The IEA has published its Nuclear Energy Technology Roadmap.

From the press release (emphasis as in the original):

Almost one quarter of global electricity could be generated from nuclear power by 2050, making a major contribution to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This is the central finding of the Nuclear Energy Technology Roadmap, published today by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). Such an expansion will require nuclear generating capacity to more than triple over the next 40 years, a target the roadmap describes as ambitious but achievable.

Speaking from the East Asia Climate Forum in Seoul, IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said: “Nuclear energy is one of the key low-carbon energy technologies that can contribute, alongside energy efficiency, renewable energies and carbon capture and storage, to the decarbonisation of electricity supply by 2050.” NEA Director General Luis Echávarri stated: “Nuclear is already one of the main sources of low-carbon energy today. If we can address the challenges to its further expansion, nuclear has the potential to play a larger role in cutting CO2 emissions.”

The roadmap finds that nuclear power is a mature, low-carbon technology that is ready to expand rapidly over the coming decades. The latest reactor designs, now under construction around the world, build on over 50 years of technology development. The roadmap notes that these designs will need to be fully established as reliable and competitive electricity generators over the next few years if they are to become the mainstays of nuclear expansion after 2020.

No major technological breakthroughs will be needed to achieve the level of nuclear expansion envisaged, the roadmap finds. However, important policy-related, industrial, financial and public acceptance barriers to the rapid growth of nuclear power remain. The roadmap sets out an action plan with steps that will need to be taken by governments, industry and others to overcome these. A clear and stable policy commitment to nuclear energy as part of overall energy strategy is a pre requisite, as is gaining greater public acceptance for nuclear programmes. Progress in implementing plans for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste will also be vital. The international system of safeguards to prevent proliferation of nuclear technology and materials must be maintained and strengthened where necessary.

Financing the construction of new nuclear plants is expected to be a major challenge in many countries. In some cases, governments may need to support nuclear investment through measures such as loan guarantees until nuclear power programmes are well-established. The industrial capacities and skilled human resources necessary to build, operate and maintain nuclear plants will also need to be increased over the next few years if nuclear is to expand rapidly.

For the longer term, the continued development of reactor and fuel cycle technologies will be important for maintaining the competitiveness of nuclear energy. Technologies now under development for next-generation nuclear systems potentially offer improved sustainability, economics, safety and reliability. Some could be suitable for a wider range of locations and to new applications beyond electricity production, for example to provide industrial heat. Such systems could start contributing to energy supply before 2050.

The Nuclear Energy Technology Roadmap is the result of joint work by the IEA and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and is one of a series being prepared by the IEA in co operation with other organisations and industry, at the request of the G8 summit at Aomori (Japan) in June 2008. The overall aim is to advance development and uptake of key low-carbon technologies needed to reach the goal of a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050.

Nuclear generating capacity worldwide is presently 370 gigawatts electrical (GWe), providing 14% of global electricity. In the IEA scenario for a 50% cut in energy-related CO2 emissions by 2050 (known as the “BLUE Map” scenario), on which the roadmap analysis is based, nuclear capacity grows to 1 200 GWe by 2050, providing 24% of global electricity at that time. Total electricity production in the scenario more than doubles, from just under 20 000 TWh in 2007 to around 41 000 TWh in 2050.

You can download the 44 page, 6.7MB PDF here.

Let me take a look at my checklist — what haven’t I done in a while? Oh, here it is: “Piss off the mindlessly pro-nuke crowd”.[1]

So, what shall it be this time? How about plain ol’ economics?

New Nuclear Energy Grapples With Costs:

President Obama may be pressing for the nation to increase its supply of nuclear power, but the market is pushing in the opposite direction—at least in the view of one of the leading figures in the U.S. nuclear business.

John Rowe, chief executive of Chicago-based Exelon, operator of the nation’s largest fleet of nuclear power stations, says the economics of the electricity business have changed sharply in just the past two years, dimming the prospects for a significant number of new nuclear reactors in the United States.

Though Obama has touted nuclear as “our largest source of fuel that produces no carbon emissions,” cleanliness is not a benefit that currently shows up on the bottom line. Without congressional action to make competing fuels that emit greenhouse gases more expensive, Rowe says, fossil fuel plants are still cheaper to build. “I just don’t think nuclear has a chance in a pure marketplace without a carbon price,” Rowe said last week in Washington, D.C., in a speech hosted by Resources for the Future, a think tank focused on cost-benefit analysis in environmental policy.

While Rowe noted that some companies are still working on nuclear projects, he pointed out that they tend to be in “rate-based jurisdictions.” In other words, they are in traditionally regulated states where monopoly power companies can sometimes recoup the costs of building nuclear plants during construction through the rates they charge their customers.

Exelon, in contrast, operates only in states where deregulation has created competitive markets. In effect, it sells the power it produces into the electricity marketplace. And because electricity prices have dropped—particularly due to new, abundant supplies of natural gas—Rowe thinks that building new nuclear plants does not make economic sense now.

What to make of this?

A massive increase in the use of natural gas for electricity generation would be a colossal mistake. It emits a lot less CO2 than does non-CCS coal[2], but when you consider the long lifetime of generating plants, the percentage reduction in CO2 from replacing coal-fired generation with NG-fired capacity, and the extremely aggressive CO2 reduction schedule the US must meet, you find out that such a conversion very quickly leaves us “above the curve”, i.e. emitting more CO2 than we can afford.

Putting a price on carbon is indeed going to happen, one way or another, and that will certainly help the nuclear industry, possibly as much as all the direct financial help and loan guarantees it gets from the federal government. The economics of a complex situation can’t be any simpler than that.

