Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, until recently a leading figure in the campaign to prosecute climate skeptics under RICO laws, now wants bipartisan support to fix the problems with Obama’s clean energy policies.
To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power
By LAMAR ALEXANDER and SHELDON WHITEHOUSEDEC. 21, 2016
If 20 fire marshals came around and told us our houses were about to burn down, we’d buy some fire insurance. So when the leading science academies in 20 developed countries, along with several major American corporations and the national security community, all tell us that burning fossil fuels is causing dangerous changes to the climate, we think it’s time for the United States to get serious about clean energy. It also means supporting safely operating nuclear power plants that produce carbon-free electricity.
Already, 60 percent of our carbon-free electricity comes from the 99 nuclear reactors that dot the nation’s map, from Avila Beach, Calif., to Seabrook, N.H. These reactors provide low-cost, reliable electricity for the United States, which uses nearly 20 percent of the world’s electricity. But over the next decade, at least eight of these reactors are scheduled to shut down. That will push up carbon emissions from the American electricity sector by nearly 3 percent, according to the United States Energy Information Administration.
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Unfortunately, some of our federal policies to encourage clean energy, such as the Clean Energy Incentive Program within President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, do not explicitly include or incentivize nuclear power. Likewise, some states have chosen to adopt policies, such as renewable portfolio standards, that do not include or incentivize nuclear power.
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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/opinion/to-slow-global-warming-we-need-nuclear-power.html
Sheldon Whitehouse’s co-author is Lamar Alexander, a centrist Republican senator. Alexander’s Wikipedia entry notes he is one of the most bipartisan Republican members of the Senate.
Senator Whitehouse seems to have been consistent in his support for nuclear power, which is unusual for a green. But his approach to encouraging the development of US nuclear potential, by putting a price on carbon, in my opinion would be an unmitigated disaster.
Under a carbon tax, nuclear industry players would have no incentive to improve their product. Why should nuclear power companies take the risk of attempting to develop cheaper, safer nuclear technology, when they could receive a much safer return on investment by spending that potential research cash on schmoozing politicians, lobbying politicians to crank up carbon taxes on fossil fuel competitors?
Nuclear power has the potential to be cheaper than coal, but realising this potential will require a serious political effort to remove bureaucratic roadblocks – to establish that passive safe systems really are safe, that all the hideously expensive multiply redundant containment and cooling systems required by current generation active safe systems are not required for next generation nuclear designs.
If Senator Whitehouse genuinely wants more nuclear power, he should have a go at dismantling the red tape which makes nuclear power uncompetitive, rather than putting his effort into trying to imprison political opponents, and bankrupt coal companies.
Except, that is not the best analogy. What we have is 20 insurance company executives who swear to state insurance regulators that, while home fires are dropping, the fire incident rate will likely be higher in the future based on model projections which include industry standard adjustment factors. Therefore, they need higher insurance rates.
Eventually, Thorium MSR Reactors will replace fossil fuels.
China’s first test Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor goes online next year and a commercial design will be available in 15 years or so.
LFTRs are by far the cheapest, safest, most scalable, and most sustainable form of nuclear energy.
Once the Chinese build their first commercial LFTR, Western countries will frantically try and play catch up, however, Western Leftists will fight tooth and nail to curtail development.
These show some promise, but you are right, it will be 15 years before the first commercial one can be online…
what to do till then?
and until 15 or so years from now, we have no clear idea of the cost, time to build, output/number required.
this is a (potential) solution for 20 years from now… but not a guaranteed solution
Will wonders never cease.? A Democrat makes some sense.
Of course, he also displays considerable ignorance – he is convinced we are warming
to a dangerous degree, and he doesn’t know the name of the new , nuclear waste burning
reactors (molten salt) and he mis-states their safety by only claiming that they “reduce the dangers of meltdowns” when in fact, meltdowns are physically impossible. But hey, can’t expect too much actual knowledge from a Democrat.
Weighing energy density against contamination density of nuclear power (as discussed in these comments), I am not liking the trade off.
Is it really a better situation to increase the amount of energy at lower cost, if we also increase the risk factors of deadly environmental contamination? I just have a bad feeling about it.
Check your feelings and analyze the data. Nukes are preferable if the goals involved are sustainable, dependable, scalable and low environmental impact.
Good practical advice, hunter.
What worried me, though, in the earlier comments was the mention of waste products that have to go somewhere, accumulating year after year, when the breakdown time of the waste far outdistances the turnaround time of one year’s waste needing to take the place of the next, forcing an ever increasing requirement of land area to continuously store the waste. How do we deal with such a thing on a mass scale?
