03.14.06

Salazar supports nuclear power, sort of

Posted in 2¢, Energy at 10:26 by RjZ

In his letter to President Bush, Democratic senator from Colorado Ken Salazar recommends nuclear power for U.S. energy independence.

10. Nuclear Power:
Promote responsible energy technologies that do not contribute to global warming and that do so without compromising safety or security. Nuclear power plants provide roughly 20% of America’s electricity. As our country moves forward with nuclear power, we must ensure that these plants have
the ability to withstand acts of terrorism, and we must ensure that nuclear power technologies do not make it easier for terrorists or nations to acquire material needed to make nuclear weapons. Finally, we must continue to work on providing safe, permanent storage for the resulting radioactive waste.

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement, but it is a sensible one.

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12.14.05

A new energy policy-Give us the money instead

Posted in Energy, Society at 8:58 by RjZ

I promise to get off this topic of energy policy soon. I really do have other things to talk about but here’s one more just the same.

During a visit to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado I asked if current policy actually maintains that the hydrogen economy for fuel cells really has any merit. It seemed to me that hydrogen gas stations just wasn’t going to work for dozens of different reasons. (Did you know that the flame from a burning hydrogen leak is completely invisible? Well it is until the high temperature flame burns right through your pants and your leg….) I was surprised to learn about a model that does make sense though. NREL pointed out that if consumers generated their own power, at home, they could store it in hydrogen fuel cells for cars (or other applications) and remove all (or at least most) of the distribution problems associated with hydrogen.

Let’s suppose it costs around $10,000 for enough solar panels to power your home. You’re off the grid now and occasionally even selling energy back to the utility but your payback on this investment in savings is more than 10 years, even at current energy prices. Aside from Ed Begley Jr. few of us are committed enough to afford this kind of investment. But what if we could?

According to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) of all 27.8 out of 40.3 exajoules (69%) of power for residential, commercial and industrial use is lost energy. Open this link (it’s a great graph) U.S. Energy Flow Trends –2002 in a separate window and follow along. That loss is due to inefficiencies in energy distribution from inductive storage to resistance along the power lines. More than two thirds of our electric power is thrown away, the majority of which as a result of moving it from the power plant to your home. If we saved just over 76% of this power lost we could stop using coal completely. Coal is used almost exclusively in electric power generation and we could eliminate coal just by reducing loss (not consumption, just loss!) Putting solar panels or a wind generator on your property eliminates all that distribution loss for the energy you consume.

Democratizing energy distribution has other advantages as well. Obviously emissions decrease, but also security risks. I’ve been to power plants and I can assure you it would be extremely easy for terrorists to cause major disruptions to power generation without even flying an airplane into a building. Democratized energy is more robust in exactly the same way the internet is. Knock out one server and the others take up the slack. Centralized power distribution is easily threatened.

Meanwhile on 8 August, 2005, President Bush signed the Energy Bill of 2005 into law. “Of the $14.5 billion tax package, renewable energy and energy efficiency received only $4.5 billion while fossil fuels received $5.6 billion and nuclear power received $1.3 billion.” The law supports renewable energy and has other small victories but overwhelmingly supports the status quo energy policy. Suppose we took just half of that $4.5 billion and instead of offering subsidies to power plants and oil companies we offered loans (not even a subsidy, just a loan that has to be paid back) to individuals who put solar or other zero emission energy generation on their homes. The loan has to be paid back in, say, 10 years.

Clearly, only the wealthy and upper middle class have houses big enough to start installing new solar panels, but what if, thanks to this government loan, a mere half a million people did so. I know I would. I know friends of mine would. I don’t mind paying for solar panels, but $10K is just too big a pill especially for a house I may not live in forever. I may never even see the payback. With the loan I can afford it now and my return on investment starts happening immediately. Do you think the price of solar panels and installation would remain so high? Imagine the boost to the economy from this new industry selling, installing, and servicing wind generators and solar panels on single family dwellings. Every one of those installations reduces emissions not only from their consumption, but also from the two thirds loss thanks to distribution. Every one of those installations increases security in the U.S. Costs of solar and wind plummet and it becomes affordable for commercial and less well-to-do customers. And, in ten years all those loans are paid back.

We won’t eliminate distribution or distribution losses completely. We will still need power plants. There will still be plenty of homes and apartment complexes that won’t be served well by solar or wind. But suddenly asking everyone in Iowa to move away to make room for the wind generators isn’t necessary to achieve the goals of increasing zero emission power in our mix. As I’ve noted before, renewable energy (even the emission producing kinds) currently make up only around 1% of the U.S. energy sources. If we were to double the amount of solar and wind farms we still would barely make a dent. But by democratizing energy production, our impact is greatly improved and the only cost is some ugly roofs (which I think will be seen as cool really quickly) and the government giving up it’s attachment to the status quo.

I’d love to have solar panels on my home. It’s time the government stopped subsidizing business (or, as in my proposal only reduced it’s subsidies) and enable an actual, grass roots shift in energy generation and distribution. It’ll be cheaper for all of us in the long run.

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12.12.05

Nuclear Explosion at Montreal

Posted in 2¢, Energy at 16:18 by RjZ

I missed a week and have plenty on my mind to post, but in the meantime here is still more fuel for the lively discussion on nuclear power that’s taken place here.TCS: Tech Central Station - TCS COP 11 Coverage: Nuclear Explosion at Montreal
Or maybe you’re bored of that and I better get to writing something else.

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12.01.05

Is conservation the answer?

Posted in Energy, Society at 23:51 by RjZ

In a recent post I argued that we should take another look at nuclear energy, at the very least in the mid-term until alternative energy sources become more reasonable economic alternatives. I was not surprised that comments on that post reacted so strongly to the bad, bad word: nuclear (or should I say newcular) One solution suggested (if half-heartedly) was conservation.

I am a big fan of conserving as anyone who has visited my home in the winter without a sweater will certainly attest. I feel that conservation, especially conservation that doesn’t impede our economy is the only wise choice. Still, I began to doubt that conservation is an effective solution to our energy problems.

According to EarthTrends energy consumption, per capita in North America is nearly flat from 1999 to 2001 at 7,539.0 kilograms of oil equivalent (kgoe) per person per year in 1999, 8,090.5 in 2000 and 7,928.5 in 2001. (That’s all the data their free database let me collect though. Earth Trends is part of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank.

National Atlas.gov had data for this graph from 1960 to 2001 which agrees well with the WRI. Again, consumption is trending down right now and hasn’t been increasing as much as you’d imagine from all those huge cars on the streets.

How is this possible? One thing’s for sure. What’s not happening is people turning off their Christmas lights or wearing sweaters in their homes, let alone driving around in little Geo Metros. Instead, all those big companies that people love to hate have been driven to produce more efficient cars and lights and electronics because, fortunately, there’s a market for it. Conservation is definitely a good thing, it’s even driving part of our economy. That’s good news. A modern mid-size SUV, for example, gets about the same gas mileage as my ‘81 Honda Civic used to and I am fairly certain it has lower emissions of SO₂ and NO_x as well. I am typing this on a laptop that uses about as much energy as an incandescent bulb and the light in this room is a compact fluorescent that uses about a fifth of the energy of the incandescent bulb it replaces. LCDs use energy than CRTs and my refrigerator and clothes washer all use less than their counterparts of 20 years ago.

Lucky for us we have all those companies, because I don’t think it’s realistic for us to actually turn off those lights and put on sweaters. And as long as that’s not the case, it’s probably equally unrealistic for us to claim that conservation is more than just part of the solution to global warming and pollution put out by all those fossil power plants. I wish it weren’t so, but it doesn’t look like conservation alone will remove that bad “newcular” word from our list of solutions any time soon.

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11.19.05

Keep the lights on

Posted in Energy, Society at 20:20 by RjZ

“They’d have over 300 engineers where here you only see maybe 30,” said the forty plus year veteran of the power industry comparing a nuclear power plant to the coal-fired plant I was visiting. I asked him why there are so many. Isn’t the plant automated much like this one I wanted to know? “To fill out all the forms,” he answered. He felt that all the regulations were a big part of why we don’t have more nuclear power. I can’t speak to how many bureaucratic forms engineers were filling out but I can see why many of them might be necessary.

Nuclear power isn’t without risk to be sure, but neither is coal, oil, or as environmentalists recently complained [more here], wind power. Somehow public misinformation about the dangers of nuclear power, perhaps combined with overwhelming legislation has doomed this relatively clean energy source in the U.S.

Here are some things most of us don’t think about when we consider our choices for power. Oil is used to generate electricity. Well, it was used to generate electricity when it was less than $30 a barrel. Burning oil to turn generators produces relatively little pollution (surprisingly!) but it does release plenty of green house gases. Environmental regulations in the U.S. drove many utilities to build new power plants that could burn oil and, in a pinch, coal and the majority of these are either idle or burning coal exclusively right now because oil is just too expensive. The story for natural gas is about the same.

The U.S. has been described as the Saudi Arabia of coal. It’s true. We have tons of the stuff, more than any other nation and while it’s frequently high in sulfur (which produces smog causing pollutants such as SO_x) equipment exists to minimize this problem. The U.S. consumed over a billion short tons of coal in 2003. A single, average sized, coal fired power plant consumes about one train load of coal per day. We’ve all waited for a typical 105 car coal train to cross in front of us on the road. One whole train goes into a power plant full and leaves empty every single day! All that coal is burnt up each day and turned into two things: ash and CO₂. Ash is frequently used in cement production or, as often as not, simply dumped near the coal plant. CO₂ meanwhile is released into the atmosphere. Coal is responsible for 53% of the U.S. 3.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year. and for about 4.4 billion pounds of CO₂ will be released into the air for 2005. (More, you say, than we even consumed in coal? different years. See this link for loads of info.)

Hydro-electric can hardly be considered environmentally friendly these days when we consider the damage to the landscape, destroyed fisheries and rivers that many dams of caused. Fact is, there aren’t really many more places for us to dam up these days and while Lake Powell is a load of fun for many people it was also an environmental disaster for the area.

Renewables? I mentioned wind-power above but there’s also geo-thermal, wave power and solar power. Currently renewable make up less than 1% of the U.S. power consumption. Probably the biggest reason for this is that it’s expensive! According to a Stirling Energy Systems “Photovoltaic technology is generally not abundant enough or cost-effective enough to meet any large scale demands.” Other solar energy is in the 10¢ per KW range. Coal meanwhile is in the 2 - 5¢ range. Of course we’re not paying for the environmental impact of coal–yet!

I used to drive by San Onofre nuclear power plant in southern California quite frequently. The power plant has been in operation for 38 years but they do not have an agreement to transport nuclear waste off site. Where do they put it? Essentially in the basement. It’s a special basement, surrounded by 2 inches of stainless steel and several feet of reinforced concrete, but it’s still the basement. 38 years and they have all of their waste on site. How is this possible? Because nuclear power plants produce about 1 cubic foot of waste per year. Oh, it’s nasty stuff, no doubt about it, but there just isn’t very much of it. The plant itself is hardened so that a 747 could fly right into it without damaging it. (You can question that if you want, but it was designed with this in mind at least.)

A long list of accidents at nuclear power plants would be dwarfed by the same listing at coal-plants but virtually none of these released nuclear material into the broader environment. The worst nuclear accident in the U.S. was three-mile island. This human-error was contained but that part of the plant was destroyed. Meanwhile, coal-fired power plants release literally billions of tons of CO₂ into the environment (and a sizable amount of nuclear isotopes as well just because they’re naturally occurring in the coal) ever year.

The U.S. is 18th in nuclear power generation. With all this power being generated world-wide by nuclear power (16% of the world’s power) you’d think we’d be hearing about accidents every day.

Nuclear power has risks and I don’t need to write a treatise on this subject here. But other power sources are simply too expensive (today) or obviously risky to our environment and yet we continue to use them.

Our choice is clear. We must continue to invest in alternative energy sources and carefully consider their advantages and disadvantages before assuming we have the end-all solution. In the mean time we should reconsider nuclear power in the U.S. and start investing new plants now. Well, that’s not true, we do have another choice–turn off the lights and move back into caves.

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