From The National Review
By Robert Bryce
May 30, 2019 4:21 PM
Climate change is the No. 1 issue for Democrats, with a recent poll showing 82 percent of Democratic voters listed it as their top priority. To appeal to those voters, contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination routinely call climate change an “existential threat” to the nation and the world. But amid all their rhetoric and promises of massively expensive plans to tackle the problem, these same Democrats — with the notable exception of Senator Cory Booker — steadfastly refuse to utter two critical words: nuclear power.
The Democrats’ disdain for nuclear energy deserves attention, because there is no credible pathway toward large-scale decarbonization that doesn’t include lots of it. That fact was reinforced Tuesday, when the International Energy Agency published a report declaring that without more nuclear energy, global carbon dioxide emissions will surge and “efforts to transition to a cleaner energy system will become drastically harder and more costly.”
How costly? The IEA estimates that “$1.6 trillion in additional investment would be required in the electricity sector in advanced economies from 2018 to 2040” if the use of nuclear energy continued to decline. That, in turn, would mean higher prices, as “electricity supply costs would be close to $80 billion higher per year on average for advanced economies as a whole.” […]
In 2013, when Michael Bloomberg was mayor, his office issued a report that estimated closing Indian Point and replacing it with gas-fired generation would “increase New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 15 percent.” It also said the city “depends on Indian Point for reliability as congested transmission lines limit power imports from more distant locations.” But current mayor — and Democratic presidential hopeful — Bill de Blasio steadfastly refuses to acknowledge Indian Point’s importance, or the potential of nuclear power in general. Last month, de Blasio unveiled his $14 billion NYC Green New Deal plan, which aims to cut New York City’s emissions by 30 percent by 2030. With the looming loss of Indian Point, that 30 percent goal will effectively become 45 percent.
Another Democratic contender, Beto O’Rourke, has dubbed climate change “our greatest threat” and says he will “mobilize $5 trillion” to cut domestic greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2050. The word “nuclear” does not appear anywhere on his website, just as it’s absent from nearly every other Democratic presidential candidate’s site. That’s a shame, because the IEA’s report is just the latest in a long line of scientific papers pointing to the need for nuclear energy. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that achieving deep cuts in emissions will “require more intensive use” of low-emission technologies “such as renewable energy [and] nuclear energy.”38
This is, frankly, one of the biggest and longest-running disconnects in American politics: The leaders of the Democratic party insist that the U.S. must make big cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions because of the threat posed by climate change, but for nearly five decades, they have either ignored or professed outright opposition to nuclear energy. The last time the party’s platform contained a positive statement about nuclear power was way back in 1972.
Full article here
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This is pre- primary season. Rational thought does not play a role at this stage of the election cycle. For either party it is all about appealing to your radical and energised base. No data required; just pure emotion and hand waving.
The far left wants renewable energy and hates nuclear. So that’s what all the Democrat primary candidates will sell. It does not matter if this is inconsistent with a reliable and affordable energy.
Once the two major candidates are chosen, then the positions move to the middle and facts start being introduced. Traditionally no one objects when the parties abandon not only their previous position on an emotional issue but drop that issue entirely from their platform.
(Biden is trying to stand out from the herd by holding middle ground at the start; but in my opinion, that’s like taking the lead too early in a middle distance foot race.)
(The 3rd stage of course is when one of the candidates is elected, and then all bets are off!)
“For either party it is all about appealing to your radical and energised base.”
The Republican base is NOT radical, unless you are looking at it from a socialist viewpoint. Republicans ARE anti-socialist so if you are a socialist, you probably think Republicans are radical.
What’s radical about wanting to pay as little in income tax as possible?
What’s radical about wanting the smallest government possible that can do the job?
What’s radical about wanting the United States to be the strongest nation on Earth?
What’s radical about wanting the politicians to follow the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law?
What’s radical about thinking babies are valuable and should not be discarded like trash?
What is the radical position of the Republicans? If you listen to the Socialists, all Republican positons are radical. Of course, that goes both ways as Republicans think Socialists are radical and in this case the Republican are correct.
The Republican base and the Democrat/Socialist base are not equivalent. The radicals on the Left far outnumber any radicals on the Right. And btw, regular Republicans don’t consider White Supremcists to be part of the Republican Party. The Republican Party freed the slaves. No White Supremacy here.
The Democrats are the radicals. The Republicans are the common-sense party.
Nothing convinces me more that the warmists do not believe their own fairy tales than their failure to embrace nuclear power. If I believed, deep down in my heart of hearts, that the earth was doomed to become a runaway Venus if we did not reduce emissions by 2030, I would make embrace of nuclear power my one goal in life, damn the expense, damn the risk of shoddy construction. Nothing would get in the way.
Instead, they concentrate on slower and even more expensive solar and wind power, which simply can’t come online fast enough to change anything by 2030.
Ergo, they do not believe their own fairy scary tales.
Yep, Felix…they don’t really believe in climate catastrophe. Else they would be desperate to build hundreds of nuclear plants this decade.
They would also be loudly forcing Asia (China, India, Southeast Asia) to put the brakes on CO2 emissions. In fact, they would be desperately helping Asia build as many nuclear plants as required.
The Soviet Union engaged in meme warfare back in the ’70s. Anti-nuclear was one of the memes, the Left is still running that programming, two generations later.
The latest on nuclear power in the U.S.:
Virgil Summer:
Bottom line: Both V.C. Summer units were cancelled in 2017.
Vogtle:
Mark Bahner, my analysis of what went wrong at VC Summer and Vogtle 3 & 4 can be found in a previous comment on WUWT from March, 2019:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/03/12/it-sounds-crazy-but-fukushima-chernobyl-and-three-mile-island-show-why-nuclear-is-inherently-safe/#comment-2654040
As is described in my comments from March, for those of us who went through the intense struggles of the 1980’s in learning how to do nuclear construction on cost and on schedule, it was clear from about 2013 on that history was repeating itself.
The entire blame for what happened with those two projects can be laid at the feet of the project managers, the project owners, and the failure of the state regulatory agencies to properly oversee and assess how well the utilities were doing in meeting their cost and schedule commitments on and off the two construction sites.
“As is described in my comments from March, for those of us who went through the intense struggles of the 1980’s in learning how to do nuclear construction on cost and on schedule,…”
Who are “we” and where were “we” in the 1980s?
I ask because I worked for the Babcock and Wilcox Nuclear Power Division in Lynchburg in the 1980s, and I certainly didn’t see any evidence of “learning how to do nuclear construction on cost and on schedule.”
And to my knowledge, not a single nuclear reactor installed after 1980 in the United States was built and constructed “on cost and on schedule.” In fact, the last reactor that entered operation in the U.S. is Watts Bar 2, which probably has a Guinnesss Book of World Records entry for “most off-schedule”! 😉
I am a nuclear industry renegade in that I refuse to blame the NRC for nuclear’s ever-growing costs. I also think pushing forward with Yucca Mountain is a big mistake. I am convinced that the largest single obstacle to nuclear’s forward progress in the United States is the industry’s inability to get its capital costs under control.
My lifetime occupational dose comes mostly from beta-gamma radiation sources, hence my internet handle is Beta Blocker. My experience from the 1980’s was in QA oversight and program control auditing for nuclear projects in the US Northwest. The serious problems we were seeing happening in the Northwest at that time were the same ones being seen generally in many other nuclear construction projects around the country.
It’s not enough to simply identify a QA issue and then resolve it. Far more often than not, these issues reflect larger cross-cutting problems with how the project is being managed as a whole. What we as QA specialists and program auditors were seeing had root causes which went well beyond the construction sites into the core of the project management teams, both the technical and the administrative sides.
Thirty-five years ago, a raft of studies and reports were being published which analyzed the cost growth problems and the severe quality assurance issues the nuclear construction industry was then experiencing. These reports made a series of recommendations as to how to solve these problems. Those studies had a number of common threads:
— Complex, first of a kind projects
— Strength of the industrial base
— A changing technical environment
— A changing regulatory environment
— Project management effectiveness
— Overconfidence based on past project success
— Reliance on contractor expertise
— Management control systems
— Cost & schedule control systems
— Quality assurance
— Construction productivity & progress
— Project financing and completion schedule
— A change in strategy by the anti-nuclear activists
— Regulatory oversight effectiveness
— Working relationships with regulators
What does a claim that “the project stayed on cost and on schedule” actually mean?
My definition is that if a regulatory driven change in the technical requirements forces design modifications and field changes to existing systems in order to achieve compliance, then those extra costs are properly considered as base costs within the project measurement baseline.
It is completely true that not a one of the nuclear projects from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s was built to its original cost and schedule estimates, those produced before the NRC’s requirements began to expand well beyond what anyone might have predicted five years earlier. What is also true is that unpredictable changes in the regulatory environment forced technical changes which resulted in higher costs.
Some projects were able to cope with those changes and pay for them just once. I’m referring to projects like St. Lucie Unit 2 and Hopecreek. Other projects, the ones which were poorly managed, paid for those changes two or three times over before the work was properly completed to the NRC’s expectations. Zimmer, Midland, Marble Hill, South Texas, and Diablo Canyon were among the worst offenders. Just like it was with VC Summer in 2017, three of those five poorly performing projects from the 1980’s were terminated.
Here is a brief history of that period:
In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, the regulatory environment became much more complex with a series of added regulatory requirements on nuclear plant design and construction. At the same time, the large 1300 megawatt plants were being constructed for the first time; they were being built without a prototype; and there were many things in those new designs which had to be tested and proven for the first time in operational service.
Also at the same time, the anti-nuclear activist groups switched tactics. They had gotten nowhere in the courts with their arguments concerning basic nuclear safety, and so they began to focus on emerging quality assurance issues with the plant construction projects — that is to say, the lack of effort on the part of the senior managers of large nuclear construction projects towards meeting the quality assurance standards they had committed to in their NRC license applications.
The NRC had assumed in the mid-1970’s that one utility was much like another in its ability manage a large and very complex nuclear construction project. This turned out not to be the case. In the mid 1970’s, the NRC had given construction licenses to utilities which were not capable of managing the demanding task of building a nuclear plant to strict quality assurance requirements while at the same time operating under significant cost and schedule pressures.
Those nuclear construction projects which had weak project management systems and which suffered from a lack of commitment to maintaining high quality assurance standards were in deep trouble well before Three Mile Island occurred. Their lack of commitment to an effective quality assurance program was reflected in their tendency to place primary responsibility for quality assurance on the Quality Assurance organization, an organization which is not equipped for handling that job. The QA organization is a means of communicating to management whether or not the project’s QA objectives are being met. But it is not a substitute for management. For those projects which got into deep trouble, managers at every level of the project organization had abdicated responsibility for quality to the QA organization.
The variety of problems these late 1970’s and early 1980’s nuclear projects were suffering were compounded by other basic weaknesses in their project management systems. Matrix management systems were common at that time, but these kinds of systems do not enforce enough internal discipline to keep a complex nuclear project on track. Every nuclear project which got into trouble in the early 1980’s had a matrix management system. Another issue was the lack of project configuration control and the lack of contractor interface control. Projects which lacked effective configuration control and effective contractor interface control saw their budgets being eaten by the nuclear construction contractors.
Inside those projects which got into trouble, middle managers and senior managers did not want to hear bad news. Managers at lower levels knew what the problems were, but by the time the message got to the senior managers, it had become so attenuated it was unrecognizable. Whistleblowers on the job became fed up with management’s lack of commitment to quality construction standards and went outside the project to the anti-nuclear activists. Those activists then made sure these very real QA problems were introduced into the NRC licensing process.
Why was it that in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s it was primarily the whistleblowers who were exposing these quality assurance issues, not the NRC’s own staff?
It was because at the time, the NRC viewed QA issues as not representing a danger until the plant was about to go operational, and so it focused its oversight efforts on the last phases of the licensing process. This meant that a project’s substandard practices which had been in place for years had remained unchallenged over most of the life of the project, and so the project had become complacent because it hadn’t heard from the NRC. In other words, no news was good news for these projects. But then when the anti-nuclear activists raised issues with how the plant had been constructed, issues which had been discovered by whistleblowers on the job, these projects then began asking the question, where was the NRC in the earlier phases of the project when its oversight and input was most needed?
Those nuclear projects which were successfully completed in the 1980’s were the ones which had strong project management systems and which viewed the NRC as a resource, not as an adversary. By the late 1980’s, most all of the earlier problems with nuclear construction had been resolved and the industry was well positioned to expand, had the market for nuclear power plants continued to hold up. But this was not to be, the weight of past problems and of increasing competition from coal and natural gas put an end to nuclear construction in the US for a period of twenty-years. More recently, the emergence of the fracking boom and competition from cheap natural gas is putting an end to the nascent American nuclear renaissance.
What do we face in the year 2019?
Once again, how did 2012’s estimate of 12 billion dollars for two AP1000’s grow to 2017’s estimate of 25 billion dollars in just five years? The answer here is that all the lessons learned from the 1980’s were ignored. The details of those lessons are explained here in my previous comment from March previously cited:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/03/12/it-sounds-crazy-but-fukushima-chernobyl-and-three-mile-island-show-why-nuclear-is-inherently-safe/#comment-2654040
Those in the United States who say the solution to nuclear power’s lack of economic competitiveness with natural gas is to remove the strict regulatory requirements government now imposes on the industry are living in a dream world. My rough guess is that removing these regulatory burdens might reduce US nuclear construction costs fifteen percent, maybe twenty percent at the very outside. But that isn’t nearly enough to overcome the lifecycle cost advantages now enjoyed by natural gas.
But more important than this, a decision to greatly reduce government oversight over nuclear power would greatly reduce the public’s confidence that nuclear is safe. Is that loss of public confidence worth a cost reduction of perhaps twenty percent at best in nuclear construction costs?
The NuScale project team is working closely with the NRC to be sure there are few regulatory surprises once fabrication and construction begins in the early 2020’s. If changes in requirements do occur, however small or large these may be, the project is well prepared to cope with whatever changes may come down the pike.
NuScale’s SMR project is the last hope for creating a successful nuclear construction industry in the United States. If NuScale and its team fails to meet its cost and schedule commitments in building its Idaho SMR plant, if NuScale and its partners fail to meet the NRC’s high expectations, we will not see another commercial reactor project being initiated in the US until the 2040’s and beyond.
That’s because for the Green Blob Climate Change is about re-structuring the Western democracies’ energy economies to renewable wind and solar power, sources that that also get lots of taxpayer subsidies. That it makes consumers electric bills much higher is an intended feature, not a bug.
The Green Blob is all about reaping those subsidies and tax credits.
You can restructure to wind and solar if nuclear power is in the way. This is about a middle class wealth transfer to green hedge funds, public union retirement funds, and rich investors like Tom Steyer.
Crony capitalism with a healthy heaping of socialism.
They need to kill nuclear. They need to kill coal. Then they’ll go after making natural gas much higher. We already see that by actions to stop gas pipelines wherever they can.
Errata: “You can NOT restructure to wind and solar if nuclear….”
sigh.. I miss edit.
You assume of course that they want to be able to supply power to meet the need for it , when enforced rationing , because of a shortage of supply , offers lots of ‘benefits’ when it comes to control .
For example who would argue that hospitals should get power before ‘evil industries ‘ !
How can you allow energy to be wasted letting people fly when you need to keep the lights on!
There are lot of ‘ideas’ you can get passed , that other would be rejected , under the the need to ‘save power’
Not all Democrats hate western civilization but the people who do hate western civilization are in the Democratic party. In order to convince people to hate western civilization they need to convince them that W.C. is evil. The extreme ecology stuff is part of that. W.C. is evil because of environmental degradation. If we transition to a nuclear powered civilization then there would be no smoke stacks for their propaganda.
The problem is the environmental degradation they claim they want to avoid would actually become severe if their policies are ever realized in full.
“The last time the party’s platform contained a positive statement about nuclear power was way back in 1972.”
It’s not curious at all why Democrats and liberals don’t recognize nuclear power as the one and only solution for emissions-free energy. They have spent their entire lives opposing it. Internal rationalization mechanisms in their brains prevent them from making such an abrupt about-face. How can they possibly admit they were so wrong, for so long? More importantly, it means that they are partially responsible for the end of life on earth because if they hadn’t opposed nuclear power we’d certainly have more of it today.
It’s just too much for them to handle.
Democrat/Enviros want scarcity, particularly energy scarcity. Anything that results in abundance, particularly energy abundance, that is accessible to more people is not useful to them.
Hollywood is heavily invested ion convincing people that we will all glow in the dark if we use nuclear power, even though it is clean and efficient and safer than almost any other form of power. Currently HBO is running some horrible new series “Chernobyl” that is all about how millions of people died from the Chernobyl fiasco. It was more like a few hundred, and that was because of gross Soviet malfeasance and incompetence.