NEI Nuclear Notes

Media Matters for America and Fox News are not the best friends in the media landscape, with the former often calling out the latter for what it perceives as bias in its reporting. I have no particular brief on that subject. But I do recognize that the energy business has done a fair amount to bring down carbon emissions through the increased use of natural gas, renewable energy and nuclear energy (through uprates) – and is quite conscious of it - so I found this report from Media Matters somewhat amusing: But Fox is ignoring the confluence of factors and touting the decline as a triumph of the free market. A Fox Nation headline today declared: "Free Enterprise Makes the Air Cleaner." On Varney & Company , Fox Business contributor Charles Payne said: "The free market, cleaning up our air. Says a lot about the free market, doesn't it?" Payne is essentially correct here. We might focus on “bringing down carbon emissions,” though “cleaning up our a...

Nuclear energy generation supplies 20 percent of the electricity in the United States. It’s been that way for years, as reported by the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Department of Energy. But a number of factors, according to the EIA , has pushed the relative percentages of several energy sources up because one went down rather dramatically, both statistically and practically. That would be coal, which dropped from 46 percent in December 2010 to 39 percent in December 2011. The EIA says that the main driver of this decrease is the increased use of natural gas, which increased its share from 22 percent to 26 percent. Electricity use itself declined 7 percent, so that in itself makes percentage increases and decreases a little chimerical – that is, nuclear generated roughly the same amount of electricity as last December but in a smaller marketplace – as did hydro, which advanced from 6 to 7 percent. But the decline of coal in favor of natural gas ...

The U.S. Energy Information Administration sees incremental growth in nuclear energy capacity through 2035 in its Annual Energy Outlook 2012 (AEO 2012) reference case, which has just been released. Nuclear generating capacity in the reference case increases from 101 gigawatts in 2011 to 112 gigawatts in 2035, with 10 gigawatts of new capacity due to 5 new plants, 7 gigawatts of uprates at existing plants and 6 gigawatts of retirements, according to the report. This is one gigawatt more than projected in the AEO 2011 reference case. At the same time, it forecasts CO 2 emissions rising 0.2 percent per year during this period, or about 4.9 percent in total. While the rise in nuclear capacity is good news, the news about carbon emissions is a little disturbing, at least at first glance. A forecast – and there are a bunch of them, though this is the most prominent for U.S. policy makers - can be a little confusing the first time you tackle it. That’s because, as these charts sho...

In 2008, the Energy Information Administration published a report that provided a snapshot of the amount of federal incentives each energy technology received during the year 2007. Three years later, EIA released an updated analysis that looked at the federal incentives received in 2010 . Below is the summary table EIA generated by examining the energy incentives for all sectors (p. xii). Renewables by far have received more incentives in 2010 than any other beneficiary: 40 percent of the total. If we look at the incentives received in just the electric sector (a subset of the overall energy sector), the numbers expose even more favor for renewables, which garnered 55 percent of the electric sector’s incentives in 2010 (p. xviii). What about nuclear? Incentives for nuclear have largely been for research and development. Since 1978, nuclear has received more R&D incentives than any other technology. Most of the R&D expenditures for nuclear took place in the 1970s a...

Based on an anti-nuclear group’s report, the New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune , published a piece last week claiming that solar is now cheaper than nuclear. Rod Adams right off the bat saw through the bunkum and took the NYT as well as the anti-nuclear group’s report to town. After taking a closer look, we have more to add. The report the NYT references comes from the group North Carolina Waste Awareness & Reduction Network (WARN). Below is the thesis of their 18 page report (pdf): Here in North Carolina, solar electricity, once the most expensive of the “renewables,” has become cheaper than electricity from new nuclear plants. When digging into the foundation of this statement, there’s one key factor in the solar cost assumptions that makes all the difference. As Rod pointed out, it’s that they are based on large incentives. On page 17 of the report, this sentence explains the large solar incentives included in the calculation...

Just wanted to bring to your attention probably one of the best, most complete, and credible sets of data on new power plant costs I've come across so far. The data comes from the Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Outlook 2009 and the chart and table below were created by the Institute for Energy Research . The only other source I've seen that comes close to a credible comparison on cost data is Lazard (pdf). In the past, I hardly used EIA's cost data much, partly because their capital cost estimates for nuclear were always too low (the estimates are much more realistic this edition), but mostly because they only presented their cost assumptions that feed into the NEMS model (pdf). They never showed a levelized, unsubsidized, balanced set of cost data for nearly all technologies. Here's IER's explanation of the data : To determine the most economic technology for the type of demand (base, intermediate, or peaking load) for which new capacity ...

Over the past few years, the Energy Information Administration has been asked by many members of Congress to model the effects of their proposed climate legislation on the US . The latest request released yesterday was from Senators Lieberman and Warner : This report responds to a request from Senators Lieberman and Warner for an analysis of S. 2191, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2007 and a subsequent analysis request from Senators Barasso, Inhofe, and Voinovich. Here is the CO2 emissions reduction targets in the Lieberman-Warner bill: The Title I caps decline gradually from 5,775 million metric tons (mmt) CO2-equivalent in 2012 (7 percent below 2006 emission levels), to 3,860 mmt in 2030 (39 percent below 2006 levels), and 1,732 mmt in 2050 (72 percent below 2006 levels). When EIA conducts these requested analyses, they develop several different scenarios "to analyze some of the key areas of uncertainty that impact the analysis results." Here's the descri...

