might expand upon it.
re: "Because human desires are unlimited and most can be met as functions of energy."
It seems we, first off, might look at what kind of desires on whose part? Example, the desire for entertainment, might be met in different ways, with low to high costs. The desire of one person to make a living (or more than a living) might motivate him/her/them to stimulate and (perhaps, more realistically) create desires that are absent otherwise. It seems advertising can quickly take on this function.
(Do you see what I'm getting at? I'm being sincere. I'd like to take a closer look at this part of your argument.)
Many needs are psychological and/or emotional in nature. The intersection of these with energy flows of society is...well, seems like a big subject, anyway.
Building reactors is not as difficult as it is made out to be.
There is certainly a long lead time to get the first units of a new design into operation - including licensing and construction phases, it is probably unrealistic to assume it could be done in less than ten years start to finish even if all goes well.
What happens next is key, however. Most of the long lead time activities can be reused since the design does not have to be changed and since US law, at least, allows multiple plants to be constructed using the same design license. Even for very large plants, I expect that construction time frames can be reduced to 4 years or so from first concrete to operation.
There is plenty of construction infrastructure in the US, so I would not be surprised if we could manage to get to a point where there were 25-100 plants under construction at the same time around the country.
It would not take too long at that rate for financial people to get really worried about "over capacity" unless, of course, we recognized as a nation that we should stop burning coal, oil and natural gas in electrical power stations as our contribution to slowing the production of greenhouse gases.
I also have an alternate vision that includes producing much smaller reactors on assembly lines; you can find out more about that vision with a simple Google search on my name.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
There are about 1 trillion tons of uranium that are estimated recoverable at an energy return of 15-30 from light water reactors alone. Thats enough to run 20000 light water reactors for a quarter million years. Its unsustainable in the same sense that someday the sun will blow up.
Sorry to Prof Goose for wrongly attributing the article.
"That are estimated". This is the crux of the matter (or one of them). It's finger in the air stuff. Some say there are 7 trillion barrels of recoverable oil. Is that a good reason to continue increasing our use of oil? This article talks of 4.7 million tonnes of proven reserves and 37 million tonnes of additional estimated reserves. You are "estimating" a trillion tonnes of estimated recoverable reserves. You've presumably also done the calculation of the lifetime of that based on some constant consumption rate. If consumption grew at 1.5% per year, that 1 trillion tonnes would last 828 years, not a quarter of a million years. Of course, it likely couldn't be produced at required rates for that growth, so it will peak long before then.
I say again, even with these wildly optimistic estimates, it is unsustainable. It's a mad path to follow. On the other hand, if you could get energy consumption to stop growing and could prove that the uranium could be produced at the required rate for 250,000 years (without increasing energy consumption to do so), there might be some cause for going nuclear, provided the problems of long term storage and security of waste are sorted first.
So far, Dezakin has simply stated his figures without reference. They seem to be taken from Wikipedia, but there it is just a bald assertion. IMO this figure can't be trusted for the obvious reason that it has to be a statistical estimate and there is no confidence level/interval provided. Nor is the sampling methodology provided. BTW, this is true of all other statements about amounts of the various elements in the earth's crust and oceans. Since we can't possibly count and nobody has done a rigorous statistical sampling, they are at best WAGs.
And then there's the questions of the possiblities and costs of extraction.
As far as Th is concerned it requires a neutron generator in an energy aplifier reactor ofr which Wikipedia describes the problemss as follows:
* General technical difficulties
* Each reactor needs its own facility (synchrotron) to generate the neutron beam, which is very costly.
* No synchrotron of sufficient power has ever been built.
Nice to fantasize.
They are very rough estimates made by ascertaining the average concentration in various types of rocks, and multiplying by the geological regions containing those rocks. There are significant trace amounts of uranium in many common ores - refining seawater has even been proposed.
Something as common as granite has a known range of U and Th concentrations. Noone is going to do an extremely rigorous statistical sampling of world granite reserves to six significant figures.
Just as noone is going to try to count the sand reserves in the ocean to a high degree of accuracy.
There is Enough. Roughly Enough to run 20k LWRs for a quarter of a million years, according to someone. If he's off by an order of magnitude on that one, does it really impact this discussion, or our course of action, at all?
Maybe not, but I think he's off by several orders of magnitude. One trillion tonnes would last 828 years, at only a 1.5% growth rate, starting at 65,000 tonnes per year. Peak would be 50 years before that. What if a trillion tonnes is off by an order of magnitude? It would last 673 years. Every magnitude that the estimate is off, brings the resource lifetime down by a century or more. The thing is, we have no idea if there are anywhere near the amounts estimated, as recoverable uranium fuel, so it is an unwise path and ultimately sustainable anyway, probably peaking within a few centuries, even if the high estimates are right. What a legacy to leave the future; a trillion tonnes of radioactive waste stored around the world for hundreds of years. And with no energy source to keep a world packed to the rafters with people and consumption. If the estimates are way out, of course, we could be reaching peak uranium before the end of the century. If the low estimates are closer, then it's all over in a few decades. There'll be 9 billion people then.
Excuse me, but you assuming an exponential growth rate for hundreds of years runs into problems of waste heat rejection long before fuel exhaustion. This is naive extrapolation at best.
Thanks, so that's another reason why nuclear is the wrong option. It will have to level out anyway and so become a smaller and smaller element in our energy needs. Consequently, we need to figure out how to get along on a sustainable level of energy, without growth. I can't see that going down a nuclear route helps, unless we can transition to sustainability without collapse.
Hi Sofistek,
re: "...unless we can transition to sustainability without collapse."
Do you have any ideas about this? Example, how to analyze the possibility and (perhaps) think about paths? How to do it?
Well, I personally believe it's possible but whether it's likely is another matter. It would require a massive mindset change in developed societies - I can't say much about non-developed countries. To move to a non-growth society/economy requires a re-examination of what businesses are for, for example. No doubt some are intended to serve a community and provide a modest living for their owners, but most rely on profit and profits rely on growth. Another aspect is food production. It needs to be very localised with a lot more manual labour, though this doesn't need to be as hard work as some imagine, using bio-intensive methods of growing. So farms will probably need to be much smaller.
But this is just touching on some of the aspects and assumes that the carrying capacity of each region is no less than the number of humans there. For current living standards, I don't think that's true, but lower standards and simpler lifestyles will raise the carrying capacity. Then we'll need to plan a stable population level.
The problem, related to nuclear, is that it's going to be tough enough to come up with a workable strategy for sustainability. Nuclear should be put on the back burner until we've got a plan well in motion. Once it starts to look like we could reach there, maybe we could look at nuclear as a way to power a sustainable society (i.e. one that could last thousands of years). However, I'd prefer to do that with energy sources that are more likely to remain sustainable indefinitely (e.g. wind and solar).
Ad the need for particle accelerator for thorium power.
A senior researcher at CERN, Egil Lillestøl, stated in my presence in a convincing way that the synchrotron wouldn't be costly. From the memory: We're talking about a radius of say 15 meters. So it's not plausible for it to be a huge ugly expensive thing.
I think the radiation and corrosion from the hot lead is viewed as the greater challenges.
Accelerator driven systems are rube goldberg designs from Rubbia that are another excuse to use an accelerator where one isn't needed. Thorium breeder reactors should be critical reactors, not these horribly expensive subcritical assemblies. But Rubbia is an accelerator guy, so everything looks like a nail to his favorite hammer.
As for hot lead being a bad coolant for a reactor, I agree. Use a molten salt instead.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
I've cited references many times here, and I'm pretty sure one was in response to a thread response to you. Maybe you'll never read this and make the same post again in another couple of weeks.
But for the citations, its from the very article thats the topic of discussion.
