Nuclear Power No Climate Cure-All

[bananas]

From Joseph Romm's blog:
http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/18/nuclear-power-no-climate-cure-all/

Nuclear Power No Climate Cure-All

Everything you could possibly want to know about nuclear power — and its (limited) potential as a potential climate solution — can be found in the new Keystone Center Report with the less-than-captivating title “Nuclear Power Joint Fact-Finding.”

Reuters is confused in its article on the report, “Nuclear Power Can’t Curb Global Warming - Report,” and actually overstates the case for nuclear:

Nuclear power would only curb climate change by expanding worldwide at the rate it grew from 1981 to 1990, its busiest decade, and keep up that rate for half a century, a report said on Thursday.

Specifically, that would require adding on average 14 plants each year for the next 50 years, all the while building an average of 7.4 plants to replace those that will be retired, the report by environmental leaders, industry executives and academics said.

Incorrect. You would need 8 to 10 times faster growth (3 nuclear plants built each week for 50 years) — and some 100 Yucca Mountains to store the waste – for nuclear to curb global warming on its own. How did Reuters get it wrong?

<snip explanation to the bottom line...>

Incorrect. As the Keystone report makes clear — and as former Vice President Al Gore told Congress earlier this year — nuclear may be a part of the solution, but probably only a very limited part.

[kestrel91316]

1. Uh oh.

:popcorn:

[Gregorian]

2. Thanks. I've been waiting for that.

It's time to refine the problem. Enough of the spinning and confusing. It's not a difficult problem to define, but I don't see enough of it in the media. Pfft, the media.

[NNadir]

3. Well I would hate to contradict a blogger, but this is a pretty dumb argument.

First of all the blogger seems to have completely neglected the fact that nuclear power plants have operated for 50 years with zero Yucca Mountains.

Bloggers like this are spectacularly mathematically incompetent. In the period between 1960 and 1980 about 440 nuclear reactors were built. My simple division we see this is a reactor build rate of about 22 per year on average.

This blogger is so poorly informed that he seems to think that was was accomplished more than a quarter of a century ago routinely is now impossible.

I personally think that we should be building several hundred reactors per year. Of course it will take some time to reach this rate, but it is hardly the case that it is impossible to do so.

Every day the reflexive anti-nuke fantasy gets curiouser and curiouser and curiouser. At this point it borders on hallucinatory.

[bananas]

7. wrong wrong wrong

1) 14+7.4 = 21.4, which is close to your calculation of 22 per year.
2) There were only about 250 plants in 1980, not 440. See chart below.
3) The blogger was quoting the report, which was funded by NEI and several electric companies.
4) The blogger is a recognized expert on these issues: http://www.nuclearfoundation.org/rommbio.html

This chart is on page 10 of the Keystone report,
it also appears in this article from Nuclear Engineering International magazine,
which is a pro-nuke publication:
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2030047

[TheWraith]

8. He's not a very competent expert, then, or that foundation has very low standards.

His math is pretty bad, starting with overestimated the amount of waste by an order of magnitude, overestimating our projected energy requirements by a factor of 2, and underestimated the practical growth rate for building new reactors.

[bananas]

11. If you want to believe science fiction written by hobbyists, go ahead.

But remember, that's how L. Ron Hubbard got started.

[jpak]

12. but..but..hobbyists invented the backyard molten salt breeder reactor

in their dreams...

:evilgrin:

[phantom power]

14. Hey, keep it quiet about my reactor.

My HOA will shit a cow if they find out.

[bananas]

15. The numbers come from the nuclear power industry

The Keystone report was funded by the nuclear power industry and several electric companies.
They've officially endorsed it.
That's the best they can do.
Romm was simply pointing out an error in the news article about the report,
and he's absolutely correct, as confirmed by one of the people who wrote it.

[NNadir]

9. Maybe you think the blogger is an expert.

I think he is full of shit. Looking at his bio, I see a guy who wants to sell the "renewable will save us meme." He's an "expert" like the moron Amory Lovings is an "expert."

Frankly your continual declaration of "expert" status is probably a representation of your ability to think for yourself. I note that people who continuously refer to "experts" usually are very, very, very, very, very bad at critical thinking.

If you would like to produce an article showing that any other form of energy that is climate change free that produces the same quantity of energy as nuclear energy you are free to do so.

If you would like to split hairs with meaningless worry about non-significant figures. If one is capable of interpreting the meaning of graphs, it is very clear that the rate or reactor building was once enormous.

Around 1990 anti-nuclear stupidity took hold, threatening the lives of everyone on the planet. Since that time there has been a dangerous surge in the use of dangerous fossil fuels and a surge in the indiscriminate dumping of dangerous fossil fuels into the atmosphere.

If one looks at the graph you provide and takes the slope of the line between 1984 and 1988, about 100 reactors came on line. Note that this was precisely the time when antinuclear ignorance became fashionable. As I recall, people were yelping in 1986 about how wonderful solar power, for instance, was. The entire solar capacity for the entire country is easily matched by just one reactor that began to operate in 1986.

Oh, and by the way, if Dr. Rohm has "fostered" things like batteries, electric cars, and that good old bugaboo, hydrogen, it would seem that he is a failure, does it not?

As for this claim to credibility from his bio:

In 2004 and 2005, he was quoted in over one hundred media outlets (see attached), including New York Times, Business Week, the L.A. Times, Fortune, Financial Times, Science, New Scientist, CNBC, NPR, CNN, the BBC, and CBS Evening News...

...I merely note that this looks remarkably like the media outlets that quoted Colin Powell on the weapons programs of Iraq. I'll let you know when I start getting my science information from the CBS Evening News. Whattya think, did Katie Couric cite Dr. Rohm after the five minute blurb on Paris Hilton's incarceration or before the ten minute blurb on Brittany Spears' situation with respect to her underwear?

The problem with our culture is nothing more than a failure to think critically. Basically the things you see on TV are distortions and not reality. If you'd turn of the TV, you'd do better but you won't turn off the TV.

Frankly I have no problem saying that I regard Dr. Rohm as curiously deluded. Of course, I didn't know who he was until you told me, but I was pretty sure that he was out to lunch simply by reading what he said.

There is, by the way, not one "renewables will save us" advocate, not one, who can distinguish between power and energy. Recognizing your inability to interpret the meaning of graphs, I nonetheless post one:



The flatness on the right side of this curve has nothing to do with technical issues, since nuclear reactors (from the embedded capacity utilization graph) have become the most reliable energy machines on earth. The flatness on the right instead comes from human stupidity that substitutes citing "experts" for common sense and reason.

[bananas]

4. I just noticed it's been posted to grist.org and there's an interesting comment

Here are just two paragraphs:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/6/18/161052/155

<snip>

Full disclosure - I was one of the 27 members of the Keystone factfinding. And there was general agreement around the table, from the enviro to ratepayer advocate to nuclear industry side, that Gen IV is at least 20 years out from commericalization, if that. That is why the process focused on expected technologies. The general expectation is that reactors built over coming decades will be advanced variants of the light water reactors in use today. This is what the industry's own understandings and projections reflect. Yes, the South Africans are developing a modular pebble bed reactor, but that will have to be proven out.

Joe has it right that Reuters had it wrong. The report looks at one Pacala-Socolow Wedge (=14% of needed carbon reductions to avoid doubled concentrations, which probably still is 100 ppm CO2 over where we need to be, and finds that for nuclear to reach even one an extremely heavy lift, equal to the best construction rate the industry has ever acheived and well below authoritative industry projections.

<snip>

Patrick Mazza

[phantom power]

5. For what it's worth, my previous estimates agree with Reuters...

about 1000 gigawatt reactors, to provide our total energy usage (US). That would be both electricity and other energy.

8 times that amount would actually provide twice what the world currently uses. Maybe Joseph is operating under the assumption that we will double our energy usage over the next fifty years? If so, he's optimistic beyond reason.

It sort of begs the question: what does Joseph think could be built faster? Considering that all other options are much more expensive per unit energy delivered, and lack infrastructure to be deployed at even a fraction of the "Reuters" rate, to say nothing of his weird "8x" rate.

[bananas]

6. He's written a lot

salon article covers about everything http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/01/25/climate_change/
wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Romm
bio http://www.nuclearfoundation.org/rommbio.html
he has a book out
and of course his blog.

[Dogmudgeon]

10. And thus, the 800 pound gorilla

There is very little discussion of the vast amount of energy we need to generate just to keep going.

A thousand reactors for the USA's current demand. Eight times that many (or more) for the world in fifty years.

That's why I support nuclear energy. That's why when I read the happy-talk articles about how this week's giant wind farm has reached 18% of its 500 MWe capacity, I groan. It's why I laugh through the tears when people assure me that all we need to do is to make those mean old corporations put solar panels on all our roofs.

And then there's the week's pyre of dead coal miners.

Over the past 150 years, we have built a socioeconomic system that absolutely depends on growth. We can't really get by on less than about 2% annual growth, and we need slightly more than that in energy. Just two percent -- but that translates into a doubling time of about 35 years, not 50. If Joseph's estimate is optimistic beyond reason, we're facing the whirlwind -- soon.

We haven't maintained even 2% since about 2000. And we've been limping by on increases in efficiency since about 1990. No action has been taken to transition to a low-or-no-growth model. The world economy is beginning to stall. The US Dollar has lost about a third of its value. We are getting by on momentum. That can't last forever. I am surprised we have made it this far.

There are many reasons why we need to grow in order to survive; an economist could make a better presentation than I could. We need to re-engineer our economy towards what M. King Hubbert termed the "Steady-State Economy", but such a task will itself take a generation.

But in any case, we have stopped building "infrastructure". It is more expensive and less profitable than trading paper-based "financial instruments". You can see it on the nuke-building chart; it mirrors the rise of profit inflation well. If you can find a similar chart for petrochemical infrastructure or even coal-burning power plants, you would see similar disturbing trends, possibly bent according to their own industries' viscissitudes.

We need more energy, and we're not so much as making plans to get it -- except to bomb people who won't give it to us. We should dedicate ourselves to a decade or more of intensive energy infrastructure building, but we won't.

Even with nuclear energy, it will be a difficult achievement. But we already have a dozen or more full-scale reactor and generator models that could be built in a year or two absent Scientology-style litigation. We don't have anything like that for wind or solar power. And photovoltaic solar power is looking a lot worse than it was sold, too. One thousand times as much semiconductor waste as we generate now would dwarf any kind of nuclear waste we could generate from ten times the number of nukes. We fear nuclear waste but not semiconductor waste. We fear nuclear waste, but not when it's released by burning coal.

But the point I want to make isn't about nuclear energy. It's about just how huge the problem is -- and how little we're doing with any technology.

We need to double our energy production by 2042 (give-or-take). We are not doing it. At all. The economy is stagnating. Soon it will sag into a recession, and then the force of its own torpor will take over. Whether we then have a fast and brutal crash, or a long, leisurely slide back into universal poverty and serfdom is a matter of debate -- and style. But a few years after that, it will end large-scale agriculture, as well as large-scale population.

We've doubled wind power production in five years, all the way to half a percent. Solar is a quarter of that, and most of that is for swimming-pool heating. Nuclear energy has been bled white by a thousand cuts administered by self-appointed world-savers fearful of nuclear cooties. Tidal doesn't exsit. Hydroelectric is being out-scaled and it's a long-term ecological disaster for its watersheds. Geothermal is stuck in the 1950s; Deep Geothermal is speculative.

This is why I fear for our future. We need energy NOW and we have no way to get it, we need an epochal socioeconomic reconstruction program and we aren't even aware of the problem, and the climate is changing for the worse. Most of us are thinking unrealistically about how to deal with the problem, and we fear our best prospective sources of energy. The rest of the world is just plain oblivious.

In a couple of years, we won't know what hit us.

"But _______ won't save us!" Since nothing will save us, then let's just lay down and die.

We won't do a thing until large numbers of people are suffering in misery and dying. The way we are going, it won't take long.

--p!

[phantom power]

13. Has anybody ever *developed* a non-growth economic theory?

If there even is one, I bet it's not taught in economics classes.

[Nihil]

17. It's a little late for that now (except for academic interest).

Somewhat similar to the problem a supertanker full of crude oil has
when someone informs the helmsman that they can see a lot of rocky cliffs
dead ahead ... a wish for a working radar is a trifle late at that point ...

[Nihil]

16. Excellent post

Not very comforting reading but an excellent post nonetheless.

:applause: