Blogging About the Unthinkable

Kiev

2011-05-27T06:09:00.000-07:00

Yet again, I must apologize for neglecting this blog. I've been quite preoccupied with my research. I finished up my time in Washington a few weeks ago and have now moved to Kiev for the summer to study in the archives here. I've tracked down some very interesting documents about Chernobyl that I will be using as part of my dissertation. I really wish I could photograph these things and post them on the blog, but unfortunately the archive they are in doesn't allow photography. For instance, the include reports made for the Communist Party about the radiation level in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities after the accident.

I've also been hesitant to comment on the still-developing situation in Japan, in large measure because detailed, accurate information seems so hard to come by. Until the accident sequence is nailed down, trying to draw concrete "lessons" from the events there will be a fool's game. At the moment TEPCO is claiming that the earthquake was not the cause of the failures at Fukushima Daiichi units 1-3, and that the tsunami alone resulted in the deplorable outcome there. This is hotly contested by some, however, who claim that the emergency core cooling system in unit 1 failed prior to the tsunami. Even if this were the case, the availability of auxiliary power in the absence of the tsunami would presumably have allowed the operation of the standby gas treatment system and prevented the hydrogen explosion as well as captured most of the volatile radioisotopes, so the end result would probably have been far less dire.

The great mystery to me is what happened in unit 4, which experienced damage to the refueling floor blow-out panels. Back in March it appeared that somehow the water level in the spent fuel storage pool in unit 4 had grown so low as to expose the fuel, resulting in the zirconium-steam reaction and the creation of large amounts of hydrogen. But TEPCO images of the unit 4 pool show that the fuel is basically intact. It's supposedly implausible that radiolytic alone hydrogen production could have had the observed result; one possibility is that hydrogen from unit 3, which apparently shared a ventilation stack with unit 4, backed up into unit 4. Presumably what actually happened will become clear as efforts to stabilize the plants continue.

In July I'm planning on a return trip to Chernobyl, which should hopefully include some sites I missed out on last time. I'm also trying to arrange a visit to an operating VVER plant here in Ukraine, but no definite word on that yet. Hopefully I'll have interesting things to say about it.

Fukushima Daiichi: Learning From Chernobyl

2011-03-12T21:53:00.000-08:00

I must apologize for my long respite from blogging. I've felt compelled to concentrate on my dissertation and several academic articles I've been working on. This effort has produced results--my article about Soviet civil defense has been accepted for publication, and I was interviewed for a TV documentary. As one might imagine, however, today I was distracted by the events in Japan.

My dissertation research is about nuclear disaster. I actually do basically sit around all day long reading about it, thinking about it, and writing about it. I have dreams about it. So of course, recent events have distracted me from getting my work done.

First and foremost, we should keep in mind the enormous human tragedy that has occurred due to this earthquake. The death toll keeps rising, and I'm sure there will be no definitive estimate anytime soon. But in the American media, at least, concerns about the nuclear plant problems have completely overshadowed the immense suffering millions of Japanese are facing right now. This is a national embarrassment. At the same time, I must admit I'm absolutely guilty of it myself.

Commentators began making comparisons to Chernobyl even before there was any real indication of problems at the plants in Japan. Such comparisons have grown increasingly common as the past two days have progressed. Usually, however, the focus is on the plants themselves and potential of actual radiation releases, and not on the emergency response to the reactor problems. On this score, I believe that the Japanese deserve our praise. Clearly, they have learned the lessons of Chernobyl and are applying them in practice.

By taking the steps of evacuating the region around the damaged plants and distributing potassium iodine tablets, the authorities have likely avoided the most dire human effects of any possible radiation release. Although I cannot find any sources at the moment stating if the evacuation effort is yet complete, once all residents have left the area the human effects of even a very large radiation release should be reduced to negligible levels. This is in contrast to Chernobyl, where authorities chose to pretend the situation was not serious, and left the residents of Pripiat in place well after the explosion.

Similarly, the Japanese government has decided to assume the worst in managing the stricken reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. As of this moment Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano has stated that even though it has not been confirmed, officials are presuming partial meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi units 1 and 3. In the case of unit 1, the decision had already been made to use seawater to cool the containment, effectively destroying any hope of repairing the reactor. By presuming the worst, officials will escape the error of their Soviet forebears of allowing wishful thinking to prevent taking decisive action to prevent a wider catastrophe. Are these officials being overly pessimistic? Possibly. But they have a responsibility to prevent this accident from becoming another Chernobyl, and they appear to be taking those steps.

If the Japanese government is indeed "assuming the worst," then they are almost certainly readying plans for reducing the amount of radiation released by a possible containment failure at these reactors. Whereas the Soviet Union had to plan and carry out the construction of the sarcophagus over Chernobyl unit 4 in incredibly hostile and uncertain conditions, the Japanese have the ability to plan ahead. In this task they enjoy further advantages. While the BWRs suffering major faults have, frankly, not performed satisfactorily under the circumstances, they are still FAR superior to the RBMK design--even if the containment ruptures, the fact that the design includes a containment would make the task of "entombing" these reactors far easier. Furthermore, the plants are far more structurally intact than Chernobyl unit 4 was after it exploded--even Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, which suffered the dramatic hydrogen explosion.

Therefore, even if the worst-case scenario unfolds, there is reason to believe that proactive measures on the part of the Japanese can forestall a catastrophic radiation release. And it appears that they have the foresight to be thinking ahead. Unlike the Soviets, who hid behind a veil of secrecy and buried themselves in denial, the Japanese government has been forthright with its concerns and willing to face the possibility that things will not work out as hoped. I pray that their concerns will not be borne out, and that emergency measures at the plants will prevent further core damage. Still, they are absolutely right to approach the situation as they are.

Wait, FEMA Got to Edit the Script of The Day After?

2010-10-23T17:47:00.000-07:00

I apologize that I haven't been posting much lately, as I've been very busy researching the American aspect of my dissertation. I'm currently living in College Park, Maryland and working through civil defense records in the National Archives annex here. It's fairly exciting as a great deal of this material is unexamined--I'm the first person to look at it since it was packed away decades ago. The documents I've looked at date from the Truman to the Reagan administrations.

So far the material from the 40s and 50s hasn't been all that ground-breaking; a lot of it is neat but it hasn't really challenged my longstanding thesis about the Federal Civil Defense Administration and its many problems. The stuff from the 80s is quite another matter. Only a very limited amount of documents from FEMA are available in the National Archives, and half of the boxes I've ordered so far were withheld and I was told that I would need to file a FOIA request to look at them. Those I've been able to access so far, however, have forced me to seriously reconsider some of my assumptions about civil defense in the Reagan era.

FEMA Public Affairs Memorandum About The Day After, August 13, 1982

One of the big surprises so far was this August 13, 1982 memorandum from FEMA Public Affairs chief Jim Holton about The Day After. One would hardly suspect that this 1983 ABC television movie had been edited at the request of FEMA to be more flattering to civil defense, but it was. As Holton noted,

The attached script for the forthcoming ABC-TV prime time movie was given to us last week and, as you'll notice on the cover sheet, it is the latest in a series of revisions. This version reflects a number of changes which DoD insisted on before agreeing to support in the making of the film, support such as the use of National Guard troops, certain unclassified facilities, military vehicles and aircraft, etc. Unfortunately, our only contribution to the production is some dosimeters, the withdrawal of which would not bother ABC films.

It should be noted, however, that the revised script has been changed to reflect suggestions we made to the producers several months ago and which had not been included in the draft before this one. DoD, in using their clout to get the changes they wanted also leaned on ABC to make the FEMA-requested amendments, nearly all of which they responded to. They are on pages 30, 31, 176, 177, and 178.

What precisely were these changes? Unfortunately, I do not have my DVD of the film here in College Park, so I am forced to rely on memory. The problem is complicated by the fact that The Day After, as originally filmed, was intended to to be a four-hour film aired in two parts, and a great deal of it ended up on the cutting room floor. As a result I'm not sure how much FEMA impacted the film as aired, but its impact on the shooting script appears undeniable. From the the revision of the script in FEMA's records, I suspect the changes were that skeptical references to Crisis Relocation Planning--the evacuation scheme being pushed by FEMA in the early 1980s--were toned down, as was the post-attack scene where an agronomist is attempting to convince skeptical farmers to scrape off their topsoil and one of them makes an angry outburst.

FEMA got to edit the script of The Day After? Who would've thought?

Basics of Soviet Civil Defense-1980

2010-10-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

1980 Soviet civil defense propaganda film "Основы Гражданской обороны"--"Civil Defense Basics."

RBMK Control Room

2010-08-04T10:40:00.001-07:00

Control room of Chernobyl NPP Unit 1

These gauges indicate position of control rods in the active zone. Black boxes are neutron flux indicators.

These are the controls for some of the many control rods in the RBMK. You hold down the appropriate button and use the joystick on the left to move them in or out of the active zone.

Six emergency shutdown switches. "АЗ5" switch (top row, center) initiated rapid emergency shutdown.

Can You Spot the Math Error?

2010-08-03T18:02:00.000-07:00

Trawling around the interwebs, I encountered the following critique of vertical farm concepts at TreeHugger:

This led us to wonder, "What would be the consequences of a vertical-farming effort large enough to allow us to remove from the landscape, say, the United States' 53 million acres of wheat?"...Our calculations, based on the efficiency of converting sunlight to plant matter, show that just to meet a year's U.S. wheat production with vertical farming would, for lighting alone, require eight times as much electricity as all U.S. utilities generate in an entire year [see calculations here].

This evoked a raised eyebrow from me, given the widespread claim that American agriculture uses vastly more fossil fuel energy than it delivers in terms of total food calories. Something doesn't add up here--clearly, someone is very, very wrong about the amount of energy embodied in our foodstuffs.

Fortunately, the included "calculations" reveal the source of the problem:

The following is a very rough estimate of the amount of power needed just for lighting vertical farms to grow the U.S. wheat crop. Note this is under ideal conditions for nutrients, temperature, and other productivity factors. Under excellent conditions, wheat has radiation use efficiency of 2.8 grams of biomass produced per 106 joule of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR). So to produce one metric ton (106 g) of wheat biomass requires [106 g / (2.8 g/10⁶ J)] = 3.6 × 10¹¹ joules of PAR over a season under ideal conditions.

Oops. >BANGS HEAD ON DESK< (3.6 x 10¹¹ joules is the amount of energy in 10,526 liters of gasoline. That's a lot of energy for just one metric ton of wheat... )

To be fair I've seen equivalent mathematical goofs from the proponents of these fanciful vertical farm concepts. A lot of people aren't dotting their Is and crossing their Ts, so to speak. I actually like the concept, but it needs ample cheap energy to work--basically, it would have to be coupled with nuclear reactors. I have no problem with that myself. But I don't think it will be a near-term development in any case.

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

2010-06-19T23:02:00.000-07:00

In the post I wrote before I left for Ukraine, I wrote:

Will it be an unparalleled ecological disaster zone? A latter-day Eden enabled by the lack of human inhabitation? The world's biggest time capsule? A toybox of wonderful Soviet things?

Now that I'm back in Moscow and have had some time to digest, I think I can issue some kind of statement on these questions.

Was Chernobyl an unprecedented ecological disaster zone? Definitely not. The radiation levels in the vast majority of the exclusion zone are now quite low--so much so, that our guide, Maxim, told us that he expects that the 30km zone will be opened up within another few years and that only the 10km zone will remain. There are, however, some significant hot spots in the 10km zone. The hottest place we ever got to in Pripiat was .25 rem/hr; but that was highly unusual. I think the usual level is a millirem/hr or less. Even in places near the sarcophagus it's many orders of magnitude lower than that. For instance, at the place I'm standing in this picture the ambient exposure is 2 millirem/hr:

However, according to a map we saw in the plant, the roof and part of the grounds on one side of the sarcophagus have exposure levels of up to 1.5 rem/hr. While that would take quite awhile to kill you outright, it's a serious workplace hazard and must make the life of the Novarka employees who are building the new sarcophagus very interesting...

Despite these isolated locations, the overall radiation hazard in the vast majority of the zone is nothing to get worked up about, in my view.

Was the zone a latter-day Eden enabled by the lack of human inhabitation? This I don't feel I can answer definitively. During my time in the zone I spent most of my time either in Pripiat or at the plant itself. Maxim told us that they had started shooting the wild boars once they began infringing on Chernobyl too much (the town the plant was named after and where the hotel is). Flies, midges, and mosquitoes were certainly in evidence; I'd have to spend time in other parts of the zone to determine if the wildlife lives up to the stories about it. Pripiat sees a lot of traffic, considering; there is a lost of post-1986 litter lying around, and at least several busloads of people come through every day.

Was it the world's biggest time capsule? Certainly less so than I would've liked. Thieves and scavengers (and I imagine simple vandals) have stolen or wrecked more or less everything that was worth taking. For instance, they stole the refrigerators from the top floor of a 16-story apartment block we visited--WITHOUT power to operate the elevators. It's astonishing how picked-over the apartments were, especially compared to places like the hospital and schools that see much more tourist traffic.

But was the zone still a toybox of wonderful Soviet things? Certainly. It was fascinating to see the remnants of aspects of Soviet life that I had read about but never seen--bottles and jars collected for reuse, basement vegetable cellars in the kindergarten, communal kitchens, and especially bomb shelters.

Wait--they had Diet Pepsi in the Soviet Union?!!? From the Pripiat Bus Garage

I Can't Believe They Let Me Take This Picture

2010-06-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

Inside the Control Room of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1.

Off to Chernobyl

2010-06-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

I apologize for my utter lack of blog posts lately. I've been extremely busy with my dissertation research--I'm really starting to feel the pressure to get my research done here in the limited time I have left. I've been working in the archives every weekday from opening until closing, and then in the libraries on Saturday. But in part that's because I knew that I was going to lose the next week and a half to an excursion I had planned from before I got to Moscow. That is, I'm leaving for Kiev tomorrow and next week I'm going to spend a few days at Chernobyl.

Now, in a sense this is still "research" since one of the chapters of my dissertation is about the role Soviet civil defense played at Chernobyl, but it's also the fulfillment of a longstanding desire to see the place for myself and cut through the myths. Will it be an unparalleled ecological disaster zone? A latter-day Eden enabled by the lack of human inhabitation? The world's biggest time capsule? A toybox of wonderful Soviet things? Only one way to find out...

This trip has been organized by a friend who's a fellow Oak Ridger--indeed, we've got something of a pilgrimage of us Oak Ridgers headed off for Chernobyl like some sort of nuclear Canterbury. I'll be back sometime around the 15th to let you know how it went.

SVBR in New York Times; Bellona Unimpressed

2010-03-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

The SVBR, which I first blogged about last year, is continuing to gain increasing attention in the American media. On March 18th the New York Times published an article about the reactor, titled "Safety Issues Linger as Nuclear Reactors Shrink in Size."

According to the article:

Environmentalists say the technology is outdated and potentially dangerous, and marketing it as green energy is an abuse of nuclear power’s good green name.
. . . .
The kinds of marine reactors the Russians are promoting, though, also happen to create a byproduct — used fuel — that no one knows how to handle. Right now, that spent fuel is being stored at naval yards in the Russian Arctic.
In most nuclear facilities, the used fuel, which is highly radioactive, is removed from the reactor and stored in a pool of water. But in the Soviet submarine model currently advanced by a Moscow company, the spent fuel ends up frozen along with the reactor and stored away. No engineering solution has been devised yet to decontaminate the fuel.

I'm fairly sure that the authors are confused here, and are conflating the problem of spent nuclear fuel with those posed by the lead-bismuth coolant. According to Gidropress, the SVBR is planned to use uranium oxide fuel enriched to 16.5% U-235. There is considerable practical and experimental experience reprocessing oxide fuel, so it's hard to understand why SVBR fuel assemblies would supposedly be impossible to reprocess. Indeed, the Russians specifically tout "Возможность работы в замкнутом ядерном топливном цикле"--the possibility of operating on a closed fuel cycle.

I think that the problem that the authors really mean to be addressing is not that posed by the spent fuel itself, but rather the hazards posed by the lead-bismuth coolant. When irradiated by neutrons, some of the lead coolant is transmuted into Polonium-210. And while lead-bismuth has a substantially lower melting point than lead, it still poses serious challenges if it freezes. This was the Achilles' heel of the reactors used in the Soviet Alfa submarine--when the coolant froze, there was no way to either restart the reactor or "defrost" it to extract the spent fuel, and the coolant itself posed significant radiation hazards. This was due to limitations of the early lead-bismuth reactor designs. The SVBR is specifically designed to avoid this problem--indeed, the reactor is supposed to be shipped from the factory pre-loaded with frozen lead-bismuth coolant. As Gail the Actuary stated on the Oil Drum last year: "The SVBR-100 is cooled by a lead-bismuth eutectic alloy which is loaded into the reactor at the factory. After testing, the heavy metal coolant is allowed to “freeze”, and the modular SVBR-100 reactor is transported to its power plant destination via railroad flat car for installation."

Presuming that the SVBR actually achieves this, Bellona's concerns about the design are moot. Disappointingly, the NYT echoes the Norwegian-Russian antinuclear group in implying that the SVBR is somehow "unsafe." This is in fact the opposite of reality--the SVBR should be considerably safer than existing LWR designs thanks to the high boiling point of the lead-bismuth coolant, low operating pressure, passive heat removal, and other advanced safety features. The coolant freezing issue would never be a hazard to the public in any case--even if it did render a reactor inoperable, it does not follow that it would result in an accident resulting in a major radiation release. Indeed, as the Russians' spokeswoman Anna Kudryavtseva stated, the liquid-metal reactor would be “maximally safe even in not very capable hands.”

On the whole it's good to see the SVBR receiving more attention, but it's disappointing that the article gives such a misleading impression of the technology. Only time will tell if the Russians overcome the engineering challenge to make the lead-bismuth reactor a commercial practicality, but that doesn't excuse this kind of sloppy reporting.

How Many Bomb Shelters Were There in the USSR?

2010-02-15T12:15:00.000-08:00

I've been collecting data on the number of bomb shelters in various Russian cities. This was a topic of major debate decades ago, when some analysts argued that the Soviet Union pursued a "war survival" capability in order to undermine America's nuclear deterrent. I'm getting some really interesting stuff out of the archives here, which I'm going to use to craft an article about the USSR's shelter system. Here are some figures that have come out in recent years:

Moscow: 7,000+
St. Petersburg: 4003, 2873 in housing sector
Tula: ~300, approximately 100,000 spaces
Tver: ~200

The CIA estimated in 1986 that the USSR had shelter space for 11.2% of its urban population. Between these figures and what I've seen in the archives, I believe that this estimate was approximately correct.

"Clean," "Safe" Natural Gas-Now With Deadly Explosions!

2010-02-07T09:57:00.000-08:00

Just a few days ago Joe Romm plugged natural gas as an alternative to new nuclear builds:

"And the relatively low price of natural gas is leading to increased power generation of that relatively clean fuel. . . .You can’t push on a string, not even a nuclear-powered one."

Romm, Robert Kennedy Jr., and others have been pushing for more gas as an alternative to nuclear, despite the fact that its environmental benefits are grossly overrated and it isn't likely to keep its "relatively low price" for long.

And now look what's happened:

At least two people were killed Sunday in an explosion at a Connecticut power plant, police said.

Two people have been confirmed dead, said Middletown, Connecticut, police Sgt. Chuck Jacobucci, but authorities expect the number to rise since they are still searching for people.
. . . .

The plant's general manager, Gordon Holk, confirmed the blast caused casualties, but wasn't sure how many. Fire and police officials in Middletown said there were "mass casualties," but no other details were immediately available.

The site is a 620-megawatt gas-fired power plant, according to Holk.

Puts the ridiculous fear-mongering about picocuries of tritium in drinking water into perspective, doesn't it? My sympathies go out to all the victims of this explosion, as well as all the others around the world whose lives are cut short by our disastrous and unnecessary dependence on dangerous fossil fuels, be it in accident, war, or otherwise.

UPDATE 2/8/2010: Speak of the devil--guess who just wrote a post buying into the tritium paranoia? Joe, I'm waiting for the post where you renounce your apologia for natural gas since it obviously kills a lot more people than tritium leaks, which you seem to think are some kind of REALLY BIG DEAL. And furthermore, (and much more importantly) it is a core climate "anti-solution," given its significant carbon intensity.

How Gary Powers Could Have Started an Atomic War

2010-01-22T23:33:00.000-08:00

From the State Archive of the Russian Federation:

Документальные кадры судебного заседания в Колонном зале Дома Союзов по уголовному делу американского летчика-шпиона Ф. Пауэрса. На столе вещественных доказательств демонстрируют предметы, обнаруженные на сбитом самолете У-2.

Судебный процесс над американским летчиком-шпионам Пауэрсом с очевидностью показал, что империалисты усиленно готовятся к нападению на Советский Союз. Допрос обвиняемого Генеральным прокуром тов. Руденко выяснил, как может вспыхнуть атомная война.
Допрос Пауэрса Генеральным прокурором СССР тов. Руденко.
РУДЕНКО: Вы заявили здесь и на следствии, что выключали рычаги аппаратуры над определeнными пунктами?
ПАУЭРС: Я делал то, что мне было указано.
РУДЕНКО: Не зная о специальной аппаратуре?
ПАУЭРС: Нет, я никогда не видел этой специальной аппаратуры.
РУДЕНКО: Вы с таким же успехом могли бы нажать рычаг и сбросить атомную бомбу?
ПАУЭРС: Это могло бы быть сделано...
Мультипликационный рисунок атомного взрыва. Ослепительно яркая вспышка образует огненный шар, постепенно превращающийся к клубящееся облако. К нему, с поверхности земли, поднимается столб пыли, вследствие чего атомный взрыв приобретает специфично грибовидную форму.

Так одно движение руки подлого диверсанта может повергнуть человечество в неслыханные бедствия и страдания. Мы должны помнить об этой угрозе и быть готовы к защиты от оружия массового поражения.

Врыв атомной бомбы поражает не только силой ударной волны и светового излучения, но и радиоактивными веществами, которые переносятся потоками воздуха на значительные расстояния. Как от них защищаться?

In English:

Documentary footage of the ongoing trial of American spyplane pilot F. Powers in the Column Hall of the House of Soviets. On the table is displayed physical evidence--devices found aboard the downed U-2.

The trial of Powers has demonstrated unequivocally that the imperialists are intensively preparing for an attack on the Soviet Union. Interrogation of the accused by Public Prosecutor Comrade Rudenko demonstrated how a nuclear war might break out.

Examination of Powers by Attorny General of the USSR Comrade Rudenko:
RUDENKO: You reported here in the inquiry, that you turned down the levers of the apparatus above the indicated points?
POWERS: I did what I was ordered.
RUDENKO: While unaware of the special apparatus?
POWERS: No, I never saw this special apparatus.
RUDENKO: You might as well have depressed the lever and dropped an atomic bomb?
POWERS: Could have...

Animated image of an atomic explosion. A dazzlingly bright flash forms a fireball, then gradually evolves into a billowing cloud. Towards it rises a column of dust from the earth's surface, consequently giving the atomic cloud its characteristic mushroom shape.

With one small hand movement a dastardly saboteur could plunge mankind into untold hardships and suffering. We should be aware of this threat and be prepared to defend against weapons of mass destruction.

The explosion of an atomic bomb destroys not only via the effects of blast and flash, but also with radioactive substances, which are carried by air currents over considerable distances. How are they to be defended against?

This is from a late 1960 script for a civil defense film titled "Защита населения по следу радиоактивного облака" (Protection of the Population Along the Path of the Radioactive Cloud). I'm going to try and track down the finished version of the film, which may have been different.

World Nuclear News on SVBR

2010-01-05T12:50:00.000-08:00

World Nuclear News has a new piece about the SVBR, which I blogged about awhile ago: "Initiative for Small Fast Reactors."

The takeaway:

The companies' statement said their initial estimates show that large-scale production of SVBR-100s could bring down costs to the same level as for coal-fired generation. En+ Group CEO Vladislav Soloviev said "We believe that the development of the nuclear power industry is one of the most promising ways to meet the rising demand for energy with the lowest environmental impact."
Deputy director of Rosatom Petr Schedrovitsky said, "We expect the government to provide strong support... It will be put on the list of projects under the aegis of the President's Commission for Long-Term Development."

I.E., the SVBR is now the small modular reactor with the best chance of making it to market... because the Russian government is making it a priority project and funding its development. Compared to similar US projects from NuScale and B&W, which are hobbled by the uncertainty of whether the NRC will change its regulatory framework to enable these small reactor projects, Rosatom is full speed ahead.

If the SVBR turns out as advertised it may end up dominating the world reactor market once it's available for export. Do we really want to let the Russians have this field to themselves?

ScienceBlogs Death Spiral Watch

2010-01-05T02:43:00.000-08:00

I've been growing increasingly dismayed in recent months by the decreasing quality of ScienceBlogs. More and more it seems that Sb is less about science than partisan bloviating. Now, it's true that PZ Meyers devotes most of his blog to criticizing organized religion--but he's a very talented science popularizer when he wants to be. But many of the more recent additions to ScienceBlogs have very little to do with any kind of "science."

Take, for instance, Casaubon's Book. This recent addition to Sb is written by Sharon Astyk, who is pretty well-known in the Oil Drum/Energy Bulletin resource pessimist mileau, as well as among boutique farming enthusiasts. Astyk is absolutely convinced that technological solutions to problems like climate change are simply unfeasible, and constantly churns out posts about how we will soon run out of energy to run farm machinery and tens of millions of people will have to become agricultural laborers, how genetic modification is supposedly useless to address the world's agricultural challenges, or endorsing the latest Peak Oil screed on The Oil Drum. The thing is, most of this has very little to do with science and everything to do with reinforcing Astyk's pessimistic attitude towards technological civilization. Furthermore, she has attracted a sizable number of like-minded commenters who attempt to shout down those who point this out.

What I find so infuriating about Astyk is her faux reasonableness, which serves to obscure what is in fact an anti-scientific mentality. A good example of this is her post "Should You Drink Raw Milk?" In this post, Astyk acknowledges the various public health concerns that resulted in the ban on raw milk sales in the US but concludes that:

If you want raw milk, I would purchase it only after understanding the full risk-benefit analysis. I do not recommend it for pregnant women or children under 2, although I know plenty of people do drink it in those circumstances. I would either get your own dairy animal or purchase milk *only* from people who you actually develop a relationship with, after seeing their barn and handling techniques, and knowing what testing they do. I would make sure that I *always* do my milk pickup with a cooler on hand and keep it cool all the time. I would drink my milk quickly, or process it to make cheese and yogurt.

I would love to see raw milk be more available to those who do make informed choices and who want it, and I'd love to see small dairy producers able to sell it. But to do so requires a level of involvement and consciousness about your food that is simply different than picking up a quart of milk at the grocery store.

So Astyk's answer to the question "should you drink raw milk?" is somewhere between "sure, if you want to" and "maybe." The problem here is that this is NOT a justifiable conclusion based on the substantial body of scientific literature on raw milk consumption. The scientific answer to the question is "NO."

