The Nuclear Green Revolution

Indian Nuclear Plans

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:44:00 +0000

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

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:25:00 +0000

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

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:04:00 +0000

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

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:30:00 +0000

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

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:28:00 +0000

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.

Small nuclear equals a big solution

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:19:00 +0000

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

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:49:00 +0000

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

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:20:00 +0000

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

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:47:00 +0000

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.

Alternative reduced CO2 wind back up systems

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000

The work of Warren Katzenstein and Jay Apt, Peter Lang, and Peter Hawkins all seems to demonstrate that natural gas beck up of wind generation imposes choices and inefficiencies, that almost or completely the CO2 emissions benefits of wind. It would appear from their work that stand alone natural gas systems using combined cycle gas turbines, are either nearly as efficient at lowering natural gas emissions or actually more efficient as a wind plus open cycle gas turbines. Supporters of wind generation have noted that that wind generators are well matched to hydro-electricity, and indeed that seems to be the case in a few parts of the world, for example Scandinavia where wind generators in Denmark appear to compliment hydroelectricity from Norway and Sweden. In the United States, hydro resources have been almost entirely utilized, and are currently inadequate for wind back up in most high wind areas. Pumped Storage has been suggested, the the high cost of past pumped storage facilities suggest that the cost of nuclear reactors is competitive with the cost of pumped storage facilities with similar rated capacities, while the nuclear facilities would be far more flexible, and produce as much as 2 times as much electricity on an annual basis as pumped storage would. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is a second form of backup proposed for wind generators. My investigation, however, revealed a surprising problem from CAES, radioactive radon gas would be brought to the surface with returning compressed air. The problem appears to be far more serious than the release of radioactive gases associated with nuclear power generation. My case study of proposed CAES project presented by the Ridge Energy Storage & Grid Services company to Texas State Energy Conservation Office in 2005 showed that 40% of the energy for the project would come from the burning of natural gas. CASE systems are huge geothermal heat pumps, and they return cold air. Humidity in the air freezes, and the ice can damage generator turbines. Heat lost in the CAES process represents lost energy from electricity used to compress the air. In evaluating the cost of wind generated electricity I stipulated

a cost for new West Texas wind of $2250 per name plate KW in 2009. Since the capacity factor of West Texas runs around .40, the adverage output West Texas wind producer can expect to pay $5625 produce KWs of electricity his windmill will average producing. Since only 70% of the electricity entering the CAES facility reaches the consumer, the wind producer must add 30% more capacity to compensate for the energy loss. Thus the price of the wind generated electry entering the CAES facility must compensate the wind producer for something like a $8000 capitol investment for every average kW sold to the CAES facility.

In addition the estimated cost of the Ridge Energy CAES facility was $765 per KW of electrical output, Thus we are looking at an investment of nearly $9000 per kW of electrical capacity and this does not count the cost of new electrical transmission lines from West Texas to energy hungry Dallas. In contrast

the 2008 cost of nuclear power is somewhere between $4000 and $5000 per kW (as opposed to an estimated $8000 to 12,000 figure during the middle of the next decade).

And nuclear plants can be located close to electricity markets. In addition, the nuclear plant would be far more flexible, and would produce more electricity on an annual basis than the wind + CAES combination. In addition I noted an alternative employment of the CAES system that no one seems to have thought of, the used of CAES in in nuclear cooling, that would produce a low cost nuclear CAES combined cycle:

It seems to have escaped the notice of most CASE advocates that CAES casn be teamed with nuclear power plants in innovative ways. Since it is more economical to keep reactors running at full power all night, suplus electricity produced at night could be used to store compressed air. During the day, compressed air can be used to expand the reactors daytime power output by as much as 40%. The air does not have to be heated with natural gas. Indeed the compressed air can be heated from the reactors waste heat, killing two birds with one stone, and conserving the water used for daytime reactor cooling, and the use of compressed air in cooling the reactor, would creat significant water use savings, allowing reactors to run even during drought conditions.

Just a thought, mind you.

I also looked at battery backup for wind, that was of course, way too expensive. In fact it was so expensive that I conducted a thought experiment,

Assume that the system operators chose to back up the 1 GW wind system with nuclear power rather than a redundant wind system plus batteries. The cost of the wind system would then drop to $2.7 billion plus $5 billion for nuclear backup or $7.7 billion. Quite obviously the nuclear backup would be cheaper, but now the wind is totally redundant, because the backup system can operate full time for just the added price of fuel. Thus the purely nuclear system would simply be a lower cost than a reliable wind system. The nuclear system would be more reliable, and could be counted on with a fairly high degree of certainty to produce at 100% of its rated capacity during peak electrical demand summer months.

Thus my conclusion was that Pumped Storage, CAES, and battery backups for wind were more expensive, less flexible, and would produce less electricity over time than electricity producing nuclear reactors.

Why won't the Government tell us the truth about wind power

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:52:00 +0000

In order to find out the awful truth of what will happen if the windmills are not stopped,
"Check out this great MSN Video": '2012' Trailer The reality is so much worse, but I have been forbidden by Google to show you.

Do wind-gas generating systems prevent CO2 in high wind penetration environments?

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:05:00 +0000

Two Carnegie Mellon University researchers, Warren Katzenstein and Jay Apt recently looked at the question of how the intermittency of wind and solar effected CO2 emissions from the grid. (see Air Emissions Due To Wind And Solar Power, Environ. Sci. Technol., 2009, 43 (2), pp 253–258). They found that variable renewables decreased coupled with open cycle natural gas generators decreased CO2 emissions between 21% and 24% less than anticipated:

A system with renewables that uses LM6000 turbines for fill-in power achieves 76−79% of the expected CO2 emissions reductions and 20−45% of the expected NOx emissions reductions. An emissions displacement analysis would have overestimated emissions reductions by 23% for CO2 emissions and by 55−80% for NOx emissions. Similar penalties of 24% are incurred for 501FD CO2 emissions reductions, but NOx emissions increase by factors of 2−6 times the amount emissions were expected to be reduced, because of the unoptimized NOx performance of the 501FD system below 50% power.

