Switzerland came to the Boston area a week or so ago. There was a conversation with one of the political leaders of the country, Doris Leuthard, Councillor of the Swiss Federal Department of Environment, Transport, Energy, and Communications, at MIT on “Future Energy Supply and Security in Switzerland” and the next day a seminar on Watt d’Or, the Swiss award for the best energy projects in the country (http://www.bfe.admin.ch/org/00483/00638/?lang=en), at Northeastern University to celebrate the opening of an exhibit that will stay up at Northeastern’s International Village until September.
I attended both events and learned quite a few exciting ideas from the Swiss and, inadvertently, something more about the limitations of MIT’s view of the energy future.
Councillor Leuthard was introduced at MIT by the former President of the Institution, Susan Hockfield. Under Hockfield, by training a neuroscientist, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI for short, pronounced “mighty” just so you catch the drift) began. You can learn more about MITEI at http://mitei.mit.edu/ A look at the members page will give you a good idea of their slant on the energy world.
During her introduction, Susan Hockfield said she wasn’t sure how the world could produce the energy it needs without nuclear power, a rather gratuitous comment especially since Switzerland has a policy of slowly but surely phasing out its existing nuclear power plants and Councillor Leuthard talked clearly about the Swiss plans to provide safe and secure energy supplies expressly without nukes while still reducing or eliminating greenhouse gas production. As she said, “When you live in an alpine region, you don’t doubt the reality of climate change.”
The next day, at the all day seminar on Watt d’Or, Anton Gunzinger of Supercomputing Systems AG and ETH Zurich, the Swiss equivalent of MIT, gave a short talk about his work on energy modeling. He has developed modeling systems which show how Switzerland can produce nearly all of its energy from renewable sources, without nuclear power, and how the USA can do the same thing, although probably not quite to the extent that Switzerland can. It was extremely useful as I could pass on this work to a friend who has been studying the Danish energy modeling systems and the German energy modeling systems which also show that their energy needs can be reliably met with renewables. (pdf and German alert: http://www.scs.ch/fileadmin/images/tg/energie.pdf)
After lunch, Robert Armstrong, the current head of MITEI, (Armstrong took over after Ernest Moniz became Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration), spoke and said he, too, didn’t know how we can get the energy we need without nuclear power, a moment of cognitive dissonance for me since I could still remember Gunzinger’s talk an hour or so earlier. Armstrong announced that MITEI will be releasing their next report, on the future of solar energy, soon.
MITEI’s previous reports have been on The Future of the Electric Grid, The Future of Natural Gas, The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle, The Future of Nuclear Power, Update to the 2003 Future of Nuclear Report, Fueling our Transportation Future, The Policies Needed to Reduce U.S. Petroleum Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, The Future of Coal, and The Future of Geothermal Energy.
When MITEI began, a source told me it was looking only at fossil fuels and nuclear power. My observation since then was only when student groups like the Sustainability Club and Energy Club became the largest student clubs on campus that any concerted attention began to be paid to energy efficiency and renewables.
I’d say the student groups still have a lot of pushing to do to get MIT and MITEI headed in the renewable direction and away from the habit of knee-jerk genuflection to nuclear power. After all, there’s a reason there’s a little tune that goes “M-I-T P-H-D M-O-N-E-Y.”
…That William Barton Rogers, MIT’s founding father, died in the middle of saying ‘bituminous coal’. So I’m not sure your surprise, regarding MIT’s view on energy, is all that warranted.
My understanding is that the Swiss people, in the wake of Fukashima and other nuclear disasters, have demanded of the Swiss state their divestment from nuclear. And that has driven their search for better efficiencies and greater ‘bang for your buck’. That’s fine for a small, highly developed, country with essentially zero population growth. I think the point that Hockfield and Armstrong were trying to make was for a different, growing and undeveloped, population, say Africa or China… China, for instance, has overtaken the US in pollution and there are orders of magnitude more people in the world going from undeveloped to developed. From the link to the Watt d’Or programs you provided you’ll find that the past winners of the Watt d’Or have been steadily focused on demand-side efficiencies: better dry-cleaning; more efficient storage pumps; etc.. That is to say making an already developed nation cleaner and more efficient. The single example that was clearly on the supply side posited the hopes that they could boost efficiencies greater than the 1 to 4 percent seen by plant photosynthesis and laminate these improvements to every surface possible… That kind of technology, while fine and dandy, isn’t, per se, transferable to a country going from lights-out to lights-on.
From an engineering point of view there isn’t even a distant second place to the efficiencies derived from nuclear. It is, hands down, the most efficient energy that is, at present, technically possible. It’s fine that the Swiss want to do more with less. But if we are going to electrify the world — Africa, India and much of Southeast Asia comes to mind — populations many orders of magnitude greater than the Swiss population, we really are not going to be able to do it absent nuclear power. That’s simple math.
Neither Hockfield or Armstrong made an argument for nuclear. They each made a one sentence statement: I don’t see how we can do without nuclear. Especially grievous to me was Armstrong’s statement an hour or less after Gunzinger demonstrated a possibility of exactly how the Swiss and the USA can do without nuclear. Assertion is not argument.
The Swiss, the Germans, the Danes are all working towards 100% renewables consistently and thoughtfully. MIT, it seems, is not even interested in engaging with this idea as a thought experiment.
I have a great deal of respect for the ‘Tute and the people there. I pay close attention to their public lecture schedule and attend many of them as I publish a weekly on Energy (and Other) Events (http://hubevents.blogspot.com for those who are interested). What worries me is the blindered and blinkered attitude I see too often there. For instance, I seem to have been the only person who went to both the civil engineering and the nuclear engineering lectures on what happened at Fukushima a few months after the accident there, an accident that was warned against by many of the opponents of that nuclear power plant before it was built. There were significant differences not only in opinion but in data between those two events. As an interested layperson, it disappoints me no end that the civil engineers and the nuclear engineers didn’t, evidently, compare notes, weren’t interested enough in each other’s disciplines to see what they each had to say. It was also troubling to this layperson that the air of True Belief in the nuclear engineering department reminded me way too much of the time I wandered into a Revolutionary Communist Party discussion group.
As for bringing reliable electricity to the billion plus people who now don’t have access, take a look at Grameen Shakti, Village Energy, of Bangladesh and what they’ve done in the past decade and a half to electrify nearly 2 million households: http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/04/green-energy-for-billion-poor.html
That, to me, is a clear alternative to the centralized power (in many senses of the word) of nuclear energy.
As I said, I think it fine to move to a post-nuclear energy focus for developed nations. We’re not in disagreement here. You said, and I quote, “Susan Hockfield said she wasn’t sure how the world could produce the energy it needs without nuclear power” (emphasis mine)… which clearly lays out a global vision. Now the Swiss vision, as fine as it is, cannot be extended to the entire world. India isn’t lookiing for better more efficient dry cleaning.
So, it may come as a further shock, that I don’t see the symposium you attended at all at odds with ‘the sentences’ both Hockfield and Armstrong uttered. It’s entirely possible that the Swiss efforts are laudable and excellent without being sufficient to the global problem.
All well and good. No argument if people are going to stay in villages prioritizing the charging of their cell phones over the use of lamplights at night. But what to do if they want more? Do we even have the moral standing to say you can have all the electricity you want as long as all you want fits in a village…? What happens when North Korea someday frees itself of tyranny and starts demanding the living standard they’ve been denied all these years? Who are you, or I, to say no? Take something like China, which a hundred years ago was little more than a large collection of small villages and a relatively small collection of large cities… Turning that into the reverse took so much more than personal solar. In 2012 China’s urban population exceeded it’s rural population for the first time in it’s history. China is rapidly becoming a large collection of large cities. China is doing it mainly on coal, which is clearly unsustainable… but what happens when another country wants to replicate China’s growth? We can’t say no to them…
Nuclear has it’s own problems, don’t get me wrong, but those problems come with the virtue of not contributing to our present, climate based, problems.
