Solving the World Water Problems: What McKinsey & Company does not say

McKinsey & Company, the management consultant company whose advice was so helpful toENRON, Swiss-air, Kmart, and Global Crossing, has now published a 185 page report on current and future world water shortages. McKinsey & Company is of course a darling of the Greens because of a previous report that suggested that huge amounts of carbon savings were possible with energy efficiency. Form this the anti-nuclear Greens concluded that energy efficiency would make the construction of new nuclear plants unnecessary. This is of course preposterous nonsense, but McKinsey & Company has done nothing to disabuse the anti-nuclear fanatics. Now McKinsey & Company has come up with a new report on global water issues.

There is no question that world water issues constitute serious problems and water shortages create multiple problems for many nations including many areas in the United States. There are, however, a good solution to the world wide shortage of good quality water that the McKinsey and Company report completely ignored, the use of nuclear desalinization. This is not a new idea. In 1963 Phillip Hammond, a nuclear pioneer who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, suggested that waste heat from nuclear power plants could be used to distill large amounts of sea water. ORNL Director Alvin Weinberg, ever a visionary, quickly realized the implications of Hammond's idea. Nuclear power can cause the deserts to bloom Weinberg told the Kennedy Administration. The Idea was presented to the 1964 United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, and was endorsed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and by the Johnson Administration. Research began at Oak Ridge, and quickly yielded improvements in both distillation technology, and reverse osmosis (RO) technology. Despite the rapid progress, the Johnson Administration, faced with mounting costs for the Vietnam War, cut funding to the ORNL Nuclear desalinization project, and prematurely ending this very promising project.

The termination of nuclear desalinization research at ORNL was hardly the end of exploration of the use of nuclear power for nuclear desalinization. In the Soviet Union, the concept was connected with the fast reactor research. The Soviet experimental BN-350 demonstrated that large scale nuclear desalinization of the brackish water from the Caspian Sea was possible. Most of the heat produced by by the BN-350 was used in the desalinization process, and up to 120,000 cubic meters (or about 100 acre feet) of fresh water per day were produced.

Currently, dedicated desalinization plants are almost without exception operated with fossil fuel heat sources. or utilized reverse osmosis, a desalinization method that forces water through a membrane under pressure.Osmosis does not require heat, but electricity is normally use to provide the energy needed to force the water. However waste heat from nuclear plants can be substituted from the heat created by burning fossil fuels. In addition electricity generated by nuclear facilities can be used to drive reverse osmosis desalinization. This opens some interesting does for conventional nuclear technology, as well as for advanced generation IV reactors.

One of the problems of the post carbon grid is the generation of part time power. Base load power is generated twenty four hours a day seven days a week. But electrical demand goes up in the day time. But excess nuclear capacity available at night need not go to waste. It can be put to work generating electricity to drive reverse osmoses. Dual purpose nuclear generators, for example, a reactor can be used to produce water most of the time, but switch from producing water to feeding the grid during periods of peak demand. Load following would be possible while operating a reverse osmosis facility. As load demand increases, electricity can be switched from the osmosis plant to the grid, and as electrical demand drops, electricity can be switched back the osmosis process.

The co-generation of electricity and water will greatly increase the thermal efficiency of nuclear power facilities, and the sale of water will add to the facility's revenue stream. Of course, electricity/water cogeneration will not be possible everywhere. Co-generation requires a source of salty, or brackish water, and a need for fresh water. Most co-generation facilities can be located close to the sea. But over half of the population of the United States lives near the sea, many in areas that have or will face acute water shortages. The American Southwest faces a grim future of long term drought, and the California water shortage of continues to grow. The long term prospects for the Colorado River are particularly grim, and researchers are now predicting that Lake Mead and Lake Powell could both run dry in little over a decade. Thus in the Southwest, particularly in California, nuclear co-generatrion of water and electricity offers the only plausible plan for alleviating the growing water shortage.

Finally it should be noted that reactor heat that is rejected during the electrical generation process can not only be used for desalinization, but it could also be used for district heating. The brine, leftover from the desalinization still has useful heat that can be captured and piped to area homes, business and factories. Not only can the heat be used to for winter heating, but it can also heat water, and can also power summer air conditioning. Such a system would have the double benefit of increasing reactor thermal efficiency while lowering electrical demand.

Finally it should be noted that the brine produced by the nuclear desalinization process contains many valuable minerals, that have been sufficiently concentrated by the desalinization process that their recovery is possible. The recovery of minerals from the nuclear desalinization process would thus provide a further revenue stream for a reactor owner.

It thus should be noted that reactors are a very promising source of desperately needed fresh water, and that nuclear desalinization has the potential to add new revenue sources to reactor owners. This is the story that the McKinsay & Company report on world water resources failed to tell.

Climate of Fear, Ignorance and Lies

The Anti-Nuclear Alliance of Western Australia (ANAWA) has recently produced a very slick, and highly dishonest video account of the nuclear power industry. The video, inaccurately titled "Climate of Hope," include claims that the use of DU weapons has lead to cancer deaths, an unsubstantiated assertion. Power reactors are characterized as being modified versions of plutonium producing military reactors, and spent nuclear fuel is portrayed as a source of weapons quality plutonium. The video grossly exaggerated claims about minor nuclear plant incidents, turning them into near nuclear meltdown. Nuclear power is characterized by Chernobyl and three Mile Island. Nuclear safety advances are, of course, ignored, as is the safety record of the nuclear industry during the last two decades. The problem of nuclear waste is treated as if it is it is an unsolvable problem. The absurd claim that nuclear power will eventually lead to carbon emissions equivalent to fossil fuel plants is advanced. The environmentally unsound of biomass is touted as a large scale energy source, and CO2 emitting Combined Heat and Power (CHP) facilities are treated as if they are a carbon free alternative to nuclear power.

The potentials of renewable energy sources is greatly exaggerated, and their problems are minimized or ignored. The necessity of burning massive amounts CO2 emitting natural gas along with solar and wind generation is ignored, as is problems of geothermal energy, such is the triggering of earthquakes, and the release of large amounts of radioactive gasses, generated the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium deep within the earth.

Once more the anti-nuclear cult relies on lie, misinformation and one sided presentations of facts to make its case. The Anti-Nuclear Alliance of Western Australia gives not the slightest hint of how this very high quality video was paid for, but its relative tolerance of of burning fossil fuels, betrayed my its advocacy of fossil fuel based CHP might be an indication. Australian coal interests are bitterly opposed to nuclear power and undoubtedly stand ready to back anti-nuclear propaganda from any source.

Update: My first attempt to link to the video was not successful. Lets hop that the You Tube links work better.

Indian AHWR300-LEU Features Revealed

A pamphlet from the Bhabha Atomic research center in Mumbai, India offers a detailed description of the AHWR300-LEU reactor now under development. The reactor will feature a complex fuel mix that will include both uranium and thorium.

