Save the nukes

@
”The worse case is Germany, where the phaseout of nuclear power has left lots of lignite-fuelled power stations still in operation”.

Or let’s say:
You need the experience of Germans – who – after Tschernobyl – for years –
couldn’t even eat their contaminated forest-mushrooms anymore?

On ”lignite-fuelled power stations” you can put at least any amount of filters – (as the Germans do) to make sure that your environment doesn’t get contaminated.
With nuclear power plants exploding that’s pretty difficult?

So much for understanding that nuclear power is a lot MORE dangerous than coal.

– and this from wikipedia:

”Germany has been called “the world’s first major renewable energy economy”.[1][2] Renewable energy in Germany is mainly based on wind, solar and biomass. Germany had the world’s largest photovoltaic installed capacity until 2014, and as of 2016, it is third with 40 GW. It is also the world’s third country by installed wind power capacity, at 50 GW, and second for offshore wind, with over 4 GW.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, along with a vast majority of her compatriots, believes, “As the first big industrialized nation, we can achieve such a transformation toward efficient and renewable energies, with all the opportunities that brings for exports, developing new technologies and jobs”.[3] The share of renewable electricity rose from just 3.4% of gross electricity consumption in 1990 to exceed 10% by 2005, 20% by 2011 and 30% by 2015, reaching 36.2% of consumption by year end 2017.[4]

AND one of the major reason for such ”progress” was/IS that ”nuclear” for most Germans is –
”NO OPTION” –
(at all!)
– and there is this belief that if Australians and Americans would just belief the same thing – OR would have had to eat the same consequences from nuclear explosions – as Germans and/or Japanese – we would be able to fight climate change much more effective?

I have three words for the anti-nuclear types: Japan, China, India.

All three are burning humongous amounts coal, and bringing large numbers of new coal-fired plants online at rapid rates.

If we (US, EU, and Japan) had committed to providing India and China with nuclear plants instead of coal ones twenty years ago (and if Japan’s NIMBY disease had been avoided), there’d be a chance of averting disaster.

But that didn’t happen, so basically, we’re scrod. Greenland’s ice (average thickness: 2 km) will all have slid or melted into the oceans by 2050, and NYC, Florida, half of Tokyo, Bangladesh will be under water. And that’s even without the Siberian tundra melting and releasing all its stored carbon into the atmosphere. Or the polar ice caps.

The idea that nuclear is “more expensive” than coal is simply insane: the cost of not doing nuclear is astronomical. And we’re already too late.

… no profit-oriented corporation is ever likely to start a new plant. The recent abandonment of two proposed plants in the UK, despite the offer of massive subsidies, illustrates the point.

I don’t think it does illustrate that point, in the present environment. That is, it makes little or no sense to start a new plant if you have grounds for believing that outside pressures would only trip it up – the “T” in a “SWOT analysis” (internal strengths and weaknesses, with external opportunities and threats). It could well be that – other things being equal, which they aren’t – certain nuclear power projects would indeed be cost-effective in their own terms. Analysis means, breaking the parts down to see them better in isolation; in that sense, it’s not analysis to build in the outside costs as though they were an internal and so inherent and essential feature of the nuclear projects themselves, rather than handling them as part of the outside features. That doesn’t mean leaving them out, it means categorising them properly. If nothing else, it helps avoid double counting them.

On 01.25.19 at 8:59 a.m., MFB wrote:-

… nuclear power plants … rely on enrichment plants which require immense amounts of power to generate fuel …

No, they do not, not in general.

What happened was, the U.S.A. focussed on designs like that because they were a better fit with other needs like making nuclear weapons. These were aggressively marketed and also benefited from the body of R&D they built up. That has led to many current designs being like that.

But that does not mean that nuclear power plants actually need that. For instance, the first round of CANDU reactors that Canada developed used non-enriched fuel, precisely because that bias favouring enrichment wasn’t then in place there. In fact, Canada found it almost impossible to get enriched fuel in those days, what with U.S. restrictions etc., but it was far more practical for Canada to use (stranded?) hydro-electricity to get the heavy water moderator those CANDU reactors needed. And the study work on yet other types of nuclear power plant, e.g. thorium breeder reactors, wouldn’t lead to needing enrichment plants either.

AND about:

”Also nuclear power causes far fewer deaths than coal, however you measure it”

– as a dedicated Lover of European mushrooms – I mentioned ”contaminated mushrooms” for decades – and as humans are able to connect all kind of ”dots” – from ”contaminated mushrooms to whole contaminated areas and all kind of ”veggies” – and for the meat lovers to all kind of contaminated meat – and all kind of health consequences the consumption of such ”stuff” can have – okay possible NOT death – or death – right away?

BUT does @6 have some numbers about ”death” after eating too much nuclear mushrooms?

My understanding is that events like Chernobyl and Fukushima have made nuclear plants more expensive to build, because they have to have more elaborate, and more effective, safety features.

If I’m remembering correctly, a fairly recent proposal to build, with public money, a new nuclear plant in Ontario, which has closed its coal-burning plants, died over a dispute about which level of government, federal or provincial, would be on the hook for the inevitable cost overruns. Isn’t that a significant obstacle, that any initial costing of a new nuclear plant will almost certainly turn out to have been way too low?

I’m with JQ about the defensibility of nuclear but also about the unlikeliness of any new construction.

Yes, nuclear is better than coal, but they’re both worse than solar and wind. Wind and solar are dropping rapidly in price and improving in performance. Taller wind generators are reducing wind’s variability and energy storage technologies are improving and becoming economical. On the decadal time scale of building and paying off a new nuclear power plant there’s no way it beats wind and solar. That of course doesn’t apply to existing nuclear power plants where the price to build them (including CO2 emissions of their concrete) have already been paid.

In a sense, there’s no need to make the case, as no profit-oriented corporation is ever likely to start a new plant. The recent abandonment of two proposed plants in the UK, despite the offer of massive subsidies, illustrates the point.

I suspect that if you go by that methodology, almost any large construction project isn’t “serious”– the West seems to have lost the ability to do things at scale. My guess would be this is a matter of corruption in the construction industry, which is regularly rewarded for lies and what amounts to sabotage, but if you’re an anti-union type, or an anti-activist type, you can probably work up a theory that features those aspects more prominently.

(Myself, I’ll plead guilty to pointing the finger at anti-nuclear activists– they exaggerate, get things wrong in ways that have arguably led to the deaths of many people, but they continue to get away with wrapping themselves in the pious flag of environmentalism.)

“The only purpose of talk about new nuclear power is to attack the only realistic options, wind and solar PV.” has it absolutely backwards. The only reason to talk about wind and solar is justify not taking the nuclear road.

On one hand, we *know*, with vast experience, that nuclear is safe, is carbon-free, and can be built up affordably (no grid decarbonification scheme will be cheap, sorry). We could start tomorrow, and (for the UK or USA) be done within a decade.

On the other hand, we also *know*, with vast experience (see for example Germany’s titanic efforts with little payoff), that absent a massive, and unforeseen, unicorn improvement in energy storage, that solar and wind aren’t going to cut it at the levels required.

So, choices. Bet our civilization and the lives of our children on a scientific breakthrough that we have no reason to expect will come, or take the road we know will work? Easy choice. Do people irrational fear nuclear power? Yes, yes they do. Is that a massive problem for a massive nuclear build? Yes, yes it is. Is climate change an existential crisis? Yes, yes it is. Is the *currently false* belief that solar and wind will save us all part of the reluctance to choose nuclear? Why yes, yes it is. I’ve had many conversations where I’ve convinced people that nuclear is safe, and a viable route for solving climate change. But even people who realize that climate change is an existential crises, and have been convinced that nuclear is (from an engineering/economics POV) a good solution, still shy away because they see the figment of “renewables” on the horizon.

Bluntly, unless you have run through the full logistics and modeling for solar/wind, and can say, with absolute confidence, that it *will work, at the level needed (>90%) and work in time*, it is your absolute responsibility to argue against solar/wind because, even if they can help at the margins, they are being grasped as excuses to not take the obvious road. Look, if you really, really believe that renewables can cut it, argue against them and for nuclear *anyways*. If a miracle occurs, and storage technology makes renewables a better solution than nuclear, it is years down the line, and nuclear power plants don’t last forever. The research into power storage will continue anyways (for vehicles if nothing else). The cost of taking the sure bet is small. The cost of taking the risky bet and being wrong…

Ugh, I’m making a Pascal’s Wager argument. I feel dirty.

They aren’t profitable for the same reason private subways in the US aren’t profitable: it’s a huge up front investment with a million regulatory choke points to strangle them when they are half done so the risk is too high. We are closing nuclear plants for the same reason we strangle them when we build them—people are irrationally afraid of the word “nuclear”. That’s why we are closing them in priority over the real danger of coal plants—it is an irrational fear driving it. Nasty woman upthread illustrates this, she doesn’t COMPARE to the environmental damage of coal, she fixates on the nuclear scares. You have to attack the irrational prioritization of fears first, but if we could do that nuclear would have been much more prevalent than it is.

– and furthermore @20

Many moons ago I stepped into a house in Freiburg Germany which energy-wise was completely ”self sufficient” – and it might be hard to believe -(in America?) – that in Germany there are already whole towns – which energy-wise are already completely self sufficient – and all of it with ”clean energy” –

So just follow the lead – and we soon won’t have to talk about ”nuclear or coal” at all – anymore…

On the other hand, nuclear power plants, because they rely on enrichment plants which require immense amounts of power to generate fuel, are not as green as they look.

