Comparing Energy Costs of Nuclear, Coal, Gas, Wind and Solar
Calculating the Per Kilowatt-Hour Construction Cost of a Project
Many energy production plants are very expensive to build. In order
to understand how expensive a particular plant is relative to other
energy plants, you must calculate the per kWh cost of construction. This
can be done using the following equation.
Total Construction Cost
[(MW rating x 1,000) x Useful Life x (Capacity Factor x 8,760)]
The MW rating is multiplied by 1,000 to convert to kW and capacity
factor by 8,760 to convert to number of hours of energy produced in a
year.
Per Kilowatt-Hour Production Costs
Normally you will not need to calculate the per
kWh production costs for a given type of energy source because these
estimates are readily available from a wide variety of resources. Each
plant is unique and may have a slightly different per kWh production
cost. Since the amount of energy produced at any plant is very large,
deviations in production cost are not generally large enough to change
the per kWh production cost for an individual plant beyond the
hundredths or thousandths of a penny. To the right is a list of the per
kWh production costs used to develop the total cost per kWh estimates in
this article. Coal, Gas and Nuclear estimates are 2008 data from NEI.
Nuclear: $0.019
Coal: $0.027
Natural Gas: $0.081
Wind:$0.030
Hydroelectric: $0.009
Solar: No estimate found
Coal: $0.027
Natural Gas: $0.081
Wind:$0.030
Hydroelectric: $0.009
Solar: No estimate found
Decommissioning Cost per kWh for Nuclear Power Plants
Nuclear energy is unique in that it must pay for future
decommissioning of the facility. Decommissioning costs vary from year to
year depending on changes in return on investment from the fund, but a
general guideline is $0.0015 per kWh. This cost per kWh yields a $500
million decommissioning fund assuming a 4% return on investment over 40
years (useful life).
Comparing Per Kilowatt-Hour Cost Estimates for Multiple Types of Energy Production
Most Cost Effective Form of Energy Production
Hydroelectric is the most cost effective
at $0.03 per kWh. Hydroelectric production is naturally limited by the
number of feasible geographic locations and the huge environmental
infringement caused by the construction of a dam. Nuclear and coal are
tied at $0.04 per kWh. This comes as a bit of a surprise because coal is
typically regarded as the cheapest form of energy production. Another
surprise is that wind power ($0.08 per kWh) came in slightly cheaper
than natural gas ($0.10 per kWh). Solar power was by far the most
expensive at $0.22 per kWh—and that only represents construction costs
because I could not find reliable data on production costs. Also, there
is a higher degree of uncertainty in cost with wind and solar energy due
to poor and varying data regarding the useful life of the facilities
and their capacity factors. For this analysis the average of the data
points are used in the calculations.
Three coal plant projects were used ranging from 300 to 960 MW. The
construction costs of these coal plants ranged from $1.2 to $4 billion,
which are less in total dollars than new nuclear ranging from $5 to $9
billion. However, due to nuclear’s higher capacity factor and larger MW
rating, the per kWh construction cost of the coal plants ($0.016 to
$0.019) is similar to new nuclear plants ($0.014 to $0.024).
Extrapolation of Results
| Energy Source | % of Total | Cost per kWh | Weighted Avg Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nuclear | 19.7% | $0.04 | $0.008 |
| Hydro | 6.1% | $0.03 | $0.002 |
| Coal | 48.7% | $0.04 | $0.022 |
| Natural Gas | 21.4% | $0.10 | $0.022 |
| Petroleum | 1.1% | $0.10 | $0.001 |
| Other Renewables | 3.0% | $0.15 | $0.005 |
| 100% | $0.059 |
Global Nuclear Power Generation to Reach 3.1 Trillion kWh by 2017
www.strategyr.com/NuclearPower
Taking these results further I calculated a weighted average energy cost
per kWh for the US of $0.059. If we were to double the amount of
nuclear energy by replacing existing coal capacity, the weighted average
energy cost per kWh would be $0.058, a cost reduction of 1.7%. Tripling
nuclear would yield $0.057, or a 3.5% cost reduction. This does not
take into account the intangible costs we would save by reducing coal
emissions by about 40% (80% if nuclear was tripled). There would also be
40% less coal required (80% if nuclear was tripled), thereby reducing
the impact of coal mining on the environment.
| Energy Source | % of Total | Cost per kWh | Weighted Avg Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nuclear | 39.4% | $0.04 | $0.015 |
| Hydro | 6.1% | $0.03 | $0.002 |
| Coal | 29.0% | $0.04 | $0.013 |
| Natural Gas | 21.4% | $0.10 | $0.022 |
| Petroleum | 1.1% | $0.10 | $0.001 |
| Other Renewables | 3.0% | $0.15 | $0.005 |
| 100% | $0.058 [change of -1.7%] |
Unfortunately, the only way to reduce the per kWh energy cost in the
US further is by replacing peak production currently supplied by
petroleum and natural gas plants. These plants satisfy peak demand
because they can be fired up and powered down quickly. As with most
things in life, there is a high cost associated with this convenience.
Since nuclear energy is typically a baseload generation source, there
are not many ways to reduce peak demand usage of natural gas with
nuclear energy capacity.
The
detailed calculations, assumptions, and project-specific information
supporting this analysis are all contained in the Excel Workbook that
can be downloaded by clicking on the icon.
Industry observer
Jason:
I took a quick look at your spreadsheet – you have the 2 new Vogtle nuclear units at 4,600 MW (this seems to be the total capacity of both new units together). The AP1000 units are about 1,100 MWe each, so the two new units will only be about 2,200 MW.
In the other direction, you have nuclear life as 40 years, yet all Gen III units are designed for 60 year life. Even the old Gen II units are getting 60 years and the new ones may have a useful life of 100 years or more.
Jason Morgan
I took a quick look at your spreadsheet – you have the 2 new Vogtle nuclear units at 4,600 MW (this seems to be the total capacity of both new units together). The AP1000 units are about 1,100 MWe each, so the two new units will only be about 2,200 MW.
In the other direction, you have nuclear life as 40 years, yet all Gen III units are designed for 60 year life. Even the old Gen II units are getting 60 years and the new ones may have a useful life of 100 years or more.
I am sorry, you are quite right. I will be replacing the
spreadsheet with an updated one shortly correcting Vogtle 3 & 4′s MW
rating to 2,300. The result is still the same, just not by such a wide
margin. The average of the three potential construction cost scenarios
($5, $7 and $9 billion per unit) results in a total cost of $0.039 per
kWh. This is still maintaining the 40 year useful life.
I understand the actual operation of a Gen III reactor may be 60, 80 or even 100 years, but so can the theoretical lives of new coal and hydro plants. They also received a 40 year useful life in their calculations, so at least it is all consistent and relative to one another. Here is the thing: as a company you do not want to put yourself in a position where you are spreading the cost of an asset over 80 or 100 years. So perhaps my 40 years is better called a depreciable life rather than useful life, but it is more conservative than using a longer life. By using 60, 80 or 100 year lives you get an average total cost of nuclear of $0.033, $0.030, $0.028 respectively – even more cost effective than I originally thought.
Therefore, adjusting for both the mistake I made on the MW rating of Vogtle’s two new units and extending the useful life estimates, we wind up back at an average total cost for new nuclear of $0.030 per kWh.
David Lewis
I understand the actual operation of a Gen III reactor may be 60, 80 or even 100 years, but so can the theoretical lives of new coal and hydro plants. They also received a 40 year useful life in their calculations, so at least it is all consistent and relative to one another. Here is the thing: as a company you do not want to put yourself in a position where you are spreading the cost of an asset over 80 or 100 years. So perhaps my 40 years is better called a depreciable life rather than useful life, but it is more conservative than using a longer life. By using 60, 80 or 100 year lives you get an average total cost of nuclear of $0.033, $0.030, $0.028 respectively – even more cost effective than I originally thought.
Therefore, adjusting for both the mistake I made on the MW rating of Vogtle’s two new units and extending the useful life estimates, we wind up back at an average total cost for new nuclear of $0.030 per kWh.
Various points:
Rod Adams had Dr. Dale Klein, Commissioner, US NRC on his Atomic Show podcast #151 and they discussed how long nuke plants could be expected to last.
Klein noted there is a lot of experience in the US renewing the 40 year original licenses to extend them out to 60 years. Klein briefly discussed the “life after 60″ plans the NRC is considering to extend the operational life out to 80 years. Later on in the podcast Klein discussed how to look at new nuke plants and used the words “100 years” when he talked about if you are thinking about building one of these , i.e. how long you could expect it to be around.
I wonder who would agree with your comparison that shows new nukes would produce electricity for 3 cents kWhr. The operators of the Columbia Generating Station in Washington state say they produce today for 3.5 cents kWhr. That plant is 27 years old and is almost fully paid for.
How can anyone claim they could reasonably expect to build a new nuke plant today, in the US, and produce power for less than that, i.e. your calculated 3 cents kWh?
One study I tend to refer to on nuclear plant cost is the 2009 update to the MIT The Future of Nuclear Power study. The “levelized” cost estimates for various baseload technologies in that study were obtained from a separate study done by Du and Parsons, and these show new coal at 6.2 cents kWh, new gas at 6.5 cents kWh, and new nukes at 8.4 cents kWh. Apply a carbon tax of $25/tCO2 and you get new coal at 8.3 cents kWh and new gas at 7.4 cents kWh. Du and Parsons stated that their figure for new nukes included a “risk premium” on capital that applies to new nuclear construction loans in the US which adds considerably to the cost. I.e., if this “risk premium” were removed, new nuclear power would cost 6.6 cents kWh.
The risk premium applies because no other industry faces the prospect of political and hence regulatory instability caused by anti nuclear protestors or a sudden change in public opinion caused by a nuclear accident anywhere in the world, which was seen most famously when after Chernobyl the Shoreham plant in NY state was completed at a cost of $6 billion, then thrown away without generating a single commercial kilowatt because politicians lost their nerve after seeing 200,000 protestors show up all demanding the plant not be allowed to operate.
The advantage I see in using the MIT study, and the Du and Parsons study it defers to on cost, other than the fact that it is top quality, is that the MIT study has been legitimized in debate by Amory Lovins and Al Gore among others. These anti nukes love to cherry pick statements from the MIT study such as the one Gore picked for his anti nuclear chapter in Our Choice – “…nuclear power faces stagnation and decline”, or as Lovins does when he states that MIT found that new nuclear power is not competitive. Gore even certifies the authors of the MIT report by calling them “the experts” on nuclear in Our Choice.
So, in plain English, what the MIT report says is that if a modest carbon price is applied to the emissions of fossil fuel generating plants, new nuclear power plants are the baseload electricity generators of choice just on the basis of cost. And if the political climate changed in favor of nuclear power as could be expected as it dawns on more people that the wastes of fossil fuels are the horror that many were duped into believing the wastes from nuclear power were, the “risk premium” on capital would be eliminated which would make nuclear even more competitive.
When summing up what MIT says in this way I then point to the fact that Al Gore calls MIT “the experts” on nuclear, and add that Amory Lovins defers to this MIT report when in a heated debate he needs an impeccable, independent, non Amory Lovin’s sympathetic source for definitive cost information.
The MIT report: http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/pdf/nuclearpower-update2009.pdf
The Du and Parsons study: http://web.mit.edu/ceepr/www/publications/workingpapers/2009-004.pdf
The Du and Parsons report has an interesting section starting on page 3 describing how to look at published figures such as when Reuters said 2 South Texas reactors generating a total of 2700 MWe would cost $6 – $7 billion, or $2200 to $2600 kW capacity, and the South Petersburg Times published saying a total of 2200 MWe for FPL was planned to cost $12 to $18 billion, or $5500 to $8200 per kW capacity. Anti nukes love to cite the FPL figures as they condemn nuclear as too expensive, and some, such as Joe Romm, point to the different figures and claim there is a tremendous cost escalation going on or that no one can know what is going on except that anyone buying a new nuke will be taken to the cleaners. The apparent huge difference is explained. Each report was based on figures produced by different although traditional and valid methods of evaluating the cost of a new nuke, and when the figures were “levelized” the cost of each plant was seen to be very similar.
When Andasol 1, a solar thermal plant with 7 hours of salt storage was completed in Spain, the head of the team that designed it stated, for publication, that the electricity it produces would cost 27 Euro cents kW, which was 36 US cents kW the day I looked it up, and this was for a plant that cost $19,963 per available kW. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/largest-solar-thermal-storage-plant-to-start-up
This is the type of thing the anti nukes claim will replace fossil fuels and nuclear for baseload power. Its a joke.
Jason Morgan
Rod Adams had Dr. Dale Klein, Commissioner, US NRC on his Atomic Show podcast #151 and they discussed how long nuke plants could be expected to last.
Klein noted there is a lot of experience in the US renewing the 40 year original licenses to extend them out to 60 years. Klein briefly discussed the “life after 60″ plans the NRC is considering to extend the operational life out to 80 years. Later on in the podcast Klein discussed how to look at new nuke plants and used the words “100 years” when he talked about if you are thinking about building one of these , i.e. how long you could expect it to be around.
I wonder who would agree with your comparison that shows new nukes would produce electricity for 3 cents kWhr. The operators of the Columbia Generating Station in Washington state say they produce today for 3.5 cents kWhr. That plant is 27 years old and is almost fully paid for.
How can anyone claim they could reasonably expect to build a new nuke plant today, in the US, and produce power for less than that, i.e. your calculated 3 cents kWh?
One study I tend to refer to on nuclear plant cost is the 2009 update to the MIT The Future of Nuclear Power study. The “levelized” cost estimates for various baseload technologies in that study were obtained from a separate study done by Du and Parsons, and these show new coal at 6.2 cents kWh, new gas at 6.5 cents kWh, and new nukes at 8.4 cents kWh. Apply a carbon tax of $25/tCO2 and you get new coal at 8.3 cents kWh and new gas at 7.4 cents kWh. Du and Parsons stated that their figure for new nukes included a “risk premium” on capital that applies to new nuclear construction loans in the US which adds considerably to the cost. I.e., if this “risk premium” were removed, new nuclear power would cost 6.6 cents kWh.
The risk premium applies because no other industry faces the prospect of political and hence regulatory instability caused by anti nuclear protestors or a sudden change in public opinion caused by a nuclear accident anywhere in the world, which was seen most famously when after Chernobyl the Shoreham plant in NY state was completed at a cost of $6 billion, then thrown away without generating a single commercial kilowatt because politicians lost their nerve after seeing 200,000 protestors show up all demanding the plant not be allowed to operate.
The advantage I see in using the MIT study, and the Du and Parsons study it defers to on cost, other than the fact that it is top quality, is that the MIT study has been legitimized in debate by Amory Lovins and Al Gore among others. These anti nukes love to cherry pick statements from the MIT study such as the one Gore picked for his anti nuclear chapter in Our Choice – “…nuclear power faces stagnation and decline”, or as Lovins does when he states that MIT found that new nuclear power is not competitive. Gore even certifies the authors of the MIT report by calling them “the experts” on nuclear in Our Choice.
So, in plain English, what the MIT report says is that if a modest carbon price is applied to the emissions of fossil fuel generating plants, new nuclear power plants are the baseload electricity generators of choice just on the basis of cost. And if the political climate changed in favor of nuclear power as could be expected as it dawns on more people that the wastes of fossil fuels are the horror that many were duped into believing the wastes from nuclear power were, the “risk premium” on capital would be eliminated which would make nuclear even more competitive.
When summing up what MIT says in this way I then point to the fact that Al Gore calls MIT “the experts” on nuclear, and add that Amory Lovins defers to this MIT report when in a heated debate he needs an impeccable, independent, non Amory Lovin’s sympathetic source for definitive cost information.
The MIT report: http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/pdf/nuclearpower-update2009.pdf
The Du and Parsons study: http://web.mit.edu/ceepr/www/publications/workingpapers/2009-004.pdf
The Du and Parsons report has an interesting section starting on page 3 describing how to look at published figures such as when Reuters said 2 South Texas reactors generating a total of 2700 MWe would cost $6 – $7 billion, or $2200 to $2600 kW capacity, and the South Petersburg Times published saying a total of 2200 MWe for FPL was planned to cost $12 to $18 billion, or $5500 to $8200 per kW capacity. Anti nukes love to cite the FPL figures as they condemn nuclear as too expensive, and some, such as Joe Romm, point to the different figures and claim there is a tremendous cost escalation going on or that no one can know what is going on except that anyone buying a new nuke will be taken to the cleaners. The apparent huge difference is explained. Each report was based on figures produced by different although traditional and valid methods of evaluating the cost of a new nuke, and when the figures were “levelized” the cost of each plant was seen to be very similar.
When Andasol 1, a solar thermal plant with 7 hours of salt storage was completed in Spain, the head of the team that designed it stated, for publication, that the electricity it produces would cost 27 Euro cents kW, which was 36 US cents kW the day I looked it up, and this was for a plant that cost $19,963 per available kW. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/largest-solar-thermal-storage-plant-to-start-up
This is the type of thing the anti nukes claim will replace fossil fuels and nuclear for baseload power. Its a joke.
Jason Morgan
David – I don’t mean to be arrogant or crass, but I don’t
particularly care who agrees with my numbers. The MIT study you cite and
link to has VERY limited information regarding their cost estimates.
They basically throw up a number with very little to support it in terms
of references or calculations – both of which I display to support my
work.
My estimates come from numbers and calculations that are fully disclosed in this article and the attached Excel document. Even using $9 billion, the high range for construction costs of a new 1,150 MW Gen III reactor, over 40 years (we know the actual life will be 60 or longer, meaning the actual cost will be even less because it is spread over a longer life) the cost is $0.044 per kWh – this is equivalent to coal.
I honestly don’t know where everyone else is getting their numbers because I have yet to find someone who puts their research and calculations front and center. I’ve done that and come up with my answers – let’s see if someone can challenge them with some credible, valid points. Because UVDIV up there with his incomplete understanding of the time value of money hasn’t debunked the calculations, even if he thinks he did.
Jason Morgan
David Lewis
My estimates come from numbers and calculations that are fully disclosed in this article and the attached Excel document. Even using $9 billion, the high range for construction costs of a new 1,150 MW Gen III reactor, over 40 years (we know the actual life will be 60 or longer, meaning the actual cost will be even less because it is spread over a longer life) the cost is $0.044 per kWh – this is equivalent to coal.
I honestly don’t know where everyone else is getting their numbers because I have yet to find someone who puts their research and calculations front and center. I’ve done that and come up with my answers – let’s see if someone can challenge them with some credible, valid points. Because UVDIV up there with his incomplete understanding of the time value of money hasn’t debunked the calculations, even if he thinks he did.
Jason Morgan
This is an update that the errors pertaining to using 4,600
MW for the new Vogtle units have been corrected to use 2,300 MW. I have
updated the Excel workbook attached, the text of the article, and the
graph image (which has changed so slightly that visually there will not
be much difference) will be updated by this evening.
David Lewis
I wish there was a standard methodology for these studies.
The MIT study doesn’t contain the detail, because the Du and Parsons study does. The MIT study defers to the Du and Parson’s study, as I stated originally. The detail in the Du and Parsons study seems exhaustive to me. The main thing is they evaluate a number of different technologies, i.e. new nukes, new gas, and new coal, then they claim to “levelize”, i.e. account for the same array of costs in the same way, so that a cost comparison between the technologies that is realistic can be made. So I believe it is accurate to say that MIT put its name on an authoritative study that includes all the details anyone would want who wished to challenge what they are saying, that says that new nuclear power is competitive with coal if a modest carbon tax is put on CO2 emissions, and would also be competitive with new coal if the risk premium on capital loans for nukes were to be reduced after a few successful new builds.
