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).

Is smaller better for nuclear energy?

What follows is an imagined conversation I'd have using quotes from two articles from the Environmental Progress and Third Way websites if I could get all of these talking heads into one room. And although he was not actually a participant in the real discussion, just to remind everyone that the integration of wind and solar has been even more expensive than nuclear, I also threw in a quote by David Roberts writing for VOX.

On February 14th I posted a tweet suggesting that the world may end up purchasing large nuclear power stations from just a few players the way the airline industry does large wide-body aircraft (leaving other, smaller players to build smaller versions of the big things). On February 17th, an article appeared in Environmental Progress using an airliner analogy. On February 27th, an article appeared in Third Way, also using that airline analogy to critique the Environmental Progress article.

I parsed Shellenberger's Environmental Progress article here. The current status of global nuclear power costs is discussed here.

The internet is a wonderful source of ideas. Once in a while I see an idea I floated in a book, article, comment, or tweet appear in another person's book, article, comment, or tweet, which leads me to at least suspect that I may be having an impact on the conversation. 

Michael Shellenberger: Nuclear Industry Must Change — Or Die

You can read the Environmental Progress article with that title here. In that article Shellenberger uses Boeing and Airbus as analogies for the nuclear industry (an idea spawned by the following tweets):

See Footnote 1 for more of the Twitter thread discussing this analogy.

I suggested in that Twitter thread that America may need to buy nuclear from someone who can build it cost competitively (South Korea). There are only two companies on the planet that build the vast majority of large airliners. Why can't the same be true for nuclear power stations?

I used airliners for an analogy because I work in the industry, but I could have used any number of other industries, like ship building, which South Korea has also been dominating for some time.

In an attempt to put the Toshiba Westinghouse bankruptcy into perspective, I made mention of over 100 bankruptcies in the solar industry: