The previous Open Thread has gone past is off the BNC front page, so it’s time for a fresh palette.
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The sort of things that belong on this thread include general enquiries, soapbox philosophy, meandering trains of argument that move dynamically from one point of contention to another, and so on — as long as the comments adhere to the broad BNC themes of sustainable energy, climate change mitigation and policy, energy security, climate impacts, etc.
You can also find this thread by clicking on the Open Thread category on the cascading menu under the “Home” tab.
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There are two very important articles now posted on The Guardian website. The first, by Duncan Clark, is titled New generation of nuclear reactors could consume radioactive waste as fuel: The new ‘fast’ plants could provide enough low-carbon electricity to power the UK for more than 500 years.
It talks about Britain’s options for plutonium (Pu) disposal, and the GEH proposal to build a pair of S-PRISM reactors (311 MWe each) to rapidly ‘spike’ the weapons-grade Pu inventory, and thereafter consume it and spent fuel for energy. The alternative option, a new MOX plant, is far less desirable.
Tom Blees wrote a detailed explanation of this plan on BNC here: Disposal of UK plutonium stocks with a climate change focus
To accompany this piece there is an excellent new essay by George Monbiot: We cannot wish Britain’s nuclear waste away: Opponents of nuclear power who shout down suggestions of how to use spent waste as fuel will not make the problem disappear.
As usual, George writes persuasively and gets to the heart of the matter. In this case, he poses a simple question for the critics:
So which of these options do you support? [IFR recycling, MOX fuel, or immediate deep geological disposal]. None of the above is not an answer. Something has to be done with the waste, and unless you have invented a novel solution, one of these three options will need to be deployed. But it is a choice that opponents of nuclear power are refusing to make – and that is not good enough.
The essay provides more details, and some examples of people who wish to shut their mind to reality. Which option would you choose?
Brave New Climate 
544 replies on “Open Thread 21”
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MODERATOR
Barry decides who to put on the Pending list and for how long. Both you and PL (and others) have been on it sometimes:) To overcome your problem I suggest you ignore any comment which breaches the Comments Policy(re-read it on the drop-down menu from the About tag – especially the new Political rule) as it will be removed once I am on the site.
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Jagdish I suspect the only reactors large or small that have any hope of being used in Australia would also have to be approved for use in the US by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Changing topic somewhat I’ve noticed a recent trend to build gas fired peaking power stations in the middle of nowhere. Since both pipelines and transmission converge on cities the city outskirts are as good as anywhere. Here’s a site in rural NSW
http://www.agk.com.au/dalton/index.php/location/
If you trace the links it will start at 250 MW then expand to 1500 MW.
What’s going on? Do grazing sheep and bicycle riding staff make them green? Is it a coincidence they are near wind farms so already smoothed output arrives via transmission ‘from the country’? The city folks won’t know it’s more gas power than wind power. I suspect a greenwash somewhere.
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I’m afraid it’s you who has missed the point Peter. Weapons production reactors are simple low pressure things. This is like comparing a simple gas heated thermal oil industrial heating system with a 200 bar coal boiler-turbine-generator set. When you get to these high pressures, everything is expensive, even a little valve costs an arm and a leg and requires expensive specialized personell who know what they are doing. All the piping and vessels are thick and expensive and require special trained welders which most countries don’t even have. All the containment becomes a problem because any break results in large pressure spikes in the containment, etc. so you need big very tight containments. This adds greatly to cost and complexity. Then add to that a need for ultra low emissions, compounding the containment cost issues. Some material regulations are really expensive too; for example there are very strict personell exposure regulations that require that very expensive materials steps are done, eg on reducing the cobalt levels in steel.
Don’t underestimate the power conversion part of the machinery either. In Hanford B they just had a simple heat exchanger that dumped the heat. If you need turbines and generators and electrical switchyards, GW class power electronics, that is a lot of complexity and cost. Just buying the titanium tubing required for seawater condensers for the power plant has requires more than 18 months, befory you can even get started. The waiting list for turbines can be even longer. Also note that Hanford weapons production reactors didn’t care about emissions to the environment; Hanford is now one of the worst radioactive messes every created by humankind. It’s very cheap if you don’t care much about the environment – no different than a coal plant. Getting rid of all the mess responsibly requires a lot of abatement equipment, modern mining techniques (in stead of slave labor camps in China which cost only a barrel of rice per day) and lots of places to store all the nasty bottom ash. That’s without considering this stuff called CO2, of which a large coal plant makes 200-300 kg per second, every second, and can’t contain that waste for more than 10 seconds.
I do think you have a good point Peter, I would also like to see a clearer explanation of why nuclear has apparently inflated more than other things. I know that delays are expensive, and I know that mid-construction changes in the design, as happened in the USA where entire cooling piping had to be redone after being poured in concrete already, are two bigger factors in the cost overruns. But how big were they and how big were other factors, it is an important question where I haven’t seen a quantitative answer to.
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Peter Lang, on 2 March 2012 at 11:54 AM said:
Barry Cohen gave an estimate back in the 1990′s that the cost of nuclear had blown out by a factor of four due to regulatory ratcheting.
My brother in law used to work for Combustion Engineering(once a leader in nuclear power plants) as a construction manager and refused to work on nuclear projects. He is in no way ‘anti-nuclear’.
The consequences of a ‘weld failure’ in a conventional thermal plant are pretty much ‘lost production’ and ‘cost of repair’. In a nuclear plant you could end up with a ‘cleanup problem’ or worse.
I spent a few days on a conventional thermal plant construction site with my brother in law. He had endless ‘heated’ discussions with the ‘Union Rep’ over quality of welds and whether or not the person doing the welds was adequately qualified to do them.
Standard practice in the US for the provision of the bulk of the labor for large constructions projects is to call down to the local ‘Union Hall’ and then the ‘Union’ sends you ‘what they see fit’ based on ‘Union’ selection criteria. Management has very little control over who does what and as the work is temporary in nature doesn’t get much of a chance to evaluate the quality of an individuals skills prior to letting them ‘go to work’.
The post ‘TMI’ regulatory environment took a hard look at ‘human factors’….I.E. Not just what happens on paper…but what happens in the real world with real people.
On paper a journeyman welder knows how to weld a joint of ‘X’ complexity. If you hire a journeyman welder the weld will be done properly.
A hypothetical ‘real world’ example.
We have a journeyman welder that manages to get 9 out of 10 welds correct. We then have an inspector that manages to catch 9 out of 10 of the substandard welds. We still end up with 1% of our welds being substandard.
Now lets’ review the objections of the ‘lone’ NRC staff member that dissented in the approval of the AP1000
Click to access ML103370648.pdf
An excerpt –
This is because the NRC also engaged a consultant, who is an expert in testing, a consultant, who is an expert in construction, and a consultant, who is an expert in steel welding,because the WEC shield building with the proposed use of new SC modules not only creates design problems but also problems in areas of testing, construction, and steel welding
I’m all for nuclear power…but I’m not willing to live next to a nuclear power plant where 1% of the welds are substandard.
I know the design engineers can design in margins of safety so that 1% of the welds being substandard doesn’t make any difference in normal operation, but I want a margin of safety where 1% of the welds being substandard doesn’t matter in an earthquake as well.
Quality control on ‘field’ welding is difficult at best.
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Harry, we had a serious earthquake a year ago in Japan. So far I haven’t heard about weld damage from the earthquake on any nuclear plant in Japan. Have you?
Keep in mind also that various pipe and weld breaks are incorporated in the design basis accident and the plant has to maintain cooling in this break scenario as part of the design basis.
A lot of people live near gasoline storage depots that store billions of liters of gasoline in welded cilindrical tanks. Some contain over 100 million liters per tank. Lots and lots of welds there. I’m involved in the HAZOP and PRA analysis of several of these oil terminals. Using standard eddy current, x-ray, and ultrasound, weld spec testing is done with a lot better reliability than 9 out of 10! Also the welds must be inspected by independent bodies at regular intervals. It works very well, we have very few weld issues and never safety critical ones (but then we have no earthquakes here – we’re all familiar with the Japan refinery fire that burned for days, but journalists don’t find refinery fires as spectacular as nuclear plants).
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Harry & Cyril,
I never knew I would be motivated to read all about weld points, but that was fascinating stuff! So Cyril, do these testing methods work on nuclear reactors?
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John Newlands — The Hyperion unit is a form of Gen IV and as such it will be quite a long time before NRC will approve the type. The PbBi coolant has the defect of requiring over 100,000 years of isolation from the environment (current IAEA radiation standards) onve one is done using it.
Even in countries with active antinukers there is no difficulty over nuclear materials shipments AFAIK.
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Hi David,
that’s sad about the PbBi coolant. I thought waste management was solved: we burn it. Now we’ve got to store the *coolant* for 100,000 years?
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EN, sodium coolant in fast reactors becomes non-radioactive after just a few days
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It seems to me we’re losing the point of having small modules. The original hype for SMRs suggested each module is loaded by crane from the back of a truck then taken away for offsite refuelling after a decade or so. No muss no fuss. If they need be laid out in a large building with machinery for regular refuelling why not have just one larger module? How does that affect load following? With Nuscale instead of 12 modules of 45 MWe just have the one 540 MW unit.
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Phew! Cheers Barry. But what is he talking about then? Now I’m concerned that it’s all too good to be true and that there really *is* a ‘waste’ management problem. Even if it isn’t strictly nuclear ‘waste’ as such, but contaminated components or coolants or whatever.
Can we honestly lay *all* our cards on the table — in English? For a layperson from an arts background? Because now I’m concerned that my non-technical background has deluded me into raving about the ‘waste’ problem being solved when *other* stuff might need to be stored long term.
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Nuscale proposes to use a lead-bismuth metal eutectic (liquid alloy) coolant. The coolant (some atoms at least) can be activated by the neutron flux. The IFR (and related SMRs like the 4S) use sodium as a coolant, not lead. Sodium can also be activated, but this only produces some Na-24 which has a half life of 15 hours: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_sodium
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Eclipse Now — Pb=lead, Bi=bismuth. The Russsians have used PbLi coolant for submarine reactors and are commercially offering larger ones for civilian power production; I don’t know wheather they have any takers yet. I don’t quite know what to term the Hyperion design given its novelty. In any case its not a fast reactor so maybe Gen IV isn’t the best term.
The equipment used for pyroprocessing to feed a fast reactor [hence consuming all the actinides] will become intensly radioactivity and so when no longer servicable have to be kept isolated for some time. I don’t know for sure how long, but a few centuries ought to suffice.
The only long term isolation I know about, that is, longer than say three centuries, is for the irradiated PbLi coolant aned of course for unconsumed actinides.
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John Newlands — I believe Nuscale has the first SMR but it won’t be a much longer wait for the larger B&W mPower. In that design the replenishment is done conventionally. Hyperion is one of the so-called nuclear battery designs.
Each module of a non-battery, whether 45 MW or 540 MW, has to undergo periodic replenishment and refurbishment (r&r). One of the advantages of having multiple smaller units is that the r&r crew is kept at it all the time while the other modules continue to supply power. For example, having 24 Nuscale units implies one is down for r&r at any given time and the remaining 23 supply 1035 MW continuously. That’s a capacity factor of 95.8% [which ought to be acheivable and so lower the net O&M cost].
The Nuscale r&r unit is on-site, at the end of each row of up to twelve [although I see no reason why rows of 24 could not be used]. My understanding is that the module undergoing r&r is held vertically rather than laid on its side; this avoid upsetting the geometry of the various nuclear and control rods.
Nuscale points out the advantage of their SMR design is that additional modules can readily be added as demand grows while it is not necessary to invest in excess capacity before there is actual need for it. Obviously the same holds for all SMR designs, including the nuclear batteries.
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Barry Brook — Hyperion has a design using PbLi coolant. Nuscale is offering a plain ol’ PWR as their SMR.
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David, right – but you mean PbBi :)
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Barry Brook — Yes, dern it! Lead bismuth coolant.
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Instead of increasing the cost of electricity via a carbon tax in an effort to make alternatives more competitive, why not just mandate X% emission reduction by X year then set the retail price of electricity so it reflects the average cost of producing electricity plus transmission plus some profit? You know… a regulated system. Seems like it would be cheaper that way.
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David B. Benson,
Nuscale isn’t really a plain old PWR. It is an integral PWR where the steam generator, pressurizer, and reactor is essentially once piece. The possibility of a loca is basically eliminated.
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Scott — Yes, the Nuscale unit uses convection to transfer the heat from the reactor to the heat exchanger [making steam on the steam side which is then piped out to the steam room (if any) and the Rankine cycle turbine. So it isn’t a Gen II design and obviously far safer for lower cost. However, it remains a PWR [to contrast with the unproven technology of the Hyperion unit].
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Scott we are supposed to be moving from carbon tax to a CO2 cap in July 2015 as discussed here
Click to access Consolidated-Final.pdf
I’ve saved a copy to check back in future as the goalposts get moved.
Details are sketchy such as the actual size of the cap. At one point it was said 2020 emissions it would be 160 Mt below year 2000 levels which were ~500 Mt. Prorata to 2015 that would be 500-120= 380 Mt. Barring recession we won’t get that low and it was said that overseas carbon credits would be bought to achieve it. As Martin Nicholson points out that could cost billions and as the Breakthrough Institute points out they don’t actually reduce global emissions.
Suppose in 2015 the emissions cap is back to 500 Mt CO2e. Then big emitters would have to bid for CO2 permits in an auction system akin to the US EPA’s NOx and SOx auction. Even if the same political party is still in power federally I don’t see it happening so easily.
It doesn’t help that the govt’s Clean Energy Future website is riddled with implausible claims. For example they claim that Australia’s metals industry is moving to a lower emissions future. No it’s not. It’s moving to a higher emissions future by relocating to coal profligate China.
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I like the NuScale design. We haven’t figured out how they overcome the conventional steam generator pressure drop limitation, which seems to make full power natural circulation PWRs difficult. No doubt the annular steam generator (with a lower average tube length) is a big factor here, but NuScale is being like a chicken on a golden egg in terms of its IP policy.
The simplicity, modularity, and similarity to PWRs look like winners in the speed of deployment. The passive safety is something everyone can understand – the containment is in a below grade pool of water, so cooling is always assured even if all the recirc valves would fail. When the water has boiled away, weeks have passed and the decay heat has been reduced to levels where simple air passing over the containment will be sufficient cooling. So looks like fail-safe, walk away safe reactors. I thought for a long time about how to get radioactivity out of this thing into the environment, and couldn’t come up with any scenario, excellent.
Regarding cost they will have an initial disadvantage due to smaller unit size and reactor efficiency (eg need more fissile fuel for smaller reactor cores because they leak more neutrons out). But they should have a faster cost reduction curve in the nth unit, because they can make more units per GW and they are more modular.
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Cyril R., on 3 March 2012 at 8:50 AM said:
Keep in mind also that various pipe and weld breaks are incorporated in the design basis accident and the plant has to maintain cooling in this break scenario as part of the design basis.
I accept that…but even from a plant owners perspective..a pipe break on a nuclear power plant is going to represent a massive repair bill, . Hence, even the plant owner is going to want an additional level of quality control before startup.
The TMI accident didn’t harm anyone…but the plant owner lost their entire investment and had substantial cleanup costs. TMI Unit #2 was in commercial operation all of 3 months.
I wasn’t attempting to make a point that the existing reactors were ‘unsafe’. I was attempting to shed light on why nuclear power plants
cost what they cost.
The last progress report on VC Summer
Ihttp://www.scana.com/NR/rdonlyres/1489A977-3C09-4213-993D-63E5915972DA/0/2011Q4BLRAReport.pdf
A significant area for focus related to the project involves module fabrication work at Shaw Modular Solutions (SMS). This work has been delayed due to module redesign, production issues, manpower issues and Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/QC) issues.
Over time the workers at Shaw’s modular facility will get good at what they are doing(given a steady amount of work) and costs will drop.
If the work at Shaws modular facility ends up being ‘boom or bust’ then they will endlessly suffer the quality control problems associated with having a lot of ‘new hires’ doing the work.
Achieving the level of quality control that will give investors confidence that they will enjoy a 60 year ‘return on investment’ and the public confidence that the plant is safe costs a lot of money.
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TMI was not a weld failure. It was instrument failure (lack of good instruments) combined with valve failure that initiated the event, combined with human operator error (due to the ambiguous instruments readings) causing the operators to think the valve was closed. Though I’m a bit flabbergasted that something similar did happen at Fukushima – at some point operators also thought that too much coolant was in the reactor, oddly enough. Personally I’d suggest to not allow human override in such an event – better to flood the vessel too much than to have insufficient cooling melting down the fuel rods.
As far as I know, weld failure has never been an issue in any event or accident at any nuclear plant. In fact, the whole LBLOCA design basis thing seems far-fetched: clearly the permanent station blackout scenario, as happen at Fukushima Daiichi, is far more real and dangerous (and not included in the design basis – existing plants are only required to deal with temporary blackouts of hours to days).
From my experience, welds that are in fact too strong turn out to be more dangerous. For example the wall-roof weldings in a gasoline storage tank must not be stronger than the wall-bottom weldings. Otherwise you can get a rocket in the event of a serious fire. So you must make sure that certain welds are much weaker than others, so any failure will occur there. It’s the same with a PWR pressure vessel. You want the top welds and flanges to be weaker than the bottom welds, so that if an overpressure accident occurs your break will occur well above the top of the core (so it won’t dry out completely and you can still fill it with water).
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Instead of using weak welds which are designed to fail in case of excessive pressure, why not use blow out plugs?
Steam railroad locomotives had a problem with boiler explosions if the water dropped below the crown plate in which case the fire would overheat the crown plate causing an explosion. Excessive pressure could also cause a crown plate failure. The boiler would explode into the fire box to the detriment of the occupants of the locomotive cab and send the boiler rocketing down the tracks for a considerable distance. So for safety, they started equipping the crown plates with numerous blow out plugs. That way, excessive heat or pressure would cause the blow out plugs to blow out thereby safely releasing the pressure in addition to extinguishing the fire.
