Where Wind Outpaces Nuclear: Carbon Emissions

Forbes provides a pretty good primer on why the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan for limiting carbon emissions can make a nuclear advocate a little grumbly – maybe a lot:

The Clean Power Plan calls for a near 20% reduction in U.S. carbon emissions from 2012 baseline levels by 2030. But here’s how the Clean Power Plan works—or doesn’t work, in the case of nuclear power. The draft rule sets forth an emissions rate baseline of CO2 emitted per megawatt-hour of fossil fuel generation … The draft rule allows for a 100% credit for all existing wind, solar, and geothermal sources, but only a 6% credit for nuclear. There’s no room at the inn for the other 94% of nuclear.

Remember, these are proposals, so they will change. Still, the issue of relative valuation in the proposed rule is at the root of discussions about properly valuing nuclear energy. Natural gas is currently priced very low due to its ubiquity. The problem is that natural gas only works as a replacement for coal because it produces about half the black rock’s carbon emissions. That’s still a fair amount of carbon, though, and on its own won’t get the country where it wants to go.

And it could get worse: what if natural gas prices prove enough to drive a nuclear facility out of the marketplace? That’s a lot of emission free energy taken off the table that can’t be easily replaced.

Why not renewables? Forbes writer Michael Krancer explains that because wind and solar are intermittent in nature, they need baseload energy to back them up. That requires natural gas (or coal or nuclear) to backstop them. Nuclear isn’t the best choice because it runs full tilt virtually all the time and it’s tough to ramp it down to allow renewable energy onto the grid – the same is true of hydro, plus the difficulty of building new dams. Coal and natural gas are more natural partners in this scenario, but they produce carbon emissions. The result: renewable energy plus natural gas or coal produces far more emissions than nuclear energy alone.

So the virtues of nuclear energy – baseload, non-carbon-emitting – has a decided value that the EPA’s proposed rule barely acknowledges. It’s hard to say for sure – there are a lot of factors – but the rules as they stands have the capacity to do a lot more harm than good. They could roil energy markets such that more not fewer carbon emissions are produced.

Lots of “coulds” there, an invitation to overstating the case. There are potential market forces, but also plenty of unpredictable human agency. Krancer does offer examples to suggest the case cannot be overstated:

Bentek, a Colorado energy analytics firm, found that 1,327 such cycling events [that is, a natural gas plant ramping up and down to accommodate wind) happened in Colorado in 2009, which released up to 6.8 million pounds of extra sulfur dioxide (“SO2”), 3.1 million pounds of nitrogen oxide (“NOX”), and 147,000 pounds of carbon dioxide (“CO2”).

That’s – awful.

Krancer provides the bottom line on nuclear energy:

Nuclear power is the work-horse of power supply and of zero-carbon generation. Nuclear plants operate around the clock in all weather, providing nearly 20% of the nation’s electricity supply and comprising about 63.3% of all clean (zero carbon emissions) energy, which is more than all other clean energy sources put together.

It’s a great article on a complex topic. Well worth a full read.

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

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