Can common ground be found between “warmers” and “skeptics”? Can we identify energy sources that satisfy the concerns of both groups?
Guest Post by Charles Hart
Warmers want energy that does not emit CO2 because they look at the climate data and conclude that CAGW is a credible threat that needs to be addressed. Their energy sources of choice are typically wind and solar.
Skeptics look at the same climate data and conclude the evidence for CAGW is just too weak to justify accepting the current high cost and unreliability of wind/solar. They look at Europe and notice that nuclear has given France the smallest carbon footprint and wind/solar has not been effective in any European country in keeping energy both low cost and low carbon.
What about nuclear? Some warmers support it (e.g. Dr. James Hansen) but others do not because of toxic waste streams, lingering concerns about safety, cost, and the potential for proliferation.
What if we could have nuclear power that was far “greener” than current technology, cost considerably less, was even safer and more proliferation resistant? What if this “greener” nuclear technology had already been proven in working prototypes?
Welcome to LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactors) technology. Demonstrated in the 60′s, the thorium/uranium fuel cycle molten salt reactor (LFTR) approach was abandoned to concentrate efforts on the uranium/plutonium fuel cycle pressurized water reactor (PWR) during the cold war bomb making era, an era when lots of plutonium was considered a good thing, not something to be worried about.
LFTR (compared to current PWR): A waste steam 10,000 times less toxic (some variations of LFTR can actually burn PWR waste). Cost <50%, thus competitive with coal. Even safer (no fuel rods to melt, no high pressure radioactive water to escape, passive criticality control ….). More proliferation resistant.
What about the politics? Replacing coal with LFTRs is far easier politically than imposing cap n trade or carbon taxes. $10B invested over 10 years could update this technology and make it ready for commercialization. LFTR is attractive to both Democrats/warmers and Republicans/skeptics. It is very green, cost competitive and can be put into production for a realively modest sum.
Short version:
Long version:
For more information see:
American Scientist “Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors”
http://energyfromthorium.com/2010/07/01/welcome-american-scientist-readers/
“Energy Cheaper Than From Coal”
http://energyfromthorium.com/2010/07/11/ending-energy-poverty/
Mechanical Engineering Magazine “Too Good to Leave on the Shelf”
http://memagazine.asme.org/Articles/2010/May/Too_Good_Leave_Shelf.cfm
Dr James Hansen LFTR endorsement
20081229_Obama_revised.pdf (application/pdf Object)
LFTR nuts to bolts.
Just to let you paranoid %#$ know, nobody is any particular rush to phase out coals and gas powered power plants and replace them with solar and wind.
Evidently you don’t live in the USA.
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2010/08/less-power-more-control.html
I think we’re going to see Solar coming online for $2.00/Watt in a few years. Considered over a life-cycle that blows the doors off nuclear.
That would be $2 a PEAK watt. Multiply by 3X (or more) to get costs per average watt. Then add in the costs of backup plants to handle wind fluctuations and no wind days and you are talking seriously uneconomical.
I have a dream that someday folks will actually run the numbers before shooting their mouths off. Nothing difficult: BOE (Back Of the Envelope) will be good enough.
” It is very green, cost competitive and can be put into production for a realively modest sum.”
Compared to what? the oil prices in 1998/9, or 2008, or what?
http://www.ioga.com/Special/crudeoil_Hist.htm
This desideratum is completely feasible with capitalist innovation, technical virtuosity and risk-taking. What are we waiting for?
Cheap storage.
All the tax money for Green energy projects – from ethanol to windmills to solar panels to dreams of tides ala Logan’s Run should be diverted to building nuclear power stations. One per month or as fast as possible. The goal would be to triple our electrical energy production so that there will be a huge abundance of surplus electricity. Note that one does not “crank down” power plants when demand is low. The engineers and physicists will explain why if you need to know.
Then use the surplus to manufacture all forms of hydrocarbons. The raw components can be frozen from air (carbon as in dry ice) along with all the hydrogen and oxygen you want from water. Even nitrogen is “in the air”. The technology has existed for decades. And the hydrocarbons have zip in the way of contaminants. For example, gasoline manufactured this way looks like a glass of water from your tap and burns cleaner than refined gasoline. Plus the volume of waste is a fraction.
Known supplies of thorium and other nuke ore sources are, for all practical purposes, limitless. You can measure oil reserve sources in maybe tens to hundreds of years but nuclear fuel reserves are in the billions. And the can even be extracted from seawater.
Don’t forget about the inventiveness of Americans. Google the traveling wave reactor. Mostly one should understand that current hydrocarbon technology just won’t get much better. Neither will the Greenie energy. Nuclear technology is, at worst, in it’s teen age years with lots of room for improvements.
Jobs? The US can be a net exporter of energy and energy technology. The markets are just out there waiting. For example, want a third world clean water site with pumps and filters? Drop in a portable self contained nuke electrical generator. Runs for decades. Imagine having electricity and what you can do with it. Lights, motors, drinking water, refrigeration, education (think computers and such), etc., etc.
In the meanwhile, as we ramp up with nuclear, we’re really, really screwed. The UK and others of the Green Dream are confronting what it’ll be like without electricity. Prices of energy will skyrocket if the recovery ever start. There’s a huge lid on the US energy industry if you consider the lead time to build even one new power plant (sometimes a decade or more, if ever) and blocking development of anything outside of Greenie Dreams.
Politically, this will simply not change over the next four Congressional election cycles due to the lead times of bringing energy on line. If you think $4/gal gasoline was bad, how about your electrical bill exceeding your mortgage and food bill combined. That’s were we’re headed. It’s simply too late. Converting to Smart Meters and such will help in a small way but energy needs will not decline.
Instead of striking a deal with Greenies, one should simply ridicule them to the sidelines. They can live in caves, starving and freezing and drinking foul water if they wish. Sane people will vote for cheap, clean energy and to heck with the wind farms – actually make them illegal to save the eagles.
We must not do these things for the wrong reason(s).
To appear to do so will undermine the credibility of future projects after the wrong reasons have been exposed as bunkum.
There are valid reasons for migrating baseload (and some other) electricity generation to nuclear. The main one that I can think of is that it conserves the raw “carbon stock” for use in transport fuels, chemical, pharmaceuticals, plastics, lubricants, … “Waste” (low-quality) heat from nuclear reactors may be used to convert e.g. coal and gas to liquid fuels and lubricants.
Do it for the right reasons.
How can one find common ground between a truth and a lie? A compromise beteween a truth and a lie is a ‘half’ lie which is, for all intents and purposes, still a complete lie, if not worse.
Thorium reactors are considered as a very good solution, if achievable, in providing, together with all other cheap energy sources such oil and coal, a cheap and reliable energy sources that would help humanity continue its continuous rise in better living standards at a global level (contrary to what greens/reds want), but this (thorium reactors) will not be a solution to the AGW discusion. This argument will only find its end when science confirms ONE of the opposing side’s theories. It’s either AGW is right or it is wrong.
Let us assume, for argument’s sake that the item under discussion is gravity; some saying that it exists while others say that it does not. Can one find a compromise? Such as if one jumps of the top of a skyscarper he would be half dead instead of totally dead?
Here’s a three-part solution I endorse, spelled out in a book called “Prescription for the Planet: The Painless Remedy for Our Energy & Environmental Crises,” whose details are outlined in the first reader-review, by G. Meyerson:
Here’s the Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Prescription-Planet-Painless-Remedy-Environmental/dp/1419655825/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236568501&sr=1-1
Nuclear is hardly the answer.
I am reminded about all the guarantees offered by the “New Nuke” folks that the new nukes are fail safe. And I am also reminded about BP and the oil industry’s guarantees about “new” drilling. There is nothing to suggest that the corporate mentality responsible for the Gulf disaster is different in the nuclear industry than in the oil industry.
Then France is always trotted out as the poster child for nuclear. I should remind folks that France’s nuclear industry is heavily and secretly subsidized by the French government – hardly something that good, free-enterprise Republicans should be advancing. The degree of support is difficult to determine since Areva budgets are shrouded in secrecy. France’s actions in procuring uranium ore – especially in Africa – are profoundly neocolonial. It is no accident that the people of Niger, one of France’s chief supplies of uranium, face starvation and that there has been an armed insurgency against the French/nuke supported government for more than a decade.
Then there is the minor problem of storage. I define two kinds of storage – physical and political. While I do not accept the arguments for safe physical storage, let’s set that issue aside for now and discuss political storage. Because storage is only as safe as the political environment under which it takes place. If one considers a mere 10,000-year time frame – we are going back in human history to the Neolithic, the Stone Age. The proponents of “safe” storage are claiming that storage can be effectively managed for a period of time equal longer than the expanse of recorded human history. Even if one looks a a mere 500-year period, there is not a single human society on Earth that has not had an overturning revolution, civil war, coup, or military occupation – – England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Japan, China, India, Iran, Egypt, Congo, Brazil, Mexico, or the United States.
