Back in 2011, the federal Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency commissioned the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to investigate two future scenarios in which the National Electricity Market was fuelled entirely by renewables … as defined by the Department. An essential component of AEMO’s 100 percent renewable solution involves the annual transport of 50 million tonnes of plant material from farms, native forests and plantations in what can only be described as a massive soil mineral mining operation. Log, slash, truck and burn. For details read on.

AEMO has just released draft findings and been met with typically enthusiastic headlines among renewable advocates: “100 percent renewable is feasible: AEMO” and “100% renewables for Australia – not so costly after all”. It took the Financial Review to point out that “not so costly” means doubling the wholesale price of electricity. The AEMO report was welcomed by the Australian Conservation Foundation “100 per cent clean energy on the way”.

Martin Nicholson on BraveNewClimate.com responded quickly saying it’s possible to meet the modelled electricity demand using nuclear power for less than half the lowest cost scenario of the AEMO report. This is $91 billion compared to the range estimate of $219 to $332 billion for 100 percent renewables with Nicholson using the same source of costing estimates as AEMO.

A nuclear solution would also avoid some of the uncosted gotchas, the extra “challenges” contained in the report: land acquisition of half a million hectares, boosting the distribution network, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, biomass logistics infrastructure, and DSP. What’s DSP? … demand side participation. A wonderful piece of euphemistic jargon whereby people either do without or get their electricity at some inconvenient time. E.g., Why cook dinner when you get home from work when you can cook it at lunch time when the solar PV is powering and just re-heat it later? All you need is the will and a new oven remotely controlled by your smart phone. I call it the demand side kitchen rules.

Let’s first sketch AEMO’s broad findings before looking at the most contentious issue.

Climate change isn’t just about electricity

Firstly, note that the study doesn’t deal with Western Australia or the Northern Territory. It’s strictly about areas in the NEM (National Electricity Market), the eastern Australian grid.

Second, the AEMO study is about electricity. Electricity is about 1/4 of our fossil fuel energy use, and about 230 of our 580 million tonnes of CO2eq (carbon dioxide equivalent) greenhouse gas emissions. The AEMO study dealt with switching to electric vehicles by assuming that all charging would be done at times of high solar PV output and would thus absorb it’s entire assumed rooftop PV output.

So the AEMO study isn’t a total climate change action plan. It’s just one component.

Base-load power and lunch bars

But the AEMO study authors understand electricity systems. They understand the value of systems you can control compared with systems you can’t. In traditional power systems, demand is uncontrolled while the supply is adjusted to match. Typically decisions are taken every 5 minutes about which power sources to crank up or throttle back.

But high profile renewables, like wind and solar power, reduce the elements of the system that a manager can control while simultaneous increasing the parts they can’t. The traditional system works like an inner city lunch bar. The boss has a couple of permanent staff and tries to hire just enough casuals to cope with reasonably predictable peak periods. The permanent staff are like the base-load part of a normal system.

Building a 100 percent renewable system is like operating with no permanent staff and where the casuals rock up (and leave) when they feel like it.

AEMO’s solution isn’t to abandon the base-load concept but to build a partial base-load system from biomass or geothermal power, supplement it with concentrating solar thermal (mirrors heating water making steam driving turbines) with molten salt storage and to roster double the number of casuals like wind and solar in the hope that they’ll be around when needed based on past behaviour. After all, how different could future weather patterns be from the past?

Wind and solar contributions to the power system in the immediate future are somewhat predictable if you throw enough research dollars around. You can, for example, monitor cloud cover with satellites and use super computers and weather modelling to predict wind speeds 24 hours in advance … but however good your predictive capacity may be, wind and solar can’t be powered up to deal with surprising demand increases. Providing too much power is also a problem and one that costs money to solve. For example, the Czechs are having to add grid infrastructure to allow them to lock out excess German renewable electricity flowing across interconnectors.

AEMO’s base-load renewables

So how does AEMO’s electricity lunch bar fly?

I’ll only consider the second of two scenarios considered by AEMO. The first scenario only supplies 300 TWh/yr by 2050. This is inconsistent with any serious concern for climate change which will require far more clean electricity than this to replace as much as possible of our full gamut of fossil fuel use. The first scenario also relies heavily on geothermal power which has so far promised much and delivered nothing.

The second scenario aims for about 370 TWh/yr by 2050. This is rather closer to what is required. In addition, the second scenario relies heavily on biomass with less geothermal. Regardless of the geothermal outcomes, the biomass component of scenario two requires considerable comment.

AEMO uses three grand assumptions to make scenario two feasible:

• First, it presumed a base-load supply driven by biomass and geothermal power.
• Second, it presumed it could shift peak demand from when the sun wasn’t shining much in the late afternoon to somewhat earlier when it was.
• Lastly, AEMO postulated heavy use of concentrating solar thermal power with molten salt storage.

These are AEMO’s key responses to what it calls the challenges of a 100 percent renewable system. The word challenges gets plenty of use in the report!

Let’s consider these assumptions:

What’s biomass?

Biomass in this context is plant material. Mostly we eat plants, and they provide about 83 percent of global calories, but burning plant material, mainly wood, has always been popular and deadly.

Wood smoke from cooking fires causes about 3.5 million premature deaths a year, including 1/2 a million children. It’s been poisoning the air, killing children and damaging our cellular DNA throughout our evolutionary history. And it’s not only the smoke that is a problem, wood dust is a demonstrated human carcinogen, so any increase in people working at the wood face will present OH&S health challenges. A 2012 Italian study called for research on the health impacts of emissions from power plants fueled by solid biomass … there’s been little work. A recent Spanish study found that “wood-processing-plant” operators had a particular and significant stomach cancer sub-type rate 8 times higher than normal. There hasn’t been enough work to take this figure as face value, but it should certainly be taken very seriously because it’s a rate increase of a size normally unseen outside of tobacco studies. Most focus on wood dust has been on lung cancer because of the obvious pathway with fine particles lodging in lungs, but what ends up on their sandwiches may be a bigger problem for workers in wood dusty environments.

Biomass may be natural, but working with it isn’t always benign. Nor is there anything necessarily renewable in any relevant sense about biomass production systems. More on this later.

AEMO envisages biomass coming from various places: 1) stuff left over after a harvest, typically called stubble or crop residues, 2) suburban waste, and 3) native and plantation forestry “waste”. AEMO contracted CSIRO to provide biomass expertise and the resulting CSIRO report makes for interesting reading. They envisage planting 4.8 million hectares of good farmland with fast growing trees to provide 20 million tonnes of timber to pulp and burn each year with correspondingly reduced food output. The idea takes some beating in the selfish and unethical stakes. Thankfully, AEMO didn’t go for this option.

What they did go for was a biomass base-load system which, by 2050, would require shifting 50 million tonnes of plant material annually to a huge network of furnaces connected to turbines connected to some kind of grid attaching to the NEM. This 50 million tonnes is slightly more than we typically shift during our annual grain harvest as food.

Is biomass a renewable resource?

Any reasonable backyard gardener knows that, with a couple of exceptions, everything you take out of a garden has to be put back. It doesn’t get back by magic. It’s not like solar power. A crop of lemons removes (among other things) iron, so you sprinkle iron chelates around the tree. Similarly, the backyard gardener with a few chooks may praise the chook manure, but the real input is the chook pellets from the grain store. These are liberally laced with minerals but also embodying the minerals added to croplands by the farmers who grew the grain. The chooks merely spread it around and add a rapid composting component to enhance the availability of the nutrients.

When you remove crop residues after a harvest, you are mining the minerals embodied in the plant matter and removing them from the soil. But the negative impacts don’t stop there. Here’s a chart from one of the world’s foremost soil scientists (Rattan Lal) outlining the chains of adverse impacts.

Spend some time reading the above image. I won’t waste space expanding on all the points, but will note that it’s not only the minerals which disappear and need to be replaced, removing stubble may also cause the carbon content of soil to decrease depending on a complex mix of factors. This isn’t rocket science, it’s much harder with many more constantly changing variables. Soil nutrient depletion may turn out to be the least of the problems.

According to Lal, cropping can be done in ways that increase soil carbon, but that’s not (overall) how we do it in Australia. Our croplands have been losing about 17 million tonnes of carbon per year over the past twenty years. And probably much more for decades before that, but it’s only in the past 20 years that we have been measuring the losses and reporting on them (to the UNFCCC).

So if we can’t even crop without losing carbon, what are the chances we can remove even more plant material during the process and do it properly? Zero would be a pretty safe bet.

Some years back when Jared Diamond wrote in “Collapse” about Australia’s farmers mining the soil, he received plenty of flack. But our carbon inventory data demonstrates the accuracy of his claims. Certainly, there are many farmers operating benignly, but it’s our net average which matters and that net average sucks.

With Australia’s track record, calling electricity from biomass “renewable” is, at best, a pipe dream.

Another of the big biomass streams in the AEMO base-load system is urban waste. For a renewable energy system to be predicated on high levels of suburban waste, including food waste, is rather bizarre. What happens if people finally start listening to the constant barrage of messages to stop wasting food? To start using composting systems? To dig up the fence to fence concrete and plant veggies? A shrinking waste stream might be unlikely, but it would certainly knock a hole in AEMO’s biomass budget.

Lastly, AEMO wants to get more biomass out of both our native and plantation foresting operations. Why pull any material from a native forest without a pressing need? It may be waste to us, but to an bird it’s nesting material or the nest itself. Many of the crop residue problems apply similarly to tree harvesting operations, whether in native forests or plantations.

The CSIRO report on which AEMO based its modelling is explicit in stating that it didn’t consider the constraints of logistics or economics, but strictly what quantities of biomass could be produced. The report didn’t even bother saying that it didn’t consider the impacts on wildlife of or food production of such operations.

The following image indicates that by 2050, if you can hit the 50 million tonne biomass mark, you can get 57 TWh/yr from it (in scenario two).

In easily remembered round numbers, it takes a million tonnes of stubble pulled off about a million hectares of crop land and transported in 40,000 x 25 tonne truck loads to produce 1.1 terawatt hour of electricity. The adverse consequences could spread far and wide with topsoil productivity losses adversely impacting food production capacity for decades. Alternatively, you can mine 21 tonnes of uranium to produce 2 tonnes of slightly enriched fuel transported in 1 rather small minivan.

It is strongly ironic that the green facet of politics is backing this kind of 100 percent renewable plan. Ironic because this amorphous group grew its support base with a very public concern for the natural world. Our forests, rivers, wild areas and biodiversity. They coupled this with the concern that every rational person has with clean air, water and productive soil. These are core green values and they resonate with many people.

But the renewable system envisaged in the AEMO report violates these values in both letter and spirit. The energy system they have modelled is renewable only by definition, and not in any likely relevant physical sense.

But it’s emphasis on logging, slashing, trucking and general bushland violence makes it a renewable system with plenty of red neck appeal.

But wait, there’s more

As I said above. Climate impacts aren’t just about electricity and it’s important to understand the breadth and scale of our climate impacts.

The Copenhagen Diagnosis estimated that the long term sustainable per capita emission level for 9 billion people in 2050 is about 1 tonne CO2eq. The 100 percent renewable scheme constructed by AEMO won’t get us anywhere near that target. To get close to that target would require far more electricity and deep “whole of industry” switch to electrification where possible and to other technologies where not. The AEMO study (p.14) acknowledged clearly that it wasn’t considering any other switch away from fossil fuels except for electric vehicles as noted.

In addition to our energy emissions, Australia has plenty of non-energy emissions. Consider our latest 2010 greenhouse gas inventory (to UNFCCC). The average over the past 20 years of CO2 generated by the cattle industry turning forest into grass has been 69 million tonnes per year. That single activity generates three times the per person annual sustainable level of CO2 emissions … and that’s before you add the cattle.

So the AEMO study isn’t about a total response to reducing our climate damaging activities to sustainable levels, it only deals with one part of that task. We need to ensure that however we deal with electricity leaves us with sufficient social and economic capacity to solve the rest of the problem. It’s not much use blowing your budget on the foundations and having no money left for the walls of your house.

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The description of my talk, as it appeared in the programme, is as follows:

Title: Advanced fission and fusion technologies for sustainable nuclear energy

Abstract: Next-generation nuclear energy – including advanced fission reactors, fusion-fission hybrids and pure hydrogen-fusion designs  – offers a means to produce vast quantities of zero-carbon and reliable electricity and process heat. For fission, new designs that are now ready for commercial demonstration can take advantage of the superior physical properties of plutonium in a fast neutron spectrum to convert essentially all of the mined uranium into useful fissile material and abundant electricity.

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) and similar ‘Generation IV designs’ can change in a fundamental way the outlook for global energy on the necessary massive scale. These resource extension properties multiply the amount of usable fuel by a factor of over a hundred, allowing demand to be met for many centuries with fuel already at hand, by a technology that is known today, and whose properties are largely established. Demonstrating a credible and acceptable way to safely recycle used nuclear fuel will also clear a socially acceptable pathway for nuclear fission to be a major low-carbon and sustainable energy source for this century.

For fusion, there are exciting medium- to long-term prospects, based on work now being done on the International Thermonuclear Reactor Experiment (ITER) and on hybrid fusion-fission designs that use molten-salt coolants and use thorium and hydrogen isotopes as fuel.

Replacement of fossil fuels is urgently needed to sustain global society whilst mitigating environmental impacts, and sustainable forms of nuclear energy offer a realistic and effective way of achieving this goal.

Bio: Barry Brook is a Professor and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute, where he holds the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change. He has published three books, over 200 refereed scientific papers, and regularly writes popular articles for the media. His awards include the 2006 Australian Academy of Science Fenner Medal and the 2010 Community Science Educator of the Year. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of extinction, analysis of energy systems for carbon mitigation, and simulation models of the synergies of human impacts on the biosphere.

Here is the HD recording of my talk – recorded professionally by the Academy, which includes many close ups of my slides. The talk runs for 28 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions. I trust you will find it useful, and be sure to pass on the link so that others can watch it and be more informed – and entertained!

There were a wide range of talks presented, generally of high quality, and many of which were also recorded. The full video cast can be viewed here. Below is the programme:

This makes sense… or does it?

This post has two purposes.

First, for those who don’t follow my Twitter feed (hey, why don’t you?), I’d like to highlight some terrific work from Geoff Russell and Ben Heard that has hit the ‘net over the past few weeks. These are all ‘must reads’ – with the first of them going viral in the retweet world!

1. A devastating critique of Jim Green’s anti-science nonsense — who recently shot a ‘junk science’ attack against respected climatologist James Hansen:

Green Nuclear Junk: In their determination to attack nuclear power and those who support it, anti-nuclear activism has walked away from the scientific process. As a result, nearly the entire community of environmental organisations in Australia is currently standing behind figures that are completely mathematically incorrect. Will they correct these blatant errors and open their publications to expert external review? Or is correct maths and good science optional when you wear the colour green?

2. One million solar roofs no reason for celebration: 1M solar rooftop doesn’t even scratch the surface of the emissions generated by a few Queensland cowboys in a single year, let alone take a serious bite out of fossil fuels.

3. Solar miracles and the nuclear reaction: Given the speed of a nuclear rollout compared to that of renewables, it needs to be considered as part of a shift to cleaner energy sources.

Second, I’d like to present a little philosophical message from Geoff Russell on waste. This recapitulates some arguments made forcefully by Tom Blees in Prescription for the Planet.

In praise of waste

The title of this piece will hopefully arouse curiosity, but I have to confess it’s not quite what I believe. My parents lived through the depression so I was bought up to be frugal. We weren’t poor by any means, but my mother didn’t go to a restaurant until she was in her mid forties. For my parents, particularly during my younger years, waste was anathema, a serious moral issue. Attempting to leave any part of a meal uneaten would be responded to with industrial grade suggestions to think about poor people going to bed hungry who’d be glad of the food we children were attempting to throw out. Those attitudes struck root and are so clearly sensible on many levels that it was a personal shock to suddenly realise that when they are applied to energy, they are worse than wrong; they are dangerous.

What can possibly be wrong with promoting energy efficiency?

The Spanish generate 5.8 tonnes of CO2 per person your year (t-CO2/person/yr) while the Swedes produce almost 20 percent less at 5.07 t-CO2/person/yr. So can the Spanish turn off more lights, watch less TV, drive less, eat more raw food, use smaller more efficient fridges, cars, computers and so on to save 20 percent and get themselves down to the Swedish level?

Quite possibly. But it’s an incredibly brainless way to reduce emissions. Partly because it won’t ever get them low enough to be sustainable, but more importantly because it may impede the deep and meaningful changes that will.

It’s not difficult to see this when you consider that the Swedes use more than twice the electricity per person of the Spanish. In fact, at 15,000 kWh/person/yr, the Swedes use more electricity than almost anybody, even more than couch potato Australians and Americans, but they have far lower CO2 emissions.

Why? Because the Swedes generate smart clean electricity for about 20-30 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour (g-CO2/kWh). They are lucky enough to get about half of it from hydro schemes and smart enough to have built plenty of nuclear reactors during the 70s and 80s. Their nuclear build speed makes the German renewable revolution look positively glacial. The German energy system produces about 1,000 kilowatt hours per year per person more from wind and solar now than it did 11 years ago. The Swedes added 7,000 kilowatt hours per person per year to their nuclear electricity output between 1975 and 1986.

Who gives a damn how much electricity you use when it’s clean?

Nobody should give a damn. What’s even more important is that if you have bucket loads of clean electricity you can use it to decarbonise plenty of other activities. You can charge electric vehicles. You can make hydrogen for fuel cells. You can run desalination plants. You can make aluminium and replace heavy steel anythings with lightweight alloys.

In Australia we have had over a decade of energy saving exhortations as successive Governments, backed by environmental groups of all persuasions, pushed the energy efficiency mantra. We had the Climate Clever campaign and who can forget the Government black balloon advertising “You have the Power. Save Energy”? Here the number one suggestion was to install ceiling insulation followed by switching off that second fridge. The messages were clear. First, climate change mitigation will be a doddle, just turn stuff off and be a bit more careful and everything will be fine. Second, it’s your fault you are generating so much CO2. Both messages are wrong. There are areas of personal behaviour that will need to change to prevent total climate destabilisation, like eating little if any animal food (meat and milk), but using less electricity isn’t one of them. We can all have air conditioning and central heating. The only way in which it’s our fault is that we keep electing Governments who don’t understand either the scope or the urgency of the problem.

Australians emit around 17 tonnes of CO2 per person (tCO2/cap/yr) compared to the 5 tonnes of the Swedes. We also have a huge non-CO2 emission output. Will any amount of energy efficiency close that gap? And we don’t just need to close the gap. We and the Swedes need to get down to about one tonne per person per year, according to the Copenhagen Diagnosis documents. To even suggest that efficiencies can play a significant roll is daft. We have had energy efficiency stickers on white goods along with a constant stream of improved efficiencies in all of our household and industrial processes for a couple of decades. I used to use a 120 Watt computer screen, now I use a 40 watt screen, I used to use a computer with a 400 watt power supply, now I use one with a 30 watt power supply. Has any of these kinds of huge efficiency gains slashed our total or per capita emissions?

No.

On the contrary, our electricity is dirtier (meaning more CO2 per kilowatt hour) and for most of the period since the Kyoto benchmark years of 1990, our electricity use, and per capita carbon dioxide emissions have gone up. The recent downward blip, the global financial crisis of 2008, is just that, a blip.

So it’s time we stopped wasting time with brain dead energy saving mantras and got on with the real task of building a clean energy infrastructure so we can use far, far more electricity.

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In late April 2013, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) released its draft report titled 100 Per Cent Renewables Study – Draft Modelling Outcomes. The study was commissioned by the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCCEE) to explore future scenarios for the National Electricity Market (NEM) fuelled entirely by renewable resources.

AEMO provided scenarios for a 100 per cent renewable electricity supply at 2030 and 2050 along with the generation plant and the major transmission networks required to support each scenario. The study included estimated capital cost requirements for each scenario and an indicative estimate of the impact on customer energy prices.

AEMO found that a 100 per cent renewable system is likely to require much higher capacity reserves than a conventional power system. They estimated that the generation nameplate capacity could need to be over twice the maximum customer demand.

Assuming the reason for commissioning the report was to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from electricity generation, it is disappointing that the DCCEE didn’t also request that nuclear power be included along with the renewable resources.

According to AEMO, to convert the NEM to a 100 per cent renewable system will cost at least $219 to $332 billion. This is excluding significant costs for the land (which could be as much as 5,000 sq kms) and augmentation of the distribution network. This is starting to sound worse than the recent high-speed train proposal from Melbourne to Brisbane.

Example of supply and demand in a winter week (scenario 2 in 2050)

According to the Australian Energy Regulator, the current NEM has an installed capacity of 46 GW made up of 26 GW of coal plants, 9 GW of gas, 8 GW of hydro and just over 2 GW of wind.

The following analysis is partly based on a paper I will present at a conference in July this year.

If the primary aim of the DCCEE is to reduce emissions, replacing the coal plants with nuclear will do the job by reducing emissions from electricity generation from 196 Mt CO2-e in 2010 to 30 Mt in 2050; a reduction greater than the national target of 80 per cent by 2050.

What’s more important, based on the same BREE costing source used by AEMO for its study, replacing all the coal plants with nuclear power will cost only $91 billion. Less than half the lowest cost scenario for the 100 per cent renewable system. The savings come largely from reducing the need for additional capacity reserves demanded by the prevalence of intermittent technologies.

The AEMO study using 100 per cent renewables estimated wholesale electricity prices in the range of $111/MWh to $133/MWh. My wholesale electricity price estimate for a combination of nuclear and renewables, based on the CSIRO eFuture model, is in the range $124/MWh to $126/MWh. As this is in the middle of the AEMO range, wholesale prices are likely to be similar with or without nuclear.

As well as reducing capital costs, nuclear power for the NEM rather than a 100 per cent renewable system offers other benefits. Significant less land is required and there is less need to upgrade the transmission network. Land use in the USA for nuclear plants averages 3.6 sq kms per GW. So we could expect to use less than 100 sq kms of land rather than the 2,400 to 5,000 sq kms needed for the 100 per cent renewable system.

Also, more changes to the transmission network may be needed for the 100 per cent renewable system than one using nuclear. The costs of these network changes will be added to retail electricity prices.

It seems that the emissions reduction targets by 2050 can be achieved using nuclear power to replace coal at less than half the capital cost of a 100 per cent renewable system without increasing electricity prices.

It seems hardly surprising that countries like China, India, Russia and Korea are building nuclear plants as well as renewable energy systems given the cost and other resource savings.

Australia wants the lowest cost solution to reducing GHG emissions. The DCCEE must request AEMO to perform a further study to consider a scenario including nuclear power.

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Click the above image to download the PDF (full version is free – Open Access)

With declining system costs and assuming a short energy payback period, photovoltaics (PV) should, at face value, be able to make a meaningful contribution to reducing the emission intensity of Australia’s electricity system. But will it? Graham Palmer takes a critical look at this key question. The original peer-reviewed paper is:

Palmer, G. (2013) Household Solar Photovoltaics: Supplier of Marginal Abatement, or Primary Source of Low-Emission Power? Sustainability 5(4), 1406-1442; doi: 10.3390/su5041406

The energy return on investment (EROI) of solar PV has been the subject of many studies over decades, with some recent studies suggesting an energy payback of less than 2 years. However conventional PV-LCA’s usually focus on ingot/wafer/cell/module/BOS, with the LCA boundary ending at the inverter output.

Further, some researchers argue that upstream energy impacts that are beyond the standard PV-LCA boundaries can make up half of the energy impacts.

My paper builds on a recent study by Prieto and Hall titled “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution: The Energy Return on Investment”.

Hall is arguably the world’s leading expert on the concept of EROI and Prieto was a chief engineer for several major photovoltaic projects in Spain. Based on real-world experience in Spain’s large PV expansion before the GFC, they conclude that the EROI of PV is far lower than commonly assumed, and may be too low to support an energy and economic transition away from fossil fuels. Given Spain’s excellent solar insolation, this is a serious concern.

Taking a similar approach, I examine the role of high-penetration household PV within the Australian NEM, with a focus on Melbourne. I also include an analysis of intermittency, grid integration and the energy costs of storage. Once these downstream energy costs are included, and assuming that PV has an integral role in the electricity system, the EROI drops below the minimum threshold generally considered necessary to transition from fossil fuels.

I conclude that in a grid dominated by unsequestered coal and gas, and treating PV as a non-essential add-on to an electricity meter, PV provides a legitimate source of emission abatement with high, but declining costs. But at high grid penetration, the economic and energy costs of accommodating PV erodes much of the benefits.

PV’s greatest strength lies in being embedded within the low voltage distribution network as a supplementary power source, where it can potentially provide valuable network support, but will require electricity market reform along with a substantial decline in lifetime battery costs. The conclusion is that the short-run tactical response of the expansion of PV without storage works against a long-run strategic approach to deep emission cuts, which will ultimately require the successful adoption of one or more of the candidate low-emission baseload technologies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The system costs are limited to costs that accrue within the electricity system, so environmental and long-term security of supply impacts are excluded from this study.

The study assessed the grid-level system costs for six OECD countries with contrasting mixes of electricity technologies: Finland, France, Germany, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. System costs, which include short-term balancing, long-term adequacy, and the costs of various grid infrastructures, were calculated at both 10% and 30% penetration levels of the main generating sources.

A summary of the results, expressed in dollars per megawatt hour ($/MWh) of electricity delivered, is shown in Table 1 below. The table shows the lowest and highest system costs for each technology considered at each penetration level.

Table 1: Grid-level system costs at differing penetration levels for a range of electricity generation technologies

The consequences of these results are clear. Grid-level system costs can be significant, particularly for wind and solar, and must be included in any realistic analysis of the total system costs of all technologies deployed at scale in regional or national electricity markets.

For Australia, the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics (BREE) in its AETA reportsets out the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) for each technology, with and without a carbon price. However the bureau does not consider grid-level system costs. The levelised cost reflects the minimum cost of energy at which a generator must sell the produced electricity in order to break even.

If we take the mid-point of the OECD grid-level costs for 30% technology penetration shown in Table 1 and add them to the plant costs and carbon costs from the bureau, we can make a more accurate comparison of the total system costs for each technology as might apply in the Australian context – see Figure 1.

Figure 1: Total system cost for generation technology (2012) including carbon and grid-level costs

Ignoring such costs distorts the picture. For example, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) recently put out a press release headed “Renewable Energy Now Cheaper Than New Fossil Fuels in Australia”, which attracted a great deal of attention.

Bloomberg’s very high coal levelised cost ($143) and lower on-shore wind levelised cost ($80) were the primary reasons for the headline, as pointed out by Tristan Edis at Climate Spectator.

However, if we include the grid-level system cost for wind and solar as estimated in the OECD study and apply the arguably more authoritative levelised costs presented by the bureau (shown in Figure 1), then the Bloomberg headline seems unlikely to be correct.

Like the carbon price, grid-level system costs need to be internalised. In other words, the plant owner should have to pay for grid-level costs in the same way they pay for carbon emissions. That way, solar and wind bid prices into the national electricity market would need to include the grid-level costs and could no longer be bid at rock bottom levels. This would help to level the playing field with coal and gas (important for the future viability ofcarbon-capture-and-storage technologies), and allow for a realistic assessment of the financial viability of nuclear energy for Australia.

In particular, if the Australian Energy Market Operator is to make a fully costed assessment, it must include grid-level costs in its forthcoming 100 per cent Renewable Study.

———–

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What’s a solar atlas?

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) recently released its World Solar Atlas report reckoning that the world’s entire projected needs in 2050 of something beginning with “e” could be met with solar panels on less than one percent of the planet’s surface. Pundits covering the report suffered some confusion about whether the ‘e’ was ‘electricity’ or ‘energy’, but none bothered with the obvious implication that covering one percent of Australia, for example, in solar power stations would require trucks as well as panels and land. Extrapolating from the proposed Moree Solar Farm project shows that this “one percent solution” would keep our entire 81,000 strong articulated truck fleet busy lugging stuff out into the bush for a minimum of four years and involve some 50 million round trips. That’s right, all the semi-trailers, all the B-Doubles, and all the road trains. All diverted from goods transport, food harvests and whatever else they do and all doing nothing else but carting solar stuff for four full years. Allocating 8,000 of the fleet to the build would see it stretch out to four decades. Read on for the details…

I didn’t see any mainstream media coverage of the WWF report, but then again, the Lance Armstrong soapie broke at about the same time and didn’t leave much room for other news. So coverage was left to the renewable energy bloggies.

Here’s a sample of the headlines: “… Solar power could serve all the World’s Energy Needs”, and “… solar panels in harmony with nature”, and “…land requirements insignificant”, and “solar could power entire world with less than 1% of land mass”.

“Bloggie” is a neologism related fairly clearly to “groupie” and I’m expecting it to go viral.

Here’s a couple of typical paragraphs that illustrate the coverage:

Highlighting the fact that a global switch to renewable energy is not just necessary, but doable, a new report released by the WWF concludes that the solar arrays necessary to meet all the world’s projected energy needs in 2050 would cover under one percent of global land area. Obviously this is a theoretical exercise, and 100 percent of the planet’s electricity needs are not actually going to be filled through solar.

and

The report illustrates that PV technology, when well-planned, does not conflict with conservation goals and clarifies that no country or region must choose between solar PV and space for humans and nature.

Electricity? Energy? Both start with ‘e’

What’s the problem? Well the problems begin with the letter ‘e’. Globally, electricity is only about 18 percent of energy use (IEA). So meeting all the world’s energy needs is very different from meeting all the world’s electricity needs.

Both needs begin with ‘e’ but getting them confused is no minor matter.

Think about that 2010 IEA (International Energy Agency) pie chart shown above. Most of the sectors are fossil fuels which need replacing with clean sources. Most oil is used in transportation and much of it can and must be replaced by electric vehicles. Other oil and gas is used for heating and again we will either replace these with clean electricity or by some kind of co-generation. Either way, the electricity slab of the pie must grow. You can compare the 2010 pie with that of 1973. The 2010 pie is bigger and electricity’s share has almost doubled. Nevertheless, three billion people still cook with wood or cattle dung. This might be carbon neutral and renewable but the smoke is doubly nasty. Apart from warming the planet, it prematurely kills 3.5 million people a year, including half a million children.

A world without wood cooking stoves needs more electricity, much more. Yes, there might be some other clean technologies that will expand to replace parts of the pie slices but there is still a requirement for the entire pie to grow and for electricity to grow fastest of all and absorb as much of the other sectors as possible.

Does anybody think you can shrink the entire pie or the electrical sector while simultaneously increasing electricity to the 3 billion people who still cook with biomass? Certainly, some countries, and Australia is an example, are electricity gluttons and they could usefully redirect some of their electricity use toward transportation, but justice demands that pie must grow to provide for the 3 billion “have nots”.

In short, to have a shot at stopping the planet heating much more than it already has, we need to be tackling the whole energy sector, electricity alone isn’t enough. And tackling household electricity is only a part of tackling electricity. How big a part? That varies from country to country, but in Australia, household electricity is only about a quarter of all electricity, so the answer is “bugger all”. Adding a 3 kilowatt solar PV system to all of Australia’s 7.6 million households (assuming they all have adequate roof or yard space to install them), would deal with about 3 percent of our energy related greenhouse-gas emissions. The surge in rooftop solar is both a heartening demonstration that people want to do something about climate change, but also a disheartening demonstration that they don’t have a clue about the scale of the problem and the real changes that will make a difference.

Neither deforestation nor livestock start with ‘e’

But wait there’s more. There are also some really significant non-energy climate killers. Scientists call them forcings. A climate “forcing” is anything which forces a change in the ratio of heat arriving to heat leaving the planet. If there is more arriving than leaving, then we have a problem. Globally, there are plenty of non-energy forcings which are really important. The climate forcing from Australia’s livestock methane isn’t just bigger than all household electricity, but bigger than the forcing from the carbon dioxide from all our coal fired power stations. Similarly, the carbon dioxide emissions from clearing peat forests in Indonesia has nothing to do with energy but it rivals Australia’s entire greenhouse gas emission inventory.

