From Nuclear power analyzed from warming angle:
Nuclear power could curb climate change but it would have to expand worldwide at the rate it grew from 1981 to 1990, its busiest decade, and keep up that rate for half a century, a report compiled by environmentalists, academics and nuclear industry proponents said on Thursday.
Specifically, that would require adding on average 14 plants each year for the next 50 years, all the while building an average of 7.4 plants to replace those that will be retired, the report said.
…
While the report also supported storing U.S. nuclear waste at power plants until the long-stalled Yucca Mountain repository opens, 10 dumps the size of Yucca Mountain would be needed to store the extra generated waste by the needed nuclear generation boom.
You can grab the entire report here (108-page, 2MB PDF).
I have to wonder how much longer it will take before people figure out that the “nuclear power is the silver bullet that will save us from global warming” meme is a humongous steaming pile. Nuclear power is much more expensive and less reliable than most people realize, and it creates one hell of a waste management problem that lasts, in human terms, forever.
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June 26th, 2007 at 11:48 am
The industry has never said that nuclear energy was a silver bullet when it comes to alleviating global warming. What we have said from the beginning was that it could help contribute to the constraint of greenhouse gas emissions while providing a stable source of baseload electric power. But if you take nuclear energy off the table, you make it all the more difficult, if not impossible, to keep the lights on.
To read more about the Pacala/Socolow wedges model, click the following link:
http://www.pathsoflight.us/musing/?p=247
June 26th, 2007 at 11:48 am
My policy on nuclear power is the U.S. is Zero Population Growth (ZPG)
We have about 100 nuclear power plants in the U.S. at the present time.
As plants get decommissioned you can build one to replace it.
The new plant can be larger and a better design.
June 26th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Eric [1]: Please note that I never said the industry made that claim. I merely said that I was sick of hearing people make those ridiculous, sweeping claims.
Everyone: As for the oft-heard claims of reliability, I cannot recommend highly enough the Union of Concerned Scientists report Walking a Nuclear Tightrope (report home page), which goes into quite a bit of detail about the frequency, cause, and length of nuclear plant outages. Given that a reactor that’s being refueled or undergoing upgrades or repairs cannot be partially shut down, and that a lot of electricity generation goes offline at a time, nuclear power has its own intermitency problem, just as solar and wind do.
And that doesn’t include the growing issues of water consumption for cooling in an increasingly drought-stricken world, and how some areas, like Europe, have had to throttle back nuclear power plants during extreme heat spells.
My point is not to bash nuclear power. There is no perfect way to generate electricity. But I think it’s critical that we take everything relevant into account when evaluating ways to pump electrons. That means the total cost to design, site, build, operate and maintain, and decommission the hardware, the total environmental impact, waste management issues, and susceptibility to outages whether it’s to refuel a nuke plant or solar that produces nothing at night or wind that produces nothing on calm days.
Given the global warming challenges we’re facing, this is an even tougher set of challenges than it used to be back in the day when we were told (as I was, as a kid) that nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter.” I remain optimistic for one simple reason: Despite this new concern about global warming we’re still collectively smarter than this problem is tough.
June 26th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Lou, I concur with your thinking that all factors have to be taken into account when determining future power supplies. I would quibble with the idea that the intermittency of nuclear on the broad scale is comparable to wind or solar - - in the US at least, nuclear plants run around 90% capacity factor - - but your basic idea that they aren’t 100% reliable is correct. And if a nuclear plant goes off line, it is a sizeable amount of power lost. However, this does demonstrate one benefit to having a multi-state electric grid running 15% over-capacity - which is what we’re suppossed to have in the US. You can lose a nuclear plant or two all at once and still be okay, because there is enough of a buffer.
Capacity factor is very important when talking about power sources. A good wind farm has a capacity factor of perhaps 30%. That means if you have a “10 Megawatt wind farm” which consists of 10 wind turbines each one megawatt in size, on average you’ll only get 3 MWe output at any given time.
There are a number of factors against nuclear - it requires a lot of technology and smart people, it requires water (though no more so than a comparable sized fossil-fuel plant, I believe), and there’s the nasty waste issue. On the latter, it should be kept in mind that nuclear waste is compact, with leakage (radiation) being easy to detect. Compare that to coal ash - which has uranium specs in it - or the extensive, long-lived piles of chemical toxins one might get from building huge numbers of windmills and solar panels. Dangerous chemical waste is usually harder to detect than radiological waste. (Of course, maybe there’s a clean way to build these things.) Bad waste is bad waste, no matter what it’s source.
