Atomic Balm: Long NYT Magazine article on Nuclear Power.

[NNadir]

The New York Times Magazine featured a long article on the future of nuclear power yesterday.

It is found here:

An entire concrete factory, now defunct, was built here during that time; so was a factory to manufacture ice, a necessary ingredient in making the superdense nuclear-grade concrete required for the reactor-containment buildings. To Ellie Daniel, a local man who has worked as an administrator at Vogtle for more than two decades, only two significant things have happened in the history of Georgia’s Burke County. “One is the Civil War,” he told me. “The other is Plant Vogtle.”

The boom that swept through the region as Vogtle rose from the forest floor — its immense cooling towers are each 548 feet tall — ended somewhat badly, however, at least in a financial sense. The plant took almost 15 years to move from blueprints to being operational. And by the time it began producing electricity in the late 1980’s, its total cost, $8.87 billion, was so far overbudget that Vogtle became yet another notorious example of the evils of nuclear energy. In the public mind, the issue was safety. For the industry, the larger concern was economics. Indeed, as originally designed in the early 1970’s, Vogtle was intended to generate a total of around 4,500 megawatts of electricity, enough power to serve the needs of several million homes. The grand plan was to have four reactors. Instead, it was scaled back to two, Vogtle Unit 1 (finished in 1987) and Vogtle Unit 2 (1989). Today these reactors together produce about 2,400 megawatts, satisfying about 15 percent of the state’s power needs.

One day this May, on a brisk morning so clear that I could see its cooling towers from 20 miles away, I visited Vogtle on one leg of a tour to assess what many in the energy industry are calling a nuclear renaissance. Thanks partly to large government incentives and to market forces that have pushed the price of other electric plant fuels (especially natural gas) to historic heights, the prospect of starting a new nuclear reactor in this country for the first time in 30 years has become increasingly likely. By early summer a dozen utilities around the country had informed the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees all civilian nuclear activity in this country, that they were interested in building 18 new facilities, nearly all of which would be sited next to existing nuclear reactors. Vogtle was in this group of 18. In fact, the Southern Company, the large utility that runs Vogtle, also announced that it would formally apply to the N.R.C. next month for an early site permit, the first step in readying the community for a nuclear project that would complement the existing reactors. Whether Vogtle will turn out to be the 1st, 5th or 10th next-generation plant to break new ground is difficult to say; trying to predict which utility will be able to overcome formidable obstacles — public approval, regulatory scrutiny, billions in financing and complex engineering challenges — is akin to predicting the winner of a presidential election years in advance...

...the industry, in a way, is in a race against time. Recently, Paul Joskow, a professor of economics at M.I.T., sent me a chart that looks ahead to the output of America’s reactors over the next half-century. As the current 103 nuclear reactors continue to generate electricity for the next few decades, the line on the chart remains mostly flat. But then the plants’ electricity production falls off a cliff. “I think this is the first time in many years, perhaps 20 years, that the combination of government policy, economic conditions and environmental constraints are reasonably favorable for nuclear,” Joskow told me. “If they can’t move forward now, it would be very difficult in the longer run...”

...When it comes to America’s future energy needs, one of the larger points of confusion is the somewhat tangled relationship between fossil fuels and electricity. Current prices at the gas pump, for instance, or the possibility that we are approaching a moment of “peak oil” — the point at which the global supply of crude peaks and then diminishes forever, with cataclysmic consequences for transportation, trucking and the economy in general — actually have little to do with the future supply of power. Making electricity is generally about creating a source of heat and steam, and using that steam to turn giant turbines and generate power. Less than 3 percent of our electric power is generated from oil. Besides the 20 percent contribution from nuclear power, 50 percent of our electricity comes from burning coal, 18 percent from burning natural gas and (in a heat-free method that is often the cheapest) 6.5 percent by harnessing the energy of water moving through dams. Wind and solar power make up less than one-half of 1 percent of what we use on a typical day. In part because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine (and in part because wind turbines and solar cells are expensive to build) neither technology is yet good enough to generate large, reliable quantities of inexpensive electricity, or what utility companies call “base load” power. At at some point in the future, oil and electricity may fight for supremacy: Toyota recently announced it is developing a plug-in car in addition to its hybrids, for instance, and electricity has the potential to help manufacture clean-burning fuels like hydrogen for the future...

...None of this is assured. Moreover, what makes the choice of fuels such a knotty problem is that something that is cheap now, like coal, may not be so cheap in 10 years. This isn’t because we’re running out; we probably have at least a century’s worth of coal reserves in the United States alone. But if the government were to impose a tax or a cap on carbon emissions, something that almost everyone I spoke with in the energy industry believes is inevitable, or if new laws mandate that coal plants must adopt more expensive technologies to burn the coal cleaner — or to “sequester” the carbon-dioxide byproducts underground — the financial equation will change: a kilowatt-hour generated by coal suddenly becomes more expensive. There are other contingencies at play, too: fuels, like natural gas, could experience a supply interruption that leads to enormous price spikes...

...Probably the best comparison of gas, coal and nuclear energy was done with Joskow’s help in 2003, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published an exhaustive analysis of the future of nuclear power. The M.I.T. study concluded that nuclear energy is competitive, but only under certain circumstances. One instance is if the costs of building a plant are significantly reduced (by shortening the length of construction, for example). Another is if coal and natural-gas plants are taxed on carbon emissions. Because nuclear plants don’t produce carbon dioxide and wouldn’t be taxed, their electricity could conceivably cost no more to generate than that from coal and gas, or even less...

