Transporting Small Factory Built Reactors and Modular Components

Factory produced small reactors must be designed with transportation in mind. The design of the Babcock & Wilcox mPower reactor core is highly suggestive of the transportation considerations which the designers of factory manufactured reactors have in mind. In the case of the Babcock and Wilcox mPower core (illustrated to left) the core and the primary coolant loop appear designed to be shipped as a single unit. The mPower core unit appears to be intinded for shipment by rail. Width is the most significant limitation of rail transportation. A typical rail load cannot be a lot more than 9 feet wide under most circumstances. The mPower measures 75' by 15' (23m by 4.5m). That may not seem very wide but it is clear that moving the mPower core by rail is going to offer some challenges. In fact the 4.5 meeter wide package may not be the shipping unit at all. The Westinghouse SMR, a competing design measures 11.5' in diameter, and 81 feet long. The mPower steam generator is reoirtedly 3.6 metres in diameter and 22 m high. Thus the mPower steam generator unit diameter is only a few inches greater than the SMR unit diameter. Pictures of the mPower suggest that is is wider at the bottom, and the extra width can probably be accounted for by a pressure vessel slipped over the core. Thus it would appear that the mPower pressure vessel may not be shipped as a part of the core unit.

How can Westinghouse slip a reactor that is almost twice as powerful as the mPower into a core package that is similar in size. The answer is that Westinghouse uses a few tricks. For example the steam generators could be placed outside the core package, and the Westinghouse core package may not include the steam generators. The SMR containment vessel has s outer diameter: 32 ft. We are thus well beyond the rail transport point with a 32' diameter pressure vessel. The Westinghouse SMR appears to be an evolutionarily development from the earlier Westinghouse IRES SMR.

The question thus arrises how much labor will the factory manufactured Light Water SMR actually save in comparison to full size LWRs? The Westinghouse AP-1000 is constructed from factory built modules, and the B&W mPower may require more manufacturing labor input per MW of rated output than the AP-1000. Ditto for the Westinghouse SMR. Thus it would appear that Light Water SMR may not have a cost advantage over standard size LWRs, and although they may have a decreased construction time, they will still require a couple of years to construct. But since the AP-1000 is designed for manufacture within three years, this does not seem like a lot.

We have seen in the paper, A Small Mobile Molten Salt Reactor (SM-MSR) For Underdeveloped Countries and Remote Locations, that 100 MWe MSRs can be made to be easily transported by breaking down the loads into core structure and graphite components. Core assembly could be easily acomplished in a day, during the time while the underground core chamer is being dug and lined with a prefavricated concrete liner. At that point the core can be lowered into its underground chamber. Other trucked in modules for example a reactor salt cleaning moduuel, which could be housed underground, and turbine and generator moduels.

If we abandon the requirement that factory manufactured reactors be delivered by truck or rail we can focus on the economic benefits of delivery of factory manufactured reactors by barge or ship. Factory manufactured reactors Factory production can shift from moduels to major components, and indeed whole reactors. Research by Professors Larry Townsend and Larry Miller of the University of Tennessee and Professor Andy Kadak of MIT has focused on barge transportation of factory manufactured nuclear units. Professor Townsend's ANS interview is probably more approachable to the average reader than the DoE report, DESIGN AND LAYOUT CONCEPTS FOR COMPACT, FACTORY-PRODUCED, TRANSPORTABLE, GENERATION IV REACTOR SYSTEMS. The most detailed account in this study focuses on the Westinghouse IRIS SMR. The choice of the IRIS lead to a discovery, as Professor Townsend acknowledged,

Initially, we considered transport by barge, truck, or rail. But for the IRIS reactor, because of the large size of the reactor vessel itself, it quickly became clear that we were limited to barge transport. So, we de- cided to focus strictly on barge transport. The other two groups—the liquid-metal and gas reactors—focused on truck and rail transport.

The IRIS as designed by Westinghouse turned out to not be barge transportable on the entire Mississippi/Ohio River system although adjustments can be made:

Note that the 100m (328 ft) length of the plant is less than the 400 ft capacity (length) of the locks on the Mississippi/Ohio River system for barge transport. However, the 40m (144 ft) width of the plant exceeds the 110 ft width limitation for barge traffic through the Mississippi/Ohio River locks. The excess width in the plant layout arises from the width of the Westinghouse reactor building specifications. The actual width of the reactor containment and balance of plant is less than this 110ft width limitation. Therefore, barge transport is still possible if the "buildings" are redesigned or are constructed after barge arrival at the plant site.

Thus barge transport is possible for 300 MWe LWRs. Since MSRs and their potential generating systems are both lighter and more compact the barge transportation of MSRs of up to 500 MWe and even greater generating capacity is a reasonable possibility. It may not be desirable to transport complete MSR generating units by barge if the reactor core is to be located underground. The underground core component would be lowered into place and then connected to above ground components. Still if the reactor arrived onsite with in only two barge carried component loads, the actual final assembly could be performed in a few weeks at most. Considering the potential barge accesible reactor locations on the Mississippi River system, the Great Lakes, and the North American Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Pacific coats, a factory intended to produce barge transportable reactors should not suffer from transportation problems for its products.

We have seen that both highway and rail transport of reactor units and reactor modulare components will create problems for reactor mobilitry. At the same time it appears possible to truck transport core units for MSRs of up to 100 MWe. The SM MSR modules could be locally delivered by barge or ship, and then moved to their final locations by truck or by rail. Thus the cost savings potential of factory manufacture of reactors is an open possibility

Underground Reactor Advantages

Underground sited. This scale was chosen so that the physical size allowed it to be factory manufactured and transported to the site,which is a significant potential cost reducer. . . .

- John Rawls, Chief Scientist at General Atomics

From the dawn of the Nuclear era, Edward Teller was deeply concerned about reactor safety. Teller favored underground placement of civilian nuclear power plants primarily for safety reasons. Indeed in his last paper Teller advocated underground placement of Molten Salt Reactors, although arguably MSRs could be designed to be safe enough to make further safety measures unnecessary. A further justification of underground placement of MSRs, would be that it would be consistent with low manufacturing costs and rapid reactor deployment.

Underground deployment of nuclear tractors offers a number of advantages including,

Higher Resistance to...

– Terrorist attack

– Aircraft impacts

– Proliferation

– Sabotage and vandalism

– Conventional warfare effects

Underground sites offer superior protection against the effects of severe weather events and some potentially protection even from the effects of earthquakes. Underground sites also offer superior protection against fission product release in the event of a serious reactor accidents. Studies of underground siting conducted during the 1970's reported that underground siting would cost more than traditional reactor siting, but these studies assumed the use of conventional nuclear technology and that the entire nuclear facility would be located underground. From the viewpoint of safety and security it is only necessary to house reactors underground. Turbines and generators, as well as other Nuclear Power Plant related facilities can be located above ground without any disadvantages if the cost of underground facilities placement become a matter of concern. In addition Generation IV reactors are generally more compact than conventional reactors. There are other ways to limit underground housing costs. For example salt formations offer unique advantages for nuclear reactor housing, with low cost excavation. Existing underground salt mines offer unique placement advantages. In addition to existing salt mines, many old mines and natural caverns offer potential underground siting for reactors. Studies of underground placement of nuclear facilities made during the 1970's assumed that reactors would be placed 300 feet or more beneath the surface, but reactor manufacturer Babcock and Willcox intend to place their small mPower Reactor just below the surface.

Underground placement of small, compact Generation IV nuclear power plants would be inexpensive, and underground placement is often featured in many small Modular nuclear designs including the B&W mPower Reactor. A recent report to the American Nuclear Society by Mark S. Campagn and Walter Sawruk and titled, "PHYSICAL SECURITY FOR SMALL MODULAR REACTORS" states,

Rely on government response for SMR facilities with vital assets underground or otherwise well protected. Shallow burial or a hardened structural design provides excellent protection against large explosive weapons and aircraft impact as well as an excellent means of enhancing security system effectiveness against sabotage. Application of the traditional multilayered defensive approach of detection, deterrence, delay, and defeat can be used effectively for physical protection of SMRs. Detection, deterrence, and delay concepts must be integrated into the early design phase of the facility in order to provide sufficient lead time for government response.

