Scientific American joins the Push for Emission Free Nuclear Power
Eric Worrall / 16 hours ago June 3, 2016
 Susquehanna steam electric nuclear power station
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Scientific American reports increasing interest in using nuclear power to lower US CO2 emissions – but Presidential wannabe Bernie Sanders has vowed to decommission all US nuclear power plants.
The Nuclear Option Could Be Best Bet to Combat Climate Change
To cut CO2 pollution, experts argue for nuclear power.
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Many analysts are now calling not just to preserve existing nuclear power plants, but to invest in new designs to help fight climate change. “A new round of innovation for nuclear reactors would be quite important,” said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last month.
Across the United States, nuclear provides 20 percent of all electricity and more than 60 percent of greenhouse gas-free electricity. But some plants have already shut down ahead of schedule, and others may do so, as well, not because of environmental opposition but because of market forces.
“In the United States today, we have some older plants shutting down,” Moniz said. “The pattern is obvious: It’s principally plants in competitive markets faced with very low natural gas prices.”
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“Nuclear is without a question the most important environmental technology in the 21st century,” said Michael Shellenberger, an advocate for nuclear power and president of Environmental Progress.
He said nuclear is the highest rung on the energy ladder that civilizations climb as they move to denser fuels from biomass, to coal, to oil, to gas and finally to uranium. “From an energy and environmental and development perspective, I want everybody to go up the hierarchy of energy,” Shellenberger said.
Under U.S. EPA’s Clean Power Plan to reduce emissions in the power sector, new nuclear power plants and reactors upgraded to produce more power count toward states’ carbon goals.
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The renewed interest in nuclear energy has led to startup companies developing “fourth-generation” reactor designs that are walkaway safe, meaning that if left unattended, they safely coast to a halt.
“All three generations of nuclear technology that are out there today require babysitting,” said
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates during a panel last month in Washington, D.C. “The nuclear industry has never designed an inherently safe product.”
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However, existing reactors are tacking into the wind, in terms of economics and politics. Vermont independent Sen. and Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has laid out a plan to decommission every reactor in the United States.
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Mark Jacobson, an energy researcher at Stanford University who found that it’s feasible for much of the world to run on wind, water and sunlight, acknowledged that nuclear energy has some carbon benefits but said it has an insurmountable drawback of opportunity costs, namely the billions of dollars needed upfront and the decades it takes to plan and build reactors.
“If you’re looking at just one technology in isolation, maybe you don’t care about that opportunity cost,” he said. “But when you’re comparing the two technologies, that becomes relevant. If you have $1 to spend, would you rather spend that on nuclear or wind?”
But the nuclear industry isn’t arguing to be the only option on the table, saying instead that it wants to be an appetizing entree in a buffet of energy options to fight climate change.
“You don’t want to go all in on any one technology,” said NEI’s Keeley. “And NEI is pretty clear about that, too. We see a role for renewables. We see a role for natural gas. We see a role for nuclear.”
Read more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-nuclear-option-could-be-best-bet-to-combat-climate-change/
The Scientific American article is quite long and wide ranging, in my opinion well worth reading in full.
As a fan of nuclear, I’m happy that nuclear power is getting more traction, though I am concerned the nuclear industry are using the climate “emergency” to promote their product – a strategy which I believe will ultimately backfire.
The hostility presidential wannabe Bernie Sanders expresses towards nuclear power is telling. From my perspective, Bernie Sanders is the kind of green hypocrite who first led me to question the legitimacy of the global warming “emergency”.
Even if nuclear was as risky as greens claim, what is the risk of a few meltdowns, compared to the destruction of the entire biosphere? Hostility to nuclear power doesn’t make sense, if you truly believe the entire world is on the brink of an climate catastrophe.
In my opinion, if socialists like Bernie and Naomi Oreskes cared more about CO2 than social engineering, they would join Scientific American, and scientists like James Hansen, and embrace nuclear power, the only energy technology which has a realistic chance of significantly reducing global CO2 emissions.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/03/scientific-american-joins-the-push-for-emission-free-nuclear-power/
Robert of Texas says:
June 3, 2016 at 5:57 pm
Nuclear power is really the only major alternative to fossil fuels. I do not believe CO2 is a problem, but I do support building better nuclear energy power plants – assuming they can operate at market competitive prices.
To do this – burn fuel more efficiently, solve the waste storage issue, build plants using standardized reactors, and use designs that shut down using passive systems. This really isn’t difficult engineering – its the politics that are difficult.
I used to really like Scientific American… They really went downhill the last 20 years. I sure hope this is a sign they are once again becoming more than a green activist mouthpiece.
Greg says:
June 3, 2016 at 10:30 pm
I’ve always wondered if this is the old one two switch.
Exactly.
Renewables have been designed to fail. UK govt has incentivised unmeteredrooftop solar PV in a country that has sod-all sun !!
This ludicrously pays householders an estimated fixed amount per unit area of installation, irrespective of whether it actually produces anything and pays them a feed-in tariff. Rooftop thermal solar is several times more efficient at producing energy but has not been pushed.
Why is this ? Because none of this was ever about saving energy or the environment but about saving the banks. If you have a solar PV contract with a guaranteed income, a bank is allowed to lend you money instantly create “wealth” in the economy and increase its assets.
The Ivanpah plant was design and built without any storage capacity which would have meant it produce in the afternoon and deliver in the evening when there is peak demand. It also means it has to burn natural gas in the morning to get it up to running temperature.
It was designed to suck up federal subsidies but designed in such a way as to be a technical failure.
Bryan A says:
June 4, 2016 at 9:03 am
It was is certainly far more wasteful of resources and land space to not consider the Nuclear Option
For example:
California’s Diablo Canyon facility, the generating portion of the power plant covers 12 acres, has a capacity of 2240MW and produces electricity 88% of the time day and night wind or calm.
The Alta Wind Farm covers an area of 3200 acres and has a capacity of 1547MW (roughly 70% of Diablo) but operates only 30% of the time so would require almost 12000 acres at 30% capacity to offset Diablo Canyon.
Blythe Mesa PV Solar Farm will cover 3587 acres for 485MW but will likely have a capacity factor of under 25% so would likely require almost 50,000 acres to offset the production of Diablo Canyon
Walter Sobchak says:
June 4, 2016 at 9:14 am
The anti-nuclear prejudice of the “greens” is a key proof that they are really a leftist political movement, not at all concerned with anything other than imposing a socialist regime featuring themselves as the nomenklatura. Their opposition to nuclear power is the shadow of a Soviet Dezinformatsiya campaign aimed at crippling the US’s nuclear weapons capabilities in the 1950s and 60s. It is also a graphic illustration of how they have abandoned the proletariat they once claimed to champion. One might think that the union movement would champion an energy source that created hundreds of jobs for skilled craftsmen. The union movement has been taken over by the government employees, and is indifferent, or even hostile, to the interest of the proletariat.
Eric Worrall says:
June 3, 2016 at 7:39 pm
The design principles of walk away safety (passive safety) seem quite robust.
For example, with pebble bed reactors, if the core overheats, the spherical fuel pellets physically swell up, increasing the volume of the core, and physically moving the fuel pellets away from each other. This stabilises the reactor core temperature at a level which is well below meltdown temperature, even if the cooling system completely fails.
Or there are molten salt designs, where the liquid is held in place by a plug of salt, kept from melting by a small electric fan. If the core overheats or the fan fails, the salt melts, physically draining the molten core into a holding tank, away from the nuclear moderators which are required to keep the reaction going.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
Dr. Strangelove says:
June 3, 2016 at 8:29 pm
“Even if nuclear was as risky as greens claim, what is the risk of a few meltdowns, compared to the destruction of the entire biosphere?”
They are both green fantasies. Nuclear is the safest of all energy sources. Around 50 died in Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident. 118 fatal accidents in the wind industry. Around 100 deaths every year in solar roof installation accidents. Hydroelectric industry’s worst disaster, Banqiao dam failure, killed around 250,000. Worse than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Cancer by nuclear accident is another green fantasy, Ukraine where Chernobyl is located has lower cancer incidence than California.
“if socialists like Bernie and Naomi Oreskes cared more about CO2 than social engineering, they would join Scientific American, and scientists like James Hansen, and embrace nuclear power”
Bernie is a communist and Oreskes is a lunatic. Global warming is just an excuse to promote his ideology and her psychosis.
Leo Smith says:
June 4, 2016 at 2:31 am
There’s a couple of things I wrote a few years back about exactly these subjects.
In essence I was trying for a complete review of energy generation, put the Late Prof Mackay beat me to it on energy density, so I helped him get his book published. That’s really where you need to start at
http://www.withouthotair.com
That book shows you the size of installation you need to make renewable energy work assuming some kind of storage to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar exists.
I then wrote this:
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Renewable%20Energy%20Limitations.pdf
To address two further issues – intermittency and cost. The final analysis of that, is that ex of fossil fuel, there is only one other viable technology – nuclear, of one sort or another. I am not going to get into a detailed war about which technology, because frankly they all work or could be made to work, and its a matter of development costs and production costs which are largely dominated by regulatory overburden and politics.
Cost of course is somewhat a moveable feast with the likes of subsidy and government interference, but in the end a figure of quality – EROEI – energy return over energy invested is what cost tends to be a proxy for, and is a figure of quality for power generation. Recent studies suggest that is actually less than one for most solar installations, and windmills are only marginally positive, and with storage…well there’s the rub, In order to provide dispatchability, you need storage (or co generation with e.g. hydro or fossil) and then the cost goes even higher and the EROEI even lower.
(I randomly put on a bit of TV – in the UK there is a channel dedicated to the dreary outpourings of government – this was the energy select subcommittee – and there I was startled to hear the minister utter the magic word ‘dispatchable’ . Then I knew that David Mackay, who was scientific advisor to the energy department, had not died in vain, and had managed to educate them about intermittency. Maybe my essay helped. I’d like to think so).
Having concluded that love it or hate it, the only alternative to a return to the Dark Ages was nuclear power, as even if there is plentiful fossil fuel now, at economically extractable prices, it won’t be so for ever. I wrote a speculative piece of – well perhaps science fiction – to address the future of a society that has no access to cheap fossil energy resources. NOT an easy thing to do, because the whole post war society has been shaped by exactly that – access to cheap fossil fuel sources, especially petroleum. The name of the game there was to see how much industrial or post industrial society had to change to accommodate very high priced fossil fuels, (in the limit, you can synthesise hydrocarbon fuels but the price is perhaps 10 times what it is now in relative terms).
That essay is here:
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Beyond_Fossil_Fuels.pdf
What the results of a few years research and cogitation revealed were basically this:
1/. Renewable energy is barely able to meet our energy needs and then only by exploiting huge land areas at fairly insane costs. An ecological disaster in its own right. This is David’s (never stated, but actual) conclusion. David was a committed Green, but a supremely intelligent and honest one.
2/. Intermittent renewable energy (wind wave solar tidal) has the greatest potential for generation, but the lack of dispatchability makes the costs even more insane. There isn’t enough hydro actual or potential in the world to be a battery, and anything else is simply too expensive, and that means EROEI is probably around 1 or less, rendering it completely unviable and unsustainable.
3/. If CO2 reduction is what you want, there are at least 10,000 years of fertile and fissionable material at good extractable values available to generate energy at massively better EROEIs than renewables, that is constant reliable and dispatchable enough. And its cheaper than renewables, despite the massive costs imposed on the nuclear industry by regulatory ratcheting and regulatory overburden. I like to think That David, and to a small extent I, have been instrumental in making Britain almost alone on the Western world, begin to take a look at new nuclear in a serious (though currently very flawed) way.
4/. Even if CO2 reduction proves to be totally unnecessary – and I personally think it is – there are not unlimited supplies of fossil fuel and the more you have to frack it the less the EROEI is. The USA has at least 100 years of coal, and ex of Greenpiss, doesn’t need nuclear the way e.g. Britain, whose viable coal was largely worked out 50 years ago – does. But 100 years of coal and maybe 50 years of frackable gas is not 10,000 years of nuclear fuel. There is no rush to go nuclear, for the USA, but there is pressure, so to speak. A program that keeps some nuclear as a portion of the generation mix is advisable, so it can be ramped up if and when needed.
5/. Looking further into the future, almost everything we do today could be done with nuclear power, with some salient exceptions: Industrial processes that use carbon as a reducing agent (smelting) could use electrolysed water as hydrogen instead, industrial hydrocarbon feedstocks could use synthetic hydrocarbons from water and carbon dioxide…or alternatives to these products could be used. None of it is as cheap, but it is all do-able if we had access to cheap abundant nuclear power.
6/. The salient exceptions are off grid power – notably small boats, aircraft and road transport. One way to address these is to simply build railways. The UK to France channel tunnel replaces ferry boats effectively. And uses trains. Large vessels can easily be nuclear powered. Electric cars hover on the ragged edge of viability. The bugbear is energy density. There is some scope for improvement but not a lot. Hydrogen is a possibility, but its a horrid fuel to handle. Its advantage is that its easy to make by electrolysis from nuclear electricity. Fully synthetic fuel of a diesel/kerosene like character is possible, but the price is high relative to the electricity used to make it. What I suspected would happen is that all of these would vie for dominance until the most cost effective one emerged in any given niche market.
7/. Social changes would be dominated by the relative costs of transport against the relative costs of no transport: prices of goods would move around: Plastics might become expensive. Wood based products might reappear as economically viable. Work would increasingly be done without moving the people to the work: they stay at home and use a high speed internet to control robotic machines for physical labour, or teleconference for service type jobs.
AS I said, it was all extrapolation towards what is almost science fiction, but even though the essays are rough, bear much improvement and are out of date, I think the debate is worth beginning: Ex of Climate change, which I think is deader in the water than most people on both sides think, there still remains a big question of what energy we run an industrial and post industrial society on, because it needs a LOT of per capita energy to run, and there ain’t much room to reduce it.
Love it or hate it, my analysis concludes that nuclear isn’t an option: Actually its the only option.
We need to be slowly steadily and carefully keeping it going and developing it until the need arises. The USA is likely to lag here, because it doesn’t need nuclear power yet, the way places like Japan, parts of the Far East, parts of Europe, do. Places with high population densities, no oil or coal under and no mountains to speak of. |