For instance, see S.P. Oliver et al., "Food Safety Hazards Associated with Consumption of Raw Milk," published in the September 2009 issue of the journal Foodborne Pathogens and Disease. According to the abstract:

"An increasing number of people are consuming raw unpasteurized milk. Enhanced nutritional qualities, taste, and health benefits have all been advocated as reasons for increased interest in raw milk consumption. However, science-based data to substantiate these claims are limited. People continue to consume raw milk even though numerous epidemiological studies have shown clearly that raw milk can be contaminated by a variety of pathogens, some of which are associated with human illness and disease. Several documented milkborne disease outbreaks occurred from 2000–2008 and were traced back to consumption of raw unpasteurized milk. Numerous people were found to have infections, some were hospitalized, and a few died."

The article reviews CDC records for the last decade regarding outbreaks of illness related to raw milk consumption for the last decade, while cautioning that these are clearly incomplete due to reporting problems. The authors conclude that "Enhanced nutritional qualities, taste, and health benefits have all been advocated as reasons for raw milk consumption. However, science-based data to substantiate these claims are lacking or do not exist. On the other hand, the evidence for the risks associated with raw milk consumption is clear."

There a substantial body of literature supporting the same basic conclusion, going back decades. Some pertinent examples:

Lejeune JT and Rajala-Schultz PJ. Unpasteurized milk: a continued public health threat. Clin Infect Dis 2009;48:93-100
Headrick ML, Korangy S, Bean NH, et al. The epidemiology of raw milk-associated foodborne disease outbreaks reported in the United States, 1973 through 1992. Am J Public Health 1998;88:1219-1221.
Chin J. Raw milk: a continuing vehicle for the transmission of infectious disease agents in the United States. J Infect Dis 1982; 146:440-441.

...and so on. Research on this dates back well into the 19th century.

So what Astyk is ACTUALLY doing, rather than offering a reasonable science-based assessment of the risks and benefits of raw milk consumption, is undermining scientific medicine. It is in fact eerily similar to one of the rhetorical gambits used by the anti-vaccine movement: "shouldn't parents be allowed to weigh the risks and benefits and choose for themselves?" It sounds appealing, but from a scientific standpoint it's indefensible, and it ends up killing innocent children for no good reason.

Perhaps it's unreasonable of me to expect this, but I think something called "ScienceBlogs" should be firmly based in actual science, not in Peak Oil resource millenialism or a faux-progressive pastoral romanticism. To avoid confusion, I suggest that Seed magazine (the sponsor of Sb) change the name to "W00Blogs," and potentially consider inviting advocates of other anti-scientific and non-scientific outlooks to blog there. Is Deepak Chopra available?

Carrots

2009-12-28T08:33:00.000-08:00

The disappointing end of the talks in Copenhagen has predictably resulted in a slew of finger-pointing. Although Bill McKibben and others laid the blame on President Obama, other observers argue that China intentionally crippled the talks. For instance:

While Brown refrained from naming countries, his climate change minister Ed Miliband said China had led a group of countries that “hijacked” the negotiations which had at times presented “a farcical picture to the public.”

In a very interesting Guardian piece Mark Lynas gives an account of how this transpired:

Even George Monbiot, writing in yesterday's Guardian, made the mistake of singly blaming Obama. But I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying "no", over and over again.
To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition.
China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak "as soon as possible". The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.

Lynas accounts for this diplomatic strategy as follows:

Why did China, in the words of a UK-based analyst who also spent hours in heads of state meetings, "not only reject targets for itself, but also refuse to allow any other country to take on binding targets?" The analyst, who has attended climate conferences for more than 15 years, concludes that China wants to weaken the climate regulation regime now "in order to avoid the risk that it might be called on to be more ambitious in a few years' time".
This does not mean China is not serious about global warming. It is strong in both the wind and solar industries. But China's growth, and growing global political and economic dominance, is based largely on cheap coal. China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to.

I think that Lynas is probably too generous here. The existence of sizable renewable energy industries means little with regard to climate change in the absence of meaningful emissions reductions, which were explicitly rejected by the Chinese.

Beijing's logic in rejecting binding emissions targets is not hard to understand. Following the Chinese Communist Party's abandonment of socialist ideals, its only claim to legitimacy is China's continued economic growth. The cessation or even deceleration of economic expansion would place the stability and potentially even the survival of the regime at risk. And as Lynas points out, China's rise to economic prominence has been fueled by cheap coal. Thus, for the PRC, emissions caps are more threatening than climate change. That they managed to deflect the blame for crippling the talks on Obama is just icing on the cake.

The lesson of Copenhagen, then, is that the only way to forge an international agreement to limit greenhouse emissions will be to offer a real alternative to coal. A carbon-free source source of energy that will allow the developing world to develop without wrecking the Holocene. Given geostrategic and engineering realities, this basically means Gen IV nuclear reactors--ideally LFTRs and IFRs but also less sustainable reactors such as the Russian SVBR that can conceivably scale quickly in the near term.

Furthermore, the promise of these technologies could prove an indispensable "carrot" in future climate change talks. Taking steps to commercialize advanced reactors, and offering assurances to share these with countries making efforts to decarbonize their economies, could provide a major incentive for recalcitrant nations to accede to emissions reductions, or at least a disincentive to sabotage negotiations like the PRC did. Furthermore, the promise of advanced reactors doesn't have to wait until they reach commercial status. Even a major development effort could be a significant incentive for developing nations hesitant to commit to emissions controls. Therefore, we don't have to wait decades for Gen IV nuclear to begin saving the climate--its enormous potential can start playing a vital role right now in climate negotations.

But until we have a viable alternative to coal, we can expect future negotiations to turn out like Copenhagen did. Gen IV nuclear reactors like the LFTR can be the carrot that saves the climate; it's high time we put some real political muscle into developing them, so that they can start putting some muscle behind our diplomacy.

Books on VVER and RBMK

2009-12-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

Since I arrived in Russia three months ago I have been accumulating books not merely about civil defense, but also about the Soviet civilian nuclear power. The one on the left is titled "NPP with VVER: Procedures, Characteristics, Effectiveness," and the one on the right is "Channelized Water-Graphite Reactors: Textbook."

The book on water-graphite reactors is particularly interesting, as it was sent to press a mere six months before the accident at Chernobyl Unit 4. In the fourth chapter, "Safety of Nuclear Reactors," the authors note that:

Нарушение соответствия между выделяемым и отводимым теплом и, как следствие этого, разрушение твэлов и других элементов конструкции могут возникуть или при повышении энерговыделения выше допустимого уровня, или при ухудшении теплоотвода. В результате бесконтрольного увеличения реактивности первый процесс возможен как в активной зоне в целом, так в отдельных ее частях. Причинами такого явления могут быть, например, заклинивание регулируюших стержей на вводе в активную зону, резкие изменения темпуратуры теплоносителя и т. п.

A lack of agreement between produced and removed heat, and consequently the destruction of fuel elements and other elements of construction, can result from either an increase in heat production beyond acceptable levels, or from a reduction in heat removal. The first process is possible as a result of an uncontrolled increase in reactivity in the active zone as a whole, or in a part of it. The causes of such an event can be, for instance, the jamming of control rods on entry to the active zone, abrupt changes in coolant temperature, and so forth. (p. 104)

Although such a reactivity spike caused the explosion at Chernobyl, it's clear from the textbook that the accident the authors envisioned was much more limited than that which actually transpired. This was probably because if the RBMK-1000 was operated according to regulations, the resulting power excursion would have been much smaller. (RBMKs have "safety rods" as well as control rods, and the operators removed most of these in order to start the reactor while it was subject to xenon poisoning, leaving it in an extremely unstable and dangerous state.) In any case, the book is merely an introduction (albeit a highly technical one) to Soviet water-graphite reactors. I'll keep my eye out for a more complete account of RBMKs, like the book about VVERs on the left.

As Though the Future and the Climate Didn't Matter

2009-10-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-10-16T11:09:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-10-11T00:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-01T08:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-02T16:56:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-26T18:45:00.000-07:00

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?

That Doesn't Even Make Any Sense

2009-08-21T09:33:00.005-07:00

I've been eternally mystified by the insistence some arms control types have that restricting the domestic deployment of civilian nuclear technology will somehow forestall proliferation abroad. The classic example of this is the Ford/Carter reprocessing ban. Given that reprocessing continued in the UK, France, Russia, and Japan, it seems that this policy failed to make much of an impression, and given the ability of North Korea to build a basic plutonium extraction plant, it hasn't done anything to halt determined would-be nuclear states. But that doesn't stop certain observers from claiming that this policy was actually a success and should be used as a model for future US nuclear energy policy. The most recent example is James M. Acton's article in the August/September issue of Survival, "Nuclear Power, Disarmament and Technological Restraint." As the author puts it:

The appropriate way to evaluate a strategy of desist and discourage is to ask whether it not only discourages states from taking small-scale research programmes to an industrial level, but leads states to avoid launching new reprocessing programmes in the first place. (Small-scale reprocessing programmes are perhaps even more worrying from a proliferation perspective than their industrial-scale counterparts.) For this reason, the claim from a recent Department of Energy report that 'U.S. opposition [to reprocessing] has not slowed large-scale reprocessing programs in Europe, Japan, and Russia', while true, is also somewhat beside the point. What the Department of Energy's statement really underlines is that, because of the web of political, legal and financial commitments needed to create such multibillion-dollar programmes, it is extremely difficult to stop them once they have been set in motion. This phenomenon, termed 'entrapment' by William Walker, highlights the importance of a policy aimed at stopping such programmes before they have even started. Here, there is evidence that the US moratorium had a positive, albeit modest, effect.

And where were these effects felt?

Most Western nuclear-power programmes prior to the mid 1970s were built around the expectation that power-reactor fuel would be reprocessed. The seminal 1976 study Moving Towards Life in a Nuclear Armed Crowd? observed that, given contemporary plans, 17 states would have reprocessing facilities and enough separated plutonium for between three and six nuclear weapons by 1985; today, just eight or nine states (including North Korea) are reprocessing. Not all of these stoppages were due to the US moratorium. Some programmes, such as South Korea's and Taiwan's (both of which had a clear military dimension), were avoided because of intense US pressure on both the supplier and recipient of reprocessing-technology transfers. Others, however, were influenced by the moratorium.

Acton uses Italy as an example of a state influenced by the moratorium, but ultimately concludes that "the evolution of policy in Italy was driven by a domestic debate about the economics of reprocessing and safety concerns about plutonium," leaving the reader to wonder exactly where it was that the policy had the desired effect. On the whole, it's not at all convincing as a defense of this kind of policy.

The technology which Acton particularly seems to envision for this kind of treatment is Silex laser enrichment:

Realistically, the gas centrifuge is too economically advantageous, and its use too entrenched, to be phased out. The opportunity does exist, however, to forsake enrichment and other nuclear technologies that have not yet been commercialised.

Today, for instance, Global Laser Enrichment (GLE, owned by General Electric Hitachi) is attempting to commercialise a new enrichment process (known as the SILEX process) based on lasers. GLE expects that the SILEX process will be more profitable to enrichment firms than other technologies. However, the economic benefits of cheaper enrichment to electricity consumers are slight because enrichment typically accounts for less than 5% of the total cost of nuclear electricity. Meanwhile, laser enrichment is probably even more worrying from a proliferation perspective than the gas centrifuge because detecting a small, clandestine laser-enrichment plant is likely to be even harder than detecting a secret gas-centrifuge enrichment plant of a similar capacity. Regulators should factor such concerns into licensing decisions for all nuclear technologies and be willing to deny applications if they determine that the costs outweigh the benefits, as is almost certainly the case with GLE, for instance. Forsaking sensitive nuclear technologies on non-proliferation grounds would be controversial, but justifiable.

I'm not sure why this follows. Silex is an extremely challenging technology which is already subject to what are arguably some of the tightest information controls ever applied to a civilian endeavor. Centrifuge technology, however, is much more achievable to would-be nuclear states and information about it has already been widely disseminated thanks to the efforts of A.Q. Kahn and others. Nuclear proliferators would be fools to pursue Silex, so why should we deny it to ourselves?

In general, Acton claims that "policymakers, industry insiders and regulators have usually failed to factor proliferation concerns into decisions about nuclear energy." This is a highly questionable assessment, given not only the history of the reprocessing ban in the US recounted by the author. To read the article, one would not know that such international controls have been in place already for decades. Incredibly, Acton totally ignores the existence of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which has been working to discourage nuclear proliferation since 1978. Perhaps one could argue that the efforts of the NSG have been utterly inadequate, but a failure to consider its efforts historically in an article making this argument is, to say the very least, an extraordinary oversight.

For all its shortcomings, however, the article does make an important and often-overlooked point:

The proliferation costs of not selling less-sensitive technologies are frequently underplayed. A dramatic example is the US decision to cut the United Kingdom and Canada out of the development of civil nuclear power after the Second World War. Reluctant to rely on the United States as a supplier of enrichment, Britain and Canada decided to focus on reactors that did not use enriched uranium (GCRs and HWRs, respectively). These reactors are, however, more suitable for proliferation than LWRs (which is not to say that LWRs are proliferation proof). Indeed, the Indian nuclear-weapons programme was based on a Canadian-supplied HWR. South Korea tried to acquire an almost identical reactor in the early 1970s, when it was pursuing a nuclear-weapons option. And, as noted above, North Korea produced plutonium for its weapons programme using a GCR based on a British design.

Historically, I think that Acton's example is rather imperfect, but I think the overall point is sound. The UK developed the MAGNOX GCR in order to produce plutonium for its weapons program; it seems unlikely that the US would have provided HEU for weapons use. The Canadians chose HWRs in the 1950s because they determined that developing domestic enrichment capabilities for solely civilian purposes would be prohibitively expensive, and there was no international civilian source for enriched uranium at the time. The US denial wasn't necessarily the issue per se. But it is easy to imagine how an unwillingness to share nuclear technology today could have undesirable consequences. For instance, states denied US reactor technology might turn to India and Russia, which could sell them reactors like the BN-800 that would have less proliferation resistance than conventional LWRs. This is one reason why more sensible arms control wonks have embraced the UAE deal as an example for how nuclear exports should be conducted.

The biggest flaw with Acton's argument, however, is that it is an anachronism in an era when the US dominates the world nuclear field far less than it did thirty years ago. In 1978, the US had much more influence over the civilian nuclear energy field; today, the major American players have been bought out by the Japanese, we have to import critical forgings, and Areva and Rosatom are furiously competing for the export market with offers of financing, fuel cycle services, and other enticements. Acton speaks mysteriously of "a small number of advanced nuclear states," but does this have any bearing on the world situation today? As nations like China and India build up their domestic nuclear industries, US influence continues to shrink, for better or for worse. Any strategy for non-proliferation that is posited on continued American dominance in the nuclear energy field is doomed to failure.

Thermodynamics Fail

2009-07-17T18:32:00.000-07:00

From Grist:

There's an old book called How to Lie With Statistics of which I'm very fond. Here we have a good example of an anti-nuclear argument that hinges on flimsy statistical assumptions--in this case, a silly definition of "delivered energy" which actually makes it appear that only the electrical generation field has to abide by the laws of thermodynamics.

In fairness the EIA perpetuates these silly myths by accounting for use of fossil fuels for transportation and heating as "delivered energy," even though the use of the primary energy in these applications is far from 100% efficient. This leads to numbers that give the impression that the electrical sector is massively wasteful, which is not at all the case. Look at Table A2 in the linked EIA document: the only "losses" accounted for are in the electrical field: 27.88 out of 101.9 quads of primary energy used in the US.

Grist promises that "Architecture 2030 will post a better answer on Grist next week." I certainly hope so, since so far all they've demonstrated is an ignorance of thermodynamics.

The SVBR: Russia Makes it Modular

2009-06-01T18:26:00.000-07:00

Recently there has been a flurry of attention in the English-language blogosphere about the Russians' prospective SVBR reactor series, inspired by this Oil Drum post. While the SVBR development program is hardly new, it has received important endorsements from the Russian government in recent months that suggest that the SVBR reactors will actually see the light of day.

The SVBR-100 reactor.

SVBR stands for Svintsovo-vismutovyi bystryi reaktor, or in English "Lead-Bismuth Fast Reactor." And this is exactly what the SLBR is--an evolved version of the lead-bismuth fast reactor which powered the Alpha submarine. The SVBR is one of three liquid-metal-cooled reators currently under development in Russia, along with the sodium-cooled BN-series and the lead-cooled BREST. Unlike the lead- and sodium-cooled reactors, which Rosatom ultimately envisions as very large (1600+ MWe in the case of the case of the BN-series), the SVBR is designed as a small, modular, and passively-safe reactor.

The reason I think that this is interesting is because I am convinced that such relatively small modular reactors are the future of nuclear power, and the SLBR is the Russian entry into this field, along with the Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor, the NuScale, and others. Furthermore, with Moscow's support the SLBR has better odds going for it than most of the other perspective modular designs.

The SVBR is currently envisioned in three sizes: 10MWe, 75MWe, and 100MWe. The first is intended for various portable and remote uses, incuding electricity and heat. (Ironically, I believe that the SVBR-10 meets Amory Lovins' definition of "micropower.") The 75MWe version was conceived as a way of reusing the equipment at aging Russian VVER-440 reactors. As described here, four SVBR-75 modules will replace the characteristic VVER steam generators within existing plant buildings and take advantage of existing turbomachinery. It's a very elegant idea, and it's easy to see why such a proposal would appeal to Rosatom. Finally, the SVBR-100 would be used in various stand-alone applications, including combined-heat-and-power and clustered in groups to create large power plants.

According to its designers, the SVBR will possess passive safety thanks to its "monobloc" design which incorporates the entire primary coolant loop in the reactor vessel, the physical and nuclear characteristics of the lead-bismuth coolant, and the placement of the reactor vessel in a pool of water which will serve as a passive emergency cooling system. The arguments for the SVBR's safety are, in my view, quite convincing, and it is clearly much safer than the current VVERs and the BN-series. I have my doubts, however, about whether the lead-bismuth coolant is quite friendly enough in operational practice to allow the general civilian application of these reactors. The Alpha submarine program, after all, suffered myriad difficulties with their lead-bismuth reactors and the expectation of widespread use of these reactors in the Soviet navy went unrealized. Gidropress believes that they have solved the attendant materials and design issues associated with lead-bismuth coolant, however. Only when the construction of a prototype SVBR will ascertain whether or not this confidence is justified. Furthermore, bismuth is rare, but geological exploration in Russia has already located enough of the element for hundreds of SVBR reactors.

Besides use repowering VVER-440s and building new electrical and heating plants within Russia, Rosatom also envisions the SVBR as a profitable export item. Anna Kudriavtseva, director of the department of research and scientific-technical policy at Atomenergoprom, reported at a conference last November that the SVBR could conceivably take 10-15% of the world market for small and medium-sized reactors, projected by the IAEA as 500-1000 units by 2040 and a potential value of $600 Billion. To this end the government is investing 16 Billion rubles in the project (about $500 million at current exchange rates), with a view to complete development work by 2017 and to have a pilot plant in operation by 2020. Although certainly less immediate than one might like, it appears that the SVBR will enter the commercial market at around the same time as the PBMR and other competing modular concepts.

Although the cost estimates I can find for the SVBR are not entirely reliable (they are, after all, made for an as-yet undemonstrated reator), they indicate that the SVBR is likely to be more economical than either the VVER or the ruinously expensive BN-series. This makes me wonder why Rosatom's expectations seem to belimited to sales of a few hundred units; barring unforseen events the SVBR would be its most attractive product both within Russia and on the export market by the early 2020s. By then there will probably be enormous demand for an economical, passive-safe nuclear reactor like the SVBR--a demand which Rosatom may be in a highly advantageous position to fill. I am heartened, however, by the fact that the NRC seems to be pondering the adoption of regulations encouraging the development of small, modular reactors. Hopefully the US won't abandon this critical arena to the Russians.

Is Joe Romm a "Delayer-1000"?

2009-05-05T15:52:00.000-07:00

I'm rapidly losing patience with Joe Romm, whose self-righteous arrogance is, if anything, actually harming the cause of addressing global climate change. Today, Romm published two posts on his blog illustrating the shortcomings of his methods and outlook.

The first, Memo to James Hansen: Your opposition to Waxman-Markey is ill-conceived and unhelpful, is the latest in Romm's series of critiques of James Hansen, the world's most prominent authority on climate change. Romm opines that:

"Why oh why do even smart people like NASA’s James Hansen think that there is such a thing as “simple carbon tax”? Have you folks ever looked at the friggin’ tax code?"

Besides denigrating Hansen, Romm apparently considers it obvious that there is only one credible solution to climate change--socialism: "There is only one way. That is a WWII-style and WWII-scale government-led mobilization." Despite this rather ambitious goal, Romm dismisses a carbon tax as "a political dead end." Are you kidding me? A carbon tax is infinitely more politically acceptable to the American electorate than state control of most of the economy (and that was what state-led WWII economic mobilization consisted of.) Furthermore, Hansen is right that the courts are really the best (and probably only) hope for substantial action on carbon reduction. Perhaps Romm is blind, but the Senate is never going to pass a bill that will reduce emissions substantially anytime soon, much less socialize the economy.

On the bright side, however, Romm's inane critiques of Hansen only serve to undermine his credibility. Anyone with sense can tell the difference between a brilliant, world-renowned scientist and an insufferable, politically intolerant and self-righteous blogger.

In another post Romm used Progress Energy's recent announcement that it will delay its new reactor builds by two years to crow about the supposed uselessness of nuclear power to combat climate change:

I’ll cast an even more positive light on the project delay. Maybe it will give Florida regulators or utility executives time to figure out that other options would be superior.

Well, I've got news for you, Joe. Turns out that those executives and regulators are way ahead of you. And you're dead wrong. Your three proposed alternatives: efficiency, biomass, and CSP, are no alternative to the new nuclear units.

Despite the fact that Amory Lovins' sophistry has deluded many into believing that "efficiency" is baseload power, this is nonsense. Efficiency does not generate electricity: it merely uses it more efficiently. When faced with the challenge of decarbonizing their electrical generation over the next few decades, Florida utilities have to address the prospect of how they will provide reliable, around the clock power even under adverse conditions to a growing population in a carbon-constrained world. Efficiency is important and worthwhile, but because it conserves energy rather than produces it, it does not allow FPL and Progress to avoid the sticky question of how they will generate electricity 25 years from now.

Last year the Florida Public Service Commission issued a study examining the feasibility of implementing a Renewable Portfolio Standard in the state. This study is the most complete comparison of the costs and possibilities of renewable and conventional energy I have ever seen. It compares the costs of different forms of generation across a spectrum of scenarios, using the Florida utilities' actual capital cost projections for these technologies. The results are sobering, as they show that renewables, particularly solar and wind, are not going to be cheaper than new nuclear plants in Florida except with large government subsidies. Biomass is another story, as it is projected to be cheaper than nuclear. However, biomass potential is limited by the availability of sustainable biomass feedstock. Furthermore, several form of "biomass" included in the analysis are not carbon-neutral, such as municipal solid waste burning. As nearly half of the 13,750MW of solid biomass feedstock available per year is from devoting existing farmland to energy crops, it should be readily apparent that biomass is not really an easy, "renewable" alternative to new nuclear plants for Florida. There just isn't enough feedstock for biomass to provide the entirety of Florida's baseload generation needs in coming decades.

Finally, the Florida PSC's study clearly shows that concentrating solar power (CSP, or "solar baseload" in Romm's insufferable newspeak) is an absolute loser in Florida. It is projected to cost more than nuclear power, and indeed more than anything, including all other forms of renewable energy. With generous subsidies the study found that CSP might come in at a little over 16 cents/kW-hr, but under pessimistic assumptions it would cost well over 30 cents/kW-hr.

The Navigant study, significantly, was actually made to support the Florida PSC's Renewable Portfolio Standard proposal, which was actually approved a few months ago. The PSC has definitely done its homework, as have Progress and FPL. Anti-nuclear types like Romm like to pretend as if huge utilities are so stupid that they would make multi-billion dollar investments in nuclear plants--investments that will restrict their near term profitability and severely impact their cashflow--without actually investigating alternatives. The fact of the matter is, these new nuclear plants are being built because the utilities see no good intermediate-term alternative. If coal or gas was acceptable, or if renewables were cost-effective, available, and non-intermittent, FPL and Progress would not be pursuing new LWRs. The very same Florida PSC that sent a RPS proposal to the state legislature also approved rate-recovery to build the nuclear plants. Somehow, I doubt that the PSC is confused about the necessity of nuclear power for Florida.

Furthermore, Romm and his certified accountant (and 70s-era coal apologist) associate Craig Severance are playing fast and loose with the nuclear cost estimates. Severance's so-called "analysis" that Romm "published" on his blog is both mendacious and irrelevant to estimating the costs of the new plants in Florida. Firstly, Severance simply chose to ignore the real reason that FPL's and Progress' cost estimates rose so rapidly in 2007-8--that the utilities were prudently and conservatively extending the ongoing increases in construction costs into the 2010s. Severance assumed that costs would continue to escalate beyond these estimates at a similar rate, but due to the global economic downturn and increasing competition in the production of nuclear components such as pressure vessels, construction cost escalation should soon drop precipitously. But the fundamental problem with the Severance "study" is that it uses capital cost assumptions that are in spectacular excess of the way FPL and Progress are actually financing the new builds. Severance assumed a 15% cost of equity, which was in keeping with the 2003 MIT study but is greatly in excess of the 11.85% rate set by the Florida PSC. Over a multi-year period, the difference between 15% and 11.85% interest is enormous. Furthermore, Severance added hugely inflated figures for decommissioning and waste-disposal costs which he essentially fabricated out of whole cloth. Romm's enthusiastic endorsement of this travesty is a testament to both his own pitifully low intellectual standards as well as his desperate desire to avoid owning up to being spectacularly wrong on the nuclear issue.

Romm claims that "The only thing that would decrease risk is not pursuing this nuclear power plant until all of the lower-cost efficiency and renewable options were exhausted." But if Florida pursued this course (which on close inspection isn't actually available), it would be too late. Such a short-sighted approach would leave Florida in the 2020s with a dwindling base of firm generation. Only decisive action now can forestall the likely challenges of the 2020s, and FPL and Progress are taking the most prudent course open to them. Joe Romm is too proud to admit that addressing climate change will probably require some measures that he doesn't care for. That's his right, but in his own way he's as much of a "delayer-1000" as the figures he decries on his blog.

Jon Wellinghoff is Blind

2009-04-22T18:38:00.000-07:00

Via Joe Romm, some comments from the Obama Administration's pick for head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff:

“I think [new nuclear expansion] is kind of a theoretical question, because I don’t see anybody building these things, I don’t see anybody having one under construction,” Wellington said.

Building nuclear plants is cost-prohibitive, he said, adding that the last price he saw was more than $7,000 a kilowatt — more expensive than solar energy. “Until costs get to some reasonable cost, I don’t think anybody’s going to [talk] that seriously,” he said. “Coal plants are sort of in the same boat, they’re not quite as expensive.”

