Counting the hidden costs of energy

Posted on 22 March 2013 by Barry Brook

When comparing power sources, we have to take the costs of system effects into account.

By Martin Nicholson and Barry Brook. This article was first published on The Conversation. A response was then published on Business Spectator. It is worth reading both pieces, and the comments that followed them (for instance, Martin’s reply).

A recent Bloomberg press release got wide coverage with its claim that wind power is now cheaper than coal. But a new report from the OECD shows that when you cover the full cost to the grid, variable renewables like wind don’t add up as favourably.

It is often claimed that introducing variable renewable energy resources such as solar and wind into the electricity network comes with some extra cost penalties, due to “system effects”. These system effects include intermittent electricity access, network congestion, instability, environmental impacts, and security of supply.

Now a new report from the OECD titled System Effects of Low-Carbon Electricity Systems gives some hard dollar values for these additional imposts. The OECD work focuses on nuclear power, coal, gas, and renewables such as wind and solar. Their conclusion is that grid-level system costs can have significant impacts on the total cost of delivered electricity for some power-generation technologies.

All generation technologies cause system effects to some degree. They are all connected to the same transmission and distribution grid structure and deliver electricity into the same market. They also exert impacts on each other, on the total load available to satisfy demand, and the stability of the grid’s frequency control. These dependencies are heightened by the fact that only small amounts of cost-efficient electricity storage are available.

Any electricity generation technology can cause grid instability and price fluctuations if it goes offline unexpectedly. But a key finding of the OECD report is that renewables that are particularly variable, such as wind and solar, generate system effects that are at least an order of magnitude greater than for “dispatchable” technologies such as coal, gas, and nuclear.

These renewable sources require no fuel, and so have very low operating costs. This allows them to enter the market at low prices (or even negative prices if production subsidies or generation mandates are in place).

As a consequence, with the current power-generation mix in the OECD (including Australia), dispatchable technologies will suffer due to lower average electricity prices and reduced capacity factors when a significant quantity of low-cost renewable energy is available. (That is, dispatchable units will more often be forced to ramp down their output when there are high flows of low-cost renewable energy, yet will still need to be ready to ramp up again when the output from variable renewable generators is not sufficient to meet the total demand across the grid.)

The report defines grid-level system costs as the total costs (on top of plant-level costs) to supply electricity at a given load and given level of security of supply. These additional costs include the extra investment to extend and reinforce the grid, plus the costs for increased short-term balancing and for maintaining the long-term adequacy of electricity supply in the face of intermittent variable renewables.

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Filed under: Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 3 Comments »

Two decades and counting…

Posted on 18 February 2013 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. He has published a book on diet and science, CSIRO Perfidy.

While the French have been generating electricty for ~80 grams of CO2 per kWh for two decades, the Germans are still putting out ~450 grams/kwh and Australia is close to world’s  worst practice ~850 grams/kwh. The anti-nuclear movement has corrupted green thinking and cost us two decades and thousands of lives in the battle to avoid dangerous climate change … and counting.

Introduction

This submission relates to clause (e), “any other relevant matters”, on the list of things to be considered by the Select Committee on the Port Augusta Power Stations. The relevant matter is climate change and the place of wind and solar energy technologies in the battle to reduce Australian and global emissions as required by physical climate change emission budget constraints.

The 2009 paper: The Copenhagen Diagnosis gives long term sustainable limits for greenhouse gas emissions and work by NASA climate scientists led by James Hansen details more immediate requirements.

Port Augusta coal-fired power station, South Australia

Climate, oil and energy

For the past 20 years, there has been a competitive cacophony about the urgency of climate change by Governments and environmentalists around the world … but very little action. The emission reductions supposedly generated by the 1997 Kyoto protocol have in fact been measurably less than the increase in imports of emission intensive products by countries in the first world from countries in the third world. Many countries have simply out-sourced their emissions. This comprehensive failure has accelerated the urgency of substantive action.

During virtually all of these two decades, the French have been generating electricity using nuclear reactors at a CO2 emission rate of about 80 grams per kilowatt hour, compared to the global  average of over 500. Australia has a worst-in-class level of about 850 grams CO2 per kilowatt hour. The French completely transformed and grew their electricity generation infrastructure over a two decade period in the 1970s and 80s. The spur was oil prices rather than climate change, but the lesson remains. A fast affordable move to low carbon electricity is possible. The French did it. The Swiss did it. The Swedes did it. It isn’t the total solution to our climate problems, but it would be a bloody good start.

In contrast, it’s been 12 years since the Germans introduced a feed in tariff to reward rich Germans for electricity generated by putting solar panels on their roofs. We copied them. During this  period the German Government has incurred a 100 billion Euro debt to be paid over the next 20 years to those same rich Germans for a miserable 19 terawatt hours per year of day-time only electricity (about 3.3 percent of its total). And after all this expense and a forest of wind farms they are still generating 450 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour as a result of one the biggest white elephant projects in the history of cool technologies being promoted well beyond their tiny niche of applicability.

To admit the French are right about anything is clearly something everybody in general, and the Germans in particular, would like to avoid, but we really need to get over this, to give them credit and move on.

The French didn’t panic when a nuclear melt-down at Three Mile Island in 1979 resulted in no deaths. After all the people who didn’t die weren’t French and the reactor wasn’t French either. The French also didn’t panic in 1986 when a steam explosion in Ukraine at Chernobyl blew the top off a reactor without a containment building and killed less people than many a drunken Australian Easter holiday road toll. Again — not French.

In the 1980s, the French added 216 terawatt-hours/yr of nuclear electricity to the 100 or so they built in the 1970s. By the time of the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, their carbon dioxide cost per kilowatt hour of electricity was down to about 100 grams and hit 80 soon after. Meanwhile the Germans and most of the rest of us just continued to bugger up the climate big time.

Had we followed the French and gone nuclear in a big way, as they did in Switzerland and Sweden, the world would be very different. It is ironic that sincere concern for the planet has often gone hand in hand with innumeracy, irrationality and frequently both. The 2010 floods in Pakistan displaced 20 million people; cyclone Nargis in 2008 killed 140,000; These are the kinds of events which environmental and Green anti-nuclear activism has made more likely in the future because of ill-informed fear-mongering. Had we all gone nuclear and decarbonised our electricity, we’d still have work to do, but the urgency would be considerably reduced and some of the key technologies would be cheaper and better.

The anti-nuclear movement has cost us all a couple of decades … and counting.

Let me say one last thing about Chernobyl before moving on. The accident at Chernobyl was a horrid industrial accident which taught engineers valuable lessons and nobody builds reactors like that anymore. The radioactive plume from the accident increased natural radiation levels in large areas of what are now Russia, Ukraine and Belarus and they have been eating plenty of food with higher than normal radiation levels in those three countries for 25 years.

And the result? Three tenths of a half of a sixth of bugger all.

During this 25 years the three countries have had about 14 million cases of cancer (rough estimate based on Globocan data) with about 6,000 likely due to Iodine-131 emitted in the first days of the accident. It was a predicted problem and avoided elsewhere, but the Soviets stuffed up. Nevertheless, these extra cancers were treatable thyroid cancers with just a couple of dozen deaths.

It may seem to flippant to dismiss “just a couple of dozen deaths” and 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer. Not so. If these three countries had had Australian age standardised per-capita cancer rates during the past 25 years, they’d have had something in the order of 20 million cancers … not 6,000 but 6 million extra cancers!

Australian’s are flippant about much bigger causes of cancer and other diseases than tiny amounts of radiation. They are happy to eat BBQ’d meat, get pissed, get fat, get unfit, feed themselves and their children bacon and eggs, sausages and steak. And they still smoke cigarettes. All of these are far more potent as causes of cancer than small amounts of extra radiation in food or soil. Australians are flippant about causes of vast oceans of cancer and terrified of things that don’t even cause detectable ripples. Anti-nuclear campaigners are conveniently ignorant of comparative risks so it’s easy for them to tell cancer horror stories to the general public because the general public has no idea about comparative risks.

It is far worse than flippant to risk the destabilisation of the unusually benign climate of the past 10,000 years because of a few dozen deaths. That’s nutter stuff. When anti-nuclear elder “states person” Helen Caldicott told people at a press conference in Canada just a week after the deathless Fukushima melt-downs in 2011 that they should stop eating Turkish apricots because the whole of Turkey was contaminated by the Chernobyl plume, she showed exactly what a nutter she was and is. Turkey has half the age standardised rate of cancer of Australia. What has all that contamination done in Turkey? Nothing. Bring on those apricots!

Happily, a growing number of environmentalists have realised they have been deluded by anti-nuclear fear mongering and are now pro-nuclear. Once you start checking information issued by the likes of Caldicott, the result should be inevitable. Most of us just find it hard to believe that a person can tell so many untruths with such sincerity and even harder to admit our own gullibility. It took me months to finally “come out” as pro-nuclear after I realised what a crock of rubbish I’d believed for so long. Even more unfortunately, while some environmentalists have woken up,
it’s looking like we will have to wait for the rest to die.

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Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 2 Comments »

Energy Policy – substance wins over style

Posted on 4 February 2013 by Barry Brook

There’s a gradual, but a rising tide of rational, enviro-progressive scientists out there who are committed to solving some of the world’s biggest problems. Many of these problems involve touchy subjects, including ways to reduce poverty while improving or maintaining high standards of living elsewhere, the means for ‘sustainable’ electricity generation, and how to limit the human population’s over-consumption and over-production.

Inevitably, however, many well-intentioned, but grossly misinformed environmentalists (‘enviro-conservatives’?) object to technical solutions based on emotional or ideological grounds alone. As self-professed enviro-progressives (but also scientists who base decisions on evidence, logic and balancing trade-offs as part of our everyday work), we hope to reduce this backlash by providing the data and analyses needed to make the best and most coherent decisions about our future.

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Reference paper:

Hong, S., Bradshaw, C.J.A. & Brook, B.W. (2013) Evaluating options for the future energy mix of Japan after the Fukushima nuclear crisis. Energy Policy, doi: 10.1016/j.enpol.2013.01.002

On 14 September 2012, Japan’s government announced a nuclear-free policy to phase out its nuclear power generation by 2040. Of course, electricity demand would have to be supplied by both renewable energy and fossil fuels to respond the public unwillingness for nuclear power.

But is this most environmentally sound, safest and economically rational aim? In a new paper we’ve just had published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Policy, we set out to test Japan’s intentions the best way we know – using empirical data and robust scenario modelling.

Before the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japan produced 25% of its total electricity consumption from nuclear power, 63% from fossil fuels (mostly coal and liquefied natural gas), and 10% from renewables (including hydro). Originally, the Japanese government had planned to increase nuclear power up to 45% of supply, and include new renewables builds, to combine to make major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and meet or exceed their Kyoto targets. However, the original plan could reduce emissions by the energy sector from 1122 Mt CO2e in 2010 to < 720 Mt CO2e by 2030 (< 70% of 1990 emission levels).

After the accident, the National Policy Unit in Japan hinted that the original plan was likely to be scrapped in favour of a new scenario, whereby the nuclear target was to be reduced to somewhere between 0–35% and the renewables target increased to 20–30%. These new plans, obviously, will not be able to meet the original emission reduction targets (Cyranoski, 2012; Normile, 2012). Our paper examines the implications of these different energy mixes.

Why do many people think ‘an anti-nuclear policy’ is environmentally friendly or sustainable?

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables, Scenarios | 1 Comment »

Zero emission synfuel from seawater

Posted on 16 January 2013 by Barry Brook

Guest post by John Morgan. John runs R&D programmes at a Sydney startup company. He has a PhD in physical chemistry, and research experience in chemical engineering in the US and at CSIRO. He is a regular commenter on BNC.

You can follow John on Twitter @JohnDPMorgan

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Introduction

Liquid hydrocarbons account for about one third of fossil carbon dioxide emissions, and while transition to electric vehicles is possible for some passenger transport, it is simply not feasible to substitute for liquid fuel in most long haul transport, aviation, or agricultural and industrial prime movers. Synthesizing fuel from carbon dioxide extracted from air is possible in principle but horrendously expensive.  Yet, if we are to achieve CO2 levels of 350 ppm from our current 392 ppm, CO2 removal from the biosphere appears necessary.

Two papers published last year described a new approach to zero emissions synfuel, looking at direct carbon dioxide extraction from seawater.  The new insight in these papers is that CO2 is very soluble in seawater, where the concentration is about 140 times higher than in the atmosphere. This could make seawater extraction a lot cheaper than direct air capture.

The work was done by the US Navy (full text here), and by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC),who each developed membrane processes to extract CO2 from seawater.   The Navy’s interest is military – shipboard production of synthetic jet fuel far from supply lines – but I figure we can beat this sword into a ploughshare.

Rather than going after the CO2 directly with chemical scrubbers, they use electrochemical processes to split seawater into an acid and base stream, and the CO2 bubbles off from the acidified water.  The two streams are recombined and returned to the ocean.  While these processes are novel, they are very similar to a number of ion exchange processes, including desalination, which are currently deployed at scale.

The Navy costed the production of jet fuel at sea.  But they neglected to include the cost of energy for the carbon capture process.  I used the PARC research to estimate it and include it in the Navy costings.  I arrived at $1.78 per litre. I was also able to calculate the cost of just the carbon capture part of the process at about $114 per tonne of CO2.

But if we don’t insist on running these processes on an expensive ocean-going platform, the cost drops to $0.79 per litre for synfuel and $37 /tCO­2.  The costs are rough and there are a number of caveats, but this is surprisingly low. To put it in context, the American Physical Society recently reviewed carbon capture from air, and “optimistically” costed it at about $600/tonne.