In the article, we hear from the oracle at Snow Mass, Amory Lovins, speaking from his million dollar renewable airy, filled with all the renewable technologies that could be hauled up the mountain by truck:

There is a counterargument to building large new power plants. One view — voiced most forcefully, perhaps, by Amory Lovins, a physicist who runs Rocky Mountain Institute, which advises corporations and utilities on energy efficiency — is that we don’t need to increase our electrical supply. We need to decrease demand by rewarding utilities for getting customers to reduce electricity use by, say, updating their appliances, furnaces and lighting. Lovins, a longtime critic of nuclear power, contends that it remains financially uncompetitive and that the 30-year absence of new plants is proof that the market has rejected nuclear power as a viable technology. When we spoke about whether utilities need to build more big generating plants in this country, he told me no — not now, not in 15 years, not even after that. “I think if you do,” he remarked, “your shareholders and ratepayers will be asking awkward questions that you would really rather not want to answer.” Yet the concern, even among Lovins’s admirers, is that if he is mistaken — that is, if either his estimates on efficiencies can’t accommodate population and industrial growth, or because what is possible in principle for energy efficiency is not possible in the real world — then the utilities will require an alternative plan...

...When I asked John Holdren at Harvard whether the potential for efficiencies is as large as Lovins says, he replied, “The savings could be huge.” Yet Holdren also maintains that creating a clean and reliable energy supply for the future is going to be so daunting that nothing should be taken off the table. Clean coal, renewables, nuclear — we’ll need them all. To those in the electricity business, this is known as creating an energy portfolio: build everything, use everything and rely on nothing exclusively. “I’ll be very happy if Amory’s right,” Holdren added, “but I’d like to hedge my bets.”

And the people who actually run the plants discuss their new confidence derived from experience (as opposed to handwaving):

No two factors have been quite so important to the revived prospects for nuclear power as the high price of natural gas and large incentives offered by the Department of Energy, amounting to several hundred million dollars, to help finance the first few reactors. But there have been a great number of helpful factors inside the industry too. By the late 1990’s, for instance, several utilities, notably Exelon (based in Illinois) and Entergy Nuclear (Mississippi), had developed specialties in buying and operating nuclear plants. With Westinghouse’s help, the companies proved that refueling the plants, a complex choreography that occurs every 18 months or so and results in the temporary shutdown of the plant, could be done in about 35 days rather than the customary 60 or 70. The profits in decreasing that refueling period (many nuclear plants take in revenue of about $1 million a day) have been tremendous. Indeed, the companies became so adept at refueling and day-to-day operations that they began acquiring old nuclear plants whose owners either didn’t want them or couldn’t manage them. And they have proved that building a nuclear plant and buying a nuclear plant are entirely different business propositions. A company like Entergy, for instance, has purchased plants like Indian Point in Westchester County and Pilgrim in Massachusetts, updated them, retrained the work force, sped up the refueling process and reaped a nice financial reward. When I traveled to Jackson, Miss., to meet with Entergy’s executives, its C.E.O., Gary Taylor, pointed out that the company’s fleet, which now numbers 10 reactors, accounts for about $250 million in annual profits. What’s more, it has been companies like Entergy and Exelon that in the 1990’s began to give the engineers at Westinghouse and G.E. suggestions for the next generation of nuclear facilities, if they were ever built, rather than the other way around...

...The hypothetical nuclear plant then hits the next set of obstacles. In the South, at least, there appears to be little in the way of community opposition. When I spent the day in Port Gibson, Miss., the tiny town next to the Grand Gulf plant, the local politicians were adamant in support of any new reactor. “We’ve not been able to prosper like other communities,” James Miller, the country administrator, told me. “We see this as our golden opportunity.” The industry seems more concerned about the logistics of building a plant — that is, the actual construction. Several executives told me that they worried most about finding enough craft labor to work on the special aspects of plant construction. They also worried about steel orders, since the domestic industry that long ago forged the massive reactor vessels no longer exists. Only Japan Steel Works, these executives say, has such capacity now. “This country hasn’t built really a lot of whole infrastructure in 20 years, and it hasn’t licensed a new nuclear plant in 30 years,” Gary Taylor, the Entergy Nuclear C.E.O., told me. “Most of the hard manufacturing moved offshore. In many ways that may be a bigger challenge than anything else...

The article, from which I have cherry picked quotations, is far more balanced than I am. My strong opinion is that unless we start building massive numbers of nuclear power plants, we are going to experience a tragedy of proportions that will dwarf anything we have ever seen before.

[megatherium]

1. Good, detailed article.

Mostly focused on the economic issues of building nuclear plants, which is said to be the primary concern of utilities contemplating new nuclear construction.

No discussion of the availability of fuel for nuclear plants, beyond a one-sentence mention (early in the article) that the fuel is abundant and inexpensive. The anti-nuclear folks here make an issue out of this, I was surprised the article didn't mention this concern. Apparently it isn't an issue as far as the electrical utilities are concerned--capital costs for nuclear plants seem to be the overriding issue in their deliberations.

