What a "Green New Deal" Should Include -- But Probably Wouldn't

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's revival of the idea of a "Green New Deal" in recent weeks seems to be getting a little traction, at least among the Washington press corp. It's difficult to say whether it is a good or a bad idea because, like the Paris Accords, it is big on atmosphere and light on specifics.

In general, the idea of a Green New Deal is for an economic stimulus package that accelerates our transition to a more ecologically sustainable society. One might build solar panels and windmills, aggressively retrofit current buildings for greater energy efficiency, or build a network of public charging stations for electric vehicles.

In general, anything that spends money (excuse me "creates jobs") and is environmentally friendly could be considered a potential candidate for inclusion in a "Green New Deal." I am quite skeptical that any such plan, even if it could be articulated and passed into law, would contain the elements that could make a real dent in anthropogenic global warming, water scarcity, habitat loss, or any of our other serious environmental problems.

Most obviously, in the midst of a record-breaking period of economic expansion, with unemployment under 4%, a financial stimulus is hardly what we need at the moment. Rather, this would be an excellent time to make some of the difficult structural changes -- such as a carbon tax, banning the burning of coal, sunsetting federal flood insurance -- that might be impossible politically to undertake during an economic downturn.

But staying with the premise -- spending, not taxing, new programs, not legal or regulatory changes -- there are still many good investments we could make.

Here are ten things that should, but most likely will not, be included in any serious "Green New Deal":

1. A nuclear build-out on federal lands.

A single nuclear complex can incorporate as many as eight reactors, while modern reactor designs generate over a gigawatt of electricity (1.1GW, in the case of the AP1000.)

Twenty such complexes, build on federal lands to minimize commercial and regulatory hurdles, would generate enough electricity to replace every coal-fired plant in the United States, with all the oil, wood, and biomass thrown in. TWENTY. With the waste able to be stored indefinitely at the site itself. Forty could replace every fossil fuel plant in America.

The major obstacles to a nuclear build-out -- something we critically need if we are to have our emissions peak any time in the next few decades -- are NIMBYism and the business case. The federal government building on federal land would be in a better position than a local utility to resist NIMBYism. With the benefit of #4 (see below) the plants need not be located anywhere near where the electricity is being consumed.

And while nuclear can get rather expensive (although dirt cheap in comparison with the ultimate cost of burning fossil fuels) an order for 160-320 identical Westinghouse AP1000s should allow for some economics of scale -- a "mass produced" unit in contradistinction to today's "artisanal" nuclear power designs.

2. Build desalinization plants.

The optimal method of freeing up water resources would be leaning on farmers -- who use 80% of the water -- to adopt more water-efficient methods. But that has proven politically difficult and, for the purposes of this exercise, we aren't regulating. The brute-force solution to water scarcity is to simply make more of the stuff.

Desalinization costs less than half a penny per gallon and we could eliminate our entire consumption of "wild" freshwater (see also #9, below) -- giving our aquifers a much-needed opportunity to recharge -- for less than a billion dollars per year.

3. Electrification of the national rail network.

Currently diesel railroad engines emit between 30-40 million tons of CO2 per year. That can be eliminated via electrified rail, a hundred-year-old technology already well-established all over the world.

4. A high voltage direct current electrical network.

Current AC lines lose current rapidly, resulting in heavy losses over distances over a few hundred miles. A backbone of HVDC lines would make a real national power market possible with the ability to send electricity from any source, to any consumer, coast to coast.


5. Rail-based mass transit in America's 100 largest cities.

While electric cars are making inroads, they are still vastly inferior to mass transit in terms of CO2 emissions. Even when charged from a clean grid, the production of battery-powered vehicles makes their life-cycle emissions -- while far better than a fossil-fuel-burning vehicle -- far from insignificant.

What the cities which get a significant percentage of their people out of cars and into mass transit all share is some sort of fixed-track infrastructure -- a subway, an elevated rail, a light rail system. Each of the top five performers (see graphic) have such a system, while most of the low performers do not.

6. Coastal adaptation (hardening vs planned retreat) for the first 5m of sea level rise.

Does anyone remember when Hurricane Sandy hit New York, and during the approximately five minutes after in which we had a national conversation about the risks of climate change, and Lomborg came out and claimed hardening the coast would be much much cheaper than cutting emissions?

The numbers were wrong, the argument was a disgraceful mess, and to no one's surprise, once the heat died down deniers interest in actual, non-hypothetical adaptation vanished without a trace.

But the need is still there. The oceans are going to continue rising for centuries; that is about as close to an established fact as anything we can say about the future. And on past trends, we aren't going to abandon our economically and culturally central coastal cities. There's no time like the present to get in a Netherlands frame of mind.

7. Evacuated-air trains for long-distance travel.

American air travel is responsible for about 3% of our emissions -- a figure expected to double over the next 30 years. Americans drive 3.22 trillion miles per year, contributing to emissions from cars and trucks ten times those from aircraft.

One approach to this is fixing carbon from the atmosphere and using it to manufacture synthetic fossil fuels, including jet fuel. This is likely the best solution for international air travel. But domestically, a more ambitious solution would be high-speed ground transportation, using technologies with the potential to travel faster than airplanes without the cumbersome infrastructure of airports.

No one knows exactly what a system like that would cost, but at the price quoted for a proposed 560km hyperloop system ($7.5 billion) a nationwide system of 50,000km would cost around $700 billion. That's a lot of money (3.5% of the GDP) -- about what we spend annually on the military.

8. Retrofitting CCS on all remaining fossil fuel electricity generation.

We should not be burning fossil fuels to generate electricity at all, but the rules of this exercise forbid proposing regulations or Pigovian taxes. If, therefore, we must assume coal and gas plants will continue to exists, they must at a minimum capture their CO2 emissions and store them in a stable form.

9. Nationwide water network.

 Once we have abundant fresh water thanks to #1, we need a system to supply it to regions far from desalinization plants, via a system of pipelines.

Evacuated-air trains, a water network, a system of HVDC electric lines -- all of these require the same basic infrastructure layout: track/pipe/lines connecting our major cities (throw in an upgrade of our fiberoptic trunk lines, as well.)

This would require not only large amounts of money but also eminent domain along the course of the "pipes." It could be the Interstate Highway system of the 21st century.

10. Replacement of government-owned internal combustion engines (ICEs) with electric vehicles. 

The United States Post Office owns over 200,000 vehicles. The Border Patrol operates "over 10,000 SUVs and pick-up trucks." In total, the US government, excluding the military, owns or leases about a half a million fuel-burning vehicles. Virtually all of them could be replaced with electric vehicles. This wouldn't be cheap -- assigning a back-of-the-envelope cost of $100,000 per vehicle (an estimate that takes into account that in addition to cars the government owns many pickup trucks, semis, fire engines, and other potentially expensive vehicles) this might cost $50 billion. But it would powerfully demonstrate that the future is not in ICEs and would create the conditions not only for mass production of electric vehicles but for a massive expansion of fast-charging stations -- and a government purchasing such a fleet could chose the charging standard that would become the default.


None of these things are likely to happen any time soon, not simply because of the mismatch between what feels "green" to most people (solar panels, wind turbines, etc.) and things which, although they have great potential to protect the environment, do not (nuclear power, desalinization, an upgraded electrical grid.

There is also a related problem which extends beyond environmental issues -- thinking too small. Private enterprise can be a powerful force for good in human affairs, and efforts to replace it with tight government central planning have been disappointing. But where the government can add value is projects which are too big for any private actor to undertake. The interstate highway system, rural electrification, the postal service, K-12 public education -- these are success stories, both in the sense of generating wealth and in expanding opportunities. But by definition, that sort of thing isn't cheap.

But in recent decades, the right's crusade against "big government" has taken its toll, such that even on the left, small targeted anti-poverty, environmental, infrastructure programs are the rule, and large nation-shaping public investments are the exception.

There are many benefits to thinking small, but there are also things you will never accomplish with a $5 million grant for a needle exchange in LA or $10 million dollars for redevelopment grants in Minot, ND. The above proposals would cost trillions of dollars. But climate change is doing to cost us trillions and trillions of dollars one way or the other, whether we mitigate it or adaptive preemptively or just wait for the hammer-blows of crisis to fall.

EnviroNews's Nuclear Nonsense

India has embarked on the construction of a mammoth 9.9GW nuclear complex, but not everyone is happy. Opining that "Dangerous Coastal Jaitapur Nuclear Power Mega-Plant Should Be Stopped," EnviroNews gifts us with this gem of misinformation:

This is wildly inaccurate. The estimate cost of this plant is $17 billion (of course we have to worry about cost overruns, but the author specifically claims this is true "No matter what the final cost ends up being.") The electricity it can be expected to generate, at a typical-for-nuclear capacity factor of 0.9, is 78 TWh/year. How much solar would it take (ignoring storage costs) to generate 78 TWh?

As it happens, India has recently constructed what is now the world's largest solar plant, a 648MW facility covering 10km^2, costing $679 million to build. At a capacity factor of 0.2, it will generate 1.1 TWh. You would need 71 of them, costing $48 billion, to generate the same amount of electricity.

