As Though the Future and the Climate Didn't Matter

I've had some fun on this blog in the past critiquing Joe Romm's various "analyses" of nuclear power, but I basically gave up once Romm came out as an apologist for fossil fuels. That took the joy out of it for me; it hardly seems worth the bother to pursue "debate" with someone who's so clearly out of touch with the real issues in the climate crisis to realize that all fossil fuels are too carbon intensive, PERIOD.

Predictably, however, Romm has continued his bizarre crusade against new nuclear builds in the US. Seizing upon setbacks such as the NRC's letter challenging Westinghouse to demonstrate the efficacy of the AP-1000's shield building design to the rejection of AECL's ACR-1000 proposal in Ontario, his disdain for the nuclear option is readily apparent. And in keeping with past examples, the announcement that Toshiba's asking price for the South Texas nuclear project had increased by $4 billion came in for similar treatment.

However unpleasant the cost run-up is, it appears to be mainly a hardball negotiation tactic on Toshiba's part. As usual, veteran nuclear industry-watcher Dan Yurman is on top of things:

CPS interim general manager Steve Bartley told the San Antonio newspaper the $4 billion price increase could be a "negotiating tactic." He agreed with Mayor Castro that the decision to postpone the bond vote "sends a signal to Toshiba" that the delivered price of the twin reactors must come down. Bartley added that CPS Energy will send a delegation to Japan to sit down with Toshiba to discuss costs.

Note that a similar process happened with Rosatom's nuclear tender in Turkey. The Russians originally offered an extremely high quote of $0.21/kWh, which of course Romm seized upon as "proof" that nuclear power is ruinously expensive. But as more sober observers always knew, it was really the Russians' desire to gouge the Turks, rather than anything intrinsic about nuclear power, which resulted in the high bid. As of a few weeks ago the Russians and the Turks were down to $0.15/kWh and were still negotiating. Look for a similar process in coming months with the project in Texas.

Romm's constant companion in his recent anti-nuclear tirades has been Craig Severance, a Republican (!) accountant and disco-era coal apologist. I have to hand it to Mr. Severance--he's an alchemist who would make Hermes Trismegistus jealous. He transmuted Joe Romm, crusader against climate change, into Joe Romm, shill for natural gas. I never thought I would see the day.

It seems that Joe Romm is merely among the more prominent individuals suckered by the natural gas industry's present marketing strategy, which is really quite brilliant. I might even admire it, if it didn't have the unpleasant side effect of wrecking the planet upon which I happen to live. Fortunately, Rod Adams has been paying close attention to this trend (see particularly here and here). Essentially, the natural gas industry is selling itself to the public as a "cheap bridge to a renewable future" while assuring its investors that the lean times won't last forever, and that soon their industry will be buoyed by strong demand resulting from economic recovery and the need for carbon reductions. A fine visual example of this cynical gambit pulled from the web:


Note that nearly all of the "clean energy alternatives" that Romm's recent post puts forward are really ways to burn natural gas. Compressed-air energy storage to "firm" wind capacity? Gas. Combination solar-thermal/gas plants? Gas. (And a particularly wasteful use of it, given the lower thermodynamic efficiency of such an arrangement compared to a CCGT). Severance even goes so far as to cut to the obvious and suggest

Another type of power plant San Antonio could build might be a natural gas power plant (of course, it can wait until at least 2015 to decide to do so, as noted above under “Rushed Decision”).

The reason this isn't OK is not just because natural gas prices will recover from their currently depressed level by then (keep in mind that the REAL reason for recent low prices is the economic downturn, NOT the unconventional gas discoveries, and that those merely pushed the date that US natural gas production will begin to decline from the immediate to the intermediate future), both due to probable economic recovery as well as the fact that new legislation will encourage gas in preference to coal for electrical generation. Nor is it because the Russians are clearly hoping to manipulate the world energy market to maximize their gas export revenues in coming years. It's because the climate advantages of natural gas have been greatly exaggerated. It's true that gas is better than coal--but nowhere near as much as many believe, including Joe Romm.

