Tag Archive for: nuclear power

The Case for Nuclear Power

There are solutions to energy, water and infrastructure challenges that make compelling economic and environmental sense even if there was no climate crisis. But for those policymakers and influencers who believe we face an existential threat for which the only appropriate way to cope is to achieve “net zero,” these solutions ought to be even more compelling.

Mass timber is a perfect example — to make it, you can harvest smaller trees and leave older growth alone, thin overgrown forests, sequester carbon in the finished product, and replace reinforced concrete as a building material. Water projects that improve our capacity to manage runoff from “bomb cyclones” and store more water from unusually wet years to guarantee a supply during unusually dry years is another example. But greatest opportunity to meet California’s energy challenges while also achieving the goal of net zero is with nuclear power.

Consider the tradeoff between two zero emission solutions: Diablo Canyon vs. the offshore wind farms proposed off the coast of San Luis Obispo and Humboldt counties. Diablo Canyon generates 2.2 gigawatts with a 90 percent uptime, i.e., it produces 2 gigawatt-years of electricity per year, nearly 10 percent of California’s entire in-state generating capacity. To generate an equivalent amount of electricity using 10 megawatt wind turbines, each one of them longer (vertically) than a supercarrier, floating 20 miles offshore, you would need at least 500 of them. This is an astonishing fact.

The cost of nuclear power plants is often cited as a reason not to build more of them. But some of that expense is avoidable. A report published in 2020 by Ars Technica acknowledges the role that litigation and bureaucratic obstacles play in elevating the cost of nuclear power, although it claims they only account for one-third of the overruns. The other source of increased costs? To quote the author: “the largest increases were indirect costs: engineering, purchasing, planning, scheduling, supervision, and other factors not directly associated with the process of building the plant,” and “about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.”

Even at these elevated costs, however, nuclear power is economically competitive with renewables. When comparing the cost of nuclear power to wind and solar power, a peer-reviewed paper, published by Science Direct last year, analyzed the difference between the traditional Levelized Cost of Electricity analysis and the more recently introduced, and more accurate, Levelized Full System Cost of Electricity. The study identified the lowest full system cost for renewables in the U.S., the blend of wind and solar on the Texas grid. By mixing input from both of these intermittent sources of electricity, the required storage capacity is minimized since solar and wind produce power at different times of day. Even in this case, when including the cost of storage and new transmission lines, nuclear power was found to be half as expensive as these renewables. No accurate evaluation of energy costs can fail to take into account full system costs, which are inherently greater when, for example, you must install a high voltage transmission line to connect a ten megawatt wind turbine, floating in 4,000 feet of ocean, 20 miles offshore, to land based battery farms and the grid.

California was once home to six nuclear power plants, generating a total of 5.8 gigawatts. Three of them, Humboldt Bay, Vallecitos, and Santa Susana, were small-scale, generating barely 100 megawatts in total. But San Onofre, with three reactors that could have been retrofit, took its 2.6 gigawatts offline in 2012. The other big plant was Rancho Seco in the Sacramento Valley, generating 913 megawatts until it was taken offline in 1989. Now, instead of building more nuclear power plants, California’s last operating reactors at Diablo Canyon are scheduled for shutdown. In the face of hyperbolic opposition, PG&E has applied to renew its license for another 20 years.

But what about the waste! Can nuclear power ever be completely safe? This article from 2019 offers a useful summary of how France has managed nuclear power, which provides over 70 percent of that nation’s electricity. In particular, it is worth noting the success the French have had recycling spent fuel, which enables a more efficient and secure supply of fuel and reduced radioactive waste. Every form of power generation carries with it an assortment of safety risks and environmental impact. To belabor the question — because it is appallingly obvious a fraud of historic proportions is sleepwalking to fruition – why are environmentalists obsessed with eliminating oil, gas, and nuclear power, while ignoring the aquatic and avian slaughter and squandered billions that are coming to California with offshore wind?

So how can we bring more nuclear energy to California, a state that, after all, is the global epicenter of climate crisis madness? Last year, writing for Quillette, Robert Zubrin, a nuclear engineer and author of the book “The Case for Nukes,” wrote a three-part series on clean energy with a focus on the nuclear option. This third installment provides an overview and makes specific recommendations in the areas of regulatory reform, the licensing process, waste disposal, and progress and priorities in research and development. In terms of advancing the technology, he writes “Breeder reactors could multiply our nuclear fuel resources a hundredfold. Small modular reactors could open up new markets unsuited to large pressurized water reactors and potentially make reactors much cheaper by enabling mass production in factories. High-temperature gas-cooled reactors and molten salt thorium reactors both hold great promise. New types of fission reactors for space applications are needed. The promise of thermonuclear fusion needs to be explored and developed.”

If California’s state legislature and governor are not merely serious, but also smart about how to deliver abundant “net-zero” energy, they need to fast-track nuclear with the same zealotry that they’ve applied to wind and solar.

The Opportunity Cost of Shutting Down Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant

For nearly 35 years, Diablo Canyon Power Plant has pumped just over 2.0 gigawatts of electricity onto California’s power grid. Unlike hydroelectric power, which has good years and bad depending on rainfall, or solar and wind power which depends on sunshine and wind, Diablo Canyon’s nuclear reactors generate this electricity 24 hours per day, 365 days a year.

But Diablo Canyon’s days are numbered. In January 2018 California’s Public Utility Commission voted to shut it down. Barring legislation to countermand this decision, by 2025 Diablo Canyon will cease operations, making California a nuclear free state. Is this a good idea?

Anti-nuclear environmental groups, as reported at the time in the Los Angeles Times, “hailed the decision, which was expected after 17 months of filings and debate, but also were concerned about what type of energy sources would be used to replace Diablo’s electricity.”

Good question. Especially since environmental groups are the groups one might expect to be most concerned about “greenhouse gas,” and the only way wind and solar power can operate is by having natural gas power plants to spin into action every time the wind falters or the sun goes down.

The alternative to natural gas backup is to overbuild wind and solar farms and store the excess energy with batteries. An interesting comparison would be to see what battery storage capacity would be required to replace the power Diablo generates during off peak hours of 12 hours per day.

The following chart projects a $12 billion price tag, based on a cost of $500 million per gigawatt-hour of battery farm storage. This cost estimate relies on data from several parallel projects at the 2.0 gigawatt-hour Moss Landing energy storage facility currently under development on the Central California coast. 

While battery storage costs are declining rapidly, with some experts projecting prices at one-fifth current levels within 10-20 years, others are not so sanguine. And battery costs aren’t the only consideration. Balance of plant costs – siting, distribution infrastructure – and California’s obstructionist construction climate will also pile on costs.

How Many EVs Could Diablo Canyon Recharge Every Night?

If Diablo isn’t shut down, of course, it isn’t necessary to invest $12 billion (or more) in battery storage to scoop up sun and wind dependent intermittent renewable energy and save it for nighttime charging. But either way, assuming California’s policymakers achieve their goal of filling our roads with battery powered vehicles, how many miles could they travel based on tapping into 12 hours of Diablo Canyon’s 2.0 gigawatt output?

As the next chart shows, the metric we’re going to be getting used to when evaluating mileage efficiency from EVs is not “miles-per-gallon-equivalent,” but the far more descriptive kilowatt-hours per 100 miles. And based on US EPA data, most EVs on the road today require around 25 kilowatt-hours to travel 100 miles. That equates to 4 million miles per gigawatt-hour. Taking into account 12 hours of 2.0 gigawatt output from Diablo Canyon, that’s enough to power a fleet of EVs driving 96 million miles per day. How does that compare to the total mileage driven each day by Californians?

According to US Federal Highway Administration data, the Californians log per capita vehicle mileage of 9,053 miles per year. That means California’s nearly 40 million residents are driving nearly one billion miles per day. Nonetheless, Diablo Canyon alone could power enough EVs to put quite a dent into that total. Nearly 10 percent of all driver mileage could be powered by EVs charged overnight by electricity produced by Diablo Canyon.

