Yucca mountain revival and Fukushima design specs

It seems that science may prove more enduring than politics in the case of Yucca Mountain, which was given up for dead by many two years ago when Harry Reid apparently made it his price to support Obama's legislative efforts. A recent review calls into question the decision, in particular the conduct of NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko (former science advisor to, coincidentally, Harry Reid). My views on this are pretty clear and it's encouraging to see the disappointing decision receive this scrutiny.

In related news, I found it interesting (from this CSIS report on nuclear power after Fukushima) that the Fukushima reactors did not fail their design specifications:

First, the nuclear facility itself seems to have withstood a record 9.0 earthquake without critical damage because all of the reactors struck by the earthquake shut down as intended. The March 11 earthquake exceeded the design criteria and reinforces a lesson learned from an earthquake that damaged the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactors several years earlier—these facilities are very robust. A second lesson is that the facility was vulnerable to compromise from damage to external elements of the plant brought about by a tsunami that was 150 percent larger than the design criteria.

Little comfort after a full meltdown of three different cores, but at least interesting in diagnosing the root cause of the problem and planning for the future.

P.S. The fact that that was what jumped out at me makes me wonder if I should be driving more consistently for higher-level messages, rather than interesting factoids.

Germany to phase out nuclear by 2022

This isn't the first time they've said this (the last was before the commodity boom), but

Germany will shut down all its nuclear plants by 2022, and eight reactors shut down after Japan's nuclear disaster in March won't be reactivated, the government announced Monday.

I'm generally bullish on nuclear power compared to other power sources (especially those which are currently baseload capable), so I'm sad to see this. And as a colleague of mine noted, the Russians must be grinning with glee that their geopolitical leverage and economic profits from natural gas will return with a vengeance.

Current U.S. nuclear waste storage strategy

Speaking of strategies to store nuclear waste, here's an article on the current de facto U.S. government strategy: compensate nuclear operators for storing onsite, and double the expense by continually pursuing doomed litigation to avoid these payments. I think in a perfect world we could probably figure out something better.

Larry Summers, prophet of toxic waste

Two decades after the infamous Summers memo,

The U.S. is reportedly in talks with Mongolia about the country setting up an international repository for nuclear waste.

Via FP Passport, details (fairly speculative) here.

Like a few other Summers statements, the one on toxic waste (which he later asserted was sarcastic) is easily demonized, but upon further examination shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

I find the nuclear waste storage debate in the U.S. intensely frustrating - it is on par with entitlement spending in the political challenges of doing the right thing in the face of short-term incentives that are much stronger and more visible than the long-term ones.

I also liked an idea from Stuart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline: rather than try to prove a storage site will be safe for 10,000 years, use the Iroquois seven generations rule, find somewhere it will be safe for 200 years, and see how far re-processing technology has evolved by then.

Not to be deterred...

... China is going ahead with plans to build a fourth-generation nuclear reactor.

“There are differences between the Japanese and Chinese reactors,” Cui said. “Japan’s Fukushima plant was using old technology while Chinese reactors are more advanced.”

Given the amount of potential in new reactor designs, and the hurdle of technological lock-in, great to see someone boldly taking the lead post-Fukushima.

Web guide to radiation exposure

A colleague directed me to this online graphic, which aims to put different magnitudes of radiation exposure in context. While not taking anything away from the heroic efforts of the on-site engineers and technicians who are battling to prevent further meltdown, or how scary it must be to find radioactive iodine in your spinach, the (highly caveated) message seems to be that we're an order of magnitude or more from Chernobyl or any level of serious danger to populations beyond the immediate vicinity.

Prediction markets in nuclear disasters

Via MR, Intrade has Fukushima reaching Level 5 nuclear disaster status at 94%. Hard to tell how meaningful this is (volume looks tiny), but the people I know who know most believe that the media has been overly optimistic thus far, which is scary. For example:

A particular feature of the 40-year old General Electric Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor model – such as the six reactors at the Fukushima site – is that each reactor has a separate spent-fuel pool. These sit near the top of each reactor and adjacent to it, so that cranes can remove spent fuel from the reactor and deposit it in a swimming-pool-like concrete structure near the top of the reactor vessel, inside each reactor building.