The biggest plus for a nuclear plant is that it can produce a huge amount of power with limited CO2 releases, and the public wants to consume a huge amount of power. Producing the same amount of electricity from renewable sources would be a really vast undertaking (I believe you are talking about 100,000’s of sizeable windmills just to make up the 20% that nuclear does in the US now.) That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, or shouldn’t, of course. And if massive conservation efforts are somehow put in place, the situation looks less bleak - but that only moves the bar from a really, really huge amount of power to a really huge amount of power. That’s how nuclear ends up competing. Nature’s checkbook is hard to balance, and unfortunately an electron produced with clean, renewable energy isn’t worth any more than one produced by nuclear, or coal, or squirrels on treadmills. I believe you recognize that, but clearly many in the public don’t, and our politicians and media certainly don’t help much in that area, regardless of what power source they embrace.
June 27th, 2007 at 8:37 am
Lou,
Thanks for listening. Back in September 2006, a number of NEI folks took a look at the UCS report and found it wanting. My blog post on that report can be found here:
http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2006/09/on-ucs-report.html
In short, that report attacked the industry’s strength, and used essentially ancient data to draw its conclusions while ignoring the steady improvement in efficiency as measured by industry-wide capacity factor. As of now, that measure stands at about 90%, higher than any other source of electrical generation.
June 27th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Tackling climate change and dealing with decreasing availability of fossil hydrocarbons is not going to be easy. As you say, there are no silver bullets, and indeed the silver bullet meme is pretty much an antinuclear strawman. It’s a bit like the ancient “too cheap to meter” throwaway remark, quite possibly referring to fusion, that antinuclear groups continue to wring every possible drop out of.
The ramping up of nuclear power station build rate to previously achieved levels seems like a very modest plan. Surely we can build faster than that? If we want to support some degree of electricity use in transportation, a more radical plan seems essential, for all non-carbon technologies.
Refueling and maintenace outages seems a rather marginal point to bring against the nuclear industry. You are presumably aware that a nuclear plant only needs refueling every 18 months or so?
I concur wholeheartedly that the handling of nuclear waste need to be improved, but this will not happen when everyone is afraid to discuss it. So far, spent nuclear fuel has been handled with zero consequences to human health. Yucca Mountain is (in my opinion) a timid solution to a technically straightforward problem.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
>14 plants each year, replace 7 plants
In the united states, 12 nuclear plants were completed in 1974, 10 in 1973, 8 in 1972. There were years in the eighties with 8 completed. Before 1968 only small reactors were built. Only two had over 400MW, but most were less than 100MW. 1969, 1970, 1971 had 3-4 each year, then in 1972 the 8 reactors. So from a relative standing start the scale up was rapid to the peak of 12/year of the last build cycle. We are in a better position now because US rebuilt a new nuclear plant and is switching on Browns Ferry 1 this year.
Copy and paste the data at this link into excel and sort by date
http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=US&sort=&sortlong=Alphabetic
Two coal plants are completed every week. Coal plants are on a similar construction scale to nuclear plants.
From 1993 to 2005 in the United States new non-fossil fuel sources of energy aded
Wood (biomass): 96 thousand megawatt-hours/per year.
Waste: - 259 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. Negative number.
Geothermal: - 190 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. Negative number.
Solar: (Usually everybody’s favorite): +8
Wind (Another favorite): 1345 thousand megawatt-hours/per year.
Overall, renewable energy in the United States has increased at a rate of 1,000 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. The nuclear energy figure is 16,203 thousand megawatt-hours per year for nuclear even without building a new plant.
My fairly comprehensive look at levelized cost of electricity for all kinds of power
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/06/solar-cells-with-407-efficiency-made-58.html
My articles on nuclear. Note: for me efficiency is good, solar is good, wind is good, nuclear is also good.
Coal is the worst, oil is pretty bad. Air pollution and actual deaths (and injury and actual costs) should drive decisions in my opinion. I think climate change should take a back seat to air pollution deaths. Millions dead each year now and many billions in costs now verus mostly future costs. Plus if we fix air pollution we can mostly address the climate change problem too.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/search/label/nuclear
June 27th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Actual historical nuclear plant construction in the USA
12 nuclear plants were completed in 1974, 10 in 1973, 8 in 1972. There were years in the eighties with 8 completed. Before 1968 only small reactors were built. Only two had over 400MW, but most were less than 100MW. 1969, 1970, 1971 had 3-4 each year, then in 1972 the 8 reactors. So from a relative standing start the scale up was rapid to the peak of 12/year of the last build cycle. We are in a better position now because US rebuilt a new nuclear plant and is switching on Browns Ferry 1 this year.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/06/increasing-nuclear-power-in-past-and-in.html
So the 14 per year number is not unreasonable. Also, the existing plants are mostly getting extended another 20 years to 60 years of operation.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Coal plants take 3-4 years to construct as well, plus permitting etc… also take several years.
http://www.bigstoneii.com/PlantProject/PlantProjectOverview.asp
Over the next few decades the choice between coal and nuclear is a straight up swap.
Nuclear waste is better in vats and cooling ponds than coal pollution (particulates, Nox, Sox, mercury, toxic metals,
more uranium and thorium released by coal than nuclear fission etc…) in the air and our lungs
June 27th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Just wondering–when did the build rate or a strict choice between nuclear and coal become the issues?
I’m not arguing with the historical build record; I assume our new visitors from the NEI have their facts straight.
But does that history mean that we can build 14 per year every year for half a century, at an acceptable cost, even while other countries, most notably China, are building more nuclear plants? That’s not meant to be a debating point, but an honest question in the spirit of looking at all relevant factors, as in my comment [3] above.
And while I’m asking such questions, what do we do with all that extra nuclear waste when we can’t even find a long-term solution for managing the stuff we have now? I’ve heard some nuclear power supporters say that eventually we’ll find the political will to open Yucca Mountain (or a whole series of them), but I’m not convinced, given the track record. I’ve also heard people say we should just give in and admit that we’ll likely wind up storing the waste on-site forever. That’s not a conclusion I agree with, by the way; I’ve said many times on this site that I don’t know what the nuclear waste management solution is.
But whatever we do, we should be up front about all the costs, monetary and otherwise. By all means, talk about the horrors of lung disease caused by coal plants (and there’s an energy source I genuinely hate, at least as it’s used today) and similar issues, but we should also be honest about the need to either admit we’ll store the waste permanently on-site or force some state to accept it against their will. I’m assuming that ocean disposal is still off the table and banned by an international treaty. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong on that point.
I’m deeply conflicted about nuclear power simply because we’re making such large bets with some aspects of it, primarily the safety, waste management, and proliferation issues. Yes, I know how solid the safety record has been for decades, but the fact remains that even a tiny risk of an accident or a leak or theft of nuclear material could be a very big deal with horrible consequences.
June 27th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
btw: I am not with the NEI.
The reason that nuclear and coal are the primary choices:
Coal is the primary source for electricity now and the one that is being planned to be added.
There has been a fair bit of natural gas power that was added over the past couple of decades but we have natural gas supply issues. Natural gas is cleaner compared to coal but is still a fossil fuel with carbon and other pollution.
50% of electricity in the USA is from coal.
80% of electricity in China is from coal.
Going forward the US and europe etc.. will be adding power generation but
most of the world’s power is going to be added in China and India.
China is adding over half of its power from coal from now to 2020 about 317GW.
From current power level of 600GW. They are adding 155 GW of hydro (about 7 to 8 times
the three Gorges Dam). They are adding 30GW of nuclear and some natural gas and some
renewables (wind and solar)
Hydro is pretty much tapped out for the USA.
May, 2007 global reactor projections are an increase from february, 2007 of 3 being built, 12 planned and 52 proposed. A 21% increase from February. 286 reactors versus 219 reactors are now in the development pipeline.
http://www.uic.com.au/reactors.htm
Schedule about 6-8 completions per year worldwide for next few years.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip19.htm
Why would building more nuclear reactors each year increase costs ? What is the global limiting factors?
We can make 100+ coal plants each year. Those as noted are about the same size. During the 70’s and 80’s there
were years with 28 reactors built (1984) worldwide. The cost factors are primarily financing costs. High interests
rates in the 1970s and 1980s were not good. Also, delays because of construction skrews ups.
But large construction like high rise buildings and ocean liners and freighters are able to
go on around the world at a far higher rate than most people understand.
China is building new urban additions to cities to house 30 million people each year and to build new
factories for them to work in. Two Los Angeles’s every year.
“Nuclear waste” there is reprocessing for 10% of it now (France, Japan and russia)
but the primary long term solution as I see it is new high burn reactors where more of the fuel
is burned. Nuclear waste is mostly unburned fuel.
Two liquid flouride reactors were built in the 60s and 70s. they would work. There is research in
Europe and India on them. This is not a gating factor to saving millions of lives from air pollution now.
If you want to understand those reactors and what can be done with waste then look here:
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/
>Tiny risk of accident or leak or theft of nuclear material
Coal and fossil fuels kill over 3 million every year under normal operation.
Perhaps the numbers are so horrible that you read it and don’t believe or understand it.
15 Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s every year worldwide.
Almost a Hiroshima from air pollution in the USA each year.
Half of a Hiroshima from coal air pollution.
Is it because people die from heart disease and lung disease over a few years
but on average 14 years earlier than they should that this is less horrible ?
Is it because they don’t generally collapse on the street the way they did in the 1952 London Fog ?
Nuclear power has killed rarely and only something goes very wrong.
Three mile island killed no one.
Balance the real risks with what is actually happening.
My view on proliferation as an unimportant risk from where we are now
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/06/nuclear-proliferation-has-killed-no-one.html
June 28th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Lou said: “Just wondering–when did the build rate or a strict choice between nuclear and coal become the issues?”
The reason its coal and nuclear is because they are the only cheap, reliable baseload power sources that exist. And when I say cheap, I mean both coal and nuclear’s operating costs are cheap. We will always need baseload power and these are the two primary sources that can supply it. Sure renewables can contribute but if we are to have a reliable grid then it can’t rely primarily on intermittent sources of energy.
“But whatever we do, we should be up front about all the costs, monetary and otherwise.”
Definitely. Ask a more specific question on costs. There is so much to discuss that I don’t know where to begin.
“what do we do with all that extra nuclear waste when we can’t even find a long-term solution for managing the stuff we have now?”
We’re not in a hurry to do anything with it. The plan is to leave it on site and then when the U.S. has developed the reprocessing technology then we will do that. And once it has been reprocessed then the plan is to take the rest (probably about 5% of the initial waste) and bury it in a geological repository (most likely Yucca).
The amount of waste we are talking here can all be stacked together and fit in a Best Buy parking lot. And if we were to double nuclear’s capacity then it is only two Best Buy parking lots. What to do with used fuel is a political issue. Not a technical one. And we have confidence that we will eventually reprocess the used fuel and bury it. We’re not in a hurry, it’s not going anywhere, and it’s not harming anyone. Fossil fuels wish that they could handle and contain their waste like nuclear can.
Thanks for allowing me to comment.
July 1st, 2007 at 1:47 pm
It you really want an eye opener, look at the insurance system for nuclear power plants. It is suppose to be self funded by the industry, but is so underfunded that it is useless. Which means that the Federal tax payer picks up the bill the next time $600 Billion dollars is required to cover a meltdown.
July 1st, 2007 at 8:47 pm
SJC,
$600 Billion? I bet you don’t know how much was paid out in insurance claims when the TMI accident occurred. Only about $70M. The nuclear industry is required to pay nearly $10B if an accident were to occur. Considering that the worst accident to happen in the U.S. was a fraction of that I would think many would agree $10B is a decent cap. You could read more on the Price Anderson act here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
July 13th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Btw: I believe that the historical record of plant construction and the actual current economics and rate of
nuclear plant construction refutes the original posting :
>“nuclear power is the silver bullet that will save us from global warming” meme is a humongous steaming pile.
The 434 nuclear reactors around the world are preventing the addition of 10% more global warming
gases if that same energy was supplied with fossil fuels.
So it would seem that nuclear reactors are certainly helping to reduce global warming.
Wind and solar are not being built fast enough.
Wind which has been scaling up had a recent report in the Wall Street Journal that they
are facing new build constraints. Supply problems. They cannot build as fast as they
would like which is still less than the level needed to displace the new coal additions.
I was just wondering: if you, Lou or SJC, are willing to modify or re-examine the steaming pile statement ?
based on the evidence and information that I have provided in this and previous comments ?
If not then I was wondering about the details of why not ?
If coal is the main powersource that planned to be added in China and the United States over
the next few years.
In the USA (the official stats show that http://www.eia.doe.gov/) most of the 30 GW added each year
has been natural gas power, but that from 2009 onwards it is shifting to coal power.
That coal power will not be built with sequestering. It will mostly be pulverized coal.
Modern larger 1.5 GW to 2 GW nuclear reactors can be built. Build them at the old peak rate
of 10 to 12 per year and the new coal that would have been added could be displaced.
The construction capacity would be a fraction of the overall building capacity of the US and the world.
World production and consumption of cement totaled 2.283 billion tons in 2005, an increase of about 5.75%, or 124 million tons, over the previous year. (All tonnage figures in this article are metric.) This continues the annual increases we have seen in almost every year since the 1970s.
The world has produced a record 1,24-billion tons of crude steel in 2006, some 8,8% more than in 2005
1000 one GW nuclear reactors each year would be less than 10% of each of those materials.
Plus the steel and concrete used would be less than what is needed for comparable coal and wind.
From Per F. Peterson, Department of Nuclear Engineering. The Future of Nuclear Energy Policy: A California
Perspective 2005:
Nuclear power plants built in the 1970’s used 40 metric tons of steel, and 190 cubic meters of concrete, for each megawatt of average capacity. For comparison, modern wind energy systems, with good wind conditions, take 460 metric
tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt. Modern central-station coal plants take 98 metric
tons of steel and 160 cubic meters of concrete—almost double the material needed to build nuclear power plants.
This is due to the massive size of coal plant boilers and pollution control equipment.
Conversely, natural gas combined cycle plants take 3.3 metric tons of steel and 27 cubic
meters of concrete—explaining why natural gas is such an attractive fuel, if it is cheap.
The nuclear power plants that we built in the 1970’s were very efficient in their
use of steel and concrete. In response to the Three Mile Island accident, however, “bloat”
occurred in the designs of new, evolutionary reactors, with steel and concrete inputs
increasing by 25 to 50 percent. This is the case for the ABWR, first built in Japan in the
1990’s, and for the EPR, the new European plant design which be built in Finland.
But a major change has occurred with the new nuclear plant designs that will be
built in the United States. These new designs—the ESBWR and the AP-1000—use
passive safety systems, that replace the external cooling supplies, large pumps, and diesel
generators used for emergency cooling in the old plant designs with simple, gravity
driven heat exchangers.
These changes result in large reductions in steel and concrete inputs for these new
passive plant designs—actually below the values of our 1970’s plants. Thus we can
expect, if they are built in the time periods demonstrated in Japan, that these new nuclear
plants can have the lowest construction costs of any reactors every built.
July 13th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Sure, I’ll revisit it: What do you think “silver bullet” means? It means “this thing can fix the problem all by itself”. That’s what I said explicitly that I was addressing, the notion that nuclear power is a silver bullet. If you really want to make the case that nuclear power, and nothing else, not renewable electricity generation, not any changes to transportation, not any changes to other sectors of the economy, will reduce our GHG emissions by enough to avoid a global warming catastrophe, then feel free.
But please note that of the 7.147 billion metric tons of GHG emitted in the US in 2005, 2.0 billion metric tons (28%) of it came from transportation and 2.375 billion metric tons (33%) came from electricity generation, with the rest from the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. The most commonly discussed requirement of reducing GHG by 80% couldn’t be achieved if you converted 100% of electricity generation to zero-GHG sources, nuclear or otherwise. (All these figures are from the DOE.)
And I wouldn’t get too carried away with the DOE’s projections. As I’ve pointed out many times on this site, the DOE is an outstanding source for historical data, but their projections are a bad joke. Anyone who thinks the US will really build up the use of coal for electricity as the DOE states is going to be in for quite a surprise.
July 27th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
I think the “silver bullet” analysis is useless and misleading.
The wedges analysis where we look at how much different solutions
can scale up and contribute to solving the energy, pollution and climate problems is better.
Using the “silver bullet” analysis then nothing works to solve everything.
I see that you are not advocating “silver bullets” but just being upset when others use it.
We are in agreement adding renewables, changing transportation, building energy efficiency, and
industrial efficiency and using technology, processes, policy and behavior to change those.
I already stated that nuclear power does not do it all by itself, but it is an important
contributor to a solution and it can help to solve a lot more of it than most people
are saying. Your position certainly appears to be against using more nuclear power.
Can you clarify that position ?
How much nuclear power usage do you think there should be ?
What are the outlines of what you think the solutions should be ?
how much contribution are you expecting from each aspect of a solution or
rank the pieces of the solution.
I think the 80% GHG reduction is a tough target for 2050.
I think we need to maximize the use of renewables, nuclear, efficiency to get there.
France’s use of nuclear for electricity is an example of how much it can help.
(80% of electricity generation)
Plus by switching to plug in hybrids at the same tiem we can shift more transportation over
to clean energy sources.
If the plug in hybrids are efficient, then instead of oil we can use genetically engineered (synthetic biology)
biofuels (ideally generated from engineered single cell organisms).