Why Not Nuclear Power?
Posted by Robert Rapier on August 2, 2007 - 10:30am
A couple of days ago I was reading the CNN/YouTube Democratic presidential debate transcript. Of course I am always interested to hear what the candidates have to say about energy. There were a lot of good comments, and the usual spattering of dumb comments. But I won't dissect them right now. What got me to thinking were the comments of John Edwards (on Page 2):
EDWARDS: Wind, solar, cellulose-based biofuels are the way we need to go. I do not favor nuclear power. We haven't built a nuclear power plant in decades in this country. There is a reason for that. The reason is it is extremely costly. It takes an enormous amount of time to get one planned, developed and built. And we still don't have a safe way to dispose of the nuclear waste. It is a huge problem for America over the long term.
I also don't believe we should liquefy coal. The last thing we need is another carbon-based fuel in America. We need to find fuels that are in fact renewable, clean, and will allow us to address directly the question that has been raised, which is the issue of global warming, which I believe is a crisis.
Following this, Barack Obama said that he favored including nuclear power in the mix, and Hillary Clinton said she was agnostic about nuclear power. She did play the "oil" card, which is to say that she thinks the solution to our energy problem is to take from oil and then let the government figure out how to spend that money on alternatives.
I have been accused occasionally of having various anti-nuclear views. This is amusing, given that I have never written anything negative about nuclear power. The main reason is that I am not well-versed in the pros and cons. My understanding is that the main pro is that nuclear can provide an abundant source of energy for quite some time. This is also a reason that I favor a transition to an electric infrastructure: We are going to run low on liquid fuels long before we run low on the ability to produce electricity.
As I understand it, the primary negative is still that we don't have a good solution for dealing with nuclear waste. Obviously, we can't just pile up waste indefinitely, and I am not sure how reactors around the world handle this problem. And of course historically there have been the occasional Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, which ensures that nobody is going to want a nuclear reactor in their backyard.
My feeling is that we will desperately need nuclear energy in the not too distant future. But what about the waste problem? How do other countries deal with the waste problem? I presume France, with all of their nuclear reactors, must have a solution that the population is comfortable with.
For an extremely negative view of nuclear power, see the recently published essay by anti-nuclear activist Rebecca Solnit:
CNN also presents a negatively slanted view in a just-published article, but they do discuss the waste issue a bit:
So which viewpoint is closest to the truth? Do the negatives outweigh the negatives of 1). Blackouts; and 2). Global Warming caused by coal-fired plants? Some people may not be aware of it, but all of the top point sources of CO2 emissions are from coal-fired power plants. (I had a list, but can't find it. If someone knows where this information resides, please post the link).
I would like some people knowledgeable in this area to provide some input here. My own view is that we are going to need nuclear power in the mix. But it may take frequent blackouts before the public starts to accept the necessity.
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Given a choice between coal and nuclear, I would take nuclear, but the reality is that we are going to pursue every single energy source, in a full blown panic driven effort to bring more energy supplies on line.
Because in the long run, it is not sustainable. How many years have you people been yammering about a peak in a finite resource? What do you think is used to make nuclear reactors?
For all the brain power supposedly in cahoots here, you all fall several standard deviations short in common sense. It should be enough to observe the data flowing in from petroleum related activities for light to have dawned on Marblehead. Shoulda could woulda. Here's the crimp note:
The problem is not our activity, it's our proclivity.
You can wank away at alternatives all you want, but it does nothing to address the fact that humanimal can't seem to suss out the natural limits of the environment that gave rise to its existence. Armory Lovins certainly was on to something when he titled his rant "Natural Capital," but forgot to ask a prudent question:
Just because we can, should we?
The future of humanimal, if your goal is to get us as close to the eventual frying of this world by our star, is not going to be cultivating DVD players from organic carbon strings powered by pebble bed breeders. If we are to see another 10,000 years of "civilization," it is going to be based on low tech, low impact, low consumption and low wants. We need very little to survive: clean air, food, water, shelter from the elements and community. That was all the environment that gave rise to our existence promised when life emerged. It is our inability to be satisfied with that reality that has brought us here.
It is our collective inability to understand the true limits of our host, that continues to drive the supposedly with it to clamor for a continuance of the binge. Fools. Every last one of you. In the end you realize, your continued myopic behavior not only will consume your own life, but the lives of the innocent yet to reach an age where cognizance could be applied toward changing the psychotic behavior exhibited even here. Enjoy the soup. It comes at a heavy cost.....
LOL, thanks for making this clear. The future you just described looks quite like what the humanity had up to the 19th century. Are you applying for a landlord here?
Wretched Excess
I am not sure that rudeness, name calling and profanity are called for. Personally, "wretched excess", I found this comment offensive.
Offensive yes, but also totally inaccurate.
I'm no fan of nuclear power, but if I thought we had a choice between collapse / reversion to a pre-industrial world and using nuclear power to get us through the next 50 years, I'd reluctantly say lets starting building lots of nukes.
Fortunately I don't think that's necessary - we can meet all our current and projected energy needs with a combination of renewables and efficiency measures.
Go and do the sums...
Saildog,
Wretched excess has been a member for 19 hours, yet he criticizes TOD as though he has been a member for years.
The Oil Drm was started in 2005, so on the face of his comment, its a lie.
Its pretty clear that he's either an old troll returning or a new troll, possibly paid. At any rate the best policy is to ignore him, especially since he semms to want to start a flame war..Bob Ebersole
With all due respect I'm more offended from people that tell me what I have to want and what I have to need.
I say enough of self-appointed demiurges.
Yes, when the binky is pulled from an unprepared mouth screams will ensue. Sorry to disturb your slumber but a clue by four is sometimes the only method for bringing about a shift in perceptions. Time is not for dainty conversation over petit-fours. Time is to get serious. The only thing being done here is desperately trying to preserve the halcyon daze. The sooner the collective "in the know" step away from the bong the better. Do the freaking literature review before writing your treatise.
I'm an old troll; and if you think that anyone would pay to have this board disrupted your sense of self importance is way out of whack. Been poking your tender underside since the day you opened your door back on blogspot. Been resource scarcity aware for much longer. Been reading about civilization, energy use and political history even longer. Of course my thesis is going to rupture the committee. It don't toe the line. Then again most real breakthroughs in understanding never have. Get used to it. Of course if you are really sensitive you could try and play whack a troll and ban my MAC. That will be interesting in a lab of 200+ machines...
Wrong. Getting sustainable will require the sobering drying up of use of finite materials. Again, the wizardry of technology is not going to grow off of berry bushes. All the maths show that even at complete utilization of available fixes will not cover even half of what is currently the norm. The way is not through seeking continuity, the way is complete change.
Uh oh, psychopath label, better get out the troll stamp. How convenient that cliche is. Just label anyone who might have a dissenting viewpoint and we can all get back to the delusions. Unfortunately, delusions are not solutions.
If the majority of the posters here are a representative sample, the resounding answer is no. Levin would have us believe that it is perfectly reasonable to think that the way we currently live is done to meet needs. Wrong. The way we currently live is in thrall to desires fed by a completely untenable level of consumption; unless of course your goal is to eradicate most life off the face of the planet.
Sometime in the future, people will be looking to groups like this for answers to what has happened and solutions. What currently passes for reasoned debate is really no more than replacing the whip at the back of the lemming pack for a dog whistle at the front. You are still headed for the cliff. So much for evolution.
Every single individual that continues the lie that what we have become accustomed to can be patched sustainably is another voice of hegemony that will lead to a barren wasteland. Witness Iraq. Do you think wars will end because you put up solar panels? Wars will end when we stop being rapacious. Whatever slew of alternatives you propose will require inputs. Inputs that will not always be available in the quantity desired at the local level. Enter colonialism. We've been doing it for so long people no longer even bother to recognize it.
Just how do you think the shelves are stocked and the lights remain on in la la land? It is because in addition to the slaves we harness from hydrocarbons, we additionally rely upon the deprivation of billions across the globe to refine raw materials into widgets sans ecological impact considerations. Every single one of us is responsible currently for the conditions that exist in the slums and backwaters across the globe because of the lifestyle we are so irrationally attached to. That same lifestyle that we are trying desperately to maintain for the future generations. Bunk. The madness that is the civilized world is a madness that will render future generations impossible.
Go ahead be offended. The offense is actually yours...
Agreed, trolling-for-dollars.
Indeed, wretched-excess has gone on a rant, but in his defense, wisdom on this thread is not high. If we understand that oil is a finite resource, then why can we not understand that other resources, too, are finite. Only when resources are used at a rate less than replenishment is activity sustainable.
And that takes us to the crux: Our civilization uses more energy per day than comes to us from ANY combination of sources. Coal, oil, uranium--these are all drawing on the past to try to EXCEED sustainability. We can do it--indeed we have done it--but only temporarily. Our civilization is absolutely guaranteed to end, and all our quick fixes are just a junky who has run out of heroin mainlining ludes. It is sure to end badly.
Some people take offense at the idea of living like our ancestors. The truth is, we could do worse. Mid paleolithic people had a ten-hour work week, plentiful food (most of the time) and a network of meaningful relationships. Yes, frankly, their life was physically arduous, but humans are designed for that.
Of course, our life is comfortable, but that is not what is at stake. What is at stake is the simple fact that our comfortable way of life is going to end, and the most likely scenerio for its ending--a frantic consumption to exhaustion of available resources--will leave a desertified world with MUCH fewer survival possibilities than were offered to our paleolithic ancestors.
The most likely model for US is Easter Island. It would be very good to avoid doing what they did, but at this moment Easter Island is certainly what we are collectively trying for. It would be a mistake.
Nuclear power of course consumes large quantities of non-nuclear energy in plant construction, and in many peripheral activities. But the heart of the problem is that it is a literal dead end. When we say that the waste disposal is unsolved--after more than fifty years!--why would you understand that it will BE solved the day after tomorrow? Between the known laws of physics and nuclear energy's own history, the odds are that it will not. Ever. By the way, do you understand the effects of elevated radiation on human beings? Cancer is the least. Birth defects and immune disease are the real problems, and they never end. Unlike cockroaches and most other insects, humans just are not designed for the world we are invoking when we consider nuclear power. The outlook for cockroaches is good. The outlook for humans is not--and nothing will reduce our long term prospects more permanently or thoroughly than the nuclear route.
There is an attitude on this thread which just leaves me shaking my head--that we can tell nature what to do. Are you nuts? I can assure you it is the other way around, as we will learn, the easy way or the hard way. We can comply with nature's constraints, or we can die. It's a free choice.
It's a shame that this comment got so high up in the thread, because it is so very much not true.
Human beings can design systems that preserve, restore and regenerate natural capital, while providing services and resources to satisfy human needs. I have personally done so on a small scale, and I can see how it could be done on a large scale, if we choose to do so. All we need to do is accept:
1) That it's a priority, because it's necessary to our survival.
2) That it will slightly diminish short-term returns (in most cases), for the sake of long-term health.
3) That just because we can do something, does not mean we should.
If we could wrap ourselves around those principles, we could design a technological civilization for the ages. Alas, the discussion seems mostly divided between the "there's-no-problem" cornucopians and the "technology-is-fundamentally-unsustainable" doomers. There seems to be very little room left to consider the middle road.
Besides being a Lovins disciple, I guess this would make you a cornucopian as well. From your Live Journal page we come to understand that, beyond your link to the online version of NatCap, "I like technology. A lot. I like the ways it makes my life easier, more effective, more free, and more interesting. I also like the intellectual challenge of creating it, understanding it, and using it. About the only thing I don't like about it, is having to fix it. But I really enjoy figuring out how to design it so that it doesn't need fixing." See here's the thing, have you been able to get all your technology from fully renewable sources? You sure none of them rely on trace elements which are finite in nature? Oh, but don't let that deter your (benighted) enthusiasm.
The original affluent society, see Stone Age Economics by Sahlins, still holds the record for highest cultural EROEI and leisure time. It has been the steady encroachment of technological 'advances' that have required more time of each individual, and increasing reliance upon finite sources of energy, to provide a lifestyle. The early adopters of the sedentary lifestyle also lost their ability to fend against the wilds. Hence their hybrid-domestication of the nomad hunter by providing for his needs in exchange for protection; which is where royalty came from and we have been slaves to them ever since.
Point 1 being priority, score one for the home team. Point 2, that it will slightly diminish is a gross understatement. The only long term health to be had will come at a great decrease in the net amount of per capita energy consumption; barring a rethinking of how many people will live at any given time. History is clear. We went from wood to charcoal to coal to oil to splitting atoms. Unless the Stoernies blow open known physics, there ain't no free lunch on the other side of this feeding frenzy.
Done any math lately? If the latest attempt at solar farming is any indication, it will take the area of Connecticut to power residential use alone in the US. Forget industrial. Not a watt for commercial. Nada for schlepping their carcasses around. How many of these exercises need to be done at the end of the sustainability chapter before the lesson sinks in?
You know what long term was/is? That's the time in which we did not seriously jeopardize the holding capacity of our planet. How long do you seriously think there will be all those nifty metals around to enjoy so that your iPhone can be used to remind you that it's time to turn the compost? Ahhh the life of an engineer.
Aboriginal societies tested the limits of the system long ago. Those that survived came to live within them. Those that did not perished. Too bad about the opposable thumb and incipient desire to overreach. That is why we are here. Hello. We have the capability to manipulate far beyond the sustainable ability of the parent system to provide. Attachment. Bittersweet.
So, have fun. The other side of the century will be the proof in the pudding. Of course only those with a belief system that incorporates an afterlife will get to know the answer. The living will be far less fortunate given the inability of most to deal with reality.
By the way, your point 3? I think that was the main crux of wretched excess' comment. The problem being you are to attached to your technology to see the forest for the trees...
I think you misread my position, badly. But it's understandable, I guess, given the material I've put online. Maybe it's time to revise again.
If I'm a disciple of anyone, it would be much more Bill McDonough than Amory Lovins. To Lovins, solving a problem by design is a matter of engineering out all the waste. To McDonough, it's a matter of reconsidering the problem statement, figuring out what we actually want (e.g. cold beer and hot showers, not refrigerators and water heaters), and then designing a solution that works within the context of existing and potential natural systems. The key is respect for natural systems, and the selective and careful application of technology where it will do the most good.
I do agree that if humanity has a future, it will be based on greatly reduced per-capita energy consumption. That's OK. By conservative estimates, we waste 2/3 of our energy production, and 4/5 of our transportation energy. And those estimates are made within the context of currently prevailing design practice for buildings, generation/transmission assets, and transportation. In point of fact, our waste:service ratio is probably more like 20:1, when you consider that a well-designed building in most climates needs only a very minimal climate control system, for example.
I'm not particularly worried about depletion of non-renewable non-energy resources. Either we will learn to design and live with closed cycles (>90% recovery), in which case it won't be a problem, or we won't, in which case the law of exponential growth dictates that no amount of resources will be enough.
If we build our artifacts from carefully selected technological and biological nutrients, we aren't going to run short of materials. We've got plenty, if we're careful. All that we need then is energy, and that is actually a challenging but tractable problem if we can stop being so toweringly stupid and short-sighted at every turn.
As for my personal love of technology: Yes, I like it. But that doesn't mean I particularly care for the way that it has invaded every nook and cranny of every moment of our lives. I like having the ability to travel to distant destinations at high speed, but I don't want to do it every day. I like being able to communicate instantly with distant loved ones, but I'd much rather see them in person. I like having access to an abundance of food, but I'd much rather grow my own. And I will, and have, made what most people would consider sacrifices in order to live closer to these preferences.
I rely heavily on email and the web, because it facilitates my ability to shape the world in a positive direction, but frankly I'd be just as happy to give up much of that. I just don't feel that I, personally, as a white American male with an expensive education, have the right to go live on a mountain and tend my garden while the world goes to hell around me.
What I hope for in the long run is not millions of years of low tech civilization but mature biotechnology, nanotechnology and subcultures no one yet have dreamed of. So little have been done of what can probably be done but it wont happen overnight and we can not count on it to happen to solve todays problem with magic technology.
Now the game is to preserve and build upon what we already have in technology and culture capable of change and development. And to have a good time doing it while building for the next generation.
Nice points, Green.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Just because we CAN do something, doesn't mean we WILL. Humans are dumber than yeast. Maybe they are inventive, have opposable thumbs and all, but philosophically, they have the wisdom of a starved raccoon. It's amazing to me that more of us aren't found lying on the sides of our own highways.
That's because sitting on the fence means two things:
1. You have to come down to eat.
2. You are an easy target.
3. (I can't count) There isn't much profit in the middle ground unless you are a lawyer who gets paid for not solving problems, or a politician that gets paid by crooks on both sides of the fence.
Doomers like me see the long term problems as the immediate need, because we've tried to see where compromise leads, and it leads to the status quo. Things have to change. One way or another, especially how decisions are made based upon the profit motive alone. The only thing wrong with the busload of lawyers going over the cliff is that it doesn't have their accountants strapped to the roof.
We can argue about the numbers all day, but if the plan to use nuclear is only compared to using coal, then there really isn't any choice. The real question is still this: "What are we using the energy FOR?" All the talk about current consumption, reducing consumption by 'x' percent, and finding sources to 'fulfill the demands of customers' never questions the actual results of what humans are doing. It's one thing to say "we have freedom", or "we will live in harmony with our environment", but you have to ask yourself, and others, "Then what?"
What is the Net Creativity of the human race going to be, when all is said and done? What do we contribute to the universe that makes it a better place for children to grow up in? Are they really growing up, or have we created a perpetual game zone for them to exist like yeast in a petri dish?
If the petri dish is going to be contaminated anyway, then let's just burn it up now and enjoy ourselves, right?
The petri dish has existed for hundreds of millions of years, with many Net Creative species (Perhaps that includes ourselves before our 200 years of industrial toys).
Are you trying to make a better petri dish or just minimize how fast we drain it (coal) or destroy it (nuclear)? To someone who is a cornucopian or windmill salesman, my rants sound anti-technology. I am not. I am against wrongheaded technology or technology being used for the sake of the technology, not for the sake of Net Creativeness. Any technology we adapt should provide more potential(to our grandchildren) usefulness than it uses up in resources. That's a pretty simple theory. See how the things you do add up in your own mind. Rationalize any way you want, because Nature will decide in the end, not us, unless we change.
Last one out of the dish, please turn off the lights (if they still work).
Humans are dumber than yeast. Maybe they are inventive, have opposable thumbs and all, but philosophically, they have the wisdom of a starved raccoon.
It sure seems that way. On the other hand, consider the degree of social evolution we've achieved in the last couple of centuries (e.g. a semblance of racial and sexual equality). We've come a long way, far enough that I can't rule out the possibility that we will be able to meet this new challenge.
In my mind, we are in the process of transitioning from being a pre-tech species to a technological one. As technicus, we are a juvenile species, and we look pretty hopeless. But teenagers tend to be that way, and if we gave up on them, there'd be no future for the species.
What? You see a transition from one type of species to another, more highly developed one within the current human population?
Give me a break! Evolution works with hundreds and thousands of generations, not two or three.
And what part of the human population are you talking about? People like yourself? And what about the other 99.9 percent of people who are oblivious to any understanding of world systems and the oncoming crisis due to lack of or bad education, daily fight for survival, lack of IQ, misinformation by the MSM etc.?
Wake up, man!
Davidyson
I do not think we have progressed in any degree of social evolution. We just have a few more educated people around who have time to consider social issues. Look at some of the writings in biblical times - Jesus (or whoever wrote or said those words) said things that were socially very advanced (and I don't mean manipulative religous messages) - his words seem far more socially advanced than many of the ones people spout today IMHO. Of course some things that were said at the time were also painfully socially retarded, but we make plenty of such statements today too...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
I see no shame in it at all. I agree with just about everything he wrote, nor does it diminish what you wrote.
That we are not doing as you wisely think we should is one fact that better supports wretched excess's post than your ready dismissal of it. Until we do as you suggest and do so Big Time we'll be left hanging on the "If we could wrap ourselves around those principles" problem!
Right there is a Big Time problem, as exemplified by most of this nuclear rehash to solve problems that are at root ones of human excess. What's really telling is that your "middle road" concepts are no where on the publicly acceptable radar screen of what we can and should be doing. It's all mostly more of the same stupidity that got us where we are now.
There is no shame at all in pointing this out. Especially with respect to how nuclear power is getting trotted out for another look. What's to see that wasn't there the first time? It stunk then and it stinks now! Chasing after it just goes to prove how totally incapable we are at wrapping ourselves around the sane principles you wrote of to resolve our problems.
It's all about: Grab another mop & bucket, boys! The taps are on and we can't turn them off!
Insane.
"Insane."
Yup.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
I should like to correct something, which is:
It's all about: Grab another mop and bucket, boys! The taps are on and we can't think to turn them off!
I took some calculations that Robert and Nick started and polished (well at least sanded) them a little. Getting sustainable is pretty easy and saves money all along the way. Here is the link.
Chris
One of the problems with many nuclear proponents is an almost blind refusal to accept that we are part of a greater set of interrelated systems - not separate from the world. Anyone advocating anything close to current lifestyles is a psychopath.
We like to pretend we are separate from the world, because we've had the cheap energy to set aside normal constraints for a while... but all that ignorance will catch up with us, and if some things do not catch up with us, they will end up affecting our children or their children. Nuclear may stretch our current lifestyles out a bit, while making a few wealthy, but it'll come back and bite us later.
So we can choose. Do we take some responsibility for what we are doing or not? If yes, then ask serious questions:
The available productive area of the earth is 1.9ha per person. How much are we using? What is really sustainable?
We share that area with most other land-based organisms, and some of that area with non-organic resources. Whatever we extract from the earth that will not be replaced in the near (geological) future is a drawdown on mineral (and other) savings that future generations will not have the benefit of (except for the few enduring things we create).
So what level of energy use is sustainable?
What level of fresh water use?
Soil use at rates required to feed 6.5 billion and growing?
Plant and animal husbandry/natural ecosystems?
Mineral use?
Pollution?
Etc...
Why give lip service to sustainability? It will only drag things out... which answers the question - many of us will kid ourselves that we are doing something and just hope to leave it to our grandkids to suffer the worst of it.
And the answer is not in NO technology. Technology will always have its place. I just don't believe nuclear technology is part of the non-lip-service sustainable equation.
Solutions? Ideally, I think it starts with voluntary population reduction, coupled with uncensored education of the problems we are causing, looking at truly sustainable practices, and encouragement by government and citizens to reject our economic, consumer, money obsessed society... how do we do these things? That's the real question?
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
I basically do not care about the global average. For me the relevant question is how the local environment wich I have a chance to influence (Sweden) can be cultivated in a way that gives long term prosperity and makes the world better. We are 9 million here now, we will probably be 10 million in a not so distant future and we can export stuff that maks a small but notisable differense for perhaps a hundred million people or so. When we get more efficient we can do more but we will never save the whole world.
We will probably use at least 10 times the global average of water but that does not matter since we got the rainfall and the best we can do is let it aid us in industrial processes that gives goods that can benefit people. If we add plenty of electricity we can do more with the water we get, the biomass we grow and the plentiful minerals.
I would be content with such ambitions if they were common.
They dont give a fair world in absolute wealth levels but a lot healthier one where the resources will last a lot longer and some will last close to indefinately if technology and efficiency continue to improve.
"I basically do not care about the global average."
That says it all really...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Very terrible of me that I dont want to sacrifice myself and my community/culture for getting closer to global average. I only want to work very hard with being usefull and encouraging stuff that in the long term makes life easier for a large number of people. That wont help everybody but it sure betas beinga doomer or run to the hills as a survivalist or having ideas about working against individual self intrest.
There is nothing in power-down that is against self-interest, except perhaps having a large family and laziness. There is nothing in it that is survivalist or about running for the hills if it is a common societal goal. Living closer to the land, walking, using public transport, being open about the problems we face, having small families, changing our market culture - none of these things are bad, and I believe the overall benefits would far outweigh any perceived "sacrifices".
Why does everyone associate power-down with doom and gloom? That is an uninformed, narrow view, and it if is the best argument you can come up with, it only serves to support the proposition.
If you really want to argue against it, try asking how we go about changing the way people think in order to reach the goals of sustainability. That will be the hard part...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Power down and all that implies is coming. The real questions are: How well we accept and work within such a reality while relinquishing our humanistic arrogance of control over such matters as opposed to fighting against such submission as it occurs.
As Aldo Leopold put it: "The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism? That if he will work with that mechanism his mental health and material well being can expand indefinitely? But that if he refuses to work with it, it will ultimately grind him to dust?"
In short: Nature does not make political compromises with anyone.
In this sense power down is all about living within the means of creation as it is and not as we keep trying to make it. IMO, we've got a ways to go before we get it.
Some people can profit from a panic. Here is an only half in jest accusation that the reason we have loan guarantees for new nuclear power in the Senate Energy Bill is that Bill Richardson is just trying to preserve the southern electricty market for New Mexican solar power. Bait them with nuclear then switch in solar that they could have developed themselves with the taxpayers bailing out the unused nuclear plants.
Chris
You can just about guarantee that many "solutions" will be fueled more by money-making opportunities than anything else. People will delight in kidding themselves that they are making a difference AND getting rich!
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
The difference is that renewable solutions are solutions while depletable solutions are just postponing the actual solution. The renewable sourcing is getting permanently set now. There will be very little oportunity to change the future market because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Oil, gas, coal and nuclear are all, by nature, temporary, and thus broken so they'll get fixed. Renewables are permanent and they won't.
Exxon, Peabody, and Excelon will continue to exist, but as supliers of lubricants, christmas novelties and smoke detector parts respectively. Most of their shareholders will have migrated. Even BP is going to end up with a small market share because they are trying to be incremental in an exponential market. They are trying to balance competing interests rather than committing to what the market can do.
Ruth, if you are reading this, please tell me I'm wrong about BP. We need you.
Chris
Except that nuclear is different than oil, coal and gas in that there is an essentially inexhaustible supply (one trillion tons of recoverable Uranium at high eroei with many times that if you consider Thorium and other fuel cycles). A solution that works for thousands or millions of years should be considered a permanent solution.
Not really, we experience a major disaster every forty years at the current rate of use. That implies a disaster every 10 years if nuclear is going to be a solution rather than just a nuisance. That means removing a circle of radius 20 miles from use for each accident. That exceeds the land surface area of the earth in 60,000 years, a shorter time than the areas can recover.
I also suggest that you are engaging in magical thinking to say that we know about much more than about 85 years of fuel at current use.
OOps, that should have been 600,000 years. Same point though.
You cannot be serious with that first comment. Chernobyl was a serious incident but there have not been others where there has been loss of life or environmental damage. We cannot learn anything in 60,000 years?
There was one period of exploration for Uranium in the 80s and they found about 100 years worth. Since then no one has been looking. You think that is the end of the story?
The issue of how much Uranium exists has been seriously debated here many times. You really should look into some of the previous threads, especially some of the comments by Dezakin. I for one am tired of making the same comments over and over when so many of the nuclear opponents are so impervious to the facts.
The one thing we seem to be unwilling to learn is that people make mistakes. So far, we have avoided sabotage. How much longer? People want whole new kinds of reactors and swear they are safe without any experience except that four of the prototypes had accidents. Do we make the mistake again of believing these people, or do we judge nuclear power on its actual performance? The performance does not match the promises in the least. Electricty is NOT too cheap to meter. Plants in populous regions are NOT operated in a safe manner. Yucca Mountain is NOT operational.
We have made a mistake promoting civilian nuclear power. It is time we admitted it so that the other mistakes that WILL lead to more accidents don't happen.
You may not be aware of critcality incidents that have led to fatalitites in civillian nuclear power but they have occured. Radiation released to the environment has also happened on many occasions. You may want to study this list. It is surely incomplete as there has been quite a lot of coverup going on in the industry. If you do not know these things, why are you complaining about the attention of others to facts?
Without new nuclear power, the probability of a meltdown that blows containment in the next 20 years is greater than 80%. You can do the math yourself from the near misses. Lessons learned do not help this much because these are complex systems and you are only as smart as your last problem, and not necessarily smart enough for your next. The failure modes have not all been excercised or even conceived. If we can't keep simple things like bridges from collapsing despite regular inspections, do you really think that no more serious nuclear accidents will happen ever? The only way to ensure this is to shut the reactors down permanently.
This statement demonstrates you are entirely ignorant of how containment works. The reason why Chernobyl was so bad was the lack of any containment to begin with.
A failure of the emergency core cooling system can lead to containment breach. Failure to avoid a hydrogen build up can lead to containment breach. Pick you system, it can fail.
You are of course incorrect that Chernobyl had no containment. It just did not have enough. There are circumstances under which other containment systems can fail as well. Take a look at what a jury-rigged system defence in depth is, how complex and, most of all, how deeply it has been penetrated in actual accidents and you'll see that another large accident is bound to happen.
Look, pilots and people who work in national security are very heavily screened. Yet we have pilots who crash planes deliberately and spys who betray their country. With all the extra active systems needed to avoid containment breach, why would you ever say that containment alone is adequate? A saboteur can make the active systems inoperative, open the containment deliberately, any number of things. Security drills at plants lead to penetration. We then try to fix the problems with that. Then another method works. Another large accident will happen. It is only a matter of time.
If you are not willing to acknowledge the risks, I would suggest that you keep as far away from the nuclear industry as possible. The most dangerous thing is to assume there is no danger.
You could, but you'd be wrong.
Its like you were incapable of reading resource estimates from 'World Uranium Resources' and skipped towards the end which really only discusses reserves. The IAEA number only uses rich known orebodies (with essentially no exploration for decades.) It doesn't take into account any nontraditional sources such as phosphates, shales or even flyash, nor does it account for reprocessing or double enrichment.
Reprocessing and double enrichment alone multiply the resource base by 4-10 without even opening one new mine.
Reprocessing is a job that few like to take on. The working material is pretty nasty. I would say that non-traditional sources sound quite a lot like the NPC report. You can belive it if you like, but you do not know. We do know of about 85 years of fuel at current use. A plan to replace coal with nuclear power had better be quite clear that the fuel could run out prior to the end of the design lifetime of the plants and include this in the rates that are charged. $0.08/kWh wholesale is about what would be required to account for this risk. Especially since the loans for construction will be guaranteed, this should be a clear requirement to ensure loan repayment.
So what? We have several demonstrated technologies and several industrial scale plants operating allready. Its not a problem that needs to be solved because its done allready. Fortunately uranium is so plentiful we don't actually need to do any reprocessing...
I have confidence in it the same way I'm confident that the world doesn't become very dense hamburger beneath the crust. I can't really know for certain because I haven't taken core samples to make sure there's no hamburger down there. I think your problem is you really don't understand the numbers you're quoting.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeAvailabilityOfUsableUranium
Reasonably assured reserves (or proven reserves) refers to known commercial quantities of Uranium recoverable with current technonology and for the specified price. As well there are estimates of additional and speculative reserves in extensions to well explored deposits or in new depoists that are thought to exist based on well defined geological data. These are necessarily subject to a larger uncertainty, however, the historically low price of uranium over the past ten years has provided a disincentive to exploration.
Between 2003 and 2005 the world uranium reserves for 130$/kg U increased by 50% due to only modest exploration, to currently the '85 years' reserves with 500 years additional reserves. The uncertainty of the additional reserves doesnt mean additional reserves might not exist, but simply assigns probabilities of excess reserves in this price band.
This doesn't include 200 or 300 doller per kg uranium (still quite affordable for competitive nuclear power.) And it doesn't reflect the resource multiplication of modest price increases with simple process steps such as extra enrichment, reprocessing, and DUPIC.
But, look it up yourself. You're being deliberately obstinate. Avaliability of resources isn't ever going to be a problem in nuclear power in any timeframe worth discussing (clear the calender for the next thousand years). If you want to object on security, safety, relative risk, or even cost I respectfully disagree there; But at least there's two sides to those arguments. The resource avaliability canard is just being deliberately ignorant.
Now you are at 500 years at current use. OK. That gives 100 years as a solution to global warming, or less if energy use grows as anticipated, perhaps 50 years with population stabilization at 11 billion. Then you want the price to go up. But it does not matter when the carbon goes into the atmosphere so you are back to coal and have not solved anything. I still want accelerated loan repayment, there are other reasons to think nuclear won't last even 50 years.
I just don't know anyone serious who thinks of nuclear power as anything that should be permanent. It can't be for one thing, and everyone is aware that there are much better alternatives. Everyone would much prefer fusion to fission, for example. Why do you insist that it makes sense to replace one polluting energy source with another? Having a strange love for nuclear power just does not seem like enough to me. It is a facinating jumble of patches placed on splints attached to dohickees, but it is not beautiful or even practical, just very very dirty. Make a mess with neutrons....
The fuel price could triple without anyone seriously noticing any additional cost to nuclear power: Its all wrapped up in capital, not fuel. A simple doubling of price opens up roughly ten times the resources for exploitation.
Its also rather unlikely that fuel price needs to go up to expand resources beyond that. As was mentioned earlier, very little uranium exploration has been done in decades, and technology advances open up new resources at lower price points. DUPIC could be use today for relatively low costs, possibly even competitive today at todays prices (with lag time for setting up the systems.) And all of this is still before simple resource multiplication of doubling the enrichment step. Pyrometalurgical reprocessing methods developed at ANL could be far more economically viable than the aqueous methods currently favored (largely developed for weapons production.)
Its capable of filling a major role in the power production for human civilization for the next several centuries. We may very well have much cheaper solar or wind by then. Hell, Alan could be right and its cheaper today, but I still feel nuclear should be relied on as a demonstrated source of capable baseload power. Future fission power plants will almost certainly be useful in extreme environments and space exploration even if we move on to the next great thing; Unless that next great thing is truely revolutionary. (Say Bussards electrostatic fusion idea isn't all hope following hype)
I simply dont view nuclear power as any more polluting than wind. What it does generate is spent fuel, which I honestly feel is still likely a valuable resource even if we dont use it for nuclear fuel... in a hundred years we could be producing the majority of the worlds rhodium and xenon from nuclear alchemy.
I think what you are saying is that you will only accept a disruptive technology as replacement for nuclear power? In that case, are you willing to be disrupted enough to abandon the base load concept?
I think what he saying is that he would only accept a better technology that obviates the need for nuclear.
Check out this post:
Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?
If you have a bit of time google “Rubia reactor”.
Should that be Rubbia?
It should be Rube Goldberg. Using a particle accelerator to supply neutrons to maintain the reaction is not what I would call a good design. It sounds like a clever way to make money disapear.
In the land of the future where we all drive flying cars and particle GeV acceleratores an be made cheap enough to pick up at the local hardware store, its just barely plausible that this will be useful in some fast neutron reactors. It solves a problem that doesn't exist: reactor stability. Careful engineering of the core geometry does this allready to the point where you only have to worry about criticality excursions in fast reactors with tiny delayed neutron components, but here doppler broadening and negative reactivity coefficients reduce the problem to an engineering exercise.
I like Rubbia's idea for a graphite moderated fission rocket, where the fission fragments from the thin film Am242 fuel directly heat the hydrogen reaction mass. The temperature of the H can go very high, tens of thousands of degrees, so the specific impulse is also very high.
555, it's that time...
Nuclear salt water rocket sounds better to me. Of course, designing that is sort of like designing a continuous a-bomb more than an ordinary reactor...
My view is that we should build more nuclear power slowly and safely.
I do NOT want a Canadian Tar Sands type rush to nuke (others here do, see debate on July 30th Drumbeat).
There are a large number of supply issues in restarting an almost moribund industry (a few new nukes internationally + suppliers of maintenance needs). Large forgings are a critical issue, with other nations looking at new nukes as well. But the biggest problem is personnel.
The personnel to manage, engineer, build and regulate new nuclear power construction are few and mostly old in the USA. A limited number of the workers that travel from one refueling outage to the next can be brought into new construction (but not all, or else neophytes will be maintaining our nukes).
The recent restart of Browns Ferry I (down for 24 years after a fire) and the just announced restart on construction of Watts Bar II ($2.5 billion to finish a 60% complete nuke, work stopped in 1985) by TVA are great steps to train a new pool of experienced people at all levels.
A slow ramp-up reaching about 4 new nukes/year going commercial in 2027 seems about right to me.
I simply do believe the construction times and costs quoted by industry boosters for the next generation of nuclear plants.
IMVVHO, we should build secure containment for waste fuel for 500 or so years (not 10,000 years) with the idea that we will reprocess it at some point (for the platinum group metals produced by fission & zirconium if not for uranium). By 300 or so years all fission byproducts should have pretty much decayed and only the transuranics would be left.
Best Hopes for Slow, Safe New Nukes,
Alan
Perhaps the only way the problem of nuclear waste can be solved with the attention and respect it deserves is to require that it be stored in Washington next to the Capitol
Putting the spent fuel in or near Washington D.C. is a great idea. It will show ordinary Americans that the stuff is really not that dangerous. We will likely put our spent fuel within 150 km of our capitol.
We have, by the way, solved the spent fuel issue. If anyone is interested, check out my article here: http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2006/8/13/184016/739
To bad Edwards is so irrationally anti-nuclear and anti-CTL. I liked his message of redistributing wealth, health insurance and so on.
Best hopes for a radical nuclear rollout.
I wanted to clarify when edit was cut off by a reply:
About 4 new nukes/year in the USA, 6 to 8 new nukes/year in the rest of the world by 2027.
Alan
With the current 104 nuclear plants starting in the 1970s and assuming a 40 year lifetime, a large replacement/decommissioning/recommissioning cycle is in store over the next decade. At 4 nukes/year, we will basically replace the existing 104 plants in the USA in 26 years, past the time the current plants will be needing a substitute, thus, at your rate Allen, we will be running in place at best.
It is interesting to see in the NYT that the nuke industry snuck in the loan guarantees into the Senate version of the Energy bill, and that without the loan guarantees, they threaten that the nukes will not be built.
The nuclear industry already has the largest subsidy already--they are indemnified against any damages caused by a nuclear accidents. The role of the NRC is to police them to insure there will be no accidents. Without this insurance policy, no public reactors would have been built.
You were spot on in your earlier post Robert. The future is solar.
In the summer of 1969, I went to the States for the summer - I was at university in the UK at the time studying civil engineering.
A friend of mine took me to meet a senior manager at Bechtel in San Fransisco at their HQ. This guy showed us around and told us that Bechtel was currently building no fewer than 23 nuclear power stations in the USA!
I mention the above just to let some of you Americans know just how capable your elders were. Nowadays the "easy" option is always taken when confronted by a difficulty of that magnitude - I agree with Kunstler on that. It always seems to be easier to use the military as a first option when confronted by an intractable problem.
I am not a proponent of nuclear reactors - quite the opposite. I just want to make clear that sometime one has to make sacrifices to get what one wants or to avoid chaos and shortages.
When handwaving or preaching, at least try to keep to the facts. The fact is that there is a cap on the liability from nuclear incidents which AFAIK is $30bln. Are you suggesting that any nuclear incident would cost more than $30bln, or that $30bln. is nothing? Can you borrow me this nothing for a while?
LevinK, I wasn't trying to preach, and I admit guilt to not being as precise as possible (It has been a while since I examined the details of Price-Anderson). So, you are right, my use of the word "any" you have so 'boldly' pointed out was not exact.
My post was really to point out that (1) Alan's construction rate is basically replacement, and (2) the nuclear industry wouldn't exist without the government insurance subsidy. If only solar received such support...
My belief that the future is solar is not hard and fast and could change with more and better information. I've come to that conclusion as I've been trying to figure out how to insure myself against our oil predicament, and to do so in a way that doesn't generate other problems. Given the urgency of the situation, I believe that I can't rely on our friends in D.C. to fix it for me and my family.
I can conserve, and I have, but that still keeps me dependent on fossil fuels for such basics as heat, power, and food, and hence, I am still energy insecure by conserving. If the supply line to the Middle East is cut, conservation will revert to the Reagan definition: "Conservation means being hot when it's hot and cold when it's cold." But, by going solar, I can cost-effectively obtain adequate heat, and (less cost effectively) cover a significant fraction of my power usage. The reason I advocate solar is that I'm finding it can do the job for my family's basic needs. In short, practicality. By the end of next year, I should be covered in basic needs (except food) by solar. No need to wait for that government approval for the new reactor.
If you want preaching, read advancednano's posts.
Er, bullshit.
The most critical claims of this by United States Public Interest Research Group as an insurance subsidy rate it at 33 million per reactor per year, roughly the cost of the fuel, and would minimally impact the competitiveness of nuclear power. More realistic assessments of the value place it at roughly 2.3 million per reactor year.
Er, not b.s.
Without indemnity, there would not have been a nuclear industry, and if indemnity were to disappear (not likely), I'd be willing to wager that the nuclear power industry would also disappear. I'm NOT advocating that, btw.
For a good historical discussion, I recommend the wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity...
It is clear from the Supreme Court proceedings of the suit challenging the constitutionality of the P-A Act that the industry needed a boost.
In addition, you can look at the NYT online article regarding the need for loan guarantees:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/washington/31nuclear.html
Is this just pigs feeding at the trough, or do they really need them?
Pigs need a trough. The two senators who snuck in the loan guarantees have very high contributions from the electric power industry. With Domenichi they are trying to keep up with Oil and Gas. With Bingaman they come in right after lawyers and doctors.
It is pretty easy to calculate what the government will liable for in the case of a Chernobyl scale disaster say at Indian Point, which has had lots of problems. Take a radius of 20 miles, so an area of 1257 square miles or 800,000 acres. With $300,000 homes on half acre lots that comes to $240 billion. Now, depending on how the wind blows, you might have to cover Manhatten real estate as well. That gets you into much larger numbers. Large enough for the government to default I think.
Your home owners insurance excludes nuclear accidents because the government has assumed the liability. But, you won't be covered if the liability is as large as it could be.
Chris
tards without the gov there would be no nuclear power.
nuclear power will always be within the directed purview and regulation of the government, until people don't want to gain access to nuclear arms, or the need for power is greater than the need for bombs.
The Manhattan project, the single greatest project ever undertaken history, with likely the smartest group of scientists ever assembled in history gave us nuclear fission, fusion, breeder reactors, a bombs, h bombs, radionuclides, space probes, and power plants.
But...but...but...the free market is always the best way to develop new technology...right? Governments should never pick winners!
No way to know this counterfactual unless we had a window into the what-ifs of history. Maybe gov can pick winners, or maybe we lost opportunities letting the gov pick something that wasn't as good as would have come along.
Playing devils advocate here by the way; I dont know where the best line is to draw between government and markets, and my guesses and opinions aren't solid enough for me to argue with conviction more than mildly pro market.
I'm "mildly" pro-market myself, but we appear to live in a world that's so virulently anti-government that no-one will even consider massive-scale government funded and organised projects to help address energy issues.
It's very very hard to see how we would ever have mastered and commercialised nuclear power, or successfully launched payloads into orbit, if science and technology was left entirely to free enterprise with no government funding.
LevinK where did you get the $30Bn number? My understanding is that there is group self-insurance to the tune of $9-10Bln, the current amount in the insurance pool. After that, the liability is all Federal Govt.
Sorry about that, I quoted the number from memory. You are right, it is $10bln.
Many and probably most of the existing nukes are getting life extensions from 40 to 60 years. So retirements will slow down.
The oldest US operating nukes are in the 600 to 900 MW range, The first four new nukes are finishing Watts Bar II (1.2 GW from memory), 2x 1.7 GW and 1x 1.6 GW. Toshiba Westinghouse is bidding a 1.2 GW reactor. So basically two retirement = 1 new reactor.
Nuclear power production will grow in absolute terms and as a percentage of US generation under my proposal. Just not significantly till 2022 or so.
Four new reactors/year, 6.x GW is a significant addition. And I raised that estimate to 5 or 6 new reactors by 2027 based on new information.
Alan
Question though, after 60 years, what happens to the plant?
Is the entire infrastructure useless? How much effort is required to 're-build' it to last another 60 years (compared to the effort of building it initially)?
Since the plant has to meet security standards all thru its life it wont be all rotten after 60 years.
I guess the limit would be set by a realy expensive component such as the reactor vessel in combination with technical development. If making a new vessel and swapping out the old one dont make sense compared with installing the newest design in a completely new plant the plant is history and will be torn down and most of it recycled.
For instance it would not seem to make sense to build a new 600-700 MW BWR reactor vessel with piping and external circulation pumps when the cost for the kit ought to be about the same for a 1400 MW BWR vessel with internal circulation pumps.
The question is more or less if LWR reactor technology is mature and LWR reactors will be more or less of the same design in 2050.
Good question. The NRC and the industry engineers are modest enough to know that they do not yet know all of the effects of aging on the plant. That is why the license renewals are for a limited period of time (that and the fact that is the way the law is written.)
I would expect that when it comes time, there will be careful analysis of the plant condition and the economic aspects of operation. That will determine what happens next, a shutdown or a license renewal and continued operation.
Here is a thought project for those people who are so concerned about nuclear plant decommissioning. What does the coal industry do when a mine or a power plant wears out?
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
What does the coal industry do when ... a power plant wears out ?
They remove any toxics that were not removed during operations (lead paint & asbestos usually, sometimes mercury in instruments). Salvage a few bits & pieces that could be used elsewhere and cut the rest up for salvage. Usually a profit after disposing of wastes.
If the building is near an urban area, it may have an adaptive reuse (such as an art museum). Otherwise usually torn down and turned into a park (cooling pond become a fishing lake, etc.
Alan
Best hopes for bridging the electric capacity gap in the next decade with extension of aging nuclear infrastructure whilst securing funding, govt and public approval for new, larger, and presumably safer nukes.
In the meantime, I'll be tying into the Sun.
...and I go mean Best Hopes.
The problem with large nuclear plants are the same as for large coal plants, when they trip you have to get alot of spinning reserve on line in a hurry. So while very large plants are possible, the reerve issues become more significant.
Now it really doesn't take all that long to fire up 5-7 large turbines (200-300 MWe each), but it's more than just building big plants.
See above. Double posted by "trip" in my router.
Somewhere close to 50% of the 104 operating nuclear plants in the US have already gone through a rather intensive process of inspections and verifications to achieve a 20 year extension on their license. There is every expectation that most of the rest of the plants that are currently operating will also go through this process when the time comes. Some may have special situations that lead to a decision to shut the plant down, but I predict that will be fairly rare.
Many anti-nuclear activists point to the "subsidy" of insurance and load guarantees, but few are able to "show me the money". If you really take a hard look at the flow of money between nuclear power plant operators, nuclear equipment suppliers, and nuclear industry employees, you will find that there is a tremendous amount of money flowing into the coffers of federal, state and local governments and very little flowing out into the industry.
For example - each plant current pays a $4 million annual fee to the NRC for the privilege of being carefully inspected and monitored by the NRC. They also pay the US government 0.1 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated - a total of nearly $800 million from the industry in 2006. Each plant pays an average of more than $20 million in local property taxes and I cannot begin to compute the income taxes paid by the corporations and employees.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Of the approximate 104 GW of the current nuclear generating capacity, approximately half of the installed base went online between 1969 and 1980. Most of the remainder went on line between 1981 and 1989, with two additions in 1993 and 1996.
The reactors now basically come in two sizes...big and bigger. However, not SO BIG, that the spinning reserve requirements are enormous. To stay "running in place" with demand growth you basically have to build about 100 new units (at ~1000 MW each, fewer if you go with 1500 MW) over the next 30 years (that averages 3/year but the demand/load growth is nonlinear AND you'll have to have them online much than in the past. A 5-7 year cycle from beginning to full-power license/commissioning is not unreasonable).
To increase the percentage supplied by nuclear by more than just a pittance will take something along the lines of double to triple the rate you anticipate. In the meantime, it still requires a substantial investment in coal and gas fired units or a very dramatic change in the way we do business.
Hi Alan,
I favor reprocessing the nuclear waste now, since the weight and volume of waste is reduced by over an order of magnitude, and the half life of the waste is decreased by about 100 times. In a few thousand years, reprocessed wasted is less radioactive than the original uranium ore.
Your statements assume large unit nuclear power, but small unit plants (100 to 200 MW) has many advantages. Small units can be built prefabricated, so that quality can be controlled at the point of origin, and onsite expertise is less necessary. Small units, due to the surface area to volume factor, are much easier to cool than larger units, so operational and safety systems have a much easier time coping with the heat from the reactor core.
Yeah, but, so what? These aren't anything more than political problems.
Economies of scale seem to indicate otherwise, at least with light water reactors.
I tend to believe most major nuclear power issues have a large political component. People will be impressed when 70,000 tons of high level waste becomes 7,000 tons of high level waste and 63,000 tons of MOX fuel.
Right now nuclear plants have alot of fabrication done onsite, piece work, and expensive. For a plant that is around 100 MW, you can have a factory/assembly line that does a majority of that fabrication offsite. A nuclear power plant factory would provide ecomonies of scale and would speed construction. Also, for many utilities, a 1,000 MW plant would be too large, the scale is wrong for their business, providing a diseconomy of scale.
What is even more important is that the 7,000 tons left would have a halflife of 20-25 years, and in 100 years would be reduced to almost harmless stuff you can put on your desk if you want. No more "millions of years of storage" scaremongering.
I can't help but think that a lot of this is done on purpose. Of course if there was the political will this could be done - but, the truth is that politicos do not want nuclear power. What they want are cheap dividends by exploiting its unpopularity in the public conciousness. They would always get more votes if they have their pictures taken in front of a wind mill than a nuclear site. More than that; until shortages are upon us they will keep beating on the "dead horse" to get their votes. Actually in some countries like Switzerland they "overdid" - they wanted a ban on nuclear power and the voters rejected it... gives you some idea why Switzerland is so much ahead.
IMVVHO, we should build secure containment for waste fuel for 500 or so years (not 10,000 years) with the idea that we will reprocess it at some point...
I don't think you need to be so humble on this point. 75 years ago the neutron was still a theoretical particle, it had never been observed. We now have proposals for "burning" all of the wastes. I would guess true disposal technology -- as opposed to dumping it in a very expensive landfill -- will be available in less than 100 years, and certainly within 500.
I think these are not mutually exclusive. After 500 years of experience managing nuclear waster we will be able to design a better long term waste management strategy. I do like Canada's NWMO's plan because it does specify that we design in the ability to retrieve the waste in case we change our minds or in case of problems.
What should also be specified is that as much as possible the short term (500 year) facility should have a high level of security even in the absense of active management. You now, just in case the short term facility turns into the default long term facility.
The issues with nuclear are more than simply the waste. There is the issue of security that I cannot see being adequately addressed especially in a tumultuous environment that the future might give. There is the cost issue, there is the health issue (we may disagree here but I am convinced that even routine operation of nukes has detrimental health impacts almost as bad as coal when low level internal biological nuclide issues are considered). There is the siamese twin issue with military uses etc. etc.
The other caveat is that there are alternatives that can scale to the same level as nuclear with any where near the same level of commitment and resources pursued. There is no reason for instance that rooftop solar photovoltaic eventually not eliminate the need for daytime peaking power. Easily, 20 - 30% of present demand could be accounted for just by this one technology. I will repeat, for the tropical maritimes, Ocean Thermal is on the cards, wind, high temperature solar thermal, concentrating photovoltaic, efficiency, tidal, biomass to electricity and heat, wave, improved transimssion.
It's not just daytime peak power that is at issue though. Ultimately, the existing gas and other base load generators have to be converted to something else and the likely candidates right now are nuclear and coal. Given the choice for base load, I'll take nuclear, warts and all.
Yes, we do need to drastically expand into solar, wind, etc. But that expansion cannot supply everything we need, at least not yet, so we're going to need something else. And in a world where global warming is a huge issue right alongside peak oil, nuclear simply seems the only certain path (to me) that we can take if we wish to avoid catastrophic disruptions to society. Even Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory and once very opposed to nuclear, recognizes that we cannot solve the global warming problem in the time frame in which it must be solved without going to nuclear.
Is nuclear problem free? Hardly! But when the choice is nuclear versus radical and dangerous climate change, I'll take nukes. In short, nukes are the only thing that is going to get us past peak oil and global warming with most of civilization intact.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
" that expansion cannot supply everything we need, at least not yet, so we're going to need something else. "
The question is, can wind & solar do it as fast as nuclear? I see no reason why not. Wind provided 20% of new generation in 2006, and it's doubling every 2 years. In fact, I think they can do it much faster than nuclear.
By the time wind & solar reach current limits (roughly 20% of market for each, maybe 30% for both), plug-in hybrids will be able to provide the buffering they need to raise those limits.
Wind and solar are intermittent and to the best of my knowledge this problem has not yet been adequately solved. There simply must be a base load generating capacity that is not intermittent the way solar and wind are. Nuclear fits that bill.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
"Wind and solar are intermittent and to the best of my knowledge this problem has not yet been adequately solved. "
Geographic dispersion, long distance transmission, demand management, storage (PHEV's, pumped storage, flow batteries, used PHEV batteries, etc), and backup biomass electrical generation (much, much more efficient than biomass liquid fuels) are perfectly adequate.
Nuclear almost certainly makes sense as a significant part of this mix, and it's likely to help reduce costs and improve system stability, but it isn't essential.
Geographic dispersion, long distance transmission
Requires nonexistant infrastructure at greater cost.
demand management
Requires smart meter infrastructure that largely doesnt exist, and automatic power draws at various price points for things like water pumps and the like. This is one of those obviously great ideas that take forever to implement.
storage (PHEV's, pumped storage, flow batteries, used PHEV batteries, etc)
Mostly infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. This isn't a nonzero cost.
backup biomass electrical generation (much, much more efficient than biomass liquid fuels) are perfectly adequate.
Better natural gas or coal than biomass. Theres no point.
"Geographic dispersion, long distance transmission
Requires nonexistant infrastructure at greater cost."
It's not "nonexistant", but certainly there's a cost there. OTOH, it would probably be a good idea even without renewables, for grid stability and cost minimization through use of least cost generation.
"demand management - Requires smart meter infrastructure that largely doesnt exist, and automatic power draws at various price points for things like water pumps and the like. This is one of those obviously great ideas that take forever to implement."
It's been around in various forms for a long time - it just hasn't been needed in scale. It's tested and practical, and it's starting to grow quickly. For instance, California's PG&E is installing it everywhere. The 2005 energy act requires it to be developed nationally. Check out www.thewattspot.com .
"storage (PHEV's, pumped storage, flow batteries, used PHEV batteries, etc) - Mostly infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. This isn't a nonzero cost."
But it will exist by the time it's needed, when wind gets above 15% of market share. PHEV's are largely a zero cost to utilities. Sure, there may be costs, but nuclear needs this almost as much as renewables. Check out Ludington, MI's pumped storage: it was developed to allow load following for nuclear.
"backup biomass electrical generation (much, much more efficient than biomass liquid fuels) are perfectly adequate. - Better natural gas or coal than biomass. Theres no point."
I agree, it wouldn't be needed for a very, very long time. This is more a theoretical point for those who question whether we could eliminate fossil fuels entirely for generation.
The point here is that solutions to the variability of wind & solar do indeed exit. Are there some costs? Sure, but they're not great, especially if you don't do assume something unrealistic, like a grid using 100% wind, or 100% solar only. A great diversity of supply, including nuclear, would work best.
Downthread advancednano writes "Overall, renewable energy in the United States has increased at a rate of 1,000 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. The nuclear energy figure is 16,203 thousand megawatt-hours per year for nuclear even without building a new plant." This has been through upgrading existing plants. If he's right, nuclear capacity is coming on board at 16 times the rate of renewables, even before the expected nuclear boom.
"If he's right, nuclear capacity is coming on board at 16 times the rate of renewables"
Basically, he's wrong. Wind added in 2006 about 2.5 GW nameplate capacity, about 7 times the figure he quotes, and will add 3.5GW in 2007, 9 times as much. What he's doing is like looking at cell phone growth in the 80's, and concluding that cell phones would never challenge land lines.
Nuclear has added capacity by improving it's capacity factor from about 70% to about 90%. That's a great accomplishment, but it can't go much further due to the time required to refuel.
OTOH, wind can just keep doubling every two years. That will allow it to provide all of the needed new annual generation capacity in just 5-7 years, should we choose to do so - IOW, if regulators, ISO's or utilities don't block it.
Many nukes are also "larger" today. Detailed engineering is improving generation and getting more power out of old plants.
Nothing dramatic for each one, but with 100 nukes out there, it adds up.
Alan
Yes, that's what I was talking about, when I discussed the improvement in the capacity factor.
Well I do not buy your numbers. I am not sure how you convert nameplate capacity to megawatt-hours/per year but I think you need to factor it by about 30%. Even using your numbers nuclear capacity has still been coming on faster than wind.
And I am not sure about how fast wind can be geared up. There are a limited number good locations. Last week I drove by two multi thousand turbine wind farms in California's Riverside county and the Bay Area's Altamont Pass and saw hardly any of the blades turn even a little.
"I am not sure how you convert nameplate capacity to megawatt-hours/per year but I think you need to factor it by about 30%."
I did. Multiply 2.5GW by 30%, and 8,760 hours per year, and you get about 6.6 TW hours.
"Even using your numbers nuclear capacity has still been coming on faster than wind."
Sure, but nuclear's growth can't really accelerate for the next 10 years, while wind really, really can.
"And I am not sure about how fast wind can be geared up. There are a limited number good locations. "
Sure, but we've only used about 1% of them. Take a look at the state inventories at www.awea.org, and keep in mind that many of these state inventories are based on old studies at low heights: larger, higher turbines will take advantage of much better winds. They also don't include much offshore wind: a recent study found that eastcoast offshore wind could power all of the eastern seaboard.
"I drove by two multi thousand turbine wind farms in California's Riverside county and the Bay Area's Altamont Pass and saw hardly any of the blades turn even a little."
There are a lot of 25 year old, very small turbines in California that don't do much. That doesn't tell us much about what wind can do, especially at Altamont, which has an highly unusual bird problem, and many turbines which should be replaced by newer ones, but can't because of the raptor problem.
Actually, I think that the used batteries from plugin hybrids provide about three times more storage than the ones in the cars. This is because a transportation grade battery is going to have plenty of cycles left once it degrades below transportation grade. And, the cycles can be done optimally in a managed power storage environment. Accounting for the shrinkage in the energy use transportation sector that converting to mostly electic transportation will cause, and the increase in electrical generation, my estimate is that we'll end up with about 12 hours of total generation capacity in stationary storage. The mobile storage in the vehicles is bespoken, but might add another hour or two. There is a bit more detail here.
I also argue for a 100% annual growth rate for solar power there.
Of course! Finding such gems makes reading ToD worthwile. I figured on my own out that wehicle-to-grid is dumb since it wears down the batteries and thus has a high cost for the car owner. But I did not follow thru with having a need for expensive energy storage as a second hand market for used wehicle batteries waiting to be recycled. A rack in a warehouse and an electronics box for each battery that lasts a hundred second hand batteries and a further value is created for each manufactured battery.
Yes, I think that this must happen to make electric vehicles competitive. Once the total cost of ownership goes below straight ICE vehicles (which will happen in Europe sooner) it becomes pretty inevitable that the market will switch on a fleet replacement timescale. The California market for stationary storage will make that start happening in Europe on a retooling timescale because gasoline is so much more expensive than electricity there. I would guess that northern offshore wind and spanish solar will pickup the extra generation needed to cover transportation. French nuclear power won't keed up. If peak oilers are correct, world gasoline prices will reach european levels in a few years so that the mainly electric cars will be the most attractive product. There are some interesting battery technologies reaching production scale, but this is not really all that important since the ones in the norwegian car are already just knockoffs from the Tesla. We don't need new technology to jump, we just need a business model that apportions the battery value correctly, and the California stationary storage market makes that possible. That kind of scale at the ouset will bring costs down quicky as well. I'm willing to guess that a southwest dispatchable solar power plant will compete at wholesale with nuclear in ten years, and, being dispatchable, will be much more profitable. If you want to know what's coming, look at which industries need loan guarantees and which don't. Those that don't will make money, the others won't. Once dispatchable solar is the best wholesale deal, I'd guess it will take about 15 years to make it impossible for nuclear power to find customers that can buy their base load model power consistently, and they'll have to go off line to avoid maxing out their cooling. Once this kind of thing happens, their operating cost will be so high that they'll have to close with the loan guarantor ponying up the unpaid portion of the plant. As the interview with Laherrère pointed out, base load models are not compatable with renewable energy. Where the penny drops is in understanding that dispatchable models will cost less. This is completly inevitable when the base load model is dependent on a depletable resorce and the dispatchable model is not. The only question is the timing, and the economies of scale advantage available to renewables but not to depleatables because they have already been taken, together with the nudging we are experiencing from depletion of gas and oil make the time now.
Chris
The idea is probably best in countries with a weak grid and a lack of easily dispatchable hydropower.
The Republic of California does have the Pacific Intertie for hydro but is does seem to want to have a large difference between peak and off peak rates. I think this is owing to generation rather than a problem with grid capacity. This is the "counrty" that wants the batteries. We figure that under time of use rates we can zero out a customers electric bill with a solar power system that only covers 70% or so of the customer's use of electricity. A larger delta between peak and off peak would lead to an even smaller system. Why do utilities want solar under time of use? It is hard to fathom. Perhaps the battery thing is the same?
Let's check. PG&E has these TOU residential rates. The delta is about $0.11/kWh across the tiers. Let's assume that this is flow through that reflects their cost. Let's assume also that the off peak wholesale rate is $0.04/kWh. A battery that operates at 90% efficiency charges 1.1 kWh at $0.044 and discharges 1 kWh at $0.11. So, you break even at a battery cost of $0.066 per kWh cycle. So, for a battery that has 500 transportation cycles and 1500 effective stationary cycles down to say 80% capacity degradation it would need to cost less than $99/kWh capacity (used). Now, the Tesla battery pack has 56 kWh capacity and is sounds like it goes for about $15K, so $270/kWh capacity new. Seems like they could make money this way if $200/kWh capacity is a transportation premium. They may also be just priming the pump expecting lower future costs. They probably only need to make a fraction of a cent per kWh on the deal for it to make sense since they avoid building other capacity at $0.1 /kWh to meet peak. To begin with, using them to meet special situations might make them quite profitable. Avoiding all or most of a $0.4/kWh spot market price would do quite a lot.
"wehicle-to-grid is dumb since it wears down the batteries and thus has a high cost for the car owner"
Only if the battery life is shorter than the vehicle life. If not, as is the case with the new li-ion chemistries, than V2G is worthwhile.
OTOH, the buffering from scheduled charging will be all that is needed for quite a while.
good points - in addition to the waste issue, Edwards pointed out cost and also the length of time it takes to build plants. Given that we haven't built one in the US in a long time, do we have a good handle on those numbers? The industry puts things out that don't look so bad, but they might be a teensy bit biased...
Reddit link:
http://science.reddit.com/info/2bpdx/comments
Regarding waste disposal, about ten years ago I read about an idea to dispose of nuclear waste that made a whole lot of sense to me. The first step is to encase the material in glass orbs or marbles large enough to seal, shield, and protect the material indefinitely. The second step, admittedly controversial, was to randomly deposit the orbs into deep sea canyons. The idea is that the glass orbs will be able to contain the toxic material for tens to hundreds of thousands of years needed for the radioactivity to decrease. By depositing them in deep ocean trenches, they are virtually inaccessible to man, and even if they were accessible, they would be dispersed randomly and in such low density that the cost of finding them and attempting to recover them (and use it for terrorism) would be enormous. This is certainly not a politically feasible solution at this point in time, but it seems to me like it is probably technically feasible. If the alternative is chaos and rising sea levels, in the future this may be deemed an acceptable risk.
Nuclear is not as climate friendly as it seems:
http://www.peakoil.org.au/nuclear.co2.htm
"Proponents of nuclear power always say that one of the big benefits of nuclear power is that it produces no Carbon dioxide (CO2).
This is completely untrue, as a moment's consideration will demonstrate that fossil fuels, especially oil in the form of gasoline and diesel, are essential to every stage of the nuclear cycle, and CO2 is given off whenever these are used."
The same argument can be made for solar cells or windmills. Perhaps we need to have a new unwieldy acronym: EROCE -- Energy Returned On Carbon Emitted. So, what is the EROCE of the various contenders? Is nuclear worse than solar cells and windmills? Probably, but I'll bet nuclear is far better than burning even more coal and that building nuclear might allow us to burn less coal (or have fewer blackouts, take your pick).
This is an interesting area to explore... I'll be writing a (hopefully not unwieldy) series of shorts on EROEI over the next few weeks, and this seems like a good notion to explore...
This quantity is already being used in sustainable biofuels circles. You can see some discussion here.
Not exactly;
An NREL study determined that three representative Solar Panel technologies (Polysilicon, CIS -copper indium diselenide and Cd Te -Cadmium Telluride) will completely recover their embedded energy from manufacture in a range of 2 to 5 years, Including what is called the Balance of System components.. "Balance-Of-System inputs are included in all cases, namely: aluminium for the module frames, steel for the support structure, copper and plastics for the cables and contact boxes, as well as some fuel required for the installation."
http://www.nrel.gov/pv/thin_film/docs/20theuropvscbarcelona4cv114_raugei...
So yes, there are energy inputs, but they are essentially over once the panels are installed. At that point, this energy source is not plagued with Waste Issues, supply lines failing, nested layers of complexity; political, financial, hydraulic and 'unforseen or maybe just unreported eventualities'.. as is the case with Nuclear power. (Remember the missing Plutonium stories .. written off as accounting discrepancies?)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/30/BAGGQFVT7J1.DTL
"UC spokesman Chris Harrington said Los Alamos "does an annual inventory of special nuclear materials which is overseen by (the Energy Department). These inventories have been occurring for 20-plus years. Special nuclear materials are carefully tracked to a minute quantity."
The report concludes that at least 661 pounds of plutonium generated at the lab over the last half-century is not accounted for. The atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 contained about 13 pounds of plutonium. "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4272691.stm
"But Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Norman Baker said: "If the figures are wrong then this looks like serious incompetence from an industry that deals with highly dangerous resources."
- 'Liberal Democrat Environment Spokesman'?! You kiss your mother with that mouth?
I think, given that this would be a long term strategy, that an important caveat to this point is that none of the construction or operation activities necessitate CO2 emissions. These emissions are more a function of our societal infrastructure and would be phased out if we moved towards an electric economy.
Chemist is absolutely correct.
Further, anyone familiar with underground mining in the United States is already aware that it is done completely without fossil fuels in the mine, using electric machinery. We don't do this with above ground mines but we could. We could move ores via electric transport. We could either hugely reduce the fossil fuel impact of these activities or in most cases, eliminate it entirely.
Just because something is done one way does not mean that it must always be done that way. Once again I point out that the problem is not technology, which exists already to do this. The problem is simply us, the short-sighted decisions we make, and our tendency to focus on now rather than tomorrow. So the question is not can we do this but will we do this.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
I had an article which discusses a lengthy report which analyses the carbon dioxide generated for each power source compared to power generated. This goes through the whole fuel cycle.
Nuclear power is about 10-20 times better for CO2 than coal or natural gas.
Nuclear power is better than photovoltaics for CO2 and three times worse than wind and four times worse than hydroelectric.
For something that is so important to the world and to people here, we should base our decisions on the facts and not what we hope the answer will be.
========
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
btw: the link to my article on CO2 comparisons
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/07/energy-sources-compared-on-life...
The link to the 182 page pdf
http://www.pmc.gov.au/umpner/docs/commissioned/ISA_report.pdf
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com/search/label/energy
I read the article about Thorium reactors and was blown away. I'm an ex employee of the nuclear industry and have been pretty anti-nuc for many years. Considering that coal is the real alternative its hard not to be impressed by some of these new technologies. However 500 years of monitoring waste is still longer than any government has survived yet so cautious optimism is the most I can muster.
There is also the problem that any optimism regarding hugh growth in available electricity encourages the "more growth/ more population/ more junk" mentality.
How about someone writing a TOD essay on all of the new nuclear designs floating around out there?
Yes, I'd really like to read a summary like that too.
Sure, but let's not have it done by an anti-nuclear activist as most of the nuclear stories in TOD have been in the past. We honor the contributions of oil industry people on this site but many seem to think that people that have actual work experience with nuclear are too tainted to contribute.
Not true.
What strikes me is that the nuclear insiders who have posted here have been pretty much anti-nuclear. Which isn't the case for oil industry people.
The nuclear industry has downsized over the years producing a population of former workers. Some are happy and some are not. Some should have never been hired and some just wish they had never been hired.
Of course, anyone can claim to be former insiders although I know that this does not apply to everyone posting against nuclear.
It ain't an easy business to love!
Well, if you know any pro-nuclear insiders who'd be willing to write an article for us, PG's mailbox is always open.
I would say TOD staff is pretty much pro-nuclear. Or at least not rabidly against it. If we haven't posted many articles supporting it, it's not that we hate nuclear, it's that we haven't gotten any.
Is a pro-nuclear "insider" necessary ?
I think the conversation can move to a better level by people at least taking the time to look at the relevant parts of wikipedia. It is not perfect but it is better than most sources. For the question of types of reactors existing and proposed a I have gathered the wikipedia links. An article (even a lengthy one) would be to provide a cliff notes version of this information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Current_technologies
Pressure boiler reactor (about 230 of the 438 in the world)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_Water_Reactor
Boiling water reactors (next most common)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_Water_Reactor
Pressurised heavy water reactor (the canadian CANDU)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurised_heavy_water_reactor
The russian RBMK (13 exist but have been modified since Chernobyl)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
Advanced gas cooled reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_gas_cooled_reactor
Breeder reactors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Breeding vs burnup
Advanced and planned reactors
Generation IV reactors
The molten salt reactor
Nuclear power in general at wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
Nuclear reactor technology in general at wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_technology
===============
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
advancednano,
You sure seem definite about some awfully suspect figures. there's sure a lot of definitiveness when I know some of the figures are just B.S.. Nuclear power, hydro wind and solar make no CO2 except in building the plants, dams, turbines and solar cells.
Since they all use differing methods of manufacture powered by varying types of generation depending on part of the world, its impossible to get within more than the general range of the actual carbon cost. In spite of what you think, natural gas has about 5% of the CO2 than coal for equivalent energy for electric generation.
I agree that the world needs the facts. There's just a lot of difference between facts and assertions. And, most of these decisions aren't really our choice. As an example, a big utility might build nuclear as opposed to coal for baseload generation. They're not going to build gas in North America, because of the rising fuel cost, and wind and solar won't do for a baseload. But at any rate, its the decision of the Board and the Corporation's officers, not you or I, and only indirectly by our governments where we might be able to vote in one candidate or another.
Our only real chance of having a little influence is by personal conservation, buying our own solar or wind turbine, or by persuasion. And, how can you persuade anyone with spurious figures, or an arrogant and confrontational style?
Bob Ebersole
So you read the 182 page paper which is the source and you looked at the ranges that they are providing and you see what specific problem with the methodology ? The ranges provided are + or - about 400%. But even taking nuclear at the top of the range it still comes out OK relative to the other options.
I have other sources on the amount of steel and concrete used for wind and coal plants both use more than nuclear plants. So the indirect CO2 falls in nuclear's favor. Although wind comes out ahead because of less mining etc...
Where are your better figures ?
You call my figures spurious. Prove it and provide the accurate figures. I provide links to my sources. If you do not believe them then fine, but anyone can judge the quality based on the original sources. Where is the original source research paper for your unsubstantiated 5% claim ?
========
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
That is wrong, natural gas is 55% (or 42% using CCGT) the CO2 emissions of coal for electrical generation.
You would think just knowing basic chemistry and basic math would have helped caught that one.
Coal: Mostly carbon... combusting to CO2
Natural gas: Mostly methane, CH4 to CO2 and H20
Now unless oxidation of hydrogen produces over 20 times the energy of the oxidation of carbon (it doesn't) even before the endothermic decomposition of CH4, theres no way this could work.
"wind and solar won't do for a baseload. "
Actually, they will. They're just not as good for peak, when you need firm capacity.
OTOH, there are solutions for wind & solar variability, as noted elsewhere: Geographic dispersion, long distance transmission, demand management, storage (PHEV's, pumped storage, flow batteries, used PHEV batteries, etc), and backup biomass electrical generation (much, much more efficient than biomass liquid fuels) are perfectly adequate.
It looks like your data on PV is dated. EROEI is about 12.5 assuming a 25 year life, but including recycling brings it towards 25 on a 25 year recycling cycle. On a 100 year cycle (final performance degradation 60%) it approches 66. Your numbers appear to reflect a lower EROEI than 12.5. This could mean that panels were considered which were built using silicon from small batches where the heat management was not so good. Also, current panels are about 19% efficient in production which is higher than in the past.
Another aspect of the solar industry is that, like aluminum, it seeks out low cost electricity. Often this is hydro power. Now, using the hydro power means that someone else is going to use coal, and so going by the energy mix can make sense, the choice of hydro as renewable is sometimes deliberate just on the grounds that bootstrapping is good. If we take EROEI for wind to be 18 then scaling we get about 30 g CO2/kWh at the high end and 6 at the low end, lower even than hydroelectric when panels are milked for power then recycled. Cells with 40% efficiency may be in production in a few years. This should more double all the EROEI numbers because these are required to work with concentrators so that less silicon is involved. As far as I know, no other power source has the potential to achieve this kind of performance.
Chris
"EROEI is about 12.5"
Actually, that's now out of date. Most silicon cells use much less silicon than when those studies were done, and don't forget CIGS, which is 10% of the market & growing more quickly than silicon - it's E-ROI is much, much higher.
Our silicon panels take about 2 years of operation to payback, others may be doing better. As I point out, the calculation depends also on assumptions about duration of use and recycling. We go with silicon because the durability data is solid but you are correct that other technologies are coming along. I'm quite sure you can use a silicon cell for 100 years because their degradation behavior is well understood. I doubt that this will be the case for polymer mounted cells, and there will be less of a gain from recycling. That is not a bad thing. For one thing, most roofs need mainenance after 30 years, so matching that timescale makes a lot of sense.
The company's plan for panels that come off a roof to allow maintenance is to sell them in developing countries that don't have their panel fabrication ramped up yet. That way, new panels go onto a new roofs saving labor in the long run. A 100 year total use may not be out of the question in that situation since the panels can be a foundation for sustainable development which could take a couple of generations. You pretty much need teachers who have taught teachers to get into a virtuous circle.
Chris
It uses the storm/smith study for its data; Its a bullshit hit job. Garbage in, garbage out.
I get particularly annoyed with this claim of "no CO2." Well maybe not directly from the process during operation but there are lots of other things that happen before and after the plant is started. A couple of years ago during a briefing by the DOE I raised a number of very specific issues and pointed questions about the claims made. When the briefer from the DOE asked me if I had nuclear power experience (yes, I do) and where, they told me that they'd get back to me on that (they never have).
Some specific issues that involve large quanties of energy AND produce significant CO2 emissions.
Concrete: a blend of cement and aggregate and the newer GEN III+ designs use much more than any of the previous designs ever did. That requires lots of cement.
The first step in making cement: calcining the limestone feed to drive off the CO2 from CaCO3 (to form CaO + CO2). For every 100 pounds of pure CaCO3, you drive off 44 pounds of CO2 plus the CO2 from the fuel (usually coal) required to get to the calcining temperature and then on up to the "liquid -phase temperature where the Ca, Al, Si, and Fe in the mix react exothermally to form "clinker." Requires about 4.5 million BTU per ton of cement produced (typical, depending upon the kiln arrangement but that's a bit beyond our scope here). Limestone is the largest percentage of the feed to the kiln process.
Steel: lots more steel in the new Gen III+ designs. The conversion of iron oxide (Fe2O3) to Fe through a reduction reaction. For every ton of steel, the reaction produces a minimum of 0.59 tons of CO2. Not to mention the energy requirement to bring the temperatures to the appropriate level (usually supplied by the coke once everything gets going. But it also has to heat up and melt all the impurities of a low grade ore, not to mention the CO2 generated by the fluxing/slagging agent...our good friend limestone).
Note: most of the other metals with the exception of the uranium fuel go through a functionally equivalent refining process.
Fuel: If you had to process the uranium bearing ore in the same manner as you process other metals, you'd likely never do it because the energy requirements would be unbearable. However, chemistry gives us another path where adding fluoride to uranium creates a uranium based "gas."
The gas diffusion plants of yesteryear were (and still are) real energy hogs in the using the differential rate of diffusion between the various radionuclides of UF6. Gas centrifuge plants require about 40% less energy to accomplish the same degree of enrichment. But it still requires a great deal of energy to separate the U235 from the U238. Energy ultimately means CO2
Once a suitable degree of enrichment has been achieved (and the newer designs call for a greater enrichment along with a commensurate longer "burn time" in the reactor core), the UF6 is converted back to it's oxide form and formed into clad "fuel pins" that are placed in rods that are gathered as fuel bundles for insertion into the core. Once the reactor is initially loaded, more uranium must be processed for the eventual removal of groups of expended fuel bundles.
Note that while you design this as almost exclusively electrically based (using some of the power from the reactor to run the purification process), the lower the starting ore percentage, the greater the amount of energy required to enrich the fuel. At some point it requires 100% of the nuclear reactor power output to process the replacement fuel with no net left for anything else. Fuel reprocessing takes a somewhat different route than the UF6 route described above with reduction of energy requirements for the fueling of the reactor.
The nuclear reactor has a rather deep CO2 hole to start with compared to a coal-fired power plant (even IGCC) because of the nature of the equipment design and requirements, but can nominally show less CO2 emissions over the life of the reactor based upon MWh production comparisons. However, as ore grades decline, the energy requirement and the CO2 produced in chasing the fuel enrichment requirements can easily put a reactor design so deep into a "CO2 hole" and energy hole that it can never emerge from. We are probably a few decades away from that point but it might not bode well for the reactors coming on line as we approach that point.
You may have experience in nuclear power, but your numbers for gas diffusion versus gas centrifuge seem way off. According to this Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium
an SWU from diffusion takes about 2,400 KwH, while for the centrifuge, it takes about 60 KwH, a factor of 40 difference. You say a gas centrifuge takes 40% less energy than diffusion for the same enrichment, but this should be more like 98% less energy!! It is like getting 800 miles per gallon instead of 20 miles per gallon. Compared to gaseous diffusion, the gas centrifuge is a much superior process.
An order of magnitude less than wind for the same generating capacity, and wind isn't seen as a big contributer to CO2 emissions from the cement foundations of the turbines. This is trivially inconsequential.
And modern nuclear powerplants use far less steel than wind farms for the same generating capacity; The CO2 emissions from plant construction are trivial.
Well thats a double load of bullshit. Centrifuge plants use about 2% the energy of diffusion plants, not 40%, and the energy can come from, hold it now, other nuclear power plants.
This is before we get to CANDU's which dont actually require enrichment.
Well seeing we recover 300ppm ore with an energy return of over 500, we can extend that all the way down to mining average crust with postive energy return before even going to breeder reactors. Theres financial reasons why we wont do this, but the energy argument just aint so.
Somewhere buried away I have the concrete and steel requirements for a number designs under consideration as well as recently completed (elsewhere in the world).
But off the top of my head, the current Gen III design requires something on the order of 50+ metric tons of steel/MW. The Gen III+ require less than that (somewhere between 40 and 45, but more than the reactors currently sited in the US). Concrete and steel requirements depend upon the manufacturer but even the AP1000 "standard design" has a fairly impressive basemat concrete footprint at 10,000 cubic yards and we haven't even considered the walls, subassemblies, etc. The 1.75-inch thick steel containment dome (~110 ft dia x 215 ft high)isn't exactly a "lightweight"
So, are you saying that 1000 MW of wind power would require at least 100,000 cubic yards of concrete? Interesting.
As for the difference between the gas diffusion and gas centrifuge plants USEC advertises the energy usage rate as being 5% of the comparable gas diffusion plant of the same SWU rating. I don't dispute that. Again, what is overlooked is that those high precision centrifuges don't grow on trees or spontaneously form from a collection of aluminum soft drink cans.
Don't get me wrong and think I'm "against" nuclear power...I'm not. But I also think it's unrealistic to expect that we can simply go one and grow at 2 to 2.5% per year and expect we'll be able to "keep up" no matter what the technology.
I reiterate the recent comment of Duke Power on this issue as they look to increase both their nuclear and coal-fired capacity at a recent climate change meeting: "If you think that we can simply keep growing at this rate, you're dreaming."
I'd really like to find:
1) Steel usage per MW for Gen III and Gen III+ reactor designs. e.g. the AP1000.
2) Concrete usage for the same reactor designs.
3) What other materials get used in large amounts to make nuclear reactors?
This site http://timjervis.blogspot.com/2007/05/co2-pollution-from-nuclear-constru... cites 520000 cubic metres (~= 1.2 million tonnes) of concrete and 67000 tonnes of steel for an average sized (1GW?) plant, unfortunately the source link is broken, but you can check Google's cached version:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:dpPOL8J4B8sJ:www.nei.org/index.asp%3...
I tried comparing this to wind, and it struck me that the big differences are a) the percentage "uptime" of wind vs nuclear (maybe half at best) and b) the estimated lifetime of a wind turbine vs nuclear (again, about half). So even in completely optimal location, with minimal concrete foundation requirements and very high wind reliability, it's hard to see how providing 1000MW of high-availability electricity for 60 years could require less concrete and steel building wind turbines vs nukes.
Nuclear energy is subject to negative visceral reactions by most adults who remember the atmosphere of fear because of the cold war. I still remember vividly being a six year old trained to huddle under my school desk in "duck and cover", neighbors building bomb shelters and my father explaining that a shelter wasn't necessary because in Houston we were surely at ground zero in an attack .
Alan's right about a 500 year standard of waste security being fine, and our probable future reprocessing fuel. But, since the alternative seems to be coal, we need to really speed up the construction of reactors. I'm personally more worried about transportation accidents on the way to Yucca Flats than I am about the safety of storage, and Hansen is very likely right that we've underestimated climate change from CO2.Bob Ebersole
Mr. Rapier, in regards to CO2 emissions, there is some information located here:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuclearenvissues.html
There is a table that notes the following:
I could not access the EPA source site above (file not found).
How much CO2 is put off by the concrete in a nuke plant?
IIRC, a lot is put out by the process of creating cement, much more than is created by the energy input into the cement or concrete. Not enough to make nuclear's CO2 output all that high, but noticeable.
In the production of 1 ton of cement clinker: calcination of CaO ~1000 lb/ton of cement
and combustion of coal to provide process heat (at 4.75 MMBTU/ton of cement clinker using a bituminous coal): ~975 lb/ton cement.
Combined CO2 generation rate: ~1975 lb/ton. Adding the CO2 from the calcining of the small amount of MgCO3 to MgO puts you just over 1.1 ton CO2/ton of clinker.
A typical concrete will weigh in at 2 tons/cubic yard and the cement fraction of the concrete will be between 12 and 15% for non-supplemented concretes, 10.5-12.5 % for supplemented.
This works out to roughly 0.275 tons CO2/cubic yard of concrete.
I've followed the nuclear waste issue a bit in Canada. They are heading towards a managed central repository located in the Canadian shield. The Nuclear Waste Management Orgranization's proposal to start developing this central repository was recently accepted by the government. Now they will have to find a community that would be willing to accept this repository.
They key idea I think that has to be accepted in any repository is that it is not a way to get rid of the responsibility for the waste. The nuclear industry will be responsible for the waste for thousands of years. If that requires periodic reprocessing and inspection of the waste they need to budget for that now.
Nuclear waste really isn't any worse of a waste disposal problem than plastic waste or heavy metal waste. In each case we want to be able to limit the dispersal of a substance that will be around for tens of thousands of years.
We not only want to limit the dispersal but in the case of nuclear we also want to make sure that it remains accessible. Why? Because we do not currently recycle nuclear fuel, which we darned well ought to do because that would both reduce the remaining waste and give us significant amounts of additional nuclear fuel as well as other rare elements. Why don't we recycle? Purely for political reasons. Ask Jimmy Carter why we don't recycle as he was the one that mandated that policy.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
There is the potential to recycle all wastes so we should always as much as possible keep it in a valuable concentrated form and accessible.
I see several fundamental problems with nuclear:
1) it has large unit sizes, and long development cycles, so that it can't grow & improve as quickly as wind and solar. Wind & solar are starting at a lower point (20% of new generation capacity in 2006), but they can provide the power we need, and more quickly.
2) it has a number of external costs/subsidies which aren't included in the sticker price. These include all the familiar ones: weapons proliferation, waste storage (which utilities are indeed paying something for, but the costs of which are unknown, because it's paralyzed), and Price-Anderson liability protection. These costs need to be analyzed, perhaps by the NAS, and included in the price, or at least in the cost comparisons used in making public policy. Wind & solar have none of these external costs.
3) uranium supply has been deeply underinvested in for decades. It's not clear how quickly it can ramp up, and at what cost. It's price has jumped very quickly lately: $250/lb uranium, for instance, is not an insignificant cost, as it would add $.01 per KWH. Utilities have long term contracts, so they aren't paying that price yet, but they will eventually.
$250/lb uranium? Looks like less than half of that to me.
Sure. But I've seen investor advisories projecting $250. Will it get there? Who knows. All we know is that due to weapons conversion that 1) current uranium mining is a small % of current consumption and 2) that prices up until very recently were artificially low, and 3) that ramping up production will take a long investment period.
If $125 is sustained, that will add half a penny per KWH, which is significant in the highly competitive world of electrity trading.
My point is that nuclear advocates claim that uranium costs can never be a significant factor in nuclear electricity pricing, and that appears questionable.
Nick,
Those "investment advisers" wouldn't be trying to sell you shares in some penny uranium stock or another? My question is, if the stock is so good, then why aren't they holdin on to all they can get and keeping their mouths shut so they can accumulate more?
Its generally better to watch what people do rather than believe their sales pitch. I'd also like to know their credentials as investment advisers, and track record. If they can't provide them they are no better than the "investment advice" of a casino tout telling you which slot machine is paying off that night.
Bob Ebersole
Nuclear plants do not have to be large units. Small units (100 to 200 MW) can take advantage of techniques like prefabrication so that most of the complex fabrication can occur on a tightly controlled assembly line.
Most nuclear advocates, such as Robert Somsel, seem to feel that economies of scale greatly favor large units.
I know people like Rod Adams are pushing for smaller units. What kind of licensing timeline are we looking at for such new designs?
Waste storage is a noncost. Look up discounting. Weapons proliferation isn't an external cost of domestic nuclear power unless we have technology sharing agreements with countries that desire nuclear weapons (North Korea comes to mind) and so really just is a matter of wise policy than a direct cost of electricity production. Liability protection is essentially a non-cost, all individual power providers can operate as LLCs allready, and somehow this allways comes up for nuclear power but not for hydro or natural gas which have similar liability risks (dam failures and natural gas explosions can cause enormous capital loss)
"Waste storage is a noncost. "
We don't know what longterm storage will cost - no one is doing it yet. I agree that discounting future costs make sense, and perhaps the $.001 per KWH will be enough...but we don't know.
"Weapons proliferation isn't an external cost of domestic nuclear power"
Nuclear is an international industry. The Iraq war, a $1.2T expense, was started to prevent WMD's, mostly nuclear. Was that just an excuse? Was the cost unanticipated? Sure. But proliferation is a mighty scary thing, and can't be ignored, just because PO & GW are more in front of us. It would be awfully nice to have an alternative to nuclear to present to N Korea, Iran, and the dozen other countries that are considering nuclear programs. Investment in nuclear represents lost opportunity costs.
"Liability protection is essentially a non-cost"
Just because it's an essentially random, future cost doesn't make it unreal. Just ask the FDIC people, after the S&L bailout.
"all individual power providers can operate as LLCs allready,"
I don't understand. How does this relate? If Price-Anderson were repealed, would these LLC's still be able to invest in new plants?
" somehow this allways comes up for nuclear power but not for hydro or natural gas"
Hydro & natural gas don't have liability caps, do they?
Dezakin
"all individual power providers an operate as LLCs allready"
A Limited Liability Corporation may protect a utility from the financial consequences of their actions, but that still leaves the question of who pays for an accident. Its obvious the utility's answer is the victims and the public, not the management or investors.
How in the fuck is that supposed to convince me to support nuclear power?
"and somehow this allways(sic) comes up for nuclear power but not for hydro or natural gas which have similar liability risks"
No, they don't. Nuclear accidents have the potential to poison an area for 10,000 years. There has not been a dam collapse since the Johnstown flood, and only a very few natural gas fires at generating plants.
As I've stated elsewhere in this thread, I favor nuclear power as a baseload. But when you lie about the risks or who is assuming the risks you totally loose me.
And its utter BS that storage of wastes is a non-cost. We have onsite storage right now. The plant guards, and the storage areas are current costs.
Bob Ebersole
Its not my job to sell it to you. Its stating the obvious that nuclear power can survive in the market by distributing its risk to the average citizen, just as chemical processing and hydroelectric companies are capable of doing today. Or they could buy insurance, at maybe 5 million per reactor year.
Er, no. Actinide contamination represents a tiny portion of radiological hazard vastly dwarfed by potential contamination by Sr-90 and Cs-137, both of which have roughly 30 year half lives. 300 years and the background radiation is the same as ordinary soil; These aren't very motive and pose little radiological risk. The largest risk is radioactive iodine, which has a half life measured in days, because of its high mobility and high biouptake and its tendancy to migrate to the thyroid gland. Nearly all of the Chernobyl accident fatalities (outside those directly at the plant who suffered acute radiation sickness) were related to iodine contamination, which thankfully poses no threat after several months.
Using that logic, theres never been a fatality from nuclear power plants... Chernobyl doesnt count because its foreign.
There have been... some dam failures since Jonestown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morvi_dam_burst
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malpasset_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_Dam_failure
Natural gas terminals face enormous risk and potential loss of life, on the order of tens of thousands.
All options have risk, and you have to weigh them. I still think hydro is the best way of generating power even with it having the largest risk portfolio of any energy source.
The plant guards are watching the plant, not the waste, unless you cout the cooling ponds. You cant steal a storage cask, they're too damned heavy and big. You cant damage it, they're too damned durable. Maybe with a whole lot of anti-tank artillery, but even then its doubtful.
The storage space required is very small per reactor year, taking up less than a quarter of the plants parking lot.
Dezakin,
Yes it is your job to sell nuclear power to me, and everyone else on this blog. Otherwise, why are you bothering to post?
You still have not explained why transfering the liability for nuclear plants to the public, while letting the finaceers collect the profit and not assuming the risk is in the public's interest. I certainly don't want any liability.
You stated that Chernobyl shoudn't count against the industry's safety record because it was constructed overseas.Its still an accident killing thousands from cancer.
The dams that you cited as failing were all overseas except a couple over 100 years ago. So, your logic says that nuclear accidents don't count, while 100 year old dam accidents do count. You hypocrisy is duly noted.
Still no gas plant explosions, even though the gas business has been around in a big way for the last 60 years?
I don't want to debate with you any longer, you misrepresent the evidence to support an untenable position, that somehow every human in the US should be liable for the nuclear industry's profits without getting the financial profits.
Bob Ebersole
Bob,
I think that whatever the disaster, if it is big enough, the SOP these days is that liability get charged to Uncle Sam. Isn't Price-Anderson just an explicit statement of what happens anyway? People talk about the S&L blowout in the 80's, but wasn't the bailout something way above and beyond what FDIC was supposed to do? Also, wasn't the net result there the transfer of money (hundreds of billions) from taxpayers to wealthy investors? Like I said, SOP.
Suppose there is a deep, undiscovered fault under Glen Canyon Dam and it lets go with a Mag. 7 earthquake (sort of like what just happened to the nuclear plant in Japan). The inundation might breach Boulder/Hoover, and then we have an "interesting" situation. Lots of little riverside towns get scrubbed off the map, and lots and lots of people in the Southwest no longer have enough electricity or water (and this goes on for years). I don't think there is any insurance for something like this, probably there could not be, unless the government intervened, and I bet something like this event is more likely to happen than a major nuclear accident in the US.
You're arguing against a strawman here. Its not explicitly in the public interest to assume liability. You can argue in favor of Price-Anderson if you want to make incentives for nuclear investment, though I would favor instead simply heavily taxing coal power.
But I wasn't illustrating desirable policy. Its simply an observation that givin the nature of limited liability theres no reason why Price Anderson is necissary for the survival of the nuclear power industry even if it was uninsurable. If you have a problem with this, you need to address how liability for hydroelectric dams and chemical processing companies manage their liability as well.
Are you so deliberately obstinate or is it that you cant recognize sarcasm?
If there hasn't been a dam disaster since the Jonestown flood, then there hasn't been a nuclear power accident ever. If you include Chernobyl as a warning for nuclear power (you should, 5000 lives shortened from iodine poisoning) then you should also consider the far greater danger posed by dams. One several decades ago washed 25000 people away overnight and killed some 145000 over the next several months from famine and disease.
Western dams are mostly safe, and well, western reactors are mostly safe. There are risks to both (and substantially greater risks from dams) and I support both in spite of the risks.
Well, obviously you dont want to debate. You want to construct strawmen. That was never my position.
"givin the nature of limited liability theres no reason why Price Anderson is necissary for the survival of the nuclear power industry even if it was uninsurable. "
Do you feel that Price-Anderson could be repealed? Corporate limited liability hasn't changed since the 50's, so do you feel it was never necessary in the first place? If so, why was it passed?
Sure; There'd probably be unintended consequences. I dont know how liability is managed for hydroelectric dams or natural gas terminals, or other large structures with low risk probability but trillion dollar costs in the event of a failure, but I suspect it wouldn't be the end of the nuclear industry. They'd hate it of course, and I'm not familiar enough with the law or the liability structure of competing power supplies; Who insures coal against frivilous (or legitimate) lawsuits for resulting health problems? So I cant really say I advocate its repeal either.
With some fifty years of experience, modelling liability costs shouldn't be too difficult.
Well it was probably necissary for the nuclear industry to get started. This was fairly new and the risks were not well understood, but everyone knew you could blow up cities with it. I imagine large corporations were unwilling to invest in something potentially risky (or even fund VC) without some sort of legal protection.
I'm not intimately familiar with the law but I think theres more in there than just liability protection also... something that prevents frivolous lawsuits or something along those lines.
Hi Robert,
I am not an expert in nuclear power, though I do have a degree in nuclear physics, and have been interested in the issues since the early 80's. I started out as a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, but early on reconsidered and have felt for a long time that nuclear power is getting a bum rap.
My current thinking on the subject has been formed mostly by the writings of Bernard Cohen.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/
Dr. Cohen is a nuclear physicist with an extensive background in research and is well regarded in the nuclear physics community; he is a former chairman of the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics. He has spent the latter part of his career investigating the environmental effects of radiation. He has written an excellent book in support of nuclear power:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html
Cohen presents many strong arguments on issues related to nuclear power. Regarding nuclear waste, his views include:
Three Mile Island exposed the public to miniscule amounts of radiation. A passenger on a transcontinental flight receives a greater dose of additional radiation than a person living near TMI did from the accident. Chernobyl is a worst-case accident, and while 75 people died as a direct result, and overall thousands developed thyroid cancer, the casualties are comparable to those from exposure to fossil fuel power toxins for just one year.
I wouldn't mind a nuclear power plant in my backyard. It is much safer and pleasant to live next to a nuclear plant than to a coal-fired plant, and with cogeneration, I could get inexpensive district heating from the nuclear plant cooling water.
Finally, something Cohen doesn't emphasize, but which I think is important; the risks of low level radiation are probably grossly overestimated, and in fact, most of us may be radiation deficient. Cohen did an extensive study of radon in US homes, and found a negative correlation between radon exposure and lung cancer. While he did an ecological study, which doesn't have the same rigor as a typical epidemiological study, his results and the results of the nuclear shipyard workers study (see John Cameron) disprove the linear no threshold model of radiation exposure used in our radiation exposure standards.
I have always thought it was the orders of magnitude more low level waste that was the problem. Too radioactive for people to be around and there is a lot of it.
an ionizing radiation deficiency? oh, come on now.
Some of us could probably use a little more UV to create vitamin D, but the contention that we could use a little more hard radiation is quite a stretch.
Looking at the question on a large scale, the question to me seems to be whether it's nukes 'instead of' coal or 'in addition to'. Using well-designed nukes to help reduce death and misery while transitioning to a lower-energy lifestyle makes some sense. Using them to maximize the current paradigm for a short while longer makes little, and I'm afraid that's what we'll see.
greenish,
if you glow in the dark you won't need electricity for a reading lamp by your bed. Of course you are radiation deficient.
Bob Ebersole
I've been pretty hard on nukes lately, but I'll take this one on. It's the same effect that causes kids living in pristine environments to get asthma. We need exposure to certain natural dangers so that our body's immune systems learn how to cope with them and how to cope with new exposures to things. We live in a sea of air, filled with viruses, bacteria, and lots of little jiggly things that ionize dna and stimulate our senses. We spend way too much time in the shower and too little time in the dirt. Whether we like to think about it or not, we are not a single organism. Our bodies are simply bags full of various creatures that figured out how to live together under one skin. Our organs, cells, mitochondria, etc. are all vestiges of separate living things, and our digestive system is a rotting chamber of horrors, separated from all the rest by a thin wall through which we absorb the waste products from lots of tiny little creatures.
Dismissing the data of radiation exposure offhand is dismissing billions of years of evolution on a much more radioactive world than we have now.
Well I haven't been all that hard on nukes lately, but REALLY, you think anyone has an ionizing radiation deficiency?
You are perfectly right that kids who are brought up eating a little dirt do better. This has to do with growing up with a healthy immune system.
On the other hand kids growing up in a house with a lot of radon are NOT benefitted. http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/physic.html
Ionizing radiation smashes through cells and creates damage. If you can find any credible link anywhere about its beneficial effects at a low level, I will be very impressed.
So to sum up: dirt good for kids, ionizing radiation not so good for kids.
The EPA uses the results of the BEIR. They base their results on the study of uranium miners, who all received a fairly high dosage of radon over a short period of time. The studies use the Linear No Threshold Model (LNT)to extrapolate to residential exposure (small dosages over 70 years). The studies used by the EPA do not have large enough sample populations to discriminate risk from low levels of radon directly, they have to model to low level risk.
The Cohen study, done after the studies used by the EPA, is an ecological study over a large population of US homes across the country. It shows that the LNT model used by the EPA DOES NOT FIT the data for low dosage radon, and probably grossly overestimates the risk. See:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/%7Eblc/LNT-1995.PDF
So our radiation standards and our "Physician's Guides" from the EPA are fundamentally flawed, they use a model for risk that clearly does not hold in the dosage regime where they make recommendations. Linear models are usually the first best guess in science, for radiation exposure risk, it is time to develop more sophisticated models.
Every second, in every human body, thousands of natural radioactive elements in our bodies decay and create damage. This has been going on since humans have existed, and we, like other organisms, have ways of coping with this damage. It seems to me there is a threshold.
Here is a recent link about fungi that seem to really benefit from radiation:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070522210932.htm
Yeah, I already know about the fungi - cool - and I understand that a linear model may not be the perfect fit, no surprise in a nonlinear system.
Still, an ionizing radiation deficiency?
Come ON now.
Why not, damn it? Radiation is a natural phenomen, and if I may suggest billions of people think some of it is healthy by just going out sunbathing.
If there could be deficiency from low exposure to infection agents, why not from radiation?
The long term hazards of fission power are well known, hence the un-insurability of fission power thus needing Price-Anderson.
And the 'need to defend' fission from 'terror' are an expense that I do not see the pro-fission people account for.
Do the negatives outweigh the negatives of 1). Blackouts; and 2). Global Warming caused by coal-fired plants?
Nor do I see the people who argue along these lines address how the model of existence (continuous growth - ever expanding money/consumption) or the limits of things like Phosphorous or other commodities.
Lets say you GET enough fission power to keep the present growth cure going - what then? What will be attempted in 50 years to keep things going?
Compare TMI and Vajont dam. Or even natural gas terminals near large population centers.
Which is more insurable?
Price-Anderson is a boogeyman.
Price-Anderson is a boogeyman.
Under Appeal to authority argument:
"Even nuclear power executives acknowledge that their industry is financially dependent on Price-Anderson to shield nuclear power from free market forces."
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear_power_plants/c...
So you have Dezakin - who says 'boggyman' (and has a history or handwaving) or statements made by nuclear power executives and summarized as the above statement by the group Public Citizen.
(And no one has touched the idea of 'Oh look, here's a limit' - if we address this limit of keeping a growing power source - "keep the economy going", how does humanity address the next limits of raw material?)
Edwards is smart. Since Germany has shown that they can grow their economy while oil consumption declines, why not imitate their efforts or surpass them? It would seem that investment in wind and solar is the way to go, along with accepting that suburban sprawl peaked in 2007 and is going down the tubes.The USA should be moving toward dense living arrangements as quickly as possible-only the countries without major suburban development will make it over the hump, IMHO.
so if we copy the Germans then who will be our equivalent France and Eastern Europe ? I guess the goal would be Canada and Mexico.
Germans import France's nuclear power and are trying to get eastern europe to build nuclear reactors so that they can import nuclear electricity from them.
Germans are also looking to get a europe wide grid so that they can get their power from other countries and places.
The Germans are building and refurbing coal plants.
Of course the USA is bigger than Germany and Europe so importing electricity would be tougher and less efficient.
Good luck convincing Canada and Mexico to go along with the copy German hypocracy plan.
You wish that suburbs have peaked. Watch the building of more distributed work centers and other infrastructure reconfiguration tweaks that will allow suburbs to continue to florish.
=========
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
I had posted this info (at the tail end of the discussion on peak oil from gail the actuary) which expands upon what Alanofbigeasy says but have modified it for this discussion.
For Robert Rapier, France reprocesses its waste. Nuclear waste is mostly (95-98%) unburned nuclear fuel. Only 0.7-2% of the uranium is used in current once through reactors. Reprocessing sends the fuel through a second time in the form of MOX. France, Russia, Japan and the UK are the main reprocessors of fuel. the US did not reprocess because 1) it was thought to cost a bit more than sticking it in the ground (although with cost overruns on Yucca Mountain this may not be true) 2) Jimmy Carter was concerned about using reprocessing to pull out Plutonium. It is a harder and more expensive way to get your nuclear bomb material.
Molten Salt and other types of nuclear reactors can achieve high burn. Burn up 90+% of the fuel (the actinides) what is left has a half life of 12 years or less. Each of the components of the waste has uses.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com has info on reactor types.
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/
their discussion board has info on reactors and possible waste handling.
For waste handling, store them for a few decades while you build high burn reactors. You will need the high burn reactors to handle existing waste fuel anyway. Using the waste fuel would provide power for 500 years at current usage rate. High burn reactors are breeder reactors lite and can be designed to not have the problems.
The historical choice of water reactors and pressure boilers was because that is what was already made for nuclear submarines and it was for historical political reasons. They always knew even 50 years ago that better nuclear reactors could be made. We need to scale up what we got and finish developing and refining better designs.
========
438 nuclear reactors operating in the world now
http://www.uic.com.au/reactors.htm
32 are under construction now.
completing 4-5 per year 2007-2009
going up to 8 per year 2010-2012
http://www.uic.com.au/nip19.htm
by 2013-2017 the completion rate will be up to 15-30 per year. Without a "crash" program. So the reactors already under construction in the world will be completing at the 8 per year rate that Alanofbigeasy was targeting for 2027.
The historic peak of 24 reactors completed world wide in 1984. The USA completed 12 reactors all by itself in 1974 from an almost standing start in 1969. Only small reactors before then.
Brown Ferry 1 plant started this year in the USA
Watts Bar 2 is going to get completion approval early 2008
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/07/another-nuclear-plant-for-usa-a...
http://www.uic.com.au/nip58.htm#capacity
As of August 2006 over 110 uprates had been approved, totalling 4845 MWe. A further seven uprates totalling about 750 MWe are pending with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and applications for a total of 1690 MWe are expected by 2011.
Up-powering, plant operating extensions to 60 years instead of 40 years for most current plants will more than offset plant closures. New technology from MIT can allow up-powering to increase power generated by 50% for existing reactors. Donut shaped fuel instead of cylinders and nanoparticles to coolant water to allow for higher operating temperatures.
There are 320 reactors in the world production pipeline.
80 reactors were added to the pipeline since the start of 2007. Expected completion of the 320 reactors in the world pipeline by 2030. More reactors are being added to the pipeline. Most of the action will be in China, Russia, India, Ukraine, S Korea and Japan.
The legislation that makes nuclear power plants in the USA attractive already passed in 2005. Further sweateners are going through now. The US will build those 28 reactors by 2025.
Most US and other existing plants are getting operating extensions from 40 years to 60 years. Do not be surprised if they get refurbished for 80 years of operation.
Coal plants are completed at about two per week worldwide. Coal plants take 3 years to build and are of comparable size to nuclear plants. If the world shifted from coal plants to nuclear plants, we could add 100+ nuclear plants every year.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nuclear-pow...
I compare nuclear, coal and wind in terms of construction material. Coal and wind use more steel and concrete to generate the same power.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/06/solar-cells-with-407-efficiency...
Russia has restarted its fast breeder development program. Japan is a likely buyer of it. China and India are also working on fast breeder.
==Nuclear power has added more power than wind and solar and can continue to do so. The lack of flexibility is wrong.
From 1993 to 2005 in the United States new non-fossil fuel sources of energy added
Wood (biomass): 96 thousand megawatt-hours/per year.
Waste: - 259 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. Negative number.
Geothermal: - 190 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. Negative number.
Solar: (Usually everybody’s favorite): +8
Wind (Another favorite): 1345 thousand megawatt-hours/per year.
Overall, renewable energy in the United States has increased at a rate of 1,000 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. The nuclear energy figure is 16,203 thousand megawatt-hours per year for nuclear even without building a new plant.
So the claim that wind and solar are being added faster has not been the case. With up-powering and nuclear plant life extensions nuclear could still end up adding more power than solar.
From 2009 onwards the majority of new US power will be coal. Of the 11 new coal plants being built in the USA now, none are sequestering their pollution.
There is some social pressure against coal but why not more ? Coal pollution kills more people in a day than nuclear energy ever has (1 million per year, 2000-3000 per day). The coal plants don't always blow up they just keep killing. More people die in the coal mines (5000-10,000 per year). Where is your outrage ? Mountain tops are blown off and 7% of the Appalachian forests are destroyed for coal. all the animals that were then when the mountain tops are destroyed get killed. Then after digging for coal for few decades they push the soil back and stick in some seedlings.
When you get cancer from coal or oil pollution does it hurt more than when you get it from a theoretical radiation leak ? Do you end up more dead or less dead ?
Fossil fuel air pollution hurts children and women and older people more.
=====
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
====
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
"So the claim that wind and solar are being added faster has not been the case. With up-powering and nuclear plant life extensions nuclear could still end up adding more power than solar. "
No one is claiming that wind & solar added more than nuclear through 2005. The claim is that wind & solar can add more than nuclear in the next 10 years, and that is clearly the case. Wind was 20% of new generation in 2006, and it could be 100% in 6 years, and start replacing coal & gas after that. Nuclear can't do that.
If I were energy czar I would ban all new non-sequesting coal plants, emphasize wind & solar, and encourage nuclear to grow slowly & without new subsidies. You might object that wind & solar have subsidies. I agree, and my best suggestion would be to eliminate them, and institute carbon taxes on coal.
Treehugger (wall street journal) and many other sources talk about the wind turbine shortage and shortages of suitable silicon for solar.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/07/world_wide_wind_1.php
If wind can go to 100% of new power in 6 years and start replacing coal and gas then great. I will believe it when I see it. Also, make sure that you are talking the correct calculation not 20% of watts but watt/hours. You must add three times the watts for wind before getting equal watt/hours.
build more nuclear and wind and solar until coal and oil are eliminated. Do not stop building any of the better sources until coal and oil are eliminated. Do not assume that wind and solar can do the job until the job is completed.
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com
btw: I know that most people will not take the time to follow the links.
From the link from treehugger
From the wall street journal
http://www.charleston.net/news/2007/jul/15/turbine_shortage_knocks_wind_...
In the U.S., more wind power was installed last year than in any other country in the world: 2,454 megawatts.
However, because wind has 30% operating load factor this is less than the power from one 1GW nuclear reactor. So less power than from the re-activated Browns Ferry 1 Reactor this year. Plus less power per year still than the up-powering of reactors.
Nuclear still adding more than solar. Even if nuclear were to fall to third place, why stop adding it before coal and oil are eliminated ?
=========
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
"the wind turbine shortage and shortages of suitable silicon for solar"
Sure. Wind & solar demand has exploded, and supplies are limited by the speed of manufacturing expansion, which is about 40% per year. That's still doubling every 2 years.
"make sure that you are talking the correct calculation not 20% of watts but watt/hours"
I was.
"build more nuclear and wind and solar until coal and oil are eliminated. Do not stop building any of the better sources until coal and oil are eliminated. "
A good idea. I suspect that we aren't quite ready to do it yet, but I support it. I think it will be hard to retire coal plants before their natural end-of-life, but it would be nice to try.
"Aren't quite ready to do it"...now there's an understatement. Supposedly there are at least 900 new coal plants in the pipe-line worldwide (mostly China, India and around in 70 in the U.S.), probably none of which will have CCS. If they all run for the expected lifetime at max capacity, they will spew out so much CO2 that even if every other country in the world cut their emissions by 50%, we still wouldn't keep CO2 levels under 500 ppm.
I really don't see anyway we're going to be able to avoid dramatic, high-risk and massively expensive "technofix" measures to keep global warming in check. And if they don't work, or backfire, we really are screwed.
First, I had not been following the recent order cycle for foreign nukes and the rate is higher than I expected. This raises the 2027 rate significantly on what can be built on a smooth growth curve.
It also mean that the USA can import more critical parts and reduce bottlenecks with their associated delays.
It also means that the US has a larger poll of engineers to import from (if we can outbid others). Most other nuke labor categories are less likely to be helped by imported labor.
I am willing to raise my guess-estimate of what a safe ramp-up in new nuke construction could reasonably be to 5 or 6 new nukes completed in 2027.
OTOH, your wind vs. nuke data is quite biased !
From 1993 to 2005 in the United States new non-fossil fuel sources of energy added
Wind has exponential growth in both size of individual WTs and installed base. Using 1990s data and even early 200x data is simply invalid and irrelevant for wind.
Just use 2006 and first half of 2007 data (outside your range) to give a better view of the impact that wind is having today.
12,634 MW installed as of 6/30/07.
Nice graph to show wind growth
http://www.awea.org/faq/instcap.html
Per the graph an almost 50% growth in the last 24 months.
And wind by state.
http://www.awea.org/projects/
Best Hopes for more new non-GHG generation,
Alan
Does anyone have figures for the amount of Radioactive particles in Coal -how does that compare with releases from Nuclear plants?
If we burn lots of coal to make electricity to make silicon for solar how much radiation does that release?
Every time we walk out on a sunny day we are blasted by radiation. I think we need to keep the risk in perspective. France generates 70%+ of her Electricity from nuclear and no-one seems to bat an eyelid. The're going to be sitting pretty with their electric TGV and plug in Priuses in 10 years and we will be queueing at the gas pumps...
Nick.
Does anyone have figures for the amount of Radioactive particles in Coal -how does that compare with releases from Nuclear plants?
ASCII and Yee shall receive:
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF8&q=coal+radioactivity
Coal loses by several orders of magnitudes.
Even using the average ppm concentration of uranium in the earth's crust, the amount of coal burned lets this amount into the air.
Nuclear reactors however do not let the radioactive materials into the air, unless an accident occurs.
Even including accidents coal still puts more radiation out.
Some coal ash is rich enough in uranium that China is now considering mining it for their power reactors.
Nick -- Don't forget to consider other toxic releases from coal combustion; EPA figures indicate about 48 tons/year of Mercury release from US Coal-burning electrical plants, making them the single largest industrial mercury source in the US and accounting for 40% of total mercury release.
Consider the impact this has on our ability to safely feed ourselves from the ocean...
Mercury Decision: 'Virtually All' Mercury In Ocean Fish Is 'From Natural Sources'
At least, that's one thing 'big-coal' is not responsible for !
Humans dont accumulate mercury, but it is very dangerous for growing nervous sytem: pregant women and young kids shoud avoid eating tunna or swordfish.
"Nick -- Don't forget to consider other toxic releases from coal combustion"
I don't see anyone considering all the "other" toxic relesases from nuclear beyond the high-level end waste. What about ISL chemicals, milling chemicals (including fluorides which are exceedingly more GH intensive than CO2), tailings, radon dust, DU shot at people overseas, controlled releases from plants, etc...?
How many millions have died from poisoning from the nuclear industry?
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2002/DU-Weapons-Pollution31jan03.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/DU-Leuren-Moret21apr03.htm
http://www.downwinders.org/Jim%20Phelps.htm
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/sview/1,3329,250010691,00.html
http://fluoridealert.org/WN-414.htm
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
The mercury pollution caused by humans affects land-based ecosystems and fresh water fish much more than the fish in the ocean.
http://leahy.senate.gov/issues/environment/mercury/hg_prime.html
It is ironic that Vermont, which emits very little mercury, has advisories on mercury-contaminated fresh water fish, due to MidWest mercury emissions that contaminate Vermont watersheds.
An issue that I never see addressed is this: Let's, for the sake of argument, say that nuclear can be made safe if all the procedures followed by the engineers are followed scrupulously. To replace the energy currently supplied by hydrocarbons, or any significant percentage thereof, will require a many fold expansion of the nuclear power base. Nuclear power presumes a highly developed industrial and technological infrastructure.
So nuclear power represents an immense gamble that we will continue to have our present high level infrastructure. If this gamble fails, we have bequeathed our children far, far worse situation than that already bequeathed us by the nuclear industry.
Chernobyl itself is, partially (I know, there are better designs now), an example of what I mean. The SU was in a period of disintegration. Engineers can write procedures, yet even if those procedures are correct, there is no way for engineers to guarantee those procedures will be carried out. There is no way to account for societal decay. And anyone who wants to greatly expand nuclear power without taking account the possibility of societal decay is a -- well, I won't say it.
There is not only an energy crisis, there are other converging issues: some important metals are becoming scarcer, soil is a major issue, water is an issue, and of course global warming is an issue.
These issues are beginning to intertwine and influence each other in a pernicious spiral, just as there was a happy synergy of various factors on the way up the hydrocarbon age hill.
If one looks at the whole picture, there is no truly responsible course but for humanity to scale back and find a way to live in a sustainable way using (mostly) above ground resources. We will be forced to do that eventually in any case. It's simply a matter of how much damage we do to ourselves and our future environement before getting there.
Chernobyl itself is, partially (I know, there are better designs now), an example of what I mean. The SU was in a period of disintegration. Engineers can write procedures, yet even if those procedures are correct, there is no way for engineers to guarantee those procedures will be carried out. There is no way to account for societal decay. And anyone who wants to greatly expand nuclear power without taking account the possibility of societal decay is a -- well, I won't say it.
Clearly by this measure we need to stop all our chemical factories as well?
And demolish (in a controlled way) all our dams too?
If you project forward large scale societal decay, then yes, we really are totally screwed in all sorts of ways.
I think the energy crisis is going to be so bad (and global warming too) that if we DON'T have nukes (as well as as much solar & wind we can, and no damn coal) we're much more likely to fall into that self-sustaining chaos and decay.
Sustained blackouts == riots & collapse.
Sustained coal burning == eco collapse .
Without a highly developed industrial and technological infrastructure, biological hazards (e.g. disease and murderers) will be many orders of magnitude more dangerous problems than nuclear plants.
Yes, of course uncontrolled nuclear plants are dangerous but the service they provide is so critical, compared with so many other things, that we really need them to avoid that general collapse.
Really---I think civilization is fundamentally at risk without large scale replacement and enhancement of non-greenhouse emitting power---and quantitatively it is impossible to achieve in the time we have without substantial nuclear power plants.
If technological society collapses, the most likely proximate dispersal event will be war. Nuclear reactors are a relatively high value targets in a war situation, however that doesn't mean they will be a great source of radiation. What is most likely to happen is that the facilities surrounding the hardened reactor are destroyed and the reactor has to shut down. The nuclear waste stored around the facility is most problematic. I would expect there would be a greater than 50% chance that the nuclear waste would be dispersed somehow in a war situation, either through looting like in post invasion Iraq or directly through intentional bombing of the nuclear waste facilities.
In this postapocolyptic happyland we'll have far more severe problems to occupy our time than radiological dispersal.
Hear, hear.
Wars, however, are much more common the apocolypses. My comments were chiefly targeted at recognizing that the mitigations necessary in order to avoid problems with nuclear material durring an apocolpse are the same mitigating measures you should take to secure the material in the event of war.
I see these all as 'second order' problems stemming from the fact there's too many people. And it's getting worse. What is it - after deaths an additional 200-250 thousand people are added to the planet every day.
People will address everything but the root cause, hence I'm a doomer. The entire current paradigm is based on growth. I see no chance of this changing until it's too late to avoid a crash.
There is often the assertion made that insuring nuclear facilities is an expense that is 'subsidized' by the US govt in the form of Price-Anderson act. Maybe someone could explain to me how this is an expense. Other than the time involved in debating the issue in congress, the cost is non-existent. Only IF there are significant accidents will there be cost. This is like any other 'self-insuring.'
I tend to favor AlanFromBigEasy's point of view. IMO the biggest detriment to the nuclear debate is from the nuke proponents who arrogantly dismiss anyone who brings up the negative issues. These issues need to be dealt with and not dismissed as being insignificant.
Expected cost of all nuclear accidents =
probability of a nuclear accident in any year
x average cost of accident
x number plants
x average life[*] of nuclear plant (in years)
Per plant share of "insurance" cost =
Expected cost of all nuclear accidents / number of plants
Is Per plant share of "insurance" cost >> Price-Anderson limit of liability ?
If yes, insurance cost is subsidized and the expense is not fully accounted for in the operating costs of the nuclear facility.
-- Philip B. / Washington, DC
* - operating life should include the full length of time when the risk of an accident is greater than zero [i.e., from first fuel loading through final mothballing (or longer?)]
energy is subsidized.
So what ?
Compare subsidies on a $/kwh basis and see how things look.
Compare the hypothetical cost risks of nuclear with actual damage and costs of coal and oil.
Coal ($50 billion revenue industry) causing about $160 billion per year in health and business damage. Acid rain reduces the life of many cars and increases repair costs on property. 25% more emergency room visits for asthma and heart attacks. Care for the 30,000 + people in the USA who are sick for years before dieing of cancer and lung and heart disease.
Oil also comes out bad on actual cost and damage borne by society. Japan's motivation for WW2, cut off from oil. Iraq wars one and two. Plus the air pollution deaths, illnesses etc...
solar and wind build it and stop the new coal plants and fossil fuel addition and replace the old coal and natural gas plants and then we can revisit how much nuclear was added in the meantime.
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com
"Only IF there are significant accidents will there be cost. This is like any other 'self-insuring.'"
Sure. The same could have been said about FDIC insurance, before the S&L meltdown.
Liability caps, like other things like loan guarantees, are a significant subsidy. Maybe it's worth it, but it's a real expense.
If its too big a risk for private insurance, why should the government assume the risk? Remember, we all pay taxes and will all have to pay if there is a problem, but only the investors get to keep the profits from a new generating plant. Sounds like another public trough for the corporate hogs.
The other examples of public risk underwriting generally have broad spread benefits. FDIC encourages small savers. Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac lower interest rates for homeowners and make homes affordable for millions of people.
Bob Ebersole
Who insures against dam failures or natural gas terminal explosions?
I'm not aware of any of the above as having happened, but LLoyds of London generally insures against all large, unusual risks. The Johnstown flood was the only dam failure with loss of life, and it was about 130 years ago. And wasn't there a LNG explosion at a terminal in Boston about 60 tears ago? At any rate, the chances of either are vanishingly small.
Bob Ebersole
And there have not been any nuclear accidents in the west that have resulted in any documented loss of life. But coal plant routinely kill tens of thousands of people per year as other have documented in this thread.
'Not any Documented loss of life'
- well, documents are only paper, of course.. paper gets lost, shuffled, buried. But here's a taste of STEP ONE in the process.. and just consider how many places have a similar version of this story..
Uranium Mining and the Laguna People
http://www.greens.org/s-r/10/10-07.html
"The reason nobody opened their mouth was because the bread and butter were placed on the table every weekend. Money is the maker of all evil. It's very sad what we're going through. People are crying out for help. One day, with God's will, that will straighten out..."
"I've lost my mother, a brother who left four children. The youngest one didn't know who his father was. He keeps asking his older brothers, "How did it feel to have our dad around?" It's sad for a child to ask, how would it feel to have your dad to help you with problems, to hug you and to hold you, to tell you, "I love you very much." I still feel sad about it. (Her brother worked 30 years for Anaconda, and she believes he died of undiagnosed stomach cancer, like their mother, who suffered severe stomach pain and wasted away before her death, which was attributed to heart failure. The nearest hospital was in Albuquerque.) "
"The ore was transported by (the) Santa Fe (railroad), to the mill site. No one has had the idea to sweep along the tracks to find out what kind of contamination (is there)—the crusher was on the east side of the village. The wind blows from the east, and we suffered a lot and the smell was really something terrible...we had to go through all this hell; to me it was like during the Vietnam war, how this blasting-you could actually hear the rocks fall back to the surface. There was a lot of cracks (in the houses); the homes have been jarred so much, they're hard to put back together...we were told it didn't have to do with the mine blasting, but some of us Native Americans aren't dumb! We know what technology is, now...it's just a shame how we Indians are crying out for help, yet DOE doesn't understand. I think we need to push."
"Anyway, I sit here, day after day in Paguate, still suffering. I'm proud to be a Native American Indian from Laguna, who was diagnosed with cancer, whose life has been shortened. But I'm going to keep struggling for better tomorrows, & I hope to continue to do what I have to, to be happy and say what I have to."
Mining is historically the dirtiest step, and all these anecdotes could be told in any community anywhere in the world. This isn't necissarily an epidemiological connection.
But, its all about risk assessment; Compare risks.
Will people please stop saying nuclear is safe. 3rd story down, although they are all interesting and relevant to this topic.
http://www.dukeemployees.com/nuclear27.shtml
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Define "safe"! Based on its track record, and compared to alternative forms of power generation of equivalent wattage, it seems pretty safe to me. I didn't used to think so 5 or 10 years ago, mind you, mainly because the abstract threat of a meltdown or nuclear war just seemed far more terrifying than the reality of the death and injury caused all the time by other forms of power generation. Actually, to be honest, it does still seem more terrifying, but at least I accept now that the probability of such an event is sufficiently low that I'd be comfortable living with it, given the alternatives.
Read.
http://www.euradcom.org/2003/execsumm.htm
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Ok, so a) what sort of peer-review process has that study been through and b) where's the comparison to, say, the effects of radiation from coal-based power consumption?
Further, most of that report seems to be based on the effects of fallout from weapons testing, which is just as likely to have occurred whether we have nuclear power stations or not.
Certainly nothing in there changed my view that the risks of living near a nuclear power station are neglible compared to the risks of traffic accidents, or even the risks of the climate change consequences from continuing to release CO2 at current rates.
There's far far simpler and more effective things we could do to reduce the risks of premature death from anthropogenic causes than worry about nuclear power stations.
I've never been in favour of coal.
The ECRR is a radiation risk assessment committee. It was not a study, but a review of data and literature from Europe, mainly in the years following Chernobyl.
This (PDF) http://www.llrc.org/health/subtopic/anoracfinal.pdf sites several sources which all point to the ICRP models being falsified by the evidence, hence the new ECRR model with is in line with the actual numbers. Studies of infant leukemia and the observation of increased minisatellite DNA mutations following Chernobyl, both falsified the ICRP risk models by factors of between 100 and 1000, as did other cancer and health factors. That is why a new model on up-dated biological information was made.
The report encompasses nuclear fall-out, pollution, DU and accidental release. All of which will continue in a world of nuclear power.
There are far simpler and more effective ways of reducing CO2 emissions than nuclear power.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
"There are far simpler and more effective ways of reducing CO2 emissions than nuclear power"
Well that's a more interesting debate to have. I'd agree "more effective - in many locations", or at least "preferable".
"Simpler"...well, that's more debateable. The technology necessary to guarantee sufficient baseload power from renewables is far from perfected, and certainly not commercially viable yet. It's also very location dependent - Australia & NZ, for instance, probably have no pressing need for nuclear due to adequate resources provided by renewables (especially given Australia's low population density). But there are parts of the world with very high population densities, and insufficient reliable supplies of renewable energy. That would be the obvious place to install nuclear (and indeed, generally is the places it is already).
The story that you indicate uses results from the ECRR 2003 recommendations. Those recommendations are based on several generally unaccepted models for radiation exposure. The recommendations would place a limit of 10 mR per person per year from man made sources, where the natural radiation background is already over 200 mR per year and the typical US citizen receives around 80 mR per year from radon.
You mean it is based on models that were not invented by the nuclear industry itself... And not wanting to increase the amount of radiation one recieves beyond the background radiation is bad how? Radon causes a lot of lung cancer in particular - it is a problem in many parts of the US. Your example only serves to strengthen that model.
Think tobacco science. Nuclear science. Backed by industry. Safe.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
All of the accepted models were invented by people outside of the nuclear industry, health physicists. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a linear model, it did take some imagination to come up with the erroneous hot particle model espoused by the ERCC.
You say that radon causes much lung cancer, but such statements are based solely on extrapolations down from high exposure samples, like uranium miners and Hiroshima survivors. It is like setting car insurance rates for normal drivers by observing accident rates for race car drivers.
There is a wide variation in background radiation exposure in the US. People in one state get 600 millirems/year, while others in another state get 200 millirems/year. It is interesting that the people in the 600 millirem/year state, Colorado, have a lower cancer mortality than people in the lower radiation states, like Florida. When something like TMI exposes its neighbors to about 1 millirem additional exposure, it is easy to see this amount is neglegible compared to the 400 millirem/year additional exposure people get when they move from Florida to Colorado.
It is interesting that New Zealand, where you live?, doesn't have nuclear power, yet the cancer mortality rate in New Zealand is higher than for the United States, where we have nuclear power and even had open air nuclear weapons testing.
http://www.nzhis.govt.nz/stats/mortstats.html
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/otheract/gis/gis_atnchs.htm
"It is interesting that New Zealand, where you live?, doesn't have nuclear power, yet the cancer mortality rate in New Zealand is higher than for the United States"
Different populations will always had different cancer rates. It is the change in those rates due to external factors that is important. There have been plenty of studies in Europe after Chernobyl that show that the CHANGE in cancer rates is far above expected given the old radiation risk models.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1867971
The rest of your exposure argument hinges around your first premise, which is where the debate is centred. Does internal exposure (low dose) cause more harm than external. And that is where the old models fail to explain increased rates of cancers. Why is it erroneous?
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Can't say I know how reliable this report is considering some of the sources (TORCH for instance.)
Looks like an attempt to put the cart before the horse. People are often sloppy with epidemiology. This isn't saying that there weren't significant risks beyond the contamination of I-131, but thats the only thing we have reliable causal connection with.
Sure, but thats part of the measurment. I-131 doses are very small but they're very significant because they migrate immediately to the thyroid.
And about half of Americans get cancer and a third die from it, with radiation being a primary cause. I would argue for lower civilian and industry exposure limits.
Medical X-rays have a clear health benefit and are, generally worth the risk of added exposure. But nuclear power ?
I would be happy to never see another BWR reactor built, unless GE can get the radiation down to PWR levels.
And another reason to place nukes *FAR* from population centers.
Would that we could away with shutting down existing nukes in an orderly fashion, but the alternatives of coal & NG are worse.
Alan
Is NG really much worse? My understand was that the state-of-the-art in gas turbine power stations have a life-time carbon intensity little more than most nuclear power stations of equivalent capacity.
You're kidding right? Your dose from the potassium in ten bananas is higher than that. Get your priorities strait. Its time to ban bananas!
I was just finishing a banana when I read that.
Bananas help me meet a biological need (5 fruits & veggies/day). Potassium is lost through sweating (see sauna and New Orleans summers). Any excess potassium is quickly excreted, so I am not at ALL sure that eating bananas increases my radiation load. My body needs just so much potassium and no more.
I live 1 foot above sea level (good) in an area without granite & radon (400' of silt underneath) so I get minimal natural exposure, despite my banana eating habits :-)
If I am short one fruit & veggie after dinner, I walk to Sophie's for a handmade Papaya or Blackberry or Strawberry or Coconut or Plum sorbet. If I am short two fruits & vegetables, well ,,,
Purely for my health of course :-)
OTOH, I do NOT have a biological need for radiation from a BWR (about twice the releases per MWh of PWR from memory). And Waterford III is as close as I want to get even a PWR (actually I would prefer Riverbend, >100 miles away).
NO MORE BOILING WATER REACTORS !
Alan
Alan, some of your posts are credible; You fretting about the radiation dose from BWR versus say, phosphate based fertilizers, No Salt, bananas, or even the very bones in your body signifies a... lack of perspective.
Hi Alan,
The CDC atlas for mortality in the US (1988-1992) give about 500,000 cancer deaths a year out of a total of about 2,100,000 deaths a year, so less than a quarter of those deaths are due to cancer.
The BEIR gives a whole life cancer risk estimate of about 0.8/1,000,000 per millirem of exposure. Given that the average exposure in the US is about 300 millirem/per year, or 15,000 millirem over 50 years, that would give an integrated whole life cancer risk at about 1.2%. This is about 1/40 of the 50% whole life cancer risk that you mention. One part in 40 is not a primary or majority cause, even if you are a former Republican. ;-)
Here is an observation that proponents of a high radiation risk have a difficult time refuting. About 300 millirem per year is the average US exposure, but that average is not uniform. People in the Rocky Mountains get about double the exposure due to prevalence of uranium ores and high altitudes that reduce shielding by the atmosphere. People in the South get less than the average, as they are not proximate to uranium deposits and also live at a low altitude. Despite the difference in radiation exposure, which is much larger than the typical exposures from nuclear power, the rate of cancer death is lower in the Rocky Mountains than in the South! Maybe it is just that the people in the Rockies just know how to live right, but as they are getting a double dose of radiation, and still coming in with a low rate of cancer, this indicates that there are other factors here that are more "primary" than radiation, as far as cancer is concerned.
Here are some links to sources I use:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/otheract/gis/gis_atnchs.htm
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/radon/usagamma.gif
I assume you're talking about the U.S. alone, but the global situation is rather different. http://www.uic.com.au/nip14.htm lists 4000 "immediate fatalities" from 1972-1992 due to hydro power.
According to http://www.uic.com.au/nip14app.htm, 3500 alone killed in India due to two dam failure incidents in 1979 and 1980. Mind you, I have some issue with equating a "dam failure" with "deaths due to hydro power", given that dams have a purpose other than for hydro (I can't even find proof that the dams in question are used for hydroelectric power. However the Vaiont dam disaster in Italy, 1963, killing over 2000, was definitely a case of fatalies due to hydroelectric power generation).
I completely disagree. What happens is that the proponents patiently and convincingly debunk the negative issues that are raised but it seems to have no effect. The anti-nukes just keep using the same discredited sources (e.g. Storm and Smith) and making the same disproved arguments (e.g. we are running out of Uranium). Many observers just sort of split the difference. So the proponents get frustrated and sometimes are intemperate.
But this thread seems to be different. It seems the proponents are being heard.
I've read too many assertions that nuclear waste is 'no problem' with the implication that one can almost sprinkle it on one's breakfast cereal with no ill results. Then there are assertions that Chernobyl caused 'only 30-70' deaths and everything is hunky-dory in that area now because look, all the wildlife is thriving. Even the most cursory search will reveal major problems and excess deaths in the thousands from Chernobyl. These are the kinds of 'arrogant dismissals I'm referring to, and there are plenty of them. I find assertions that there exists thousands of years of easily extracted nuclear fuel to be highly suspect. When someone makes these kinds of suspect assertions, I tend to doubt anything else they say. And I also am very skeptical of the notion that humans can be 'radiation deficient.'
I do appreciate in-depth analysis of nuclear power and the design difficulties. I'm wary of what I consider arm-waving. I'm not anti-nuke, just cautious and very aware that humans are not very good at handling large complex technical systems. Hence the desire to take it slowly and carefully.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster_effects
Take it apart yourself. Epidemiological studies only show any measurable effects in the immediate vicinity from thyroid cancer caused by rapid uptake of I-131... notably because many in the region were iodine deficient with no stay indoors order untill much too late.
This leads to maybe some 5000 incidences measurable over the decades. To generate numbers larger than that you start using the risk assessment questionable models that dont even rise above the statistically measurable.
There hasn't been any statistically measurable effects from contamination by any long lived radioisotopes. This doesn't mean that you can sprinkle them on your cereal, but you dont want to do that with lead paint either.
Why? Do you have any particular reason that gives you insight into why these repeatedly demonstrable figures are in error?
You think that its all made up? Run the number yourself.
That is the theoretical hormesis effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
Its rightly rejected, because its statistically immeasurable to the linear no-threshold model. Specifically, they're equivelant because at low doses the data is too noisy to tell which one actually applies... a dose that either increases your risk of cancer by 1 in 200 or decreases it by 1 in 200 is hard to discern when your base chance is 1 in 5.
Reprocessing existing nuclear waste might yield useful power without further mining and without further increasing the amount of nuclear waste. Google the terms: heavy, metal, nuclear, reactor. Here's an interesting read that talks about a lead-bismoth reactor: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/physics/sobel/Nucphys/breed.html . Alas, the heavy metal reactors are still just research projects.
Can anyone comment on nuclear transmutation? I thought I read once the Fénix or Superfénix reactors in France were planned to reprocess wastes into fuel and shorter-lived species.
Phénix and Superphénix were planned to reprocess wastes into fuel and shorter-lived species. Phénix is still 'on-line' but Superphénix has been shut down around 2000 for political reasons.
The technical expertise developed to build this two sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor will be useful to design one of the most promising gen IV nuclear reactor, the sodium-cooled fast reactor.
The sodium cooled fast reactor is the most promising design of gen IV? No.
Its a fast neutron reactor, inherently harder to control because the delayed neutron fraction is so low.
Sodium coolant is opaque thus examination of the core is very difficult.
No significant advantages over a light water reactor except solving a political problem badly. People that fret about nuclear waste usually dont want another reactor built to address the issue.
If any breeder reactor design is to compete its a molten salt variant. Liquid fluorides work excellent for thermal neutron thorium breeder reactors. Liquid chloride reactors work excellent for actinide incinerators. Both offer more passive safety features than the sodium cooled faste reactor, and both are much more likely to be economically competitive, without the need for massive pressure vessels or fuel fabrication.
My guess is the gen IV reactor that has the most promise of becoming a market success will be some high temperature gas cooled graphite moderated reactor like the pebble bed or something similar.
Well, there are a lot of designs out here for Gen IV reactors, and none of them are perfect.
Like for gen II (boiling vs. presurised water) each 'partner' (US, Japan, China, France) will chose a different technology, master it, and try to sell it to everyone else in the world. The choice wont be made on economic grounds, nor on technical grounds, at this level technology is politics.
France seems to bet on sodium and helium.
What technologies are favored by the US ?
Technically and economically the reactor I favor most for the next gen would be the molten salt reactor, either fluid chloride reactors or fluid fluroide reactors depending if you want to operate in thermal or fast neutron regimes.
For thermal thorium breeding regimes, liquid fluoride reactors are the best way to go. I doubt I'll see them tested anywhere in spite of being a mature prototype technology with years of reactor time testing from the ORNL MSBR experiments because:
1) It doesn't require any fuel fabrication or service regime, which is the economic model for nuclear service contracts today. So lack of interest on the part of the providers.
2) Its very poor for weapons production, and most reactor development often has a wink towards dual use. Liquid metal breeder reactors are perfect for making lots of Pu239 really fast.
Which is a pity. 1/100th of the fuel requirement and you can use thorium which is 3 times as plentiful and 5 times cheaper than uranium. Fuel fabrication isn't a cost, much more passive safety. The core cant melt down since its allready fluid in its most critical state. If the core somehow does get too hot it melts a freeze plug in the bottom and drains into critically safe dump tanks. 1/200th of the waste stream with roughly a 30 half life for the longer lived isotopes.
You dont have to build massive pressure vessels because the core operates at atmospheric pressure.
Oh well.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
I'm not an expert, but I have read some interesting articles about nuclear fuel cycles and "generation IV" reactor designs. My reading has led me to come to the conclusion that it would be a minor mistake to proceed with investment in/construction of current commercial reactors (compared to the colossal mistake of building more coal plants). I would institute a crash commercialization pilot program for generation IV reactors including the following design elements:
* molten salt or liquid metal cooling at atmospheric pressure (no high-pressure cooling system);
* passive cooling using density-gradient circulation of motlen salt or liquid metal cooling, so the reactor is not dependent on any pumps for ultimate safety;
* passive safety, i.e., fuel assembly designs that become sub-critical if the reactor overheats because the coolant drained out of the reactor vessel;
* fast-neutron breeding, actinide-burning, and thorium-cycle designs to make the most of the fuel sources;
* electro-plating based fuel reprocessing to prevent any accumulation of bomb-grade material during the reprocessing cycle;
* companion sub-critical particle-accelerator actinide burner reactors for final use of actinide fuels;
* the above three steps mean that the remaining waste is fission-products only, and will decay fast to very low levels of radioactivity in 300 years;
* Brayton-cycle electrical generation using a secondary working fluid in a closed loop (nitrogen gas?);
* continuous refueling capability instead of a refueling shut-down;
* hydrogen-producing capability (iodine-sulfur process?) to absorb off-peak capacity, thus allowing nuclear plants to fulfill baseload and most of peak capacity. The hydrogen could then be reacted with CO2 to make methanol and water, and the methanol then reacted to make longer-chain hydrocarbons (and more water);
* bootstrapping capability, so each plant complex can self-start even if the grid is down.
Whew! A long list but AFAIK all technically feasible, no new science or speculative technologies, just engineering and safety testing. This would take at least 10 years to commercialize, but the advantages over current power sources would be enormous.
For the commercial build-out, I think you have to plan building the labor force very carefully. Hire the highest-quality people for the first plant build and start-up, rotate them into several positions, be inefficient with labor so as to get greatest level of experience among the largest number of people, then use that core of people split four ways on the next generation of plants, again be inefficient with labor use but maximize experience and learning, and increase your labor force geometrically as you go along.
Given all this effort, I think you would have no choice but to go with one design. Unfortunately, the real effects of such a program would not be felt until 2025 or 2030. As a Floridian, I would gladly throw open the eastern Gulf and Atlantic continental shelves open for gas drilling to bridge the gap instead of digging up Wyoming and West Virginia for coal.
Robert, check this presentation: "A Few Nuclear Power Myths & Facts: Why nuclear power is part of the problem and not part of the solution" (Powerpoint file, 844KB).
I was watching CSPAN yesterday and some Republican House Rep was talking on the floor with charts about how the environmental laws have been such an impedance to the energy companies and how LNG was coming and how they could drill off the east coast on the continental shelf.
This is a long standing straw man for the right wing. TO them, we should not look to renewable energy but drill for more finite fossil fuels in even more difficult and expensive places.
Why does it have to be such and either/or polarized discussion? People like me know renewable energy will not replace ALL fossil fuels, but they can reduce the use of fossil fuels and we should do ask much of that as we can as soon as possible. In fact, we need fossil fuels to develop renewable resources and once we run out, we are really in a bind.
Since there is no resonable alternative at the moment for fossil fuels, they will be integral in fueling our technology and building of infrastructure to replace them. Therefore, by proposing to drill and LNG, they're attempting to keep costs down while they can. Plus, who doesn't love to drill?
Just a quick "here's a comment/two cents".
Conservation and energy efficiency are the "reasonable alternative at the moment for fossil fuels" and they make much more economic and environmental sense. Is drilling the last drops of US oil in sensitive off-shore sites so we can continue to power in-efficient gas-guzzlers really the "reasonable alternative"?
Only if you sell or manufacture ridiculous vehicles.
tommyvee,
Why are deepwater Gulf of Mexico sites sensitive? I've been out there, and they aren't as sensitive as near shore wells in bays or marshes, IMHO.
I get very tired of misinformation. I agree 100% on the need for conservation and the ridiculousness of the way we waste energy in SUVs and monster trucks.
But it really undermines your points when you use misinformation
Bob Ebersole
The idea behind continued drilling is to keep energy cheap and affordable for all for as long as possible. I apologize for my lack of clarity in my earlier post; I am definitely for conservation and efficiency. However, why stop drilling when it's the only way to keep supply up while demand will increase elsewhere, regardless of what we do at home? How will we power our current infrastructure if we can't fuel the construction of new energy sources (nukes) because prices are rediculous?
I realize that you may be asking a rhetorical question here, but I thought I would try answering it anyway.
The answer is - money (and it's half-brother - power). Politicians rarely take a stand unless there is a potential to increase their money and power. You seem to be confusing politicians with caring and thinking human beings. That will only lead you into trouble. It is true regardless of the stripes or spots of the politician.
"People like me know renewable energy will not replace ALL fossil fuels"
I see no reason why it can't: 72 terawatts of wind, 100,000TW of solar, vs 5TW of equivalent consumption; high E-ROI.
Infrastructure requirements...
Can be done isn't will be done or even should be done.
"Infrastructure requirements"
Could you be more specific and quantitative?
You dont just have to build the wind turbines and solar towers (or whatever.) You have to build the HVDC lines for shuttling between high supply to high demand areas, pumped storage for the required dispatchable power. Sure it might be a good idea for us to have this stuff anyways with ordinary nuke baseload (necissary since you cant throttle nuke plants) but you dont need nearly as much with baseload plants that you can stick anywhere. This can make nuclear much less expensive than wind or solar depending on the market.
of course if I'm honest with myself, neither nukes nor wind or solar are likely to displace coal anytime in the next thirty years.
"You have to build the HVDC lines for shuttling between high supply to high demand areas"
Sometimes, though they don't have to be HVDC. When you do, you're likely to be using a pretty high quality wind resource, which will help offset the cost. Finally, it's not an enormous cost, maybe $.25 per watt or less. That's significant, but not a killer.
"pumped storage for the required dispatchable power"
That won't be needed for quite a while, perhaps when wind gets above 30% of market share.
"neither nukes nor wind or solar are likely to displace coal anytime in the next thirty years"
Well, it won't be due to those sources not having the capacity. Actually, I think solar will become cheaper than utility retail rates in the next 10 years, and then it's a whole different ballgame: the purchasing decision will no longer be under the control of the utilities, and demand (as seen by the utilities) could collapse.
The pols. discussions, for or against nukes, coal, etc. are like a personal preference contest, where ppl profile themselves for others by putting forward their opinions and dislikes, addressing voters, colleagues, and various industries. Up their sleeves they have neat pie charts of public opinion on these matters, correlated with various categories. - Or so I suppose, having known several ppl who did that kind of work for pols/Gvmts, if not in the US.
Edwards is typical, I mean nuclear plants are expensive, and have killed (compared with coal?) but the death and expense of the Iraq occupation is incommensurate.
The discourse is very reassuring, as it implies a situation where *choice*, guided by opinion built on ethics in its widest sense, technology, science, is open. It is soft-soap. The real situation is nothing like that, and rather represents a mad scramble to make hay while the sun shines, beat competitors, coerce others into performing, grab resources, etc., while it is accepted that many will be left by the wayside.
There *are* important choices to be made, of course. Doubt that pols like Obama or Edwards can genuinely decide or realistically impose.
Management of nuclear waste in France.
This short fact sheet in Eng. trans. from the French, by ANDRA, responsible for the management of radioactive waste in F, purely descriptive, gives a v. brief overview.
Click on the map at bottom left to see the the multiplicity, diversity, complexity of sites, types of waste, storage, etc. Each circled point leads to a PDF, in French, but one can get the flavor...
andra
In response to "compared to coal?", talk to coal miners in the mountain regions about their lungs and how they have to pressure wash the soot off of their houses once a month.
The EPA has estimated that about 100,000 people die prematurely due to air pollution. About 30% of this air pollution was attributed to coal-burning power plants. This means 30,000 people die prematurely due to coal power plants in the United States, every year. There is alot more blood on the hands of fossil fuels than you seem to think!
Here is a recent link, a study in the UK about mortality due to air pollution. The news is not good!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070731085554.htm
It sometimes seems ludicrous to me that people are so concerned about potential risks from nuclear power while they have become so accustomed and blaise about much greater real risks from burning coal.
The biggest criticism thrown at nuclear is the waste problem. However, we need to keep some sense of perspective and scale.
Consider 1GW-year of electricity production as reference case:
Coal: 4 million tons burned, producing nearly 12 million tons of CO2.
Nuclear: 100 tons of spent fuel. With Uranium density of 19000kg/m3, that is a cube 1.7m on each side.
The scale of the nuclear waste problem is miniscule relative to the alternatives - don't forget that when getting the heebiejeebies about radioactive waste!
Here's a something else to ponder when considering coal:
and, the kicker:
Even that 1.7m cube of spent fuel per 1GW plant per year is a problem, especially when multiplied by hundreds of plants worldwide. Nevertheless, it is very little in comparison to the DISASTER that is coal combustion. But, we can do a lot better.
Right now, with a very wasteful once-through fuel cycle, we only use a fraction of 1% of the energy potentially available from the mined Uranium. If we make Gen IV fast reactors a reality ASAP, then this waste volume can be reduced by a almost TWO orders of magnitude. Our 1.7m cube now shrinks to about 43cm per GW per year. The fast reactor also has the benefit of "burning" the transuranics, which are the nasty elements that are the 10,000year problem. What is left for disposal are only fission products, which have short decay lifetimes - rendered harmless after a few centuries.
Required reading on how to make better use of nuclear "waste", while addressing profileration concerns: here
IMHO, the only reason we havn't been serious about fast reactors to date is that it is / was cheaper to wastefully use cheap Uranium rather than build more expensive, more complex plants. The core of these technologies has been known for decades, but for want of commercial competitiveness. If waste minimization and resource utilization are priorities, then the higher cost for fast reactors should be borne. We can virtually eliminate the waste problem. Indeed, with fast reactors, the inventory of waste fuel built up over the years could generate 50-60 times more energy that it produced originally going through the reactors once. Adding inventories of depleted Uranium, it would be possible to power the USA for centuries without having mine any more Uranium and the waste left over would be only fission products with short half lives! I don't know why we don't get moving on this with all due haste... in the meantime, reprocessing with existing reactors can stretch existing resources by at least a factor of 2, IIRC. If we have problems with Uranium supply, then there is Thorium, which is approximately 3 times more abundant...
I'm going to sound like a broken record, but I'm going to bring up my question du jour again in the present context:
Nuclear power plants are expensive to build. It will be hugely expensive to build lots of them.
At the same time, we also need huge investments to recover conventional and unconventional fossil fuels. We need huge investments in a whole range of renewable energy resources. We need huge investments in electrified rail transport and other energy efficiency measures. And as the bridge collapse in MN reminded us, we also need to make huge investments in maintaining our civic infrastructure (and meanwhile, China and India are making huge investments to still build theirs -- investments that are attracting capital that could otherwise be invested here).
Where is all the investment capital going to come from? (And as I clarified on another thread, we are not just talking about inflated funny money or creative accounting here; I am talking about actual reallocation of GDP so that real resources can be deployed.)
I rather suspect that, short of draconian measures to forefully reduce domestic consumption expenditures of all types and thus free up resources to be invested (which is extremely unlikely to happen in the US), the resources simply will not be available in the scale needed to do all of the above.
Thus, when asking about the pros & cons of nuclear power, we must not think about these things in isolation. What is really needed is a discussion regarding prioritization of investments. If we can't do everything, what is most important to do? If we do make the investments in nuclear, some other things are going to have to remain undone -- what can we most afford to do without?
I, for one, think that we need to put renewable resource development and energy efficiency investments at the top of the list. These are the things that are most helpful in actually moving us along a pathway toward sustainability at some level. (Disclosure: I do think that any effort to maintain the US & global economy at current levels - let alone growth -- is vain and doomed to failure. We ARE going to decline. My only hope is that we can level out at a lower, sustainable level rather than a crash collapse doomer dieoff scenario. This, to my way of thnking, is the maximum realistic optimistic scenario.)
If we can somehow manage to come up with additional investment capital above and beyond that top priority, then we might think about how to allocate it between conventional and unconventional FFs & nukes. I'd put just about anything that gets us more natural gas or NG substitutes at the top of that secondary list, as long as it has a positive EROEI. (To my own astonishment, I guess that means that I must even take a relatively favorable view toward LNG imports, in spite of the downsides.) Extracting the most we possibly can with a positive EROEI out of existing oil fields would be my next priority. Everything else (arctic, offshore, oilsands, coal, nuke) all have serious environmental downsides, so I can't feel very excited about any of them. Since they all have environmental downsides, if there are any investment resources still available after these higher priorities, I would allocate them in strict EROEI order. While there is considerable debate about nukes, I doubt that they come in at the bottom of that list; I'm not so sure whether they would be at the very top, either.
While the civic infrastructure is important, a lot of it is of the wrong type in the wrong places. For example, given that gasoline might be selling for >$200/gal (in real 2007 US$) in ten years (if you can get it at all), do we really need to even be rebuilding that multi-lane bridge in Mpls/StP? What we really need is a well thought out transition plan, built around those investments in elctrified rail and renewable resources. Because we will very likely have to abandon the low density suburbs and make additional invesments in civic inrastructure once the electrified rail systems have been put in and people have relocated to higher-density areas, it is all the more important that we focus investment capital right now on renewables and energy efficiency, so that we will be able to scale back later and refocus on civic infrastructure.
Unfortunately, I see no evidence that investments even at the scale possible, let alone needed, are being made, nor that they are being made in any sort of rational priority. I do not even see any evidence of serious discussion and thought along these lines.
"I, for one, think that we need to put renewable resource development and energy efficiency investments at the top of the list. "
I agree.
"we will very likely have to abandon the low density suburbs and make additional invesments in civic inrastructure once the electrified rail systems have been put in and people have relocated to higher-density areas, "
Rail (in this scale) and new housing are enormous investments. It would be much, much cheaper to simply replace ICE vehicles with PHEV/EV's. Think 25K EV per household, vs 200K for new housing.
An 400 to 800 sq ft condo should cost less than 200K to build in a severely depressed market (cheap labor & materials). And it should last (if well built) for centuries.
An EV will last how many years ?
Also, suburbia absorbs vast amounts of energy to service it and for HVAC, problems that could be greatly reduced with better housing.
Alan
Much of the needed housing will likely come in the form of remodeling and subdividing existing single-family homes into multi-family homes. Average household size will also increase as grandparents come to live with children (or vise versa), kids don't leave the nest so quick, and other relatives & friends & lodgers join the mix. What new construction there will be will mostly be infill, and high density multi-family. There probably won't be that much new construction though, because as I figure it we already have a substantial surplus of housing capacity in the US compared to what a sustainable economy will actually need.
The paradigm I am using in thinking about these things assumes that the US must drop to about 25% of its present per-capita GDP in order to reach sustainablilty. Simply think how people live in countries with an average PPP GDP per capita that is 25% of US and you are pretty close to visualizing our best-case future. Costa Rica is the best and most hopeful model -- we'll be lucky if we manage to end up that well off.
Most of the folks that live at that level of per capita GDP live in housing with much less space per capita. Our space per capita will have to shrink substantially as well.
So perhaps it would cost 100K, for something much, much smaller than people currently live in. Versus 25K for the EV, which likely will replace a household's next ICE purchase for the same $. Why, oh why should society consider such an investment?
"suburbia absorbs vast amounts of energy "
So, spend several $1,000 insulating, and converting to a heat pump. Why consider moving?
Why consider moving ?
1) Because Suburbia was based on herd movements, not independent choices. When 80% of the houses empty out in your neighborhood, and no one cuts the grass anymore, and the real estate agent laughs when you ask for a listing, etc.
2) It costs more money and more energy to service suburban housing. This will be reflected in higher prices for everything (water & sewer, property taxes, sales taxes, road repairs, school quality, UPS delivery surcharges, plumbers, pizza delivery, ...) Just because the people went away, does not mean that the bonds went with them.
3) Most suburban housing is not durable, major repairs loom for many.
4) It is not cool to be in suburbia. People start asking "aren't you scared to live there ?"
Best Hopes for an Orderly Winddown in Exurbia & Suburbia,
Alan
Great, and I would add:
5) After a few months of weekly commutes and only seeing the family on weekends, increasing numbers of suburban residents will start asking themselves "Why am I doing this? For a stupid HOUSE?!?!?"
"When 80% of the houses empty out in your neighborhood,"
But why would they empty out? Not because of energy costs.
"It costs more money and more energy to service suburban housing. "
Not that much. Furthermore, heating & transportation can be reduced and converted to electricity. If gas costs double, buy a Prius. If they double again, buy a PHEV. PHEV's have a temporary premium, due to unexpected demand? Car pool for a couple years.
Again, if it costs $25K to buy a PHEV, and $100K to move, why would anybody in their right mind move??
"Most suburban housing is not durable, major repairs loom for many."
Maybe, but what's changed? People have been replacing their roofs and siding every 20 years for a long time, and they seem to be ok with that.
Alan, I just don't get it: there's nothing realistic behind this idea that suburbia is unsustainable due to energy. Have you done the numbers???
I agree that city living is better: I live in the city. But, I pay twice as much for my housing. My reduced energy costs will never, ever pay for the difference.
The decision to move to Suburbia was a mass, herd movement, not the consequence of individual decisions (ever heard a Real Estate person talk about "hot areas"). So will the move out be.
About 30% of Americans today (see group of polls linked by Laurence Aurbach) want to move to TOD. Give them TOD and that hollowing out will create a death spiral for many (but not all) suburbs (the same thing happened to cities with "white flight" and in many ways that is my model).
Once a certain % of homes do not sell AND the owner ceases to mow the yard, etc. panic sets in. People want out in a hurry before their asset declines any more (if they have any equity left). Others that have trouble with making payment's just walk out the door (see Cramer's advice recently).
People are reluctant to invest in major repairs in such conditions and just patch instead.
Meanwhile taxes skyrocket and services plummet. Potholes multiple, schools slide downhill, police protection becomes scarce as crime increases, stores shut down, requiring even further to drive to get inferior goods, random arson becomes a problem (especially when an empty home burns down across the street) and squatters begin to show up.
This is precisely how America destroyed it's Great cities after WW II. I think the same process will happen to the suburbs.
You seem to assume that "everything else" will remain static as gas prices just double or quadruple. I see a dynamic system at work with people following the herd instinct.
I did tour the under construction Greenbush commuter rail line south of Boston after the ASPO meeting there. The new suburbs to get rail service to South Boston will survive and do fairly well post-Peak Oil IMHO. Outside employment via commuter rail. Add freight at a later date. And domestic service economy in each little town (perhaps adding a bit of light industry to some villages). These 1800s villages with later sprawl still had walkable cores and small businesses.
The line was not electrified but was specifically designed for later electrification (a couple of low bridges near Boston on an old existing line prevented that. Replace them and it would be easy).
http://www.mbta.com/schedules_and_maps/rail/
Greenbush in grey to lower right going east.
Best Hopes,
Alan
There won't be a big shift out of suburbia because we have other alternatives when the price of gasoline rises:
1) Motorcycles.
2) Diesel electric hybrids.
3) Pluggable hybrids.
4) Pure electric vehicles.
5) Take jobs that are closer to home.
I know some regular commenters here get a kick out of prophesying a coming huge economic götterdämmerung. But we are facing a shortage of liquid fuels, not a shortage of all energy forms.
The key technology we need that we do not yet have for replacing oil is a great battery for cars. We could quite affordably scale up nuclear power plants to replace fossil fuels. Eventually solar will provide another way to power cars. But the big unsolved problem is how to make electrical power much more useful for transportation. Solve that problem and the cost of operating vehicles will go down, not up.
One you forgot, computer and communications technology that lets us work from home, such as the one we are all using right now. Matt Simmons has been calling attention to this often recently. With IT power likely to increase one billion fold in the next 25 years there will be dramatic new technologies that reduce the need for travel, especially commuting to work.
Much as I'm a big fan of telecommuting where possible - I do it 4 days a week, it's hard to see that this could really have all that much impact - realistically what percentage of the workforce can work from home at all, let alone 2, 3, 4 days a week?
In a environment of high evergy prices (we are not there yet) and with dramatic increases in technology my guess is that 80% of workers could use the technolgy to some extent and we might be able to save 50% of the travel. A different world than what we now live in.
80%? Don't see how that could be possible.
Consider especially that many of the jobs where telecommuting is the most feasible are jobs that are probably more likely to be under threat in an economic downturn triggered by the initial adjustment to P.O., given they tend to provide less "essential" services as say, farmers, miners, manufacturers, doctors, tradesmen etc.
Currently the stats seem to suggest that as much as 25% of the (U.S.) workforce telecommute "at some point during the week" - but I'm willing to be that includes workers who count checking their work-related e-mail from home as a form of telecommuting, and still travel in to the office everyday.
OTOH, personally I have at least 6 or 7 acquaintences (including my wife) who could telecommute much more than they currently do - and probably would in a world of $5/L petrol and occasional shortages. So there's definitely room to expand in areas like I.T. that are especially suitable, but saving 50% of all travel through telecommuting alone seems a bit optimistic. Note, I think reducing 50% of private vehicle usage for commuting purposes (km travelled) is very very doable, through a mix of car-pooling, bicycling, increased mass transit, reduced employment (including reducing full-time employment), re-location, and some increase in telecommuting. On that basis, a 50% decrease in oil usage for commuting purposes should be trivial, once you throw in increased fuel economy (including eventually PHEV and even EV), biofuels, a public education campaign on efficient driving skills, and a reduction in traffic that should improve fuel economy.
Indeed, this is why I think Sweden should have little trouble getting very close to their target of 0 oil dependency by 2020 - if they are genuinely committed to it, acheiving at least a 95% reduction in 13 years sounds very doable to me. For countries like the U.S. and even here in Australia, well, there's no reason we couldn't commit ourselves to such a target (although realistically it would take us significantly longer, due to lack of P.T. infrastructure and compact urban design), but sadly, there's no indication yet that we're about to.
Let's consider some of the professions where you do not think it could apply (farmers, miners, manufacturers, doctors, tradesmen). The key thing is to realize that people will not continue to do things the way they do today.
Farmers - Sensors to allow them to inspect their crops without traveling to them. Better distribution system to let them order their supplies on line. Better distribution systems to let them deliver their good to market.
Miners - More automated systems for actual extraction (still requires energy but less hauling people around). Streamline marketing, financial and distribution systems.
Manufacturing - Do it here, not in China. Distribute and automate the physical manufacture to get the processes closer to the workers. Most people in this sector are office worker and that part is more obvious.
Doctors - My wife is a physician and I have already been working on this part. Greater use of email to consult with patients (my wife already does this for three hours a day at home). Automated diagnosis on a website (working on that, too). Remote surgery (being done today to serve remote areas).
Tradesmen - Machines that can be diagnosed and even fixed remotely. Better scheduling of travel (people like UPS already do this). Teleconferences to set up deals.
So even the kinds of work where it does not seem to apply can be redefined. Remember, we are talking about a billion fold increase in power in the next 25 years and the motivation of high energy prices that we do not yet have. The energy problems will only accelerate this.
Yes, I can see all of the above happening to a certain degree (much as they already have been), but it sounds a bit like the promise of a paperless office computers were supposed to give us.
For a start, even if farmers can remotely monitor crops, and physicians can remotely communicate with patients, does that really cut their travel? Your wife still goes to the surgery everyday, no?
I also think technology is some way from being able to providing the dynamic exchange of information and ideas you get from being in the same room as other people - I wouldn't be so sure as to say it will never get there in my lifetime, but nor would I bet on it happening in the next 20 years either. Then there are various other limitations with working at home (for instance, my 2yo has been screaming all morning!) that are not easily solved by technology (soundproofing my office would be prohibitively expensive at this point, given there's an open stairwell leading upstairs, where the noise is coming from).
I think the issue of being in the same room will be solved by systems that really seem like you are in the same room. I do not think we will need to sacrifice the feeling of being around others. I am saying that we will be able to mostly recreate that through the technology. We are not there today, but then today we still have plentiful, cheap energy.
If my wife can reduce patient office visits, it saves both her travel and that of her patients. It might be that she would never need to see her patients. Consultations and exams could be done via teleconferences. Even invasive exams (she is a gynecologist) might be done remotely. A patient might go to the nearest doctor's office and the invasive part could be assisted by a tech while my wife watches the imaging and other vital signs remotely. She could order tests that again would be drawn at a neighborhood center. She does not do surgery any more now, because she has found better ways to treat her patients.
The home office problem is real but maybe there will be neighborhood centers where people go to work, remotely connected with their companies. These places would have virtual meeting room and computer technology that you might not have at home.
I have been in the software business since the early 1970s and still find it hard to believe how far we have come since then. We have seen more than a billion fold increase in IT power since then. I have two teenaged sons who have been into video games for about 8 years. The advances there have been even more startling. Computer and communications technology will only accelerate, reaching the next billion fold increase in only 25 years. Based on this experience I feel safe in saying that the actual advances in technology that would reduce travels will be greater in reality than almost any of us (myself included) can even imagine today.
This thread is pretty old. We might be among the last still viewing it. Regards.
"Yes, I can see all of the above happening (telecommuting)to a certain degree (much as they already have been), but it sounds a bit like the promise of a paperless office computers were supposed to give us."
The bottom line is that the work done in office buildings, in dense urban cores, is almost entirely knowledge work. It could all be done in properly equipped home-offices.
Video-conferencing depends on transmission speeds & video/audo quality. With sufficient quality it feels like everyone is in the same room, and people love it.
BTW, my office is paperless.
"The key technology we need that we do not yet have for replacing oil is a great battery for cars."
Batteries are here. Not the absolutely perfect battery, but more than good enough. A123systems, Firefly, and many others. Light enough, cheap enough to make PHEV's as cheap as ICE with lifecycle costs well below ICE's, even at current gas prices.
"We could quite affordably scale up nuclear power plants to replace fossil fuels.Eventually solar will provide another way to power cars. "
Don't forget wind: already competitive, and with a perfect synergy with PHEV charging.
"The decision to move to Suburbia was a mass, herd movement, not the consequence of individual decisions (ever heard a Real Estate person talk about "hot areas"). So will the move out be."
Not really. That suggests it was an arbitrary move, based on fashion. That certainly happens a great deal in real estate, but that's not what fueled the move to suburbia.
Cheap Land. That's what fueled the move. It was cheaper then, and it's still cheaper now, and it will be even cheaper compared to dense cities, as a marginal movement to the city and TOD corridors takes place. Only the affluent will be able to afford to move into cities: the middle class will stay behind. Exurbia will slow down, and suburban price appreciation will be a bit less, but a collapse? Not because of energy.
there's nothing realistic behind this idea that suburbia is unsustainable due to energy. Have you done the numbers???
Metropolitan areas without a decent Urban Rail system use not quite twice as much oil/capita as those that do.
Los Angeles, Houston & Phoenix vs. Chicago & Philadelphia for example.
Certain areas of LA are low mileage & walkable, but they are few. Common sense says that the bulk of the VMT come from the suburbs. So, in an economic competition between places to live & work, I believe the low oil use places have a decided advantage.
I certainly hope so !
Alan
" I believe the low oil use places have a decided advantage.
- I certainly hope so !"
And that's just the point: you say that because you know that an urban, low driving lifestyle is a nice way to live.
But...it's not cheaper. It's much, much more expensive to live in dense urban areas. High oil prices won't change that, because it's much cheaper to use oil more efficiently or not at all (Prius, PHEV, car-pooling, telecommuting/insulation, heat pumps, etc) than it is to move into a dense urban area.
Well there's "suburbia" and there's "suburbia".
It's quite possible to have medium-density suburbia, that includes townhouses, apartment blocks, terraced housing as well as standalone housing, that is well serviced by public transport, and based around a commercial and retail hub, but still a significant (>10km) distance from a traditional "inner-city" or downtown area.
A significant number of the suburbs in my own city would fit that sort of definition, and with a bit more public transport investment, and more higher-density housing, significantly more (including my own) would qualify too.
I assume the type of suburbia you're referring to you is where there is low-density housing and roads and nothing else, where the only realistic way to get to anywhere where significant number of jobs are actually located is to drive for tens of kilometres, and even the closest retail centres are several km away. That type of suburbia definitely has big problems, and scarily, it's still the type that's getting built the fastest.
Nuclear plants are indeed very expensive.
But look at the numbers when you consider reconstructing a large portion of the physical infrastructure for transportation and housing.
What is that cost? It's enormously, titanically greater still. Just as a very crude estimation look at the size of people's mortgages to their electric bills.
People look at the nameplate costs of nuclear plants (which have many zeros) and yet don't look at costs of alternatives, which yield the same effect. That's because nuclear plants are a definable known quantity---and people compare it to an unestimatable fuzzy future, and assume the fuzzy future is lower.
If it's going to be by the numbers I think that paying for 1) energy efficiency 2) nuclear power plants 3) electric cars is going to be a heck of a lot less than re-constructing the physical infrastructure of thousands of cities.
it is all the more important that we focus investment capital right now on renewables and energy efficiency, so that we will be able to scale back later and refocus on civic infrastructure.
At the moment $X dollars of capital in renwables produces significantly less energy gain than $X invested in fission.
This is unfortunate---it would be nice for sure if it weren't so, but I think it is. Remember to account for energy quality---intermittent (wind/solar) is worth less than continuous.
Since I think bottlenecks for wind and nuclear are not generally the same we ought to be doing both.
What about the nuke that is miles under our feet??
I haven't seen any mention of geothermal in this discussion of future electrical generation mix. I've read a couple of stories recently suggesting that it may be practical in many more areas than previously thought, ironically due to the technology developed for drilling very deep oil wells.
Most recent story on this I have seen:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22169496-2702,00.html
Note the ironic naming of the geothermal wells as Habanero 1, 2, 3....
Is this only a fantasy or is there reasonable hope that this could be a useful contributer?
Strictly its a limited resource; Geothermal energy is sort of like 'heat mining.' Eventually you suck up all the heat. Another problem is the low delta T means poor conversion efficiency.
I've read that there are huge potential generating resources, but we'll have to see.
Since much of the heat comes from alpha decay of long-lived radioisotopes I think we don't have much to worry about for a long time.
Engineered geothermal---"drilling for steam"---certainly deserves additional attention and investigation for baseline power. If it works it could be quite attractive. The low delta T is an issue but I think there some some clever thermodynamic processes to maximize the ability.
Until that works, we need nukes now, since we know they will work.
Let's wait and see if Habanero 'repays' not only investors capital but Fed's grant money. Problems include isolation from the grid, radon gas in the steam (which should be closed loop), the need to pick it up and move it sideways every few years and whether the cooling towers will work well in 45C outback summers.
There are no "clever thermodynamic processes to maximize the ability". The source and sink temperatures set a strict upper limit on the overall process efficiency, not only in this Universe but in any possible Universe. Any practical conversion system will be less efficient, but there are technologies readily available which approach the limit as closely as you might want (combined cycle). A hand-waving exception to the efficiency limit would be if you use geothermal as a source of process heat, but that doesn't circumvent any of the laws because you're not converting heat to work (so useless for transport, electricity generation etc.).
Well, that's what I mean.
What matters here is output divided by money input, since the 'fuel' is roughly free.
I understand fully there are immutable limits---the cleverness is getting close to them in a practical and not exceedingly expensive way.
Strictly speaking geothermal isn't "renewable", as the earth will eventually cool. Then again, strictly speaking tidal isn't either, for the moon will eventually spin out of orbit. And then again, strictly speaking solar (and thus wind) isn't either, for the sun will eventually go supernova and then die.
I think we can reasonably expect all of these resources to be around for quite a few multiples of humankind's existence on earth thus far.
Geothermal can be part of the mix, but you've got two types of geothermal: small scale but widespread (e.g. geothermal heat pumps), and large scale spotty (e.g. Iceland, NZ, & a few other installations). By all means let's develop both types to the extent we can. At best geothermal will only be a slice of the pie.
The University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology did some studies of geothermal from the Frio (Eocene) formation. They even drilled a well or two, but I guess the results wer'nt very good as it was 15 or 20 years ago. I'd guess water disposal costs would be too high as I recall, summaries were published in the Oil and Gas Journal.
There probably is something in it, but its pretty blue sky.
.Bob Ebersole
The problem is that unless we build enough nukes to at least totally replace what we are losing each year as FF depletes (an unlikely scenario), then we are still facing a declining economy. True, the decline might be less steep and thus more comfortable initially. However, how are we then going to make the needed investments in renewables when our economy is at a lower level? Our capacity will be lower than it is right now -- permanently lower. Shouldn't we grab this last chance to build as much renewable infrastructure as we can, while we can?
Note well, I am not totally anti-nuke. I'm just not convinced that they should get that high a priority in the allocation of scarce investment capital.
However, how are we then going to make the needed investments in renewables when our economy is at a lower level
One way is to ensure our economy isn't at too low a level because we have 24/7 electricity like civilized places, thanks to nukes.
If we have to commute by tram or rail, we can deal with it. If the electric railroad is shut 50% of the time because of blackouts we have problems, likely cascading nonlinearly to collapse. I really worry about Pakistan.
But really, the total scale of the economy is quite big enough that even at a smaller rate, we could --- if deemed a societal priority --- devote plenty of capital to energy infrastructure.
Lets see, the Iraq war will end up costing about $1000 billion over 7 years or so. At $5b each just monetarily, that would be 200 nuclear plants each with 2 or 3 reactors, tripling US capability, resulting in a large power surplus.
And the Iraq war so far has not been an enormous financial sacrifice, though it is foolish and has engendered excess inflation.
At the moment, if it were a priority, we could do a significant investment in renewable and nuclear energy at the same time. I think we need to have at least half in nuclear since it is more predictable and likely we will gain a substantial power load.
Really I favor diversified funding for:
1) energy efficiency
2) strong incentives for fuel-efficient transportation
3) electrical transport conversoin PHEV's and rail)
4) new nuclear generation to replace baseline coal
5) new wind generation to add intermittent capacity displacing CH4
The reason to give allocation to nuclear plants is exclusively because they will provide large amounts of energy compared to renewables. In the end, that does matter. Other factors of course favor wind & solar but the gap in output isn't trivial, unfortunately.
"At the moment $X dollars of capital in renwables produces significantly less energy gain than $X invested in fission."
Yes, but renewables can be ramped up faster, even so. Further, fission operating costs are much higher. Total nominal lifecycle costs may be a bit lower for nuclear, but the underlying wind costs (as opposed to the recent scarcity premiums for construction materials & wind turbines) are falling faster than for nuclear.
"Remember to account for energy quality---intermittent (wind/solar) is worth less than continuous."
Kind've. Wind provides less capacity credit for peaks, but the kwh's are just as valuable. Solar power kwh's are more valuable than nuclear, as solar is correlated with peak demand.
"Since I think bottlenecks for wind and nuclear are not generally the same we ought to be doing both."
Probably, though I'm not convinced we need more nuclear in the US. I'd like to see an emphasis on expanding & improving wind & solar - the only way I see to prevent another Iran-like nuclear push is to have a convincing renewable alternative. If the US actually relies on renewables it will be infinitely more credible.
I think the extent to which solar aligns with peak demand is exaggerated. Peak demand is around 4 to 5 PM and tapers off slowly in the evening on a hot day. By contrast, peak solar photovoltaic output happens around noon time.
Also, I've read that the growth of massive server farms has reduced the difference between peak and base demand. Base demand has grown faster than peak demand. So we really do need a lot of base supply.
Plus, there's another way to solve the variable demand problem: Variable pricing. Imagine a future with no peak supplies. Nuclear and other base sources could charge a lot more during the day to compensate for the lower revenue they earn at night. Peak generation capacity is not an absolute requirement.
It makes very little sense to try to meet peak demand with a constant-on thermal generating source unless it is very dispersed. Consider the case of a nuclear plant that is designed to meet peak and just waste the energy it produces off peak. Wasting the energy is not so easy. Cooling towers are built to handle the 2/3 of power that is wasted owing to thermodynamics. You would need to build more to handle the power that would otherwise be generated as electricity. And there are environmental constraints. The cooling towers are often just buffers to be sure that water that is released to a river is not too hot, but much of the heat is carried away by the river. But, plants are shut down in summer sometimes because they will warm their river too much. This would be more frequent if you are just wasting what would otherwise be electricity. So, you need a river with a greater flow. But then you run into the same problem that hydro has: maxing out the flow rate.