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution
From Deffeyes & MacGregor, "World Uranium resources" Scientific American, Vol 242, No 1, January 1980, pp. 66-76.
If you took a few minutes to read any of these articles you wouldnt have made such an uninformed post. Its the very topic of the discussion.
Do you get all of your information from press releases from Popular Science? The molten salt breeder reactor experiment in the late 60's was a critical reactor that operated for years in the breeder mode with thorium sucessfully demonstrated.
Energy amplifiers are a horrible idea foisted on the world by a particle accelerator engineer who has more political connections than sense. They're not necissary for any nuclear power regime anywhere ever.
Do some research next time rather than being an insulting bore.
I think the issue here is that we have a number of sources, including the IAEA Redbook, The US army Corps of Engineers,
Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, and the UIC of Australian Uranium Association, all giving limited estimates of the energetically recoverable uranium resource.
On the other side of the argument, you have referenced nuclearinfo.net.
I have read the presentations at nuclearinfo.net, and find them to be more confusing than informative. (IMHO)
I really hope that the authors of nuclearinfo.net take this as constructive criticism; that they are arguing against some very persuasive and well researched sources, and while some of their presentations do make points (The EROI at the Rossing Mine comes to mind) I'd really need to see "their work" where it comes to nearly every other assertion on the site.
Nuclearinfo.net might well be right, but it's going to take a body of work as detailed and researched as Twilight in the Desert to convince me that the folks in my list above are wrong about how much Uranium is available.
Respectfully,
J.
This is disingenuous at best. Only the storm/smith report is a pessimistic assesment of resources, and thats easily explained when you examine their dubious methods... most telling insistance of gasseous diffusion enrichment to inflate energy costs of light water reactor cycles. As for UIC, the conclusions are largely the same as the university of melborne and have been illustrated here as well. They cite the same enviromental assesment study, and reach largely the same conclusions.
I'm sorry you feel that way.
Can you please cite a source reference (or two) for the energy required for gaseous diffusion v.s. centerfuge cascade for uranium enrichment?
J.
Why? The storm smith paper is a mountain of lies, half truths, and twisted statistics, while UIC comes to the exact same conclusion as the nuclearinfo group from melbourne did. Other agencies data conform with the estimates from nuclearinfo and UIC as well. Only storm smith stands out as the chicken little.
You want me to use google for you? Come on man.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip33.htm
http://www.cameco.com/uranium_101/uranium_science/nuclear_fuel/
http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/uranium.htm
From http://www.uic.com.au/nip33.htm
Please check my calculations, but assuming $0.04/KW hour
that's $10,000,000 for gaseous diffusion (100,000 * 2500 * .04) and $200,000 for gas centerfuge (100,000 * 50 * .04).
Wow. The US was leaving $9.8 Million on the table for every GWe every year.
How can it be that the US (and France) were using gaseous diffusion all those years when gas centrifuge costs 1/50?
Another way of looking at this is that a 1000 MWe (1GWe) plant would have to spend 5 hours of its output to spin centrifuges, but over 10 days to drive a gaseous diffusion process?
I'm wondering how can that happen in free market economy...
These lecture notes from the University of Wisconsin may hold the key:
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep423/FALL99/lecture8.pdf
So every 20 minutes you have to isolate and repair an element in the cascade. Every 20 minutes replacement parts must be purchased, fabricated or refurbished.
The paper does not examine those technical costs, nor does it examine the costs associated with gaseous diffusion plants, which obviously also require some real-time maintenance, but it may point to a solution to the economic mystery.
It may be that at lower energy costs, a real-world gaseous diffusion plant may have similar dollar cost per reactor load of fuel rods as compared to a real world gas centrifuge plant. Further, as energy costs rise, the lower gas centrifuge energy requirements would make it the more economic solution.
Further, Storm / Smith paper cannot be dismissed by arguing that they chose one enrichment method over another for two reasons.