Pressure cookers also have blow out plugs.
Couldn’t blow out plugs for reactor vessels be designed to release the pressure more predictably than welds intentionally made weak? Also, it should be possible to have the pressure released in a more predictable direction.
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High pressure systems can have high pressure rupture disks or blowout plugs, yes, I forgot to mention these systems are always installed on high pressure systems, the building code and notified bodies require it. In the case of a reactor pressure vessel, they have high pressure liquid or steam relief valves, lots of them. Even if all of those fail, which is unplausible, the weakest part of the system would be the flange where the top head is connected to the vessel with lots of bolts. Too much pressure will force up the head so that steam escapes, relieving the pressure. Not the way you want it by design, but it is a reversible system – when the pressure drops again the head drops down again, sealing the pressure vent. EL posted a link to a story that suggested this is what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi containment vessels: these also have bolted flanges that would releave pressure (and radioactive volatile fission products with it since there was lots of core damage at that point already). If that is true then we have proof that this is a safety feature that prevents catastrophic failure of the containment vessel. Of course it is bad in that fission products such as iodine and cesium would leave the containment unfiltered, so in stead a passive overprotection system should be used, with lots of filters in it.
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Cyril R., on 4 March 2012 at 4:44 AM said:
TMI was not a weld failure. It was instrument failure (lack of good instruments) combined with valve failure that initiated the event, combined with human operator error (due to the ambiguous instruments readings) causing the operators to think the valve was closed.
The plant had only been in commercial operation for 90 days. A valve failure seems like inadequate quality control to me.
From my experience, welds that are in fact too strong turn out to be more dangerous. For example the wall-roof weldings in a gasoline storage tank must not be stronger than the wall-bottom weldings
Neither over spec or under spec. That takes ‘quality control’ going in both directions.
Quality control costs money. My brother in law used a portable x-ray machine all the time.
Here are the requirements to become a ‘nuclear certified’ welder in the US.
http://www.dynabondpowertech.com/en/nuclear-power-news/civil-nuclear-regulations/141-haf603/4197-civilian-nuclear-safety-equipment-welder-qualification-regulation-haf603
Article 7- Welding examinees must meet the following requirements:
1. Have at least a middle school degree.
2. Be healthy.
3. Can follow welding procedures
4. Can perform welding activities independently
A ‘middle school degree’ in the US is 8th grade.
They also have to take a written and practical test. A score of 60 out of 100 is ‘pass’.
Then we have this from the US NRC Inspection Guidelines from 1983 –
Click to access ip55100.pdf
If practical, sample adequate number of welders taking the
qualification tests and confirm by positive identification
that the person welding the test weldment is indeed the person
being qualified.
That’s not exactly comforting..if it’s practical the NRC inspector will wander over to the welder certification center and verify that the welders taking the test are actually the people who are getting the certificates.
Work Observations. The IE inspector should select for work
observation a sample of welds comprising a combination of
structures and AWS welding contractors associated with the
work……..The total number of sampled welds selected for
work observation should be at least thirty (30) but need not
be greater than sixty (60)
That’s the NRC inspector…the builder is also supposed to inspect above and beyond what the NRC inspector does.
Click to access ML072970562.pdf
INSPECTION OF WATTS BAR NUCLEAR PLANT
WELDING CORRECTIVE ACTION PROGRAM PLAN…….On February 20, 1985, TVA certified that Watts Bar was ready for an
operating license. On April 11, 1986, as a result of over 5000 employee concerns, TVA withdrew their certification that Watts Bar was ready for licensing.
The plot thickens
Click to access ML082280206.pdf
The expanded review involved approximately 8,000 radiographic exposures, which represented approximately 1,780 welds. Approximately 170 of these welds in the expanded review have at least one radiograph having indications which may not meet ASME Section III requirements.
It took 23 years to complete Watts Bar #1. It wasn’t the fault of the ‘anti-nuclear’ crowd that almost 10% of the welds inspected by a single inspector had some evidence of being ‘sub standard’.
Then we have the leaking VC Summer Hot Leg Saga which was caught during a refueling inspection –
Click to access ml010740293.pdf
determined that extensive repairs to this weld during original plant construction in 1978 generated high residual tensile stresses, which contributed to primary water stress corrosion cracking
So a lousy weld that was caught and reworked at the time the plant was built resulted in an ‘extended outage'(how much money does a nuclear plant lose a day if it is offline?) and I assume expensive repair 22 years later.
Which brings me back to the original point I was trying to make to Peter Lang.
Comparing the construction costs of a plant built in 1970 to the construction costs of a plant built in 2012 isn’t possible unless one adds all the premature maintenance costs to the 1970’s era plants that was a result of insufficient quality control and construction practices.
I think the ‘higher initial quality ends up resulting in lower life cycle costs’ argument is a powerful one.
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Right; in many fields of endeavor, cutting corners to save money ends up costing more money in the long run. I hope that better quality control exists today.
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I read BEIR VII. I am calling into question the conclusion regarding the LNT (Linear No Threshold) hypothesis. The difficulty is the choice to statistical method used to choose between LNT and QNT (Quadratic No Threshold) for low doses of ionizing radiation. Even with a better statistical method [that I will briefly describe] it might be the case that the BEIR panel would still recommend LNT to set standards for exposure to ionizing radiation, but as I hope to make clear, not on the grounds the panel actually used.
As background, LNT has been used for many decades. In the earliest days one found the dose for LD50 (50% mortality) and noticing the data points roughly fit a straight line, simply drew one from the origin through LD50. In BEIR VIII that slope is set with standard sophistication to obtain the regression line; I have no complaints about that.
It is easy to devise a highly simplified model of living tissue repair based on known cell biology. Several have noticed this, including me. At low dose rates the mathematical approximation is, in fact, QNT. At moderately high dose rates the exact equation is approximately linear. It is only the low dose response which is in question between LNT and QNT. [I note that recent experiments at LLNL seem to give evidence of the essential correctness of this simple model, but of course the BEIR VII panel could not have known about these.]
For leukemia, BEIR VII finds that QNT fits the data better than LNT using standard Fisher/Pearson statistical methods. I see nothing wrong with this and the statistical method I suggest below as superior will give the same result.
For solid cancers, however, BEIR VII notes that while QNT fits the data better than LNT, it does not do so with statistical significance (which I take to mean 95%). The panel therefore recommends continuing to usee LNT for regualtory purposes. I object. There is another way to attempt to select between competing hypotheses.
Instead of the one-sided nature of Fisher/Pearson hypothesis comparison, in which [in this case] QNT must greatly outperform in order to displace LNT, use a Bayesian (ratio) factor test in which both hypotheses are treated equally. There are information criteria such as AIC and BIC which offer guidance as to whether the two hypotheses perform about equally well, whether one is clearly superior to the other [and which it is], or a muddy middle gorund where one is not sufficiently certain.
From BEIR VII it is clear that if such a Bayesian factor test were performed on their (overly sparse) data QNT would be found to be superior. Which of the three decision outcomes obtain requires actually performing this test.
I fault the BEIR panel for not doing so. How to use AIC well was already in a textbook by 1979. To repeat, the outcome might well be in the muddled middle where no easy decision can be made, at least with just the data in hand. But as it is now, I have doubts about the BEIR VII conclusion with regard to solid cancers nor am I willing to just acceed to their expertise.
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One of my biggest critiques of BEIR is its omission to treat dose rates in a scientific way. All the data BEIR uses is high dose rate – nuclear explosion flashes, medical imaging flashes, very short lived medical isotopes in the body, etc.
This is not what is relevant to nuclear power, where exposure is low dose rate, chronic, even during a major accident.
As a matter of fact, the hormesis model explicitly states that when the bodies capacity to deal with ionizing radiation is exceeded, it’s a downward slope of more and more damage. With a brief flash of radiation, the bodies capacity will always be exceeded and there will be damage.
Paracelsius said that the dose makes the poison. This is not correct. A more accurate assertion is that the dose rate makes the poison. I drink a lethal dose of alcohol many times a year. But because I take it regularly my body can process it and I am still alive an in good health.
BEIR does not like to talk about biological DNA repair mechanisms, or any other biology science that is very relevant to the discussion. They only like to talk about statistics, not biology. This is strange. When only looking at statistics, I can see that the amount of crime in a city and the number of supermarkets are correlated. More supermarkets, more crime. That’s simply statistics. I will only know what’s really going on when I know something about cities: bigger cities have more crime and more supermarkets. This spurious correlation can only be brought to light by taking the correct data to compare, which in turn requires knowledge of cities beyond statistics. The BEIR case is similar: they only care about statistics, not about the underlying biological science. As a result they are using a faulty data set. The doses vary but all are extremely high dose RATES.
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Cyril, quite right. Rate, not just dose, matters. If you get hit will a dose of 1000 mSv in 5 minutes, you’re in a bit of trouble. Get hit with 1000 mSv over 20 years, and it’s quite probably beneficial. Going back to the old staircase analogy, if you decide to jump down 100 stairs in one go, you’re time is almost certainly up. If you jump off the bottom step of your flight of stairs every day for 3 months, the most you risk is a sprained ankle (occasionally). Same ‘dose’ in both cases, very different rate.