But EnviroNews is not just angry about the cost, but the footprint. The cruel, cruel footprint:

2,400 acres sounds like quite a bit, and I in no way want to diminish the disruption and loss to those living on those lands. I can't speak to whether this was debated and agreed upon in a democratic way; India has a bad history of pushing people out of the way of its mega-projects, and not providing the compensation promised.

What I can speak to is the incredible hypocrisy of complaining about the footprint of nuclear power. That 2,400 acres? It's 10km^2. Haven't we seen 10km^2 in this post already? That's right, just one of the 71 solar plants required to replace this nuclear plant takes up that much room. If you replace these nuclear reactors with solar panels, a lot more people are going to be displaced.

There are other important factors not considered here, such as the 60-year operational lifespan of this design vs about 20-25 years for current solar designs. Such as the intermittent output of solar panels, requiring solar be held to a small share of the total electricity generated over a particular grid, or expensive storage be added.

I understand the people at EnviroNews are not pro-nuclear energy and are not likely to have a road-to-Damascus moment where they embrace it. But they could, at least, not completely cut loose from the facts whilst smearing it.

The reactor park is slated to engulf approximately 2,400 acres of land, and would destroy the encompassing villages of Varliwada, Niveli, Karel, Mithgavane and Madban. The government has offered to pay villagers for the land they will lose, but only 114 out of 2,375 families affected, have claimed any money — the rest have refused the compensation as an act of protest. - http://www.environews.tv/120716-editorial-construction-dangerous-coastal-jaitapur-nuclear-power-mega-plant-stopped/

- http://www.environews.tv/120716-editorial-construction-dangerous-coastal-jaitapur-nuclear-power-mega-plant-stopped/

Dangerous Coastal Jaitapur Nuclear Power Mega-Plant Should Be Stopped - http://www.environews.tv/120716-editorial-construction-dangerous-coastal-jaitapur-nuclear-power-mega-plant-stopped/

Construction of Dangerous Coastal Jaitapur Nuclear Power Mega-Plant Should Be Stopped - http://www.environews.tv/120716-editorial-construction-dangerous-coastal-jaitapur-nuclear-power-mega-plant-stopped/

We can do 100% renewables. But we probably shouldn't.

Source

 Peter Sinclair has a post up taunting "renewable haters" who are invited to be embarrassed that nuclear plants, under pressure from cheap natural gas, may require public money to stay in operation. Following hard on the heels of that, Exelon has announced the shuttering of the Clinton and Quad Cities nuclear plants, 3GW of near-zero carbon energy gone for want of $110 million in subsidy per year (which is the combined losses of the two plants in the current market.)

As an enthusiastic taunter of those I feel deserve it, I know the people Sinclair is talking about: people who position nuclear as the honest, work-a-day, practical solution, where as renewables are impractical fairy dust, a con sustained by massive public money. Which is ridiculous on all counts: nuclear energy has always required public support, with the government providing most of the R&D, permanent waste disposal at bargain prices (how's that coming, guys?), loan guarantees, even free insurance against the possibility of a meltdown. Meanwhile wind has reached 5% of US electricity production: sunny counties and regions, such as Jordan, are finding solar energy profitable without subsidies, as prices for modules continue to fall.

But the vices of nuclear advocates should not be confused with the virtues of nuclear energy. And just because we can build a 100% RE grid, does not mean we should.

Looking out into the world today, it is obviously imperative to get human civilization to net zero or net negative GHG emissions as soon as possible. Every year, every month that we don't pushes us further into the heart of a global disaster.

Renewables require careful load-balancing across large areas, storage, and dynamic demand management to begin to approach 100% of the energy supply. Contrawise, every 1% of baseload power you add makes the intermittent load easier to manage and cheaper overall. Science of Doom has a great post on the math here, and it's worth quoting his conclusion at some length:

What is the critical problem? Given that storage is extremely expensive, and given the intermittent nature of renewables with the worst week of low sun and low wind in a given region – how do you actually make it work? Because yes, there is a barrier to making a 100% renewable network operate reliably. It’s not technical, as such, not if you have infinite money..

It should be crystal clear that if you need 500GW of average supply to run the US you can’t just build 500GW of “nameplate” renewable capacity. And you can’t just build 500GW / capacity factor of renewable capacity (e.g. if we required 500GW just from wind we would build something like 1.2-1.5TW due to the 30-40% capacity factor of wind) and just add “affordable storage”.

So, there is no technical barrier to powering the entire US from a renewable grid with lots of storage. Probably $50TR will be enough for the storage. Or forget the storage and just build 10x the nameplate of wind farms and have a transmission grid of 500GW around the entire country. Probably the 5TW of wind farms will only cost $5TR and the redundant transmission grid will only cost $20TR – so that’s only $25TR.