1st: The simple fact that much of the world's uranium was (and still is) enriched by gaseous diffusion (90% in the 1999 lecture note http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep423/FALL99/lecture8.pdf). Also in they have updated their analysis to assume that centrifuge enrichment will become predominant - it did not substantively change their results.
2nd: Going back to the 5 hours vs 250 hours of a 1Gw plant's output to power enrichment -- that ratio is startling, but 250 hours is not quite 10.5 days, out of 365 in a year. That's only 3% taken out of whatever the EROEI for the plant. (I call that small beer.)
J.
P.S. the University of Wisconsin-Madison site is a gold mine of information:
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/fti?rm=courses
There are hundreds of pages of presentation slides in the NEEP423 Nuclear Engineering Materials course
Whats the infrastructure cost to replace it? if its a billion dollars or more, you're dealing with it just not being important enough to care about. The return on investment for replacement isn't high enough.
Well theres your answer in your question. Uranium enrichment is in the US a monopoly granted by the US government to the uranium enrichment corporation.
Irrelevant if enrichment represents a major energy cost.
Its an example of all the sins they committed for the sake of painting nuclear power as unsustainable when reprocessing is the dominant energy cost for LWR regimes. Another is completely disregarding reprocessing even for uranium extraction.
Both France and the U.S. were gambling on third generation laser seperation technologies that proved more difficult to develop than was supposed. The U.S. even cancelled their Advanced Gas Centrifuge programme in the eighties because of their optimism over AVLIS (Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation).
Actually, diffusion accounts for approximately a third of all enrichment done today:
x 1000 kg SWU/yr
and will fall to zero over the next ten years as plants in France and the U.S. close and are replace by centrifuge technology.
For the simple reason that they picked an early life cycle analysis of centrifuges from the seventies that gave an energy cost of 861 kwh/SWU, ignoring later studies that give figures a small fraction of this.
Another of Storm/Smith's dubious claims is that modern uranium plants have a full power life of 24 years. They base this on the assumption that nuclear plants have capacity factors of 60% (40 yr lifetime x 0.6 capacity = 24 yrs), when in reality PWR reactor achieve capacities of 90% or more (and 60 yr lifetimes). They also use a figure of 3000kwh/SWU, so this equates to 12.5 days out of 219 days each year, or 5.7% of the plants output.
This is the approach taken throughout the Storm/Smith report: find the most pessimistic figures from the literature, use the LCA techniques that give the highest values, and present all this as typical of nuclear power today. This is why their estimates for the energy costs of mining low grade uranium fall down so badly when compared with existing mines.
Of course, they really give the game away right at the beginning on the opening page of their website:
Anyone who thinks that the Green parties of Europe are interested in an honest or neutral assessment of nuclear power probably also believes in fairies and abiotic oil.
Prof. Goose,
what do you think about this discussion of nuclear power energy balance: http://www.stormsmith.nl/
It says that the fuel supply is not as uncritical as you suggest.
Generally, I think it is slightly dangerous to use Vattenfall (or any other NPP operator) information as facts. It's a little bit like asking Exxon if there will be a fuel crisis.
Some specific comments:
Proliferation
- Your point about proliferation is rather weak: Even if the Pu in the spent fuel does not come in concentrations suitable for a fission bomb, it still leaves several possibilities for dangerous proliferation:
- Stop the process before 4 months to avoid too high Pu240 concentrations
- Use non-fissible radioactive material for a dirty bomb
- Separate and enrich the "useful" components of the fuel
Safety
- No reactor hull can survive a full, uncontrolled core meltdown.
- Every complex technical system has unknown possibilities of failure.
- "Safety culture" is invariably subject to human error, as the recent Forsmark incidents prove. There is no such thing as a reliable safety culture.
- No insurance in the world insures nuclear power plants. I wonder why?
Storage
Are you sure there is any place in the world which would keep the highly radioactive wastes safe for 100.000 years? To me, it feels like hubris. 100.000 years ago, humankind were still "primitive" hunter-gatherer, at best. How would we know how human societies will evolve in the next 100, 1,000 or even 100,000 years?
Also, who will be paying for securing these places for 100.000 years?
Just my 5 pence :-)
Cheers,
Davidyson
Oh Yes
Safe for way beyond that. In Oklo in Gabon, natural nuclear reactors operated around 2 billion years ago, in fact about 16 reactions which ran for a long time moderated by spring water.
As part of the reaction, plutonium has lain undisturbed for about 2 billion years about 33 metres below the surface in clay. Not only a man made element after all.
This was discovered by a French scientist in 1972 and has undergone extensive tests by the nuclear community whereby analysing xenon gas isoptopes they can understand what went on.
Google " Oklo nuclear reactors " and you will find many links to this remarkable natural occurence much to the dismay of the nuclear luddites.
One comment on this. That it has been undisturbed for 2 billion years is no guarantee of future stability. The Natural world flows are dynamic and not predictable. It is also likely that a lot of the original plutonium had already dissipated and "cooled off" over the timeframe.
The key point here is that Vattenfall does not publish these figures themselves, they in fact have independently accredited environmental impact statements drawn up for their processes.
http://www.environdec.com/page.asp?id=130&epdId=24
Prof. Sevior and his colleagues in the scientific community have already examined the widely quoted paper by Storm and Smith, as detailed here:
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/TheBenefitsOfNuclearPower
To put it simply, all indications are that Storm and Smith have got it wrong.
Your ideas about Plutonium isotopes and weapons proliferation are not quite correct.
Shutting down a light water reactor every few months to swap in new fuel is easy to detect, and assuming oversight from IAEA or similar bodies, extremely difficult to cover up.
Seperating and 'enriching' weapons-usable Plutonium-239 from reactor fuel would defeat the whole point of breeding Plutonium as a fission weapon fuel - getting around the enormous difficulty of isotope seperation to a very high degree of purity. Given that this entails the same enormous degree of effort associated with weapons grade U-235 enrichment, plus extra complications involved with the radiochemistry due to the high radioactivity and cocktail of actinides and fission products present, it's just not a practical proliferation concern.
Terrorists seeking to build a radiological bomb would not successfully be able to steal spent reactor fuel - ignoring everything else, the intense radioactivity and decay heat of the fuel makes this impractical.
If I were in the bomb making business and wanted no one to know, I would add encased thorium to the walls close to the fuel rods. Long term irradiation would create a reasonable amount of U 234. After a few years (perhaps 2 or 3 refueling cycles), pull out the thorium and chemically seperate the U 234 (careful not to get a critical mass).
Alan
Thats simply a terrible idea.
First: U234 isn't fissile. U233 is.
Second. Thorium to U233 breeding with solid fuel matrices inevitably leads to contamination with U232 which has hard gamma decay chains, which make assembly and maintenance of any sort of weapon much more difficult.
Third, the half life of protactinium is such that you would accumulate a rather lot of sterile U234 that would destroy the weapons potential of your material.
Theres a reason we never use thorium for breeding weapons material.
Something that was not yet mentioned:
What are the investments up to date in nuclear energy? The funding has been huge. Exact numbers aren't even available for every country.
To make a meaningful comparison with other sources of energy, one should compare their yield at the same level of investment. So we probably should compare the present-day output of renewables with the nuclear output of around 1950.
The nuclear bandwagon is now starting to roll, propelled
by commercial interests and politicians with only short-
term interests in mind.
As I mentioned in a previous post, anyone who thinks that
problems relating to the storage of high-level radioactive
waste have been solved should take the trouble to read the
UN report on this subject, published about a decade ago.
Asolutely horrendous reading, and this is with only the
Western industrialised countries involved.
Heaven help the environment if/when nuclear power is adopted
by all other countries, many of which are corrupt and have
not the slightest interest in conservation.
Nuclear waste will end up leaking into the oceans!
