I know, you’ve heard it all before from me and at least a few others: The energy/water nexus is going to bite us hard, and it’s already started. You need water to make electricity (for the most part) and you need energy to provide water. Climate chaos can change the quantity and characteristics (e.g. temperature) of the water available for thermoelectric plant cooing at most locations, meaning that every time we build a thermoelectric plant we’re making a decades-long bet that we’ll have the needed cooling water, and that we can use it without causing other major problems downstream.
Once again, this has gone from “nice theory” to “ugly fact”, as Joe Romm points out in France imports UK electricity as summer heatwave puts a third of its nukes out of action:
To avoid maxxing out on my July quota of irony in the first week of the month, I will simply report this as a straight news story. The UK Times reports:
With temperatures across much of France surging above 30C this week, EDF’s reactors are generating the lowest level of electricity in six years, forcing the state-owned utility to turn to Britain for additional capacity.
Fourteen of France’s 19 nuclear power stations are located inland and use river water rather than seawater for cooling. When water temperatures rise, EDF is forced to shut down the reactors to prevent their casings from exceeding 50C.
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EDF warned last month that France might need to import up to 8,000MW of electricity from other countries by mid-July — enough to power Paris — because of the combined impact of hot weather, a ten-week strike by power workers and ongoing repairs.
EDF must also observe strict rules governing the heat of the water it discharges into waterways so that wildlife is not harmed. The maximum permitted temperature is 24C. Lower electricity output from riverside reactors during hot weather usually coincides with surging demand as French consumers turn up their air conditioners.
One power industry insider said yesterday that about 20GW (gigawatts) of France’s total nuclear generating capacity of 63GW was out of service.
Much of the shortfall this summer is likely to be met by Britain, which, since 1986, has been linked to the French power grid by a 45km sub-sea power cable that runs from Sellindge in Kent to Les Mandarins.
A statement from EDF played down the heat problems, saying that the French system continued to meet customer demands — but similar heatwaves have caused serious problems in France in the past.
In 2003, the situation grew so severe that the French nuclear safety regulator granted special exemptions to three plants, allowing them temporarily to discharge water into rivers at temperatures as high as 30C. France has five plants located by the sea and EDF tries to avoid carrying out any repairs to them during the summer because they do not suffer from cooling problems.
Aside from the energy/water nexus point, which, try as I might, can’t be stressed too much, this situation also highlights a more general issue: The danger of becoming so reliant on one form of electricity generation. It’s very appealing to say, “All we need to do is standardize nuclear power plants. Come up with one design for the entire plant, make sure it works as desired, and then replicate it.” The problem is that then you have a large portion of your electricity generation, whether based on nuclear or any other technology, that has the same strengths and weaknesses. And in a time of rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns, cooling water for river-fed thermoelectric plants is quickly emerging as a much more serious weakness than we thought, as great as fuel supply and CO2 emissions.[1]
The reason for this “surprise” is simple: We’ve become accustomed to a remarkable level of stability in our climate. There are certainly anomalies that arise on yearly and shorter time frames, including drought, heat waves, and severe winter weather. But for a long time we’ve been able to look at places like the continental US or most of Europe and predict with confidence that certain locations will “always” have a good supply of cooling water for an electricity plant. We then build the plant with a 40 to 60 year, or longer, lifespan, and sleep soundly, “knowing” everything will work out.
Thanks to climate chaos, that’s suddenly a much riskier bet, and we’ll increasingly have to build thermoelectric plants that use much less or no cooling water, or site them on gigantic, some would say Great, lakes or near the oceans. At least I’m hoping we’ll have the sense to do that before we suffer a major electricity crisis, much worse than Europe in 2003 or what almost happened in the US SE a couple of years ago. Of course, we’ll still have to deal with the installed base of thermo plants for decades. Consider it yet another example of how our past ignorance, kicked up a notch with at least a pinch of hubris, will force us to live with decisions we wish we could undo.
[1] No, I’m not overlooking the issue of the size of the individual generating plants, in case you were wondering. If you build a 1GW generating plant, you have to deal with the problem of losing a lot of electrons all at once if/when it goes offline, for whatever reason. The more diversified and decentralized our electricity generating infrastructure is (and therefore the less we try to force any technology into being a silver bullet), the less vulnerable it is to individual outages.
Yet another study on the cost of a specific way to move electrons has been released, this time the technology of interest is nuclear fission. The author is Mark Cooper, Senior Fellow for Economic Analysis
Institute for Energy and the Environment, Vermont Law School.
From the press release announcing the study [PDF]:
The likely cost of electricity for a new generation of nuclear reactors would be 12-20 cents per kilowatt hour (KWh), considerably more expensive than the average cost of increased use of energy efficiency and renewable energies at 6 cents per kilowatt hour, according to a major new study by economist Dr. Mark Cooper, a senior fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School. The report finds that it would cost $1.9 trillion to $4.1 trillion more over the life of 100 new nuclear reactors than it would to generate the same electricity from a combination of more energy efficiency and renewables.
Titled “The Economics of Nuclear Reactors,” Cooper’s analysis of over three dozen cost estimates for proposed new nuclear reactors shows that the projected price tags for the plants have quadrupled since the start of the industry’s so-called “nuclear renaissance” at the beginning of this decade – a striking parallel to the eventually seven-fold increase in reactor costs estimates that doomed the “Great Bandwagon Market” of the 1960s and 1970s, when half of planned reactors had to be abandoned or cancelled due to massive cost overruns.
The study notes that the required massive subsidies from taxpayers and ratepayers would not change the real cost of nuclear reactors, they would just shift the risks to the public. Even with huge subsidies, nuclear reactors would remain more costly than the alternatives, such as efficiency, biomass, wind and cogeneration.
Dr. Mark Cooper said: “We are literally seeing nuclear reactor history repeat itself. The ‘Great Bandwagon Market’ that ended so badly for consumers in the 1970s and 1980s was driven by advocates who confused hope and hype with reality. It is telling that in the few short years since the so-called ‘Nuclear Renaissance’ began there has been a four-fold increase in projected costs. In both time periods, the original low-ball estimates were promotional, not practical; they were based on hope and hype intended to promote the industry.”
Commenting on the study, former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Peter Bradford said: “This study makes clear that new nuclear reactors can only be built if taxpayers or customers assume the very large risks that investors would normally bear in the U.S. economy. Such subsidy to a mature industry – already heavily subsidized — is contrary to the fundamental free enterprise principles that protect customers and allocate resources efficiently. The risks of cost overruns, reactor cancellation, poor operation and the development of less costly competitors are real. All have happened to nuclear power in the U.S. before. If the enormous financial burden of assuming these risks falls on the taxpayers (in the form of loan guarantees), it will increase our national deficit and crowd out other borrowers needing federal credit support. If it falls on customers (in the form of ratemaking guarantees), it will create additional economic hardship and job loss … Setting a quota of 100 new nuclear reactors by a certain date presumes – against decades of evidence to the contrary - that politicians can pick technological winners. Such a policy combines distraction, deception, debt and disappointment in a mixture reminiscent of other failed federal policies in recent years.”
The presentation slides for the study are here [32 page, 326KB PDF].
The study itself is here [78 page, 630KB PDF].
www.azstarnet.com: Key senator calls for 100 new reactors in 20 years:
Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander called Wednesday for doubling the number of nuclear reactors nationwide, a potentially $700 billion proposal that calls for building 100 more over 20 years.
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“I am convinced it should happen because conservation and nuclear power are the only real alternatives we have today to produce enough low-cost, reliable, clean energy to clean the air, deal with climate change and keep good jobs from going overseas.”
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The country’s 104 commercial nuclear reactors produce 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, while most of its energy comes from carbon-producing coal. The last reactor to come online was the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 reactor in Spring City, Tenn., in 1996.
Steve Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, called Alexander’s proposal “reckless.”
“Nuclear power is a problem, not a solution,” Smith said. “New nuclear reactors are expensive, create significant water use and thermal pollution risks to our communities and produce radioactive waste that after 50 years we still have no long-term solution for.”…
Alexander said he would increase federal loan guarantees now being offered for the first four reactors to as many as 12 to “jump start” the nuclear revival.
Fascinating. Is the Senator saying that all we need to do is rely on conservation and nuclear powered electricity to deal with climate change? He says they’re our “only real alternatives”, so clearly they’re enough to deal with the problem all by themselves or the battle is already lost. Perhaps the Senator should re-think that particular sound bite.
And as for Steve Smith’s comments, I would add that a much greater use of nuclear power also creates a much greater dependency on shifting and therefore less reliable and less predictable water supplies for cooling. This is a point that’s often lost in such discussions: Many people point out that nuclear power plants have a high water draw, but not nearly that much in terms of water consumption, which is unarguably true, and is typically cited to show that nuclear plants don’t make as big a dent in water supplies as some people assume. But the flip side to that situation is that regardless of how the water is used (merely a draw vs. gone-for-good consumption), the plant still requires that flow to operate. Build a nuclear plant, and you’re assuming that you can predict a viable source of cooling water at that location for the next 50 years, likely longer.[1]
I would also like to know what Senator Alexander’s long-term plan is for the additional 6 tons of nuclear waste these new plants will produce (in addition to the 6 tons generated by our current plants) every day.
[1] In the US, nuclear plants are typically licensed for 40 years, but many have recently been renewed for an additional 20 years.
Excuse me for a moment or three while I pull us out of the Big Discussions (like the throw-down brewing between James Hansen and Joe Romm) into a side trip on a topic I think it worth stressing.
The core concept is that we have to differentiate between a design or theory and the actual implementation we get in the real world.
Exhibit A is the cash-for-clunkers law making its way through the US legislative process:
What is the point of the “cash-for-clunkers” plan cooked up in the House of Representatives?
It took a relatively toothless, much-criticized bill to scrap old, inefficient cars and made it even more toothless. Any environmentalists looking to this first round of congressional horse-trading as a harbinger of things to come on the wider climate debate better head for the hills.
The compromise version of “cash-for-clunkers” announced by the House offers prospective car buyers between $3,500 and $4,500 vouchers for trading in old cars to get new ones. But the bar is set really, really low.
For passenger cars, “clunkers” that get less than 18 miles per gallon can be traded in—for cars that get at least 22 miles a gallon. The corporate average fuel economy for new cars is 27.5 miles a gallon
If the new car is 4 mpg more efficient, the consumer will get $3,500. If the new car offers a 10 mile-per-gallon improvement, the payout rises to $4,500.
Things don’t get any more ambitious when it comes to light trucks. Says the House Energy and Commerce Committee plan: “New light trucks or SUVs with mileage of at least 18 mpg are eligible for vouchers.” A similar sliding-scale payout applies.