Hopefully, the point is clear. It’s a different story from dispatchable conventional generation. Adding up the possible total energy from wind and solar is step 1 and that’s been done multiple times. The critical item, missing from many papers, is to actually analyze the demand and supply options with respect to a time series and find out what is missing. And find some sensible mix of generation and storage (and transmission, although that was not analyzed in this paper) that matches supply and demand.

What's more, baseload renewable sources such as geothermal, hydroelectric dams, and tidal power, all require large areas with appropriate geography (and geology) to be successful. Geothermal and tidal power are starting from an extremely small base, while hydroelectric dams (which have significant environmental costs of their own) are already close to their saturation point.

Compare the Exelon plants, Clinton and Quad Cities. Their combined capacity is 3GW, which at the industry-standard 0.9 capacity factor is roughly 24,000 MW-h per year. Those two plants, alone, produce more GWh of electricity than all the geothermal plants in the nation, combined. They produce more clean energy than all the utility solar plants in the nation, combined. That would be a bargain for a tiny subsidy of $100-150 million a year. It comes to about $0.05/kWh. We could subsidize our entire electrical grid to that extent and spend less than 2% of the GDP.

Nuclear energy is, by far, the largest source of low-carbon energy in the United States. Doubling or tripling our capacity could be done easily with the political will to do so. At a bare minimum, we should be maintaining the plants we have to the end of their useful life. Subsidies aren't a dirty word here. At least until we have a comprehensive carbon tax, all low-carbon energy will require subsidies or unfunded mandates, including wind and solar, especially once they reach a scale where their fluctuations necessitate storage.

Different countries and regions with different resources, relationships, and geography are going to need different mixes of sources to get to net zero. Ruling out either more RE or more nuclear seems irresponsible to me.

Radiation risks of the Fukushima nuclear accident, expressed as slices of bacon

If we must die . . .

Because I apparently enjoy banging my head against brick walls and similarly productive activities, I commonly place myself in the path of rampaging internet mobs, calling for humility, moderation, and tolerance (hypocrisy being one of my other defects of character.)

Nuclear energy in the United States is, by far, the largest single source of low-carbon energy. Nuclear energy production has been flat in the United States for the last ten years, even as the need for more low-carbon electricity has become screamingly apparent, partly because these plants tend to be expensive and can take a very long time to build, but in large part because these plants are very unpopular, due to fear of nuclear radiation.

Nuclear kWh -- flat as a day-old soda

Nuclear advocates don't always respond to these concerns in the best way. Besides pointing out that these risks are often overstated, a fair number of them foolishly try to deny that ionizing radiation from nuclear accidents or improperly stored waste could cause any harm at all, justifying that counterintuitive conclusion with misreadings of the epidemiological literature or with reference to pseudoscience like radiation hormesis.

The truth is that the cancer risk of low-level exposure is real, but very, very small. Since the cancer risk of red and processed meats are in the news -- sometimes being similarly exaggerated -- I wondered if one could express the risks of the Fukushima nuclear accident in terms of an equivalent number of slices of bacon.

Ten thousand people living close to the Fukushima plant, tested in this study, were exposed to as much as 1.07 mSv of internal radiation (one person) [1]. The average was less than that. They don't directly give the average or the means to calculate it in the paper, but judging by these graphs, and by the fact that two-thirds of adults had no detectable internal radiation exposure at all, we can estimate the average at less than 0.25 mSv. One mSv carries with it an additional risk of death from cancer of 0.005%.

Doctors and researchers are still trying to sort out the cancer risks, if any, from non-charred red meat. Processed meats, like bacon, are definitely associated with distal colon and rectal cancer. There may be other cancer risks, such as gastric cancer, but these are so small that scientists are still arguing about them. The only significant risk (other than that associated with excess calorie consumption, i.e., obesity and its diseases, and hypertension from excess sodium in susceptible individuals) is from colorectal cancer. Two slices of bacon per week carry with them a 47% increase in the risk of death from colorectal cancer, which in Americans is 15.5/100,000 = 0.0155% risk of death.

0.0155% * 0.47 = 0.007285%

But this is meat consumption over the long term, so we will give our hypothetical colon cancer victim 30 good years of bacon consumption before succumbing -- 0.007285/(30 * 52) = 0.00000466987% excess risk of death from colon cancer per serving. 1 mSv is approximately 0.005%, so 0.00005/
0.0000000466987 = 1070 slices of bacon.

One civilian in the "hot zone" at Fukushima was subjected to an excess cancer risk comparable to three slices of bacon with breakfast daily for a year. The average exposure in the hot zone was on the order of two slices daily for four months.

I suggest slices of bacon as a new standard method of describing radiation risks from nuclear energy. Real, but small. 

