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A review of the underlying fundamentals of nuclear energy
Posted by Jerome a Paris on March 12, 2007 - 11:30am in The Oil Drum: Europe
I've been meaning to do a big nuclear energy diary for a long while, but Real Life constraints have prevented me from doing so. In the meantime, NNadir has been providing a steady stream of informative diaries on various aspects of the nuclear energy technology (read them all here).
As NNadir, who does not hide his (pro-nuclear) biases, I'll start by stating mine: I'm favorable to nuclear, as it is vastly superior in all respects to the coal-fired plants that dominate the industry in many countries, but I think we should focus policy first on conservation, then on renewable energy (in particular wind power, the sector I finance), and then only on nuclear. But that does mean that I consider nuclear to be invitable and thus necessary. I would like to note also that I am influenced by the French experience, which is highly successful, and has a number of traits which I think are desirable for the industry (strong State involvement, including for the financing of the sector, strong and independent regulation) and which may reflect my personal biases (the engineers that built and run the sector are alumni of the same university as me).
- is it safe? In particular, can it withstand a major terrorist attack?
- what do we do with the waste?
- do we have enough uranium anyway?
- is it cost effective? And do the announced costs include everything?
- aren't there better options to pursue before nuclear?
Is it safe?
I'll answer that one simply: nuclear energy can theoretically lead to much worse accidents than other industrial activities, but it can also be made safe. The risks are understood, the required procedures and technical standards are defined and can be adapted to effectively eliminate the risk of large scale incidents.
The circumstances that would lead to a large scale incident are quite remote and they require more effort, planning and resources than could likely take place. More importantly, should any group with murderous intent ever have access to that kind of resources, they are many much simpler acts that would have a bigger impact than an attack against a nuclear power plant with military grade protection.
Which brings us back to ensuring that safeguards and procedures exist and are actually enforced. That's a task that can only be run and managed by a public body with the ability to retain competent personnel and to impose rules on the industry. That requires clear laws, a strong culture of regulatory enforcement, and the necessary high level political support and funding for the relevant body.
To me, this is the single most important element to ensure that nuclear is viable, and to make it possible for the public to trust the industry, something that a culture of secrecy and occasional contempt for the public has damaged.
That said, it has to be noted here that we tend to hold the nuclear industry to much higher standards than other bits of the power industry. I fail to understand why the public does not hold the coal industry to the same kinds of requirements, and tolerates amazingly high levels of pollution and other damage to the environment from coal mining and burning operations - and a proven high level of avoidable deaths in the general population every year. Coal (just like roads) seems, for some reason, an acceptable killer.
Two wrongs do not make a right, so there is no reason to argue for similarly sloppy supervision of the nuclear industry, but the double standard has to be noted, in particular with respect to the impact on the cost of each form of generation. A fair requirement would be to apply equivalent rules to all sectors on safety, pollution, and internalisation of all externalities.
What to do with the waste
The very long term, apparently open-ended need to take care into the distant future of what are potentially highly dangerous materials is the other big argument brought forward to show that nuclear energy is an unreasonable proposition.
Again, the technical solutions are, to a large extent, known. The volumes of material, their dangerosity and how they should be handled are known. The technical requirements for safe storage can be met. If done properly, it is possible to say that we are not leaving boig ticking bombs to our descendants. Two important requirements should be that (i) storage be reversible, so that, as we discover new technologies and new uses for nucleotides, we reduce the volume of waste stored and (ii) the cost of storage should be as transparent as possible and fully taken into account in the price of the energy.
Again, these are requirements that can be met with strong regulatory supervision of the industry. And again, these are requirements that are simply not applied to other power generation sources, except for wind power (which is currently obliged to pay for its decommissioning costs, something that I have never seen for any industrial activity, and certainly not for coal-fired plants or chemical factories). Can we make sure that the carbon dioxide spewed out into the atmosphere for the rest of eternity by gas-fired plants is not around to destroy our descendants's livelihood? Can we make sure that the mercury sent in the atmosphere by coal-burning plants - also for eternity - will not be around to pollute what our descendants eat and breathe?
Mercuty kills and hurts more people every year than nuclear waste ever has. Same with carbon dioxide.
How much uranium is there
I'll admit quite frankly that this is the question for which I have the least visibility. I have seen arguments that convincingly demonstrate that uranium is not an issue in the foreseaable future, and I have seen others that point to a looming shortage in a relatively small number of decades. Uranium is a relatively plentiful element, and so is thorium, which could be used in reactors of a slightly different (but known) design, but what matters is how much it costs to bring about the requisite volumes at the necessary concentration. I cannot answer that question myself right now, but would note that the pessimistic scenarios seem to put a "peak uranium" date pretty close to the expected date for peak coal (see this diary: Even coal (clean or not) will not save the US way of life).
is it cost effective?
Ultimately, all these requirements bring us back to the issue of how much it costs to provide for our needs. I discussed the issue of what influences the cost of electricity in this fairly detailed diary last year (The real cost of electricity - some numbers) which I can only encourage you to read.
With respect to nuclear, as an industry with a combination of high upfront investment costs, low (even if increasing) fuel costs, and high, but far away decommissioning and waste management costs, the fundamental driver of electricity cost is going to be the discount rate used - i.e. the long term cost of money. Low interest rates mean that initial investments can be spread easily over the long term, thus bringing about vastly lower production costs. That means one simple thing: nuclear will always be much cheaper if financed by the State - and that holds true even if (especially if) the State financed all possible technologies. Similarly, the impact on production costs of decommissioning and waste storage requirements will depend on public decisions about the acceptable lifetime of plants. While there are objective technological constraints there, there will always be room for political decisions there. Finally, the cost of catastrophic insurance cannot be borne by the private sector and will always be borne (whether by law as in the US via the Price Anderson Act, or in practice in all countries) by governments, the only entity able to act should a large scale accident happen. How that insurance is priced is to a large extent a political decision, and it will depend fundamentally on the quality of the regulatory oversight imposed on the industry.
This may sound convenient for someone who frequently praises the positive role that government can and should play, but the above shows that nuclear is an industry that can only be viable with heavy governmental involvement, and its competitiveness will hinge on decisions by public authorities, in particular with respect to the cost of financing. Those that argue for nuclear should make that point explicitly, and recognize that investing in nuclear energy requires governmental consent, supervision and involvement, and thus democratic support. once that step is made, the case for a government-run industry is quite strong, provided that the same government is able to put in place independent regulatory oversight at the same time.
What makes nuclear different from other sectors in power generation is that every angle requires government involvement. Wind would benefit from public funding for its high initial investment costs, but requires only limited oversight after that. Coal requires tough regulation of emissions and pollution, but public funding would help it only little.
Aren't there better options to pursue before nuclear?
With all that said, I'll restate here the order in which things would be done, in an ideal world:
- first, conservation and energy efficiency. "Negawatts" are the cheapest and most underexploited resource we have;
- second, renewable energies, starting with wind. They are proven technologies, are scalable and wind is already competitive, price wise;
- third, nuclear. it's the least bad way to provide the base load capacity we'll need in the foreseeable future;
- fourth, gas-fired plants. Gas is less polluting than coal, gas turbines are very flexible to use. Such plants will probably be needed (in places that do not have sufficient hydro) to manage the permanent adjustment of supply to demand that electricity requires;
- last, coal should be dismantled as quickly as possible from its current high levels of use - and new construction should be stopped.
I often have a discussion about wind with the pro-nuclear crowd; whereby they point out that wind is still providing an insignificant share of our needs, and that its intermittent nature will impose the presence of some other form of baseload capacity to ensure certainty of supply. To me, the first argument is not one, and we should make all efforts to ensure that wind reaches the 20% of production that are acknowledged as the level that can be absorbed at little cost by the networks. The second one is very real, and barring a breakthrough in storage technology (something not to be discounted) or in some smart combination of wind turbines with other on-demand technologies at a reasonable cost, it is true that wind will not be able to provide for all of our demand, and thus, the least damaging source available is, indeed, nuclear. Solar is still very expensive, and large scale use (again, barring major technology breakthroughs) is likely to involve massive pollution (and depletion) risks as the materials used for now are highly polluting and some are quite scarce. Biomass can play a role within sustainably harvested forestry programmes. Other biofuels and waste will always remain marginal (given the limited supply sources).
Thus, I expect nuclear to be pursued, but it would be better if it were done with the following conditions fulfilled:
- strict public oversight (which should exclude a number of countries from pursuing it);
- full transparency in waste management and accounting;
- democratic support, and
- ideally, public funding.
In fact, these conditions should apply to all forms of power generation, starting with coal-fired plants. But will the public have the stomach for full cost accounting of our current energy use? If, in all likelihood, the answer is no, then we will have an energy policiy that focuses on the exact opposite order: coal will come first, followed by nuclear and some renewables. And we'll keep on dying from air pollution and global warming while worrying about nuclear waste.
Some further diaries:
Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?> by Martin Savior here at the Oil Drum
NNadir diaries over at European Tribune
How Sweden deals with nuclear waste by Starvid
Nuclear renaissance in Europe, part 2 by Starvid
Nuclear renaissance in Europe, part 1 by Starvid
The Nuclear Skeptic Part 2: Megaprojects vs Micropower by DeAnander
The Nuclear Skeptic, Part 1: Sketching the Playing Field by DeAnander
Chernobyl +20: retrospectives and dispatches (long) by DeAnander
Chernobyl's Downplayed Victims by DoDo
Case for nuclear energy 'overwhelming'? by Jerome a Paris
Government works. The exemple of power generation by Jerome a Paris
A Nuclear Lobby Lie by DoDo
Nuclear energy in France - a Sunday special by Jerome a Paris
On waste, the English version of the site of the French nuclear waste management agency is a good place to start.
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I've put it this way: the more one learns about coal, the better nuclear looks.
If it were up to me, I would implement an energy consumption tax, or at least fossil fuel consumption tax, combined with a crash wind/nuclear program, and Alan Drake's program:
http://www.energybulletin.net/14492.html
Electrification of transportation as a response to peaking of world oil production
Alan S. Drake, Light Rail Now
Electrification of transportation ought to be the leading economic and policy response to the advent of "Peak Oil."
first published March 31, 2006.
Yes, as a former (regrettably) anti nuke activist, go nuclear. But ban coal now. And plan to phase out existing coal plants. It's our only hope. With coal, the world is very much doomed.
Sigh. In an energy-short world, phasing out coal plants is just not going to happen. Especially with high-investment replacements.
If we are only concerned with CO2 then stopping new construction (without sequestration) within a decade and then gradually decommissioning over the next half century might be acceptable from a climate change point of view i.e. it would keep us under 450ppmv CO2 concentration.
Excellent idea.
Free also.
.
Jeffrey,
Wind power can never provide significant power into a main AC grid because of it's intermittency. Most people advocating so called renewable power generation have no knowledge of the highly complex and technical requirements to keep a grid operational.
Wind and solar certainly can have a place in stand alone systems. I won't go into too much techncial detail here but there are something like 100,000 large AC generators in the US grid system. That power has to be provided within 1% tolerance for voltages across the system and most importantly a necessary amount of reactive power must be produced by generators to supplement those that can't provide it.
It also does not travel long distances and is vital in stabilalising falling voltages due to overload and is a necessary part of providing generator excitation both in motors and large generators.
Fault currents have to be independently sent to monitor the system and the whole system kept to very accurate frequency control by timing devices using GPS. Renewables cannot provide some of these capabilities in many instances. This is not my opinion but facts stated by at least six electrical engineers whose reports I have read, some of whom have long grid experience as well as others who are Professors in their field and also have experience in many aspects of electrical engineering.
E. on Netz the largest operator in the world with wind turbines in their network have reported huge problems with wind and their reports should be read. A further very significant reason why solar and wind cannot provide enough power is that when the wind is too strong, wind can't operate and if the wind is too strong it will be associated with severe weather.
Lines of thunderstorms with hail, lightening and extreme turbulence will wreck any of these types of systems if the cell passes overhead. On any day there are 50,000 active thunderstorms around the world with 20 to 30 million associated lightening strikes. Two recent storms systems in the US which hit Denver and Seattle should be a sober reminder of what nature can do - and we haven't even mentioned hurricanes.
Jeffrey, I could expand on this and quote references etc but I will do it privately if you are interested.