The problem with all this, as Duke’s Bill Chameides pointed out last month, is that making a new car produces, on average, about 6.7 tons of carbon dioxide. By his calculations, it would take at least five years to “pay off” the environmental impact of building the new car with a 22-mile-per-gallon purchase. That SUV might be even worse—the estimated payback time is almost 20 years.
To use a technical economics term, that sucks. A lot.
Twenty two MPG for a car? Seriously? Who in their right mind (oh, yeah, this is the US House we’re talking about) thinks that’s high enough to earn an incentive worth more than one of those little pine tree air fresheners?
So, cash for clunkers is a Stupid Idea, right? Well, no. The basic concept is very sound–give people a financial incentive to do what we want them to do (i.e. things that will help society in general). So the theory and general design of the program is sound. But the details of the implementation are pathetically bad.
Aside from the fact that this will waste money and not accomplish much, a situation that makes all economists go nuts, as we’re trained to always look for the lost opportunity costs in a situation, the worst part is that this program will be used by the anti-government camp and the ideologically driven global warming deniers as “proof” that government can’t do anything effectively, so it shouldn’t even try.
As my wife and I like to say, everything in life is a test. Do your best to pass every one, and things will go much better for you in the long run.
Exhibit B of theory vs. implementation, and the one that makes me most often want to say something sarcastic about a beautiful theory being slain by an ugly fact (or set of facts), is nuclear power.
Nuclear power’s supporters point out that it’s a very low CO2 way to pump electrons, and (all together now) “no one has ever died in a nuclear power plant accident in the US”, both of which are true. But they also love to talk about how economical nuclear power is, which just ain’t so, at least not when you’re looking at building new power plants. One of many such articles about cost overruns appeared on ClimateProgress just yesterday, What do you get when you buy a nuke? You get a lot of delays and rate increases….:
Progress Energy said Friday it has pushed back by 20 months its schedule for bringing on-line two planned new nuclear reactors in Florida, after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said its review of the plant site will take longer than expected.
Progress also said it will spread out over five years certain early–stage costs for the new reactors that it could legally bill to ratepayers entirely in 2010, an apparent bid to tamp down customer anger over rate increases linked to the project that took effect earlier this year.
New nuclear plants are so expensive they are likely to provide electricity at some 15 cents per kilowatt hour (see “Nuclear power, Part 2: The price is not right“) — or possibly more than 20 cents/kWh (see “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power“). The precise answer — 50% higher than average U.S. electricity prices or more than 100% higher — is hard to know since it is all but impossible to find a utility willing to stand behind a firm price in a rate hearing.
When we last left Progress Energy in 2008, it had said the twin 1,100-megawatt plants it intends to build would cost $14 billion, which “triples estimates the utility offered little more than a year ago.” And that didn’t even count the 200-mile $3 billion transmission system utility needs, which brings the price up to a staggering $7,700 a kilowatt. Under Florida law, to pay for these nuclear power plants, Progress Energy can raise the rates of its customers a $100 a year for years and years and years before they even get one kilowatt-hour from these plants. Sweet deal, no?
Energy Daily (subs. req’d, quoted above) updates the Florida story. Let’s start with the cost to consumers:
As for project costs, Progress said it has filed with the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) for permission to add to customer bills next year an additional $6.69 per thousand kilowatt-hours (KWH) charge to cover the Levy County reactor costs as well as work to boost output at its existing Crystal River nuclear plant from 900 to 1,080 megawatts.
The costs of the Levy County project have already irked some Florida ratepayers who saw their bills jump 25 percent in January to cover early costs for the new reactors as well as increases in the cost of fuel Progress purchases to generate power.
I suspect that the low costs in cents/kWh nuclear proponents talk about are relatively accurate when you limit the discussion to older, existing plants. But building new plants is proving to be a conspicuous challenge, even with copious government assistance (Google “US nuclear power subsidies insurance guarantees” and see how many analyses you find of how the nuclear industry would be non-existent without subsidies of various forms).
After reading dozens of such reports and articles over the last couple of years, I think it’s fair to say that this isn’t a single failed instance (like a bad first attempt at a cash-for-clunkers program), but a systemic or even fundamental problem. As I’ve said many times before, if someone can show me real world evidence or a compelling case that we can build, fuel, run, and manage new nuclear power plants, and guard their waste forever in a cost competitive way (including all costs, right down to the mining of uranium ore), then sign me up. Until then, nuclear power looks to me like a beautiful theory that got ruined by a whole list of ugly facts.
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For those who haven’t heard it, the classic definition of chutzpah is a child who murders his parents and then asks a judge for mercy because he’s an orphan. While nothing below or in the recent news reaches quite that mythical height (with the possible exception of the rampant idiocy over at AIG), sometimes one has to wonder…
The first example is a real beauty that comes from the UK, where Green lobby and nuclear groups clash over role of renewable energy:
EDF and E.ON have warned the government they may be forced to drop plans to build a new generation of nuclear power plants unless the government scales back its targets for wind power.
The demands – contained in submissions to the government’s renewable energy consultation – reinforces the worries of wind developers that the two sectors cannot thrive simultaneously.
EDF of France and E.ON of Germany, two of the most high-profile nuclear supporters, said attempts to reach 35% of electricity generated by renewables is not only unrealistic but also damaging to alternative schemes such as nuclear plants.
“The deployment of high levels of intermittent renewables for electricity generation will require the construction of additional carbon-emitting plant as back-up for when renewables are not available to meet demand,” EDF argued. “This is likely to be predominantly gas-fired and will therefore undermine efforts to reduce dependence on non-domestic fuel sources.”
