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The folly of making perfection the enemy of excellence: a visit to Beverley Uranium Mine

by Ben Heard

Today I visited the Beverley uranium mine in northern South Australia, operated by Heathgate Resources. Heathgate have been a client of mine through ThinkClimate Consulting for the last two years for the delivery of mandatory greenhouse gas reporting under NGER.

View to the foot of the Gammon Ranges, on approach to Beverley

It was clear skies on the flight in, showing an amazing landscape at the foot of the Gammon Ranges on the border of the Arkaroola pastoral lease. From the air the low vegetation takes on a wonderful patterned effect. It is a stunning view, with visible water courses snaking across the land. It is easy from that height to envisage that it was once covered in ocean.  In both the landscape of eroded mountains and the creatures that inhabit it, tell-tale signs of truly ancient history abound.

As you approach the site in from the air, the various locations that make up the Beverley operation begin to appear. Each is truly unremarkable in size, no bigger than a block you might find in an industrial suburb of Adelaide. Even taken together it is a small imprint on the land.

The main facility of Beverley (foreground) and accomodation (background). Image is from Australian Geographic and provided by Heathgate

From ground level you could be forgiven for thinking the landscape of the plains is a “barren desert”. Nothing could be further from the truth. On a simple site visit I saw wedge tailed eagles, nesting and flying, a beautiful small lizard whose name escapes me and a truly wonderful example of a bearded dragon basking on the road. This critter was too bold for his own good and was impervious to our best efforts to shoo him away. He simply was not afraid. A true highlight of the day was the head of Health, Safety and Environment picking this feisty fella up on a shovel and carrying him into the scrub, hopefully to safety.

The regular wildlife surveys reveal a multitude of birds, insects and reptiles, from tiny banded snakes to big lace monitors and woma pythons. After enough rain, the local water course, previously dry as a bone, abounds in a fish called the Spangled Grunter. As a word-lover, I am so, so glad to know of the existence of something called a Spangled Grunter.

Bearded dragon. Not the one I saw unfortunately (technical issues at that moment)...

But I was not there to check out the local fauna. I was lucky enough to see most of the facilities and processes and see how this form of mining works up close.

My registration as a day visitor included notification that this was an area of naturally elevated radiation. I queried the radiation protection officer on this. Working here for a year, exposure of about 2mSv could be expected. You would receive a larger dose of radiation taking a flight to London than visiting the mine for a day, but I have never been warned ahead of boarding the aircraft. Oh well, such is insanity.

Following registration at the main camp (which, by the by, is every bit as pleasant, both in the view and the facilities, as many tourist locations) I was fortunate to have a good tour of the processing facility with the radiation protection officer. Having visited many industrial sites in my time, including a few mines, one of the strongest impressions of Beverley is that it is neat, tidy, and remarkably quiet. It struck me as particularly safe for such an operation. The liquid ore for the main plant arrives for processing in pipes from the main deposit, with some trucked in from the satellite locations. The trucks in question are not your frighteningly oversized Caterpillars, but rather modest and road-legal tankers. So there is minimal heavy vehicle movement, and the materials and ore are essentially never exposed until the dried uranium oxide (yellow cake) is loaded into drums (an automated process, within a sealed room) at the far end of the process.

We visited one of the satellite well fields where the in-situ leaching process takes place. As I have previously described, it very much resembles a big above ground plumbing apparatus with two large trunk lines, one marked “IN” the other marked “OUT”, that then diverged into perhaps a couple of dozen injection and extraction wells.

In situ leaching well heads (file shot, provided by Heathgate)

Here, a solution of hydrochloric acid was being injected below the surface to dissolve the ore. The well fields are pretty small, and the disturbance is minimal. The area has been cleared to permit the mining. When the ore has been extracted, rehabilitation consists of cutting off the well heads to a depth of 2m below grade, backfilling the wells with concrete, covering the wells, and then furrowing the area to facilitate re-colonisation by the local vegetation (to provide a simple description of the process). Truly, this is very low impact mining. There is a good discussion of the overall process in this transcript from Catalyst (NB this reference is 5 years old. Some of the processes are slightly different to those I saw).

This fluid that has been injected is then extracted with a solution including dissolved uranium. The uranium is stripped out of the fluid by bonding with a resin. The resin is then stripped away and reused, and the solution is dried and packed into drums as yellowcake. For export of course. We don’t use it here. Heaven forbid. That would be… fill in the blank folks. What would that be? I can’t come up with much except “exceedingly sensible”. Others seem to come up with things like “ecological catastrophe”.

In situ leach mining for uranium

How can such divergent views of the same processes and products exist particularly among people who all claim a care for ecology and our natural environment?

In my fairly brief time as an advocate of nuclear power, I have heard some criticism of the type of process and operation that is delivered at Beverley. The first is that polluted waste solution is re-injected into an aquifer. That’s 100% correct, it is. Some context is required though. Prior to use for this mining purpose, the contents of the aquifer in question are no of use for other common purposes like, for example, agriculture. It is salty and, self evidently, radioactive. The solution that is reinjected is, quite obviously, less radioactive than when it came out. From the point of view of Heathgate, the less radioactive the better; it means they are capturing more product, and making more money. The radioactive material that is re-injected is more mobile than it was before (for a period of some years or perhaps decades), but there will be less of it, and on the basis of the geological surveys, the aquifers are isolated, as I discuss further below.

The second main criticism I have heard is that operations like this run the risk of polluting the Great Artesian Basin. You would expect the folks at Heathgate to take care of this. Why? They run on-site desalination from the Basin to supply their potable water. Pollution of this water source is most certainly not in their interest.

More to the point though, it would be virtually impossible, for two reasons. Between the aquifers that are being mined and the GAB is a very large, impermeable layer of clay. Accessing the Basin by accident is nigh on inconceivable. If one did though, the pressure from the basin would be such that the chances of actually getting anything in there are practically nil. That is what the word Artesian in Great Artesian Basin means: a water body under positive pressure.

That leaves the possibility that there is some obscure innate ecological value that is being disturbed by using the aquifer in the first place. I suppose this is possible. But I seriously doubt it, and in a world of trade-offs, whatever impact we impose by this re-injection is very good deal for the benefit we derive, and considering the extent of damage caused by the alternatives. Thank goodness for you, you don’t have to take my word for it, or Heathgate’s:

Overall, the process of ISL mining of uranium has considerably less environmental impact than other conventional mining techniques. Both sites, which are remote from urban areas and occur in semi-arid pastoral country, have relatively small surface footprints, are environmentally conscious and have initiated some world’s best practice techniques. Both sites are considered to be compliant with the many Acts, Codes of Practice and Regulations.

The use of acid rather than alkaline leaching and disposal of liquid wastes by re-injection into the aquifer is contentious. Available data indicate that both the leach solution and liquid waste have greater concentrations of soluble ions than does the pre-mining groundwater. However as this groundwater has no apparent beneficial use other than by the mining industry, this method of disposal is preferable to surface disposal. Although not yet proven, it is widely believed and accepted that natural attenuation will result in the contaminated water chemistry returning to premining conditions within a timeframe of over several years to decades.

CSIRO Land and Water 2004 Executive Summary

The ore-bearing sands (Beverley Aquifer) are completely confined by clays above (Beverley Clay) and below (Alpha Mudstone)

CSIRO Land and Water 2004, pg 21

These very simple and straightforward realities beg the question for me of how people can get so excited about this place and this type of mining. The fact is, whether it is food, energy, water or any of the other goods and services humans enjoy, essential or non-essential, we never, ever get something for nothing. We will, and must, make an impact. The challenge of attaining sustainability in a world that is heading for 10 billion people is to minimise our negative impacts both in quantity and dispersion and, where possible, be smart in our actions to enhance and increase positive impacts. Deciding whether a process or product is “good” or “bad”, “desirable” or “undesirable” is therefore an entirely relative concept. It is quite devoid of meaning unless the action under judgement is being considered for impacts in many areas of sustainability, and alongside the alternatives.

In a nut shell, the operation at Beverley clears very discreet patches of land, takes otherwise unusable aquifers, acidifies some of the liquid in the formations, extracts it, takes the uranium, and returns the waste to the aquifer, where it stays. In return, we get the raw material to enrich and then fabricate fuel for the generation of a staggering quantity of energy. We get that energy with no greenhouse gas, particulate pollution, or other nasty airborne pollution. From an sustainability perspective, it is not perfect. It is merely excellent.

Contextualising the negative impacts of the mining is only possible when you appreciate the scale of the energy being exported. In the packing plant, a shipping container awaited with about 60 drums of yellow cake, each weighing around 290kg. That’s 17.4 tons of U3O8 awaiting export. This will go on to provide around 8.7 million GJ of zero carbon energy in typical modern light water reactor. For comparison, my flight home took me via Pt Augusta, where I enjoyed a view from the air of the Northern and Playford coal fired power stations. To generate the equivalent energy contained in the shipping container of U3O8  from these stations would demand the digging and transportation over 13,000 laden railway cars.

A much younger me visiting the Leigh Creek Coal Mine, 2002. I dare say the hole is a bit bigger these days. I have less hair...

As the depleted uranium from the enrichment process and the waste products from the power generation plants find their way to Integral Fast Reactors, about another 250 times the energy will then be available, at no additional mining impact.

This world of ours is full of complex decisions that need to balance competing needs to attain something called sustainability. The last thing we should be doing is making the easy ones harder than they should be.

This is an easy one. If you want a good outcome for global sustainability, in-situ leach uranium mining for nuclear fuel is a hell of a good deal. Australia should do more if it.

If you just want amazing views and some close encounters with bearded dragons, try and get a seat on the flight to Beverley.

Many thanks to Sue and Martin, my hosts and guides for the day.

Damien Fordham, Barry Brook and Miguel Araújo enjoy the cool Spanish mountain air

Yes, I am enjoying myself (but working too!). We (me, and some colleagues from University of Adelaide: Corey Bradshaw, Damien Fordham and Salvador Herrando-Perez) are visiting a research collaborator in Spain (Miguel Araújo). Our workshop is being held at the El Bosque Hotel in Mataelpino, a village located 1,000 m up in the Madrid Sierra.

We’re investigating the shifts in the geographic ranges of over 200 bird species in the U.K. in relation to climate and land-use change, as well as developing a multi-species population viability analysis metapopulation model on the predator-prey-habitat interactions of the critically endangered Iberian lynx, rabbits, disease and climate change.

Although it’s the height of winter here, the region is currently experiencing a drought, and so conditions are very mild for this time of year. As such, the weather is incredibly beautiful, with bright blue skies and crisp dry air. Yesterday we went for a hike (at about 2,100 m elevation) in the Parque Natural de Peñalara. There was some snow about, but not a lot. This is the area where some of the scenes of one of my favourite movies was filmed. It’s just like being in Cimmeria…

Barry Brook at Peñalara Natural Park, Spain

I’ll be back in Adelaide in the middle of next week, with some new BNC posts on sustainable energy and climate.Meanwhile, feel free to use the comments list of this post as an especially open “Open Thread” — one not necessarily limited to climate or energy topics! As for me, I’ll sign off with some more photos (taken by Corey):

¡Adiós! ¡Hasta pronto!

Part II, which I don’t reprint, answered by Iceland’s Thorsteinn Sigfusson, covered the relationship between large-hydro and climate change, and why solar conversion isn’t used more extensively.

I’ve reproduced my and Tom’s answers below.

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Barry Brook’s Q&A

Sunil Sood: What are the “Real Energy Payback Periods” for Solar PV and Wind Energy Systems? Taking in to account the energy consumed during manufacture of components, balance of systems, transportation, installation, servicing and variations in availability of energy and usage patterns, actual life expectancy (not theoretical).  Are we consuming more of ‘Dirty Coal’ to produce these so-called ‘Clean’ energies?

Calculating true energy paybacks are tough. Every energy system has initial investments of energy in the construction of the plant. It then must produce energy for a number of years until it reaches the end of its effective lifetime. Along the way, additional energy costs are incurred in the operation and maintenance of the facility, including any self-use of energy. The energy payback period is the time it takes a facility to “pay back” or produce an amount of energy equivalent to that invested in its start-up. A full accounting of energy payback includes not only the materials and energy that are input into the extraction (mining) and manufacturing processes, but also some pro-rata calculation for inputs into the factory that constructed the power generation facility, some estimate for human (worker) inputs, etc. As you can imagine, it can be difficult to fully integrate all possible inputs.

However, there are reasonable ballpark estimates for a range of technologies, including wind, solar PV, solar thermal and nuclear. Material inputs tells one part of the story, and some attempts are a standardized comparison are given here and here for a few technologies (wind, solar thermal, Gen III nuclear). As a short-cut for estimate of total energy-returned-on-energy-invested (ERoEI), we can use studies that have looked at the life-cycle emissions of alternative technologies, and then calibrate these against the emissions intensity of the background economy used to produce the technology. This gives us an approximate ERoEI. Based on a range of studies, the estimates range from 180 to 11 for Gen III nuclear, 30 for wind, 11 for solar thermal and 6 for solar PV. That is, your PV panels would repay their inputs 6 times over during their lifespan, and if they lasted on your roof for 25 years then the payback time is about 4 years. If a nuclear plant had a ERoEI of 50 and operated for 40 years, its energy payback time would be 10 months.

Sophie Hughes, General Manager, CPR Sustainability, Sydney: As we battle with NIMBY-ism and planning issues, should international governments be focusing on building large scale renewable energy projects in uninhabited areas, such as central Australia or the edges of the Sahara? Is this feasible and does this mean that we need to focus more efficient infrastructure and storage capacities, rather than being dazzled by the technologies themselves.

All energy technology options have their pros and cons, and so investment decisions should ideally be based on a set of logical, consistent and unbiased criteria. This should include considerations of cost, externalities (e.g., CO2e emissions and toxins emitted per MWh of energy), technological maturity, dispatchability, reliability, safety, energy returned on energy invested, sustainability and security of material inputs and fuel, facility lifespan, land use, public acceptability, and so on. Typically however, many (most) of these are left out of decision making – public and private. As an example, a recent analysis of the ‘fit-for-service criteria’, life-cycle emissions and levelized costs of technology options, can be read here, here and here.

So, as to the specific question, it would make sense for governments to invest in large-scale desert-based solar plants if, on the basis of a rational analysis using these criteria, it was shown to be a superior option compared to alternatives. At present, desert solar has many large uncertainties, especially in terms of cost (including transmission from remote locations), amount of energy storage required, and technological maturity. My view is that it is worth developing, via multi-lateral funding and RD&D initiatives, a number of large demonstration plants for a range of new renewable and next-generation nuclear technologies – and then on the basis of performance, governments and the market can work together on commercial deployment. For a checklist of what types of details any large-scale alternative energy plan should (ideally) cover, see here.

Susan:  Given that oil is a finite resource, and our society is unlikely to re-invent itself, what is the most exciting development that you see that has the potential to replace our dependence on oil?  And, what are the difficulties in getting solar power from remote areas, like the Sahara Desert or the Australian Outback – identified as some of the best solar sources – to the places where people actually live? Is there anything new on the horizon that may improve this?

Oil will ultimately be replaced by some mixture of batteries, synthetic fuels, exotic energy carriers and, probably, small modular nuclear reactors. Desert-based solar could, if proven economic, be used to generate hydrogen from water via electrolysis or direct heat processes, as could nuclear heat or electricity. Pure hydrogen can be difficult to manage and transport, however, so derivatives such as hydrogen-nitrogen (e.g., ammonia, hydrazine) and hydrogen-carbon synfuels (e.g., methanol, dimethyl ether) may end up being preferred. See here for some detailed discussion of the many potential applications for ammonia. Batteries using lithium air or other advanced technologies will likely be increasingly used for passenger vehicles. There are also serious concepts for using refined metals like boron in a closed B-O cycle as a totally recyclable energy carrier for combustions engines (just add heat to recharge).

Large transport fleets like rail will move increasingly towards electrification, and ship-borne cargo transport will probably depend more on small nuclear reactors rather than huge diesel engines – as the Russian private ice-breaker fleet already does. As to transmission of electricity from remote locations to high-demand centres, the current limitations are cost – $1 to 10 million per km for Ultra-High-Voltage Direct-Current lines (UHVDC), with the actual cost depending on the power rating and other factors (huge generation facilities would require many lines). Some exciting work is being done in the area of high-temperature superconductivity, but this is many years off commercial application.

Tom Blees’ Q&A

Brooks Keene: The IEA has more or less acknowledged that global oil production has or will soon peak (see here). What implications does this have for the need to decarbonize our economies, and what role can businesses play in leading the way towards creating policy frameworks that create the right incentives for navigating the road ahead?

While there are different opinions for when the world reaches “peak oil”, most agree that we either have already hit that mark or will soon do so. Assuming that’s the case, the response of businesses depends to a great degree on what businesses we’re talking about. The oil companies would seem to have little incentive to make major changes (short of prospecting for more oil), since their costs are always passed on to consumers, in either shortages or gluts. They’re looking at many more years of virtually guaranteed healthy (if not obscene) profits as long as the majority of transport depends on gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuels based on petroleum.

That being said, gas companies have a tremendous incentive to take advantage of concerns about peak oil, especially now that fracking is expanding almost exponentially. The push to convert automobiles and other ground transport to compressed natural gas has been with us for a while and can be expected to increase, especially if fracking continues to expand–though anti-fracking pressures based on environmental concerns may affect that, in some countries more than others.

Though some environmentalists have embraced natural gas as an alternative to coal in electrical generation, this is a Faustian bargain that is driven more out of desperation than logic or conviction. Those who are pushing the hardest for an all-renewables future know that they need what is euphemistically called “backup power” for when solar and wind facilities aren’t producing. How one can call the system that provides about 75% or more of one’s energy “backup” is a mystery, but so it is in today’s energy politics.

The hard data available to date indicates that the only way we can decarbonize—eliminating both oil and gas—is to employ nuclear power as backup, and to devise methods of using renewables plus nuclear and biomass to make the transportation fuels we need, in addition to the electricity that our societies will come to depend on more and more in the future. Businesses not directly involved in the energy sector have few options in terms of directly affecting the course of energy policy. Sure, we see some businesses putting up solar arrays or making other politically correct token gestures, but these are window dressing that relies on subsidies, not really consequential in the effort to decarbonize human energy systems. The decisions that matter will be made within the energy sector, and those decisions will continue to accommodate the fossil fuel industries—be they coal, oil, or gas—unless governments lay down the law and force through policies that make it impossible for the status quo to continue. Carbon taxes are a first step, but support for a massive buildout of nuclear power (as we see in China today and to a lesser degree in some other countries) is critical to making progress in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in a meaningful way.

