The latest advocates are former fans of renewable energy at the European Union, who say the strategy will be "essential" if the EU is to meet targets for limiting the emissions of the greenhouse gas CO2. This month, at a conference in Brussels, Europe's new commissioner for energy, Andris Piebalgs, said the EU could cut CO2 emissions while continuing to burn its native coal and lignite. And still stay economically competitive.
Notice the phrase "former fans of renewable energy". Now that the Euros have put themselves on the hook to meet Kyoto Accord carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction targets their leaders are finally looking hard at the cost of a large scale shift to non-fossil fuel energy sources and they are not liking what they are finding. Hence Tony Blair's sudden warming to nuclear power and the EU energy commissioner's embrace of technologies for clean coal. These people are beginning to sound a lot like the Bush Administration (leaving aside Bush's deal with the coal burners that put them on the slow road to cleaning up their power plants).
Solar photovolatics are literally an order of magnitude more expensive than nuclear or wind. So what is being discussed here is the idea of making extremely clean coal power that can compete with nuclear and wind power.
Cost is the big issue. CO2 has to be separated from the exhaust fumes, piped to an oil field, coal field, or other suitable deep underground formation, and then piped down into the ground. Each step has a cost associated with it. Does anyone know which of the steps is most expensive?
Note that injection of CO2 into coal can help to produce methane from coal. So part of the sequestration cost can be offset by the value of the extracted methane. Similarly, CO2 injection into depleted oil fields can be used to enhance extraction of oil from those oil fields. So again part of the sequestration cost might be offset by additional energy extracted as a result.
At an estimated current price of $40 to $60 per tonne of CO2, carbon storage and burial is still not cheap, though its proponents say it could soon compete with renewable energy.
So here is the question: In a modern high efficiency coal burning electric generating station how many kilowatt hours of electricity are generated per tonne of CO2 emitted? Does anyone know the answer? Take that number and divide the $40 or $60 by that number to get the cost of CO2 sequestration per kilowatt-hour. For coal to compete that cost must work out to at most a couple of pennies per kilowatt-hour.
This is part of a bigger question I've asked here before: Given current technologies what is the total cost (measured in pennies per kilowatt-hour) for reducing emissions from coal burning electric power stations by 99+%?
My guess is that even with technological advances achievable within the next 5 years very low emissions coal burning is going to be a lot more expensive than nuclear. Look forward 20 years and maybe photovoltaics will be as cheap as nuclear. But right now nuclear is the cheapest way to reduce CO2 emissions while simultaneously producing little in the way of other immediate pollution.
By Randall Parker at 2005 May 02 11:59 AM Policy Energy | TrackBackHow about reforestation of deserts, by actually planting many billions of genetically enhanced trees designed to survive in deserts? Some biologists have certainly worked on trees capable of surviving in deserts. Then we can use robots to make it economical to plant hundreds of billions of trees in deserts at a low cost, and the trees would then absorb much of the CO_2.
Also, the planktons in the ocean can be used to digest the CO_2 from coal plants. The late physicist Edward Teller had suggested that by pouring a reasonably small amount of iron powder in the ocean, the planktons can be invigorated and multiplied so that they would eat much of the CO_2.
But the main issue about burning the coal in a clean fashion, is not so much CO_2, but the toxic metals like mercury, uranium, etc. What we need to do is to improve the filtering process of the coal plants. Then it will be OK to build many more coal fired plants.
Invis: Let's also point out that burning coal is short-sighted. It's going to run out at some point.
As for the plankton, I believe I read an article about where they actually successfully tried this. But then you know how science and politics works. For some reason people are afraid of taking active positive steps in altering the environment. Continuing our active negative steps like burning coal, well that's a different story.
One of the major problems I have with the 'expense' of switching to a different energy source is that it's such a short term outlook. Of course our current energy generation methods are cheaper than something new. They've been being actively refined for the last century. However, I think it's important that we invest in our future.
I do like the idea of reforestation especially for places like northern Africa and the Arabian penninsula that have minimal eco-systems that would be disrupted.
It's not the source be it coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or oil.
It's zero emissions. Zero emissions the way that W. Edwards Deming talked about zero defect.
I'd use Bill McDonough's ecological design principles; waste equals food, use only available solar income, respect diversity, and love all the children. I would like to do the thought experiment of those parameters. Could a zero emissions social system provide R. Buckminster Fuller's bare maximum for the world population? Is a zero emissions social system even possible?
BrenBart:
I agree that investment in the future is needed, but the "expense" question is not without merits, short-term though it may be. Economic collapse brought on by a rapid ramping-up of energy prices to pay for a quick conversion (not an impossible scenario; I think the world's economy is too leveraged to rule out somebody miscalculating and pushing us just a billion or two over the line and starting a chain-reaction) could hurt productivity and decrease available capital for further advancement. We may get stuck, without the resources to run the current infrastructure and fund the scientific community long enough to get to the next big technological breakthrough.
I favor a multi-pronged approach: Invest in the renewables and more efficient non-renewables, build a few more nuclear plants to tide us over, upgrade slowly.
The problem is, however, gradual progress doesn't get much attention or show rapid return-on-investment, so it's easily undercut by succeeding CEOs and administrations.
[All this is armchair energy-policy-writing from an art/history major, so feel free to tear it to shreads.]
"Invis: Let's also point out that burning coal is short-sighted. It's going to run out at some point."
So is everything on Earth that yields energy faster than it comes in from the sun. We need it to get infrastructure off-planet so we can start importing energy.
So, we have Parker selling nuke power again? Since he has decided not to answer my questions as to how much money he receives from the nuke power industry to run this shill, someone else will have to pass this on.
http://www.seen.org/pages/db/method.shtml runs through the calculations of CO2/ kW-hr. It turns out to be right about two pounds per kW-hr. So given Parker's average estimate of $50/ton for sequestration costs, that would be about a nickel per kW-hr. But since Parker gets all his information via his nuker buddies that estimate is overblown by a facter of 2.5. The DOE at http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/geologic.html indicates that the actual cost would be about two cents for new power plants.
What our nuke-friendly Mr. Parker also doesn't add in is the cost of nuclear waste sequestration to the cost of nuclear power, since that is picked up for free by us taxpayers. He also doesn't include the cost of risk/insurance avoided by the Price/Anderson Act, another Federal Government giveaway to the nuke industry that allows them to abscond in the event of a large scale nuclear disaster. The nukers will tell you that a large nuclear release from a power reactor is impossible, but why then would they fight like a bunch of wildcats to re-instate Price-Anderson which absolves them from responsibility for just such an incident?
This British report suggests a net cost for CO2 sequestration for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in the North Sea if the oil price is assumed to be $20/barrel. But at current oil prices it is very likely that the sequestration could more than pay for itself. EOR in the US on land is likely to be even more cost effective since it is less expensive. Of course the coal/sequestration/EOR provides additional economic benefits in that many more people would be employed in the projects compared to nuclear and the nation's dependency on imported oil would be reduced.
Given the massively increased risk of a devastating trillion dollar disaster caused by a terrorist attack on vulnerable nuke power plants, we should be talking about dismantling the existing power plants rather than building new ones.
I forgot the British report reference. It is http://www.consumer.gov.uk/energy/coal/cfft/co2capture/CO2Reportv5.pdf
As an ardent plant lover I must say that all this talk about reducing CO2 is a bit distressing. Honestly, plants love CO2 and simply cannot get enough of the stuff. CO2 is the plant's elixir of life.
Plants do not like heavy metals, sulfuric acid, and nox compounds. So please concentrate on the toxins and true pollutants, not the CO2. People who focus on CO2 as the problem remind me of the people in the 60s and 70s who predicted massive starvation for the 70s and 80s unless the world rejected capitalism. It is rather as if the same group of people had simply changed tactics, what?
CO2 sequestration gives me "the willies." Trying to put CO2 into old oil fields, into solution at the bottom of the ocean, or what have you sounds risky - if spent nuclear fuel leaks into an acquifer, you can get your water from somewhere else. If CO2 leaks into the atmosphere, you are stuck because there is only one atmosphere!
Antarctivark,
Don't worry. The CO2 levels are much higher than at any time in the last half million years or so, according to Antarctic ice records, so the plants should be happy. Indirect measurements suggest that it was higher at the Permian-Triassic boundary and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, but those are times of mass extinction. The plants didn't do too well at those times, but we are very sure that almost all of the animals died off. Probably just a coincidence.
Mr. Eco,
Consider that the gas in the wells I'm working on right now has been down there for about six hundred million years. Rocks a few thousand feet down leak very, very slowly. You can relax as far as a leak through the rocks goes. Now there is always the possibility that there could be a release at the injection site, but with proper oversight by the USGS that risk can be eliminated. You guys worry too much.
And here is a bit from the other side - of the world (Australia) and of the argument:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0415-23.htm
It does a good job of covering the insurance issues and the waste storage issues.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So, we have Parker selling nuke power again? Since he has decided not to answer my questions as to how much money he receives from the nuke power industry to run this shill, someone else will have to pass this on."
"Given the massively increased risk of a devastating trillion dollar disaster caused by a terrorist attack on vulnerable nuke power plants, we should be talking about dismantling the existing power plants rather than building new ones."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excellent point, but this is why the importance of NEW reactor designs must be emphasized: these designs EXIST!!!
1) The already proven Pebble Bed Reactor, which uses helium gas instead of water, has an intrinsically meltdown-proof design, in the sense that even if the entire reactor were totally demolished, the billiard ball shaped fuel components cannot spread any significant radiation to the environment, and absolutely no meltdown is possible because the configuration of the reactor does not allow any overheating even if the flow of helium is interrupted.
