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On Faint Praise for Nuclear Energy in New Documentary [VIDEO]
@Davis
Are you ignoring the capital investments made by the fossil fuel industry in maintaining their current production? I think Shell, for example, spends about $30 billion per year in capex. That is just one of the major fossil fuel companies.
On Kewaunee Nuclear Power Station: Employee Buyout a Win-Win-Win Solution?
Dominion is planning to shut down the reactor sometime in April or May. I expect they will work quickly to put it into a Safestor condition so that they can turn in the operating license and stop paying the $4.7 million per year fee to the NRC to maintain that license.
The Safestor condition also lowers insurance and security costs. However, once an operating license is given up, it is very difficult and expensive to recover. As far as I know, there has never been a reactor that obtained a new operating license after having given up its previous operating license. Even at Browns Ferry Unit 1, which was shut down for about 20 years, the owner apparently maintained the operating license and kept paying the annual fee just in case the plant would be needed in the future. Eventually, TVA successfully restarted that plant, once power prices and demand justified the action.
On Is Bill McKibben Really Serious About Climate Change?
@Bob Meinetz
It would be terrific if Shell and other oil and gas producers would invest some of their vast capital resources on new nuclear power plants; my preference would be Gen III construction in addition to a little Gen IV research.
However, I have not found any evidence of that happening. Can you tell me the source of the following statement in your comment?
"It's encouraging to see Shell investing in Gen IV nuclear, but in general what fossil fuel companies either don't understand or don't care about is the fact that we're within decades of a tipping point which will lock in climate changes that could last for eons, and result in a hefty percentage of the worlds species going extinct."
Rod Adams, Publisher, Atomic Insights
On Is Bill McKibben Really Serious About Climate Change?
@Bob Meinetz
This article is not about an alternative to gasoline. In terms of human CO2 emissions, personal automobiles are actually quite a manageable contributor; perhaps 15% or less.
The "big noises" in CO2 emissions are burning coal, natural gas and oil (in oil exporting countries, mostly) to produce electricity, space heat, industrial process heat, and commercial ship propulsion. (Though that application is mostly invisible to people, ships carry about 90% of all international cargo and burn up about 6-8% of the world's annual oil production.)
Those are all applications in which fission can play a huge role and win on almost all measures of effectiveness - as long as the regulatory environment encourages safe nuclear plant construction and operation rather than being such an onerous burden that it purposely discourages ALL nuclear plant construction and operation.
Rod Adams
PS - You really think gasoline is "cheap"? On a price per unit heat basis, gasoline at $3.50 per gallon is about 7.5 times as expensive as natural gas at $3.50 per million BTU. I drive a fuel efficient diesel Jetta that averages better than 40 miles per gallon have a short commute of about 12 miles. If I go nowhere other than just go back and forth to work, my bare minumum fuel bill is $48 per month. Add some miles choose a less efficient automobile, perhaps because you work as a carpenter or plumber or have a few kids to carry and the fuel bill can start to become a large portion of a paycheck.
On Biofuels Are a Loser, Despite the Hope and Hype
@EnergyFacts
I am quite familiar with the Navy's daliance with biofuels. My last job on active duty was in the office where the funding was being diverted from operational the operational fuels budget into the biofuels experiments where bio based jet fuel was costing in excess of $20 per gallon. The fuel works, but requires an energy intensive set of processing steps that does nothing to reduce our vulnerability to supply interruptions.
As an analyst, I strongly recommended not moving that money. Instead, the experiments continue and the fleet does not have the fuel it needs to do its job.
There is one hope for turning biomass into useful liquid fuel - injecting the energy input required from nuclear energy. Captain Keifer mentions that option briefly in the paper, but did not spend much time exploring why it might be beneficial. The key is that nuclear plants are great for making heat and electricity in a place where weight is not an issue, but they would have a hard time propelling an airplane or a personal vehicle. Artificial hydrocarbons made from plants could perform that task rather well.
This concept has been well known in defense analysis circles for many years. One of my buddies served on the CNO advisory panel in the early 2000s. They investigated the option and thought it would work well, but they determined that the politics would be challenging. The economics were quite favorable, especially for an organization that already has all the necessary infrastructure and the necessary training systems in place.
Rod Adams CDR, USN (Ret)
Publisher, Atomic Insights
On Risk Assessment: Are Our Regulators Going Too Far?
Are you telling me that there is no rotating door between the regulators that write the rules and the firms that engage in the cleanup?
When the environmental businesses are working directly for industry, whose standards do they use to determine if the target is clean enough?
On Risk Assessment: Are Our Regulators Going Too Far?
@Michael
Not only have I heard of toxicology, but my post was designed to encourage people to go and read a paper by Dr. Edward Calabrese, a professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts.
I understand a bit about how standards are established, though I am much more familiar with the way that standards for radioactive substances are established compared to my knowledge about chemical standards.