Also a fairly slender discussion of renewable sources: the utilities are described as highly skeptical they would be able to make a significant contribution, or not for 40 years. Photovoltaic solar is dismissed as costing three or four times as much as nuclear would cost, which is deemed prohibitively expensive to the economy. (This is late in the article.)

[NNadir]

3. My feeling is that the anti-nuclear folks here make issues out of

anything, anything at all, that supports their view.

To my way of thinking all of their arguments are irrational. They are religious arguments and not arguments based on sober assessment of the facts.

The only serious risk to which they appeal that concerns me is this:

Some nuclear technology, especially, isotopic separation technology, can be diverted for weapons use.

Given however that global climate change is now a certainty, and that nuclear war represents just a risk, and a small one at that, I think the choice of which risk to accept is pretty clear.

People always appeal to a scare scenario in which New York City is nuked. It is far more likely however that New York City will be inundated and ultimately submerged.

[jpak]

7. Rationalize this

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0903.html

It is mystical irrational religious thinking to conclude this is not a problem and that it can be solved by extracting uranium from seawater.

It is also irrational thinking to suppose that the Southern Company, operator of Plant Vogtle, is motivated to build new nuclear power plants over concerns with global warming.

The Southern Co. was a charter member of the infamous (and now defunct) Climate Coalition. An urGreenwash organization whose sole purpose was to spread lies about the alleged scientific uncertainty over global warming.

They were wildly successful - and their lies resonate among the morans to this day.

The Southern Co. also lavished large amounts of cash on the GOP in the last election cycle - and were rewarded handsomely by Dick Cheney's Energy Task force.

As a result, Georgia tax payers will be handing their hard earned $$$ over to the SoCo to build a new reactor at Vogtle and *pay* them to generate electricity from it (1.8 cents per kWh) - electricity that will be sold back to them at the highest rate possible.

...and the True Believers see nothing wrong in any of this....

[soothsayer]

8. My beef with nuclear is, where do you put that horrid waste?

Have you seen how expensive power is in Europe? That's cuz nukes are EXPENSIVE cuz of that infernal waste.

[NNadir]

9. The most infernal waste is carbon dioxide.

So called "dangerous" nuclear waste storage has not killed anyone at all.

Nobody has even a remote clue about how to solve the problem of carbon dioxide, which is killing people.

[Scribe]

2. Indian Point and Shoreham

The reactors at Indian Point will be closed by fears of terrorism striking a nuke plant so close to New York City. They've been targeted for closure by Governor Pataki who would like to use the same mechanism Governor Cuomo used to shut down Shoreham.

There is such a pervasive climate of fear in America and so much political advantage to be gained by exploiting it that I fear for your suggestion. And, there is the larger problem of general public ignorance of science.

Shoreham was closed simply by fear. Billions were spent to build it and it never produced a single watt of electricity because of fears that Long Island couldn't be evacuated. I don't think it is political possible to site a nuclear plant near any metropolitan area.

[NNadir]

4. To my great shame, I was a participant in the Shoreham debacle.

I was one of the protesters.

It will be interesting to see how easy it is to evacuate Long Island when the south shore is inundated in the next global climate change driven super hurricane.

[Scribe]

5. Wow. You were right and wrong, I think.

Long Island could not be evacuated quickly. But the chances of an accident requiring so huge an evacuation were very small.

Yet, if you apply the Cheney 1% rule, you probably have to close Shoreham.

[NNadir]

6. I think I was 100% wrong.

The probability that Long Island would have needed evacuation because of Shoreham was vanishingly small.

The probability that much of Long Island will be severely damaged by global climate change is very much higher.

[ramapo]

10. Random thoughts

It was nice to read an intelligent and balanced article in the Times Magazine instead of some of the nonsense that they've published of late.

A number of thoughts struck me:

1. Nobody talks about what will replace the aging nuclear fleet. I hadn't REALLY considered it until I read this article. Many plants are nearing the end of their original certification. Thankfully, most can be recertified for another 25 years or so. Otherwise they'd have to be shutdown, production of electricity would fall off a cliff, and we'd be burning even more coal, a LOT more.

Given the glacial speed at which anything gets done in this country, there had better be some serious consideration as to what our infrastructure should be in the year 2030. I'm not real hopeful since business and the leadership as a whole basically has a horizon of three months (the end of quarter), or to the next election campaign. Most other people worry about what's for dinner and then what's on TV with some consideration as to how much credit they'll need to fund a home purchase or college for the kids.

2. Here in NJ, more than 50% of our electric comes from nuclear. There's been a move to shutdown the plant in South Jersey as it is deemed as possibly unsafe. Nobody mentions what would replace it and how unsafe that might be.

3. I was quite surprised by the claim that photo voltaic solar sources could supply current requirements but at a cost of 3x-4x current supply. I had thought the cost would be significantly higher, if it was even practical. Is 3x-4x really prohibitively expensive? If the price doubled tomorrow, most people could cope, just like we coped with the price of gasoline doubling.

Perhaps we'd then learn to stop pissing away electricity like it was a free and limitless resource. Lights burning all the time, AC running when not needed, computers on 24x7, and a thousand other drains on the grid. Maybe we wouldn't insist on living in the fricking desert. Conservation and greater efficiency should bring down the total dollar outlay for electricity.

