Nuclear Power: High-Grade Uranium Soars, Low-Grade = Mucho Greenhouse Gases: Nukes NOT THE ANSWER

[Dems Will Win]

"It may well be true about the pebble bed and waste," he allows. "But then, okay, back to the old drawing board!"
- Stewart Brand on hearing that the new Pebble Nukes produce 10 times the radioactive waste of old designs



Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute reveals the truth of nuclear power economics and why this old technology can never be part of the solution for global warming.

Enthusiasts claim hypothetical new reactors might deliver a kilowatt-hour for 6¢, vs. 10+¢ for post-1980 plants. (Nearly 3¢ pays for delivery to customers.) But super-efficient gas plants or windfarms cost 5-6¢, cogeneration of heat and power often 1-5¢, and efficient lights, motors, and other electricity-saving devices under 2¢; and they're all getting cheaper.

... buying nuclear power instead makes global warming worse. Why? If delivering a new nuclear kWh cost only (say) 6¢, while saving a kWh cost (pessimistically) 3¢, then the 6¢ spent on the nuclear kWh could instead have bought two efficiency kWh.

Gales of Change: Global Annual Additions of Electrical Generating Capacity

In 2004, decentralized cogeneration and renewables, excluding big hydro dams (any over 10 megawatts), added 5.9 times as much worldwide net capacity as nuclear power added, and raised annual electricity production 2.9 times as much as nuclear power did. By the end of 2004, these decentralized, nonnuclear competitors' global installed capacity totaled ~411 GW*--12% more capacity than global nuclear plants' 366 GW--and produced ~92% as much electricity. Thus the "minor" alternative sources actually overtook nuclear's global capacity in 2003, rivaled its 2004 and will match its 2005 output, and should exceed its 2010 output by 43%. They already dwarf its annual growth. Official and industry forecasts indicate they'll add 177 times as much capacity in 2010 as dwindling nuclear power will. And they're dwarfed in turn by demand-side opportunities, not graphed here because reliable global implementation data aren't available.

So the big question about nuclear "revival" isn't just who'd pay for such a turkey, but also...why bother? Why keep on distorting markets and biasing choices to divert scarce resources from the winners to the loser--a far slower, costlier, harder, and riskier niche product--and paying a premium to incur its many problems? Nuclear advocates try to reverse the burden of proof by claiming it's the portfolio of non-nuclear alternatives that has an unacceptably greater risk of non-adoption, but actual market behavior suggests otherwise.

* About 266 GW (billion watts) of mostly gas-fired decentralized cogeneration (emitting ~30-80% less CO2, depending on fuel), 47 GW of wind, 47 small hydro, 37 biomass/waste, 10 geothermal, and 4 photovoltaics.

The world's nuclear plant vendors have never made money, and their few billion dollars' dwindling annual revenue hardly qualifies them any more as a serious global business. In contrast, the renewable power industry earns ~$23 billion a year by adding ~12 GW of capacity every year: in 2004, 8 GW of wind, 3 GW of geothermal/small hydro/biomass/wastes, and 1 GW of photovoltaics (69% of nuclear's 2004 new construction starts, which PVs should surpass this year). PV and windpower markets, respectively doubling about every two and three years, are expected to make renewable power a $35-billion business within eight years. And distributed fossil-fueled cogeneration of heat and power added a further 15 GW in 2004; it does release carbon, but ~30% less than the separate boilers and power plants it replaces, or up to ~80% less with fuel-switching.

Windpower's 50+ gigawatts of global capacity, half of U.S. nuclear power capacity, paused in 2004 due to Congressional wrangling, but is expected to triple in the next four years, mainly in Europe, which aims to get 22% of its electricity from renewables by 2010. One-fifth of Denmark's power now comes from wind; German and Spanish windpower are each adding as much capacity each year (2 GW) as the global nuclear industry is annually adding on average during 2000-10. No country has had or expects economic or technical obstacles to further major wind expansion. The International Energy Agency forecast in 2003 that in 2010, wind could add nine times as much capacity as nuclear added in 2004, or 84 times its planned 2010 addition. Eight years hence, just wind plus industry-forecast PVs could surpass installed global nuclear capacity. The market increasingly resembles a 1995 Shell scenario with half of global energy, and virtually all growth, coming from renewables by mid-century--about what it would take, with conservative efficiency gains, to stabilize atmospheric carbon.

Whenever nuclear power's competitors (even just on the supply side) were allowed to compete fairly, they've far outpaced central stations. Just in 1982-85, California utilities acquired and or were firmly offered enough cost-effective savings and decentralized supplies to meet all demand with no central fossil-fueled or nuclear plants. (Alas, before the cheaper alternatives could displace all those plants--and thus avert the 2000 power crisis--state regulators, spooked by success, halted the bidding.)

Today's nonnuclear technologies are far better and cheaper. They're batting 1.000 in the more competitive and transparent processes that have swept most market economies' electricity sectors and are emerging even in China and Russia. A few Stalinist economies like North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Belarus still offer ideal conditions for nuclear sales, but they won't order much, and you wouldn't want to live there.

No wonder the world's universities have dissolved or reorganized nearly all of their departments of nuclear engineering, and none still attracts top students--another portent that the business will continue to fall, as Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén warned, "into ever less competent hands," buying ever less solution to any unresolved problem than in the days of the pioneers. Their intentions were worthy, their efforts immense, but their hopes of abundant and affordable nuclear energy failed in the marketplace.

- Amory Lovins

http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid1151.php

Nuclear advocates say there is a new "inherently safe" design, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor. However, the only large Pebble Nuke resulted in a 1986 graphite fire in Germany, which the government then permanently closed as being "unsafe". Pebble nukes also produce 10 times the waste of conventional nukes.

Because they are "modular" and "inherently safe", the industry wants to build them all WITHOUT containment buildings, so they can keep adding reactors in series.
Yet they are not safe, as the German graphite fire and the resulting 2 km contamination showed.

More on the Pebble Nukes, the great glowing hope of the industry:

"It has some good features," says Dave Lochbaum at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Studies have shown that even if a cooling line breaks, it won't melt down.

I've come to Lochbaum, who works out of a tiny, barely ventilated office in Washington, D.C., because he has a reputation among anti-nuclear activists and industry advocates alike for limiting his assertions to what he knows to be true. And his organization is as nervous about climate change as it is about the perils of nuclear power plants.

"By not using water you've significantly reduced the amount of low-level waste you generate," Lochbaum says, and then pauses. "On the other hand, there is no free lunch. While it may not melt down, it could catch on fire. The pebble bed is like the Chernobyl reactor in that it uses an awful lot of graphite. None of our reactors operating in the United States use graphite in the core. Graphite's just carbon. If the carbon catches on fire, it's pretty hard to put out. It's particularly hard if you're using airflow to cool the reactor, which the pebble bed does. If you have a fire and you stop the airflow, you also stop the heat removal. So you may stop the fire and start the meltdown.

"You may not be able to get `fireproof' and `meltdown proof,'" Lochbaum says. "You may have to pick one or the other."

Which one is worse?

"I don't know," he says. "The Three Mile Island accident was a meltdown. It released a lot of radioactivity into the environment. We've never been sure how much. Chernobyl was a fire. Smoke carried the radioactivity into the environment. I guess they're pretty much the same."

There's one other problem with the pebble-bed reactor, one that's less a safety issue than a logistical one: "Because the pebble-bed doesn't have the same power density, or octane rating, as our current plants do, it generates about 10 times as much spent fuel for the same amount of electricity." In other words, 10 times the waste.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/51/features-lewis.php

The other Big Lie of the nuclear industry, that there is no way a mix of solar and wind can replace fossil fuel-burning power plants to solve global warming. This is simply not true. Not only can renewables and natural gas Cogeneration replace coal and other fossil fuels, they are already racing past nuclear in terms of capacity worldwide (see above)! And as Lovins points out, nuke economics buys you only half the Kwh, other cleaner and more immediate approaches do, including conservation.

In fact, by conserving 20% of energy in the US, adding 30 GW of wind power by 2020, 15 GW of solar by 2020, 20 Mw of power from additional more efficient generators at existing dams by 2020 and retrofitting and planning for natural gas cogeneration and sequestration of carbon, the US can reduce carbon emissions dramatically by 2020 without any nuclear expansion at all.

And then there's the final point. After Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island and the near Besse-Davis reactor disaster in Ohio in 2002, it is simply not possible to site a nuke in the US without at least 15 to 20 years of site permitting and litigation by NIMBY activists.

That is so delayed, that Amory Lovins points out that this cost of waiting must be figured into the poor economics of nuclear power--which he did not even bother to do.

In the light of poor economics, the radioactive waste issue, the history of diasters and leaks, and factors I don't even have time to mention--such as increased terrorism (Australia reports the 8 terrorists arrested were casing the Sydney reactor site)--the thought that nuclear power can be revived from the asheap of history is a mistaken one.

Please RECOMMEND if you don't like nuclear power...

[MadHound]

1. No, nukes are not the way to go, two inherent problems will keep them from ever being viable

Human error and the question of what to do with the waste. It is unrealistic to think that we could ever eliminate human error, and there is no safe, viable solution as to what to do with the waste. The only real solution would be to stick it all on a rocket to the sun, but the Columbia tragedy showed how foolish that notion is.

We don't need nukes either. Between wind, solar and biodiesel, we have plenty of safe, renewable, clean alternatives to fulfill all of our energy needs.

[Dems Will Win]

2. Exactomundo

[Igel]

3. I didn't catch the part of your post that justifies your subject line.

Nuclear power generates GHGs, or costs more in GHGs than it saves?