Robert: The storage area of the waste is trivial. The only US waste storage site, Yucca Mountain, never became operational. Waste is currently stored at each reactor site, essentially in their collective ‘back yards’. With reprocessing, as is done in other countries, the volume of waste drops by a factor of 10 or so. There is no technical nor financial problem with waste storage; it’s all political. I have personally been 3 meters from power plant waste that was 2 weeks after removal from the reactor. I was leaning over the railing looking at the blue glow around the fuel rods. Two meters of water was all between me and the highest level waste ever to come from a power plant.
If it’s not important, why haven’t they done so ? And why is it still an issue ?
Just goes to show that nobody, not even Senator Whitehouse, is 100% wrong 100% of the time.
On the other hand, no matter how compelling any argument for nuclear power becomes, anything with Sheldon Whitehouse’s name attached warrants scrutiny.
One of Al Gore’s “billionaire” buddies recently bought an unfinished nuclear plant from the TVA and plans to finish it. I suspect that might be connected to this bipartisan nuclear advocacy one month later by a Tennessee senator and the most vocal “climate change” senator.
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2016/nov/15/reviving-nuclear-powerhaney-pay-111-millifini/397760/
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/05/after_hefty_campaign_donations.html
As I posted at the time of the Gore / Trump meeting, I suspect Trump plans to replace renewables with nuclear as his power focus. Gore would like that, because his main man Hansen is a nuclear advocate.
People in here are talking as if the question of nuclear power is to have it or not have it. Globally, that choice is not in the hands of the USA or Europe.
According to the World Nuclear Association, China alone, at this point in time, operates 35 nuclear reactors and has 20 more under construction.
Worldwide there are 60 new reactors under construction.
Horse is out of the barn folks.
This is more lip service for lobbyists.
Just got my power bill in Maryland.
$36.00 for gas commodity.
$61.00 for gas delivery.
Our house has natural gas for heating and hot water. It leaks like a sieve when the wind blows. We turn down the thermostat, manually, to save energy.
According to my bill, our electricity comes about 35% from coal, about 35% from nuclear. Renewables are about 4%. The delivery charge for the electricity was higher than the cost of the electricity itself.
I am sure the Green could make this all more expensive.
P.S. I drive a 16 yo car which gets 29 mpg. I am more green than anyone driving a hybrid or putting solar panels on their house. And, it didn’t cost me or the govt a penny to be green.
Just to add to your misery, the Green lobby stated that switching coolants in air conditioning systems would only cost pennies more. That side stepped the cost implications of higher pressured equipment and almost mandatory maintenance service contracts for the higher cost equipment and repair. Even if the switch was needed, it’s honesty that is in short supply.
FWIW I drive a 24-year-old car that averages 41 mpg around town on gasoline. Can you guess what I drive? (Hint: MIJ)
It’s hard, but not impossible, to do business with bad people and have a desirable outcome. There will be difficult compromises ahead. There is nothing close to a viable skeptical majority in government. And the climate consensus is rabid and persistent. We may have to make and accept some tough choices.
The Senator has a point on taking good advice from experts such as his point on fire risks.
And if the insurance sales force said to take out $1 million dollar policies on all homes though they may only be worth $500k each, would you pay the premiums regardless? I don’t think so.
How much need we pay to save the planet or at least adapt to some warming?
So why not determine the costs before developing an appropriate price? The uncertainty of currently applied ECS amplification factors and the discount rate used to determiner SCC are devilishly uncertain and imprecise leading to a high probability of over pricing and all that entails for those who must pay.
Redundancy is good. The issue is antiquated technology mandated by regulation. Containment is good. Stagnated R&D hinders CI.
Just like in the general aviation market in the 400 Hp and below where antiquated engines rule, atomic energy is over regulated. General aviation however, sees some R&D through experimental aviation.
Oh .. the irony ..
The ONLY reason we have so many CARBON spewing hateful coal plants is because
The left wing Green loons were so misguidedly rabidly anti-nuclear 40 years ago ..
If nuclear had been allowed to continue the development path it was already on ..
We’d be enjoying a carbon free present that the Greens insist we must have ..
Gen III and GEN IV nuclear would have been a present reality ..
They’ll never admit it though ..
