This is a Discussion Thread, because I really want your feedback. But first, some context.
By late 2008, I was pretty stressed about climate change. Working on the science of climate (and other anthropogenic) impacts on natural systems, as I do, I could foresee potentially insurmountable problems for biodiversity and human civilisation this century. A time of consequences. Things looked grim, unless there was a massive change in attitudes towards energy supply and resource sustainability. This was exemplified by my post on the Olduvai Theory and Paul Gilding’s short essay on “The Great Disruption”. I got really annoyed by ‘climate change sceptics’ because I felt they were undermining our collective will (and political capital) to take effective action, using mostly recycled, pseudo-scientific distractions.
Then, I started to study the energy problem in detail. It was a Damascene conversion, as I came to realise, via the analysis of the real-world numbers rather than hype or spin: (a) the inadequacy of renewable energy as a complete (or even majority) solution to achieving low-carbon future (…and therefore avoiding the worst of climate change impacts), and (b) the comprehensive value of nuclear energy in solving the energy and climate challenges the world now faces, in the race to supplant our dependence on fossil fuels.
At this point, mid- to late-2009, I got really annoyed with anti-nuclear protesters, because I felt that, through their outdated ideology and inexcusable hypocrisy, they were undermining the collective will (and political capital) needed to pursue a future in sustainable atomic energy. What galled me the most about this was that I felt I was now fighting a war on two simultaneous anti-science fronts — against trenchant ‘fossil fuels forever’ interests (who ironically understood the need for energy security and technological prosperity) on one side, and hardline ‘nuclearphobes’ (who ironically understood the need for action to avoid serious climate change) on the other.
Now though, I’m much more relaxed about it all. In short, I’ve learned to stop worrying about ‘sceptics’ and ‘antis’ and love energy economics (the real-world outcome, not the academic discipline!). Let me explain briefly, prior to further elaboration in the comments section.
Historical emissions of fossil fuels have come largely from the developed world (US/Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, etc.). In the 21st century, the growth in emissions, and quite soon the total mass of emissions, will come from the developing world (China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, etc.).
In the developed world, there is general recognition of the energy and climate problems, but little real political incentive to do anything meaningful about it (at least in the short term). There are, however, many minority (but influential) special-interest groups trying to block or stymie change. Now, environmental well-being is ultimately very important to these societies, as is steady economic growth and maintenance of high standards of living, but they also (think they) have the luxury of making choices that balance these priorities against more nebulous or philosophical concerns. This has, in turn, led to inaction, endless circular debates, media wars, unstrategic planning, and public policy that is guided by political points scoring and partisanship rather than rational analysis and long-term cost-benefit. In short, slow, suboptimal change.
In the developing world, there’s a race on. A race to higher standards of living and lots of energy, delivered as cheaply as possible. Environmental concerns have tended to take a back seat, although immediate, local problems, such as air and water pollution, are quickly rising to prominence. These nations represent an economic and demographic freight train, and nothing we ‘decide or advise’ in the developed world is going to slow it down. Anti-nuclear campaigners and climate change sceptics are both utterly irrelevant in these places. By the time the dust has settled, and these societies have the ‘luxury’ of paying any attention to special interest groups, it’ll already be game over — be it a ‘win’ or a ‘loss’.
Now, if the Chinas and Indias of this world do end up following a fossil-fuel-intensive pathway to development, we’re all stuffed — whether they manage to make it all the way up the development curve or fail in the attempt. It won’t matter at this point what gains the currently developed world might have managed to achieve. If, alternatively, these rapidly growing economies are able to develop and deploy non-fossil energy sources cheaply and on a massive scale, we all win. Whether the technology ends up being ‘proven up’ in China, the US, or wherever, the very fact that it will have proven cost-competitive with coal will mean that everyone has won. I return to my favourite quote from Steve Kirsch:
Pouring money into token mitigation strategies is a non-sustainable way to deal with climate change. That number will keep rising and rising every year without bound. The most effective way to deal with climate change is to seriously reduce our carbon emissions. We’ll never get the enormous emission reductions we need by treaty. Been there, done that. It’s not going to happen. If you want to get emissions reductions, you must make the alternatives for electric power generation cheaper than coal. It’s that simple. If you don’t do that, you lose.
Take a nation like Australia. It has very high per-capita carbon emissions. It currently has an anti-nuclear government. It has many noisy, influential climate change sceptics, including leading politicians. It makes token gestures towards subsidising renewable energy, but won’t commit to it seriously (for good reason, in my opinion). The upshot is that we’ll vacillate, debate and tinker with toy solutions for years. Then, when it makes economic sense to do so — when those places with the incentive to make things happen have done so and the cheaper-than-coal alternative energy is available — we’ll follow like sheep as the viable-clean-energy bell calls us home. As such, I see my role as a messenger, a public educator, a futurist, a facilitator (e.g. via SCGI). I won’t change what’s coming, but I might influence the timetable of events!
So, the debating point I open to BNC readers is this. Do climate sceptics and anti-nukes matter? My evolved position is that they don’t — at least not in any way that is meaningful — but I’m happy to debate it below. The floor is open…
(Acknowledgements to Dr Strangelove for the title of this thread. Also, regarding the topic of weapons proliferation and used nuclear fuel, I highly recommend the following essay that has just been posted on DepletedCranium, “Why You Can’t Build a Bomb From Spent Fuel“. It’s the best layman’s summary of the issue I’ve yet seen, bar none, with lots of useful diagrams too. Do yourself a favour and go read it.).
Brave New Climate 
456 replies on “Do climate sceptics and anti-nukes matter? or: How I learned to stop worrying and love energy economics”
“One of the problems with visionary energy solutions is that they tend to assume that all of the institutional arrangements will just fall into place under the notion that everyone will see the compelling logic of the visionary’s notions. Either that or they assume a dictatorship of the visionary.”
This comment applies not merely to renewables it applies equally to nuclear – it applies to any attempt to change the direction in which we are heading – indeed it hearkens back to my initial response to Barry and my earlier reference to the impossibility theorem. We can argue the pros and cons of various solutions until the cows come home but ultimately our opinions do not count for anything other than to give the politicians an excuse to do nothing.
Perhaps the best way to look at all of it is to assume that politicians and the media circus that accompanies them live in a parallel universe and that only incidentally takes any notice of us mere mortals.
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Hi John,
BZE are anti-nuclear. Their podcast is great on renewable advances, and it is hard to keep up with them all. Just open up iTunes, go into STORE, and type Beyond Zero Emissions into the search field. It will come up and you can download quite a few back issues. Listen to a few, even though you are sceptical, and you’ll soon realise that there are a truly astonishing variety of incremental improvements to all the big renewables areas. New announcements and experts and approaches seem to be coming out weekly.
After listening to it for a year or so, I have no doubt that we could eventually, with a little trial and error, meet our needs with renewables. Society might look a little different and a *few* behaviours might be a little changed, but it would be a comfortable modern world.
DV8,
your post just basically says “I don’t like your arguments”. There is no data there, and nothing of substance, to contradict the REAL money gathering momentum behind the science of solar thermal investment in Africa under the Desertec solar scheme.
Consortium
The project is developed by a consortium of European and Algerian companies under the name DII GmbH, Desertec Industrial Initiative, founded in Munich and led by Munich Re.[5] The project company is incorporated under German law.[6] The consortium consists of Munich Re, TREC, Deutsche Bank, Siemens, ABB, E.ON, RWE, Abengoa Solar, Cevital, HSH Nordbank, M & W Zander Holding, MAN Solar Millennium, and Schott Solar.[4][5][6][7] Press investigations point to a number of more interested parties – among them ENEL , Électricité de France, Red Eléctrica de España and companies from Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. The company is supposed to create a detailed technical plan for the DESERTEC realisation and to prepare contracts for the DESERTEC supergrid that can be signed in 2012. On October 30, 2009 Paul van Son, a senior international energy manager, has been appointed CEO of DII GmbH (the Desertec Industrial Initiative).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec
Money talks, and your substance-less BS will walk.
Next please.
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While generally pessimistic about mankind’s future, I am now heartened by the general rising tide of support for sustainability, global warming and non carbon energy issues despite the climate change sceptics. Many who are paid by the big polluters.
I write constantly to politicians raising these issues, particularly now I have two grand daughters and would like a life for them as good, as I have been able to enjoy over the past 60 years.
Forty years ago I first read about the potential for climate change due to CO2 emissions and the effect it would have on Australia’s climate. The prediction was a dryer Australia with stronger cyclones. Over the past forty years I have seen this prediction come true.
During the 1970s oil crisis, I attended an energy seminar conducted by engineers from the State Electricity Commission. They stated quite clearly that until the military gentleman, Major Breakthrough arrived, the only viable alternative to fossil fuels was nuclear power. Forty years later this statement is also still true.
Unfortunately, nuclear power generation, like so many other issues was hijacked by so called “green” groups and Governments globally, except France opted out of nuclear power generation at this time.
Forty years ago global warming was not a big issue as I, like most people thought that its consequences was so far into the future, technology would “fix” the problem. Unfortunately, technology went in the wrong direction. Once nuclear power was off the agenda all our resources and ingenuity went into the large open cut mining of coal, reducing its price and paving the way for massive GHG emissions and other pollutants to generate electricity.
This massive CO2 increase, coupled with rising global temperatures and melting ice has seen global warming hit the mainstream media as a major issue, particularly this century.
Billions of dollars are now spent by Governments globally, researching the climate change issue. Unfortunately all the measurements, data and forecasts are bad and the situation is much worse than we all thought. There is high risk of a catastrophic climate change before the end of this century (within the potential lifetime of my grandchildren) that will reduce quality of life and result in the death of many millions of humans.
I believe that the weight of evidence is so high that during the next decade or so there will be a huge turnaround in public opinion and thus action by governments. In Europe this is already the case with governments spending huge sums (not very wisely in the case of Germany, Denmark and Spain) on non carbon energy. However overall Europe has half the emissions of Australia (going for GOLD as the global climate change bludger!), Canada and the USA.
I am also heartened by the number of nuclear reactors currently under construction globally, 53 with another 469 planned or proposed, with most in China, India and the USA. However none in Oz.
Whether the climate sceptics win out and stop us from moving fast enough to keep climate under control remains to be seen. However I am doing my bit, I am very carbon conscious and have solar panels. A very expensive way to generate electricity I admit, but does raise awareness in my neighbourhood and must help with grid electricity peak loading.
On the other hand, scientists like Lovelock think the sceptics will win out and is very pessimistic. He forecast that while humans will survive as a species, the cull will be huge with the number remaining at the end of the century, a billion or less.
His advice “enjoy the next 20 years!”
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For all those doubting Better Place’s claims, this “Economist” podcast is well worth listening to. It’s only about 7 minutes. Please, do yourself a favour and have a listen.
http://castroller.com/podcasts/TheEconomist/1443204
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@eclipsenow – if the only thing you can bring is an appeal to authority based on name dropping the members of a consortium then you are the one who is bankrupt of any rational arguments.
Surely you are not so unsophisticated that you are not aware that these consortium are often constructs that are formed to determine if there is something there worth investing in, but they do not in anyway establish that the idea is viable?
Since you are quoting that font of perfect information, Wikipedia on the subject, let me show you what also is written there on this matter:
“Centralized solar energy plants and transmission lines may become a target of terrorist attacks. Some experts fear that generating so much of the electricity consumed in Europe in Africa would create a political dependency on North African countries which have corruption and a lack of cross-border coordination. Desertec would require extensive economic and political cooperation between Algeria and Morocco, which is at risk as the border between the two countries is closed due a disagreement over the Western Sahara. There are also concerns that the water requirement for the solar plant to clean dust off panels and for turbine coolant may be detrimental to local populations in terms of the demand it will place on the local water supply. There is also a fear that due to the large scale cooperation necessary between the EU and the north African nations the project may be delayed due to diplomatic and bureaucratic red tape and other factors such as expropriation of assets, license agreement reneging and corruption.”
This hardly looks like a project that will be coming on line soon, if ever.
And again your need to throw out an extraneous insult at every opportunity does little to enhance your credibility.
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eclipsenow despite the big names latching onto North African solar thermal a couple of simple considerations raise doubts. First is that the Dakar car rally no longer goes to Dakar because of serious concerns over security. Secondly we have an underwater HVDC cable in our backyard that didn’t work out as planned. Basslink between Tasmania and the Australian mainland was supposed to export hydro. It does in small amounts up to 1,000c per kwh in the spot market and imports increasingly large amounts of cheap coal fired baseload to run heavy industry. Before that no coal power was used for electricity in Tasmania. It seems if you connect dirty energy to clean energy dirty takes over. I’d need some convincing that Desertec can solve these problems.
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DV8,
You’re the one that said the following, not me.
And any talk of a ‘world wide grid’ demonstrates a total lack of any grasp of the physics of transmitting electrical energy over great distances.
I mentioned HVDC transmission lines, which you hardly blinked at. Now you”re digressing into the solar thermal discussion while I was presenting the sheer DISTANCES involved in transmitting that power from across the mid-Sahara across Europe, and the billions involved. So I mentioned the physics in the HVDC lines, and the business plans around them. If you remain confused, try wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hvdc
As for North Africa and Desertec:
1. You’re cherrypicking ONE troubled area.
Look at this map.
There are plenty of borders not involving the disputed countries where proof of concept projects can be started, stretchng from Iraq, down through the Middle East, into Egypt and Lybia before we get to Algeria.
2. Give Africa a chance.
I remain an idealist hoping that serious money and investment will also create some serious impetus for the AU to actually mean something. A Federated Africa remains a bit of a dream of mine, and so you’ll get no sympathy from me indulging in racist overtones that it can’t be done, because it’s Africa you know. ;-) I’m sorry mate, but I believe in Pan-Africanism and that the process that is already underway will *eventually* consolidate into a single market Africa. Regional zones are already forming single currency zones, and the movement is growing. It’s WAY off topic to this thread, and so not something I’ll bother debating with you, so there it is.
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“Can you please show me a functional Gen4 reactor that has been mass produced on the production line? Where can I order one? At what *demonstrated* market price? Sound familiar to certain individuals attacking solar PV at 85% of the full spectrum of light wave lengths?”
To be accurate I was attacking your flawed understanding of that type of solar PV, nevertheless…
I for one have not been writing about the need for Gen IV reactors, in fact I have gone on record many times in many forums that it is premature to be looking at this while there are plenty of well-proven, existing designs, that you can order, and that do have a demonstrated market price, and that can be deployed quickly enough to have a real impact on the carbon issue.
In general it would seem that much of the Gen IV rationalizations seem to revolve around reasons that themselves don’t stand up to much scrutiny, and it is my fear that by overreaching, the growth of nuclear power may in fact be delayed. This is not to say work should stop on these designs, only that they should be put in perspective and scheduled appropriately. The major thrust should be building current designs.
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Secondly we have an underwater HVDC cable in our backyard that didn’t work out as planned. Basslink between Tasmania and the Australian mainland was supposed to export hydro. It does in small amounts up to 1,000c per kwh in the spot market and imports increasingly large amounts of cheap coal fired baseload to run heavy industry. Before that no coal power was used for electricity in Tasmania. It seems if you connect dirty energy to clean energy dirty takes over. I’d need some convincing that Desertec can solve these problems.
I have a vision of north african businessmen and diplomats putting urgent entreaties to the EU to increase their output of coal AND nuclear power to meet the demands of rapidly industrialising countries such as Morrocco and Algeria once the cross-mediterranean HVDC links are established…
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Hi John,
HVDC has a long and complicated history, but it seems there have been a number of successful lines.
The modern form of HVDC transmission uses technology developed extensively in the 1930s in Sweden at ASEA. Early commercial installations included one in the Soviet Union in 1951 between Moscow and Kashira, and a 10-20 MW system between Gotland and mainland Sweden in 1954.[1] The longest HVDC link in the world is currently the Inga-Shaba 1,700 km (1,100 mi) 600 MW link connecting the Inga Dam to the Shaba copper mine, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hvdc
Regards, and did you ever listen to that Economist podcast on Better Place! :-)
http://castroller.com/podcasts/TheEconomist/1443204
(I hope to afford one of these one day! Our family budget is a bit stretched these days…)
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Finrod, only you mate. The powerful consortium I listed has visions in exactly the opposite direction, on all counts.
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Finrod, only you mate. The powerful consortium I listed has visions in exactly the opposite direction, on all counts.
If I ever get a job as a salesman, you’ll be my first on my list of potential customers.
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“I mentioned HVDC transmission lines, which you hardly blinked at. Now you”re digressing into the solar thermal discussion while I was presenting the sheer DISTANCES involved in transmitting that power from across the mid-Sahara across Europe, and the billions involved. So I mentioned the physics in the HVDC lines, and the business plans around them. If you remain confused, try wikipedia.”
HVDC is a viable technology for some long distance connects. Asserting that it can be scaled to make for a ‘world-wide grid’, demonstrates an ignorance of the physics involved. To say nothing of the costs.
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[…] Do climate sceptics and anti-nukes matter? or: How I learned to stop worrying and love energy econom… […]
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eclipsenow, has not noticed the Universe I live in appears to be different than his. But I will explain again, that I am in contact with a number of AGW skeptics, who agree that an expansion of nuclear power generation capacity, and the development of Generation IV nuclear technology are important steps for the future of plentiful and low cost energy. I am under the impression that many and perhaps most AGW skeptics would support carbon-replacement, if that was presented to them on grounds other than AGW. There are very good grounds for arguing that coal generated electricity comes at high indirect costs, and that American society would be economically better off if it did not have to pay for imported oil.
I am certainly not an AGW skeptic, but I am quite willing to get the support of AGW skeptics for carbon mitigation efforts, by persuading them on other grounds. It seems that no one in the 21st century has heard of pragmatism.
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I watched the Bill Gates TED video.
From his final remarks at the end of the Q&A in response to a question about skeptics he said:
“if you can make it economic … then the skeptics will accept it because it’s cheaper”. So he thinks that nuclear could become cheaper than coal but that it is not cheaper at present.
I’m not a Bill Gates fan (ubuntu please) but do think he has some understanding of economics.
His aim is to support more R&D which he argued is badly neglected but is now funding himself (tens of millions), testing out materials to see if they work (hundreds of millions) and to build the first terrapower nuclear reactor which is very expensive (several billions)
He mentions modular and liquid reactors (“a little hard”) at 23 minutes in distinguishing his preferred approach from them.
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Judging by the the discussion(s) taking place so far in this thread, I would say the answer to the question “Do climate sceptics and anti-nukes matter?” is a big YES in the minds of some posters here on BNC.
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[…] Re: The psychology and sociology of the International Global Warming Debate You might enjoy this. Do climate sceptics and anti-nukes matter? or: How I learned to stop worrying and love energy econom… It's by Adelaide Climateologist Dr Barry Brooks who is pushing Gen3 (then in a decade or so) Gen4 […]
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Bill Kerr – Years ago many knowledgeable people that had carefully studied both the small computer software field at the time, and their company’s IT needs, where left pulling their hair out by the roots when upper management unilaterally decided to go with Microsoft products, on nothing more that the fact that Bill Gates had impressed them with his business acumen.
The truth was that his company made shoddy products that really never preformed anywhere near as well as it should have, but that never managed to get past the the fact that he had made billions, when it came to convincing other businessmen to buy his software.
I am not happy seeing this happen again in the case of nuclear energy. Gates is not some sort of techno-god, in fact, from the outset he was held in contempt by tech crowd because he bought into DOS when everyone had moved beyond it. There is no reason to assume that he has chosen Tarrapower because it is superior, and it would be a shame if the lemmings followed him into it on the strength of his name.
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Barry,
You have candidly acknowledged that your views on AGW solutions have gradually changed as you followed the evidence and interpreted it as you saw fit. I wonder, now, whether you have reached a static position or whether your ideas will continue to adapt with the evidence. I ask because, as an erstwhile close supporter of your thinking, I am beginning to wonder whether it continues to have my full support.
While I remain convinced that nuclear fission provides the best hope of avoiding the catastrophic consequences predicted by Lovelock (to which Tom Bond alluded), I have been impressed by the contributions of DV82XL, Charles Barton, Rod Adams and several others. I fear that you may have fallen captive to the fixed prescription outlined by Tom Blees. I can see that there may be some sense in picking a 4th Generation winner and sticking with it. MSRs have certainly had more R and D funds devoted to them than other designs and the IFR is probably the closest to being deployable. Thus, the strategy is sensible if we have no option but to close the fuel cycle very quickly. However, what I think I have learned (I’m only a layman) is that there’s not likely to be a nuclear fuel shortage any time soon and that we can do with all the spent fuel we can get to make sufficient start charges for rapid deployment of closed cycle reactors in the future. The other motivation to move rapidly to 4th Generation could be construed as an attempt to disarm the anti-nukes by hammering home its advantages with respect to safety, proliferation and waste issues. However, if such was a motivation, it seems to have largely failed, despite the validity of the arguments presented. Ironically, these same arguments can, in fact, be subverted by the antis and used in support of their continuing attacks on nuclear fission power in general.
I have also noticed that the only Gen 3 + design that you have any time for is the Toshiba Westinghouse one. Is it sensible to dismiss the Chinese High Temperature Gas Cooled design mentioned above by Rod Adams? It would seem that replacing coal with nuclear in existing coal plants, apparently possible, with this design, would make a great deal of economic sense and be the fastest route to reducing CO2 emissions. (It seems to be a pebble bed type and this, for all I know, might make its waste less easy to reprocess and thus outweigh its other advantages.)
Most sodium cooled reactors seem to have experienced sodium fires which have reduced capacity factors while not necessarily representing significant risks to the public or site workers. Lead cooling would appear to have advantages but for its corrosive effect on containment surfaces – which may or may not prove to be an insuperable problem. Molten salt cooling now seems to be a relatively “new kid on the block”. Anyway, if there’s no rush, wouldn’t it make sense to research as many closed fuel cycle options and fuel reprocessing methods as possible before committing to a single approach?
In summary, it seems to me that there is great urgency to move to nuclear fission power and equal urgency to research optimum methods of fuel cycle closure. However, there is less urgency to deploy closed cycle reactors at this juncture. A prescriptive approach may not be the best. I do agree, however, that the most active deployers and researchers will win the economic battle and leave the stragglers to face a dire and unsustainable future. I think that, given the current state of the world, with overpopulation and dwindling resources, economics will become a zero sum game. I also believe that wealth and access to cheap, dense sources of power are more or less synonymous. In other words, without wealth, many will lack the power to survive. The IFR might thus be America’s best hope.
I appreciate that many correspondents on this thread have greater idealistic tendencies than I. They would argue that the affluent should make their technology available to all and then the poor would stop breeding so fast -perhaps, eventually. Is there time for this strategy before AGW or lack of dense energy sources result in massive die offs? The former may not happen if the latter happens first. Given that, in the former case, die off would be indiscriminate while, in the latter, it might be largely afflicted on citizens of poorer nations, how should one choose? Should one give primacy to one’s kin or pull everyone on to the lifeboat with the probability of all sinking together?
Barry, please don’t relax. There is urgency. I’m sure you are exerting more influence than you think or, to be more honest, I sincerely hope you are.
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Woah! The planets have aligned or something. For once DV8 and I agree on something… we both can’t stand Bill Gates or Microsoft.
Douglas Wise, great post, especially the sentiments regarding the richer nations trying to develop the poorer nations so they’ll stop breeding so fast. Telling times, and morally compelling questions.
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BTW Douglas…. I do NOT enjoy http://dieoff.org/ … not my favourite bedtime reading, really!
Try a regular diet of http://worldchanging.com/ to balance out whatever else you’re reading.
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Oh, and before bed… I just had to share that Worldchanging have a piece on nuclear power.
And they are a VERY influential blog, have regular talks at TED.com, and an enormous worldwide following.
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010981.html
One of the most important greenie blogs on the planet. No time to read it myself… night all.
Nice to end the night agreeing with DV8 on something… group hug everyone! (Ok, I’m tired).
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Tekay, you noticed!
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OK, didn’t go to bed yet. Someone will need to address this on Worldchanging.com… just yelling at me doesn’t get the word out to them, OK? You can comment at the end of the link here.
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010981.html
“New Research Ranks Top Renewable Energy Options
Research from Stanford University ranks the world’s energy options — putting wind, concentrated solar and geothermal at the top of the list, and nuclear power and coal with carbon capture and sequestration in a tie for dead last.”
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“President Obama revealed his great support of nuclear energy this week, announcing that the Department of Energy will offer $8.33 billion for a new nuclear plant. Administration officials said it would be the first U.S. nuclear power plant to break ground in nearly three decades.”
Wow, $8.33 billion for “a” nuclear power plant? Surely that’s a typo, they’re cheap as chips these days aren’t they? Unless of course it is some freak 4 gigawatt plant or something?
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eclipsenow, that’s a loan guarantee, not the cost of a nuclear power plant. The two reactors have a combined total cost of approximately $14 billion including balance of plant and transmission and distribution infrastructure. It’s also the US, with a high risk rating for new entries after a 30 year delay. I suggest you read Prescription for the Planet for details of the current problems with pricing/charging in the US.
The cost for 4 x FOAK plants (Korean APR-1400 units) in the United Arab Emirates has been bid at $3.8 billion/GW. The AP1000 and CPR-1000 are scheduled to come in at $1.8 – $2 billion/GW, and projected costs are falling as ‘settled down’ effects come into play, including construction experience, factories for component manufacture, etc.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html
Finally, a suggestion. You would likely engender more measured answers from people if you didn’t consistently take such a sardonic tone in your comments. It does you no favours.
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Articles such as this only reinforce my view that rather than a “Damascne Conversion” Barry has actually “jumped the shark”.
It is completely ridiculous to compare climate change deniers with anti nuclear people.
There exists a vast body of peer reviewed research, that Barry has contributed to, proving global warming is a real phenomenon and will cause some degree of climate change in the future. What that climate change will be is harder to determine as the climate is very complex and we do not have a complete understanding however most of the current models are far more optimistic than reality as the climate is changing faster than most people predicted. Climate change deniers cherry-pick and/or ignore this evidence to arrive at their world view. Additionally the vast majority of scientists agree that AGW is happening and will cause climate change.
There is no doubt that we will need to reduce carbon emissions in the future to avoid dangerous degrees of climate change however there exists no body of peer reviewed work that proves one way or another what the best method of achieving that low carbon future is. Therefore Barry’s conversion is only his opinion and his opinion carries no more weight than the hundreds of scientists such as Mills, Diesendorf and Jacobson that have done peer reviewed work on the future of energy and concluded that renewables can in fact contribute a majority of future energy needs.
Therefore to compare climate change deniers who deny the body of evidence for climate change and renewable advocates that have a degree of science on their side is a fallacy of the highest order and is unworthy of a person so well educated as Barry. Barry’s current obsession with nuclear power is not supported by peer reviewed science and it involves just as many outlandish assumptions and/or stretching of technology than any of the claims of renewable advocates such as myself. There are very real concerns about proliferation and storage of nuclear waste that are ignored by nuclear advocates to arrive at the conclusion that nuclear is the energy source of choice for a low carbon world.
I am the first to admit that renewables do have a long way to go before they will be supplying anything more than a token amount of the worlds energy. However renewables have one overwhelming advantage over other energy sources and that is by their nature foster a lower energy use philosophy that is sadly lacking with most nuclear advocates. The very core idea of nuclear power seems to be to continue the high energy use society pretty much the same as it is now whereas most if not all renewable advocates acknowledge the truth that our present society is unsustainable no matter how much energy we throw at it. Nuclear power with all its problems without drastic steps to reduce society’s consumption of energy will be at best a band-aid on a wound that really requires surgery.
Renewables, the philosophy of lower energy consumption and the universal and scalable nature of renewables that are able to be deployed to a village in Africa as well as Sydney means that in my opinion offers more than nuclear power. If we truly want to transition to a low carbon society and avoid dangerous climate change we need to do more than change our energy source.
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Douglas Wise, #47571:
The other motivation to move rapidly to 4th Generation could be construed as an attempt to disarm the anti-nukes by hammering home its advantages with respect to safety, proliferation and waste issues. However, if such was a motivation, it seems to have largely failed, despite the validity of the arguments presented.
I would not judge success or failure on the basis of an inability to persuade the Mark Diesendorfs and Helen Caldicotts of this world (and a swag of other vociferous people who duck in and out of discussion forums). These people have far too much invested in the anti-nuclear position to ever change their views. I do suspect, on the basis of my day-to-day conversations and much private correspondence, that many — perhaps the majority of nuclear ‘fence sitters’ — are persuaded, or at least are open to consider the nuclear option now that they recognise that the problems they considered to be intractable are in fact simply issues of science, engineering, economics and perception.
The Gen III+ designs I prefer to talk about at present are the ones that are now being built. This includes the AP1000, the APR-1400, the ABWR (Gen III). The EPR, in my mind, is an over-engineered design that was bound to fail economically. The Chinese HTRs are interesting prototypes, and the Chinese are in the best position to demonstrate their economic competitiveness, just as they seem to be among the first to try and prove up the competitiveness of large sodium-cooled fast reactors — the Russian-designed BN-800 and its planned successor, the BN-1200/1600.
What is the ‘rush’ for Gen IV, and why not continue to research many designs? I agree that we should continue the R&D, but given the time required to move from first deployment to full scale commercialisation to assembly line roll out of 100s or 1000s of units is in the order of 10-15 years on a fast-track schedule, we need to be building the first commercial-demo Gen IV reactor within the next 5 years if we want them to be going up everywhere come 2030 or so. If we want IFRs to be deployable on a massive scale in two decades hence, we’d better kick start the process NOW. If the LFTR R&D can be completed in 10 years and they’re also coming online in the 2020-2030 decade and massively thereafter, all the better.
I am not relaxing. I am working with SCGI to get the first IFR built ASAP. It’s a big task to be getting on with.
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Stephen Gloor:
It seems quite a valid comparison to me.
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Reading back over all these 130 comments generated in the last 2 days, I get the feeling that many people didn’t read, or skimmed and then forgot, the context statement that accompanied the title of this discussion thread.
My point was not whether climate sceptics and anti-nuclear activists matter in terms of delaying effective action in certain jurisdictions (e.g., Australia, US, Germany etc). They clearly do. No doubt. No argument, and we, as a community, should be working hard to try and short-circuit their effectiveness. People like Peter Lang have been doing a particularly impressive job at this.
But my point, which I still maintain is valid, is that climate sceptics and anti-nukes are irrelevant in the global picture. Since climate change is a problem of the global commons, and the ‘make or break’ decisions over atmospheric CO2 this century will come from the choices made in the developing world, sceptics/antis have, at most, a very marginal influence over whether humanity can effectively tackle climate change and energy shortage problems, or not.
Go back and read the blog post at the top of this comments thread and, I hope, more of you will understand where I’m coming from. Currently, there seems to be a lot of unnecessary confusion.
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Stephen Gloor- To suggest that the case for nuclear energy is not sound or is unsupported by evidence, and peer-reviewed research, is simply dead wrong. To also suggest that renewable energy can reach beyond its very real physical limitations and provide a civilization such as ours with the power it needs to move forward, is to be obstreperously blind.
When you look at the science of nuclear power, you realize nothing will ever match it for minimizing the impact of human civilization on the environment. Nuclear is the perfect solution to global warming. The energy transformations that take place in the nucleus of the atom are a million times greater than transformations that occur in the electron orbits, which is where coal, oil, and gas derive their energy. That means the “environmental footprint” of nuclear is a million times smaller than fossil fuels.
According to environmentalism, there is no moral way to produce the motive power that industrial civilization requires. Large-scale power production is incompatible with environmentalism’s injunction against man-made alterations to the environment. Any form of man-made power that supports industrial civilization, regardless of how little it pollutes or how few resources it uses, is immoral because it supports industrial civilization.
The greens pretend that renewable power sources, which currently supply 2% of the nation’s electricity, are a gigantic untapped resource that would be able to support American prosperity. They pretend that it is only the capitalist system that prevents us from enjoying these bountiful sources of energy—energy that would enable us to live in harmony with nature, in perpetuity.
But when California’s subsidies—which guaranteed renewable energy generators three times the income of conventional power producers—increased the scale of “alternative” energy in the state, the greens dropped the pretense. They have turned against geothermal, small hydroelectric, and wood-burning generators—and they are turning against wind power producers. Their sin: these generators provide 7.5% of the state’s electricity needs and promised to expand with the growing demand for power.
Environmentalists ultimately object to the amount of power produced, regardless of how it is produced. The instant that any technology promises to supply power on an industrial scale, it becomes an unpardonable evil that must be stamped out by force—either by government policy or by direct action.
@Barry – Yes I agree that the current batch of doctrinaire idiots writing and speaking in the West are not going to have any real impact on steps to deal with global warming, or the adoption of nuclear energy. However they are still going to be a factor in Western politics, and while the salvation of the planet may now be in the hands of the Chinese and Indians, the quality of our lives can still be impacted if nitwit ideas drive the price of power through the roof chasing some ideological fantasy of a reduced energy society.
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It just seems strange when you can built around 60GW of wind power for 14bilion.
In future windpower technology (lets call it Gen4) you could built 160GW of centralized wind power plants.
If you invest half of it in the grid that is still 30GW.
It would not hurt to test that technology before investing billions in nuclear.
Its true they would need no fuel chain but you would have mantainance industry also.
Maybe Bill Gates has not heared about such solutions.
In contrast to nuclear power it would mean sustainable developement even for small countries or cities that do not need GWs of power.
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eclipsenow wrote:
“Someone will need to address this on Worldchanging.com . . .”
No, they will not “need to.” You need to address your actual questions as carefully and honestly as you can, using the best information you can find. If you have a specific one, it may well have been thoroughly addressed elsewhere in Barry’s blog or in the outward links mentioned in it.
Barring that, I would suggest that you at least articulate them in detail.
My impression is that many anti-nuclear advocates chase around scaring up “something to say against nuclear” and thus scare others. When they find it, they tout as though it means something, not because it necessarily does, but because it reinforces what they want to believe anyway, and gives them a powerful tool – – fear – – with which to manipulate others. Since logic and data do not matter, debates with people like that are only valuable when done in the presence of others who have actual curious and open minds.
I notice that your response to my point about the difficulties and costs of transitions that involve things like other people’s car parks was addressed by positing super cheap solar would overcome those issues and then the market would assure this triumph. Well, if the solar engineers can make solar film so cheap that all of the secondary issues such as ease-of-use, intermittence, grid integration, fear of rooftop leaks, attachment to the status quo etc., are trumped by the cheapness of the product, more power to them. Have at it, prove us wrong. But don’t think that you have proven anything just because you found some stray fact or comforting projection.
Based on everything I have read, which is a lot, I doubt it is going to happen, and am unwilling to bet the future on it. Nuclear is here now in Generation III and III+, and Gen IV is coming, irrespective of what happens in the U.S. or Australia or any particular country.
If you have a real issue, I would urge you to articulate it yourself, not by proxy reference, along with its logic, data, and description of data sources, so all this can be evaluated and talked about. This is the approach participants take on Barry’s blog when it is working at its best, and discussions can then be productive because they are proceeding sort of like science does. It also requires a lot more of you.
Stephen –
You write that:
” . . . renewables have one overwhelming advantage over other energy sources and that is by their nature foster a lower energy use philosophy that is sadly lacking with most nuclear advocates.”
This is like saying the advantage for renewables is that they don’t work to provide the energy that people want.
In a world where people tend to want more, this is not an advantage that aligns with ecological preservation of the biosphere as we have known it.
Also, I would dispute the notion that renewables advocates tend to want to foster lower energy use. Certainly those in the supply side of the renewables business – – and it is “just another business” once the idealist innovators are supplanted by profit maximizing Companies – – do not want that. They want a market for their product, the bigger, the better.
You admit that renewables have a long way to go to contribute more than a token amount of energy. We do not have a long time to wait around. By all means, advance renewable technology. But to exclude nuclear, a priori, is, in my view, senseless. And if we are going to have nuclear expansion – – and we will, in this world irrespective of what is said in this blog or what happens in the USA or Australia – – then isn’t the better course to have nuclear advance in the best possible way from the perspective of social equity, environmental protection, and sustainability?
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Stephen Gloor, I think your comparison of Barry pro-renewables scientists is unfortunate.
Barry is willing to answer his critics, while Jaconson avoid’s answering his. David Mills has been Known to be deliberately dodgy about ST costs.
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/11/ausras-first-us-solar-thermal-plant.html
Mark Z. Jacobson avoids answering critics,
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2010/01/bill-hannahans-on-his-difficulties.html
and outrageously fudges on his his CO2 emission estimates for nuclear power:
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/12/review-of-masrk-z-jacobsons-review.html
In a response to a Jacobson article in Scientific American, Dr. Michael Briggs wrote:
As a physicist focused on energy research, I find this paper so absurdly poorly done that it is borderline irresponsible. The authors cherry-picked highly inaccurate claims from other papers solely because those were the only claims that could support their pre-determined conclusion (that we can meet all of our needs purely with renewable power).
The fact that they think hydrogen fuel cells and tidal power have any value in the energy future is enough to illustrate that they either did not spend much time analyzing the actual technologies they are promoting, or are intentionally duping readers (as many in the energy field do).
David Mills was so dodgy about solar costs, that virtually any price is plausible, including $18,000 a kWh, as I demonstrate:
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/11/ausras-first-us-solar-thermal-plant.html
Mills appears to have underestimated the price of hot water storage, and over estimated its effectiveness.
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/11/ausras-first-us-solar-thermal-plant.html
I believe that Mills is no longer the Chairman of Ausra, as he was when he made his glowing claims about solar power, and Ausra is no longer in the electricity generation business.
As for Diesendorf and your use of Diesendorf as an authority, I would like to quote a comment directed to you by “Atomic” Rod Adams: “Steven Gloor – No it doesn’t. Well dispersed wind requires between 1/3 and 1/5 of the average capacity of gas backup to equal the same amount of average capacity baseload.”
Here is a quote directly from the Diesendorf paper that you linked to:
“To replace the electricity generated by a 1000 megawatt (MW) coal-fired power station, with annual average power output of about 850 MW, a group of wind farms with capacity (rated power) of about 2600 MW, located in windy sites, is required. The higher wind capacity allows for the variations in wind power and is taken into account in the economics of wind power.
. . .
“Although a single wind turbine is indeed intermittent, this is not generally true of a system of several wind farms, separated by several hundred kilometres and experiencing different wind regimes.” (Emphasis added.)
So even the paper that you linked to – which has its problems, like asserting that hot rock geothermal, biofuels and solar thermal already qualify as base load generators – indicates at least a factor of 2.6 additional wind capacity is required (2600 MW wind versus 1000 MW coal) as long as the sites for the wind are distributed far enough apart so that they are in different weather patterns and as long as they are all in “windy” locations.
From a capital investment point of view, that means that you need to buy not only 2.6 times as much wind turbine capacity as you do steam turbine capacity, but you also are on the hook for a considerable investment in transmission infrastructure to hook those turbines into the grid. It is a reasonable rule of thumb that transmission lines cost about a million dollars (US) per kilometer to site and install. Coal plants can be built close to existing grids; wind farms have to be built where the wind is.
Aside – this statement from Diesendorf’s paper still irks me “Even an optimal mix of fossil-fuelled power stations is not 100% reliable.” Of course that is true, but in the developed world, we have a pretty high standard for the reliability requirements of a mix of electrical generators – most customers on the grid would be very unhappy with less than about two 9’s of reliability. (That would mean that they would be powerless for an average of 86.7 hours per year. Here in the US, the vast majority of customer outages are caused in the distribution and transmission grids, not due to generator failures.)”
http://theenergycollective.com/TheEnergyCollective/56111
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Marcus, I think you need to check that number… 60GW of wind for 14 billion…. unless my maths is lousy (and it is not all that flash I admit)… that is about $230 per installed kW… quite a staggeringly low figure.
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Marcus, The last price estimate for West Texas wind projects was $2500 per kW of name plate capacity. When capacity factor is considered that is about $6250 per average kW of output, a price that is higher than the 2010 going rate for nuclear plants in many parts of the world. The US EIA estimates that the levelized cost of new wind generated electricity in 2016 will be 15 American cents per kWh, while the same source estimates a levelized cost of 12 cents per kWh for new American Nuclear generated power for the same year.
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Dear Barry, I watched the video with you and Mark Whatsisname. Adelaide is a funny place. It has been twenty five years since I sat in the Barr-Smith library (nearly married one of the librarians) and it was ever so. Having never really been interested in the life of an academic, rather the “Engineer/Scientist” role it was very pleasing to come across your site. Great information.
I have always been a rusted on AGW sceptic. I have looked at the numbers over and over and over, and I just can’t see it. Not for the lack of training, the ABS thought I was pretty nifty at computational statistics. It would come as no suprise to let you know that I have been pro-nuclear since age nine. I have no particular problem with burning coal to boil water apart from it is a little 18th century for my tastes, and we can think of a LOT more nifty things to use coal for.
Anyway, back to Mark Whatsisname, I would have dearly loved to ask “Just how are you going to steal Pu from an IFR? Dip buckets into the core and smuggle it out in Eskys?”. The man hasn’t got a clue. I spent a fair bit of time with energy companies as well, doing power networks, data networks and SCADA. If he thinks a 4GEN IFR is in the distant future then I suggest an affordable (and more importantly do-able) ‘smart’ distributed energy supply system powered by windmills could be finished twelve weeks after the second coming ;-)
So, good luck with the on-going work, and applause for the work already done. Very impressive.
Now…..
“Podargus, on 21 February 2010 at 18.23 Said:
Yes,climate change deniers,nuclear deniers and,even worse,population deniers,do matter- a hell of a lot.We are running out of time.
Until those sheep” …….
Whoops. That is really not a great way to win friends and influence people. It exactly that type of thing that leads some rather brilliant polymaths (ahem) to regard the Green movement as a “load of ill-bred, ill-educated, ill-informed, ill-prepared scruffy wankers that need to go and live in a cave”.
[…]
“Podargus – swift,silent hunter of the night”
If you had any more tickets on yourself you could be a Glenelg Tram Conductor.
Mark Addinall. Ex Australian Army (Regular), a few universities, Engineer to the Stars!
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They don’t matter. I’ve commented on lot’s of these blogs that seem to fuss endlessly over some idiotic statement by someone in the US or Europe, that it seems more and more clear that the countries that will really matter are India and China and they both seem on the verge of a massive buildup in nuclear capacity. It would be nice if we ‘led’, and maybe we still will, but it really doesn’t matter.
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“Frank Jablonski, on 23 February 2010 at 2.18 Said:
[…]
This is like saying the advantage for renewables is that they don’t work to provide the energy that people want.”
I think I love you ;-)
Humans have had about 3000 years of R&D spent on Windmills, and I can’t see much of an improvement. At least the older ones had some aesthetic merit (being a beginner watercolour painter I start to pass an eye on function AND form ;) unlike those ugly product of the eco-terrorist, the Wind Farm.
“I wanna 400BHP V12 Street Machine”
Petrol Salesman
“Sure, but don’t stand behind it, you’ll choke to death, and you have to service it a few times a year”
Coal Salesman
“Sure, but you might get a LITTLE performance degredation towing these coal carts around the country, and you have to service it a few times a year”
Nuclear Salesman
“Sure, but places exist where the locals will throw rocks at you and will not let you park it in conveniant places, and you have to service it every year”
Wind Salesman
“Sure, but when I say 400BHP we actually mean our 72BHP model with a shiny 400BHP sticker. And you can only drive it on Tuesdays, and Friday arvo’s. But sometime Friday is out of the question. HOWEVER, if you buy TWO of them, and stick one in another city, there is a REAL GOOD chance that you could drive that one on a Friday arvo instead. You can get to your other ‘Bitchin’ Wind Machine’ by scooting up the Smart Distribution Yellow Brick Road in a Petrol, Coal or Nuke powered jobbie. How many would you like? Errr. We only have one colour, Green”
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“And I forgot to mention. If you try to go slower than 15 mph it will automatically stall. Oh, and if you try to go faster than 68 mph it will also, for your safety, stall. Isn’t that nice and ECO-CARING?”
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“Oh, and the car park need to be a LITTLE large. For the 400(72) model, lessee, hmmmm, 20,000 acres should do it. It needs to be on prime beachfront land. And you will need a car park for the “Friday Emergency Smart Balancing Act” machine, so yea, about 40,000 of prime coastal real estate should just about do it”
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some kW
more power… 5MW
http://www.kitves.com/state_of_art.aspx
3-30MW
3MW-60GW
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OT. Apologies.
Well, hating Bill Gates is an old and well-trodden hobby,
however, I seem to remember……..(wooooo….)
“from the outset he was held in contempt by tech crowd because he bought into DOS when everyone had moved beyond it.”
Well, not quite true. He didn’t buy INTO MS-DOS as such.
He bought QDOS and re-named it MS-DOS. And shortly
killed the Daddy of the 8088/8086 set, CP/M. So, the choices were, don’t have an operating system, write machine code. BASIC in ROM. CP/M. QDOS (very briefly), 86-DOS, CPM-86,
UCSD-P System (a little late), DR-DOS, SCO XENIX System V or MS-DOS(PC-DOS). Having used all of them, I thought MS-DOS was quite sweet :-), XENIX was a pig on a little chip, UCSD-P System was AWSOME! Using a 8088 system with 512 KB of RAM as a multi user server (three users, console, two serial) at a respectable business speed! The various flavours of CP/M dies a death. BASIC became an ugly word. MS-DOS won the OS race hands down. Whilst reading in the Barr-Smith I had a wonderful job porting C-BASIC code and Z-80 assembler from a CP/M environment into Microsoft Business BASIC under MS-DOS and Thus verily, the Adelaide based Sybiz accounting application was born. And the rest, as they say, is history……
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Look out, Marcus has linked to KiteGen.
Marcus, they don’t like any *new* renewable technologies here mate. They’ll harp on about the wonders of Gen4 reactors and how they’ll be cheaper than chips, really truly, there’s this paper that says so, they’ll be totally unlike their more expensive grand-daddy’s…
…but somehow the same courtesy of listening to the scientists and engineers involved in the latest *renewable energy* does not apply.
Then it’s all, “Where can I order one?” (giggles.) “Hey, who do I call?” (chuckles). “Yeah, I’ll just rush out and order a dozen.” (whooops with self congratulations and hi-fives all around).
But mention Gen4? “Oh yes, XYZ paper claims….” (serious self important tone begins).
Whereas SCIAM states:
“One of the main arguments against such reactors is cost—a fast reactor is cooled by molten sodium rather than water, and the advanced design is estimated to cost anywhere from $1 billion to $2 billion more per reactor than a similarly sized conventional reactor [see “Rethinking Nuclear Fuel Recycling,” by Frank N. von Hippel; Scientific American, May 2008]. Democrats in Congress blocked most funding for fast reactors late in the Bush administration, and President Obama does not favor them.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rethinking-nuclear-fuel-recycling
At least Barry had the honesty to publish the following recently:
“– Nobody knows yet how much IFR plants would cost to build and operate. Without the commercial-scale demo of the IFR, along with rationalization of the licensing process, any claims about costs are simply hand-waving guesses.”
So Marcus, don’t you DARE go sharing gigawatt scaled KiteGen wind power systems with higher capacity factors, because although they’ve tested many prototypes and the engineers are quite confident that this will soon be a seriously cheap new energy source, these guys are just not used to thinking of renewables as baseload mate, and so you’ve got to break it to them gently! ;-)
http://www.kitegen.com/en/
http://www.kitegen.com/pages/faq_eng.html
http://www.kitegen.com/pages/technology3.html
I’m not that stressed about nuclear power after reading this blog, but just imagine if the (to date unsourced) claims of the KiteGen wiki actually developed as claimed!!
“This can generate 1 Gigawatt of power, equivalent to a medium size nuclear power station but with an estimated capital cost 10 times lower. In other words 1 cubic Km of sky is able to provide 1 GigaWatt of power for 80% of the time in a year.”
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Whooops…. typo!
I meant to say:
So Marcus, don’t you DARE go sharing gigawatt scaled KiteGen wind power systems with higher capacity factors THAN REGULAR WIND..
I’m not claiming that KiteGen have higher capacity than nuclear, although if it really works out to be 80% that’s not so bad hey?
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The kitegen would be a bit larger for 1GW.
About 1.6km in diameter.
For 60GW you would have a 25km diameter ring.
For now they are commercialising the 3MW Stem. A 27MW kitegen Windpark (9 stem units) is under construction since Dez 09.
1MW installed will be about 4 times cheaper than conventional windturbines with a capacity factor from 50-85% depending on location an operating high (800-10.000m).
The Stem could be operated offshore or on a ship.
Heres much more information on the project (with comments by the Italien engineers).
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5538
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5554
I like it because you can service it localy and on the ground.
No more silly arguments about people falling from roofs or turbines…
They are beatifull, almost invisible and noiseless.
Theres also great potential in new kite designs and flight algorithmics design.
Obama should give them a call and order some. Australia too.
There is also Makani Power in the US (a google thing) but kitegen is way ahead.
In Swizerland they just started research and in the Netherlands they have a kitelab at TU Delft where they research “the laddermill” and kite aerodynamics.
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Mate, IF this technology works as advertised they won’t need Obama to do anything: the marketplace will be screaming for it.
Which ironically is the whole point of Barry’s post above. All the bleating from climate sceptics and anti-nukes and pro-nukes won’t mean a thing if these beasts can generate power that cheap at that kind of capacity, AND that level of simplicity in construction. At that price, if you are even remotely worried about capacity issues, just build another 25% and you’ve got it covered!
Or better, divert some of the economic savings into other diverse and complementary energy streams. If a big wind storm is going to ground the kites, why not have some wavepower and geothermal going as well? The KiteGen people would even argue that having another KiteGen farm a few hundred miles away would probably be cheaper, so we’ll see.
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**Hi DV8**
“According to environmentalism, there is no moral way to produce the motive power that industrial civilization requires. Large-scale power production is incompatible with environmentalism’s injunction against man-made alterations to the environment. Any form of man-made power that supports industrial civilization, regardless of how little it pollutes or how few resources it uses, is immoral because it supports industrial civilization.”
I’ve met some whacko environmentalists that are in this camp, but Stephen is not one of them. You’ve basically just run up another character attack argument again, and are trying to ‘poison the well’ by association.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_the_well
(Ways finger at childish argument strategy).
Do you want me to right-off all pro-nuclear advocates because George Bush was an anti-climate conspirator that called NUKULAR power ‘renewable’? I’m sure I could find other ‘confused’ nuclear advocates… Let’s all lose our credibility as we play…. (drum roll)…. ‘Poison the well’.
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@DV82XL:
Fair comment about Bill Gates software.
I was citing him because of his economic opinion (that nuclear could be cheaper but currently was not) and added a couple of extra paragraphs because I thought his views were interesting, not expert. I agree with you that we should not follow gurus and make our own independent investigations based on a variety of expert sources.
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eclipsenow, -If Stephen Gloor has anything to say about my reply to him, he is free to address me on his own. He doesn’t need any help from you.
I have come to the conclusion, based on the tone of your postings here that you are nothing more than a noisy little peckerwood, with nothing of consequence to add to this discussion.
I’ll will not be responding to anything you post until you learn some manners
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Well, if you’re going to dive headlong into a LONG character attack post on someone I’ve respected for years, what do you expect? You’ve hardly got an endearing online persona yourself.
But I was soooo looking forward to your disproving the CETO wavepower, OTEC oceanpower, geothermal, new graphite block solar thermal storage mechanisms, and of course Kitegen. I guess I’ll have to just do what I’ve said I was doing all along, and sit back and watch the energy market unfold, including all the “Black Swans” and twists and turns and surprises of technical advancement. And who knows? Maybe Bill Gates will get his wish for a 100 fold increase in battery performance. If that happens the game will have totally changed. EV’s won’t store 160km worth of juice, it’ll be more like 16,000 km per car. Even a 10 fold increase would be a game changer!
Then it will be a case of “What storage problem?”
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I think the very nature of the response to your initial comment highlights a problem that I believe you consistently underestimate namely that we are caught up in a real life version of the prisoners dilemma and the choices that will be made will not be the optimum choices that are available.
When I read the various comments I see much the same thing and it seems to happen in every forum where this topic is discussed – people focus on those issues about which they are passionate largely ignoring the larger picture.
Representatives of sovereign states operate in a similar vein there is a token concern about the global commons but the pessimistic side of me suggests that this will be resolved in much the same way as the problem of the commons was solved in 18th century Europe – the commons were simply taken over by the large land holders.
We are already seeing some moves in this regard in Antartica where nations are preparing to stake a claim to that last bit of terrestrial global commons .
The atmosphere and oceans are not so readily appropriated but again there are some initial moves in the WTO that will enable countries to restrict imports on environmental grounds (see Sands Lawless World) hence my scepticism that anyone’s opinion particularly matters – ultimately all that we can be doing is make an impact in our own backyard and hope that our good example will be followed.
It is also the basis for my continued opposition to nuclear – I can accept that the engeering is at a stage where we can address most if not all of the problems traditionally associated with nuclear energy what I cannot accept is that governments will necessarily implement best practice and furthermore not see nuclear power as an opportunity to develop their own nuclear arsenals – the same twisted logic that applies to Dr Strangelove is still alive and kicking in governments the world over.
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barry brook:
“But my point, which I still maintain is valid, is that climate sceptics and anti-nukes are irrelevant in the global picture”
How much time we have to develop more large scale and modern Gen III and IV nuclear is important. Also the time line influences whether to focus more on R&D, eg. fusion, or rapid commercial development of what we have now.
In the IPCC 2007 report the low scenario is 1.8 degrees over the whole century and the high scenario is 4 degrees over the whole century. These upper and lower limits (which are themselves subject to controversy) represent significant differences in how much time we have. You can never remove the role of scepticism in the discussion because that is the nature of science and what is is good for – a means of inquiry, rather than as an official arbiter of the truth.
Anties have not been irrelevant in the past because they influenced Clinton and Kerry to shut down and suppress information about the IFR. The battle for ideas is always important. I think they are relevant in that they influence career paths in the West. We might be better off if the nuclear science faculty was bigger than the climate science faculty.
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Barry wrote up thread:“Perhaps what “we” can do is help in getting costs of low-carbon electricity down. In which case, maybe climate skeptics and anti-nukes do matter after all? This is the discussion I’m trying to get us to knock around…”
In the near term most new nuclear plants will likely be evolutionary designs often pursuing economies of scale. In the longer term, innovative designs can be developed, but for the moment we are best going in with what we got.
Capital costs for nuclear plants generally account for 45-75% of the total nuclear electricity generation costs, compared to 25-60% for coal plants and 15-40% for gas plants. Nuclear power’s advantage is in its low fuel costs, relative to fossil, and especially to gas, fired generating stations. Design organizations quote generation cost (capital, operation and maintenance, and fuel) targets in the range of 3-5 US cents/kWh, which are highly competitive with fossil alternatives.
Reducing the capital cost to meet these generation cost targets presents a significant challenge, which reactor builders are addressing by incorporating both proven means and new approaches for reducing costs into their evolutionary designs. Moreover, there are now available plants scaled for various grid capacities and owner investment capabilities, including large sizes for some markets and small and medium sizes for others.
Experience has provided proven means for reducing costs of nuclear projects. Economies of scale are being pursued in, for example, the Republic of Korea, India and Japan for new evolutionary water-cooled reactors.
Shortening the construction schedule reduces the financing charges that accrue without countervailing revenue. The schedule can be shortened by manufacture of modular systems to reduce on-site and tailor-made construction. Addressing licensing issues before start of construction is also key, as is efficient project management. Recent good experience includes extensive use of integrated design tools (Computer Aided Design and Engineering) that facilitate modularization, improvements in system arrangement and accessibility, and coordination of procurement with construction activities.
Standardization and construction in series offer savings by spreading fixed costs over several units, and from productivity gains in equipment manufacturing, field engineering, and construction. Standardization is also leading to cost reduction for Canada’s CANDU, Japan’s ABWRs, the Republic of Korea’s KSNPs. and India’s AHWRs.
Closely related is multiple unit construction at a single site. The average cost for identical units on the same site can be about 15% lower than the cost of a single unit, with savings coming mostly in siting and licensing costs, site labor and common facilities. Canada’s Bruce, Pickering and Darlington sites and the 58 PWRs in France built as multiple units at 19 sites are good examples.
This is what is available now. Not to put too fine a point on it, the rest of the world does not have to follow the United States in nuclear technology anymore. France, Canada, Korea and now India can and do export reactors all over the world, and some of them are just more suitable for many nations than the Westinghouse and G.E. offerings.
Aside: For the life of me, I do not understand why Australia, with a good supply of uranium, and no plans to build a nuclear weapon capability, isn’t buying Canadian or Indian heavy water reactors. The only supporting element that you are missing is a fuel fab plant, and one would do the whole country for the foreseeable future.[ /aside]
The point here is that the cost of existing designs can be lowered a good deal more than they have been, just by the application of commonsense and good business practice.
The question that needs to be asked is what is standing in the way – the answer is those with much to loose, dressing themselves in the mantels of antinuclear, or climate deniers, to hide their true colors.
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@ Rod Adams:
thanks for information from World Nuclear News
@ Barry Brook:
thanks for http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html link
China does seem to be ramping up nuclear quite significantly. I need to study the economic issue more.
What I would like to see would be a modern study similar to the one done by Bernard L. Cohen in Ch. 9 of his 1990 online book, see Table 1:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
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Eclipsenow – I’ve no problem with your “renewables”, I’d love wind solar et al to play a massive part in our energy future. If KiteGen is all it is cracked up to be, and other potential future renewable technologies then can you explain a couple of comments from Stephen (whom you deeply respect:
“I am the first to admit that renewables do have a long way to go before they will be supplying anything more than a token amount of the worlds energy.” Did you hear that “A LONG WAY TO GO”.
“renewables have one overwhelming advantage over other energy sources and that is by their nature foster a lower energy use philosophy that is sadly lacking with most nuclear advocates.”
because if renewables really can provide cheap baseload, then why would the end user develop a lower energy use philosophy?
Same goes for your better place cars… if they are so cheap then why would people drive less and adopt more sustainable travel modes. It is arguable that development of dirt cheap electric vehicles will destroy urbanity far more than the internal combustion engine has already managed in terms of urban sprawl and associated environmental issues.
What I think you really need to do is explain why you want to abandon a safe, reliable and cheap option such as modern nuclear power, and ignore the potential of Gen IV plants that are no more pie in the sky than kitegen? Just what is the rationale for ruling them out? I’m not ruling out renewables, three cheers all round if they manage to pull out some game changing tech breakthrough.
GEn III nuclear is here now and off the shelf. GenIV and the renewable options you prefer are “A LONG WAY OFF” – why would you put all your eggs in one basket.
All I can assume is that you are clinging to traditional anti-nuclear reasons, which gets to the point of the blog, which is….
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Barry Brook – “Stephen Gloor:
It is completely ridiculous to compare climate change deniers with anti nuclear people…Climate change deniers cherry-pick and/or ignore this evidence to arrive at their world view.
It seems quite a valid comparison to me.”
Which is exactly what you do to arrive at your world view of nuclear power. Simply linking to a list of things that seem valid to you however have absolutely no basis in truth and/or are not supported by peer reviewed research simply reinforces MY point.
Climate change deniers go against the vast body of research that exists. There is no comparable body of research that concludes that nuclear is the way to go therefore renewable advocates are NOT comparable to climate change deniers and I bitterly resent being put in the same category. It is a measure of how far off the rails that you and this blog have gone that this sort of fallacious comparison is acceptable.
This is not a return to this blog so you can rest assured that I will be not debating any of the points raised.
However climate change deniers DO matter as they delay action on climate change as they are extremely effective in what they do and they do have an effect.
Renewable advocates on the other hand perhaps do not matter other than trying to influence what they believe to be the best form of future energy. What influence they have is debatable when the real money is being wasted on Clean Coal.
“Nuclear is the answer” is a very short sighted opinion when the problem is much bigger than where our energy supply should come from. Your simplistic notion that all we have to do is roll out nuclear and all will be well is not becoming for a person of your education and experience. I would have expected a far more sophisticated world view than this from you and indeed that is how you started when I first started to read this blog. Your myopia on nuclear is chasing away real debate and BNC is now nothing more than a nuclear echo chamber.
