Gore, Grove, Pickens - All Have Energy Plans, All Mistakingly Marginalize Nuclear Power Potential
It has been a big week for energy plans. We have one proposed by a former politician and current alternative energy venture capitalist, one proposed by a former oil man who is lobbying for a Production Tax Credit (PTC) extension, and one from a former microprocessor supplier who was once an embarrassed sole supplier with insufficient capacity to meet customer demands. All of the plans envision a need for more abundant and reliable electrical power, but all of the plans marginalize the potential for growth in nuclear fission power.
I am not rich, not powerful and not a public figure. I have not spent my career drilling oil and gas wells, raiding companies, running for office, or building an industry dominating chip supplier. Instead, I have been struggling for more than 15 years to try to share a vision for a cleaner, safer, more prosperous world made possible by moving away from carbon based fuels that put most of us into dependence on people that simply do not like or respect us.
At the risk of being accused of vanity for trying to play with the big boys, I would like to add my 1.76 cents worth to all of the proposed plans. Take the ideas proposed by Gore, Pickens, and Grove to shift dependence from carbon based fuels to electrical power and add a couple more specific actions:
- Empower nuclear regulators with enough resources to work their way through current traffic jams of license applications.
- Revise rules to enable and encourage smaller, simpler plants instead of the current “one size fits all”.
- Stabilize the carbon cost structure so that nuclear power development planners can include the competitive benefits in their business case presentations for investors.
- Take a hard look at the plants operating on aircraft carriers, ice breakers and submarines to determine if, like modern jet engines developed initially for military use, they can be commercialized without sacrificing military advantages.
- Enable the world’s nuclear regulatory license organizations to share documentation, training and processes so that a plant licensed by one qualified regulatory body can be more easily licensed by all of them.
While serving as a nuclear submarine engineer officer, I had the opportunity to develop expert knowledge about an energy source that provided almost magical capabilities. How many of you would like to have a power plant that allowed you to be completely divorced from the grid, with a small volume fuel supply that lasted for a decade and a half? How cool would it be to be able to operate that system in a sealed space, knowing that you were not spewing any pollutants at all?
We - trained and educated engineers, technicians, and operators - know how to produce massive quantities of weather independent power without burning any carbon based fuels at all. We know where to find the fuel, how to run training programs, how to build the components and how to safely store the used materials. We know how reliable the plants can be, how safe they are and how little waste they produce. We can compute to three decimal places the cost to operate the existing plants.
Note: The 1.76 cents mentioned above is the 2007 average cost of operating a nuclear plant in the US. That cost includes labor, material & supplies, contractor services, licensing fees, and miscellaneous costs such as employee expenses and regulatory fees. It also includes fuel related costs like purchasing of uranium, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication services along with storage and shipment costs, and inventory (including interest) charges less any expected salvage value. (Source: Nuclear Energy Institute Resources and Stats).
What you read about ever increasing costs for nuclear power is limited to projected costs for future systems - future cost estimates are always subject to a lot of guesswork. That is especially true for systems whose construction start time is still four years - six years away.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons why some people do not like fission power.
- It has successfully taken market share from coal, oil and gas in electrical power production.
- It has the potential to push oil out of heating and ship propulsion and gas out of heating and electrical power.
- It can push coal out of its last remaining market - why spend billions to figure out how to separate and sequester CO2 when you can simply prevent its production?
- It can reduce the threat of fuel interruptions as a political or economic bargaining chip since plants can run for at least 18 months without new fuel.
- It can reduce support for spending large quantities of taxpayer dollars to subsidize less effective and less green energy sources on the pretense that they provide energy security or reduced emissions - it is hard to go below zero.
- It can reduce the need to spend money supporting scientists to research silver bullet energy sources like nuclear fusion.
“Greentech” venture capitalists like Gore and oil and gas men like Pickens will continue to try to marginalize nuclear power and spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about its capabilities. That is their job, but it is our job as citizens to ask hard questions, to seek facts, to recognize vested interests, and to make long term choices that will provide us with a better, more prosperous and more egalitarian world.
The choice to ignore the best tool in the box to address climate change, energy costs, and inequality of opportunity makes me believe that Gore, Pickens and Grove simply do not fully understand the technical nature of the challenges that we are facing. They are expressing some good thoughts on the causes and extent of the ills that face us, but their solutions simply cannot work without more effective medicine.
The wealth concentrating flow of money from the pockets of billions of European, Asian, African, Australian and American (north and south) consumers and into the pockets of a few thousand oil and gas oligarchs in Houston, Caracas, Riyadh, Lagos, Moscow, Abu Dhabi and others simply cannot be allowed to continue.
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Disclosure: Rod Adams is the founder of Adams Atomic Engines, Inc., the publisher of Atomic Insights, and the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. He is also a active duty officer in the US Navy who is speaking as a private citizen in no official capacity.
