The bumpy road to nuclear energy

[bananas]

The bumpy road to nuclear energy

Of the 182 construction permits granted by government commissions, 50 were abandoned in construction with billions in investment lost and 28 were closed before their 40-year licenses expired.

By Mark Clayton | Staff Writer for The Christian Science Monitor/ August 13, 2009 edition



In 1974, President Nixon announced Project Independence – a plan to build 1,000 nuclear stations. But of the 253 reactors eventually ordered by the US electric industry, 71 were canceled before construction began, according to a tally by the antinuclear group Beyond Nuclear.

Of the 182 construction permits granted by government commissions, 50 were abandoned in construction with billions in investment lost and 28 were closed before their 40-year licenses expired – including the Three Mile Island plant’s Unit 2.

Gary McCool knows all about the financial pitfalls of nuclear power. Thirty years ago the Plymouth State College reference librarian warned managers at his tiny New Hampshire Electric Cooperative that its plan to purchase 2 percent of the new Seabrook nuclear power plant’s generating output when it was completed could push the coop into bankruptcy – or perhaps produce the highest electric rates in the nation.

It turned out to be both. Today he’s still paying the price of nuclear power – even though his coop no longer purchases any. There on his monthly bill is a $6.06 charge for “stranded costs” – the cost of paying off the coop’s adventure into Seabrook.

It was a calamity echoed nationwide. Several government-owned power companies, including the Washington Public Power System, went bankrupt. Other investor-owned utilities, such as Long Island Lighting Company and Consumers Power, were nearly bankrupted.

This is a sidebar to the full story, Nuclear power’s new debate: cost

[NNadir]

1. Yeah, it was really, really, really, really, really "bumpy" which accounts for why it produces more

primary energy than all of the cute, cute, cute, cute, cute, cute, cute "by 2050" so called renewable forms of energy in this country combined, including the swell wunderbar Text, of course, you are here to argue - and who would be surpised if you are? - http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/renew_energy_consump/table1.html">7.301 > 8.455.

Of course, in fundie land, this was a tremendously "rocky road," faced by nuclear energy, and very much unlike the wonderful vast success of the tremendously popular solar industry of which Amory Lovins wrote at the dawn of the dumb fundie natural gas shilling age - that would be 1976 as follows, and I quote:

And, at the further end of the spectrum, projections for 2000 being considered by the "Demand Panel" of a major U.S. National Research Council study, as of mid-1976, ranged as low as about 54 quads of fuels (plus 16 of solar energy).

(Lovins, Amory: "The Road Not Taken, Foreign Affairs, October 1976, page 76)

How come we don't have any numerically challenged fundies who've been hauling out this 1970's anti-nuke rhetoric and bull day after day after day after day after day after day, year after year after year after year on and on and on and on for more than 32 years of disasterous dangerous natural gas and coal hegemony about whether or not solar faced a "bumby road."

I mean, 16 quads? Really Amory?

Oh, I see... 16 = 0.091...um...um...um...

Really airhead?

And speaking of airheads, didn't Amory tell the world in the same fucking article on page 83, um,

Neighborhood heat storage is even cheaper. In industry, wind-generated compressed air can easily (and, with due care, safely) be stored to operate machinery: the technology is simple, cheap, reliable and highly developed. (Some cities even used to supply compressed air as a standard utility.)

1976...

No "bumpy road" with the great wind powered compressed air storage industry?

I guess not...

Everybody who has a wind powered compressed air generator in their little suburban airie along with their solar powered electric car is invited to check in on how happy they are with Amory's prescience.

The fact that the Catholic Church has been claiming for 2000 years that Jesus will be back shortly, now matter how oft they repeat it, has not resulted in the arrival of Jesus.

Nuclear energy need not be perfect to be better than everything else. It merely needs to be better than everything else, which it is.

[kristopher]

2. solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security.

Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

[NNadir]

3. Really kiddie?

I've been here since 2002, and only recently have I seen the same dumb over and over and over and over and over and over again "solar, wind, geothermal blah, blah, blah" soothsaying begin to cherry pick articles from the scientific literature, unremarkably, in an illiterate way.

Um, do you know what the word "proposed" means?

In fact, Kiddie, in the last two years that you've been here soothsaying and laughably interpreting your "solar will save us" and "wind will save us" faith, about 50 billion tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste was indiscrimately dumped into the big waste dump in the sky, that would be Earth's atmosphere.

The fucking illiterate Amory Lovins was spouting the exact same bullshit as this "paper" you "cite" in 1976 in his very very very very very very very very very very stupid, obnoxious, delusional, fantasy fiction piece, "The Road Less Taken," (Foreign Affairs, October 1976) which is still often cited by people only slightly more stupid than he is.

