1. The modern theory of AGW (increasing CO2 absorbs more IR and leads to warmer temperatures) was laid out way back in 1896 in a seminal paper by future Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius. He wasn’t trying to promote socialism or be a flunky for Al Gore, indeed SA thought the warming would be beneficial – so he didn’t promote the theory to scare people.

2. Even in a case of actual cheating and cover-up, or even fabrication don’t disprove an idea itself. Look at prosecutors “framing guilty men” by “improving” evidence to ensure conviction, look at the Piltdown hoax which sure doesn’t mean evolution is false and other evidence couldn’t be rounded up. (BTW what CRU did wasn’t even that bad anyway, this just shows its irrelevancy to the material point. In my bitter experience conservatives are very into projecting from personal factors into imagined objective ones.)

3. CO2 is a stimulus similar to lowering interest rates are for an economy: the effect is not direct and linear, there are variations and other influences. Tell someone who says, “how come it got cooler during the last ten years” (it may not have, but play along here): How come it got cooler during April, before summer came along? Does that make you doubt the idea that changing axis angle causes seasons?!

4. Most of the things we would do to lower CO2 are good for the economy and national interest anyway: save money on gas and other non-renewables, reduce dependency on other nations (including Muslim ones!), it will run out anyway in decades to centuries, etc.

5. An effect doesn’t have to be “certain” or uniformly and highly damaging to be worth trying to avoid – what about terrorist threats, the irony of Cheney et al’s “One percent doctrine” etc.

6. The skeptics and doubters are way more dishonest and controlled by money interests. (You need to dig for the evidence there.)

Thanks for the european 3Gen data which is very interesting. I believe the Moody’s estimate was professionally prepared. In my experience, bond analysts are usually much more cautious than equity analysts.

The Areva price may have been because they think the Canadians are sure to go with GE or PWR or CANDU or simply because Ontario Hydro (Generation One or whatever it is these days) refuses to take any price risk (Darlington was in its original, the biggest cost overrun in nuclear history).

On CCS, a breach means a dispersible gas only toxic in relatively high concentrations (about 7% I believe). So it shouldn’t be the end of the world—it’s not Chernobyl. Although I agree the politics of location could make it so.

On actual volumes, they are large I believe, but not insuperable. If the world pumps out 23bn tonnes CO2 pa, and coal is 9bn tonnes pa of that (c. 35%) then that’s not an insuperable number to store. Nor is the energy cost (say 40% all told).

On fission generally it is cost, and scalability. Cost will come down (not huge gains due to experience curves, but gains). Scalability: I believe the world peaked at c. 7 reactors pa in the US, and therefore 20-30 worldwide. Even to get back to that level is a reach.

So I can see another 500 3G reactors, which post the scrappage of the existing fleet is a 50% increase. Twice that would be a stretch, but must be at least theoretically doable. But that’s something like 30 reactors a year every year to 2050. Even if the Chinese are 10-15 of those, that’s a heck of a lot of reactors. And it wouldn’t move the world proportion of electricity from nuclear hugely off 8% now (16% in US, now).

If you look at wind, we are already putting in (from memory) 12GW pa. That’s the equivalent of 2-4 3Gen stations, and we have only just begun to go offshore.

On solar, it is a very different technology than it was 40 years ago. Wind of course has moved much much further (there was no viable wind power in 1980) and is now competitive.

Re ; Moodys estimate. I read that. And ehh.. Either they are overdoing the cocaine, or radiation killed the writers dog when he was seven. Honestly, that is the only way I can get that piece of writing to make sense, it was depressingly detached from all reality or examples of actual build.

Re: CCS: I dont actually expect major catastrophies from this (mostly because noone sensible is going to pump CO2 into the underground below habitation centers) , but containment breeches of the storage geology are certainly possible, and since the main reason people object to nuclear power in the first place is that there is a fear of highly unlikely, but somewhat nasty accidents, and longlived waste, using a diffrent
technology that has exactly the same issues, only worse, in its place is daft.. And I felt a need to point this out.
My main objection to CCS is that I flat out do not belive that it will ever amount to anything but cosmetic whitewashing of coal power – The volumes are quite simply insane if we captured all the carbon we emitted from coal power, CO2 transport would dwarf all other transport that we do. Including food, water, ect. This is not likely to actually happen, and no, this will not ever be a cheap solution to climate change. – The energetic overhead alone of compressing the CO2 for storage will raise the cost of coal based electricity by 20%, even before considering any hardware costs whatsoever. And those will not be trivial.

I am sure I have seen a chart showing solar cells halving every 5 years. Must look again.

it’s a blip, arising from overcapacity in the semiconductor industry. But it’s real. However I must go back and source a number.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20702/
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2236953/solar-panel-prices-fall-per

suggests a 50% fall in solar panel costs (different from cells) 2006-10 but that’s a forecast, I realize. That was the number I was thinking of.

http://www.solarbuzz.com/Moduleprices.htm says about -15%

Agree CSP a very promising technology as costs are engineered down. In some ways more scalable than photo-voltaic.

Thomas Jorgenson

The crux of our disagreement is about nuclear power costs in China. I’d have to look into your data.