2) More efficient than the Pebble Bed Reactor, is the more intricate, but far more fuel efficient Integral Fast Reactor, design, which can also be made meltdown-proof, by using molten uranium salts circulating in a configuration that cannot overheat even if it accumulates after sabotage. The advantage of the Integral Fast Reactor is that it is designed to re-process and burn the long term nuclear waste internally, without the need to send the spent fuel to a reprocessing facility. This makes the IFR up to 100 times more fuel efficient, since all the U-238 which gets converted into plutonium and other long term heavy elements, actually gets burned as fuel (if the spent fuel of the Pebble Bed Reactor were sent to a reprocessing facility to extract the newly formed plutonium and to blend this plutonium with the new fuel components, then the Pebble Bed Reactor can also be made much more fuel efficient like the IFR.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"So, we have Parker selling nuke power again? Since he has decided not to answer my questions as to how much money he receives from the nuke power industry to run this shill, someone else will have to pass this on."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I forgot to mention one detail. When the Clinton Administration terminated the funding of the Integral Fast Reactor, this was AFTER the feasibility of the IFR was successfully demonstrated... But my personal opinion was not that this played to the hand of anti-nuclear groups and/or the oil companies. On the contrary, more cynically it was almost certainly the Uranium MINING Industry that probably felt threatened by a reactor design that is 100 times (10,000 %) more uranium fuel efficient than the conventional designs!!! Note that the stocks of virtually all of the uranium mining companies, especially the leading uranium mining company Cameco (stock symbol CCJ in NYSE, even though this is a Canadian company) have rallied
dramatically since the year 2000. Cameco (CCJ) itself rallied from $4 to over $40 within 4 years since the year 2000, and this is happening before even the world is more dependent on nuclear energy! Clearly, the adoption of the Integral Fast Reactor would be very bad for the uranium mining industry because in that case even if the world build 100 times more reactors than the current number of reactors, then this would only double the amount of uranim burned per year, and given that more uranium is being mined by rivals now, this would actually almost certainly hurt the mining profits!!!
Invisible Scientist
Hmm I hadn't thought of the mining lobby. Very good point. That might further explain the reason Canada went with the heavy water reactor versus other designs. The heavy water design,arguements of technical merit aside, has only about 1/5 the burn down of a BWR for example. More Uranium usage. Not sure how much horsepower they have by themselves but if partnered with the primary mining lobbiests their influence would be noticeable.
BTW wasn't the IFR also capable of burning thorium without major modifiecation?
http://www.asponews.org/images/2005Scenario.jpg
Just to speed things up a little, check this link, look at what is available now in 2005. Now look at what will be available just 15 years from now. Much less.
How about demand? That is ramping up at about 2-4% a year. Maybe we should conserve -- starting yesterday -- and speed up nuclear power. I think only to be fair to the public, that the C.E.O.s and owners of nuclear power should be required to live next to their power plants or the nuclear waste repository site… whichever is more convenient.
"I think only to be fair to the public, that the C.E.O.s and owners of nuclear power should be required to live next to their power plants or the nuclear waste repository site… whichever is more convenient."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If we use breeder reactors (such as the Integral Fast Reactor) that burn the long term nuclear byproducts (including plutonium), then the remaining short term nuclear waste would have a half-life about 300 years or less. Hence this type of remaining nuclear waste, called low level waste, can be cheaply (this is the key word) enclosed in various types of containers, preferably blended in molten glass (vitrification) and this type of enclosure would be safe for long term storage, since the short half-life of the low level nuclear waste would make it possible to store nearly unlimited amounts of such waste in underground depositories (no need for Yucca Mountain.)
Due to political reasons, the reprocessing of nuclear waste is not being done to extract the long term byproducts that are actually perfect nuclear fuels. Instead, the Soviet surplus plutonium from the retired weapons, is being purchased from Russia in order to be blended with the regular uranium that is being consumed by the current conventional reactors in the USA. The accumulating enormous amounts plutonium in the spent nuclear fuel rods, can be used for many long years as extra fuel, while elimintaing the dangerous long term nuclear waste. But the mentally challenged politicians need some gene therapy to add stem cells to their brains.
Mr. Invisible,
I would agree that the new generation nuclear reactors have a lot of potential and would be a great improvement over the current generation. A big part of the problem lies in the natural conservatism of the industry when it comes to coughing up a few billion in capital for a new-fangled device. Another problem is that any reactor constitutes a huge concentration of radioactive isotopes that in the worst possible case gets vaporized by a nuclear explosive and takes out a huge swath of real estate. As I pointed out before, both sides in the cold war targeted the other's nuke plants to make sure the destruction was permanent. Thankfully both sides were fairly rational then. That is not the case with our current enemies. It is awfully hard to estimate the likelihood of a successful terrorist attack over the next 50 years or so. The real question is "Can we afford to provide the sort of protection that this type of target demands?"
Your remarks concerning lobbying on the part of various energy concerns is appropriate. One would like to believe that a well informed electorate would be a force in the policy decisions, but the information the electorate gets pretty much depends on how much money for ads the respective side has to throw at the issue. We all just have to try to do our parts to try to make this a real democracy.
Thanks for passing on my challenge to Mr. Parker. I would hate to think that this seemingly educational and informative blog is just another mouthpiece for billion dollar business. But given the highly consistent parroting of nuke industry propaganda, one has to wonder.
Invisible Scientist
I concure fully. Burn the stuff. For people worried about proliferation the answer is also burn the stuff. Buy up the old Soviet stockpiles and start using it. After a small period of time you have P240 instead of 239 and no one to my knowledge has ever figured out how to make a reliable device with high percentages of P240. As far as living next to one I'd have no problem with it. I'd be far more concerned living in a port city anywhere in the US and nearly as concerned living within 5 miles of a major chemical processing plant.
I'd actually prefer if waste material wasn't encapsulated quite so quickly. Some of the more exotic isotopes could have improtant uses (i.e. how do people think their smoke alarms are built? Buy a smoke alarm, support nuclear energy :)
As far as target value during the cold war. Nuclear plants were targeted, along with dams, major transport hubs, major resource points etc. etc.. Criteria was to destroy a nation economically to prevent rapid recovery. We targeted them the same. I remember years ago seeing a declassified targeting proposal for Moscow. It amounted to 40 ~300kt warheads covering a grid pattern with several intended for surface/subsurface burst. Their equivalent of NORAD was in for an even bigger lovetap.
I digress however. To the main point I can't see clean coal as being economical. The pilot plant they tried out in my state was quietly closed down a couple of years ago. Single turbine system identical layout to the origional single 20 MW turbine plant. The origional plant did have scrubbers and such retrofitted. The new plant (build beside the previouse) was about double the size. The last I checked it was quietly being converted back to a tradtional configuration due to cost, reliability. In other words it was a waste of money and a pain in the butt to use. This didn't even address the carbon sequestering issue so call it the first attempted evolution.
[FuturePundit Edited This Post: Invisible, do not entirely copy a copyrighted article into a comment. I deleted most of the copied article]
I AM PASTING BELOW, AN ARTICLE ABOUT NUCLEAR TRANSMUTATION (WHICH
IS THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONG TERM NUCLEAR WASTE INTO SHORT TERM WASTE).
THIS IS A CRUCIAL ISSUE, AND ONCE IT IS PROPERLY DONE, THERE WILL BE ENOUGH
SAFE AND CLEAN NUCLEAR FUEL FOR MANY CENTURIES, BUT WITHOUT IT, WE CANNOT
GO NUCLEAR, BECAUSE TOO MUCH WASTE WILL ACCUMULATE, AND THERE WON'E BE ENOUGH
URANIUM.
----------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
By Arjun Makhijani, Hisham Zerriffi and Annie Makhijani
March/April 2001 pp. 34-41 (vol. 57, no. 02) © 2001 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
ad ideas seldom die: they simply go into hibernation, ready to burst forth when conditions ripen.
A decade ago, the transmutation of high-level nuclear waste was widely seen as a dead end. It was too complex, too congenial to proliferation, and too expensive. But today, transmutation research is again fashionable. At international energy conferences it is lauded as "bringing to the table new concepts that could be relevant for next-generation power producing systems" and as being "rather seductive to all of us" because it will require "new reprocessing techniques, new fuel developments, additional nuclear data, new reactors and irradiation facilities." In 1999, Europe's Nuclear Energy Agency said transmutation research in Japan would help bring "the nuclear option into the twenty-first century in a healthy state." And in January, Pete Domenici, New Mexico's Republican senator, secured $34 million to test the technology at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
What's going on? How did moribund, poorly coordinated research programs on transmutation spring back to life? In a word: politics.
In retrospect, in view of the fact that it would almost certainly take a at least three more decades to make the reprocessing technology cheap enough to create a clean nuclear waste management cycle (the article above says that the current state of the art would take trillions of dollars to build such a delicate infrastructure to build a worldwide nuclear reprocessing-transmutation cycle, even though in the long run this would certainly pay, become economical and environmentally sound).
But given that the United States has enough coal for more than 3 centuries, and given the fact that it is FAR cheaper and faster to build coal fired plants, even with the most stringent and most modern emissions cleaning filters, it is perhaps a good idea to build a lot more coal fired plants until the nuclear industry becomes more mature. Given the danger of accumulating too much unprocessed nuclear waste, it is not a good idea to build hundreds or even dozens of conventional reactors (includind the Pebble Bed Reactor, which is still conventional, even though it is safe.) Formerly, I had underestimated the cost of reprocessing spent fuel, which will take time to reduce.
Invisible,
Remember that UC Berkeley or Lawrence Livermore web page about the cancelled breeder reactor that you have urged me to read for years? They thought they had a great technology and said they were about to demonstrate it when the Clinton Administration pulled the plug and yanked their funding just as they were about to finish. Well, why'd the Clinton Administration do that? Because they didn't think that breeder design would work? Or because they were afraid it would work?
My guess (and it is only a guess) is that breeder reactors would be a lot further along today if political opposition hasn't prevented its more rapid development.
I read the complete article that you link to above. But I've read other articles that painted rosier pictures about what breeder reactors could accomplish.
Also, that article above pans the reactor design that uses a particle accelerator to feed in neutrons into nuclear materials. But 1984 Nobel Prize Winner Carlo Rubbia of Italy has a reactor design under construction in Italy with EU funding to test out that approach. This approach is known as the Accelerator-Driven Subcritical (ADS) system.
The ADS system adopts a different approach to nuclear safety - one that even Homer Simpson could not undermine. As its name implies, the ADS reactor is "sub-critical" - that is, its fuel simply does not generate enough neutrons to sustain a chain reaction. Instead, the reactor is fed with neutrons created by a particle accelerator. Cut off this supply of neutrons - deliberately or accidentally - and the reactor reverts to its natural, somnolent state. An explosive chain reaction is not just unlikely: it is prevented by the laws of physics.Moreover, as chain reaction stability no longer depends on the type of fuel used, the ADS system is a nuclear omnivore, able to work with fuels that are wholly unsuited to weapons production. To cap it all, an ADS reactor can even consume radioactive waste from conventional reactors.
This holy trinity of advantages has made the ADS the subject of intense theoretical research for more than a decade. Now the theory is to be tested in experiments by an international team of scientists at Italy's Casaccia Research Centre, near Rome.
The same approach is also called the "Energy Amplifier"
Even under the heavy burden of responsibility as CERN's Director General from 1989-3 the fertile mind of Carlo Rubbia the scientist was never still. A long-time Rubbia 'hobby' has been the search for new sources of nuclear energy, exploiting knowledge and skills from high energy physics.An initial objective was to adopt heavy ion techniques to induce controlled thermonuclear fusion, but in 1994 this quest changed direction. Putting the problems of thermonuclear fusion aside, Rubbia began to explore an alternative route to energy production through controlled nuclear fission.
The idea is to use a particle accelerator producing neutrons by spallation (interaction of particles with a target) to feed a fuel/moderator assembly where the neutrons multiply by fission chain reactions. If the energy liberated becomes substantially greater than that needed to drive the accelerator, the process has a net gain and becomes self supporting. Hence the name "Energy Amplifier" (EA).
You can also read Christoph Pistner's critical 1999 analysis of Rubbia's idea. Keep in mind that some of the problems that Pistner highlighted might have been solved since he wrote his article. Or Rubbia's research reactor may reveal whether these problems are real or how to solve them.
Thank you, Invisible, for the article about transmutation.
Alas, each debate concerning our next big energy source seems to come back to nuclear. This one started with cleaning up coal. I personally doubt coal will be cleaned sufficiently.
The article is useful. I have two questions. Storage of waste, and the cost estimates.
First, we will never store nuclear wastes for the long-term. We store them, as we live, day-by-day. So we should use the best storage we have now. That seems to be Yucca Mountain. The authors accept the straw-man that perfect, nearly eternal storage, must be assured. Well, Eden doesn't answer my phone calls, maybe someone else will get through.
(This remark about Yucca Mountain seems odd: i.e. the dryness at Yucca Mountain may lead future people to seek an aquifer there. Should we store under Lake Michigan where no one will drill for water?)
Second. After dismissing storage of the waste in repositories, the article then finds little good in transmutation. This is quite fair - if the outlook is poor then say so!
The authors say it would cost too much (a trillion) and not get rid of all waste. But look at the cost estimates; they take a $100B estimate for the US, extrapolate to $300B for the world, and announce $1000B. A little later they decide that won't do the job either - in fact it probably can't be done - and if it could, storage would still be costly. It doesn't matter, storage is expensive regardless of transmutation.
The world GNP is somewhere around $5000B/year. Nuclear cleanup, even at a cost of $2000B over 20 years, is affordable. And no, it would't be perfect.
Absolute figures about nuclear waste disposal are not, by themselves, terribly useful.
First off, some nuclear wastes are from nuclear weapons programs.
Second, to make costs for waste disposal useful one needs to state them in terms of pennies per kilowatt hour of electricity produced. If the waste disposal cost is a tenth of a penny per kwh, well, why care? If the cost is 10 cents per kwh then that would be a huge problem.
Also, look at other energy costs. The United States alone uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day (might be 21 at this point). At $50 per barrel that is $1 billion per day or $365 billion per year. The sums that get tossed around in energy markets are enormous.
I slipped a decimal re:the world economy is around $50 trillion not $5,000B. Cleanup perhaps $2 trillion.
The article was about cleaning/transmuting existing wastes so cost/KWH didn't apply.
The figures are almost guesses anyway. And that was my point - developing new technologies and energy sources will not cost what we estimate. It never does. And what we will do will be flawed - probably in ways not imagined.
The much ridiculed quote 'too cheap to meter' was, I believe, from Lewis Strauss, head of the AEC in the 50's.
He was not as far off as one might imagine - building a nuclear power plant is not expensive - but building an inexpensive one is too expensive for any society. Strauss was not technical and fought a lot with scientists.
Scanning the comments, I guess the preponderance of opinion is that NOTHING can compete with nuclear power. There is a dissenting minority that believes NOTHING should come from nuclear power.
I'd still like to see some discussion of zero emissions. Period. Show me a zero emissions future be it coal or nuclear or wind or solar or any combination of the above. Or as Ben Franklin said, "Waste not, want not." Start from there and work out.
from http://www.zeri.org/index.cfm?id=vision&CFID=1008426&CFTOKEN=13569394
The Five Design Principles (anno 2005):
Whatever is waste for one is a nutrient or food for another species belonging to another kingdom;
What is a toxin for one organism, is a nutrient or neutral for another belonging to another kingdom;
Whenever highly complex ecosystems operate, viruses to remain inactive and even disappear without causing harm passing through at least 2 other kingdoms;
The more local, the more diverse a system, the more productive, the more resilient; and,
Whenever species of 5 different kingdoms live and interact in an autopoetic system, they can integrate and separate all matter at ambient temperature and pressure.
A more general approach at http://www.citiesoflight.net/zerowast.html
KenS,
The price per kwh still matters for existing waste. We can take all the kwh of electricity produced to date from nuclear power, take that portion of the existing waste that came as a result of producing that electricity (and some waste came from the military and from nuclear medicine applications) and calculate what the cost has been per kwh. Seems like a useful figure to know.
Certainly if nuclear waste disposal costs really do run into the hundreds of billions of dollars using current technology then we could spend a small fraction of that amount to develop better and cheaper technologies for disposing of the waste.
Rubbia's reactor design concept or an advance in breeder technology might be able to provide a much cheaper way to dispose of nuclear wastes.
Another point: Part of the cost of disposing of nuclear wastes is a fixed cost. Double the amount of wastes and that fixed cost will not double. Research is a fixed cost. Many of the costs in developing the Nevada waste storage site are fixed costs.
gmoke,
My guess from all the reading I've done on this is that using current technology zero emissons coal would be exorbitantly expensive.
The price of photovoltaics depends in part on where you install the solar panels. Solar panels in Anchorage Alaska aren't going to produce anywhere near as much power as solar panels in Phoenix. Whereas a nuclear power plant's construction and operation would probably be pretty similar in Anchorage and Phoenix. Still, at either place solar is much more expensive than nuclear, wind, and coal.
Check out a pro-photovoltaics site that estimates that solar costs 20-80 cents per kwh depending on location and type of site. Their "Solar System I" which has battery backup with prices at 37 cents and higher per kwh illustrates what off-grid solar would cost.
Wind comes closest to nuclear for cost. But it is probably twice as expensive and perhaps more.
Better batteries would make both solar and wind cheaper.
Randall: As usual we are pretty close to agreement.
I dismiss the KWH cost because the waste already exists (in the context of the reference article) and not all was used to generate electricity. You are right, an interesting number. I just don't think it means much.
Isn't such a number more like figuring what the absence of seat belts in 1950 will cost us in 2006. That is, some people injured in 1950 must still be cared for in 2006. And 2007, and ... When you divide that by the miles they drove the information seems thin.
Anyone who regards research as a fixed cost hasn't paid for it! (Joke - couldn't help it.)
Research can be capitalized - the walls in Hell are papered with the stock of companies who did. To capitalize you put a value on a possession, but you do not know the value of research. You do know how much you spent, that is expense.
To one and all: gmoke had 5 principles - I can't say I understand them. But here are 6 of mine.
1) nothing will save more $ faster than conservation - higher mileage, hybrids, the most efficient water heaters, furnaces, AC, coated windows, led lightbulbs, sensible use of washers and driers.
2) coal seems our cheapest fuel. the true cost will take your breath away.
3) pure nuclear is cheap. leave before the unpure part.
4) wind is good where it blows. there are not enough sites. niche.
5) solar will be big, and costs will fall faster than expected.
6) add our defense budget to oil and gas bills. toss in pensions for millions of miltary retirees who will live another 50 years.
I advocate taxing carbon to spur solar and wind, hardening existing nukes, building a few of new design, and storing all nuclear waste at sites such as Yucca Mountain. Taxing carbon (at the production point) also promotes all the conservation in #1 without trying to monitor billions of small transactions.
The only reason I advocate more nuclear is that so many plants exist now. How would better ones make the situation worse?
Now that is interesting. Mr. Parker says: "My guess from all the reading I've done on this is that using current technology zero emissons coal would be exorbitantly expensive." Yet nowhere does he reference where "all the reading" he's done has come from. My reference from the DOE http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/geologic.html clearly says the cost is about 2 cents per kilowatt hour USING EXISTING TECH. Is that exorbitant? Only to die hard nuke supporters who only seem able to pass on nuke industry propaganda, I guess. I think if we did a poll to see if folks are willing to pay a couple of pennies more per kW-hr to eliminate all power plant pollution and avoid the security and waste disposal problems of nuclear, an overwhelming majority would say yes. Now I'm not a great fan of strip mining, but if coal can get us through the hump to allow us to decommission the existing sitting duck boiling water reactors and develop economic nuclear/thermonuclear/renewable alternatives, that could be a good thing.
Hey, am I the only one who noticed that Mr. Parker has refused to answer the question about his connections to the nuke industry, regardless of who brings it up? Hmmm.
TDean:
Nearly bedtime. Does anyone have zero emissions coal powerplant operating? Is the paper a report on performance or an estimate?
Ordinarily I would zip over to the DOE site and see what it says. But others will be reading so I will ask you. Does zero emissions as defined by the report include removing trace metals, sulfurs, etc? Does it capture and sequester CO2? Coal usually has to be slurried at these plants, is water pollution considered?
I heard Norwegian engineers are not happy with sequestering trials. But that is an aside.
You have spoken elsewhere about economic inertia in the energy industry. If coal goes ahead won't it be hard to displace for a century? I think it will kill renewable energy momentum in the US.
You know my lukewarm stance (or lack of a stance) on nuclear.
Let us note that even if it takes $1 trillion to establish a reliable nuclear waste reprocessing and transmutation infrastructure, this would be less than 2 years of U.S. trade deficit. In other words, if we make a national decision and start a Bronx Project, then it can be done.
And for sequestering the trace minerals like mercury and other things from coal fumes, for the right price it can be done for sure: For instance if we double the price of electricity from coal, it can certainly be done, and given that the price of oil will reach $150 per barrel in 2015, even twice the price of electricity from coal, if it is clean, would be acceptable for cars.
But this discussion is all academic so far, because UNLESS there is a national decision to attain energy independence, we are going into WW IV in 2020.
Ken,
That is an estimate for new power plants and for 90% CO2 reduction. I believe it is based on the FutureGen model, which cleans up all emissions.
Norwegian engineers are never happy about anything.
I agree about efficiency enhancements being the cheapest way to meet our needs in some areas (like cars), but we are pushing the limits in power plant design. I think your list above should include biofuels. Much progress is being made in turning cellulosic waste into liquid fuel. With fast growing plants a remarkably small area of farmland could replace our vehicular needs.
KenS,
What theoretically attainable frmo conservation is impressive. But the public does not want to be taxed to make them choose more efficient products. High energy taxes are not going to happen in America.
The government tries to compensate for the public's aversion to energy taxes by imposing requirements on appliance makers and car makers. But even the latter CAFE rules can't be extended because a lot of voters want their SUVs, big pickups, and other large vehicles.
I would remind everyone that gmoke is talking about zero emissions. Well, the cost of reducing some types (but not all types) of emissons by, say, 50% is a whole lot less than half the cost of those same emissions by 100%. The cost of reducing all emissions by 100% would be enormous. That is why you'll read about equipment that reduces emissions of only certain pollutants by 80% to 90%.
To emphasize: Estimates for pollution reduction usually describe costs only for a subset of all the emissions. Close reading of the texts will show this to be the case.
BTW, the Bush Administration has yet to impose a separate mandated reduction of mercury emissions from coal plants. Mercury emissions are going to fall in the next 20 years. But so far all the projected mercury emissions reductions will come as a fortunate side effect of NOx and SOx scrubbers. Also, those NOx and SOx scrubbers are not going to all operate 12 months of the year. I've read that in particular some of the NOx scrubbers will operate only during the warmer months because ozone is a bigger problem during that time period. Well, more mercury emissions will happen when the NOx scrubbers are turned off.
So here are some political points to keep in mind:
Right now we have a practical choice between coal and nuclear to meet growing demand for electricty. Looks like the bulk of that demand will be met by coal that will cost more than nuclear and pollute more than nuclear. I do not see a practical competitive third alternative at this point. Natural gas production is declining in the US and planned LNG terminals (which of course are being opposed) will take years to get built and LNG will cost more.
TDean, Parker, Invisible - hope I haven't missed anyone.
About Norwegian Engineers - the old sterotype of Norway was about the long winter gloom. Might even be true.
All agree that carbon taxes will be widely opposed. What will not? People who want SUV's etc. will pay for them. Seems fair to me!
More importantly, carbon tax is easy to collect and hard to evade. It should be sweetened by eliminating the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of twit taxes on appliances, electric bills, etc. that are costly to collect and administer.
Cleaning powerplants, especially coal burners, in not linear. You get 80% fairly cheaply - then the costs hit the hockey-stick, so to speak. Much of that cheap 80% is already been done.
In regard to biomass - I regard it as just an expensive carbon fuel. Improvements promise to make it a less expensive carbon fuel. Still carbon, tax it to nudge things toward conservation and non-carbons.
Battery research is often mentioned. It is best left to the marketplace. The world market for batteries is competitive and so large that ample incentives exist. Batteries facilitate energy use but don't produce any so I tend of filter them out.
Invisible seems to share the digust I feel about political leadership. And that is not a slam at the current people: the corruption and weaselity (coined word) pervades all levels of government and all parties.
Scientists are not lily-white either. Too many professors regard their school as a nice office when they are in town - mostly they are off consulting for big corporations where they make far more money.
KenS,
I try to deal in the realm of what might be politically possible. A carbon tax on gasoline is not politically possible. You can talk about it. You can claim it is fair. I might agree or disagree. But so what? It has about a snowball's chance of passing.
Battery research: The case for it is similar to the case for a number of other areas of energy research. There would be a large benefit for us in the environment and in terms of foreign policy if we could come up with ways to reduce our need for oil. Better batteries would help us do that. Why not fund electrochemistry research to the tune of a few hundred million dollars per year?
Without added government research money for electrochemistry we will eventually get better batteries. But we could get better batteries sooner if the government provided a substantial amount of money for battery research.
The same holds true for photovoltaics. The amount the US goverment spends on photovoltaics research is in the tens of millions per year. The total DOE budget for solar was about $100 million a few years ago. But some of that was for buying solar collectors and some for solar heating and other approaches. Actual academic research on photovoltaics was a mere $30 mil for the last year I saw data for (I think 2002). That is chump change. Clean coal research gets far more money.
I'm not actively defending the budget allotments but I can understand to a degree why they occure. Say what you will but coal and petroleum are well understood and in heavy use. No real surprises there so dumping money into such for incremental improvements is a safe bet. Nuclear will eventually get the additional funding also as the stigma fades away. Battery tech is still iffy. Some say more is coming others say it can't develope much further so there's no concensus for planners to rely on. Hydrogen is a clumsy work around but has better potential. Storage is still the real chokepoint but there's four (I think) different approaches being researched so good odds one will work. Geothermal has no big stumbling blocks except loaction. Like wind, the best sites for geothermal are way the hell away from where they would do the most good.
The problem with photovoltaic is the promises. I can remember variouse promises since '85. Massive effeceicy improvement...much cheaper....greater durability. Still waiting for most of it to materialise. Improvements have been incremental at best and practical application is still limited. Supplement power for your home in a sunny enviroment..great. Help out the power for your small community...not a problem. Power a city subway system...well. Power an aluminum refinery...uh. Not saying it could never be a major player, along with wind, but the much addressed commercial power storage system and none voltage drop transmission technologies have to be developed first.
I have nothing against renewable but I grew up using kerosene (grandma still called it coal-oil) lamps and hand pumped water. I ain't gonna go back to that. When I click the switch I expect light. Renewables do not yet have the flexibelity or dependability to guarantee that for me. Current systems do. CO2 emissions may or may not be as detrimental as many postulate, we'll probably know the answer in a couple of decades when better models and science are developed. Particulates are a matter of concern though and have to be addressed. Nuclear however has no such baggage despite some strident and ill-concieved terrorist scenarios.
Gee. that was a quick response.
Agreed, we probably won't get the very sane carbon tax. It's the old voting dilemma "Shall I vote for what I want and not get it, or vote for what I don't want and get it?"
I don't think we need to goose electrochemical research for batteries. The huge market funds that.
My answer on photovoltaics is similar to batteries. But there is not a the market yet so funding might help. I am cautious about government enterprise. Remember how US Semiconductor was going to revitalize American electronics? I am cautious about subsidies in general - it leads to much corruption. I think the CA funding of stem cell research will prove a cess pool.
Comment: governments often do projects well - projects a budget, a start, firm deliverables, and an end. Building a dam - a project - will probably be worthwhile. Urban transit - not a project - runs forever, goals not exact - decidedly mixed results.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I read the paper TDean cited about coal cleanup. The $.02/KWH was estimated for new plants. Retrofits are said to much higher (figures not given). It includes carbon sequestering - says that is still being tested. Not bad if the paper is right.
My observation - be careful of that $.02/KWH - to get it you must build from scratch. Then you pay a lot more to retrofit old plants or you pay to raze them. I don't think the costs of scraping the old plants was considered.
KenS,
On coal cleanup you say "includes carbon sequestration". Go read the paper again. Show me where it says the 2 cents per kwh includes not just CO2 removal but also SOx removal, NOx removal, particulates removal, mercury removal, uranium removal, and so on. Come back here with a quote to that effect. Bet you can't find it.
I'm not advocating something like US Semicoductor. I'm advocating research grants to academics to do experiments with materials that have potential photochemical and electrochemical properties.
Solar hasn't delivered because solar has not been well funded. A lot of the money that has gone to it has been spent on loans, tax credits, demo plants, and the like. But what we need is basic research to discover better materials (i.e. materials that would be cheaper to fabricate) for making photovoltaic. Also, again, the total amount going to solar in the US Department of Energy budget is chump change. I've posted numbers in the past. Chump change.
So then do you also oppose nuclear research funding and clean coal research funding?
Randall Parker
Thinking again on clean coal. Wasn't there a proposal to use solid oxide fuel cells in conjunction with in-bed coal gassification? I do remember something on those lines a year or more ago but can't find a good reference. There was also something of reseach from a Kentucky universiety that the co2 stream could be used commercially for carbon products in conjunction with the SOFC power generation. It did seem a bit more useable since sizeable coal fields are near major urban complexes.
"Right now we have a practical choice between coal and nuclear to meet growing demand for electricty."
Wrong. Adding wind power capacity pretty much beats nuclear hands down, even if you don't consider the external costs of increased terrorism risks which the nuke industry studies don't. From: http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/france/press/reports/les-co-ts-reels-du-nucleaire.pdf
"Based on figures from the nuclear industry and French official references that in general favor nuclear energy,
the report «Wind vs Nuclear 2003» demonstrates that a clear choice for wind power instead of a new EPR
would offer France major social and economic benefits. At an equal investment, wind power generates 5 times
more jobs and 2.3 times more electricity than nuclear. Even in an extreme scenario with low costs for nuclear
and high costs for wind, wind remains the best option."
The investment risk is much lower and the added employment is much higher, favoring wind over nuclear. And the installation costs of wind is decreasing over time. Nuclear is only an option if the tradition of massive Federal subsidies to private nuke business continues and the Feds continue to shield the nuclear industry from gargantuan liabilities related to large accidents/terrorism.
Ken,
The DOE paper references http://sequestration.mit.edu/pdf/JeremyDavid_thesis.pdf as the source of the 2 cent incremental cost. That paper is a study of sequestration for a powdered coal plant and an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant, both of which are low emission plants with respect to NOX and SOX. In any case the issue is incremental cost for emissions control for expanding the capacity of the grid. So looking at new plant costs is appropriate. The incremental cost for the IGCC plant is around 1.75 cents and it produces hydrogen, which can be used in automotive fuel cell vehicles as well.
Randall re: your 1:59 pm.
I didn't know the word "carbon" meant sulfur, nitrogen, uranium, and so on.
Upon reading the report again it still addresses "carbon" sequestering. Cleaning up the rest is not the topic.
The report uses the term "geologic sequestering" once or twice. It clearly means geologic storage of CO2. I doubt it lterally means stuffing the Earth down a hole in the Earth, an image I decline to discuss.
I think TDean stated things fairly. He said 2 cents and where he read it. He did use "zero emissions" and said that would cost too much. I hate the ZE words - they imply something really good is nearby - ZE is not nearby.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Joesph seems to feel renewable must be unreliable. Wind and solar are unreliable in the sense that hydroelectic is. Dams smooth the seasonal river flow. Batteries and other methods will store energy when available for use when desired.
I don't know why Joesph says nuclear has no such baggage..........
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Finally, Randall asks if I oppose nuclear research funding and clean coal research funding.
I answer yea AND nay. I have said repeatedly that I think we should build some new nukes...anyone who missed that either can't or won't read. I also said use the best storage we have (Yucca Mountain) not hundreds of small, inferior waste sites. And I said take reasonable actions to harden the existing nukes against attack.
Would I fund clean coal research? Which research? We know how to get 80% now. Do it on existing plants. The coal people have billions at stake and want to sell coal, they will fund the most productive research on the other 20% because that 20% will help them politically in getting permits. Sequestering research pilots are running at several places now - how much more would you fund until we see what happens there?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
KenS,
Again, the 2 cents per kwh is on top of other costs involved in building and operating the plant. The 2 cents per kwh is for the removal of the CO2 in a plant otherwise built to make it possible to do cheaply in the first place.
As for what the additional costs are to remove 90% of everything else: I've yet to find a good estimate.
I also have not found a good estimate for what the per kwh cost is for installing and operating SOx and NOx scrubbers on existing facilities. However, from reading news stories on Bush's coal emissions decisions it became clean that the installation of the scrubbers is only one part of the cost. The coal plant operators do not want to operate the NOx scrubbers all year around. Why? Operational costs.
My guess is that even if designed in from scratch the NOx and SOx scrubbing is going to exact an additional on-going cost. Then there is also additional costs from particulates removal and so on.
Then there is zero emissions which is what gmoke asked about. Certainly more expensive than 90% removal. But how much more expensive? Double?
BTW, I don't normally read TC Dean's posts anymore because he trades in insults and misrepresentations. But I just went back and looked at what he was saying about me in this thread. Here is what he said in his own words:
Now that is interesting. Mr. Parker says: "My guess from all the reading I've done on this is that using current technology zero emissons coal would be exorbitantly expensive." Yet nowhere does he reference where "all the reading" he's done has come from. My reference from the DOE http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/geologic.html clearly says the cost is about 2 cents per kilowatt hour USING EXISTING TECH. Is that exorbitant? Only to die hard nuke supporters who only seem able to pass on nuke industry propaganda, I guess.
So he has turned 2 cents per kwh for removing only CO2 and presented that in response to my saying that zero emissions would be prohibitively expensive. Clearly he is stating that 2 cents an hour would give zero emissions. Otherwise why quote my sentence about zero emissions? Just as clearly his link says 2 cents a kwh hour is only for carbon dioxide removal and only for 90% of that. This is yet another example of why I think exchanges with him are a waste of time. He misrepresented what that article said. I see that in a later post he backed away from his misrepresentation.
So to repeat myself: my guess is that zero emissions from burning coal would be prohibitively expensive. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise with real evidence. But 100% emissions removal across the board would be way more expensive than 90% removal and just 90% removal of carbon dioxide alone already puts coal up near wind's cost. Certainly nuclear would be much cheaper than zero emissions coal. Wind probably would be too. Though I'm not sure about that since a wind system would need storage mechanisms if it was going to replace 24x7 baseline generators.
KenS
As per baggage I was speaking of emmisions that you associate with combustin processes. Yes you have waste from the core. I believe 27 square feet of waste per year for a light water reactor (it would be far lower for say an IFT style or most gen IV designs).
As far as renewable being un-reliable. Yes I said such with the stipulation that it would be far improved with a commercial power storage system to level the output. I still wouldn't like to rely completely on such a system but it would be far more acceptable.
I'm not sure how well sequestering would work but there is one weakness. Where will you sequester it? Oilfields, possible re-injection into coal seams etc. are good possibilities but if you were far away from such areas where are you going to put it? Once again the lack of a highly effecient (little or no voltage drop over distance) transmission system rears it's head. I keep ranting about it but seriously, most problems would be mitigated if power storage and transmission tech was improved signieficantly.
Quick addition. Sequestering of the CO2... hmm could you possibly just ignore the scrubbers and such and just pump the whole stack output straight into the sink? Might save money. Though after seeing one of the north slope oil companies fined for pollution (they were injecting gas back into a field for oil recovery and a crew decided to inject chemical residue such as spent solvents into the stream) for similare actions I am unsure if it would be legally workable.
Randall: I have to leave in a moment.
I made a mistake. I thought TDean wrote this:
"My guess from all the reading I've done on this is that using current technology zero emissons coal would be exorbitantly expensive."
But he was quoting you. I didn't see the " mark.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Otherwise I stay with what I wrote - I don't feel TDean misled. He argued 2 cents handles CO2 and cited why.
Because I thought TDean made the quote above I took his poll question about 2 cents for emission clean coal as pure rhetoric. Now I see was just damn poorly phrased. I read it to mean "would people pay as much for clean coal as nuclear?"
I think if TDean really meant 2 cents did everything he would say so.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Joseph: really quick.
You can't sequester the plant exhaust as is. it will contain nitrogen and oxygen. O2 is really stuff you don't want down there with methane and residual oil. It will also be hot, CO2 is bad enough to cool and compress, but it behaves better than O2.
You are right. Sequestering limits where you can put the power plant (at it least hampers you). But suitable sites are more common that one expects. Why so? Beats me! I don't know nothing about earth sciences.
Parker,
Since you're back to reading my posts it would be a good time to answer this one: "So, we have Parker selling nuke power again? Since he has decided not to answer my questions as to how much money he receives from the nuke power industry to run this shill, someone else will have to pass this on." How bout it? Or are you going to keep tapdancing around the question?
Removing 100% of anything from anything is impossible, so using that as a standard is absurd in the extreme. And nuclear energy is not "zero emission" in any case. Mining, transporting, processing and enrichment of uranium all use energy derived from fossil fuels. These considerations generally cause researchers to attribute only about 90% of the energy generated by nuclear plants as GHG avoided. But however you may misinterpret what I say about the facts, I at least provide the reference so you can check for yourself. You, on the other hand, are only blabbering about the impossible.
But protecting nuclear plants from meltdown due to accident and terrorist attack and it's attendant costs of on the order of a trillion dollars per incident would have to be essentially perfect. That requirement certainly takes the current generation of nuclear plants out of the running, economically speaking. Unless, of course, you simply ignore it.
TC Dean,
I'm not going to keep reading what you are saying. I only intervened in this conversation because from reading what KenS was saying he misunderstanding and was placing too much trust in your claims.
You seem to misunderstand your position here. I feel no need to justify myself to rude jerks who engage in character assassination. But more importantly, I feel no desire to do so. You can make all sorts of false claims about me. But those false claims reflect poorly on you, not on me.
Parker,
Tapdance away. I made no false claims, I asked a question as to whether you were receiving compensation for so vigorously pushing the nuclear industry's line. You can feign hurt and outrage all you want, but your continuing refusal to answer a simple question about your conflicts of interest or shilling for the nuke industry takes a toll on your credibility. My original question on April 22 (http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002731.html)was: "Why is it that you fight like a cornered raccoon (and with about as much logic) when someone questions nuclear power? Do you make any money from the nuclear industry? Is your blog supported in any way by them? I just gotta wonder."
That is just a yes or no question that you have refused to answer for two weeks now. What is assassinating your character is your refusal to come clean. So I guess you are going to continue to pretend not to read my posts, only answering when you think you can take a cheap shot. The people here aren't that dumb. They can see through your cheap tricks and manipulations.
Tdean:
I AM the Nuclear original nuclear energy fan, not Randall Parker. Intially Randall used to be in favor of photovoltaics and many other things, but after a million emails I am the one who brainwashed him. I am notworking for the nuclear industry, but having read about the recent progress, I am convinced that there are some new very competitive nuclear reactors in the future, if financing is available. Reprocessing nuclear waste requieres a totally new infrastructure, but it can be done if a few hundred billion dollars are poured. The Integral Fast Reactor seems to be a good possibility here, since it is designed to do its own reprocessing.
Without a safe and economical reprocessing system, we should not build reactors, because too much long term waste will accumulate, but we must work on this.
Regrettably, the fusion energy turned out to be rather elusive. We shall see if the National Ignition Facility will be able to bear fruit and make fusion feasible in a few years. If the latter system works, we are lucky, but for some reason, igniting small quantities of Deuterium/Tritium seems to take a lot of energy, and large quantities, we need to find the right method.
