105 comments on Energy: the fundamental unseriousness of Gordon Brown
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Sterling;
While I am a regular and vocal opponent of Nuclear on this site, I have generally chosen to put more of my energy into advocating for the sources I DO want instead of working against those I oppose (at least when the discussion has reached the 'vicious circle' stage).
I'm not sure I understand, however, the connection you've tried to make as far as Investment in Windpower subverting simultaneous efforts to develop Nuclear Energy. Is it just that 'there are only so many new-source dollars available, and too many are being given to wind'? I don't know if I can buy that. I'm watching these stories of renewed interest in Nuclear, and I'm sure there is some heavy investment there, but I also wonder how wary the Energy Investors are about payback, as construction costs shoot up, delays turn projects into double their initial projections, and probably most importantly, the return time is so slow for Reactors, where Cogen and Wind are up and running in a few months to a couple years.. Amory Lovins has argued that the intrinsically poor economics of Nuclear is what has done the real damage to its growth, and unless the glowing promises of big technology advances or a great reduction in construction costs and lead-times comes true, is unlikely to gain much advantage as we continue forward.
PDF - File
http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E05-14_NukePwrEcon.pdf
"Figs. 1–2 (pp. 2–3) show that in 2004, when U.S. windpower additions were artificially depressed, decentralized low- and no-carbon generation worldwide nonetheless outpaced nuclear power by nearly sixfold in annual capacity additions and nearly threefold in annual output additions, and was pulling away rapidly. This occurred at a substantial scale, four times that of U.S. nuclear power—adding 28 GW to the 2003 global decentralized-generation base of ~383 GW— and was achieved despite nuclear power’s generally higher subsidies per kWh (with modest exceptions, notably in Germany) and its far easier access to the grid. This speed disparity, probably more than doubled by efficient use (pp. 3–4), reflects the decentralized competitors’ basic
advantages, such as short lead times, modularity, economies of mass production, usually mild siting issues (excepting such pathological cases as Cape Cod wind), and the inherently greater speed of technologies that are deployable by many and diverse market actors without needing complex regulatory processes, challengingly large enterprises, or unique institutions. As either nuclear power or its decentralized supply- and demand-side competitors grow, it’s hard to imagine how this balance of speed could ever shift in favor of nuclear power—the quintessentially big, long-lead-time, delay-prone, lumpy, complex, and contentious technology, and one that a single major accident or terrorist attack could scuttle virtually everywhere." p.11
Appropriately,Lovins does also mention the relationship he sees between Nuclear Proponents and Carbon Taxing, to tie this back in with Gordon Brown's stellar leadership move..
"Standard studies compare a new nuclear plant only with a central power plant burning coal or natural gas. They conclude that new nuclear plants’ marked disadvantage in total cost might be overcome if their construction became far cheaper, or if construction and operation were even more heavily subsidized, or if carbon were heavily taxed, or if (as nuclear advocates prefer) all of these changes occurred. But those central thermal power plants are all the wrong competitors. None of them can compete with windpower (and some other renewables), let alone with two far cheaper resources: cogeneration of heat and power, and efficient use of electricity." (Top of P.7)
But back to the initial point.. Why does investment in Windpower, assuming it is a smart investment, SUBvert investments in Nuclear, if the same assumption can be made for it?
Best,
Bob Fiske
Be careful with the data cherry picking. In the period 1997 -2005 US nuclear added 152 billion kilowatt hours/year of actual generation compared to 15 for Wind and that is without adding any new plants.
Another thing to keep in mind is that nuclear generation is more valuable for global warming mitigation than is wind or solar. Nuclear directly displaces coal generation (the primary GW problem) while wind and solar do not. Nuclear could displace all dirty generation or at least 80% with the remaining 20% from sources that are relatively clean and dispatchable, like hydro or gas (while we still have it).
The problem for wind and solar is that the currently electricity system is demand driven with significant variable demand depending on time of day, time of year and the weather. Wind and solar are at best weakly coordinated with periods of high demand and their output often goes to zero. Without viable storage (whose cost is counted in the cost of generation), there is a limited market for such variable power and it is not clear that it is as high as 20%. I am not convinced that people would put up with a Bagdad model (long, regular periods without power) if they knew that we could have gone with nuclear instead and preserved the current always available characteristics of the system.
Nuclear does have long lead times but we could start a big build up that builds thousands of reactors in 50 years. That is consistent with the expected decline in fossil fuels. It is the time to get started that is the issue. Regarding cost, the oil industry is expecting to need $20 trillion between now and 2030 chasing their hopeless targets. That would buy about 7,000 reactors.
Look, I support wind and solar. We should build them as fast as we can consistent with our ability to use them in a market that is plausible. But I think they max out far before we solve the problem. Contrary to the title of this article, I think that those who do not favor a big nuclear build up are not serious about global warming mitigation.
It is impressive the gains nuclear made without adding new plants.
A problem I see is that the levels of subsidy for nuclear are fuzzy.
How can the subsidy playing field be leveled?
If govts. were to offer a $0.04 / kWh (but no other subsidies) for solar, wind and nuclear, a lot of wind would be built, a lot of solar thermal, but no nuclear.
Nuclear needs subsidies for construction, insurance against catastrophic accidents, R/D, and maybe mining.
Although it is unlikely to happen, I think it would be nice to equalize the subsidies. Each year, for example, wind, solar and nuclear would each an equal amount of money.
This could be used to subsidize the construction of nuclear reactors, nuclear reactor R/D, or anything the nuclear subsidy distribution committee felt would be worthwhile.
Meanwhile, the solar and wind distribution committees would decide how to allocate the funding: operational per kWh subsidies, R/D, construction loan guarantees, or whatever.
If any of the power generation approaches was innately less economic, it would naturally fall behind.
Why? The objective is to transition from fossil fuels while reducing green house gases, isn't it? It is not to distributes the public spoils. We should do what it takes to build the mix that best serves society, right?
Right, we want to build the mix that best serves society.
The obvious approach which I mentioned first would do that, giving a per kWh subsidy that is the same for each energy source.
The most cost effective and efficient sources of energy would win.
However, nuclear would lose out, because even with a generous per kWh subsidy, private money would still not build any plants.
The second suggestion was a possible way around that problem.
Then giving every source the same subsidy would not necessarily achieve our objective of building the mix that best serves society.
I think it is more complicated than that. We have to decide, Do we want a system where production meets demand or do we want to tolerate shortages and ration? If we want the kind of system that we have now and we want to reduce global warming as much as possible, how do we do that? If we just leave it all to a free market, can we be assured that all the costs like waste cleanup and living with shortages will really be reflected in the market over the long term?
In a free market, the most cost effective solutions generally win. In this case we are discussing using govt. subsidies to "augment" or "distort" the free market.
While some purists oppose all subsidies on principal, they can be a valuable tool to accelerate the development of useful technologies.
It sounds like you are assuming that using only per kWh subsides will result in shortages and rationing, or that unless nuclear power receives more substantial subsidies we will have shortages.
I am not convinced that this would be true, as I think that microgeneration, renewables, conservation, and energy storage advances will work together keep the system robust.
Why do you feel there be shortages and rationing if nuclear does not receive substantial subsidies?
Because, as you said earlier, this might result in nuclear not being built. If we were to rely only on wind and solar and have no baseload generation and dispatchable reserve as we have now then we would be building a system that has chronic shortages by design. At night, when the wind is not blowing, you get no power. The assumption seems to be that we can fit up to 20% intermittent power into the current system without effecting its power on demand characteristic. I am not sure that is true and instead advocate the we build nuclear, wind and solar as fast as we can and see what mix works best. I suspect that wind and solar will max out long before nuclear because nuclear can do baseload and completely eliminate coal plants while wind and solar cannot.
Pumped hydro storage can convert wind and solar to dispatchable reserves at a penny or two per kwh.
And of course, plenty of onshore and offshore locations have wind at night (you have obviously never been to Wyoming, Colorado or the Aleutians).
OK, but then it still only displaces the other dispatchable reserves (gas and hydro) and not the coal baseload, which runs as the same level no matter what. That does not really help mitigate climate change. To displace the coal baseload, you need a nuke. And you have to count the cost of building the pumped storage, the cost of its operation (electricity to pump the water up hill) and the energy lost in the process into the cost of wind and solar operations, which limit their operating attractiveness. But it is still a good idea.
If you build enough wind generation, and enough pumped storage / interconnection to back it up, then it's obvious that you can shut coal generation down. A simple carbon tax provides the necessary market signal.
Perhaps, but all the wind generation along with pumped storage would be pretty expensive to build and operate. How much additional capacity would you have to build into it to cover a prolonged wind drought? With global warming, today's wind patterns might change in unpredictable ways and we might badly miscalculate how bad the wind droughts could be. Might it not be better to build nukes to take out all the coal and build your part to supplement/displace the existing dispatchable reserve gas, keeping enough gas to cover the wind drought?
Without major subsidies, it does seem unlikely any new nuclear plants will be built.
However, much can change in the 13 years before 2020 when the first of the new nuclear plants would come on line. To justify these subsidies for nuclear, we need to gamble that superior technologies will not be available in 2020.
