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Pro-Nuke? Anti-Nuke? Talk About It With the Experts
We asked a futurist, a MoJo writer, a No Nukes activist, and a weapons security expert:
What is nuclear energy's place in the future mix of energy sources?
They'll be checking in on this Blue Marble entry starting Monday to discuss their controversial answers with readers—and each other. Want to talk to Stewart Brand, Judith Lewis, Jonas Siegel, or Harvey Wasserman about their take on nukes? Now's your chance. Leave a comment below for one of the four guest Blue Marble moderators and they'll respond.
Stewart Brand is a futurist with the Global Business Network and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog: I expect that nuclear will grow slowly but steadily in the mix for a couple decades, because it's a mature technology that provides baseload electricity with minimum carbon emissions. Where it goes after that depends on the rapidity of climate change; the rapidity of other high capacity energy technologies such as space solar, massive electrical storage, high-tech microbe farming, etc; and the usefulness of further nuclear technology, such as decentralized nuclear "batteries," cheaper reprocessing, fusion, etc. By mid-century or later, depending on how all those work out, nuclear could be heading toward a majority role, like in France now; or it could be headed toward a phase-out by the end of the century, replaced by better things; or the question could seem irrelevant in the face of drastic climate events forcing huge-scale geo-engineering and/or enormous human dieback in the face of collapsing carrying capacity.
Judith Lewis wrote "The Nuclear Option" for the May/June 2008 issue of Mother Jones: Nuclear energy is far from environmentally benign, but it does have one significant advantage over coal-fired electricity generation: It does not emit carbon dioxide. Even taking into account nuclear's entire lifecycle, from mining to refining to enrichment of uranium, from plant construction to startup to waste, it adds far less carbon to the atmosphere than coal or natural gas do, and sometimes even beats solar generation. If we accept that catastrophic climate change caused by a buildup of carbon in the atmosphere is our most urgent environmental problem, we should at least consider replacing the coal-fired power that provides half the nation's electricity with nuclear energy (which currently provides only a fifth).
But while we consider it, we also have to understand that the nuclear industry also has a lot of problems associated with it, including a compromised federal monitoring agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And then there's the waste: It's becoming ever more clear as the Department of Energy moves ahead with its plans to build a nuclear waste repository in a mountain of porous volcanic rock on earthquake fault that the DOE and Congress made a very bad decision when it chose Yucca Mountain. There needs to be much more public involvement in the process of choosing such sites.
The same goes for just about every part of the nuclear industry's operations. The industry does seemed poised for a renaissance, and it might deserve one. But if the renaissance happens, people in the U.S. need to get as much information as they can handle about nuclear power; only public participation can force industry and government regulators to do their jobs right.
Jonas Siegel is editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a media organization that focuses on the intersection of science and security, and has covered nuclear weapons and energy issues for the past five years: Since its inception, nuclear energy has earned legions of supporters. The enormous amount of energy contained in a small amount of nuclear fuel—a pound of uranium 235 has more than 2 million times the energy content of a pound of coal—alone inspired visions of grandeur. Despite its potential, nuclear energy has not overcome a range of risks—safety, nuclear proliferation, and waste—to sustain its growth in the marketplace. If nuclear is going to be a part of the world's future mix of energy sources, it needs to address these risks head on—and compete economically with other sources.
Harvey Wasserman is a No Nukes activist, the author of Solartopia! Our Green Powered Earth, and edits Nukefree.org: Nuclear power has no place in our future mix of energy sources except as a costly and dangerous curse from previous bad decision-making. The Peaceful Atom is humankind's most expensive technological failure. To "revisit" this corporate boondoggle is to ignore 50 years of staggering losses. Economically, there is no reason to believe a "new generation" of reactors will be any less disastrous than the last one. The radioactive fuel chain is a major cause of global warming. The ecological, public health and safety aspects of unsolved problems with terrorism, human design and operator error, "routine" radioactive emissions, impossible spent fuel transport and management, weapons proliferation and much more make atomic energy the "Titanic" of energy generation. A dollar invested in efficiency saves seven times the energy a dollar invested in nukes can produce. Wind and solar are already proven and cheaper. Let's do that instead of re-running the same radioactive horror show.
Mark, water vapor is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, but once released it becomes part of a global water cycle involving condensation and rain. CO2 doesn't condense out of the atmosphere (except maybe in the dead of winter in Antarctica).
The amount of water vapor released by a nuclear power plant is nothing--nothing--compared to the water vapor being released by solar heating of seawater over 3/4ths of the planet. Consider that the Sun is pumping 500 million gigawatts of thermal energy into the illuminated side of the Earth, continuously, and a typical nuclear reactor is releasing 2 gigawatts of waste heat.
500 million vs. 2.
Three questions:
France uses nuke power to produce 80% or more of its electricity. What does France do with all its waste?
What is the supply of uranium for nuclear power? How much is there? How long will it last?
We always here Fusion power is about 10 years off. (for last 30 years we hear this). How long before we have viable fusion power reactors?
Thanks.
Sons
What France does with their nuclear waste: They reprocess it to make more fuel. The unusable residue is a tiny volume; it is vitrified (turned into glass, to make it inert) and stored - the amount is so small that storage space is not an issue.
What is the supply of uranium: For the current reactor fleet, centuries. If many more reactors of the same type are built, decades. With more efficient types, thousands of years.
If the high-grade uranium ore is exhausted, there is basically an unlimited amount of low-grade uranium reserves (including seawater).
Timeline for fusion: Forever. Any practical application of fusion would require a dramatic scientific breakthrough, which cannot be predicted.
Thorium would produce a lot less waste...maybe .1% of what a standard LWR produces now. Since they run at only one atmosphere of pressure, they would be much cheaper to build as well.
See: http://www.energyrfromthorium.com
I think Mr. Wasserman makes some outlandish statements. That nuclear energy causes global warming, for example. At *every* stage of the fuel cycle...all if can be energized by nuclear. Thus...in France, which Mr. Wasserman claims is a "disaster" (but fortunately back up all that 'renewable energy in German and Denmark') there is virtually ZERO CO2 from the nuclear fuel cycle because with the exception of mining, it's all done in nuclear energized France...so where is the CO2? It's not there. This offends, clearly, the anti-nuclear sensibilities of Mr. Wasserman.
If the US built out to about 5 times the nuclear power we have now little if *any* carbon would be emitted outside the construction of the plants themselves, which is minimal (and which uses 5 to 10 times LESS material to build than it's equivalent in wind or solar).
My view on waste is that the US has 77,000 tons. It does't go away because we end nuclear power. It stays. We have very little (some) in terms of solutions to this "waste" (spent fuel) from the anti-nuclear community. The reason for this is that *any* solution to the spent-nuclear fuel issue becomes THE solution and allows nuclear to continue.