“No argument if people are going to stay in villages prioritizing the charging of their cell phones over the use of lamplights at night.”
What I’ve read and heard from people involved in Grameen Shakti runs counter to this statement. Not how it works in any small-scale solar project in the developing world that I know of. Do you have a reference for this statement?
… is the very article you cited. I read the entire thing. Did you? For example, the article has this to say:
Clearly, people there have to prioritize their energy usage, “income (cell phone) before lamps“, because the amount of energy that is brought in remains far below the amount you and I get. Or, put another way, when was the last time you had to decide between having a lamp on at night or your cell phone charged?
If that’s how it’s going to stay, fine. But I don’t think it will stay that way. I think people will soon decide that they want both their cell phone charged and reading light at night. I think people are going to upgrade from cell phones to laptops and will want their laptops charged on demand and their lamps on at night.
God help us all if Kenyans, or any other significant population, someday decide they want the level of air-conditioning that Houston currently employs…
For engineers, efficiency is a number between 0 and 1 — a ratio of energy out divided by energy in. In what way is nuclear power the most efficient? You’re still spinning a turbine with steam, limiting your efficiency to 30-40%. A combined cycle natural gas plant gets about 50% efficiency by using both a combustion and a waste heat cycle. Not for nothing, but the efficiency of converting potential energy to electric energy in a hydro plant is as high as 90%.
I suspect that you didn’t mean energy efficiency — you meant effectiveness (cost or otherwise), perhaps with, perhaps without externalities. While existing nuclear is generally economic, new nuclear is not. In fact, dollar for dollar, you get more energy output from a PV system than you do from a nuclear system with the same cost of construction.
I’m relatively ambivalent to nuclear power — the details matter. You, on the other hand, are clearly pro-nuclear. I’d love for you to share your “simple math.”
Efficiency is the ratio of useful energy out over the total energy in.
One kilogram of nuclear material, even if you only get at 30% of the energy it can deliver, will produce many orders of magnitude more useful energy than one liter of water from hydroelectric. 90% of not a lot is is, well, not a lot. So, to make up for that little bit we get, we use billions and billions of liters to generate the electricity, all with a significant displacement to populations and impact to the environment. The entire range of available energy from hydroelectric is a small fraction of the power available to nuclear and the total global availability of hydroelectric is fixed. In addition, nuclear is significantly more mobile where hydroelectric, which has to be sited, is often done so at a significant distance, increasing losses from transmission.
I meant efficiency. Effectiveness can be a useful second order approximation for that, but it’s not equivalent
The cost of new nuclear is not a function of nuclear but rather a function of how we perceive nuclear: there is a significant, and often blinkered, outlook on nuclear that has stalled both growth of production and research. Hence this very discussion. This is nothing endemic to nuclear, but rather to politics and to fear.
The word ‘ambivalent’ suggests strong opinions in opposite directions. I suppose the one thing that could make (has made?) nuclear truly unsafe is half measures: so I’m ambivalent too; powerfully enthused about the benefits of nuclear as opposed to the equally powerful despair over our human willingness to shoot ourselves in the foot. But the United States Navy has, for almost fifty years now, proven the efficacy of going full-on for nuclear…
Also, I’ll proudly accept the label ‘pro-‘ nuclear if you promise not to insinuate it means I’m ‘anti-‘ anything. I’d be ‘pro-coal’ if we could simply stop storing the by-products in our atmosphere. What, truly, I am is pro-engineering and pro- MIT, for sure, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see the efficacy of hydro-electric, solar and others. I think these things have their place and it’s a good place… but for the specific problem of feeding the entire worlds energy hunger, they’ll not be sufficient.
China has the Three Gorges Dam, the worlds single largest power station. China also has some 20 existing nuclear reactors that produce MORE energy, in a day, as Three Gorges does in a day. They have plans to build some 20 odd more in the next two decades for a total nuclear capacity outputting electricity at or above TRIPLE that of Three Gorges. Read that again: when compared to Three Gorges, doubling the nuclear capacity will triple the output. They couldn’t double Three Gorges if they wanted to… They have no location to build anything equivalent to Three Gorges and they would commit wholesale rape of the environment and the geography trying to do three or four smaller versions. Three Gorges, most likely, will remain the peak of hydroelectric power generation. Three Gorges isn’t going to produce very much more and they aren’t going to be able to replicate it very easily. They can, and will, replicate nuclear at will. How much simpler than that can you get?
China is rapidly trying to get 1/5 of the population to the living standard enjoyed by those of us in the West ( who are << 1/5 of the population). That leaves almost 4/5 of the population watching the rest of us living well and wanting the same thing. We'd need hundreds, if not thousands, of Three Gorges Dams to provide for them, and there aren't more than several different sites we could place something comparable. But, as the US Navy has demonstrated, we have floating reactors that can go nearly anywhere. Now you might argue that we won't have to give the 4/5 exactly the equivalent of the energy we use –and indeed we could stand to shed a few energy equivalent pounds — for an overall, per capita, energy distribution far lower than the west currently enjoys… And I won't disagree with you. But I won't say, definitively, that they can't have it if they want it. So we ought to prepare for that case too… and nuclear is the only thing that's going to be able to provide it.
This sentence suggests a defensive attitude toward even mild criticism of nuclear power, because the word does not commonly have any such meaning. In turn, this supports the idea that you are inflexibly pro-nuclear.
Ambi– meaning ‘both’ and –valence meaning ‘strong’. It is exactly the plain meaning of the word. If you are using ‘ambivalent’ as a cognate of ‘ambiguous’ or ‘indifferent’, you are much mistaken.
I am inflexibly pro-mathematics. The math tells me that no matter how high I attempt to jump, I’ll never fly on my own. I can have a sad about that, and even pout about it, but that’ll never change the simple fact that I’ll never fly without assistance.
We here in the west are well aloft du to the assistance of mighty engines that have brought us here and kept us here. Other people want to get to the heights we’re at –and I welcome them– But it is the sweet, but naive, dream of those who are inflexibly anti-nuclear to assume they’ll be able to do it on their own..
So what? The original ore may contain as little as 0.1% uranium, or even less.”. For every 1 kg of uranium fuel, we had to mine 1,000 kg of ore. The size of the fuel relative to the amount of electricity it produces is rather inconsequential. Why, by your metric, wind and solar are infinitely better (how many kgs is a sunbeam?)
You do realize that nuclear power plants use more water per MWh generated than all fossil fuel plants, biomass, and solar thermal, right? (source. Of course, wind and solar PV use 0 gallons per MWh.
Nonsense. There are five nuclear units under construction in America right now. We know exactly what they cost, because the utility has to charge the ratepayers for the construction costs in four of the five. It turns out that nuclear plants are massive construction projects, just chock full of concrete, metal, plumbing, wiring, the works. And, of course, we’re not even talking about handling the waste — just the construction itself. Why, nuclear is so expensive that the ongoing capital projects to keep a nuclear plant running are so high that two nuclear plants have recently retired early due to economics — even with the plant built, they just can’t generate electricity cheaply enough (Kewaunee WI and Vermont Yankee). And, to top it off, the federal government provides free loan guarantees for nuclear construction — were it not for that, none would get built because of the fear of a project that doesn’t get completed, stranding billions of construction dollars. It’s not a matter of fear. It’s simply that big and complex projects are remarkably expensive.
Indeed. On the one hand, nuclear provides ~20% of America’s electricity, and at low (but not zero) carbon emissions (mining, transporting, refining, and construction are all non-trivial). And, nuclear’s actual safety record in terms of human injury and property damage is remarkably good. On the other hand, new nuclear is more expensive than other options that are cleaner and safer. Furthermore, nuclear is just as inflexible as those other options (wind and solar), and there’s only room for so much inflexibility on the grid. Finally, we’ve got the problem of the waste. What to do with the waste in a world where nuclear weapons are a reality and in a nation where no state wants to store the waste from other states?
I suppose the one thing that could make (has made?) nuclear truly unsafe is half measures: so I’m ambivalent too; powerfully enthused about the benefits of nuclear as opposed to the equally powerful despair over our human willingness to shoot ourselves in the foot.
The one thing? You fail to mention a few others: the willingness for humans to use nuclear weapons, greed’s impact on safety, mankind’s inability to properly weigh low probability high cost situations (black swans), mankind’s inability to make decisions that hold future generations harmless (dat waste!), engineer’s inability to accurately predict the weak points in their complex designs (Fukushima is a great but not the only example. Hell, Fort Calhoun nuclear station flooded when the Missouri River flooded, not because of the flood, but because a worker drove a forklift into an inflatable berm that was holding back the floodwaters).
I could go on and on.
The US Navy’s electric needs (quiet high power output underwater) don’t very well match the needs of the other 300 million of us. Nor, by the way, does the cost — the US Navy pays a hell of a lot more per MWh than we do on the bulk power grid. This isn’t a knock on the Navy — their reactors are tiny and fit in submarines, but that does come at a financial cost.
So the impact on aquatic ecosystems due to impingement and entrainment and thermal aquatic emissions is OK? So the mountaintop removal is OK? So the coal ash ponds that occassionally spill are OK? Given your lack of a holistic appreciation for the generation of bulk power, I won’t promise to label or not label you anything. And that’s not meant to be a knock — the bulk power system is incredibly complex, and has changed more in the past 10 years than it had from 1960 to 2005.
Not even close. The Three Gorges Dam (which, I’d add, I’ve visited) has a nameplate of 22.5 GW (22,500 MW) but because it only has a capacity factor of 45%, think of it as 10 GW of continuous 100% uptime power output. China currently has 20 operational nuclear reactors, 13 of which have capacity of about 1 GW each and 6 of which are about 700 MW, and one is 300 MW. Nuclear capacity factors in China are about 87%. So if we take the sum of MW and multiply it by the CF, we get 15,225 MW. In other words, all of China’s nuclear power combined produces about 50% more electricity than the Three Gorges Dam. China is building a lot more nuclear too. But China is also building more hydro. Four dams under construction are the Baihetan Dam, Xiluodu Dam, Wudongde Dam, and Xiangjiaba Dam, which, when completed will have about the same capacity factor as Three Gorges but, collectively be twice as large as Three Gorges. All of which is to say that
is flat out wrong. BTW, if you also include the (under construction) Nuozhadu Dam, Nuozhadu Dam, Nuozhadu Dam, Fengning Pumped Storage Power Station, and Jinping-I Hydropower Station you get yet another Three Gorges Dam sized capacity. The dams in this post, when combined and including Three Gorges, will have the total electrical output of four Three Gorges Dams, and, I’d add, more electrical output than China’s nuclear plants, both operating and under construction. And that doesn’t count the dozens of other hydro projects (existing already) that are in excess of 1000 MW each. Chinese hydro will outpace Chinese nuclear for at least the next fifteen years.
You’ve made this about hydro vs. nuclear, which isn’t the point, not by a long shot. But, I’ll play. First of all, tUSA uses more than twice as much electricity per capita than does the EU average. And, because China is, in fact, very “in” to energy efficiency, let’s assume EU numbers: 18.4 kWh per person. China is 1.3 billion people, so let’s call 4/5ths of China 1 billion. That means you need 18,400 TWh. Three Gorges produces 80 TWh. That’s 230 Three Gorges Dam. Not thousands. You’re right though — there isn’t anywhere near enough hydro. Thing is, there isn’t enough nuclear either. You start to run out of cooling water, available uranium, and grid balancing flexibility first. So, what will China do? Well, for starters, it will be a long long time before all 1.3 billion Chinese have access to EU quantities of electricity. China will have to do what the other nations will do — lots of PV and wind, some dispatchable (biomass or natural gas), and storage. China has built and continues to build lots of pumped hydro storage, but my bet is that future storage in China (and USA, and EU) will be either thermal or electrochemical and distributed, in the form of electric water heating, electric heat pumps, ice making, and electric cars.