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1. External exposure is more variable and harder to measure, but this study found 2/3 of external exposures were less than 1 mSv, and 98% were less than 10 mSv. 10 mSv is a good bit of bacon -- 3 slices a day for ten years -- but still less than a single abdominal CT. 98%, again, were below that, and 2/3 were less than a tenth of that.

Wherein I settle the renewables/nuclear "are expensive" squabble for all time

Lizard (2014) (h/t wikipedia)

The US consumes approximately 4 billion MWh per year. Our GDP is currently about $18 trillion. So if you pay $50/MWh (good wind, unfiltered coal, unfiltered gas) your cost for that is $200 billion annually, or 1.1% of the GDP.

If you pay $100/MWh (nuclear, solar) your cost is 2.2% of GDP.

If you pay $150/MWh (offshore wind, gas with CCS, rooftop solar) your cost is 3.3% of the GDP.

The cost of intermittency is pretty minor:

Apologies for smallness, original here. Bottom line: at a 30% level of penetration, you can add about $30/MWh to the cost of wind or solar, or about 0.7% of the GDP.

In other words, the costs of ALL of the alternatives under discussion are minor. We can do what we want to do. Very high levels of penetration of intermittent sources like wind or solar poses special problems, but we are a long way from having those problems today (1.)

Arguing whether nuclear is cheap or expensive, or what the costs of waste disposal will be, or what the cost is to back up wind or solar, or whether the costs of PV systems will continue to fall, misses the point entirely. We have multiple affordable low-carbon options, and the question is not which is best -- we will learn more about that as we build and operate the plants, and different sources will be optimal for different communities in different circumstances.

The point is that we need to do something, and we have both the technology and the resources to solve this aspect of the global warming problem in the next ten to twenty years. In many ways, this is the easy part -- the electrical grid (easier to green than transportation, land use, or industrial CO2 release) in the richest country in the world. The fact that it is so easy and yet we haven't done it yet underscores that it is political will, not technology or money, that are lacking.

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1. I am optimistic about synthetic fuels, as I explore here. To quote myself:

Conventional batteries continue to get better and cheaper, but right now their capacity is orders of magnitude below what would be needed to store, say two or three weeks of energy.

However we do have a large amount of energy storage in the form of fossil fuels: liquid, solid, and gas. This form of storage is stable on geological time scales and extremely energy dense. Unlike many of the alternatives, including chemical batteries, capicators, pumped hydro storage, or molten sodium, the infrastructure to store and release hydrocarbon energy is simple and cheap -- in the case of petroleum, it can be as simple as a barrel or a hole in the ground. . . .


Start with a conventional gas plant equipped with carbon capture technology (assuming we ever get serious about perfecting and deploying that technology.) Then, rather than put the CO2 in the ground, feed it into a synthetic natural gas plant and use a clean energy source to turn the CO2 back into gas. Burn, capture, and un-burn as needed in a closed cycle that doesn't release CO2 into the atmosphere.

Regardless of how cleverly we deploy storage and smart grids, we will meet our emissions goal much faster with nuclear than without it, which is why I remain a strong supporter of retaining and building out the nuclear power sector, despite the irritating epistemic closure on the value of renewables and general hippie-punching tendencies of nuclear power's more fervent advocates.

Is nuclear energy expensive?

Spot the leader.

Robert Wilson doesn't think so:

But like it or not, offshore wind is now the only scalable form of renewable energy in Britain. Solar and onshore wind are not. This leaves us with three choices as far as low carbon electricity is concerned: nuclear, offshore wind and CCS. Nuclear is currently much cheaper than offshore wind, and this is not likely to change tomorrow. So, forget about calling nuclear expensive, and be more honest and say that de-carbonisation is expensive. If nuclear energy is expensive then it is time we lowered our expectations when it comes to climate change, because cheaper options are not staring us in the face.

 While Wilson's tone is more dismissive of renewable energy than I would be, I substantially agree with his point -- calling nuclear energy expensive whilst supporting heavy investments in wind, solar, and other non-hydro renewable energy often amounts to the pot calling the kettle black.

Getting our emissions down to 20% or 10% of present-day emissions is going to cost quite a bit of money. In the long run, that investment will pay off. Even in the short run, there are substantial benefits to be had in the form of improved air quality, better transportation networks, more efficient and reliable energy grids, and so on. But there is no getting around the fact that the cost will be several trillion dollars (which, it should be pointed out, is still a tiny share of the world's wealth.)

While renewable energy is getting cheaper, it is the worst kind of motivated reasoning to think that it will continue getting cheaper indefinitely along a linear trend. While intermittancy at high levels of renewable penetration is a problem that can certainly be overcome, fixes all involve additional investment and increased costs.

