Dick Sblog

6 responses so far ↓

• 1    Rod Adams // Nov 19, 2008 at 2:51 am

  Uranium is not a fossil fuel – it is a natural occurring metal whose abundance in the earth’s crust is about the same as tin. An amazingly small amount of the material is needed – a pound of uranium contains as much energy as two million pounds of oil.

  Great Britain may not have any uranium mines, but it has a large stockpile of uranium purchased over the years and easily stored. Again – it is extremely compact and does not need much room.

  If you are not currently turning out enough engineers, why not simply train more. It is an honorable profession for creative people, far better than encouraging too many math whizzes to go into creative finance.

  The ExternE study disputed your claim of a ten year payback. I seem to recall a period that was closer to one year, including all of the energy in the concrete, steel and lead associated with building the plant.

  Rod Adams
  Publisher, Atomic Insights

• 2    dickwillis // Nov 19, 2008 at 1:02 pm

  Thanks for the comment Rod, nice to have confirmation that someone reads this stuff!

  I fully accept your point about Uranium not being a fossil fuel, I was just lazy when quoting and I should have added a comment of my own pointing out that a better description would have been that it’s a fuel source with finite reserves. Of course, that leads to the pont that the UK has reserves, as you point out, and to the option of reprocessing waste to produce stuff for a subsequent fuel cycle. On the former, I’m sure we have reserves, but they are still finite and with the resurgence of civil nuclear power demand will grow globally (both for U as a fuel and engineering skills to build and manage). On the latter point, we don’t really want to talk about the unmitigaged disaster that was Thorp, do we?

  U storage may not require much ‘room’ although this is a pretty wierd concept to apply in my opinion. What it will require, along with the increasing amounts of ‘room’ required by radioactive waste, will be technical expertise. As I noted, we don’t have enough of this in the UK and, as you’ll be aware, there’s a global shortage of folk with the required expertise in design, construction and management of such facilities. To say that we should ’simply train more’ is to provide a glib response to a serious and highly complex problem, certainly in the UK where engineering doesn’t have the status that it deserves.

  There are other issues of course which you gloss over. The location of plant on land that is prone to flooding and at risk from [now inevitable ] sea level rise. The real risk of epidemics that might further reduce the number of individuals with technical expertise to manage live facilities and long-term dangerous waste storage. The significant risks provided by the proliferation of transport, use and storage of radioactive materials around the world, providing increasing targets for terrorists and, as a result, the need for States to impose ever more unpleasant security regimes. These might sound trite but these issues need to fit into a disaster planning scenario just as much as the risk of power failure.

  I can’t disupute your figure of the ExternE study vs Lewis Lesley’s assertion of a 10 year period. I don’t have access to the science on which either is based. The issue for me is less about the absolute time, which will always be subject to disupte, and more about challenging the popular assertion that nuclear is carbon-free: it isn’t.

  There’s also my point, which you don’t address, that the substantial value of new plant build and maintenance will not go to UK business but to the overseas owners of the companies that have the capability to build a new round of nuclear stations. And that, in comparison, with a major programme of investment in demand reduction will employ a much lower number of more highly skilled individuals (also often from overseas).

  Finally there’s the issue that Lewis Lesley highlightedm that the nuclear industry absorbs a huge amount of tax-payers’ money. Had this money been spent on reducing demand, in parallel with the investment necessary to develop more sustainable and often more localised generation capacity, our overall requirement for energy could have been (and still could be) substantially reduced. I don’t know where you’re based but the UK Government (in all its shades) has hardly been a paragon of virtue in planning this issue over the last 40 years and I would suggest that this has largely resulted from the DTI being dominated by people who are entranced (I’m being generous here in my description of their motives) by the prospect the nuclear appears to offer of clean, endless and cheap energy at the expense of almost all alternatives.

• 3    Rod Adams // Nov 20, 2008 at 9:03 am

  dickwillis:

  I like reading and getting into discussions with thoughtful people. Thank you for the effort to put up the original post and the response.

  Though nuclear is not “carbon free” as currently structured, its life cycle emissions have been reliably computed in several studies to be approximately equal to that of wind turbines. Even that computation includes a couple of key contributing components that could be easily reduced – the method of enrichment used for the study is not as energy efficient as that used in new enrichment plants, and the electricity used for the manufacturing input is assumed to be “average” in it dependence on coal and natural gas. If the electricity is produced like it is in France, that carbon component drops significantly. For wind, the majority of the fossil input is in transportation and construction vehicles, which is hard to move away from fossil fuel.

  Though many of the plant components for new plants may initially come from overseas, there are a number of British firms that are fully capable of expanding their existing production of steel vessels, pumps, valves, control systems, and other components that will be needed. There is also a very large component of nuclear plant costs that are typical construction costs like concrete, rebar weaving, crane operations, site preparation, and building construction. Those will all be local as will the operations and maintenance staffs.

  I fully expect that any company building new nuclear plants in the UK will develop a substantial presence in your country and will use that presence as a base from which to build an export industry. That is especially true for any German based company since that country has such a strange desire to become dependent on Russian gas.

  The reason that size of the waste is important is that it is much easier to build good containers for small amounts of material. When was the last time that you spent much time worrying that a terrorist would gain power by stealing a large amount of gold from a vault?

  I am surprised that a guy with an education focused blog would call my assertion that people can be trained “glib”. Education is certainly not easy work, but it is valuable and doable. Maybe in our current financial situation, the “best and the brightest” will give engineering the respect that it deserves. After all, making real things that actually serve people’s needs is quite a bit more satisfying than moving around other people’s money and taking a slice with every move.

  Finally, I would submit to you that there are far more people in your planning agencies that have been “entranced” with the profits made from the dash to gas than excited about the future prospects of new nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is very threatening to the fossil fuel industry – it has proven to be a very reliable replacement in many markets that fossil can no longer dominate.

  Rod Adams
  Publisher, Atomic Insights
  (Annapolis, MD, USA)

• 4    dickwillis // Nov 21, 2008 at 7:22 pm

  Hi Rod

  I fully accept that a large chunk of spend on any new construction programme will take place here in the UK. However, I also appreciate that a sizeable chunk will flow out of the UK to the country in which the prime contractor is based. I’d rather keep it here and use it for lower skill, proven technologies that will employ more people from a wider selection of the population with a longer term impact on reducing energy demand.

  Your comment about the life-cycle emission of a nuclear plant being the equivalent to that of wind turbines is interesting – how many wind turbines, what size, what location etc etc? This statement seems more than a bit vague to me. Also, what’s considered to be the life-cycle? Unfortunately the industry has suffered badly from a lack of past transparency and apparently cooked books – calculations based on ‘life-cycle’ costs all too often turn out to exclude the cost of decommissioning. Here in the UK the taxpayer is already saddled with a £73bn (and rising) bill for decommissioning the last generation of reactors. The cost of decommissioning a generation of wind-turbines is unlikely to be orders of magnitude less and, of course, the contracts for the nuclear decommissioning are, I believe, mostly held by non-UK based companies, so we’re back into the loop of exporting value.

  I’ve never much been bothered about terrorists stealing a large amount of gold from a vault. But then I don’t have any gold and also gold is pretty non-reactive. So if you dumped it all over the countryside the health effects would be negligible (apart from folk being killed in the stampede, of course). Nuclear fuel and waste represent a bit of a contrast to this – very small quantities can be highly toxic and can be dangerous for generations (back to that skills issue again with the need for future societies to maintain those skills). Also, ho hum, the industry doesn’t have a very good record for accurately auditing the quantities of material in the system and I think I’m being generous in this description. So I think this is a bit of a fatuous comment and I’m sure you can do better.

  I couldn’t agree more about making things being more satisfying than shifting other peoples’ money around. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that either your country or mine (or many others see it that way). When a banker can make more money in a single short term deal that a whole firm’s worth of engineers can earn in their lifetimes, there isn’t much hope, really. Maybe the current crash will sort that out but my experience tells me that after a revolution, only the bosses change, the system will stay much the same. Forgive me but it was you who used the words ‘just train some more’. Education is highly complex and to change it involves changing a wide range of social and economic factors. To ‘just train some more’ engineers will involve a signficant shift in social attitudes, a sustained period of economic activity to create a consistent demand for a better trained workforce, an appreciation that engineers should earn more than 21 yr old ivy-league/oxbridge graduates carrying out legalised g*mbling, and a significant lag time. That’s why I described your suggestion as glib, I think the description was fair.

  Dash for gas – yes I agree; entrancing short term profits and eyes off the ball for sustainability. I remain unconvinced about the reliability of nuclear but maybe that’s just an English thing. After all we never settled on a single, reliable design.

  But I think we’ll have to agree to differ. You see the upside of the nuclear resurgence, I don’t. What I see is a proliferation of highly dangerous materials with no guarantee that they’ll be stored and transported safely, a significant tightening of already damaged civil liberties, enormous costs with significant portions of our cash moved overseas, a huge and expensive decommissioning legacy which will ultimately fall on the tax-payer, and an imposition on future generations to maintain waste stores that will require numbers of highly skilled technicians that, in the light of potential famine and pestilence, may not be available. Hey, it’s great being a pessimist. On the other hand, there are things about which I’m optimistic – I’ve no doubt at all that with sufficient investment in R&D we can supply all our power needs from a combination of renewables. Kennedy had the vision and the will to put men on the moon and your country had the intellectual ability to achieve that. Against that setting I don’t really see achieving renewable energy sufficiency as much of a problem at all – providing the political will and the cash are there and that, of course, is the problem as it has been ever since our Queen pushed that switch at Windscale and the industry promised energy so cheap it would be free…

• 5    Rod Adams // Nov 22, 2008 at 7:52 pm

  dickwillis – We will definitely have to agree to disagree. No matter how much witness I provide, I apparently will never shake your media imposed belief system. I will, however, quibble with just a couple of your statements:

  1. The high cost of decommissioning UK nuclear facilities is mainly due to the dual use nature of the technology chosen – your reactors were key parts of your national choice to build nuclear weapons. That is NOT a required part of a nuclear power enterprise. If there is no effort to purify certain isotopes for weapons, the activity is much cleaner and less costly to decommission. We have fully decommissioned at least two large power reactors in the US at a much lower per unit cost. Now our weapons related facilities are a completely different story…

  2. No nuke ever promise power so cheap it would be free. That would be stupid – why bother to get involved in a business that does not produce revenue. Here is the actual quote provided by Lewis Strauss, the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission -

  “It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”

  Read that prediction carefully and please realize that it was said at a time when my dear father was 29 years old. The current generation of US reactors produces power for a total O&M cost of 1.76 cents per kilowatt hour, but only 0.47 of that is variable fuel cost.

  In other words, our reactors today are operating efficiently enough so that they cost just about as much to own as they do to operate. Ergo, it would be fully economic for a utility to agree to sell power on an “unlimited minutes” plan not unlike that used by some telcos for their service. Of course, the size of the wire would have to vary – the utility could not afford to give a city the same pricing plan as an individual home.

  You may consider it parsing of words, but I believe that right now, well within the time frame envisioned by Strauss, nuclear power is cheap enough to sell without metering the flow.

• 6    dickwillis // Nov 26, 2008 at 1:17 pm

  Rod, I can’t argue with your comments about the cost of decommissioning mixed civil/military plant. I’m sure you’re right. However, the cost of decommissioning civil plant is hardly likely to be minor.

  Thanks for the accurate quotation from Lewis Strauss. That may well be the precise wording but the public perception was that nuclear power would be free for consumers. Of course it’s not free to produce, nothing is. The rest of the quote is interesting – there’s precious little evidence that famine and pestilence will become matters of history. Maybe they will, temporarily, for those of us lucky enough to live in ‘advanced’ countries but pity the poor souls who don’t.

  Like you I’ve got an interest in the outdoors and I’ve spent 30 years as cave explorer going to some of the world’s most remote places. I haven’t seen anything in that time to make me optimistic about humanity’s long-term future. In the West we flatter ourselves about the benefits of science and technology, for the majority of the world this stuff is not merely an irrelevance, it’s a drawback because they pay the costs of our global asset stripping. (Anyway, all that may be history, the last few financially catastrophic months have seen the beginning of power moving away from ‘us’).

  Thanks for the intellectual dismissal. I could easily reciprocate by saying, “No matter how much witness I provide, I apparently will never shake your industry imposed belief system”.

  For what it’s worth I’m a science graduate from one of the UK’s leading universities. I hold 3 post-graduate qualifications (admittedly in educational areas), I current;y work in knowledge transfer in the technology sector. I grew up 10 miles from the UK’s leading nuclear research establishments (AERE Harwell and the Culham Laboratories) where the parents of the majority of my friends worked and as a result I’ve been exposed to arguments about the ‘benefits’ of the nuclear industries from a very early age.

  I’m no luddite. I’m in favour of continued research and development. It’s entirely possible that we can solve the technological issues associated with safe handling and storage of waste – without a long term reliance on an elite technocracy which we cannot absolutely guarantee will exist, or exist in sufficent numbers. We may be able to crack fusion as an energy source. Given time we may even manage to harness dark-energy, who knows? We’re an enterprising and innovative species – given sufficient time.

  However, the fact that those things (or, at least, the first two) are considered possible makes it a staggering and negative miracle that we have so far not managed to harness the minute fraction of sunlight that falls on the planet every day that would provide for all our energy needs.

  For me its still about the risk benefit balance associated with nuclear expansion. My interpretation suggests that this investment will result in massive diversion of resources away from renewables development and from a focus on demand reduction; it will lead to increasing volumes of waste (with no safe, long term disposal solution); will result in proliferation of nuclear materials and their transport and therefore significantly increased security risks and prospects of a dirty-bomb and this will be accompanies by a continued loss of civil liberties.

  As a scientist that balance isn’t right for me.

  Thanks for the exchange. As you say, we’ll have to agree to differ.

  I’ll close this discussion now. Anyone reading this and wanting to pursue the issues can pick up Rod’s blog by clicking on his name at the top of one of his comments.

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