I agree with the OP. Yet …, once again, I’d like to remind everyone the EPA began in 1971. The NRC and DoE in 1975. Agencies created under Republican presidents. The Atomic Energy Commission, AEC, was split into the NRC and DoE due to lobbying by fossil fuel interests (coal). Everything Republicans ever did in energy policy looks like it was done to satisfy fossil lobbyists. There is no such thing as a nuclear industry. There are electricity supply companies. After the creation of the NRC, with its single-minded safety mandate, new nuclear power was effectively killed in the USA. New reactor licenses were not granted after the NRC began in 1975. Some of this was due to the slowdown in the US economy resulting in less electricity demand. Many of the licenses to build reactors granted before NRC creation in 1974 were abandoned.
The AEC had a dual mandate: to ensure safety at cost-competitive prices. The first step in deregulation should be to rewrite the NRC mandate away from its single focus towards the old AEC focus.
“If 20 fire marshals came around and told us our houses were about to burn down, we’d buy some fire insurance.”
Actually, the first thing I would wonder is who benefits from me buying fire insurance most. If it wasn’t me, I wouldn’t buy it.
Why do we bother to listen to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, an old friend of free speech?
(Confession: I worked 30 years in commercial nuclear industry.)
A seldom-discussed reason we should build nuclear plants: Nuclear energy has little use outside of weapons and commercial power. Natural gas and coal have many uses, including home heating, transportation, plastics, etc. We should use nuclear (and I like coal, too) for power generation, and save as much natural gas as possible for its important alternate uses. Solar panels and wind generators are mostly a waste of scarce materials, land and money, especially since they have to be backed up by instantly available, dispatchable, fossil-fueled power generators.
As for the affect of increased regulations . . . The number of personnel in my first nuclear plant increased from about 50 to 300 in ten years (1965-1975). My second plant increased from about 75 to over 500 in less than ten years. The second, 750MW plant, completed in 1972, took about four years and cost about $110M. (Yes, that is million.) Today’s 1250MW plants cost in the neighborhood of $5B to $9B, and take years longer to build. Staff: Approximately 1,000 per unit.
Bob Cherba: “Nuclear energy has little use outside of weapons and commercial power.” There is also ship propulsion. Several countries have nuclear powered military ships, and the Russians are commissioning new ice breakers. The U.S. tried commercial ship propulsion with the NS Savannah, but the union sailors didn’t like it. http://nssavannah.net/ Plus, battery powered electric cars are just starting to become viable (The Chevy Bolt is being delivered now) and it will take more grid power to charge those batteries.
Otherwise, I completely agree with you.
One way to look at energy requirements is what it is used for. In this part of AK, it is roughly divided in thirds – heating, vehicular fuel and electricity. Other parts of the county have differing percentages. When you push nuclear, you are mostly pushing the electricity piece. Natural gas works the heating piece, though it is used to power some appliances. Coal works the heating and electrical generation piece. Oil is mostly tied to fuels.
So where are we going with this? Trump’s DoE questions appear to be supportive of nuclear energy and the Yucca Mountain disposal site. If they are truly as anti-regulation as they appear to be, tearing down the rules / regs that keep innovation for nuclear generation will go a long way to getting speed bumps out of the way. It also appears that the any exposure to radiation equals cancer worldview may be changing.
Vehicular fuels may be most interesting as you have competition between oil (essentially limitless supply), natural gas via GTLs and coal via CTLs (the latter two via the Fischer Tropsch process). Break even for either is in the vicinity of $40/bbl and your competition is with the refiners rather than with the producers.
Heating similarly can be competitively worked by some combination of oil, coal and natural gas depending on your location.
I don’t think we need any new, magic technology to do any of this. While magic batteries for vehicles are possible, I don’t think they will be competitive with vehicular fuels for a while. And if Trump turns off the crony capitalist money, we will find out real quickly. Cheers –
Enough of this Envirowhaco bovine manure that Nuclear power plants are not safe. Airplanes have killed more people than all NPP accidents and BOMBS. Someone above mentioned deaths from the Fukushima NPP, excuse me but no one died from any radiation from that accident. Reputable nuclear scientists also indicate that it is very unlikely that anyone WILL die from the minimal amount of radiation released. [Do not cut and paste envirowhaco lies from their Anti Nuke hate pages, I have seen it all.] Further the area around Fukushima has less residual radiation than most of denver, and many areas wher millions of people live, and have lived for thousand of years. And science shows people living in these areas have a LOWER death and/or cancer rate than the Average person.