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Harrywr2
That is not argument for excessive regulation. The aerospace industry has much worse consequences from a design flaw or production flaw. Yet they don’t address it by excessive regulation. Excessive regulatory costs on aerospace industry would have caused aerospace industry to have been excessively costly and to have been held back in their development just as has happened with the nuclear industry. Air travel would have been much more costly, there’d be less passenger movements, less aircraft operating and the standard of safety would be well behind where it is. Excessive regulation is not the solution.
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Peter Lang,
The aerospace industry has much worse consequences from a design flaw or production flaw. Yet they don’t address it by excessive regulation
http://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/continued_operation/ad/
Airworthiness Directives (ADs) are legally enforceable rules issued by the FAA in accordance with 14 CFR part 39 to correct an unsafe condition in a product. 14 CFR part 39 defines a product as an aircraft, aircraft engine, propeller, or appliance.
Here is a list of airworthiness directives the FAA issued in the last 60 days – I count 45
http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgAD.nsf/MainFrame?OpenFrameSetd=
Same general process happens in the aerospace industry as the nuclear industry. Something unexpected happens, they do a root cause failure analysis then issue orders to take whatever action is appropriate to minimize a re-occurrence. Sometimes that means an increased inspection schedule…sometimes that means a retrofit.
‘Lessons Learned’ are incorporated in ‘New Design’ licensing.
In 1970 you could probably buy a Boeing 747 for $50 million. They cost about $300 million now.
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Occasionally materials scientists and engineers come up from PNNL in Hanford to give seminars about advanced materials for radioactive environments. This work is part of DoE’s efforts directed (eventually one hopes) towards high temperature reactors. The materials in question (mostly) have no or poor defect repair and so after some total dose deteriorate to uselessness.
I don’t know enough biology, health physics or radiology to be positive that the same does not occur to humans exposed to ionizing radiation. Neither, it seems, is there any useful data collected post-1945. This is true of other health physics research articles I read, not just BEIR VII. That data is of course only whole dose data from one rapid delivery. So AFAIK there is no understanding of low dose rate response by the biological and medical communities.
The BEIR VII panel did briefly discuss hormesis to conclude that more research was required.
All told, I’m quite dubious of reasoning by analogy in this case and also point out that the only scientific understanding of low dose effects is entirely statistical.
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David B. Benson – here is a link to recent research that flies in the face of the linear no threshold theory:
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_New_data_on_low_dose_radiation_2112111.html
Who knew, the body has a certain capacity to repair itself, as long as that capacity is not exceeded (low dose rates) damage can be repaired very effectively. But when the capacity to repair is exceeded (high dose rate, no matter the total dose) the body has to be sloppy in a pinch and do hasty repairs which often fail. It’s almost elementary class biology, so intuitive. Flabbergasting that BEIR doesn’t talk much about such simple facts of biology.
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Harrywr2,
That makes my point. The Boeing 747 has gone down in real costs and the nuclear poants havew gone way up in real terms.
Pulling unconparable bits an pieces out like this is not helpful. Show me real costs that regulation has added to nuclear and to aerospace. I understand from Bernard Cohen (1990’s some time) (anmd going from memory) regulatory ratcheting has increased the cost of nuclear by about a factor of 4 in real terms (from memory). Nothing else has suffered this. And I think it would be difficult to argue that it has increased the safety as much as would ahve been achieved by allowing nuclear to roll out at a much loser cost. I am convinced we’d be way ahead no if that had been the approach. We’d have got over the mass nuclear phobia decades ago.
If you want to provide a convincing case to change my mind on thjis, you’d need to do more than pull out a few unrelated facts and figures.
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(Comment deleted. Violation of the political comments rule.)
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Hi Harry2,
///Something unexpected happens, they do a root cause failure analysis then issue orders to take whatever action is appropriate to minimize a re-occurrence. Sometimes that means an increased inspection schedule…sometimes that means a retrofit.
‘Lessons Learned’ are incorporated in ‘New Design’ licensing.///
And that’s a good thing, right?
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Peter Lang, France switched almost completey to nuclear in about 10 years. Are you suggesting they have poor regulations on nuclear safety? In actual fact they are really tight on it. And what about the Finns? They are rapidly transitioning to nuclear power right now (will be mostly nuclear electric before 2020). Do you think Finnish nuclear plants are underregulated? Olkiluoto’s EPR experience suggests the opposite. Yet despite all the regulatory intervention and delays, the Finns are going ahead with a few more nuclear builds, very large units, allowing them to source most of their electricity from nuclear by 2020. Olkiluoto is a popular media anti-nuke target, but the truth is that the Finns are transitioning effectively and rapidly to a nuclear powered electricity grid.
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Eclipse Now, on 5 March 2012 at 9:29 PM said:
Quoting me
///Something unexpected happens, they do a root cause failure analysis then issue orders to take whatever action is appropriate to minimize a re-occurrence. Sometimes that means an increased inspection schedule…sometimes that means a retrofit.
‘Lessons Learned’ are incorporated in ‘New Design’ licensing.///
And that’s a good thing, right?
Absolutely. That’s how you achieve safety and reliability.
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Briefly interrupting the ranting…. Did anyone see the SBS documentary on Fukishima mentioned up thread
https://bravenewclimate.com/2012/02/04/open-thread-21/#comment-151506 ?
The presenter has asked on twitter for comments, and seems to have attracted the usual antinuclear accusations.
http://twitter.com/#!/jimalkhalili
from his comments, Prof. Al-Khalili would seem a natural BNC ally.
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In the TV doco Al Khalili took a short side excursion into the potential of thorium. I would be interested in his views on the LFTR vs IFR question.
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So, Cyril R and Harrywr2, do I understand correctly you are believe the costs of nuclear in western democracies are OK? That is the message I take from your comments because you are defending the status quo and stridently opposed to considering what could and should be the case.
Do you believe you can force people to accept these costs by regulation?
In Australia the cost of nuclear would be about five times the current cost of coal generated electricity and at more than twice the cost of new coal. Most people want cheap energy. The benefits to society are enormous and cannot be dismissed. You cannot avoid the fact that democracies are not going to accept high cost nuclear and nor are the developing countries. I am of course referring to nuclear roll out at the scale needed to make a substantial difference to global emissions, not just a few plants.
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Peter Lang, on 6 March 2012 at 11:15 AM said:
So, Cyril R and Harrywr2, do I understand correctly you are believe the costs of nuclear in western democracies are OK?
The cost of new nuclear is ‘competitive’ with ‘new coal’ or ‘new gas’ generation in the South Eastern US ,most of Western Europe, China, India, Japan and South Korea.
Obviously..those places where the cost of ‘new nuclear’ is already competitive will end up bearing the FOAK and SOAK costs.
I emphasize the word ‘new’ as competing against a power plant that is paid for is difficult regardless of the generating technology.
Competing against brown coal at $1/GJ or black coal at $2/GJ is also difficult. Most of US and most of rest of the world pays more then that.(Except Australia)
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harrywr2,
Nuclear generation is not competitive. If it was it would be being rolled out throughout the developed and developing countries.
It is a figment of advocates’ imagination to argue it is competitive, just as it is a figment of the wind and solar advocates’ imagination to argue that their pet technologies are competitive.
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Cyril R — Thank you for link. In my earlier comment I alluded to this work but had the lab wrong; it is LBNL. However, I do not subscribe to your interpretation; biology is much more complex than that.
Some who know much more biology than I suggest caution in applying this preliminary investigation to mammels in general and humans in particular. Nonetheless, it does point in the direction of QNT being a better statistical model of low dose risk than LNT for solid cancers.
Despite the name the BEIR panels are almost exclusively considering effects on humans; the series ought to have been named HEIR but we are stuck with the poor title.
It is likely to take many years before regulatory and advisory groups are ready to move away from LNT to something like QNT.
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Peter Lang — Mostly by just following World Nuclear News it is quite clear than NPPs are currently under construction in the devloped and developing world.
Last Friday’s TNYT had a article of Vietnam; one under construction and site work for another. The Vietnamese current plan calls for 10 NPPs.
In India, the current plan is for about 44 NPPs; India is, of course, a coal producer.
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According our Federal Treasurer Australia can pride itself of introducing a carbon tax. However critics of coal exports are irrational
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/wayne-swan-labels-anti-coal-activists-irrational/story-e6frg9df-1226290295710
I think Australia’s domestic emissions must be around the 550 Mt CO2e mark at the moment. However CO2 from 300 Mt of exported coal (assuming all thermal coal) X 2.4 would be 720 Mt and from LNG 20 X 2.8 = 56 Mt CO2, call it ~800 Mt CO2 from fossil fuel exports generally. vs a domestic 550 Mt. If as looks likely several smelters close down and the emissions move offshore then we re-import metal made from our own ores and coal that won’t appear on our greenhouse accounts.
