First, one wedge of nuclear would be increasing today's 350 GW to 1,000 GW or so. Assume that the average plant to be built in the future 1.4 GW, some are larger, some are smaller. So 1.4 GW/plant x 3 plants/week x 52 weeks/year x 50 years comes to more than 10,000 GW.

I've showed you my arithmetic, can you show me yours?

The 14 plants/year assumption (with China committed to adding close to half, the rest of the world adding a wee bit over half) are assumed to be the same size as today's plants, about 1 GW.

I do want to ask why you assume that the world needs 8 to  10 wedges. Socolow and Pacala assumed 7 to stabilize, but cutting emissions 80% or more is probably preferable, plus they ignored positive feedback. I doubt that any climatologist wants to see only 8 to 10 wedges.

A Musing Environment

Karen Street

I gather the Keystone Institute is fuel-tax-funded.

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

From the report (Page 3):

The Keystone Center would like to thank the following organizations for their generous financial support of this project:

American Electric Power
Constellation Energy
Duke Energy
Entergy
Exelon
Florida Power & Light
General Electric
National Commission on Energy Policy
Nuclear Energy Institute
Pew Charitable Trusts
Southern Company

The Keystone Center Statement of Independence

Background

The Keystone Center specializes in helping community, government, and business leaders acquire the scientific, social, economic, and political information they need to make sound decisions. More specifically, The Keystone Center helps the public, private, and civic sectors use scientific knowledge and state-of-the-art consensus-building in the areas of environmental, health, and energy policy. We accomplish this through independent facilitation and mediation services on a range of significant policy issues.

How We Maintain Our Trustworthiness and Independence

We intentionally seek to sustain broad confidence by:

    * Ensuring that a broad range of perspectives are brought to bear on the decision-making processes we facilitate, including the perspectives of those most affected by the decisions or policies at issue.

    * Remaining impartial on the substance of issues being discussed while ensuring that participants decide the issues being discussed.

    * Striving to maintain a balanced and diverse funding base institutionally, and wherever possible and appropriate, on a project basis.

    * Considering the entire group as the "client;" recognizing that any participant, not just the funder, can decide that the facilitator is not acting as a neutral party and should be excused from his or her duties.

    * Fully disclosing the sources of our funding.

    * Reserving the right to withdraw from a process if the facilitator has just reason to believe participants are not participating in good faith.

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    * Encouraging decision-makers in our projects to use consensus wherever possible and appropriate.

    * Encouraging the fullest disclosure and exchange of information that may be vital to finding solutions while respecting that participants may choose to place constraints on what is made public and what remains proprietary.

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Disclosure. Participants in The Keystone Center activities have a right to know, in advance, any past and present relationships that could give rise to actual or perceived conflicts of interest.

Goals, Purposes, and Objectives. Participants in The Keystone Center activities have a right to understand what they are about to be involved in before they get involved. As facilitators and technical experts, we have a duty to the individuals and groups we serve to help clarify the reasons for undertaking a project, initiative, or series of meetings, and what can be expected from us.

Role of The Keystone Center Facilitators. Participants in The Keystone Center activities have a right to understand who is responsible for Keystone's presence in a particular policy issue, how we got involved, and what we will and will not be responsible for doing. We are obligated to explain our role, the auspices under which we have been asked to facilitate or provide technical assistance, and what our processes will entail.

Political Diversity. While it is physically impossible to get everyone who is affected by a decision (including future unborn generations) in the same room at the same time, participants who are potentially impacted by decisions or actions that emerge from The Keystone Center activities have a right to see someone representing their perspective or "voice" even if they themselves are not present. The Keystone Center staff are obligated to assure that the fullest diversity and the widest representation of views and voices possible are present in our process. This must also be balanced with the practicality of finding participants who are open to seeking common ground with those who hold different views.

Uses of Information. Participants in The Keystone Center activities have a right to know what will happen to the information and ideas that are discussed in a Keystone activity meeting or throughout a meeting process. Recognizing that convening or contracting entities may place constraints on what is made public and what is not, facilitators have a duty to clarify to the greatest extent possible how information generated by a group will be used, who owns it, how it will be represented, and by whom.

