NY Times Energy Series: Nuclear
Posted by Glenn on August 22, 2006 - 4:52pm in The Oil Drum: Local
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: electric, energy, nuclear, oil, peak oil, utilities [list all tags]
My growing (and worrying) conclusion is that we are headed back to the future with coal - either liquified for our cars or simply burning it for electricity. Perhaps somewhat cleaner coal, but even clean coal is more polluting in terms of global warming than most other forms of energy production.
Despite nuclear power's promise as a clean energy source that could hold down emissions of global warming gases, most environmentalists are skeptical of the latest claims by its advocates. They say that utilities, at best, will move ahead with a handful of plants that will receive lavish incentives from the government. But the risks of nuclear power are still so high, they argue, that no utility will be willing to put its own money into building a plant unless the federal government heavily subsidizes it.
It continues by pointing out that despite recent increases in the cost of all other forms of energy, Nuclear is still too risky to justify the investment:
because of high prices for natural gas and uncertainty about how emissions from coal plants will be regulated in the future, the nuclear industry is moving from near death to the prospect that perhaps a handful of plants will be ordered in the next few years. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission counts 27 potential reactors under consideration; 103 are now operable.For all the momentum behind the push, however, there is still a high degree of skepticism within the utility industry. There are better places to put the money of shareholders, Mr. Hecht of PPL said. At the moment he sees a much greater advantage in cleaning up his coal-fired plants, investing $1.5 billion to scrub out most of the sulfur dioxide. That would not only benefit the environment but also generate pollution credits PPL can profitably sell.
That decision was "dull and basic," Mr. Hecht said, but adheres to a paramount goal: maximizing shareholder returns. He won't rule out nuclear plants forever, Mr. Hecht said in an interview, but the business case would have to be a lot clearer than it is now.
"Technology often has zealots, it seems, behind it," he said of companies moving forward on nuclear power.
However, some are moving ahead, like Constellation Energy:
Constellation plans to apply for a reactor-operating license by the end of 2007, probably at either the Calvert Cliffs site in Maryland where it runs two nuclear reactors built in the 1960's and 1970's, or at Nine Mile Point, in Scriba, N.Y., on Lake Ontario, where it operates two reactors it bought in 2001.Its decision has implications beyond the corporate bottom line for the global environment. There are also arguments over nuclear waste and the risk of accidents. Around New York City, especially, there is concern over reactors as terrorist targets.
But the risk that really matters to utility executives is financial. Among the companies that would actually build these plants, executives focus more on uncertain factors like the future price of power, the cost of producing competing fuels, and the cost of cleaning up coal plants to meet standards for the pollutants that Washington does regulate -- sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and soot.
At this point companies do not face any constraints on carbon emissions.
That seems to be the critical point - Uncertainty. The main benefit of nuclear power, Less Carbon Emissions, lacks a clear economic incentive due to lack of regulation. A long term commitment to a Federal carbon cap and trade system or a simple carbon tax would be a great way to creat more incentives for lower carbon emissions. But until then, increasing the share of power from Nuclear does not seem to be in the works:
even if a few plants are built, industry insiders do not expect nuclear power to assume a significantly greater role. Roger W. Gale, an electricity expert and former Energy Department official, asks several hundred utility executives each year what they foresee in their industry.While they are convinced that a new plant will be ordered soon, the more than 100 senior utility executives who responded also said they do not expect "a future where nuclear generation represents a larger share of generation" than today.
And even with action now, it takes about a decade for a new nuclear plant to come on-line. Establishing a cap and trade system for carbon for sometime in the near future would help create incentives for all non-carbon emitting forms of power production.
I am optimistic about the increased safety and cleanliness of modern nuclear fission reactors, as well as the potential for recycling of nuclear materials - I'm also hopeful that we'll have fusion reactors one day, or some other as-yet undreamed of energy source.
But even for the nuclear reactors we could start building now, as you rightly say, it will take years and years before they'll be up and running. And it sounds like the people who would have to invest in their construction are still apprehensive at even starting to build any.
Which brings us back to conservation and cleaning up our existing energy sources. I don't think there's anything else to be done.
And none of this touches on cars unless/until they shift to electric (batteries) or hydrogen (fuel cells) so we can just use our existing local power plants to fuel them. Until then, they need oil, so redesigning our cities and towns and reducing our car use is the only thing to be done.
Am I right? What am I missing?
Damek,
I don't think your far off, but at this moment, "non car" energy is not yet really in crisis, except in certain localities, and due to the greenhouse gas concern, much more than the "fuel supply" problem. It is "liquid fuel" problems, i.e., the car fuel problem that is most pressing.
Please check out some of the posts and links on down this thread on DG (Distributed Generation), it is an area in which we have not even began to scratch the surface of possible advances, incorporating "smart" grids, 'mini" grids, semi autonomous and part time stand alone power, energy storage on small flexible systems that can be used for power shaving, power smoothing, and streamlining the grid system to reduce line loss, incorporate renewables in various scales, use flywheel storage, ultra capacitors, thermal storage through cryogenics and ground coupled geothermal heatpumps, electrified transportation by hybrid and electric car and light rail and Personal Transport Rail, the list goes on and on.
Right now, for the planners and investors "in the know" of what is really going on technically, they are rightfully frightened of sinking billions into concentrated expensive nuclear. About the time, a decade or two away, when they finally get them built and running (as you rightfully point out it will take years and years), they look up and there is no market for expensive, centralized only semi-reliable power from a single massive source (remember, one major storm, or an equipment failure at one giant reactor and you could still be in the dark, completely reliant on ONE single utility and it's nuclear priesthood to maintain your lifestyle.)
Nuclear will just be so passe', it will seem so primitive! :-(
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
There is plenty of fuel to support a distributed generation model particularly if we de-couple and re-couple cooling, heating and lighting from electrical generation.
We decouple by using solar thermal, geothermal and daylight harvesting strategies and we loosely couple by using waste heat for heating and cooling (which moves efficiencies from 30% for small turbines to 80-90%)and thermal (ice) storage and pumped storage to take advantge of excess nightime capacity of large, centralized plants. In addition, as we re-design communities to be pedestrian-friendly we can create heating and cooling districts (heating & cooling are 50% of the load) that are substantially more cost-effective and efficient to operate than stand-alone HVAC systems.
Time-of-day net metering and breakthrus in thin-film PV (see Nanosolar) are the icing on the vake.
That is SOP in Sweden and it do anyway only add up to a few percent of the electricity production. In 2004 47.8 TWh of heat and 6.1 TWh of electricity were produced out of a total of 148.8 TWh electricity produced.
I think the district heating could about double and all of the electricity production potential is not used, 6.1 TWh could probably become 24 TWh in a very optimistic scenario.
We alost got biomass comming out of our ears, lots of hydro power but still need nuclear power. At least while we still have a lot of heavy industry making paper, steel, etc for quite a lot of people.
Energy markets are not homogeneous. In the US many older markets use NG for heating so the electric impact of districts is much smaller (though increased cooling demands are driving electric demands).
In the cooling-dominated climes of the sunbelt (e.g. Florida) heating and cooling is met predominately by electricity. And cooling represents 60-70% of peak demand.
You write:
My growing (and worrying) conclusion is that we are headed back to the future with coal - either liquified for our cars or simply burning it for electricity. Perhaps somewhat cleaner coal, but even clean coal is more polluting in terms of global warming than most other forms of energy production.
Precisely - and for that we should say `thank you' to the environmentalists.
Thank you for being clueless about relative risk.
Thank you for talking bullshit about the hazards of exposure to low-level ionizing radiation.
Thank you for making false, Cornucopian promises about the potential of renewable energy sources.
Thank you for objectively promoting the growth in fossil fuel consumption.
Thank you for helping to usher in the global warming era.
Of course, we know your intentions were good.
The human species is treading thin ice because it doesn't understand or respect natural limits. It has convinced itself that opposable thumbs annoint us as the crown of creation. The only three words we seem to understand are more, bigger, and faster.
Many enviros have been preaching reduced consumption, reduced population and avoidance of overly-complex and polluting technologies (like "Noo-que-lar" power) for decades -- mostly to an empty house. Now the chickens are about to return to the roost, just as predicted.
When I hear someone blame the environmental community for our current crises, I am reminded of one of my favorite bumper stickers: Plants and animals disappear to make room for your fat ass.
Nothing personal, mind you...
It strikes me that it is more like blaming the anti-war movement for the war.
Except for some influence in Europe, environmentalists have had little to do with the slowdown in nuclear plant construction in recent decades. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did not change the attitudes of environmentalists, but sure put the fear of Satan into a lot of the unread. But like most things, it's mostly about cost and coal and natural gas have been providing electricity at a cost that nuclear has been unable to match, despite an earlier promise of electricity "to cheap to meter". I am reminded of this every month, when as a resident of Ontario I look at a significant premium on my electricity bill that is dedicated to a huge debt that nuclear facilities have imposed on us.
As an anarchist, my main objection to nuclear rests with the repressive political structure it requires: a caste of high priests who hold the knowledge and police/army who maintain security.
That's the problem. Tell someone that they don't need nucler and they use coal instead. The enviros keep thinking that one day they'll say "no nuclear" and the world will hear "don't use air conditioning" and agree. They are still waiting. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and always expect a different result. It is never going to happen. Anti-nuclear is pro-oil and pro-coal, just as passivism on the eve of WWII was pro-facist. If there are only two viable choices (and the world seems hell bent on choosing one of them), then to degrade one is to help the other.
I agree with the grandparent. Thank you green party for being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party and keeping us breathing coal and diesel fumes for well nigh 40 years now. Keep up the good work. And when all the glaciers are melted, then you better believe people will be using their ACs like mad. The world will go nuclear (or solar, or whatever), but it looks like the bashing of new power production techniques guarantees that we'll burn up all the coal and oil first.
You sir don't actually understand natural limits all that well, at leas as they relate to energy. The UN proposes that human population will peak at around 9 billion people and then decline. Lets suppose that it remains at 9 billion people, and each one uses 3KW pretty much continuously. This is fairly close to what the US uses, depending on how you count energy, roughly 3KW (say, between 5 and 2) per person when you add up all the oil, gas, coal, wood, nuclear, hydro, and everything else.
This is (once again, very roughly) 10^11 joules per person, per year. 10 billion people would bring the grand total to 10^21 joules per year for the whole planet. This is actually entirely sustainable. There is more than enough solar, and nuclear could maintain that level far beyond the sort of time horizons we should concern ourselves with now (say, a few thousand years). Beyond that, fusion would render the entire exercise a waste of time, if we manage to get it in the next few thousand years, which I guess we probably will.
There are limits to human growth, but they have NOTHING to do with energy. Food, yes, space, yes, recreational land that isn't paved over, absolutely. Energy, not relevant. We will use all the oil (check), and gas (check), and then either proceed to use solar and nuclear or continue to use all the coal, and then use solar and nuclear. That's pretty much the options, and there's no reason why we will ever be short of energy, given the current state of technology.
Personally, I'd like to just jump the coal step and not completely screw up the planet. It's much harder to do that when the greens are screaming like prissy princesses about nuclear day and night. If you want something to scream about, scream about coal. leave nuclear alone. Maybe one day, in 50 years when all our energy infrastructure is nuclear, then, by all means have this discussion about people living in caves and not using energy. By all means, lets have that discussion then, or even now, but don't spend the days bashing nuclear in order to get there. Bash coal first, nuclear either later or never.
Wow - living in Germany, where the Green party in the later 1990s proposed a 10 dollar a gallon tax on gasoline, I hadn't realized that it was all a Republican plot to get an oilman elected in the U.S.
Or are we talking about the same Green party?
Because the one I know of played a major role in shutting down not only the domestic German nuclear industry, but East Germany's brown coal industry too. They have also been huge supporters of locally based agriculture, a typically Republican ruse. Let's not even begin to explore Green dedication to reducing consumption at all levels, from packaging on up, another typical Republican concern.
Actually, you get all your information about the Green Party and its politics from the American media, I would hazard to guess. Well, in that case, rest assured that it is a Republican ploy to help the Green party as a favor for the Greens helping the Republicans. Sort of like how feminists and fundamentalists are really just big buddies in the end.
And if you are standing on the opposite side of the planet day IS night. As a historical note - the Greens basically became an organized party ca. 1980 - they haven't even been around for 40 years. Of course, the Republicans and the Democrats have. Now that I think about it, maybe the Catholic Church is responsible for abortion, pacifists cause war, and people who live in America have nothing at all to do with the fact that a quarter of the world's fossil fuel consumption takes place in the United States.
Well, for a while there, I thought I would actually have to resist changing my worldview so as to blame environmentalists for McMansions, SUVs, and obesity. But I stopped myself - it really wasn't that hard.
And of course, the world is not in any sense running out of oil, and this peak talk is just crazy - and home prices always go up, too.
Ignoring reality is so much easier than dealing with it.
Partly bought by government money Vattenfall got as compensation for handling over a large share in the nuclear powerplant Ringhals to the utility Sydkraft now German E-on as compensation for our greens forcing a closure of the Sydkraft nuclear powerplant Barsebäck.
I dont like closing nuclear powerplants in Swedens since it is stupid due to environmental, economical and of course peak oil reasons but it gets realy disgusting when tax money used for this stupid idea ends up financing new brown coal powerplants.
I would for environmental and national selfish reasons very much enjoy a sale of these Vattenfall assets in Germany to finance new nuclear powerplants in Sweden. The official line seems to be that Vattenfall must be one of the largest players on the european market or they will otherwise be destroyed or perhaps loose the pee distance competition. My less advanced insights into such things is that well run and profitable trumphs big but I am of course poor and powerless myself and dont know what makes mega corporations successfull.
Well, I live next door to Germany (Luxembourg) and from my balcony I have a nice view of the wind turbines that grace the Saarland's skyline on the other side of the Moselle. So I am reminded every day of the aesthetically less pleasant aspects of implementation of some of the Green Party's policy proposals - but perhaps that's the price we have to pay. Thanks anyhow - rejecting the nuclear option makes the German countryside a more beautiful place, doesn't it?
Their proposal to raise gasoline taxes was certainly a saving grace, but I remember that in the 1980s they seemed to devote about 90% of their energy to demonstrating against nuclear power plants, which for them embodied evil incarnate - and they spent the remaining 10% on data-dredging-based hysterical scare-mongering about the alleged carcinogenic hazards resulting from exposure to miniscule and barely detectable quantities of chemical insecticides. Never in their literature did I come across any reference to relative risk either in connection with nuclear power or in connection with toxicological issues. Perhaps I didn't read enough.
I'm not denying their positive side.
Just saying they were pretty much a mixed bag.
Personally, I never found the few windmills on the Rhine in Karlsruhe a problem - but then, the coal power plant chimney, and the barges carrying coal into the Rhine harbor tend to be much more noticeable.
As for what the German Greens protested against - I would guess their anti-war stance took at least as much of their energy during the 1980s as any environmental concern. (The Greens are not Greenpeace.) Of course, some Greens tend to be hopelessly hysterical romantics, so I am not disagreeing with any personal observations. And living here in Baden is strange - the joke is that people here think Green, but vote Black (CDU) - this may mean that the Greens don't look or act as extreme here as in other parts of Germany, or that many Green concerns about sustainability are just considered normal.
It always interests me to see how the truly radical Greens of that time tend to get reduced to the most politically palatable level of environmentalism, which all major parties in Germany adopted, without discussing other major concerns which remain quite unacceptable to discuss it seems - such as blood for oil being morally wrong.
But then, gaining power does that to idealists. I tend to be a fan of the Greens to the extent they were true outsiders (they aren't anymore), and in the sense they seemed more capable of seeing a larger picture - again, as outsiders they didn't have to worry about insulting any other power blocs.
There are a number of transformational changes that are directly due to them. Waste management, energy conservation, transport, bioclimatic housing, solar and wind energy : these are fields where Germany leads the world.
The Greens didn't invent them, and we can imagine that they would have come anyway, sooner or later (though Germany would probably not have led the world in any of them by then); but they were, in fact, imposed by the Greens through tough political coalition-building, persuasion, compromise and (most of all!) proportional representation, which gave them political clout.
The nuclear issue is a tough one, but shouldn't serve to hide the huge and very positive overall contribution of the German greens.
We should be so lucky in France!
But they are no longer an outsider party, and one of the main reasons for their existence seems to have faded into the background of necessary police actions, or peace keeping, or whatever term works for sending soldiers to do something other than defend a nation from direct attack. The Greens had that debate, and the ones in power did what people in power normally do - exercise that power to remove opposition to what those in power feel is necessary and correct.
Sort of like how Green Rezzo Schlauch now sits on the EnBW board - even though the company is majority owned by EdF, the world's largest commercial operator of nuclear reactors (I believe - the U.S. may have more reactors, but they are owned by various companies).
I'm sure he thinks his reasons for being there having nothing to do with the check he receives, or the cover it gives EnBW to keep selling electricity generated in France using nuclear reactors. But then, he is an innocent politician, not a cynical citizen.
Come on. You claim to be concerned about peak oil, global warming, and sustainability, but you're going to oppose a key element of the solutions on the grounds of visual aesthetics?
Personally, I find them, without exception, beautiful. That may not be entirely unconnected with the fact that I actually care about these issues.
The greens in Germany are not the same as the Greens in PA, for instance, where they are entirely funded and staffed by republicans.
Hell, he got his supporters to donate 40 grand to the green party for the ballot drive. Do you really think he is doing this because he is a warm and fuzzy environmentalist?
If you vote for the green party candidate for senator in PA this Nov. you really need to have your head examined. Rick Santorum is the most vile thing that ever came out of PA and really, really needs to lose his job.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/15167552.htm
The two-party system is really neat!
It's TWICE as democratic as the one-party system!
Yes, and those greens are so competent and smart!!!!!!
They could challenge Hillary from the left, or Lieberman, or Kennedy, or Kerry, and in any of these cases they would have a significant chance of winning. In addition, they'd significantly advance their cause whether they won or not, and not severely hurt their cause if they lost. Do they do so, no, they do not.
Where do they challenge? Well, lets see, there's Pennsylvania, where without their help Santorum has about a 5% chance of survival, with their help perhaps 30%. In either case, the greens have roughly a 0% chance of winning. Sure looks like that'll help the environment, if they save the nastiest of the republicans from his day of reckoning.
Where else, well, they challenged in the presidntial race, and told everyone that a Gore presidency would be the same as a Bush presidency. Does anyone actually believe that? Do they even actually believe that? Two words, willful, ignorance.
Where else, looks like a challenge against Feingold to soften him up and make absolutely sure that we don't ever get a real liberal running for president, good, good.
In all of these cases, they had massive help from republicans. The campaigns are waged with republican money and republican volunteers. It shows, the corruption seeps through. The chief justice of the pennsylvania supreme court called their 2004 ballot petition (if memory serves) "the most horrendous fraud ever perpetrated upon this court.."
Hmm, seems like they're really saving the environment. Good thing we have them around. Without them there would be no Bush, and god only knows where we'd end up. Probably with very little CO2 emissions and vastly less dependency on foreign oil. At the very least we'd be in good financial shape. Good thing we have greens around fighting for the rights of endangered wingnut republicans everywhere.
The two party system isn't perfect, but it surely does far worse with a third spoiler party hell bent on underminig their own ideals.
A primary challenge within the democratic party can work, just look at Lieberman. Basically, the twoparty system works fine without massive election fraud and willful ignorance on the part of the major players. Even with these handicapps it will work itself out eventually anyway. The US isn't the only country to elect a nasty leader, Italy (twice!), and Germany spring to mind. Neither case can really be blamed on the convenient scapegoat, the two party system.
Nice illustration of my thesis.
I have no desire to defend the US greens. In the electoral setup you have, they have little hope of being anything but a spoiler. That's because of the two-party system, which is a travesty of democracy.
Contrast the Green Parties of Germany or New Zealand, where proportional representation gives them an influence, a hugely positive one.
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1409304.ece
Particularly interesting -
'A short circuit at Forsmark caused an immediate shutdown in one of three reactors. At this point cooling must begin at once but only two of four diesel generators began the automatic process of pumping water to carry this out. Höglund said that "only luck" prevented disaster, as all of the generators shared the same construction error.'
'"It is surprising that this happens in Sweden, which has an extremely strict safety system for their nuclear power plants. I have been to Forsmark myself and there is a large difference between safety thinking there and, for example, in Russian plants," Bøhmer said.'
Of course, the people pointing these things out seem to be opposed to nuclear power. I wonder why that is?
Certainly has nothing to do with any facts, I'm sure, it's all more of that Republican ploy to discredit nuclear power to burn more coal since Greens are ignorant ninnies scared of a few more harmless backyard becquerels. And to think the Swedes just missed an opportunity to show just how harmless a nuclear accident really is.
Another link from another utterly biased source -
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,430164,00.html
At some point, the pro-nuclear people just need to prove that mistakes never happen, and we can all rest easy.
A good way to do that is to make sure that such little itsy-bitsy almost meltdowns don't get much attention.
Or build reactors which can't melt down - which is technically possible, by the way. It is just that apparently NO nuclear reactor currently being used commercially to generate electricity is so designed.
Please feel free to contradict that assertion with a list of facilities world wide which do use such designs.
My english summary and impressions of them are:
There were large cooling margins to dry boiling any part of the fuel.
Defence in depth and redundance worked and enough automatic systems started to cool the reactor core to keep the no manual actions required within 30 minutes rule. The idea with this rule is to give time for manual analysis so that operators dont make a problem worse by incorrect actions such as happened during the TMI accident.
But too manny things failed from a single source of failure, an overvoltage from the switchyard short circuit, showing that some "defence in depth" systems to allways have power to run the systems depended on each other in bad ways.
From reading reports nothing seems to have broken down inside the plant as in the magic smoke leaving the electronics. The problems were bad values set for overvoltage protection in UPS equipment, bad design decisions in how to feed power to some components and systems and faulty installation of some components.
I will stay with my earlier impression that the nuclear powerplant were not perfect but good enough to handle these faults. I enjoy the open information while they fix these faults and better the design procedures for plant maintainance and upgrades. It is quite like what has happened before in earlier incidents, a learning experince that will make the plant better and the lessons will be distributed in the industry.
I suppose the imperfections can be quite scary for those who are scared by nuclear power. It will never be perfectly safe, only very very safe and it is important to not depend on an illusion of perfect safety since that gets in the way of the work to make the safety better over time.
The problem with nuclear power essentially remains the problems of dealing with the waste and mistakes - and until you can build a system where no mistakes without catastrophic results occur, I remain a sceptic on nuclear power. And please, a nine minute margin for ruining a significant amount of the Swedish landscape for a significant number of years should not be comforting to you - unless you think that the two generators that started to run the pumps represent very very safe. I certainly wouldn't, and that is based on a very rational understanding that the benefits from running the plant do not compare to the results of a no longer exactly theoretical chain of events leading to the slagged core meeting the wider world.
It was the captain's considered opinion during our discussions that the newer, safer designs are unlikely to be built, at least in the U.S., since the risk of a new, hopefully 'safer' design would seem higher than building reactors of a proven design, even if that proven design has known flaws.
Any design that results in a meltdown after power is lost, measured in seconds, minutes, or hours, is a problem.
I do wish that advocates for nuclear power would, at a minimum, insist that new reactors not be so designed or built that a meltdown in a fueled core is the default setting, so to speak.
As for burning brown coal - yep, you can always tell who is the junior partner in a coalition government. The SPD understands coal miners very well, of course.
If even more things had gone wrong the emergency preassure release filter would have proven adequate or inadequate.
Btw regarding meted cores, melted salt reactors are intresting. It is probably possible to build quite efficient Thorium and Uranium breeders that give high temperatures needed for chemical hydrogen synthesis. Unfortunately I am afraid that I live in too small a country for us to research them on our own. It makes more sense for us to improve the reactors we got and hopefully build a few more, lack of power in a post peak oil world scares me much more then the small risk for nuclear accidents.
If that cant be avoided on a global scare I would very much like to live in a country that has lots of energy to export things that are valuble for the rest of the world to get political leverage to keep this courner of the world calm and the ability build up a good military defence if that is needed.
My minor fear is having living conditions far closer to our ancestors then the current ones. People can both kill and die to avoiding such a fate, I hope they also can work and make sensibe politics.