First generation enrichment facilities based on gaseous diffusion were extremely energy-hungry. But much more efficient centrifuge enrichment has replaced gaseous diffusion facilities. The last US diffusion plant shut down in 2013.

and this:
”Jerry Brown, despite being Mr. Green, decided to throw away a huge chunk of California’s clean energy generating capacity”.

One of the most wonderful character traits of every ”Mr. Green” I know in California – IS -that like all the other Mr. Greens I know in Europe – closing nuclear Plants make them ”Great Mr. Greens”.

It is so tiring to keep hearing “wind and solar can never provide baseline”, when dozens of detailed studies have shown that it can indeed. Most well know is Jacobson from Stanford. There have also been detailed models for Germany, which use years worth of actual weather data to look for
meteorological holes in the scenarios. And yet it is a matter of faith that it is impossible.

Usually it takes the form of “somewhere someplace it might be cloudy and calm for two weeks, therefore you need a battery sized to completely cover two weeks worth of usage…” But, that’s not what simulations show. Partly this is because the catchment area for the grid is larger than individual weather systems.

@22
”Nasty woman upthread illustrates this, she doesn’t COMPARE to the environmental damage of coal, she fixates on the nuclear scares”.

Not really – as she ”fixates on food” – and hardly anything is more scary then not being able to eat the food anymore – once grows.
– Or not being able to send your child (ME) – out into the forest anymore – to play because of being scared about contamination.

But as I already mentioned – I guess you got to experience such a ”scare” by yourself – to understand the ”environmental damage of nuclear” – which in these times – where there actually isn’t any need for ”nuclear energy production” at all anymore – is such a stupid and senseless scare!

Feels like groundhog day, I have last been arguing with nuclear energy proponents, who minimize the tremendous risks and completely disregard the question of long-term storage, in my teenage years…

But hey, a few pointers:

– the German nuclear phaseout has been one of the core policies of the Green Party for decades and has finally become mainstream (with Fukushima forcing Merkel’s hand) – maybe they are not just ideologues but have instead amassed a wealth of expertise over this time that can’t be just waved away

– it is a fact that most nuclear power plants in the US and Europe are over or nearing their originally intended life-span and that the risk of malfunction increases exponentially – so relying on aging reactor to solve our energy/climate crisis is completely irresponsible

– finally, again, what are you going to do with all the spent nuclear material? This question has not been solved.

@JQ OP,

I’m glad you’re speaking out to keep existing nukes open, but I don’t think we should give up on new nuclear builds. They are currently very expensive and hard to finance in the West, yet they still make economic sense as a decarbonization strategy.

Let’s compare new nuclear with new solar. For example, last year 9 new reactors came on line, with a capacity of 10.4 gigawatts. I haven’t done a detailed analysis of how much they cost, but I’ll overestimate it at $10 billion per GW, or $104 billion. You could buy a lot of PV for that money: at $1000 per kw global average capital cost (an underestimate), that would buy you a whopping 104 gigawatts of solar.

But the greater productivity and longevity of nuclear compensates for that disparity. Assuming generously that the PV has a service life of 40 years and the global average capacity factor of 14 percent, that 104 GW will produce 5,101 terrawatt-hours over its service life. With their rated 60 year service lives and 85 percent capacity factors, the nukes will produce 4646 Twh, or 91 percent as much as the solar panels. Tweak the assumptions a bit—give the nukes the US capacity factor of 90 percent and assume a service extension to 80 years (one US plant has started an applications for an 80-year license), or that the PV capacity factors drop with age and curtailment, and the balance tips a bit in favor of the nukes.

Nukes have higher operating costs—three cents per kwh in the US last year, versus probably 0.5-1 cent for PV. Over their lifetimes at a 5 percent discount rate and 20 year payback period, the nukes would have an LCOE of about 6 cents per kwh. That’s not an outrageous price to pay for carbon-free energy. And of course it’s a much better quality of power than solar is—very reliable and dispatchable 24/7/365, doesn’t require the huge extra costs of expanded grids or storage that are not counted in solar LCOEs. And it’s more scalable—both Germany and now China have had to slow their solar deployments at low penetrations because of difficulty integrating chaotic solar output into the grid.

This is all assuming super-expensive costs under stifling Western regulatory regimes. Nukes can be built a lot cheaper. The latest APR1400 reactor in South Korea cost about $4.5 billion per GW. At that price nuclear’s superior productivity and reliability give it a serious economic advantage over wind and solar.

You can make a case for nuclear or solar having the edge in particular contexts, but ruling out new nuclear in every context is irresponsible. Anathematizing it as nothing but an “attack on wind and solar, as the only realistic options” only robs us of a low-carbon option that is making major contributions right now.

@ Dragon King Wang Chuk,

“Even in France, where the nuke fleet is regarded as the most flexible in the world, they don’t really load follow. Coal is much better at this.”

No, coal and nuclear ramp about as well as each other. The Craig Morris article you linked to is misleading. He simply observed that in daily operations coal ramps more than nuclear in France and Germany, but that is explained by the merit order. Coal plants have high marginal costs: they save on fuel costs by ramping down when prices drop, then ramp back up when prices rise abover their marginal fuel costs. Nuclear plants have zero marginal costs: they save nothing by ramping down and expend nothing by ramping up. So nukes always run at full capacity unless prices are pushed into negative territory by oversupply or grid operators order them to ramp down (to accommodate falling demand or wind and solar surges, e.g.).

Coal ramping is wasteful of fuel—coal plants burn fuel most efficiently at steady full power—and therefore generates more emissions. Even if the plant is sending no power to the grid, it has to have its boiler stoked—thus burning fuel—to be able to ramp quickly. It’s a good way to increase global warming.

“When you consider the variable output nature of non-hydro renewable generators, the need for keeping flexible generators like coal becomes more important.”

Here you’re not talking about “load following,” you’re talking about “renewables-following.” Your argument is that coal can ramp to accommodate surges and slumps in wind and solar better than nuclear can. Leaving aside whether this is true or not, I’ll note that it’s logically absurd. There is no reason for carbon-free, zero marginal costs nuclear power to ramp down to accommodate surges in wind and solar; displacing nuclear with renewables has no emissions benefit. It makes more sense to let nuclear run at constant full power and force the wind and solar generators to deal with their own chaotic output by curtailing their surges. That sensible approach, however, would tank WS economics, so wind and solar are often given “must take” privileges so that utilities have to buy their power, whether it is needed or not, even if it means ramping down nuclear and hydro to compensate.

“Anyways, shutting down nukes can help get to that point sooner – because the energy supply hole left by the decommissioned nuclear plants will drive renewables uptake, which will further drive down install prices – setting off a virtuous cycle.”

So we should use new low-carbon power to displace existing low-carbon power, with no net progress on emissions, while leaving coal plants open so that wind and solar surges will have plenty of carbon to partially abate. This argument is insane—so naturally it’s become green gospel.

@ JQ 30

“The line that excessive safety concerns led to the failure of nuclear in the West was popular after Three Mile Island, with the Soviet Union being pointed out as making the right trade-off. Then came Chernobyl.”

The Soviets made the right trade-off. Given how dirty their fossil-fueled power supply was, there’s no doubt that the lives saved by Russian nuclear plants’ abating of air pollution outweighed the lives lost in the Chernobyl accident many times over; Kharecha and Hansen put the number at 180,000 lives saved by nuclear in the Soviet Union and FSU.

There’s also no doubt that excessive safety concerns did indeed lead to the failure of nuclear in the
West. Take the Oyster Creek nuclear plant, which shut down last year under pressure from the State of New Jersey. OC was a 619 megawatt plant built in 1969 for $488 million in 2007 dollars, about $1000 per kilowatt in today’s money. That’s cheaper than PV, for six times the productivity. The plant did fine for 50 years, good safety record, still in excellent shape when the state forced it to close.

So there’s no way to argue that safe plants can’t be built cheaply, because historical data show that they can be, in the US, France, China, Korea, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Japan etc. It’s clear that the cost blowouts today are the result of gold-plated safety and regulatory burdens. We should be building more Oyster Creeks, but we can’t because of misguided “concerns.”

What this means is that the “trade-off” with nuclear isn’t just between safety and economics but between safety and more safety. Not building a nuclear plant avoids a minuscule accident risk but at the cost of incurring a vastly greater and certain harm from ongoing fossil-fueled pollution and warming; the net effect is to forego a large gain in safety—and almost always in the name of safety. In the 1970s there were plans to build thousands of nuclear reactors, but greens and allied politicians and regulators stopped that push by ratcheting up costly safety standards. In so doing they shortened the lives of millions of people who would have had cleaner air to breathe had we built those reactors, delayed decarbonization for many decades, and made the world profoundly less safe.

It’s good that you recognize that nuclear is safer than coal. (Let’s underscore that: it’s roughly 100 times safer, and statistically about as safe as hydroelectric power.) But you’re not following that insight to its logical conclusion. The real trade-off to consider is this: we should make the world safer by making nuclear power marginally less safe and less costly, like Oyster Creek. That’s the right trade-off to make, the math says so. But to grasp that will require you to undertake a really searching reexamination of your preconceptions on this issue, more than you’ve attempted so far.

Omega Centauri@32 wrote:

It is so tiring to keep hearing “wind and solar can neverprovide baseline”, when dozens of detailed studies haveshown that it can indeed. Most well know is Jacobson from Stanford.

And myself, I get tired of hearing about Jacobson.

Mark Z Jacobson’s claims that we could decarbonize solely withwind, solar and hydro were severly criticized by work by Clack et.al, published by the National Academy of Sciences.

(Jacobson then revealed he has some serious issues, by respondingwith a $10 million defamation law suit– though after a major uproar, Jacobson dropped it.)

The main complaint of Clack et.al. was that Jacobson was insanelyoptimistic about what could be done with hydro. There’s a studyby Clack from 2016 that concluded it would be optimum to go with80% from wind, solar & water but we’d still need 20% from other power sources:

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/10/f33/1_NOAA%202016%20Paper%20-%20Christopher%20Clack%2C%20University%20of%20Colorado.pdf

By the way, currently California was got 18% of it’s electricity from Diablo Canyon in 2017.

Many people here (e.g. nastywoman@4) remain enthusiastic about the German “energy transformation”, but it really doesn’t seem to be playing out very well:

James Conca, “Why Aren’t Renewables Decreasing Germany’s Carbon Emissions?” from October 10, 2017:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/10/10/why-arent-renewables-decreasing-germanys-carbon-emissions/#3cd2c38368e1

Germany’s carbon emissions per person actually rose slightly in 2013 and 2015. The country produces much more electricity than it needs and is not addressing oil in the transportation sector.

As Peter Rez at Arizona State University discusses, renewables will not make much of a dent in their total carbon emissions. The problem is that even when renewables produce enough energy to supply all of the country’s electricity, the variability of the renewables means Germany has to keep the coal plants running, over half of which use the dirtiest of all coal, lignite.

In fact, in 2016, 7 out of 10 of Europe’s biggest polluters were German lignite power plants.

This article has a nice graph of per-capita GHG emissions for US,
Germany and France. You might ponder how it is that France is so low.

Found among my folders. For what it’s worth—

2011 “terrorist attacks” (spelling it out)
Who wants to pay to secure storage?

. . . The lack of a clear plan for temporary fuel storage to date has created a situation in which large amounts of radioactive material are being stored in cooling pools at nuclear reactors, and such storage facilities are potentially vulnerable to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. At Fukushima, at least one cooling pool lost water, allowing the spent fuel to overheat and release radioactive materials. This has led some experts to call for spent fuel to be moved more quickly out of cooling pools in the United States and into dry casks that do not require water to keep cool, just naturally circulating air.

Others, including Kadak, counter that there will always be a need for cooling pools, since water cooling is important for removing heat from spent fuel that has recently been removed from a reactor. It takes about five years for the spent fuel to cool down enough to be stored in dry casks. (Moving sooner would be prohibitively expensive.) Moving out the old fuel will do little to make the water-cooling storage areas safer, he says, since this fuel is already cool enough that it doesn’t need water. He says what’s needed, instead of a push to move fuel into dry casks, is backup systems that can supply cooling water reliably, even if the pools leak and there is no power for pumping in water. . .

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/423854/a-100-year-plan-for-nuclear-waste/page/2/

Just a few points about Asia’s experience with nuclear power … contra David L at 6, Japan does not have a problem with NIMBYism – there are nuclear plants spread all around Japan and the locals had very few objections to them, since they played an important economic role. It was Fukushima that sank the Japanese nuclear industry, in combination with a DJP government that had completely muffed its disaster response and was looking for a signature policy that would show it cared.

The other thing that screwed the Japanese nuclear industry was the discovery that it had a dodgy and corrupt relationship with its regulators, and that many of its plants weren’t up to the standards required for earthquake safety. It’s likely in fact that the Fukushima incident was caused by lack of earthquake resilience, not the tsunami, which just compounded things. The rest of the country’s plants were shutdown for “safety checks” and even when Abe got back in and had solid support (before his constitutional shenanigans and the bullshit with the primary school) he was unwilling to reopen them. That wasn’t NIMBYism – that was the realization that they were vulnerable to earthquakes. Now he is reopening the plants as they complete their safety checks.

I agree with the nuclear boosters on this thread that nuclear is very safe but it is only very safe if it is subject to stringent safety rules. A fullblown nuclear disaster (not a managed half-disaster like Fukushima, or a disaster averted by great self sacrifice like Chernobyl) is truly terrible. And remember: if the wind had been blowing to the southwest there would have been a risk that people would have fled Tokyo. You can talk about radiation panic as much as you like but if even 10% of a population of 37 million have an irrational fear of radiation, you have a disaster on your hands when the wind changes.

Japanese people are very realistic about the risks of nuclear, and there is significant support for it in the Japanese population. But on the very clear understanding that it is safe, and in an earthquake zone that means real “gold plated” safety standards. If you doubt me, come experience a shindo 6 earthquake and tell me you think that safety standards here should be sloppy.

Also, this idea that China has “no political constraints” is ridiculous. The CCP is not some kind of one-man show that can just wave its hands and get stuff done. Not only does it have a lot of competing internal factions that have to be balanced, it does retain a strong awareness of local public opinion, and party leaders make decisions to avoid unrest and dissatisfaction. This is the whole reason for their efforts to reduce air pollution over the past 10 years. The CCP also values the health and welfare of the population it governs, and makes policy accordingly. So they can’t just plop down a nuclear power plant anywhere they want, and they have made rational decisions about pursuing solar power on that basis. It’s a big mistake to analyze Chinese behavior on the assumption that its government are unaccountable, unprincipled psychopaths.

Having said all that, regardless of the economics of building new nuclear plants, I think it’s madness to close existing ones. We should be running them out as long as we can until all the carbon emitting power sources are dead. I also think if baseload power is an issue, or there are timing issues, more investment in tidal power could be a good alternative to nuclear. It’s very reliable even if intermittent, in some areas it’s constant, and it’s huge.

@ Omega Centauri 53, on Jacobson’s all-renewables models.

“It is true that Jacobson was rightly attacked for heroic burst hydro assumptions. But, one can redo the computations without that assumption, and the results aren’t that bad.”

It’s hard to take anything Jacobson publishes at face value. His “burst hydro” scenario assumed that the US could build *1300 GW* of hydro capacity, thirteen times current capacity, and without any major new dam construction. That result is obvious lunacy, by an order of magnitude, yet Jacobson placidly made it a centerpiece of his paper until public criticism forced him to correct it. Given how outlandish that paper was, I can’t have any faith that his latest “computations” don’t have other outlandish assumptions buried in them.

Take his deployment of “demand response.” DR is a favorite magic wand in all-renewables modeling and Jacobson waves it frantically in his recent papers.

That’s because Jacobson’s studies actually demonstrate that all-renewables systems cannot supply reliable power. Let’s look at last year’s “Matching Demand with supply at low cost in 139 countries among 20 world regions with 100 percent intermittent wind, water and sunlight (WWS) for all purposes.” Although he employs a toolkit of wind onshore and off, PV and thermal solar with storage, hydropower, geothermal, batteries, hydrogen storage, underground thermal storage, phase-change storage and more, all overbuilt at colossal scale, his modeling shows that there are still many lengthy periods when load can’t be met.

So Jacobson has to resort to “demand response” to avoid blackouts. That means that households and businesse have their power cut to reduce demand on the grid—what Jacobson euphemizes as “flexible load.” Here’s how it works in his model:

“All remaining loads are electrical and are separated into inflexible loads that must be
satisfied immediately and loads that are subject to demand response thus are “flexible.” The flexible loads must be satisfied within a certain number of hours (a maximum of 8 here). All flexible loads not met after the demand response time limit are converted to inflexible loads that must be met immediately with current or stored electricity.”

So whenever demand outstrips supply the “flexible” loads go unsatisfied for up to eight hours, depending on how the wind and sun and waters are feeling. A large fraction of energy use will be consigned to flexibility:

“Of the total transportation electric load among 139 countries, 41.4% is assumed flexible for charging vehicles any time ahead of use, another 43.6% is assumed flexible for producing hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles any time ahead of use, and the rest (15%) is assumed to be inflexible for charging electric vehicles immediately before use.

And not just transportation:

“Other flexible loads include 70% of high temperature industrial-process loads; 15% of
energy for non-heating, non-cooling, non-transportation loads in each sector; and 75% of loads in the “other” sector.”

In North America, Jacobson reckons that out of a total load of 1,532 gigawatts, 1,104 GW will be classified as “flexible load,” and 436 GW will be directly subject to demand response. So a quarter or more of the energy supply and economy—driving, air conditioning, smelters and blast furnaces, 75 % of “other”—will be subject to a regime of chaotic scheduling in which activities can be halted and time-shifted for uncertain periods of up to eight hours, on short or no notice.

This is the best Jacobson could do using WWS, but it’s still a far cry from the super-reliable, power-on-demand systems developed countries now have. The chaos would impose large inefficiencies and costs on economies (that Jacobson doesn’t seem to account for), which by themselves might tip the cost advantage to a reliable nuclear-powered grid. Developed societies simply won’t tolerate the level of disruption from demand response that Jacobson envisions (think yellow vest) so on that ground alone his WWS model is a dead letter.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build wind and solar, but it does mean they will be reliant on fossil-fueled backup power. That’s OK: an 80 percent renewables, 20 percent gas system is probably feasible and will mitigate a lot of global warming, though not fast enough to meet the 2-degree goal.