Last month Leslie Berliant of Celsias asked Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen if nuclear power is “free of greenhouse gas emissions.” For those who are unfamiliar with van Leeuwen, he and his colleague Philip Smith have been falsely claiming nuclear power’s lifecycle emissions will be higher than a fossil-fueled power station within several decades as high-quality uranium ore grades diminish. As I was reading the Celsias piece, the sentence below stopped me in my tracks: Today the world nuclear capacity is around 370 GW, providing 2.1% of the world energy supply (see Part A - PDF). 2.1%? It's common knowledge around here that the actual share is about 6 percent, so I checked the reference. What I found was stunning. In the debate about lifecycle emissions, the conclusions of both the antis and the pros depended mostly upon the assumptions of the analyses. But the error above wasn’t a matter of assumption, it was due to a complete lack of understanding of how certain energy statisti...

Tampa Tribune ’s “Nuclear Costs Explode” piece provided some updated insights to the estimated costs of a new nuclear plant. The article began with Progress Energy’s cost reassessment of a new nuke from an initial estimate of about $5-7 billion per plant. “Based on new industry estimates, the tab for Progress Energy's project could surpass $10 billion.” The reason for the increase: because the cost of concrete, steel, copper, labor and reactor technology has soared as energy companies move forward with plans to build more than 30 new reactors nationwide. Also, Progress Energy's initial estimate excluded the cost of land, inflation, interest payments and new transmission lines. … A September 2007 report commissioned by the Edison Electric Institute, a nonprofit trade group for the nation's electric utilities, showed that steel prices have risen 60 percent since 2003. Copper prices nearly quadrupled between 2003 and 2006 and cement prices rose 30 percent during the same per...

The Energy Information Administration last Wednesday released it's AEO 2008 Overview (pdf). This is a preview to an annual report (due out in February) which studies and forecasts the energy supply and demand fundamentals out to 2030. Questions they attempt to answer each year are: how much energy will the U.S. be consuming in the future? how fast will the U.S. GDP grow? will renewables have an increased role to play? what happens to fossil fuels? etc. One of the topics NEI pays close attention to, of course, is the role EIA sees nuclear power playing over the next several decades. According to the report, by 2030, 20 GW of new nuclear capacity are projected to be built as well as 2.7 GW in uprates and 4.5 GW in retirements. Total nuclear capacity in 2030 is projected to increase to 118.8 GW from today's 100.3 GW. This year's nuclear projection is a step up from last year's report which forecasted nuclear will only increase to 112.6 GW by 2030. Prior to 2006, nuclea...

The Energy Information Administration released yesterday its annual International Energy Outlook for 2007. Here are some highlights from the press release : World marketed energy consumption is projected to grow by 57 percent between 2004 and 2030. ... Coal consumption, which grows an average annual rate of 2.2 percent, is the fastest-growing energy source worldwide in the IEO2007 reference case projection, which assumes that existing laws and policies remain in effect through 2030 notwithstanding concerns related to the rising level of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. ... Higher fossil fuel prices, energy security concerns, improved reactor designs, and environmental considerations are expected to improve prospects for nuclear power capacity in many parts of the world, and a number of countries are expected to build new nuclear power plants. World nuclear capacity is projected to rise from 368 gigawatts in 2004 to 481 gigawatts in 2030. ... In the IEO2007 reference case, whi...

Over at Gristmill, anti-nuclear zealot David Roberts is at it again . This time with the Christian Science Monitor article I referenced yesterday . Roberts: The question is not whether nuclear power is "acceptable" or "good" by some subjective standard -- economic, moral, or otherwise. It's not even whether investments in nuclear power could lead to emission reductions. The question is: what is the maximum amount of climate change mitigation we can get for a given dollar of investment? Nuclear fails that test. Hmmm, where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, Amory Lovins. Roberts quotes him in the post but that last sentence from Roberts above looks like he’s pawning Lovins’ words as his own. We have dealt with Mr. Lovins’ arguments plenty of times, but we’ll go another round. "It's easy to show that building more reactors makes climate change worse than it should have been," says Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy t...

For all you stat gurus out there, I'm going to begin periodically posting new and updated statistics as they come out. Here you go. Electricity Demand According to EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2007, forecasts show that the United States will need an estimated 40 percent more electricity by 2030 (xls). In terms of capacity, the U.S. is projected to need an additional 292 GW by 2030 (xls). 2005 Voluntary Reporting of Greenhouse Gases According to EIA, U.S. nuclear plants avoided 36% of all reported emissions avoided in 2005 (pdf). This is more than any other category in the program. Nuclear Waste Fund Statistics Q1 FY 2007 As of December 31st, 2006, total ratepayer commitments to the Nuclear Waste Fund are $28.938B .