Decision-making. Participants in The Keystone Center activities have a right to know how decisions will be made before they are made. The Keystone Center Associates have a duty to explain, or help a group collectively decide, at the beginning of a process, how decisions in the group will be made.

Personal Needs and Biases. Participants in The Keystone Center activities have a right to expect a high level of objectivity, self-control, and self-awareness from anyone calling themselves a The Keystone Center employee. Associates and support staff are first and foremost, servants of the good processes and good science we believe is necessary to shape smart policy. We therefore have a duty to subordinate our own personal needs which includes examining, to the greatest extent possible, our own likes, dislikes, predispositions, and cultural biases and, if necessary, disqualifying ourselves from work or respectfully declining it.

There is wide agreement among the NJFF group participants that transport of spent fuel and other high-level radioactive waste is highly regulated, and that it has been safely shipped in the past.

A Musing Environment

Karen Street

And it's bullying, based on the fact that he takes a position you don't agree with. It's not something you belligerently demand of everyone who participates here.

I don't want this place becoming an echo chamber. When I invite guests here and they're immediately met with vitriol, snotty aesthetic critiques, and attacks on their integrity -- all of which have been on display here over the last week or two -- it pisses me off, not to mention embarrasses me. I'm happy to absorb all blows anyone wants to direct my way, and return them, on the assumption that we're all family here, and there are no hard feelings. But when new visitors come in our house, I'd prefer we give them a chance to get comfortable before we start pissing on their shoes. Or else they won't come back, and we'll be left here slapping each others backs over how damn smart and superior we are.

grist.org

Full disclosure - I was one of the 27 members of the Keystone factfinding.  And there was  general agreement around the table, from the enviro to ratepayer advocate to nuclear industry side, that Gen IV is at least 20 years out from commericalization, if that. That is why the process focused on expected technologies. The general expectation is that reactors built over coming decades will be advanced variants of the light water reactors in use today.  This is what the industry's own understandings and projections reflect.  Yes, the South Africans are developing a modular pebble bed reactor, but that will have to be proven out.  

Joe has it right that Reuters had it wrong.  The report looks at one Pacala-Socolow Wedge (=14% of needed carbon reductions to avoid doubled concentrations, which probably still is 100 ppm CO2 over where we need to be, and finds that for nuclear to reach even one  an extremely heavy lift, equal to the best construction rate the industry has ever acheived and well below authoritative industry projections.  

Place on top of that the finding that new nukes would cost 8-11 cents/kilowatt hour delivered at the plant, before around 2.5 cents delivery costs, and what emerges is that nukes are a very costly option at least 2 cents/kWh over new wind.  And UCS has criticized that number as too low!  So any nuclear revival would require public policy support, probably in excess of the $6 billion the feds put on the table in Energy Act 2005.  

Bottom line question as the political debate ramps up - Is nuclear really what we want to subsidize?  Or are there better investments the public can make such as mass-scale wind and energy efficiency that do not have the associated waste and proliferation problems?  

Patrick Mazza

in nuclear waste-related injuries or deaths, whose real-world occurrences so far number zero.

Bull.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html --
oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes

A less than 99 percent reduction in body count?

I have a slow connection. Describe the video and explain how, if your introduction of it as evidence is wholly truthful and relevant, it weakens my argument that for every hundred gigawatt-years of delivered energy, fossil fuel waste kills many while nuclear waste kills none.

Fun how you switched it from injuries AND deaths.
To only deaths.

"We didn't kill them, we just gave them luekemia"

The only thing that has direct correlation in nuclear power production is when Chernobyl blew in an area with iodine deficient children with no stay indoors orders; A thyroid cancer spike. But this isn't indicated in any studies from spent fuel or more generic nuclear waste.

?
Didn't think so.

Not quite so risky when it's wrapped in steel and concrete.  It's the other parts which are the problem.

It is a 60 Minutes piece ("Lethal And Leaking") on Hanford and also Bechtel's nuclear-contracting in general. It includes no health-physics information other than the statement: "...the waste is so lethal that a small cup of it would kill everyone in a crowded restaurant, in minutes."

The complete transcript is available here:
cbsnews.com/stories/200
6/04/27/60minutes/main1553896.shtml

Generation IV reactors do not exist.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

Generation IV reactors (Gen IV) are a set of theoretical nuclear reactor designs currently being researched.

And where in the New Scientist article (not exactly lacking in sensationalism) are there any links for anything related to leukemia caused by spent fuel or even mine tailings. The most there is mention of is nominally highe rate of lung cancer by uranium miners... not necissarily caused by what we normally define as nuclear waste unless you consider granite a nuclear waste also with it feeding radon into unventilated basements.

Between 10 minutes and 40 years, for a two-month irradiation time, the radioactivity reduces itself about 100,000-fold. A more conscientious Lesley Stahl would have said that a large vat of the waste liquid would, assuming it absorbed no more of its own rays than the original cup-sized piece of irradiated uranium did, would give everyone in that restaurant a dose within a few hundred thousand minutes, if they stayed, that would kill them if received quickly.

The diminution of radioactivity over time is hard to calculate. For times less than a century it's closely given by the Untermyer and Weills rule, where 'T_0' is how many seconds a piece of uranium was roasted and 't' is how many seconds it has since cooled:

(Delayed thermal power)/(thermal power while in an operating reactor)
        =
        0.1*{
        (t+10)^(-0.2) - (t + T_0 + 10)^(-0.2)
        -0.87*[(t + 20000000)^(-0.2) -
        (t + 20000000 + T_0)^(-0.2)]
        }

Failure to do this legwork amounted to one lie, perhaps it seemed like a little one, in a good cause. But in fact it's not a good cause, because it is all lies.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?

Nor are the waste plumes heading for the Columbia (already detectable in very trace amounts) doing anyone any good.

The 5% Project

Would you quantify that, please?

Depending on how you look at it, the Westinghouse AP 1000 is either an advanced generation III reactor, or a true generation IV reactor, with generation III roots.  The simplisity of the design, coupled with greatly improved safety features, makes the AP 1000 a true breakthrough in reactor design.  The AP 1000 can be mass produced, and using modular construction techniques, it can be constructed within 36 months.  The NRC has approved the final design certification the AP1000.  Mass produced the AP 1000 will cost one billion dollars or less.

http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/AP1000/index.shtm

It would be criminal if the environmental community did not push for the replacement of coal fired power plants, with highly sophisticated and safe reactors like the AP 1000.

It is also acknowledged that the Molten Salt reactor is a generation IV product, yet three generations of Molten Salt reactor were designed and produced by ORNL in the 1950's and 60's.

Charles Barton

There are geological structures we can project will stay stable for 15,000 years and much longer based on the geological record.  Unfortunately, Yucca Mountain is rife with uncertainties, including water in an oxidizing environment and seismic activity.  It was chosen as a product of politics, long before Harry Reid became Senate majority leader.  That gets to a very basic issue - Longterm geologic storage looks is technically feasible, but is it politically feasible?  (Finland is on track to complete a geologic repository, but their politics are different.) In the interim, waste will be stored in dry casks, and probably remain at over 100 little waste repositories at current, former and future (?) reactor sites indefinitely.  Those with an agenda for reprocessing waste will be secretely satisfied.

In response to deezakin, no, the factors that are driving nuke to 8-11 cents kWh are pushing wind to about 6.5 cents, and that includes grid connections and balancing resources.  Add another 2.5 cents to the nuke cost for a comparable figure.  Also note that wind prices are up not just because of the general run-up in materials costs, but because wind is booming and the supply chain is still being built.  

The test of the Westinghouse reactor linked in Charles' post will be if it can play in the marketplace.  Energy Act 2005 puts up $6 billion in production credits on the table for the first new nukes to be built in the U.S.  A number of utilities are circling around this and looking at Southeastern sites.  China also has major reactor construction plans announced.  Test of time and the market.  

Patrick Mazza

http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml

Even in the unlikely event that reactor waist is not contained, would the consequences be worst than a 3 or 4 meter sea level rise during this century?  We will solve the nuclear waist issue if we want to badly enough, just as we will solve the problem of Greenhouse gas is we want to solve it.  Our problems will not be solved as long as we give in to anti-nuclear hysteria.  

When advocates of wind power tell us that reliable, unlimited wind power can be had for $.065 a KW hour, I want to pull out my shovel.  In what real world is that possible?  TVA reports that there is enough wind on Buffalo Mountain, one of the most windy spots in Tennessee to generate electricity 7% of the time in Augst, a peek demand month, in air conditioner friendly Tennessee.  How far are you going to string your grid to bring reliable power to Tennessee in August pray tell?  Certainly you are going to have to go far beyond the South Eastern United States, which has the same wind conditions you find in Tennessee.  The wind plus grid idea is a pipe dream.   Get real, and lets get on with the solution.

Charles Barton

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/07/15/wind.power/

We would need a Smart Grid to operate mass intermittent renewables, along with new transmission lines from wind reservoirs such as the Great Plains.  Ackowledged, the Southeast is wind-poor and other options are needed.  

If you read my post carefully, I ackowledged long-term geologic storage is feasible.  

Patrick Mazza

And still not factoring in additional infrastructure cost for dispatchable storage to counter winds behavior as a negative load rather than a base supply.

Experience with massive nuclear infrastructure projects in France shows nothing of the 8-11 cents per kw/hour that you're inventing, and yet wind shows no sign of being less expensive baseload than nuclear anywhere.

In short... you're lying; Cooking the books for a desired outcome.

Stick the dry storage casks in a parking lot. Check on them in another 100 years an reseal if necissary. Chances are in several hundred years at the very latest we'll strip out the actinides for fuel anyways, in addition to the xenon and platinum group fission products.

Geologic repositories are misdirection solutions to a nonproblem. They arent necissary and never were.

The NRC approved the AP 1000 design in 2006.  3 are on order in the United States and 4 more in China.  This is a very impressive step toward the demand that can lead to mass production.

Charles Barton

"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter; will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history; will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast of an age of peace."

  -- Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, 1955

Sounds even better than the claims being about safe, clean, cheap nuclear power being spun today.  But in the real world and, especially in the political, business, and security climate of the United States, it's difficult to take such dreams seriously, now.

As I understand it, we are all agreed that protecting the environment and enhancing the virtues of living in a more or less free and more or less technologically advanced state are primary considerations in evaluating a combination of new and existing energy and conservation measures to carry us forward.  Shouldn't we be looking at the full spectrum of possible consequences of significantly expanding nuclear power in these terms instead of staying within the frame the PR firms pushing nukes find most comfortable as of late?

Has anyone given some serious thought to the implications of much more widely distributed nuclear fuel and waste in the context of terrorist threats, dirty bombs, infiltration of supposedly secure facilities, and the overwhelmingly dire response to just one such event in the U.S.?  Before we even think about building and supporting more of these things, I think it makes a great deal of sense to truly clean up and secure the ones we already have, then use that effort as a basis for calculating the real world cost of doing the same may times over for new facilities.

I am sure there has been some work done in that area.  And I am sure we remain in a vulnerable situation.  So, where do people stand on this?  Are we supposed to just hope for the best and ignore the implications of what is likely to happen if that changes?

Many, I suspect, will remain sure of nuclear power's vulnerability to "terrorist threats, dirty bombs, infiltration of supposedly secure facilities" no matter how much negative evidence accumulates. They will demand we "truly clean up and secure the ones we already have" as a clever way of suggesting they aren't already clean and secure. Sure, they are in practice, but not in theory.

Perhaps the theory is incomplete. "Much more widely distributed nuclear fuel" isn't really possible, because nuclear fuel is uranium. It's everywhere. It has always been everywhere.

Unless future revenues on hundreds of billions of barrels of oil are for some reason important, it surely is a persuasive bit of theory that no amount of putatively security-related hobbling of the nuclear enterprise will make any worthwhile difference at all once it is easier for miscreants to find their own uranium and proceed entirely independently of it.

What is the evidence that this isn't already true?

