Why it’s time to dispel the myths about it.
Long past time, I’d say. The Guardian has had surprisingly good science and technology coverage lately.
20 thoughts on “Nuclear Power”
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Why it’s time to dispel the myths about it.
Long past time, I’d say. The Guardian has had surprisingly good science and technology coverage lately.
Comments are closed.
There is something seriously wrong with humans that we can’t have abundant nuclear power too cheap to meter.
“We’re why we can’t have nice things.”
That’s how I put it, typically.
I’m skeptical of “too cheap to meter”, but abundant, affordable, and reliable would be nice.
In the book, “The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear”, the case is firmly put that people are much worse off without nukes than with. The conclusion was that humans, as a species, would rather not have a benefit from something if there’s even an infinitesimal chance of it bringing a massive catastrophe.
I’ll tell you a myth about nuclear power . . . that you can make money investing in it . . .
That depends a bit on public sentiment, the engineering is far cheaper than the politics.
The kinds of trade-offs one would make in designing an electric utility power generation station from scratch using nuclear fission vs those one would make when designing a ship or submarine based power plant using nuclear fission are not the same. Unfortunately our (US) history in nuclear power development confused the two, because at the time it was believed it would be cheaper to simply scale up what the Navy had already done. What would have helped some was if we had standardized on one or two designs, but that’s not what happened either. Thus no economies of scale to be had either. That legacy alone has not served us well. Then along came the 60’s & 70’s and the idea that we should not be building anything that used the word ‘nuclear’ lest we poison our children. Hence the safety regulations started pouring in, more to do with safety theater than engineering. This also further reduced the possibility of being able to go with standard designs and vastly increased the cost, the latter of which was exactly the openly stated goal of the “green” nuclear opponents of those times. What we have now are an aging set of one-off power plants, each unique in its own way and expensive to operate, expensive to maintain and expensive to de-commission.
US nuclear: 20% of electricity
US coal: 33% of electricity (responsible for 71% of CO_2 emissions in electricity generation)
US natural gas: 33% of electricity (responsible for 28% of CO_2 emissions in electricity generation)
Electricity is responsible for about 32% of greenhouse gas emissions in the US.
France nuclear: 75% of electricity
I’d suggest a catastrophic global warming advocate who wasn’t advocating for the wholesale replacement of coal power plants by natural gas in the short term and nuclear in the long term wasn’t serious about doing something effective.
Hogwash! Exterminate 75% of the proles and all the elites can have private jets without guilt!
If you concerned about human emission of CO2 { I am not} then the cheapest, safest, and only way to lower CO2 emission [if near term and/or exclude harvesting solar energy from space environment] is to increase the amount of electrical power generated by nuclear energy.
And electrical cars do not reduce CO2 emission by much and not at all if electrical power is created by burning coal. Or since China gets 80% of it’s electrical power from Coal, any electrical cars in China cause more CO2 emission than do gasoline cars. And in terms of air pollution, you would need electrical freight trucks.
OK, you forced me to crank the numbers:
The dirtiest coal, lignite, emits 0.98 kg CO2/kWh. An exhaustive arm-wave search of Wikipedia (so it’s gotta be true!) yields an average for electric cars of about 23 kWh/100 km. Let’s goose that up to 25 kWh for transmission losses.
So 100% lignite power generation yields an electric car footprint of 0.25 kg CO2/km.
Now: Gasoline emissions are about 9.1 kg CO2/gal, and average fleet economy of new cars in the US is 23.6 mi/gal = 38.0 km/gal. So gasoline engines yield 0.24 kg CO2/km.
You are, technically, correct.
However, even in China, lignite makes up less than 50% of their reserves. Bituminous coals emit about 5% less CO2/kWh, so even if you run with half lignite, you’re down to 2.5% less CO2, which would move the electric car to dead-even with gasoline. And of course that’s before you throw in gas (44% less CO2 than lignite), and all the non-carbon energy sources.
On to nukes:
If you’re going to define “safest” as “fewest number of quality-adjusted life-years lost”, then I agree. However, another metric for “safest” might be “least land taken out of service per year”. A while back, I eyeballed the Chernobyl, Kyshtym, and Fukushima maps and came up with an average of about 500 km^2 per year contaminated at >5 curies/km^2. The average is obviously made up of only three events. And you could argue that most western nations wouldn’t accept contamination levels much higher than 2 Ci/km^2, which might make the average closer to 1500 km^2/year.
That… might be about the same as coal, but it’s vastly worse than other fossil fuels and hydro. Solar’s really land-intensive, but it tends to be crappy land, and wind isn’t very land-intensive unless you’re going to count the whole wind farm and not just the tower footings.
And as for “cheapest”: even if you use Chinese and South Korean capital costs (the low $3000’s/kW), onshore wind already beats that handily, and solar PV is closing in on it. If you use US nuclear costs, PV is already ahead.
I think you’ve got a reasonable argument that, if the regulatory structure were reformed, we were manufacturing standardized nukes off-site and installing them, and all the NIMBY legal hoo-hah suddently vanished, you could scale nuclear power up faster than either wind or PV, for a somewhat lower capital cost. However, since none of those things have happened yet, and two of them are likely never to happen, your argument has a pretty tough row to hoe.
If your “nuclear power” analysis includes Kyshtym (or even Chernobyl), you’re doing it wrong.
Chernobyl was a plant nobody in the West would have dreamed of operating after 1958 or so, and Kyshtym’s disaster(s) were due to it being a plutonium factory run by Communists who didn’t give one fig, ever, about waste control or safety, not “a nuclear power plant”.
You have to be trying to rig the game to use them as your baselines, given modern plant designs and safety records.