As far as SAFETY, If the FAA forced the airline industry to have “safety” regulations as strict and comprehensive as the NRC forces on NPPs, not only would most planes be to heavy to fly, you would be traveling by train due to the excessive cost. If the NTSB did the same for trains you would be walking!
The big dream today is “Driverless Cars” everyone is claiming they are the Future many more are investing money in them. Who is at fault when it drives off of a clif, into a lake, into a train, etc when your wife, daughter is sitting in ti talking on the phone? these vehicles do not have a “two-out-of-four” safety related logic control system. If there was ever a requirement to have them Driverless cars, trucks, would cost 2-3 times as much and go away FAST. .As a Nuclear Instrumentation Engineer, and a project manager on one of the first plants we hoped to get “Digital Control Systems” approved by the NRC for I would not ride in one of those vehicles till it had a 1 out of 3, or 2 out of 4, or even a 1 out of 2 with worst case logic selection safety logic system, Well here is a point to ponder, Electronic Digital Computers were invented back in the 50’s. Nuclear Instrumentation Control Engineers were testing Digital control of NPP process in the 70’s. Keep in mind that most oil refining process were using digital control system by the early 80’s. Same for aircraft. Yet, the NRC dilly-dallied around only letting “auxiliary” systems (those systems that have no control function/impact to the reactor or protection thereof) to have digital controls in the late 80’s and only just recently writting a NRC regulation allowing safety related systems to have digital systems. So, why are we allowing these vehicles on the road. By NRC standards they are not safe enough. And 20 years from now after 30,000 ++ (that’s only about 1,500 a year, a drop in the bucket,)have died from computer problems everyone will just accept it as the norm, Claiming fewer have died than if a human was driving.
NRC safety concerns are only a facade for their true agenda of thwarting the building of nuclear power plants. As with any other of mankind’s efforts which is touched by politics, follow the money.
“So when the leading science academies in 20 developed countries, along with several major American corporations and the national security community, all tell us that burning fossil fuels is causing dangerous changes to the climate, we think it’s time for the United States to get serious about clean energy”
But what about the thousands of leading science academics and many major American corporations and others across the world who tell us just the opposite? The authors should give us examples of where warming is occurring to support their argument.
And “when the leading science academies in 20 developed countries, along with several major American corporations” and the envirowhacos tell us how dangerous NPPs are and they force “Clean Energy Incentive Program within President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, do not explicitly include or incentivize nuclear power ” thus forcing 6 NPPs to shut down in the last 5 years and probably 5 more in the next few years (un less Trump fixes it) tells me that the REAL problem is NOT CO2 but the existence of NPPs. There is no why the USA is going to reduce CO2 AND increas the economy, pay down the national debt, etc. UNLESS we proceed with a JFK space race initiative building at least five NPPs a year till all power is from Nuclear, including most power used in transportation.
The national security “supporters” of the climate consensus extremist claims are doing so because Obama has corrupted them into doing so. AGW is like a spreading cancer, metasticizing its corrupt thinking into every organization it’s believers sneak into.
Nuclear doesn’t give off life-giving CO2. I wouldn’t bother with it as long as fossil fuels remain cheap. A day may come when to have to use nuclear energy to produce lots of Portland cement from limestone in order to keep CO2 at a healthy level.
The Trump Effect! I believe the AGW house of cards is crumbling. Remember as soon as Raegan was elected Iran released hostages that couldn’t be negotiated before over the previous eight years by the softies. Oh, and USSR fell apart.
Here is what you need to know about the entire continent of Asia including Asia Minor (pearse foreign policy 101): Act very tough, stir the pot, build up your military capability and you get what you want. Russia, Syria to Afghanistan, and China will sweeten up to America. This also works on the mice like S. Whitehouse etc. Kumbaya stuff invites recalcitrance, disrespect, aggressive behavior, Asian pilots barrel rolling your ships, shooting at your navy from flotillas of little boats after they’ve bested you in a deal., stealing your little yellow boat drones, not meeting your president with the red carpet and head of state, building a new continent where you used to command the China Sea…
PFP works because all these countries have been trained to obey strength above all. A corollary of PFP is it works on the weeping useful fool followers of Kumbaya stuff too. Not bad for an old geologist, huh?
and Breeder Reactors are ‘renewable’ too!
Hey Sheldon, Did you notice who Mr Trump selected to be Secretary of State and head of the EPA?
Trump On!
I have no issues with nuclear power, except that when used instead of coal/gas, they deprive the atmosphere of MUCH NEEDED CO2.