Nuclear plants are inflexible for physical reasons and thus require the somewhat artificial "base load" concept to justify their existance.
If you want to meet variable demand with a constant source, you should be sure the source is nonthermal or dispersed or else you need storage such as batteries. You may need a lot of batteries to cover seasonal variations in demand.
Given the cost curve of solar, this is what I expect the grid to look like in 50 years: Way more capacity than use with storage only amounting to a day or two of use (not generation). Wind also has future cost reductions beyond just the scale advantages it is taking now. Once a tower is up, your future costs are in the refurbishment of the turbines. While there may be maintenance of the towers and replacement of stressed parts, these are basically 3-500 year structures. This situation is much different from nuclear power where plants have to be abandoned basically forever after a certain time, scratching out a prime thermal site that might have been used for fusion. For this reason, fission is not a good stepping stone to fusion. In some special cases, like Calvert Cliffs, there are no towers and the flow is tidal. This site may have to be abandoned in the next few decades as sea level rise makes this method untenable at its site or any other. The cost of removing the current reactor cores to avoid contamination of the rising water may be substaintial. Beginning to cool them now may make sense to reduce this cost. The current plans for expansion seem to be a tremendous boondoggle in the making. But solar and wind are distributed and non-thermal so it is easy to have much more capacity than is usually used. From time to time, spare capacity will be put to use for special projects such as launches of space vehicle components.
If you are rather talking about draconian load shifting, you can't do that with price, you need blackouts.
Chris
Chris,
With price we certainly could do "draconian" load shifting.
For example, some skyscrapers in NYC are using late night electricity (which they can buy much more cheaply) to cool big tubs of water to use to cool the skyscrapers during the day. The same could be done with heating and cooling of houses given a large enough differential between low and high electric prices in the course of a day.
Better batteries for electric cars are going to create a large source of flexible demand for electricity. People will be able to program their cars to begin recharging whenever prices pass below some threshold level.
Farmers will be able to run electric-powered irrigation pumps whenever electric power prices get really low.
Cheap batteries for homes and industrial uses (e.g. the NaS batteries from Japan that one utility in the US has begun buying) will allow shifting of electric power between high and low priced times. The bigger the difference due to variable pricing the more affordable the storage batteries become.
BTW, batteries coupled with variable dynamic pricing is the only way that solar can become a big contributor if we stop using fossil fuels to generate electricity.
http://www.tva.gov/sites/raccoonmt.htm
Useful for wind, useful for nuke.
Alan
I do think batteries have a role in a renewable grid, but I think that role will be limitied. With $0.40/Watt 30% efficient panels, I think it will often make more sense to meet late afternoon demand with straight solar and just don't use much of the power generated at noon. Perhaps batteries will get to the point where they only add a fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of electricity, but I think that will be hard to achieve. My guess is that it will end near $0.02/kWh. And, there are environmental issues as well with batteries.
Storage is being planned for thermal solar plants and this will likely be cheaper than batteries for some time.
Chris
"BTW, batteries coupled with variable dynamic pricing is the only way that solar can become a big contributor if we stop using fossil fuels to generate electricity."
Batteries coupled with variable dynamic pricing would certainly help, but I think that exaggerates the case. Keep in mind that solar is mostly a consumer-side technology: it's going to explode, and it will just look to the utilities like demand is falling. Summertime peaks will fall, and demand will vary based on clouds a bit more. It's not at all clear that overall variability will increase, at least until solar supplies something like 30% of demand.
"I think the extent to which solar aligns with peak demand is exaggerated. Peak demand is around 4 to 5 PM and tapers off slowly in the evening on a hot day. By contrast, peak solar photovoltaic output happens around noon time."
This varies by area, but what I see is generally a peak around 3:30. What is important here, is that the underlying drive is solar: solar heat which must be air-conditioned. That solar heat is, of course, perfectly proportional to solar power. Now, residential A/C tends to get turned on in late afternoon & evening as people get home, but that's an entirely artificia product of the current flat-pricing model.
The late-afternoon peak occurs at a point where solar is still producing, solar would reduce the absolute peak, as well as greatly drop the curve before that. It will be trivial to move demand a couple hours earlier.
"I've read that the growth of massive server farms has reduced the difference between peak and base demand."
Do you have numbers? I don't think server farms are that large a % of overall demand. Further, computer useage still peaks during the day, and CPU power demand is partially a function of processing activity.
Most electrical consumption is driven by human activity, which is still pretty correlated with the sun. "Baseload" has a significant I/C component pushed to the night by "demand" charges, which would move back to the day if the night/day price differential fell.
What's my point? Solar power generation is a very nice match with demand. If we need to, we can move demand to the night, or we can move it to the day, but there's a cost to moving it. Solar would work very nicely: better than wind, nuclear or coal, so if it gets cheap, it will be very practical as a major source of power.
This lack of investment capital is another reason I support a slow and less costly build-up in new nukes.
I think that there is a place for more nuke power and it follows a "different path" for resources & capital than admittedly better alternatives.
We cannot have a crash program EVERYWHERE, but we can have a mix of crash, fast track and slow but positive programs on different tracks.
Best Hopes for the WILL to do something,
Alan
(...)
I agree, this is pretty much how I feel about Nuclear. Meh, I agree with the nuke heads (and others) - Nuclear is probably one of the best short term measures for maintaining BAU. Certainly a good argument can be made coal is much more polluting (& radioactive!), in addition to CO2.
I just have troubling imagining we'll be able to build enough nuke plants in the "peak oil" economic environment to make a difference.
Bear Stearns estimates 16 trillion will be needed for energy infrastructure updates and new build for what is needed for the world by 2030
http://www.psers.state.pa.us/org/board/resolutions/2006/First%20Reserve%...
The infrastructure is generally paid for by issuing bonds. Any government subsidies ultimately come out of taxes. the US gov't in 2004 took 3.9 trillion in federal, state and local taxes
http://www.urban.org/publications/1001092.html
You can also raise money by selling stock.
The size of the international bond market is an estimated $45 trillion of which the size of outstanding U.S. bond market debt is $25.2 trillion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_market
New issues of bonds in 2006, 2006 Bond Market Issuance Rises to $6.13 Trillion Led by Corporate Bond Record of Over $1 Trillion; Issuance to Remain Strong in 2007 But Moderate from 2006 Pace
http://www.sifma.org/news/sifmastory.asp?id=2793
Bonds are repaid from the revenues generated by the power generating source.
There is plenty of capital to build what needs to be built. The only question is how is it allocated. Usually it is not command economies. The rules that are setup effect the profitability of the projects.
===========
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
Money to build energy infrastructure is not a problem as long as the energy thereby produced is cost competitive with other energy sources. The United States has a per capita GDP of over $13 trillion. Well, GE is quoting new nuclear plant costs of $2000 to $3000 per kilowatt of capacity. We could buy new capacity for at most $3 billion per gigawatt. For less than a quarter of 1 year of US GDP we could build 1000 gigawatts of nuclear power plants.
Surely at such a scale we could achieve some big economies of scale and cut costs quite a bit. Long term contracts to buy steel and concrete would lower their costs down from the highs that China's market has driven construction materials up to.
As for $200/gallon gasoline: Never going to happen. We could cut our energy usage to a quarter of current levels by switching to small diesel hybrids. We could get 80 mpg or higher.
Sorry, but GE is NOT "quoting" those prices for new nukes.
Those might be PROJECTIONS based on predicted commodity prices. Commodities affect all energy sources but future prices are difficult to predict.
You don't quote a PRICE in a public forum. A price quote only comes after detailed negotiations and assignment of division of responsibilites, agreement on terms and conditions, and firm delivery dates.
I did read someplace that the French do not actually reprocess the waste as much as they use the Atlantic to dilute the waste - is this true?
Please give a reference to this text.
I know for sure that dumping radioactive waste in the ocean is absolutely forbidden by an international treaty.
Lets see....
http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/green-to-the-core-part-2/150/?p...
I am actually for nukes - but I do know Judith Lewis does her homework.
Its a part of a longer article
http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/green-to-the-core-part-1/151/
and
http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/green-to-the-core-part-2/150/
and some info on David Lochbaum
David Lochbaum is one of the nation's top independent experts on nuclear power. At UCS, he monitors safety issues at the nation's nuclear power plants, raises concerns with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and responds to breaking events, such as current concerns over aging power plants and plant fire safety.
Take all with a grain of salt - I can say I am the King of Fresno on the web.
UCS also has Skip Hammond as a resident nuclear expert right? I understand David Lochbaum works closely with him on safety issues.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39473
The author seems overly impressed with the work of Helen Caldicott. Yes, the nuclear power industry works with, produces, and sequesters toxic substances. The effect of all this is a minute fraction of what we do to ourselves with toxic releases from fossil fuel burning and the chemical industry. Caldicott paints a frightening picture, but it lacks perspective for the many other non-nuclear risks that we face.
I saw Caldicott on television a couple of weeks ago on a local TV show and she spouted so much obvious non-information and special pleading that I was almost ready to reach into the screen and grab her neck...the sad thing was that a) the audience responded far better to her than to the other commentators b) the "pro-nuke" people did a very lousy job of responding to her points.
And note that I don't particularly think Australia needs to go nuclear, given the number of other options we have, but it should at least be a politically feasible option if it gets to the point that the other options are obviously not working out. She's not doing Australia any favours by trumping up the dangers of a technology that is already viewed with unnecessarily high levels of suspicion by the general public (and note that for most of my life, I saw nuclear power stations as bogeymen that I was glad to know would never be built in my backyard - an attitude that is still the dominant one today).
The miners at Olympic Dam don't understand why cool contained waste isn't stored in the hole they just made to get out fresh ore. Some logistic hassles with high level grades and possible future retrieval but other problems like heavy transport, water removal and security are already solved.
I know a range of properties are changed but it seems neat to put it back in the same hole in the ground, maybe after a round the world journey.
Edit; changed 'buried' to 'stored'.
1- all French (and a lot of other countries) nuclar used combustible is reprocessed at the La Hague plant
2- a vast majority of reprocessed nuclear materials are sent back to the customer (France or other country)
3- a very small amount of nuclear materials is 'lost' during the reprocessing, and dumped, partly in the atmosphere, parlty in the ocean through a long pipe :
see photo and video
This pipe a getting a lot of attention from Greenpeace, CRIIRAD and local associations, and there is a annual limit on the radioactivity COGEMA can legally dump in the ocean.
Except in the very close proximity of the pipe, there seems to be no danger. This is far from "clean" but I don't want anyone to think that "France dumps it's nuclear wastes in the ocean".
Even if it did it would be less than what happens with coal.
Study coal and you tend to go pro nuke.
"Study coal and you tend to go pro nuke."
Actually think for a minute and you tend to go power-down.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Yup that was me. After reading LATOC, for a few minutes, I really did think there was no other choice.
Then I thought and read a lot more, and realised it was a) never going to be happen b) not desirable anyway.
There's a lot wrong and unsustainable with modern civilisation, but no sort of powerdown is going to fix it.
You can't powerdown with 7 billion people on the planet. Powerdown is death, which we may get anyway if we keep up current policies. Powerdown is the collapse that so many doomers discuss. We either avoid powerdown or we get the full impact of everything waiting offstage for us to make a mistake.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
"You can't powerdown with 7 billion people on the planet."
Who suggested we could? I think voluntary population reduction is a necessary ideal of power-down. Power-down ideally has nothing to do with collapse, either. Why associate it with doomerism? That is just conflating two separate ideas.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Power-down would almost certainly cause collapse in a world of 7 billion people as well as a big die-off, especially if it also accompanied the end of availablity if most fertilizers.
Most of the population growth is now in the third world. Those people need offspring to take care of them in their old age and help them produce food. How would you get them to throw that away along with most of the little energy and fertilizer they now use (also considering that the developed world would not longer be able to supply them with any food either)? That's why it is associated with doomerism. It would almost certainly cause a catastrophe in the world as it is.
"Power-down would almost certainly cause collapse in a world of 7 billion people as well as a big die-off"
Rubbish. Please explain how voluntary population reduction, more people walking/taking public transportation, people living closer to the land and becoming more self sufficient, people wasting less/using less energy (in the 1st world at least - since we use the lion's share of resources), education about the problems we face, greater use of renewables, etc. would most certainly cause collapse? Power-down does not mean no technology either.
The argument that power-down = die-off/collapse is a distraction, scare-mongering and a trite label used to deflect discussion from the real problem of finite resources and our consumer addiction.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
I am talking about realistic scenarios. Voluntary population reduction is unlikely in a world where almost all the population growth is with people who are poor and need the kids for food production and their old age. China has been able to slow down their population grown but I am not sure I would call that voluntary. The only thing that seems to work on a voluntary basis is development.
Regarding power down, your scenario is also wildly unrealistic. The most likely cause of power down is the result of unwillingness to invest in new energy infrastucture as fossil fuels decline or the inablitiy to mobilize the effort to do so. But then it would not be the developed world that would willingly be giving up power. The people who would suffer would be the poor who would be priced out of the energy markets. If we had a big reduction in world population it would be mainly through mass starvation in the third world. We might also have quite a few death by resource wars, like Iraq, going nuclear.
Sure, if we can get people in the developed world to use less energy that would be great. But that will only happen if they are not forced to cut back by serious shortages. If we let the world slip into serious resource shortages, the developed world will grab all they can and leave the much more overcrowded third world to go to hell.
Agreed that currently voluntary population reduction won't be swallowed by many people and is not realistically going now - but that doesn't mean we should be promoting the status quo, either - "swap coal energy for nuklea energy!"
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Then consider the other part of the argument. If you do not swap coal for Nuclear you will continue to have too many green house gases from coal. If you stop running/building coal plants and we lose gas plants and transportation fuels from oil due to peak fossil fuels and do not attempt to replace them with any resources that can scale and do not produce green house gases, we will soon have a very serious energy deficiency (one that cannot be solved by voluntary powerdown in the developed world). That will cause massive involuntary population decrease because the reductions in energy use will come disproportionately from poor people who will then starve. The energy deficiency and mass starvation would have repercussions, such as resource wars and environmental damage on an unimagined scale, that, I contend, would wreck the world.
Since I contend that it is impossible to scale up other non polluting energy sources (like wind and solar) fast enough without nuclear to avoid a crunch that would cause such a catastrophe, the only choice we have is to also build nuclear and the others as fast as we can. And that still may not be enough to prevent disaster.
BTW, promoting the status quo also leads to almost certain disaster. I am not in favor of that.
I respectfully disagree.
Look at
http://www.awea.org/faq/instcap.html
and realize that it will take 5 years (and $2.5 billion if they stay on budget, rare for nukes) to finish the 60% complete 1.2 GW Watts Bar II and the two new TXU nukes recently ordered will be on-line 2015 to 2020 (maybe).
Also realize that the skilled and experienced personnel to build nukes are almost all retired or dead now.
The domestic suppliers are largely moribund and the USA (with our US$ in hand) will have to compete for very limited overseas supplies. Other nations with no other options (and export surpluses) will be building nukes on a crash basis and we will have to outbid them or wait.
We cannot do "crash everything" (as we are doing with Canadian Tar Sands). So my priorities are:
Crash
- Tar Sands (the momentum is already there)
- Electrify and expand our freight railroads
- Urban Rail
- Make Bicycling Easier & Safer
- Wind
- HV DC lines (Phoenix is building two to WY)
- Insulation (retrofit & German type standards for new construction)
- Solar & tankless gas hot water heaters
Urgent (one step below crash)
- Solar PV & Thermal electric
- Geothermal
- Micro and small hydro
- Pumped Storage
Normal Boom
- Nuclear (say 5 or 6 new nukes/yr, ~8 GW/yr by 2027)
- Biomass
- Unconventional Natural Gas
- Tankless electric hot water heaters
You have to realize that the nuclear industry has a multi-decade record of over-promising and under delivering. One CANNOT (unfortunately) COUNT on the promise of nuclear power !
Go with what works and can deliver quickly, on-time and on budget (tar sands have problems there as well). Nuclear is
Plan B" and will follow up later.
Best Hopes for Reality Based Planning,
Alan
The only part of what you wrote that I agree with is "go with what works". That's why I think our best hope is a massive nuclear buildup. I do not think you are considering what could be done if nations put the effort into this that they did for World War II, when the US mobilized 25-50% of national income for the war effort. As pointed out above, with about 25% of national income ($3 trillion) we could fund 1,000 GW reactors in one year! I think we need to build about 2,000 in the US in the next 40 years. Hell, we are going to end up spending about $1 trillion in Iraq and this is orders of magnitude more important.
To do that we would might have to do some things that seem extreme, which is what happens in wartime. We might have to make final decisions about licenses and plans in about 2 years. We might need to settle on a small number of standard designs and only fund them. We might need to draft scientists, engineers and operations people, have them be part of a national service and create new universities to train them. We might have to make the federal government responsible for procuring resources, possibly denying them to other industries and possible using our armed forces to help.
I think that is what a crash program would look like. If the US nuclear indsutry is not up to it, we might need to build a new one. Think about what we did in the forties. That generation is not greater than we could be.
If you took thos esteps to build Urban Rail as fast as we did from 1897 to 1916, AND a massive wind program AND a massive bicycle program And a massive railroad building & electrification program etc., I could agree,
But such an effort with nukes would lead to dangerously unsafe nuclear reactors and a likely major disaster.
Besides, an isolated grid cannot use more than 50% or so nuclear power, since no current designs were made to throttle up. And there is a disconnect between electricity and transportation unless transportation is electrified (see above).
Best Hopes for Realism.
Alan
Get back to me when you have success getting just 10% of the third world to hold population growth to zero percent.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
you have success getting just 10% of the third world
China seems likely to get there within a decade or so.
The teenagers of today (One Child started in 1979, but took a few years to get going properly) are products of the "One Child" policy (and fertility was lowest early on, since creeped back up but still below 2.0 children/woman). The male/female ratio is heavily male (40 million extra males in the current generation).
If the women of this generation have 1.4 children, starting at age 27, and pollution etc starts to drop Chinese life expectancy (killing off the older ones early) by a year or so, China could reach 0% population growth (0.6% now).
Best Hopes for Reduced Fertility,
Alan
How long do you think that'll take? You quote Dr Bartlett fairly regularly - at some point soon global death rates will equal birth rates. Would it be better to reach that point via voluntary means or should we continue to encourage a cultural/energy status quo and let that point be reached through non-voluntary means?
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
An interesting article on a variant of "One Child"
http://www.wunrn.com/news/2007/03_07/03_19_07/032507_china2.htm
In rural areas, a second child is allows if the first is a girl. Overall, 1,7 childen/woman.
This experiment required later marriage and at least 6 years between child #1 & #2. Better male/female ratios (106:100 vs 118:100)
Policy will change in 2010.
Best Hopes,
Alan
And how are you going to acheive "voluntary population reduction"? Even if we managed to get the whole world to agree to having only 1 kid per couple, starting today, the world population will still hit 8 billion at least, and it would take roughly until the end of the century to get back down to 4 billion. And we don't have that much time before CO2 levels have to be drastically reduced and fossil fuels become sufficiently scarce that they are unable to provide much of the energy needs of 4 billion people.
Personally I think the debate for nuclear power is no less than the debate for the future of our civilisation. Simply put do we plan to have a civilisation after FFs are gone (in say 50-70 years) or not?
Everyone (or most people) in the debate knows the technical facts about nuclear and its touted alternatives - solar and wind. Everyone knows that renewables are not able to supply the amounts of energy we need to maintain even a reduced version of our civilisation.
So what is this debate all about? Why for example real, but solvable (and successfully solved!) problems with nuclear are presented as impossible hurdles? I've reached slowly to the conclusion that the long term idea of hard-core nuclear opponents (except for a few delusional ones) is basically to dismantle civilization and probably erase human species with it. It is all that idea that the human kind is evil and has to reduce to some prehistoric "sustainable" version, so that the biosphere can survive and recover from it.
Personally I am open to discussing this (unstated) idea, but if this is what we are debating I would politely ask these guys to state it clearly, so that we can proceed from that point on. Most of them start their statements with "I'm not an expert in nuclear power but I have read [insert here a site, presentation, pdf etc.] that says it does not have a future because it is too costly, dangerous etc.etc." Yeah like the 440 reactors producing 16% of our electricity today don't exist at all. And with all due respect since "you are not experts" (read you don't know jack) about nuclear power, why the hell you are engaging in a debate you don't know anything about?
Everyone knows that renewables are not able to supply the amounts of energy we need to maintain even a reduced version of our civilisation
I do not.
My too long delayed North American non-GHG grid proposal has 24% nuke and the rest renewable. 52% wind (measured by gross GWh/year).
Alan
Alan I know you have good intentions but a top-down plan like that that does NOT fit in our infrastructure can only be described as wishful thinking.
Just think about the problems and the resources that will be stressed if you try to do it (which implies some government program):
1) Concrete, steel, copper - wind is 10-20 times more material extensive than nuclear on GWh basis
2) Transmission lines and infrastructure
3) Backup generation - I'm not familiar with your calculations but you will need a considerable backup for this and it is hard to see how you can do it with hydro only (only 10% in US).
4) Good wind sites near major consumers are also subject to depletion
5) What will be the overall efficiency of your envisioned system with all the transmission lines going through the entire US?
6) In the end, even if we let the possibility that such system can be built (and theoretically it probably could), would you be able to do it in the rest of the world? How about India, China, Europe? Mexico? Nicaragua?
I admit that just like Denmark and Germany, US can afford expensive experiments but IMO this will not happen here. Thanks God, US culture of pragmatism usually prevails.
1) Concrete, steel, copper - wind is 10-20 times more material extensive than nuclear on GWh basis
All steel is not the same.
All concrete is not the same.
Nuke requires high specification, close tolerance, extreme thickness steel and concrete. Wind can take any decent carbon steel and medium psi portland concrete. Wind does take more copper/GWh (although aluminum windings in the generator have been looked at and all other wiring can be Al).
LOTS of people can make WT towers out of steel or concrete.
If labor gets cheap & steel expensive, hyperboloid towers are possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperboloid_structure
OTOH, I believe that there is a single source left for some nuke forgings (in Japan), alloy steel is the rule with VERY tech specs.
As a percentage of current world capacity, a few new nukes will take close to 100% of operating capacity while WTs take a very small % (<1%) of available resources. Even blades can take from other fiberglass & composite fabrication.
Best Hopes,
Alan
So what? They're not an order of magnitude in price difference, and the entire plant doesn't all require 'high specification' materials as you imply. Critical areas like the pressure vessel do certainly, but the containment dome is just a whole bunch of rebar and ordinary concrete.
Japan Steel Works and Creusot Forge, with Japan steel works being the only one with the capability to manufacture forgings above 500 tons. I don't expect that they'll retain the monopoly on ultraheavy forgings forever, and Creusot is often good enough. Its a supply chain pinch, same as wind has a supply chain pinch in things like large cranes.
I'm not sure what you're trying to demonstrate with 'VERY tech specs.' however...
I'm not sure what you're trying to demonstrate with 'VERY tech specs.' however...
It is my understanding that Alcoa has a near (and very profitable) monopoly on aluminum for aviation. Certain bauxite sources are certified, along with sources for alloys, and this is "tagged" with a paper trail from mine to a specific a/c.
Almost any decent aluminum can be used for a beer can (including recycled Al).
Wind turbines can use any decent carbon steel.
Nukes cannot use any decent carbon steel for ANY safety related project. The rebar in the containment dome has to be nuke certified rebar (looks like the cheap stuff at Lowe's but it is not). And some rebar manufacturer has to get into the business of making and certifying nuke grade rebar. Just like Alcoa Aluminum certified for aviation.
Beer can Al = Wind Turbines
Aviation Al = Nukes
There is a lot more beer can aluminum and ordinary rebar in the world than certified Al or rebar.
Hope that explains my point,
Alan
They're not an order of magnitude in price difference, and the entire plant doesn't all require 'high specification' materials as you imply
A nuke grade of Loctite (same bottle with a sticker and serial # on it) does cost 8 times as much as a bottle without the serial #.
And *ALL* safety related materials (down to simple bolts to hold covers on) require nuke grade.
Yes, the site HQ building and the guard shack can be ordinary construction with ordinary materials. BUT anything safety related in any way has to be nuke grade.
And nuke grade is ALWAYS multiples in price. x10 is not unheard of.
Alan
Alan, I'm not sure I believe you. I've tried finding data on this, but we're getting in the bluster territory here for rhetorical points.
If its a matter of someone making 8 fold markup on bulk materials for a stamp, that problem has an obvious solution.
The eight fold mark-up is reasonable for the
1) extra QA on a small batch (how much Loctite do ALL nukes use ?)
and
2) paperwork (they have to keep records for a long time).
This is true for EVERY nuke grade material !
Fortunately for new construction nukes, Loctite is already making nuke grade Loctite for maintenance and it will only cost them 8x as much.
Talk to anyone doing nuke maintenance and they will confirm (they may not know the price).
Unfortunately, there has been no demand for nuke grade rebar for decades (AFAIK) and they are going to have to find a manufacturer willing to make some. They may be lucky if the price is only 8x.
Supplying nuke parts is a HIGH profit business and GE is the worst AFAIK for raping their captive customers.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Alan,
Part of that problem is economies of scale, correct? The amount of nuke rated material for application X is small so the cost is high.
That cost should fall, at least somewhat, if we build more nukes and the market expands. It can probably never be as cheap as non-nuke rated material but it can certainly go down if we scale up production (which I believe has to be done to avert the looming energy crisis).
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Your arguments are meaningless without the numbers.
Give me a breakdown, how much high-grade, low-grade steel and concrete the nuclear require, what is the energy/resource requirements for each etc. Then compare it with wind. Otherwise it is just a hollow argument for the non-specialists which will be impressed that "nuclear uses high grade steel". So what?
Dezakin is right - a ton of steel or concrete is a ton of steel or concrete. You have to still take it out from the ground, process it, transport it etc.etc. I would bet that when tracked to the sources wind will require an order of magnitude more ores, energy inputs, manual labor etc. than nuclear. I would especially stress on the copper/aluminium requirements for transmission lines and transformers. I would also suggest that you will end with significantly higher concrete requirements - these wind turbine basements are huge!
Overall this argument can be ended with just a short look at the economics. Even in the best wind sites wind is still more expensive than nuclear. Bear in mind that much of the costs associated with nuclear are associated with value added by highly qualified personnel needed at all stages. Mass production and economies of scale have the potential of driving down these costs significantly, while wind is pretty much maxed out on these. And looking at the activity nowadays the utilities obviously know it.
Boeing will be pleasantly surprised that it can build aircraft out of recycled Budweiser cans.
Nuke requires virgin ores as it's source, recycled is not generally acceptable. And QA is NOT cheap ! Recycled steel is perfectly acceptable for WTs.
And you are QUITE wrong about WTs. They have their own "Moore's Law" and unit prices have been steadily dropping.
No one knows what a new nuke costs. The prior history of promises by the nuke industry and promoters is worse than dismal, so I give current claims no credibility (I owned GE stock when they lost billions on fixed price nuke contracts) . $2.5 billion to finish a 60% complete nuke (1.2 GW from memory) is as good a data point as we have ATM.
I fully expect Texas wind to be cheaper than the two 1.7 GW nukes ordered by TXU. After all, T Boone Pickens is spending $6 billion on 4 GW of wind, not a new nuke.
Best Hopes for Reality Based Planning,
Alan
It could be pointed out that nukes have similar siting and transmission line issues.
Hm you don't need to build a nuke in the middle of nowhere, just because its fuel (the wind) is good only there.
All you really need is a source of water. Coincidentally all major population centers have large sources of water nearby, so the transmission is much less of an issue (vs the amounts of electricity produced of course). In addition wind because of its nature underutilises the transmission infrastructure it needs. Simply put if a wind farm is rated 400MW you need to put in place a 400MW transmission lines though in practice you will get 100MW on average (25% is a realistic load factor). Thus 75% of the fixed costs are sunk while in nuclear it would be more like 10-15%.
Please note that the ONLY new proposed site for a nuke in the USA is a single 1.6 GW nuke in Idaho, and not close for what passes as population centers there.
All the rest of the 28 or so are on existing nuke sites AFAIK (there was talk of one in an empty part of Texas).
There will never be a nuke on Long Island NY (at least not in the next half century) but WTs may well be.
Building new nukes within 100 miles of any US city of 1 million is "not feasible" except on existing sites.
The future on new nuke sites is in Idaho, West Texas, UP Michigan, perhaps rural Georgia and northern Maine, etc.
Proximity will be only good till existing sites are filled up.
25% is unrealistically low load factor for WTs.
32% is the average load factor so far in the USA. The larger wind turbines are getting better load factors, so the % may grow.
Best Hopes for non-GHG generation,
Alan
US is not the world and the US tomorrow won't be the US today. The only problem with siting nukes relatively close (<100miles) to population centers is NIMBY. Hopefully and predictably NIMBY will begin to die off in the years to come.
On the other hand it is hard to imagine how you can bring wind to blow where and when you want it to. What will you do to make it stop blowing in North Dakota and move to Illinois? Sue it?
http://www.awea.org/projects/illinois.html
You are not arguing my points just going sideways. I did not expect that from you.
BTW I'm all pro-wind; I just don't see it as significant as you do. And IMO in the near future we will see depletion of both good sites and backup capacity. The additional backup capacity you suggest will be needed is mostly theoretical and each one would need feasibility studies which are far beyond the ability of one person to make.
On a general note I'm appalled by the idea to dam every single river on the American continent and clear forest and land to put wind mills and transmission wires all around it. Especially since I know there are much more cheaper and reliable options... but it is again a matter of choice what to choose to like or dislike.
You are not arguing my points just going sideways. I did not expect that from you
I had to walk out the door for lunch with a friend and had limited time. The upper left of that link for Illinois
Wind Energy Potential: Average Power Output (MW): 6,980
This estimate is at least a decade old (back when 0.25 MW was about the biggest WT, perhaps 0.66 MW). With modern WTs, doubling that number seems reasonable and quite conservative.
Illinois can generate a fair % of their power from wind. Imports add needed extra power and geographic diversity.
Most small hydro & micro hydro will have minimal impact on the streams. Run-of-the-river is often cheaper to build and has minimal impact.
And WTs require minimal space (and most good sites are not in the midst of forests, trees add too much friction).
You may be happy with 25% wind & 50% nuke. I with 25% nuke & 50% wind and reality may work out to 40% wind and 40% nuke :-)
Best Hopes for Less Coal,
Alan
Idaho
http://www.awea.org/projects/idaho.html
has eight 10.5 MW projects, four 18 MW and one 21 MW project scattered about. My deduction is that is there way of getting around transmission issues.
10.5 & 18 MW are probably standard size distribution feeders for ranchers & farmers & small villages in Idaho. Build some WTs next to the line and send as much power out (at peak) as it could once carry in. Local demand (the local ranchers) will absorb a MW or two and the rest goes back into the larger grid.
I bet in 30 years we'll see a little more wind, a little more nukes, a little less natural gas, and a lot more coal, no matter how we argue.
Agreed. To some extent this argument is meaningless as the economic interests have already determined what is down the pipeline.
as the economic interests have already determined what is down the pipeline
Government actions and policies are at least as influential as economic interests.
Would T Boone Pickens have invested $6 billion into 4 GW of Texas wind if it were not for the 1.5 cents/kWh tax credit ? I doubt it, at least not that much this year.
If it were not for the recent gov't subsidies for nuke, would TXU have ordered those two 1.7 GW reactors ? I think not.
If the US Gov't enacted even a modest carbon tax, what would happen to both wind & nuke ?
IMO, economics is secondary to gov't policy because the different options are fairly close economically.
Best Hopes for Better Policies,
Alan
The world sure must look pretty through those rose coloured lenses. My bet is coal will be the political whipping boy no one will actually do anything about.
Globally, the picture stays the same also. Whats happening in India and China? Coal coal coal, a nuke here, a wind farm there, coal coal coal.
BTW 32% seems kind of high... they usually say 25-30% is the average. Can you provide a source?
Here is a screen shot from the NRC of the expected US applications. They are expected because the companies involved have already been in unofficial discussions with the NRC and are already spending tens of millions of dollars each on the prep work for filings. The list shows the state and names the location and whether there is already a nuclear plant there.
A summary of NRC expected new reactors and up-powering
Unistar (joint venture of the french firm Areva) seems to moving the fastest.
Wikipedia has info on nine mile point (in New York state) where they are looking to add
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Mile_Point_Nuclear_Generating_Station
Wikipedia lists all current reactors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#United_States_of_A...
Most of the New York reactors are around Lake Ontario.
The Indian Points Reactors (3 units) are on the Hudson River 24 miles north of New York City.
=====
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
The market will correct some siting problems. For example, any area that is nuke friendly will enjoy cheaper electricity. Therefore industries will tend to move toward the cheaper electricity and away from the areas with expensive electricity.
One of wind's big problems that there's so little wind in the rapidly growing US southeast that wind projects are extremely rare in the US southeast. Though check out all those wind projects in Texas. If Texas also allows in lots of nuke projects then add in its high insolation and wind projects and it might have the cheapest electricity in the US in 10 or 20 years time.
The southeast is relatively nuke friendly. So I expect lots of new nukes in the southeast.
What I wonder: Will any northeastern states allow new nukes?
"you don't need to build a nuke in the middle of nowhere, just because its fuel (the wind) is good only there"
Some wind resource is close to population, and so don't need long distance transmission.
When you do, you're likely to be using a pretty high quality wind resource, which will help offset the cost. Finally, it's not an enormous cost, maybe $.25 per watt or less. That's significant, but not a killer.
BTW if you reverse the places of nuke and wind you would make your plan much more realistic.
Some notes:
Canada has significant undeveloped hydro resources (5 GW in Manitoba if they had a market, this 5 GW could have extra turbines added and become a larger peak source). Lake Winnipeg (the "other" Great Lake) is now a reservoir.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Winnipeg
About 20 GW more hydro from Canada and several more GW from the USA in microhydro (USGS says 17 GW available in microhydro).
Niagara Falls has very interesting possibilities if we are willing to sacrifice the tourist potential except when the continent has a power surplus. Today 4 GW.
I assume that pumped storage absorbs 19% of MWh generated and produces 15%, time shifting generation.
One example would be Florida, paired with Chattanooga (pumped storage & wind) and Western Oklahoma (wind) by HV DC in a triangle (bisected by a short 4th HV DC line from Chattanooga to the OK-FL HV DC line, allowing parallel flows).
On a "typical summer day & night",
At about 1 or 2 AM the FL nuke power would be in excess of demand and power would flow from FL to pumped storage near Chattanooga till close to 6 AM. And again, on fairly clear days, about an two hours before solar noon, nuke + solar PV would be in surplus and power would flow northward from FL to storage. This storage flow would cease about 45 minutes after solar noon as a/c demand picked up. The lower weekend demand would stretch the power excess times and limit imports.
Florida would be importing power from pumped storage or directly from "fresh" wind production the rest of the time and would be a considerable net power importer.
A second triangle would be set up from West Texas, the Ozarks and Florida.
The "Wind Exporting Belt" would have HV DC spine(s) to shift power from the Prairie Provinces down to Texas; very few highs becalm that entire mid-Continent area. None for very long. And Lake Winnipeg could be drained down when they are (install, say, 35 GW of turbines with a small % load factor).
The Wind Exporting Belt would export both East & West depending on demand & supply.
Just a sample.
BTW, France can have such a high % nuke only because of hydro & FF generation in the rest of the EU. One cannot live by baseload alone.
French nukes run much of Switzerland at night at steeply discounted rates, whilst the Swiss save their water for Peak Demand at many times the price/MWh.
50% is about the maximum a grid can accept in nuke power.
Alan
Yep, we're going to need all those hydro projects - every single one. More megabucks.
And btw, those hydro plants will likely still be operating long after the latest round of nukes have been decommissioned.
We'd better start building them while we still can.
Don't forget pumped storage in the Great Lakes, like Ludington, MI. I strongly suspect that the Northern UP of Michigan would take all the capacity you could throw at it, for economic development.
By definition renewables are the only energy resource upon which a sustainable economy can be based. From this point forward, everything else is just a transitional strategy which -- at best -- might help us to get from here to there.
And you are right. That sustainable, renewables based economy cannot possibly operate are our present levels. A couple of months ago there was a profound article by Francois Cellier:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2534
It is obvious from studying Dr. Cellier's comments that it is only possible for any country to operate on a sustainable basis at a level of approximately 25% of the present US per capita GDP.
There are plenty of examples of countries presently operating near that level right now, and also with a level of human development that is not too far removed from that achieved by the US. Costa Rica is a notable example, Uruguay another one. Are those countries "uncivilized"? Is life unbearable in such countries? Some might argue that life is actually pretty good in those countries, maybe even better than in the US in some non-material ways.
Our biggest danger is that in a vain and misguided effort to sustain the unsustainable, we might squander our last opportunity to manage the inevitable decline so that we can end up even at the 25% level. There is a very real danger that this will happen.
By definition renewables are the only energy resource upon which a sustainable economy can be based.
Whose definition is that? What does "renewable" mean? Does the hydrogen in the Sun's core magically "renew" itself? Or does a broken wind turbine fix itself? Is the concrete or steel in a wind turbine of endless supply that will last forever?
I can very easily show you that nuclear can power our entire civilisation for thousands of years. Personally I think this is enough to make it worthed to persue without the need of all of us collectively embracing Costa Rica lifestyle. If you do not agree with that then there is no point of arguing I guess.
I would not leave it at that. If people think we should not attempt to mitigate peak fossil fuels and global warming by trying to rapidly build new energy infrastructure it is not enough to say that a small population, low tech civilization would be better for the world. They need to present a plausible scenario of how we get there from here. How do you reduce the population from 6.5 billion to a billion or so in a few generations? That’s 15 times the rate of excess deaths per year of World War II if you do it over forty years (5,500/40 vs 55/6).
Do you commit genocide directly or passively by doing nothing to stop it? If you do it by omission, how do you prevent the starving, desperate people from creating Haiti’s throughout the third world and migrating to the currently developed world and taking our resources and destroying our environment as well? How would any lifeboats survive that holocaust? I think they need to answer that question.
It's worse than that, because the current population has at least 2 billion females at prime fertility, so in the next 20 years, at least another 4 billion babies will be born and survive (current fertility is actually 3 surviving infants per female), of which 2 billion will be females, and almost certainly will give birth to another 2 billion children, so at the very minimum, there's 6 billion new surviving infants being born in the next 40 years right there.
Current death rates (~60m/y) would give at best 3 billion deaths in the next 40 years, so on that basis, the population will easily reach 9.5 billion. Even if the death rate more than doubles in that period due to disease/wars/famines (not unlikely), the population will reach 8.5 billion. Hence for it to be cut down to 1 billion in 40 years requires in the order of 7 BILLION additional deaths.
Right. The one thing that seems to slow down the growth rate is development. Hardly any of the developed world has any population growth except by immigration and births to immigrants. If we can avoid the catastrophe, I think we can eventually turn the population around and bring it down from where it is now - over a few hundred years.
But to welcome a quick, short term die-off is ignorant and evil. It would wreck the world and none of us could be sure of surviving.
I'm not sure many people actually welcome a "quick, short term die-off": there are some posters who believe we could possibly dramatically cut our energy usage (by 90%, or whatever) without such a massive die-off being necessary, others who just think that no matter what we do, die-off is inevitable. Both are making extraordinary claims that require extraordinary proof, that so far has not been forthcoming.
BTW, it shouldn't need a few hundred years to get the population back below 6 billion. It could well happen by the end of the century, and certainly by 2150.
I think it is fair to say that some people who post here seem to welcome the opportunity that they see developing to get the world population down to a what they call a sustainable level, quickly. They are just not properly considering the consequences. And they are calling others like me, who think we can and should save civilization, evil and deluded technophiles.
I meant getting the world population down to a uncrowded level, which I would guess might be in the two billion range, in a few hundred years.
"A couple of months ago there was a profound article by Francois Cellier: - http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2534 - It is obvious from studying Dr. Cellier's comments that it is only possible for any country to operate on a sustainable basis at a level of approximately 25% of the present US per capita GDP."
Dr. Cellier is not an authority on which you should rely, based on the TOD article. There are a wide range of unrealistic assumptions, including a lack of understanding of wind & solar; a profound misunderstanding of economic growth; and a lack of understanding of electricity, and the implications of replacing fossil fuels with renewable electricity.
Nick,
I'm on the green party ecoaction committee and I hear quite a bit about carrying capacity. The basic assumption of carrying capacity is a closed system. I did some scolding here in response to another oil drum article in Cellier's vein.
So, lets think about this. We get 6 W/m^2 from wind on dual use land. If we really need to boost food production, this energy can be put into LED lights tailored to be optimal for photosynthesis and used in multilevel buildings such as old parking structures. Similarly, we can use a dichroic to grab the longer wavelengths of sunlight that plants don't use to generate power for greater growth. Making nitrogen fertilizer from sunlight appears to be less technically challanging than Haber-Bosch.
The short answer is we have no idea what the carrying capacity of a nurtured Earth is except that it is large but we do know that we are not nurturing it right now. If we don't get going on that, then there will be problems; there are now. But, economic activity, that is aimed at coming into harmony with the ecosystem, could be quite large leading to a high GDP.
You see signs up all over the place saying there is a $500 fine for littering. We get it in some ways but we need to get it in many other ways as well.
Chris
I am no friend of nuclear power. The politics, the waste issue (a form of intergenerational tyranny if ever there was one) and the cost are all problems. However, I am prepared to accept the idea that nuclear power may be the lesser of two evils vs. coal on all their counts.
But my biggest problem with nuclear is none of the above. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that a focus on nuclear power encourages a continuation of the large-central-plant approach to distribution grid design. Without invoking highly speculative new technologies, there is no way to build nuclear plants in a small-scale distributed fashion. So all that waste heat is lost, rather than being used to offset gas usage. And we tie ourselves ever-more-firmly to a large, unwieldy grid that is expensive to maintain (both in labor and in energy) and prone to cascade failures.
If the situation is as dire as many people here believe (myself included), then it is likely that necessity will force us to accept a lower standard of service, and a less uniform standard of service, from our energy infrastructure. In this scenario, it makes sense to design for a system that is robust and localized, so that the inevitable failures occur as gracefully as possible and deferred maintenance in one place does not bring down the grid everywhere.
That said, I think it is very wise for us to invest in ongoing research into nuclear energy. There are reactor designs that, at least theoretically, solve the issues with waste, safety, and proliferation. If those technologies can be matured in time, they should be. But further construction of traditional fission reactors just represents an additional investment in a dead-end technology.
Have a look a this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
Distributed nuclear generation seems to be possible. And when you think of nuclear-powerwed tri-generation (electricity + usable heat + usable cold) this looks like a damn good idea. The question is: are people living in cities OK with the idea of having small underground nuclear reactors every 1-10 square kilometer ?
The question is: are people living in cities OK with the idea of having small underground nuclear reactors every 1-10 square kilometer ?
Maybe someday, after the technology has been extensively proven out. Not in the near future, though. Certainly not soon enough to help us with our immediate energy issues.
And I'm actually OK with that. As a species, we need to learn to do alot more with alot less, and eliminate the 95%+ waste that is part of almost everything we do currently. Energy intensity reduction will force us to learn that, or it will kill our civilization. I think we can learn; if not, it's back to the drawing board for an Earthseed species.
In the short term, we should build a few test-scale new-technology nukes. Put them far away from people, and use them for grid baseload (which we'll need for some time even under the best of circumstances). I'm not saying we should abandon nuclear technology altogether. We just need to use it appropriately, and that means we're going to need to do alot more R&D, not alot of panic-driven construction of obsolete reactor designs.
95%+ waste?
Let's look at electricity consumption by capita:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_con_percap-energy-electricity-...
US electricity consumption is 12,343kwth/person. Reducing it with 95% will lead us to 606kwth/person... or where countries like Honduras and Morocco reside.
Having said that I think that we can certainly reduce our energy consumption (in US) in half and still preserve a decent way of life. But just like nuclear it won't be neither easy nor free - restructuring suburbia won't be cheap by any means.
Of course in practice we must have all of this.
Yeah, 95%. It's a rough number, but I think it's pretty legit. In fact, it's probably conservative.
To start with, we waste about 2/3 of our primary energy in generation and distribution, according to this. Most of that goes to industry/commercial and residential use, where another 20%-25% is wasted. So we're up to about 75% total waste, by a very conservative, conventionally-minded analysis.
Now consider how much of that energy we actually need to be using, to get the services we desire. Lighting? We build windowless boxes, and then light them artificially. Ventilation? Ever hear of stack effect? Most architects design as if they never have. How about air conditioning and heating? Passive solar and good design gets you most of the way there, even in harsh climates. RMI's headquarters in Snowmass uses a small woodstove for heat, and they rarely have to fire it. Bill McDonough's thesis project, apparently, was a passive solar house... in Ireland, where there is no sun. Etc.
Point is, we use the amount of energy we do because it's been dirt cheap, and designers have gotten lazy, and the economic expectations have fixated on least-first-cost. It's dumb and unnecessary, and it has to change. If it doesn't, then the doomers are right.
GreenEngineer,
Do you think your 95% waste figure to holds across the board? In particular, do you expect it to hold for the industrial and other processes involved in developing renewable energy systems? If so, then can we expect a 20 fold increase in EROEI of these systems eventually, and this with no improvement in the energy extraction part of the fraction (numerator)? Okay, that's perhaps too optimistic, but 100+ EROEI wind energy anyone, 200+? :) There don't seem to be any hard physical boundaries preventing this, some day.
Increases in efficiency are absolutely crucial, in my view, not only because they conserve fossil fuels, but because they also increase the effective potency of renewables. I don't know that I've even seen this dual benefit explicitly noted anywhere, though I'm sure its already obvious to most here.
Do you think your 95% waste figure to holds across the board?
No, probably not. The economics driving efficiency in homes and cars are very different from those driving efficiency in manufacturing processes. Because of this, I suspect that industrial processes are generally less wasteful. But I still think there are remarkable efficiency opportunities to be had. Natural Capitalism has some nice examples of how simple design or construction changes (like changing pipe layouts, and favoring big pipes and small pumps vs. small pipes and big pumps) can save a ton of energy.
Increases in efficiency are absolutely crucial, in my view, not only because they conserve fossil fuels, but because they also increase the effective potency of renewables.
Yes. I'm actually of the opinion that there is fundamental difference between incremental efficiency and radical efficiency. Incremental efficiency (5-10%) improvements allow you to continue to do things more or less the same way, using the same energy sources, slightly less wastefully. Radical efficiency (80-95%) improvements open up the possibility of meeting our needs in a completely different way, from e.g. renewable energy or waste heat. Radical efficiency changes the game in ways that incremental efficiency does not.
Radical efficiency changes the game in ways that incremental efficiency does not
Radical efficiency such as trading 20 BTUs end-use diesel or gasoline for 1 BTU of electricity ?
True (roughly) for both freight railroads vs trucks and Urban Rail vs. cars & SUVs.
Best Hopes,
Alan
I won't get into the technical details but there is one principle objection to eliminating what you call "waste": redundancy.
What you envision or suggest is equivalent to a highway fully packed with automobiles each driving 80miles/hour 3 feet one from another.
Theoretically possible? Yes of course.
Efficient? Absolutely! Will increase the throughout of the system manifold.
Realistic? Absolutely not! Not even remotely.
We live in imperfect world and where you see waste, others may see operative reserve. This reserve allows shocks through the system to be absorbed without a total breakdown. Take a look at mass transit. Isn't it a waste of resources if we can transport people only with cars much more cheaply? This has been well proven by suburbia - it was much more cheaper to build than urban development in Western Europe (just compare the price of real estate). Yes, but it provided an alternative transportation options for the people and proved more resilient with time - because it provided for such events as resource constraints imposed on the system. Such resource constraints in Europe were first the land, and now we are getting to the point where energy is also a constraint. Of course I can offer similar examples from many other places.
LevinK,
I agree that in some cases increasing efficiency can decrease system resilience. However, it seems a mistake assume that that is true under all circumstances. Consider more localized, community-based power generation through renewables, micro-nuclear, or whatever. There is much less loss in transmission, and, for heat engine systems, waste heat can be used for space heat. Yet, the systems would be far more stable at the level of the society as a whole than is the current system in, say, North America. General system failure would be all but impossible. Local failures would of course occur, but it would be easy to cope/fix because unaffected communities can lend a hand.
If a given industry can learn to use energy more efficiently to make its products, does that reduce system resilience?
If a given type of transport system can be designed to be more efficient, does that reduce system resilience?
If we can transmit power over distance with less loss, or just over less distance, does that reduce resilience?
But I certainly agree that we need to find ways to increase efficiency without decreasing system resilience :)
You have a legitimate point, so far as I goes. But there are different ways to create system resilience. One way is to overbuild, using alot more materials and/or energy than is necessary for 99% of circumstances, in order to not fail under the 0.001% outlier circumstance. And that's a legitimate things to do in some situations.
But there are other ways to make a system resilient. One is diversity: provide more than one way to fulfill a particular need, and operate them in parallel. If one system fails, the other takes up the slack (maybe not totally, but enough to prevent catastrophic failure).
Closely related is smart redundancy: Have a backup system ready to go, but engineer it in such a way that it does not create ongoing losses when it is not being used. For example, in a fluids-handling process, don't do this:
(MP = main pump; BP = backup pump; ignore the "." - it was the only way to make the ASCII art work out)
........---MP--->
>---|
........---BP--->
do this instead:
>-----MP--->
....|
....---BP--->
This seems like a no-brainer, but the former is more common in practice than the latter.
Another is what Lovins etc call "right sizing". In this context, rightsizing is basically a way to reduce the necessary level of overbuilding, by fitting the service to the need on a localized level. Decentralizing the electric grid, for example.
Another is designing for graceful failure. Our current paradigm treats failure as something that must be prevented at all costs, but spares little thought for what happens when the inevitable failure occurs. We pile on vast resources to reduce the failure rate from 1:1000 to 1:10,000. But if you have 100,000 of whatever it is, you're going to experience some failure. Rather than trying to make the chance of failure miniscule (a game of diminishing returns), accept that failure will happen and design accordingly.
We need to stop calling spent nuclear fuel "waste." It is full of "nuclear beneficial byproducts." (Just trying some spin here!)
In fact, we're at a point where building a nuclear fuel reprocessing infrastructure is less than half the cost of completing Yucca Mountain and reduce the required retention time for the minimized waste stream by a factor of 20.
Here's an article I did on the subject that gives the layman some further details:
http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=1108
While I would love for small nuclear power plants to become viable economically, the current economics create very strong economies of scale. One very important metric for prospective clients is the cost per unit capacity, usually as $/kW. We get paid big bucks to squeeze additional output from existing reactors and to push the efficiency and capacity of existing designs. Operating costs share a similar, but less strong savings with increased output in $/MW-hr.
As a conservative Republican, I'm no fan of government subsidies but the recent subsidies address a very real problem - uncertain government regulation. The plan is to offset the political risk of investing in a new plant with enough honey and downside coverage that it could bring out some financial risk takers. This has been done.
Others will follow once the regulatory risk is tested and the licensing process is found reliable. Yesterday, a feasibility study was announced for Hope Creek 2 in New Jersey. The premise is NO subsidies or guarantees will be involved but the schedule puts the big investments AFTER the government processes are proven. This is the way the subsidies were supposed to work.
The reason nuclear advocates dismiss the anti-nuclear arguments is because the antis will NOT listen to reason! We hear the same old negativity year in and year out. We've wasted our time with reasoned, factual rebuttals to these issues for years! Too many of the leading anti-nuclear leaders have agendas other than providing safe, clean electricity to the population. That's an ad hominem argument, I realize, but it is the stone cold truth!
As for the people without emotional or career investments in being anti-nuclear, the subject is not easy and is mental work to study and comprehend. But that's why I take the time to post here and elsewhere - if someone wants to understand and is willing to make a personal investment in understanding the complex scienific, engineering, financial, and political issues, I'm glad to support them.
What is your opinion of my argument that the USA has a shortage of nuke grade suppliers and a severe shortage of all the people skills needed to build new nukes. Skilled, experienced people do NOT appear over-night just because there is suddenly demand.
Bad, inexperienced managers result in Zimmer. Skilled experienced people (all skill types) build Palo Verde.
Under the current administration, Zimmer would get an operating license, and I fear that. (I was an R from age 19 to age 52, but GWB cured me).
Therefore, the best course of action is a slow build-up in nuke construction (restarting Browns Ferry I was a good learning step, finishing Watts Bar II will be another, a number of good people with some experience will come out of that)
OTOH, wind is growing explosively.
http://www.awea.org/faq/instcap.html
Best Hopes,
Alan
Big issue. Add better education to my list of needed mega-investments.
That should be issue n°1 ...
The USA is not going to solve any of its problems with a population of more than 50% of unliterate science-hating world-ignoring patriotic bigotic oil-lovers !
Lots of your compatriots have their heads stuck so deep in their asses it's both hard to believe and very frightening.
Good luck not sinking with such a dead weight.
An educated, trained, and sober workforce could be the limiting factor in the current expansion plans. The Nuclear Energy Institute has studied the problem and action plans are underway. License applicants have to describe where their construction and operations workforce will come from and where they will live as well as what measures will be taken to train them for nuclear procedures and processes.
On a personal level, I talked with my 18 y/o nephew the other day. A high school drop-out party guy - you know the type. I gave him the pitch - get his GED, make sure he had clean urine and police record (just barely!), and go to welder school. He'd be able to make a good living, marry a pretty girl, and have a boat and a new pickup parked in front of the house he owned. Hope he was paying attention.
But I guess some where would disapprove as that's not "powering down." He's already about as "powered down" as I'd want a family member to be.
To me building large new nuclear, coal or gas plants continues the business as usual of highly centralized power systems. I believe that power systems should be more distributed and smaller in scale. This builds a system which is more efficient (less loss from transmission lines) and more secure from massive disruptions.
Centralized power generation arose because of the fact that no one wanted massive coal-fired or fuel oil power plants located near their homes. Many options exist today for cleaner power generation on a smaller scale (wind, solar, gas-fired turbines) which could be located in communities and even in neighborhoods.
Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against the absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. -- Thomas Jefferson
You need to check the economic history of the electric power industry. Edison's direct current system was limited in its reach from a central generating station. Hence, they were suitable only for dense inner city markets or as luxury goods for individuals or small enterprises. One had to move lots of amperes and that needed huge copper wires but still voltage drop was a problem.
Westinghouse and Tesla won the game with the invention of alternating current which made possible higher transmission voltages and hence reduced copper cross-sections. Niagra Falls became the first breakthrough where a cheap hydroelectric power source was now available for wide distribution via high voltage AC power.
Centralized power generation arose because it was cheaper and technically feasible to control, not because of NIMBYism. It continues today, strong as ever, because the economics continues to favor it. All your "options" for cleaner, decentralized electrical power are much more expensive and much less reliable than the current industry structure.
You are really posing a "if pigs could fly..." type argument.
Joseph Somsel,
You are trying to group all wind and solar advocates with people who want to live on a homestead and revert to a 19th century lifestyle. That's no more fair than trying to claim all nuclear poer plants are Chernobyl.
I don't like big utilities very much. For a hundred years or so they had subsidies in the form of a monopoly market, rates set on a cost plus basis , plus the subsidy of using the commons without paying a fair price for the pollution. But, they are a necessary evil, because otherwise most people couldn't afford power. We'd be like the countries in Africa,South America and Asia living on $2 a day.
I think realisticly we need nuclear for the grid base load. Coal is killing the world-I've seen the brown sky over Kentucky and West Virginia. But we also need solar,wind and hydro because they are permanent solutions to the energy problem. We have to replace the 70% of the energy thats provided by fossil fuels in the next 30 years, and the quicker the better, plus provide for an exponentially growing population.
If you'd like to join in a fair discourse, I'm in favor. But broad stereotypes that distort the arguements aren't going to help.
Bob Ebersole
Why do you limit this to electricity? I suggest that everyone should get and purify his own water, drill and refine his oil to make gasoline, build his own roads, grow his food. This seems perfect to me - it will be near your house and hence more "efficient". Isn't this your logic?
Yeah, it's called "rainwater harvesting", and because more than 50% of domestic water you use dont need to be potable, you can halve the load for purification stations ... witch are already highly decentralized BTW
Why to you want to refine when sunflowers and a simple mechanical press produce vegetal oil that can be used pure in most diesel vehicles ? Ok, that hard if you live on the 43th floor of a tall building
A guy in a flying DeLorean once said "Where we're going, we don't need roads" (^_^)
Hummmm, tasty no-GM organic tomatoes
Decentralized internet works OK because people don't die when you plug it in the wrong way.
And people don't die when it goes out.
Also, the internet is less decentralized than people think. At some level you need real pros running the major hubs, and I bet this level of concentration is about the same as the power grid.
It isn't surprising, if internet bills about equal electricity bills, and internet engineers salaries equal power engineer salaries, you need the same level of economic concentratoin to pay for hte same amount of paid professional monitoring and repair.
LevinK,
You've misunderstood me. I think that Utilities should build wind turbines and solar, with a base of nuclear. Our utilities are already doing this in Texas-we now have more wind electric generation than any other state in the U.S., and its expanding very rapidly. Solar looks as though its going to be economic here also. I can buy solar cells retail for $3.00 a watt right now, and I'm considering a 4KW solar system. But it looks to me that the prices for solar cells may be as low as $1.50 per watt in a couple of years, so I'm going slow.
In the deregulated areas of Texas-and I live in one-the utilities are required to purchase any excess electricity and put it into the grid. But even more importantly, a solar generating system keeps the owner from brown-outs.
The peak hours of electric useage are the same as the peak hours of sunlight here, so a solar system will be very useful here.
As far as producing my own oil, I do, and I like the money. I put together deals to drill for oil and natural gas for a living. I own stock in a couple of refiners, so I guess I refine it too. Food?-just some home grown tomatos,and I fish.
So what do you do besides write snippy comments?
Bob Ebersole
It is very satisfying to have a solar panel up on your roof, but a centralized power system is definitely more efficient. Sure, there are transmission losses, but those solar panels are charging batteries very inefficiently, and having DC inefficiently converted to AC. And while those infrequent grid outage won't get you, you will have more downtime due to insufficient sun and equipment maintenance and breakdown.
On top of this, that solar panel might kill you! You will have to climb up on the roof occasionally (wear your safey harness!) Also, you have to exercise care since there is no way to turn off the storage batteries. Compared to centralized power, you are much more likely to get electrocuted looking after your distributed power system.
Everett,
Check into what's actually out on the market today. Google solar power systems. I intend to stay tied to the grid and sell electricity back to the grid when I'm working and the ac and lights are off. Its not all DC.I plan to get an inverter and a reverse meter. And, since I'll be tied to the grid, no need for batteries.
As far as efficiency, I want to reduce my personal carbon footprint, and buy as little as possible from the coal plants. But more to the point, its my money, not yours, so the return on investment that I'm satisfied with is all that's necessary.
Bob Ebersole
This comment has to do with both coal and nuclear: since we are facing difficult choices and cutbacks in the future in any plausible scenario, why not re-examine the assumptions behind the need for full baseload power to the full grid at all times?
Hospitals, traffic lights, and other necessary public infrastructure require some, but suburban homes do not. It's a luxury.
The perceived need for that luxury is what makes things like solar thermal and wind seem unsuitable. And it is clearly a luxury, since a few generations ago people had no electricity whatsoever.
Those determined to afford luxury could install battery banks, flywheels in their basements, or other technologies.
A living planet and a future are also a nice luxury. Let's choose. It isn't like blackouts aren't coming anyhow; it'd be nice if it was planned in a sane way.
Once baseload was down to 5-10% of what it is now, there would be a lot of options, nukes among them.
It would cost to retrofit but it may be worth it.
Hello all, I have a few candid questions (and I do not mean to be rethorical at all):
- It seems nuclear will be pursued in the US (along more "renewable" technologies), no matter what, in a mad scramble to maintain current levels of consumption and because the grid is already here, among many other reasons. Building new plants on a large scale seems to be very dependent on regular and cheap supplies of oil (and concrete, metals, plastics etc. all dependent on oil for mining, processing and transporting). What will the situation be in a few years on that front, and won't the costs of this expanded infrastructure be too prohibitive, and unstable, for the US, along its military presence in the middle-east and around the world in a not-too-distant future?
- Isn't betting on increasing technology in order to solve current problems what brought us exactly where we are now? Can current levels of complex technologies (and the associated research, testing, distribution etc.) be maintained in an energy descent unstable world, especially given the extreme centralization of power, money and energy?
- I am not a big fan of anarcho-primitivism, most of these people tend to forget that almost 7 billion humans won't survive foraging on the same planet, let alone 300 millions in the US… Besides, human groups with a technological advantage always seem to expand and eventually absorb those living with more primitive means, when they don't displace or anihilate them.
That being said, from my point of view, the only path to soften the downward curve and accompanying disorders seems to willfully decrease complexity (and wants as someone pointed out) before it is forced upon us.
How many of you see such a trend possible (or not) on a large scale in the US, for example?
- Lastly nuclear power seems predicated on the idea that global networks (energy, finance, resources) will remain as they are in an increasingly difficult global climate (literally and politically). Is this a good long term investment, to say nothing of the security needed to keep an growing amount of nuclear material from falling in the "wrong" hands?
There is no "mad scramble" to build nuclear.
There are some increasing trends.
There will be no descent of civilization.
Even if the projections of reduced oil production happen.
1. There will be less fuel for those who have less money.
Wealthy people in the US can keep driving at $6/gallon, $20/gallon etc... Just like there are Europeans driving SUVs inspite of $6-10/gallon there.
2. Any descent would be off of a high peak.
World production and consumption of cement totaled 2.283 billion tons in 2005, an increase of about 5.75%, or 124 million tons, over the previous year. (All tonnage figures in this article are metric.)
The world has produced a record 1,24-billion tons of crude steel in 2006, some 8,8% more than in 2005.
For nuclear, 40 metric tons of steel, and 190 cubic meters of concrete, for each megawatt of average capacity.
Modern wind energy systems, with good wind conditions, take 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt.
Modern central-station coal plants take
98 metric tons of steel and 160 cubic meters of concrete
—almost double the material needed to build nuclear power plants. This is due to the massive size of coal plant boilers and pollution control equipment.
Natural gas combined cycle plants take
3.3 metric tons of steel and 27 cubic meters of concrete—
So about 30,000,000 tons of steel and 50,000,000 cubic meters of concrete for 300GW of new energy each year. About 140 million tons of material for new cars and trucks each yaer.
A crash program would be to use 30-50% of the material for restructuring energy infrastructure, which would be . Something close to a WWII mobilization effort. Such an effort would provide a full conversion in 4-8 years depending upon ramp up factors. A mad scramble is 50% of you engineers and scientists drop what you are doing and work on this problem. That has not happened.
To buy the needed time and to supplement during the transition, ANWR would be drilled and everywhere else. Bioengineered biofuels would be used etc... We will be able to engineer fossil fuel substitutes.
The world economy is 46.6 trillion (2006)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy
2-3% of that goes to infrastructure and only 25% of that for energy infrastructure. If our backs get pushed to the wall there are the resources to fix the problem and then for an almost all electric economy to carry forward.
I do not think it will get to that point.
Plus I think growth will be maintained and will increase with better technology. Global warming can be offset with the release of gas and particulates into the atmosphere.
There will be recessions and maybe a depression but no Anarchy.
=============
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
Whether or not the world would be better off with a much smaller population and a greatly simplified civilization, we cannot get there from here in a few generations without a huge catastrophe that I contend would wreck the world. So I am in favor of trying to avoid the big die-off/disaster even if the attempt makes some aspects of the situation worse and even if we cannot be sure it will succeed.
Softening the downward curve of fossil fuels can be addressed in ways other than over all power down and willfully decreasing complexity. I think it is conceivable that we could build 10,000 reactors (and a comparably scale up of wind and solar), convert to electric transportation and create a more complex civilization. advancednano correctly identifies the scale of the effort that this would require in his preceding post. The world has put forward this kind of effort before and that is the scale of response this crisis calls for.
One area where technology will certainly advance is software and communications because of its immense potential to reduce our need to travel. It is forecast that IT power will increase one billion fold in the next 25 years (as it has in the past 30 years).
Even in such areas as food production I would bet that in the developed world that industry becomes even more concentrated with big organizations and technology rather than small private farms. If we are going to pack into ever denser cities I think there is no other way.
Your thinking is pretty much along my lines. We can't sustain at the present level, we will decline, we'd better be figuring out how to come to a smooth landing at a sustainable level. We don't have enough $$$ for all the mega-projects, so we'd better prioritize and allocate the $$$ toward those projects that will be most useful for us in getting toward sustainability. And we are not doing that.
Laurent,
Nuclear power has made considerable contrabution to dealing with difficult global political climates. In 1970 the US made 35% of its electricity from oil. After the initial big fleet came on line, that went down to about 3%.
Today, we are working to forstall a similar vulnerablity with imported LNG. Here in California, in spite of our loud endorsement of solar and wind, the real going foward fuel is natural gas. As an earlier posted article showed, North American has apparently peaked in gas production.
That means most future generation will be fueled increasingly with imported LNG. While some will come from Indonesia and Australia, the big resources are off Saklin Island in Siberia.
In other words, new nukes on the West Coast can prevent excessive dependence on Russia for our electricity fuel.
While economic globalization has brought a better standard of living to billions on the planet, 1st world, 2nd, and 3rd, certain commodities like energy and food have a large national security component.
My worry over nuclear power isn't power plants, but military use. First material for nuclear weapons, second (and more concerning for actual USE) depleted uranium (DU) is used in ammunition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Ammunition
Is there ANY sensible USE for U238? Is there ANY way to use nuclear power and NOT create immoral markets uses for DU?
These questsions dominate all "upsides" of nuclear for me.
Well, THOSE and whether mining uranium affects local communities and the health of workers there.
Its as hopeless as using lightbulbs and fluorescent lamps withouth supporting the vile tungsten manufacturing technology used for deadly anti-tank rounds.
;-)
Nuclear proliferation has killed no one. This is a link to my write up on it. If you do not use depleted uranium then you use some other conventional bomb/shell. The main countries adding nuclear power already have or could easily get nuclear weapons. Canada could have nukes in weeks but chooses not to. Same with Japan, S Korea and others.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/06/nuclear-proliferation-has-kille...
Nuclear war - I know you are scared about it. Conventional war and attrocities killed 170 million in the 20th century. Nuclear war killed 214,000. 3 days of fire bombing Tokyo in WW2 killed 72,489. Operation rolling Thunder in Vietnam dropped 500 times the amount of bombs as the firebombing of Tokyo.
A one sided all-out modern conventional war can be just as deadly as a nuclear war to the losing side. The big nuclear power countries (US, Russia, china etc...) could firebomb and destroy the infrastructure of a target country. Take out medical, emergency response capability, roads, rail and bridges. Then poison food and water. Blockade and wait a couple of months. They could speed it up with some biologicals which would be devasting to a place without medical infrastructure but which is ok for a place with it.
Nuclear war is just a bit faster. We should stop letting the nuclear war fears cause us to continue to let 3-5 million/year die from pollution when we could save them.
==================
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
DU for ammunition is easy to answer. If we didnt have nuclear power we wouldn't bother enriching the uranium for it or depleting it for ammunition. So we'd use just natural uranium ammunition instead. Its the best tool for the job.
As to nuclear weapons... if we decide to pursue nuclear power for domestic energy production its orthoganal to the decision to pursue nuclear weapons. There are many countries with nuclear power without nuclear weapons, and at least one with nuclear weapons without nuclear power.
No, I don't believe that (first point). No one could justify using a U235/238 mixture for ammunition because it would be highly radioactive, unlike DU which is low level radiation.
There MUST be a significant cost to enriching, and this cost is carried by the U235's value, and so U238 would be much more expensive without the market energy value of U235 paying for it.
Well, I'm just guessing, no idea on real costs at all. I just expect every industrial WASTE from any process is going to find its way into SOMETHING to make a little money and save money on disposal, so if nuclear power expands cheap supply of DU, then there's going to MORE DU used.
Why don't you believe me?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
Since depleted uranium contains less than one third as much uranium-235 as natural uranium, it is weakly radioactive and an external radiation dose from depleted uranium is about 60% of that from the same mass of uranium with a natural isotopic ratio. Depleted uranium behaves in the body as does natural uranium.
You get more than half the dose, which is allready low. You have much more to worry about its toxic properties:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium
The greatest health risk from large intakes of uranium is toxic damage to the kidneys, because, in addition to being weakly radioactive, uranium is a toxic metal. Uranium is a reproductive toxicant. Radiological effects are generally local because this is the nature of alpha radiation, the primary form from U-238 decay. No human cancer has been seen as a result of exposure to natural or depleted uranium, but exposure to some of its decay products, especially radon, does pose a significant health threat.
People will pay a lot for a bullet, especially one that can penetrate tank armor... tungsten carbide was the closest competitor and it was found insufficent for the job.
A 235-U/238-U mixture, both combined with oxygen, is what comes out of the ground. We in Ontario leave the oxygen attached and put the whole deal into our CANDU reactors. If you find a deposit of thousands of tonnes of 20-percent uranium oxide, you have found the site, ten or 15 years hence, of a uranium mine, but if you find a concentrated gram or two of uranium oxide, that's nothing unusual, as shown by the experience of the author of this blog entry.
Decaying seven times faster than the 238-U, the 235-U is that much more radioactive, but as 0.7 percent of the natural mix, or up to five percent of what light-water reactors take, its radioactivity still is swamped by that of the 238.
If the mixture were not still low-level radioactivity, problems would have been noticed before 1939 with ceramics in which uranium oxide was used as a pigment: Fiesta ware, vaseline glass.
--- 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
DU is created by uranium enrichment. Not all reactors
require enriched fuel, and fuel production for those that
do not does not create any DU.
--- 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
Advancednano:
- How can you be so sure about the future?
- Wealthy people can afford oil at $20/gallon, how wealthy must they be and what about the rest of the population and the infrastructure to support exurbanization, roads, bridges and so on? It seems to me that the standard of living, just in the US, is invariably declining for most, however slowly.
- Violent anarchy is already happening in a lot of places around the world, Iraq being a prime example… In some places the US/Mexico border doesn't seem a haven of peace and order either.
- The numbers you give about resources prove that economic growth is happening, for how long will that be possible?
- Even if your predictions were more than an article of faith, what to do with an exponentially increasing population always following in the footsteps of economic growth?
- Finally your assessment about nuclear warfare is irrealistic, the bombs used in WWII were mere toys compared to today's arsenal. That nuclear warfare hasn't happened, as yet, doesn't prove anything and certainly, if the past is any example, having faith in human reason is rather misplaced… IMHO fears about nuclear proliferation are well justified.
What I am saying with certainty is that before a man (or a society or civilization) lets themselves starve (doomsday/crash scenario) because they do not have enough prime rib (low priced oil) then they will be willing to eat hamburger, rabbits, dogs or bugs (a whole series of intermediately options before the crash scenarios). A lot of people here talk about the decline like it is a certainty, but I do not see the same people calling them on it.
Plus I happen to have current examples in Europe and historical examples to say... I have more evidence for my position because it either is happening now elsewhere or happened before.
I am not sure why people say that I am preaching when I give position with facts and data behind them. Tell me specifically something that you think is preachy. I will either modify the statement to be less preachy or I will show why it is what I believe to be a fact and provide the evidence for it.
===More facts and info that some people may not like. Two more plants (Calvert Cliffs, Maryland and Owyhee county, Idaho) are in the early approval stages. One with the NRC and another with local officials who have cleared the way for simultaneous NRC application. The NRC is expecting 12 more plants to get into the application process this year.
Owyhee County has received an application to build a nuclear plant from Alternate Energy Holdings Inc. If approvals go as expected then the plant would come online in 2015.
Rendering of the complex
They have funding in place
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com
For nuclear war, my faith is not in human reason. My belief is in military practicality. Opening up the nuclear option is an unnecessary complication.
It is a TV show with live gladitorial games and actual public executions. It could be simpler and faster than going to the trouble of stunts and special effects and it could get ratings, but the criminal and civil legal hassles and costs afterwards would make it not worthwhile.
I also believe that conventional weapons and warfare methods do not get enough fear and respect relative to nuclear.
Also, nuclear proliferation is mainly past tense. Nuclear proliferated. To unproliferate now, you must kill a lot of people who know what to do and destroy stockpiles and facilities (which triggers the war you might have wanted to avoid). Iraq and Iran got their info back in the 1980s from Pakistan's Khan. Any other country that is not complete crap has people who know what they need to do get nuclear bombs.
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com
I note the Japanese KK reactor came through a Richter 6.8 earthquake relatively unscathed. Maybe they shouldna built it on the fault line.
Japan should stop building nuclear power plants and go for VIBRATION HARVESTING ... that sure is a very renewable energy out there.
"For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, neat, and wrong."
H. L. Mencken
There is a difference between crash and decline, nobody can predict the future with certainty and I certainly don't hope for a crash. My argument is that by increasing complexity and centralized systems, resiliency and redundancy diminish. Nuclear technology is perhaps widely known, however, as yet, no mad group has had access to it and the global landscape is still generally and relatively stable. Conventional warfare, state fighting state, is probably a thing of the past at this point, although I wouldn't bet on it. Fourth generation warfare gets a lot of press lately, exactly what's happening in Iraq again, and from the standpoint of an organized state, it is unwinable. Again, inevitably nuclear power will increasingly be part of the picture. As materials travel more and more and increase in volume, the possibility of an emerging black market and those materials falling in the hands of extremist groups seems unavoidable.
I agree that it seems that the USA is not willing to do what needs to be done to win in Iraq.
However, I do not believe in fourth generation warfare. These tactics were used in the past. The difference was back in WW1, WW2 and hundreds and thousands of years ago the response was to kill large numbers. In Iraq this worked when Sadaam did it to much of the same crowd that the US is fighting now. How come Iran with inferior military equipment could fight Sadaam's Iraq for years without Iran using its terrorism and suicide attacks to win. Iran has more of those people trained and ready to go ? Because Sadaam would not care when such acts were performed. He would just gas and kill whole areas. Al Sadr did not act up against Sadaam because he would have been killed just like the rest of his family. Old school is what Alexander the Great and Ghengis Khan and the Romans did which was slaughter a city as an example or kill 100 or 1000 for each legionaire (and make that a guaranteed policy). Note: the US does kill 200 to 300 to 1 in Iraq and before in Vietnam, but they do not do it in a way that it demoralizes the enemy.
A serious attack with nukes by an extremist group will not result in the west rolling over. It will be a return to the effective old school ways. I am not saying this is good thing and I would not want to see Patriot Act 2 and 3 etc... or any actual mobilization. The US is not really trying to win compared to what was done in the past. Trying to win is war bonds, draft army, and WW2 scale camps. Millions in the German army were imprisoned in vast camps at the end of the war.
I will also say that I am against the Iraq conflict. It is a waste of resources and it is not achieving goals. Instead of 1.2 trillion spent on this, I would rather see 600 GW of nuclear reactor built. shut down the coal plants and start shifting to electric/hybrid cars.
I am less concerned about a stray extremist nuke, than the fact that it will trigger a serious militant shift in the west and more wasted resources crushing the whole middle east. Of course Iran and the others would probably roll over and hunt down their own extremist if they saw the mobilization machine start kicking into gear. I say that because Iran was cooperating after 9-11 when it seemed that the US did have a bit of bloodlust going for a few months and they weren't sure quite how far the US would go.
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com
What I do not understand is the flippant way the proliferation issue is seen by some commenters. If that were true that proliferation happens and it does not matter why were there such strenuous efforts made by the international community to deny nuclear power to Iran and North Korea. Surely if the proliferation issue is as small as it appears to some people then both North Korea and Iran should have been welcomed into the nuclear club with open arms.
I also do not understand why you in the US are so willing to embrace a technology using a fuel you do not have. Here in Australia we are the Saudi Arabia of uranium however you have bugger all and yet you are willing to bet on a power system that you will have to maintain a huge army to make sure that everybody will be too frightened to not sell you the drug that you need.
At least if you go solar/wind/geothermal then you may be able to oust the military/industrial complex that rules you at the moment as you have all these things in abundance without having to fight for them. As long as coal is reduced to under 30% of the mix and is gasified and the CO2 perhaps stored, the US could power itself for centuries and cut CO2 emissions by the required 60%.
As Greenpower said big nuclear is just more of the same. Any renewable solution starts with massive energy efficiency gains as we waste a lot of power. Big nuke and big coal want to continue business as usual and then you are just going to run into the exponential function that never sleeps.
It's hard to tell why the Bush administration is so against the Iranians getting the bomb. It might be that that would make it so much harder for us to invade them as we try to control the Middle East's oil. But one can make a good case that Iran really wants nuclear power because without it they might not be able to export oil in about seven years. I do not think that you can make a plausible case for any realistic offensive use of atomic weapons.
The US does have enough domestic supplies of Uranium (we just shut down a bunch of perfectly good mines) because much richer sources exist in places like Canada and Australia. If you started withholding it, we could reopen them and be fine for a long time. We just might have to pay a little more for fission electricity. But the costs of all forms of generation are going to go up with the coming scarcity.
Since we will need to abandon coal and are running out of natural gas, we will need to gear up electricity generation very dramatically in coming years. I do not think there is any realistic possibility of doing this without nuclear. Wind and solar have such low penetration now and no one has proposed a good solution for the intermittency problem with them. We are going to need to develop everything we can as fast as we can and we are still going to come up short.
Nothing to do with that. Iran supports Hezbollah. Hezbollah fights against Israel (our buddy or something like that) and killed a bunch of troops in Beirut with a big bomb some 25 years ago. Iran also kicked the US out during the Islamic revolution and held some people hostage for a while. Now that Iran has mostly calmed down, people worry that Iran is a dangerous country with psychotic leadership ready to push the button to kill all the Jews as soon as they get a slingshot; not the case I know. Its not strategy so much as politics.
Of mullahs and MADness covers this pretty well I belive.
I don't agree with you there. Israeli politics always gets a lot of attention in Washington but I tend to think that even Bush is more driven by grand strategic considerations. The neocons made a big mistake when they so upset the Sunni/Shiite balance by invading Iraq and now they are trying to redress that in the only way they know how, by threatening Iran. Ultimately I think both Gulf wars were primarily attempts to maintain/grow US influence in the Middle East to control oil supplies.
"Wind and solar have such low penetration now"
Wind was 20% of new generation in 2006 - it could do 100% in 5-7 years.
"and no one has proposed a good solution for the intermittency problem with them."
Geographic dispersion, long distance transmission, demand management, storage (PHEV's, pumped storage, flow batteries, used PHEV batteries, etc), and backup biomass electrical generation (much, much more efficient than biomass liquid fuels) are perfectly adequate.
That assumes what you say is the current rate of new wind generation continues. It might not if resource limitations in materials and sites develop. It also assumes that the current rate of overall capacity expansion stays the same. Not likely (I certainly hope that is not true). If coal and gas generation of electricity are to decline because of global warming and depletion along with oil depletion then the other types of electricity generation have to increase 10-20 fold over the next 20-40 years to approximately replace those other energy sources, including taking over transportation. Where is wind now? .5%? 1%?
I am in favor of expanding wind and solar as fast as is possible, too, but I am pretty sure that wind cannot scale up 200-400 fold in that time period.
I am not convinced that your solutions for the intermittency problem can scale up at that rate either or even adequately deal with the intermittency problem of the current level of wind capacity.
"That assumes what you say is the current rate of new wind generation"
Not me, the Nuclear Energy Institute and the Am Wind Energy Association.
I understand why you're surprised, but it seems to me from your comments that you're not familiar with the wind industry. Before voicing skepticism I suggest some research.
I'll try to post more info for you later.
I am not surprised by your comments. I just do not think you get it how much we will need to scale up electricity generation capacity to deal with global warming and peak oil. I think that if the Nuclear Energy Institute or the Am Wind Energy Association shared my view of how quickly we will need to increase capacity I would have heard about it because those would have been big news stories since my views are so at odds with the conventional wisdom. You would realize that too if you actually thought about my comments instead of just blowing me off.
Its great you are promoting wind energy. Now think about how we are going to grow the total wind, nuclear, hydro and solar segment by 10-20 fold over the next generation or two. I think we will need to build enough new generation capacity to supply the equivalent of all the world's current energy supply (that's about 10,000 nuclear reactors) in the next 40 years or less. Now that might seem impossible and it may be but that's what it is going to take to avoid a major collapse. It might be possible if we had a World War II level global effort. It could happen.
I think we will need to go all out with all of them but that the lions share of the total will be nuclear because it is so much bigger than wind and solar now.
“I think we will need to build enough new generation capacity to supply the equivalent of all the world's current energy supply (that's about 10,000 nuclear reactors) in the next 40 years or less.”
The world uses about 1.7 TW of electricity generation, on average, or the equivalent of very roughly about 1,700 nuclear plants. That supplies about 40% of energy consumption. We’d need about 2,500 nuclear plants to provide the rest. Seems low? Don’t forget, 3 quads of heat generate 1 “quad” of electricity (for instance, in the US 39 quads generate 13 quads of electricity). In fact, 6 quads of transportation internal combustion heat-power can be replaced by 1 quad of electricity, because ICE’s are so inefficient.
“that might seem impossible “
No, that doesn’t seem difficult at all. I doubt we’ll decide to do it, but it’s certainly doable. It would be much easier to do with wind turbines, or solar.
“the lions share of the total will be nuclear because it is so much bigger than wind and solar now”
The proportion of current generating capacity is much less important than the proportion of new capacity being manufactured and installed. Further, wind & solar are pure manufacturing problems, and they can be scaled up very quickly - more easily than nuclear, which has very exacting material demands - wind in particular uses commodity steel & concrete. We could easily manufacture whatever quantity needed.
Turbines cost roughly $4.5 per watt of average generating capacity to manufacture and install (more than nuclear’s $2 (optimistically), but with almost no operating costs). 2.5TW of additional generation capacity over 40 years is 62.5GW per year, so we’re talking $281B per year. That’s really not that much, especially over the whole world. Heck, the worldwide auto industry is worth about $1,400B per year, so that’s only 20% of the auto industry. Not much, in the grand scheme of things.
No one talked about FUSION, why ?
Don't you think fusion is the way to go ?
Maybe that with a good ol' crash program we wont need a 5th generation of fission reactors. Use the 4th generation to burn all remaining nuclear 'wastes', and then switch to fusion.
No one wants a fission reactor in his backyard, but won't it be different if the nuclear reactor is a miniature sun ?! A MINIATURE SUN ! Is this awesome or what ?!
Here is why I did not talk about it.
1. I had points to make about the nearterm and clarifications about what is going on now and in the past. It tough to talk about things in the future if there is no agreement on what already happened and what is happening now.
2. There has been an article at the oil drum talking about the ITER fusion work. It is about 30-40 years away from the first commercial reactor. It is as far as 60-100 years away from being a significant contributor to energy solutions. Also, an ITER type reactor is not that much better than a gen IV nuclear fission reactor in terms of radiation and waste. Plus if people can't believe in molten salt and breeder reactors which have been built but need to be perfected then why talk about a project that they hope to get working for the first time at a worthwhile scale in 30 years. I also want the focus to be upon immediate action to start saving lives lost to pollution.
3. The two programs that I think have a better chance of making a difference are TriAlpha energy's colliding beam fusion project (venture capital funded along with Paul Allen and Goldman Sach's)
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/06/tri-alpha-energy-raises-40-mill...
I also like the Z-pinch reactor (not yet funded, just part of the z-pinch weapons stockpile maintenance program)
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/04/rapid-fire-pulse-brings-sandia-...
These have the chance to make an impact in 20 years. Plus they have the chance to run a lot cleaner, but aneutronic reactors have scientific controversy (questions if they would work).
The policy thing around this that I would want is for the US to create an EARPA (energy equivalent of DARPA) and for 20% of the ITER money to get spread around to alternative fusion options. The EARPA money can go to advanced solar, wind and nuclear.
>No one wants a fission reactor in his backyard
the polling data indicates that many do want more nuclear power. All of the US states where 30 new applications are being made are quite pro nuclear and want the reactors to be built. France is pro-nuclear.
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com
Only reaction that doesn't produce neutrons that we would bother exploiting is P-B11, impossible in thermonuclear reactions because of braking radiation losses. Bussard has an electrostatic design he claims will work with it (somehow) based on his claimed observation of three whole neutrons with deuterium fuel.
In short its because its an imaginary technology right now.
Molten salt thorium breeders we've actually built, and those are imaginary for commercial power for at least a couple of decades.
Actually, there is d+d->He4+gamma low probablity branch that may explain excess heat and He4 production in deuterium loaded paladium. You can read more here. No neutrons involved.
Sure, theres wierd branches that involve physics we dont know how to do, palladium in heavy water crank science aside. Pycnonuclear fusion for instance allows proton-deuterium fusion yielding 99% of the energy as gammas and the remaining as ion recoil, but it faces the challenge of getting down to 20g/cm^3 at a temperature of 1400k or less.
Sort of difficult.
I'm sure someday we'll figure out how to do it one way or another, but the way sure isn't clear yet.
The branch is not weird, it comes about owing to symmetry. You might want to look over the document that was submitted to DOE a year or two back. It has some interesting data. Also, paladium deutrium codeposition seems to work about every time so reproducibility is less of a problem than in the past. An intesting development is the presence of energetic particles near the electrode. Something curious seems to be happening.
Do you actually know anything about it or are you just repeating something you read? I have no idea what you mean about the branch probability owing to symmetry (of what sort) or which of the million cranky documents submitted to DOE I'm supposed to go through and spot check. Nor am I likely to get anything useful from it if its sufficiently advanced nonsense.
A great deal of my knowing comes from reading, but in this case I've also been fortunate in knowing some of the people in the field, allowing knowledgable discussions. Here is a link where you can find the DEO review documents. This presentation gives a summary of recently published work from the Navy's SPAWARS lab. The review document short changes Navy work a little I think but it does cover fusion products production pretty well.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-nuclear23jul23,1,71...
??
Because humanity does not have a 10,000 year attention span. That's why.
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
Robert Rapier asks, "Why not nuclear power?"
Alan Drake says, " restart of Browns Ferry I (down for 24 years after a fire) and the just announced restart on construction of Watts Bar II ($2.5 billion to finish a 60% complete nuke, work stopped in 1985) by TVA are great steps to train a new pool of experienced people at all levels."
Well, Alan seems to have answered Robert's question, and Alan is actually for a "slow" developing nuclear program (it must be admitted that Browns Ferry and Watts Bar II are astonding successes if what you want is slow! :-)
I am not anti nuclear....the safety issue is not that worrisome when you look at the dangers that come with the chemical industry (anyone remember Bhopol India), the coal industry, or the petrochemical refinign industry...
I do not support nukes for two simple reasons:
NIMBY and NIMP. NIMBY we are all familiar with, the Not In My Backyard. It is a MUCH bigger problem than most folks know, and can slow what would have been only a marginal project down to the point that it becomes a complete loss. Well organized opposition can hold up even relatively benign projects for years, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, and in the case of nuclear, potentially over a billion.....
Which brings me to NIMP, which means Not In My Portfolio. Look at the Browns Ferry example and the Watts Bar II example given by Alan.
Would you want these trainwrecks in your portfolio? Who pays the dividend for 25 years while the nuclear plant sits idle with no income and lawsuits swirling about?
Frankly, I don't think the nuclear industry can ever raise enough money to expand greatly. The investors, large and small, can see too much going wrong:
1. Cost overruns in construction are a norm in the nuclear industry, but so are they in most industries. It's just that with nuclear, the stakes are so high, it is almost impossible to change major contractors or end the project once it us underway. The investor is married to the original contractor and project.
2. A major nuclear accident. And it doesn't have to happen at your plant. If one happens anywhere, the lawsuits and investigations of any nuclear plant under constuction will be ruinious. Some other bonehead can screw up and manage to screw you, the innocent nuclear investor.
3. Price dislocation. About halfway through building the nuke, you see something you DO NOT like: The Concentrating Mirror and PV solar industry are exceeding expectations. Electric rates are holding flat or dropping! What do you do with your billion plus nuke now? Or, someone really comes up with a way to sequester carbon from coal. Not likely you say, but remember, if you have millions at stake, it doesn't have to seem too likely to be a real fear. More deadly to nuclear investent would be a sudden burst of natural gas discovery and production.
4. This of course leads to a problem, and I will close on this one: Is there enough investment money going around to cover the cost of (a) nat gas drilling and exploration, (b) Crude oil drilling and exploration, (c) Solar and Wind among other renewables (d) refinery expansion, and (e) a massive expansion of nuclear power.....all the while as fight a war that is projected to cost the U.S. a trillion bucks?
If it were your portfolio AND your backyard, would you still be big on nukes?
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
....oh, one more little thing....the NIMBY issue is why I am looking very hard at whether large scale wind can ever succeed....the opposition to windmills is growing nationwide, in cities because they are too noisy and people don't like the looks of them, and in wide open spaces, because they are regarded as a menace to natural beauty and birds....wind is becoming a hard sell, as even so called "greens" take the NIMBY approach, wind is great as long as it's not close to me.....
This is why I am becoming more and more interested in solar.....if well down it is essentially invisible and by it's very nature is silent.....the ultimate "stealth" renewable! :-) Run silent, run deep......I am liking the idea more everyday!
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
NIMP is an interesting insight. The uncertainty (mostly created by the industry itself) will throttle any mad rush to nuke WITHOUT GOV'T SUPPORT.
I am sure that the conservative R in the industry that posted here will support such gov't subsidies. So the Gov't decides how fast we develop nuclear power.
In the Wind Export Belt (Prairie Provinces to Texas) there is no strong NIMBY effect so far. Low population density in most of that area may be why. Strongest in the NorthEast and moderate in California is my take.
Rising utility bills will dampen NIMBY sentiment.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Man! 251 comments and none of them mine! After reading all this - and I'm an extremely fast reader - I'm pooped.
My take? I'm looking at a small underground shelter, a crossbow, a trapper nelson, a 'misery whip' and maybe a still - for drinking, that is. No google, no nukes, no magic pinwheels going fwup, fwup ,fwup, but maybe some peace and contentment.
If some idiot's iodine cloud takes me out, so be it. It won't be my cloud. I may have to sing my own songs and laugh at my own jokes, and I won't own a damn thing except my existence while it lasts. That's all anybody actually has, anyway.
As someone said, the eggs may not be worth the strain on the chickens.
HROEI ; happiness returned over effort invested. I'd rather shoot squirrels than build nuke plants or work in a turbine blade factory. If humanity is destined to be tied to a nuke plant, I'm off the bus.
Humanity is separated from other creatures by our use of tools. When the tools start using us ......
Wind is very welcome in most places: farmers love it. West Texas and Midwest farms have all the power we need, if necessary. Far offshore will also work.
Consensus is growing among bird-lovers that wind is good.
OTOH, solar is also good.
That's awfully conventional thinking, Roger. It’s as though there are no peak oil or global warming crises. If we have to stop building coal and gas power plants because of global warming and have to move to an electricity based transportation system because we are running out of oil we are going to need a lot of new generation capacity unless we are going to allow the world to sink into the abyss of a massive die-off with it’s attendant resource wars and environmental devastation. In that case, society is likely to overwhelm the NIMBYism and reliable generation capacity is going to look like extremely valuable financial assets. Nuclear has a very bright future if these crises are real, as I believe they are.
Watts Bar I was no Road Runner either.
Ordered in 1970, it went commercial in 1996.
Alan
Nothing a couple of blackouts wouldn't fix. Even brownouts would do.
The problem is that those will work very well for coal either. Even better than nuke.
As I noted higher up in this thread. The international bond market is about $46 trillion. And they raised more than another 6 trillion in 2006. The three levels of US gov't take 33% of the GDP in taxes ($3.9 trillion in 2004)
so plenty of money for Iraq war and everything else.
They already have loan guarantees. It is 64 percent of the projects. 2005 legislation (which also funds any "advanced energy source" XVII of the Energy Policy Act of 2005). Anything to "reduce, avoid or sequester" CO2 emissions
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16286304/page/2/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16286304/page/3/
Typically, the [nuclear projects] would be financed with 80 percent debt and 20 percent cash or equity put up by the owner of the plant. But federal officials in charge of loan guarantees have interpreted the law to mean that those guarantees apply only to the debt portion of the financing package. Using that math, the loan guarantee — 80 percent of 80 percent — will only cover about two-thirds of the total cost. That could be more risk than Wall Street is ready to assume — especially for the projects that go first.
A new energy bill in the senate will tidy up that interpretation. 80% loan guarantees are coming.
As I noted in prior posts nuclear plants are moving ahead in Idaho and Maryland. The funds were raised.
I think the big companies have confidence in their ability to work the systems and get the support they need (They know they are crossing a tightrope with a net, whether it is loan guarantees or a gov't bailout). The companies are still risking plenty if things don't go right. The big companies have a lot of state backing. Russia, China, Japan would not let one of their major corporations go down because of a failed project. GE is another one of the big companies.
This is only relavent for the first few reactors.
I predict the 80% guarantees will happen. I predict the nuclear plants will get made and mostly on schedule because
of experience in other countries and experience basically building Brown Ferry 1 and Watts Bar 2.
This is another reason why you need big nuclear to take on and displace big coal and big oil/natural gas. You need companies with the money and connections to make it happen. Did wind and solar have enough money and juice to buy the senators and congressman to pass this legislation on their own ?
I did not make the system, I am just telling you how it appears to work, but the end result will be cleaner power than if we kept using coal and oil. We will get more wind (also GE) and more solar. If technology can be made to work better and cheaper the companies can make more money than by capping losses. A good project and good tech is still more profitable than a bad project and bad tech even if the bad project has a cap on the losses.
As noted in the Godfather: I need, Don Corleone, those politicians that you carry in your pocket like so many nickels and dimes.
Also, note that this is not just an energy industry thing. Look at how subsidies and loan guarantees and other legislation works for agriculture, pharma etc...
In the end citizens pay.
The legislation is mostly past tense.
I pay taxes so all of it (energy, defense, health, roads, rail, water etc...) is part of my portfolio. I am still big on nukes. Better nukes than coal. Less coal would mean lower medicare and private health costs.
Carbon sequestering does not deal with particulates and smog and other pollutants.
If the utility is buying the power from the builder of nuclear power, they will not double up and build another source of power to compete with another of their sources. You will pay a blended rate. All of the energy sources that get built get used.
>Risk of dropping energy prices:
I guess you dismiss everything that is written on this site about the chances of that happening?
Plus concentrated solar has to drop over 500% to get the level of nuclear. 10 cents per kwh to get down to 2 cents per kwh. Solar production has to ramp up 100 to 200 times. Other more expensive energy sources start losing money first.
Where are these successful lawsuits that you speak of ?
The big companies have lawyers on staff.
Recent nuclear plant construction around the world has not had cost overrun problems.
Can you change your coal plant contractor ? How about your concentrated solar guy ? How about your offshore wind farm guy ?
Above (in the comments) I listed the nuclear projects and where they are going. You also see the companies involved. Which one is not happening ?
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com
First, let give all due compliments to your blogspot, it has already put me back to work on research, some great and interesting links!
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/
Secondly, I am certainly NOT going to get into a war of words with another optimist who obviously does not view technical advance as evil, as many here do. I read your remarks at the lower end of your blog, allow me to quote,
"I think we need to maximize the use of all available options to get improvements in green house gases and pollution reduction as fast as possible.
We have to use renewables, nuclear, efficiency to get where we need to be.
France's use of nuclear for electricity is an example of how much nuclear can help.
(80% of electricity generation)
Plus by switching to plug in hybrids at the same time we can shift more transportation over to clean energy sources.
If the plug in hybrids are efficient, then instead of oil we can use genetically engineered (synthetic biology) biofuels (ideally generated from engineered single cell organisms).
I could not say it better myself as a matter of goals, I think your remarks just about dead on. We differ only on the details and means in some cases.
I have nothing against nuclear power in principle. As I said, I don't have the hysterical fear of it that some do, and do think the waste issue can be managed. I think we face far greater nuclear proliferation dangers from military nuclear weapons leaking out that we will from civilian power plant nuclear material leaking out. So, given all of that, as Robert originally asked, why not nuclear?
For me, it comes down to COST, COST, COST. I simply do not see how in the world, without the U.S. nuclear program being taken over by the government, it can be a profitable venture over the long haul. And if the government takes it over, it will drive the feds to the edge of default. That's my view. I think in the financial area, nuclear has too much in common with our ethanol program, which could very well be financially ruinious to the nation.
The risk structure of nuclear strikes me as horrendous, the cost of financing a catastraphe waiting to happen, and frankly, you and I will just have to disagree on the cost overrun issue, because I think they will be horrific.
The very nature of financial expenditure for nuclear plants is all at once, and big. The nature of some of the other renewables (wind and solar in particular) is decentralized and fractionalized. For reasons too long to go into on almost dead string, I feel that this is a MONUMENTAL advantage for the new arriving technologies. And when I go over to your blog and look at the developments in nano technology that will revolutionize the energy industry soon, I see a decentralized, destandardized, multi optional confluence of technology that will cause almost NO investor to want to risk the giant all at once gamble of nuclear. Batteries, solar panals, control systems, advanced materials in electric motors, new advanced turbines, etc., YES. Nuclear? It's like buying a possibly sick elephant, spending every dime on him, and then having to pay interest for years before you can at least charge the public to see him. The whole structure of nuclear has struck me as wrong from day one.
You asked, "Above (in the comments) I listed the nuclear projects and where they are going. You also see the companies involved. Which one is not happening ?"
Sorry, but frankly, I see almost NONE of them ever "happening"
I am a child of the 1970's. I am also a child of the Ohio River Valley. Here is where I see most of these plants ending up.....the projections and high hopes of this industry has continued to lead in so many cases to a dead end road...but oh my the projections are always glowing at the front end....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Hill_Nuclear_Power_Plant
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/83/MHinspring2007.JPG
http://www.nukeworker.com/pictures/displayimage.php?album=435&pos=3
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Marble-Hill-Indiana-Blair27jul03.htm
http://physics.ius.edu/E/MarbleHill.html
http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?S=3086846&nav=0RZFXZct
A great prospective site for a solar farm?
http://www.satellite-sightseer.com/id/8998/United_States/Indiana/New_Was...
Rancho Seco, the pride of the 1970’s nuclear fleet....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Seco_Nuclear_Generating_Station
Served only 30 years, now being decommissioned....here is the historic “nuclear efficiency” that is so much bandied about...”The plant operated from April 1975 to June 1989 but had a lifetime capacity average of only 39%”
Remember that number the next time nuclear fanatics tell you about the “intermittency” problems with wind and solar....
But, for those who grew up with the dream, old habits are hard to break...
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/regulationSafety/Former_Radioactive_Bo...
Back to the future: Post WWII remarks regarding costs....fascinating link
http://www.cns-snc.ca/media/toocheap/toocheap.html
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Just a quick note - I've been looking for good books on nuclear power for sometime now.
i) The best one I've come across so far is "Introduction to Nuclear Power" (ISBN: 1560324546) by Geoffrey Hewitt and John Collier.
It has a good discussion on the types of reactor design, principles of a nuclear reactor, in addition to an excellent discussion on the safety risks.
The book uses several theoretical and actual incidents as examples (including 3 Mile Island, Windscale, Chernobyl amongst several others) - Its the most thorough discussion I've come across so far, for example going through the definition and causes of positive void coefficients etc.
While quite technical, and some of it went of the my head (as a lay reader who studied economics) I found it very rewarding, and felt it was also a balanced discussion, more interested informing than outright promotion of nuclear power.
ii) My second favourite was "Nuclear Renaissance" (ISBN: 0750309369) by W. J. Nutall. It was a more high level discussion of nuclear power, and I thought it was most useful for its discussion of the current new reactor designs (Westinghouse, Areva etc.). Although its descriptions of the accidents (3 Mile Island, Windscale, Chernobyl) were slightly simplified relative to the book above, it addressed all the key issues. Again, although the author is clearly in favour of nuclear power, it felt like a well balanced discussion.
iii) My third favourite was "The Nuclear Fuel Cycle: From Ore to Waste" (ISBN 0198565402) by P D Wilson. What I learnt particularly from this book was how little High Level Waste there is, relative to how much low level waste, and the remarkable amount of precautions that are already taken when shipping and storing fuel to make sure its safe.
I tried a couple of other books too, however I learnt most from these three. Sadly none of the books are exactly enthralling, all being rather technical!
Generally I feel a lot more sanguine on nuclear power after reading these books, although I have been in favour of it for some time.
Finally, for someone wanting to learn about nuclear on a budget (as these books all retail for £40-£60..), I would recommend asking the French company Areva to send them a copy of their annual report. Areva is active at every level of the nuclear fuel cycle, and the annual report includes an excellent high level overview of each stage!
Try The Nuclear Energy Option by Bernard Cohen, available free online at:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html
It was written in the early 90's but has some sections that could have come from last week's TOD.
I looked at his section on PV. Boy, has he been pessimistic. Seems a little optimistic on the cost of nuclear plant construction too. It's probably time for a new edition with a vastly different conclusion.
California recently awarded Bussard a $200 Million dollar grant to build his sixth generation pilot fusion reactor so we'll know in a couple of years if he's just blowing smoke or not. Even if it works it will not quickly solve the problems we are facing with declining oil invetories/foreign energy dependence (and will create a few new problems). The basic problem it won't solve I've outlined in my other post on this topic; the monumental difficulty in switching from a fossil-fuel to an electricity based transportation system. We don't have the generating capacity and we don't have the infrastructure to move that electricity from the generatiing stations to where it needs to go to charge those EVs/make all that hydrogen/biofuel/whatever we're going to use to replace gas & diesel in our fuel tanks. That's going to be the real challenge IMHO.
I think the California funding did not come through, at least according to a vistor to my Real Energy blog. Too bad.
I'm not sure that generation or distribution are problems. The US devotes about a third of energy use to transportation, but going to electrification would reduce this to about a ninth with the same performance. This would be perhaps 25% or so of current generation, but with the RPS legislation passed today, we expect 15% of generation to come from renewables by 2020, and much of this will be distributed where the vehicles will be based since the residential sector has the best roof surface area resource. So, there is expected new generation that is scaled about right and placed in a way that makes new distribution infrastructure unneeded.
Chris
I am not concerned about the source of power, be it coal, solar, nuclear fission, or even exotic technologies like the new Bussard Fusion reactor. When crunch time comes, we will find something. If nothing else we have the current technology and resources to build a 20mi x 20mi solar power array out in Arizona that will generate enough power to light the country.
The real problem is distribution. The US electrical grid system is an archaic hodgepodge of separate networks that can only loosely be desecribed as a "national grid". Delivering power from that hypotheticla solar power plant in Arizona over our current "grid" to New England would probably melt it down at the transmission towers. Couple with this the quantum increase demand for electricity to switch from a fossil-fuel transportation system to non-fossil fuel (EVs, biofuels, hydrogen, etc.; all these will require lots and lots of electricity to replace the fossil fuels used now) and the grid will collapse unless we start upgrading it ten years ago.
National energy legislation should concentrate on updating the grid and worry about where we get the power to send across it later.
In the United Staets I think we are going to see an even greater widening of electric rates between states. Some states (especially in the Old South) will welcome nukes. California and the Northeast will put up more opposition and continue to pay more for electricity.
I expect a similar pattern in Europe. Germany will pay more for electricity than France. Britain could go either way. Will the price differences eventually reduce public opposition when the people paying higher prices see that they could allow in nukes to lower their electric bills?