Is the Climate Bill Being Fossil-Nuked?

Is the Climate Bill morphing into an excuse to promote fossil fuels and new nuclear power plants?

Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) recent promotion of a pro-nuke/pro-drilling/pro-coal agenda in the name of Climate Protection has been highlighted in a New York Times op-ed co-authored with Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC). The piece brands nuke power "our single largest contributor of emissions-free power." It advocates abolishing "cumbersome regulations" so utilities can "secure financing for more plants." And it wants "serious investment" to "find solutions to our nuclear waste problem."

The Senate Bill as now drafted also includes a "Clean Energy Development Administration" that could deliver virtually unlimited federal cash to build new reactors and fund other mega-polluters.

Also on the table are vastly expanded permits for off-shore drilling. And Kerry/Graham have talked of making the US "the Saudi Arabia of clean coal" while bringing "new financial incentives for companies that develop carbon capture and sequestration technology."

If you think pushing nukes, oil wells and coal mines to "prevent global warming" is counter-intuitive, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The give-aways are allegedly meant to attract GOP votes. The joint Kerry/Graham op-ed is being billed as a "game changer."

But even with provisions pushing a hundred new reactors in the US alone, some GOP stalwarts hint they would never vote for a bill that includes cap-and-trade clauses. So is the GOP set to play the same game with climate legislation as it has with health care: prolong negotiations, gut the substance of reform, demand--and get--untold corporate give-aways, and then oppose the bill anyway?

What thin green substance survives could be limited to a few showpiece handouts for renewables and efficiency, with cap-and-trade as the centerpiece. But many environmentalists argue that cap-and-trade could create yet another costly bureaucracy with little real impact on the climate crisis.

To get real about solving this crisis, Congress should demand--and fund--a definitive national transition to energy efficiency and modernized mass transit. We still waste half the energy we consume. There's no source of usable juice cheaper and quicker to install than increased efficiency.

Taxes on carbon and other forms of "ancillary" pollution would help if they assess radioactive emissions (from coal as well as nukes), destruction of our oceans,lakes and rivers, removal of mountain tops, creation of nuclear waste, and so on. Merely axing the subsidies to King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas) and rendering a level playing field for true green energy sources to fairly compete with the old fossil/nukes would take us a long way up the road to Solartopia. A feed-in tariff that rewards renewables for the pollution they avoid would also help.

Without all that, the Climate Bill's outright negatives could be huge. Atomic reactors can do little or nothing to bring down carbon emissions. Projected construction costs for new nukes have jumped from $2 billion to $13 billion and counting. Body-blows to the all-but-dead Yucca Mountain nuke waste dump have left the industry, after 50 years, with nothing tangible to do with some 50,000 tons of spent lethal radioactive fuel rods. And after a half-century, the industry cannot command private construction financing or private liability insurance to cover a catastrophic melt-down or terror attack. Even if reactors could help with greenhouse gas emissions, it would take a trillion dollars or more to make a noticeable dent, and a decade or more for such reactors to begin to come on line.

But the reactor lifeline does not flow through licensing or waste. Because it has failed as a commercial technology, the industry must have massive infusions of cash and loan guarantees. The Climate Bill's real damage will be measured by the size and scope of reactor subsidies, if any.

Kerry's willingness to entertain "clean coal" and new offshore oil drilling as "solutions" for climate chaos staggers the imagination. It seems to signal that King CONG still owns Washington, and that any meaningful Congressional push for green power will demand serious re-direction from the grassroots.

DC insiders generally doubt that any Climate Bill can pass this year. Afghanistan and health care still dominate the national agenda.

But Democrats are desperate for SOMETHING to show at December's Copenhagen Climate Conference. The question is: how much will they give fossil/nuke Republicans to get a bill--any bill--with the world "Climate" attached?

The anti-nuclear movement has three times defeated proposed $50 billion loan guarantees for new nuclear plants. The environmental community still understands that solving the climate crisis requires the ultimate phase-out of fossil fuels. "A carbon-free, nuclear-free energy future is within the Senate's reach," says Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. "The approach laid out by Kerry and Graham would lead to a climate bill in name only." NIRS is organizing a national call-in this week ( http://nukefree.org/news/callyoursenatorsoctober15 ). A nationwide series of demonstrations for the environment will take place October 24.

Preserving our ability to survive on this planet demands we phase out fossil fuels and nuclear power, and win a green-powered Earth based solely on renewables and efficiency. Ultimately, we cannot live with less.

Comments

[JShep]

Coal is the worst pollutant in our power industry, but currently generates almost half of our electricity. Nuclear has disposal and safety problems, not to mention being very unpopular. Natural gas, though less polluting than coal, is still a major source of carbon emissions and requires drilling. It's very easy just to say replace it all with renewables. But, wind and solar are currently very expensive and its questionable as to the amount of total US energy needs they can meet (Existing ideally located wind farms are only 30% efficient at best). So, before any individual source of power is dissed, we need to take a comprehensive look at an overall power production and distribution plan sufficient to meet all the US's needs. The time required to replace undesirable power generation sources also needs to be addressed. With wind & solar accounting for less than 5% of our total power generation, it will take many decades to replace coal, not to mention the impact of the resulting increased cost of energy. Anyone who thinks it will be easy to replace existing coal and nuclear power plants does not have a good grasp of the facts. We need a detailed national plan that covers all the future energy needs and how to provide them.

[Matt Wasson - Huffpost Blogger]

It's entirely reasonable to say we can't simply take energy technologies off the table and there are a host of complexities in getting off of nuclear and coal, but your facts, JShep, are terribly misleading. It's just not true that wind and solar, at least at industrial scale, are expensive compared to building new coal and nuclear plants. Building new wind power, in particular, is already less expensive than building new coal and nuclear plants on a levelized basis in most parts of the country and the difference gets more favorable to renewables all the time. The problem is that big energy companies want us to believe that new coal and nuclear plants would produce power at a similar cost to existing coal and nuclear plants, but the reality is that they will generate electricity at 2-3 times current costs.

Yes, moving to renewables will mean more expensive electricity than what we pay now - at least for a while - but building more coal and nuclear plants will mean even more expensive electricity than that. People need to stop taking the analyses of big energy companies at face value, they're just not telling the truth.

[YCSTS]

Absolute nonsense. Wind right now is running $2-$3K per pk kw purchase price, onshore. Pickens largest ever Wind Purchase was $2k per kw. Now let's add a minimum of $300 per kw installation. And a reasonable minimum of $500 per kw for the quadruple oversized transmission infrastructure. So now we are up to $3.3k per kw pk. USA avg capacity factor 2008 was 23.5%. So now cost is up to $14k per kw.

Wind is extremely unreliable and intermittent. You need energy storage AND backup power. Just 2 hrs peak smoothing batteries add $400 per pk kw which makes $15.7k per delivered kw. And we still need fossil fuel backup power, minimum $1200 per kw plus high fuel price. So typical onshore (cheapest) Wind runs about $17k per kw for unreliable, environmentally destructive energy that eats up fossil fuels in backup mode.

Before the Coal Lobby had the NRC (Nuclear Rejection Commission) instated, Nuclear Reactors in the USA were coming in at an average of $1100 per kwe with Quad Cities 1800 MWe coming it at $680 per kwe, that’s in 2007 dollars!!

From BraveNewCl­imate.com: “…look at the cost of the Advanced Boiling Water Reactors (ABWRs) that were built in Japan in the late 90’s at a cost of about $1.4 billion/GW, and the Chinese’ recent estimates for the final cost of their first two AP-1000s ($1.76 billion/GW)….”

The truth about Wind Energy:

http://www.aweo.org/ProblemWithWind.html

[JShep]

You missed the main point of my comment. Pologize if it wasn't clear. Before we push forward with any single or combination of power generation sources, we need a comprehensive national plan that accounts for all power needs and how they can be satisfied. Not all areas are ideally suited for wind or solar and both require some type of backup for times that the "wind don't blow and sun don't shine". Remember what happened when environmentalists stopped the proliferation of nuclear power plants but didn't push any acceptable alternatives. We just got expanded coal plants and more NG plants. Their honest intentions actually resulted in more pollution. We need not repeat that problem. We need a comprehensive national plan before we embark on a major overhaul of our power generation and distribution system.

[EvanRavitz]

The ONLY reason nukes were ever built was because Congress (the opposite of progress) in 1957 indemnified the industry against liability for a big accident -like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Anderson_Act Without this nukes couldn't be insured without greatly increasing the price of their electricity. Still, nukes are so expensive that nobody will build them without huge taxpayer subsidies. And there's still nowhere to put the 50,000 tons of poisonous nuclear waste that's sitting in leaking cooling pools everywhere, perfect targets for terrorists.

Read what the world's foremost energy expert, Amory Lovins has to say, in his famous mathematical way: http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid467.php Amory wrote "Soft Energy Paths" in 1977 which convinced utilities & policy-makers NOT to build lots more coal plants, but to invest in efficiency instead. Because of that Amory is responsible for saving more energy, money, pollution and climate change than any person alive.

[sethdayal]

While Lovins has a lot to say on the subject he has not graduated from any university that i could find - academic qualifications incomplete. He certainly could not be considered an energy expert.