I guess that Mr. Wellinghoff is blind, because anyone who has actually been paying attention knows that there's gonna be construction starting soon right here in the good ol' USA:
Southern Nuclear has given notice to its main contractors to proceed towards two new reactors at Vogtle. Permissions already in place allow some construction work to begin.
And as Dan Yurman reported here, Progress Energy in Florida and NRG in Texas are moving in the same direction. But this is symptomatic of much more serious problems with Mr. Wellinghoff: from all appearances, he has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.

This quotation gets at the heart of what I mean:

“I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism,” he said. “Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind’s going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you’ll dispatch that first.”He added, “People talk about, ‘Oh, we need baseload.’ It’s like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don’t need mainframes, we have distributed computing.”

The technology for renewable energies has come far enough to allow his vision to move forward, he said. For instance, there are systems now available for concentrated solar plants that can provide 15 hours of storage.

“What you have to do, is you have to be able to shape it,” he added. “And if you can shape wind and you can effectively get capacity available for you for all your loads.

“So if you can shape your renewables, you don’t need fossil fuel or nuclear plants to run all the time. And, in fact, most plants running all the time in your system are an impediment because they’re very inflexible. You can’t ramp up and ramp down a nuclear plant. And if you have instead the ability to ramp up and ramp down loads in ways that can shape the entire system, then the old concept of baseload becomes an anachronism.”

Wellinghoff is seriously confused, both in terms of the current status of renewable technology but also in that he's proposing technological frameworks that are currently wishful thinking. I'm not sure what he means by "shaping" wind, but he seems to be proposing making wind's serious inadequacies irrelevant by allowing energy providers to control end-use--an idea currently in vogue but whose popularity I am certain will disintegrate once it starts being implemented widely. The thing is, most (all?) qualified experts dispute the idea that "baseload is an anachronism." Intermittent generators just aren't dispatchable by definition, and once you get past the wishful thinking and do serious analysis, the barriers to making something like wind dispatchable prove much more forbidding than building new nuclear plants.

Here's a pertinent example of some people who don't share Welinghoff's vision: the authors of the DOE study that estimated that the US could generate 30% of its electricity from wind by 2030. As they concluded:

Wind power cannot replace the need for many “capacity resources,” which are generators and dispatchable load that are available to be used when needed to meet peak load. If wind has some capacity value for reliability planning purposes, that should be viewed as a bonus, but not a necessity. Wind is used when it is available, and system reliability planning is then conducted with knowledge of the ELCC of the wind plant. Nevertheless, in some areas of the nation where access to generation and markets that spans wide regions has not developed, the wind integration process could be more challenging.

However, Mr. Wellinghoff's position makes more sense when we consider his background:

Chairman Wellinghoff is an energy law specialist with more than 30 years experience in the field. Before joining FERC, he was in private practice and focused exclusively on client matters related to renewable energy, energy efficiency and distributed generation. While in the private sector, Chairman Wellinghoff represented an array of clients from federal agencies, renewable developers, and large consumers of power to energy efficient product manufacturers and clean energy advocacy organizations.

While in private practice, Chairman Wellinghoff was the primary author of the Nevada Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) Act. The Nevada RPS is one of the two states to receive an “A” rating by the Union of Concerned Scientists. In addition, he worked with clients to develop renewable portfolio standards in six other states. The Chairman is considered an expert on the state renewable portfolio process and has lectured extensively on the subject in numerous forums including the Vermont Law School.

Chairman Wellinghoff’s priorities at FERC include opening wholesale electric markets to renewable resources, providing a platform for participation of demand response and other distributed resources in wholesale electric markets including energy efficiency and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), and promoting greater efficiency in our nation’s energy infrastructure through the institution of advanced technologies and system integration.

So the head of FERC is not merely ignorant (not knowing that the new nuclear projects are breaking ground is totally inexcusable for someone in his position), but he's a technological fantasist who's determined to pick energy winners before they've been tested in the real world. It's rather akin to trying to pick the winning racehorse before it has been born. It makes me glad that FERC isn't powerful enough to actually implement most of this; at this rate, let's hope it stays that way.

"Solar-Powered City of Tomorrow" Will Probably Be More Nuclear Than Solar

2009-04-09T13:18:00.000-07:00

From Time:

An NFL lineman turned visionary developer today is unveiling startlingly ambitious plans for a solar-powered city of tomorrow in southwest Florida's outback, featuring the world's largest photovoltaic solar plant, a truly smart power grid, recharging stations for electric vehicles and a variety of other green innovations. The community of Babcock Ranch is designed to break new frontiers in sustainable development, quite a shift for a state that has never been sustainable and lately hasn't had much development.

Where will the power for this "green" city come from?

Kitson has been promising unprecedented sustainability all along, but today's shocker was the announcement of Florida Power & Light's plan to provide electricity for Babcock Ranch with a 75-megawatt photovoltaic plant nearly twice as big as the current record holder in Germany. Solar power has been slow to catch on in the gas-powered Sunshine State, but FPL hopes to start construction on the 400-acre, $300 million plant by year's end. The utility expects it will provide enough power for Babcock Ranch and beyond.

Furthermore, Time writer Michael Grunwald claims that:

At $4 million per megawatt — FPL estimates the cost to its customers at about 31� per month over the life of the project — it should be more than four times as cost-effective as the nuclear reactors FPL is trying to build near the Florida Keys.

This statement raises the obvious question of why FPL is trying to expand its nuclear capacity if solar photovoltaics are already four times as cost effective. The answer, in fact, is elegantly simple: Grunwald's math is way off. Not only will the solar plant produce power at least twice as costly as that from FPL's new reactors, but thanks to its likely <25% capacity factor and a lack of energy storage, this "solar-powered city of tomorrow" will likely end up consuming more nuclear-generated electricity than solar-generated electricity.

A quick Google search reveals that Grunwald's numbers are simply inaccurate to begin with:

The Babcock Ranch project will cost between $350 million and $400 million, FP&L officials said. Three other solar projects now being built by FP&L will add 31 cents to the average monthly bill of the utility's 4.5 million customers.

Instead of the $4000/kW given by Grunwald, that's $4667-$5333/kW. This is still considerably lower than the estimates that I had seen in studies commissioned by Florida PSC, for instance this one. This study expected ground-mounted single-axis tracking solar PV installations to reach this price point in approximately 2014. Still, even at that point using favorable assumptions electricity from these facilities was projected to cost over $0.20/kW-hr, with government subsidies reducing that price to $0.136-$0.15/kW-hr. Meanwhile, the same study concluded on the basis of equivalent methodology that the new nuclear plants currently being planned in Florida will produce power at a cost of approximately $0.12-$0.13/kW-hr, beginning in 2016. This was assuming the relatively high figure of $7700/kW capital cost for the nuclear plants. The Navigant study does, however, make it absolutely clear why the Florida PSC has adopted the particular set of policies it has by endorsing aggressive pursuit of both nuclear power and some renewables. However, in ALL scenarios it studies nuclear power is cheaper than all forms of solar electricity after 2016, even with government subsidies. Far from being "more than four times as cost-effective as the nuclear reactors FPL is trying to build near the Florida Keys," this plant will ultimately be considerably more expensive.

Furthermore, it will not actually power Babcock Ranch most of the time. As reported by the Miami Herald:

Though researchers are working to create storage capability for sunlight-generated power, solar electricity at present only is available during daytime hours. The concept is FPL's 75-megawatt solar generator will produce more power for the state's electric while the sun shines than the city will use in 24 hours.
''We're going to generate more renewable energy than the city consumes,'' said Kitson spokeswoman Lisa Hall. ``It will be a leader in solar. It's a great opportunity to overcome that storage thing. The carbon footprint is going to be net zero.''

Basically, the solar plant will produce four times as much electricity as is used by the development one-quarter of the time. The majority of the electricity generated by the plant will go out into the grid and be used throughout Florida. At night and when the sun isn't shining brightly enough to produce much power, the city will receive its electricity from the rest of FPL's generation base... including the reactors at Turkey Point. Currently about 19% of FPL's electricity in Florida is generated at Turkey Point and St. Lucie, but with the ongoing uprates and the two new units at Turkey Point this should increase to 30%+. Furthermore, as solar insolation varies considerably between summer and winter, most of the electricity from the solar plant will be produced in the summer. This means that the PV arrays will produce far more electricity than the city will use in the daytime in June, and far less than it needs in the winter and, of course, none whatsoever at night. So it is unavoidable that most of the energy consumed by Babcock Ranch will come from elsewhere on FPL's grid, and given the probable makeup of their generation mix one decade from now, it will use more electricity generated by nuclear reactors than by its own solar plant.

Isn't that just deliciously ironic?

Nuclear Power: An Indispensable Climate Change Solution

2009-03-26T16:37:00.000-07:00

Joe Romm clarifies his position on nuclear power:

Why not more than 1 total wedge of nuclear? Based on a post last year on the Keystone report, to do this by 2050 would require adding globally, an average of 17 plants each year, while building an average of 9 plants a year to replace those that will be retired, for a total of one nuclear plant every two weeks for four decades — plus 10 Yucca Mountains to store the waste. I also doubt it will be among the cheaper options. And the uranium supply and non-proliferation issues for even that scale of deployment are quite serious. See “An introduction to nuclear power.”

Note to all: Do I want to build all those nuclear plants. No. Do I think we could do it without all those nuclear plants. Definitely. Therefore, should I be quoted as saying we “must” build all those nuclear plants, as the Drudge Report has, or even that I propose building all those plants? No. Do I think we will have to swallow a bunch of nuclear plants as part of the grand bargain to make this all possible and that other countries will build most of these? I have no doubt. So it stays in “the solution” for now.

Romm's take on nuclear power is not particularly well-informed, as I've discussed in the past. But examining its limited role in his proposed solution reveals that Romm has not seriously considered the physical limitations associated with his preferred energy options. For political, geographical, and practical reasons, nuclear power must ultimately play a vastly larger role in our energy future than predicted by Romm.

Romm describes his preferred future energy mix as follows:

1 of wind for power — one million large (2 MW peak) wind turbines
1 of wind for vehicles –another 2000 GW wind. Most cars must be plug-in hybrids or pure electric vehicles.
3 of concentrated solar thermal (aka solar baseload)– ~5000 GW peak.
3 of efficiency — one each for buildings, industry, and cogeneration/heat-recovery for a total of 15 to 20 million GW-hrs. A key strategy for reducing direct fossil fuel use for heating buildings (while also reducing air conditioning energy) is geothermal heat pumps.
1 of solar photovoltaics — 2000 GW peak
1/2 wedge of nuclear power– 350 GW

What's wrong with this picture?

4000 GW wind, 5000 GW solar thermal, 2000 GW solar photovoltaic. This is an increase of two orders of magnitude for wind and three for both types of solar. I notice that the capacity factor assumptions implied by Romm are quite high. Wind turbines are now a fairly mature technology, so its economics are increasingly apparent, but the costs solar thermal and solar photovoltaic are still unclear. But for the sake of argument I'm willing to grant Romm that maybe in 2050 these technologies will be cost-competitive. The important thing is that the qualitative limitations of these sources of energy go far beyond cost. With the possible exception of a handful of exceptionally well-endowed nations, investment in solar and wind can NEVER assure energy security.

Solar and wind generators depends on the ambient energy resources available in the locations where they are installed. There is, of course, no place on earth where the sun shines all the time, and not many where the wind always blows. So these are intermittent resources by nature. But some countries are better-endowed than others. Imagine, if you will, a future world of 2050 with the energy supply specified by Romm. Some nations, such as Russia, would be unable to meet their own generation needs through wind and solar power. They could import electricity from abroad, but they would have to compete with other markets such as India and China for it. Not only would this make energy expensive, but it would also place Russia at the mercy of its energy suppliers. Hostile states could cripple Russia's economy by interrupting its energy supplies. States exporting renewable energy would also have substantial incentive to underproduce to both encourage uncertainty and raise energy prices. There would be little incentive to produce enough energy for the have-nots, especially since electricity transmission would make them largely captive markets, unlike present-day oil importers. Countries without abundant renewable energy resources would therefore have a desperate need for more secure energy supplies.

Hence the reason why nuclear energy is likely to dominate our energy future. Because relatively few nations have the renewable resources needed to support their economies themselves (just how many depends on how these technologies develop), the most logical step for them to take to secure their post-carbon energy security is to invest in nuclear energy infrastructure. They would have every reason to doubt that other countries would build the infrastructure needed to provide them with affordable and reliable energy, as it would be in those states' interest to underfulfill their needs. Even in a world where renewable energy technology could fulfill all of the world's energy needs affordably, geographic realities would make nuclear power more attractive.

I do not actually believe that wind and solar power are cheaper than nuclear, but my point is that the barriers to a world powered by solar and wind are not merely technological, but geographical, political and economic. I do not expect that solar thermal electricity will cost less than nuclear electricity in 2050, but even if it did this would not translate into energy security for most of the world. Only the provision of non-intermittent energy sources with the ability to store months' or years' worth of energy will secure the interests of these nations. And nuclear power fits these requirements.

In 2050, I expect there to be far more than 350-700 GW of new nuclear plants in operation. In fact, I would not be surprised by 5000-6000 GW of new nuclear by this point. Most of this will probably consist of mass-produced Generation IV reactors, including ALMRs, PBMRs, and various kinds of MSRs. Not only can these technologies replace fossil-fuel electrical generation anywhere on earth at reasonable cost, but they also allow nations to stockpile decades or even centuries worth of fuel--meaning that even a war or natural catastrophe could potentially have minimal effect on energy production.

The real-world alternative to this is NOT an idealistic future of cooperation, windmills, and solar panels. It is a dystopian nightmare where most of the world continues to burn coal because they lack the ability to domestically produce or import environmentally benign energy. It is a world wracked by war, catastrophe, and want. Even if the myriad technological problems of renewable energy were solved, the simple geographic fact remains that some nations lack sufficient energy resources, be they oil, gas, sunshine, or wind. For this reason, nuclear power is indispensable for averting climate catastrophe. Those who pretend otherwise, such as Romm, are fooling themselves.

Noisome Falsehoods About Three Mile Island

2009-03-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

As I expected, the upcoming anniversary of the Three Mile Island Accident has inspired Harvey Wasserman to trot out one of his more dubious perennial deceptions:

People died---and are still dying---at Three Mile Island.

As the thirtieth anniversary of America's most infamous industrial accident approaches, we mourn the deaths that accompanied the biggest string of lies ever told in US industrial history.

Mr. Wasserman does not apparently live with us in the reality-based community, where it is widely understood that radiation release at TMI was minimal, and that the public health impact from radiation was nonexistent. Repeated epidemiological studies have confirmed this (see Hatch et Al., Am. J. Pub. Health 81:719-24 (1991), Talbott et Al., Environmental Health Perspectives 108:545-62 (2000), and so on).

Sadly, Wasserman has some allies in perpetuating his falsehoods:

A study by Columbia University claimed there were no significant health impacts, but its data by some interpretations points in the opposite direction. Investigations by epidemiologist Dr. Stephen Wing of the University of North Carolina, and others, led Wing to warn that the official studies on the health impacts of the accident suffered from “logical and methodological problems.” Studies by Wing and by Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry official, being announced this week at Harrisburg, significantly challenge official pronouncements on both radiation releases and health impacts.

Gundersen, a leading technical expert on nuclear engineering, says: “When I correctly interpreted the containment pressure spike and the doses measured in the environment after the TMI accident, I proved that TMI's releases were about one hundred times higher than the industry and the NRC claim, in part because the containment leaked. This new data supports the epidemiology of Dr. Steve Wing and proves that there really were injuries from the accident. New reactor designs are also effected, as the NRC is using its low assumed release rates to justify decreases in emergency planning and containment design."

The notion that TMI radiation releases were two orders of magnitude higher than official estimates is preposterous. How do we know this?

As a public service, in 1979 the Eastman Kodak Company collected all the unexposed film that it could locate in the area around Three Mile Island and examined it for evidence of radiation-induced fogging. This would provide excellent evidence of even relatively small radiation exposures, because the film would begin fogging at a mere 5 millirem.

Kodak found nothing. As the reputable scientists who have examined the accident since have emphasized, this totally rules out the theory that public exposure was substantially above background.

Wasserman and his ilk, however, have something better than science. They have... ANECDOTES!

Anecdotal evidence among the local human population has been devastating. Large numbers of central Pennsylvanians suffered skin sores and lesions that erupted while they were out of doors as the fallout rained down on them. Many quickly developed large, visible tumors, breathing problems, and a metallic taste in their mouths that matched that experienced by some of the men who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and who were exposed to nuclear tests in the south Pacific and Nevada.
...
In March of 1980, I went into the region and compiled a range of interviews clearly indicating widespread health damage done by radiation from the accident. The survey led to the book KILLING OUR OWN, co-authored with Norman Solomon, Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Walters which correlated the damage done at TMI with that suffered during nuclear bomb tests, atomic weapons production, mis-use of medical x-rays, the painting of radium watch dials, uranium mining and milling, radioactive fuel production, failed attempts at waste disposal, and more.

My research at TMI also uncovered a plague of death and disease among the area's wild animals and farm livestock. Entire bee hives expired immediately after the accident, along with a disappearance of birds, many of whom were found scattered dead on the ground. A rash of malformed pets were born and stillborn, including kittens that could not walk and a dog with no eyes. Reproductive rates among the region's cows and horses plummeted.

Much of this was documented by a three-person investigative team from the Baltimore News-American, which made it clear that the problems could only have been caused by radiation.

The plural of anecdote is not "data." The best longitudinal mortality study of TMI was the Talbott et Al. study published in Environmental Health Perspectives in 2003. (EHP 111: 341-348). Following 32,135 individuals who were within five miles of TMI during the accident, the authors followed their mortality rates between 1979 and 1998. Their findings?

In conclusion, the mortality surveillance of this cohort, with a total of almost 20 years of follow-up, provides no consistent evidence that radioactivity released during the TMI accident (estimated maximum and likely gamma exposure) has had a significant impact on the mortality experience of this cohort through 1998. Slight increases in overall mor- tality and overall cancer mortality persist. The findings of increased risk of LHT for males for maximum gamma exposure and in females for background gamma are of interest and merit continued surveillance to deter- mine if the trend continues. With the excep- tion of breast cancer risk and all lymphatic and hematopoietic tissue (LHT) and maximum gamma exposure, no apparent trends were seen with any of the radiation exposure variables. The slight trend for female breast cancer and likely gamma exposure seen in the earlier update is no longer evident.

Basically, Wasserman's claim that the TMI cohort is unstudied is simply a noisome falsehood. Longitudinal studies have simply discredited his preconceived understanding of the accident. But Wasserman's ravings are not what bothers me. I'm more concerned by the fact that there are still people like Steve Wing, who is trying to push the same discredited scaremongering as genuine science. This is an embarrassment to the University of North Carolina and the field of epidemiology. The tactic of presenting "new studies" at a news conference rather than in a peer-reviewed journal is the kind of tactic employed by cold fusion charlatans and other pseudoscientists. We've humored these people far too long; the public needs to learn that the debate is over, and that they lost.

NNSA to Remain in DOE

2009-02-24T22:40:00.000-08:00

Well, that didn't take long:

The Obama administration has scrapped a plan to study placing U.S. nuclear-weapon research under the control of the Defense Department, Albuquerque, N.M., Mayor Martin Chavez said following a Friday meeting of U.S. mayors and top administration officials (see GSN, Feb. 6).
"I think that one is nipped in the bud," Chavez said after discussing the proposal with Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

It will be interesting to see how DOE changes under this administration--Obama's emphasis on energy issues (and the very large sums for energy and science research he's proposing) imply a need for serious changes in the way DOE is organized and run. Only time will tell how these issues play out.

Down To Earth

2009-02-13T15:55:00.000-08:00

Atomstroiexport has issued a new tender for the proposed nuclear complex in Turkey:

Russia's Atomstroiexport has offered to cut the price of power from its planned nuclear power plant in Turkey by 27 percent, the state Anatolian news agency said on Friday.
Atomstroiexport and its partners -- Russia's Inter Rao (IRAO.MM) and Turkey's Park Teknik -- will sell power from the planned plant for $0.1535 kilowatt hour, instead of $0.2116, Anatolian said, citing Duran Gokkaya, general manager of Tetas, the state power company.

Atomstroiexport was the only bidder in a September tender for Turkey's first nuclear license.

I put a fair amount of effort last month into determining why the original tender was so expensive, but details of the bid were not public knowledge. In any case, the Russians have now offered a new price that, while steep, is not unreasonable. We'll see if the Turks take it.

A VERY Special Relationship

2009-02-09T19:07:00.000-08:00

A rather shocking revelation published in The Guardian:

The US military has been using Britain's atomic weapons factory to carry out research into its own nuclear warhead programme, according to evidence seen by the Guardian.
US defence officials said that "very valuable" warhead research has taken place at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire as part of an ongoing and secretive deal between the British and American governments.
The Ministry of Defence admitted it is working with the US on the UK's "existing nuclear warhead stockpile and the range of replacement options that might be available" but declined to give any further information.

Basically, this is tantamount to an admission that the RRW is a joint American-British project, with the Atomic Weapons Establishment providing vital assistance with research that the US weapons labs are apparently unequipped to do. This makes sense in light of the British decision to build new Trident subs--after all, the main purpose of the RRW is probably to replace the W88s on the USN's Trident II SSBMs.

This news makes it clear why the RRW program is unlikely to disappear, even if Obama elects to formally cancel it. The RRW is supported by powerful, entrenched interest groups and is likely to be realized eventually, even if it is delayed another ten years or so. The project has apparently been shared with our closest ally, presumably with the condition that the new warhead could be manufactured at AWE for deployment by the RN. If this is any indication, the "special relationship" between America and Britain is stronger than ever.

NNSA to DOD?

2009-02-06T20:36:00.000-08:00

Obama's pondering it, apparently:

The Obama administration is considering moving the nation’s federal weapons complex, including New Mexico’s Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, under military control, ending decades of civilian oversight.
The Albuquerque Journal, in a copyright story Wednesday, said an internal memo it obtained shows the administration is looking into turning over control of the labs to the Department of Defense. They currently are controlled by the Department of Energy.
The Office of Management and Budget memo, which carried no date, said such a change would not occur until at least 2011.

I'm not sure what this would entail for some of the labs. LLNL and Los Alamos would presumably move to DOD control; but would ORNL remain with DOE while the Y-12 weapons complex moved to DOD? Growing up in Oak Ridge I do think that the current DOE management of the national labs leaves a lot to be desired, but DOD might not make a better home. Perhaps a better idea would be to recreate the old Atomic Energy Commission and delegate DOE's various nuclear functions to it. In my view, DOE's big problem is that it wears far too many conflicting hats; an agency with a narrow nuclear focus might do a better job than DOE dealing with issues ranging from managing the weapons complex to developing advanced nuclear fuel cycles.

The Soviet "Doomsday Device" Myth

2009-02-05T19:15:00.000-08:00

Those of you who watch the History Channel may have come across this clip, which is from a series titled "Secrets of War." The speaker, Victor Suvorov, is the author of a notorious and now wholly-discredited book about the Soviet entry into WWII. I was wondering where this persistent "Soviets planned a doomsday machine" myth came from, and it appears it is simply another of Suvorov's many imaginative fabrications. I can find no Russian-language references to this tale whatsoever, and all the English ones lead back to this "documentary," and to the ever-unreliable Mr. Suvorov. Given what I know about Soviet nuclear war planning (my field of academic specialization) the story is ludicrous on it face, as well. The concept of self-immolation implicit in a doomsday machine like this is absolutely alien to Soviet political and strategic thought. The Soviet "doomsday machine" is no more than a fairy tale to concocted to amuse American basic cable subscribers, nothing more.

Aqueous Homogenous Reactor Research in US

2009-02-01T12:15:00.000-08:00

As I noted in my recent post, the Russians are developing an aqueous homogeneous rector (AHR) for medical isotope production at the Kurchatov Institute and the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering in Obninsk. But as I read a Russian-language article about the problem of Mo-99 production using LEU, I was surprised to discover that the Russians have some American competition.

The resurrected Babcock and Wilcox is developing a 200kW AHR called the Medical Isotope Production System to produce Mo-99 and other isotopes. As described by the September 2008 IAEA report Homogeneous Aqueous Solution Nuclear Reactors for the Production of Mo-99 and other Short Lived Radioisotopes:

Current concepts under consideration include a 200 kW reactor, capable of producing approximately 1,100 six day Ci/week of 99Mo and other useful isotopes. An existing containment structure formerly housing a pool type research reactor at the BWXT facility in Lynchburg, VA, is under consideration for an initial commercial facility (Figure 1). The reactor would contain approximately 150 L of LEU solution and would operate at approximately 80˚C and atmospheric pressure. A new separation/purification facility is envisioned with hot cell capacity for the several separation/purification/packaging and shipping functions as well as a waste management facility.

The recently-published Medical Isotope Production Without Highly Enriched Uranium has more details. B&W hopes to field the MIPS 5-6 years after a radiopharmaceutical partner is identified, but faces a bevy of challenges related not only to the conceptual design of the reactor, but also to the fact that NRC regulations are ambiguous as to the classification of an AHR and its waste stream. They hope to convert an existing containment structure in Lynchburg, Virginia from an old pool-type reactor to house the first unit. B&W is hiring a lead project engineer to manage the development effort. Anyone out there with experience in liquid-fueled reactor design?

UPDATE: B&W has announced a partnership with radiopharmaceutical manufacturer Covidien to develop the MIPS.

So Much For "Solar Baseload"

2009-01-31T13:03:00.000-08:00

One of the most-hyped renewable energy technologies of the moment is CSP--concentrating solar power. Joe Romm, in particular, is an unabashed CSP booster who has gone so far as to claim that CSP will be "the technology that will save humanity" and that this "solar baseload" make new nuclear builds unnecessary. However, CSP is already failing to live up to the hype.

One of the most advertised of the various companies promoting CSP is Ausra. This company was founded by Australians and financed largely by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Ausra was notable for its excessive braggadocio, claiming that within a few years its technology would be cheaper than all other alternatives. In recent weeks, however, Ausra has essentially admitted that these claims were merely so much hot air. Ausra CEO Robert Fishman announced that Ausra was scaling back its plans to build large plants, instead focusing on equipment sales. According to the Mercury News, "Fishman said Ausra will build small plants for companies that need industrial steam or electricity." So far from building huge CSP plants with storage that could offer a form of baseload power, Ausra is now planning on providing process heat to factories and auxiliary capacity to existing steam plants--a far cry from its ambitious plans a few years ago. Indeed, Ausra is laying off employees whose expertise was in large power plant construction in light of their new strategy.