Now what is the loaded cost of coal vs. the loaded cost of nuclear vs. the loaded cost of
photo voltaic? The loaded cost of coal must consider the environmental and health cost, and the loaded cost of nuclear must include decommissioning and waste storage costs.

All things considered, solar might not be so expensive, if it could really save our asses.

4. Shoreham - What an incredible waste. I seem to remember reading that it was converted to natural gas but I'm not sure. Any chance it could ever be used for the intended purpose?

Of course back when Shoreham was debated, global warming and climate change was just a twinkle in Al Gore's brain. Well not quite since he had already written Earth in Balance, but few were really focused on the environmental catastrophe of coal. Climate change was mostly championed by "enviro-nuts". Nuclear was the evil bogeyman, and honestly, the thought of nuclear gone bad is a scary thought.

I suppose it is good that the industry is ramping up but I don't think it'll be nearly fast enough to save our bacon. "Success" in terms of CO2 emissions is to somehow hold at current levels. Current levels are likely too high and it will take years to reduce emissions enough even to return to today's too high levels. Given the obvious changes taking place right now, it is none to pleasant to imagine what the world might look like in 20 years.

Perhaps in 2008 there will be a change in leadership. Maybe something may start to happen. Unfortunately, I think that will be about 25 years too late but hey, I've always been a bit of a pessimist, and maybe our kids will be ok.

What is most amazing (and depressing) is how long it takes to get anything done. Construction at Yucca Mt. isn't close to even starting. What to do with the nuclear waste is pretty simple. Get it all to an isolated, secure facility where it can be protected and managed. Yet, we've been unable to even do this relatively simple thing.

[NNadir]

12. Some comments on your thoughts.

1) Here is what will replace nuclear plants that are shuttered: Fossil fuels, primarily and overwhelmingly coal. Humanity is unlikely to survive such an approach.

Germany recently announced plans to phase out nuclear power, and Germany is building lots of coal capacity.

2) I believe we should build more nuclear plants in New Jersey. Noting my property taxes, I would be very happy to have such a plant right near here, preferably in my town.

3) Solar power is only 3 to 4 X cheaper than current power when one is not accounting for batteries. However it's fully loaded cost is probably much cheaper than natural gas for peak loaded systems. I don't think anyone objects to solar power displacing natural gas. However I think many people would have a problem with quadrupling electricity rates and buying batteries. Conservation is good. People using light switches to cut off power to power consuming devices is a very good idea. Solar is well suited for providing peak power at high levels of demand (like today). It is not well suited for running your heater motor late at night on Christmas Eve.

4) The Shoreham reactor was not converted to natural gas. It was dismantled. Part of the reason was that it was a boiling water reactor. Thus it's turbines were technically nuclear materials.

Interestingly the site is on the high bluffs over Long Island Sound. Thus the site of the plant may remain after rising seas have taken out the area to its south. In the future, it may be an excellent point to look at the reefs that used to constitute Long Island. I suppose that some of the garbage dumps nearby will also jut above the new water line, leaching toxic shit into the rising ocean. (The highest point on Long Island is now the Huntington Town dump.)

By the way, you have your timelines wrong. The issue of Shoreham had already been decided by the time Earth in Balance was published.

5) For the record, I very much support nuclear power, but I oppose Yucca Mountain, at least as it is presently conceived. It may, for the long term, be desirable to store some fission products there, but I oppose any system that disallows for the facile recovery of nuclear materials, especially the actinides, including uranium. Yucca mountain has, like Shoreham, become talismanic for both sides. Such an approach is not particularly helpful or wise. I think the disposal mentality of the twentieth century is on its way out for reasons of necessity rather than anything else. Spent nuclear fuel is being managed perfectly well right now. There are much more pressing energy waste issues that require more urgent address.

I favor keeping the spent fuel dispersed in casks until it is needed for recycling, as surely it will be.

[NNadir]

11. The link to the article was missing from my original post. Here it is:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/magazine/16nuclear.html

[Terry in Austin]

13. Pro-nuke claims

Do nuclear advocates seriously claim that world energy needs can be fulfilled by building enough nuclear power plants? If so, they need to make a strong case to back up the claim. Any credible case would have to be quantitative.

The numbers I've seen don't look so good. World energy demand is currently around 450 exajoules per year. A 1200 MW plant puts out something like 30 - 35 petajoules a year. A little arithmetic says that would require 12,000 - 15,000 plants, give or take. Currently, they only number in the hundreds.

A credible case would address the following questions, for starters:

1. Can that many plants be built?
2. Is there enough fuel?


MIT's study, "The Future of Nuclear Power", sees a best-case for nuclear that's very modest relative to a 450 EJ demand:

...our study postulates a global growth scenario that by mid-century would see 1000 to 1500 reactors of 1000 megawatt-electric (MWe) capacity each deployed worldwide, compared to a capacity equivalent to 366 such reactors now in service.

We believe that the world-wide supply of uranium ore is sufficient to fuel the deployment of 1000 reactors over the next half century and to maintain this level of deployment over a 40 year lifetime of this fleet. This is an important foundation of our study, based upon currently available information and the history of natural resource supply.

Even in this fairly aggressive scenario, the number of plants falls short by an order of magnitude. More serious, perhaps, is the outlook for the fuel supply -- forty years' worth for this too-small fleet.