Invisible Scientist
I'm surprised more work isn't being done on colliding beam fusion (boron/deuterium). I read the guys at Irvine had countered arguments about the feasibility of the magnetic structure (variouse individuals challenged their math model which they defended successfully to my understanding). And no I'm not talking about those focus fusion freaks that are apparently operating out of a Mexico City college now :) Now that would be a system if it could be made feasible. No nuetron emmissions. Direct conversion to electricity. Probably to good to ever happen in our lifetimes though. Closests thing I ever found on government acknowledgement was a DOE document from the 80's I believe. Basically said deuterium/tritium fusion should be worked on first.
I mention this because the newest release concerning ITR is now talking about France as the probable resting place. Interestingly the article mentioned 2050 as the estimated production date (whatever the devil they mean by that).
Nuclear energy would be valuable in cold environments where the waste heat could be utilized to aid the growth of plants out of season. Auxiliary fossil fuel plants could add more waste heat and the invaluable CO2 that the plants so love. You could make frozen deserts bloom year round. More heat, more CO2, please.
"Super clean coal" seems to have different meanings depending on who is saying it. Is oxygen-blown IGCC "super clean"? It nearly eliminates SOx and NOx emissions (and particulates go down to damn near zero, including all the stuff containing uranium), but you still get about 83% of the CO2 emissions per kWh and something like half the mercury.
Projected cost of IGCC plants a few years ago was about $1100/kWe. (In contrast, the projected cost of pebble-bed HTGRs is about $1000/kWe and they have no emissions and much smaller fuel costs.)
IGCC with cold-gas cleanup allows roughly half the carbon to be removed in the same process as the H2S. I presume that filtration of the fuel gas can soak up most of the mercury. Is a 58% reduction in CO2 and near-elimination of all other pollutants "super clean"?
Suppose that you replace the gas turbine with molten-carbonate or solid-oxide fuel cells; waste heat from the fuel cells generates steam as before. This requires better fuel-gas cleanup, and allows the entire gas output of the system to be maintained at high pressure and nearly nitrogen-free. You could cool the output gas to room temperature and ~300 psig, and it would become soda water, suitable for deep-well injection. The system would take in air and coal, and dump nitrogen back to the atmosphere. That's definitely "super clean", but I have no idea how much it would cost.
----------------------------------------------------------
"Projected cost of IGCC plants a few years ago was about $1100/kWe. (In contrast, the projected cost of pebble-bed HTGRs is about $1000/kWe and they have no emissions and much smaller fuel costs.)"
-------------------------------------------------------------
First of all, although the Pebble Bed Reactor currently has small fuel costs, that uranium fuel will cost probably 10 to 100 times more in the future if we build thousands of such reactors in the world to generate electricty for everyone and every car, because there will then be shortge of uranium in the world... and this is one reason we need breeder reactors or reprocessing to use plutonium as fuel.
Sceondly, it is not true that the Pebble Bed Reactor is emissions free, because not only would the long term waste would accumulate like in the case of regular reactors, but at the same time, when you fission uranium, a certain radioactive isotope of iodine gas is formed, and this particular isotope of iodine, has a long term half-life. Because there are very few reactors in the world, so far wer are getting away with diluting this iodine in the atmosphere like many pollutants, or we are able to store it in canisters, but in the long run it will be necessary to use transmutation (bombarding this isotope with radiation) to transform it into a short diferent compound with short half-life, which is possible, but necessary. And the long term solid nuclear waste from Pebble Bed reactors would also need to be reprocessed or transmuted, which would add a lot more to the cost of operating the reactor, so that in the long run, the cost would be higher than the $1000kWe you are talking about.
But in any case, even $3000/kWe would be acceptable if the reactor's long term waste can be totally recycled, so that we have an independent national energy policy. Recall that in many other countries, the price of gasoline is 4 times higher, because there are taxes on petroleum.
Invisible,
I have not focused on the problem of waste disposal because I think the security issues are more pressing. But you are right that the risk of the inability to solve the disposal problem is perhaps the single biggest roadblock in terms of capital acquisition for the nuclear industry. And given the NIMBY culture, unless the current regime gives the nuke industry a regulatory bulldozer that completely overwhelms local and states' rights, the risk of tying up capital in decades of legal battles is way too high. At first glance I opposed the "Clean Coal" initiatives, but given the apparent viability of sequestration, it looks pretty good as a technological bridge to more feasible renewables and fusion or whatever. You can check out the Fed's propaganda about the "FutureGen" clean coal initiative at:http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/futuregen/ I think that we also need to keep in mind that CO2 for enhanded oil recovery is becoming scarce from the traditional sources and that it has real economic value when used for that purpose. And don't forget that super-critical CO2 is a great dry cleaning fluid and can turn fly ash into useful building materials. By the way, the questions about the availability of reservoirs suitable for sequestration has to do with the widespread existence of deep saline aquifers that can absorb plenty of CO2 with essentially zero risk of leakage. The most significant risk would be injection induced seismicity that could create possibly damaging earthquakes. Details are in the DOE site below.
E-Poet,
The MIT paper cited in the DOE site I cited details the CO2 separation technology: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/geologic.html
http://sequestration.mit.edu/pdf/JeremyDavid_thesis.pdf
It is standard petroleum technology. It apparently takes care of 90% of CO2 emissions and the paper details the economics. I think they are looking into the fuel cell technologies you mentioned, but I don't know the details. I imagine the economics depend a lot on how clean the source gas has to be to prevent poisoning the fuel cells.
In perusing the web I found this apparently well-balanced and informative article about nuclear power. I recommend it.
http://home.earthlink.net/~cevent/10-8-04_nuclear_challenge.html
A cursory look at your Earthlink cite shows a number of highly questionable claims and outright errors. I quote from the anti's list of claims:
Any author who cites such nonsense as serious, informed objections hasn't done his homework.
- Radioactive uranium hexafluoride, left over from the concentrating process in large quantities, also has to be stored.
- Uranium 235, which is fissionable without concentration, is not abundant.
E-P,
I have a basic challenge for the opponents of nuclear power: Do you support to the continued operation of current dirty coal burners and the addition of about another 100 planned coal burners?
If someone does not support that path then they have to present a different way forward. But what to do before research efforts might pay off? Research that might solve problems n years in the future by, say, making photovoltaics cheap is something I fully support. I have argued for far larger funding for photovoltaics since the 1970s. But none of that could pay off before we need more electric plants.
Perhaps the debate about coal versus nuclear can be used to make some portion of the public see that more photovoltaics research is needed. But even if support for more photovoltaics research could be won we'd still be faced with what to do while waiting for that research to finally pay off.
One alternative is much higher electric prices in order to throttle back demand. But I do not expect that alternative to win out in America as a whole. It might win out in, say, Califonia. But most of America won't go for that.
Arguments for conservation end up being arguments for higher prices. Conservation isn't going to be mandated at an extreme enough level through regulatios of buildings and vehicles enough to prevent future demand growth. So I do not see mandated conservation as a solution.
Battery tech advances would allow energy to be used more efficiently in transportation. But, again, we run into the lack of political support for battery research and the research would take years to pay off anyway.
Wind can't substitute for all the coal burners. Solar is a full order of magnitude more expensive than nuclear. Natural gas has gone up in price and costs more than coal. Domestic natural gas production is declining. LNG terminals will take years to build and when built the world LNG prices may be higher than what we are paying now for natural gas.
One alternative to current dirty coal might be clean coal. But I've yet to come across an authoritative source for what really clean coal would cost. If we dismiss the CO2 concerns and just try to reduce 90% or 95% or 99% of the rest of the pollutants what would that cost in additional pennies per kwh? If we then tack on the CO2 for a 90% reduction that is another 2 cents per kwh on top of the other emissions control costs.
Bottom line: Our current realistic choice is between nuclear and coal. I am skeptical that the political system will make coal burners operate in a way that substantially increases their costs. So my guess is we have a choice between the latest light water reactors and new coal plants that might remove, say, 70% or 80% of what the worst coal plants of today emit.
I support much bigger research funding for next gen nuclear, photovoltaics, and batteries. But I am not optimistic about winning big political support for upping research funds for the latter two. Though Bush might up research funds for next gen nuclear.
Well that's a primary purpose of a forum such as this. Information of value is actually harder to find now with all the competing claims and stances. This allows people to compare what they find and make assesments.
It all keeps pointing back to nuclear as the best option for now. Most reasonable people on these threads seem to understand that. Perhaps there'll be some breakthrough shortly in some of the more exotic areas that will be actually manufactureable instead of lab curiousities but I wouldn't stake my life on it. The obviouse tech has pretty well been developed. New tech such as nano is needed to reach the next plateau. This will take time. I happily look forward to running my appliances off of nuclear generated power:)
As an aside the ITR, if construction starts soon, should be operational by 2015. No guarantees of course. I also believe they're hesitant to announce just how much mid-level long term waste will come from this. Sigh heating a fluid to run a turbine by way of nuetron flux into a medium sheesh....
I agree with E-P that the paper had flaws. The comments following the paper addressed several.
I am with Randall somewhat about nuclear but I would insist on a parallel reduction of total risk.
i.e. to build 10000mw you must decomission 4000 mw of older plant at the same time. the newer plant to be of safer design, better protected from attack.
I can't see a solution to waste storage except total federal control. No NIMBY. It is a national problem, we have it, and not everyone can be happy.
TDean really hates the Anderson legal limitation on nuclear liabilty. I repeat my words about waste storage.
I think fusion will finally work in 2012-2016 at the French site. If that happens the infrastructure, turbines, etc. we use for nuclear are likely to be adaptable to fusion.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Concurrent with nuclear improvement we should go for solar.
Randall will be proven wrong about photovoltaic solar. It can payoff before clean coal power plants. I use a 19" LCD monitor. It costs $400 now. Five years ago it was $4000 if 19" was even available. I don't recall the federal government researching the cost down. I do recall all local and federal government offices having LCD before I could afford one. They made a market:
I don't think the cost of solar depends on chemistry research. I suggest we test:
Let the Feds guarantee a market - each year, for 10 years, agree to buy $2B of solar cells at $xx/w, or $3b at a slightly lower price, or $5B at a slightly lower price, etc. Delivery to start in 2007. Put them at schools all over America.
That will either bring the cost down or no supplier will bid. At worst $xx/w will prove too high and we waste maybe $30B over 10 years. Gee, we never did that before! Oh, wait - the Big Dig in Boston!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Batteries need no help. Hybrids are here and affordable. Toshiba has (not pie-in-the-sky seems to have) a much better battery than those in the Prius. Toyota is not a foolish company and they are going to use it.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Conservation and carbon tax is a politcal problem. No technology involved. We may never pass these sensible measures. We can also save energy by rebuilding the distribution grid. Again a politcal problem.
So, rejecting what we should do, will we proceed with what we should not do - more coal - instead?
I wish those working on clean coal well - I just don't see coal or biomass as a good enough, or likely to improve as fast as solar.
KenS,
You would spend far more on government funded photovoltaics market subsidies than I would spend on government funded photovoltaics research.
For half the cost of your photovoltaics market subsidies we could fund a half billion a year in photovoltaics research and a half billion a year in battery research.
Yes, advances on photovoltaics depends in advances in research. Industry takes a lot of stuff coming out of basic research labs and commercializes it. Look at the post I just did on a DNA sequencer company that started up as a result of a research paper published by Stephen Quake's lab in PNAS in 2003. That sort of thing happens all the time. At first glance it is just a free market venture capital start-up. But look closer and it is obvious that the venture capital start-up happened because of basic research. That is extemely common in biotech. It could be extremely common in energy tech if money was shifted away from non-market price purchases, tax credits, and other government interventions and toward basic research.
Look at medicine in more detail. The United States has about a $1.6 trillion a year medical industry (give or take a hundred billion depending on where you draw the line). That causes pharmaceutical companies to spend about $30 billion in research (maybe about another $3 bil from biotech start-ups). That is a horribly small fraction of the total health care dollar spent. I have a friend who keeps arguing to me that we need more subsidized medical spending because that will cause more research by pharmaceutical companies. But the governments of the United States already spend in excess of $700 billion a year on medical treatments to cause a portion of that $30 billion in pharmaceutical research.
At the same time the US government directly spends over $28 billion in NIH research. Well, what is producing more research spending? The $700+ billion spent by governments on medical care or the $28 billion spent directly on medical research?
The same is going to hold for subsidies to buy high priced photovoltaics. The vast bulk of the money thereby spent will go toward operating manufacturing lines using existing expensive technology. That is incredibly wasteful. We'd get far more bang for the buck spending the money on research.
Yes I would spend more on market subsidies than you would spend on research.
But my subsidy would achieve something: either a large reduction in solar cell price; or pretty firm evidence that the price can't be driven down by the market. If the price came down we would have a lot of solar equiped schools - that is worth something - and solar would be adapted faster because of the new low price.
But suppose the cost did not fall. Then we don't buy the cells, don't spend much money, and other ways. My test was an offer to buy at a lower price, and an offer to buy much more at even lower prices. I did not say we buy at today's price.
So the cells would not be made with existing expensive technology. They would come from newer production methods developed by companies. If not the cells wouldn't be made.
Now, I ask what your campus research dollars will yield? My guess is decades of puttering, mutterings of "any day now", and many grant applications. The great thing we get from universities is superbly trained people who then do something else - gee, that sounds like what universities were founded for!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Now, about the NIH/Drug Companies.
When you wrote about the NIH research you unknowingly supported me. Let's see - NIH spends $28B on research and the drug companies spend $30B. We know why NIH spends $28B - because Congress gives it to them. And the drug companies spend their $30B because there is a market for new products.
What is the overall result. NIH does some good things - I don't regard them as bad. But it is the drug company that actually delivers what the item the sick person needs. The yield of their $30B can be measured.
You write and I quote:
"At the same time the US government directly spends over $28 billion in NIH research. Well, what is producing more research spending? The $700+ billion spent by governments on medical care or the $28 billion spent directly on medical research?"
Your quote wanders into sophistry. By definition the $700B is not spent on research but on care. But the $700B DELIVERS care. We know not what the $28B will deliver - we can only hope. And I salute the NIH they have made good use of their funding.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
There is good reason for government funded research. But solar is a reasonable industry now. We know how to deliver solar. No one has yet made it very affordable - that is engineering and economics, and why I think the progress will now come from the market not the lab. Who really knows?
KenS,
Yes, the hundreds of billions spent on medical care does deliver "care" in some fashion. But for a great many diseases the care provides little or no benefit.
I've posted recently on how being a billionaire provides little or no increase in life expectancy. Why? The market can't cure many fatal illnesses no matter how much money you have to spend. In fact, if the market could provide effective treatments those treatments would be cheaper than what is sold now. Yet the market can't do it and we wait for basic researchers to figure out enough that the pharma cos can even begin to develop effective treatments.
The way it works in pharmaceuticals is that basic researchers - mostly funded by the government though the Howard Hughes Medical Institute also funds some excellent labs as do some smaller foundations - figure out things about how cells work and in the process of doing so they discover potential targets for drug development. Then the pharma cos have a thing to target. That thig could be the p38 gene about which I just did a post. Knocking out p38 and adding in a growth factor causes heart muscle cells to divide. Basic researchers - no doubt in part funded by the NIH though also HHMI in this case - just discovered this and now big pharma have another protein to target. But basic researchers will have to learn a lot more about p38 before the pharmas will even bother.
What I see in medicine is proof that the market for a product can be huge and yet the market can still fail to develop effective solutions for many of the demands of buyers. Why? We simply do not know enough about complex biological systems and we need to accumulate huge amounts of knowledge that only basic researchers will find before we can solve these problems. Too much of unpatentable and unownable knowledge has to be accumulated at huge expense before solutions can be devised. Therefore the private sector just does not have the financial incentives to collect the information needed to fund the needed research.
Research isn't going to get short-term cuts in the cost of solar, but manufacturing volume can. Take the "polymorphous" thin-film cells announced last year. If those can be made for 1 euro/watt, they'll make solar electricity as cheap as anything from fossil... while the sun is shining. If those really could be made that cheap, they could certainly sell enough of them to justify some serious automation. Economies of scale are real.
The technologies are very close to production, almost as close as microchips. There turned out to be a HUGE market for inexpensive electronic stuff, justifying large investments in making them cheaper. There is an even bigger market for energy, and as soon as electricity from solar starts looking cheaper than from other sources... watch out.
A relatively cheap way to push scale is to pay for wattage. Imagine $2/watt buydown for the first gigawatt, then $1/watt for the next 2 GW, then $.50/watt for the next 4: total program outlay, $6 billion. This wouldn't make much of a difference for today's $5/W single-crystal panels, but an outfit able to manufacture for $1.34/W would be able to collect 66 cents while giving the product away! More likely they'd charge $3 and pocket a bundle.
How many GW/year could the USA absorb? How fast could we build the plants to make the silicon, deposit and dope the cells, wire and package the panels? 3 years? And if those claims hold up, we'd get all that for chump change.
We could get a lot of energy that way, cheap. What we would not get is dispatchable capacity, night capacity or adequate winter capacity in the north. It would take a lot of demand-side management to be able to use large amounts of solar effectively, and I'm not sure that the grid operators are up to it. Lynne Kiesling over at Knowledge Problem would know.
Nuclear is dispatchable. HTGR's are more than just dispatchable, they can load-follow.
I'll bet a pitcher of good beer that HTGR's are suitable for breeding thorium to U-233, and could supply current world demand for a thousand years on what's available; we'd only need them for a hundred, maybe 50. I'll bet another pitcher that it wouldn't take more than a couple more Yucca Mountains to dispose of a century's worth of waste, though it might take some volume reduction.
E-P,
"A cursory look at your Earthlink cite shows a number of highly questionable claims and outright errors. I quote from the anti's list of claims:
Radioactive uranium hexafluoride, left over from the concentrating process in large quantities, also has to be stored.
Uranium 235, which is fissionable without concentration, is not abundant."
Maybe your look was a bit too cursory. Well what do they do with all the uranium hexafloride? I guess they make depleted uranium ammo? In most places it is illegal. And I think most of it is not used for that purpose. Give me a reference.
Last I heard U-235 is fissionable and not abundant. Do you think it is abundant? Or not fissionable?
The paper was attempting to give both sides of the nuke pro and con arguments and critiqueing both then trying to parse some truth. He gives an examination of the depleted uranium claim by saying "U238 is relatively abundant and the technology to concentrate it for reactor fuel is mature." So I would suggest your read carefully and don't take things out of context. Nuance, nuance.
If you are going to knock something you have to give the alternative. Wait! That's what Parker said.
Parker,
I will pretend you aren't reading this, OK?
"I have a basic challenge for the opponents of nuclear power: Do you support to (sic) the continued operation of current dirty coal burners and the addition of about another 100 planned coal burners?"
I support the Clean Air Act which should have cleaned up the coal plants about 20 years ago if it hadn't been hobbled and gutted by industry lobbyists. Any technology that separates CO2 will also greatly reduce NOx and SOx. Doing a proper job on mercury is necessary and not being done in a serious manner by the Bush administration even though the technology is available. Uranium is a particulate component so that will also be removed with current technology that takes out particulates.
I just don't get why you say the whole ballgame is between coal and nukes. Biofuels can directly supplement coal right now and processing them to liquid fuels will replace a lot of oil. Why are we only talking about solar voltaics? Solar thermal is quite mature and could add a lot of peaking capacity in the southwest right when it is needed. Wind can't replace the base load of the nukes but it is a significant part of the picture. Adding in "FutureGen" coal and conservation subsidies will get us over the hump as we decommission the existing nukes until the good stuff gets here.
E-P,
I'm skeptical of arguments that the government is needed to create the volumes necessary to lower costs. If some photovoltaic technology in question is very amenable to cost reduction then just like other technologies that fall in price with time so will the technologiy used to create those photovoltaics. A new process that is cheaper ought to be able to quickly displace existing photovoltaics by selling at a lower price.
TDean,
Not only does Randall build nuclear reactors in his spare time -- he was instrumental in introducing fluoridation to the west. But on the bright side, you should see his pearly white smile. You would even say it glows.