And you tell me that the “New Nukes” are the answer.
Right!
They are in the UK.
ajones
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/09/finding-an-energy-common-ground-between-%e2%80%9cwarmers%e2%80%9d-and-%e2%80%9cskeptics%e2%80%9d/#comment-453015
“As for nuclear fusion I remember DRAGON and worked on JET and it is just as far in the future as it was then. ”
I presume you meant ‘nuclear fission and fusion’? As DRAGON was certainly not a fusion reactor.
http://www.iasmirt.org/iasmirt-2/SMiRT18/S05_2.pdf
fundamental ecological issue is growth
I like growth. I think we should consider slowing it down when mean per capita income in every country of the world is above $50,000 a year in 2010 dollars. But maybe not.
A no growth policy announces the stupidity of the espouser. “I am not smart enough to figure out how to create the right incentives for both wealth and a well functioning ecology.” I can accept that. Just keep it to yourself. It makes you look smarter.
What LFTRs can do is give a false sense of “problem solved”
Problems are never solved. Civilization requires constant maintenance.
ajones
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/09/finding-an-energy-common-ground-between-%e2%80%9cwarmers%e2%80%9d-and-%e2%80%9cskeptics%e2%80%9d/#comment-453070
“The British AGR reactor programme of the 1960′s used helium and after various teething problems have proven so satisfactory that they are probably good for another forty years.”
Looks like you need to do some serious and more accurate research on the history of nuclear power development in the UK ajones as once again you are way off base.
AGR stands for Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor and the coolant used in all the UK’s AGR NPPs is that evil, odourless, tasteless, atmospheric trace gas Co2 and not helium (looks like you may be confusing the AGR with DRAGON?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_gas-cooled_reactor
Are you sure you are an ex-nuclear physicist? I’m sure I am. Are you?
The original MSBR at ORNL cost $40 million in 1965 dollars. It ran for five years and was rated at 8 MW thermal. They did a lot of the necessary egineering investigation. I can’t see commercialisation of this costing $10 billion. I have seen another estimate out there of $3 billion.
They are in the UK where they passed a climate change bill to reduce our CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050 on an October day that saw the first snow in London in about 70 years. This is the climate change bill that now has the force of law.
So if the climate does NOT change for the better after that? Will they arrest God? Or the Sun? Who do you arrest when the climate breaks the law?
“John Brookes says:
August 9, 2010 at 11:13 pm
As a confirmed AGW alarmist, I have no problem having nuclear power in the mix. It seems likely it will end up being part of the solution to the problem which (according to you guys) we don’t have”
That’s not quite accurate. We believe that it’s a solution to a problem that you have created. Quite a different problem.
JimB
“thegoodlocust says:
August 9, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Thank you so much for talking about this, I’ve been a proponent of thorium reactors for a while and if we build enough of these we can start converting our coal into fuel for our cars and get off of Middle Eastern oil.”
You mean Canadian oil, as that far surpasses the imported oil from the Middle East.
JimB
Re: GM says: August 10, 2010 at 12:57 am
Sure we do. We can make synthetic oil via Fischer-Tropsch from coal or gas. Or hydrogen. South Africa makes most of their diesel this way and has done for years. We could make unnatural gas via the Sabatier Process from Hydrogen and CO2, yet our greens want us to sequester CO2 and bury it rather than use it for something useful. Both require ideally cheap, low cost energy which renewables won’t deliver but nuclear can.
For gas though, one problem is gas (at least in the UK) is seen as ‘greener’ than electricity, so lots of homes fit expensive and expensive to maintain gas boilers to make heat. Electric heating is seen as bad, yet ‘renewable’ energy generates electricity, not gas and gas may be better saved for generating electricity in the dark or when the wind isn’t blowing. If we persist with tilting at windmills, electric storage heating may be a way to act as a distributed energy storage array, but that needs smart grids, smart meters and smart policy makers to incentivise.
It’s not unrealistic. We’ve been building irrigation networks and canals for centuries. We’ve been building piped water irrigation systems for centuries. But in much of the West, we’ve also been content to let a lot of our drinking water get wasted via leakage. We flush our toilets with it. We wash our clothes with it. We wash our cars with it. So we waste a lot of good water rather than implementing policies to reduce waste and fit seperate drinking and grey water supplies.
We could potentially synthesise those. We could use more organic fertilisers like Azolla, which could also act to sequester CO2, reduce water reservoir evaporation and serve as animal feed. We could have some advantage current levels of CO2 helping boost current crop yields, but the EPA tells us CO2 is a harmful pollutant.
