This hourly diagram of electricity production and emissions for eleven European countries over the course of 2023 is honestly fascinating.
The lowest emissions, unsurprisingly, are found in Norway (hydro), Sweden and Switzerland (hydro plus nuclear, although Switzerland has yet to abandon its “nuclear phase-out” policy), and France (nuclear). The highest are in Poland, which burns coal very heavily. And Germany varies wildly.
But we can also see, for instance, that Poland has a very narrow range in its production of electricity. So does Denmark, perhaps suprisingly ― although, contrary to what you might expect, Denmark is not among the top 10 countries in the world by share of wind power, according to OECD-IEA. We can guess that Norway’s very broad range of output variation reflects the use of its hydro plants to follow the variations in the Danish load.
Belgian output is also in a fairly narrow band, and we can likewise guess that a part of the large variation in French output is to compensate for that. German output, on the other hand, is all over the map because of variations in supply, not correlated with load.
The fossil fuel industry has a huge voice in this year's climate talks. But what are oil companies actually saying? And why does it matter?
I had to send a comment in response to this piece.
Listening to this segment, I was dismayed to hear no mention of the energy source which the IPCC ranks as having the lowest life-cycle global warming potential, an energy source which supplies approximately twice the fraction of world energy that wind and solar do, an energy source which is already affordable and reliable. I mean, of course, nuclear fission.
It’s all very well to say that wind and solar have fallen in price, and can be made reliable with batteries and upgraded power grids, but in most places that have tried it, the price of power has soared, and there has been very little decarbonization achieved. And that is the key consideration : a climate policy which costs too much or causes too much hardship to implement, won't be implemented. So we see that Germany, despite vast investments in wind and solar, has this past month reactivated a three-gigawatt coal-fired power station. French energy-sector greenhouse-gas emissions are half those of Germany, and electricity prices in France are about half what they are in Germany, too.
Nuclear energy is such an effective competitor to fossil fuels that, in the 1970s, companies such as Gulf Oil and Exxon invested heavily in nuclear technology, in order not to be left behind. Considering how fragile power grids are across much of the USA, it’s important that nuclear power plants can be located near the cities they serve, reducing the need for (and cost of) grid upgrades. With “breeder” reactors, like the one which generated the first nuclear electricity back in 1951, the uranium and thorium already mined can provide more energy than all the fossil fuels that can ever be extracted. And, to bring us back to the subject of COP28, the UAE (which has three big power reactors in operation now, and one more under construction) and 21 other countries, including the USA, have just pledged to triple nuclear power by 2050. It’s not enough, but it looks more like real progress than any number of vague “net zero” pledges.
People are hardly accustomed to hearing about nuclear, and what they do hear tends to be negative. That doesn’t reflect the reality at all. And it’s that reality that we need to talk about.
Physicist Anders Carlsson, at Washington University in St. Louis, and Sid Redner of the Santa Fe Institute have created a new mathematical model to describe the most reliable, efficient and cost-effective way to harness solar power.
It’s always important to read to the end of an article!
Carlsson said the math of renewable energy points to another important lesson: The search for perfection might be counterproductive. A hypothetical system that runs exclusively on renewable solar and wind power would be significantly more expensive than a renewable system that used small amounts of natural gas as a backup, he said.
He estimated that, with current technology, a 100% renewable system that powered St. Louis could cost $130,000 per household. A system that was 95% or 99% renewable, however, could be in the range of $80,000 to $90,000.
“Extremely highly renewable systems are very expensive,” Carlsson said. “If we can get to 99% renewable in 10 years, versus 100% renewable in 30 years, we'd better figure out how to get to that 99%.”
What does the actual paper say?
For an annual failure rate of less than 3%, it is sufficient to have a solar generation capacity that slightly exceeds the daily electrical load at the winter solstice, together with a few days of storage.
The definition of “annual failure rate” appears to be the chance that, in a given year, a day will come, on or about the winter solstice (when insolation is least), that the storage will be exhausted and power demand cannot be met. This does not necessarily imply 263 hours of blackout in an average year, which would indeed be poor value for money!
There are two glaring flaws in the analysis. The first, which mostly affects price calculations, is that only the present–day electrical demand is considered. No allowance is made for the likely doubling or tripling of system loads as a result of promoting electric cars, electrification of home heat, and so on. The second, which appears to completely invalidate the analysis, is that, while great effort is made to simulate the variation of solar energy input, no allowance whatever is made for variation of system load, which is assumed to be a constant 4·6 GW, all day long, all year round.
