This may be perhaps the first time I’ve embraced an article from the Yale Environment 360 forum, the opener reads:
Environmentalists have long sought to use the threat of catastrophic global warming to persuade the public to embrace a low-carbon economy. But recent events, including the tainting of some climate research, have shown the risks of trying to link energy policy to climate science.
Al Gore’s latest book where he had to photoshop in some hurricanes comes to mind.
The NCDC sponsored climate change report where they photoshopped in a flooded house also comes to mind.
And, yes even the snowstorms reportedly caused by global warming this winter are also reminders of how common this bogus linkage to weather is.
From:
Green think tank tells environmentalists: Leave climate change science behind
By Ben Geman
Leaders of a contrarian environmental think tank, The Breakthrough Institute, have a way to get beyond the climate science wars: Break the link between global warming research and the push for low-carbon energy.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, in a new essay in Yale Environment 360, [Titled: Freeing Energy Policy From The Climate Change Debate] argue that environmentalists are too eager to link natural disasters and dangerous weather to man-made climate change.
…
They write:
Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy. Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.
The essay also suggests that climate advocacy and research have become too intertwined, with environmentalists seeking to represent the science as “apocalyptic, imminent, and certain.” The science has been harmed as a result, they argue, stating:
Greens pushed climate scientists to become outspoken advocates of action to address global warming. Captivated by the notion that their voices and expertise were singularly necessary to save the world, some climate scientists attempted to oblige. The result is that the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself.
…
The Yale Environment 360 website has a comments section below the articles. Look for a lively response to their new piece.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
openunatedgirl (19:05:59) wrote:
“To address the overall tone of this message board, I would like to say that I am completely depressed by the majority of your comments. You really want to challenge that we are ruining our environment? Really?”
It’s much easier to fault the other person’s tin gods than to admit that one’s own tin gods are melting. That would partially account for the Libertarian perspective of many commentators here at WUWT, since from that Weltanschauung, it’s not difficult to be skeptical about ‘problems’ that require Big Government as a ‘solution’.
Take AGW-abandonment . This particular kind of disillusionment is a much bigger step for Lefties, most of whom were educated to believe that truth is a linear combination of ‘expert’ opinions.
I agree that there are genuine environmental concerns–like overfishing in the world’s oceans. I also think that the mythology of the Flying CO2 Monster is a major distraction from this and other real problems. And I don’t view governmental regulations as bad in their own right, if there’s full public access to the data and reasoning–if any–behind them. Sometimes the Greenies get it right, and sometimes they don’t.
If you haven’t seen it already, please check out jennifermarohasy.com. Jennifer is a biologist and a proponent of evidence-based environmental policy, with an emphasis on issues that affect Australians. However she’s writing a novel at the moment, and there hasn’t been much current stuff on her blog for the last several months. When it was more active, I regarded Jennifer’s blog as the very best on environmental issues other than climate change, even though I’m not an Aussie.
Given your engineering background, I think that you can make a real contribution here. Please don’t feel like the Lone Ranger.
There is nothing mystical about doing levelized cost of electricity calculations. It is a rather straightforward formula.
I suspect that, as is the case with climate, ideology is getting in the way of understanding.
Taking into consideration the availability factors of the various forms of generation, and especially the intermittent forms, new nuclear (the kind you can actually buy today with commercial terms) is the most expensive form of base generation known to man. It is also, by the way, the most subsidized form of ANY kind of generation.
Comparing solar thermal to nuclear is appropriate because both can be base loaded. And solar thermal wins hands down by any metric.
People who try to compare wind or photovoltaics to nuclear are just shouting “I don’t know what I am talking about!” These are intermittent forms that today enter the grid when the power is produced. They compete with whatever other forms of generation are economic at the time they are produced (almost all grids do economic dispatch on at least an hourly basis- as demand rises more expensive units are called). Wind farms with storage – and this is going to happen within 2 to 3 years – using flow batteries or other technologies that are just about commercial will become very competitive as base load generation.
Finally, getting back to ideology, it mystifies me that the right is so pro-nuclear. Nuclear only works at very large scale and in centrally planned electricity grids. That’s why big coal and big nuclear plants are referred to as “central generation.” In fact, you can’t think of a better form of generation for a socialist society. We have huge problems today with the enormous inefficiencies in a grid network that was great for 1935 but makes no sense today. When you plop in a 1 GW nuclear unit in the transmission network it literally has no place to go unless you build a lot more lines. With central generation there are huge losses to get to the end user. Power reliability and quality suffers and gets worse as more customers are added at the distribution end. Distributed sources of power avoid all of these inefficiencies, increase quality and reliability, and put the power in the hands of the end users. The technologies are there, now.