Community pressure may not result in more stringent standards, but I can testify that behind the scenes regulation writing is often pushed by business interests into drafting very stringent standards because they result in a lot more technology and services revenue (one man's COST is another man's REVENUE).
I worked as a Requirements Officer on the US Navy staff in Washington DC for 9 years. Near the end of the first of my three tours in a row (very unusual career path, by the way) I realize just how valuable a position that job was considered to be. By creatively writing requirements, you could establish a forcing function that would result in sales for contractors.
I've been told that I am kind of a weird guy, but the thought of doing that as a way of landing a good job after retirement nausiated me. I remained on the staff long enough to have done a small amount of good and eventually took a job in field that is not related to defense contracting. Since the companies involved in major clean up efforts are often exactly the same companies involved in the kind of contracting shenanigans I witnessed, I expect that the behavior is similar.
On Risk Assessment: Are Our Regulators Going Too Far?
@Michael
Can you expand a little more on your comment? I am not sure I understand what you mean by the impact to the freshwater system of the actions that you list. Do they cause an overall loss of available water due to the waste involved in trying to clean up down to very low levels of contamination?
I am quite worried about our water supply system; I do not advocate putting it at risk by some of the activities that you mentioned. However, part of my concern about the way that we currently regulate some "contaminants" is that water that is perfectly safe to drink can be declared unfit.
On Dieter Helm: Coal Critic, Atomic Agnostic, Natural Gas Enthusiast
A tax credit is simply a direct payment to a taxpayer provided at the time that they file their tax return.
Of course wind "exists", but as a competitive energy source it lost out to primitive steam engines in the 1850s. It only exists as an industry today because of heavy lobbying, set asides, quotas, higher than market FITs, and cash payments from taxpayers.
There are no subsidies for operating nuclear power plants in the United States. They generate competitive electricity worth about $50 billion per year, pay income taxes, pay about $750 million per year for used fuel services that have never been delivered, pay about $4.7 million per plant as a special nuclear tax called a license fee, buy their own liability insurance and participate in a pooled insurance arrangement that would provide at least $10 billion in coverage in the never yet tested case of a major accident.
I work in nuclear power plant design and can testify that the additional costs imposed bear no relationship to actual needs or improved safety. They simply add to the schedule and cost of building a new plant. Many of the regulations can be traced either to vendors that had a product to sell and knew they could sell better if it was mandated by regulation or to competitors that wanted to increase the cost of nuclear energy so that they could sell more of their product into the market.
On Dieter Helm: Coal Critic, Atomic Agnostic, Natural Gas Enthusiast
@ronwagn
Do you really think that today's unusual energy pricing situation will continue without the injection of a tremendous amount of new energy supplies into the mix?
Natural gas prices are low enough so that many independent drillers cannot obtain any financing for new wells and the deep pockets companies like ExxonMobil (through its subsidiary, XTO) have already shifted more than half of their gas drilling rigs to plays that produce more oil than gas.
North American natural gas prices are about 1/3 as high as natural gas prices in Europe, and 1/5 as high as prices in Japan. There are more than a dozen applications at FERC right now for permission to being equalizing those prices by moving more of the gas from here to there via LNG shipments.
Large industries are also interested in soaking up some of our currently available excess supply, but the margin between current production and current demand is already close enough so that a few really cold weeks would do the trick of consuming most of the excess.
No matter how large the potential resource really is (and the Potential Gas Committee put it at 2170 TCF as of the end of 2010, which is less than 90 years at our current consumption rate of 24.3 TCF per year) the rate at which that resouce can be extracted is already limited and cannot be expanded as fast as demand will change based on the marketing efforts of the gas suppliers.
That is the plan, of course. No supplier likes selling low priced products; they like for the demand to catch up with and surpass the supply so that prices are driven to a higher and more profitable level. That is simple Econ 101 and if you look at the history of natural gas prices you will see that the very worst prediction of long term prices is to assume that today's prices will not change very much.
On Dieter Helm: Coal Critic, Atomic Agnostic, Natural Gas Enthusiast
@Geoff
If wind energy was so good, why did the entire industry state that it would completely collapse if the Congress did not include a last minute life ring toss with a New Year's Day extension of the $22 per megawatt hour Production Tax Credit?
I thought wind was mature, but apparently installers cannot make the numbers work without a direct flow of a substantial quantity of our tax dollars directly into their coffers.
Just in case there are any readers who are ignorant of the destination of those tax dollars, they flow to such needy enterprises as GE, Siemens, Next Era Energy, Vestas and Iberdrola.
On Faint Praise for Nuclear Energy in New Documentary [VIDEO]
@Davis
You are focusing just on electricity production capacity, not energy production capacity. You are ignoring the enormous capital investments being made by ExxonMobil, Shell, Aramaco, Gazprom, Chevron, Total, Chesapeake Energy, Anadarko, Peabody and dozens of other fossil fuel companies.