We could try going back to smaller, more sustainable farming methods and plant hedges again to act as windbreaks and reduce wind erosion of topsoils. If we didn’t ‘need’ as much agricultural land to make biofuels and instead made synthfuels, that may be less of a problem. Agricultural land goes back to growing food, not fuel. We can also mitigate against salt build up with GM crops, but like CO2 and nuclear, the ‘greens’ have been telling us for years that that’s evil.
We could just stop listening to the ‘greens’ and get on with it.
There are other reactor types too, like the Pebble Bed Reactor, safe, self-regulating technology that’s running in China today, and has been tested in Germany, and South Africa as well. Guess what, in each instance the “Radical Greens” are the strong opposition.
It’s about politics, not about the planet.
alex the skeptic
“The two main reasons why thorium reactors were never built are:
1. Thorium reactors did not produce plutonium which was necessary for keeping communism away from the free world.
2. During all this time, scientists were banking on fusion reactors.
The former reason is no longer valid while the second turns out to be the second biggest global scam ever, (after the AGW theory) because after some 60 years of money-guzzling research, fusion is still very far away.
Meanwhile, hydrocarbons have moved the world foreward, lifting many from below the poverty line up to a decent living standard.”
I agree with you on No. 1 Alex but I presume you mean never got passed the experimental reactor stage onto a full commercial basis as happened with the PWR, BWR and AGR in the UK.
Alex makes a very important point here. It’s all too easy to forget the Cold War and the post WWII threat of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) that the fuelled and accelerated the nuclear arms race.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_arms_race
It is a fact that but for the cold war and the nuclear arms race we would most likely have never funded and develop the current nuclear technologies we currently exploit to generate electricity (particularly in France). For those who may be interested in seeing how the electricity supply industry could be ‘de-carbonised’ in the UK by 2050 have a look at the Wiki page here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
France built and began to operate their first NPP in 1965 and over the space of the next 40s years has managed to reduce its dependence on foreign imports of fossil fuels significant.
“At the time of the 1973 oil crisis, most of France’s electricity came from foreign oil. While France was strong in heavy engineering capabilities, it had few indigenous energy resources,[2] so the French government decided to invest heavily in nuclear power, and France installed 56 reactors over the next 15 years.[21] President of Electricite de France Laurent Striker said, “France chose nuclear because we have no oil, gas or coal resources, and recent events have only reinforced the wisdom of our choice.
Areva NC claims that, due to their reliance on nuclear power, France’s carbon emissions per kWh are less than 1/10 that of Germany and the UK, and 1/13 that of Denmark, which has no nuclear plants.”
Poptech says:
Regardless Nuclear still cannot replace hydrocarbon energy because it nor the electricity it generates can be used as a practical transportation fuel.
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I saw a documentary a few years back (called ‘Back To The Future’) that showed how small, portable nuclear devices would be available for powering things such as cars from about the year 2015 – not long to wait now!
“peat says:
August 9, 2010 at 10:28 pm
I have never understood the correlation between a concern about global warming and an aversion to nuclear power.”
That’s assuming that the goal of alarmists is global warming and not “de-industrialization”. Then the correlation fits perfectly. Who are the biggest proponents of this? You can start with our chief energy czar, John Holdren:
http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/William%20Yeatman%20-%20Holdren%20WebMemo.pdf
GM says: (multiple comments)
My god GM, with your fatalistic view why do you bother getting up in the morning?
And why is it that folks such as yourself, who lecture the rest of us about human evils, never take the logical step to be a real leader and show us the way to save mother Earth. It’s simple, just put a call in for Dr Kevorkian.
Nuclear has a role in the mix of energy production technologies. A mix of technologies is a good approach. NOTE: development of nuclear plant designs is not needed to provide a step jump in nuclear energy production . . . . . advance designs are approved and already being built, mostly in Asia.
Remember, it was the environmentalists who precipitated the curtailed (since the 1970’s/1980’s) building of new US nuclear plants.
Now mainstream environmentalists are attacking carbon based fuel technologies used for energy production.
My perception is that on the face of it, at the core of mainstream environmentalism there is a significant component that is fundamentally anti-technology. Their actions do imply that it is technology that must be removed to achieve a natural earth. Their strategy to attack energy production technology is effective, since energy is the base of advanced technical civilization.
If these kind of fundamental environmentalists were consistent they would actively support space colonization to save the earth that created human from humans. But I have not seen them do so.
John