The Jacobson-Delucchi plan revealed

The devil is in the details, and the details are where the renewable energy schemes come apart. This is the case for the Jacobson-Delucchi plan recently published in Scientific-American to set the world on a course to an all renewable energy scheme. But support for Mark Z. Jacobson's thinking about renewable energy has hardly been universal, and Jacobson has not responded to many criticisms of his work. in particular Bill Hannahan has offered significant criticisms of Mark. Z. Jacobson research on wind reliability, in the form of a paper offered to the Editor of the "Journal of Applied Meteorology & Climatology" (JAMC). Mark Z. Jacobson refused to cooperate with the review process for Hannahan's paper, and although the editor of the JAMC could have published Bill's paper even without Jacobson's cooperation, he refused to to so.

It should be noted that Jacobson, like many other renewable energy advocates regularly sidesteps and ignores criticisms. Thus legitimate questions exist about the value of Jacobson's scientific work, and Jacobson has failed to take reasonable steps to answer those criticisms. While Jacobson's work on wind reliability is repeatedly mentioned by renewable advocate, the mention of that work, in the absence of unanswered arguments that Jacobson's work is deeply flawed, suggest that the renewable power enterprise lacks critical standards for its knowledge claims. On Tuesday, I posted numerous informal criticisms of Jacobson's latest Scientific American Paper, that were left as comments on the Scientific American Web Page, in response to its announcement of the Jacobson-Delucchi paper. As of this morning 50 comments have been posted in response to the SA announcement. Many of these comments point to serious problems with the Jacobson-Delucchi plan. For example, "EGPreston" wrote,

By profession I do transmission studies for wind and solar clients. My company name is TAC meaning Transmission Adequacy Consulting at web page http://www.egpreston.com. I currently am doing studies all across the US. "A path to sustainable energy by 2030" omits the transmission system needed by 2030. Because the wind and solar and water and geothermal projects are not in the locations of the existing power plants, new lines will be needed. Looking at the graph on page 63, and carefully measuring scales on the graph, I estimate that there is 40,000 MW of wind and 40,000 MW of centralized solar on that graph. The reason I omitted rooftop solar is because Jacobson has its contribution to be rather small. For example, multiplying out the numbers on page 61 you will get 5.1 TW of rooftop solar and 26.7 TW of large scale solar of 300 MW size in farms, much like wind farms. This seems reasonable since centralized solar is twice as cost effective as rooftop solar. Since the rooftop solar is small I will omit it from these comments. That leaves us needing 80,000 MW of new wind solar and geothermal generation just to serve California. I think an estimate of 500 miles from wind and solar resources to major load centers is reasonable. A 500 kV transmission line is rated at about 2000 MW max power. But you don't want to operate it at that power level because the losses are too high and there is no reserve capacity in the line to handle the first contingency problem. Therefore I will estimate we will load the new 500 kV lines to about 1500 MW on average. So we have 80,000 MW of renewable sources widely scattered around the Western System (WECC) with each carrying 1500 MW so that we need roughly 50 new 500 kV lines of 500 miles each, for a total length of 25,000 miles. The article assumes there is little solar power energy storage and it also assumes the wind be blowing at night. We know for sure that the solar power is not available at night so we are nearly totally dependent on wind for night time energy. You are going to ask about the geothermal energy. One geothermal project I recently worked on for determining the transmission access for looked like a good project until the geothermal energy extraction failed to work. Recently other geothermal projects have created human induced earthquakes. Geothermal energy seem less likely today than just a few years ago. So we are nearly totally dependent on wind energy for the nighttime CA energy as envisioned in the 100% renewables by 2030. If we plan for those few occurrences when there is no wind in the WECC system, we must interconnect WECC with the rest of the US so CA can draw power from other wind generators that do have wind (hopefully) outside the WECC area, such as the Texas coast and east of the rocky mountains where massive wind farms can be constructed. However we will need at least 40,000 MW of lines that I estimate will average 2000 miles in length. If we used 500 kV lines, we would need about 25 of these lines bridging from WECC to the US eastern grid and ERCOT and the total length would be about 50,000 miles. By 2030 we would need 75,000 miles of new 500 kV lines just to serve California with 100% renewables. Considering that we have the period from 2010 to 2030, that means we would have to construct about 4000 miles of new 500 kV lines every year from now until 2030 for the renewables plan as outlined in this article to work. I do not believe this is achievable at all. Therefore the concept envisioned in the SA article is not a workable plan because the transmission problems have not been addressed. The lines aren’t going to get built. The wind is not going to interconnect. The SA article plan is not even a desirable plan. The environmental impact and cost would be horrendous. Lets get realistic.

Criticisms such as Prestons' cannot be ignored, if Jacobson and Delucchi wish for their plan to be taken seriously. So far Jacobson and Delucchi have offered no response to their critics. Unfortunately, as I have noted, this conforms to Jacobson's past pattern.

A Scientific American article is not a real scientific paper. It does not amass reliably produced evidence, to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the weigh of evidence supports a proposition. Traditionally Scientific American stuck to mainstream science, science that was not controversial. Thus it should be noted that of 5 papers referenced by Jacobson and Delucchi in their Scientific American article, two contain Jacobson's name in the authorship line. Both are the subject of unresolved controversy. A third paper is coauthored by Ben Sovacool, who is a political scientist. I have addressed the uneven quality of Sovacool's work in the past. Following as assessment of Sovacool's account of some of his research, I concluded,

Sovacool has produced another typical example of his work. His research is weak, his research methods are suspects, and his conclusions will not withstand critical examination.

To his credit Sovacool vigorously defended his research, but it should be noted that his database was neither based on random sampling, nor was it comprehensive, thus no valid generalizations would have followed from it. At any rate the Sovacool paper Jacobson and Delucchi referenced cannot be accessed on the Internet, nor are critical reviews of it found on the Internet. A further paper referenced paper, The Technical, Geographical, and Economic Feasibility for Solar Energy to Supply the Energy Needs of the U.S. by V. Fthenakis, J. E. Mason, and K. Zweibel has just been made available on line. The Fthenakis, Mason, and. Zweibel paper has not been the subject of open reviews on the internet. Thus it hardly can be maintained that Jacobson and Delucchi have expressed views that represent the consensus of a scholarly and scientific community, or that their own views are represent good science. Statements such as the claim that

Nuclear power results in up to 25 times more carbon emissions than wind energy, when reactor construction and uranium refining and transport are considered.

simply are not based on sound research. Sovacool, upon whose research Jacobson partially depends concludes, found that 81% of the studies of carbon emission from the nuclear power cycle,

had methodological shortcomings that justified excluding them from the assessment conducted here. . . . Of the remaining 19% of studies, , , they varied greatly in their comprehensiveness, . . . studies differed in whether they assessed future emissions for a few individual reactors or past emissions for the global nuclear fleet; assumed existing technologies or those under development; and presumed whether the electricity needed for mining and enrichment came from fossil fuels, other nuclear plants, renewable energy technologies, or a combination thereof,

Clearly then we are looking at an area of research that requires from which no valid conclusions can be drawn. in light of Sovacool's note on the limitations of he research evidence, Jacobson's sweeping dismissal of nuclear power was an unwarranted expression of personal prejudice. We the Scientific American still an intellectually respectable journal, the 25 times statement would undoubtedly have been removed before publication.

In addition Jacobson and Delucchi stated that

we consider only technologies that do not present significant waste disposal or terrorism risks.

Yet they considered Hydroelectric which poses significant risks from terrorist attacks, and photovoltaic which posses significant waste disposal issues. Again we have the author's uninformed personal judgment being substituted for matters of fact. And as the "scots engineer" comments,

the authors have been disingenuous . . .

"demyer"referring to the comments which Jacobson and Delucchi have drawn, states,

The comments by others have pretty much shot a lot of holes in the plan, particularly wind power

I will thus leave to the author's Scientific American critics to spell out many of the numerous shortcomings of the Jacobson and Delucchi plan. I do wish to offer my comments on the claim that a renewables mix, and electrical costs under the plan.

Jacobson and Delucchi claim

Intermittency problems can be mitigated by a smart balance of sources, . . . relying on wind at night when it is often plentiful, using solar by day and turning to a reliable source such as hydroelectric that can be turned on and off quickly to smooth out supply or meet peak demand. For example, interconnecting wind farms that are only 100 to 200 miles apart can compensate for hours of zero power at any one farm should the wind not be blowing there.

Thus without telling us exactly what they are doing, Jacobson and Delucchi introduce a costly solution to the problem of intermittency - redundancy. If the wind does not blow all of the time, we are going to use a little sunshine to get us through wind free days, they tell us. First we should note that redundancy does not always work. Sometimes the wind stops blowing at night. But redundancy has a cost. If we are going to rely on redundant wind and solar generating facilities, the cost of round-the-clock electricity will include the cost of both wind and solar electricity. Thus if a wind facility costs $3 million and a solar facility costs $6 million, and we need both to provide round-the-clock electricity, the cost of our generating system will be $9 million. In addition the facilities may need to be interconnected, and that will cost extra.

Now it turns out that paying for a solar and a wind facility is not going to be enough to insure reliability for a renewable system. Mark Z Jacobson has studied what sort of redundancy is required to make a wind system as reliable as a coal-fired power plant. What Jacobson found is that if you build one windmill in West Texas, it might generate electricity at 40% of its rated generating capacity. Most of the time, the windmill will produce far less than its rated capacity, but on very windy days, it might produce almost all of its capacity, but on may other days, the windmill would produce very little of its rated capacity. A windmill located a few hundred miles away might produce electricity better on some days and worse on other days. a windmill in Kansas would perform differently, and a windmill in Oklahoma still differently. So if you hook up two windmills in Texas, with one in New Mexico, one in Oklahoma, and one in Kansas, you might be able to produce a decent amount of power, say 20% of the windmill's rated power output, most (80%) of the time.

Another way of saying this is that 50% of the time, if you hook up 5 windmills at selected sites in 4 states, you will generate the electrical equivalent of one windmill's full power output 4 out of every 5 days. What you will do for electricity on the 5th day is not clear. What is clear is that reliable electricity from wind will cost you a lot. You will have to pay for 5 windmills in order to be assured of at least 1 windmill's worth of electrical output 4 out of every 5 days, and you will have to pay for something to be assure of electricity on the other day. So Jacobson's wind scheme is quite expensive, in fact more expensive than a nuclear power plant's.

Would a solar-wind mix be cheaper? We have noted that solar generating facilities of a given power output would be more expensive than wind facilities of a similar power output rating. By careful wind site locations, you can increase wind output to 40% and even 45% of rated capacity in some instances. By moving your solar facility into a cloudless desert, you might improve your power output to a little better than 20% of your rated capacity. Solar output starts out the day weak in the morning, builds up till noon, and then starts dropping off. It is hard to think about solar without including storage, and that will add to the cost of an already expensive solar generating system. The actual cost of solar generating systems being built this year (2009), make nuclear generating systems look really cheap. So you cannot count on a solar-wind mix to be cheaper than generating electricity with nuclear power.

Finally we ought to consider the Jacobson and Delucchi claim that electricity can be produced by their renewable system, can be produced

as cheap as coal.

But we need to look closely at their reasoning. They claim

Power from wind turbines, for example, already costs about the same or less than it does from a new coal or natural gas plant, and in the future wind power is expected to be the least costly of all options.

Well here we encounter a paradox. If wind power is so cheap, why is it that wind operators say they need a heavy subsidy in order to operate. Why is wind not able to compete on the open market? The answer is simple. Wind does not produce electricity when consumers want it. We have already seen that Jacobson's own in order to get wind generated electricity to consumers, wind producers have to buy windmill after windmill, and spread them all over the map, at increased transmission costs. So wind generated electricity may be cheap, but wind generated electricity when you want it is not cheap at all.

What of solar then? Jacobson and Delucchi claim

Solar power is relatively expensive now but should be competitive as early as 2020. A careful analysis by Vasilis Fthenakis of Brookhaven National Laboratory indicates that within 10 years, photovoltaic system costs could drop to about 10¢/kWh, including long-distance transmission and the cost of compressed-air storage of power for use at night. The same analysis estimates that concentrated solar power system with enough thermal storage to generate electricity 24 hours a day in spring, summer and fall could deliver electricity at 10¢/kWh or less.

Since I have just found a link to the referenced Fthenakis paper, and have not had a chance to review it, I will simply note that Fthenakis' conclusions are dramatically at odds with those of Australian Engineer Peter Lang, (See a review by Barry Brook with comments by others here.) A revised version of Lang's paper can be found here, and Brook's discussion of those revisions are found here. Lang argues that the capital costs of a reliable Solar power system would be 25 times as high as that of an all-nuclear power generation system. Since the contentions of Lang and Fthenakis are clearly at odds, and the referenced Fthenakis paper has not yet been reviewed, I will withhold final judgment on the issue, but will note that Fthenakis views, if accurately represented by the Scientific American article, probably do not represent mainstream thinking about future solar costs.

Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark Delucchi have thus written a new Scientific American article which claims much that has not been accepted by other researchers on renewable energy. Their article has already drawn significant criticisms, and no doubt will continue to do so. They also reference sources that appear to go well beyond mainstream of views on the future cost and utility of renewables. The Jacobson-Delucchi article also refers to Jacobson's past work which has also received significant criticism. Jacobson has proven in the past to be reticent to respond to criticisms of his work. And Jacobson and Delucchi have, as of yet, failed to respond to the criticisms posted on the Scientific American Web site. Therefore the current Jacobson-Delucchi Scientific American article can not be said the represent a plausible account of our energy future. The article contains an unsubstantiated and borderline irrational attack on nuclear power. Unfortunately this cult-like attack on nuclear power has been a frequent feature of Scientific American during the last couple of years.

Lowering Nuclear Costs

I am a big fan of Barack Obama, but the folks who are advising him on his energy policy are playing him for a fool. Blogger "uvdiv" recently demonstrated the incongruity of Mr. Obama's message and its setting in a recent speech the President gave at a new Florida Power & Light Solar generating facility. In order to fully appreciate the unintentional Irony of the president's speech, the reader is also encouraged to read a post on it in Rod Adams' blog. Rod calculates that given a capacity factor of 25%,

the capital cost of the facility is roughly equivalent to paying $21,600 per kilowatt for a plant that has a capacity factor of 90%, which is a bit less than average for a US nuclear power plant.

Rod's calculation is probably low since it fails to take into account the effect of Florida's frequent cloud cover on the solar plants generating capacity. Given the huge cost of the solar facilities rather modest power output, the President's remark that the traditional grid

costs us too much money

seems downright absurd.

The president talked about

The President then ascended into the realm of the transcendentally silly.

a clean energy superhighway that can take the renewable power generated in places like De Soto and deliver it directly to the American people in the most affordable and efficient way possible.

Oh please, please, please Mr. President, tell us that you did not write that. Tell us that you did not think about what you were saying. The president talked about saving consumers $20 billion, saving $150 billion, cutting utility bills, without the slightest insight into the huge cost of the facility where he chose to make his speech.

The President clearly does not have a clue, furthermore he sets himself on the side of "Green" rhetoric, and against a sensible dialogue about our energy future.

I have to be honest with you, though. The closer we get to this new energy future, the harder the opposition's going to fight. The more we're going to hear from special interests and lobbyists in Washington whose interests are contrary to the interests of the American people.

There are those who are also going to suggest that moving toward a clean energy future is going to somehow harm the economy or lead to fewer jobs.

What the President does not seem to understand is that his view of the energy future is going to be enormously expensive, so expensive that it will be possible for this country to afford it, and ruinous if it tries.

In 2007 when I began to explore our national energy options, the high cost of the "green" renewable energy option quickly became clear. It also became quite clear to me that the cost of conventional nuclear power plants would be too high to make Light Water Reactors the technology of choice for carbon mitigation. This is not to say that Light Water Reactors are impossibly expensive. In fact the levelized cost of power produced from LWRs built during the next decade appears to be lower than the Levelized cost of Solar or wind generation facilities. The problem then is that all carbon replacement energy forms currently on the table are too expensive.

As I have noted else were, the current cost of reactor construction in India is already competitive with the cost of coal fired electrical generation plants, and improving the economies of scale of Indian reactors would appear to hold the promise of even lower capital costs. In addition Indian nuclear technology is rapidly developing, and it appears that India will be the first nation to develop a low cost thorium fuel cycle. It is clearly the case that unless the cost of post-carbon energy in the United States can be dramatically lowered, that the United States will become an economic backwater.

Given the high price of renewable electrical technology, and the high price of Light Water Reactors, alternative low cost electrical technology should be given the highest priority for the sake of maintaining the nation's economy. I have long been aware that advanced nuclear technologies were explored at American National Laboratories from the 1940's until the 1990's. These technologies were not rejected for technical reasons, but because they did not receive political support for their further development and implementation.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory regarded Molten Salt Reactor technology as being particularly promising. In 1967 ORNL Director Alvin Weinberg wrote:

Nuclear power, based on light-water-moderated converter reactors, seems to be an assured commercial success. This circumstance has placed upon the Atomic Energy Commission the burden of forestalling any serious rise in the cost of nuclear power once our country has been fully committed to this source of energy. It is for this reason that the development of an economical breeder, at one time viewed as a long-range goal, has emerged as the central task of the atomic energy enterprise. Moreover, as our country commits itself more and more heavily to nuclear power, the stake in developing the breeder rises—breeder development simply must not fail. All plausible paths to a successful breeder must therefore be examined carefully.

To be successful a breeder must meet three requirements. First, the breeder must be technically feasible. Second, the cost of power from the breeder must be low; and third, the breeder should utilize fuel so efficiently that a full-fledged-energy economy based on the breeder could be established without using high-cost ores. The molten-salt breeder appears to meet these criteria as well as, and in some respects better than, any other reactor system. Moreover, since the technology of molten-salt breeders hardly overlaps the technology of the solid-fueled fast reactor, its development provides the world with an alternate path to long-term cheap nuclear energy that is not affected by any obstacles that may crop up in the development of the fast breeder.

The molten-salt breeder, though seeming to be a by-way in reactor development, in fact represents the culmination of more than 17 years of research and development. The incentive to develop a reactor based on fluid fuels has been strong ever since the early days of the Metallurgical Laboratory. In 1958 the most prominent fluid-fuel projects were the liquid bismuth reactor, the aqueous homogeneous reactor, and the molten-salt reactor. In 1959 the AEC assembled a task force to evaluate the three concepts. The principal conclusion of their report was that the "molten-salt reactor has the highest probability of achieving technical feasibility."

This verdict of the 1959 task force appears to be confirmed by the operation of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment. To those who have followed the molten-salt project closely, this success is hardly surprising. The essential technical feasibility of the molten-salt system is based on certain thermodynamic realities first pointed out by the late R.C. Briant, who directed the ANP project at ORNL. Briant pointed out that molten fluorides are thermodynamically stable against reduction by nickel-based structural materials; that, being ionic, they should suffer no radiation damage in the liquid state; and that, having low vapor pressure and being relatively inert in contact with air, reactors based on them should be safe. The experience at ORNL with molten salts during the intervening years has confirmed Briant's chemical intuition. Though some technical uncertainties remain, particularly those connected with the graphite moderator, the path to a successful molten-salt breeder appears to be well defined.

We estimate that a 1000 MWe molten-salt breeder should cost $115 per kilowatt (electric) and that the fuel cycle cost ought to be in the range of 0.3 to 0.4 mill/kWh. The overall cost of power from a privately owned, 1000-MWe Molten-Salt Breeder Reactor should come to around 2.6 mills/kWh. In contrast to the fast-breeder, the extremely low cost of the MSBR fuel cycle hardly depends upon sale of byproduct fissile material. Rather, it depends upon certain advances in the chemical processing of molten fluoride salts that have been demonstrated either in pilot plants or laboratories: fluoride volatility to recover uranium, vacuum distillation to rid the salt of fission products, and for highest performance, but with somewhat less assurance, removal of protactinium by liquid-liquid extraction or absorption.

The molten-salt breeder, operating in the thermal Th-233U cycle, is characterized by a low breeding ratio: the maximum breeding ratio consistent with low fuel-cycle costs is estimated to be about 1.07. This low breeding ratio is compensated by the low specific inventory* of the MSBR. Whereas the specific inventory of the fast reactor ranges between 2.5 to 5 kg/MWe the specific inventory of the molten-salt breeder ranges between 0.4 to 1.0 kg/MWe. The estimated fuel doubling time for the MSBR therefore falls in the range of 8 to 50 years. This is comparable to estimates of doubling times of 7 to 30 years given in fast-breeder reactor design studies.

From the point of view of long-term conservation of resources, low specific inventory in itself confers an advantage upon the thermal breeder. If the amount of nuclear power grows linearly, the doubling time and the specific inventory enter symmetrically in determining the maximum amount of raw material that must be mined in order to inventory the whole nuclear system. Thus, low specific inventory is an essential criterion of merit for a breeder, and the detailed comparisons in the next section show that a good thermal breeder with low specific inventory could, in spite of its low breeding gain, make better use of our nuclear resources than a good fast breeder with high specific inventory and high breeding gain.

The molten salt approach to a breeder promises to satisfy the three criteria of technical feasibility, very low power cost, and good fuel utilization. Its development as a uniquely promising competitor to the fast breeder is, we believe, in the national interest.

It is our purpose in the remainder of this report to outline the current status of the technology, and to estimate what is required to develop and demonstrate the technology for a full-scale thermal breeder based on molten fluorides.

Less than two years after Dr. Weinberg wrote these encouraging words, the Nixon Administration began to shut down Molten Salt Reactor research in Oak Ridge.

Except for the cost estimate number, little appears to have changed in the prospect for this technology. Reviving the development of Molten Salt Reactor technology would be relatively inexpensive, and the cost savings potentially could be enormous.

President Obama needs to stop floundering around delivering silly speeches about his failing energy policy. He needs to find a new policy direction, one which will lead to low cost energy.

Jacobson and Delucchi, Half baked at best

Some of my readers are aware that I have in the past addressed flaws in the work of Mark Z. Jacobson. Jacobson is a Stanford Professor, and normally I would expect that appointment to the Stanford faulty to carry with it the suggestion that the individual involved does good quality work. But my reviews of two of Jacobson's papers raises serious concerns about the quality of Jacobson's research. In "A Review of Mark Z. Jacobson's Review" I noted a number of major flaws in Jacobson's paper, Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security, which seemed to both over hype wind generated electricity and perform an absurd hit job on nuclear power. I was harshly critical of this Jacobson essay, and was hardly the only one to do so. Last December, Renewable Energy World.com published a Stanford press release on Mark Z. Jacobson's paper, Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Numerous readers responded on line. "stop killin our wilderness" provided a devastating critique of Jacobson on Wind and Solar Thermal Power

obviously this person [Jacobson] lives in NORTHERN california, not southern california, or they would have a clue about how these technologies are vastly different here.

CSP uses nearly 90,000 gallons of water a year, just for rinsing mirrors (from a diesel truck), per megawatt - and that's for the inefficient air-cooled ones. water cooled use an additional 2,000,000 gallons of water/year per megawatt. 2 million gallons per year per megawatt!!! and the output declines as the temperature rises outside, right when we need the power most. idiotic. how can we justify these levels in SoCal, which is already on water rationing?

the land (10 acres/mw) is also permanently destroyed, and lengthy transmission means another 10% is lost.

to say "leave the rest as open space" around massive, inefficient wind turbines is also misleading. dynamiting, boring, trenching (so the turbines can pull power from the grid), concrete, roads, powerlines - all of these things add up to near-total devastation of the entire region when they are in SoCal deserts (which is usually where they are sited in SoCal). that means 45 - 70 acres per megawatt that is permanently decommissioned for all other uses. oh, and these turbines operate at roughly 16% of rated capacity, lower than rooftop solar, especially after transmission losses.

so, in terms of wasting HUGE amounts of water, killing habitats, destroying our carbon sinks (like the Mojave, which is a fantastic carbon sink, equal to temperate forest), massive roads and powerlines, and eminent domain, i beg to differ that these are reasonable solutions in SoCal. they are insane.

Other writers were nearly as harsh in their criticism of Jacobson. The most unfortunate Scientific American has further disgraced itself by publishing another deeply flawed Jacobson paper, A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables. Jacobson's Scientific American paper, coauthored by University of California-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi, is unfortunately behind a subscription wall, Jacobson and Delucchi have provided a parallel paper available by pdf download, Evaluating the Feasibility of a Large-Scale Wind, Water, and Sun Energy Infrastructure. This paper, however comes with the label, "INCOMPLETE DRAFT FOR REVIEW – DO NOT CITE, QUOTE, COPY, OR DISTRIBUTE." That I have access to is apower point presentation that is linked to the Scientific American announcement. That presentation is titled, Powering a Green Planet: Sustainable Energy, Made Interactive. In addition Scientific American has posted a number of comments on the Jacobson-Delucchi essay.

We have then a [aper behind a wall, a paper we are told to not use, a power point and a number of second hand comments. Not really a substitute for the actual paper, but hay this is a blog, and like a good blogger, if I don't have the actual facts, I can always put something together.

The graphic presentation tells us that the maximum amount of energy in use at any one time on earth is 12.5 terrawatts. The US EIA estimates that the energy demandwill rise to 16.9 TWs by 2030. With the US demand rising to 2.8 TWs. The authors tell us that there is an abundance of potential wind and solar resources to provide energy. The authors believe that by harvesting that energy in the form of electricity and electrifying surface transportation, and other aspects of the economy, the greater efficiency of electricity will reduce world wide energy demand to 11.5 TWs by 2030. The authors asdsume that all energy in 2939 will come from Three sources, Solar, Wind and Water.

Secondly the authors call for the use of clean technology only. They call for the use of technologies what work on a large scale today, and produce limited CO2 over their entire life cycle. They tell us that nuclear power results in up too 25 times more CO2 emissions than wind energy when reactor construction, uranium mining and refinement and transportation are considered. The authors then rank energy sources, using Jacobson's highly controversial ranking system, and of course wind and solar are ranked at the top. The authors conclude that 11.5 Terra watts can be provided by 3.8 million large wind turbines, 89,000 large photovoltaic and concentrated solar power plants, each rated at 300 MWs, and 900 hydro stations. The authors believe that this goal is possible to accomplish by 2030.