Nuclear power can also produce synthetic gasoline, diesel fuel, methanol, and even aviation fuel if the electricity is used to power water electrolysis and carbon dioxide extracting convection towers. Just 500 reactors could supply all of our gasoline needs.
The miracle of nuclear power produces less desired nuclear waste. Until someone can calculate the cost of storing this waste safely for 10 thousand years, I would doubt its cheaper than oil.
The first power-generating nuclear reactor in usa, was a retrofitted nuclear submarine reactor. Those reactors were specifically designed to produce bomb grade fuel (plutonium?). They are were not designed for efficiency.
I agree that new generation nuclear reactors might be a solution to all current energy needs, especially if they were designed to use thorium instead of uranium. But it would be better if we dont implement this step as a solution, because (as author mentioned) new technology improvements would not be funded then. And there are many approaches to energy generation that look really promising:
http://www.nanosolar.com
http://www.humdingerwind.com/windbelt.html
http://www.focusfusion.org
http://www.emc2fusion.org
Breakable:
You are wrong about submarine reactors. They were designed as compact power sources and have no ability to produce bomb grade material. Quite the opposite.
Why should we spent time and effort computing the cost of storage well into the future when we know what it costs to store the by products today? This is an aspect of the whole debate that I have never understood. Our storage systems work and there is no reason to suspect that they will stop working unless one fantasizes that civilization will disappear.
I believe it is immoral to ignore the tools that we know how to use today if the reason for doing that is to pressure the system to fund “promising” tools for tomorrow. We simply cannot afford to wait or to pass the buck.
Future generations will certainly not thank us if we burn up all of the useful hydrocarbons and leave our energy waste in the atmosphere where the materials are very difficult to recover.
Every serious discussion I had heard about building new nuclear plants starts with the problem of location. NIMBY rules.I live in NH and remember the protests and related cost overruns of 30 years ago over Seabrook. It costs consumers here about 12 cents per kilowatt now from our mix of plants.
How big would a sub size reactor facility be? How many megawatts would it produce? At what initial cost? What would be the expected cost per kw once in operation?
Gore is wrong about the technology.
Free Energy Forever
http://nlspropulsion.net/Documents/Free%20Power%20Forever.pdf
It is too bad your argument ignores the fundamental purpose of green technology. The worst alternative to renewable fuels tech is one in which the waste product is more deadly for longer than any of us will live. Nuclear energy is for navy ships and space travel not everyday local electric generation. Nuclear energy is not a tool it is a product.
A good Craftsman wrench made in New Britain, Conn. is a tool. A Craftsman wrench made in Taiwan is a product.
A tool is something used to do a job properly. A product is something somebody produces to resemble a tool, and only does a semblance of a job.
A better education than the one you have would teach you the difference.
Nuclear power is simply NOT financially viable. The risks - financial alone are too great. This does NOT count the waste costs or the “estimates” (which are absurdly low for de-commissioning old reactor. It just does not make dollars and sense. If YOU think it does, be my guest. However, if you do your homework and still invest, you will find yourself alone…
http://nanosolar.com
panel price: thirty cents per watt
capital infrastructure to make panels: sixteen cents a watt
panel lifespan: twenty five years
so, run the numbers, calculate cost per kilowatt hour, and get back to me about this nuclear option of yours, ok?
The author is absolutely right about Nuclear energy…but none of the politicians have the courage or intellectual integrity to take an objective and bipartisan position. Today we get more than 85% of energy from Fossil Fuels(Coal, Oil, Gas).We need a holistic approach to move to a sustainable solution in which a third each of our energy needs will come from Fossil, Nuclear and Renewable(Solar, wind, Biomass) energy sources. Even within Fossil fuels we will need to use new sources, such as Tar sands, Shale, Gas hydrates to reduce dependence on conventional oil sources.The transition to this future will take decades, but we need to start moving now!
The 1.76 cents/kWh is misleading. This is a fully paid off Nuclear plant working simply on variable costs. Under this definition, a Solar PV plant would cost just 0.6 cents/kWh (O&M and equipment replacement costs).
Even levelized cost of energy seems to be a corrupted way to compare technologies because it does not value peak power, baseload power, and inherent fuel price risk for Nuclear, Coal, Natural Gas, etc.
I would recommend comparing technologies by the net rate increase needed to support them. Progress Energy wants a minimum of a 12% rate increase for 2,234MW of nuclear. To acheive the same amount of solar MWs you would need a 2% rate increase. To acheive the same number of solar MWhs (because solar has a lower capacity factor) you would need a 4% rate increase. To add smart grid technologies, battery storage, and other technologies to make the solar “dispatchable” you would need a total of a 6% rate increase — still far cheaper than the Nuclear Power plant.
This doesn’t count other benefits such as a distributed solution like solar PV helps customers fix their own electricity costs where Nuclear is blended into the rate base.