This is the main reason private investment does not like nuclear.
A subsidy that does not require such a long term gamble is a per kWh subsidy for power generated. Private investment can fund wind and solar plants that come online 12 to 24 months after the decision to go foward, maximizing the changes that the plant will give the anticipated return on investment (factoring in the subsidy or carbon tax).
Your point is that neither wind nor solar is a direct replacement for existing generation is obviously true. The decision to apply present-day funding to nuclear vs. other promising technologies would ideally be made based on careful analysis of probabilities.
I can think of several emerging technologies would work with wind and solar in a practical system, that could be quite mature by 2020.
Lithium batteries
Solar thermal plants with thermal storage
Flywheel storage
Flow batteries
Coal gasification with carbon sequesterization via terra pretta
Organic material gasification with carbon sequesterization via terra pretta
High efficiency LED lighting
The real killer is energy efficiency. Already, I have a cloths washer that uses 0.15 kWh per load, lighting is making great strides, and organic LED flat panels use miniscule amounts of power. With high degrees of efficiency, the storage required for household power is semi-affordable even now.
If the money needed to subsidize nuclear plant R/D and construction was put into the above technologies, I would be very surprised if they did not provide a robust power system. Even without heavy subsidies, they should do very well.
Sterling;
I won't deny that Lovins' assessment overlooks expansion of existing sites' capacity, but that is, of course also an outgrowth of the burden of getting new plants initiated.
This is a rough week to make claims that nuclear is going to be our steady and constant source of baseload power.. It is as long as it works. India's 'above-ground-factors' are different from England's and US's, but it still leaves many reactors dark..
The idea of the 'Baghdad Model' is cute. It's a battle-torn city amid a mismanaged oil-war, BUT it still gets lots of Sun every day. I wouldn't expect residents to refuse an offer to get panels on their roofs, so they at least have a guarantee of some 10 hours every day. Can you imagine trying to get an investor to back a couple reactors for that city? Of course, the priorities that govern the use of US Tax dollars there probably means there are some underway already, but how much will you have to pay the drivers to get the fuel to the site? To say you support wind and solar, but compare those alternatives to Baghdad is diversionary at best.
"Nuclear directly displaces coal generation (the primary GW problem) while wind and solar do not." Of course they do, unless you have to interject the provision that the only real power is steady-perpetual power, a fantasy we're stuck in after 4-5 generations of cheap oil. This argument that says 'we have a demand model, and so must bend over backwards to maintain a demand model' is basically a euphemism for 'Our lifestyle is not negotiable.' We are accustomed to eating cake.. the solution for the future is not to assume that we have to create a perpetual cake industry. Our diet is central to the energy problem, and nuclear tries to promise that it can keep us 'in cake'. Clean cake, cheap cake, reliable cake.
"I think that those who do not favor a big nuclear build up are not serious about global warming mitigation." Just because I say no to Strychnine, doesn't mean I'll say yes to Arsenic. Coal and Nuclear are both bad roads to take. If Nuclear can fix their potholes- their complexity, their emissions, their insurance and other externalities.. maybe I'll take that ride. We'll see. But the claims of being the only clean and viable alternative to coal is another unconvincing promise. I don't buy it.
Translation: "We are accustomed to having power on demand. the solution for the future is not to assume that we have to create a perpetual power on demand industry." At least you are facing up to it. But why is that a good solution? And why is that a better solution than what I am proposing.
'At least you are facing up to it.'
I've never been rosy on that point. I've stated it openly here any number of times. WE CANNOT RELY ON ANY SOURCE PROVIDING US A PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE. Nothing out there will be enough. We have to figure out how to function with FAR less. (And I think we can.. but it will be no picnic getting there)
Petroleum has led us down the garden path, and I don't believe we can count on another adjoining be-pathed garden to hop onto when this one winds down. I accept that there will be new nukes.. but as mighty as they seem, but I don't think they'll pull the load, I think they depend on the oil infrastructure far too heavily (roads, concrete, fuel supply) to weather the coming decades with any reliability.. between technical complexity, political complexity and financial, err, complexity.. there are just too many BIG pieces that are just waiting to fall apart. That's why I have far more trust in a massively parallel system of smaller generators. We know what some of them are already.. one of the biggest being Lovins' 'Negawatts', which is the power we can figure out how NOT to use.
Nuke will be out there in the mix.. and yet I don't trust it to stay there for us, Safe, long-term, affordable. I am glad there are people working the problems, as others are working out other sources. Maybe they'll pull it off.
