In a recent post, I discussed why the US needs, on average, 15,000 additional megawatts (“MW”) of new power plant capacity – each year! – just to keep up with the growth in domestic demand for electricity. How many new power plants have to be built to accommodate this national thirst for energy?   Two power plants a year? Five? Ten?  And what  if all of that new power had to come from renewable energy – say solar – as so many in the green community suggest it should, or more urgently, demand it must!? Is it even technically feasible to satisfy our annual electrical demand growth from solar alone?

Of course, the number of new plants (or generating units) needed to supply 15,000 MW of new capacity each year depends on your technology of choice.

• 15 – Large scale 1,000 MW coal fired or nuclear power plants
• 30 – Medium sized 500 MW natural gas, coal fired or nuclear power plants
• 7,500 – Utility scale 2 MW wind turbines
• 75 million – 200 Watt solar panels.

In reality, 75 million solar panels a year isn’t enough. It’s too low because solar panel manufacturers rate their panels DC whereas our electrical grid uses AC power. Using an approximate conversion factor of 0.85, the real number would closer to 88  million – each year. Are we done? Install 88 million solar panels each year instead of 15 large coal or nuclear plants? Hardly.

There’s the pesky matter of cloudy days when a solar plant can’t produce at full power. That’s the rub with most renewable power including both solar and wind. It’s intermittent and you can’t count on all of it being there when you need it.  On average, a typical solar power plant might have a capacity factor rating of roughly 20%; even lower in locations with less abundant sunlight.  Said differently, you could build a 100 megawatt (“MW”) AC solar facility but on average you could only count on 20 MW (20%) being available on any given day. But there’s a niggling problem with that that word “average”. On a bright, clear sunny summer day that solar plant might  produce 100 MW (100%) power during midday. But on a cloudy day in winter it might only produce 5-10% of peak output. In fact, it might rarely ever produce at exactly the 20 MW average. And then there’s mornings and early evenings when the sun is waxing and waning and only a fraction of the 100 MW nameplate rating is produced. Finally there’s that inconvenient daily event…..called night….when the output of  a solar plant is nil, nada, zip – all night long.

Follow this to its logical conclusion and you might want to have some backup power plants that can fill in for the solar plants when the sun doesn’t shine (or shines less than needed for solar output to meet the electrical demand).  And these backup plants had better be ready when you need them – the very definition of “firm capacity”. Today, firm capacity comes from fossil (mostly natural gas and coal) and nuclear plants. By now you might also be tumbling to the fact that 100% of our electrical needs cannot be met with intermittent renewable energy like solar and wind. Simply stated, until we figure out how to store massive quantities of electrical power economically, we need the kind of firm capacity that can only come from fossil and nuclear power plants.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m a big fan of renewable power and solar in particular. I think solar has… (forgive me) a sunny future! However, green energy proponents who oppose all forms of fossil power may be the greenest of green advocates but all too often appear willfully ignorant of the realities of delivering reliable electricity 24×7 to consumers.

Today, regulated utilities, independent power producers, regulatory authorities, politicians and rate payer advocates are all engaged in a healthy debate over what percentage of renewable power is practicable.   There is broad consensus that at least 25% of the our electrical power demand can be met with renewable sources. The “25 by ’25″ resolution recently passed by the House Representatives expresses the sense of the Congress that by the year 2025, at least 25 percent of total U.S. energy will come from renewable, domestically produced sources. Since we’re at approximately 9.5% today (source EIA), if enacted into law, we would need an incremental 15.5% over 16 years.

Let’s assume for a moment that all of this incremental renewable energy were to come from solar (admittedly unrealistic but bear with me here). The US currently produces/consumes approximately 4.1 billion megawatt-hours of electricity annually. 15.5% of this is about 615 million megawatt-hours. Assuming 99% reliability and a 20% solar fleet capacity factor, this would translate into 431,050 megawatts DC of newly installed solar panels. Assuming 200 watt DC panels, we’d need approximately 2.2 billion new panels to hit the 25 by 25 target.  If we built one large 431,050 megawatt DC solar power farm, we would need 3,368 square miles of land (assuming 10 acres per megawatt). To put this into perspective, that’s a square parcel of land 58 miles by 58 miles or approximately 0.1% of the total US land area excluding water bodies. You could circumnavigate this solar plant in roughly 4 hours driving at 60 mph. Imagine this facility being located in the hinterlands of the greater southwestern US. Not too hard to imagine, no?

Ok, so we meet our national mandate of 25 by 25 with a 60 mile square swath of solar panels (of course in reality never all at one location and not with 100% solar). I don’t know about you, but I still want electricity at night and on cloudy or rainy days. So lets talk about backup power for the 25% of energy coming from solar. Backup power would only need to operate at night and partially on some, but not all, days during daylight. This intermediate load resource would have to be the lowest cost to build while also not costing too much to operate. Nukes are VERY expensive to build, difficult to finance,  although cheap to run – not the best fit for  backup. Coal plants are relatively less costly than nukes but more costly to run (and getting costlier if you assume carbon taxes or carbon capture/sequestration) plus they have an enormous carbon footprint that threatens their viability. Just try to permit one today. Good luck. That leaves simple and combined cycle gas turbines burning  natural gas. Least cost to build, much lower carbon footprint than coal, financeable, easily permitted and reasonable cost to operate provided natural gas supplies remain abundant and reasonably priced. The good news is that the long-term natural gas supply picture has improved greatly over the past 2 years and prices have come down accordingly.

So there you have it. Solar, wind and other renewables generating at least 25% of our energy backed up mostly by natural gas and maybe a few more nukes. As coal plants retire, a mix of new renewables and gas fired plants will take their place. The renewables mandate may even increase towards 50% or higher over time. A diversified mix of solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass may even require less backup power than initially thought especially if the electrical grid is expanded. Should large scale power storage becomes feasible, the days of fossil fired power may eventually fade.  Until then, fossil based power generation is going to be part of the mix. Welcome to the future of our electrical supply – real or imagined?

Human Behavior – Past Is Prologue

If you accept that past is prologue when it comes to human behavior then we have all the data we need to know, and not just guess at, how much additional power we will need – each year -  over the next couple of decades if not beyond – 15,000 megawatts (“MW”) as it turns out. Let’s break that down.

The graph below tells us that over the past 58 years, the addition of new generating capacity has been essentially (and surprisingly!)  linear with time. What makes this particularly interesting is that the annual rate of increase in capacity has slowed over time (otherwise capacity would have increased exponentially).

The slowdown in new builds from the late 70′s through the late 90′s (when capacity growth actually went briefly negative) is also noteworthy. It was over this same period that deregulation of the power industry unfolded and the independent power producer (“IPP”) flourished. Deregulation led to a flurry of new IPP plants while many traditional utilities deferred new builds in the face of uncertainty. Eventually supply didn’t keep up with demand. Ultimately, a correction took place that peaked around 2000-2002.

Remember the rolling blackouts in California around this same time and all the political hoopla about Enron and others gaming the deregulated power market? Those with supply prospered and those with demand (especially CA ratepayers) paid out the nose until enough new plants were built to correct the imbalance. Supply and demand at work – a beautiful thing. Of course, far easier for politicians to go on a corporate witch hunt than admit  their failure to enact rationale public policy.

15,000 Additional Megawatts A Year

The figure below shows the same data as above but expressed in terms of the incremental power plant capacity built each year between the same 1949 and 2007 period.  Despite the peaks and valleys, this data clearly tells us that the US has, on average, added between 10,000-20,000 MW of power plants each year for the past 58 years. The long term trend line shows a gradual increase in this rate over time, but an average of 15,000 MW per year is a highly reliable historical guide.

Note that the spike in construction in the early 70′s represented a wave of mostly coal-fired plants whereas the even bigger spike in the early 2000′s was almost entirely due to new natural gas-fired plants.

Power To We The People

So what accounts for this steady 58 year demand for additional supply of electricity? The answer is sex and procreation. As evident in the graph below, the U.S. population has been growing 1-2% per year for most of the past 100 years and has steadied out at around 1% per year for the past 30-40 years. You don’t have to be a statistician to see the close correlation of population growth with the growth in power generating capacity shown above.

Every Baby Requires ~2.7 Kilowatts Of Additional Power

We knew kids were expensive but today each child also needs its own additional 2.7 kilowatts of power generation. Sixty years ago you’d only have needed 0.5 kilowatts per bundle-of-joy. The good news is we seem to have reached a plateau during the 80′s and 90′s and we might even be witnessing a slight reduction in per capita electrical demand.

So as we debate what forms of power generation will be acceptable, let alone needed, in a carbon constrained future, then unless we stop having sex or otherwise change our basic human behavior, we’re going to need 15,000 MW of additional power plants each and every year far into the future. Safe bet is on the megawatts.

Is clean coal a fiction or half-truth that forms part of an ideology, i.e. a myth? As with most things, it depends on your point of view and your own ideology. If building a clean coal power plant is simply a matter of a fat check book, willpower and a room full of engineers, an event that simply hasn’t been achieved as of today, does that make clean coal a myth?  If every design aspect of clean coal is fundamentally proven and doable and yet we haven’t put it all together, then is it real or imagined?

Arguably, clean coal is more real today than landing a man on the moon was in the early 1960’s or building an atomic bomb in the early 1940’s. Yet even as the urgency for both energy independence and clean energy grows, the term “clean coal” is being portrayed as the mother of all energy related oxymorons – practically an outright lie.

For those aligned with all things green and renewable to the exclusion of all else, clean coal represents nothing less than a dangerous distraction. Greenpeace calls clean coal “an attempt by the coal industry to try and make itself relevant in the age of renewables.” They portray clean coal as a cynical public relations strategy – the ultimate greenwashing of the dirtiest energy source on earth. You may have seen the add below that is being run by therealnews.com on numerous cable channels. Created by the Reality Coalition whose members include the Alliance for Climate Protection, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club, the viewer is shown a clean coal plant that, well, does not exist. Not surprisingly, advocates for clean coal are crying foul and calling the ad a complete distortion of the truth.

As always, truth can be an elusive commodity. Truth is, no clean coal power plant exists today. Truth is, clean coal technology is real and ready and every part of it exists today. These truths coexist in parallel worlds for a number of reasons.

Clean Coal – When Worlds Collide: When it comes to making electricity, the term “clean coal” is effectively synonymous with “integrated gasification combined cycle”. That mouthful of technical jargon is more commonly referred to by its acronym – IGCC.

Right off the bat, this topic runs smack into a level of  technical complexity that makes having an informed discussion especially challenging for those outside of the energy industry – and even for some of those on the inside. IGCC is a marriage of two technologies that might as well come from two different worlds. One is the world of petrochemicals and refining ruled by chemical engineers – the land of “big oil”. The gasification component lives in this world. The other world is that of power generation or what most of us refer to as the “utility” business. This world is ruled by mechanical engineers who make electricity for a living using fossil fuels, steam turbines and gas turbines – often in a “combined cycle” or “CC” configuration. The CC in IGCC lives in this world.

It’s quite rare to find a utility guy with any real experience with gasification. It’s not just a matter of training and competence. Utilities burn fuels to make steam or fire natural gas directly in gas turbines. That’s what they know. It’s all they’ve needed to know. And since the culture of making electricity is extremely adverse to risk, no sane utility manager goes looking for unknowns like gasification unless compelled or otherwise incented to do so.

Until the early 1980’s the entire industry was a collection of monopolies under the thumb of 50 different state regulatory commissions. Historically, those commissions protected each utility franchise from normal competitive forces in exchange for guaranteed rates of returns as long as they kept the lights on and generally acted prudently. This is largely true even today. As any economist will tell you, innovation is glacial and risk takers are rare in the ossified world of a regulated monopoly . Even after 25+ years of utility deregulation and the emergence of independent risk takers, the idea of designing, building and operating a chemical processing plant (gasifier) as part of making electricity is a daunting prospect for even the most stalwart of U.S. power companies. Of course the petrochem boys, who like to think they can eat power plants for breakfast, would have no problem pulling this off. But they have much bigger fish to fry turning oil and gas into every chemical concoction they can think of for fun and profit. There’s good money in it. It’s what they know. They have no interest in getting into the electricity business.

Thus, the people who know gasification have no interest in the power business and the people who know power have no interest (or qualifications) in owning and operating a complex chemical plant.