It is no wonder then, given this, that utilities are considering new nukes, now that a price on carbon is looming. When a price on carbon was not in the cards at all, say a few years ago, there was no interest in new nukes. Now if you are correct, and new nuclear power plants could be built for that much less than coal all along, why was there no interest in new builds?
It doesn’t matter to me if you don’t care who disagrees with you. I still would ask, who else is saying that new nuclear power can be built that would produce electricity for 3 cents kWhr?
The point I care about is doing something about the solar advocates who are getting away with quoting MIT on the cost of new nuclear. They are saying MIT says new nukes are prohibitively expensive, then they flog their solar dream. They are advocating solar power that costs in excess of 20 or even 30 cents kWhr. It is getting politically ridiculous, as for instance in the UK where the government is proposing the expenditure of billions on solar subsidies and the opposition, instead of saying this is money down a rat hole compared with spending on equally low carbon nuclear, is calling for even more billions to be spent on solar, fueled by the dupes of the solar dreamers who have been duped into actually believing nuclear is far more expensive. Or in California, where the 1/3 subsidy of solar plants costing in excess of $15,000 per installed available kW would exceed the entire cost of a nuke, i.e. the taxpayers would be further ahead if they paid for the entire cost of building a nuclear plant and gave it away to the nearest utility company – the net cost per available kWhr to the ratepayers and taxpayers would be less.
Jason Morgan
The MIT study doesn’t contain the detail, because the Du and Parsons study does. The MIT study defers to the Du and Parson’s study, as I stated originally. The detail in the Du and Parsons study seems exhaustive to me. The main thing is they evaluate a number of different technologies, i.e. new nukes, new gas, and new coal, then they claim to “levelize”, i.e. account for the same array of costs in the same way, so that a cost comparison between the technologies that is realistic can be made. So I believe it is accurate to say that MIT put its name on an authoritative study that includes all the details anyone would want who wished to challenge what they are saying, that says that new nuclear power is competitive with coal if a modest carbon tax is put on CO2 emissions, and would also be competitive with new coal if the risk premium on capital loans for nukes were to be reduced after a few successful new builds.
It is no wonder then, given this, that utilities are considering new nukes, now that a price on carbon is looming. When a price on carbon was not in the cards at all, say a few years ago, there was no interest in new nukes. Now if you are correct, and new nuclear power plants could be built for that much less than coal all along, why was there no interest in new builds?
It doesn’t matter to me if you don’t care who disagrees with you. I still would ask, who else is saying that new nuclear power can be built that would produce electricity for 3 cents kWhr?
The point I care about is doing something about the solar advocates who are getting away with quoting MIT on the cost of new nuclear. They are saying MIT says new nukes are prohibitively expensive, then they flog their solar dream. They are advocating solar power that costs in excess of 20 or even 30 cents kWhr. It is getting politically ridiculous, as for instance in the UK where the government is proposing the expenditure of billions on solar subsidies and the opposition, instead of saying this is money down a rat hole compared with spending on equally low carbon nuclear, is calling for even more billions to be spent on solar, fueled by the dupes of the solar dreamers who have been duped into actually believing nuclear is far more expensive. Or in California, where the 1/3 subsidy of solar plants costing in excess of $15,000 per installed available kW would exceed the entire cost of a nuke, i.e. the taxpayers would be further ahead if they paid for the entire cost of building a nuclear plant and gave it away to the nearest utility company – the net cost per available kWhr to the ratepayers and taxpayers would be less.
@ David – I also looked at the Du and Parsons study and
they reach a different conclusion on the per kWh costs, but the absolute
construction costs are in the same range. They cite the South Texas
project at $6 to $7 billion (not including financing costs or costs to
upgrade transmission, etc) and the FPL project for two units that would
cost between $12 and $18 billion all-in (including financing and
transmission upgrades, et). If you look at the highest range they
provided for construction costs ($18 billion), that translates to $9
billion per unit, which is the same cost figure I used in my analysis as
the high range for nuclear that yields a total cost of $0.044 per kWh.
The major difference between the MIT Du and Parsons study and mine is that they INCLUDE transmission costs and I EXCLUDE them. I was looking solely at the cost of generation, not transmission. The difference between the two figures is not as great as you might think at first glance.
The major difference between the MIT Du and Parsons study and mine is that they INCLUDE transmission costs and I EXCLUDE them. I was looking solely at the cost of generation, not transmission. The difference between the two figures is not as great as you might think at first glance.
Climate Change, Nuclear Power and the Red Queen Syndrome
By: Richard_Mills
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article37698.html
All
through human evolution we have been harnessing increasingly effective
forms of energy. From human power to horse power, to wood, coal,
natural gas and uranium we've been working our way up the energy
efficiency ladder. In reality what we've been doing is searching for
the highest energy density to make energy production more efficient.
"The release of energy from splitting a uranium atom turns out to
be 2 million times greater than breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond in
coal, oil or wood. Compared to all the forms of energy ever employed
by humanity, nuclear power is off the scale. Wind has less than 1/10th
the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal, and coal
half the density of octane. Altogether they differ by a factor of
about 50. Nuclear has 2 million times the energy density of gasoline." William Tucker, Understanding E=MC2
Ahead of the Herd recently
interviewed Richard (Rick) Mills about the dark cloud of negative
sentiment hanging over the nuclear power industry.....
Ahead of the Herd (AOTH): Japan's reactors are
offline, Chinese demand has slowed considerably as well. German demand
has evaporated and many miners are being forced to sell into the spot
and mid-term market. This selling has dropped the much watched spot
price of uranium to US$40.00 lb.
RM: Japan's inventories are thought to be an
overhang in the spot market as are German inventory sales. There's
been very limited Chinese demand lately because of the country's
revised nuclear new build schedule.
Buyers are sitting on the sidelines waiting for prices to come to them.
AOTH: The Chinese authorities took a timeout in
regards to new nuclear builds to implement stringent safety standards
in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
RM: Yes they did. But China has recently released
its new energy plan and it effectively ends the pause on new nuclear
construction. Any reactors currently under construction will be
allowed to continue but new reactors will be required to use
third-generation technology, the EPR or AP1000.
This is a major industry catalyst as it paves the way to commence
building a lot of reactors very soon. Currently China has 12.57 GW in
operation with 26 GW under construction. The Chinese government had
previously stated that its goal was establish 40GW of nuclear power
capacity by 2015 and to reach 80 GW by 2020.
AOTH: It's not hard to raise money in China for nuclear power.
RM: China Guangdong Nuclear raised 1.5 billion yuan
or US$240 million through a *dim sum bond offering. The offering was
oversubscribed by a factor of four, that equates to a lot of interest.
* A bond denominated in Chinese yuan and issued in Hong Kong. Dim sum
bonds are attractive to foreign investors who desire exposure to
yuan-denominated assets, but are restricted by China's capital
controls from investing in domestic Chinese debt - INVESTOPEDIA.
AOTH: And where is Japan?
RM: The current Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)
government tabled a new nuclear energy policy in September 2012 that
would see all reactors phased out in the 2030s. The Cabinet refused to
ratify it and Japanese utilities are spending money upgrading their
reactors and JOGMEC, the Japanese governments exploration arm, has
entered into a joint venture with the government of Uzbekistan to
explore for uranium for export to Japan. You would not do all these
things if you weren't going to restart.
AOTH: Japan has a new regulatory agency.
RM: Yes, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA)
replaces the old NISA. The key takeaway here is that the power
utilities, in addition to the NRA green-lighting their restart, will
only need the consent of the host municipality and the prefectural
governor, no higher levels of government are involved.
An initial regulatory framework will be drafted by Mar-2013 and,
after a public comment period, written into law by Jul-2013.
Inspections, to see if plants are up to the new code, will be allowed
prior to the July legislation so I expect the next restarts in the
third quarter of 2013.
AOTH: Germany is walking away from nuclear power and selling its fuel inventory.
RM: Germany is greenwashing the world. They need to
import more and more nuclear produced electricity from Holland, the
Czech Republic and France to cover their self-inflicted power
shortfall. Germany touts itself as the poster child for green energy
yet they are sucking up nuclear generated power at a prodigious pace,
just not from reactors on their soil.
And that's not all there is to this story. France relies on electric
heaters for heating many of its homes, the country's energy needs
rises over 2,000 MW, the equivalent of two nuclear plants, for every
one degree drop in temperature. Germany helped cover their own, and
the French energy shortage, by using its existing coal-fired plants.
There are twenty three new coal fired power plants under
construction in Germany. Why so many? Because Germany is worried about
the increasing cost of electricity.
Here's a staggering reality, Germany opened a $3.4 billion
2,200 MW coal fired power plant in August 2012. It vomits 13 million
tonnes of CO2 instead of the 15 the old ones do by being 10 percent
more efficient and burning only the 'cleanest' of coal, lignite. In
one year, in just one year that one coal burner will generate one
million times more CO2 than Germanys entire nuclear fleet would have
over 20 years!
The top five coal fired power producers are; China, the U.S., India, Germany and Japan.
AOTH: Mainstream media, many internet bloggers and
newsletter writers are 'reporting' the U.S. has 100 years of NG
supply. There's a widely held perception that there are so many shale
natural gas discoveries being made in the U.S. that nuclear energy is
dead.
RM: Nothing could be further from the truth. The key
to the U.S. natural gas boom is the use of new technology. Hydraulic
fracturing, fracking, and horizontal drilling have tapped huge
resources previously thought unrecoverable.
However the decline rate of shale gas wells is very steep. A year
after coming on-stream production can drop to 20-40 percent of the
original level. If the best prospects were developed first, and they
were, subsequent drilling will take place on increasingly less
favourable prospects. Can you imagine how much drilling would have to
take place just to keep even with the existing production rate? Not,
imo, going to happen.
Here's James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency" and his take on the situation;
"In order to keep production up, the number of wells will have to
continue increasing at a faster rate than previously. This is
referred to as "the Red Queen syndrome" which alludes to the character
in Alice in Wonderland who famously declared that she had to run
faster and faster just to stay where she is."
Here's something else, it's a piece from an interview with energy expert Bill Powers;
"My thesis is that the importance of shale gas has been grossly
overstated; the U.S. has nowhere close to a 100-year supply. This myth
has been perpetuated by self-interested industry, media and
politicians. Their mantra is that exploiting shale gas resources will
promote untold economic growth, new jobs and lead us toward energy
independence.
In the book, I take a very hard look at the facts. And I conclude
that the U.S. has between a five- to seven-year supply of shale gas,
and not 100 years. That is far lower than the rosy estimates put out
by the U.S. Energy Information Administration and others. In the real
world, many companies are taking write-downs of their reserves." Bill Powers, author 'Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Exploding the Natural Gas Supply Myth' in a Energy Report interview
AOTH: What's the state of the U.S. uranium market?
RM: The U.S. has 104 nuclear reactors operating
requiring 55 million pounds of uranium. This is the largest fleet of
nuclear reactors and the US is the world's largest uranium market.
There are also two reactors currently under construction in the U.S.
U.S. uranium mines produced only 4.1 million pounds U3O8 in 2011, three percent less than in 2010.
AOTH: In its just released outlook, the IEA said
global energy demand would grow by more than a third over the period
to 2035, with China, India and the Middle East accounting for 60 per
cent of the increase.
RM: We need to de-carbonize energy. The earth's
population is projected to climb from its current seven billion people
to upwards of ten billion by 2050, most of this population growth
will come from developing countries. All the people without power and
all the new people will want power, they want TV's, air conditioners,
washers and dryers, phones, clean drinking water etc, they will want
electricity. They all want the very same amenities we in the West take
for granted, this will take enormous amounts of energy.
The quote below is from an article by James P. Hogan, Nuclear Power, It's No Contest
"A year's operation of a 1,000-MW coal plant produces 1.5 million
tons of ash - 30,000 truck loads, or enough to cover one and a half
square miles to a depth of 40 feet - that contains large amounts of
carcinogens and toxins, and which can be highly acidic or alkaline
depending on the sulfur content of the coal. Also, ironically, more
unused energy is thrown away in the form of trace uranium in the ash
than was obtained from burning the coal. Getting rid of it is a
stupendous task, and it ends up being dumped in shallow landfills that
are easily leached out by groundwater, or simply piled up in mountains
on any convenient site. And that's only the solid waste. In addition
there is the waste that's disposed of up the smokestack, which
includes 600 pounds of carbon dioxide and ten pounds of sulfur dioxide
every second, and the same quantity of nitrogen oxides as 200,000
automobiles.
An equivalent-size nuke, by contrast, produces nothing in
addition to its cubic yard of high-level waste, because there isn't
any chemical combustion. No ash, no gases, no smokestack, and no need
for elaborate engineering to generate and control enormous air flows.
Because of its compactness, nuclear power is the first major
industrial technology for which it is actually possible to talk about
containing all the wastes and isolating them from the biosphere."
Natural gas systems were the largest anthropogenic (refers to
greenhouse gas emissions that are a direct result of human activities
or are the result of natural processes that have been affected by
human activities) source of methane emissions in the United States in
2009. Methane is more than 20 times as effective as CO2 at trapping
heat in the atmosphere.
AOTH: Life-cycle emissions definitely favor nuclear power.
RM: Nuclear power's life-cycle emissions range from 2
to 59 gram-equivalents of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour. Only
hydropower's range ranked lower at 2 to 48 grams of carbon
dioxide-equivalents per kilowatt-hour. Wind came in at 7 to 124 grams
and solar photovoltaic at 13 to 731 grams. Emissions from natural gas
fired plants ranged from 389 to 511 grams. Coal produces 790 to 1,182
grams of carbon dioxide equivalents per kilowatt hour.
Nuclear energy is the only proven technology that can deliver
base-load electricity on a large scale, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
regardless-of-the-weather, without producing carbon dioxide
emissions. Nuclear power plants emit no carbon pollution - no carbon
monoxide, no sulfur oxides and no nitrogen oxides to the atmosphere -
nor do they need costly electricity storage options.
The bottom line? One ton of uranium produces more energy than several
million tons of coal and oil. Fuel transportation costs are less and
there is less impact on our environment from mining or fracking shale
gas.
AOTH: Nuclear power plants aren't cheap to build.
RM: Neither are $3.5 billion coal fired plants. Here's a bit more from the same article I quoted from earlier...
"A 1,000-MW solar conversion plant, for example - the same size
as I've been using for the comparisons of coal and nuclear - would
cover 50 to 100 square miles with 35,000 tons of aluminum, two million
tons of concrete, 7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000
tons of glass, and 1,500 tons of other metals such as chromium and
titanium - a thousand times the material needed to construct a nuclear
plant of the same capacity. These materials are not cheap, and real
estate doesn't come for nothing. Moreover, these materials are all
products of heavy, energy-hungry industries in their own right that
produce large amounts of waste, much of it toxic. So much for "free" and
"clean" solar power."
When it comes to cost, upfront money isn't everything.
Compare the costs of nuclear/gas, nuclear/coal or nuclear/hydro. The
operational cost of nuclear power was 1.87 ¢/kWh in 2008 which is 68%
of the electricity cost from coal and a quarter of that from gas, and
who wants to dam a bunch more rivers?
One pound of yellowcake (U3O8 - the final product of the uranium
milling process) has the energy equivalence of 35 barrels of oil. One
seven gram uranium fuel pellet has an energy to electricity equivalent
of 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, 564 liters of oil or 1,780
pounds of coal, that's energy density.
Natural gas accounts for 80 percent of the cost to produce power from
an NG power plant while uranium accounts for 5-10 percent of the
price of nuclear energy. The future price of uranium matters little,
yet if Mr. Powers is right what is going to happen in regards to NG
produced electricity pricing in a few short years? Never mind the
environmental cost.
AOTH: Without a much higher incentive price to make
most new production economical we're heading towards a serious
shortage of mined uranium. Many existing uranium mining operations
will not be able to withstand a protracted period of prices in the
low-US$40s, particularly publically-owned entities with high cost
mines and high exposure to spot.
RM: There's not a lot of people that get that, yet
it seems fairly straight forward that without sufficient price
incentive, pipeline mine supply will continue to erode thus
exacerbating the future shortfall. There are several significant
deposits which were progressing down the development path but have
been put on hold due to the fall in the uranium price.
The supply side of the equation needs at least US$70/lb., some
analysts are saying as high as $85lb, to encourage new projects and it
takes up to ten years to develop, permit and build a uranium mine.
We're talking about facts, real supply side issues that will keep the
market tight over the next several years. Expected and new
projects/production are at risk at current prices.
AOTH: There are recent developments backing up what you say.
RM: The Olympic Dam, Kintrye, Millennium and Langer
Heinrich Stage 4 expansion deferrals have removed a potential 22
million pounds of U3O8, or 1.5x the supply provided by Cigar Lake,
from the market.
Areva placed its 9 Mlbs/yr Trekkopje development project on care and maintenance citing a projected US$75/lb break-even price.
Energy Fuels (EFR-TSX) stated on Oct-17-12 that it will cease operations at two of its mines due to current market conditions.
Cameco has cut its long term uranium production forecast trimming guidance by six MM lbs to 36 MM lbs U3O8 in 2018.
AOTH: China is uranium deposit hunting and security
of supply is going to be a huge issue moving forward, especially for
the U.S. which was short 51 million pounds of uranium in 2011.
RM: Here's four good examples of what's happening to future supply.
China's Guangdong Nuclear Power Corp.'s subsidiary Taurus Minerals
did a A$2.2 billion acquisition of Australian listed Extract
Resources. Extract owned the Husab uranium project in Namibia which is
said by Extract to be the fourth largest uranium-only deposit in the
world having measured resources of 84 million pounds uranium and
indicated resources of 274 million pounds (Swakop Uranium is the local
wholly-owned subsidiary of Taurus and is developing Husab).
Canadian PM Stephen Harper met with India's Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh to fast-track the 2010 India-Canada nuclear deal so a lot of
Canadian uranium will be going to India.
Australia-India talks that were recently concluded resulted in an
agreement to see Australian uranium exported to India for its huge
pending nuclear power program. Again this is a deal tying up a lot of
uranium.
Turkey imports more than 70 percent of its energy, primarily fossil
fuels, and electricity demand has been growing an average of eight
percent per year over the past decade. Current Turkish leaders plan to
turn the country into the nuclear energy poster child. Russia is
going to build, and own, the Turkish plants, running them presumably
using fuel from the motherland. This is now the adopted Russian
business model for selling its nuclear technology to nuclear
newcomers. If successful, and there's no reason to believe they won't be
highly competitive, this will take a lot of Russian supply off
market.
Of course all of these long term deals locking up future supply means less uranium for the rest of the world going forward.
AOTH: There are more reactors under construction and planned now than there were before Fukushima.
RM: Without higher prices, we won't see the
necessary uranium mines coming on stream to keep up with the ever
increasing uranium demand from the nuclear power industry.
AOTH: Do you see uranium prices recovering anytime soon?
RM: According to a recent report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), by the year 2035:
"World nuclear electricity generating capacity is projected to grow
from 375 GWe net (at the end of 2010) to between 540 GWe net in the
low demand case and 746 GWe net in the high demand case, increases of
44% and 99% respectively.
There are several catalysts that should spur utilities to pick up their buying activity short term.
