NEI Nuclear Notes

In Monday's New York Times , columnist John Tierney adds a thoughtful piece to the many articles and blog posts written about the paradox of efficiency as energy policy panacea. Mr. Tierney discusses several aspects of energy efficiency, including the "rebound effect" (also known as the Jevons Paradox, about which my colleague David Bradish has written several blog posts ). For us, the bottom line of the article is a recognition that efficiency improvements are unlikely to reduce carbon emissions and may, in fact, increase them as consumer savings on energy are spent on more carbon-intensive products and services elsewhere in the economy. We believe Mr. Tierney gets it right when he says: "But if your immediate goal is to reduce greenhouse emissions, then it seems risky to count on reaching it by improving energy efficiency. To economists worried about rebound effects, it makes more sense to look for new carbon-free sources of energy , or to impose a direct penalty f...

And we really mean a little more, as a new set of flowcharts from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory suggest that folks used more renewable energy and a little more nuclear energy in 2008 than 2007. Science Daily reports : Nuclear energy also saw a slight increase from 8.41 quads [quadrillion BTUs] in 2007 up to 8.45 quads in 2008. While no new nuclear power plants came online in 2008, the existing plants had less down time. Over the last 20 years, the downtime for maintenance and refueling at nuclear power plants had been decreasing. "There's an incentive to operate as much as possible," [A.J.] Simon [, an LLNL energy systems analyst,] said. "It's a smart thing to do. You can't earn revenue by selling electricity when you're down." Gulp! I’m sure if Mr. Simon talked to any nuclear energy supplier, he’d learn that less downtime for maintenance has everything to do with the growing capabilities of the work force and the developme...

Nuclear Green and Pro-Nuclear Democrats took a critical eye to Greenpeace's latest study called Energy [R]evolution and weren't impressed. Greenpeace's study leaves nuclear plants off the table as a solution in reducing CO2 emissions (surprise, surprise) while renewables and efficiency are claimed to be able to handle it all. Here's Nuclear Green's part one on Greenpeace's study: The cutesy feature of the report title, the rather uncreative play on the words revolution and evolution suggests the report's fundamental dilemma: the difficulty of charting a path to a renewables energy future given the serious limitations of renewable energy sources. ... Clean thus appears to be disassociated from "science based emissions reductions", because the shutdown of nuclear is viewed as being in the interest of being "clean." Furthermore, the notion that over 50% of American nuclear plants would be shut down for the sake of "the clean",...

We’re now on our third week of posts seriously looking at Amory Lovins’ and the Rocky Mountain Institute’s latest paper that bashes nuclear energy. Today’s post deals with the paper’s claim that nuclear energy’s “true competitors” (according to RMI) are cheaper and therefore “produce” more “climate solution” than nuclear. I will show that RMI relies on weak sources, no sources, and cherry-picked data for their cost assumptions to exaggerate their claims. From page 19 in RMI’s paper (pdf): Every dollar spent on new nuclear power produces 1.4-11+ times less climate solution than spending the same dollar on its cheaper competitors. For a power source merely to emit no carbon isn’t good enough; it must also produce the least carbon per dollar… To come up with the above statement, RMI’s paper takes the cost assumptions for each technology from their graph below, inverts them to get kWh per dollar, finds each technology’s “CO2 emissions displaced relative to coal,” multiplies the kWh per d...

So far I have written two detailed posts on Amory Lovins’ and the Rocky Mountain Institute’s latest nuclear critique. My third post discusses energy efficiency and Amory Lovins’ coined term “negawatts.” There is this widely held belief that becoming more energy efficient means that we will consume less energy. At first glance, that notion seems correct but digging further, I found there’s much more to it. In the case of energy efficiency, RMI overlooks a fundamental effect of efficiency on the energy marketplace. From RMI’s condensed version : An even cheaper competitor [to new nuclear plants] is enduse efficiency (“negawatts”)—saving electricity by using it more efficiently or at smarter times. There are several misperceptions about what energy efficiency really contributes. Here’s what Robert Bryce has to say in the Energy Tribune : The final – and most important – area in which Lovins has been consistently wrong is his claim that efficiency lowers energy consumption. And when it c...