Only when we realise that our society is the problem and we need drastic change so that we can be truly sustainable for the future will the problem of climate change be addressed. Only then can we begin to consider what is the best energy source. That answer may turn out to be nuclear or at least GenIV however you are not asking the right questions nor are you fostering a free and open debate that may get near the correct questions. Indeed there are many people that question the notion that any society that needs exponential growth can EVER be sustainable and we are just pissing in the wind. They may turn out to be the most correct of all of us.
I am cross posting this at the Energy Collective.
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Stephen Gloor said:
Well, if it’s any comfort, I’m sure climate change sceptics bitterly resent being put in the same category as anti-nukes. But hey, I’m not in this business to please either group. I’ll just say like like I see it.
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I’m not really sure why the energy source suited to providing energy for civilisation is dependent on realisation that “our society is the problem.”
To me it sounds like a recipe for continuing the status quo because I don’t see society choosing “drastic change” or self-flagellation any time soon.
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With me, The Energy Collective has lost such reputation as a place for open debate as it once had when a comment of mine got through moderation, and then, somehow, disappeared again. I wondered if I had been mistaken in thinking it had got through, but in Google’s cache, there it was.
(It was in a discussion of CCS that did the usual listing of options that to me seem superfluous, and as such discussions commonly do, proceeded as if the one that makes them superfluous — pulverization and dispersal of alkaline earth orthosilicate minerals — was undemonstrated and unthought of. What is the point of behaving that way, and animal-farming the comments into compliance??)
(How fire can be domesticated)
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Stephen Gloor –
You wouldn’t answer my last remarks to you in any detail, and apparently you won’t answer this. You are not going to, or defend your position because you have a religion. Your religion tells them that only renewable energy is “good” and all other energy is “bad.” Your definitions of good and bad are in your mind. There is no objective truth for religion, no foundation. When religious people argue, they’re arguing about opinion, and they can argue forever.
Wind and solar are stupid little toys; they will forever remain toys. They will never power an advanced civilization. They are a waste of our economic resources, our attention and our time. Real, productive people need real, industrial-sized power. And, don’t even mention conservation. Conservation is no energy policy. Conservation is no more an energy plan than fasting is a food supply. Sure, greater efficiencies save energy, but we immediately have more uses for it.
As I wrote elsewhere today, your kind are seeking to cut off the motive power of industry. You are quite simply attempting to destroy the Industrial Revolution by starving it to death. Such a reversal would begin a new Dark Age for mankind—a Dark Age in which everyone would be compelled to accept a standard of living well below that of the Third World—a Dark Age that would open with the deaths of billions of human beings who would have become the “surplus” population that could no longer be supported in a world without mass production.
This is in the end is what you stand for.
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‘Renewable advocates are NOT comparable to climate change deniers and I bitterly resent being put in the same category.’
I don’t think Barry or anyone was calling you a climate change denier, so I wouldn’t take it personally. However, it is certainly the case that some renewables advocates, in their zeal for advocating an energy roadmap that also satisfies certain philosophical, political or personal identity imperatives, have used the same class of rhetorical ploys as climate deniers, as creationists, as the anti nukes, and the tobacco science lobby. The comparison is spot on.
You’ve argued here, tenaciously but not convincingly (to me, anyway), that renewables can provide baseload (and peaking) power. But when you say:
” .. renewables have one overwhelming advantage over other energy sources and that is by their nature foster a lower energy use philosophy”
I’m just flabbergasted that you can hold two such contradictory statements in your head at once. This seems to be a sabotage mindset – advocate renewable energy systems ostensibly to provide power, but, cryptically, to ensure power is not provided, because your endgame is a powered down society.
I think you’d stop tying yourself in contortions if you made it explicit that your aim is a low power society, not a renewable power system for our present civilization. That way we could stop arguing about renewable capabilities, (they clearly have the characteristics you want), and we could stop arguing about nuclear power (it clearly works against your aim). If this is your aim, your energy position makes sense to me (and sorry if I’ve been a bit thick about not recognizing this earlier).
We could then have a discussion about whether a low power society or a high powered, but clean powered, society is preferable. I might disagree with you on that, but the positions could be argued with integrity.
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I’ve been away and haven’t caught up with many things, including all
the comments on this post, so apologies if I repeat what has already been
said. Contrarians (Hansen’s favoured term) and anti-nukes matter, and matter big time, because they vote. All those yobbos driving
round in 4WDs with “I fish/hunt and I vote” stickers have an excellent
knowledge of the (Western) political process. They visit politicians, they lie,
they threaten, they bully. These tactics work and there is enough overlap
in the fishing/hunting lobby and the Contrarian lobby that if they
feel threatened they will use the same very effective tactics. The anti-nukes
are rather different and can, hopefully be persuaded with rational
debate … I was.
The people involved in IFR promotion and design have plenty of
work to do. It’s up to the rest of us to deal with skeptics and anti-nukes as
well as possible. BNC is a great resource.
While I was away, I read Hansen’s book “Storms of my grandchildren” … definitely a must read!
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Just what is a “Climate change denier” by the way?
The nearest I can see to that rather bizarre description
is the folk that want to sell windmills and have declared
that the weather on the 28th of Julember 1981 was just perfect
and nothing should be ALLOWED to move it from that base.
This is the “Goldilocks” School of Climate Science.
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Upthread, eclipsenow said:
Yes, thanks for the nudge, I’ve been considering doing something like this — to not only capture my occasional talks and extended radio interviews, but also to run a regular series, with guests etc., much as Rod Adams has successfully done for quite some time.
I’ll get my Environment Institute guys onto it… soonish. I’ll be running a 6-part energy series in conjunction with RiAus in mid-2010, so this might be a good time to launch it.
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Stephen, anti-nuclear renewable advocate most are obstructing climate change mitigation and doing so in a far more dangerous way than climate change deniers are. There is a rapidly growing body of research literature that contradicts the claims that renewable supporters make about the carbon mitigation potential of renewable energy.
When renewable critics point to holes in arguments in support of renewables, to inadequate data, or to data which contradicts the case which anti-nuclear advocates are making, the renewable advocates simply ignore the problem, and simply go on to another argument.
Anti-nuclear ideologues base their case on several untrue arguments. They argue that nuclear power is unsafe, despite ample empirical evidence that nuclear power has a superior safety record, and is safer than both fossil fuels and wind. Anti-nuclear ideologues argue that nuclear power is dangerous because of the problem of nuclear waste. Yet despite ample evidence that any number of several competing nuclear waste solutions would work, anti-nuclear ideologues continue to oppose any nuclear waste solution. Anti-nuclear ideologues argue that nuclear power is dangerous because of nuclear proliferation. This argument rests on two mistakes. The first is that the possession of civilian power reactors in itself leads to weapons programs. An analysis will of the routes taken by states that currently possess nuclear weapons, demonstrate that most developed their nuclear weapons program before rather than the developed civilian reactor programs. Furthermore, the notion that reactor grade plutonium is weaponizable is contradicted by nuclear weapons experts, and physicists who have worked with nuclear arms control negotiations. No nation has ever developed, and successfully tested a reactor grade plutonium nuclear weapon, despite having abundant raw material to do so.
Finally, anti-nuclear ideologues argue that nuclear power is too expensive. Yet when the true capital costs of electricity from renewables, that is the cost of the subsidies, and the costs that gets paid by rate payers, the cost of renewables is always higher. Thus none of the anti-nuclear arguments withstands critical evaluation, and people who are interested effective AGW mitigation, such as environmental activist Stewart Brand, should be willing to acknowledge the weakness of the anti-nuclear case. You are not willing to do that.
Stephen, John D Morgan,has pointed out the contradictions in your claims, that renewable energy can both serve as base load power, and that it will teach us to get by on a low energy lifestyle. Steven, isn’t that what AGW skeptics do, maintain contradictory positions, even after the contradictions are pointed out.?
You argue ““Nuclear is the answer” is a very short sighted opinion when the problem is much bigger than where our energy supply should come from.” This is what logicians call a straw many argument. You simply, without the slightest evidence, make a blanket attribution of a bogus idea to the people you disagree with, and then say, “you see there, you are wrong.”
You argue, “Your simplistic notion that all we have to do is roll out nuclear and all will be well is not becoming for a person of your education and experience.” This putdown is totally unjustified because you have not established that anyone holds the simplistic notion you attribute to them.
You argue, “I would have expected a far more sophisticated world view than this from you and indeed that is how you started when I first started to read this blog. ” Since you have failed to make a case that Barry Brook takes any of the is unsophisticated ideas you attribute to him, this is simply another gratuitous put down.
You state, “Your myopia on nuclear is chasing away real debate and BNC is now nothing more than a nuclear echo chamber.” Echo chamber? Please! Don’t you see that there are at the moment 167 comments on in response to Barry’s post? Don’t you see that comments are written from a variety of positions, and there is spirited disagreement between commenters? Don’t you see that among the pro-nuclear commenters on this blog there are significant areas of disagreement? Stephen, who is being myopic here?
You maintain, “Only when we realise that our society is the problem and we need drastic change so that we can be truly sustainable for the future will the problem of climate change be addressed.” You have not established what you think the problem is. I will presume that you are a neo-Malthusian, that is a person who doubts that the earth lacks the carrying capacity for its present and future human population. In fact, I have detected some sympathy for that position in Barry’s writings, and if so it would be one of the areas that Barry and I disagree on.
In addition to attributing to Barry a position that he might well disagree with, you add a seeming non-sequitor. Even if the claims you are attempting to make are true, how does your no-nuks approach follow. You have laid not groundwork, and have not presented to well thought out argument to which this would be a valid conclusion.
Finally, you srgue, “That answer may turn out to be nuclear or at least GenIV however you are not asking the right questions nor are you fostering a free and open debate that may get near the correct questions. Indeed there are many people that question the notion that any society that needs exponential growth can EVER be sustainable and we are just pissing in the wind. They may turn out to be the most correct of all of us.”
Stephen what are “the right questions,” and why do you think that they are? Again you attribute to Barry and others a view, which they might disagree with if given a chance, and if they agree with it, might add significant qualifications. In short you are creating another straw man argument. No one her has argued for exponential growth, and economic growth, need not consume more and more materials. There is, as Richard Feynman pointed out plenty of room for growth by miniaturization, there is plenty of room at the bottom. Economic growth can come by doing more and more by less and less. Secondly, there has not been a realistic assessment of world material resources, and thus there is no grounds for claims that economic growth, at least the sort of growth I suggest is unsustainable. We know that some material resources exist in a sustainable supply. Among the sustainable resources are uranium and thorium, which exist in sufficient abundance that they will outlast and human demands, given that solar evolution will one day maker the earth uninhabitable. Should solutions to our energy problems wait for a world resource assessment? I don’t think so. We have the material resources to solve the energy problem for as long as we choose to, so why not use them.
Stephen the argument here is that nuclear critics resemble AGW skeptics. One of the ways they do so, I would maintain is by use of irrational arguments.
I have pointed to numerous flaws in your arguments, flaws which I also find in arguments presented by AGW skeptics. Thus in that regard, I would maintain that yes, your argument style and its flaws does have a lot in common with AGW skeptics.
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Been there, done that. Next?
Critique of ‘A path to sustainable energy by 2030′
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“Well, if you’re going to dive headlong into a LONG character attack post on someone I’ve respected for years, what do you expect? You’ve hardly got an endearing online persona yourself.” – eclipsenow
eclipsenow,, what do you make of Stephen’s long ad hominem attack on Barry, the one I dissected? One is, of course, rarely endearing online when he or she makes a point or using the rules of logic against an opponent, but is what matters getting people to like you, or is it bringing the truth out? One can be a great guy, and kind to his children and still use very flawed arguments, and stubbornly adhere to them, even when their flaws are pointed out. People who are engaged in passionate argument, are likely to say things in the heat of the moment that they may not mean. It happens. Apply your rules consistently and get over it.
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Sure… but there’s a difference between “Renewable advocates” and people who come to the discussion with a dogmatic almost religious ideology that nuclear energy is bad, and who refuse to entertain rational, fact-based, evidence-based scientifically sound discussion of the benefits of nuclear energy – and people who refuse to participate in any sensible discussion of the real facts regarding the limitations, scalability, availability and costs of “renewable” energy.
No, by the way, I’m not saying that the above is a description of you.