Bottom line is that your claim
is wrong. Nuclear can’t provide it. Nuclear can be a part of it, but it simply can’t become a majority part. It can’t reach those levels without substantial storage, and if we have substantial storage than wind and PV is cheaper on a MWh basis — and can be built much more quickly than can nuclear.
Neither the US, the US navy, the Japanese, nor the Chinese have solved the nuclear waste problem. Without a solution to the nuclear waste problem, nuclear power creates far more risk than its benefits justify.
Fukishama became a disaster in part because so much dangerous nuclear waste was stored on-site — a practice repeated at existing US nuclear plants throughout the country. Another contributor was the construction of multiple reactors in close proximity to each other and the pools of waste. When disaster struck, the first-responders had to deal with overheating nuclear waste WHILE multiple reactors were melting down.
There is no safe place in the world where we (or anyone else) can store the waste we already have. The rate of nuclear waste production is roughly proportional to the rate of nuclear power generation.
A proposal to generate ten or a hundred or a thousand times as much nuclear waste is dangerously, foolishly suicidal.
I think this seals it for me:
I think nuclear might have made sense 30 or 40 years ago, as a more carbon neutral approach (at least on the emissions side) than the coal, gas, and oil burning powerplants of old. But now, we are seeing the cost of solar, renewables, geothermal, tidal, and other alternative power sources go down significantly. Nuclear will always be incredibly expensive, and a free market in energy will push us towards more renewables as the cost of coal and oil continue to skyrocket. This is why we should try and stop fracking as well, not just to avoid the environmental impact, but also to keep natural gas higher than the renewables. A carbon tax, which is highly unlikely, would do more to spur these efficiencies on both the production and consumption sides.
I might add, my experience visiting the Philippines, showed me that not only is wind an incredibly viable option, it actually is considered a tourist attraction, which puts a real kibosh to all those Cape Wind critics. It’s been a real lifeline for the community. My fiancees uncle works as a security guard at the wind farm, several of her cousins and neighbors make their living selling trinkets out of all the shops and restaurants that sprang up, and the government will be building better roads and infrastructure to accomodate all the tour buses. And full electrification and an end to brownouts.
Developing countries are getting ahead of us on this front, already jumping past coal to renewables. The hotel we stayed at in Manila had a neat feature that turned all the electricity off as soon as you exited, turning it back on when you entered the room. Obviously, electricity is still a luxury and not the right it is considered here in the states, but no reason we couldn’t adopt something similar. The hotel hallways weren’t air conditioned either, the logic being that you weren’t gonna spend a whole lot of time in the hallways.
Seeing different people from different backgrounds make informed arguments about energy efficiency is exactly what I come to BMG for.
Stomv hits the nail on the head for me. I too am an agnostic, you won’t see me protest or demand a nuclear freeze (on power anyway), but I also am not a zealot either. It’s funny to me that the same people who want a ‘free market’ in energy cramp down the electric car, fuel cells, solar and other low cost alternative energy sources by favoring subsidies for the grossly expensive and inefficient ethanol or the nuclear industry, which has always been a huge welfare queen. The liability risks or enormous too.
The French approach-utilizing nuclear as a gateway to more efficient sources down the road-seems to be the one petr is advocating for developing countries. But considering the tie in to weapons grade proliferation that we have had, particularly looking at North Korea or Iran on that front, it seems it will be awhile before the west builds those kinds of reactors for other nations. And who would staff them and oversee them? Solar and wind have been great options for the Philippines from my personal experience (lived on a farm in the Philippines next to a wind farm for about 2 weeks in February), and saw a lot of solar panels in that region as well. It’s in a bad place for earthquakes and typhoons, so nuclear would never be a great option there.