A few years ago three University of Tennessee Nuclear Engineering Graduate students, William A Casino, Kirk Sorensen, and Christopher A Whitener wrote a paper titled "A Small Mobile Molten Salt Reactor (SM-MSR) For Underdeveloped Countries and Remote Locations." The paper won first prize in an American Nuclear Society reactor design contest. This design exercise focused on a reactor small enough to be transportable by truck, yet large enough to be transportable by truck. The design is highly suggestive although it turns out to be a little big to be truck transported. The reactor was designed to produce 100 MWe, with an active core region that weighed 216 tons (about 200 metric tons). This is too heavy to be easily transported by truck, but it might be possible to shave that weight down significantly. More than half of the core weight is contributed by core graphite (about 147 of 215 tons). Thus a method of inserting core graphite into the core at the destination site, would offer considerable advantage if this could be accomplished quickly and at low cost. The use of graphite pebbles would be consistent with these goals. This would lower of the weight of the core moduel to 68 US tons, which would certainly be manageable by either truck or train. Further the primary heat exchange and connecting pipes are included in the core module, and this might be considered a flaw in the design.

There were a number of flaws in the SM-MSR design, which was after all a student design exercise. Although a core dump tank was included in the SM-MSR design, no colling system was included. However, a passive cooling system for the disposal of fission product decay heat is possible with an underground MSR. Air can be drawn into the underground chamber and heated by the dump tank exterior, and then the heated air could rise through a chimney. The rising heated air, would, of course, draw more air into the underground chamber by lowering its air pressure, thus creating a passive decay heat cooling system.

Casino, Sorensen, and Whitener noted that,

One site specific limitation is that the primary containment module as proposed is to be placed into a silo to be trenched into the earth. This silo needs to be approximately 28 meters in depth and be approximately 25 square meters in area. The water table in most locations will likely occur above this level, and the SMMSR containment module shall be constructed to withstand moisture impingement on the outer surface. Other corrosive elements in the water need to be checked for.

The reactor silo would not requite a significant amount of excavating, and thus could be dug quickly. As has already pointed our, building a silo from scratch might not always be required. Silos built for cold war guided missles, and well as a variety of underground mines might be useful, although preexisting underground structures would not be the only solution to small reactor siting the problem. Rapid drilling of a silo could advance at rates of as much as 10 meters a day. With prefacricated silo liners, site preperation might require no more than a week. Thus the re-use of coal fired power plants sits to house clusters of small baseload reactors could easily include underground housing of a number of reactors.

Underground housing of small reactors appears to be practical and it is credible to argue that Underground reactor housing can lower nuclear costs, and dramatically shorten reactor construction times. In addition underground housing can increase nuclear safety and offer significant protection of reactors from aircraft and other forms of terrorist attacks.

The Sovereign Debt Crisis and the Nuclear Green MSR Plan

Believe it or not when in 2007, I worked out the plan that lies behind all of my work on nuclear Green, I included the possibility that the United States would not be able to pay off its sovereign debt during a period of time when national goals included replacement of fossil fuel energy sources with post carbon energy sources. I assumed that new energy sources would have to be low cost tp build, and low cost to operate. In 2007 when I first attempted to think and talk through the future of American energy, I realized that the international financial situation of the United States was a precarious, and that any energy solution that was likely to work, would, at the very least, not raise energy costs. Yet in order to adopt a renewable energy approach, to fossil fuel replacement we would either be forced to build a large number of redundant renewable energy facilities, in order to provide 24 hour a day energy sources, and greatly expand the electrical transmission grid. Redundancy and expanded transmission facilities were, however not the only added expense required to make a renewable dominated grid reliable. A very large back up energy storage system would also be required. This made a future American renewablees dominated energy system very expensive, and probably not affordable, given the economic situation of the United States.

Renewables advocates suggested that energy efficiency and the continued use of fossil fuel energy backup systems backups could bridge the gap between energy supply and energy demand. But the united states government has carried on programs to encourage greater energy efficiency since the 1970's. And while these programs have meet with some success, they have not succeeded in dramatically lowering American energy demands. Much of the decline in energy United States demands during the last 30 years can be attributed to the shift of energy intense industries off shore. Energy that was once required to produce American consumed goods, is now produced off shore. Moving America manufacture to other countries may make the United States economy look more energy efficient on paper, but it does not reduce global energy demand, nor does it solve the long term problems of the American economy.

Planning for continued use of fossil fuels as an alternative to nuclear power is stupid and self defeating. Climate scientists tell us that we need to reduce global fossil fuel consumption by 80% by 2050 to avoid a drastic climate shift. Yet German Greens prefer building new coal and gas fired power plamys, to continued use of German nuclear plants. Given the problems that an 80% carbon reduction involves, continued use of fossil fuels in electrical generation may not be an option. In addition the emerging economies of India and China require very large amount's of energy, and the prospect of seeing nations such Brazil, Mexico Nigeria, Indonesia and other nations, whose economic development is expected to expand during the next 40 years. We should not expect that any energy required to power newly emerging economic activities will come from from fossil fuels. Nor can we expect renewable energy and efficiency to bridge the energy gap.

Thus leaves us with no option other than nuclear energy if we are to avoid unacceptable emission levels of carbon-dioxide. But what of the complaints that are often made against nuclear energy. I was told when I proposed the nuclear solution in 2007, that the use of nuclear power

* Was not safe and that accidents at nuclear power plants could kill thousands of people
* Produced deadly toxin waste that would be deadly for millions of years
* Lead to nuclear proliferation, and the the use of nuclear weapons by terrorists
* And at any rate was too expensive
* Plus we are running out of nuclear fuel.

I have explored akk of these problems extensively on Nuclear Green. Others including bloggers Kirk Sorensen, Barry Brook, NNadir, and Rod Adams have also offered extensive explorations of these issues. None of these problems seemed unsolvable to me, although I quickly noted that many nuclear power critics seemed singularly uninterested discussing solutions. It also struck me that the critics of nuclear power seemed to exaggerate their complaints. For example, the deadly for million years complaints, might refer to a relatively small amount of actinites from uranium fuel cycle reactors, but it is quite possible to eliminate the production of transuranium elements from Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors almost completrely, and to burn the remining TRUs completely over time. The remaining fission products produced by liftors would be no more radioactive than natural uranium ore after 300 years. There are billions of tons of uranium ore burried in the earth, and it does not seem to be killing people. Thus the dangerous for millions of years claim seems to be a huge exageration.

Much of my knowledge of the nuclear option stems from the fact that my father had worked for nearly 30 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He had made a major contribution to the development of what is today the main stream reactor technology, the Light Water Reactor. He received exactly one dollar from the United States Government for the patent of his discovery, which is used in practically every civilian and military reactor in the world today.

Oak Ridge scientists, including my father, had believed that it would be possible to design and build a far better reactor than the Light Water Reactor which they developed during the 1940's.

After reviewing what scientists had written about nuclear power technology, I came to the conclusion that reactors were not unsafe by any reasonable standard, that nuclear waste did not constitute anything like the hazard that nuclear critics claimed, that civilian nuclear power plants are not useful tools for the development of nuclear weapons, that historically civilian nuclear power had not lead to nations acquiring nuclear weapons, and infacts most nations that had acquired nuclear weapons, had first done so without first developing civilian power reactors, and that almost all nations that built civilian nuclear power plants before acquiring nuclear weapons, had not gone on to acquire nuclear weapons. Thus the evidence from history is that there is at worst only a association between the prior acquisition of civilian nuclear plants, and the aquisition of nuclear weapons proceeds the acqusition of nuclear powered generating plants.

It has proven quite possible for even underdeveloped nations that lack civilian nuclear power facilities, to develop advanced nuclear weapons programs and even develop and test nuclear weapons, and that countries that acquire nuclear weapons in disregard to international treaties, almost always acquire nuclear weapons before rather after they acquire civilian nuclear power. Further nations that acquire civilian nuclear power technology first almost never go on to acquire nuclear weapons.

The traditional arguments against the use of nuclear power offer a very weak case against nuclear power, and the urgency of our need for fossil fuel replacement. Objective evaluations have repeatedly concluded that renewables and efficiency are ineffective substitutes for fossil fuels and will cost far more than nuclear power.

Marcel Coderch Collell, a distinguished Spanish technocrat, has reviewed the possibility of replacing much of the worlds fossil fuel generated electricity by 2030.

Based on United States Energy Information Agency estimates, Collell argues that the business as ususl approach to new electrical generation facilities would not work with the French nuclear generation model. But then of course, the French did not follow a business as usual model when they developed their nuclear electrical generation facilities.

In fact, the French model is to not rely very much on renewable energy, but we will allow Senior Collell latitude in making his point. He describes the French Model

One of the first options to consider would be to follow the French model and gradually increase the number of reactors to produce a good deal of the world’s electricity by 2030 or perhaps a little later. This would take the pressure off fossil fuels and, in principle, would not require technical innovations of any kind. Electricity would be produced emission-free, based either on nuclear or renewable sources. This would save enormous amounts of natural gas and coal, as well as considerable oil, thus reducing emissions and perhaps putting downward pressure on fossil fuel prices (or at least keeping them steady), while making non-renewable fuel available for a longer period.

But is the French model to gradually increase the number of reactors, Or did the French embark on a crash reactor building program during the 1970's and 80's? Historians say that the French embarked on a deliberate, reactor crash building program.

Senior Collell then suggests that in order to follow the nuclear French model by 2030,

4,740 new 1GWe reactors would have to be built and [one] put in operation every two days for the next 25 years.

Senior Collell then offers a reflection on the difficulty of this task in a business as usual world.

An optimistic estimate of construction times (five years) would mean having 950 teams of technical specialists, workers and machinery simultaneously working full time. This is hard to imagine, despite talk of standardising designs. In the previous period of nuclear construction (1963-88) only 423 reactors were built, at a rate of 17 per year.

He also argues that fuel shortages would constrict the depolyment of such a large reactor fleet.

A simple calculation suffices to show how an extension of the French model would collide with a scarcity of uranium. This is old news, given the serious doubts that already exist regarding the availability of uranium even to feed a few more reactors than now exist. In 2004, 365 GWe of nuclear capacity consumed about 67 kt of uranium (approximately 180 tons of uranium per GWe per year), of which 36 kt came from currently operating mines, while the rest came from recycled nuclear weapons and other secondary sources (that is, from prior production). Supply forecasts for the reactors currently in operation (plus foreseeable growth) put uranium mining production at 50 kt per year in 2015, with a significant shortfall developing in 2010, by which time Russia's nuclear weapons will have been dismantled and their uranium will have been consumed, . . .

If we assume linear growth from the current 365 GWe to 4,959 GWe in 2030, uranium demand would be around 400 kt in 2015 and 700 kt in 2030. This means multiplying by eight today’s estimates of production capacity in 2015, and multiplying by fifteen for 2030.

In fact, scientists have been forcasting a uranium shortage for a long time, and so far it has not happened. Nuclear Green has reviewed the evidence that vast amounts of recoverable uranium and thorium are avaliable in the earth's crust. Infact enough recoverable nuclear fuel is avaliable to make nuclear power for all practical purposes a sustainable resource. This has been known for a long time.

Alvin Weinberg recored,

“At the April 28, 1944, meeting of the New Piles Committee, Phil Morrison had reported the known reserves of uranium at workable concentration to amount to only about 20 000 tons. With so little fuel, nuclear energy based only on the 0.7 per- cent of uranium-235 in natural uranium could hardly amount to much. Morrison also pointed out at this meeting that the vastly larger amount of residual uranium in the granites could be burned with a positive energy balance—but only if used in a breeder.”

According to Weinberg, Morrison added that

more work should be done on the nuclear development of thorium because of its greater availabil- ity and also suggested experiments, . . .

Weinberg records Morrison's excitement when,

Morrison showed me his calculations . . .

What Morrison demonstrated to Weinberg was that,

if uranium (was) burned in a breeder (reactor), the energy released through fission exceeded the energy required to extract the residual 4 ppm of uranium from granitic rocks.

Despite the long standing evidence of science Senior Collell insists we will quickly run out of nuclear fuel.

Senior Collell sees these facts as casting the nuclear build out on the horns of a dilemma.

Let us suppose, however, for argument’s sake, that it were possible to achieve a production capacity of 700 kt/year by 2030. In the context of this analysis, two questions are raised: first, the CO2 emissions that would be generated in this phase of the nuclear cycle. Given the amount of uranium necessary, it would almost certainly be necessary to make use of hard rock deposits and low concentrations.

There are fortunately multiple flaws in this argument. First the rock does not have to be moved in order to be mined. Low energy mineral recovery technologies are avaliable to miners. Uranium miners are increasingly adopting a mining technique called in situ leaching. When in situ leaching is practiced on uranium ore, the primarily the uranium is extracted, and the rock is left in place. Thus contrary to Senior Collell, a low energy technology is avaliable that would permit the recovery of a huge amount of uranium with a favorable energy return for energy invested.

The problem that Senior Collell is pointing to is the limitation of the Light Water Reactor. Light Water Reactors were first developed as a means of powering American Nuclear submarines. In American Nuclear Submarines LWRs are small, they provide reliable power for 15 years, after which their cores can be replaced. Submarine reactors are expensive, but nothing can serve as a substitute . Large power reactors can be even more expensive and they are very fuel inefficient. Part of the problem has to do with the flaws in the Uranium cycle. In LWRs as little as 0.3% of the potential fuel gets burned, and the rest falls into a category called "nuclear waste." The problem is that uranium is relatively cheap, so it cost less to seperate out the good stuff, the U-235 and use it for nuclear fuel. A tiny fraction of the 95% to 97% of the fuel gets converted to fissionable Pu239, and a fraction of that gets burned as nuclear fuel. Unfortunately Pu-239 is not very good fuel in LWRs.

French Scientists from the University of Grenoble are aware of the problem. In "Scenarios with an Intensive Contribution of Nuclear Energy to the World Energy Supply," H.Nifenecker, D.Heuer, S.David, J.M.Loiseaux1, J.M.Martin, O.Meplan, and A.Nuttin, maintain that

If carried out with PWR or BWR reactors, the important nuclear power deployment will make heavy demands on natural Uranium resources. Resources are, presently, estimated to be around 20 Million tons. Assuming PWR or BWR reactors, the cumulative needs in 2050 could reach 16 million tons. This shows that breeding reactors are necessary to meet the needs or, alternately, that Uranium would have to be extracted from sea water, at a significant cost.

These considerations may, however, probably exaggerate the Uranium shortage. Certainly when the huge global thorium stock is added to recoverable uranium there will be no shortage of nuclear for a long time to come. Alvin Weinberg relates how the possibility of a future global uranium shortage was understood by the founding fathers of the Nuclear age, including Enrico Fermi, and Eugene Wigner.

At any rate I am not going to contend with the not enough uranium argument. Even if there is enough uranium, the French analysis is fairly sound for other reasons, which I have pointed out on Nuclear Green. In "Intensive Contribution," the French team reviewed two possible breeding cycles:

* The U-Pu cycle using fast reactors
* The Th-U cycle using thermal reactors

This analysis was expanded with typical French thoroughness in "worldwide deployment," if anyone is interested. Both "Intensive Contribution," and "Worldwide Deployment" came to the same conclusion, that a deployment of Light Water Reactors can only be sustained until 2030. Lets call this the conservative case. Conservative, in that it is based on very conservative estimates of global uranium resources. While far more generous Uranium resources are justifiable, they are by no means certain. A really plausible plan should make conservative assumptions. If generous assumptions do not pan out, then the plan can be altered in to reflect a better than expected resource picture.

The nuclear intensive plan would assume a nuclear build out to 3387 GWe of electrical generating capacity by 2030. This is, in itself an enormous and extremely daunting build out, and indeed suggests that a major revolution in nuclear manufacturing technology will be required. Fortunately many of the components of that revolution are already understood, and none of them represents a serious impediment to technological change. Factory production of reactor construction kits, together with on site labor saving machines, and new materials savings reactor designs can be expected to improve reactor manufacturing, labor, time and materials efficiencies during the next decade, and to be reinforced by a learning curve. Such a large build out will probably require a shift of many reactor manufacturing activities from the final manufacturing site to factories. The recycling of old steam plant locations as nuclear power stations sites, will also save money and time for the buildout.