The issue is methane. Burning methane for fuel may produce less CO2 than coal in the same applications, but methane is itself a very strong greenhouse gas--indeed, twenty-five times as much as CO2. While comparing the smokestack CO2 emissions from coal and natural gas plants may suggest that gas plants are vastly superior, this gives only an incomplete picture of the actual situation. A full-lifecycle analysis including the methane inevitably lost during extraction and transport leads to much more sobering conclusions.

This shouldn't really be news. See, for instance, this 2007 paper from Environmental Science & Technology, "Comparative life-cycle air emissions of coal, domestic natural gas, LNG, and SNG for electricity generation." The authors found that when the entirety of the fuel cycle is accounted for, conventional gas is nearly as bad for the climate as coal--and LNG is as bad as coal! Natural gas hardly seems to be the stuff from which a bridge to a climate-friendly energy future will be built.

The importance of accounting for non-CO2 greenhouse gases has recognized by professional climatologists for years. Indeed, a 2006 NYRB piece by James Hansen (who has been the target of repeated and increasingly unreasonable criticism from Joe Romm) noted that:

Further global warming can be kept within limits (under two degrees Fahrenheit) only by means of simultaneous slowdown of CO₂ emissions and absolute reduction of the principal non CO₂agents of global warming, particularly emissions of methane gas. Such methane emissions are not only the second-largest human contribution to climate change but also the main cause of an increase in ozone—the third-largest human-produced greenhouse gas—in the troposphere, the lowest part of the Earth's atmosphere. Practical methods can be used to reduce human sources of methane emission, for example, at coal mines, landfills, and waste management facilities.

If we want to get serious about fighting climate change, we need real clean energy solutions. Funding underhanded schemes that will drain our pockets via fuel surcharges while depositing methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere do not fall into this category, however successful the gas industry's spin doctors may be at convincing credulous pundits like Joe Romm otherwise. If we we're going to act like the future and the climate actually matter, we must be willing to take the steps needed to build a genuinely climate-friendly energy infrastructure--and this is definitely going to include considerable investment in new nuclear facilities.

Atomic Technology in the Sixth Five-Year-Plan

From Voennye znaniia, June 1956:

"We Communists must place the greatest discovery of the 20th century--atomic energy--in full service of that task, the fulfillment of which is the programmatic goal our Party--the task of building Communism."
--N.A. Bulganin, at the 20th Party Congress

One of the most poorly-remembered aspects of "Atoms for Peace" back in the mid-50s was the way in which the Soviets responded to it. President Eisenhower and his advisors hoped that their proposal for an international nuclear fuel bank would deprive the Soviet weapons complex of fissile material it couldn't spare, and thus restricting the growth of the USSR's nuclear arsenal. Instead, the Soviet Union elected to produce a flood of propaganda demonstrating that the "peaceful atom" really only existed on their side of the iron curtain. Touting the construction in Obninsk of the first nuclear power plant in 1954, two years before Calder Hall in the United Kingdom and three before Shippingport went into service in the United States, as proof of a Soviet lead in civilian applications of atomic energy, Soviet propagandists in the mid-1950s portrayed a world in which socialism and nuclear power combined to alleviate technical and social problems.

Emboldened by this early success, the Communist Party adopted outrageously overambitious goals for their civilian nuclear program during the Sixth Five-Year-Plan (1956-60). As described by a 1956 article in Voennaia znaniia (Military Knowledge):

In the Sixth Five-Year-Plan it is planned to build five large atomic power stations. A large atomic power station will be put into service near Moscow. It will have a 400 thousand kilowatt capacity. Two atomic power power stations with a total capacity of a million kilowatts will be constructed in the Urals.

Altogether in the current Five-Year-Plan atomic power stations will be constructed with a total capacity of 2-2.5 million kilowatts. . . .No capitalist country, including the USA and England, are planning to place atomic power stations of such great capacity into service.

The USSR saw the construction of these plants as a means of fulfilling two goals: firstly, as a means of constructing energy centers in regions lacking local fuel supplies, and secondly, as a "great experiment" in order to determine what reactor technologies would be most economical and advantageous for widespread deployment in the subsequent Five-Year-Plan. According to the article, "up to ten types of reactors" ranging in electrical output from 50 to 200MWe would be developed before 1960. One suggestion was a homogeneous reactor that would use the radiolysis of the fuel solution to power a galvanic cell in addition to a turbine. One of the reactors would use thorium fuel, and might potentially be an aqueous homogenous reactor as suggested by Academician A.I. Alikhanov in Geneva in 1955, producing U-233 from Thorium.

Besides power stations, atomic energy would also be put to use by the Socialist motherland for transportation purposes. One goal for the the Five-Year-Plan was the construction of an atomic icebreaker; this would ultimately see the light of day as the Lenin, entering service in 1959. But this was not to be all; nuclear airplanes and locomotives would also be the objects of intense research and development. It is true that the Myasishchev design bureau made several prospective designs for nuclear-powered strategic bombers in the late 1950s--the M-30 and M-60--but like their American counterparts, these aircraft did not ultimately see the light of day. And while the article stated that "it can be expected that atomic locomotives will travel our railways in the near future," and was illustrated with an elaborate picture of a two-story atomic locomotive quite reminiscent of the one in the 1979 NBC flop Supertrain, no such conveyance ever left the drawing board.

Atomic Locomotive As Imagined By Soviet Artist (1956)

The article concluded that:

Our country stands ahead of other countries in the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes. In the years of the Sixth Five-Year-Plan the Soviet Union will make a great new leap ahead in the development of atomic technology and in the use of the immeasurable energy of the atomic nucleus.

Unfortunately, this was not quite the way things turned out. The only item mentioned in the article that actually got completed during the Five-Year-Plan was the icebreaker Lenin. The next nuclear plant to go into service after Obninsk was in Tomsk in 1958; but these were basically plutonium-production reactors for the weapons program that also produced electricity. The civilian reactors (water-graphite in Beloyarsk and light water at Novovoronezh) began construction in 1957 and 1958 respectively, but only entered service in 1964. But little notice was paid to these failures at the time, given another technological marvel grabbed the world's attention:

Amory Lovins Admits He Doesn't Know the Carbon Intensity of "Micropower"

From Amory Lovins' reply to Rod Adams' critique of this post on Grist:

Mr. Adams’s claim about “an awful lot of diesel, coal, and natural gas” being consumed by micropower is addressed in Part One of my response to David Bradish’s post at http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2008/06/amory-lovins-and-his-nuclear-illusion_05.html. Mr. Bradish was referring to the fuel mix of the non-biomass cogeneration that our “micropower” database combines with renewables other than big hydropower. As I stated, cogeneration does burn some coal, but not much. The mainly gas-fired cogeneration fuel mix is unknown in detail but does include some coal, chiefly in China and India (where gas is often available), and to some extent in Germany, all aided by coal subsidies. USEIA also reported that 18.7% of the U.S. cogeneration in its partial database for 2006 that burned fossil fuels was coal-fired, including culm or waste coal. However, even coal-fired cogen greatly reduces the carbon otherwise emitted by separate production of power and heat, because it displaces the separate fueled boiler(s) otherwise needed to produce the heat that cogen recovers. The resulting carbon saving is smaller than for the predominant gas-fired cogen, let alone for renewables, but is still substantial. I hope soon to receive updated cogen data casting more light on the fuel mix, and if I do, will post it to our micropower database at http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid256.php#E05-04.

So Amory Lovins admits that, so far as the supposed carbon savings from "micropower" are concerned, he really doesn't know what he's talking about... but he might find out soon?

As I pointed out in the past, Lovins' definition of "micropower" makes no sense and only serves to obscure the fact that Lovins is in practice essentially shilling for fossil fuels, his (perhaps earnest) claims to the contrary aside. All that's new is that Lovins is admitting he doesn't actually have the data to support his claims.

No, the Soviets Did NOT Build a "Doomsday Machine"

From Wired:

"The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again. Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks.

No, no, NO. Perimeter is NOT a doomsday machine and does not meet the definition of one. As Russian nuclear arms expert Pavel Podvig explained in a 2006 post on his excellent blog:

The Soviet Union never built this automatic Doomsday Machine (also known as Dead Hand) -- the Perimeter communication system that is often mistaken for it is something quite different.

As Podvig explains, the "Dead Hand" was a proposal made in the mid-1980s that was ultimately rejected. Distinct from Perimeter, it was to be fully automated--if it detected nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union and lost contact with all human agencies with the authority to launch a retaliatory strike, it would retaliate on its own. Perimeter, meanwhile, merely automatically delegates launch authority from the highest civilian and military authorities to a hardened command center in case of a decapitation strike. The difference is that Perimeter is not fully automatic--launch authority ALWAYS remains under human control. Furthermore, never mind that the classic doomsday machine was supposed to be much more destructive than Perimeter--keep in mind that Perimeter would in all likelihood only ever be activated once a very substantial fraction of the Soviet nuclear arsenal had been destroyed in an American preemptive nuclear strike. The doomsday device proposed by Leo Szilard and explored by Herman Kahn in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War was supposed to be a world-destroying weapon which would render the world uninhabitable. By this definition, even the fully automated and unrealized "Dead Hand" would not be a doomsday machine.

I can see the temptation to confuse Perimeter with a doomsday machine--after all, everyone loves Dr. Strangelove and you wouldn't exactly sell as many books if they were titled "Perimeter: Soviet Automated System for Delegation of Launch Authority in Case of Decapitation Strike." But Perimeter just isn't the stuff pulp thriller novels are made of. Indeed, Thompson even admits this, despite the hype contained in his own article:

According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine.

Unlike some other spurious Soviet doomsday machine myths this one contains a germ of truth. Furthermore, Perimeter is not in fact particularly dangerous. Multiple layers of human authority are still required to launch a nuclear attack, in addition to the detection of nuclear strikes on Russia. What was really dangerous was the practice in the 1950s and 1960s to field nuclear weapons that either lacked permissive action links or in which they were effectively disabled (it is well-known that SAC bypassed the PALs in the 1960s by setting all of them to strings of zeros). This would raise the possibility of lone "General Jack T. Rippers" launching nuclear wars all on their own. During the early Cold War Soviet nuclear posture was vastly less aggressive and accident-prone than that of the United States (the actual weapons were only to be released to the military in a crisis), greatly reducing the likelihood of such a scenario.

Perimeter is neither a doomsday machine nor a serious threat to U.S. security, past or present. It's time to stop pretending otherwise.

The Energy Crisis in the Capitalist World, 1975

I apologize for my recent lack of posts. I received a Fulbright-Hays grant and am currently in Moscow conducting dissertation research about the history of the Soviet civil defense system. Hopefully my efforts will lead to some kind of closure to the longstanding debate in the US during the Cold War about the extent, nature, and intent of Soviet civil defense. I'm making solid headway in the archives so far--today I found some figures for the implementation of the 1955-56 campaign for the education of the adult population in "anti-atomic defense" for various Soviet republics. (It turns out Estonia did very, very poorly).

I'm currently living in a building that was constructed in the 1950s to house members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and (presumably) because of this, it's right across the street from the Academy of Sciences bookstore. On my previous trips to Moscow I had always made a point to frequent this establishment, as it offers a very good selection of used items at reasonable prices. Last week I found an interesting book there--a 1975 analysis by the Soviet Academy of Sciences of the capitalist world's energy woes.

Titled Энергетический кризис в капиталистическом мире (The Energy Crisis in the Capitalist World), this 478-page volume offers fascinating insights into Soviet thinking on energy in the mid-1970s. Published in an edition of 5000 copies, this highly technical book was clearly intended mainly for specialists, rather than everyday readers.

On the whole, the authors of the book attribute the energy crisis to the "fundamental contradictions of capitalism," and in particular to a lack of planning. In their view the attendant inflation resulting from the energy crisis would deepen international capitalism's problems, encourage increasing divisions between the first world and the third world, and ultimately further the cause of socialism. Comecon, meanwhile, was utterly devoid of energy problems and indeed a model for the world to follow: "These countries supply the current and perspective fuel cycle from their own resources . . . act as exporters of energy resources on the world market, and work to provide assistance to many developing countries in accessing their energy resources, without demanding political, military, or other concessions. In effect the socialist energy sector is the most stable and balanced component part of the world's energy industry." (p. 474) While certainly rather hyperbolic, keep in mind the role that the energy export sector played in enabling the USSR to avoid confronting its many internal problems in the 1970s--at the very least, it was one of the best-run aspects of the socialist economies.

What's perhaps more interesting sections of the book is its analysis of the Ford Administration's then-current efforts to free America from oil imports by 1985--"Project Independence." Presciently, they predicted the failure of the United States to achieve these goals. Of the range of measures intended to solve America's energy problems technologically, ranging from synthfuels to renewable energy, the Soviets expected only one--nuclear energy--to meet expectations. At the same time, they expected all of these efforts to be realized on a larger scale than they actually were. For instance, follwing contemporary western estimates they forecast 280 GW of nuclear generation in service in the United States in 1985, when the actual figure was under 100.

The Soviet authors made the following comment about renewable energy that still rings true 34 years later:

Preliminary evaluations of many new trends in energy take on an extremely polemic character in the USA. On the one side, strong monopolies established in the fuel-energy complex attempt to minimize the potential technological and economic value of these resources. On the other side, small firms (most of the efforts for the development of new forms of energy come from this sector) loudly advertise their products, making maximum use of the current market situation. (p. 329)

One of the more surprising sections is that on energy efficiency efforts in the US, particularly with regards to combined heat and power (CHP) plants. In a statement that would make free-market "natural capitalist" and CHP guru Amory Lovins' head explode, they declare that:

American economists are attracted by Soviet experience in the development of centralized heating of cities with the assistance of CHP plants. But under the conditions of capitalism speculative land prices and laws regarding the laying of thermal mains discourage the development of this trend in energy. (p. 315)

On the whole, an interesting historical artifact. The more things change...

The RRW: Not So Dead After All

From Newsweek:

As a candidate, Barack Obama declared war on nukes, but now he's calling a tactical truce. To encourage tougher international action against proliferation, he hopes to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. The idea of outlawing weapons tests was so divisive that the Senate said no in 1999, and Republicans are ready to fight if Obama tries again. To buy them off, Obama will propose updating America's aging nuclear-weapons manufacturing complex and funding design work that would tiptoe to the very edge of crafting a new warhead, according to a senior official's recent briefing to a small group of outside experts. (Candidate Obama pledged "not to authorize the development of new nuclear weapons and related facilities.") Meanwhile, the Pentagon, working on a new "nuclear posture review," is contemplating a force of 1,000 weapons deployed and 2,000 in reserve. That's well below the 1,675 agreed to in Moscow this May, with 2,500 currently in reserve, but it dismays some of those who have been briefed. "It's Bush Lite," says one, speaking anonymously to preserve his access. "That's not what Obama promised."

I had stated in the past that the RRW would likely prove to be a program that just won't die. This is because entrenched interests--and not just the weapons labs--are deeply invested in the project. But I'm surprised with the apparent ease with which Obama seems to be retreating on this issue. I had expected the RRW to face much greater obstacles from this administration.

Scientists Release Radioactive Cockroaches Into Phoenix City Sewer

From the "research committee wouldn't approve that nowadays" file:

Approximately 6,500 American roaches, P. americana, were trapped in sewer manholes, tagged with P32, and then released at selected sites. To capture the specimens, a quart jar fitted with a plastic screen cone and baited with over ripe bananas was placed on its side in each of 9 manholes. A total of 18 traps was operated for 12 days to collect the desired number of specimens. Prior to marking, the roaches were maintained in 18-inch square screen cages on a diet of banana and powdered milk.