More importantly, anti-nuke renewables zealots who want a true emissions-free system should focus on carbon capture and sequestration to cope with ongoing fossil-fuel use. Storage and demand response are dead ends, as Jacobson’s work shows; CCS is probably the best way to make a mostly-renewables system work.

> Jacobson’s all-renewables models

This argument seems irrelevant. Renewable energy is sold as a premium product, and a higher price than commodity energy. As such, it inherently requires the existence of some form of commodity energy to be superior to. If it is the only option, it loses that premium, and the numbers don’t add up.

Nuclear is unable to capture that premium, not because of the direct effects of green activism but the wider diffusion of ideas of environmentalist and green branding that seem unlike to reverse any time soon. There is a limited amount of money that people are willing to pay for the future happiness of their grandchildren, and that money is naturally going to go to the most attractive options first.

So unless nuclear can economically compete as commodity energy, against forms that do not have to pay for the externalities they impose, then it has no role.

If politics changes that fact, it becomes false. Until it does, it remains so.

soru @60 Only renewables are increasingly being sold to utilities as the cheapest power available. Not all, but increasingly so. So the challenge for the more traditional baseline sources is to be close enough in cost that utilities will be able to justify the higher price per unit of energy. So yes Nuclear if it is going to compete has to justify that premium. whereas mostly renewables won’t need it -at least until integration of time varying sources starts becoming more difficult.

@ Faustusnotes 54

1. “It’s likely in fact that the Fukushima incident was caused by lack of earthquake resilience, not the tsunami, which just compounded things.”

No, the reactors shut down as soon as the earthquake hit and emergency cooling with diesel generators started up and was operating properly for almost an hour. Then the wave hit, knocking out the diesel gens and electrical switching equipment that powered the cooling systems, leading to the meltdowns. No tsunami, no meltdowns. Fukushima etc. weathered the EQ okay.

2.“I also think if baseload power is an issue, or there are timing issues, more investment in tidal power could be a good alternative to nuclear. It’s very reliable even if intermittent, in some areas it’s constant, and it’s huge.”

3. No, no and no. Tidal power fluctuates wildly not just during the day but between spring and neap, the overall capacity factor is about 25 percent, even widely separate coastal sites correlate, and tides aren’t constant. It’s reliable only in the sense that you can set your watch by the blackouts. In no way is it comparable to nuclear.

4. “A fullblown nuclear disaster (not a managed half-disaster like Fukushima, or a disaster averted by great self sacrifice like Chernobyl) is truly terrible.”

What are you talking about? Chernobyl was as bad as an accident can get: a red-hot fire open to the sky lofting radioactive material for days on end. That kind of accident can’t happen with the reactor models being built today.

5. “And remember: if the wind had been blowing to the southwest there would have been a risk that people would have fled Tokyo. You can talk about radiation panic as much as you like but if even 10% of a population of 37 million have an irrational fear of radiation, you have a disaster on your hands when the wind changes.”

No, there wouldn’t have been any evacuation unless the government had ordered people to evacuate Tokyo, as they did in Fukushima. And it’s out of the question that fallout in Tokyo, a hundred miles from Fukushima, could have been heavy enough to pose any health risk at all, even with a southwest wind. Also note that Tokyo, like every dense city, is a great place to have a nuclear accident: the stone and steel buildings block virtually all radiation, and the city’s paved surfaces and sewer lines make it easy for rainfall to wash fallout out of inhabited spaces.

Nuclear evacuations are elite panics—they are caused by public officials and activists deliberately trying to fan hysteria and start stampedes in the name of safety. In your scenario, as long as the government simply tells the truth—there is no health risk from the radiation—and refrains from forcing people to leave, Tokyo-ites will shrug and stay put.

6. “nuclear is very safe but it is only very safe if it is subject to stringent safety rules.”

No, even if the rules are lax, nuclear is still very safe. You’re right that Japan, with all its fearsome seismic hazards, had a corrupt and mediocre regulatory regime and dumb design choices like not raising the Fukushima sea wall and not storing the diesels above the tsunami line. As a result, they got the Fukushima accident.

But so what? When you quantify the health consequences, accidents and all, it’s still an extremely safe industry. High-end estimates of Fukushima casualties are about a thousand excess cancer deaths over many decades. Had the Fukushima plant been a coal plant of similar size, its air pollution from normal operations would have caused many times more deaths over the years. Not only was the lax, corrupt Japanese nuclear industry as a whole dramatically safer than the coal-fired power sector, the Fukushima Daiichi plant on its own, counting the accident casualties, was much safer than any equivalent coal plant would have been.

This is the heart of the debate about nuclear power, this systematic misunderstanding of risk and safety by greens. Much of this is just scientific ignorance—greens persistently overestimate the danger of radiation by orders of magnitude, and conjure up disaster scenarios that are unphysical. But some of it is a cognitive confusion in the counterproductive fixation on safety.

Both Quiggin and you, FN have stated that you support keeping existing nuclear plants open because they are much safer than coal plants; great, you’re half-way home. But both of you also lapse back into a safety critique to justify banning new nuclear plants, or what’s the same, subjecting them to “safety” standards that are so stringent as to price them out of the market. By effectively banning the kind of cheap, mediocre nuclear plants we used to build *you make the world less safe* by foreclosing a very safe alternative to fossil-fuels that has marked advantages over renewables in performance, scalability and total-system costs.

Being too safe makes us less safe. That’s the insight anti-nukes need to absorb.

“You’re right that Japan, with all its fearsome seismic hazards, had a corrupt and mediocre regulatory regime and dumb design choices like not raising the Fukushima sea wall and not storing the diesels above the tsunami line.”

Thing is, before Fukushima that same Japan was the poster child of nuclear power – the rich, well organized country that was not cutting corners, but could still build plants without breaking the budget.

The Japanese public was not aware of the risks they were taking. The international nuclear sector was not aware (or at least, not sending warnings) despite all the regular review rounds. Japan’s own nuclear second was mostly unaware, or keeping mum.

At the time, I was working in the nuclear industry, and I asked myself: how could I convince someone around here, that the same won’t happen here? Even if I believe that our part of the sector would not accept such risks, can I be really sure? I am not at the table at every meeting where costly conclusions might be buried. And even if I am sure, why should the general public trust me? After all, my Japanese equivalents didn’t sound the alarm either.

I do not have an answer, and I have not seen a convincing answer from the industry either.

I do see the opposite movement, more like what you are saying here. The argument that radiation effects were always overblown, that 1 Fukushima every few decades is not that bad in the greater scheme of things, that evacuation schemes do more harm than good, etc.

There is, AFAICT, a lot of truth in that! It’s also an argument that never had any success before. Even when the competition was the dirtiest of dirty coal power. That’s why the industry promised gold-plated safety – because it could not convince the public that a little radiation is not actually that bad for your health. And those decades of safety promises just helped to emphasize the health risks of radiation -or why else take all that effort?

novakant@67:
When polls show people are in favor of nuclear power– presuming the information registers at all– the anti-nuclear activists just take them as a sign that they need to shout louder. They don’t go “well okay then” and shut up and go away.

In the United States, people are typically more positive on nuclear power than you would expect from the volume of the anti-nuclear folks. For example, “American’s Still Favor Nuclear Power a Year After Fukushima”:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/153452/americans-favor-nuclear-power-year-fukushima.aspx

#68

You might have quoted a more recent version of the same poll:

“For First Time, Majority in U.S. Oppose Nuclear Energy”

https://news.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppose-nuclear-energy.aspx

It seems the US population is rather divided on the issue and I think decisions of such a magnitude should have strong popular support.

Anyway, I was talking about Germany and there the picture is clear. Of course one could argue that the survival of mankind is at stake so who cares, but in the real world, unless you want to suspend democracy altogether, you have to get a broad consensus.

Current data says nuke plants fail catastrophically once every ten thousand plant years (twice in forty years over about 500 plants): this is not what I’d call particularly good. There simply have never been more than tiny numbers of nuclear power plants; if chemical-engineering systems failed at that rate people would be appalled.

I mean… flour mills have a failure mode where they literally explode, like a bomb. That’s a pretty catastrophic failure, comparable in degree to a core meltdown although rather lower-impact in consequences.

They don’t explode very often, though, and people think they’re safe because practically the failure rate is brought down to acceptable levels rather than because of innate safety. They probably explode at more than one every every twenty years, though… but there are rather more flour mills than nuclear plants. We can compare the rates: is a nuclear plant less likely to melt down than a flour mill is to explode? How effective is nuclear risk management vs farinacious?

“It seems to me the main problem with these debates is that some people style themselves as technocratic philosopher kings whose insights are supposed to translate directly into policy – the same goes for the debate about genetically modified food debate.”

This is the kind of thing that shows up right as I’m feeling open to being convinced that just makes me rethink the idea of changing my mind. Lots of people are open to the idea that vaccines might cause autism, but they are just not correct. At some point being strongly influenced by the flatly wrong is a problem. I’m really trying to be open to Quiggin’s argument that nuclear just can’t work rather than my suspicion that its largely about zoning and regulating it in such a way as to intentionally make it impossible to run (akin to the Texas method of regulating abortion centers). But raising the almost entirely made up GMO debate really enflames all my suspicions again.

mpowell: “If you want to persuade me (and I assume many other people have a pretty similar very basic take), you need to explain why nuclear is less cost-effective today. Is wind/solar today already less expensive than nuclear was in 1970? Is there a good way to explain what happened here?”

This might be good starting point, an in-depth study to the historic cost of French nuclear power:
http://www.cerna.mines-paristech.fr/Donnees/data04/429-BoccardSlides.pdf
These are summary slides, you can find the paper with more details as well.

It’s focussed on France, though it also mentions some (comparable) numbers for the US. It matches my general impression form other sources: nuclear power from the “golden age” was roughly competitive with other electricity sources in cost, but never truly cheap. Electricity cost itself has grown roughly in line with inflation, over the decades. So, if wind and PV are now getting roughly cost-competitive with the general market, then they are not miles away from the cost of golden-era nuclear power plants.

On the cost escalation issue: here is a study n that, looking at more countries than the US and France https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151630010

Most countries in the sample show a gradual increase, but not the crazy escalation of the US (now also seen in France). The best case in their sample is Korea, where costs keep falling slowly over time. That’s a reasonable baseline of what is possible, if you can avoid the nebulous problems of other programs.

Though note that Korean costs are still somewhat higher than golden-era French and US costs; and the recent UAE plants (build by Korea) are now showing some of the worrying signs of safety-related technical woes, delays and cost overruns.

Omega Centauri@53:
It is true that Jacobson was rightly attacked for heroic burst hydro assumptions. But, one can redo the computations without that assumption, and the results aren’t that bad.

It should be noted that anyone claiming to propose carbon reduction by invoking massively increased hydro – particularly by increasing reservoir size to increase energy storage – should not be taken seriously regardless of how tight their calculations are. If they’re strictly arguing for an increase in renewable energy sources, that’s one thing, but if they propose to address greenhouse gas emissions by substituting fossil fuels’ carbon dioxide emissions for hydro’s methane emissions (from its reservoirs), they’re either engaging in magical thinking, or haven’t kept up with what is ostensibly their field.

Looking for reports of protests against nuclear power (not nuclear weapons), I couldn’t find any in the last decade

My impression is that there are protests against any new nuclear power, and any plan to move nuclear waste, but that the key focus of anti-nuclear-power activists is the courts and regulatory agencies, and protests are focused on affecting their decision-making. I’ll just note the wikipedia article on Vermont Yankee. Yes, the stated cause of shutting it down was competition from natural gas, but I find it implausible that the years of legal battles had no effect on the decision.

Sure. It turns out that I’m human and that we suck at the facts based approach. But I’m owning my failing on the issue and being clear about how the emotions are inappropriately pushing me. As opposed to the anti-GMO folks who act as if their fear mongering it is a good thing.

mpowell: “If you want to persuade me (and I assume many other people have a pretty similar very basic take), you need to explain why nuclear is less cost-effective today.”

mpowell: “this is not the same as saying they are cost competitive with Gen II at the levels of market penetration required to sufficiently address global warming”

Regardless of GenII or GenIII, it’s 2018, not the 1970s. Nuclear plant construction and operation is highly labour intensive, and especially in first world countries, that labour is expensive. Think thousands of qualified engineers and scientists and construction workers required.

There is already a shortage of qualified workers in the industry. One third of current nuclear employees in the US are aged over 55. So, first you need to invest heavily in the university sector and encourage many more young people to enter the industry, which they are most definitely not doing currently at anywhere near the rates required to scale up nuclear quickly enough to become an effective solution to climate change – or even achieve replacement levels for its current 10% share of world electricity generation.

This is well acknowledged by the industry itself, and one of many reasons the scaling up of nuclear power quickly becomes uneconomic. You don’t get economies of scale with nuclear in the same ways you do with solar and wind renewables, which can be mass-produced, and require orders of magnitude less labour and time to deploy.

Nuclear technology by contrast, despite the best efforts of an incredibly well-funded and heavily publicly subsidised and underwritten industry, has defied mass production for 80 years, and that is highly unlikely to change any time soon.

The belief that “GMOs pose severe health risks” is not the only reason people oppose GMOs.

Maybe they’re not happy with Monsanto et al controlling agricultural production. Maybe they’re worried about the medium-term environmental impact. Maybe they’re not convinced that the purported benefits are worth trouble and that they are presented as a false solution to the crisis of the food industry. Maybe they just prefer organic, maybe they don’t like the taste and prefer variety.

Right, on some level it speaks to a classic human move. THIS IS A CRISIS inevitably means that you must give up your concerns about other important issues to fix this, but that I shouldn’t give up anything I think is important for it. Global warming is important enough to do all sorts of things if it effects the other side’s issues (it is of course a brilliant time for environmentalists to continue long held critiques of capitalism), but not important enough that we should seriously fight false narratives about nuclear power. I applaud John for trying to fight back against it even a tiny bit by arguing that we keep open the existing plants instead of shutting them down, but even in that, the crisis doesn’t appear severe enough to motivate environmentalists to change course even slightly.

Seb@92:

Global warming is important enough to do all sorts of things if it effects the other side’s issues […] but not important enough that we should seriously fight false narratives about nuclear power.

While I agree this is a very human tendency, I would be inclined to be a bit more sympathetic to environmentalist than you if for no other reason than the fact that there are politically powerful forces with large, prominent media platforms who are not just the environmentalists’ opponents WRT climate change (and other issues), but actively argue that the crisis is not a crisis – or at the extremes, that the crisis is not real. Granting concessions when this is a prominent face of the other side is rhetorical and possibly political suicide – at best, you’ll sacrifice credibility in exchange for precisely nothing from the naysayers, who are prominent rather than marginal bad-faith cranks.

I think the basic problem here is that Sebastian refuses to accept that environmentalists are arguing in good faith, and instead of taking them at face value when they say they’re concerned about the environment sees them as using environmentalism as a fig leaf over communist ludditism.

But this is of a piece with everything from the Right: gay people don’t want to fuck other gay people, they want to disrupt my family, unions don’t want safer and better-paying jobs, they’re using that to take over my company, women don’t join together because they want to be treated with individual respect but because they want to castrate men-like-me, girls and boys complain about being raped by priests not because they don’t want to be raped by priests but because they’ve been seduced by godless communism.

Everything they see they see as motivated by spite and malice, an unshakeable belief in the perfidy and secret plotting of everyone who disagrees with them; all statements of motivations are pretextual, to cover the malice that’s in the heart of those who want things to change.

Like… this is not normal behaviour. Healthy people don’t act this way.

“I take as read JQ’s argument that the private deployment of nuclear power is uneconomical, and to this I respond: who cares? How much does one of these things cost, roughly speaking? $10 billion? I realize that this is a somewhat US-centric argument, but this is like a drop in the ocean that is the federal budget. ”
It’s not just one, though. Some numbers to get a feeling, for the US: about 400 extra of those to cover all electricity production, another 100 to cover electric cars, perhaps another 100 to replace fossil-fuel heating. And very roughly, yet another 100 to cover peak load (or you get the same mismatch problem as solar and wind).

10 billion for a reactor (lets say 1 GWe) is high. It really should be possible to get it much cheaper (especially if you build 100s of the things), but how much is conjecture. Add about 250 million/ year/reactor in operating and fuel cost.

So that’s serious money – even on the scale of the US government. Private or public money – things get easier if they are cheaper.

@ Omega Centauri 73,

“The thing I mainly think about Nuclear power…it its lack of assured reliability. Solar and wind are always attacked because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. But after a nuclear panic, the nuclear plants are shut down in a hurry. And we can’t just wait until the next shift in the weather, politics then dictates that they plants can’t run come hell or high water, Look at the huge power gen deficit in Japan months to years after the accident. Every plant that had a temporary planned shutdown, was refused permission to restart, so the entire nation became power starved. That is what we risk is we rely on Nuclear to any degree. An accident even halfway around the world to a design that we don’t even have can still generate an irrational panic movement, and possibly a rapid shutdown of all of much of the system.”

OC, this is specious. You’re saying that nuclear is unreliable because its opponents want to shut it down, and that this is a law of nature which we can’t change. Nonsense.

Nuclear plants are not always shut down after an accident. The 3 Mile Island accident caused an enormous uproar in the U. S., but the nuclear sector was not shut down; it simply absorbed the safety lessons from the accident on the fly.

Japan did not immediately shut down its nuclear sector after Fukushima, only gradually over many months. There was time for cooler heads to prevail and switch to a reasonable program of making improvements to the plants while they remained in operation, as happened after TMI. The Japanese government instead chose to close the sector, and made that decision long after the crisis and the initial elite panic had passed. And that was a contingent and reversible decision, because one plant that was judged critical to the local grid was kept operating through 2013 after a planned outage.

Note that politicians who order nuclear shutdowns have an easy out—fossil fuels. Japan actually was not energy-starved after Fukushima. Electricity production in 2011 was 1104 terrawat hours, down just 4.7 percent from 2010’s 1156 TWh and less than 1 percent from 2009’s 1114 TWh. In 2012, when the nuclear shutdowns were almost complete and nuclear generation plummeted to 18 twh from 2011’s 163 TWh, total electricity production actually rose a bit to 1106 TWh.

On the whole Japan had adequate fossil-fueled capacity to make up the nuclear shortfall. Had the economy relied on nuclear power and faced serious energy shortages, the government would not have closed the plants.

So no, shutdowns are not a brute force of nature that reason cannot sway. They are contingent, calculated policies, and they can and are avoided when political leaders want to do that.

@ JQ 76,

“New-build nuclear is competing with renewables not coal.”

1. How can new-build nuclear *not* compete with coal on the same grid?

it’s renewables that have a hard time competing with coal. Hundreds of coal and gas plants are still being built despite the alleged cheapness of renewables, because renewables can’t provide the reliable power that economies need to develop. That’s why fossil-fueled generation continues to rise sharply, along with emissions. Nuclear, by contrast, can replace coal plants with reliable power. So you’ve got it backwards: Nuclear is the direct competitor to coal; wind and solar are imperfect, partial substitutes that cannot completely de-coal the grid.

That’s why Germany, now 19 years into the renewables revolution and with vast renewables capacity on line, is taking yet another 19 years to phase out coal. You toasted that announcement without registering just what a damning testament it is to renewables’ inadequacy as a decarbonization strategy. (And without noting that the shuttered coal capacity will be replaced with gas capacity to back up unreliable wind and solar. That’s why Germany is desperate for a new gas pipeline to Russia and LNG terminals.)

2. “Renewables are cheaper and safer, even allowing for the costs of storage and grid integration… cheaper has been demonstrated in many different countries, with different markets and quasi-markets.”

What does this mean? Wind and solar are a pretty cheap way to displace some fossil-fueled generation from established grids in many places, and that’s great. But if you’re saying we can run the whole grid from renewables and storage, and do it cheaply, there’s no evidence to support that.

There is no grid where storage provides more than a sliver of backup capacity. Wind and solar everywhere rely almost exclusively on fossil, hydro or nuclear backup. The only feasible all-renewable systems would be dominated by hydro, geo or biofuels, but they won’t scale and biofuels are too destructive. We have no examples of grids that run reliably on wind, solar and storage, and studies show it’s impossible. That includes Jacobson’s studies, see 58, which rely not just on physically impossible engineering feats but also massively disruptive “demand response” with costs he does not count. And, of course, your “cheaper” comparison is to overregulated, overdesigned nuclear with inflated costs, not the cheaper nukes that predominate.

Wind and solar could get pretty high penetrations, maybe 80 percent, but only with fossil-fueled backup power. It’s okay to propose that, but you need to be clear and not imply that “100-percent renewables” is a solved problem.

2. “Renewables are cheaper and safer…safer is obvious.”

No, it’s not obvious. Nuclear is as safe as hydro. It’s much safer than biomass and biofuels, which create pollution and crowd out food production. (German biomass burning generates almost as much electricity as solar.) Expanded hydro, biomass and biofuels are key components of most all-renewables scenarios because they provide the dispatchable energy that wind and solar can’t. it’s quite possible that an all-renewables grid could be less safe than an all-nuclear grid.

Nuclear might even be safer than rooftop PV. Workers fall off roofs, the wiring can cause fires. It wouldn’t take much for solar to outstrip nuclear. High-end estimates put Fukushima casualites at 1000 cancer fatalities spread over many decades, so if a few dozen solar workers fall off roofs every year we’re talking Fukushima levels of mortality.

People here just aren’t processing how safe nuclear really is when you run the numbers. It’s very safe.

@JQ 76 and 89

“On safety, its reasonable to claim that Gen II plants are safer than coal (despite spectacular disasters that have convinced the public otherwise), and that (if public opinion could be ignored) it would have been better to persevere with them than to incorporate all the expensive safety equipment that has made Gen III uncompetitive. But that’s a point of purely historical interest now.”

“It might be true that building plants on the Chernobyl [??] model was both cheaper and safer than new coal, but the chance that the public could be convinced of this, with or without an active anti-nuclear movement, is essentially zero. A suggestion now that safety standards should be lowered is just ludicrous.”

Look, the older designs aren’t enigmas from the mists of time. China brought a Gen II+ plant on line in 2017, part of its CPR1000 campaign that built 20+ reactors on time and cheap. It’s not beyond the wit of man to dust off the blueprints and build them again.

And no, the public won’t rise up in revolt. We know this because of the Watts Bar II reactor. It started construction in 1973 and was abandoned mid-build for 20 + years. The project was finally revived and completed in 2016 (at pretty high cost because of the hiatus). The design is ancient and would never get a license from today’s NRC. But there was no public outcry over bringing this Gen II relic from the lax regulatory regime of the past into service in today’s supposedly more stringent Gen III+ era.

Today’s stifling regulations and gold-plated designs are not the product of public agitation or some ineluctable law of history. They are contingent policy decisions made by politicians and regulators influenced by anti-nuclear elites. They can be reversed, and the public will go along with the regulatory consensus as it shifts.

.JQ 89, “If a cognitive bias can’t be fixed, there’s no point complaining about it.”

JQ, you’re projecting: If you hold a position you assure us that the public can be persuaded of it; if you reject a position you assure us that the public will always irrationally reject it so shut up and bow to the cognitive biases of the people.

A lot of commenters here have been sounding a similar theme about the uncorrectibly anti-nuclear public: “Yes, yes, science and all that, but the peasants simply won’t listen to reason, so nothing can be done.”

This is distasteful, and it’s a myth, as I’ve argued upthread. Here’s more evidence: in November Taiwanese voters passed a referendum to repeal a new law that would have abolished the nuclear sector in 2025, by a 59-41 margin. Vigorous debate can change people’s minds on nuclear power.

I’ve found that ordinary people are quite open to reconsidering nuclear power when they encounter an honest discussion of the science. It’s intellectuals who tend to be the most irrational on this issue.

FN 111,

1. “there was “shadow evacuation” in all areas of Fukushima prefecture, ranging from a reduction in population of about 40% in the area north of the power plant to 2-4% in the western areas.”

This geographic survey is meaningless. What matters in assessing the propensity for spontaneous evacuation from Tokyo is to show that there is mass spontaneous evacuation from areas that the government has not urged people to evacuate.

When you write “the area north of the power plant” or “the western areas” we don’t know whether these were mandatory evacuation zones, be-prepared-to-evacuate zones where people were primed to flee by government statements that evacuation was imminent, or areas that the government had not urged people to evacuate. If “the area north of the plant” was mainly a be-prepared-to-evacuate zone, that would explain why there was a large shadow evacuation.

And of course you have sidestepped the example of Fukushima City, which is the exact test case—30 miles from the plant, right in the path of the fallout plume, radioactivity higher than anything Tokyo would get from a SW fallout plume. But because the government didn’t urge evacuation there, there was no mass evacuation, the city in fact swelled with refugees and continued functioning normally. Because that happened in Fukushima City, we know for a fact that there would have been no evacuation of Tokyo, 150 miles away, unless the government urged it. QED.

2. “There was also flight out of Tokyo (I told you this happened – I was there).”

This isn’t evidence, it’s just an anecdote—about a sighting of crowded Tokyo train stations, which are not exactly unheard-of.

3. “There was also rationing of bottled water in Tokyo, because of radiation panic. This rationing was not introduced by the government because of the real risks, but in response to panic buying.”

That’s because the government announced that the tap water was unsafe for infants to drink because of iodine levels that exceded legal limits. People understandably (tho mistakenly) generalized that to adults and started a run on bottled water. The government’s advice on infants was of course incorrect and unnecessary, because the legal limits are meant for chronic consumption, not the fleeting spike in iodine in Tokyo water (and are in any case incredibly conservative).

So the run on bottled water was not a spontaneous public panic, it was again caused by the government panicking and wrongly telling people the tap water was unsafe.

4. “I am aware of the literature on what happened with evacuation in Fukushima, because I helped to prepare some of it.”

Link, please.

5. “It is not the case that the collapse of power plants did not affect Japan’s electricity supply: TEPCO had to introduce rolling blackouts after the earthquake. See this English language explanation, which I hope makes clear that analyzing the change in Japan’s total output of electricity is meaningless. Here is an example of a press release from Tepco instructing people when their blackout will be – we have varying levels of blackouts for about a month after the event (which is part of why I joined the exodus from Tokyo in the week after the event, and part of the reason my work was closed).”

FN, the power shortages in the month after the EQ (one of your press releases is dated March 14, 2011) were the result of a generalized devastation of the grid caused by the EQ and tsu. That included not just the damaged coastal reactors, but fossil-fueled plants knocked off line (these are specifically mentioned in your sources) as well as downed power lines and damaged substations and transformers.

To ascribe this general devastation specifically to the properties of nuclear power plants is false and misleading. Had all of these plants been coastal wind farms or solar plants, they would have been wiped out too or cut off from the grid by damaged distribution infrastructure. They would also have been subject to catastrophic interruption by cloudy days, calm weather and nighttime.

6. “Even the following summer, my workplace was receiving instructions about energy conservation and some people were being given stern letters, because Tepco was writing to big businesses to ask them to reduce consumption during summer.”

Stern letters, you say? I had no idea that Japan was driven to such extremes by the energy famine.

7. “You talk about completely reasonable safety measures that were not taken, and then seem to think that although we have evidence that people didn’t take completely reasonable safety measures, they will do so next time… If it was easy to correct, why wasn’t it done? If it was easy to correct why wasn’t it predicted?”

Look, like every human enterprise, nuclear plants are run by fallible people, who don’t always anticipate risks or calculate them right, and have to learn from painful experience. So yeah, nuclear plants are going to continue to make mistakes, and there will be accidents in the future. But the industry will learn lessons and get steadily safer (as it has throughout the past).

The problem is that anti-nukes won’t accept nuclear power as a normal human enterprise with occasional lapses and a learning curve. They insist that nothing short of perfect safety be tolerated in the industry. That’s because they believe that radiation is a uniquely dangerous toxin and that any nuclear accident poses a literally apocalyptic threat.

These are basically religious beliefs, and they are false. Radiation is not very dangerous, and even catastrophic nuclear accidents are less of a threat than normal operating conditions at fossl-fueled plants; in the aggregate nuclear power is about as safe as renewables.

By insisting, as you do FN, that nuclear plants never make mistakes, that every possible risk and scenario be anticipated and made impossible, we make nuclear power too expensive to run. And so we have to resort to fossil fuels—and some renewable sources—that are more dangerous than nuclear.

Making nuclear power too safe makes us less safe.

8. “You think that the panic was an “elite panic” caused by the government, but it wasn’t. It was the pictures of the plant exploding, playing on a loop on tv, and the US government urging the Japan government to set a 50 km exclusion zone, and the constant panicky local journalists – it wasn’t the government.”

Yes, it was the government that panicked, not the public.

People in Fukushima City watched TV too, and saw the explosions, and heard the panicking journalists, and were close to the plant and right in the path of the fallout plume—but they didn’t hold a mass evacuation, because the government didn’t tell them to.

Yes, Gregory Jaczko, head of the US NRC, did say that people should evacuate out to 50 miles (not km) although NRC experts in Japan told him that was unnecessary. This is another case of panic by a government official (who is also an elite anti-nuclear activist). But people in Fukushima City paid no attention to Jaczko. They did not evacuate because their own government didn’t tell them to.

People don’t panic until their own government tells them to.

10.” the people falling off roofs thing is just silly, if you don’t consider deaths in the installation of nuclear power. It’s just silly.”

No it’s not silly. You’re not thinking rigorously about the risk. All-factor studies of deaths per TWh usually rank solar as more dangerous than nuclear, for good reason.

I couldn’t find stats on fatalities in nuclear power plant construction, but I did find stats on a close proxy, “industrial building construction” in the US, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So on average from 2003 to 2014, 16 workers died every year in the whole US in the construction of industrial buildings. So if the US were to devote all its industrial building sector to building nuclear plants, we could expect 16 fatalities per year from that. More reasonably, if say 10 percent were devoted to new nuclear construction, 1 to 2 fatalities per year.

Nuclear plant operations and maintenance (which involves a lot of construction) are very safe. From 2003 to 2014 in the entire US “nuclear electric generating” sector, there was a grand total of 2 worker deaths.

Roof work is a lot more dangerous, and a lot less supervised and regulated than heavy construction. Every year about 100 workers in the US die falling off roofs. And rooftop PV will mean a lot of roof work, not just installation but periodic maintenance and cleaning of the panels. So let’s say there is a ubiquitous rollout of rooftop PV which increases total roof work by 10 percent, then deaths will scale up proportionately and we’ll get 10 additional deaths per year from rooftop PV. But that seems like an underestimate. If we imagine giving, say, 100 million roofs a 4 kw PV rig and estimate that that will raise roof work by, say, half, which sounds plausible, then we would have 50 additional deaths per year, three times the nuclear construction deaths even if the entire industrial building sector was devoted to building nukes.

That huge rooftop PV sector might generate 600 terrawatt-hours per year if we’re lucky, less than the current US nuclear fleet. So we would have a lot more deaths for considerably less energy.

And we’re not done. A huge PV sector requires an expanded grid, which will mean dozens of extra worker deaths per year from power-line construction and accidental contacts with power lines.

And that’s just worker deaths. When PV panels are buried in snow, there will be homeowners climbing on the roof to clean them—very dangerous.

Then there’s road accidents from all the driving to far-flung sites for RE construction and maintenance, mining deaths because RE uses a lot more material inputs than nuclear, other stuff.

All-in-all, a much higher death toll than at Fukushima.

It’s not a huge safety difference, and in perspective it’s right to say that nuclear and rooftop PV are “comparably safe.”

But greens who thinks that solar is decisively safer than nuclear just haven’t done the math.

Over the not so long run (say, a few centuries) arguing over nuclear vs renewables misses the point. Which is that the earth cannot sustain even modest continued growth rates in energy use – however generated – without raising temperatures. See, eg https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

Since what cannot go on will not, why not argue about the most efficient way to minimise energy usage? Lots of low-hanging fruit there.

Peter T: “the earth cannot sustain even modest continued growth rates in energy use – however generated – without raising temperatures.”

From the article: “Earth surface temperature given steady 2.3% energy growth, assuming some source other than sunlight is employed to provide our energy needs and that its use transpires on the surface of the planet. Even a dream source like fusion makes for unbearable conditions in a few hundred years if growth continues.”

Solar, wind, hydro and tides have no effect on the Earth’s heat budget. The limitation he finds with renewables is that the sun only puts out x amount of energy, so continued growth in energy usage means we hit that limit in 1400 years. (Figure 2)

The limitation he finds with nuclear is that within 2-300 years from now, heat budget effects start warming the planet worse than CO2-induced climate change. (Figure 3)

Here are the Post and Courier stories tagged “Westinghouse.”

A sampling of headlines:

S.C. utilities knew of big problems 6 months into nuclear project but didn’t tell customers

Georgia Power knew for years about nuclear contractor’s flaws that doomed S.C. project

Letter shows S.C. utilities knew Westinghouse’s reactor designs would lead to increased costs and schedule delays

Confidential Westinghouse report details early faults with nuclear projects

Insight that would’ve alerted problems with nuclear project scrubbed from audit two years ago

Another SCANA employee says execs weren’t ‘truthful’ with Wall Street investors

SCANA decided not to disclose critical review of SC nuclear project when auditor asked

Santee Cooper secretly griped for years about SCANA’s ‘ineptitude’ in failed S.C. nuclear project

Whistleblower says he was demoted after finding problems in S.C. nuclear project, report says

@ Matt, 119-20

Right, Matt, I was too optimistic about the AP1000. It’s a bad design, and was immature–when they started the builds they didn’t have a complete set of blueprints, and design revisions were ongoing during construction.

Now I’m talking about building APR1400s and CPR1000s. Those are mature designs, with plants in operation. So we know they can be built in 5 years for $4-5000 per kw. The CPR1000, for example, has 20 reactors online now, the last one finished in 2017, each one brought in on time and budget.

CPR1000s are actually Gen II+, somewhat more advanced designs than the Gen II models that both you and Quiggin agree should remain in service. So they are safe, cheap, established supply chain, experienced project managers, etc. No reason not to build them.

You’re kind of cherry-picking evidence, Matt–looking only at the failed designs but not at the successful ones. Gotta look at all the evidence.

” AP1000 designs did not change after VC Summer construction began in March 2013.”

False. The monitoring reports for the South Carolina and Georgia PSCs go into great detail about how the design packages–the detailed blueprints– for the AP1000 were not finished even years into construction, and that delays in their provisioning to the contractors by Westinghouse were a major driver of delays and cost overruns. Those blueprints for modules and equipment that were finished often had to redesigned because the suppliers found them to be unbuildable.

That won’t happen with a mature design like the CPR1000–provided NRC doesn’t demand changes in the design.

“False. The monitoring reports for the South Carolina and Georgia PSCs go into great detail about how the design packages–the detailed blueprints– for the AP1000 were not finished even years into construction, and that delays in their provisioning to the contractors by Westinghouse were a major driver of delays and cost overruns.”

Sorry, you are correct about that. I meant that there were no design changes required by regulators after construction started. The regulatory requirements were there in 2013 and stayed fixed. Revision 19 of the AP1000 design control document, from 2011, was the final revision. The AP1000 builds weren’t surprised like those reactors that were half-built when Three Mile Island happened.

Shin Kori 3 looks like it’s operating well so far, and its construction was both affordable and brisk. As for foreign builds of the APR1400 — we’ll see after the Barakah units begin commercial operation. The first was originally supposed to start in 2017.

Are new CPR1000 units still being built? I thought that the Hualong One superseded it. Once the Pakistani Hualong One units are in commercial service we’ll see how those projects went.

Climate change is an enormous threat that will be catastrophically expensive if not addressed. Paying $10000/kW for new nuclear power is better than continuing to burn fossils. But efficiency measures and intermittent renewables are a cheaper way to decarbonize at the margin in the US (and most other places that don’t already have high intermittent renewable penetration). I don’t see this changing in the next decade or so. In fact I expect the cost gap between new renewables and new nuclear to further widen over the next decade. South Korea and China both seem to be pulling back from previous nuclear ambitions, and solar and wind equipment manufacturers are still scaling up. We may need more nuclear power to reach deep decarbonization, but I see scant hope of it being particularly cheap.