In addition to their very optimistic assumptions about the potential for overcoming materials parts shortages between now and 2030, the authors suggest that the cost of renewable generated electricity will drop dramatically during the same time span, with wind generated electricity dropping to as little as 4 cents per kWh, by 2020, and solar generated electricity with 24 hour a day storage dropping to about 10 cents per kWh. The authors estimate that the global cost of this system would be about 100 trillion dollars exclusive of the cost of transmission. Not all comments on the Power Point presentation were effusive with praise. Skeptic wrote"

I find your estimates for the costs to be extremely optimistic. I assume the wind estimate is for on-shore wind, as the costs for off-shore are much higher. Additionally, there is the question of the intermittent nature of both wind and solar. Without a reliable storage mechanism, they would need some sort of back-up for reliability. Finally, as very briefly mentioned in your final paragraph on page 8, there is the question of the transmission of these new energy sources to the demand. This would add significantly to the cost of this proposal and yet it is being downplayed here.

"hkulper" wrote

I'm sorry but your plan is merely a dreamy-eyed sketch that has not yet been pulled through a reality filter. I recommend you read Prof. David MacKay's publication "Sustainable Energy without the hot air" at www.withouthotair.com and learn how a realistic plan should be constructed. Also note that he arrives at much more modest results.

Comments on the scientificAmerican story, were equally harsh. "dwbd" wrote>

Pure garbage. Jacobson has written similar trash in the past. Charles Barton rips Jacobson's previous work to shreds:

http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/search?q=jacobson

"dwbd" continued

Tom Blees has just written a devastating analysis of Danish Wind energy, that just blows away any dreams of Wind becoming an effective substitute for fossil fuels. Denmark is going to have to start PAYING its neighbors to accept its produces-the-most-when-needed-the-least Wind Energy:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/22/denmark-wind-experiment-awry/

Peter Lang has done a solid analysis of running Australia (certainly one of the best locations on Earth) on Solar Power:

http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/lang_solar_realities_v2.pdf

http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/lang_solar_realities_addendum.pdf

His conclusion:

"…The capital cost would be 20 times more than nuclear power. The least-cost solar option would require 400 times more land area and emit 20 times more CO2 than nuclear power.
Conclusions: solar power is uneconomic. Government mandates and subsidies hide the true cost of renewable energy but these additional costs must be carried by others…"

Peter Lang shows that just the power transmission trunk lines to support a Wind & Solar strategy in Australia will cost 50% more that the Nuclear option:

http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/lang_transmission_cost.pdf

And Peter is using a pricey $4,000 per kw for Nuclear Power. Whereas 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. 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!!

Depleted Cranium has a couple articles about how the pro-fossil-fuel NRC Scam was used to cause Nuclear Costs to skyrocket in the United States:

http://depletedcranium.com/hey-hey-ho-ho-the-nrc-has-got-to-go/#comments

http://depletedcranium.com/why-i-hate-the-nrc/

Edoates summerized the problem which lies at the heart of what I call the Era of Confusion:

The article is in direct conflict with David JC MacKay's book: "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" (which is available free online). He does a detailed analysis of many renewable and not-so-renewable sources of energy, and the basic conclusion is that without nuclear, it doesn't work.

My question for the authors and SciAm editors, is "what are we poor non-scientists to make of all of this?" We don't have the resources or time to compare these conflicting books/articles head to head. You could do us a tremendous service, and help the public debate along by doing so.

Reading the SciAm article, a bunch of folks are going to say, "peachy: we're done. All the world has to do is spend 5 trillion a year for 20 years." Those reading MacKay's book will say, "Peachy: bring on the nuc's and we're all set."

We are inundated with conflicting information that we cannot verify, so each faction picks the data that serves its ends, and blathers away on some TV show, then some politicians simplify it even more, and use it to push an unknown agenda.

Please, so a comprehensive survey of the numbers and claims, at least from these two sources.

"sethdayal" added

This paper is an irresponsible piece of nonsense that would generally be found for order in the back pages of some pulp fiction magazine. The sad part is the editors for some reason chose to not only publish the claptrap but to endorse it.

How about the authors' 7 cents a kwh current cost of wind energy. Horns Rev 2, the world's largest offshore wind farm cost $1 billion for 209 MW = $4800 per kw peak.

Add extra transmission lines, storage, a capacity factor of 25%, finance it at 5% and we get 20 cents a kwh - Germany's and Ontario, Canada's feed in tariff.

So where did that absurd 7 cents a kwh come from?

Jacobson rejects nuclear power because he claims it puts out 25 times as much carbon per unit energy as wind, based on the astonishing claim that nuclear power plants lead to one nuclear bomb attack every thirty years, resulting in enormous amounts of atmospheric soot. While this argument in itself makes one wonder about his sanity, nuclear bomb material is not made in power reactors.

http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/2008/12/review-of-mark-z-jscobsons-review.html

Big Oil has been putting out anti nuclear propaganda since the oil crisis they engineered in the seventies - that almost no nuclear plants have been built since is evidence of their success.

Mass produced nuclear power is expected to cost $1 billion a gigawatt and 2500 gigawatts would displace all $900 billion a year in American fossil fuel purchases wiping out Big Coal/Oil with a three year payback. Call it the Nuclear Picken's plan. They know renewables are a joke and will have no effect on their profits.

James Hoggans new book Climate Cover-Up shows how Big Coal/Oil finances global warming deniers. One of their tactics is planting denier pieces in main stream media. It isn't a stretch to think they are doing the same thing with Nuclear deniers at Scientific American.

Author Mark A. Delucchi from is UC Davis and his work is brought to you courtesy of Chevron.

http://eec1.ucdavis.edu/news/news-archives/chevronendowment

The world is maybe ten years from a civilization destroying climate and peak oil disaster and only nuclear power can save us in that short a time frame. China and India have taken the lead with proposals for 120 and 450 gigawatts of new nuclear.

This sort of renewable nonsense from Nuclear Deniers and this magazines irresponsible editors bring us that much closer to the edge.

Dr. Michael Briggs wrote:

As a physicist focused on energy research, I find this paper so absurdly poorly done that it is borderline irresponsible. The authors cherry-picked highly inaccurate claims from other papers solely because those were the only claims that could support their pre-determined conclusion (that we can meet all of our needs purely with renewable power).

The fact that they think hydrogen fuel cells and tidal power have any value in the energy future is enough to illustrate that they either did not spend much time analyzing the actual technologies they are promoting, or are intentionally duping readers (as many in the energy field do).

What of the dismissal of nuclear power? First Jacobson and Delucchi claim that studies show that the nuclear power life cycle produces 25 times more carbon emissions. What studies we must ask? Not even the notorious "stormsmith" study comes anywhere close to concluding the 25 times figure, and "stormsmith" is an outlier among life cycle nuclear CO2 emission studies. That leaves us with only one study that would support the 25 times range, Jacobson's own study that based its nuclear emission totals on on the assumption that there would be a nuclear exchange between nations every thirty years, and that the spread of nuclear power would be the cause of exchange. This claim is based on very flawed reasoning.

Thus the Jacobson and Delucchi assumptions on nuclear power are not backed by serious research. Other Jacobson and Delucchi arguments appear to be based on questions that should receive further research and debate before a determination of facts is possible. Thus it seems reasonable to characterize the Jacobson and Delucchi, November 2009 Scientific American essay as half baked at best.

LFTR "ultimate and absolute" safety consistent with low cost housing.

Some time ago I wrote an essay on LFTR/Molten Salt Reactor safety from the prospective of a system of barriers to radiation release. My agenda was to argue that LFTR safety could be achieved through a system of barriers to the release of radioactive materials. This argument assumed that a fuel spill was the over riding safety issue. However, the classic texts on MSR safety (Gat and Dodds) do not examine MSR safety primarily in terms of a system of barriers. Gat and Dodds believed that

The Ultimate Safe Reactor (USR) is a special concept of a molten-salt reactor with prime and complete emphasis on safety. The USR uses a processing frequency, yet to be developed, that is about an order of magnitude higher from that contemplated for the molten salt breeder reactor (MSBR). The MSBR had a ten-day inventory turn around in the fuel processing. The USR uses a one day or less of turnaround of the fuel inventory. This rather fast turnaround reduces the build up of all fission products with half-lives of a few days or longer. The reactor is an epithermal spectrum reactor and uses no moderator per se in the core. The clean core consists solely of a low-pressure vessel. Freeze valves are used throughout. The prime circulating pump is sized to assure no critical cold slug accident can occur. Furthermore, the USR uses the Th-U fuel cycle with a breeding ratio of exactly one. Thus, the USR has all the safety benefits that are passive, inherent and non-tamperable and, in addition, has proliferation-resistant attributes and simplified waste that is free of fissile material, which can be transported in any arbitrary size or quantity from the processing part of the plant.

Beyond the ultimate safe reactor Gat and Dodd argued that there could be an absolute and ultimate safe reactor:

The absolute and ultimate safe reactor (A+USR) is a special concept of the USR which utilizes natural convection to transfer the heat from the core to the heat exchanger. The A+USR has no safety-related mechanical operating parts nor any externally-actuated controls, it becomes the ultimate in PINT-safety. The reactor responds internally and inherently to a change in power demand via its temperature response.

Frequent processing of the fuel increases the fuel inventory in the processing part and puts high demand on the performance of the processing units. The removal of the fission products from the fuel stream occurs at low concentrations, which requires precision and sophistication. In an actual plant, an optimization between performance, inventory and safety is needed.Thus Gat and Dodd saw MSR (and LFTR) safety in terms of reactor design features, that prevented accidents from happening, and prevented bad things from happening in the rare event of an accident. Gar and Dodds, argue, in effect that absolute and ultimate safety can be manufactured into Molten Salt Reactors, and can be implemented through low cost mass production manufacturing methods.

As a consequence of the Gat and Dodds argument is that an elaborate and costly system of barriers is not required. to assure absolute and ultimate nuclear safety. Mass produced, factory manufactured features can in most cases be low priced. Thus from the Gat and Dodds perspective LFTRs can be more safe at trivial costs than LWRs can be with the massive expenditure of money on safety features. This leads us to consider drastic, cost lowering changes in the way reactors are built.

Even the worst sort of reactor disaster, say an aircraft attack on a reactor, would not cause a massive release of radioisotopes, because the nuclear fuel would be continuously cleaned of radioisotopes. Since an attack on a reactor no longer poses great danger for a civilian population, the reactor holds little value as a target for terrorist.

Secondly, LFTRs can be air cooled. Meaning that they do not have to be sited next to water, and water shortages posed no difficulties for LFTRs.

i recently observed on Narry Brook's blog, Brave New Climate:

David LeBlanc has designed a very simple, low material LFTR that could easily mass produced. David tells me:

My work on the tube within tube will take very little material but I don`t have a number off the top of my head. Cost figures would be pretty much guesswork at this point but seems obvious that a simple tube should not cost very much. As for output levels, we could have a 1000 MWe tube within tube but I typically look around 200 MWe as a good size and this is about 1 meter wide (inner tube) and 6 meters long. This is surrounded by 60 to 100 cm of blanket salt and then an outer Hastelloy vessel. The tube material might be Hastelloy or Molybdenum (or many other things). David adds, “The heat exchangers will be a bigger user of metals like Hastelloy and that will be the same for just about any design.” in addition the LFTR would meed a couple of closed cycle gas turbine generators.

David has discussed lowering reactor costs by building them with stainless steel. Using CO2 instead of helium we could get about 175 MWe from each. You could easily mass produce 4 per day, 400 if you wanted too. LFTRs are very safe, and all you need is a steel shed with prefabricated concrete radiation containment barriers and a cement floor to house the things. Thus not only would the mass manufacture of LFTRs allow for the timely deployment of huge ammounts of post carbon energy sources, but mass manufacture is entirely consistent with greatly enhanced nuclear safety, while lowering nuclear manufacturing costs. That safety in turn would allow for great cost savings in the construction of nuclear housing facilities.

Update 10/22/09: David LeBlanc disagrees with my assessment of the potential of low cost LFTR technology. I eat crow and go back to the drawing boards. Yesterday David wrote me: “There are a few options for cheap salts without tritium and still below Melting point 525. One is RbF-NaF-27%(Th,U)F4 (I think its 27, might be 22%) but that salt isn`t an option for a fuel salt of a Two Fluid (too much Th+U). The other is old fashioned NaF-ZrF4 which you can break even (with a bigger fissile load) and you can`t really get the melting point down much to use stainless steel.

I wouldn`t want to think of not using a containment building. All we need is something that is air tight and safe against aircraft crashes. It needs to be air tight for any gaseous leaks like Xenon. It doesn`t need to hold pressure or be a big volume so that makes it far cheaper than for LWRs.”

A Gathering of Visionaries

Kirk Sorensen speaks to the Thorium Energe Alliance Conference..

An Facebook Message from Robert Steinhaus

Robert sent you a message.

--------------------
Subject: A friendly Hi!from the first Thorium Energy Alliance Conference

Hello Charles!
I would like to send you greetings from the Thorium Energy Alliance Conference. Beginnings only come once and this is the only very first Thorium Energy Alliance Conference. You were missed by those attending. We are sorry that health considerations kept you from attending.

John Kutsch, who largely organized the event, assured me that the vast majority of the sessions would be available over the Internet in days. While the attendance is small I think you would be pleased at the strength of the list of those who made the trip and gathered for the event.

I would just like to thank you for all of the inspired and informative blogging that you have done for the cause of energy and specifically for LFTRs.

Best wishes!
-Bob Steinhaus

Barry Brooks is a World Class Energy Thinker

Not long ago in a fit of honesty, I realized my own deficiencies as an energy writer. My assets are that I am intelligent, nuclear literate, and connected to very most important figures in the future of energy. I am speaking of my father, who made outstanding contributions to the fields of reactor chemistry and nuclear safety, and Alvin Weinberg who was the father of my childhood friend, David Weinberg. Both my Father and Alvin Weinberg had a great deal of foresight, and it was Alvin Weinberg's vision of a nuclear future that the youthful Amory Lovins attacked.

I have the enormous advantage as an energy writer that I have read Alvin Weinberg's writings on Energy, and have some idea of the extent of Weinberg's vision. In the world of the blind, a one eyed man is king. And as an energy writer, I am at best a one-eyed man. My education is not in science, and we clearly need a scientist to think the problems through that clearly go beyond my conceptual skills. Such a person is Barry Brook, who is rapidly emerging as a first rate energy thinker. Barry is a climatologist, and got into the energy field because he realized that it was not enough to talk about the climate problems, they had to be fixed. Barry has the intelligence, and the conceptual skills to move very rapidly once he reached that point, and he has reached the point where he is beginning to educate the rest of us, who a few months ago thought of ourselves as the most advanced energy thinkers in the world.

Barry has begun a series of Brave New Climate posts on energy fundamentals which should be required reading for anyone who wishes to claim expertise in energy issues, at least in the near future. They include

1. Thinking critically about sustainable energy (TCASE) 1: Prologue

2. TCASE 2: Energy primer

3. TCASE 3: The energy demand equation to 2050

Bottom line: 2050 power demand will be ~10 TWe of electrical generating power — a 5-fold increase on today’s levels, requiring the construction of ~680 MWe per day from 2010 to 2050. . . .

So, now, let’s say that by 2050 we have managed to achieve the following:

a) Transition to an all-electric society with nuclear power meeting the greater fraction of our demand;

b) Use nuclear power and renewables to create our energy carriers (e.g. batteries, hydrogen, ammonia, boron, whatever), and also use waste heat from thermal reactors for desalination; and

c) Increased technological development means that we get 30% more efficient at using energy to do work (e.g. cumulative improvements in electrical appliances, but excluding transport, see below) — that’s an 8% improvement per decade (one imagines that in reality, the biggest efficiency gains will come in the next two decades, with diminishing returns thereafter).

4 TCASE 4: Energy system build rates and material inputs

Given the large uncertainties associated with this forecast, the actual value could easily be as high as 15 TWe, which would up the daily built-out rate to a little over 1 GWe per day. But let’s stick with 680 MWe rate for this post.

That would requireL

1. Wind turbines. Wind power collects ~2 W/m² (or 2 MWe per km²), and this figure is not really dependent on the turbine size. (If you have larger turbines, you need to space them further apart. If you build large turbines with tall towers, the increased hub height does access stronger winds, increasing the yield by ~30%). The 2008 US capacity factor for wind was 23.5%. For our unit, let’s choose a widely deployed turbine, the 2.5 MWe (peak), the GE 2.5xl (rotor diameter = 100 m, hub height = 75 – 100 m, cut-in windspeed of 3.5 m/s, peak at 12.5 m/s, cut-out at 25 m/s).

To get 680 MWe average power, 680/0.235 = 2900/2.5 = 1,160 GE 2.5xl turbines per day, worldwide, spread over 340 km² of land area (a square 18.4 x 18.4 km). Based on Per Peterson’s figures, this will consume ~590,000 tonnes of concrete and 310,000 tonnes of steel per day. Every day, from 2010 to 2050.

or

2. Solar thermal. In good desert locations such as the Sahara or central Australia, concentrating solar power would access ~15 W/m² (or 15 MWe per km²). In Spain, it is closer to 10 W/m². These figure are derived after taking account of mirror/heliostat spacing required to avoid shading. It agrees with current experience with solar thermal. . . .

To get 680 MWe average power, 680/0.4 = 1700/100 = 17 Andasol-3 plants per day, worldwide, requiring (in an ideal desert location) 45 km² of land (a square 6.7 x 6.7 km). Or, to put it another way, this means rolling out 520 m² of mirrors/heliostats per second, every second, from 1 Jan 2010 to 31 Dec 2050.

It’s difficult to get decent material estimates for this — the best I could come up with are these figures from David Mills, which give 220 tonnes of steel, 27 tonnes of glass and 320 tonnes of concrete for a 5 MWe peak plant (these quoted figures were for a system without thermal storage, so we need to about double the above number to get the equivalent sized mirror field for Andasol-3 and ignore material components of the storage system). This would equate to 215,000 tonnes of concrete, 150,00 tonnes of steel, and 18,000 tonnes of glass per day — shipped out to a remote desert site, each and every day, from 2010 to 2050.

Or

3. Nuclear fission. The AP1000 reactor, a Generation III+ design by Westinghouse that is now being heavily deployed in China, has a small concrete/steel footprint compared to other designs (see figure) — about 100,000 m³ of reinforced concrete incorporating 12,000 tonnes of steel rebar. The AP1000 unit’s island buildings would cover about 40 ha (0.4 km²) and generate 1,154 MWe (peak) at a capacity factor of 91.5% (based on US 2008 operations).

To get 680 MWe average power, 680/0.915 = 743/1154 = 0.64 (close to 2/3) AP1000 plants per day, worldwide, or roughly 2 x AP1000 reactors every 3 days, from 2010 to 2050. (This would require ~90,000 tonnes of concrete [based on 1.4 tonnes per cubic metre] and 7,700 tonnes of steel per day). Compare this to the figures for wind and solar thermal given above!

Conclusion:

The main point of this post, TCASE 4, is to take a one step in quashing the absurd ‘bait-and-switch’ meme that some disingenuous anti-nuclear folk repeat: That because the energy replacement challenge facing nuclear energy is huge (a 25-fold expansion on today’s levels), it couldn’t possibly do it, so renewables are our only sensible option. On the basis of this post alone, any objective reader can see that this is pure, quantitatively unsupportable, nonsense. It’s going to be really tough, no matter what — and believe me, I’ve not even warmed up on the problems with renewables taking the lion’s share of the work.

Wind Energy, The Case of Denmark: A Review

The Danish Center for Political Studies, last month published a wide ranging critical study on the Danish wind generation power, titled Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark. The Danish Center for Political Studies would appear to be either conservative or Libertarian in orientation. Most of the Study was written by Hugh Sharman whose background and professional training as a Civil Engineer, as well as his business role as would seem to qualify him for the task.

The remainder of the Report, Wind Energy's Effects on Employment in Denmark, was written by a Danish Economist, Henrik Meyer, who is on leave from his position as Deputy Director at Copenhagen Consensus Center. The Copenhagen Consensus Center appears to be a think tank run by Bjørn Lomborg. I will not prejudge the professionalism of Meyer's work, but I will note that this section appears to have been written with intent to draw conclusions from the Damish Wind experience about Obama administration energy policies. This would be a valid purpose, and indeed the studies conclusions would parallel my own conclusions based on my case studies of the American Wind Industry. Meyers concludes,

Based on the Danish experiences with wind power, subsidies to wind need to be significant or corresponding taxes on carbon-based electricity need to be increased substantially. The Danish experience also suggests that a strong US wind expansion would not benefit the overall economy. It would entail substantial costs to the consumer and industry, and only to a lesser degree benefit a small part of the economy, namely wind turbine owners, wind shareholders and those employed in the sector.

This will not make the windmill cheerleaders happy, but that does not in itself suggest an ideological bias. There is no indication of funding sources for the report, but it is written in English, and the reference to Obama administration policies, indicates an interest in directing American energy policies.

Since the report does carries no copy restriction, I will simply quote the executive summery, which will allow it to speak for itself.

Denmark generates the equivalent of about 19% of its electricity demand with wind turbines, but wind power contributes far less than 19% of the Nation’s electricity demand.

The claim that Denmark derives about 20% of its electricity from wind overstates matters. Being highly intermittent, wind power has recently (2006) met as little as 5% of Denmark’s annual electricity consumption with an average over the last five years of 9.7%.

In the absence of large-scale electricity storage, any modern electricity system must continuously balance electricity supply and demand, because even small variations in system voltage and frequency can cause damage to modern electronic equipment and other electrical equipment.

Wind power is stochastic,especially in the very short term (e.g., over any given hour, 30 minute, or 15 minute period). This has created a completely new challenge that transmission system operators (TSOs) all over the World are only now learning how to handle. Some draw from Denmark’s experience. But Denmark’s special circumstances make its experience of limited transferability elsewhere.

Denmark manages to keep the electricity systems balanced due to having the benefit of its particular neighbors and their electricity mix. Norway and Sweden provide Denmark, Germany and Netherlands access to significant amounts of fast, short term balancing reserve, via interconnectors. They effectively act as Denmark’s “electricity storage batteries”. Norwegian and Swedish hydropower can be rapidly turned up and down, and Norway’s lakes effectively “store” some portion of Danish wind power.

Over the last eight years West Denmark has exported (couldn’t use), on average, 57% of the wind power it generated and East Denmark an average of 45%.The correlation between high wind output and net outflows makes the case that there is a large component of wind energy in the outflow indisputable.

The exported wind power, paid for by Danish householders, brings material benefits in the form of cheap electricity and delayed investment in new generation equipment for consumers in Sweden and Norway but nothing for Danish consumers. Taxes and charges on electricity for Danish household consumers make their electricity by far the most expensive in the European Union (EU). The total probable value of exported subsidies between 2001 and 2008 was DKK 6.8 billion (€916 million) during this period. A similar amount was probably exported prior to 2012 and larger quantities will be exported following the commissioning of 800 MW of new offshore wind capacity in 2013.

The wind power that is exported from Denmark saves neither fossil fuel consumption nor CO2 emissions in Denmark, where it is all paid for. By necessity, wind power exported to Norway and Sweden supplants largely carbon neutral electricity in the Nordic countries. No coal is used nor are there power-related CO2 emissions in Sweden and Norway.

Wind energy has replaced some thermal generation in Denmark. It has saved an average emission of about 2.4 million t per year CO2 at a total subsidy cost of 12.3 billion DKK or an average cost of 647 DKK (€ 87 or $124) per ton CO2. Wind power has proven to be an expensive way to save CO2 emissions

The cost of Denmark’s wind capacity to Danish consumers is exacerbated by its inability to use so much surplus electricity. The surplus will increase in 2013 when 800 MW of new offshore capacity is commissioned, increasing Denmark’s wind production by 2.7 TWh per year. Nearly all the additional wind power will be exported and this will further depress prices; nearly all the subsidies paid by Danish consumers will also be exported without achieving any significant fossil fuel use nor any CO2 reduction. Achieving own-consumption of all its wind power is technically impossible in the short term and will remain entirely hypothetical until electricity consumption rises and new technical and demand-side solutions have been developed and implemented. In most cases, these have yet even to be invented, let alone proven and costed.

Notwithstanding its many disadvantages wind power’s one striking advantage is that, like nuclear, its marginal costs of operation are very small once the capital has been paid. However, unlike nuclear, many ten to fifteen year-old turbines are past their useful life. By contrast, most conventional rotating power plant can enjoy a working life of 40 to 60 years, as evidenced by most power plants in Europe today. This puts into question the strategic, economic and environmental benefits of a power plant that may have to be scrapped, replaced and re- subsidized every ten to fifteen years.

The executive summery of the second half states:

Denmark has been a first-mover in the wind power industry for over ten years, and its leading wind turbine manufacturers have been able to maintain a very strong global position. This has been a consequence of a concerted policy to increase the share of wind power in Danish electricity generation. The policy has only been made possible through substantial subsidies supporting the wind turbine owners. This indirect subsidy has in turn generated the demand for wind turbines from the manufactures. Exactly how the subsidies have been shared between land, wind turbine owners, labor, capital and shareholders is opaque, but it is fair to assess that no Danish wind industry to speak of would exist if it had to compete on market terms. This paper documents the experiences gained in Denmark with regard to the employment effect of subsidizing the wind industry.

Substantial subsidies have been directed to the Danish wind mill industry over years. From 2001-2005 the yearly subsidy has been 1.7-2.6 billion DKK.

The Danish Wind industry counts 28,400 employees. This does not, however, constitute the net employment effect of the wind mill subsidy. In the long run, creating additional employment in one sector through subsidies will detract labor from other sectors, resulting in no increase in net employment but only in a shift from the non-subsidized sectors to the subsidized sector. Allowing for the theoretical possibility of wind employment alleviating possible regional pockets of high unemployment, a very optimistic ballpark estimate of net real job creation is 10% of total employment in the sector. In this case the subsidy per job created is 600,000- 900,000 DKK per year ($90,000-140,000). This subsidy constitutes around 175-250% of the average pay per worker in the Danish manufacturing industry.

In terms of value added per employee, the energy technology sector over the period 1999-2006 underperformed by as much as 13% compared with the industrial average.

This implies that the effect of the government subsidy has been to shift employment from more productive employment in other sectors to less productive employment in the wind industry. As a consequence, Danish GDP is approximately 1.8 billion DKK ($270 million) lower than it would have been if the wind sector work force was employed elsewhere.

This study and its conclusions should be carefully read by anyone who would be interested in applying the Danish Wind Industry model to the American Wind Economy, and indeed in a more general way applied to the application of the Renewable paradigm tto the American Energy economy. The conclusion of this study might be profitably tested by a comparison to the California Energy Economy and the overall state economy.

The report focuses on something that is seldome noted about the Danish electrical system,

Denmark has effectively become the World’s leader of distributed power.

Denmark's 16 central generations stations combine heat and power generation.