Will a price on carbon help or hurt the expanded use of natural gas? Well… I’m not so sure there’s a cut and dried answer to that one. If we wimp out and put only a low price on carbon, with not much prospect for it increasing to what’s needed to effect the CO2 reductions science dictates, then natural gas will likely continue to boom and we’ll see things like coal fired plants being converted to NG plants.[3]

But if we get a much more appropriate carbon tax, meaning one with a real chance of getting US emissions on the needed glide slope, then we might not see a rush to embrace natural gas for new or converted electricity generation. The reason is that “above the curve” issue I mentioned above. If you’re going to spend a lot of money to build a brand new electricity plant, then you’re counting on it being in service for a long time, likely 40 years at a minimum. In fact, you need it to be in service for decades just to produce electricity at anywhere near a market-friendly price. But why would you do that when you see that the current carbon price (or the price likely to be in effect in merely 10 or 20 years) will be so high that you’ll be forced to choose between paying a high carbon levy or spending a lot more money to retrofit CCS technology (assuming it ever becomes a mainstream technology)? And I don’t think that the relatively lower cost of converting a coal plant to natural gas would be a much rosier prospect, given that you’re starting with a facility that’s already been in service for anywhere from years to decades.[4]

The bottom line is that we’ll likely wind up making much greater use of nuclear power, but only after we’ve exhausted and/or re-priced the CO2-heavy ways of pushing electrons and figured out that renewables can’t grow fast enough to pick up the slack in a country that thinks “conservation” is a commie pinko Nazi homo plot to corrupt our children, curve our spine, and lose the war for the allies. Will we have good solutions to the problems of waste management or reprocessing, proliferation, supply concerns, etc.? Of course not, but that won’t stop us.

[1] Two things about this statement:

First, I don’t really try to piss off anyone, except climate change deniers, and even then I’m much more interested in mocking them until they’re wracked with shame and self-loathing until they sit in a corner and weep uncontrollably. I’m merely making a joke about the hate mail I get almost every time I say something about nuclear power.

Second, if you don’t understand that “mindlessly pro-nuke” is not a redundancy, not an oxymoron, and not an insult aimed at all pro-nuke individuals, then please leave this site and go read something that’s a better match for your intellectual capacity.

[2] By “non-CCS coal” I mean “the only type of coal-fired generation that will be a major contributor to the electricity supply in the US, ever”. Again, it’s brute-force economics. The high cost of CCS will keep it from being a mainstream solution to coal plant emissions, whether we’re talking about new plants or retrofitting old ones. And that’s assuming we can get past all the technical and political hurdles along the way.

[3] My understanding is that the cost of converting a non-CCS plant to a non-CCS NG plant are small compared to the cost of retrofitting CCS onto a coal plant or building a new non-CCS NG plant. If anyone has solid numbers from a reliable source, let me know in the comments.

[4] This is much the same reason why I think natural gas as a vehicle fuel is a non-starter. It takes far too much infrastructure investment for a paltry 25% savings in CO2 emissions when we need to do dramatically better than that for the transportation sector overall.

In trying to communicate the urgency of our climate situation to newcomers, there are two basic approaches we can take, and we’re doing a reasonable job on just one of them. We can talk about all the “feeds and speeds” of climate change–if we let atmospheric CO2 reach X parts per million it will mean Y degrees of warming and Z cm of sea level rise and W people turned into climate refugees because of inadequate food and/or water. This is the kind of talk that consumes about 95% of the blogosphere, and quite understandably–it’s hard not to scream about will happen if the ship we’re all on hits the iceberg that’s dead ahead.

But there’s another aspect of this, tied to that old devil I keep bringing up, timing, that realists who know what’s going on are doing a terrible job conveying to the newcomers: The difficulty of doing what science says we must to avoid all those horrific ramifications. The implication of ignoring that side of the coin are terrible; if mainstream consumers and voters think that climate change is a distant concern and that we “have plenty of time to deal with it”, then they will be far less inclined to do something about it now. This is hardly a new phenomenon, or one restricted to climate change. Ask dentists how many patients they see who neglect their teeth for years and then suddenly need root canal procedures or extractions. Ask doctors how many patients they treat who “have been meaning to quit smoking for years” but never did, only to discover they have a serious lung disorder or even cancer.

I find it very frustrating how many of my fellow dedicated enviros are utterly clueless about the sheer magnitude of the effort needed to hit that 80 by 2050 goal. Far too many of “us” think that driving a hybrid, changing their light bulbs, bringing home their groceries in reusable cloth bags, and not buying bottled water “makes them green” and they’re “doing their part to help”, etc. Not only are they not even close to doing “enough”, they’re actually doing considerable harm by inadvertently sending the message to mainstreamers that what they (the enviros) are doing is the silver bullet that will solve our environmental problems if only we could get everyone to be like them. The mainstreamers see that what the enviros do isn’t all that different from what they themselves do, so what’s the rush? Why is everyone getting so worked up about it?

One way to approach this particular gap in our communications is to look at just what it will take to reduce US CO2 emissions below 20% of the 1990 level by 2050. An excellent book on the topic, albeit one focused on the UK and not the US, is George Monbiot’s Heat, which I very highly recommend. I don’t plan to write a US-centric version of Monbiot’s book (although I would certainly read it if one were available). Instead, I plan to look at a series of scenarios for cutting US emissions, and present them in a slightly different way than I’ve done things in the past. For each installment of this series, I will create a spreadsheet that readers can download and fiddle with, and I will write a post that walks you through the spreadsheet and what it says, but without talking about every single cell.

I can’t stress this enough: I want your feedback about this idea in general, as well as what kind of scenarios to include in future installments. You don’t have to write a detailed treatment, just leave a comment here and we can talk about it publicly and narrow it down to something specific enough to be done in Excel. And to be blunt, I will likely not pursue this project unless I have some indication that it’s of value and people want to see more installments; this first one is an experiment.

For the first installment, I wanted to look at one of the enduring memes that’s arisen in the last few years, that we can make huge strides in reducing our CO2 emissions by making much wider use of our vastly increased natural gas reserves. We all know that natural gas is cleaner than coal or oil (and it certainly is), so making a big, long term commitment to using it in place of those other fuels would be a big win, right? Well, maybe not so much.