The future US electric power generation will be based on Natural Gas.
Here you find some of the arguments.
http://www.naturalgas.org/overview/uses_eletrical.asp
For the price of five Nuclear power plant we can build the entire US future energy
requirements based on Natural Gas power plants!
That is if we let free market principles do their work in a free energy market!
Any other energy policies driven by Government grants, semi science and ideology are nothing more but a kind of robbery of the American consumer.
The ignorance, and dogma, on this thread are getting tiresome. Solar of any kind can not be base loaded – period. Go read the company website about how these plants work and then research what base loaded means. They generate power only when the sun is shining on the focusing mirrors. That means, by definition, they can not be dispatched OR base loaded.
You are correct, there is nothing mystical about levelized capitol cost calculations. However, if you assume a 12% weighted cost of capitol you get a very different result than if you assume a 6% cost of capitol. It’s math no mystery involved.
Finally, production subsidies by generation type are found here – http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy2/pdf/execsum.pdf:
solar and wind – 23-24 dollars per MwHr mostly direct tax credits
nuclear – $1.59 per MwHr mostly R&D
Subsidies for other generation sources are available at the same link and all of this data I have provided is EASILY verified in this report.
Good day
Legitimate reasons for saving energy:
Make best use of scarce resources
Reduce our dependence on foreign oil and gas
Save money on energy bills (for cheapskates like me).
Illegitimate reason:
Fight AGW.
Dear Doug:
As I said before, solar electric is not baseloaded and cannot be compared to nuclear. Neither can any other intermittently generating technology unless it has storage. Solar thermal, however, because it uses liquid heat storage, has an availability factor of 70% and, at the scale SCE is constructing (750 MWe per unit), is very much baseloaded.
You’re missing the following nuclear subsidies:
Price Anderson liability limit (anything accident over $1 B the feds cover- TMI cleanup was $1.6 B and was very minor)
The enrichment facilities were built with defense funds and are not paid for by commercial nuclear.’
Uranium mill tailings cleanup has been fully funded by the feds.
There is a measly fund to store nuclear wastes paid into by the utilities that is a pittance relating to what has been spent and will have to be spent to solve the problem.
All nuclear units are currently paying into a fund for decommissioning at the mandated total of $300 M per unit. Recently one of the original Yankee units was decommissioned – a unit that was about 250 kW – and it cost $600 M. Think of what the realistic costs of a 1200 MW unit will be. Who do you think pays that? Hint: It ain’t in the cost of power today!
Some nuclear fuel will come from dismantled weapons. This saves enrichment costs, but the buyer will not be paying the actual cost of those weapons in the first place.
An added thought: nuclear is a net negative energy generator.
The hallmark of agendas is making apples and oranges comparisons to those who do not understand the differences to support an argument.
Good Day!
PS. The second most subsidized form of energy is oil.
Another thought regarding efficiency.
There is a common fallacy in the anti-AGW dogma: the one that goes something like “investments in renewables and efficiency are only being done to get carbon credits because they are too expensive otherwise.” Or, “the only people who invest in clean energy plan to make a killing via carbon and thats why they support it.”
No one, and I say again, no one with any business sense develops a project because of carbon. It is icing on the cake if it ever happens, but these projects must stand alone economically. Carbon could be an additional revenue stream but it is way to small to tip the scales one way or the other.
Efficiency is far more cost effective than new generation, of any type. We could take out 20% inefficiency in the transmission grid alone. Think about that. the US generation base is around 1,000 GW. That’s 200 GW of waste. Or 200 large scale nuclear or coal plants. At far lower costs per kW. That’s where the priority needs to be, not on perpetuating a business and regulatory model that has been outdated since WWII.
“”” Ed Shearon (08:28:50) :
……..
I suspect that, as is the case with climate, ideology is getting in the way of understanding.
…..
Comparing solar thermal to nuclear is appropriate because both can be base loaded. And solar thermal wins hands down by any metric….
…..
Finally, getting back to ideology, it mystifies me that the right is so pro-nuclear. Nuclear only works at very large scale and in centrally planned electricity grids. “””
“”” ideology is getting in the way of understanding. “””
Having a problem reconciling these two statements; if “ideology is getting in the way of understanding.” then why bring it up, in relation to Nuclear energy ? Perhaps the answer lies in a corollary question:- Why is the left so anti-nuclear ?
Here of course I am using right and left in their usual street public debate connotations; without regard for who or what they actually refer to.
