Senator McCain made a speech yesterday advocating the need for an increased nuclear power generation capability in the US. Let me first say that I agree with a number of the positions proposed by the Republican nominee. Nuclear power will have to be part of the solution to the energy and environmental challenges confronting the world today. Wind, solar, and tidal power should be developed to their utmost, but, considering their limited capacity into the foreseeable future, they are incapable of meeting anywhere near our demand. If we are serious about cutting carbon emissions in a manner that is not crippling to our economy, nuclear expansion has to be on the agenda.
Recycling spent fuel may make good sense too. It reduces the amount of the waste product and, as I understand it, it decreases the half-life of those radioactive waste products that must be stored. Furthermore, it gives you more power out of the same material. It is true that plutonium reprocessing/recycling has not been cost-effective historically, and I would not advocate government subsidization of it. This process must be cost-effective, but possibly with a greater accounting of costs it would be considered so. The French certainly believe spent fuel recycling is worth the investment. Despite scares involving “plutonium hang-up” – the tendency for plutonium material to get stuck in pipes and fixtures at reprocessing facilities so as to create the impression that material has gone missing- the experience of France gives reason to believe that spent fuel recycling can be done safely and securely.
Where the train went off the rails was with the statement about 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030. Now I am not saying that McCain is self-medicating with medicinal marijuana, but he may want to get urine samples from his staff - starting with whomever gave him this suggestion. It is true that a number of advances have been made that could increase the speed of reactor deployment. The most notable of these is the shift to using a few standardized reactor designs instead of making each plant a unique entity unto itself. This cuts time in the early phases because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) does not have to evaluate every aspect of the design every time, but rather whether the site is suitable and whether any design modifications are acceptable.
The above being said, there are a number of realities that make 45 reactors in less than a quarter of a century a difficult prospect to swallow. First, there is a huge human capital deficit. The skilled craftsman and engineers needed for an undertaking of this scope are not available. The US certainly hasn’t been producing them at the rate needed for such a boom, because we haven’t been building new nuclear power plants in recent decades. It is true that we should not need to think solely within our own borders. However, besides the French, much of the rest of the world has seen a lull in new reactor production as well - at least since Chernobyl. Furthermore, one can expect all manner of delays resulting from attempting to use international firms. Consider what happened to the Air Force when they made the dread mistake of giving a contract to the lowest bidder who offered to make a plane meeting their specs (which happened to be a consortium including European Aeronautic Defence and Space company [EADS]). That is, one can expect political fall-out, perhaps even considering the security ramifications of having foreign firms build something as sensitive as nuclear reactors. Not that there should be any problem, but nor should there have been with a Dubai company contracting to manage US ports, but one should expect hang-ups due to alarmism and nationalist sentiment.
Second, there will be political resistance every step of the way. It may be true that resistance of the American citizenry to nuclear power seems to be waning, and that the greatest supporters of nuclear power are those who have a nuclear plant in their communities already. (People often point out that this effect is because the nuclear plant is the bread and butter of such locales. True enough, but if they were having 8-toed 3-eyed babies it would hard to imagine that the support wouldn’t falter.) All this being said, there is still a vocal faction of the populace that will drag their feet every step of the way, and who have the political acumen to succeed in holding things up.
My final point is that the utilities who would be the ones actually building these plants would have to be ready, willing, and able to plonk down a lot of money over a relatively short time-frame in an investment with an uncertain future. Not that there is a particularly great deal of uncertainty, but the future is always uncertain. Carbon sequestration technology improvements might make nuclear an uncompetitive producer of base-load power compared with coal – even with the costs of carbon included, or any number of other events could occur (a freak accident causing panic) that could make the investment flop. McCain may intend to offer public financial support. Such a plan suffers a couple problems. One is a political resistance problem not only from the aforementioned anti-nuclear power establishment, but also from the coal suppliers, mining labor, etc. Nuclear competes with coal as a base-load power supply, and the coal establishment has a right to resist subsidization of its competitor. The other thing is that we are running persistent national debt, and, in my opinion, we should avoid shoveling more money into government subsidization of for-profit firms.
I could be wrong about this, but these words will long be forgotted by 2030. Of course, I suspect Senator McCain was thinking the same thing. Barring breakthroughs in genetics or cyrogenics, I don’t think anyone will be holding the good Senator accountable.
3 Comments
August 12, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!
September 1, 2008 at 4:54 pm
We hear from the media that alternative renewables can only provide a small portion of the energy we need, and it’s not reliable. Solar power can only be generated when the sun shines, wind only when the wind blows, and so on. And that’s true, as far as it goes. It is true that renewables would have to be a mix.
But I just read an article on http://www.metaefficient.com (which they got from the Wall Street Journal) about the problems the Danish utility company is having with wind power. Because they have a lot of windy coastline, Denmark built enough windmills along it to generate 20 percent of their electricity.
But often, it gets really windy. When that happens, the percentage of electricity generated by the windmills can climb to 40 percent. If that happens, the price of electricity can drop to zero “leaving utilities scrambling to offload excess power or take a financial hit”.
So far, they have been selling the extra electricity cheap to Sweden and Norway. This is neither a desirable nor a long-term solution. So the Danish utility company is planning to build a country-wide system for charging electric cars with the excess power. (Israel is doing the same.)
So the problem in Denmark is that renewables are just so darn — well — renewable. The wind just keeps blowing. Blowing down the price of electricity. Thus the task of the utility company becomes finding ways to use excess electricity. In other words, to find ways to limit the supply of electricity enough to keep the price up. (Are you wondering why they need to keep the price up?)
And all this bother because they have built enough windmills to provide 20 percent of their electricity on ‘normal’ wind days. Kind of makes me wonder what would happen if they built enough for 50 percent wind power and 50 percent solar power — or 50 percent tidal power. Would electricity be virtually free except for small maintenance and labor costs? So abundant we couldn’t find ways to use it all?
Profit demands scarcity. Faced with abundance, our economy would be in ruins. It seems the name of the “man behind the curtain” in our energy woes is Profit.
MJ Olsen
http://butisitpc.wordpress.com
September 1, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Unfortunately, we cannot apply the example of cases where renewables work well globally because electricity production is inherently localized. That is, the further the point of consumption is from the point of production, the more ineffecient it becomes.
I know Georgia (the US state not the country recently dominating headlines) has produced pilot-scale off-shore wind farms, but has not yet found it cost-effective to expand. Off-shore wind farms present a two-fold advantage resulting from capitalization upon temperture differentials between land and sea (a source of wind), and the ability to avoid the Not In My Back Yard sentiment. However, some places the wind blows and some places it doesn’t.
Having said this, I am optimistic that with improvements in battery technology, efficiency of solar cells (the likely reason they don’t do 50% solar is that they would probably have to cover every square inch of the country with cells to achieve it) when combined with some type of pigouvian tax on carbon that captures the marginal cost to society, renewables will play a progressively larger role in energy production.
As for the profit issue, most people, if asked to put their 401K money in investments with companies that were unprofitable- thus getting less back when they retire (in real terms) than they put in, they would dismiss this is crazy talk. However, somehow profitability has gained an interesting stigma that I don’t quite understand. Without profit there is no incentive to invest one’s money; just like without salaries and wages there is no incentive for people to go to work.