I lived in Pennsylvania during TMI. You have to ask yourself WHY the state is still habitable, including cross the river from the plant? You have to ask why there hasn't been a serious nuclear accident in the US since TMI. Why?
David Walters
Dear Mr. Brand,
I have read it and strongly agree with respect to the book.
Regarding Ms. Cravens' transition to nuclear (as well as other notable changes of heart). Could you comment on the transition of greens as well as the general populous from a subjective/emotive perspective on this topic (climate change and nuclear technology's role in any interim to long term mitigation efforts) to one that is more thoughtful and objective? Not so much about whether the transition is occurring or not, but rather if you feel things are moving fast enough and, if not, any ideas on how to accelerate the change.
One final comment: I have very much enjoyed the Long Now videos available on the Fora.tv site. Thank you for sharing the discussions.
Sons, fusion is hard and fission is easy because fusion is trying to release nuclear energy with positively-charged particles (nuclei) that try to repel each other. Fission is trying to release nuclear energy using a large nucleus and a neutral particle (the neutron) that is not repelled by the nucleus.
I don't see that basic fact ever changing.
Especially for this Mother Jones forum, it's worth looking at all the energy systems in terms of global poverty.
Most of the dozens of reactors now being built are in the developing world. Among the reasons for that is that the developing world is urbanizing at a breakneck pace, and billions are climbing out of poverty in that process. That is great news, but it also raises new energy demand, and of a particular kind.
City power is grid power, is "baseload" power--- meaning electricity that is always on, no matter what. At present there are only three sources of baseload power--- fossil fuel (coal and gas), hydro, and nuclear. Wind is supplemental and growing; solar may become significant soon; both require a massive storage capability to become a baseload source, and so far that's not in sight.
Electricity is so crucial in the world's slums (a billion live there now, another billion is on the way) that people routinely steal it from the grid, making ingenious homebrew infrastructure to get it to their homes to run the basics: light, a refrigerator, a TV, and a charge for the cell phone. With those covered, they give each other jobs in the informal economy, get local-retail education for their kids, and they're on the way.
Asia, Africa, and Latin America have to build baseload power. There's a little room for better efficiency, but nothing like we have. Some places have a bit of hydro capacity (Chile has a huge project that will murder world-class wilderness, and China is currently building 32 dams, along with the Three Gorges Dam). Mainly it comes down to coal expansion or nuclear expansion. Or stay poor.
I guess I violated some unwritten length rules for my last contribution. I apologize. If you want to read what I tried to post in this debate early this morning, you can find it with a quick Google blog search.
Bob accused me of being a "tool" of the nuclear industry. I am a passionate supporter of atomic fission technology, but I am not a tool of the established nuclear power industry. In fact, I have never worked for that industry. I get my paychecks from the American people; I am a professional officer in the US Navy and have been for about 27 years. I owe the American taxpayers a lot for the high quality education and training opportunities that they provided to me at the US Naval Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Nuclear Power Training pipeline.
I write about fission because I have personal experience and information that is worth sharing. Feel free to disagree and question and if you want to learn more, I can point you to some excellent sources. Some of them, like Judith Lewis, Kirk Sorensen, Stewart Brand, G.R.L. Cowan and David Walters have commented in this debate.
Fission technology is relatively new compared to all other energy technology - we have only known that self sustaining chain reactions were possible for about 65 years. In contrast, we have been using wind, solar, biomass, falling water, and fossil fuels for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
We are still on the low flat portion of the technological 'S' curve that Clayton Christensen has matched to almost all new technology developments while all other energy technologies are on the upper flat portion of development. Even so, fission beats the competition on a number of different measures; often decisively.
I have put my money on fission as THE energy technology that is going to allow human society to prosper and flourish.
Rod is absolutely right in his S-curve analogy (and in many other things). Many professional anti-nuclear activists point to the limitations of today's nuclear technologies as if they represent the end-all, be-all of nuclear capability.
That is simply not the case. Nuclear technology can get much, much better, and those better forms of nuclear technology (like thorium and the fluoride reactor) can relieve many of the concerns the average person has about today's nuclear technology.
Judging nuclear energy based on today's reactors is like judging the potential of digital computers based on the limitations of vacuum-tube technology.
But there are many professional anti-nuclear activists who are desperately trying to convince the public to slam the door on nuclear technology based on very poor examples of primitive and unsafe nuclear reactors, like Chernobyl.
A very brief amount of online research enables an interested party to learn why Chernobyl was a bad design that never would have been built or operated in the United States.
Water should be a central issue in this discussion. A 1000 Megawatt coal plant uses about 4.4 billion gallons of water a year, and the demand is similar for nuclear power:
"Drought could cause nuclear power shutdown", CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/01/23/drought.nuclear.ap/index.html
"French nuclear power plants shut down during heat wave due to warm river waters".
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0728-06.htm
And this off the wires:
"Water is the nuclear industry's Achilles' heel," said Jim Warren, executive director of N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, an environmental group critical of nuclear power. "You need a lot of water to operate nuclear plants." He added: "This is becoming a crisis."
An Associated Press analysis of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors found that 24 are in areas experiencing the most severe levels of drought. All but two are built on the shores of lakes and rivers and rely on submerged intake pipes to draw billions of gallons of water for use in cooling and condensing steam after it has turned the plants' turbines.
Because of the yearlong dry spell gripping the region, the water levels on those lakes and rivers are getting close to the minimums set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Over the next several months, the water could drop below the intake pipes altogether. Or the shallow water could become too hot under the sun to use as coolant.
Solar and wind do not suffer from those water problems, and are thus an ideal solution for desert and dry regions.
That said, solutions that are strictly supply-side are not going to work. Curbing demand is also a critical issue. - this is another good argument for publicly operated and owned utility districts, since no competitive enterprise wants to see demand reduction). Cutting electricity demand is certainly possible - especially in the areas of heating and cooling:
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1502/
"GE's New Water Heater Could Kill 30 Coal Plants, Apr 2008"
Finally, there are the real economics - solar and wind are cheap and without the severe accident liability issue. However, the French do manage to run an apparently safe nuclear power system - but then, they don't let Enron manage it either. . .
Practically, we'd be better off maintaining and/or upgrading nuclear power plants than building new ones. New power systems should all be based on wind & solar.
Um, the term "professional anti-nuclear activist" suggests that somebody can make good money opposing nuclear, and suggests they are doing it for the money. I doubt that either is ever the case.
Nobody makes great money as a Navy officer either, of course. (Thank you for your service.)
Great question, Nick. The notion that coal releases more radioactivity than nuclear is a popular one in with the nuclear industry right now, but I'm not sure it's their soundest argument. Here's a long, pro-nuclear-slanted discussion of it:
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
Nuclear plants do release radioactive tritium into local groundwater. Everyone paying attention to the industry knows this, but I it's still an underreported phenomenon. So I don't know whether comparing nuclear's radioactive releases to coal is all that useful.
Also, many coal plants were built before we knew enough to put buffer zones between them and residential communities, so people live closer to whatever radioactivity they release.
We do know that 24,000 people die a year because of pollution from coal-fired power plants, and the emissions from those plants fill our oceans (and consequently fish) with mercury -- a poison the EPA under the Bush administration shown a criminal lack of willingness to regulate. And then there's the carbon.
By the way, you can detailed information about nuclear reactors and their radioactive emissions from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html
It's an extremely difficult site to navigate, but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty interesting. You might even get someone at the agency to help you if you ask right.
Solar and wind do not suffer from those water problems, and are thus an ideal solution for desert and dry regions.
Wind is already directed energy, thus it is not based on the thermodynamics of a heat engine. But solar thermal power is.
There is no difference in the heat rejection problem for a solar thermal plant and a nuclear plant.
In fact, it's even worse for solar thermal because out in the desert there are no large bodies of water to serve as convenient thermal sinks.
Ike, solar and wind are not cheap. Wind power requires subsidies to be produced at all, even in the marginal amounts that are practical (since it cannot produce steady baseload power). Solar is so expensive that even with subsidies, no one bothers to try to produce any.
If wind and solar were actually economical, you can bet that corporations would be all over them like flies on ships. Believe it or not, corporations like to make money.
Nuclear's overall net CO2 emissions are a tiny fraction of fossil fuels, and are similar to or lower than renewables, even after accounting for all aspects of the process (including uranium mining and enrichment, plant construction, plant decommissioning, waste management processing and disposal, etc...).
Scientific analyses of net CO2 emissions from various sources:
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull422/article4.pdf
show that nuclear's net emissions are ~2% of coal's, and ~5% of natural gas. Net emissions from renewable sources are similar to (or higher than) nuclear.
Judith,
Nuclear plants do not have any significant (or measurable) effects on public health, despite any (tiny) releases.
The air, ground, and water around nuclear plants is thoroughly monitored and radiation levels are very accurately determined. It is known that nobody living around the plants is exposed to more than a fraction of a millirem of annual exposure (i.e., no more than ~0.1% of natural background levels).
Natural background radiation levels vary widely across the US, by a factor of several (from ~200 mrem to over 1000 mrem in some places). Despite this, no correlations between cancer incidence (or any other disease) and background radiation level has ever been observed.
If radiation levels that are several times higher (i.e., several hundred extra millirem per year) do not have any measurable impact on health, we can be very confident that exposures ~100 times smaller (i.e., ~1 mrem or less) have no impact.
Coal plants cause ~24,000 deaths annually, in addition to being the largest single source of global warming. Nuclear plants have no measurable impact (~0 deaths) and have a negligible global warming impact. Even the worst possible accident/meltdown event that could occur at a Western reactor would cause far fewer deaths than US coal plants do ANNUALLY. The choice couldn't be more clear.
Stewart:
A naval officer with 27 years of service earns an income that is high enough to enter the top 10% of wage earners. It might not qualify as "a lot" but it provides a comfortable lifestyle. It certainly supports my writing and inventing avocations.
With regard to the potential income from opposing nuclear power - just imagine how much less valuable natural gas and coal would be today if we had continued building nuclear plants at the rate achieved in the 1980s.
The 104 reactors in operation in the US today produce the energy equivalent of nearly 4 million barrels of oil per day; at least 100 additional plants were ordered and partially completed before the projects were halted, partially as a result of some very focused and organized anti-nuclear opposition groups.
People who lead commodity enterprises know that the law of supply and demand is not a passive law; they are deeply aware of the value of limiting competition.
Countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Mexico, Canada, the UK, the US, and Norway all have leaders that know just how valuable their fossil fuel supplies are when the balance between supply and demand is tight and how quickly the price falls during times when supply exceeds demand.
I am pretty sure that there is a great deal of money to be made by opposing nuclear power and that many of the people who oppose it do it for reasons that are different from what they say in public. I was shocked when I learned that not everyone told the truth all of the time, but that educational revelation happened when I was about 5 years old.
Four important points . . .
1) We should not be exploring new generation options without implementing aggressive conservation and efficiency programs.
2) We should not continue to throw so much energy away as waste heat in conventional power plants. The entire US nuclear contribution to the electric grid could be offset if we reduced conversion losses by 30%.
3) To bash wind and solar for their subsidies (which are shamefully paltry when compared to the handouts for fossil fuels, nuke development, and nuke waste disposal) while touting nuclear as a low-cost option is disingenuous at best and deceptive at worst.
4) Conventional analysis of the nuclear option concentrates on the three physical dimensions and cost. Adding a fifth dimension, time, to the analysis may change the results substantially. How to put a value on the fact that the waste stays lethal for what, hundreds of thousands of years? A reactor may look relatively small physically, financially, and even from a greenhouse gas perspective, but the huge stain it leaves on a timeline is where its footprint really shows.
1) Conservation is a false hope. It's possible to save a little here and there, but a 30% reduction in consumption is a fantasy even for the wealthy nations. The developing nations are most certainly not going to start using less energy!
Furthermore, if one usage of energy is curtailed, something else will take its place. Energy is the most versatile of commodities, and people will find uses for whatever's available. The only thing that could stop energy from being consumed as fast as we can get it is concerted and stringent action by every major government on earth. Good luck getting India, China, Russia, or even Germany on board with that.
2)The amount of energy we waste in power plants is fixed by the laws of thermodynamics, which we can't change. There's very little room for improvement.
3)Solar and wind receive generous subsidies, both directly and in hundreds of billions of research dollars. Nuclear research has received virtually no funding for the past twenty years, and Yucca Mountain is not a subsidy, it's a curse - the utilities are being forced to help pay for it even though it's not needed.
4) Nuclear power has essentially NO environmental impact. It's much friendlier than solar, which (if it worked at all) would consume enormous amounts of land. The great bulk of spent fuel is not waste at all, but can be processed back into fuel. The remainder is such a small volume that storing it is not an issue at all, and it's not dangerous for millenia - only for a couple of hundred years. The mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium released into the biosphere by burning coal, on the other hand, will be there for millions of years.
Rod, there are certainly enormous economic stakes in play with all the energy sources. It has occurred to me that devious coal interests might want to quietly encourage anti-nuclear greens, but I've seen no sign that's actually happening.
