ENERGY: Is the nuclearization of energy sources a prudent investment?

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Buck

Personally, I’m not against using nuclear energy sources to meet energy demand and to reduce carbon emissions. However, since there are significant drawbacks to nuclear power, I do not believe that the nuclearization of energy sources, or substantially increasing the number of nuclear power stations to meet energy demand and to reduce carbon emissions, represents prudent energy policy. I’ve outlined the significant drawbacks to nuclear power before:

[T]he Republican Party believes that “the best way for utility companies to reduce carbon emissions is to increase their supply of nuclear energy.” However, nuclear power isn’t cheap, and the costs associated with constructing new nuclear power plants have skyrocketed. There are also substantial costs associated with decommissioning nuclear power plants (“it may cost $300 million or more to shut down and decommission a plant“). Other negatives associated with nuclear power production include the fact that the nuclear power industry depends solely on a nonrenewable energy source, and there’s the well-known problem of storing nuclear waste. Also, “the process of thermoelectric generation from fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, as well as nuclear power, is water intensive. In fact, each kWh generated requires on average approximately 25 gallons of water to produce.” Therefore, drought could force nuclear power plants to shut down. What’s more, there are past and present safety concerns with nuclear power production. Recently, the nuclear power industry has been plagued by safety problems at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. Certainly, if the costs associated with decommissioning nuclear power plants, with the management of nuclear power plants, and with the disposal of nuclear waste are considered, then both solar and wind power are substantially cheaper than nuclear power.

Shouldn’t the massive costs associated with nuclear power construction, production, and decommissioning be invested into renewable energy research and production and into research and technologies related to energy storage, grid modernization, and energy conservation. According to Nathan Lewis, “To get the 10 terawatts we need to stay on the ‘business-as-usual’ curve, we’d need 10,000 of our current one-gigawatt reactors, and that means we’d have to build one every other day somewhere in the world for the next 50 straight years.” Lewis also points out that “one hundred twenty thousand terawatts of solar power hits the earth . . . It is the only natural energy resource that can keep up with human consumption.” More via an earlier post on the Conservation Report:

Nathan Lewis provides a gloomy but sobering assessment of the challenges humanity will face in meeting its future energy needs (emphasis added):

Energy is the single most important technological challenge facing humanity today. Nothing else in science or technology comes close in comparison. If we don’t invent the next nano-widget, if we don’t cure cancer in 20 years, like it or not the world will stay the same. But with energy, we are in the middle of doing the biggest experiment that humans will have ever done, and we get to do that experiment exactly once. And there is no tomorrow, because in 20 years that experiment will be cast in stone. If we don’t get this right, we can say as students of physics and chemistry that we know that the world will, on a timescale comparable to modern human history, never be the same.

The currency of the world is not the dollar, it’s the joule.

. . .

Humanity’s current energy consumption rate is 13 trillion thermal watts, or 13 terawatts.

. . .

The United States consumes a quarter of the world’s energy, at a rate of about 3.3 terawatts[.]

. . .

With population and GDP growth conspiring together, we would then obtain a tripling of energy demand by 2050. This is partly mitigated, however, by the fact that we’re using energy more efficiently per unit of GDP. The ratio of energy consumption to GDP has been declining at about 1 percent, globally averaged, per year. The United States actually saves energy at a faster rate, about 2 percent per year. Because we have such a high per-capita energy baseline consumption, it is easier for us to save off that base, whereas the developing countries save less. The “business as usual” scenario assumes that this will continue, and if we project that down, we will achieve an average energy consumption of two kilowatts per person within our lifetimes. (The United States now uses 10 kilowatts per person.) But factor in population growth and conservative economic growth, and we’ll still need twice as much energy as we need now.

In terms of average thermal load, a person on a 2,000-calorie-per-day diet is basically a hundred-watt lightbulb. And in our highly mechanized western agricultural system, the energy embedded in food—to run the farm and grow the food and transport it to the supermarket and put it in the refrigerator—is 10 to 20 times the energy content of the food itself. And the farther you live from the food source, the more embedded energy you consume. If we are 100-watt lightbulbs, this means that just keeping us fed requires one to two kilowatts.

. . .

Ice cores taken near Vostok Station, Antarctica, show that the CO₂ level has been in a narrow band between 200 and 300 parts per million by volume (ppmv) for the last 425,000 years; data from other cores have extended this back to 670,000 years. Current CO₂ levels are about 380 ppmv. “Business as usual” will require 10 trillion watts, 10 terawatts, of carbon-free power, and it never stabilizes CO₂ levels—they just keep going up. So even on that track, we are betting against data that goes back for almost a million straight years, and hoping that this time, we get lucky.

. . .

[U]nfortunately, there is no natural destruction mechanism for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Unlike ozone depletion, it will not heal by itself through chemical processes. In our highly oxidizing atmosphere, CO₂ is an end product. The lifetimes of CO₂ in the atmosphere are well known, and the time for 500 to 600 ppmv of CO₂ to decay back to 300 ppmv is between 500 and 5,000 years. Which means that the CO₂ we produce over the next 40 years, and its associated effects, will last for a timescale comparable to modern human history. This is why, within the next 20 years, we either solve this problem or the world will never be the same. How different that world will be, we won’t know until we get there.

If we want to hold CO₂ even to 550 ppmv, even with aggressive energy efficiency we will need as much clean, carbon-free energy within the next 40 years, online, as the entire oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear industries today combined—10 to 15 terawatts. This is not changing a few lightbulbs in Fresno, this is building an industry comparable to 50 Exxon Mobils. Furthermore, if we wait 30 years, the amount of carbon-free energy we’ll need will be even greater, and needed even faster, because in the meantime we will have put out 30 years of accumulated CO₂ emissions that will not go away for centuries to millennia. So stabilizing at 550 ppmv will then require about 15 to 20 terawatts of carbon-free power in 2050.

. . .

So let’s look at carbon-neutral energy sources. We could go nuclear, which is the only proven technology that we have that could scale to these numbers. We have about 400 nuclear power plants in the world today. To get the 10 terawatts we need to stay on the “business-as-usual” curve, we’d need 10,000 of our current one-gigawatt reactors, and that means we’d have to build one every other day somewhere in the world for the next 50 straight years. I’ve been giving this talk in one version or another for five years—we should have already built on the order of 1,000 new reactors, or double what’s ever been built, just to stay on track. So we’re really behind.

There isn’t enough terrestrial uranium on the planet to build them as once-through reactors. We could get enough uranium from seawater, if we processed the equivalent of 3,000 Niagara Falls 24/7 to do the extraction. Which means that the only credible nuclear-energy source today involves plutonium. That’s never talked about by the politicians, but it’s a fact. Forgive my facetiousness, but on some level we should be thanking North Korea and Iran for doing their part to mitigate global warming. We’d need about 10,000 fast-breeder reactors and, by the way, their commissioned lifetime is only 50 years. That means that after we choose this route, we’re building one of them every other day, or more rapidly, forever.

We don’t have time for the physicists to figure out how to make nuclear fusion reactors—they’ve been saying it will be demonstrated (although not economical) in 35 years, and they’ve been saying that for the last 50. If we assume they’re right this time, then ITER, a multinational demonstration fusion reactor being built in the south of France, will demonstrate break even—that is, it will put out as much energy as it takes to run it—in 35 years, and it will run for all of one week before the entire machine will, by design, disintegrate in the presence of that high-neutron radiation and temperature flux. And in the meantime we would have to build a commercial fission reactor every day for the next 30 years. It’s not going to happen.

. . .

One hundred twenty thousand terawatts of solar power hits the earth . . . It is the only natural energy resource that can keep up with human consumption. Everything else will run up against the stops, soon. In fact, more solar energy hits the earth in one hour than all the energy the world consumes in a year.

VIDEO: Explosion occurs at one of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plants (updated)

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Buck

Japan is having trouble cooling down five nuclear reactors at two power plants after a massive 8.9 earthquake struck near the east coast of Honshu, Japan yesterday. After the quake struck, “the plants immediately shut down, but the cooling systems failed, leading to a dangerous build-up of radioactive steam.” The Japanese government responded by evacuating people living around both the Fukushima Daiichi and the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plants. Most recently, an explosion was reported from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As a result of the situation at both plants, Japan may hand out potassium iodine near nuclear plants to limit the intake of radioactive material by the thyroid. Updates on the situation at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plants can be found with Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones. More on the explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi plant via NPR:

NPR’s Jon Hamilton tells us it was NOT a nuclear explosion. Images from the scene show one building was destroyed. The Associated Press reports that the blast “tore down the walls of a building Saturday.”