600, village-scale, heating-only or small combined heat and power plants having an aggregate power capacity of roughly 1,600 MW, all built during the last fifteen years. These have widened the access of district heat to even quite small villages, saving heating oil, while delivering electricity into the grid, mostly from gas engines. Straw or wood chips fuel many of the heat only stations.

The ownership scheme for Denmark's 5500 windmills is based on the distributive concept.

Because the Danish grid has been based on Amory Lovins distributive power concept, there is an interesting chance to test Lovens overall theory by comparing the overall performance of the distributive system of Denmark, with the nuclear dominated sysyem of France. In 2008 the emissions from Nuclear powered France ran about 6.2 tons per person. in contrast Danish CO2 emissions equaled 9.9 tons per person, over 50% more than France. Next door Sweeden which gets 50% of its electricity from reactors ran an even lower 5.6 tons of CO2 per person. So much for the value of Lovins' crack pot theories adding in the fight against anthropogenic global warming.

French electrical costs are 6 cents per kWh. Again in contrast Danish electrical costs ran to 9.6 cents per kWh 160% of the cost of French power. In other words both in terms of emissions and in terms of cost Amory Lovins' anti-nuclear distributive generation system has proven to be a disaster.

Alexander DeVolpi verse Amory Lovins: Part I

I continue to repost old essays. This two part essay reviews Physicist, Nuclear Weapons design expert, and Nuclear Arms Control expert Alex DeVolpi's assessment of Amory Lovins competence as an expert on nuclear proliferation and on nuclear powerreactor design.

Part I: DeVolpi on Expert Knowledge, Scientific Knowledge and Ethics
Amory Lovins has Chutzpah. Lovins, a Harvard & Oxford physics drop out, believed that he could argue with Alvin Weinberg about reactor technology. Not long ago he showed up at Argonne National Laboratory where he attempted to argue with Alexander DeVolpi about nuclear proliferation. This was a big mistake, first because DeVolpi ought to be regarded as one of the world's leading authority on nuclear proliferation, and further DeVolpi does not suffer fools gladly. And Lovins is nothing if not a fool, and only a fool would have argued with DeVolpi at Argonne about nuclear proliferation. For Amory Lovins to argue with DeVolpi on nuclear proliferation is more than a little like Alfred E. Newman attempting to argue with Albert Einstein on the theory of relativity.

Nothing illustrates the confusion of the Era of Confusion better than the fact that Amory Lovins is imagined to be an expert on energy by Al Gore and hundreds of of other political and business leaders in contemporary American Society. Lovins tends to overwhelm his auditors with a dense presentation of supposed facts and references, that cannot be easily or quickly or easily deconstructed. Thus am authorizing link may be in fact be to a statement that was published in an obscure South African humor magazine, and which is locked beyond a firewall, with the payment of a fee required for admission. Another Lovins trick is to reference a statement which he himself made 30 years ago, without any further support. Unless the auditor has a copy of the collected works of Amory Lovins, it is impossible to determine if the 30 year ago statement had just as weak evidence as the statement presented today.

Dr. DeVolpe can recognize shabby tricks for what they are, but most people, including Al Gore, doubt their own intelligence when confronted with a MacArthur Genius. To such people I can only recommend a reading of the story The Emperor's New Clothes together and Immanuel Kant's essay, What is Enlightenment. But such remedies may come with distress, because they invariably require a person to look at how he or she thinks and feels, and then to think about the answers to the questions those thoughts and feelings raise.

Dr. DeVolpe has written excellent and instructive Google Knols that should be read by anyone who wishes to think about let alone openly discuss nuclear issues like proliferation and nuclear safety. Beyond simply talking about proliferation issues, Dr. DeVolpi looks at a question that clearly strays into an area that might be described as practical epistomology. It particular how can we know if someone who claims expertise actually possess authority. Dr. DiVolpe shreds claims to authority on such matters, with a particular zest"

For progress in non-proliferation, we need be saved from the assumed or accorded authoritarianism of well-intentioned professors, especially from the East Coast, who have titles mistaken as credentials. Frank von Hippel of Princeton comes to mind. Notwithstanding good intentions, pleasant personality, teaching experience, and published papers — these do not constitute hands-on field or laboratory experience. Nor should one count time spent in Washington corridors, offices, and conference rooms.

I hold Frank partially responsible for the decade-long hiatus in reaching agreement with Korea on nuclear demilitarization, for decades of lack of progress in conversion of the Siberian plutonium reactors, for stalling growth of nuclear power in the United States, for misrepresenting the weaponizability of reactor-grade plutonium, and for sustaining radiophobia.

On the latter point, over two decades after the Chernobyl accident, Frank is yet to acknowledge in print that he was utterly wrong in projecting or implying a huge number of fatalities due to the accident. He and others cling to unvalidated beliefs regarding the effects of low levels of radiation . . .

DeVolpe scorns the authority of the under experienced.

were it not for the professors of the 1930s and 1940s who gained hands-on laboratory and field experience, we would not have succeeded in the timely development of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. With the demise of Hans Bethe and Pief Panofsky, a good example remaining is Dick Garwin (aside from some uncharacteristic overreaching he has done with regard to Chernobyl cancer projections).

DeVolpe offers us nothing less than a phenomenology of experties.

Expertise isn’t fungible; it can’t be bought or transferred; it’s accumulated from sometimes-tedious, but aggregate years of hands-on experience. Nor is anyone’s accumulated expertise unique or exclusive; some individuals have subsets of very relevant knowledge or experience that include skills and understanding of energy released in fission or fusion, or of policies and implications regarding nuclear weapons. These fields of knowledge overlap and supplement each other; there are no islands of expertise.

Incidentally, professional conferences and lectures are a common adjunct for keeping up to date, but they do not contribute directly to hands-on experience in the functioning of complex equipment. The same can be said about presentations, lectures, and facility visits; these are an integral aspect of technical development, but they are not substitutes for actual laboratory or field development, construction, experimentation, and analysis.

To a certain extent DeVolpi is an advocate of the tacit knowledge tradition without formally acknowledging Michael Polany's writings on the concept. In addition to focusing on the practical dimension of expert knowing, Dr. DeVolpi also focuses on ethical issues implicit in expert knowledge claims, authorized by a presumed claim to scientific authority. In particular Dr. De Volpi's, focuses on be called a phenomenology of scientific authority. That is he offers a description of the essential characteristics of a knowledge claim that is advanced with scientific authority. That description did not originate with Dr. DeVolpi, rather he found it in the U.S. Supreme Court's 1993 statement of standards for testimony regarding areas of science that required an explicit estimate of probabilistic error. That statement, presented in connection with the courts ruling on the Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals case, set forth a four part qualifying standard:

peer review,
replicability,
documentation,
and stated rates of error

DeVolpi notes:

Judiciaries have retrospectively encountered deficiencies in ad hoc scientific/technical testimony and in forensic evidence that did not fully comply with a standardized methodology. Individuals have been wrongfully convicted of crimes; cancer and other illnesses have been incorrectly attributed; and epidemiological data has sometimes been misrepresented.

This is an ethical issue in DeVolpi's view. Making claims to scientific authority which do not conform to the Supreme Court's Daubert standard are not just epistomologically flawed, they are also ethically flawed, and such scientifically wrong statements have lead to moral wrongs.

Individuals have been wrongfully convicted of crimes; cancer and other illnesses have been incorrectly attributed; and epidemiological data has sometimes been misrepresented.

While DeVolpi focuses primarily on a case study of the over statement of anticipated public health consequences for the Chernobyl and TMI reactor incidents. He observes:

The scientific, technical and journalistic professions, though not alone, must share significant responsibility for premature and exaggerated predictions that have not materialized nor been rectified.

This professional ethical lapse have had serious public consequences:

Unsubstantiated characterizations contribute to public confusion, rather than clarification. Inordinate risk estimates have lead to the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars to protect against dangers whose existence is highly questionable.

(In Part II, I will address the substance of Dr. DeVolpi's "Bill of Particulars" against Amory Lovins.)

Alexander DeVolpi versus Amory Lovins: Part II

This section reviews DeVolpi's assessment of Amory Lovins' reputation as an expert on nuclear proliferation and nuclear power..

Part II: DeVolpi on Amory Lovins Expert Knowledge on Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Power

Alexander DeVolpi has offered a serious critique of Amory Lovins that I believe accurately raises questions about Mr. Lovins' authority. DeVolpi, points out that

Because Lovins renders no substantive academic or acquired nuclear credentials, the analyses he presents ought to be held to a strict standard of scientific credibility, such as that described by the Daubert U.S. Supreme Court decision. . . . This is in lieu of granting him interim benefit of doubt, a courtesy often extended to individuals who have an established scientific reputation . . . In other words, I would advise treating Lovins’ renderings on nuclear issues with healthy, but not dismissive skepticism. His presentation and publications should be judged by standard scientific criteria, no more, no less.

Next Dr. DeVolpi points to Lovins' scanty educational credentials and his lack of the sort of experience that would qualify him as an expert on nuclear matters.