My question to the Honorable Treasurer is why is pointing out this hypocrisy irrational?
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Carbon tax will lead to trading or outsourcing to those unlikely to pay it. Awareness of peaking of resources or increased cost are the real deterrents. In case of coal, SPM or sulfur emissions could be policed. IFR or a closed nuclear by any name is the real antidote to peaking of energy.
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Peter Lang, you asserted on 6 March at 1:02 PM that nuclear is not competitive. Competitive with what?
Let us suppose that nuclear is not competitive with coal. If that is the case, it is at least partly because externalities are not taken into consideration when power is generated from coal and because the cost of nuclear power has been greatly increased by bureaucratic bungling. But would you be willing to damage our environment seriously because nuclear power is more expensive than coal power?
Compared to the alternatives to fossil fuel power, such as wind and solar, nuclear seems to be highly competitive.
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Peter Lang, on 6 March 2012 at 1:02 PM said:
Nuclear generation is not competitive. If it was it would be being rolled out throughout the developed and developing countries
Global Coal Statistics – Page 2
Click to access coal_section_2011.pdf
1999 Prices
Northwest European $28/tonne.
Central Appalachian(Eastern US) $31/tonne.
Japanese Steam Coal Import Price(cif) $35/tonne,
2010 Prices
Northwest Europen Benchmark $91/tonne.
Central Appalachian(Eastern US) $71/tonne.
Japanese Steam Coal Import Price(cif) $105/tonne,
Nuclear is not cost competitive against $30/tonne coal.
For most of the world $30/tonne coal no longer exists.
In the US(Coal Capitol of the World) coal consumption has dropped by 100 million tons in the last 5 years.
Click to access t32p01p1.pdf
In most of the world the discussion of the economic benefits of inexpensive electricity from inexpensive coal vs the environmental costs is over. The inexpensive coal no longer exists.
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Nuclear is not allowed in many countries including Australia. Kind of strange to say it isn’t competitive.
That’s like saying, stealing from a bank is not competitive. Yes it is competitive but it is not allowed. Except that nuclear power creates wealth and a cleaner environment whereas stealing from the bank is just concentrating other peoples wealth.
In countries where nuclear is allowed and fossil fuel and anti-development interests don’t red-tape them to death, nuclear is expanding rapidly. That’s why many of the asian countries have a rapidly growing nuclear sector. China has ambitious targets, but just when you think they’re too ambitious, they revise the targets upwards again!
Here are some figures by Brian Wang on nuclear costs. These are quite competitive. Not dirt cheap but you only get dirt cheap by using existing coal plants that are paid for already. Those plant’s don’t last forever. Australia still needs power decades from now when all existing coal plants are closed. If Australia refuses new builds they are simply defraying the cost to future years when it will come back much bigger (because you have more old exisiting capacity to replace with new expensive capacity) and you risk old generation failing causing blackouts.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/02/levelized-current-and-future-costs-of.html
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Anybody in Melbourne with some free time today?
Sorry about the short notice.
http://www.facebook.com/events/130133937108045/
http://au.wherevernow.com/?event=130133937108045
Gavin Mudd wouldn’t be stupid enough to endorse Mangano’s (Deleted pejorative) pseudoscience claims regarding Northwestern U.S. infant mortality… would he?
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I think we have the ingredients for a disaster in the making with the development of Queensland’s coal and CSG exports . A UN team points out the possible damage from 10,000 ships a year crossing the Great Barrier Reef
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/curb-coal-gas-to-save-great-barrier-reef-un/story-e6frg8y6-1226291267250
On land there are the problems with fracking and long term issues such as the future gas needs of south eastern Australia and the need to replace costly oil imports. None of these issues appear to have been thought through in the rush for export dollars. However I suggest the biggest fallout could be resentment.
A year from now we will have working class Australia struggling to pay the bills as we forcibly reduce our consumption of coal and gas. Meanwhile increased amounts of Australian coal and gas will be sold overseas without restriction. Upthread I suggest CO2 from exported coal and gas will be 40% or more higher than domestic emissions. The hypocrisy is bizarre with one government minister saying that it was needed to prevent mass starvation in developing countries. When one of those ships crunches into the Reef it will be the last straw.
Anyway I see a way to get for sectors of the Australian economy to get the carbon tax monkey off their back ..become an honorary overseas country. For example I think the State of Victoria will struggle with their 5 GW of brown coal fired baseload with the pay packet adjustment the same as for gas and hydro dominated states. Simple; just declare Victoria a foreign country and they’re off the hook.
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Cyril R. — Thank you for the link.
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Harrywr2,
I see in yesterday’s Australian, exports from Queensland’s coal ports are projected to increase by a factor of five by 2020.
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Meanwhile, you’d prefer to sit on your hands and try to defend the status quo on the cost of nuclear rather than look openly at why it is so expensive (e.g. estimated to be four times more expensive in Australia than in Korea, and that’s not FOAK).
You’d argue to raise the cost of coal something that is clearly not going to be accepted across most of the world, where most of the population lives and where most of the emissions will come from over the decades ahead. And nor should it be accepted!
I find it very frustrating how blind some people are to reality. And blind to economic reality.
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(Deleted political comment)
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A short review of BNC on Campus Review: http://www.campusreview.com.au/blog/news/a-brave-new-world-of-blogging/
I’ll paste it below since it requires registration to read. Overall, I thought it was a nice piece, and highlighted the importance of good moderation on a site like this:
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(Comment deleted)
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Harrywr2,
This comment (now slightly reworded) was posted about 11:00 am, before my comment at 11:08 am, but it was deleted. My following comments built on this one.
It is not generally accepted and not supported by the facts. The facts being the worldwide growth in coal generation capacity far outstrips nuclear.
MODERATOR
Sorry Peter – I don’t know to what you are referring. I did not delete your 11:00 am comment which is still on the blog.
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Peter Lang, on 7 March 2012 at 11:29 AM said:
Harrywr2-The examples of why nuclear would be so costly in Australia and why it would have such an exorbitantly high investor risk premium just keep coming
I have been commenting on the ‘competitiveness’ of nuclear in those localities(most of the world) that have steam coal prices substantially above current Australian domestic steam coal prices.
My understanding is that the domestic cost of ‘steam coal'(brown or black) in Australia is between $1 and $2/gigajoule.
‘Most of the world’ is paying $3 to $5 /gigajoule for steam coal.
Those localities that are currently paying $4 to $5/gigajoule for steam coal will obviously be the early adopters and bear the FOAK and initial regulatory certification costs because it makes financial sense for them to do so.
I would note that if someone told me in the year 2000 that US Central Appalachian mine-mouth coal prices would more then double by 2010 I would have suggested they see a ‘mental health professional’.
History has proven me wrong.
I don’t have sufficient knowledge of Australian Coal markets to render opinion as to what ‘future prices’ will be.
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Harrywr2,
I understand what you are saying. I am talking about the whole world.
But from my perspective you are pulling out bits of what makes up the total costs and total viability of nuclear versus coal. Just talking about fuel costs is next to irrelevant, IMO.
I am approaching it from the overall viability. Nuclear is clearly not economic anywhere except in a few places like China, India and Korea. Everywhere else it is not being built. It’s not being built faster than coal capacity in South America, Africa, and most of the developing countries. It is only built in USA, UK and Europe with enormous government support in one way or another. No investor would touch it without government guarantees.
No matter what the reasons, it is clearly not economically viable. There are many reasons for this. What frustrates me is that advocates deny it is not economically viable and apparently do not want to open the potential can of worms to investigate why it is too expensive.
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Peter Lang — You seemed to have not read my earlier comment which indicated that NPPs are indeed be built in many countries around the world. Rather than repeat, I’ll just mention that both South Africa and Chile are seriously moving forward towards building fleets of NPPs (3 for Chile).
Both countries also mine coal, a valuable export commodity.
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Greenhouse gases, climate change and the transition from coal to low-carbon electricity
Click to access 1748-9326_7_1_014019.pdf
The paper is interesting, but I have two concerns after a quick read:
1. you can’t have renewables without a lot of gas. So it is misleading to show renewables on their own. When showing renewables it should also show the emissions from the gas component needed to make the system reliable.
2. The emissions per technology seem to be biased in favour of renewables and against nuclear. The LCA emissions from nuclear are less than or equal to wind, and much less than solar PV and solar CST. http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/carbon-emissions-from-electricity-generation-just-the-numbers/
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Peter Lang — It may be possible to have some solar component without natgas as the balancing agent. Here
is a preliminary analysis for solar PV backed by NPPs.
Wind, however, is hopelessly expensive without cheap natgas as the balancing agent.
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While I appreciate the power of market forces what we have in Australia is legislative banning backed by cultural resistance. I was going to say inertia, but it’s too strong for that. People are genuinely scared of a meltdown closing down their neighbourhood, forever. (Three centuries is beyond the reckoning of most people, and so *forever* works to describe how emotional people are about this subject.
Economic forces are not even a relevant part of the debate right now in Australia. Nukes are devil-spawned radiation spewing time-bombs about to blow radiation and close down a 60 km radius circle of Australia. People can’t think past that being somewhere rural and deserted, and always assume it will be their backyard. Like Chernobyl.
Given how extreme the cultural resistance and political inertia is over nuclear power, I would back a variety of programs that would install nukes, whether government driven or strictly market driven. (But with independent auditors and safety inspectors of course).
For example, I would also support a Carbon Tax *if* it fed into state-of-the-art AP1000’s or equally super-safe Gen3.5 nukes.
If we cannot convince the Australian public that Gen3.5 nukes are exponentially safer than anything that has gone before, this game is over. The ban will stay put.
And that will have NOTHING to do with market forces.
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Peter Lang, on 7 March 2012 at 1:08 PM said:
I am approaching it from the overall viability. Nuclear is clearly not economic anywhere except in a few places like China, India and Korea. Everywhere else it is not being built. It’s not being built faster than coal capacity in South America, Africa, and most of the developing countries
A article from a Virginia newspaper(Coal country)
http://wydaily.com/local-news/8543-coal-plant-receives-local-approval-for-second-time.html
Dendron’s town council again voted to approve a rezoning that will allow a large coal-fired power plant to be built in the town about 20 miles outside Williamsburg.Old Dominion Electric Cooperative has plans to build a $6 billion, 1,500-megawatt power plant
$6 billion for the plant and coal priced at $3/GJ. Not exactly an ‘economic’ decision.
Have it now pressure sometimes causes people to purchase things that are not in their long term economic interests.
If I go through the latest VC Summer status report the ‘supply chain’ is still working to get ‘up to speed’.
Click to access 2011Q4BLRAReport.pdf
The ability to deliver on time and on budget are valid concerns at this point in time. With an ‘immature’ supply chain either one has to build a lot of fat into the budget and timeline or explain cost overruns and delays.
In the US I keep seeing articles like this –
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120307/NEWS10/303070054/1007/NEWS05
MidAmerican Energy is considering a 540-megawatt nuclear plant to be built at an unspecified Iowa site.
If I look at delivered price of coal in Iowa it works out to be about $1.50/GJ. (it will be ‘Western Coal’ which has a heat content of about 17GJ/ton)
Click to access table34.pdf
540 MW seems to me to be this –
http://www.nuscalepower.com/ot-Scalable-Nuclear-Power-Technology.php
Or this
Click to access e2011002.pdf
It’s probably the mPower unit as that already has a FOAK customer.
Whether it ever gets built I don’t know. Someone in Iowa is working to at least ‘have the option’. Who knows if it will even be legal to build a coal fired plant in 2020?
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$4/Watt for the modern coal plant, that’s pricey. But then the dollar isn’t what it used to be.
$4/Watt is about what NuScale says they can do. A bit optimistic perhaps, since the $4/Watt coal is for a real project and NuScale hasn’t gone into specific projects yet. Still, looks competitive if you’re paying 3 cents per kWh for the coal fuel (nuclear should be around 2 cents per kWh).
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Test audience reactions to proposed TV ads for our clean energy future are apparently not going well
http://www.smh.com.au/national/carbon-polluting-govts-ad-messages-20120307-1uks8.html
Perhaps the public is smarter than the politicians think. The ads we saw a year or ago showed solar panels with lots of happy people wearing hard hats, even on the ground. Since then major solar projects have been cancelled and 4-5 GW of new gas fired generation is on the books. I also suspect the public is highly cynical of the double standard regarding coal exports. While Aussies have to pay higher power bills 10,000 coal ships a year will bash their way through the Great Barrier Reef to prevent ‘mass starvation’ overseas according to one senior minister.
No doubt the new $10bn Clean Energy Finance Corporation will get a mention. That will at least mean somewhere in Sydney gets a shiny new rooftop. The government should get their story straight first then make the ads.
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Harrywr2 @ 8 March 2012 at 2:53 AM said
You quoted my statement at the top of your post but then didn’t address it. The fact is, new coal capacity is far outstripping new nuclear throughout the world. That is because nuclear is far too expensive to be taken up in preference to coal throughout most of the world.
Put simply, nuclear is too expensive. It is not economic.
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@Peter Lang,
I would suggest that there are other factors at play as well as cost in the coal verses nuclear choice. I suspect (without supporting evidence) that both India and China would like more nuclear and less coal but are going as fast as they believe they reasonably can in the context of building up a nuclear industry, the supply chain, education and training of a “nuclear” workforce of scientists, engineers, technicians and qualified trades people etc, etc. In some sense, the capacity of the world wide nuclear industry to supply after a couple of decades of little new activity may well also be a factor.
Choices are also likely to be specific to individual nations. In particular nations with limited domestic coal resources must surely be concerned about future fuel cost for new coal capacity. Not only the fuel cost but the cost of the transport infrastructure for imported coal. Nuclear may be attractive because of it’s price stability. This may have something to do with the decisions of Bangladesh and Vietnam.
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Quokka,
I note your unsubstantiated personal opinion that nuclear is economic. It has about as much credibility as Mark Diesendorf or Matthew Wright saying that solar and wind are economic.
I also notice that you avoid the key point that demonstrates, clearly, that nuclear is uneconomic. If it was economic it would have been being built instead of coal and gas throughout the developing world for the decades past.
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Please note that unsubstantiated personal opinion is allowed on an Open Thread.
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Peter Lang wrote:
This would be true if there were no political and restricted know-how dimensions to nuclear power. Of course, that’s not the case. Nuclear is heavily politicized and know how is fiercely guarded. Iran is a case in point. Heck, they get their nuclear engineers assassinated, and their economy heavily sanctioned. Nuclear’s curse is that it originated in wartime, and the bomb was built before power reactors.
Nuclear plants are a manufactured product, the cost of which drops if you build a lot of them (if you think the first Boeing 747 was cheap, think again). This is the French experience, and France is hardly underregulated.
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Peter Lang, on 8 March 2012 at 10:02 AM said:
The fact is, new coal capacity is far outstripping new nuclear throughout the world. That is because nuclear is far too expensive to be taken up in preference to coal throughout most of the world.
The ‘inflation adjusted’ price of coal experienced a 40 year decline that ended in 2002. Obviously, in 2002 if I were making a decision about building a electricity plant the fact that the price of coal had been ‘going down’ for 40 years would heavily influence my decision.
Someone only interested in ‘saving their wallet’ would have ordered a coal fired plant in 2002.
It’s not 2002…it’s 2012…the price of coal has been going up dramatically for 10 years. The usual excuses of there was a flood, or a mine accident or a harsh winter to explain away a one or two year price blip don’t hold anymore.
If you want a nuclear power plant you have to put a deposit on the reactor pressure vessel 5 years in advance because the nuclear industry was ‘asleep’ for 30 years while everyone was enjoying ‘cheap energy from cheap coal’.
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In a couple of weeks the Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics will release a detailed report on Australia’s coal and LNG exports. Press release here. I presume BREE is an offshoot of ABARE formerly much quoted on BNC.
This report should make it possible to confirm that CO2 from exported fuels is much higher (I reckon 40%) than domestic emissions from all source such as deforestation. So as not to get tangled up with this nasty emissions business the new term for coal and LNG is ‘resources’. It’s just that they happen to be the type that burn in air.
You might also note that Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan is trying to bully Greenpeace for economic treason or some other heinous crime. Treason maybe but not hypocrisy. As the press release notes export energy prices went up 20% in the last year. That’s a doubling time of 4 years. Could it be that coal and gas will price themselves out of a market with or without carbon tax?
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Cyril R. — Nuscale’s approximately US$4/W does not include site preparation, auxiliary strucutres, switchyard or transmission.
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Considering that nuclear prices depend mainly on the capital cost, it may be worthwhile take them as basic. Imported fuels, if any, should be taxed to bring energy prices on par. Carbon tax is too unwieldy.
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Nuclear giant Areva is building CSP plants, called CLFR (compact linear fresnel reflector). They’ve got one project, a solar booster on a coal plant, of particular interest to this website because it is in Australia.
http://www.areva.com/EN/solar-209/areva-solar-projects.html
This is only 5 MW of average electric flow. Capacity factor of just 0.11. The project costs AUD 104.7 million, almost AUD $ 21/Watt. Plugging it in the NREL calculator gives about 27 cents per kWh. The coal plant still produces over 99% of the electricity (it is 750 MW peak). Yet the 1% solar addition is an excellent excuse for the utility to keep the dirt burner running. So this is pretty terrible greenwashing going on.
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John Newlands, on 9 March 2012 at 8:21 AM said:
As the press release notes export energy prices went up 20% in the last year. That’s a doubling time of 4 years. Could it be that coal and gas will price themselves out of a market with or without carbon tax?
For those countries dependent on fossil fuel imports that pretty close to reality now.
US EIA LNG import/export cost estimates.
http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/global/lngindustry.html
generic liquefaction costs amount to around US$1.09 per million Btu..regasification will add US$0.30 per million Btu.
Then there is the matter of the cost of the boat which adds another US$0.30 to US $2.00.
So if we say the ‘transport tax’ for natural gas is $2.50/MMbtu.