The development of the AHWR300-LEU has significant implications for the less well developed nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Current Indian capital costs for reactors are running per $1.10 per watt of generation capacity. The design of the AHWR300-LEU contains numerous cost saving features. An no doubt the Indian's expect to be able to deliver these reactors to less well developed countries at a cost that will be at an order of magnitude lower than that of renewables. The low cost of the AHWR300-LEU could lead to an energy revolution in energy hungry less well developed countries. At the same time the Indians are paying careful attention to traditional nuclear problems such as safety, proliferation control, and nuclear waste management.

The pamphlet states

AHWR300-LEU possesses several features, which are likely to reduce its capital and operating costs.

* Using heavy water at low pressure reduces potential for leakages

* Recovery of heat generated in the moderator for feed water heating

* Elimination of major components and equipment such as primary coolant
pumps and drive motors, associated control and power supply equipment and
corresponding saving of electrical power required to run these pumps

* Shop assembled coolant channels, with features to enable quick replacement
of pressure tube alone, without affecting other installed channel components

* Inherent advantages of using high pressure boiling water as coolant

* Elimination of steam generators

* Use of high-pressure steam

* Production of 500 m3/day of demineralised water in Multi Effect Desalination
Plant by using steam from LP Turbine (For plants located on the sea coast)

* Hundred year design life of the reactor

* A design objective requiring no exclusion zone beyond plant boundary on
account of its advanced safety features

These features to common themes of Indian reactor design. An emphasis on simplicity, low cost, safety and longevity. The AHWR-300-LEU will produce a modest amount of fresh water in the cooling process, and indeed the production of fresh water is not a major goal of the Indian reactor design at the moment.

The AHWR-300-LEU is designed primarily for export, and it contains a number of idiot proof safety features, such as a fail safe protection features that operate to both prevent and mitigate major reactor accidents. Thus

AHWR300-LEU is provided with a double containment. For containment isolation, a passive system has been provided in AHWR300-LEU. The reactor building air supply and exhaust ducts are shaped in the form of U-bends of sufficient height. In the event of LOCA, the containment pressure acts on the water pool surface and drives water, by swift establishment of syphon, into the U-bends of the ventilation ducts. Water in the U-bends acts as a seal between the containment and the external environment, providing necessary isolation between the two.

The Indians are extraordinarily careful about safety:

Some important safety features of AHWR300-LEU are given below.
• Slightly negative void coefficient of reactivity
• Passive safety systems working on natural laws
• Large heat sink in the form of Gravity Driven Water Pool with an inventory of 7000 m3 of water, located near the top of Reactor Building
• Removal of heat from core by natural circulation
• Injection of cooling water by Emergency Core Cooling System directly
inside the fuel cluster
• Two independent shutdown systems (primary and secondary)
• Passive poison injection in moderator in the event of non-availability of both the primary as well as the secondary shut down system due to failure or malevolent insider action

In addition to three shutdown control systems, a reactor design passive safety feature, called a negative reactivity coefficient will shut down the reactor if it starts to overheat.

Careful attention has been paid to design of the AHWR300-LEU fuel mix in order to prevent nuclear proliferation using spent fuel, and to minimize problems related to the long term storage of spent fuel.

Canada and Indian Reactors

It has recently been proposed that the Canadian reactor manufacture company Atomic Energy Canada, Limited should be sold to Indian interests, presumably the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL), an Indian government owned business that builds and operates Indian power reactors. NPCIL is a very successful reactor designer of small to middle size reactors. And AECL has something that NPCIL needs, and that is reactor manufacturing capabilities. India is buying foreign reactors in part to jump start the Indian reactor supply chain, but in the long run indian plans still envision Indian designed and built reactors producing most of the countries future energy.

Currently India has a number of successful, low cost reactors, whose design has evolved from the an early AECL CANDU reactor design. A couple of the Canadian reactors were built in India, and served as prototypes for subsequent Indian reactors. The Indians appear to have solved a number of technological problems with the CANDU design, and are now interested in exporting their small and possibly their middle size reactors. AECL is stymied because they don't have any up to date reactor products, and their old reactors are known to have significant material flaws that necessitate expensive rebuilds every 25 years. The Indians appear to have overcome this problem. Thus Indian technology and reactor design might benefit SECL, but what benefits would the Indians receive from the deal?

We should note that it would cost significantly more for AECL to manufacture reactors in Canada, than for NPCIL to manufacture reactors in India. But on the other hand AECL has a number of international customers in Asia, Latin America, and Europe and an established presence in North America. AECL gives NPCIL an opening to its old customers and an international reputation. Sale of NPCIL designed reactors to customers in the United States as well as Canada might be a possibility. NPCIL could aid AECL to lower reactor costs by exporting parts as well as the design of low cost reactors. The smallest Indian reactor at rated at 220 MWe, has very large potential for world wide sales, and might well sell well in the united States, where small reactors are beginning to attract attention. A second Indian reactor. the larger 700 MWe design is similar in size to the CANDU 600 reactor. The Canadians have looked at an enhanced CANDU 600, but It might cost less to adapt the Indian 700 MW reactor to North American requirements. Among the advantages of the Canadian-Indian reactor design is the absence of such manufacturing bottlenecks as requirement for a large and difficult to manufacture reactor pressure vessel.

Thus the AECL could adapt the Indian reactors to Canadian and American requirements, and manufacture and sell them in North America, together with sales to other traditional AECL customers. NPCIL could contribute its technology and capital which AECL desperately needs. NPCIL could also sell reactors directly to customers in Asia and Africa.

The Indians are developing a reactor, the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR). This reactor has Generation III + safety features. In India the AHWR will operate on a thorium fuel cycle, but a AHWR design that uses uranium is in the works for export. The AHWR(U) might fit into the AECL catalogue, and a 1000 MW big brother might cap the AECL offerings for some time to come. Thus NPCIL does have something to offer AECL, and AECL might help NPRIL find international customers, as well as boosting reactor production. There would be, of course, issues of corporate culture to overcome. Thus a deal is at least possible.

Electrical Reliability and Wind Redundancy

I have an Internet friend, NT, who lives at the very southern tip of India. We frequently chat on line, our conversation are windows into life in India. Our conversations are frequently interrupted by power outages, which crash my friends computer. I had no idea why those outages occurred so frequently, until I recently learned that electricity for NT's community is generated by two small conventional power plants and a large wind farm. NT has electricity when the wind is blowing, but local electrical demand can overwhelm the output of the small electrical plants, in the absence of a brisk breeze. At periods of high electrical demand the result is a blackout that only is reversed when the wind starts blowing again. When NT's computer crashes because of an electrical blackout, that may be the end of our conversation for the rest of the day. According to NT outages could last for hours, and it was often impossible to predict when electrical services would resume.

People in the United States could adjust to such conditions, but would they want too? Until very recently I lived in Dallas, Texas. Summers in Dallas can be blisteringly hot. Hotter in fact than NT's home town of Kanyakumari, where the summer temperature seldom rises about 95 F. In contrast the average Dallas temperature in July and August is 96 F, with as many as 59 100 degree days having been observed. The Dallas heat can be a health hazard to older people with heart conditions. Thus air conditioning in Dallas is not a luxury, it is a matter of public health. In 2003 when Dallas like summer heat descended on Western Europe, 50,000 people died. Thus electrical reliability in Texas is not a matter of personal connivance, it is a matter of public health.

Thus when a famous energy expert claims

there is not and has never been a need for any particular plant or kind of plant to run all the time, . .

what is he really saying? Does our expert mean that reliability is not a desirable characteristic?

Our expert alleges,

All power plants fail, varying only in their failures’ size, duration, frequency, predictability, and cause. Solar cells’ and windpower’s variation with night and weather is no different from the intermittence of coal and nuclear plants, except that it affects less capacity at once, more briefly, far more predictably, and is no harder and probably easier and cheaper to manage. In short, the ability to serve steady loads is a statistical attribute of all plants on the grid, not an operational requirement for one plant. Variability (predictable failure) and intermittence (unpredictable failure) must be managed by diversifying type and location, forecasting, and integrating with other resources. Utilities do this every day, balancing diverse resources to meet fluctuating demand and offset outages. Even with a largely (or probably a wholly) renewable grid, this is not a significant problem or cost, either in theory or in practice—as illustrated by areas that are already 30-40% wind-powered.”

This is a very cleaver argument, but there is an error. What differentiates base load power from other generation sources in not a never fail reliability, but low generation cost. Base load power is low cost power, and the reason grid operators seek it out, is because it is available day in and day out at a low cost. Since the grid operator is interested in fulfilling customer demand at the lowest cost, the operator seeks to contract with the lowest cost power source for power as much time as possible. The fact that low cost power providers may be also highly reliable operators is a significant plus for the grid operators, because he or she does not does not have to contract with higher cost power providers at periods of high power demand.

The problem for the grid operator is that electricity must be provided, no matter the energy costs. Our way of life is dependent on reliable electricity, and not just for air conditioning. Consider the the great blackouts of 1965, 1977 and 2003. The August 14-15, 2003 blackout shut down many cities in the United States and Canada. Cost estimates vary, but the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association (OMA) estimated the direct costs of the blackout on Ohio manufacturers to be $1.08 billion. Numerous large manufacturing plants were shut down for a day. Ontario set asside $75 million to compensate local governments for their blackout related expenses, and lost revenue. Utilities lost between one and two billion dollars, and the total losses for the day long blackout may have been as high as $10 billion. Clearly then the electrical reliability problems which my friend NT experiences in India would not be considered acceptable in the United States.

The baseload issue then is the balance between grid reliability and low electrical cost. If the wind capacity factor were .30 and the capacity factor for nuclear is .90, at least 1000 MW wind farms would be required to produce as much electricity as one reactor 1000 MW reactor. But a wind system with three generator is not likely to be as reliable as the reactor. In Archer and Jacobson suggest that it would take at least five 1000 MW wind farms to begin to approach a reactor's reliability, and that a wind array containing seven wind farms would still not be as reliable as a single reactor. The seriousness of the redundancy problem is illustrated by Peter Hawkins' case study of German wind.

Germany’s 22,000 MW of wind, with a capital cost of about $40 billion, is really effectively a capacity of only about 4,000 MW in terms of production capability. As a result, the wind plants in Germany represent 16 per cent of the total capacity (MW), but only about 5 percent of the electricity production (MWh).

By increasing their wind capacity to 48,000 MW in 2020, the germans hope to be able to increase their wind generated electrical output to 13% of their generation total. But the added 26,000 MWs of wind capacity would cost at least $100 billion. actually it probably would cost more because in order to increase their wind capacity factor, the Germans would be required to build offshore wind generators, and German offshore wind is proving to be as expensive. The German Alpha Venture offshore project has a name plate generating capacity of 60 MW and cost $375 million to build. That is $6.25 watt, a cost that lands German wind squarely in the nuclear cost range for much less reliability and a far shorter life span. But from a carbon reduction standpoint the increase in German wind capacity will not lead to a decrease in German CO2 emissions. At least not if the German Left gets its way and shutdown all German reactors by 2020. The 26,000 MWs of German wind generators would not even begin to approach the displaced electrical generation of German reactors. No wonder German

wind integration study, which covers the period to 2020, did not project CO2 emissions beyond 2015.

The shutdown of German reactors would increase absolute amount of CO2 emitted in the generation of German electricity, That does not really matter to German Greens, whose insane hostility to nuclear power knows no bounds. The Greens would clearly prefer to destruction of human life on this planet to the toleration of nuclear power.

Renewables advocates argue that the limitations of wind can be countered by adding solar generation to the renewables mix. But given the limitations of renewables, renewable advocates have found only three methods of making renewables reliable:

1. Burn a lot of natural gas whenever renewable generated electricity is in short supply.

2. When renewable output is high, save the surplus in some form of energy storage.

3. Build transmission systems from areas where surplus generation is possible, to areas where electrical supplies would be inadequate due to the limitations of local renewable resources.

Each of these approaches has serious flaws. The first approach is unsatisfactory because it fails to eliminate carbon emissions from the electrical generation system.

The second approach is advocated by a report titled Energy Self Reliant States. The word storage is repeated over and over in this report:

Very high penetration rates will require new developments in electricity storage. . . .
establish a system of widely distributed and abundant storage that would change the very underpinnings and assumptions of an electricity system designed without storage in mind. . . .
Some renewable fuels, like sunlight and wind, are variable. Thus the estimates, especially for wind, assume a significant level of storage or on-demand distributed generation. . . .
sufficient electricity storage . . .
sufficient electricity storage . . .
These investments should be designed to allow the integration of many variable and dispersed generators as well as growing amounts of distributed storage. . . .
To achieve very high proportions of our electricity from variable renewable energy sources will require very significant amounts of storage and/or a restructuring of our electricity system to rely on more natural gas-fired distributed backup generators. The electricity storage sector has seen many technological and commercial developments. This report does not examine storage and its implications but in our analysis of variable renewable energy potential we assume sufficient storage is available. . . .

The report argues:

that a new extra high voltage inter-regional transmission network may not be needed to improve network reliability, relieve congestion and expand renewable energy. The focus should be on upgrading the transmission, subtransmission and distribution systems inside states. These investments should be designed to allow the integration of many variable and dispersed generators as well as growing amounts of distributed storage. New in-state transmission lines may well be needed but these will probably be lower voltage lines. In any event, they should be built only after maximizing energy efficiency and the use of existing transmission capacity.

Energy efficiency and demand reduction, as well as the use of distributed generation, can free up significant amounts of distribution and transmission capacity.

But what would such a storage system cost? Tom Konrad. a renewables advocate suggests that

On a national basis, such storage would cost an estimated $13 Trillion, or over 65 times the cost of the transmission investments they oppose.

Konrad argues that by connecting low renewable resource states with electricity produced in high resource states, much of the cost of storage could be avoided. Konrad argues that a $700 billion transmission system could be substituted for the $13 trillion storage system. However, Konrad's estimate is presented with out the sort of detailed analysis that would back up his claims. Before the $700 Billion estimate is accepted, it would have to be tested against a worst case scenario.

Even if we accept Konrad's cost estimate for the total transmission package, we have to weigh that against lower cost alternatives. The Babcock & Wilcox, small mPower reactor is expected to cost less than $3500 per kW. MPower reactors can be located on the grounds of old coal fired power plants. close to target electrical markets, eliminating the need to expand the current grid, or alternatively add very large and hugely expensive grid storage components. A $700 Billion investment in mPower reactors would buy half of the current generation demand. Given that practically immortal reactors now produce about 20% of our electricity, the other 30% of the electricity could be had for another reactor investment of $400 billion or less. Furthermore, reactors can be situated close to the sea coast, where their now wasted heat can be set to work producing massive amounts of fresh water. The sale of water thus would add to the nuclear revenue stream, while adding little to nuclear costs. The $400 billion reactor investment would end the necessity of investing several trillion dollars in renewable generation capacity, and the all nuclear system would be be far more reliable than either renewables plus storage or renewables plus new long distance transmission. In addition the nuclear system would offer significant new water source for areas now experiencing water shortages.

Thus the fallacy in the "base load fallacy" argument is its failure to acknowledge the relationship between electrical reliability and electrical costs. The name plate capacity costs of renewable electricity means little. What will matter in a post carbon grid is the cost of reliable electricity, and nuclear generated electricity, even conventional nuclear generated electricity would cost far less than a renewables plus storage or a renewables plus transmission approach. The only other renewables reliability approach would involve the unacceptable emissions of large amounts of CO2. Thus, nuclear power can supply reliable electricity at a far lower cost than renewables, and would not extract a carbon penalty.

Indian Nuclear Plans

The World Nuclear Association has published a long new account of the advances in the Indian nuclear program. Things are now moving very fast and three dozen reactors reactors are either planned or under serious consideration. Indian plans include light water reactors from Russia, France, and the United States, in addition to a locally designed Light Water Reactor.

Why the plunge into foreign Light Water Reactors, after India has painstakingly developed its heavy water reactor technology? The reason becomes obvious when we learn that the Indians are now expanding their fast breeder reactor plans. The WNA tells us

Longer term, the AEC envisages its fast reactor program being 30 to 40 times bigger than the PHWR program . . . this will be linked with up to 40,000 MWe of light water reactor capacity, the used fuel feeding ten times that fast breeder capacity, thus "deriving much larger benefit out of the external acquisition in terms of light water reactors and their associated fuel". This 40 GWe of imported LWR multiplied to 400 GWe via FBR would complement 200-250 GWe based on the indigenous program of PHWR-FBR-AHWR. Thus AEC is "talking about 500 to 600 GWe nuclear over the next 50 years or so" in India, plus export opportunities.

Oh wow, talk about ambitious! As i keep saying the Indians intend eat every ones lunch by running their industries on low cost thorium power. Even though foreign reactors are more expensive than Indian designed reactors, they fit into Indian plans, because they produce lots "spent fuel". In other countries "spent fuel" is considered a problem, and is called nuclear waste. In India spent light water reactor fuel is fuel for fast breeder reactors. And fast breeders will produce both electricity and the start up fuel for Advanced Heavy Water Reactors. The AHWRs will be breeders too, so as long as India has thorium, it will have nuclear fuel.

Unlike China, India does not have a legacy of coal, and further unlike China, India is not cursed with a large domestic coal supply. The Indians have known for 60 years that the key to their energy future would lie with nuclear power, and have doggedly pursued a nuclear development program. Along the way the Indians were able to develop really low cost but good quality reactors. Locally designed and built Indian reactors cost 40% less than Chinese reactors. And needless to say both cost a whole lot less than American and European reactors. The Indian reactor price advantage could begin to tell in 20 years when India and China start their post carbon energy program in ernest.

Current Chinese plans for post-carbon energy call for an everything but the kitchen sink approach. And even the lowest carbon Chinese energy plan calls for over 40% of Chinese electricity to be generated by fossil fuels in 2050. The Chinese expect to be building 4th Generation reactors by 2050, but it is far from clear what role they will play in Chinese nuclear plans.

The Indians clearly have charted a route to a high energy, low cost nuclear future. The Chinese as of yet have not. Of course Indian plans, though good, could be even better. The Indians are committed to do a lot of fuel reprocessing, a decision the Chinese appear to be also following. Both nations are involved with expensive approaches, and current fuel reprocessing technologies tend to loose too much plutonium, Indian reactor and fuel processing costs could be lower, provided the Indians adopted Molten Salt Reactor technology. A LFTR would include fuel reprocessing technology with each reactor unit, and would not produce plutonium. LFTRs need not produce plutonium at all. The Indians are probably years away from doing that, but a rapid program ofLFTR development in the United States could lead to lower post carbon electrical costs and would keep our industrial economy competitive with India.

Will renewable investments save more CO2

The Environment America Research & Policy Center of California has just published a report titled Generating Failure: How Building Nuclear Power Plants Would Set America Back in the Race Against Global Warming.

The Environment America Research & Policy Center of California is a non-profit outfit which has a mission statement which states

We are dedicated to protecting California’s air, water and open spaces. We investigate problems, craft solutions, educate the public and decision makers, and help Californians make their voices heard in local, state and national debates over the quality of our environment and our lives.

All this sounds relentlessly high-minded, but as the old saying goes

the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Ignorance and incompetence can screw up the best of intentions. So how much do the report authors know? The report is written by Travis Madsen and Tony Dutzik Frontier Group, and Bernadette Del Chiaro and Ron Sargent of the Environment America Research & Policy Center.

Well it turns out that none of the report's authors has been educated or has worked in professions that would help them to understand the technological or economic issues involved. This by itself hardly demonstrates that they are wrong, but it does show that we should carefully review their arguments before we accept their conclusions.

In order to assess how well our authors did we turn their discussion of their methods, and there we find

We use lifecycle carbon dioxide emission rates per kWh for a variety of renewable technologies and new nuclear reactors from a 2008 report by Stanford scientist Mark Jacobson.

Jacobson's assessment is flawed by the assumption that use of nuclear power will inevitably lead to a nuclear war every 30 years and that the CO2 emitted by cities torched by nuclear blasts should be included with nuclear CO2 emissions. While Jacobson's approach is imaginative, arguments in its favor are very weak. Any conclusions based on Jacobson's implausible assumptions must be taken with very large grains of salt.

If we disregard the Mark Jacobson's very dubious and controversial assertions about nuclear CO2 emissions, then we are left with an assertion that

Nuclear Power Is More Costly than Other Forms of Emission-Free Electricity.

