Let's start with the repeated contentions that solar power and renewables have been well-funded (compared to nuclear?) to little effect. From the article: "pouring billions of dollars into windmills, solar panels, and biofuels", "Despite all the hype, tax breaks, and incentives, the proportion of US electricity production from renewables has actually fallen in the past 15 years, from 11.0 percent to 9.1 percent."

While those numbers may be correct, they're wildly misleading. There has certainly been egregious waste in the name of renewables - the "hydrogen economy" hype that we've dealt with elsewhere here. But government spending on nuclear power dwarfs that spent on renewables, even now in the US with no new plants for the last three decades. In fact, the authors of the article propose roughly $10 billion in new spending and tax incentives (spending that coincidentally seems to already be in the US budget proposal) to get 6 new nuclear plants built in the US in the next 10 years.

On the fraction of electric production attributable to renewables - almost all of that, and the reduction in recent years, is from hydro-electric and bio-mass production; the hydro contribution can shift significantly from year to year depending on rainfall levels, and obviously word burning is no longer a major energy source in the US.

In the renewables areas the article seems to imply are shrinking, solar photovoltaics and wind, in fact there has been tremendous growth of 30% or more per year in recent years. Solar PV now adds a good fraction of a new nuclear plant to the world's energy supply every year, and wind turbines add another GW-size plant or two, even after accounting for the much lower capacity factors from wind and terrestrial solar installations.

The article also makes the common mistake of conflating percentages of electric supply with meeting a nation's full energy needs - speaking in one sentence of matching France's 77% of electricity from nuclear power, and then in the next of "barrel[ing] down the freeway in a hydrogen Hummer with a clean conscience as your copilot". Electric, even after the big heat-rate factor adjustment, actually accounts for only 2/5 of world energy use, so France's 77% from nuclear is really only about 30% of energy needs.

In a further example of real innumeracy, the authors glowingly quote an analysis of hydrogen production: "a single next-gen nuke could produce the hydrogen equivalent of 400,000 gallons of gasoline every day." - 400,000 sounds big, but the usual unit for large-scale is barrels, not gallons, and that's less than 10,000 barrels of oil equivalent (bboe) per day.

Total US energy needs are on the order of 42 million bboe/day - are they seriously proposing construction of some 4000 new "next-gen nuke" plants here in the US? If we're talking about energy independence, say, the US imports over 10 million bboe/day right now - so we need at least 1000 new "next-gen nuke" plants for that!

And, as the authors point out, world energy needs are likely to triple by 2050 (see our notes on the likely ranges). So we're not talking about just multiplying the world's nuclear capacity by a factor of 10 to substantially meet world energy needs - more likely it will be two orders of magnitude more plants than we have now.

Schwartz and Reiss seem to at least partially realize the need for such a vastly bigger scale, in talking about fuel reprocessing and extraction of uranium from seawater. Those could well work. But, if the world will likely need 20,000 or more GW-scale nuclear power plants by 2050, why don't they explicitly mention that sort of number?

Unless the full scale of the nuclear option is put before the public and accepted, this sort of pro-nuclear hype only serves to undermine support for real long-term sustainable solutions. In fact, it sounds suspiciously like the hydrogen economy hype of the past few years, which has ended up strengthening the position of the fossil fuel dinosaurs on the world stage.

There are real solutions to the energy problem, but nuclear fission is not now, or likely ever to be, one of them.

Comments

Boron power advocate Written by GRLCowan on 2005-02-09 16:02:05 "Unabashedly pro-nuclear", eh? A publically funded science career is one significantly funded from fuel tax revenue, a perch from which one can safely advocate fossil fuel replacement technologies until the cows come home as long as each and every one advocated is currently, and likely long to be, ineffective.     This must be a significant abashing factor; perhaps Schwartz and Reiss are not beholden to the tax man, and so escape it. But they make concessions to his antinuclear orthodoxy that look like abashment to me. The "high-minded answer" is not renewables and "our fear of the nuclear bogeyman" is really ours only for that we for whom tax increases are generally good news. Projecting it on the public has long been an error.     Nuclearizing the world's existing motorists and giving rides to all those Asians who want them would, as A. P. Smith says, require tens of thousands of small reactors; however, unit sizes increased tenfold in the 1960s, bumped up against electrical grid limitations, and stopped.    Nuclear reactors for motor fuel production will not be subject to those limitations. As far as I know nothing in the nature of reactors themselves makes scaling them up to MBoe/d unit capacities in any way awkward.       I agree that this, or the tens-of-thousands-of-units alternative, which I consider a strawman, should be explicit.    --- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan  how individual mobility gains nuclear cachet

how big is big? Written by apsmith on 2005-02-09 18:35:58 Graham - on your first point, fuel taxes don't make up a significant portion of general tax revenues that fund US science, though perhaps they should. In any case, those represented on this website are neither publically nor privately funded, we're independent people who care about the world and are looking for real solutions, not myths...    Anyway, on the main point, how big would a Mbboe/day reactor actually be? From our handy-dandy units page, 1 bboe is 1700 kWh , so 1 million bboe/day is an energy production rate of 70 million kW, or 70 GW. Given that a typical nuclear plant today is 1 GW or less, you're talking about a couple of orders of magnitude scale-up.    The real problem with nuclear plants is the immense energy concentration - the fuel isn't replenished daily as with coal or oil, but lasts for months at a time - and used fuel still retains most of its original energy content in the radioactive elements (that's why reprocessing is so essential to long-term support of fission). By building them 70 or 100 times bigger, you make that problem that much worse!    But any time you have such a huge concentration of energy, you have the potential for a correspondingly huge accident - no matter how safe you think you can make it.    And just 1 million bboe/day plant won't be enough to feed world energy by a long shot - even now the world uses about 200 million bboe/day, so the need would be there for hundreds of these immense plants.    The tens-of-thousands-of-units I described is not talking about small units - we would literally need on the order of 20,000 big GW-scale reactors to replace fossil fuels. I don't think that's any sort of strawman.    Nuclear power is fine as a component of the solution, just as is hydro - both should be exploited to the extent that's practical, reasonable, and cost-effective. But neither nuclear fission nor hydropower is capable of doing more than a small part of the whole job.

A 100-fold Three Mile Island ... Written by GRLCowan on 2005-02-09 19:41:48 is a prospect I think we could live with, if it were the price of motorizing the world with 100-GW(fuel) reactors.     Consider that unlike electricity production reactors, fuel-producing ones don't have to be within a megametre or even 10 Mm of the people using them. The motor fuel itself would have to get close to us, but that can, and I think will work out significantly better it does today.    After Apollo, big dumb boosters went away, although I believe a small dumb booster recently flew under a name that included "Heavy". In 1970 it seemed as if by 1975 or at the latest 1980 an expendable launch vehicle would be cheaply putting 250,000-kg loads into geosync. Do you think it would be helpful if rocket development got back on that track?    --- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan  how individual mobility gains nuclear cachet

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