The US cost is due to the financial risk. The contractors will not provide price guarantees (remember Westinghouse and GE originally did so in the 60s) without a price that protects them. The utilities will not sign (see the interview with the CEO of Exelon in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) unless they get those price guarantees. The US government is being told $18.5bn of loan guarantees will not get the first 4 built. So we are seeing some pretty big subsidies to get any built. Ontario Hydro got quotes 3 times what they were looking for for the next Darlington Station. That will NOT be due to local litigation: that’s not how Ontario works. Once the environmental assessment is done, the plant gets built. You can’t tie it up endlessly in court as in some US cases.

The ‘nuclear renaissance’ is better known as the ‘nuclear aftershock’ in that it’s not going to be huge in any country: 30-40 in the US, 8-10 in the UK etc. You really shouldn’t buy into huge numbers the Indians throw around (they always have)—the country is not now, and will not be in the next 25 years, capable of that level of construction of nuclear plants. 100, yes. 400 not bloody likely. I doubt even in the next 50 years.

On the Finns, I believe they are coming in at c. 4000 euros/ MW of capacity?

On solar, China is a big country. And yes, rooftops. They already are the world’s largest user of solar energy (for water heating) so the rooftop problem is hardly insuperable. You can’t just assume it away as ‘too expensive’.

China is 9.6m km2. Even if we assume only 20% is suitable for solar power solutions you still get to an incredible amount of solar energy (you do so if you just use the rooftops).

On wind in China, it’s called Xinjiang, and it is huge and has a population of 20 million people. All of that NW corner of China is highly suitable for wind power. 1.5m km2 in Xinjiang alone so could easily be up to 500-750k wind turbines.

As I say, I don’t doubt the Chinese can (and probably will) build 100 nuclear reactors. Maybe 200. You don’t, then, I don’t think, get to electricity from nuclear as more than say 20% of total production.

On CCS you overestimate the geological risks. Huge clouds of methane, aka natural gas, do not explode and destroy cities. They are stored geologically. There is a political issue (people confuse CO with CO2) but the safety issue is not huge: CO2 is already schlepped around the country in pipelines.

As to the economics of CCS they are very difficult to know in advance. But there’s no technology within CCS that doesn’t already exist, the problem is scaling (and higher operating costs). Learning curve effects will be significant.

McKinsey has put CCS in a similar cost bracket to nuclear (and their nuclear numbers are low—haven’t reflected the Moody’s and other recent forecasts) and both below offshore wind.

Also, lets’s see a mention of solar thermal. Like wind power, this is a straightforward medium-scale technology where everything works OK and we can expect economies of scale and learning by doing to drive a steady cost reduction similar to wind. Since most of the world’s poor countries are also hot, and many of them dry as well, it’s going to be useful where it’s most needed. The latest designs in Spain build in heat storage so the generation can work 24h. Yeh, yeah, intermittency. Even Almeria gets a few dozen cloudy days a year.We’re going to have to live with and manage this.

Which is a problem with nuclear as a solution to climate change- the current supply chain needs to get a lot bigger and a lot more competetive.

In any case, the main thing is to get a high price on carbon. At that point, market processes will do most (not all) of the work of picking the cost-effective technologies, including conservation, and discarding the rest. A bit of policy intervention to support infants like solar PV might be justified, but nuclear has had its fair share of this kind of support and much more.

Second:
You are aware what the population density of china is ? No matter how cheap solar gets, it will play absolutely no significant role in the future energy mix of either it, India, Japan or Europe, it simply would occupy to much land area which is already in use. Solar is a technology that will only ever pay off for countries with large amounts of land that can be paved over with mirrors or solar cells. (yes, rooftop. At which point installation and maintainance costs make it more costly than nukes even if the cells themselves are literally free.) Wind – sure. sticking a windmill in a ricepaddy or a cornfield does not stop you from continuing to farm there, so the effective “footprint” of wind is very low, but again, there are only so many ricepaddies and cornfields, so wind will likely cover some 10-15 percent of demand.
CCS is a bondoggle in the worst way. Even with the cost overruns, the capital cost of okiluto 3 is much lower than any estimate I have seen of a comparably sized coal station with full CCS, and such a plant would consume a third more coal than current power stations for the same output, and it adds failuremodes to your powerstation that makes chernobyl look pedestrian.
Step one: Pump carbon dioxide into the underground below your centrally located combined heat and powerstation.
Step two: Wait 10 years.
Step 3: Catastropic breech and venting from underground structure.
Step 4: your entire city dies instantly by choking. Kill count: million +

And that sequence of events is more likely, by orders of magnitude, than major disaster at an EPR.

‘Cheap fast breeders by 2060’. Nobody has made breeder reactors work in a safe and economic fashion. Maybe they can by then, but to also build 600 GW+? India does not now, and will not in the next 20 years, have the kind of infrastructure to make that work. India changes, but never as fast as one would like. I suspect they’ll build 20-50 reactors in the next 30 years or so.

Given that these thorium breeder reactors don’t even exist yet, the possibility that India will scale that far is remote. India just doesn’t work like that: they can’t get existing consumers to pay for electric power.

Remember, price of solar cells is currently halving every 5 years. Assuming that rate falls (the price of wind power is dropping by 15% with each doubling of world capacity. A normal learning curve for a moderately mature technology) you’re still in a position where the levelized cost of solar power is well below that of nuclear power (a very mature technology) by 2040 if not earlier.

Breeders are one of those ‘holy grail’ technologies that we have been kicking around for 50 years, that just doesn’t work. Not well enough, and safely enough, to be useful.

I’m interested in your Chinese ‘cost’ estimates, in a country where cost is not a simple question. It’s not a free market economy, and in the regulated sector (ie electric power) there’s no ‘market’ that gives us a realistic cost. I doubt the Chinese even know what the true cost of electric power generation is.

$4,000-6,000/ kw is where new western reactors are coming in. It’s reasonable to assume that on an opportunity cost basis, the Chinese will face similar costs:

There will be significant learning curve effects on the 3rd Generation reactors, but remember they are still fundamentally Pressurized Water Reactorss, and PWR is a (very) mature technology: Shippingport PA was 1958 from memory, and the naval programme even older.

(we will not see a true 4th Gen PWR this side of 2035 I suspect, and could be even later—none of the proposed designs are that convincing from a safety/security/ proliferation point of view).

What the Chinese nuclear programme smells of is the same factors that propelled the UK nuclear programme and the Soviet one. Massive cross-subsidisation (the French, the same) by the state, ignoring future costs (waste disposal, decontamination). That does put something of an economic cap on the size of the nuclear power sector (even the Chinese state cannot keep this up—forever).

I’ll stick with my core estimate. One can see 100 3G reactors aka c. 140GW capacity in China by 2030. This is big, no doubt about it and implies a very high completion rate. It’s almost absurdly ambitious. It won’t be cheap (although if they standardize designs, they will get some of the economies of scale the French reaped). It’s unlikely to be more than 20% of Chinese electric power production in 2030.

By which time, technologies like solar and wind will be fully mature (actually, solar won’t- we’ll be onto technologies you and I cannot imagine). Which doesn’t mean they are the entire answer, but they’ll be huge (all those rooftops will become thin film solar collectors) and we’ll have more handles on the power storage problem. There’s ocean power, geothermal etc. as well- quantities unknown (but China well placed to do those, just as it has the second best onshore wind resource in the world, and the scale and capability of industrial capacity to exploit that- -Xinjiang and Guansu etc. are very big places).

The great virtue of wind (and concentrated solar etc.) is that they scale, and scale easily, because the unit of production is quite small (1-5 MW). More wind power on a site simply equals more wind turbines. You can build the damn things in a factory and ship them to the site, and heh presto, gentlemen we have a power plant. (power lines are another matter, but the Chinese have fewer scruples than most countries).

On coal, yes, but. They do have a huge logistical problem, true, but that’s more crackable than the logistical problems of building that many nuclear reactors.

The ringer is Carbon Capture and Storage, whether it can be done economically, and fast enough, and whether ‘post combustion’ processes which can be retrofitted to existing power stations, can be made to work.

Indias nuclear plans are anything but modest, as they are aiming for 500+ gigawatts of cheap fast breeders by 2060, and theyve been revising that upwards after they gained access to international suppliers..

Without deeply compromising safety, it is unlikely the Indians and the Chinese can get radically below western cost levels for nuclear reactors.

So $6000/kw. Say the Chinese do 40% better then $3600.

There is not easily the scale in the world for the Chinese to build, say, 104 operating reactors, which would only put their capacity at current US capacity (X 1.5 say, to allow for the larger 3rd Gen reactor size).

At that rate this would be c. 15%-20% of Chinese electricity consumption in 2030, say, about the same level as the US now. Beginning say 6 years from now, that’s still finishing a new reactor about every 1.9 months (figure 84 reactors 2018-2030 ie 7 pa having built 20 before then)—as much as the US managed at the absolute peak of commissioning in the 1970s,

Over to India. The problems are far, far greater. The economy lacks the necessary infrastructure. Much of the key capital equipment would have to be imported which would seriously hamper the construction due to macro issues eg trade balance, nationalism etc.

If you visit India you will quickly realize how difficult it is to build quality infrastructure in anything. that’s why India’s success has been in ‘asset lite’ businesses like software. Their nuclear programme is a prestige thing tied into their military efforts.

So 104 Indian reactors is probably unattainable by 2030 (40 might be doable, but it’s more of a stretch than 104 Chinese reactors). 20-30 is probably what is practical. Again, not more than 20% electric power consumption.

Nuclear fission is tomorrow’s answer, and always will be. The ‘nuclear revival’ will be about replacing the existing 480 power reactors in the world, with some sectoral shift between the US/UK/Europe and Asia.

There will not, in 2030, be more kilowatts generated by nuclear means than there are now (given the rundown in existing fleets).

Note the projected costs for the new Darlinton Reactor in Ontario, the ones in Florida, the 4 being bid to the US DOE, the Finnish 3G reactor and Flamanville in France, are all 3 times what was projected in 200o at the beginning of the ‘nuclear revival’.