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Rod Adams peels apart Arnie Gundersen’s misleading résumé

Published April 10, 2013 Nuclear Power Closed

In “Was Arnie Gundersen a Licensed Reactor Operator and Senior VP Nuclear Licensee?” Rod does some of the hard work required to uncover some of anti-nuclear activist Arnie Gundersen’s highly misleading résumé inflation. These are two examples from the résumé:

1. “RO Licensed Reactor Operator, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission License # OP-3014″

2. “Former Senior Vice President Nuclear Licensee”

For those of us accustomed to reviewing lots of résumés those kind of declarations are big red flags. If the history is  both factual and meaningful, where the hell are the particulars? When, were, for whom, what was accomplished? I’ve done some of my own homework trying to discover what real-world experience Gundersen really has – it is extremely difficult. I found that #2 was narrowly true, but couldn’t find any evidence that Gundersen actually accomplished anything. In the end I gave up. Rod didn’t give up.

If anyone has found solid evidence of Gundersen gaining any real-world nuclear operations experience, please comment. Meanwhile, read Atomic Insights.

Zero emission synfuel from seawater

Published April 8, 2013 Nuclear Power , Transportation Closed
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Click the image for John Morgan’s full size Table 1

Physical chemist and entrepreneur John Morgan wrote a fascinating post for Brave New Climate in January. The possibilities of the US Navy and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) research underscore the importance of innovation to deliver energy and especially transport fuel solutions that are workable (i.e., solutions that are compatible with Roger Pielke’s Iron Law).

The seawater CO2 extraction is a big win if the costs hold at scale, because the costs look to be MUCH lower than direct air capture. If the huge energy inputs required are supplied by nuclear (especially if the nuclear supply includes 800C process heat via high temperature gas reactor), then the synfuel is long-term carbon neutral. Innovation in direct air capture is still extremely important because it is clear that the planet will greatly exceed current carbon goals before it becomes truly zero carbon. 

Two papers published last year described a new approach to zero emissions synfuel, looking at direct carbon dioxide extraction from seawater.  The new insight in these papers is that CO2 is very soluble in seawater, where the concentration is about 140 times higher than in the atmosphere. This could make seawater extraction a lot cheaper than direct air capture.

 Please read John’s entire post – it is well-sourced and well-written, and I believe accurate.

Greenpeace Inc.

Published March 17, 2013 Agriculture , Energy Policy Closed
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A Greenpeace activist illegally destroys a genetically-modified (GM) wheat crop site in Australia. When ideology mixes with vast financial resources, the result can derail progress on climate change, energy, and food security.

Matthew Nisbet writing for The Breakthrough Institute pulls the covers off of Greenpeace, one of the most powerful global NGO’s. I have enormous respect for Mark Lynas, not least because Mark took responsibility for the bad things he did as a leader of the politically correct but oh-so-wrong activists. Personally I have a much harsher view than Mark of the responsibility that Greenpeace must take for both global warming and for hunger, poverty and malnutrition (anti-nuclear, anti-GMO respectively).

Matthew begins with this: 

A March 9 profile on The Observer spotlights writer and activist Mark Lynas, who has gained notable attention for arguing that environmentalists need to reconsider their longstanding opposition to nuclear energy and genetic engineering. As Lynas told The Observer, during his days as an activist, he had viewed the Green movement as a brave, scrappy underdog – a little David battling the Goliaths of industry, government, and conservatives.

But the more he critically examined the work of Greens on issues like nuclear energy and genetic engineering, the more he was surprised to discover the vast financial and organizational resources available to organizations like Greenpeace.

The financial might of today’s environmental groups has helped narrow the gap with industry and their political allies across issues. Yet, as Lynas rightly argues, in some cases this same organizational wealth has helped institutionalize an ideological bias that threatens progress on issues like climate change and food security.

“The anti-nuclear movement is partly responsible for global warming,” Lynas told The Observer. “Everywhere, pretty much, where a nuclear plant was cancelled, a coal plant was built instead, and that’s because of the anti-nuclear movement. The environmental movement has been very successful in regulating GM [genetically-modified agriculture] out of existence in some parts of the world.”

Read the whole thing as Matthew peels apart the Greenpeace finances (almost 30% of your donations go to fundraising!).

And please do not miss the Mark Lynas lecture at the Oxford farming conference.

Merkel’s Offshore Wind-Power Dream for Germany Stalls

Published March 17, 2013 Energy Policy 3 Comments
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At some point the German voters are going to figure out they have been scammed:

RWE AG (RWE) is delaying investments. SIAG Nordseewerke GmbH filed for insolvency. REpower Systems SE is cutting temporary staff. All show how German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 550 billion-euro ($734 billion) plan to replace nuclear reactors with renewable sources is stalling.

About 700 workers demonstrated in Hanover last week calling for more support from Merkel to the offshore wind industry. Her 2011 plan to shutter atomic plants and add sea-based wind farms that could cover an area six times the size of New York City remains bogged down amid wrangling over financial risk-sharing and upgrading the transmission grid.

“It’s a chaotic standstill,” Claudia Kemfert, who heads the energy unit at the Berlin-based DIW economic institute and advises the government, said in an interview. “Actions have failed to live up to promises.”

Merkel wants to more than triple the share of renewables in Germany’s power mix by 2050 in the biggest energy overhaul in the country’s post-World War II history. The costs and scope of the project have moved energy to the center of the political agenda as the chancellor seeks re-election this year.

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Are global wind power resource estimates overstated?

Published March 17, 2013 Energy Policy Closed
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The answer to the captioned question is “Yes”, probably overstated by a factor of 5x to 10x. This isn’t an issue for small, dispersed collections of turbines – but it is absolutely a big problem at the scale Germany is planning for offshore wind.

Harvard’s Amanda S Adams and David W Keith recently published their modeling and analysis of the impact of scale on available wind resources in Environmental Research Letters. 

(…) Each wind turbine creates behind it a “wind shadow” in which the air has been slowed down by drag on the turbine’s blades. The ideal wind farm strikes a balance, packing as many turbines onto the land as possible, while also spacing them enough to reduce the impact of these wind shadows. But as wind farms grow larger, they start to interact, and the regional-scale wind patterns matter more.

Keith’s research has shown that the generating capacity of very large wind power installations (larger than 100 square kilometers) may peak at between 0.5 and 1 watts per square meter. Previous estimates, which ignored the turbines’ slowing effect on the wind, had put that figure at between 2 and 7 watts per square meter.

In short, we may not have access to as much wind power as scientists thought.

(…) “One of the inherent challenges of wind energy is that as soon as you start to develop wind farms and harvest the resource, you change the resource, making it difficult to assess what’s really available,” says Adams.

(…) “If wind power’s going to make a contribution to global energy requirements that’s serious, 10 or 20 percent or more, then it really has to contribute on the scale of terawatts in the next half-century or less,” says Keith.

If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, “the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts, but at that point my guess, based on our climate modeling, is that the effect of that on global winds, and therefore on climate, would be severe—perhaps bigger than the impact of doubling CO2.” 

Environmental Research Letters Volume 8 Number 1; Amanda S Adams and David W Keith 2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8 015021 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/015021

Besides scalability and intermittency there is the minor issue of “how much does it cost“.

German Energy Policy Contradicts Environmental Policy

Published March 17, 2013 Energy Policy 1 Comment

Germany really needs adult supervision:

(…) As Germany’s environment minister, it is Peter Altmaier’s job to balance the interests of both sides. But the CDU politician spent his first months in office singing the praises of renewable energies only to then turn around and warn with increasingly grim forecasts of an explosion in electricity prices that can no longer be controlled. Indeed, nature conservation doesn’t exactly top his list of priorities.

Last summer, when he presented his personal 10-point renewable-energy plan, it occurred to him, just in knick of time, that he was also responsible for environmental protection. He then pulled out a few meager words on nature and water protection, which have yet to be followed up with deeds. Nor has any progress been made on a noise-control plan relating to the building of offshore wind farms that had been announced with much fanfare.

At least Norbert Röttgen, Altmaier’s predecessor and fellow CDU member, conceded during his time in office that nature protection might ultimately risk getting put on the back burner as a result of the nuclear phaseout. He even set up a Nature Conservation and Energy division within the ministry to address the issue. Nevertheless, it is the champions of renewable energies who are increasingly dominating the ministry’s policy line, with the traditional advocates of nature and environmental protection just standing back and watching in astonishment. “In decision-making processes, we either get listened to too late or not at all,” says one ministry official. “Nature protection just isn’t an issue the minister has taken up.”

Read the whole thing at Spiegel Online.

Ben Heard: “New wind power at low penetrations cheaper than new baseload fossil in Australia”

Published February 12, 2013 Energy Policy Closed
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Ben Heard is the prime mover behind Zero Carbon Options and the proprietor of the reliable Decarbonise SA. Recently Ben did a great job taking apart a misleading Bloomberg report headline. 

(…) This headline comes from new analysis from research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance  who have found ‘electricity can be supplied from a new wind farm at a cost of AUD 80/MWh (USD 83), compared to AUD 143/MWh from a new coal plant or AUD 116/MWh from a new baseload gas plant’.

This may have caught people by surprise, not just that the wind is cheap(ish) but that the new fossil is costly.

But if you have already spotted the flaw, you get a star. This analysis, and the breathless headline accompanying it, are a great demonstration of how to be correct and irrelevant all at the same time.

These figures compare the cost of electricity production between:

  • Marginal costs of introducing incremental new wind, which will be intermittent with capacity factors around 30%
  • Marginal cost of introducing new modern coal, which would be baseload and quite large, with potential capacity factors above 85%
  • Marginal cost of introducing new baseload gas, which would be combined cycle plant, again quite large, again with potential capacity factors above 85%

All three produce ostensibly the same product (electricity), but they do not provide the same service. A new wind farm, with the well understood intermittency does a poor job of meeting our requirement for baseload, being the minimum electricity demand required at all times.

If you want to compare these sources fairly, you need to set them the same challenge, namely that of providing baseload.

(…)  

Read Ben’s complete post and don’t miss the comments by informed regulars at Brave New Climate. E.g., I loved Robert Wilson’s quip comparing wind to real baseload power: 

It’s like train taking me half to London, but costing me less than one that goes the whole way.

Why nuclear loan guarantees are not a taxpayer subsidy (Southern Co vs. Solyndra)

Published February 3, 2013 Energy Policy 1 Comment
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Rod Adams wrote an excellent post explaining why the US taxpayers were subsidizing Solyndra (feels good). But contrary to the anti-nuclear activists claims, the type of loan guarantee available to qualify nuclear utilities is not a subsidy at all. It is a financial market transaction, one where the US federal government can offer a product at a better price than a public corporation (think Treasury bond yields vs. AAA corporate bond yields).

Reading through the many resources that Rod offered I came across the following NEI summary table. This is a simple, but accurate way to quickly understand the fundamental difference.

 But first, I recommend you read Rod here: Enormous differences between Southern Co & Solyndra, where you will learn why Southern Co. has not accepted the DOE guarantee offer. 

Nuclear Energy Loan Guarantees Renewable Energy Loan Guarantees
“Skin in the game”:  Nuclear energy companies receiving a loan guarantee pay the credit subsidy cost – the fee that covers the risk to the government of providing the loan guarantee. “No skin in the game”:  Renewable energy companies receiving loan guarantees do not pay the credit subsidy cost. The credit subsidy cost is paid by taxpayers through appropriations.
Loan Guarantee for Vogtle Nuclear Power Project Loan Guarantee for Solyndra Solar Facility
The Vogtle project is being developed by Georgia Power Co., which has been in business for 100 years supplying electricity to the citizens of Georgia. The Solyndra project was a start-up, with no significant corporate track record.
The Vogtle project uses proven light water reactor technology, which incorporates innovative features to provide even higher levels of safety than America’s 104 operating nuclear plants. Solyndra was manufacturing unproven, experimental technology.
The Vogtle project is a “full recourse” corporate financing. In simple terms, Georgia Power has pledged its $26 billion in assets to ensure repayment of the guaranteed loan. The Solyndra transaction was a “non-recourse” project financing. In simple terms, if the project failed (as it has), the Department of Energy has no recourse to any assets beyond the manufacturing facility itself.
Georgia Power is a profitable enterprise, with net income exceeding $800 million in each of the past three years. Solyndra was not profitable.
Georgia Power is a regulated, fully integrated electric utility. Because it is regulated, it has reasonable assurance that it will recover its costs through rates. This results in stable cash flow. In addition, under state law, Georgia Power can recover its financing costs during construction of the Vogtle project. This relieves stress on cash flow during construction. Solyndra had no such assurance of steady, predictable cash flow.
Georgia Power Co. and Southern Co. (its parent) are both A-rated, investment-grade companies. Even before its bankruptcy, Solyndra was not considered investment-grade. Fitch Ratings assigned the company a B+ credit rating in 2008, before it received the DOE loan guarantee.
 
 
 

 

 
 

 

 

Burton Richter: America’s Nuclear Future

Published January 30, 2013 Nuclear Costs , Nuclear Power Closed

We cannot get a coherent accepted long-term plan. The French have a long-term plan. The Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians have it. We don’t have it. That’s not the fault of the labs, that’s the fault of the administrations.

Burton Richter is my #1 choice for energy policy advisor. In the recent Breakthrough interview you’ll read the true story of the state of Gen IV reactors and what passes today for “US policy”:

When it comes to nuclear energy, Dr. Burton Richter is Mr. Credible. Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for discovering a new sub-atomic particle, Richter has advised presidents and policymakers for almost 40 years. Richter has been a Breakthrough Senior Fellow since 2011, and is technical adviser to the forthcoming documentary, “Pandora’s Promise,” about pro-nuclear environmentalists.

Breakthrough interviewed Richter recently to get his opinion on next generation nuclear reactors, and why so many of them are being developed abroad and not by the Department of Energy in the United States. “The DOE is too screwed up to go into a partnership and do this in the US,” the blunt Richter told us, referring to the Bill Gates-backed nuclear design pursued in China by Terrapower.

Is DOE really to blame? In the end, Richter told us it was partisan polarization that was the problem. “George W. Bush actually had a good thing on next generation nuclear,” Richter said. “When the Obama people came in all the Gen IV activities were stopped. With a system that keeps changing its priorities every few years, the [National DOE] Labs are pretty demoralized. The French have a long-term plan. The Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians have it. We don’t have it. That’s not the fault of the labs, that’s the fault of the administrations.”

And that’s the fault, we might add, of irrational environmentalist and progressive fears of nuclear energy — something “Pandora’s Promise” hopes to change. Read the rest of our interview below.

What is the future of next generation nuclear reactors?

(…)

What about the reactor designed by Nathan Mhyrvold and backed by Bill Gates through Terrapower?

They had to change designs because the original design of a kind of slow-burning candle didn’t work. The new version is supposed to have a core that would be sealed for 50 years. But it’s not completely sealed because you have to shuffle the fuel rods. One advantage is that that at the end of 50 years, the waste is so impure that nobody would want anything to do with it for making a weapon.

Terrapower is being done in China because in the US there’s no way he could get it licensed. And the DOE is too screwed up to go into a partnership and do this in the US.

We always hear from people that DOE is screwed up. But what exactly does that mean? Can it be fixed?

Consider the fact that the DOE can, at one of its labs, go ahead with an experimental fission system that is not approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). After all, the DOE is supposed to develop new technologies, while the NRC is supposed to deal with things in the civilian nuclear world.

In other words, the labs don’t need NRC approval to make a 5MW version of TerraPower’s reactor. They could just go do it. But it’s so agonizing to get [lab] approval for that kind of thing. So political. Ultra-greens would say too dangerous and NRC has to approve it, and NRC would say it will look into it and it would take a decade.

That’s the reason Nathan [Mhyrvold] and Bill Gates said, “Let’s build the first one in China.”

Is the problem with Congress or DOE?

Both. At DOE there are a lot of layers of bureaucracy and very little continuity. Everything changes with every new administration. The long-term goals change. The result is that the labs have become very conservative.

With a system that keeps changing its priorities every few years, the labs are pretty demoralized. We cannot get a coherent accepted long-term plan. The French have a long-term plan. The Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians have it. We don’t have it. That’s not the fault of the labs, that’s the fault of the administrations.

Is this a problem of ideological and partisan polarization?

George W. Bush actually had a good program on next generation nuclear. We were part of the Generation IV International Forum, working closely with Japan and France. We had a program that was headed toward certain kinds of advanced reactors, including liquid sodium, and a high temperature gas reactor. When the Obama people came in all the Gen IV activities were stopped. Yucca Mountain was shut down. And we’re off in totally new directions.

Partly, but there were even changes between the first George W. Bush term and the second. In first term, they were talking about reprocessing, and the second Gen IV designs. We have an on again off again program that changes too often. The next problem is the budget. The DOE nuclear budget is a complete mess. They are working off of a continuing resolution, and in that process you always take the lower budget line from either the Senate or House. This creates massive amounts of uncertainty in the programs.

Who can change that? Can Obama just tell the labs to build a next gen nuclear reactor?

No, it has to go to Congress to change. The whole structure has to change.

What’s your general impression of the integral fast reactor (IFR), the prototype of which ran at Argonne-West [which is now part of Idaho] National Lab, and is now being marketed by General Electric as the PRISM reactor?

The IFR is a sodium-cooled fast spectrum reactor with all the good and bad that come with it. The one sodium cooled reactor at Hanford ran for thirty years until we drilled a hole into it [after Congress ended funding for it in 1994]. France and Russia built versions as well.

What’s new to the IFR is the on-site reprocessing, and the feeding back of the actinides [radioactive elements like uranium and plutonium] back into the fuel, so that nothing ever leaves it. The new IFR trick is in the electrorefining [sometimes called pyroprocessing] to reprocess the waste into new fuel, making it a continuous fuel cycle. So think of the IFR as a liquid sodium fast spectrum breeder reactor with a trick as to how to do the separation of actinides in an effective fashion.

Electrorefining is the most interesting new element in the IFR, but it has been hard to figure out how to get it working well enough to be used commercially.

Who is working on improving electrorefining?

South Korea is very interested in electrorefining and would like to do a joint program with the US. The question is whether we’ll let them do it. The 123 agreement we have with them says that the US has to agree to any reprocessing. The Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee to the DOE has said that if you’re going to do this, then having a Korean partner would be a great idea.

Wouldn’t technologies like the IFR greatly reduce the amount of waste needed?

You need a geological repository anyway because you always have fission fragments, and that’s the really radioactive stuff. So if pyroprocessing worked perfectly the long lived components would be removed to be used as fuel, and after 500 years you wouldn’t have to worry about them any more because the radioactivity would be low.

So you’ll still need a repository, though probably not for 100,000s of years. But there’s a big if here. How efficiently can you separate these long-lived actinides from the fission fragments? If you allow only a few percent of the actinides in, then it will be for 100,000s of thousands years. It has to be really good. Right now, it’s not that good. The people working on it say they have good ideas but they haven’t fixed it yet.

(…)

 

Understanding Energy Efficiency Rebound: Interview with Steven Sorrell

Published January 30, 2013 Energy Policy Closed

Do not miss this Steven Sorrell interview, which ends with this realistic answer:

Is your experience that policymakers view the whole discussion of rebound as sort of bad news?

The argument that you can boost the economy, reduce energy consumption, reduce emissions, and boost welfare all at the same time is very seductive. If you start raising questions about whether that is really the case, it doesn't go down too well. People react defensively and don't want to hear. You end up with a highly polarized debate that generates more heat than light. It gets in the way of sensible discussion of how important these effects are and what we might do about them. In my experience, this problem is worse in the US than in Europe, but it applies everywhere.

More to come on this important work…

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