To tag the roaches, a radioactive casein solution containing 10 microcuries of P32 per milliliter was sprayed upon the specimens under confinement. The spray mixture contained equal parts of a 10 per cent casein solution and a P32 solution, the former being included to assure adhesion of the spray to the integument of the roach. The initial step in the treatment of the roaches was to place 1,000 to 1,500 specimens in a 10 or 20 gallon garbage container which was covered by a transparent plastic lid. The latter was equipped with an exhaust filter and a center hole for nozzle insertion. The spray was then introduced by means of a nasal syringe attached to a small air compressor. A total of 40 to 50 milliliters of spray solution sufficed for each can application, the operation requiring approximately five minutes.

Following the application of the spray, the container was allowed to remain undisturbed for fifteen minutes. At the end of that time, the plastic lid was replaced by the standard garbage can cover. When treatment of all roaches was completed, the contained specimens were transported to the liberation sites which consisted of four manholes one block apart and serving the same trunk line. Release of the specimens occurred at dusk, the container being lowered into the manhole and the lid removed. The opened container remained in the manhole for a 24-hour period.

For recovery of the tagged specimens, 34 traps were located in sewer manholes within a one-mile radius of the four release sites, the majority of the stations being within the 0.5 mile radius (Fig. 1). On the basis of the direction of sewage flow, stations were selected at manholes below and above the release points and at manholes located on secondary lines. In addition to the manhole sites, 10 traps were placed on premises in the blocks immediately adjacent to four liberation sites. Collection of specimens was effected at each station for 8 1/2 weeks following the release of the tagged roaches, a total of 12 samples being procured from each manhole. Radioactive roaches were detected by examining all samples with a laboratory or field count rate meter equipped with a thin-walled Geiger tube.

This is from "The Occurrence and Movement of Periplaneta Americana (L.) Within an Urban Sewerage System," by H.F. Schoof and R.E. Siverly, published in the March, 1954 issue of The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

What was the logic behind tagging cockroaches with radiophosphorus and releasing them into a municipal sewer? As the authors explained,

These instances coupled with the prevalence and movement of cockroaches in and around food-handling establishments, residences and waste disposal sites have focused further attention upon the importance of these insects as possible vectors of enteric infections. Concurrent with this interest is the renewed effort by communities to control roaches within city sewerage systems (Gary, 1950). The heavy roach infestations within such systems combined with the availability of human wastes are factors which conceivably could constitute a potential hazard to the health of a community.

Since it has been demonstrated that roaches resident within the sewerage systems can become contaminated with pathogenic organisms, the next step in the mode of spread of the pathogens would involve the degree of dispersion of the infected roaches and the contact between the insects and the human population. To obtain information on the dispersion of roaches within and from a sewerage system, a study was conducted at Phoenix, Arizona, in October 1952. Previous surveys of 22 selected manholes in that city for a seven-week period had shown a weekly average of 92 to 143 specimens per manhole with all roaches being P. americana.

Mercifully, it turns out that the radioactive cockroaches didn't go much of anywhere:

The collection data are summarized in Table 1. As is apparent, only one tagged specimen was recovered from sites other than the release point. Despite the absence of marked specimens, all manhole stations yielded P. americana, the average number per collection being 39 specimens. Only one specimen was trapped in the 10 yard stations but this roach was radioactive. Three of the four release sites were trapped to provide a total of 929 roaches in 17 collections or an average of 54 specimens per sample. Of this number, 97.5 per cent were radioactive, thus demonstrating that the method of tagging had been effective. Further substantiation of this aspect was shown by the recovery of tagged roaches throughout the 8 week period. Specimens captured 39 days after release displayed counts of 1,000 to 6,000 per minute.

The authors concluded from these findings that:

The conclusion derived from the experimental evidence is that P. americana does not disperse throughout the urban sewerage system of Phoenix, Arizona. . . .The results reported tend to raise a question as to the relative importance of roaches as a means of disseminating disease pathogens within the sewerage system and from such locations to human habitations. Further evidence discrediting the concept is the finding that the roach populations in sewer manholes are composed of one species, P. americana, whereas the predominant species taken in homes have been Supella supellectilium and Blattella germanica.

Isn't that reassuring?