If you have evidence or want to pursue evidence for your statement...
"I am pretty sure that there is a great deal of money to be made by opposing nuclear power and that many of the people who oppose it do it for reasons that are different from what they say in public."...
then you have a great article to write, maybe for Mother Jones.
A number of energy companies, such as Duke Power, have coal-fired AND nuclear plants, and are not likely to do surreptitious lobbying against themselves.
A question for you. Skip Bowman at NEI says there are 103 military reactors in operation (in addition to the 104 civilian reactors in the US). What can be said about the amount of power they put out, safety record, etc.
I ask partly because I was in a discussion today with Coast Guard and commercial shipping people, and the question came up of nuclear power replacing the usual burning of vile bunker fuel on at least some ships. Thoughts on that?...
HI! I'm back guys.and I still think that pandas shouldn't fight and that maybe someday in the future they could become pets. Tell me what you think about that.
Stewart, if you're interested in nuclear power for civilian ships, I have the complete text of the book "Nuclear Ship Propulsion" hosted on my website. The text has been released by the author for educational purposes, and I found it very enlightening.
Stewart you said:
"Um, the term 'professional anti-nucleaer activist" suggest that somebocy can make good money opposing nuclear, and suggests they are doing it for the money. I doubt that either is ever the case."
At least you earned your money by adding value to a product. And while a Director for GBN, you accept no compensation. Kudos. However, the professional anti-nuclear activists actually suck value from the system. As always, I back up what I say with facts.
Most of the environmental/anti-nuke organizations are set up as 501(c)(3) non-profit corporations. As such, they must file annually the IRS Form 990, which is akin to the lovable IRS 1040 Form for individuals. The 990 Forms are public information. The following is directly from the 2006 IRS 990 Forms for these organizations:
NIRS Revenue of $1,060,704, paid $272,00 in salaries.
CarbonFund.org Revenue of $749,129, Expenses of $415,349, of which $127K went to "carbon offset projects" their stated mission. So for every $10 donated, $1.70 went to a project. Hint: cut out the middle men and plant your own trees. Also they had only $3200 revenue in 2004 and $40K in 2005. This is a real growth company here and you get a signed certificate to document your carbon offset!
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Revenue of $2,156,576, Expenses of $1,263,365. Nice profit for a non-profit. Of those expenses, an unmanned officer received $130,000 compensation.
Foundation for National Progress who are they? The owners of MotherJones.org. Revenue of $9,650,897, Expenses of 9,245,089, of which nearly $3 million was in salaries to people who also had $145K in travel expenses no carbon impact from that travel, I am sure. They had $500K in cash at year end and $1.7 million in "accounts payable." Hmm not good to be one of their vendors. They have at least 10 people making $100K to $171K per year.
Rocky Mountain Institute Amory Lovins, CEO. Receipts of $9,371,101, Expenses of $7,530,761. $3.2 million in salaries. $706K in travel. $108K for telephones. $6.3 million in investments and a $1.2 million line of credit. Amory's compensation was $189,163 and Martha Picketts was $169,392. Five other employees made between $108K to $176K each. As part of $2.5 million in Assets, there are three different "Staff Housing" properties listed. Perhaps another employee benefit.
I would say some are doing quite well.
Ab-grundle,
1) A 30% reduction in conversion losses is not the same as a 30% reduction in use.
The average US power plant is about 30% efficient, and bumping that to just 50% efficient would offset the entire contribution of all our nuclear plants. You do that by using the heat instead of wasting it: cogeneration.
Hardly a false hope to wish for 50% efficiency!
2) Limited by the laws of thermodynamics? Not to those low levels. We throw away useful heat because we've decided to build large power plants geographically isolated from where the heat output could be used. That's not so hard to fix.
3) Show me the money. Compare the budgeted annual amounts for renewables research against the low-buck leases for oil and gas exploration and other federal giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. Nuclear power development was basically bought and paid for by the DOD, not that it was necessarily a bad thing. Almost none of our existing energy infrastructure stands on its own.
4) Not enough space for solar? That gives it away that you are no expert in this area. Even in rainy Seattle, the sun supplies 16 times the energy to a commercial building's roof and south façade than it uses in a year. 8 times the amount on a residence. We just need to figure out how to harvest it.
Maybe we could have one of the experts weigh in on cogeneration, the relative subsidies of renawables vs. fossil and nuke, and the time-stamp of nuclear waste?
Messrs. Siegel and Wasserman
Still looking for answers to my above questions, which were based on your earlier responses to me. As a reminder:
Mr. Siegel, you use the possibility for weapons proliferation among rogue states such as Iran and North Korea as an arguement against commercial nucleaer power here. Better to spend your energies trying to convince the Russians, French, and ChiComs to stop exporting their technologies to them why penalize us?
Mr. Wasserman, you speak about the nuclear cycle and its contribution to GHGs. Where is the research denoting the GHG contribution for the entire cycle for all generation sources on a "per kilowatt" basis so we can better evaluate each source?
Where is the list of 30 U.S. nuclear plants that have containments weaker than Chernobyl's?
Explain how terrorists could get their hands on irradiated commercial nuclear fuel to make "dirty bombs" that fuel being stored inside a hardened, secure facility under 25 feet of water with each fuel assembly weighing 1450 pounds?
Spouting generalities does not a forceful argument make. Read the banner at the top of this page - Smart, Fearless Journalism. Come on, Gents. Step up to the plate with relevant facts.
Oops, the sun's energy striking the roof and south face of a building (~675 kBtu/sq.ft./yr) is 8 times the use of a commercial building (85 kBtu/sq.ft./yr) and 16 times a residence (43 kBtu/sq.ft./yr).
Juxtaposed the #'s. Source: Architecture 2030.
1+2)What is your big plan for using all the low-grade waste heat from power plants? Build coal plants in the middle of cities and have homeless people huddle close to them?
3)I didn't say fossil fuels weren't subsidized, and I don't support subsidizing them. In fact I think they should be taxed for carbon and pollution, to encourage the deployment of sustainable clean energy (and we all know where that comes from).
4)According to this site Seattle gets 147 watts/m² average insolation. Times .15 for the efficiency of the best photovoltaics is about 4400 watts for a 2,000 sq ft house. On average, that should be enough, provided you have a 100% efficient storage system.
When you have invented a safe, affordable, efficient, compact means of storing energy, we can talk about the cost of the panels themselves. Then you can explain how to supply power for industry, agriculture, and transportation.
Well, first of all, solar is actually cheap on the scale of true cost economics - which involves taking environmental damage into account.
However, even on standard cost accounting, solar and wind are cheaper. A solar PV factory costs about $100 million in upfront construction costs, and might produce about 50 MW of panels per year - so if you invest $2 billion, you can produce 20 such plants - producing an entire gigawatt of solar panels every year.
By comparison, a rough guess at the complete cost of a 1000 MW nuclear power plant could be anywhere from $500 million (low end) to $5 billion (high end).
At the end of 20 years, each of our twenty solar PV factories will have produced 1000 MW of panels each - for a hefty total of 20 Gigawatts of power - which would produce about 20,000 gigawatt-hours per year - the equivalent of one-fifth of the power generated by natural gas.
However, if we built 200 factories, instead of 20, we'd have enough solar panels in 20 years to replace some 2/3 of our entire electricity system with solar - just using existing silicon technology.
In reality, wind and various biogas approaches will probably also play large roles. It is true that this will be an expensive project, but it will also create many jobs and stimulate in-state economies.
What percentage of energy demand is this, just for the state of California?
First, the numbers: 78% of our electricity is generated in-state, 7% from Pacific NW hydro, and 15% from southwestern coal-fired power plants, primarily.
Currently, solar is a tiny fraction of the total, and wind is a bit higher (0.2 and 2 percent of the total). Counting grid-tied power only, wind and solar made up only some six thousand GwH per year.
The lesson here is that it is technically possible to switch to sunlight and wind as our primary energy sources, but it was also be one of the biggest re-construction jobs in history.
Regarding solar thermal plants, Ausra says that almost 100% of the water in their solar power systems is recycled and condensed - and no soot, carbon dioxide, mercury, sulfur and nitrogen oxides, arsenic, or minute amounts of uranium are involved. Hmmm.... let me think - which would I rather have in my back yard?
A nuclear power plant, a coal-fired power plant, or a solar thermal power plant, or wind turbine farm?
First, let's get rid of the coal fired plants before squabbling over whether nuclear or solar is really the "cheapest" way to go.
Rod,
I thank you for your service to our country. I'm curious to hear your opinion of a charge in the introduction to Kirk Sorensen's webpage Energy From Thorium. His claim is that the Thorium fuel cycle, despite environmental and safety advantages, was passed over in the 1970s specifically because it was an inferior cycle for manufacturing nuclear weapons materials. If this charge is true, do you believe the military was right to steer the industry away from what may have been, and may yet be, a superior nuclear power technology in the name of national security?
Jonathon:
I think you have misunderstood Kirk's point and the history of nuclear technology development.
There was a substantial faction within the nuclear community in the period from the 1950s through the 1980s (and some are still around) that believed that the future for nuclear power generation included a rapid deployment of liquid metal cooled fast breeder reactors. These reactors would be able to convert fertile U-238 into fissile Pu-239 at a rate that would allow them to supply other reactors with either Pu-239 or mixed oxide fuels - depending on whether or not they were other liquid metal breeders that needed Pu-239 for their "seed" or light water reactors running on MOX.
The liquid metal cooled reactor engineers and their political supporters did some very good work and overcame a number of problems in the technology. In fact, they converted one of the early sodium cooled reactors - Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) - into a rather nifty facility that actually performed a pyroprocessing of the fuel materials on site in an integrated fashion. Hence the name Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/designs/ifr/anlw.html
Not only was the IFR an interesting demonstration of how to build a truly sustainable fuel system that would not run out of raw material, but the IFR was also passively safe - the operators could halt all forced cooling and the plant would safely coast down and never approach any thermal limits. (I would like to provide a link, but my sources are on paper from a library. With a Google search of "IFR passive safety test" you can find links to scientific paper suppliers that can provide a copy for a fee.) The operators actually demonstrated that capability to the world in 1986, just a few weeks before the incredibly botched and outright criminal test procedure at Chernobyl changed the conversation and drowned out all of the positive work being done at the same time.
What Kirk was referring to in his blog was the fact that the liquid metal crowd within the Atomic Energy Commission, later the Energy Research and Development Agency and finally the Department of Energy worked hard to sell their concept as THE way forward. The director of reactor research and development, Milton Shaw, believed they were right. He was a Rickover trained bureaucrat that believed that focus on a single purpose led to success, so he cut out all competitors, like the Liquid Fluoride Reactor, the Light Water Breeder Reactor (which also used thorium) and the High Temperature Gas Reactor (which could use either thorium or uranium and which could be configured as a breeder as well.)
By cutting the funds of all of the competitors, Shaw thought he had a better chance of success with the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. He was wrong for a lot of reasons, including the fact that he simply made Clinch River a bigger target for the anti-nuclear competition.
The fallacy that many in the "nuclear non-proliferation community" repeat is that the desire to produce fissile material like Pu-239 or U-235 is prima facie evidence of a bomb program. Without going into details, I can testify that there are LOTS of peaceful reasons to want to produce fissile material and lots of ways to use refined fissile materials to produce some rather amazing power producing capabilities.
Stewart:
You asked about evidence linking anti-nuclear activists with fossil fuel interests. It is an interesting forensic challenge - the fossil fuel industry is so integrated with our power structure that it is hard to find people in positions of wealth and power that have NO interest in continuing our fossil fuel addiction. However, I have tried and have found some specific evidence.
I have a series of posts on Atomic Insights that I call the "smoking gun" series. I have attempted to document when I run across stories that I can link to that describe the relationship between people fighting nuclear fission and people that want to sell fossil fuel.
Barry Wallace provided some information about the resources used each year by RMI, headed up by Amory Lovins. Lovins has been fighting nuclear power with the assistance of powerful people for more than three decades. One of his first publicly recognized efforts was an article titled "Energy Strategy, The Road Not Taken" which was published by Foreign Affairs in 1976. (Not a bad place to get an article published when you are a college dropout campaigning for Friends of the Earth.)
Lovins freely admits that he and RMI have been receiving consulting fees from the oil industry for more than 30 years. One example is a February 28, 2004 article in the New York Times titled Iconoclast Gets Consultant Fees To Tell Big Oil It's Fading Fast.
One thing that many people forget is that "Big Oil" happens to be "Big Natural Gas" as well. It is hard to dispute the "golden haired child" public and environmentalist perception of methane, AKA natural gas, especially as someone who works in a city where all of the public buses have huge signs claiming that they are "Powered by Clean Natural Gas". That perception did not come by accident - it was bought and paid for through very well thought out marketing plans, focused advertising, political contributions, and informal partnerships with groups like Sierra Club (search around for information about the TXU coal plan fight recently conducted with the overt assistance of Chesapeake Energy, a natural gas supplier.)
Regarding solar thermal plants, Ausra says that almost 100% of the water in their solar power systems is recycled and condensed
They're talking about the water in the steam loop. By that definition, 100% of the water in a nuclear plant is recycled and condensed as well.