All the points that you make can be overcome with good engineering, a network of perhaps 75 to 100 HV DC lines (1,000+ km & 3+ GW each) and significnat amounts of pumped storage.
High % wind power is NOT the way that have done things before so "changes will be required". But they can be done IMO.
Alan
I may just publish my draft of a non-GHG North American grid without much more development. It is a "non-trivial" exercise.
Down Under - "Wind power can never provide significant power into a main AC grid because of it's intermittency. Most people advocating so called renewable power generation have no knowledge of the highly complex and technical requirements to keep a grid operational."
Absolute and complete rubbish. The report you mention is from the German Coal industry and is not an unbiased report. Wind is less intermittant than you think and can be predicted reasonably well from advanced weather prediction that is starting to be used today. Plenty of people without coal industry axes to grind have done studies to show that wind can be a significant part of the grid with little trouble. As you are also from Australia I would suspect that you are part of coal industry mafia that operates here and renewable power people in Oz battle against.
One of the problems is that thermal coal is baseload and is ill suited to interfacing with a rapidly changing grid. Combined cycle gas is much better as it can vary on demand rather than following demand. Look to Esperance for way forward with wind supplying up to 22% of the town's electricity supply, despite forming only 15% of the generating capacity, in combination with a natural gas power plant.
Coal's days are over mate. It it long past time that this 1800s technology was put to bed for good. Clinging onto the past like Howard's 1950s government is doing is really starting to look pathetic. Investing 100 million in a coal plant is really bordering on corrupt.
http://stevegloor.typepad.com/sgloor/2007/03/the_question_is.html
Ender,
It is not rubbish at all. I am not from the coal industry nor ever worked in it and in fact agree with you that coal is not a desirable form of power long term and gas is certainly preferable. Nuclear is in my opinion the best way forward for base power.
Wind cannot be predicted in advance and never will. It changes by the minute, always has and always will. Anyone stating this knows nothing about the weather. The E.on Netz report had nothing to do with coal companies as it is an electric utility. You didn't address the technical issues I raised because I suspect you don't understand them
Wind CAN be predicted in advance, and most wind turbines have a flat output curve over a broad range of wind speeds (such as 12 to 25 m/s). (the exact shape is a matter of economic design, most generators are smaller than max capacity of the blades. Smaller generators allow for lighter towers, it is just economics).
There are many places in the world where one can predict that a wide geographic range will see wind speeds between 12 & 25 m/s for a dozen hours in advance. And if there are, say twelve wind farms in a row behind an advancing front; one can see changes in the leading farm and predict the timing and results for the eleven behind with some confidence once operating history has been developed.
BTW, large fossil fuel plants (such as 500 MW) "trip" fairly frequently, yet the grid adapts and rarely crashes. How can 1.5 MW WTs (with high rotating inertia) slow down a bit in their output and yet the grid just cannot deal with this !?
If a few handfuls of WTs go offline due to excessive winds, NO BIG DEAL ! Your thunderstorm example was "stuff & nonsense" for a widespread grid. Just a triviality.
New Zealand says that they can take 35% wind without further study or grid modification. The only requirement is a minimum of geographic diversification.
At least 20 % wind should be possible without extensive grid modification. Just look at Denmark. Of course, it's located next to about 50,000 MW's of hydro power and lots of German gas plants, but still.
Down Under - "Nuclear is in my opinion the best way forward for base power."
Great - so in a county like ours with unlimited land area for wind and solar you think a nuclear is the best option. What do you do with the waste? Bury it in the outback where you can forget about it?
"Wind cannot be predicted in advance and never will."
Really? What about predicting the weather? I am sure that the BOM would disagree. There are now highly accurate models and forecasting techniques that do work:
"To address these needs, 3TIER Environmental Forecast Group develops, maintains and operates a comprehensive environmental forecast system to provide forecast information for its clients. We have found that recent advances in computer power, coupled with advances in environmental simulation models and improvements to global and local observational systems allow us to predict the weather and the state of the environment accurately for a specific site and a specific resource."
http://www.djc.com/news/en/11146933.html
"You didn't address the technical issues I raised because I suspect you don't understand them"
That is partly true as I am not an engineer however I can address some of them.
"I won't go into too much techncial detail here but there are something like 100,000 large AC generators in the US grid system. That power has to be provided within 1% tolerance for voltages across the system and most importantly a necessary amount of reactive power must be produced by generators to supplement those that can't provide it."
Yes that is true however storage options for renewable power is becoming increasingly cost effective. Several options are now in use in Australia. Modern wind turbines are now variable speed meaning that all frequency stabilisation is done with power electronics rather than controlling the speed of the turbine. Even a small reserve of ultracaps makes wind power stable frequency wise and able to cope with large swings in wind strength without upsetting the frequency. Furthermore even small amounts of storage within the renewable power electronics can help stabilise the grid as the frequency and phase of the power controllers can be varied easily and quickly to bring the grid back into sync.
"Lines of thunderstorms with hail, lightening and extreme turbulence will wreck any of these types of systems if the cell passes overhead. On any day there are 50,000 active thunderstorms around the world with 20 to 30 million associated lightening strikes."
Wind turbines are all lightning protected and have survival wind speeds of up to 240km/hr. In these sort of conditions the blades are automatically feathered, locked down and do not spin. This is no more a valid argument that objecting to a NP plant because of the same objections.
Perhaps you could answer a few of my objections to NP and perhaps comment on V2G cars if you understand them. How is nuclear power going to help with Peak Oil without electric cars, and if we have all these electric cars then NP is unnecessary because in Australia at least we have sufficient renewable power coupled with storage in electric cars to power our needs 24X7.
How is nuclear power going to help with Peak Oil without electric cars...
See the trams of Melbourne :-)
Best Hopes,
Alan
Or process heat for thermochemical hydrogen production. You can burn the hydrogen directly (unlikely IMHO) or run it with CO2 or CO for synfuel production.
For example: thermo-chemo-nuclear hydrogen -> methanol -> DME.
And DME (di-methyl ether) is a most excellent fuel.
NNadir has written about this at DailyKos.
I'm not sure what exactly the worry is with reactive power. Yes, system power factor should be close to unity but capacitor banks are the usual technical fix.
Plus, any tornado that took out a wind turbine would take out a nuke plant.
I disagree with this statement. By their natures, a wind generator is exposed to wind and can't hide from a tornado, while a nuclear plant is fairly squat, with massive concrete and steel. Also, with hundreds of Megawatt wind generators spread across the landscape, some of those generators are more likely to be hit than the single nuclear plant that provides equivalent capacity.
Nuclear plants have been hit by tornadoes, and while they were knocked off line, the damage was fixable. A wind generator would have to be rebuilt.
OTOH, a tornado would not take out all the turbines in a wind farm. As a matter of fact, what's most vulnerable in both plants is the electrical end, the transformers and wiring. Followed by the cooling towers that are required for a nuke (or coal) plant.
Cooling towers are not needed.
A US nuke plant was hit by a tornado, in the 80's I believe. The switchyard went to kingdom come, but the reactor building is after all made out of reinforced concrete and didn't even get a scratch.
It is highly unlikely that a tornado will take out an entire large windfarm which is inherently spread over large areas. Some will go down certainly but not all. That is doubly so for a windfarm large enough to approach nuke generation levels. That is the beauty of modularization and redundancy. Unless the tornado took out the transformer station or disrupted connecting power links it is highly likely that the plant could restart production soon after while the damaged turbines are repaired/replaced over time.
"The E.on Netz report had nothing to do with coal companies as it is an electric utility"
So, let's make sure I understand this....an electric utility puts out a report that says it is impossible for anyone to produce power reliably except an electric utility......why does this not amaze me? :-)
(We have E.on power in our area of Central Kentucky by the way, through LG&E, and KY utilities....why am I not amazed that the only solution they can imagine is coal?)
On the technical issues, as you said, they are very involved and too long to handle in a board post of this type, however, I would like to point out two big factor of interest that cause me to slightly doubt that renewables are impossible on an impactful scale due to variability in a grid based system:
1. The world has a few thousand firms of various sizes in nations all over the world working on grid connected renewable. Now, they do NOT have engineers working and money being dispersed on say, time machine research. Why do you think that is?
Because the first (time machines) are considered technologically not real as a practical area of work and research, and the other (renewable energy including energy from variable power) is considered technologically viable.
This by the ways is true in several industries that often dismissed as rubbish or totally impossible. Many nations are researching renewable production of hydrogen, for example, and have some of the best talent in the world on research projects at a cost of millions. Yet, there are those who swear it is completely impossible. Fascinating difference of opinion, we will see, but think of the many inventions and developments in technical history that were declared impossible before they were designed and built (just about all of them in fact!)
2. On the issue of wind "changing by the minute", this is of course true and obvious. What is also changing by the minute are the precision and sophistication of the control and monitoring devices used in energy production, management and distribution.
I would only ask that you go to the magazine and website:
www.distributedenergy.com/de.html
Please take a look at the devices and control systems advertized, at the projects already working, at the giant industrial firms who are already getting a share of the Destributed Energy business.
(by the way, you can register for the magazine, it is free, and a great read, again, the adverts alone are fascinating :-)
Distributed electrical generation, back-up and emergency electrical supply, peak hour energy production and consumption control, devices for control of variability at the mili-second level, power storage on both small/fast and large/long scales, and all ranges between...
When folks say that America has run out of new industries to invent, I simply send them to this website! People most often (including people like me who try to stay abreast of these developments) come away surprised, stunned, at how fast the energy, distributed energy and renewable industry are moving.
It is a fascinating time, and the game is just now getting underway.
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Dear me, the knives are out, emotion's high, and the logic is underwhelming.
While you might wish it:
It just ain't so, Ender, me old china plate. Coal will almost certainly be growing as a primary energy source for generations.
The debate on energy has been overtaken by emotional diatribe about 'unnatural' things like fossil fuels and the fact that burning coal and oil will kill us all because of the CO2 pollution.
I have two problems with that, first: fossil fuels are natural - they came out of the air via biological forces that took them from the environment where they rightly belonged.
Second, the planet functioned brilliantly for billions of years with all this 'unnatural' CO2 swishing around the atmosphere while life evolved and developed into our ancestors.
There's something, IMO, wrong with the whole CO2 doomsday scenario. All the world's CO2 predates us, it never caused life's extinction before it became locked away in organic fossils.
Why would it do so this time?
Ian Down Under - "have two problems with that, first: fossil fuels are natural - they came out of the air via biological forces that took them from the environment where they rightly belonged.
Second, the planet functioned brilliantly for billions of years with all this 'unnatural' CO2 swishing around the atmosphere while life evolved and developed into our ancestors."
Yeah right!!. First while fossil fuels are natural they are the Earths sequestration mechanism that prevents huge buildups of carbon. We take this safely sequested carbon and burn it out of the natural carbon cycle making it anything but natural. The MEASURED CO2 level is now 380 ppm and rising.
Secondly the planet functioned perfectly well by naturally sequestering the bloody stuff under the ground and out of the atmosphere.
"All the world's CO2 predates us, it never caused life's extinction before it became locked away in organic fossils."
Again yeah right!!! Have a look at the Permian Eocene Thermal Event - 95% of Earths species were wiped out. Earths history has been punctuated with mass extinctions - some of them possibly caused by greenhouse gases.
G'Day Ender,
Carbon isn't 'built-up' - it was there from the beginning, and, as I wrote, it appears that most carbon was available during most of the epochs of life. And life thrived. It seems the planet is currently running under a carbon deficit.
I am asking a serious question about CO2 in the atmosphere based on undeniable data - CO2 has, for the major part of life's history, been in far higher abundance than it is now.
Your reply is about a vague, unknowable, unprovable (at this time) 'possibility'.
Why need it be different this time?
" CO2 has, for the major part of life's history, been in far higher abundance than it is now. "
Ian, putting most of the coal carbon back into the atmosphere will result in a return of the conditions that caused its deposition: anaerobic conditions in eutrified shallow bodies of water covering a large proportion of the planet's "land" mass. Think shallow seas coving Florida, the entire Mississippi river valley, all of Bangladesh, etc.
We're headed that way already.
That is, perhaps, because your response to the article discussing a study by the UK's electricity grid body - an article linked to in the main post - was not so much "underwhelming" as "nonexistant".
