NEI Nuclear Notes

Millions of Americans traveled long distances in hopes of getting a front-row seat for the dance of the heavens today, watching the moon eclipse the sun, from Portland, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina. Hundreds more had spent months preparing for an odd complication of the event: the very sudden loss of up to 9,000 megawatts as solar panels were cast into shadow, and then its very quick return. The lost production is the equivalent of about fifteen good-sized coal plants. How do you keep the lights on when the sun suddenly goes out? The loss and rebound of generation is much larger than the system usually faces, but experts made some serious advance preparation, and were hopeful  largely because of the diversity of generators. Nuclear plants continue to provide the backbone of the system, and generators running on natural gas were called on to power up quickly, and as the sun reappeared, power down even faster. Such diversity is important because the system has to functio...

The past two weeks have seen record temperatures grip the nation as a " heat dome " has descended over most of the continental U.S. While it isn't news that summer is hot, it is when the temperatures are 15-20 degrees higher than average for this time of year. But life must go on and the electricity must flow. Without the sort of reliable baseload power that nuclear energy provides , our electric grid would be in a tight spot, as grid operators would be forced to juggle intermittent source of energy (like wind and solar) with others that could be vulnerable to supply constraints (like natural gas). In California, the independent system operator recently asked consumers to conserve electricity in the face of high temperatures during a period where the supply of natural gas is constrained due to the Aliso Canyon methane leak . Put it all together and you could be looking at grid reliability being compromised, prices skyrocketing and electric utilities being forced t...

Matt Wald The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald. The hot new idea in energy and real estate is the “zero net energy building.” It usually means a building with enough solar panels on the roof so that over the course of a year, it produces as much energy as it consumes. And that means the building poses no burden on the grid, right? Well, no. In fact, the grid’s work may get harder when a zero net energy building is connected . And it means that in real life, the building still has a carbon footprint. That’s not a fatal flaw for “zero” buildings or for solar on the roof. In fact, many aspects of a zero net energy building are unambiguously good and ought to be incorporated into a lot of structures – good insulation, high efficiency lighting and other devices, and placement of the building to make optimum use of the sun, for example. And there’s a certain attracti...

Not too long ago, we reviewed a report that looked at nuclear energy (and other energy sources) as biodiversity agents. This had to do, in part, with the amount of land a facility needs to function. Nuclear energy and fossil fuel plants use relatively little, wind farms and solar arrays quite a lot of land . Based on an objective and transparent analysis of our sustainable energy choices, we have come to the evidence-based conclusion that nuclear energy is a good option for biodiversity conservation (and society in general) and that other alternatives to fossil fuels should be subjected to the same cost–benefit analyses (in terms of biodiversity and climate outcomes, as well as sociopolitical imperatives) before accepting or dismissing them. Writer Barry Brook, who collected 75 scientists to endorse his paper, is interested in land use as it impacts flora and fauna. Biodiversity concerns do not get as much play as they might – and, when they do, it annoys many when land is withdraw...

Matt Wald The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald . California researchers have sketched out an American energy system that they say can be powered almost entirely by wind, water and sunlight, by 2050 . It’s an interesting thought experiment, with some valid insights, but it’s a little like hopping from New York to California on one foot. Even if you could do it, would you really want to? The paper, summarized here , is not just a recipe for just powering the electric system, but for converting everything that uses oil or natural gas to run on electricity instead – including ships, cars and even airplanes. The airplanes would fly on hydrogen derived from water molecules split with electricity. Electrification is almost always a good idea, because it improves efficiency, cuts pollution, and can cut geopolitical risk. We are in the early stages (at least, we hope it’s th...

Matthew L. Wald In an October 7, 2014 article , New York Times reporter Matthew Wald aptly describes the market forces, technological changes, and policy choices challenging electricity providers today. He artfully distinguishes two aspects of electric generation that are important to understand the value of diverse sources of electricity. One is the energy contributed by a generator, the other is the power it provides. Wind and solar contribute energy (i.e., electric current flowing when the wind blows or sun shines). Nuclear, coal, and gas-fired generators contribute both energy and dependable power (i.e., current flowing when and in the quantities needed by the grid). Mr. Wald's article nicely complements two recent posts on this blog by our NEI colleague Mark Flanagan on October 1 and September 29 . It is also gratifying to note that Mr. Wald refers to nuclear power as "zero-carbon", a frequent subject of this  blog . For a more quantita...

One could use a story like this to slag solar energy, but that’s not the point : According to the Associated Press, up to 28,000 birds per year might be meeting an early death after burning up in the focused beams of sunlight, with birds dying at a rate of one bird every two minutes. The burned-up birds are being dubbed "streamers," after the poof of smoke produced by the igniting birds. Assuming plant workers came up with “streamers,” well, that’s pretty tasteless. It gets (potentially) worse. A quasi-food chain is being established around the solar plant, with predators eating birds and bats that burn up in the plant's solar rays chasing after insects which are attracted to the bright light from the sun's reflected rays. That prompted wildlife officials to refer to Ivanpah [the solar farm’s name] as a "mega-trap" for wildlife. It turns out this is the consequence of what sounds like an interesting design. (You can view a very fancy Goog...

Sunday night is a crowded spot on the television calendar (Mad Men & Game of Thrones), which means that in my house, the re-boot of Cosmos hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson goes straight to my DVR. When I first heard that the show was being resurrected by Fox's Seth MacFarlane , I immediately began looking forward to the premiere. I'm more than old enough to remember watching the original PBS series hosted by Carl Sagan . It was a huge hit, challenging the Big 3 networks in the ratings on the night it premiered in September 1980. For a kid who had grown up fascinated by space exploration, it was a real treat. Let's get back to 2014. I've been plowing through each episode a couple of days after it originally aired and was really enjoying it (I've been a fan of the cosmic calendar from the start). Then I watched Episode 9, "The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth." That night, Dr. Tyson touched upon the topic of climate change* (emphasis mine) : We just c...

The quote of the day that's getting passed around this morning at NEI comes from Suzzanne Shelton of the Shelton Group. She was in attendance last week at Fortune's Brainstorm Green 2014 , and shared her top five takeaways from the conference on her blog before the start of the long holiday weekend. Not surprisingly, this aside involved Mike Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute and his ongoing struggle to get other environmentalists to understand that constraining carbon emissions and keeping the lights on is going to mean relying on a diverse set of energy sources that includes nuclear energy: The solar industry doesn't need the Sierra Club. There was a very interesting point/counterpoint discussion between Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, and Michael Shellenberger , president of the Breakthrough Institute. It appears the two men are/were friends, and Shellenberger was practically doing an on-stage intervention with Brune, begging him ...

A posting on the Nevada Wilderness Project blog about the Silver State North Solar Project: In the case of Silver State North, we dubbed this 600-acre project 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas “smart” because the developer was willing to gather environmental input early on to avoid complications during the formal review process. From where we sat at the review table, that was a good sign. Well, it is a good sign – the desert tortoise was a particular concern. But I focused more on that 600 acres – that’s a lot of acres! Surely the project is producing an impressive amount of electricity. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was in Nevada today to flip the switch on Nevada’ original “fast-tracked,” utility-scale solar power project – a 50 megawatt photovoltaic plant in the Ivanpah Valley. You have to start somewhere. 50 megawatts is the rated capacity, so actual production is less than half that amount – but solar power doesn’t require turbines or water, so arrays can be situa...

Although Germany has become something of a whipping post on this blog, it’s hard not to look at its energy profile since it decided to close its nuclear facilities and not see something like chaos. But a lot of that chaos is incipient, so there’s time – not a lot, but still some time – to figure out how to proceed. For Germany, one of those ways has been encouraging the uptake of renewable energy. But now, the plummeting price of solar panels has unleashed a new round of, how shall we put it, chaos. Germany plans to reduce government subsidies supporting solar power by up to 30 percent within a year because higher-than-expected demand has made the scheme far more costly than authorities initially expected. At first glance, that seems a boon to the solar business and a vindication of those subsidies – they seeded the market and now the market can proceed on its own. But not so. German companies producing solar panels, already under pressure from stiff competition from n...

You may recall that in November, President Clinton made the following statement about the relative costs of nuclear, solar and wind in an appearance on The Daily Show : "Solar energy and wind energy ... would already be competitive with coal if you had to pay the extraneous costs of coal -- the health care costs and other things. And ... wind within two years and solar within five will be competitive in price with coal. They're both cheaper than nuclear right now." In response, Lou Jacobson, a reporter with Politifact, took a closer look at Clinton's claim, and rated it half-true : Clinton was correct about wind energy being "cheaper than nuclear right now," at least the onshore kind. But for now, nuclear beats the cheapest form of solar energy on price. So we rate his statement Half True. That claim didn't sit well with NEI's David Bradish, who pulled apart the numbers and suggested that Politifact change its rating from "half true" to ...

One of the things that struck me when reading about the bankruptcy of Solyndra and its implication for the federal loan guarantee program is that it seemed so small bore – beyond the entertainment value of any “scandal-worthy” elements attached to it – because it “only” realized the risks associated with the loan guarantee program. That doesn’t impact the social value of loan guarantees as a mechanism for promoting a desirable energy policy. Now, I’m not saying risk is nothing – and Solyndra’s bankruptcy is worth an investigation – but everyone knows that no business is a sure thing.  But, of course, Solyndra didn’t make nuclear facilities, so it was interesting here only insofar as its downfall might impact upon the loan guarantee program. Still - Solyndra had a use as Exhibit A for the argument that solar energy is always a bad investment, but that’s transparently false, so there’s nowhere really to go with that line of attack. It has also been used as an argument agains...

