Have the Chinese Been Reading Energy from Thorium or Nuclear Green?

Last week the Chinese Academy of Science announced that it planned to finance the development of a Chinese Thorium Breeding Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR) or as it is called in the United States, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). The announcement came in a news report from Weihui.news365.com.cn. The announcement was relayed to Westerners who were interested in Thorium breeding molten salt reactors in a discussion thread comment posted by Chinese Scientist Hua Bai, last Friday. Kirk Sorensen, Brian Wang, and I all posted about Bai's announcement on Sunday, January 30.

In addition to these posts, the thread which Hua Bai started contains the revelation that the engineer who heads the Chinese Molten Salt Reactor Project is none other than Jiang Mianheng, a son of Retired Chinese President, Jiang Zemin. In addition to being President of People's China, Jiang was the chairmanship of the powerful Central Military Commission, suggesting the likelihood that Jiang Mianheng has military ties. He is the cofounder of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, and a former lead researcher in the Chinese Space Program, as well as Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The presence of such a well connected Chinese science leader suggests that the Chinese TMSR project is regarded as important by the Chinese leadership. Thus the Chinese leadership, unlike the American Political andscientific leadership has grasped the potential of molten salt nuclear technology.

Yesterday, "horos11" commented on my blog, Nuclear Green,

I read this, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

After all, this site and others have been sounding the clarion call to action on this, and I should be glad that someone finally heeded it and its getting traction in a place that really matters, but I have a sinking feeling that:

a. its going to take far less than their planned 20 years

b. they are going to succeed beyond their wildest expectations.

Which means that the next, giant sucking sound we may hear is the sound of the 5 trillion dollar energy market heading east, further depressing our economy, weakening the dollar (and the euro) and ultimately making the US economy dependent on rescue from the chinese in the future (when they are done rescuing themselves).

Yet, in the large scheme of things, this is a definite good, and may be our savior from anthropomorphic climate change.

so again, laugh? or cry. I guess its up to how you view things - I guess I'm tentatively laughing at the moment, but mostly from the overwhelming irony of all this.

Jason Ribeiro added,

I can't help but have a feeling of sour grapes about this. While I congratulate China for doing the obvious, America has its head buried so far in the sand it can't see straight. With all the internet clamor about LFTR that's been going on the internet in the past 3-4 years, it was the non-English speaking Chinese that finally got the message that this was a great idea worth investing in. Our leadership ought to be ashamed of themselves.

The Chinese News story on the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor reflects the clear Chinese thinking about the potential role of LFTRs in the future Chinese energy economy. I will paraphrase,

"the future of advanced nuclear fission energy - nuclear energy, thorium-based molten salt reactor system" project was officially launched. . . The scientific goal is to developed a new generation of nuclear energy systems [and to achieve commercial] use [in] 20 years or so. We intend to complete the technological research needed for this system and to assert intellectual property rights to this technology. Fossil fuel energy is being depleted, and solar and wind energy are not stable enough, while hydropower development has reached the limit of its potential.. . .

Nuclear power seems to offer us a very attractive future energy choice, high energy density, low carbon emissions, and the potential for sustainable development. . . . China has chosen {to make an energy] breakthrough in the direction of molten salt reactors. . . . this liquid fuel reactors has a simple structure and can run at atmospheric pressure, [it can use any fissionable material as fuel} and has other advantages. "This new stove" can be made very small, will operate with stabile nuclear fuel, and will run for several decades before replacement. After the thorium is completely used in the nuclear process the TMSR will produce nuclear waste will be only be one-thousandth of that produced by existing nuclear technologies.

As the world is still in the development of a new generation of nuclear reactors, the thorium-based independent research and development of molten salt reactors, will be possible to obtain all intellectual property rights. This will enable China to firmly grasp the lifeline of energy in their own hands.

Let the word "nuclear" no longer mean war.

In the past, people always talk about "core" colors. The Hiroshima atomic bomb, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, these are like a lingering nightmare that is marked in human history. But a new generation of nuclear power will take the color green, the mark of peace taking human beings into a new era.

Oh Wow! It sounds as if someone in China has been reading Nuclear Green or Energy from Thorium. And there is more!

In addition, the "new stove" operating at atmospheric pressure operation, rather than the traditional reactor operating at high pressure, will be simple and safe. "When the furnace temperature exceeds a predetermined value, in the bottom of the MSR core, a frozen plug of salt will automatically melt, releasing the liquid salt in the reactor core into an emergency storage tanks, and terminating the nuclear reaction," scientist Xu Hongjie told reporters, as the cooling agent is fluoride salts (the same salts that also carrying the nuclear fuel), after the liquid salt cools it turns solid, which prevents the nuclear fuel from leaking out of its containment, and thus will not pollute ground water causing an ecological disasters. The added safety opens up new possibilities for reactors, they can be built underground, completely isolating radioactive materials from the reactor, also the underground location will protect the reactor from an enemy's weapon attack. Reactors can be built in large cities, in the wilderness, or in remote villages.

Well Kirk Sorensen and I wanted our ideas to become national priorities. We just did not know in what country it would happen first. Unfortunately the leadership of the United States, continues to be determined to lead this nation into the wilderness of powerlessness, while the leadership of communist China is alert to the possibilities of a new energy age. Possibilities that can be realized by molten salt nuclear technology. Lets hope that someone in the White House or Congress wakes up. The Chinese understand the implications of their venture into Molten Salt nuclear technology. The American leadership does not.

China starts LFTR Development Project

China has become the first nation to begin a LFTR development project. Hua Bei announced Friday in a new Energy from Thorium Discussion thread that

Five days ago, China just started the TMSR project in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) annual report conference, which indicates that China has joined the international MSR club officially. Chinese TMSR project is one of the first four launched projects in 2011, as can be called the "Strategic and Leading Project of Science and Technology". Its ultimate target is to investigate and develop a whole new nuclear system ( thorium based molten salt nuclear system) in about 20 years. The website link of related reports are as follow.
http://www.cas.cn/xw/zyxw/ttxw/201101/t ... 7050.shtml
http://whb.news365.com.cn/yw/201101/t20 ... 944856.htm

The LFTR (TMSR) was first developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers between 1950 and 1975, and has been discussed in detail on Energy from Thorium and Nuclear Green. During the last decade by The Reactor Physics Group of the University of Grenoble has renewed TMSR research. This step is highly rational for the Chinese to take. China appears to have a large thorium reserve, much of it now in the form of rare earth mining tailings. LFTRs as so efficient that they could supply China with all the energy it needs for a period of time that could streach out for millions of years. LFTRs can be factory built and rapidly deployed in Very large numbers. A large scale LFTR program would enable China to replaced fossil fuel energy sources with nuclear power by 2050, if LFTR development had a 20 year gestation period.

Kirk Sorenson at Energy From Thorium has a deperate story on the Chinese TMSR plan.

No Help with Global Warming: Wind and gas

The Blog sphere is rapidly replacing the conventional media as a source of important ideas that effect the future of society. Several recent blog posts raise important issues about the future of energy and call into question the future energy concepts that are informing American and Global energy policy. These posts suggests that there is a significant disconnect between the energy constructs referenced by national and international policy makers, and viable future energy possibilities. The first two posts are on wind power and were offered by Dr. Ulrich Decher,
a Nuclear Engineer who works for Westinghouse. The one post, "Fitting wind onto the electricity grid," has been cross posted on the American Nuclear Society's Nuclear Cafe, and The Energy Collective. Fitting includes an excellent account of the organization of the Grid, along with a discussion of the limitations of wind power, and a case study of how wind generated electricity is integrated into the Bonneville Power Administration grid. Disher points out a number of disadvantages for wind including,

1. Adding windmills decreases the grid stability, and this limits the amount of wind energy that a grid can accommodate.

2. Adding windmills to the grid does not add electric capacity. Stating it another way, adding windmills does not replace the need for any other generator. All the generators needed without windmills are still needed with windmills.

3. The pairing of wind with hydro has no emission benefit during periods of excess water flow (the current situation at BPA).

4. If pairing wind and natural gas is used for future capacity, it will increase emissions compared with other sources, such as emission-free nuclear.

Desher also notes a couple of Wind advantages,

1. The pairing of wind with hydro during periods of drought can reduce the rate of hydro head loss and therefore the need for fossil power to make up for the lack of hydro.

2. The pairing of wind with natural gas can reduce the fuel used by existing natural gas plants (by about 1/3), thus reducing the emission in this pairing.

Desher uses relatively simple conceptual models. For example he ignores Mark Z. Jacobson's contention that coupling with turbines spread out over a large area would make wind generation more reliable, but Jacobson's theory does not take into account the cost of wind redundancy or of an enlarged transmission system. It seems unlikely that Jacobson's reliable wind system would cost less than nuclear generated electricity, and very likely that it would be less much reliable than nuclear power plants.

Desher take into account the possibility of coupling wind systems with energy storage to enhance wind reliability, but again coupling wind and storage is likely to be more expensive than nuclear power plants, and still would not be as reliable as a system of nuclear power plants.

Desher concludes,

Although there are some advantages to adding windmills to the grid, these advantages are not generally stated to justify them. The common justification that wind power is emission free and that using more of it will have an environmental benefit is actually not true. When we look at how wind power is accommodated on a real grid such as by BPA, there is very little, if any, environmental benefit. Other grids that have less hydro require adding natural gas plants, such as those proposed for California, and are therefore not emission free.

Windmills can save some fuel, but the main challenge of grid operation is to supply enough capacity to meet the peak load, rather than to save fuel. Windmills do not help overcome this challenge. This is independent of how many windmills are built. Doubling or tripling the number of windmills does not help if the wind is not blowing. The hope that wind-generated power will always be able to meet the peak from some far away wind farm is not reasonable because of transmission losses. The Northeast, for example, does not benefit from the abundance of hydro in the Northwest.

The reasons for having windmills on the grid are not very convincing when looking at both the advantages and the disadvantages. The reason that there are so many wind turbines in the United States and elsewhere is primarily due to environmental politics. It is a measure of the strength of the environmental lobby. It is a forced market created by politics, not by economics or real environmental needs.

Given the further analysis I have suggested, Desher would appear to be correct in his argument that the disadvantages of wind out weight its advantages.

Desher followed up his first wind post with a second ANS post on The economics of wind power. The substance of this post will be clear grounds to Nuclear Green readers who have reviewed my past posting on wind. Desher actually underestimates wind construction costs. For example suggesting that a completed wind turbine would cost around $1.75 million per MW. In fact West Texas Wind turbines were costing $2.5 million. The Manzana Wind Project, a 246 megawatts (MW) California wind farm proposed by PG&E was slated to cost $900 million, or $3.66 million per MW, over twice Desher's estimate. But even while he seemingly downplays wind costs, Desher makes a strong case that wind generators are astonishingly expensive. Wing facilities typically produce far less of their rated capacity than nuclear facilities do. Nuclear power plants produce over 90% of their rated capacity, while

A typical wind farm would generate electricity about 30 percent of the time, and not necessarily at times when electricity is needed.

Further nuclear plants are shut down for service during periods of low electrical demand, while wind generated electricity may be virtually non-existent during periods of peak electrical demand. Because it is down so often, wind requites backup. But,

This pairing—wind and backup—has limits because of the huge rapid variability of wind that must be compensated for by the backup power source. It is estimated that this pairing can account for only 20 percent of the capacity of the grid.

It is often argued that wind can be paired with hydroelectric generators or with natural gas generators. Desher points to problems with hydro-backup.

1. Too much wind on the grid may violate the Endangered Species Act. Placing too much wind on the grid is actually a concern in California, as that state is negotiating with the neighboring Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) grid for renewable energy credits to meet its self-imposed Renewable Energy Standard. In order for the BPA to help meet California’s demand for wind-generated energy, it might need to decrease the hydro generation to the point that the excess water flow over the dams causes harmful effects to migrating salmon during the spawning season due to excess dissolved nitrogen.

2. Too much wind on the grid may violate agreements to provide downstream irrigation needs. During drought situations, it may not be possible to turn down the hydro generation to let wind onto the grid and still meet irrigation needs.

There are further issues that Desher ignores. The need to provide river flow for navigation is important in the American Middle west and South east. Modern river management by agencies like TVA typically commits 100% of river water to competing uses, thus the generation of more hydroelectric power would interfere with other river uses.

Strangely,

we have passed laws in many states (Washington and California, for example) that do not count existing hydro into the legal definition of renewable energy.

Yet hydro fits every definition of clean, sustainable energy. The purpose of such laws is obvious,

The bottom line is that we have allowed laws to be passed that are harmful both to our pocketbooks and to the environment. Without the benefit of these laws, wind developers would have lost their legally mandated status and there would be no windmills on grids with ample hydro.

Nor is the pairing of wind with natural gas justified from an economic standpoint.

A simplified comparison shows that the worth of the natural gas saved is less than the cost of building and operating a wind farm. The details of the cost trade off are shown at the end of this article. . . . If the price of natural gas is low, then the worth of the saved fuel does not compensate for the cost of the wind farms. If the price is high, then the use of natural gas is not competitive with other forms of power generation.

In addition to direct costs,

There are some additional costs that make the comparison even worse:
# Transmission losses. Since the transmission lines from a remote wind farm are likely to be longer, a wind farm may need to be larger to provide the same amount of power as the backup. For example, if we assume a 10-percent electricity loss per 100 miles, a wind farm 500 miles away needs to be double in size.

# Transmission line cost. A remote wind farm will need expensive transmission lines to deliver the electricity. For example, a proposed new 12 000-MW high voltage transmission line connecting wind sources in New England would cost $19 billion–$25 billion. Transmission line cost may not be directly born by the power provider, so these costs may be hidden from any direct cost comparisons, but ultimately they are still paid for by the consumer or taxpayer.

Desher concludes,

there appears to be no economic justification for building windmills except when low-cost alternatives are not available. This is especially true when windmills are placed on a grid with ample hydro, as there are no compensating fuel savings in that situation.

There is no free lunch.

So our energy salvation is not written in the wind.

Environmentalist have a strange;y ambivalent attitude toward fossil fuels. In the 1970's Amoey Lovins foresaw a coal bridge to a soft energy future. He argued that by 2011 we would be well on our way to a coal freer energy system, and that by 2020 coal use would be a thing of the past. Yet here we are in 2011, 9 years before the Lovins proclaimed date for the end of coal use, and coal use, as well as coal CO2 emissions is greater now than it was in 1976 when the then youthful Amory Lovins told us that coal would be by 2020 a thing of the past.

To Amory Lovins' coal bridge we must now add a environmentalist Joe Romm's argument that
low cost natural gas makes 2020 CO2 emission targets so damn easy and cheap. In other words, Romm proposes a natural gas bridge to replace Amory Lovins coal bridge to no where.

If we look at future energy plans proposed by environmental groups, we almost invariably find that they include natural gas use, as a back up to renewables, certainly, but also as a bridge to a carbon free, nuclear free future. Hence we even supposedly ultra fanatic Greenpeace propose increased natural gas use until 2030.

Yet this Green enthusiasm for natural gas is not based on a rational study of the impact of natural gas production and use on the environment, or an analysis that conclusively demonstrates that natural gas will contribute to to the mitigation of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Thus it is possible to speak of the Green Natural Gas myths, myths encouraged by propaganda from the natural gas industry, but also supported by anti-nuclear Greens, that natural gas is clean, and is a low cost route to carbon/greenhouse gas mitigation.

ProPublica is an online news source that does serious investigative journalism for a variety of traditional news media outlets. ProPublica began to challenge environmental orthodoxy on the cleanness of fracking, an alternative natural gas recovery technology that has revolutionized the Natural gas industry during the last decade. ProPullica states,

The push to find clean domestic energy has zeroed the country in on one resource it has plenty of: natural gas. Vast deposits large enough to supply the country for decades have become the focus of a drilling boom stretching across 31 states. But water contamination has also been reported in more than a thousand cases where that drilling is taking place, raising questions about the primary drilling method being used to get to the gas.

ProPublica reports that

Pennsylvania . . . state officials long ago determined that the methane bubbling up in Dimock's wells was the result of the disruptive drilling processes taking place adjacent to the wells. . . . Scientists have tested the molecular composition of the methane found in Dimock and determined that it came from the Devonian layer of shale, thousands of feet below the surface. In geologic geek-speak, it's called "thermogenic," meaning it is essentially the same kind of gas that the energy companies are drilling for.

Residents in Dimock and across the country have found thermogenic gas in their water where drilling is taking place. Many people are blaming the invasive and controversial drilling process called hydraulic fracturing, and federal authorities are studying whether that process in particular is endangering water supplies in several states. But whether it was fracking or some other part of the drilling process -- the construction of the wells, for example -- there is little debate among regulators and scientists that the contamination in Dimock is related to the drilling.

The methane problem is not limited to Pennsylvania and constitutes a serious threat to some ground water users,

The federal government is warning residents in a small Wyoming town with extensive natural gas development not to drink their water, and to use fans and ventilation when showering or washing clothes in order to avoid the risk of an explosion.

In addition to methane, the Propublica story tells us,

Environmental Protection Agency Researchers found benzene, metals, naphthalene, phenols and methane in wells and in groundwater. They also confirmed the presence of other compounds that they had tentatively identified last summer and that may be linked to drilling activities.

What does this have ti di with fracking for natural gas?

EnCana, the oil and gas company that owns most of the wells near Pavillion, has agreed to contribute to the cost of supplying residents with drinking water, even though the company has not accepted responsibility for the contamination.

EPA scientist investigating Pavillion water wells found,

It found low levels of hydrocarbon compounds -- various substances that make up oil -- in 89 percent of the drinking water wells it tested. Methane gas was detected in seven of the wells and was determined to have come from the gas reservoir being tapped for energy. Eleven of the wells contained low levels of the compound 2-butoxyethanol phosphate -- a compound associated with drilling processes but that is also used as a fire retardant and a plasticizer.

Propublica asserts, based on its own investigation,

An investigation by ProPublica, which visited Sublette County (Wyoming) and six other contamination sites, found that water contamination in drilling areas around the country is far more prevalent than the EPA asserts. Our investigation also found that the 2004 EPA study was not as conclusive as it claimed to be. A close review shows that the body of the study contains damaging information that wasn't mentioned in the conclusion. In fact, the study foreshadowed many of the problems now being reported across the country.

A 2004 EPA report found that some chemicals used in the fracjing process are

biocides and lubricants that “can cause kidney, liver, heart, blood, and brain damage through prolonged or repeated exposure." It found that as much as a third of injected fluids, benzene in particular, remains in the ground after drilling and is “likely to be transported by groundwater."

Yet environmentalists hail natural gas produced by fracking as clean. ProPublica is not ignoring radium-228, another part of the fracking story. Water used in the fracking process is typically recivered and then dumped, despite the presence if toxic chemicals including radioactive Radium-228. New York's Department of Environmental Conservation,

analyzed 13 samples of wastewater brought thousands of feet to the surface from drilling and found that they contain levels of radium-226, a derivative of uranium, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for people to drink.

In addition to radioactive radium brought to the surface by water recovered from fracking wells, radioactive radon gas travels to the surface along with natural gas, and is released into homes, by water and space heating and by cooking with gas. I concluded about the safety issues related to

radioactive radon gas, transported to North Texas homes, from Barnett Shale gas wells, almost next door, constitutes a significant ganger to the health of North Texans. Needless to say, this problem is being ignored by gas companies, the governments of Texas, and the United States. Interestingly, it is also being ignored by critics of nuclear power who complain about the radiation dangers of nuclear power, but are unconcerned about the radiation associated with natural gas. How much is radon from natural gas effecting the health of Texans? No one knows.

Thus natural gas production is far from clean, and it poses radiation threats that may be far more dangerous than those posed by nuclear power. But will it save the planet from global warming? ProPublica tells us,

Advocates for natural gas routinely assert that it produces 50 percent less greenhouse gases than coal and is a significant step toward a greener energy future. But those assumptions are based on emissions from the tailpipe or smokestack and don’t account for the methane and other pollution emitted when gas is extracted and piped to power plants and other customers.

But leaks of methane gas from the natural gas indistry, raises troubling questions about natural gas as a Anthropogenic Global Warming mitigation tool. ProPublica notes,

The EPA’s new analysis doubles its previous estimates for the amount of methane gas that leaks from loose pipe fittings and is vented from gas wells, drastically changing the picture of the nation’s emissions that the agency painted as recently as April. Calculations for some gas-field emissions jumped by several hundred percent. Methane levels from the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas were 9,000 times higher than previously reported.

When all these emissions are counted, gas may be as little as 25 percent cleaner than coal, or perhaps even less.

If that were not bad enough,

roughly half of the 1,600 gas-fired power plants in the United States operate at the lowest end of the efficiency spectrum. And even before the EPA sharply revised its data, these plants were only 32 percent cleaner than coal, . . . Now that the EPA has doubled its emissions estimates, the advantages are slimmer still. Based on the new numbers, the median gas-powered plant in the United States is just 40 percent cleaner than coal, according to calculations ProPublica made . . . Those 800 inefficient plants offer only a 25 percent improvement.

Other scientists say the pollution gap between gas and coal could shrink even more. That’s in part because the primary pollutant from natural gas, methane, is far more potent than other greenhouse gases, and scientists are still trying to understand its effect on the climate—and because it continues to be difficult to measure exactly how much methane is being emitted.

It is far from clear that Natural Gas is the panasia for global warming. Indeed it may turn out to be another energy bridge to no where if we rely on it too much.

Will the United Kingdom Need a Green Program of Energy Rationing

A new report from the House of Commons All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil & The Lean Economy Connection offers a sobering picture of the energy future. Unfortunately the report must be classified as "Green Propaganda" and cannot be taken seriously. One of the reports two lead authors is none other than the the late British Green Party Honcho, David Fleming. One of the fundamental assumptions made by Fleming and by the report is that nuclear power cannot fill the gap left by a declining fossil fuel supply and the necessity to end fossil fuel use due to the role of CO2 in promoting Anthropogenic Global Warming. Fleming previously published a pamphlet titled The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy. This pamphlet received a write up in The Oil Drum, and an extensive "Open Science" quality discussion.

Flemming's pamphlet offered the following thesis:

NUCLEAR ENERGY
In Brief
1. The world’s endowment of uranium ore is now so depleted that the nuclear industry will never, from its own resources, be able to generate the energy it needs to clear up its own backlog of waste.

2. It is essential that the waste should be made safe and placed in permanent storage. High-level wastes, in their temporary storage facilities, have to be managed and kept cool to prevent fire and leaks which would otherwise contaminate large areas.

3. Shortages of uranium – and the lack of realistic alternatives – leading to interruptions in supply, can be expected to start in the middle years of the decade 2010-2019, and to deepen thereafter.

4. The task of disposing finally of the waste could not, therefore, now be completed using only energy generated by the nuclear industry, even if the whole of the industry’s output were to be devoted to it. In order to deal with its waste, the industry will need to be a major net user of energy, almost all of it from fossil fuels.

5. Every stage in the nuclear process, except fission, produces carbon dioxide. As the richest ores are used up, emissions will rise.

6. Uranium enrichment uses large volumes of uranium hexafluoride, a halogenated compound (HC). Other HCs are also used in the nuclear life-cycle. HCs are greenhouse gases with global warming potentials ranging up to 10,000 times that of carbon dioxide.

7. An independent audit should now review these findings. The quality of available data is poor, and totally inadequate in relation to the importance of the nuclear question. The audit should set out an energy-budget which establishes how much energy will be needed to make all nuclear waste safe, and where it will come from. It should also supply a briefing on the consequences of the worldwide waste backlog being abandoned untreated.

8. There is no single solution to the coming energy gap. What is needed is a speedy programme of Lean Energy, comprising: (1) energy conservation and efficiency; (2) structural change in patterns of energy-use and land-use; and (3) renewable energy; all within (4) a framework for managing the energy descent, such as Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs).

During the Oil Drum "Open Science" discussion that followed a posted account of Fleming's pamphlet, Flemming's thesis received a complete shellacking from numerous supporters of nuclear power. Fleming offered only one response to the mountain of criticism that was heaped on his pamphlet. Fleming's defense primary focused on defending the reputation of a single source, namely the work of Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and the late Dr. Philip Smith, and other sources which Storm van Leeuwen authored or co-authored. Fleming acknowledges that before he wrote his booklet, he had a consultation with Storm van Leeuwen that lasted many months, and he mentions Storm van Leeuwen 86 times in his 50 page booklet, making Storm van Leeuwen a virtual coauthor. Significant criticism was leveled at Fleming by Oil Drum commenters for his reliance on Storm van Leeuwen. Critics noted on the estimation by Storm van Leeuwen and Smith of the energy uses and corresponding CO2 emissions from the complete nuclear energy cycle are viewed by other researchers including Roberto Dones of Paul Scherrer Institut, as inaccurate and exaggerated. Roberto Dones stated,

the authors do not critically address their own evaluation in view of findings from those studies. Instead, they extract worst data from just one presentation (Orita 1995: Preliminary Assessment on Nuclear Fuel cycle and Energy Consumption), which is a highly incomplete survey, was never reviewed, nor it reports the used sources. ISA (2006, #35) discard figures reported in Orita (1995) on mining as “outliers”. . . SvLS qualify the data presented at that meeting as oversimplified and incomplete as if this were representing the whole of studies on the nuclear chain. Incidentally, several studies whose intermediate results were presented at the IAEA had and have been published in reports and journal papers and are acknowledged as reference LCA studies."

Fleming failure to offer a stronger defense against many of his claims in the pamphlet. His one comment was a defense of Storm van Leeuwen. It is clearly questionable if Storm van Leeuwen, can be uncritically relied on in matters involving such broad judgements. He is not a nuclear scientist or a resource economist, indeed it is not clear if Storm Van Leeuwen has ever published a paper on Uranium resources in a peer reviewed journal.

There is in fact little reason to think that we are about to run out of Uranium, even if demand is greatly expanded, and there is no change in nuclear fuel cycle technology. A recent report from the MIT Nuclear Fuel Cycle Technology and Policy program stated,

Our findings support a conclusion that concerns over resource depletion should not motivate premature large scale deployment of alternatives: there are sufficient reserves of natural uranium, allowing for further R&D and well-paced introduction of fuel cycle alternatives.

Given that Fleming could not offer other more credible evidence from and evidence from more reputable sources to back up his claims, The oil comments must be taken as discrediting flemings arguments on nuclear power.

While it is perhaps not a fair game to speak ill of the dead, Fleming's views on nuclear power were written up, it would appear that the new report from the House Of Commons group, rests in no small measure on his. Fleming's co-author, Shaun Chamberlin claims to have edited Fleming's pamphlet, The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy. It appears unlikely that Chamberlin has any knowledge on nuclear independently of Fleming, and Fleming nor only relied heavily on Green financed anti-nuclear propaganda.

Fleming believed that what he called a fourfold "Lean energy" strategy would save us,

1. a transformation in standards of energy conservation and efficiency;
2. structural change to build local economic and energy systems; and
3. renewable energy; all within
4. a framework, such as emissions permits or tradable energy quotas (TEQs),eading to deep reductions in energy demand

Fleming argued,

to develop nuclear power as far as the uranium supply allows, . . . there is a catch. . . . A dash for nuclear power would reduce the funds and other resources, and the concentrated focus, needed for Lean Energy. Nuclear power depends on the centralised grid system, which depends on a reliable flow of electricity from gas-powered stations if it is to function at all; Lean Energy is organised around local minigrids. Nuclear power inevitably brings a sense of reassurance that, in the end, the technical fix will save us; Lean Energy depends on the recognition that we shall need, not only the whole range of technology from the most advanced to the most labour intensive, but the whole range of opportunities afforded by profound change - in behaviour, in the economy, and in society. Nuclear power, even as only a short-term strategy, is about conserving the bankrupt present; Lean Energy is about inventing and building a future that works.

For these reasons, the best-of-both-worlds strategy of backing both nuclear power and Lean Energy could be expected to lead to worst-of-both-worlds consequences. Lean Energy would be impeded by nuclear power; nuclear power would be hopelessly ineffective without Lean Energy. Result: paralysis. This should not be overstated: a few token nuclear power stations to replace some of those that are about to be retired would make it harder to develop Lean Energy with the single-minded urgency and resources needed, without necessarily ruling out progress towards Lean Energy entirely. But the defining reality of the energy future - equivalent to the reality of oil in the Oil Age - has to be an acknowledgment that no large-scale technical fix is available. Energy cannot any longer be delegated to experts. The future will have to be a collective, society-transforming effort.

Now of course Fleming does not offer any justification, other than his discredited reliance on the work of a single anti-nuclear propagandist, to support his assertion that nuclear power would requite he continued use of natural gas generated energy. Indeed most renewable energy plans heavily rely on natural gas, while nuclear energy, especially with low cost Generation IV reactors offers a route away from continued natural gas use, which Fleming's "Lean Energy" scheme is almost sure to require.

Thus The House of Commons All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil & The Lean Economy Connection, almost certainly prematurely discounted the possibility that future energy for the British Isles could be based in part or entirely on nuclear generated electricity.

The Report states,

it is becoming clear that nuclear energy faces depletion issues of its own. As the world’s reserves of high-quality uranium ore dwindle, it has become an open question whether new nuclear power stations would use up more useful energy over their full life- cycle (in mining, transporting, milling and processing the fuel, building and decommissioning the power stations and managing the waste) than is generated over the power station’s lifetime.

It may be that nuclear is actually becoming an energy sink, rather than an energy source, and thereby worsening our climate and energy challenge, in addition to providing its own unique difficulties – the risk of nuclear accidents (or deliberate sabotage), the commitment to millennia of high-tech nuclear waste management, and the increased risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.

The sole reference used to support this statement is David Fleming's "Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy." Despite Fkleming's failure to answer his Oil Drum critics, Chamberlain still maintains on Fleming's authority that nuclear power . Hence we havea number of Members of the House Of Commons offering a report which rests on a very flawed pamphlet by a nonexpert on nuclear energy who in turn relied on a pseudo expert who used flawed data to support the contention that we were running out of Uranium.

Thus dishonest propaganda is at the heart of a multiparty effort to introduce fuel rationing in the United Kingdom. It is clear that British Greens have penetrated all political parties in the UK, and are pressing forward with their anti nuclear anti-high energy agenda. It is quite possible that the United Kingdom might need some form of energy rationing before 2020 as the report suggests, however, than it is also quite possible that a crash program of new nuclear construction could do do much to lessen energy shortages during the next decade and might make such energy rationing as might be required to constitute a short range rather than a long range proposition. Placing Greens in charge of any energy rationing program would be like placing a fox in charge of a hen house.

LFTR design from the 1960's

The Core of a 250 MWe two fluid LFTR from ORNL-4328. The design team was lead by Ed Bettis.

Deregulating the Atom

A new pro nuclear blog has popped up. It is named Deregulating the Atom, and it is the brain child of Robert Steinhaus, and Rick Maltese, both well known in the nuclear blogging circle. Rick describes DtA as,

a new site is needed to cover the subject of what prevents the earths greatest invention from developing in the home of it’s birth place.

Robert & Rick focus on the problems for new nuclear projects posed by what appears to be a full court press against new reactor construction by government regulators. I might add that the NRC currently appears to be a major obstacle to the emergence of a new generation of advanced technology, factory built small reactors.

This blog promises to produce some lively copy. It already has Q & As on nuclear regulations with that irrepressible curmudgeon, DV8 2XL , and with Rod Adams who also can be something of a curmudgeon. (Needless to say I have had arguments with both Rod here and with DV8 2XL on Brave New Climate recently, and I am certainly not a curmudgeon.) Of course both Rod and DV8 2XL can be quite brilliant when they aren't disagreeing with me.

Robert and Rick are quite proper bloggers, and they provide us with a mission statement,

There is an urgent need for intervention with the tightly secured, overzealous and outdated nuclear regulatory bodies in our world. The urgency I speak of is that we have serious climate change happening as a result of pollution from our cars and our coal plants and other industrial and commercial activity. Phasing in electric cars and nuclear plants would go a very long way to eliminating the effects of green house gases.

But first those coal plants put out a large amount of energy and we can’t just shut them down without affecting the economy. So the only sufficiently powerful and carbon-free energy source that can meet and surpass the demands of energy is nuclear energy.

Alvin Weinberg and the Molten Salt Reactor

After Alvin Weinberg's death in October 2006, I began a study of his writings that were available on the internet. This was to lead me to several brief papers on the Molten Salt Reactor, and to the Molten Salt Breeder (the LFTR). My interest in Weinberg's Molten Salt Reactor vision, was facilitated by the emergence of Kirk Sorensen's blog Energy from Thorium. Kirk had started his blog about six months before my rediscovery of Weinberg's vision. Kirk had done an amazing job of documenting the history of Molten Salt Reactor Research in Oak Ridge. Kirk's Document archive is perhaps the single most powerful rhetorical tool on nuclear energy available on the Internet. Most people who bother to work their way through Kirk's Documents end up being MSR believers.

In addition to Kirk's Documents a number of important Weinberg papers were posted on the Office of Science and Technology Information web page. One of the most important of those papers was “Towards an Acceptable Nuclear Future" in which Weinberg had

re-examine man's long-term energy options, in particular solar energy and the breeder reactor.

In Acceptable Nuclear Future Weinberg had discussed the cause of the collapse of the first Nuclear Era:

At that time, with Oyster Creek being contracted at a little over $100 per kilowatt of electricity [kW(e)], it seemed plausible to expect nuclear energy to be extremely cheap, as well as inexhaustible. Our dreams of nuclear-powered agro-industrial complexes seemed like legitimate extrapolations from what we thought was demonstrated technology. That the technology turned out to be much more expensive for reasons that few could foresee, or that other sources of energy have also become very expensive, is beside the point: disillusionment with our predictions made it difficult for the nuclear community to retain the confidence of some of the public.

But then Weinberg pointed to a potential low cost nuclear future,

I am unprepared to give up: reactors with an intrinsically low fuel-cycle cost, such as CANDU-Th or molten salt, may yet be realized.

During his OrNL days Weinberg wrote a number of short papers intended to introduce Molten Salt Reactor technology. One was titled WHY DEVELOP MOLTEN-SALT BREEDERS? it was a an introduction too ORNL-TM-1851 (posted in Kirk's document archive). "Why develop" summarized Weinberg's thinking about the Molten Salt reactor, and was offered Weinberg's case to make a persuasive case for the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor:

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.

Papers like this sent me to the Internet, where i found Bruce Hoglund's Molten Salt Interest Pages. Bruce was not actively adding to his Pages when i discovered them, so by far the most significant web site on Molten Salt Reactor Technology was Energy from Thorium. My interest in EfT eventually lead to my encounter with Kirk Sorensen.

Weinberg's interest in Molten Salt Reactor technology extended well beyond writing a few brief papers. He was passionately involved in the Progress of the MSR project.

In a brief 1987 talk, R. G. Wymer of the ORNL Chemical Technology Division, described Weinberg's passion for fluid fueled reactors.

At Oak Ridge we were concentrating on the thorium fuel cycle. Alvin Weinberg, for many years the Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is a great phrase maker. His dream was to "burn the rocks", in "a pot, a pipe, and a pump". By those rather fanciful phrases he meant that the thorium present in many granitic rocks throughout the world could, in a sense, be "burned" by incorporating it in a fluid fuel reactor. The fluid was to be pumped around and around in a loop. The loop was the pipe. As the liquid fuel was pumped through an enlargement in the pipe (the enlargement was the pot), there was enough of it present in the right configuration to go critical. The heat of fission was to be taken off by heat exchangers in the loop and converted to electrical energy. Also, as the fuel circulated around the loop, it was to be reprocessed continuously by equipment located in a side stream through which a fraction of the fuel was diverted. In principle that was a pretty good idea. One of the major reasons for the poor capacity factors of present-day power reactors is that it takes a long time to refuel them. Weinberg's concept avoided that refueling problem. Of course it created a few problems too.

Two major programs were carried out at ORNL based on the pot, pipe, and pump concept. One of them was the Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor, and the other was the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. Needless to say, these projects were of major importance to Dr. Weinberg. Occasionally he would engage me in conversation. Invariably the conversation would turn to the current ORNL pot, pipe, and pump reactor project. This was perfectly reasonable from his point of view because my division, Chem Tech, had a major role in both of those reactor projects.

The interesting thing about Weinberg's encounters with Wymer was that Wymer was never directly involved in the development of fluid core reactors. Wymer knew what was going on in the Chemical Technology Division and Weinberg was pumping him for information that he was not being given by other division leaders. And Heaven help the division leader who Weinberg was not satisfied with after Weinberg pumped members of their staff for information.

Kirk had posted on EfT a number of short Weinberg papers on Molten Salt Reactors and thorium breeding . Thus my interest in Weinberg lead in turn to an interest in the Molten Salt Reactor, that became foundational to my views on the future of energy. That is, however, another story.

Oxygen Separation Via the Application of High Temperatures.

Study for the Regular Division of the Plane with Angels and Devils - M.C. Escher.

A contribution from NNadir, crossposted from Daily Kos, where it is accompanied by an amusing poll.

Recently I have been interested in the chemistry of the lanthanides, sometimes called, somewhat erronously, the "rare earth" elements, although, as I have pointed out elsewhere, neodymium is rare enough as to preclude the realization of car CULTure fantasies of there being one billion electric cars powered by one billion wind turbines.

But let's not track in oblivious fantasy land.

In my travels in the scientific literature last year I developed a quirky fascination with a class of compounds called perovskites, which are bimetallic oxides that have the interesting property that oxygen can diffuse through the solids, which are, in fact, ceramics.

There are many, many, many, many papers in the primary scientific literature on this phenomena, and to pick one (of several hundreds I've collected) at random, the paper I will discuss tonight is ...Journal of Membrane Science 309 (2008) 120–127

The separation of oxygen from air (or compounds) is a very important industrial process and one which is frankly laborious. Oxygen, of course, has medical uses, as well as many industrial uses, including ironically enough, a process for making hydrogen, which may seem counterintuitive, but is nonetheless real.

Industrial techniques for accomplishing the separation of oxygen include cyrogenic distillation, in which air is liquified - using vast amounts of electricity to run the cooling machinery - adiabatic expansion of highly compressed air which involves the mechanical application of work, electrolysis (of course), and a type of absorption into zeolites, which are atomic scale cages - also at high compression - called "pressure swing absorption."

If one thinks about the energy flow in these processes it goes something like this: Uusally a primary heat source, generally dangerous fossil fuels, although solar thermal and nuclear energy would work, nuclear being far superior for the purpose, is used to drive a turbine, with thermodynamic losses typically being better than 60%, and then the electricity is transported over power lines, with thermodynamic losses (of pure electricity in the neighborhood of 5% to 10%) and then convered into mechanical energy which drives refrigeration units or other compressors, also with very, very, very, very significant thermodynamic losses, during which the oxygen is separated, often in multiple stages, each involving even more thermodynamic penalties.

It's a very inefficient business and is only actually profitable in the case where energy is cheap.

Wouldn't be better if we could dispense with all these thermodynamic middle men and cut right to the chase with pure heat?

Of course it would.

The Chinese chemists who wrote the paper cited above, have looked at two very specific oxygen permeable ceramic materials, a cerium gadolinium oxide and a gadolinium strontium ferrate and determined what the effect of nanoscale homogenity on these mixtures has toward their ability to allow oxygen to diffuse between them.

Here is what the authors speak about in their introduction:

Dense ceramic membrane reactors can integrate oxygen separation, steam reforming and partial oxidation into a single step for the conversion of natural gas [1–9], and the process is regarded as an effective and economic approach to convert natural gas into syngas (H2 + CO). Although lots of perovskite oxides were investigated as oxygen permeable membranes during the past decades [1–7,9–15], the applications of the dense ceramic membranes are still limited by many disadvantages of membrane materials. These disadvantages are mainly related to the stability and permeability of membranes under syngas production conditions [16]. Cobalt-free perovskite materials were developed to meet the requirements of the stability under reducing environments, however, the improvement of stability is at the cost of the oxygen permeability [17–19]. Furthermore, decomposition of the perovskite phase under a large oxygen partial pressure gradient is still hard to be avoided for the cobalt-free membranes [17,20]. Dual phase composite membranes were suggested to meet the requirements for both the stability and the oxygen permeability simultaneously, and to overcome the dilemma occurring in the single-phase perovskite membranes [21–23]. Usually, the composite embranes comprise a solid electrolyte for oxygen ionic transport and a solid oxide or noble metal for electronic transport. Solid electrolytes-noble metals composite membranes generally show significantly low permeability and expensive costs comparing to the perovskite membranes [24–26]. Therefore, the cermet composite membranes are far from the practical applications. However, the permeability and costs would be remarkably improved and reduced, respectively, if solid oxides with good electronic conductivity were used to replace noble metals as the electronic conducting phase.

By the way, the authors remarks about the utility of using oxygen obtained from perovskite oxygen separation to make hydrogen from dangerous natural gas should not be construed, as a result of my citation of the paper, to imply that I endorse dangerous natural gas. I don't. My position is that all dangerous fossil fuels should be phased out, but that doesn't mean that certain aspects of the chemistry of methane are useless to consider as a tool to approach such a phase out or banning.

Anyway, the authors have studied this matter, and have discovered something about the homogenity of perovskite membranes. Their best sample was able to diffuse oxygen from air at 950^oC at a rate of 0.91 ml per square centimeter per minute.

This is, by the way, nowhere near a world record for this sort of thing, but this kind of research is critical to understanding the parameters by which this interesting class of materials may ultimately be commercialized, and create new energy efficiencies.

Note that these high temperatures would also afford other efficiencies, including efficiencies in the generation of electricity from various types of heat engines. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that the most efficient heat engines are those that work with a high difference in the temperature of the heat reservoir and the cold reservoir. This is why all thermal power plants are more efficient in winter than they are in summer.

Realistically, the only way to access the temperatures, reliably, without huge environmental penalties is nuclear energy. Many civilized countries around the world are working very hard on such nuclear technology. I dabble in it myself, if you must know, although there is some question as to whether I live in a civilized country.

Have a swell day tomorrow. Tonight, have sweet, if completely unrealistic, dreams about a billion electric cars powered by a billion wind turbines.

Rediscovering Weinberg's Vision

I was in Oak Ridge to visit my father when Alvin Weinberg died. Immediately after Weinberg's death I looked at materials about him that were present on the Internet. I also had my memories of playing with Weinberg's son David when we were school boys. I recalled visiting the Weinberg home, and of David's mother Marge as well as Dr. Weinberg. The Internet stories were about the public side of Weinberg's life. I read an account of Weinberg's 80th birthday celebration at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1995, and a subsequent interview in which Weinberg talked about aspects of his career that were previously unknown including his firing.

Stories I looked at about Weinberg tied back to my father's ORNL career and my own year at ORNL. Mention was made in the materials I reviewed of the ORNL-NSF Environmental Studies project, at which I was employed as a sort of glorified intern for a year in 1970-1971. People I knew, who were involved in the Environmental studies project including project Directors David Rose from MIT, and later Presidential Science Advisor Jack Gibbons as well as Bill Fulkerson, later an ORNL associate director,were mentioned. Fulkerson described Weinberg as

Our Spiritual leader."

and said,

"He viewed national laboratories as tools for achieving social progress.

There is a tradition in Western thought, that goes back to Sir Francis Bacon, that views science as the primary tool for social Progress. Fiulkerson placed Weinberg squarely in that tradition. Among Weinberg's projects, was the use of nuclear energy to desalinate seawater and

make the deserts bloom.

The Weinberg story interlaced at significant points with my own life, among the significant projects which accounts of Weinberg mentioned, the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program, the Homogeneous Reactor Experiment, and the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, all played roles in my father's ORNL, and he in particular, as I was to learn, made major contributions to Molten Salt Reactor Technology.

At the time of Weinberg's death I had begun a return to themes I had encountered during my ORNL days. Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth had already opened a door to the past for me. During My ORNL days, Jerry Olsen had discussed briefed people working with the ORNL-NSF Project us on the CO2/Anthropogenic Global Warming problem. This was long before AGW became a political issue, and long before Republicans started reading Climate Audit and committing intellectual suicide. At that time it was perfectly possible to be a Republican and accept the mainstream science views on the greenhouse gas problem. Republican skepticism about AGW is not just wacky, it is tragic and pointless. What Republicans want is the continuation of economic freedom in the future. With a nuclear solution, they can protect the free market, while having an appropriate response to AGW.

When I worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 1970-71, the idea of anthropogenic global warming was beginning to circulate. Alvin Weinberg had taken a long look at the future of humanity, and decided that for that long run to work, we had no choice but to use atomic power. There were two possible forms, Nuclear power from reactors, and thermonuclear power from Hydrogen fusion. T here was enough raw material available in the sea to last human energy needs a long time, but thermonuclear power posed daunting technological challenges.

Building advanced reactors was the option that appealed to Alvin Weinberg. And Weinberg, who was nothing, if not a forward thinker, had access to to the most forward thinking in the world about anthropogenic CO2 and global climate change, and idea that the upper reaches of the Atomic Energy Commission had begun to encounter during the 1950's. No less a figure than Willard Libby was interested in atmospheric CO2 as part of his radioactive carbon-14 research. Roger Revelle and Hans Suess were arguing the case for CO2 monitoring. The rational was simple and compelling. Scientists foresaw a need of "a clearer understanding of the probable climatic effects of the predicted great industrial production of carbon-dioxide over the next 50 years." Revelle tapped Charles Keeling to become the ultimate standard barrier of the project to monitor atmospheric CO2. By the 1960's awareness and concern about the long term implications of anthropogenic CO2 was spreading at the upper levels of the American Scientific community, and was beginning to enter into the voices of scientists who had influence over American policy.

During the late 1960's and early 1970's Weinberg's career and indeed the fate of ORN began to be effected by a high AEC official, The Director of Reactor Research Milton Shaw. Shaw was allied with the powerful Congressman Chet Holifield. It appears that neither Shaw or Holifield liked Weinberg. It is not clear if their animosity was at the root of their objection to Weinberg's ideas, but it is clear that they both felt that Weinberg had to go. There were clashes over the Molten Salt Reactor, and Reactor Safety. These were related issues. The Molton Salt Reactor, had a leg up in reactor safety, as compared to the then dominate light water reactor. Weinberg like many of his ORNL staff was acutely concerned about reactor safety issues. Weinbergs safety concerns directly conflicted with Holifield and Shaw. In 1973 Weinberg was fired as director of ORNL. But Weinberg was too big a voice to silence. In 1974 Weinberg published a major paper on the energy economy is the prestigious journal Science. In " Global Effects of Man's Production of Energy," Weinberg set out his case on the long term consequences of the human commitment to carbon based fuels. In 1975 during testimony to congress, Weinberg laid out his global warming concerns.

During his last years at ORNL Weinberg was very concerned about the Laboratory's future. also concerned about the future of ORNL. ORNL had been a reactor research center during the Weinberg years, and AEC reactor czar Milton Shaw had decided to shut down ORNL's reactor research establishment. Shaw decided that the AEC's biggest reactor research project, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, was to be built within a couple of miles of ORNL, but without ORNL supervision. The result was a disaster.

Dixie Lee Ray claimed,

One of the notions he (Milton Shaw) had was his stated desire to destroy the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I never really knew exactly why but I was equally determined that that fine American institution should live forever. At one time he (Milton Shaw) could have accomplished his goal, because he had Congressman Holifield on his side and both of them detested my old friend, Dr. Alvin Weinberg, who ran the Oak Ridge lab. To this day I don't understand the Holifield-Shaw dislike of Oak Ridge, but I had to believe it had no place in the Holifield nuclear empire.

Weinberg denied Ray's claim that Shaw wanted to destroy ORNL, but it is quite clear that Shaw damaged ORNL to a much greater extent than simply firing Weinberg. Weinberg has proposed during the late 1960's to turn ORNL into an Environmental Laboratory, but Holifield and probably Shaw was opposed to that. It is probably the case, even though Weinberg later denied it, that he was aware that the Laboratory needed a new mission if it were to survive as a scientific institution. Weinberg brought David Rose to ORNL to lead the rescue attempt. Rose was a visionary like Weinberg, and was perhaps along with Weinberg and my father one of the most outstanding people i knew while I was at ORNL. What i recall about Rose now was how approachable he was, and that was a rare quality among the many ORNL chiefs. Rose owned two old Aston-Martons and he maintained them as a hobby. His official title at ORNL was Director of Long Range Planning, and he was not entirely comfortable with the day by day supervision of the ORNL-NSF program. It is perhaps a mark of Rose charisma, that when he was replaced by Jack Gibbons, some people in the program including me felt disappointed. Gibbons was of course an outstanding scientist and science communicator, who was later Presidential Science Advisor to President Clinton.

I left Oak Ridge at the end of the summer of 1971, heading out for graduate school, and left the environmental and energy concerns I had found at ORNL behind me for 35 years. Then I heard a wakeup call from Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth.' The death of Alvin Weinberg a few months later confronted me with the solution to the Climate problem that ORNL had to offer under Weinberg.

Following Weinberg's death I found that following his departure from the Laboratory, Alvin Weinberg had virtually assumed a prophetic mantel as he reviewed the issues forced on us by greenhouse gasses and the future of energy.

In a 1976 paper "Economic Implications of A US Nuclear Moratorium. 1985 to 2010," which Weinberg co-authored with Charles E. Whittle, Alan D. Poole, Edward L. Allen, William G. Pollard, Herbert G. MacPherson, Ned L. Treat, and Doan L. Phung, reveal to us exactly how accurate Weinbergs vision of the future was. In the paper Weinberg and his associates assessed the the economic and environmental consequences of moratorium on neuclear construction in the United States. He assumed that no new reactors would be ordered after 1980, but that reactor construction would continue till about 1985. He then looked at the consequences to allow continued operation of reactors on line by 1985. Weinberg tried to think out the implications of the cesation of new reactor construction.

Weinberg understood that if reactor construction ceased, power companies would construct more coal fired power plants to meet consumer demand for electricity. Weinberg assumed that consumer demand would be driven by two factors population growth, and economic growth. He also assumed that technological changes would increase the efficiency of electrical use, but that these efficiencies would not offset the increase in demand.

Weinberg saw

"four levels of environmental tradeoffs as a result of shifting the additional fuel requirements from nuclear to coal after 1985."

The first level of effect was what he called global. There were two components:

(1) Proliferation: Countries wishing to rely primarily on the nuclear option can do so whether or not the United States abandons nuclear power. Thus, a domestic moratorium on nuclear energy would have little effect on proliferation unless the rest of the world abandoned nuclear power.

(2) CO,: Should 20 percent of the world’s fossil fuel be burned, the CO(2), concentration might double; this could lead to unacceptable changes in the world’s climate. A U.S. moratorium per se would have little effect on this possibility; however, loss of the nuclear option through much of the world,’which is a conceivable consequence of a U.S. moratorium, might make it more difficult to respond quickly to a perceived danger from higher CO(2), levels in the atmosphere.

Weinberg's observations on CO2 were extrordinary:

The ultimate constraint on the burning of fossil fuel may be the climatic impact from atmospheric CO(2) buildup. This, of course, is a global problem; what the United States does during the next 30-50 years is likely to contribute little to total global atmospheric levels. Nevertheless, increasing reliance on fossil fuel by such a large consumer as the United States poses a prospect of severe climatic shifts that cannot, in principle, be dismissed. The extent to which a nuclear moratorium would aggravate the buildup of CO(2), must therefore be examined.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affects the thermal radiative balance of the planet and through this balance the global climate. On the basis of the best atmospheric models now available, a doubling of the atmospheric CO(2), would result in a global average surface temperature increase of 1.5-2.4"C, with greater increases in the high latitudes. Although models of the type used in these studies predict present global climate surprisingly well, a number of significant variables are not included. Consequently, the results must be regarded as preliminary until additional information and more reliable climatic feedback mechanisms can be properly included.

During the past hundred years, the annual global production of CO(2), by burning fossil fuels has grown nearly fiftyfold. It now stands at 18 x lo9 tons, which is about one-tenth the amount accounted for by the annual net primary fixation of carbon by terrestrial plants. This production appears to have caused an increase in the concentration of CO(2), in the atmmphere. Since 1958 observers at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii have monitored atmospheric CO, content, and the 1975 measurements show an average CO(2), concentration of 330 ppm (in the latter part of the nineteenth century it was 290-295 ppm). The measurements show annual increases for each year, averaging about 0.7 ppm during the late 1950s and early 1960s and up to 1 .O ppm or more in recent years.

The cumulative production of C02 since the end of 1957 and the observed increase in CO, are plotted in Figure 8. The upper set of points indicates the increase in concentration of CO, in the atmosphere that would have occurred if all CO, produced from fossil fuels and cement since 1957 remained airborne. The lower set of points represents the observed increase in atmospheric CO, concentration at the Mauna Loa Observatory.

Weinberg added:

Almost any reasonable scenario for future global energy demand yields continued increases in atmospheric C02, but the resulting concentrations do not appear to reach levels that will cause severe climate alterations before 2000. However, little complacency should be derived from this, since continued energy demands during the first few decades of the next century will push atmospheric C02 concentrations to levels which warrant serious concern, even for the low
energy growth case. The inertial effect in energy supply systems makes it clear that decisions made now on the nuclear/nonnuclear issue will have an impact reaching many years into the future.

He observed "that the time when atmospheric CO, concentration will become crucial is early in the twenty-first century." He expected "an increase of 62-73 ppm over the 1958 value of 315 ppm by 2000. " Then he added, "atmospheric concentration of 375-390 ppm may well be a threshold range at which climate change from C02 effects will be separable from natural climate
fluctuations. "An increase of 150-225 ppm by 2025 (concentration of 465-540 ppm) should certainly result in recognizable climate change if such changes are ever to occur. The consequences of an increase of this magnitude in atmospheric C02 make it prudent to proceed cautiously in the large-scale use of fossil fuels."

In both nuclear proliferation and CO2/global climate change Weinberg was clearly correct. In 1974 India exploded its first Atomic bomb without possessing American reactors. Other nations followed in developing nuclear weapons programs without relying on American designed and built power reactors. South Africa which actually assembled 6 nuclear weapons during the 1980's. Pakistan built nuclear weapons using its own resources from the 1980's onward. Pakistan is believed to have stolen technology from the West, and also received some technological help from China. North Korea was able to construct nuclear weapons with Pakistani help. Iraq's nuclear weapons programs were blocked by Israeli military action in the 1980's, and by international pressure and military actions since the 1990's. Iran which received Pakistani help in developing a weapons program, but appears to have stopped the program for technical reasons as well as international pressure. Libya also received Pakistani help on developing a nuclear weapons program, but appears to have dismantled that development a few years ago, after an agreement with the United States. Israel acquired nuclear weapon making capacity during the 1960's with some French assistance.

Weinberg was also correct about the implications of an American reactor construction moratorium for CO2 emissions. The world wide demands for energy has increased rapidly, and as of January 2011, much of that demand has been filled by coal burning power plants. Despite the 1976 prophecy of Amory Lovins, that coal use would be in decline by 2011, Coal use for energy and its threat to the climate is still very much with us. In a discussion of Lovins vision or perhaps more accurately lack of vision of the future. Lovins had foreseen a coal burning bridge to a low energy, energy efficient future. Weinberg asked,

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

Weinberg commented on the title of Lovins book, The Non-Nuclear Futures,

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

What then Weinberg argued, against Lovins, was a loss of freedom. My own assessment is that Weinberg was correct, and that Weinberg not Lovins and the anti-nuclear environmentalists was the true progressive and the true champion of human freedom.

Good and better forms of nuclear energy

My big argument with Rod Adams is not about the flaws of nuclear power plants. I don't question whether Light Water Reactor nuclear power is good. I question whether it is good enough and whether we should spend the relatively small amount of money required to to make nuclear power better.

* Nuclear power is already better than renewables in many respects.

* Nuclear power is safer than solar or wind generating systems

* Nuclear power costs less than solar or wind generated electricity

* Nuclear Power is more reliable than solar or wind generating systems

* Nuclear power is capable of providing energy on demand, solar or wind generating systems cannot provide energy on demand

* CO2 mitigation costs less with nuclear power than with solar or wind generating systems

* Nuclear generated electricity will cost less to transmit to markets than solar or wind generating electricity

Needless to say these facts will be vehemently denied by renewable advocates, but the facts are firmly on the nuclear side. Nuclear advocates need t0o continue to work to make the facts about nuclear power vis-à-vis renewables known. Yet there are problems with conventional Light Water Reactors if Nuclear power is to replace coal by 2050, and Light Water Reactors are not good sources of Industrial process heat.

Although LWRs are less expensive than renewables, they are more expensive than coal fired power plants, and considerably more expensive to build than natural gas fired power plants. If Nuclear power is to offer as a marketable replacement for natural gas fired power plants, it must be offered in an alternative to light water reactor technology.

In addition there are many industrial processes that require a considerable amount of heat. It is estimated that 5% of human CO2 emissions occur during the cement manufacturing process. If anthropogenic CO2 emissions are to be reduced by 80%, this means that up to 25% of CO2 emissions will come from the cement industry, and this would most likely be unacceptably high. Although Light Water Reactors are capable of supporting some hydrogen production chemical processes, temperatures of 700 C to 1000 C are desirable to produce hydrogen, and hydrogen related chemical processes, such as ammonia and methane production. Graphite moderated helium cooled reactors and molten salt cooled reactors can theoretically operate in this temperature range. With Molten Salt cooled reactors requiring more development for the 700 C to 1000 C operation range. Current Molten Salt technology can tolerate industrial processes up to 700C, which is twice what LWRs can tolerate. Helium cooled reactors can tolerate temperatures of close too 1000 C, but also operate at lower power densities than MSRs and are potentially more expensive. to build than Liquid Salt cooled Pebble Bed Reactors.

Renewables are really not in the running for industrial heat sources. Wind and solar PV do not offer high temperatures, and solar thermal is limited to water short environments, while Industrial process heat is usually matched to high water demands. Solar Thermal systems are useful for heating water during the day time, and thus industrial uses that require heated water can be sited with some flexibility. Solar heat is not nearly as flexible for industries that require more heat than that needed to heat water. If an industry needs heat 365 days a year, or needs consistent summer-winter heat, solar may not prove satisfactory. Their operations are impaired by clouds, and by the impact of winter on solar energy.

Thus all forms of nuclear energy have significant advantages over solar and wind generated electricity, and several Generation IV reactor types including Molten Salt cooled reactors have significant advantages over Light Water Reactors for both electrical production and industrial process heat. Helium cooled graphite reactors also are superior sources of industrial process heat. Helium cooled graphite core reactors have cores that are up to 5 times larger than Molten Salt cooled reactors, and thus are likely to cost more.

Joe Romm and reactor construction by 2050

Joe Romm belongs in my pet peeve category. Although Romm sometimes provides useful information on climate developments. On energy he is just plain loco. He is hog-wild over renewables, and his energy related beliefs are not open to discussion. He appears to systematically censor comments from nuclear supporters on his blog, Climate Progress. "Seth" commented on NEI Notes,

Romm is pretty crafty about allowing/censoring comments from those who disagree. Many like Charles Barton have complained they can't get in a word. I've tried several times with zero rhetoric links to real wind, solar and nuke projects and their costs to try to contradict his nonsense. No comments have made it past his censor.

He likes to feature a David Benson dude as a pro nuke guy then shoot down his poorly crafted argument with a "see how dumb they are "comment. Benson routinely takes a trashing on Bravenewclimate.

Notes has already considered the Romm comments on the Nuclear wedge.

Romm has his own AGW mitigation plan, and were he sane enough to post my comments, I would have offered comments on it. But as as Seth indicates, I am on Romm's "do not publish comments" list.

Romm has been playing a silly game, for some time. While not paying attention to real and potential developments in nuclear deployment plans. Romm recently discussed his comprehensive energy plan, the one I once called Stalinist. He offered a slightly revised version of his Stalinist plan earlier this week. Romm is not totally opposed to nuclear power, mind you, he just thinks that only a limited amount of nuclear power is possible within the 40 years we have between now and 2050. Romm thinks a wedge of nuclear power - the equivalent of 700 GW of electrical generating capacity is possible. He justifies this view by reference to a single 2007 report from the Keystone Center. Romm's post on the alleged limitation of Nuclear energy, along with David Roberts anti nuclear screes in Grist, posed problems to which Nuclear Green has attempted to offer solutions. In response to Romm's post I wrote,

Actually this essay (the Keystone Report) simply states the case for the mass production of breeder reactors. Only breeder technology would provide the nuclear fuel for all the reactors imagined here. The only way that such a large number of reactors could be built is on an assembly line basis. Since we are going to be recycling so called “reactor waste”, there will ne little need for long term repositories for spent reactor fuel. Assembly line production of reactors, which then can be shipped to on ships and barges to the power production sites around the world, will enable reactors to be manufactured for a fraction of their present costs.

Hence the advocacy of the LFTR a thorium breeder that is very amenable to mass production.

Recently however, MIT has offered a more optimistic view of Uranium availability. The MIT view suggests that breeders are not necessary in the short run. This actually makes things a lot easier for Molten Salt Reactor technology, because the technology for building uranium fueled MSRs was tested in the mid to late 1960's. Uranium fueled MSRs can be built using already tested technology, very likely at a significantly lower cost than LWRs.. Since MSRs require less steel and concrete than LWRs, and are simpler and more energy efficient, they can probably bebe built much more quickly than LWRs, and built in much larger numbers over a given time period. This would allow for a greatly expanded nuclear fleet.

As it is Romm's suggestion of a single nuclear wedge by 2050 seems absurdly small given the MSR potential. China appears to have set a 500 GW nuclear goal by 2050. the Indians are talking about a similar goal ca. 2060. National Nuclear Goals of such magnitude are possible, given MIT's findings on Uranium. Thus even given the limitations of conventional nuclear power, a single wedge appears unrealistically small.

We can build Molten Salt Reactors in factories. Turn them out the way Henry Ford produced Tin Lizzies, and set them up anywhere in the world. They can be air cooled so don't need coolant water. MSRs that are 1/10 the size of conventional NPPs can be built on factory production lines and turned out in very large numbers.

Joe Romm censors any information that tells his readers that he is hugely underestimating the potential of nuclear power.

Well censorship is one of the tools of any great dictator, and I came to the conclusion some time ago that Romm's energy plan owed a lot to a well known 20th century dictator, Joe Stalin. I wrote:

Joe Romm seeks inspiration for his plan to combat Global Warming.

I think that Joe Romm has offered the reductio ad absurdum of green energy policy. What Romm has demonstrated is that the Green approach can only be successful in a neo-Stalinist type economy.

Let me repeat the key point: It is utterly inconceivable that you could stabilize atmospheric concentrations anywhere near 350 ppm by using a carbon price as your primary mechanism […] A price isn’t what is needed to stop building any new coal plants and shut down every existing one in 10 years in rich countries and 20 years everywhere else — and replace all that power (plus growth) with carbon-free generation and efficiency. Plus you have to build all the necessary transmission […] How are you going to site and build all the alternative plants that fast? How are you going to site and build all the power lines that quickly? How are you going to allocate the steel, cement, turbines, etc? How are you going to train all the people needed to do all this? There is only one way. That is a WWII-style and WWII-scale government-led mobilization […] Well, we didn’t accomplish the WWII mobilization through a pricing mechanism.

The "Air High" plan and Nuclear Green have offered answers to Romm's questions. Romm offers an unreachable time frame, even with the socialist means he proposes, however if the time frame is to 2050, the task becomes doable, and doable without socialism.

How are you going to site and build all the alternative plants that fast?

Develop a factory built, transportable, modular LFTR and the factory to build it by 2020.

How are you going to site and build all the power lines that quickly?

By using existing power lines and existing access at coal and gas fired power plants that are to be recycled as LFTR sites.

How are you going to allocate the steel, cement, turbines, etc?

By making maximum use of existing power plant sites and facilities, and by housing LFTRs in underground homes rather than above ground structures, we will minimize structural steel and cement requirements. Closed cycle gas turbines will be mass produced at Jet engine factories.

How are you going to train all the people needed to do all this?

Through expansion of university and military training programs for nuclear scientists, engineers, managers, and workers. And by designing self controlling reactors that do not require on site operations staff. It is clear that within a doable time frame, all of our carbon containment goals can be meet without

a WWII-style and WWII-scale government-led mobilization.

The Aim High plan is explained in this video of Dr. Robert Hargraves "Aim High" presentation.