In particular, your bald claim that "Wind power can never provide significant power into a main AC grid because of it's intermittency" rather directly contradicts the conclusions of that study, namely that "the expected intermittency of the national wind portfolio would not appear to pose a technical ceiling on the amount of wind generation that may be accommodated".
Moreover, speaking of underwhelming logic...
Straw Man fallacy - nobody here's said anything of the sort.
Non Sequitur fallacy - the question is not whether life will be at risk, but whether human life will be at risk.
The reason you're seeing nonsense in the debate is (in part) because you're injecting (some of) it yourself.
Hi There Mr The Elder,
My response was perfectly apt because it replied to a comment on the unsuitability of coal as an energy source based on the foregoing debate.
There's nothing like that in my post???
Utterly sequitur! It is impossible to separate the multi-threaded debates of PO, GW, Nuclear, Wind, CO2, life-as-we-know-it. To question one is to question all.
MY query remains unanswered, and it relates directly to the main topic of this debate: Why do we need wind, nuclear, or other alternative energy when all we are doing when we burn fossil fuels is return to natural use what has been lost for aeons? Are we not simply re-dressing the CO2 deficit the planet has been suffering?
Why should it be a problem this time?
Good thinking! And while we are it, we should surely re-dress the SO2, CO, S2, Cl2, N2, H2, NH3 and CH4 deficits!
Cute response, Tarz Mate,
Doesn't work, those originals gaseous compounds were in abundance in the atmosphere prior to oxygen-using life (ie humans et al). Most were broken down into their elements and recombined into organic compounds then became fossilised; and yes, they are also liberated with fossil fuel use.
N2 is of course still most abundant in the atmosphere, the only toxic element in your list is Sulphur, and pretty easy to remove from oils etc.
I still really would like an answer to the question that everyone wants to avoid.
Why will it be different this time?
Life loves CO2! Ask a cabbage what it eats.
Indeed, some of that carbon has been locked up for half a billion years or more!
This has had other consequences. In that half-billion years, all kinds of life has evolved to suit the changed conditions. We ought to do something about that too! And the energy balance of the Earth won't be the same because the Sun has brightened with age, so we'll have to reduce its mass and cut its output back to what it used to be.
You ready? Let's get cracking!
"I still really would like an answer to the question that everyone wants to avoid.
Why will it be different this time?
Life loves CO2! Ask a cabbage what it eats."
Ian, I answered your question upthread: the problem with coal is that it WON'T be different this time. Putting coal carbon back into the atmosphere will indeed favor some life forms, humans not among them. Your (swamp) cabbage, mangroves, and crabs will indeed love CO2 over 500ppmv. While I'm not a big human chauvanist, I do like the world the way it was 50 years ago.
Down Under
About 25% of Denmark's electrical generating capacity is from wind turbines. Are they having huge problems controling the voltage in their electrical grid?
Yes, they are,
They are only consuming about 5% of it themselves and the rest they try to off load to neighbouring countries sending their grids unstable
No they are not.
The 5% figure is QUITE misleading. You should NOT have quoted that figure since it is SO misleading. Jutland and Copenhagen are joined politically, but not electrically.
Jutland (mainland Denmark) is not connected electrically (directly) with the populated sections of Denmark around Copenhagen. Most of the wind (but not all) is installed in (or offshore) Jutland.
So Jutland wind turbines cannot power Copenhagen without passing through Norway, Sweden or Germany. There are have been no significant problems with power shifting surplus wind power (even when Jutland is 100+% wind powered) to Norway, Sweden and Germany.
Best Hopes for honest debate,
Alan
Ahem..
A comment from Denmark with some data.
Denmark has on several occasions been supplied 100% by wind electricity.
On average 20 % of our electricity is wind power based. (2004 18.5%, and growing) The rest is Coal, natural gas and biomass/ waste burning. http://www.ens.dk/graphics/Energiforsyning/Vedvarende_energi/Rapport%20o... (Danish)
As Denmark is flat, we have no hydro, and therefore we export excess to Norway, Sweden or Germany through the grid. Excess wind energy can go into pumped hydro storage and is recovered with > 80% effectivity. The Electricity is traded between Nordic countries and Germany intensively.
http://www.eusustel.be/public/documents_publ/WP/WP5/D5_1.pdf ( English)
The Danish energy providers see 50% wind electricity possible in the grid and profitable, according to The “Elkraft System” that is responsible for energy supply in Eastern part of Denmark. http://ing.dk/article/20050429/MILJO/104290115 (Danish)
Translation here: In a 2025 scenario 21.000 MW wind energy in Scandinavia of which 8.500 MW in Denmark. Citation:” The numbers show that a strategy with 50 percent wind electricity in Denmark is technically feasible and profitable for society, says Department engineer Hans Henrik Lindboe from Elkraft Systems”
This can in principle be done everywhere.
For the future we will see coal, a lot nuclear and even more renewables.
What surprises me is that nobody talks conservation. Several European studies has shown that conservation cost much less than new power, and conservation - or energy efficiency is the key to controlled power down. The more energy efficient we are, the easier it is to provide energy by renewables. Therefore conservation / energy efficiency is the core of the new EUROPEAN Power plan approved last week.
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/action_plan_energy_efficiency/index_en.htm
Kind regards/And1
Good points on Danish wind. But respectfully, as regards the "nobody talks about conservation" line, I'll point to the order of priority for action I pointed to in this very post:
1) conservation and energy efficiency
2) renewables
3) nuclear
4) gas-fired
Dear jerome
You are right, off course :-)
my fault
Regards/And1
Everyone talks about it. Its just not the path of least resistance. We face a world with rising energy demand flat out. You're post of priorities read as aesthetic desirability for many, but in terms of cost the chart is often exactly the reverse.
Dear Dezakin
You wrote "but in terms of cost the chart is often exactly the reverse".
Not correct everywhere.
The Aestetic desirable option- conservation is also the cheapest option.
Se here what the EU comission says on the subject.
The average cost of saving a unit of electricity in the domestic sector is around. 2.6 € cents.
The average off peak price for delivered electricity is around 3.9 € cent/kWh.
See yellow insert page 1 in the presentation.
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/demand/legislation/doc/2003_12_10_memo_energy...
Kind regards /And1
Could it be that conservation is not a desirable option for politicians and businessmen because it will not lead to major new employment and economic opportnities?
"Could it be that conservation is not a desirable option for politicians and businessmen "
Partly right, but conservation is big business.
The problem
For example the energy renovation of all US buildings in order to save 20% energy on heat/aircon
Public 4.7 million buildings
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cbecs/pba99/comparenumber.html
and private approx 110 million homes.
if 1 public building = 20 homes then there are 200 million homes to renovate. Spending 20.000 $ on each ( much less than a new kitchen) it amounts to 4.000 Billion USD. If renovation should take 25 years ( 4% each year) that is 160 billion USD/year for 25 years...
Energy efficiency in Power generation, in transport, in power distribution, in food production is similarly big business.
Much on energy efficiency (conservation)everywhere in society can be studied at this IEA website http://www.caddet.org/index.php
for example http://www.caddet.org/public/uploads/pdfs/Brochure/R445.pdf
regards /And1
Could it be that conservation is not a desirable option for politicians and businessmen because it will not lead to major new employment and economic opportnities?
That's more or less the conclusion that I've come to, with an added wrinkle. Efficiency rennovation is potentially very big business that can create alot of jobs. It could be very good for the economy as a whole. However, the work is decentralized both physically/geographically and financially (many small players, rather than a few large ones). Supply-side solutions, on the other hand, tend to be large and centralized, both geographically and financially. Practically speaking, this means that the supporters of centralized supply can focus a great deal more pressure on the politicians than can the supporters of efficiency/conservation. Also, supply-side has a tremendous amount of historical inertia -- with few exceptions, it's how we've always solved energy problems in the past. So supply-side solutions get the majority of the political attention and thus the funding and favorable regulations.
You write:
I can only invite you to go read again this story I posted not so long ago: No technical limitation to wind power penetration (including the discussion with some virulent pro-nukers)
Westexas:
Help me with where you would set the level of a "fossil fuel consumption tax" as you suggest in your post. (I assume the idea of such a tax is to reduce fossil fuel consumption)
This chart shows oil price per bbl in 2005 constant US$ vs global oil production in 1,000's of bbls per day for the past 30 years (each data point is a yearly avg. value)
Maybe it's just me but I have trouble seeing how you design a tax when it looks like there is no obvious relationship between price and consumption, short of crashing the economy into recession to evoke demand destruction that way. I'm not sure if the same relationship (or better lack of relationship) holds for N. gas and coal. Any thoughts?
(Data source for the chart is the BP annual energy review)
That chart is meaningless without a timeline, plus figures on population and world income. The law of supply and demand has not been repealed. However, the tax would have to be pretty high because people think of fossil fuel as a necessity. The psychological impact of a tax plus a government initiated campaign to conserve might have much more impact that the tax alone.
Here it is with a time line:
I'm working on the population and world income ones, will post those soon
Here is global population and global GNP for the same period, again, as with the first one dollars are in 2005 constant (i.e. inflation adjusted) US$:
(Data source is The World Bank online statistics database, as this data not found in the BP review)
"The law of supply and demand has not been repealed."
Nope, but it describes a hypothetical market which varies in many respects from the oil market (and many others):
- High cost of exit for consumers
- High barriers to entrance for producers
- Small number of producers
- Lack of available substitues ouside of the market
- Lack of perfect competition between producers
- Lack of perfect knowledge of market factors (Secrecy of reserves etc., Simmons et. al.)
etc. etc.
OK, fair enough John, but have you a better suggestion to disincentivize consumption?
Would you prefer rationing or some other regulation?
Something else in mind?
Or are you just saying we shouldn't bother trying to find a way to conserve?
I continue to believe that the market is the best mechanism to use to disincentivize consumption.
"OK, fair enough John, but have you a better suggestion to disincentivize consumption?"
Well, where I live (Canada) everywhere you look, far from attempting to "disincentivize consumption" you will see Gov't trying to "incentivize consumption", I'd love to see these actions stop.
Right now huge amounts of public money are poured into energy intensive transport uses (Cars, trucks, planes) while more efficient modes (rail, marine) are expected to pay their own way.
Same goes for gov't actions that incentivize the lifestyle of high energy consumption i.e. "Suburbia" / "Exurbia". As Kunstler says these are investments in a lifestyle with no future. I won't repeat his list of solutions to those issues here, and I don't think he's "God" or anything, but at least he's offering a set of suggestions that address the issue.
On the price side I think the combination of ongoing speculation and peak impacts (I'm an "early peak" guy) will dwarf tax measures I can imagine gov't taking...
I think your graph is very misleading. The graph provides a very broad amount of information, which is simply not focused enough to come to any conclusions. We know that the oil shock of the 70s resulted in more fuel efficient cars, and that higher gas prices now are also pushing people in that direction. If there was no correlation between cost and consumption then Hummers would still be flying off the lots.
The unfocused nature of your graph doesn't do anything to shed light on this subject. You could just as well say something like "the high cost of building a skyscraper hasn't stopped them from being built, therefore there is no correlation between the cost of building and the amount of skyscrapers."
As I understand it the suggestion by Westexas, and many others elsewhere is that oil consumption taxes are a good way to reduce oil demand.
My limited understanding of these things (I'm certainly no economist) is that if consumers were price setters in this market, or if the effect of increasing cost to the consumer was at least incremental & predictable in terms of demand this might make sense, but it seems to me that consumers are in fact price takers, and the price is much more the result of a combination of the result of speculation by traders and manipulation of the market by producers than it is things like E&P costs of producing the oil.
Demand does respond to price increases at some point , think 1973 and 1980 oil shocks. i.e. there are "tipping points" in price, but pushing a market to such a point to effect a demand reduction is I would hope something a Gov't does only to it's enemies (I.e. OPEC vs US in '73), not to its citizens?
Consumers are "price takers' in the very short run, but price elasticity of demand increases with time.
Some actions are individual (move closer to work, buy more efficient car) and others are collective (the Washington DC subway was pushed forward due to 1973 embargo, today 40+% of commuters use it to get to work and it will allow the federal bureaucracy to operate "no matter what" happens to oil).
The longer the time period, the more the elasticity of demand (see oil production drop after 1973 & 1980 due to declining demand).
