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Friday, November 24, 2017

Peer Review of Wendover Production's "The Nuclear Waste Problem" Youtube Video

Above images from Nuclear Energy Waste--Making Mountains Out of Mole Hills

The YouTube video, The Nuclear Waste Problem was published on November 21, and went viral with about half a million hits in a few days. I learned of its existence when it was presented to me as irrefutable evidence for why nuclear can't be part of the climate change solution.

Technically, it's quite well done. The graphics and music are appealing. The transcript is about two and a half pages long, single spaced. Unfortunately, the narrative found in that transcript is remarkably inaccurate. If the graphics and music are lipstick, the narrative would be the pig.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Simon Holmes à Court thinks 100% Renewable Energy has been Demonstrated to be Possible in Australia

More Twitter activity from Simon.

He starts by asking:
nuclear twitter: does anyone have a simple LCoE for a nuclear power station? i'd love to better understand the economics.
If he's an energy expert, I have to wonder why he's asking for data from strangers on Twitter. You wouldn't see the likes of James Hansen doing that for one of his many papers published in Science and elsewhere. And as is almost always the case with his tweets, you're never sure what he is trying to say. Did he mean an equation? An example calculation? Examples of LCOE for nuclear? A spreadsheet?

It's not just me. Also not sure what he is asking for, Suzy Waldman handed him a link to Lazards which listed various LCOEs and an EIA link that explained the concept of LCOE.


I, in turn, responded to Suzy:



Tom Biegler responds to me:

Thanks. And I don't suppose they include load leveling costs to turn wind and solar into a product that users might like, want and need.
I, in turn, respond to him with a link to an Energy Matters article that tries (but apparently often fails) to explain why you can't compare the LCOE of sporadic sources to baseload sources:
Exactly ...if you want to compare LCOE of wind and solar to baseload nuclear LCOE, you find what it would cost to make them do baseload (answer offshore wind in UK is six times more expensive than Hinkley). 
Missing the point of the Energy Matters article entirely, Simon posts a typically cryptic response devoid of capitalization:

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Environmental Progress--The Power to Decarbonize

Figure 1

Environmental Progress has a new study out that I found very compelling.  It's just raw data arranged in a manner that paints a global picture. Critics can't punch holes in it by attacking assumptions chosen because it doesn't have any. In a nutshell, it shows a strong global correlation between nuclear energy use and lower carbon intensity, but no such correlation between wind and solar.

It took some effort for me to understand how the graphic shown in Figure 2 below was derived. To make sense of it I had to drop down into the appendices to look at the data for each country:
In service to transparency, we have reproduced all 68 national carbon intensity of energy charts used in this analysis in our appendix, in addition to publishing the aggregated national charts.
Each dot represents a given country's carbon intensity at a given level of annual nuclear, or wind, or hydro, or solar output. Each data point used to plot the thick curve is a kind of average of the dots at a given annual electricity output for nuclear, or wind, or hydro, or solar. The carbon intensity in countries can grow or retract with the addition or reduction in any given energy source (nuclear, wind, solar, or hydro). In Japan, for example, a reduction in nuclear caused an increase in carbon intensity.

I put my anti-nuclear hat on to find a way to punch holes in the results. Could the different horizontal scales be hiding something? Are plots using the same scale hiding something in the clutter for wind and solar? To resolve those issues I overlaid the nuclear and wind graphs at the same scale and magnified the results to make them more visible (see Figure 1).