Bounding the Renewables-Nuclear Debate

Figure 1: From NREL Renewable Electricity Futures Study

Very few people out there are arguing for a 100% nuclear future, and most are not arguing for a 100% renewable future. When we toss the extreme views out, the debate is over how much of what.

If you bound your debate to electricity generation in 2017 in a given geographical area, say, Seattle, you get:

Hydro 87.3%
Nuclear 4.7%
Wind 3.1%
Coal 2.1%
Natural Gas 1.3%
Biogas 1.1%
Other 0.4%

Not bad. Who said you can't cost effectively decarbonize with renewables (when 87% comes from hydro)? Doing that with wind and solar, on the other hand, remains an untested hypothesis.

If you bound your debate to electricity generation in 2050 in the continental United States you might get what you see in the lower half of Figure 1 above, which encapsulates the four-volume mega-study from the National Renewable Energy Lab to replace 80% of our electricity generation with "renewable" sources.

If you can't trust the NREL to come up with a competent study biased to favor renewable energy, who can you trust?

Some things to note about that study:

Road Trip–Thoughts on the Satsop and Other Unfinished Nuclear Power Stations

A version of this article was originally published in 2014.

Cooling Towers

While on a trip to do some bird watching, I saw two cooling towers off in the distance shrouded in mist. I realized that they belonged to the unfinished Satsop nuclear power station and decided to have a closer look. I took the above photo of one of the towers. Click here with your left mouse button to see a higher resolution image and then left click once again on that image to see it at an even higher resolution. Note the stairs zigzagging along the side to get a sense of scale.

Many people associate this type of large cooling tower with nuclear power plants, I’m guessing, because they make dramatic copy. But this type of cooling tower can, in theory, be used with any thermal power plant regardless of energy source: solar, coal, biomass, natural gas, oil etc. From the Wikipedia article on cooling towers:

"These designs are popularly associated with nuclear power plants. However, this association is misleading, as the same kind of cooling towers are often used at large coal-fired power plants as well."

Six cooling towers at the Didcot Power Station (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

The Didcot power station pictured above burns a combination of coal, natural gas, and oil. Note the use of six hyperboloid cooling towers. Cooling towers are used to condense the steam exiting the steam turbines back into liquid water to be converted into steam again and sent back through the turbines. This greatly reduces the amount of water lost as steam.

A 2015 article titled "Shh! Secrets of the Cooling Towers" in the All Things Nuclear antinuclear energy blog (which deliberately conflates nuclear energy with nuclear power) of the Union of Concerned Scientists Lawyers admitted:

It is odd that cooling towers that are widely used at all types of power plants and that have no safety function have become iconic nuclear plant symbols.

Antinuclear UCS Publications Featuring Cooling Towers on Covers

Yes, odd indeed. It would appear that the "experts" at the UCS writing these antinuclear articles (subsequently converting them into official looking PDFs) were unaware that cooling towers are not unique to nuclear power stations. 

How do they work? Essentially the rising steam

David Roberts thinks there's a revolution happening in electricity, blames utilities for lack of progress

David's headline "There's a revolution happening in electricity" is yet another example of how Americans are being misled. In an earlier article, Roberts blamed television for this but Paul McDivitt and I have our suspicions:

 From How renewable energy advocates are hurting the climate cause:

But even if you look at just electricity, the numbers for the U.S. still don’t come close to 20 percent. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2015 statistics show that 4.7 percent of the country’s electricity was generated from wind, with 0.6 percent coming from solar. That’s a 14-plus percentage point difference between what Americans think and the truth

It’s hard to blame them, with confused and confusing coverage of renewable energy statistics popping up in their social media feeds and on news outlets they’ve come to trust. On top of that, most social media sharers never even read the articles they share. According to a recent study, 59 percent of links shared on Twitter have never been clicked, underscoring the outsize influence of misleading headlines, subheads and header photos. And research has shown that misleading and clickbait headlines have a lasting effect on how those who actually read articles interpret and remember their content.

David thinks the over-hyping of wind and solar "reflects a real communications victory on the part of clean energy industries and climate advocates."

Which may be true for the industries, but not so much for the cause of climate activists (assuming they want to end climate change instead of nuclear energy). We can, in part, thank misleading articles and clickbait headlines for the rise of emissions in Germany and Japan.

You'd never know from reading any of this climate hawk's articles, but nuclear is still the single largest source of low carbon energy in Germany and is expected to be the largest single source (according to six recent independent studies) for the entire world in 2050. See Figure 1. Renewables tribalism, the over-hyping of wind and solar in lieu of an advocacy for a mix of wind, solar, and nuclear has measurably worsened greenhouse gas emissions.

Figure 1: Over-hyping wind and solar while denigrating nuclear results in more emissions

I love gizmos as much as the next guy, but when it comes to climate change, their impact will be more incremental than revolutionary. More gizmos won't get us there. We should be replacing existing coal plants with nuclear as well as building reasonable amounts of wind and solar to reduce natural gas fuel bills when the sun shines and the wind blows.

From Jesse Jenkins in the interview:

CleanTechnica Watch: Is Thorium A Future Option For Nuclear Energy?

Previous CleanTechnica antinuclear articles reviewed:

• ·         CleanTechnica Watch: Let’s Be Honest — New Nuclear Power Is Not Competitive
• ·         CleanTechnica Watch: Does Nuclear Really Help The Integration Of Renewables?

Screenshot From Documentary of Sunniva Rose, Nuclear Physicist

Sunniva Rose explained some nuclear physics terms in the documentary. Be sure to see her TEDx talk: "How is it possible to worry about global warming and not be pronuclear?"

Click here to learn more about CleanTechnica watch. 

The CleanTechnica version of this article was originally posted on the German antinuclear energy website Energy Transition.

The article is an ad for the author's book in the disguise of a review of a TV documentary that aired in October on Arte (a Franco-German TV station), promoting a thorium molten salt reactor design. I found a version with English subtitles here. I recommend that you read Myths and Misconceptions about Thorium nuclear fuel instead of watching the film. It will save you an hour and the article is far more factual.

In his first sentence he calls pressurized-water reactors "awful." I'm not convinced that a total of three incidents of note in over a half century of low carbon energy production with only one of them releasing enough radiation that will (after eighty years), result in a statistically possible total number of fatalities that are less than a percent of annual global car deaths ...fits the definition of awful.

The film clearly calls for tremendous investments in thorium nuclear, with a prototype reactor costing “a billion euros.”

If that's a "tremendous" investment, what would you call the $30 or so billion Germany has been spending annually for several years now trying to displace its existing nuclear with wind and solar? Ginormous?

Just as there are millions of ways to skin a cat, there are thousands of potential configurations for nuclear power reactors. Using a thorium fuel mixed with molten salt is just one of them and would come with its advantages and disadvantages if ever put into commercial operation. The film touted three advantages: the abundance of thorium, the potential for passive safety (lose power, the fuel drains into a big bathtub and just cools off) and less waste.

CleanTechnica Watch

CleanTechnica Watch will be an ongoing series of articles that discuss their antinuclear energy articles, which are typically either republished from other antinuclear energy sources or written by an assortment of antinuclear guests.

You can think of these articles as a form of public peer review.

Their policy of hoovering up antinuclear pieces to put on their website is a convenience for me in that they have become my go-to source for nuclear energy misinformation material.

In a nutshell, CleanTechnica promotes the belief that the planet can decarbonize without help from nuclear.

Reality Check

The German Energy Transition

 

Studies, and there is no shortage of them, have limited value. As any experienced engineer knows, real world data trumps theoretical calculation.

Luckily we have the German experiment (often referred to as the Energiewende or Energy Transition) which has been testing the hypothesis that a highly motivated, wealthy, industrialized nation can rapidly decarbonize its electrical grid by displacing nuclear energy with wind and solar.

The experiment isn't complete, but it has already provided a wealth of real-world data.

Putting the cost into perspective

The roughly $30 billion dollars being spent annually to expand wind and solar in Germany could build enough third generation AP 1000 nuclear reactors to fully decarbonize their grid over a ten year period (similar to what France did decades ago).

$30 billion a year would pay for forty custom built $7.5 billion Generation III AP1000 reactors over ten years.

$30B/year x 10years  = $300B

$300B/$7.5B = 40 AP1000 reactors

Add those to existing reactors and they could supply about 97% of Germany's electricity by 2025.

From the German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, second in command to Merkel, who was also the Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety from 2005 to 2009:

I don’t know any other economy that can bear this burden [$30billion a year]...We have to make sure that we connect the energy switch to economic success, or at least not endanger it. Germany must focus on the cheapest clean-energy sources as well as efficient fossil-fuel-fired plants to stop spiraling power prices."

While renewable aid costs are at the “limit” of what the economy can bear, Germany will keep pushing wind and solar power, the most cost-effective renewable sources, Gabriel said. Biomass energy is too expensive and its cost structure hasn’t improved, he said.

Source: Germany Can't Bear 32 Billion-a-Year Costs, Minister Says

Biomass

Growth of biomass essentially stopped when its subsidies were truncated. It currently provides roughly four percent of Germany's total energy (electricity, heat, transport) consumption.

Given the discussion about the sustainability of biomass, the question is therefore whether the Energiewende itself is sustainable. That’s one reason why the German government has slammed the brakes on biomass.

CleanTechinca Writes Last Antinuclear Energy Article—Pigs Fly

Frankly, we primarily stopped writing about nuclear since everyone in the industry should know by now it is an industry entering its retirement stage.

...so says Zachary Shahan in yet another antinuclear article. Interestingly enough, I wrote an article earlier this year critiquing yet another of their antinuclear energy articles.

However, because of the interest (and backlash) the Before the Flood article raised, I decided it was worth communicating this point one more time [emphasis mine].

If CleanTechnica really believed that nuclear energy is “entering its retirement stage” they wouldn’t still be writing antinuclear articles.

Using Bill McKibben’s climate change war analogy, Figure 1 below lists our four main weapons against climate change in descending order of deployment:

Figure 1: Low Carbon Sources of Energy in United States via 2016 BP Review

Pronuclear comment is not welcome at CleanTechnica. From their original comment policy page:

This site is not the place to discuss future nuclear designs that might make nuclear affordable, the unproven GenIV type stuff that might or might not work. If there’s a clear demonstration of affordable nuclear sometime in the future [China will begin replacing the furnaces in many of its coal plants with Gen IV, gas cooled, pebble bead reactors as soon as 2018 and Russia just put a breeder reactor into commercial operation last month], then we can open up the discussion about the role nuclear could play in replacing fossil fuels.

In the meantime, there are several sites where they love to discuss nuclear ideas. Feel free to take your speculations to one or more of those sites. We’re going to stick with stuff that is affordable and practical.

[Aside]

 Shahan began his article with praise of another antinuclear article.

David Roberts of Vox (formerly of Grist) -- Not "Pro-nuclear"

A little history from Grist:

Climate Hawk takes flight

"It is with great sadness but also no small degree of pride that I'm writing to share the news that David Roberts will be leaving Team Grist shortly to join Vox ...

...When he applied to be a news writer at Grist in 2003, he didn't know much about climate change or any issues we covered--I.e., he was a philosophy grad who used to write movie reviews for IMDb--but he definitively knew how to write, so we took a chance on him."

Although he wrote for an environmental website, David does not consider himself to be an environmentalist (whatever exactly that is):

From David's Twitter account:

Why is he compelled to point out that he isn't a doctor? Because, believe it or not, less astute readers out there fairly routinely think the dr in his Twitter moniker stands for doctor instead of David Roberts. There is a Dr David Roberts who writes for Foreign Affairs, so maybe that's part of the confusion but more than likely it's an artifact of a roughly bell-shaped IQ distribution.

Nature just isn't his thing. David's thing is climate change. I don't recall him ever writing about nature in the decade or so he was at Grist. A climate hawk does not "focus on things like land preservation or biodiversity." When put to a vote by Grist readers to pick a term that describes someone who wants to focus on climate change instead of, say, nature, the term Climate Hawk was chosen ...which is somewhat ironic considering that raptor deaths have always been and continue to be a major concern with improperly sited wind farms (not a problem if properly sited). The irony can be taken a step further considering that every self-proclaimed climate hawk I've ever encountered is also antinuclear energy--the second largest source of zero-emission energy on the planet.

Global Zero Emissions Sources of Electricity

First Annual Clean Energy Forum at the Columbia (nuclear power) Generating Station

Photo Credit Utilities Service Alliance

I was recently invited to attend the first annual Clean Energy Forum, hosted by Energy Northwest in Richland, Washington, which included a tour of the Columbia Generating station.

The Tour

We were greeted at the security gate by three polite security guards who inspected the bus and checked our photo IDs against a list. This level of security isn't unique to nuclear power stations. You would have to go through a similar procedure to take a tour of Hoover dam. We also had to leave our cell phones on the bus (which would also be the case should you ever get the chance to take the highly recommended Boeing, Everett factory tour).

Next, we had to pass through metal detectors very similar to the ones I had to walk through at the airport. Between the airports and tour, I passed through metal detectors four different times on this trip.

We were given radiation dose badges (to document that exposure levels were well-below any amount that could possibly affect health).

We saw the control room mock-up where crews are trained to staff the real control room. They ran through a simulated core shutdown from an earthquake (including a shaking floor and emergency lighting), which took only a few seconds to complete. It looked complex but I doubt that there were many more gauges, lights, and switches in that control room than you would find in a 747 cockpit (between 365 and 970 of them, depending on model). Because a control room does not have to fly, the gauges and switches were quite large and widely spaced in comparison.

 Photo of 747 Cockpit National Air and Space Museum

Nuclear Energy Waste--Making Mountains Out of Mole Hills

My previous articles on nuclear energy dealt with the scientifically established, statistically irrefutable fact that modern nuclear power stations are one of the safest forms of energy at our disposal:

Bill Nye the Science Guy Social Primate and Nuclear Energy

Parsing Bill Nye’s Anti-Nuclear Energy Keynote Speech

Terrorists, Nuclear Powerplants, and Snakes

There are four categories of nuclear waste:

1. Spent nuclear fuel—solid metal cylindrical pellets
2. High-level waste—goop with the consistency of honey (primarily from cold-war weapons production)
3. Transuranic waste—mixture of solid debris and goop (primarily from cold-war weapons production)
4. Low-level waste—contaminated protective shoe covers and clothing, wiping rags, mops, filters, reactor water treatment residues, equipment and tools, luminous dials, medical tubes, swabs, injection needles, syringes …

To recap, items 2 and 3 have little or nothing to do with nuclear power stations and most high-level waste was created before 1970 which has since cooled down to become transuranic waste.

The United States actually already has a deep geologic repository called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (which needs renamed because it is no longer a pilot plant) that is now accepting waste.

Many think it would be unwise to put used nuclear fuel into a repository you can’t retrieve it from because it could be a source of fuel for other types of reactors, like the BN-800 fast reactor that went into commercial operation in Russia last year. That reactor is being used in a “burner” fuel configuration to consume stockpiles of plutonium from decommissioned warheads but it could also be used as a “breeder” reactor. Breeder reactors could create enough fuel to power civilization for many centuries from used fuel.

A much wiser idea for storage of our used nuclear fuel, which presently is sitting in parking lots at nuclear power stations in nearly impervious bomb shelters for fuel rods (commonly known as dry casks) would be to put all of these casks into a single secure parking lot just in case we need what is inside them to help save the world from climate change.

These casks are good for about 160 years, so there’s no big hurry on that count. And the cost to build and run this secure parking lot could be paid for with just the interest on the money already put into the Nuclear Waste Fund by nuclear power stations.

Thanks to anti-nuclear groups, the Department of Energy has paid roughly $4.5 billion in damages to various utilities for failing to create a permanent repository for used fuel with the money in that waste fund.

The largely successful effort by antinuclear groups to prevent the creation of permanent storage may be what saves us in the end because it has kept that future supply of zero carbon energy available. Not sure which law that falls under, Murphy’s Law or the Law of Unintended Consequences.

In addition, according to James Conca,  this delaying action has made Yucca Mountain largely irrelevant. Most high-level waste has cooled enough to go into the existing Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and our used nuclear fuel really should be kept readily available for future use in an interim storage area.

Please note that most of the above information was gleaned from articles by an expert on the subject, James Conca, writing for Forbes.

Engineers love graphs but the general public, not accustomed to seeing them every day, tend to ignore them. There have been many attempts to convey without graphs how little waste is produced. In the documentary Pandora's Promise, they showed a football stadium that would contain all spent fuel used in the United States since the invention of nuclear energy. But to some people, this seems like a lot of waste. Images of Coke cans or a hand holding a vitrified glass disc of waste as examples of how much waste would be generated to provide an American with a lifetime of electricity fail because it requires the reader to trust whatever numbers were used to make this claim.

 Which is why I created the graphic below. No trust required. All you need are your eyes. And anyone is free to borrow this graphic to help reverse the decades of misinformation created by antinuclear energy groups.

Articles of Interest and Commentary--5/7/2016

 Cross-posted at Energy Trends Insider

Green Tech Media

 

I Was Wrong About the Limits of Solar. PV Is Becoming Dirt Cheap

by David Keith

Although quite upbeat about solar PV (and I'm also a big fan of solar PV), this article generated almost 300 comments because it was also frank about the limits of solar PV, and wind, and to make matters worse, he concluded the article with the following statement:

My view is that only two forms of energy -- solar and nuclear power -- can plausibly supply tens of terawatts without a huge environmental impact.

This is tantamount to blasphemy in most green (whatever exactly that means) technology websites. Which explains much of the action in the comment field but one comment in particular by Susan Kraemer caught my attention. She feels that CSP (concentrated solar power) with molten salt for heat storage is the answer to solar intermittency. I found this interesting because she had recently written an article at Earth Techling titled How a Hotter Climate Destroys Thermal Electricity Generation. CSP is thermal electricity generation (spins turbines with hot gases and must dump waste heat). The irony (is that the right word?) is that I had explained this to her in a comment under her article:

Thermal power simply becomes less efficient. It will be no more "destroyed" than solar photo voltaic:

"As part of Power System Program of the International Energy Agency (EIA), a study was conducted to analyze data from 18 grid connected PV plants located on different geographic locations and it showed a direct relation between temperature and PV module efficiency. The plants were located in Austria, German, Italy, Japan and Switzerland. The study concluded that 17 out of the 18 systems showed annual losses in efficiency due to temperature changes by 1.7% to 11.3%."

Also, solar thermal power plants have the same efficiency loss as any other thermal power source.

So, that leaves wind. Nobody is planning to run civilization only on wind. The future will be some mix of wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear with just enough natural gas to stitch them all together. The fact that higher temperatures will reduce efficiency is just something engineers will compensate for, and the lower efficiency would, all things being equal, result in higher prices, but I suspect the price difference will be negligible.

...you can lead a horse to water.

But the the study she wrote about also pointed out that hydro, the undisputed king of renewable energy, is going to be in a world of hurt. There are a lot of environmental bloggers out there without any kind of engineering background who write about energy issues, and the fact that they don't always understand the engineering principles behind what they write is obvious, at least to an engineer.

VOX

VOX doesn't allow comment under its articles. I try to make it a policy not to provide links for (or usually even read) articles without comment fields under them. Comment fields go a long way to keep blog authors honest. Would you buy stuff on Amazon from a retailer that does not allow reviews of their products? Me either. Why should you have to buy what an author says without seeing what reviewers think? I'm making an exception in this case because I'm essentially providing a comment field for these articles and anyone is welcome to participate.

Two articles by Dave Roberts caught my attention.