Skip to main content

The China/U.S. Deal and Its Nuclear Portensions

The greenhouse gas deal reached by the United States and China promises to be exceptionally consequential. Reining in China’s emissions has always seemed a difficult, practically impossible goal because the huge country is very quickly trying to develop an industrial sector while providing electricity to a widely scattered and mammoth population. Despite a large commitment to nuclear energy, China has had a larger one to fossil fuels. The ghastly, and widely reported, air quality found in Beijing and other urban centers has been a result – and a symbol of China’s reluctance to change course.

Now, it will change course.

Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to cap China's emissions in the future — a striking, unprecedented move by a nation that has been reluctant to box itself in on global warming.

To be more specific:

China, whose emissions are still growing as it builds new coal plants, didn't commit to cut emissions by a specific amount. Rather, Xi set a target for China's emission to peak by 2030, or earlier if possible. He also pledged to increase the share of energy that China will derive from sources other than fossil fuels.

That doesn’t feel all that consequential, does it? What it does is split the difference  between the twin needs to electrify the country and control carbon dioxide, which is further than China has been willing to go up to now. The lack of such commitment from China has had a deleterious impact on attempts at a global pact. This move makes that much more plausible.

And the U.S?

The U.S. set a new target to reduce its emissions of heat-trapping gases by 26 percent to 28 percent by 2025, compared with 2005 levels. That's a sharp increase from earlier in Obama's presidency, when he pledged to cut emissions by 17 percent by 2020.

---

Does nuclear energy win in this scenario? That’s a pretty crass way to get to the point. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s headline is much more high-toned about it:

Natural gas producers, nuclear, win in U.S. climate deal with China

The paper’s view on nuclear energy is actually pretty sour:

As more coal plants retire because of carbon emission regulations, grid reliability will be strained. Until more gas- fired power plants can be built, there won’t be enough generation to pick up the slack. That gives nuclear plant owners like Exelon Corp. and Entergy Corp. more leverage to ask for subsidies to keep their existing plants running longer.

Or maybe the plants’ value as emission-free energy sources will become more strikingly apparent. The San Francisco Chronicle closes in on this a little better:

But reaching the goal may require using more nuclear power and carbon-sequestration technologies in addition to wind and solar, he said.

“With any energy technology — coal, oil, gas, nuclear — the more you build, the cheaper it gets,” Cohen said. Costs are falling precipitously for solar and wind energy, he said.

The “he” in both cases is Armond Cohen, executive director of the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit based in Boston with offices in China.

---

Early days and a lot more analysis to come. I was struck though by the latest energy forecast by the International Energy Agency.

By 2040, world energy supply is divided into four almost equal parts: low-carbon sources (nuclear and renewables), oil, natural gas and coal.

Nuclear power plays an important strategic role in enhancing energy security for some countries. It also avoids almost four years’ worth of global energy-related carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2040.

The forecast zeroes in on four countries that will drive electricity growth in the next 25 years.

In an in-depth focus on nuclear power, WEO-2014 sees installed capacity grow by 60% to 2040 in the central scenario, with the increase concentrated heavily in just four countries (China, India, Korea and Russia).

All of which, we should note, are heavily committed to nuclear energy. The IEA by its nature hedges all its bets, since the Outlook provides a snapshot of the future based on what is happening today. But some previous years’ Outlooks have been exceptionally dim on nuclear energy’s prospects and this one – while still a bit dimmish – shows it returning to the fore. This was published prior to the U.S.-China deal, so the 2015 Outlook should be even more interesting than this one.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fluor Invests in NuScale

You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin