SeekerBlog

An essay by UK environmentalist Mark Lynas on the UK CCC renewables report. I don’t agree with the “major upscaling and support for renewables too” point but otherwise Mark hits all the important aspects of the new report. After reading this you will no doubt wish to also read Mark’s new book The God Species (it is wonderful – we are both reading the Kindle edition).

It is difficult to draw any other conclusion from the new Climate Change Committee renewables report than that headlined by the BBC and the Telegraph – namely that nuclear power is highly cost-effective and essential to scale-up if the UK is to achieve its carbon-reduction targets. But before the antis reach for their green ink, let it also be said loud and clear: decarbonisation cannot be realistically envisaged without major upscaling and support for renewables too.

In essence, the report provides strong evidence for something which can never easily be conveyed in a headline: that a portfolio approach on energy technologies, employing the best and cheapest of everything, is the best way forwards. Many green groups are now beginning to converge around this idea, which was ably demonstrated in DECC’s recent ‘2050 pathways‘ modelling exercise. Even Friends of the Earth – despite the occasional relapse into traditional anti-nuclear posturing – seems to have got the message that realism in energy is the best approach to climate campaigning. There can be no ‘either-or’ thinking if we are to successfully get to grips with decarbonising our economies.

The headline on nuclear economics is actually quite an important issue, however. Look at the table below:

What is most striking is that not only is nuclear cheaper than all competing renewables, but that it is also potentially cheaper even than unabated gas (although this assumes a carbon price of course) out to 2030 with a 7.5% discount rate. This suggests that economics is not much of an issue as regards to the energy technology mix we eventually end up with – what is far more important is public acceptability. Both nuclear and onshore wind suffer a hardcore of determined opposition. This has locked wind up in planning battles for years, and could stymie nuclear completely. Although broadly public opinion favours nuclear and renewables, it is the hardcore – whose views are not amenable to change – who will most likely determine policy simply because they shout the loudest.

The report also helpfully scotches both some anti-nuclear and some anti-renewables myths. To start with the latter first, it is clear that the issue of intermittency (wind not generating on still days, solar cutting out at night etc) is not a deal-breaker. That is not to say that intermittency itself is a myth, for as the graph below shows, it is a very real issue indeed; merely that it is technically and economically manageable. (I’ve put this graph in larger to aid reading of the small print; you can find it on page 55 of the PDF report.)

Look at the red dashed line, bringing together all prospective 2030 renewables outputs, including wind, tidal, wave and solar. In an illustrative 2-day scenario, renewables generation dips to near-zero on two occasions, meaning no electricity is being generated at all. Does this mean the lights go out? No – if planned properly, demand mangement, interconnections with Europe and backup generation can deal with this question in a cost-effective way. According to the Committee, the financial penalty for dealing with intermittency is only something like 1p/kWh for additional renewable generation even up to 80% penetration in a 2050 scenario. So don’t believe the anti-windies who tell you that the turbines on hills and out at sea are useless because sometimes the wind stops blowing.

Don’t believe either the anti-nuclear types who tell you that nuclear power stations simply can’t be built fast enough to deal with climate change. This is a favourite of the Green Party – Caroline Lucas trots out the myth every time she discusses the issue. But myth it is, as a glance across the Channel indicates: France managed to open 48 GW of nuclear generating capacity over one 10-year period back in the 1980s, far more than anyone is suggesting for the UK at present. Indeed, the build-rate issue is more of an argument against new technologies like marine renewables, which are still in the R&D stage and are unlikely to make a significant contribution to UK energy until the 2nd half of the 2020s at the very earliest.

It is important to bear in mind when discussing the future that costs change, and that estimates of costs two to three decades from now will be necessarily imprecise. If the peak-oil doomsayers are right, then the economics of energy are about to change radically. Even if they are not (and I don’t think they are) then the changing cost of renewables technologies – and the possibile deployment of fourth-generation nuclear – will put us in a very different position in as little as a decade from where we are today. Currently, for example, solar PV is wildly expensive in a UK context, costing 31-46p/kWh, as compared to 8-9.5p/kWh for onshore wind and 6-10p/kWh for nuclear. But falling costs could, in an optimistic reading of the technology cost curve, bring solar PV on a level with wind, gas and nuclear as early as 2030.

So what does all this add up to? It is simple: nuclear and renewables need each other, and all need to compete on a level playing field which sees the climate cost of fossil fuels brought in via a moderate carbon price (around £70 per tonne), whilst emerging technologies like marine renewables are properly supported until they are ready to compete. As the Committee emphasises, we need to totally decarbonise the UK’s electricity sector by 2030, which is completely unfeasible economically without both additional nuclear build and large-scale deployment of offshore wind. Indeed, the Committee’s “illustrative scenario” includes an identical deployment of 40% for both nuclear and renewables by 2030 (with CCS at 15% and unabated gas at 10%).

The UK is in an unusual position internationally, in that it has highly ambitious climate mitigation targets, and a strong cross-party consensus domestically on the need to achieve them. There are also moves afoot – with a planned Green Investment Bank, and the sensible announcement of a £30 carbon price floor in the last budget – to structure the market in such a way as to deliver the needed investments. What we need to do now is to get on with building, and to stop the infighting between proponents of renewables and nuclear in particular. In many ways, both face the same constraints, in the form of a planning bureaucracy and public resistance to change which makes it difficult to do anything at all.

So let’s stop arguing and start getting on with transforming the country towards becoming the world-leader on climate change that it so clearly has the potential to be.

[From Time to stop arguing and start decarbonising]

British environmentalist Mark Lynas has a tightly written article up explaining why so-called ‘waste’ is actually a resource treasure, and why we need to focus on building fast neutron reactors such as the ‘Integral Fast Reactor’ (IFR).

For decades we have all been told that nuclear waste is an unsolved ‘problem’ which makes future nuclear power development unethical because it will add to a toxic legacy left to poison our descendants thousands of generations into the future. The Yucca mountain controversy in the US and other debates about geological disposal seemingly illustrate the technical impossibility of guaranteeing to isolate a radioactive waste stockpile from the biosphere up to a million years into the future. But there is an easy way to solve this problem, and it doesn’t involve digging deeper holes – politically or physically. It involves remembering the principal ‘R’ word of the environmental movement: recycling.

In actual fact, the worst thing possible we could do with nuclear waste would be to throw it away. Worldwide stockpiles of ‘waste’ from thermal light-water reactors (which comprise the vast majority of civil nuclear reactors) already include enough fissile (or fertile) elements – plutonium, other actinides like americium and neptunium, and uranium (both U-235 and U-238) – to run the world on clean energy for centuries without having to go out and mine another gram of uranium ore anywhere. That so few people appreciate this fact suggests that igorance about all things nuclear is more profound than many of us would like to think, and especially so within the environmental movement.

(…)Waste-wise, IFRs or other fast reactors can generate prodigious amounts of clean energy by vastly reducing the current waste stockpile, but they cannot eliminate it altogether. Some fission products remain at the end of the process, and will need to be disposed of in a geological repository – probably after having been stabilised by vitrification (turned into glass). However, it is a misnomer to assume that these need to be isolated from the biosphere for thousands or even millions of years – in fact, after only a few hundred years, the radioactivity levels in the leftover waste will have declined back to those of the original naturally-occurring uranium ore, and they will become functionally safe much sooner. This is not a significant environmental problem, and indeed is much less of a challenge than the waste produced by other industries like electronics or metal smelting, which has no half-life and therefore remains toxic forever.

(…)So why, if they are so great, are we not using fast reactors already? Partly this is for political reasons, because it has long been thought that ‘breeding’ plutonium adds to proliferation concerns. Actually this is largely a misunderstanding, for all reactors produce plutonium – the issue is the need to design the fuel cycle so that bomb-grade materials are never separated, but fed back into fast reactors whilst still highly radioactive and unusable to terrorists or militaries alike. Fast reactors allow us to destroy plutonium stockpiles, and thereby reduce the dangers of proliferation. The big reason why fast reactors have stayed at the experimental stage (although 500 reactor-years of experience have now been clocked up in different prototypes around the world) is that uranium fuel is simply too cheap to be worth the additional cost of using efficiently or recyling. Only governments can solve this problem, by insisting that recycling be made an integral part of new fourth-generation reactor designs (like the IFR) in order to avoid the need for environmentally-damaging and carbon-intensive uranium mining and processing.

(…)As Tom Blees puts it in his book:

Thus we have a prodigious supply of free fuel that is actually even better than free, for it is material that we are quite desperate to get rid of. Uranium, plutonium, and other actinides, both weapons-grade and otherwise, will go into the IFR plants. Only non-actinides with short half-lives will ever come out. We will eliminate the problems of both radioactive longevity and the potential for nuclear proliferation.

I cannot imagine a more environmentally responsible proposal for tackling both climate change and nuclear waste/proliferation at the same time. Can you?

[From Good reasons not to waste nuclear ‘waste’]

Chris Anderson interviewed Bill Gates at the 2011 Wired Business Conference: Disruptive By Design. Excellent interview and a relaxed Bill Gates, who delivered some quips with sharper edges that his typical soft shoe. We appreciated his characterization of home solar projects as “cute”, where I would have said perhaps “feel good” stuff.

Bill Gates has a simple plan for the future of energy: Don’t rely on the cute stuff.

‘If we don’t have innovation in energy, we don’t have much at all.’

Sure, attaching solar panels to roofs, building windmills in backyards or deploying other small-scale energy technologies is a fine idea, Microsoft’s co-founder told a packed auditorium at the Wired Business Conference: Disruptive by Design.

Trouble is, they can’t significantly aide developing nations thirsty for cheap energy, he said.

“The solutions that work in the rich world don’t even come close to solving the [energy] problem,” said Gates, interviewed by Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. “If you’re interested in cuteness, the stuff in the home is the place to go. If you’re interested in solving the world’s energy problems, it’s things like big [solar projects] in the desert.”

Read the whole thing » The full transcript of the interview is here. The video is at Fora.tv.

The Royal Society of Chemistry hosted a formal nuclear debate. Sadly the video is published in Flash so I cannot download, nor display on the new Apple TV. The debate audience (hence voters on the proposition) were members of the Society (that is, scientists and engineers) so the outcome of the voting supported rationale energy policy. Greenpeace (Doug Parr) is of course on the wrong side. On his website George Monbiot introduced the debate as follows:

The motion was:

“New carbon targets require reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by 50% for 2030. This house believes that it will be impossible to meet the emissions reductions required to fulfil these obligations without the use of nuclear power.”

Speaking for: George Monbiot, Malcolm Grimston

Speaking against: Roger Levett, Doug Parr

Hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The motion was carried 63 – 9.

You can watch the debate here. It starts at around 6 minutes 30 seconds in. [From Nuclear Power Debate – The Film]

That seems to be the view of Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold at TerraPower. They seem to have concluded that their immediate future lies outside US regulation. Rosatom and TerraPower put out a press release that they are “drafting an agreement” in which Rosatom contributes some 16 billion roubles to the development. The recent 23 June 2011 NYT article on Terrapower’s overseas move is worth a read — the article is ambiguous regarding which country will get privileged access to the new technology.

(…) “We’ve had conversations with the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, the French,” Reynolds said in an interview. “We have an aggressive schedule where we think it is important to get something built and accumulate data so that we can eventually build them in the U.S. Breaking ground in 2015, with a startup in 2020, is more aggressive than our current [U.S.] regulatory structure can support.”

In addition to its unique fuel cycle, the TerraPower design employs a high-temperature, liquid metal core cooling technology suited to a breeder reactor with “fast” neutron activity, rather than today’s predominant reactors whose water cooling systems slow neutrons. TerraPower wants to partner with countries that are actively pursuing fast, breeder reactor technology. “That isn’t here right now,” he said, referring to the United States.

‘Breed and burn’ process

TerraPower’s design and other once-through reactor designs use a “breed” and “burn” process. The company’s CEO, John Gilleland, originally likened his reactor to a smoldering cigarette or cigar, with a slow-moving fission phase moving wave-like through the fuel core, generating neutrons to maintain a gradually advancing chain reaction while it consumes most of the fuel.

TerraPower’s scheme has changed as the research program has evolved. In the new version, the wave does not move, but remains stationary, and the fuel material is shuffled in and out of the breed and burn zones within the reactor, TerraPower officials say. Under this new approach, the reactor can still be sealed and run without being reopened for 40 to 60 years, Reynolds says.

Reynolds, who was chief technology officer in the United States for France’s nuclear developer Areva, said the greatest engineering challenge is durability of the metal alloy used to encase the fuel. The pilot plant will enable TerraPower to assess the impact of radiation damage on the specialized stainless steel alloy, to document its survival capabilities.

“We believe the material will tolerate [the high radiation impacts], but there is no data to prove it,” Reynolds said. “So one of the missions of the engineering demo is to accumulate that demo.

“And that is THE challenge. Everything else we know how to do.” Reynolds added that TerraPower didn’t start out with the goal of proving that fast breeder reactors could outgrow their troubled past.

“We’re not building a fast reactor just to build it,” Reynolds said. He said the approach was a response to the larger goals set down by Gates and Microsoft’s former chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, whose organization Intellectual Ventures developed the TerraPower concept.

Concept grew out of battle against poverty

“They were asking, what are some of the world’s largest problems” that could be addressed by new technologies. “The problem they settled on was poverty,” Reynolds said.

“You can’t really deal with poverty unless you have a sufficient amount of energy,” Reynolds said. “You can’t grow your family; you can’t build schools or hospitals; you can’t mitigate all the problems that are associated with poverty without energy. So how do you generate a lot of energy without contributing to global warming?” was the question, he said. “They looked at all the alternatives and settled on nuclear power.”

For advanced nuclear in general, including the vitally important development of Small Modular Reactors (SMR) I speculate the innovators will be moving their prototype and piloting efforts to the nuclear-friendly nations. Meanwhile, the US has the technical leadership – or I should say “had the leadership” until in 1994 Bill Clinton cancelled Argonne National Laboratory’s development of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). The leader of the IFR project, Dr. Charles Till, was interviewed for Plentiful Energy, the IFR Story. Currently the best source for information on the IFR is at Barry Brook’s BraveNewClimate.

BTW, Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman Jr. has endorsed the importance of fast-tracking advanced nuclear technology.

While he was still U.S. ambassador to China, Huntsman referred to TerraPower’s approach to China with a sense of frustration. “Right now, the regulatory environment here in the U.S. means that it would take decades just to certify the design,” he said at a U.S.-China energy summit last year. “By partnering with the Chinese, they can move ahead and commercialize the technology around the world when it is proven,” Huntsman said.

Steve has posted an excellent piece on SMR, referencing an op-ed by Dr. David McNelis (a member of Steve’s dissertation committee).

I’ve commented to Steve noting the expected improvements in safety to be delivered by SMRs due to manufacturing processes. It is not only less costly, but much more effective to “build safety in” via strong manufacturing process control systems. That is, more effective than trying to “inspect safety in” at installation time.

Unfortunately the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is neither budgeted nor staffed to process SMR designs through to licensing. Even if a vendor is financially capable of paying all the NRC expenses (as required by current law), the NRC doesn’t have the trained staff available to focus on a new applicant. Do you have a view of the additional budget the Congress needs to authorize if SMRs are to become real in our lifetime?

The smallish activity I am aware of is the industry-created “SMR Licensing Task Force” populated by 4 utilities, 5 SMR vendors and nuclear insurer ANI. The slide decks from the two recent meetings are: Regulatory Issues Related to Small Modular Reactors and Status of Generic Issues Related to SMR Licensing.

UPDATE: the US Department of Energy (DOE) is a possible source of financial support for the SMR licensing process. In fact DOE has proposed a small effort in the 2012 budget request: $67 million for “LWR SWR Licensing Technical Support”. In parallel DOE has requested some $29 million for SMR Advanced Concepts R&D – which I take to mean beyond-LWR designs, which would include PRISM, Hyperion and TerraPower.

I’m very pleased to see some DOE support, though I would vote for much more funding for at least two pilot reactors. Isn’t PRISM ready for a pilot?

The most recent NRC perspective is this page on Advanced Reactor licensing issues (last updated May 9, 2011).

Via Areva, Paul Fishbeck, Shilo Raube and Chriss Swaney at Carnegie Mellon have released their model for analyzing the consequences of shutting down various segments of the 104 US nuclear reactors. The results should be alarming to the German, Italian and Swiss politicians who have been stampeded by their green parties. The bottom line is straightforward: every NPP that is turned off increases both GHG emissions and electricity prices. The Carnegie team has published their spreadsheet model — so the EU (and Japanese) politicians can plug in their own national data to assess the damage that will be done to the environment and to their economies.

(…) “Turning off a single large nuclear power plant could require dozens of coal and gas-fired plants to ramp up production to make up the difference,” said Paul Fischbeck, a professor of social and decision sciences and engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon. “These plants use fossil fuels, cost more to operate, and emit pollution that can lead to acid rain and ozone, and CO2, a greenhouse gas.”

Fischbeck, a risk expert, added that some of the differences are large. “Replacing the Brown’s Ferry plant in Alabama with a mix of coal and gas power plants would cause CO2 emissions to increase by approximately 24 million tons each year. That’s the same as the annual emissions of over 4 million cars,” he said.

Dr. Fishbeck is affliliated with the consulting group DAI. The reported work may have been supported by DAI – I can’t tell from what I’ve seen. But from reviewing DAI publications it appears they have covered the waterfront in energy, electric generation and renewables. Reading through the DAI “Corporate Qualifications” will give you an overview of their studies and sponsors. They have been retained by investors interested in coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and natural gas projects.