Also

Vast amounts of clean energy are available – now – at far less cost.

Where would this energy come from? According to "Generation Failure" those sources include

* Energy Efficiency
* Combined Heat and Power generators
* The Sun and Wind

First we should note that they chose to aggregate energy efficiency, with CHPs and renewables and weigh their combined cost and CO2 savings against nuclear power. The report claims

End Use Efficiency, based on estimates by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy of 4.6 cents per kWh total resource cost, inflated to 2018 dollars...

The American Council's report concludes

These results serve to confirm that the costs of saved energy are far less than the costs of new conventional fossil fuels and alternative energy sources and remain consistent over time.

A more fair minded approach might look at aggregation energy efficiency and nuclear as well, because presumably efforts to achieve energy efficiency would continue with a nuclear investment. Thus efficiency may be cost-effective in terms of carbon savings, but carbon-free energy still needs to be generated, and efficiency will still be cost effective whether teamed with either carbon free nuclear power or with other energy sources.

A second source of supposed carbon savings would come from the use of

Combined heat and power (CHP), derived from estimates for recovered heat industrial CHP, combined cycle industrial CHP, and building-scale CHP by the Rocky Mountain Institute,

While Rocky Mountain Institute holds CHP would save CO2 emissions, CHPs, even with natural gas is not nearly effective as nuclear energy. This can be illustrated by a comparison between Denmark and France. While it is well known that Denmark uses wind power, what is less well known is that

Most electricity in Denmark is produced by large CHP plants that also supply heat to district heating systems and institutions in major cities. More than 50% of the space heating supply in Denmark comes from district heating systems. In 2000 combined heating and power facilities generated 60% of the electricity for domestic supply and approximately 75% of the heat supplied to district heating systems.

Since 80% of French electricity is produced by nuclear plants, a comparison of the French and Danish CO2 emissions would give us a clue about the relative effectiveness of Danish use of Wind plus CHP verses the French use of nuclear power, 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. Thus clearly nuclear power offers a significant advantage over the CHP approach in savings CO2 emissions. Other high nuclear nations like Sweden which produces 50% of its electricity with nuclear also show superior CO2 reductions.

The case for the use of biomass in not improved by the fact that Denmark uses a significant amount of biomass in the production of its electricity.

In 2000, biomass contributed 45.1% of the energy production from renewable sources; waste combustion 35.6%; wind 18.7%.

Thus policies requiring the burning of biomass and refuse to produce electricity and heat do not appear to significantly lower Danish CO2 output.

Thus we are left with Generation Failure's assertion that vast amounts of low cost carbon free energy are available and a far lower cost than nuclear. This assertion is based on a California Energy Commission Report. While that report is not available on line, a slightly earlier version of that report, published in late 2007 is.

That report states offers a levelized cost for advanced nuclear of from 91.12 to 118.25. This tracks closely with estimated 2016 nuclear levelized costs of 107 based on Energy Information Agency 2009 data. There are however discrepancies between the California estimate of levelized cost for wind, and the EIA's estimate. The California estimate for class 5 wind was between 61.38 and 84.24. The estimate for the levelized cost for wind in 2016 based on EIA data is 141.5. The apparent discrepancy is that most wind generating facilities have a lower capacity factor than the class 5 winds the California Energy Commission noted.

Other renewable resources which which the California Energy Commission in its 2007 report include various forms of solar, which it estimated to have levelized cost far higher than those of nuclear. In this respect the California report coincides with the EIA data.

Estimations of the future costs of energy producing facilities tends to be more than a little like predictions of the future weather. The further out one goes, the more inaccurate the guess is likely to be.

It would appear then that "Generation Failure" has failed to the quality of the California environment. Instead it give us a highly distorted picture of the carbon emissions of nuclear power as well as its relative cost. "Generation Failure" should be regarded yet another product of the anti-nuclear propaganda machine.

The B&W mPower and TVA

Some time ago I wrote a series of posts titled the Keys to Lowering Nuclear Costs. Although my primary focus was on lowering LFTR costs, use of many of the cost lowering approaches I suggested was not by any means limited to LFTR type reactors. Most of the ideas did not originate with me, and most of them are obvious to anyone who thinks seriously about methods of lowering nuclear costs. I would thus expect that lowering nuclear costs will become increasingly important during the next few years, and that parts of the Keys formula will be repeated over and over again in new nuclear projects. Rod Adams posted a discussion of the B&W mPower reactor yesterday.

In my estimation the mPower has a far better chance of becoming a reality than he Hyperion reactor does. Rod's post points to Babcock & Wilcox's existing production system, now engaged in the production of reactors for the Navy. Much of skepticism about the future of nuclear power has to do with supposed production bottlenecks. Those bottlenecks would not be a problem for B&W, and at any rate if orders start flooding in, B&W will have ample time to expand their production capacity. Rob also links to an article in Nuclear Engineering International that focus on the B&W reactor. We see clearly how much of B&W's thinking parallels the Keys. We have a small factory built modular reactor, intended to be sited underground. Small reactors can be built in a shortened construction time, B&W estimates as little as two years. The "m" in mPower probably stands for modular, and modules can be clustered in sets of from two to eight reactors. Building the cluster one reactor at a time means that part of a project can be producing power and thus income while other parts are under construction, and still others are in the planning stage. These features substantially lower the accrual of interest, and thus lower capital costs. That is straight out of The Keys.

The mPower can be either air or water cooled, and thus becomes the first site anywhere reactor. B&W says that the reactor will cost $500 million. For the water cooled mPower that comes to $3.70 per watt. It is not clear if this is an overnight figure, or the actual cost of ownership. The B&W mPower would save its owners around $30 million a year in coal costs. The mPower at $3.70 per watt will be price competitive with wind. It will offer a capacity factor of .90 to wind best of .30 to .40 depending on location. Wind costs $2.50 per will produce less than half of the power, and the mPower can produce power on demand.

The mPower would be an excellent investment at the $500 million price. The market would perceive an mPower based project to be low risk, because of the relatively short manufacturing time, and its affordable price. The market has a long memory of the Washington Public Power Supply System's (woops) $2.25 billion default its five reactor nuclear project. The market is likely to be far less intimidated by a project of the modest size of the mPower. At that point the mPower story will begin selling itself. B&W can point to not only the reliability and safety of the nuclear power industry, and to the reliability and safety of the thousands of reactor years of safe operation for small naval reactors it has built by B&W. The combination of small risk and a competitive rate of return is likely to ease investor fears. B&W has the deep pockets needed to make the mPower happen, and they have TVA backing. The first mPower TVA is committed to evaluating a possible site, located in Roane County near Oak Ridge, as a potential site for the lead mPower reactor. In addition, B&W states,

A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed by B&W, TVA and a consortium of regional municipal and cooperative utilities to explore the construction of a fleet of B&W mPower reactors to meet the consortium’s need to diversify its power generation assets.

This sounds like something other than direct TVA ownership for the fleet of mPower reactors might be in the works.

TVA confronts a statutory debt limit of $30 Billion with an existing debt of $25 billion. Thus TVA cannot afford more than one large reactor project, at the most. TVA is currently finishing the Watts Bar II unit, and that will add $2.5 billion to its debt. That would leave room for only one more large project, completion of the long delayed Bellefonte I project, probably for around another 2.5 billion 2009 dollars. That will leave TVA with very little wiggle room, but the Alexander-Webb 100 reactor imitative might provide TVA with an out. At the moment TVA's best large new reactor option, the Westinghouse AP-1000, is under a very silly regulatory cloud at the NRC, and may have to undergo a major containment housing redesign. No such redesign would be requited with the underground mPower reactor. If TVA gets reactor money out of Congress, without a small debt limitation revision, I would expect Bellefonte II and more mPower reactors, perhaps with some arrangement that keeps the debt off TVA's books, to be added to TVA's plans before long. The hand writing on the wall says, "carbon taxes on fossil fuel fired electrical generation are coming soon." TVA faces an utter lack of viable wind resources. and with as many as 209 cloudy days a year, solar reliability is a big joke in the Tennessee Valley. If TVA is going to go green, it will have to go Nuclear Green.

My Energy Collective debate is finally winding down

My debate with Stephen Gloor, an Australian pro-renewables engineer, seems finally to be winding down. I have been very ably assisted by Bill Hannahan, Rod Adams, and Nathan Wilson. This morning I wrote the following comment:

Stephen, you have in our discussion nicely illustrated the case against renewables, while offering your defense of renewable power systems. When confronted with the limitations of wind, you offered redundant dispersed wind installations as a solution. When it was pointed out that wind dispersion still left gaps in wind electrical generation, you offered solar-wind redundancy as a solution. Against the case that solar and wind both fail over wide areas, you offered another redundancy, the CO2 emitting use of natural gas as a backup to the not always reliable renewables system you call for.. Your solution also requires an enormous and expensive expansion of the electrical transmission system. I have called attention to a statement by a electrical transmission systems expert that an all renewables generation system would require 75 thousand miles of new transmission lines for California alone, in order to make the system reliable. Your solution to almost any renewable reliability problem is to build further, redundant renewable facilities, and connect them up with hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines.

You claim that nuclear construction it too slow, but nuclear power with its superior reliability, and its potential to be located near consumers, is far far more easily scaled to meet carbon free energy requirements, and to fulfill consumer demands than renewables are.

You never once stop to count the cost of the multiple redundancies and grid expansion you advocate. When confronted with the fact that even with the huge investments in wind, solar and natural gas facilities, there still would be uncovered problems like summer peak demand, in areas like Texas. Your response was to call for even more huge investments in energy efficiency. Thus you like other renewables advocates never stop to count the cost of your solutions, you simply recite the claim that nuclear is too expensive, while ignoring the fact that the renewables system you advocate would be far more expensive. You argue that reactors cannot perform load following, despite the fact that nuclear load following is performed as a matter of course in the French electrical system. You reject the possibility that nuclear research and a new generation of nuclear technology might lower nuclear costs.

Conclusions from our debate:

1. Renewable advocates have failed to make a convincing case that wind plus natural gas "backups" actually saves significantly more CO2, than wind alone. Money spent on wind generators is not justified unless a strong case exists that they actually save CO2.

2. Wind generators seldom operate at full capacity. Redundant wind generators are required to equal the capacity factor of reactors.

3. Even with multiple generators, natural factors such as day and night influence wind output. To achieve high renewable penetration, wind generators require daytime solar back up. The solar backup is a second form of renewables redundancy. In order to insure the availability of solar generated electricity during all daylight hours, heat storage is required, Heat storage requires redundant gathering fields, in order to insure that enough heat is collected during limited daylight hours.

3. All forms of energy storage, if used with renewables, require redundant generating capacity to service them. In addition the storage-generator unit is a further redundant electrical generator.

4. Even with significant redundancies, a high renewables penetrated grid requires significant natural gas backup. Natural gas backups thus form a further redundancy.

5. Renewables seldom can be located close to energy customers. Transmitting electricity from renewables generating facilities to customers usually requires new and expensive transmission lines. The cost of those transmission lines are a hidden cost of a renewable generation system, Using renewables output from other regions as a backup to local renewables requires still more new transmission lines. These interregional transmission lines that would not be required by an all nuclear grid, are transmission redundancies required to support a renewable power system.

6. Construction of nuclear power plants use significantly fewer materials than the construction the construction of solar and wind facilities require. The United States must compete with growing Asian economies for construction materials, and the current trade balance places the United States at a significant and growing disadvantage in this competition. Hence the cost of power generation facilities construction can be expected to rise during the next 15 years, with the cost of renewables rising more than the cost of nuclear power. The rise in materials cost, will also effect the cost of transmission lines, and this will effect the cost of an all renewables system far more than the cost of an all nuclear system.

7. Renewables advocates when confronted by the limitations of renewable energy and its high cost, fall back on a further redundancy, and that is efficiency. Efficiency advocates point to potential energy efficiencies, but seldom attempt to understand why these efficiencies are not already being adopted. Efficiency advocates often believe that naming an efficiency and describing it as a low hanging fruit is the same thing as demonstrating that it is a low cost alternative to building generation facilities. This is not in fact the case.

8. Renewables critics of nuclear power never reference renewables cost and compare the total cost of an all renewables electrical system, with the cost of an all nuclear electrical system. But judging from the current cost of renewables generation facilities, their capacity factors, and the added cost of new transmission lines needed to bring renewable generated electricity to distant customers, and the likely inflation of the cost of materials, the total cost of an all renewables system is likely to be several times higher the cos of an all nuclear system.

2025 Economic Developments in China and India, and the Future of American Solar and Wind

Brian Wang has a very interesting post based on economic projections by Rio Tinto, the international mining outfit. Rio Tinto clearly wants to know about future metal demands in the global economy. Of course this is important for Rio Tinto to know since it takes both time and a lot of capital to develop a new mine, and an accurate future projections is a way to control investment risks. Rio Tinto's projections are most interesting because they foresee the most significant driving force in the world economy as the development of China. The development of India will be a second major world economic driver. The Rio Tinto projection focuses on the next 15 years, and foresees rapid advances for both Chinese and Indian economies, with dramatic increases in personal income and standards of living. From Rio Tinto's perspective, the most important aspect of this picture is the demand for metals, and Rio Tinto for sees dramatic increases in Chinese and Indian demand for copper, and by implication for iron (steel) and aluminum.

While it would be fascinating to speculate on the consequences of these developments on the peoples of China and the United States who will by 2025 find themselves in the middle of an energy crisis, brought on by a decline in the world supply of petroleum, and the certainty of Anthropogenic Global Warming. I am assuming that by 2025 reality will have caught up with the most confirmed AGW skeptic. What I am interested in is how the economic development of China and India will impact the American efforts to deal with this dual energy crisis.