Gasify This! Gasification is the “G” in IGCC. Leaders in gasification include Shell, ConocoPhillips and more recently GE (which acquired its technology from Texaco). There are almost 20 major gasification plants in the U.S. and hundreds around the world. Gasification has been around for a 100+ years.

Gasification is about as far away from being a myth as you can get. But what is far less common is the deliberate integration of gasification with gas turbines to make electricity. This integration is the “I” in IGCC. Nevertheless, there are at least 15 IGCC plants operating around the world today with a combined capacity of roughly 4000 megawatts (most new conventional power plants today are 300-600 megawatts each). Two of these IGCC power plants exist in the U.S. – one in Florida owned and operated by Tampa Electric and the other located in Indiana owned and operated by a private independent. Both were built around the mid-90’s with significant federal support from the DOE’s clean coal technology development program. I’ve personally visited both plants. The one in Florida is Tampa Electric’s most profitable (lowest marginal cost) plant.  (If you want to dig deeper into the technology, gasification.org is good place to start.)

So if IGCC is synonymous with clean coal, and the “G” in IGCC is for real, and the “CC” in IGCC is for real, and there’s ample evidence that we can “I” them together, then how can “clean coal” be called a myth?

It Ain’t “Clean Coal” Til You Put It In A Hole! The “myth” argument is all about CO2. What makes a clean coal power plant a true “clean” coal plant is the capture and permanent storage of the CO2 that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.  Such permanent geological storage of CO2 is referred to as “carbon sequestration”. To date, gasification is the only technology that lends itself to reasonably affordable capture of CO2. CO2 capture is a fully proven add-on to the gasification process. In the extreme, nearly all the carbon can be removed leaving almost 100% hydrogen gas to be burned in the gas turbines to make electricity. And the only byproduct of hydrogen combustion is water! The “captured” CO2 is compressed and injected underground into suitable geological formations thousands of feet in the ground where the CO2 is permanently “sequestered”.

This brings us to the bloodied front line of the clean coal war. Developers of new coal fired power plants are being effectively attacked. Opposition groups are stopping new coal plants because most utilities are not including carbon capture and sequestration in their designs. They haven’t because they haven’t had to, it raises costs substantially, and frankly there’s no cost effective way (yet!) to capture carbon from conventional coal plants.  Those bold enough to mush ahead with IGCC and sequestration are then bombarded with arguments claiming permanent underground storage of CO2 is unproven, dangerous, and too expensive. And indeed, electricity from such a plant would cost between 50-100% more than from a new conventional coal plant. But then again so would solar but that’s another story for another day. Not surprisingly, this sends utility commissioners running for the hills.

In retaliation, clean coal defenders fire back with the Dakota Gasification Plant in North Dakota. This plant gasifies coal into a synthetic natural gas, captures the CO2, and sequesters it in depleted oil fields to help squeeze out some additional oil production. Right behind Dakota comes Norway’s offshore CO2 injection at Sleipner where Statoil started injecting CO₂ in 1996. At Sleipner, geologic sequestration has proved to be an environmentally sound and financially prudent disposal option for CO₂. To which the renewables-only-brigade counter with cries of too small scale compared to the amount of CO2 we’d need to sequester, claims of insufficient proof, and the dropping of the “what if the CO2 escapes and kills us all” fear-bomb (CO2 is heavier than air and if released quickly in large quantity could blanket the ground and suffocate populations in low lying areas)? To be fair, each army in this war has large arsenals including numerous “weapons of mass deception” but more on that some other time.

I’ve had some exposure to sequestration and the geologists who specialize in this area. When asked why they think permanent sequestration of CO2 is technically viable the answer is quite simple and compelling. Did you ever wonder about all that oil and natural gas we’ve been drilling for and releasing/pumping up the past 100 years or so? No matter how it was formed way down there, certain geological formations are quite capable of keeping gas trapped deep underground for millions of years until we drill a hole to let it out. Why can’t we find similar geology, drill a hole and pump down CO2 so it stays put just like natural gas? In fact, we can. It gets better! Geologists also point out that over a few decades CO2 eventually solidifies into mineral deposits thus further mitigating concerns over the integrity of long term carbon sequestration.

Git ‘er done! Perhaps the most vexing of all facts staring back at clean coal advocates is, that despite all the arguments in favor of real clean coal power generation, no true clean coal power plant exists today. This vexing reality is why the Reality Coalition folks are doing the happy dance over their televised advertisement of the non-existent clean coal plant. This is where culture, politics, finance and the risk-adverse power utility industry come together in a Gordian knot that needs cutting.

A clean coal plant is big, expensive, complex and frankly a bit intimidating for the utility industry to take on alone without some protection. Only the federal government has a big enough knife to cut that knot. Some would argue that that is reason enough to run, not walk, away from clean coal as fast as we can into the arms of an all-solar-and-wind-all-the-time renewable energy world. The reason we haven’t yet is the all-renewables alternative is either as costly, if not more so, than clean coal plus we haven’t yet figured out how to keep the lights on when the wind stops or the sun goes down. I’m all for responsible clean energy of all types but I’m also a big fan of keeping the lights on. We have to be pragmatic about this. We’re going to need to lean on coal for at least another generation so let’s make it as clean as we can.

In the near term, the key impediment to clean coal is mostly political and not technical or financial. All the pieces needed to make a clean coal power plant a reality exist today except the political will to overcome any remaining obstacles. We are far better prepared to build clean coal plants today than we were putting men on the moon.  A comprehensive national clean energy program, including clean coal, is about real national security – economic, environmental and homeland. What we have here now is a failure to launch. Only this time it’s something far more urgent and necessary than sending a man to the moon.

The last weekend before the recent presidential election, a San Francisco Chronicle interview found Mr. Obama stating, “Build the coal plants if they want, but it will bankrupt them if they do.” Not surprisingly, the conservative herd quickly wolfed down this final slab of red meat and lept to the conclusion that the Obama administration intended to literally bankrupt coal plants and more broadly the entire coal industry. Insofar as the electorate was concerned, that dog didn’t hunt. Still, many of my Republican acquaintances continue to insist that the coal industry will be in the next administration’s crosshairs.

Is bankrupting coal plant operators and coal producers a credible threat? Let’s start with where our electricity comes from today. As shown in the pie chart below, we currently derive almost 50% of our electricity from coal! Yes, coal. So let’s be realistic. No sane administration is going to shut down almost 50% of the nation’s power supply overnight.

Even under an accelerated national moon-shot style rebuild program, it would take a decade or more to replace the existing fleet of coal plants. It takes 3-5 years to build a single large complex traditional power plant. Coal plants produced over 2,000,000,000 Megawatt-Hours of energy last year. Let’s break that down. Divide by the number of hours per year (8760) and we get 228,310 Megawatts worth of running coal plants each hour. Figure an average coal plant size of 500 Megawatts and that gives us about 457 plants. But since they all can’t run 24x7x365 we need some extra plants. Using an 85% capacity factor we end up with 537 plants. Published numbers run closer to 600 so we’re in the ball park here. At a nominal replacement cost of $2,000,000 per Megawatt (very optimistic!), we’d need to invest 537x500x2,000,000 which equals roughly $500 billion (half a trillion) dollars.

The real price tag could easily be double or more – say an even $1 trillion.  And since we’d be building all these plants almost simultaneously, the demand for steel, concrete, engineered equipment, contractors, and design/construction labor would skyrocket so figure at least a 50-100% premium so now we’re pushing $3-4 trillion. But maybe clean coal plants aren’t so clean. So let’s say we replaced them with nuclear plants. Ka-ching! Now we’re up to $4-6 trillion and counting. No nukes you say! Ok, then let’s go green and replace those coal plants with a combination of wind and solar. Adjusting for higher costs and lower operational availability puts us somewhere in the land of $6-8 trillion. Add in the obligatory cost overruns and we could see $10 trillion. Now we’re talking real money. About equal to the current national debt! And we haven’t even touched on the cost of upgrading the national electrical grid.

Oh, and let’s not forget that while we’re busy bankrupting the coal business and replacing the existing coal fleet these past 20+ years, our national demand for additional power supplies is projected to increased by 30% so let’s throw another $3 trillion dollar green log on that fire. Warm yet? Does bankrupting the coal business sound realistic? Hardly.