Best,
Bob Fiske
Each kWh of wind (as opposed to each MW of wind) directly goes to reduce the need for coal production of the same kWh - and it's only when you burn coal that you generate CO2, so the goal should not be to replace MWs, but to replace kWh - and wind is a perfectly good solution to do so.
But you cannot eliminate the need for any coal plants with wind and solar because they often go to 0 kWh production. And I am not sure you can throttle back a coal plant.
You can create a market where wind and solar can dump kWhs on the market when they are intermittently running, to the economic disadvantage of the sources like coal and nuclear that can supply to demand. But in a rational world, those surplus kWhs would not be priced the same as the ones needed to fill shortages. Above a certain percentage for wind and solar, disadvantaging the sources of generation that have to be counted on to respond to demand is crazy. Unless you want a system with chronic shortages where you have to ration supply (probably by price).
Thermal solar energy can be cheaply stored for months if the storage system is large enough. It is just a matter of some pipes and a pile of sand or a vertical shaft drilled deep into the ground if the water table is deep enough.
Maybe we should worry about that when we get there, not when we're still wondering if 20% is achievable?
I expect that given the number of gas-fired power plants around, there's a lot of flexibility to play with in the system. And making coal "economically disadvantaged" is pretty much the whole point, I'd say, given how much it pollutes and spews carbon...
Agreed. You are the one favoring the hard 20% target. I am saying let's build the mix that will produce the best result.
Yes, but should we also be doing that with nuclear?
It is quite possible, at least for some classes of plant.
You're making several conceptual mistakes here.
Nuclear is a direct one-for-one replacement of baseload coal plants. If you absolutely have to have some generation that goes 24/7, nukes displace coal without compromise.
Yes but unless they can eliminate a plant, it is likely to be run at full capacity because it has the lowest marginal cost for a source that can serve as base load. I am talking about eliminating plants in a whole region.
They are not going to substitute gas for coal if they have a choice because gas is much more expensive. Same is true of batteries. They might run hydro as base load as I assume they do in the Pacific Northwest but not where hydro is in limited supply as it is in most places. If they have the coal plants, they are almost certain to run them at full capacity as much of the time as they can. That's why using nuclear to displace old or needed coal plants is such an effective way to limit global warming.
There are quite a few (small, old, highly-polluting) coal plants in the US which are used largely for peaking. Neighbors of some of these plants have tried to get them shut down for years, without success.
Fuel is not the only expense. Maintenance (gas turbines are much cheaper than old coal plants) and emissions permits can also be costly and/or limiting. Add in the cost of carbon taxes or the value of tradeable quotas (plus the fact that modern gas turbines can have efficiency 50% greater than old coal plants), and gas looks better for everything but base load.
The way the power plants added the extra power without adding extra plants was to up the U235 content of the reactor fuel and add extra boron (a burnable poison) to the coolant water. This meant that they could shut down the reactor (to refuel the reactor) less frequently and keep it generating electricty more of the time.
So they increased U235 consumption by 100% to increase electricity output by 10 percent, or some such. I suppose I could go to Terman library at Stanford, look at some back issues of Nuclear News, and tell you to two significant figures what happened to U235 consumption per kilowatt vs what happened to downtime as a percentage of uptime over the last 10 years.
But the point is, they can't double the fissile load in the fuel rods again because they built the reactors for a low fissile load and they are bumping up against safety limits already. Burning nitromethane in a car is one thing. Burning nitroglycerine is something else.
You imply that the uranium consumption per kWh has gone up roughly 80%. Do you have any data to support that?
Thorium light-water breeding has been shown to be able to maintain the fissile load over time, and even increase it slightly (Shippingport). The power level of fuel rods has been limited by heat transfer out of the fuel pellets, but a new hollow-pellet design is relaxing that limit and allowing greater power out of the same reactor system. If you combine the two, you could get a reactor which runs at higher power and goes a decade or more on a load of fuel.
As others have said, Lovins likes his cherry picking.. he is very good at picking numbers that support his case, which is not the same as making an objective case per se.
As far as wind vs. nuclear goes, we see - repeatedly - claims made there is no need for new nuclear plants because we can do the same job with wind/solar/efficiency/etc; it is very much the Green movement that is making this a contest. And of course, if they got their way, the net effect would be to pluck all of the low hanging renewable/efficiency fruit whilst making zero impression on CO2 emissions..
(cf.)
http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/briefi...
http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/climate_change/solutions/energ...
Why the WWF opposes Nuclear power is particularly strange to me, considering the wildlife impact of windpower and hydropower.. but there you go.
"if they got their way, the net effect would be to pluck all of the low hanging renewable/efficiency fruit whilst making zero impression on CO2 emissions." Exactly. Completely unserious about mitigating global warming.