We have a moral and spiritual obligation to the well-being of future generations as well as our own. Just because a business activity is profitable doesn't mean that society hasn't made rules opposed to them. I see the fossil fuel addiction as the biggest threat to the well being of the world without a doubt. We have made laws against the use of certain drugs because we believe they threaten the well being of society. Just because coal and oil are currently cheaper than enhanced geothermal, solar, wind, and biomass doesn't mean we have no choice about their use. The low level likelihood that nukes will cause harm are essentially local problems while fossil carbon spreads it's hazards globally. The world needs to be weaned off of fossil fuels as quickly as substitutes can be brought on-line. The US and europe can simply put gradually reducing caps on on the use of fossil fuels while putting high tarriffs on the embodied fossil energy content of goods produced in nations that don't play along. Does this mean interfereing with free trade? Absolutely! We interfere in the free trade of cocaine and heroin and many other goods some of which actually improve the well being of the world's poorest people. Will this cause economic distress in certain parts of the world? Definitely! As the Stern Report says the economic distress of continued use of fossil fuels will be as much as 20 times greater. Will these few changes in the rules of the game be implemented. Once the pain is felt by enough people in democracies then a threshold will be politically breached and rapid changes will take place.
Technically, there appear to be no show stoppers for a considerable expansion of Nuclear Power throughout the world.
Yea, other than Humans.
To make such a bold statement one has to ignore the costs of the failure modes of fission. And one has to ignore the willingness of others to attack to damage or use a power source as a weapon.
The failure mode(s) of hydro - flooding. The failure modes of PV - broken glass? The Failure mode of a wind machine - falls down. The failure mode of a fission plant is exactly HOW big?
cost USD $1500-$1800 per KW f
And NanoSolar is claiming a $1 per watt for 2007 solar panels.
The failure modes of a nuclear fission reactor?
Firstly, we have to remember that the majority of nuclear power reactors being used in the world today are not unsafe RBMK-era designs.
I know that we're not using Gen IV technologies just yet, but to consider one of the most promising Gen IV platforms, the Pebble Bed Modular reactor - the reactor can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew radioactivity.
It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged. The machinery can be repaired or the fuel can be removed.
Helium coolant isn't made radioactive by neutron activation, so the potential release of radioactivity in the form of the coolant is physically impossible.
Modern fission reactors - if managed appropriately - are safe, and newer experimental reactor platforms are only getting safer.
Gen IV fission reactors are still largely experimental - we can't start constructing dozens of them now.
But, personally, research, development and prototyping of these designs needs to happen sooner, rather than later.
Actually the test pebble bed reactor melted, I believe.
One of the pebbles got stuck in the intake.
4th Gen is a long, long way away. 2025 maybe for a commercial deployment.
3rd gen is almost now: 2015 for a commercial deployment. (The Finns are late, but will be first, along with the Japanese).
Global warming can't wait until 2025 for us to take action.
Those are business as usual projections (assuming oil peak around 2030), not a World War II scale crash mitigation scenario.
The failure modes of a nuclear fission reactor?
Yes. Failure modes.
Modern fission reactors - if managed appropriately - are safe, and newer experimental reactor platforms are only getting safer.
So then they can never fail? Because human management never makes a mistake?
If terrorists exist, how do actions by them fit in the no-fail by management model?
Hi Professor Goose,
Been chasing my tail feathers all over the shop in a vain attempt to find out what was going on in the section entitled 'Energy Lifecycle of Nuclear Power' in the article you posted yesterday (March 1/07) Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?
This to no avail so finally e mailed my son who is a third year Math/Physics student and got his reply: "They were referring to the linked spreadsheet, I think. It includes uranium. It certainly isn't clear."
I realize that you did not write this article but do you think it is would be worthwhile asking the author to 'clear/clean' this up? I've dragged out the url referral and selected what I think pertinent but ?
