About Social Media Today
Comments by Rod Adams Subscribe 
On Dieter Helm: Coal Critic, Atomic Agnostic, Natural Gas Enthusiast
@Geoff Thomas
Electricity is sold by measuring kilowatt-hours, not "watts" or kilowatts. A watt is a unit of power that tells how fast energy is being consumed, not the total amount that is consumed.
The figures I quoted for "production costs" are all costs that are not capital costs. For US nuclear plants that $0.0213 per kilowatt-hour includes the following: "labor, material & supplies, contractor services, licensing fees, miscellaneous costs such as employee expenses and regulatory fees" plus fuel costs including "purchasing of uranium, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication services along with storage and shipment costs, and inventory (including interest) charges less any expected salvage value"
http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/costs
I am a former nuclear submarine Engineer Officer, so I completely reject the assertion that nuclear plants cannot throttle up and down to respond to loads. It is not typical for large commercial plants of any kind to be used as varying power supplies because they have a lot of intertia and because they represent a very large capital asset that should not be left idle if there is any demand for the product that it produces.
Your assertions about the cost of battery storage are completely wrong. See, for example, http://www.electrochem.org/dl/interface/fal/fal10/fal10_p049-053.pdf
You may disagree with my conclusions, but they are not unsupported "beliefs" at all. In contrast, your statements about power systems that do not even exist on paper indicate that you have an overriding belief in renewable energy fairy dust.
On Dieter Helm: Coal Critic, Atomic Agnostic, Natural Gas Enthusiast
Thanks Aggie.
I have one quibble, however. I do not believe that thermodynamics trumps economics; a low thermal efficiency nuclear heated steam plant can beat a super high efficiency combined cycle gas turbine running on moderate to high priced natural gas or distillate fuel.
Thermodynamically the combined cycle gas turbine is superior to a simple cycle steam turbine.
Of course, it is possible to produce a combined cycle or cogeneration nuclear plant if you simply use a high temperature gas cooled reactor as the heat source.
(http://atomicengines.com)
On Dieter Helm: Coal Critic, Atomic Agnostic, Natural Gas Enthusiast
@ronwagn
I am pretty well versed in how the money flows work for nuclear energy. Contrary to your assertion, the vast majority of funds flow from nuclear energy producers (actually from their customers) to the government, not vice versa. Those money flows, however, do not mean that nuclear customers are paying higher prices for their electricity. Instead, since nuclear fuel costs just $0.0068 per kilowatt hour (a figure that includes "amortized costs associated with the purchasing of uranium, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication services along with storage and shipment costs, and inventory (including interest) charges less any expected salvage value") the operating costs of nuclear power plants are far below the nearest competitor - "cheap coal".
For 2011, the last complete year of stats available, the average total production cost from a US nuclear plant was $0.0219 per kilowatt-hour while the average production cost from a coal plant was $0.0323 per kilowatt hour, roughly 50% more.
http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/costs
Nuclear energy is affordable, even with all of the special burdens placed on it by governments that are often encouraged by competitive energy suppliers. It is clean enough to run inside of sealed submarines full of people.
The primary beneficiaries of antinuclear actions are the people who prefer for us all to keep burning coal, oil and natural gas or to keep paying outrageous direct payments from tax payers to huge companies like GE, Siemens, Next Era, and Vestas to build unreliable wind turbines and solar collection systems.
References - approximately 2500 posts on Atomic Insights, many with numerous external links.
On Time for rational risk evaluation of energy sources – natural gas versus nuclear
Speaking as someone who spent a career in the US Navy, the last 9 years of which were in Washington --in offices that would have been in the Pentagon if not for the renovation and the damage from 911, I am insulted by your accusation.
Not only do we take nuclear weapons extremely seriously and never consider them to be "toys", most military officers consider them to be rather useless for anything other than MAD.
We have plenty of plutonium in our stockpile, so much that we are working really hard and spending lots of money to safely destroy 34 tons of it. I personnally wish we would just use that as fuel for systems like an IFR or consider it to be seed corn for a multi-century supply of LWR fuel or some combination of those two extremes.