“A 25% electricity target will provide the best platform for further decarbonisation of electricity generation in the period beyond 2020, through a combination of further renewables, new nuclear and coal and gas with carbon capture and storage.”
The attempt to dilute the contribution from renewables has infuriated the environmental lobby. “We’ve always said that nuclear power will undermine renewable energy and will damage the UK’s efforts to tackle climate change – now EDF agrees,” said Nathan Argent, head of Greenpeace’s energy solutions unit.
What really frosts my cookies (and not the browser variety) is that the people who most strongly push nuclear power tend, on average, to be the same people who scream the loudest about letting the free market do its thing without the evil, corrupting hand of Government Intervention involved. Unless, of course, it’s a situation like the one here in the US where nuclear power gets massive subsidies, including loan guarantees, then it’s just peachy keen.
The other example involves The Quarrel Over Coal Ash Waste (emphasis added):
More than 500 million gallons of toxic waste from a Tennessee Valley Authority coal plant broke through the containment wall of a storage pond, destroying homes and contaminating two rivers.
“Any new coal project shouldn’t be approved until there’s a thorough analysis of how it will be dealt with in a way that’s fully protective of public health and the environment,” said Peter Lehner, the N.R.D.C.’s executive director.
But Thomas Adams, executive director of the American Coal Ash Association, said, “Kingston was a problem of containment, it wasn’t the ash that was the issue. The solution is to encourage beneficial use of coal combustion products and to make sure disposal requirements are up to speed.”
Next thing you know we’ll be seeing bumper stickers that say, “coal doesn’t cause environmental impacts, people cause environmental impacts”.
On a more serious note, the coal article links to a (new?) set of pages on the NRDC’s web site about CCW (coal combustion waste), available here which I highly recommend. Clearly, someone at the NRDC has been doing his or her homework on this topic to put together all that sate-level information. From that site:
The Harriman spill isn’t the first time that the inadequacy of our nation’s coal waste storage systems has been proven, and it isn’t likely to be the last. In a 2007 draft report, the EPA identified 24 sites in 13 states where pollution from coal combustion waste dumps and lagoons has contaminated surface water and groundwater.
Coal-fired power plants produced more than 126 million tons of contaminated coal waste in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available, according to figures reported to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And NRDC estimates show that the waste produced in a single year contains nearly 100,000 tons of toxic metals.
That’s just the waste from plants already in operation. But coal plant developers want to build more than eighty more coal-fired plants that would produce nearly 18 million tons of additional coal waste, contaminated with more than 18 thousand tons of toxic metals.
Despite the well-documented risks, no federal regulations govern the storage of this toxic coal waste, even though the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined as far back as 2000 that rules were needed. State rules are inconsistent and often laxly enforced, and the utility industry has lobbied hard to keep it that way.
So, not only does coal have the huge negative externality of CO2 emissions, but it has the additional unpriced impact of pollution from coal waste, which we clearly don’t know how to manage.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: Price every form of electricity generation to include all impacts–CO2 emissions, mercury pollution, waste management (what’s the half-life of coal waste, anyway?), fresh water draw and/or consumption, insurance, and loan guarantees, grid upgrades, etc.–and let’s see how wind, solar, wave, tidal, and geothermal fare against coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. Or am I just indulging in my own enviro version of chutzpah by posing such a comparison?
The debate over the size and scope of nuclear power’s role in our future won’t be settled any time soon, I suspect. Between the people who truly love the technology (or have a huge financial incentive to love it), and those who consider it the technological equivalent of the Ebola virus, we can safely assume that the verbal arm-wrestling over nukes will be an essentially permanent fixture of of our shared infosphere, kind of like nuclear waste, sad to say.
This came to mind in recent days as I read several articles related to nuclear power, starting with Is small the future of nuclear power generation?:
Distributed energy generation, hailed by most environmentalists as the future of sustainable electricity production, is about powering a country with hundreds, potentially thousands, of renewable and clean energy systems with some help from natural gas.
It’s efficient because power is generated where it’s used. It’s flexible because projects can be built quickly when needed. It saves money in the long run because there’s less need for expensive transmission lines that carry the power elsewhere. And if one generator fails, its relatively small size means it doesn’t threaten the stability of the entire system.
This, of course, is the antithesis of centralized power generation that relies on a dozens or so large nuclear and fossil-fuel plants. Proponents of distributed generation cite the massive size and cost of nuclear power plants as one reason, beyond safety and waste-management concerns, and the technology is unsustainable and far too risky.
Not so, argues one start-up firm from Santa Fe, N.M., which has high hopes of expanding the definition of distributed generation to include nuclear power.
Hyperion Power Generation Inc. has developed a garden shed-sized nuclear reactor that can produce enough heat to generate 25 megawatts of electricity for up to 10 years.
That’s enough energy to power 20,000 homes, but still tiny by current nuclear standards. An Advanced Candu Reactor, for example, is 48 times larger and a next-generation Areva reactor is 64 times larger.
Hyperion, which calls its reactor as a “nuclear battery,” licensed the technology from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It plans to sell the reactor for about $30 million (U.S.) and says there’s potential to sell 4,000 of them around the world by 2025.
Ignoring the silliness of the “nuclear battery” name, the basic thrust of this idea–smaller, decentralized, and likely diversified electricity generation is definitely where I think we’re headed. Just the need/desire to exploit local resources–wind, geothermal, wave/tidal–will push us in that direction, in addition to the savings mentioned above. But neighborhood nukes? Really? Despite the manufacturer’s claims of perfect security for thousands of these units dispersed around the US (or the world?), there’s still that nasty and expensive issue of managing forever the nuclear waste. Using nuclear power now amounts to putting a permanent tax on ourselves for the cost of managing and guarding that waste. That’s of the same degree of shortsightedness as building new, non-sequestered coal-fired power plants in 2009.
And then there’s the whole “where’s the evidence we can trust ourselves to manage nuclear materials on that time scale?” issue, as pointed out a pair of Independent articles this week.
Nuclear power station owners ‘allowed leaks’:
Nuclear power station operators unlawfully allowed radioactive waste to seep from a decontamination unit for 14 years, Chelmsford Crown Court has heard.
Waste leaked into the ground from a sump at Bradwell power station in Essex between 1990 and 2004, the Environment Agency claimed.
Magnox Electric Ltd, which had operated the station, denies 11 breaches of legislation governing the disposal of radioactive waste. Mark Harris, on behalf of the Environment Agency, told the jury that leaks were caused by a combination of poor design and a lack of checks and maintenance. He said the power station was no longer running.
IoS Investigation: Officials plotted Sellafield cover-up:
Top civil servants and nuclear administrators colluded to prevent MPs from challenging a massive sweetener to a private business taking over the running of Sellafield, internal documents in the hands of The Independent on Sunday reveal.
The documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, also disclose that the Government pushed through the handover at breakneck speed because it feared that the “unstable management arrangements” of the controversial Cumbrian nuclear complex risked its safety.
Yesterday, a leading Labour MP announced that he would try to get a parliamentary investigation into the revelations in the documents, which run to 140 pages and had been so heavily censored prior to release that many whole pages, and the names of most of the officials involved, have been systematically blanked out. Paul Flynn MP, a member of the House of Commons Public Administration Committee – which examines the performance of the Civil Service – is to ask it to inquire into what he calls “an egregious example of obstruction of parliamentary accountability”.
The bottom line is that there are many people in this world who value money more then your safety or mine, and at least some of them wind up in positions of incredible power, whether in government or in corporations that oversee or actually run things like electricity plants.
But I digress.
Let us assume, for the moment, that we can overcome all of these management and oversight issues. We figure out, somehow, a way to hire only those people people with the highest standards and deepest commitments to the common good for critical positions regarding electricity generation. And those people do a perfect job of managing that vast, interlocking, set of agencies and companies. What will nuclear power cost us then?
As Joe Romm points out in Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power, the economics of nuclear power ain’t a pretty picture, either:
A new study puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates!
This staggering price is far higher than the cost of a variety of carbon-free renewable power sources available today — and ten times the cost of energy efficiency (see “Is 450 ppm possible? Part 5: Old coal’s out, can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?”).
The new study, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power [PDF], is one of the most detailed cost analyses publically available on the current generation of nuclear power plants being considered in this country. It is by a leading expert in power plant costs, Craig A. Severance. A practicing CPA, Severance is co-author of The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger 1976), and former Assistant to the Chairman and to Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission.
This important new analysis is being published by Climate Progress because it fills a critical gap in the current debate over nuclear power — transparency. Severance explains:
All assumptions, and methods of calculation are clearly stated. The piece is a deliberate effort to demystify the entire process, so that anyone reading it (including non-technical readers) can develop a clear understanding of how total generation costs per kWh come together.
I haven’t yet read the 37-page report, linked in the quote above, but I suspect it’s safe to say that the infowar over nuclear power will play out pretty much as one would expect: Nuke lovers will bash this report as being deeply flawed and presenting a wildly high estimate of the costs of nuclear power, and nuke haters will consider it proof that “nuclear power just doesn’t make sense/work/can’t compete with renewables”. Lather, rinse, repeat.
)Note: As I was writing this, Joe posted the follow-up to the above article, Warning to taxpayers, investors — Part 2: Nukes may become troubled assets, ruin credit ratings.)
So, where does this leave us? Have we done nothing more than execute a perfect plot loop[1], fueled by a few billion keystrokes in print and online, and come back to where we began? Not entirely, as we’re now talking more openly about the wisdom of using nuclear power (or coal or wind or …) as well as the notion of decentralizing and diversifying electricity generation, something I’ve been yapping about for nearly four years on this site, and other people have likely been pushing for a lot longer than that. That’s not as much progress as I’d like to see, especially given the proximity of nasty things like peak oil and the growing impacts of climate chaos, but it’s inarguably progress nonetheless.
Having learned nothing from my prior attempts at crystal ball gazing, let me end this post with some predictions:
[1] A plot loop is a phenomenon in fiction where some seemingly big, important set of occurrences takes place, but then turns out not to matter when the story continues on as it was pre-loop.
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Yucca Mountain is the epitome of a radioactive topic (no pun intended), and it’s in the news again, thanks to a big jump in its projected cost:
The Yucca Mountain program, which began in 1983 and is expected to close in 2133, is expected to cost $96.2 billion in 2007 dollars over its 150-year life cycle, up 67 percent from a 2001 estimate of $57.5 billion.
Excluding inflation, the new estimate increased 38 percent to $79.3 billion.
The Energy Department said the increased costs are due to more than $16 billion in inflation and a 30 percent increase in the amount of nuclear waste that will need to be disposed of at the site.
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The long delayed nuclear waste dump is expected to be opened in 2020 at the earliest, the department said in June.
Let me be painfully clear about this: When we’re talking about public expenditures measured in the tens of billions of dollars, it’s only appropriate that we pay attention to the sums involved. So I have no argument whatsoever with such articles. But I think we also need to look just a bit deeper into the nuclear waste management issue to assess this project fully.
First, notice the number listed above for the lifetime of the project: 150 years. Why is anyone saying that this project will “end”, ever? In human terms, high-level nuclear waste is forever, as in “if Julius Caesar had had nuclear reactors we’d still be managing the waste.” Is the plan really to lock the door, throw away the key, and then never spend a single cent on monitoring, maintaining, inspecting, repairing, etc. the site?
Second, we have the issue of capacity, which is mentioned in the article above and detailed a bit more on the Dept. of Energy site in this March 6, 2007 item:
The proposed legislation would also eliminate the current statutory 70,000 metric ton cap on disposal capacity at Yucca Mountain, in order to allow maximum use of the mountain’s true technical capacity. This provision would help provide the safe isolation of the nation’s entire commercial spent nuclear fuel inventory from existing reactors, including life extensions.
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“We have a legal and moral obligation to get Yucca Mountain opened and operating,” Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management Director Ward Sproat said. “Currently 55,000 metric tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel and Defense high-level waste is being stored at more than 100 above-ground sites in 39 states, and that number grows by about 2,000 metric tons annually. By entombing it deep in Yucca Mountain – a safe and secure permanent geologic repository – we can ensure public safety for thousands of generations.”
Hmm. 55,000 metric tons of waste in existence today plus 2,000[1] metric tons/year between today and when the DOE “hopes” to have the facility open in 2020 gives us a total of 79,000 metric tons. And that assumes we don’t build any more nuclear power plants. If the US does start building new nuclear power plants, ala John McCain’s proposal for 45 new plants by 2030, then we’ll increase our production rate for this kind of waste to roughly 3,000 metric tons/year. And every such increase in the rate of waste creation only adds to the cost of monitoring, guarding, and management that we’re passing off to future generations.
(Architects are familiar with a problem in designing very tall buildings that serves as a good analogy for this waste situation. The usable space inside a skyscraper is essentially an inverted pyramid because for any given design the taller the building the more space that must be used on the lower floors for things like elevator shafts, water pipes, etc. to service the upper floors. As we build more nuclear reactors, the future cost of waste management continues to grow, making nuclear energy less and less desirable, but that cost is just as inescapable as the requirement to give up valuable space on the ground floors of skyscrapers for utilities.)
Third is a date, as in when do we start talking about what “permanent storage solution” comes after Yucca Mountain? If we’ll completely fill Yucca to its ultimate limit of 132,000 tons long before the proposed end of its lifespan in 2133 (roughly 2050, using the above numbers, even without new plants in the mix), then what do we do with all the new high-level nuclear waste we’ll be churning out? Do we make some excuse to allow ourselves to scrap the current international ban so we can bury it in subduction zones in the ocean? Or will we simply find another place for “permanent” disposal and start the whole ordeal all over again?
I’m sure that this post will elicit most of the same hate mail I get every time I say anything negative about nuclear power, so let me be so clear only the willfully belligerent can miss it: I’m not saying that nuclear power is evil and should never be used. But just as we need to get far more realistic about all the costs associated with burning fossil fuels (most notably the currently “free” dumping of CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere), we also need to take a deeper and more detailed look at just what we’re signing up for and imposing on future generations with any brave new commitment to nuclear power.
[1] The number I’ve seen quoted endlessly is 2,194 metric tons of high-level waste/year. For the sake of simplicity, I used the approximation of 2,000 metric tons above.
The abstract of The Water Intensity of the Plugged-In Automotive Economy (7 page, 3.9MB PDF) (also available in HTML format):
Converting light-duty vehicles from full gasoline power to electric power, by using either hybrid electric vehicles or fully electric power vehicles, is likely to increase demand for water resources. In the United States in 2005, drivers of 234 million cars, light trucks, and SUVs drove approximately 2.7 trillion miles and consumed over 380 million gallons of gasoline per day. We compare figures from literature and government surveys to calculate the water usage, consumption, and withdrawal, in the United States during petroleum refining and electricity generation. In displacing gasoline miles with electric miles, approximately 3 times more water is consumed (0.32 versus 0.07–0.14 gallons/mile) and over 17 times more water is withdrawn (10.6 versus 0.6 gallons/mile) primarily due to increased water cooling of thermoelectric power plants to accommodate increased electricity generation. Overall, we conclude that the impact on water resources from a widespread shift to grid-based transportation would be substantial enough to warrant consideration for relevant public policy decision-making. That is not to say that the negative impacts on water resources make such a shift undesirable, but rather this increase in water usage presents a significant potential impact on regional water resources and should be considered when planning for a plugged-in automotive economy.
I can’t stress enough how important it is that we take a broader view of our public policy regarding energy and environmental matters. Papers like this one, looking at the water impacts of electrifying our transportation, are a good example.
It’s also worth pointing out that hydrogen fuel cells, which require three to four times as much electricity per mile traveled than PHEV’s or EV’s, would have a correspondingly higher implication for water consumption.
With global warming triggering shifts in where water is and isn’t, it’s also notable that we’re not just talking here about the issue of how much water does thermoelectric generation pull away from other sources, like agriculture, personal consumption, etc. (even though that’s clearly important), but what happens to electricity generation and everything that’s increasingly dependent on that flow of electrons when thermoelectric plants have to reduce their output or shot down completely because of a lack of cooling water. That’s where it gets ugly in a hurry.
I’m most worried about one scenario, which I still think is the most likely one as all these factors unfold and interact:
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Speak now … Or forever hold Italy’s nuclear waste:
Opposition is mounting against EnergySolutions Inc.’s proposal to import low-level radioactive waste from Italy’s dismantled nuclear power industry.
The Utah Radiation Control Board and a key U.S. House committee chairman saddled up against the plan last week, joining a posse of nuclear-watchdog groups, the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah and congressional leaders from Texas, Kentucky and Tennessee.
While the state control board, according to its lawyer, lacks the legal authority to derail the shipments to EnergySolution’s dump in Tooele County, it will ask the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to carefully assess our nation’s long-term disposal needs before allowing large volumes of foreign waste to enter the country. The EnergySolutions facility at Clive will soon be the sole repository for waste from 36 states. And if company officials have their way, and the NRC sets a dangerous precedent by granting the high-volume import license, the facility may eventually serve much of Europe, where public outrage has prevented the development of even low-level disposal sites.
While the board is powerless to stop the plan, the Northwest Interstate Compact on Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management, which controls the flow of waste to the EnergySolutions disposal facility, apparently is not.
In a letter last week, U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., the House Science and Technology Committee chairman, reminded the compact that its 1998 decision to open the Tooele facility to waste generated outside the eight-state compact was made to serve “an important national purpose.” And that while accepting waste from Europe serves EnergySolutions’ purpose - to make money - it serves no purpose for the nation.
If the license were granted, Gordon wrote, “It would say to the world that the United States is open for business and will take the world’s low-level radioactive waste until our facilities are filled, regardless of the needs of our country.”
The congressman is correct. And that’s not the message the United States and Utah should send.
Now it’s time for our governor, our congressional delegation and our state House and Senate leaders to pressure the compact and the NRC to put a stop to EnergySolutions’ plan.
You can do your part, too. The NRC is accepting public comment before ruling on the licensing request. If you’re worried that Utah could become the world’s radioactive waste dump if the plan is approved, and you should be, send your objections to Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C., 20555-0001, Attn: Rulemaking and Adjudication Staff.
Drought Could Force Nuke-Plant Shutdowns:
Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.
Utility officials say such shutdowns probably wouldn’t result in blackouts. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region’s utilities could be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.
Already, there has been one brief, drought-related shutdown, at a reactor in Alabama over the summer.
“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.
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An estimated 3 million customers of the four commercial utilities with reactors in the drought zone get their power from nuclear energy. Also, the quasi-governmental Tennessee Valley Authority, which sells electricity to 8.7 million people in seven states through a network of distributors, generates 30 percent of its power at nuclear plants.While rain and some snow fell recently, water levels across the region are still well below normal. Most of the severely affected area would need more than a foot of rain in the next three months — an unusually large amount — to ease the drought and relieve pressure on the nuclear plants. And the long-term forecast calls for more dry weather.
At Progress Energy Inc., which operates four reactors in the drought zone, officials warned in November that the drought could force it to shut down its Harris reactor near Raleigh, according to documents obtained by the AP. The water in Harris Lake stands at 218.5 feet — just 3 1/2 feet above the limit set in the plant’s license.
Lake Norman near Charlotte is down to 93.7 feet — less than a foot above the minimum set in the license for Duke Energy Corp.’s McGuire nuclear plant. The lake was at 98.2 feet just a year ago.
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“Currently, nuclear power costs between $5 to $7 to produce a megawatt hour,” said Daniele Seitz, an energy analyst with New York-based Dahlman Rose & Co. “It would cost 10 times that amount that if you had to buy replacement power — especially during the summer.”At a nuclear plant, water is also used to cool the reactor core and to create the steam that drives the electricity-generating turbines. But those are comparatively small amounts of water, circulating in what are known as closed systems — that is, the water is constantly reused. Water for those two purposes is not threatened by the drought.
Instead, the drought could choke off the billions of gallons of water that pass through the region’s reactors every day to cool used steam. Water sucked from lakes and rivers passes through pipes, which act as a condenser, turning the steam back into water. The outside water never comes into direct contact with the steam or any nuclear material.
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Nuclear plants are subject to restrictions on the temperature of the discharged coolant, because hot water can kill fish or plants or otherwise disrupt the environment. Those restrictions, coupled with the drought, led to the one-day shutdown Aug. 16 of a TVA reactor at Browns Ferry in Alabama.The water was low on the Tennessee River and had become warmer than usual under the hot sun. By the time it had been pumped through the Browns Ferry plant, it had become hotter still — too hot to release back into the river, according to the TVA. So the utility shut down a reactor.
It really is this simple: The climate changes triggered by global warming amount to a massive rewriting of the rules that governed how society does everything, and in particular will have profound effects on our production and consumption of energy.
The energy impacts will take three forms:
The electricity generating part of this mess is especially vexing, and I’m not sure how we get out of it, short of building dozens of thin film solar PV plants (with government loans, if needed) and flooding the market with dirt cheap solar panels, plus building wind, wave, and tidal plants at rates vastly higher than anything we’ve seen to date. It’s almost enough to make one, oh, I don’t know, write a book about it.
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…you run the risk of reaching unsupportable conclusions.
As most of you probably realize by now, there’s a post over at The Oil Drum that is an attempt to take a long term view of our energy situation. The posting is Chris Clugston’s When Is “Global Peak Energy?” According to Publicly Available Data, Probably Sooner Than You Think.
To say that I have some misgivings about this post would be a decided understatement.
The basic notion of predicting what energy supplies will do out to the year 2200 is deeply flawed. If there’s one thing I learned in both economic and computer systems modeling (analytic as well as simulation), it’s that you have to be exceedingly careful of plunging too far into the unknown and reaching that point where any set of assumptions, no matter how accurate and predictive it may be in the short run, breaks down. Hell, I wouldn’t want to put together a projection more than 10 years out with the apparent precision of this one, let alone reaching all the way to 2200.
But that’s not even the biggest issue with the post at hand. The core problem, as with virtually any projection that looks beyond the immediate short term, is the assumptions that are made. Get those right, and you’re a hero. Get them wrong, and you’re in deep trouble in a hurry.
Clugston provides a couple of tables (”conservative” and “optimistic” scenarios) detailing his assumptions about the supply of various individual energy sources. If you look at his optimistic scenario, he sees all renewable energy sources (biomass, hydro, biofuels, solar, geothermal, wind, and “waves and tides”) growing very slowly and then peaking 2050.
How slowly? The low is hydro at 0.9%/year from 2025 to 2050, and the high is solar at 6% from now until 2050. Wind, which is currently growing very quickly worldwide, is assumed to grow at 5% until 2025 and then 2.5% from 2025 until its peak in 2050. Nuclear doesn’t escape the same treatment, as it’s projected to grow at 1.4%/year until it peaks in 2040. And again, this the “optimistic” scenario. The conservative scenario assume that renewables will peak sooner and then actually decline at 1% to 2%/year starting in 2050 for most sources. (Biomass is the exception, as it peaks in 2050 and then holds steady.)
As you can imagine, with these assumptions and the very safe conclusion that fossil fuels will peak and decline a great deal in the next 193 years, some dire conclusions are reached.
Let’s look at these assumptions just a bit. Wind, wave, tidal, solar, and geothermal will all peak in 2050? Even at or past the time when we’re seeing (according to Clugston) fossil fuels peak? Really? We’ll just march in lock-step off that cliff and not continue to build out these renewable energy sources? This has to be one of the most egregious examples of linear extrapolation I’ve seen.
I’ll leave it as exercise for the reader to find other items worth discussing in that post.
Someone made the comment in the discussion thread over on TOD that this was a case of “garbage in, garbage out”. I couldn’t agree more. There’s a reason why computer geeks use that cliche so often that they refer to it by the well worn acronym GIGO; it’s very easy to fall into the trap of making superficially reasonable assumptions and then getting useless results by relying too much on them. In this case, I honestly can’t see how the assumptions meet even the narrowest of examinations.
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From New Reactor Costs Daunt U.S. Utilities as TVA Restarts Old Unit:
Far more than safety and environmental concerns, the biggest hurdle to fulfilling Bush’s ambition to build the equivalent of three new nuclear plants a year by 2015 is money.
U.S. utilities will have to invest about $350 billion by 2025 to satisfy the country’s growing appetite for electricity, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, consultant.
At a time when the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington trade group, is heralding a “nuclear renaissance,'’ TVA is alone in executing the objective. Of the 16 U.S. electricity producers that have told the government they are interested in building new nuclear plants, none has committed to the projects.
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Investment banking consultant Gary L. Hunt, president of Global Energy Advisors in Sacramento, California, estimates the cost of building a plant at $2,214 per kilowatt of generating capacity. The market places a value of $1,730 per kilowatt of generating capacity on currently operating reactors, he says.TVA’s renovation of Browns Ferry Unit One was attractive because it retooled an old reactor for just $1,558 per kilowatt.
By comparison, traditional coal-fired plants cost $2,022 per kilowatt to build, Hunt says. And Congress is considering clean-air legislation that would add about $500 per kilowatt to the cost of those conventional coal plants.
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Several state governments in the south — Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina — have assured utilities they will be able to recapture the costs of new nuclear plants through higher electricity rates, says Mary Quillian, director of business and environmental policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute.James Curtiss, an energy lawyer at the Washington law firm Winston & Strawn LLP, predicts that applications to build and license the new reactors will start coming in to the government overseer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, at the pace of about one a month beginning in the fourth quarter. That would surpass the peak of applications in the 1970s.
Still, bankers and utility executives say more incentives are necessary to make the projects viable. That is because $3 of nuclear power-generating assets — reactors hooked up to steam generators — are needed to produce $1 of revenue, making it the most capital intensive of all major industries, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
A longish article about the past and current US nuclear power industry. Highly recommended.
I’ve heard the comment many times that the real reason for the US nuclear industry coming to a screeching halt after the TMI incident was not safety concerns, but economics. I honestly don’t know the truth, but given how often large companies (including utilities) do things people don’t like, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if a financial disincentive were a major part of the shift.
As for what the economics of nuclear power say about its future, I think it’s clear that we’re facing a whole other set of decisions on the public policy front. If we really do think that nuclear power is a necessary component of our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, then we need to make people pay higher electricity rates or higher taxes to subsidize these new plants.
Notice that the costs mentioned above are described as being “construction costs”. I don’t know if that includes any allocation of funds for fuel, operation and maintenance, plant decommissioning, and waste management, but it appears that the answer is no.
Have I mentioned lately that our energy future will be a lot of things, but “dull” ain’t on the list?