21st century nuclear… for beginners

Posted on 28 August 2012 by Barry Brook

SACOME has put published a glossy portfolio edition of the 6-part series (9 pages in total) was done by me and Ben Heard for the SA Mines & Energy Journal – you may find this useful for family and friends! (some of these individual articles were already published on BNC and DecarboniseSA). Thanks to Megan Andrews and Dayne Eckermann for putting this together.

The aims were to be: (i) easy to understand, (ii) concise but accurate, (iii) attractively presented, and (iv) to tackle the most common objections raised by anti-nuclear folks.

Download the PDF here (5.5 MB) and distribute far and wide.

The content covers generation IV technology, safety, radioactive waste, sustainability and carbon emissions of uranium supplies, small modular reactors, and economic competitiveness compared to other low-carbon energy options. The overarching context is nuclear as a solution to climate change. That’s what Ben and I really care about, after all.

(Note that we offered this series gratis as a community service — we are educators, after all, and to us, dissemination of evidence-based knowledge is its own reward).

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Nuclear | 1 Comment »

Two books on sustainable nuclear energy

Posted on 22 August 2012 by Barry Brook

This is a short post to alert BNC readers to a couple of important things.

First, Tom Blees has now generously released the full text of his book “Prescription for the Planet” — it is available for free download here (or click image).

So, if you own an iPad or other tablet, or just have a PDF reader on your notebook computer, then you can comfortably read and search the entire contents. Spread the word — more people NEED to read this. (I’ve previously reviewed the book in 4 parts on BNC).

Second, Robert Hargraves was kind enough to post me a pre-publication hard copy of his new book “THORIUM: energy cheaper than coal“. It will be released for sale on 1 September 2012. Its fundamental axiom — that we need (and can have, via advanced nuclear technologies) energy that is cheaper than coal, even without carbon taxes, subsidies etc., is enormously appealing as a ‘saleable message’, and I think right on the money if we are going to allow the world to phase out fossil fuels in time to avoid major environmental problems.

Anyway, I’m currently part-way into reading it in detail (amongst a hundred other things on the go, alas!). From what I’ve absorbed so far, it is excellent — comprehensive but easy to digest, logically structured, attractively presented, and approachable for a non-technical audience (without excessive ‘dumbing down’).

You can find many more details on the book’s website. Here are a list of the book’s chapters, to give you a taste of the content:

(more…)

Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear | 3 Comments »

Talking turkey on nuclear $$ costs

Posted on 16 August 2012 by Barry Brook

This the final article in the SA Mines & Energy Journal series on nuclear energy (issue 24, pg 34), about the economic bottom line for nuclear. Ben Heard, my co-author, has also blogged about this on DecarboniseSA. And if you want a second opinion, read what Columbia University’s Jeff Sachs has to say (one of the smartest economists out there — I’d strongly recommend his 2011 title “The Price of Civilization“).

——————

It does not take long in any discussion of nuclear power before people want to talk turkey. How much does nuclear power cost?

It’s odd that when it comes to nuclear power alone, some environmentalists morph into incredibly hard-nosed economic rationalists. If the solution can’t pay its own way from the get go, bad luck.

That suggests a misunderstanding of not so much nuclear economics, but of energy economics more generally. It also hints at an ideological position if the same criteria are not applied elsewhere.

In considering nuclear at all, we are looking to replace baseload fossil fuels at 100s or over 1,000 MW at a time. Take your pick of technology, including modern fossil fuels: that is never going to be a cheap task. There is no way around the “sticker shock” of a modern power facility.

If we want new, large-scale energy generation in Australia, there is a large price tag, comfortably in the billions of dollars range. If, as we would argue, response to climate change demands that any new baseload is zero-carbon generation, then the options are (currently) restricted to the more expensive end of the range for capital costs (fuel is cheap or free for these technologies).

So, what, in that context, can low-carbon options offer in terms of up-front cost? Let’s take some real-world examples (for details of the following calculations, see TCASE 15: Comparison of four ‘clean energy’ projects).

If we take the oft-quoted Olkiluoto nuclear new build in Finland (oft-quoted because it is suffering major cost and time over-runs), we find that the new EPR design, with 1600 MWe of generation capacity, looks to be coming in at a cost of EU6.4 billion. That normalises to $6.0 bn per GWe when capacity factors are accounted for.

Dome 3 being lowered onto the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant in Finland. Cost is $6 billion per GWe, but with very high capacity factor.

A large (600 MWe peak) planned wind farm in South Australia, with a proposed 120 MWe biomass generation as back-up, will cost $1.2 billion, plus and extra $0.2 billion for the connecting infrastructure. That’s about $6.9 billion per GWe.

When we turn and face the sun,costs jump. Based on the proposed Moree Solar Farm, this large solar PV facility with no storage or back-up (i.e. not a true baseload solution) comes in at $19.6 billion per GWe. A concentrating solar thermal plant (based on the Spanish Gemasolar plant) with molten salt storage back-up can be had at a cost of $25.1 billion per GWe.

The lesson is clear.

(more…)

Filed under: Nuclear, Policy | 2 Comments »

Fit-for-service low-carbon electricity technologies are the key

Posted on 8 August 2012 by Barry Brook

This article (by Barry Brook) was originally published on The Conversation website until the title: “Low-carbon electricity must be fit-for-service (and nuclear power is)“. You can wade through the 224 comments over there (if you dare…) See also the comment here by Keith Orchison.