The Excel spreadsheet accompanying this post is here [XLS]. Please note that I added some pop-up comments to help explain exactly what I did. (Look for the little red triangle in the upper-right corner of some cells; hover your mouse over the cell to see the comment.)

In the spreadsheet, I started off by reproducing some data from the US Dept. of Energy’s Annual Energy Review. The first two tables present data from tables 12.3 and 12.2, which provide US CO2 emissions from energy consumption for 2008 and 1990, respectively. Next is a table showing how much each sector of the economy derives its energy from various sources (coal, oil, etc.).

The next thing in the spreadsheet is Scenario 1: All NG for electricity, transportation, and stationary use, which is simply a reworked version of the AER table 12.3 at the top of the spreadsheet. This is a “magic wand” scenario, in which I’m looking at what would happen if we could wave a magic wand and instantly transform the entire US infrastructure to replace all use of coal and oil for electricity generation, transportation, and stationary use, e.g. space heating and industrial processes). Thus there is no time lag for infrastructure transformation, no issues of how to finance such a massive undertaking, etc. Wave your wand and POOF!, it’s done.

I scaled the emissions from natural gas to replace coal and oil in the residential, commercial, industrial, and electricity sectors to show what they would be if an equivalent amount of energy were provided by natural gas. This assumes that the same mix of natural gas technologies would be used as is currently in place.

For transportation, I reduced the CO2 emissions from oil use by 25%. Why only 25%? As it turns out, that’s all the CO2 savings you get from burning natural gas instead of gasoline in a motor vehicle. Proponents of CNG vehicles talk about how it’s vastly cleaner than gasoline, and it is, if you take into account all pollutants, like particulate matter. But we’re talking here about CO2 emissions, and that’s all you get.

The results? This sweeping change gets us a whopping 13% reduction from 1990 emissions levels, or 26% from 2008 levels. If you look at the sector totals in the spreadsheet, you’ll see that transportation is a wash compared to 1990 levels, and the other sectors shoe a 13% to 24% improvement. Not exactly the improvement we were hoping for.

In Scenario 2: Scenario 1 + 50% more nuclear, I bumped the amount of electricity the US gets from nuclear power from 20% to 30%, and continued to make the simplifying assumption that nuclear power has zero CO2 emissions. (It does have some associated emissions, of course, but the level is very low so I hand waved it.)

This improves the situation, but not by a lot. We’ve now reduced CO2 emissions by 17% (compared to 1990), 30% (2008). Suddenly, 80% is starting to look like really immense number.

And I note that in the real world where we don’t have magic wands, that 50% bump in nuclear power would require one new nuclear reactor to go online every week for a year, or one a month for over four years. Anyone care to bet on that happening?

In Scenario 3: Scenario 1 + 100% more nuclear, I assumed a 100% increase in nuclear power, bring its contribution to 40% of US electricity (with a real-world contrustion time of two years at one/week, over 8 years at one/month).

The results improve slightly, and we’re now up to 21% less CO2 (vs. 1990), or 33% (2008).

In Scenario 4: Scenario 1 + 100% more nuclear + 33% reduction in elect I assume that not only do we have the full natural gas changeover plus a doubling of nuclear power capability, but we also achieve an ongoing reduction in electricity demand of 33%. That one-third conservation factor is purely a visceral guess about what could be possible in the US. I realize that would still leave us higher, per capita, than Japan and the EU, for example, but I don’t think that sort of mass hypnosis you could do better than that, given how many Americans think conservation is part of some vast hippy pinko plot to turn their children gay, remove religion from public life, and force them to eat cardboard-like cereal for breakfast.

Note that in calculating the conservation savings I assumed that all of it would come from that portion of electricity generation provided by natural gas, so we would get the maximum benefit fro the doubling of nuclear power.

This drags our numbers up to a 30% CO2 reduction (1990), or 40% (2008).

Finally, Scenario 5: Scenario 1 + 100% more nuclear + 33% reduction in elect + 33% reduction in trans adds a 33% reduction in all transportation emissions. You can make whatever assumption you want about how we get there–much greater use of public transit, more people walking and bicycling, a conversion of a large swath of private vehicles to EV’s, or some combination thereof.

After all that–NG conversion, doubling nuclear power, 33% reduction in emissions from non-nuclear electricity generation and 33% reduction in transportation emissions–we’re still at only a 40% CO2 reduction (1990), 50% (2008).

Clearly, this is a rough first pass at estimating the difficulty of making the kind of CO2 emissions reductions required. I didn’t take into account a major electrification of transportation, for example, the possibility of algae fuel delivering a major portion of our transportation at nearly zero net carbon emissions, or the continue expansion of wind and solar power. But I also didn’t point out that the population of the US is projected to rise to 420 million by 2050, according to the US Census Bureau [PDF], which throws a gigantic wrench into the works.

Nuclear projects face financial obstacles (emphasis added):

Hopes for a nuclear revival, fanned by fears of global warming and a changing political climate in Washington, are running into new obstacles over a key element — money.

A new approach for easing the cost of new multibillion-dollar reactors, which can take years to complete, has provoked a backlash from big-business customers unwilling to go along.

Financing has always been one of the biggest obstacles to a renaissance of nuclear power. The plants are expensive, and construction tends to run late and over budget. The projected cost for a pair of proposed Georgia plants would be $14 billion; the Obama administration last month pledged to provide them with $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees.

So utilities have turned to state legislators and regulators to help contain capital costs. In states such as Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, utilities have won permission to charge customers for some of the cost of new reactors while construction is still in progress — a financing technique that would save utilities a couple of billion dollars for each reactor. Previously, utilities had to wait until power plants were in operation before raising rates, as they still do in most states.

“We tell people it’s like paying off the interest on your credit card as you go along, rather than letting it compound,” said Suzanne Grant, a spokeswoman for Progress Energy.