There is about 117 pounds of CO2 per MMBtu. So burning 18MMBtu of gas resultes in a tonne of CO2 emissions.
18 * $2.50 = $45/tonne of CO2.
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Gas burned to drive LNG compressors will be 65% carbon tax exempt I believe since it is an EITEI emissions intensive trade exposed industry. Since Fukushima (one year ago) the Japanese have paid $10-$15 per GJ or mmbtu for LNG. That contrasts with piped gas prices in the range $3-$4 per GJ. If a tonne of LNG with 55 GJ heating value is priced at $825 then that would include $60 worth of liquefaction effort according to the quoted figure.
On the Queensland coast parallel to the Great Barrier Reef three new plants will liquefy coal seam gas for export. The fully laden LNG tankers along with the coal ships will then crunch their way through the coral to supply north Asia with the fossil carbon it lacks. With the sort of money on offer I’d say the chances are slim for parts of Australia (eg Melbourne) getting cheap gas in future.
The government wants us to believe these stupid and irrelevant side shows like the solar steam boost make a difference. Meanwhile the truly significant energy sources like gas are pricing themselves too high for local consumers. At the same time we are trashing our backyard and losing control over carbon abatement. To use a favoured expression we are not seeing the forest for the trees.
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As I have pointed out before, those advocating renewable sources of energy are unable to cite studies which have numerically determined that it is practical. I recently came across a quotation by Galileo which may be useful:
“Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.”
That is exactly what they have failed to do.
Lord Kelvin stated that knowledge that cannot be expressed in numbers is not knowledge; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but it is of a meagre and unsatisfactory sort.
It seems to be that those advocating renewables should be continually admonished, over and over again, to provide numbers to prove that renewables are practical. That may not sway the hard core, but it could make the public and the decision-making politicians more aware if the impracticality of renewables as a major source of energy for large developed countries.
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Yes Frank, recently I had a discussion with a renewables enthusiast. The question was whether the UK could be powered by solar. The answer is of course no, simply by looking at when the sun is available (which is not the case 90% of the time in the UK). The renewables enthusiast then went into some kind of lawyer science act, saying this report does not claim that solar can power the UK, so it’s not a relevant question. When I launched a torpedo in that and called him back from the tree to look into the forest, he went into a vague defence of “we use a combination of wind, solar, hydro, and tidal”. Hiding behind the vague and complex so that he didn’t have to face the reality that none of these energy sources is reliable enough to power a country, even all of them together. David Mackay’s book, “sustainable energy – without the hot air” also outlined numerous capacity problems of these renewable energy sources (which are actually not renewable but nuclear energy sources, except they are unreliable unlike nuclear fission on earth). Just getting people to read that book will be a major step forward. Best to just link to the online version when in discussions with the renewables enthusiasts
http://www.withouthotair.com/
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I shall book mark that link to have it readily available
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How to get low emissions electricity generation in Australia
To get low emissions electricity generation in Australia, this is what I think we need to do:
1. Fund research into how to implement low emission energy in Australia. Remove the pro-renewable bias. Establish research centres in universities and research organisations throughout Australia with the goal to define how we could remove the impediments to low emissions electricity generation.
2. Direct the Productivity Commission to define the impediments to low cost low emissions energy for Australia. Define how they could be removed, the consequences of removing them and the priority for removing them
3. Implement a nuclear regulatory regime for Australia. One of the most important goals of this agency is to provide Australia with low cost nuclear generated electricity. This goal must be explicitly stated in the agencies mission statement.
Risk Maps
I expect one of the outputs from the research into how to get low-cost, low-emissions electricity would be that we need to educate the public about the real risks and advantages of nuclear energy.
I would like to be able to answer this question: “Do we force people to evacuate from areas where there is radioactive contamination at much lower levels of health risk that we accept for other accidents?”
I would like to see risk maps. I would like to see map layers for different risks to human health. You could built up layers on top of each other so they showed the total risk of living in an area. You could also add layers for a new imposed risk, such as a new hospital, freeway, pulp mill, wind farm gas power station, coal mine, CSG, CCS, or nuclear power station. Here are some examples of risks you might want to select on a map for your area
1. traffic accidents
2. crime
3. industrial area
4. paint factory
5. oil refinery
6. particulate pollution from coal power stations
7. mercury, lead, arsenic, benzenes, long chain hydrocarbon compounds
8. flood risk
Now, consider we could see such a map for the areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima before and after the nuclear accidents.
I would really like to see such a map. Because I do not understand whether or not the evacuations were warranted on a purely objective basis.
That is, do IAEA regulations force people to evacuate from areas where there is radioactive contamination at much lower levels of health risk than we accept for other contaminants and other risks?
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PL I’d point out the Gillard government has already flatly ignored the advice of the Productivity Commission
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/renewable-subsidies-too-costly-productivity-commission/story-fn59niix-1226072665830
The PC along with Garnaut and a senior ACCC figure have pointed out that renewables subsidies on top of a carbon price represent double dipping. It seems if the mandarins give advice that doesn’t suit the political agenda it gets ignored.
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This may be of interest to the community… even if you disagree with it, it’s open for comments :)
https://theconversation.edu.au/fukushima-anniversary-reminds-us-there-are-better-options-than-nuclear-5806
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It seems like Jim Green is running out of steam, if the latest weak-as-water ‘critique’ of Prof Brook on New Matilda is anything to go by:
http://newmatilda.com/2012/03/12/nuclear-power-isnt-green-bullet
Not much of substance or ‘punchiness’ there! Still, it may be worth correcting some of his many errors.
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Thanks Rapid Rabbit for that alert. I’ll probably post a response at some point – it’s already given me an idea for a new post.
Talking of Jim Green, click here to see him get torn to shreds by the commenters today on The Punch, after his latest ‘essay’ on Fukushima. As others noted, this was perhaps the most unanimous commentary ever on that site, other than the near-universal praise for Geoff Russell’s latest sanity post from a few days earlier. Terrific work Geoff, and great work too Jim — you’re efforts are doing more to emasculate the anti-nuclear cause than any external party could ever hope to achieve!
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JN, @ 11 March 2012 at 2:25 PM
The program I proposed – to build the capability to educate Australians (public, media and politicians) on nuclear power – is going to take time, as I laid out in the “Implementation” (points 3 and 4) and the “Schedule’ sections in the lead article for this thread: https://bravenewclimate.com/2010/01/31/alternative-to-cprs/
My comment at 11 March 2012 at 12:51 PM expands on the education part of that proposed approach to get economically viable nuclear power in Australia.
To expand on my comment of 11 March 2012 at 12:51 PM about the ‘Risk Maps’, what I am suggesting is:
1. Risk maps with contours of fatalites/projected fatalities per capita per year.
2. The map would have layers that could be selected and deselected. The layers would be:
a. by polutant (eg lead, mercury, particluates, NOx, benzenes, long chain hydrocarbons, radioactive contamination, etc)
b. by cause (e.g. by smoking, heart attack, cancer, motor vehicle accident, falling off a roof, coal electricity generation, nuclear, etc)
3. The user could add or subtract layers. Ideally, the user could, for example, remove 1.6 GW of electricity generation from Hazelwood brown coal power station in the Latrobe Valley and add 2 GW of nuclear on the Gippsland coast, and see how the total fatalities per capita per year would change in a given selected location, e.g. a suburb of Melbourne.
4. There are many ways this could be expanded and improved – eg ‘what if a nuclear accident?’ What if a chemical accidnet?
My reason for arguing for this suggestion is because we keep hearing that “100,000 people have been evaccuated from the Fukusjima area and the area will be uninhabitable for decades”. But how serious is the problem? Is the area uninhabitable because of an objective assessment of risk or is the analysis of the risk biased against radioactive contamination because of nucear phobia?
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There was an excellent documentary on SBS 2 tonight. It covered nuclear energy, radiation risk, LNT model. There was a lot of really good material. I’d recommend watching it if you didn’t see it.
I’d love to see how Jim Green, Mark Diesendorf and Matthew Wright respond to it. I congratulate SBS for showing it.
It does seem we are at a turning point. The media is starting to explain nuclear power and radiation risks objectively.
The documentary also showed studies of animals from the Chernobyl exclusion zone and showed that despite high levels of radiation their was not detectibly damage. I say this shows why the risk maps I proposed and discussed in my last two comments on this thread would be valuable. I wonder, if we acted purely rationally, would we evacuate people from the area surrounding a Chernobyl or Fukushima type accident?
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PL, yes, I saw that documentary more than a year ago on YouTube. Indeed, I referred to it here:
It, along with the one by Jim Al-Khalili shown the week before, should be seen by a wide audience.
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PL an insight into the likely public reception of risk maps comes from the 2006 BBC documentary ‘Nuclear Nightmares’ just aired on SBS Two. It made an overwhelming case against the Linear No Threshold theory for radiation caused illness around Chernobyl. As in 4,000 expected deaths in 20 years versus 56 actual if I recall the numbers. Little did they know Fukushima was yet to happen. Now it seems all that careful analysis counts for nothing because people simply don’t want to know.