Thus while ambitious, the 3387 GWe buildout by 2030 is still not impossible, but the goal must be set soon. Both "Intensive Contribution," and "Worldwide Distribution" then looked at the U-Pu fast reactor cycle. By 2030 an enormous amount of reactor grade plutonium will become available. This RGP can be put to use both in the production of nuclear power and in the breeding of more reactor fuel. Doing so would serve as at least a partial solution to what is commonly seen as a major problem for nuclear power, the so called nuclear waste problem. Indeed the reuse of nuclear fuel turns "nuclear waste," into an asset. "Intensive Contribution," argues that given the supply of plutonium for LWRs and fast breeders, a buildout to 9000 GWe by 2050 is possible.

"Worldwide Deployment" looks at a number of added options including burning recycled RGP in LWRs. This delays, perhaps for a hundred years, but does not prevent the eventual draw down of fissionable materials that are tied to a non-breeding nuclear economy. A better use of the RGP is

Thus the transition to some form of nuclear breeding will be inevitable, if a long term commitment to nuclear power becomes a matter of policy.

Fast sodium cooled reactors are often viewed as the preferred method of nuclear breeding, although various Molten Salt Reactor breeding options exit, and include many attractive features that are more than competitive with what liquid sodium cooled breeder reactors such as the Integral Fast Reactor. IFR backers claim higher breeding ratios, but the compatibility of those high breeding ratios with optimal safety has, as of yet to be confirmed.

"Worldwide Deployment" also reviews a gas cooled fast reactor option, but did not like it as well as the sodium cooled concept.

"Worldwide Deployment" foresaw global energy demands for the equivalent of 18 Billion tons of oil by 2050. Even with stockpiling massive amounts of RGP, and using it to start Sodium Cooled Fast Breeder Reactors, "Worldwide Deployment" concludes that there will not be enough fast breeders to meet world energy demand after 2080. Hence, we must turn to Thorium fuel cycle Molten Salt Reactors.

The argument that nuclear power was too expensive, does not seem rational because when the cost of redundancies, new transmission systems, and energy storage systems required by a renewable generated electrical system is factored into the costs of renewable generated electricity, the cost of renewables turns out to be far more expensive than the cost of nuclear generated electricity. If we are confronted with a Sovereign debt crisis, the cost of renewables would be prohibitively expensive, while the cost of advanced nuclear power systems will be low enough to pay for out of current electrical rates. In addition by adopting more advanced nuclear technology, and adopting the thorium fuel cycle, all the objections brought against nuclear power by renewable advocates can be demonstrated to be fallacious. If we want to avoid a climate disaster, we have no choice other than to commit to a massive deployment of nuclear power. Even in the face of a sovereign debt crisis, a massive deployment of LFTRs is possible.

On Futute Nuclear Grrrn Posts

My recent eye surgery has left me at least temporarily unable to continue work on my blog.

Climate change Skeptics need to look again. We have known about the CO2- climate change link for over 100 years.

The work of Climate Change denier Roy Spencer has recently been demonstrated to contain large scientific errors. (see here, here, here, here, and here, here, and here), while a recent paper by Texas A&'M professor Andrew Dessler offers a devastating critique to the skeptical claims of both Spencer and MIT Professor Richard Lindzen. Needless to say the Climate change skeptics are not folding, but their days are numbers.

Before the end of June, NOAA had announced that the United States had set an all time record for extreme climate events.

Climate scientists have been noting the emergence of patterns of extreme weather for some time and predicted more same.

The extreme weather events of 2011 are continuing. Houston witnessed a once every 10,000 year weather event in August, and Dallas may tie or even break an all time record for 100 degree days this week. The Northeast is just starting to recover from yet another rain/flood event,this one brought on by remnants of tropical storm Lee. Lee dumped an enormous amout of Water on the Gulf Coast and the Southeast as it headed north, we had something like 6.5" of rain from Lee in Knoxville, and parts of East Tennessee received much more.

Before the end of June, NOAA had announced that the United States had set an all time record for extreme climate events.

I have thought for some time that a run of very hot years, global temperature breakers, will be required to silence the global warming skeptics. The evidence for global climate change must be both very powerful and quite evident, before global warming skeptics, will fold their tents and slip quietly into the night, but that day is coming and is coming soon. In the debate over climate change the skeptics have nor established that the over all theory that climate change is upon us is wrong. Indeed I do not believe that they have shown that a preponderance of evidence contradicts the climate change theory. They have certainly have failed to shown that climate change is not happening with appodectic certaintyIt is clear that some conservative critics of climate change theory are not climate change skeptics. Doug Craig has recently pointed out the rather more subtle thrust of the right wing "American Enterprise Institute" ideological line on climate change. In 2002 an AEI essay stated,

That the environment should be a source of extreme ideological fractiousness and bitter partisan division is a mystery from a common-sense point of view. When the environment rose to the top of the public policy agenda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was widely regarded as a consensus issue around which long-term bipartisan action would ensue. No public constituency favors polluted air, fouled rivers, and wasted habitat. The conservative governor of California, Ronald Reagan, joined the environmental bandwagon on the first Earth Day in 1970 and declared "the absolute necessity of waging all-out war against the debauching of the environment." Barry Goldwater was a member of the Sierra Club.

There is of course the rather simplistic identification of climate change with Environmentalism. In fact the Environmentalists are Johnny come lately to the climate change game. As I have several times pointed out, supposed environmental stalwarts, such as Ralph Nader, and Amory Lovins supported the use of fossil fuels as a remedy against the use of carbon mitigating nuclear power. Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund continue to favor the use of natural gas over the superior carbon mitigating qualities of nuclear power.

Many nuclear power advocates, are as concerned as the environmental community about climate change, but unlike the environmental community, they entertain strong doubts that renewable energy strategies will mitigate carbon driven climate change without high costs for the future quality of life, and a diminished possibility for the development of under industrialized countries.

The 2002 AEI essay rightly distinguished between romantic and practical environmentalism. Advocates of nuclear power would for the most part fall on the practical rather than the romantic side of that divide. The Essay states,

Romantic environmentalism is a strong and uncompromising environmentalism that holds that environmental values should always or almost always trump other values, especially those associated with economic development and growth. The movement has strong roots in American intellectual and political history and many accomplishments to its credit (without John Muir the Yosemite Valley might today be known as the San Francisco Reservoir). And romantic environmentalism has many adherents today. Some are philosophically authentic--people who are strongly attached to the natural world and believe that civilization grows distant from nature at its mortal peril. Others adopt the uncompromising posture for strategic reasons because they see that the forces of development and growth are powerful and require a strong counterattack just to be held to a draw.

The essay wrongly attributes concerns about the catastrophic consequences of climate change, with Romantic Environmentalism. In fact many practical environmentalists are concerned about potential catastrophic consequences of climate change, And thus the case assignment between categories between practical and romantic which leads the AEI essayist into his ideological trap. The essay categorizes the existential dilemma which Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) posses with Romantic Environmentalism. Yet practical Environmentalism also acknowledges the dilemma as well. The difference between the practical and the romantic views, is that the practical view offers nuclear power as the course away from disaster, and toward greater human prosperity. While romantic environmentalists tend to either engage in Pollyannaish rhapsodies on the future of renewable energy, coupled with bumper sticker like attacks on nuclear power, or to lapse into pessimistic neo-Malthusian discourse, proclaiming that the human race is headed toward a mass dienoff, if not extinction. The rejection of nuclear power is coupled with a romantic attachment to a petit-bourgeois model of society, with at the very least the means of local electrical production owned by lower middle class investors in small local distributive power projects. The AEI fails to note the extent to which its calls for local control of environmental issues is mirrored by some romantic environmentalists. The very environmentalism localism, which the AEI advocates, is increasingly being used by the romantic environmentalists as a tool to fight nuclear power.

Other Conservatives are less sophisticated than the AEI, and fall deep into an epistemological trap, in which they claim appodictic certainty for their skeptical views. These right-wingers, in effect painted themselves into an ideological corner. If their rejection of the climate change theory proves wrong, they stand in danger of being irretrievably tarnished with a monumental intellectual error. Conservatives should know better, but they are so trapped in a partisan world view, that seemingly demands a highly risky opposition to practical society and world wide carbon mitigation efforts. Libertarian John Jacobs, offers an example of the conservative problem,

I’m a libertarian and don’t believe in any of the climate change, earth is warming due to man nonsense. BUT…even if it was true, the absolute best way to attack it is through the free markets.

Well maybe but if you deny that a problem exists, you are hardly going to work through the relationship between free markets and world wide carbon mitigation needs. Ryan Avent,has pointed out the problem for Libertarians,

a serious problem for libertarians. Climate science has followed a path very similar to many other sciences over the past few decades. An interesting hypothesis touched off a great deal of research which led to a growing consensus on the validity of the hypothesis — that in fact, it was consistent with the available data. But scientific progress in other fields didn’t, by and large, generate some rather significant policy implications (the minimalist one of which, for climate change, is that something should be done, even if that something is simply preparing for the effects of warming). And so libertarian think tanks haven’t devoted themselves to trying to undermine the science in those fields, while libertarians have gone to war against the field of climate science. They made this choice not because they dislike the process of scientific inquiry, but because they dislike the policy implications of a specific scientific conclusion.

That is to say, confronted by a problem demanding solutions inimical to libertarian beliefs, libertarians were faced with the choice of reneging on their beliefs or turning their back on science. Tellingly, they chose the latter. One might think that’s a rather drastic decision, given the role scientific endeavors have played in delivering the material prosperity so dear to the hearts of the libertarian world, and one would be right.

A belief system that cannot grapple with the fundamental reality of a situation is, quite simply, not a belief system worth having.

The problem faced by the Libertarians involves more than the simple choice to accept or reject climate change. If the Libertarians acknowledge that society faces a climate related crisis, is it an emergency. Free market solutions are often seen as inappropriate to society wide emergency situations. We do not seek to fight World War II with free market solutions. Nor do we attempt to deal with much smaller nature driven crises, for example floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis by turning the response over to the free markets. Crisis responses may require a mobilization of social resources that extends well beyond the business as usual model of libertarians. In fact major social emergencies such as fighting wars, is often seen as an exception to Libertarian principles. Indeed some rigid Libertarians are pacifists or at least limited pacifists. However, the objection that war involves both the corrosive use of violence and the dist ruction of property, would not seem appropriate in the case of a global climate change emergency.

Global Climate change is likely to impose on society a prolonged emergency, that may require that the free market "business as usual model" may fail and should be abandoned for at least the short run. A quick review of the Irish potato famine should be enough to illustrate the magnitude of the folly of attempting to solve a major social crisis through recourse to libertarian principles. The British government, led by Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel attempted to solve the crisis created by the failure of the Irish potato crop without "stifling private enterprise." While the British government did make some small food purchases in the United States, the Peel government placed primary responsibility for response to the crisis in the hands of the local authorities in Ireland. Those authorities could only draw on the resources of a shattered land, and their efforts were doomed to failure. Before the crisis was over one million people died, and another million had fled to the United States. Libertarianism offered limited and often inadequate solutions for major social crises.

Lest the conservative forget, the Irish potato famine was a man made crisis, created by the political economy of Ireland, the dependence on mono culture potato farming, and the importation of the potato disease on board one or more merchant ships sailing from South America. The potato famine proves that human beings, aided by free market economies are perfectly capable of afflicting society damaging ecological disasters on themselves., disasters that free markets cannot be relied on for mitigation.

Conservatives including libertarians have not shown with appodectic certainty that we do not face a major crisis due to AGW. Furthermore, there is good reason to believe that Libertarian principles are not helpful when societies face major crises, and the reliance on them for mitigation may cause further harm.

The dilemma for Conservatives as well as libertarians is simple, the survival of a society in which meaningful Conservatism and Libertarianism are possible, may only be possible through the temporary abandonment of Conservative and Libertarian principles. The extreme weather events of this year strongly suggest that the climate change crisis is now upon us. If Conservatives are not willing to get on board the climate change ship now, they may witness their ship go down. Tragically we may all go down with it.

ORNL Offers a Brief Look at MSR/LFTR Economies

A recent ORNL report, Fast Spectrum Molten Salt Reactor Options, offers some insight into the cost lowering potential of MSR nuclear technology. Since Nuclear Green has always had an interest in the cost lowering potential of MSR technology, I intend to review the cost related information included in this report, while in some cases offering a context for that information.

The "Fast Spectrum" report does not offer and cost evaluation in terms of dollar costs, indeed this would not be possible. The report offers an overview of technical options, and no dollar cost evaluation is possible outside the context of a specific design project. The report acknowledges,

A confident assessment of the economic performance of an FS-MSR is not yet possible. Technology, regulatory requirements, and market conditions have changed significantly over the 40 years since the economic assessments accompanying the MSBR; therefore, the cost inferences drawn from the earlier work have such large error bands that they provide little guidance. Additionally, the neutron spectrum of the present evaluation alters the fuel cycle both in and outside the power plant site sufficiently that direct analogies to other reactor concepts are challenging. The most challenging aspect of reporting a cost for an FS-MSR, however, arises from the concept flexibility. A no-heavy-metal reprocessing design variant has a plant layout much different from that of a full-recycle plant intending to directly accept used LWR fuel as its fuel source. Similarly, a plant intending to produce gasoline as its primary product has an entirely different power cycle compared with an electricity generator.

Overall economic tendencies, however, can be estimated by comparing FS-MSR attributes with those of other nuclear power systems. A summary of FS-MSR attributes and their cost implications is provided in Table 2. A primary cost metric for any power plant is its thermal efficiency. FS-MSRs, as high- temperature power plants, are anticipated to have 45–48% thermal efficiencies, a 12–15% efficiency advantage over LWRs. As refueling for an FS-MSR would be performed on-line, the plant availability would be expected to eventually, once maintenance techniques were developed and matured, surpass that for an LWR.

Thus costs are evaluated in relationship to the cost of Light Water Reactor costs. For example, the absence of a fuel fabrication requirement would lower FMSR costs and indeed all MSR costs relative to LWRs

Other FMSR characteristics that would tend to lower capital costs noted by the Fast Spectrum report would include,

* No fuel handling equipment or pool storage facilities
* No irradiated cladding or matrix material in ultimate waste stream
* Large temperature reactivity coefficient
* No cladding- or matrix-based temperature limits in accident scenarios
* Safe shutdown possible through geometry control in accident scenarios
* Higher primary coolant volumetric heat capacity
* Visually transparent, low-pressure, chemically stable coolant

In addition to these cost lowering characteristics, the capacity of all MSRs to operate at a one atmosphere pressure offers a further and important cost lowering potential.

The ORNL Fast Spectrum report also noted characteristics of FMSRs that would lower electrical costs to customers, or increase utility revenue per unit of electricity generated. These include,

* No cladding-based burn up limits
* Higher operating temperature
* Flexible input fuel chemical form
* Flexible input fuel isotopic content

A number of FMSR characteristics that would raise capital costs include,

* No cladding as fission product barrier with a substitute fission product barrier
* Higher operating temperature
* Highly radioactive, fissile-bearing primary coolant
* Potential for safeguards concerns with separated material
* Material corrosion problems

In the case of materials corrosion, it should be noted that there is a low cost work around, if the designer is willing to accept a somewhat lower but still high by LWR operating temperature.

One MSR characteristics offer a mixed cost picture. This was:

* Continuous separation of fission products (and reduction of source term in accident scenarios)

Not only did continuous separation have potential to lower safety related manufacturing and construction costs, but it offered a potential for dramatically lowering regulatory costs. If gaseous and volatile fission products are removed from a reactor as they are produced by nuclear fission, then the motive for most aspects of nuclear regulation is disappears. Thus the cost of nuclear regulation can be lowered. In addition, if separated from the coolant salts, many fission products become salable, either immediately or after a laps of some time. Thus fission product separation can lead to a new revenue stream. Finally although fission product removal devices add to capital costs, their cost can be lowered if Molten Salt Reactors are mass-produced.

It should be noted that the capital cost raising and lowering picture is similar other forms of MSR, with factors such as coolant salt choice, core design including graphite use, and relative neutron speed (thermal, epithermal, and fast), effecting capital costs.