The Rio Tinto model suggests that Asian demand for the raw materials for developed societies, such as copper, steel, aluminum and cement would increase, and by implication there will be a steady increase in the price of these commodities. It will be plausible then the price in American dollars for copper, steel, aluminum and cement will be much higher than it is now, and that the ability of the United States to compete for these commodities on the international market will be seriously compromised by the large American international debt, especially the debt to China.

The competitive disadvantage of the United States will adversely effect many of its options in dealing with the dual energy crisis, because the raw materials for building new energy producing resources will be subject to increasingly onerous dollar inflation of materials costs. These developments will preclude energy approaches that will require high levels materials inputs, and will favor energy sources that will use lower cost materials, or smaller material inputs. These factors would tend to favor nuclear energy over renewables for both obvious and hidden reasons. The obvious reason is that nuclear requires far less copper, steel, aluminum and cement by the kW of generating capacity than Wind and Solar generating facilities do. We can infer from Barry Brook's discussion in the previous link, that the material requirements for a large renewables development in the United States would make such a development unsustainable.

Renewable advocates seldom talk about costs, that is advocates with the exception of Ed Ring. Prior to the 2008 vote on California Proposition 7, which mandated that by 2025 50% of California power be produced by renewables. Ring observed:

There is nothing wrong with encouraging clean, renewable, domestically produced energy. But California’s proposition 7 “would, if approved, require California utilities to procure half of their power from renewable resources by 2025" . . .

since Californians by 2025 are going to be consuming about 1,000 gigawatt-hours per day, if proposition 7 is enacted, 500 gWh per day will have to come from wind and solar power.

Solar power, installed – not including transmission or storage infrastructure – costs about $7.0 million per megawatt of output; this equates to $7.0 billion per gigawatt. If this sounds expensive, it is, but to get a truly accurate price you have to also take into account yield. Even in sunny California, solar energy (in terms of full-sun-equivalent hours), can only be harvested on average for 4.5 hours per day, which means to get 500 gWh of solar generated electricity each day in California, you would need to install 111 gigawatts of solar arrays (500/4.5), which would cost $777 billion dollars.

Wind power, installed – is a better deal currently than solar – insofar as you can probably get costs down to around $2.5 million per megawatt of output, or $2.5 billion per gigawatt. But the yield figures are also not promising. In California there is widespread disagreement on the yield for wind power – credible estimates range from 10% (2.4 hours per day) to 25% (6.0 hours per day). Given the magnitude of what is being proposed, it would be prudent to project wind yields in California somewhere in the middle of this range, say 17.5%, or 4.2 hours per day. This means to get 500 gWh of wind generated electricity in California you would need to install 119 gigawatts of solar arrays (55/4.2), which would cost $297 billion dollars.

Ring added,

It is tempting, and not entirely implausible, to expect prices for solar power to drop significantly over the next several years. But given the cost of balance of plant and installation labor, it is unlikely solar electricity is going to get measurably cheaper than wind power no matter how inexpensive the actual collector materials become. Moreover, the costs for new transmission lines and grid upgrades, the costs for massive energy storage units (since the sun and wind are only producing power during small portions of the day), and the costs for land aquisition, permitting and fighting environmentalist lawsuits will be substantial. For these reasons, estimating the total cost for California to deliver 50% renewable electricity at $300 billion is probably the very best case, if not fantastically optimistic. This is $20 billion per year for the next 15 years. Readers are encouraged to critique these projections.

Ring, did not include the costr of materials inflations in his estimate of costs.

A second serious materials problem for the development of renewables is materials requirements for electrical transmissions systems necessitated by the remote locations and the necessity of generation backup associated with a renewable dominated grid. Electrical Engineer E.G. Preston, who "by profession" does

transmission studies for wind and solar clients.

Preston, who has a PhD in Electrical Engineering, has an very impressive resume, clearly qualifies as an expert on renewables transmission, that is someone who would be accepted as an expert witness in court cases involving renewable related electrical transmission. In addition Preston does not have an ax to grind. Thus what he has to say about renewables transmission systems deserves serious attention. commenting on the recent Jacobson-Delucchi Scientific American article, A path to sustainable energy by 2030", Preston states:

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. . . 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.

Preston adds

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.

Of course, the increased cost of materials will effect the cost of transmission lines as well.

Prestons estimate is far more parsimonious in its guess about the number of solar and wind installations require to meet California's electrical need, and given a system of the magnitude Ring foresaw to meet California's 2025 electrical needs, a far larger local transmission system would have been required. Given the nuclear power cost advantage of both China and India over the next 20 years, the energy future of the United States and indeed the economic future looks quite dismal without a major technological breakthrough.

Small nuclear equals a big solution

Dan Yurman has an interesting post on the Hyperion Reactor project today. The Hyperion uses several strategies to lower cost. It is designed to be factory produced as a unit. It is small enough to be transported by truck or rail. It is a relatively simple design, which simplifies manufacture and lowers labor and parts cost. It uses a lead-bismuth coolant, that will not boil at reactor operating temperature, thus no pressure vessel is needed. Rather than design an elaborate above ground structure, the Hyperion designers have taken a "dig a hole, stick reactor in" approach to site development. This simple approach provides superior safety and protection from nuclear terrorism than the massive above ground containment domes of conventional reactors. Digging a hole is of course much cheaper and takes far less time than building a massive containment dome. The Hyperion will be sealed, and the reactor will be fueled with HEU, so it will not need a fuel charge for period of from 5 to 15 years. A secondary coolant loop, will be connected to a steam turbine,. A small prefabricated structure can hold the turbine and it can double for the security detail headquarters, and house the computers that will monitor the reactor and security sensors.

Hyperion estimates that the whole thing will cost from $2000 to $3000 per watt, a cost that would be competitive with windmills. Unlike windmills the Hyperion will produce power very reliably and will have a capacity factor of 1 until it runs out of fuel, which will take from 5 to 15 years. At 15 years the Hyperion would be approaching the natural lifespan of wind generators. The Hyperion would produce up to 5 times the electricity that five 5MW windmills would produce during a 15 year run, and the Hyperion need not sit at the end of a long high voltage transmission line. It is safe enough to sit down the street from your house, although having the security guards come over to borrow sugar for their tea all of the time might prove a headache. After the Hyperion runs out of fuel, the Hyperion company will dig it up and ship it back to the factory to be refurbished and refueled.