Smart government policies can make renewables cheaper -- by supporting research into new technologies, encouraging adoption on a wide scale, and by making changes to the utility model and the grid such as dynamic pricing which favor the development of more renewables.

Similarly, though, a smart set of policies could make nuclear energy much cheaper. Settling on a single standard design, providing a steady stream of orders for that design, and streamlining regulatory approval after the initial instances of that design, could bring costs down dramatically. Whether or not you think the US government was right to commit itself to the long-term storage of nuclear waste, it did make that commitment and ought to settle on a site and answer that question once and for all.

Whatever low-carbon energy sources are the most successful, we ought to resign ourselves to spending some serious cash up front. Hydrocarbons are a very efficient way to store energy, and I very much doubt if any alternative energy source in our lifetimes is going to be easier than just pumping the stuff out of the ground. Renewable energy advocates who decry the expense of nuclear energy are sharpening the sword that will be at their throats for the foreseeable future.

A scary graph

Source

Whether or not you think growth in nuclear power is a smart play -- I think, on balance, it is -- nuclear energy production declining in absolute terms is bad, bad, bad news. It's going to eviscerate efforts to cut CO2 emissions via RE. You are going to end up -- as Germany has -- substituting low carbon renewable energy for low carbon nuclear energy. Leaving fossil fuels dominating the energy mix for decades to come. No es bueno.

Chart from the Wikipedia

Source

So a few interesting things here that we maybe all know, but are worth reviewing. Fossil fuels are dominating the energy mix in every sense. They are the largest component of the energy mix, and they are growing the fastest. We would need between five and six times the amount of low-carbon energy currently in existence to phase out fossil fuels, assuming demand remained static. And demand is not going to remain static.

Renewables produce twice the energy provided by nuclear power plants. An inconvenient truth for climate-conscious white individualist hierarchist males who whilst crying up nuclear power delight in dismissing renewables as pie-in-the-sky hippie moondust, but the truth, nonetheless.

And the excuse that this is mostly hydropower, and hydropower can't be scaled up, won't wash here, because we can see renewable energy as a category is rapidly growing -- if only the hydro resources matter, where is the growth coming from?

When I look at the share of fossil fuels, though, and the tiny shares of its rivals, I'm reminded of how guerrila organizations like the IRA or Fatah and Hamas, faced with an overwhelmingly powerful and dominant force, turn on each other and their own people in sheer frustration, fighting over turf like rival gangs, murdering informants, acting like criminals.

It's stupid and self-destructive, but sometimes when you're tired of losing you ache for a fight you can win. For environmentalists, nuclear is an easy target, because it's unpopular, expensive, and people are just plain afraid of it. All things we wish could be said about fossil fuels. The environmental movement, aided by public mistrust and fear and lack of corporate investment, are within striking distance of shutting down an entire industry. It's just that it's the wrong one.

What the hippie-punching nuke-boosters want is a little more complex. I don't think it's really about the climate for them. They want to fight the cultural wars, bash greens, promote big and manly and heterosexual things -- but they are smart enough not to go down the road of denying the science.

And the beauty of it is, they don't have to! By lining up with James Hansen and other smart greens behind a policy of more clean nuclear energy, they have found the one part of the argument between environmentalists and conservatives that they can actually win. For once they have (a part of the) real solutions, and the other side is sticking their heads in the sand.

Meanwhile the first column keeps growing.

UPDATE:

 

 H/t blueshift, via the Rabett, from BP.

What this chart adds to our understanding is that, as far as the last decade is concerned, anti-nuclear environmentalists are winning the aforementioned pointless catfight. And what they have won is a total stagnation in the proportional of non-fossil-fuel energy. And make no mistake, the blue line is what history will judge us on.

"New" Indian nuclear plant illustrates what's right and wrong about nuclear power

The first unit of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is up and operating at full power, a mere 26 years after it was commissioned as part of a joint project by Indian and the Soviet Union. Big victory for the international trade and diplomacy of the Soviet Union! Hey, where'd they go?

So what is good about this? It is 1 GW of very low carbon energy. When the second unit is operating a full capacity (which is scheduled for May 2015, but so far the builders have not stuck to their schedule very well) it will provide 2 GW of power, with a carbon footprint comparable to wind or solar, but compared to a solar or wind energy project, a lot bigger.

The photo above is of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) in California’s Mojave Desert. It's currently the largest solar thermal project in the world. It generates 1,000 GW-h annually, compared to Kudankulam's roughly 17,000 GW-h.

If you care about environmental issues at all, you've probably hear of Ivanpah. You've probably never heard of Kudankulam, built in the poor, underdeveloped (but proud and growing) state of Tamil Nadu. Yet Kudankulam will generate -- is already generating -- amounts of low-carbon electricity that dwarf Ivanpah as well as almost any renewable project in the world.

So what's wrong with Kudankulam? They have been trying to build it for twenty-six years, and it's still half-finished. This has taken so long that one of the countries that agreed to build the plant no longer exists. It's been delayed by bitter anti-nuclear protests, by the collapse of the Soviet Union, by technical problems. In the time it took to build this one plant, the cost of solar PV cells fell by 90%:

Building nuclear plants is too damn slow (for a combination of human and technical reasons). And that means that innovation and the spread of new technologies is too damn slow. And that means that by the time we could slog through another quarter-century nuclear construction project, both the renewables industry and the climate will have moved greatly on. And that in a nutshell is the greatest problem for nuclear energy.

Nuclear reality check

The Economist muses over the impact of Fukshima and the nuclear big picture:

And if the blow is harder than the previous one, the recipient is less robust than it once was. In liberalised energy markets, building nuclear power plants is no longer a commercially feasible option: they are simply too expensive. Existing reactors can be run very profitably; their capacity can be upgraded and their lives extended. But forecast reductions in the capital costs of new reactors in America and Europe have failed to materialise and construction periods have lengthened. Nobody will now build one without some form of subsidy to finance it or a promise of a favourable deal for selling the electricity. And at the same time as the cost of new nuclear plants has become prohibitive in much of the world, worries about the dark side of nuclear power are resurgent, thanks to what is happening in Iran.

After reading Burton Richer's incredible "Beyond Smoke and Mirrors" (which I hope to formally review pretty soon) I had a rekindled enthusiasm for nuclear energy. The problems of disposal can be greatly mitigated by running fuel through plants twice, albeit at the cost of a greater threat of nuclear proliferation if the stuff goes wandering. The actual threat posed by plant malfunctions to human safety is minimal, far less than that of just the deaths caused by inhaling the smoke from burning oil or coal. Nuclear is readily scalable with many promising technologies on the horizon. But for those hoping for modular reactors or micro reactors or molten sodium reactors or thorium on a white horse, another article in the review points to an important problem, beyond a nervous public or heavy-handed regulation, a problem that I, for one, had failed to consider:

Such homogeneity in a 70-year-old high-technology enterprise is remarkable. Seven decades after the Wright brothers’ first flight there were warplanes that could travel at three times the speed of sound, rockets that could send men to the moon, airliner fleets that carried hundreds of thousands of passengers a day, helicopters that could land on top of skyscrapers. Include unmanned spacecraft, and there really were flights a billion times as long as the Wright brothers’ first and lasting for years. But aircraft were capable of diversity and evolution and could be developed cheaply by small teams of engineers. It is estimated that during the 1920s and 1930s some 100,000 types of aircraft were tried out.

Developing a nuclear reactor, on the other hand, has never been a matter for barnstorming experimentation, partly because of the risks and partly because of the links to the technologies of the bomb.

Wind and solar, not without their disadvantages compared to nuclear power and energy sources, have this great advantage; they are relatively safe and easy to tinker with. There are hundreds if not thousands of designs of solar panels and wind turbines, at every stage of development. You will never be able to build and test 100,000 different types of nuclear energy generation, not if your regulators were raving Randian paleolibertarians. If you don't like the shape of your wind turbine you can radically redesign it and throw it up in the wind and see what it does; will you ever be able to do that with a nuclear reactor? And if not, what can we reasonable expect in the coming decades except that renewable technology will continue to advance and nuclear will be (at best, if the public's fears can be allayed) a bridge technology on the way to a low-carbon future?

The lonely life of the pan-energist

Florida has good, not great solar potential

I like nuclear energy (the more so since reading Burton Richter's Beyond Smoke and Mirrors), and I like Brave New Climate and their relentless championing of nuclear energy.

When I read articles like "Solar Power in Florida," though, it makes me feel lonely. Because I do not have a power source to champion. I am not a wind-and-solar guy, nor am I with the nuclear-or-bust folks. As long as it doesn't spew carbon into the atmosphere, I really don't care what it is. This not-caring rests on several bedrock principles:

1. There really are no silver bullets to cut emissions and stop climate change. Everybody admits that, but not everybody really believes it. Whether or not you agree with the details of the wedge analysis, it's deeper truth is this: there is no single technology, strategy, or breakthrough that can cut carbon emissions by 80-90% from current levels while sustaining economic growth. But many hands make light work.

2. Nothing is more obvious in the world of energy than that different technologies thrive in different circumstances. Some places are really sunny; some enjoy a nice steady wind; some have plentiful water to cool a great big pile of fissionables. Some places are ideal for large, more efficient plants; some places are way off the grid and only need a smidge of power anyway. There are great geothermal sites in Iceland; there are mighty rivers coursing through the Northwest.

Wind energy potentials

Places like Japan have already picked the low-hanging fruit of efficiency; places like the Eastern United States have a giant source of "free energy" that they can tap any time they want to by choosing sensible measures (higher mileage standards, green building codes, etc.) to implement greater efficiency. 

Japan gets two-and-a-half times the economic output from a ton of CO2

Our energy present is messy; our energy future will be messy too. Often arguments about existing sources or promising future directions get caught up in what technology has the most promise, the greatest scalability, the cheapest implementation. But the reality of energy generation is that the answer to that question will not only depend on technological advances no one can accurately predict, but on who you are, where you are, and what kind of power you need at what times.

3. There is nothing in the political universe that is as important to me as action on climate change. Some people I respect want to yoke climate change to a more general shift in our politics towards greater equality, less consumerism, more respect for the environment and a smaller human footprint. I might agree with George Monibot that the general anti-progressive trend in politics is to be deplored. But that is not the argument. I am for a wedge solutions to climate change, not climate change as a wedge issue. This is about the survival of our civilization. Everything else is secondary. So I have no problem (well, I do have a problem, but I will accept) our remaining a selfish, consumer-driven, greedy and unequal society, to the extent that we can find a way to do that without shooting ourselves in the head. Give me plentiful no-carbon energy and I will happily waste it like a good American and defer the rest of the green agenda for another day. While we don't have that, we need to think about conserving energy and becoming more efficient, and I'm fine with that too. If the no-carbon energy kills birds or generates waste or floods valleys, then I'm for facing those consequences directly and incorporating them into the cost-benefit analysis, without trying to prove that one source is clearly superior and all the others are useless or repugnant. Which you would think would be the default position for everyone but, surprisingly, not so.

COMING SOON: How the hit piece on the potential of solar in Florida misled.

September 11th, ten years on: What the response to 9/11 can tell us about responding to climate change

I'm not going to link to a big picture of the towers burning, OK? We're all going to see enough of that today.

No one is going to hold up our response to 9/11 as a model of success. In retrospect, we ought to have spent more time pushing the Taliban to turn on Al Qaeda. We ought to have started and finished with ruthless intelligence work/assassination -- the thing that ultimately brought Bin Laden down. But it is a model of what we can do; the resources we command and the lengths to which we can go without sacrificing our first-world lifestyle.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us $2 trillion so far. (Operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya are a statistical flutter by comparison at this point.) We are on the hook for a total of $3 trillion when we include things like veteran's benefits, healthcare, replacing gear and evacuating the two countries.

We did all that without throwing away our smartphones, doing our washing by hand, or living in tents. What would $3 trillion get us in climate mitigation? 

The cost of new nuclear capacity is somewhere between $2,100/kW -- $5,000/kW, depending on the particular project. In 2007 (per wikipedia) the total installed electricity generation capacity in the United States was 1,088 Gigawatts, 20% of which was already nuclear power,  and of which the fossil fuel contribution was 857 GW (1 GW = 10^6 kW). So with a middle-of the road $3,500/kW, replacing the entire fossil fuel base with nuclear power would cost $2.66 trillion. We'd have some money left over for more wind and solar capacity to beef up the grid for our electric cars.

In the real world, we wouldn't go all-in on power generation; we'd get the most bang for our buck by attacking on a number of fronts. We could expand weatherization programs from low-income homeowners to all homeowners, and commercial businesses too (heating and cooling buildings represents about a third of our electricity consumption). We could upgrade our power grid to minimize transmission losses (6% of generated electricity is lost in transmission).

We don't have to spend trillions to get these improvements. A reasonable carbon tax will lead industry and consumers to make these changes on their own dime. But we could. In the last ten years we spent trillions in the service of the "1% doctrine" -- the notion that any chance of an attack on our soil like 9/11 justified massive efforts at prevention. With global warming, the same people who sold us the 1% doctrine on weapons of mass destruction are now advocating the opposite approach to climate change -- that until we are greater than 99% certain of disaster, until the 1% of doubt, not about climate change, but about the scale of the destruction -- is removed, we should not act to prevent it.

And this cynical doctrine is promoted with horror stories of green extremists forcing us back to the living standards of the 17th century to halt climate change. But it is 21st century technology, not Ludditism, that is the backbone of mitigation strategies. Yes, it's going to cost some money. But keep that in perspective. Most of my readers are Americans. You and I have spent $2 trillion in the last decade on the threat of terrorism. Do you see lamplighters and horse-drawn carriages in the streets? No? Then maybe we should take the fearmongering of do-nothings with a grain of salt.