The Fast MSR offers a tool for managing the actinide content of nuclear waste. . In 1991, Uri Gat, and J. R. Engel of ORNL, and C. H. Dodds, of the University of Tennessee, proposed burning fissile fuel from dismantled nuclear weapons in LFTRs, as a means of nuclear deproliferation. That is the process of destroying the raw materials of nuclear weapons.

V. V. Ignatiev, S. A. Konakov, S. A. Subbotine, and R. Y. Zakirov of the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, and K. Grebenkine proposed the use of Molten Salt Reactors as a means of disposing of nuclear waste. They noted that LFTRs had advantages over Liquid Metal reactors for nuclear waste disposal. The Russian research has lead to the development of the MOSART reactor design. The MOSART is a liquid salt fuel reactor concept intended to burn nuclear waste.
A similar proposal has come from Charles W. Forsberg of ORNL.

The integral Fast Reactor can perform a similar function. and while I have come to appreciate the IFR design, it still has safety problems that would not trouble a fast MSR design. In addition, fast reactors require very large start up charges, in comparison to MSR thermal thorium breeders. The large size of fast start up charges limits their scalability. Thus ten times as many LFTR can be started with the plutonium from nuclear waste, as IFRs or FMSRs. Fast reactors thus are an option for disposing of plutonium from nuclear waste. LFTRs can be started with Reactor grade plutonium (RGP), U-235 or U-233 if it is available. They can be started with a mixture of reactor fuels, or they can be started with all three. The current American stockpile of RGP is gig enough to start enough LFTRs to supply the entire American electrical demand and then some.

Some IFR advocates argue that high breeding ratio IFRs are rapidly scalable because they can produce a very large amount of nuclear fuel. But IFR design research and development has to date largely focused on IFRs capable of burning RGP with breeding ratios similar to those of thermal LFTR breeders. Higher IFR breeding ratios are undoubtedly possible, but they would require much R&D and would never be as safe as FMSRs. Thus RGP can be disposed of by fast reactors, but Lars Jorgensen has established that a fleet of thermal LFTRs can dispose of our entire stock of RGP in under 300 years. Thus if it is viewed as desirable to use the RGP found in "nuclear waste" to start thermal breeder LFTRs, it can be used to start hundreds of LFTRs. Since actinide disposal is the largest single problem associated with the so called nuclear waste issue, the thermal LFTR-RGP start option may well represent the best option for nuclear waste management.

At any rate ORNL FMSR report, offers further support for the contention that MSRs have the potential for lowering nuclear costs. The cost lowering features of the FMSR are all available in high scalable thermal spectrum LFTRs, as well as uranium fueled MSR designs. In addition small MSRs can be built in large numbers in factories. Factory produced small MSR/LFTR modules can be shipped by truck or by train to final assembly sites, or completely assembled in factories and shipped by barge. Not only can they be used to provide electrical power, but they can produce industrial heat, serve as the basis of combined heat and power systems, and even include bottom cycle desalinization. Thus the small MSR may prove to have not only a lower cost than conventional nuclear power plants, but superior versatility.

It is clear then that if breeder scalability and rapid manufacture is desirable, the thermal MSR/LFTR path holds significant advantages over the FMSR or IFR fast breeder approach.

Faustian Bargains and the 80 Year Slow Motion Train Wreck

There are moments when abstract concepts become real, and about our survival. We can call these existential moments. I had my existential moment about global warming in 1971 when I heard Jerry Olson talk about the topic at a very informal gathering of people who worked for the ORNL-NSF Environmental Studies Project. Alvin Weinberg had his existential moment about the same subject at about the same time, and with Jerry Olsen initiating him as well. The same year Alvin Weinberg coined the phrase Faustian Bargain to describe the relationship between society and nuclear energy.

Weinberg first used the phrase "faustian bargain in a 1971 speech. In an 1972 Science article "Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Weinberg repeated the content of the 1971 speech. In the article Weinberg wrote,

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand, we offer -- in the catalytic nuclear burner (breeder reactor) -- an inexhaustable source of energy. Even in the short range, when we use ordinary reactors, we offer energy that is cheaper than energy from fossil fuel. Moreover, this source of energy, when properly handled, is almost nonpolluting. . . .

But the price that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions that we are quite unaccustomed to. In a way, all of this was anticipated during the old debates over nuclear weapons. . . . . In a sense, we have established a military priesthood which guards against inadvertent use of nuclear weapons, which maintains what a priori seems to be a precarious balance between readiness to go to war and vigilance against human errors that would precipitate war . . .

It seems to me (and in this I repeat some views expressed very well by Atomic Energy Commissioner Wilfred Johnson) that peaceful nuclear energy probably will make demands of the same sort on our society, and possibly of even longer duration.

Weinberg repeated the same message a year later. In the conclusion to his November 1972 Nuclear Safety speech, Weinberg stated,

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand, we offer - in the breeder reactor - an almost inexhaustible source of energy. Even in the short range, when we use ordinary reactors, we offer energy that is cheaper than energy from fossil fuel. Moreover, this source of energy, when properly handled, is almost nonpolluting. Whereas fossil fuel burners must emit oxides of carbon and nitrogen, and probably will always emit some sulfur dioxide, there is no intrinsic reason why nuclear systems must emit any pollutant - except heat and traces of radioactivity.

Yet Weinberg saw that the benefits of nuclear energy came at a cost,

the price that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions to which we are quite unaccustomed.

Yet this contention has turned out to be untrue. As I pointed out in a post on this speech, by the time Weinberg delivered it, the molten-salt reactor technology which he had led Oak Ridge scientists in developing was off the table. but that promise has not been forgotten. Yet Weinberg still knew of the unique promise of molten-salt reactor technology.

What exactly was Weinberg getting at with his Faustian Bargain? There are in fact two Faustian Bargains known to literature. The first, found in Marlow's play the Tragic History of Doctor Faistus and Gounod's Opera Faust. In both Faust signs an agreement to obtain the services of Méphistophélès' master Lucifer, during his life, in exchange for the surrender of his soul after death. At the end of the story, Méphistophélès collects on Faust's bargain, dragging him down to hell.

In Marlow's Doctor Faustus, Faustus says,

Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas;

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there
is no truth in us. Why, then, belike we must sin, and so
consequently die:
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera,
What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!
These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters;
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, and omnipotence,
Is promis'd to the studious artizan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces;
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a demigod:
Here tire, my brains, to gain a deity.

This surely does not express the ambition which Weinberg had in mind in his 1971 speech. The end of that Faust is depicted in Gounod's Opera Faust:

There is another Faust tradition, this one linked to the great German poet, thinker and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In a paper written shortly before his death in 2006, Weinberg made explicit his intent to refer to Goethe's Faust.

In Goethe’s play, Faust is assisted and put up to mischief in his endeavors by the devil. This assistance is arranged over the course of the discussion of a number of contract- like arrangements: In the Prologue, Mephistopheles (the devil) suggests to God an experiment with a virtuous human being named Faust. Mephistopheles claims that it will be easy for him to make Faust forget his striving in return for an easy life on Earth. God, reluctantly, agrees to the experiment, knowing that Mephistopheles will fail in his attempts.

Interestingly, Mephistopheles does not explicitly suggest to God a deal that goes beyond Faust’s death. This would be too irreverent towards his master, even for Mephistopheles. God, on his part, does not enter into a contract with anyone else, this would mean to step down to the level of the contract partner. So this preliminary discussion is not a bet or bargain, but in a sense it is part of the ‘‘Faustian Bargain’’.

In Part I of Goethe’s play, Mephistopheles offers Faust a bargain similar to the one that the bridge builders and other innovators were thought to have accepted. His offer, however, is not the experiment he has discussed with God. Mephistopheles suggests to Faust a bargain, his services here on Earth in return for Faust’s soul . . . .

Faust accepts Mephistopheles’s services, leaving open, however, his fate after his death. Instead he offers to make a bet:

Weinberg points our that Mephistopheles encourages Faust to work for greater Energy and speed. The Goal of Goethe's Faust is clearly that of the 18th century Enlightenment,

The restless striving for more power and success derived from knowledge, energy, and other resources; along with the striving for unattainable perfection in love and virtue; are the main themes of Faust II. This Faustian drive is described as an essential element of human existence. It creates wars and suffering, but it is essentially human in the Faustian sense to live for continuous progress.

In Goethe's play, Faust says,

If e’er upon my couch, stretched at my ease, I’m found, Then may my life that instant cease!
Me canst thou cheat with glozing wile
Till self-reproach away I cast, –
Me with joy’s lure canst thou beguile Let that day be for me the last!
Be this our wager!

Weinberg agrees with the economist, Hans-Christoph Binswanger, that Faust's bargain

is that Mephistopheles helps Faust to overcome time, to become immortal by being part of eternal progress, while Faust promises never to rest and never to pause striving for further progress . . . .

In the end Faust’s soul is not left to the devil. The angels, carrying Faust’s remains up into heaven, sing:
"For he whose strivings never cease, Is ours for his redeeming."

Boito depicts the death of Goethe's Faust.

If Weinberg undersood the Faustian Bargain interns of Goethe's Faust, then what was Weinberg striving for? As I have often pointed out in 1971 Weinberg was striving for three things,

* Nuclear safety

* Control over CO2 emissions, which Weinberg understood threatened the future of humanity

* The Development of Thorium Breeding Molten Salt Reactor technology, which Weinberg believed would fulfill his first two goals

In all three goals, Weinberg faced protagonists, Congressman "Chet" Holifield and AEC Reactor Research Director Milton Shaw. Not long after he made the "Faustian Bargain Speech, Weinberg was told by Congressman Hollifeld, that it was time for him to go.

I have attempted to explored the background of Weinberg's Firing on Nuclear Green. Alvin Weinberg was involved in a conflict between National Laboratory Scientists, and the leadership of the Washington DC nuclear elite, including Congressman Chet Hollifeld and AEC Reactor Research Director Milton Shaw. In addition to disagreements over the safety of conventional reactors, the conflict for Weinberg involved a radical approach to reactor safety, which would solve many conventional reactor safety concerns. That approach was embodied in the development of the Molten Salt Reactor. Undoubtedly, what Weinberg had learned from Jerry Olsen in 1971, added to his motivation in the struggle for Nuclear Safety and the development of Molten Salt Reactor Breeding technology. Weinberg's Faustian bargain had as its goal the rescue of humanity, from the consequences of a quest for energy.

During the struggle Washington DC elite were telling the scientists, further striving toward nuclear safety is unnecessary. Weinberg was responding, we have made a deal with society and our side of the deal is not yet complete, and indeed it may take a long time and a lot of hard work to complete. The benefit of the deal to society is a low cost abundant supply of energy. The benefit to scientist are twofold, first they get to explore and to know the secrets of nature. Secondly they get the respect of their fellows for benefiting society by striving to fulfill the bargain.

In 2006 Alvin Weinberg explained,

The image has been used and the phrase quoted over and over again, both because the term was well chosen and because, very often, it has been misunderstood.

The two elements of the Faustian Bargain were both present in the early nuclear enterprise: the temptation of the easy, carefree life it offered (electricity too cheap to be metered), and the bargain it struck (continuous striving was promised). The service electricity provides could be used to pursue progress in all kinds of ways, as long as the obligation was kept to look after the nuclear waste (and, for that matter, other fissionable material as well). If the obligation were shirked, it could, in an extreme scenario, mean the end of humankind.

Weinberg added,

The phrase Faustian Bargain was also misunderstood. The same year that Weinberg’s paper appeared in Science (1972), John W. Gofman wrote an article in which he painted a sketch of what was needed, institutionally, to keep nuclear waste safe (Gofman, 1972). Not only was there a need, in Gofman’s view of the Faustian Bargain, for a perpetual institution (like a priesthood) to look after these wastes, but also everyone had to bow to the whims and wishes of this institution. In other popular publications, the Faustian Bargain was presented not as a human condition, but as a devilish complot by one group of humans to enslave the rest.
The term Faustian Bargain has been used during the subsequent years to characterize many ‘technological fixes’ of immediate problems with potential negative long-term consequences.

Fulfilling the Weinberg's Faustian bargain meant solving all of the problems associated with nuclear power, so that nuclear energy could be made available to the masses without any reason for fear. It also meant solving the CO2 emissions problem.

Weinberg's critics, including Ralph Nader and Amory Lovins were afflicted with a paranoid fear of nuclear power. Even though Weinberg held out the possibility of safe, clean, cheap and peaceful nuclear power as the goal of the Faustian bargain, Nader and Lovins weren't ready to buy the vision. Even if Weinberg's vision could be fulfilled, they weren't buying.

Instead Lovins and Nader held out Fustian bargains of their own. Nether seemed to have experienced the deep existential encounter with Global Climate change that Weinberg had, and both had confused visions of its remedy. Lovins envisioned coal as a non-nuclear bridge to soft energy and thus preferable substitute for nuclear power, that would gradually be replaced by soft energy around 2020. Lovins thus was no opponent of coal to generate electrical power in practice. Thus if anyone ever made a Faustian bargain, Amory Lovins did. Armory Lovins, who was warned about what he was doing by Alvin Weinberg, sold his soul for lumps of coal, and now has lost his soul completely and forever. Lovins soft path failed to offer a path to a carbon free existence, and seemingly never will.

Ralph Nader was always more concerned about the fate of coal miners than about what coal was doing to the environment. Nader's Faustian bargain involved the sale of his soul for government regulation of business and industry. Nader triumphed when General Motors and Chrysler nearly went bankrupt, but his Faustian bargain brought him presidential campaigns that lead to failure in his life's ambition. And for his country, Ralph Nader's crusades have not brought a low carbon non-nuclear coal substitute, and I wonder if he really cares.

Many so called environmentalists, including Ralph Nader, Amory Lovins, David Roberts, Mark Z. Jacobson, and Joe Romm simply ignore problems with "Green energy" solutions. In 2007 I had something of a one sided dialogue with David Roberts, via the comment section of the Grist blog. Roberts relentlessly championed the green technological fixs, and was convinced that renewables and efficiency offered all of the solutions, even when other people raised seemingly raeasonable objections. When those renewable fixes did not make sense, Roberts took big leaps of faith, telling us about miraculous solutions to all the renewable technology problems. I learned quite a lot from the discussion with Roberts, but unfortunately Roberts was not willing to learn anything from me.

Roberts pulled out all of the stops on Green objections to nuclear power. I responded to his objections by pointing out both flaws in Roberts statements of facts, and in his reasoning, as well as the advantages offered by molten salt reactors. Roberts responded by raising the question of scalability and I responded by pointing to the potential for mass production of small MSRs which could be built very rapidly and in large numbers in factors. Roberts appearantly had never heard of factories, and did not understand my point.

I knew about Molten Salt Reactors because my father had worked on the development of the technology over a 20 year period of time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Because he was working under contract, neither he nor I stood to gain any money from MSR development. My father had also made a significant contribution to the development of conventional Light Water Reactors.

I did know enough from my father to know that he considered the MSR to be a remarkable reactor that offered many potential advantages over conventional nuclear power plants. He had found working with Molten Salt Reactors difficult and challenging, and he had made significant contributions to the development of MSR technology.

MSR were safe, could, at least in theory, completely eliminate the problem of nuclear waste, would not increase proliferation, and in factories could be built in very large numbers over a short period of time.

There were significant problems with with the Faustian bargain Roberts offered. The United States Government has had efficiency improvement programs for over 30 years, and while these programs have produced small but steady improvements in efficiency, they have not produced the sort of improvements Roberts envisioned. Roberts did not offer good reasons for expecting future rapid improvements in efficiency. Secondly, economist note that big increases in efficiency sometimes produce increased use of energy. In some instances the increase may be greater than the energy saved, while in other instances the increase only partially offsets the energy savings. Thus efficiency gains, although desirable, may not constitute the sort of energy panacea which the Green Faustian bargain claims efficiency to be.

By 2011 the goals of the Green Faustian Bargain are receiving more and more. It has been repeatedly pointed out to Amory Lovins, that the predictions which he made with respect to the soft energy path, have failed to come to pass. In 2011m human energy needs are still wedded to coal, and to other fossil fuels, contrary to Lovins' predictions. Amory Lovins 1976 claim for coal use in the soft path.
Coal use 2001 to 2010, the reality that Amory Lovins refuses to acknowledge.