Ausra still plans to complete its 177MW plant in Carrizo, California, but henceforth it plans to concentrate on decidedly "non-baseload" applications. Whether this business plan will work remains to be seen (efforts to market similar technologies in the 1980s fizzled), but this is a sign that their technology did not live up to expectations. Particularly interesting is the fact that the new applications that Ausra is marketing its collectors for do not involve storage--suggesting that their ambitious plans to store steam geologically were far from the "trump card" they had claimed. Clearly, Ausra is now paying dearly for its hubris.

Although Ausra has been mum on the issue, I have a suspicion that their solar concentrators have probably failed to perform up to expectations. DOE tested similar solar concentrators in the early 1980s and concluded that the cost advantages of the fresnel reflectors weren't worth the tradeoff in reduced performance. If the concentrators had performed well at Ausra's test facilities I suspect that it would be widely advertised in Ausra's marketing, so its reticence (and its difficulty attracting utility-scale orders) suggest some problems in this arena.

While Ausra is far from the only player in the CSP field and as such it ought not be conflated with the entire industry, well-apprised figures say that it is likely that many other firms are in similar straights. "I think it's going to be a brutal, brutal year for solar, and a lot of companies will go out of business," said Andrew Beebe, the CEO of Suntech Energy Solutions, which develops solar-power facilities for corporations and utilities. "A lot of mistakes were made. Now is the time of reckoning, and it's going to be ugly." Far from being poised to save the world, the solar industry is apparently fully occupied trying to save itself.

Will 50% of Nuclear Loan Gurantees Default?

2009-01-30T21:04:00.000-08:00

Critics of DOE's loan guarantees for new nuclear construction are fond of pointing out that the Congressional Budget Office reported in 2003 that it expected that "over 50%" of nuclear loans would default. For instance, this piece in the Washington Monthly trots out the figure as a means of pouring cold water on the prospect of new nuclear builds.

But what are the assumptions behind the 50% figure?

To find out it is merely necessary to refer to the CBO website. Reporting on the Energy Policy Act of 2003, the CBO found that:

CBO considers the risk of default on such a loan guarantee to be very high--well above 50 percent. The key factor accounting for this risk is that we expect that the plant would be uneconomic to operate because of its high construction costs, relative to other electricity generation sources. In addition, this project would have significant technical risk because it would be the first of a new generation of nuclear plants, as well as project delay and interruption risk due to licensing and regulatory proceedings.
In its 2003 Annual Energy Outlook, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that production from new nuclear power plants would not be cost-competitive with other power sources until after 2025. EIA also reports that current construction costs for a typical electricity plant range from $536 per kilowatt of capacity for natural-gas-powered combined-cycle technology to $1,367 per kilowatt of capacity for coal-steam technology. Although construction costs could diminish significantly as a new generation of nuclear plants are built, a new nuclear power plant starting construction in 2011 would have a construction cost of about $2,300 per kilowatt of capacity. By 2011, that cost would result in capital costs that are 40 percent to 250 percent above the cost of capital for electricity plants using gas and coal. Because the cost of power from the first of the next generation of new nuclear power plants would likely be significantly above prevailing market rates, we would expect that the plant operators would default on the borrowing that financed its capital costs.
Assuming the nuclear plant is completed, we expect it would financially default soon after beginning operations, however, we expect that the plant would continue to operate and sell power at competitive market rates. Thus, over the plant's expected operating lifetime, its creditors (which could be the federal government) could expect to recover a significant portion of the plant's construction loan. The ability to recover a significant portion of the value of the initial construction loan would offset the high subsidy cost of a federal loan guarantee. Under the Federal Credit Reform Act, funds must be appropriated in advance to cover the subsidy cost of such loan guarantees, measured on a present-value basis. CBO estimates that the net present value of amounts recovered by the government on its loan guarantee from continued plant operations following a default and the project's technical and regulatory risk would result in a subsidy cost of 30 percent or about $375 million over the 2011-2013 period. Based on information from DOE, we expect other loan guarantees would not be issued for nuclear power plants until after 2013.

Basically, the CBO determined that nuclear plants would default because they would be uneconomical compared to conventional coal and natural gas generators. The former, it appears, are not going to be in the picture due to government regulation. The latter's costs will depend considerably on future natural gas cost trends, but by the time new nuclear plants enter operation in the 2018 timeframe chances are that natural gas prices will have returned to high levels due to resurgent worldwide demand. Furthermore, electricity prices are definitely going to go up in the next decade. The EIA is predicting that retail electricity costs will be about 12 cents kw-hr one decade from now. Finally, many of the new nuclear plants are being planned by regulated utilities that can use rate-recovery to finance construction, and so long as they convince regulators that they have incurred costs prudently they are allowed to adjust electricity rates to cover costs. The scenario outlined by the CBO--nuclear being uncompetitive with coal-fired electricty--is exceedingly unlikely to cause a default at a regulated utility, and given projected increases in retail electricity rates, deregulated utilities as well.

The assumptions behind the 50% loan default figure were dubious in 2003 and are indefensible now. It's time to consign this "fact" to the scrap heap.

The Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor Lives!

2009-01-29T16:35:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of the aqueous homogeneous reactor. These are nuclear reactors that have their fissile fuel in an aqueous solution, rather than as solid fuel rods. Back in the late 1950s there was a major program at ORNL to try and develop an AHR on the Th-U233 cycle for commercial power production, but extreme corrosion issues resulted in the cancellation of the program. ORNL researchers decided (rightly, in my opinion) that molten-salt reactors were a better idea.

Soviet researchers never attempted to develop AHRs for power production, but they did develop these reactors for a practical application: radioisotope production for medical use, in addition to certain research applications. To this end they developed a series of AHRs culminating in the ARGUS: a miniature AHR producing a mere 20-50 kw thermal.

The ARGUS reactor: it's a wee little beastie

The AHR has two big advantageous for medical isotope production: firstly, its fluid fuel form makes extraction of isotopes from the fuel much simpler than from solid-fuel reactors. Secondly, AHRs have excellent safety characteristics. They have strongly negative temperature and void coefficients, making them essentially self-controlling. However, the corrosion issues associated with uranyl sulphate fuel have resulted in the abandonment of AHR research in most of the world. This is not the case, however, in Russia. In September of last year the Physico-Energetic Institute in Obninsk (normally known as the Institute for Physics and Power Engineering) announced plans to build a new nuclear medicine facility on the basis of a modernized AHR:

На промышленной площадке ГНЦ РФ «Физико-энергетический институт» в г. Обнинске Московской области предлагается создать комплекс по производству радиоизотопов на основе новой технологии с применением растворного реактора малой мощности. Как отметили в ФЭИ, проект растворного реактора для наработки и выделения радиоизотопов непосредственно из топливного раствора является одной из самых существенных разработок, осуществленных с участием радиохимиков. По словам директора отделения изотопов и радиофармпрепаратов ФЭИ Николая Нерозина, проект позволяет использовать реактор малой мощности 50(82) кВт для получения следующих изотопов медицинского назначения: Mo-99, Sr-89, Xe-133, а также смеси изотопов йода.

In the industrial sector of the GNTs RF "Physico-Energetic Institute" in the city of Obninsk, Moscow Oblast, the construction of a complex for the production of radioisotopes on the basis of new technology utilizing a solution reactor of low power is planned. As described by FEI, the project for a solution reactor for the production and extraction of radioisotopes extracted directly from the fuel solution is one of the most significant developments, being carried out with the assistance of radiochemists. In the words of the director of production of isotopes and radiopharmaceuticals Nikolai Nerozin, the project will utilize a reactor of low power 50(82) kWt for the production of the following isotopes with medical uses: Mo-99, Sr-89, Xe-133, and also a variety of isotopes of iodine.

From the published articles I gather that this reactor will be an evolved version of the ARGUS, designed to operate on 20% U-235 rather than the HEU utilized in the original ARGUS. Given the recent economic downturn, these plans for a new AHR in Obninsk may be scrapped, but clearly the researchers at the Kurchatov Institute and IPPE believe that the AHR is the solution to the worldwide problem of producing radioistopes for nuclear medicine without resorting to reactors using HEU. Personally, I wish them all the success in the world.

Just Say No to Portfolio Standards

2009-01-21T09:23:00.000-08:00

The latest regulatory boondoggle, this time from Illinois:

Omaha-based energy company Tenaska Inc. plans to move forward with building a $3.5 billion clean-coal plant in Illinois after the Illinois General Assembly passed the Clean Coal Portfolio Standard Act.

The new legislation would require large utilities in the state to enter into long-term contracts to buy up to 5 percent of their electricity from clean-coal facilities, such as Tenaska's Taylorville Energy Center in Taylorville, Ill., said Bart Ford, vice president of business development at Tenaska.

Clean-coal facilities must capture at least 50 percent of their greenhouse gas emissions in order to qualify.

This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. But then again, it makes as much sense as portfolio standards for renewables, or nuclear power, or anything else. The problem with portfolio standards is that they are corporaratist giveaways to the manufacturers of various technologies, which mandate the use of certain options whether they make physical, economic, and environmental sense or not. Portfolio standards are bad policy and will not be an effective substitute for carbon pricing. The sooner our country's leaders realize this, the better.

Russia Seeks Japanese Nuclear Plant

2009-01-19T11:05:00.000-08:00

From The Japan Times:

The government plans to send senior officials to Moscow for final-stage negotiations on concluding a bilateral civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Russia, government sources said Saturday.
The move, which could happen later this month, is part of efforts to settle the matter before Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visits Japan, taking into consideration that Putin is placing importance on energy. No date has been set for the trip.

The plan expected to pave the way exporting a modern nuclear power plant to Russia. The Japanese government's initial plan was to conclude the deal if Putin visited Japan by the end of 2008. But the visit was scratched by the global financial crisis, and the talks remain in limbo.

In past negotiations, Japan and Russia have clashed over involvement by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Japan is demanding the agency conduct a "strict examination" of Russia's nuclear facilities to confirm the plant will be used for peaceful purposes. Russia showed reluctance by insisting the country is already a nuclear power, the sources said.

Since Japan will field its own candidate this fall to take over the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the government is expected to continue to press Russia to accept the demand so it can gain support from other countries in the election.

The idea of Russia importing Japanese nuclear power plants is an old one--it was first floated in the 1970s when the USSR was experiencing great difficulty building VVER-1000 pressure vessels. My guess, however, is that Russia may be interested in acquiring more modern technology to bolster their nuclear export business. Currently, Rosatom can only sell its reactors to former Soviet satellites and developing countries. But if Rosatom licensed more modern technology, it could conceivably market its wares in the first world while undercutting Japanese and European vendors on price--potentially winning profitable new markets for Russia, while avoiding the need to develop a new LWR itself.

Note that Russia's primary next-generation reactor effort--the BN-series liquid-metal fast breeder--cannot be exported for proliferation reasons, in addition to the fact that it will probably prove economically uncompetitive with LWRs. So the royal road for Russia to compete in the global nuclear reactor market in the intermediate term is to import foreign technology. (Note that China and Britain are basically doing the same thing with their plans to start building AP1000s domestically). Especially worrisome (for Rosatom) is that cost trends suggest that its latest version of the VVER-1000 is probably going to be only slightly cheaper than reactors like the AP1000, so it really needs to come up with a strategy to compete in the global nuclear market after the 2020 time frame. But I'm not quite sure what's in it for the Japanese.

A Federal RPS: A Very Bad Idea

2009-01-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

However thrilled I am about Obama's choice of Steve Chu as Secretary of Energy, I am not exactly thrilled by the proposals being put forth by the transition regarding energy policy. Take, for instance, this component of Obama's stimulus proposal:

Obama and Biden will create a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) that will require 25 percent of American electricity be derived from renewable sources by 2025, which has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

A federal RPS is simply bad policy, for a variety of reasons:

1) It's inequitable. Because different parts of the country vary enormously in their renewable energy potential, some parts of the country (such as my native Tennessee) would probably never be able to meet the 25% standard, even if cost were no object. I imagine that there will be some kind of trading scheme to address this imbalance, but it will both place enormous pressure on more endowed areas of the country to overinvest in renewable generation, and also increase the cost of compliance for have-nots. Therefore, to the extent that renewable portfolio standards are good policy (which I don't think they are) they should really only be mandated on a state-by-state basis.

2) It's economically inefficient. Unlike carbon pricing, a RPS does not encourage end-users to change their preferences in light of environmental externalities, but rather forces utilities to purchase power from sources that may not be appropriate. The need to meet targets will also create a massive distortions, allowing the renewable energy industry to increase their prices and making their product more expensive than it needs to be. This deprives other possible carbon-mitigation measures, from efficiency to nuclear power, of capital that would be more efficiently invested in them.

3) It's probably unattainable, given European experience with similar policies. The UK's decision to pursue new nuclear power plants resulted from a politically unpopular discovery that even in windy Britain, renewable energy just doesn't live up to the hype. Despite the DOE's report that wind could provide 20% of US electricity by 2030, this estimate is based on extremely optimistic assumptions that seem thoroughly debunked by European experience. Keep in mind that US electricity use will probably grow at least some by 2025, so growing from current US renewable capacity to 25% would involve a near-unimaginable number of new generators--given average capacity factors for solar and wind generators, probably 4x or more the size of the current US nuclear fleet in terms of nameplate capacity, in just over 15 years.

On the whole, a federal RPS is a boondoggle that will misallocate resources and distract attention from more efficient and effective means of combating global warming. I will grant, however, that it would probably live up to its promise to "create hundreds of thousands of jobs"--but only at the expense of being an enormous drag on the economy, in addition to huge federal subsidies. As the stimulus also promises:

They [Obama and Biden] will also extend the Production Tax Credit, a credit used successfully by American farmers and investors to increase renewable energy production and create new local jobs.

If renewable energy is a sensible investment, carbon pricing will be all that is necessary to expand its utilization to an appropriate level. If renewable energy is such a good idea, why is it necessary for the government to force people to buy it? Carbon pricing, whether cap-and-trade or a carbon tax, is a much more appropriate policy for addressing climate change. A federal RPS is simply a very bad idea.

Are Gen III+ Nukes "Prudent?"

2009-01-06T14:17:00.000-08:00

The latest critique of building new nuclear power plants, Craig Severance's Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power, has created quite a buzz. Severance comes to the conclusion that the "most likely" cost of electricity from new Gen III+ plants is an eye-popping 30 cents kw-hr. On this basis, he charges that new nuclear plants are not a good investment for utilities, and that capital should be invested elsewhere.

In his conclusion, he states that:

The goal should be a reliable and cost effective utility network. This is the goal – not a particular type of power plant or a particular set of plans to defend.

Utility management shouldn’t be too exciting. If an idea starts to look like it could have excessive business risks and costs, it is best to re-assess and find less risky ways to meet the goals. The last generation of utility managers nationwide reached this conclusion about nuclear power. This Paper has shown reasons why these executives were right, even though they had to cancel nuclear plans they themselves, plus a powerful nuclear lobby and a pro-nuclear government, had at one point advanced.

If current-day utility executives and utility regulators will now consider these facts, the nation can proceed to address the energy challenges we face, with far less rancor and risks, and lower costs overall, than if a futile attempt is made at great cost to revive a nuclear industry that has never kept its promises to provide a competitive and viable generation source.

The problem here is that utility executives do not have any kind of single-minded determination to pursue nuclear power at any cost. In fact, most of the utilities planning new nuclear builds are doing so not because they are stricken with an "irrational exuberance" they need to be disabused of, but because of the need to prepare for a carbon-constrained future. If the prospect of carbon pricing wasn't looming, no one would be pursuing new nuclear plants.

To understand why building new nuclear plants is a prudent decision for a utility to make, we have to think ahead, to what conditions might possibly be like in the 2020s. In light of carbon pricing, old coal plants will either have to limit their operation or shut down entirely. Those that do operate will be expensive (as this is the entire purpose of carbon pricing). Even with license extensions older nuclear plants will be reaching the end of their operational lifetimes. This will open a very important qualitative gap in the generation mix of the utilities thinking about new nuclear builds.

Much like Amory Lovins, Severance makes the erroneous assumption that a kw-hr is a kw-hr, no matter what, and we should simply select the very cheapest generation option and be done with it. But this raises an important question--why do utilities invest in generators that don't have the lowest available lifetime cost? In other words, why did they invest in gas turbines and not coal plants?

The answer, of course, is that utilities have to provide power when and where it is wanted, and demand is not constant. Different technologies vary considerably in their ability to adjust to rapid changes in load. As circumstances have it, only two technologies in widespread use really lend themselves to peak power generation--hydroelectric dams and gas turbines. It is unlikely that many more of the former will ever be built in this country; the latter were the great winner in the energy field in recent decades. But gas has high operating costs, which discourages its use for off-peak generation. Baseload power is produced by coal and nuclear plants, which serve as the foundation of the generating capacity of many utilities. Basically, any policy to address climate change will tear the heart of these utilities' generating fleets, and the new nuclear units are a hedge to avoid this possibility.

Since a carbon-pricing scheme will force the utilities to close their amortized coal plants, they need to plan new baseload capacity to be available to keep providing reliable services. And right now, new nuclear plants are the only available option available for this role. Of course, this claim is disputed by renewable-energy enthusiasts, but the most currently hyped "baseload" renewable option--concentrated solar thermal--will not work in most of the areas considering new nuclear plants, due to want of direct sunlight. These areas generally lack geothermal and wind resources as well, although the latter don't constitute a real "baseload" source in any case. Fanciful proposals to build huge CSP plants in the southwest and transmit the power east of the Mississippi are not realistic alternatives to nuclear reactors for utilities in places like South Carolina. For all the barriers to building a new nuclear plant, they are minuscule compared to the technical and legal barriers facing such a scheme.

It is possible to use natural gas for baseload. Indeed, this is how most electricity in Russia is generated. But the example of Russia neatly illustrates why increased reliance on natural gas is ill-advised. Firstly, electricity in Russia is expensive and in short supply; and secondly, the Russian government is determined to maximize revenue from gas exports, and therefor drive up world prices. For these reasons, the Russians are planning to nearly double the size of their domestic nuclear fleet in the next ten years and are betting the long-term future of their electricity sector on nuclear power.

Of course, no one in their right mind would build generating capacity as expensive as Severance's 30 cent/kw-hr figure. This figure is in "nominal" dollars--essentially, a value from ten years in the future inflated from present dollars, and so would be lower in 2009 terms. But the reason that companies like Progress and FPL are ordering new plants is that they will not cost this much. Part of the reason for this is that Severance has used excessively pessimistic estimates for aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle for mining, milling, enrichment, waste disposal and decommissioning. Another reason the 30-cent figure is an overestimate is because Severance makes the assumption that the massive run-up in nuclear construction cost estimates between 2000 and 2008 will continue until the end of the next decade, nearly doubling construction costs. There is no good reason to believe this, given the recent collapse in commodities prices and the probable near-term global increase in the number of nuclear component vendors. Finally, Severance assumes a 14.5% average cost of capital, but regulated utilities in Florida and South Carolina are expecting to use rate recovery to finance plant construction, resulting in far lower capital costs. So the power generated by these plants will cost nowhere near 30 cents kw-hr. Just how much will depend on the degree of construction cost escalation and the cost of capital, but I expect a final figure in the 11-15 cents kw-hr range.

This is admittedly not cheap, although ten years from now this will probably be fairly competitive in the electrical generation field. I myself, and many readers of this blog, are confident that with a concerted effort we can develop nuclear plants in the next decade with vastly lower capital and operations costs than Gen III+ LWRs. Still, at the moment these utilities have no better options. These nuclear plants are not premised on massive future demand growth; they are are premised upon massive future generation loss. They cannot reasonably expect any technology--be it wind, "clean coal," or, sadly, Gen-IV nuclear--to be available in the next fifteen years to avoid the need for these new units. Right now, the utilities can either order new nuclear plants or risk being left without the ability to provide reliable service in the 2020s. They've chosen the former. And that's just prudent.

Time Magazine on New Nukes

2009-01-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

From Going Nuclear, by Micheal Grunwald:

Nuclear power is on the verge of a remarkable comeback. It's been three decades since an American utility ordered a nuclear plant, but 35 new reactors are now in the planning stage. The byzantine regulatory process that helped paralyze the industry for a generation has been streamlined. There hasn't been a serious nuclear accident in the U.S. since the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. And no-nukes politics has become a distant memory. It was a sign of the times when John McCain ridiculed Barack Obama for opposing nuclear energy--and the allegation wasn't even true. "There's only a very small minority in Congress that still opposes nuclear power," says Alex Flint, the top lobbyist at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). "That's quite a change."
...
So how should we produce our juice? The answer may sound a bit unsatisfying: more wind, less coal but mostly the same electricity sources we're using, until something better comes along. The key will be reducing demand through energy efficiency and conservation. Most efficiency improvements have been priced at 1¢ to 3¢ per kilowatt-hour, while new nuclear energy is on track to cost 15¢ to 20¢ per kilowatt-hour. And no nuclear plant has ever been completed on budget.

It appears that the author's conclusions were influenced by our old friend Amory Lovins:

Energy maven Amory Lovins has calculated that, overall, new nuclear wattage would cost more than twice as much as coal or gas and nearly three times as much as wind--and that calculation was made before nuclear-construction costs exploded.

Indeed, he provides plenty of unreferenced RMI talking points [link mine]:

A Warren Buffett--owned company has scrapped plans for an Idaho nuclear plant; banks and bond-rating agencies are skeptical as well. In fact, renewables attracted $71 billion globally in private capital during 2007 while nukes got zero. The reactors under construction around the world are all government-financed. "I have to keep explaining: France and China are not capitalist countries!" says Congressman Ed Markey, an antinuclear Massachusetts Democrat. "Nobody wants to put their own money into this so-called renaissance--just ours."

Of course, the truth behind this is rather more complex. Buffett dropped his plans to build a plant in Idaho--only to turn around and buy Constellation, which owns five reactors and is planning to build more, beginning with Calvert Cliffs 3 in Maryland. Investment in nukes is definitely non-zero, as is evidenced by companies such as Hyperion and NuScale, among others. This also makes it sound as if renewables are never financed with government funds, when it's clear from the renewble industry's own lobbying that they lead a hand-to-mouth existence on the basis of government subsidies. Take, for instance, this Time piece from a few months ago:

In a press conference last week the leaders of the solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower industries called on Obama and the incoming Congress to look ahead. First, energy leaders asked Obama to immediately adjust the alternative-energy production credit to provide green investors with a cash rebate, rather than a tax reduction. With the economy tanking, simple tax credits — which Congress renewed in October and without which the renewable-energy industry would not survive — aren't the lure they once were for companies looking to invest in new energy projects.

This gives a much more realistic picture of the situation. Worldwide, the renewables industry benefits from mandates, feed-in-tarriffs, and similar distortions that render utterly meaningless any appeal to the "wisdom of the market" in comparing new nuclear capacity and renewables in terms of gloabl investment. As the leaders of the industry themselves make clear, private investors put money into their businesses because they are a spectacular opportunity for rent-seeking. But I digress.

I'll Take Nuclear, Please

2008-12-24T08:55:00.000-08:00

Latest fossil fuel disaster, this time quite near my hometown of Oak Ridge:

A wall holding back 80 acres of sludge from a coal plant in central Tennessee broke this week, spilling more than 500 million gallons of waste into the surrounding area.
The sludge, a byproduct of ash from coal combustion, was contained at a retention site at the Tennessee Valley Authority's power plant in Kingston, about 40 miles east of Knoxville, agency officials said.
The retention wall breached early Monday, sending the sludge downhill and damaging 15 homes. All the residents were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, a TVA spokesman told CNN.
The plant sits on a tributary of the Tennessee River called the Clinch River.
"We deeply regret that a retention wall for ash containment at our Kingston Fossil Plant failed, resulting in an ash slide and damage to nearby homes," TVA said in a statement released Tuesday.
TVA spokesman Gil Francis told CNN that up to 400 acres of land had been coated by the sludge, a bigger area than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Could TVA please finish Watts Bar 2 and shutter these decrepit old coal plants? In terms of real environmental consequences, this is bigger than any accident ever experienced by the nuclear power industry in the U.S.--Brown's Ferry, Three Mile Island, any of them.

Furthermore, this is a good example of how "clean coal" can't be expected to be "clean." All the ash will have to be put somewhere--and some will inevitably leak out into the environment, with deleterious effects. But given that "clean coal" primarily exists as a marketing slogan at the moment, it's not really serious competition for new nuclear plants anyway. So make mine nuclear, please. Before your coal plants end up destroying my house and/or killing me.

An Energy Pick I Can Live With

2008-12-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

WashPo's Al Kamen has a new piece on Obama's possible choices for remaining cabinet picks, including that for Energy Secretary. While the names we've been hearing for awhile are repeated, including Google's Dan Reicher (who according to Tom Blees was intimately involved in killing off the IFR in the Clinton Administration). However, Kamen also repeated some Washington buzz I hadn't heard:

There's buzz that the transition folks are also looking hard at some scientific types for the energy job, including Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at Cal-Berkeley. Chu co-chaired a group producing the international study "Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future." He also shared the Nobel Prize for physics, but that was back in 1997.

Who is Steven Chu? From what I gather, this is the guy we want to head Energy. This is what he said about nuclear energy issues back in 2005:

Should fission-based nuclear power plants be made a bigger part of the energy-producing portfolio?

Absolutely. Right now about 20 percent of our power comes from nuclear; there have been no new nuclear plants built since the early '70s. The real rational fears against nuclear power are about the long-term waste problem and [nuclear] proliferation. The technology of separating [used fuel from still-viable fuel] and putting the good stuff back in to the reactor can also be used to make bomb material.

And then there's the waste problem: with future nuclear power plants, we've got to recycle the waste. Why? Because if you take all the waste we have now from our civilian and military nuclear operations, we'd fill up Yucca Mountain. [Yucca Mountain, which sits on federal land in Nevada , is under consideration as a long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel.] So we need three or four Yucca Mountains. Well, we don't have three or four Yucca Mountains. The other thing is that storing the fuel at Yucca Mountain is supposed to be safe for 10,000 years. But the current best estimates - and these are really estimates, the Lab's in fact - is that the metal casings [containing the waste] will probably fail on a scale of 5,000 years, plus or minus 2. That's still a long time, and then after that the idea was that the very dense rock, very far away from the water table will contain it, so that by the time it finally leaks down to the water table and gets out the radioactivity will have mostly decayed.

Suppose instead that we can reduce the lifetime of the radioactive waste by a factor of 1,000. So it goes from a couple-hundred-thousand-year problem to a thousand-year problem. At a thousand years, even though that's still a long time, it's in the realm that we can monitor - we don't need Yucca Mountain.

And all of a sudden the risk-benefit equation looks pretty good for nuclear.

Right now, compared to conventional coal, it looks good - what are the lesser of two evils? But if we can reduce the volume and the lifetime of the waste, that would tip it very much against conventional coal.

I like the sound of that! Furthermore, an experienced administrator from one of the national labs is a much better pick than an outsider unfamiliar with what DOE actually does and the byzantine world of internal DOE politics. In my opinion, this is by far the best candidate I've seen mentioned for this position. We should do what we can (however limited) to advance his candidacy.

