A little more than two years ago, I wrote a post entitled, "Renewable Electricity is Our Only Viable Option." The bottom line was that nuclear power plants were just too expensive. The 9.0 Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami has totally changed the comparison landscape, initially covered in my HuffPo last week.
I flew into Tokyo's Narita Airport on Day Two of this crisis, barely got into my hotel room after a trying five hours of travel agony. On Day Four I took the advice of the French Embassy, again found my way to Narita, and thanks to United Airlines, escaped to Beijing. However, the feud China is having with Google is stifling my reporting ability, so I moved to Seoul to enable me to continue my personal blog. South Korea is #1 in net speed, but actually plunged 24% just with Apple's iPhone. Yes, connection is much slower now, at least from the W Seoul.
That aside, this is thus no knee-jerk reaction: Nuclear fission is now no longer an option for our society. Mind you, I have a pro-nuclear stance, and even penned "There is Something About Thorium," for The Huffington Post. But I'm afraid even this cleaner fission option now no longer has any real chance.
I still hold long-term hopes for fusion, but my experience working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser fusion, and my knowledge of the ITER magnetic confinement experiment in France, convinces me that we are at least a generation away, and more likely two or more, before any kind of commercialization will occur. I also have not totally discarded some hybrid form of cold fusion.
Here are the reasons why nuclear fission is dead:
1. Economics. Compounding the obvious from Part 1, all existing nuclear sites will now undergo a careful review, and those allowed to operate will no doubt be faced with massive retrofitting costs to withstand hurricanes and other potential natural disasters. Keep in mind that last year in the USA, there were 14 "incidents," which can only worry you if live close to any nuclear power plant. Click on "The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety in 2010" for details. Add terrorism factors, future storage concerns and the overly generous government benefits towards nuclear electricity and the cost factors can be multiplied. But for equal time, I was informed that there were 25 serious fossil fuel accidents last year, meaning that, I guess, renewable energy makes even more sense as the only option left.
2. Liability. Certainly, another cost item, but the matter of who will pay for any nuclear accidents could be a future killer for the industry. Presently, the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act largely protects them. In short, if you are affected by any nuclear disaster, your local utility will be obligated to cover up to $12.6 billion. Beyond that the government steps in to give you aid, maybe. Remember that the Fukushima earthquake damages will exceed $300 billion, although nature's earthquake and tsunami caused most this destruction. It's a bit more complicated than this, of course, but the underlying motivation had to do with the Department of Defense encouraging the industry when they chose uranium/plutonium over thorium to provide material for atomic bombs. In the future, society will not permit this largesse to nuclear investors. I don't think most within a hundred miles of any nuclear power plant realize all this.
3. The attitude of the public. Three Mile Island effectively prevented any new nuclear electricity development in the U.S. and Chernobyl for at least a decade just about killed world interest. Fukushima has now wiped out any future construction for a long time to come. Consider that every one of Japan's 55 nuclear reactors are at their coastline, many on the Ring of Fire. China had 25 new nukes in the pipeline and today suspended their approval. This is a country that is desperate for power, were planning to expand from the current 10,800 nuclear megawatts to 86,000 MW by 2020, but so quickly and summarily coming to this decision is breath-taking indeed. Checking with local authorities who should know, though, they are skeptical that this pronouncement has any real meaning except for possibly good public relations.
4. Freshwater. Now that any new nuclear power plant at the coastline (and they are built there because seawater is used as the coolant) will be resisted, what about building them away from earthquakes sufficiently inland? Well, consider that half of the water consumption in France is utilized by their 58 nuclear generation facilities, and you get the picture.
5. Worst case scenario. This is hyperbole and rhetoric, but if Fukushima #3 had exploded like Chernobyl, imagine an area about the size of Switzerland remaining contaminated for at least a 100,000 years. Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years, but 24,000 years later, half the radiation remains. Chernobyl did not have plutonium, and their restricted area will supposedly be kept unused "only" for 300 years. Gray smoke on Day 12 from Fukushima probably means burning fuel rods. Black smoke on Day 13 could well mean burning cement, meaning that it is all over, the rods are melted. I can only fear the worse, and hope I'm wrong.
Toss in peak oil and global warming into the above cauldron and we have an explosive mixture that can only be ameliorated by renewable energy. The problem, though, is at least two-fold: time, or the lack of it, and the incapability of our decision-makers to make command decisions with our democratic form of government heavily influenced by lobbyists. China just did it, but I'm afraid the USA will mostly diddle and dawdle.
So you ask, what can our government do? Well, perhaps the "10% Simple Solution to Peace" can now be considered.
By the way, the Huffington Post published a parallel article the same morning as this posting:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-takahashi/the-great-sendai-earthqua_b_834994.html
which provides a blow-by-blow reportage of the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. Curiously, though, while this article will draw more than 50 comments, that one has ZERO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
are now also DOA, other than the public's appetite for guilt by association?
I.e., from my perspective, unless further techno improvements make photovoltaics and lithium batteries a lot cheaper and massive "point-of-use" installation is shown to be reliable enough to overcome infrastructural bureaucracy, less than half our electricity can come from renewables.
That leaves zero meltdown potential LFTRs, which can also burn up most of our existing rad wastes, as the only viable option remaining.
Meanwhile, where's the national program to commercialize LFTRs?
I suggest that you write another column that assesses these issues in more detail.
I've encouraged Kirk Sorenson to swiftly advance the cause. Go to:
http://energyfromthorium.com/
"That leaves zero meltdown potential LFTRs, which can also burn up most of our existing rad wastes, as the only viable option remaining."
Exactly what I say! I'm much more fearful of those past 50 years of radioactive wastes hanging around for millenia where they shouldn't be. That is an assured catastrophy when the human race can't do the right thing for 50 years, let alone the 100,000 years to render these wastes less toxic. So let's double down on the right kinds of nuclear ractors and burn up the bulk of those wastes, and make our way to clean fusion in a century or two.
The president of Singapore makes $3,376,8000/year, and will get a raise to $4,267,500. President Barack Obama makes $400,000, with an annual expense budget of $500,000. But the Singapore President also has a generous expense budget. This country of 5 million (307 million for USA) has a leader that makes ten times the salary of our President. Oh, Hu Jintao, president of China, makes $10,633/year. (Also, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad $3/000/year and Hamid Karzai $6,300/year.)
How did I get here, anyway?
Power generation is going to have to change in this country. I think we're going to see a transition to smaller, more local and diverse sources of electricity supplying us. I live in the mountains and a lot of people around here have made it a priority to get off the grid entirely. There are a lot of local businesses seeking to help them do that in the most affordable way possible. I think we can make a transition without sacrificing our electrical comforts.
5. Worst case scenario. This is hyperbole, but if Fukushima #3 had exploded like Chernobyl, imagine an area about the size of Switzerland remaining contaminated for at least a 100,000 years. Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years, but 24,000 years later, half the radiation remains. Chernobyl did not have plutonium, and their restricted area will supposedly be kept unused "only" for 300 years.
Well, maybe thorium should now take center stage.
1. Economics: Retrofitting existing plants may not be necessary.Many of the lessons from Fukushima and Three Mile Island are already implemented in Gen III+ reactors.The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) has the potential to produce electric power < 3 cents/kWh.
2. Liability: The Price-Anderson act requires makes each of 100+ US nuclear plant responsible for $1 billion of loss from any accident at another nuclear plant -- $100 billion. Japan's $100-200 billion losses were caused by the earthquake, not the reactors.
3. Public attitude: TMI did not prevent new reactor construction -- Shoreham NY did, with billions of dollars of investment wiped out by Governor Cuomo's refusal to permit the completed plant to operate.
4. Freshwater: Water is not "consumed", but either warmed or partially evaporated to cool power plants. Nuclear, coal, and thermal solar all have about the same cooling requirements. New designs such as LFTR operate at higher temperatures and can be air cooled.
