I’m getting tired of comments threads being derailed by disputes over nuclear power. So I’m going to give everyone a final chance to state their views on the question, then declare this topic off-limits. Here are my views:
* If there is no better option, I’d prefer an expansion of nuclear power to continued reliance on fossil fuels (particularly coal) to generate electricity
* We don’t have enough information to determine whether nuclear power is more cost-effective than the alternatives (conservation, renewables, CCS) and we have debated this question at excessive length (a fact which itself reflects our lack of info)
* In practical terms, there is no chance of any movement towards nuclear in Australia for at least the next five years.
So, I’m going to ask everyone to have their final say, and come back in five years when we might have something new and relevant to say.
Update I’ve been asked by Fran Barlow in comments to reconsider my policy, and here is my response. If I see anything new and interesting (to me, that is) on the topic, I’ll post on it, and open up discussion. Readers who see something suitable are welcome to email me and tell me. Otherwise, nothing more on this until further notice, please, including in open threads.
John Quiggin 
Well this is off topic but perhaps we have other sources of human error to worry about in the financial markets (yes its a bubble…and still there)…its a bit of analogy isnt it when some want to suggest nuclear is perfectly (and I mean perfectly) safe when we cant even get the financial markets in order??
http://www.ldjackson.net/news-politics/taking-the-wall-street-plunge/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
Oh its a lovely world we all live in. Its all just so …hmm perfect.
BilB, my narrative is about where we are most likely headed. In regards to population growth I am pleasantly surprised at the speed of growing negativity towards it and realise the same thing could easily happen towards economic growth and rampant capitalism.
I think that widespread application of renewables must be associated with a major change towards sustainability with all it’s consequences to our current economic and political system. This is the most desirable outcome.
Widespread application of nuclear power looks to me like a desperate attempt at BAU in the first place but in the long run could ameliorate the worst effects of AGW until we get with the ZEN, that is, learn to live with the constraints of Mother Nature.
Basically it all comes down to political will. Political will could start us on a sustainable renewables future, or a risky nuclear future with rising prices for fuel and occasional accidents, or continuing reliance on fossil fuels with well known consequences and probable collapse of civilization. Or a mix of all three. Or, a change of our economic system to a steady state and/or a power down to ward off a possible collapse.
Unfortunately, action on the science will be limited and real life consequences will need to be felt before vested interests can be overcome.
Liability insurance. For some time, I’ve been looking for estimates of the monetary cost of liability insurance for nuclear power and finally found some. (I am setting aside here the difficult moral question as to what extent a financial calculus is at all relevant in relation to human life and health.)
With respect to the French nuclear power operator, EDF, Mycle Schneider, International Consultant on Energy and Nuclear Policy, reports in Nuclear Power in France – Beyond the Myth, Brussels, December 2008, Commissioned by the Greens-EFA Group in the European Parliament, p30 :
“A study for the European Commission suggested that if EDF was required to fully insure its power plants with private insurance but using the current internationally agreed limits on liabilities, it would increase EDF’s insurance premiums from €c0.0017/kWh, to €c0.019/kWh, thus adding around 0.8% to the cost of generation. However, if there was no ceiling in place and an operator had to cover the full risk of a worst-case scenario accident, it would increase the insurance premiums to €c5.0/kWh, thus tripling the current total generating costs.59 “
fn 59 “Solutions for environment, economy and technology”, Report for DG Environment, Environmentally harmful support measures in EU Member States, European Commission, January 2003, page 132, quoted in Antony Froggatt, Simon Carroll, “Nuclear Third Party Insurance: The Nuclear Sector’s ‘Silent’ Subsidy – State of Play and Opportunities in Europe”, 5 November 2007
Good result, Ernestine.
Fran @ #49, renewables are reliable and proven when applied to their strengths. As is nuclear.
Spending ” ten or twenty times as much as is needed” is not an issue because the costs of renewables vs nuclear are nowhere near that now let alone in 5 to 10 years time.
There is a major committment to population growth in many countries including Australia and the USA. Population growth in developed societies adds a huge financial and social burden to residents in terms of infrastructure, services, environment and quality of life.
Population growth increases the cost of resources and so the cost of living and completely negates the increase in wealth touted by growth proponents.
Unfortunately, Australia’s core business has become catering for the needs of increasing population, whether it be here or offshore.
No one has proved that nuclear is the cheapest or solar or wind. The proof will be in the building AND decomissioning and lifecycle costs which no-one knows. When the world gets desperate for power it will not always be the “cheapest” that gets the finance. All the corruption under the sun will be set free (if it hasn’t already).
Now even the ‘cheapest’ don’t win. Solar power is extremely attractive despite it’s higher costs.
Growth takes up a considerable amount of our resources, labour, materials, education, infrastructure, energy. Without growth, these resources would be available for use on wiser things like sustainable energy and a sustainable society.
@Salient Green
Salient … when comparing costs, one must compare like with like. Whether society as you so delicately describe it “powers down” or powers up it will want dependable power at acceptable cost. This will be true whether people turn off their appliances at night or not.
The fact of the matter is that right now about 3-4 billion people in the world don’t even have ready access to potable water. Even if they all stopped reproducing above replacement tomorrow they would still going to want reliable water, shelter, food, medicine, transport, refrigeration, light and so forth. Renewables can’t give them these things reliably at acceptable cost. Nor can industrial societies that are set up to deliver this stuff operate on highly volatile power supply.
If you are going to use power sources that have capacity credits of less than 20% then regardless of how good they are occasionally you are going to have to either back these up with sources that have nearly 80% capacity credits or have storage for this credit or overbuild by a factor of five, or some combination. In the case of renewables, they are limited by site. You must build a solar facility where insolation is high and persistent, a wind facility where there’s wind within the range that the turbines can exploit most of the time, a geothermal facility where there are hot rocks, a hydro facility where there is good head pressure and so forth.
If these resources are not close together then you have to connect them all to the grid using very long lines and connection equipment which adds very substantially to the build cost. In Australia, even in the hot arid centre at midday, it is not always equally sunny. Cloud can persist over a very wide area for several days at a time, meaning that solar facilities, would have top be placed far enough apart to not share the same cloud cover. The same goes for wind. No government is gong tyo be responsible for a system in which power output can’t be predicted or where the cost of security makes it necessary to hike power charges to include 2 million dollars per Km over tens of thousands of Km or pay for several days’ storage for the whole economy at $5-6000 per KwH. We are not entirely sure in this country we even want FTH broadband at $40 billion. 10,000 km of HDVC @ 2 million per km plus an overbuild of five times capacity so we can do renewables? And where are we getting the water cooling for all that thermal solar? Good luck selling that. Good luck getting it done in 25 years even if you could sell it.
And is it really even renewable if you have massive multiples of steel and copper and concrete over conventional power to do it and it only lasts 25 years before decommissioning? Not in my opinion.
Most countries in the world will reach for nuclear power with alacrity in preference. It is no accident that the most effective commercial wind in the world — that in Denmark, supplies a market backed by German coal and nuclear, Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear.
Here in Australia, there is a substantial body of opinion that is anti-nuclear on principle and one can see that in some of the regulars. Everyone is entitlled to their view but we should know what we are choosing. If you adopt this policy then in practice you are choosing coal or gas into the indefinite future. Yes we may have some lovely marquee wind facilities, an impressive solar plant or two, perhaps a tidal facility in Broome. A whole bunch of people may have solar panels on their rooves. By 2050 we may have a really nice geothermal facility in SA. But per capita emissions will not be much less than what they are now and coal and gas will still between them deliver at least 80% of our basic power supply. If we can get most cars onto the grid by converting them to EV, this will still be a substantial step forward in resource efficiency terms and the cut in per capita emissions will be bigger but we will still fall far short of what is needed to be a good global citizen. Meanwhile, places like China, India and Indonesia, who are not against nuclear on principle will have cleaner power than us.
Moreover to believe in renewables, you have to believe in good faith and courage by successive governments between now and 2050. You have to keep building to maintain capacity. If we built state of the art nuclear facilities between now and 2035, these would only need recurrent maintenance over the ensuing 60 years of their life cycle. We wouldn’t have to control emissions of GHGs or anything else. There would be almost none. And if we placed them where there were coal plants being phased out, the environment locally would immediately become cleaner contributing to the health of people straight away. That alone would justify the expense.
Straw man. We’re not suggesting, we’re saying straight out that it is a lot saf-ER than windpower, hydro, coal, oil, and gas. It is probably safer than solar power, although that’s a little harder to demonstrate, since so little solar power is produced.
And just to underline my point above about how much people are willing to pay at the moment to do climate change mitigation …
One in three voters against paying for climate change ‘myth’
The Government’s abrupt, three-year pause in introducing an emissions trading scheme angered many of the 35 per cent of voters who believe human activity is changing the climate.
Now even some of those believers are refusing to pay the rises in power bills and other household costs which would be caused by an ETS, the survey has found.
About 35 per cent of all voters told Galaxy they did not want to pay a cent, and that group included 15 per cent of people who agreed with the concept of man-made climate change.
Of the change believers, 27 per cent would not pay more than $100 a year extra.
Almost half – 47 per cent – would not pay more than $100 a year to combat climate change, the poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs showed.
[…]
The lower your income, the less you are likely to want higher bills, which is why nearly half the unemployed oppose the idea.
The greatest opposition to paying even a cent extra came from Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland.
If this poll is even roughly accurate, how keen do you suppose any government is going to be to forcing anything like the internalisation of costs or the RECs needed to make renewables competitive in energy markets at industrial scale?
Successive governments will put this into the future projects in tray, do renewable window dressing and encourage everyone to personally do their bit to save the planet.
@G.R.L. Cowan
It’s unlikely to be measurably safer than wind, GRL … but as both are very safe, this isn’t that relevant.
Fran,
You have made a bewildering array of assumptions there, which appear to be mostly incorrect. You’ve identified real issues with energy systems, selected the most negative view, then strung them out end for end. Life is not like that, and design engineers are not that stupid. For instance, 10,000 kilomters of HVDC?? that is the Sydney to Perth times 3. There is an extensive Eastern seaboard electricity grid already in place. HVDC is only required to connect the Eastern Grid with Western Australia Grid, and if that were to be done it certainly would not be done 3 times over. Wind turbines are being built because they are cost effective and fit into the energy production map very well. Again with CSP extended solar downtime is very rare and catered for with biomass firing. The Solarpaces document spells out how the 3 levels of electricity delivery work and cost.
It seems to me that you are getting rather hysterical over the whole energy fluctuation issue completely losing site of the fact that demand fluctuates. Any number of commentators have shown how consumer demand tracks very well with solar output. You are rudely patronising for the renewables in place and planned, without having any real appreciation of what that total is.
But most astonishing is your determination to waste the free energy that comes to us from the sun which where not used costs more energy to be protected from. Advanced individual solar energy systems will provide all of the individuals energy needs for living for transport, and for sale while providing free hot water space heating and air conditioning. All from one system. And the cost of this is not a burden on the business or government investment resources, it is part of building financing but of a nature that provides an income for each and every building to which it is integrated into. It is that very feature that will ensure rapid uptake of such systems as they become available.
Your vision of the future has every home and business tethered to and totally dependent on a nuclear power station permanently paying for lighting heating cooling cooking and driving. Mine is for a world where all of those things are achieved for free and the money saved dramatically shortens peoples mortgage terms supporting family financial independence at a very early age. The coming generations will need every cost saving that they can find as they will be carrying the burden left by our generation.
Just read your #8, Fran. Well there you have it. There is no problem. Coal it is. The whole Nuclear issue just died because the market has spoken. I’m glad the whole global warming and energy thing is finally resolved.
The chart Warren asks about represents a situation I hope to improve.
The formulae I gave tell how buried nuclear waste would compare, after many decades of continuing burial, with radioactivity naturally already in the same earth. So if fission power plant waste were always buried 560 m deep after ten years aboveground, and the fission power plants on the planetary surface were making 0.1 W/m^2 of heat, after many decades the radioactivity in the earth, down to 560 m, would be nine percent man-made. One-eleventh, 9.09 percent, would be the limit it would tend toward but never reach. And down to 550 m, of course, zero percent.
But what if just one burial occurred, and then no more? Obviously the buildup towards the asymptote would not occur; instead, there would be a peak of much less than nine percent and then a long tailing-off over time to very near zero. If we use logarithmic coordinates, we can hide the nearness to zero, and that is one misleading thing the ‘whatisnuclear’ chart does. (When the red Pu-239 trace gets to half as high on the chart as where it started, that means it’s radiating half as much, right? Wrong: it’s down 99.8 percent.)
And what if we want to obscure the distinction between more energetic decays such as those of 239-Pu and less energetic ones such as those of technetium-99? Then we, on the ‘whatisnuclear’ chart, measure radioactivity in units of curies, which count how many atoms disintegrate per unit time without considering how energetically they do so.
Last and worst of all, what if we want to completely leave out the very illuminating comparison to naturally occurring radioactivity? Then, on that chart, we just … do that. A line representing radium-226 naturally in the earth at equal or lesser depth, if the 239-Pu, etc., are buried a few hundred metres deep, would be a horizontal line well above the chart’s present top edge. (Fixing this, without abandoning the silly use of curies, would involve changing the units from curies to curies-per-square-metre.)
@BilB
You miss the point. If you have to connect facilities dotted all over the landscape to the grid you will eaisly get your 10,000 km figure. How far apart would you have to place wind and solar facilities to ensure they were not affected by the same wind and cloud patterns? How far is your tidal facility going to be from the grid? Your geothermal facility?
Yes, it does but unless it mostly maps to the output of the facility then this worsens the management problem rather than cancelling it out. Regrettably, this is the exception rather than the rule, which is why SAs 900MW of wind gets a capacity credit of 8% and Victorian wind gets 3%. Try this exercise — how much wind or solar would you have to build to replace the world’s dirtiest coal plant — Hazelwood in Victoria?
It’s not a waste if the energy costs more to collect than it is worth. People drop coins in the street all the time and leave them in change slots in vending machines but it never occurs to me to scour the streets or vending machines for this “free money” and even when I see it I don’t bother picking it up. The cost per KwH of uranium or thorium is also tiny and you want to waste that.
Ah, we’re back with your fear of “tethering” — your own personal twist on socio-spatial angst. As I said, this is a cultural choice for you as it is for many.
It’s not cost-efficient for everyone to be their own energy producer. It’s not even plausible for renters like me. I would not be allowed to put a solar panel on my roof and charge the landlord. Nuclear power remains the cheapest near-zero footprint energy source there is.
Think of it — for about $3.5 billion dollars we replace Hazelwood and cut Australia’s total emissions by 5% (9% of electricity related emissions) AND clean up Morwell of its local coal pollution. Victoria becomes Australia’s lowest emitter. Australian aluminium becomes the cleanest in the world after Iceland’s. We use the off peak power to power desal making that clean too. How simple is that?
@BilB
Squeal all you like. This is where your advocacy will inevitably lead. You and I can bat this back and forth until we’re bored, but one can guarantee that without nuclear, business and government will choose coal and gas and well-intended people like you will not get a hearing. You want a clean and substantially decentralised energy system, but you will get a dirty one tarted up at significant expense like the metaphoric pig with lipstick instead. Count on it.
I should think that nobody is going to make up their mind on the basis of public relations and sales promotion advocacy.
@BilB
Ah so now Fran declares about you
“Ah, we’re back with your fear of “tethering” — your own personal twist on socio-spatial angst.”
Whatever that means is anyone’s guess. Perhaps Fran should unpack it and bit more and map it out for the rest us of us?
Fran,
HVDC is for long haul interconnection of entire grids. Local grid connection for the near connection of smaller energy suppliers such as wind turbines is aready in place. To replace Hazelwood? One SolarPaces CM3 CSP plant of equal of equal nameplate capacity is all it will take. And with solar energy we are not talking about coins in the street, we are talking about Jackpot lottery wins and seams of gold kind of wasted opportunity. Everyone is already tethered, what is on offer is energy freedom. Yes it is cost efficient to be one’s own energy producer with the GenII solar PV coming up, if only you bothered to use a calcualtor you would see just how cost efficient that is at today’s electricity prices. As I have been at pains to 10 Kw capacity on 6 million small an residence rooves replaces 50% of Australia’s electricity generation capacity and the cost for that infrastructure is bourne by the end user paid for with the money that they would otherwise pay to the current electricity distributor. This is entirely cost neutral for the user and the government, and such installations accelerate the rate at which the total system will be replaced with renewables. As a renter you would have the option of buying your electricity from the central grid suppliers or from independent agencies managing the distributed grid “exported” electricity. This is the ultimate energy free market that you were arguing for just a couple of years ago.
$3.5 billion? This would be your imaginary price extraction based no doubt on the Indian deal built by China with Indian labour in the country where desperate people weld metal together with welding shields made from cardboard and coloured selophane. Not credible. My 12 year old is snuggled here beside me and is saying “what is wrong with Solar power that is what we should be using, it is so obvious”.
Fran, To BilB’s excellent arguments at #10 I will add that ‘de-comission’ applies to nuclear power as increasing contamination means that at the end of a power station’s life it must be completely dismantled and the waste stored very carefully for 100’s of years, thousands of tons of concrete, steel, soil etc.
The term need not apply to renewables and certainly not after 25 years. PV cells don’t just stop producing power at the end of their guarantee and mirrors don’t stop reflecting after 25 years. The tower of a wind turbine and footings, as well as the supporting infrastructure of PV and Solar thermal arrays probably have a useful life of over a hundred years with upgrades and replacements required occasionally to the business end and regular maintenance such as painting and cleaning.
On your point about lots of cooling water required for solar thermal, a bottoming cycle such as Kalina which is air cooled could and should be used to cool the steam and increase efficiency.
@BilB
Do you have liability insurance costs for CSP and wind (and any others) or are these costs built into production costs as they should? (small stuff, like my solar hot water oollectors, did not change my house insurance.)
I am asking these questions because I finally found some estimates for nuclear power in France. See 3, p3 above.
Here is an excellent article titled “The Future of Nuclear Energy: Facts and Fiction – Part IV: Energy from Breeder Reactors and from Fusion?”
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5929
It became particularly interesting at section 4 where the realities of large technolgical gaps in Gen IV were detailed and then section 5 where much larger technological gaps were detailed for fusion power.
Ernestine,
Dr Franz Trieb informed me in personal conversation that the long term failure rate for CSP is 1% per annum, so operators cover this with a 2% of capital insurance policy. The issue of environmental liability did not come up, perhaps that means that to date it had not been seen as a significant risk or it was covered in the other 1%. This, of course, might be situation specific or even vary from country to country.
I’ve read you 3/3 and saved it to file. So thanks. That is a good research reference platform, now looking for corroborative information.
The most appealing road EV that I have seen to date. Its Mini Cooper styling has my daughters very keen, even though this is intended as a taxi
http://smh.drive.com.au/motor-news/cab-that-charges-itself-20100421-sse8.html
I’ll just insert a general personal observation here from a veteran of the Roxby protest in ’83, an organiser of the Roxby protest in ’84, and a coordinator of SA’s Campaign Against Nuclear Energy through the mid 80’s.
The fight against uranium mining in Australia was lost by the time I stopped working for CANE.
The lure of $Squillions will remain irresistible. Some projects are so environmentally daft, though, that they need to be nixed at the outset. I have grave reservations about the expansion of Roxby to become the world’s biggest man-made hole in the ground and Heathgate’s in-situ leach project at Beverly, but anyone who followed my previous weblink would discover I wasn’t campaigning against either. Closed-loop ISL at least makes more sense where most deposits are found in areas with very little water on offer.
I’m no longer opposed to nuclear power for AGW reasons, but I remain sceptical of it. Where our U3O8 is a feedstock for existing reactors in NPT-ratifying countries it’s a lacklustre 2 cheers from me.
However, as to building new reactors, and particularly in Australia, you’re going to have to work harder than saying it’s ‘safe’ and ‘cheap’ repeatedly to convince me.
There seems an obvious opportunity cost problem in tying up so much investment in huge-scale centralised projects whose final cost is never really fully determined given the still unsolved disposal issue, and that have to be massively publicly-subsidised in order to operate. Particularly the insurance risk.
I did identify at my last post the actual scale and potential growth of wind farm infrastructure here in SA, and this is appearing over months, not decades. As for safety, let’s consider ‘Massive air spill at wind farm: not many troubled’ as a potential headline!
SA also has several thermal projects drilling as we speak. Some of them may, amusingly, end up making the carbon cost of some nearby uranium mining operations much more attractive. It’s early days, though.
As for solar-baseload – well let’s build some pilot plants and find out if it works. The sun will always be with us, but we may not be rich enough to build the infrastructure required to capture its energy effectively forever.
Yes, I accept that new nukes might have to come into the mix if we determine that renewables really can’t handle it – bear in mind we’re theoretically wisely putting the oodles of cash we’re making from exporting our yellow-cake into an infrastructure fund – but that’s just means we’re deferring the problem, as the uranium won’t last forever either. (3 decades? Half a century?) And after that – well, in my experience the people who seem most convinced of the feasability of endlessly extracting Tritium from seawater are the La Rouchies! (h/t Alexander Cockburn, AGW denier) One shouldn’t argue by provenance, but…
Incidentally, I agree with Nick Minchin about at least 2 things –
One, preserving the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary from uranium miners (where I agree with Ian Plimer, too. Seriously.)
Two, SA should be the site of the federal nuclear waste dump. It’s blatantly hypocritical to be the major world supplier of nuclear materials, pocket buckets of cash, and then play NIMBY over the waste. We’re wealthy, politically and geologically stable, sparsely populated, and even stand to make more money out of it!
Good call Prof Q. The debate on nuclear is short on sunshine but long on wind.
BilB,
Pleasure. The post by JohnL also contains information. The economic analysis of any energy source requires reliable scientific-technological information and economists who are sufficiently ‘scientifically minded’ to be able to communicate with the science-technology people. It is absurd to suggest that 1 person can arrive at any sensible conclusion on anything by means of throwing around a few words.
Thanks for your candidness there, Bill. I think that Rudd has killed himself off and, for the moment, the momentum on environment action with his blatant “wait for CCS technology to catch up” tactic just as Howard did with the “wait for Nuclear to be available” bulldozer tactic. The South Australian renewables story is the best news in Australia other than the Burdekin area cane ethanol performance (see Pioneer Cane and the Friends of Ethanol). Salient Green is right in his assertion that nothing will be done until there is no time left then every thing that wrong will be done in a panic. SA is a leading light, and not for the first time.
The only manner in which nuclear waste is even vaguely acceptible in Australia is if it is encased in high lead content leach proof vitreous pellets which are then disposed of in the same (deepest) hole from which the uranium was extracted, and covered to provide the same original degree of geological seperation that the Uranium was protected by.
I am confident that Nuclear will never get up in Australia, for a whole swag of reasons, not the least of which is coming from SA’s renewable energy achievements achievements.
@bill
The fight against unranium mining was lost when a ALP national conference held at the Lakeside Hotel in Canberra resolved to support the 3 mines policy.
Also the Seamens union was willing to ban handling yellowcake but only if the Australian Railways Union banned handling yellowcake on rail. The right wing ARU failed to do this.
Community campaigns such as CANE, MAUM, FOE etc appear to have operated out of this ALP-union loop, and consequently failed.
No doubt corrupt ALP heavies were also responsibile for driving ALP policy where-ever big capitalist corporations desired.
this is timely – peter sinclair of ‘climate crock of the month’ fame (and didn’t we all enjoy that last devastating takedown of lord monckton) now adds ‘renewable energy technology of the month’
this month’s technology? – wind power
should be an entertaining series
@bill
Thanks for your contribution Bill.
You say:
I absolutely endorse this. I’m quite as sick of hearing about the potential of solar thermal as some here are about nuclear power. I see no good reason why we shouldn’t build one or two industrial scale solar thermal plants and try to make them do the job of a baseload power plant. Let’s pick what those best placed think are the ideal locations and configurations, give them a budget of 4 billion per GW or so and see what they can come up with. Then we will know and can either scale it up in a hurry or move on.
I also think though, as part of the deal, we ought at the very least to have a serious public debate about nuclear power — one which isn’t couched as the energy equivalent of a referendum on ch*ld p*rnography.
I’d like to see a scientific and economic commission into nuclear power set up which would have expertise on its panel in each of the key areas of feasibility to be considered — proliferation, hazmat and stewardship, engineering and specification, economics, CO2 mitigigation, etc and to examine the feasibility of specific locations. The panel could examine each question in phases publishing draft reports for public discussion and feedback. It might take 12 or even 18 months with a new report published quarterly. It’s a scandal that this has never been done.
Then we could have a basis for deciding whether it should be included in the mix in Australia that everyone could accept as properly scientific.
@bill
great link bill
@Fran Barlow
Im not sick of hearing about solar thermal and Id like to hear more about it and I am sick of hearing about mostly one person’s extremely lengthy misleading pro nuclear posts.
I wish JQ would declare the thread closed.
Thank you, JQ, for the respite. These debates are particularly tiresome.
For the sake of posterity, my position is as follows: we should aim for implementing the suite of power-producing technologies that gives the greatest benefits at the lowest cost/risk; the costs/risks should be borne by those who benefit. Ruling out certain technologies without comparing rigorous CBAs is puerile foolishness.
Those who, like me, believe that global warming is a threat are compelled by intellectual coherence to advocate following the shortest possible path away from our reliance on coal, oil, and gas. This means considering all options, and bowing to fiscal reality. So I can’t have my ideal – orbiting solar collectors built by space elevator and beaming energy down in microwaves (assuming we don’t have a physics breakthrough and start directly tapping gravity as a power source 🙂 ).
Those advocating rapid nuclear development must, in turn, bow to political reality – negative attitudes in Australia and many other places will only change slowly (though if AGW has more severe effects than anticipated, it may make people reconsider their opposition). This means accepting sub-optimal solutions in the short- to medium-term, and having to concentrate on the problematic areas of nuclear in order to sway public opinion – waste, storage, decommissioning, proliferation.
Unfortunately, I can all too easily imagine the worst of both worlds – continued corporate intransigence and political thumb-twiddling on moving away from fossil fuels, half-hearted energy efficiency measures, insufficient investment in renewables OR nuclear, rising GHG emissions… then panic about AGW’s negative effects that used to be a long time away and suddenly seem uncomfortably close, and a mad dash for decarbonisation that involves rapid nuclearisation with the attendant increased risks and costs, which is too late to stop damaging changes in our weather patterns anyway.
Sigh.
If the pro nuclears were half interested they may also like to check Seouls efforts to use tidal energy which harnesses the power of tides (as regular as closkwork) and they expect will generate enough “clean” “risk free” energy for half a million homes.
And to make matters worse, while we are sitting on our “posteriors” arguing about yellowcake they started building this thing 6 years ago.
Why cant I hear more about that? Why arent we building them? Its boring hearing pro nuclear arguments on behalf of people with nothing but mining equipment they want to use.
While Australia is five years behind everything …and I mean everything…arguinmg with rednecks about nukes…other countries are actually doing dome testing and constructing of clean energy sources.
Like Scotland. Do we want to be left behind in the race for clean power with the pro nukers holding up advance?
No. They can be stored with the outdated waste of their own technology for 1000s of years.
It looks like Korea is clearly winning this race (tidal power) and they have put the money in…even Scotland and Canada are building or constructing for testing.
… http://genastropsychica.blogspot.com/ …
possible spammer
@Jarrah
The first part is my general attitude here, which is why I favour a thorough and informed debate where questions can be given contextually relevant naswers. “How would that work here?” is something that has not been comprehensively addressed.
I would like all the possible suites of options to be put on the table and compared for efficacy, cost & abatement efficiency, environmental impact with their timelines included, and so forth so that we could pick the suite that worked best. By all means, if there are technologies that are plausible right now which we haven’t full worked through, let’s spend the money and explore them. Let’s try to plug them into our sources of demand for energy at industrial scale (though still in “pilot” and “prototyping” configuration) and see how it works. Let’s have a go at tidal or geothermal or wave or syngas from solar thermal + waste biomass or algae or whatever.
That way we can avoid this dance about what might work and see what can work within acceptable parameters.
I have to say I share Jarrah’s ‘worst of both worlds’ fears.
As to public mood the nuclear option always seems to me uniquely vulnerable – and I apologise if this has been extensively covered before.
The oil spill off Lousiana that currently seems, unfortunately, not to have been contained won’t put anyone off oil as a technology, though it may – and should – have a substantial impact on offshore drilling. Oil=cars, and we love and really know our cars. And, for whatever reason, as a species we’re generally far more scared standing at the top of a ladder than we are of sitting in a car doing 110 and missing another car going diametrically the other way at the same speed by a couple of metres.
But invisible, undetectable particles that may cause slow lingering death and – horror of horrors – potential mutations in our offspring; there’s a gut level of fear that even the largest oil slick can never hope to replicate.
Nuclear power is uniquely ‘unlucky’. I’m not afraid in the car, perhaps because I have no similar evolved response to the potential impact of speed as I do to heights. Al Gore is currently pointing out that the CO2 slick in our atmosphere is way larger than the Lousiana oilslick, but we still just can’t react to it the way we do to all-too-tangible black sludge.
But radiation is the invisible ‘no-apparent-evolved-response’ entity that really gives us the willies! Hiroshima and Nagasaki being our first introductions to it didn’t help.
So the whole industry, particularly the as-yet-unbuilt sector of it, is always one-more-Three-Mile-Island – let alone another Chernobyl – away from an almost complete withdrawal of public support, certainly in this country, AGW notwithstanding. And, I’d suggest, a massive dent – if not collapse – in any shareholder confidence.
I’m not at all saying the technology hasn’t improved massively since the incidents listed, but I will note that it seems BP were so confident that what’s unfolding now couldn’t happen that they were specifically allowed not to prepare for it!
We clearly cannot afford any such complacency if we proceed down the nuclear path. This includes factoring in this ‘public-perception risk’ that is pretty-well confined to this one industry.
@bill
You make a good deal of sense and I can endorse your reasoning. Firsdt world people ought to be a lot more relatively fearful of dying/getting sick from cancer or heart disease or in a road accident or from particualte or aerosol pollution or indeed, falling off a ladder than sharks, or terrorists or nuclear accidents. But big events loom large in people’s minds.
Unlike our oil drilling operation which by defintion is outside of goround we can control and involves huge masses of material under pressure, something like the Chernobyl fire can be contained by a very simple piece of technology — a concrete containment structure. They all have them now. Passive shutdown technology also makes a repeat of Chernobyl impossible.
Actually, Dr. Teller made sure that in his adopted country, and all its allies, there would be no first Chernobyl. His Reactor Safeguard Committee had described the accident in all but name by about 1950.
Fran,
You do not know what you are talking about. No containment vessel will prevent a significant hydrgen explosion from destroying the building. That is what created the mess at Chernobyl, and came close at Three Mile Island.
And,
“Passive shutdown technology also makes a repeat of Chernobyl impossible”
this is also nonsense. Automatic control rod management systems work under normal circumstances. Accidents happen when the abnormal occurs. When materials fail, sensors fail, when systems fail, when people fail, when combinations of controls fail, when external events intervene.
Fat breeder reactors with liquid metal cooling MAY reduce the risk of hydrogen explosions, but using liquid metals introduces a truck load of other more challenging problems.
You appear to have read the glossy brochure, but not the opporational manual or the troubleshooting and problem solving manuals containing the dangers and cautions, along with the pages that cover “when to evacuate the area”.
Your engineering naivity is charming in the “around the bar-b-que” sense, but in the making decisions sense, it is dangerous.
@BilB
you are correct BilB – but no amount of reason will disuade anyone who is committed to nuclear that nuclear is a failed option, superseded by technologies that in their economic and broader social sense hold greater promise now and into the future. If reason could work it would have already.
On a positive note, many other countries are working hard researching and implementing practical solutions to future energy needs, and we in Australia will benefit from their research and technologies. eg bill’s link at #28
I guess that one thing that could reopen discussion on this topic would be if an energy company in Australia, say AGL, expressed interest in building a nuclear power station, or overseas companys or investors offered to enter the Australian energy market by building a nuclear power plant. Until someone who actually can build a nuclear power plant wants to build one here the whole issue seems fairly dead. But in the meantime I recommend that people who support nuclear power should push for a high price being put on carbon as soon as possible, as that will help make nuclear power more competitive.
TerjeP (say Taya), carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases that contributes to global warming causing the average surface temperature of the earth to rise. My understanding is that CO2 contributes to over 85% of greenhouse gases in Kong Kong and it is not hard to figure out that using a cleaner fuel ie natural gas will more or less resolve their problem. As for carrying on I suggest you desist
I think the smell in Hong Kong is due to factories in China not domestic emissions and definitely not CO2 which is without odour.
Ronald – we should be seeking to make nuclear cheaper not fossil fuels more expensive. If we do the former then transition to a zero emission energy system is no regret.
No, no we really shouldn’t be seeking to make nuclear energy cheaper than fossil fuels. Commercial nuclear power has had 56 years and hundreds of billions of dollars from various governments to get cheaper than fossil fuels and hasn’t managed it yet, so I don’t think it would be wise to spend our limited resources this way and hope. I do think it would be wise to make people who burn fossil fuels pay for at least some of the damage they are causing. Putting a price on carbon is the most efficient way to do this. Once there is a price on carbon if the cheapest way to generate CO2 free energy is nuclear power, then power companies will apply to build nuclear plants. If the cheapest way is to burn biomass in existing coal plants, then that is what they will do. A price on carbon is the most efficient way to reduce emissions and it is something the government can start right now by putting a carbon tax in place until a carbon trading scheme is up and running. This would result in reduced emissions immediately. Contributing money to nuclear power research is a gamble and, looking at the history of the nuclear power and the very low cost of coal in Australia, one where the odds are very much against humanity.
I don’t think it would be wise
TerjeP, do you have a way to make nuclear power cheaper than fossil fuels? If there is such a way, why hasn’t the nuclear power industry used it at some point in the last 56 years? Is the method of making nuclear power cheaper than fossil fuels revolutionary and new, or were the nuclear power industries simply too stupid to realize they could use it? If the nuclear power industries didn’t use it because they were stupid, can we trust what they say, as they might be
No, we should those who burn fossil fuels pay for at least some of the cost they are inflicting on others.
TerjeP, Commercial nuclear power has had 56 years to get cheaper than coal. I don’t think we can afford to wait any longer and hope that the cost of low emission electricity will decrease. There are at least two coal plants in Australia that I know of where coal is scraped out of the ground and dumped on a conveyor belt that takes to straight to the coal plant right next door. It costs the coal plant about $2.50 a ton to mine this coal.
Oops, I only meant to send the first paragraph. I didn’t mean to send the other paragraphs. I rewrote and didn’t delete my first draft. Sorry for my messy posting.
“Commercial nuclear power has had 56 years and hundreds of billions of dollars from various governments to get cheaper than fossil fuels and hasn’t managed it yet, so I don’t think it would be wise to spend our limited resources this way and hope. ”
If coal was really so cheap and good, then why don’t people open up new coal-fired power stations next to the nuclear ones all over Europe and the US and put them out of business, and why is France still able to export all that obviously so expensive nuclear power? If coal really was so cheap, I don’t see why some country that doesn’t care too much about global warming (i.e., all the poor ones) wouldn’t just plonk a few plants down in Europe.
“My understanding is that CO2 contributes to over 85% of greenhouse gases in Kong Kong and it is not hard to figure out that using a cleaner fuel ie natural gas will more or less resolve their problem”
.
Last time I was in HK, I think the cheaper cleaner fuel was going to come from a couple of new nuclear reactors built in Guangdong (see e.g., here), as well as an old one. That won’t resolve the problem of cross border smog (which comes from many sources like shipping, the coal fired power plants of HK and Shenzhen, and the trucks using poor quality diesal fuel), nor the HK generated smog (HK’s own truck fleet is ancient), but it should help it a bit.