The restart of Japanese reactors and the Chinese resumption of
construction for their reactors should at the very least firm up spot
prices. The new Chinese energy plan reiterates a nuclear capacity goal
of 60-70 GW by 2020 which is in line with previous expectations.
Under the terms of the 1993 government-to-government nuclear non-proliferation agreement (Megatons to Megawatts program),
the United States and Russia agreed to commercially implement a 20
year program to convert 500 metric tons of HEU (uranium 235 enriched
to 90 percent) taken from Soviet era warheads, into LEU, low enriched
uranium (less than 5 percent uranium 235). The HEU agreement ends late
in 2013 and removes 24 million pounds of uranium supply from the U.S.
market.
AOTH: The U.S., if naysayers like Bill Powers are
proven correct, has no energy security. They don't in uranium, your
feed for 24/7 base load power and don't in natural gas. Supplying a
meaningful percentage of the U.S. population with renewable power,
solar/wind, is pie in the sky dreaming.
Does anybody else out there, besides the Indians and Chinese,
understand the absolute importance of energy security - security of
supply?
RM: Oh absolutely, EDF of France has dropped US$200
million in cash a full seven years in advance of delivery from one
producer for 13 MM lbs, and has contracted 78 MM lbs from another.
Three billion dollars worth of sales contracts from the United Arab
Emirates appears to cover a full seven years of uranium supply for its
first four reactors.
I would not be surprised if Saudi Arabia follows these examples and
buys long term supply for their planned 16 reactors, if all this
doesn't sound like worry about security of supply, then nothing does.
AOTH: Thank you Rick.Conclusion
Set up in 2008 the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) was to advise
the UK government on climate change issues. Their very first report
stated; "It would be possible to decarbonise electricity generation with very significant nuclear deployment."
Concerns about climate change, carbon footprints, energy security and
the rising cost of fossil fuels spurred a revival of interest in
nuclear power generation. In early 2010 we saw the start of a of a
global nuclear renaissance. It was derailed when the unfortunate
Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant accident paused the renaissance.
Whether you believe in a nuclear renaissance or not, the security of
supply issue for today's global reactor fleet of 436, coupled with
future demand for the 60 nuclear reactors under construction and the
approximately 150 reactors planned, is an issue of paramount
importance and should be on every investors radar screen. Is energy
security on yours?
If not, maybe they should be.
By Richard (Rick) Mills
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Nuclear Power, It's No Contest
Richard (Rick) MillsAhead of the Herd
http://aheadoftheherd.com/Newsletter/2012/Nuclear-Power-Its-No-Contest.html
As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information
The electricity needed for any country to successfully replace fossil fuels, both for transportation and everyday use, will have to come from nuclear generation.
As the world’s population and standard of living continues to climb, demand for more - and cleaner energy - grows alongside the pressures we continue to put on our environment.
Today, there is an almost global wide move to develop higher levels
of nuclear energy production. This is because nuclear energy works,
it’s safe and recognition is slowly dawning it’s going to be impossible
to meet the global, growing demand for energy and cut carbon dioxide
emissions without nuclear energy.
There is simply no other logical alternative.
Nuclear No-Contest
By: James P. Hogan
September 19, 2009
September 19, 2009
jamesphogan.com
Before the 1950s, the future confronting the human race was bleak. With the global population increasing and becoming more dependent on energy-dense technologies to sustain its food supplies and rising living standards, there seemed no escape from the catastrophe that would come eventually when the coal and the oil ran out. But few worried unduly. It was only after an escape from the nightmare presented itself with the harnessing of nuclear processes and the prospect of unlimited energy that people began to worry. People can be very strange.
Toward Higher Energy Densities
For reasons that have mainly to do with politics and the media's thirst for sensationalism, nuclear energy has been a subject of much disinformation and alarmism for several decades. In fact, nuclear is safer, cleaner, and potentially cheaper and more abundant than any other proven source of energy that the human race has come up with. But beyond this, it’s real significance is that it represents the next natural step in the evolutionary progression that has marked the history of energy development.
From unaided muscle power, through the use of animals, wood, wind and water, to coal, and oil, finding better ways of doing the work involved in living has reflected the harnessing of more concentrated energy sources. A lot is written about how much energy can be obtained from this source or that source. But if you really want to do things more easily and efficiently – and open up ways to doing new things that were inconceivable before – what counts is energy density. How much can be packed into a given volume. It's easy to calculate how much energy it takes to lift three hundred people across the Atlantic, and how much wood you'd need to burn to release that much energy. Okay, now try building a wood-burning 757. It won't work. The mountain of logs will never get itself off the ground. You need the concentration of jet fuel.
Some people argue that we don't need nuclear power because we already have other ways to generate electricity. This misses the whole point. It would be like somebody in an earlier century telling Michael Faraday that we didn't need electricity because we already had other ways to heat water. What made electricity so different was its ability to do things that were unachievable to any degree with existing technologies, and the whole field of electrical engineering and electronics that we take for granted today was the result. A similar distinction sets nuclear processes apart from conventional sources. All forms of hydrocarbon and other chemical combustion involve energy changes in the outer electron shells of atoms. The energies associated with transitions of the atomic nucleus are thousands of times more intense, and hence represent a breakthrough to the next regime of energy control that the growth of human populations and wealth creation require. The so-called alternatives do not.
Our present use of nuclear energy, as a replacement for conventional heat sources to generate electricity by steam turbines, is just a first, exploratory step into a qualitatively new realm of capability, opening up prospects of obsoleting most of today's cumbersome and polluting industries in much the same way as the introduction of electricity revolutionized the coal-based methods of the nineteenth century.
The availability of cheap, high-temperature process heat opens the way to desalinating seawater inexpensively in large quantities and pumping it to where it needs to go to irrigate currently useless land. Furthermore at such temperatures, water "cracks" thermally into its constituent atoms, yielding a potentially unlimited supply of hydrogen as a base for a whole range of synthetic liquid fuels to replace gasoline. My guess is that, given the will and the vision, we could be making our own hydrocarbons more cheaply, and possibly with higher efficiency, long before the last barrel of the natural stuff is pumped out of the ground.
What About Safety?
One of the fears implanted in the public mind has been that nuclear power is inherently dangerous. Every form of human activity carries some attendant risk. The only meaningful way that society can judge the acceptability of a given risk is by weighing it against the benefits, and comparing the result with those obtained by similarly treating the alternatives.
Despite the hysterical media reactions to the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, nuclear power remains probably the least threatening to human life of all major industrial technologies. Because the energy density of nuclear fuels is much greater, the amount needed to achieve the same result is correspondingly less. Over five thousand times as much coal has to be mined, transported, and processed as uranium to produce the same amount of energy – 200 trains a year, each consisting of 100 cars, to feed a 1,000 Megawatt plant, compared to four car loads of uranium oxide. Fatalities resulting worldwide from mining operations alone every year are numbered in thousands, but like automobile accidents they occur in ones and twos spread over time in many places, and are largely invisible. In the Western world, nuclear power generation has never killed anybody.
At Three Mile Island no one was killed, no one was hurt, and no member of the public was ever in any danger. We were not at the brink of a major catastrophe. A bizarre set of circumstances coupled with inappropriate operator responses led to a loss of coolant and damage to the reactor core that included the melting of some fuel. The safety systems responded the way they were supposed to by shutting the system down. The outer layers of containment were never challenged, let alone breached, putting conditions well within the worst-case scenario that the plant had been designed to withstand. At one point there was speculation that an accumulation of hydrogen gas might explode. Had it done so, there would have been simply a chemical detonation – certainly nothing of a thermonuclear nature as was suggested by the headline H-BLAST IMMINENT that appeared in some newspapers. It was established later that an explosion couldn't have happened since there was no oxygen present; but even if it had, the shock would have been comparable to that imparted by a sledge hammer, which would hardly damage a reactor vessel with steel walls twelve inches thick. The engine block of a car absorbs more stress thousands of times every minute. Even if the vessel had cracked, any dangerous material would still have had to get through a four-foot concrete shield and an outer steel containment shell to reach the environment. Yes, some radioactive gas accumulated in the containment building and was subsequently vented to the outside. But the predictions of tens of thousands of cancer deaths as a consequence were absurd. The maximum increase in radiation dose measured immediately above the plant was in the order of eight millirems over the course of several days. A routine dental X-ray delivers three times as much in seconds. When a dam bursts, a drilling platform collapses, or a gas storage tank explodes, you don't have days for the luxury of holding press conferences and talking about evacuating.
Chernobyl didn't say anything about nuclear engineering. It did say something about priorities under a militarist totalitarian system in which public safety doesn't figure highly in policymaking. What happened was that the reactor's graphite core caught fire after the safety systems had been turned off for experimental work to be conducted, and the resultant explosion ejected radioactive material due to the lack of a comprehensive containment structure. Reduced containment suggests a design intended primarily to serve military needs, where the fuel has to be removed frequently to avoid the contamination by fission products that would prevent purification to the level that weapons-grade material requires. In civilian power reactors the fuel rods are changed typically every three years, and the obstruction caused by containment structures becomes less of a hassle. So what the circumstances point to is a facility built primarily for defense purposes being used to supplement the power grid at a time of low political tension and reduced military demand.
It's difficult to see how anything comparable could happen with Western nuclear plants in the way that some critics have claimed. Besides operating inside multi-layer containment to ensure defense in depth, Western reactors don't possess graphite cores – such a basis for design was expressly rejected by the U.S. in 1950, precisely because of the risk of one igniting in the way that happened. Two features are essential for a nuclear power reactor to function: a "moderator" substance, which surrounds the fuel and in effect keeps the nuclear chain reaction running; and a coolant to carry away the heat produced and deliver it to the steam generator that drives the turbines. The Chernobyl design used graphite as the moderator and water as the coolant. This means that if the coolant flow fails the reactor will continue to produce heat at full power (because of the presence of the moderator), with consequent rapid escalation to an emergency – as in fact occurred. Western designs, by contrast, use water as both the moderator and the coolant. So if the coolant should fail, the moderator is automatically lost also, and the chain reaction ceases, leaving only the residual fission products as sources of heat to be disposed of, which represents typically five percent of the normal power output.