The paper quotes the cost of a solar installation “just sufficient to supply the daily electrical load of the St. Louis region during an average insolation day at the winter solstice” at $75 billion (covering a land area of 16×16 km, out of the 270×270 considered as the “region”), and the cost of storage for one day worth of load at $22 billion. The minimum–cost result of their simulation calls for about 1·2× the minimum solar installation, and 2 days of storage, for a total of about $134 billion.
Let us consider the alternative that is not mentioned. A 100% nuclear energy system is commonly assumed to be far too expensive. Three EPRs, generating 4·9 GW continuously (excepting refueling outages, once every 18 months per reactor or 6 months for the plant, which can usually be scheduled during periods of low demand), at the price of Hinkley Point C, would be about $60 billion. Four AP–1000s, generating 4·5 GW, would be something like $60 billion at the price of Vogtle 3&4. And three Korean APR–1400 units, generating 4·0 GW, would be about $18 billion at the price of Barakah. These figures should give us some kind of basis to work from.
For this price, even at the exceptionally high prices of Hinkley Point C and Vogtle 3&4, we could buy some 10 GW of nuclear generation, which would be adequate to meet, under virtually any conditions, a system load of twice the average. At Barakah prices, 30 GW could be had, which would be more than adequate to handle any foreseeable load escalation.
The above calculation does not even consider the possible use of nuclear heat. Nor does it account for the cost differences due to lifespan of facilities ― storage batteries will probably need replacement in 6 to 10 years, PV panels in 12 to 20, and nuclear steam plants in 40 to 60 years (with major refurbishment after 20 to 30 years).
We are often told that wind, solar, and storage are cheaper than nuclear, but this hardly seems to be the case. We are also often told that they are constantly coming down in price, so that even if they aren’t cheaper this year, they will be next year, and there is no reason to make investments in nuclear. We wonder. People in the industry seem to think that even Barakah costs are much above those possible, given the kind of learning and replication involved with the kind of large global commitment which a real effort at decarbonization would require.
Infrastructure bill includes $8bn to develop ‘clean hydrogen’ but study found large emissions from production of ‘blue’ hydrogen
The plan here was clearly devised by the “Underwear Gnomes” from the cartoon South Park.
Extract fossil fuels from the ground
Convert fossil fuel to a mixture of hydrogen and carbon dioxide
???
Decarbonization!
Can hydrogen derived from fossil fuels ever be less carbon-intensive, as an energy carrier, than the fossil fuels themselves? Surprisingly, yes. If the conversion of hydrocarbon to hydrogen is done by steam reforming, and the energy used to make the steam is supplied from fission, then you can (depending on losses in processing and transport) get more energy from burning the product hydrogen than by simply burning the fossil fuel.
The water reactors which dominate nuclear power today cannot produce steam at the required temperatures, about 800 °C. High-temperature, helium-cooled reactors, such as Fort St Vrain or THTR (Hamm-Uentropp), can, but so far they have not been commercialized.
There is a lot of enthusiasm here, and and a media presenter who seems willing to learn, which is (alas!) far from always being guaranteed. We hope that the public response is rewarding and encouraging.
We are also reminded of the following, from the Cross Section column by “Gracchus” in Nuclear Power magazine, 1958 April.
Like aviation and radio before it, atomic energy has frequently been blamed for various meteorological anomalies and I well remember a ghastly holiday in Brittany some years ago when conversations on the appalling weather invariably ended with a shrugged ‘c’est la bombe atomique’. This question of whether atomic energy has affected climate has never, I think, been satisfactorily resolved but I have just been hearing a pretty powerful argument for the possibility that it might be affected in the future — although only in a minor way. For many years industrialized countries have been belching forth millions of tons of carbon dioxide as a product from the combustion of oil and coal. This gas absorbs strongly in the infra–red and thus the atmosphere becomes heated from terrestrial radiation. Apparently mean temperatures over inhabited areas of the world have increased by about 2 degrees over the last century and it is claimed that it is the carbon dioxide pollution that has done it. In the long run, as atomic energy takes over from coal and oil this source of carbon dioxide will disappear and the temperature will tend to return to its former value. This will however be an imperceptibly slow process and one in which we need take little subjective interest, I feel.
Small modular reactors, long touted as the future of nuclear energy, will actually generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear
It’s difficult to understand why anyone would ever say that small nuclear reactors would lead to the production of less waste, and yet we have seen the claim made, repeatedly. For a given reactor type, the smaller the core, the greater the loss of neutrons by leakage. This means that the initial fuel charge must have a greater proportion of fissile material, and less of it is consumed before the operating reactivity margin falls too low and it must be replaced.
This study, however, doesn’t make a great deal of sense. The authors concentrate on two factors which are both probably irrelevant. The first is neutron activation of steel — specifically the steel of the reactor pressure vessel. The first reason that this is surprising is that the main constitutents of steel, iron and carbon, do not generally become transformed into radioactive isotopes by interaction with neutrons, and especially not long-lived, energetic radioisotopes. About the only substance commonly found in steel that does become so activated is cobalt, and so that element is typically excluded from reactor construction. (There is also some possibility of neutron absorption in molybdenum to form technetium.) Since the half-life of cobalt-60 is less than 6 years, irradiated stainless steels and other nickel alloys containing traces of cobalt can, if necessary, be held for 60 years for the activity to decay, before being mixed with other scrap steel.
Now, neutron collisions move atoms out of their places in the crystal lattice of a solid material. This happens much more often than the absorption of neutrons to create new (and sometimes radioactive) nuclei. As a result, inside the typical reactor pressure vessel you will find something called a “thermal shield”. This is a steel liner, which is under no structural load, so that changes in its mechanical properties as a result of such displacements, known as “neutron embrittlement”, don’t hurt anything. In other words, its whole function is to stop neutrons from getting to the pressure vessel (which is frequently lined with stainless steel, which in turn may contain traces of cobalt). And since this thermal shield is constructed of materials which do not become strongly and long-lastingly radioactive under neutron bombardment, it can be treated as normal scrap steel after a moderate cooling-off period.
The second factor they consider is radiotoxicity of plutonium in the fuel wastes. This, it seems to us, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the small reactor. The large nuclear power reactor is very economical in meeting the energy needs of large cities. In the absence of anti-nuclear political pressure, the demand for such reactors tends to be strong. While there are many potential applications for small reactors, relatively few of them are so economically or technically compelling that they are likely to be pursued, absent a strong commitment to shifting the overall energy supply towards fission.
A heavily-nuclear energy economy requires a closed, regenerative nuclear fuel cycle. In other words, small reactors are not likely to account for more than a very small amount of the nuclear fuel consumed (and thus the fuel waste produced) unless discharged fuel is going to reprocessing plants and into breeder reactors, not to geological repositories for disposal. Therefore the question of “disposing of plutonium” from such small reactors is probably irrelevant.
Hydro-Québec has confirmed it is assessing the current state of the plant which closed in 2012, as it looks at options to increase its produ
Now this is big news.
A decade ago, Hydro-Québec’s one nuclear unit was approaching 30 years old, and the utility was gearing up to perform major maintenance so that it could continue for another 30. (This type of maintenance has just been finished at Bruce 6.) The government of the day chose instead to shut down the station, even though well over a billion dollars had already been spent toward the refurbishment, including procurement of major components.
Today, it appears that the Provincial Government is beginning to acknowledge that plans for electrification of heat and transport will overtax its available generation ― especially as Québec is supposed to be furnishing power to distant New York City, to make up for the politically-motivated loss of 2 GW of nuclear at Indian Point.
(Gentilly-1 was a prototype CANDU variant cooled by boiling light water, generating power on a direct steam cycle. It never worked satisfactorily.)
While the goal of achieving net zero by 2050 is a worthy objective, the financial, environmental, and societal costs associated with it are
Here we see the expected outcome.
It is certainly true, when we consider the many and varied purposes for which people want and need energy, that energy supplies must be both reliable and cheap.
It is also very likely that the costs of securing a reliable energy supply, based primarily on wind and solar electricity, are beyond what the world can afford ― not only economically, but environmentally, considering the large quantities of exotic raw materials required.
What is categorically not true is that these are the only options.
The fissioning atom provides heat, which can be handled by ordinary steam-engineering techniques, using ordinary and plentiful engineering materials everywhere except in the very core of the reactor itself. It is fully capable of taking up most of the roles now filled by the combustion of fossil fuels, so that applications requiring exotic technique and material can be reduced to a tolerable scale.
The insistence on wind and solar as the only acceptable “clean energy”, and on electrification of heat applications which can be served from a multi-purpose thermal central station, only serves to prolong the dominance of the fossil fuels, and to frustrate the project of decarbonization.