I think "the overwhelmingly dire response to just one such event in the U.S." doesn't give the people of the US enough credit. After the Oklahoma City bombing, they continued to tolerate fuel oil shipments, and ammonium nitrate shipments. They didn't assume every such shipment was actually both, mixed, and didn't declare the fertilizer and fuel-oil industries forever and inextricably linked to terrorism.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html --
oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes

In that case, you understand incorrectly since the outlook you describe is humanist, and not everyone is a humanist.

Rune wrote: Has anyone given some serious thought to the implications of much more widely distributed nuclear fuel and waste in the context of terrorist threats, dirty bombs, infiltration of supposedly secure facilities, and the overwhelmingly dire response to just one such event in the U.S.?

Yes.

thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/11/build_more_nucl.html#comment-25220524

Safety may even have reverse value since domestic radioactive insults upon a nation reduce the value of an enemy's potential radioactive insults. In other words, if we did not have accidental radioactive leaks, in terms of the security of the nation from foreign insult we would profit from intentionally creating radioactive leaks. Unsafety can be valuable.
[...]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine#Developing_immunity

[...] As long as the vast majority of people are vaccinated, it is much more difficult for an outbreak of disease to occur, let alone spread. This effect is called herd immunity.

in terms of the security of the nation from foreign insult we would profit from intentionally creating radioactive leaks.

Because we all know America would go to war over insults from foreign nations ;D

_

Anyways, sounds like a plot from an episode of 24.

Jack Bauer shall save us!

Perhaps the theory is incomplete. "Much more widely distributed nuclear fuel" isn't really possible, because nuclear fuel is uranium. It's everywhere. It has always been everywhere.

Since when is hydrogen the same element as uranium?

GreyFlcn wrote: Since when is hydrogen the same element as uranium?

What does your question have to do with the nuclear terrorism that Rune was talking about?

uranium. It's everywhere. It has always been everywhere.

The more pressing question should be what does Hydrogen have to do with the availibility of Uranium.

Please clearly-explain how you arrived at that conclusion.

Mostly adding nuclear power in places that have both nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. What is the incremental risk ? Compare the risk with actual deaths from coal and oil pollution.

Scaling up:
The world is completing about 2 coal reactors every week. Coal reactors can take almost as long to build as a nuclear reactor. So the scale of construction is feasible.

Research shows we can safely up power all water based reactors by 50%. Donut shaped fuel and nanoparticles in the water for higher temperatures  for boiling. (MIT study)

So the reactors would produce a lot more power.

Also, historically, the US completed 12 reactors in 1974,10 in 1973, 8 in 1972. There were years in the eighties with 8 completed. Before 1968 only small reactors were built. Only two had over 400MW, but most were less than 100MW. 1969, 1970, 1971 had 3-4 each year, then in 1972 the 8 reactors. So from a relative standing start the scale up was rapid to the peak of 12/year of the last build cycle. We are in a better position now because US rebuilt a new nuclear plant and is switching on Browns Ferry 1 this year.

Overall, renewable energy (1993 to 2005) in the United States has increased at a rate of 1,000 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. The nuclear energy figure is 16,203 thousand megawatt-hours per year for nuclear even without building a new plant. This is from operating efficiency gains.

There are now 286 nuclear reactors in the world construction pipeline. Up 20 from last month and up from 219 in February.
http://www.uic.com.au/reactors.htm

GreyFlcn wrote: The more pressing question should be what does Hydrogen have to do with the availibility of Uranium.

Please clearly-explain how you arrived at that conclusion.

GreyFlcn wrote: Perhaps you should ask Cowan
gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/6/18/161052/155#comment33

Please clearly-explain how you arrived at that conclusion.

Calling someone a liar because you disagree with their statements is low level mudslinging, dezakin.  You should learn some respect.  

Patrick Mazza

Also from the same paper:

'If we examined the cost of construction for a coal or wind plant, we would expect to find similar cost increases'

But the study did not examine the cost of construction of either. You're lying about making a valid comparison. The grid integration costs for wind would be huge for the simple reason  that supplying the dispatchable power (often in the form of pumped hydro or natural gas) incurs much higher capital costs than nuclear.