Thanks to weathergirl, for alerting me to this article, by Alan Roberts and Christopher Scanlon, in today’s Age. As I’ve been feeling too lazy to go up to the corner to buy the rainforest edition today, I might otherwise have missed it:
The problem with satire is that it has a nasty habit of becoming common sense. Yesterday’s absurdity becomes today’s accepted wisdom.
Take nuclear power, for example. It wasn’t so long ago that we all laughed at Homer Simpson’s prayers of thanks for nuclear power: “And Lord, we are especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is. Except for solar, which is just a pipedream.”
Moving on from the problem with satire – which I might have to renounce, if that opening paragraph is right – Roberts and Scanlon pour a bucket of ice water on the idea that nuclear power is going to be our greenhouse salvation:
But nuclear power only looks greenhouse-friendly from a distance. If you take a closer look, it’s far from a solution to the climate crisis.
The first problem is the widespread idea that most greenhouse gases come from electrical power. Unfortunately for all of us, that’s not the case. In 1999 the International Energy Agency estimated the world emissions from electrical networks at less than 39 per cent of total emissions.
…
Whichever figures we go by, it’s evident that even total removal of the fossil fuel stations from the equation would still see a vast quantity of greenhouse gases pouring into the atmosphere every year. Substitution by nuclear power could achieve no more than set back its damage by a few years.
And it gets worse – to find out how much, just go read the whole article, already.
* – it isn’t always easy coming up with these catchy titles you know.
That reminds me of another great Simpson’s quote: “Fossil fuels, use us and no-one gets hurt”.
Listen fan of human abbatoirs and the people that fill them.
Try and figure out what we want here.
The issue is NOT reducing greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gasses, or at least CO2……. IS GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!
The issue is we want more power. Because more power………….. IS GOOD and enhances peoples lives. And the greater the supply the cheaper the cost.
So get rid of this nonsense about warmer arctic winters being evil. YOU are evil. Warmer arctic winters………….ARE GOOD.
Have we all got that straight yet?
The first problem is the widespread idea that most greenhouse gases come from electrical power.
Here are some graphs which show greenhouse gas emissions by sector in Australia.
I’m not sure what to make of that graph. If you look at 2006, it seems that the stationary energy consumption is on par with the other ones (around 50/50)… or is it?
It looks to be about 50%. That graph is from mid-2005, but I doubt it has changed too much.
SO let’s see how the economics play out. The bottom line remains that we have to generate base load electricity in Australia from either coal or nuclear, or a mix (always including our very limited hydro). If the newer nuclear is price competitive with the new clean coal burning technologies, good. We have more and better options.
MarkL
Canberra
According to the government’s figures, it’s almost exactly 50%.
Now, not all of that is immediately replaceable, but all the coal is, and coal seems to represent about two-thirds of that figure. So if we replace all our coal with nuclear, that’s a one-third cut in our greenhouse emissions, getting us more than half-way to the target of a 60% cut by 2050 that’s advocated by, for instance, the UK. According to the UK sustainable development commission (1) , the net emissions from a nuclear plant, taking into account the energy cost of construction, decommissioning, mining, fuel preparation, and waste disposal, is about 2% of a coal plant – so it’s a huge saving, despite the numerous handwaves made in the full article you’ve quoted (which is a pretty poor argument coming from a physicist – rather than merely noting the existence of construction and mining emissions, if they wanted to argue that they’re as much as coal or gas power they should have actually provided some numbers to back up their claim).
Secondly, most of the serious proposals for replacing petroleum for transport fuels involve either using electricity directly (in, say, pluggable hybrids) or using hydrogen, either by burning it or in fuel cells. (anybody who mentions biofuels, try George Monbiot’s maths (2)). To create the hydrogen, you’re either using electricity to electrolyse water (which, to make sense in a greenhouse context, must be from a non-emitting source), or you’re making hydrogen from fossil fuels and sequestering the resulting CO2. So nuclear power can be a part of the transport fuel solution, not to mention a lot of the non-electricity stationary emissions – for instance, replacing gas burners with electric elements when heating is required. It may not turn out to be the best way of doing so, but it certainly represents a plausible way of doing so. You’ll note that if such a hydrogen economy takes off, virtually all the emissions in the mining and construction go away, because the energy used is itself carbon-free.
So at the very least nuclear power can get us half-way to our (very, very challenging) long-term emissions reductions goal, and in combination with electric or hydrogen-electric transport, might get us closer still. If it can do that cheaper than any other alternative, isn’t that worth serious consideration?
Sorry about the non-link links, LP seems to have problems with URLs containing question marks.
1) http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications.php?id=344
2) http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/
Whether it is 50% or 39%, that is still a sizable percentage, no?
Robert Merkel:
How many nuclear power plants would we have to build to replace all coal-fired plants?
What about the extra capacity needed for back up, disaster recovery and peak overheads?
How much would these plants cost? What is the tax payer subsidy for this amount of plants? What cost is the electricty (without subsidy) for the plants to make a profit?
Finally, how much uranium is needed to run those plants, and how much high-level radioactive byproduct would these plants generate in a year, where would this byproduct be stored, bearing in mind that we need to store in a way that it’s retrievable if we ever find a use for it?
I guess that’s what an inquiry is for, but I don’t trust this government to run a scientific inquiry scientifically. Its about some cheap consortium of mates getting a mates rates discount and taxpayer subsidies for their pet meccano project.
To answer questions briefly, in turn:
1) To replace our coal-fired power, we’d need roughly the same capacity in nuclear. I don’t have figures close to hand for the whole of Australia, but for Victoria to replace the brown coal generation we’d need roughly 6 GW of capacity – roughly half a dozen 1GW power stations (most of the generation III reactors put out about 1GW of power).
2) You need those with coal as well. Neither nuclear nor coal is used for peak overheads – that role is played by hydro and gas. The new South African PBMR design can be used for peaking power, but it’s rather expensive if operated in that role.
3) That’s the billion-dollar question. According to the ANSTO report, right now, more than standard coal, but not that much more – less than geosequestration, and much less than renewables. Their “base case” was the Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor (there are alternatives, notably the Canadian ACR-1000). Roughly, if we built the first Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor (and so paid for Westinghouse to learn how to build them), with no subsidies whatsoever, the resulting cost of electricity production would be about $67 per Mwh compared to about 38 for coal. In practice, we won’t be doing that, because the first few will almost certainly be built in the USA and China. The fifth would be about $46 per Mwh. The “nth” reactor (think around 2020 or so) would cos about $36 per Mwh – cheaper than coal. In ten years time (once they’ve got enough practice building the new-generation plants), it should be less than non-geosequestered coal.
4) Rather than run the calculations myself, here’s some annual spent fuel generation figures. Note that even in the US, the total amount of spent fuel created each year is about 2000 tonnes. Remember that this stuff is extremely dense (on the order of 10 tonnes per cubic metre), so the total volume of waste we’re talking about is 200 cubic metres for the 104-odd plants the US runs. So we’re talking about 2 cubic metres of spent fuel per plant per year. As to where we’d put it, for the first few years it’s generally put in a cooling pond at the reactor site. After that, you can keep it in storage casks indefinitely, until you find a permanent disposal site, which will presumably be deep underground burial in stable rock a few thousand kilometres away from population centres, the Murray-Darling basin, and so on.
In addition to what Robert said, I found this just stupid.
Wow its like a mystery why its lower in Europe!
It’s lower in Europe because France, Germany, the UK and Spain etc already generate a signifigant amount of power via nuclear. 80% for france, 36% for Spain and around 30% for UK and Germany. So the main reason its not closer to 50% in Europe is because of nuclear power, and the reason its 39% and not closer to 50% globally is because 16% of electricty globably is nuclear.
Obviously nuclear power isn’t a panacea for our greenhouse woes, but by the same token it may be able to solve a big chunk of them.
I was curious about that para too, SE, and you’re right to point it out. But the following statement suggests he the authors did, in fact, account for this in their sums. I’m wondering whether the subs might have edited out a linking or clarifying sentence cut for space? (It’s happened to me, before.)
I think the latter part of the argument holds more water than this part.
FWIW, I’m no great fan of nuclear power – I think it’s expensive and the non-proliferation issues are very real. But that article had an awful lot of crap in it.
To take just one at random: ” … the uranium in all the known rich-ore bodies in the world … would keep them going for just under nine years. Thereafter, the world would have no nuclear power stations …”. That’s an obvious non-sequitur because the fuel doesn’t have to come from currently known rich ore bodies (no-one has bothered prospecting for more uranium for decades, even extracting it from seawater only boosts total costs by about 3 percent, and anyway there’s always breeder reactors). That’s why no-one will ever be prevented from making nuclear weapons by lack of access to yellowcake.
Hmmm, I posted a reply to Steve Edney half an hour ago and it didn’t appear.
I was curious about that para too, Steve. You’re right to point it out. But the authors’ following statements suggest they factored this into their reckoning, so I’m wondering if a sub-editor cut out a linking or qualifying sentence. It’s happened to me before.
But certainly, the authors’ last arguments hold more water than this one. And the other thing they didn’t mention is, can we trust this government (or subsequent governments?) to regulate such an industry adequately? Nuclear poses an unnecessarily dangerous situation, when other, infinite resources are on offer to us. I think resorting to nuclear rather than investing in other technologies demonstrates a lack of imagination, to say the least.
Weathergirl, I gather you are referring to this claim:
This is complete nonsense. Remember that all those energy inputs would have to be paid for. If they really massively exceed the amount of energy you get out, the cost of paying for all that input energy would far outweigh the value of the electricity you sold. And that’s before you’ve paid the salaries of the people who built, fuelled, and operated the plant, not to mention the cost of capital to build it.
That UK sustainability report I linked to in my last post provides some numbers on the energy analysis if you’re interested. They estimate that the net emissions are about 5% of gas-fired power.
It appears that Alan Roberts understands the physics, but not the economics. The problem is not that 800 square kilometres of solar collector wouldn’t generate the required power (about 300GW on average?) , but that the existing technologies vary from being very expensive compared with other power generation methods (solar towers), to being in a completely different ball-park (photovoltaic cells). And that’s before taking into account the cost of the infrastructure required to move that power from the places where it can be effeciently collected to the places where it is used.
Sorry about the dual postings. One didn’t appear (til later) and then I posted the second.
RM, thanks for providing that. I just hope that the current (some would argue politically-stacked) committee weighs up these issues against the likelihood that a government would (1) not palm-grease/give corporate welfare to the industry to distort this equation, and (2) adequately regulate such a dangerous industry. I’m not confident it would.
Weathergirl, they are two reasonable points.
WRT point 1), without sounding like a broken record I agree with the position of myriad economists who have advocated a carbon tax or permit system, and then letting the market sort it out. If renewables or geosequestration turns out to be cheaper than nuclear, great.
As to point 2), we already rely on this government (or state governments) to regulate Lucas Heights, building standards, food safety, aircraft safety, drug safety, and so on. I don’t think there’s much evidence to suggest that we are significantly different to any other Western nation on our ability to regulate these. Given that nuclear power plants have operated in the West for over 40 years and killed virtually nobody, I don’t see why Australia would be uniquely incapable of doing the same, particularly as we have the benefit of those decades of experience to draw upon and would be building the newest, safest plant designs.
It’s impressive, all those clever people totting up the cost on nuclear power relative to coal, renewables etc.
The Alan Roberts article did point out the time gap. To have nuclear power up and running will take more than 20 years – climate change well on the way then – so nuclear would be too late, enyway – as a climate change cure.
Is ANYBODY able to tot up the cost of virtually permanent waste disposal. combined with virtually permanent security measures around that waste?
Come to think of it – what about the security costs of transporting the stuff around, and of guarding nuclear plants too?
But then the nuclear industry doesn’t care about that – the taxpayers of the future will pay for all that!
All these clever people, totting up the economic cost of nuclear power versus coal and renewables!
The Alan Roberts article did point out that nuclear power wouldn’t be up and running in Australia for over 20 years – too late to work as a cure for climate change.
Nobody seems to want to tot up the cost of the virtually permanent nuclear waste disposal, with its equally virtually permanent security measures. And what about the cost of security measures to transport the stuff around, to guard nuclear reactors – in their life-time, (a relatively short one) and after thet’re out of action, while still radioactive.
Well, of course that’s economic, because the cost will be borne, not by the industry, but by the tax-payers of the future – our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc.
Is that the satire?
Ok all you sundry nutballs.
Can you all tell me why CO2 is BAD….
You see you are all being totally mindless in this regard.
Now the other thing is that Bob Hawke is right. We ought to get every little bit of radioactive material and bring it here to Australia while these irrational ecological fears give us this window of opportunity.
Because its only a matter of time before we will be able to harness what surely will be a major resource. Imagine getting this all for free……… nay… getting to take this stuff off peoples hands and being paid for the priveledge.
They used to just have this big flame firing off natural gas on top of these oil refineries….
Such a waste.
Such a waste.
Bob Hawke was a terrific Prime Minister.
You should listen to him more.
“..In dismissing solar power, Homer has to overlook the recent United Nations report saying that an 800-square-kilometre area of the Sahara could generate enough electricity for the whole world.”
What is the potential return on capital incurred.
Who amongst us will continue to work, even work harder, make more money and SAVE LIKE BUGGERY TO PROVIDE THE RESOURCES FOR SUCH A MASSIVE PROJECT?????
You are right of course. But we might also buy a diamond elevator 100km high so that we can build solar factories in space and transfer the energy through laser.
But you can only get the capital to do these things by deferred consumption.
RM: with regard to your second point, what I worry about is that, under this current government (and even state Labor governments) the trend is to DEregulate all these things.
We had a superb air transport record, for example, with a history of ample ground time and a strongly regulated (and union-based) groundstaff. As soon as this changed we started hearing about “incidents”. Of course, thankfully, so far nothing disasterous has happened, but if we “let[] the market sort it out” on this issue, you can imagine what could. Letting an unregulated market behave ethically takes a huge leap of faith I’m not prepared to take on this matter. The market-view of “risk management” doesn’t equate with the more scientific utilitarian precautionary principle.
I don’t agree that the Howard government HAS adequately regulated industry as you suggest: deaths in the workplace far exceed road accidents, violence or HIV Aids.
I don’t agree it has adequately regulated the food industry, either: the Gene Regulator, for example, has allowed GM food products in our supermarkets which still contain antibiotic resistant markers, posing dangers not ruled out by current experimental data. As epidemiologist Judy Carmen has pointed out, the very real risk of novel DNA being taken up by microbes in the gut or tissue, or of new superbugs evolving in our stomach flora, cannot yet be identified using current studies — it may take 20 years to recognise if this is happening.
That public health regulation bodies are being stacked with drug industry interests is also a point. I could go on, but my point is, the trend is towards DEregulation, not heavy regulation. In this climate the risk of nuclear power is unnecessary when viable alternatives may be available.
Weathergirl, neither “conventional” risk management and the precautionary principle are “scientific”. At their bedrock, they are both philosophical positions with no particular connection to science, though a whole mathematics of risk management has evolved to support the needs of the insurance industry.
I happen to reject the precautionary principle on the grounds that it is ridiculously biased towards accepting the status quo over the unknown. It’s essentially the same damn argument the conservatives have been running with since Burke – It’s a big philosophical “here be dragons” that sits at the boundaries of the uncertain. For instance, Don Arthur pointed out a couple of years ago that if you accept the precautionary principle it is a powerful argument against, say, gay marriage.
In any case, I would argue that we already have a great deal of experience with nuclear reactors, and that we *don’t* need to be any more than averagely competent by western standards in regulating nuclear plants to have them operate safely. Countries from the USA to Japan to the UK to France to Sweden, have managed to do this (though the Brits have done their level best to run theirs uneconomically). Why would we so uniquely incompetent?
By the way, do you have any quantitative evidence that workplace deaths are getting worse? here is some data from Victoria from 1994 to 2004. Despite a growing workforce, the trend is down, not up.
Weathergirl, the precautionary principle, or for that matter risk management, are not really scientific. They are, in essence, philosophical positions, though plenty of mathematics has evolved to allow risk management to be quantified.
I happen to reject the precautionary principle on the basis that it is overly biased towards the known rather than the unknown – it’s Burkean conservatism by another name. For instance, Don Arthur pointed out that if you accept the precautionary principle it’s a rather potent argument against gay marriage.
As to your point, I would merely point out that Western countries from Spain to Japan to the United States, all with very different regulatory and legal cultures, have operated nuclear power safely. I see no evidence that we are uniquely incompetent to do so, given that we have the benefit of all their experience.
It’s getting slightly offtopic, but do you have any compelling evidence that recent regulatory trends have actually led to higher risks? For instance, according to the Victorian WorkCover Authority workplace deaths have consistently been trending down for the past decade.
weathergirl, I heard Judy Carmen on radio a couple of years ago and decided I wouldn’t eat GM food until she said it was OK.
Tim Flannery reckons we should give some priority to decarbonising our electricity grid, because it’s sizable, because coal is very dirty and a real problem, and because you can then use it for things like electric cars, or making hydrogen cells (if that happens) or whatever. I’m not in a position to have an opinion on nuclear power, but the notion that it will take 20 years to crank up shouldn’t rule it out as long as we don’t use it as an excuse not to make progress on other fronts. We’re going to need all the help we can get.
But I’d like to see more discussion of ‘hot rocks’ where I understood we had enough potential power to keep Australia going for 70 years from just one site in northern SA.
I’d also like to hear more about thorium.
My last comment got hooked in the moderation filter too. Wierd. I wonder whether this one will.
Robert, I hear what you say about the prcautionary principle, but there are situations where I still think it should apply. Like where something can cause deaths. Or where we are trying to keep diseases out that are known to be out there, and if impiorted, would wipe out or seriously damage a whole industry.
We’re still fighting the fire ant up here. They reckon they are beating it (a world first if they do) but it keeps popping up somewhere new. Toowong was the last one I heard.
But I also can see that if you were excessively worried about dying you wouldn’t get out of bed.
OK, RM, I should have said “science’s” precautionary principle, not “scientific” precautionary principle. To me it’s just common sense. If something poses a potential serious adverse risk, don’t introduce it until those risks are ruled out. It’s conservatism in the best sense.
And my deregulation points? What say you?
(BB: yes, JC’s work is excellent.)
Exactly, but under WTO rules they now do it the other way around. Even if you have good reason to believe something is dangerous, you can’t keep it out unless actual harm has been demonstrated.
The precautionary principle is a good one provided it isn’t applied in a heavy handed fashion. As has been pointed out before by a number of people, anti-biotics would never have got past an extreme application of the precautionary principle. This is because penicillin is fatal to guinea pigs as well as some people. Precautionary Principle purists could easily have derided anti-biotics as potentially dangerous toxins.
In the real world, “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost” are both right and wrong, depending on the circumstances.
We want both more coal and atomic energy production because more (and therefore cheaper) energy is good.
You leftists live in fear of all things. Yet all the empirical evidence tells us that nuclear power is safe.
Hey. What’s going on with the censorship? Surely its important here for the left to examine its irrational superstitions.
I know what you’re doing. You’re waiting for ten more posts before you can hide my one.
I’m asking these people to explain their insane and anti-scientific attitude to CO2. Surely this is an important question. And though there has been no serious problems with nuclear power in free enterprise countries they have taken a superstitious attitude to that also. This ought to be explored.
Weathergirl, I’m skeptical that the supposed trends in regulation (and I’m not convinced that there actually is a trend towards deregulation of safety and environment related matters) have actually led to increasing risks. For instance, the trend in workplace deaths appears to be down, not up. Similarly, the global trend in aircraft accidents is down (1). So are vehicle accident deaths (2).
Brian, if you’re interested in hot rocks, have a look at the Geodynamics website (3)- they’re a startup company doing trying exactly that in the South Australian desert (disclaimer: I own Geodyamics shares). However, while the principles are simple, nobody has yet actually run a power plant with HDR geothermal, and apparently at least some geologists are skeptical that it can be made to work cost-effectively (amongst other things, the fractures in the rock might clog up preventing the water from circulating).
There was an excellent >article on thorium-based reactor proposals in Cosmos (4). It should be noted that the “energy amplifier” discussed in that article is still a paper project. The Uranium Information Center has a slightly less enthusiastic take on the issue (5). Notably, most concepts for using thorium in existing reactor designs make use of small amounts of highly enriched uranium, or plutonium, as a “fire starter”. HEU and plutonium are directly bomb-usable, so such fuel mixes represent not insubstantial proliferation concerns.
1)http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/01/13/askthepilot169/index.html
2)http://www.monash.edu.au/pubs/monmag/issue15-2005/opinion/roadtoll.html
3) http://www.geodynamics.com.au
4) http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348
5) http://www.uic.com.au/nip67.htm
Seems a lot of comments are being held up here. In Robert’s case I think it was because of the number of links.
PanelbeaterBird sez:
The increasingly overwhelming scientific concensus is that too much CO2 causes global warming, a fact which I believe you acknowledge given you worship the molecule for that reason. Your view that we are in great danger of slipping into an iceage and need to pump out as much CO2 as possible is ridiculous. While an ice age would be devestating, the danger quite clearly is on the heating side as that is what it happening.
The reason why people won’t discuss it with you is for the same reason I won’t discuss, say, theories of geocentricity with you. Its a settled question as far as I am concerned.
Edney the above is the most intellectually dishonest comment I’ve seen in a long while. And I have my revenge over at Catallaxy.
“The increasingly overwhelming scientific concensus is that too much CO2 causes global warming…..”
You knew already that I agreed with this. You knew that. So why do we have an IMPLIED LIE ABOUT ME IN THIS STATEMENT. You knew already that I agreed that CO2 adds to the warmth of the world. And that what singled out my poing of view was that I explain very carefully WHY THIS IS A GOOD THING.
“a fact which I believe you acknowledge given you worship the molecule for that reason.”
Right. But its not “I believe” it “I know it for a fact yet see how I still tried to misrepresent your position.” So to third parties who don’t know any better you were lying about me. And we can see the reason for this intellectual dishonest. If we look under a microscope we can see no argument, no reasoning, that stacks up against my thesis in your link. You linked it but in the place of a counter-argument you put an implied lie.
You know that I’ll never let you get away with this sort of thing Steve?
Why try it on?
Right. So we don’t want these shenanigans to distract from the challenge I threw at you. Edney’s answer was no answer at all. So lets go over it again. Why do they try it on. Tch Tch.
“Ok all you sundry nutballs.
Can you all tell me why CO2 is BAD….
You see you are all being totally mindless in this regard.”
So why do you people think its bad. I don’t believe its all about the descendants of the Pakistanis.
coal is very dirty and a real problem, and because you can then use it for things like electric cars, or making hydrogen cells or whatever. I’m not in a position to have an opinion on nuclear power, but the notion that it will take 20 years to crank up shouldn’t rule it out as long as we don’t use it as an excuse not to make progress on other fronts.
Given that nuclear power plants have operated in the West for over 40 years and killed virtually nobody,
40 years is nothing, given the extremely long time frames – millennia — over which the radioactive waste must be managed. I find the concept of leaving our grandchildren with a lot of dangerous stuff because we refuse to adapt our comfortable lifestyle a bit abhorrent.
Time to close comments on this very old thread, before it becomes a venue for pointless stoushing. My bad – should have deleted the spam.