Best Hopes,
Alan
And as has been stated here before by others, changing elasticity of demand over time can be incorporated into the tax. Make the price of gas go up incrementally over an extended period of time, both of which are stated at the onset. No one gets surprised and everyone knows what to plan ahead for.
IMO, higher oil prices are coming, so it is only a question of when, not if, we see forced conservation. So, why not help the process along, while we can offer a carrot and a stick?
I would abolish the highly regressive Payroll (Social Security + Medicare) Tax here in the states and replace it with an energy consumption or fossil fuel tax, at the consumer level, perhaps with part of the revenue being directed to electrification of transportation.
This also has the benefit of being appealing to those who are concerned about Global Warming.
I might add that Texas Oilman and Republican Boone Pickens endorsed the Energy Tax/Cut the Payroll Tax idea before Al Gore did. (Coincidentally or not, Mr. Pickens adopted this position after a much less famous Texas oilman sent him a letter asking him to support this position.)
How much and where, not when.
A family buying a small car instead of an SUV because they can't afford the gas is "forced conservation", albeit of a very mild sort, so forced conservation is always happening in a situation with nontrivial prices.
The potential problem is that some forsee a rapid transition to a much higher level of forced conservation (i.e., peak oil). The task, then, is to manage that transition in such a way as to minimize disruption and harm. The most obvious way to do that is to smooth the transition, starting it early and ramping it in over a longer time.
Think of a water glass.
If you pour ice water over the glass, and then immediately switch to pouring boiling water, it will shatter from the thermal shock.
If you pour ice water, then room temperature water, then tepid, warm, hot, scalding, and finally boiling water over the glass, it will suffer no damage - the smaller thermal shocks will not be strong enough to break it.
Europe, with its artificially high gas prices, is in the position of a glass with artificially warm water being poured over it. If a thermal shock - peak oil - comes, it's already halfway there.
The US? Room temperature, at best.
(Caveat: IMHO, the economies of both are more like disposable plastic glasses, and so will not shatter even with a strong oil shock; however, I like the analogy.)
Largely irrelevant.
People respond to incentives. If the price of oil goes up, consumption will go down. Hence, if the price of oil is raised substantially by a tax, then less will be used, regardless of whether consumers - either individually or consuming countries - are the ones who control the price of crude oil.
Consider, for example, the difference between Europe and America. Car fuel is much more expensive in Europe, due to high taxes, and so much less is used per capita (about 1/3). France and Germany (for example) have no power to alter the price of crude oil, but by changing the price of petrol and diesel fuel, they can effectively manage the incentives given to consumers of those fuels inside their countries.
Demand responds to price all the time. Remember all of the news stories from last summer reporting how sales of SUVs were dropping due to high gas prices?
Demand reduction happens far, far before the point of an oil shock.
Demand responds to price all the time. Remember all of the news stories from last summer reporting how sales of SUVs were dropping due to high gas prices?
Yup. Now, how much did this actually reduce demand?
It seems like it was pretty tiny.
That is a wonderful piece of writing which has not at all recieved enough widespread circulation.
forget ye not the reddit and digg buttons! and don't forget the link farms.
Seems to me that it hardly matters which source of energy we turn to unless we can compel the corporations behind them to act responsibly.
That's a HUGE problem in the US -- crooked energy companies and the politicians they finance.
Something fundamental must change in the American culture before we can expect a decent nuclear program overseen and financed by a skilled and ethical government.
Amen. Lots of talk here about responsibility and good engineering. Not in the American culture I know. Who is going to operate the nukes and why does anyone suppose it will be done every minute of every day by best known practices?
60 Minutes had a look at coal mine safety last night:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/08/60minutes/main2547001.shtml
King Coal is disregarding safety regs and sacrificing more miners (though nowhere near the rate in China), neither King Coal or Big Oil bother to pay their fines, and Mighty Wind is stomping all over the environment. What can we expect from Cool-Hand Nuke?
Dear Old Hippie,
Your statement:
"Who is going to operate the nukes and why does anyone suppose it will be done every minute of every day by best known practices?"
has a simple answer - the men and women who have families downwind.
Nobody is perfect, but the people I've known and worked with in the nuclear industry have almost without exception been responsible, intelligent, thoughtful, mature adults. They have a huge personal stake in the successful and safe operation of the nuclear plant. They know that every misstep will be reported in the local and national press and their neighbors will question them about their actions and hold them accountable.
Do old, unrepentent hippies have that sort of self-discipline?
Having a solid governmental regulatory apparatus in place empowers workers to report malfeasiance or misfeasiance on the part of management. Every workplace has a toll-free number to the NRC posted for such reporting. I had to use it once myself on a design detail and it got the needed response.
If I'm unrepentant you qualify as complacent.
I'm in a little bind here because there's a reason I post anonymously. Most of what I know about nuclear is from family who worked there & they would not wish to be public in any way. Glad to know there are still good people working the industry, there always were.
Since you're on the inside I'm sure you can easily access all the files on the closure of the Commonwealth Edison reactor at Zion, Illinois. Problems that went on year after year. Power struggles between NRC and a corporation that was absolutely immune and indifferent to regulation. Local news media that didn't much care with a strong bias against anything that even smelled like muckraking. Was Zion eevr covered in the national press? Complete system breakdown. Yes, the NRC finally prevailed but it was no one phone call thing.
One of the marquee issues of the Zion closure was control room staff drunk and asleep while on duty. In the control room, drunk, asleep with no one covering them. My father witnessed the exact same thing twenty-five years earlier and was able to do something about it. I have the clearest memory of having family dinner with the man who took over my father's job, and was not able to rein in control staff. I'm quite sure it continued all the twenty years between dad's retirement and the final shutdown of that plant. It got shut down but accountability? -none, never.
I would wish to believe that Joseph Semsel is a bright, alert, responsible man and that we are all better off for having him on the job. Only so much you can tell from a post but I think you're probably at least as good as that characterization. Do you think the system works better if the public accepts bland assurances and easy promises? Can't you see the danger in hubris?
Maybe I'm too much of a Luddite. Wind turbines may have a few new wrinkles but still look like comfy old-shoe 19th century tech to me. Conservation is a discipline I can see and measure, not a case where I need a Discipline of Faith. Nukes require a level of hubris that should make anyone pause. Anyone who supports nukes should be happy to have obtrusive and cranky watchdogs, as well as supporting formal regulatory mechanisms an order of magnitude stronger than what now exists. How that can be done in present political culture escapes me.
Those Chicago guys are still a bear to work with! Bunch of screamers and yellers.
Indeed, hubris is a a form of pride which is the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. I've a sign on my desk reminding me every day. But complacent? Dear God, I hope not!
Part of being a good engineer is having the right answer when it is needed and knowing what you don't know. It ain't easy to say "I don't know." That does encourage "know-it-all" attitude in the profession. The natural correction is when reality hits and one is made a fool by events such as Three Mile Island. Not on my watch!
Nowadays, there is zero tolerance for any sort of non-Puritanical behavior at a nuke. The NRC has pursued a number of actions against individuals with punishments including life-long banning from the industry and even criminal prosecutions by the Justice Department. They can get a manager fired with the word to the VP.
One useful addendum.
Many look at the high % of electricity in France that comes from nuclear power (depending on accounting method; 70% to 90% is the range I have seen quoted) and think that other nations can do this as well.
Au contraire !
Late at night France sells surplus baseload power to, among others, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Luxembourg pumps water uphill into pumped storage, the Swiss reduce their hydropower to a trickle and also do some pumped storage. Then during peak demand, they let France bid for their high cost peak power.
Without the means to sell baseload power to others, France could not operate so many nuclear plants.
Nuclear plants are not designed for any other role but constant, baseload operation. "Daily Peaking" or cycling nukes are not designed (safety problems with thermal stresses as temperature varies with output) and I think we are decades away (4 decades ?) from well tested and proven nuclear designs good for anything but baseload operation.
This "baseload only" limitation to nuclear power also limits the maximum generation from nuke. In North America, I see the upper limit for nuke as about 45%-50% of all MWh generated without MASSIVE pumped storage construction. Of course, GW would benefit if even 33% of North American generation was from nukes.
The storage issue for power has been solved. It is pumped storage. High % wind and/or high % nuke will require large pumped storage facilities (wind more than nuke). One can see several nuclear plants from atop the Raccoon Mountain pumped storage plant.
If the EU wants to move towards a mostly non-GHG grid, they need to build both more wind turbines, more nukes AND more pumped storage.
Best Hopes,
Alan
I would also like to thank the French for their prompt and effective aid to New Orleans after Katrina. While the US Gov't remains tied up in bureaucratic red tape in Washington DC, the French came in with a rapid "Can Do" spirit !
The French worked with New Orleans to select 5 fire stations in the flooded areas to rebuild ASAP. These 5 (later 7) fire stations were the only source of fire protection for 80% of the city (many people living in tents inside their gutted homes, so fires were a greater than ever threat).
After the French had opened these 5 stations, the sluggish paper shufflers of DC moved in some undersized trailers for other fire stations, and have not OKed funding for rebuilding even one fire station so far.
Would you consider a reversal of the Louisiana Purchase ? We do more things with roux than French chefs ever imagined :-) The classic Cajun cookbook always starts with "First you make a roux..."
http://www.bedrockpress.com/order-make-roux.html
There is actually no particular problem with temperature cycling: the temperature of a PWR core is always 250°C, +/-5 °C, anytime it is up, whatever the power output (for the technically inclined: because it is the range of optimal control via doppler feedback). It is only the pressure (and the enthalpy) of the secondary loop that changes, and the speed of circulation in the primary loop.
And they are effectively being cycled to some extent on a daily basis (like -20/30% at night, on a totally fixed schedule). What nukes cannot do is 10-minute notice adjustments, just because of the time it takes for all the triple-check procedures to move control rods, and because there is just one boiler and one heat loop for 3 GW of heat, giving it terrible inertia (gas plants have much smaller increments and less stringent procedures for turning the tap knob).
Military (navy) reactors with much smaller power output (50-200MW thermal) can be ramped up/switched off in a minute by a crew of three (military also have cow boy procedures, it helps). But cutting commercial plants in such small increments and safety checking them all independently would be way too expensive.
As for superfast cycling nuclear reactors, they are much closer than you think: have a look at the pebble bed reactors concepts. Prototypes have already worked, and production designs are about to be built in South Africa and China, with the US lagging a bit behind. These reactors do just as well as hydro and gas, plus they are the most passively safe ever designed. Not everything is rosy so, as they require fuel packaging that is basically impossible to reprocess (but that would be OK if they're only commissionned for peak production).
Pierre
Every nuke that I am aware of operates @ 100% all of the time once it goes commercial. The pre-commercial testing (first 10% power, etc.) does put significant thermal stresses that are triple checked before the reactor goes into commercial operation.
The common design fault of the N4 reactors in France (all four were brought down at once; if France had built 14 instead fo 4, the EU would have had energy problems) was due to thermal stresses from memory.
The secondary loop is not a critical safety issue (for those unaware) but the heat exchanger is a critical safety area and it will be affected by changes in temperature & pressure due to changes in output.
But you are right, and I forgot, the core is kept at constant temperature to avoid thermal stresses. The nightly changes in output that you suggest (which reactors ?) may well be doable but that will allow for a higher % nuke in a grid (say 55%-65%) and not a totally nuke grid. But again, I am unaware of this happening daily.
A better path to a higher % nuke grid would be to build more pumped storage. (when TVA planned for a large # of nukes, most of which were never built, they also built Raccoon Mountain pumped storage, originally 1.6 GW, upgraded to 2 GW). These same pumped storage units can also support large % wind and solar power.
I believe that the pebble bed reactors are 3 decades away from enough operating experience to be comfortable with wide spread use. It just takes time ! I would oppose construction of one in the US within the next 20 years.
You also dont get anything for turning it off. You dont save much fuel and fuel is so cheap compared to the capital anyways.
Whats more likely is we just wont tear down natural gas peakers for a long time.
Pebble beds dont seem to offer significant advantages over the general LWR design, and they are significantly worse from political perspectives. The produce higher volumes of spent fuel thats harder to recycle. They're designed to run without a containment building. Their economics is untested at best. The one real advantages I see for them is direct dry storage of spent fuel rather than cooling ponds and higher thermodynamic efficiency, but I dont expect these advantages will be enough to give pebble beds significant play.
Until the population issue is addressed, pursuing nuclear power is insane. Will nuclear energy be provided to all 6.8, 7.5, 10.1 billion, or even higher numbers of people? How do we provide fuel? It is finite. And so is thorium. What will we do when the stuff runs out? Eleven billion people on the planet and suddenly there is no power. But, we have umpty thousand radioactive sites scattered around the globe.
Brilliant.
The planet cannot support infinite growth. You guys do understand that, right? You do understand that we have only so much land, that we have only so much fresh water, that the seas are failing, that fish stocks are in collapse? You do understand that, right? You do understand that metal ores are following a similar bell curve of depletion that oil is following? You do understand that, right? You do understand that global climate change will probably reduce the amount of arable land and disrupt the fresh water cycle, right? You do understand that by finishing off the remaining oil, gas, coal, and nuclear supplies, we will dump the rest of the primordial carbon into the atmosphere and that dump will effectively speed up and exacerbate the reduction of these primary resources, right? You do understand that, right?
Why is it that technical people have the hardest time with technical issues? Why are they so blind to the inevitable physics of population overshoot? Too many episodes of Star Trek causing techno-optimist disease?
The basic problem is that NO AMOUNT, NO TYPE, NO VERSION of technology will solve the problem, if solving that problem does not involve reducing the population. In fact, any additional technology will require additional energy, energy that is not available. Of course, even if we could discover fusion and implement it with the snap of a finger, the population would still collapse. All the other resources, land, water, metals, and so on cannot be made. You cannot make land. You cannot make fresh water or metals. The end is coming. Maybe not in one hundred years, or five hundred, but it is coming and it will be made all the worse because technologists will insist on being enablers. Do they believe that their way will somehow have an end game?
What could that end game possibly be? What would a permanent solution look like? Infinite population growth? No? Then how many? Is there a way to determine the optimum population sans fossil fuel input and taking into consideration land and water availability? Can that end game feature fossil fuel? Can it feature nuclear? Why not?
It is time to realise that our techno world on steroids will end. It can either end with a well thought out marshalling of our remaining resources in the service of developing a rational plan to survive within physical bounds, or it can end in a spectacularly stupid fashion.
You tech guys are pretty smart. I'm sure you can figure it out.
So, because we might run out of fission fuel in a few thousand years, the right thing to do it let most of the world's population die in the next generation or so. Is that your idea?
Do you realize that in developed countries most population growth from births has ended (the US has considerable growth from immigration)? The likely scenario is that the world population continues to grow for a while and then starts to subside.
The most unexceptable, truely evil scenario, is to welcome or to work to enable a big short term die-off.
Your reply is disingenuous. Cherenkov didn't call for "letting most of the world's population die in the next generation or so" - he called for "addressing the population problem".
I admit that we are in territory where morality is important - and challenging. If you were convinced that one of the consequences of the current world population is massive degradation of ecological systems that people need and will need in the future, would you still be so sure of your position? What if you became convinced that our actions today lead to a 50% probability that human beings will be extinct in 200 years?
Speaking as an American, I have developed a rather foul view of how government will protect humans and their environment over the next two years, much less the next 200 years.
What Enron and its fed cronies did to California a couple of years ago was simply vile. And now Jerome wants government to be in charge of something like a a massive and centralized nuclear-power industry?
Then what is he calling for? He rails against those who would try to avoid the die-off. If we do not try to avoid the die-off, we will be complicit in the resulting holocaust.
I think it would be nice to have a world with a much lower population. But, we are not facing peak energy, I can imagine what is to me an attractive scenario after we have transitioned past the oil era and I think the world population will decline as the world becomes more developed, just as is happening in the developed world today. I do not accept any scenario that does not attempt to avoid a large short term (next 25-50 years) die-off.
What kind of future could mankind have if we allowed a massive die-off which would undoubtedly be accompanied by resource wars that would leave no one and no part of the environment untouched? Is suicide the only answer? No.
I would much more want to take my chances with a 50% chance of extinction in 200 years than to not take sensible steps to mitigate peak oil and, as a result, bring on a massive short term die-off. You might not be among them but I have read plenty of talk on this site that seems to be welcoming the end of civilization. I have never heard any plausible scenario that gets us there without going through an unspeakable tragedy if people really understood the consequences of what they are advocating.
You seem a bit touchy about death. We are all part of the 'die off' - you and me too. It's the only guarantee I can offer.
The 1st part of any honest debate requires an acceptance of the human condition.
Cherenkov is suggesting [as I'm sure you are aware] that the way to avoid misery is for people to use birth control, develop a hobby, or keep our dick in our pants. It's called personal responsibility.
regards
Does that not recommend that first we have the die-off and then we do something about mitigating the energy problem?
He is suggesting that first we assist terrible misery and then whatever is left will be fine.
Not in favor of deliberate pop. reduction or anything along those lines, nor to the inevitability of a certain kind of gloom and doom, but let’s not forget that:
Conflict in the Congo killed almost 4 million people. Or around there. That was 98 - 2003, roughly.
These deaths can’t be simply dismissed as the outcome of ‘primitiveness’ or ‘local ethnic strife no-one could do anything about’, etc. They are part of the struggle for resources, part of the ‘North’s’ domination of the ‘South’, part of an ‘energy gap’...
One kidnapped Israeli soldier deserves press, 3 000 US soldiers deserve media attention - 4 million? What? Who? Where? Why?
You raise a great issue. This site is dedicated to the study of peak oil and we often discuss specific countermeasures to that one issue. The larger issue for society is the supply of all types of resources and the energy flows and material flows through our society and the associated waste.
There was a great book published about twenty five years ago titled Entropy. It was by Jeremy Rifkin and another guy. I understand Mr. Rifkin is an activist but independent of his conclusions and suggestions the book did a great job of laying out this very problem for the layman.
If you know of a site that discusses this larger topic I'd like to know about it.
I'm skeptical that we as a society have the tools to deal with this problem. Special interests always argue for their narrow interests. Democracy is mostly based on compromise yet in physics there is little room for compromise.
We attack specific problems and solve them - we build faster semiconductors, different kinds of cars, various air liners, sewage treatment plants, power plants for specific areas of the country, etc. We don't have a public forum for deciding how to manage all of the energy and material flows through our society. Even if we did, I don't think we have enough information for doing this successfully. Mostly our society has grown organically, modified by each new, big discovery (oil, electricity, electronics).
In a sense, there are no renewables, there are only supplies so large they appear endless such as sunlight.
A few cultures have learned how to maintain a steady-state existence where their needs are completely met by sunshine and the available land and water (read Jared Diamond's "Collapse"). None of them are high tech.
Our culture is predicated on supplies of energy and materials which are limited and not renewable. We don't know how to run a culture like ours in a way that looks renewable in that we deplete our sources very slowly.
On top of that we have a huge population that is rapidly trying to emulate American life styles which accelerates the depletion of everything.
I do not believe the powers that be will allow it to just "take nature's course" and risk an uncontrolled die-off. I believe they will initiate an intentional controlled depopulation where they have control over who, how many, and where. Hitler did it on a small scale compared to what we could do now.
http://www.rense.com/general18/spbio.htm
The guy sounds off his rocker but I wouldn't be suprised if we had something like that in our weapons locker.
I once read an article about prion based targeted bioweapons(which seemed totally insane as prions remain in the environment) but if they only attack a specific segment of the population, the population that was left would be immune as prions are not alive and do not mutate.
Nobody who's paid attention expects infinite growth. You do understand that, right?
"In these projections, world population peaks at 9.22 billion in 2075."
Jerome - "Again, the technical solutions are, to a large extent, known. The volumes of material, their dangerosity and how they should be handled are known. The technical requirements for safe storage can be met."
This is not even close. If it was true then Yucca Mountain would be operating today. Some of the thorniest problems remain of unexpected leaching of radionucleides and corrosion and deforming of containers used for storage right down to how do you guard a facility for 500 years.
You do not mention nuclear weapons proliferation which is one of the most potent arguments against nuclear power. If we are to rely on it then all countries need it, even ones we do not like. Can we trust them not to develop nuclear weapons? To extend the supply of uranium we need to breed - how do you think the concept of an Iranian breeder reactor would go down seeings as they cannot be trusted to even enrich uranium.
I agree with your order of priorities. Conservation should be number one. Mitigating Peak Oil with V2G electric cars can help solve the twin problems of making renewables into 24X7 power and our transport problems.
Finally if the US goes nuclear in a big way they are just substituting one type of power they do not have for another. Australia has something like 40% of the world's uranium. Suppose the next Labor Government enacts legislation to only sell uranium to countries without nuclear weapons. Suppose further that Canada, following Australia's lead, enacts similar legislation. The US, France, Britain etc are then locked out of most of the world's uranium from stable countries and would be forced, like they are now, to do deals with the devil for their energy. At least with the wind and the sun you do not have to fight wars to get supply.
Ender writes:
"Suppose the next Labor Government enacts legislation to only sell uranium to countries without nuclear weapons. Suppose further that Canada, following Australia's lead, enacts similar legislation. The US, France, Britain etc are then locked out of most of the world's uranium from stable countries and would be forced, like they are now, to do deals with the devil for their energy."
I do not think that the US, France, Britain, etc. (especially the US) would allow those kinds of shenanigans on the part of Australia and Canada to go on for long without putting a figurative gun to those countries' heads. Very likely, in fact, Australia and Canada would never dare enact such legislation, knowing precisely that being victimized by a military intimidation in which they would be completely helpless would be the inevitable end result.
The U.S. military can't even control a poor country like Iraq. Canada and Australia don't really have much to worry about.
I agree, however, that this is unlikely to ever come to pass as enough pressure would be put on these nations to prevent that from happening.
The only reason the US is not controlling Iraq is because they haven't taken the gloves off. They could, in principle, deal with the current threat to their hegemonic control of Iraq emanating from the Sadrist stronghold in Sadr City by simply leveling the entire 2 million+ enclave, for example.
Total war is always an option for a military behemoth when comfronting a defenseless enemy. Of course, circumstances must normally become pretty desperate before strategic planners regard this option as the most efficacious one available. But it seems to me that Peak Oil, etc., constitutes the perfect sort of cause for eventually bringing about just such desperation.
And the fact is that both Canada and Australia are ultimately defenseless in the face of US military might. Nothing they could do could stop the US from annihilating both places if they so wished. US diplomats would surely find subtle and not-so-subtle ways of impressing this point on the governments of both countries should they try to withhold their uranium, tar sands, etc., from the market to teach the US a moralistic lesson.
Musharraf of Pakistan (if I remember correctly, it was Musharraf himself) came out publicly not too long ago with the revelation that US diplomats threatened to bomb Pakistan back into the stone age, or something to that effect, if they didn't cooperate with the US in its "war on terror." Why do you think the US isn't capable of making similar threats against Australia and Canada under the right conditions - with the latter knowing full well that the US is perfectly capable of actually carrying out such threats?
Phil: Your wet dreams re US domination of the planet are hilarious. I suggest you handle that rag tag bunch kicking your behind in the desert before you take on the whole world.
Phil
Take a look at recent coverage of Iraq from irinnews.org. Sorry no hyperlink, I just don't html, the URL is good.
The gloves are off. Genocide in Iraq is at a new level. I can't tell you if it will be a winning strategy. It will cause a lot of death.
Sure, if the US was willing to multiply the number and funding of anti-US terrorists 10,000-fold, was willing to suffer substantial quantities of radioactive materials "accidentally" finding their way into the hands of terrorists, was willing to suffer an immediate oil shock that would make 1973 and 1979 look like a walk in the park, was willing to suffer large-scale boycotts by the rest of the world in protest to genocide, and was willing to suffer internal unrest not seen since the civil war as a result of internal dissent against the murder of millions of civilians.
In the real world, though, not a chance.
And doing so would be a great way to ensure the US gets less energy from each.
Not so useful.
Because they know full well it's a bluff.
The US actually invading Canada, for example, would cause such massive disruption to the US economy - from the destruction of its largest trading partner, from the efforts of the rest of the world knowing they need to stand together to put down a mad dog, from Canadian insurgents who aren't conveniently brown and foreign-speaking, and from massive internal disgust at what the once-great US had become - that it would effectively destroy the country.
Wank all you want about the US military; it can't do even a tenth of the things you dream about. Iraq proved, if nothing else, the shocking limitations of American force.
From what I've read, the US, over the past decade and a half has been responsible for at least 1 million deaths in Iraq alone. I wonder what the magic number is at which this massive worldwide and internal US protest will begin? When you realize how much bloodshed US foreign 'adventures' have caused, it is a wonder that 'terrorism' is not at much greater levels than it now is.
PhilRelig - "Very likely, in fact, Australia and Canada would never dare enact such legislation, knowing precisely that being victimized by a military intimidation in which they would be completely helpless would be the inevitable end result."
So we HAVE to sell them energy? If not we will get invaded? This is really at the hub of the debate - you would rather fight a war with an friend rather than give up your some of your lifestyle. What about when the Canadians get a bit antsy about selling you the last of their oil and gas - they might want a bit for themselves - you planning on invading them then?
This is what supply at all costs is all about and what is so wrong with it. If we in Australia decide to enact such legislation then that is what we will do. How would the US go without a friend like Australia in the Pacific. How would it contain China and control the choke points like the Straits of Malacca without Australia?
All the US, Britain etc would have to do to have all the energy that they want is to dismantle their nuclear weapons and allow unrestricted inspections, something they are insisting on in Iran. Anyone else see the hypocrisy here?
Please don't misunderstand me, Ender. I do not in any way approve of the morality of the points I am making. I think the prospect of total war is utterly appalling, and I regarded even the limited war now being conducted in Iraq as a murderous and criminal enterprise founded upon gross lies well before the invasion of Iraq was even launched.
But it seems to me that that is the way the world works. The codes of morality in international relations are not ultimately distinguishable from those of gangsterism; and, to paraphrase Mao Tse-Tung: "The only kind of power that ultimately matters in the world is the kind that comes out of the barrel of a gun."
So, yes, if push came to shove, the US would invade Canada and/or Australia to gain access to its energy resources. I say this while fully granting you that the shape of international relations would have to alter radically before it came to something like that. But undoubtedly the Canadian and Australian ruling elites sense this on some level anyhow - which probably explains part of the reason why both are so eager to play the role of lapdogs in the US pursuit of world supremacy by military means that has been taking place under Bush.
The US and Canadian Uranium industry is very intertwined. I don't see how what you suggest could ever happen.
The Accelerator Driven Reactor makes the nuke waste issue moot. The ADR would use nuke waste as fuel while transmuting it into short lived isotopes that will be less radioactive than background levels within a few decades. ADRs should be a high priority for any nation with nuclear power.
Please understand that using accelerators are neither necissary nor desirable for doing actinide incineration. All you need is a reasonably safe critical reactor, and fluid fuel reactors with liquid fluoride or chloride salts have been developed allready.
The first two arguments you give for nuclear power are, to my mind, against it:
Safety and waste disposal are really one issue -- short and long term safety. You freely admit the necessity for strict regulation and control, following procedure, etc. But this cannot be guaranteed into the future.
With the decline of oil and other hydrocarbons, it would be necessary to multiply nuclear power plants many fold. But it is very, very possible that in the future there will much less of both a technical and a social infrastucture that can support these requirement. Thus our immediate descendants will inherit a tremendous problem, perhaps beyond their power to handle.
Thus nuclear power represents an extremely dangerous gamble with the future. To your credit, you put nuclear in third position. The whole debate, once one accepts peak oil, is what will be left, how can we escape the huge loss of energy supply this entails.
I'm of the opinion that deep pessimism in this regard is the safest position, our best chance of surviving decently. In other words, we need a planned pullback, globally negotiated, based on the limitations indicated by the relevant sciences. Fat chance, one replies. But if there's no other way, sooner or later we'll go that way.
P.S. I also think that our problem with energy is not just with supply and production, but also with consumption. That is, even if fusion came through and all our supply problems were miraculously solved, I doubt that our continued consumption of energy at current levels would be sustainable -- for many reasons.
Follow this, and another coal plant goes up. Again, and again, and again and again.
I agree that there are conceivably future problems, but we are already buying much worse current problems and conceivablly far worse climate problems now.
We can bleat about powerdown but in the real reality of the world, this (opposing nuclear) means coal coal coal and coal and coal.
I'd rather do something that has a chance of maybe turning out OK {nuclear for 100 or 200 years}, instead of something that I know, already, today, has no chance whatsoever of turning out OK. And is the current path for what's going to happen.
So clean up the coal plants. It's not like the gazillion or so now in operation are ever going to be shut down.
How?
CO2 sequestration is imaginary technology. And if eventually it were to sort of work it would require plants to be built in specific geophysical locations rather than where needed.
At least with nuclear you can separate the sequestration of the waste (which is much easier than CO2! it's solid and you can watch it).
CO2 sequestration is working in the Weyburn (SK) oil fields. However, PCC plants would almost certainly be too expensive to retrofit to do this; we would have to repower with oxygen-blown IGCC and steam-reform the syngas to extract the CO2 before mixing with air.
I think ultimately a smaller world population will have to make do with true renewables like wind and solar. The problem is how to transition to that state with PO and GW staring down at us. The next 20 years will probably be tough with a massive reallocation of priorities. I see the role of nuclear is to smooth that transition for several decades (assuming no breakthoughs with breeders) mainly to displace coal and help electrify transport. By that time the long term vision should be clear.
Incidentally uranium miners I've spoken to seem perplexed by the waste issue. They see no problem burying waste (albeit 'hotter') next to existing mines. Maybe there is no surefire answer to diverting material for weapons even if the industry closed tomorrow.
There are technical answers. The kind of reaction that powers a reactor is quite different than what powers a bomb. To make a bomb, the material has to be made up almost entirely of a fissionable isotope, while a power reactor needs only a few percent.
In a power reactor, Uranium is used that has been enriched to 3% U235 with the rest being unfissionable U238. No one but an advanced state can build the vast infrastructure needed for an isotope separation facility which could turn reactor Uranium into a bomb. The problem is that the power operation turns some of the Uranium into Plutonium, which, in the early stage of consuming a new batch of reactor fuel, has enough of the fissionable P239 isotope to make a bomb if someone diverts the material and builds a chemical separation facility (something even impoverished North Korea can do). However, after a few months of power generation, enough of that Plutonium turns into unfissionable P240, so that the Plutonium is also no longer usable for a bomb. Plutonium is three times as hard to separate as is Uranium. So, the risk is only for diversion soon after a reactor is loaded with fuel and there might be a technical fix for this as well. Spent fuel is never a real risk of being used by a terrorist to make a bomb because what Plutonium it contains is also unusable without isotope separation.
If a country is advanced enough and determined enough, like Iran appears to be, they would not need to divert reactor fuel to build a bomb. That’s the real risk and it will remain even if the world decides to give up on nuclear power.
One thing which is underappreciated is that a working nuclear fusion reactor (ignoring the really remote and low-cross section aneutronic cycles, much harder than D-T) would be quite useful for upgrading U-239 to fissile weapons-grade Pu-239.
Pu240 is not, I believe, as effective a "poison" as you imagine. Adding Pu240 raises the critical mass required and will likely decrease the explosive yield, but spent fuel is not as useless for weapons as you imagine. (I remember discussions on exactly this issue when a Physics student decades ago).
The greater issue is the other transuranics in spent fuel.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?
I submit the following link to hopefully result in useful comments as to the viability of the process. Negative or positive and hopefully not dismissed with outright derision.
Either it works and has been fully demonstrated or it does not. The MORE INFORMATION tab at the bottom should have a link to a GOOGLE flash presentation.
Editted to add the missing URL...duhhhhh!!
http://www.science.edu/TechoftheYear/TechoftheYear.htm
Jerome;
Thanks for the report. I have come out as anti-nuke on this site a number of times, and remain so, while I appreciate the concerns that a 'vote against nuke is effectively (allegedly) a vote for coal' .. Well, I voted for Nader twice, so damn the damn torpedoes..
My concerns about Nuclear are many, these three pop out at me:
1) Energy Monopolies - ie, 'Absolute Power Corrupting - Absolutely!' yada yada .. including the everpresent tie-ins with the Military Ind Complex. Does this really matter, when the Climate itself maybe hangs in the balance? Sure it does. One more anti-society, destabilizing factor that works for 'increased shareholder value' instead of the betterment and security of the People.. matters.
2) Continued Dependence/Development of Complexity (both the extensive processes from the mine to the turbine, plus the Grid as it now functions, Baseload dependent, Hypersensitive).. particularly if Either Oil or Climate are waiting in the wings to chaotically split us up and isolate regions/communities.. we don't need centralized behemoths keeping the fridges running.. there are Local-centered alternatives that need to be built out. (Solar Ammonia Absorbtion fridges, for 1 example [BB])
3) Safety (or Safetyosity, to sound a bit more Scientificalistic about it.. [I kid, cause I care..]) I don't believe this is solved.. The Hydro- mining is potentially threatening aquifers, rusty pipes here, cracked concrete there.. oops! Who let that story leak out! I that that hole was plugged! - It's not the 'big incident', but the a)Highly Concentrated materials near populations, combined with the b)accumulation of decades of little 'oops'es..
"The risks are understood, the required procedures and technical standards are defined and can be adapted to effectively eliminate the risk of large scale incidents."
"The circumstances that would lead to a large scale incident are quite remote and they require more effort, planning and resources than could likely take place."
One piece at a time.. I'm afraid the first sentence is a campaign promise. Did Giuliani say the same thing when he convinced the city to put the NYC emergency system at the WTC, barely years after the complex had already been attacked? The unthinkable and unlikely.. no it ain't.
The incidents might not in fact even be large, but think of the PR effect of even a small attempt at terrorism on a US reactor. Not only you, Jerome, and the engineers, but every person in the very general vicinity of any reactor would be thinking "What COULD be the downside if the next guy actually gets through?" .. and rightly so. What's the downside? I'm not sanguine about Mercury, Antimony, etc. My daughter breathes the air and drinks the fine, Maine water that today inherits a continuous stream of quicksilver precipitate and other mutagenic scum from the coal plants across the midwest.. but these and the little nefarious flakes of Lead Paint Dust that challenge her toxicity loading seem like the common cold next to the chance that a 'hardened' cannister has rusted through upstream, right during the spring rains and runoff, or the little Cessna hit the right substation and debalanced the cooling system.. even though it was designed to survive that kind of attack.. 'noone had expected a breaching of the cooling towers'
I don't have ANY confidence in statements with.. "..standards are defined and can be adapted to effectively eliminate the risk.." how could I at this point, unless I was just a hopeless rube?
Nuclear is complex, it's vulnerable.. we say we 'Need' this baseload. Well as part of the Negawatt process, I think we need to see how to run a grid(s) on intermittent power, if that's the best we've got. If it somehow turns out that Nuke really can't hang on effectively without a steady stream of oil or NG around to maintain the support system, then we've got to learn how to be much more flexible in our usage, and get past the Oil-rich attitudes we've developed that say 'We just HAVE to have constant power, day and night' I suppose that's a completely unmentionable Elephant in the 'Developed, Industrialized First World'.. but I think we have to face that possibility.
Make hay while the sun shines!
This, too, shall pass.
Bob Fiske
Jerome, thanks for the effort.
I have several objections. First, your solutions seem couched in a sort of utopian world ruled by philosopher kings who only have the best of intentions.
Regarding a major accident, look what happened in New Orleans after the poorly maintained levees failed. Not too pretty.
Look at how economic powers such as oil and coal are able to bend government oversight to their benefit.
I also don't think that we have complete transparency in the nuclear industry. What happens to nuclear mine tailings? How much water leaches through them causing problems downstream? How much uranium leaks into the air during processing? I recall a story from some years ago about tens of kilograms lost at one plant. Here is a story about a plant missing 30kg of plutonium.
http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=9568
It may really be missing, it may be a bookkeeping error. In the words of Donald Rumsfeld "Who knows?"
As I said, I am biased by my experience with (and belonging to) the French technocratic leadership... But yes, that's the main requirement for the nuclear industry.
French technocratic leadership
From another thread, a post by Bob Shaw.