Hyperion Poll

2008-11-28T17:12:00.000-08:00

Rod Adams' post on Hyperion's claims about nuclear waste production from their Hyperion Power Module has elicited a very interesting series of responses, with several commenters casting serious doubt not only on the volume of fission products produced, but also on the viability of the entire Hyperion concept. I recommend that anyone interested in the Hyperion read the thread. In particular, there is concern that the finely divided hydride fuel used in the Hyperion has never been tested, and that Hyperion has not put out any kind of timetable for doing this despite their ambitious commercialization plans. I'm not sure if it's true that finely divided hydride fuel has never been tested; it's an elegant idea, and it's possible that the Soviets looked into it, so I'm going to do my small part by checking the Russian literature for any exploration of the concept. Personally, I'm choosing to be optimistic that Hyperion has some kind of good answer to the concerns that are being raised about issues like fuel testing, but the company needs to provide some kind of explanation of how they are expecting to demonstrate their technology. In order to gauge the sentiment of this blog's readership on the Hyperion issue, I have created a poll. Also, I'd like to hear about readers' concerns about the Hyperion concept, so please comment if you have any insights or strong feelings on the matter.

Marginal Revolution Discussion of Nuclear Power

2008-11-25T07:37:00.000-08:00

Marginal Revolution, one of the internet's premier economics blogs, on nuclear power:

If President-Obama is serious about green energy it's not wind he needs to look at but nuclear. Nuclear is clean and green and we can build power stations where we need power, instead of having to invest in costly and inefficient transport networks.

As you can imagine, this has inspired intense debate. Feel free to contribute your insights.

Romm on Hansen

2008-11-24T17:45:00.000-08:00

In response to Jim Hansen's latest piece on policies and taxes to get us to 350 ppm, Joe Romm felt the need to write an "Open Letter to Jim Hansen" in which he claims that

...you have made an uncompelling case about how President-elect Obama should go about achieving 350 ppm in your new draft essay Tell Barack Obama the Truth — The Whole Truth and in previous essays (see here). You are, for instance, overly dismissive of cap-and-trade and overly enamored of a carbon tax, when, in fact, neither holds any prospect whatsoever of achieving your goal. Your discussion of as-yet non-commercial 4th generation nuclear technologies is equally off the point, as we’ll see.

Romm's position is basically as follows:
1) Neither cap-and-trade nor a carbon tax can work because pricing carbon high enough to drive amortized coal plants out of business is impossible
2) Generation IV nuclear power is irrelevant
3) A WWII-style national economic mobilization (apparently based on command-and-control economics) is the only way to address the climate crisis

All three of these arguments are unconvincing, and indeed Romm seriously contradicts himself on the energy technology issue. But I believe that Romm's argument rests on his glib dismissal of Gen IV nuclear options. With Romm's favored technologies, 350 ppm is impossible; with LFTRs and IFRs, 350 ppm becomes feasible and potentially not even that difficult. As Blees put it, it's the "painless" option.

On nuclear, Romm claims that:

NUCLEAR: The single nuclear wedge requires building 35 nukes a year — roughly 10 times the current production rate, more than 50% higher than the greatest rate the world ever sustained for even a single decade, and far in excess of what current production bottlenecks would allow. Nuclear plant prices in this country have already tripled since 2000 to nearly price themselves out of the market (see “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power, Part 1“).
Is it now clear why your extended nuclear power discussion is off the mark?

If I can speak for Dr. Hansen, "Not really, seeing as none of those points have anything to do with the Gen IV reactors under discussion. You're just changing the topic to link to your critique of Gen III+ reactors, which has received a Bronx cheer from most of the informed people who have read it."

Romm continues in response to Hansen's comment that Gen IV reactors could be ready in the 2015-2020 timeframe:

Sorry, too late. The incomprehensibly fast scale up of low carbon generation we need for 350 ppm leaves no time for such hypotheticals, no time for hoping things get commercialized within 10 years. After all, somebody has to build the massive manufacturing capacity right now, and somebody has to train all of the people needed to build these reactors right now (not to mention training people to run them), and somebody has to contract for all of the relevant raw materials pretty damn soon.

Damn, it's a good thing Eskom and Hyperion are already well on their way to mass-producing small, mass-produced, idiot-proof reactors in the middle of the next decade. Rosatom is in the middle of constructing their "commercial" LMFBR, the BN-800, and has a lead-cooled passively-safe IFR-like fast reactor in the development pipeline as well. Speaking of which, even though Russia is short on forging capacity to build VVER pressure vessels, they have ample spare capacity to construct components for various Gen IV reactor designs, particularly fast reactors--a field in which Russia is undisputed world leader. Indeed, Russian companies like OMZ and Energomash would jump at the chance to build this stuff for export. This is one more reason why we need to get Gen IV reactor development going again in the US--otherwise, the Russians and other nations with more foresight will end up ruling our energy future.

Maybe fourth-generation nukes could be useful in the next set of post-2030 wedges, which is why a major ramp up of R&D remains incredibly valuable. But for getting off of coal in two decades, we gotta go with what we have.
Again, I’m not advocating building 700 nuclear plants over the next 20 years, and certainly agree with the myriad failings of existing commercial nuclear plant designs that you describe. I am merely pointing out what the logical technology and policy implications of your paper is.

This is one of your problems, Joe; you should be. Actually, I think you should advocate building, say, 2500+ GW of nuclear by 2030. About 3 1/2 "wedges" and eminently achievable using mass-produced small reactors like the Hyperion. This would require building an average of 6,200 27 MWe Hyperions every year between 2015 and 2030--and given that the reactors are about the size of a hot tub, not a serious manufacturing problem. What about the infrastructure? Why, we reuse what we already have, using the Hyperion to generate steam to turn turbines in existing coal plants, sending electricity through existing grid resources. Perhaps this scheme could be scaled up further, but it is not at all implausible at this scale. Between this and the number of LWRs that will probably be built in the next two decades, that's half of your eight wedges--without needing either the IFR or LFTR. Now, I'm certainly not saying that we can't do a similar deployment of those in the 2020s...

As for Romm's favorite energy technology, solar thermal:

And the other renewable wedges require an even more challenging ramp up. Solar thermal electric (aka solar baseload power) holds perhaps the most promise of all renewables because it can be integrated with low-cost high-efficiency storage to provide power when it is most needed, because it has no obvious production bottlenecks, and because the United States, China, and India have vast solar resources. The market might plausibly achieve 50 to 100 GW a year of growth, but only after a steady ramp up for the next 5 to 10 years. If you wanted to do that faster, you’d again need the WWII-style approach.

Never mind that energy storage on solar thermal plants is far from being proved cost-effective; there are several ways to do it, and between that and the diversity of different solar thermal technologies it's hard to issue any kind of blanket statement. Solar Two demonstrated molten salt storage in the 1990s, but its performance in terms of cost per annualized capacity factor was less than spectacular. Ausra's approach is apparently the same as that used in fireless steam locomotives, which is simple but comes with unavoidable thermodynamic efficiency limits. A lot of the solar thermal capacity currently being built is of the stirling-dish type made by Stirling Energy Systems; these do not lend themselves to thermal energy storage at all. What's really significant here is that Romm admits that solar thermal needs the government to force people to buy it in order for it to become the dominant energy source he insists it will become.

Indeed, it turns out that Romm simply distrusts "the market" to solve climate change. Instead, he repeatedly uses the metaphor of WWII to describe the policies he thinks should be enacted:

This national (and global) re-industrialization effort would be on the scale of what we did during World War II, except it would last far longer. . . .

But of course we had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, the world was at war, and the entire country was united against a common enemy. This made possible tax increases, rationing of items like tires and gasoline, comprehensive wage and price controls, a War Production Board with broad powers (it could mandate what clothing could be made for civilians), and a Controlled Material Plan that set allotments of critical materials (steel, copper, and aluminum) for different contractors.

He says to Hansen that "[this] is what you are talking about — or should be — not “tax & dividend” and fourth-generation nuclear power."

There is, in fact, a much more adept historical analogy for what Romm is proposing: the forced industrialization program undertaken by Stalin in the late 1920s and 1930s. And as an honest-to-God sovietologist, I feel I am more qualified than most to comment on the efficacy and pitfalls of command-and-control economics and central planning.

To be fair, the command economy worked--for Stalin. This was because Stalin had very definite goals--avoiding being conquered by the Nazis, building an atomic bomb--and cared not a wit at the cost paid by his subjects in blood and treasure to effect these ends. At the end of his life Stalin and the Soviet Union were more powerful than ever--he had won WWII, he built the bomb, he and his allies straddles most of Eurasia--but tens of millions were dead, living standards were abysmal, and the threat of a new war loomed. In order for a command economy to operate optimally, planners need to be both omniscient and precognitive. Generally, this approach is only called for in order to do something a market will never do--like mobilize resources for a large war. But as a rule, they are inefficient--given information problems, this is unavoidable.

Economically, Romm's charge that Hansen's proposed carbon tax would be ineffective makes little sense.

A price isn’t what is needed to stop building any new coal plants and shut down every existing one in 10 years in rich countries and 20 years everywhere else — and replace all that power (plus growth) with carbon-free generation and efficiency.
Indeed, I can’t imagine how high a price would be needed but it is probably of the order of $1000 a ton of carbon or more starting in 2010. Talk about shock and awe. Remember, we are talking about a carbon price so high that it actually renders coal plants that have been completely paid for uneconomic to run. And once you stop new demand and start shutting down existing plants, the price of coal will collapse to almost nothing.

Once you start building all of the alternatives at this unimaginable pace, bottlenecks in production and material supply will run up their costs. The collapse in coal prices, making existing plants very cheap to run, together with the run up in the price of all alternatives will force carbon prices even higher.

So carbon pricing is a bad idea... because it would fulfill its intended purpose by making carbon emissions expensive? I'm not sure what Romm is getting at. The point is that pricing carbon will make whatever changes are necessary cost-competitive, and nothing Romm presents suggests that this will not work.

He continues that

But, in any case, if you want to replace all those existing coal plants with carbon free power that fast, again the carbon price is almost beside the point. How are you going to site and build all the alternative plants that fast? How are you going to site and build all the power lines that quickly? How are you going to allocate the steel, cement, turbines, etc? How are you going to train all the people needed to do all this?

This is where Romm really falters. Of course, if you try and build eight wedges of windmills and solar thermal plants, you won't be able to build infrastructure fast enough. We need low-carbon power that can use existing infrastructure wherever possible, and small, mass-produced nuclear reactors fit the bill perfectly. Given an appropriate regulatory environment and a sufficiently high carbon price, utilities will buy these reactors. The initial adjustment will be painful, but once transport is electrified, the economy would actually benefit, since nuclear power was already qualitatively superior to carbon-based energy anyway. Meanwhile, the idea that massive government intervention into the economy is likely to successfully develop a low-carbon energy infrastructure seems profoundly improbable. In the absence of price signals, it is not merely implausible, but laughable. This is the same organization that gave us the Synthetic Fuels Corporation and ethanol subsidies; how is it wiser than individual consumers? Without a recourse to Romm's (apparent) skepticism about the ability of markets to solve complicated economic problems, this makes little sense.

In any case, I believe nuclear technology already in the commercialization pipeline is more than sufficient for a 350 ppm strategy. Without nuclear, even 450 ppm is probably unfeasible. Hence, Hansen's preoccupation with nuclear power in his letter is absolutely justified--especially in a global perspective, Gen IV nuclear technology is the key to our energy future. Furthermore, Romm's critique of Hansen's carbon tax proposal is based far more on his own incredulity than any kind of reasoned argument. On the whole, I have to say that I'm proud to share Hansen's position on this one.

Is Obama's Energy Plan Enough?

2008-11-22T09:02:00.000-08:00

I fear it may be too much--of the last thing we need more of.

From Time:

With the possible exception of Barack Obama's puppy-anticipating daughters, no one is more eagerly awaiting the incoming Administration than the leaders of the renewable-energy industries. President-elect Obama campaigned on the promise to spend $150 billion over the next 10 years to support alternative energy, like wind and solar, as well as the green jobs that the sector has the potential to create. At California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's climate summit on Nov. 18, Obama, in taped remarks, reaffirmed that he would hold fast to those campaign promises, starting with mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions. "This is a crucial step forward," says Linda Church Ciocci, the executive director of the National Hydropower Association.
The problem is, it won't be enough. As ambitious as Obama's campaign promises were — at least compared to his predecessor's — the future state of global energy will demand government policies with a much longer reach, according to alternative-energy leaders.

And what precisely is it that these "leaders" want? Turns out, it's our tax dollars.

In a press conference last week the leaders of the solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower industries called on Obama and the incoming Congress to look ahead. First, energy leaders asked Obama to immediately adjust the alternative-energy production credit to provide green investors with a cash rebate, rather than a tax reduction. With the economy tanking, simple tax credits — which Congress renewed in October and without which the renewable-energy industry would not survive — aren't the lure they once were for companies looking to invest in new energy projects.
Other items on the renewables industry's wish list: a national renewable-energy portfolio standard, which would require a certain percentage of U.S. electricity to come from alternative sources. (More than 20 states already have similar standards, but a national one would be tricky, given that utility regulation in the U.S. is localized.) Green energy leaders would also like to see an executive order that would greatly expand the federal government's procurement of renewable energy — a smart idea, easily doable — plus a major initiative to update and smarten the nation's aging, overworked electrical grid.

Huh, I'm kind of curious as to why an industry that is supposedly so much more economic than nuclear power needs the PTC "just to survive." This is rent seeking, plain and simple, as are all the other desires of the renewable energy industry. The last thing America needs is another corporatist energy boondoggle--remember this one? How about this one?

In all fairness, it's not like this list is Obama's actual energy platform, which remains obscure. Recent indications, however, suggest that many of the desires of the renewable energy industry will be realized. Most worrisome is the prospect of a national renewable portfolio standard, which is just bad policy any way you look at it. Most forms of renewable energy are already a costly means of reducing CO2 output, but a national RPS would encourage building renewable generation facilities in marginal areas--making them increasingly uneconomic. Furthermore, certain parts of the country are far better endowed with renewable energy potential than others. For instance, my home state of Tennessee is deficient in solar, wind, and geothermal resources, and TVA has already tapped out most of the hydro potential. While an RPS would presumably allow trading so that utilities in such underendowed locales could buy offsets, this doesn't end up going anywhere near far enough. This is because it would require that the areas with better renewable potential (such as, say, California) develop an overdependence on renewable energy, creating all kinds of attendant problems and costs.

Furthermore, such a scheme actually encourages making compliance maximally expensive. Let's think through the incentives facing the "haves" in a system with an RPS that requires that every utility either produce a particular percentage of electricity from renewables or buy credits from another utility with excess renewable capacity. Say it's 2030, and you're a utility in Southern California. There's a 25% RPS, but thanks to some very expensive solar thermal plants built during the Obama administration, you actually generate 30% of your output using renewables. This gives you tradeable credits worth 5% of your output that you can now auction off to the highest bidder. These are worth a lot, since no utility east of the Mississippi has actually managed to meet the RPS by generating its own power. This, of course, means that whatever ratepayers ultimately pick up the tab for these credits end up paying the most any utility would bid on them. This is one disincentive to building more renewable capacity--the tighter the market for RPS credits, the more the utilities that sell these credits can get for them. If the utilities are rational maximizers, they will only build out their capacity to a point that is far less than adequate for supplying cheap credits to the rest of the country. The second disincentive is that the utilities' need to deal with the intermittency of the renewable resources on their grid. Even with the construction of "smart grids" and "green energy superhighways" (whatever the hell those are), this will be first and foremost a local problem, since renewable generation facilities have to be integrated into the utilities' own grid resources. Research from Europe indicates that once you start trying to integrate much more than 30% intermittent generators, things start getting really unmanageable (and it's pretty hard even below that). These two disincentives would work together to encourage the utilities with renewable resources to maximize the cost of compliance for the have-nots, rendering the RPS an extremely inefficient and expensive way of reducing CO2 emissions.

A better plan would be some kind of cap-and-trade scheme for CO2 emissions themselves. Indeed, I like the sort of "cap-and-auction" idea that Obama is pushing, but I'm extremely wary of the apparent plan to use the proceeds to subsidize certain energy technologies. Personally, I think that the ideal policy would be as follows:

1. Set stringent CO2 output limits that go down each year.
2. Auction off emissions permits for the legal CO2 emissions--no grandfather clauses for industry or other measures that would render the scheme impotent.
3. Enforce compliance, but let individuals and corporations find their own preferred measures for doing so.
4. Divide the auction proceeds among all American taxpayers as a dividend. This will both act as a way of helping American families deal with the costs of compliance, but also serve as an economic stimulus. And as the costs of permits go up, so does the dividend.

I believe that this scheme probably has the best achievable mix of economic efficiency and fairness. In practice, I believe that it would encourage investments in efficiency in the short run, and modular, mass-produced nuclear reactors in the long run. But even if I'm wrong about that, these measures should find the most cost-effective means of reducing CO2 emissions. Compared to the RPS, which even on paper appears to be a highly inefficient way of fighting climate change, this is a vastly superior policy prescription. But somehow I imagine we'll end up with an RPS anyway. Let's just hope the government realizes the folly of this before they've done any more damage to our already faltering economy than necessary.

Soviet Civil Defense: Now A Tourist Attraction

2008-11-19T15:27:00.000-08:00

Tourists Don GP-5 Gas Masks to Relive the Soviet Experience

In 1980, the Soviet government constructed an underground TV station near Vilnius, the capital of the Lithuanian SSR. Intended to be used in the aftermath of nuclear war, the facility has now been perverted to the ends of capitalism--that is, it is now a tourist attraction. For a mere $44, you can descend underground to eat Soviet food, listen to Soviet music, and be "interrogated" by the KGB. You'll also get to learn all about the the GP-5 gas mask, just like generations of Soviet people did in civil defense drills.

The tourists in the picture have donned GP-5 gas masks (Гражданской противогаз-5, lit. "civilian gas mask 5") and are circling around an "injured" comrade on a stretcher. The combination of gas masks and first aid was a common тренировка (drill) used by Soviet civil defense in its training activities. The GP-5 is probably the most common of the many civilian gas masks made in the Soviet Union, and is now widely available as a surplus item.

Gas mask training was the closest Soviet equivalent to the "duck and cover" drills found in the US in the 1950s. It was not, in fact, a product of the Cold War; they were something of an obsession dating back to the days of Osoaviakhim before WWII, and were merely continued from that era into the nuclear age. Beginning under Khrushchev the claim was made that gas masks like the GP-5 would help protect citizens from internal radionuclide expose following a nuclear attack, but Soviet civil defense was also convinced that NATO would also use biological and chemical weapons against the USSR. Therefore, the gas mask drills continued up until the end of the Soviet period, and became an ubiquitous part of every Soviet citizen's education.

While I was in Moscow this summer, I met with prominent Russian historian Elena Zubkova, who told me an anecdote about these gas mask drills. Just like almost every Russian I've met, Zubkova and her peers did not take civil defense training very seriously. Instead of paying attention to the instructor, she and her schoolmates kept twisting the air inlet on each others' gas masks, making it impossible to breathe. I gather that Soviet kids spent most of their time in these classes goofing off. Somehow I doubt this dimension of Soviet civil defense training is showcased in the totalitarian world portrayed by the underground TV station outside Vilnius, but who knows. I'm mainly just fascinated that these civil defense activities are now regarded as quintessentially "Soviet," at least it Lithuania.

Stylish and Functional

2008-11-04T18:11:00.000-08:00

I recently noticed that someone has listed a vintage operating fluoroscope on eBay. This head-mounted radiological appliance was made during the interwar years and allowed surgeons to x-ray their patients constantly during surgery--at the cost of massive radiation exposure to everyone in the operating theatre. In practice, the patient would be "illuminated" by an X-ray tube, while in order to simultaneously operate the surgeon could be afforded little or no shielding. Add to this the fact that fluoroscopes require relatively large amounts of X-rays to get satisfactory results, and the problems of the device become even more onerous.

The Patterson Operating Fluoroscope: X-Ray Glasses That Really Work

The fluoroscope is on a hinge, allowing it to swing out of view if necessary. A red lens included in the device keeps the surgeon's eyes adapted to the dark, ready to re-engage with the darkened interior of the leatherette-covered fluoroscope.

Fluoroscope in Use.

These devices seem useful, and remained in use from WWI until the 1950s, but died out in light of increasingly stringent X-ray exposure standards. In 1965, E.R.N. Grigg wrote: “The appliance is hopelessly obsolete by any standards of radiation protection”. ORAU has one of the fluoroscopes in its collection of antique radiology equipment. I wonder if modern imaging technology could produce an equivalent device with acceptable exposure levels...

Science and its Enemies

2008-10-31T18:02:00.001-07:00

I have grown increasingly convinced that the greatest threat to science today comes not from the usual suspects--creationists and the like--but rather from the "holistic science" movement. Unhappy with the findings of "reductionist" science, they attack the fundamental methodology upon which all modern science is based, usually in conjunction with a disgusting degree of self-righteous moral opprobrium. Take, for instance, this gem from (in)famous organic agriculture activist Vandana Shiva:

"In order to prove itself superior to alternative modes of knowledge and be the only legitimate mode of knowing, reductionist science resorts to suppression and falsification of facts and thus commits violence against science itself, which ought to be a search for truth. We discuss below how fraudulent this claim to truth is."

This is from her essay Reductionist Science as Epistemological Violence, which is in my view not merely an outstandingly wrong-headed document, but also the sociopathic ramblings of a dangerous fantacist:

"Medicine is generally presented as an area in which modern science has the most achievements and successes to its credit. But there is increasing evidence that modern medicine and therapeutics have themselves become a source of disease and death. According to Ivan Illich, diseases brought on by doctors are a greater cause of increased mortality than traffic accidents and war-related activities. Iatrogenic illnesses cause between 60,000 to 140,000 deaths in America alone each year, and leave 2 to 5 million others more or less seriously ill. The situation is worst in establishments which generate medical knowledge, viz. university hospitals where one in five patients contracts an iatrogenic disease which usually requires special treatment, and leads to death in one case out of thirty.
'Scientific medicine' extends its monopoly even to those cases of common diseases in which people would get well without therapeutic intervention. It only converts simple problems into serious or fatal ones."

This flies so far in the face of well-understood historical fact that it boggles the mind that this author is not only taken seriously, but is regarded as a great authority and even a "hero" by many in the west. I, for one, owe my life to the achievements of modern science and medicine--I was born with a condition that even thirty years ago was usually fatal. And as a historian, I am all too aware of just how much better the present day is than the "natural" past idealized by people like Shiva. Life in the not-to-distant past was nasty, brutish, and short--and the reason it's better now is because of modern technology that has been enabled by "reductionist" science.

Shiva concludes that:

"Protest against reductionist science is emerging in all spheres. In India, for instance, the famous 'Chipko' movement is a movement against reductionist forestry; organic farming movements are challenges to reductionist agriculture; and health-care movements are projecting alternatives to reductionist medicine.
Since the monopoly of special interest groups over peoples' lives is mediated by the state, these movements have political implications. The search for alternatives to reductionism is basically a political struggle which cuts across material and intellectual domains. The non-reductionist alternatives that people across the world are building together is a non-violent science that respects the integrity of nature and man and truth and seeks liberation of the people, which is what science is, or should be, all about. And when a large number of little people think alike and act together, major changes may well be in the offing, including a change in worldview."

Apparently, Shiva is under the unfortunate delusion that reality is some kind of political choice. Given the facts on the ground, I believe that what the world needs is more science, and considerably less pseudoscientific hogwash based on undefinable concepts like "the integrity of nature." Wishful thinking and misplaced nostalgia are the absolutely wrong prescriptions for the many challenges facing the world today. It's true that the gifts of science have all too often been used for destructive ends; but this is no more an argument against reductionism than the possibility of choking is an argument against eating solid food. I, for one, know what side I'm on.

Sovietology: No Appeals to "Common Sense" Allowed

2008-10-16T14:57:00.000-07:00

In his HNN interview decrying Hiroshima "revisionism," Robert Maddox made the following statement:

VF: The peace movement condemns the attack as triggering the nuclear arms race. Is this the right cause-effect chain? If so, isn't it impossible to support the mission?
RM: This is absurd on its face. The Soviets had their own atomic program in place long before Hiroshima and knew through espionage all about the US effort. There would have been an arms race even if the US did not use the bombs against Japan. Can anyone imagine that, if only the United States had not used the bombs, Stalin would have permitted the US to enjoy a perpetual nuclear monopoly [with] the Soviets...helpless? The idea that Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused the arms race merely provides revisionists with another stick...to beat Truman.

To answer Maddox's rhetorical question, I can imagine it. Anyone who knows anything about Stalin's USSR knows that appeals to "common sense" don't work in this mileau. I've seen what Stalin wrote about the bomb in his own private papers, and the impression I get is that Stalin did not regard nuclear weapons as an effective weapon of war. Instead, he saw the bomb as a must-have prestige item. Not only would a Soviet bomb undermine belligerent anti-Soviet elements in the west, it would also prove that Soviet science and technology were equal to America's.

Stalin was infuriated by the failure of the United States to involve him in the decision to develop and use the atomic bomb. It is true that Communist spies within the Manhattan Project kept the Soviet government apprised of American progress, but the available evidence suggests that whatever information about this reached Stalin made little impression on him. Stalin, after all, was no scientist, even if he had pretensions to the contrary. Contemporary records show that Stalin and his inner circle were shocked and disturbed by the news of Hiroshima--quite possibly because it threatened their hoped-for gains in their campaign against Japan which began August 8th. Stalin craved acknowledgment from other nations that the USSR was a fully-fledged great power, and the decision to develop and use the bomb without so much as mentioning it to the Soviets was interpreted by him as a sign of Western disrespect at best and a willful insult at worst.

The Soviet atomic project began in 1941 but received only minuscule funding and attention until late August of 1945--several weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After this it became a top priority, but it was never high enough to cannibalize other projects Stalin regarded as critical. On the military front, Stalin was determined to expand Soviet naval power to world-class standards, expending enormous resources on ship construction. Domestically, major prestige projects in Moscow alone consumed several percent of overall Soviet GDP. Regarding his own capital's low skyline as a retrograde embarrassment in comparison to modern American cities, Stalin ordered the construction of a group of bizarre ornamental skyscrapers in Moscow. The Moscow Metro and its highly ornamented stations also sucked up vast amounts of Soviet blood and treasure--even in a period when famine was widespread in the USSR. Stalin's priorities were plainly irrational--a point which should be kept in mind.

Most significantly, Stalin saw little need to develop a means to deliver the few nuclear weapons available during his twilight years. The earliest Soviet delivery system for nuclear weapons was the Tu-4A--a modified version of the Soviet clone of the B-29. As the earliest Soviet nuclear weapons were copied from the American Mk-III that was dropped on Nagasaki, these had to be modified to carry a weapon considerably larger than would easily fit in the bomb bay; however, only three of these bombers were built. More credible delivery systems only became available only around the time Stalin died. What this means is that Stalin was perfectly pleased to be "helpless"--he did not order his followers to build less skyscrapers and more bombers to carry his handful of weapons. Furthermore, the Tu-4A would have had difficulty reaching Britain from the USSR without refueling, much less the United States. It appears that no Tu-4s were built with both refueling equipment and the ability to carry nuclear weapons--meaning that the ability of the Soviet Union under Stalin to project nuclear force was essentially non-existent. Soviet delivery capabilities lagged far behind Stalin's infant nuclear arsenal, and as far as I can tell the dictator did not regard this as a problem.