Peter Lang noted that there are two types of natural gas powered generators:

Open Cycle Gas Turbine (OCGT) and Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT). OCGT has lower capital cost, higher operating costs, uses more gas and produces more greenhouse emissions than CCGT per MWh of electricity generated. OCGT follows load changes better than CCGT. OCGT produces electricity at less cost than CCGT at capacity factors less than about 15% (ie 15% of the energy it would produce if running full time at full power). CCGT has higher capital cost and needs to run at higher power and run for longer to be economic. CCGT is more efficient so it uses less gas and produces less greenhouse emissions. CCGT produces electricity at less cost than OCGT for capacity factors above about 15%.

Of the two CCGT emits 0.577 tons of CO2 per MWh of electrical generation, while OCGT emitts 0.751 tons of CO2 per MWh. (See here p. 136) Coal emits about 0.86 to 0.88 tons of CO2 per MWh. THE AWEO claims:

The average CO2 emission saved by wind is about 0.58 t CO2/MWh.

But that figure assumed that wind displaced natural gas and coal in proportion to their percentage of the generation mix.

Lang found that some forms of natural gas generation were more likely to be displaced than others, however.

If wind generation is available the power produced is highly variable and unscheduled so it needs to be backed up by OCGT. Although OCGT is called up to back up for wind, the energy produced by wind actually displaces CCGT generation mostly.

Assuming OCGT backup, Lang calculated that wind saved 0.058 tons of CO2 per MWh. CCGT is unsuitable for wind backup because it lacks the flexibility that OCGTs have. OCGT can ramp up from zero generation for full power in a short period of time, thus along with hydro, OCGTs compliment wind. But that complimentary relationship comes at a cost Thus Lang's conclusion is that wind, if backed up by natural gas is far less capable than nuclear power in preventing CO2 emissions.

The University of Sidney's figures for CO2 emissions from natural gas were higher than most sources. I assume that those figures included methane loss from natural gas processing and transmission, and from combustion inefficiencies, but Lang inferred CO2 emissions from natural gas turbines that closely tracked conventional assumptions in the Royal Academy of Engineering report. Those numbers were .400 kg of CO2 per kWh from CCGTs and .533 kg of CO2 from OCGTs. Lang then calculated the CO2 emissions avoided by using wind as 0.09 kg per kWh generated by wind. Lang's paper was posted on Barry Brook's blog Brave New Climate and drew 169 responses. Criticisms focused on Lang's assumption of natural gas backup. It was augued that hydro backup would lead to improved wind carbon reduction performance, and indeed it would. But Lang's critics appeared to make unrealistic assumptions about the avaliability and cost effectiveness of hydro backuo including pumped storage.

Thus Lang's findings and those of Katzenstein and Apt, raise significant, unanswered questions about the value of wind in a wind-natural gas system in mitigating carbon emissions. Peter Hawins supports those questions. Hawkins is a retired Electrical Engineer who is investigating wind performance, and indeed Hawkins appears to have enough to say about wind performance, that I probably will make his work the subject of a separate post.

Hawkins is very critical of published research that supports wind. Hawkins contends, as a result of his analysis of CO2 emissions savings that

the typical claims {by wind supporters] are not supported, except by ignoring most of the following considerations:

The amount of wind mirroring/shadowing backup required.
Inefficient operation imposed on the mirroring/shadowing backup, in terms of both the fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, treated separately.
The need to make comparisons, with respect to gas plants, of:
Case A – The more efficient Combined Cycle plants (CCGT) operating alone, in other words without the presence of wind, versus;
Case B – The appropriate mix of gas plant type used to balance wind’s volatile output. This includes the need to introduce less efficient, but faster-reacting, Open Cycle Gas Turbine gas plants (OCGT) to mirror/shadow the wind production, especially as wind penetration increases.
The effect of reduced wind capacity factor.
The effect of wind output exceeding 1-2 percentage points of a total electricity system, on a country or regional basis.

Hawkins compares the typical claims with

Hawkins relying on Katzenstein and Apt explains

The “Typical Claim Scenario”, which ignores the heat rate penalties, shows over 50,000 MMcf/yr savings assuming CCGT plants only. In this case, introducing OCGT, again without heat rate penalties, reduces the savings to about 30,000 MMcf/yr. Introducing heat rate penalties and using CCGT only produces savings of about 30,000 MMcf/yr as well, but the inclusion of OCGT plants reduces gas savings to almost zero.

Hawkins offers this chart of the reality of wind-gas CO2 emissions abatement claims and and actual performance:
Hawkins offers this explanation:

The “Typical Claim Scenario” shows annual savings of about 3 million tons of CO2 ignoring any OCGT considerations and any effect of heat rate penalties or the related CO2 emissions increase factor. Introducing OCGT within this scenario cuts the savings by more than one-half. Using the inefficiency factors and only CCGT shows that the CO2 savings are reduced by about one-third, but introducing OCGT drives the CO2 savings into the negative category.

Hawkins offers this analysis of the CO2 emissions performance of a wind-gas system:

Hawkins then offers this analysis of the relationship of wind penetration and the OCGT/CCGT ratio.

Hawkins explains:

Again negative values represent increased emissions over CCGT plants operating alone. Reducing the OCGT component to 25 per cent at a 28 per cent wind capacity factor yields effectively zero CO2 emissions savings.

Hawkins also observes:

The lower ranges for OCGT plants in the mix are likely not feasible

Hawkins conclusion is:

Notwithstanding the nature of the calculator, robust inferences can be drawn from its results because the analysis captures a fuller range of considerations. The general conclusion is clear: industrial wind power does not produce the claimed benefits of reductions in fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions when up-and-down backup generation inefficiencies are taken into account.

It is clear then that Katzenstein and Apt, Lang and Hawkins have offered a formable challenges to the conventional wisdom about with CO2 emission savings from wind investments, and that investments in wind when coupled with natural gas backup appear to not be cost effective. Lang argues that investments in nuclear are 50 times more cost effective than an investments in wind. I am unaware of any effective challenge to these argument at the moment, and thus wind supporters must come to terms with it by offering effective critiques, if they are to loose their last shreds of intellectual respectability.

Indian Nuclear Power

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:24:00 +0000

This video provides an interesting sketch of the development and potential of Indian nuclear technology.

Gail the Actuary to Jacobson and Delucchi: All is for naught

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:30:00 +0000

Critiquing the Mark Jacobson, Mark Delucchi Scientific American article has turned into a cottage industry for internet energy sages. Gail the Actuary has at Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi in a Monday post on the Oil Drum. Gail is very bright, and though I am not nearly as pessimistic as she is about the energy future, her insights are very worth while looking at. If you enjoy a seeing a good mind at work, you will enjoy Gail's analysis. As "paal myrtvedt" observed,

Gail is jolly good here ; a well founded realist/skeptic. I'm impressed by her ability to present 'her case' without even using a small spoon of Sarcanol-

Of course Gail's conclusions would only bring joy to Parson Malthus, but that is to be expected from Gail. She observes:

There are a number of weak areas in this system:

• There are not likely to be enough rare minerals (and even not-so-rare minerals), to make all of the desired high-tech end products. Recycling will help, but it is likely that the system will run into a bottleneck in not very many years.

• The system will use a huge number of electrical transmission lines. These transmission lines are subject to all kinds of disturbances--hurricane or other windstorm destruction, forest fires, land or snow slide, malicious destruction by those not happy for some reason (perhaps those unhappy by wealth disparities). Fixing lines that need repair will be challenging. We currently use helicopters and specialized equipment. These would need to be adequately adapted to a system without fossil fuels.

• If electricity is out in an area, pretty much all activity in an area will stop (except that powered by local PV), and there will be no back-up generators. Residents will not be able to recharge vehicles, so they will quickly become useless. Even vehicles coming into an area may get stranded for lack of recharge capability. Food deliveries and water may be a problem. The current system at least offers some options--back-up generators, and cars and trucks powered by petroleum that one can drive away.

• Operating the system will require a huge amount of international co-operation, because the transmission system will cross country lines. If one country becomes unable to pay its share, or fails to make repairs, it could be a problem.

• All of the high tech manufacturing will require considerable international co-operation and trade. This could be interrupted by debt defaults by major players, or by countries hoarding raw materials, or by difficulty in producing enough ships and airplanes to handle international trade.

• The system clearly can't continue forever. It could be stopped by a lack of rare minerals, or international disputes, or lack of adequate international trade. The system doesn't provide any natural transition to a truly sustainable future. For example, food production is likely to still be done using industrial agriculture, with the food that is produced shipped to consumers a long distance away. It will be difficult to transition to a system which is truly sustainable at the point the system stops working.

Gail points out the problems of the transportation system under the Jacobson-Delucchi scheme.

Airplanes. The authors propose that airplanes be powered by hydrogen powered fuel cells (with the hydrogen be made by hydrolysis using WWS energy sources). I understand that hydrogen is three times as bulky as gasoline, explodes easily, and escapes fairly quickly from its holding tanks, making it difficult to store for very long. It seems like airplanes and helicopters would need to look more like blimps, to hold the necessary fuel. Unless the explosion issue is solved, the popularity of hydrogen fuel cells would likely be pretty low.

• Ships. The authors don't tell us how ships would be powered. Clearly sailing ships would meet the criteria, but would be quite slow. Because of their slow time for passage, we would need a lot more sailing ships than the types of ships we use now, because so many would be in transit at a given time. Barges could float down rivers, and if the current isn't too strong, could perhaps be towed back in some way (boat with fuel cell?). Ships powered by hydrogen fuel cells might also work, but they would have the same issues as for airplanes. Because of their long trips, leakage would be more of an issue than on airplanes.

Gail's post has drawn nearly 400 comments during the last couple of days, and no doubt will draw more. Some of the comments are very interesting, for example 'sampson" reported

It was the plan of the notorious Bavarian Illuminati to accomplish three goals in the overthrow of the Old World Order:

1)The emancipation of women.

2)The overthrow of all monarchies.

3)The separation of 'church' and state.

Gee that sounds familiar.Yes HAcland, America indeed has a religion; and it is not the Bible, it is Illumination via the Illuminati.It is no longer a secret order, it is out in the open; an open conspiracy if you will.
Just ask any psychotropic pill popping TV addicted brain dead American, they'll tell you.

And of course it comes with Gails favorite chat of doom:

Dr. Michael Dittmar on the Future of Nuclear Energy

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:27:00 +0000

CERN Dr. Michael Dittmar, a CERN Physicist, has posted Part IV of his essay on the Future of Nuclear Energy, on the Oil Drum. In many respects Dr/ Dittmar's conclusions track the conclusions of thorium advocates.

Dr. Ditmann has some interesting observations on LMFBRs. He claims that

the IAEA data base for fast reactors does not present any evidence that a positive breeding gain has been obtained with past and present FBR reactors. On the contrary, the presented data indicate at best that a more efficient nuclear fuel use than in standard PWR reactors can be achieved during normal running conditions. However, once the short and inefficient running times of FBR's, in comparison with large scale PWR's, are taken into account, even this better fuel use has not been demonstrated. In fact, the required initial fuel load in FBR's contains at least twice as much natural uranium equivalent and with a fissile material enrichment that is roughly 5 times larger than that in a comparable PWR. A fair comparison of the fuel efficiency should include the efficiency to recycle fissile material from used nuclear fuel in both reactor types.

In addition Dittmar notes that there are three areas of further concern about LMFBRs"

Fast reactors are known for their worrying safety record. For example, it might be true that serious incidents, like the one that happened with the Chernobyl graphite moderated reactor, cannot happen with modern PWR's. However, only very few nuclear experts would agree to such a statement for sodium cooled FBR's.
FBR’s are known for their huge construction costs relative to PWR's, and it might be tempting to compare some of the past FBR's to a monetary "black hole." An equivalent of 3.5 billion Euros has been invested in the construction of the SNR-300 in Germany. Because of safety concerns related to sodium leaks and other problems, this small FBR has never started operation. This amount of money corresponds to the price tag for a five times more powerful modern PWR reactor.
A third problem is related to the FBR requirements to have a large inventory of high purity fissile material. The amount of fissile material listed in Table 3 should be compared to the few tenths of kgs required for a Pu239 bomb. This problem makes even small experimental FBR reactors highly sensitive to the proliferation problem.

Indeed Dittmar's view seems to be that

* The breeding of Pu239 with fast neutrons has huge problems, and it would be great if another nuclear fuel could be found.

* Thorium breeding shows interesting potential if the remaining large number of problems can be mastered in the long term, . . .

Dittmar nots evidence for thorium breeding in the Shippingport LWBR experiment. Dittmar also noted some advantages for thorium breeding:

The possibility of utilizing an abundantly available resource that has hitherto been of so little interest that it has never even been properly quantified.
The production of power with few long-lived transuranic elements in the waste.
A reduction of radioactive waste, in general.

Dittmar pointed to what he believed that the problems of thorium breeding include,

The high cost of fuel fabrication due partly to the high radioactivity of U233 chemically sepa rated from the irradiated thorium fuel.
Separated U233 is always contaminated with traces of U232 (69 year half-life but whose daugh ter products such as thallium-208 are strong gamma emitters with very short half-lives). Although this confers proliferation resistance to the fuel cycle, it results in increased costs.
The similar problems in recycling thorium itself due to highly radioactive Th-228 (an alpha emitter with two-year half life) present.
Some concern over weapons proliferation risk of U233 (if it could be separated on its own), although many designs such as the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor address this concern. The tech nical problems in reprocessing solid fuels are not yet satisfactorily solved. However with some designs, in particular the molten salt reactor (MSR), these problems are likely to largely disap pear.
Much development work is still required, before the thorium fuel cycle can be commercialized, and the effort required seems unlikely while (or where) abundant uranium is available. In this respect, recent international moves to bring India into the ambit of international trade might result in the country ceasing to persist with the thorium cycle, as it now has ready access to traded uranium and conventional reactor designs.

Dittmar also finds that:

The well known use of nuclear fission energy in PWR's is unsustainable. The problems related to long-lived transuranic elements, e.g. plutonium and heavier elements, as well as nuclear waste in general, are unsolved. The concern with nuclear weapon proliferation cannot be dismissed either.

Of course expressing proliferation concerns is a form of shibbolith. It is a minimal requirement that demonstrates that one is a good person, even though he or she supports nuclear technology. In fact, nuclear proliferation using nuclear waste is something that is extremely difficult, would not produce a weapon that could be left sitting on a shelf in a weapons depot, and would produce a devise that would explode with the equivalent force of $150,000 worth of fertilizer. One would have to be crazy to prefer building a nuclear device from nuclear waste rather than using the fertilizer, and if you are that craze, your capacity to design and build a successful nuclear device would be very doubtful. Like most shibboliths, the word proliferation makes little rational sense as an objection to the development of nuclear technology.

I posted a comment on Dr, Dittmar's essay:

Dr. Dittmar supports what Liquid fluoride Thorium Reactor advocates like Kirk Sorensen and myself have been saying. Breeding thorium is our best long term nuclear option. Dr. Dittmar points to some, but not all of the advantages of a Molten Salt Breeder Reactor approach. In fact Thorium Molten Salt Reactor/LFTR would solve the thorium fuel fabrication problem, the U-232 problem, And problems associated with recycling thorium. Thus we are left with a single problem:

"Much development work is still required, before the thorium fuel cycle can be commercialized, and the effort required seems unlikely while (or where) abundant uranium is available. In this respect, recent international moves to bring India into the ambit of international trade might result in the country ceasing to persist with the thorium cycle, as it now has ready access to traded uranium and conventional reactor designs."

This statement requires multiple answers:
1. The expression "much development" work is extremely ambiguous. ORNL researchers in the 1974 analyzed the developmental tasks required to for the development of a Molten Salt Thorium Breeder (ORNL-5018, Program Plan for the Development of Molten-Salt Breeder Reactors). The cost would have been somewhere around 2.5 billion 2009 dollars, to prototype stage. To date the United States has spent about $25 billion on the development of the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor without a product. Even if the development cost were several times higher that $2.5 billion, it would still be cheap, even in terms of what the United States spends researching renewables. A mini-Manhatten Project approach would vastly shorten the development time frame. With an investment of $15 billion, less than the United States spends on its space program every year, the United States could have a viable commercial LFRTR prototype in 5 years.

2. There is a strong motive for LFTR/TMSR development. Namely low cost rapid substitution of nuclear energy for fossil fuels. The LFTR is significantly simpler than the LWR, and it can be built with less materials, fewer parts and less labor. LFTRs that produce between 100 MWe and 400 MWe will be small and light enough to transport by truck, rail or barge. Factory ass production of LFTRs would greatly increase labor productivity. Because of its small size, and high level of safety, LFTR site construction would be less expensive. Thus dramatic savings in nuclear construction costs could be realized by switching from LWR to LFTR technology. Finally factory production would dramatically increase the scaleability of nuclear power, making the replacement of 80% of fossil fuel energy sources by 2050

3 Indian efforts to develop the thorium cycle are likely to presist for some time for several reasons:
A.The international imbargo on uranium sals to India, will not be forgotten quickly, and a determination to make India independent of international uranium sources will remain fixed for some time to come.

B. India has at least a low cost thousand year fuel supply in surface thorium deposits, that beg to be used.

C. Building locally designed thorium breeding reactors will be cheaper for India than buying uranium fueled reactors from Russia, France, Japan, and the United States.

Dr. Dittmar thus has suggested views that are supportive of the case for thorium generally, and offers indirectly for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. The major problems for thorium breeding molten salt reactors, which Dittmar notes have more to do with the current scale of development, than development difficulties. A much larger development effort, could vastly shorten development time.

David McKay turns on a light

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:34:00 +0000

David McKay is one of the brighter voices in the energy conversation. Indeed I would suspect that we would need fewer lightbulbs in any room where McKay could be found. MeKay is now the Chief Scientist for the United Kingdom, a country which sometimes listens to scientists.

Apples and Oranges? Compairing Nuclear costs with Wind

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:31:00 +0000

Renewable advocates often criticizr nuclear power costs, but rarely compare the costs the cost of Nuclear power with renewables. When challenged to make the comparison, renewable advocates will often resort to the apples to oranges dodge. That is when challenged to make a comparison between nuclear electrical costs, and renewable electrical costs, renewable advocates will claim that such a comparison is impossible because it is an apples to oranges comparisons. There are several ways to get around the the apples to oranges dodge. One way would be to compare the cost of generating a kW of electricity for a year (8400 kWhs). Once we do that we quickly would discover that a single nuclear plant would come close to producing the 8400 hundred hours of electricity on its own, while most renewables are going to require substantial help. Photovoltaic generators in very sunny spots, may produce 4 to 5 times their rated capacity every day. But there are 4 hours a day, so the daily electrical output of PV solar generator may only be around 20% of its rated capacity. In contrast a nuclear reactor will generate on average over 9o% of its potential output in a year. Thus one way to compare our apples and oranges is to compare how much of their name plate output actually gets delivered. This if a PV system costs $40 million is is rated at 10 million Watts, but only produces 4 times that amount in a day, then we are paying not $4.00 per 24 hour a day watt, but $4 per 5 hours a day watt. in order to find how much it costs to for for a 24 hour a day watt, we are going to have to multiply our $4.00 by around 5. Thus our watt of 24 hour a day electricity is going to costr about $20.00, Renewable advocates will objet that we don't need for all electricity o be 24 hour a day electricity, but of course the problem is that a good deal of the electricity wind produces, is generated when consumers don't want electricity, while wind does not produce electricity when consumers want it.