Randall: I am amazed at your 10:18 pm.
The idea that when the market has a problem the problem must be in basic research is not right.
Instead figure out why the market has a problem.
It may be a scarcity of buyers - the fountain pen took care of the quill. It may be production efficiency - the Ford production line started about 15 years after cars appeared and made them affordable. There can be price monopolies at work - where railroads had a monopoly shipping was costly, but the established line could bankrupt any new competitor.
I argue that we should test the market to determine to see what happens. Researchers may in the meanwhile come up with a cell of much lower cost. No one is stopping them and they have spent a great deal of money trying over 30 years.
My bet for affordable solar is on the market, you think otherwise.
My last message sat for an hour while I ate. So this is catch up.
I think E-P at 10:59 is on target. But I want to answer Randall's of 11:39. Randall wrote:
"E-P,
I'm skeptical of arguments that the government is needed to create the volumes necessary to lower costs. If some photovoltaic technology in question is very amenable to cost reduction then just like other technologies that fall in price with time so will the technologiy used to create those photovoltaics. A new process that is cheaper ought to be able to quickly displace existing photovoltaics by selling at a lower price. "
Randall your logic is right as far as it goes. Photovoltaic, solar for short, is growing and falling (too slowly) in price. Has been for decades. We want to speed that up. And volume often works wonders, sometimes not - here we do not know, but solar is so desirable it is worth the shot.
Second point. A new process that is cheaper will not necessarily quickly displace the old. It depends on the total value of the new process - people making one Rolls Royce a week will not pause to evaluate a new gas cap priced 1 Euro lower. No matter what they do the adjustment can only save 1 Euro. Toyota would be pleased to save 1 Euro on every car.
KenS,
Markets are flawed.
The energy market has all sorts of external costs that do not show up in prices. Pollution is an obvious one. But so is a chunk of our military's budget. So is the US foreign policy that kow tows to the Saudis. So is Al Qaeda and some of the cost of homeland security.
But markets are also flawed when it comes to knowledge. Science will never be funded well enough by the market because the transaction costs would be too high to pay basic researchers for how each discovery contributed to the eventual development of some new commercial product. Also, it would be impossible to identify all the basic research advances and how they contributed insights to allow other advances to eventually produce enough knowledge to some new product development possible.
So I understand why the energy market has problems. I've just listed a bunch of reasons. I also understand that these problems can not be fixed directly. For example, the public is opposed to energy taxes that would internalize some of the external costs. Also, the market's flaws that cause it to underinvest in research can not be fixed by changing intellectual property laws.
Because unfixable market flaws cause the market to underinvest in energy research government funding of energy research is highly appropriate.
"But given that the United States has enough coal for more than 3 centuries, and given the fact that it is FAR cheaper and faster to build coal fired plant..." --Invisible Scientist
300 years at PRESENT RATES of consumption. That figure can't hold up. Coal will be tapped to replace the rapidly declining oil reserves to make transportation fuels, of which ~80-90% goes to global transportation. Google http://www.engin.umich.edu/~cre/01chap/html/reactors/fis-tro.htm or
http://www.aiada.org/article.asp?id=37939
Again that coal utilization figure can't hold up. Natural gas supplies are poised to fall off a cliff, if LNG can't take up the slack fast enough. Happens US electricity generation uses coal and natural gas, then nuclear and then much less hydro/wind/etc.
KenS: I have nothing to add to that.
Tdean:
Maybe your look was a bit too cursory. Well what do they do with all the uranium hexafloride? I guess they make depleted uranium ammo? In most places it is illegal. And I think most of it is not used for that purpose. Give me a reference.They can convert it to:
Last I heard U-235 is fissionable and not abundant. Do you think it is abundant? Or not fissionable?Since I have to spell it out for you, here is the full quote with emphasis added: "Uranium 235, which is fissionable without concentration, is not abundant." There is no such thing as even partially pure U-235 in nature, so the whole phrase in bold reflects a gross error in thinking. There are also reactors which can maintain a chain reaction using natural uranium (CANDU is one) so the mention of concentration is of questionable relevance to the argument and the sentence makes an implied assertion which is false.
If you spent any time informing yourself of the state of the technology even of 10 years ago, you would already have known all of these things and much more. You would have recognized the factual and logical errors before anyone else had to mention them (I could have told you much of the above before I was out of high school). Yet you did not. You missed them even after having them brought to your attention. This speaks very poorly of you.
Despite a level of ignorance which should have kept you quiet, you conduct yourself arrogantly. You cite nonsense as authority. You have done this and been called on it before, but you have proven yourself either unwilling or unable to learn. That's two strikes; one more, and you're going to be on my not-worth-a-response list too.
The last clue train is leaving now. Be on it.
Randall: Your 7:43 AM
Of course the energy market has distortions. But every problem of the world is not solved in basic research.
Solar (to shorten photovoltaic generated commerical energy) is falling in cost. There is good reason to believe it will become cheap enough in 10-20 years - but that is projection, not fact. It is possible that we can make that 10-20 years shrink to 5 years, and it is possible that it will never happen.
If solar did not work by all means find chemists and physicists. Fund the most promising ideas anyway.
But perhaps solar cost declines are being SUBSTANTIALLY retarded by politcal uncertainty, or by hidden subsidies that make other energy investments look better, or by low sales volume, etc. In that case guaranteeing a market, if done in the right way, will bring cost down.
The wrong way to guarantee a market is to buy at, or near present market price. This, sadly enough, is what is going on with biomass. There is not much incentive for biomass producers to drive down the price of
ethanol - the legislature will mandate, for you, that it be used in auto fuel.
Tariffs are another way to guarantee a market. The U.S. put tariffs on foreign cars about 1980 when GM, Ford, and Chrysler were producing utter crap and couldn't sell it. That helped US makers sell more cars, it also made them complacent - by 1990 they were farther behind foreign cars than they were in 1980.
You constantly cite science and research. Well, testing and studying markets is science. It is just not chemistry - the chemist feels sure his observation about hydrogen applies to every hydrogen atom. Economists cannot be as sure but we use the economic tools that seem likely to work.
I also dispute your idea that science will never be funded enough by the market. "Enough" is a vague gimme, gimme word. We don't know what enough is. It is equally foolish to say the market will not fund research because every consequence can never be itemized - the market funds research often, there is just a different attitude when spending one's own money.
You are simply advocating money be given to a narrow set of researchers until they say they have enough. That much money will never exist. I say set a plan a market test, budget, conduct it, see what happens - that is science.
KenS,
I never said every problem in the world is solvable by basic research. But for a number of problems I think I can very confidently state that they will not be solved without advances in basic research.
For example, 25 years ago an accomplished (NAS member) biochemist told me that the bulk of applied cancer drug R&D was a waste of money because until the basic mechanisms of cellular growth and differentiation were worked out in far greater detail we were going to simply lack the insights necessary to know how and where to intervene to kill off or get control of cancer cells. Well, here we are 25 years later and it is clear that he was obviously right (and it was clear to me back then).
Similarly, we need basic research to turn up new types of materials to use to make photovoltaics. Just refining currently photovoltaics manufacturing processes using silicon crystals will not get us there.
Yes, science will never be funded enough. This is true for the same reason that the market will never fund a national defense well enough. Goods that can not be selectively sold to some people without getting the benefits delivered to everyone else are goods that will be underfunded. This is basic economics.
Yes, I constantly point to the importance of science and research on some topics. But I only do that on topics where I think the market failures are really large. The energy market has very large market failures. Ditto for medicine.
You bring up "hidden subsidies". Yes, and there are external costs that are not included in the cost of many fuel sources. But I've already argued that it is politically impossible to internalize all those costs and eliminate all those subsidies. I gave up on libertarian policy prescriptions when I watched decades go by and came to understand the powerful forces that prevent those subsidies from being eliminated. Think you can take on the farm lobby over corn ethanol? No way, not going to happen. It is a pointless battle to fight. I'd rather advocate better energy science policy.
EP,
Don't flatter yourself into thinking you have informed me of anything in your snotty little diatribe. Your response is immature and way over the top. I would be plenty pleased if you didn't respond, since you disputed a source without stating what your objection was. Someone with so little ability to communicate effectively should keep quiet.
Specifically, I am not sure what the source's author meant by "without concentration" since it goes without saying that pure things that are not abundant need to be concentrated. I suspect that he was referring to the fact that an explosive chain reaction was possible with U235 metal at standard pressure, whereas plutonium must be physically compressed before it will explode. In any case, why is that such a big deal to you? And depleted uranium, whatever it may be combined with is considered a "low level radioactive waste" product by the NRC and must be treated as such: http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/eples.html#NRCDULLW
So get your facts straight, take a pill and feel free to not respond. You should be ashamed.
from http://corrente.blogspot.com/2005/05/options-leadership.html
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Options & Leadership
More on Peak Oil, and the politics of consumption, from Richard Heinberg of the New College of California, in an article written by Melanie Gosling for the Cape Times of South Africa. WARNING: Reading this may bum you out. Here’s the gist:
Natural gas extraction will peak a few years after oil, extraction rates for coal will peak in decades, nuclear energy is dogged by unresolved problems of waste disposal and solar and wind energy will have to undergo rapid expansion if they are to replace even a fraction of the energy shortfall from oil. And the enthusiasm about a hydrogen economy comes from politics rather than science, he said.
"Our real problem is that we are trapped in a perpetual growth machine. As long as modern societies need economic growth to stave off collapse (given existing debt-and-interest-based national currencies), we will continue to require ever more resources yearly. But the Earth has limited resources.
"The energy conundrum is thus intimately tied to the fact that we anticipate perpetual growth within a finite system," Heinberg said.
He sketches four main options available in response:
1. Following the US leadership in competing for remaining resources through wars;
2. Wishful thinking that the market or science will come to the rescue;
3. Assuming that we are already in the early stages of disintegration, devoting our energies to preserving the most worthwhile cultural achievements of the past few centuries.
4. "Powering down" - reducing energy