Ausra wants to build their solar thermal plants in the desert. Hence they HAVE to employ air-cooling of the steam in the condensers of their Rankine cycle. This leads to significantly lower efficiency than a water-cooled condenser, such as is typically found on nuclear power plants.
Since Ausra uses air-cooled condensers (and I can't imagine what other choice they would have out in the desert) then they need to condense at a higher temperature to get a decent temperature differential between the ambient air and the wet steam in the condensers.
Again, this is desert, so there will be many months a year where the air is quite hot. Furthermore, air has much worse thermal transfer properties (per unit volume) than water, so you need to move a lot more fluid past the condenser pipes.
The real trouble comes about in the fact that condensation is isothermal, so you can't run a countercurrent heat exchanger effectively for a steam condenser like you could for the precooler or intercooler of a Brayton cycle. That means lot of fluid flow.
You could say, hey I'm air-cooling, I've got all the fluid I want, but you still need to move that air over the condensers in an effective way for heat transfer. That's going to take some seriously big fans that are being powered off the electrical generation, reducing what the plant can sell.
Ausra's plants are probably going to get worse conversion efficiency than water-cooled steam plants (like nuclear plants) unless they are water-cooled from a lake, river, or the ocean. The conditions on the low side of the cycle (heat rejection) are going to kill the improvements on the high side.
I'm amazed that so many commentators these days are so blase' about the prospect of a return to nuclear. The simple fact is, there's absolutely no prospect of verifiably safe, secure storage for the thousands of years during which the resultant deadly waste is 'hot'. We don't even know what the geopolitical picture is going to be in December, let alone in a thousand years, or ten thousand. Not only don't we know how to store this stuff safely, even if we did we have no guarantee that there will be anyone capable of doing it in, say, 50 years. End of story!
For the hard of thinking, or believers in a ten thousand year reich, try costing storage for that period, and remember to internalise the environmental costs of any acciedental or deliberate release or misuse of the waste. If you can manage a realistic stab at that, proceed to amortize that cost over the reasonably likely lifespan of the political institution that's going to be in charge, and add a pro rata portion to the bill of every nuclear energy consumer.
You'd need a lot of space for the zeros.
Solar photovoltaic plants do not require any water, and neither do wind turbines. Furthermore, the power density of solar is lower - a point that nuclear enthusiasts love to bring up - but not in this context. Low power denisty means that cooling is not as big of a job. The power density in a nuclear plant is incredibly high - meaning high rates of cooling are needed.
Thus, Sorenson's argument here is incorrect from a basic engineering perspective. Solar thermal will use far less water than any other system - and in the case of Ausra, the cycle is closed - which is only possible because solar does have a low power density. Solar PV, of course, uses no water and is the real long-term solution.
The central argument though, is that nuclear costs are kept artificially cheap by the Price-Anderson nuclear accident indemnity Act, as well as by the billions in loan guarantees provided by the U.S. government.
Solar is obviously cheaper - and there is no fuel needed, other than the sunlight provided by our local thermonuclear fusion reactor, aka the Sun.
It's not just solar - investors are also realizing that wind farms are far better bets than nuclear at the present time. There's no liability to worry about, and the new wind machines are very tough and robust.
The real economic issue is demand reduction - something no electricity dealer wants to see - but which is really needed.
Ike -
You got me thinking about those solar generating parks...here are some figures I just pulled off the net.
How much land area is required for Solar vs. Nuclear?
Solar Photovotaic (PV)
SkyPower Corp and SunEdison Canada announced the groundbreaking of First Light, North America's largest solar photovoltaic 19 megawatt (MW) solar park, located on 300 acres in Lennox & Addington County, Ontario.
300 acres / 20 MW = 15 acres per MW
Solar Thermal
The proposed project includes three solar concentrating thermal power plants, based on distributed power tower and heliostat mirror technology, in which heliostat (mirror) fields focus solar energy on power tower receivers near the center of each heliostat array. The total area required for all three phases and 400 MW would including the administration building/operations and maintenance building and substation is 3,400-acres.
3400 acres / 400 MW = 8.5 acres per MW
Solar Thermal
Total Generation 280 megawatts, 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, near Gila Bend, Arizona. Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology with thermal energy storage. Solana's parabolic mirrors focus the sun's heat on a heat transfer fluid. The fluid can reach a temperature of 735 degrees Fahrenheit. To produce electricity, the hot fluid transfers its heat energy to water, creating steam. The steam is then used to run conventional steam turbines. The heat energy in the fluid also can be stored and used at a later time to generate electricity. The Solana Generating Station will cover 3 square miles and contain 2,700 parabolic trough collectors. Located on what is currently agricultural land, the power plant will use 75 percent less water than the current use of the property.
3 square miles x 640 acres/ sq mile = 1920 acres. 1920 acres / 280 MW = 6.85 acres / MW
Nuclear
Two nuclear plants were evaluated for power density. One produces 2400 MW on 650 acres, resulting in 0.27 acres / MW. Another nuclear power plant 50 miles west of Phoenix, generates 4000 MW on 1000 acres or 0.25 acres / MW.
Now compare:
Solar photovoltaic 15 acres / MW means 15,000 acres 1000 MW
Solar thermal 7 acres / MW means 7,000 acres 1000 MW
To equal replace the Arizona nuclear power plant,
Solar PV would need 60,000 acres, or 94 square miles, a 9.4 x 10 mile rectangle
Solar Thermal would need 28,000 acres, or 44 square miles, a 7 x 6.3 mile rectangle
Manhattan Island = 23 square miles
20,000 MW, as you suggest
Solar PV would need 300,000 acres or 468 square miles
Solar Thermal would need 140,000 acres, or 218 square miles
Rhode Island = 1045 square miles
The same nuclear island would be 5000 acres or 7.8 square miles.
Seems that for large scale generation, solar, in its current state, would require significant amounts of land. Now there is an environmental impact!
I. Lindley, I'm amazed how many people will blithely dismiss "nuclear waste" as an unsolvable, multi-thousand-year problem when about 20 minutes of study on Wikipedia will help them understand that most "nuclear waste" is not waste at all.
The way to get rid of the long-lived transuranic isotopes in nuclear waste is to "burn" them in fast-spectrum reactors to fission products, releasing energy and converting them (from actinides to fission products) to a form that will decay to stability in a small fraction of the time.
There seem to be a lot of people who want to use the "waste" argument as their excuse why nuclear power cannot be considered, when in fact, it is a problem that can be solved and solved well, if the politicians will get out of the way and let the engineers fix the problem.