Making the Hyperion plan work will require a lot of capitol, and there is a risk. Much of the Hyperion plan can be adapted for LFTR. LFTRs could be designed to be as small as the Hyperion, but LFTR cores, and other major parts are truck transportable in much larger size. In fact a 400 MWe LFTR can be truck transported in several sections. Like the Hyperion, the LFTR is quite simple, in fact the LFTR is simpler. Indeed the manufacturing cost of a 400 MWe LFTR might not be higher than the manufacturing cost of a 25MWe Hyperion. Unlike the Hyperion, the LFTR would not create a long term toxic residue, and it could be refueled during its operations. Refueling the LFTR would cost less than refueling a Hyperion, because it fueling involves the use of ultra cheap thorium, rather than relatively expensive highly enriched Uranium. The LFTr would be more proliferation proof, would cost less to build, and less to own, It would last for at least 30 years, If the Hyperion costs from $2000 to $3000 per kW (in the fine print it says "over night price" and that does not make the Hyperion such a great bargain), the LFTR might well cost half that price. And with an anticipated lifespan, the LFTR would produce several times the amount of electricity a Hyperion would produce during its lifespan. Like the Hyperion the LFTR core could be buried and thus would not require an expensive housing. Thus LFTR owners would receive several times the revenue the Hyperion owner would, with similar costs for a much higher generation capacity and longer lifespan. In short the Hyperion would not last long on the market if a LFTR showed up as competition.

Update: I commented on Dan's post,

Like Martin Luther King, Hyperion has seen the promised land, but they may not get there. Los Alamos never was a great reactor design shop, and the viewpoint that if it fizzled as an atomic bomb, it must make a great reactor may not be the brightest idea around.

Nuclear Green on the Energy Collective

The Energy Collective picked up my Alternative Wind Backup post. Stephen Gloor, an Australian Engineer, picked up on my post and started a vigorous debate on my dissatisfaction with wind CO2 performance. Gloor is far from stupid, and he proved a serious opponent during the early part of the debate. But when I was able to responds to his arguments he fell back on reciting trite anti-nuclear line, and began parroting Amory Lovins. By now the debate is up to 17 comments, which is quite a lot by Energy Collective standards.

Wind Redundancy I: Archer-Jacobson

The Wikipedia explains engineering redundancy with the following formula:

Each duplicate component added to the system decreases the probability of system failure according to the formula:

P =

where:

• n - number of components
• c p_i - probability of component i failing
• P - the probability of all components failing (system failure)

The failure in this case would be the failure of wind components of the grid. For wind temporary component failure would be the rule rather than the exception, and the high likelihood of failure means that redundancy is necessary for any wind penetrated grid system, almost to the extent the system relies on wind generated electricity.

Here is an example of a suggested use for redundancy to increase the reliability of a wind system:

the power guaranteed by 7 and 19 interconnected farms was 60 and 171 kW, giving firm capacities of 0.04 and 0.11, respectively. Furthermore, 19 interconnected wind farms guaranteed 222 kW of power (firm capacity of 0.15) for 87.5% of the year, the same percent of the year that an average coal plant in the United States guarantees power. Last, 19 farms guaranteed 312 kW of power for 79% of the year, 4 times the guaranteed power generated by one farm for 79% of the year.

Thus by lining up an array of 19 geographically dispersed wind generators, the authors. Cristina L. Archer AND Mark Z. Jacobson propose to increase the reliability of wind generating systems. The one question which Archer and Jacobson did not answer is how much would it cost. If we assume that system operators will want the 87.5% reliability, that means, the authors tell us a firm capacity of .15, then we will be able to count part of the capital cost of the generators in the system. The most recent Wind Generators for the most recent West Texas wind project, are priced at $2.5 million per MW installed. At .15 capacity the cost of one MW of 87.5% reliable wind generating capacity would be $2.5 million divided by .15 or a $16.75 in wind investments per every kW of reliable wind generating capacity. But that would not be the end of the investment, because the Archer-Jacobson system would require a large number of high voltage electrical lines to gather the electricity produced at 19 separate locations in 4 different states. More high voltage lines would be required to carry electricity from the central location or locations to Texas or California cities where electricity would be consumed.

Drew Thornley offers a discussion of ERCOT wind transmission cost studies. Thornley reports:

According to ERCOT, 138-kV lines cost $1 million per mile, while 345-kV lines cost $1.5 million per mile. See Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) Transmission Optimization Study, ERCOT System Planning (2 Apr. 2008).

That is overnight costs. According to Thornley, 500-kV or 765-kV lines are even more expensive. Thus

Energy consultant Jeffry C. Pollock quantified the rate impact of future transmission investment on various customers.† Taking into account rising material and la- bor costs, interest/financing costs, and routing issues, the installed cost for CREZ Scenario 2 is estimated to be $7.8 billion ($3,282,828.28 per mile).

In the case of the Archer-Jacobson plan, the gathering and transmission system would be far more ambitious and expensive than ERCOT's CRUZ plans which only transmit electricity from wind farms in West Texas.

A further and until now unnoticed consequence of the Archer-Jacobson plan is what I call its carbon penalties. Carbon penalties are the added and usually hidden CO2 costs of attempts to make renewable schemes work. Professor Manfred Lenzen from the University of Sydney estimates that CO2 costs related to wind generator construction amount to from 30 and 60 grams of C02 per kilowatt hour. But redundancies inherent in the Archer-Jacobson plan would multiply the CO2 penalty for wind by from 6.67 times. The carbon penalties for Archer-Jacobson reliable wind will run from 200 to 400 grams per kW hour, but in addition there would be further carbon penalties for the electrical gathering and transmission systems necessitated by the Archer-Jacobson plan. I am unaware of studies that address the carbon costs of transmission systems, but surely there must be some. Thus not only would reliable power under the Archer-Jacobson plan cost far more than than equally reliable power from conventional nuclear generators, but carbon emissions from the construction of large numbers of redundant wind generators, necessitated by the Archer-Jacobson plan, would lead to far higher carbon penalties for reliable wind, than for reliable nuclear electricity.

Thorium Remix 2009

Kirk Sorensen, Dr. Robert Hargraves, and Dr. Joe Bonometti explain the importance of Thorium as a potential nuclear fuel and the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) in this digested version of their Google Tech Talks. 197 minutes of video have been digested into a 25 minute long video, which can serve as an introduction to these revolutionary ideas, and the talk is indexed for important ideas.

00:34	Thorium not fissionable, so how can it be a fuel?
01:30	Wartime perspective: Uranium vs Thorium. Uranium better suited for bombs.
02:48	Today’s light water reactors’ wasteful fuel cycles.
04:17	Nuclear criticality and self controlling reactors.
05:25	1944: A tale of two isotopes.
08:47	“We’ll build a fluid fueled reactor.” Easy removal of Xenon-135.
16:05	Alvin Wineberg fired. Program canceled.
18:48	Basic light water reactor problem: Incomplete combustion. LFTR solves problem of spent nuclear fuel.
20:58	What is LFTR’s biggest obstacle? LFTR is different and unknown.
23:11	U-238 Pu-239 chemical separation (fast breeder reactors): LFTR still better.

The video was prepared by Gordon McDowell who wrote:

If you are care about climate change, energy independence or nuclear fission byproducts (some take thousands of years to decay), then please check this out.