NEI Nuclear Notes

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2014 report on climate change is its fourth such  report this cycle. This report synthesizes the findings of the previous three working group reports. The result can be considered hair raising if this is the kind of thing that raises your hair (assuming you have any, of course.) Here’s the summary : Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. This has led to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. [italics theirs] What drives much of the response to the IPCC’s work is not the science, which is...

The IPCC report on climate change is scrupulously neutral when it comes to energy types, no more supportive (or non-supportive) of nuclear energy than coal with carbon capture or wind. But our friend Rod Adams at the Energy Collective has found an ingenious way around this: Not only have I spent time smithing words for human consumption in intensely political environments, but I also have a fair understanding of Boolean logic. I admire what the IPCC authors have accomplished. In both human communications and computer programming, the operators ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ have important meanings. So do modifiers like ‘with’. (Fossil with CCS is a completely different animal than fossil without CCS.) This is more funny than convincing – it turns the IPCC authors into Paul De Man-style semiologists , looking for signs pointing to meanings. But here’s the thing: no coded message necessary. Just in stating facts and discussing energy types at all , the IPCC cannot avoid the truth. Let ...

The IPCC report on mitigating climate change is now out and, it is, as you’d expect, a bone dry read considering how alarming it is.  But one section that probably won’t get much attention is on ethical considerations when considering a world response to climate change. This is something that it would be good to see in legislation in general – it might forestall at least some obnoxiously partisan bills from emerging. This part of the report, is, if nothing else, a fascinating read, and nuclear energy, which is never mentioned, seems corrected fitted to such issues The report says that some developed countries with heavy carbon emission output are expected to suffer relatively modest physical damage from projected climate change and some may even benefit from it. But some developing countries could experience significant physical damage from climate change while having no or little causal responsibility. How does policy develop that responds to this disparity? It’s not an easy ...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release the third volume of its 2014 report tomorrow. Subtitled Mitigation of Climate Change, it will present a set of scenarios to show the impact various sets of policy decisions can have on reducing carbon emissions. Naturally, this gets into energy types and the IPCC is notably non-selective. This is from the Summary for Policymakers, which is available now . At the global level, scenarios reaching 450 ppm CO2eq are also characterized by more rapid improvements of energy efficiency, a tripling to nearly a quadrupling of the share of zero ‐ and low ‐ carbon energy supply from renewables, nuclear energy and fossil energy with carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), or bioenergy with CCS (BECCS) by the year 2050 (Figure SPM.4, lower panel). This is a scenario that keeps temperature rise below 2 degrees centigrade – in fact, it overreaches if we take the following as the goal. Mitigation scenarios reaching concen...

Earlier this year, the Fort Calhoun nuclear facility in Nebraska was surrounded by the Missouri River, which jumped its banks due to a strong winter runoff and heavy spring rains. That flood was characterized as a 100-year event.  Is a 100-year event like the cicadas that swarm the Washington area every 17 years? No, not at all. The cicadas arrive on a predictable schedule. Seventeen years elapse and there they are again. This is a better description of a 100-year event: Of course, return period doesn’t mean that we won’t see that kind of rain in those locations for several decades (or centuries). A 1 in 100 year rain means that there is a 1% chance of seeing that amount of rain in any given year. A 0.1% chance is true for a 1 in 1000 year event. I assume that the 1 in 100 number changes every time something similar takes place – obviously, the odds of it happening in a given year drop if it happens more frequently. In any event, what is being discussed here is the ra...

Reuters has a nice roundup of Generation IV nuclear reactor designs. I’m pretty sure author Lisa Song is wrong when she says the designs will not be finalized before 2030. The very high temperature reactor, for one, is due to reach commercial viability by 2020. Plants currently under construction or proposed are Generation III-plus reactors, which are Gen III reactors with further safety enhancements. No quotes. The whole thing is worth reading if only to learn the difference between a gas reactor and a fast reactor. --- Last week, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked Chubu Electric to close the Hamaoka plant over fears of an earthquake. Chubu complied and expects it will take two years or so to retrofit the plant to better withstand an earthquake. Whether this is necessary or a sop to unfounded fears, I choose not to guess, but it’s certainly within the country’s purview if doing this quells fears. After all, if Japan wanted to close all its nuclear plants, that’d be its...