To make the opportunity cost of shutting down Diablo Canyon even more stark, one might ask what the cost would be to use solar panels and batteries to replace Diablo Canyon’s off-peak nocturnal output? The next chart shows those estimates, based on a rock bottom price of $1.00 per watt of solar panels. That is a best-case number pretty much forever, since land acquisition, engineering, labor, racking, connectors, utility interties, distribution infrastructure – along with the price of the actual panels – make this a mature industry.

As an aside, the less said about wind power, the better. Wind power is an abomination, slaughtering birds, bats, and insects at a rate which would destroy the planet in a few years if it were ever developed to any meaningful scale, not to mention the visual blight, the hideous quantities of materials, or the physical and psychological illness the inescapable low frequency thrum triggers in humans and animals.

As shown above, it would cost about $18 billion to develop renewable assets using solar and battery technology to replace the overnight EV recharging capacity of Diablo Canyon. If California’s vehicles were electrified, this capacity is sufficient to power 10 percent of California’s automobile mileage. And this is exactly half the story – Diablo Canyon operates 24 hours per day, not just at night to charge EV batteries.

It is interesting – or depressing, depending on one’s ability to confront these scandalous miscarriages of policy with equanimity – to wonder why environmentalists, who think we have barely a decade to “decarbonize” before the planet is lost, are so intent on shutting down Diablo Canyon.

The only sane way to sell renewable energy is to make it cheaper than fossil fuel and nuclear power. But the flawed policies and phony accounting that are used to present renewables as competitive need to be replaced by honest analysis.

It should be obvious that if renewable energy was truly less expensive, every nation in the world would be turning to renewables instead of building, as fast as they possibly can, more coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants.

The single most significant variable affecting the economic viability of intermittent renewable energy is storage costs. Maybe batteries will eventually come down in price to, say $50 per kilowatt-hour, i.e., $50 million per gigawatt-hour. And if and when that happens, maybe it will make economic sense to convert to 100 percent renewables. And maybe then, instead of having to sow fear and panic in the media, and weaponize brainwashed elementary school children for photo ops with politicians pushing “green” energy, states and nations will adopt renewables because they really are the cheaper alternative.

If we are entering the electric age, where not only lights, PCs, refrigerators and air conditioners use electricity, but also space heaters, water heaters, cooktops, and vehicles – not to mention cyber currency – then we’re going to need more electricity at a time when “renewables” aren’t ready for prime time. And if the urgent imperative to rush into this decarbonized electric age is to supposedly save the planet, why are we shutting down Diablo Canyon?

In the meantime, Diablo Canyon is a sunk cost. Ratepayers long ago covered the construction bill for Diablo Canyon. But these reactors, instead of continuing to generate 2.0 gigawatts of clean, carbon free electricity for decades to come, are going to be shut down and subject to expensive decommissioning costs. Those who sincerely believe in the need to decarbonize energy need to join with those who support economically sound energy policies, to demand Diablo Canyon stay open.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Why Not Nuclear Power to Mitigate Climate Change?

AUDIO:  A discussion of nuclear power, especially asking the question: why aren’t climate change activists in favor of nuclear power? – 8 minutes on KNRS FM 105.9 Salt Lake City – Edward Ring on The Rod Arquette Show.

Why Don’t Climate Activists Support Nuclear Power?

For several days in mid-April, downtown London was paralyzed by thousands of “climate activists” who were protesting the failure of the U.K. government to act swiftly enough to combat climate change. In mid-March, thousands of students across the United States staged school “walkouts” to demand action on climate change.

These protests are ongoing, but there is little underlying logic to them. The primary sources of anthropogenic CO2 are no longer Western nations, which in sum are only responsible for about 30 percent of global emissions. The biggest single culprit, if you want to call it that, is China, responsible for 28 percent of global emissions, nearly twice as much as the U.S., and literally 28 times as much as the U.K. Rapidly industrializing India, responsible for 6 percent of global CO2 emissions, is on track to become the most populous nation on earth. The chances that China and India will sacrifice their national future in order to reduce CO2 emissions is zero. The same holds for every emerging nation, including the demographic heavyweights Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, along with all the rest.

The logic of these protestors also fails when it comes to the science of climate change, although to even suggest this is heresy. So rather than point out that moderate warming might actually be beneficial to the planet, or that extreme weather is actually more highly correlated with a cooling planet, let’s accept all the popular wisdom with respect to “climate science.” So what? According to their own theories, it’s already too late. Climate alarmists have repeatedly said we had just a few years left, or else.

Back in 1989, a “senior U.N. environmental official” said “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Then, in 2006, Al Gore told the Washington Post that “humanity may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan.” Fast forward to 2019, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins today’s alarmist chorus, telling us that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

So where’s the logic and reason behind these protests? The biggest emitters of CO2 are not going to stop emitting CO2, and it’s too late anyway. But there’s an even more obvious flaw in the logic of these protestors, and more generally, in the entire agenda of the climate change lobby: They will not support nuclear power.

The Case for Nuclear Power

Emissions free: While it’s disingenuous for those of us who don’t believe anthropogenic CO2 is a mortal threat to humanity to use that argument to promote nuclear power, it’s important to recognize that nuclear power plants don’t emit anything into the atmosphere. Even so-called “deniers,” if they’re intellectually honest, acknowledge that burning fossil fuel still causes genuine air pollution. While carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead, and particulates are scrubbed out of most modern power plants in America, the rest of the world lags behind in cleaning up their smokestack emissions. And even in America, where auto tailpipe emissions are cleaner than ever, air pollution can accumulate around busy intersections in large cities and remains a health hazard. Whether to recharge car batteries or to otherwise power the electric grid, nuclear energy is 100 percent emissions free.

Safer than ever: The fear of a nuclear accident animates anti-nuclear activists around the world. But all the nuclear accidents in history – including the big three, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island – have caused at most 200 deaths. Even that number is based on generous speculation since it is impossible to positively identify the cause of illnesses people develop decades after an exposure. Of course, there have been accidents while mining for nuclear fuel, or during construction of nuclear power plants. But as this chart shows, using data from the International Energy Agency, coal mining, drilling for oil and natural gas, and harvesting of “renewable” biomass are all far more harmful to human health.

Absent from the above chart are renewables, but this doesn’t mean renewable energy doesn’t have a cost in human life. Renewable energy relies primarily on photovoltaic panels, wind generators, and batteries, all three of which are incredibly resource intensive. Hundreds if not thousands of miners have already died, working under slave conditions, to extract the cobalt and lithium needed for modern batteries. As renewables increase their share of global energy production, this human catastrophe will increase in scale, and to-date there are minimal reforms, and no viable alternative materials.

Not only does nuclear power have an exemplary safety record when compared to other forms of energy, the next generation nuclear power technologies are safer than ever. These new reactors employ even more resilient cooling systems, they can reprocess their own spent fuel, and they are being designed as modules of various power outputs that require far less maintenance.

Abundant: The world’s present measured resources of uranium are enough to last for about 90 years at current global rates of consumption. According to the World Nuclear Association, “this represents a higher level of assured resources than is normal for most minerals.” This is an important point. Just as the concept of “peak oil” was popularized in the late 1990s, and debunked about ten years later as new reserves were discovered and new methods of extraction were developed, it is unlikely the global supply of nuclear fuel will precipitously diminish especially as the development of reprocessing technology improves. The history of resource extraction, at least when market forces are allowed to operate, is that innovation and alternative solutions are always sufficient to offset looming scarcity of any particular resource.

Renewables are overrated: There are a lot of aspects to this, from the incredible waste of land, to the devastating toll on wildlife, to the resource intensity, to the monstrous recycling challenge as these massive installations wear out and have to be replaced. But what should be relevant to the climate activists is the intermittency of renewables, which cannot produce energy when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

In order to compensate for the on again off again nature of renewable energy, fossil fuel has to be employed as backup. This not only guarantees ongoing CO2 emissions, but it has economic consequences. Because natural gas power plants now have to be shut on and off depending on the availability of renewable energy, they cannot efficiently recover their construction costs. This artificially distorts upward the actual cost of fossil fuel energy, making renewable energy look more economical by comparison. Nuclear power plants, which have zero emissions, but cannot be rapidly turned on and off, are in some cases being decommissioned to make room for hybrid renewable/fossil fuel systems. In states where this has happened, CO2 emissions have actually risen.