5. Worst case: There is indeed plutonium in the spent fuel of Chernobyl and Fukushima and all of today's nuclear reactors -- about 1%, created in the reactor by neutron irradiation of U-238. The LFTR produces < 1% of the 1% of the plutonium of today's reactors.
http://nuclearpoweryesplease.org/blog/2011/03/22/patrick-takahashi-doesnt-estimate-the-situation-correctly/
Anyway, I noticed another site entered by one of your readers, and would like to attach it here, for this individual (Hiroshi Takashi, who I don't personally know) apparently is quite familiar with the situation in Japan:
http://www.counterpunch.org/takashi03222011.html
I agree that the nuclear debate sometimes sounds like a religious debate. I'm not specifically fans of light water reactors at all. But we are pro-nuclear due to the potential of it. We kind of try to think like David Mackay(Renewable energy without the hot air). Not so much pro nuclear as pro arithmetic. All the numbers, ecological footprint, resource consumption, external costs per kWh etc makes sense and thats why we are pro-nuclear. If numbers where to arrive that show differently then our opinion can change. I deeply wish that a move away from LWR would take place though and its my hope that this accident will accelerate that transition. Like you I am a fan of thorium.
An inexpensive, green, Low Energy Nuclear Reactor (LENR) is now in production.
It is inherently much safer than existing nuclear plants and uses non-radioactive Nickel, not radioactive Uranium, as fuel.
Power cost is projected at one penny per kilowatt hour.
No nuclear waste is produced.
See Cold Fusion at www.aesopinstitute.org to learn more.
A one Megawatt heating plant is scheduled to open in Greece, in October.
A scientist has said when these compact modular units, which can be linked like solar panels to produce any desired power level, begin producing cost-competitive electricity it will start a "stampede".
Competitive designs are being developed. Early regulatory approval may prove possible..
These developments could cost-competitively undercut any need for new Uranium fueled nuclear plant production.
And LENR designs have no possible chance of a meltdown!
These are Black Swans - Highly Improbable developments with huge potential impact.
Other potential Black Swans are mentioned on the same website.
Given grid long-term power failure vulnerabilities, small is increasingly attractive and beautiful.
"Power cost is projected at one penny per kilowatt hour."
I heard that line 60 years ago from the nascent nuclear industry.
If this actually pans out, I will owe you a huge apology, but for now I don't believe it. The multinationals have proven that they can own even our government, and they'd own this as well if it were real.
But, it will surprise nobody if the consumer is charged more.
That is a projected cost to the party owning the generator.
You have know idea just how very, very expensive nuclear is, do you?
In a way, though, I agree with you that renewables would not be the answer for a world population of 7 billion, at least not in the next decade when Peak Oil will strike. Perhaps for 2 billion, yes. I'm actually beginning to be influenced by some of those noisy doomsday pundits.
We could make headway in keeping nuclear in the mix, but just like climate change and energy depletion, it calls for a massively better informed citizenry.
The situation in Japan is distressingly scary, but it won't necessarily be catastrophic, for any but the locals. It remains to be seen how local is local.
A miniscule percentage of the citizenry know that there is nuclear tech right now that is capable of reducing the nuclear risk literally hundreds of times what it is right now with all these old light water reactors sitting around mining plutonium for us. That's what scares the hell out of me, nuclear wastes with half lifes of up to 24000 years siting in containers next to reactors that can go ballistic. If those wastes had half lifes of several hundred years such as with a thorium reactor or if the wastes were reprocessed and rendered considerably less lethal over time in a pebble-bed reactor, we might make it until fusion. Most new tech reactors are designed to cool down on their own after disaster. They don't use self-sustaining reactions but must be constantly fed to keep the reaction going.
My contention is that the only way to deal with the eventually catastrophic nuclear waste issue is to double down on Nuclear power with reactors that create manageable wastes and burn up the unmanageble wastes from the last 50 years. Get these lethal old reactors and their preposterous toxins off line over time.
The BUILT ENVIRONMENT is the place for solutions, not millions and millions of acres of healthy wilderness areas currently being targeted by Goldman Sachs (Cogentrix), BP, Chevron, etc. for Big Solar and Big Wind, and the sun shines MORE than enough on the rooftops, parking lots, warehouses and in-city brownfields to produce ALL the renewable energy we need!
