Open Thread 2

Douglas Wise,

Yes, the UK White Paper does claim that they have included the emissions from back up in their figure of 11-37 kg CO2-e/MWh (I am writing all this from memory, so correct me if I am wromg).

However, that statement is plainly not correct. The figures for wind power from all the studies are the life cycle emissions for wind alone, not including the emissions from back up. The emisisons in the UK white paper are consistent with the ExternE figures and most other studies all of which do not include the emissions from back up.

Here is a summary of the most authoritative studies, including links to the sources.
http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/carbon-emissions-from-electricity-generation-the-numbers/

A great deal of work is going on to determine the emissions penalty for fossil fuel shadowing and back up for wind power. This provides a calculator and references to the recent work:
http://www.masterresource.org/2009/11/wind-integration-incremental-emissions-from-back-up-generation-cycling-part-i-a-framework-and-calculator/

There is a new version of thie calculator about to be posted. It shows that for realistic input variables, wind power saves no GHG emissions, and perhaps causese more than with no wind power.

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Peter et al:

I’ve read from Lightbucket among other places that wind power has a generally favorable EROEI number. But at one wind site, I found the caveat below. I’m wondering what else wind eroei leaves out.

How would wind accommodate the gas backup issue? would the numbers include penalties for pollution due to the gas use?

It just seems to me that without massive demonstration projects, EROEI numbers can be pretty easily fudged.

Much of the wind resource base is located in remote locations, so there are costs of getting the wind from the local point-of-generation to a potentially distant load center. This cost is distinct from the cost of simply interconnecting the site to the nearest transmission line. Even at the relatively low current levels of wind penetration on regional grids, long-distance transmission has already proven to be a significant issue for new wind development in some regions. For example, wind plants in Texas have had to curtail output during hours when regional trunk lines are at physical capacity, and Minnesota and California are currently examining ways to alleviate transmission congestion as more development is proposed in their best wind resource areas. These costs are not reflected in most EROI analyses.

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That’s the gist of it Doug. Article IV and to some extent Article V of the NPT have loophole so large that one could drive a truck through them. I suspect at the time they were worded in this way so that the major powers would tie their own hands too much, thinking that smaller nations wouldn’t be in a position to exercise their Art IV rights, and and so the major powers neglected their obligations under Article III, to transfer nuclear power tech to non-weapon states. Now its come back to bite them in the ass, and the minor powers are in no mood to tighten the treaty now.

What goes around, comes around.

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A colleague of mine recieved this email today and passed it on to me. Here it is for anyone in or near the ACT who might be interested, especially Peter Lang, given Peter’s excellent work on analysing the efficacy of ‘renewables’.

Have your say on Canberra’s energy future
The ACT Government has recently launched two major discussion papers in the energy sector – the proposal to expand the electricity Feed-In Tariff Scheme and the Draft Sustainable Energy Policy 2010-2020

Authorised by Geoffrey Rutledge, Director, Ministerial and Corporate, Department of the Environment, Climate Change, Energy and Water.

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The following main lessons can be deduced from the Chernobyl accident:

(1) Ionizing radiation killed only a few occupationally exposed people. Due to rapid decay of short-lived radionuclides, the Chernobyl fallout did not expose the general population to harmful radiation doses. Near the burning reactor, the area covered by the dangerous radioactive fallout where, on April 26 1986, the radiation dose rate reached 1 Gy per hour (after one year it had decreased by a factor of about 3000), was limited to two patches totaling together about 0.5 km2 in an uninhabited location, and reaching a distance of 1.8 km from the burning nuclear reactor. Several hundred meters outside the 1 Gy isoline the dose rate dropped by two orders of magnitude, to a level of 0.01 to 0.001 Gy per hour.

(2)Psychosomatic disorders and screening effects were the only detectable health consequences among the general population.

The reported excess of thyroid cancers in children and in adults exposed to Chernobyl fallout is not consistent with current knowledge on effects of medical use of iodine-131. Reports of an “excess” appears to be an artifact of screening, and is only a small fraction of the normal occult thyroid cancers incidence occurring in populations unexposed to iodine-131.

What I find particularly glaring is the lack of controls for other insults given that the area around the nuclear plant was a well known industrial wasteland before the accident. In other words no steps were taken to eliminate the potential influence of chemical or heavy metal contamination in the soil and food chain on the initial health of the human population.

I also find it disingenuous to continue to invoke latency every time actual results fail to meet the dire predictions made previously. We were told shortly after the event, when the immediate death toll was found to be minimal, that the full impact would not be felt for twenty years. Twenty years later, the Cassandras are now saying it could be as much as sixty years before the damage appears, or maybe several generations in the future. At what point do we accept the fact that the impact of this accident has not been anywhere as serious as it was assumed it would be?

(3) Radionuclides were injected high into the stratosphere, at least up to 15 km altitude, which made long distance migration in the whole Northern Hemisphere, and a penetration over the Equator down to the South Pole possible . With the extremely sophisticated radiation monitoring systems implemented to assure compliance with test-ban treaties, even the most tiny debris from the Chernobyl reactor were easily detected all over the world. No such system exists for any other potentially harmful environmental agent. Ironically, this network’s sensitivity ignited mass anxiety, and contributed to the strangulation of nuclear energy development all over the`world.

(4) Finally, and this bears repeating; the event at the Chernobyl reactor was caused by an inherently poor design, shoddy construction coupled with a criminal lack of good judgment.

This was a complete meltdown of the reactor core, followed by ten-days of free emission of radionuclides into the atmosphere. Nothing worse could happen. It resulted in a comparatively small occupational death toll, hundreds of times lower than that of many other industrial catastrophes, and it is unlikely that any fatalities were caused by radiation among the public.

There is simply no rational grounds for continuing to hold this event up as an example of the potential for an accident at any modern nuclear power plant. In fact if anything it demonstrates just how small the overall impact of a worse-case power excursion and critical loss of containment is even under the poor emergency response conditions that were in place at the time. In centuries to come, the Chernobyl catastrophe will be seen as a proof that nuclear power is a safe means of energy production.

Unfortunately the cranks that continue to beat the Chernobyl drum lack the scientific background to properly evaluate the material that has been published on this matter, nor are they able to put the political biases of the authors of these papers into perspective, or check their credentials.

One of the most reliable indications of this effect, (and this is not limited to this debate, but is true across many contentious scientific issues), is flinging out raw counts of publications, in the erroneous assumption that somehow shear volume will carry their point.

Many of us have been looking very carefully, and very critically at the Chernobyl data for years, there is much to be learned from this accidental experiment that is of great scientific value. Other than the survivors of the nuclear weapon attacks on Japan, there has not been a large exposed population to follow, and the results show here as they did there that the effects of radiation on the general health of a population are nowhere near as bad as previous models indicated it might be.

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One of the things I find getting tiresome in debating nuclear energy on the web is the endless capacity of cranks to upbraid everyone for using the same tactics they do.

To date you have not engaged in anything that even approaches rational debate. I have seen nothing from you except sweeping and bombastic opinions and demands that we answer other critics regardless of their standing or credibility, but nothing in the way of cognizant counter arguments.

You make pompous demand that we collectively withdraw statements or repudiate positions that you seem to think we have taken, yet ignore any calls to make your own position on key points known.

You have not advanced the discussion here one iota, and I am beginning to suspect that you are little better than a troll. From now on I intend to treat you as such.

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Soon after my intemperate post I made one of my occasional visits to Kjell Aleklett’s blog (http://aleklett.wordpress.com/) to look for English translations (I wish he’d run a separate RSS feed for them). The latest “We need global ‘energy miracles’” is very relevant. A snippet: ‘In the last month the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated 10 billion dollars for vaccines for children in developing nations. Now it appears they are changing their focus to a new area, ”Finding a cheap and clean energy source is more important than creating new vaccines and improving farming techniques”.’