But businesses and other electricity users in those states aren’t buying that argument. Instead, they are saying utilities are pawning off much of the projects’ liabilities on customers because bank lenders and investors will not take the risks.

“It’s a terrible idea,” said Jim Clarkson, a consultant with Resource Supply Management, a Georgia firm that advises companies on how to reduce electricity use. “We’ve had decades of subsidies for nuclear plants and all sorts of preferential treatment. They still require loan guarantees because the smart money won’t touch them.”

“Nuclear power is very important,” says John W. McWhirter, who represents the Florida Industrial Power Users Group. “We just wish consumers could be protected.”

The reaction of big businesses, as well as other consumers, has turned states that were bastions of support for nuclear power into hazardous territory. And it could thwart the Obama administration’s efforts to jump-start nuclear reactor construction by handing out chunks of the $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees Congress authorized in 2005.

By all means (including government backed loans, if necessary), go read the whole thing.

As I’ve said before, nuclear power in the US will get every reasonable and unreasonable chance to succeed. We’ll keep throwing money at it, trying new reactor designs, finding new angles around the brutal economics of the technology (like asking electricity customers to start paying for it before the reactors are built), and looking the other way when leaks are detected (i.e. 25 Percent of U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Are Leaking Radioactive Chemicals. I’m not sure what it will take before this ends, but I see only two realistic possibilities:

We finally figure out how to make nuclear power work safely and economically, and it can either stand on its own financially or requires minimal government help. (And no, I don’t consider the track record of old nuclear power plants to be proof we can make the economics work. That’s proof that we did make it work decades ago, even if the reactors are still online. The question is how we should be spending scarce resources on new generating capacity, and there’s plenty of evidence that nuclear power has gone from being “too cheap to meter to too expensive to matter”, as Joe Romm and no doubt others have said.)

Once again, I’m not a nuclear power hater. Make it work, taking into account all costs and risks, and I’ll be the most vocal supporter of the technology you can find.

Most regular readers of this site are probably aware that Vermont Yankee, the nuclear power plant in Vermont, the one with the tritium leaks (now and years ago; see below), will not have its license renewed in 2012.

Bradford Plumer has a good take on this, Vermont Senate Pulls Plug On Nuclear Plant:

I don’t think this spells doom for that nuclear renaissance we keep hearing about. (Obama, recall, just announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two brand-new reactors down in Georgia.) Essentially, the Vermont Senate voted to close the Yankee plant on schedule rather than grant it a 20-year extension—which, given that it was an older reactor and Entergy officials had provided misleading answers about the leaks under oath, seems more like a decision about this particular plant than a broader sign that nukes are unpalatable.

One pressing question, though, is how Vermont will replace all that nuclear power going forward—the plant provides about three-quarters of the state’s electrical generation. When the Yankee plant had to shut down temporarily in 2008 because of a leak in its cooling tower, the regional power system operator, ISO New England, had to flip on a bunch of fossil-fuel-fired “peaker” plants to keep the electricity flowing. And it’d be a huge step back, from a carbon-emissions perspective, if the state ended up building, say, a new coal-fired plant for its power.

This is a perfect example of the point I’ve been making almost since this blog went live: Our energy and environmental future will have a lot for people from all parts of the political (or ideological or …) spectrum to hate.

Those who think the “free market” will solve all ills have to deal with a company that operated a nuclear power plant and provided “inaccurate testimony” (see last linked article below). Thnat screams out for some sort of regulation to protect consumers and local residents from harm.

Those who hate nuclear power will have to deal with the issue of replacing the missing kilowatt hours once this one is shut down in 2012.

Those who love nuclear power will have to deal with the gigantic image problem caused by the Vermont Yankee mess plus the revelation of leaks at other plants (see 25 Percent of U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Are Leaking Radioactive Chemicals).

And those who just want cheap power will really be conflicted, thanks to all the competing claims of what nuclear power really costs.

What a mess…

Related:

• Whistleblower says Yankee had tritium leak two years ago
• Nuke expert: ‘Entergy is worst of worst’
• Owner admits leak found at VY in 2005
• Vt. Senate votes to close Yankee power plant

Why Obama’s Nuclear Bet Won’t Pay Off (emphasis added):

If you want to understand why the United States hasn’t built a nuclear reactor in three decades, the Vogtle plant outside Atlanta is an excellent reminder of the insanity of nuclear economics. Its original cost estimate was less than $1 billion for four reactors. Its eventual price tag in 1989 was nearly $9 billion for only two reactors. But now there’s widespread chatter about a nuclear renaissance, so the Southern Co. is finally trying to build the other two reactors at Vogtle. The estimated cost: $14 billion. And you can be sure that number is way too low, because nuclear cost estimates are always way too low.

That’s why no Wall Street moneyman in his right mind would finance a new reactor. But President Obama has located an alternative financier: you. On Tuesday, he announced an $8.33 billion loan guarantee for the new Vogtle reactors, the first step in the Administration’s push to jump-start the nuclear construction industry. Obama also urged Congress to set aside political differences and triple the budget for nuclear loan guarantees. “On an issue that affects our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, we can’t keep on being mired in the same old stale debates between the left and the right, between environmentalists and entrepreneurs,” Obama said. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)

But the President is ignoring a much fresher debate: between theory and reality. Even if Obama were correct that a nuclear rebirth is needed to address the climate crisis — and he isn’t correct — the fact is that the rebirth isn’t happening. Despite the prospect of new taxpayer guarantees — and the cradle-to-grave subsidies that already promote this 50-year-old industry at the federal and state level — utilities keep scrapping or delaying plans for new reactors.

…

But waste disposal problems, safety issues and regulatory delays do create a much more serious obstacle to a nuclear comeback: They jack up the already exorbitant cost of construction. That is the truly serious drawback of nuclear energy. Recent studies have priced new nuclear power at 25-30 cents per kilowatt-hour, about four times the cost of producing juice with new wind or coal plants, or ten times the cost of reducing the need for electricity through investments in efficiency. Atomic energy is much cleaner than coal, and it provides baseload power when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, so it sounds like a sensible way to accommodate increasing electricity demand. But it’s not nearly as sensible or feasible or affordable as decreasing electricity demand altogether.

Meanwhile, nuclear costs keep spiraling out of control; last year, the estimates for several reactors doubled, and for one Pennsylvania reactor more than tripled. This is why credit rating agencies keep downgrading utilities with nuclear ambitions, which increases their borrowing costs and makes their projects even more expensive. Even with the federal guarantees, the new reactors at Vogtle are expected to boost local electricity bills by 9% — and like most nuke-friendly states, Georgia has enacted a law ensuring that ratepayers won’t get their money back if the utility fails to complete the plant.

Nuclear power really is emissions-free, so we’re fortunate that 20% of our electricity comes from existing nuclear plants. But even if they weren’t spectacularly expensive, additional nukes couldn’t come on line quickly enough to solve our climate problems; the industry dream of 45 new plants by 2030 would barely replace its aging plants scheduled for decommissioning. And nuclear energy may be the least cost-effective way to reduce greenhouse gases, which is why private investors are pouring billions into efficiency, wind, solar and other renewables instead. Taxpayers would get more bang for their energy bucks if their elected representatives made similar choices.

Once again, we’ve been building commercial nuclear power plants since 1957. When do get to the point where we’ve solved the waste storage and material proliferation challenges, and found a way to build as well as decommission the plants at an acceptable cost and without government intervention?

Don’t forget my “level the playing field” mental experiment: Zero out every cent of government funding for the implementation of all energy sources, including tax breaks, subsidies, loan guarantees, the whole smash. Then put a reasonable market price on carbon emissions (via whatever mechanism you choose), meaning one that accurately reflects the cost of future impacts from additional CO2 emissions. How many nuclear power plants would then be built in the US? My guess: Zero.

That doesn’t mean that we should actually cut all government support for nuclear power, or that it’s a bad idea to try to breathe life into that hibernating industry. We’re in one hell of a bad position with climate change, and the challenges of realizing the kind of broad efficiency gains plus the continued build-out of renewables needed to meet rising demand (especially as we start to get serious about electrifying our transportation) and account for those to-be-decommissioned nuclear plants, raises some really nasty questions about our choices.

I just wish the nuclear proponents (who love to e-mail me) would stop the righteous and deluded talk of how insanely cheap nuclear power is and either find a way to make it cheaper (good luck with that) or simply admit that they’re completely dependent on government support and move on to a more productive conversation.

I’ve mentioned recently the tritium leaks that have been detected at aging US nuclear plants (see Tidbits, More on nuclear leaks, and Tritium for everyone!), and now the news is getting worse in one location…

Tritium hot zone expands.: Rutland Herald Online:

The Department of Health said late Monday there appears to be “a very large area” at the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor contaminated with radioactive tritium, and contamination levels continue to rise.

Because the area is so big, according to William Irwin, radiological health chief, there are many potential sources of radioactive water at this particularly high concentration of tritium.

“This is a very large area that encompasses many potential sources of water at this concentration of tritium, including the condensate storage tank and the systems and components of the advanced off-gas system,” Irwin said late Monday afternoon.

He said the area of contamination was roughly from the reactor building to the Connecticut River.

Robert Williams, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear said Monday the new well with the highest level of contamination saw its concentration drop a little on Sunday to 2.38 million picocuries per liter, but went higher on Monday, to 2.52 million picocuries per liter of water. The federal standard for drinking water is 20,000 picocuries per liter.

…

The first indication of the contamination showed up in November in one of three 2007 monitoring wells and the levels quickly rose starting in January. New wells, closer to the reactor and turbine buildings, show contamination in extremely high levels.

“We have to uncover pipes and see what’s leaking. And get a better image of flow times and flow directions,” he said. Water flows west to east on the site, toward the Connecticut River. Some of the monitoring wells are 15 to 20 feet from the river, while others are 100 feet or 200 feet away from the river.

Irwin said the Health Department is starting to test wells at private residences along Gov. Hunt Road, where Vermont Yankee is sited.

He said all of the private wells the state is testing are within a quarter of a mile of the plant and the point of the highest level of contamination.

Irwin said the state was looking to add five or six private residences to the state’s weekly testing program, but he said the state had to get landowners’ permissions. He said the department wanted to publish those test results, with the names of the individual homes kept confidential.

He said the Department of Health is testing private wells at Vernon Elementary School, which he estimated was just under a quarter of a mile of the contamination. The state is also testing water at two area farms — the Miller farm, which he said was about a quarter of a mile north of the plant, and the Blodgett farm, which, he said, was a mile from the plant “as the crow flies.”

In addition, the Vernon Green nursing home and residential center is also being tested, he said. He estimated Vernon Green was about a half-mile south of the plant.

There are no municipal water systems in Vernon, he said, and every business and home is dependent on its own well.

Irwin said the Vernon health officer had done some initial private well testing when the tritium contamination problem first was made public.

Irwin said all deep wells are testing free of tritium.

This situation neatly explains why a lot of people “don’t like” nuclear power: We have to do everything exactly right, or we could have a huge problem. Other ways of generating electricity can certainly have design and construction flaws, but for coal or natural gas or wind or solar such an error typically means you get less electricity than planned or even a complete shutdown of the facility and no electricity for a while. When we have leaks of radioactive material into ground water 126 times higher than legal limits for drinking water, that’s a whole other story.

Stephen E. Koonin gave a presentation last October, Addressing America’s Energy Challenges. Koonin is Under Secretary for Science of Energy at the US Dept. of Energy, and he pulled together a lot of information and presented it in an excellent, and sometimes quite enlightening way.

The presentation is available here [36 page PDF].

The most interesting slides are:

• 15: Greenhouse gas emissions in 2000 by source, which shows a detailed breakout of worldwide emissions. (The slide doesn’t actually say that it’s worldwide and not US emissions, but it gives a 2000 figure of 42 billion tons of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases, which is clearly a worldwide figure.)
• 20 and 21: The relationship between yearly emissions and the overall level of CO2 in the atmosphere. This graphically depicts one of the nastiest details in our current energy and environmental predicament: The long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere.
• 23: CO2 emissions, OECD and non-OECD, from 1865-2005, which has a couple of call-out boxes that neatly delineate the biggest single point of contention between “developed” and “developing” countires, namely who emitted what when.
• 30: Renewable electricity costs. Let the hair-splitting and food fight begin!
• 31: Cost of CO2 reductions. This could be the best single graph I’ve seen on the topic to date.

Why, you might well ask, don’t I just reproduce these slides here? Because I want you to click through to the presentatoin and look at it all, of course.

Much higher tritium levels found at nuclear plant:

A radioactive substance recently found in groundwater monitoring wells at a Vermont nuclear plant has turned up again at levels more than nine times those previously reported and more than 37 times higher than a federal safe drinking water limit, officials said Thursday.

Officials at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, state Health Department and federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission said a newly dug monitoring well at the Vernon reactor turned up a reading of nearly 775,000 picocuries per liter. It was by far the highest reading reported yet for tritium, which has been linked to cancer when ingested in large amounts.

Despite the much higher reading, an NRC spokeswoman said Thursday there was nothing to fear.

“There’s not currently, nor is there likely to be, an impact on public health or safety or the environment,” the NRC’s Diane Screnci said in an interview. She had maintained previously that the Environmental Protection Agency drinking water safety limit of 20,000 picocuries per liter had an abundance of caution built into it.

…

News of the new reading came nearly a month after the Jan. 7 announcement that tritium had been discovered in a monitoring well at the Vernon reactor. No source has yet been found.

Plant spokesman Robert Williams said in an e-mail Thursday that the new reading is “good news” because it could indicate plant technicians searching for the leak are zeroing in on a source.

“The good news is that one newly installed well, located just to the east of the plant’s condensate water storage tank and some underground piping, appears to be closer to the source because its concentration is 774,825 picocuries per liter,” Williams wrote in the e-mail.

Wow, that “good news” has to set some sort of record for spin.

Just wondering–what would it take in the way of a radiation leak or other “incident” for the owner of a nuclear plant to say, “We have a really big problem”? Would it take a near-meltdown of a core, ala Three Mile Island? A catastrophe like Chernobyl? And when do we conclude that after doing this commercial nuclear power plant stuff for a smidge over 52 years that we really don’t have the hang of it yet?

Related:

• More on nuclear leaks
• Infonugget: Nuclear leaks

25 Percent of U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Are Leaking Radioactive Chemicals:

Would you like a little radioactive tritium with your water?

As far fetched as it sounds, the Associated Press recently reported that at least 27 of 104 nuclear reactors across the United States are leaking potentially dangerous levels of tritium into the groundwater around the plants.

The scope of the problem surfaced after the recent discovery of a leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. According to the AP, new tests have shown that the levels of tritium in the wells at the Vernon, Vermont site are more than three-and-a-half times the federal safety standard.

…

Vermont Yankee isn’t the first case of a U.S. nuclear power plant leaking tritium, the AP article reveals. In the 1990s, leaks from the Braidwood nuclear station in Illinois contaminated local wells, and owner Exelon Corp. had to provide a new municipal water system. The Oyster Creek nuclear plant in Ocean County, New Jersey, was found to be leaking tritium just last year — “just days after Exelon won NRC approval for a 20-year license extension there,” the AP reports. And there have been more.

The source of the leaks can be any number of things, including corroded underground pipes, and leaks in the spent fuel storage pools.

The AP story mentioned above is Leaks put spotlight on aging nuclear plants, also recommended.

The one question I have about this is: In the entire realm of energy issues can you imagine a steeper and more slippery slope than, “yeah, we’re leaking radioactive stuff and we’re not sure exactly where it’s coming from, and there’s debate over whether it’s a real danger, but let’s keep re-licensing old nuclear power plants”?

Why There’s $54.5 Billion for Nuclear Power in Obama’s Budget:

Obama’s budget for 2011 is filled with peculiarities. There are a few primary points of interest when it comes to energy–the empty cap and trade framework outlined within, the severing of multi-billion fossil fuel subsidies (which I’ll get to in a post later today), and perhaps most surprisingly, over $54 billion for nuclear power. That’s up almost $20 billion from the year before.

Details on More Nuclear Loans

The move expands from $36 billion to $54.5 billion the amount of loan guarantees the federal government is willing to award nuclear power projects. But why? Why expand nuclear loan guarantees–which weren’t even capitalized on last year–when the budget is already, as everyone and their mother knows, strapped for cash?

Conventional wisdom says that it’s a move designed to bring more Republicans to the table for energy reform negotiations. But conventional wisdom also holds that passing a climate bill this year is unlikely at best. Perhaps Obama simply wants to demonstrate his goodwill and put some muscle behind his calls for bipartisanship, especially on energy issues. The nuclear industry is strongly aligned with the GOP, and conservatives have been calling for more nuclear power for as long as I can remember.

Let me suggest the following mental experiment:

Imagine a US in which there are precisely no subsidies or tax breaks or land deals or loan guarantees or other forms of support for any form of energy. Not one cent for fossil fuels, nuclear, wind, solar, wave, tidal geothermal, biofuels, etc. They’re treated no differently than any other US business. Additionally, we have a price on carbon, through either an outright carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. (Any government funding goes to research and development, not deploying technology, plus there are regulations one would expect to protect the public from less-than-desirable behavior of companies providing such critical services.)

How long would nuclear power be considered viable, even with the lack of subsidies for wind, solar, and other renewables? Keep in mind that the companies involved in all projects and ongoing operations would be responsible for the cost of all failures plus procuring their own liability insurance.

Isn’t this exactly what the political right, which never saw a proposal for a nuclear power plant it didn’t like, and also claims a deep disdain for all forms of government “meddling in the market and picking winners”, would want? We’ve been doing commercial nuclear power for just over 50 years, so by now we surely know enough for this technology to stand on its own two feet, pay its own way, and be free of the shackles imposed by those bloodless Washington bureaucrats, right?

Hello…?

Is this thing on?

Leaks imperil nuclear industry:

The nuclear industry, once an environmental pariah, is recasting itself as green as it attempts to extend the life of many power plants and build new ones. But a leak of radioactive water at Vermont Yankee, along with similar incidents at more than 20 other US nuclear plants in recent years, has kindled doubts about the reliability, durability, and maintenance of the nation’s aging nuclear installations.

Vermont health officials say the leak, while deeply worrisome, is not a threat to drinking water supplies or the Connecticut River, which flows beside the 38-year-old plant, nor is it endangering public health. But the controversy is threatening to derail the nuclear plant’s bid, now at a critical juncture, for state approvals to extend its operating life by 20 years when its license expires in two years. Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors, Vermont Yankee’s owners, and state officials are tracing the source of the radioactivity and searching for other leaks in the labyrinth of below-surface pipes on the plants’ property about 10 miles from the Massachusetts border.

The timing couldn’t be worse for the nuclear industry, coming as it attempts a broad rebirth as a green energy source in the battle against global warming; the reactors do not emit greenhouse gases that cause the atmosphere to warm.

Memories of the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are receding and many in the public are taking a second look at nuclear. President Obama last week endorsed a new generation of nuclear power in his State of the Union address, and for the first time in decades, more than 20 new plants have been proposed.

But the leaks have the potential to slow, if not stop, the bandwagon. Crucial voices are calling for caution. “I am appalled by the safety procedures not only at Vermont Yankee, but at other nuclear facilities across the country who have failed to inspect thousands of miles of buried pipes at their facilities,’’ US Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, said last week. Earlier this month, Markey asked the US Government Accountability Office to investigate the integrity, safety, inspections, and maintenance of buried pipes at nuclear plants.

Oops.

As I said in a recent post (see Nuclear predictions), we will build more nuclear plants in the US and they will have government support until they are seen to be a failure. That could be purely on economic grounds or it could be safety issues (operations, nuclear material proliferation, waste disposal), but nuclear will get every conceivable chance to succeed.

(If you don’t like nuclear power, don’t bother sending me hate mail. This is not a description of what I want to see happen, but the path I’m convinced we’re on. The political climate (including the influence of big business on public policy) plus the number of people who are happy to have nuclear power as long as we can ship the nasty ol’ waste to somewhere Far Away, like Yucca Mountain[1], make it a lock. The only mystery is how we get there and how the elected representatives in office at the time will spin it.)

[1] Wait–did I just predict the resurrection of Yucca Mountain? Why yes, I did. I think it’s virtually certain that the recently announced blue ribbon committee tasked with figuring out what the heck to do with all that nuclear waste will conclude that [1] we can’t store it on-site at the plants forever, [2] the most logical alternative is to store it in a centralized, tightly controlled facility, and [3] thanks, in part, to the amount of money and effort already invested in Yucca Mountain, it’s the best option. Once again: This is not my conclusion; it’s my prediction of what the committee will conclude.

I don’t talk too much about nuclear power here, for a very simple reason: I don’t think there’s much interesting to say about it. I’ve been saying since the very earliest days of this blog that our future would have plenty for people on every part of the political spectrum to hate. More nukes that will annoy left wingers, more government intervention in energy markets that will annoy the right wingers[1], etc. You can quickly build your own list and figure out instantly which end of the spectrum will hate each one.

More generally, I’ve long assumed that regardless of what a lot of people on the left end of the spectrum think, the US will wind up with at least “some” new nuclear power plants. The US has roughly 100 nuclear plants operating now, and I expect we’ll see that number increase, even with some decommissioning of older plants, to roughly operating 120 plants by 2030.[2] In other words, we will build more nuclear plants, but it won’t be the shining city on the hill renaissance that so many proponents push. Nor will it be the end of the world if we build a few dozen new plants. If my hunch is right that nuclear will prove to be uncompetitive, it will only die by failing miserably in the market, possibly at unacceptably high cost to taxpayers and customers. The political reality is that nuclear power will get every reasonable chance, and then some, to succeed.

This all came to mind when the following item came to my attention:

Nuclear Renaissance Dealt Blow by South Texas Project Troubles:

A critical court ruling today rang the first chime in what could be the death knell of the so-called “nuclear renaissance,” starting with the failed expansion of the South Texas Project (STP).

This afternoon’s ruling by 408th District Court Judge Larry Noll that CPS Energy can safely withdraw from the proposed STP expansion project without losing all its investment offers the utility and the city of San Antonio the cue they’ve been waiting for to exit the national nuclear stage. Combined with the NRG Energy CEO’s announcement during a shareholder and press conference call this morning that NRG would “wind down the project as quickly and economically as possible” if CPS withdraws or STP does not receive federal loan guarantees, this news marks a major blow to those who claim nuclear power is a viable alternative to fossil fuel energy. The expansion project calls for two new nuclear reactors at a site with two existing reactors.

These events give credence to the contention made over the past five years by opponents of nuclear power that it is a needlessly expensive and risky way to meet future energy needs.. In less than a year, the price of the STP nuclear expansion ballooned from around $5 billion to more than $18 billion. Given this case study of nuclear power’s failure, we must call into question the federal government’s decision to increase federal loan guarantees to support oversized, untenable projects that are already proving too risky for private investors.

It’s as premature to sound nuclear power’s death knell as it is to schedule a victory party for the renaissance.

So please, everyone, calm down. We’ve got much bigger problems to worry about, like how the heck we’re going to stop the Three Stooges (China, India, and the US) from blowing humanity’s remaining carbon budget.

[1] Of course, the right wingers who scream the loudest about letting the market pick winners and set prices unfettered by nasty old government intervention are curiously silent about or even supportive of the government lending a helping hand to the nuclear power industry, e.g. Obama To Propose Tripling Of Nuclear Loan Guarantees.

[2] The high up-front costs of nuclear power plants, plus the ongoing headaches of waste management and plant decommissioning will make nuclear power less attractive than some newer technologies, like concentrating solar with storage, thin-film solar PV, offshore wind, wave/tidal, and continued use of geothermal. At least that’s my guess. Ask me in a few years (or months or weeks) and I might have a somewhat different view.

At times, the synchronicity in one’s news feeds can be positively stunning…

Utility PACs Generous to Key Lawmakers in Climate Debate:

Large electric utilities that rely heavily on coal poured money into re-election campaigns as the House shaped and passed landmark climate legislation, a bill that helps those businesses partly sidestep its toughest provisions.

Employee-run committees for American Electric Power Co. Inc., Duke Energy Corp. and Southern Co. gave $165,000 to 70 House members in April, May and June. They sprinkled money among senators, too, contributing $46,500 to 18 Senate re-election campaigns.

The money went heavily to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that amended and voted on the bill before the final floor vote. Contributions also went to lawmakers from states where the utilities have plants.

Both the companies and lawmakers insisted there is no correlation between campaign contributions and votes. Watchdog groups believe the money buys influence and made the legislation friendlier to power companies.

“Companies give campaign contributions to gain access that they otherwise wouldn’t have,” said Erich Pica, spokesman for environmental group Friends of the Earth. “If you look at the provisions in the bill for coal, they got a pretty sweet deal.”

Green Ink: It Was Oil Speculators, After All:

Maybe fundamentals don’t matter so much: U.S. financial regulators will rule that speculators played a major role in oil-price volatility, reversing their own findings last year, the WSJ reports. The U.K., meanwhile, comes to the opposite conclusion, also in the WSJ. Natural-gas traders are steamed about new trading limits, in the WSJ.

Heads set to explode among the peak oil doomers in 3… 2… 1…

Shocking Report: California Climate Leaders’ Trips Around the World Paid for by Big Oil, Utilities:

Talk about a conflict of interests. A report from the Sacramento Bee reveals that California lawmakers–the very ones in charge of enforcing the state’s ambitious initiative to fight climate change–routinely take trips focused on climate change that are funded by oil and utility companies. Worst of all, they do it shielded from public view, by using loopholes in the law and shady nonprofits supported by utility giants and big oil.

Follow the link for more detail, but take your in-flight barf bag with you. You’ll need it.

Little money left to power-down nuclear reactors:

Many of the nation’s nuclear power plants don’t have enough cash set aside to close down safely, according to a wire report late last week. And a hastily closed plant could result in such ills as water contamination and theft of nuclear materials.

Taking a nuclear reactor offline costs about $450 million, which includes storing fuel and dismantling the plant, among other expenses, according to an investigation by the Associated Press. But as funds have flowed out of companies’ investments during the recession, the amount of money earmarked for safe dismantling has also diminished.

About a third of the country’s plants have been asked by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for plans on how to make up for fiscal shortcomings.

“This is not a current safety issue,” Tim McGinty, NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation policy and rulemaking director, said in a statement. “But the plants do have to prove to us they’re setting aside money appropriately.”

Some industry insiders go even further. “No one at the NRC wants to acknowledge what is absolutely obvious to us,” a retired nuclear engineer told the AP. “The funds are inadequate and the industry has bare assets.”

How will companies generate the cash to close plants? Keep pumping out the power.

Twenty-year extensions on operating licenses have already been granted to more than half of the U.S.’s 104 nuclear plants, the AP reports, and another 16 are currently under review. In addition to hoping for better market performance to up their assets, the companies will likely pass costs on to customers in the form of small surcharges.

So, let me get this straight. We can’t figure out what to do with nuclear waste, and we can’t even figure out how to fund the life cycle of the plants themselves.

At least the companies will be responsible for every last cent of the decommissioning cost. I mean, it’s not like this kind of funding shortfall would ever wind up being dumped on the taxpayers, right?

There’s new in the local paper here in Rochester this morning about the nuclear power plant closest to our fair city, and it involves everyone’s favorite intractable problem, nuclear waste.

Ginna builds crypt for nuclear waste:

Since it first began producing electricity in late 1969, the Robert E. Ginna nuclear power plant has put spent fuel rods — 12-foot long, finger-thick containers of uranium dioxide pellets — into a large, deep pool of water inside the plant.

By later this year, that pool will be full.

So the plant’s owner, Constellation Energy Group, is spending $70 million to build a crypt — a large concrete bunker of a building, with walls thick enough to withstand a passenger jet crashing into it — to hold giant lead-lined barrels filled with that radioactive waste.

…

When built, Ginna’s dry cask storage operation will start with a mammoth crane to be put next to the plant on a thick concrete pad. It will take fuel rods from the pool inside the plant and lift them into large, lead-lined canisters. Those canisters, after being emptied of any water and welded shut, will then be lifted by crane to the back of a large truck for the slow, careful drive a couple hundred yards away to the storage area. Each one of those loaded canisters will weigh 110 tons, said Robert J. Beske, director of projects for Constellation.

Construction of the storage area is largely complete. Most work now centers on the area for the crane.

The construction is to be complete by April. Two canisters — each holding clusters of 27 to 32 fuel rods — will be loaded into the crypt in 2010, with four more scheduled to move over in 2012, Beske said. Then the plant plans to move rods over every three to four years.

Currently, the cask storage site has room for 10 canisters, and Constellation likely will put in a facility to hold another 10 in about a decade, Beske said. That would be enough storage capacity to hold all the used fuel rods Ginna likely will generate over its total life span, he said.

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.

…

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.

…

“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.”

…

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.

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?