What implications does this have for our understanding of Stalin's intentions? I am inclined to draw the conclusion that Stalin regarded nuclear weapons as a gimmick, at least until the end of the 1940s. Flush from Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, he placed his faith in the Soviet Union's colossal land forces rather than America's strategic aviation and nuclear arsenal. I can easily imagine Stalin being content with his armies and tanks in a world where nuclear weapons remained a murky, undemonstrated secret. After all, to a considerable extent he was content without a credible nuclear deterrent despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is not because Stalin was a peacenik at heart, as he wasn't; it's because Stalin failed to understand the power of the bomb and its effects on Soviet security. He wanted the bomb because it was source of American pride, and because it convinced the Truman Administration it did not need to accommodate Soviet interests in the postwar world. If neither of these factors came into play--and if the atomic bomb had not been used, it's hard to imagine how they would have--it's hard for me to see why Stalin would have thought it necessary to build a Soviet bomb.

Fact Check: Joe Romm on New Nukes

2008-10-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

Joe Romm manages to be quite a chameleon when it comes to nuclear power. On certain occasions, he manages to be quite reasonable--as when he admitted that the Russians have no good non-carbon energy options outside of fission. He insists that he's not "anti-nuclear." But much of the time his writing on the subject is more reminiscent of Paul Gunther than of an even-handed, sober-minded analyst. And for someone who has been bashing nuclear power in the national media for years, Romm seems to have a difficult time keeping basic facts straight.

Take, for instance, this statement that Romm inserted into Finrod's comment to this post on Climate Progress:
JR: Gimme a break Once there is a price for carbon dioxide that reflects its actual damage to humanity, wind and solar will do just fine, thank you. Right now, new nuclear plants get all of the subsidies that wind gets, plus this absurd 80% loan guarantee, full liability protection, and expedited licensing.
In this comment Romm makes four claims, which I will go through one at a time.

Claim #1: New nuclear plants "get all of the subsidies wind gets."
It's hard to boil the complex reality of US energy subsidies to a short statement, but all things considered I don't believe this is a fair assessment. It is true that the Energy Policy Act of 2005 expanded the Production Tax Credit of 1.9 cents per kW/hr to the first 6000 megawatts of new nuclear capacity. However, with current reactor designs this only represents 4-5 units, when there are dozens currently being planned for the US. The act calls for allocating the 6000 MW among various reactors, with each of them receiving a fraction of the credit.

The list of federal incentives (which represent de facto or explicit subsidies) for renewable energy sources is actually pretty extensive. Fortunately, there's a handy website that lists and explains them all. You can go through them at length if you like, but I would like to direct readers' attention to the Renewable Energy Production Incentive (REPI). This is not the same thing as the Production Tax Credit (PTC). As the DSIRE website explains:

The Federal Renewable Energy Production Incentive (REPI) provides incentive payments for electricity produced and sold by new qualifying renewable energy facilities. Qualifying systems are eligible for annual incentive payments of 1.5¢ per kilowatt-hour (in 1993 dollars and indexed for inflation) for the first 10-year period of their operation, subject to the availability of annual appropriations in each federal fiscal year of operation.

As new nuclear systems are ineligible for this significant federal subsidy, I believe that we can dismiss Romm's first claim as demonstrably false.

Claim #2: New Nuclear Plants receive "this absurd 80% loan guarantee" in addition to all the incentives received by new wind capacity.
I find this sentiment quite ironic, given that the DOE program that provides the loan guarantees provides the same incentive to renewable power projects. Here's the nuclear power solicitation, and here's the renewable power solicitation. Seems like nuclear projects possess no advantages that renewables do not from the loan guarantee program, with the exception of the $18 billion limit for nuclear plant guarantees (vs. $10 billion for renewables). Doesn't strike me as all that "absurd."

Claim #3: New Nuclear Plants receive "full liability protection."
This is one of the longstanding myths about the Price-Anderson Act. Buried in the intense legalese of the law is a section that nullifies any guarantee of legal protection above the Price-Anderson limit. The relevant text is here:

(2) In the event of a nuclear incident involving damages in excess of the amount of aggregate public liability under paragraph (1), the Congress will thoroughly review the particular incident in accordance with the procedures set forth in subsection (i) of this section and will in accordance with such procedures, take whatever action is determined to be necessary (including approval of appropriate compensation plans and appropriation of funds) to provide full and prompt compensation to the public for all public liability claims resulting from a disaster of such magnitude.
(3) No provision of paragraph (1) may be construed to preclude the Congress from enacting a revenue measure, applicable to licensees of the Commission required to maintain financial protection pursuant to subsection (b) of this section, to fund any action undertaken pursuant to paragraph (2).

Translation: In case of a nuclear incident resulting in claims greater than the Price-Anderson limit, Congress can pass measures to extract revenues from the licencee to cover the cost of liability. This means that if the "American Chernobyl" that anti-nukes like Harvey Wasserman fantasize about somehow actually happened, Congress would use its powers to expropriate everything the reactor operator owned. That doesn't sound like "full liability protection" to me. The provisions of the law are a considerable deviation from how liability law normally works, but that sword cuts both ways--take, for instance, this clause in the legislation:

The Commission or the Secretary, as appropriate, may incorporate provisions in indemnity agreements with licensees and contractors under this section, and may require provisions to be incorporated in insurance policies or contracts furnished as proof of financial protection, which waive

(i) any issue or defense as to conduct of the claimant or fault of persons indemnified,

(ii) any issue or defense as to charitable or governmental immunity, and
(iii) any issue or defense based on any statute of limitations if suit is instituted within three years from the date on which the claimant first knew, or reasonably could have known, of his injury or damage and the cause thereof.

Basically, under Price-Anderson licencees waive their right to several defenses that they would be fully entitles to use in conventional liability cases. Full liability protection? I think not. At the same time, the law is very helpful in case of incidents with claims below the Price-Anderson limit, as operators are not individually liable for the full sum under such cases. So it is a subsidy--just not anywhere near as advantageous one as its detractors imagine.

Claim #4: New Nuclear Plants Receive "Expedited Licensing"
A semantic quibble, but current NRC procedures are only "expedited" in comparison to the way they worked prior to the 2005 Energy Bill. Under current circumstances, all the new plant designs still require NRC approval--and the shortage of qualified NRC staff to evaluate them isn't making things progress any quicker. If the NRC was rubber-stamping applications, that would be one thing; but so long as it takes four years or more for new designs to be approved, licensing is anything but "expedited."

So on the whole, I think Romm's aside has a somewhat tenuous relationship with legal reality. Wind power receives a lengthy list of subsidies not available to new nuclear plants, wind and nuclear receive the same 80% loan guarantees from the same DOE program, Price-Anderson allows Congress to expropriate the assets of reactor operators in case of a serious accident, and 48+ months is still a long time. But somehow I doubt that he will admit any of this.

It's Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

2008-09-29T19:21:00.000-07:00

You just can't make this stuff up.

NRDC: Russian Fast Reactor Program "A Failure"

2008-09-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

From the ongoing BAS roundtable "Managing the Global Growth of Nuclear Energy":

As has been noted by Frank von Hippel, co-director of Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, the GNEP vision of burning the long-lived actinides, requires for every 100 thermal reactors of the type used throughout the United States today, some 40-75 new fast reactors of similar capacity. The commercial use of large numbers of fast reactors for actinide burning is unlikely to occur because--to borrow observations made by U.S. Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover more than 50 years ago--fast reactors have proven to be “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolong shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.” The development of fast reactors to breed plutonium failed in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. I would argue it failed in the Soviet Union despite the fact that the Soviets operated two commercial-size fast breeder plants, BN-350 (now shut down in Kazakhstan) and BN-600 (still operational in Russia), because the Soviet Union and Russia never successfully closed the fuel cycle and thus never operated these plants using MOX (mixed-uranium and plutonium oxide) fuel.

That's from Thomas B. Cochran of the NRDC. Clearly, someone forgot to tell the Russians, given what Premier Putin said back in July:

But it is necessary to migrate to new technologies: to introduce a closed fuel cycle, to construct a commercial fast reactor.

Meanwhile, construction of the BN-800 is continuing apace. Never mind as well that MOX fuel assemblies made with recovered plutonium have been tested in the BN-600. Even though I agree with Cochran that the GNEP plan to build dozens of commercial fast reactors is a non-starter, the fact of the matter is that the Russians' fast reactor efforts show that these plants can be operated on a commercial basis, and constructed affordably enough that, given a very significant increase in uranium prices, they could be competitive with conventional LWR designs.

The Internal Layout of the BN-800 Reactor Scheduled for Completion in 2012.

The real question is whether the BN-series reactors are safe enough. Even though Rosenergoatom claims that the BN-800 incorporates features that avoid the problem of a positive void coefficient and possible recriticality in case of a meltdown, I haven't been able to locate technical information detailed enough to evaluate these claims. The Russians are also developing the BREST series reactors, which are lead-cooled fast reactors intended to incorporate passive safety features like the IFR concept. Unlike the BN-800, however, these are clearly a long way from fruition. In any case, however, the Russians seem to be betting the future on these fast reactors--wise or not.

Who Will Build the Next Generation of Russian Nuclear Plants?

2008-08-29T12:46:00.000-07:00

Russia's plans for the expansion of nuclear power are ambitions. The plan announced at the end of July calls for essentially doubling the size of Russia's reactor fleet by 2020. But are these plans even remotely realistic? After all, ambitious construction programs laid out for the industry in previous decades have gone almost totally unfulfilled. Does Russia have the capability to build dozens of reactors in the next decade?

The bulk of Russia's nuclear plant construction in the coming years will consist of the AES-2006, a modernized version of the VVER pressurized-water reactors built during the Soviet period. The major components for these plants were built in three facilities, all of which currently exist in some capacity:

1. The Izhorskie Zavody, in Kolipino. These plants manufactured the vast majority of pressurized-water reactor components in the Soviet period. From naval reactors to VVER-1000s, the Izhorskie Zavody is still the center of Russian reactor manufacture. Estimates of its theoretical capacity to produce pressure vessels vary considerably, from a single unit a year to approximately four. The latter seems like an overestimate, and in the past few years production has averaged less than two sets of reactor equipment a year. Rosatom is making sizable investments in the facility to raise this to three sets a year by 2011, and four sets a year a few years after this. Due to long lead times and the fact that the plants produce a wide array of equipment for other industries, it is unclear how great production will be in the next few years.

2. Skoda Power, in the Czech Republic. The division of Skoda that produced reactor equipment under socialism was acquired by the same company that owns the Izhorskie Zavody several years ago. Historically, this plant produced 21 VVER-440s and 3 VVER-1000s prior to the collapse of Communism. Today it still produces parts and equipment for existing VVERs and is exploring the prospect of beginning production of components for new reactors.

3. Atommash. As its name suggests, this plant was founded to produce nuclear power equipment for the Soviet electrical sector. One of the most ambitious industrial investments of the Brezhnev years, Atommash was planned to produce eight complete VVER-1000s a year in an assembly-line fashion. This would enable the USSR to fulfill its plans to produce 60% of its electricity from nuclear power by the year 2000. As one might imagine, the scale of this factory is absolutely colossal. Unfortunately, the plant never managed to produce reactor equipment at anything like the projected rate. To date, Atommash has only ever produced three sets of equipment for VVERs. This was the result of a myriad of problems, including labor difficulties and architectural oversights that allowed the pressure vessel foundry to settle and caused one wall of it to collapse. However, Atommash has enjoyed a quite successful second life producing heavy equipment--albeit mainly for the burgeoning Russian petroleum and natural gas industries. Today it is owned by Energomash, and as such is not responsible to Minatom in the sense that the previous two factories are. At times Atommash seems to have been written off as a supplier of pressure vessels, but occasional mention of the plant by figures in the Russian nuclear industry suggest that the prospect of procuring AES-2006 components from the facility is still under consideration.

Can these facilities produce all the components needed for Minatom's nuclear construction program? Within Russia, there are naysayers. They believe that between the unavailability of Atommash and the failure of the Izhorskie Zavody to build even two VVER-1000s a year so far as a sign that Minatom cannot build anywhere near as many new plants as it plans to. On the other hand, Putin's promise of over $40 billion dollars in state investment in the nuclear industry through 2015 should work to bolster the prospects of the Russian nuclear revival. Some of this money is bound to be used to increase the production capacity of the Izhorskie Zavody. But ultimately, only time will tell whether Russian industry is up to the challenge of the nuclear renaissance.

Russian Article on the LFTR

2008-08-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

From ProAtom, May 8th 2008, "Nuclear Energy Without Plutonium or Chernobyl":

Страна, которая первой освоит и запустит в серийное производство экологически безопасные ядерные реакторные установки уран-ториевого цикла на базе реакторов с расплавами солей фторидов, выйдет на передовые рубежи высококонкурентоспособных ядерно-энергетических технологий со всеми вытекающими из этого преимуществами.

The country which first develops and mass-produces safe uranium-thorium cycle nuclear reactor installations on the basis of reactors with flowing fluoride salts will move to the leading edge of highly competitive nuclear energy technology with all the advantages resulting from it.

ProAtom has a number of pro-LFTR articles, which suggests that there is a vocal (if small) pro-LFTR minority within the Russian nuclear establishment. The primary figure in this group appears to be P.M. Yakovlev of the Khlopin Radium Institute, whose name is associated in some capacity with nearly all of the pro-LFTR pieces.

Pamir: Nuclear Power Goes on the Road

2008-08-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

The strange tale of the Soviets' mobile nuclear power plants is largely unknown to the English-speaking world. Which is a shame, as these machines offer fascinating insights into the world of the Soviet nuclear complex.

The first mobile nuclear generator built on the USSR was the TES-3, completed in 1961. This treaded monster was designed to rumble around the countryside on 4 modified T-10 tank chassis, conveying a 2MWe nuclear plant wherever it might be needed.

The TES-3 Mobile Nuclear Power Plant, 1961

Over the course of the next two decades the mobile nuclear concept was revised by researchers at the Belorussian Academy of Sciences Institute of Nuclear Energy. In the mid-1980s they created the road-mobile Pamir. The Pamir consisted of four heavy trailers, one of which contained a 630kW reactor, another the gas turbine, one which contained a miniaturized control room, and one to house the plant's sizable staff. The reactor and control trailers are illustrated by these models:

The "Pamir" Mobile Nuclear Power Plant

The Pamir was designed to operate in a wide variety of conditions--temperatures from -50 to 50 degrees centigrade, with a fuel load sufficient for five years. The reactor utilized HEU and was gas-cooled with dinitrogen tetroxide a single loop, and was part of a 60-ton truck. Operation of the plant required a staff of 28 people. Two examples of the system were completed by 1986, when the Chernobyl accident inspired a campaign within the Soviet government to end the Pamir program. The location of the BSSR's nuclear research institute a mere seven kilometers outside Minsk concerned the protesters, who feared the consequences of an accident with the exotic reactors. Both of the plants were scrapped, leaving only a few mementos of a 300 million ruble development program. One of the reactor vessels was fashioned into a memorial outside the institute:

A Pamir Reactor Vessel Preserved at the Belorussian Academy of Sciences Institute of Nuclear Energy

Soviet engineers imagined a variety of uses for the Pamir. The primary purpose of the system was to power military radar outposts in remote parts of the USSR. Part of the appeal of the concept was that these road-mobile nuclear plants could be dispersed under the threat of nuclear war to secure locations, then used to help rebuild Soviet defenses after a nuclear attack. More mundane uses also included civil disasters: after catastrophes like the 1988 Armenian earthquake, or ordinary power outages, the mobile nuclear plants could be used to restore electrical service.

The road-mobile nuclear generator is one concept that I very much doubt will see any kind of revival, but it does serve as proof of just how compact and mobile nuclear power can be. Not only can nuclear plants be built in sizes other than "extra large," it is possible to build an entire nuclear power plant that will fit inside a truck trailer. After all, the Soviets did it over twenty years ago.

A Recipe For Failure

2008-08-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

Why does the anti-proliferation crowd continue to stubbornly insist on the efficacy of policies that are demonstrable failures?

Take, for instance, this recent piece from Leonor Tomero of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation: "The Future of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership: Next Steps." I believe that this article typifies the dangerous trend towards Americocentrism in U.S. policy circles. As a Russia specialist I find the once-through fuel cycle argument incomprehensible, as it is so clearly an abysmal failure that I have a hard time believing that professionals can pretend otherwise.

In their world, apparently, a "good example" on the part of the United States will forestall the spread of weapons-sensitive technologies. But in actuality, other nations have generally scoffed at American demands that they forgo particular technologies. Especially today, with Russia offering civilian nuclear technology to Iran in open defiance of US wishes. In earlier years Russia had offered fuel reprocessing services to all countries as well, but in the last few years this has been restricted to fuel made in Russia only. Russia has made a point of aggressively marketing nuclear power abroad, and there is no good reason to believe that this will stop anytime soon.

Even sillier is the proposal that "Washington should demand that its allies abandon ongoing plans or forego ambitions to develop these technologies. [reprocessing and fast reactors]" One need only look so far as France to see the wonderful success that this policy is likely to have. Thirty years of U.S. "leadership" in this area has been completely ignored by the French, who in the meantime have managed to demonstrate that reprocessing can be done well. In practice, we are in no position to "demand" anything. Tomero claims that this policy "worked in the past," citing the example of Taiwan (which in my mind is not really a great supporting case). The places where reprocessing has been abandoned have generally done so for the very sensible reason that uranium was absurdly cheap for decades, and without fast reactors the need for separated plutonium failed to materialize as expected. U.S. pressure seems to have had very little to do with it. Besides, North Korea proved dramatically that even a desperately poor and isolated country can develop the technology to construct a nuclear weapon. No commercial reprocessing needed.

Tomero suggests that "at home, the new administration should redirect funding currently provided to the national labs for reprocessing and fast neutron reactor research to programs that improve and reduce the cost of safeguards technology, explore ways to make uranium enrichment more proliferation-resistant, and develop renewable energy." To understand just how little good this is likely to do, just imagine what the likely results would be after a few decades. Research funding for reprocessing research and fast reactors has been moribund for years in any case. I cannot imagine any credible means how uranium enrichment can be made "proliferation resistant"--indeed, at Oak Ridge back during WWII the U.S. succeeded in producing weapons-grade material using even crude, inefficient, and handicapped technologies. In the real world, we're likely to see the commercialization of laser enrichment techniques like Silex. Even if the U.S. government squelches current research into this technology, it is so advantageous that it is certain to be reinvented by some other interested party. This may be unfortunate, as the very features that make laser enrichment so attractive make it a genuine proliferation nightmare. Unlike commercial fuel reprocessing, laser enrichment could make the clandestine production of weapons-grade U-235 absurdly easy.

Hard experience is fast exploding the popular notion that government investment in renewables will prevent the need for nuclear power in the future. Just look at Germany, where the nuclear phase-out is quickly losing public favor and will likely become an unpleasant memory when the SPD loses power. France is already nuclear, the UK is planning new plants, as are many of the former Soviet satellites and republics. The UK seriously reviewed the renewable options and found them inadequate, choosing to go nuclear despite the unpopularity of doing so. Indeed, it appears the rest of the world will ultimately go nuclear no matter what the US does.

The choice, therefore, is likely to be between various nuclear futures, rather than between a nuclear and a nuclear-free option. And because the U.S. has to live among its brother nations, it is in our interest to help build the best of all possible nuclear futures. Do we want to abandon the future to other nations with more vision and foresight than we? Do we want the Russians to realize the light-metal fast breeder using aqueous reprocessing, with all its attendant risks, when we could create a thorium-based fuel cycle that, upon maturity, would end the need for enrichment and produce no separated weapons-usable materials? I know what option I want. And pretending that we can go on with the failed policies of the 1970s isn't doing anyone any real favors.

A Modest Proposal

2008-08-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

Here's an ad that Barack Obama's campaign has been running in Nevada:

This is, of course, standard anti-nuclear scaremongering, but we oughtn't let McCain off the hook for his opposition to nuclear "waste" shipments moving through Arizona.

In any case, we should make the best of the situation. If the Democrats' opposition to Yucca Mountain can be translated into government support for advanced fuel cycles, this is all for the better. After all, Yucca Mountain and the open fuel cycle to epitomizes have failed to have the desired effect. In theory, U.S. opposition to closed fuel cycles was supposed to encourage other nations from pursuing this technology, but in experience no one seems to have cared about what US practice was. France, Russia, and Japan have gone along the closed fuel cycle path with little regard for American disapproval. Meanwhile, Yucca has turned into an albatross for the nuclear industry. So long as the repository remains incomplete, the nuclear waste problem can be used as a bat to bash nuclear power.

To people in the know, of course, this is all very maddening. The nuclear "waste" awaiting disposal at Yucca Mountain still contains nearly all of its potential energy--enough to provide for all of America's energy needs for over a lifetime if utilized efficiently. So sensibly, pro-nuclear types have wanted to use this energy rather than throw it away.

At the same time, some solution must be found for the large quantities of nuclear waste produced by the U.S. government over the last 65 years in military programs. The decision to store this material with spent civilian fuel in the Yucca repository may have once been a way of "killing two birds with one stone," but in retrospect it seems to have been ill-advised. In any case, it is inarguable the United States government has a responsibility to develop a way of dealing with this material. Harvey Wasserman's weird fantasies aside, wishful thinking won't allow us shut every nuclear facility, turn Yucca Mtn. into a casino, and somehow ignore this stuff.

So long as politicians are going to oppose Yucca, therefore, they are obligated to provide some kind of alternative. So here's my proposal: a program to develop a transmutation reactor (perhaps to be called the Waste Transmutation Pilot Plant) whose primary purpose would be to demonstrate transmutation, preferably on a commercial scale. There are a variety of technological options for this, but the most mature are light-metal cooled fast reactors. I'm a fan of liquid-fuel reactors, but I'm not sure how well the existing research will translate into a fast transmutation reactor. In any case, I think the best way to deal with this question within DOE would be to have a competition between various proposals of varying degrees of technical ambition. I'm sure that even among ALMRs, there are many possible options to choose from. Ideally I'd prefer it if Argonne got a fast transmutation reactor project and ORNL got to build a follow-on to the MSRE that would demonstrate the thorium fuel cycle in an MSR, but perhaps this is wishing for too much.

But in any case, we need a solution to break the deadlock that has held up nuclear power development for decades. If the waste issue can be manipulated to spur the development of more modern nuclear technologies, America--and the world--will be better off for it. It's like making lemonade from the Yucca lemon.

Understanding "Duck and Cover"

2008-08-19T16:02:00.000-07:00

Everyone's heard of it... but why would anyone think it was a good idea? Who made it, and why? How did it become a cultural milestone?

I have to confess that I find "Duck and Cover" maddening. Not so much the film itself, but the reputation it's developed, and the fact that no one bothers to contextualize it in its proper historical context. "Duck and Cover" is a unique historical artifact, one that could only have been produced in a very particular cultural and political context. What should be emphasized is that this particular historical moment lasted all of a few months, after which the Federal Civil Defense Administration realized that they had made some very serious mistakes.

The roots of "Duck and Cover" can be found in the efforts of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey to interview survivors of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Irving L. Janis wrote in 1951 that "A substantial proportion of respondents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki reported having reacted immediately to the intense flash alone, as though it were a well-known danger signal, despite the fact they were unaware of its significance at the time. A number of them said that they voluntarily ducked down or "hit the ground" as soon as the flash occurred and had already reached the prone position before the blast swept over them." Janis argued that these findings suggested "that the casualties of an A-bomb attack might be reduced if the population had been well prepared in advance to react appropriately to the flash of the explosion." The U.S. Army Medical Department estimated in 1948 that "of the 50,000 or more deaths which would ordinarily result from a single attack on a modern city about 10,000 could be avoided if every person in the city were adequately informed beforehand as to what he could do for himself in case of an A-bomb disaster."

Clearly, the U.S. government regarded improvised civil defense measure like "duck and cover" to be minimally effective. So why did they create an instructional film emphasizing them? The answer can be found in the Report of Project East River, a colossal 10-volume review of the U.S. civil defense program made in September, 1952. As the authors explained:

With the advent of the Korean difficulties, it appeared that the civil defense structure of the nation should be brought to readiness at the earliest possible moment to meet an immediate threat.

"Duck and Cover" was meant as a temporary measure, in case of a sneak Soviet nuclear attack before U.S. active and passive defenses could be improved. These were to include better radar systems to give earlier warning of impending Soviet attack, improved active defenses to intercept and destroy incoming bombers, and an elaborate civil defense system to protect American urban dwellers. However, only the first two of these ever saw fruition. The FCDA, in large measure due to its own bungling and incompetence, proved unable to convince Congress to fund its shelter program. This did not, however, prevent the FCDA from including a public blast shelter in the film. Had the FCDA's plans been realized, these would have been a common sight in American cities. Instead, public shelters only became a reality in the Kennedy years.

One should keep in mind that a major (and perhaps the major) goal of the FCDA's 1950s propaganda efforts was to enlist public support for the FCDA's more ambitious schemes. After all, like all bureaucracies the FCDA's primary imperative was its own perpetuation and growth. This is not to say that the FCDA's motives were cynical--it genuinely feared the prospect of Soviet nuclear attack--but its desire was for the funding to create a credible civil defense, not for the American people to complacently believe in "duck and cover." But in order to create the public clamor for increased civil defense funding, the people needed to fear the prospect of enemy nuclear attack, and to believe US defenses were inadequate. The FCDA's initial efforts to stoke nuclear fear, unfortunately, failed to inspire Americans to write their Congressmen to demand the allocation of funds for shelter-building.

Even by mid-1952, it was clear that the FCDA's efforts to "sell" civil defense to the public were failing. As the Report of Project East River stated:

Thus far, the major appeal has been on the likelihood and imminence of attack. The country, now in its second year of major civil defense effort, has not responded to the continuous campaign stressing the need for civil defense. Since the appeal has not led to durable results, new ways must be found for establishing a sounder basis for civil defense needs and participation.

"Duck and Cover" is perhaps the epitome of civil defense propaganda emphasizing the likelihood and imminence of attack. (I won't bother going into the production history of the film, as Conelrad has already done a far better job of that than I could.) Therefore, the film was recognized as a failure less than a year after it was produced. Unfortunately, the film failed to disappear from circulation, and continued to torment children in some places for years to come. This, of course, ultimately worked against the purpose for which the film was originally intended. Instead of encouraging greater support for civil defense, the film's apparent naivete in the face of the growing nuclear threat helped convince an entire generation of Americans that defense against nuclear attack was impossible.

"Duck and Cover" probably owes its current notoriety to the 1982 film The Atomic Cafe. On the one hand, The Atomic Cafe is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. Its creative editing and exposition-free presentation make for a powerful viewing experience. On the other hand, these very features make the film incapable of historicizing its contents. Indeed, even though all of the footage is from the 40s, 50s, and 60s, The Atomic Cafe really tells us much more about the culture of the early 80s than it does about the early Cold War. Among other things, its makers edited the historical footage (and particularly "Duck and Cover") for maximum irony. For these reasons I disapprove of the use of this film as a means of instructing students about Cold War civil defense. Without an understanding of the activities of the FCDA at the time it was created, it gives a highly misleading impression of the goals and methods of civil defense.

Indeed, "Duck and Cover" is so fascinating and ironic because it is atypical of U.S. civil defense propaganda, not because it is representative of it. Because the FCDA changed propaganda tactics less than 18 months after it was founded, "Duck and Cover" is very unusual. In large measure because it was made before the development of the H-bomb, it looks especially foolish in retrospect. It is a film that could only have been made in 1951, and can only be understood in the context of 1951. Any other way, the film is reduced to mere kitsch, rather than history.

More Soviet Bomb Shelters

2008-08-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a Russian website, I can now offer some more images of Soviet bomb shelters:

Seating/Bedding

A Blast Door

Air Filters.

A Generator.

This Shelter is Flooded.

Soviet Bomb Shelter Sign

2008-08-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

Nearly everyone, it seems, is familiar with the American Kennedy-era yellow and black fallout shelter sign:

But it seems that hardly anyone, even older Russians, remembers the Soviet equivalent:
It reads:

BLAST SHELTER No. 28
OAO "Tiazhpromarmatura"
Keys are at Dormitory Security
Tel. 46-4-08
Under the leader of factory shop no. 33
V.I. Diudnev
Tel. 46-4-61

Убийство и сверхубийство

2008-08-09T17:41:00.000-07:00

One of my great finds on my recent trip to Moscow was a copy of the Russian-language Soviet translation of Ralph Lapp's 1962 Kill and Overkill: The Strategy of Annihilation. This little volume had eluded me for years. I was quite eager to find out exactly what Soviet censors regarded as unacceptable for their readership, and why they picked Lapp's book instead of the many other contemporary Western books about nuclear strategy.

Published in 1964, the Soviet translation is titled Убийство и сверхубийство. This is an earnest translation of the title, but the meaning in Russian is something like "Murder and Overmurder." Soviet readers were treated to an extensive introduction detailing Lapp's various ideological errors, but which concluded that the book would benefit Soviet readers by unveiling the self-apparent moral bankruptcy of the U.S. strategic nuclear posture. It explained that "the Soviet Union is opposed to nuclear war because it is confident in its strength, certain that its cause is just, certain that it will outperform imperialism in the world economic arena, while being steadfastly guided in its foreign policy by the great Leninist principle of peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems."

The edits made in the course of translation are certainly revealing. Take, for instance, this passage from Lapp's original (p. 140):

If the "semi-official estimates" are even approximately correct, the Soviet striking force was astonishingly far below that of the United States. Senator Stuart Symington conceded in 1961 that our intelligence agencies had vastly overestimated Soviet strength. (Among other things there was no "missile gap.") It became obvious that the U.S.S.R. had relied on a "minimum deterrent"--a force not designed to knock out our striking power but only large enough to destroy our cities and industries if it were attacked. In short, a second-strike force.

The Soviet translation renders this paragraph rather differently:

СССР явно полагается на "минимальные средства сдерживание"--на силы, предназначенные не для разгрома и уничтожения наших ударных сил, а для того, чтобы в ответ на нападение нанести сокрушительный удар по нашим городам и промышленности.

The USSR clearly relies upon "the minimum means of deterrence"--upon forces, intended not for the crushing defeat and destruction of our strike forces, but rather for the conveyance of a crushing blow to our cities and industry in answer to an attack.

The avoidance of any admission of Soviet weakness is typical of literature published in the USSR about the nuclear threat. Lapp's original paragraph has been changed here so that the Russian uses phrases common in Soviet propaganda of the Khrushchev years--particularly the phrase "в ответ на нападение нанести сокрушительный удар."

An edit I found particularly interesting, given my interest in civil defense, was to be found in this paragraph (p. 121):

But this technical question, as I have mentioned, is only one aspect of a vastly complex problem. Among many other aspects, one must consider the strategic effects. General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, welcomed the fallout shelter program as "an essential element" of our "deterrent"--that is, our military power. There can be no doubt that a large-scale shelter program would intensify the arms race, leading to Russian shelter-building and the pyramiding of more and bigger weapons by both sides. Shelters would then become part of a vicious cycle in strategic thinking.

Soviet readers, meanwhile, were treated to the following:

Но эта техчическая сторона вопроса, как я отметил, является только одним аспектом исключительно сложной проблемы. А мы прежде всего должны помнить об ее стратегических аспектах.

Бывшый председатель комитета начальников штабов генерал Л. Лемитцер охарактеровал программу строительства убежищ, обеспечивающих защиту от действия ядерных излучений, как "существенный элемент" нашей "сдерживающей силы", то есть нашей военной мощи. Не может быть никакого сомнения, что программа строительства убежищ в крупных масштабах вызовет гонку вооружений и приведет к увеличению количества и мощности оружия, создаемого обоими странами. Убежища тогда станут частью порочного круга в стратегическом мышлении.

But this technical part of the question, as I mentioned, is merely one aspect of an extremely complex problem. Most of all, we must consider the strategic aspects of it.

The former head of the committee of heads of staff General L. Lemnitzer characterized the program of the construction of shelters offering protection against the effect of nuclear radiation as "an essential element" of our "deterrent forces", that is, our military power. There can be no doubt, that the large-scale construction of shelters would intensify the arms race and lead to the increase in the number and power of weapons constructed by both countries. Shelters would then become a part of a perverse circle in strategic thought.

I am not quite sure what the deletion of the clause about Soviet shelter construction means. The Soviets had a much larger shelter program than the United States, but they were quick to emphasize that their civil defense program was qualitatively different from its American counterpart as it "served the people's interests" rather than the ambitions of "adventurists who seek to start a new world war." In any case, it's certainly an interesting editorial choice.

Civil Defense History: The Importance of Chronology

2008-08-08T21:50:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of BAS contains an article by Joseph Masco, "Target Audience," about government films about nuclear weapons effects from the 1950s and how they continue to affect Americans' understanding of nuclear weapons. This attracted my attention as it contains a discussion of "Operation Cue," a civil defense film produced in 1955. I have to say that I think that the author's analysis is not particularly astute, as it ignores the issues raised by chronological context. As such, it cannot avoid being ahistorical.

According to the author:

This scripting of danger and stagemanaging of nuclear effects became increasingly sophisticated at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s, eventually including parallel civil defense material aimed at civilians. Again, panic, not nuclear destruction, was positioned as the real danger in nuclear warfare. This argument was made with careful crafting of the images of nuclear warfare, censoring of nuclear effects such as fire and radiation, and focusing on atomic bombs rather than the much larger thermonuclear weapons already in the U.S. arsenal.

...

In Operation Cue, there is no discussion about radioactive fallout or the extensive fires that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced. Instead, the film provides a detailed portrait of a functioning post-nuclear state. Rescue personnel pull damaged mannequins from the rubble, flying several to off-site hospitals; meanwhile, the mass feeding takes place alongside standing homes and power lines. Later, the mannequins scorched by Operation Cue went on a national tour of J. C. Penney department stores, which had provided the clothing used in the test, offering an explicit portrait of nuclear survival to the U.S. public.

A closer reading of Operation Cue reveals a more complicated message: The film is training citizens to accept nuclear war as a normative threat, employing nuclear fear to craft a militarized society organized around preparing for nuclear war every minute of every day. To accomplish this, the portrait of nuclear danger presented in Operation Cue is partial, a carefully edited version of nuclear science that the day’s prevailing experts had already disproved via the test programs in Nevada and the South Pacific. In actuality, the fallout produced by nuclear tests such as Operation Cue traversed the continental United States, creating negative health effects for soldiers and civilians that continue to this day—a much starker reality than Operation Cue promises viewers.

Here Masco is arguing that the Federal Civil Defense Administration was being willfully mendacious in its propaganda efforts, intentionally withholding disturbing facts about nuclear weapons in order to engineer Americans' emotional lives to fight the Cold War. The truth of the matter is that when the film was made, the FCDA was not privy to the information that the AEC had gathered about fallout in the course of the nuclear tests in the Pacific in 1954. Indeed, a big part of the reason that Ralph Lapp went public with the problems posed by fallout in 1954-5 was so that civil defense planners could take this information into account in their planning efforts. (Lapp was a longstanding civil defense advocate, who wrote a pro-civil defense book titled Must We Hide? in 1949.) After information about fallout began reaching the FCDA, "Operation Cue" was edited to include an introduction regarding the fallout problem, as seen here:

And part two:

Besides the fact that the FCDA lacked up-to-date information to censor, the current knowledge about fallout in mid-1955 left a very great deal to be desired. It doesn't help that Masco's citation on this issue is to Richard L. Miller's 1986 Under the Cloud: the Decades of Nuclear Testing, a book which does not evaluate the health impacts of fallout scientifically. Indeed, in 1988 Technology and Culture published a scathing review of the book by Barton C. Hacker dismissed the book as merely the latest addition to the lengthy list of anti-nuclear screeds (including Harvey Wasserman's Killing Our Own) which "vary considerably in quality, but all are one-sided" and "selective in their use of evidence." In particular, Hacker noted that "nowhere, in any event, does Miller show that detectable fallout equals hazardous fallout. There may be a case for that view, but it needs better evidence than hazy memories, self-interested statements, or innuendo." This book hardly seems to be a stable foundation upon which to build a historical argument.

On the fire issue, Masco calls on Lynn Eden's Whole World on Fire, which is certainly not a bad book (albeit very partisan to the Harold Brode school of predicting fire effects from nuclear explosions). Unfortunately, I do not believe that Eden's book supports Masco's claim that the FCDA was willfully ignoring fire effects of nuclear explosions. The entire point of Eden's argument was that the AEC, SAC, and the other pillars of the American nuclear establishment all downplayed or ignored fire effects in their nuclear war planning. Seeing as the FCDA played second fiddle to these organizations, it's no surprise that they followed the contemporary fashion. It is also worth pointing out that the nuclear explosion in the film did not incinerate the model buildings prepared by the FCDA. This was due to inadequate fuel loading, and as a result of this and similar tests civil defense planners concluded that so long as fuel loading was kept sufficiently low, firestorms could not develop. Brode regarded this as a serious error, but it is worth pointing out that his was a minority view. In any case, I do not believe that the FCDA was being willfully mendacious on the fire issue, even if they were arguably very wrong about it in hindsight.

On top of this, "Operation Cue" is not a good example of the FCDA's elaborate fear management theories. This is partially because Behavioralism was on the wane by 1955, but it is also because the film is about nuclear weapons effects rather than people. Although subtle, the message of the film is really that then-current investment in civil defense infrastructure was inadequate. Keep in mind that hardly anyone built the home blast shelters featured in the film, and plans for public blast shelters were canceled by the Eisenhower Administration. Therefore, the average viewer in 1955 was likely to have thought, "what if that was my house? I don't have a shelter...I'd be killed!" This is very different from "I must accept nuclear war as a normative threat, and prepare for it every day of my life." The FCDA's hope was that this would translate into clamor for increased civil defense spending, but between the problems posed by the H-bomb and the highly disturbing overtones of civil defense in general, these efforts were in vain.

Besides this, the author gets even the simplest facts wrong, such as describing Val Peterson as the "inaugural head of the Federal Civil Defense Agency." Firstly, it was the Federal Civil Defense Administration; and secondly, Val Peterson was the second head of the FCDA. The actual inaugural head of the FCDA was Millard Caldwell, a segregationist southern Democrat whose racism and general incompetence caused massive problems for the FCDA's initial civil defense efforts in 1951-2. So on the whole, I must say that I am not altogether impressed by this article.

Hansen on Nuclear Redux

2008-08-05T19:53:00.000-07:00

In the past I have blogged several times about James Hansen's not-entirely-clear attitudes towards nuclear power as a climate change solution. Interestingly, Hansen's recent "trip report" contains a section on the subject, which I will highlight here:

Nuclear Power
On one of my trips I read a draft of “Prescription for the Planet” by Tom Blees, which I highly recommend. Let me note two of its topics that are especially relevant to global warming. Blees makes a powerful case for 4th generation nuclear power, the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). IFR reactors (a.k.a. fast or breeder reactors) eliminate moderating materials used in thermal reactors, allowing the neutrons to move faster. More energetic splitting of nuclei releases more neutrons. Instead of using up less than 1% of the fissionable material in the ore, a fast reactor burns practically all of the uranium.

...
Wait a minute! If it’s that good, why aren’t we doing it? Well, according to Blees, it’s because, in 1994, just when we were ready to build a demonstration plant, the Clinton Administration cancelled the IFR program. Blees offers a partial explanation, noting that Clinton had used the phrase “You’re pro-nuclear!” to demonize rivals during his campaign, suggesting that Clinton had a debt to the anti-nuclear people. Hmm. The matter warrants further investigation and discussion. It’s not as if we didn’t know about global warming in 1994. Even more curious is the assertion that Argonne scientists, distraught about the cancellation, were told they could not talk about it (why do I find this easy to believe?). Here too there is no explanation in depth, although Blees notes that the Secretary of Energy, Hazel O.Leary, was previously a lobbyist for fossil fuel companies (my gosh, is everybody in Washington an ex-lobbyist – alligators will go extinct!).
I have always been agnostic on nuclear power. I like to hope that, if our next President gives high priority to a low-loss national electric grid, renewables will be able to take over most of the power generation load. Wind and solar-thermal are poised to become big players. IEA’s estimate that renewables will only grow from 1% to 2% (by 2030!) can be dismissed due to IEA’s incestuous relation with fossil industries – nevertheless, one must have healthy skepticism about whether renewables can take over completely. Maybe an understatement – I’m not certain.

Blees argues that it made no sense to terminate research and development of 4th generation nuclear power. Was it thought that nuclear technology would be eliminated from Earth, and thus the world would become a safer place?? Not very plausible – as Blees points out, several other countries are building or making plans to build fast reactors. By opting out of the technology, the U.S. loses the ability to influence IFR standards and controls, with no realistic hope of getting the rest of the world to eschew breeder reactors. Blees suggests, probably rightly, that this was a political calculation for domestic purposes, a case of dangerous self-deception.

Bottom line: I can’t seem to agree fully with either the anti-nukes or Blees. Some of the anti-nukes are friends, concerned about climate change, and clearly good people. Yet I suspect that their ‘success’ (in blocking nuclear R&D) is actually making things more dangerous for all of us and for the planet. It seems that, instead of knee-jerk reaction against anything nuclear, we need hard-headed evaluation of how to get rid of long-lived nuclear waste and minimize dangers of proliferation and nuclear accidents. Fourth generation nuclear power seems to have the potential to solve the waste problem and minimize the others. In any case, we should not have bailed out of research on fast reactors.

I don’t agree with Blees’ dismissal of the conclusion of most energy experts that there is no ‘silver bullet’; they argue that we need a mix of technologies. Blees sees a ‘depleted uranium bullet’ that could easily provide all of our needs for electrical energy for hundreds of years. His argument is fine for pointing out that existing nuclear material contains an enormous amount of energy (if we extract it all, rather than leaving >99% in a very long-lived waste heap), but I still think that we need a range of energy sources. Renewable energies and nuclear power are
compatible: they both need, or benefit from, a low-loss grid, as it is more acceptable to site nuclear plants away from population centers, and nuclear energy provides base-load power, complementing intermittent renewables.

This is simultaneously encouraging and disappointing. On the bright side, it's great to see Hansen pointing out that anti-nuclear activists haven't been doing the climate any great favors. But the particular endorsement of the IFR I'm not so excited about. I'm not a great fan of liquid-sodium cooled reactors like the IFR; I think that various kinds of molten-salt reactors offer more attractive options for Gen IV reactor research. Hansen doesn't seem to be aware of the rather significant difference between the IFR and the fast reactor projects under construction abroad, such as the BN-800.

Commenters on Climate Progress pointed out Hansen's comments on nuclear power, resulting in this response from Joe Romm:
JR: you guys must be joking right? We have thrown some $100 billion in subsidies at the nuclear industry since 1948, we have forced taxpayers to take the economic burden of any nuclear catastrophe, We have streamlined the permanent process, states Re: even allowing nuclear utilities to raise people’s utility bills years before a single electron flows to pay for new budget busting nukes, we’ve had nuclear-loving conservatives running this country for most of the last seven years, and notwithstanding the efforts of most conservatives, we’re probably going to have a price on carbon dioxide within a few years. And all those for an extremely mature technology that is 20% of the electricity market. If we did those things up for efficiency, wind, solar PV, and solar baseload nobody would even think of building another nuclear plant. Your product is too damn expensive to convince even Warren Buffet it is worth the risk.

I won't take the time to respond to these allegations in particular (Charles Barton and others have already done this elsewhere), but rather stick to my own area of expertise in relation to another area in which it seems Hansen's and Romm's views have diverged. Not too long ago Romm wrote a post for Next Generation Energy titled "Forget energy diversity, we need energy action," which contained the following series of gems:

Indeed, the country that may be the biggest obstacle to the clean energy transition is likely to be Russia.

Russia does not have a good solar resource. But they do have a lot of coal and oil-- and they very much want to stake a claim to the rich oil resources in the Arctic. Moreover, they may (mistakenly) think global warming is good for them. Since it will create a navigable Arctic and open up "currently inaccessible energy resources" no less an authority than The Economist has written, "warming is likely to make Russia richer rather than poorer." Sad -- but quite untrue.

Perhaps the most important climatic tipping point is in Russia -- the Siberian tundra. If that defrosts, then avoiding the equivalent of 1000 ppm atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will be all but impossible. After all the tundra contains more carbon than the atmosphere does, and much of it would likely be released as methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Indeed, we have some evidence that may have already started.

Russia does have a staggering amount of wind potential, but it tends to be in the sparsely populated areas. Russia will need to be convinced that some combination of nuclear, wind, and natural gas can provide all the power it needs -- but the even harder task will be convincing them not to use all that oil and coal they have.

As a professional Russia specialist, I was a little mystified by this post. I know that up-to-date information about Russian energy policy is a little hard to find in English, but the fact that coal makes up only a minor proportion of Russia's generation mix isn't exactly a big secret--as Dr. Hansen rightly pointed out in his trip report:

Figure 3 also shows that coal use in Russia is modest and not increasing. Thus the common assertion that Russia is a wild card that would prevent successful control of global warming is diminished by realization that the primary requirement is phase-out of coal emissions.

Never mind as well that the Russians are building new nuclear plants as fast as they can, and that their per-capita CO2 emissions are not particularly high by world standards. Indeed, far from being the intractable obstacle to global warming action, Russia has a much more credible policy for developing a post-carbon economy than most. Compared with nations that claim to be building a post-carbon future while building new coal plants, I think that Russia is making a more than respectable showing for itself. At the same time, it must be emphasized that Russia intends to export its oil and gas until it runs out. But I have a hard time ascribing the belief that Russia poses an insurmountable obstacle to climate change mitigation to anything other than ignorance and Russophobia on the part of Joe Romm (and others). It simply lacks any basis in fact.

Office of Technology Assessment on Nuclear Power

2008-08-05T18:37:00.000-07:00

From the Office of Technology Assessment's Nuclear Power in an Age of Uncertainty, February 1984:

Without significant changes in the technology, management, and level of public acceptance, nuclear power in the United States is unlikely to be expanded in this century beyond the reactors already under construction. Currently nuclear powerplants present too many financial risks as a result of uncertainties in electric demand growth, very high capital costs, operating problems, increasing regulatory requirements, and growing public opposition.

If all these risks were inherent to nuclear power, there would be little concern over its demise. However, enough utilities have built nuclear reactors within acceptable cost limits, and operated them safely and reliably to demonstrate that the difficulties with this technology are not insurmountable. Furthermore, there are national policy reasons why it could be highly desirable to have a nuclear option in the future if present problems can be overcome. Demand for electricity could grow to a level that would mandate the construction of many new powerplants. Uncertainties over the long-term environmental acceptability of coal and the adequacy of economical alternative energy sources are also great and underscore the potential importance of nuclear power.

A significant passage:

The use of coal can and will be expanded considerably. All the plausible growth projections considered in this study could be met entirely by coal. Such a dependence, however, would leave the Nation’s electric system vulnerable to price increases and disruptions of supply. Furthermore, coal carries significant liabilities. The continued combustion of fossil fuels, especially coal, has the potential to release enough carbon dioxide to cause serious climatic changes. We do not know enough about this problem yet to say when it could happen or how severe it might be, but the possibility exists that even in the early 21st century it may become essential to reduce sharply the use of fossil fuels, especially coal.

On the whole, a very interesting historical document. It will take me awhile to fully digest it in light of the events of the past 24 years.

ORNL=KKK?

2008-08-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

As a rule, I'm generally quite wary of the generalization that environmentalists are misanthropes. On the whole, I think, they are well-meaning people who want the best for humanity; it's just that I believe that the policies they advocate would result in a disastrous reduction in the quality of life enjoyed by most people, especially with regards to energy. But the recent hoopla over Joe Romm's post about low-level radiation has seemingly drawn some people like this out of the woodwork.

Take this comment from "Wolverine" (a regular commenter on Gristmill posts related to nuclear power):

Local solar and wind power can supply all the energy that's needed. Keep in mind that electricity is not a necessity, but is a luxury that some humans have had for so long that they can't imagine living without it.

Electricity is a "luxury" only in the sense that clean food and water are "luxuries"--especially given that electricity is instrumental in powering the infrastructure that provides us with these necessities. Many people, particularly in the poorer parts of the world, must do without all of these things. The association between electrification and better health outcomes is well-established. I want to live in a world where all people can enjoy the benefits that electricity brings--and outside of the realm of wishful thinking, advanced nuclear fuel cycles appear to be the only available option for making this vision a reality.

'Wolverine" also had this to say about my (and Charles Barton's) hometown of Oak Ridge:

Joseph,
Good post until you got to the nukes v. coal issue. While I assume you oppose both coal and nuclear power, Oak Ridge is not a credible source for this information, as it is heavily invested in nukes, though probably more as weapons than as energy. Just as you would not use a "study" by the KKK to determine whether racism was worse in the U.S. or Africa, it's equally illegitimate to use the study you cited for the purpose you did.

"Wolverine" apparently assumes that we Oak Ridgers are just Klansmen with radiation suits instead of sheets. I cannot help but be rather put of by the implications. After all, so many of my neighbors, friends, and relatives are being tarred by a very wide brush here. Especially given the lofty and humanitarian goals that ORNL researchers have put themselves to over the decades, and in many cases even achieved. Many of them were (and are) not just good, but great scientists. The work of ORNL researchers stands on its own merits--science does not operate on a principle of "appeals to authority." But I suppose that humane goals pursued by ORNL over the years like curing cancer and electrifying rural Africa are probably rather alien to the sort of person who would say something like this:

I think our differences on this issue come down to priorities, and mine is protection and restoration of the natural world. Humans began their massive ecological destruction 10-12,000 years ago when they discovered agriculture, which lead directly to gross overpopulation. Because it took millennia to create the ecological problems we now face, it will also take a very long time to fix them. But if we don't have fixing these problems as our goals and instead prioritize how we can supply massive amounts of electricity to grossly overpopulated masses of people, these problems will never be solved.

If humanity is the problem, I don't want to be part of the solution. I am certain that most self-identified environmentalists would disagree with this outrageous statement. After all, I've known many of them over the years and, however much we may have disagreed over specific issues, I've never met one with the callous disregard for their fellow human beings expressed here.

Putin's Nuclear Plan

2008-07-30T20:52:00.000-07:00

I just returned from Moscow, and the day before my departure I had the opportunity to see the Russian news reportage about Putin's grandiose schemes for the Russian nuclear industry. Over the next seven years, the Russian government plans to invest about one trillion rubles in new nuclear power projects. After this point, Putin expects that the industry will be able to secure regular financing for itself. With twenty-six new nuclear reactors by 2020, Putin hopes to double the size of Russia's nuclear fleet.

What really made my ears perk up, however, was when I heard this:

- Но следует переходить к новейшим технологиям: внедрять замкнутый топливный цикл, создавать коммерческий реактор на быстрых нейтронах. На решение этой задачи должна быть направлена целевая программа "Ядерные энерготехнологии нового поколения". Следует завершить ее подготовку уже к ноябрю текущего года", - сказал Путин. Наиболее эффективно АЭС работают в режиме полной загрузки, "поэтому единая энергосистема страны должна быть готова принять новые мощности". В этой связи Путин подчеркнул необходимость опережающего развития сетевой инфраструктуры. Он напомнил, что по некоторым объектам атомной отрасли решения не были приняты, "так как сетевая инфраструктура не была готова". "Прошу учесть этот аспект в генеральной схеме размещения объектов электроэнергетики", - сказал он.

But it is necessary to migrate to new technologies: to introduce a closed fuel cycle, to construct a commercial fast reactor. To achieve these aims there an entire program, "Next Generation Nuclear Energy Technology," should be introduced. Its preparation should be completed by November of this year," said Putin. The most effective nuclear plants operate at full load, "therefore the entire national energy system should be ready to receive the new capacity." To this end Putin underscored the necessity of the aggressive development of grid infrastructure. He reminded [listeners] that at some nuclear sites solutions were not reached, "and therefore grid infrastructure was not ready." "I request the study of this issue in the general scheme of siting power stations," he said.

I believe that the fast reactor part is probably a reference to the ongoing work on the BN-800, although it may be referring to even more ambitious fast-reactor projects, such as the BN-1600. It will be very interesting to see what the Russian plan for advanced nuclear technology includes when it comes out in November.

Better Than Baseline

2008-07-06T06:47:00.000-07:00

I apologize for my lack of posts lately. This is because I'm currently in Moscow scoping out archival sources for my dissertation, and I've had some difficulties with my housing situation. The Russians I'm currently staying with informed me only a few hours before my flight to Moscow that I could only stay with them for one week, as their landlord apparently balked about their scheme to sublet a room. As a result, I've had to find a new place to live, so I'm moving to an apartment over at Park Pobedy on Tuesday. I'm happy to be staying there, as it's an elite housing development from the Brezhnev years a few hundred meters from the WWII memorial. The bad news is that I am probably going to lose internet access when I move, so I probably won't have another post until August.

Lately I've been pondering the debate surrounding potential policy solutions for global climate change. One of the things that I believe that nuclear advocates should emphasize is that our solution has the potential to be an enormous improvement of "business as usual." I'm honestly not sure what to make of the economic analyses that have been made of reducing carbon emissions. So many of the technical questions remain unanswered that it seems hard to know what sort of numbers are being used to reach these conclusions. And never mind the debates over issues like discount rates that plagued the Stern Review a few years ago. I believe that simple logic can provide a good basis for the nuclear case.