If the hydrogen explosions damaged those pools – or systems needed to keep them cool – they could become a big problem. Keeping spent-fuel pools cool is critical and could potentially be an even more severe problem than a reactor meltdown, some experts say. If water drains out, the spent fuel could produce a fire that would release vast amounts of radioactivity, nuclear experts and anti-nuclear activists warn.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the engineers who are battling to keep Fukushima's four damaged reactors from spiraling out of control, as well as the millions of people in Japan affected by the horrific quake and tsunami of last week.

Highest climate ROI = family planning

Suppose you had $1 million to spend on tackling climate change. How would you spend it to get the best bang for your million bucks?

Would you spend it on stopping the slash-and-burn of forests? Perhaps on switching to nuclear energy? More energy-efficient buildings? Building cleaner power stations?

According to a recent paper by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer, climate change experts at the Center for Global Development, the answer is (drum roll): you would do much, much better to spend your money on a combination of family planning and girls’ education in developing countries.

That's Owen Barder, reporting on a Copenhagen Consensus-like analysis (in output, not methodology) on climate change mitigation. According to the analysis, the killer combo of family planning and girls' education is ~4x as cost effective as reducing deforestation, ~6x better than nuclear and almost 10x better than CCS.

An interesting thought explored in the comments is whether this would be more impactful in poor countries (high potential to reduce fertility but tiny per capita emissions) or rich countries (little unmet demand for family planning, but much larger carbon footprints). Apparently the two are similar (at least the U.S. is).

As Owen acknowledges, there are limitations to this approach, but at the very least this appears to be a solid analysis with a thought-provoking conclusion.

Can't quit "dirty power" cold turkey

In response to an over-enthusiastic Earth Day petition, the always-thoughtful Geoff Styles thinks through the following:

What would it mean if every power plant burning coal, oil or natural gas shut down today and remained idle? The short answer is chaos and social collapse, but let's take a quick look at why.

Here are a few of his facts for the numerically inclined:

As it turns out, all renewable sources plus nuclear generated a bit over 1.2 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) last year... Unfortunately, it's also less power than the US has generated in any year since 1966.

If we adjust for energy:GDP, then 1979, with its net generation of 2.25 trillion kWh, looks like a more appropriate basis of comparison to the economic work that our current zero-emission power output could do. The problem is that the US population has grown by 84 million people since then, and our economy, expressed in constant dollars, is more than twice as big as in '79--even after last year's contraction.

The wind, solar and geothermal power sources we've focused intensely on expanding accounted for just 2% of the electricity we used last year. Double them, and then double them again (10 years?) and that's still only 8%, compared to the 69% we got from fossil-based generation last year.

The argument almost makes itself, but he makes it well. And rightly doesn't even bother with the triviality of a similar argument for fossil transportation fuels.

How to make nuclear economic

Tax the hell out of coal, is in essence the argument of long-time environmentalist Stewart Brand in this interview and his new book.

e360: One of the main arguments against nuclear is economic — it’s not viable in the marketplace. How much should the market play in pushing these technologies, versus the government?

Brand: It’s a strange kind of desperate argument. Probably that question applies most in the developing world where coal really is king, is the cheapest. If the market rules, coal wins almost everywhere. I’ve been saying, and I say in the book, that we have to get used to the idea that there’s a very serious role for the government here, basically to make coal expensive, and let the rest fight it out.

Coal is cheap everywhere, not just in developing countries. His admission that under pure market rules coal is unbeatable is a different tack than those environmentalists who optimistically hope for the advent of renewable power at massive scale... but I think he is being more realistic than they are. After all, renewables are nowhere near being able to satisfy our current demand, let alone the likely future growth:

... the greenest people in the world probably are the squatters in the slums of the world — a billion people. How lucky we are that they’re there, they’re getting out of poverty, they’re green as hell but they would really like electricity 24/7 and fresh water and sanitation and some other things that are going to involve more energy use. That’s either coal or nuclear as far as I can tell.

The whole interview is interesting, and the book looks interesting too – I’ve added it to my (long) reading queue.

Economics of cap-and-trade

Michael Roberts kindly sketches out the economics of cap-and-trade (and specifically its impact on energy markets and prices) through a classic supply-demand framework. I tend to believe that formalizing these sorts of things into models is a very effective way of thinking through issues and effects, so many thanks to Michael for taking this direction.

It still doesn't feel intuitively correct to me that oil and coal would benefit from cap-and-trade, even in the short term; here's my first thought on where the model might be off:

Thanks for writing this out - much more cogent than my first attempt.

The one thing I'm not sure it captures fully is the interaction with existing low-carbon energy technologies (as opposed to future innovations). The demand for total energy is inelastic in the short term, but the demand for carbon-based energy is probably more elastic because as prices climb higher, broader swathes of existing low-emission technologies (wind, solar, nuclear, etc.) become economically viable.

There may be other tools from the Econ 101 toolkit that can include price-based substitution into the standard supply-demand framework (besides embedding in the demand curve) - if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.

Explore all the nuclear fuel alternatives

Environmental Capital on the statement emerging from Obama's recent visit to Japan:

But one bit in particular seems interesting: “Strengthened partnership on nuclear energy including on advanced fuel cycle technologies…”

That pretty much boils down to figuring out the best—and most affordable way—to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. That’s something Japan and some European countries do; the U.S. nixed such plans during the Carter administration, though it’s perennially on the Energy Department’s back burner.

Given the many challenges posed by reprocessing nuclear fuel, one would hope that "advanced fuel cycle technologies" has a more broad and far-sighted connotation, including alternative reactor designs (e.g. here, here) and perhaps a more substantive R&D effort around the promising but under-developed thorium fuel cycle.

The case against reprocessing

Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor of public and international affairs at Princeton, has an op ed in the LA Times arguing against reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. The simple case for reprocessing is that it reuses much of the spent nuclear fuel that we in the U.S. consider waste (and were, until recently, planning to store at Yucca Mountain). There is a catchy sound byte I can't find that says something like all of France's nuclear waste is stored in a warehouse the size of X (not very big).

Unfortunately, it is not so simple. (To be fair, the media has pointed this out before, e.g. in this NYT piece on reprocessing from May). But von Hippel brings true expertise to the table, so his articulation of the objections is worth citing (subtitles are mine).

Cost: "Based on French and Japanese experience, the cost of producing this recycled fuel is several times that of producing fresh uranium reactor fuel."

Waste volume (not actually reduced): "The French reprocessing company AREVA claims that its method reduces the volume and longevity of the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power reactors. But when you take into account the additional radioactive waste streams created by reprocessing and plutonium recycling, the volume of the long-lived radioactive waste is not reduced."

Radioactivity: "Reprocessing is enormously dangerous. The amount of radioactivity in the liquid waste stored at France's plant is more than 100 times that released by the Chernobyl accident. That is why France's government set up antiaircraft missile batteries around its reprocessing plant after the 9/11 attacks."

Plutonium: "Even more dangerous, however, is the fact that reprocessing provides access to plutonium, a nuclear weapon material. That is why the U.S. turned against it after 1974, the year India used the first plutonium separated with U.S.-provided reprocessing for a nuclear explosion."

von Hippel favors eventually storing waste in a long-term storage like Yucca Mountain (except perhaps one in a community which already has a nuclear plant, for easier acceptance, as successfully done in Finland and Sweden). In the meantime, he thinks we should sit on the current dry cask storage, rather than "panic" and take the "very expensive and dangerous detour" of reprocessing.

His arguments have something for everyone - cost for businessmen and economists, waste volume for the environment, radioactivity for human health and plutonium for security hawks. In particular I think the high cost of reprocessing is not well-known and deserves to be mentioned more prominently in a balanced debate.

Nuclear's long regulatory march

A U.S. nuclear renaissance faces many hurdles, not the least of which is the government:

On Wednesday, General Electric claimed a significant step toward getting one of its advanced reactor designs, the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor, approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — although the model has recently lost most of its customers.

G.E., along with its nuclear reactor partner, Hitachi, said on Wednesday that it was moving ahead. "Over the last five years, we have answered well over 6,000 questions from the N.R.C.," said Daniel L. Roderick, senior vice president of G.E.-Hitachi. "We have all of those answered; we have zero open right now."

But while Exelon, the Chicago-based utility, had planned to build two of G.E.’s new reactors in Victoria County, Tex., the utility dropped the idea last November, at least partly because of delays in design certification. It switched to an older Hitachi design.

Dominion, another large energy provider, still has plans on file for an E.S.B.W.R. in Virginia, but it says it is exploring alternatives.

Detroit Edison is the only company still on record as wanting to build an E.S.B.W.R.

Safety should be the top priority, of course, but bureaucratic inefficiency isn't doing the technology any favors in the race to reduce emissions from the nation's power generation.

Sandia Labs nuclear mini-reactor

Private companies aren't alone in looking for the next big (or, in this case, small) thing in nuclear.

Sandia National Laboratories said it has designed a small nuclear reactor and is looking for partners to commercialize it and even sell it overseas. The reactor could provide 100 to 300 megawatts worth of heat. More importantly, the factory-built reactor could be completed in two years, far less than the seven years or more that large (3,000 megawatts), conventional reactors take.

Roughly 85 percent of the design is complete. The cost of the reactor could drop to $250 million once in production.

That works out to about $800-900 per kilowatt, an order of magnitude better than the latest bids for conventional nuclear reactors. So pretty promising, although "could drop to ___ once in production" should be taken with many grains of salt.

Cutting-edge nuclear technology is a great place for government research, given the sensitive nature of the topic and the enormous intellectual firepower the government's national lab system can bring to bear on the topic. Most promising small-scale nuclear designs, like the Integrated Fast Reactor, also came from the national labs system.

Disappointing rhetoric, but Yucca Mountain review proceeds

Green Sheet takes a negative spin by citing the worst part of a recent interview by the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

Finding a permanent site for spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. isn’t “an urgent problem,” the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

Gregory Jaczko, who took over as chairman of the agency in May, said in an interview that the material can continue to be stored safely for the time being at nuclear power plants.

“Certainly, in the short term it’s not an urgent problem,” Jaczko, 38, said in the interview yesterday at the agency’s headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. “It is an issue we need to be aware of and be diligent about, but it’s not a crisis by any means.”

I find it extremely disappointing that the Obama administration has seen fit to take the easy way out of the nuclear waste issue by kicking it down the road. Whether or not nuclear is part of the new energy solution, the existing waste requires long-term storage, which is a tremendous challenge both technically and politically. The most charitable explanation of such a decision would be that the administration calculated that its finite political capital would best be put to use elsewhere (like health care and energy/climate legislation).

On the other hand, the news is not all bad:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will press ahead with its review of a license for a nuclear waste dump in Nevada, even as the Obama administration has made clear it is abandoning the project, the commission's chairman said Tuesday.

Jaczko says they are taking it "one year at a time", so I hold out hope that Yucca Mountain is not as dead as Obama claims and Harry Reid (the Nevadan Senate Majority Leader) hopes.

Nuclear sticker shock

I've previously mentioned my optimism about nuclear power, but I'm unpleasantly surprised (as were Joe Romm and the state of Ontario, I'm sure) by this:

The Ontario government put its nuclear power plans on hold last month because the bid from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the only “compliant” one received, was more than three times higher than what the province expected to pay, the Star has learned.

Sources close to the bidding, one involved directly in one of the bids, said that adding two next-generation Candu reactors at Darlington generating station would have cost around $26 billion.

The vaunted French were similarly exhorbitant:

The bid from France’s Areva NP also blew past expectations, sources said. Areva’s bid came in at $23.6 billion, with two 1,600-megawatt reactors costing $7.8 billion and the rest of the plant costing $15.8 billion. It works out to $7,375 per kilowatt, and was based on a similar cost estimate Areva had submitted for a plant proposed in Maryland...

The Areva bid was ultimately deemed "non-compliant", perhaps because (according to Tyler Hamilton) because they insisted the government bear part of the cost escalation risk.

I guess this means we may really need the next generation of nuclear technology before any sort of nuclear revolution gets underway.

Nuclear chatter

Environmental Capital has a nice roundup of the resurgent nuclear power debate across the U.S., UK, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Unfortunately, as the U.S. has amply demonstrated, there is a long way from debate to action.