The Navy costings are based on commercially available equipment whose capital and operating costs are understood for all processes except the membrane CO2 extraction. Analogous processes like desalination are available for a cost baseline for membrane extraction.  The costing assumed power from Navy nuclear reactors. (They also costed OTEC power – Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion – but this is not a commercially available technology.)

I describe the CO2 capture and fuel synthesis processes below, and show how the costings were derived.  I also consider how the costs would change for civilian nuclear electricity (Table 1).  In brief, accepting the Navy’s assumptions leads to plausible prices for synfuel and carbon capture, but the amount of new power generation required makes very large volume production unlikely.

A spreadsheet with my cost calculations can be downloaded here: Synfuel cost model.

CCS – Carbon capture from seawater

Concepts for carbon capture from air have been developed, but never realized.  The basic idea is to pass air over alkaline scrubbers, such as amine or carbonate solutions, extract the CO2, and recycle the scrubber solution.  Because the concentration of CO2 in air is so low, a very large surface area is required, and the process is energy intensive and overall very expensive.

The American Physical Society prepared a technology assessment on this approach in 2011. The results weren’t promising.  A 1 Mt/yr CO2 extractor comprised five 1 m x 1 m x 1 kilometre long air contactors, occupying about 1.5 km2.  The cost, so far as it could be determined for an undeveloped technology, and making optimistic assumptions, was about $600 per tonne.  Another 2011 study estimated costs based on current experience with trace gas removal systems at about $1000 per tonne.

Graphic – cover of the APS report, with link

Graphic – cover of the APS report, with link

But CO2 is very soluble in water, and its concentration in the ocean is about 140 times higher than in air.  So we are using the whole of the ocean surface as an air contactor right now – for better or worse!  The extraction system is ‘built’, we just need to recover the CO2.

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Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Renewables | 4 Comments »

Next Nukes – how U.S.-European cooperation can deliver cheaper, safer nuclear energy

Posted on 3 January 2013 by Barry Brook
Innovative international collaborations and strategic government support, especially from countries with advanced technologies such as the United States, will be critical in bringing next generation nuclear designs to market and deploying them at scale. Developing countries like China, which announced last month that it would move ahead with plans for new nuclear power plants, are particularly keen on new reactor models. Above, construction of the Changjiang Nuclear Power Plant Phase II gets underway in southern China's Hainan province in April, 2010.

Innovative international collaborations and strategic government support, especially from countries with advanced technologies such as the United States, will be critical in bringing next generation nuclear designs to market and deploying them at scale. Developing countries like China, which announced last month that it would move ahead with plans for new nuclear power plants, are particularly keen on new reactor models. Above, construction of the Changjiang Nuclear Power Plant Phase II gets underway in southern China’s Hainan province in April, 2010.

As the debate over climate policy picks up again in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and President Obama’s reelection, policymakers should prioritize efforts that will accelerate the adoption of zero-carbon technologies, especially the only proven baseload source available: next generation nuclear.

Whereas traditional nuclear reactors from the 1950s were designed in secret, advanced models are being researched, designed, and financed by innovative international collaborations. Take GE-Hitachi’s PRISM, a joint American-Japanese venture to construct a power plant in the United Kingdom capable of processing plutonium. Or the recent announcement that South Korea’s national electric utility, KEPCO, had been awarded a contract to build the first nuclear plant in the United Arab Emirates, using Australian-mined uranium for fuel.

An expanding international community recognizes the importance of developing advanced nuclear reactor designs to meet energy needs and address global warming. Thirteen countries have joined the Generation IV International Forum (GIF), for instance, a cooperative endeavor to encourage governments and industry to support advanced nuclear energy concepts. Member countries, which include the United States, Japan, Russia, and China, have agreed to expand R&D funding for advanced nuclear projects that meet stringent sustainability, economic, safety and nonproliferation goals.

Yet despite international agreement on the necessity of next generation nuclear systems, there is a dearth of support at the national level. In the US, annual federal RD&D spending for advanced fission reactors has not exceeded $200 million in the last 10 years, following much larger budgets through the 1970s to mid-1990s. The majority of research and investment in advanced nuclear systems today comes from Asia, and most new nuclear is constructed in developing nations. Yet many of the countries most interested in building more nuclear are largely stuck with old Generation II designs.

Private industry appears ready to take a leadership role in the development and deployment of advanced nuclear builds, but the right government incentives, international agreements and support structures must be in place for this to occur. GE-Hitachi, for example, submitted a proposal last year to build a pair of next generation modular fast reactors in the UK, the first commercial advanced nuclear plant. These “PRISM” reactors are based on an Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) design that is widely considered one of the most promising next generation models (see this white paper by Breakthrough Senior Fellow Barry Brook and Tom Blees of the Science Council for Global Initiatives). In addition to providing clean electricity, PRISM reactors would burn weapons material, offering a cost-effective solution to the UK’s plutonium disposal problem. If built, the reactors would be able to process all of the UK’s stockpiled plutonium within five years and then generate decades of clean energy, in addition to providing a full commercial demonstration of the technology. Other European countries and the United States should seek out and support these win-win scenarios, where an advanced clean technology can be demonstrated while also solving a separate policy problem.

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Energy White Paper is hazy on future vision for nuclear

Posted on 15 November 2012 by Barry Brook

The Energy White Paper 2012 (EWP2012), released by the Australian Government last week, seeks to map out a strategic policy framework for future energy supply. One of the major goals of EWP2012 is to provide a “clear vision” of how Australia should set about the long-term task of decarbonising our stationary electricity, liquid fuels and industrial sectors. So how well does it succeed?

As an overview of the current status quo on domestic supply, distribution and exports of energy, it is a fine document. However, as a forward-looking, agenda-setting stimulus paper, it has weaknesses. The focus is strongly on how natural gas and unconventional fossil fuel markets might develop in the coming decades under various uncertainties, and the impact of these on national economic growth and trade. In terms of its projections of the expansion of currently poorly developed “alternative” (non-fossil) electricity – the biggest issue to address – let’s consider the medium-demand scenario (Fig. 6.1, pg 88):

This shows a gradual phase out of traditional coal (to be replaced by carbon-capture and storage [CCS] variants after about 2035) and a ramp-up of combined cycle gas (both CCS and non-CCS). Up to half of electricity is coming from wind, solar thermal, solar PV and engineered geothermal by 2050. The estimated cost is “more than $200 billion in new generation investment”.

These projected finances are based on the levelised cost of electricity estimates provided in the recent AETA report, but do not adequately consider “value” of the electricity, as I explained here. Putting that to one side, the basic technology options, with current and projected 2030 prices, are shown in Fig. 6.2:

Nuclear power – generated by both large (“monolithic”) and small (“modular”) reactors – are an obvious low-cost, low-carbon (and baseload) standout here in Fig. 6.2. Yet nuclear power is invisible in the Fig. 6.1 projections.