My earlier comment stated that the entire 50000 tons of waste can be used as fuel for Gen IV reactors. You must have missed that.

You also missed the comments on nuclear cost. Google China Westinghouse AP1000 you find the cost of nukes to be far less than any alternative including fossil fuels.

Big Coal/Oil are terrified of nuclear as it is so inexpensive it could easily put them out of business. Their well financed no nuke propaganda has people so scared of nukes for absolutely no reason that attorneys were lined up waiting to sue the local nuke plant it the toilet backed up. Hence nuclear liability acts.

[YCSTS]

Armory Lovins, " ..the world's foremost energy expert...". That's got to be one of the stupidest statements in human history. The man is just another pseudo-greenie (green on the outside, black as coal on the inside), riding the fossil fuel gravy train. He collects big cheques from the likes of Chevron, whereupon he heartily embraces their Hydrogen Economy bait-and-switch Scam. Meanwhile Chevron, buries the NiMH battery for electric vehicles - you don't hear Armory complain about that.

A couple good quotes from Armory:

"Complex technology of any sort is an assault on
human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to
discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy,
because of what we might do with it."

I guess he doesn't like the high tech Prius.

"Coal can fill the real gaps in our fuel economy....."

Runaway Global Warming catastrophe, here we come.

[poomplet]

I love green-on-green catfights!!

Particularly the one where Jim Lovelock, perhaps the most respected, quoted. longest-tenured global warming activist/e­nvironment­alist on earth (who Al Gore cites a LOT in his film/book) has been saying for over a decade that the ONLY thing that MIGHT save our planet would be the immediate and massive global switch to nuclear power plants.

100%...all nuclear.

"BUT...BUT­....BUT...­what about nuclear waste?" Jim sez that it won't matter, as nuclear waste + a living planet trumps waste stockpile + EXTINCTION.

So then, we get to see people like Gore, Harvey & all the other "wind & solar is all we need" dreamers trying to figure out how to say he's dead-wrong when they know how well he researches things...they KNOW they'd get mauled in a straight-on debate of facts, studies and predictions.

[sethdayal]

Steward "Whole Earth Catalog" Brand and James "Gaia" Lovelock are on the same side of this issue.

Add Brand's new book Whole Earth Discipline or Lovelock' s The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning to your reading list.

[YCSTS]

Sunny Spain has just had an epiphany of sorts, about Solar Energy, after figuring out that all they are getting for taxpayer costs of $26.4 billion is a miserable 450 MW average output or an ASTOUNDING $58,670 PER KW!!

And Germany's Solar program, by 2013 it is expected to be 1375 MW avg. Which will cost the German taxpayer US$113 billion, that’s $82,000 per kw avg. Compare with Nuclear – ABWR’s built in Japan in the 90’s cost $1400 per kw, Chinese recent estimates for the final cost of their first two AP-1000s at $1760 per kw.

You think Wind is Green? You are ignoring the problems of Grid Integration and need for Fossil Fuel Backup energy. THE TRUTH ABOUT WIND ENERGY: is summed up with these facts. #1 Wind Energy country, Denmark has the highest power rates in Europe and produces the highest CO2 emissions of 881 gm CO2 per kwh of electricity, #2 Wind Power Germany produces 601 gm CO2 per kwh, while Nuclear France produces 83 gm CO2 per kwh, lower than any industrialized country in the World, and has the lowest electricity prices in Europe.

To learn about Texas Wind Energy, see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUbGZHXD7fM

[sethdayal]

There should be a huge land tax on wind and solar projects which use roughly 400 sq miles and 50 sq miles a baseload gigawatt compared to football field sized nukes. How about a tax on materials wasted as wind plant uses 60 times the GHG producing steel and concrete of a nuke plant.

How about a hundred bucks a unit tax on all the millions of avians and bats windmills kill. How about a tax on deafening whales and porpoises. What about the 30 years down the road disposal of the thousand of tons of arsenic from the hundreds of thousands of sq miles of desert those solar panels you are planning will destroy forever.

And what about gen IV reactors like the new Indian, Russian, Chinese, Westinghouse and Sandia units which run 30 years without refueling on those 50000 tons of re-processable fuel rods leaving a tiny amount of low level waste. France's 50 years of nuclear waste would cover a soccer stadium a foot deep compared to the hundreds of thousand of square miles of destroyed solar desert and dug up wind farms.

Fortunately India and China with plans for 450 and 120 gigawatts of nukes are leading the world in ending GHG production. At least if the Republicans can get Obama to see reason, we might get a start with a minuscule hundred gigawatts or so.