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The Energy Return of Nuclear Power (EROI on the Web-Part 4)
Posted by nate hagens on April 22, 2008 - 10:00am in The Oil Drum: Net Energy
This is 4th in a continuing series of articles by Professor Charles Hall of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and his students, describing the energy statistic, "EROI" for various fuels.
The concept of an energy theory of value has been around since (at least) the 1930s and net energy actually became part of law after Mark Hatfield petitioned Congress in 1970 regarding the importance of EROI. His efforts resulted in the passing of (now defunct) Public Law 93.577 which stipulated that all prospective energy supply technologies considered for commercial application must be assessed and evaluated in terms of their ‘potential for production of net energy”. However, insurmountable theoretical and practical difficulties arose when using the energy unit to understand, a) the conversion among disparate fuel types (energy quality), b) the contribution of the environment, and c) the boundaries of analysis. Despite these problems, energy analysis is grounded (largely) in physical principles, which gives it an important long term edge over financial analysis which may proximately be related to real things, but ultimately is related to the political will to print money.
Nuclear power is the logical step up in energy density from dung, wood, coal, oil..., but its scaling has been controversial and uncertain. Below is an overview of both the nuclear fuel cycle and its energy return. Please add your comments, links and expertise in a manner that Prof Goose is fond of saying, 'that would improve the silence'...;-)
Previous articles/commentary from this series:
At $100 Oil, What Can the Scientist Say to the Investor?
Why EROI Matters (Part 1 of 5)
EROI Post -A Response from Charlie Hall
EROI Part 2 of 5 - Provisional Results, Conventional Oil, Natural Gas
Unconventional Oil: Tar Sands and Shale Oil - EROI on the Web, Part 3 of 5
APPENDIX F. Nuclear
Nuclear Electricity: Potential, EROI and Social and Environmental Impacts
Robert Powers - SUNY-ESF, Syracuse NY
INTRODUCTION
Definition: Nuclear power refers to the controlled use of nuclear fission reactions to release energy captured for use in electricity generation.
Figure 1 – Basic nuclear fuel cycle (Leeuwen 2005).
Click to Enlarge.
Table 1 – Timeline of Major Events Related to Nuclear Power
Click to Enlarge.
TECHNOLOGY
Light Water Reactors (LWRs):
Figure 2 – Nuclear Fuel Chain (Leeuwen 2005).
Click to Enlarge.
All commercial reactors in the US are variants of light water reactors, either Pressurized Water Reactors, or Boiling Water Reactors, and are known as Generation II reactors (EIA 2007). Thus plants constructed in the short and medium term can only be incrementally different from current designs. Generation III and III+ reactors (which any new reactors built in the US will be) incorporate new safety features and standardized designs. It takes years to get regulatory approval for new reactor designs. Standardization, such as has been done in France, lowers costs substantially. Passive safety features activate through physical means, with little or no electricity and no human operators are necessary, increasing reliability in extreme traumas.
Breeders
Breeders are plants that use excess radiation to generate new fuels, with the combination of new LWR reactors could increase the amount of energy extracted from fissionable resources by 100 times (Martinez-Val 2007).
Figure 3 – General breeder cycle (Leeuwen 2005).
Click to Enlarge.
RESOURCE BASE
As noted in Proops (2001) and elsewhere, and shown in Figure 2, the nuclear fuel cycle is simple, and basically similar to the fossil fuel cycle. As can be the case with coal, the EROI and energy and economic balances in general seem to be highly dependent on ore-quality.
Uranium
Uranium can come in several types of deposits, with different energy requirements for extraction from each.
Figure 4 – Available uranium in the world (WISE 2007).
Click to Enlarge.
At current use rates, the known resources are enough to last for 70 years, although changes in price and technology can affect the economically recoverable resources available (Hore-Lacy 2006). As with other mineral resources the average grade of uranium has declined substantially over time as the best reserves have been depleted. The average grade mined also is very sensitive to the mining rate, and the mean grade declines substantially when the rate of extraction increases for society (Hall et al. 1986). Not much research, with the exception of Leeuwen (2005), has been done on the effect of net energy with regards to these decreasing quality deposits, which will be used when uranium increases in price.
Figure 5 – Available uranium as a function of resource/ore type (Leeuwen 2005).
Click to Enlarge.
As extraction and depletion have operated over time, the average ore grade has decreased and the uranium has become more and more dispersed within the background substrate, plus the total amount of uranium we can extract can decrease as well. Leuwen (2005) argues that the empirical extraction yield declines much more sharply than the hypothetical one, which could come into play if there is a large increase in nuclear capacity in the coming decades.
Figure 6 – % of Uranium Extracted from Ore as a Function of Ore Grade (Leeuwen 2005).
Click to Enlarge.
An increasing portion of the world’s uranium comes from in-situ leaching (ISL) (Hore-Lacy 2007).
Figure 7 – In Situ Leaching (WISE 2007).
Click to Enlarge.
With ISL oxygenated groundwater is circulated through a porous ore-body to dissolve the Uranium and bring it to the surface. This should help the energy balance, as much less materials are being moved around, although it is unclear how concentrated (what grade) the ore must be.
Seawater
Uranium salts exist in seawater at low concentrations, as is the case for essentially every other element, and hence can be extracted from the massive total supplies in seawater. Some scientists in Japan are considering this, although according to at least one source, extraction of uranium from seawater would cost much more energy than contained in the uranium itself (Leeuwen 2006).
EROI
We have found the information about the EROI of nuclear power to be mostly as disparate, widespread, idiosyncratic, prejudiced and poorly documented as information about the nuclear power industry itself. Much, perhaps most, of the information that is available seems to have been prepared by someone who has made up his or her mind one-way or another (i.e. a large or trivial supplier of net energy) before the analysis is given. As is usually the case, the largest issue is often what the appropriate boundaries of analysis should be. The following diagram, which should be considered conceptually if not necessarily quantitatively appropriate, illustrates the main issues. The diagram indicates from left to right the timeline of a power plant, with the initial negative values (“phase 1”) indicating the initial energy costs of plant construction, the large positive value generated over the reactor’s lifetime (with a correction for the energy to get/refine the fuel) and phase 3 indicating the energy required for dismantling the plant and sequestering the dangerous by products.
Figure 8 – Lifecycle view of energy costs and production (Leeuwen 2005). The above figure is a general outline of the energy costs and gains lifecycle, but does not accurately reflect the operational lifetime (which is more likely to be around 50 years) or the EROI (which depends on the study looked at).
Click to Enlarge.
The seemingly most reliable information on EROI is quite old and is summarized in chapter 12 of Hall et al. (1986). Newer information tends to fall into the wildly optimistic camp (high EROI, e.g. 10:1 or more, sometimes wildly more) or the extremely pessimistic (low or even negative EROI) camp (Tyner et al. 1998, Tyner 2002, Fleay 2006 and Caldicamp 2006). One recent PhD analysis from Sweden undertook an emergy analysis (a kind of comprehensive energy analysis including all environmental inputs and quality corrections as per Howard Odum) and found an emergy return on emergy invested of 11:1 (with a high quality factor for electricity) but it was not possible to undertake an energy analysis from the data presented (Kindburg, 2007). Nevertheless that final number is similar to many of the older analyses when a quality correction is included.
Figure 9. EROI for nuclear power plotted vs. year of analysis. (Source Robert Powers).
Click to Enlarge.
Tyner was the author (or co-author) on the 1988 and 1997 reports which are examples of the lower EROI numbers -- less than 5:1. Tyner’s 1997 paper reported an “optimistic value” of 3.84 and a “less-optimistic” value of 1.86 and may be based on “pessimistic” cost estimates. For example capital monetary costs were 2.5 times higher than those reported for Generation III and III+ plants (Bruce Power 2007, see below). Fleay’s 2006 on line paper at least gives very detailed numerical analyses of costs and gains and hence probably can be checked explicitly. Different boundaries are used for these “low EROI” studies than most other recent studies that effect the results. For example Tyner takes interest (with a 4-5x larger energy cost magnitude than capital energy costs) into account in EROI (Tyner 1997). The two large EROI values reported here were for nuclear lifecycles which used centrifuge fuel enrichment as opposed to diffusion-based enrichment. Centrifuge enrichment uses much less electricity than other methods (Global Security 2007). We do not know how to interpret these analyses because centrifugal separation is an old technology. Newer rotor materials allow more rapid rotor spin which might influence results. At present much of the enriched uranium used for nuclear power is coming from dismantled nuclear warheads from the US-Russian agreement to decrease nuclear warheads but, apparently, that program will soon come to an end and we will have to contemplate again generating nuclear power from mined uranium. Much of the arguments about the great or small potential of future nuclear power comes from those who argue about the importance of technology vs. those who focus on depletion. As usual, however, technology is in a race with depletion and the winner can be determined only from empirical analysis, of which there seems to be far too little.
Charles Hall inserts:
As an example of the disparity in information “out there” I quote the following from the responses to our earlier posting of the balloon graph on the web:
(From mkwin): ……..A recent study I read from Melbourne University quantified the EROEI from the Forsmark Plant in France as 93:1. Source: http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/TheBenefitsOfNuclearPower
How can there be such a discrepancy (with the balloon graph)? This discrepancy on the EROEI figure for nuclear has to be clarified as one of the most urgent energy issue.
(a reply was posted by Chris): There is a large discrepancy because the report you read is intentionally deceptive. Their goal is to hide carbon emissions associated with nuclear power so when they calculate the EROEI they hide the energy needed to enrich the uranium. This is currently the largest energy input. France devotes the entire output of three reactors to enrichment so the EROEI of their program should be around 7 or less….. (Charles Hall stupidly gave the critics ammunition by extrapolating from that number to all reactors in France).
Charles Barton added later:
If I were researching EROEI, I would identify who in India might be helpful in identifying information that would lead to an understanding of the EROEI of the Indian fuel cycle. If I were looking for information you might start with the Indian Department of Atomic Energy. http://www.dae.gov.in/ I would also suggest contacting the AECL of Canada, to get a picture of the EROEI of the CANDU reactor. http://www.aecl.ca/site3.aspx
I understand your frustration but your assumption that you can get a good picture of the EROEI of the nuclear Industry by a literature review and a meta-analysis will lead to a distorted and inaccurate picture. As I told you my interest in establishing a basis of comparison between competing or potentially competing nuclear power systems. If you only analyze the EROEI of one system, and ignore the existence of other systems in Canada, and India, you will leave yourself open to criticism, and not just to me.
So, dear reader, take your pick. I am not technically qualified to judge from all these differing perspectives. Please send any hard analyses you may have. We need a really good review by a committee of qualified people with few axes to grind. I leave you with one thought my mother told me long ago: caveat emptor.
ECONOMICS
There has been a general upward trend in the cost (in inflation-corrected dollars) of constructing a new nuclear power plant in the U.S., although there has not been a new plant completed for decades.
Plant Costs
Figure 10 – Historical Capital Costs per KW of Nuclear Capacity Installed Over Time In the US
Click to Enlarge.
Bruce Power (2007) gives cost estimates for new plant construction (no subsidies included) as --- $1,000-1,100/KW for a Westinghouse AP1000 and $1,160-1,250/KW for a GE ESBWR. These costs are significantly lower than historical trends, and no plants with these designs have been completed yet in the US, so it remains to be seen if these cost projections are accurate. In general as the price of oil has increased so has the cost of just about everything.
Another unresolved issue is that of government subsidies. Proops (2001) lays out three main types: subsidies from the military nuclear industry, non-military government subsidies, and artificially low insurance. In the US the initial expenditure on uranium enrichment plants was exclusively from military budgets, so for these commercial plants the capital costs were written off. The figures for direct government subsidies are hard to come by, however billions have been spent by the government directly and through grants on nuclear power R&D (Proops 2001). In addition, the US government has pledged to cover up to $500 million in cost overruns due to regulatory delays for the first 2 new nuclear plants built, and half that for the next 4 (Energy Policy Act of 2005). There are also funds to cover the Nuclear Power 2010 Program, “a joint government/industry cost-shared effort to identify sites for new nuclear power plants, develop and bring to market advanced nuclear plant technologies, evaluate the business case for building new nuclear power plants, and demonstrate untested regulatory processes” (DOE 2007).
The longest standing, and perhaps most important, direct subsidy for nuclear power in the US is the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. This act artificially maintains low insurance costs with “no-fault” insurance for operators. The first ten-billion dollars of damage from a major disaster would be covered by the nuclear industry (not solely the operator), and above that the government up the tab. Thus the nuclear industry in the USA has had to bear only a small proportion of the risk, the rest is assumed by the state or imposed as an uncovered risk on the public (Proops 2001). If commercial plants had to cover the full risks, such as the human, environmental and property damages from a major accident or terrorist attack, nuclear power would be extremely uneconomic (Proops 2001). In unsubsidized markets there are many natural-gas plants being built but not a single new nuclear plant, suggesting unsubsidized returns are not competitive with similar sized fossil-fuel plants (Proops 2001)
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
As in any large heavy industry there are substantial environmental impacts of operating the nuclear fuel cycle. Although the accidental release of radiation has received the largest attention, (even there have been no such deaths in the U.S. from more than 50 years of nuclear power), there are far more actual fatalities from the routine mining and processing of the material that will eventually enter a plant. The same perhaps could be said about environmental impact although no such overview exists to our knowledge. We next look at the impacts at each stage:
Mining
Open pit uranium mining has similar environmental impacts to other forms of open-pit mining, such as ecosystem removal or physical disruption, dust. leachates entering into water supplies and so on. In all uranium mining (except, perhaps, in situ leaching tailings are a major issue. While the leachates themselves are relatively low in radioactivity, the sheer amount of tailings (usually 100-1000x the amount of uranium extracted) make them a major issue (Anawa 2007). Radiation-emitting particles can leech into groundwater, or dried tailings from soft ores can be carried by wind and deposited on plants. The most serious (human) issue is lung cancer from inhaling uranium decay products (Anawa 2007).
Plant Operation
Accidents causing small to large releases of radiation can occur impacting either the local environment (in the case of a small loss of primary coolant) or much larger geographic areas (as was the case with the plume of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl). Large accidents also have the possibility of making huge areas of land uninhabitable, as was also the case for the area surrounding Chernobyl were over 300 thousand people were moved and resettled. There is production of radioactive waste from routine plant operation. These include: Low-level waste (such as tools used in the reactor, containment suits, used piping, etc) which are often dealt with on site, typically by burying for several years until it is not significantly radioactive anymore (Fentiman 2007). High-level waste includes materials such as spent fuel, and is much more radioactive and difficult to deal with. It must be stored on site for several years to cool down before the possibility of moving it to a geological repository is considered.
Waste Storage
Waste from nuclear reactors can contain lethal doses of radiation for thousands of years. The best known way to deal with waste is to store it in a geological repository, deep underground. Currently Yucca Mountain, Nevada is the only site being developed or investigated as a repository in the US, and is scheduled to begin accepting waste in 2017. More repositories will be needed especially if the use of nuclear power is expanded in the US. Even then, over tens of thousands of years waste could possibly leak into the water table. Again the issue is controversial even after extremely expensive and extensive analyses by the U.S. Department of Energy.
SOCIAL IMPACTS
People around the plant
While no one living near a nuclear power plant in the US has been killed accidents are an ever present fear and risk for those living near current power plants. Plants are also targets for terrorist attacks. New designs greatly reduce the probability of serious events associated with plants, but not necessarily the perception of high risk around plants.
Nuclear proliferation
Main fear in the US is that spent fuel will be stolen for use in a ‘dirty bomb.’
Yucca Mountain
The area surrounding Yucca Mountain has traditionally been holy lands of the Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Owens Valley Paiute and Shoshone peoples who arenaturally not enthusiastic about the construction or operation of the facility.
CONCLUSION
There are great potential gains and great potential costs with nuclear power. Existing reactors seems to work well and mostly safely although waste disposal problems remain. If the uranium resource limitation people are correct then we cannot go much further without a new technology, perhaps based on thorium. Various issues related to terrorism are more important than they used to be. Earlier “new technologies” such as Breeders (Clinch River, Super Phoenix) have been abandoned as too expensive. Plumbing issues have plagued the Candu style reactors, although they appear intrinsically cheaper and safer and do not require energy-intensive enrichment. Fusion is still many decades away. So there is no free lunch with nuclear. Nevertheless it is possible that nuclear fission should be considered as a transition fuel on our way to solar or something else simply because the cycle emits far less CO2 than does any fossil fuel. In our opinion we need a very high level series of analyses to review all of these issues. Even if this is done it seems extremely likely that very strong opinions, both positive and negative, shall remain. There may be no resolution to the nuclear question that will be politically viable.
REFERENCES
Anawa http://www.anawa.org.au/mining/tailings.html
Bruce Power (Canadian) “New build Project Environmental Assessment” - Round One Open House BrucePower (2006). Retrieved on April 23, 2007.
Caldicott, H. 2006. Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer To Global Warming Or
Anything Else. Melbourne Press, Australia
Cleveland, Cutler J. (Topic Editor). 2007. "Nuclear fuel cycle." In: Encyclopedia of Earth. Eds. Cutler J. Cleveland (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment). [First published October 8, 2006; Last revised January 28, 2007; Retrieved June 12, 2007].
DOE http://www.ne.doe.gov/np2010/neNP2010a.html
EIA http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_reactors/reactsum.html
Fentimann http://www.ag.ohio-state.edu/~rer/rerhtml/rer_10.html
Brian J Fleay. 2006. Nuclear power: energy inputs and life cycle net energy yields.
(Version 3, 23 October 2006. http://blog.greenparty.ca/files/Nuclear_In_Out_3.pdf)
Global Security http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/u-centrifuge.htm
Hall, C.A.S., C.J. Cleveland and R. Kaufmann. 1986. Energy and Resource Quality: The ecology of the economic process. Wiley Interscience, NY. 577 pp. (Second Edition. University Press of Colorado).
Hore-Lacy, Ian (Lead Author); U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Content source);
Lindburg, A. 2007. Emergy evaluation of a Swedish Nuclear Power Plant. Uppsula University Neutron Physics Laboratory Report ISNN 1401 – 6269.
Mills, David. (2006) Comparison of solar, nuclear and wind options for large scale implementation. Presidential Address Australian/New Zealand Solar energy society 2006.
Storm van Leeuwen, Jan Willem and Phillip Smith (2004), “Can Nuclear Power Provide Energy for the Future; Would it
Solve the CO2 Problem?”, www.stormsmith.nl.
Proops, J.L. et al (1996). The Lifetime Pollution Implications of Various Types of Electricity Generation – An Input-Output Analysis. Energy Policy 24(3) pp 229-237
Proops J., 2001 "The (non-) economics of the nuclear fuel cycle: an historical and discourse analysis, Ecological Economics,39: 13-19.
Tyner, Gene. 2002. Net Energy from Nuclear Power. Minnesotans for sustainability (web site).
Tyner, Gene, R. Costanza and R. G. Fowler. 1988. The Net-energy yield of nuclear power. Energy Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 73-81,
WISE Uranium Project http://www.wise-uranium.org
Additional theoildrum.com articles related to net energy analysis and EROI:
An EROEI Review
North American Natural Gas Production and EROI Decline
The Energy Return on Time
Peak Oil - Why Smart Folks Disagree - Part II
Ten Fundamental Truths about Net Energy
The North American Red Queen - Our Natural Gas Treadmill
Energy From Wind - A Discussion of the EROI Research
A Net Energy Parable - Why is EROI Important?
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A massive global expansion of commercial nuclear power may mean depletion of uranium resources in a few decades, perhaps within the useful operating life of some of the plants now in the planning stages. Breeder reactors are apparently the only viable solution for sustainable nuclear power over the long term, with all the dangers they entail.
By definition, Breeder reactors are reactors configured so as to produce more fissile material than they consume. The reprocessing of fissile material adds to the costs, and is vulnerable to proliferations.
The plan is to build proven, improved Gen-III+ pressurized water reactors over the next decade, then begin to use spent fuel to power Gen-IV fast reactors. Fast reactors segregate and consume fissile material at the same rate that it is created.
http://www.ne.doe.gov/pdfFiles/genIvFastReactorRptToCongressDec2006.pdf
So yes, older technology like the Super Phenix has been abandoned due to high cost of operation and low uranium prices. However, rising uranium prices and Gen-IV improvements will soon make fast reactors viable.
I agree with Deuterium.
Rather than claiming that breeder technology was too expensive, it really is a case of uranium and enrichment being too cheap. A once-through fuel cycle has been the economical way to make nuclear electricity with recycled spent fuel and a full breeder cycle being more expensive.
Cooling a nuclear reactor with molten sodium sounds pretty scary to the average citizen, I'll agree, but for a nuclear engineer the charms of liquid metal cooling are manifold and very appealing. That said, there may arise competing technologies for breeding such as molten salt.
Breeder reactors appear to offer a solution. The issues I see are that of the circa four breeder reactors built, only Russia’s BN-600 is still operational. The others were shut down either for safety or economic issues. They aren’t proving to be a solution for the generation of nuclear fuel.
The 2nd issue is that Gen IV plants, as I understand, are theoretical. I don’t know of any being built. These may be needed sooner than later but they aren’t here yet. Will we find a working solution soon enough?
Since I assume this is the US version of the Oil Drum, the 3rd issue is that of the Gen-III reactors, or for that matter any reactors, non-are being built in the US. Of the 34 reactors currently under construction, almost all are in Asia. It's good that there is a technology solution that might help meet my energy needs, but how is Nuclear going to help the US and me when none are being built here?
Not related to Breeders or Gen-III reactors, but since Nate Hagen points out that the US hasn’t built a reactor since 1971 and that the (per his “Figure 8”) vast amount of expense of a reactor is at the end of life of the reactor, aren’t our 104 US reactors ready to be dismantled? Is that what his Figure 8 means by "storm?" Who’s going to pay the expense of the dismantling of these reactors? Where do we get the electricity to offset their loss? Do we have to pay to dismantle these while paying to build new ones?
Lastly, doesn’t the reduction of 104 reactors in the US put a lot of fuel on the market for other countries that are building reactors?
Peak-a-boo
Two breeder reactors besides the BN-600 are currently in operation
They are the French Phénix (not Super-Phénix} which has been in operation since the laye 1960's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phénix
And the Indian Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) which has been in operation since October 1985. A second Indian fast breeder, the Indian Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) is expected to go into operation in 2010. The Indians expect to build 4 more by 2020.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/2005/09/07/stories/2005090704781300.html
A second Indian commercial fast breeder design, the Fast Thorium Breeder Reactor (FTBR) being developed at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center.
http://www.india-defence.com/reports/3390
Why did you chose to ignore India's very advanced breeder reactor program?
China has been developing fast breeder technology since the 1960's. The Chinese are panning to build a commercial size fast breeder, scheduled to come on line in 2015.
http://www.indianexpress.com/india-news/full_story.php?content_id=87775
Charles Burton,
I did not overlook the French Phénix.
It was shutdown in 1996 as the wikipedia webpage your reference accurately states.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phénix
I am aware of the nuclear developments in India. Everything I read about the Indian reactors is "test", "planned" or "developed." Once India passes the test and planning phase and has an operational plant, as Russia does, they can be counted as having a working reactor. India may not succeed, just as the US, French, UK and others have failed with their FBRs. Russia’s BN-600 is only one of four FBRs built by Russia still operational. We may look back at India as we do the others.
The "hinduonnet.com" link you reference no longer works.
The "India Defense" link talks about the theory of India's FBRs using Thorium. Perhaps one day this will be great. I can only hope.
The "indianexpress.com" link points to China’s and India's attempts to build FBRs.
Many countries are very interested in FBRs. Japan was also not mentioned, but they are working hard in this area as well. The Germans are also quite active in the field, albeit not in Germany.
For now, Fast Breeder Reactors, creating more fuel than they consume, is still my hope. They have yet to be proven safe and economical and reside, from one I can see, in the realm of test, planned and developed.
Peak-a-boo
You have mistaken the Super-Phénix which was shut down in 1996 with the Phénix which is expected to be shut down in 2014. The Indians have bred thorium in their their test fast breeder, and the plan to breed thorium in the prototype fast breeders as well as in their "thorium" commercial breeder design. Since the Indians have operated their test breeder for over 20 years, and are building a prototype commercial reactor, I would say they passed the test. Why are you so skeptical about the capacity of the Indians to develop an advanced technology? If the Russians can succeed in developing the BN-600 why not the Indians?
I am not a particular fan of the liquid sodium fast breeder, which I think has proven a difficult to master in practice. Better, far safer, and technologically less arduous approaches are to be found in fluid fueled reactors, Like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor or the Liquid Chloride Breeder Reactor. But I do not doubt, that a Liquid Sodium fast breeder can be made to work.
Charles
The Phénix is a prototype. It is used to develop scaleable projects like the Super-Phenix and others. Under the title of "Successful Breeder Reactors" I would not give France the gold medal. My sense is the Russia's B-600 is also a prototype that is kept functional for themselves and other countries to study. The holly grail of nuclear energy is the FBR, humankind just doesn’t have a viable FBR solution yet. This is my perception.
India is attempting to make great strides forward. It is only natural for each of us to protect our own interests. In the case of India, the US, Germany, Russia and France were the first to take the lead in nuclear power. India is working hard to find an independent nuclear power system, free from the west. Since they haven't achieved the ultimate Thorium reactor or FBR, they are reliant on the west, the US, Russia, France, and Germany for their fuel. These countries have their interests to protect. This is my perception.
Peak-a-boo, My point is that the EROEI of various nuclear fuel/reactor combinations should be assessed. Evan if you count the BN-600 and the Phénix as prototypes, we are in effect in the stage of commercial development for the LMFBR. And that is exactly what the Indians are doing. At this point in the reactor development cycle there is little doubt that commercial LMFBRs can be made to work. My point here is not to say I like the LMFBR, because I don't, but to argue when questions - which I regard as poorly informed - are raised about the future availability of uranium. My point is this. At least 99% of the potential energy of uranium is unextracted by the current uranium/LWR system. Even if we were running out of uranium, and we are not. We possess the technology to produce nuclear power for a long time, and in addition, even if we are running out of uranium, which is not the case, we can still extract nuclear energy from thorium. Our thorium reserve will last for a very long time.
So far, the problem about breeders has been high capital costs. This is the Achilles' heel of nuclear power, and any new technology that exagerbates it is a non-starter.
Slashing capital costs is one of the most important issues for new breeder designs.
Fluid fuel reactors such as liquid fluoride reactors offer advantages in capital costs over LWRs. They're low pressure and so massive steel pressure vessels aren't required, they're more scalable for very high or low powers than LWRs. That they eliminate the fuel fabrication and complex reprocessing steps are nice also.
LFTR does appear to be one of the most promising concepts, if not the most promising.
Do you have any news on the commercialization of such reactors? The only one I know of is the Fuji project, which isn't proceeding very rapidly, and IIRC won't use continuous reprocessing to maximise the potential of the design.
Cyril R, at the moment theoretical and materials research is being conducted in several countries, but only the Fuji project is directed at developing an actual reactor. This is tragic considering the potential of the LFTR. Development of the LFTR will require an act of political will. The manufacture of LFTR would destroy the current business model of LWR manufacturers, who make their money selling fuel rather than reactors. Efficient use of nuclear fuel in LFTRs would mean that the manufacturers would have to make their money selling reactors, and the current manufactures don't know how to do that.
Here is a list of benefits from the development and adoption of the LFTR/liquid core reactor design.
. The LFTR is an extremely safe reactor design. It is self regulating. Core meltdown is absolutely not a problem. Continuous removal of radioactive gases insure that only small amounts of radioactive gases would be released in a worst case accident. Coolant leaks do not lead to fires or explosions. There would be little or no solid fission product release/radiation problem in the event of a leak. Because of the chemical properties of the liquid salt coolant/fuel attacks by terrorists using explosives or aircraft, would not create a wide dispersal of radioactive materials. The use of liquid salts eliminating a threat to public safety from terrorists attack on LFTRs.
2. The thorium fuel cycle is efficient. Up to 98% of thorium used in a LFTR can be burned. In contrast only about 0.6% of uranium involved in the LWR/uranium fuel cycle is burned.
3. Virtual elimination f the problem of nuclear waste. The LFTR produces 0.1% of the waste that light water reactors produce, per unit of power produced. Instead, the spent fuel of LFTRs contains many useful and some rare and very valuable metals and minerals. LFTR "spent fuel" represents a potential means of providing industry with rare materials in an increasingly resource starved world.
4. Lowest fuel cycle costs coupled with very high fuel safety. A LFTR is more than a reactor. It is a fuel processing/reprocessing system. The liquid salts approach enables fuel and breeding materials to be processed on a continuous basis while the reactor is producing power. This includes continuous removal of gases produced in the nuclear reaction, the processing of newly breed reactor fuel, the removal of fission products. Nuclear fuel (U-233, U-235, and plutonium) can be continuously added to the reactor. Thus the reactor never needs to stop operating for refueling. The nature of the LFTR fuel cycle makes reactor fuel theft by terrorist impossible, while diversion of reactor fuel for weapons purposes a very unlikely approach to nuclear proliferation.
5. Lower manufacturing, construction and siting costs coupled with great manufacturing time efficiencies. The LFTR can be designed in a size that can be mass produced on assembly lines. Many external parts including heat exchanges can be made from low cost carbon-carbon composite materials, dramatically lowering materials, parts, and assembly costs. High reactor operating temperatures mean that electricity can be generated using low cost-highly efficient closed cycle gas turbines. Compact reactor/generation unit means smaller, less expensive reactor/power unit housing is required. The inherently safer design means that less money needs to be spent on reactor safety systems, and on accident containment, while assuring the highest possible public safety. Small reactor/power generator size can simplify siting problems LRTRs can be manufactured and set up in weeks or months, compared years for custom built LWRs.
6. Liquid core reactors can be used to dispose of existing stocks of nuclear waste.
Charles, that sounds as though it would also be good for the production of hydrogen - not that I believe in basing the economy on hydrogen production, but it could possibly be used to make things like biodiesel, which would be less volatile.
This might make problems of using nuclear reactors for peak power more manageable, as during periods of low demand the surplus might be used effectively.
Unfortunately hydrogen production is one of those flat out demands that is either allways on or not if you want any efficiency.
Good demand management will have to be found somewhere else.
US nuclear engineers have built new nukes, just not in the US. I've been at work on new overseas plants for 8 of the last 10 years.
The last two year of my career have been devoted to preparing the application for two reactors in Texas. The application was submitted 9/07 - we're working on revision 3 now. Several other applications are in the NRC's hopper and under review.
As to decommissioning, every US plant has to start a trust fund and make regular payments to fund removal at end of plant life. Last time I check, many plants have TOO much money in their funds since the investments paid off better than expected and the original cost estimates are proving too high.
Joseph,
I consider the US a key leader in the nuclear industry. I would put Russia, the US, France and Germany as the leaders in the Nuclear Reactor field and in that order. My perception, India is attempting to enter the arena. My sense is that they are being kept on a short leash. I am guessing China is simply applying the technologies others have developed, not trying to re-invent the wheel and working as a team player. Japan, well, they may not be showing all their hand, but they are very active as well. I stress, these are my perceptions.
I was unaware of the US Decommissioning Trust Fund. It makes complete sense. Thank you for the information.
I know the US has seven Nuclear plants planned (China 30.) I didn't look into the matter much, but if I were building a plant in the US it would be in Texas.
There are 15 Combined license applications that have been received by the NRC
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-licensing/col.html
34 plants from 23 applications are expected by 2010
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-licensing/new-licensing-files/expected-n...
China has 21 reactors under or about to start construction and another 18 should start construction after that.
35 are under construction right now and that does not include Watts Bar Unit 2 being completed in Tennessee.
Watts Bar 1180 MWe reactor is expected to come on line in 2013 at a cost of $2.49 billion. Construction was suspended in 1985 and will resume late in 2008 under a still-valid permit. It will provide power at 4.4 c/kW
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.html
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html
There was a net increase of 3724 MWe in capacity 1991-2003 resulted from many reactors with increases - some substantial, offset by 19 with decreases. [net increase is increased power less reduced power]
As of December 2007 over 110 uprates had been approved, totalling 4900 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.
In 1980 the average utilization for all US reactors was 54%, by 1991 it was 68%, in 2001 it had risen to 90.7% and in 2007 it was 91.8%. A major component of this is the length of refuelling outage, which in 1990 averaged 107 days but dropped to 40 days by 2000. The record is now 15 days.
Output since 1990, increased from 577 billion kilowatt hours to 807 billion kWh, a 40% improvement despite little increase in installed capacity, and equivalent to 29 new 1000 MWe reactors. Average thermal efficiency rose from 32.49% in 1980 to 33.40% in 1990 and 33.85% in 1999.
Current new build by country in order of amount of power added
China 6 reactors, 5520 MW
Russia 7 reactors, 4920 MW
S Korea 3 reactors, 3000 MW
India 6 reactors, 2976 MW
Japan 2 reactors, 2285 MW
France 1 reactor, 1630 MW
Finland 1 reactor, 1600MW
Canada 2 reactors, 1500 MW
Iran 1, 915MW
Slovakia 2 reactors, 840MW
Argentina 1 reactor, 692MW
Pakistan 1 reactor, 300 MW
35 reactors, 28798 MW (most should be completed by 2012/2013)
91 reactors 99095 MW
with approvals, funding or major commitment in place, mostly expected in operation within 8 years (by 2016)
China raised its target for 2020 to 60GW
http://www.platts.com/Nuclear/highlights/2008/nucp_nw_041008.xml
Much of the increase is likely to be from increased reactor sizes
Sites tentatively identified by prospective investors as most likely to host 1,000-MW PWRs beginning in the Twelfth Plan may in some cases instead see construction of bigger units based on foreign technology from the US, Russia, and France, Chinese sources said last month. That could favor the AP1000 -- provided the State Nuclear Power Technology Co., Snptc, an arm of the State Council of Ministers responsible for China's future nuclear power development, succeeds in increasing the AP1000 power level to 1,400 MW. The 1,600-MW-class EPR, the biggest reactor to be built in China, but so far limited to construction of two units, could also be favored for additional construction should China Guangdong Nuclear Power Co., Cgnpc, overcome opposition to further construction by key Beijing bureaucrats. Russian industry, Chinese sources said, may now also be pushed to complete development of a 1,500-MW PWR for the Tianwan site.
Advancednano
As I follow your threads through this post, I find you a warehouse of knowledge. Our screen names are interesting choices, yours advancednano. I take it to mean something about smaller and better.
Mining: We know where ore or U308 is extracted. Primarily Canada and Australia. Kazakhstan is poised to become the leader. Facts on US production are unclear, the US does leaching still; however, US mining production of U308 became negligible. Now, some things I read tend to imply US leaching or mining of U308 has increased dramatically. Do you know the state of US mining of U?
Canada is projected to grow its output of U308. Anything I read indicates production in a plateau or dropping. What are your thoughts on Canada increasing production?
Do we know anything about the concentration levels of mined material in Canada or Australia? Are they decreasing?
Uranium Conversion (UF6): Converting U308 to UF6 is a gray area for me. It appears the US, through USEC, may be the world leader here. Are the same companies that enrichme Uranium the same that perform U Conversion? Who’s at the top of the list of Conversion?
Enrichment (U235): This area appears clear but it’s good to bounce information off someone. It appears Russia (Tenex) leads with 43% of enrichment. The US (USEC) has 20%. France (Avera) 19%. Germany (Urenco) 15%. Does this appear correct to you?
'Megatons to Megawatts” or “Swords for Ploughshares” deal signed in 1994. This deal expires in, I believe, 2014. Do you know if the deal is being upheld? At current U prices, the Russians may find themselves wanting to break the deal as they have with oil development deals. Did the US have to convert warheads into reactor grade U?
U Pricing: Do you know what caused the spike of U prices to spike to $133 back in 2007?
Lastly, from what I know, inventories of U are depleting. I can’t find any numbers on inventories or the rates of depletion since late the 1990’s. Do you have any information on this?
Advancednano just refers to Advanced nanotechnology as opposed to current nanoscale technology. My website used to be called advancednano but I changed it to nextbigfuture. I believe that molecular manufacturing will be developed and will massively alter human civilization.
Wise uranium has a lot of info on uranium mining
http://www.wise-uranium.org/indexu.html
US uranium mining
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-situ_leach
There are currently five in-situ leaching uranium mines operating in the United States, operated by Cameco, Mestena and Uranium Resources Company, all using sodium bicarbonate. ISL produces 90% of the uranium mined in the US. Two more ISL projects are in licensing and proposal stages in the US, and two in reclamation in 2006.
Significant ISL mines are operating in Kazakhstan and Australia. The Beverley uranium mine in Australia uses in-situ leaching. ISL mining produces around 21% of the world's uranium production
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Uranium_mining
Canada uranium mining
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Canada
Today the Athabasca Basin in northern Saskatchewan hosts the largest high-grade uranium mines and deposits. Cameco, the world’s largest low-cost uranium producer, which accounts for 18% of the world’s uranium production, operates three mines and one dedicated mill in the region. Among the major mines are Cameco's flagship McArthur River mine, the developing Cigar Lake mine, the Rabbit Lake mine and mill complex, and the world's largest uranium mill at Key Lake. French-owned uranium syndicate Areva also operates the McClean Lake mill. Saskatchewan has become a hotbed of uranium exploration, with many junior exploration companies rushing to explore the highly valuable Athabasca basin.
Read up on Cameco's mine from the company's site
http://www.cameco.com/operations/uranium/mcarthur_river/
The main mine is McArthur River
average ore grade of 20.5%
http://www.investcom.com/moneyshow/uranium_athabasca.htm
various new small discoveries from the junior companies
Forum found 148 million pounds
http://www.forumuranium.com/s/NewsReleases.asp?ReportID=284791&_Type=&_T......
a new areva, denison mine, expected to produce 18,000 tons 2011-2013
http://www.miningweekly.com/article.php?a_id=122717
believe that molecular manufacturing will be developed and will massively alter human civilization.
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/mdd/v07/i07/html/704feature_willi...
Yup - Nanoparticles bypass the blood-brain barrier
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4825-buckyballs-cause-brain-damage...
And, alas I could not find a link to the 1950's monkey death/nanoparticle work.
Molecular manufacturing is making bigger things from molecules. The current nanoparticle technology is useful but is insignificant relative to the larger potential.
Eric you are fixated on small negative incidents while ignoring the larger issue.
The world is filled with naturally occurring nanoparticles. So what is the differential risk and effect ? What is the potential harm relative to potential benefits ?
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11248&page=7
Naturally occurring nanoparticles: volcanic ash, ocean spray, forest fires etc..
http://aps.arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0801/0801.3280.pdf
People are trying to use nanoparticles for drug delivery but are using them in targeted ways. I am unaware of proposals to dump large amounts of artificially synthesized nanoparticles into the air.
Eric you are fixated on small negative incidents while ignoring the larger issue.
And that larger issue is? Overpopulation? Capitalists out to make a buck will do things as documented in Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle? Man's willingness to screw over people who are not 'in your tribe'? What, exactly is the "larger issue"?
The world is filled with naturally occurring nanoparticles.
Oh, so then that makes man's creation of more OK then?
I am unaware of proposals to dump large amounts of artificially synthesized nanoparticles into the air.
And No one has a policy of taking another industrial building block - plastic nurdles - and dumping them in the sea. And yet the Pacific Gyre is full of 'em.
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Trashing-Oceans-Plastic4nov02.htm
So just claiming I am unaware of proposals to dump large amounts of artificially synthesized nanoparticles into the air. does not address the known water case, or the case of 'accidental' release. The concern over 'accidental release' is vividly demonstrated by the nurdles in the Gyre.
Alternative energy in China is in the lift, but the coal part leaves little room for optimism:
Brian the Westinghouse/MIT donut fuel approach potentially could pump up the AP-1000 to 1800 MWs. It probably would take about 5 years to develop, but once developed the chinese could begin to build the revised design reactors quickly.
Even without that MIT power uprate.
China is already trying to build AP1000 reactors in Sanmen and Haiyang in China will be rated at 1,250 megawatts. And the next batch look likely to be pushed ot 1400MW.
http://construction.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0249-260138_ITM_platts
Plus China is looking at more 1600MW EPRs and 1500MW PWR.
When the MIT power uprate rolls around it could be pushing the APR to 2100+ MW
I think you are speaking of South Texas? If so, is it true that the current application was put on hold because it was not possible to come up with credible cost estimates?
Thanks,
Chris
No, the owners switched reactor vendors from GE to Toshiba. I followed the job and changed employers. The application was partially put on hold until we revise the sections that mention GE, use different technology, or reference GE's proprietary intellectual property. Some editorial work also needs to be done. The NRC review of the portions not requiring revision (environmental, operations, etc) continues.
Since Toshiba, Hitachi, and GE all shared the original ABWR development, most of the technology is shared.
Toshiba seems to have been able to offer better financial and contractual terms and has formed a joint venture with the prime owner, NRG, to market the ABWR in the US.
Has the application considered the effects of sea level rise on the integrity of the cooling pond there? Is a different cooling method planned for the new reactors?
Chris
The main cooling resevoir is 10 or more miles away from the Gulf of Mexico and is composed of levees. It would take more than 60 years for sea level to change that much, even according to the IPCC.
The new reactors (units 3 and 4) will share the pond with units 1 and 2. The pond (more like Lake Erie!) was originally designed for four units.
The new reactors will have their own "ultimate heat sink" safety-related cooling ponds. These will be tornado, hurricane, earthquake, fire, flood, etc etc proof.
I agree that IPCC projections don't seem to threaten the pond but the IPCC did not call its upper range an upper limit because it did not consider ice sheet dynamics. The number that look comfortable for the end of the century for planning purposes would be around 5 meters of sea level rise and to this one should add storm surge so that, if I have read the elevations correctly, there would be a threat. I know that England is beginning to address this issue in its permitting process and so I'm wondering if you have also started to look at this?
Chris
We should be deadly concerned about large asteroids impacting the ocean washing away nuclear powerplants as well. We haven't properly accounted for the risk that these scenarios paint. Also alien invasion fleets are another capital risk for nuclear power plants that we haven't properly assessed.
Nevermind the planning issues that circulates around the trillions of dollars of other installed infrastructure as only nuclear powerplants are vulnerable to these threats.
Again, your usual public display of ingorance on nuclear matters.
New nuclear power plants can't be built without substantial federal loan guarantees. Banks won't lend without them because of a long history of meltdown, failure to come on line entirely accompanied by bankruptcy, long delays owing to poor safety practices, and early closures owing to shoddy construction or poor seismic study that has dogged the industry. Because the industry has its hand out for public largess, it is very much in the public interest to know if factors that could cause default on loans have been considered. It may be more prudent to build the South Texas reactors further inland. It would be a bad thing were the loan to default just at the time we need to shift I-10, for example. $30 billion here, $30 billion there, it starts to add up.
Get a grip already,
Chris
"long history of meltdown" ??!
What on earth are you talking about!?
There has been only one "meltdown" in a commercial nuclear power plant in the world, at Three Mile Island - which didn't hurt anyone. There have been a couple of partial fuel-damage accidents at prototype research reactors, too, but clearly a "long history of meltdown" is complete nonsense, especially in the context of commercial nuclear power reactors for electricity generation.
Omitting Chernobyl are we? That's rather dumb. Chernobyl was a commercial reactor.
Still, the fear of large scale disasters caused by core damage is rather unfounded.
And yet you did not list the fission plants as a target in warfare.
How, exactly, in your risk-assessing world do asteroids smack into the ocean but warfare has stopped?
Yes, because fission power plants are the only potential targets in warfare. No one would consider targetting say skyscrapers or dams. Good point.
Dezakin, actually the 9/11 terrorists were attempting to attack reactors reactors when they accidentally flew their planes into the the WTC. But reactors are truly deadly. The government hushed up the fact that the Titanic struck a reactor, not an iceberg.
The government hushed up the fact that the Titanic struck a reactor, not an iceberg.
Thanks for proving my point that the pro-nukers just make up their positions.
Cooling a nuclear reactor with molten sodium sounds pretty scary to the average citizen,
A sodium leak and fire on the night of December 8, 1995, at Japan's prototype fast-breeder reactor
Or how about:
The Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) was a commercial power-producing nuclear reactor. In April of 1957, the SRE came online. On July 12, 1957, the SRE began feeding electricity to the grid, powering 1,100 homes in the Moorpark Area of California, and narrowly beating out the Shippingport Reactor (December, 1957) in Pennsylvania for the title of first commercial reactor in the United States.
The most infamous nuclear accident at SSFL occurred on July 13, 1959, when the SRE — a sodium-cooled nuclear reactor — experienced a power excursion. Power production from the reactor rapidly rose out of control. With significant effort, the reactor was shut down. Inexplicably, a few hours later it was restarted without the cause of the initial incident having been determined. The reactor continued to operate until July 26, 1959 with high radiation readings and other signs of problems. It was finally shut down at the end of the month.
After a full shut down was complete, the reactor operators discovered that a significant fraction of the nuclear fuel had suffered melting. Tetralin, a coolant used for the pump seals, had leaked into the sodium coolant of the reactor. Carbonaceous material formed, blocking the coolant channels and preventing the coolant from reaching the reactor core. This, in turn, caused the nuclear fuel rods to overheat and melt. Approximately one-third of the fuel melted.
Radioactive gases were released from the reactor into holding tanks and then bled into the atmosphere over a period of weeks. The extent of the radioactive releases remains uncertain to this date, but estimates put the amount from 260 to 459 times the amount of radiation that was released at the Three Mile Island facility.
(and there is more!)
The sodium burn pit, an open-air pit for cleaning sodium-contaminated components, was also contaminated when radioactively and chemically-contaminated items were burned in it, in contravention of safety requirements. In an article in the Ventura County Star, James Palmer, a former SSFL worker was interviewed. The article notes that "of the 27 men on Palmer's crew, 22 died of cancers." On some nights Palmer returned home from work and kissed "his [wife] hello, only to burn her lips with the chemicals he had breathed at work." The report also noted that "During their breaks, Palmer's crew would fish in one of three ponds... . The men would use a solution that was 90 percent hydrogen peroxide to neutralize the contamination. Sometimes, the water was so polluted it bubbled. The fish died off." Palmer's interview ended on a somber note: "They had seven wells up there, water wells, and every damn one of them was contaminated," Palmer said, "It was a horror story." (see: The Cancer Effect, October 30, 2006, The Ventura County Star.)
I'll agree, but for a nuclear engineer the charms of liquid metal cooling are manifold and very appealing.
I guess fires and radioactive leaks are appealing?
Its no wonder that Price-Anderson exists - Fission power is too unsafe to run without the law backing fission power.
Safer than coal and fossil fuels.
Where are the deaths in your incidents above ? With my coal examples below plenty of deaths. I think things are more dangerous when they have a history of killing a lot more people. Not killing more then not more dangerous.
Price Anderson only kicks in for damage above $10 billion. No payouts by the government and no costs to this point. Only industry payments have been collected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity...
http://www.nuclearpowerprocon.org/pop/Price-Anderson.htm
http://www.appvoices.org/index.php?/mtr/environmental_impacts/
As of 2000, there were more than 600 sludge impoundments across the Appalachian coalfields. Chemical analyses of this sludge indicate it contains large amounts of arsenic, mercury, lead, copper, and chromium, among other toxins, which eventually seep into the drinking water supply of nearby communities. Even worse than this seepage, however, is the threat of a dam break. Several dam breaches have occurred, one at Buffalo Creek in West Virginia, which took the lives of 125 people, many of whom were children.
The most recent sludge dam breach was in Martin County, Kentucky, in 2000, which the EPA called the worst environmental disaster in the history of the Southeast. When the sludge dam breached, more than 300 million gallons of toxic sludge (about 30 times the amount of oil released in the Exxon Valdez oil spill) poured into tributaries of the Big Sandy River, killing virtually all aquatic life for 70 miles downstream of the spill.
Where was the insurance on that ? Where are the fish in that sludge ?
mountain top removal coal mining : 800+ square miles of mountains are estimated to be already destroyed.
http://www.appvoices.org/index.php?/mtr/geography/
More than 7 percent of Appalachian forests have been cut down and more than 1,200 miles of streams across the region have been buried or polluted between 1985 and 2001.
Where are the deaths in your incidents above ?
Safer than coal and fossil fuels.
And your point?
My point is Coal power is 50% of electricity and 22% of overall power and kills 1 million per year from air pollution and 5000 to 10,000 per year from coal mining and several thousand per year transporting 6 billion tons of coal by truck and train and uses large amounts of diesel fuel to move it which cause more air pollution and will take decades to solve and since it is thousands of times more deadly than nuclear power based on actual events that we should replace coal first.
Nuclear proven to be proven to be a lot more deadly in terms of deaths per twh than other power sources which it is not. An article of mine on this should be published shortly at theoildrum. Comparing deaths per twh.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
People talk about ban coal and ban nuclear power. Well oil is just as deadly. Ok lets ban that too.
85% of power from fossil fuel. 8% from nuclear power (nuclear supplying 20% of electricity worldwide and is the biggest non-fossil fuel source). So how will this 93% ban of existing power sources work ? People talk about peak oil and the collapse of civilization and that is for the 40% of energy from oil. How about he deaths then from poverty and a de-powered civilization. So lets can coal, oil and nuclear power is a not a plan and would make things even worse.
====
You responded to the fact that nanoparticles are naturally occurring by the millions and billions of tons every year with nurdle pollution incident. Where are the naturally occurring nurdles. Incidents of cancer. Overdoses of anything causes cancer. Eat too much and you get fat and you get more cancer. There has to be tight correlation. Which there are many studies for particulates and smog from coal pollution.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/04/epa-confirms-link-between-ozone-air.html
My point is Coal power ... kills 1 million per year from air pollution
So we should follow up one bad idea with another bad idea?
Nuclear proven to be proven to be a lot more deadly in terms of deaths per twh
And yet, the class of professionals who determine risk (Insurance companies) feel fission is a bad enough plan that the providers of Fission power have to beg Congress to provide legal risk coverage.
I've asked for documentation where the fission industry is able to show they are *SO* safe that they don't need Price-Anderson. Why is no pro-nuke advocate here able to provide this?
You responded to the fact that nanoparticles are naturally occurring by the millions and billions of tons every year with nurdle pollution incident. Where are the naturally occurring nurdles. Incidents of cancer. Overdoses of anything causes cancer. Eat too much and you get fat and you get more cancer. There has to be tight correlation. Which there are many studies for particulates and smog from coal pollution.
Can you re-phrase what you are asking here?
Don't worry, many of us are happy to ban coal, too! :)
In the US, breeders are not legal for reasons of national security so it would seem that the dangers out weigh any supposed benefit.
Chris
Now this is an interesting claim - can you point me toward some documents to back this up?
Hah. He cant because hes lying.
It has been a long standing policy of the US not to reprocess nuclear fuel. This makes breeders a non-starter.
Chris
Liquid fuel reactors do not use reprocessing. A small amount of fuel goes in and a small amount of waste comes out
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/12/fuji-molten-salt-reactor.html
along with a lot of electricity.
And that's fine - but can you point me to laws or even policies that back up your 'illegal' claim?
Here is why EROI seems particularly difficult on Nukes:
--Safety, Waste, & Historical Subsidies:
Safety factors are unknown & insurance is possibly underestimated and underwritten by the public.
These problems aren't easy to quantify in a thermodynamic analysis and involve 'risk management' and actuarial estimates.
The waste is an external cost that is extremely difficult to quantify--I would argue that it is impossible.
Another strange problem is that it has been subsidized extensively bringing down costs and making it appear more efficient than if those subsidies could be subtracted.
stiv, I find your comment most curious. Why would the cost of insurance be included in EROEI? Insurance does not involve energy input or output. It is part of the cost of doing business, like interest, and wages. Secondly your claim that safety factors are unknown is truly amazing. A great deal of research has gone into identifying reactor safety hazards, and in fact much of the energy input into reactor construction is safety related. This is well documented.
The issue of "post reactor fuel" is up in the air. Concerns anbout the future availability of nuclear fuel, for example those expressed by Gall the Actuary, would suggest that post reactor fuel would be recycled in reactors to extract more of it its energy.
Finally your assumption that subsidies effect EROEI analysis is not supported by the facts you note. In fact, reactor owners pay the government a fee for the disposal of post reactor fuel, but the government has failed to fulfill its end of the agreement. It would appear that reactor owners are subsidizing the government.
Charles,
I thought you supported repeal of Price-Anderson. It is easy to see how insurance premiums should be counted as an energy input. The premiums are paid to cover the eventuality of a large accident or attack that takes out a city. This is something that will happen, thus the need for insurance. When the accident or attack happens, then all of the energy expended to improve the property that will at that point need to be abandoned counts as an energy input for nuclear energy. The insurance premiums (probably around $0.08/kWh) are merely a financial tag for that wasted energy.
Chris
Chris, Sigh. Chris, you are mixing risk with facts. I favor realistic assessment of accident risks, and basing insurance premiums on that assessment. If private insurance carriers are unwilling to carry the policy, then the government should act as the insurance carrier of last resort. A realistic assessment of the loss potential from a worse case nuclear accident, would suggest that the maximum loss would be fare less than you imagine. Only the nuclear illiterate would suggest that a Chernobyl type accident would be possible with a Light Water Reactor, as you seem to imagine. Property owners are not held responsible for damages caused by acts of war.
You couple your nuclear illiteracy with an over active imagination. If you note the comment I made on LFTR's, because of the chemical features of their carrier/coolant, even a terrorist attack using explosives or an airplane would not lead to wide spread dispersal of radioactive materials.
If private insurance carriers are unwilling to carry the policy, then the government should act as the insurance carrier of last resort.
Why?
Fission is so risky that it should not be undertaken. You yourself have demonstrated this on TOD when you refuse to answer direct questions I've asked on the matter of safety.
But lets work with your idea, for the sake of the other readers. Example: Russian Roulette. I'm rather sure no insurance policy will cover a death from that game. By the logic of Charles Barton - The Government should.
Property owners are not held responsible for damages caused by acts of war.
So that makes the damages OK?
You couple your nuclear illiteracy with an over active imagination.
Interesting claim.
Charles,
You seem to misunderstand the liability of companies that fail in their responsibilities. Weaknesses in airport security, for example, have led to insurance payouts and payouts beyond insurance coverage by airlines as a result of the 9-11 attacks. Indian Point post solo gaurds who sometimes fall asleep at their posts. Should an attack be successful owing to systematic lack of vigilance or this sort, which is quite common in the industry, then there would be liability.
Worst case nuclear accident senarios studied by the NRC include catastrophic containment failure. They are not realistic in the sense that they use a generic model for property damage that does not account for the high level of development around some of the worst run nuclear power plants, but they probably have some of the physics right in terms of the very wide-scale dispersion of high levels of contamination such an event would cause. The dispersion can be greater than for Chernobyl. I suppose you might consider the NRC lacking in expertise on this subject, but I think you would have to demonstrate this rather than just calling them illiterate.
I guess I misunderstood you previously. You don't feel that nuclear power is safe enough to get its own insurance and you feel that it should remain in that state for the foreseeable future. Forgive me if I consider your claims that there are safety benefits with your preferred technology as not worthy of further consideration since you don't seem to have any confidence in it yourself.
Chris
Chris, excuse me for saying this, but you are profoundly ignorant about reactor safety. You don't show the slightest sign of understanding the issues, or the approaches which reactor designers use to avoid or mitigate accidents. You clearly don't know what you are talking about, which is par for the course for nuclear critics. Go and lear, because right now you are wasting both yours and my time.
Charles,
It would seem that either your lack of understanding of physics or your wishful thinking leads you to such statements. I'd urge you to study the subject more carefully. Then we would not have to waste time on your groundless objections.
So long as the nuclear industry continues to lobby for Price Anderson, it is clear that you are mistaken about the risk.
Chris
Chris lamenting all experienced engineers as dumber than him, would be amusingly ironic if it weren't so sad.
Nevermind that Price Anderson has nothing to do with reactor safety anymore than the interstate highway system has to do with automobile safety.
Nevermind that Price Anderson has nothing to do with reactor safety
Readers can choose your position, or they can actually read the law and commentary about it.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1228037
But hey, if you wanna keep making your claim - you go right ahead. You'll still be wrong.
Chris, excuse me for saying this, but you are profoundly ignorant about reactor safety.
And you've been given a forum to prove your statements.
In fact I've asked you direct questions that you refuse to answer. But a refusal to defend their positions or to make up statements is on par for the pro-fission crowd.
(and another hint for ya Mr. Barton - keeping posting lies over and over does not mean you have 'won' a debate.)
Regarding the Uranium from Seawater question - from a purely thermodynamic viewpoint, less than 1% of the energy in the Uranium (non-breeder cycle) should be required. The Leeuwen approach - estimating worst case for everything - multiplied this by 100, but even so, given a breeder approach it would be technically feasable.
Even Van Leeuwen was forced to admit that! :P
Bottom of page 23:
http://www.warsocialism.com/Chap_2_Energy_Production_and_Fuel_costs_rev6...
He seems, however, not certain that the technology has worked. Has this guy heard about the BN-600?.
I believe he also assumed that the water would need pumping through the membrane, whereas the experiments used an ocean current to do this work, and hence he was suggesting an EROI for a system which no-one proposed building, instead of what was actually happening.
It hardly seems appropriate to quote his work, given his methodology.
In reference to the waste materials produced by uranium mining, although the figure of 100 times the volume of the uranium mined sounds impressive, the volumes of the uranium needed are so tiny in relation to the amounts of coal needed to produce equivalent energy that they are still comparatively miniscule.
The appropriate point of comparison for the nuclear industry are the coal and gas industries, since we currently simply do not know how to produce very large amounts of power in any relatively economic way with renewables, although it is correct to keep reviewing this as the technology matures.
In reference to these real alternatives the following points should be noted.
Both gas and coal produce large amounts of greenhouse gases, which they do not currently pay for.
Gas is also in short supply, so at present the real choices are between coal and nuclear, as the Germans are discovering.
In spite of theoretical safety concerns, in practise in the West nuclear power has been several orders of magnitude safer than coal, which has killed plenty of people.
In reference to costs and nuclear not fully funding insurance needs, it should be noted that rising costs of alternatives should make nuclear more attractive, and that is even without fossil fuels paying the real costs of their emissions and wastes.
As regards insurance, in fact this applies in many respects to other industries such as chemical industries and natural gas.
Should a terrorist organisation shoot a missile into an LNG tanker, it could easily take out a city.
Nuclear power stations are a lot tougher target.
The risks for this type of event are not insured.
In fact, nuclear plants are so safe that their safety may have been counterproductive --- it can argued that for every life saved in improving the safety of nuclear plants several lives have been lost in constructing those super-safe plants. Can't present a graph here but obviously at some stage the rising fatal accident rate associated with increased investments in constructing safe buildings will intersect with the declining fatal accident rate resulting from the added safety.
Not easy to explain to the general public, though. The individual deaths of 100 construction workers employed in building nuclear plants is not headline news. But if a sparrow falls within a radius of ten miles of an operating nuclear power station Greenpeace and co. will start turning on the waterworks ....
Sparrows near Three Mile Island at leukemia risk, Greenpeace claims
In fact, nuclear plants are so safe that their safety may have been counterproductive -
Prove it. Show where fission plant operators said this to Congress during the re-authorization hearings for Price-Anderson.
That doesn't prove anything. A wrongful death lawsuit is a lot less expensive than a class action lawsuit.
Hardly a rebuttal or a response that actually covers the question asked:
Show where fission plant operators said [nuclear plants are so safe] to Congress.
Too bad for the pro-fission camp - they can't be bothered to answer simple questions. Ones that have answers (elsewhere in #3877 I give a direct quote from the fission lobby group of 'fission is safe') But then I ask the question 'if fission is so safe, why is this same gent begging for Congress to keep Price-Anderson - a law that exists because fission is so unsafe that congress must carve out a special exception of the legal framework just so fission can exist.
I think it's fair to ignore Leeuwen & Smith's dismissal of uranium extraction from sewater, since we can't say anything about EROEI on technolgoy which has never been put in place anywhere.
But by the same token, we have to forget seawater extraction for now. If we can't criticise it because it's unproven, then we can't praise it, also because it's unproven.
We have to make plans on the basis of what we know works. That doesn't mean we don't research things to find new things that work, of course we should do that. But we plan to use things we know work. Jet engines were invented in Britain in the 1930s, but to fight WWII they built prop-driven plans. The Germans built jets and lost.
Success in a crisis goes to those who take existing technologies and make good use of them, not to those who rely on unproven stuff.
So the question we're left with is, of the proven technologies, what is a good mix?
very good point.
Conservation #1.
After that it becomes messier.
Your point is a good one but the actual example is unfortunate. As with almost all the cutting-edge German technology of WWII, they would have whupped ass with it, if only they were able to produce it properly in the first place. The Germans faced very severe economic constraints that really screwed up their manufacturing priorities: they pretty much couldn't afford to properly invest in anything that might have showed a war-winning payoff within even a short period, as they didn't have the time or the materials(see The Wages of Destruction on this point). Had they been able to churn out the jets, at least, the war might have been different.
The same goes for another 'unproven technology', nuclear weapons. The Americans and even the British were eager to throw as much as they could at such a project, immediately. Hitler decided, correctly within the circumstances, that the Germans couldn't afford to invest in such research, as they would be defeated before it bore any fruit.
Anyone interested in this might want to check out the book cited above, which is an economic history of the Third Reich, and shows just how screwed the Nazis were economically (and thus strategically) pretty much from the start.
Re: the Third Reich, a decision was made in the late 30's to NOT use assembly lines to produce tanks because because a) tank designs were changing rapidly and they didn't think the lines could be adapted quickly (or cheaply) and b) the war was expected to be short. If you look at WWII photographs of German tank factories you'll see rows of tanks lined up side by side!
The example is an ideal one, PRECISELY for the reasons you state. Yergin might call them 'Above Ground Factors', but whatever the excuse, their experimental technology 'didn't quite' pull it off. That's the message, isn't it?
"whatever the excuse, their experimental technology 'didn't quite' pull it off."
As I understand it, they didn't have the manufacturing capacity to produce enough planes, so it didn't matter whether their planes were technically better.
In other words, Britain didn't do better because they used prop planes, they did better because they had manufacturing capacity. The germans weren't hurt by using better tech, they just didn't have a prayer to begin with.
That's a little different than the original argument, which was that we should stick with proven solutions: the German plane analogy doesn't support that.
In fact, the success of German CTL (it worked quite well until the Allies figured out that they should bomb the plants) seems to support the value of innovation.
Another example: Britain beat the German navy in WWI in large part due to the enormous gamble of converting to oil, which propelled ships 20% faster than coal. (oilaholics should note that coal worked just fine for normal shipping, it just didn't have that slight edge that makes the difference in wartime).
The Germans were also the victims of Peak Oil, WWII-style. Late in the war, orders went out from the Luftwaffe that, in order to save fuel, the jets were not to taxi but were to be towed out to the runways by horses.
Plus, they completely stopped training new pilots!
Rommel failed in N Africa due to fuel shortages, as well.
The only oil fields the Germans had access to during the war were the ones on Romania. They did capture some others in the Caucasus in 1942 but were soon driven out of them. They had to rely heavily on synthetic fuel made from coal.
The other thing was that they just did not have the industrial base to build the number of vehicle to field mechanized forces. Throughout the war their infantry divisions relied almost entirely on horse transport while they only had a few panzer and mechanized divisions. They used literally millions of horses in the invasion of the USSR.
Sea-water extraction of uranium has had some provisional work done, which has not been vigorously pursued basically because uranium from mining is so cheap.
That does not mean that nothing can be said about it, as the principle is proven and as it is simple technology - ways of further reducing costs are clear:
http://www.taka.jaea.go.jp/eimr_div/j637/theme3%20sea_e.html
Synthesis of adsorbent for uranium in seawater
http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/2006/4_5.html
4-5 Confirming Cost Estimations of Uranium Collection from Seawater
The technology basically consists of hanging and absorbent membrane in an ocean current, and pulling it up when it is saturated.
Leeuwen was inferring energy costs to pump the water through - no-one is daft enough to do that.
Probable costs look like around $200/pound, but the costs of fuel are such a low part of nuclear power generation that it would still be OK if these costs are out by a factor of two or three, which gives us a lot more confidence in such an early technology.
"The technology basically consists of hanging and absorbent membrane in an ocean current, and pulling it up when it is saturated. Leeuwen was inferring energy costs to pump the water through - no-one is daft enough to do that."
Are there easily available ocean currents for this purpose? Would the energy cost of the additional drag be significant if you towed them behind container boats?
If this works for uranium at something like $12-$36 per ounce, why isn't anyone doing it for gold???
Gold is several orders of magnitude less abundant in seawater than uranium is. Also, if you follow the links, you should find diagrams of amidoxime linkages seizing uranyl (UO2++) or vanadyl (VO++ or maybe +++) ions in a grip of just the right strength. I don't know of any "auryl" ion and if there is some analogous gold species, the abundances have made the search for something that works with it uninteresting.
At http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/2006/4_5.html you can see massive hydrocarbon ropes that have been flung in the sea and come out laden with enough uranium to yield as much heat as the combustion of 30 to 90 such ropes would yield; if they were laden with gold, no energy would have been harvested.
How shall driving gain nuclear cachet?
hmmm. Maybe gold doesn't have the right chemistry.
OTOH, gold is a couple orders of magnitude more expensive than uranium, and E-ROI doesn't matter here.
I should think lithium would be much easier to extract than uranium...
There are loads of available ocean currents - like the gulf stream and whatever.
You do not need to tow them behind container boats - just suspend them in the water - see the references I have given.
Gold is much scarcer as an element in water and earth than uranium.
I do not get this facination with extracting Uranium from sea water. According to Deffeyes & MacGregor there is more than 50 times as much Uranium in the shallow crust in concentrations of 10-20 ppm or higher compared to seawater where it exists in concentrations of only .0002-.001 ppm (at least 5 orders of magnitude less concentrated). Unless there is an enormous advantage in the ease of extraction, you would think it would make more sense to work the high concentration stuff, like the 210,000 ppm Cigar Lake deposits, before we resort to sea water.
Right. There is probably more U in the top kilometre of Japan than in all the oceans. Yet Japan has continued to do these experiments, and people keep popping up who are, or pretend to be, ignorant of this. I suppose they're like the trolls on climate boards who aggressively share their ignorance of how CO2 capture from air, e.g. by silicate minerals, can increase entropy and be spontaneous, or repeatedly say, oh, why don't we just plant treees.
Edit: I notice you give a range of wrong values for marine U concentration. The amidoxime pages and this one agree that it's 0.003 ppm -- enough, I seem to recall, that if the water had to be lifted 20 m in order to be filtered, the use in CANDU reactors of uranium so won would be just at breakeven, i.e., no net energy. With no lifting at all, there is of course a lot of net energy.
The experiments you linked to were published about in May 1998.
They gave us a picture of what they picked up,
which was 16 grams of uranium oxide. This is 13.6g uranium, or 0.097g U-235, which is the stuff we want for nuclear reactors.
This tells us that each 1kg of sheet was 7m2 in area, though apparently they were cut up and piled. And here we see the rate of adsorbtion and recovery,
They refer to grams of uranium oxide recovered in total, but refer to grams of uranium recovered from their sheets on the graph; it's unclear if they mean the oxide in both cases or not. This would only drop the yield a little bit, though.
They achieved 2g uranium (oxide?) after 60 days, per kg/7m2 of adsorbent.
Thus, to recover 1kg uranium would require 500kg/3,500m2 of adsorbent. To recover 1 tonne uranium would require 500t/3.5ha of adsorbent. This would of course be only 7.1kg U-235. It's not clear if the units can be reused or not. Let's be generous and assume they're 100% reusable, and that they put the things in the seawater for 60 days, pull it out, extract the uranium and clean up the adsorbent in 1 day, thus doing it four times a year.
So a 500t/3.5ha (remember, the stuff is cut up and piled) unit could recover 4t uranium annually, or 28.4kg U-235. Nice.
Current world use is about 66,000 uranium tonnes annually. To supply even 1% of this would require 330,000 tonnes and 2,300ha (23km2) of adsorbent. And again, this assumes that the stuff is 100% reusable. If it can only be used once, then we need 1,320,000 tonnes and 100km2 of adsorbent annually.
For 1% of current uranium consumption.
Now, how easy or hard this is to do is too early to say, prototypes are always clunky. But it does appear the task is non-trivial.
And of course, the real test is: it's been ten years since this experiment. What have they done since then?
So is this a matter of ignorance, or pretended ignorance, or perhaps just... we only worry about proven things, not lab experiments?
You shouldn't judge uranium capture just by the amount of U-235. While it is true that U-235 is the fissile species, U-238 burns in light water reactors also.
We all understand that a breeder reactor makes more fissile material than it consumes. It converts U-238 into Pu-239/240/241 at a coversion ratio of >1.0.
However, LWRs with typical US fuel cycles have conversion ratios approaching 0.8. At the end of core life, 50% of the power comes from the fissioning of plutonium. Discharged fuel contains 1 to 2% plutonium which can and should be recycled.
If you go down thread there is a link to more updated studies, including a large test using braided material. The trial seemed to have 18 reuses of the same material (they wanted to answer the same questions you did). Quite interesting actually, and very hopeful. It makes me wonder what other elements could be captured in a similar fashion.
Yeah, I actually chased up some more research after writing that post. Interesting stuff.
But it's still far from being commercialised. And the rough cost calculations they've done were actually more pessimistic than me - they're suggesting a 1,000 tonne unit could extract 1 tonne of uranium a year. Given we use 66,000t uranium annually, and given that this is being promoted by people here as a way to be able to use even more uranium, well... we quickly get into pretty huge extraction plants required.
Now, are we technically and physically capable of doing this? Of making tens of millions of tonnes annually of this adsorbent and thus getting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of uranium from seawater? Probably. But it's a nontrivial task, and will take decades.
So it's not going to reduce fossil fuel consumption in any substantial way.
No-one is suggesting that we go out now to get uranium from seawater.
The guys who think that we are going to run out of uranium give precisely the sort of time-estimate that you refer to as when the problems hit - a few decades.
Since in practise very large new finds of high-grade uranium have been found recently for very modest exploration funds, in contrast to massive exploration efforts for little return inn oil, it seems that we have ample means of tiding ourselves over.
Thorium reactors are also a fairly near term prospect, so in fact any risk of running out of nuclear fuel seems wildly improbable.
So the use of nuclear energy can indeed reduce fossil fuel consumption very substantially.
Well, if no-one is suggesting we get uranium from seawater, then why is it being brought up here? I wasn't the one who brought it up, that was a pro-nuke guy.
"Uranium will last for a thousand years!"
"Well, not quite, looking at proven reserves -"
"But you can get it from seawater, and it'll last a million years!"
I'm not interested in vague statements that if we go looking for some reserves, we'll find them. That's a statement of faith. I don't buy it when it comes from an oil guy, and I'm not going to buy it when it comes from a nuke guy. When the reserves are found, let us know. In the meantime, we can only count on what we know we've got.
It's unfortunate, Dave, but the pro-nuker brigade, like the pro-renewables brigade, is remembered for its most ridiculously optimistic members. And thinking that nuclear can be a significant contributor to a reduction in fossil fuel use is ridiculously optimistic.
We have only to look at today, where the USA, the country with the largest nuclear electricity generation in absolute terms is also the highest per capita consumer of oil (about 25bbl annually per person), excepting only oil exporting countries. If nuclear displaces fossil fuels, why does the US use so mcuh? Or we can look at the country with the largest proportion of nuclear as electricity generation, France, where they consume 12bbl oil each annually.
So we can see that nuclear does not displace fossil fuels. People just use the fossil fuels and nuclear.
Now, the same applies for renewables. We see that Denmark uses more oil per person than France, and Sweden more still, though Germany slightly less. So that renewables don't displace fossil fuels, people just use the renewables and the fossil fuels. It's basically because there's no limit to their desires for electricity. Even Iceland and Sweden, with twice the electricity generation per capita even of the wasteful United States or Australia, are not satisfied and are building more generation capacity - which is why Sweden didn't shut down all its nukes, even though they had a referendum and voted to do so twenty years ago.
What reduces use of fossil fuels is quite simply a decision to reduce the use of fossil fuels; not an attempt to replace them with something else. That's what history has shown. To think otherwise is ridiculously optimistic.
Even the IAEA thinks (in talking about whether current proven uranium reserves are enough) that nuclear will grow at most 44% from 2006 to 2025. Global electricity generation has grown by, according to the EIA 2.79% on average from 1980-2005. By comparison, world population increased by 1.14% annually over the same time.
If world electricity generation continued to grow at 2.79%, we'd find it 69% higher than 2006 by 2025. If it only grew at the same rate as population growth, it'd be 24% higher.
In other words, even the IAEA's most optimistic assessment of the growth of nuclear in the next couple of decades makes its growth such that the nuclear kWh per person grows, but nuclear's total share of generation drops.
If we want nuclear or renewables or both to displace fossil fuels, we'll need a massive buildout of them. And coupled with that we'll need a deliberate shutdown of the use of fossil fuels. They won't just be displaced by market forces - they haven't been anywhere on a national scale. People just use the new energy and the old together.
Most of us here think that Hubbert was correct in forecasting peak oil.
If you look at the characteristics which indicated a problem, uranium does not share any of them.
Oil and gas are only produced and stored in very specialised circumstances, whereas uranium is a major constituent of the crust.
One of the signs Hubbert took into account is that people, at the time mainly in the States as that was peaking, were looking harder and harder and finding ever decreasing quantities of oil.
A very cheap, cursory search for uranium in the last couple of years has greatly expanded known high-grade reserves.
The reason uranium form sea-water is being discussed is because it is repeatedly brought up by people who are against nuclear power that we will run out of uranium.
This case appears to be totally ill-founded.
As for the rest of your remarks we differ in that I feel that we are in trouble from global warming and shortage of supplies, and think that we should take every opportunity to try to get through.
In spite of man fy being doomers, I don't mean you, it seems to me that many who argue for renewables only don't fundamentally take our situation seriously.
There have been massive excess GW gases released in the last few decades, and huge numbers of deaths from coal, and it seems to me that attempting prematurely to go for all renewables will lead to equally unfortunate results at the present time..
To me, and of course this is just my all too fallible human judgement, this fastidious pickiness is the last thing we need when the circumstances are so dire - it is like complaining that you are worried about minor side-effects from medication which is the only thing keeping you alive.
You may be confident that we can rapidly and relatively cheaply replace 90% or so of our present energy resources with the relatively untested renewables, but many of us do not share your confidence - to quote Kiashu - that is ridiculously optimistic! ;-)
It would be if I believed it. I don't believe we can replace all our current energy consumption with renewables or nuclear or both together by 2050.
Current world electricity generation is about 2,000GW, and other energy use is 13,500GW. On the basis of absent fossil fuel liquids (absent due to peaking, mitigation of climate change, or both), what we're talking about, if nothing else changes, is turning 2,000GW electricity generation into 15,500GW.
The increase in electricity generation from 1980-2005 was 2.79%. This if sustained over the next 42 years would turn 2,000GW into 6,350GW (in fact only about 500GW of our present 2,000GW is not fossil fuels, but we'll just assume all fossil fuel plants get replaced along the way, too). So even if we built nothing but renewables and some ideal nuclear, we'd still be left with 9,150GW of energy coming from fossil fuels.
And that assumes there's no increase in energy demand, when in fact that's been increasing, too - and we can expect it to increase at least at the rate of population increase, which has been 1.14% annually from 1980-2005, though the UN expects us to level off in population about 2050, at 9-10 billion people.
The biggest annual increases in electricity generation in the last quarter century, of 6% for the world, or 10% nationally, have essentially come when China and India build power plants like crazy, taking a significant chunk of their economy to do so. So we could conceivably have a world transformation to renewables and/or nuclear, increasing electricity generation by 6% annually. That seems to be about the most we could sustain, especially given that along with the electricity generation, we'd need more other infrastructure like railways.
6% annually for 42 years takes us to 23,100GW, which with the 9-10 billion people is about what we'd want, to be in an equivalent situation to today.
I'm sceptical we'll manage 6% annually for 42 years running worldwide.
So really we're going to have a lower-energy future, as the fossil fuels become more scarce and rise in price, and as we're sluggish in replacing the old generation.
I'm not ridiculously optimistic; but nor am I a doomer.
There's nothing I would disagree with there.
On my blog, which I won't reference as I haven't updated it to take account of the latest info, I do a quick review of some of the latest conservation measures, and take that as a fundamental requirement for any energy policy whatsoever - we are lucky like that though, and high prices lead to conservation!
Really the only point we disagree on is that I don't think we can afford or should leave nuclear power out of the mix - I would attack the problem with all the resources we have.
You might be interested to know though that after Nick kindly provided me with credible information regarding new solar panel costs from First Solar, and following Nanosolar's ideas for providing small 2-10MW solar plants right on the doorstep of where it is consumed in small towns, but on the ground instead of the more expensive roof installations, I would now see solar as cost-effective for peak load installations in hot areas.
The practical difference between that and those who think that we should be using it for base-load at the moment is small, since we will need all the panels we can produce for the next few years just to meet this part of the demand - it is just that this would mean that they would tend to be installed in the most cost-effective places.
Someone on this blog when I was putting this forward actually took me to task for being in their view anti-nuclear! :-0
I don't know enough about the wind-power resources in Australia to be more definitive in their case, but at any rate in many places in small town America it seems that in view of the savings in transmission costs and the likely increase in FF costs a system whereby solar is used for peak power backed up by wind and biogas might work - nuclear plants would tend to hold the advantage perhaps for larger cities and in northerly latitudes or colder areas.
The hot dry rock geothermal experiments in Australia also hold some promise.
There may be an excellent synergy between hot dry rock and AACAES. Low cost low- to medium grade geothermal heat could be used to effectively deal with freezing issues.
That would be a darn good use of geothermal.
It tends to be a bit difficult to integrate into systems, although it has great advantages for base-load over most renewables as it does not suffer from intermittency, but is fairly location-specific.
It would be ideal for co-generation, but you have to be very careful about how close in to buildings you put it, as the Germans have recently discovered:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/03/31/eager1...
Germans get sinking feeling over energy plan - Telegraph
OTOH some of the Australian resources, although not all of them, are a very long way from where you can use it, which gets you into a lot of expense for transmission lines, and it is difficult to predict how successful rock fracturing will be.
From the map given here though it is clear that a few areas in Australia are nearly ideally placed to explore the possibilities of this resource:
http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/3215
In hot dry areas it's low water use conveys a large advantage.
For me it perfectly encapsulates the problems with fairly evaluating renewables - apart from the fact that many of the technologies are at a very early stage, how good it is varies enormously from area to area depending on local factors.
A high grade heat location wouldn't be strictly necessary though, just the technology to create the resevoir, to store the heat generated during compression. And high grade heat itself isn't needed either, just high enough to deal with freezing issues without too much parasitics. Another idea is what Barton mentioned, to use nuclear heat (from the turbine outlet). Which could have the advantage using a standard low temperature compressor. It's not adiabatic by definition though, just diabatic with a different heat source.
"Current world electricity generation is about 2,000GW, and other energy use is 13,500GW."
That's too high by a factor of about 3. It takes roughly 3 BTU's to generate 1 BTU of electricity, and 1 BTU of electricity can do the work of 3 or more BTU's. For instance, in the US, light vehicles account for about 40% of BTU's (about 40 quads), but we could replace them with about 7% of BTU's (7 quads) worth of electricity. Similarly, space heating with heat pumps can use 1 BTU of electricity to generate 3-5 BTU's of heat.
"On the basis of absent fossil fuel liquids (absent due to peaking, mitigation of climate change, or both), what we're talking about, if nothing else changes, is turning 2,000GW electricity generation into 15,500GW. "
No, you'd need something like 5-6,000GW.
So, in fact, you'd only need something in the range of the 2.79% rate of growth we've had so far.
As said yesterday, the true value is a little over 0.003 ppm, and as far as I know doesn't vary from one part of the ocean to another. I see from the second-rightmost bar in Charlie Hall's or Bobby Powers' Figure 5, "Available uranium as a function of resource/ore type", that the lower numbers must date back at least to Deffeyes and MacGregor's "World Uranium Resources", Scientific American January 1980, where that figure first appeared.
Edit: on looking at Figure 5 more closely, I see the seawater bar actually is an over, not an underestimate of the ocean's U content, being slightly over 10^7 "Gg", where "Gg" means gigagram, aka thousand tonnes. So they counted ten billion tonnes marine U rather than the 4.5 billion that now is accepted.
Also, it's not quite the figure D&M used. Their vertical coordinate was logarithmic in "TONS", presumably non-metric tons, and the revision has added two bars at the left for "unconformity deposits", although these appear to represent the known amount of U in such deposits, not the amount that can be reasonably be expected to exist in all deposits of that type, and in that respect does not follow the convention of the other 15 bars, which all are just as they were.
Uranium: more vertical rectangles in more locations!
How personal transportation gets decarbonized
I agree that land-based resources will probably provide all we need just fine.
It is reassuring though that countries who might be reluctant to import all their energy supply in the form of uranium could get their own at a reasonable cost.
The main point of discussing it though it that is short-circuits those who seek to argue that we will run out of uranium, and saves tedious EROI debates on going to lower grade ores, as the 'grade' of seawater would remain constant for many thousands of years.
"we currently simply do not know how to produce very large amounts of power in any relatively economic way with renewables"
Sure we do. Wind is competitive with natural gas generation in the US - the primary problem for both wind and solar is that production can't expand as quickly as demand, so there's scarcity pricing (this is also a problem with nuclear, per Joseph Somsel). When solar panels cost $1.12 per watt, it's really just a matter of ramping up capacity to bring down prices.
"Should a terrorist organisation shoot a missile into an LNG tanker, it could easily take out a city....The risks for this type of event are not insured."
Sure, but that doesn't really matter, does it? Price-Anderson doesn't have anything to do with concerns about terrorism.
The main problems with nuclear, wind, and solar is getting as much as we want, as quickly as we want.
"Such bad food! Yes, and such small portions!" :)
Well actually the LNG is low pressure and very cold (ie it won't evaporate all at once) so taking out the entire city is rather a stretch. It could cause one hell of a fire though.
It depends for wind on what you mean by 'large'. To ramp up production to the same percentage as in Germany in the States would be a huge project, and at high levels of penetration integration into the grid is not an easy or solved problem.
The US is also a very small part of the world-wide picture, and most places don't have anywhere near as good a wind resource as the US.
As for solar, you seem to be using the press-statements for Nanotechnology.
They are not currently publicly selling panels to the public at that price, and many doubt their ability to do son anytime soon.
Actual stuff you can buy in the shops works out several times more expensive than the figures you quote per average kilowatt hour of production.
No, we were discussing costs which were not fully borne by industry.
No industry bears all of it's costs for every conceivable event, and coal and gas don't even pay for their emissions.
"To ramp up production to the same percentage as in Germany in the States would be a huge project"
Perhaps, but electrical generation is a huge industry.
5GW of wind was installed in the US in 2007, and that was about double the rate of 2006. There are about 125GW of proposed projects in the US (in the form of requests to regional ISO's to connect to the grid), more than any other form of generation. At about $6/watt (average production), it appears to no more expensive than the high end of the range for nuclear projects capital-wise, with much lower operating cost. Granted, it would take probably 5 years to ramp up capacity for wind turbine manufacturing, and transmission, to the roughly 25GW(nameplate)/year needed to handle new demand. To get up to Germany's 6% would require about 90GW (nameplate), and by the end of that 5 years you'd be at that level of installed capacity.
That would be a roughly $40B/year manufacturing volume, which is large, but not that large relative to, say, car manufacturing at around $500B/year.
"at high levels of penetration integration into the grid is not an easy or solved problem"
6% isn't a high level of penetration (keep in mind that the US is a lot larger than Germany, with much better geographic diversity, somewhat better long distance transmission, and substantially lower wind variance). 20% would begin to pose real problems for the grid as it's organized today. Of course, wind is likely to ramp up in a nice parallel path with PHEV's, and there's a marvelous synergy there.
"The US is also a very small part of the world-wide picture"
The US is 25% of world energy consumption. That's not "very small".
"most places don't have anywhere near as good a wind resource as the US."
Some places don't. That certainly includes Germany and Denmark, places which stubbornly insist on making it work anyway. The UK certainly has some good quality onshore resources which it refuses to use, unlike Germany, in the name of visual aesthetics. To me that doesn't seem to reflect a serious recognition of their energy problems - the Germans, on the whole, have decided that turbines are beautiful. OTOH, there are a lot of good quality wind resources around the world - the NW EU isn't the only place you should be considering, either.
"As for solar, you seem to be using the press-statements for Nanotechnology."
You probably mean Nanosolar, and no, I'm referring to First Solar. As a publicly traded company, it's costs are easily verifiable. It sells about $500M per year in PV panels, and it's growing very fast.
"Actual stuff you can buy in the shops works out several times more expensive than the figures you quote per average kilowatt hour of production."
Yes, prices are floating much higher than costs, and PV manufacturers are making very tidy profits today. When manufacturing catches up with demand prices will crash.
"we were discussing costs which were not fully borne by industry.
No industry bears all of it's costs for every conceivable event"
True. But all other energy industries are liable for the costs of negligence, and if they cause trillions in damage they'd be liable up to the extent of their capitalization. Bankruptcy would be the penalty for incurring liabilities that could not be paid - the corporate death penalty.
"coal and gas don't even pay for their emissions."
True, and I'm sure you agree that they should be, and that if they were that the competitiveness of wind, solar and nuclear would be greatly increased.
I believe that there is general consensus that no new nuclear plants would be built in the US without Price-Anderson. That suggests that it's a significant indirect subsidy. I'm not suggesting that this is a deal-breaker for nuclear, but it should be recognized when discussing the relative costs of various forms of generation.
Nick, I would basically go along with your remarks about ramping up wind production, and think that in the States the best bet is to ramp up to nearer the German penetration levels and then re-assess - that means we would be building all we practically could, anyway. Your cost figures are in the right ball-park it seems to me.
By high levels of penetration I was talking about amounts in excess of the present level of penetration in Germany - Denmark is a bit of a special case as it relies so heavily on Scandanavian hydro power.
I don't know if Germany and Denmark make renewables work - they certainly spend a lot of money on it, but Germany at any rate is having to consider building more coal plants, and so far their efforts have been expensive and not that effective at reducing CO2.
They can't get away from the fact that they have poor resources which are expensive to exploit. The case is different elsewhere.
Your characterisation of UK opposition to on-shore wind as being purely on aesthetic grounds is unfair:
http://news.scotsman.com/politics/Scientists-agree-placing--.3990531.jp
Scientists agree placing wind farms on peatland is 'disastrous' - Scotsman.com News
My remarks about the US having far superior wind resources to most other places was by no means referring only to Europe - I was actually thinking of China:
http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publications/stat...
070129_Wind_map_2006.pdf (application/pdf Object)
As can be seen in this report, although the wind power resource is fine in some areas of China, it is pretty useless in many others.
This is one of my bones of contention about discussion of renewables - by their nature they are localised, and need specific consideration for each resource and each area, but some insist on branding them as 'good', leading to building wind turbines where it ain't windy and solar collectors where it ain't sunny.
I picked up from a later post in this thread that you were talking about First Solar for solar costs, which is great - I have confidence in their figures and had not realised that they had got them so low - the only ones I had seen in that area were Nanosolar's, which I feel are much more doubtful.
At that cost level then we can reasonably expect that peak load will go solar in hot areas - another massive build which would max out what we can do and which leaves plenty of time to see what else can be achieved, base load power and so on.
In respect of that I would like to draw your attention to Nanosolar's ideas for building Municipal scale solar plants, in the 2-10MW range:
http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3/2008/04/16/municipal-solar-power-plants/
Nanosolar Blog » Municipal Solar Power Plants
Now I might have reservations about Nanosolar as a company, but the method of introduction here strikes me as excellent, with no expensive messing around putting solar on roofs, and local power happening right where it is needed, minimising transmission costs.
For small town USA I would have thought that for many areas this plus windpower and some biogas might be the way to go - here is the German experience on integrating such a system:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeremy_leggett/2008/02/renewed_energ...
Comment is free: Renewed energy
Amusingly I was accused of being biased against nuclear power for my remarks! :-)
Liability for large accidents is more complex than you indicate - after Bhopal the company was not given to the Indians, maybe it should have been, but it wasn't.
The coal industry would have been bankrupt many times over if it had had to pay for the damage it has done.
Should a terrorist organisation shoot a missile into an LNG tanker, it could easily take out a city.
It's unlikely, as the fuel isn't pressurized significantly. Just really damn cold!
A huge fire is plausible, maybe severly damaging a big part of the harbour. But easily taking out an entire city?
Ah well, we probably don't have to worry about it in the future anyway. Natgas is in rather a short supply. Everyone wants it, and there's not enough.
As I said at RealClimate,
How shall driving gain nuclear cachet?
I didn't spot it in the article, and am not sure if your comment addresses it, but I have wondered about the CO2 emissions from the cement manufacture required to build new nuclear plants. Cement mfg is the largest source of carbon from the chemical sector. I would think it takes a lot of cement to build a fission plant. Especially in an age of the need to harden such reactors against terrorist attacks.
If anyone has any data on this impact I'd love to see it.
Per MW, Wind turbines uses over four times more cement than a nuclear power plant.
From Per F. Peterson, Department of Nuclear Engineering. The Future of Nuclear Energy Policy: A California Perspective 2005:
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/news/CEC/CEC_Nuclear_Workshop_PFP_8=051.pdf
Nuclear power plants built in the 1970’s used
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.
Conversely, natural gas combined cycle plants take
3.3 metric tons of steel and 27 cubic meters of concrete—
explaining why natural gas is such an attractive fuel, if it is cheap.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nuclear-power.html
While it is true that wind uses more materials than nuclear, your numbers and assertions are biased and misleading for several reasons:
First, it is incorrect to compare to 100% capacity factor, as the real average system capacity factor of the US electrical grid is less than 45%, and this is what one should compare to when considering average capacity factor. This lowers material input for wind by more than 50%.
Second, the capacity factor you referenced is very low, good locations in the US get 30-40%, which is close to the average capacity factor in the US. Moreover, consider the correlation with the load to be more indicative than capacity factor. Not good for wind, but with CAES this can be cost-effectively dealt with; the CAES equipment is similar to NG turbines, i.e. they have low materials input so this won't fundamentally increase the materials input for wind. And anyways, a nuke would also need something like CAES to compensate for high capacity factor (ie miscorrelation with the load). Nuclear load following might be an option for near term nuclear technologies, but this lowers output and thus EROI. Which is quite unacceptable I'm sure.
Third, 1990's vintage windmill tech is not 'modern' - a 5MWe 21st century windmill should be used for that purpose. These use materials more efficiently. By contrast, 21st century LWRs have only slightly lower materials requirements, if indeed they are lower at all.
Fourth, the energy gain that light water reactors get over wind from less materials input is strongly reduced by the energy required for enrichment, which is the biggest lifecycle energy requirement for light water reactors' kWhs.
Fifth, the energy gain compared to wind is further reduced by the high recycle percentage of wind power systems. Nuclear power actually requires significant amounts of energy to decomission the plant, while not being able to recycle much of the materials due to high radioactivity levels.
Sixth, your numbers assume 15 year windmill life, which is rather low-balled and thus indicates bias. But perhaps this has more to do with the assumption of 1990's windmills. In adittion, the fifth argument above makes the shorter lifespan less of an issue.
HINT: for a strong argument, think about the broadly similar ballpark EROI estimates of wind and nuclear LWR - when using reasonable numbers for both of course, a bit of bias could make any of the two come out favourably. But even then the difference is NOT as high as you imply with your focus on materials input alone.
Seventh, wind uses mostly commodities such as concrete and steel, which don't have strict resource limitations, the bottlenecks are mostly in production capacity. So the amount of commodity inputs is not an inherent showstopper if strategically planned. What is more of a showstopper, is highly specialized and exotic materials and equipment requirements for modern nuclear powerplants. These are likely a bit more difficult to scale up than commodity production facilities like concrete and steel.
Eighth, using moderate technological optimism, wind becomes much better, for example Tubercle technology could dramatically increase output especially with lower wind speeds but with high wind speeds as well. Or superconducting turbines, larger turbine sizes, or novel materials such as advanced composites etc. With a similar amount of optimism, there are advances in LWRs such as MIT's uprating techs.
Bottom line: you've made the fallacy of not taking a system and holistic perspective.
While the grid capacity factor might be 45%, wind power, based on EIA historical data, has been about 26% on average. That's significantly less than the 30 to 40% range claimed above.
If one wants to look at the capacity factor issue that way, the important question is how coincident are the two? If wind is blowing when grid demand is down, it is only worth the natural gas or coal NOT consumed. If wind and peak are coincident than good.
However, here in the San Francisco Bay Area, our wind resource on the Altamont Pass is NOT coincident with load. The wind blows over the pass when it's foggy in San Francisco. That cools off the Central Valley where the air conditioning loads are. When it's hot in the Central Valley and people turn on their air conditioners and grid peaks happen, the wind does NOT blow and the windmills don't spin. Hence wind produces electricity OFF-PEAK.
It still doesn't make sense that future wind investments will occur where the wind resource are better than those wind sites already exploited. The only casees would be where long, expensive transmission lines (and attendent losses) were required to bring the power to electrical users. One would expect the converse - the best wind sites were exploited first and new sites would have lesser wind resource.
BTW, new nukes should use less materials per kW. The scaling is very strong and the designs more powerful. I did an analysis for a 10% power uprate on a plant being designed and found it to cost only $600/kWe.
While the grid capacity factor might be 45%, wind power, based on EIA historical data, has been about 26% on average. That's significantly less than the 30 to 40% range claimed above.
Because so little wind has been built, and often in sub-optimal locations due to grid restraints. If a large buildout of wind is to happen, then grid extension costs are much lower. And historical data means small windmills, which are not built anymore for large windfarms. 30-40% is a good estimate what large-scale wind with current technology from reasonable to very good locations would get. I'm not even assuming Tubercle technology and other advances, just today's large turbines.
If one wants to look at the capacity factor issue that way, the important question is how coincident are the two? If wind is blowing when grid demand is down, it is only worth the natural gas or coal NOT consumed. If wind and peak are coincident than good.
However, here in the San Francisco Bay Area, our wind resource on the Altamont Pass is NOT coincident with load. The wind blows over the pass when it's foggy in San Francisco. That cools off the Central Valley where the air conditioning loads are. When it's hot in the Central Valley and people turn on their air conditioners and grid peaks happen, the wind does NOT blow and the windmills don't spin. Hence wind produces electricity OFF-PEAK
CAES, CAES, CAES. Didn't you read my post above? It's already competitive with systems in use today, and aquifers/salt formations are very common in the US. Adiabatic CAES or hydrogen/biofuel diabatic CAES in the future.
It still doesn't make sense that future wind investments will occur where the wind resource are better than those wind sites already exploited.
Yes it does, because of the abovementioned grid extension cost vs quality of location economics. There's a lot of work done on this issue such as Decarolis and Keith's, Arches, Socolow etc.
One would expect the converse - the best wind sites were exploited first and new sites would have lesser wind resource.
A short-term problem. With the right, strategic policy (or is that an oxymoron?) it's all very doable on the medium- to long term. Not that I have much trust in the eggheads in Washington.
BTW, new nukes should use less materials per kW. The scaling is very strong and the designs more powerful. I did an analysis for a 10% power uprate on a plant being designed and found it to cost only $600/kWe.
Good, then implement that in reality and see how much it costs and how well it works, and we'll talk some more. With nuclear power, there's often a big difference between theory and practice. Major upratings such as MIT's are promising but mostly unproven commercially. Without uprating, new plants have maybe 10-20% less material inputs, not a whole lot. Older plants were also big, like a GWe or more. Not much more economy of plant scale is achievable. Economy of plant production volume is still promising though.
So the burden of proof for minor extensions of 50 year old LWR technology rests with me while you ask us to accept a huge reliance of new wind turbine technology, site resource utilitization, and compressed air storage technology. Of course, grid reliance on wind is limited by its unreliability.
How much of the existing wind farm lack of production is due to lack of wind and how much due to equipment unavailability?
Yes, CAES sounds promising and there have been small prototypes built but I don't see a big rush to build new ones. That implies to me that business scrutiny reveals some problems that the advocates gloss-over. It does seem a clever technology though.
As I've tried to point out here and elsewhere, any electric storage technology is strongly leveraged to use the lowest cost, most reliable electric input and that ain't wind.
The basic cost equation is:
X = Y/e + Z/T
Y = input unit cost of electricity
e = efficiency of pumping and generation or kW-hr output divided by kW-hr input
Z = annual capital + operations/maintenance cost of the facility (assume non-variable)
T = annual kW-hr output
The usual run-of-thumb for pumped storage is 4 kW-hr go in to a plant and 3 kW-hr come out for e = .75. Therefore, the costs differences in inputs are magnified by the inefficiencies of the process making cheaper input power a priority - hence coal or nuclear are preferred.
The term Z/T is simple amortization of the plant costs against total output - the less output, the fewer kW-hr to amortize the costs against. If your fixed costs are $10 million and you output one billion kW-hr per year, the Z/T = one cent. Curtail operations because of limited wind resources to 500 million kW-hr a year and the Z/T term is now 2 cents per kW-hr.
BTW, new nuclear plants can push 1500 MWe (1.5 GW) although one vendor is selling lots of 1.1 GW reactors.
So the burden of proof for minor extensions of 50 year old LWR technology rests with me while you ask us to accept a huge reliance of new wind turbine technology, site resource utilitization, and compressed air storage technology. Of course, grid reliance on wind is limited by its unreliability.
What proof? All of the new turbine techs, CAES and... ?resource utilization? [come on now, are you totally unaware of the major detailed work of wind energy and power availability?] are all working today in commercial systems. Your "minor extensions" to nuclear LWR are just that, minor. 10% extra is nice, but it's hardly world-changing. And gen3+? So far all it has proven is that it is very costly, with project costings in the range of $ 5000-8000 per kWe. There are some huge gov't handouts here, as usual, nuclear power doesn't kick off without it. That implies to me that business scrutiny reveals some problems that the advocates gloss-over. There you have it, the difference between theory and practice. What unreliability? With CAES, it's as good as nukes, perhaps even better in practice.
As I've tried to point out here and elsewhere, any electric storage technology is strongly leveraged to use the lowest cost, most reliable electric input and that ain't wind
Then you have been spreading lies. Please stop doing that. Nuclear powerplants @ 5-8 bucks a Watt are not the cheapest option, and definately not the highest earning ones due to operating inflexibility.
The term Z/T is simple amortization of the plant costs against total output - the less output, the fewer kW-hr to amortize the costs against.
Are you unaware of the large differences in time of day pricing by utilities? Again, not taking the system perspective, same error as Brian. It's not that simple. Take a look at the discussion and make sure you get all the links there:
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2008/04/pickens-wind-fa.html#c...
"Then you have been spreading lies."
With that, you have degenerated into ruthless advocacy and fanaticsm.
End of discussion with you.
There you go, spreading lies again. New nuclear power projects are expensive. Thus, you are a liar. This is a fact. Let's stick to the facts. Misinterpreting my posts, omitting the second part of that sentence, and then calling it end of discussion - now that is ruthless advocacy and fanaticism.
OK, let's add something pragmatic to the debate, to stop mud-throwing and hypocrisy.
My two cents: put a price on carbon (eg through cap-and trade or taxing or a combination) and use some of this money to implement a small (say 3-5 cents), fixed feed-in tariff for nuclear, wind and solar (and other alt e techs) for at least a decade so everyone knows where it's at (intermittent policy is worse than intermittent energy). This will ensure equity between technologies and will allow markets to optimize the energy mix, while lowering FF use. Simultaneously, add to that a major aggresive campaign to advance, diffuse, and mainstream energy efficiency and conservation, as well as providing incentives to innovative smart-grids and major grid upgrades and extensions, and we have ourselves the beginnings of a sound energy plan.
It will also make silly debates, hypocrisy and mud-trowing unneeded ;)
Pretty hard to unring the bell, now that you have stepped so far over the line, is it not?
Just insisting, really really hard that nuclear is expensive, and claiming that those that do not agree with you are liars, does not make it so.
Unring what bell? I just accurately judged someone to be a liar based on facts, and then that person decided to take those few words personal and move away from the facts altogether, and blaming me for what he did himself. This is an example of hypocrisy. Don't blame me for the definition of a liar, it's nothing personal. There is a lot of propaganda on The Energy Blog so I tried my luck here. It's been somewhat disappointing so far, I was hoping for more objectivity here.
New nuclear projects are expensive - more expensive than coal, for sure. That's why we need a carbon tax plus a modest feed-in tariff for alternative energy, on top of the regular rate.
We've been over the cost issues before in a previous thread, in which you also participated. Are you being deliberately obtuse? Never mind, rhetorical question.
At least I base my argument on recent real project costings rather than wishful thinking.
Here are the figures I found for new nuclear projects in the US:
Moody's estimated $5000 - $6000 per kWe.
The FPL 2200 MWe project has been revised to $5780 - $8071 per kWe.
The FPL 3040 MWe variant has been revised to $ 6256 - $ 8005 per kWe
The NRG project, based on FPL ABWR, but for 2700 MWe is estimated at $ 5062 - $ 6488 but they include some transmission costs, so substract a couple hundred.
Progress Energy: $ 6300 per kWe. (7000 minus 10% transmission and hookup IIRC)
http://www.psc.state.fl.us/library/filings/07/09467-07/09467-07.pdf
http://www.ieer.org/reports/nuclearcosts.pdf
This all is hardly surprising; light water reactors in the US are on a historical rising cost trend, and these new costings only confirm this even more.
Again you are pushing forward the same non-overnight rates which is one all-in project cost estimate. Which is misleading because most energy price quotes between energy sources are based on levelized kwh or on overnight rates and operating costs.
Is Cyril R being deliberately obtuse? Rhetorical question.
" non-overnight rates which is one all-in project cost estimate....most energy price quotes between energy sources are based on levelized kwh or on overnight rates and operating costs"
An all-in project cost estimate would be more useful when comparing capital intensive forms of generation, like wind and nuclear, right?
What do you think of these estimates of roughly $6/watt for nuclear?
Again you are pushing forward the same non-overnight rates which is one all-in project cost estimate. Which is misleading because most energy price quotes between energy sources are based on levelized kwh or on overnight rates and operating costs.
Nick already said it. Of course comparing total project costs gives a more complete picture of cost than just overnight capital costs. With both wind and nuclear, project related costs are by far the biggest cost, and comparing project costs between these two gives a closer indicator of levelized cost than overnight capital costs alone.
Here's a bit of info on cost issues:
http://www.senate.ca.gov/ftp/SEN/COMMITTEE/STANDING/ENERGY/_home/10-23-0...
It is you who is being misleading by not incorporating all costs in your method of cost comparison. For example, cost overruns by nuclear plants are a significant cost, and so are long delays, and I can see no reason for you omitting them other than for propaganda.
I am not being deliberately obtuse. Nuclear power is great, and as many plants as possible should be constucted. It's doesn't look cheap though, but we cannot afford to build more coal plants. It's a bit of a stretch to claim that the business case for light water reactors looks better right now than modern wind turbines. I'll have both for now and let the market sort that out eventually. With a little help from a carbon price and adittional feed-in tariff for all alternative energy. This is much better and more equitable than the gov't subsidizing builds directly.
All told, it is difficult to calculate exact EROEI. Using future spent fuel or depleted uranium in fast reactors, for instance, could improve EROEI. Even for just LWRs, using centrifuges for uranium enrichment could as well, as could having a standardized 'model-T' design. I would say, personally, that there is more room to improve nuclear tech in the future than turbine tech, mostly since we haven't even built a new plant in decades.
In regards to wind, E.on Netz in Germany builds 0.8 MW of coal 'Shadow Stations' for every 1 MW of wind farm. This, I'm sure, would greatly increase materials costs. In Denmark, most wind capacity is exported to Norway or Sweden, where hydro is used as base-load generation. Should we count the cost of those dams? My point is that the more wind that comes on the grid, the less traditional power generation it replaces. If you're getting 20% from wind, providing back-up for when it isn't windy is a huge cost, and lowers efficiency if the weather forecast is wrong. If you're getting .1% from wind, you just burn a bit less coal on a windy day, so EROEI is much higher.