Many many organizations are being paid to greenwash Chevron Solar, BP Wind and other destructive, expensive boondoggles (many of which waste billions of gallons of water a year, too!), because they all know that conservation, passive heating/cooling and ROOFTOP PV are a serious option, now, and threaten the Big Energy Monopolist status quo, which they are frantically trying to maintain with these insane remote, centralized power plants.
PLEASE, support conservation, efficiency and clean, non-deadly solutions, that are owned by US, and are sited within the built environment and refuse to be sucked into the Big Energy greenwash of their wilderness-killing, extremely expensive and GHG emitting Big Solar, Big Wind and Big Transmission messes. We can't afford - environmentally or economically - another "woops" version of energy destruction...
In fact, the households and businesses that will be forced to buy the power from Big Solar could produce the exact same net power from their own properties (on a per watt installed basis) as air-cooled desert CSP (operating at much lower efficiency whenever it's hot outside, and net of high-temp transmission losses).
Insolation is ~ 10% lower in the SCE ratepayer territory than in the Mojave, and (tracking) PV/CSP are basically equal in capacity factor at the same location (~27%), so the reduced output from heat (~12%) and from transmission (~8%) means non-tracking PV (~17%) in the relevant built environment and desert CSP net out the same power and the same price, only ONE of them kills wilderness, monopolizes power, is vulnerable to hacking and weather and creates only half as many jobs, while the other improves property values and stabilizes the grid.
So why should Big Energy dominate a future ideally suited towards decentralization and democratization? seems like we should be aiming for "internet" as a model, not "dead end one-way street," right?
Their past track record is what we will get again - dead wilderness, pricing and supply manipulations and parasitic speculators between us and our energy. How is that an "important part of our future?"
PLEASE don't misjudge the severity of the energy hammer that is starting to decimate our long held conceptions of the economy and growth. I share your preferred solutions of solar/conservation, but I'm certain that we can't get over the transition from dirty-finite to clean-renewable energy without using every energy source in our arsenal including the old, dirty ones to make the systemic infrastructure and lifestyle changes necessary. As Patrick responded we need big oil and industry (and lots more) if it has even a shot at getting done to scale.
To give a rough idea of the task at hand and the wonder of the finite, dirty fossil fuels that we have built our civilization around here's one comparison of energy density. PV solar energy is of limited worth without a storage system for the electricity that it can create. The energy density by weight and volume of the expensive batteries in a Chevy Volt are less than 1/50th that of gasoline.
Urban environments just don't have the space area in the locations necessary for solar to handle the whole load, because solar panels need unrestristed access to the sun. Without an electricity base load that isn't intermittent our lives would run in fits and starts. Wind coupled with solar can do some smoothing of energy supply but it isn't enough. Battery technology is not yet up to smoothing out the load at any reasonable cost. It'll get there, but it isn't there now.
here's the bottom line - if you are serious about the economy, the environment, democracy, grid stability, jobs, property values, water or AGW, rooftop solar and money-saving conservation are the BEST option. they are fastest, cleanest, fairest and most reliable. since ~50% of our grid load is PEAK power which corresponds very closely to rooftop production hours, let's knock that out NOW while better storage solutions come online.
sitting around waiting for Chevron to save us is insane on about 50 levels. all we need are the proven, affordable, reliable and FAIR solution of german-style feed in tariffs, and everyone with a sunny roof will clamor to install. it's happening in canada, italy, japan, and the czech republic already, and could happen here if we weren't so pathetically deranged and dependent on our Big Energy overlords.
Utilities can convert to load-balancing, distribution and billing entities and stop being generation monopolies. It's happened in computing, phones and the internet - now we need to decentralize and democratize the grid and do it FAST.
I agree with that assessment. I'm also afraid that the world has less time than our governments are counting on. Right now, various world governments are committed to reducing carbon dioxide by 80% by 2050. Recent research into global warming has shown that the climate models that goal is based upon are too conservative and that the true goal should be 0% emissions by 2050 (or before). Yet the US government has largely dragged its feet on this issue. The main strategy seems to be to ignore it in hopes that it goes away.