..............
totoneila on March 12, 2007 - 5:14am | Permalink | Subthread ^
Hello Sgage,
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~mmaslin/publications/Maslin1.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
http://canterbury.cyberplace.org.nz/peace/nukenviro.html
----------------------------------------------
Triggering of Landslides, Tsunamis and Earthquakes
At least one major test-related landslide and consequent Tsunami in Moruroa, on July 25, 1979. Apparently, the 120kiloton weapon, which was supposed to be lowered into a shaft of 800 meters, got stuck at a depth of 400 meters and could not be dislodged. The French authorities decided to explode the device anyway. This explosion resulted in a major underwater landslide of at least one million cubic meters of coral and rock and created a cavity, probably 140 meters in diameter. The underwater landslide produced a major tidal wave comparable to a tsunami, which spread through the Tuamotu Archipelago and injured people on the southern part of Moruroa Atoll. (27)
French authorities initially denied that any mishap had occurred and declared that the tidal wave was of natural origin, but in a publication in 1985 they did acknowledge "the accident of 25 July 1979".(28)
--------------------------------------------------
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Some factoids about a rumoured proposal for
Australia's first nuclear plant which I think
puts several issues in perspective. A consortium
is looking at installing a 1600MW Westinghouse PLWR reactor (I think) at a coastal town called Pt Augusta. It will replace a 300MW lignite station in the town and the diesel generator for electrical machinery at the inland Olympic Dam mine. Note 'closing the loop'. The mine has a nuclear waste dump site nearby. The plant will also desalinate enough seawater for the mine expansion plus several outback towns thereby freeing up water piped hundred of kilometres from the main river which is drying up. Surplus energy will go to the state grid since the gas basins which supply the main generators are also depleting.
As it happens in 1960s the Brits exploded several A-bombs west of this town, plus several balloon launched plutonium dirty bombs. Those were the cowboy times; nowadays the mine is subject to strict EPA monitoring.
Here's my questions for the green utopians; how are you going to replace the generators that run on lignite, diesel and natural gas? How are you going to get fresh water when the natural supplies are diminishing fast?
"The mine has a nuclear waste dump site nearby."
Really? You mean they have a hole in the ground nearby? Australia has, to my knowledge, no such recognised facility.
In fact a lot of protests eminated from South Australia over the mere suggestion of such a facility. I know that when Ranger is finished everything, EVERYTHING will be pushed into the pit and covered. You mean like that?
Link Please.
"The plant will also desalinate enough seawater for the mine expansion plus several outback towns thereby freeing up water piped hundred of kilometres from the main river which is drying up."
You mean 'sucked dry'. Ah, the technologists solution to our water crisis, desalination. Are those outback towns going to be pleasant or sustainable places, in the "desert", with global warming? I guess your nuclear facility will also provide the power for the airconditioners.
All this proposal really does is take about 3-400 km off the length of the pipe and adds an energy intensive water treatment process. I believe currently Olympic Dam uses the Great Artesian Basin as it's source (you might want to google that).
Water in Australia is not neccesarily, as you say "diminishing fast", more it has been over extracted, over allocated and generally misused pursuing lifestyle choices not always in agreement with the local conditions.
Your argument starts with the implicit assumption that your lifestyle will not, should not, change. And that we "need", rather than desire, all that power to preserve the status quo; more as the population swells.
My response to you as a green(ish) non utopian, what have you done to reduce your impact? Do you think you can do better? Should others follow your example?
Then we worry about the lights going out.
YR
There are two designated N-dumps near Olympic Dam mine, the main one being Arcoona Station. However mine tunnels that won't be swallowed by the 'super pit' could also be used for retrievable storage of canisters. I predict the State government will keep stalling on the dump until a rival interstate site starts getting the big bucks.
You ask what am I doing; I have a 1500 watt roof mounted PV system plus a separate solar irrigated half acre permaculture garden. I've restricted the electrical input to the water heater and all my cooking is microwave or wood fired. I've just made up a batch of 300 litres of biodiesel. I decline invitations to interstate weddings and every vehicle trip has multiple purposes. If that's not enough let me know.
There is another angle to look at, for nuclear.
Can going for more nuclear generation absolutely guarantee that society won't break down? If it can't, and society does break down, will the existing nuclear plants be safe in a chaotic society? I'm not necessarily talking about terrorists taking advantage but simply ongoing maintenance and monitoring not being carried out.
Isn't this already the case? Quarterly report is coming, numbers don't look so good, so we better defer some maintenance. This happens in every sector of the economy. If posts and dare I say propaganda as seen on this page succeed in normalizing nuclear power then normal negligence will be applied to nuclear power.
This isn't France. This isn't Sweden. Deadeye Dick Cheney is the final regulator here.
Oldhippie: Very very good point. IMO, overwhelmingly the posts on TOD which advocate societal change or government action pretend to be unaware that the USA, as a country, a culture and an economy is nothing like France,Germany, Japan or Sweden. The current structure of the USA is midway between Germany and Argentina/Mexico and the trend is definitely toward a "South American" style USA.
Jérôme, a great post. Some local remarks:
I’d just add that Coal mining and consumption kills, direct or indirectly, more than 30000 people every year.
IMHO Nuclear will be a stronger option when we stop storing its waste in the Earth’s crust. Sending it away is probably the safest and cheapest option.
As for the final part of the post I totally agree with you that Nuclear energy is a sector that can only go forward properly with full State involvement – France is a good example of that. I’d go forward in saying that in such issue any kind of private management should be avoid.
Unfortunately a State (or Union) led Nuclear program seems very unlikely under the current European scenario, where liberal politics excels.
IMHO Nuclear will be a stronger option when we stop storing its waste in the Earth’s crust. Sending it away is probably the safest and cheapest option.
No. The problems involved in any difficult transportation is much more dangerous.
Send it on a rocket? That's totally insane. They blow up. They want light payloads, not heavy ones.
Here's what we need to do. The only wastes that have really long half lifes are the transuranic actinides. But these don't need to be wastes at all!
With accelerator or fast-neutron based reactors and transmutators, they can be fuel themselves. (This also greatly extends the lifetime of uranium reserves!)
The remaining wastes have O(100-500) yr lifetimes, and geological storage will be very secure over this timescale.
So, the right strategy for now is to have retreivable storage, and we develop transmutation for the long run.
Really, Nevada is pretty damn big when you consider the benefit.
People have a greatly exaggerated sense of danger of nuclear wastes compared to all sorts of other dangers.
Dying from a global warming heatwave (30k already dead a few years ago) or supertyphoon is just as dead.
I’d go forward in saying that in such issue any kind of private management should be avoid.
I wouldn't go that far, but I think that only regulated utilities, not fully capitalist merchant power providers, ought to run nuclear plants. And they will need to be truly regulated. Even a government program can be corrupted---you need a bit of checks-and-balances in management.
By the way, I think Jerome left off one potentially useful, but quite long term possiblity: engineered geothermal.
Using some of the technology developed of course for deep petroleum---you drill for steam instead of oil. The topside tech requires getting power off of fairly low temperature differences, but this is advancing reasonably well. Like nuclear it provides steady baseline power.
Eventually the decline past peak oil is going to obsolete a fair amount of onshore petroleum infrastructure; maybe it can be adapted for geothermal needs?
This is the typical attitude of people who dont understand spent fuel and draw upon some sort of destroy the one ring of Sauron reference. It astounds me how often people come to this conclusion of a rather simple, benign industrial waste. Its far more manageable than other wastes such as the mountains of coal ash.
They certainly don't need to be a concern at all. Its not like they are any problem except political. We're not running out of space to store spent fuel casks. People are allways in a hurry to invent problems we dont have it seems.
Look up the thermal load per meter from the ground itself and it reveals why this just isn't a source. You'll get far more from the sun.
This is basic thermodynamics which is pretty much the same for over a century. Off of a low delta T you wont get much power out says master Carnot.
Jérôme, very interesting. You make the point, quite rightly in my mind that nuclear is different in that it needs (and receives) much tighter and stricter regulations and controls. This is seems to be feasible at the moment with some 440 power stations (though questions have to be asked about the decommission schedule of ex-Soviet reactors). Do you think it is feasible to maintain such strict controls if the nuclear industry was to grow to several thousand installations globally? I fear familiarity may lead to over confidence and complacency expressed through lower standard operating practices, less staff training and vetting, more of a "push button" mentality rather than in-depth understanding. Do you think this is realistic concern?
Secondly, you also make the point that government financing is important. How is this compatible with the European energy markets that frown on such state interference? The UK Government has repeatable said that whilst they support new nuclear build they won't fund it. The new plant in Finland has been criticised for potential French state funding with acquisitions of a subsidised low price to get it built as an example. Does the EU allow governments to fund new nuclear build? How does funding currently work in France? And what does this mean for new European nuclear build?
Chris,
On your first question, I don't know. There are advantages of scale to having a larger fleet to supervise, just like there are risks as you point out. The important thing is to have a culture of safety, and a fiercely independent regulator, whose importance is recognised politically. Checks and balances and all that. Transparency helps that.
On the second point, the answer is simple: government funding is currently prohibited as such. But as the industry wants to build these plants, and the banks are salivating over the fees to be made on such large deals, it will happen in the worst possible way: unacknowledged, and at a greater cost to taxpayers, to the profits of the big utilities and not consumers. what is happening is that banks are saying "of course we'll finance nuclear... IF..." and the list of conditions includes:
- catastrophic insurance borne by government (that might be okay if the price is right, but the re is precisely no market for it...);
- waste management and disposal is the responsibility of public authorities;
- clear regulatory/licencing procedures (and long amortisation periods)
That of course means that the public is asked to take the major risks, in order for the private sector to then benefit from the "low" cost of the resulting plants. Governments would simply be better off to do the investment themselves.
Thank you for the useful review, Jerome. You said,
I think you are overlooking the demonstrated capability of solar thermal, or CSP (Concentrated Solar Power). Solar thermal does not have issues of scarce or polluting materials that solar PV does. It is also not prohibitively expensive, and as Shinnar and Citro point out, solar thermal is already a financially competitive source for a large portion of the electricity supply:
In all of these discussions it is helpful to keep in mind how much of the electrical load is base power, and how much is intermediate and peak.
We're financing solar trough technology right now in Spain, and it requires special tariffs that are 5 times higher than normal wholesale market prices. But I agree that that particular technology is less polluting than PV.
Please contact Vincent Denis of MHyLab
http://www.mhylab.com/fr/index.html
41 24 442 87 87
for financing opportunities for small hydroelectric plants. MHyLab is a non-profit engineering firm that designs (very well BTW) small and innovative microhydro plants. As such he is aware of financing opportunities.
Be forewarned, he speaks the S L O W Swiss mountain French :-)
Best Hopes,
Alan
BTW: you should visit Nouvelle Orleans and see what happens when French peasants are thrown into a swamp and one waits for a couple of centuries. Our food is better than that of Paris >:-)
I can envision a future where massive nuclear power plants are located in remote areas and fortified like large military bases. Complete with anti-aircraft guns, anti-missile batteries and battalions of military personnel to protect them against acts of terrorism. Of course, none of this would be enough to protect against the odd cruise missile.
It seems to me that most terrorists have serious axes to grind and a little social justice and economic opportunity would go a long way to mitigating the threat these organizations pose. To listen to the news today one would think a relatively small group of people is actually more dangerous to the world at large than Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the USSR at the height of the Cold War put together.
While I agree nuclear power generating plants can be made safe enough for use, I think it's a straw man argument that the biggest danger posed by them comes from what terrorists could do to them. Design flaws, substandard construction methods and materials, and cutting corners on safety systems are much more credible threats to their safe operation than the boogeyman.
A fair discussion of nuclear power.
I would add that one of the lessons of Three Mile Island was that the owners and investors stood to lose billions of dollars in an accident in their plant. The US nuclear industry has since made it a legal contract that ALL owners would lose if ANY nuke had an accident by pooling risk. Industry groups like INPO, EPRI, and NEI are a response at self-policing.
Believe me when I tell you that the management of nuclear power plants changed profoundly after Wall Street lost a couple of billion at TMI.
As to financing of nukes, the surprise in the US market is the 1% financing deals being offered by the Japanese on new plant sales. The only thing better than taxpayer subsidies is taxpayer subsidies from another country!