(Even Fukushima? An obsolete design from the 70s … that still only failed because of a natural disaster beyond estimated bounds and bad placement of backup generators.
Plenty of modern designs exist that physically cannot suffer core meltdown, is the thing.
Do nuclear power right and you can’t even get Three Mile Island, let alone Fukushima – and Kyshtym was never even on the map.)
I’m perfectly willing to believe that the accident rate and severity in the future will be orders of magnitude lower than the past statistics show, but they are the past statistics. And yeah, there are lots of nifty designs, and even a few prototypes, but they’re not deployed yet, and you can’t do the full set of failure chains without a few deployments. And even then, it’s the stuff that you forgot to include in the chains that gets you.
BTW, I included Kyshtym because there have only been 3 accidents in history that took any land out of service, and Kyshtym was one of them. However, Kyshtym is a rounding error compared to the other two.
–TheRadicalModerate
April 11, 2016 at 9:31 PM
OK, you forced me to crank the numbers:
The dirtiest coal, lignite, emits 0.98 kg CO2/kWh. An exhaustive arm-wave search of Wikipedia (so it’s gotta be true!) yields an average for electric cars of about 23 kWh/100 km. Let’s goose that up to 25 kWh for transmission losses.
So 100% lignite power generation yields an electric car footprint of 0.25 kg CO2/km.
Now: Gasoline emissions are about 9.1 kg CO2/gal, and average fleet economy of new cars in the US is 23.6 mi/gal = 38.0 km/gal. So gasoline engines yield 0.24 kg CO2/km.
You are, technically, correct.–
Good, I like being technically correct:)
But couple things. One is buying a electrical car because it reduces CO2. And in China or other areas which use high percentage of coal power, you are technically not doing this.
And were people [despite this] to buy and use such cars in any significant numbers, then this could cause electrical power shortages which may require building more coal powerplant. As in if this were to occur within a short time period, the sudden increase in load require rapid development of addition power plants, and coal plants are favored, if one needs to add electrical power capacity in a short development time frame.
Another thing is one comparing an electric car which has to be efficiently designed and comparing to gasoline cars which are not bought because they have a focus upon being efficient:
“Using technologies that make them fuel-efficient, these cars fill everyday driving needs while saving on gas. The pricing on these cars with a 40-mpg-or-better rating ranges from $12,445 to $19,455, making them easy on your new-car budget.”
Read more: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/auto/9-fuel-efficient-cars-gas-only-1.aspx#ixzz45gaXJ1wI
These gas powered cars get 40-mpg-or-better. So in above example they would emit about 1/2 as much CO2, have longer range, last longer, and are cheaper. And considering electrical car shorter range, it seems one could need additional car if you want an electrical car if one wants the option of occasionally going further than one can go with electrical car.
Plus another factor to add to above analysis:
—“Let’s say your charger had a meter — most don’t — and it read ’12 kWh’ after you finished charging,” Edmunds says. “Only about 10 kWh of that charging actually made it to the battery. But, of course, you’re paying for all of it.” Charging losses of 15-20 percent are pretty typical of most electric cars, he says.—
http://www.edmunds.com/car-technology/electric-car-battery-basics-capacity-charging-and-range.html
Of course for some people, with limited needs, a electrical car might fit one’s needs.
But you would not be saving the world.
Except that solar doesn’t work at night and “when the wind don’t blow the power don’t flow”.
Li-ion battery costs have declined by a factor of 3 (per kWh) in the last five years, and will decline further. Other utility-scale battery chemistries (and other non-battery storage schemes) are also being pushed forward. I see utility-scale electric energy storage as being a problem that will be solved by the time it needs to be solved. The big question is which storage technology will come out ahead.
I haven’t checked lately, but my understanding is that lithium cell chemisties are really only favored when energy/mass is paramount. Otherwise lead-acid batteries are much more cost effective.
It’s my understanding that Li-ion lasts much longer (like 4x the cycles) than Pb-acid, and is now much cheaper overall.
Some other technologies, like Eos Energy Systems’ zinc-air chemistry, are supposed to last longer still, and may be better than Li-ion for stationary applications. But Li-ion is getting so much development money it may pull ahead anyway.
Solar and Wind will not work until we have low cost utility scale power storage.
Current Lipo cells have a max life of less than ~2000 cycles.
If you are using this for night time baseling power that means the battery needs replaced every 5 years or so.
Also Battery storage efficiency is not 100% so this father reduces the amount of energy needed. Achademics studies put the solar EROI at between 10 and 20 before batteries are added, add batteries and its 5 to 10…. ye the only seious utility scale solar plants audited for real life EROI were in spain and showed an non battery EROI of ~2.
This means that to get 1MW out of solar over 25 years we need to spend 500KW of power Today. We can not have an industrial civilization with an EROI less than about 20 otherwise the civilization has no energy to do anything but make more power plants.
Nuclear power is VASTLY more energy dense and involves orders of magnitude less fuel, infrastructure (and consequently environmental disruption) than any other power source. Failure to utilize this in our society is unforgivably impoverishing.
It strikes me that nuclear electric plants (in the US) are much like spaceflight. They have been stuck in a bureaucratic cul-da-sac for many decades, limping along being marginally useful, but unable to change and innovate due to military/government style of operations.
Recently we’ve seen innovators from the private sector start the process of change in the spaceflight sector. Things are looking optimistic on that front.
Change in the nuclear power industry must come from radical innovation MOSTLY in breaking out of the government industrial complex. I’m sure it will also be accompanied with radically different technological approaches as well. The outlook, as of right now, is not very promising.
I’m hoping that serious commercial operations in space might make for both the need and opportunity for a nuclear renaissance.