On Shell's Natural Gas Marketing Aiming Squarely at Nuclear Energy Sweet Spot
I will grant that there is a question about whether today's nuclear plant designs can compete with natural gas at today's market price IN NORTH AMERICA. However, my memory is a little longer than most; I recall quite clearly the time when natural gas prices marched rather inexorably up from $1.60 per MMBTU to more than $13.00 per million BTU during the period from 1999-2008. The REAL reason those high prices disappeared - in North America - was that we experienced a severe economic recession that reduced the demand for gas by about 10-20%. The price fell to less than $4.00 per MMBTU within months and eventually dipped below $2 per MMBTU before starting on its way up to about $3.50 today.
In Japan, the landed price of natural gas delivered from distant suppliers via liquified natural gas tankers is $17.72 per MMBTU! Nuclear energy, even with all of the imposed overhead, can easily compete with that price - converting gas at that price leads to a COST per kilowatt hour of electricity in excess of $120 per MW-hr just for fuel (an efficient gas plant uses 7,000 BTU of heat per kilowatt hour), without considering any of the other costs of the power plant, the fuel delivery to the plant, or accounting for any of the waste that the gas produces along its lengthy production chain. No power plant operator can stay in business by selling its product to the customer at its cost of production, so the market PRICE is far higher.
You are wrong about there being no safe and secure storage for nuclear waste. We have been doing that job for more than 50 years. Can you point to a SINGLE instance anywhere in the world where someone has been injured because they were exposed to the waste material from a commercial nuclear power plant? In contrast, I can point to lists of of routine accidents in which hundreds of people each year are killed by exposure to carbon monoxide or other waste products that are associated with producing and burning natural gas. In fact, I can point to instances where there were thousands of people killed by a single accident involving natural gas extraction in areas where hydrogen sulfide is a natural component of the gas that is being pulled out of the ground.
Cost overruns are something that can be addressed through sound design, good project management and and aggressive response to regulatory ratcheting that imposes new requirements and forces design changes for NO gain in safety to the public.
Old, but well maintained nuclear plants do not need expensive rehabilitation in most cases. They are like the energizer bunny - they just keep on keeping on, producing massive quantities of electricity at a very low marginal fuel cost. The AVERAGE cost of nuclear fuel, including provisions for "purchasing of uranium, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication services along with storage and shipment costs, and inventory (including interest) charges less any expected salvage value" for US nuclear utilities in 2011 was just 0.68 cents per kilowatt hour. That equates to about 68 cents per million BTU since it takes about 10,000 BTU of heat to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity in a standard nuclear power plant.
http://nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/costs/
That is probably enough right now, but I would be happy to engage in further discussion about the cost of nuclear energy versus the cost of natural gas. There are plenty of gas costs that are not factored into today's prices, which is why the rig count for natural gas drilling in the US has fallen by about 50% in the past 18 months. Few producers are interested in the expense and risk of drilling in order to sell their product for a loss making price.
One more thing - on my blog at atomicinsights.com (which is where the original of this post appears) - I have plenty of publicly available information about my vested interests in helping people to understand more about nuclear energy. I am a nuclear energy professional; I have been studying the subject for more than 30 years. I have a good paying job as an engineer/analyst at a company designing small modular reactors aimed at incorporating many of the lessons we have learned in the brief 70 years since we first demonstrated that fission is both possible and controllable. I have invested a fair amount of money in nuclear energy related companies because I believe that their product is so good that the market will eventually recognize that value.
I once spent a large portion of family and friend investment money over a period of more than 15 years working on a start-up company to market relatively small nuclear engines that were designed to use the same kind of Brayton cycle turbomachinery that helps to make gas so attractive - but our designs would not have produced ANY CO2, CO, or NOX.
Can you provide any information about your own interest in the discussion so that people can judge our arguments while understanding the biases of source of those arguments?
Rod Adams, Publisher, Atomic Insights (http://atomicinsights.com)
On Con Ed substation explosion during Superstorm Sandy
Note: The post has been corrected with updated information. The video does not show a power plant explosion, but instead shows transformers exploding at a power distribution substation.
On Radiation probes indicate NO melt through at Fukushima Unit 1
@budrichard
In your periodic searches for information about Fukushima, have you found and followed the three times per week updates at Hiroshima Syndrome?
http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukushima-accident-updates.html
I can assure you that my article was not based on a single reading and it is not a new idea - I have been skeptical about the containment breach scenario since day 1. If the reactors had been PWRs with no control rods in the bottom reactor pressure vessel head, I would have been even more bold and vocal about my certainty that the corium penetration in the specific case of a slow loss of cooling would not exceed an inch. (It was a measured 5/8 of an inch at TMI).
Since the geometry in a BWR is complicated by the existence of control rod drive penetrations, I have been a little less assertive, agreeing that there might have been some leakage at the penetrations, but I have been pretty sure even that was relatively minor. The radiation readings reported earlier this week simply confirm my long held hypothesis that is based on physical knowlege of the latent heat of fusion for the kind of steel used in the 6-8 inch thick reactor pressure vessels along with a reasonably accurate model of decay heat generation, the latent heat of vaporization of water, and the large volume of water that was in the core at the time that circulation was stopped.
On Radiation probes indicate NO melt through at Fukushima Unit 1
elidyl
Thank you for the link to the Simplyinfo interpretation. It includes a rather fascinating leap of logic and guesswork that is not supported by the reported evidence.
The piece you pointed to makes the following scary claim:
"TEPCO found the radiation level in the bottom of the torus room under water to be 100,000 to 1,000,000 Sv/h * on the west side. "
Those are exceedingly high radiation readings. If true, they would convince me to eat crow and admit I was wrong and that a large portion of the reactor core has escaped from the reactor pressure vessel and is now in the torus room under water. So I followed the link (http://www.simplyinfo.org/?p=6340) to find that the linked article included a table in which the highest MEASURED radiation level was 10.3 Sv/hr with ASSUMED areas with doses that are many orders of magnitude higher because there was an ASSUMED radiation probe failure.
That assumption was apparently made because the radiation dose rates started dropping off after reaching a peak when someone (perhaps the people who operate "simplyinfo) expected the dose rate to keep going up.
Here is another telling quote from the Simplyinfo article that describes the way the workers who were measuring the radiation levels in the torus room were dressed:
"The workers noted on the TEPCO documents had only rubber gloves.. it looks like they have shoes on under the coveralls (yellow coveralls)… no instrument held over the opening of the hole, no preparations for extremely contaminated cabling once they pull out… they should be in scott air packs for air… no sniffer hose down the hole which would go to a constant air monitor. Clearly a lack of radiological controls for protection of the workers."
Perhaps the regular audience at Simplyinfo will buy the notion that radiation workers are stupid and careless with their own health. Since I have been working with trained nuclear workers for about 30 years, I have a much higher opinion of their level of knowledge and conservative decision making skills.
If the Tepco workers are dressed as described, it is because they know that the work they are doing does not require any additional protective measures. In other words, the highly trained radiation workers are pretty sure that they are not going to find a large quantity of radioactive material in the torus room.
The uncertainty expressed for media consumption by the acting general manager is also typical - many engineers and scientists in the nuclear industry have been inculcated with the notion that it is never okay to make bold statements that sound like you are not as conservative as possible.
Submariners are the only people who are both trained as nuclear workers and also trained that being correct is more important than being conservative. Most of the nuclear management level folks I know would never repeat a famous navy saying of "he who will not risk cannot win" because they do not want someone to think they are not appropriately "conservative".
On Radiation probes indicate NO melt through at Fukushima Unit 1
@budrichard
For someone with degrees in nuclear engineering, you have provided a rather creative number for the amount of power produced by decay heat. Here is a good refresher for you on the topic - http://mitnse.com/2011/03/16/what-is-decay-heat/
Please do not blame the US Navy Nuclear Program for my "arrogance"; though that program provided me with a solid base of understanding, I have spent the past 20 years outside of the program learning more about nuclear energy, materials, and modeling. I have also had the opportunity to read about the post accident analysis of real core melt events like the one that happened at Three Mile Island. There was a wonderful summary article published in Science that provided some pertinent information about just how far a melt will progress in a large, light water reactor that gets shutdown and subsequently loses cooling.
http://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/SciencePaper-9.02.pdf
Finally, you might be interested in reading a more detailed analysis of the information that Tepco has recently released regarding the current conditions in the area under the Unit 1 Reactor Pressure Vessel.
http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukushima-accident-updates.html
Look for the October 17, 2012 installment of that running series of Fukushima Accident Updates.
Rod Adams
PS - Please do not disrespect my level of knowledge about nuclear energy by comparing it to that displayed by Jimmy Carter. He lasted just six months in the program, never existing the classroom phase. He was out of the Navy and farming peanuts in Georgia by October 1953; the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine, did not get underway on nuclear power until January 17, 1955. That was 15 months AFTER Carter had already resigned his commission. In contrast, I served as the Engineer Officer of USS Von Steuben for about 40 months and 6 patrols. I freely admit that I have never managed any aspect of a large commercial nuclear power plant, but I have been in Maneuvering for more transients, startups and shutdowns than most commerical plants will see in 60 years of operation.
On Nuclear Fission Energy – Best of the Above
@tamikenn57
You claim to have been employed in places where you obtained some amount of experience with nuclear materials, but can you be a little more specific about your actual job and training? As is the case in any industrial facility, there is a wide range of employment at nuclear facilities - with jobs ranging from janitorial services to PhD level science and engineering. The level of training and understanding varies quite considerably among those various jobs. My guess is that your assignment was not at a very skilled or responsible level.
I am fully cognizant of the way that the Navy handles its used reactor cores and its used reactor compartments. For a part of my Navy career, I was the resources (requirements) officer at OPNAV N43 who was tasked with evaluating the annual budget requirement from Naval Reactors. I can assure you that we handled the waste carefully and completely. I can also assure you that waste handling and disposal did not represent a big portion of our operating cost.
Though there are many in the nuclear industry who disagree with me, I trust other nations with nuclear energy and believe them when they say that they want commercial power, not useless, burdensome weapons. It is my personal opinion - illuminated through years worth of research - that many of the people who CLAIM to believe that certain countries are seeking weapons are REALLY worried about the possibility that those countries will become independent producers of nuclear energy facilities. When they can handle a fuel cycle on their own, they become FAR less vulnerable to international sanctions and other weapons of economic destruction.
Countries that build and operate nuclear power plants for their internal energy consumption also free up substantial quantities of oil and gas that they can then export into world markets in COMPETITION with suppliers like Saudi Arabia. Though traditionally an energy consuming nation, Israel has in recent years discovered vast quantities of natural gas in several multi-trillion cubic feet deposits in the eastern Mediterranian. They NEED to keep others out of the export market so that they can produce and export that newly found gas at the most profitable price achievable.
(I hope you can see just how much MOTIVE some of the biggest influencers on US foreign policy have to ensure that Iran is demonized and isolated.)
On In The ‘Crazy’ World Of Carbon Finance, Coal Now Qualifies For Emission Reduction Credits
Please correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it true that an emission free nuclear plant built in a developing nation DOES NOT qualify for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and cannot obtain any emissions credits?
This is just one more example of the absurd way with which the world's political decision makers are going about addressing a huge and dangerous problem. People who campaign against nuclear are working against the very best tool that nature has provided to allow human society to continue to harness energy that does not come from muscles and is available around the clock on demand.
Once again, it really seems clear to me that the whole process has been dominated by The Establishment energy fuel providers seeking to use their existing wealth and power to accumulate even more of both while tying down atomic energy with as many Lilliputian style strings as possible.
When will atomic Gullivers wake up and recognize that we have the power to toss off these silly strings?
On Dieter Helm: Coal Critic, Atomic Agnostic, Natural Gas Enthusiast
@ronwagn
Just curious - are you willing to share information about your involvement with the natural gas extraction, distribution and sales enterprise? Are you a trader or financial investor?
I freely disclose that I am a nuclear professional, employed by a nuclear power plant vendor. I invest in nuclear related stocks including uranium mining, plant vendors, and selected utility operating companies. Energy density is the key; a single gram of uranium produces as much energy as 2 million grams of oil and also produces less than one gram of waste material, none of which is a gas that needs to be dumped into our common atmosphere.
You can find out a lot more about both my personal interest in nuclear energy and about the energy industry in general by visiting Atomic Insights. There are more than 2,500 posts there and about 20,000 comments, many of which have been thoughtfully provided by practicing experts in the field of radiation health, energy production and nuclear power plant design.