Used net calorific values:
Renewable
MJ/kg
Wood (TS) 19.2
Non-renewable
Lignite (dry) 15
Lignite (wet) 8
Coal 25.1
Natural gas 48
Crude oil 40
Uranium in ore 127,389
My physics, what there was of it, is nearly 40 year out of date and judging by the response to my queries this may be the case generally. I have updated my user account so that any irate response to that or any other statements I have or may make may be sent there (I would prefer counter comments to be made on the site but that may take up space that would be used in a more constructive manner).
I realize you wish to establish this site on a level that merits wide public access, and that it needs to do the work of enlightening on P.O and related items and, to that end, I reiterate that my user account with e mail address has been updated for any private critique.
Hi Black,
This seems like a good idea - and including sharing comments on site.
I'll try and explain what it is trying to say, as far as I can interpret it.
The mining, processing, enrichment, waste disposal, etc associated with the nuclear fuel cycle involves energy inputs into all these steps.
In practice, this energy comes from coal, hydroelectricity, natural gas, and so on - a whole mixture of different energy sources.
That's what the table tries to show - the effective amount of coal, natural gas and whatever else - being consumed to produce 1 kWhe of energy by nuclear fission.
Ideally, in the future, we could have nuclear-generated electricity supplying these energy outputs, either as electricity, as heat, or as energy stored as Hydrogen, for things such as transportation fuel.
Then the nuclear energy option truly will produce absolutely no greenhouse gases at all.
And Minerva my dear you answer my question even more completely,
thanks. Incidentally a couple of months ago I wrote to
Cameco mining co. with the question as to feasibility of using wind/hydrogen in the mining process and got the following link which naturally didn't answer my question.
http://www.cameco.com/sustainable_development/index.php
That inquiry was from before I came upon this site, maybe someone here, with time and more knowledge than I, would like to take up that cudgel with Cameco?
For anyone concerned LevinK eplains my Nuclear query to Pof Goose, word search LevinK in this article.
The new figures for Uranium reserves and their viability are certainly very interesting as I was only familiar with the pre 2003 figures giving about 50 years or so left with the current number of reactors worldwide. If these figures are even roughly correct then it does mean that there is enough Uranium to scale up the use of nuclear power and make it contribute more to the total at the same time.
However, I must qualify this statement with caution, because as usual Nature never hands you anything on a plate that is easy, as in the gift of fossil fuels but the pollution problem, renewables and diffuse energy and need for extra capacity and as with nuclear the radiation problem.
If we dash to nuclear and up the total number of reactors worldwide from the present 450 or so up into the 1000s we are going to have a big problem with low level radiation and the required massive increase in mining and the contamination coming from those is going to be a big problem. Indeed I would foresee that just as with fossil fuels the CO2 problem is now global, I can see that a massive increase in low level radiaton and problems with high level radiation may well lead to similar global scale threats where after a few decades of intensive and greatly increased usage the environment becomes critically threatened by the large burden of radiation because it has spread far and wide and contaminates nearly everything. We are not at that stage now but it could happen, if we were really sloppy. Just like the way we have been sloppy with all kinds of pollutants and for which the technology is available to avoid or cleanup the worst, but it never does because our economic system externalises the costs and refuses to do it.
Already with the careless use of depleted Uranium in wars, large areas of Iraq, Afghaninstan, and considerable areas of the Balkens are contaminated. Also the contaminated area as a result of Chernobyl is still a pretty large area of Belarus and parts of the Ukraine. And in parts of Russia where they had earlier (nuclear storage) accidents there are pretty big areas contaminated there too.
Above someone mentioned the huge environmental destructon around Canadian Uranium mining sites. I would presume it is similar in Australia. Projecting into the future the widespread deployment of reactors around the world would strongly suggest there will be an awful lot more mining and hence a lot more contaminated enviroment.
The bottom line is that we must make real and not tokenistic efforts to move to a lower energy society. This nuclear salvation is seen primarly by many as an excuse to continue with the same approach to things and same mentality. It is not necessarily any particular technology that is the problem but our collective mentality or cultural approach that has created the problems. And as I said Nature never hands over solutions that are straight forward. They always incorporate some kind of dilemna in them.
One would expect that the environmental damage of mining is somehow roughly proportional to the size of the hole in the ground, so to speak, that is, the environmental impact is proportional to the amount of mineral mined.
Thus, to compare, for example, the environmental impact of Coal mining for energy generation to the environmental impact of Uranium mining for energy generation, with respect to the same amount of energy production, we can simply compare the energy output from 1kg of coal, to the energy output from 1kg of Uranium, once these materials are mined, processed, and turned to energy in a power plant of course.
A 1GWe coal-firing power plant burns about 3.2 million tons of black coal a year, compared to about 70,000 tons of typical Uranium ore that needs to be mined to produce the equivalent amount of Uranium fission fuel.
That's ignoring the environmental impact of the coal burning.
If you're concerned about tiny levels of radionuclides being released to the environment, you should be aware that coal burning power plants contribute *100 times* the ionizing radiation dose to the population than nuclear power does.
(Source - Oak Ridge National Laboratory:)
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
The use of Depleted Uranium munitions, and any radioactive contamination which this may cause, has got ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with power plants, nuclear power, or energy generation, which is what we're discussing.
I am fully aware that depleted uranium has nothing to do with power plants. My point is that if you end up mining and lot of Uranium you will still be left over with depleted uranium. And we know it is not just left to simply hang around. Money was spent mining so there is an imperative to use it and we know that it is used in weapons. For example thousands of tonnes were used in Iraq. DU is being used more and more in conflicts. And why? Because there is so much available. Increase the scale of Uranium mining globally and there will be even more of this stuff 'to get rid of'. As we know when this stuff is used in weapons, it gets pulverised into a fine powder of tiny particles with vastly increased surface area thereby permitting widespread contamination and emission of radioactivity in contact with surfaces such as when accidently ingested or inhaled.
So you see while it may have nothing to do with the power generation per se, it is linked and we can't just ignore it.
Regarding release of total radioactivity from coal mining versus Uranium mining, indeed it may well be the case as you point out.
You dont really know much about background and low level radation I'm afraid. There are parts of the world that have much higher background radiation levels than the Chernobyl site just from radium in hot springs, but people dont drop like flies or treat them as nuclear waste sites. Its all political fear and misinformation.
>You dont really know much about background and low level radation
I'm not clear how you determined that?
Trying to compare and belittle the contamination of Chernobyl and it's surrounds with a few springs in the world where there is higher level than background radiation is very misleading.
If you look at the map of contamination around Chernobyl (here at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Chornobyl_radiation_map.jpg ), it amounts to 1000s of square kilometres. It is similary the case with sites with waste problems like Mayak in Russia where a 1957 explosion spread a large amount of radioactive waste over an area between 15,000 and 23,000 square kilometers. In addition there have been other releases at this site into local rivers which presently continues to spread its radioactivity.
I have not suggested at any point that people will simply drop dead but what I am suggesting that over the medium to long term a chronic increase in contamination over wider and wider areas is certainly not a good thing. And how is this related to the topic discussed above -i.e. providing energy for the future via nuclear power? Because it is somehow imagined this will happen in an ideal world that is politically trouble free. If nuclear power increases on the vast scale suggested, it is not hard to imagine some really shoddy mining (and safety) practices taking place in less politcally stable and democratic parts of the world. Likewise it quite likely various corrupt regimes would happenly take for import the nuclear wastes of other countries and simply dump it in their own lands. This practice already happens in regard to toxic chemicals and waste where there is a huge trade in this stuff. Why would it be different for nuclear waste? And so these are the very mechanism which will lead to the scenario that I suggest in my original comment that in the long run it is bound to lead to more and widespread contamination. We cannot simply dismiss with a hand-wave this very legitimate concerns and realities.