I believe that recently, I made a very powerful case against wind generated electricity. I demonstrated that West Texas winds are not matched to consumer demand. I pointed to the admission by a well known West TexasWind developer that the West Texas business exists because of subsidies, not profits. I pointed to arguments suggesting that wind matched to fossil fuel generation does not substantially lower the carbon emissions from wind-fossil fuel generating systems, and that investments in nuclear power would bring far more CO2 reduction, dollar to dollar than investments in wind. My conclusion was that a new West Texas wind project financed by Chinese investments and American stimulus monies, existed solely because government subsidies would be financing much of it, and that those subsidies would primarily benefir chinese workers and investors. The project did little to mitigate the energy related emissions of CO2 from the electrical generation industry, and thus was a a largely wasted investment as far as climate is concerned.

My story got posted on the energy collective, and about the same tme, the energy collective posted another essay, by David Levy, a University of Massachusetts, management professor. Levy, in effect criticized protests against the West Texas wind project on the grounds that were directed to its failure to creat American jobs. Levy suggested that such attitudes place American business related policies at a disadvantage in competition with China.

I can see Levy's point, but in one respect Levy goes off base, He claims

the proposed wind farm will generate plenty of clean power,

This, bot the jobs issue goes to the heart of my case. The words "clean power" are a sort of shibboleth. Levy seems to believe that ifthe words "clean power" can be attached to a project, it is justified. I asked Levy,

David, Do you have any answers to my argument that the proposed Texas wind farm will generate largely useless power that will not meet the needs of Texas electrical consumers, and that money spent on this project would will be far less effectively spent on a nuclear project if CO2 mitigation is the project goal. I suspect that a government subsidy of a nuclear project would create more long term American jobs.

Levy responded,

read that land-based wind power costs a long term average of 4-8c/kWh, depending on location and scale. At least we have plenty of wind online to be able to estimate the costs. True, there are problems of intermittency, but gas powered peak backup is needed for multiple reasons, including plant downtime, etc. It doesn't need to back up wind one-to-one. Intermittency only becomes a major problem when wind reaches 15-20% of grid capacity, a limit being reached in parts of Europe. But a balance of wind, solar thermal (good for the hot afternoons and with some storage potential), some long-distance transmission (esp. across time zones), and new storage technologies will address the issue. We really don't know the long term costs of nuclear, including decommisioning. In Mass., we are paying around 2c/kWh, I think, for the 'transition charge', the nuclear bailout.

Now David's comment raises several questions about wind cost. First, Davod assumes that the price of wind is its true cost. That is not the case. Last year Drew Thornley looked at hidden Texas wind costs. Thornly notes,

Cost estimates for wind-energy generation (not includ- ing costs of building and maintaining wind turbines) of- ten exclude many of wind energy’s costs, such as the following:
• Wind-energy transmission costs;
• Grid-connection and grid-management costs;
• The costs of backing up wind turbines with tradi- tional power sources;
• Lost tax revenues from federal and state subsidies and tax breaks.

Thornley notes another, little noticed. subsidy for wind in Texas:

unlike conventional-power generators, wind-energy providers do not have to pay ERCOT for generation-schedule deviations.† This is no small perk for Texas’ most intermittent energy source, and it distorts wind energy’s price, relative to conventional power prices. The result of this is that non-wind generators, and primarily customers, must bear the cost of ERCOT’s deploying regulation and other reserves when there are large deviations from their schedules.

Thus when Levy recites the "4-8c/kWh" cost for wind generated electricity, he no doubt ignores the hidden costs of wind. Levy tells us that fossil fuel back up need not be one on one. Excuse me professor, but in Texas and indeed in California as well, when summer winds stops blowing and wind capacity factors drop as low as .02, you are going to need one on one backup, if you are going to avoid rolling blackouts when air conditioners start begging the grid for electricity.

Levy's solutions to the problems of wind contained many hidden costs, Build long distance transmission lines, well according to Thornton in 2008 they cost $3,282,828.28 per mile. That does not count against Levy's "4-8c/kWh." Levy does not tell us how much it costs to build and operate a fossil fuel or solar back up system. The Royal Academy of Engineering, estimated that the cost of maintaining and operating a back up fossilfuel system increased the real cost of wind generated electricity by something close to 70%.

CSP facilities currently run to $4 billion per GW, and that gets you 5 GWh per day of electricity. Levy tells us, "Intermittency only becomes a major problem when wind reaches 15-20% of grid capacity"? Ask ERCOT, if they agree.

Professor Levy claims, "We really don't know the long term costs of nuclear." But do we know the long term cost of wind? Given Thornley's observations, we don't even know the short term cost of wind. Wind generators are suppose to last for 25 years, but the data suggest that they last about 16 years. After 16 years they windmills ware out and have to be replaced. Nuclear plants have a nominal life span of 40 years, but many are now being relicensed for 20 more years, and research has begun on extending their life to as long as 80 years. Levi mention "transition charges." How come there are no nuclear transition charges in Texas or Tennessee? Finally uses the strange term, "nuclear bailout." Wind is constantly being bailed out, at the rate of two cents per kWh, what is a nuclear bailout?

If there is an apples to oranges comparison of wind and nuclear power, It would appear that much of the problem is that many costs for renewable electricity are not accounted for when renewable advocates make comparisons.

Texas Wind Rips off Taxpayers and Rate Payers, Money to Flow to China

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:19:00 +0000

In 2006, the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) published a study that showed that while West Texas Wind resources were considered among the best in the United States, they were poorly matched to the needs of Texas Electrical consumers. The ERCOT staff reported:

These data indicate that the representative areas in West Texas have their highest monthly capacity factors in the spring months and in late fall. . . . None of these patterns has a high correlation with the typical ERCOT monthly energy demand pattern, with maximum electric demand occurring in July and August.

Not only did the ERCOT staff find that West Texas wind was the most productive during seasons of slack consumer demand, but that the West Texas Wind blew blew was the most productive during the hours of the day when consumer demand was low.

during the month of April, typical wind resources in West Texas have significantly higher average output in the early morning hours in April than during the afternoon. . . . for July, . . . typical wind generation in West Texas peaks in the early morning hours.

These findings pointed to an inescapable fact, West Texas wind would be least available when electricity in the ERCOT system would be most in demand, on hot summer afternoons. Other ERCoT studies showed that based on a review of historical data of actual wind turbine generation during ERCOT system peaks (from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. in July and August), the average output for wind turbines was 16.8% of capacity. However, the data also showed that for any hour during these months, the output of the wind turbines could range from 0% of installed capacity to 49% of installed capacity. Because of wind's intermittency, the ERCOT Technical Advisory Committee, considered recommending a wind capacity value of 2%. This problem was by no means localized to Texas, and has been observed for New England Off shore wind, the upper Great planes, Tennessee, California, and Canada.

Last year T. Boone Pickens was interviewed by Fast Complany.com's David Case. Pickens was candid

Pickens: "I'm not going to have the windmills on my ranch. They're ugly. . . ."

Question: "So whose land is it going on?"

Pickens: "My neighbors', . . ."

Question: "What happens if Congress doesn't extend the $20-per-megawatt-hour Production Tax Credit for wind -- set to expire December 31? On a project this size, that's an $80,000 deduction every hour at full capacity."

Pickens: "Then you've got a dead duck. It would be hard to go without a subsidy."

Question: "What about when the wind doesn't blow?"

Pickens:"That's the problem with wind generation. You've got to supplement it with a gas-fired or coal-fired source so whoever buys it gets continuous 24-7 generation."

So West Texas Wind is not about meeting consumer demand, it is about subsidies. This was amply illustrated by Michael Giberson, who discovered that during the first six monthsof 2008, West Texas Wind

prices were below zero nearly 20 percent of the time. During March, when negative prices were most frequent, prices were below zero about 33 percent of the time.

Giberson observed,

ven if the market value of the power is zero or negative, the subsidies encourage wind power producers to keep churning the megawatts out.

Evidence from market data suggests that wind power producers will accept prices down to about negative $35 MWh before they shut down, since marginal operating costs are very low for wind power we can conclude that the subsidies are worth about $35 – $40 for each MWh of wind output.

Giberson in another post noted,

Unfortunately for wind power producers in the region, their output was higher during times that the price was low and their output was lower during times that the price was high.

Well of course. Wind generation is not about making money from the market, it is about subsidies as T. Boone Pickens admitted.

So do the tax payers get good value in terms of the dollars they spend on C02 mitigation by wind? Not according to Australian engineer Peter Lang, who has researched cost and benefits of wind generation. Lang found that the cost of wind generated electricity, with natural gas back up was 224% higher than the cost of natural gas generated electricity alone, Thus not only does wind electricity at the wrong time, and thus the heavy lifting of electrical production with wind has to be performed by fossil fuels, but electricity generated by wind and fossil fuels costs far more than electricity generated by fossil fuels alone. But how much CO2 does the use of wind save us? The answer is very little. Lang looked at three estimates, the first, suggested by Lang himself, suggested with a wind and gas combination CO2 savings would be in the order of 0.058 tons of CO2 per MWh id electricity generated. A second estimate from an Australian government report determined that wind without considering back up, would lower CO2 emissions by 0.5 tins of CO2 for every MWh of electricity generated. Finally Lang turned to a Royal Academy of Engineering report that found wind with fossil fuel backup lowered CO2 emissions by 0.09 tons per MWh generated.

Given this data Lang calculated that given his assumptions, using wind to mitigate CO2 emissions cost $1,149 per ton of CO2 eliminated, while using the Royal Academy of Engineering's estimate using wind backed by natural gas would cost $830 per ton. The United States Energy Information Agency estimates that the levelized cost of nuclear power will be 107 in 2016. That would yielded a cost of around $100 per ton of CO2 saved. (Lang reported a lower estimate for nuclear based on older Australian studies. Lang concludes

Only nuclear and the fossil fuel technologies with carbon capture and storage can make substantial reductions in emissions.

Well there you have it. Earlier this week, I reported on an absurd scheme to build windmills in West Texas, using wind generators made in Chinese factories and 30% paid for by U.S. stimulus funding. Electricity produced by the turbines would be heavily subsidized. Most of the jobs created by this project would go to Chinese workers, and profits created by tax payer subsidies would flow to Chinese investments. Is anyone else outraged?

Small Reactors, Mass Reactor Deployment, and the LFTR

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:25:00 +0000

There is at present no end of projects to build small and mini reactors. Most of these projects will not get beyond the concept stage, but a few probably will. I distinguish between mini and small reactors by power output. I would class reactors that generate less than 100 MWe as mini reactors, and reactors that generate from 100 MWe to 400 MWe as small reactors.

Mini reactors are primary useful in situations in which you need small stand alone energy producing units. Think of cities like Juneau, Alaska, where about 30,000 people live. Juneau is too small to rate a big power plant, and too remote to rate an electrical grid hookup. Juneau thus needs a very reliable and low cost, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year electrical technology, to keep all of its dishwashers, and hair blowers running. The 25 MWe Hyperion reactor would appear to offer everything Juneau needs, and at a cost Juneau can afford. Of course. the prototype Hyperion mini-reactor has not been built yet, so estimates of cost and claims about practicality might be subject to revision.

In addition to providing electricity, mini reactors could provide district heat for cities like Juneau. If Juneau had a water shortage, electricity from the reactor could be used to desalinate sea water through reverse osmosis. Local industries could use the Hyperion's heat as input into chemical and manufacturing processes. Clearly then mini-reactors are potentially useful then, but perhaps most useful to smaller communities that are off the grid.

Small reactors are large enough to be useful on a grid, but small enough to be partially or completely factory produced. The proposed Babcock & Wilcox 125 MWe mPower reactor is an ideal example of the small reactor. While engineers will argue in theory that small reactors will be more expensive than large reactors, factory production can change that. Babcock & Wilcox appear to be planning to build their small reactor as a lit in a factory, and then assemble the kit on site. Westinghouse is planning to build the much larger AP-1000 using the same kit system, so Babcock & Wilcox does not seem likely to save a great deal of money with its small reactors, and indeed the amount of on site labor Babcock & Wilcox appears to believe it will need to manufacture the mPower will not lead to a major cost breakthrough.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is planning to buy the first mPower, and to set it up in East Tennessee. Was planning to build as many as 4 big reactors, and still might build them, but the mPower means that TVA can buy reactors in smaller chunks and thus encounter lower financial risk. A large reactor could cost the TVA as much as $7 billion and possibly more. The mPower would be expected to cost under $1 billion, and begin producing power more quickly than a large reactor. Producing power means you don't have to carry interest.