The actual attributed deaths at Chernobyl numbered thirty-eight, from immediate effects and acute radiation poisoning among firefighters and rescue workers. The figure of hundreds of thousands of long-term cancers that was bandied around came not from any physical diagnoses but from statistical computer exercises using theoretical assumptions that have been shown to be wrong. Studies twenty years later show nothing to support these predictions.
But What If? . . .
More people seem to be realizing that a nuclear power plant cannot explode like an atom bomb. The detonating mechanism for a bomb has to be built with extreme precision for the bomb to work at all, and a power plant contains nothing like it. Besides that, the materials used are completely different. Natural uranium contains about 0.7 percent of the fissionable U-235 isotope, which has to be enriched to more than 90 percent for bomb-grade material. For the slow release of energy required in power reactors, the fuel is enriched to only 3.5 percent. It simply isn't an explosive.
So what about a meltdown? Even if TMI wasn't one, mightn't the next accident be?
Yes, it might. The chance has been estimated – using the same methods that work well in other areas of engineering where there have been enough actual events to verify the calculations – as being about the same as that of a major city being hit by a meteorite one mile across. Even if it happened, simulations and studies indicate that it wouldn't be the calamity that most people imagine. If the fuel did melt its way out of the reactor vessel, it would be far more likely to sputter about and solidify around the massive supporting structure than continue reacting and burrow its way down through the floor. The British tested an experimental reactor in an artificial cave in Scotland for over twenty years, subjecting it to every conceivable failure of the coolant and safety systems. In the end they switched everything off and sat back to see what happened. Nothing very dramatic did. The core quietly cooled itself down, and that was that.
But what if the studies and simulations are flawed and the British experience turns out to be a fluke? Then, mightn't the core turn into a molten mass and go down through the floor?
Yes, it might.
And then what would happen?
Nothing much. We'd have a lot of mess down a hole in the ground, which would probably be the best place for it.
But what if there was a water table near the surface?
In that case we'd create a lot of radioactive steam that would blow back up into the containment building, which again would be the best place for it.
But what if some kind of geological or structural failure caused it to come up outside the containment building?
It would most likely expand high into the sky and dissipate.
But what if . . .
Now we're beginning to see the kinds of improbability chains that have to be dreamed up to create disaster scenarios for scaring the public. Remembering the odds against any major core disintegration in the first place, what if there happened to be an atmospheric inversion that held the cloud down near the ground, and if there was a wind blowing toward an urban area that was strong enough to move the cloud but not enough to disrupt the inversion layer? . . . Then yes, you could end up killing a lot of people. The statistical predictions work out at about 400 fatalities per meltdown. Perhaps not as bad as you'd think. And that's if we're talking about deaths that couldn't be attributed directly to the accident as such, but which would materialize as a slight increase in the cancer rate of a large population over many years, increasing an individual's risk from something like 20.5 percent to 21 percent. Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to cause 10,000 deaths annually in the U.S., for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal is now would require a meltdown somewhere or other every two weeks.
But if we're talking about directly detectable deaths within a couple of months from acute radiation sickness, it would take 500 meltdowns to kill 100 people. On this basis, even having 25 meltdowns every year for 10,000 years would cause fewer deaths than automobiles do in one year.
What About The Radiation, Then?
It's true that even an un-melted down nuke under normal operation and in proper working order releases some radiation into the environment. But then, so does a shovelful of dirt from your back yard, the air you breathe, everything you eat, the water you drink, and even your body tissues. There's hardly anything that doesn't emit some radiation from trace elements that it contains, all of which adds up to a natural background thousands of times stronger than anything contributed by the nuclear industry. The emission from the granite that Grand Central Station is built from exceeds the permissible limit set for industry. Grand Central Station wouldn't get a license as a nuclear plant.
This is not meant to suggest that large doses of radiation aren't harmful. Napalm bombs and blast furnaces are not very healthy either, but it doesn't follow that heat in any amount is therefore hazardous. You wouldn't last long at the no-dose temperature of absolute zero.
The science of toxicology has long recognized the phenomenon of "hormesis," in which substances that are lethal in high doses, turn out to be beneficial, if not actually essential to health, in small doses, as a result of stimulating the body's immune and repair mechanisms. In the last few decades it has become increasingly clear that this applies to ionizing radiation as well. By just about every measure that biologists use to assess the well-being of living things – vitality; longevity; number of offspring; the number of them that survive; healing of injuries; susceptibility to disease and speed of recovery – everything from bacteria through plants, bugs, invertebrates, to mammals and people fares better when the environmental radiation is moderately increased. Depending on the type of organism, the optimum seems to be around ten times the natural background; beyond that the effects become less benign, then harmful, and eventually lethal. And this makes intuitive sense. When it comes to temperature, pressure, humidity, light, internal and external chemical concentrations, and just about everything else that makes up their environments, living things are designed, created, evolved – whatever you subscribe to – to exist within a distinct comfort zone, beyond which too little can be as bad as too much. It would seem odd if the same didn't apply to radiation too.
Nevertheless, we are constantly being told that any level of radiation is harmful, however small. A simple prediction from this would be that cancer in areas with higher background levels ought to be greater. But the fact is, they're not. The cancer rate in Colorado, for example, with twice the nation's average radiation, due to the cosmic rays at that altitude and the high radioactivity of the rocks that occur there, when corrected for such factors as age and occupation, is only 68 percent of the average. The relationship remains negative – i.e. the higher the radiation background, the lower the cancer rate – across the country as a whole, with a spectacular correlation coefficient of minus 39 percent. That's about the same as the correlation of lung cancer with cigarette smoking – but the other way around.
What About The Waste?
Well, after the foregoing heresies, would it come as a complete surprise if I were to suggest that the ease of getting rid of the waste is one of nuclear power's major benefits? Because the amount of fuel needed for the same amount of energy is much smaller, so is the amount of waste produced. And the waste that is produced isn't as hazardous as people are led to believe. It's considerably less dangerous than many other substances that are handled routinely in far greater quantities with far less care, which the world accepts as a matter of course.
Around 95 percent of the spent fuel that comes out of a power reactor can be reprocessed into new fuel and put back in – saving in a typical plant's 40-year lifetime the equivalent of eight billion dollars' worth of oil. Burning it up in this way is the sensible thing to do, and the industry was designed on the assumption that this would be the case. What's left after reprocessing constitutes the "high level" waste that needs to be disposed of. A large, 1,000-MW plant produces about a cubic yard of it in a year – small enough to fit under a dining-room table. A coal plant of equal capacity produces ten tons of waste every minute. A facility to reprocess spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. was commenced as a joint venture by government and industry at Barnwell, South Carolina. But work was halted in early 1977 essentially for political reasons, while at the same time the utilities were cut off from the military reprocessing facilities that had been handling domestic wastes safely for twenty years. Thus, 100 percent of what comes out of reactors is having to be treated as if it were high-level waste, to be stored in ways that were never intended, and this is what gets the publicity. It's a needlessly manufactured political problem, not a technical one. The rest of the world continues to reprocess its spent fuel regardless.
But isn't it true that the high-level waste remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years? So what do you do with that?
Yes, the high-level waste contains fission products that have long half-lives. But these are not what constitute a possible biological hazard. They just provide big numbers that get the public's attention. For obviously, if the energy release is spread out over that long a time, its intensity can't be very great. Rusting iron has a long half-life; TNT has a short one. The principal danger is from the short-lived isotopes, such as iodine 131, with a half-life of eight days. To allow these to decay to levels that can be safely handled, the spent fuel is put into cooling ponds at the reactor site for six months before being shipped for reprocessing.
So what do you do with what's left?
Current proposals are to reduce it to a powder, vitrify the powder into a highly stable glass, seal the glass into steel canisters, and bury them in a concrete repository two thousand feet underground – although some scientists have urged that the repository be made accessible, since the "wastes" contain many rare isotopes that could be invaluable after the current phobias have abated. Beyond this somewhat mundane approach, more recent theoretical and research developments point to the feasibility of artificially stimulating these long-life fission products to decay instead in ways that will take only minutes, using low-cost equipment that can be operated on-site, without need for costly transportation and long-term bulk storage. By definition these are unstable nuclei, after all, like rocks balanced on the edge of a precipice, waiting for a nudge to send them in a direction that they're already set to go. Such a solution has a feeling of "appropriateness" about it – using nuclear technology to resolve an issue that is of an inherently nuclear nature.
Let's make no bones about it. We are talking here about a
significant concentration of radiation that would have to be confined
and handled with great care. If all the electricity used in the United
States were produced by nuclear power, the high-level waste produced
each year would be enough to kill ten billion people – more than the
present population of the planet. Sounds scary, doesn't it? But the
U.S. also produces enough barium to kill a hundred billion people,
enough ammonia and cyanide to kill six trillion, enough phosgene to
kill twenty trillion, and enough chlorine to kill four hundred
trillion. There's no doubt enough gasoline around, too, in cars,
garages, storage refineries, and under filling stations to kill us all
several times over, and enough pills in hospitals, pharmacies, and
family medicine closets. But we don't worry about it, because there's
no way in which the population is going to line up to be administered
their dose or otherwise be evenly exposed to any of these substances.
This is even more true of nuclear waste sealed deep underground.