We're not even starting to talk about the sustainability or social issues here. Just from the bare energy-resource point of view, nuclear doesn't appear able to cover the needs. Those who claim otherwise need to make their case.

[NNadir]

14. Well obviously the French, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Russians

and the Indians are unimpressed by the "MIT study."

There are lots of studies, most originating in the United States, arguing for a "once through" uranium cycle.

However the claim about the purported uranium reserves lasting 50 years is entirely dependent on the dubious assumption that the world will buy into the assumptions that the study announces in the opening summary, that the once through approach is the best. Specifically it makes (very clearly if someone actually reads the link) that the only argument for fuel recycling is for resource extension. Now, disregarding the importance of resource extension might have been trivial in a 2003 study that remarks coal is cheap. It might be fine if you're concerned with only the here and now, but somehow I don't think our grandchildren are necessarily going to buy into the notion that the lust for low prices on the part of the self absorbed baby boom generation and their immediate decedents will outweigh their own. (This assumes that global climate change will not be of such a scale as to completely eliminate future generations)

Also the study looks only at traditional reserves, and makes no reference to the considerable amount of Japanese work showing that uranium can be recovered from seawater economically at a few hundred bucks a kilo. The reserves of uranium in the ocean, which is chemically saturated with respect to uranium, amounts to about 3 to 5 billion tons of uranium.

One can cite lots of studies from equally prestigious institutions, probably all cited by name droppers of previous generations, making wrong predictions about the energy future. The thread referencing some of the more incredible claims from the past is found here and in my journal:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x39929

Harvard in 1979 told us in 1979 that US solar/wind production would be 5.1 quads by 2000. Where is it?

The onus is not on advocates of nuclear energy to prove anything. Uranium mining has been moribund mostly because uranium has been too cheap, especially since the Russians were dumping their highly enriched weapons grade uranium on the market for several decades. Rather the onus is upon detractors to prove that current energy practices, including the once through fuel cycle are written in stone for all time by a pronouncement from authority A or authority B.

Nuclear energy now provides 30 exajoules of primary energy to the planet. For years, most of my adult life, people have been predicting the imminent collapse of the nuclear industry because of fuel, safety, non-proliferation arguments, the impossibility of fuel recycling etc, etc, etc. Actually right now both in the US and worldwide, the amount of energy produced by nuclear means is greater by a factor of almost 4 than it was at the time of the Three Mile Island accident.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

Still the pace of world wide reactor building is accelerating, not slowing:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.htm

Not one nuclear reactor anywhere on earth has experienced a shortage of fuel because of resource limitations. In fact reactors run on MOX fuel in many countries, including for example, Belgium. In fact the world inventory of plutonium alone is enough to provide all of the world's energy demand, oil, gas, coal, renewables included, for about 6 months, and most of it is regarded as waste. However this MOX fuel is still more expensive than virgin uranium. All of the nations I mentioned in my opening sentence are either planning to maintain their current level of nuclear power use or increase their nuclear shares. India is planning on using its vast thorium reserves. In theory any nation with vast thorium reserves could do the same. The United States could collect lots of thorium from lanthanide tailings dumped because the price of thorium was too low to justify isolation.

Because of the enormous energy density of actinides, it is also true that the cost of fuel is actually relatively trivial in the cost of nuclear power. The main cost is capital plant costs, and it will always be so.

Nuclear power is the single largest non-fossil fuel contributor to energy on the planet. I submit that anyone who is arguing for another climate change mitigation strategy needs to show that the proposed option can produce as much primary energy as the nuclear option does.

http://www.iea.org/textbase/work/2004/bonn/sellers.pdf

[Terry in Austin]

15. Nuclear in the mix

Whoa, there, big fella -- no need to get excited. Just looking for some numbers. And you did have a few, I appreciate that. Great graphic, too, BTW. I found it very useful.

> The onus is not on advocates of nuclear energy to prove anything.

Sorry -- burden of proof is always on the positive. Still, you did take on some of that burden, and I appreciate that, too.

Let's go with some of your claims, for the sake of discussion. You've addressed the second question, Is there enough fuel. As far as I can tell, your affirmative answer for the long term is due in large part to the Japanese study showing feasible extraction of uranium from seawater. I assume you're presenting the Japanese research as more credible than the MIT study. Fair enough -- I'm not familiar enough with all the sources to dismiss any out of hand.

For the other question, Can that many plants be built, I didn't see much that addresses it directly. However, you do mention the 30 EJ figure for world energy production by nuclear, and total energy supply and demand is certainly the key factor in determining the number of plants necessary.

Assuming the 30 EJ figure, then, that represents 30/450, or about 7% of world energy demand. That means we'd need about 5500 plants to supply all of the world's present energy needs. The present number of plants is in the mid-300's. Looks like we're lagging by about one and a half orders of magnitude.

As an aside, I couldn't find the 30 EJ figure you mentioned. Both of your references about world nuclear energy output show about 2020 billion KWh. At 3412 BTU per KWh, that's about 8.94 quads, or 8.47 EJ -- nowhere near 30 EJ. Perhaps you could straighten me out about the apparent discrepancy, because the lower figure would imply a need for almost 20,000 plants.

I suggest that building even 5000 plants is not a realistic project. I'd be interested in hearing any strong case that it is.

More generally, I think numbers like this reinforce the idea that advocacy of any non-petroleum energy source, in order to be credible, has to acknowledge that it must be part of a mix of many such sources -- wind, solar, biomass, nuclear, whatever. Any single one of them is not a silver bullet. That goes for nuclear, too.

[NNadir]

16. There is a difference between primary energy and electrical energy.

The situation is summed up in this graphic which is found in my journal:



From the graphic it is easy to determine that in 2002, the overall efficiency of US electrical power stations was 31%. For a working number, I assume 30% efficiency for nuclear power stations.

I personally favor many thousands of nuclear plants, covering all of the fossil fuel demand that cannot be addressed by affordable renewables. I believe this should be an international effort, involving as many governments as possible, each government doing whatever it takes, including but not limited to subsidy and outright public financing, to build these plants.

I note that many of the Gen IV nuclear power plants, will be very high temperature reactors and will operate with thermal efficiencies of close to 60%, especially if they use the heat from thermochemical hydrogen production facilities to run turbines.

There are now many hundreds of papers in the scientific literature on the aldoxime resin approach to removal of uranium from seawater. Many are in Japanese, but an important series of such papers has been published in English, including information on pilot runs.

The 15th such paper in this series is found here: Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 1994, 33, 657-661.

The technology is well established but is not commercial owing to the low price of uranium, which only 4 years ago was at historical lows never before seen. It is expected to become commercially competitive when the price of uranium reaches about $200/kg, which is equivalent, in energy terms, to crude oil at 0.04 cents per gallon or 1.5 cents per barrel.

Recently some Japanese workers were able to obtain 1 kg of uranium from seawater using 350 kg of amidoxime resins. http://www.ans.org/pubs/journals/nt/va-144-2-274-278

This is more concentrated than some worked uranium ores in Australia:

http://www.uic.com.au/ozuran.htm

Moreover the resin is reusable and has been tested in pilot plants through repeated recycles.

Some Japanese argue for using the technology right now on security grounds. I actually believe that it may be use to wise the technology right now for environmental reasons, but not if it is used to preclude fuel recycling. (Uranium can now be recovered with in situ leaching as opposed to strip mining. This technology is used in many of the newer uranium mines.) I believe both for purposes of resource use, the long term minimization of risk, and for reasons having to do with increasing the difficulty with which nuclear weapons are manufactured, we must recycle our nuclear fuel repeatedly.

The physics of recycling plutonium and other transuranium actinides in pressurized water reactors (the most successful type of nuclear reactor thus far) is a broad area of international research.

Here is just one presentation on the subject that touches on how I think of this approach:

http://www.nea.fr/html/science/meetings/ARWIF2004/4.02.pdf

Note that the recycling approach is probably more expensive than the seawater recovery approach. However the cost of fuel is always trivial in nuclear technology. I believe that the reason to spend slightly more money is to be more responsible via risk minimization.

[Terry in Austin]

17. Realistic project?

Okay, there's some interesting stuff there that nicely fleshes out how nuclear could be a feasible part of the mix.

First things first, though. It appears that you are taking the position that nuclear should be the predominant source of world energy; specifically, that building 5,000 - 20,000 nuclear plants is a realistic project.

If so, I fail to see that the position has credible support.

I don't see any feasible case for building such a large number of plants.
I don't see any credible rationale for marginalizing other alternative energy sources in favor of nuclear.

[NNadir]

18. Who said 20,000 plants? Who said anything about marginalizing?

I have previously offered a back of the envelope calculation on this website of how many nuclear plants it would take to replace all of the transportation fuel in the United States:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x47795

According to these calculations, each 100M cars could be fueled with 120 nuclear power plants.

Now mind you, I don't like cars. I think they're way over used and that we should appeal to other means of transport wherever it is possible.

The world energy demand right now is 440 exajoules. This represents a continuous constant load power demand of about 14 trillion watts, where I am referring to physicist watts and not magical solar peak watts.

Note that this power requirement includes heat rejected to the atmosphere and hydrosphere, and thus is independent of efficiency.

A modern EPR (Gen III) nuclear reactor operates at 36% thermal efficiency and is typically rated at about 1600 MWe, meaning that the thermal output is about 4400 MW(th). You may say that this reactor is a fantasy, but it actually happens several Gen III reactors have already been built or are under construction. Japan is operating several of them, and plans to build more. Thus it is straightforward, appealing to simple arithmetic to show that between 3000 and 4000 nuclear reactors would be sufficient to produce the entire world energy supply. This means eliminating coal and every other form of energy. It means no dams, free rivers, no refineries, no coal strip mines, no coal ash waste dumps, no air pollution, etc.

Now, I'm not asking for that, but I am asking for realism. I am willing to let the dams stay, at least until they silt up. I believe that biofuels have a place in the future. I support all of the wind facilities I have ever heard about. I have no problem with people buying solar PV cells, or constructing solar concentrator thermal plants. I have never heard of a single geothermal plant that I oppose, not one.

When you say 20,000 nuclear plants, I suspect that you are trying to make a point that is completely disconnected from any realistic situation and sounds like some of the scare terms one hears all the time in the business of energy mystification. You can really get a rise out of people by saying even 1,000 nuclear plants, but this is mostly because, in general, people are stupid, not because 1,000 nuclear plants is a particularly dangerous idea.