Shadi Saboori: What would be an optimal way to create incentives for businesses to transition to renewable energy? (And one that is politically realistic).

This is touched on in the previous response. Assuming that the term “renewable energy” doesn’t include nuclear power, the options for businesses that wish to transition to renewables are dictated primarily by the degree of subsidization offered. Customer demand is also a factor, such that if a company believes that hyping their green credentials by putting solar panels on their roofs will help business, then it’s more likely that they’ll take that step even if it costs them money in the long run. Thanks to generous subsidization by many governments, however, businesses can make it a paying proposition because, unlike many homeowners, they have the wherewithal to put up the sometimes fairly large sums up front, knowing that they’ll more than make back their investment over time due to tax deductions, generous depreciation and other allowances, and especially feed-in tariffs.

While all these incentives do encourage businesses to transition to renewable energy, is that necessarily a good thing from a societal standpoint? After all, the only reason that it’s at all profitable for the few companies that do it is because a large base of ratepayers are splitting up the cost amongst themselves (usually unknowingly). In other words, while such deployment (of solar, usually) makes things appear to be progressing in terms of societal transition to renewables, it’s simply not economically rational without the subsidies, so the wealthy (the companies that do it) are taking advantage of the less well-heeled individual citizens. If everyone were to attempt to transition to solar thusly, it would obviously be impossible, since there would be no pool from which the subsidies could be derived.

When it comes to large energy-intensive industries, even massive solar arrays can’t hope to provide the energy they’ll need, which is why some of Germany’s major industries with long histories in that country are either demanding specially reduced electricity rates or threatening to leave the country. Germany, of course, is where renewables—particularly solar and wind—have had enthusiastic government support for the last couple decades or so. Of course when the government cuts a discount energy rate deal with such industries to offset the steadily climbing electricity costs, it transfers even more of a burden onto the shoulders of regular consumers, forcing their escalating rates even higher.

Ultimately, the truly consequential decisions about a nation’s energy policy will be made by governments, with individual businesses moving in one direction or another based on their economic self-interest. And if Germany and Denmark—as the two nations with the longest history of continued government support for non-nuclear renewables—are any guide, the transition to an all-renewables future is nothing we can expect to consider viable in the foreseeable future.

Berend Jan Kleute, Bluerise BV: Island environments have unique characteristics that make them interesting to provide a general view of how possible integration of renewable energy (RE) systems can be implemented. Tropical islands usually have the greater potential of conversion using traditional RE technology (wind, solar) given their resource availability. Unfortunately islands very often lack the luxury of interconnection to a large grid, and the limited space and resources make energy storage and widespread deployment of these traditional RE systems (due to intermittency) unfeasible. The lack of an effective storage/buffer solution limits the penetration potential of traditional RE sources. What role do you foresee for different RE systems, including wind and solar, and in particular baseload RE technologies such as Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) and Seawater Air-conditioning (SWAC) to achieve a 100% energy self-sufficiency of tropical islands?

Even in the most environmentally cooperative islands (breezy tropical settings) wind and solar alone will simply not be able to lead to 100% self-sufficiency without considerable energy storage, not something that’s heretofore been demonstrated at scale except at great expense. OTEC and SWAC theoretically could provide true baseload power, but these two also have yet to be scaled up.

As someone who spent a couple decades working on some of the world’s stormiest seas, whenever I consider the often glib assurances that OTEC and wave power and other such systems will someday carry a meaningful amount of the load in supplying mankind’s energy demands, I cannot help but be skeptical. For while such systems may scale up and perform quite well for months, Mother Nature has a way of kicking up the power of the ocean in ways that are truly awesome to behold, and when that happens even the sturdiest manmade contraptions are often brought to ruin. I suspect it is difficult for many people who hold out high hopes for such systems—or for many of those who design them, for that matter—to truly appreciate what they’re up against. For my part, having experienced hurricane-force winds several times in the Bering Sea and a hurricane in the Caribbean that broke wind speed records, I would have to say that I’ll believe these ocean-tapping systems will work over the long haul when they’ve been deployed and operated successfully for many years.

One technology that I believe will soon be seeing widespread deployment on island groups is plasma converters, which I wrote about in my book Prescription for the Planet. I’ve posted a chapter on this technology online for those who wish to read about it in detail. These systems allow for efficient recycling of virtually everything, being essentially molecular deconstructors. Disposal of municipal solid waste, sewage sludge, discarded tires and other waste is especially problematic for islands, what with limited space for landfills and water contamination issues that can sometimes result. Plasma converters eliminate the need for landfills altogether and allow waste materials to be converted into electricity (usually extremely expensive on islands) and building materials. They also do away with the need for an entirely separate recycling infrastructure, since everything can be discarded in any mix and the plasma converters will sort it all out. Another bonus for island groups that have problems with reef destruction: the inert glassy slag resulting from treating wastes can be used to build artificial reefs, or to augment the surviving reefs.

But even if all the islands’ waste is efficiently converted and the electricity from it is piped into the island grid, there will still be a shortfall. Barring dependence, to one degree or another, on either fossil fuels or nuclear power, I suspect that islands that can manage the cost of substantial wind and solar systems will end up adding the cost of as much storage as they can muster and their citizens will learn to live with energy rationing and occasional failures. Several companies are prepared to provide small modular nuclear power systems, however, that could serve islands perfectly. The Russians are also planning on deploying reactors on barges, and these could also provide all the energy that island groups require. I believe the next couple decades will see more and more island groups turning to nuclear power, which has a very small footprint (or none, in the case of floating or submerged systems), low operating and maintenance costs, and no emissions.

I have published a new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Policy with the title “Could nuclear fission energy,etc., solve the greenhouse problem? The affirmative case” (currently online first, DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2011.11.041 — it will appear in the print version, with volume/page details,  later this year). If you would like a PDF copy of the article, email me and I’ll be happy to send it to you.

My paper was written as a response to Ted Trainer’s (mostly) excellent 2010 article “Can renewables etc. solve the greenhouse problem? The negative case” — hence my particular choice of title. I explain the purpose of my piece in the introduction:

…In this context of needing to replace fossil fuels with some alternative(s), Trainer (2010) examined critically the adequacy of renewable sources in achieving this energy transition. He concluded that general climate change and energy problems cannot be solved without large-scale reductions in rates of economic production and consumption.

However, Trainer’s (2010) sub-analysis of nuclear energy’s technical potential involved only a cursory dismissal on the grounds of uranium supply and life-cycle emissions… In this paper… I argue that on technical and economic grounds, nuclear fission could play a major role (in combination with likely significant expansion in renewables) in future stationary and transportation energy supply, thereby solving the greenhouse gas mitigation problem.

Thus my aim was to critique the only substantive weakness I could identify in Trainer’s analysis — the short sub-section on nuclear energy.

The abstract provides the core thrust of my argument:

For effective climate change mitigation, the global use of fossil fuels for electricity generation, transportation and other industrial uses, will need to be substantially curtailed this century. In a recent Viewpoint in Energy Policy, Trainer (2010) argued that non-carbon energy sources will be insufficient to meet this goal, due to cost, variability, energy storage requirements and other technical limitations. However, his dismissal of nuclear fission energy was cursory and inadequate. Here I argue that fossil fuel replacement this century could, on technical grounds, be achieved via a mix of fission, renewables and fossil fuels with carbon sequestration, with a high degree of electrification, and nuclear supplying over half of final energy. I show that the principal limitations on nuclear fission are not technical, economic or fuel-related, but are instead linked to complex issues of societal acceptance, fiscal and political inertia, and inadequate critical evaluation of the real-world constraints facing low-carbon alternatives.

Below I’ll fill in a few details, but I’d of course encourage you to read the actual paper (contact details above for the PDF).

The paper begins with one of my favourite quotes from one of the best books on energy, by Alvin Weinberg (you can get it as a Kindle e-book):

“I can still remember the thrill that came with my realization that the (nuclear fission) breeder meant inexhaustible energy… I became obsessed with the idea that humankind’s whole future depended on the breeder.” (Alvin M. Weinberg, 1994, The First Nuclear Era)

After setting up the context (climate change, energy crisis, issues facing nuclear) in the introduction, I lay out some assumptions and a future scenario. I explain:

Before the technical potential of nuclear fission and complementary low-carbon energy technologies (renewables and fossil fuels with CCS), a scenario must be set against which plausibility and sustainability can be assessed objectively… The future energy mix scenario offered… should not be considered a prediction – it is better thought of as a ‘working hypothesis’… consistent with the projected demand… and IPCC greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets…

I first present a summary of current energy use from low-carbon sources, based on a compilation of data from the IEA, EIA and other sources. I also develop a projection of possible final energy use in 2060 (~50 years time), under a ‘storyline’ where wholesale decarbonisation of global energy production has occurred. It is summarised in the table below:

I spend considerable space justifying the assumptions and calculations that underpin section (b) of Table 1, which I won’t detail here — but it is consistent with Trainer (2010), with some modifications, and also some projections from integrated assessment modelling (a family of computable general equilibrium simulations).

Table 2 offers a potential energy mix, based on current deployment, possible future major contributions and growth rates (including consideration of the boundary conditions outlined by Trainer), and some basic intuition on my behalf. It is not based on an economic forecast, because for these lengthy time frames, it is very difficult to assess the relative competitiveness of currently nascent renewable, energy storage and nuclear technologies. Instead, I take the position that “This is possible, and if this occurred, then could nuclear actually reach and sustain these levels of usage?”.

Note the massive growth here in wind/solar (over 8% p.a. over five decades, a 50-fold expansion on installed capacity compared to 2010), a substantial contribution from fossil fuels with CCS, and a more modest (though still major) expansion of the use of hydro, biomass and other renewables. The ‘gap’ is then filled by nuclear — this amounts to 52% of total final energy. The world in this scenario is almost completely electrified, so assuming a Carnot cycle efficiency for nuclear of 35%, this is equivalent to 13 TWt of primary energy (heat) from fission.

The final section of the article then justifies the large-scale nuclear component of Table 2, addressing the following major issues (briefly,  naturally — this is not a book!):

• Technology options
• Is there enough fuel?
• Will carbon emissions intensity be sufficiently low to meet IPCC targets?
• Can nuclear plants be built quickly enough?
• Safety, proliferation and cost

I also note that:

In reality, there may be a greater or lesser supply from any of these low-carbon energy sources (i.e., the relative mix of nuclear fission, various renewable technologies, and CCS); this will depend on a broad range of complex factors, including carbon prices, subsidies and tariffs, energy security considerations, fossil fuel supply constraints, and technological, logistical, economic and socio-political circumstances…

If, for instance, renewables or CCS fail to reach the high penetration assumed in Table 2, then nuclear (or something else) will have to take up the slack.

I conclude with the following:

The critique of the future global role of renewable energy by Trainer (2010) underscored many important limitations associated with variability, dispatchability, large-scale energy storage, the need for overbuilding and geographical replication (and the likely consequence: ‘dumping’ of unused excess energy), energy returned on energy invested, and other key points. The meta-analysis by Nicholson et al. (2011) also considered technological maturity, cost and life cycle emissions as constraints on renewables’ capacity to displace fossil fuels. Although I support Trainer’s (2010) conclusion was that renewables alone will not be able to ‘solve’ the greenhouse problem, I argue that his dismissal of a major role for nuclear fission energy, working in complement with other low-carbon energy sources, was unjustified.

The principal limitations on fission energy are not technical, economic or fuel supply – they are instead tied up in the complex issues of societal acceptance and public education (Adamantiades and Kessides, 2009; Pidgeon et al., 2008), fiscal and political inertia (Hyde et al., 2008; Lund, 2010), and inadequate critical evaluation of the alternatives (Jeong et al., 2010; Nicholson et al., 2011; Trainer, 2010). Ultimately, as the urgency of climate change mitigation mounts, and requirements for sustainable growth in developing economies and replacement of aging infrastructure in the developed world come to the fore, pragmatic decisions on the viability of all types of non-fossil technologies will have to be made. Engineering and economics realities point to a large role for fission in this new energy future.

I hope this summary has interested you enough to read the full paper, and after that, to encourage others to do the same!

In this short essay, I draw an analogy between the IFR and the Wright brothers’ 1903 ‘ ‘Flyer’. The idea is that successful technology — especially a revolutionary design — is built on the back of many learning-by-doing failures. Yet, once the initial problems have been solved, the remaining pathway for the technology’s development is one of incremental (but often rapid) evolutionary improvements.

I suspect that with just a few more years of serious investment in RD&D, the LFTR ‘Flyer’ could also launch. The molten-salt thorium reactor concept is extremely appealing, and the ORNL prototype, which ran in the mid- to late-1960s, showed real promise. In my view the Th232-U233 fuel cycle would make an excellent complement to the U238-Pu239 fuel cycle offered by the IFR, and both reactor types hold the promise of safe and inexhaustible energy.

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Foreword to: Plentiful Energy – The book that tells the story of the Integral Fast Reactor

On a breezy December day in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, N.C., a great leap forward in the history of technology was achieved. The Wright brothers had at last overcome the troubling problems of ‘inherent instability’ and ‘wing warping’ to achieve the first powered and controlled heavier-than-air flight in human history. The Flyer was not complicated by today’s standards – little more than a flimsy glider – yet its success proved to be a landmark achievement that led to the exponential surge of innovation, development and deployment in military and commercial aviation over the 20^th century and beyond.

Nonetheless, the Flyer did not suddenly and miraculously assemble from the theoretical or speculative genius of Orville and Wilbur Wright. Quite the contrary – it was built on the back of many decades of physical, engineering and even biological science, hard-won experience with balloons, gliders and models, plenty of real-world trial-and-error, and a lot of blind alleys. Bear in mind that every single serious attempt at powered flight prior to 1903 had failed. Getting it right was tough!

Yet just over a decade after the triumphant 1903 demonstration, fighter aces were circling high above the battlefields of Europe in superbly maneuverable aerial machines, and in another decade, passengers from many nations were making long-haul international journeys in days, rather than months.

What has this got to do with the topic of advanced nuclear power systems, I hear you say? Plenty. The subtitle of Till and Chang’s book “Plentiful Energy” is “The complex history of a simple reactor technology, with emphasis on its scientific bases for non-specialists”. The key here is that, akin to powered flight, the technology for fully and safely recycling nuclear fuel turns out to be rather simple and elegant, in hindsight, but it was hard to establish this fact – hence the complex history. Like with aviation, there have been many prototype ‘fast reactors’ of various flavors, and all have had problems.

Stretching the analogy a little further, relatively inefficient balloons, airships and gliders were in use for many decades before powered flight became possible, even though people could see that better ways of flying really did exist (they only had to look up in the sky, at the birds). Powered aircraft allow people to travel hundreds of times faster, and more safely, than lighter-than-air devices. Similarly, the type of nuclear reactors we have used commercially for decades, although far superior to other methods of generating electricity, have harnessed but a tiny fraction of the potential locked away in uranium. To get at that, you need a very different approach – a nuclear fission Flyer. Enter the integral fast reactor (IFR).

This wonderful book by fast-reactor pioneers Charles Till and Yoon Chang, two of the foundational developers of the IFR during the fabulously productive years of research and development at the Argonne National Laboratory from the 1980s to early 1990s, explains in lucid terms the historical, philosophical and technical basis for truly sustainable nuclear energy. It’s quite a story.

Imagine a reactor that passively responds to critical stressors of the kind that befell Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima by shutting down without human operators even needing to intervene. Or one that includes a secure recycling and remote fabrication system that, almost Midas like, is able to turn uranium or even old ‘nuclear waste’ from contemporary reactors into an inexhaustible (and zero-carbon) fuel, as well as simultaneously solving the socio-political problem of long-term disposal.

Once you’ve read this book, you’ll understand how this technological wizardry is performed and why other options – those alternatives to the Flyer – never quite worked out. Moreover, you’ll have a much deeper appreciation of the true potential of fission energy in a low-carbon and energy-hungry world – and an insight into what has stopped it reaching its potential, to date. There is something here for the non-specialist scientist and engineer, but also for the historian, social scientist, and media commenter. It is wrapped up in a grand narrative and an inspiring vision that will appeal to people from all walks of life – indeed anyone who cares about humanity’s future and wants to leave a bright legacy for future generations that is not darkened by the manifold problems associated with extracting and burning ever dwindling and environmentally damaging forms of fossil carbon, like coal, oil and gas.

For the sake of averting crises of energy scarcity, mitigating the ever mounting global problem of anthropogenic climate change, as well as drastically reducing the pressure on society to make huge swathes of productive landscapes hostage to biofuels and other diffuse forms of energy collection, we need to continue the historical impetus towards ever more energy-dense fuels. It’s time for the Integral Fast Reactor ‘Flyer’ to take flight, because, as Till and Chang explain, the sky is the limit…

The subtitle of the book is “The complex history of a simple reactor technology, with emphasis on its scientific basis for non-specialists”. Written by the two leading engineers and Argonne National Laboratory Associate Directors behind the integral fast reactor, Dr. Charles E. Till and Dr. Yoon Il Chang, it is a landmark in the sustainable energy literature.

The first paragraph of the Acknowledgements explain the authors’ motivation for writing the book:

In beginning this book we were thinking of a volume on fast reactor technology in general to be done in a manner suited to the more technically inclined of the general public. There had been advances in this technology that had not been adequately covered in the literature of the time, we didn’t think, and we felt that a book on this area of nuclear technology could play a useful role. However, at about this time the enthusiastic advocacy of the IFR in the writings of Tom Blees, Steve Kirsch, Terry Robinson, Joe Shuster, Barry Brook and Jim Hansen began to appear.

In books and articles they outlined the merits of the Integral Fast Reactor and advocated its urgent deployment. Written by these highly technically literate non-specialists in the technology, they provided a general understanding of the IFR and what its implications for energy supplies would be for the future. And they did this admirably, describing accurately and vividly the capabilities of the IFR and the reasons for urgency in its deployment. They could only touch on the technology underlying it, however, and the why and how of the technology that caused it to work as it did, and the influence of the history of its development on the development itself, were obvious to us as being very important too. These things then became the focus of our efforts in this book…

After visiting Chicago and Idaho Falls in 2009/2010, talking to Yoon and Chuck, visiting the EBR-II site, and really getting immersed in the background to the technology, I was delighted to assist in the production of this book by reading and doing a technical edit on the entire draft manuscript — and so I think I can claim to be the first person to have read it all, other than the authors!

More about the book is given at its CreateSpace publishing page, and you can purchase it at Amazon.com (currently for $US 18). Obviously, I thoroughly recommend that all BNC readers get a copy.

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a fast reactor system developed at Argonne National Laboratory in the decade 1984 to 1994. The IFR project developed the technology for a complete system; the reactor, the entire fuel cycle and the waste management technologies were all included in the development program. The reactor concept had important features and characteristics that were completely new and fuel cycle and waste management technologies that were entirely new developments. The reactor is a “fast” reactor – that is, the chain reaction is maintained by “fast” neutrons with high energy – which produces its own fuel. The IFR reactor and associated fuel cycle is a closed system. Electrical power is generated, new fissile fuel is produced to replace the fuel burned, its used fuel is processed for recycling by pyroprocessing – a new development – and waste is put in final form for disposal. All this is done on one self-sufficient site.

The scale and duration of the project and its funding made it the largest nuclear energy R and D program of its day. Its purpose was the development of a long term massive new energy source, capable of meeting the nation’s electrical energy needs in any amount, and for as long as it is needed, forever, if necessary. Safety, non-proliferation and waste toxicity properties were improved as well, these three the characteristics most commonly cited in opposition to nuclear power.

Development proceeded from success to success. Most of the development had been done when the program was abruptly cancelled by the newly elected Clinton Administration. In his 1994 State of the Union address the president stated that “unnecessary programs in advanced reactor development will be terminated.” The IFR was that program.

This book gives the real story of the IFR, written by the two nuclear scientists who were most deeply involved in its conception, the development of its R and D program, and its management.

Between the scientific and engineering papers and reports, and books on the IFR, and the non-technical and often impassioned dialogue that continues to this day on fast reactor technology, we felt there is room for a volume that, while accurate technically, is written in a manner accessible to the non-specialist and even to the non-technical reader who simply wants to know what this technology is.

The book is both comprehensive in detail and at the same time very readable, telling the personal as well as technical details of the IFR development and the rationale behind the choices made. It includes chapters on:

• The Argonne Experience and the foundation of the IFR programme (Ch 1-3; allowing readers to get a good feel for the excitement, uncertainty and missteps that occurred in reactor development in the early years of the Lab)
• A review of the current energy crisis (Ch 4)
• The basis of choices for the IFR technology (Ch 5; fuel, coolant, reactor configuration, spent fuel processing)
• The special characteristics of metal fuel (Ch 6)
• Safety advantages of the IFR systems design (Ch 7)
• A huge amount of detail on the pyroprocess and electrorefining (Ch 8-9 and Appendix, both for initial preparation of spent light water reactor oxide fuel [Ch 10], and the subsequent multiple recycles of IFR metal fuel)
• Implications of the technology for waste management and radioactive lifespan (Ch 11)
• Non-proliferation aspects of the IFR fuel cycle (Ch 12), and
• A very interesting analysis on the economics of fast reactors in comparison to today’s LWR technology (Ch 13).

For those energy-policy buffs who are focused predominantly on what it all means for the future of abundant low-carbon energy, you could do worse than to jump straight to Chapter 14, “IFR design options, optimum deployment and the next step forward”. The valuable overeview includes a description of what an IFR reactor site would look like, the rationale for sodium coolant over alternatives, the basic physics of fissile fuel breeding, the principles underpinning the reactor design choices, a brief history of fast reactor experience worldwide, some projections on future deployment scenarios, and thoughts on the path forward…

Look, if you are seriously concerned about the future of energy in a carbon-constrained world, I’d argue that you owe it to yourself to read Till and Chang’s book and understand its fundamentals. Also, please pass it around to your friends, colleagues, family, politician — whoever you think matters.

People don’t need to read all the details contained within this to appreciate how robust the science and engineering behind the IFR is, and why it is so critical that this technology is given its chance (but the details are there, if you want them). Read alongside Tom Blees’ Prescription for the Planet, it is clear from ‘Plentiful Energy‘ that a sustainable and prosperous future for humanity and the biosphere is not only possible, but really is within our reach.

For 2012, I will expect the unexpected, but also hope to see some better signs of progress towards the downfall of fossil fuels. But really, let’s be honest, that is a decadal rather than year prospect.

Anyway, to the BNC year in review. Below I list some of the most read, most commented and most stimulating or controversial subjects of the past BNC year.

1. Fukushima nuclear crisis: This was the biggest story of the year for the blog. Read about the early diagnosis and explanation, ongoing reports, some technical speculation, an essay on what we can and can’t design for,  preliminary and considered lessons learned, what the INES 7 rating means, and the need to avoid radiophobia with some common sense (and data). Another highlight is Ben Heard in his pre-decarbonisesa.com days…

2. Renewables in the context of effective CO2 abatement. Some useful analyses on CO2 avoidance cost with wind, climatologist James Hansen admonishes use to get real about how effective (or ineffective) green energy has been to date at displacing fossil fuels, an adventure to energy debates in wonderland, a look at geographical smoothing, an argument that an energy strategy without nuclear does not have history on its side, Geoff Russell deconstructs the situation for India and Switzerland, and I do so for Germany.

3. More depressing climate trends. Sea ice declines and emissions rise, the cost of climate extremes, complications and realities, a plea to clean up the climate ‘debate’, why the argument of ‘no recent warming’ is statistically invalid, and a graphical review of the grim numbers.

4. The cost of ending global warming. A back-of-the-envelope calculation by Chris Uhlik, a critique of the IPCC WGIII report on renewable-dominated scenarios and their economics, carbon smoke and mirrors, a view of how nuclear energy could be the big energy player in the mid- to late-21st century, and a detailed look at some of the major technology options for sustainable nuclear fission and derivatives.

5. Why has pro-nuclear environmentalism failed? Some thoughts here, as well as a list of environmentalists that have bucked the trend, and a look back to anti-nuclear views in 1978 (and how little has changed). Moving forward, a possible route to getting the first IFR built?

6. New TCASE entries. These include assessments of the levelised cost and life-cycle emissions of various fit-for-service baseload technologies, and an attempt at a fair comparison of various first-of-a-kind builds. Although not a TCASE entry, Martin Nicholson’s superb analysis on cutting Australia’s carbon abatement costs with nuclear power must also be highlighted.

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There was plenty more of course, and within the next week or two I will update the BNC post listing to include all entries for 2011, in chrological order, on a single page that can be easily searched in your web browser.

With that, I’ll bid 2011 farewell, wish you all a happy new year, and hope that 2012 is your best year yet!

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the 2008 International Global Energy Prize award ceremony

The Christmas to New Year period is traditionally ‘hibernation mode’ for blogs, when page views and comment counts plummet (my hits have dropped about 70% compared to early December!).

I suppose this is a time when people find better things to do than sit in front of a computer screen (family time, good food, beach/snow [depending on hemisphere], travel, reading, new games and toys, whatever). So during this activity lull, it’s as good a time as any to announce a few little personal triumphs.

Within the last month or so I received two tokens of recognition for my work in the sustainable energy space. To explain what, I reproduce below a short write-up done by the University of Adelaide’s media office. I’ve added a few relevant hyperlinks and cites, for further information.

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International recognition for Environment Professor

The University of Adelaide’s Professor Barry Brook — an environmental scientist who holds strong pro-nuclear energy views — has received recognition from two prominent international bodies.

Professor Brook, who is Director of Climate Science at the University’s Environment Institute, has become the first Australian appointed to the international award committee of the $1.2 million Global Energy Prize.

Known as the “Nobel Prize of Energy”, this is the most prestigious international award granted for outstanding scientific achievements in the field of energy that have benefited the human race. From Wikipedia:

The Global Energy Prize is an independent award for outstanding scientific research and technological development in energy, which contribute to efficiency and environmentally friendly energy sources for the benefit of humanity.

The award was established in Russia, through the non-commercial Global Energy partnership and with the support of leading Russian energy companies Gazprom, FGC UES and Surgutneftegaz. Laureates are presented with their award by the President of Russia.

The Global Energy Prize promotes energy development as a science and demonstrates the importance of international energy cooperation, as well as public and private investment in energy supply, energy efficiency and energy security. It stands for the belief that advances in science and technology should serve the long-term interests of human development, improving social security and living standards of people in all countries.

Barry Brook

Professor Brook has also been made a 2012 Senior Fellow at the California-based think tank, The Breakthrough Institute.

The Institute is dedicated to “modernizing liberal thought for the 21st Century” and creating “secure, free, prosperous, and fulfilling lives on an ecologically vibrant planet”.

Both appointments are in recognition of Professor Brook’s work on energy policy. He holds strong views on the use of nuclear energy and alternative energy systems from an economic, environmental and scientific point of view.

“I’m honoured to have been chosen for the international selection committee of the Global Energy Prize and as a fellow of The Breakthrough Institute within a short space of each other,” Professor Brook says.

“Although many environmentalists consider nuclear power to be somehow anti-environment, it’s my firm belief that nuclear energy actually offers a viable low-carbon, low-impact alternative that cannot be matched by other low-carbon solutions.

“The reality is that any of the main ‘green energy’ solutions – solar, wind, geothermal – are expensive and won’t be sufficient for displacing fossil fuels. Even if we were willing and able to pay for them, the result, without nuclear being part of the mix, would be an unacceptably unreliable energy supply system,” he says.

In addition to his extensive research, supervision and public outreach duties, Professor Brook runs a highly popular blog on climate change and energy options.

The blog – http://bravenewclimate.com/ – has already received more than three million page hits and fifty thousand comments since he established it in August 2008.

In that time, Professor Brook’s own views have shifted towards nuclear energy as a viable alternative to fossil fuels, with a particular emphasis on next-generation technologies that recycle nuclear waste, are passively safe, and provide a truly sustainable energy source.

Professor Brook blogs about scientific findings and commentary from a range of sources, including many of his colleagues who work in the fields of conservation, climate, environment and energy science.

Tom Wigley

One such colleague is University of Adelaide Adjunct Professor Tom Wigley (from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in the United States). Professor Wigley has also been made a 2012 Senior Fellow at The Breakthrough Institute.

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So, there you have it. Tom Wigley, also a 2012 BTI Senior Fellow, is a good friend and colleague of mine, and we are currently writing a couple of new papers on energy systems and global decarbonisation options in relation to climate change mitigation, which will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals next year.

Tom and I will be attending The Breakthrough Dialogue in California in June 2012, where we’ll join Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, Jesse Jenkins and many others for a stimulating brainstorming workshop on energy, policy and the environment (see here for a wrap of the 2011 event).

The Global Energy Prize for 2012 is now accepting nominations — details here. In sum:

The winner of the 2012 Prize will be selected by an International Prize Award Committee, which includes 37 internationally-based scientists and specialists, as well as representatives of international research organisations. The award will be given for outstanding achievement in the field of energy, including:

– discoveries, inventions and fundamental research providing new opportunities for energy industry development;

– development projects, engineering improvements and application-oriented innovations which create new ways of using energy more efficiently;

– discoveries, inventions and theoretical R&D projects opening up new energy sources as well as opportunities for using them;

– discoveries, inventions and research which have resulted in finding breakthrough approaches to addressing energy transmission and energy saving challenges;

– discoveries, inventions and research which have materially contributed to the solution of environment protection and development problems as well as opened up new and feasible ways of using innovative energy conversion method.

I’ll be visiting Russia twice a year (St. Petersburg and Moscow) for the GEP selection deliberations and awards ceremony. As you might guess, I can’t wait!

What future for agriculture on a hotter planet?

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: Feeding the billions on a hotter planet (Part II)

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Welcome to Part III of my still presumptuously titled series on feeding the world in 2050.

I spent the first two parts of this series looking at global authorities like the FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation) with its predictive obsession and its policy associate IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute) with its meat obsession. Writing in a similarly obsessed country with far more cattle than people, I felt compelled to add a special section on protein and to also quantify the place of meat, particularly sheep and cattle meat, on the world food stage. Cattle are a major player in climate change, biodiversity loss and general environmental destruction but both they and sheep are globally irrelevant to food security. But worse than being irrelevant, their net contribution may well be negative. Here are some of the negative impacts:

1. Reductions in the productivity of the land that produces real food. These reductions are via physical soil damage, consumption of crop residues which protect the soil, the deliberate burning of areas that are croppable to maintain them as pasture.
2. Fouling water. Lack of clean water is the second biggest cause of malnutrition.
3. Acting as disease generators. I mentioned Cryptosporidium in the last post, but livestock are also major generators of novel rotavirus strains. Rotavirus kills a million children annually, with vaccination not always available in the developing world. We don’t need new strains.
4. The direct sickening and killing of children and women via the use of animal dung as a fuel.
5. The reduction in the global food supply by making feed production more profitable than food production. The last impact doesn’t always apply to sheep and cattle but is more general. People with the perspicacity to easily recognise this problem in the context of biofuels are almost universally blind to its existence elsewhere.

Today, in the last of the series, I want to look some standout scientific work that breaks the predictive meat obsessed mould. This is work by Jonathan Foley and Navin Ramankutty and a sizeable group of associated researchers. I’ll call this the “FR” work, but keep in mind that there are many other researchers involved.

This work breaks the mold because it isn’t concerned with mere prediction, like that of the FAO. Nor is it obsessed with meat as a food but rather it recognises meat’s central role in reducing global food Calories.

Step 1 and 2 and 3 … prepare the data

Central to the 2011 Foley-Ramankutty paper is the careful selection and preparation of global data sets over more than a decade. This combines large scale vision with obsessive attention to detail. Here are the major data sets that serve as input into their global modelling:

I don’t know the extent to with these datasets are the product of independent effort or orchestration, but FR have assembled them to work as a unit together with assorted algorithms.

The first two of these datasets are particularly important. National governments collect data on agricultural output for various regions and then combine. Most people work with the combined data. But FR work as much as possible with the low level regional data. Australia, for statistical purposes, has 59 regions and Brazil has 5510! For some countries, the data is thin or suspect and FR use FAO national figures which are derived using all kinds of estimation techniques and expert knowledge. The FR team then combine this raw (or not so raw) data with two sets of satellite data. Satellites can identify different types of woodland, grassland and so on, but are not good at differentiating between different crops, you need the low level regional data for that. Combining the two types of data allows you to allocate production to geographical regions at a reasonable level of detail.

The resulting dataset allows you to answer many questions. FAO has national data of how much of which crops are used as feed, so if you combine this with knowledge of which crops and animal products are produced in different areas, then you can, for example, calculate the food Calories produced in those areas. You can combine this with climate records and predictions from Global Climate models to predict how much food might be produced with the same or different crops or animals in the same region. Knowing planting times and crop suitabilities for different areas allows you to calculate food production possibilities under any alternative agriculturally feasible scenario.

Next step … use it

So far, so good. The FAO and IFPRI modellers do similar things and indeed, FAO data is central to the FR work. But it’s what FR do with the data that separates them from the rest. They don’t stop with “mere” prediction and they don’t let prevailing meat industry biases block the science.

FR suggestions on ways to increase the global food supply begin with a basic constraint: agricultural expansion onto new land, particularly tropical forests, must be slowed and eventually cease. With a few important exceptions, tropical crop yields are below those in temperate regions, but carbon released during their deforestation is huge. This cessation of deforestation, particularly tropical deforestation, is a climate change imperative.

Within this already radical constraint, FR’s first two suggestions are straight from the “more of the same” play book of FAO and everybody else. These suggestions are to reduce the gaps that exist between the yields achieved by the best farmers and the worst and to increase resource use efficiency. Even in areas with similar soils, rainfall and climate, some farmers get far larger yields than others. There are many reasons for this, and current agricultural research and extension programs are designed to address such problems. While recognising and quantifying the room for improvement, the fact that we have doubled the global population without heavily increased rates of malnutrition is an indication that these parts of the current food supply system are working.

Plant scientists have achieved a myriad of small useful advances in the past few decades in addition to the larger and more heralded successes of the green revolution. They are also constantly battling plant diseases by deriving new resistant strains and treatment. Without those on-going efforts the global food supply would crash. Animal scientists on the other hand, have achieved increased output by pushing livestock well past physiological limits so that, for example, all but a few percent of the world’s 18 billion chickens at any point in time will be unable to walk normally in the final weeks of their 6 or 7 week life.

The next suggestion in the FR paper goes beyond business as usual and is the bombshell … shifting diets away from animal source foods. As we saw last time, IFPRI explicitly rejected any analysis of such an option for reasons that were simply rubbish. Similarly, the lead article in the special issue of “Science” on food security last year also rejected analysing the potential for such a shift, again using unsubstantiated claims. In the previous post I showed that the claim that grasslands produce significant amounts of meat is false under any reasonable definition of “significant”. The same lead article goes on to claim that: “… pigs and poultry are often fed on human food ‘waste’.” . This is also false under any reasonable definition of “often” and FR quantify the details.

One can reasonably argue that scientists should stay out of policy debates, but refusing to calculate or estimate the impact of a fairly plausible policy direction is not only entering the debate but taking a strong stand and showing a clear bias. It pre-empts policy decisions by failing to provide policy makers with proper data. This is unconscionable, sloppy and unprofessional.

Foley and Ramankutty grasp the nettle and calculate the impacts of a full shift to plant based foods. They estimate that this would add 49 percent to the world’s Caloric output. They naturally leave open the vexed issue of how big a shift in this direction is socially and politically possible. But their calculations allow policy makers to consider the issue. Not only do they calculate how many extra Calories we could produce but the article contains a map showing exactly where in the world these extra Calories could be generated.

And in a changing climate …?

The extensive datasets and modelling enable FR to calculate changes in potential food production under various climate scenarios. Early work on this was done in a 2002 paper and can be repeated as improvements are made in both climate models, auxiliary methodology and the datasets. In the 2002 paper, 3 climate models were used and in regions where the models were in substantial agreement, an index was derived to predict the change in suitability of the land for cropping.

Here is that early result. It shows large regions of increased suitability for crops in 2070-99 as well as regions of decreased suitability.

That 2002 study was aimed at mapping cultivable land … cropland. Unsurprisingly, there are vast croppable areas available in tropical regions, including Africa, but much of it is forested or grazed.

As the future warms and more northern regions become cropable, there is a disturbing potential for the north-south food and wealth gap to grow. What will the northern countries do? Will they clear and crop or clear and graze newly productive land? Will they clear and crop and feedlot and refuse to sell cheap food but ship frozen meat? Will some dark forested areas become more reflective under wheat and will this increased albedo compensate for the loss of carbon? There are many questions.

Concluding remarks

Foley and Ramankutty have quantified what is qualitatively obvious. The explosion of global food production over the past few decades would have wiped out malnutrition if had been used to feed people instead of livestock.

But malnutrition is still with us. It has changed its face a little with a billion overfed people facing chronic diseases being added to a billion underfed people facing the more pressing daily diseases of poverty. As the wealthy in developing countries adopt the diets of the dominant western culture they contract the same diseases and demand the health care facilities that go with the diet. You can get a triple heart bypass in Cairo or Nairobi despite 30 percent of the children in Egypt and Kenya being stunted.

The same policy path which FR has shown has the potential to tackle the biggest component of malnutrition, not enough food, will also enable both a cessation of deforestation and an increase in reforestation. James Hansen’s Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim? regards both rolling back 200 years of deforestation and slashing non-CO2 climate forcings as both essential to get to a stable level of atmospheric forcings. Changing to a plant based diet tackles both problems. It isn’t a substitue for rebuilding our energy infrastructure, but it is both essential and complementary. A 2009 paper also showed huge financial benefits in fighting climate change using dietary change.

We know we need to change the global food system for a myriad of reasons and the work of Foley, Ramankutty and their colleagues has quantified the evidence and so strengthened the case.

Any move to reduce livestock and increase plant foods will be resisted by powerful and well connected forces. Marion Nestle in Food Politics and T. Colin Campbell in The China Study described the subversion of the nutritional advice system in the US by the livestock industries. They did it as well connected Professors inside that system.

In Australia, the CSIRO has pushed a high meat diet in a bestselling book owned by 1 in 7 Australian households, effectively thumbing its nose at its climate scientists and sending a very effective message to the Australian public that climate change isn’t worth doing anything about. Similarly, the recently released NHMRC Draft Dietary Guidelines have done no more than pay lipservice to environmental issues in general and climate change in particular. We don’t have a whistle blowing insider (yet), but we have all the external public evidence of the subversion of the system. Elsewhere, the signs of progress away from meat obsession are reasonable in the UK and parts of Europe. India is holding the line and Chinese livestock growth has at least plateaued.

It will be an uphill battle.

And from left field …

A long crippled theory which frequently gets a run in discussions on food security received another hammering recently. Fish and other seafood are globally irrelevant to food security. Together they provide about 1 percent of Calories and mostly to the rich with some 63 percent of the ocean’s fish going to high income countries having just 18 percent of the world’s population. Fish can of course be locally important in developing countries like Indonesia and we rich countries know exactly what to do when people who need food try to take it from people who don’t … we burn their bloody boats and put them in jail.

The dodgy theory that drives the demand for fish and fish oil in rich countries is that we need to eat them for their long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFAs), because our brains can’t make them efficiently.

The existence of millions of children with normal brains dispite no LCPUFAs in their bottled infant formula for decades (it is still only “optional”) should have been enough to kill this myth, but it keeps popping up. However recent work in the Maasai in Kenya has done the hard work of measuring everything carefully (easier said than done) and showing that people can indeed make ample LCPUFAs, far more than theory predicts. The Maasai have almost no sources of LCPUFAS in their diets, but have perfectly normal levels in their red blood cells.

The study also contains some interesting and highly relevant observations about the value of cattle to the Maasai. The cattle have little food value. They rarely eat them, but cattle are traded for maize. The exchange rate is said to work out at about 1000 Calories of beef for 8000 Calories of maize. The argument that cattle are important for food security because of their economic value is very different from the argument that they are important nutritionally. It is one of a myriad of economic and social problems associated with formulating plans for dietary change.

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It’s been quite a year for nuclear power. The dramatic events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in north-east Japan March and April 2011, following the Great Tōhoku Earthquake and tsunami, made headlines around the world. It constituted the most significant nuclear emergency in 25 years.

Nine months on, engineers continue to work to secure the plant and transition to a state termed ‘cold shutdown’, whereby the radioactively decaying reactor fuel is consistently cooled to below 100°C. The mangled reactor buildings now have new protective shells to keep out the weather, and an elaborate water purification system on site is working steady to decontaminate the large amount of contaminated cooling water that accumulated in holding tanks during the months following the accident.

The evacuation zone of 20 km around the plant remains in place, with more than 100,000 people displaced. There are medium-term plans to scrape away the topsoil in those ‘hotspots’ where radioactive cesium-137 was deposited (somewhat randomly) by the winds, following steam venting and the hydrogen explosions that occurred in the first week of the crisis. Once this is done, it is probable that residents will be allowed to return to the tsunami- and earthquake-ravaged area, to rebuild their lives.

I say ‘probable’ because a particular personal lesson for me from the events at Fukushima was that one can never be definite about anything involving major industrial, engineering and socio-political events! Indeed, I wrote the following on March 12, just a few hours before the first hydrogen explosion:

I don’t know the full situation… [but the reactors] have just performed robustly in the face of the worst earthquake ever to strike the Japanese islands. The risk of meltdown is extremely small, and the death toll from any such accident, even if it occurred, will be zero. There will be no breach of containment and no release of radioactivity beyond, at the very most, some venting of mildly radioactive steam to relieve pressure. Those spreading FUD at the moment will be the ones left with egg on their faces.

Well, no one was killed by radioactivity from the event, but it was still an incredibly disruptive accident and I clearly got all the other predictions wrong. Ignorant as I was at that time of the seriousness of the damage the tsunami had inflicted on the backup generators, I suffered from unconscionable hubris (an all too common ailment), and it was me who ended up with the omelette mask. On reflection, it is clear that in my haste to defend what I assess to be a relatively safe low-carbon energy source (relative, that is, to all other effective, large-scale electricity-generation options), I failed to imagine the unimaginable.

This heavenly manna, of course, delighted anti-nuclear campaigners like Dr. Jim Green, who made all they could of this. Although the fantastical yet never-realised doom-and-gloom predictions that followed from the anti-nuclear crowd was often eye-poppingly bizarre, they could always say in their defense ‘Ahh, but it could have happened…’, whereas my early speculation was quickly proven false.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Fukushima crisis has not diminished my conviction that nuclear energy will need to fulfill a major role in moving the world away from fossil fuels in the coming decades. Renewable energy will also have an important role, but won’t be enough. We’ve just got to try and be rational, honest and pragmatic about the scale of the greenhouse problem, and of the maturity, scalability, reliability and relative cost of the non-fossil-fuel options available to us. Yes, nuclear power has problems – which can be mitigated but not eliminated with new technology – but then so do large-scale renewables, massive requirements for energy storage, carbon-capture, geoengineering. Trade-offs must be faced up to, not fobbed off, and uncertainties need to be acknowledged, including having a plan B (or N). The new draft Energy White Paper for Australia, released this week, says as much.

So I haven’t really changed my views on energy options for avoiding dangerous climate change – I’ve just become more circumspect in making predictions. But what might be surprising to some is that a number of prominent environmentalists who were anti-nuclear prior to Fukushima have been provoked to look hard at the issue and, on the basis of evidence and logic, have indeed altered their stance.

Among them is formerly anti-nuclear George Monbiot, who, writing in The Guardian this month, said:

Anti-nuclear campaigners have generated as much mumbo jumbo as creationists, anti-vaccine scaremongers, homeopaths and climate change deniers. In all cases, the scientific process has been thrown into reverse: people have begun with their conclusions, then frantically sought evidence to support them.

Quite so. As the conversation around nuclear power in Australia and worldwide builds, fear will give way to a desire for information. In a fact-based discussion on safety, economics, reliability and comparative performance in doing the job of displacing fossil fuels, nuclear proponents need not be concerned.

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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.

Energy minister Martin Ferguson has today released the Draft Energy White Paper 2011 (The Australian, ABC). The Government is soliciting submissions , so with a quick review, I’d like to open some discussion on possible material for a submission.

So what’s in the white paper? In short, lots of new gas development, energy market privatization, and “…the Gillard Government unambiguously does not support the use of nuclear energy in Australia”.

But Ferguson does seem to be determined to inject some ambiguity into the matter. Elaborating on this unambiguous position he explained:

Nuclear for Australia is always there as an option. We don’t have to invest in R and D and innovation on that front. Other nations are the specialists. But if we get to the end of this debate some years in the future and we haven’t made the necessary breakthrough on clean energy at a low cost outcome, then nuclear is there for Australia to blow off the shelf after a debate in Australia.

His Opposition counterpart Ian Macfarlane is singing from the same song sheet:

We haven’t had any active consideration of nuclear energy in Australia but the fact remains that nuclear energy is the one base load technology that is clean energy and until we find a better alternatives to clean, zero-emission energy than nuclear, then it’s going to remain on the agenda of other countries.

And of course the Greens are furious.

The white paper itself expresses this unambiguous position in remarkably equivocal terms. The full position on nuclear power is buried right at the back of the document on page 223 in a text box aside from the main text, where it is offered as a ‘contingency’ consideration. I will quote this in full:

• Australia’s plentiful natural endowment of a range of low‐cost energy resources has played a major role in shaping our energy generation base around coal and gas.

• Other countries have chosen to adopt nuclear power often as a way of diversifying their energy mix. As one of the world’s largest uranium exporters, Australia has respected and supported this right through trade under strict safety and security safeguards. Nuclear‐powered electricity generation currently produces around 16 per cent of the world’s electricity – around 10 times Australia’s total annual electricity generation. Undeniably this results in lower global carbon emissions.

• The government has chosen not to permit the use of nuclear energy in Australia and the use of nuclear technology for power generation is expressly prohibited under the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. At the Australian Government level, advice on this issue was most recently commissioned in 2006. There has, at different times, been passionate debate on this issue.

• The Gillard Government unambiguously does not support the use of nuclear energy in Australia, noting that at present there is no necessary social consensus over this technology nor is there currently a compelling economic case, even taking into account the need to reduce our national emissions. Australia will invest heavily in renewable and other clean energy technologies such as carbon capture and storage as preferred alternatives to conventional high‐emissions generation.

• However, noting the multi‐decade focus of this draft Energy White Paper, it cannot simply be assumed that future Australian governments will necessarily hold this view. To provide a comprehensive assessment of future possibilities, it is prudent to consider under what circumstances a future government may conceivably wish to revisit this position, and what would be required should such a choice be contemplated. This suggests the following observations:

• Given our diverse energy resource base, there does not appear to be a compelling energy security argument in support of future adoption of nuclear power for electricity generation in Australia.

• The best case supporting future consideration of nuclear power would be the failure to commercialise new low‐emissions baseload energy or energy storage technologies within the timeframe that economic analysis suggests is necessary to meet long‐term global and national emissions reduction objectives (from 2025 onwards). (My emphasis)

• Estimates of future costs for representative electricity generation technologies suggest that nuclear might then represent an economically competitive backstop baseload energy option.

• However, given the long lead times for plant approval and construction and for development of appropriate regulatory frameworks, this would necessitate a decision to move ahead considerably in advance of expected deployment – lead times would be at least 10 years, with 15 years more probable. If this were the case, such a decision would need to be taken by the latter part of this decade if deployment was required by 2030 or 2035.

• This would require the development of new institutional and regulatory arrangements and development of a local nuclear engineering skills base.

• Realistically, such a decision would also have to attract broad community consensus. Australian history suggests that this would require bipartisan political support and, in the wake of the recent tragedy in Fukushima, the prospect of new safer nuclear generation technologies and waste disposal options.

• While there is no intention to change its well‐established position on this matter, the Australian Government continues to support open public debate on all of Australia’s energy options, particularly in light of the desire to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

i.e., We don’t need nuclear for energy security because we have enough coal and gas. But we will need it to meet emissions targets if baseload renewables fail.
 It almost reads like the alternative white paper the minister would have liked to have written, in an alternative reality where sanity prevailed over the politics.

So there seems to be some mixed messaging in this unambiguous stance. And there is a challenge in Ferguson’s statement:

But if we get to the end of this debate some years in the future and we haven’t made the necessary breakthrough on clean energy at a low cost outcome, then nuclear is there for Australia to blow off the shelf after a debate in Australia.

…namely, how do we quantify the precondition? How do we make it finite and actionable?

How many years do we allow? What specific breakthroughs do we need? What cost do we require? What reliability do we require for clean energy “baseload”? What is the drop-dead date for renewables performance beyond which national policy must commit to nuclear?

For my part I’m satisfied that point in time is in the past. But many obviously disagree. I’m interested in a milestone that a reasonable person would agree that, if not met, its time to pick up the phone, call that supplier in China, and place an order for a bunch of AP1000s. We can’t hold off forever from making that call, on promises of “soon” and “if only”.

Submissions on the white paper are being solicited. Anyone inspired to contribute might therefore focus on:

• the potential, or otherwise, of commercial base load renewable power to be developed,

• any objective milestone that could be set on baseload renewable development, which if not met would trigger a review of the antinuclear position

• strategy for developing the necessary community support should this eventuate.

I’m particularly open to input from those who favour a renewables only strategy: What specific time bound milestone could be set that if met would confirm with confidence the ability of the non-nuclear strategy to decarbonize our energy supply; or if not met, prompt that phone call?

The Guardian

Ask the Global Energy Prize‘s expert panel your toughest energy questions and they’ll be back here on Friday with their answers. What should power our cities, homes and industry in the future — renewable energy, nuclear power, or fossil fuels? How significant will shale gas be? And what role will oil play in our energy future? Just post your energy Qs here. 5 experts will answer the 10 best questions: Harry Fair (US), Tom Blees (US), Thorsteinn Sigfusson (Iceland), Barry Brook (Australia) and Klaus Riedle (Germany).

Below are the six questions put to me (Barry Brook) and Tom Blees — and our answers, of course! The original answers were not hyperlinked, but if you are curious about anything we mention here, try searching for the keywords on this website (e.g. type bravenewclimate.com/?s=thorium in your browser address bar), or on Google (e.g. type  ”ammonia site:bravenewclimate.com” in your search box).

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BARRY W. BROOK

Q1. Do you agree that Thorium power is a safe, plentiful, and viable energy source that should be investigated as a matter of urgency?

Yes, thorium power is an attractive prospect for the next generation of nuclear reactors, but then surprisingly enough, so is uranium.

For today’s reactors, it takes about 150 tonnes of natural uranium to fuel a 1 gigawatt (GW) power plant for an entire year (the total energy produced is called a gigawatt year, or GWyr).  One GWe of power (the ‘e’ stands for electrical power rather than ‘t’ for thermal power, or heat) is a huge amount. It’s enough to run 65 million desk lamps (assuming they used 15 W compact fluorescent globes), or more practically, to satisfy today’s electricity demand of a typical UK city of more than half a million people. For comparison, to deliver a GWyr of energy using a coal-fired power station, about 4 million tonnes of coal must be burned (the amount can vary depending on the grade of coal).

Most of the nuclear power stations in use today are called ‘thermal reactors’, or ‘light water reactors’ (LWR). They use ordinary (‘light’) water as a coolant, which take heat away from the reactor core. The water also acts as a ‘moderator’, slowing down subatomic particles called neutrons, which shoot out of the atom’s nucleus when a nuclear chain reaction is underway. These neutrons are responsible for causing unstable heavy atomic nuclei to split apart and release energy. Other reactor designs use heavy water (enriched in ‘heavy hydrogen’: deuterium) or graphite (a form of carbon found in pencils) to moderate the neutrons (the latter is used in the UK’s gas-cooled Magnox reactors, for instance), but the effect is similar. These nuclear power plants need, as fuel, a form (isotope) of uranium that has 143 neutrons in its nucleus, called ²³⁵U (or ‘uranium 235’). Yet natural uranium contains 0.7% ²³⁵U; the other 99.3% is composed of an isotope that has 3 additional neutrons, called ²³⁸U (or ‘uranium 238’). As a result, today’s LWRs are able to extract less than 1% of the atomic energy content of uranium. The rest is discarded, unused, either as spent fuel (‘nuclear waste’) or as depleted tails (the leftovers, composed mostly of ²³⁸U, after the fuel has been ‘enriched’ to raise the concentration of ²³⁵U to 3 – 5%).

However, other sorts of nuclear power plants have been developed called ‘fast spectrum’ reactors (FR) and ‘liquid fluoride thorium reactors’ (LFTR). These are able to not only fission ²³⁵U like LWRs, but also readily ‘breed’ other fissionable isotopes from ²³⁸U or ²³²Th. With repeated recycling, this allows them to unlock virtually all of the energy in nuclear fuel. The amazing upshot is that instead of using 150 tonnes of natural uranium to produce a GWyr of electricity, FRs and LFTRs require only 1 tonne.

The key for both types of reactors – uranium and thorium based — is that the nuclear fuel is repeatedly recycled. For thorium, this is crucial because in order to ‘burn’ nuclear fuel, the ‘fertile’ ²³²Th must be converted, in the reactor, to ‘fissionable’ ²³³U – which is then consumed to generate the power. Given currently estimated reserves of cheap uranium, there is enough already identified to run the planet at a power level of 10,000 GWe for 4,000 years (which takes us well beyond 2050, to the year 6000AD). Then, consider that there is roughly four times more thorium, and we have 20,000 years of energy, give or take a few millennia. And this is before we start looking for lower-grade ores or uranium in sea water.

Finally, it’s worth noting that uranium FR and thorium LFTR type designs take advantage of a range of ‘passive’ safety systems based on natural physical processes, rather than just depending on active engineered systems or operator actions. In the LFTR design, the coolant is a molten fluoride salt, with the thorium and uranium dissolved within it (a liquid fuel). If the reactor starts to overheat, the molten salt expands in volume. This causes fissile particles to move away from each other, just like dots on the surface of a balloon spread apart as it is inflated. This heat-expansion feedback, in turn, causes the nuclear reaction to slow down, and allows the reactor to cool. It’s a self-regulating form of control.