Every foot of overlying rock reduces the radiation by a factor of ten, which means there's no hazard to anyone above ground from the buried material. What danger there is comes from the risk of some of it finding its way out of the repository and into a person through being ingested or inhaled. Unlike chemical toxins, which remain lethal forever, radiation from nuclear waste decays with time. After ten years of burial, it would be about as toxic as barium if ingested; if inhaled, a tenth as toxic as ammonia and a thousandth as toxic as chlorine. After a hundred years these figures fall to one ten-thousandth, one hundred-thousandth, and one ten-millionth respectively. Nature's biological waste-disposal program puts a thousand million tons of ammonia into the atmosphere every year, and we use chlorine liberally to clean our bathtubs and swimming pools.
For comparison, a year's operation of a 1,000-MW coal plant produces 1.5 million tons of ash – 30,000 truck loads, or enough to cover one and a half square miles to a depth of 40 feet – that contains large amounts of carcinogens and toxins, and which can be highly acidic or alkaline depending on the sulfur content of the coal. Also, ironically, more unused energy is thrown away in the form of trace uranium in the ash than was obtained from burning the coal. Getting rid of it is a stupendous task, and it ends up being dumped in shallow landfills that are easily leached out by groundwater, or simply piled up in mountains on any convenient site. And that's only the solid waste. In addition there is the waste that's disposed of up the smokestack, which includes 600 pounds of carbon dioxide and ten pounds of sulfur dioxide every second, and the same quantity of nitrogen oxides as 200,000 automobiles. So in answer to questions about the "unsolved problem" of nuclear waste, is this supposed to be a solved one?
An equivalent-size nuke, by contrast, produces nothing in addition to its cubic yard of high-level waste, because there isn't any chemical combustion. No ash, no gases, no smokestack, and no need for elaborate engineering to generate and control enormous air flows. Because of its compactness, nuclear power is the first major industrial technology for which it is actually possible to talk about containing all the wastes and isolating them from the biosphere. A study of the consequences of the U.S. going to all-nuclear electricity concluded that the total additional health risk that the average citizen would be exposed to, covering everything from uranium mining through transportation, power generation, to final disposal of the wastes, would be equivalent to that of raising the speed limit by six thousandths of one mile per hour. The risks eliminated, of course, would be far greater.
What About Terrorists?
Fears are expressed that the spread of nuclear power would make available the resources and materials for politically unstable nations and terrorists to make bombs. To whatever degree such possibilities may exist in today's world, domestic nuclear power is pretty much irrelevant. Any group that has the determination and funds to make a bomb can do so in any of at least a half-dozen ways that are cheaper, simpler, faster, and less hazardous than going through the complications of using new or used power plant fuel, and require no access to civilian generating technology. Expertise is available that can be bought for a price, and with laser isotope separation techniques the materials to produce bomb-grade materials exist in rocks everywhere. Slowing the introduction of nuclear power to developing nations does nothing to reduce potential weapons threats. It does, however, retard their economic development and thus help perpetuate the differences in health and living standards that perhaps make resorting to such threats more likely.
Solar Dreaming
If the way forward into the future calls for higher energy densities, the notion that we can depend on solar or wind (which is another form of solar) represents a move backward. To get an idea of just how dilute a source solar is compared even to coal, consider a lump of coal capable of yielding a kilowatt-hour of electricity, which would weigh about a pound, and ask how long the Sun would have to shine on it to deposit the same amount of energy that the coal will release when burned. The area of its shadow, which measures the sunlight intercepted, would be about fifteen square inches. In Arizona in July, with a 24-hour annualized average insolation of 240 watts per square meter, it would take 435 hours, or almost three weeks , for this amount of surface to receive a kilowatt-hour of sunshine. For the average location in the U.S., allowing for bad weather and cloud cover, a reasonable estimate would be twice that. But to obtain a kilowatt-hour of electricity, at the ten to twenty percent efficiency attainable today, which appears to be approaching its limit, we'd be talking somewhere between thirteen and seven months.
The Sun shining on forests for tens or hundreds of years affords an enormous concentration of energy over time that Nature performs for free. Subsequent geological compaction into coal adds another dimension of concentration in space, which humans carry further by their activities of mining and transportation. Hydroelectric power is another form of highly concentrated solar. The Sun evaporates billions of tons of water off the oceans, which fall on wide areas of land and drain through river systems to strategic points suitable for building dams. Once again, most of the work involving the concentration of energy in time and space on enormous scales is done for nothing by Nature.
I wonder if the people who talk glibly about attempting to match such feats artificially really comprehend the scale of the engineering that they're proposing. A 1,000-MW solar conversion plant, for example – the same size as I've been using for the comparisons of coal and nuclear – would cover 50 to 100 square miles with 35,000 tons of aluminum, two million tons of concrete, 7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000 tons of glass, and 1,500 tons of other metals such as chromium and titanium – a thousand times the material needed to construct a nuclear plant of the same capacity. These materials are not cheap, and real estate doesn't come for nothing. Moreover, these materials are all products of heavy, energy-hungry industries in their own right that produce large amounts of waste, much of it toxic. So much for "free" and "clean" solar power.
The comparison doesn't end there. When a power engineer talks about a one-thousand-megawatt plant, he means one that can deliver a thousand megawatts on demand, anytime, day or night. A nuclear plant can do this; so can a conventional fossil-fuel plant. But a solar plant can only operate when the Sun is shining, which straightaway gives it a maximum availability of 50 percent – low enough to be considered prohibitively uneconomic for any other type of power plant. To ensure supply when the demand is there, some kind of regular supply would have to be available as a backup anyway, making the whole idea of solar as a replacement unrealistic.
The only other way would be to provide some kind of storage system that the solar plant would be able to charge up during its operating period, and then draw on when demand exceeds supply. At present there isn't any really satisfactory way of storing large amounts of electrical energy. What's usually proposed instead is to convert it to potential energy by pumping water up to a high reservoir, and letting the water flow back down through turbines in the nonproductive periods. A sleight-of-word commonly slipped in by solar advocates when pushing for this kind of option is to continue referring to the facility as a "thousand megawatt" solar plant. However, the power industry's normal criterion expects a practicable storage system to be capable of recharging at five times the nominal rating. This means that for "thousand megawatt" to mean the same as it does for every other kind of plant, the solar facility would have to have a peak capacity of six thousand megawatts, adding vastly to the size, complexity, cost, and environmental effects implied by the figures above.
Decentralizing by putting solar panels on everyone's roofs wouldn't reduce the cost or the amount of materials, but simply spread them around. In fact things would get worse, for the same reason that McDonalds use less oil to cook two tons of fries than eight thousand households that make a half a pound each. The storage problem wouldn't go away either, but would become each homeowner's responsibility. In a battery just big enough to start a car, gases can accumulate that one spark can cause to explode – sometimes with lethal consequences, as some unfortunates have demonstrated when using jumper cables carelessly. Imagine the hazard that a basement full of batteries the size of grand pianos would present, which a genuinely all-solar home would need to get through a bad spell in, say, Minnesota in January. And who would do the maintenance and keep the acid levels topped up?
Then we have the problem of keeping the roof panels clean and free from snow and wet leaves, not in the summer months, but when the roofs are slippery and frozen. Even today, the biggest cause of accidental deaths in the country, after automobiles, is falls. If we build all those houses with bombs in the basements and skating rinks on the roofs, it seems to me we'd better add in a lot more hospitals and emergency rooms too, while we're at it.
As a science-fiction writer, I'm certainly enthusiastic about the thought of our expanding into space – for the right reasons. Solar power satellites has never struck me as one of them. The intensity of solar radiation outside the atmosphere is about six times that on the surface, which isn't a lot really. I don't see how it could justify the expense of putting huge amounts of technology into orbit to re-concentrate energy diluted by ninety-three million miles' worth of the inverse square law, when we can generate it at the Sun's original density right here. One study that I read estimated 10,000 shuttle launches to build a satellite capable of powering New York City – and on top of that would be the cost of ground equipment to receive the beamed power.
Similar considerations apply equally to wind power, which seems to be the current fad of the political savants who would lead us into the twenty-first century. The picture above shows the South Korean nuclear park at Yongwang, which has six one-thousand-megawatt reactors. Matching that capacity with wind generators would require a wind farm 175 miles wide extending from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Direct solar would require somewhere around 20 square miles of collector area alone, i.e. without allowing any spacing for steerable geometry or the maintenance access that would be necessary for a practical plant design.
This isn't to say that solar doesn't have its uses. It can be beneficial in remote places far from a supply grid, such as isolated farms or weather stations, and if somebody who lives in the right place finds it worthwhile to shave something off his electricity bill, there's nothing wrong with that. But the problem that matters isn't simply a domestic one of keeping the living room at 75 degrees and heating the bath water. The real issue is that of running the aluminum smelters, steel mills, fertilizer plants, cement works, factories, and transportation systems that keep a modern industrial society functioning. Solar and its variants can never make a significant contribution. And that is precisely the reason why those who don't want a modern industrial society are so much in favor of it and would like to see everything else forcibly shut down.
All of the world's peoples would like to think that a century from now their children will be living that way. They could be, too. The human race possesses the knowledge and the ability to ensure that every child born on the planet could look forward to a healthy and well-fed body, an educated mind, and the opportunity to become the best that he or she is capable of. But when the demand is translated into energy needs – providing a globally stabilized population of, say, ten billion with energy per person probably greater than that of the U.S. today – the amount is utterly beyond any approaches that are merely variations of what we have. Only continued evolution into the next logical realm of energy control can do it.
So, can we make nuclear energy work, safely, cleanly, and efficiently? Sure we can. When we take a long, hard look at the alternatives, we see that we have to. Fortunately for all of us, the Neanderthals who first learned how to tame fire thought the same way.