How many more hundreds of billions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste will you come here to ignore while we wait for your little fucking Jesus to descend from the sun and bring us all paradise.

How many Bengalis, exactly, have to continue to live in hell while you talk of paradise from your little suburban airie in the car powered clouds?

Last year, there were http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/states/statesca.html">lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of operating reactors in this country each of which produced in a few acres more fucking energy than all of the solar PV systems in the entire United States. It takes just two or three reactors to match all of the wind power in the United States, the main difference being that the reactors are reliable.

That's. Right. Fucking. Now.

That's not some fucking theory or the results of some self referential "study." That's something called reality as in experimentally verifiable results.

Got the difference between observed phenomena and soothsaying speculation?

No?

Why am I not surprised?

I would not recommend the members of the anti-nuke cults attempt to fucking open science books this late in the game. They are clearly too uneducated to understand what the scientific literature means, how reliable it is, or the context of scientific thinking. There are zero fundie anti-nukes who can tell the difference between Blondlot and Bohr, and zero fundie anti-nukes who can tell the difference between George Olah and Stanley Pons. Thus they, the fundie anti-nukes, only look triply more pathetic and ridiculous.

[kristopher]

4. Same old shite, eh?

His arguments are propaganda, pure and simple. You endorse his "numbers", but make no mention of the way those numbers fit into a a larger set of equally relevant information that invalidates the significance he assigns his data. For example, using HIS fundamental criteria for selecting an energy source going forward we should continue to burn fossil fuels.

His ONLY numerical argument for nuclear is that nuclear has produced more electricity than other competing technologies.

He refuses to consider external costs for nuclear, so why should we consider them for fossil fuels?

He refuses to consider the political support that led to the favorable numbers of nuclear, so why should we consider that about coal and demonize the coal lobby?

If the ONLY valid yardstick is aggregate numbers of kWh produced to date, the we should shut down the nuclear plants and increase natural gas and coal generation forever.

Of course that is a ridiculous argument for continuing to use coal, isn't it? It is no less ridiculous when applied to nuclear and the POTENTIAL problems associated it.

The rhetorical sleight-of-hand practiced by Nnadir is to, on a limited basis, compare the crisis created by overuse of fossil fuels to the fact that nuclear isn't a heavy producer of GHG emissions while omitting production numbers - with no mention of production or costs. He then compares the cost and production numbers of nuclear with the cost and production numbers of renewables - with no mention of externalities. That's simply dishonest.

Since this discussion has started the cost figures for nuclear have skyrocketed, so that aspect of nuclear is no longer a reason to support it. When the known/potential externalities and other relevant considerations are factored in to the equation determining what technologies we should pursue to address climate change, the results of the equation are significantly different than Nnadir's "numbers" provide.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=205090&mesg_id=205181

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

[HamdenRice]

7. ROFL! When are you going to take this act on the road? It's comedic gold!

I have no idea what you are talking about as usual, because you simply cannot express yourself. You are the most unclear writer on DU -- mostly because whatever it is you are trying to say is overwhelmed by your vitriol.

But I think you could make a living as a Don Rickels type comedian, but you'd have to change the subject matter from nuclear power to the hair piece of the guy in the third row.

:rof: :rof: :rof:

[joshcryer]

5. Nuclear was subsidized at the expense of renewable power all of these years.

This is indisputable fact.

All energy R&D for the past 30 years:

Conservation: 16956990000 / 6.9%
Fossil Fuels: 33038553000 / 13.5%
Renewables: 19811293000 / 8.1%
Nuclear: 143844275000 / 58.8%
Storage Tech: 7426103000 / 3%
Other Tech: 23193409000 / 9.4%
Total: 244271100000

All USD over the period of 30 years. With roughly a .2% growth rate.

ANY TECHNOLOGY GETTING THAT MUCH R&D MONEY IS GOING TO GROW. .2% growth is pitiful at best.

Neither nuclear or renewable are competitive with fossil fuels. There's no conspiracy "stopping nuclear" from happening. There simply isn't anyone stupid enough to invest in either at the moment.

[bananas]

6. Your word-salad has nothing to do with the OP - or reality.

The chart in the OP shows how reactor orders fell off a cliff in 1974.
Amory's Foreign Affairs article was published in 1976, two years later.
Are you under the delusion that Amory's 1976 article caused reactor orders to fall in 1974?
That's insane.

Amory's article was titled "The Road Not Taken".
Reagan sent us down "The Road Taken".
After thirty years, you still get this backwards.