So the bloggie mistake of mixing up energy and electricity is a big deal because an effective response to climate change must deal with both … and more.

Getting down to details

But let’s get down to the actual WWF report which is only about electricity, despite all the bloggie confusion over ‘e’ words.

The report’s take home message is simple. Knowing we can supply electricity to the entire planet with solar panels on just one percent of the surface makes solar photovoltaic in particular and renewables in general look like an obvious and complete solution to our climate woes. Because one percent is such a small number. Isn’t it?

What does one percent look like?

One percent of Australia is a bit under 8 million hectares. Cover it in solar farms similar to the proposed Moree Solar Farm and you’d have about 12 times our current electricity supply and about 2.6 times our current total energy usage.

In theory, we would have as much clean electricity available for export as we currently are exporting coal. We’d just need to run an extension cord up to Darwin and across a little bit of water to Indonesia with some double adapters and a bunch of power boards. Yes, I’m aware that the Germans have been having a few problems with the extension chords running out to their offshore wind farms, but they’re only three years behind schedule. How hard can it be?

We had better assume that electricity export is feasible and persist with considering the 8 million hectare figure because we shall soon see that Indonesia won’t have a hope in hell of covering its WWF allocated area with panels.

What does 8 million hectares look like? Consider all the cities and urban areas in Australia. They add up to just 1.6 million hectares, about 10 times more than we use for mining and waste management. So we can get an idea of one percent by multiplying all our urban and city areas by about 5. So drive from the centre of the city of your choice to its outer suburban edge, then start bull dozing trees and levelling ground for your solar panels until you’ve levelled an area about 5 times bigger than the city you just left. Do it for every city and you’ll have one percent.

But what if you are fond of trees, bats and koalas? Let’s think about alternatives. We currently crop 25 million hectares, and these areas are already cleared and mostly level enough. So let’s just buy a third of our crop land and cover it in panels. That’s not sounding much better than the first alternative.

No matter. Just keep driving. And driving. And driving. Out past the fringes of the cities and suburbs and on through the market gardens and interminable grape vines; past all the wheat and barley and sorghum fields. Out to the middle of nowhere. Being sure, of course, to avoid the 100 million hectares of protected areas including those for indigenous uses. Don’t forget to fill up with petrol before you pass the last town.

Now, stop, think and compare. The proposed Moree Solar Farm is intended to cover 1129 hectares of land. Where? Near Moree. Is it good-for-nothing middle-of-nowhere land? No, it’s farm land. Remember, I rejected this, but they didn’t. They wanted to be near Moree. Near an electricity inter-connector, near workers, near supermarkets, near schools for the worker’s children, near every other bloody thing you need to build anything big.

Honk if your B-double is working for solar

So one percent is 8 million hectares and covering it in panels is like building 7,000 Moree Solar Farms. The Environmental Impact Statement for the Moree Solar Farm detailed about 7,200 B-Double truck loads of material being shipped from Sydney and Newcastle over a four year period to build this relatively small 150 MW power plant. So 7,000 similar solar farms would require some 50 million truckloads of stuff being shipped out past all the trees and farms and workers and petrol stations into the middle of nowhere.

Don’t forget sacred sites and wildlife

I wonder if WWF has heard of the Ranger Uranium mine? The local aboriginal people have spent the last 40 years fighting mining companies who dug a bloody big hole for that mine. This bloody big hole is about 400 hectares. So it’s about a third the area of the Moree Solar Farm. Which makes 8 million hectares equal to some 20,000 Ranger mines … but with panels instead of a big hole. An agreement with the aboriginal people has now been reached at Ranger. The hole is being filled in and the next mine will be underground.

The mining industry was a slow learner, it took decades to learn to consult with and treat aboriginals as a trusted work force worthy of investment and fair dealing rather than as a nuisance. What will Big Solar do when it wants to cover an area the size of 20,000 Rangers with panels and stuff? Will it consult? Will it pay? If we had the reactors, the uranium from just one Ranger could supply all our current electricity.

According to the SBS documentary “Dirty Business” (part 3), the Ranger agreement is worth some $700 million. Would anybody like to estimate how many of the 20,000 Ranger sized areas to be covered in panels will require negotiation with traditional owners? Do I hear an insignificant number like “one percent”? Someone needs to tell WWF that terra nullius got put out with the garbage in Australia some time back.

And of course there’s wildlife. How many sites will encounter wildlife issues involving protected plant or animal species? Do I hear a guess of just one percent? In which case we could generate about 200 legal battles involving perhaps three or four solicitors and a scientist or two for a couple of years each. The Desert Sunlight Solar project, featured by WWF in the Solar Atlas and mentioned again below, has a 2200 page Environmental Impact Study which is clear: habitat for various animals, including various species of “special concern” and the threatened desert tortoise, will be destroyed, including parts of what had formerly been called “critical habitat” for the tortoise. The most the tortoises got was an exclusion fence to keep them being killed during construction.

How much is 50 million loads of stuff?

But regardless of whether we deal sensitively with these issues or just bring in the red-necks and bulldoze compliance, the material problems remain. Is 50 million B-double truckloads a lot? Line up 50 million B-Doubles end to end and it would go around the planet 32 times. But let’s suppose we manage to find 8 million hectares of good for nothing land. Hopefully, wildlife free and a mere 300 km from our material sources of steel, cement and glass. That’s a 600 km round trip. Note that Sydney-Moree is a 1200 kilometre round trip, and Sydney-Bourke is a 1500 kilometre trip, and Perth-Kalgoolie is 1200 km return, so I’m being ridiculously optimistic. As it happens, our Bureau of Statistics keeps data on articulated truck distances traveled in Australia. Keep in mind that we are rather well blessed with bloody big trucks compared to many countries. Our 81,000 articulated trucks travel around 7,000 million kilometres annually, with rigid trucks doing slightly more. Not all of these articulated vehicles are B-Doubles, so we may actually need more than 50 million loads depending on fleet composition. In any event, the project would keep our entire current articulated truck fleet busy for over four years. If we devoted 10 percent of the fleet, then it would stretch out for 40 years.

Now you are starting to see why an energy source’s footprint matters and why land close to your source of steel, glass and cement is at a premium. Nobody wants to drive out to whoop whoop, or build there, or work there.

Practical feasibility cannot be determined by comparing the size of blobs on a piece of paper, but this is the entire substance of the WWF Solar Atlas argument. The oft-heard statement that Australia has plenty of sunshine and space shows a naive childishness that is inappropriate in dealing with a serious problem.

And what about our northern neighbor?

But what of other countries? The WWF Solar Atlas has some case studies. They didn’t study Australia, but did consider our northern neighbor Indonesia. In this case, the amount of land they considered necessary was about 1/4 of a percent of Indonesia or just half a million hectares (4897 square kilometres in the pseudo scientific precision of the WWF report). Now, Indonesia has an area of about 200 million hectares which is roughly the same size as Queensland, but with a population of 237 million people. How much free space is available? If the people were evenly distributed, the density would be 123 people per square kilometre and you’d need to displace some 600,000 people for the proposed solar panels. But, of course, the population isn’t evenly spread out. There are many protected areas in Indonesia and they include about 88 million hectares of the planet’s most valuable tropical forests. Subtract this forest area and, on average, there are 211 people per square kilometre and you’d need to displace over a million of them for the panels.

How well do solar panels and rainforest mix?

But using an “on average” figure like this is a little misleading, we can get a better idea of actual land availability by considering what other industries which need land are doing. What, for example, is the palm oil industry doing to get its land? It’s burning the forests and killing orangutans. Would it bother doing this if there were plenty of terra nullius just waiting for palms and panels?

Pick a number, any number

Does the WWF consider such matters? No. But aside from just not thinking and making claims without evidence, even the basic technical factors used in the report calculations are questionable. The back of the report contains a very nice picture of some very shiny solar panels at a First Solar project in the US, the Desert Sunlight Project (DSP) (mentioned above). This is a 550 MW $1.5 billion project spread over 1600 hectares. At an estimated 20 percent capacity factor, this will produce about 0.6 gigawatt hours of electricity per year per hectare [(0.55*24*365*0.20)/1600=0.6] with a very dense design involving 8.8 million panels and over 14,000 truckloads of stuff. The Moree Solar farm is much less densely occupied using quite different technology with just 640,000 quite different panels. Hence the anticipated gigawatt hours per hectare of the Moree Solar Farm is about half that of the DSP [(0.150*24*365*0.31)/1129=0.34] despite it using a sun tracking system to boost the capacity factor. In very rough terms, the DSP’s thin film technology gets double the energy density per hectare by putting almost twice as many truckloads of stuff in each hectare.

The MSF and DSP represent interesting points on the solar design spectrum. But what’s the figure the WWF uses in its report as a reasonable figure for gigawatt hours of electricity per year per hectare? On page 52 it uses 2.6 gigawatt hours per hectare per year. If they used the First Solar actual project figure, they’d need to multiply the land required by about four and that’s an even bigger deal. Suddenly you need to displace some 4 million people or slash and burn far more tropical forest.

And don’t forget. This is all just for daytime electricity. At night we’d be at the mercy of the wind or burning fossil fuels.

But the questionable assumptions just keep coming. The report assumed that Indonesians, and everybody else on the planet, will consume 3,850 kilowatt hours of electricity per year per person in 2050. How reasonable is this? Australia’s current electricity supply generates about 11,000 kilowatt hours per capita. The OECD average is about 8,000 kwh/yr. WWF expects the Indonesians and everybody else to get by with half the current OECD average while also using that electricity to replace oil and gas.

Has the WWF talked to anybody in China?

In contrast to this WWF ‘proof by picture book’ approach to a serious problem, the Chinese are gearing up to mass produce small modular nuclear reactors (SMR). Each of which will generate about 10 times more electricity than the Moree Solar Farm despite being just a few metres in diameter.

SMRs are being developed by other countries also and are generally designed to be shipped on railway carriages and buried. They can be put precisely where required. You really don’t need to drive to the middle of nowhere and fence off the tortoises. You really don’t need long extension chords and smart grids and energy storage. Just dig a hole, drop in your reactor, and connect a generator, desal plant, hydrogen generation plant, whatever. In the interim, the Chinese are building a back bone of huge reactors that will be generating somewhere between 450 and 670 (depending on how you read the proposed reactors list) TWh/yr (terawatt hours per year) of nuclear electricity by 2020. Nobody should be predicting further than that because the SMRs will be game changers, whether they come from China, Russia, South Korea or the US. Some are fast spectrum units that can use troublesome nuclear waste as fuel. Bingo, the so-called nuclear waste problem is gone.

But aren’t the Chinese building solar panels? Of course. But not for serious electricity. It’s the jobs. With 1.4 billion people, jobs are a priority and, unless you’re a desert tortoise, solar jobs are as good as any other. So the Chinese are planning some 30 TWh/yr from solar PV by 2020. This is just under one percent of the China’s 2009 electricity supply and about one tenth of one percent of her 25,586 TWh/yr total primary energy. If you covered one percent of China with Moree Solar Farm efficiency, you’d cover about 9 million hectares and generate about 11% of China’s primary energy and 81% of the of the 3750 TWh/yr in China’s 2009 electricity supply. Note that China’s per capita energy and electricity use are both still well under half the OECD average, so to supply them the OECD levels of electricity, you’d need to cover about 22 million hectares in Moree Solar Farms.

It’s clear that the main things making a dent in China’s fossil fuel usage in the future will be nuclear and hydro. Wind power in China will be interesting. It’s already producing 73 TWh/yr, but will it survive the factory roll outs of small modular reactors? Not likely. Why install something which is unreliable and buggers up your power grid when you have something which is cheap and reliable and doesn’t need a special grid or storage?

Concluding remarks

The WWF should do better. It has a high powered scientific advisory board. Did they even consider this report? Or did they just give it the nod like the bloggies based on the pretty pictures and nice slogans? That’s not enough, this isn’t a game.

The nuclear build of the 1970s shows us that we have everything we need to rapidly build a low carbon energy system. SMRs will certainly make it easier and quicker, but even without them we have the technology and we have the funds. We don’t need to hassle the tortoises, slaughter the orangutans and increase Aussie road kill with 50 million extra trips. We also know exactly how to roll back most of the last 200 years of deforestation but that won’t be helped by adding another source of habitat destruction.

A world which is four or more degrees hotter should be terrifying enough to make us act promptly and with methods we know work on land we’ve already expropriated, rather than have us bugger up more of the planet with shiny but horrendously inefficient new toys. Shame on WWF for even suggesting it.

———–

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Locally, tipping points are real, but it’s unlikely the whole globe will go at once. (Truthout.org)

NOTE: For some counter arguments, see this HuffPo piece: Tipping Points: Can Humanity Break The Planet? What strikes me is that many of the critics apparently did not read the original article, because they’ve confused/conflated what we’ve said about ecological tipping points with those observed or forecast for the climate system. Because of the inherent global interconnectivity and physical couplings of the latter, tipping points are plausible and indeed likely for some elements, such as Arctic sea ice. Not so for biomes, we argue. If you want a PDF copy of the TREE paper, email me.

Barry Brook

We argue that at the global-scale, ecological “tipping points” and threshold-like “planetary boundaries” are improbable. Instead, shifts in the Earth’s biosphere follow a gradual, smooth pattern. This means that it might be impossible to define scientifically specific, critical levels of biodiversity loss or land-use change. This has important consequences for both science and policy.

Humans are causing changes in ecosystems across Earth to such a degree that there is now broad agreement that we live in an epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. But the question of just how these changes will play out — and especially whether we might be approaching a planetary tipping point with abrupt, global-scale consequences — has remained unsettled.

A tipping point occurs when an ecosystem attribute, such as species abundance or carbon sequestration, responds abruptly and possibly irreversibly to a human pressure, such as land-use or climate change. Many local- and regional-level ecosystems, such as lakes,forests and grasslands, behave this way. Recently however, there have been several efforts to define ecological tipping points at the global scale.

At a local scale, there are definitely warning signs that an ecosystem is about to “tip”. For the terrestrial biosphere, tipping points might be expected if ecosystems across Earth respond in similar ways to human pressures and these pressures are uniform, or if there are strong connections between continents that allow for rapid diffusion of impacts across the planet.

These criteria are, however, unlikely to be met in the real world.

First, ecosystems on different continents are not strongly connected. Organisms are limited in their movement by oceans and mountain ranges, as well as by climatic factors, and while ecosystem change in one region can affect the global circulation of, for example, greenhouse gases, this signal is likely to be weak in comparison with inputs from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation.

Second, the responses of ecosystems to human pressures like climate change or land-use change depend on local circumstances and will therefore differ between locations. From a planetary perspective, this diversity in ecosystem responses creates an essentially gradual pattern of change, without any identifiable tipping points.

This puts into question attempts to define critical levels of land-use change or biodiversity loss scientifically.

Why does this matter? Well, one concern we have is that an undue focus on planetary tipping points may distract from the vast ecological transformations that have already occurred.

After all, as much as four-fifths of the biosphere is today characterised by ecosystems that locally, over the span of centuries and millennia, have undergone human-driven regime shifts of one or more kinds.

Recognising this reality and seeking appropriate conservation efforts at local and regional levels might be a more fruitful way forward for ecology and global change science.

Corey Bradshaw

(see also  notes published here on ConservationBytes.com)

Let’s not get too distracted by the title of the this article – Does the terrestrial biosphere have planetary tipping points? – or the potential for a false controversy. It’s important to be clear that the planet is indeed ill, and it’s largely due to us. Species are going extinct faster than they would have otherwise. The planet’s climate system is being severely disrupted; so is the carbon cycle. Ecosystem services are on the decline.

But – and it’s a big “but” – we have to be wary of claiming the end of the world as we know it, or people will shut down and continue blindly with their growth and consumption obsession. We as scientists also have to be extremely careful not to pull concepts and numbers out of thin air without empirical support.

Specifically, I’m referring to the latest “craze” in environmental science writing – the idea of “planetary tipping points” and the related “planetary boundaries”.

It’s really the stuff of Hollywood disaster blockbusters – the world suddenly shifts into a new “state” where some major aspect of how the world functions does an immediate about-face.

Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of localised examples of such tipping points, often characterised by something we call “hysteresis”. Brook defines hysterisis as:

a situation where the current state of an ecosystem is dependent not only on its environment but also on its history, with the return path to the original state being very different from the original development that led to the altered state. Also, at some range of the driver, there can exist two or more alternative states

and “tipping point” as:

the critical point at which strong nonlinearities appear in the relationship between ecosystem attributes and drivers; once a tipping point threshold is crossed, the change to a new state is typically rapid and might be irreversible or exhibit hysteresis.

Some of these examples include state shifts that have happened (or mostly likely will) to the cryosphere, ocean thermohaline circulation, atmospheric circulation, and marine ecosystems, and there are many other fine-scale examples of ecological systems shifting to new (apparently) stable states.

However, claiming that we are approaching a major planetary boundary for our ecosystems (including human society), where we witness such transitions simultaneously across the globe, is simply not upheld by evidence.

Regional tipping points are unlikely to translate into planet-wide state shifts. The main reason is that our ecosystems aren’t that connected at global scales.

The paper provides a framework against which one can test the existence or probability of a planetary tipping point for any particular ecosystem function or state. To date, the application of the idea has floundered because of a lack of specified criteria that would allow the terrestrial biosphere to “tip”. From a more sociological viewpoint, the claim of imminent shift to some worse state also risks alienating people from addressing the real problems (foxes), or as Brook and colleagues summarise:

framing global change in the dichotomous terms implied by the notion of a global tipping point could lead to complacency on the “safe” side of the point and fatalism about catastrophic or irrevocable effects on the other.

In other words, let’s be empirical about these sorts of politically charged statements instead of crying “Wolf!” while the hordes of foxes steal most of the flock.

———–

Originally published on The Conversation, an independent analysis and commentary website written by academics and researchers.

———–

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

Introduction

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

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

Port Augusta coal-fired power station, South Australia

Climate, oil and energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to do at Port Augusta

So what are we to do at Port Augusta? And every where else in Australia?

A report, Zero Carbon Options from Ben Heard of ThinkClimate Consulting with financial analysis from James Pang of Pang and Brown tells us we can install a Canadian nuclear plant for about $4 billion dollars, or follow the German lead and install a combination of wind and solar for about $8 billion. Of course, the former risks a deathless nuclear meltdown if Port Augusta is ever hit by a 15 metre Tsunami, and the latter risks continuing to bugger up the climate because we will have $4 billion less to deal with the remaining emission problems we still need to deal with.

At this point it is imperative to point out that while the reactor being considered in this report is Canadian, it isn’t French Canadian.

At this point you could just go and read the aforementioned report. The rest of this document will just present a few more details about the comparative history of the nuclear growth in response to the 1970s oil crises compared with the wind and solar response to climate change of the past decade.

The 1970s oil crisis and nuclear expansion

The oil crisis of 1973 provided an example of just how incredibly fast an energy infrastructure can be rebuilt if you have the skills and the will.

Figure 1.

The response to a rapid 5 fold increase in oil prices was that many countries rapidly rolled out substantial amounts of nuclear electricity capacity. Figure 1, using International Energy Agency data — See Appendix A. illustrates the rates at which some small, medium and large countries added nuclear power during this period.Many countries had small nuclear research programs at the beginning of the 1970s, but by 1981 most had expanded these and were generating substantial amounts of electricity using nuclear reactors with a phase out of oil combustion for electricity. For example, Belgium, as shown in the Figure, despite a population below 10 million in 1975, added 25 terawatt-hours/yr in just seven years. They aren’t shown on the figure, but Switzerland and Sweden did much the same, adding nuclear to their predominantly hydro electricity systems. To put the Belgium figure into context we can compare it to the German solar build. Between 2000, when it began its solar feed in tariff policy, and 2011, Germany, with 80 million people, added just 19 terawatt-hours/yr of solar photovoltaic electricity

The per capita rate of the Belgium nuclear roll out is about 10 times faster than the German solar roll out. But what about the German wind roll out? The Belgium nuclear roll out was 3 times faster than the combined wind plus solar German roll out. Keep in mind that there was nothing new about solar photovoltaic technology in the year 2000. More than 10 years previously, in 1989, Australian Professor Martin Green of the University of NSW predicted that solar photovoltaic cells could replace coal in 10 to 15 years. Indeed solar photovoltaic power plants were a dismally ineffective part of the oil crisis response and quickly abandoned. Debris from these plants still pollutes some desert areas in the US.

After the initial startup phase in response to the oil crisis, additional nuclear growth during the 80s was huge. The figure shows France, with a population of just 50 million people in 1980, adding 215 terawatt-hours/yr of electricity in a decade. This is about 6 times faster than the recent decade’s combined German wind $+$ solar growth. Germany’s nuclear growth during the 80s was well behind that of France but still almost double its combined wind and solar growth since 2000. It also looks highly unlikely that solar and wind growth will accelerate as nuclear growth did in its second decade. More on this below.

Figure 1 contains just a sample of countries, but it is fair to say that during that 1970s oil crisis, every country who tried to roll out significant amounts of nuclear power succeeded.

In contrast, it has been 15 years since the Kyoto protocol was signed and during that period no country has achieved anything like the oil-crisis nuclear growth using non-hydro renewable energy technologies like wind and solar.

Germany, with over 80 million people, is often held up as a model of renewable energy deployment, and it certainly has the best record in growth of wind and solar electricity technologies. But between the signing of Kyoto in 1997 and 2011, it has added just 19 terawatt-hours/yr of solar photovoltaic electricity and another 46 terawatt-hours/yr of wind power. I’ve already mentioned the staggering cost, and poorer Germans are paying the price with high electricity bills and hundreds of thousands of disconnections annually.

South Korea, with a population of 45 million when the Kyoto protocol was signed, has since added 71 terawatt hours of nuclear electricity. She has recently begun work with the United Arab Emirates and will have 4 x 1400 mega watt nuclear reactors up and running by 2020 generating some 44 terawatt-hours/yr for the next 60 years at a capital cost of 20 billion dollars with another 20 billion in running costs. Compare this 40 billion dollars for 44 terawatt-hours/yr for 60 years with Germany’s 100 billion Euros for 19 terawatt-hours/yr Solar PV for about 25 years … after which you have to build everything all over again.

If Australia is to take climate change seriously and make steep reductions in our climate forcings (Note: A forcing is anything which has a climate impact, not just greenhouse gases. For example land clearing changes how much sunlight is reflected back to space, so it is a forcing.), then it is clear that it must consider nuclear options. The ThinkClimate Consulting and Brown and Pang report gives a concrete example of how a nuclear option might work at Port Augusta and should be considered by the committee. The report can be downloaded from the Decarbonise SA website.

Climate change responses and mountain climbing

I now want to turn to more general issues which relate to our response to climate change. Because the climate science tells us that our response has to be much bigger than just electricity.

What would it do to Australia’s emissions profile if we added 3 kw of solar panels to all 7.6 million Australian households? Not that this is even possible. Think of high density areas like Lane Cove in Sydney’s North Shore with its dense cluster of multi-story units. Even so, such a move would clean up just 3 percent of Australia’s energy consumption. That’s all.

In Australia, household electricity is about 25 percent of all electricity use and electricity use is about 25 percent of all energy use. So household electricity is a quarter of a quarter … i.e., 1/16 … of the energy component of our impact on the climate. And universal 3 kw panels would only deal with about half of that. The knee jerk feeling that installing solar panels is a positive response to climate change is short sighted and ill-informed. Such actions might bring incremental improvement but at great cost and they wouldn’t get us to where we need to get.

To understand why incremental improvements don’t necessarily lead to the desired reductions we need to make, you need to think about climbing mountains.

Figure 2.

Will incremental ascents always get you to the main peak? The figure makes it obvious. If you head to the left, you go up. Great. But you end up going in a direction that doesn’t lead you to the summit and it might not get you high enough to achieve what you need. Going right looks all wrong because you go down. We’ll give details of real world example shortly with the totally useless switch by the British to natural gas.

The situation is the same when fighting climate change by setting emission reduction targets or a tax on carbon. It’s assuming that all upward paths get you to the summit. They may not.

Industrial problem solvers in industries as diverse as bus scheduling or oil refinery planning deal daily with these problems. They use vast computing power and sophisticated mathematics to find pathways to solutions using either techniques proven to be optimal or, when this isn’t possible, by surveying as much of the solution landscape as possible. The little picture I’ve drawn is in two dimensions. In industrial and scientific applications, there may be thousands of dimensions to a problem. This means there are many more ways to head off in a wrong direction.

Think about what can go wrong (and has been going wrong!) with the current short sighted response to tackling climate change:

1. You can head into a dead end. This is one of  the three problems with using natural gas (which is just methane) to generate electricity.

The UK has gradually substituted gas for coal over the past 20 years and its CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity has fallen slowly from 672 grams to 470 grams. But we’ll see later that the real target that needs to be met is well under 100. All that capital invested in gas is dead end investment. It has been wasted, gas is just another fossil fuel which can never feature in any long term sustainable energy system. They’ll have to throw out that massive wasted investment and start all over again.

In comparison, modern nuclear plants have a 60 year design life, and we know they meet long term sustainable goals for emission levels.

The second reason is even worse. Methane burns cleaner than coal but extracting gas inevitably leads to leakages. Because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas, even small amounts of leakage can easily offset the gains due to the cleaner burning.

Last but not least. Burning coal produces sulphates which have a cooling impact on the planet. They are a serious pollution problem but they have a short term cooling impact which partly offsets some of the extra CO2 emissions.

The bottom line is that gas actually makes things worse, it just substitutes things that aren’t easily measured and accounted for in agreements like Kyoto for things which are. Gas is a dangerous dead end.

2. You can run out of money. This is the German solar photovoltaic feed in tariff problem. As of 2011, 100 billion Euros has  cleaned up just 3.3 percent of German electricity.

3. A similar but slightly different problem to running out of money is that you can run out of rich people.

Currently there is a global glut of solar panels which has been pushing down prices and sending solar panel companies bankrupt. How can you have a global glut with solar panels producing so little electricity?

Our Productivity Commission estimated that the Germans are paying $891 for each tonne of CO2 that solar panels reduce. This is bizarre. The solar panel strategy in effect, relies on there being enough rich people who want to feel like they are doing “the right thing” or enough gullible Governments willing to subsidise it. The solar panel strategy globally is simply running out of rich people.

3. You can run out of alternative energy sites.

This is part of the problem with wind power. It gets progressively harder to find good sites and a profit oriented company doesn’t want to build in less than optimal positions. The Germans
have been busily building wind farms in the north of Germany, because it’s nice and windy there, but there’s no way to get that energy to the industrial heart land in the south. They need a massive grid upgrade. Suddenly cheap  wind power isn’t so cheap any more. This ends up as a run-out-of-money problem again.

4. You can simply blow the cumulative emissions budget.

Climate scientists have got a pretty good handle on how much CO2 you can add to the atmosphere in total. With CO2 unlike other climate gases, it doesn’t much matter you add it. Most of it stays aloft for hundreds of years. So what matters isn’t when you emit CO2, but the cumulative emissions over the next 100 years of so. It’s fine to increase emissions for a decade if you can plunge to zero at the end of it. For example, the Chinese are looking to build 400 huge nuclear reactors. That’s a lot of emissions from cement production, but it gets them to a very good place. In parallel, they are looking at mass produced small modular reactors (SMR).

We, in contrast, don’t have either a plan A or a plan B, let alone parallel plans.  We just hope that a carbon tax  will guide the inscrutable mechanism of the market to produce a
solution and bumble along with emission targets. Our backup “plan” is to buy dodgy credits if we don’t meet our dodgy targets.

The carbon credit system is designed to complement shortsighted emission target thinking. It allows for example, a developing country to build a supercritical coal plant and get carbon credits because these plants are a slight improvement over other coal plants. This allows a dirty coal plant in Australia to offset some of its emissions by buying credits from the country with the new supercritical plant. Bingo. You have two coal plants pumping out CO2 and most of this CO2 is additional because the developing country had nothing to start with.

The obsession with targets obscures the fundamental need in in developing countries for far more energy. They aren’t interested in targets because their current deprivations still look pretty serious compared to climate risks. They need technologies which simultaneously solve both problems. Currently some 3 billion of the planet’s population still cook with wood, or some other biomass like cattle dung. The smoke from this cooking kills about 3.5 million people annually, including around a million children per year with pneumonia or acute lower respiratory tract infections (see the recently released Global Burden of Disease study. Lancet 2012; 380: 2224–60).

So while about 200,000 children die annually in India because of wood or dung smoke, Greenpeace in India is trying to stop the building of a massive nuclear complex at Jaitapur which would save many thousands of lives because Greenpeace think nuclear power is dangerous. Hell, there might be another meltdown and nobody would die.  In the two weeks that the world’s global media jackals waited to get pictures of 3 minor radiation burns at Fukushima, some 38,000 children died from infections caused by wood smoke.

But I guess they don’t matter because they were carbon neutral deaths and not those scary radiation kind.

5. Lastly, you can run out of time.

We are busily trying one ”promising” new beaut cool technology after another only to have them all fail for different reasons while we shy away from a technology which we know works. We are rapidly running out of time.

The bigger picture

An effective response to climate change isn’t just about energy. It’s important when considering Port Augusta to see whatever action is taken as part of a total response to climate change. We can’t simply invest huge sums of money at one or a few power plants and think that this is enough. It isn’t.

There are a couple of ways to view what is required for an effective response to climate change. In the following two short sections, we first present the broad requirements as determined by climate scientists and secondly quantify the per person greenhouse gas emissions budget that this implies.

Getting back our recent climate

James Hansen’s NASA team has established that there are three things necessary to return the climate to its unusual and relatively stable state. The last 10,000 years really is unusual in the climate record and may be the key to the development of crop farming, the critical feature needed to support large stable populations. It’s not quite clear if we are partly or wholly responsible for this stability, or that we have merely exploited a lucky run to develop our civilisation. Certainly, our species and forerunners did nothing for at least a couple of hundred thousand years despite having ample mental and physical capacity. But the climate of the past 10,000 years has been special and to preserve it in roughly its current form we need to do three things:

1. Rebuild the energy infrastructure with close to carbon neutral methods. This is the EnergyRebuild requirement. This is a natural focus in the context of decisions about Port Augusta. But there is more we must do.
2. Roll back 200 years of deforestation to draw down additional carbon. This is the Reforestation requirement.
3. Slash non-carbon-dioxide contributions to climate change. This includes methane, black carbon and nitrous oxide and can be called the MethaneReduction requirement on the understanding that it embodies a little more than simply methane.

None of these measures on their own will be sufficient to bring atmospheric CO2 back down to 350 ppm (parts per million) by 2150. The last measure is particularly important because it can change climate forcings quickly. It’s methane reductions that might just help stop us from crossing climate tipping points from which there is no return.

But these measures will not be without substantial cost and disruption. Reforestation and methane reduction will require rural restructuring which cannot be done humanely without adequate compensation. Australia has 70 million sheep now compared to 170 million in 1990. This is a major part of how we have been able to meet our Kyoto commitments. But reductions in cattle are also essential. The Zero Carbon Britain 2030 report is making similar calls for similar reasons with plans for a 90 percent drop in the British beef herd and an 80 percent drop in the dairy herd.

Plans for Port Augusta must be seen in the light of a total climate change response plan and we must not think that all our problems will vanish simply with an energy rebuild.

Per person emissions

The Copenhagen Diagnosis documents tell us that the sustainable level of annual CO2eq (carbon dioxide equivalent) emissions per person for the estimated 2050 global population of some 9 billion people is about one tonne each.

Australia’s current level of per person CO2eq emissions is about 25 tonnes.

Australia’s current greenhouse gas emissions are about 550 million tonnes CO2eq per annum, with about 200 million of those coming from electricity generation. Clearly then, replacing all our electricity generation with clean sources would still leave us with 15 tonnes of GHG emissions per person. There are clearly many more sources of emissions than electricity. Some of these relate to energy and others to agriculture.

Australia’s livestock generate about 3 million tonnes of methane per annum which is considered, under Kyoto rules, to be equivalent to 75 million tonnes of CO2. So even if we reduced all energy emissions to zero, our livestock emissions would still put us at 3 times the global average sustainable level.

Is it even possible to get to 1 tonne per person?

Given that about 2/3 of our beef is exported, we could stop exporting that and get close to that one tonne level, but this would still leave no room at all for any other emissions.

Globally also, meat consumption is a major problem. A 2010 paper showed that FAO projections of meat consumption growth globally would see greenhouse gas emissions due to meat production occupying 71 percent of that one tonne per person CO2eq budget by 2050. If you spend 700 kilograms of your 1000 kilo limit on meat, then there isn’t much room for everything else.

At the current French rate of 90 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity then we can use about 11,000 kilowatt hour per person per year for one tonne of CO2. The current Australian per capita electricity use is just under this. This isn’t household use, but total electricity use divided by the population.

Australian electricity use accounts for about a quarter of the energy we use and 95 percent of that energy comes from fossil fuels. So “simply” replacing current electrical energy with clean electricity won’t come even close to meeting the one tonne target, not in Australia and not anywhere. But with enough electricity, we can use it to replace most other forms of energy. We can make synthetic aircraft fuel, we can make hydrogen for fuel cells. But we need plenty.

So the one tonne budget will be tough. To achieve it we will need to produce electricity for about half the CO2 yield of the French. This is possible, the Swiss and the Swedes both manage this with a mix of hydro and nuclear, while the French still have some dirty fuels in their system. We also must slash meat consumption and meet all our other energy needs, such as petroleum, with electricity or other clean fuel technologies.

Unfortunately, there’s one last complication which highlights why the methane reduction plank is absolutely essential, along with reforestation in Hansen’s 3-pronged strategy. The complication is that the concept carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq), is poorly named. The factors used by the Kyoto protocol to convert methane to CO2eq understate the climate impact of methane during the 20 years after its release by a factor of about four. So the impact on the climate of the 3 million tonnes of Australian livestock methane isn’t 3 tonnes per capita, it’s more like about 12.

The good news is the relationship of the livestock population to the Land Use plank of the climate problem. Australians only live on a couple of million hectares of our 770 million hectare land mass. We have cleared about 100 million hectares since white arrival and crop about 25 million. So we have 10s of millions of hectares cleared for sheep and cattle that will reforest and soak up CO2 if we remove the livestock. It’s similar globally. We have plenty that will reforest if we don’t use it to grow 12 million tonnes of feed for livestock. So slashing livestock populations simultaneously tackles two of Hansens’s three planks.

Concluding remarks

As you can see, the one tonne long term global greenhouse emission budget will be really tough and we can’t afford to stuff around with expensive feel good technologies. We don’t just need to replace Port Augusta with a clean electricity source, we need to either double its output so that we can charge electric vehicles and/or make hydrogen for fuel cells.

Nuclear power is currently illegal in Australia. This is incompatible with an effective response to climate change. Many countries, particularly Belgium, France, the US, Switzerland, and South Korea have shown us that low emission electricity can be obtained quickly with nuclear power. Germany has demonstrated that even the biggest economic powerhouse in Europe can’t roll out renewables quickly, let alone affordably.

To resist nuclear because you are worried about safety issues is like standing on a railway track before and oncoming train and not jumping out of the way because you may sprain an ankle. I’ve included an appendix discussing the stress and fatalities caused by anti-nuclear hysteria at Fukushima. The only issue I haven’t dealt with is nuclear waste. Again this is irrelevant and trivial compared to climate related risks. The nuclear industry has had a solution to the so-called waste problem for decades. The solution is to use the waste as fuel in what are called fast reactors.

The second appendix is some IEA graphs presenting the data used to build Figure 1 at the beginning of this submission. They will repay careful examination.

I urge you to read the Decarbonise SA and Pang and Brown report and take the necessary steps with the Federal Government to make nuclear power legal. I urge you to show leadership and consider the United Arab Emirates path to fast tracking nuclear development so that Australia is no longer a luddite climate vandalising basket case.

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This is a web version of a submission to the South Australian Parliamentary Committee on the Port Augusta Power stations (the PDF is available here)

Appendices

Fukushima fear mongering turns fatal

It is unfortunate that any recommendation for nuclear power in Australia needs to deal with decades of nuclear fear mongering. Not only has the anti-nuclear movement delayed effective action on climate change, recent events in Japan have shown exactly how deadly and destructive such fear mongering can be.

In March 2011, Japan was hit by a quake and tsunami which killed some 19,000 people. The seismic events killed along an extensive area of the north eastern coast of Japan. There were a few places along this coast where people didn’t die … the nuclear power plants. All but three of the 1,000 or so workers at the 4 plants housing 10 reactors on the day of the tsunami owe their lives to the simple fact that they were working in plants designed to cope with a sizable tsunami. Had these people been working as coastal roof top solar panel installers, or any other kind of coastal business, many would be dead. But the tsunamis exceeded design specifications and swamped backup generators and the end result was a deathless triple meltdown. So after saving lives by generating clean electricity for decades and saving more lives on the day of the tsunami, the reactor failures and subsequent events were portrayed as a disaster. The media staked out hospitals overflowing with victims of the actual disaster to eventually take pictures of three reactor workers with mild radiation burns in images that went global.

As the reactor failures unfolded the anti-nuclear movement went to work calculating the number of cancers that the Fukushima radiation would cause over their lifetime to those involved. A paper was subsequently published. Did anybody think to do this calculation when a toxic and carcinogenic plume blossomed over Adelaide with the huge Wingfield fuel fire in March 2012, or when the Chiba oil refinery burned for 12 days after the quake and tsunami in Japan? How did the paper calculating the cancers due to Fukushima radiation control for those due to the Chiba smoke? It didn’t and nobody bothered in Adelaide, because nobody ever bothers to calculate refinery fire cancers.

The method used in this paper by physicists Ten Hoeve and Mark Jacobson is explicitly warned against as invalid by international radiation experts. Here’s an illustration of the method using alcohol instead of radiation. Alcohol causes cancer. True enough. Let’s suppose that if 1000 people drink a glass of wine a day then eventually 10 will get cancer due to that wine. I just made those numbers up, they are to illustrate the method and are intended to be simple to work with rather than accurate, but it is definitely true that alcohol causes cancer and the Cancer Council says there is no safe level so the situation is analogous to the situation with radiation. So how many people will get cancer if a billion people drink 1/1000 of a glass per day? The anti-nuclear logic used by Hoeve and Jacobson estimates 10,000 cancers. The population is consuming 1000 times the alcohol that produced 10 cancers, therefore there will be 10,000 cancers. That’s the logic behind the study and the anti-nuclear people have been pulling this rubbish ever since Linus Pauling made it famous.

[Thanks to Jim Green for pointing out the error in the previous paragraph ... it has been fixed ... I'd hope Green will do the same with his errors]

Radiation experts advise explicitly against the method of calculation used in the study:

“Collective effective dose is not intended as a tool for epidemiological risk assessment, and it is inappropriate to use it in risk projections. The aggregation of very low individual doses over extended time periods is inappropriate, and in particular, the calculation of the number of cancer deaths based on collective effective doses from trivial individual doses should be avoided.”

This is why the study appeared in an energy and environment journal and not a specialist radiological, medical or epidemiology journal. So the conclusions are ill-founded, but let’s consider them anyway.

The study’s best estimate is that without any evacuation the Fukushima radiation would have caused between 24 and 1800 cancers with the best estimate being 180. This is over the whole of Japan. Given current cancer rates, Japan will have about 10 million cancers over the next 30 years … plus 180. But of course cancer rates aren’t constant. They change according to lifestyle choices, pollution levels and so on. For example, Japan used to have what can what can reasonably be called background levels of bowel cancer. These are the low rates found around the world in populations living on mainly plant based diets. The rates in men and women were similar and resulted in about 20,000 bowel cancers per year in the Japan of the early 1970s. With the Westernisation of the Japanese diet, the number of new cases of bowel cancer rose over a couple of decades to more than 101,000 annually, with the small increase in population accounting for perhaps 3,000 of these. Of all the changes to the diet, the only ones with a causal connection to bowel cancer were the increases in red and processed meat. Obesity can also cause bowel cancer, but the Japanese rate of just 3.2 percent is one of the lowest in the world.

Over the next 30 years, Japan will have about 78,000 x 30 = 2.3 million extra bowel cancers due to dietary change and, if you trust anti-nuclear logic, about 180 due to Fukushima radiation.

The Hoeve Jacobson study is rather like some Hollywood films. The special effects are brilliant and the technical excellence is remarkable, but nothing can save a fundamentally silly plot-line.

But such was the fear mongering panic after the reactor failures that an extended evacuation was decided upon. According to Hoeve and Jacobson, the panic and haste of the evacuation killed some 600 people. It is amazing how much expertise they expend on estimating their figure of 180 cancers and how little they spend on checking the 600 figure on evacuation deaths. It’s a news report, it must be right. Nevertheless, Hoeve and Jacobson plough on, assume the figure is accurate and apply their considerable skills to estimate the cancers saved by the evacuation at about 22 percent of the cancers. This is a savings of about 40 cancers over the next few decades.

So if we take the results at face value, then the result of anti-nuclear hysteria at Fukushima has been to kill some 600 people to prevent 40 cancers.

The Fukushima reactors saved lives on the day of the tsunami and have been preventing all manner of diseases for decades. The panic whipped up by the anti-nuclear movement completed the devastation began by the tsunami and prompted an unnecessary evacuation that killed people. The evacuation also killed many animals. These were frequently left to starve, often locked in pens or let loose on deserted streets.

But it doesn’t stop there. On top of the deaths and stress induced by the anti-nuclear hysteria of the evacuation, the Japanese are wasting billions of dollars and considerable scarce resources dealing with a miniscule problem while hundreds of thousands languish in evacuation centres with much, much bigger problems than the odd milli Sievert of radiation. The environmental destruction of decontamination is also considerable. Forests are being felled and precious top soil removed to “decontaminate” areas whose raised radiation levels are lower than normal radiation levels in some other parts of the world where people go about their daily lives without concern. While there are point sources requiring cleanup around Fukushima, the linked document illustrates the bizarre activities being undertaken. Many areas being “decontaminated” have radiation levels assessed at below 3 micro Sieverts per hour. If you get 3 micro Sieverts 24×7, then, by the end of a year you’d have, 26 milli Sieverts, about as much as a full body CT scan. Being inside a house or vehicle or even on a bicycle reduces your exposure.

Electricity generation by fuel

The PDF version of this submission contains graphs are from the International Energy Agency and which show the breakdown of electricity production by fuel type to 2009. Note that the y-scales differ among the graphs, but that the growth of the yellow Nuclear slab within any single graph can be compared with the growth of the Other slab representing wind, solar and geothermal. It is useful to compare nuclear growth during the end of the 1970s with renewable growth during the first 9 years of the 2000s.

Compare Germany with France. Or compare Denmark with Finland. This latter pair both has populations of about 5 million. In the 1970s Denmark opted to replace oil fired electricity with coal and Finland chose nuclear. So in 1990 Denmark was generating 477 grams CO2 per kilowatt hour while Finland was down to 227. All of Denmarks recent efforts have bought it down to about 300. Still well above the Finnish level of the past two decades.

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Got a Comment?

To leave your comment and read other reactions, please go to the dedicated Discussion Thread on the BNC Forums:

http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=bncblogposts&thread=377

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

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Reference paper:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reasons are varied, but the perceptions basically emanate from at least one of the following concerns:

1. Safety issues – health problems and land contamination from released radioactive materials
2. Environmental – Cutting greenhouse-gases is claimed to be more effective using renewables
3. Cost – nuclear energy is assumed to be too expensive

To address these concerns and measure whether they are real or only perceived, we chose ten objective criteria followed the guidelines of the International Atomic Energy Agency (2005):

For the economic dimension:

(1)    levelised cost of electricity and

(2)    energy security

For the environmental dimension:

(3)    greenhouse-gas emissions,

(4)    land transformation,

(5)    water consumption

(6)    heated-water discharge,

(7)    air pollution,

(8)    radioactive waste, and

(9)    solid waste

For the social dimension:

(10)  safety issues.

These ten criteria covered all possible negative impacts of the energy systems we investigated (nuclear power, fossil fuels, and renewables), and compared them based on Japan’s four newly planned scenario options as well as the current condition (before the accident) (Table 1), using multi-criteria decision-making analysis (MCDMA), which is a transparent and objective methodology for choosing among alternative scenarios.

Table 1. Energy mix scenarios for Japan by 2030

Our results clearly show that the less nuclear power is used, the lower will be the sustainability of the future Japanese energy network, based on MCDMA (Fig. 1). The nuclear-free pathway has more negative impacts than the current condition for some environmental and economic criteria (energy security, levelised cost of electricity, greenhouse gas emissions, land transformation, and freshwater consumption). For the other criteria, the current condition has the most negative values.

Fig. 1. A comparison of each sustainability impact criterion for the four proposed future energy scenarios for Japan, and the current condition, from 0 (no negative impact) to 1 (largest negative impact)

All the details of our analyses are explained in the paper (a PDF of which you can be sent by emailing a request to the corresponding author, Prof. Barry Brook). We also outlined some discussion points relevant to this modelling in an article published on The Conversation. What is the take-home message? – Having the appearance of an environmentally friendly energy policy doesn’t necessarily mean you have one.

Of course, it’s a no-brainer that a higher penetration of renewables is better than a fossil-fuel future, but in countries like Japan and South Korea, there a few realities that make renewables potentially less of the cure-all that they are often purported to be. First, many countries with a high human population density cannot supply 100% of their current electricity (let alone energy) consumption using renewable energy sources. Even if targets could be met, the intermittency of renewable sources restricts their usefulness. In other words, the electricity is not always there when need, so massive facilities for energy storage, like pumped hydro, is essential; this in turn requires substantial land transformation, immense new engineering works in often pristine areas, and financial investment, and of course, emits more greenhouse gases.

Second, there is no perfectly safe system in the world. Even a chair can kill you. For example, there were about 1,500 wind power-related accidents and 4 fatalities from 2007–2011 in the UK (according to RenewableUK). In our paper, we cited evidence from a range of authoritative sources, including the International Energy Agency and World Health Organisation, that nuclear power has a much lower accident and death rate, which includes direct and indirect damage and external costs of fatalities, injuries, and evacuations, compared to any fossil fuel sources, and is as safe or safer than most renewables.

Another concern about nuclear power is radioactivity. It is obvious that more nuclear power will produce more radioactive materials in the form of controlled waste. However, coal power – nuclear’s major competitor in Japan – also releases radioactive waste in the form of uncontrolled pollution –as solid waste and fly ash. Indeed, when we only consider ‘uncontrolled radioactive pollutants’, the nuclear-free pathway releases more radioactive materials than any other scenarios.

Third, and most importantly, an anti-nuclear pathway aims to replace a massive ‘greenhouse-gas free’ energy source (nuclear), with other forms of zero-carbon energy sources (renewables), rather than seeking to reduce or displace dependence on coal, natural gas and oil (almost all of which is imported in Japan).

The primary consequence of a no-nuclear choice is, unfortunately, that we run a major risk of losing the battle against global climate change, because we’ve thrown away our best fighting force. The greenhouse-gas emissions of the nuclear-free scenario can reach up to about 421 kg per megawatt hour. By comparison, in the 35% nuclear-power scenario, it is only 262 kg per megawatt hour despite the higher renewable energy share of the former. This means that a high dependence on renewables will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Japan due to physical limits and the lack of large-scale energy storage.

So when you look at the numbers and avoid the temptation to let ideology take over, our paper transparently and objectively demonstrates that Japan’s choice to limit its nuclear power generation is the least sustainable option.

Limiting fossil-fuelled electricity generation is the primary concern here – not preferencing or advocating for any particular non-carbon technology. It’s just that nuclear power is the only option that can achieve it in the foreseeable future. We are not saying that renewable energy doesn’t have a role (of course it does) – but nuclear energy is a key component of that long-term sustainability goal. In fact, replacing nuclear power for other sources will allow the role of fossil fuels to expand rather than reduce.

