This quote is attributed, perhaps spuriously to Keynes. A sharper version of the same point is made here by Noah Smith, exploring the concept “Derp”, “”the constant, repetitive reiteration of strong priors”, where “strong priors” in the technical Bayesian sense, mean that ” … you really, really believe something to be true. If your start off with a very strong prior, even solid evidence to the contrary won’t change your mind. ”
A notable example of this, very relevant on this blog, and cited by Smith, is the cost of solar energy. Roughly speaking, the cost of solar modules has fallen by a factor of 10 over the past few years, and the cost of installed systems by a factor of three. If that hasn’t changed your mind about the relative merits of alternative policy option, then you must have really strong priors, and in that case, you shouldn’t be engaging in debate, since your mind can’t be changed by evidence. As Smith observes, “That is unhelpful and uninformative, since they’re just restating their priors over and over. Thus, it is annoying. Guys, we know what you think already.”
But, it’s easy to throw stones, so I thought I would check my own archives to see if I was guilty of Derping on this point. Here is what I thought in 2004
Nuclear (fission) power is probably the cheapest large-scale alternative electricity source (there are some sites where wind is cost-competitive, and similarly for geothermal) but it is still a good deal more expensive than coal or gas. How much more expensive is hard to tell because the industry is riddled with subsidies, but I’d guess that the full economic cost is about twice as high for nuclear electricity as for coal or gas. Moreover, most recent construction has been in places like China and Korea where safety standards may not be as high as they would have to be to get nuclear energy restarted in the developed world as a whole.
What this means is that nuclear power won’t enter into calculations until we have a carbon tax (or equivalent) steep enough to double the price of electricity. It’s clear though, that much smaller increases in costs would make a wide range of energy conservation measures economically viable, as well as reducing final demand for energy services. Implementing Kyoto, for example, would not require anything like a doubling of prices. Whether or not a more radical response is justified, it’s clearly not going to happen for at least a decade and probably longer.
Nevertheless, if mainstream projections of climate change turn out to be correct, and especially if, as Lovelock suggests, they turn out to be conservative, we’ll eventually face the need for new sources of electricity to replace fossil fuels. Solar photovoltaics are improving fast but still a long way from being cost-competitive. So it may well be that, at least for an interim period, expansion of nuclear fission is the best way to go.
I didn’t mention carbon, capture and storage, but I also supported that as a good option for Australia, assuming it could me made to work.
The facts have changed, and I have changed my mind. I now think the role of renewables, and particularly solar is going to be much larger than seemed likely ten years ago, nuclear much less, and CCS marginal.
Update Obviously, this post was intended to provoke a reaction from the critics of renewable energy (normally, also advocates of nuclear) who regularly comment here, challenging them to say how they had adjusted their views in the light of the evidence of the last decade. Most commenters responded thoughtfully. But our single-topic nuclear fans, Hermit and Will Boisvert, responded by herping even more flerps of derp. Despite being reminded of the topic, they just kept on pumping out the same constant, repetitive reiteration of their priors that defines derp. This does, at least provide me with some guidance. From now on, comments from single-issue pro-nuclear commenters (specifically, the two mentioned) will be deleted unless they contain a point that has not been made previously or (highly improbably) a change of view.
John Quiggin 
The follow-up question to declining PV costs is ‘how much could we use if it was absolutely free?’. There is still the problem of night and other low light periods such as winter and cloudy weather. More immediately will we get to 2m solar roofs if the feed-in tariff becomes 8c per kwh Australia wide in a few years? Even the much vaunted assist with air conditioning cost becomes moot after sunset. It can still be 35C at 9 pm on some very hot days. I suspect many aircon users will want grid power from the despised despatchable sources at night. Note that wind is usually becalmed in the high pressure systems of heat waves.
There’s also the early morning electrical demand spike for coffee and toast. While some solar hot water will carry over from the day before others will have have their shower water heated by gas or electricity in near realtime. Without looking it up I think the estimate was that 1.1% of Australia’s electricity was generated by PV in 2012.
Some opine that home batteries will store enough PV generated electricity to run appliances at night. That’s where the cost savings near to occur next as PV is cheap enough. Until there is gigajoule scale storage of solar energy either in homes or central locations then PV could already be close to its sweet spot. Maybe we could get that to 10% then diminishing returns will set in as key despatchable power sources (gas and coal) become less efficient.
@Hermit
I must say, I don’t see any change here from what you were writing nearly 10 years ago in this thread
https://johnquiggin.com/2005/04/29/time-to-go-nuclear/
It is pleasing that the price of solar PV is now in a number of places competitive with fossil fuels. But it does show that the future is unpredictable. 10 years ago the solar enthusiasts were promising grid parity very soon now, but the trouble was they had been promising the same thing for the previous 10 years. 10 years ago it looked most likely that it would be wind in conjunction with some other renewable technology like geo thermal or wave that would be the solution. And as John said, perhaps nuclear would be a supplementary solution.
Now it looks as though solar PV by itself (with new storage technologies) will provide most of the solution. But we don’t know for sure. In ten years it could be a different picture again. However the constant is that it is innovation combined with appropriate (and not necessarily market) incentives that provides the solutions.
The modelling from the AEMO was the game changer for the renewables argument in Australia. This was a study from the people who manage and do the long term planning for the eastern electricity grid. Their work showed that 100% renewables in Australia is technically feasible. It would certainly increase the wholesale cost of electricity, particularly since it requires overbuild of capacity but ironically since privatisation, the wholesale cost is now a much smaller % of the retail electricity price.
Politically we are further away than ever. Abbott signalled in an interview yesterday with Alan Jones that renewables are in his sights.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/tony-abbott-gets-it-wrong-on-wind-farms-and-renewables-80014
Ten years ago, I was predicting a steep cost curve that would make PV competitive by now. I rationalised my prediction with tenable views about the progress of infant technologies and the economies of mass production, but I did have strong priors.
Did I luck out, or do I have the right kind of priors?
@John Quiggin
The vehicle I was running on home made biodiesel all that time needed a total fuel system cleanout due to wax deposits. I’ve now moved on to microhydro and a novel form of energy storage. My conclusion is the same …. put them all together and it won’t be enough.
We shouldn’t feel bad John about how difficult it can be for people to change their mind as it seems to be buried very deep inside our ?still reptilian? brains. I’ve posted this before but this seems a good time to repeat as you just intoned the great Reverend’s name …. Hallowed be thy Bayes.
By way of evidence the wonderful 3 doors problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem (a classic ‘simple’ Bayesian problem) continues to prove this thesis and provide a party treat to befuddle students and intellectually arrogant friends. The problem and its history provides incontrovertible proof that we tend to be non rational when it comes to probabilities and decision making. And (most likely) when you go through the logic, you can prove to yourself how resistant you are to change once you have made up your mind – even in the face of a mathematically precise and trial and error proofs you are wrong.
Beyond that is the wonderful study below which uses this simple problem to show that randomly selected rational people (economics? students for University of St Gallen), are as individuals highly resistant to learning. This simple falsification test should have been enough to bring down all the economic rationalism nonsense but alas we am still waiting.
Interestingly the authors claim competition + communication can eliminate mistaken economic decision making. But omit to mention their data showed mistakes were never completely eliminated, learning of even this simple problem took a long time, and communication and competition are to a degree mutually exclusive the way society is being atomised today .
Slembeck, T., Tyran, J.-R., 2004. Do institutions promote rationality? An experimental study of the three-door anomaly? Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 54 337-350.
(seems to be openly accessible see
http://www1.vwa.unisg.ch/RePEc/usg/dp2002/dp0221slembeck_ganz.pdf )
Abstract
The three-door problem is an example of a systematic violation of a key rationality postulate
that has attracted much attention. In this seemingly simple individual decision task, most people
initially fail to apply correctly Bayes’ Law, and to make the payoff-maximizing choice. Previous
experimental studies have shown that individual learning reduces the incidence of irrational choices
somewhat, but is far from eliminating it. We experimentally study the roles of communication and
competition as institutions to mitigate the choice anomaly. We show that the three-door anomaly
can be entirely eliminated by these institutions.
PV is under $1 per watt (peak) installed now – with some rebate/subsidy involved. If it can manage that price with subsidies gone the amount of installed PV will continue to grow. If it can come down some more – say to 50c per watt – we’ll see unstoppable take up.
I think a lot depends on time of use electricity pricing and how it’s done.
Cheaper solar will make oversizing popular and grid operators are going to have to deal with growth of daytime supply during sunny conditions, whether they want it or not.
In-home batteries are starting to hit the market; if the grid pays too low for daytime excess but charges too high for evening supply that will make an incentive for batteries. They don’t need to do multiple days, just a few hours, to see fossil fuel plant that’s idling during sunny days stay idling through evenings and nights that follow as well. From daily ramp down and ramp up, they can go multiple days ramped down. They will have to shift from always on to only on when needed and will be the backup to renewables without any specifically needed to be built for that purpose.
To what extent energy intensive activities can be scheduled around cheap daytime electricity I don’t know; I doubt many businesses would seek to work that way – but if cheap power is available they may seek to take advantage of it.
In a solar powered Australia, weather prediction is going to be a very serious business, determining when households run their heating and air con most cost effectively, when businesses should best do their heavy lifting, when the fossil fuel plant needs to come online. In ‘smart’ homes with ‘smart’ appliances the most economic energy use will be programmable to some extent.
Solar power systems are going to be capable of switching between any combination of direct consumption, battery charging, power to the grid or from the grid; how that will be programmed to work will probably depend on how charges are being leveled. I think flat electricity charge rates are headed for obsolescence but to what extent retail price will slavishly follow wholesale, or to what extent retailers will offer fixed prices by time of day blocks is unclear. Whichever way it goes the PV owner is going to be able to set their system to best advantage.
Of course nothing is stopping energy companies from being big PV owners or building large scale energy storage; they ought to be able to do it and do it cheaper.
In 1993 when I was still at university finishing engineering I did one of my elective subjects on solar power. I recall seeing charts projecting the cost of solar falling until it could start to be cost competitive with coal around 2015. Based on the costs in the tables attached to the following page, after adjusting for differences in name plate capacity, I suspect the price drop is running behind that 1993 schedule and we won’t be there by 2015.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/capitalcost/
I would make the following points:-
1. I always expected solar to be cheaper to adopt in the future which is why I’ve always thought we should adopt it in the future.
2. Name plate capacity is only part of the story. Capacity factor tends to be much lower for solar and wind.
3. If solar can compete without subsidies or biased feed in tariffs or MRET then let it rip.
4. Most of the stories about coal being subsidised don’t stack up except in regards to some of the sunk capital costs. But they are sunk costs.
5. At some given price on CO2 emissions coal will fall by the wayside relative to alternatives. I’m not of the view that the right price is whatever it takes to kill coal. But I’ll be quite content when something actually is competitive enough to kill coal. It may well happen even with a zero price on CO2 emissions.
Ten years ago I think everybody pretty much agreed that unit prices would fall over time. However without cheap mass storage the system cost of solar and wind increases as the penetration rate gets higher. You can perhaps do some demand shaping with dynamic pricing however this just transmits the cost to consumers. It still entails a higher cost.
“I recall seeing charts projecting the cost of solar falling until it could start to be cost competitive with coal around 2015”
If we had electric cars, it would more than competitive for oil at least right now. Imagine if you had a car with two batteries you could swap in and out easily that plugged more or less directly into a solar panel (i.e., you’d have almost zero installation costs)? This would save the average person thousands in fuel costs for a pretty minimal outlay. Or imagine if you could drive to work, park your car and get it charged before you went home? You’d only need one battery then. I can’t imagine we will have to wait too long for this sort of thing and that’s not even being optimistic.
So at least around some pretty significant edges, solar seems like it will be a bit of a long-term winner.
“I’m not of the view that the right price is whatever it takes to kill coal.” – TerjeP.
I take it you would rather kill the biosphere as place which can support humans? That is the corollary of your position.
Who is projecting the destruction of the biosphere? IPCC is projecting warming that may have serious costs if it is too fast.
@TerjeP
OK, let’s take what we can agree on: the IPCC projections. With respect to serious costs “if it is too fast”. We can add to that. The rate of change (fast or not fast) is not the only issue. The extent of change is also the issue. It is in false to believe that we can adapt and adjust to any extent of change if the rate of change is slow. Eventually extent of change, if it continues, must go beyond any adaptational ability.
I hope by “costs” you mean more than money costs, particularly since money is notional and not real.
@Hermit
Despatchable resources can be 100 per cent efficient (hydro, interruptible tariffs for aluminium smelters and zinc refineries. CCGF plant can be 95 per cent efficient with a short start-up cycle; even the monsters at Loy Yang can pick up or drop 5 Mw/minute and continue working at top efficiency.
No-one familiar with the experience curve should be surprised at the fall in cost of solar panels; the same effect is at work with battery technology.
Given the zero marginal cost of wind and soar power, having some standby gas systems with low utilisation is quite affordable: after all, open cycle gas is used in Victoria for a few hundred hours per year if that.
Ikonoclast,
Money is just a way of measuring things. Of course it’s real costs we care about.
As for IPCC projections we’re probably just going to derail the discussion if we go there.
Perhaps it is more informative to talk in terms of the CO2 price required to make solar cost competitive with coal and how that price has dropped with time. It would seem from the comment by JQ that relative to ten years ago he now thinks a lower CO2 tax will suffice.
Battery technology, PV cell technology, rectifiers etcetera etcetera are all moving ahead. Clever and smart technology. They can move faster, like the Manhattan Project moved things faster.
Against this we have established systems which require burning coal (which incurs great pollution) or nuclear (which is ultimately the greatest polluter).
The latter two are used to boil water. Is the use of WMD to boil water a good outcome?
Back to topic, I think some of us change and others don’t. Maintaining the status quo is generally easier than change.
I think JQ falls under the heading of professionals whose livelihood necessitates an up-to-date knowledge of matters. If their teachings are out-of-date or unsupported by current knowledge, their employer soon finds someone more knowledgeable and usually younger (… and possibly cheaper) to replace them. Professionals need to keep up-to-date, but the rate of take-up of new knowledge is generally managed haphazardly by employers.
But in society generally, there is not always the incentive to update one’s knowledge and apply it rationally. [ANY NUMBER of examples could be given.]
In physics, my momentum will be maintained, unless some external force provides an incentive to change. In life/blogging/teaching, my knowledge base will be maintained (and regurgitated) unless some external force provides an incentive to change my mind.
As history has shown maintaining the status quo usually leads to tears.
Well in 2004 I was a lot less optimistic about nuclear power than I am now, but three years ago I was a lot more optimistic about nuclear power than I am now.
Ten years ago, I’d have been opposed to the building nuclear power plants on principle, but I was keen to work out if I had any good basis for that, or was just doing what are called here “strong priors”. The leftwing party to which I used to belong more than a decade before 2003 had a technology-neutral position in the sense that it trusted a healthy workers government to make the right choices and expected capitalist government to fail regardless of what it tried. This didn’t help me much as there were no exampoles of healthy workers governments where our distinction could become meaningful
So by 2003 I had reverted essentially to a position I had held in the mid-1970s on NPPs. Yet I remained keen to find a solid objective basis for opposing nuclear power development. The urgency of mitigation was something of a circuit-breakwer, because now it was not merely a purely theoretical point but one tied to human well-being for all time. In 2003 I strongly favoured a suite of measures to ‘firm” intermittent sources — (such as pumped storage) and favoured massive developments in wind, wave and tidal technology as well as geothermal. I was also keen on algae to biodiesel and/or butanol.
Yet I found out on close examination that pumped storage wasn’t as easy as I’d supposed as it turned out the site constrainst were a lot more considerablke than I’d supposed, given that I wanted to avoid disrupting river systems and estuaries and wanted to keep them close to load centres and sources of intermittent power.
Similarly algae-to-fuel turned out to be not as promising as the EROEI was going to make scaling difficult and in practice to over come that you would up with a price not in the same commercial ballpark as conventional oil. As it turned out, you’d be better off using your algae for something where EROEI wasn’t relevant — pharmaceutical preparations, packaging, plastics or even food. I still fancy that it might be OK as an exercise in carbon sequestration.
So I would say that although I did have some pretty “strong priors” I was able to work through them in an attempt to go where the salient facts led me given my overall goals.
Since the price of developing technologies are coming with positive feedback, if followed this rule of adopting it in the future, solar would never arrive to that future.
That future does not come on its own, it has to be pushed by subsidies in order to reach it quicker.
This variable is dependent on faster adoption, which makes it a positive feedback.
Mistake of concluding that price parity will come in 2015 depended on subsidy size to fossil fuels and to subsidy size to solar alternative which is a political decision, not economical decision. Those subsidies are competing with each other and cancel each other.
Also, subsidies to fossil fuels are worldwide which affects worldwide prices and not so much individual state dependent. If USA subsidezes the oil and coal prices it will affect Australian prices of oil and coal. That is also working for the solar but to the smaller effect due to developemental natur eof it. It is not developed for use yet as the fossil fuels are, which is more costly then if solar already had its own infrastructure as fossil use has.
So if you want the price of the solar to arrive quicker to such future, it will need more subsidies to solar and less to fossil fuels. It is a self fulfiling prophecy type of thing. Making it wait for the price reduction by itself, it will never come.
There were sufficient opportunities for solar to develop. From remote energy solutions where grid was not an option to load relief on long haul distribution systems. I’ll accept that subsidies probably helped things along but the future was coming regardless. And every dollar and scientist you divert to solar is a dollar and scientist that doesn’t get applied elsewhere.
Same here.
At present, in the early days of the energy transition, countries look very similar: everybody instals GW of wind and solar. As you move towards 100% renewables, the differences re-emerge. Australia has tremendous potential for CSP and geothermal (per AEMO), but not for pumped storage. Japan can’t instal much fixed offshore wind because the Pacific side where the cities are has little continental shelf, but it already has 35GW of pumped storage. Britain’s solar potential is limited by high latitude and cloudiness, according to the DECC scenario calculator; but it has half of the North Sea for offshore wind. Brazil is lucky – it already has lots of hydro, and has plenty of wind an solar resources, but not geothermal. And so on.
Well, I don’t know about it being a strong prior, but my stumbling block is around risk factors being grossly under-estimated with nuclear power. In principle, those factors can be accounted for, by and large; in practice though, some incredibly obvious things get overlooked for reasons that can really only amount to economic concerns, rather than due to genuine ignorance of the unk-unks. Fukushima illustrates the issue quite graphically: if it had been built up on much higher ground, it would have cost more for water transport to and from the ocean to the reactor site; if it had been made earthquake-proof, in the sense of being able to fail gracefully in the event of a massive one, that would have been very expensive too, and yet tsunamis and massive earthquakes were known risk factors in the area. Low frequency, high impact—almost the definition of an operational risk, given that they ultimately involved people and processes, and system failure. If a nuclear power station must be built, then let it be built somewhere away from the margin of statistical mis-judgement (eg requiring a sea wall of x metres, then needing one of x+h metres in the actual event), and with decent, non-marginal, safety factors employed.
I would also like to see a more serious and progressive approach to the issue of nuclear waste confinement, storage maintenance, and ultimate disposal. Again, there are a range of obvious risk factors which can be dealt with—at a cost—but a most clearly not being dealt with on anything but the most ad hoc basis: see the article and accompanying lead image, “Eternal Challenge” in New Scientist, pp 42–45, 2 Nov 2013 (unfortunately, paywalled; however, National Geographic has a less impressive image that makes the same point, i.e. haphazard dumping of nuclear waste in a salt mine prone to water penetration.)
If these concerns constitute strong priors for me, then call me guilty; the real question though, is are they valid strong priors? (Actually, my position on these can definitely be shifted, just not very easily, so I guess they are moderately strong priors, rather than the strong priors in question by the above blog post.)
According to data from the US renewables have eclipsed nuclear, with coal on the decline (replaced by gas).
It is cold comfort though as total energy, incl fossil fuel, is up.
The issue of radioactive waste just won’t go away, business rails against increased regulation while the potential for waste dumping is being exploited by criminal groups.
The quantum of once legal ocean dumping is described here.
Regarding the topic, I changed my mind on the practice of slavery.
I had read Gone With The Wind when I was about 11 without more knowledgable supervision to give me context. For around 10 years afterwards, I thought slavery was not great theoretically, but that many slavers treated the enslaved like “Mammy” well etc. I can’t really remember all the details of my muddy and muddled thought, except arguing when I was 17 or 18 that The Birth of a Nation was not an inherently racist film (this being despite the fact of it having a character called “Gus the Renegade Negro”).
To change my mind I had to read more legitimate and well researched and reputable accounts of the history than Gone With The Wind – that set out the horrors and brutality and violence. all of which were less palatable than Gone With The Wind *seemed* to be when i was 11ish. I feel especially stupid about this because when I was younger still I loved Little Women, and still do, where the father is away fighting for the Union. I never drew the two together ’til I was older.
I feel ashamed that I was so easily led astray on this, but very grateful that my lack of good judgement didn’t really affect anyone else, which, of course, if things had been different, it could have. If I had been a young man who was mulling over enlisting for the civil war for example.
In 2023, the fraction of Germany’s electricity generation produced by fossil fuels will be the same as in 2013. The Energiewende will make no progress at all on decarbonizing the power supply over the next decade. Quote me on that 10 years from now, John Quiggin.
The Green obsession with wind and solar is the worst environmental policy of our time.
Dear Will Boisvert, this thread is about a time when you changed your mind.
To help you out I will bow and balance to you and quote you on the subject matter of the discussion:
“I used to worship Chomsky; now I think he’s a mixed bag.
His condemnations of American wars and support for foreign dictators are fine-useful and stimulating; good to have a Jeremiah to keep us honest. That officials and pundits can be callous hypocrites is a message that bears repeating.
But Chomsky can also be one-sided, obfuscatory, tendentious, hypocritical and uninformed, his writings on the Khmer Rouge being a good example. (Here is an excellent critique of them http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm.)”
Sorry, I should list the source of that quote:
http://coreyrobin.com/2013/03/28/why-noam-chomsky-can-sound-like-a-broken-record/
Corey Robins’s answer to the question was :
“I mean seriously, folks: are you surprised Chomsky can sound like a broken record? The guy has been doing God’s work for over a half-century, confronting this kind of deep corruption, moral and political, in our chattering classes. How would you sound after 50 years? I’d have simply given up.
Here’s a thought: if you don’t like the record, change it.”
@ZM
Nice examples of the incentives for us to change our mind, in my opinion.
Donald Oats, the two plants to the north and south of Fukushima Daiichi were hit by the same tsunami and came through unscathed. Raising the sea wall at Daiichi, or just stowing some generators, fuel and switching equipment on upper floors instead of basements would have seen the Daiichi plant through just fine. Coastal plants can be made safe at a modest cost.
Burying nuclear waste in the desert is an expedient and obviously safe way to dispose of it. The disaster scenarios surrounding waste are fanciful.
@ Rog, on renewables eclipsing nuclear in the US.
Rog, half of the renewables production in the table you cited is biomass, almost all of which is corn ethanol with some wood clear-cut from pine plantations thrown in. Just about every environmental group denounces energy production from corn ethanol and wood-cutting because it destroys wildlife habitat, displaces agriculture and drives up food prices.
Is that really the kind of energy system we want?
Will Boisvert remembers how he thought about technology back in the days:
“They might, as Boisvert does, think nostalgically of a time when technology was big and bold and beneficial. “Back then,” he remembers, “we did not expect machines to be us; they were bigger and stronger and faster than us, and we revered them as they remade the world in ways we had never imagined”” (p.98). The Baffler
@rog
(Regarding nuclear) And you have to wonder about management subcontractors – in Japan apparently the local Mafia??!! – and non proliferation controls – India (we wont sign the non proliferation treaty) is a great market and because they are big, our friends and play cricket we’ll just ignore them and the fact they are in ‘mini’ nuclear arms race with Pakistan which must have China concerned.
But separately the real economic problem for me is the absolute size of the resources which amazingly doesn’t get talked about much until you look in the literature from the IAEC. Why replace one depleting resource with an even smaller one? It doesn’t make much sense – any more than our university’s ‘Centre/Institute for Sustainable Mining’. The oxymoronic nature of these places is not lost on the inhabitants.
If the USGS is to be believed there is only about 2 million tonnes of high grade uranium ore of which only 1% is usable with current technology. Now Uranium is very energy dense but say 10-20,000 tonnes if nuclear power went global wouldn’t go far. Thus France is an exception not the model for the future.
How long will it last? Uranium 235 is about 1 million times more energy dense than coal so using current technology you get the replacement equivalent of about 10 gigatonnes of coal. Now given coal production currently is 7 gigatonnes per annum, nuclear power could supply coal replacement alone for only 2 to 3 years. Its a joke.
Alternative ores? Seawater mining is also joke (see Bardi on this). Mining bedrock? You very quickly get to the same problem of too much energy in to produce too little fuel out – same as tar sands.
The trouble is both the pro and anti nuclear rarely seem to do the sums limiting growth of the industry but base their arguments on personal biases conceptual appeals based on fairly stories – Disney in the case of the pronuclear people – shock horror selective statistics e.g. greens and fellow travellers of Helen Caldicott.
So the function of current power station promotion is not to seriously address climate change but to keep the commercial industry and its research allies on life support and provide a pool of technicians in the event there is a desire in a country to develop nuclear weapons using government subsidies.
Nuclear was definitely killed not by mad greenies but by economic rationalism irony of ironies. But too many people still remember those Disney propaganda films about the friendly atom.
In the longer term of course the dream is breeder technology which is taking a lot of time. Historically several first generation breeders were tried at full scale during the 20th century but all except maybe the Russian one have been shut down as lemons.
Regarding the new ones this could be Thorium or Plutonium. The candidate technologies so called Gen IV are promoted by our local nuclear environmentalist Barry Brook. But few others are talking about the implications or discussing the earlier bad experience of plutonium breeders.
Perhaps John this is the debate you should be having in these pages – rather than discussing the current nuclear systems which have too small a resource base to make a difference – what does the future hold and where has this got to.
Some interesting discussion points perhaps:
– Gen IV – where is it up to what are its prospects and are there any serious critiques yet.
– How are we to solve the problem of transport fuels whether primary energy comes primarily from solar wind or nuclear?
– Thorium breeders – given the ore is abundant and cheap, doesn’t produce transuranics much and supposedly is less proliferation risky – WHY hasn’t it happened long ago? (a possible is the extremely radioactive nature of the liquid thorium caldron and some of its by products – but it would be nice to hear some crowd sourcing here)
– Plutonium supply proliferation – (anyone out there remember the original ‘Edge of Darkness’) – is this really soluble?
– Supply – the conventional ores reported by the USGS are only sufficient for around 100-200 years even if breeders were successful and world energy demands didn’t increase much – say double. To illustrate consider the Uranium 235 calculations above. You might be able to put off PV for a couple of hundred years at best.
– Mining bedrock (Herman Kahn’s solution) – How big a quarry do we want the earth to become before we get the limits to growth message? When does recycled PV become the natural solution?
I find some of the comments here disturbing because it suggests we are going spend years labouring under a delusion. That delusion is that wind and solar will make a serious dent in coal use. Therefore I blame such people for perpetuating the reign of coal with expensive sideshows while the core problem is unresolved.
Case in point Germany which has over 30 GW of both wind and solar is expected to increase its emissions about 2% in 2013. Similar thinking would have predicted a large cut in emissions. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves if we are part of the solution or part of the problem.
Newtonian, can you clarify a couple of your statements for me?
“but base their arguments on personal biases conceptual appeals based on … shock horror selective statistics e.g. greens and fellow travellers of Helen Caldicott.
So the function of current power station promotion is not to seriously address climate change”
I do not have a scientific leaning mind myself, but I did look for academic sources and found a study and a review of a study about the effects of Chernobyl.
Now, Will Boisvert has argued – without giving any supporting references – against trusting in these scientists, despite him not being a scientist himself, and coming across from his writing as someone not to put your trust in himself, so I feel I can fairly easily not take note of his criticisms.
OTOH if you are a scientist, can you say what is objectionable in the studies I cited? And why do you disregard those scientific studies on the harm of nuclear energy production etc but not disregard the scientific studies on climate change?
Hermit, here is a link to an article by a scientist, whom i’ve already mentioned and linked to proper articles by, saying the world can use only renewable energy. It is an accessible read for non-scientists:
Click to access sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf
Will, your points simply confirm my original comment: if a few simple and perfectly obvious risk factors had been accounted for during the original design, the reactor site would have survived the tsunami. But the developers did not take the known risk factors into account by anything like what was necessary. In engineering terms, they knew the risk profile for tsunami, but failed to apply a generous safety factor for the seawall and the site placement; they (presumably) operated on the margin of the risk for commercial reasons, effectively hoping a big tsunami would never occur during the life of the plant.
As an extension of the argument, consider the example of an IT centre holding data crucial to the ongoing operation of a big business, and their operation is located in a known tornado zone. Then merely extending the IT centre’s size (perhaps putting some servers on different floors), hoping only some of it would be damaged in the event of a tornado, is operating on the margin of the risk; having another IT centre somewhere well away from the known tornado region, with data replicated, is applying the principle of a generous safety factor. Clearly, while the latter rather obvious option deals with the risk of tornado events, and other catastrophic risks as well, it is a more expensive option in the initial instance. The question as to how tornado risk is dealt with most likely is one of economics, not one of a lack of obvious good options for virtually avoiding the risk factor entirely.
@Donald Oats
I don’t differ radically from this. The curiosity with Fukushima was that the original construction created the risk so as to get easier access to the water. Had they built at the original elevation, they’d have been operationally unaffected by the tsunami, though they’d have had to pump the water up. Given ValVerde had reached Japan from the other sside of the Pacific 4 years earlier, you might have thought they’d have taken that into account.
Equally, not isolating the diesel back up power needed to run the SCRAM and shut down/cooling units (it being a system requirement that in serious earthquakes the unit be shut down) was a serious error. Again, had they preserved the original elevation this would not have been a problem. Preserving the original elevation would also have demanded a less impressive sea-wall, at some cost saving.
Presumably, there was a net cost saving in what they did, but as you imply, the choice they made exposed them to appreciably more risk. Had they decommissioned in 1999 (which IIRC was the original plan) they’d have got away with it, and if they’d isolated the back up power then — again, there’d have been no serious problem, but as TEPCO fancied that the plant would shortly be decommissioned they couldn’t justify spending the sums involved and fancied that they’d keep getting away with it. They were wrong.
Really the big mistake was made at the original commission, and then, 40+ years later, not simply to decommission and keep their ‘winnings’ from the reckless gamble they took.
I suppose the broader issue concerns how one prevents such reckless trade in human safety. Even state control doesn’t guarantee accountability — particularly as the Japanese regime was effectively a one-party state post-War and in a facility such as a nuclear plant, all manner of official secrecy provisions can be adduced against disclosure — and these form the analog with “commercial-in-confidence” defences for private operators.
For me, this is one of the more persuasive arguments against having nuclear power, because although in theory, one could commission and run the plants with suitable regard for public safety, the very scale of the enterprise and its technical complexity will tend to jeopardise accountabilty and this in something with a very obvious putative catastrophic risk. No industrial scale solar or wind plant is ever going to generate that kind of a problem.
While I agree that the problems of dispatchability (often mistakenly called “the baseload problem”) are IMO greatly overstated, I’m now of the view that if we really were forced to choose between slightly less reliable power supply and a slightly greater risk of an uncontrolled contamination of a wide area of heavily populated land, I prefer the former risk to the latter. The former, if it occurs, is a nuisance in the case of brown-out, but we can take a deep breath and get over it. The latter is something people are going to be living with for a very long time and is orders of magnitude more costly.
I should say that it was not clear what, in 1964, Japan could have built to supply their energy needs apart from nuclear that would have generated less CO2 or cast a smaller eco-footprint. Had there been no Fukushima, there would have been massive coal and/or gas with all that implies and I daresay that when the tsunami arrived the consequences would not have been much more manageable. We ought also to keep that in mind.
A little reminder – there are several different units for quantifying radiation and radiation dose, but m^3 is not one them. Your comment is without meaning. One may also observe that there are 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water in the world’s oceans.
What would be pertinent would be any studies of what harm that historical dumping may, or may not have done. I would have thought that anybody who believes that such dumping may pose a meaningful risk would make an attempt to seek out such studies.
However, since the issue of “priors” is raised here, this is all rather incidental to the fact that dumping in the oceans of radioactive waste is no longer allowed, just like the dumping of some other potentially hazardous materials is no longer allowed though such dumping has certainly occurred in the past. Furthermore illegal release of hazardous material of many types has occurred in the past and no doubt occur in the future – nothing unique in radwaste in that.
There would be one case where ocean dumping of radwaste would be entirely justified. And that is water contaminated with tritium, but cleaned of other radio nuclides from the Fukushima plant. It would free up resources to deal with the big issues which are the spent fuel pools and the reactors. If there is any risk of serious future radiation release, that’s where it lies. Tritium is a radiation wimp because of it’s very low decay energy. Which is why the WHO recommended limit is 10,000 Bq/l. In this context msm hysteria over levels of 300,000 Bq/l of tritium in water leaks is simply incredible. Even water with multiples of that would be diluted to absurdly insignificant levels very rapidly if dumped into the ocean.
Pandering to radiation phobia on this issue is dreadful policy and is NOT the lowest risk policy. It should also be observed that there is a lot of money sloshing around at Fukushima and a lot of money to be made in addressing phantom issues. No doubt there will be some kind international offers of help to address the very difficult technical issue of separating tritium – at a price.
Just to clarify an omitted detail in the above comment: the WHO recommended tritium limit is 10,000 Bq/l in drinking water
@ Donald Oats and Fran Barlow, on nuclear risks.
Although the probability of nuclear accidents per reactor-year will go down because of Fukushima lessons learned (as it has steadily over the history of nuclear power), you are right that it will never go down to exactly zero. There will always be some tiny possibility of an asteroid impact or whatever.
But that’s not the crux of the nuclear risk issue. The real point to understand is that we’re getting the risk profile of nuclear all wrong. We think of nuclear accidents as low-probability, high-impact risks. In fact, the real risk profile is low-probability, low-impact.
That’s because nuclear accidents, very much including Chernobyl and Fukushima, are not cataclysmic. Radiation is simply not very dangerous at the levels civilians absorb from even the biggest nuclear spews. With Chernobyl, for example, the average dose to people living in the fallout zones, over decades, was 1.3 millisievert—that’s as much extra radiation as you would get living in Denver, Colorado for three months.
While the LNT theory conjectures that 27,000 people should die of fatal cancers from Chernobyl fallout, the number of deaths that we actually observe in epidemiological studies is quite small, according to UNSCEAR and other authoritative sources–on the order of a few hundred. There were very serious health effects: dozens of deaths from acute radiation syndrome among firemen; an epidmic of 6000 thyroid cancers, with 15 resulting deaths, which could have been avoided by warning peasants to avoid drinking tainted milk. A tragedy, no question, but in no sense an apocalypse, and not even outstandingly large for an industrial accident.
As for Fukushima, the scientific consensus, even among anti-nuclear academics, is that the radiation might eventually cause a thousand or so fatal cancers, a number that’s far too small to observe epidemiologically–and that’s assuming no evacuations or cleanup. Which means that all the cataclysm of Fukushima—the forced relocations, the closed fisheries and farms, the poignant vistas of abandonment and ruin, all the vast effort and cost of cleanup and compensation—stems from an irrational overreaction to a radiation release that will have no observable public health effects.
So history and science turn the conventional risk profile of nuclear power on its head. People commonly think, “there is a one in a thousand chance that a nuclear accident will destroy the world,” and that balancing of infinitesimal odds against infinite harm rightly terrifies them. But the real risk profile is, “there is a one in a thousand chance that a nuclear accident will cause your house to come down with a moderate case of radon that will largely wear off in a few years.”
And of course that risk pales beside the risks of other energy technologies. The pollution from coal-fired power plants, which nuclear power is uniquely suited to displace, kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. That’s why NASA climate scientist James Hansen in his recent paper reckoned that nuclear power had saved a net 1.84 million lives over the last few decades by abating coal pollution, and could save another 400,000 to 7 million by mid-century.
Nuclear risks compare favorably even to renewable technologies. Renewables can’t be all windmills and PV panels; dispatchables like hydro and biomass are needed as well. But hydropower is at least as dangerous as nuclear power, and probably much more so; dam bursts in China and Italy killed at least 30,000 people over the last 50 years, more than Chernobyl, Fukushima and TMI combined. If we ban nuclear because of cataclysmic risks, why not ban hydro as well?
Biomass is even worse. It’s an integral part of most renewables plans, and will require hundreds of thousands of square miles of energy crops and tree plantations. But that will displace a huge amount of food production, which will raise food prices. Even modest food price rises can really exacerbate malnutrition among the poor in a hungry world. There’s little question that, all by itself, scaled-up biomass will cause many times more deaths and illnesses than the worst nuclear accidents could.
Fran, even a slightly spottier electricity supply from wind and solar can have risks comparable to nuclear risks. There are lots of ways people can die from power outages. They can slip and break their necks in the shower when the lights go out, they can crash their cars when traffic and street lights go out, they can die of heat exhaustion when the air conditioning conks out. (No joke: when I lived in Chicago in 1995 we had a heat wave that killed 600 retirees who lacked air conditioning.) If the added unreliability of an intermittent grid kills just 50 people a year worldwide, it will be killing on a Fukushima scale.
And the economic costs of unreliable power could dwarf those of nuclear accidents. Suppose that more frequent power outages cause the US to lose all of one day’s worth of GDP per year. Doesn’t sound like much, but that would add up to $41 billion per year. That would be about 200 times more than the offsite costs of TMI, every year.
We’ve all had it drummed into our heads that nuclear fission is the worst threat in the world—that it will obliterate the planet, unleash Godzilla, and turn us all into mutant cannibal zombies. But apocalyptic radiophobia is not just unwarranted, it’s a profound misapprehension of the real risks that we face. Short of a rogue planetoid, there is not going to be an apocalypse, not from nuclear power, not even from global warming (which is still a very bad thing that we should avoid). The serious threat isn’t doomsday scenarios but the steady drip drip of banal risks and costs that we shrug off: warming; air pollution; hunger; poverty–including the simple lack of energy when it’s wanted.
This OP is about changing one’s mind when new facts emerge. If we take that idea seriously, then it’s time for greens to drop their anxieties about nuclear safety and insist on a prominent role for nuclear power in a clean energy system, with a systematic roll-out that drives down costs through mass production. The scientific and historical facts show that nuclear energy is safe, even when it melts down and blows up.
Unless I am getting it wrong it seems that the consensus of some commentators here is that the risk of illness and/or death from nuclear accidents is almost zero, including the dumping of nuclear waste at sea.
No more on radiation risk, please. FWIW, I don’t think its a central issue.
Will Boisvert is certainly one for routine…
(yes I’ve read the Arendt book in reference, but has Will Boisvert? Or has he just referred to it for showiness?)
“The Banality of Radiation
When we shift the focus away from comparative mass body counts, we get a less fraught perspective on nuclear power as an ordinary and rather modest item on the list of marginal everyday risks. I could compare it to car crashes or beer or nitrite-laden barbecue. Instead, I’ll just compare it to other sources of radiation in which we blithely wallow even though they give us drastically larger doses than we get from nuclear plants.”
http://slackwire.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/trying-to-be-for-nuclear-power-when-it.html
Thanks for that link, ZM, but absolutely nothing more on this topic. Will, I’m going to assume from now on that anyone who wants that link can find it. Nothing more about Fukushima, please, from anyone.
More generally, Will, I think you have missed the point of the post even worse than before. The idea is not for you to reiterate a demand that your opponents should accept your point of view, but for you to take a moment to think about the evidence suggesting you might be wrong.
What about hindsight bias? Im sure ive changed my opinon a billion times, while believing that i thaught so all along. Fortunately, theres no 10 year old blog post to pin me down on my opinon about solar at that point. Im suspecting myself to have been far less sure about the extend of US espionage pre Snowden than i think right now. Strong priors are not always bad. Look at how people like Merkel which have very weak opinons just sit out everything, even when doing anything at all would be better.