This MIT Technology Review article is good but gets off on the wrong foot: Politicians are drawing parallels between the $535 million federal loan guarantee issued to bankrupt solar manufacturer Solyndra and loan guarantees that the U.S. Department of Energy is offering to utilities building new nuclear power plants. But while those nuclear startups could also go bust, experts say U.S. taxpayers are unlikely to take a loss on them. That's because the only reactor projects moving forward are those in a handful of southern states, where laws allow utilities to offload the risk onto state ratepayers. Offload the risk? All the risk of any large electricity project redounds to the ratepayers – because they pay the bills. What those southern companies are doing is using a method that pays for plant construction as it goes along – which means less money borrowed from banks or paid back to banks – and thus less interest charges for ratepayers to eventually absorb. Here’s how So...

IEEE has published a very strong account of the first 24 hours at Fukushima following the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Japanese plant. Almost novelistic in depth, it is long and impossible to extract – well, not impossible, I just don’t want to. Read the whole thing here . Terrific job by Elizabeth Strickland. We’ll be seeing some official timelines on the accident before the end of the year – consider this a considerably fleshed out coming attractions trailer. --- The folks at IEEE have also put up an interesting if slightly misleading chart called Fukushima Daiichi’s Messy Future. It aims to show how the cleanup will go at the stricken Japanese plant at the 1 year, 10 year and 100 year marks. The misleading part is that setting the future at 10 and 100 years doesn’t really indicate when the cleanup or disposition of various components – reactor buildings, reactor cores, etc. – will be finished, only that they will be finished by then. Maybe this is fair enough ...

CBS News finds a new hook for their look at nuclear energy: Temperatures began going down Sunday in the eastern half of the country, dropping from last week's record triple-digits and easing a heat wave blamed for at least 34 deaths. Boy, it didn’t feel that way from here, but okay. In any event, the question of where to get more electricity as everyone switches on their air conditioners becomes crystal clear. Demand was said to be ten percent higher than the average for July, and with demand only growing, going nuclear is getting another look. The story doesn’t really get into why this should be so and tries to be even handed, not always to its benefit, but it makes a strong point: that if demand for more electricity increases – and it will – then nuclear energy is an excellent way to feed that demand. --- The Wall Street Journal talks to Sharp Corp. President Mikio Katayama: WSJ: Is it necessary for Japan to gradually move away from nuclear power? ...

This is the kind of editorial that pops up more frequently, from the Lexington Herald-Leader (actually, an op-ed in this case): Should Kentucky reconsider nuclear power, which now provides 20 percent of this nation's electricity? Maybe so. We're in no position to ignore any source of energy. But Japan's disaster reminds us nuclear power is an imperfect, unforgiving technology that can be dangerous and costly. And Kentucky, of course, provides a fairly good case study when one is of a mixed mind: Coal provides half the nation's power and more than 90 percent of Kentucky's power. Electricity has been cheap in this state, because many of the health and environmental costs of mining and burning coal have been ignored. That is changing, because it must. We’re not completely sure about “must,” but let’s hear out the argument: We must invest in research and technology to mine, drill and burn coal and oil more cleanly and efficiently. We must incorpor...

What about electric cars ? Plans in Europe call for about 1 million EVs on the road by 2020, and a lot that push centers around increasing the number of nuclear power plants to feed these vehicles. Let's face it, an EV that's charged via electricity generated at an oil or coal-burning plant doesn't do much to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels, so nuclear makes a lot of sense. And as costly and time-consuming as it is to erect a nuclear facility, it's likely easier and less expensive than relying on solar, wind or hydro-electric energy sources. So what does all this have to do with electric vehicles? If the events unfolding in Japan lead governments to question the safety and viability of nuclear power, then new plants will be slow to come online. If car buyers know that their EV is likely burning the same CO2-emitting fossil fuels as their neighbor's internal combustion engine, what's the point of paying more for something that's just as dirty,...

Well, President Jimmy Carter was one. His panels were taken down by his successor, ronald Reagan, and ended up at Unity college in Maine. An environmental activist, Bill McKibben, decided to take them back to the White House last month to see if the current occupant, Barack Obama, might reinstall them. But he had a problem: As McKibben's party made its way from Maine to Washington, D.C., they had just one "nagging concern": They hadn't heard any confirmation from the White House that Obama would see them. But this has kind of a soft human interest angle, so why not? In the end, McKibben and company did end up with a meeting, with two unnamed "environmental bureaucrats," but the Carter panel and the Sungevity donation were refused. Sungevity was going to donate a “full solar system” – I’m not sure what that means – a system capable of running the entire White House? In any event, no go. The response? Not too good: The Obama administr...