It always ends up being a discussion of research dollars, as if it is necessary to outlaw research in people's favorite renewable scheme in order to build nuclear reactors. Of course, if one looks into the matter of research dollar efficiency, one finds very quickly that measured in exajoules/dollar, nuclear is far more efficient than other research investments, but that is neither here nor there. (Note that money invested in wind energy research apparently was well spent - this is a very viable and very economic form of energy.) As a person who is chiefly concerned about climate change, I have no problem spending oodles of money on research for all forms of energy, but I do insist that, given the fact that our atmosphere is collapsing now, we utilize what we already know. If we don't do this, we die. That's also pretty straight forward.

The world built 440 nuclear reactors in about 20 years time. That is a historical fact. I note that the world did this in a period where there was tremendous debate about what nuclear power might mean. One heard many kinds of scare stories in those days, and frankly I believed most of them, at least until Chernobyl blew up, demonstrating to my satisfaction once and for all, experimentally, the worst case.

The debate on the consequences of nuclear scale up is no longer theoretical. It is based on experiment. On the other hand, the debate on whether the world can magically produce 440 exajoules of renewable energy without inducing wholesale environmental disaster is entirely theoretical.

We hear about biofuels, but we also hear about unprecedented droughts. We hear about solar cells, but we have yet to see a single exajoule worldwide. We hear about wind, but we are already hearing about problems with grid integration and the need for back-up. We hear about sequestration, but no facility is under construction anywhere on this planet that can accommodate even one day's of the world's carbon dioxide output, never mind every day for the rest of history.

Many people who appeal to questions of research dollars do not recognize that every scientific problem can be solved by throwing sufficient research dollars at it. Were this the case, there would be operating fusion reactors, and, oh yeah, we'd be 100% solar powered. (The solar cell was invented exactly 10 years after the nuclear reactor.) Vast amounts of money have already been devoted to solar research, and still the stuff is mostly rich toys for rich boys.

For the record, I favor a massive carbon tax, reflecting the environmental cost of fossil fuels, which in my mind includes the inundation of beautiful ancient cities like Amsterdam and Venice, as well as New World cities like New York, and Washington and Miami. I would like this tax to reflect both the economic and the moral cost of submerging 400 million people now living in Bangladesh. I would like this tax to reflect the cost of what one billion Chinese living in a desert might cost humanity. In this case, the creation of such a tax, there would be plenty of options for phasing out extremely dangerous fossil fuels.

For the record, 27 nuclear reactors are now under construction, 38 are ordered and 115 are now proposed. For my money, this is way too few, but to give ourselves the best chance to survive global climate change - and let's be clear, we are very much running out of time - we have to go with what is demonstrated, and not what sounds cute.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.htm

Thus even in an age of energy mysticism and denial, more than 150 new nuclear reactors are in various stages of development. This is about 5% of the number required to completely displace all other forms of energy, if, in fact, we wanted to do that. In the case where people do simple arithmetic, and simple evaluations - admittedly quite a bit to ask these days - we could easily scale that number up in a huge way.

I have noted elsewhere that the efficiency of nuclear reactors can be greatly improved, and thus the ultimate number, coupled with energy efficiency, population stabilization and ethical population reduction and other strategies such as co-generation could be much, much, much lower.

[Terry in Austin]

19. Now we're getting somewhere!

Thanks for getting to the arithmetic -- it's central to the basic question: Is it feasible to build enough plants to supply the all the world's energy needs?

> When you say 20,000 nuclear plants, I suspect...

No need to be suspicious of anything here. I'm just trying to get a handle on the essential numbers.

The 20,000 figure came from arithmetic based on the data you supplied. I extrapolated from world nuclear output you referenced, about 2620 BKWh, which works out to 8.47 EJ. To come up with the projected number of plants, I was assuming a current fleet of 336 and came up with 19,835, or in round numbers, 20,000. That was the high end of the range.

For the low end of the range (5000), I used your 30 EJ figure, just for the sake of discussion. (BTW, what is it -- 8.47 EJ, or 30 EJ?)

I'm left to the arithmetic for the number of reactors required. Just out of curiosity, how many plants do you say it will take to provide the 440 EJ?

Even considering the interesting new reactor technology you describe, and allowing a twofold increase in output over current reactors, I don't see where the number of reactors comes in at less than 2,500. Even stretching the assumptions favorably, we're still talking an order of magnitude increase here.

I still don't think there is a credible case for a project that size. I'd really like to see one.

[NNadir]

20. Well then, let's ask for what you do see a "credible" case.

Let us say, for argument's sake, that 2,500 new nuclear reactors are required. Let us say that that a ten year program is required. This is 250 reactors a year. Because of scale up and the elimination of FOAKE costs (first of a kind engineering costs) let us assume that each reactor costs 2 billion dollars to build.

The cost engendered is about 500 billion dollars a year, or about 5 times the annual cost of say, the Iraq war. Note that this is money invested worldwide and not just in the United States. Now the situation with war is very different than the situation with building. Building is investment. When you build 250 nuclear plants per year you are providing construction jobs, engineering jobs, equipment and manufacturing jobs, and of course, facilities to provide an essential resource, energy. You are creating infrastructure. Each nuclear plant is a production machine that enriches the lives of all who use the product it produces, energy.