Thus the advantage of a small conventional reactor like the B&W mPower, is that it lowers risks. The mPower has some slight advantages in deployability, but apparently very little advantage in price over larger reactors.

One way to get costs down is to to get better control of labor costs. One good way to do that is to build your reactors in India. Indian built reactors are, even by Chinese standards, inexpensive, and as I have frequently argued the Indians may be about to eat everyone's lunch through low energy prices. The Indians have been building small reactors for years, perfecting their design, and trying out cost savings tricks. What they have learned is impressive, and if they start manufacturing reactor kits in factories as the Chinese are doing, they will stand on

the edge of an energy revolution.

So one way to lower nuclear costs would be to employ Indian labor in reactor construction. But that would not work in the United States or other advanced societies. We have to bring labor costs down by increasing labor productivity. In addition we face a time limit. Climate scientists say we need to bring CO2 emissions under control by 2050. Under control means something like an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions, so that means replacing most of the world's current sources of energy. Thus energy replacements need to be hugely scalable, and they need to be cheap. Conventional reactors are neither scalable enough nor cheap enough, The mPower example demonstrates that small conventional reactors are not going to do the trick. In order to meet our need for low cost and high deployment, we need a compact reactor that is small enough to be transported by rail, truck or barge, easily and quickly assembled on site, and online within a few months. The whole energy generation system has to be low price, and its nuclear fuel will have to be both low cost and abundant.

When I figured this out, the answer to how to do this became amazingly clear. My father had done research on just such a reactor over a 20 year period of time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That reactor, the Molten Salt Reactor, was known to be capable of operating on the thorium fuel cycle. Researchers believed it to be extremely safe. It was so good at destroying nuclear waste that it had been actually proposed for use in a nuclear waste destroying system. The MSR was both simple and compact, ideal for factory production, and transportation. The MSR was extremely efficient. Thus building a huge reactor was not required in order to efficiently produce electricity. In fact a 100 MWe MSR could produce electricity more efficiently that a 2000 MWe conventional reactor. Nor did the power production system require elaborate housing. You could ship in the turbines and generators by truck, rail or barge, set them up in an old power plant or factory, hook them up to the grid, and to the reactor, and you are ready to produce power.

If you are worried about terrorist attack, you can dig a hole and stick your reactor in it. Kirk Sorensen has produced such designs. Once your reactor is in the hole, it is not going to be damaged by truck bombs, or aircraft attacks. On-site set up and assembly can be facilitated by highly automated machinery.

What about fuel, you ask. It turns out that there is a great deal of thorium just laying around. There is something like 400,000 tons of thorium sitting on beaches in India. As David Walters would say, all you need is 4 Indians with shovels and a pickup truck. In an afternoon, they can dig up enough thorium to produce 1 GWe for a year. Thorium in easily recoverable amounts is found in mine tailings, thus we don't need new thorium mines to produce it, we can simply scoop up thorium that is already on the surface. Even in seemingly small concentrations the energy recovery potential from thorium is such, that the energy investment required to bring about that recovery is worth while.

There would not seem to be any potential impediments to the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor solution to our energy issues. They can be built in large numbers in factories. Small LFTRs are efficient and easily transported. They can be set up anywhere. The do not require water for cooling, they can be cooled with air. They are not good nuclear proliferation tools. They are safe. Their materials output is safe after 300 years, and need not be considered waste.

What is wrong with the LFTR? Some money needs to be spent on their development. A crash development program that cost less than what is spent on the NASA Space program in a year would probable come up with a commercial LFTR model in 5 years or so. Thus considering the enormity of the energy challenges we face, the LFTR provides a doable solution.

So called energy experts claim that there is no such thing as a silver energy bullet, but there is a thorium bullet, and we have every reason for using it. Small Liquid Salt Thorium cycle reactors hold amazing promise for solving the energy problems that confront us during the next 40 years.

Energy costs and advanced nuclear technology

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:41:00 +0000

Energy costs are a major concern for Nuclear Green. I am on the lookout for cost data on renewables, and one of my stated concerns is lowering nuclear costs. I contend that renewable generated electricity cost more than nuclear generated electricity, but that the cost of conventionally generated nuclear power, while lower than cost of renewable generated electricity will still be far to expensive to be satisfactory.

I have noted that nuclear generated electricity sells for 4.5 cents per kWh. The Indians seem to be making money at this price even when the power comes from new reactors and is only generated part of the time, due to a uranium shortage. Other nations that will be competing in a post-carbon energy environment, will have to match Indian energy costs, or loose the competition for energy intensive industries. Indian labor costs are lower than those of Western Europe and North America, and if Indian energy costs will also be lower, India will have a significant economic advantage during this century.

Thus it would be highly advantageous for the United States to adopt low cost nuclear technologies. Both labor costs and the cost of materials and parts play a significant role in nuclear costs. So low nuclear costs requite a simple, cheap to build, reactor with low material input as well as relatively few parts. Building reactors in factories could lower costs. Small simple reactors could open the door to other approaches to lowering nuclear costs.

I am hardly the only person who has seen the potential value of this course. Senator Mark Udall has just introduced legislation titled "the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative Improvement Act of 2009,calling for the following,

AUTHORIZED RESEARCH INITIATIVES—In carrying out the program under this subsection, the Secretary shall conduct research to lower the cost of nuclear reactor systems, including research regard
‘‘(A) modular and small-scale reactors; ‘
‘(B) balance-of-plant issues;
‘‘(C) cost-efficient manufacturing and
‘‘(D) licensing issues; and
‘‘(E) enhanced proliferation controls.

Someone in Washington is starting to get the right ideas. We still need to look at what sort of reactor is going to fulfill Senator Udall's expectations. We can expect to see a push for the GE-Hitachi PRISM reactor to accompany this legislation. Steve Kirsch is telling people:

One nice thing about the S-PRISM is that they’re modular units and of relatively low output (one power block of two will provide 760 MW). They could be emplaced in excavations at existing coal plants and utilize the same turbines, condensers (towers or others), and grid infrastructure as the coal plants currently use, and the proper number of reactor vessels could be used to match the capabilities of those facilities. Essentially all you’d be replacing is the burner (and you’d have to build a new control room, of course, or drastically modify the current one). Thus you avoid most of the stranded costs. If stranded costs can thus be kept to a minimum, both here and, more importantly, in China, we’ll be able to talk realistically not just about stopping to build new coal plants but replacing the existing ones, even the newest ones.

There may be a fly in the ointment, as a recent Reuters story suggest:

The drawbacks of the system by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy are that the fast reactors involved are very costly and the reprocessing technology involves handling highly radioactive material yet to be proven on industrial scale. . . .

The challenge lies in the high costs of building fast reactors, . . .

Tim Abram, professor of nuclear fuel technology at Manchester University in Britain [says,]

The big challenge is: can we make it economic? Today, the answer is no, so this remains one of the main goals of the Generation IV initiative . . ."

The Reuters story attributed the expensive assessment to "experts". So we have two different stories about cost. is a backer, and of course backers is his more private moments, when he looks at himself in the mirror, yours truly knows full well, that it is difficult for a backer of advanced technology to be fully objective. I have indeed written about LFTR costs, and indeed have probably gone so far out on a limb, that no expert would willingly be quoted as endorsing my claims. Yet I do have a rational for my LFTR cost claims, several as a mater of fact. So we have some conflicting evidence about S-PRISM costs.

A note on history. History would suggest that as a research project, developing the S-PRISM will be very expensive, and the production of the S-PRISM is likely to be expensive by LFTR standards. This statement is not going to make Steve Kirsch, Barry Brook or Tom Blees happy, but I am not trying to step on their toes. None of them have been LMFRR supporters for very long, and they are relying on the Argonne National Laboratory crowd for their information. The history is that a lot of money has already been put into LMFBR research, In the 1970's ORNL research planners estimated that about 10% of the money spent on LMFBR were spent on Molten Salt Breeder Reactor technology, that is LFTR technology could be made viable. Steve, Tom, and Barry will tell you that the money spent on LMFBR technology has not been wasted. Perhaps not, but we need to look at deployment costs.

Features of the S-PRISM are likely to lead to higher cost than could be expected with the LFTR. First, the S-PRISM requires an expensive fuel reprocessing technology, while a low cost fuel reprocessing technology will be included in the LFTR design. Paying for the LFTR will get you fuel reprocessing too, and LFTR advocates will suggest that LFTRs with attached fuel reprocessing units, will cost less than S-PRRISM reactors with comparable power output. A second S-Prism cost issue has to do with a safety feature, the large pool of liquid sodium that the reactor core will be immersed in. The pool structure will probably not be factory built, and on site construction adds to reactor cost. In addition the large pool structure means a larger reactor housing. The solid fuel has to be mechanically removed from the reactor and transferred to a separate processing unit. Than means that space inside the reactors inner housing has to be allowed for fueling and defueling equipment. The NRC will be concerned about the safety of a reactor that uses a coolant as dangerous as liquid sodium.

Reservations about the safety of sodium cooled reactors first lead Oak Ridge scientists and engineers to develop liquid salt cooled reactors as a safer alternative to Sodium cooled reactors. I have no doubt that sodium cooled reactors can be made safe enough to satisfy the NRC, but because of the sodium safety issue, there will be a cost.

At the moment the S-PRISM reactor has business, institutional and governmental sponsors. These include GE-Hitsachi, Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories (with Sandia jockeying for its own smaller LMFBR candidate), and The US DoE. LFTR advocates can point to a viable research program in France, and a very lively interest community in the United States. It is perhaps a sign of the progress of nuclear power that nuclear advocates feel they can have controversies. In fact the controversies are old, and it is almost inevitable that they will resurface as the case for nuclear power grows stronger.

The future of nuclear power will be dependent on lowering nuclear cost. Although most prognosticators suggest that it will take a generation or longer for low cost nuclear technology to emerge, such judgements are based on business as usual assumptions that are likely to quickly fall by the wayside. The desire for low cost, rapidly scaleable nuclear technology is about to become very urgent. The cost of developing either the LFTR or the IFR to a production phase, is very small compared to world spending on energy during the next 40 years. No one yet knows how much money developing advanced nuclear technology will save, but place that sum into the trillion dollar range.

West Texas wind still $2,500 per kW, Chinese Rejoice

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:13:00 +0000

The drought of wind cost data has been broken with a Chinese-American plan to build a big West Texas wind farm.. U.S. Renewable Energy Group, Texas-based Cielo Wind Power LP, China’s Shenyang Power Group and A-Power Energy Generation Systems Ltd. are planning a 600 MW wind farm somewhere in West Texas. The total cost of the project will be $1.5 billion with $450 million (30%) coming from U.S. stimulus funding. The cost suggests that the rise in wind funding prices observed between 2003 and 2008 has not reversed, and the inflation of wind facilities cost is likely to continue into the next decade. The wind turbines will be built in China, so much of the stimulus monies, meant to benefit American workers, will in fact be used to pay workers in Chinese wind turbine manufacturing factories.

The Jacobson-Delucchi plan revealed

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:19:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In addition Jacobson and Delucchi stated that

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

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

the authors have been disingenuous . . .

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

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

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

Jacobson and Delucchi claim

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

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

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

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

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

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

as cheap as coal.

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

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

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

What of solar then? Jacobson and Delucchi claim

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

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

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

Lowering Nuclear Costs

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:09:00 +0000

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

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

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

costs us too much money

seems downright absurd.

The president talked about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacobson and Delucchi, Half baked at best

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:44:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"hkulper" wrote

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

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

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

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

"dwbd" continued

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

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

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

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

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

His conclusion:

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

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

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

And Peter is using a pricey $4,000 per kw for Nuclear Power. Whereas ABWR’s built in Japan in the 90’s cost $1400 per kw, Chinese recent estimates for the final cost of their first two AP-1000s at $1760 per kw. Before the Coal Lobby had the NRC (Nuclear Rejection Commission) instated, Nuclear Reactors in the USA were coming in at an average of $1100 per kwe with Quad Cities 1800 MWe coming it at $680 per kwe, that’s in 2007 dollars!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"sethdayal" added

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Michael Briggs wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

bartoncii@yahoo.com (Charles Barton) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:25:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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