Why? This is explained in Box 6.3 on pg 98 of EWP2012. The argument made is that there is no “social consensus” on the technology (is there one for coal-seam gas?), nor an economic case (but that is relative to its direct competitor, black and brown coal, with no carbon price).

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Filed under: Nuclear, Policy, Renewables, Scenarios | 2 Comments »

CSIRO Energy Future 2050 tool

Posted on 8 November 2012 by Barry Brook

CSIRO eFuture have built a new tool for exploring scenarios of Australia’s electricity future. It gives great flexibility to ‘build your own future’ and is a wonderful point of reference for debates on clean energy pathways from today through to 2050. It’s based, among other things, on the data published in the recent AETA report that I commented on here.

Their description:

Explore scenarios around technology cost, electricity demand and fuel prices, and see how your choices impact Australia’s electricity costs, technology mix and carbon emissions through to 2050.

Below is an example scenario that I think is likely. But do try your own (just make sure you can justify it!). Oh, and spread the word that this fantastic tool exists.

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Filed under: Nuclear, Policy, Renewables, Scenarios | 1 Comment »

Objective analysis of nuclear and wind-solar options – needs $$ support

Posted on 6 November 2012 by Barry Brook

I’ve never asked the BNC community for any financial contribution. There’s no tip jar on the site; indeed I happily fund the website costs out of my pocket and give my time freely, because I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit. But now, I’d like to ask you to give a little, to a most worthy cause that encapsulates all that BraveNewClimate is about.

Ben Heard, my friend, colleague and fellow environmentalist traveller on the pro-nuclear, pro-full-decarbonisation road, has worked incredibly hard on a collaboration to do some serious clean energy planning. In this impressive 15,000 word report, Ben and his co-authors consider two alternate energy solutions, a hybrid solar/wind renewable solution and a reference nuclear solution,  against the challenge of delivering the same hypothetical energy task: the replacement of the Northern and Playford Coal-Fired Power Stations in northern South Australia with clean energy. The report compares these solutions against 13 holistic sustainability and economic criteria. It’s a terrific case study, the lessons of which are applicable to decision makers far and wide.

As he says in his DSA post here, they wrote the report unpaid, because it matters. But if it’s going to have real-world impact, it needs effective publicity and wide distribution. This report must get into the hands of lots of people. That is where you can come in. Please consider giving a small donation to make it happen, even if it’s only a few $$. Every little bit helps.

Although the project has already received over half of the requested funds from 42 supporters, input has recently slowed to a trickle. As with most crowdsourced funding requests, the early donations are relatively easy to secure, whereas the ‘long tail’ is much tougher. It’s the old Pareto 80:20 principle.

To get a taste of what you would be supporting, you can read a preview of the introduction, here: Zero Carbon Options: Seeking an Economic Mix for an Environmental Outcome (4-page PDF). It’s well written and engaging, and, having twice refereed the whole report, I can confirm that it’s also extremely rigorous.

Below are some additional words from Ben, written especially for the BNC audience.

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Zero Carbon Options – Launch the Report

Ben Heard

It’s not an original concept, either for the pages of BNC or anything else. We have all heard that the major hurdle nuclear power faces is social acceptance.

However after nearly two years of independent nuclear advocacy, I think I’m in a position to nuance that a little. The key word is “social”. Acceptance, per se, is not the issue.

I have had a lot of conversations about nuclear power in the last two years. I have written a lot of articles, and given a lot of presentations. I have had many confidential meetings, taught many classes, and landed a pretty convincing debate victory. Along the way a few things have become very clear.

  • Far, far more people are essentially supportive of the deployment of nuclear power in Australia than I originally believed. If this group is a minority of the population, it is not a small minority. However for the majority of these people the opinion is held quietly, mainly it seems from a sense of futility
  • Many, many people want to know more about nuclear power. They want information. Whatever their view, it is not strongly held. Their opinions are in play. These people range in age, gender, political leaning and general walk of life but there are common reasons why they are seeking answers: concerns about climate change and a search for a solution that is up to the challenge
  • A huge number of people in what I would describe as positions of power or influence in the political or business community, particularly in the energy community, are strongly supportive of nuclear power. But they see too much downside risk in either themselves or their organisation standing by that position

The “acceptance” of nuclear is everywhere. But except in rare and valuable forums like Brave New Climate, it has not been socialised. It has not been shared, voiced, and reinforced. It has not been widely stated, restated, and stood by because of a reinforcing silence and, frankly, fears of what other people think. Fear of how they will react. Nuclear suffers an appalling first mover syndrome for those who feel they have something at stake, whether it is friendships, votes, funding or customers.

That’s a deadlock we need to break. That’s why we wrote Zero Carbon Options.

When Brown & Pang approached me for a collaboration in nuclear, two things struck me. The first was the quality of their work. The second was that they did it. They did not wait for funding, or a buyer. They wrote a report Australia needed on nuclear workforce requirements because it needed to be done.

We agreed on something else that needed to be done. Something so simple it’s weird that it hadn’t been done before: a straight-up comparison of how two zero-carbon options would perform against an identical, precisely defined task: the replacement of actual coal-fired baseload in South Australia. Could there be a clearer, more tangible, more relevant way to demonstrate the essential role of nuclear power than such a comparison?

Six-months, 15,000 words, dozens of drafts and two rounds of expert review later, the report is finished. It is clear, easy to follow and well-structured. It is well researched and comprehensive. It will look outstanding, and it offers this unique comparison of options into the public conversation. As this article goes live it is in the safe hands of Brown & Pang for graphic design, and I am preparing to launch it. That, we hope, is where you come in.

Everything to date has been our work, freely given. We were happy to move and make this report happen. But launching a report in a meaningful way requires funds that independent consultants lack. We need your help to take a big step in socialising the acceptance of nuclear power. To that end we are accepting pledges for the launch of Zero Carbon Options via crowd-funding site Pozible.

The launch will be held in Adelaide on Wednesday 5 December. Based virtually on word of mouth (no media, no advertising) nearly 60 tickets have been snapped up for this in the week since it was announced. We are providing written invitations to every sitting member of the South Australian parliament, as well as a full range of Federal and local Government identities. We will be issuing media releases and invitations, and several media opportunities are already lining up. After I present the findings of the report, peer reviewers Professor Barry Brook and author and BNC regular Mr Martin Nicholson will be joined by myself and Professor Doug Boreham from Canada for a moderated question-and-answer session. Attendees will receive a hard copy of the report.

I know we can use this report to take a big step toward socialising the acceptance of nuclear power in Australia. But we can’t do it without you. Let’s get the nuclear discussion right into the mainstream in 2013. Please make a pledge and help us launch Zero Carbon Options.

Please visit our fundraising site and make a pledge by clicking on the image below.

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To register comments, go to the Brave New Climate Discussion Forum

Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables, Scenarios | 1 Comment »

The Case for Near-term Commercial Demonstration of the Integral Fast Reactor

Posted on 23 October 2012 by Barry Brook

I’m currently in Dubai at the 2012 World Energy Forum, as part of a delegation from the Science Council for Global Initiatives. Tomorrow (24 Oct) we will run symposium on “New Nuclear”, which will be chaired by Tom Blees and feature talks from Dr Eric Loewen (GE), Dr Alexander Bychkov (IAEA), Dr Evgeny Velikhov (Kurchatov Institute) and me (Dr Barry Brook, University of Adelaide). I will also chair a session later in the afternoon on “Vision for a Sustainable Future”, just before the closing address.

Tom and Nicole Blees of SCGI stand in front of the World Trade Centre in Dubai, during the World Energy Forum, Oct 2012. The sign behind them makes for some interesting reading…

In preparation for this meeting and as a result of a focussed conference at University of California Berkeley in early October, a white paper on the Integral Fast Reactor was prepared by Tom and me, on behalf of SCGI, and has garnered signatories from 8 key countries, including prominent people not attending the Berkeley meeting, such as climatologist  Jim Hansen. The white paper is given below.

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The Case for Near-term Commercial Demonstration of the Integral Fast Reactor

Demonstrating a credible and acceptable way to safely recycle used nuclear fuel will clear a socially acceptable pathway for nuclear fission to be a major low-carbon energy source for this century. We advocate a hastened timetable for commercial demonstration of Generation IV nuclear technology, via construction of a prototype reactor (the PRISM design, based on the Integral Fast Reactor project) and a 100t/year pyroprocessing facility to convert and recycle fuel.

1. Synopsis

We propose an accelerated timeframe for realizing the sustainable nuclear energy goals of the Generation IV reactor systems. A whole–system evaluation by an international group of nuclear and energy experts, assembled by The Science Council for Global Initiatives, reached a consensus on the synergistic design choices: (a) a well-proven pool-type sodium-cooled fast reactor; (b) metal fuel, and (c) recycling using pyroprocessing, enabling the transmutation of actinides. Alternative technology options for the coolant, fuel type and recycling system, while sometimes possessing individually attractive features, are hard-pressed to be combined into a sufficiently competitive overall system. A reactor design that embodies these key features, the General Electric-Hitachi 311 MWe PRISM [1] (based on the Integral Fast Reactor [IFR] concept developed by Argonne National Laboratory [2]), is ready for a commercial-prototype demonstration. We advocate a two-pronged approach for completion by 2020 or earlier: (i) a detailed design and demonstration of a 100 t/year pyroprocessing facility for conversion of spent oxide fuel from light-water reactors [3] into metal fuel for fast reactors; and (ii) construction of a PRISM fast reactor as a commercial-scale demonstration plant. Ideally, this could be achieved via an international collaboration. Once demonstrated, this prototype would provide an international test facility for any concept improvements. It is expected to achieve significant advances in reactor safety, reliability, fuel resource sustainability, management of long-term waste, improved proliferation resistance, and economics.

2. Context

When contemplating the daunting energy challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century in a world beyond fossil fuels, there are generally two schools of thought [4].

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, IFR FaD, Nuclear | 4 Comments »

Is Japan’s nuclear-free pathway an environmentally friendly choice?

Posted on 5 October 2012 by Barry Brook

The Fukushima crisis sparked protests and prompted a move away from nuclear energy for Japan

Below is an essay I co-wrote with one of my current Ph.D. students, Sanghuyn Hong. In it, we take a critical look at the current national energy policy of Japan, and highlight the unfortunate implications of a strategy that preferences fossil fuels over nuclear energy.

San, in the first year of his studies, is from South Korea, and is researching current and future energy policies in South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Read or leave your comment the original article here.

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On 14 September 2012, the Japanese Government considered a new policy that excited many self-proclaimed environmentalists and anti-nuclear power protesters. Following intense political wrangling, they proposed phasing out the use of nuclear power in Japan by 2040, replacing it with renewable energy (and fossil fuels). This decision, if carried through, has important environmental and financial implications that may come as a surprise to many.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident on 11 Mar 2011, caused by an earthquake-triggered tsunami, consigned the established Japanese electricity-generation plan to the dustbin. Along with it went Japan’s Kyoto-protocol commitments for greenhouse-gas mitigation.

Originally, the Japanese government had planned to increase nuclear power to 45% and renewables (including hydro) to 20% by the year 2030, up from 26% and 10% respectively in 2010. After the accident, the National Policy Unit in Japan hinted that the original plan was likely to be scrapped in favour of a new scenario, whereby the nuclear target was to be reduced to somewhere between 0–35% and the renewables target increased to 20–30%. Even with an increased share of renewables, the shift away from nuclear under any of the proposed scenarios will lead to greater use of fossil fuels.

To compare the proposed options fairly, we argue that it makes sense take a holistic view of their relative sustainability. To do this, we need to account for a range of environmental and socio-economic factors, including greenhouse-gas emissions, water consumption, land transformation, health and safety issues, and cost of electricity. One should use an evidence-based auditing method like multi-criteria decision-making analysis (MCDMA), which is transparent and relatively objective.

Our recent research (currently submitted to the journal Energy) uses MCDMA to show that even when the negative consequences of using nuclear power are properly factored in (and costs assigned to waste management, accident consequences, and so on), those scenarios with reduced nuclear power result in a less sustainable future in Japan.

In particular, the greenhouse-gas emissions of the nuclear-free scenario can reach up to about 430 kg per megawatt hour. By comparison, in the 35% nuclear-power scenario, it is only 267 kg per megawatt hour, in spite of the higher renewable energy share of the former. Except for the differing nuclear capacity, in all scenarios the ratio of coal to gas power had the largest influence on greenhouse-gas emissions.

Unfortunately, a high dependency on renewables without ongoing support for nuclear in Japan cannot cut the electricity generation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions unless some currently undeveloped alternative forms of cheap, large-scale energy storage are deployed in the future.

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Filed under: Emissions, Future, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 2 Comments »

21st century nuclear… for beginners

Posted on 28 August 2012 by Barry Brook

SACOME has put published a glossy portfolio edition of the 6-part series (9 pages in total) was done by me and Ben Heard for the SA Mines & Energy Journal – you may find this useful for family and friends! (some of these individual articles were already published on BNC and DecarboniseSA). Thanks to Megan Andrews and Dayne Eckermann for putting this together.

The aims were to be: (i) easy to understand, (ii) concise but accurate, (iii) attractively presented, and (iv) to tackle the most common objections raised by anti-nuclear folks.

Download the PDF here (5.5 MB) and distribute far and wide.

The content covers generation IV technology, safety, radioactive waste, sustainability and carbon emissions of uranium supplies, small modular reactors, and economic competitiveness compared to other low-carbon energy options. The overarching context is nuclear as a solution to climate change. That’s what Ben and I really care about, after all.

(Note that we offered this series gratis as a community service — we are educators, after all, and to us, dissemination of evidence-based knowledge is its own reward).

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Nuclear | 1 Comment »

Two books on sustainable nuclear energy

Posted on 22 August 2012 by Barry Brook

This is a short post to alert BNC readers to a couple of important things.

First, Tom Blees has now generously released the full text of his book “Prescription for the Planet” — it is available for free download here (or click image).

So, if you own an iPad or other tablet, or just have a PDF reader on your notebook computer, then you can comfortably read and search the entire contents. Spread the word — more people NEED to read this. (I’ve previously reviewed the book in 4 parts on BNC).

Second, Robert Hargraves was kind enough to post me a pre-publication hard copy of his new book “THORIUM: energy cheaper than coal“. It will be released for sale on 1 September 2012. Its fundamental axiom — that we need (and can have, via advanced nuclear technologies) energy that is cheaper than coal, even without carbon taxes, subsidies etc., is enormously appealing as a ‘saleable message’, and I think right on the money if we are going to allow the world to phase out fossil fuels in time to avoid major environmental problems.

Anyway, I’m currently part-way into reading it in detail (amongst a hundred other things on the go, alas!). From what I’ve absorbed so far, it is excellent — comprehensive but easy to digest, logically structured, attractively presented, and approachable for a non-technical audience (without excessive ‘dumbing down’).

You can find many more details on the book’s website. Here are a list of the book’s chapters, to give you a taste of the content:

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Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear | 3 Comments »

Talking turkey on nuclear $$ costs

Posted on 16 August 2012 by Barry Brook

This the final article in the SA Mines & Energy Journal series on nuclear energy (issue 24, pg 34), about the economic bottom line for nuclear. Ben Heard, my co-author, has also blogged about this on DecarboniseSA. And if you want a second opinion, read what Columbia University’s Jeff Sachs has to say (one of the smartest economists out there — I’d strongly recommend his 2011 title “The Price of Civilization“).

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It does not take long in any discussion of nuclear power before people want to talk turkey. How much does nuclear power cost?

It’s odd that when it comes to nuclear power alone, some environmentalists morph into incredibly hard-nosed economic rationalists. If the solution can’t pay its own way from the get go, bad luck.

That suggests a misunderstanding of not so much nuclear economics, but of energy economics more generally. It also hints at an ideological position if the same criteria are not applied elsewhere.

In considering nuclear at all, we are looking to replace baseload fossil fuels at 100s or over 1,000 MW at a time. Take your pick of technology, including modern fossil fuels: that is never going to be a cheap task. There is no way around the “sticker shock” of a modern power facility.

If we want new, large-scale energy generation in Australia, there is a large price tag, comfortably in the billions of dollars range. If, as we would argue, response to climate change demands that any new baseload is zero-carbon generation, then the options are (currently) restricted to the more expensive end of the range for capital costs (fuel is cheap or free for these technologies).

So, what, in that context, can low-carbon options offer in terms of up-front cost?  Let’s take some real-world examples (for details of the following calculations, see TCASE 15: Comparison of four ‘clean energy’ projects).

If we take the oft-quoted Olkiluoto nuclear new build in Finland (oft-quoted because it is suffering major cost and time over-runs), we find that the new EPR design, with 1600 MWe of generation capacity, looks to be coming in at a cost of EU6.4 billion. That normalises to $6.0 bn per GWe when capacity factors are accounted for.

Dome 3 being lowered onto the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant in Finland. Cost is $6 billion per GWe, but with very high capacity factor.

A large (600 MWe peak) planned wind farm in South Australia, with a proposed 120 MWe biomass generation as back-up, will cost $1.2 billion, plus and extra $0.2 billion for the connecting infrastructure. That’s about $6.9 billion per GWe.

When we turn and face the sun,costs jump. Based on the proposed Moree Solar Farm, this large solar PV facility with no storage or back-up (i.e. not a true baseload solution) comes in at $19.6 billion per GWe. A concentrating solar thermal plant (based on the Spanish Gemasolar plant) with molten salt storage back-up can be had at a cost of $25.1 billion per GWe.

The lesson is clear.

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Filed under: Nuclear, Policy | 2 Comments »

Fit-for-service low-carbon electricity technologies are the key

Posted on 8 August 2012 by Barry Brook

This article (by Barry Brook) was originally published on The Conversation website until the title: “Low-carbon electricity must be fit-for-service (and nuclear power is)“. You can wade through the 224 comments over there (if you dare…) See also the comment here by Keith Orchison.

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To paraphrase George Orwell, “All electricity is created equal, but some of its generating technologies are more equal than others”. This is a key point – emphasised but typically overlooked – in the new report Australian Energy Technology Assessment (AETA) on current and future costs of electricity options for Australia, released yesterday by the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics.

No such thing as a free lunch: nuclear power can do what many renewable energy systems have not yet done on a large scale – deliver. Flickr/Gretchen Mahan

Assessing the ‘levelised’ costs of existing energy technologies is already surprisingly difficult, given the array of assumptions that need to be made, on capital and owner’s costs, financing terms and associated risk, facility lifespans, fuel supply, government policy interventions, and so on. It gets even more challenging when projecting future cost changes, because learning curves and settled-down costs, uptake rates, future fuel and material supply bottlenecks, training, price incentives, social license, and other ‘known unknowns’ need to be factored into the economic modelling.

So the AETA authors had a difficult task on their hand. Perhaps the most contentious, yet important task, is defining the relative market value and role for technologies within a national electricity system. From the perspective of replacing fossil-fuel combustion with alternatives, a crucial issue is how effective it is, at a large scale, in providing a fit-for-service replacement for existing coal plants.

In a recent paper I co-authored with two colleagues in the journal Energy, we assessed technologies against a range of criteria intended to determine their suitability as a baseload alternative. These were:

Proven: Has the technology been used at commercial scale?

Scalable: Can the technology be built in sufficient quantity to replace significant proportions of existing fossil-fuel generators?

Dispatchable: Can the output be allocated by the system operator to meet the anticipated load?

Fuel supply: Is the energy source reliable and plentiful, even when, as with some kinds of renewable energy, it varies with time?

Load access: Can the generator be installed close to a load centre?

Storage: Does the technology require electricity storage in order to deliver a high capacity factor?

Emission intensity: Is the emission intensity high (>300 kg CO2e/MWh), moderate or low (<100)?

Capacity factor: Is the capacity factor high (>70%), moderate or low (<40%)?

For a technology to be considered fit-for-service as a baseload generator (i.e., a direct replacement for coal or combined-cycle gas power plants) it needs to be scalable, dispatchable without large storage and have a reliable fuel supply, low or moderate  emissions intensity and a high capacity factor. The only current technologies that score well enough to meet these criteria are nuclear power and solar thermal with thermal storage and/or hybrid gas. Coal and gas with carbon capture and engineered geothermal could also qualify but are only at the pilot plant stage of development.

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Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 3 Comments »

Is the Olympic Dam mine a special case?

Posted on 20 July 2012 by Barry Brook

Here is an Op Ed published by Geoff Russell and me in the The Adelaide Advertiser newspaper this week. It was in response to this piece by Jim Green.

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OLYMPIC Dam uranium can power Australia four times over and close all our coal mines, write Geoff Russell and Barry Brook.

FRIENDS of the Earth’s Jim Green makes important points on the Olympic Dam expansion (The Advertiser, 10/7/12).

Should BHP be given an easy ride on this project? If so, why?

Here’s some background people need before making a decision.

The expanded Olympic Dam will be a massive hole in the ground.

How big? About 12sq km in area and 1km deep.

For comparison, the proposed alpha coal mine in Queensland will be about 400sq km. The various coal mines in the Hunter Valley are also much bigger, not necessarily individually, but they are all big holes and they add up to a much bigger hole than the proposed Olympic Dam expansion.

An aerial view of BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mining site at Roxby Downs, which could provide Australia with a new source of clean power. Picture: Matt Turner

The Canadian Athabasca oil sands cover 141,000sq km. These oil sands are not in a desert but under boreal forest. They currently produce 1.3 million barrels of oil a day from those deposits and, at current prices, there are reserves of about 170 billion barrels, which go under 14,000sq km of forest.

Yet Olympic Dam is different. Most of what comes out will be copper but, at peak production, it will also be producing 19,000 tonnes of uranium oxide annually.

How much is that? Enough to power the whole of Australia four times over. Enough to close all of Australia’s coal mines for domestic consumption. So here’s the first question for Jim Green.

We could have nuclear reactors, clean electricity and one mine, just one single mine. Or we could have the whole current nightmare of the Hunter Valley, Latrobe Valley and Bowen Basin disasters, gas fracking and every other filthy deadly fossil fuel industry in Australia.

What’s his choice?

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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Nuclear | 1 Comment »

Radio debate on nuclear power for addressing climate change – Brook vs Ludlum

Posted on 10 July 2012 by Barry Brook

Scott Ludlum

Barry Brook

Yesterday I debated nuclear energy and climate change on 891 ABC radio with Greens Senator Scott Ludlum, on the afternoon show hosted by Sonya Feldhoff. (It was a studio interview, so the audio quality is quite good.) We had a decent amount of time to cover off on issues, including answering callers, but as always, there was much more that could have been said!

Download the audio file here (39 minutes, MP3)

Another item of interest are two new articles on the UK proposal to construct the first Integral Fast Reactor to dispose of its separated plutonium inventory (first discussed on BNC in Disposal of UK plutonium stocks with a climate change focus).

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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 1 Comment »

Notes from the US of A

Posted on 2 July 2012 by Barry Brook

I’ve been travelling internationally for the last few weeks. It’s been a productive time – I’ve drafted a complete paper intended for The Breakthrough Journal (more on this in a later post), increased and enhanced my network of professional connections and friendships, got some robust strategic planning done on how to get ‘big things’ happening in energy and ecology, and generally had a fun time!

First, I was in St Petersburg, Russia, for the awards ceremony of the Global Energy Prize. (Whilst there I saw a performance of Swan Lake at the Alexandrinksy Theatre).

Then I visited Chicago for a few days at the annual meeting of the American Nuclear Society, where we had a full-day workshop on the Integral Fast Reactor, including insights from some of the key engineers (Charles Till, Yoon Chang, Len Koch, Mike Lineberry, John Sackett), followed by some environmental and international perspectives from Joe Shuster, Tom Blees, Mark Lynas and me.

Over the last few days I was in Sausilito for the 2012 Breakthrough Dialogue (here is a link to the 2011 meeting) on dealing with ‘wicked problems’ (energy and biodiversity related) — apart from a great meeting, I got to walk around the beautiful surrounding landscapes of pine (and eucalypt!), and across the Golden Gate Bridge before the typical San Francisco fog started to roll in.

Oh, I also stayed with Tom Blees for a day in Sacramento, along with Mark Lynas – whilst there, we got some education in energy policy from Hobo the Hedgehog (courtesy of Dave Blees):

Mark Lynas, Tom Blees and Barry Brook getting lectured to on ‘energy mixes’

Now, I’m in downtown San Francisco with Ben Heard, preparing to head home tonight. (By the way, check out John Morgan’s report on Ben’s recent nuclear debate in Sydney).

Some other things of general interest, before I sign off:

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Filed under: Humour, Nuclear, Policy | 2 Comments »

Time for a reckoning, time for an apology

Posted on 17 June 2012 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous article on BNC was: Dietary Guidelines Committee ignores climate change.

What’s the difference between the fear of bungee jumping and the fear that comes from finding out after 10 years that your house was built on a toxic waste dump?

People pay for the former because the fear delivers a rush of adrenalin, and the safe survival brings elation. But people sue for the latter because it can permanently throw an angle grinder into your sleep patterns, steamroll your joie-de-vivre, wreck your marriage and make you sick. Stressed people get sicker quicker.

Radiation impacts below those of urban air

Post Fukushima, Nature is reporting that the first indications are that post traumatic stress disorders may be even worse than after Chernobyl. As for the physical disease impacts, David Brenner, a leading radiation expert, was quoted in the same article that it was unlikely that any cancer impacts from the radiation release would be measurable in any epidemiological study.

Think about this. Please. Can you use epidemiology to measure the impacts of air pollution in Japan? Indeed you can. Here’s just such a study which shows increases in lung cancer risk of 25 to 50 percent at common levels of urban air pollutants. If you want to know why 10-20 percent of lung cancer is in non-smokers, then air-pollution is a major factor and its impact is readily detected and measured.

But Brenner’s expert opinion is that the impact of the Fukushima radiation releases will be too small to measure. I.e., less cancers than are due to common levels of air pollution. He isn’t saying the impacts will be zero, he can calculate them with a theoretical model. His calculations are that there may be about 20 cancers over a 40 year period per 100,000 people affected. Given that 100,000 is close to the number of people actually evacuated, then 20 cancers looks to be the maximum impact. This is based on Brenner’s expert understanding of the careful dose estimates just published by the World Health Organisation.

About 40,000 of the 100,000 people will have got cancer during the remainder of their lives without the radiation exposure. Detecting an increase of perhaps 20 amongst the normal variation using statistical measures will be impossible. Brenner has estimated this based on the “linear no threshold” approach to radiation, so it’s pretty much a maximum estimate among people who actually know anything about such matters.

Bomb threat hoaxers … inadvertent or deliberate?

It’s time that anti-nuclear activists were called to account over their role in the panic, stress, mental anguish and related illness caused by their fear mongering. I’m not sure if they should be grouped with people who make false bomb threats or those who falsely shout “fire!” in a crowded theatre. Either way, there needs to be an accounting for the suffering they are inflicting.

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Filed under: Nuclear, Policy | 4 Comments »

Small(ish) is beautiful

Posted on 12 June 2012 by Barry Brook

This a new article written by Ben Heard and me in the SA Mines & Energy Journal (issue 23, pg 22-23), about the potential for small modular nuclear reactors. (Ben should get the primary authoring credit here — my job was to ‘enhance’ this one rather than lead the writing.) For comments, head over the the BNC Discussion Forum, here.

Also, be sure to check out Ben’s reporting on the Walkerville ‘environmentalists for nuclear energy’ event that was held last Saturday. It was a great success!

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Back in August of last year, ‘born again’ nuclear advocate and long-time environmentalist George Monbiot made a surprisingly harsh call about energy solutions for climate change: “Small is useless”. Since the time of E.F. Schumacher in the early 1970s, we’ve heard the opposite. So what’s the deal?

Home solar PV systems are small. South Australia has easily the highest per capita installation of solar PV with around 15,000 systems, but this only adds up to 19.8 MW of (peak) capacity. It would take around 215 times this level of installation, or over 3.2 million systems just to match the yearly energy generated by the 760 MW of the Northern and Playford coal power stations.

Considering Adelaide has only 500,000 households, you can begin to see Monbiot’s point.

Conceptual drawing of a two module reactor, featuring full underground reactor containment, reservoirs for emergency passive cooling (top left and right) and fully contained below ground spent fuel cooling pond (bottom centre).

We need big solutions, solutions that can scale up. So what could possibly be good about the emergent technology of “small modular reactors” (SMRs) as a zero-carbon power offering?

When people think about nuclear power, they typically envisage something large. Huge, in fact. That’s reasonable, given that today’s global nuclear fleet is made up of plants larger than 600 MW, with the new French EPR coming in at a hefty 1,650 MW. For context, the entire baseload generation capacity for South Australia is around 3,000 MW.

But now, something very different is emerging in nuclear: the small modular reactor (SMR). These units range up from as little as 25 MW to around 180 MW. Their commercialisation will dramatically increase the flexibility and relevance of nuclear power in a range of settings, and South Australia is a good example.

As a mature, industrialised economy with a small population, South Australia’s overall growth in energy consumption is slow. It is difficult to envisage circumstances, any time soon, where there will be a strong case for an additional 1,000 MW of baseload to be added, all at once. So, for meeting new energy needs, nuclear power is on the outer.

Of course, we have a looming need to replace a great deal of baseload generation, starting with the 760 MW of the Northern and Playford coal power stations. That’s more like the size for nuclear. But unfortunately it has been so long since Australia invested in significant quantities of baseload that we are staring down a big “sticker shock”: the upfront price tag is going to be tough to swallow. That will be the case regardless of the technology, but nuclear is on the pricier end before heading into super-expensive solar options (more on the cost of nuclear for our final article). This leaves us stuck with the high greenhouse options of incrementally adding more low-efficiency gas for peaking (with high fuel costs), and smaller modules of higher-efficiency gas for new baseload.

But if nuclear power could be down-scaled… that changes things. What if, instead of purchasing 700-1000 MW all at once, you could buy 200 MW (or less) at a time, and work up from there? That is the promise of the small modular reactor: a compact, energy dense and zero carbon generating option for new power needs and fossil replacement in slow growing economies. Suddenly, the major capital raising challenge replacing 1,000 MW of baseload could be spread over a series of discrete investments, with returns beginning to flow much more quickly.

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Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear | Leave a Comment »

Roads Not Taken (yet)

Posted on 31 May 2012 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Tom Blees. Tom Blees is the author of Prescription for the Planet – The Painless Remedy for Our Energy & Environmental Crises. Tom is also the president of the Science Council for Global Initiatives and a board member of the UN-affiliated World Energy Forum [wef21.org]. Many of the goals of SCGI, and the methods to achieve them, are elucidated in the pages of Blees’s book. He is a member of the selection committee for the Global Energy Prize, considered Russia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize for energy research. His work has generated considerable interest among scientists and political figures around the world. Tom has been a consultant and advisor on energy technologies on the local, state, national, and international levels.

Roads Not Taken

Those who grew up during the years of the Cold War will probably never forget the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a time when two superpowers came perilously close to unleashing all-out nuclear war. Several of John Kennedy’s generals were purportedly advising an attack at least on Cuba, if not on Russia itself. Kruschev was likely receiving similarly bellicose advice from some of his advisors. The fact that these two men took the decision to stand down brought the world back from the precipice.

But this harrowing incident was certainly not the only time that those two nations came close to initiating nuclear Armageddon. Yuri Andropov was also reportedly urged at one point by his military advisors to attack the United States, but refused to listen to them. And then there have been close calls caused by malfunctioning early warning systems, sometimes in the USA, sometimes on the other side. The average citizen was blissfully unaware of these near misses, and will likely never know about them except from hearsay or historical reporting many years after the fact.

But there is another nuclear road that was not taken. Ironically, the failure to take that road can lead to global catastrophe for both humankind and many of the species with whom we share this planet. This time the problem is not nuclear war but the threat of climate change, and nuclear power can be the solution.

This article is being written on the one-year anniversary of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated communities in northeast Japan in March of 2011. Though nearly 16,000 people were killed in the tsunami and over a million buildings were destroyed or damaged, if one were to ask nearly anyone outside Japan about the Tōhoku earthquake it would likely elicit no recognition. But mention Fukushima and immediately people know which earthquake you’re talking about. For the press coverage of the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant dwarfed the attention paid to the devastation wrought elsewhere by the tsunami.

As a result of this phenomenon, Japan has taken nearly every one of its 54 nuclear power plants offline amid pressure to abandon nuclear power entirely. Since those power plants were supplying about 30% of Japan’s electricity, this has dramatically increased the country’s carbon emissions as it turned to fossil fuel imports to keep the lights on and the factories running. It has also created Japan’s first trade deficit in over thirty years, with an estimated cost of about $100 million per day for additional energy imports.

But the impact of the Fukushima accident reached far beyond Japan (Aside: can it truly be termed a “disaster” or “catastrophe” when there was not a single instance of radiation-induced injury to the public? Even among emergency workers at the plant there were only a few who are expected to have any radiation-induced health risks. One worker died, but it was from a heart attack and had nothing to do with radiation exposure.) Shortly before the accident, Germany had been arguing over whether to decommission their perfectly serviceable nuclear power plants in deference to political pressures from the Greens. Fukushima tipped the scales, consigning Germany to a future of more coal and gas burning and almost certainly more (ironically, often nuclear-generated) electricity from its neighbors. Some other European nations have likewise reacted to Fukushima by foreclosing the option of building any new nuclear power plants.

But the nuclear road not taken that was alluded to above was a far more consequential decision, and one that might without exaggeration be termed a disaster. Like many choices of great import, the decision to abandon a new type of nuclear power system was taken by a few people in key positions. History will not likely judge them kindly, though as in so many cases those who exercised the most influence remain for the most part nameless, unknown to those who were outside the process.

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Filed under: IFR FaD, Nuclear | 17 Comments »

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