As conservationists (Brook and Bradshaw have worked for almost two decades on research and models aimed at saving endangered species and protecting global biodiversity), we are dedicated to finding solutions that benefit the Earth’s natural systems. If relying on nuclear fission is the only way we can achieve real climate change mitigation, then we have one clear choice. Climate change is possibly one of the biggest additional pressures biodiversity will face over the coming centuries – if we don’t do anything about it, then our ecosystems – our life support systems – will continue to spiral down the gurgler.

Yes, some people might die if we adopt nuclear power globally, but orders of magnitude more people will if we don’t, and biodiversity will suffer all the more.

Sanghyun Hong, Corey J.A. Bradshaw, Barry W. Brook  (co-published simultaneously on ConservationBytes.com)

References

Cyranoski, D., 2012. Japan considers nuclear-free future. Nature 486.

International Atomic Energy Agency, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, International Energy Agency, Eurostat, European Environment Agency, 2005. Energy indicators for sustainable development: Guidelines and methodologies. International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna.

Normile, D., 2012. Growing distaste for nuclear power dims prospects for R&D. Science 336, 1220-1221.

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Guest post

You can follow John on Twitter @JohnDPMorgan

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Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CCS – Carbon capture from seawater

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

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

Graphic – cover of the APS report, with link

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

The PARC and Navy researchers both used the clever approach of acidifying seawater with H⁺ ions generated by water electrolysis, forcing the CO₂ to bubble off.  The PARC system in the illustration used a stack of semipermeable membranes sandwiched between two electrodes.  Inside the stack, H⁺ is generated on one side of a membrane, and OH^- on the other, which creates alternating acid and alkaline compartments.  CO₂ is recovered as gas from the acid stream, which is then recombined with the alkaline stream and returned to the ocean as CO₂-depleted seawater.  The Navy process chemistry is similar, but uses ion exchange resin beds instead of the internal membrane stack.

The process has not been scaled up, but the technology and challenges are similar to reverse osmosis desalination, so there seems to be no in principle reason why it couldn’t be.  The lifetime of membranes operated in seawater is also unknown, but again, membrane desalination of seawater shows the problem can be overcome, using techniques like polarity reversal to remove scale formation.

Figure 1. The membrane separation system developed by PARC. Seawater (SW) is pumped through alternating bipolar and anion exchange membranes (BPM, AEM), and an electrolyte solution (ES) is pumped past the electrodes, separated from the seawater streams by a cation exchange membrane (CEM). H+ and OH- form on opposite sides of the BPM, creating acidic and basic compartments.

This process doesn’t require material inputs of acids or bases – they are generated internally by electricity, and it is non-polluting – only the original seawater is discharged, minus the CO₂.  The process consumes 242 kJ per mole of CO₂.

Applying the capital, operating expense, and cost of energy assumptions made by the Navy researchers gives a carbon capture cost of about $114 per tonne CO₂, using Navy nuclear electricity at 7.0 c/kWh.  If sequestered – perhaps by injection into spent offshore oil or gas fields, as this is a marine process – this would be offset by any carbon price that might apply, currently $23/tonne in Australia, for a net $91 per tonne (exclusive of sequestration costs).

The Navy estimated the capital cost of the carbon capture process at $16m for a 715 tCO₂ per day plant.  Unfortunately no justification is offered for this cost, so I am unable to check it, and it seems quite low.  I have used this cost as given, but it may underestimate the CO₂ capture cost.

As a purely speculative exercise, what would it take to draw atmospheric carbon down to 350 ppm with just this technology?  If we follow the American Physical Society in their technical assessment of direct air capture and set a target of reducing atmospheric CO₂ to 350 ppm by capturing 400 Gt over a hundred years, we would need to collect 4 Gt/yr, from the perspective of an already decarbonised society.  We would require the power of about 700 AP-1000 nuclear reactors.  At the Chinese cost of $1.3b apiece and an 80 year lifetime this would cost a bit over $1 trillion dollars.  That sounds like a lot of money. But its only about the cost of America’s 2003 Iraq War spread over the century, so I guess it’s a question of priorities.

CCS – Carbon capture and synfuel

The feedstock for fuel synthesis is hydrogen, and a source of carbon.  Commercial synfuel operations have all used fossil carbon, such as natural gas, or coal in coal-to-liquids processes.  They address availability of liquid hydrocarbons, but are terrible emitters, using fossil carbon both as a material input and to provide the energy to run the process. CO₂ extracted from seawater is an ideal carbon source – it embodies negative emissions and is very pure, free of sulphur and other impurities.

In the Navy concept, carbon dioxide is converted to carbon monoxide by reaction with hydrogen.  The carbon monoxide is further condensed with hydrogen in the Fischer-Tropsch process, to produce hydrocarbon.  The overall reaction is, nominally,

11 CO₂ + 34 H₂ à C₁₁H₂₄ + 22 H₂O

Fischer-Tropsch produces a range of pure alkanes, with no aromatics or sulphur, although heavier hydrocarbons may require cracking.  Alternative fuels such as methanol or dimethyl ether could also be produced from the CO₂ and H₂ feedstock, and would require no further processing.  So the end product is much closer to a final fuel formulation than, say, crude oil.

A source of hydrogen is required, and the energy required to produce the hydrogen is the single most expensive component in the whole process.  The Navy used performance data for large scale 2 MW commercial water electrolysis units that cost $2m each and can produce 485 m³ per hour of hydrogen.

Figure 2. Hydrogen Technologies 2 MW water electrolysis unit.

Suppose the whole process were powered by Navy nuclear electricity.  The USS Nimitz has two reactors that together produce 200 MWe.  Using 37 MWe for CO₂ capture and 163 MWe for hydrogen generation from 78 electrolyser units, they could produce 24 million litres of fuel per year, for about $1.78 per litre (Table 1).

For context, a small oil refinery produces about 550 million litres per year, while Sasol’s South African coal liquefaction plant, the largest commercial Fischer-Tropsch plant, produces 8.8 billion litres per year.  To produce the same fuel output as the Sasol plant the Navy process would require about 73 GW.  So while the cost per litre may look plausible, the infrastructure required is huge.

Land based operation and other improvements

Not everyone has the Navy’s interest in manufacturing at sea.  What if the process were operated from a land based site?  The largest capital component in the Navy costing is the floating platform, which adds a huge $650m to a 200 MWe power plant.  If the platform cost were taken out, the fuel cost drops to a bargain basement $0.79 per litre, and the carbon capture cost drops to $37 per tonne!

A nuclear site doesn’t come for free, even on land, so these are lower limits to the possible costs.  Maybe we should look at current civilian LCOE nuclear electricity costs.  Nicholson et al. reviewed available data in their 2010 Energy paper and reported electricity costs for established nuclear power.

Table 1 shows synfuel and carbon capture costs for median and low end electricity costs for established nuclear power, and for the low end of current Chinese nuclear builds.  The cheapest Chinese cost gives synfuel at just $0.82 per litre, and carbon capture at just $39 per tonne.

The other major cost component is hydrogen production by electrolysis, which is very energy intensive.  There are more efficient ways to do this, such as using high temperature solid oxide electrolysis cells, or the sulphur-iodine thermolysis cycle.  These processes operate above 800 °C.  High temperature gas reactors could provide this heat, and an efficient HTGR-SI hydrogen production system would further reduce the synfuel cost (though not the carbon capture cost).

1. 2012 Annual Energy Outlook, US EIA.  2. Australian Energy Technology Assessment, Aust. Govt. Bureau of Resource Economics and Energy 2012.  3. Willauer, Hardy & Williams, Naval Research Laboratory 2012, with minor changes.  4. Nicholson, Biegler & Brook, Energy 2010.

CCS – Carbon capture at source

Carbon dioxide can be captured more readily from the flue gases of either coal or natural gas power plants.  The IPCC estimates carbon capture costs from these sources as US$15-75 per tonne CO₂.  If we are committed to burning more coal, we might at least use it a second time before releasing it to the atmosphere.  A coal plant supplying CO₂ to a Fischer Tropsch plant collocated with a high temperature gas reactor producing hydrogen would produce carbon neutral liquid fuel.

The overall carbon accounting for the electricity and synfuel would be roughly the same as for sequestration, if the synfuel substituted for oil.  It would also avoid the difficult problem of finding a permanent sequestration solution for the CO₂.  Its not negative emissions, but it is at least emission free.

Is carbon capture from the ocean worth a carbon credit?

Does it matter whether CO₂ is captured from the ocean or from the atmosphere?  I’ve assumed not, so long as CO₂ is removed from the biosphere.  Atmospheric CO₂ causes global warming, oceanic CO₂ causes ocean acidification.  Both have serious consequences.

But if ocean uptake of CO₂ were very slow, burning synfuel derived from oceanic carbon would be just as bad for the climate as burning fossil fuels.  If the climate were more sensitive than ocean pH to anthropogenic CO₂, we might prefer to leave the carbon in the oceans.  Would seawater carbon capture benefit ocean acidity, or climate, or neither?

Table 2 shows the distribution of carbon between air, land and sea over a recent twenty year period.  Roughly half of our CO₂ emissions end up in the atmosphere, a third in the ocean, and a sixth on land.  There is substantial equilibration between ocean and air on a timeframe short enough to be relevant to climate.  There is a complicated tradeoff between marine and climate impacts of CO₂ emissions, but it appears carbon capture from either reservoir would be beneficial.

From Table 3.4, The oceanic sink for carbon dioxide, Sabine & Feely 2007

Conclusion

We’re not going to be manufacturing the world’s diesel from seawater anytime soon.  There is a limit to the rate at which we can roll out zero emission power capacity, nuclear or otherwise, and for a long time the most environmentally effective application will be to displace coal power, and gas.  But if we take seriously the need to decarbonise our energy systems, this will have to happen, most likely by mass production of modular nuclear reactors.  It would take many decades to build that capability.  But by then, in a warming world suffering from ocean acidification and hydrocarbon depletion, zero emission synfuel at $1 per litre, and carbon capture at $40 per tonne would look like a bargain.

Maybe its time to stop talking about carbon capture and storage, and start talking about carbon capture and synfuel.

Appendix: Production costs

The Navy researchers provided a rough costing of an ocean-going nuclear powered carbon capture and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis plant, and came up with a fuel cost of production of $1.52 per litre.  They did however neglect to include the cost of energy for the carbon capture process.  I constructed a revised cost model that includes the energy for carbon capture, which I took to be the same as measured by the PARC researchers for their process (242 kJ mol^-1).

The energy and cost of seawater pumping was also not accounted for. I estimated this as follows.  In a previous paper on their carbon capture system the Navy researchers describe their ion exchange unit, and give its specifications as

Max Flow: 35 cm³s^-1

Max Pressure: 350 kPa

So I write P = QR where R is the hydraulic resistance.  If the max flow occurs at the max pressure, R = 350 kPa/35 cm³s^-1 = 10¹⁰ Pa s m^-3.  The experimental flow rate was 2.5 cm³s^-1.  So I can write power = PQ = Q² R = 0.0625 W for 2.5 cm³s^-1, or 2.5 MW for 100 m³s^-1.

This is approximately 1% of total process power, so its a minor component, and I don’t include it in the cost.

I allowed the carbon capture and Fischer Tropsch plant costs to scale with production capacity.  Otherwise I have followed the Navy costs and assumptions, including a cost of capital of 8% pa and annual operation and maintenance expenses of 5%.  The main line items are given in Table 3.  For more details, refer to the Navy paper and the spreadsheet.

Some of the Navy capital costs are unsourced and I am unable to verify them.  These include the cost of the CO₂ capture and Fischer Tropsch plants, given as $16m and $140m respectively, per 82 000 gallons per day fuel output.  I take these values on faith.

The final cost I arrive at is $1.51 per litre, the same as the original researchers – the increase in assumed power is roughly the power required to run the carbon capture, so the changes mostly cancel out.  This spreadsheet was then used to model the alternative scenarios in Table 1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impression of the underground mPower small modular reactor (Image: B&W)

Advanced nuclear technologies and small modular reactors (SMRs) are being actively researched and designed, particularly in nations where governments recognize the strategic necessity of nuclear energy in the future energy mix – China, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, and others. Further research is required to understand how governments can best advance next generation nuclear designs, but many of the policies that have helped renewable technologies succeed – federally backed loan guarantees, feed-in tariffs, access to public lands for demonstration projects, and others – show signs of promise.

Yet the initial development and deployment of advanced nuclear, which is required to give confidence to commercial utilities to build these at a large scale, is not occurring fast enough. It is time that the United States and European countries recognize advanced nuclear as a potentially crucial component of a clean-energy transition. Without the rapid deployment of nuclear power, our energy needs will probably continue to be met predominately by fossil fuels, and the oft-cited 2°C global warming target will almost certainly not be met.

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Originally published at The Breakthrough Institute.

Jessica Lovering is a policy analyst, and Max Luke is a policy associate, in the Breakthrough Institute’s Energy & Climate program. Barry Brook is a Breakthrough Senior Fellow. Follow Jessica and Barry on Twitter: @J_Lovering and@BraveNewClimate.

(Note: about mid-way through the year, the site closed WP comments and moved them to the BNC Forums – this led to a redirection of many pageviews to the new site).

Here’s an excerpt:

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 430,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 8 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!

Click here to see the complete report.

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

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

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

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

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

So, in fact, nuclear doesn’t appear in the future modelling race because it’s not allowed up to the starting gate. This is not the case for any other energy source. Note that Box 6.3 does leave the door ajar for “future governments” to consider nuclear if other low-carbon technologies fail to achieve desired emissions cuts, and also notes that a decision to fission should be made by around 2020 if the first significant nuclear generators are to be plugged into the grid by 2030.

Other than a fleeting reference here or there regarding international forecasts of electricity use and uranium mining, that’s the only real reference to nuclear fission across the 234-page EWP2012 report.

The trade-offs implicit in ignoring a viable low-carbon energy option can be underscored by undertaking a short tour of the excellent new CSIRO efuture tool that was released to accompany EWP2012.

This is a web-browser-based scenario builder, which is simple and intuitive to use, allows any interested person to “Explore scenarios around technology cost, electricity demand and fuel prices, and see how your choices impact Australia’s electricity costs, technology mix and carbon emissions through to 2050.”

There are a large number of possible combinations to try, but I’ll focus on one that combines:

• an enhanced emphasis on energy efficiency and conservation (low demand)
• projections of future rising prices of fossil fuels due to potential shortages or supply bottlenecks (high fuel price)
• inclusion of all technologies with a high-cost scenario to allow for a potentially diverse mix of supply
• storage backup
• crucially, a “yes” answer to “nuclear permitted”.

The electricity time series looks like this:

… and the resulting greenhouse-gas emissions profile is as follows:

In this nuclear-powered crystal ball, fission energy starts to grow seriously after about 2030, and by mid-century it constitutes a little under half of Australia’s electricity supply. Gas is held steady at a relatively low level, coal and wind are largely displaced, and grid-scale and distributed solar generation continues to grow.

Greenhouse-gas emissions are slashed by 90%, with most of emissions coming from gas plants used to meet peak demand.

In addition, I should point out that if nuclear is permitted, the general balance of electricity generation technologies that results is insensitive to selections on fuel prices, demand levels, storage choices, and so on. Try it. In modeller’s jargon, we’d say the conclusion that nuclear ought (by the numbers) to play a big role in decarbonising Australia’s future economy is robust to parameter uncertainty … if it is allowed.

Finally, for a point of comparison, here are the greenhouse-gas emission reductions achieved with the efuture tool, for the same scenario as above. The only difference is in this case, nuclear remains forbidden:

In this case the 2050 emissions are acceptably low, although still almost double that under the nuclear-allowed scenario. To achieve this outcome, there will need to be a far greater reliance on carbon capture and storage to do the job (around a third of total supply). This is unlikely to appeal to most environmentalists.

The estimated cost for this scenario is about $150 per megawatt hour (wholesale), compared to $110 per megawatt hour when nuclear is permitted for otherwise the same modelling selections.

We can each draw our own conclusions from this scenario building. That is a great thing about modelling of alternatives, where the user is given flexibility – trade-offs can be made explicit and transparent.

For me, the overriding message is this: nuclear plus renewables equals cost-effective decarbonisation. Excluding nuclear means higher greenhouse-gas emissions, higher cost, and more fossil fuels with CCS.

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To register comments, go to the Brave New Climate Discussion Forum, here: http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=bncblogposts&thread=358 

This article was originally published at The Conversation. That site contains further comments on the above essay.

Their description:

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

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

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To register comments, go to the Brave New Climate Discussion Forum, here: http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=bncblogposts&thread=354

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

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

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

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

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

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Zero Carbon Options – Launch the Report

Ben Heard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Synopsis

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

2. Context

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

One is to take a scattergun approach, which emphasizes energy efficiency, a gamut of actual and potential clean, low-carbon energy systems, and a hope of future technological advances to solve currently intractable problems like large-scale energy storage. Those who espouse such a view sometimes grudgingly admit that a large component of natural gas will be needed to ‘fill the gaps’ and often support the view that the majority of humanity will have to learn to be content with consuming much less energy than the customary level common in developed countries.

The other perspective sees a way out of the climate/energy/population dilemma in the development and deployment of environmentally benign, fit-for-service technologies that can provide the vast amounts of energy that will be (and are being) demanded, over many millennia into the future [5]. This view not only recognizes that people who are accustomed to energy wealth (or aspire to it) will be loath to give it up, but that there will be no reason to do so. In fact, vast amounts of energy will be required in order to rectify the damage already done to the environment, and to avoid further damage and resource depletion in the future.

The latter viewpoint—sometimes derisively referred to by proponents of the former as the ‘techno-fix’ mindset—is the general outlook of an international think tank called The Science Council for Global Initiatives (SCGI). On October 2-3, 2012, SCGI assembled key scientists and policymakers at the University of California Berkeley to discuss the most pivotal technology in the SCGI spectrum: the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR).

Participants at the conference came from nine countries: Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Sweden, United Kingdom and the USA. (Since the UK government is currently weighing an offer from GE-Hitachi regarding a proposal to construct PRISM reactors in Britain, our UK guests participated as observers and are understandably constrained from taking a position on fast reactor deployment.) Most of these had deep knowledge of fast nuclear reactor systems and global energy policy. Several of the countries represented have fast reactor research projects ongoing, have had them in the past, or are considering them for the future. The goal of this conference was to share the current state of fast reactor development in each country, reach a consensus on design attributes of a system that could be feasibly deployed within this decade, and explore ways in which international cooperation can be mustered to move as quickly as possible from the experimental to the commercial phase.

The Emiratis are serious about nuclear for low-carbon energy, as attested to by these banners in their main convention centre a the World Energy Forum in Dubai.

3. Partner Nations Preparing Today for Tomorrow’s Energy Needs

At the turn of the twenty-first century a group of nine nations agreed to collaborate in the development of advanced nuclear power systems capable of meeting the energy needs and aspirations of the new millennium. These nine nations were soon joined by several other countries to form the Generation IV International Forum, GIF [6]. (Generation IV refers to the next-generation nuclear power systems in the incremental technical evolution—Generation I through III—since the dawn of the nuclear age. [7])

The goals of GIF involve four categories: sustainability, economics, safety and reliability, and proliferation resistance and physical protection. Six promising nuclear technology concepts were selected after an initial evaluation of a wide variety of systems, with an aspiration for ongoing development to 2030 and beyond. (In an evaluation of 19 reactor systems by the Gen IV Roadmap Integration Team in 2002, the IFR ranked number one overall. [8]) The purpose of the Berkeley SCGI conference was to promote international cooperation in hastening the move from R&D to a near-term demonstration of a commercial-scale Gen IV system. The pressing nature of climate change, burgeoning population growth, and the socio-political imperative to demonstrate solutions to the perceived problems of current-generation nuclear energy systems, demand an end to interminable delays.

Until very recently, deployment of fast reactor systems was characterised as plausible only decades into the future. Then late last year, in November of 2011, GE-Hitachi Nuclear made a paradigm-shifting offer to the United Kingdom, which was seeking a solution to disposition of that nation’s plutonium inventory [9] (at 112 tons, the largest such stockpile in the world). GEH submitted an offer to build a pair of PRISM reactors in the UK to solve their plutonium quandary in about five years, with the recouping of costs coming via a set fee for each kilo of plutonium that was successfully processed by the PRISMs [10] and from the electric power generated in the process.

4. The Integral Fast Reactor System Design

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a Gen IV system that meets the goals of GIF, backed by decades of engineering-scale R&D at Argonne National Laboratory and elsewhere. The IFR is ready for commercial demonstration. It has the following essential features: (i) liquid sodium coolant, (ii) pool configuration, (iii) metallic fuel, and (iv) fuel recycling using pyroprocessing [11].

Liquid sodium coolant has by far the most operational experience in experimental fast reactors, and offers a number of advantages: it transfers heat from the fuel efficiently; it can absorb significant heat without excessive temperature rise; its boiling point is far above operating temperatures, yet it melts at a fairly low temperature; it does not react chemically with either the reactor structural materials or the metallic fuel; it is stable both chemically and under irradiation; its activation products are short-lived; and finally, it is cheap and commonly available. These attributes allow operation of the fast neutron reactor at atmospheric pressure, a characteristic that has many obvious safety and structural advantages. The main disadvantages of sodium are its opacity and its high chemical reactivity with oxygen in water or air. These disadvantages are overcome by design.

The reactor pool has both primary and secondary guard vessels with no penetrations below the sodium surface level, to minimize the possibility of leakage, and is surrounded by inert argon gas. This configuration makes it simple to isolate the radioactive primary coolant from the steam generator. A non-radioactive secondary sodium circuit gives up its heat to the steam generators in a separate structure away from the reactor core, and if leakage does occur, it is blanketed by an inert argon atmosphere and would leak slowly out of any pipe break because the circuit is not pressurized. The reactor pool contains enough sodium to absorb the transient heat under accident conditions, to allow safe reactor regulation, and to permit passive circulation and heat removal.

The metal fuel, a ternary alloy of U-Pu-Zr, is a crucial choice for the IFR. The long-standing problem of fuel swelling that plagued early use of metal fuel and severely limited fuel burnup was solved by allowing the fuel slugs to fit loosely within the stainless steel cladding, with the necessary thermal bond provided by a sodium layer between fuel and cladding. Fission product gases are collected in a plenum above the fuel. This simple innovation allows for long irradiation times and high burnup (once fuel swells to the cladding’s inner surface, fission-gas pores interconnect and the gas is released to the plenum without further swelling). The metal fuel not only allows for high breeding ratios and a simple yet proliferation-resistant method of recycling and recasting (see below); it also confers significant safety features. Little heat energy is stored in the fuel and is rapidly transferred to the sodium coolant; furthermore, negative reactivity feedbacks occur as core temperature rises, quickly reducing reactivity due to increased neutron leakage.

The pyroprocess for fuel recycling uses an electrochemical system to separate actinides from the fission product waste within a hot molten-salt bath, yet it cannot yield a purified plutonium stream (the pyroprocessing heavy-metal product is inevitably mixed with minor actinides and highly radioactive trace lanthanides, providing substantial proliferation resistance). The fission products and cladding hulls are immobilized in zeolite and vitrified, whilst the actinides can be readily re-formed into metal fuel pins using a simple injection-casting method that can be done remotely. The pyroprocess lends itself to a compact plant design without aqueous byproducts, thereby offering significant potential cost savings and environmental benefits.

The reason for recommending these design choices in preference to potential fast reactor alternatives (e.g., oxide fuel, lead coolant or loop configuration), are detailed in the 2011 book by Till & Chang, Plentiful Energy [12].

In summary, the key design elements of the IFR – metallic fuel, sodium coolant and pool vessel configuration, work together as a complementary system to bring out the best in the fast reactor and yield many desirable, synergistic characteristics. These component choices, along with the associated proliferation-resistant and relatively inexpensive process for recycling the used fuel and the technology for disposal of the residual waste, define an advanced nuclear system that can truly be called revolutionary in its possibilities. In the words of the Nobel laureate physicist Hans Bethe, “All the pieces fit together.”

Next-generation nuclear energy, as exemplified by the IFR design, offers a means to produce vast quantities of zero-carbon and reliable electricity and process heat. By taking advantage of the superior physical properties of plutonium in a fast neutron spectrum for converting essentially all of the mined uranium into useful fissile material, the IFR can change in a fundamental way the outlook for global energy on the necessary massive scale [13]. These resource extension properties multiply the amount of usable fuel by a factor of over a hundred, allowing demand to be met for many centuries with fuel already at hand, by a technology that is known today, and whose properties are largely established. All that is required now is to complete the final steps in a prototype demonstration to give confidence for a large-scale deployment.

Below: Mass flow diagram for off-line stand-alone pyroprocessing facility using light-water reactor (LWR) waste to provide fuel for a gigawatt-sized integral fast reactor (IFR) plant operating in closed-cycle mode.

5. Alternative Technology Choices and Implications

The GIF selected six promising next-generation nuclear technologies on which to focus for research, development and deployment. Some of them have the benefit of actual experimental experience, while others are as yet theoretical. The Berkeley conferees discussed a variety of reactor types and components, albeit not an exhaustive list since exploring all those options would require a discussion of a complexity and depth beyond the scope of a two-day conference. Our intention was rather to explore technologies that readily meet the overall goals and can be demonstrated at a commercial scale now, since climate change, population growth and other critical issues for 21st century sustainability will not wait for long-term research and development. Replacement of fossil fuels is urgently needed to sustain our world’s well-being.

It should be noted here that virtually all of the conference participants were in agreement that construction of advanced water reactor designs is imperative to meet the near-term electricity demand growth. Light-water reactors (LWR) of any stripe, however, produce only a tiny fraction of the potential energy in uranium, less than 1%. Fast reactors, in contrast, unlock nearly all of it. The IFR, with its metal-fuel system and pyroprocessing, is able to utilize the actinides to such an extent as to essentially solve the waste problem by reducing the radiological toxicity of the waste products from hundreds of thousands of years to a mere few hundred years. Even if the “million-year problem” of LWR spent fuel is more a political than a technical challenge (given the small volume of the waste stream), nevertheless the issue of public perception of that issue is the one that guides nuclear policy in many countries [14]. As such, the transition to fast reactors and a closed nuclear fuel cycle is both a technical advancement and a political enabler for nuclear power of all kinds.

The Berkeley group looked at other fast reactor systems besides the IFR/PRISM that are in the R&D phase in various countries today, in order to weigh the pros and cons vis-à-vis IFRs. This included discussion of alternative coolants, such as lead, and fuel forms such as uranium nitride or oxide. On balance the arguments presented by the conferees favored the use of sodium coolant and metal fuel, within an IFR-like system. It was suggested that perhaps the oxide-fueled Monju experimental fast reactor in Japan might get a new lease on life if it could be converted to metal fuel. Given the politically sensitive situation of nuclear power in Japan after Fukushima that makes the development of super-safe nuclear design more urgent than ever, the controversial Monju could well become a model of future nuclear power in Japan.

GEH S-PRISM modular fast reactor.

One of the issues most often mentioned when discussing sodium-cooled fast reactors—by far the type with the most reactor-years of experience worldwide—is the chemical reactivity of sodium, which burns upon contact with air (though with a very cool flame) and reacts quite dramatically upon contact with water. Yet sodium has several compelling advantages in fast-reactor operation: superior heat-exchange properties, virtually no corrosive effect on reactor components even after decades of operation, short half-life of sodium isotopes that form in the reactor vessel, etc. (see previous section). Some advocates of other systems characterize sodium’s volatility as a deal-breaker. But the intermediate loop that transfers heat from the reactor vessel to the steam generator contains only non-radioactive sodium, with the steam generator isolated in a separate structure, assuring that in the highly unlikely event of a sodium-water reaction there will be no danger to the primary system and no chance of radioactive material being involved. This design means that the unfairly characterized sodium problem is nothing more than an engineering design issue, involving a common element that has been used in industrial processes for well over a century. With over 300 reactor-years of experience with sodium-cooled fast reactors around the world, not a single instance of sodium-water interaction resulting in radioactive release has been recorded [15].

The conferees also touched on other fast reactor and thermal reactor systems being considered today, in varying degrees of development: molten fluoride salt thorium reactors (LFTRs), liquid-salt-cooled pebble fuel systems, etc. [16] While some of these hold promise, none are near the level of readiness for near-term commercial-prototype deployment as the PRISM reactor and its metal-fuel technology. In addition, none of the immediate prospects can match the IFR concept in meeting all the goals of the Gen IV initiative.

6. The Way Forward

There is a pressing need to: (a) displace our heavy dependence on fossil fuels with sustainable, low-carbon alternative energy sources over the coming decades to mitigate the environmental damage of energy production and underpin global energy security [17], and (b) demonstrate a credible and acceptable way to safely deal with used nuclear fuel in order to clear a socially acceptable pathway for nuclear fission to be a major low-carbon energy source for this century. Given the enormous technical, logistical and economic challenges of adding carbon capture and storage to coal and gas power plants, we are faced with the necessity of a nearly complete transformation of the world’s energy systems. Objective analyses of the inherent constraints on wind, solar, and other less-mature renewable energy technologies inevitably show that they will fall short of meeting future low-emissions demands. A ‘go slow, do little’ approach to energy policy is not defensible given the urgency of the problems society must address, and the time required for an orderly transition of energy systems at a global scale. As such, SCGI advocates a near-term deployment of the Integral Fast Reactor.

What is needed now is a two-pronged approach, for completion by 2020 or earlier, that involves: (i) demonstration of the pyroprocessing of LWR spent oxide fuel, and (ii) construction of a PRISM fast reactor as a prototype demonstration plant, to establish the basis for licensing and the cost and schedule for subsequent fully commercial IFR plants. Once demonstrated, this commercial IFR will be expected to show very significant advances in nuclear safety, reliability, nuclear fuel sustainability, management of long-term waste, proliferation resistance, and economics. The time has come to capitalize on this exceptional energy technology, with the benefits of this development extending throughout the global energy economy in the 21^st century.

7. Follow Up

For further information on the IFR and related technology options, visit The Science Council for Global Initiatives website: http://thesciencecouncil.com (This resource includes a list of members from science, engineering and policy backgrounds, contact details, and various technical publications and popular articles).

SCGI is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to informing the public and policymakers about technologies and strategies that can lead to an energy-rich world. SCGI provides a forum for many of the world’s prominent scientists, authors and activists to collaborate and share their knowledge regarding solutions to the world’s energy, resource and environmental problems.

SCGI’s ambitious aims are to advocate near-term deployment of cutting-edge technologies, such as integral fast reactors, zero-emission vehicles and plasma recyclers. Such technologies can realistically eliminate most air pollution, recycle spent nuclear fuel, bring the fossil fuel era to an end, prevent resource wars (including potential water wars), effortlessly recycle virtually all of our waste products, power our vehicles with zero-emission energy systems, provide abundant energy and fresh water to every nation, reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions to a trickle, diminish the world’s nuclear arsenals, turn old nuclear weapons into energy, and promote other technologies that, once commercialized and deployed on a large scale, can lead us to a sustainable post-scarcity era.

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

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

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

Read or leave your comment the original article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Efforts to increase the penetration of renewable energy in Japan are obviously a better pathway than a fossil-fuel-only future. However, Japan must face a number of realities.

It is not possible to supply 100% of Japan’s current electricity consumption using renewable energy, due to physical limits of generation on the densely populated island nation. As such, the nuclear-free scenario aims to replace a massive “greenhouse-gas free” energy source (nuclear), with other forms of zero-carbon energy sources (renewables). It does not seek to mitigate or displace dependence on coal, natural gas and oil.

From http://www.npu.go.jp/policy/policy09/pdf/20120720/20120720_en.pdf

The consequences of this choice are, obviously, losing the battle against global climate change. This is more serious than any known nuclear-power-related issues, such as waste management or accidental releases of radioactive material.

We all must understand that there is no “silver bullet” energy source which can solve all problems perfectly without any negative impacts to society and the environment. Trade-offs are, like death and taxes, inevitable.

Some examples:

• The life-cycle greenhouse-gas emissions of photovoltaic power are higher than nuclear power.
• According to RenewableUK, in United Kingdom, there had been about 1,500 wind-power-related accidents and four fatalities during 2007–2011.
• Manufacture of photovoltaic cells uses a mix of toxic chemicals.
• Wind turbines and solar thermal plants use relatively large amounts of concrete and steel per unit of electricity.
• Hydro requires massive land transformation.
• Intermittent renewable energy sources typically rely on natural-gas backup.

Moreover, most countries are not able to supply 100% of their own electricity consumption from renewables due to physical limits (such as usable land that is not already dedicated to human use or for nature reserves). For instance, our Energy paper shows that Japan can theoretically meet 20–30% of their electricity consumption using non-hydro renewables. Although some countries are able to achieve a 100% renewable-powered electricity network (for example, Norway or Iceland; they both have plentiful hydro and/or near-surface geothermal resources), other forms of energy must be supplied, for heating, domestic-vehicle fuels, shipping and aviation, and industrial processes.

Even with major improvements in energy efficiency, we will need much more future electricity to manufacture synthetic fuels to replace the currently dominant role of mined liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons.

These comparisons do not mean that renewable energy is worthless, or that nuclear power is the only option. But they do illustrate the risks posed by arbitrarily closing off technology options.

The Japanese government’s original plans for nuclear energy to provide 45% of their total power by 2030 have been abolished.

To achieve a sustainable electricity network, the inherent trade-offs and workability of the whole system – now and into the future – need to be carefully balanced. Choosing one or two renewables might be helpful to reduce greenhouse gas emissions somewhat. But substituting renewables for existing and proposed nuclear, while also allowing dependence on fossil fuels to increase rather than diminish, as Japan now proposes, is irresponsible from an environmental and energy-security perspective.

Recognising this reality, talk is already emerging that the zero-nuclear policy may be shelved.

Climate change and its many consequences are arguably the greatest environmental threat facing humanity this century. Fossil-fuel combustion for electricity production is a major cause of the buildup of greenhouse gases, and its use must be mitigated heavily and eventually eliminated.

Nuclear fission, an abundant and zero-carbon energy technology, has an enormous potential to supply reliable baseload electricity and displace coal and gas power plants directly. Energy plans that expand the role of both nuclear and renewables make sense.

Policies that result in a swap of nuclear for coal and gas, and so increase emissions intensity, put us on the road to disaster.

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To register comments, go to the Brave New Climate Discussion Forum, here: http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=bncblogposts&thread=343

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A note on the energy chapters in, A. Lovins, Reinventing Fire, Rocky Mountains Institute, 2011.

Ted Trainer, UNSW

This book continues the presentation of the Lovins perspective, essentially the claim that there is great scope for conservation measures and alternative technologies to solve our problems and enable maintenance of rich world economies and lifestyles.  He says at least 80% of US power, and possibly all of it can come from renewable energy sources by 2050.  My comments refer only to the two energy chapters, one on transport fuel and one on power supply.

I don’t think these chapters add much to his Winning the Oil End Game.  More importantly, I regard the arguments as quite unsatisfactory and unconvincing.  They are almost all superficial; there is no detail and no derivation of conclusions.  The core issues require numerical analyses; they are about whether or not quantities and targets can be achieved but there are few if any explanations of this kind in the energy chapters.  The approach is to make vague and generalised claims, support them with a few spectacular examples, and proceed as if this establishes that the practice in question could be implemented everywhere.  As Smil (undated) said long ago, Lovin’s style is “… discourse by declaration.” This is disappointing as Lovins has extensive expertise on these issues and it could have been applied here more effectively to clarifying the potential and limits of renewable energy.

Lovins claims huge reductions in energy demand will be achieved by efficiency effort.  His renewable scenario actually assumes a 70% reduction on the level of electricity demand he says that business as usual would produce by 2050 (from 6000TWh/y down to 1650 TWh/y.)  I can’t find any evidence or reasoning supporting this claim in the book. There is much discussion of energy reducing technologies, but no case that these would add to the claimed reduction.

Regarding the difference conservation etc. might make, the estimates I am aware of for the rich countries indicate in recent years a business as usual demand trend rising to about twice the present level by 2050. (Demand is down at present, partly due to the GFC.) Clear and confident estimates of future efficiency gains do not seem to exist, understandably, but for working purposes I assume a 33% reduction to the level business as usual would generate. Note that US population is rising significantly (.91% p.a.) and at this rate would be 50% higher by 2050, so Lovins is actually assuming a very big reduction in energy consumption per capita by 2050.

Smil is one among many who stress the huge gulf that typically exists between what is technically/theoretically possible on the laboratory bench and what is likely to be achieved in the real world.  In my critical discussion of the “Tech-fix” position (Trainer, 2012a) I set out the cascade through what might be a) “theoretically possible” without consideration of limiting factors, b) technically possible given real-world difficulties, c) economically possible, e.g., in view of the infinite cost of being as efficient as is possible, d) has an acceptable EROI, e) is socially acceptable, and f) is the final achievement after the Jevons or rebound effect has operated (e.g. where increased car efficiency results in an increase in driving and fuel use.)  A good example is where Smeets and Faaij (2007) conclude that global biomass production potential is 1,550 EJ/y, but Field, Lobell and Campbell (2007) conclude that the amount that might be obtained after taking into account all limiting factors would be a mere 27 EJ/y.  I don’t think there is any reference in Lovins’ two energy chapters to any of these factors, or even to the EROI concept.

Lovins always has an enthusiastically optimistic view of probable future trends in costs.  However discussion of all issues to do with energy, resources, technology, environment and consumption should be based on the assumption that in the near future there are very likely to be large and irreversible rises in the prices of energy, resources, materials, construction, plant and technology etc.  These will multiply through the whole economy, impacting further on the construction of new energy technologies, cutting into the availability of capital to build them in large quantity, and into the incomes and capital available to pay for energy and efficiency improvements.

Costs

It is not difficult to show how most or all energy could come from renewables; you just assume enough plant to do it when there is little sun or wind. My main interest is in the capital cost of the energy technologies required to enable demand to be met at all times, and my general view is that renewable energy will be much too capital costly to run consumer societies. (The best current statement of the case is Trainer, 2012b, and as applied to Australia, 2012c.)

Lovins says that the capital cost of transition to providing 2050 US electricity from renewable sources will be $6 trillion.  No reasoning in support for this figure seems to be given in the book.    Firstly this is misleading as plant is usually assumed to last only 25+ years, so a $6 trillion construction cost would mean that $240 billion would have to be paid every year to maintain the amount needed.

The renewable scenario outlined assumes a generating capacity of 1,650 GW (peak capacity).  In Trainer (2012b and 2012c) I work out the capital cost of the amount of wind, PV and solar thermal generating plant required to deliver 1 Watt in winter, at long distance, and net of embodied energy cost of the plant’s construction. (The figures are $4.6, $12.8, and c. $20.)  When these are applied to the above capacities that Lovins assumes the total capital cost comes out at around that which he arrives at for the generating plant, i.e., in his case $2.2 trillion.  (I make it $2.8 trillion.) Note that the rest of his $6 trillion total is made up of factors such as distribution and operations and management costs.

U.S. energy consumption falls well below government and industry projections, even below projections made by the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) in 2000. However, Amory B. Lovin’s projection (in Soft Energy Path: Toward a Durable Peace, Penguin Books, 1977) that fossil fuels, nuclear power, and large hydroelectric power would all be largely replaced by small-scale renewable energy has also proved to be inaccurate. (from James Hansen’s book, ‘Storms of my Grandchildren’)

According to Pfuger (2004) and Birol (2003) the annual rich world energy investment is about .7% of GDP, or for the US, around $98 billion p.a.  So even if Lovins’ figure is accepted he is assuming annual investment required to provide electricity must be about 2.5 times the fraction of GDP presently invested in providing all energy.  Electricity is only about one-fifth of energy used in rich countries. (And note again that the target he assumes is probably much more than 70% below the probable 2050 business as usual demand.)

Some questionable assumptions.

1. Lovins assumes wind will be providing about 50% of demand.  Lenzen’s (2009) review finds that the limit is probably around 20% except in atypical locations such as Denmark.  At higher penetrations problems integrating wind into the supply system become too great.  (In Trainer 2012b I assume 25% penetration.)
2. The assumed PV contribution is also implausible for the US, being around 30%.  PV contributes nothing for about14 hours on a sunny day, and little through winter days in North America.
3. He assumes a considerable dollar cost for “distribution”, i.e., local reticulation, but assumes that there would be little long distance  “transmission, i.e., via HVDC lines from mid-west wind regions or south west solar thermal fields.  (He assumes a negligible solar thermal contribution.)  He says that transmission loses would be less than 3% of energy produced.  This seems to mean that he assumes that the PV will be located close to users, eliminating the need for transmission.  (He dwells on the virtues of localised generation.)  But most US consumers are in northerly regions which would be generating very little via PV in winter.
4. He seems to make little or no provision for the huge storage task that would be involved, especially as he does not rely on solar thermal heat storage.   Below it will be asked what happens at night when there is no PV input, and the winds are down across much of the US?  He assumes only 60 GW of hydroelectric capacity so it can’t plug such gaps.

The problems of intermittency, big gaps, redundant plant required, and resulting system capital cost.

Most of the foregoing numbers are based on annual average demand and output assumptions, and are thus quite misleading.  What matters is the amount of plant needed to cope with peak demand, not average demand, in conditions of minimal availability of renewable sources.    Lovins does not discuss these issues.

Australian average electricity demand is c. 25 GW, but the amount of generating plant we have available to cope with peaks in demand is 51 GW.  This is unusually high; a 1.3/1 ratio might be more typical.  However the proposal put forward by Elliston, Diesendorf and MacGill (2012) for deriving all Australian electricity from renewable sources requires 84 GW of capacity to meet the average 25 GW demand (due to the need for redundant plant, see below.)

More importantly, how much wind and solar generating capacity needs to have been built to maintain supply when winds and solar radiation are below average for long periods?  Oswald et al. (2008) provide a clear illustration of the magnitude of this problem.  (For other studies see Trainer, 2012b.)  They report that in February 2006 Western Europe had almost no sun or wind for two weeks, and in this period UK demand reached its highest peak for the year  Existing and foreseeable electricity storage technologies cannot possibly cope with such problems.   A typical solar thermal plant in operation today might be capable of storing 200 MWh(e).  To get the UK through two weeks without sun or wind would require storing about 14 days x 24 hrs x 60GW = 20 million MWh.(e), i.e., 100,000 times as much as a solar thermal plant can store today.  Such problems can only be dealt with by resort to fossil fuelled or nuclear plant standing by idle much of the time.  As Lenzen (2009) points out these should be regarded as being parts of the wind and solar system and their cost should be added to the renewable account (just as my solar PV house lighting system includes the cost of the emergency generator that is needed from time to time.).

Thus renewable energy supply systems involve serious problems to do with the provision of redundant plant, and these greatly increase system capital costs.  The term “capacity credit” is often used to indicate the amount of fossil fuelled generating plant that can be retired if a certain amount of renewable plant is added to a system.  However this concept is somewhat misleading as it is to do with a probability of “loss of load”.  Even though there might be a very low probability of losing almost all load, from time to time that will happen even from a combined wind and solar system extending over a continental area, as Oswald and others have shown.

Sometimes it is argued that this problem can be overcome if systems are very widely spread, because “…the wind is always blowing somewhere”.  Firstly, as Oswald et al. show, sometimes it isn’t blowing anywhere.  But even if it is, the question is, where is it blowing this time?    Are we to have built enough wind turbines to meet all demand in that region where it is blowing today, and also to have built enough in the different region which is the only place where  it will be blowing next time there isn’t much wind anywhere else, and so on…?  Obviously when there isn’t much wind anywhere but it is blowing somewhere the system capacity is very low even if you do have turbines everywhere, and demand can be met only if some non-wind source plugs the gap.

Thus a supply system containing much solar and wind capacity is very likely to also have to also need a lot of generating capacity that runs on coal, gas, or nuclear fuels.  (Globally biomass is much too limited to do the job; see below.)

Transport fuel.

It is difficult to assess the transport fuel chapter as it seems to consist mainly of very optimistic claims for which little or no demonstration or derivation is given, and which seem quite implausible. It is not helpful to have impressive possibilities mentioned; what matters is evidence which enables quantitative conclusions.

Lovins says business as usual transport energy consumption will go to 25 million barrels a day by 2050 but his proposals will cut it to 3.1 Mbd. (p.66), i.e., by a remarkable 88%. Plots are given attributing the reduction to various factors but without any case showing that these reductions are plausible.  One major factor is “Smart growth”, meaning better design of settlements requiring less travel, claimed to account for about half the savings he is saying are achievable.  No evidence or argument is given to indicate that this is technically plausible or socially achievable.  Note that a major reducing factor is transfer of much transport to electrical drive, adding to the reasons for questioning the above greatly reduced electrical demand claim.

The reduction plots show the IEA’s expected saving, i.e., a 5.5 Mbd drop from the 2050 anticipated 25 Mbd, and then Lovins proceeds to add the reductions he thinks are possible, but it is not clear whether these are completely separate from and additions to those the IEA has in mind.  We would need to see that there has not been double counting here and the lack of explanation does not enable this.

There seems to be no discussion of the embodied energy cost of electric vehicles. They will be lighter but the new plastic bodies are likely to have at least three times the cost per kg of steel.  In addition lithium etc. batteries will have a much higher energy cost than petrol tanks.  The global availability of exotic battery materials is also not considered.

Conclusion.

These notes indicate that it would be far too capital costly for the US to run largely on renewable energy.  Lovins’ $2.2 trillion figure would be more or less correct if a) demand could be cut to much more than 70% below the 2050 business as usual level, b) plant could run at its average annual output level all the time, as distinct from at winter average levels, and most importantly, if c) there were no lulls or big gaps in solar radiation or wind.

And note again that the $2.2 trillion sum is just for electricity supply and electricity accounts for only about one-fifth of total energy consumption.  Yet this sum represents an annual investment that is probably 2.5 times the present US investment in all energy.  (Surprisingly, figures on national energy investment seem not to be recorded.) These points indicate that a renewable system capable of supplying 80% of probable  2050 US energy despite long periods of little sun or wind would involve such quantities of redundant plant that it would have an annual capital investment cost many times the present cost.

As I have often stressed, critiques like this do not imply that renewable energy should be abandoned.  My view is that we can and should transition to 100% renewable energy, and that we could run an idyllic society on it…but only if we scrap the commitment to economic growth, market domination, globalisation, capitalism and affluent lifestyles, and instead adopted the basic principles of The Simpler Way. (Trainer, 2012d and 2010.)

References.

Birol, F., (2003), “World energy investment outlook to 2030”, IEA, Exploration and Production:  The Oil & Gas Review, Volume 2.

Elliston, B., M. Diesendorf, and I. MacGill, (2012), Simulations of scenarios with 100% renewable electricity in the Australian National Electricity Market , Energy Policy, 45, 606 – 613.

Lenzen, M., (2009), Current state of development of electricity-generating technologies – A literature review. Integrated Life Cycle Analysis, Dept. of Physics, University of Sydney.

Oswald, J.K., M. Raine, H.J. Ashraf-Ball, (2008), “Will British weather provide reliable electricity?”, Energy Policy, 36,  3202 – 3215.

Pfuger, A., (2004), World Energy Investment Outlook, International Energy Authority, Berlin.

Smeets, E., and A. Faaij, (2007), “Bioenergy potentials from forestry in 2050 –  An assessment of the drivers that determine the potentials”, Climatic Change, 8, 353 – 390.

Smil, V., (Undated), Rocky Mountains Visions: A Review Essay, PDR, 26,1.

Trainer, T., (2010), The Transition to a  Sustainable and Just World, Envirobook, Sydney.

Trainer, T., (2012a), The Technical-Fix Faith.   http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/TECHFIX.html

Trainer, T., (2012b) Can the world run on renewable energy? A revised negative case.  http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/CANW.htm

Trainer, T., (2012c), Can Australia run on renewable energy? The negative case. http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/CANA.htm

Trainer, T, (2012d), The Simpler Way website,  http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw.htm

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