Story of the day: Nukes and global warming

The two don't mix well

Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 1:08 PM on 21 May 2007

Read more about: nuclear power | energy | desertification | water crisis

This story deserves singling out because it is on an important but too-neglected subject -- the connection between energy and water.

"Climate change puts nuclear energy into hot water," from the International Herald Tribune. Key point: Nuclear power "requires great amounts of cool water to keep reactors operating at safe temperatures. That is worrying if the rivers and reservoirs which many power plants rely on for water are hot or depleted because of steadily rising air temperatures."

Factoid of the day: "During the extreme heat of 2003 in France, 17 nuclear reactors operated at reduced capacity or were turned off."

An Australian report noted that there are "few seaside sites available" for siting nuclear plants, but warned "that building nuclear plants inland would be a major threat to water supplies in a country already stricken by drought."

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

For story: Story of the day: Nukes and global warming
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World's larget nuke being proposed for Fresno, CA

A 1,600 megawatt nuclear power plant--potentially the world's largest--is being pushed by Fresno Nuclear Energy Group, LLC to be built in California's hot and dry San Joaquin Valley, which would be a desert were it not for the California Aqueduct, snow melt from the Sierras (snow pack is one-third of normal this year and the long run forecast is for less snow and earlier melting, and a groundwater supply that is being overdraughted by agriculture and residential use that is not even metered. Ironically, farmers, who depend heavily on the locally available water supply are among those pushing for the nuclear power plant, which would be situated upwind of the poorer part of Fresno (noted in 2005 for having the highest concentration of poverty in the U.S.) and would require the repel of California's moratorium on new nuclear construction after the Diablo Canyon plant, which sits atop an earthquake fault, was the second plant in the state to be constructed backwards. (Safety first and always! Er, um, well, it won't happen again. . . . Unless we start building again. . . .)

Go figure.

And there is another connection between water and energy that often gets overlooked. In dry states, and more and more states in the U.S. are dry, projects that move and filter water tend to be the largest individual users of electricity. In California, almost 4% of all electricity is used to move water along large water projects and another 3% to 5% (an amount expected to grow sharply due to new, energy intensive water projects) is used by local water companies to recover, pump, and treat water. So, water equals energy. And when it comes to nukes, water uses energy, in this case, perhaps, where it is most needed--in the place where the majority of the nation's salad vegetables are grown.

by Rune at 7:33 PM on 21 May 2007

Gosh

This is possibly the most breathtaking single piece of information I've seen posted on Grist. In one minute it has radically changed the way I think about nuclear energy.

It is also terrifying to ponder: how many other issues---hydrogen energy, public transit, watershed development, fire prevention---do we debate without really touching upon the most important details?

by pcarbo at 9:48 PM on 21 May 2007
[ Parent ]

Sorry, make that a 3,200 megawatt nuke!

Apparently the initial report from Mike Rhodes, with which I was familiar, was only half right. There are to be 2 1,600 megawatt reactors in the Fresno facility. No thought to how they will cool down their hot sewage water enough in the summer, when temperatures are usually near or above 100 degrees (so far) is provided with the plan for how to keep those babies cool.

The proposed nuclear plant for Fresno would operate a pair of 1,600 mega-watt reactors needing as much as 10 million gallons of water to cool them. It would come from the million gallons of grey water produced at Fresno's Waste Water Treatment Plant.

Oh, and did we mention what's to be done with the waste, which is what is keeping the California moratorium in place? Why no, we didn't. But you should read all about it:

President George W. Bush and his energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, have recently intensified their lobbying to revive nuclear recycling through a program they call the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, GNEP.
. . .
Members of Congress, who will soon vote on the President's request for $405 million for GNEP in fiscal year 2008, should recognize that GNEP has no chance in our lifetimes of brightening the prospects of finding safe ways of nuclear fuel disposal.
In 1982, Congress enacted legislation requiring that nuclear power spent fuel be disposed of in ways that shield humans for at least hundreds of millennia.
But today, a quarter-century later, prospects for long-term disposal are dimmer than ever. The government's nuclear waste disposal program is plagued by scandal, legal setbacks and congressional funding cuts. As a result, the schedule for the proposed Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada has slipped by two decades.
Under the President's plan, the United States and its nuclear partners would sell power reactors to developing nations who agree not to pursue technologies that would aid nuclear weapons production, notably reprocessing and uranium enrichment.
To sweeten the deal, the United States would take highly radioactive spent fuel rods to a recycling center in this country.
The foreign reactor wastes, along with spent fuel from the U.S. reactor fleet, would be reprocessed to reduce the amount that would go deep underground. Nuclear explosive materials, such as plutonium, would also be separated and converted to less troublesome isotopes in a new generation of reactors.
In short, using the Bush administration's fuzzy nuclear math, more would become less.
In fact, however, to reduce the amount of radioactive wastes slated for a deep geological repository, the majority of radioactive byproducts are planned to be stored in shallow burial. . . .

Many more dirty details to consider. Like I said, read all about it.

by Rune at 10:24 PM on 21 May 2007

Heat engines are not big water consumers ...

not even if they are evaporatively cooled; the bit about inland nuclear power plants being a "major threat" to water supplies was a lie or error of the genuine-but-insignificant-cause variety. The attempt to mislead that Romm perpetuates has had a previous go-round.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes

by GRLCowan at 10:17 AM on 22 May 2007

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