The problem with assuming a "business as usual" scenario is that it's pretty clear that our current economy, with its dependence on oil and natural gas, will not survive this century. Even assuming that sizable new resources are discovered, it is totally implausible that these will be adequate to meet soaring demand from the developing world. So clearly, there will be some sort of transition away from these fuels. Coal is another matter. We can continue burning coal for the forseeable future, but without vast technological intervention this is unacceptable in the current situation. It appears (to me, at least) that the chances of coal with CCS becoming competitive with even current nuclear plants is quite slim.

The preferred solution of much of the population is the idea of a renewable energy economy. This idea comes in several variants, of course. One popular vision is ultracentralized, as seen in the ideas for giant solar farms in the Southwestern US and the Sahara. The opposite vision is decentralized, to the point of people producing their own energy via rooftop solar panels, small windmills, and the like. Neither one of these is a good idea, in large part due to the vagaries of the weather. Indeed, the renewable energy economy is by its very nature crippled by serious problems. It might be best to describe its probablt result as "energy fuedalism."

Renewable energy technologies operate by extracting energy from the ambient environment. As such, renewable energy production is much like farming. And just as with corn or turnips, solar and wind farms can have a bad year. For instance, large volcanic eruptions can reduce solar flux, and large storms could damage offshore wind capacity, reducing generation considerably. So long as these technologies provide a negligable amount of our overall energy supply, these things don't matter. But if our economy lived off of them in a hand-to-mouth fashion, the results would be disastrous. Inclement weather events could cause large sectors of the economy to grind to a halt at a moment's notice. We would live in a world of fear and uncertainty, knowing that we could be mere hours or days away from a serious energy shortfall. Just as our medieval ancestors, we would be powerless in the face of nature, and would be forced to accept whatever bounty (or lack thereof) nature saw fit to grant us.

Renewable energy really becomes "feudal," however, in its "decentralized" variant. In this dystopian world, people would produce their own energy. What this would probably mean in practice is that only the rich could afford to acquire reliable energy supplies. It's fairly obvious that most places where people live are suboptimal for renewable energy generation, and on top of this many people don't own land to site such devices even if they could afford them. On top of this, it's unlikely that such a system would possess enough storage and excess capacity to be reliable under unfavorable weather conditions. As such, I'm shocked that so many people are enamored by this terrible idea. It's inequitable, and the uncertainty it created would curtail and probably cripple economic growth. Instead of creating a world of peace, equality, and prosperity, it portends a dystopia where energy will be monopolized by a neofuedal ruling class and the poor will have to go without.

Advanced nuclear fuel cycles, meanwhile, offer the possibility of a future markedly improved from the present. One of the great advantages of nuclear fuel is its incredible energy density. Because of this, nations could conceivably stockpile decades or even centuries worth of fuel. Air-cooled PBMRs and MSRs could be sited almost anywhere, allowing the electrification of remote communities that could never be adequately served either by fossil or renewable plants. Energy supply would be independent of the vagaries of the weather, and would indeed be considerably more reliable than they are now. Imagine the possibilities: a world where wars over energy resources are an unhappy memory. Where energy prices are stable because fuel is acquired decades in advance. Where electricification has improved the health and well-being of the world's remotest and poorest communities. Where the lack of uncertainty in all these things has fueled robust economic growth for all the world's people. And all without the deleterious environmental, social, economic, and political costs of the alternatives. Indeed, we can have all these things and beat global warming too. But to do so we have to start now. If we waste twenty years pursuing fantasies, we could very well lose everything.

There are, of course, a number of issues that will need to be resolved to make the nuclear future happen. Among other things, we need a practical agreement regarding the internationalization of nuclear energy. I believe that the universal and equitable inspection of all the world's nuclear facilities by the IAEA of some similar organization is called for. Every nation needs a chance to benefit from nuclear energy so long as they follow a reasonable set of rules. Given an appropriate agreement between the US and Russia, most of the world's nuclear weapons and weapons materials can be converted into fuel salt for starting MSRs or solid fuel assemblies. But the solutions seem simple enough, especially given the enormous possibilities.

The Misadventures of Amory Lovins, Fossil Fuel Apologist

2008-06-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

I've been following RMI's response to David Bradish over at Gristmill with interest, and I must say that so far I'm not exactly blown away. But the fact that I'm unimpressed isn't at all surprising; what is surprising is that it seems that regular Gristmill commenters are nonplussed as well. But I think this is to be expected, given that Lovins' defense of his anti-nuclear critique makes it abundantly clear that he's an apologist for continued fossil fuel use.

However much we pro-nuclear types may disagree with the people over at Grist, they know as well as anyone the many reasons why continued fossil fuel use is unacceptable given the realities of global climate change. On top of this, RMI's explanation of why Bradish's critique is "wrong" makes it abundantly clear that he was absolutely correct in his charges of cherry-picking data and using highly arbitrary definitions for concepts like "micropower." Most importantly, Lovins is explicitly defending onsite diesel and gas generators as an alternative to new nuclear plants--a position that any "environmentalist" worthy of the name should be highly skeptical of.

Take, for instance, Lovins' defense of "micropower." RMI claims that Bradish simply misread their "simple" definition, which they give as:

1. onsite generation of electricity (at the customer, not at a remote utility plant) -- usually cogeneration of electricity plus recovered waste heat (outside the U.S. this is usually called CHP -- combined-heat-and-power): this is about half gas-fired, and saves at least half the carbon and much of the cost of the separate power plants and boilers it displaces; [and] 2. distributed renewables -- all renewable power sources except big hydro plants, which are defined here as dams larger than 10 megawatts (MW).

I still don't see why these things deserve to be grouped together at all, other than that Lovins has been doing this since the mid-1970s. Although he digs at Bradish that " we chose and defined our terms carefully, presented data consistent with our definitions, and cannot be responsible for Mr. Bradish's pretense that we meant something different and should have said so. He's welcome to compile his own data using his own idiosyncratic definitions, but he shouldn't blame us for not adopting them," RMI's definition is so idiosyncratic by nature that it's hard to really regard it as "careful." He admits that wind doesn't really possess most of the "advantages" of micropower, but he doesn't explain why huge solar thermal plants in California deserve the "micropower" appellation but an 11MW hydroelectric system doesn't, or why diesel-fired anything deserves to be regarded as "green." Never mind as well that the Soviets operated nuclear-fired systems for decades that meet the above definition. Indeed, there's no reason that small nuclear systems can't be built that would be far more environmentally sound than the fossil-fuel alternatives championed by Lovins.

Yesterday's post mentioned Lovins' rebuttal of the claim that Jevons' Paradox seriously compromises his theories regarding energy efficiency. As he puts it:

Mr. Bradish has posted part three of his critique, claiming that RMI has overlooked Jevons Paradox, which undoes and reverses the intended energy savings from more efficient end-use. We have rebutted this invalid claim in a response to Mr. Bradish's cited primary source -- an article by Robert Bryce in his newsletter. Completion of our response was delayed by travel, but we expect to finish it shortly, and will then post it on RMI's website, in this blog, and (Mr. Bryce has assured us) on his site.
Meanwhile, readers should know that the claimed "rebound" effect -- phenomena that make net energy savings smaller than gross savings -- is real but generally very small, and has no material effect on our conclusions. This is firmly established in the empirical literature, and is well-known to knowledgeable energy economists but evidently not to Mr. Bryce, Mr. Bradish, or the theory's current standard-bearers, Dr. Peter Huber and Mr. Mark Mills. A brief introduction to some basic concepts is on Wikipedia.

It'll be interesting to see this, because Lovins isn't on very firm ground on this point. RMI's earlier attempts to rebut Bryce were unimpressive, to put it mildly. Indeed, the "Rebound Effect" is not something that can be debunked in the sense that Lovins is implying, as it derives directly from the basic economic principles accepted by free-market economists. In order for the "rebound effect" to be a myth, neoclassical economics must be fundamentally wrong.

The basic principle on which orthodox economic theory rests is the idea of utility. It is no coincidence that Jevons was an important figure in the development of the concept of marginal utility. Neoclassical economics, also known as the "marginalist" school, explains economic decision-making in terms of marginal utility. Utility is defined as "a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of consumption of goods." Early concepts of utility, such as that of Jeremy Bentham, regarded utility as a concrete, quantifiable thing, but later economists moved away from this idea. Economists argue that people consume goods to the extent that gives them the most satisfaction for their expenditure.

What implication does this have for Lovins' efficiency theories? Far from having "no material effect," Lovins' arguments dating back to The Soft Energy Path are incompatible with neoclassical economics. Increased energy efficiency increases the marginal utility of consuming a particular amount of energy. If consumers are rational maximizers, the ability to produce a greater amount of satisfaction from consuming energy will, all other things remaining equal, increase energy use.

It is true that in recent first-world experience, the short-term rebound has not been 100%, or close to it. There is a simple explanation for this: in developed economies, major efficiency improvements have been driven by scarcity. In many classic instances, increased scarcity far outweighed increased efficiency. Because the cost of energy has not remained the same and also because demand for the things produced using energy is also somewhat inelastic, efficiency improvements haven't generally resulted in a large rebound. RMI seems intent on insinuating that this demonstrates that Jevons was wrong, but it really does nothing of the sort. The simple fact that global energy consumption continues to increase as the marginal benefits of consuming energy has increased with the proliferation of more efficient technology is a powerful confirmation of Jevons' Paradox.

I find it ironic that Lovins' linked to the Wikipedia article about the paradox, given that it explains why Lovins is wrong in two sentences:

At the microeconomic level (looking at an individual market), even with the rebound effect, improvements in energy efficiency usually result in reduced energy consumption. That is, the rebound effect is usually less than 100%. However, at the macroeconomic level, more efficient (and hence comparatively cheaper) energy use leads to faster economic growth, that in turn increases energy use throughout the economy. Taking into account both the microeconomic and the macroeconomic effects, technological progress that improves energy efficiency will tend to increase overall energy use.

That sounds about right. Lovins' riposte is a pretty weak given the withering critique Bryce gave Lovins in Energy Tribune last year. But I still think that RMI's big problem is that their argument is that we shouldn't go nuclear and that we should use fossil fuels more efficiently instead. These days, people like James Hansen are arguing that we really shouldn't be burning fossil fuels at all. It's hard to make a convincing argument for a fossil-fuel future, even one vastly improved on the present. We need a zero-carbon economy, and realistically that means fission. As such, "negawatts" and "micropower" are just obfuscation that only serve to cloud the energy debate.

Is That The Way I Look?

2008-06-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

Herbert Block Political Cartoon, September 26, 1954.

Что такое АТЭЦ?

2008-06-09T17:53:00.000-07:00

With the recent release of RMI's new piece criticizing nuclear power, there has been an upsurge in the discussion of waste heat from nuclear plants. It's important to keep in mind that there is no reason why nuclear plants can't do all the things that Lovins' beloved natural gas cogeneration plants can. In fact, in Russia they already do--and have been doing so for more than thirty years.

Although it is likely to surprise readers who associate cogeneration with Lovins' criticisms of "centralized planning," the Soviets were actually huge fans of cogeneration. This might be taken as evidence that cogeneration isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be, as anyone who has lived in St. Petersburg in the summer when the municipal hot water is turned off can tell you. I imagine it's a lot less fun when the system fails during the winter, which I've heard about but have been mercifully spared in my own experience. Because of these problems it's increasingly common for Russians to install water heaters in their apartments.

Whatever the shortcomings of the centralized water and space heating systems found in Soviet cities, they combined with the Soviet penchant for nuclear technology to inspire the creation of the Атомная теплоэлектроцентраль (АТЭЦ)--a nuclear plant designed to produce both heat and electricity. Officially, this term was reserved for a special variant of the VVER-1000 that was under construction in Odessa and Kharkov in the 1980s. These plants were canceled following Chernobyl. However, the principle of nuclear cogeneration was demonstrated before this at the Bilibinskaia AES in northeastern Siberia.

The Bilibino Nuclear Cogeneration Plant, Siberia

The Bilibinskaia plant is one of the more unusual in Rosenergoatom's fleet. Whereas most Russian nuclear plants are either VVER LWRs or RBMKs, Bilibino's consists of four comparatively tiny EGP-6 graphite-moderated boiling-water reactors with a total electrical output of only 48 MW total. The plant began construction in the mid-1960s and the first reactor went into service in 1974. It provides both heat and power to the city of Bilibino, which is a small gold-mining town of only 5700 people. In part as a result of this low demand, the plant operates at a low capacity factor--well under 40% in recent years.

So here's what I'm wondering: why isn't the Bilibino nuclear plant "micropower?" It's much smaller than some of the fossil-fuel fired cogeneration plants that RMI includes in its statistics for "micropower," and it certainly has a better claim for climate-friendliness. In Forget Nuclear, RMI defined "micropower" as follows:

1. onsite generation of electricity (at the customer, not at a remote utility plant)—usually cogeneration of electricity plus recovered waste heat (outside the U.S. this is usually called CHP—combined-heat-and-power): this is about half gas-fired, and saves at least half the carbon and much of the cost of the separate power plants and boilers it displaces;
2. distributed renewables—all renewable power sources except big hydro plants, which are defined here as dams larger than 10 megawatts (MW).

It's pretty clear that most of the combined heat and power (CHP) plants in RMI's statistics are larger than Bilibino and no less removed from the consumer. But somehow I doubt that Bilibino has ever been included in RMI's tally of "micropower," or that Soviet plutonium-production reactors that also served a similar role in their cities of residence were included. I wonder why?

How's This For A Premise?

2008-06-04T14:54:00.000-07:00

1999: A World of Difference

On August 12, 1992, England's tiny nuclear arsenal fell on Ireland, South Africa, and finally on China. Instantly the planet went up in flames. In the first half of what was to be called the War of '92, half the Eath's population perished.

The United States was reduced to a vast underpeopled land--and, to make matters worse, Texas had seceded and taken her precious oil reserves.

But Israel, virtually untouched in a world ravaged by war, was painfully overpopulated. So Sol Ingelstein and Myra Kalen had come to America looking for a place to settle. As mercenaries on the side of the union in its war with Texas, the Israelis had been promised land in exchange for their services.

Leading their bedraggled troops into the heartland of Texas, Sol and Myra head up operation King. Mission: Resuce the President of the United States!

From The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 by Jake Saunders and Howard Waldrop (Del Rey, 1974). And yes, it's about as bad as it sounds.

Why Gas Is Not Our Future

2008-06-04T12:59:00.000-07:00

From Lovins' recent Newsweek piece:

Variable but forecastable renewables (wind and solar cells) are very reliable when integrated with each other, existing supplies and demand. For example, three German states were more than 30 percent wind-powered in 2007—and more than 100 percent in some months.

I'm not sure what parallel universe Lovins inhabits, but he can't seriously believe that because Schleswig-Holstein generates more electricity from wind than it uses in certain calendar months that it is "more than 100% wind-powered"... can he?

Micropower delivers a sixth of total global electricity, a third of all new electricity and from a sixth to more than half of all electricity in 12 industrial countries (in the United States it's only 6 percent). In 2006, the global net capacity added by nuclear power was only 83 percent of that added by solar cells, 10 percent that of wind power and 3 percent that of micropower. China's distributed renewables grew to seven times its nuclear capacity and grew seven times faster. In 2007, the United States, China and Spain each added more wind capacity than the world added nuclear capacity. Wind power added 30 percent of new U.S. and 40 percent of EU capacity, because it's two to three times cheaper than new nuclear power. Which part of this doesn't Moore understand?

This particular set of numbers is pretty illustrative of how mendacious Lovins' presentation is, and how in practice he's essentially shilling for the natural gas industry. Note that the very limited additions in nuclear capacity coming online in 2006 were 83% of new installed solar capacity and 10% of new wind power. At realistic capacity factors, the new nuclear capacity could be expected to generate about 3x the new solar capacity and about 1/3 that of the new wind capacity. However, "micropower" generally added more than 30x the capacity than nuclear in 2006. This reveals that "micropower" is really a code-word for fossil fuels, and in practice that means natural gas. Lovins' numbers reveal that the vast majority of "micropower" is really natural-gas fired cogeneration. However attractive this technology may appear at present, it is not viable as a long-term energy strategy. A brief review of Russian energy policies reveals why.

Although the Soviet Union's fleet of nuclear power plants is pretty notorious in the west, nuclear power provides a smaller fraction of Russia's electrical generation than it does in the United States. Instead, Russian cities are actually dependent upon natural gas for a very large proportion of their electrical generation and heating. There are a variety of reasons for this, the main ones being geographic. Russian coal reserves are mediocre, and they tend to be located far from urban centers. Because gas is easily transportable and the Soviet Union possessed it in abundance, this was a logical choice for domestic energy needs. Similar considerations, however, fed into the Soviets' enthusiasm for nuclear power. Nuclear plants could be sited in energy-poor regions of the European USSR, such as Ukraine. This freed up oil and gas for sale to western nations in exchange for desperately needed hard currency.

Today, Russia's gas reserves have become a source of wealth and power. This produces a significant incentive to restrain domestic consumption to maximize the profitability of state-owned Gazprom. I am convinced that this is one of the primary reasons that Russia is building new nuclear plants. There is another reason, however: the Russians understand that their days as a net gas exporter are numbered. This isn't likely within the immediate future, but sixty years from now Russian gas reserves will probably be largely depleted. It is clear that by this time the Russian government plans to create some kind of plutonium economy, and that they hope to dominate the fission-powered future as much as they do the fossil-fuel present.

This should give serious pause to anyone considering major increases on natural gas as an energy source. It is not likely that sustainable biofuels will be available in the quantities needed to supplant natural gas for the range of applications it is currently used. If we take the path that Lovins has prescribed for us, and make our economy and our way of live much more dependent on this resource than they currently are, what will happen when it runs out? Obviously, nothing good. Indeed, it would rapidly become untenable as gas becomes scarcer and more expensive. Even with aggressive efficiency measures, by the late 21st century this path would have played itself out. The fact that the nation with the world's largest natural gas reserves doesn't think that natural gas has a very bright future is a sign that we should be divesting from dependence on it.

Never mind as well that natural gas is a fossil fuel. If James Hansen is right and we need to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels to 350ppm to avoid catastrophic climate change, burning fossil fuels is simply unacceptable as a climate strategy, no matter how efficiently they are used. This also puts the kibbosh on "negawatts" generally, because using coal-fired electrical generation just isn't going to cut it. Even if Jevons' Paradox doesn't eat all the gains (a likely scenario, given past experience), we really need to supplant all fossil-fuel fired generation as quickly as possible.

Lovins concludes that:

The punch line: nuclear expansion buys two to 10 times less climate protection per dollar, far slower than its winning competitors. Spending a dollar on new nuclear power rather than on negawatts thus has a worse climate effect than spending that dollar on new coal power. Attention, Dr. Moore: you're making climate change worse.

Lovins simply does not get it. In the long run, negawatts do not really offer credible climate protection, whereas a new nuclear plant does. Neither does "micropower," a mendacious concept that has only served to distort the energy debate. In the present circumstances, the only thing that matters is developing a non-carbon energy infrastructure. In the long run, any apologist for fossil fuel dependence--even magical, ultra-efficient fossil fuel dependence--is making climate change worse. And it would appear that Amory Lovins is such an apologist.

Can We Send Our Nuclear Waste to Siberia?

2008-05-28T08:58:00.000-07:00

John McCain's speech yesterday has been making the rounds on the blogosphere. It's received a Bronx cheer from some observers (see Kate Sheppard in Grist here) but on the whole I feel better about it. McCain's stated commitment to multilateral arms control agreement and, particularly, the need for close cooperation with Russia, are both good developments.

Readers familiar with McCain's earlier rhetoric about Russia may find this surprising. He did, after all, say awhile ago that Russia should be kicked out of the G8. This is inconsistent, and my hope is that it signals some moderation in McCain's stance on Russia. One would certainly expect so, given that one of the things McCain is proposing is a repository in Siberia for foreign spent nuclear fuel. As he stated in his speech:

I would seek to establish an international repository for spent nuclear fuel that could collect and safely store materials overseas that might otherwise be reprocessed to acquire bomb-grade materials. It is even possible that such an international center could make it unnecessary to open the proposed spent nuclear fuel storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The location of this facility was only clarified by one of his advisors:

Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy and national security advisor to the McCain campaign, said later that the repository could be in Siberia and that if there were sufficient security guarantees, McCain had a "willingness to entertain possibility ... that we could possibly send some of our spent fuel there."

However convenient this might be for American politicians, it is not something that the Russians are likely to agree to. The enthusiasm of the Russian government for providing spent nuclear fuel storage has waned in recent years as their economy has boomed. The concept is unpopular with the Russian public, who are tolerant of the idea of offering reprocessing services but not of becoming "the world's nuclear waste dum p." At the same time, international cooperation on monitoring the nuclear fuel cycle is important, so any step towards working closer with the Russians could be interpreted as a good thing.

In any case, the real proliferation danger is associated with the front end of the fuel cycle. McCain's solution to this is reminiscent of internationalization schemes from Atoms for Peace to GNEP:

The most effective way to prevent this deception is to limit the further spread of enrichment and reprocessing. To persuade countries to forego enrichment and reprocessing, I would support international guarantees of nuclear fuel supply to countries that renounce enrichment and reprocessing, as well as the establishment of multinational nuclear enrichment centers in which they can participate. Nations that seek nuclear fuel for legitimate civilian purposes will be able to acquire what they need under international supervision. This is one suggestion Russia and others have made to Iran.

It is interesting that McCain seems to be implicitly endorsing Russia's scheme for Bushehr: allowing the Iranians to possess the VVER-1000 reactor but making them dependent on foreign (i.e., Russian) fuel suppliers. This is in marked contrast to many Congressional critics of Russia's nuclear export policies, who are threatening to block the 123 agreement over Bushehr.

While a fair amount of what McCain proposed in the speech is no more than a pipe dream, on the whole it marks an enormous improvement over the policies of the current administration in several areas, particularly the need for real arms control negotiations with Russia. As such, I'm heartened by it. As Obama has also emphasized the need for such negotiations, there's reason to hope that there will be new arms control efforts irrespective of who wins the election this fall.

Indy's Atomic Fridge Ride

2008-05-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

By now I'm sure most of you have heard of the scene in the new Indiana Jones movie where the title character survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator. I get the bad feeling that I'm going to be answering questions about this for the remainder of my career, so I figure I may as well get started. Here's the summary:

1. There is such a thing as a lead-lined refrigerator.
2. This was not a feature that ordinary household refrigerators had in the 1950s.
3. Even a refrigerator made entirely of lead would probably not save you receiving a lethal radiation dose within the radius of the blast depicted in the film.
4. When attempting to survive a nuclear blast, do NOT hide in a refrigerator.

The lead-lined refrigerators are made to store materials used in nuclear medicine. The shielding they offer is pretty limited, only .125" of lead. Also, they're made to fit under a lab bench, and I doubt that any normal adult could shoehorn themselves inside of it. For comparison, let's explore the kind of radiation protection offered by a hypothetical refrigerator made entirely of lead.

According to Cresson Kearny, 1 cm (.4") of lead reduces the intensity of gamma rays by 50%. Therefore, 2" of lead would reduce gamma ray intensity to 6.25% of the original intensity. Note that this does not include the effects of neutron, beta, and alpha radiation. Calculating this is a LOT more complicated. As the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons explained:

Neutron shielding is a different, and more difficult, problem than shielding against gamma rays. As far as the latter are concerned, it is merely a matter of interposing a sufficient mass of radiation between the source of gamma radiations and the recipient. Heavy metals, such as iron and lead, make good gamma-ray shields because of their high density. These elements alone, however, are not quite as satisfactory for neutron shielding.

Using the graphs provided in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, it appears that from a distance of 1000 yards, a 20 kT fission explosion would result in a dose of about 4,000 rads from gamma and 4,000-6,000 from neutrons. Therefore, the shielding offered by our hypothetical lead fridge would reduce exposure to its occupant to 260 rads, with a presumably greater dose from neutrons. More than half of individuals exposed to 500+ rems will die of acute radiation poisoning, with several months of convalescence minimum. In short, Indy would not be up for a trip in the near-term to battle Soviet agents in exotic South American locales. Never mind the massive injuries he would have sustained from being flung around inside a heavy metal box.

Podvig on US-Russia Civil Nuclear Cooperation

2008-05-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

From a column in BAS:

Two weeks ago, the United States and Russia signed an agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation, commonly known as a "123 agreement." It was immediately attacked from all sides. Some members of Congress urged the Bush administration not to submit the document to Congress and threatened to block it once they did. Meanwhile, nuclear skeptics in Russia raised concerns that the agreement could revitalize the idea of importing foreign spent nuclear fuel into Russia or strengthen the U.S.-led Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. For their part, U.S. nuclear enthusiasts suspected Russia of attempting to gain access to advanced U.S. nuclear technologies, which, they argued, Moscow could use to establish a competitive advantage in the international nuclear trade.

There are many good reasons why such a nuclear deal should receive scrutiny and raise questions, but in this case, the opponents of the U.S.-Russian agreement are wrong. Whatever their concerns, blocking the cooperation agreement is the worst way to address them.

I'm in general agreement with this. A particular statement in the piece caught my eye:

The Russian public may be sympathetic to using the spent fuel to recover plutonium and produce electricity--a grand vision promoted by the Russian nuclear industry--but it's not ready to accept the idea of permanently burying nuclear waste somewhere in Siberia.

Go read the whole thing.

In Case of Nuclear War, Take...

2008-05-17T23:22:00.000-07:00

Аптечка индивидуальная АИ-2

This item, available now on eBay for the princely sum of $35, is an example of the first aid kit stockpiled by the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s to distribute to ordinary individuals in case of nuclear war. The ominous-looking black thing at the top is a single-use morphine syringe. Quite a few of these little orange kits seem to have been made, and they were featured fairly prominently in Soviet civil defense propaganda.

With This Missile, India Can Even Strike Shanghai

2008-05-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

From The Times of India:

India's long-range nuclear capable Agni-III missile, which was successfully tested on Wednesday, is not aimed at any particular country but can hit targets deep inside China or any West Asian country, according to Group Captain R K Das, spokesperson of the Indian Army's Eastern Command.

"The Agni-III is not country-specific but was test-fired to strengthen our military power. With the successful launch of the missile, India has joined the league of global superpowers like China, France, Russia, US and UK who already have this type of weapons in their possession," Das said here Wednesday evening.

He said: "With this missile, India can even strike Shanghai. Agni-III was developed indigenously by scientists in India. The research and development activity of the missile had been on for the past eight years."

India successfully test-fired the 3,000 km range surface-to-surface nuclear capable missile from Wheeler's Island off the Orissa coast Wednesday morning.

"We can't let ourselves be unprotected. We have built a capability to retaliate if we are threatened. This missile would help India form a credible defence from China. With this launch, China will think twice before attacking us," Das said.

Who said the arms race was over?