My main point is that exact EROEI is difficult to pinpoint, but as more nuclear comes onto the grid it should improve for nuclear due to recycling, Gen-III+ designs, etc. For wind it should greatly decrease, as more back-up plants are needed, and sudden fluctuations in wind cause more fluctuations in coal-plant capacity, which lowers coal use efficiency.
Using future spent fuel or depleted uranium in fast reactors, for instance, could improve EROEI.
So could Tubercles, superconducting tech, more advanced composites for materials etc. But let's stick to what works (reasonably) well today.
Even for just LWRs, using centrifuges for uranium enrichment could as well
That's what I meant with reasonable assumptions. Like, not 1 kW turbines and not 100% diffusion powered LWRs. Reactors with higher neutron efficiency such as CANDU's are one promising option, already available today.
In regards to wind, E.on Netz in Germany builds 0.8 MW of coal 'Shadow Stations' for every 1 MW of wind farm.
So you've decided to apply causation to wind construction with coal construction? It's difficult for me to stay polite with such grossly unscientific reasoning, but the author of this article requested no mud-throwing. So let's stick to the argument: the coal plants E On is building cannot ramp quickly and cannot cost-effectivey follow the wind's fluctuations. GT or CCGT could be built for that, and then your argument would be worth investigating further. But no, there are other reasons, such as replacing old coal fired plants, increases in European energy demand etc. Besides, nukes also require backup, if you know anything about diurnal load cycles you'll know you have to build more backup capacity than nuclear capacity just to compensate. If you want nukes to be a huge part of the gridmix, and still want run the nukes at 80-90% CF, you'll end up burning a lot of natgas.
My point is that the more wind that comes on the grid, the less traditional power generation it replaces.
Then that's another reason why your inference about shadow stations is evidently fallacious. Why are you contradicting yourself?
I was replying to a question about material usage.
I was not planning to dump the definitive updated 400 page tome on the subject.
If you have the updates that you suggest, then please calculate and present them. The assumptions are by the producer of the original work, you are free to change those assumptions. Make your wind turbines 30 year turbines. The work and the assumptions are stated so feel free to adjust and represent.
Bottom line: My fallacy was answering a question different from your questions and staying on the topic of the first question and not answering your post which was not yet posed.
I was replying to a question about material usage.
So was I, and suggested that there are several caveats.
I was not planning to dump the definitive updated 400 page tome on the subject.
That doesn't change the erroneous assumptions and non-system perspective. If it did, then that would be internally contradictory.
Bottom line: My fallacy was answering a question different from your questions and staying on the topic of the first question and not answering your post which was not yet posed.
So you consider answering a question with biased and obsolete figures to be better than using modern data based on the latest projects and disclosing the caveats and sensitivities in assumptions? I believe the correct word for that is deception, not answering questions.
My source and the values provided are better than many other anti-nuclear sources (like Leuuwin).
The source figures are still relevant since the 1970 nuclear plants are still operating and the wind turbines are not that different yet and the 1990 plants are still operating.
Plus you were able to make your points based on the information that I presented, so what was misleading. Positions were presented based on information that I added which had caveats and assumptions. Why are you not providing a balanced criticism of the lead article. It has obsolete and biased information. By not having a balanced criticism you are biased. By allowing other obsolete figures to stand you are being deceptive and not answering the questions.
My source and the values provided are better than many other anti-nuclear sources (like Leuuwin).
Better than van Leeuwen? Wow, you hold yourself to high standards don't you? One ill reference does not deserve another.
Plus you were able to make your points based on the information that I presented, so what was misleading.
There were so many ifs, buts, and caveats that the number you presented were just utterly misleading.
By not having a balanced criticism you are biased
No, I refrain from calculating a solid figure as that would require too many assumptions, especially since we have to take a system perspective. That's my point. But your 11x more steel figure is just crazy and misleading for all the reasons outlined above.
By allowing other obsolete figures to stand you are being deceptive and not answering the questions
What obsolete figures? You want an answer to a question that requires 50 different assumptions to yield a solid result? A sensitivity analysis would be nice, but EROI is enough indication for me. Both nuclear LWR and wind are good enough, which would not be possible by your numbers.
All energy construction costs are rising with the commodity price rises.
We (and when I say we, it was Cyril R and me) had this same debate back 2 weeks ago on oil drum
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3795#comment-328101
info presented again below
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3795#comment-328130
Also, you are not comparing overnight costs for each source. Every power generation has to add in other owner costs like land and site prep. Will the other power sources not need land or connection to the grid ?
The overnight costs quoted in the FPL are from $6.7 billion, or $2,444/kW, to $9.8 billion, or $3,582/kW.
In March 2008 Progress Energy published estimates for building two new Westinghouse AP1000 units on a greenfield site in Florida. If built within 18 months of each other, overnight capital cost for the first would be $5144 per kilowatt and the second $3376/kW. The costs include land, licence application, initial core load, cooling towers, owner's costs, insurance and taxes, escalation and contingencies. This would appear to be a wider scope for overnight capital cost than usual. Interest adds about one third to the combined figure - $3.2 billion, and infrastructure - notably 320 km of transmission lines - about another $3 billion. The units are expected on line in 2016 and 2017 and are expected to save customers some $930 million per year relative to natural gas-fired generation.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm
China contracted for $5.3 billion for four AP1000 in 2007. Construction started. The contract was for $1,130/kw
http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=65127
four AP1000 in the USA, contract in 2008 $13.7 billion, $2927/kw
I presented info from a Sept 2007 source.
http://www.edisonfoundation.net/Rising_Utility_Construction_Costs.pdf
From the Sept 2007 Batelle, Edison foundation report. Nuclear power costs have been staying more stable than other kinds of energy. Nuclear is the lowest line, which means prices moved the least.
Oyster Creek has been operating since 1969. 40 years of operation and it is getting extended to operate for another 20 years. Half of the plants have had license extensions for 20 more years to 60 years. To pretend that they will not keep running to the end of the 60 year extended licenses is biased and blatently misleading.
The NDA is the UK's decommissioning authority and they have had the poorest performance on decommissioning and have a reactor type that is more costly to decommission. An OECD survey published in 2003 reported US dollar (2001) costs by reactor type. For western PWRs, most were $200-500/kWe, for VVERs costs were around $330/kWe, for BWRs $300-550/kWe, for CANDU $270-430/kWe. For gas-cooled reactors the costs were much higher due to the greater amount of radioactive materials involved, reaching $2600/kWe for some UK Magnox reactors.
[If I am not building a gas UK Magnox reactor then decommissioning costs are a lot less, which they are not in Florida ]
You are cherry picking and mixing data. You have not discounted once and are mixing up reactors.
Financing methods vary from country to country. Among the most common are:
Prepayment, where money is deposited in a separate account to cover decommissioning costs even before the plant begins operation. This may be done in a number of ways but the funds cannot be withdrawn other than for decommissioning purposes.
External sinking fund (Nuclear Power Levy): This is built up over the years from a percentage of the electricity rates charged to consumers. Proceeds are placed in a trust fund outside the utility's control. This is the main US system, where sufficient funds are set aside during the reactor's operatinig lifetime to cover the cost of decommissioning.
Surety fund, letter of credit, or insurance purchased by the utility to guarantee that decommissioning costs will be covered even if the utility defaults.
In USA, utilities are collecting 0.1 to 0.2 cents/kWh to fund decommissioning. They must then report regularly to the NRC on the status of their decommissioning funds. As of 2001, $23.7 billion of the total estimated cost of decommissioning all US nuclear power plants had been collected, leaving a liability of about $11.6 billion to be covered over the operating lives of 104 reactors (on basis of average $320 million per unit).
In USA many utilities estimates now average $325 million per reactor all-up (1998 $).
http://www.uic.com.au/nip13.htm
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2003/03-125.html
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your previous responses were to claim inaccuracies in the China data but did not provide any kind of adjustment or detailed analysis or attempt to correct or to quantify errors.
Meanwhile most of the new nuclear plants in the World will be going up in China. Since they are willing to subsidize energy I see no risk of those plants not being built.
Yes, and naturally you omit my response (why doesn't this surprise me?), which was:
All energy construction costs are rising with the commodity price rises.
Already dealt with that - the argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny as the increases in cost are monstrously greater than just the rise in raw materials. Think about it. Wind uses far more material than nuclear, but hasn't risen nearly as strong, as your Edison reference shows. This undermines your argument. It has more to do with advanced reactor technology and more advanced (non-commodity) materials and expert labour being undersupplied compared to recent increases in worldwide nuclear power plant builds.
To pretend that they will not keep running to the end of the 60 year extended licenses is biased and blatently misleading.
To pretend that nuclear power plants ALL last 60 years when NONE of them have EVER ran that long ANYWHERE on earth is biased and blatently misleading. I base my analysis on empirical data. You base yours on predictions and projections. Yours is not a very objective analysis Brian.
From Wikipedia:
Consumers Energy had previously announced that Big Rock Point's operating license would not be renewed when it expired on May 31, 2000. However, economics proved in January 1997 that it was not feasible to keep Big Rock Point running to the license's expiration date.
An OECD survey published in 2003 reported US dollar (2001) costs by reactor type.
For someone who calls himself a futurologist, you are using surprisingly antiquated data. That's ironic, don't you think?
for BWRs $300-550/kWe
Big Rock Point cost an order of magnitude more than that. Decommissioning cost vary so wildly that it is difficult to state such a thing without being misleading.
The NDA is the UK's decommissioning authority and they have had the poorest performance on decommissioning and have a reactor type that is more costly to decommission.
Well there are various other costs as well, such as chemical contamination of sites etc. which are significant, and were underestimated previously. The Magnox design is more expensive to decommission, 2600 per kWe is the claim. Well it turned out to be a bit more than that, and it could be that the estimate gets raised again in the future, if history is any lesson. So why should I trust your obsolete sources?
You are cherry picking and mixing data. You have not discounted once and are mixing up reactors.
The NDA estimate is for the entire fleet. It's 12000 per kW and still more than 6000 per kW after discounting. You don't have to believe me, just check the NDA website. You show me just one nuke, Oyster Creek. It's you who is cherry picking data Brian. I've given you multiple real project costings in the US as well, and I didn't even take into account decommissioning for the US reactors, so no, I am not mixing things up.
In USA, utilities are collecting 0.1 to 0.2 cents/kWh to fund decommissioning.
Based on the average decommissioning cost so far. That may not prove to be the best assumption.
Let's see, 0.1 to 0.2 cents/kWh based on 325 per kW. For the UK, it's $ 12,000 per kW so that means 3.7 to 7.4 cents/kWh. Or 1.9 to 3.8 cents/kWh when discounting is taken into account. (give or take, depending on exchange rates etc, check the NDA website.)
Look, decommissioning cost is reasonable if done well in a fund with interest. My point here is, if you assume low costs for decommissioning you can get into trouble in the end. It's better to pay a bit more, and have a bigger financial buffer at the end. What can go wrong? If there's any money left, then that's great, it can be used for new projects and stuff.
By the way, I'm not too happy with you quoting interest (nuclear) groups.
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And you might want to check this comment out as well:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3877#comment-333931
And this presentation if you didn't get it in the other post.
your previous responses were to claim inaccuracies in the China data but did not provide any kind of adjustment or detailed analysis or attempt to correct or to quantify errors.
You try it, and see how it goes. Good luck with that. You'll need it.
Meanwhile most of the new nuclear plants in the World will be going up in China. Since they are willing to subsidize energy I see no risk of those plants not being built.
Of course Chinese nukes are heavily subsidized, in various ways. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been built at all. They cannot compete with Chinese coal plants even if those weren't still subsidized. The Chinese are building more than 1 large coal fired electricity plant every week on average. Nuclear power will grow fast in China, and coal much faster still. They need all the energy they can get, and coal is still just too cheap and too abundant, and there are not enough nuclear equipment suppliers and production capacity to meet China's growing needs for energy.
You can fiddle with the numbers in all sorts of ways, but what it comes down to is that overall wind turbines don't give you a big advantage in concrete use, compared with other forms of power generation. They're all in the same ballpark, except for hydro which uses heaps.
So what's most important is the fossil fuel use and emissions during electricity generation, and for decomissioning. And for wind turbines, solar, etc, that's plainly lower than anything requiring fuel you have to mine.
From that point of view, wind, etc become like a hybrid vehicle - it might require more fossil fuels and emissions during construction, but it requires much less in running it. Now, you have to run it a lot and for a long time to get ahead, and I would question whether it's worth the bother with a hybrid car, we have better options like trains. But there's not really a downside to running a wind turbine for longer and more often.
Big emissions in construction, much less going along. Overall, much less. Sounds good to me.
On top of that, if electricity prices triple (which I expect they will), you are investing in a long duration instrument while prices are low (and available)- which changes the fulcrum in the break even teeter-totter.
Well, that's $RO$I, which is a different thing. If you want to look at it that way, no mineral resources should ever be used for energy generation, since their price is only going to rise in future. We should only use wind, solar, geothermal and so on.
But I tend not to worry about the money issue on a global scale. There are a few reasons for that.
First is that frankly we're just pissing away not just billions but trillions of dollars utterly unproductively, on losing wars ($1-$3 trillion in Iraq so far, depending on who you believe), subsidising very profitable industries ($18 billion annually to US oil, with $123 billion profit), on speculative trading, and so on. So we've obviously got enough money for just about anything. It's just a matter of whether we choose to spend it unproductively, or productively, and what we decide to call "productive".
Second is that electricity and transport are to the modern West like water or food, we'll pay just about any price for it. Germans and Danes pay twice or thrice for electricity what Aussies and Americans do, and it only seems to drop their consumption by about a quarter relative to us. People will bitch and moan a lot but pay it anyway.
Thirdly, cost is really variable. Even a casual survey of electricity generation projects around the world shows that whatever the method, it varies by a factor of ten or more - one country might pay $1 billion for some plant, and another $10 billion for the equivalent electricity generation. It's like roads and rail in that respect.
So I don't think we can easily make general and global comments about cost of various methods. If you mention this project in this country someone else will mention that project in that country, then someone else will say that some particular cost wasn't included or was subsidised, or whatever. It's really hard to generalise about these things.
Lastly, cost is not really a hard limit. But EROEI is. I mean, between seabed stuff, Antarctica, coal to liquids and so on, if we spent enough money we could get 130 million barrels of oil a day, and get it for a century or more. But the EROEI would pretty quickly drop below 1:1, we'd get less energy from the oil than it took to get it. So EROEI represents a hard physical limit. Once you hit that, that's that.
This statement is not really correct. Yes, translating the opportunity costs of using finite production resources (e.g. labor, fresh water, land, etc) used to produce energy into monetary terms is a messy and complicated business, but these costs have a real physical basis and represent real limits on what standard of living can be supported by a given complex of energy sources.
Economic limits on the usefulness of a given energy source are reached even before the energy balance goes to zero. The purpose of extracting energy is to enable the production of goods and services. On the other hand energy producers must be compensated for their efforts. That is the energy producers receive the right to consume goods and services in return for the energy they supply. The economic break even point in the extraction of energy is reached when the consumption entitlement that the energy producers receive for producing 1 net unit of extra energy equals the excess production of goods and services enabled by that unit of energy. At this point no reason exists for non-energy producers to purchase more energy.
Note that this break even point depends on the standard of living of the society in question. If the energy producers live in 2500 square-foot air-conditioned homes filled with electrical appliances and electronic toys, and if every adult member of the family drives a 2000lb/100hp+ automobile, etc., then the compensation for energy production must pay for such a lifestyle. That is to say that as the cost of producing 1 net unit of energy goes up the standard of living that can be supported by that energy source goes down. It may well be that in the OECD countries our way of life is so ridiculously wasteful that we can afford to pay a lot more for our energy and still maintain a decent quality of life, but this truth does not change the fact the non-energy related costs are important factors which will help to determine the economic productivity that can be achieved in a post fossil fuel world.
Cyril R.
Cyril appears to believe that the letters "CAES" can replace an argument. While he is skeptical about other potential technologies, Cyril believes that CAES is going to save us from the scourge of wind unreliability.
There are a few questions that remain to be asked however.
"CAES: stands for "Compressed Air Energy Storage." Where will all that the air be stored?
The Grand Solar Scheme published in the Scientific American suggested that the wind be stored in caves located in the American Southwest. There was no indication in the Scientific American story that a survey of appropriate caves had been undertaken or that even one appropriate cave had been identified.
The last time I checked, the expansion of compressed gasses has a cooling effect. If the gasses contain humidity the cooling can produce condensation and even freezing. The Grand Solar Scheme recognized the problem and proposed to burn natural gas in the released air stream to reheat it. There are two problems with this approach. First as we all know natural gas is not a sustainable resource, so it is not a sustainable solution. Secondly, burning natural gas produces CO2, and thus a CAES solution would contribute to global warming.
Cyril would have us store compressed air in aquifers/salt formations. Aquifer storage would seemingly increase the humidity of the stored air, with the problems I have noted above. As far as I am aware no one has done a study of the potential air storage capacity in American salt formations.
As a solution to the manifest short comings of current CAES systems, Cyril would propose exotic, unproven technologies, "adiabatic CAES or hydrogen/biofuel diabatic CAES." No price tag on developing either of these technologies is provided.
Cyril would also have us believe that by repeating the letters CAES - "CAES, CAES, CAES" - he has made his argument stronger
The third problem with the Wind-CAES approach is that there is less wind energy to capture in the summer than in the winter. Furthermore on very hot summer days, winds drop all over North America. Thus a CAES system would require a large compressed air reserve to get us through heat waves, and a very large over capacity of wind generators to assure that enough energy was being put into keep the air compression going. Hence a Wind-CAES approach would require double redundancies. First redundant wind generation systems to compensate for the failure of summer winds, and secondly a redundant CAES energy storage and recovery system, for days when no wind is blowing anywhere. Cyril, the capital costs for all the redundancies of a Wind-CAES system would be enormous.
Cyril appears to believe that the letters "CAES" can replace an argument. While he is skeptical about other potential technologies, Cyril believes that CAES is going to save us from the scourge of wind unreliability.
No, I am sceptical about all new technologies, but there are degrees of scepticism. CAES facilities are operational today. Large modern wind turbines are operational today. I do not believe in putting all eggs in one or two silver bullets as much as in a broad porfolio of potentially promising technologies.
Of course, your position is much better: a design of which we have 0 Watts installed today called the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. A paper design. Interesting, and very promising, but more vaporware and higher risk than wind-CAES. The fact that only one tiny plant (which didn't even convert electricity, just generated heat) was run decades ago succesfully implies potentially high technological, business and engineering risk, certainly higher than wind-CAES.
"CAES: stands for "Compressed Air Energy Storage." Where will all that the air be stored?
The Grand Solar Scheme published in the Scientific American suggested that the wind be stored in caves located in the American Southwest. There was no indication in the Scientific American story that a survey of appropriate caves had been undertaken or that even one appropriate cave had been identified.
Of course there are some issues and caveats (no pun intended). From this study:
http://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/enepol/v35y2007i3p1474-1492.html
Low-cost geologic reservoirs for CAES may not be available in all areas. While it is estimated that some form of suitable geologic storage is present in 75–80% of the US land area (EPRI-DOE, 2003 EPRI-DOE, 2003. EPRI-DOE handbook of energy storage for transmission and distribution applications. Report Number 1001834, EPRI, Palo Alto, CA and the US Department of Energy, Washington, DC.EPRI-DOE, 2003), the type of geology varies: salt domes are prevalent in the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain and Gulf States regions; saline aquifers are ubiquitous in the Great Plains, Midwest and Appalachian regions; some regions contain only expensive hard rock; a few regions (the Southeast, much of California, and Nevada) contain no suitable geologic formations (Cohn et al., 1991). However, for the most part, the areas of potentially favorably geology overlap substantially with regions of high-quality wind resources. It remains to be determined from high-resolution geologic surveys just how prevalent this overlap is, though such surveys have not been completed for the US or any other region. Also, experience with the use of aquifers for CAES is limited.
The last time I checked, the expansion of compressed gasses has a cooling effect. If the gasses contain humidity the cooling can produce condensation and even freezing. The Grand Solar Scheme recognized the problem and proposed to burn natural gas in the released air stream to reheat it. There are two problems with this approach. First as we all know natural gas is not a sustainable resource, so it is not a sustainable solution. Secondly, burning natural gas produces CO2, and thus a CAES solution would contribute to global warming.
And the authors recognized that as well, and they had various solutions. For example, using biomass derived fuel for heating in combination with hydrogen. In this instance, the use of hydrogen would be interesting because of the higher thermodynamic efficiency. In adittion, there is the AACAES approach which is hardly rocket science. Just add thermal oil storage (proven industrial technology) to store the heat created during the compression stages and use it later to deal with the cooling effect of expansion. You actually quoted me on that part, answering your own issues! Kinda hurts your credibility.
Cyril would have us store compressed air in aquifers/salt formations. Aquifer storage would seemingly increase the humidity of the stored air, with the problems I have noted above. As far as I am aware no one has done a study of the potential air storage capacity in American salt formations.
Check out the data and maps here:
http://www.nci.org/conf/williams/williams.pdf
However, the business potential for CAES is definately there.
http://www.colorado.edu/engineering/energystorage/files/EESAT2007/EESAT_...
As a solution to the manifest short comings of current CAES systems, Cyril would propose exotic, unproven technologies, "adiabatic CAES or hydrogen/biofuel diabatic CAES." No price tag on developing either of these technologies is provided.
The same can be said for LFTR, which is far more exotic. And, to a somewhat lesser extent, several gen3+ designs as well.
The third problem with the Wind-CAES approach is that there is less wind energy to capture in the summer than in the winter. Furthermore on very hot summer days, winds drop all over North America. Thus a CAES system would require a large compressed air reserve to get us through heat waves, and a very large over capacity of wind generators to assure that enough energy was being put into keep the air compression going. Hence a Wind-CAES approach would require double redundancies. First redundant wind generation systems to compensate for the failure of summer winds, and secondly a redundant CAES energy storage and recovery system, for days when no wind is blowing anywhere. Cyril, the capital costs for all the redundancies of a Wind-CAES system would be enormous.
That is simply incorrect; read Cavallo's work and others. The costs of developing the aquifer or salt dome are so low that storing it for weeks makes sense and high turnover is no longer necessary. The biggest costs are in the turbomachinery. A nuke would also require some sort of storage plant, so would incur the same big turbomachinery component cost. The difference between 12 hours of storage and 120 hours is relatively modest. Your assertions are baseless.
Cyril R - If I understand you correctly you want to avoid the CO2 emitting/global warming consequences of CAES by burning biomass instead of natural gas. Out poor planet earth, so many claims are being made on its biomass to fight global warming by people with the best intentions. I wonder if stripping so much biomass to operate CAES facilities might be counter productive in reclaiming CO2 from the atmosphere. Shouldn't biomass be used as a CO2 sink? Doesn't burning large amounts of biomass have the same effect on atmospheric CO2 as burning fossil fuel?
While potentially all forms of nuclear power have the potential to are to lower and even eliminate CO2 production from their energy inputs, it looks like CAES is stuck, with the production of CO2. One possible exception might be the use of a CAES system in nuclear cooling. in a form of cogeneration. Hence after compressed air is super cooled by release, it passes over reactor cooling exchanges, extracting reactor heat into the cooled air. The heated air can then pass through turbines producing electrical energy. This would then be a interesting form of wind-CAES-nuclear cogeneration that would solve multiple problems holistically, and would incidentally eliminate CAES CO2 emissions.
As for the LFTR, if you read the all my comments on this post, you will find discussion of relative efficiencies of a variety of nuclear fuel cycle/reactor systems. I have largely avoided discussion of the LFTR, even though it potentially could produce an EROEI of well over two hundred times the EROEI of Light Water reactors. Rather I have focused on the superior EROEI of the CANDU reactor and of the Indian Fuel cycle, both of which can operate with greatly reduced CO2 emissions compared to either LWRs, and the Wind- CAES system.
Cyril R - If I understand you correctly you want to avoid the CO2 emitting/global warming consequences of CAES by burning biomass instead of natural gas. Out poor planet earth, so many claims are being made on its biomass to fight global warming by people with the best intentions. I wonder if stripping so much biomass to operate CAES facilities might be counter productive in reclaiming CO2 from the atmosphere. Shouldn't biomass be used as a CO2 sink? Doesn't burning large amounts of biomass have the same effect on atmospheric CO2 as burning fossil fuel?
What, you've never heard of a study called the Billion Ton Vision? There's plenty of biomass, and if it's a problem, then use hydrogen produced by excess wind and other sources. Or better yet, thermal storage. Of course, you might just to claim that such technologies are very complicated, and advanced nuclear power is not. I'll leave it up to the readers to decide how delusional that is.
While potentially all forms of nuclear power have the potential to are to lower and even eliminate CO2 production from their energy inputs, it looks like CAES is stuck, with the production of CO2.
No, AACEAS and hydrogen diabatic are carbon-free cycles. I've mentioned this multiple times, indeed you've even quoted me on that. AACAES is not even that difficult, large tanks of mineral oil and heat exchangers basically. The reason there's been little interest in CAES is simple: natural gas has been too cheap for too long a time. Now that's different, so we're seeing a lot more interest now.
One possible exception might be the use of a CAES system in nuclear cooling. in a form of cogeneration. Hence after compressed air is super cooled by release, it passes over reactor cooling exchanges, extracting reactor heat into the cooled air. The heated air can then pass through turbines producing electrical energy. This would then be a interesting form of wind-CAES-nuclear cogeneration that would solve multiple problems holistically, and would incidentally eliminate CAES CO2 emissions.
Now we're talking! This sounds like a very promising concept, if it can be made to work.
Rather I have focused on the superior EROEI of the CANDU reactor and of the Indian Fuel cycle, both of which can operate with greatly reduced CO2 emissions compared to either LWRs, and the Wind- CAES system.
Agreed, except for those last couple of words. Wind is a very promising technology. The CANDU is indeed an excellent design, I wonder why the US isn't importing it, or at least develop their own heavy water reactor design. Politics most likely.
But, from your short response time, did you read all of the links I've provided? It's good substance.
Cyril R. Most advocates of renewable energy have not thought the the problems. I will pay you the compliment of saying that I have learned something from you. I compliment you on looking for holistic solutions. Now having said that I still object to biomass, on the grounds that harvesting conventional biomass mines the soil. It might be possible to produce biomass in ponds fertilized by nutrient from animal and human waste, but there would be many other demands on that source.
However as far as I am concerned the the case for CAES is open, and with it the possibility of putting renewables to useful work. That does not mean that I regard it as proven, but that I will consider it in the future. The issues I raised previously still are matters for consideration. Resources need to be inventoried, and their potential use appraised. Saying CAES might work in some instance doesn't prove that it will play a big role in energy solutions. Sometimes the cost of resource development gets wildly underestimated. There is a lot to chew. I am looking at two of your links. The third cost $31 to read, and I will pass on that,
As you are aware I am looking for solu
The last time I felt this way was when I was at my 8 year old nephews birthday party and they were playing musical chairs.
I agree that there is much more work to be done on detailed CAES project potentials, especially in the US. Preliminary geological surveys show great potential though, with perhaps half of the US geology suitable for inexpensive storage volume development (Aquifer and/or salt formation).
However, the engineering itself is proven. The Huntorf CAES plant in Germany has operated succesfully for more than two decades:
http://www.uni-saarland.de/fak7/fze/AKE_Archiv/AKE2003H/AKE2003H_Vortrae...
And I'm glad that you acknowledge the system perspective analysis. It's very important.
You seem to be throwing in the kitchen sink here with respect to the non-wind energy sources needed to make CAES work. My understanding is that natural gas supplies 40% of the energy to a CAES powered turbine, so there is a significant amount of energy needed in addition to energy in the compressed air. I am personally skeptical about getting this energy from biomass, particularly if you are envisioning per capita energy use levels similar to that enjoyed today in the OECD counties. We have not yet addressed the problem of sustainable biomass production in terms of nutrient recycling and soil preservation in our current system of production, not to mention the fact that we are causing mass extinctions of non human species due to increasing exploitation of the biosphere for human economic production. I think that counting on large increases in our dependence on biomass is not a good idea.
As for converting wind to hydrogen, the only mature technology for making this conversion is alkaline electrolysis whose capital costs/kw are probably four times that of wind (plus the efficiency is only 70%).
AACAES involves more than heat exchangers and a thermal storage medium. It also requires a compressor capable of operating efficiently high temperature. From what I have read, I understand that the engineering problems of designing and building such compressors are non-trivial. This is definitely not a demonstrated technology.
Thermal storage would certainly work. Wind generated electricity can be converted to heat with 100% efficiency using electrical resistors, and as you point out heat exchangers and thermal storage media are existing technologies. I believe that converting part of the electric current to heat will lower the overall efficiency of storage. I read somewhere that the efficiency of current CAES schemes is about 70%. I also used data about the operation of the Huntorf CAES facility to do my own estimation of efficiency (assuming that 60% of the energy output came from the compressed air) and came up with a number of 72%. The efficiency for energy stored as heat is likely to be only half of this number.
To get a feel for the overall system efficiency I make the following (somewhat arbitrary) assumptions:
The percentages of direct wind, compressed air storage and thermal storage were chosen so that 50% of the delivered electrical energy comes directly from the wind turbines and 50% comes from stored energy. The overall system efficiency in this case is 72% which is not great but not horrendous either.
One problem with thermal storage is that very long storage times are probably not possible. For example I have seen claims that thermal storage at 550C in nitrate salts would have loss rates of 1%/day.
As for converting wind to hydrogen, the only mature technology for making this conversion is alkaline electrolysis whose capital costs/kw are probably four times that of wind (plus the efficiency is only 70%).
It's not my favorite either, but the projected costs for alkaline electrolysis are very impressive, in the order of hundreds $ per kW. Of course, that is unproven.
AACAES involves more than heat exchangers and a thermal storage medium. It also requires a compressor capable of operating efficiently high temperature. From what I have read, I understand that the engineering problems of designing and building such compressors are non-trivial. This is definitely not a demonstrated technology.
Well, another heat exchanger between the first (low pressure) compressor and the second (high pressure) compressor mostly solves the entry temperature issue, and intercoolers or multiple stages can lower the compressor operating temps. Water could be used then, which could be very cheap. Still the temperature levels would logically be higher than traditional CAES with intercoolers - otherwise there wouldn't be much use for the thermal storage. And there would be higher demands on the air turbine, such as higher entry temperatures.
Natural gas diabatic CAES is proven, and uses less gas than CCGT as backup for wind, so will be more interesting commercially, for now. Remember, we'll need cheap good storage for nuclear as well, unless true load following nuclear plants become available. It is an open question whether the technical risk of true load following nuclear plants is lower than AACAES. And I think the problems of AACAES appear quite surmountable both technically and economically when compared to advanced breeder reactors.
I read somewhere that the efficiency of current CAES schemes is about 70%. I also used data about the operation of the Huntorf CAES facility to do my own estimation of efficiency (assuming that 60% of the energy output came from the compressed air) and came up with a number of 72%. The efficiency for energy stored as heat is likely to be only half of this number.
Unless some kind of breakthrough highly efficient thermo-electric or infrared nano-antenna comes along. I'm not counting on it, but it's possible.
ESPC states their proposed AACAES as 74.9% efficient so your estimate looks valid.
One problem with thermal storage is that very long storage times are probably not possible. For example I have seen claims that thermal storage at 550C in nitrate salts would have loss rates of 1%/day.
I was talking about that on TEB as well. Space age insulation could help, but may be too expensive. One option that may be more practical is to use the thermal store for short to medium timeframes heating (diurnal to weekly), and use some biogas for heating the compressed air during the occasional emergency (such as longer lasting heat wave). In such an application, there would be little total need for biogas, just a strategic reserve, so it might solve the issues with biomass you mentioned. Of course, it depends on how much electricity we want to use. Nothing is sustainable with infinite growth. Which brings us back to the affluence and population question. With contemporary electric use, I think it would work well. At 10x that, not so well.
Do you have a reference for this statement? Such cost represent and order of magnitude improvment over current technology.
There is some discussion of it here in this document:
www.h2fc.com/Newsletter/PDF/ElectrolyserTechnologyReportFINAL.doc
(The 90% electrolyser efficiency seems incorrect as it exceeds entropy limits)
However, that's a 2004 reference, and the 2010 target isn't likely to be met, considering recent developments. A more recent PDF reference seems to indicate that as well:
http://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/progress07/ii_c_4_bourgeois.pdf
Perhaps these targets won't be met either. The DOE does feel that there's a lot of room for improvements and benefits from scale-up, considering the huge differences between actual completed projects cost and near term cost targets.
Another option for long term heat managment could be ammonia thermochemical storage as described in Big Gav's recent thread on TOD. In this application, heat loss is not an issue as the heat storage is not sensible but chemical.
Also, if low-cost water storage could be used, perhaps using a geologic storage technology such as those being developed for hot dry rock geothermal, then high temperatures may not be required at all. The heat is needed to deal with freezing, so high grade heat isn't strictly necessary from a thermodynamic perspective. Lower temperatures could be a solution to the engineering problems of high temperature compressors. There may be excellent synergy between hot dry rock geothermal and AACAES.
When about 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to deforestation, I don't think it's really true to say, "there's plenty of biomass."
You're confusing countries here. The Billion Ton Vision is US based; most deforestation is in 'developing' countries. The US is actually increasing it's forest area, overall.
But it's just an example. No more biomass than is rational should be used; hydrogen seems like an option for much of the rest, but I think the overall system efficiency of thermal storage would be better.
"Modern wind energy systems, with good wind conditions, take
460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt. "
Well, at costs of about $750/mton for steel, and $350/m3 for concrete, this is only about 11% of the project cost for a windfarm (assuming about $6/watt).
It doesn't look to me like this is the way to compare wind and nuclear. I think it's fairly clear that both wind and nuclear have acceptably high E-ROI, and acceptably low CO2 emissions. Wouldn't cost/KWH be a better comparison??
hmmm. I guess George.Mobus was asking about CO2 emissions. I suspect that steel CO2 emissions aren't enormous, but concrete is certainly significant. All of the published calculations I've seen for CO2 have indicated that both wind and nuclear have very low CO2 emissions. I've seen some controversy over that for nuclear, but none for wind.
Where does the $6/watt number for wind turbines come from? That seems quite high compared to numbers I have come across in the past. I have frequently seen $1/watt quoted although I know prices have risen recently. This report from the EIA claims that an assumption of $1.70/watt is probably reasonable for current wind turbine installation costs.
"Where does the $6/watt number for wind turbines come from? "
Ah, I wasn't clear. I meant $/watt after adjusting for capacity factor of about 30%.
So, $1.70 divided by .3 gives 5.67, or as close to $6 as we can reasonably get with the limits to precision of our knowledge.
Thanks for the the clarification, but the question remains whether Advancednano's steel and concrete numbers were capacity factor adjusted. If they were not then your quoted costs work out to over 30% of the total cost rather than to 11%.
" the question remains whether Advancednano's steel and concrete numbers were capacity factor adjusted. "
They were. If you look at the original post, you'll see "for each megawatt of average capacity. "
These numbers may be high - they appear to be for smaller, older wind turbines than those now being planned (plans are what's important, because, after all, TOD is all about planning).
Actually, those numbers are biased:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3877#comment-333985
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3877#comment-333496
Not taking a system perspective is biased and misleading. The consumer pays for the system, not the individual powerplant.
Those numbers are misleading, for several reasons. EROI is indeed a strong indication that what Brian's numbers imply is just not true. Costs also seem similar, another strong indicator.
Since the British SDC sought peer-reviewed assessments, you should certainly follow the links from section 7.2. Anonymous reviewers typically would ask why they didn't see concrete being mentioned and accounted for, if they didn't, and absent a satisfactory answer, the paper will not be in in Section 7.2.
Can you do a BOTE? If so, please do one and show it. I'm told concrete represents a 1.4-GJ/tonne energy investment. I think the cement in it is basically pulverized clinker. This, said this a few years ago -- it's not answering right now -- takes 4.69 GJ/tonne. So that makes sense if concrete is 30 percent clinker by mass.
The NEI's Skip Bowman says,
300,000 m^3 concrete times 0.3 clinker mass fraction times concrete's density, I guess 2.5 tonne/m^3, makes 225,000 tonnes clinker. I'm not sure how much CO2 comes off per tonne clinker. I do know that if the clinker kiln were electrically heated, a 1-GW reactor could pay back that electricity in a few days.
Let the baby light matches in the fuel storage room!
Thank you, Dr. Hall, for starting to address this subject, which undoubtedly could take several reams of documentation to sufficiently cover. I'm curious to see more on the restoration of open pit mines to 'greenfields', as most attempts in the coal industry in the Eastern US are utterly dismal to say the least.
Active open pit uranium mine
Water-filled depleted open pit uranium mine
From the conclusion of this article: "Previous “new technologies” such as Breeders (Clinch River, Super Phoenix) have been abandoned as too expensive" ... is anyone able to expand on this?
BTW Nate, since we are doing homilies today, how about adding this one ... I find it a large step up from things like 'silence is golden'. It goes ... The only really stupid question is the one not asked
In general I like that idea, but the topic of nuclear brings out emotions on both sides, and the last few nuclear posts we had here devolved into unhelpful mudslinging. I just added that so we keep discussion informative and above the belt.
How unhelpful? I am a fan of Nuclear (for what ever good more energy in our hands will do for this planet) but I welcome anyone who has emotion filled opinions against my view to throw all the mud they wish, if I can't defend a position against mere mud it either can't be much of a position, or else I need to do more work in order to justify holding that opinion. (I will look back to a previous nuclear article to see if I am missing something in taking this view, if you have a favorite mudslinging issue let me know, okay?:)
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3795#comments
Nate, above is the link to Continuing the Nuclear Debate.
I scrolled through a bit of mudslinging, at the beginning of that article, to find in main good commentary. There were 534 comments and if you could get that much traffic for every article a bit of 'mudslinging' should be happily overlooked if not positively greeted as an exciting aperitif to so meaty a meal. Remember now, doilies and white gloves are really so 50's.
Russia has an operating Breeder reactor. BN600 since the 1980s and still operating.
Russia is completing the BN800 which they may sell to Japan, S Korea and others
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
This article will be pointed out as being biased. Particularly since it is using the Storm van Leeuwen studies
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/03/nuclear-illiteracy-and-nuclear....
The posting says that there is only the Storm Van Leeuwen analysis of the energy used in the fuel cycle. This is wrong.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf11.html
Ah, I see you found the NEI analysis, which is much more informative. Uranium has 2 million times the energy density of oil, pound for pound, so anyone who gives it a low EROEI should be scrutinized carefully.
Also, I'd like to add, Van Leeuwen (which the oil drum frequently seems to cite in its analysis of nuclear energy) is NOT a credible source. He is the secretary of the Dutch club of Rome, and has published non-technical non-peer reviewed lies about nuclear power numerous times.
http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf11.html
The NEI analysis debunks his studies at the end of this webpage.
Van Leeuwen is not a credible reference, but neither is the NEI as it makes several omissions and errors in data and information. True for much of the nuclear interest groups' websites, and I am not happy that Brian keeps linking to them. Not to mention why he brings up Russia as the shining example of nuclear power. It is almost as if he is being deliberately uptuse, which seems to happen a lot to TOD commenters.
Here again we have the EROEI problem -- a wide range of numbers defined by special interests attempting to promote or undermine the viability of various energy sources.
For my part, I think that the high energy density of nuclear energy plus its near renewability given certain technologies makes it part of the solution to the peak oil/peak fossil fuels problem.
In the end, we can produce nuclear energy economically and, since dollars/currency represent energy trading units, that alone should say something about its energy viability vis a vis fossil fuels. Currently, the cost of uranium goes down as the cost of coal and other FF surges. Plus the potential for other elements to be used in the nuclear fuel chain further diversifies the power source.
One other point -- there is certainly a fossil fuel input into nuclear construction. But there is also an electricity input. So to claim that all construction energy comes from FF is a bit of an overstatement. As more of our energy balance becomes electric/renewable, the construction energy from these sources will increase as well.
What, exactly, is inaccurate about the NEI numbers? At least they list a lot of sources, since EROEI calculations can be difficult to determine, for instance diffusion vs. centrifuge enrichment, etc.
For example, cost projections that don't match with real project costings seen recently. It's so obsolete, it's almost ludicrous. The NEI is in dire need of an update.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html
Fine and well for economics but doesnt have much to do with energy return.
True, but there's errors there as well. For example, they're not homogeneously comparing thermal and electrical output figures. They're also, again, not using the latest data, most of it is pre-2000, I'd like to see some new studies there, maybe the EROI of LWRs as well as other sources will be better. Still, the EROI of most LWRs is pretty good even using older tech. This is hardly a surprise; if it was close to 1 they wouldn't have been built in the first place.
You ask for more up to date numbers and studies and complain about their not being presented. But you do not produce the numbers.
You complain about lack of sensitivity analysis but do not perform them.
Do your own work. Produce the up to date numbers that you claim have not been presented.
Meanwhile I will use the best and most up to date numbers that I can find. Which I believe are in line in terms of relative ranking.
Wind power, solar power,coal power, natural gas and oil have all been experiencing price inflation.
You complain about lack of sensitivity analysis but do not perform them.
It's a lot of work, requires long and detailed discussions with suppliers, manufacturers, detailed equipment and materials breakdown etc. and I don't have the time for that. Not to mention the expertise, which you don't have either, Sir.
If I want a new railroad, do I have to build hundreds of miles of track myself? If I want to build a sky scraper, do I have to place every stone? If I want to solve global famine, do I have to grow all the food for billions of people worldwide?
What kind of logic is this? I am not a construction worker, nor a farmer.
Wind power, solar power,coal power, natural gas and oil have all been experiencing price inflation.
Yet nuclear appears to suffer more than wind and solar which is strange considering the lower material use.
Right now, I don't think wind vs nuclear has a very clear winner in terms of EROI and overall economics.
I don't have a lot of difficulties the work of van Leeuwen. It seem credible enough. The main areas of controversy are in energy costs of waste disposal, plant decommissioning and future mining. And, it appears to be the most careful work in these areas so far. On the other hand, the tables that Brian posted seem suspect from the beginning. Where table 2 refers to table 1, the numbers don't agree. That kind of sloppiness does not inspire confidence in any criticism offered.
Chris
One of the tables is a compilation of multiple studies. A meta-analysis.
So there would be differences because the data is from multiple sources.
If you think certain data is wrong. Then prove it is wrong and produce a better reference with what you are proposing are correct values.
Just a thumbs up/thumbs down review of your "gut feel" reaction to numbers is meaningless.
Nuclear Waste does not have to disposed. It can be stored cheaply onsite for decades and then used as fuel.
Plant decommissioning. I have presented information and data above on why using the UK decommissioning costs are not representative (The UK reactors are the worst for decommissioning by orders of magnitude. Actual US reactor decommissionings were far less costly).
I would criticise your detailed analysis of any of the numbers that I presented ... if you put forward a point by point fact based presentation...Oh thats right you have not put forward any referenced facts or point by point comparisons of numbers and methodology.
What an odd thing to say.... I point out that the tables you posted are not internally consistent and you say I should post a link that says so. Very well.... http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3877#comment-333761
Chris
I said present detailed analysis, point by point with facts and references for your position, not your meaningless and vacuous declaration that actual detailed and reference is incorrect.
Your say so is meaningless.
You have no proof or substance.
Present substance.
I explained what you are calling inconsistency is not inconsistent because it is from multiple sources and the multiple sources are referenced.
I have also provided the link to 50 some pages of detailed critique of storm and smith by the University of Syndey and with actual measured data.
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/66043/20061201-0000/www.dpmc.gov.au/umpner...
People can judge the quality of the sources that I cite and your lack substance.
You are just embarrassed that you don't bother to read or understand all the stuff you post I think. I said specifically where there is a problem with your table. Find a corrected version or stop posting it every third day. When you are picking cherries, we'd rather not have all the ones with worms delivered to us over and over and over again.
Chris
That's true. Using the same references after having pointed out all the flaws, caveats and sensative assumptions again and again is the mark of a propagandist.
Come up with the numbers and the analysis.
I will stop putting out these numbers when better ones are produced, which they have not been. I do not agree with most of your caveats and you have not demonstrated the significance and sensitivity of the assumptions.
I have presented information on the increasing costs of wind and other power sources from Batelle from 2007.
You talk about new 5 MW turbines but the average size of turbines for projects even new ones is still 2-3 MW. The big ones are still rare. Plus they have 3-4 year waits.
If you had some other better information then you could put it out whenever I put out my information...oh thats right neither of you has any better information but Cyril Florida numbers.
Levelized costs of energy from various sources
http://www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/levelized_cost.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/06/solar-cells-with-407-efficiency-made-58...
notice the key elements/assumptions of the analysis are included. So they can be adjusted.
http://www.nirs.org/ch20/publications/nip5_thomas.pdf
http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm
I will stop putting out these numbers when better ones are produced, which they have not been.
So your numbers are evidently misleading but because you assert that there's nothing better out there you keep posting them? A rational person would stop posting misleading figures simply on the basis of them being misleading.
I do not agree with most of your caveats and you have not demonstrated the significance and sensitivity of the assumptions.
Yes, I have, repeatedly. You might disagree on the earth being roundish even after having been shown several satellite pictures of the earth. Your numbers have been busted and found irrelevant for many reasons which I will not repeat again. If your figures were a strong indicator, then the EROI and/or economics of nuclear would be vastly superiour to wind, which is just not the case.
You talk about new 5 MW turbines but the average size of turbines for projects even new ones is still 2-3 MW. The big ones are still rare.
It's an evolutionary curve. They get bigger, slowly but continuously. This will continue up to some point when it becomes unpractical/uneconomical.
Plus they have 3-4 year waits.
Oh, and what is the waiting list for a nuclear powerplant? How long do all the regulation, lawsuits, construction delays etc take?
If you had some other better information then you could put it out whenever I put out my information...oh thats right neither of you has any better information but Cyril Florida numbers.
The Florida number are based on real project costings. What more do you want, Brian?
Here's a presentation on some of the caveats of new nuclear. It puts some light on your erroneous thinking.
Here are links to a debate between pro-nuclear and Van Leeuwin
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power
Storm rebuttal
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/SSRebuttal
Response
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/SSRebuttalResp
Another storm smith rebuttal
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/SSSRebuttal
another response
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/SeviorSLSRebutall
Here is energy lifecycle analysis (comparing nuclear and other sources) from 2006 by the University of Sydney for the Australian Government.
Page 63-100 provides correction of the Storm and smith numbers and where it is wrong
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/66043/20061201-0000/www.dpmc.gov.au/umpner...
I am just going to comment on the EROI argument between Storm-Smith and Sevior (nuclearinfo.net).
Nuclear Info reports that they took a life cycle assessment by Vattenfall and using that data found nuclear power had an EROI of ~100:1.
Ok. Some common sense here. This value is far, far above anything in the literature on nuke EROI. And it would mean that nuke generated electricity would cost less per BTU than coal at the mine mouth. That is just nonsensical.
So what happened? It was the very typical issue with EROI studies: boundary conditions. The Vattenfall study was a processed based study (bottom up) and these are prone to error on the positive side because the more energy inputs you leave out (the sloppier your work), the better your answer gets. So it is not surprising that the answer errored on the high side, because processed based studies error that direction.
V. Fthenakis & H. C. Kim reviewed both Storm Smith and Vattenfall in the paper "Greenhouse gas emissions from solar electric and nuclear power: A life-cycle study", Energy Policy 35 (2007) 2549–2557.
And no surprise, they found that the processed based analysis was lower than a top down input output analysis.
Where were some of the processed based errors?
Hall did a study of a coal plant in 1979 using both top down and bottom up techniques and found they could get to within 10-15% agreement on a final value. However, he had a bill of materials for the construction of the plant from the engineering firm that built it.
Since these EROI posts are as much about how to calculate EROI as to report findings, here are the lessons learned:
1. Use multiple techniques (both bottom up & top down) to estimate the EROI. Try to get your numbers to match.
2. Review the literature. If your number is wildly different from everyone else, why?
3. If you are going to use a processed based approach, get the bill of materials and account for the embodied energy of every item. The more complete the BOM the more accurate your processed based approach will be.
In the end, nuclearinfo.net never calculates an EROEI, just a sort of bastardized energy pay back time on "non-nuclear" inputs. The value 93 that comes up on TOD so often does not include the energy needed to enrich the uranium, for example. So, trying to get anything useful out of what they've done on energy analysis is pretty much a waste of time. Since enrichment related emissions are also hidden via their "approach," getting anything useful out on emissions would also seem to be a problem in addition to the problems you've pointed to.
Chris
The Vattenfall study was noted as an outlier to the low side for emissions when multiple studies were compared. There are quite a few papers that try to calculate emissions. Nuclear in the US is badly hampered by diffusion enrichment and a coal intensive grid. Some authors have suggested that we stop all enrichment until the surplus US weapons are burned, since those emissions have already been released (as our goal is to stop growing emissions as quickly as possible).
How about we build plants that don't require (much) enrichment in the first place? The Canadians have a very decent design.
It seems to me that diluting the weapons grade uranium back down to natural uranium using the depleted uranium and then vitrifying at a concentration below granite would be best for putting the stuff beyond use. Using uranium in a reactor creates a lot of radioactive waste which we don't know how to dispose of, so it is better to leave it alone I think.
Chris.
Chris the EROEI of mining granite for thorium and uranium is quite positive. Better burn plutonium in fast reactors.
Power reactors can't be made to operate safely so it makes no sense to burn plutonium. One might use transmutation for some waste though accelerators would seem to be the best method available so far. Reactors just make more and more of a mess. The proper thing to do is to shut them all down other than the naval reactors so that we stop generating so much waste. Then, once we've brought the concentration of CO2 below 350 ppm or so, we can turn to the nuclear waste problem. Cleaning up the atmosphere may take up to about a sixth of the energy that we have derived from fossil fuels thus far depending on how it is done. Once we've completed that effort, we should have plenty of spare generation capacity to transmute nuclear waste, even if it takes all the energy we've derived from nuclear power thus far to do it. Geological storage isn't going to cut it and has been shot down by the Supreme Court so transmutation is about the only option left I think. But we don't really have time to waste on nuclear power now so this is going have to be another deferral. It is very sad to burden future generations with this task, but we really do need to concentrate on carbon just now.
Chris
So much for credibility...
Its a draft man.
Thanks for the heads up DD- I've notified the authors and changed in text
Yucca Mountain is in Nevada, just north of Jackass Flats
haha, I apologize for that - that should have popped up in my head sooner (I really do know where it is...) but I would hope you really don't disregard the rest of the paper because of it. Thanks for fixing it here Nate.
The cost chart was enlightening in both the range of costs ($1/watt to $8/watt) given that thin film PV may cost as little as $1/watt. With a mid-range estimate at $4/watt and a 30% duty cycle for PV and CSP it appears that nukes are an economic loser on a kwh basis. It also comes in behind multi-megawatt wind turbines.
What I see lacking from power plant designs is a system of energy recovery from the cooling down of nuke "waste". This heat could be run thru an organic rankine cycle to generate additional power or simply used for district heating systems. Such uses could substantially improve the net energy and economics of nuclear power.
No, not substantially. If a fission reactor produces one watt of heat and each fission fragment remains in it for 't' seconds and then is removed to a cooling pool, the thermal wattage in that pool approaches this limit:
0.1*{(t+10)^(-0.2) -0.87*(t + 20000000)^(-0.2)}
So for removal after 1 second, 1 hour, 1 day, and 1 year the asymptotes in that pool are 0.059 watts, 0.0164 watts, 0.0073 watts, and 0.000669 watts, if I didn't mispunch.
Since fuel typically stays in a real reactor for 18 months or so before moving to a cooling pool, the time-averaged thermal power in that pool is going to be nearer the 1-year value, although this average will include spikes at fuel change times because some of the fission fragments that then are moved to it are much younger than others.
Essentially, the delayed power is either very small, or delayed very little, so the valuable parts-per-thousand you are saying should be recovered are in fact already being recovered in plants' normal operation, as the fragments decay in the fuel while it still works.
Oxygen expands around B fire, car goes
Actually, in a US LWR, the fuel stays in the core for three cycles of 18 months each before discharge.
Is that 59 milliwatts the amount of energy from one milligram of waste or one megaton? Cute formula but it is very vague in real world terms. Just what is meant by cooling? Does it have any relationship to the actual temperature of the waste or is it a metaphor for some other phenomenon? Can't recall his name but a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin once claimed that vitrified rods of nuke waste was hot enough to be boiler fuel for a steam car. It is my memory of that claim and the fact that only 3% of the potential amount of nuke fuel is actually used in in a reactor.
It is not vague, but rather answers a very specific question that you're not asking. That question is, how much radioactivity builds up when 1 watt of fission is maintained until its fragments are spending themselves -- emitting rays, and becoming stable nuclei by so doing -- as fast as they are being made.
To answer that question, it is helpful to say what minimum time the fragments must wait before decaying; that's the 't' in the 0.1*{(t+10)^(-0.2) -0.87*(t + 20000000)^(-0.2)} formula. If for 't' you specify a long time, then you're asking how much long-lived radioactivity can accumulate. Or strictly speaking, long-delayed.
Since that accumulation must take several times 't', the mass of nuclear fuel would be the amount that can sustain a thermal watt for several times a long time.
It means diminution of radioactivity. As it diminishes, it will produce heat at a diminishing rate in the matter that absorbs the radiation. This can translate into a diminishing temperature if the ability of the environment to remove heat doesn't change.
Oxygen expands around B fire, car goes
"thin film PV may cost as little as $1/watt."
First Solar's PV panel manufacturing cost is $1.12/KWp, 1st quarter 08, and fell 12% from 1st qu 07, so we seem to be about a year away. Nanosolar seems to claim that they're there already, but that's unverifiable. Costs continue to fall quickly for all vendors (silicon, thin-film (CdTe, etc)).
"a mid-range estimate at $4/watt "
Pricing: PV residential, installed, seems to be about $8/W. Industrial/Commercial seems to be about $5. These include substantial "allocation of scarcity" premiums - without them pricing might be $5 and $2.50.
"and a 30% duty cycle for PV and CSP"
I would use 20% for PV.
Bottom line: I think we'll need all the sources of low-CO2 energy we can get. PV, wind, nuclear, geothermal, wave...
Those PV price quotes ar for uninstalled components.
We could have a similar price quote for just the main reactor and the generator for nuclear without the buildings and the site installation.
I think the best bet for solar is Coolearth's concentrated solar power with installation in rural areas outside of cities and towns. the target is 29 cents per watt by 2010. It looks to be inherently cheaper, safer and better than PV and uses less material.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/04/concentrated-solar-power-balloons.html
I agree that we need everything that is not coal and we will not be able to escape from coal for decades (getting rid of old plants and stop building new ones)
"Those PV price quotes ar for uninstalled components. "
The $1.12/KWp was for panels, uninstalled. The following paragraph, reproduced from the post, was for installed:
"Pricing: PV residential, installed, seems to be about $8/W. Industrial/Commercial seems to be about $5. These include substantial "allocation of scarcity" premiums - without them pricing might be $5 and $2.50.
You said: "I think the best bet for solar is Coolearth's concentrated solar power with installation in rural areas outside of cities and towns. the target is 29 cents per watt by 2010."
I'm baffled by this. Their web site seemed to say 29 cents per KWH. That's not significantly cheaper than conventional PV, and it's much more expensive than standard CSP. Perhaps they did mean 29 cents per Wp - can we tell for sure?
"It looks to be inherently cheaper, safer and better than PV and uses less material."
uhmmm...it is PV. It just uses reflecting balloons for concentration. It does look promising, especially if that cost is for peak watt. I wonder how they address dimensional stability (especially in windy conditions) and durability?
Coolearth is targeting a price 25 times less than regular Photovoltaic panels.
all the sites that I have seen is a price of 29 cents per watt INSTALLED by 2010. 50 MW production in 2009. 18 cents per watt for materials. 18 cents /Wattp
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Cool_Earth_Solar
they claim: The inflated structure is lightweight but strong enough to survive 125 mph winds.
They are using up to 500 times less solar cell material.
Their plan for installation looks simpler and cheaper as well.
http://www.coolearthsolar.com/CoolEarth_SP2006.pdf
solarbuzz.com says the Solar Module Retail Price Index is $4,81 per Watt for April and the solar module typically represents around 50% of the installed cost of a PV system.
"solarbuzz.com says the Solar Module Retail Price Index is $4,81 per Watt for April"
That seems a bit high, from what I've been hearing.
Take a look at First Solar's most recent quarterly report at http://investor.firstsolar.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=294090 . Their panels (modules) cost $1.12 to make, and they're selling them for about $2.50 (just adjust $1.12 by the difference between Net sales
and Cost of sales). Their gross margin is about 55%, which is rather higher than you'd expect for a competitive environment. Now, First Solar may be the market cost leader, but silicon is working very hard to stay close. If modules really are going for $4.81 then that's quite a markup to the end-consumer.
"the solar module typically represents around 50% of the installed cost of a PV system."
Installation cost should vary substantially between I/C and residential, and between rooftop and greenfield, and in a competitive market shouldn't depend on the cost of the modules. A 5KW system really shouldn't cost $25K to install, and a 100KW system really, really shouldn't cost $500K to install!
The lead chart at solarbuzz.com is interesting. You can see a rapid price reduction from Dec 2001 to 2004/2005, and then you can see a sharp scarcity premium reverse the price fall. The interesting thing is that production costs have continued to fall throughout the period shown in this chart (in fact, the price reduction has probably accelerated, in part due to the polysilicon shortage), so when polysilicon production catches up with demand we can expect a real price crash.
Thomas,
have a look at what xenesys propose -taking heat discharge from power stations and exploiting it. Not exactly what you meant but a lot more energy available as they are effectively extracting it from the 'waste' heat created during the fast decay period of the fuel rather than the slower cool down period you suggest...
www.xenesys.com
Regards, Nick.
I don't suppose anyone will be inclined to include the energy of the supernova explosion that forged the heavy nuclei, but what about including the risk cost inputs of potential terrorism? Suppose that on 9/11/01 instead of targeting the WTC the terrorists had chosen to hit the reactor containment vessel at Indian Point nuclear powerplant on the Hudson just north of NYC. Would the impact have ruptured the containment vessel? In the days immediately following 9/11 "officials" announced that it wouldn't have. Later they admitted that no one really knew. Even if the plane had hit the spent fuel depository instead, wouldn't this have created the "mother of all dirty bombs"? 30 million people live within the fallout radius of Indian Point. I was living on Long Island at the time myself, well within the fallout radius. How are such risks going to be valued for inclusion in any EROEI analysis?
Personally, I don't think they are. Nor are they adequately factored into economic analysis. Tyner/Costanza tried to parse externalities into energy terms which is why those studies had lower EROIs. An interesting spin to credit/energy is that if we have to scale up more nuclear, Price Anderson or its successor will undoubtedly be subsidized by govt, as taxpayers couldnt afford true cost of long term storage/safety/insurance.
EROI hits a wall with nuclear in my opinion. Society is after maximum power. We COULD conceivably increase our total power flow (rate per unit time) with combination of wind, nuclear, wave, etc. but it wouldnt be the type of power we are currently used to, and building it out would use more of our current power, and take time.
Lots of tradeoffs ahead for the ecocidal species
If we did try to include risks in the determination of EROEI for nuclear and all other sources, nuclear would benefit relative to the others because the calculations for nuclear already includes more of the externalities than the others. Imagine if we have to compute the cost of waste disposal (global warming mitigation) for coal? What if we had to compute the cost of the thousands people that die every year in coal generation from air pollution and other environmental degradation and compare that to the essentially non existent deaths from nuclear?
Nuclear would only be at a disadvantage if you include some of the absurdly hyped, extremely low probability risks that some throw out for it and do not include the reasonably expected risks, based on actual experience, of the others.
This is a valid and insightful point.
"nuclear would benefit relative to the others because the calculations for nuclear already includes more of the externalities than the others. "
That may be true for fossil fuels (although I'm doubtful - none of the studies I've seen account for the cost of Price Anderson, or for proliferation), but doesn't appear true for true renewables like wind, solar, geothermal, wave, etc.
Of course security risks cannot be objectively weighed in EROI calculations. It's an energy balance. Security is an almost completely different parameter, and should be viewed as such. We should not confuse economics with security either, even though they may be related in some ways.
We should not confuse economics with security either, even though they may be related in some ways.
*points to The Pentagon and the US budget*
http://mibi.deviantart.com/art/Death-and-Taxes-9410862
I don't like that budget at all!
Gov't spending on energy should be greater than that for the military, as energy is even more important for national security than the military. In fact, without energy, the military is quite useless.
I think it could only be done by assuming that a person killed represented some large aliquot of energy investment, and a person injured represented a smaller one. It would be stupid. The sensible way to think about such risks is in comparison to the worst imagined risks that other methods of power supply might produce; the largest possible fuel-air explosion a several-GW natural gas pipeline could produce if it leaked into the air upwind of a large city for the longest time such a leak could remain unignited, for instance, or the largest carbon monoxide poisoning a several-hundred-kilotonne coal heap could conceivably produce.
Boron: A Better Energy Carrier than Hydrogen?
A back of the envelope approach would show;
Risk Cost = Probability of Event Occuring X (Impact Costs + Mitigation Costs)
Impact costs would include;
- Loss of life (hard to quantify)
- Short, mid, and long term medical costs for those exposed
- Medical triage costs of those suspected of being exposed
- Costs to clean up/bury the plant
- Cost to build an energy plant to replace the energy generation of the damaged plant (or to restore the original plant to full working order)
Mitigation costs would include;
- Some portion of the DHS budget (and similar for other countries)
- Other GWOT costs (including some portion of war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan to keep 'them' occupied over there)
- Intelligence/surveillance resources
- Plant security
The probability would be difficult to assign and would be best approached from a sensitivity analysis, as mitigation would affect the original probability ranking. A full risk assessment for expanding a country's energy capacity with nuclear would be daunting, though has been done at least in part many times in the last 5 years for existing plants (don't expect to find any details online).
As one can see, the above costs would be (and in the case of ongoing mitigations, are) staggering. Even a 1% probability would raise the lifecycle cost of the plant to the point of being close to prohibitive, if not completely so.
in a dark, wide boundary sort of way, loss of life from nuclear accident might INCREASE its society wide EROI, as it would lower future consumption of energy...sorry I digress to the existential...
That depends on how one 'costs' the loss of life. Actually, I think Gail might be able to offer thoughts on this.
And that would fall under 'energy avoidance' rather than 'energy return', similar to the effect from Demand Side Management.
agreed.
There is something called a "value of a statistical life" that is sometimes used in analyses. According to Wikipedia, typically, the value of life has been placed at $3 million per life and $100,000 per year of life. The quote from a government publication below gives a higher value - $4.8 million in 1990 dollars.
This is a link to a government publication that talks about valuing a life. According to this publication:
Thanks Gail. This is the type of info readers like me appreciate.
Dang! Never figured I was worth so much. Not sure my ex- would agree..
She'd probably ask that you be denominated in Euros, or gold equivalents.
If you get killed and there is a deep-pocket defendant available to sue, they will probably asked for an award of this order of magnitude. Elderly people tend to get less, so have difficulty finding lawyers to pursue the claims. The death of a baby or small child gets an especially high award.
Policy awards high enough to cover these claims are available in hospital malpractice. Lower policy limits limits the awards in many other types of claims. In private passenger auto death claims, policy limits are much lower, so you generally cannot get much.
Yes, thanks Gail.
So at $4.8 million per human life, an incident that caused the death of 100 people would have a cost of $480 million. Likely 2 orders of magnitude more people would require medical treatment, and the other issues of cleanup and restoration of power would accrue very large costs.
Gail, any idea how actuaries would determine the risk of a successful (even partially so) terrorist attack on a nuclear plant? Or do they only employ historical empirical data?
I really don't know what kind of analysis has been done, or whether actuaries were involved.
Reading about the plan, it sounds as if the government never sets any funds aside to pay for claims. The first layer is financed by assessments on individual participants. The federal government's role is primarily to borrow money, which will eventually be paid back by the various utilities subscribing to the plan. Given the way it is structured, the number of attacks is not really relevant, as long as it is low. The plan is mostly a financing arrangement for the industry eventually paying its own losses. If the amount exceeds the first layer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is to submit a plan to Congress regarding how the balance will be paid. This would presumably be paid out of taxpayer supplied funds.
You're better looking at hydro for that since it actually kills people overnight. The worst nuclear accidents in history didn't do much for the bodycount compared to clearing real estate.
Personally, I don't think those risks should be included in an EROI analysis, even though they are real (I grew up 7 miles from Indian Point). There is so much variation in how you could quantify them that it could easily call into question the rest of the analysis, even if it is rock solid (which it isn't for nuclear).
More importantly, for the same reasons that GDP isn't good as the sole indicator of the well-being of a nation, EROI shouldn't be seen as the sole indicator for a good energy source. I think that is what you are getting at is there are other considerations, like risk to people and harm to the environment. For another example consider mountaintop removal. It may have a positive EROI (I haven't seen any numbers on it, but strip mining out west does okay for itself), but its a despicable practice.
EDIT: fixed my blockquotes...
It seems like as a practical matter, we will never dismantle most of the nuclear plants, if we have a decline in fossil fuel inputs. I don't think it is really legitimate to model this in EROI calculations, since it would be nice to do this, if we were capable of doing it.
I expect that nuclear will stop in a ragged fashion, as we meet Liebig's Law of the minimum. I can think of a whole host of long-run potential problems. Some of the less obvious ones might include inability to import uranium, because of financial problems; nuclear facilities that will not operate properly because they were built with substandard materials, or without adequate oversight by experienced nuclear engineers; political instability makes it impossible to properly staff and run a facility.
I expect that nuclear will stop in a ragged fashion, as we meet Liebig's Law of the minimum.
I'd expect a stop only after an attack on a fission plant results in radiation containment being breached.
In the US of A, Price-Anderson exists only because the downside risks of operation of fission are too great for insurance companies.
And elsewhere:
Society is after maximum power.
But is that what humans SHOULD be seeking?
(and a design document for waste disposal)
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Anthro/Anth101/wipp.html
I've been helping on an aircraft impact study. While the assumptions and methodology are sensitive, the early results are no problem, even with a direct impact into the spent fuel pool. Worst case is still no offsite radiation fatalities.
If you're a suicide terrorism planner, there are many, many more effective targets for your limited resources.
the early results are no problem, even with a direct impact into the spent fuel pool.
As one government report DID claim just the opposite.
http://riverkeeper.org/campaign.php/indianpoint_waste/the_facts/1259
Hrmmm, who to believe?
Worst case is still no offsite radiation fatalities.
Define the above please. What would be considered 'an offsite radiation fatality'?
The scenario is a large airplane crashes vertically into a spent fuel pool. For the reactor type I'm working on, the cooling water boundary remains intact but the spent fuel, at the bottom of 10 meters of water is all damaged but remains submersed. "Damaged" means the cladding is ruptured and the helium fill gas and other noble gases vent out into the water and bubble to the surface. With an intact pool, makeup water is pretty easy and wouldn't need to be done for maybe days. The NUREG was a scoping study - a lot of work has gone on since then, most of it security safeguarded.
Most of the fuel is well aged so that the only remaining volatile radionuclide is Krypton-85 (Kr-85) with 10 year half life and a weak beta ray of .237 MeV. All the xenons, radioiodines, and other kryptons pretty much decay away after about 60 days after reactor shutdown.
At Three Mile Island, the highest offsite dose was 100 millirem. It released 50,000 Curies of Kr-85 plus other radionuclides. If one conservatively assumes that all the dose was from Kr-85, and aged spent fuel for a regular core offload could release 135,000 Curies of Kr-85, one can scale 30 years of spent fuel release as less than a lethal dose to a member of the public leaving next door to the plant. I'm not sure when the Kr-85 inventories reach an equilibrium.
A lethal dose of prompt radiation is considered about 500 rem or 500,000 millirem.
One conservativism not estimated is the "chi over q" or atmospheric dispersion. TMI had its release on a still night so mixing and dilution of the non-energetic release was minimal. This maximizes local doses at the fence boundary. In an aircraft impact scenario, large amounts of fire from the jet fuel would be involved and rather than these krypton bubbles spreading locally, the gases would be caught in a severe and violent updraft and well mixed and dispersed over a large area, much like the releases from Chrenobyl.
Now I haven't analyzed a case where the spent fuel pool inventory is lost and maybe jet fuel burns around the assemblies. That could turn really nasty.
In either case, one should favor prompt fuel reprocessing or at least on-site dry cask storage so to minimize spent fuel pool inventory.
Again, is this preliminary, back-of-the-envelope work just for scoping but it sure doesn't look like the end of the world to me.
it sure doesn't look like the end of the world to me.
Now - who says the worry about a failed nuke plant is the end of the world?
Looks like you are changing scopes - from 'how many dead around the plant' to 'end of the world'.
Why is that? Why the concern over immediate deaths when long term things like cancer are a more immediate concern, or the 'active denial' of the land/material when certain classes of failure happen?
Again - Fission power is SO dangerous that insurance firms won't cover the risk. Not a single data point has been offered to contradict that claim. Instead, the citizens of the US of A must trust 'the government' - and one only has to ask Alan about New Orleans about how much faith one should have that there will actually BE coverage.