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There wont be 10.000 nukes overnight or a renewable solution in a matter of some years…
There is no other chance than to use less.
The average american household uses what? 11.000kWh? Yet they do not have a very high standard of living compared to countries taht use less than 1/3.
Use less and shut down some coal plants.
Providing those people that don`t understand that with energy does not make sense at all.
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Conservation is a bad long-term policy. It’s a backwards-looking policy of stagnation. It certainly needs to be part of our short-term goals while so much of our energy comes from fossil fuels, but it needs to stop there.
Conservation is important when the resource is limited. Energy is not. Conservation helps us maintain the status quo, but it prevents us from moving forward. There’s an implication by those who call for conserving energy — sometimes overt — that an insatiable appetite for energy is a bad thing. But it isn’t.
The solution to our energy needs is not conservation. The solution is creating, developing, and deploying new sources of renewable energy so we never have to conserve again. Energy lets us do things. With more energy we can do more. Simple as that. If we can’t grow enough food, so we say, “Go a little hungry?” No. We develop ways to produce more.
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You have to learn to let go. To share stuff, money, food,…
As long as 1.800billion or more are wasted for wars I don`t see how we would need more energy?
There are obviously places we can save energy and ressources.
Why should you give energy to those that use too much?
If China was the USA in terms of standard of living they would not push nuclear but restrict the use of energy instead. Now they are investing in every technology…they might even come up with a renewable solution instead.
But of course a centralized power source does suit a dictatorship.
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A centralized power source would definitely suit a dictatorship.
It would also very well suit a popular democracy, a hereditary monarchy, a socialist collective, a constitutional republic or a theocracy.
What was your point? Perhaps to create a spurious negative association? Would this be an instance of the rhetorical ploys I mentioned in my response to Stephen, above?
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Barry,
Re: your call to review the original post. I maintain my original position – that anti-nukes do matter. As energy demand sees the most growth in the developing world over the coming decades; existing, aged generation infrastructure will be replaced elsewhere during the same period (in addition to new capacity installation to address more modest growth).
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You would not accept the same limitation with the Internet.
Why would you accept it with power?
You can`t switch off my PV island solution. (ruling out EMP weapons…)
You can cut off gas supply, uranium, cole, oil or just switch of a big plant.
Thats where pv trumps anything in the long term. Plus is cheaper for the individual.
People that use their own power also consume less power thus saving even more (money/envirement).
People could actually feel standby, old light bulbs or the fridge that is just too big.
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Marcus, when there’s no oil, gas, coal or uranium energy, and industrial civilisation has collapsed, who is going to manufacture your replacement solar panels and inverter? As Gregory pointed out. ‘Alternative lifestylers’ and doomists usually also conveniently ignore this little problem.
Your figures for payback times for PV are wrong — completely wrong. I strongly suggest you read this piece by Gene Preston:
Key concepts for reliable, small-scale low-carbon energy grids
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Marcus, if your gas, coal and oil get cut off the other 8 million people in Austria might just come and take your PV panels too. You haven’t thought this through, have you?
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the fact that you get your power off grid would not make it decentralized unless you made the solar or wind power yourself. distributed power is perfectly compatible with production monopolies over that power.
distributed power deriving from a monopoly would likely be affordable only by the rich.
No sensible energy system would be primarily off grid for efficiency reasons. Centralized power systems can be owned by multinationals or the public.
I think we have to resist equating decentralization with dispersed power and democracy; by the same token, as John points out, we should resist equating central power sources with concentrated wealth and economic power.
If decentralized power proponents had faith in a future human solidarity, they would not make a fetish of decentralization.
I, having watched many dystopian movies, associate decentralized power with Mad Max scenarios, not William Morris utopias.
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Thats exactly why everybody needs pv.
They would not come for my panels if it was only a shortage for some days…like last winter…they only consequence for them is that those on gas have to find some other place to sleep or wear some serious pullovers.
PV will also be integrated in building materials. You would have to take apart a roof, fassade or windows.
Do we want to depend on foreign gas, oil, uranium?
Material for Indium/Germanium free pv is more easily available.
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marcus: perhaps I cannot switch off your pv island, but you have to buy the pvs from somewhere, most likely a multinational. and at any rate, pvs, since they cannot provide reliable base power, would carry their own off switch as part of their constitution. “they” wouldn’t have to switch off your power since you would often not have sufficient power to start with.
second, as noted above, ordinary people cannot afford to buy their own power sources. third, what does your island imagery tell us about your view of human cooperative potential?
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What do you pay for your power?
At 23€cent/kWh it is economical to go off grid and it saves you money after some years.
You get payed 60% of your grid tied pv instalation.. Most pv is payed for after 5 years. You will fed in more years because you get money doing so.
After FIT you will get more (even cheaper panels) and get off grid completly.
We are rich. Whats the point?
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We do cooperate.
I`ve built s micro hydro gravityvortex plant with my neighbors. It is grid tied and it is also cheaper than buying power. It is also base load.
Ever heared of batteries? You can also have PV/wind/storage solutions for small cells.
We got communal grids owned by the people.
Small citys do not need big power solutions. They are better of if they produce their own power and sell the surplus.
People from all over the world are comeing to Austria to see how such solutions can work. Güssing would love to welcome you some day.
http://www.eee-info.net/cms/EN/
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austria gets most of its electricity from hydro. yes? over 60 %?
austria is thus not much of a model for the rest of the world, as the rest of the world does not have such resources. the base power you mention is hydropower I assume.
what percentage of your electricity comes from solar power?
what will happen without the significant subsidy you mention?
I’m glad you are rich and no, I have not heard of batteries? what’s a battery?
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Just visit the acadamy of Güssing.
It is Burgenland….there is little to no Hydro in Burgenland.
There are various renewable solutions for various locations.
You can get on contact with the EEE- I just provided you with the website.
The gravityvortex plant is some Austrian invention that enables more people to use hydropower with little overhead.
I produce about 4.900kWh/a pv power and use 3.600kWh/a.
It would also pay without the subsidy but take longer. Since we want to switch faster we use subsidies.
Austria is one of the richest countries of the world. I don`t see a problem in the use of subsidies. You can move a lot when everybody contributes a little money.
You seem to have money too. You are using time to think about ideas, post ideas on the internet,…
It does not make a difference for the western individual if power costs 5,6,7, or 15 cent..or 23-27€c like in Europe. We can provide the poor with subsidiesed power.
OTOH if you visit the EEE ind Güssing you will learn that this is not necessary at all.
If you visit kitegen.com you will learn that there are many other ideas to produce cheap baseload renewable power.
We might even consider changes in society. Like the unconditional basic income.
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Barry,
Maybe you should also consider visiting the EuropeanRenewableEnergyCenter in Güssing some day.
Austria is a beautiful country and there is much to learn from projects that have been realised in this model region since 1996.
I got pv installed for 2€/W. They do all the paperwork. I get 60% and FIT. You can buy that package from your utility too. Thats how it works.
That also encourages you to lower your consumption.
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Marcus, if you have PV at 2€/W, then the Austrian tax payer has met the additional ~8€/W cost.
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Marcus all these subsidies for PV might help certain individuals but for society as a whole it is an extremely expensive way to generate electricity. In Australia peak electrical demand is in summer daytime so in theory PV could help with load following. However in practice it barely makes a dent.
Therefore you have to ask why politicians are spending taxpayers money on generous subsidies and feed-in tariffs when they make so little difference. I suggest it is greenwashing and vote buying. Some people may tend to become more frugal with electricity once they have grid tied PV installed. I doubt that will ever make much difference to the need for night time generation capacity such as that required for electrical heating in winter. PV does nothing for heavy industry or hospitals that have steady electrical demand day and night, all year round.
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That is exactly what I am paying taxes for.
The fit program is capped at 2.1Mio€
It will be raised if we vote to get out of Euratom which saves us 40Mio/a (which is very likely).
PV prices are coming down every year. I already postet the link to crystalsol who developed a monocrystaline cell based on non rare earth material.
This is what the future of integrated solar looks like with cell cost coming down 80% and integrated in your tiles, fassade, windows or metalroofing (which also cheapons installation).
You can buy pv-tiles in Austria today.
When you live in a passive house (no to +5% in extra cost to conventional buildings) with solar energy supply and only need about 4000kWh/a for heating/hotwater/power + 7000kWh for transportation that makes a difference to your 25.000kWh figure (not very much scenarios explored in that small article..you might want to compare this with Güssing which is a real model).
You can get another glimps of the future if you visit Austrias olympic house in Vancover…which probably is the first passiv house on Canadian soil.
We will soon have laws for mandatory insulation and energetic certifacation for private buildings as well.
We go a wide way in conservation and efficiency…which makes it even more depressing when other societies use more than double the energy.
It is not that easy to push one or another idea in a free democratic society. Keep that in mind when you try to press your visions.
But like eclipsenow I like the idea of “waste eating” nuclear plants.
For ships I rather have kitegen/kiteves or skysails technology….which is available now and could be retrovitet on any ship or supertanker and save CO2 today.
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Marcus, if your installation cost 2€/W and the program is capped at 2.1Mio€, then the whole things only supporting 2 MW of power. If you pull out of Euratom and put all the savings to the FIT program, you’re still only talking 40 MW a year. Like John Newlands said, it just doesn’t make a dent.
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Sorry, thats 1 MW and 20 MW respectively.
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I thought some of you might find the wikipedia entry on renewables “interesting.” Personally, the entry made me want to puke.
A criticism of some renewable sources is their variable nature. But renewable power sources can actually be integrated into the grid system quite well, as Amory Lovins explains:
Variable but forecastable renewables (wind and solar cells) are very reliable when integrated with each other, existing supplies and demand. For example, three German states were more than 30 percent wind-powered in 2007—and more than 100 percent in some months. Mostly renewable power generally needs less backup than utilities already bought to combat big coal and nuclear plants’ intermittence.[57]
Mark Z. Jacobson has studied how wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 per cent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. He advocates a “smart mix” of renewable energy sources to reliably meet electricity demand:
Because the wind blows during stormy conditions when the sun does not shine and the sun often shines on calm days with little wind, combining wind and solar can go a long way toward meeting demand, especially when geothermal provides a steady base and hydroelectric can be called on to fill in the gaps.[58]
From detailed studies in Europe, Dr Gregor Czisch has shown that the variable power issue can be solved by interconnecting renewable across Europe the European super grid and using only existing storage hydro. The costs of power over the lifetime of the scheme are the same as today’s conventional power supplies, indicating that the capital investment is roughly the same as the cost of fuel avoided over the projects 25 year lifetime.[59]
Lovins goes on to say that the unreliability of renewable energy is a myth, while the unreliability of nuclear energy is real. Of all U.S. nuclear plants built, 21 percent were abandoned and 27 percent have failed at least once. Successful reactors must close for refueling every 17 months for 39 days. And when shut in response to grid failure, they can’t quickly restart. This is simply not the case for wind farms, for example.[57]
Wave energy and some other renewables are continuously available. A wave energy scheme installed in Australia generates electricity with an 80% availability factor.
Sustainable development and global warming groups propose a 100% Renewable Energy Source Supply, without fossil fuels and nuclear power.[60] Scientists from the University of Kassel have suggested that Germany can power itself entirely by renewable energy.[61]
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here’s the reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy
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@ Matt Buckels
“I am the first to admit that renewables do have a long way to go before they will be supplying anything more than a token amount of the worlds energy.” Did you hear that “A LONG WAY TO GO”.
I’m not sure if Stephen had in mind the scale of the DEPLOYMENT or the state of the technology, so I cannot comment on that one.
“renewables have one overwhelming advantage over other energy sources and that is by their nature foster a lower energy use philosophy that is sadly lacking with most nuclear advocates.”
because if renewables really can provide cheap baseload, then why would the end user develop a lower energy use philosophy?
Because, by and large, the mode of energy is electricity, not liquid fuels, and this provides enormous infrastructure issues. Being “into” renewable energy seems to also imply intimacy with the many other resource challenges and city planning challenges we face, and hence the adherents are more likely to be pro-New Urbanism or ecocities, etc, which promote a more pedestrian focussed city plan with *less* (but not necessarily no) cars and car requirements.
Even if the electricity is abundant, supposedly cheap nuclear energy (and I will remain agnostic about “cheap” nuclear energy until I see it built), we are facing a liquid fuels energy crisis which will strain the world’s airlines and transport systems at a minimum.
While a bit off topic, I’d love Barry to invite other authors to investigate how abundant nuclear/renewable ELECTRICITY can meet our transport, mining, flight, and agricultural needs and either:
* replace our modes of transport through electric transport
* or manufacture the liquid fuels… somehow, in the quantities these niche markets might need. (Assuming Better Place & better city design meet our personal transport needs).
Might be good for the podcast sometime hey Barry? ;-)
Note on tone:
I know I’ve had some acid in my tone on occasions above, when I feel certain points are being obviously neglected. (Like Blees ignoring the revolutionary potential of EV’s to create a whole new demand for that currently ‘useless wind’ at night). But what really brings it out are some of the character attacks, and indeed, sheer internet trolling that seems to go on in the comments.
@ Charles: When someone of Stephen Gloor’s character and blogging reputation is forced to write:
This is not a return to this blog so you can rest assured that I will be not debating any of the points raised.
..it sadly reflects on the status of this blog becoming ruled by cranky idealogues rather than being an honest exchange of information between like minded, climate concerned activists trying to plot out a better future.
And then after DV8’s character attack on Stephen Gloor, DV8 sounds positively petulant when sulking that Stephen didn’t immediately dignify it with a response. “Religion” indeed, we’re talking about peer reviewed science and the ongoing, DEVELOPING complementary modalities of energy supply and societal response. It’s a BIG picture, and “Just insert nuclear” is too simplistic. DV8 implying Stephen Gloor stands for the dark ages, well, I guess after my interactions with DV8 I should have known exactly what to expect. Nothing but pure internet trolling!
@ John Morgan
“sabotage mindset” no no no! Nuclear advocates just seem more likely to “us” renewable advocates (or advocates of both, as I tend to be a bit in the middle these days) to be more informed about the broader ecological issues.
Nuclear guys just *seem* to be more BAU and less likely to have thought through the *many other* consequences of industrial civilisation and other adaptation measures and DEPLETION issues that we face! How many nuclear advocates above have a sewerage plan for peak phosphorus, are concerned about biodiversity, are passionate about “Cradle to Cradle” design, are concerned about overpopulation, want to save the whales, etc etc etc?
I’m sorry if that sounds like a cliche generalisation, and I’m aware of the exceptions like Lovelock etc, but there you have it. If Barry’s happy to dump anti-nukes in the same camp as anti-warming, then I’m happy to dump *many* (not all) pro-nukes in the same camp as pro-BAU on industrial civilisation, which needs reinventing for MANY other reasons, not just energy.
I mean, just look at DV8. “Conservation is a bad long-term policy. It’s a backwards-looking policy of stagnation.” But with less energy, we might be forced to think through alternative city designs that meet our needs in a more humane manner, brainstorm new ideas that solve MULTIPLE problems at the same time and create a whole new, much better city plan and lifestyle. Some rather fantastic peak phosphorus solutions that also involve city planning could have been lost if the authors had also had DV8’s “just add more energy” perspective above. I rest my case.
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Eclipsenow don’t go confusing eco-cities and new-urbanism now. New urbanism borders on being window dressing for suburban sprawl in many circumstances. But like many renewable energy advocates, new-urbanism carries an illogical fear/resentment of genuine high density sustainable development. A politically correct camouflage for nimbyism and twee. Neo-conservatism meets urban design.
You are absolutely correct about the liquid fuels crisis… It is a problem common to all forms of electricity generation. To me it is a strong argument for moving to nuclear power, so that oil and gas are conserved for the valuable uses for which there is no known replacement. Instead wasted on low end uses.
I essentially agree with what you are saying here – I just don’t get your opposition in principal to nuclear energy. Why would you exclude it from the mix?
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Barry’s initial post is headed how I have learned to love energy economics – it is clear that he either has little understanding of economics or that he is quite selective in his understanding. Indeed this is the problem with the pro nuclear posts generally.
This becomes evident in the way Barry summarised the anti-nuclear position.
My opposition to nuclear is not based on the science (ie whether the engineering problems have been solved – I am happy to concede that they may well have been solved.) Nor is it based on the threat of terrorism or nuclear arms proliferation (although that remains a legitimate concern that has not been adequately addressed by any of the arguments that I have seen.) For the sake of the argument I am happy to concede all those points.
There is still a very powerful economic argument that has not been addressed in these posts.
It seems that for the pronuclear proponants the economic argument comes down to one of cost – but that is a very limited view of economics. Cost is an issue but not a major issue.
The real problem is that the problem of climate change appears to be defined in terms of our emissions of greenhouse gasses and all that needs to happen is that we need to solve that problem. If that were indeed the case then many of the arguments in favour of at least considering nuclear as part of the mix of solutions would have some merit.
However, there is also an argument that runs a little bit like this. Climate change is a symptom of a much larger problem – the problem of unbridled economic growth.
Given that many of the bloggers here have a science background start by reading Geoff Davies’s Book Economia; here is a physicist who looked closely at the discipline of economics – especially the way it is espoused by the pro-growth lobby and demolished that particular perspective.
In a world of continuous economic growth you need exponential increases in your energy supply and clearly nuclear is best placed to provide such an exponential increase.
However, if we choose that option we will only accelerate the rate at which the planet becomes unlivable. There are natural constraints on renewable energy and in a sense these constraints force us to stop treating the environment like a ponzi scheme but instead force us to live within our means. As Lincoln describes only too well In Challenged Earth we are already living beyond our means – nuclear is being sold as the tool whereby we can get even more people on this planet to live beyond their means. It makes as much sense to go nuclear as giving someone who is drowing in a debt an extra credit card to accumilate yet more debt.
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marcus: I’m all for the passivehaus. I’ve superinsulated my own house, including nano painting my ceilings (with nansulate).
stephen gloor: I suspect you are right about exponential growth. This growth will tend to swamp efficiency improvements and it pretty much means exponentially augmented energy thruput.
the consequences cannot be good for the planet but I’m a bit dissatisfied with this position as it is too “philosophical” for me at this point, too intuitive.
still, I’d rather have a steady state economy where we all had european level energy consumption.
to put some numbers on my intuition, when I calculate what the energy requirements would be for a healthy global capitalism (let’s unrealistically abstract out things like class struggle) growing at 3 percent a year for one hundred years, we go from the current 15 TW of energy thruput to 288 TW of energy thruput.
okay: perhaps this is just being bowled over by the mathematical sublime, but this “sounds” insane to me.
so: exponential growth I think is a bad idea, but we still need nuclear power.
saying we can get euro power for the whole world on renewables is story telling, solar/wind just so stories.
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This silly mantra that growth cannot go on forever so we’d all better give up this civilization thing, trade, the division of labor and all of that, and go back to living as peasants ensconced in our 40 acres with a mule is getting tiresome Good luck on convincing the majority in the First World with that, never mind India and China.
The statement “endless physical growth is impossible in a finite physical system” is of course true. The statement “endless economic growth is impossible in a finite physical system” would only be true if economic growth were in fact physical growth. Which, sadly for the argument, it isn’t.
The physical limit of the globe, how much stuff we have to play with, does not limit the amount of value we can add. Thus continued economic growth is entirely compatible with a finite physical system.
Narrow-mined neo-Malthusians predictions of doom are misplaced because they do not take into account positive changes that have historically counterbalanced population growth, and resource utilization. The most obvious being that a rise in the standard of living is generally followed by a drop in the birthrate. In other words these forecasts of doom are always predicated on one change that does not take other changes into account.
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@John Tons:
Exponential growth cannot be maintained for long, that is correct. But the real world does not live by a maths equation, 70 / growth rate = doubling time and real philosophy does not either.
What happens in the real world is that growth occurs or does not occur depending on the resources available. If there are more resources, including energy, then there will be more growth. If there are less resources there will be less growth.
You cannot demonstrate that we will run out of energy anytime soon. In fact it has been demonstrated that we can have enough energy to raise the standard of living of everyone or double or current population on the planet to current USA levels and more.
eg. population will stabilise (zero growth) eventually due to increased standard of living – pretty much an empirical fact.
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DV: i really don’t know how much you can disconnect energy thruput from economic growth.
the idea that you can is called “dematerialization” and is favored by people like paul hawken and our favorite, amory lovins. I think this is b.s.
standard growth narratives call for things like 120 million barrels per day of oil consumption by 2020. that’s to put it mildly augmented physical thruput, and is crazy for other reasons (peak oil, etc).
A limits to growth thesis is not necessarily equivalent to “neo malthusianism.”
and the comment about peasantry, 40 acres, etc., is truly irrelevant–a straw man argument unless you’re arguing with Derek Jensen, or someone like that.
The neo malthusians are the power down folk who talk about reducing population to 2 billion.
Malthus blamed poverty on population growth instead of on the social system.
that’s the real point to make about malthusians.
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I agree with the demographic transition point made by DV and Bill–population stabilizes when a certain standard of living is achieved, the latter not equivalent to exponential increase of goods and services and material.
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@gregory meyerson – Where did I suggest that there is a disconnect between energy and economic growth? That’s the whole bloody point – nuclear energy can supply essentially unlimited amounts of power and thus allow us to increase the value of the available materials at hand.
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A study commissioned by the Howard government in 2006 found that the cost of cheap coal generated electricity was A$28-$38 / MWh compared with nuclear A$40 – $65 / MWh. The nuclear cost was settled down not FOAK (first of a kind)
Click to access Umpner_report_2006.pdf
See Fig 4.7 on page 56
The wikipedia page explaining costs is not bad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants
It explains that the large capital costs of nuclear combined with unpredictable future income in a privatised electricity market further combined with expected 10% discount rate (or higher) work against the economics of nuclear
A 2003 study in the UK makes similar points about nuclear being more expensive than coal
Click to access postpn208.pdf
I can see there are factors in some countries which make nuclear preferable or which make it a good supplement to coal. For example, France has no fossil fuels. Also in part France’s decision was a strategic one for energy independence following OPEC prices rises in the 1970s. China is using half their trains to bring their coal to their coal plants. Also not sure of discount rates in China. It is also possible that future, better designs will bring the capital cost of nuclear down but wouldn’t expect to see dramatic, quick changes in that respect.
Without a carbon tax coal will remain cheaper for some time.
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Hi DV:
I may have misinterpreted you. You said this:
The statement “endless economic growth is impossible in a finite physical system” would only be true if economic growth were in fact physical growth. Which, sadly for the argument, it isn’t.
I thought you were here disconnecting economic growth from physical growth, which I in turn connected to exponentially increasing energy thruput.
it’s hard for me, dv, to imagine 288 terawatts, even supplied by nuclear power, not being connected to ecological problems due to vastly expanded physical growth, yes.
I read you with great seriousness so if you can suggest something I might consult that would correct the misimpression I’m under concerning the relation between exponentially increasing energy use and physical growth, I’m listening.
g
but this sort of debate has nothing to do with nuclear power and nothing to do with pastoral visions of 40 acres.
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oh well: one more comment before bed–john tons, I don’t like your analogy between credit cards and nuclear power.
nuclear power seems to me able to provide sustainably enough energy for the world’s population to live well or well enough. I don’t think this is the case for the “renewables,” which I doubt are in fact renewable.
Credit cards are inseparable currently from a society based on endless consumption. I would like to distinguish nuclear power from a society based on endless consumption. You seem to wish to conflate the two.
That said, I can see your point. A society based on endless consumption would need endless amounts of energy (“unlimited” in DV’s words). NP would presumably provide this.
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There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Australia will have carbon pricing by July this year. The CPRS bill won’t be discussed in parliament til May. That will be nearly three years of inaction on a core election promise back in 2007.
Though Peter Lang and others disagree I believe nothing will happen without an imposed carbon price. That price must be nontrivial and with few if any gaps for the big fish to swim through. I also believe we should charge the same carbon levy on coal and LNG exports and pay the money into green funds of the importing countries. Put Cosgrove in charge to sort out the rent seekers.
With fossil fuel depletion it’s always possible the price may not increase even with shortages eg global oil circa 2012 and Chinese coal circa 2015. Negative income feedbacks may also reduce demand as discussed on The Oil Drum. That will create an involuntary powerdown with many losers. Yet another reason to go low carbon AGW or not.
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