But I can think of some reason why some people (no idea whether they would be your right, or left, or something else) might be pro-nuclear.
It seems to me that “Sources” of energy; in so far as they are of interest to humans, can be separated into two categories.
The first category; which also happens to be the first energy available to “humans” is renewable energy sources. By that I mean that if I consume energy from such a source yesterday, today, or tomorrow (now), I can return (here) say a year from now, and find that source of energy is replaced.
An example of such would be figs from trees; which our ancestors spent a good part of their waking hours trying to get at. There are many others of course; but they all have one thing in common; such renewable energies are forms of solar renewable energy; without the sun’s radiation, they would not exist.
The same is true of proposed modern renewable energies; some of them Hi-tech. They too are sun sourced, and without sun energy, they would not exist.
The second category of energy sources can be loosely described as “Stored energy sources.”
Now arguably figs are also stored energy sources; but they have a finite life after which they are dissipated and become unavailable; which is why I referred to the idea of returning next year to find replacements.
Fossil fuels such as natural gas, petroleum, tar-sands, coal and the like, are stored energy sources. Let’s not quibble about whether coal and petroleum and natural gas are renewable on geologic time scales; that is of no use to our children and granchildren.
Intermediate between renewable and fossil might be things like wood, and peat; which are renewable on longer time scales but shorter than geologic; but also result from sun energy.
Thej “fossil fuels” are pretty much all “Stored Chemical energy sources.” The energy is essentially available only through chemical combustion with atmospheric Oxygen; producing the essentials for life; namely H2O and CO2, as by-products.
Renewable energy from the sun, of course is also available in the form of tidal or hydro-electric ; which are only available in relatively rare locations; with sometimes extreme environmental burdens, as to their usability.
The only thing missing from the list of stored energy sources, turns out to be Nuclear energy; although renewable energy can sometimes be stored by human action in the form of hydroi-electric facilities.
Stored energies have one great advantage over renewable energies. You flip a switch and the energy release process starts immediately. In the case of Hydro, this feature is achieved by using gravitational storage of solar energy to create an always available instant on energy source. With fossils of course you simply strike a match to get the energy.
So perhaps the interest (pro if you like) in Nuclear, stems from the fact that it is the only significant stored energy source available in considerable amounts, besides stored chemical energy.
Stored energy in any form is dangerous; and the greater the energy density the more dangerous it is; which makes nuclear energy quite dangerous. Yet more humans have been killed by hydro-electric energy sources than Nuclear; by far; most often as a result of broken dams; the hydro equivalent of a nuclear containment leak or core melt down. Don’t even start on Nuclear weapons; because “gunpowder” wins that race hands down.
Petroleum in the form of gasoline seems to be one of the safest high energy density stored energy sources available to us; and it puts electricity to shame for portable applications.
So I’m not sure what your point is in asking why the right; whoever that is, is so pro nuclear; maybe you can explain the counter position; because I certainly can’t.
Which gets us back to renewables starting from those figs, and on to today’s hi tech renewables from solar.
There’s that embarrassing 1 kW/m^2 availability rate that we don’t seem to have any practical solution to. Yes it is renewable; but the rate of renewal is just too damn slow.
Arguably, the fossil fuels are also stored sunlight; and it is claimed that we have just about exhausted, what has taken the sun some 4.5 billion years to store up for us. So fat chance that it can continue to supply us at the rate we can consume. Well yes there is plenty of solar energy arriving on earth; but it is so dispersed, that we pretty much would have to spend our every waking minute out trying to gather it up to use.
Seems like we were there once before ; up in those fig trees.
Ed,
You may continue to believe what you like about the SCE solar thermal plants. I have worked all my adult life in thermal power plants and the only difference between what solar thermal does and what coal, nuke, or nat gas do is in the heat source. When the heat source goes away so does the power output. Your 75% availability defies the laws of thermodynamics unless the turbine-generator is grossly undersized compared to the solar array.
The PA act liability pool currently stands at approximately 10 billion. This is the amount that has been funded by industry.
Commercial nuclear power plants pay for their fuel, although can’t own it but that is another issue, that is what pays for the current enrichment facilities.
We are idiots if in the long term we store high level waste – we should reprocess like the rest of the world does. In any case, much more has been paid into this fund than has been spent to solve the problem.
I would love to see your numbers supporting net negative energy generation.
What were my apples and what are your oranges?
Losses in the HV transmission network are closer to about 8-10%. Distributed generation will in part simply relocate those losses to the distribution network. If distributed generation can be made cost effective based on other issues.
Business men most assuredly agree to buy wind power in large part because of the 1.8cent per Kwhr tax credit – including the company I work for.
Doug:
Here’s the story on thermal storage at solar thermal plants:
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/thermal_energy_storage.html#systems
Price Anderson Act limits commercial insurance coverage to $350 M, sets up a pool with a ceiling of $10.5 B administered by the government, and indemnifies owners from any claim exceeding $10.5 B, You have government artificially reducing the cost of risk management, providing insurance and limiting what people could sue for. That’s a pretty big subsidy. BTW, the Wikipedia discussion of PAA is not accurate.
Commercial nuclear plants pay for their fuel because they own it. Government ownership of fuel ended in 1968. When you buy U3O8 it is yours. After you convert it to UF6 title gets a little odd while it is in the hands of DOE for enrichment. But title is clearly yours once it comes out of enrichment and stays yours until you turn over title when the feds take custody for storage or disposal. You can put liens on nuclear fuel precisely because you have title, and it makes sense to borrow against it because it is in the pipeline for quite a while during processing.
We stopped reprocessing in 1975 under the Ford administration. You know why that happened in a Republican administration? Because even then reprocessing made no economic sense and people were looking for a bailout. The public reason was to mitigate nuclear proliferation. I know because I had contracts with the two reprocessors still in business: West Valley and Barnwell. It still makes no economic sense. No one in the world reprocesses to reuse fuel as MOX or to fuel breeders. MOX fuel is ridiculously expensive (not just to buy, but to keep secure from bad guys) and there are no commercial breeders. The Navy reprocesses highly enriched submarine reactor cores, but this is an organization that will fly a $2 part from Norfolk to Scotland to get a boat underway.
Net negative nuclear energy generatation:
http://www.mnforsustain.org/nukpwr_tyner_g_net_energy_from_nuclear_power.htm
http://www.stormsmith.nl/
Line losses in transmission are between 8% and 10 % but that’s only one very obvious inefficiency. They occur because of simple resistance in wires that span big distances. If they are eliminated they are NOT transferred to the distribution network, nor to they occur with distributed generation (since the path of the electrons is so much shorter, there is little resistance). A problem faced on the distribution side is harmonic distortions. These (and voltage sags and spikes) wrech havoc with computer systems and are endemic in areas with high growth and old infrastructure. Local generation solves that problem.
If you want to read about other efficiencies possible beyond simple line losses, go to http://www.abb.com/cawp/db0003db002698/145abc3534b16460c12575b300520d8b.aspx and read some of the papers there.
The tax credits for wind and solar pale in comparison to those provided to nuclear. And regarding business judgments, there’s lots of people building wind and solar, but I only see one utility willing to risk the farm on nuclear, and that’s with all kinds of support and subsidies.
Ed,
This is my last post on this thread.
The first link is to a hypothetical plant. It is not the plant SCE is building. Nothing can overcome the limited energy density of solar. To get a continuous 750Mw you would need to install a 3000-4000Mw peak absorption system and store the peak to use at a later time – with loss of efficiency at every step.
The 10 billion provided by PA is industry funds. To date they have issued a total of 151 million, about half as a result of TMI. These federal insurance schemes are not unique they exist for flooding, agricultural catastrophes, financial failures and maritime accidents. To date it has cost little or nothing to the taxpayers. I do not disagree that like all insurance the protection after the first 10 billion has economic value but to date it has been revenue neutral to the taxpayer. Any value assigned is simply a ledger item. Some of the other federal systems cannot say the same, e.g. financial system failures have cost billions over the years.
What does France, etc do with their transuranic elements if not “reburn” them?
If local generation is both more efficient, more economic, and of better quality why do we not use it now? I could install a wind turbine at my house except it would cost about $40,000+ last I checked and never pay for itself. I suspect I will disagree with your answer. I am curious, what power source do you envision for your distributed generation? Wind and solar with storage? Micro-turbines? I do not disagree that distributed generation has the potential to be more efficient but that has always been the case. The downsides have, to date, outweighed this potential advantage.
I looked at your link regarding negative net energy. It looks like a rather unique calculation and I will have to spend more time reading it to fully understand the author’s assumptions. I did notice one statement describing how if we build out nuclear power plants eventually nuclear plants would have to load follow. This would make them uneconomic based on all of the idle capitol. This is, of course, correct but we would be fools to build out nukes to that point. Any economic asset that has a high capital cost must also have a high utilization. No one I know of is proposing such a plan. For instance, the EIA report assumes a 90 percent capacity factor. About what the industry average is now. Although much better than it was 20 years ago.
I consider your final paragraph simply unsupported by the facts unless some rather curious assumptions are made – such as those about PA.
Doug:
My last post as well, and I feel compelled to recite credentials. I received an MS in Nuclear Engineering in the late 70’s. I was in charge of a soup to nuts nuclear fuel procurement division for 3 reactors. We were the first utility to buy ore (even had a few geologists looking for new sources), and separately contract for all of the services necessary to deliver fabricated fuel. I worked for three nuclear organizations in my career with a total of 5 reactors. I have testified in rate proceedings on nuclear fuel cost and have also been in charge of a utility holding company strategic planning division, where we made decisions regarding new generation and transmission options. Currently I am involved in several alternative energy projects, including smart grid options.
Utilities pay commercial premiums for the first $350 M of an accident. They then pay the government a premium for the next $10.15 B. Under PAA no one can sue beyond $10.5 B in damages. So in the event of a PAA ceiling accident, the utility pays commercial rates on 3.3% of the loss and gets subsidized federal insurance for the other 96.7%. The max payout for any loss in the US was $300 M for TMI, not $151 M like Wikipedia says. The total cost of cleanup at TMI was $1.6 B and that was a) in incomplete job; and b) the core was removed, shipped and stored by the DOE at no cost to the utility. This was for what the NRC would call an “entombment” decommissioning option. Entombment is a generous term. The entire basement and much of the containment vessel concrete is embedded with a soup of isotopes to a depth of a few inches. I know, because I was there.
We don’t use local generation because we operate in a monopolistic regulatory environment. If you are a utility and your customers start putting in their own generation you have two problems: 1) that generation may be out of synch with you and you are both connected to the same network; adn 2) it amounts to a loss of revenue. Both are rather frightening things to utilities, so what you will see across the country are barriers to distributed generation. Economic barriers, such as silly buy back rates and additional interconnection fees that make local generation uneconomic. And regulatory barriers. In NM, for example, the second best solar resource in the country but a major gas and oil producer, it is illegal to install a solar PV array over 50 kW. That means that commercial sized installations don’t exist. There is a fight going on right now- the utility said it would allow up to a MW, but a month later filed another plea that it had to own all commercial scale solar. NM is 15th in overall solar capacity. Number one is New Jersey, with hundreds of MW.
Utilities make their money by getting a return on their capital investment. When you put in big wires, big substations, big generation, you add to the “rate base.” You put in a new substation, costing $25 M, sized to meet demand that occurs less than 1% of the year. The incentives are entirely skewed to large centrally planned and centrally operated utilities. Utilities number one core competency is not reliable operations or least cost operations, it is never allow the regulatory rules to change. And they are very good at it.
I’m afraid you are awash in a sea of what constitute urban myths about how energy works and is valued in this country.
Ed
As I understand it from several sources the actual amount paid out under PA ever is 151 million. Of this, about 75 million was paid out to various plaintiffs and lawyers as a result of TMI. In addition, the collective industry is obligated to pay the excess damages above the 300 million each utility must carry, up to 10 billion total. Paid as a little less than 100 million per reactor in installment payments of 10 million per year max. Again, this has never cost me as a taxpayer anything. I do not question your assumptions on the cost to put TMI into it’s current state but I suspect it was borne primarily by the utility.
Utilities are obligated to serve me but I am not obligated to buy from them. Again I ask what is the system you envision? It seems like from your discussion that you want to provide your own power but use the utilities assets to both sell excess at a rate you determine and probably buy from them when your own generation is insufficient to supply your own needs.
By the way:
I have a BSE in mechanical design and I am about half way done with an MSEE in power systems (I did not quit, I just started).
I held an operating license and senior operating license at a nuclear plant for 14 years.
On paper I guess you win on impressive qualifications but I am sure I could find someone with a PhD who agrees with me. I think we will simply have to agree to disagree.
Yes! I am so happy that you guys have been posting your credentials! I know it can kind of feel like a “my degree/background/opinion is more relevant/important/right than yours” but it can really help to explain some of the bias associated with each argument (not a bad think, just a fact of life 🙂 ) I would really encourage everyone to post their educational and employment industry when making these types of posts, as it can give some great context to the discussions taking place. These discussions are so important to scientific topics, and I hope they continue to happen.
openunatedgirl
Thanks. You do have to look beyond that also though. My qualifications and experience can provide context but it can never be justification for an opinion by itself. I point this out only because this argument has been used so frequently in the AGW debate. It is possible to have an opinion that is not in your own self interest. For instance, it would be completely self serving of me to line up firmly behind the AGW hypothesis. I am definitely not there.