In the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) design, the fuel is a metal alloy (of uranium, plutonium and other heavier elements), not a ceramic oxide like in today’s reactors. Metals are superb heat conductors, which mean that if the reactor overheats, the fuel rods expand, like railway tracks on a hot day. As with the LFTR, this causes the reaction to passively slow or shut down, and natural convection in the sodium coolant then takes heat away from the core without needing active pumps. These stunning safety features are not just theory – they have been proven in experiments at US National Research Laboratories.

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Q2. Considering ‘energy’ itself is free, enough of it all around us and with cheaper, cleaner, safer, decentralised methods of harnessing it as individuals(going ‘off-grid’) and the growing devastating, global crisis of Fuel Poverty on social-economic conditions:

-Why do you think the energy industry and governments are so keen to continue the current dependency on the infinite extraction of gravely finite fuels, wasteful and polluting means of supplying across great distances from source to customer?

-What are the chances of seeing off-grid autonomous power generation becoming our main energy source? what role could it have in eliminating fuel poverty, climate change and the world economy/markets?

Energy from the sun, which powers all renewable energy sources, is abundant but variable and diffuse. Although solar energy is constantly replenished, the test (and cost) lies in capturing and storing this energy on a large scale. Technically, there are many challenges with economically harnessing renewable energy to provide a reliable power supply. Because solar and wind energy is diffuse, collecting it in large amounts requires wide geographical areas to be exploited and large material inputs for building the installations (concrete, steel, glass and other more exotic materials). For some countries, like Australia, the scale of the installations is not, in itself, a major problem, but it is a severe constraint for small nations with high population density, like the UK. The other issue with capturing industrial-scale amounts of solar and wind energy is that it is variable and intermittent (sometimes delivering a lot of power, sometimes a little, and at other times none at all, meaning that they are not ‘dispatchable’), and it also varies seasonally (this is especially true for rooftop solar energy in winter in countries like the UK).

The most commonly proposed ways to overcome intermittency and unscheduled lulls in local renewable energy generation are: (i) to store energy during productive times and draw on these stores during periods when little or nothing is being generated; (ii) to have a diverse mix of renewable energy systems (including distributed generation – the second part of the question being asked), coordinated by a smart electronic grid management system (so that even if the wind is not blowing in one place, it will be in another, or else the sun will be shining or the waves crashing); and (iii) to have fossil fuel or nuclear power stations on standby, to take up the slack when needed.

The reality is that any of these solutions are uneconomic, and even if we were willing and able to pay for them, the result would be an unacceptably unreliable energy supply system. Energy storage (batteries, chemical conversion to hydrogen or ammonia, pumped hydropower, compressed air), even on a small scale, is currently very expensive, and in order to store the truly massive amounts of energy required to keep a city or country going through long stretches of cloudy winter days (yes, these even occur in the desert) or calm nights with little wind and no sun, we would have to ‘overbuild’ our system many times, to allow for  not only delivering  all of our regular power demand, but also  continuing  to do this whilst  charging up the energy stores when it needs to catch up on those low generation periods. This is the case whether or not the system involves hundreds of very large wind or solar ‘farms’, or millions of rooftop-scale PV panels with grid-connected inverters and on-site lead-acid batteries.

As a result, an overbuilt system of wind and solar would, at times, be delivering five to twenty times our power demand, and at other times, none of it. Modelling of these contingencies has shown that a system which relies on wind and/or solar power, plus large-scale energy storage and a geographically dispersed electricity transmission network to channel power to load centres, would be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than an equivalent nuclear-powered system, and still less reliable.

The answer to the first part of the question is therefore that economic and technical realities currently dictate typical government policies on the use of fossil fuels worldwide. Coal is relatively cheap, gas moderately so, and both are natural forms of stored chemical energy. Society has not yet worked out how to properly price (or implement appropriate penalties) on the damaging externalities these fuels cause to society, so they continue to be sought preferentially. If renewables were cheaper than fossil fuels, or even if they were slightly more expensive but were in the convenient form of stored energy, their uptake would be more likely. Nuclear fission, the other low-carbon, low-impact alternative, has the advantage of using an energy-dense stored fuel, but it carries a social stigma in many countries (centred on ‘radiophobia’) that will be a real challenge to overcome. So currently, fossil fuels win by default.

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Q3. My question is about shale gas. It is a natural form of gas which large reserves have recently been found in Lancashire. However, it emits the same levels of greenhouse gases into the environment. Our move from fossil fuels should be for environmental reasons more than a lack of resource. Do you believe we should continue finding new reserves of fossil fuels and try to attenuate the impacts of the emissions, or do we make a move towards a renewable energy future?

Shale gas, derived from fractured sedimentary rocks, is one of the forms of ‘unconventional’ fossil fuels that exist in large quantities. Other unconventional sources include coal-seam gas, deep water offshore oil, tar sands and oil shale. However, these resources are more difficult and costly to extract than conventional oil and gas, requiring substantial energy and chemical inputs and new technologies. Yet, because of the lower quality source material, the extraction efficiency is worse than conventional supplies and faster production-depletion rates are a typical feature. In addition, we are seeing increasingly large local environmental impacts, greater emissions of greenhouse gases, and more public resistance from people concerned about contaminated water supplies and climate change impacts.

Historically, coal, oil and gas have represented a huge store of energy; the accumulated byproduct of millions of years of sunlight harvesting by ancient forests and marine plankton. Most of the cheap and readily available oil and gas, used for transportation, is concentrated in a few, geographically favoured hotspots, such as the Middle East, Russia and parts of South America; coal is found most abundantly in the US, China, India, Australia, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa.

Yet many credible industry analysts are now suggesting that we’re already close to, or have passed, the point of maximum global oil production – at a figure of around 85 million barrels per day – even after accounting for an increasing future use of shale gas and other unconventional fossil fuels. Others, including the International Energy Agency, suggest that with sufficient investment in exploration and improved extraction methods, we may not hit ‘peak’ oil production for a few decades yet. We’ve tapped less of the available natural gas (methane), used mostly for heating and electricity production, but globally, it too has no more than a few more decades of major production left before supplies start to tighten and prices rise significantly, especially if we ‘dash for gas’ as the oil wells run dry.

Most of the world’s coal is buried so deep that we will never access it – even if we were not concerned with the carbon emissions that result from burning coal, we still might only end up using 10 to 20 percent of the estimated 15 trillion tonnes of coal that has been deposited in the Earth’s crust. Why? Because coal is an energy source, and if you need to use more energy to dig it up than you get back from burning it, well, then there’s no point. It just takes too much energy to access the deepest coal seams. A rough estimate is that globally, there may be two centuries of minable coal left, at today’s level of use (less, if we continue to burn more and more each year). Hence to push to stretch our technology to new types of supplies, to keep our seemingly insatiable thirst for fossil fuels quenched.

The development of an 18^th century technology that could turn the energy of coal into mechanical work – James Watt’s steam engine – heralded the dawn of the Industrial Age. Our use of fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – has subsequently allowed our modern civilisation to flourish. It is now increasingly apparent, however, that our almost total reliance on these forms of ancient stored sunlight to meet our energy needs has some severe drawbacks (climate change, environmental pollution, regional economic disparities and resource wars), and cannot continue much longer. As the oil runs out, we need to replace it if we are to keep our vehicles going. Oil is both a convenient energy carrier, and an energy source (we ‘mine’ it).  In the future, we’ll have to create our new energy carriers, be they chemical batteries or oil-substitutes like methanol or hydrogen. On a grand scale, that’s going to take a lot of extra electrical energy – and this is likely to come from both nuclear and renewable sources. Although both of these low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels will be important, I suspect nuclear fission will play the larger role.

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TOM BLEES

Q1.  Do you think nuclear fusion, as opposed to fission, will be the biggest energy development in the future, or do you foresee other technologies as a more realistic alternative to the burning of fossil fuels?

Fusion has been a hoped-for panacea for years despite the old joke among physicists: “Fusion power is only 40 years away…and always will be.” The prominent Russian physicist who was the founder of the ongoing ITER project (the international fusion research effort), Dr. Evgeny Velikhov, intended for fusion to be the answer to providing unlimited clean energy to the entire planet. Though still dedicated to that effort, Dr. Velikhov and many others realize that the urgent and ever-increasing energy needs of humanity warrant utilizing fission systems until such time as fusion comes of age. We simply cannot afford to wait for fusion—or any other as-yet-undeveloped promising technology—to come to the rescue.

Many data-driven and peer-reviewed studies have been carried out to determine the feasibility of providing humankind’s energy needs utilizing various mixes of systems, particularly so-called renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Most tend to agree that nuclear power will have to play a dominant role in replacing fossil fuels. (Massive, economically viable and extremely effective carbon sequestration technologies to allow continued use of coal have yet to be demonstrated and so cannot yet be considered dependable solutions—even without taking into account the carbon footprint of coal mining itself, for which there is not even talk of a remedy.) Breakthroughs could conceivably happen with geothermal technology or other systems, but for now we have to plan on using proven methods. As for wind and solar systems’ ability to provide the bulk of our energy, adherents of such views have yet to convincingly solve the problems of energy storage, economics (especially in regard to the massive redundancy necessary) and, especially, intermittency and extended down times that are inherent shortcomings of such systems.

Many who have reflexively rejected nuclear power systems of any kind in the past have recognized that those technologies evolve like any other, and that modern nuclear power plants show every indication of being safe, effective, economical and reasonably fast to build. We saw this with the first two GE Advanced Boiling Water Reactors built in Japan in the Nineties. Even those first-of-a-kind plants took just 36 and 39 months to build. We’re seeing it again as China builds the first Westinghouse-designed AP-1000 nuclear reactors, a so-called Generation III+ design that uses modular construction techniques and passive safety systems that greatly enhance their economics. (GE-Hitachi will soon be building their own III+ design, the ESBWR, that will have similar characteristics.)

Many of the same countries that are building nuclear power plants today are concurrently working on fast reactor systems—so-called breeder reactors—as the ultimate step beyond even the most advanced water-moderated reactors. These fourth-generation reactors will produce more fuel than they use by converting abundant non-fissile uranium 238 into fissile plutonium, forever removing the threat of fuel shortages, since their utilization of uranium’s potential energy is so efficient that even extracting uranium from seawater would be economically viable to fuel them hundreds of years hence, when our current inventories of fuel could finally be used up. Nuclear power systems utilizing thorium as their primary fuel are also being researched and may very well prove their viability and economics with pilot plants in the near future. Prototypes were already built in the Fifties that prove the principles are sound. A couple decades hence we might well witness molten salt thorium reactors and metal-fueled fast reactors replacing water-moderated reactors entirely.

What makes nuclear power such a compelling candidate for future energy demand is its energy density. This is the same feature that conversely makes wind, solar, wave and tidal power systems so difficult to scale up to the needed extent, for they rely on extremely dilute energy sources. No matter how efficient solar cells become, there’s still only a limited amount of solar radiation that falls on any square meter of the earth, even under optimal conditions. Energy density is what led to the age of fossil fuels, and energy density millions of times greater—as is possible with advanced nuclear power systems—is the key to bringing the fossil fuel era to a close.

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Q2. By what year could the UK decarbonise our electricity supply (i.e. run on 100% renewables)? Would this decarbonisation process be quicker with new nuclear power?

David MacKay, the chief science advisor to Britain’s Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC), wrote a book prior to his assuming that position called Sustainable Energy – Without The Hot Air. In this book Mackay exhaustively explored the entire range of possible energy mixes available to the UK. Like others who’ve undertaken such challenging projects (though rarely with MacKay’s comprehensiveness), his conclusions could not support the feasibility of 100% renewables being able to power the country.

Germany, being at nearly the same latitude and with similar cloud cover issues, has provided a substantial amount of data to weigh the feasibility of an all-renewable path for the UK. We should be grateful to our German friends for dedicating so much effort (and money) to demonstrating what can be accomplished when a government puts its full effort behind wind and solar power. Rather than rely on glib predictions about these systems’ ability to meet all Britain’s energy needs, we need only look at the German data from the past couple decades to get an idea of the viability of renewables to meet the UK’s energy demands.

That data, alas, is not friendly to those who dream of an all-renewables future. Having committed over 75,000,000,000 Euros to solar subsidies and development, Germany can expect to obtain barely 3% of their electrical needs from the sun, and intermittently at that. Wind power projects are as skittish as they always will be by their very nature, and so have not allowed for the retirement of any fossil-fuel power plants despite the additional and not insubstantial money that’s been poured into them.

If the United Kingdom is to decarbonise its electricity supply, the hard numbers indicate that nuclear power will not only do the job faster but that it will be absolutely necessary. Fortunately, this very week, the nation’s energy policy experts and scientists are being offered an elegant solution to both the plutonium disposition issue and the need for safe, carbon-free and essentially unlimited energy for the future. GE-Hitachi has offered to build the first of its cutting-edge PRISM modular fast reactors in Great Britain. This is the fruit of the most forward-thinking energy R&D project ever undertaken in the USA. It took decades of work from a small army of top-flight scientists and billions of dollars to solve all the thorny issues of nuclear power (safety, proliferation resistance, fuel supply and fabrication, waste, etc.). The PRISM reactor that GE is now offering to the UK is the result of that American effort.

Since the PRISM reactor operates at atmospheric pressure and its modules can be factory produced, once the first one is built to demonstrate its effectiveness (which could likely be accomplished within five years) it would be possible to quickly ramp up production and build as many of these power plants as necessary. Since the UK already has the world’s largest supply of plutonium, that startup fuel could quickly be put to good use providing clean energy for British households and industry.

The UK could certainly completely decarbonize its electricity production well before 2050 using this technology. But the potential goes far beyond just the electricity domain. If sufficient PRISM systems are built to meet peak demand, the fact that they operate just fine at full power 24/7 means that vast amounts of excess energy would be available for other uses, such as heating and the production of liquid fuels, that are now met with fossil fuels. Because the PRISM can be fueled with nuclear waste or depleted uranium, that means that its fuel is essentially free (or even better than free, since people would pay to get rid of it). Since peak demand is roughly three times average electrical demand, that means that Britons would have twice as much excess energy for alternative uses as they require for all their electrical needs.

Decarbonizing must include far more than just the electricity sector. The PRISM system can address the full spectrum of energy needs, and it can do so quickly, safely and economically.

Full disclosure: I have absolutely no financial connection of any kind to General Electric or any other energy company. I do, however, want to repair the damage that the industrialized world has wrought upon the planet, and I firmly believe that the PRISM is the best currently-available technology to do that. It is only because nuclear politics in the USA is so dysfunctional that this opportunity is being proffered to the UK instead of being built within the country of its origin.

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Q3. Why is there so much emphasis on fixing the supply side? To reach our targets we need to “simultaneously” reduce the kgCO2/kWh and reduce the total kWh used. Then the benefits will be multiplied and we’ll have a chance to make a real impact on emissions. Why aren’t government talking more about reducing the total demand for energy? Yes, we can do efficiency but it isn’t enough. We need conservation too. Could it be that reducing demand would go directly against their economic goals?

As a resident of California, I’ve been a beneficiary of the most effective energy efficiency policies in the USA. Per capita electricity demand in this state has remained fairly flat for the last three decades, though that statement must be qualified somewhat since some industries have left the state and so reduced the overall electricity demand. Nevertheless, energy efficiency is something that should always be a goal even if we develop virtually unlimited clean energy supplies, since we would still want to save the capital costs of building unnecessary power plants. By the way, you can read about one of the winners of this year’s Global Energy Prize, a man some call the Grandfather of Energy Efficiency, at this website.

But you are right, efficiency is not enough. It isn’t actually an energy source. Talking about conservation and reducing demand for energy is a luxury only allowed those of us in developed nations with already-high per capita energy use. All too often, purported solutions to climate change are trotted out that ignore the fact that the vast majority of people on this planet live in energy poverty. Even if everyone in the USA and the UK stopped using all energy tomorrow, global energy demand would still rise inexorably, for energy availability is inextricably bound to standard of living. This applies to both personal energy use and to the energy used by industries that contribute to high living standards.

If there is to be any egalitarianism and social justice in the world, those living today in poverty must be afforded the opportunity to raise their standard of living to levels enjoyed today in fully industrialized countries. This will be absolutely impossible without a massive increase in global energy supply, all the more so because the world’s population is expected to increase by another 2-3 billion people by mid-century.

But the raw numbers tell only part of the tale. Consider where the fresh water will come from for all those people, not just their personal water use but all the additional water needed to grow the food for such a tide of humanity. The only place where so much fresh water can come from will be from the sea, necessitating desalination projects on a scale hitherto unimagined. Those desalination projects (and the energy needed to move both the water and the salt to their ultimate destinations) will require staggering amounts of energy.

Hence the focus on fixing the supply side. We must consider the entire planet, not just the fortunate nations in which we might live. While ever-better energy efficiency is certainly something to strive for, the policies and technologies to provide virtually unlimited clean energy for the entire planet must be the focus if we are to leave a better and fairer world to our progeny.

The Open Thread is a general discussion forum, where you can talk about whatever you like — there is nothing ‘off topic’ here — within reason. So get up on your soap box! The standard commenting rules of courtesy apply, and at the very least your chat should relate to the general content of this blog.

The sort of things that belong on this thread include general enquiries, soapbox philosophy, meandering trains of argument that move dynamically from one point of contention to another, and so on — as long as the comments adhere to the broad BNC themes of sustainable energy, climate change mitigation and policy, energy security, climate impacts, etc.

You can also find this thread by clicking on the Open Thread category on the cascading menu under the “Home” tab.

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A new temperature reconstruction by Foster & Rahmstorf (Env. Res. Lett.), which removes ENSO signals, volcanic eruptions and solar cycles, and standardises the baseline.

I’m currently in Auckland, New Zealand, attending the 25th annual International Congress on Conservation Biology. A 4-day event, it’s a great chance to network and catch up with my colleagues, hear the latest goings on in the field of conservation research, and also give a few presentations (me and my students). I’m talking tomorrow on the impacts of climate change in Oceania — this covers a co-authored paper I have coming out in an upcoming special issue of Pacific Conservation Biology (which was actually the first journal I ever published in, back in 1997), entitled: “Climate change, variability and adaptation options for Australia”.

A conversation starter: George Monbiot has written a superb piece on nuclear power and the integral fast reactor over at The Guardian. It is titled “We need to talk about Sellafield, and a nuclear solution that ticks all our boxes” (subtitle: There are reactors which can convert radioactive waste to energy. Greens should look to science, rather than superstition). My favourite quote:

Anti-nuclear campaigners have generated as much mumbo jumbo as creationists, anti-vaccine scaremongers, homeopaths and climate change deniers. In all cases, the scientific process has been thrown into reverse: people have begun with their conclusions, then frantically sought evidence to support them.

The temptation, when a great mistake has been made, is to seek ever more desperate excuses to sustain the mistake, rather than admit the terrible consequences of what you have done. But now, in the UK at least, we have an opportunity to make amends. Our movement can abandon this drivel with a clear conscience, for the technology I am about to describe ticks all the green boxes: reduce, reuse, recycle.

George’s essay includes details on the integral fast reactor and the S-PRISM modules that GEH hope to build in the UK (to, as a first priority, denature the separated plutonium stocks, and thereafter generate lots of carbon-free electricity). The fully referenced version is here.

Although the comments thread contains the typical lashing of misinformation and vitriol one would expect from such topics in a relatively unmoderated stream, it’s also clear George has created some converts — or at least people who are willing to reassess their preconceptions. Great stuff. Feel free to leave a few comments yourself on that post — Ben Heard has certainly weighed in a few times! This is becoming an inescapable reality for rational Greens now. I really feel some momentum, at last.

Guest Post

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Welcome to Part II of my presumptuously titled series on feeding the world in 2050. Before concluding where we left off with the analysis of the foods which the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) thinks are globally important, we need a short prologue on protein.

Protein prologue

Any suggestion based on Calorie counts that the net contribution of beef or other meats to global food security may be trifling or even negative brings instant feedback about protein. The presumption is that it is adequate protein, particularly animal protein, which is the key requirement for beating malnutrition. This is inevitable for two reasons: first, the absence of medical malnutrition literature from the best seller list, and second, we have all spent our entire lifetime swimming in meat industry propaganda … much of it focused on protein.

We need some historical perspective on protein.

There’s nothing quite like being the first, and protein can lay good claim to being the first critical nutrient discovered in the early days of modern chemistry. Nitrogen is protein’s key chemical component and one of the first to be accurately measured. Consequently, quite precise measurements of protein utilisation in people have been around for almost 200 years.

Early investigators fed dogs pure sugar diets and watched them die. Absence of protein was the explanation they eventually settled on. What else could it have been? In 1815, vitamins (in any measurable sense) were well beyond the knowledge horizon, so there was really only one candidate. By 1842, protein was pronounced the only true nutrient and the sole provider of energy to the muscles. It mattered not that measurements on prison work gangs showed no differences in protein utilisation on rest days and hard treadmill days. The history of protein spin is a picturesque tale of arrogant opinionated people holding fast to beliefs in the face of overwhelming data. Not everyone was fooled. US Yale University researchers in 1907 took athletes and halved their protein intake during a mammoth 5 month piece of live-in research. Over the 5 months, far from fading away, the subjects got stronger by 35%. The protein myth charged on regardless, pushed by the then head of the US Agriculture Department who thought (seriously) that when people could choose food without regard for cost or availability, they would choose an optimal diet. i.e., the rich must know best.

Between about 1950 and the mid 1970s, the protein pushers even subverted the General Assembly of the United Nations which declared war on the global deficiency of protein … the World Protein Gap.

But truth will out … eventually. In 1974, The Lancet published the start of the death knell of the protein gap theory … “The Great Protein Fiasco”. It wasn’t quite a naked emperor moment, but over the next few years, the junkiness of what passed for science on the issue became clear.

Fast forward to 2000. A 124 page paper called “Explaining child malnutrition in developing countries” by acknowledged experts (yes, from IFPRI), has not a single occurence of the word “protein”. The big factors in childhood malnutrition are Calories in the food supply, access to clean water, and levels of female education. The science may be done and dusted, but that won’t of itself stop conglomerates of livestock lobby groups funding researchers to run around Africa telling people to eat more meat. Given the scarcity of good fencing in Africa, what impact will 275 million cattle have on the problems of providing clean water? The tip of the iceberg is clearly visible in Cryptosporidium parvum infections, made even more tragic by the interaction between these infections and high rates of both malnutrition and HIV.

The recent ignorant ravings of some current politicians about our live cattle exports being part of a desperate need for protein in Indonesia show that profitable myths need persistent debunking. Like me, some of these politicians were indoctrinated about the protein gap during their formative school years and it stuck in their brains with the full force of rote learned multiplication tables. Indonesia needs more food and if we didn’t annually feed 12 million tonnes of grain to pigs, chickens and cattle to fuel our vast over consumption of animal protein, we could supply far more food to Indonesia and elsewhere.

The Australian food supply produces 109 grams of protein per person per day. Our National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) recommends a protein intake slightly below that used in the 1907 Yale experiment which makes 109 grams roughly double what is recommended. And even the recommended intake is considerably higher than many people need because it includes a sizable buffer to allow for individual differences. Not only are the official recommendations about half the average intake, there are no separate higher or lower requirements for people eating exclusively plant protein (vegans) or for people eating exclusively animal protein. Oils ain’t oils, but proteins is proteins.

Okay, end of prologue. Back to business. Calories are king.

At the end of the last post I was discussing foods considered critical by IFPRI in a recent report on childhood malnutrition rates in 2050. I dealt with the meats but still need to deal with the plant foods. During that discussion I also produced a table of the relative amounts of meat in the least developed countries. So we need to finish a couple of details, first we need a feel for actual quantities of meat rather than just percentages and second we need to deal with the plant foods.

Then we can finish this piece by putting everything in context by considering IFPRI’s obsession with animal products in the context of the FAO’s monumental lack of vision on how to feed the world in 2050.

Relativities and absolute values

The global average intake of meat is 7.4 percent of daily Calories. How much is this? And how much is the 2.6 percent intake the LDC? These numbers are best understood with reference to research I discussed at length previously on BNC in Brains, Biceps and Baloney. In that research, young (7-9 years old) Kenyan children were given daily 240 Calorie food supplements for a year made from a stew of maize, beans and greens and either 85 grams of meat, 200 mL of milk or vegetable oil. Each supplement provided the same energy, but one group of children got the added meat, another group the milk and the control group just got more stew with a little added vegetable oil.

What percentage of daily Calories is provided by 85 grams of beef mince? For 9 year olds eating 1700 Calories per day, its about 8.5 percent. For an adult, it is even less. In absolute terms, this serving is some 10 times bigger than the average amount of beef currently available in the LDC. It’s more than 3 times the total amount of meat available on average in the LDC.

Oh yes, and it’s close to double the red meat intake of Australian children of the same age.

But did this amount of meat make any significant difference compared to simply giving the kids extra stew? No.

Clearly, even these substantial amounts of meat were no magic bullet for chronically underfed children also frequently fighting infections from poor quality water and sanitation.

The bottom line

What are the implications of the Kenyan research, the production levels of various meats, together with the knowledge that the real needs of the malnourished are more food, clean water and well informed mums?

The implication is that doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the supply of meat is about the worst way to achieve the smallest reductions in malnutrition in the least developed countries but such a path will interfere with attempts to combat climate change and biodiversity loss by ending deforestation and extending reforestation.

Oil’s ain’t just oils

Maize and soy are both interesting additions to the IFPRI’s table. Most of the world’s maize is used as feed (463m tonnes), not as food (110m tonnes). If it were used as food, the global Calorie supply would jump by 585 Calories per person per day minus an amount for reduced meat production. The net increase would be well over 400 Calories per person per day. The story with soy is more complex. Most of the world’s beans (85 percent) are crushed with the oil being used as food and the left over soy meal being further processed for animal feed.

Soy meal is typically about 44 percent protein. The amount of protein in the meal used as feed is over double the entire protein output of the meat industry. If there really was a protein gap, here is a good candidate to fill it. However, the required processing to turn soy into meal is complex and to further process this into food that tastes like something humans know and like is also complex. Whether this is regarded as an impediment or an opportunity depends on your viewpoint, but certainly developing suitable technologies to turn soy meal into food for LDCs could be a valuable contribution to food security. The story is the same with other meals: palm kernel meal and cotton seed meal to name but two. There is a vast mountain of potential food currently being used to feed livestock for people with no food security issues and which could be turned into affordable food with appropriate technology. All that’s missing is a suitable price signal … see below.

Missing foods

As well as containing irrelevant foods which probably earn their place by their popularity at IFPRI staff BBQs, the IFPRI table is missing foods which are critical for large groups of people and can be expected to remain so in the warmer world of 2050. For example, sorghum, pulses, cassava and peanuts, to name a few. Pulses, for example, provide both more protein and more energy than the entire sum of all meats in the countries of the LDC.

Missing collateral damage

Also conspicuously absent from the IFPRI report is any concern with the environmental impact of livestock or the fact that their feed is either food which could provide far more energy if fed directly to people or it is grazed biomass which would otherwise protect the soil from erosion and add to soil carbon. The worst possible combination is having livestock feed on crop residues and with the resulting dung burned as fuel. This combines soil cover losses with nutrient losses and sick or even dead children from smoke mediated infections.

Biomass flows tell the story

A consideration of biomass flows should make the impact of livestock on food production potential obvious:

This table shows that the major appropriations of plant growth in the countries I’ve selected are by livestock, not people.

The data in the table comes from work on biomass flows by an Austrian team headed by Fridolin Krausmann and was kindly supplied by the author. The fires in the bottom row are almost entirely set by livestock herders to keep land free of woody regrowth. They represent a major nutrient and biomass loss.

While the environmental impacts of 11 million cattle in Queensland (Australia) and Colombia have been well studied, the down side of having 50 million cattle in Ethiopia, a country about half the size of Queensland, hasn’t received much attention. The World Bank Report mentions that:

“Overgrazing and degradation of pastoral areas are widespread in much of the steppe of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, and the Sahel.”

but doesn’t make a connection between its implicit support of large increases in meat production and the consequences. Ethiopia’s 50 million cattle eat over 7 times the weight of harvested food but provide just 3 percent of daily Calories and drive annual conflagrations that further depress soil productivity. Environmental impacts from livestock don’t rate a mention in the IFPRI report I’m considering.

All up, the IFPRI report seems obsessed with meat despite IFPRI having the internal nutritional expertise to know better.

IFPRI and the FAO

The FAO regularly publishes weighty reports on feeding the world. It’s latest has a publication date of 2011 but a writing date of mid-2009. Its title is Looking Ahead in World Food and Agriculture, and it is the outcome of a High Level Expert Meeting on “How to feed the World in 2050″.

IFPRI modelers gets a chapter as do a range of other experts. But if you expect a meeting about “How to feed the World in 2050″ to have any policy vision, then you will be disappointed. There is a total lack of any kind of vision of what should be done. The entire 558 pages are about predicting the future, not planning for it. One gets a clear sense that the FAO doesn’t consider itself a player but merely an observer with a keen interest in accurate forecasting and no interest in constructing policies for a better future.

Also missing is any sense that the climate change causal arrow runs in both direction. Food is a principle cause of deforestation and greenhouse gas production with animal source foods having the lion’s share of responsibility.

Don’t misunderstand me. An obsession with accurate measurement is entirely proper for the FAO and there is plenty of evidence that FAO is indeed properly obsessed. But the climate science is clear that we must change direction, not merely accurately predict our problems. Similarly, I suspect that if the malnourished had a voice they too would rather we change direction than merely predict outcomes.

The only issue on which some consideration of policy is discussed is biofuels which gets numerous mentions along with an entire chapter. The IFPRI authors in their chapter explicitly reject any consideration of policies concerning meat.

“… policies that might affect direct food and feed use of grains would rely on the alteration of consumer preferences for food products (including meat), and are not as straightforward to address within the analytical framework discussed in this chapter. “

This is simply wrong. IFPRI later describes a promising policy tool which could reduce the feed/food ratio and which doesn’t rely on any alteration of consumer preferences:

“Policy interventions include limiting or even avoiding the use of food crops to produce biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.”

Why not use this policy lever on meat production? Why not limit that amount of human quality food used as feed? Why not prohibit it altogether? This doesn’t involve changing consumer preferences, but it certainly sends a price signal. How much of a signal? In the lead article in a special issue of Science last year Charles Godfray asserted:

“… although a substantial fraction of livestock is fed on grain and other plant protein that could feed humans, there remains a very substantial proportion that is grass fed.”

If this is true, then meat consumers won’t mind at all, there will still be substantial amounts of meat. It is the perfect policy for all those meat advocates who claim that meat production just turns stuff we can’t eat into stuff we can.

Conclusions

Climate scientists tell us we must reforest the planet and cease additional deforestation to have a chance at avoiding the worst of climate change. Biodiversity concerns imply likewise. Nutrition experts tell us we don’t need livestock to beat malnutrition and in any event, the amount of livestock required to provide adequate Calories is incompatible with tackling climate change and biodiversity loss. So we need policies to reduce livestock populations globally and such policies are missing from the organisations who should be providing them.

In the concluding article of this series, I’ll look at the Foley and Ramankutty Nature papers that provide data and modeling that can inform policies with teeth. Policies that will make a difference.

Calories and kiloJoules

Sometimes SI units are awkward, so I stick with long established usage and use Calories instead of kilo joules. Dietitians have long used Calories with a capital “C” to name what physicists call a kilo calorie. Journals these days use kiloJoules (kJ) or both. It’s just a unit of energy.

Guest Post

Jani’s previous post, Geographical wind smoothing, supergrids and energy storage, focused on distributed wind alone. In this follow-up, he turns his attention to solar combined with wind.

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Earlier, I wrote on how crucially an unreliable sources of power such as wind depend on fossil fuels. Based on real world production data from around the world, I noted that even with massively distributed production wind power is very variable and necessitates a reliable backup power source (typically from fossil fuels) which must be able to produce essentially all the power society consumes. A way around this problem would be a massive energy storage, but I found the size of the required storage to be unreasonably large.

One typical response to findings such as these, is to brush them aside by claiming that even if true, the results will not matter since we will have many different renewable energy sources acting together (as if there is some “harmony” in two essentially random signals). Most importantly quite a few people base their vision of future energy production on a mixture of wind and solar power. For this reason I felt the need to return to this problem so that also solar power is considered. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a good source for real world production data for solar power. The best I have come up with are images (typically of the daily production), but raw data is better hidden.

However, since solar power (without storage) production is proportional to insolation we can use meteorological data as a reasonable starting point. US has a National solar radiation database which has large collection of insolation modelling data around USA. From this data they have also formed a “typical meteorological year 3 (TMY3)” datasets. (There are some quirks in the construction of TMY3 that I frown upon. For example, after El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo eruptions insolation was reduced, but these periods were apparently excluded from the TMY3 as atypical. Of course they were atypical, but they are still things that do happen and whose effects must be considered. However, I suspect that the effect due to eruptions was still minor in US.) As my insolation data I take the average of TMY3 data from six different class I sites (class I has the best data) in three different states: Prescott Love and Tucson Airport in Arizona, Arcata Airport and Fresno Yosemite Airport in California, and Denver Airport and Limon in Colorado. These sites have an average latitude similar to southern Spain. (Why did I choose these sites? Well, being lazy I started from the entries listed in alphabetical order by states and picked the first southern states I encountered.)

Somewhat annoyingly only hourly data is provided. We know from BNC among others that solar power (especially PV) can have large swings on shorter timescales. Therefore, this limitation may have important consequences. Nevertheless, let us ignore the torpedoes with an understanding that the solar power we talk about here is such that sufficient storage has been already implemented to smooth out hourly variation in production. So keep in mind, that the starting assumptions for solar production have a bias towards the optimistic side. Since the production data for wind power is given every 5 minutes I will linearly interpolate the solar insolation data to deduce the production of solar power every 5 minutes (link to the data here). As in the earlier study the data corresponds to one year starting July the 1st. and the consumption data corresponds to the Bonneville Power Authority load with a possible scale factors to suit my needs.

Now that we have rather massively distributed production of both wind and solar power, what do we find? In Fig. 1 I show the average insolation from six US locations (the wind data I have discussed earlier). Daily variation is apparent as is also the large seasonal variation between summer and winter. In this system the solar power has an impressive 20% capacity factor. OK, having the relevant data available let us then proceed to check what backup requirements we have if we are to integrate this solar production in such away that production and consumption match (as they must).

Figure 1: The average insolation as an average over 6 sites in USA. The figure shows both the yearly data as well as an example of one random 7 day period.

If we choose the installed solar capacity such that the solar power produces the same amount of electricity over the year as our model society consumes, we find that a massive 55% percent of the electricity is generated with reliables (typically fossil fuels). These reliable power plants must be able to produce 97% of peak demand and they are running at a capacity factor of 36%. Solar power itself sees its capacity factor drop to 9%. These results are essentially caused by the seasonal variation of insolation (too little production in the winter) and the fact that solar power reliably produces nothing when it is dark. It is perhaps not worth pointing out that this scenario is not compatible with the goal of decarbonizing our societies.

How about mixing solar and wind? Since the sun shines during the day when consumption is higher one can guess that unreliables production matches the consumption better if there is some amount of solar in the mix. On the other hand the solar output varies even more than the wind output since, unlike wind, it predictably produces nothing when it is dark. (Of course, if the sun stops shining for good, eventually the winds disappear as well.) So presumably one shouldn’t push the fraction of solar production too high. This suggests some “sweet spot” for the fraction of installed solar capacity if we are to match the production of wind and solar optimally to consumption.

Figure 2: How well the solar and wind production match the consumption as a function of solar capacity.

In Fig. 2 I show how the function:

Σ(Production-Consumption)²/Σ Production²

…behaves. If production matches the consumption exactly (as it does in the real world), this function vanishes. We note that optimally the installed solar capacity should be about 21% of the installed wind capacity. (Not that this split gives rise to production which matches consumption. It is just somewhat less worse than other choices.)

For comparison, European renewable energy council and Greenpeace postulate a more ecumenical figure close to 50/50 for the split between wind and solar. (Since no explanation for this split was apparent, cynic in me is left wondering if this choice simply reflects the relative turnovers of respective industries which presumably correlate with spending on lobbyist.) However, if we are to use such a mix and produce as much power with wind and solar as we consume, it turns out that we need reliable power plants with a capacity of 91% of peak demand. They will have a capacity factor of 17% and amount to 24% of total production. Combined capacity factor of wind and solar has now dropped to around 19%. This case is presented in Figs. 3 and 4. In my earlier study with just wind power I found that fossil fuel power plants accounted for 21% of production (and with a capacity 88% of peak demand). So adding this much solar into the system has actually made things worse! The culprit is again the seasonal variation of insolation which reaches minimum during the winter (in northern hemisphere) when the consumption is often greater.

Figure 3: A snapshot of the production and consumption during a one week interval when solar and wind capacities were equal.

Figure 4: The yearly production and consumption together with the reliables output when solar and wind capacities were equal.

(As an aside: Another way to understand the challenges involved is to compare standard deviations relative to mean for wind and solar production as well as for the consumption. For the consumption this number is around 0.15, for wind power it is much larger 0.47, and for solar power it is huge 1.32. However, keep in mind that the underlying distributions are anything but normal. They cannot really be described properly by just the mean and standard deviation.)

How about choosing the solar capacity to be the “optimal” 0.21 of wind power capacity? Then we need reliable power plants with a capacity of 89% of peak demand. They will have a capacity factor of 14% and amount to 19% of total production. So, yes! Adding solar power to the mix can sometimes help, by reducing the electricity produced with fossil fuels from 21% to 19%. Unfortunately, the required capacity of reliable power plants is actually slightly higher than with wind only. I will not dare to compute the cost of CO2 abatement under such a scenario.

Figure 5: Solar capacity is 21% of the wind capacity. Weekly snapshot.

Figure 6: Solar capacity is 21% of the wind capacity. Yearly data.

Finally, few words about storage. Maybe adding solar into the mix would help us to live with a smaller energy storage? Unfortunately, also that hope is misplaced. Due to seasonal variation systems with solar power actually need MORE storage. In the earlier study with only wind power I estimated that in order phase out fossil fuels AND keep the lights on, we need an energy storage for about 9% of yearly production. Repeating the exercise (storage doesn’t decay and 20% round trip loss) for the system combining wind and solar, we find that we need storage for 13% of production in the 50/50 case while about 10% is enough with solar capacity limited to 21% of wind capacity. (Also, in the 50/50 scenario we would have to be able to store energy at a rate which is nearly 2.5 times the average power consumption of the surrounding society. Otherwise capacity factors are reduced and/or dependence on reliables reappear.)

To conclude, I note that adding solar power and wind without massive storage to the mix does next to nothing to remove the need for fossil fuel based energy infrastructure. Scenarios based on wind and solar power are fundamentally reliant on fossil fuels and sooner this is understood the better it is for climate. Currently the mirage of purely unreliables based energy production essentially maintains the use of fossil fuels for as long as the eye can see both for technical and financial reasons.

While doing these exercises I occasionally get a feeling that I am fencing with a tetraplegic. You might say this is not sportsmanlike, but unfortunately the political reality is that the mirage of solar and wind based solutions is a tetraplegic which hampers us from confronting the real and difficult issues with respect to climate change. By offering an easy “alternative” this mirage effectively acts as a cover for the damage anti-nuclear activities are causing for attempts to mitigate climate change. Unfortunately fencing must continue since this cover must be removed.

Some of you would already know that the Chinese are in the late stages of planning the construction of two Russian-designed BN-800 sodium-cooled fast reactors, to be located at a site on China’s east coast. These are scaled-up (880 MWe) versions of the BN-600, which has run successfully in Russia for a number of decades. There is also the Chinese Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR), a 25 MWe demonstration unit near Bejing.

Before I get to the main point of this post, it is worth reproducing this WNA summary of the current Chinese builds:

In China, R&D on fast neutron reactors started in 1964. A 65 MWt fast neutron reactor – the Chinese Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR) – was designed by 2003 and built near Beijing by Russia’s OKBM Afrikantov in collaboration with OKB Gidropress, NIKIET and Kurchatov Institute. It achieved first criticality in July 2010, can generate 20 MWe and was grid connected in July 2011 at 40% of power, to ramp up to 20 MWe by December. Core height is 45 cm, and it has 150 kg Pu (98 kg Pu-239). Temperature reactivity and power reactivity are both negative.

A 1000 MWe Chinese prototype fast reactor (CDFR) based on CEFR is envisaged with construction start in 2017 and commissioning as the next step in CIAE’s program. This will be a 3-loop 2500 MWt pool-type, use MOX fuel with average 66 GWd/t burn-up, run at 544°C, have breeding ratio 1.2, with 316 core fuel assemblies and 255 blanket ones, and a 40-year life. This is CIAE’s “project one” CDFR. It will have active and passive shutdown systems and passive decay heat removal. This may be developed into a CCFR of about the same size by 2030, using MOX + actinide or metal + actinide fuel. MOX is seen only as an interim fuel, the target arrangement is metal fuel in closed cycle.

However, in October 2009 an agreement was signed with Russia’s Atomstroyexport to start pre-project and design works for a commercial nuclear power plant with two BN-800 reactors in China, referred to by CIAE as ‘project 2′ Chinese Demonstration Fast Reactors (CDFR) – in China, with construction to start in 2013 and commissioning 2018-19. These would be similar to the OKBM Afrikantov design being built at Beloyarsk 4 and due to start up in 2012. In contrast to the intention in Russia, these will use ceramic MOX fuel pellets. The project is expected to lead to bilateral cooperation of fuel cycles for fast reactors.

The CIAE’s CDFR 1000 is to be followed by a 1200 MWe CDFBR by about 2028, conforming to Gen IV criteria. This will have U-Pu-Zr fuel with 120 GWd/t burn-up and breeding ratio of 1.5, or less with minor actinide and long-lived fission product recycle. CIAE projections show fast reactors progressively increasing from 2020 to at least 200 GWe by 2050, and 1400 GWe by 2100.

For those with an engineering bent, further technical papers on this programme are available here, a timeline of the CEFR is here, and a short tabular summary here.

Although both the BN-800 and CEFR are oxide-fueled designs, sources tell me that the Chinese are interested in metal fuel (a U-Pu-Zr ternary alloy) and pyroprocessing by the time they reach commercial fast reactors. CEFR actually uses uranium oxide (fabricated in Russia) since they do not have the MOX (mixed Pu-U oxide fuel) capability. My sources tell me that they cannot use metal fuel yet since they do not have the technology, nor fabrication facility. However, they are planning to develop the metal fuel capability and hopefully apply to CDFR. The plan is to start with MOX and then gradually switch to metal core and also to pyroprocessing for fuel recycling.

Xu Mi

So, what of the detail behind China’s future plans? In my opinion, the best summary is a 43-slide presentation given by Xu Mi (Chief Engineer, China Institute of Atomic Energy), entitled “Fast Reactor Technology Development for Sustainable Supply of Nuclear Energy in China“, delivered at the China International Nuclear Symposium, November 23-25, 2010, Beijing. (Note: there is also related 50-slide presentation here). Xu Mi has also written a short paper called “Fast Reactor technology R&D activities in China“. Here are some particularly interesting slides (click to enlarge):

As you can see, China’s ambition in both Generation III and Generation IV reactors is substantial (as is India’s). Let’s hope, for the sake of a stable climate system and long-term environmental sustainability of the human enterprise, that the economic rise of these two 21st century superpowers is fueled by advanced nuclear (uranium- and thorium-based) and renewable energy (where competitive), and NOT built on the same fossil-fueled 19th century technology that underpinned the development of the West. Frankly, either this works out, with China and India as clean energy leaders, or our goose is cooked.

This issue is often raised by media commentators like Alan Jones, Howard Sattler, Gary Hardgrave and others, when arguing that fossil fuel emissions are irrelevant for climate change. For instance, check out the Media Watch ABC TV story (11 minute video and transcript) called “Balancing a hot debate“.

I’ve seen lots of analogies drawn, in an attempt to explain the importance of trace greenhouse gases. One common one is to point out that a tiny amount of cynanide, if ingested, will kill you. Sometimes a little of a substance can have a big impact.  But actually, there’s a better way to get people to understand, and that’s to follow one of the guiding principles of this blog: “Show me the numbers!“.

In response to a recent post by John Cook on George Pell, religion and climate change, commenter Glenn Tamblyn pointed out an interesting fact: Every cubic metre of air contains roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of CO₂. In scientific notation, this is 10²² — a rather large number.

A cubic metre is 1000 litres, which is not really that much air:

It’s simple enough to verify this figure. One mole of an ideal gas at standard room temperature and pressure occupies 22.4 litres. A mole, for those not familar with chemistry, is defined as follows:

The mole is a unit of measurement used in chemistry to express amounts of a chemical substance, defined as an amount of a substance that contains as many elementary entities (e.g., atoms, molecules, ions, electrons) as there are atoms in 12 grams of pure carbon-12 (12C), the isotope of carbon with atomic weight 12. This corresponds to a value of 6.022142 × 10²³ elementary entities of that substance [Avagadro's number]. It is one of the base units in the International System of Units, and has the unit symbol mol.

So, 1 cubic metre contains 44.64 moles of gas, of which 0.0389% is CO₂ = 0.0174 moles = 10,458,094,447,812,500,000,000 molecules of CO₂. We have a match!

Finally, let’s try to get a feel for just how large a number this is. You can write 10²² in words as a ten billion trillion molecules (0r 10 million quadrillion if you prefer).

The number of stars within the 14-billion-light-year radius of the visible universe (Hubble volume) is estimated to be thirty billion trillion (click on image above), i.e., 3 x 10²². Thus, a mere 3 cubic metres of air, which would sit comfortably on most dining tables, contains as many CO₂ molecules as there are stars in the vast span of the visible Universe (which includes an estimated 350 billion galaxies the size of our Milky Way spiral, as well as another 7,000 billion dwarf galaxies similar to the Small Magellanic Cloud).

Bearing these mind-boggling numbers in mind, it’s perhaps not quite so hard to understand how trace atmospheric gases in our atmosphere really do a good job at intercepting infrared radiation. Don’t you think?

Guest Post

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During the past few years, all the world’s major science journals have had a steady stream of papers on the challenge of feeding 9 to 10 billion people on a warming planet in 2050. They have been joined by reports from bodies with varying prestige and influence likeInternational Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), The World Bank and the Royal Society. CSIRO has a long history of interest in the issue and even billionaire packager Anthony Pratt is getting in on the act telling Australia that since it can produce food for 200 million people, it has a responsibility to do so.

All these reports pay swollen lip service to the food security issues of the poor. All rightly regard the current global levels of stunting and malnutrition … running at 30 percent or more in many poor populations … as unconscionable.

Do we simply need more of the same?

Most of these papers and reports fall into two groups. The first looks at population and food intake trends and guesstimates that adding 2 to 3 billion people by 2050 will require between 70 percent and 100 percent more food. They typically then suggest places where large buckets of money might be deposited to fund research directed at meeting these projections.

Meanwhile, at least some planners focused on decarbonising developed countries have understood that agriculture as usual is not an option. The European Profetas project tabulated and measured a range of indices showing that the total transformation of European agriculture away from producing animal protein was a general ecological as well as a specifically climate driven imperative. Similarly, in the UK, plans by Zero Carbon Britain for reducing climate forcings and environmental damage involve reducing all livestock numbers with the steepest cuts being in beef cattle, to be cut by 90 percent, and dairy cattle, by 80 percent. They see the accompanying major dietary shift as inevitable and a source of colateral health advantages. In 2010, a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science established that trend line increases in meat consumption would, all by themselves, dominate or exceed the long-term sustainable level for greenhouse gas emissions, biomass usage and reactive nitrogen mobilisation … leaving little or no space for any other human activity which relied on these eco-system services.

The contrast between visions like these and “more of the same” from food policy bodies couldn’t be more stark. The “trend line” approach is rather like weighing a chubby teenager and preparing a financial plan to pay for the lap-band surgery they’ll obviously need by age 25. The failure to consider alternatives falls somewhere between tragic and incompetent. It’s as if the food policy bodies are locked away in a little bubble and isolated from the findings of climate and environmental scientists.

Happily, there is now a second group of scientific papers on food in 2050 which is more realistic and will hopefully inform the policy bodies. It’s a tiny group … so far just a single headline paper, but with a suite of supporting studies. The headline paper, recently published inNature, is by Jonathan Foley, Navin Ramankutty and 18 co-authors.

The key supporting work is a detailed modeling of the global amount of land that can be cropped as a function of key climate variables. This makes use of slowly but inexorably improving geocoded (“geographically coded”) datasets. A geocoded dataset gives a set of attributes in a small region around a GPS location. Relevant attributes might be the kind of soil, the temperature and rainfall regimes, the soil carbon content, the livestock population by species, the human population, and so on. As the datasets improve, the estimate of croppable land will become more accurate.

In scientific journals, geocoded datasets can make for evocative images, like the following:

In the hands of policy makers, the fine grained details behind such maps should eventually turn into working tools.

Such global geocoded datasets also allow the arbitration of claims like: “a very substantial portion [of livestock] is grass fed” (Godfray, Science 2010), and “most of the land devoted to livestock is not viable for crop production” (Eckard, The Conversation, 2011). Geocoded datasets allow the testing of such claims. Back in 2006 Livestock’s Long Shadow (LLS) authors used geocoded datasets in conjunction with other information to estimate that only 8.4 percent of meat is produced from pure grazing systems and that a third of all crop land is used to produce feed instead of food. Godfray and Eckard seem unconcerned by contradictions between their claims and the available data and feel no need to support their assertions with evidence. In any event, the latest Foley-Ramankutty work provides more detail and a framework for incorporating climate data in an on-going fashion as it comes to hand.

This series of BNC posts on feeding the planet in 2050 will have that Foley paper as its final destination, but first we need to set the context with more detailed commentary on the “agriculture as usual” status-quo which still dominates major food policy organisations.

These are a few of IFPRI’s favourite foods

Let’s start with IFPRI which runs a global chain of policy and analysis research centres with money ultimately derived from all of the biggest Governments on the planet. IFPRI does plenty of modeling, but there is nothing in the food policy world to match CMIP, the climate science process which allows the best of the world’s climate models to be independently compared against reality and each other. So it’s hard to judge the quality of IFPRI modeling. In 1999, IFPRI’s main agricultural model predicted that India’s annual per capita beef consumption would rise from 2.6 kg in 1993 to 4.02 kg in 2020. The latest FAO data from 2007 shows that Indian per capita beef consumption has actually fallen and is now down to 1.5 kg. This is despite 70 percent of Indians not being vegetarian. One anomaly may not demolish a model, but the failure to predict the sign of the trend in a population of over a billion people is a worry.

The mindset of IFPRI’s recent offering on food security in 2050 can be illustrated by a table (Table 2 in the report) describing predicted changes in the availability of 4 crops (wheat, rice, maize and soybeans) and 4 meats (called interestingly beef, pork, lamb and poultry) under future climate predictions using modeling from CSIRO and NCAR.

Remember, IFPRI puts food security front and centre of their food supply concerns for 2050. The rich rarely have food security issues, regardless of where they live. But, at a rough guess, at least a few billion of the 9 to 10 billion people in 2050 will be poor and shouldn’t, in my view, be further disadvantaged in access to healthy food by food choices of the wealthy. Nor should they be disadvantaged by the livestock keeping habits of other poor people. For example, farmers who want to maintain or improve their productivity using crop residue mulches to protect their soils are frequently impeded by customs which allow livestock free access to crop residues. More on this later in the series.

IFPRI’s choice of important foods is very revealing. Just how important to global food security are its chosen foods?

The table (built from the FAO Food Balance Sheets) shows the current percentage of global food Calories provided by each of the chosen IFPRI foods. The first column is the global average, and the second is the percentage in the diets of the 0.7 billion people in the least developed countries (LDC) on the planet. I have, of course, assumed that by Lamb, IFPRI meant all sheep or goat meat and not really just lamb. Even with this interpretation, lamb is an irrelevancy in the global food system providing just a third of one percent of daily calories.

Sheep tails can’t wag elephants

Sheep and goat meat has provided less than half a percent of global calories for the past 40 years. Julia Gillard may have fed lamb to the Queen, but even in the country which once rode on the sheep’s back, sheep meat has dropped from 10 percent of Australian calories in the 1960s to just 3 percent now. So even in Australia, where we eat (in absolute terms) 7.5 times the global average, calories from sheep meat are considerably behind those obtained from alcohol, palm oil, or sugar and the protein provided by sheep meat is one quarter that of wheat.

It is certainly possible to find nomadic herders to whom sheep meat is an important food, but such exceptions shouldn’t be the tail wagging the elephant of global food security policy.

At 1.4 percent of global food calories, and far less for the poor, it’s not even clear that cattle meat should be considered relevant. Even in Australia, where beef consumption is 4.5 times the global average, wheat provides more protein. It may be that cattle’s primary role in global food security isn’t just as an irrelevancy but negative by degrading the productive capacity of land to produce foods which actually matter to people with food security problems. Beef should perhaps appear on a list of foods which are enemies of global food security. Far less speculative is the role of pigs and chickens. On average globally, these animals compete directly with humans for food. This is because the majority of meat globally from both species is produced in factory farms or in irrigated mixed farms in both the developed and developing worlds. From this and the Livestock’s Long Shadow assessment that livestock’s overall contribution to the net human edible protein supply is negative (p.271), it follows that pig and chicken production will have an even stronger than average negative impact on both net food calories and protein.

And next time …

I haven’t quite finished with IFPRI and this table. Despite the redundant or negative role of meat in the global food supply, it clearly dominates IFPRI’s thinking. In the next post in the series I’ll finish off the analysis by considering the choice of plant food items: rice, wheat, maize and soy. These four are indeed giants of global agriculture, but the last two, maize and soy, as can be guessed from the table above, are primarily feed … not food. In particular, both are mostly used as feed for the livestock of people to whom food shortages are events in other people’s lives.

The focus of this series (IFR FaD) is aimed squarely at the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) rather than other Gen IV designs, such as the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) or Advanced High Temperature Reactor (AHTR). The reason for this is two fold: (i) I’m more familiar with the IFR technology (and I am in regular email exchange with the world experts on this technology, via SCGI and other links), and (ii) LFTR has a strong and welcoming advocacy group elsewhere, and I’d encourage people to go there to ask more questions about that technology … However, I should make it quite clear that I’m not “for IFR and against LFTR” — both 4th generation nuclear designs hold great appeal to me, and I will sometimes consider IFR vs LFTR comparisons in the IFR FaD series, as a point of comparison or contrast.

I think we need to be pursuing the final stages of research, development and commercial-scale deployment of all of these next-generation fission technologies, since it would require such a trivial input compared to the huge investment that will be required anyway in energy infrastructure over the next few decades (>$26 trillion globally by 2030). However, it is nevertheless useful to consider the relative merits of the individual technologies, and I hope to look at this from a number of angles in blog posts during 2012.

For some initial ideas and to initiate discussion, below I reproduce an email exchange on this matter, including aspects of commercial readiness,  that was recently posted on the Science Council for Global Initiatives website. The conversation is from three highly experienced nuclear physicists/engineers, Dr George Stanford, Dr Dan Meneley, and Prof. Per Peterson. I’m sure this will stir some debate! (And, as I said, I will have more to post on this in the new year).

I have also added a few hyperlinks to clarify terms that may be unfamiliar to the general reader; please note that the links and pictures were added by me (Barry Brook), not the original correspondents.

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G. Stanford wrote (11-29-10):

We’ll see what others on this list have to say, but in my opinion, Carlsen’s enthusiasm for thorium is premature, to say the least.  The ONLY significant advantage a thorium cycle would have over fast reactors with metallic fuel (IFR/PRISM) is its lower requirement for start up fissile.  That advantage is offset by the fact that the thorium reactor is at a stage of development roughly equivalent to where the IFR was in 1975 — a promising idea with a lot of R&D needed to before it’s ready for a commercial demonstration — which puts its deployment about 20 years behind what could be the IFR’s schedule.  The thorium community has not yet even agreed on what will be the optimum thorium technology to pursue.

I think that thorium should indeed be investigated as a possible future competitor for the IFR.   But what would be gained by putting off demonstrating the IFR/PRISM technology while waiting to see if thorium really lives up to its promise?  Nothing would be lost by getting a fleet of IFRs up and running.  They could be breeding fissile for decades while a possible thorium fleet gets up and running, and the IFR-bred fissile — several times more than was started with — could be used for expanding the hypothetical thorium fleet at the end of the IFRs’ lifetimes.

If the current perceived urgency is to sequester plutonium to put it out of the reach of proliferators, that can be done much faster with early deployment of IFRs rather than by later deployment of thorium reactors — and each IFR will sequester 8 – 10 times as much plutonium (Pu) per GWe as a thorium reactor.

– George S. Stanford 11-29-10

D. Meneley wrote:

On the matter of thorium, George and others have repeated a . . . realistic picture.

[Boosting thorium] will do no good. This is another idealist’s dream, like large-scale wind energy. They only want to save the world and are not interested in practical details.

If you’ve tried to do control, fuel cycle, and safety system design on a thorium reactor you’ll not be so enthusiastic. The flux shape is a strong function of the past flux shape — because of the protactinium. After you shut the thing down you must account for the later reactivity increase. And then there’s the detail of not having any fissile isotope to start up in the first place.

If you’re using thoria fuel, how are you going to extract the U233 economically?

And so on.

Thorium if absolutely necessary, but absolutely no thorium if not necessary.

–Dan Meneley 11/27/10

P. Peterson wrote:

George,

Your assessment on the relative technical maturity of LFTR versus IFR is correct.

But there are other substantive technical differences besides the lower fissile start up requirement for thorium reactors.

Thorium reactors operate in with a thermal spectrum, which allows them to use graphite as the primary structural material in the reactor core.  Graphite can be heated to very high temperatures without losing structural integrity. Combined with the very high boiling temperature of the fluoride-salt coolant (> 1400°C), thorium reactors can deliver heat at substantially higher temperature (between 600 and 700°C with current primary pressure boundary structural materials) than IFR (between 370 and 510°C with current fuel cladding materials).  This is a sufficiently higher temperature that several options exist for gas-Brayton power conversion, while at the IFR temperatures steam Rankine is likely to remain the most practical option.

There are a number of substantive theoretical advantages to gas Brayton power conversion (this is the reason Brayton cycles are now used universally with natural gas), but essentially all of the existing turbine and compressor technologies optimized to open combustion cycles and thus substantive development is needed to adapt it to nuclear power conversion.  Once successfully developed, though, one would expect substantial commercial pressure to move from steam Rankine to gas Brayton cycles as the dominant approach for nuclear power conversion (as has already happened with natural gas).

The other major differences arise from the different thermophysical properties of the two coolants.  The fluoride salts have volumetric heat capacity slightly larger than water and about 4.5 time larger than sodium.  So the primary systems for thorium reactors are physically much smaller than for IFRs, or alternatively, a primary system of the same physical size can produce substantially more power (factor of a 2 to 4).  Thorium reactors have no sources of stored energy that can pressurize containment, so they also can use a compact, low-pressure containment structure and thus a correspondingly smaller reactor building.

These are substantive technical differences that are likely to affect the relative levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) produced by the two systems.   But one of the major issues with LFTR is that one must overcome multiple, substantive technology development problems simultaneously (gas-Brayton power conversion, qualification of materials for corrosion resistance, on-line fuel processing, licensing for fluid-fuel reactors). This creates a significant activation energy problem, even if the final LFTR technology would have desirable LCOE and sustainability characteristics.    One of the reasons that we’ve been working on solid-fuel variants at UC Berkeley is to see if one can reduce the activation energy barrier by capturing most of the LCOE benefits (which come primarily from improved power conversion efficiency and reduced capital cost relative to advanced light water reactors [ALWRs]) while keeping the licensing approach much closer to that used for passive ALWRs and not taking on the technical issues for fluid fuel.

In the end, LCOE will be a dominant consideration in commercial decisions to deploy nuclear power. In the near term the best opportunities involve further improvement to ALWR technology and construction methods (with AP-1000 providing the best role model to date).  In the longer term some mix of uranium fast spectrum and thorium thermal spectrum reactors is likely to emerge as optimal.

-Per F. Peterson 11/29/10

G. Stanford wrote:

Per:

Thanks much for the additional information, clarifying the technical challenges and strengthening the case that thorium power is worth pursuing and might well have an important role down the line.

While the LCOE will undoubtedly be an important consideration, it seems to me that breeding potential also is destined to be important if we are to have abundant clean energy.  It also seems likely that thermal efficiency per se will not ba a major issue, in view of the very low cost of fuel for breeders (or “isobreeders” like the LFTR) — but you point out that the Brayton cycle potentially offers significant additional advantages.

I gather that you do not take issue with the proposition that it would behoove us now to complete the development of what is currently closest to commercial readiness with the characteristics needed for an assured indigenous energy supply — namely LMFBRs with metallic fuel and pyroprocessing.  At present, that appears to be a U.S.-developed technology that we have abandoned, bequeathing it to other countries for exploitation.

Cheers,

–  George S. Stanford 11-29-10

P. Peterson wrote:

George,

For LFTRs, the breeding potential may not be particularly important, as long as they can achieve isobreeding.  Uranium from seawater provides a backstop technology that sets the maximum cost of fissile material, much as coal-to-liquids provides a backstop for the cost of oil (absent a price on carbon dioxide emissions).  The startup of an isobreeding LFTR requires about 1/4 to 1/2 the fissile needed to start up an LWR, and uranium from seawater will have a cost around 4 times greater than current uranium prices.  Thus the capital cost for the fissile to start up isobreeding LFTRs will be comparable to the current cost for the initial core loading for LWRs, which constitutes a modest fraction of the total capital cost of current LWRs.

Our experience to date is that “backstop” energy technologies never emerge to be economically competitive, because lower cost alternatives tend to be developed instead (at the scale that we use energy, the economic incentives are very large).

So I would be very surprised that the cost of fissile will ever rise to the point where one would actually begin commercial efforts to recover uranium from seawater (although there is always some slim probability that the government might in the future enact a “seawater uranium portfolio standard,” to create an assured market for seawater uranium, so the technology will be brought to commercial readiness regardless of cost).  Absent such government intervention, the cost of fissile to start up LFTRs will likely remain lower than the cost of fissile to start up current LWRs, in perpetuity.

My expectation is that the LCOE for electricity from ALWRs will drop well below the LCOE for new pulverized coal plants before the end of this decade, as Westinghouse’s costs to build AP-1000′s and enhancements to the AP-1000 drop and as competing LWR technologies for the AP-1000 emerge, and as construction methods improve further. Financing nuclear construction will likely remain a challenge, although SMRs may prove to be helpful in this respect.

But we need an aggressive effort to develop multiple technologies that can improve upon and ultimately replace ALWRs.  Fast-spectrum reactors clearly have advantages, along with thorium cycles, from the perspective of fuel cycle.  IFR metal fuels are vastly better than conventional oxide fuels from the perspective of affordable and secure fuel recycle. LFTR is also a potentially attractive technology, but clearly has substantial technology risk.  So yes, I strongly support demonstration of IFR technology.  The key issue is that IFR needs to remain a part of a portfolio of technologies the federal government invests in, and that IFR demonstration needs to sustain discipline to assure that federal investment is likely to result in commercial success

A simple type of evidence, which Congress has required for the next-generation nuclear plant (NGNP) project, would be 50% cost sharing by commercial interests.    I think that this approach is too simplistic, since it does not recognize how risk changes during design, licensing, and construction of a demonstration reactor.  The best approach is to require very small or zero commercial investment at the stage of conceptual design and NRC pre-application review, moderate commercial investment during detailed engineering and NRC licensing, and substantive commercial investment for the construction of a prototype unit (where the intellectual property and up-side commercial potential ends up being owned by the commercial entities who invest).

This sort of decision framework is also easier to implement in statute, since one can authorize the needed expenditures, but the actual appropriations can depend upon progress being made and commercial investment materializing.

What commercial interests will tell you is that it is much easier to make a decision to make a substantial investment if they have an NRC construction license to build a reactor, while it is almost impossible if the reactor is just a concept that needs a lot of detailed engineering work.  But in the end, the commercial entities that perform this reactor development work are also in the best position to assess its commercial potential–so a lack of willingness to place some commercial money at risk (less earlier and more later) should be viewed as evidence that the concept needs more R&D, not accelerated demonstration.

For IFR, though, the availability of affordable fuel is a big issue.  It requires the capacity to recycle used LWR and IFR fuel, as well as to test and qualify recycled fuels for use in IFRs.  This is a problem that the commercial sector is not going to be willing to take on, and thus it requires purely federal effort.

-Per F. Peterson 11/29/10

George Stanford wrote:

Per,

Thanks for the further elucidation.

To get quantitative about LFTRs, suppose the world were to want 50,000 GWe of isobreeding LFTRs by 2100, primed with 10% EU at 1 tonne of U-235 per GWe.  That U-235 would be contained in 10 tonnes of EU, which would come from ~200 tonnes of Unat.  Thus the amount of uranium to be mined would be ~ 50,000 x 200 = 10 million tonnes of Unat — which is well within the realm of the possible.

However, a downside would be the perpetuation and global expansion of uranium enrichment infrastructure, with its proliferation implications.  Also, left over would be some 9.5 million tonnes of orphaned depleted uranium containing 9.5 million GWe-years of unavailable (and unwanted) energy.

–  George S. Stanford 11/30/10

CANDU reactors in Qinshan, China

D. Meneley wrote:

G. Stanford wrote:

Dan:

Sorry if I slighted the CANDU. It’s a fine reactor design, struggling to acquire a bigger share of the international market. To believers (like you and me) in the importance of conserving fissile material, its high conversion ratio is an important asset. But – apart from the fact that it doesn’t need enriched uranium — to a first approximation it’s just another thermal reactor. Since most of the generalities about LWRs apply also to CANDUs, much of the time it’s convenient to use the term “LWR” as shorthand for “uranium-based thermal reactor.”

While I can’t speak for Per, of course, I suspect that he would ascribe less importance to a high conversion ratio than I do.

George S. Stanford 12/01/10

For high-penetration utility-scale wind, we'll need much bigger batteries than these...

Debate over large-scale energy storage is a regular theme in the comments on this blog. The post is intended to be a place to centralise this discussion. Some questions that might be considered in the comment thread:

1. What is the cost (per Watt hour, kWh, MWh, GWh — how does this cost scale up, and how does this scale as higher levels of reliability are required, e.g. energy delivered on demand 90% vs 99% vs 99.9% of the time)?

2. What is the energy density of the proposed storage technology currently, and what are its physical limits? (i.e., how good can it get, with perfect engineering, and how long can the energy store be held?)

3. If the storage technology becomes cheap, what is to stop baseload plants like coal and nuclear from undercutting renewables, given that they can charge large batteries in low-demand times and then sell the power during peak (high-price) periods?

4. What are the material inputs for the storage system, and how does this effect the energy returned on energy invested of the paired energy technology (e.g., what is the EROEI and life-cycle CO2 emissions of, say, a 2kW solar PV system with no storage vs the same system with 10 hours battery storage to cover nights [ignoring winter and long cloudy periods])?

5. Lifetime: how many cycles can the storage technology handle (100, 10,000, near-indefinite [e.g. conversion to hydrogen])?

6. Does the storage technology need its own power-generation system, or can it be paired to the original generating technology (e.g., a molten salt heat storage can create steam for use in the same turbine set as the solar thermal plant itself, whereas compressed air energy storage for wind requires a different generation system to the wind itself)?

(If people can propose some other general questions, I’ll add them to this list)

Anyway, to kick the discussion off, here is something sent to me by George Stanford, in response to the following missive:

Seems to me the answer to intermittency is more wind and solar power and larger grids so they have over capacity and can share across larger areas. Conversely consider energy storage devices, flywheel systems, pressure accumulators, batteries, etc. If you consider all the economic benefits of the positive environmental savings of wind and solar (when getting away from coal) then the overcapacity costs would balance out in the end.

The end benefits of ending destructive mining practices, decreased oxides of nitrogen and mercury emissions and disposal issues with fly ash probably make it worth it alone. Has anyone found a study that shows the costs of that.

George replies:

Large-scale energy storage faces hurdles like cost, scale, material availability, and environmental disruption. For example, regarding battery storage, I have found this on the Internet:

Conway, E. (2 September 2008) “World’s biggest battery switched on in Alaska” Telegraph.co.uk, 12:01AM BST 28 Aug 2003

Excerpt: The world’s biggest battery was plugged in yesterday to provide emergency power to one of the United States’ most isolated cities.

The rechargeable battery, which at 2,000 square metres is bigger than a football pitch and weighs 1,300 tonnes, was manufactured by power components specialist ABB to provide electricity to Fairbanks, Alaska’s second-largest city, in the event of a blackout.

Stored in a warehouse near the city, where temperatures plunge to -51 degrees Centigrade in winter, the battery will provide 40 megawatts of power – enough for around 12,000 people – for up to seven minutes.

This is enough time, according to ABB, to start up diesel generators to restore power, an important safeguard since at such low temperatures, water pipes can freeze entirely in two hours. . . .

The earthquake-proof contraption contains 13,760 NiCad cells – bigger versions of those used in many portable electronic appliances including laptop computers and radios. Each cell measures 16in by 21in and weighs more than 12 stone [168 lb].

Notice that this system will store 40 MW x 7 minutes = 280 MW-min of energy. So let’s do a little ball-park arithmetic. The US uses roughly 500 GW-hr of electrical energy per hour. Suppose we want enough storage to supply 1% of that energy for 10 hours (feel free to plug in your own guesses). That’s 50 GW-hr, and 3,000,000 MW-min / 280 MW-min = 10,714.

So for our postulated backup system, multiply the Fairbanks numbers by 10,700. This gives us:

Area: 21.4 million sq. meters = 21.4 sq. km.

Weight of whole system: 1,300 tonnes x 10,700 = ~ 13.9 million tonnes

Weight of NiCad cells= 13,760 x 168 lb x 10,700 = ~ 12.4 million tons = ~12 million tonnes.

Weight of Cd: ~ 3 million tonnes (this is a guess).

World reserves of cadmium: 0.6 – 1.8 million tonnes (inadequate for just US need).

In other words, current battery technology would be unable to support battery storage for any significant part of the electric supply. Equivalent considerations apply to the other storage techniques.

Without storage or hydro backup, wind power looks hopelessly impractical as a major supplier of electrical energy. Larger grid? Apart form the elaborate new transmission network needed, remember that it’s not sufficient merely to always have power being produced somewhere — you constantly have to have enough power to supply the whole grid. Think of the over-capacity needed to accomplish that! Much of the time, most of the windmills would have to be feathered to prevent over-production.

Here-s a year’s worth of daily wind energy from all the wind farms in Germany:

(The Web site I got the above chart from seems now to be inactive.)

You can see almost-real-time info about the wind contribution to the Bonneville Power Authority here:

As for ending the destructive mining practices, etc., that can’t be done more than partially (if that) by wind and solar power — but it certainly can be done, in spades, by fast reactors such as the IFR.

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Then there is this comment by Tom Blees, putting recent solar costs into context (see also my recent comparison in TCASE 15):

This is being cheered on the internet by the windies and sunnies:

The Energy Department on Wednesday approved two loan guarantees worth more than $1 billion for solar energy projects in Nevada and Arizona, two days before the expiration date of a program that has become a rallying cry for Republican critics of the Obama administration’s green energy program.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the department has completed a $737 million loan guarantee to Tonopah Solar Energy for a 110 megawatt solar tower on federal land near Tonopah, Nev., and a $337 million guarantee for Mesquite Solar 1 to develop a 150 megawatt solar plant near Phoenix.

The loans were approved under the same program that paid for a $528 million loan to Solyndra Inc., a California solar panel maker that went bankrupt after receiving the money and laid off 1,100 workers.

These people can’t do math. A solar power plant rated at 110MW will have a capacity factor of about 18% tops (because of when the sun shines). Less in winter, of course. So that’s effectively about 20MW for $737 million. The price per gigawatt, then, is about $36 billion! And people complain about the high cost of nuclear power?! Even at the ridiculous prices for new nuclear in the states of about $6-8 billion/GW (and mind you, that’s for 24/7 availability, unlike solar), this solar investment is patently ridiculous.

Edit: It was pointed out in the comments that with Tonopah’s projected capacity factor of 55 % (with energy storage), the capital cost comes to a bit over $13 billion per GWe average power.