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Here’s an update on the Australian government’s attitude concerning nuclear power:

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/labor-rejects-nuclear-power-in-australia-20100217-ocdu.html

I especially note this quote from Rudd:

He said the people of Australia could debate anything they wanted.

And also:

“On the question of a debate in the community, we will happily debate this until the cows come home.”

In other words, Rudd will oppose nuclear power no matter what the merits of the case in favour of it. Isn’t that nice?

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Yes.

Not. Happy. Kevin.

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Actually Ewen, I was more thinking of the “Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life here” approach to the ballot paper.

The primary impact the current crop pro-nukes will have on future policy mwill not be through their own voting patterns this coming election, but on the effectiveness of their public advocacy in leveraging the voting patterns of the larger community.

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Finrod said:

Australia has arguably been one of the strongest pillars of the international anti-nuclear community of first-world sovereign states. The fall of anti-nuclear policies here would have a much greater international impact than our small population size would initially suggest.

I’m not so sure about it. I kind of see Australia as one of the last holdouts, and I’m not sure the handful of others would pay much attention. Of course I agree that we shouldn’t be holding out and it is damned annoying that we are. When you look around at the general political process in this country, it is, regrettably, not all that surprising. Hardly any big policy gets discussed on its merits or even in ways that are consistent with some vision of political philosophy.

Barry said:

Actually Ewen, I was more thinking of the “Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life here” approach to the ballot paper.

Oh well, that’s different. Been there and done that plenty often enough. I wish there were something better though.

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“such’, that is to say.

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Democracy now just had an interesting day:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/18/nobel_economist_joseph_stiglitz_on_obamas
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/18/nukes
I’m not real happy that Democracy now keeps being anti-nuke. They’ve had Wasserman on several times recently.

In the first interview, Stiglitz argues:

“In Copenhagen, if we had succeeded in raising the price of carbon—the cost of carbon emissions that pollute the atmosphere are going to impose enormous costs all over the world. If we had succeeded in doing that, that would have provided a market signal. It would have told firms, you have to invest to reduce your carbon emissions. There would have been this retrofitting of the global economy to meet the needs of global warming. That would have stimulated an enormous level of investment and stimulated a lot of spending. And that would have been the critical thing that could have gotten us out of the current Great Recession.
But as it is, what we did is left even greater uncertainty. Where are we going? The result of that is that—greater hesitancy even to make the kinds of investments that we were in the process of making. So, in fact, the failure in Copenhagen has its economic consequences right now. ”

I take it that Stiglitz, who is a pretty good economist, thinks we need to increase the cost of carbon, which sounds like the opposite approach to Peter Lang’s recommendation.
Is it?

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Ewan, I dont expect any European Green party to support nuclear power, they’ve invested too much political capital in opposing it. The German phaseout is already on hold, though, and the Swedish phaseout is dead in practice as well. We are just about the last holdout in the western world.

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The MAPLE reactors are not NPPs, they were designed to be isotope production reactors, and one is running just fine in South Korea.

The MAPLE issue, is not a technical one, but a political one. Any discussion of the problem would require a detailed background on the internal workings of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, its relationship with Canadian party politics, the problems inside AECL, and the corporate games being played by MDS Nordion. While I know some of this information, I am not sufficiently confident of the details, to start airing them in this forum.

It is also obvious that you have done little in the way of research on this topic, with any other objective but to skim off something that you could post here out of context, in an attempt to sling mud at me, only underlining that you are nothing more than a troll.

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Lawrence – It is not just a technical issue of a slight positive coefficient, it is an issue that cuts to the very heart of the future of the industry in Canada and is much more than a furious row over who is to blame for this costly and embarrassing debacle.

The Nuclear Safety and Control Act in 2000, created a political monster in the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, that is so out of control that Linda Keen, a political hack with no background in science, who served as the CNSC first president, had to be sacked by an emergency Act of Parliament over the first NRU shutdown. Making major changes at this point is not possible for the minority Conservative government now in power, and Keen, a long time Liberal is still out there bashing the decision to dismiss her in the media at every opportunity.

AECL is on the block and is going to be sold piecemeal, and this was known to be in the works for several years in advance. According to AECL, uncertainty about the cost of solving the MAPLEs problems was a key factor in the project being scrapped. However refurbishment of the NRU is not going to be cheap ether, the difference being that the overhauled NRU will still be there even if the CANDU division is sold. Stripped of its isotope mission, there would be few reasons to fix the aging reactor, or consider building a replacement, if testing CANDU components were no longer being done. Had the MAPLEs been released and licensed, they would have passed to MDS Nordion, and AECL would be hard pressed to justify a new research reactor.

Meanwhile MDS Nordion, which by this time had invested approximately $350 million in the MAPLE project, commenced arbitration against AECL and filed a $1.6 billion court claim against AECL and the Government of Canada to compel them to return to work, and fulfill their contractual obligation to bring the MAPLE facilities into service. Among other things they are demanding that AECL contract with another organization to fix the MAPLE reactors, if it does not have the necessary in-house technical expertise or resources to do the work itself. Naturally this has not been met with much enthusiasm at AECL, given the iffy status of the company at the moment.

As I said above, there is more than meets the eye going on here, and much of it is being played behind closed doors. I doubt that a full accounting will be available for public scrutiny for some time. But for sure the technical issues are an excuse, not a reason for the project’s current status.

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When Mulroney decided to privatize the isotope business and gave MDS Nordion the profit, it left AECL with having to build the reactor for MDS Nordion while not getting any proceeds from the profit. It eventually lead to AECL having to shoulder a bigger percentage of the cost for building the MAPLE reactor with MDS Nordion still getting all the profit from the isotope business. So when AECL decided to shutdown MAPLE, there’s speculation that it was a strategy to avoid having to shoulder all extra cost when there’s no benefit to be had. Which means taxpayers won’t be shouldering the extra cost while MDS Nordion continue to profit from it. So in some respects it could be said that AEDL wins.

The CNSC has acted by the letter of the law in this matter, and yes I think the new act was a mistake.

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Not to confuse things – Linda Keen shut down the NRU not MAPLE right?
If AECL was contractually obligated to finish MAPLE how can they just stop? I dislike socialising cost and privatising profit but it’s a big protest to make.

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Keen was president of the CNSC during both decisions. Her dismissal was a bit more complicated than being fired for following the law. She was dismissed for having lost the government’s confidence, because it was clear that she had let the situation get out of control during the NRU fiasco.

When the Minister responsible stepped in to try and deal with the situation, Keen publicly accused him of interfering. It became very clear very quickly to even her own officials and AECL and independent experts that, in fact, this was not about safety. This was a potential difference in opinion between the two, even CNSC’s director general of nuclear cycle and facilities regulation indicated the reactor was as safe as ever.

She threatened to take the government to court over this, and also said she was going to file charges of interference, with the Parliamentary Ethics Committee, but I guess she talked to her lawyers, because she never has.

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Thanks.

As discussed above, it’s really more like 95 percent of the fission potential still there, not 99.

Also, according to this, those 16 casks are at the former Yankee Rowe site, not Maine Yankee.

(How fire can be domesticated)

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http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/nuclear-only-way-to-cut-emissions-20100226-p66g.html: Mr Abbott said that if “the most urgent task confronting humanity is to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions” the “only realistic way to do that in ways which maintain living standards” was to move to nuclear energy. However, he will not be taking it to the next election.

He should take it to the electorate. (1) He’ll get Peter Cosgrove on his side; (2) Isn’t it better to take a policy that maintains living standards, rather than taking Lib’s current plan, which they are now admitting doesn’t. [Of course their actual plan is not to reduce living standards, but to not reduce emissions, but they can’t admit that.]

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