On the other hand, when you take the same 500 billion dollars and spend it on war you are destroying infrastructure. You are making it harder for people to function, to feed themselves, to protect themselves, etc. If your interest is human survival, and planetary survival, you have fewer tools with which to address any situation in which people may find themselves.

Now let's get to your claim that there is no credible case, a statement which I find purely incredible. In fact, this statement dumbfounds me completely.

The GDP of the Netherlands is about half a trillion dollars, conveniently about the cost of producing 250 new nuclear reactors per year on the entire planet. Very clearly, as some people have noted, the Netherlands is as risk in a global climate change scenario. Thus the prevention of destruction of the Netherlands covers the cost of one year of nuclear reactor building. Now this would be nice, if there were only one country at risk, the Netherlands, but there isn't just one country at risk.

It is not credible to argue that global climate change will not occur. It is occurring, and we are recognizing the early consequences.

The destruction associated with Hurricane Andrew (1992) was 21 billion dollars, ten nuclear power plants. The destruction associated with Hurricane Katrina are estimated now to approach $200 billion dollars: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9329293/ or 100 nuclear power plants.

The total taxable value of real estate in New York City, a low lying city is 616 billion dollars, or 300 nuclear power plants.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5630

I have no idea what sustained drought in the American Midwest will amount to, but I'm going to guess that each year it would cover the cost of 250 nuclear power plants.

Now I realize that in the West, we may place as low a value as one dollar per person for a life in Bangladesh, but still, even at that price, this covers one year of nuclear plant building.

Now, I have very little patience for your argument. You are acting as if global climate change were some kind of financial option that may or may not be worthwhile from a financial point to address. This is pure nonsense. The economic costs of doing nothing are enormous, very easily greater than 5 trillion dollars. In fact the costs of doing nothing may very well represent the entire GDP of the planet, whereas the cost of building 2,500 nuclear plants is about half of the GDP of the United States.

This of course, completely ignores the human (that would be moral) costs. It does not happen that if New York is submerged, that we simply go off and build another New York. The destruction wrought, as we see in the still destroyed city of New Orleans, will disrupt the lives of the citizens so much as to impoverish them. It will be quite nearly the physical equivalent of war. It will make people less able to build new infrastructure, because it is difficult to work when you are suffering enormously.

If you cannot see a credible case, there really isn't too much I can do to help you.

If you have another "credible" case to be made, produce it. I have seen and heard them all, I think, and I see none that can be accomplished directly.

If your "credible" case consists of "hand waving" about the grand renewable future, I note that the grand renewable future has been touted for more than 50 years, and it nowhere near as close to reality as is the production of nuclear energy, which is provides a significant portion of the world's primary energy. In fact, the only time that the grand renewable future was remotely a reality was in the distant past, about 3 centuries ago. Of course the population was about 5 to 6 billion fewer than it is now. (I note that one reason for the use of coal had to do with deforestation of the area around London.)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=55148

If the "credible case" is to let 5 billion people disappear, please let me know which people you intend as the victims.

If the "credible case," is "more R&D" permit me to say, "Time's up!"

Again:

[Terry in Austin]

21. No silver bullet

Hey, everything you say about global warming, I agree with.

Stopping global warming is a compelling end that requires effective means. However, it doesn't appear that global conversion to nuclear energy would be an effective means to that end -- there is little evidence that a project of that scale is realistic.

You ask about a "credible case." I would want to see some careful projections about the total number of plants required for a global conversion to nuclear power. The 2,500-plant figure appears to be the absolute lowest, and it is based on 30 EJ global nuclear output, not the 8.47 EJ that appears in your sources. I would still be interested in seeing some sources for your 30 EJ figure.

Equally essential would be a careful projection of the cost per plant. Two billion seems optimistic, even considering your FOAKE factor. I'd be interested to see some support for the figure. For example, some sources I've seen offer a rule of thumb of about $3500 per KW, which would imply $7 billion for a 2000 MW plant (the basis of the 2,500-plant scenario). I can't attest to those sources, so perhaps you could direct me to some that you accept.

Even using the very optimistic 2,500-plant figure, at $2 billion per plant, and 250 plants per year, that's still a half-trillion dollars annually, just for plant construction. We have yet to account for building the infrastructure necessary to support a 2,500 plant fleet -- primarily the production and management of fuel.

I have to say, the scale of such a project is immense. It's half an order of magnitude larger than the US's largest current project, the Iraq War.

Some implications:

• It would require close participation of the equivalent of four other global powers comparable to the US. That in itself would be a political masterstroke.
  


• The centralized planning required would also be an enormous political accomplishment, not to mention a logistical one.


• Financing would probably have to be in place for most, if not all, of the whole project. The scale of the bond issue would be unprecedented.


• There's no identification so far of a sufficient source of sheer political power for such a project, let alone one of political will.

And this is the low-ball estimate. The more likely number of plants appears to be well over 10,000, and the cost per plant could easily be two or three times what you suggest. That's the way it appears at the moment, pending more data.

It gets back to this: nuclear won't be doing it alone.
Global warming needs to be stopped, but nuclear alone is not the means to that end.
Fossil fuels need to be replaced, but nuclear alone is not sufficient.