Although Lovins seems to have completed some courses in experimental physics at Oxford University in England, he lacks any laboratory experience in nuclear physics or engineering. His vetted degree credentials are vague enough to induce caution, caveat emptor. Such a shortcoming has not prevented him from writing numerous articles, giving many briefings, and speaking frequently about nuclear technical policy. . . . Lovins has been a widely praised proponent of the so-called “soft-energy path,” as well has having been an habitual and readily available critic of nuclear energy.

. . . expertise alleged should not be considered credible simply because of personal experience, widely publicized image, or self-declared credibility — which can be crafted as concatenating substitutes for substantive technical analysis and publication. The individual being challenged should follow the same established guidelines for scientific analysis and peer-reviewed publication as the rest of us have during our professional careers.

Having offered this preamble to the question of Lovins' authority, DeVolpi proceeded to examine Lovins' method of presentation of "what appeared to be an informative but complex analysis . . .". DeVolpi thus offers a phenological approach to Lovins presentation by placing it into brackets, which examines what it appears to be at first in light of the accepted standards of scientific evidence which DeVolpi has suggested we apply to expert testimony. DeVolpi noted Lovins use of "extremely busy tables and graphs" which he found "difficult to sort through", and then suggested

his extrapolation from laboratory model to production product is unrealistic, being deficient in practical marketplace engineering. Faulty reasoning and extrapolation often reflect a lack of hands-on construction experience. Lovins did not put into evidence anything he actually built or was responsible for constructing, other than a viewgraph of a fancy banana greenhouse situated on his Aspen, Colorado, property.

The last comment is downright funny, because Lovins allegedly unheated Aspen greenhouse in which he grows bananas, is very much a part of the Lovins mystique. The greenhouse itself plays on role in establishing Lovins expertise, or the truthfulness of the case he presents.

DeVolpe noted that Lovins' presentation

more of an evangelical tirade against nuclear power, rather than a systematic case for balanced and alternative energy sources. A key indicator of stridency is the absence of explicit statistical characterization; Lovins presents almost everything in terms of absolutes, without conceding a range of uncertainty.

DeVolpi found an absence of a probabilistic perspective not only in Lovins' oral presentation but in his papers

Take a look at his papers and try to find any treatment or awareness of statistical uncertainty. What’s notably odd is that doubt/uncertainty is part of the natural order of things; to avoid recognizing it, especially in a paper about technical issues, is quite unnatural and unusual, and more indicative of proselytization for a cause.

Thus Amory Lovuns' presentations are

more of an evangelical tirade against nuclear power, rather than a systematic case for balanced and alternative energy sources.

DeVolpi subjects Lovins work to two related tests, those of "smell" and "ripeness". The smell test is designed to determine "legitimacy" or "authenticity". while the ripeness looks at "maturity", or "development".

DeVolpi notes that during a visit to Argonne National Laboratory 30 years ago Lovins called for a shutdown of all nuclear power plants. At that time almost no electricity in Illinois was produced by reactors, at the beginning of 2009 that figure had increased to between 70% and 80& of Illinois electricity being generated by reactors. DeVolpi observed

here’s a situation that has ripened enough for comparing actual outcomes with his original counsel. . . . If Lovins had his way 30 years ago, I would be paying . . . (for) coal-produced electric power. On the basis of cost, or feasibility, or environmental benefit, electric-power utilities and the state regulators would have been ill-advised if they adopted his anti-nuclear advice (at least in Illinois).

Nuclear power is not only commercially competitive, but extremely safe (no coal miners dying), no air pollution at all, no greenhouse gas emissions (such as carbon-dioxide). Nuclear-plant lifetime is being doubled from 30 to 60 years (which utilities, investors, and ratepayers appreciate). If Lovins had his way 30 years ago, considerably more particulates and gases would have been vented to the local and regional atmosphere from coal-fired plants (aside from the greenhouse gases emitted).

Moreover, if Lovins had his way, we would not have conserved the electricity-equivalent in domestic coal, imported and domestic oil, and domestic and imported natural-gas resources and reserves that we have for 30 years. A typical nuclear power plant each year avoids consumption of 3.4 million short tons of coal, or 65.8 billion cubic feet of natural gas, or 14 billion barrels of oil. (The United States has ample uranium resources.) So Lovins was wrong in implying that nuclear had no overriding societal or environmental benefits.

DeVolpi focuses on Lovins claims about nuclear costs:

Lovins displayed complex viewgraphs that, he purports, show that nuclear is the costliest of “low-or-no-carbon resources.” Yet, in the last 30 years, nuclear has displaced half the fossil-fuel combustion in Illinois while still being competitive. Inasmuch as nuclear-power plants emit no byproduct carbon-dioxide to the atmosphere, surely his claim that it is the costliest of low-carbon-emission sources fails the smell test.

Most of Lovins’ pricing and cost/benefit comparisons are based on “new delivered electricity” which frames the cost of U.S. domestic nuclear construction in the least favorable light.

He declares nuclear power an economic failure. Can someone explain that to my bank account which has benefited from compounding competitive electric power savings for the past 30 years? His rimy claim certainly fails the ripeness test.

DeVolpi then challenges Lovins' claims about nuclear reliability.

On the issue of electrical-grid reliability, Lovins asserts that there is no such thing as a “outage-free” source of electrical power. He must think that nuclear power runs by government fiat. Nuclear is a fixture on the grid because it is more economical to operate as base-load supply, while sources less reliable, intermittent, and more costly (such as wind, solar, and gas) provide supplementary power. During the past 30 years in Illinois, I don’t recall having the electricity supply and cost problems that California has had after it prohibited nuclear-power plants from being built within its borders. By the way, average U.S. nuclear capacity factor was about 92% in 2007. That’s excellent. Lovins pitiful effort to undermine the reliability of nuclear power egregiously fails the smell test.

DeVolpi examined Lovins account of nuclear power and finds that Lovins

chronically demonizes it on the grounds of the proliferation risk

opposes subsidies for nuclear power but favors them for renewables

Calls nuclear power a failure despite the reliable production of power at competitive rates

Opposes the construction of new nukes in the United States because of proliferation risks, even though new nukes are being built in other countries.

Argues that nuclear power is anti-democratic

called attention to Lovins 1980 statement in Foreign Policy that

the global nuclear power enterprise is rapidly disappearing

for nuclear power is ... the main driving force behind proliferation...

(nuclear power) retards oil displacement by the faster, cheaper and more attractive means which new developments in energy policy now make available to all countries...

DeVolpi next points to a 1980 article which the science journal Nature published. In this article Lovins, who was after all an undergraduate physics drop-out from Harvard (twice) and Oxford posed as an expert on plutonium weapons. Lovins concluded in the Nature article that

...It is therefore incorrect to state categorically that bombs made from reactor-grade or deliberately ‘denatured’ Pu are less effective, less powerful, or less reliable than those made from weapons-grade Pu.

DeVolpi was expert enough in nuclear weapons design to qualify as an expert witness on weapons design in the famous Progressive case and who had stood up to an Energy Department's attempt to intimidate him into silence about his "politically incorrect" views on "reactor grade plutonium" and nuclear proliferation gives short shift to Lovins "expert" information. De Volpi responded to Lovins

While Lovins convinced the editors and reviewers of Nature that a neophyte had figured out nuclear weaponry enough to become an publishable expert, his inverted conclusion is not supported by theoretical or anecdotal evidence . . .

Lovins further concluded

The foregoing argument also implies that power reactors are not an implausible but are rather potentially a peculiarly convenient type of large-scale military Pu production reactor....

De Volpi remarked

Coming from a neophyte who might never have seen the inside of any of those reactors, it reflects a hoary belief system that was as untenable then as now. Just show me a civilian power reactor that has been used to make military plutonium. This published proposition of his fails the ripeness test in 2009, just as it failed the smell test back in 1980.

Lovins added

In short, the somewhat greater technical difficulty of using power-reactor Pu for effective military bombs — assuming the reactor is actually operated at high fuel burn-up — may be more than counterbalanced by the greater political and economic ease of obtaining that Pu. It should not be lightly disdained in favour of purer material from dedicated facilities.

DeVolpi scoffed

This pitiful conclusion is the foundation of Lovins’ nuclear-proliferation belief system. It too, long ago, failed both the smell and ripeness tests. Incidentally, note the absence of measures of incertitude in this so-called technical paper.

DeVolpi asks

The Nuclear Illusion or the Nuclear Illusionist?

as he "fisks" Lovins 2008 paper “The Nuclear Illusion”. Lovins once again is allowed to go beyond a credible interpretation of evidence, ignoring the constraints of uncertainty.

Dr. DeVolpi in his Knols, exhibits outstanding and sophisticated critical skills. The DeVolpi Knols deserve far wider recognition than they have received to date. They are significant contributions to public discussion on many issues related to future use of nuclear energy in our society. In addition, the DeVolpi Knols are important examples of the sort of critical thinking that ought to be encouraged in the class room. DeVolpi's Knol on Amory Lovins ought to be read by any journalist, scholar, or politician who is considering using Lovins as a source.