Sorry for using a cliche "end of the world." I didn't realize that someone would admit to being so literal minded.
It looks to me that no immediate radiation sickness death to a member of the public makes such an event very unattractive and non-competitive to the terrorism planner. There aren't even many power plant workers in the plant most of the time to kill either. I'd bet that immediate deaths is an important political goal of a terrorist but maybe you know better!
Maybe terrorists should just pass out cigarettes?
There are so many more unhardened targets where real people in large numbers would be killed, most in visually gruesome manners, that finding a suicide killer, training him to fly a plane with the skill to hit a small target like a spent fuel pool, to kill NO ONE would be a waste of resources. The World Trade Center had a much better terror payback.
Here's your data point then.
Insurance firms do cover the risk. Every reactor in the US carries $300million worth of liability insurance from - guess who - insurance firms. This layer of cover has covered everything to-date, including Three-Mile Island. Then, in principle, they have the operators cross-cover which takes them to $10 billion, but this level of pay-out has never been activated. Nor is it likely to be, with fully-contained reactor designs.
Check on Price-Anderson, which you talk about a great deal, and should be familiar with.
Check on Price-Anderson, which you talk about a great deal, and should be familiar with.
I have. And the reason the law exists is because the splitting of atoms for civilian electrical power is so dangerous that the businesses in the atom splitting business claimed they could not be insured to a proper level.
Instead of your hand-waving claim - why don't you post links showing were the firms who make/run the plants asked for Price-Anderson to not be renewed because fission plants and their operation are so safe.
I've posted links to back up my position - actual statements made in front of Congress.
Where is *YOUR* non-handwaving response?
I agree with you Gail. Often the problems we face in making a technological transition in the energy we use are classified into two broad dimensions, the strictly theoretical -- whether a technology is theoretically possible; i.e. do the numbers add up -- and the political; i.e. do we have the political/social smarts to actually do the correct things that the theoretical calculations say we should do.
To this, I would add a third dimension and call it, for lack of better term, the 'logistical' dimension, having to do with issues that tend to show up as Leibig's Law of the Minimum. Simple examples might include the inability of tar sands operators to find enough tires for their huge equipment.
If one travels down each supply line in a given energy industry, as the world gets more crowded and competition for resources grows, these logistical shortages and problems will manifest themselves more and more often, regardless of our political will to solve a given problem. Concentrating our political will on, say, solar power might likely cause shortages in some other critical area, and so on. Further, the interdependence of our industries is so complicated that it may not be realistically possible to model the potential for the theoretical success of any one industry (see Stuart Staniford's analysis of the future of farming for a good example)
I also agree with your past assertions that the financial dimension is extremely important in keeping things going on any area of development. Truly, the financial dimension also represents a logistical factor. I don't agree with those who say we can simply wave our hands and create money/credit. There are obvious practical constraints on the creation of credit, if one is to maintain some kind of financial stability.
Altogether, I believe that even if a given technology is theoretically possible, AND we have the political will to pursue it, we may likely fail simply because of these logistical problems.
Actually, Fast reactors would eliminate the need for mining, milling & enrichment of uranium:
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=340
Gail the Actuary
Gail, none of your concerns are at all realistic. We will run out of actuaries before we run out of uranium. I pointed out in a post on April 4, that there was enough thorium in the Lemhi Pass Stake o provide all of the United States' energy needs for 400 years. If anything, the nuclear Industry is shackled by over regulation that zealously demands quality, and whistle blowers are not in short supply. In addition the safety features of new reactor designs have steadily improved, and even safer reactors are possible. There are about 25 University programs training nuclear engineers, and since the pay will undoubtedly be good, qualified students will not be in short supply. May reactor staff members are Ex-navy officers and enlisted men, who got trained in the quality oriented Navy nuclear system.
I didn't say we would run out of uranium. I said there might be an inability to import uranium, because of financial problems. Counterfeit parts are apparently currently an issue. We may have a lot of nuclear engineers in college programs, but there are a lot fewer with real life experience, and a lot of nuclear reactors going up around the world.
Gail, We have a large enough Uranium in stockpiled - 700,000 metric tons - that this country now could meet national energy needs for well over 1000 years. http://pubs.acs.org/cen/government/86/8614govc.html
National stockpile also includes 740 tons of U-235 and over 100 tons of Pu-239, recovered from surplus nuclear weapons. Aside the uranium stockpiles, there is an estimated 6 million tons of recoverable uranium in Chattanooga Shale.
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/Hubbert/1956/1956.pdf
No one has looked at the uranium content of Barnett Shale of North Texas, but radiation from uranium decay products, has forced radiation clean ups at 25 Notrth Texas sites associated with Barnett Shale gas drilling. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-no...
I have noted that the 600,000 tons of assured thorium reserve at Lemhi Pass, could provide American reactors with enough Fuel to provide 100% of American power needs for 400 years. Beyond that is the 1,800,000 tons of probable thorium reserve at Lemhi Pass. In addition there is the estimated tens of millions of tons of Thorium which Rice University Geologists reported finding in the Conway Granite of Vermont.
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3795#more
There would be no problem importing uranium or thorium that are already in the country.
You wrote about one of the "low EROI" studies:
For example Tyner takes interest (with a 4-5x larger energy cost magnitude than capital energy costs) into account in EROI (Tyner 1997).
The use of interest cost completely invalidates Tyner's study as an EROI study - EROI is about the real world (energy), not about economical fiction (interest reates). Interest rates are an arbitrary number set by central banks and Wall Street. Of course you get a bad result for nuclear energy if you use an arbitrary high interest rate instead of energy calculation.
Therefore, I will believe the high EROI numbers, they seem to be about energy.
This guy really, really needs to get up to date information. He concludes by saying "previous 'new technologies' such as breeders (clinch river, super phenix) have been abandoned for being too expensive." I this guy living in the 1970s?!? The next generation of fast-neutron reactors are advanced Generation IV Fast Reactors. Their superior fuel economy allows for over 100 times the energy to be extracted from the same amount of mined uranium, and draws from fast-burner technology like the Argonne national labs Integral Fast Reactor program. They eliminate the need for handling fissile material due to a burner and breeder mode. Hence, they are not 'fast-breeders' and we have no need to use dated technology.
http://www.ans.org/pi/ps/docs/ps74.pdf
http://www.ne.doe.gov/pdfFiles/genIvFastReactorRptToCongressDec2006.pdf
Of course, if Van Leeuwen is your source, just acknowledging a positive EROEI is generous.
Point taken. Just a nit, it's impossible to get negative EROI. Even if no energy is gained (like, trying to burn water or stones) it's zero EROI. Yeah, detail.
The uranium depletion conclusion sure seems to be disconnected from what the uranium mining experts are saying here:
http://www.uic.com.au/
Plus, moving to a thorium fuel cycle is no great leap technically and we've at least four times the resource base with thorium which is so far unexploited. Fuel reprocessing would be required.
When I look at the way the real world works and then listen to academics try to describe it, too often the academics seem to be wasting my time. I've been following EROEI for thirty+ years, having learned the concept, methodologies, and limitations from Dr. Odom himself when I was an engineering student at the University of Florida in the 70's. I'm glad to see at least a mention here of energy quality, a topic too often ignored.
People who have to ACT in the real world have feedback mechanisms that academics tend to avoid - there's no tenure protection in the business world. I give much more credence to an experienced executive or engineer responsible for billions of dollars of real money over most professors. I value MBAs over PhDs. Hence, the fact that work has started on new plants in the US and elsewhere (I should get back to work on my new nuke project!) and under serious consideration in most countries that can afford them should carry much weight.
As to perception of high risk amongst the neighbors of a nuclear power plant, the companies interested in building plants are being BEGGED to locate the new plants in people's localities.
And the oil depletion conclusion sure seems to be disconnected from what the oil drilling experts are saying all over the place.
ABC Australia - Oil surges to near US$120 on supply worries
Someone who makes his living from the extraction of a mineral resource tells us that the extraction of the mineral resource can continue forever.
We believe one, but not the other. Why?
In 2005, investment in the oil industry (exploration, production) was about $300,000,000,000. See: http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/23/75825/889
Assume about 10% of that investment went towards exploration, giving $30,000,000,000.
In 2005, investment in uranium exploration was estimated as about $200,000,000. This is less than 1% of the investment in oil exploration. See: http://www.world-nuclear.com/sym/2005/macdonald.htm
Minerals exploration is hard work. You get what you pay for. Once we spend $30,000,000,000 a year on uranium exploration, without finding any major deposits, then we can suspect that worldwide uranium depletion is similar to our current oil depletion.
Nice to see you are keeping up with that pattern.
Why, seemingly most reliable? Because it fits with your preconceptions or agenda?
It is clear that one of the biggest energy costs in the entire process has been enrichment. The old estimates use gas diffusion plants first built in World War II, which require 50 times the energy of centrifuge enrichment. Clearly, any new nuclear buildup will not rely on this cold war legacy but will increasingly rely on vastly more efficient enrichment, more efficient even than the centrifuge methods. Why then are the old 1980s (diffusion based) estimates deemed to be more reliable? The whole idea that we need to look at 1980s estimates to determine the energy efficiencies of a set of technologies that has and will advance dramatically is absurd.
What we need is estimates of the energy costs of nuclear if we were to build it up significantly. This would tell us if it would be a viable investment. Looking at the energy cost of 1980s reactors does not really help much unless your agenda is to prove that nuclear cannot be viable.
Up thread advancednano has provided documentation of EROEIs for several nuclear plants in the range of 60 and this is still using some gas diffusion enrichment. I think that number should be considered the floor for what we could expect in a future buildup.
Charles Hall's latest study on Nuclear EROEI confirmed my worst fear about him.
First it contained no empirical data. Hall does not tell us how much energy is used to mine, mill, enrich and fabricate reactor fuel. He does not tell us how much energy goes into building a reactor. He does not analyze back end options for “spent fuel” and the energy input for each option. Although he acknowledges my email to him suggesting that he should review the Canadian and the Indian Fuel cycles which are significantly different from the Light Water Reactor Fuel Cycle of France and the United States, he acknowledges is inability to perform the task.
Secondly most of his bibliography did not include Internet links, even though in some cases the source is posted on the Internet.
For example Hall lists an unpublished paper by Gene Tyner, but provides no link to it. Yet that paper is posted on the Internet.
http://www.mnforsustain.org/nukpwr_tyner_g_net_energy_from_nuclear_power...
Thirdly, Hall’s bibliography referes to Anti-nuclear propagandist, such as Helen Caldicott and Jan Willem Storm Van Leeuwen.
Caldicott’s writings on nuclear energy have not been peered reviewed. Numerous critics have poked holes in Caldicott’s work. When given a chance to respond to her critics, arguments Caldicott flatly refused. Instead she simply attacked her critics because they disagreed with her.
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2007/12/helen-caldicotts-reign-of-error...
Hall relies heavily on Storm Van Leeuwen to support his case. Yet David Bradish has shown that Storm Van Leeuwen has made serious mathematical errors in his work.
http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2008/01/van-leeuwen-and-smiths-egreg...
Roberto Dones, a distinguished scientist (http://gabe.web.psi.ch/team/cv_rd.html), writing under the Letterhead of the Paul Scherrer Institute, subject the work of “Stom-Smith to withering criticism. http://gabe.web.psi.ch/pdfs/Critical%20note%20GHG%20PSI.pdf
Dones argues that "Storm-Smith" cherry pick data:
Dones points to methodological errors:
Dones also states,
Dones then points to
Dones argues,
It should be noted that like “Storm-Smith” Hall prefers old sources.
It is quite clear that Hall dismisses any study of nuclear EROEI that comes up with a figure higher than he and Storm Van Leeuwen would allow as wildly the wildly optimistic, and automatically dismissed.
Martin Sevior criticisms of “Storm-Smith” have previously been twice debated on The Oil Drum. Hall ignore Sevior, Sevior’s debate with “Storm-Smith” (http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power) and the debate of Sevior’s critique of “Storm-Smith on The Oil Drum. (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2323 and http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/8/7/195721/3132)
Fourthly, Hall dismisses peer review publishes studies of Nuclear EROEI.
Fifthly he dismisses alternitive reactor technologies.
In fact the Russian BN-600 breeder has been successful. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor) The Japanese recently paid a billion dollars for BN-600. The so called plumbing problems of the CAND reactor are technologically fixable, and at any rate, CANDU reactors have a capacity factor of 87% and an availability factor of 92.4% which is more than satisfactory. (http://www.cns-snc.ca/media/reliability/reliability.html#CF)
Sixthly, Hall sites sources that do not appear in his bibliography.
Hall also references (Leeuwen 2005) several times,
There is no mention of Leeuwen 2006 or Leeuwen 2005 in the bibliography.
Hall thus uses this seemingly non-existent source from a discredited authority to prove that extraction of uranium from sea water is not an economic possibility, and to argue that uranium is a non-sustainable resource.
Seventhly, Hall confesses his lack of a technical capacity to assess the EROEI of reactor/fuel systems in India and Canada:
Yet it is this very lack of technical capacity that is at the center of Charles Hall’s failure to assess the EROEI of nuclear power. Far from producing a rigorously reasoned, well documented argument, factually based argument, Hall has given us an argument without data through the use of what Bruno Latour called black boxes, that is by reference to sources whose data are neither assessed nor reported. Hall tells us, I did that else where. a long time ago., and newer information is
In other word it does not support Hall’s conclusions.
Instead Hall relies on one schematic to set out his argument.
The diagram is found here:
(http://www.theoildrum.com/files/EROI_Nuclear_schematic.png)
On that schematic in the mid right there appears the word “Time” and an arrow that points to the word “Storm”. The word “Storm” of course represents the dubious conclusions of one “Storm Van Leeuwen.”
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/03/nuclear-illiteracy-and-nuclear....
As we use to say when I was younger, “garbage in, garbage out”.
Mr Barton,
I am not a nuclear expert, nor do I think EROI is a panacea that will solve our energy problems, but I must come to Charlies defense against that schoolyard bully attack:
Firstly, Professor Hall didn't write this paper, one of his students did. However, Charlie certainly read it and approved it I am sure.
Secondly, if you recall back to the first post of this series, there has been next to zero academic (or industry) funding for an umbrella type of energy analysis like his group is attempting. It was made clear that these are drafts posted on theoildrum for feedback and for help with links and papers that they may have missed.
As such, the hyperlinks to the references fall on me, the editor of this site, to dig up and find, which I did not have time to do - but thanks for linking to the one Tyner paper.
Fourthly, you wrote:
That is the definition of cherrypicking. You left out the second half of his sentence. "Newer information tends to fall into the wildly optimistic camp (high EROI, e.g. 10:1 or more, sometimes wildly more) or the extremely pessimistic (low or even negative EROI) camp
Professor Hall has no agenda here other than to raise awareness of biophysical analysis and get other people working and thinking in this area. I'm sure most readers will read from this piece that he is a nuclear agnostic, neither for or against, but recognizes the potential and pitfalls. I am sure he would accept that some of the sources listed may be 'garbage', but those are the sources his students had access to.
He also closed the paper with this comment:
Which seems to be born out in the small sample size of comments in this thread
As to when you were younger, perhaps you were less dogmatic then.
Nate Hagens, as the sponsor of this post, you should have exercised some editorial control over it. You state,
I would assume that both Professor Hall and you have some responsibility for its content and for correction of errors such as failure to include cited works in the bibliography.
What we seem to be discussing here is an undergraduate paper - I would hope that Professor Hall's graduate student can do better - filled with the sort of errors which a professor should mark and hand back for correction.
Nate, I can't see the 'schoolyard bullying' in Charles's post that you feel that you detect.
He has itemised inaccuracies and misconceptions in the article, and surely if there is a response to his critique, it needs to be on the level of a point for point rebuttal.
In my opinion too it needs a deeper level of analysis than just characterising much of the work that has previously been done as wildly optimistic, and attempting to equate those with the low estimates of EROI from the likes of Leeuwin who plainly has ignored much data is entirely unrealistic.
The EROI figure that has winded up being plumped for seems entirely meaningless, and unsubstantiated by the body of the article.
This confirms most of my doubts about the actual utility of such calculations, as they seem to lend themselves to flimsy glosses on prior assumptions.
I appreciate the limitations Professor Hall is working under, but have to admit that I have not found the conclusions useful, and they are unsupported by the data advanced.
Nate, I can't see the 'schoolyard bullying' in Charles's post that you feel that you detect.
Go back at look at the last go-round with Mr. Barton. His ego is on show with his 'I'm the last one posting therefore I've won the argument'.
The guy's lists of counterpoints have a history of cherry-picking and when confronted with direct questions, he's not confidant enough to actually respond.
But I've seen the pro-nukers make up claims about how safe fission is with made-up stats and how not a one of 'em have produced proof that Price-Anderson is not needed.
We are talking about a specific post, and that is usually more productive than a generalised discussion about supposed 'attitudes'.
As for Price-Anderson and so on, it always seems weird to me that the people who are anti-nuclear power give the theoretical risks from nuclear power so much weight, when opposition to it has already contributed heavily to GW, the coal industry regularly kills thousands and destroys the landscape, and countless people would die from any power-down of society, pastoral fantasies aside.
As for 'but I support solar or whatever, not coal', in practise at the moment if you don't use nuclear you use coal:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/22/business/22coal.php
This may change, and I strongly support renewables, but at the moment opposition to utilising all our energy resources to counter GW and produce enough power to live on appears to me to be an entirely counter-productive prejudice.
To date Price-Anderson has not cost a cent.
As for Price-Anderson and so on, it always seems weird to me that the people who are anti-nuclear power give the theoretical risks from nuclear power so much weight,
What 'theoretical' risks? The Department of energy considers the technology dangerous enough that special protection is needed (as pointed out by the contractors)
http://www.gc.energy.gov/documents/COMMENTS_PAGroup.pdf
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1228037
http://www.nei.org/newsandevents/speechesandtestimony/2001/ferteltestimo...
Now here is Marvin S. Fertel Senior Vice President, Business Operations Nuclear Energy Institute saying
If fission is THAT safe why is Price-Anderson needed? Because Mr. Fertel claims the law is needed.
And via:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa036.html
One of the reactor builders:
To date Price-Anderson has not cost a cent.
From the same Cato report:
I could spend days digging in the record - but that is not going to convince the pro-nuke crowd that they are wrong. "It's impossible to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair My purpose is to show how the statements of safety do not match the actions of the people making the statements. But hey, who knows, perhaps the next time Price-Anderson comes up I'll find one of the pro-nukers here testify in Congress how Price-Anderson is no longer needed because fission is so safe.
The Congressional Record on Price-Anderson shows that as a whole, the fission power industry still calls for the insurance cap because fission power is too dangerous.
But feel free to show in the Congressional Record where members of the fission power industry support the ending of Price-Anderson because of the safety of Fission Power.
Eric, you seem to feel that other industries are fully covered for all events.
This is simply not the case.
DaveMart,
You seem to feel that my argument is about 'coverage' - it is not.
I am pointing out that claims of saftey is wishful thinking. Price-Anderson's existence and renewal backs my position.
I've asked for rebuttal to show how the industry that claims safety ALSO asks for the cancellation of Price-Anderson.
The claims of safety are not backed with the proof of action in the form of asking of the end of Price-Anderson's umbrella of protection is it?
Eric, we are talking about the legal situation there in one particular country, a large and important one, but one amongst many.
I certainly do not know the peculiarities of the American legal system, and from the bits I do know would suspect that any immunity needed would be as much to safeguard against frivolous claims as to counter real and actual damage - mental distress claims and so on.
However, it is certainly true that industries in most countries do not fully cover their risks, particularly for large but rare events.
Since it appears to be the case that Price Anderson is not particularly exceptional, I don't see why you place such a great emphasis on it, except of course for your dislike of nuclear power.
As you say, in the States at any rate they might not build nuclear plants save for Price Anderson, but they certainly would not build any coal plants if they had to pay the costs of all the damage they do, and possibly not gas if they had to pay for CO2 emissions.
The playing field in energy is so distorted that a clear picture of full relative costs is difficult to obtain, but since we are about to loose oil and gas as a major contributor it hardly seems wise to try to cut out any more energy resources.
Since I believe you would not think the designation of doomer inaccurate, I don't really see why you are so concerned Eric, as surely umpteen millions will die if we don't have adequate power, so any risks from nuclear must be trivial in comparison - apologies if that misrepresents your position.
legal situation there in one particular country,
And in many nations fission exists because they are a direct arm of the State, thus there is no chance for a 'accepted skilled 3rd party' to weigh in on the risks.
To date, I've yet to see the pro-nukers try and claim that Insurance companies are bunk and do not understand risk.
I do know would suspect that any immunity needed would be as much to safeguard against frivolous claims as to counter real and actual damage - mental distress claims and so on.
And the potentional for future damages. A big one for the asset holding class is access/use of the assets.
except of course for your dislike of nuclear power.
I have no problem with the THEORY of Nuclear Power. Fine IDEA. The implementation has shown that humans can not be trusted with its implementation. The fission industry has had the opportunity to demonstrate a spotless record - yet they have not. If the claims of the part were true, I'd be happy to support the fission implementation idea.
Now, if one wants to argue that the implementation has been done well, then PLEASE argue how the sets of rules that exist for safety which get violated is some form of protest to rules that are "wrong."
The Fission Industry talks out of both sides of its mouth. It claims "we are safe" and yet rules for safety get violated. It claims "we are safe", yet begs the Lawmakers to keep a set of laws created because another professional set of risk analyzers feel that the risks will require great reward up front.
Since I believe you would not think the designation of doomer inaccurate,
Nope. Realist.
I don't really see why you are so concerned Eric,
I only bother to post on this so that others who aren't immune to rational discussions (aka the make up stuff on how safe fission power is crowd) ponder questions like:
1) If fission is so safe - why the begging for laws by the fission power industry so they can build/operate plants outside of the normal framework of risk analysis done by the professional risk analyzers (insurance industry) framework?
2) If rules for safety are set up - rules that the industry agree to FOR safety - why do these rules get violated?
3) What's the game-plan for fission plants in war? (Should that not be part of the plan - what happens when a war comes?)
4) If fission is a screwed up plan, amoung other screwed up plans - why add failure on top of failures?
5) If "we" are willing to discuss past plans and implementations, why no discussion on the plan from the 1950's (the peaceful atom) and how that has been implemented?
5a) How does "the rest of the world" get to share in the (proposed) bounty of Fission power? Where's the support for, oh say Iran? Syria? Iraq? North Vietnam? Cascadia? The Columbian Jungles where the FARC hang out? The Conch Republic? Ebonia?
Again, I don't believe that I can change your mind. But I *CAN* get others to think - and note how - when I ask the pro-nukers direct questions they opt to not respond. Or how when they make bogus claims about safety with odds like '1 in 10,000' or in this topic (the layman might feel sodium is unsafe - then I follow up with the way sodium was handled in the past) - how they ARE just making this up as they go along. The readers can then decide if the lack of response is because the pro-fission crowd doesn't respond because they know they can not without confirming themselves to be wrong or some other reason.
as surely umpteen millions will die if we don't have adequate power,
1) Everyone gets to die.
2) About 1/2 the world gets to die quicker already 'due to a lack of adequate power'
3) I've already commented on how cheap human life is to other humans. From 'I shot him because he disrespected me' 'I shot a man in reno just watch him die' to US death payments to people in Iraq ($2,500? or something like that) to 'the poor in location X' to prison systems to (on and on and on of man's inhumanity to man)
A section of the pro-nukers already have shown how they don't care about that 1/2 who gets to die faster due to a lack of adequate power. (Thus an answer to 5a - Fission power is not a universal solution - ergo when one talks about human suffering its not human suffering so much as it sounds like the poster is more concerned with their "suffering" of lack of 24/7 power.)
And not a single pro-nuker is discussing the effects of an actual shoot-em-up war on fission plants. War is yet another human behavior that *I* don't see as having gone away. The closest to an answer is 'bury the plants' - which then strikes me as more expensive and therefore the argument about how cheap fission is, or only would be next time around - no longer becomes a possible debate point. Not a single pro-nuker has tried to claim that fission plants are NOT a target in a fight.
Charles,
Thanks for your very thorough critique of Hall's contribution. The fact that he relies on a populist know-nothing like Helen Caldicott as one of his sources speaks for itself. It is on much the same level as citing Nicholas Lawson as an expert on climate change.
To your criticisms I would add Hall's failure to include any reference to relative risk -- a comparison of the pros and cons of nuclear plants with those of wind farms, coal-fired plants, etc.
Without such comparison no serious debate on nuclear energy is possible.
This is part of a series looking at the energy return on investment of all current and proposed energy sources. So far in addition to an overall summary, they have posted papers on conventional oil and gas, shale oil, tar sands and nuclear. Wind energy was posted here earlier by Cutler Cleveland and Ida Kubiszewski. The pieces on PV, Wave, Geothermal and Hydro yet to be posted. But these are relative only in their attempt to formulate energy returns, not qualitative differences. Sorry for the obscurus..;-)
Nate,
If I've gone a bit off-topic, it's because the contribution itself has also strayed from the EROI issue.
And here's a proposed correction concerning the (off-topic) issue of risk perception.
Original version:
My proposed revision:
Remember, Helen Caldicott is to Nuclear Science
-- as Michael Crichton is to Global Warming
-- as Pope Benedict is to Birth Control
-- as Tim Lahaye is to the Theory of Evolution
Your proposed revision lacks the data to support it.
The fission industry has failed to show that it conducts itself in a 'safe' manner.
You seem to know more about a "Helen Caldicott" than I do - so perhaps what she says is 'scaremongering' - but the reality is the fission industry has failed to operate without violation of rules and methods set up to insure safety.
In the intrest of fairness then, analysis of wind and other alternatives should use sources that are explicitly anti wind propagandists.
This is a ignorant hit piece.
Dezakin
Dezakin, You've got it!
Huh??
The author shows very high EROIs right along side the low and explains the difference,
You gentlemen should read about the Planck Problem (#25, among others)
When you're talking to a nuclear fan, Nate, anything less than pure praise is unfair criticism.
Seriously, I am finishing out my phd, but I now realize that science is not as pure as I once thought. Certainly there are very many well intentioned folk. But the line between advocacy and science is a fine one. I am beginning to believe that ALL humans vie for social power and advocate their particular beliefs - scientists are slightly better at it because they have at certain points used discipline and rigor. But when emotions are in play, the best of scientists will be outdebated by the more articulate and persuasive non-scientist. And, as linked above, smarter people a)have easier time rationalizing their beliefs and b)have more difficult time incorporating other viewpoints.
Pro-nuke/anti-nuke, AGW/AGW is a hoax, Peak Oil is nigh/Peak Oil is a hoax - there are many strongly held barbell beliefs in our society now. Each of us belongs to a checklist of various mini-tribes based on our world outlook and personal experience. The only 'truth' is how each of us sees the world. Places like TOD (and hopefully our education system), is where real science gradually causes people to 'see' these truths for themselves. And eventually a tipping point is reached. But science is necessarily conservative and skeptical - if each new cockamamie scheme were embraced, we would lose all order. New ideas are hard won, once they are won. I suspect Peak Oil will be one that wins, (if you could call it 'winning'). But thats just how I see it.
It sounds like something you should write an article on.
I think it's human to choose a belief and then go looking for evidence to support that belief - "confirmation bias" and all that. Even in science we can think of that French guy and his "N-rays" or Pons and Fleischmann and their cold fusion. Those are just blatant examples, think where you just have to pick and choose numbers like EROEI calculations are going to be less blatant but just as affected by personal beliefs.
But as you say, having an ongoing discussion about things, and tossing all the information out there, people slowly become a bit more objective about things.
Last night I was watching a discussion show about GM food, and how the companies involved had done lots of testing which showed it was safe, "but sorry we can't show you the results because it's commercial-in-confidence. Trust us." The truth is best served by open discussion and full information. You're right that TOD is an example of trying to do this.
Again, it seems like something for an article for TOD. Or at least a personal blog.
Certainly there are very many well intentioned folk. But the line between advocacy and science is a fine one.
And that line becomes further obscured when you start having folk take action to create a 'profit'. (Or any action with some scientific outcomes it seems.)
The science of Fission looks good. But man's history of failure with the machines man builds and how man uses these machines does extend to Fission plants. 'Greed', 'war', 'incompetent people' (on and on) - in theory definable and solvable things all work against the implementation of the best science.
How to you apply a sieve to man so that only the skilled end up working with the various 'dangerous' science? How do you sift out the plans that will 'only end poorly'?
In short - how does one bypass the flaws of man?
I suspect Peak Oil will be one that wins
*snicker* Once we've defined what 'peak oil' means *snicker*
Hello, first off please direct your comments at the deficiency of the paper at me, not Charlie as it is mostly my work. I appreciate your references and will certainly be revising this study after the (great!) comments on the oil drum here. This paper was developed over a 4 week period the beginning of this past summer, before which I only had a cursory knowledge of the nuclear industry.
The biggest deficiency I see (that you pointed out) is the lack of concrete figures to back up numbers. A lot of this was because the reports cited usually didn't give separate numbers for all of the stages, but it was also due to a lack of time. After this I hope to go back to those papers and the new ones you've referenced and make this clearer.
Thanks,
Bobby
Bobby, good for you. It is important to take the criticism seriously and see it as not personal. My suggestion is that if you are interested in the EROEI of the nuclear industry, that you learn as much as you can about the industry before you even begin to construct your model. In a lot of cases you will have to dig, in order to find good data, and the more you know about the nuclear industry, the more you will know about where to dig.
Bobby, you might be interested in the late Petr Beckmann who wrote The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Beckmann
----------------------------------------------------
Should there be an accounting for the energy costs of regulatory and other delays?
http://www.fortfreedom.org/a02.htm
Bobby,
Congratulations for standing up and accepting responsibility, this is usually lacking in today's world (anecdotal no references:-) Also for your commitment to revise the study.
These studies are vital to those of us who want to lobby our "leaders" with reasoned information.
It was a very bold attempt, in that case!
To give you some insight into why many of us feel that the low estimates (even up to, say, 11 times EROI!) are unsound, they are usually based to some extent on Storm and Smith's papers, even newer reports like that from the Energy Watch group.
You will find references to the paper here, together with what to my mind is a complete rebuttal:
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power
In my view just this one instance of their miscalculations clearly shows how unrealistic and misconceived their papers are, without the bother of looking at all their other misconceptions and prejudicial statements:
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/SSRebuttalResp
I'd also like to point out that many of the 'wildly optimistic' figures for nuclear EROI are based upon the figures for Vattenfall, which are audited figures:
http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf11.html
In fact, a little consideration shows why low EROI for nuclear plants is pretty unlikely.
To extract the very dense and highly energetic uranium fuel requires shifting a fraction of the material involved in mining coal, and the actual plant is pretty comparable in energy input costs to a coal plant.
Sure you then have to refine the uranium, and allow something for waste processing and decommissioning, which tends to be a gold-plated process in the West, but if nuclear really had as high an EROEI as some say coal plants would have long ago ceased to be built as theirs is bound to be a lot worse.
Most of the EROI calculations are also based on high US costs.
Most of Asia build them a lot more cheaply.
Hi Bobby
You should certainly make sure that any iteration on this paper includes a visit to the WNA's assessment of nuclear lifecycle, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf11.html?terms=lifecycle , both for itself and the onward references, and the discussion of the problems with SvLS.
I have a copy of Hall's "Energy and Resource Quality" and so I can add more details on how the EROI of 5 was calculated.
First, it was a summery of 11 studies on Nuclear energy by other authors (Storm and Smith were NOT among them). Those studies were analyzed in detail and they were "standardized" by changing many original assumptions to be the same. Those assumptions included: Load factor (0.75), quality factors for electricity and fossil inputs, fuel types, EROI boundaries.
The original studies had values ranging from 3 to 17 and after standardizing they ranged from 2 to 7 with an average of 5 (not including a quality factor boost of 3 because of the higher value of electricity).
These studies were all done using diffusion enrichment (which is still the only technology operating in the US). From Hall, enrichment uses about 1/2 the life time energy input of the reactor. (So one could assume that EROI would double overnight to 10 if a magic wand were used to enrich the uranium).
Capacity factor for US reactors has increased over time and this will also improve the EROI calculation substantially. A change from 0.75 to 0.90 would increase the EROI to 6 (remember EROI is not linear and a small change to low numbers is a lot of energy).
Left out of the calculation are any costs of waste handling. Also absent are any costs of decommissioning. No labor costs were included in the EROI calculations (which were about half the total energy input into a coal plant study). Nor are any transmission costs included. All of these inputs will lower the EROI (but when comparing energy sources you need to make the boundary conditions the same).
By using these 11 studies, we can make a guess as to what the EROI of a modern centrifuge enriched reactor fleet might be: 6 to 12 EROI. The high value assumes zero energy for enrichment, decommission, waste handling, and labor. The low value is if those energy requirements consume all the efficiency improvement made by centrifuge enrichment.
JonFreise, there are accounting issues that need to be addressed. For example are ex-weapon U-235 and Pu-239, input energy free when delivered for fuel fabrication. They would seem to be recycled surplus, nence the original energy input should be counted against their original military purpose, and not their use electrical generation.
Secondly, how do we account for the residual energy in ex-reactor nuclear fuel? Currently we ignore it, because enriched uranium is so cheap. But so called nuclear waste has so much U-235 and reactor grade plutonium in it, that it would serve well as fuel in CANDU reactors. Spent nuclear fuel can be burned as fuel in BN-600 reactors, so it has has potential energy that is many times the energy extracted from the same fuel by light water reactors.
Reprocessed Weapons:
Since the total amount of fuel from weapons is limited, I don’t think it should be included. Any more than the EROI of reactors in the US must use diffusion enrichment EROI even though we don’t have centrifuge enrichment in the US today.
Residual Energy:
There is undoubtedly energy in the waste and France and the UK both reprocess. I believe the US does not for political reasons. So the next step is to get reliable data on what is the reprocessing cost? How does it compare to enriching uranium? If the cost is higher, then the EROI is likely to be lower. If the cost is lower, then the EROI is likely to be higher. It takes energy to capture energy, so there will be some cost to reprocessing, and the cost could be high (highly dangerous compounds needing substantial shielding and care of handling).
My issue with breeder reactors is that the world could see it would need that tech, and yet did not invest. New reactors under construction are not breeders. So if the cost of breeders is substantially higher than enriching uranium, then the EROI is going to be lower.
One addendum:
EROI of Coal generated electricity is 9
Which is the US average for the early 80’s as reported by C. Hall in Biophysical Economics
Nuclear power does not need a high EROI to contribute to the economy. It just needs to be comparable to coal generated electricity.
Coal is still the cheapest electrical generation, so it is unlikely that nuclear has a higher EROI than coal. If this value for coal is correct, then we could expect nuclear to have a value from 6-9 EROI (somewhere slightly worse or equal to coal). This happens to be very similar to the roughly calculated range I posted above.
It is important to make sure that boundary conditions are as close as possible. That is why I prefer to compare results by the same author if a complete accounting is not available.
Jon
I see where you are going with that thought - its plausible but not necessarily true. If the 'perceived' externalities of nuclear are much higher than that of coal, nuclear might have a higher EROI and still be more expensive. On the other hand, nuclear has more subsidies.
I saw tonight that James Hansen recommended a moratorium on coal plants in an effort to keep CO2 below 350ppm. What will happen to nat gas and nuclear pricing if coal is put on moratorium? (Rhetorical question)
Coal: Cheap. Abundant. Cheap.
Yes, and nuclear must be financed mostly up front (like wind) so that will skew the price values a bit. But it is nice when separate lines of reasoning reach (roughly) the same place.
Already the LNG market is 3-4 times higher than domestic NG. When the US is forced to enter the tiny LNG market in a major way, it is going to be like a giant belly flopping into the kiddie pool.
Hall estimated that 5:1 was the minimum EROI. In just a few years both oil and nat gas should have dropped below 5:1. Oil at $180 per barrel. And Nat Gas by my own calculations (or 4x price increase via LNG). At that point, all we will have left much above 5:1 is coal. I think we will have a first hand test of Dr. Hall's estimate.
Personally I expect a migration south. I don't see any other solution that can cope in time. Did you read Sharon's latest post describing malnutrition showing up in cold climate areas? We Regret to Inform You
Thanks for that link.
Chris
That should get you started. They have broken out coal generated electricity into several types, so I am sure the references would be useful (but I have not read them).
Please send along an email (or write a blog post) about what you learn. Your piece on nuclear EROI was very helpful.
Although not solely concerned with EROI, this new paper is germane:
Mudd and Diesendorf publish paper on nuclear resources and it's eco-efficiency
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/esthag/2008/42/i07/html/es702249v...
Sustainability of Uranium Mining and Milling: Toward Quantifying Resources and Eco-Efficiency
I'd have liked to see that, as Hall says, there's a real lack of impartially-done studies. But...
"ERROR: The file is unavailable at the current time."
:(
I used the html version, which seems to come up fine on my computer- I suggest you re-try.
Nup, same again. Perhaps you could email it?
Done - but most of the data is in images, which I can't figure out how to send.
Try the link again-
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/esthag/2008/42/i07/html/es702249v...
The pdf version is corrupt
I wonder if readers of this post are aware of the possibilities offered by modern life cycle analysis tools (LCA) in combination with potent life cycle inventories (LCI) such as ecoinvent. Econinvent contains a vast number of detailed process descriptions for instance Uranium mining which could be used to construct with the aid of LCA software, very complex supply chains such as the current (or any future) European electricity mix . Thus you could not only calculate the EROI of the nuclear power including its entire life cycle but virtually any other emission to the environment. To give you an idea on the possiblities you could have a look at this paper http://www.ecoinvent.org/fileadmin/documents/en/080314_ecoinvent-event/J... presented at a recent ecoinvent conference. It describes the newly included PV technologies in the inventory. A research question such as "what is the fossil fuel consumption and the Cd emmission of a modern CdTe PV panel over its entire life cycle (production of raw material, panel manufacturing and 25 years of operational lifespan) becomes an almost trivial task.
A while ago we presented our LCA of biofuels her in TOD http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2976 which by now has considerably influenced the discussions on biofuels.
Regarding the Uranium Supply
At what price does uranium become expensive? To make all U.S. electricity with current reactor designs, we only need 0.72 pounds / year / person. Using breeder reactors we need 0.35 pounds / 80 year lifetime.
If all our electricity was made with coal, a years supply of coal (14,200 lb) cost $218 in 2005 and is much higher now and climbing. A year’s supply of natural gas (115,000 cubic feet) costs $850 in 2005.
For uranium to match the price of coal or natural gas, using current reactor technology, the uranium price would be $303 or $1,180 dollars per pound respectively.
For uranium to match the price of coal or natural gas using breeder reactors, the uranium price would be $51,500 or $194,000 dollars per pound respectively.
The average American paid $1,100 for electricity in 2005. Uranium cost is a small fraction of what we pay for nuclear electricity, about 0.2 cents per kWh. Uranium price spikes have little effect on our bill.
These numbers come from this paper
http://www.nuclearcoal.com/ENERGY%20REV%20X1.pdf
based on calculations and references from this spreadsheet.
http://www.nuclearcoal.com/ENERGY%20CALCS%20REV%207.xls
Reports in the 1970’s estimated the cost of extracting uranium from sea water at $1,500 to $2,000 per pound. R&D has reduced that to about $200 per pound, of uranium.
http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html
http://www.taka.jaea.go.jp/eimr_div/j637/theme3%20sea_e.html
http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/2006/4_5.html
The oceans contain 4.6 billion tons of uranium, half of which is sufficient to support 10 billion people at the U.S. level for 400 years using first generation reactors and over 30,000 years with breeders. In reality the oceans are continuously supplied with uranium by the erosion of land, so the uranium supply is effectively unlimited.
We do not need breeders for a long time but we should move forward with breeder R&D to reduce mining and waste volumes.
Why are there no sea water uranium extraction plants?
Historically prices have been under $60 / pound with a few big spikes.
http://www.uxc.com/review/uxc_g_hist-price.html
http://www.uxc.com/review/uxc_g_2yr-price.html
Would you bet your life savings on uranium staying above $200 / lb. I don’t think so, and neither will professional investors, however if sea water technology keeps improving the cost may drop enough to make it happen sooner than most people think.
Sea water uranium is very important because it puts a cap of $200/pound on the maximum sustainable cost of uranium for thousands of years.
Sea water uranium does not have to supply all of our uranium in order to cap the uranium price at $200/pound. It only has to replace the percentage of land based uranium sources that cost more than $200/pound, and that percentage is zero for the foreseeable future.
Bill,
Fascinating stuff -- thanks for your heretical references.
Needless to say, you will get the silent treatment from the energetically correct communities on both sides of the peak oil debate.
The Odells and the Yergins will continue to deny the need for reliance on nuclear energy, while the Leggetts and the Monbiots will continue to deny the feasibility or desirability of reliance on nuclear energy.
Thanks for the great links as always Bill.
I just wanted to comment that China and Japan may feel that the premium for sea-water uranium is worth paying to ensure security of supply instead of relying on imports.
I's also like to ask if the estimate of $200/pound for extracting uranium from seawater includes money raised by extracting other useful materials at the same time?
"Sea water uranium is very important because it puts a cap of $200/pound on the maximum sustainable cost of uranium for thousands of years. "
If this works for uranium at something like $12-$36 per ounce, why isn't anyone doing it for gold???
The country that has spent the most effort in developing polymers that can absorb uranium from sea-water is Japan, which has done so because it has no indigenous sources of energy. Gold on the other hand is a shiny substance with very few practical uses, let alone vital ones.
Uranium is present in sea water at concentrations of 3.3 ppb. Gold is present at something like 5-50 ppt, with a great deal of variation between different studies. If you assume gold is as easy to absorb from sea water as uranium, and this might not be the case, the price for gold from sea water would be 800 to 24 000 $/oz.
Florida Power and Light submitted an estimate for the cost of a two reactor AP1100 plant at $14 billion. That works out to be $5800/Kw and adjusting for inflation puts the price at $4600/Kw. That is perfectly in line with the historical nuclear plant cost data. Almost on top of the red line actually.
Not sure about that polygon myself, seems more the result of a lack of data rather than a close structural match.
A more recent study was done by Koomey & Hultmanc (2007), "A reactor-level analysis of busbar costs for US nuclear plants, 1970–2005"
Here are the conclusions which I linked in the other post:
Historical experience provides one anchor that can help contextualize cost estimates for new reactors. The comparisons presented in this article allow such an evaluation for key components of the estimated costs for new Gen III+ nuclear reactors in the US. The projected busbar costs for new reactors in a favorable regulatory environment are at or below the costs of the cheapest reactors in our historical sample, and the detailed results suggest that policy makers should devote additional attention to industry and government estimates of capital costs, construction duration, and total operations and maintenance costs before concluding that a nuclear renaissance is around the corner.
Those estimates may yet be proved right, but our data suggest the need for additional scrutiny of assumptions. While reactor designs have been standardized, licensing procedures have been streamlined, and construction management techniques are much more sophisticated than before, some old problems remain, and new ones may emerge. The policy and design changes represented by Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors do represent improvements over the current fleet, but the interlinked issues of reactor scale, customization of site-built technologies, slow electricity demand growth, intense competition from other energy sources, deregulated electricity markets, slow speed of industry learning, nuclear waste disposal, terrorism, and proliferation remain potential impediments to the cost competitiveness of next-generation nuclear power in the 21st century.
One of their graphs is in the next presentation which explains why industry and gov't estimates may not be trustworthy:
http://www.senate.ca.gov/ftp/SEN/COMMITTEE/STANDING/ENERGY/_home/10-23-0...
It looks $ 5000- $ 8000 (2007 US dollars) is a more likely cost range.
H.T. Odum had a PhD student with an Oriental surname that completed an extensive thesis on the Net Energy of Nuclear Power. It dealt with the mining and enrichment process, the building and operation of the reactor over a full life for the reactor, and included a projected energy cost of the reactor's decommissioning and subsequent waste storage.For the life of me, I can't recall his name, but Mark Brown at the University of Florida could probably do so. I think he went to work for the old AEC prior to it being molded into the Dept. of Energy. I presume that a copy of his thesis is in the U Of Fla. library. Probably completed about 1973.
I knew Odum from about 73 to 77. I was a nuclear engineering student (BSNE) and worked part time in the Environmental Engineering department as a rad tech across from his office.
While not one of his students, I did do an energy analysis of nuclear warfare for him. I think he was scared of the conclusion.
I do remember hearing something about this study and that it was considered a bit preliminary. Of course, lots has changed since then. Was the guy Korean?
Here's a contact list of professors emeritus facility. Ohanian was department chair at the time.
http://www.nre.ufl.edu/department/emeritus.php
what was the summary/abstract of your nuclear warfare energy analysis?
First, we need to differentiate war from "disorder." Disorder is what happens when too little energy is available; we see it in Africa today.
War requires large amounts of surplus energy. Classically, it took good harvests and extensive social organization to make war on the neighbors. Changing climate, technology, or social organization could trigger war. For example, the warming trend during the Roman Republic gave bigger harvest to a better organized society. The Romans used those advantages to leverage themselves to an empire. Some argue that a cooling climate lowered yields and a decadent government in the late empire are the causes of the fall. The Mongols may have been fueled by warming within their grasslands of home. Their cavalry suddenly had the fuel it needed to overtake more ordered societies.
War got industrialized with the American Civil War where the coal-powered industrialized North took on the slave-powered agricultural South. The wars of the 20th century magnified the trend with the use of petroleum. Eisenhower, for example, got his start as a junior officer in the application of trucks to military logistics. It takes energy to deliver disordering energy against the enemy.
Nuclear energy made a quantum leap in available energy deliverable against an enemy to disorganize him. The store of energy in an arsenal of nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them means that huge destruction can be delivered easily. Read Kahn's "On Thermonuclear War" for example. In a general nuclear war between the USSR and the USA, all major cities in both countries would have been destroyed with in a few hours. Prior to nuclear, no one would have thought that possible. Look at the efforts and time the Romans took to destroy one city, Carthage.
Today, the big worry is that a very small, sub-national group could smuggle in (on existing transport means) a single nuke. Could 20 guys ever before been able to flatten a few square miles of dense city?
One can bitch and moan about this but it is a fact of life. Our only choice is to deal with it and to do so means to deliver better order to the disordered parts of the world.
I'd just like to say that there is a growing consensus here that the value 93 quoted in the article is, in the words of Pauli, "not even wrong," just horribly confused in its derivation. Some still quote it, but they have not examined the math or noted the inconsistencies between the table and the text.
The (rough) calculation for France can be found here.
I would like to see a comparison between nuclear power and coal power that brings coal past the mouth of the mine. Nuclear power values for EROEI should, properly, include plant construction and decommissioning, waste disposal, and the energy cost of building a region that will eventually be made unihabitable by an accident or attack. Similarly, coal should include the energy cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere (perhaps 250 kJ/mol) applied to a substantial portion of the historic emissions. The deferred energy costs of nuclear and fossil fuels do not discount away, which is one the strengths of energy analysis over economic fable telling. I thus urge further effort on the analysis of coal.
Chris
I read an article in Nuclear News a few years ago. The interviewee was with Urenco. He said they were thinking about an upgrade to a more efficient centrifuge. The ones they had now were so efficient that they spent more for the parking lot lights than for enrichment. He wasn't sure that it would pay to build more efficient centrifuges.
Excellent article Nate and Charlie, as always
I actually have something I think may improve on the silence. I don't understand why geothermal power has been so badly ignored. I don't think I have even seen a number for geothermal in any of these energy analysis. I would suspect if there was an analysis done for Iceland that it would top out at the highest EROI on the list. I understand that geothermal power often is regarded as a regional phenomena and to a certain extent it is. But, I have a belief that in the future, it will become feasible both technologically and economically to drill very deep injection wells for Binary-cycle power plants in almost any area. It like wind has a high initial investment, but the power is emissions free once it's running along with no radioactive waste, lest you drill in the wrong spot. Assuming it will be economical, especially with a carbon tax in place, I think it would easily out-compete most other energy systems, especially those based on fossil fuel. Am I crazy? Why is geothermal power like the kid that always gets ignored around here? All these advocates for corn ethanol and solar and thorium and now wind, why is geothermal not on your favorites list?
On another note, I think I might be able to make 900$ hour in the future, optimist, not really, I could just be a trashman or vegetable farmer!
confused?
-Crews
I'm all for doing "life cycle" costs for nuclear and coal. I doubt a serious one for coal that includes health costs of the 30k people a year who die from coal has ever been included or the 300k plus who get sick from coal particulate. But it would be interesting to calculate.
It should also be noted that serious life cycle costs for solar have not really been done that include the waste disposal from the chemically intensive solar industry, energy used in plant that creates these cells, material used in solar-thermal plants or the generally understood costs of building wind turbines that use 5 times more material than nuclear on a name-plate KW-per-KW basis (let alone one based on ACTUAL KWhrs produced!).
I cannot help but think that all these studies are so biased, that they are essentially *designed* from the get-go to prejudge rational social and engineering reason to enage construction of nuclear.
----
All the above talk about uranium is somewhat irrelevant as breeders of various sorts begin to come online. Most importantly we don't even need uranium to fuel reactors, we could use thorium, as has been mentioned in other entries here on The Oil Drum and which is explained simply at energyfromthorium.com.
David Walters
I doubt a serious one for coal that includes health costs
Or the heavy metal that goes up the stack - Mercury and Uranium as 2 examples.
The supply issue is really a non-issue. Uranium is not oil. The amount of exploration and development of uranium resouces is analogous to the amount of oil exploration that had been done by the 1950's.
Since 2002, when an increase in exploration took place, the IEA have documented a massive rise in proven reserves - 50% from 2003 to 2005. The 70-80 years often thrown around represents the proven reserves based on this limited exploration. When the next redbook is released we will see another massive rise in proven reserves. See below.
I am suprised that intelligent people cannot resolve this issue and reach agreement that uranium supplies are not a problem or barrier to the continuation and expantion of nuclear power.
Whilst it would appear that we will very soon face an unsustainable energy future, we see on the domestic front wholesale complacency.
Can anyone please explain the reasons why? Two years ago I wrote an article for Challenge magazine "Could our lights actually go out.....?" and added another concerning "The Domes of Wasted Energy Over Our Cities Which Should Be Charging Our EVs". These articles can be found at http://www.lightpollution.org.uk
Our energy consumption is wasteful, profligate and only possible at present because it is cheap. Our future will fail and our politicians will be to blame. But then who really cares? Certainly NOT politicians.
Westinghouse was shooting for something like $3,000-$3,500/KW for their AP series. GE has built a few ESBWRs in Japan and I've read the cost came in around $4,000/KW. One supply-train issue is Japan Steel Works, the only company that makes forged containment vessels. Allegedly, JSW is now booked out through 2011. On the waste side, Yucca is a joke as the decision was made to use this site before the geology of the area was known; France is spening over 20 years looking for appropriate geology first. Although it seems to get zero press, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, NM has been accepting transuranic military waste since 1999 - over six thousand truckloads so far. Located in a bedded salt formation about half a mile underground (and capped by impermiable rock) this seems like an excellent repository - the salt has not moved for 225 million years, it's plastic and self-healing. According to one nuclear scientist, if expanded, WIPP could take all the high-level nuclear plant waste in the world - not that the denizens of NM might be keen to jump on this opportunity. As a final on salt storage (that I think could include salt domes in the Gulf of Mexico region, some 4-5 miles deep and 2 miles wide) in 1964 the AEC-DOE set of a 5 kt bomb 1,200 feet into a salt dome in Mississippi - and a few years later a smaller device in the cavern created by the fist bomb. No radionucleid release to date. (Google Project Dribble.) PS: Uranium fuel, including enrichment, is 49 cents per kWh.
Actually, a consortium of GE, Toshiba, and Hitachi designed and built a pair of first-of-a-kind ABWRs in Japan. Toshiba build a third in Japan and GE has a pair under construction in Taiwan. The latter construction projects are being horribly mismanaged by the Taiwan Power Corporation, a state agency. The politics inside Taiwan have a lot to do with the schedule delays and poor progress there.
Currently, the license application for a pair of ABWRs was submitted last September in Texas at the South Texas Project site. Toshiba will be the reactor vendor and overall constructor/engineer.
The ESBWR is solely a GE product and is having great difficulties in getting approval from the NRC. The schedule for marketability was just pushed back three years. It has a number of features that are become quite the technical challenges.
I'd expect the ABWR to gain a big chunk of the US market given its operational track record, certified design, complete and exercised procurement chains, and well-understood safety performance.
The cost data being reported is in part PRICE data. Demand exceeds supply so well-positioned vendors are looking for windfall profits. However, I agree that the reported costs are surprising.
chainsaw4wood
I suspect the real fuel uranium fuel is 0.49 cents per kWh, since the wholesale price of nuclear power is around 2 cents per kWh.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/19/markets/uranium/index.htm
I've always used the value of 50 cents per million BTU in the reactor. Can't remember where I got it though but it works through all my calcs and gives answers consistent with other, known facts.
Mr. Hagens, could you explain the polygon shape in the cost graph?
It doesn't look like the polygon line is going down again structurally, rather it would appear to be a lack of data on the right hand of the scale that confuses the polygon. The new project costings in the ballpark of 6000-8000 per kW seem to indicate that the upward cost trend for LWRs in the US is continuing, not reversing.
Say you are using 1999 data.
why don't you have a more updated source.
Do I sense a little back-at-cha here? ;)
It's not my reference, it's from the author above. The point is, the polygon is inaccurate, so I asked the author of the lead article what he thinks about it. You knew that, but perhaps you're being obtuse again.
I do have a more recent reference from Sciencedirect, but you need a subscription.
"A reactor-level analysis of busbar costs for US nuclear plants, 1970–2005" by Jonathan Koomeya, and Nathan E Hultmanc 2007
Here are the conclusions:
Historical experience provides one anchor that can help contextualize cost estimates for new reactors. The comparisons presented in this article allow such an evaluation for key components of the estimated costs for new Gen III+ nuclear reactors in the US. The projected busbar costs for new reactors in a favorable regulatory environment are at or below the costs of the cheapest reactors in our historical sample, and the detailed results suggest that policy makers should devote additional attention to industry and government estimates of capital costs, construction duration, and total operations and maintenance costs before concluding that a nuclear renaissance is around the corner.
Those estimates may yet be proved right, but our data suggest the need for additional scrutiny of assumptions. While reactor designs have been standardized, licensing procedures have been streamlined, and construction management techniques are much more sophisticated than before, some old problems remain, and new ones may emerge. The policy and design changes represented by Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors do represent improvements over the current fleet, but the interlinked issues of reactor scale, customization of site-built technologies, slow electricity demand growth, intense competition from other energy sources, deregulated electricity markets, slow speed of industry learning, nuclear waste disposal, terrorism, and proliferation remain potential impediments to the cost competitiveness of next-generation nuclear power in the 21st century.
Here's another one, a presentation that explains some of the issues:
http://www.senate.ca.gov/ftp/SEN/COMMITTEE/STANDING/ENERGY/_home/10-23-0...
Dear Readers
Please take time to read this chapter from the book by Prof Bernard Cohen.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter13.html
Breeder reactors are a proven technology, and the current reserves of Uranium will last for literally "millions" of years. Nuclear energy is the way to go. Without breeder reactors, it is true that the current reserves of Uranium will not last for more than 60 years of the world's energy usage. But thinking like this is pure stupidity.
If you have the time, please read the entire book Nuclear Energy Option.
Cheers
Kiran
Kiran, thank you for using the "s" word. It could also be applied to many other arguments coming from the anti-nuclear crowd.
A response on EROEI and fuel cycle/reactor efficiency
The entire business of EROEI studies is a diversion from the question of reactor efficiency. We know that vast amounts of energy are locked up in uranium and thorium. What we need to be doing is studying the efficiencies of fuel cycle/reactor systems in extracting that energy, rather than expending our time arguing about the EPOEI of one system. Any review of the uranium/light water reactor fuel cycle will review that it does an extremely poor job of extracting the potential energy of nuclear fuel.
EROEI studies never note the different between the energy economies of the CANDU reactor and the LWR. CANDU reactors have a demonstrated ability to operate with almost nuclear fuel including natural uranium. The EROEI of natural uranium CANDU fuel cycles should be examined. There are presently 18 CANDU reactors operating in Canada. Other CANDU reactors operate in India, China, Korea Argentine, and Romania. CANDU Reactors can be operated using "spent" nuclear fuel from LWR. The EROEI for recycled fuel would be very large, since recycled fuel would enter the CANDU with only the energy input of transportation and fuel fabrication. Tests have been run on CANDU reactors.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/index.html
The Indians has just completed construction the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) a CANDU type reactor to run on thorium cycle fuel.
http://www.npcil.nic.in/nupower_vol13_3/ahwr.htm
http://www.hindu.com/2008/04/09/stories/2008040959691700.htm
It is one of the most advanced reactors in the world, and should have an EROEI significantly better than the EROEI of Light Water Reactors. The Indians plan to embark on serial production of AHWR type reactors, before 2020.
A second reactor type whose EROEI should be examined, is the Russian BN-600. Although the BN-600 is a developmental LMFBR reactor that has successfully delivered commercial nuclear power since 1980. The Japanese have purchased BN-600 technology from the Russians, and may build duplicates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor
Thirdly, the Indiana are engaged in a significant thorium fuel cycle. The Indians have already built and tested both thorium fuel cycle proof on concept and developmental thorium fuel cycle reactors and have built or are building prototype thorium fuel cycle reactors including the just completed AHWR, the soon to be completed Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalpakkam, and the more advanced , Fast Thorium Breeder Reactor (FTBR) underdevelopment at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai.is second thorium fuel cycle breeder. The Indians are in the last stage of a 3 stage developmental program for a complex Uranium/thorium reactor fuel system, that is many times more energy efficient than the Uranium/light water reactor fuel system.
The Indians plans to build thorium fuel cycle reactor capable of producing 20 GWy of electrical energy by 2020, and to produces 30% of their electricity from thorium cycle reactors by 2050. Indian scientists calculate that the assurred thorium reserve of India is large enough to provide it with electrcity for 400 years. Given the extent of Indian thorium cycle reactor development, and future plans and EROEI of nuclear industry EROIE that ignores the Indian plans is at the very least incomplete.
Further, any discussion of nuclear EROEI ought to note that that real world LWR EROEI using MOX is much than the EROEI of normally fueled French LWRs. The use Pu-239 in nuclear weapons absorbed the original energy input into weapons fissionable materials. The energy input into recycled fuel (MOX) would equal the energy requirements for disassembling nuclear weapons, fabricating MOX, and transporting it to the reactor. Reactor grade Plutionium can also be a source of MOX. U-238 in the MOX can be assummed to come from Depleted uranium stockpiles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel
American civilian power reactors are being used to dispose of surplus Russian U-235. Fully half half of the uranium used in American reactors USA is ex-Russian military U-235. One sixth of the current world U-235 supply comes from recycling Russian nuclear weapons. In addition, Pu-239 from American and Russian nuclear weapon stockpiles, not ony can but should be used as reactor fuel.
The estimated US U-235 stockpile was estimated to be in the range of 750 tons in the early 1990s, of which 174 tons (23% of the total) have been declared surplus.[13] More than 30 tons of the excess HEU has been blended down, reducing the total stockpile to something in the range of 720 tons. The US has a plutonium of 111.4 tons. The UK acknowledges possession of a military stockpile of 7.6 tons of plutonium, 21.9 tons of HEU (U-235). The Japanese hold a plutonium stockpile of from 16 to 20 tons. In 2000 the US and Russia agreed to each dispose of 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium. Estimates of the total world stockpile of weapons grade plutonium range as high as 300 tons.
http://www.nti.org/e_research/cnwm/monitoring/declarations.asp
In addition to surplus stockpiles of reactor grade plutonium, mostly found in "spent nuclear fuel" equals 400 tons. http://www.dhushara.com/book/explod/nuclears/pluteu.htm Civilian plutonium stockpiles are growing and constitute the largest single problem associated with "nuclear waste." But even if all civilian reactors shut down, the disposal of military and civilian plutonium would be a significant problem. By far the best solution from an EROEI viewpoint would be to burn the plutonium in breeder reactors or thorium converters as the Indians plan to do.
EROEI studies of nuclear power commit numerous other EROEI errors.
EROEi calculations do not evaluating reactor grade plutonium reprocessing in the UK, France and Germany, despite the fact that reactor grade plutonium returned to reactors amounts to largely free energy. http://www.inesap.org/bulletin16/bul16art15.htm
Various sources describe the amount of fissionable material remaining in “spent” nuclear fuel. The Wikipedia reports that 1% of the fuel mass of “spent fuel” is reactor grade plutonium. While unburned U-235 would constitute >.83 percent of the "spent" fuel mass. The Wikipedia also reports, “Fissile component starts at 0.71% 235U concentration in natural uranium). At discharge, total fissile component is still 0.50% (0.23% 235U, 0.27% fissile 239Pu, 241Pu).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
Plutonium based fuel can be used in Heavy Water Reactors.
http://www.cap.ca/news/moxsummary.ps
With Heavy Water Reactors a burnup rate of 50% of reactor grade plutonium is possible with the use of a U-238 fuel cycle, and 75% with the use of a Th-232 fuel cycle.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/mox.htm
The encyclopedia of the earth reports
Reactor grade plutonium contains about 55-70% of fissile Pu-239, and >19% of non-fissile Pu-240, non fissile isotopes of Plutonium will never constitute more 30% of reactor grade plutonium.
In contrast. studies of the use of ex-nuclear weapon Pu-239 in MOX fueled light water reactors suggest that only a net burnup on only 1/3 of the original plutonium, leaving an unsatisfactory burn is disposal of plutonium.
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:tDm1iQnQSJ4J:www.fissilematerials.o...
Depleted Uranium contains 0.25-0.30% U-235. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf14.html
Thus the Uranium enrichment process looses 35% to 42% of the U-235 in natural uranium. 20% of reactor fuel U-235 fails to fission after absorbing reactor neutrons, thus becoming non-fissile U-236. (WASH-1097) Another 25%+ of reactor U-235 remains when the fuel will no longer support a chain reaction. In addition, plutonium remaining in the reactor amounts to nearly 25% of the original U-235 in the fuel charge. Thus the net fissile burnup rate in a light water reactor is only 30% of the original U-235 charge.
In contrast CANDU reactors contain about 0.2% U-235.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_fuel.htm
An equal amount of spent CANDU fuel will be PU-239. Hence Heavy Water Reactor fuel post-reactor fuel is more truly spent, while spent light water reactor fuel, contains more fissile material than natural uranium a fuel that can be used in Heavy Water Reactors.
Heavy Water reactors are also more efficient in burning U-235. Assuming 0.1% U236 content in "spent fuel" (WASH-1097), this means that 57% of the U-235 in natural uranium gets burned up heavy water reactors, verses a burnup of around 35% of the U-235 in natural uranium for light water reactors.
Since part or most of the nuclear energy of uranium and plutonium in post reactor LWR nuclear fuel is capturable by other reactors, it should be added to the energy output of light water reactors in a fair assessment of the uranium.LWR guel cycle..
Various sources describe the amount of fissionable material remaining in “spent” nuclear fuel. The Wikipedia reports that 1% of the fuel mass of spent fuel is reactor grade plutonium. While U-235 would constitute >.83 percent of the fuel mass. The Wikipedia also reports, “Fissile component starts at 0.71% 235U concentration in natural uranium). At discharge, total fissile component is still 0.50% (0.23% 235U, 0.27% fissile 239Pu, 241Pu).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
Plutonium based fuel can be used in Heavy Water Reactors.
http://www.cap.ca/news/moxsummary.ps
With Heavy Water Reactors a burnup rate of 50% of reactor grade plutonium is possible with the use of a U-238 fuel cycle, and 75% with the use of a Th-232 fuel cycle.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/mox.htm
The encyclopedia of the earth reports
Reactor grade plutonium contains about 55-70% of fissile Pu-239, and >19% of non-fissile Pu-240, non fissile isotopes of Plutonium will never constitute more 30% of reactor grade plutonium.
One Kg of fissile Plutonium burned in a reactor produces 10 MWh of electrical power. Thus one ton of fissile plutonium will produce 1 GW years of electrical power.
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Plutonium
Studies of the use of nuclear weapon Pu-239 in MOX fueled light water reactors suggest that only a net burnup on only 1/3 of the original plutonium, leaving an unsatisfactory burn is disposal of plutonium.
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:tDm1iQnQSJ4J:www.fissilematerials.o...
Depleted Uranium contains 0.25-0.30% U-235. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf14.html
Thus the Uranium enrichment process looses 35% to 42% of the U-235 in natural uranium. 20% of reactor fuel U-235 fails to fission after absorbing reactor neutrons, thus becoming non-fissile U-236. (WASH-1097) Another 25%+ of reactor U-235 remains when the fuel will no longer support a chain reaction. In addition, plutonium remaining in the reactor amounts to nearly 25% of the original U-235 in the fuel charge. Thus the net fissile burnup rate in a light water reactor is only 30% of the original U-235 charge.
In contrast CANDU reactors contain about 0.2% U-235.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_fuel.htm
An equal amount of spent CANDU fuel will be PU-239. Hence Heavy water reactor fuel is truly spent, while spent light water reactor fuel, contains more Fissile material than ordinary Heavy Water Reactor fuel does.
Assuming 0.1% U236 content (WASH-1097), this means that 57% of the U-235 in natural uranium gets burned up heavy water reactors, verses a burnup of around 35% of the U-235 in natural uranium for light water reactors.
Such great inefficiency leaves a great deal of nuclear fuel unused by light water reactors, but re-enrichment of so called "depleted uranium tailings" is currently being conducted at Paducah,
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080406/NEWS0...
and in Russia.
http://www.greenpeace.fr/stop-plutonium/en/trade_russia_en.php3
And research continuses on improving the burnup ratio of LWRs.
In short some of the inefficiencies of the uranium/light water reactor fuel cycle are either being corrected or are amenable to correction. Nuclear EROEI is a snapshot in time, that often ignore the complexity of nuclear fuel cycles, as well as the effect of reactor, enrichment and fuel recovery technologies on nuclear fuel efficiency. Since it is impossible to generate a single number in calculations involving so many independent variables, the value of nuclear EROEI studies which arrives at a single number is very questionable, and a meta-analysis of such studies will lead to a distorted and inaccurate picture. The best we should hope for is a range of EROEI numbers for a given fuel cycle, with the possibility of a comparison between the ranges of various fuel/reactor options.
When I was first exposed to EROEI analysis from Dr. Odum himself back in the 70's, it was clear and acknowledged that quantitative results were not definitive and there were profound methodological shortcomings. That obviously hasn't changed.
It does remain an interesting and thought-provoking intellectual exercise.
However, the bottom line is that EROEI analyses don't prove sh*t - never have and never will.
As noted in this comment thread, even a fairly good one like the original posting won't change many minds.
Well we have to find some way to differentiate from the gross to the net. All the dollars in the world won't give us a planet full of 100:1 oil again which our infrastructure has been built on. In this sense, it gets back to the coming oil depletion rates - if the maximum power principle IS the underlying explanatory force for Hubbert Linearization then we will be facing steep decline rates in the next decade, too fast for nuclear to both scale and our economies turn more local and electric. But I for one, would prefer we had a high EROI source to fall back on, even though there will first be shortfalls.
EROI does many things that conventional accounting cannot do. Here are two main ones:
1. It can predict the receding horizons effect on low EROI sources of energy and the inflation that will ripple through all industries.
2. It allows the calculation of maximum growth rates for power sources so they remain energy positive. Meaning it can tell us how fast we can turn this Titanic of an economy. This is vitally important, because conventional accounting is expecting faster transition as prices go higher. The reality is a slower transition is all that will be possible. Getting slower every day EROI declines.
I personally think that failing to understand EROI and all the ramifications of its decline is going to be tragically remembered in the same way as the Assyrians failure to understand irrigation salination of soil.
I can't say they are worthless and agreed that there is value-added - you've brought up a couple of good insights that can be gleaned from them.
One real shortcoming is the handling of various energy quality issues. I use natural gas to heat my home - the air comes in at 65 deg and blows out at 80 deg F. I use natural gas to heat my hot water. Cold water comes in at 60 deg F and flows out my shower heat at 120 deg F. Solar might have a competitive application for replacing those BTUs.
But electricity could do the same job. What gas or coal can't do directly is power my cell phone or run my stereo or computer. BTUs are not BTUs. That's where market price, or what humans value the energy form, is the metric of value.
What we can't use them for is to convince the emotional. Someone who wants to diss nuclear will disagree with some analyst's 100:1 calc and instead "PROVE" that it is an energy sink with a negative return. Likewise, we can't find convincing grounds to favor a 6:1 source over a 4:1 source.
We should all agree that corn ethanol is close enough to 1:1 that it is a misdirection of policy.
JonFreise, I sited the number 18, because that is the installed base of CANDU reactors in Canada. The biggest advantage of CANDU reactors is that they can be fueled by natural uranium, and by virtually any nuclear fuel. There are also CANDU reactors in China, Korea, Argentina, and Romania, India has a couple of CANDU reactors, but the indians reversed engineered it, and most Indian reactors are based on designs closely related to the CANDU. At the present moment, Indian heavy water reactor is more advanced than CANDU technology.
It is very expensive to get a reactor design certified by the NRC. CANDU reactors are somewhat more expensive to build, and fuel cost have been only a small part of the cost of nuclear power. The Canadians can build reactors in Canada, and sell power to the United States.
Nuclear energy will never replace fossil fuels even in just the production of electricity.The world has 75 years of uranium ore at current consumption rates with uranium oxide concentrations greater than .1%. Beyond that we HAVE to breed U-233 or plutonium. You could require people not to build anything but CANDU reactors, but they won't have the money to do that and technically they don't have to.
All long range nuke plans involve breeders of which there is only one operating commercial power breeder(BN-600) in the world due to be shut down in 2010.
Enrichment is required for all reactors except heavy water reactors(less then 9% of power reactors--deuterium is very expensive). The problem is that it is much cheaper to using processing technology to build nuclear bombs than make fuel for power plants. The nuclear power business has always been about making fuel for bombs. Even U-233 can be made into a bomb.
With issues of secrecy, proliferation and waste
nuclear power will always represent FEAR in the minds of the public. Nukes will never be cuddly.
As the world moves into fossil fuel depletion is the world going to become safer and more stable to allow a big nuke program?
Which countries are going to be safe enough to have a massive proliferation of nuclear power plants?
Is India going to be safe(with major 2 terrorist threats), China, France, the US, the UK?
Will the rush to secure nuclear materials make the world safer or bring us closer to war?
And will that not increase the temptation to deter war with home-made nukes( far cheaper in energy required to make bombs than a fuel enrichment program)?
Would the world be really safer if everybody carried a gun?
Only in an ideal world.
The nuclear power solution will lead to the same World War III situation we narrowly avoided in the last century in a desparate and fragmented world.
Look at solar instead. It will take land but it won't put a potential 'bomb'(source of fissionable materials) in every town, a source of endless fear for the public.
Cover west Texas with wind farms towering over PV solar panels; it would require much less land than comparable hydroelectric power plants. Excess intermittent power can be stored in flow batteries or hydrogen gas piped to cities for fuels cells that are more efficient than any nuclear power plant or the next generation of fuel cell cars. With concentrated solar, high temperature electrolysis of hydrogen is more than 100% efficient. Nuclear reactors for making hydrogen have temperature limitations.
Forget nukes. Solar and wind is the BEST SOLUTION.
And the object lesson for such a noble pursuit is painted in Germany, where now coal plants are again being commissioned.
That's not entirely fair. European electric demand is still growing, and the Germans have older coal fired plants that need replacing. The correlation between new coal plants (especially PC) and new wind/solar is spurious.
At least the newer ones will have better efficiency so will emit less GhG. Of course, that will likely be negated by the increase in demand. It's all rather sad. Hmm, maybe I've been reading too much of Kiashu's comments ;)
Well, no new coal plants would have to be commissioned if they didn't decide to phase out nuclear. Its entirely fair.
That's right, at $40/lb and we've barely even begun to look for it.
We're already mining uranium at a profit and with a high EROI in concentrations of 300 ppm(0.03%), e.g. see the Rössing uranium mine.
There's a ridiculous amount uranium in sea water that can be mined without significantly affecting the price of nuclear power.
Ignorance is best fought with information, not by abandoning a good idea just because someone has seen fit to spend an awful lot of money and effort on misinforming the public.
not by abandoning a good idea just because someone has seen fit to spend an awful lot of money and effort on misinforming the public.
The fission industry could have just shown its a good idea by actually delivering on its promises. Instead of delivering failure.
When first exposed to EROEI it sounded like a useful parameter, but the more I learn about it the less valuable it seems to be. It is generally used by people to promote their pet technologies, or to slam their least favorite technologies, by cherry picking the boundaries of the analysis.
It makes more sense to stick to the parameters that are a direct indication of the technologies value.
1 Cost per kWh including all externalities.
2 Emissions per kWh.
3 Capacity factor.
4 Controllability and predictability.
5 Expandability.
6 Safety
Solar has great long range potential, particularly in the area of genetic engineering. The goal should be to make hydrocarbon fuel out of water, air and sunshine, at an affordable cost, without interfering with food production. Existing solar technology is hobbled by high cost, intermittency and lack of economical storage technology.
Wind would be great if it blew at a steady 30mph all the time. Intermittency and limited room for improvement means wind kwh’s will never be cheap, but energy will be cheap someday and that will put an end to wind. Wind is a fad the world is going through, like hula hoops.
Bio mass is nice but there is not enough to make a big impact and it affects food production when we push it.
Fission is the only proven low emission technology that produces reliable cheap kWh’s and can be ramped up with mass production techniques.
Fossil fuels are still fairly abundant, cheap and are not required to pay for their CO2 and toxic emissions. The world still runs on fossil fuel and that enables people to fantasize about impractical energy technology.
The correlation between EROEI and practicality is weak. We should stick to the direct performance parameters that count.
My recommendation is to increase R&D by two orders of magnitude to $90 billion per year by adding 2.25 cents per kWh. Push every technology as hard as possible, build prototypes of everything as it becomes possible and publish the data. 20% would come from nuclear power and would pay for all the nuclear R&D. 80% of the money would be used for non nuclear R&D. Let the utilities choose the best technology to buy.
@Majorian :
It is a very selective presentation of facts when you claim that no breeder reactor is in operation. Most of these reactors have been dismantled due to political pressures, the Super Phénix reactor in France has to be stopped due to a missile attack by an environmental group !
Further, the current low prices of Uranium make it economically infeasible for developing a breeder reactor.
The technological challenges in doing this are minimal, when you compare with, for example, the Los Alamos project of building the nuclear bomb.
Being the idiots that the world leaders are, they would not do build breeder reactors until the very last moment. They would instead fight over middle eastern oil supplies, or pollute the world by drilling the last remaining ounce of Uranium.
India has already demonstrated very efficient designs of breeder reactors which harness Thorium, but this is likely to remain in the design stage for a couple of decades due to the lack of funds. But it is highly likely that the first commercial breeder reactor starts operating in India.
It takes some will and some education to convince the world of the potential of nuclear power.
I love that. "Political factors".
What does that mean?
It means the will of the people.
Is there some reason that we shouldn't follow the will of the people? Am I talking to yet more anti-democratic elitists? "Oh, the public is stupid, I know the true and right way, which must be imposed on the people whatever they say."
If the people don't want nuclear, they ought not to have nuclear. Likewise, with renewables, coal-fired stations, and so on.
I would only make it that each electorate, or council area - some area of 100,000-1,000,000 people - had to supply its own energy. What, if anything, are people willing to have in their backyard? I would simply make it that they could have any electricity generation method they wanted - including having no electricity at all.
I've no doubt that after proper public discussion and consultation about what they want in their backyards, the people would make sensible decisions.
Not how the world works though. You cannot get that enacted everywhere or even in one location.
Also, there is also outsourcing and trade. China makes hundreds of billions worth of manufactured goods for the US and Europe. The energy and pollution generated from that work is produced in China for goods used by your area of 100,000 to 1 million people.
California, Germany and other places put bans on nuclear and promote renewables but then make and use more coal power or import electricity from other places. Most of that imported electricity is coal or nuclear power.
As I said, "It takes some will and some education to convince the world of the potential of nuclear power."
In this blog, we discuss about the technological and economical feasibilities of alternatives to an oil run economy. Breeder reactors nullify most of the criticism heaped against nuclear power. My argument is that breeder reactors are technologically viable, so the critiques, if any, should address this point from a technological perspective.
In the end, it is for people to choose their destiny. It is obvious that an educated population makes a better choice.
When will you knuckleheads(vakibs) understand that nuclear power
will always rightly generate FEAR.
Why? Because nuclear power is the SAME technology as nuclear weapons.
Can you 're-educate' all those little Bin Ladins to use nuclear energy 'safely?
The temptation is always there. And in a world of falling energy the temptation will grow.
The best that you can offer is a 'balance of terror' argument, FOREVER.
Please spare future generations yet more FEAR. Things are going to get bad enough without that.
Is solar/wind really so uneconomic compared to a new arms race or a long terror war? In terms of land use, it's much better than hydro. Boulder Dam produces 50 GWh per day and Lake Meade covers 250 sq. miles. 25 square miles of solar would produce the same amount of energy.
If we can't put the genie back in the old bottle, let's try to put him in a very SMALL bottle.
NO NEW NUKES (and phase out the old ones).
This example of anti-nuclear rhetoric has nothing to do with our stated topic which is nuclear EROEI.
There are three paths to nuclear weapons.
1 Extracting weapons grade plutonium from low burnup fuel made in simple cheap unpressurized plutonium production reactors.
2 Extracting uranium 235 from natural uranium, referred to as enrichment.
3 Extracting power reactor grade plutonium from high burnup commercial reactor fuel. This is the most difficult, expensive and time consuming route. Power reactor plutonium contains heavier isotopes of plutonium that makes bomb design and fabrication extremely difficult. I do not know of any nuclear weapons state that uses this path.
How does eliminating the most difficult, expensive, untraveled path enhance our security, knowing that the easier paths will always be available with or without commercial nuclear power plants?
Consider this timeline;
August 1942; The president signs the order to start the Manhattan project.
October 1943; Ground breaking for worlds first plutonium production reactor.
September 1944; Reactor start up.
July 16, 1945; First Pu bomb explodes at Trinity Site.
August 9, 1945; Second Pu bomb explodes at Nagasaki.
August 10-15, 1945; Japan surrenders.
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/surrender.htm
That was at a time when knowledge of reactor physics, bomb physics and Pu metallurgy was very primitive.
The only countries that do not have nuclear weapons are those that do not want nuclear weapons, or at least have not wanted them until recently. South Africa for example, had nuclear weapons, than decided to close the program.
http://cns.miis.edu/research/safrica/chron.htm
Pakistan is now building its second and third Pu production reactors.
http://www.isis-online.org/publications/southasia/ThirdKhushabReactor.pdf
Pakistan may become an anti west Islamic country with a large arsenal of nuclear weapons designed by experts using weapons grade material. Pakistan will also contain the main campus of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist organization.
If western cities begin blowing up in substantial numbers, the bombs will likely be labeled, “Made in Pakistan without commercial nuclear power technology”.
The president of the United States should be leading a movement to eliminate nuclear weapons from the planet. Every humans safety would be enhanced, most of all, that of Americans.
Boeing jumbo jets are the obvious descendents of the B-52 bomber. Nobody suggests banning jumbo jets to limit the production of bombers. Even after 9-11 there was no call to stop manufacturing airliners. Most people understand that the benefits far outweigh the risk. The same is true for commercial nuclear power.
If a country wants nuclear weapons, why build a $5 billion power plant in several years to do what a simple unpressurized $10 million plant can do much better in two years?
Why deny ourselves the benefits of fission in an ineffective ploy to deny other countries the path to nuclear weapons that no one is using?
@majorian :
Would you equate your mother with a murderer ? Both use knives - one for cooking dinner and the other for killing people. Would you stop using a knife in your kitchen.. because you think potentially somebody can use it for murder ?
When the world adopted electric power for the very first time, there were several people protesting about it. Alternating Current (AC) could kill a person immediately with its high voltage. So what ? These type of highly intelligent protests now seem to have trickled down into the nuclear age.
You guys who argue against nuclear power have no clue. Do you have any idea of the link between the current food price inflation and the rising oil prices ? Do you have any link how much water could have been desalinated through nuclear plants and redirected in Australia, thus preventing the global-warming-engineered-drought that pushed up wheat prices in the world ? Do you have any idea about people dying in Indian hospitals due to lack of electricity ? You can complain about the nuclear demon sitting in your cosy little green cubicle, but nuclear energy is a matter of food, health and education for the several thousands of people in the world.
For the love of Athena, who is knuckleheaded ?
As I said earlier, breeder reactors make this entire EROEI argument ridiculous. Courtesy Prof John McCarthy :
Nuclear energy, assuming breeder reactors, will last for several billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life on earth.
Here are the basic facts.
1. In 1983, uranium cost $40 per pound. The known uranium reserves at that price would suffice for light water reactors for a few tens of years. Since then more rich uranium deposits have been discovered including a very big one in Canada. At $40 per pound, uranium contributes about 0.2 cents per kwh to the cost of electricity. (Electricity retails between 5 cents and 10 cents per kwh in the U.S.)
2. Breeder reactors use uranium more than 100 times as efficiently as the current light water reactors. Hence much more expensive uranium can be used. At $1,000 per pound, uranium would contribute only 0.03 cents per kwh, i.e. less than one percent of the cost of electricity. At that price, the fuel cost would correspond to gasoline priced at half a cent per gallon.
3. How much uranium is available at $1,000 per pound?
There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.
In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at $400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil $5.70, natural gas $3-4.)
4. How much uranium is there in seawater?
Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium, so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium. All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.
5. However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.
6. Cohen calculates that we could take 16,000 tonne per year of uranium from seawater, which would supply 25 times the world's present electricity usage and twice the world's present total energy consumption. He argues that given the geological cycles of erosion, subduction and uplift, the supply would last for 5 billion years with a withdrawal rate of 6,500 tonne per year. The crust contains 6.5x10^13 tonne of uranium.
7. He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource.
8. Here's a site discussing Japanese discovery of extracting uranium from seawater.
Comments:
* Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his postulated 5 billion years.
* He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium. There's less thorium in seawater than there is uranium.
* He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet. He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.
The main point to be derived from Cohen's article is that energy is not a problem even in the very long run. In particular, energy intensive solutions to other human problems are entirely acceptable.
Cohen's web site contains links to many of his articles. He's a particular expert on radiation hazards. His 1990 book The Nuclear Energy Option is on the web page. Its chapter on solar energy is especially interesting in its description of the 1990 hopes for solar energy.
Please find a reasonable nuclear physicist who claims that breeder reactors are technologically infeasible. There exists none, but you see this claim repeated millions of times in environmental websites. Nobody is developing breeder reactors because the current low price of Uranium makes them "economically" infeasible. Nothing else. So the world will sit in this tight-assed position until the sky falls down (until economical drilling of shallow Uranium reserves is no longer possible).
I disagree with Charles Barton. We are right now fighting a war based on alledged nuclear weapons ('uranium from Africa'..'form of a mushroom cloud'..etc, now costing 3 trillion dollars. And then there's Iran and Syria and...)
Stick that in your EROEI calculator. So much for your nuclear Nirvana.
These nookleheads sound like they're high on drugs.(BTW, 'several billion years' is nonsense..maybe 700 years tops).
Several billion years is indeed ridiculous. When you burn all the uranium and thorium on the planet as fast as possible without melting the planet you only end up with 16 million years worth of fuel. Its obvious we're in a crisis situation with nuclear fuel supply.
After all the crust only has 160 trillion tons of uranium and thorium, and the energy density of the crust is only tens of times greater than that of coal.
dezakin, you forgot all that uranium and thorium on Venus, Mars, and the Moon, not to mention all the uranium located at the center of the Earth.
I knew it would come to this.
The pro-nukies are literally out of their ever-loving minds.
Gasp! Nuke-lovers = techie cornucopians.
Some more than others; there is a theory, explanatory of nothing I know of, that a "georeactor" is down there.
However, geological evidence -- PDF -- suggests most of the whole Earth's uranium is near underfoot. If the concentration in the top few km extended all the way down, the planet would, I guess, still be glowing orange, and hardly any minerals would have crystallized.
Why would nature be obliged not to provide, in the continents' tops, many hundreds of millions of km^3 of stuff that is, with respect to today's reactors, at least as rich in net fission energy as the Alberta tar sands are in net tar combustion energy? What is misleading about the appearance that this is so?
Boron: A Better Energy Carrier than Hydrogen?
There are reasons for the heat generated inside the earth other than radiological decay. For example, the latent heat produced by liquid iron and other metals beeing deposited from the outer core onto the solid inner core. Plus some tidal friction created by the earth-moon-sun interactions. These are significant, and may, at least partly, explain the mentioned deficit.
majorian
majorian I understand that you disagree with me, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what you disagree with me about. You talk about the war in Iraq, nuclear weapons, uranium from Africa, mushroom clouds, three trillion dollars, Iran and syria, but I don't recall mentioning any of that. Maybe my memory is slipping. I don't see how any of that has anything to do with reactor EROEI. It seems to me that the ideological opponents of nuclear power have nothing to add to the discussion, and so they talk about the first thing that pops into their minds.
Perhaps you are referring to my attitude on breeders. But ordinary reactors produce plutonium that can be used in bombs. The North Koreans built their own plutonium producing reactors without anyones help. So I am not sure how not producing breeder reactors will prevent "war in Iraq, nuclear weapons, uranium from Africa, mushroom clouds, three trillion dollars, Iran and Syria from God knows what you think they will do, if we build breeder reactors.
Now there are other commenters on this post who think that breeder reactors are so hard to build, that no one is will ever be able to build one. Those guys are closer to your side of the argument than mine, why don't you get together with them, and sort things out. If you decide that breeders are so easy build, and that North Korea will build one as soon as we do, they come back and we will talk. If on the other hand you cannot agree with your friends, maybe you should wait until one side gives up, before you discuss this further.
Charles,
I don't want to argue this but when you calculate your rosy nuclear EROEI be sure to add in all the fear-based consequences of nuclear fuel. I know it isn't logical, but look at the
a vast expensive military apparatus and wars of pre-emption, the product of the special fear governments have about nukes.
For example, people used to use a lot of nasty solvents in dry cleaning, they had to put in explosion proof electrical systems, special interceptors for air and water pollution, buy extra insurance, etc. Then somebody developes a water based drycleaning system, that does away with all that.
Be sure to add in the 'all that' into your calculation.
I for one would like to see a future world with much less nuclear- inspired fear in it. Just because we avoid annihilation over the last 60 years doesn't mean the danger has passed.
majorian, one of the roles of educated people in society is to help other people overcome irrational fears. It certainly is not to manipulate those fears to further irrational personal and group agendas.
My fears are of coal, which is a proven killer, and also of energy shortages leading to disruption and warfare, and of global warming.
All of these perils are many orders of magnitude greater than the theoretical dangers of nuclear power.
Most of the fears of nuclear are, as you point out, deeply irrational.
My fears energy shortages leading to disruption and warfare
Would one nation (who lacks X) attacking another nation because they have X be OK?
Solving for X:
What about if an attack of a fission power plant happens BECAUSE the nation state attacked won't let the attacking nation state have their own fission power plants to provide their citizens with all the cheap, clean abundant nuclear power that is too cheap to meter?
Its a good thing the above kind of thought won't happen as 'cheap, clean abundant nuclear power that is too cheap to meter' doesn't exist. But what if Davemart - what if?
Regarding Price Anderson insurance.
Imagine that the terrorist attack on 9-11 never took place. Instead, suppose that on a busy weekday morning at about 11 AM, a design defect in the floor attach fittings of a World Trade Center building caused a mid level floor to collapse on to the floor below it.
That started a chain reaction collapse that brought the building down. The upper floors tipped into the other WTC tower, triggering the same defect and bringing it down.
There is no evacuation because there is no warning, and 40,000 people die in 30 seconds.
A Boeing 747 takes off with a full load of fuel on a long international flight. One minute after takeoff it flies through the wake of another jumbo jet. The turbulence causes an undetected crack in the vertical fin to propagate, and the fin snaps off. The 747 yaws sideways, rolls onto its back and dives down through the roof of a giant sports arena holding the national championship basketball game.
200,000 pounds of fuel atomizes on impact with the floor and erupt in an enormous fireball inside the building, consuming all the oxygen and incinerating 40,000 people on live HD worldwide television.
In 1997 the EPA determined that a human life was worth $5.8 million.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/funding.nsf/ef8d219bc45f0868852564c60072e0ea/d078ad618c325c5b85256c8e00788885!OpenDocument
Corrected for inflation, that is $7.6 million now.
The loss in each case would be $304 billion for human life, plus the property loss.
The WTC did not carry this level of insurance. Should they have been prevented from constructing those buildings without adequate insurance?
The airlines do not carry this level of insurance, should the airlines be grounded for lack of adequate insurance coverage?
Coal plants are killing over 20,000 Americans each year.
That is a $175 billion loss each year that the coal plants are not paying for, a virtual subsidy.
Dam failures have killed 8000 people in the U.S.
http://www.fema.gov/plan/prevent/damfailure/pdf/fema-94-inflow-design-fl...
In 1975 a single dam failure in China killed about 30,000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Dams in the U.S. are not insured for the maximum imaginable loss. Should we tear down all dams and give up our hydroelectric power?
You are holding a wedding reception for 150 people in your home. An F5 tornado sucks your home and its contents up to 1,000 feet, grinds it into small pieces, and deposits the mess in a field 2 miles away, killing everybody.
The tornado loss is $1.14 billion plus the property loss. Are you carrying that much liability insurance on your house? If not, should you be denied the privilege of owning a home?
If we required every corporation and individual to obtain insurance coverage for the worst possible event no matter how unlikely, we would have no civilization at all.
The Price Anderson Act requires that the utilities provide $10 billion in insurance coverage without cost to the public or government and without fault needing to be proven.
http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf67.html
It covers power reactors, research reactors, and all other nuclear facilities.
It was renewed for 20 years in mid 2005, with strong bipartisan support, and requires individual operators to be responsible for two layers of insurance cover. The first layer is where each nuclear site is required to purchase US $300 million liability cover which is provided by two private insurance pools.
The second layer is jointly provided by all US reactor operators. It is funded through retrospective payments if required of up to $96 million per reactor per accident collected in annual installments of $15 million (and adjusted with inflation). Combined, the total provision comes to over $10 billion paid for by the utilities. (The Department of Energy also provides $10 billion for its nuclear activities.) Beyond this cover and irrespective of fault, Congress, as insurer of last resort, must decide how compensation is provided in the event of a major accident.
More than $200 million has been paid by US insurance pools in claims and costs of litigation since the Price- Anderson Act came into effect, all of it by the insurance pools. Of this amount, some $71 million related to litigation following the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.
American Nuclear Insurers is a pool comprised of investor-owned stock insurance companies. About half the pool's total liability capacity comes from foreign sources such as Lloyd's of London. The average annual premium for a single-unit reactor site is $400,000.
Two teenage brothers are home alone. They break into the liquor closet and find a half gallon of tequila. The older boy challenges the younger brother, “Bet you can’t drink the whole bottle”. “Yes I can” says the younger boy, and proceeds to start chugging. He passes out without finishing it, losing the bet, and within the hour looses his life.
This establishes that 64 oz. of tequila is a lethal dose. The Linear No Threshold (LNT) model says that if 64 people each drink one ounce of tequila one of them will be dead within the hour.
This is how we calculate the risk of low level radiation.
60 years of studying the effects of radiation has still not proven low level radiation to be harmful or beneficial. We can say with absolute certainty that the health effects of low level radiation are very small compared to other risks we accept without much thought.
Google “radiation hormesis” for an interesting debate, or try this.
http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/content/full/179/5/1137
The Chernobyl accident exposed millions of people to a small dose of radiation. The estimates of the number of deaths from Chernobyl over the next 40 years range from 4,000 (IAEA), to 100,000 (Greenpeace), based on the LNT theory.
If radiation hormesis turns out to be valid the Chernobyl accident may prevent thousands of cancer deaths.
The Chernobyl reactor had design defects that, combined with gross operator error, allowed it to go rapidly to 100 times the design power level, creating a powerful steam explosion that tore the roof off the building and dispersed fuel. It could never have been licensed in the US.
If it had an appropriately designed containment building for that reactor design, the release would have been minor.
Modern reactors have improved instrumentation and control systems, passive safety systems and strong containments designed to contain a full meltdown.
http://www.areva-np.com/common/liblocal/docs/Brochure/BROCHURE_EPR_US_2.pdf
http://www.ans.org/pubs/magazines/nn/docs/2006-1-3.pdf
Nobody is going to build another Titanic, or a De Havilland Comet, or a Chernobyl reactor.
Authors of A Solar Grand Plan,
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan&page=1
published in Scientific American, propose a solar plan that could be used by terrorists to kill millions of Americans.
http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan/Solar-Grand-Pl...
Do you think this plan can get insurance? Nuclear does not have to be perfect, just better than any other practical option, which it is.
I cannot think of any industry that handles insurance coverage as well as nuclear power.
Mr. Hannahan,
Thank you.
I've never read a better synopsis.
And I notice how you can not show where members of the fission industry stated to Congress that Price-Anderson is not needed because civilian electrical power is so safe that Price-Anderson needs to not be renewed.
published in Scientific American, propose a solar plan that could be used by terrorists to kill millions of Americans.
Bill, you just don't get it do you? The solution to large scale organized terrorism is not smaller transmission lines, it is removing the organized terrorism threat altogether. Such terrorist could do severe damage to any kind of infrastructure and more. This is simply unacceptable, and such terrorism must be stopped even if it costs us greatly.
And all these calculations you did in the Sciam comments about costings? No need, because the authors already took this into account in their calculations of levelized cost. That's why it's called a levelized cost. You make all kinds of assumptions to state your case, and in those estimates your bias shows. Things like 200 million population by 2100 (every professional estimate disagrees with this, way too low, but convenient for you as you could spread your already exaggerated costs over a smaller population) and your nuclear figures that are just too low; 4 bucks a Watt, it's 5-8 and more likely 6-8 bucks a Watt, perhaps higher if there are more cost escalations. This yields a higher cost than the Sciam target, so nuclear plants would have to come down a lot in cost, which is uproven. Indeed, history shows nuclear getting more expensive, and there are significant uncertainties about decommissioning and waste disposal cost which may add 1, 2 or even 3 cents per kWh to the running costs. Rather than engaging in endless propaganda, I'm more than happy to let the market deal with this issue, with a little help from a carbon tax, production tax credit and a small feed-in tariff on top of the regular sale price for all alternative energy.
Nuclear does not have to be perfect, just better than any other practical option, which it is.
It might be at some point in the future, but it's definately not now. It's expensive and can't scale fast enough to displace total fossil fuel use, not on it's own it can't. In a broader portfolio of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, biomass, marine renewables etc. it may contribute substantially, and future designs such as the liquid fluoride reactor have great potential. And even then, with all the options on the table, it will still be very difficult to slash fossil fuel use by mid century.
As has been pointed out before, the nuclear absolutism you employ is counter-productive. The goal should be to replace coal, not to replace solar.
" Bill, you just don't get it do you? The solution to large scale organized terrorism is not smaller transmission lines, it is removing the organized terrorism threat altogether. "
What is your 100% reliable plan for doing that? Until it is done lets not give them an easy target for killing millions of Americans.
" And all these calculations you did in the Sciam comments about costings? No need, because the authors already took this into account in their calculations of levelized cost. That's why it's called a levelized cost. "
I only estimated the cost of the transmission system which the authors spent very little time on and seem to think is a minor issue.
From their paper;
" Subsidies would be gradually deployed from 2011 to 2020. With a standard 30-year payoff interval, the subsidies would end from 2041 to 2050. The HVDC transmission companies would not have to be subsidized, because they would finance construction of lines and converter stations just as they now finance AC lines, earning revenues by delivering electricity….
The sunlight's there; that's proven. The CAES plants have caverns, but are otherwise like today's power plants with natural gas. Solar today is at about 15 c/kWh in the desert, and all we need is something like 10; but we think we can get to 6, with time and money - so 10 c/kWh fully dispatchable (or 15 c/kWh, worst case). "
http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan/Solar-Grand-Pl...
" We include all the costs (including about a penny a kWh for HVDC transmission from the Southwest), and the price of electricity becomes equivalent to reasonable expectations about fossil fuel costs, without subsidies. In fact, I suspect solar will be cheaper than fossil fuels, given the way things are going. "
http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan/Solar-Grand-Pl...
Assuming a generous solar capacity factor of 25%, the average energy flow to the eastern U.S. will be 1.3TW. At one cent per kWh the transmission income will be $114 billion per year. This is only 1.5% of the $7.6 trillion transmission system cost. The authors missed their HVDC cost estimate by 500%-600%. The authors estimate buss bar cost of 12 cents per kWh. Add 6 cents for HVDC plus 4 cents for local utility we get 22 cents/ kWh to the customer, assuming they did not blow their buss bar estimate.
But they did blow their cost estimate because they did not realize that all the biomass in the country was only a small fraction of the CAES requirement until I showed them using their own reference.
http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan/Solar-Grand-Pl...
They responded by adding a massively expensive solar-electric-hydrogen system including a massive block of additional transmission capacity not included in their or my calculations.
" this will be only a fraction of the total fuel required in the U.S. for electricity generation, transportation, etc. The rest of the fuel we propose in the Solar Grand Plan is hydrogen (H2) produced by the electrolysis of water using solar and wind electricity for the electrolysis process. "
http://science-community.sciam.com/topic/Solar-Grand-Plan/Solar-Grand-Pl...
" You make all kinds of assumptions to state your case, and in those estimates your bias shows. Things like 200 million population by 2100 (every professional estimate disagrees with this, way too low "
Nobody knows what the population will be in 2100. It could be less than 300,000,000.
http://www.mnforsustain.org/united_states_population_growth_graph.htm
Even less if we build the Solar Grand Plan and the terrorists have their way.
" your nuclear figures that are just too low; 4 bucks a Watt, it's 5-8 and more likely 6-8 bucks a Watt "
A 1500 MW nuclear plant making the same 18 cents/kWh with a 90% capacity factor would earn $1.9 billion per year. Using your largest cost estimate it would pay for itself in less than eight years and then continue to make electricity for 50 years at less than 2 cents per kWh.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html
" Nuclear does not have to be perfect, just better than any other practical option, which it is.
It might be at some point in the future, but it's definately not now. It's expensive and can't scale fast enough to displace total fossil fuel use, not on it's own it can't. "
France is 80% nuclear and has the lowest electricity costs in Europe. Which low emission technology can produce more energy at lower cost?
" As has been pointed out before, the nuclear absolutism you employ is counter-productive. The goal should be to replace coal, not to replace solar. "
You missed my point, solar cannot replace coal at an affordable price, nuclear can. For the cost of the Grand Solar Plan’s HVDC transmission system, which is a small fraction of the total GSP cost, we can have reliable safe inexpensive nuclear power.
What is your 100% reliable plan for doing that? Until it is done lets not give them an easy target for killing millions of Americans.
There is no reliable plan to do it. The point is that if the terrorist can do such damage to electrical infrastructure, they can do it to anything. Besides, it's easy to shoot a few mortars or small missiles into all the lines leaving the nukes, and then you'd have 1500 MWe damage. Hardly any more difficult than advanced shape charges. Protecting the nukes against these mortar/small missile attacks would be a prohibitive cost, as the terrorists could stand miles away from the nuke with their mortars. This just isn't a pro-nuclear argument.
I only estimated the cost of the transmission system which the authors spent very little time on and seem to think is a minor issue.
No, their estimates are in line with other research on macro-scale energy grids. Delivered costs of the HVDC portion of 1 cent/kwh is an often quoted figure. Check out some of the literature in the field, you clearly haven't. For example, DeCarolis and Keith, Cavallo etc on large scale wind HVDC costs, and they used smaller 2 GWe lines.
Assuming a generous solar capacity factor of 25%, the average energy flow to the eastern U.S. will be 1.3TW. At one cent per kWh the transmission income will be $114 billion per year. This is only 1.5% of the $7.6 trillion transmission system cost. The authors missed their HVDC cost estimate by 500%-600%.
Your estimate for levelized cost is totally deviating from scientific work in the field, such as DeCarolis and Keith (2006) for example have calculated. It appears you're using very high figures, such as 1.50 million per kW mile when it's more like 0.6 million per kW mile in DeCarolis and Keith. A worldbank study even puts it the line only costs at 0.25 million per kW mile, adding substations, land and miscellanious costs brings the estimate closer to the 0.6 million I've seen.
Using the 10 TW figure, that would be perhaps 3 TW of nuclear. At today's project costings would likely cost 15-24 trillion, and history indicates they will escalate further, whereas solar's historic trend shows a declining cost. You could go a bit higher on capacity factor but that requires storage etc. There's a lot of need for storage for the nukes if run at close to 100% capacity factor, so they incur such costs as well as they have to deal with baseload vs grid demand load issues. They could be load following, but that would require more like 5 TW which would cost about 25-40 trillion if they don't escalate further, which is silly considering the clear historic upward price trend. The total cost of the grid would be much smaller than the higher cost of the nuclear powerplants incurred by higher cost in general, cost overruns, decommissioning and waste disposal (probably in that order).
Anyways, $7.6 trillion dollars for 10 TW total is only 76 cents per Watt extra on the system. The decommissioning cost of nuclear power plants alone might be substantially greater than that number, even after favourable discounting. For example, decommissioning the UK nuclear fleet has been costed at about 1200 cents per Watt, in the ballpark of 600 cents per Watt after discounting is taken into account. And some US decommissioning experience shows much higher decommissioning costs (eg Big Rock Point which is being decommissioned right now looks like maybe 500 to 600 cents). This is much higher than the transmission costs even when capacity factor and discounting are counted. There is quite a bit of uncertainty on total costs for the US fleet. It may be as low as the historic average, or and order of magnitude higher.
France is 80% nuclear and has the lowest electricity costs in Europe. Which low emission technology can produce more energy at lower cost?
That worked for a small country decades ago. Now and for the entire world it's more difficult. Nuclear would have to scale exponentially, but history shows more like a lineary scaling. China is building all the nukes it can get, but still coal scales much, much faster so nuclear won't displace it. Many industries have been moribund for years. They are building all they can and just can't keep up even with just a moderate increase in demand worldwide. Try as I might, I cannot come up with a reasonable light water reactor deployment model agressive enough to increase the nuclear share of worldwide electricity over the next few decades. Unless there's huge strides made on efficiency and conservation. Even then, I think we need a different design such as fluid fueled reactors to change the game.
You missed my point, solar cannot replace coal at an affordable price, nuclear can
This is just untrue, read the above. Current commercial nuclear technology is way more expensive than cheap abundant coal, and nuclear can definately not scale faster than coal, not even close. To do that, we need technologies that can sustain exponential growth for longer periods.
For the cost of the Grand Solar Plan’s HVDC transmission system, which is a small fraction of the total GSP cost, we can have reliable safe inexpensive nuclear power.
No, that couldn't even pay for the cost overruns of the nukes. It may be enough to pay for the decommissioning and waste related costs, if these costs don't escalate too much.
Again, I'm more than happy to let the market handle the cost issues.
Cyril
I used the actual power line cost, without land, for a U.S. utility and then reduced it by 1/3. In reality 5GW lines are too small and nobody knows how to make 100GW lines or what they will cost.
Show me an actual construction cost for an HVDC line recently built in the U.S. and I will use that number.
The other problem is that the GSP transmission lines will be standing idle or at low power most of the time, so the cost per kWh is much higher than for conventional applications quoted in literature.
The authors assumed the transmission cost of only 1cent/kWh and bus bar cost of 12 cent/kWh, so they think HVDC is 1/13 of total cost of GSP, and none of these calculations include the hugely expensive solar – electric – hydrogen system.
The Grand Solar Plan is totally impractical.
Regarding Price Anderson insurance.
So where is the links to the statements from the fission industry where they say they are so safe they no longer need Price-Anderson?
Why is it yet another poster unable to show such statements?