The 80 year slow motion train wreck

I use the phrase Slow Motion Train Wreck, to describe the inexorable advance of time from the 1971 Spring day when I first heard Jerry Olsen talk about Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Anthropogenic Climate Change. 50% of the time we had to set things aright then has been lost. We seem unwilling to make the commitment to the "Faustian Bargain" our energy
desires requires of us, if we want to survive. We must strive for a post-carbon energy order. If we are unwilling to strive, we will not survive as a civilization.

In a recent Forbes interview with Michael Tobias (MT), University of California-Berkeley Environmental Scientist Dr. John Harte laid out the dangers:

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), summarizes the results of these calculations and concludes that under “business as usual” trends in fossil fuel consumption, by 2050 the planet will on average have warmed between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit. . . . hat warming is the result of both the direct heat-trapping effect of greenhouse gases and certain feedback processes. The latter will increasingly occur in response to the direct warming, causing further warming. As polar and glacial ice melts and snow cover decreases, temperatures will rise as less sunlight is reflected by our planet and more is absorbed by the remaining, darker surfaces. . . . There are many of us in the scientific community who believe that any number of important feedback processes are not being accounted for in the current IPCC projections. For example, from ice core data informing us about temperatures and atmospheric greenhouse gas levels over the past million years, we know that when the planet warms a little from any cause, it responds by releasing from the land and sea to the atmosphere huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. These greenhouse gases contribute to further warming. Because this process is not reflected in current climate projections, we can expect that there will be further emissions from our soils and our oceans. These will create additional warming beyond what IPCC currently projects. . . . The evidence for these additional feedback effects is starting to pour in. Rising methane emissions from warming tundra soils and waters are being observed, and field research shows that warmed temperate ecosystems release additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Forest damage from wildfires and bark beetle infestation, both of which are triggered by warming, will also result in the carbon stored in trees flowing to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. By some estimates the additional warming could raise mid-century temperatures by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit.

For most people on Earth, the threat is not get real, and climate change skeptics deny the very possibility that there is any danger to our well being. The Climate change skeptics are offering a Faustian Bargain along Christopher Marlow's lines, "Sell your soul to the temptation to take it easy. Don't pay attention to the voices of scientists that warn of the dangers of climate change". They are willing to sell their souls for any energy headless of what the bargain will cost them. They are assured by Talk radio that Anthropogenic Global Warming is not real, it is a Liberal hoax. Or they are assured by Amory Lovins and Greenpeace that nuclear energy is a deadly illusion that will not rescue us, we will be saved by efficiency and renewable energy.

We have warnings that post-carbon renewable energy plans are doomed to failure, There are enormous problems with solar and wind as a major human energy source. Even if these problems can eventually be overcome by science, it is unlikely that that will occur before 2050 when scientists like Dr. Harte say that we face big and in many respects very unpleasant environmental changes.

But what of the idea that we can save ourselves through efficiency. In 2008 Robert Bryce laid out the case against the efficiency rhetoric. In another article, Bryce was extremely critical of Energy Guru Amory Lovins for his prophecies about the contributions that efficiency can make to solving the carbon problem. Lovins promised a detailed response to Bryce's criticisms, but has never provided that response. Renewable advocates are notorious for not answering their critics.

In a response to a pro-reneables comment, I received on Nuclear Green, I noted,

Anonymous, I do not put great stock in NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory0 studies, because they tend to pass on Renewable Industry propaganda claims as if they were facts, and consistently downplay the bad news in their data. For example, the latest Eastern Interconnect study clearly demonstrated that rising wind penetration would lead to increased electrical costs, but this was not one of the conclusions that was featured in the press release, or in the executive summary. A preliminary finding of the Western interconnect study of wind and solar has been that renewables will primarily displace CCGTs, while leaving coal largely untouched. Thus the carbon mitigation of high penetration wind and solar was much less than would be assumed if we did not have that information, but the NREL study failed to draw the obvious conclusions about the relative carbon mitigation costs of of renewables verses nuclear. I am not impressed by the 30 GWs of German PV. The capacity factor of German PV is likely to be under 10%. That means that the 30 GWs of PV capacity will probably produce under 3 GW years of electricity every year. Displaced generators are likely to be CCGTs, and German cloud conditions will likely requite a large number of OCGTs to be kept spinning. With the looming shutdown of German nuclear plants, the carbon emissions from the operations of of the German electrical system are likely to rise rather than fall. Thus we must consider the opportunity costs of the German FIT. What Germany will have is a hugely expensive electrical system that will almost certainly produce more CO2 than it does now. If PV farms are as cheap to operate as you claim why do they need such huge subsidies?

Thus the Faustian bargain offered by anti-nuclear environmentalists, like Amory Lovins, does not really lead to heaven. Instead it seems to lead straight to an energy hell, with little energy to cope with increasingly challenging environmental conditions.

The situation we face, a disastrous change in climate caused by human-carbon based energy sources, best be described as a slow motion train wreck. From 1971 when I first learned of AGW till 2050, the date which climate scientists say is the cut off point for avoiding, serious, long term consequences, consequences which I call the train wreck, is 80 years. Hence the 80 year slow motion train wreck.

In a review of "NON-NUCLEAR FUTURES: The case for an ethical energy strategy" by Amory B. Lovins and John H. Price, published in Energy policy in December, 1976, Alvin Weinberg pointed to a Faustian bargain Lovins was offering his readers and society,

Despite its title, the book is not concerned with non-nuclear futures. The reader of a book so named is entitled to get from the authors a reasoned description of a feasible non-nuclear future. The authors excuse this omission with the assertion (p159), 'To show that a policy is mistaken does not oblige the analyst to have an alternative policy.' But this is inadequate. This is not dealing with a hypothetical issue, but a real one. It is not enough to point out the deficiencies of nuclear energy; one must deal with the situation that would arise if Lovins and price were successful in their onslaught: should the society indeed turn away from nuclear energy, what then?

Here Alvin Weinberg exposes Amory Lovins' Faustian bargain with our society. Weinberg Ferrets out Lovins' fundamental assumption about energy and society,

(p xxi), 'Low-energy futures can (but need not) be normative and pluralistic, whereas high-energy futures are bound to be coercive and to offer less scope for social diversity and individual freedom.

Weinberg raised a problem with Lovins' low-energy, high freedom claim, by pointing to an inevitable tradeoff between energy and time. The more energy we have, Weinberg argued, the more freedom we have to control our time. Weinberg pointed to a truth problem in Lovins' argument

So much of the argument is at the border of Science, or even trans-scientific, that one cannot prove the authors to be wrong, any more than one can prove the nuclear advocates to be wrong.

Weinberg put his finger on the greatest single environmental flaw of Lovins' argument, his failure to identify CO2 emissions from energy as a major environmental issue, and his willingness to accept carbon emitting coal as a substitute for nuclear energy. Weinberg wrote,

the authors regard net energy analysis as a convenient device for casting nuclear power in an unfavorable light, a feat they attempt to accomplish by ignoring significant comparisons, - nuclear and non=nuclear of the same doubling time and relative effects of heat release and CO2 release.

In response to Lovins recommending a coal burning bridge between the period when nuclear power was considered acceptable and the time when all energy would come from renewable resources, Weinberg asked,

Can we really ignore CO2 during the coal burning fission free bridge?

Lovins countered that he

worried about the climate effect of the release of CO2

but that nuclear power would not prevent CO2 emissions from high coal use. Clearly then Lovins offered a Faustian bargain with his anti-nuclear energy scheme. In 2010, long after a process which Lovins forecasted would have begun to shift human society from fossil fuels to renewables, coal use for energy continues to rise. If Lovins worried in 1976 about the climate effects of CO2 emissions, he did not worry sufficiently. Lovins Faustian bargain put society clearly on track for a climate disaster, and in 2010 Lovins still has not figured out how to avoid the disaster without nuclear energy. The Lovins Faustian bargain is still in force, and until we are willing to listen to Alvin Weinberg, we will continue to follow Lovins to perdition.

I offer two serenades for those who do not wish to strive to avoid the train wreck: