Carpe Datum

Nuclear vs Solar

Kevin Drum has a post up about one of my pet issues: peak oil and the energy situation over the next century. Even the oil companies are now publishing things that take as a given we will reach peak oil production in the next 20 years (some say much sooner). The wingnuts are trying to argue that new oil will spring up from the deep Earth like something out of Zeus' forehead, but the whole abiotic oil thing is deeply suspicious to me.

Anyway, the comments are the most interesting part of the whole discussion, and I'll quote a guy who makes a lot of sense. The whole thread is worth reading, but here's the highlight for me, from a commenter named Robert Keeling (any relation to famous CO2 researcher Charles David Keeling? I dunno...):

Upthread, there are the usual postings about "if only we'd developed nuclear energy." That's all bunk. There are also the usual "France is so far ahead of us" on it, which is also bunk.

France does, indeed, have an enormous investment in nuclear power. And almost no one in that country -- very likely including many in the government itself -- actually knows how much it's costing them. To keep "The City of Light" well lit, electric rates throughout the country are massively subsidized. No one actually knows what France spends subsidizing nuclear energy, but the best bet is that it's unbelievably expensive. They will not release a full audited accounting, despite calls to do so for most of a generation now; perhaps, not unlike our own government's criminally-bad bookkeeping vis-a-vis Indian lands held in trust, the French CAN'T provide such an accounting because it's just such a mess.

The truth is, nuclear power is practically a religion with some in the technical fields (far more among engineers than scientists, the latter being far better trained and immersed in the routines of scientific skeptism, while the former typically take years and years of college courses where the scientific method is dealt with in the introductory classes, and the rest of the time they're assigned books with titles like "Conceptual Blockbusting." Or, as John Gofman once noted, an engineer he knew at Lawrence Livermore Lab asked, "John, what percentage of containment do you want? We'll engineer for it!" Total confidence without the slightest clue of how much that would actually cost and how impossible a goal that really would be).

The problems of nuclear power are just enormous. Many were technical, and certainly some of those have or can be overcome. But the costs of doing so are equally enormous. The same amount of money, spent on -- for example -- solar could and would yield at least equal results, for an intrinsically less complex (and intrinsically less rigid, more easily dispersed) energy system. One, I might add, with intrinsically greater energy yield potential, since even now high-grade uranium ore is in somewhat tight supply.

I do despair, sometimes, in discussing this. It's so easy for nuclear advocates to play the same game as the GOP plays with other political issues: "Let's cut taxes" is far easier to sell than complex (but infinitely more rational) economic arguments favoring higher marginal tax rates. Likewise, "nuclear is the answer" is a far easier argument than, say, a complex discussion about the difficulties inherent in rapid doubling-rates, energy-intensive versus labor-intensive energy choices, and so on.

But one way I used to do this argument was by creating a "let's pretend" scenario. Let's pretend that the government handed one of these enthusiastic nuclear advocates enough to build, let's say, a 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant. Say, $5 billion. And they hand me the same amount, which I can spend on any combination of alternatives I choose. Who would provide more net power quickly? Who would provide the most power over, say, 30 years? Who would do so with the fewest side impacts? Who would put the most people to work?

On almost every score, I'd beat the nuclear guy hands down. Nevermind what it's like in other countries, in THIS country it would take him at least 8 years (probably more like 10-12) to bring his nuclear plant on line, and there's an awfully high probability that it would encounter enormous cost-overruns before opening (and if all he gets is his initial $5 billion? Well, then he never finishes his plant, and he produces no net energy for the nation). During that 8 year construction period, he SUCKS UP ENERGY like there's no tomorrow. Nuclear power energy systems are extremely energy intensive, from the mining of the raw materials (not just uranium, but ALL of the materials that go into plant and its attendant infrastructure). I've had engineers dismiss that as irrelevent, "a trivial energy expense," but in fact -- as Amory Lovins long ago pointed out -- it is not a trivial factor. If you happen to have a rapid "doubling rate" (that is, an aggressive nuclear development program), you end up producing NO net electric power for many, many years. Then one day you wake up with an enormous electric glut, which is another issue altogether.

Anyhow, while Mr. Nuclear is squandering money on his atom-splitting operation -- assuming he can convince any community in the nation to even accept the damned thing -- I would be spending my $5 billion on a variety of projects, most of them far more labor-intensive in nature. A simple, SIMPLE example: hire scads of under-employed people, give them a week or so of training, and send them around to replace fluorescent bulbs (or, with an electrician supervising the crews, actal fixtures) in hundreds of thousands of commercial buildings. The net energy savings starts IMMEDIATELY ... no waiting 8 years. The cost payoff is only about 2-3 years (yep, even now lots and lots of buildings are loaded with inefficient bulb and fixture types).

Or, I can invest in the construction and operation of wind turbines. Untapped wind energy potential in the U.S. is astonishing -- the midwest has potential wind energy that is an order of magnitude greater than current U.S. electrical consumption. Windmills are already cheaper than most forms of electricity production (most assuredly cheaper than nuclear, although that's sometimes hard to see given the massive hidden subsidies the nuclear industry gets from the federal government ... a point you'd think might give some of the Libertarian-minded pause). Only natural gas and coal are currently cheaper, and in both cases (but especially the case of coal), the advantage would completely vanish in a heartbeat if the currently-externalized environmental costs were internalized via carbon taxes.

I'm a little out-of-date on all of that -- I used to be very familiar with the terrific innovations of Zond Corporation, then the second-largest windmill manufacturer / operator after U.S. Wind, but they were sold in the mid-90s to Enron, and more recently have been acquired by G.E. No telling what they're doing now.

But here's the thing: a windmill can be ordered, built, and installed, all in a few months. Once installed, it starts producing power. Because it is not very energy intensive in its construction (and takes no energy-intensive fuel, unlike the purified uranium in a nuke), it produces net energy for the nation in a very short period. If I were to drop $5 billion on windmills, I might add, I would -- all by myself -- have an ENORMOUS impact on the eventual cost of this energy source. Factories would be built to meet my orders, fields would be developed, transmission systems installed ... and subsequent units would be ever cheaper to build and install as a result. Of course, unlike nuclear power, wind has never gotten anything like massive open and hidden subsidies.

Or, I could drop my money into solar. The Japanese are installing it like crazy right now, and so are the Germans. (Japan is the leading producer of solar cells now, a position the U.S. held just five or six years ago. The Europeans are coming on strong, with Siemens now offering incredibly attractive financing to large institutions willing to allow them to install various solar-energy heating and electrical systems. A friend is, right now, pushing several school districts in California to take them up on it).

So ... my $5 billion would be spent and gone within, say, 3-5 years. It might or might not, in the long haul, generate as much net energy (or energy savings, which is exactly the same thing) as the nuclear plant ... IF it ever got built at all, and IF it never suffered any major problems. But don't think for a minute that it would be a walk-away for the nuclear guy, even over the long haul. It most assuredly would not, and probably -- given the abundant opportunities for cheap conservation techniques still available to us -- might not exceed my net production at all, ever. Leastways, not on that first $5 billion investment.

I do not understand the truly religious hold that nuclear power has on the conservative mind (and, yes, even a few techies of otherwise liberal bent). It makes no sense to me, since the objective arguments favoring alternatives far outweigh nuclear's alleged benefits. Like I said above, when I was active in the anti-nuclear movement (commercial nuclear, I mean), we found that many scientists -- contrary to public perception -- were very amenable to our arguments, and more than a few ended up cautiously on our side. The engineers were the implacable ones, just SURE nuclear power was the greatest thing since sliced bread and if it wouldn't work, then western civilization was doomed (I was actually told this by a German engineer I met at Burroughs Corporation once. Such a twit!)

That was followed up by this comment:

** It's been so many years that I simply no longer have the numbers in my head, and wouldn't know where to find them in a few minutes, but generally auto fuel is the 900-lb. gorilla on the block vis-a-vis oil consumption. A HUGE fraction of petroleum ends up in autos as fuel and lubricant. Yes, oil is used for lots of other stuff: heating fuel, plastics, chemicals, fertilizers, medicinals, you name it. But if we had a transit system running on something besides oil, we really wouldn't be having any much discussion about oil shortages.

** I haven't read Amory Lovins' latest book, but I'll vouch for the man five times over! He's a genius, and a genuinely good guy to boot. I once had the pleasure of fetching him at the airport, taking him to give a lecture at NASA/Ames in Mountain View, and then taking him on up to San Francisco for an evening lecture. Wonderful guy: funny, irreverent, and with a piercing intelligence. Was the youngest don in history at Oxford University in England, a unique achievement for an American. Once walked into MIT for a debate on nuclear power, to general catcalls from the student audience ... and walked out to standing applause at the end, having pretty much demolished his opponents. Has always seemed years ahead of everyone else in his writings. Brittle Power was all about the danger our "hard energy"-based system faces from terrorist attacks -- this written in the late 1980s. At that lecture in San Francisco, his big deal was something called the "hybrid" automobile. This around 1992. (He'd been unable to interest any of the top brass at GM, Ford, etc., so he was instead meeting with the lowest level engineers at all the auto companies, and slowly working his way up in that fashion). Check out his organization, The Rocky Mountain Institute, at www.rmi.org.

** The numbers have already been run (and run, and run, and run) on wind and solar energy systems. Wind IS cheaper than most alternatives right now, most particularly nuclear. RIGHT NOW. It's just hard to see with all of the ongoing (and utterly corrupt, to my mind) hidden subsidies that flow to nuclear. Solar remains more expensive, but has cut the gap to a fraction of what it was even just ten years ago; it is absolutely within striking distance of traditional energy sources.

** We don't need a "Manhattan Project" to develop solar or wind. An order to add solar thermal systems to every large federal building and school in the country (these are systems now being installed all over Japan, parts of Asia, and much of Europe!) would do the job, just exactly the same way that orders from NASA for small computers in the late 1960s and early '70s very effectively primed the pump for the PC revolution. It would get the factories built, and amortized, and lead to cheap, cheap, CHEAP production runs afterward.

Gee, that would cost billions! Sure ... probably many, many fewer billions than GwB has squandered on Iraq, however, with a whole lot more benefit to America.

** "24-hour operation" is a red-herring demand for alternatives. There's no reason not to have other systems -- natural gas, even coal or oil -- meeting the needs in the hours wind or solar can't provide. If you set out for the (perfectly achievable goal) of having wind and solar handle, say, 60-70% of the demand on average, you would push most fossil fuel-related problems into insignificance. Of course, with nuclear power, you're screwed: once you turn them on, you MUST keep them running as close to full-time as possible ... because whether they're producing power or not, the fuel is being consumed and the day of refueling inexorably approaches. So of course, nukes must ALWAYS be designated as baseload plants (leading to meaningless facts such as, "They represnet only 9% of our installed capacity, yet produce 14% of our power." True, and utterly without meaning either pro or con regarding their desirability). Not so with traditional systems, which can be turned on and off as needed, with little or no fuel waste.

** Of course, most wind farms are remarkably reliable day-in and day-out, 24 hours per day. Windmills produce power with as little as 3-5 mph of wind, and do best in areas with nice, steady (versus choppy) winds. Yet even "choppy" wind (e.g., in Hawaii) can now be handled pretty well. At the height most mills are put up (60-200 feet above the ground at the turbine itself), there is almost ALWAYS enough wind to keep the mills turning quite well, thank you. In some places, they're shut down more often due to HIGH wind rather than no wind (high winds can destroy them, so they go into automatic lock-down as necessary).

As for solar, storage systems of various kinds have BEEN developed, and are in use all around the world. We can, with more r&d monies, make them much, much better, of that I have no doubt. But the cost of doing so, and the technical obstacles, are pretty trivial compared to, say, the ongoing difficulties of figuring out how to safely store nuclear waste for 30,000 years.

** Nuclear is NOT especially reliable. Every nuclear plant must go down for about one-third of the time for refueling. Nevermind unscheduled shutdowns, which continue to plague the industry, and always will (and which, again, may shut off power production, but do NOT slow down the consumption of the fuel. They've all got to be refueled after 11-13 months of operation, whether or not any power is produced during that time.

** Wind farms are generally not built inside city limits, and mostly are a concern to the cows that graze under them. Newer mills tend to be much quieter anyhow. (They've also now come up with a load of effective solutions for preventing bird impacts. The problem was with hawks and eagles, which tend to watch the ground for game rather than obstructions in the air).

There is a transmission line-loss on power that increases with each additional mile distant a plant is from its customers. So distant wind fields suffer on that score a bit. Of course, nuclear by-and-large is worse in this respect, since many nukes are located WAAAAAY out in the boonies (a trend that would surely be continued if nuke construction were ever resumed). But solar energy, on the other hand, is frequently produced right at or near the site where it's used, so there's NO line loss. (Line loss, nationally, averages something like 5% ... not a trivial figure).

** Sometimes engineer types tell you stuff with an astonishing level of certitude ... and only later do you discover that they were full of it. In the mid-1970s through early 1980s, I was acquainted with a prominent professor of electrical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. He'd been chairman of the department, had many published articles to his name, did a lot of great work, was even the editor of the Proceedings of the IEEE one year (a big honor). I knew him because he served on Press Council at the time I was working on the college paper, and we rather liked and respected each other. But, boy oh boy, was he ever pro-nuclear! In late 1979, I got into a argument with him one evening on campus about Three Mile Island. I remember well him disputing my point about the reactor's fuel having partially melted -- we'd stepped into his (cavernous) office, and he's started lecturing me, scratching out numbers on his chaulk board. "There was no melting," he claimed with absolute certitude, "because the cladding will only melt at X degrees, and we know the reactor never got over X minus Y degrees." I was just almost certain he was wrong, for I'd been reading technical reports from the Union of Concerned Scientists and other sources. But I was a newly-minted B.A. (in poly sci), and how the hell was I going to dispute this technical point with him?

A few weeks later, I learned from an inside source that the upcoming reports on the catastrophe were going to show that THEY HAD NO IDEA HOW HOT THE CORE HAD GOTTEN ... BECAUSE THE DAMNED HEAT SENSORS HAD BURNED AWAY ENTIRELY. As it turned out, no one had ever reported on the core temperatures at all, one way or the other, prior to that. This distinguished college professor was truly blowing smoke out his ass. I've encountered that sort of thing many times since ... usually in more innocent circumstances (I write a lot about space issues), sometimes in what I consider very critical debates, e.g., on nuclear power. It is not all that uncommon, sadly.

So when someone tells you, ominously, "solar cell production generates just awful toxic pollutants," you might want to question that very closely. What toxins, exactly? Are they any worse than those produced by, say, computer chip manufacture? Do they get released into the environment, or are they generally contained for proper treatment and disposal? Are they harder or more expensive to deal with than, say, nuclear waste? (Or any of the thousands of chemical processes used to make all the stuff that's used to build a nuclear power plant?). Are they worse than the witch's brew of crap that comes out of hydrocarbon-based power plants? There are several new, competing methods for manufacturing solar cells ... do they all produce the same mix of wastes?

Walking across the street causes at least some kind of pollutant or impact on our environment. EVERYTHING does. It's all about trade-offs, a point environmentalists -- serious ones, anyhow -- have been arguing for decades. Wind energy, solar of all kinds, tidal energy ... they ALL have some negative aspects. But by and large, those impacts are truly trivial compared to those associated with ALL of the hard energy systems.

I wonder when the grown-ups will be back in charge of energy policy in the United States?

Posted by Observer at May 27, 2005 01:17 PM