We need an “all of the above” energy strategy: Global civilization depends on cheap, reliable, abundant energy, and it needs as much of it as it can possibly get. Just in order for average worldwide per capita energy consumption to reach half of what it currently is in the United States, global energy production has to double. This is an immutable fact.

Of course we should continue to develop renewable energy, just as we should continue to research breakthrough energy technologies such as fusion power. But fossil fuel use is not going to go away, its use is going to increase for at least the next 20-30 years until something better comes along. And clean, safe, abundant nuclear power should be part of our global energy portfolio, no matter what anyone believes regarding CO2 and “climate change.”

It is interesting to wonder who is behind the massive demonstrations around the world demanding “climate action.” Whoever they are, perhaps the single biggest challenge to their sincerity is their unwillingness to support nuclear power as part of the solution.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Californian Exceptionalism

The golden state is aptly named. The state of riches and opportunity. California is High Sierra and endless ocean shores, redwoods, saguaro, rice, cotton, alfalfa, snow melt and seasonal squalls, rolling hills of oak and granite cliffs, breathtaking vistas and vast, varied terrain. California is rich in beauty, rich in natural wonders, rich in resources.

California’s people are a reflection and embodiment of the golden state, they are as varied as the landscape, and drawn from around the world, Californians have both created and sought this destination of dreamers. From Silicon Valley to Hollywood, from those who rushed to find the Mother Lode or worked to harvest the timber, the oil, the fruit of the land, the bounty of the sea, California’s people do its natural riches justice.

California is indeed unique, a teeming nation unto its own, drawing peoples from all the nations of the world. California is a geographically isolated region over a quarter-million square kilometers in area, located on the temperate western shore of North America, separated from the world by the Pacific Ocean to the west, the Rocky Mountains to the east, high desert to the south and dense forests to the north. And California’s people are equally exceptional.

From making movies to inventing megabits or engineering life, California’s contribution to global culture and economic development is impossible to overstate. California is Athens, California is Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Friedrich Krupp. California’s culture and California’s technology are the vanguard of the world. This is California’s opportunity, this is California’s exceptionalism.

In this new century, among many other things, California now leads the world in green technology and green political savvy. This is ironic, of course, since California in 2009 is mostly perceived as mired in a political and fiscal crisis. But how this fiscal crisis is resolved – along with how California evolves in its environmental leadership – is California’s opportunity and challenge.

California’s finances are now in crisis because they, perhaps more than any other state in the U.S., have allowed their political class to become an elite, overpaid, anti-growth ruling class, completely alienated from their intrinsically entrepreneurial people. When California’s people reassert themselves, California will again surprise the world. Because the fiscal collapse happened first and was the worst in California, so too the cascading rebounds will also occur first in California. Few regions anywhere possess California’s literally incalculable innate wealth. If Californians can shrink government and roll back extreme environmentalism, the immense and diverse economic might that defines California will leap forward again.

Reforming government is relatively simple. Spend less. Stop borrowing.

Reforming environmentalism is harder, but here are a few suggestions:

(1)  Develop additional nuclear power, it is safer than ever. Reprocess and reuse nuclear fuel.

(2)  Build a liquid natural gas terminal off the California coast. Diversify and build overcapacity of electricity generation to become an electricity exporter.

(3)  Use high voltage underground direct current technology to upgrade California’s electrical grid.

(4)  With respect to air quality regulations, resume the emphasis on transitioning to clean burning fuel, instead of the inordinate, futile and flawed current emphasis on regulating CO2 emissions.

(5)  Develop massive desalination plants on or around Camp Pendleton and elsewhere on the Southern California coast.

(6)  Build a new statewide water conveyance system and upgrade existing facilities.

(7)  Build more and better roads and freeways, abandon the bullet train project, and develop intercity rail on existing tracks.

(8)  Let up a bit on the anti-growth, anti-sprawl fanaticism. Allow small homes on large lots in leafy suburbs to be affordable again.

California can still be green, but not at any cost, for virtually zero if not actual negative environmental benefit. If the metaphor for American exceptionalism is the city on the hill, then for California it is the green planet in the universe. That is our opportunity.