With Victoria specifically I suspect there will be some major giveaway because of the higher bill shock from carbon taxing brown coal. Therefore I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some kind of interstate carbon parity adjustment or other jiggery pokery. Money is what people care about risk comes distant second. Gippsland could get a nuke only if it worked out cheaper than carbon taxed brown coal. When we get back into dry years the Wonthaggi desal will be an enormous burden. They should have built NP next door. I don’t think the Latrobe Valley 1 GW combined cycle plant will go ahead even if the Feds put up most of the capital. Victoria’s gas will run out while the plant is still relatively new. Still the Vics could go nuke purely on financial grounds with risk not factored.
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This is really impressively bad. Go leave a comment, if you feel so inclined.
http://thehoopla.com.au/japans-nuclear-refugees/#comment-16737
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JN,
I get the impression you a) confuse time scales and think that because the majority of the public are scared of nuclear now, that means we should not educate them and b) it is bad policy to provide factual information to the public. It is better to try to impose beliefs by providing misleading and exaggerated spin. That seems to be your argument in your reply here and in most of your arguments presented on for example the CO2 tax thread.
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There is an increasing amount of nuclear energy discussion (some good, some bad) over on The Conversation this week, which I’m sure you’ll all probably be interested in checking out.
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This map shows the radiation levels around Fukishima. http://www.simplyinfo.org/?p=5194 The blue and green areas get less than 20 mSv per annum at 1 m above ground level.
What is the risk of fatalities per annum per capita in these areas? What is the risk in the yellow and red areas?
How do the risks from radioactive contamination compare with the risks from other contaminants and pollutants that exist in the same areas?
Can anyone tell me?
I know you cannot. So the scaremongering about nuclear and radiation can continue unabated for as long as this situation (no information) exists.
I would like to see the map of radiation levels converted to a contour map of projected fatalities, per person per year, or per life time of exposure if for a person who lived and worked in the region for their whole life or 10 years or some other suitable way to compare risk from radiation with all other risks, both natural and caused by pollution.
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According to many scientists, the rise in global temperature must be limited to 2 degrees in this century, to avoid triggering positive feedback loops, such as a large-scale methane release from the Arctic permafrost.
These days, however, emissions are increasing on an unprecedented scale, rather than peaking and then falling off dramatically in the next decade, as staying within the 2 degree limit would require. According to the ICCP we are heading for 6 degrees of warming if current trends continue.
http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-05-the-brutal-logic-of-climate-change/
According to several papers, a warming of 4 degrees or more in this century is going to lead to a “breakdown” of human civilization. Why? You often here “the effects will be catastrophic”, but less often why. Shouldn’t at least industrialized countries be able to cope with things like shifting rainfall patterns and sea level rise? The Dutch, for example, have plenty of experience in wrestling land from the sea. Countries like Canada and Russia may profit from a sharp rise in temperatures, as crops could be grown further north.
I’m not saying that limiting the temperature increase to 2°C may not be the most logical path to take (in terms of economic cost), I merely asking why climate scientists seem to think a warming beyond 4 to 6 degrees is “at odds with organized society”.
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There’s video of a speech by Duncan Hawthorne that gives an operator’s perspective on regulation, including some regulations that were problematic at Fukushima (Mr. Hawthorne heads Bruce Power, which has one site with 8 CANDU reactors).
Part 2 begins with regulation – including (about 4 1/2 minutes in) stating “this is not about pricing nuclear power out of the market.”
http://www.youtube.com/brucepower4you
There probably is little new in it for BNC regulars, but it’s a nice look from an operator (and former head of WANO), with some ideas on communicating about nuclear power.
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Peter Lang wrote:
Typically the linear no threshold theory uses a cancer mortality rate of 0.05 per Sievert of group exposure. So a group of 10 people receiving 20 Sieverts will cause one extra (or excess) cancer death. 100000000 people receiving 20 Sieverts will also result in the same 1 cancer death toll. If that seems rediculous, that’s because LNT is rediculous.
LNT says that at 20 mSv/year, the threshold for the evacuation in Japan, the excess cancer mortality is 0.1 percent. This is really nothing compared to living in a city or area with a lot of air pollution such NOx, SOx, particulate, and heavy metals (ironically almost all caused by fossil fuels). Here’s an example of that, traffic burning of fossil fuels causing 90% of the cancers in polluted areas:
Click to access cancerriskreport.pdf
Quite strange that people in Tokyo were worried about Fukushima radiation. They would have far lower cancer risk by moving out of Tokyo (a heavily fossil fuel polluted city) into Fukushima (a fairly rural area with much cleaner air).
The biggest flaw with LNT today is that it uses statistics only, not biology. And it uses a misrepresentative statistics body at that. It uses statistics of people that received high and low total dose but all of them received very high dose rates. These are primarily the bomb survivors from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and patients that have received medical imaging and radiation treatment. All of these sources are sudden flashes of radiation that overwhelm the bodies defence systems, so it is not surprising that there is a linear relationship; once you already exceed the body capacity to repair itself the damage just keeps piling up with higher doses beyond that point.
Nuclear accidents contamination give very different dose rates, spread over years in stead of seconds. Chernobyl shows no evidence of Cs-137 cancer deaths, for example. We’ve learned from Chernobyl that short lived iodine such as I-131 is dangerous because it bioaccumulates in a small organ (concentrating the dose, overwhelming a small organ). Cesium doesn’t bioaccumulate.
Imagine if you take one aspirin a week for two years. This isn’t bad for you and probably good for you (beneficial acid stuff). Now imagine taking all those aspirins, 104 of them, in one hour. Not good for you, not good at all.
The dose is the same, the result couldn’t be more different.
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It’s a bit rich for some (but not all) NT residents to complain about the Muckaty Station low level radioactive waste dump
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-14/traditional-owners-to-fight-nuke-waste-dump/3888116
when tens of thousand of tonnes of Olympic Dam yellowcake and copper-uranium concentrate travel the full length of the Territory on their way to Port Darwin
http://aliceonline.com.au/2011/11/17/jam-the-dam-plan/
Admittedly yellowcake only emits about 20 Bq/kg according to this
http://www.wise-uranium.org/rup.html#UCONC
but there’s a lot of it. Dare I suggest that objections to Muckaty are linked to who gets a cut.
Here’s my rebuff to the NT; without Icthys gas you would be in dire trouble. However the Icthys gas wells off WA are much closer to Timor who miss out, separated by both an underwater and economic chasm.
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I have some questions about soil contamination. Any help would be appreciated.
UNSCEAR Annex D on Chernobyl …
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/publications/2008_2.html
has a map of soil contamination from 1989 data (Annex D, p.5) … a
large area with 37-185kBq/m2 ie., 370-1850 MBq/km2 with
the hottest region about 37,000 MBq/km2.
Yasunari’s PNAS study …
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/49/19530.abstract
Found levels between 10,000 MBq/km2 and 100,000MBq/km2
He finishes his article with figures in Bq/kg of soil that are generally under 1000 Bq/kg. I haven’t yet worked through his calculation of
these latter figures, but I’m surprised the per km2 figures are as high or higher than the Chernobyl figures. Should I be surprised or is something not right?
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What’s happening at Hyperion Power Generation?
They just changed their name to Gen4 Energy. New CEO (Robert Prince). Old CEO John Deal has decamped with the other four founders to start a new company IX Power, which looks like a power & clean water consultancy. Meanwhile Hyperion has relocated from Los Alamos to Denver.
Deal cites disagreements with the investors and says
Thats a few curveballs on from abandoning their original interesting uranium hydride fueled design for the current uranium nitride model. I hope it doesn’t slow down their path to market but it looks like they’re a few hands short and it must be hell in the boardroom.
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Greens Senator Christine Milne has welcomed China capping its coal use at 4.1 bn tonnes from 2015
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/coal-sector-to-be-hit-by-china-cap-milne-20120314-1v1ld.html
Slight problem China’s recent coal consumption was
3.88 short tons X .91 = 3.5 Gt so they’re giving themselves a 16% increase.
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-03-09/china-coal-update
That link suggests China accounts for 26% of global manmade CO2 and rising.
Long tons, short tons next there will be medium tons. It’s a bit like our coal industry promising Scout’s honour to implement CCS but always a year or two away. I think a better insight into China’s intentions is their threat to cancel Airbus orders if the EU airline tax goes ahead
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/green/120308/eads-accuses-china-blocking-airbus-sales-over-eu-carbon-tax
Note Clive Palmer’s new coal mine will be called ‘China First’ and it will pay no carbon tax unlike the rest of us. In my opinion an alliance of carbon restraining countries should impose an arbitrary carbon tariff of say 20% on goods made in China. When China gets serious about coal cutbacks, to say 1 Gtpa, then the tariff gets lifted.
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Geoff – one important factor seems to be that Chernobyl’s graphite fire dispersed radiation over a larger area than in Fukushima. There was no continuous hot fire at Fukushima that boiled and threw radionuclides such as cesium-134 and 137 high into the atmosphere, only an initial hydrogen explosion that seemed to have had a lower driving force to push the radionuclides (no continuous heating) into the air. Here’s a map that shows the much large affected area of Chernobyl:
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