How can U.S. best promote nuclear?

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has an Ideas piece in Politico today plugging nuclear power; he runs through the standard arguments in favor (I generally agree) and then identifies two catalysts for the nuclear revolution: the NRC issuing "the first new license for a reactor before the end of 2011," and Obama's unambiguous support.

Inhofe was a long-time climate change skeptic who recently made a surprising U-turn; I find nothing objectionable in what he proposes here. Reducing regulatory uncertainty is certainly a necessary condition for such massive investments. And Obama hasn't exactly been leading the environmental charge lately.

What I'd add is that Inhofe's suggestions are necessary, but not sufficient. Jay Yarow points out that nuclear plants are expensive (not to mention the dicey project economics and poor financial state of nuclear manufacturers). And new technologies (whether reprocessing waste or new reactor designs) hold much promise on both the economics and waste issues. I believe it's only with a combined push on all five of these fronts - political leadership, regulation, economics, reactor technology, and waste disposal - that the U.S. can bring the nuclear revolution from rhetoric to reality.

Update: Especially the economics.

A world after fossil hydrocarbons

There are no shortage of proposed solutions for our future energy needs on the internet, and while I don't find the Green Sheet's "Seven Ways to Solve Our Energy Problem" particularly outstanding among them, kudos for assembling this eye-catching graph:


One can quibble with the exact level of the curves (The Oil Drum tends to be fairly vocal on Peak Oil, for example, so another source might not show oil falling to essentially zero), but there is no escaping the fact that our great grandchildren's energy mix will need to look radically different than our own today.

I think the interesting philosophical question is whether market forces alone will allow a smooth transition to that new energy mix, or whether large-scale government intervention is needed to engineer it.

Market forces are powerful - the oil price spike in the 1970s spurred a wave of new exploration, resulting in major finds in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, and the North Sea, and the spike in 2007/8 saw a massive influx of investment in alternative energy.

As for government's role, there is on one hand a compelling argument to be made that the key enabler of the technological explosion we've seen in the last half century was not private-sector innovation, but rather the dividends from unprecedented government research into basic science, which the private sector picked up and ran with once they reached appropriate maturity (see: nuclear power, the computer, the internet, the cell phone). On the other hand, the government's track record as a market engineer is mixed at best. I don't have the whole answer, but there's no question in my mind that continued government funding for basic scientific research has to play a part.

Finally, as Green Sheet says, those who criticize should offer paths of their own, so for what it's worth, the biggest differences between my current working hypothesis and Green Sheet's proposed solution are:

1) I would not rank rail as Priority #1 (I assume they're referring primarily to urban public transit, but there will still be transportation fuel demand for airplanes, intercontinental commercial shipping, etc.)
2) I would rank energy efficiency much higher
3) I am more optimistic about nuclear, particularly in the long term, given the potential for new technology breakthroughs

P.S. Not to mention existing nuclear technology. Dan Frum via Andrew Sullivan:

This past week, I had an opportunity to visit French nuclear facilities as a guest of the U.S. Nuclear Energy Institute. At the end of the trip, I was taken to the large concrete-lined below-ground chamber in which the French store the most hazardous of the nuclear wastes generated by reprocessing. The room in which I stood held something like one-third of the total of all the most hazardous waste produced in France since the 1960s. It was rather larger than a high school gym. I stood atop of a concrete disk with a numeric code. Beneath that disk was a cylinder of concrete perhaps 5 meters deep. Below that was 10 meters of empty space, and below that a stainless steel tube holding nuclear byproducts. After my visit to the room I was scanned for exposure to radiation. My dose? About half as much as I had absorbed on the flight from the U.S. to France, about the same amount as I’d have ingested from a small dish of mussels.

P.P.S. Coincidentally, Tony Blair just outlined his seven policies to fight global warming:

The seven short-term measures proposed by today’s report are: incentives to stimulate wind and solar power; improving the efficiency of machines used by industry; better building codes; reducing the fuel consumption of vehicles; cutting the carbon content of fuel; setting new energy standards for domestic appliances; and cutting back on the level of deforestation.

Note that four of the seven are efficiency-related. My only complaint is that "cutting the carbon content of fuel" is meaninglessly high-level.