@Will

What a way – trying to defend an outdated and stupid way to produce energy?

Or as a barkeeper told a Drunken Dude who went ”nuclear” on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach just yesterday:

”Para el Carro”!

Robert Heinlein had a short story about putting nuclear power plants in satellites in space and sending the energy down somehow

Right. I think the idea was to use a collimated microwave beam. Giant equatorial receivers would rectify the current and pump it into super-conductor networks for distribution.

And, damn’, if you thought wind turbine generators were deadly for birds . . .!

Will, the big thing about the AP1000 is for me: why did this all come as a surprise ? Not just to you, but in general. How could the AP1000 become the leading light of the nuclear renaissance, if it (and Westinghouse) was actually in such a bad state? It would have been nice if someone had said, look, before you spent those billions, this is actually a half-done design and the supply chain is rotten. Did no one realize, or were all knowledgeable people keeping quiet because they didn’t want to disturb the new development? And going forward, how can the public trust the industry in the future?

It’s a similar question as about Japan and its cozy industry-regulator relations. Or all the other project-management and/or safety boondoggles. It’s like the technology structurally wired for over-promising and hiding problems.

So yeah, perhaps Korea finally figured it all out. Or they are another Japan, keeping costs low by burying the problems out of sight. You talk about APR1400 as if they are a proven design, but there is only one of them running – after a delayed startup due to a fire safety scandal. It’s brother plant is delayed some more years, due to insufficient earthquake preparations that surely would have been ignored before Fukushima. The first Barakah plant was supposed to be running by now, delayed for somewhat vague reasons. Enough worries that South Korea is delaying future plants, quite possibly forever.

All of that might just be minor issues, caught by the process as it is supposed to do. Or they are canaries in the coal mine. I honestly do not know, and I don’t know how I could reliably find out. If Americans could be so mistaken about Westinghouse, the French about Areva, or the Japanese about Tepco and its regulators?

Matt 124,

“As for foreign builds of the APR1400 — we’ll see after the Barakah units begin commercial operation. The first was originally supposed to start in 2017.”

Part of the Barakah delay is delays in training their staff on Korean APR1400s, a knock-on effect of the delays in those plants caused by a substandard cabling scandal.

Now there are issues with voids and cracks in the concrete of some of the Barakah units. But, I think an exaggerated response to this is another aspect of regulatory overkill, of “being too safe makes us unsafe.”

The obsession with flawless concreting and welding has been a central driver of cost overruns. Work stoppages and rework over these issues have added several years to the Flamanville build. But it’s unlikely that welding and concreting is worse these days than it was back in the 1970s when Gen II was built in places like Brazil and India. In fact, other plants have had similar defects; they were patched up. Since we benchmarked Gen II as safe, can we say that Gen III APR1400s, even with concrete defects, are unsafe?

Concrete defects can weaken these structures against major shocks like EQs or aircraft impact, or allow radioactive material to leak out during an accident. But do they make Barakah meaningfully unsafe? Almost certainly not. The plant is not in an active seismic zone. And 18 years into the age of terrorist spectaclulars, no one has bothered to fly a plane into a reactor. These scenarios are incredibly unlikely. And even a flawed concrete containment building is still immensely strong and likely will stand up to these insults.

According to its probabilistic risk assessment, the APR1400 has a major release frequency about 5-fold lower than 70s-vintage reactors. Even with concrete defects, there’s a lot of safety margin before it becomes as unsafe as most of the old reactors that we have agreed are safe enough to keep running.

And there’s an overriding factor that makes Barakah unusually safe: it’s in the desert. Even if there is an accident, there is no one around for 50 kilometers to be contaminated. Apart from the financial loss, it’s a low- to no-consequence event.

A systematic and rational risk assessment would likely conclude that Barakah is extremely safe, concreting defects and all. Unfortunately, as always, the nuclear regulatory regime is fixated instead on absolute safety against far-fetched scenarios that would in any case have no health consequences. That’s what drives up costs.

Matt 124,

“efficiency measures and intermittent renewables are a cheaper way to decarbonize at the margin in the US”

Sure, if you want to marginally reduce carbon you can do that with RE; you might get up to 80 percent penetration or so, with fossil-fuel backup. That’s OK, that will help a lot with the pollution and climate change problems. It won’t meet the2-dgree goal, but I don’t think that’s a threshold of doom anyway.

What I object to are claims that new nuclear can’t be cheap and safe. We know that it can, and commonly is, even in the West; that’s not a “hope,” that’s an observed fact about the world.

I always hear that we must base energy policy on computer models of the conjectured performance of novel renewables technologies decades in the future, but we must never base it on the proven performance of real-world nuclear plants built just two years ago, since that’s an irrelevancy that is of merely “historical” interest. I don’t get it, but then I’m not a professor.

Why are so many people so certain that wind and solar after going to be enough, when we are talking about scaling then up by a factor of hundreds? Any project that large is going to have unexpected problems.

I don’t want to fall short. I don’t want to say to hundreds of millions “Ooops, we’re sorry, you’re going to die because we were afraid of an alternative.” Even if it’s not die, even if it’s just “You and yours will live in grinding poverty for the foreseeable future,” that’s not acceptable.

nastywoman@126: Anti-nuclear activism got us to depend on coal, which suggests to me that we are better off advocating for alternatives, rather than focusing on the preventing the use of nuclear power, though we also need to heavily regulate any such use.

There are certain to be problems with the massive deployment of solar and wind power, because there are always problems with any project that large. I do not want to bet the future of civilization on being able to resolve those problems in time.

Burning coal is a very dirty way to produce electricity, or even just heat. It pollutes air and water, and produces large amounts of toxic waste. When one accounts for that, indeed, so far coal has been a much larger pollution problem than nuclear power – and that is not even counting the release of greenhouse gases.

Chernobyl was indeed a disaster, but it is unlikely that anyone will build a large reactor that dangerous again. It was an incredibly wrong-headed design. I am not (you know from my remarks above) sanguine about the reliability of human social institutions in the face of the dangers of nuclear power, but I do think we have at least learned that lesson.

Links on pollution from coal (notice that these are not pro-nuclear sites.)
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fuels/coal-water-pollution
https://content.sierraclub.org/coal/disposal-ash-waste
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Air_pollution_from_coal-fired_power_plants

Will, is it true that in 2015 you were writing articles boosting a power plant design that the funders now describe as “a de facto ponzi scheme”? If so, do you think you’re the best judge of these issues? Why is it, incidentally, that this ponzi scheme cropped up in the nuclear industry? Any thoughts on that?

I think you are blind to some of the realities of nuclear power. You certainly are very comfortable ignoring the reality of what happened in Tokyo in 2011, by relying on only English language reports (which were hideously biased) and ignoring the reports of a person who was there (and patronizing him!) For example, dismissing my experience of people fleeing Tokyo as “crowded railway stations” like I don’t know what a crowded railway station in Tokyo looks like is … well, let’s just say it doesn’t reflect well on you. Dismissing the many reports of foreigners abandoning Tokyo because you can’t read them so they just can’t be true is also … well, it’s not a good look.

In particular I think you don’t understand how terrified people in the west (not Japan) are of nuclear power, and how sensationalist US media in particular are about this issue – without any encouragement from “elite panic.” If you had lived here when it happened, accessing social media and reading Japanese news sources, you would be aware of the intense atmosphere of panic that set in amongst westerners (but not Japanese) when the disaster hit. You would know about the intense pressure that we faced to leave – not because of the tsunami or the threat of buildings falling on us, but because of fears about a nuclear plant that is 2 hours away by Shinkansen. There were lots of foreigners living in Osaka, for example, who were putting up posts on social media showing their distance from Fukushima so their foreign relatives would stop panicking. As I mentioned above (and you ignored), students cancelled two year study plans on the basis of western media panic.

You don’t know any of this stuff, and you’re dismissing it as “anecdote.” If you are really serious about expanding nuclear power to deal with global warming, then you need to be focusing not on reducing the safety measures on the plants but on ways to convince Americans – and in particular American media – that it is safe. This means dropping your belief that it is all the fault of environmentalists and the government, and looking at the broader problems of anti-science, denialism and hysteria in the American media. After a sober assessment of those issues, you might recognize that they may be insurmountable.

Another Nick@118:
Solar, wind, hydro and tides have no effect on the Earth’s heat budget.

I hate to say this because I don’t think I’ve really said much of anything else in the last few climate change threads and I’m starting to feel a bit like a one-note crank, but AFAIK current credible science says hydro increases atmospheric release of methane significantly, so it absolutely does have an effect on Earth’s heat budget. Hydro is renewable and is not “dirty” in an old-fashioned toxic smoggy sense, but it’s absolutely not carbon-neutral (even if it’s CH4 rather than CO2).

There’s a repeated theme that asking people to use less energy is unacceptable. It may well be politically unacceptable, but it’s also inevitable. As in, the choice is not about whether we use less energy because we chose to, or because the system collapsed and so we had to. Just like we can’t keep logging, or fishing, or mining, or depleting top-soil, or overloading the nitrogen cycle. A politics that does not centre on limits is doomed, one way or another.

I don’t agree that current nuclear reactor designs are adequate. The large boiling water nuclear reactor has turned out to be an appallingly expensive and difficult way to generate electricity. It would be best to reconsider reactor designs if we are going to build new reactors.