Also, the simple burial of nuclear spent fuel is clearly more expensive that recycling, at least on a capital investment basis. Yucca Mountain will probably cost $100 billion. My estimate is we could build fuel reprocessing plants, MOX fuel fabrication plants, and actinide burners for $20 to $40 billion. The remaining fission fragment waste component would make the existing plans at Yucca Mountain a case of overbuilding. Recycling would also provide the fuel for $1 TRILLION worth of electricity at wholesale with no more uranium mining.
As to environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists finally seeing the (positive) light about nuclear, I can only say better late than never. However, friends like them I don't need. The last thing I want is nuclear power getting the full psuedo-religous enthusiasm treatment. Just as the socialist David Lilienthal, 1st Atomic Energy Commission chairman, gave us the "too cheap to meter" albatross, I fear that latter day converts will circulate another impossible and embarassing promise.
Incredible insight into the Iran/Russia gamesmanship:
"Russia, which has remained close to Iran even as the Islamic republic defied international demands to stop enriching uranium and answer questions about its nuclear program, has accused Iran of paying only a fraction of the $25 million monthly payments for construction work at the Bushehr reactor in recent months. Officials have warned that the funding delays would push back both the launch — originally planned for September — and the delivery of the uranium fuel needed to power the reactor."
-snip-
"Iran sternly urged Russia Sunday to deliver the fuel this month. "We hope the Russians won't politicize (the fuel shipment)," said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini. "This (shipment) should be done within the next two weeks. We expect the Russians to fulfill their commitments."
my sig: When is the Peak?
We're long past the time when there are any riskless responses to the dual challenge of energy shortages and global warming. Even assuming a serious effort at conservation and substantial investment in wind and geothermal, we're going to be relying on coal for the next century in addition to a renewed nuclear industry. Indeed, not only will we need nuclear, but we're going to have to go in for breeder reactors because it doesn't look like there is enough uranium and thorium to supply the projected demand after 2060 or so. You can reduce the number of new coal plants by ignoring the CO2 problem--sequestration reduces the output of a 600 MW plant to something like 450 MW--but that doesn't seem like a very wise move.
Building and operating nuclear plants, especially breeder reactors, does indeed present risks, which should neither be ignored nor hyped. The question, however, is whether the risks of not building them are even greater. Maybe you can make up for the energy shortfall by drastic reductions in demand and a heck of a lot of windmills, but the numbers I've seen make it more likely that you'll end up building a heck of a lot of coal plants.
I think you are mistaken about the supply of Uranium and Thorium. We discussed these at length a few weeks back.
Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?
The supply numbers that would cause concern are calculated using the current very low price of Uranium, that has been depressed by the US and Russia dumping a lot of weapons material into the commercial market, and the low demand of only 440 commercial reactors worldwide. Fuel costs are a very small part of the nuclear power cost equation. They could go up several orders of magnitude without affecting power costs. At higher price levels, it looks like we have about a trillion tons of recoverable Uranium at EROIs of greater than 15 (the current EROI for LWRs is 93). There is about three times as much Thorium. A Light Water Reactor requires about 200 tons per year.
My source on uranium and thorium supply is an Electric Power Research Institute report, Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World (December 2005). The report itself is not freely available, but the abstract can be found on the EPRI website. I'm limiting myself to non-proprietary information. The EPRI projections factor in the effect of increased prices on uranium supply. The estimates may be wrong; but they aren't naive; and, for what it's worth, EPRI is certainly not anti-nuclear.
Any way you cut it, theres enough uranium for thousands of years. Its all well and good to limit yourself to a single report that we don't have citations or fact checking on, and then go so far as to call it 'non-proprietary' while disgarding the work thats been analyzed time and time again here and other places.
They're wrong and naive. From the abstract:
This is obviously wrong just from the simple observation that we can get over four times the fuel efficiency from uranium just from reprocessing, and we have over fifty years of stockpiled spent fuel to go through. This doesnt even touch reserve growth. These guys didn't do their homework.
If nukes are so perfect why do they have so much downtime?
They haven't. Actually they have the least downtime of any power plant.
In the US they have gone from about 50 % capacity factor to 90+ % in 30 years.
Quite a few hydropower plants have been in continous operation for 50+ years.
The one I am working on now is designed to go to half power every 40 years and a lifetime of 400 years.
Best Hopes,
Alan
So, Alan what do you think of the reports that hydropower actually causes the emission of co2 equal to or greater than fossil fuels. I hope the guy is wrong who came up with this. But you never know.
A very few reserviors MAY have this result.
One source is where the land is not cleared before flooding, leaving a lot of biomass in a "one shot" hit.
The other is some tropical reserviors where orgainc matter goes downstream, is trapped in the reservior, and some of it becomes methane. Of course, if wood was washed ashore and termites ate it, same result. Or many other mechansims.
So 1) new organic matter has to be trapped and 2) turned into methane (instead of CO2 or sequestered for centuries as water logged wood) at a higher rate than before the dam. Because some organic matter turns into methane all the time; does Dam X increase or decrease this ratio ?
Hope this helps,
Alan
Thank you for the response. One gets old and things you think you know have changed.
OTOH there are no new plants in the US. Sounds like first we built them and then we figured out how they work. I do not feel reassured.
No one knew how they'd worked, as no one had built any before.
Hell, Oyster Creek was probably built without any computers, only rulers and pencils. Goes to show that the engineers of yore knew what they were doing as the plant has been online for almost 40 years (went online in 1969) and is going to be relicensed for 20 more.
Funny thing really. The plants were built in 1970-1985 and they started to run well in 1985-2000. But nowadays they do run damn well and no one thinks they are going to leave the 90-95 % level again.
And the uprates!
Our domestic wunder-reactor (made by ASEA-ATOM (-> ABB ATOM -> Westinghouse -> Toshiba)), BWR75, was originally rated at 1050 MW. Now the two units operate at 1200 MW. One of them is going for 1450 MW, and the other is likely to follow a couple of years later.
And 30-something new reactors are planned for the US. Big ones too. Off course, the bureaucracy has made sure they will come online in 2015-2020 instead of 2010-2015, but that's lack of political will for you.
Off course, the bureaucracy has made sure they will come online in 2015-2020 instead of 2010-2015, but that's lack of political will for you
That is reasonable regulation for you.
We do not have, among other shortages, the human skills to build much more than 1 reactor/year PROPERLY in the US. This limited group will expand, but it should NOT expend at a rapid rate. Experienced experts simply take time to develop.
Think Zimmer if you think any old fool can build a nuke !
Best Hopes for SAFE WELL BUILT nukes,
Alan
Of course, we all want out nukes to be safe and well built. And no one oppose reasonable regulation.
For example, no one says the NRC can't take a few years to evaluate a new reactor design to make sure it's safe, or spend time at looking at a certain site to see if it's okay for reactors.
What is not reasonable is five years of paperwork after your reactor design has been approved and you have a site that by definition is good (as there are already reactors there). This is for example the situation at the Vogtle ("Vo-gull") site.
The human shortages will not become visible and dealt with until the plans become more solid. And this will happen later due to needless paperwork than it could do.
And 1 reactor per year, well I don't know. France peaked at 8 reactors per year, and the US is five or six times as popolous. Also the French program was rushed from a position where the only experience was military reactors, a couple of small civilian gas reactors and a few PWR's under construction.
It all went very well.
The US has more than 100 operating power reactors and decades of experience.
I would be violently opposed to a US repeat of the French "Rush to Nuclear". Quite frankly, the French got lucky !
The did have a centralized gov't run entity (actually a series of entities) building the exact same nuke at the same time. They would upgrade the design periodically in an evolutionary way.
That does NOT describe what will happen in the US if we rush to nuke.
Sites are only approved for so many nukes (cooling water for one; do you get to boil the fish with an extra large nuke in additon to?).
How will construction affect the operating reactor next door ? Personnel issues, vibration ?
I do NOT want a "rah Rah" type like yourself ANYWHERE near regulation. Let them take as much time as needed to do it extra special right. We have not built a new nukes in over two decades; the supply chain is moribund (other than repair parts). Let us do it slow and right. SLOWLY build up the construction rate.
And build many more MW of wind turbines than nukes :-)
Best Hopes,
Alan
At least 3-4 times as many, just to maintain the equivalent output. ;)
And come on, cooling water boiling fish? It does not take 5 years to figure out if that's going to happen or not...
Of course, if a rush à la France would not be centrally planned I would worry about it too. With 200 wild entrepeneures building 200 new reactors, someone is bound to get something wrong.
But it's not black and white, there is something between the French cheetah and the American turtle.
Do it good, do it soundly, do it exactly. Don't rush, but don't have several years of extra paper work just for the sake of it.
After all, we are facing an energy crisis of rather vast proportions.
Thank you. That is an interesting story. Not sure what I can make of it. Better to lave it at glad I asked a stupid question, glad it was answered.
Actually, check out this rather striking graph too.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/infosheets/gifs/nuclpower_graph1.gif
Practically no new nukes have gone online after 1990. Still, production has been constantly growing as the fleet has been optimized and uprated. Not much potential left for such tinkering anymore, so to grow output new units are going to be built.
And this time, they'll run at 90+ % from day one.
On top of that:
And to rehash the utilisation stuff:
Quotes taken from the World Nuclear Association web page.
Forgive me, but the idea of using nuclear power to compensate for our oil/energy addiction is, IMHO, another example par excellence of our human arrogance and folly carried to extreme -- i.e. insanity -- just to avoid reality.
But to try and explain myself, the very first question asked, "Is it safe?", is a dead give away to the answer. Of course we all know it isn't. It's only safe so long as one ignores and/or discounts a host of presumptions that are highly questionable. Alas, everyone of them is given short shrift here.
Yet this undeniable reality is glossed over with the following: "nuclear energy can theoretically lead to much worse accidents than other industrial activities," which is to say life altering at its most profound level -- our genetics -- than PO or GW will ever cause. However, we are assured "but it can also be made safe."
Well, I've never seen a theory that didn't eventually meet reality, but never mind, do tell how how it can indeed be made safe!
Apparently, this only requires of us "ensuring that safeguards and procedures exist and are actually enforced. (my emphasis.) And all of this is just a "a task that can only be run and managed by a public body with the ability to retain competent personnel and to impose rules on the industry.
No worries, mate, it's just a simple "task," albeit a highly qualified one at that. In fact the caveats continue:
"That requires clear laws, a strong culture of regulatory enforcement, and the necessary high level political support and funding for the relevant body."
In other words and in all truthfulness, all of this will require a ~10,000 year "strong culture" of nuclear engineers, nuclear regulators, nuclear politics, nuclear laws, nuclear policing, nuclear taxing, and nuclear waste management just to *ensure* our well being against the *theoretical* downsides in this wonderful nuclear energy future.
Am I the only one or can anyone else see the immediate fallacy in this grand assumption, not to mention all the other contingent ones?
At heart, the grossest presumption inherent here is the belief that we are in control. And when it comes to all the levels of control, as outlined here go, necessary to using nuclear energy as a replacement for oil, as John von Neuman and Oskar Morgenstein showed, it is mathematically impossible to maximize more than one variable in an interlinked system at a given time. Adjust one variable to its maximum condition and the freedom to do the same with others is lost -- in non-mathematical terms, one can not make everything "best" simultaneously. Yet this precisely is the illusion of control suggested here that can be attained, and then maintained for eons!
Forgive me, but I'll take my future chances with all the known and theoretical risks associated with PO and GW without adding to this challenging mix (in this already deadly and overburdened day and age) the even deadlier risks of more nuclear power genies let loose than presently threaten us; nor all the centralized controls necessary alongside those already in existence that diminish, not expend, our very liberty and future prospects. Last but not least I would be remiss to not mention all the Gollums of unintended or unforeseen consequences (stemming from all our human imperfections) which is simply understood as 'Murphy's Law.'
None of this, especially as an appropriate response to the awesome dilemmas we are presently tasked with, is in any way or form sane. It's just a higher level of insanity when confronted with reality. Whatever decent answers to our sorrows may prove to be, promoting and unleashing more nuclear energy is not one of them.
We need to think a lot better than this to ensure a future that isn't irredeemably ruined, folks. The risks of nuclear are not just theoretical, they are too real to mess with.
Maintaining an advanced culture beats freezing in the dark.
The regions chosing too maintain a highly skilled work force, good work ethics and nuclear powerplants will be as prosperous as those blessed with plenty of hydro power and for a while plenty of coal.