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What's your response to Amy Harder's argument that environmentalists are missing opportunities to build consensus on climate change by opposing nuclear power and carbon sequestration projects? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Michael Barnard, low-carbon innovation analyst, on Quora:
What's your response to Amy Harder's argument that environmentalists are missing opportunities to build consensus on climate change by opposing nuclear power and carbon sequestration projects?
I have different answers for the two points. As a summary, carbon sequestration has proven itself to be incredibly expensive and hasn’t scaled at all after 20 years. Nuclear is blocked mostly because it’s too expensive, less than any concerns from environmentalists, and frankly doesn’t have the flexibility modern grid management requires.
Carbon capture
From a carbon capture and sequestration perspective, there’s exactly one sequestration project associated with a coal generation plant which is actually sequestering any reasonable amount of carbon. It’s in Saskatchewan, Canada. It was operating at 40% of targets for months and nobody noticed. It’s very expensive. I did an assessment of all sequestration efforts in Australia over the past 19 years recently and found that they had spent $4,300 AUD per ton to sequester a vanishingly tiny fraction of Australia’s emissions. The US CCS projects have gone vastly over forecasts and are abandoned and no new ones are projected. The UK government has stopped funding them.
She’s right that IPCC projections include a big chunk from CCS. I believe it’s a 20% contribution overall to the carbon budget. IEA cost estimates are targeted at 30% carbon capture at the source. But the problem with that is 30% not 100% and the cost of doing even 30% has been proven to be much higher. I’ve run the numbers using CCS industry projections of cost — very optimistic numbers reality has shown us — and actually getting to 100% would make coal generation cost 18–25 cents USD per KWH and gas generation 15–19 cents USD per KWH, both far out of the price point where they could continue to operate or receive financing. That almost all CO2 that has been pumped underground has been used in enhanced oil recovery is a serious problem with CCS as well. Using CO2 to get more CO2 isn’t a net win.
Are environmentalists saying that CCS doesn’t make sense? Yes, because 20 years of work has shown that CCS related to fossil fuel generation has failed to progress, deliver to milestones or show that it is capable of providing any useful contribution. It’s just not economically or practically possible. That doesn’t eliminate the potential for soil carbon capture or other mechanisms, but those aren’t what is being promoted by most organizations. Instead CCS has been a fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry to keep building plants, and one that they are discarding globally as is.
Support isn’t building for carbon capture as Harder asserts. Its mainstream focus areas are seeing collapsing support. It’s not clear what she’s reading but it’s not what’s actually occurring on the ground, what generators are saying or what utilities and governments globally are saying.
Nuclear
Is she right that a diminishing set of environmentalists are hyper-concerned about radiation and ignoring the low carbon value of nuclear power? Yes, but environmentalists aren’t nuclear power’s problem.
Its first problem is that it keeps getting more expensive while alternatives keep getting cheaper. It was in global decline in terms of absolute and relative generation since 2005, with a small uptick last year due to China’s deployment. That’s because it’s expensive compared to alternatives. Until recently it was fiscally challenged by natural gas generation. A handful of years ago it stopped being competitive with onshore wind. Now it’s not cost competitive with utility scale solar. Depending on the forecast, it’s either not competitive with offshore wind today or in the next two years.
Efforts to make nuclear cheaper, like CCS, have failed. The Toshiba Westinghouse AP1000 was supposed to be a standard, easy to build, cheaper option. It’s turned out to be incredibly expensive in reality and Toshiba Westinghouse has entered bankruptcy. A recent US report on next generation fission technologies found that roughly $2 billion had been spent with no progress. Fusion’s best hope is the ITER Tokamak which is expected to go live in prototype with no generation in 2040, meaning that if it works, some commercializable technology might be contributing by 2070.
The second problem is that nuclear is an inflexible form of generation. Some of that is the technology, but regardless of that, the business case requires about 90% capacity factor for nuclear in order to make money due to the extraordinary capital cost of the technology. That’s just the reality. And inflexible generation doesn’t work with intermittent renewables. If you can’t scale the various technologies up and down cost effectively, then there’s a problem. Ontario has been a bellwether in this regard with its surplus baseload generation problems of the past few years. While people tried to blame this on wind energy, what’s really happening is that the nuclear fleet is too big and can’t be turned off, so Ontario has been paying neighbouring jurisdictions to take the excess electricity. California built a lot of pumped storage to give nuclear something to do at night. France built expensive follow-the-load nuclear which basically wastes all of the generated heat without generating electricity. As France’s new President Macron has said, he used to run that ministry and even he doesn’t know how much they spent on nuclear or how much it costs.
The third problem is that nuclear is a geographically limited solution to a global problem. There are only 30 countries with nuclear today and we mostly don’t want to expand that number for reasonable geopolitical concerns related to radioactive material supply chain security, nuclear waste security and expansion of uranium enrichment technologies which happen in many cases to be useful directly for creating nuclear weapon’s grade uranium or masking the purchase of that enrichment technology. Dirty bombs anyone? A new nuclear bomb owning dictator anyone?
These aren’t environmental problems. The hysteria over health is really hysteria but is beside the point. The concerns about handing down nuclear waste to our long-distant descendants is a concern, but also beside the point.
Nuclear power is a 1970’s solution and hasn’t aged well. It hasn’t become cheaper, more flexible or more ubiquitous and it won’t. It’s failing in the marketplace, not due to environmentalists. Frankly, environmentalists are noise compared to the structural problems with the industry.
Is keeping nuclear that is going today going for as long as it is economically viable a good thing? Yeah, mostly, as long as the cost models are actually inclusive, which is rarely the case. Should we be happy China is building a bunch of nuclear — although it is behind schedule — while also building a lot more wind and solar — and is ahead of schedule with renewables? Yes, we should be happy. Should we pay much attention to expanding nuclear? No. Why bother wasting breath on something that doesn't have a business case.
Renewables are the answer because they are massively scalable, cheap and solving the problems of renewables is easier than solving the problems of nuclear that is down the road.
The big kerfuffle recently about whether we can get to 100% renewables by 2050 or not was very interesting for one reason. Everyone involved agreed we could easily get to 80%. The question was how hard the last 20% would be.
But getting to 80% globally is a huge advance and is much cheaper to achieve than trying to ride the dead horses of nuclear and carbon capture on fossil fuels. We have to find ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere, likely soil carbon capture with global transformation of agricultural approaches, but it can’t be considered a successful part of the solution to get our emissions to zero.
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