Nuclear Power

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
101

[QUOTE=gonzomax]
Watch out he is going to blowup like a nuke plant.
[/QUOTE]

I’m going to blow up EXACTLY like a nuke plant…which is to say, only in you and FXM’s dreams. :stuck_out_tongue:

[QUOTE=Measure for Measure]
The more precise answer is that we are purchasing a portfolio of energy sources. I would advocate building 1-3 new nukes over the next 20-30 years just so we keep that sort of industrial capacity, while funding an R&D effort in case a breakthrough occurs. Oddly enough, that’s probably what the US will end up doing, though this may imply a slow phase-out of nuclear power. Nukes are a lousy bargain now, but they might be relatively cheap later - again who knows?
[/QUOTE]

I agree that we need an energy mix. Sadly, folks like The Gonz and FXM really are representative of the thinking of the majority of Americans (and probably just about every other country too), so I think nuclear is going to be a non-re-starter, by and large. Even with large subsidies I don’t see it happening, at least not in the US. So, we’ll be left with coal and natural gas, fading nuclear and hydro, geothermal basically what it is today (maybe a slight uptick), and wind and solar struggling to get into double digits of our total electrical production (maybe) in a few decades…which is really another way of saying that unless the magic ponies materialize, we’ll be sticking with mainly coal for the foreseeable future, with some other stuff to fill in the gaps. The one technology available today that can scale up to really take a bite out of coal and other FF based electrical production is a non-starter in the US, and I don’t see how that’s going to change when the environment is so pervasively anti-nuclear. C’est la vie.

-XT

102

I have to disagree with your political analysis xtisme. It’s the financial markets in the US that block nukes and not Sane/Freeze. There was a generous federal subsidy bill passed a few years ago, and Wall Street has shown only a little interest. Are they afraid of an army of hippies? Hardly. They are willing to fund nukes provided they operated by traditionally regulated utilities, so that they don’t face pricing risks in the electricity market. That means plants in Georgia and South Carolina may very well be constructed.

With low worldwide interest rates, this would be a good time to build nukes – recall that a big chunk of the bill is in plant construction. But recent building efforts in Korea and Finland have been pretty dismal, cost-wise - behind schedule and over budget.

Finally, gas-turbine is fully capable of being scaled up AFAIK, and has the added advantage that it runs well intermittently, so it complements sources such as wind and solar.

103

http://jimhightower.com/node/7439 These are the people we trust to run the plants. They cover up and lie. This plant is like the Japanese plant. They expected to get a new 20 year extension without a fight.

104

[QUOTE=Measure for Measure]
There was a generous federal subsidy bill passed a few years ago, and Wall Street has shown only a little interest.
[/QUOTE]

Doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s exactly what I expected, and what I was implying earlier.

In a way, yes. They are afraid that there will be delays, lawsuits to cease building, changes in ordinances, protests and everything else you can think of to draw out how long it will take to build the plant, and increase the costs. The utilities also have to pony up money of their own (usually hundreds of millions of dollars…sometimes even billions). That’s capital that is just going to sit there, doing nothing for however long it takes to finally get the plant built and into operation, so they can start getting some kind of return on their investment. But it it takes 5 years longer than projected due to protests, and costs a billion more than projected, then that’s more years before they can even start to get any sort of return on their investment, and even more money they are in the red for, that will put them deeper in the hole before they can break even and start making money.

I will believe it when I see it. I’m not going to hold my breath.

I don’t know what the specific problem in Korea is, but I seem to recall that in Finland part of their issues have been those anti-nuclear types stirring the pot and stretching out the project. And even if in both cases the root cause of the delays and over budget costs, in the US trying to build even an older designed nuclear plant is going to be hitting multiple brick walls, as the well has been completely poisoned. This latest incident in Japan is just going to solidify opposition, as it will make the people in those communities looking at nuclear afraid and angry.

As long as the natural gas holds out. And they still produce GhG and other pollution, though less than coal IIRC. I’ve heard mixed things about how well natural gas will be able to scale up to meet our energy needs, so not really sure about that. Say that in 2 or 3 decades you could replace all of our nuclear with these kinds of plants, though. If you did, you’d be replacing one technology that has a very low pollution and zero CO2 emissions, with one that has some pollution and some CO2 release. Don’t

105

What happens in Georgia and South Carolina may very well be a test (not the only one) of our competing world views, xtisme. Our difference in perceptions is a matter of degree of course: we both agree that nukes ain’t cheap in the best of circumstances and I acknowledge that anti-nuclear sentiment is an issue. I just think that in the absence of public protest, nuclear power would still be a bad deal, absent technological breakthrough. I don’t find your stance wholly implausible: it’s just that nuclear power plant doesn’t swing many votes outside of waste depository locations.

Natural gas reserves have increased enormously in the past several years, due to the introduction of fracking. Yeah, there are some environmental problems with that technology: there’s no such thing as completely clean energy other than conservation. And I expect much whining and wrenching of garments. But again, there’s extra-rationality on both sides. Some (not all) members of the drilling community insists that there fracking can’t possibly harm groundwater and anyway the industry can’t handle being regulated to death. It’s an odd combination of disingenousness (yeah, fracking doesn’t cause problems directly, but compromised well linings sure do) and hysteria. OTOH, the major environmental groups are generally supportive of fracking, though they think it needs federal regulation – industry claims the states can handle it. I can only roll my eyes and hope that grownups prevail within the industry.

Further down the road, gas hydrates are another possible source.

Gas produces about 1/4 the CO2 emissions as coal, IIRC, though of course that varies with the efficiency of the power plants being compared. And recently concerns about methane leakages have come to light: this would be a problem as a molecule of methane warms more than a molecule of Co2.

“Say that in 2 or 3 decades you could replace all of our nuclear with these kinds of plants, though.”

That’s mostly the wrong thought experiment, methinks. The battlelines involve new plant construction: outside of Vermont few are arguing over the extension of existing licenses. That may change of course as some plants reach their effective 60 year lifespan. I predict that nukes will continue to provide about 20% (+/- 5 percentage points) of electric power in the US over the next 10 years.

Something to watch: there’s a nuclear renaissance in China, India and other third world countries. Nuclear governance certainly has its problems in the West, but I suspect that regulation will be substantially less transparent within developing nations. So we might expect a few accidents. Depending upon how they play out, western public opinion could plausibly shift against nukes in a substantive way (as it arguably has in Germany). For the present though, I hear of few calls for nuclear moratorium among noted US politicians.

106

It’s generally understood that nuclear executives are evil and construct doomsday devices in their underground lairs. But coal and auto magnates do the same. The difference is that coal-bombs and car-bullets kill far more over any period of time than nukes do.

The dose makes the poison: what exactly are the harms that we’re talking about?
More seriously, it’s not enough to show tritium in the water supply, scary though it is. You have to show that evil nuke execs cause more mayhem than competing sources of energy, either in actuality or potentially. Cecil argues that Chernobyl demonstrates the absolutely worst case scenario for a nuclear accident. If his argument is to be refuted, it seems to me that the way to do it is to point to what could happen in a nuclear disaster (plutonium in the water supply, anyone?) but did not in 1986. What is the plausible range of deleterious effects?

107

Congrats, Randvek! Cecil has used your post as the launch for his current (10-Jun-2011) column: Followup: Why don’t we ditch nukes and coal? - The Straight Dope

108

Nice article!

I would nit that as wind turbines get bigger and more powerful, they also can get taller, which greatly expands the areas we currently think of as being sufficiently windy.

Space-based solar power is pretty much infinite, just have to work on those launch costs.

109

Hmmm… it might seem a pedantic point, but this article conflates energy with power.

Watts represent power, not energy. Power is a measure of energy over time. (1 W = 1 J/s). Analogy: 1 mph = 1 mile/hour. Power is to energy what speed is to distance.

Presumably by terawatts Nocera means continuous power output, implying a certain annual energy consumption (in joules or watt-hours).

It’s ambiguous, if not completely wrong, to say “In 2002, global energy consumption was 13.5 terawatts.” That’s directly equivalent to saying, “In 2002, I drove a total of 120 mph.”

You can see the problem with that! The mitigating factor is obviously that when we’re talking about world power consumption, it’s generally implied that the watts quoted is an average amount supplied continuously.

110

Another thing that’s often missing from analyses of future energy sources is the caveat that much of our energy today comes and is consumed in the form of fuel.

Electricity is not a fuel. It’s misleading to talk of “total global energy consumption” and imply direct equivalence with electrical power output over time, if by “energy” we mean all forms of energy.

In fact it’s not only misleading but produces completely incorrect numbers, because to convert electricity in to any sort of fuel is an extremely inefficient process.

We need to produce fuels both for transportation (air travel, shipping, and many smaller vehicles won’t be using batteries or nuclear reactors any time soon). We also need to produce fuels from wind and solar if they are ever to provide more than a tiny fraction of total energy output.

There’s another reason to produce our own fuel: if it’s got a carbon backbone, we can use CO2 from the air as our raw material, reducing the atmospheric concentration.

So, in short, “alternative power” is not the problem we need to be solving. We need to be finding ways to produce synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. A breakthrough here will solve many unrelated problems simultaneously, which is the hallmark of a “right” solution.

111

It’s customary to express generating capacity in terms of watts. The car is capable of going 120 MPH, a power plant can generate 5 MW. Nocera used this convention, and so did we. We did leave out the word “rate,” though, which I’ve now added.

Production of synthetic fuels will undoubtedly be important, but it’s hardly the fundamental problem.

112

In 2008 the solar, wind, geothermal and biofuels used for energy was almost twice that of nuclear. And 5 times that of hydro.

It wouldn’t take much (less than the cost of building new nuclear plants) to replace all nuclear energy with renewable sources. The sun alone provides much more energy each day than the entire world uses in a year.

Faced with this immutable fact, the negative minded may cry out “It costs too much!”, or some nonsense about the amount of land it would take.

Meanwhile a parking lot for a shopping center bakes in the solar energy each day, which would provide far more power than the building uses, it it captured even a fraction of the solar energy that is coming down.

And the numbers for world energy consumption are mostly nonsense. Leaving out the huge amount of solar energy that is actually used by mankind each year skews the entire concept. Much more energy is ‘used’ by humanity to warm the land and water and air so it’s bearable to live. And to grow crops.

Calculate out how much energy it would take from ‘power’ generation just to grow all the food each year, then put that number next to the power generation figures. It will become obvious that we already depend on solar power to be able to survive.

The energy needed to bring a 400 acre field of corn to harvest (three times a year), how much ‘power’ or energy is that?

You think the oil used to run the tractors and other machinery comes anywhere close to that figure?

Plants convert solar energy to a form we can use. And remove CO2 from the air. It’s almost as if there is a solution to the energy problem, but you can’t see it for the trees.

113

Adding “rate” does fix the units in the way that saying “In 2002 I drove at a rate of 120 MPH” fixes the car example. But ideally one would multiply 120 MPH by 24*365 hours to get miles, and just say, “In 2002 I drove 1.05 million miles”. The resulting number adds a few orders of magnitudes to impact factor as well.

I don’t think it’s fundamental problem – I think it’s the fundamental solution.

114

Plants TEMPORARILY remove CO2 from the air. When trees or other plants are burned or when they die and naturally decompose, all that CO2 is released back in the air.

This is not to say that we should cease to fight rainforest clearing or stop planting new trees, but it does give it the proper context.

115

[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
In 2008 the solar, wind, geothermal and biofuels used for energy was almost twice that of nuclear. And 5 times that of hydro.
[/QUOTE]

I’d like to see a cite for this one. But if you take ‘biofuels’ (by which I presume you mean ‘biomass’) out of the equation I wonder what it does to the factoid. :stuck_out_tongue:

Total horseshit. Let’s see some cites to back this up, ehe? What would it cost to replace all of the electrical energy production in just the US with ‘renewable sources’? Just roughly.

I won’t go into the rest of your post…how about just backing up these two assertions as a start?

-XT

116

I read in a science journal many months ago about a propsal to install solar cells in the Sahara desert with essentially a really big extension cord going to Europe. Sounded very interesting, and it would be a great way to ultimately electrify Africa and address some of it’s problems. I assume nothing will ever come of it becasue it wold take multi-nation/continent partnerships over decades to achieve.

117

But that’s the point – the carbon cycle is balanced. Simplistically speaking, the number of new trees decide where it’s balanced. What more do you want?

It’s not desirable to have all our recent contributions to atmospheric CO2 sequestered again permanently. We should withdraw them from the atmosphere in a way that allows for controlled re-release or reuse in the future. New trees are one way to do this, but not the only, or most useful way.

Synthetic hydrocarbons are a better mechanism: we’ll produce them from CO2 from the air, and then either burn them (keeping net CO2 at zero), or store the fuel on land (reducing atmospheric CO2). There is no denser store of carbon that is both useful and feasible to produce.

118

Quoth tomL:

No, there is exactly one sensible way to interpret that statement, and so it is neither wrong nor ambiguous. We don’t care how much energy power plants can produce: A little 1-HP backup generator can produce that amount of energy, too, if you let it run for long enough. What we care about is the rate of energy production, or in other words, the power.

And FXMastermind, you keep repeating (here and in other threads) that we could replace all our current nuclear power with wind and solar, but that doesn’t actually support your argument. You think it proves that nuclear is insignificant enough that it can be ignored, but really all it proves is that we’re not using enough nuclear right now. Call us back when wind and solar can completely replace coal.

119

Alright then: it’s wrong, but not completely ambiguous. Happy?

Otherwise you are going to have to defend this statement: “In 2002, global energy consumption was 13.5 terawatts” as demonstrating correct use of the terms “energy” and “watt”. Which it doesn’t.

120

While it may just kill the nuclear dreamers, it’s actually faster and easier to build and install green tech than nuclear power plants.

Just the interest on the loan to build a nuke plant would allow huge amounts of energy to be harvested, starting now. Not 10 to 12 years from now. Maybe, If all goes well.