———————

To paraphrase George Orwell, “All electricity is created equal, but some of its generating technologies are more equal than others”. This is a key point – emphasised but typically overlooked – in the new report Australian Energy Technology Assessment (AETA) on current and future costs of electricity options for Australia, released yesterday by the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics.

No such thing as a free lunch: nuclear power can do what many renewable energy systems have not yet done on a large scale – deliver. Flickr/Gretchen Mahan

Assessing the ‘levelised’ costs of existing energy technologies is already surprisingly difficult, given the array of assumptions that need to be made, on capital and owner’s costs, financing terms and associated risk, facility lifespans, fuel supply, government policy interventions, and so on. It gets even more challenging when projecting future cost changes, because learning curves and settled-down costs, uptake rates, future fuel and material supply bottlenecks, training, price incentives, social license, and other ‘known unknowns’ need to be factored into the economic modelling.

So the AETA authors had a difficult task on their hand. Perhaps the most contentious, yet important task, is defining the relative market value and role for technologies within a national electricity system. From the perspective of replacing fossil-fuel combustion with alternatives, a crucial issue is how effective it is, at a large scale, in providing a fit-for-service replacement for existing coal plants.

In a recent paper I co-authored with two colleagues in the journal Energy, we assessed technologies against a range of criteria intended to determine their suitability as a baseload alternative. These were:

Proven: Has the technology been used at commercial scale?

Scalable: Can the technology be built in sufficient quantity to replace significant proportions of existing fossil-fuel generators?

Dispatchable: Can the output be allocated by the system operator to meet the anticipated load?

Fuel supply: Is the energy source reliable and plentiful, even when, as with some kinds of renewable energy, it varies with time?

Load access: Can the generator be installed close to a load centre?

Storage: Does the technology require electricity storage in order to deliver a high capacity factor?

Emission intensity: Is the emission intensity high (>300 kg CO2e/MWh), moderate or low (<100)?

Capacity factor: Is the capacity factor high (>70%), moderate or low (<40%)?

For a technology to be considered fit-for-service as a baseload generator (i.e., a direct replacement for coal or combined-cycle gas power plants) it needs to be scalable, dispatchable without large storage and have a reliable fuel supply, low or moderate emissions intensity and a high capacity factor. The only current technologies that score well enough to meet these criteria are nuclear power and solar thermal with thermal storage and/or hybrid gas. Coal and gas with carbon capture and engineered geothermal could also qualify but are only at the pilot plant stage of development.

(more…)

Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 3 Comments »

No easy substitutes for fossil fuels

Posted on 2 August 2012 by Barry Brook

The following guest post is republished (with permission from the author) from Opinion Online. Tom Biegler, who wrote this piece, worked with Martin Nicholson and me on our 2010 Energy paper, How carbon pricing changes the relative competitiveness of low-carbon baseload generating technologies. Tom noted to me that he:

carefully avoided mentioning nuclear, which can do the job, only because it would deflect attention from my arguments

For the audience of BNC however, I’m sure this conclusion about nuclear as a viable and proven fossil-fuel replacement comes as no surprise!

—————————

How clear is the roadmap to a ‘clean energy future’?

Guest Post by Dr. Tom Biegler. Tom is a physical chemist and former CSIRO divisional head, spent much of his career managing technological research and development related to the resources industry. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute.

To go with Clean Energy Week comes a new report from The Climate Institute telling us that Australians overwhelmingly support renewable energy but don’t understand how carbon pricing will work. Not surprisingly, they are also sceptical about the political motivations behind its introduction. I think their scepticism is misdirected. Their target should be the carbon tax itself.

Carbon pricing (of which the tax is a temporary start) is the standard economic remedy for problems like carbon dioxide emissions. As Tim Colebatch, an economist, wrote in The Age recently: “Give us a price incentive, and we find ways to reduce emissions with little damage to profits or our standards of living”.

The tax should work in two ways. It should encourage substitution of high-emission fossil fuels by lower-emission alternatives (“our clean energy future”, as the government puts it); and discourage energy usage in general (“behaviour change”) by raising energy costs. Clean energy will cost more. After all, if low-emission technologies were not more expensive there would be no need for a tax.

Fine in principle, but will it work?

I need to assert here that I am not a climate sceptic. And I see the timing of Australia’s tax and its explicit contribution to global climate change as important but separate issues.

The carbon price policy is based on two premises: the right technologies will be there when needed; and significantly less energy will be used as its price rises.

Underlying the whole matter is energy’s key economic role. Energy is the lever that multiplies the output of human personal effort to give us our unprecedented productivity and prosperity. Energy builds economies. Whatever its shortcomings, the bonanza of fossil fuels we inherited has given us our present living standards.

Both of the above premises have major problems. Firstly, in my opinion (after all, this is a journal of opinion) the expectations regarding renewable energies have been raised to quite unreasonable levels. The proposition as accepted by the public is that feeble, intermittent solar, wind, ocean energy, etc, can effectively replace intensely combustible, high energy fossil fuels as drivers of prosperity. The enormous scale and associated cost of collecting and processing this weak energy is what makes the proposition extraordinary. Extraordinary propositions need extraordinary evidence. That’s the sceptics’ slogan, and that’s why I am sceptical about renewables.

Coal. It’s cheap, abundant, polluting… and tough to replace.

The evidence is in fact very ordinary.

(more…)

Filed under: Emissions, Policy, Renewables | 1 Comment »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 3,798 other followers