James P. Hogan, a former digital systems engineer and computer sales executive, has been a full-time writer since 1980. He was born in London, moved to the USA for many years, and now lives in the Republic of Ireland. His web site is at jamesphogan.com
Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
Every foot of overlying rock reduces the radiation by a factor of ten, which means there's no hazard to anyone above ground from the buried material. What danger there is comes from the risk of some of it finding its way out of the repository and into a person through being ingested or inhaled. Unlike chemical toxins, which remain lethal forever, radiation from nuclear waste decays with time. After ten years of burial, it would be about as toxic as barium if ingested; if inhaled, a tenth as toxic as ammonia and a thousandth as toxic as chlorine. After a hundred years these figures fall to one ten-thousandth, one hundred-thousandth, and one ten-millionth respectively. Nature's biological waste-disposal program puts a thousand million tons of ammonia into the atmosphere every year, and we use chlorine liberally to clean our bathtubs and swimming pools.
For comparison, a year's operation of a 1,000-MW coal plant produces 1.5 million tons of ash – 30,000 truck loads, or enough to cover one and a half square miles to a depth of 40 feet – that contains large amounts of carcinogens and toxins, and which can be highly acidic or alkaline depending on the sulfur content of the coal. Also, ironically, more unused energy is thrown away in the form of trace uranium in the ash than was obtained from burning the coal. Getting rid of it is a stupendous task, and it ends up being dumped in shallow landfills that are easily leached out by groundwater, or simply piled up in mountains on any convenient site. And that's only the solid waste. In addition there is the waste that's disposed of up the smokestack, which includes 600 pounds of carbon dioxide and ten pounds of sulfur dioxide every second, and the same quantity of nitrogen oxides as 200,000 automobiles. So in answer to questions about the "unsolved problem" of nuclear waste, is this supposed to be a solved one?
An equivalent-size nuke, by contrast, produces nothing in addition to its cubic yard of high-level waste, because there isn't any chemical combustion. No ash, no gases, no smokestack, and no need for elaborate engineering to generate and control enormous air flows. Because of its compactness, nuclear power is the first major industrial technology for which it is actually possible to talk about containing all the wastes and isolating them from the biosphere. A study of the consequences of the U.S. going to all-nuclear electricity concluded that the total additional health risk that the average citizen would be exposed to, covering everything from uranium mining through transportation, power generation, to final disposal of the wastes, would be equivalent to that of raising the speed limit by six thousandths of one mile per hour. The risks eliminated, of course, would be far greater.
What About Terrorists?
Fears are expressed that the spread of nuclear power would make available the resources and materials for politically unstable nations and terrorists to make bombs. To whatever degree such possibilities may exist in today's world, domestic nuclear power is pretty much irrelevant. Any group that has the determination and funds to make a bomb can do so in any of at least a half-dozen ways that are cheaper, simpler, faster, and less hazardous than going through the complications of using new or used power plant fuel, and require no access to civilian generating technology. Expertise is available that can be bought for a price, and with laser isotope separation techniques the materials to produce bomb-grade materials exist in rocks everywhere. Slowing the introduction of nuclear power to developing nations does nothing to reduce potential weapons threats. It does, however, retard their economic development and thus help perpetuate the differences in health and living standards that perhaps make resorting to such threats more likely.
Solar Dreaming
If the way forward into the future calls for higher energy densities, the notion that we can depend on solar or wind (which is another form of solar) represents a move backward. To get an idea of just how dilute a source solar is compared even to coal, consider a lump of coal capable of yielding a kilowatt-hour of electricity, which would weigh about a pound, and ask how long the Sun would have to shine on it to deposit the same amount of energy that the coal will release when burned. The area of its shadow, which measures the sunlight intercepted, would be about fifteen square inches. In Arizona in July, with a 24-hour annualized average insolation of 240 watts per square meter, it would take 435 hours, or almost three weeks , for this amount of surface to receive a kilowatt-hour of sunshine. For the average location in the U.S., allowing for bad weather and cloud cover, a reasonable estimate would be twice that. But to obtain a kilowatt-hour of electricity, at the ten to twenty percent efficiency attainable today, which appears to be approaching its limit, we'd be talking somewhere between thirteen and seven months.
The Sun shining on forests for tens or hundreds of years affords an enormous concentration of energy over time that Nature performs for free. Subsequent geological compaction into coal adds another dimension of concentration in space, which humans carry further by their activities of mining and transportation. Hydroelectric power is another form of highly concentrated solar. The Sun evaporates billions of tons of water off the oceans, which fall on wide areas of land and drain through river systems to strategic points suitable for building dams. Once again, most of the work involving the concentration of energy in time and space on enormous scales is done for nothing by Nature.
I wonder if the people who talk glibly about attempting to match such feats artificially really comprehend the scale of the engineering that they're proposing. A 1,000-MW solar conversion plant, for example – the same size as I've been using for the comparisons of coal and nuclear – would cover 50 to 100 square miles with 35,000 tons of aluminum, two million tons of concrete, 7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000 tons of glass, and 1,500 tons of other metals such as chromium and titanium – a thousand times the material needed to construct a nuclear plant of the same capacity. These materials are not cheap, and real estate doesn't come for nothing. Moreover, these materials are all products of heavy, energy-hungry industries in their own right that produce large amounts of waste, much of it toxic. So much for "free" and "clean" solar power.
The comparison doesn't end there. When a power engineer talks about a one-thousand-megawatt plant, he means one that can deliver a thousand megawatts on demand, anytime, day or night. A nuclear plant can do this; so can a conventional fossil-fuel plant. But a solar plant can only operate when the Sun is shining, which straightaway gives it a maximum availability of 50 percent – low enough to be considered prohibitively uneconomic for any other type of power plant. To ensure supply when the demand is there, some kind of regular supply would have to be available as a backup anyway, making the whole idea of solar as a replacement unrealistic.
The only other way would be to provide some kind of storage system that the solar plant would be able to charge up during its operating period, and then draw on when demand exceeds supply. At present there isn't any really satisfactory way of storing large amounts of electrical energy. What's usually proposed instead is to convert it to potential energy by pumping water up to a high reservoir, and letting the water flow back down through turbines in the nonproductive periods. A sleight-of-word commonly slipped in by solar advocates when pushing for this kind of option is to continue referring to the facility as a "thousand megawatt" solar plant. However, the power industry's normal criterion expects a practicable storage system to be capable of recharging at five times the nominal rating. This means that for "thousand megawatt" to mean the same as it does for every other kind of plant, the solar facility would have to have a peak capacity of six thousand megawatts, adding vastly to the size, complexity, cost, and environmental effects implied by the figures above.
Decentralizing by putting solar panels on everyone's roofs wouldn't reduce the cost or the amount of materials, but simply spread them around. In fact things would get worse, for the same reason that McDonalds use less oil to cook two tons of fries than eight thousand households that make a half a pound each. The storage problem wouldn't go away either, but would become each homeowner's responsibility. In a battery just big enough to start a car, gases can accumulate that one spark can cause to explode – sometimes with lethal consequences, as some unfortunates have demonstrated when using jumper cables carelessly. Imagine the hazard that a basement full of batteries the size of grand pianos would present, which a genuinely all-solar home would need to get through a bad spell in, say, Minnesota in January. And who would do the maintenance and keep the acid levels topped up?
Then we have the problem of keeping the roof panels clean and free from snow and wet leaves, not in the summer months, but when the roofs are slippery and frozen. Even today, the biggest cause of accidental deaths in the country, after automobiles, is falls. If we build all those houses with bombs in the basements and skating rinks on the roofs, it seems to me we'd better add in a lot more hospitals and emergency rooms too, while we're at it.
As a science-fiction writer, I'm certainly enthusiastic about the thought of our expanding into space – for the right reasons. Solar power satellites has never struck me as one of them. The intensity of solar radiation outside the atmosphere is about six times that on the surface, which isn't a lot really. I don't see how it could justify the expense of putting huge amounts of technology into orbit to re-concentrate energy diluted by ninety-three million miles' worth of the inverse square law, when we can generate it at the Sun's original density right here. One study that I read estimated 10,000 shuttle launches to build a satellite capable of powering New York City – and on top of that would be the cost of ground equipment to receive the beamed power.
Similar considerations apply equally to wind power, which seems to be the current fad of the political savants who would lead us into the twenty-first century. The picture above shows the South Korean nuclear park at Yongwang, which has six one-thousand-megawatt reactors. Matching that capacity with wind generators would require a wind farm 175 miles wide extending from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Direct solar would require somewhere around 20 square miles of collector area alone, i.e. without allowing any spacing for steerable geometry or the maintenance access that would be necessary for a practical plant design.
This isn't to say that solar doesn't have its uses. It can be beneficial in remote places far from a supply grid, such as isolated farms or weather stations, and if somebody who lives in the right place finds it worthwhile to shave something off his electricity bill, there's nothing wrong with that. But the problem that matters isn't simply a domestic one of keeping the living room at 75 degrees and heating the bath water. The real issue is that of running the aluminum smelters, steel mills, fertilizer plants, cement works, factories, and transportation systems that keep a modern industrial society functioning. Solar and its variants can never make a significant contribution. And that is precisely the reason why those who don't want a modern industrial society are so much in favor of it and would like to see everything else forcibly shut down.
All of the world's peoples would like to think that a century from now their children will be living that way. They could be, too. The human race possesses the knowledge and the ability to ensure that every child born on the planet could look forward to a healthy and well-fed body, an educated mind, and the opportunity to become the best that he or she is capable of. But when the demand is translated into energy needs – providing a globally stabilized population of, say, ten billion with energy per person probably greater than that of the U.S. today – the amount is utterly beyond any approaches that are merely variations of what we have. Only continued evolution into the next logical realm of energy control can do it.
So, can we make nuclear energy work, safely, cleanly, and efficiently? Sure we can. When we take a long, hard look at the alternatives, we see that we have to. Fortunately for all of us, the Neanderthals who first learned how to tame fire thought the same way.
James P. Hogan, a former digital systems engineer and computer sales executive, has been a full-time writer since 1980. He was born in London, moved to the USA for many years, and now lives in the Republic of Ireland. His web site is at jamesphogan.com
Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
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