Reuters says that:

“A nuclear industry body official said on Saturday he believed a blast at a Japanese atomic power plant was due to hydrogen igniting, adding it may not necessarily have caused radiation leakage. ‘It is obviously an hydrogen explosion … due to hydrogen igniting,’ Ian Hore-Lacy, communications director at the World Nuclear Association, a London-based industry body, told Reuters after reports of the explosion in Japan.”

And the AP adds that: ” ‘meltdown’ is not a technical term. Rather, it is an informal way of referring to a very serious collapse of a power plant’s systems and its ability to manage temperatures. It is not immediately clear if a meltdown would cause serious radiation risk, and if it did how far the risk would extend. Yaroslov Shtrombakh, a Russian nuclear expert, said a Chernobyl-style meltdown was unlikely. ‘It’s not a fast reaction like at Chernobyl,’ he said. ‘I think that everything will be contained within the grounds, and there will be no big catastrophe.’ “

More on what happens during a meltdown at a nuclear power plant via the BBC:

You can think of the core of a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR), such as the ones at Fukushima Daiichi, as a massive version of the electrical element you may have in your kettle.

It sits there, immersed in water, getting very hot.

The water cools it, and also carries the heat away – usually as steam – so it can be used to turn turbines and generate electricity.

If the water stops flowing, there is a problem. The core overheats and more of the water turns to steam.

The steam generates huge pressures inside the reactor vessel – a big, sealed container – and if the largely metal core gets too hot, it will just melt, with some components perhaps catching fire.

In the worst-case scenario, the core melts through the bottom of the reactor vessel and falls onto the floor of the containment vessel – an outer sealed unit.

This is designed to prevent the molten reactor from penetrating any further. Local damage in this case will be serious, but in principle there should be no leakage of radioactive material into the outside world.

More on the importance of potassium iodine via ABC News:

“Any attempt to make it seem that this is not the worst case imaginable is foolhardy,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Both the U.S. and France have plans in place to distribute doses of stable potassium iodine to children who live in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant in the event of a catastrophic radiation release. Lyman said he did not know whether Japan had similar plans in place.

If the reactor core melts through the steel vessel that is housing it, Lyman said, the risk Japan faces is a radioactive plume that could disperse tens or even hundreds of miles. “You could have large swaths of areas that will need severe remediation. And a lot of people exposed to radioactivity who will have an increased chance of cancer.”

After the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Lyman said there were over 6,000 cases of childhood thyroid cancers, and it was later determined if the children had taken stable iodine a few hours before being exposed to the radiation it would block the intake of the radioactive material in the thyroid. “That has been shown to reduce exposure significantly,” he said.

UPDATE 1 (14 March 11): There’s been another explosion at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This time, the explosion “ripped through Unit 3 of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station.” The first explosion occurred at the plant’s Unit 1 reactor.

UPDATE 2 (15 March 11): According to the BBC, after a third blast at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that may have damaged a reactor’s containment systems, “radiation from Japan’s quake-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has reached harmful levels.”

POLITICS: Republicans attack policies and regulations that promote energy conservation, address environmental degradation, and protect the public’s health

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Buck

Republicans are using the state of the economy and the debate over the national debt to attack the EPA, to rollback environmental regulations, and to rollback policies that address overconsumption, pollution, and our addiction to oil. Republicans aren’t considering the best interests of the American people or the welfare of the public when they imprudently decide to attack policies that attempt to address issues threatening U.S. national security. Climate change, pollution, and our reliance on dwindling, dirty fossil fuels are all issues that the federal government must address to secure our future. Instead, the majority of Republicans don’t consider climate change, energy security, or environmental degradation as issues that must be addressed in order to preserve national security and to protect the public welfare. For example, House Representative Mike Simpson, a Republican from Idaho, “added language to the Continuing Resolution that would block any attempt by the Obama Administration to enforce rules under the Clean Water Act, undermining the EPA’s ability to administer these programs.” Another House Republican, Michele Bachmann, recently “introduced legislation that would eliminate federal light bulb standards passed in 2007 that are expected to have the effect of phasing out some incandescent bulbs in the next few years.” Republicans also want to defund the EPA, and Tea Party Republican Rand Paul recently blamed the Department of Energy for his toilet problems. Another Republican Tea Partier, Marco Rubio, a junior Senator from Florida, “hopes to use the budget debate happening now in the Senate to block new pollution controls for Florida waterways.” Since Republicans [are] reversing a series of in-house green initiatives undertaken by Democrats” at the U.S. Capitol, their regressive efforts aren’t limited to rolling back major U.S. environmental regulations. Given the GOP’s shenanigans, I’m baffled that they can even get elected into a majority.

On the Net & Resources:

ENERGY & THE ENVIRONMENT: Oscar-nominated documentary highlights the drawbacks to natural-gas drilling

Posted on February 26, 2011 by Buck

Gasland, a documentary that tackles the environmental side effects associated with drilling for natural gas, is up for an Oscar for the best documentary feature at the Academy Awards ceremony tomorrow. Not surprisingly, the fossil-fuel industry attacked the claims that are made in the documentary. However, given the history of environmental litigation that’s associated with fossil-fuel companies and their wrongdoings, the efforts of fossil-fuel companies to circumvent and stifle environmental regulations, and the known environmental crimes that have been committed against the human environment by the fossil-fuel industry, I believe that claims made by the fossil-fuel industry should be taken with a grain of salt. Here is a review of Gasland via Scientific American (a comprehensive review of claims made in Gasland can be found at Greenwire):

Scientific American got its hands on a pre-release copy of the film months before it aired on HBO, and the movie convinced me to write a feature article investigating the claims of fracking critics and promoters. After doing my own research and interviews, it became apparent that, like most documentaries, Gasland revealed surprising facts, amplified a few, and chose to gloss over a couple others. What writer and producer Josh Fox did achieve, regardless, was to blow the lid off the secrecy that kept most local residents, not to mention scientists and regulators, in the dark about the chemicals used in fracking and their possible effects. And he certainly put me on the reporting trail.

You can see a trailer here. And do your own handicapping of Gasland‘s competitors for the Oscar.

And from New Scientist:

[Josh Fox] spends a lot of time on three Colorado households who can all set their water on fire. All three cases were investigated by Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources, and while one was indeed traced to fracking, the other two apparently have nothing to do with it. One homeowner had inadvertently drilled his well through four coal beds, which contained natural gas.

Indeed, the film is at the centre of a row over its supposed inaccuracies. An organisation called Energy in Depth (EiD) has produced a lengthy list of criticisms. But it is worth noting that EiD is funded by a host of major oil and gas companies, and that Fox has produced an equally lengthy rebuttal of their comments.

Regardless of the arguments, will Gasland take home the Oscar? It seems unlikely that arguments about its accuracy will sway the Academy much. But for the record, my money’s on Banksy.

More via the Connecticut Post:

“Gasland” is up for best documentary at Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony. Director Josh Fox’s dark portrayal of greedy energy companies, sickened homeowners and oblivious regulators has stirred heated debate among the various stakeholders in a natural gas boom that is sweeping parts of the U.S. The film has galvanized anti-drilling activists while drawing complaints about its accuracy and objectivity.

In a letter to the academy, Lee Fuller, the executive director of an industry-sponsored group named Energy In Depth, called “Gasland” an “expression of stylized fiction” with “errors, inconsistencies and outright falsehoods.”

He asked the academy to consider “remedial actions” against the film.

Davis, the executive director, wrote to Fuller that if the academy were to act on every complaint made about a nominated film, “it would not be possible even to have a documentary category.” He said the academy must “trust the intelligence of our members” to sort out fact from fiction.

. . .

Fox said the industry’s campaign against “Gasland” has backfired.

“What they’re doing is calling more attention to the film, so I think it works against them,” the director said from Los Angeles. “But I think it shows how aggressive they are, how bullying they are, and how willing they are to lie to promote the falsehood that it’s OK to live in a gas drilling area.”

The documentary category is no stranger to controversy. Michael Moore films like “Bowling for Columbine” and “Sicko,” as well as Al Gore’s 2006 global-warming tale, “An Inconvenient Truth,” have likewise been attacked as biased and inaccurate.

Interestingly, it appears that a quote from a fossil-fuel industry spokesman in a Wall Street Journal article by Ben Casselman was removed, because the quote was critical of the energy sector’s practices of removing minerals from the earth (see the screenshot at right for a copy of the original article that contains the missing quote). The quote that was removed stated, “We have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror.” More via Alison Rose Levy for The Huffington Post:

When the article was published on Friday night, it was the first time an industry spokesperson deployed a shift in strategy from the industry’s standard denials and repeated assertions that fracking is safe, despite the numerous reports of problems, such as flammable water, contamination of drinking water, trucks leaking toxic and radioactive waste-water on public highways, the pollution of streams, as well as fires, and explosions in which people have been injured.

“We have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror,” Matt Pitzarella, a spokesman for gas producer Range Resources Corp., was quoted as saying in WSJ.

However, if you go to the article, you won’t find Pitzarella’s statement because within the hour the quote disappeared, say citizen journalists, who screen captured it and posted it on Twitter. Gasland director Fox, in Los Angeles, awaiting Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony, has the screen shot of the original version. He also has questions:

“Why did this key quote disappear from the article? Why did the WSJ censor its own piece ? Does the Gas industry get to edit the Wall Street Journal?” Fox wondered. “Who pulled the quote?”

It’s more innocuous replacement from Tom Price, a Chesapeake Vice-President reads, “We need to be able to respond objectively and accurately.”

. . .

Although it’s unknown who ordered the yanking of the quote published in the Wall Street Journal, the appearance of censorship, whatever its source, does little to restore public confidence in either the industry reported on, or the media outlet doing the reporting.

Meanwhile citizens are rooting for Gasland to win the Oscar Sunday night at nationwide Gasland parties, and by writing letters to President Obama, asking for a nation-wide moratorium on fracking and safety studies. To learn more and participate, go here.

Despite what you believe about Gasland, here are some facts and observations about hydrofracking that are a cause for concern: (1) the evidence for groundwater contamination from hydrofracking is compelling; (2) the industry maintains that the complete list of chemicals used in hydrofracking are proprietary property, so the industry maintains that they shouldn’t be required to disclose their fracking recipes to government regulators or to the public; (3) in addition to a plethora of toxic chemicals, ”drilling service companies have injected at least 32 million gallons of diesel fuel underground“; (4) like the production of corn ethanol, the energy input associated with hydrofracking might be excessively high and perhaps disproportionate to the actual energy returns that might be derived from the natural gas that’s actually extracted from the ground; (5) animals and people have become sick in areas where hydrofracking is conducted; and (6) hydrofracking is exempt from some major environmental regulations.

Given the large amount of water that must be used and transported during the hydrofracking process (“fracing a typical Chesapeake horizontal deep shale gas well requires an average of 4.5 million gallons per well“), the large amounts of chemicals that must be produced and used in hydrofracking, and the large amount of diesel fuel that is used in hydrofracking, I’m interested in seeing data that compares the energy input that’s required to extract natural gas during the hydrofracking process against the actual energy that’s extracted from the ground in the form of natural gas. Considering the likely high costs to the human environment and to human health, it seems to me, that if the energy return is slight or even in the negative, then why do politicians allow natural-gas drilling in such an extreme and gross negligent manner without reasonable precautions to protect the environment. Of course, the answer is money in the form of profits and subsidies. However, the price paid to land owners and the price paid for natural gas by consumers vastly undervalues and ignores the human and environmental impacts that occur during and after the drilling process.

Another problem with hydrofracking is wastewater treatment. Wastewater contains carcinogens and radioactive elements, and since “radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways,” it appears that wastewater from hydrofracking is a threat to drinking water supplies and to public health. Via the New York Times (emphasis added):

With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.

While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.

The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.

Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.

The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.

But the E.P.A. has not intervened. In fact, federal and state regulators are allowing most sewage treatment plants that accept drilling waste not to test for radioactivity. And most drinking-water intake plants downstream from those sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania, with the blessing of regulators, have not tested for radioactivity since before 2006, even though the drilling boom began in 2008.

In other words, there is no way of guaranteeing that the drinking water taken in by all these plants is safe.

That has experts worried.

“We’re burning the furniture to heat the house,” said John H. Quigley, who left last month as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “In shifting away from coal and toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, and it’s not clear we have a plan for properly handling this waste.”