But they won't. The politicians, aided and abetted by professional anti-nuclear hysteria, insist that there is a connection between civilian nuclear power and weapons that does not exist, and that this non-existent connection is the reason why "waste" should not be reprocessed. Then they further mandate that all of this unprocessed "waste" go into a mountain in Nevada that they insist must be geologically understood for hundreds of thousands of years in the future.
That makes no sense to me. Nuclear engineers know exactly what to do with "nuclear waste". Let them do it.
Thus, Sorenson's argument here is incorrect from a basic engineering perspective. Solar thermal will use far less water than any other system - and in the case of Ausra, the cycle is closed - which is only possible because solar does have a low power density. Solar PV, of course, uses no water and is the real long-term solution.
I'm sorry Ike, but it's you who've got the basic engineering wrong. If Ausra was somehow using the concentrating surface of their system for heat rejection, your low-power-density leads to better cooling argument might have some merit, but they don't.
Ausra's system concentrates solar energy on a tube, causing the water in the tube to boil at an elevated pressure. This is the same basic process that is going on in a nuclear reactor or a coal-fired power plant. That hot steam then goes to a steam turbine and is then condensed in a condenser. That condenser HAS to use air as the heat rejection medium instead of water, because air is the only cooling medium available out in the desert. Air is a lousy choice, but it's the only one they have.
Because they must employ air cooling, they have to run the condenser at a higher temperature than you would want, for improved efficiency, if you were near a body of water like a river or lake. The efficiency of the overall process takes a serious hit. You're not getting away with anything, thermodynamically.
You then say photovoltaics employ no water cooling. Again, true, but they wish they could. The conversion efficiency of a photovoltaic cell is inversely proportional to its operating temperature, a fact well known to those who work with the technology. If you have a 10% efficient PV cell, then 90% of the energy that strikes that cell must be rejected as waste heat. To convey that waste heat to the ambient medium (air) the cell will assume a equilibrium temperature that is sufficiently elevated to conduct this waste heat to the air. The higher this equilibrium temperature, the worse the performance of the PV cell. Systems that use concentrated sunlight on PV arrays must use active cooling (either with water or ammonia or some other coolant) to avoid degrading the PV cell performance so badly that the efficiency is completely shot.
Dealing with the problems of heat rejection is not only endemic to all heat engines, like nuclear and solar thermal, but is fundamentally a part of systems like photovoltaics, whether we like it or not.
I. Lindley -
In the U.S., the government requires that utilities add a charge for waste burial to every kilowatt of nuclear generated electricity. By one report's account, the government has collected $22 billion to date.
Waste dispoal is not a technical issue... France recycles their used fuel and with the 10% that's left over, vitrifies it... that is, mixes it with glass, making little marbles. Why glass? Glass holds the radioactive materials and is impervious to water or molecular migration. Glass found in archeological digs that are thousands of years old prove that embedded material does not dissolve or transport. These marbles are then stored in caskets and put into salt mines below the earth's surface.
Research more than the generalities and histeria promoted by those with an agenda. Then make your own decision. Understand that without a Boogey Man, many would no longer have a means to incite and raise funds.
Rod,
And let's not forget former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder. He engineered Germany's policy of phasing out nuclear power.
After leaving office, he was given a lucrative post on the board of the Russian gas company that will be exporting a huge amount of gas (at great profit) to Germany, largely for power plant use.
Also note that Germany has recently announced that they will be building several new coal plants (which they clearly would not be doing if not for the nuclear phaseout). They've even had the gall to demand a higher CO2 emissions allowance, on acount of the fact that they decided to phase out nuclear.
Tee Are Aitch,
According to DOE's budget documents,
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/budget/08budget/Content/Org_summary.pdf
fossil and nuclear programs recieve about the same level of overall funding, whereas conservation and renewable energy recieve about 50% more than either nuclear or fossil.
On top of govt. research funding, there are direct operating/construction subsidies. These are summarized in the article below (which references the formal report):
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/04/25/at-the-trough-a-pee...
Renewables recieve much larger subsidies than nuclear or (most) fossil programs, especially on a per kW-hr basis.
Of course, the largest subsidies of all are unpaid external costs, i.e., the priveledge of polluting the environment for free. Scientific studies which estimate and quantify the extermal costs of various energy sources (www.externe.info/) agree that the overall external costs for both nuclear and renewables are very small (a fraction of a cent/kW-hr), while the external costs for coal and oil are very high (4-8 cents/kW-hr), enough to double their price.
Ike:
Your economic analysis of solar energy is repleat with flaws. You talk about the cost of the fabrication plant (only) and not the cost of the product itself. That would be like me only counting the cost of the foundaries that forge large nuclear plant components, and not the cost of the nuclear plants (and the associated materials) themselves. Solar cells (and their associated materials) are very expensive.
Also, you compare rated capacities directly, without accounting for the fact that solar will generate only ~25% of rated power, on average, whereas nuclear will generate over 90%.
Finally, you don't talk at all about the intermittentcy of solar and wind power, and how it will limit those sources to a small fraction of overall generation (unless some low cost method of massive-scale energy storage is invented, which is not on the horizon).
One final point would be to ask why renewables supporters are pushing so hard for laws which require that a certain fraction of generation come from renewable sources. If these sources really were cheaper than (or similar to) coal, gas or nuclear, even under "standard accounting", we would not need any such law. We also wouldn't need the very large per-kW-hr subsidies (much larger than nuclear or fossil) that renewables get. Utilities would be voluntarily building them for most new generation, without any govt. support or mandate.
The fact is that solar PV is very expensive, ~25 cents/kW-hr (several times nuclear's cost). Solar thermal is significantly better economically, but it takes a lot of land. Wind is th cheapest of all, with costs similar to nuclear, but intermittentcy is a real problem (as it doesn't generate power during peak demand, which solar actually does to some extent).
It is also true that, due to intermittentcy, the highest (optimistic) goal that anyone is talking about is for renewables to supply maybe 20-25% of our power by 2025 or 2030. The rest will have to come from nuclear or fossil fuels, and the choice couldn't be more clear, as nuclear's environnental impacts are negligible compared to fossil fuels.
One final note, in terms of total "real" costs (i.e., including external costs), scientific studies which estimate and quantify the external (environmental) costs of various energy sources (such as the European commission's ExternE project) show that nuclear's external costs are a fraction of a cent per kW-hr, which is similar to most renewable sources. Coal and oil's external costs, by contrast, are 4-8 cents/kW-hr. Adding external costs will not change the picture very much with respect to nuclear vs. renewables. It would dramatically change the picture however, for the comparison of either source to fossil fuels.
Great nerdly posts here.
Barry Wallace's numbers on solar-thermal persuade me it can join the mix effectively, because the kind of space needed is pretty reasonable in places like the American west and Australia, though water becomes crucial. The storage feature is very attractive and an advantage over already effective wind.
It's a real pity if running the numbers and taking the time to understand the technology is "nerdly" because that's precisely what it will take to really solve our energy problems.
Many of us are taking the time to try to explain these principles to a non-technical audience in the hopes that they will actually learn something and make decisions commensurate with that.
Concerning weather/water issues:
Saying that vulnerability to drought and heat is a reason to use sources like solar and wind as opposed to nuclear is one of the more absurd arguments that I've heard. Both solar and wind are much more "vulnerable" to effects of weather than nuclear is. Indeed, these sources literally rely on the weather itself to produce power.
The supposed point is that very rarely, in a severe heat wave or drought, a few nuclear plants may have to scale back their power level somewhat. Cloudy and calm days are much more common, and they affect the output of solar and wind plants (respectively) to a much greater degree. Then there's nighttime of course... These are the reasons why solar and wind have capacity factors (i.e., uptime percentages) of ~25%, where nuclear's is over 90%.
Everyone's heard about the European heat wave, and how some nuclear plants had to reduce power. What everyone didn't hear (thanks to the politically correct press), is that whereas overall nuclear power production over the affected region was down only ~7% (i.e., still ~93% of rated power), wind power production was almost nil, only a few percent of rated power. Heat waves are generally associated with low/no wind (as a high pressure dome over the area). This example highlights one of wind's main problems, i.e., that it tends to not generate power when we need it most.
There are features (e.g., cooling towers, etc..) that nuclear plants can install (at some cost) which will eliminate most or all of any water source problems they may have. It should also be noted that nuclear plants do not "consume" water. They just heat it up somewhat (and it cools back down after a little while). Water limitatins and higher global temperatures will not be a significant problem for nuclear in the future. We do have a massive (~4000 MW) nuclear plant in the desert around Phoenix....
Also, in the future, high temperature gas cooled plants will have a much higher thermal efficiency (~50%) and will require about half as much cooling water per unit of electricity produced.
Mr. Wallace is right. Just because there are attendant proliferation risks with developing nuclear energy in some countries doesn't mean that the same risks exist everywhere. Each type of reactor has its own waste, proliferation, and safety challengesand its own advantages; each country chooses to manage its nuclear fuel cycle in its own way; and the countries that require additional energy capacity vary tremendouslyin regulation, availability of natural resources, instability, and level of demand.
The difficult part comes with the precedents that the United States and other countries set by taking a specific nuclear energy course. Why should the United States be allowed to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel, while it is asking other countries, for example Iran, to suspend its uranium enrichment activities? Despite Iran's many transgressionsconcealing its nuclear activities, etc.it is still theoretically allowed to operate uranium enrichment facilities under international law.
The United States, Russia, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and many others are working to develop a system where countries that operate nuclear reactors would be guaranteed a supply of nuclear fuel. This would obviate the need for every country to have an indigenous capability to make nuclear fuel and would reduce the proliferation risk. To answer Mr. Price's question, yes, I think that it is quite possible that such a system could come into being. But there are a lot of interested partiescountries that want to serve as suppliers and others who worry about their supply being cut off for whatever reason--so putting together this type of arrangement might take a little while.
Ike, why do you feel the need to leave out all the operating and materials costs in your "analysis" of the cost of producing solar panels? Why don't you just say what the actual cost of producing the panels is?
Why do you leave out the cost of the panels while claiming that solar power is "free"? Is there any way you can justify making such a claim, other than deliberate mendacity?
How can you ignore the fact that solar power produces only intermittently, averaging only a small part of its rated power?
I'd ask who's paying your bills, because I don't think anyone is honestly capable of overlooking the fact that solar panels cost money, but I suspect we would not get a truthful answer.
The rule is: wherever there's a bad public policy, there's a lurking corporate interest. When people deliberately work to deceive the public, someone is profiting.
I'm with Lindley: the nuclear waste is the issue. High level waste takes about 1000 years to fall back to levels of radioactivity found in nature. Meanwhile, all those who don't want dirty bombs going off willy nilly had better keep it under guard.
I have never seen a financial calculation that prices this reality explicitly for the long term. I suspect this is because astronomical sums are involved. Even if vitrified waste in a geologically stable vault is a technical solution, you'd still need to ensure some sort of oversight... for a thousand years.
What kind of sum would need to be invested today to pay an annuity that lasts this long? 1 euro invested at 2.5% compound interest (paid quarterly) for a 1000 years would yield 66 billion.
Say it costs (plucking the figure from nowhere) 100 million euros a year to maintain a storage facility, how much would you have to invest today to ensure that year 999 was paid for? I've cast around a bit to try to find an answer. The closest I got was this: http://www.nea.fr/abs/html/nesc9532.html
Funnily enough, their "post-operating period model" lasts only for 100 years. But as they work in the nuclear industry, they should know that leaving a zero off your sums can result in deadly error.
Does anyone know of any independent studies that address this?
Nice to read that Wasserman has not sold out to 'problem solvers' who want to promote the big energy solutions.
We can debate (and probably will) the safety/hazards of nuclear power until the Hopi prophecies come true and the world goes up in a ball of flames, and humanity is saved by the techno wizards who transport us all off to some genetically manufactured homeland in a galaxy far, faraway.
Until then, whether we use coal, oil, nukes, wind, bio-gas, or solar the real concern should be who owns it. Nukes will never be community owned.
Solar and wind hold the promise of decentralized, secure, resilient,diverse sources of energy that will free us from the neo-con, "freemarket" control of the globalized economy.
Since the 70's we've been waiting for solar to have its day. The technology for PV's has advanced rapidly. Industry stimulus programs equal to the scale of big oil and nukes would be enough to make solar energy commonplace.
We'd create more long term jobs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, end the worry of wide-spread blackouts, defuse the threat of terrorism,keep our money in the community and maybe save a few fish.
Phil, where do you think solar panel technology comes from? Do you think it's developed in hemp-smoking hippie communities with free love?
Or is it developed by "techno-wizards" who actually spend years of their lives studying quantum mechanics, optics, materials science, and semiconductor manufacturing techniques to make it possible?
Heaven forbid that "problem solvers" use their brains to actually fix the problems with the world. We'll just retire to the "nerdery" and stop troubling the rest of you with pesky numbers and real concerns.
Seriously, the level of anti-intelligence shown on this site is insulting to people who try to take to time to explain "how things really work" to the rest of folks. Listen, learn, expand your mind, and if you can't do that, then just shut up.
Since the 1970's we've been PAYING for solar energy, to the tune of hundreds of billions in research and subsidies. So far, the only payoff has been for the researchers. Solar was given an enormous, decades-long chance and it failed completely.