So what was Mr. Obama driving at with his comment? I believe he was simply being realistic by suggesting that building the next conventional coal power plant may prove to be an imprudent investment. Coal plants have been popular amongst utilities because until very recently coal fired power has had the lowest apparent cost. Why apparent cost? Because coal produces low cost electricity provided you ignore what economist refer to as “externalities”. An externality occurs when an economic activity causes external costs or benefits to third party stakeholders (in this case all living organisms) who do not participate in the economic transaction. Global warming has been ranked as the #1 externality of all economic activity in terms of the magnitude of potential harm yet remains largely unmitigated and unaccounted for in consumer electricity prices.

Many, including Mr. Obama, believe that carbon emissions, in the form of either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program, will soon become a reality. The Northeastern Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that kicks in starting in 2009 is a prime example. And since coal is the most carbon intensive of the three fossil fuels (natural gas, oil & coal), the costs to emit carbon will fall hardest on coal plants. After all, that’s the whole point of climate change regulation; impose a tax (whether directly or indirectly) on the worst offenders in order to change behavior. Those emitting the least carbon pay little or nothing. Properly applied, these regulations will eventually tip the playing field in the favor of greener low/zero carbon sources of electricity like wind, solar and biomass that would otherwise lose out to coal because they are currently more expensive when the cost of externalities are not included. Politically, this is tricky business of the first order because it’s a sure bet the voter will end up paying more for electricity – some would say we’d finally be paying the “real” price.

Moving away from traditionally lower cost electricity derived from coal goes totally against the political grain; especially in coal states. Nevertheless, widespread opposition to new coal plants has become fierce. Even though carbon regulations have barely entered the picture, the belief that such regulations are inevitable, if not imminent, are changing the politics of electricity. Some regulators are already aligned with Obama’s views. Just last month, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission unanimously denied Wisconsin Power and Light’s plan to build a new 300 MW coal-fired electric generation in part because of uncertainty over the costs of complying with future possible carbon dioxide regulations. The fact that the new state-of-the-art coal plant had a nose bleed price tag of $4,200 per kW ($1.25 billion for 300 MW) was no doubt also a big factor. So much for low cost electricity derived from coal.

But even as we begin to wean ourselves off of coal, the question of what to replace it with goes largely unanswered. We need new baseload generation – the kind of power plants that can provide power whenever we need it – day or night. Natural gas is the default solution but T. Boone Pickens says we need to funnel natural gas into transportation fuel. Wind and solar can’t provide baseload power – at least not today or until we have some phenomenal breakthrough in battery/storage technology that could prove as elusive as nuclear fusion. Ironically, as new coal plants are becoming politically radioactive, nuclear power is seeing a potential resurgence; albeit very slowly. Now if can only solve that nasty spent nuclear fuel problem we might get somewhere – in 20 years or so. Meanwhile, coal will be with us for at least another generation, Obama’s statements notwithstanding.

Despite having spent most of my adult life trying to make electrons move through wires there’s one flavor of power generation of which I know very little. I confess I’ve never really cared for it very much either. Ok, the truth is I’m even more than a little intimidated by it. No, it goes even beyond that. I’m creeped out by it. It’s the electron boogeyman under the bed that could come out in the night and steal your life away; slowly, painfully. But it isn’t some dark childhood fantasy that has clung to me into adult life.  It’s nuclear power.

It’s a fair bet that most of us feel a little quiver in the gut when the we hear “nuclear power” mentioned. The topic itself has been radioactive in America for the better part of the last 30 years.  There was the event at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Then Chernobyl in Russia. The “what if” of a 9-11 plane augering into a nuke plant in New Jersey instead of the Pentagon. The unavoidable connection to it’s dark side. Oppenheimer, the dark side’s father quoting Hindu scripture at its birth…. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”. Even the lexicon of nuclear finds mothers holding their children closer – proliferation, meltdown, China Syndrome, fallout, arms race, Mutual Assured Destruction, containment, and God forbid…..release.

Nuclear power is the ultimate bi-polar source of electricity. On the one hand, an affordable, reliable, long lived base load energy source with absolutely zero, zip, nada, none, null greenhouse gas emissions, runs day and night at our command, and where nearly 50% of the fuel comes from friendly places like Australia, Canada, Brazil, South Africa and here at home. And notwithstanding that quiver in your gut, it actually has proven itself to be extremely safe. On the other hand, there’s that not so little mind boggling detail of disposing of a waste that will remain lethally radioactive for 10,000 years.

Personally, nuclear waste is what has bothered me the most about nuclear power. There is something breathtakingly wreckless and arrogant about producing a waste product that has to be intimately cared for over 10,000 years before it stops killing you.  Being an engineer I know in my bones that mankind can conceive, build and operate marvelous things through first principles, thoughtful design and sufficient capital. But thinking we can designs a storage facility today based on a 10,000 year useful life specification defies gravity.  Admittedly, I say this fully unencumbered by the facts surrounding the minutiae of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. But contributing editors to Wikipedia have this to say about Yucca mountain:

As of 2008, $9 billion dollars has been spent on the project which makes Yucca Mountain one of the most studied pieces of geology in the world. The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that it has over 100 million U.S. gallons of highly radioactive waste and 2,800 short tons of spent fuel from the production of nuclear weapons and from research activities in temporary storage^. The cost of the facility is being paid for by a combination of a tax on each kilowatt hour of nuclear power and by the taxpayers for disposal of weapons and Naval nuclear waste . Based on a 2001 cost estimate, approximately 73 percent is funded from consumers of nuclear powered electricity and 27 percent by the tax payers^.

The latest Total System Life Cycle Cost presented to Congress on July 15, 2008 by Director Sproat is $90 billion dollars. This cost, however, can not be compared to previous estimates since it includes a repository capacity about twice as large as previously estimated over a much longer period of time (100 years vs 30 years). Additionally, the cost of the project continues to escalate due to the lack of sufficient funding to most efficiently move forward and complete the project.

The Yucca project is currently being run by a consortium led by Bechtel. Like all things big, dangerous and federal that is managed by an army of scientists and engineers, there are no doubt a multitude of conflicting views and probably several sets of incongruent “facts” that exist simultaneously in their own separate realities. Just to round things out, Obama dislikes the Yucca project and has called for its closure. McCain has been against it before he was for it provided none of it travels through Arizona on the way to the “big hole”.

Which brings me to a point of curious cautious optimism. What if nuclear power didnt’ produce a lethally radioactive waste that had to be managed for 10,000 years?  Say what? Certainly, if that were the case then we’d be all over it and feel a hell of a lot better about building the next generation fleet of nuclear power plants. Right? Not so fast. A little research led me to a website refreshingly short on politics and fervently dedicated to the type of verifiable and repeatable truth that is the realm of the scientist. The website is a forum for physicists called, quite logically, physicsforums.com.

On this forum, a Dr. Gregory Greenman (Physicist) shows up as a frequent contributor to discussions regarding things nuclear.  I have no idea who he is but based on his writings he appears to be a clear thinker and debunker of misinformation related to nuclear matters. Dr. Greenman debunks…….

I’m afraid you are INCORRECT in virtually EVERYTHING you said above.

For example, spent fuel is NOT 96% fissile. Nuclear reactor fuel starts out fresh as about 4% U-235 and 96% U-238; which is probably where you got the 96% number.

After 3 years in the reactor, virtually ALL the fissile U-235 has been burned up. However, some of the fertile” U-238 has been transmuted into Pu-239 which is fissile. Some of that Pu-239 is fissioned in the reactor. In fact, in the 3 years that a fuel assembly spends in a reactor, about 40% of the energy you get from that assembly comes from fissioning Pu-239 that was created in situ. At the end of 3 years, there is still some
Pu-239 left in the fuel; about 2% or so.

So spent fuel consists of about 2% fissile Pu-239, about 4% fission products, and about 94% U-238. So only about 2% of the spent fuel is fissile; NOT 96%.

NO – it DOESN’T make sense for Congress to ban reprocessing because it is costly. Reprocessing IS economical; and that is what the British, the French, and the Japanese do with their fuel cycle. Reprocessing IS economical.

Reprocessing lets you recover the fissile Plutonium so that it can be recycled back to the reactor – so you get more energy out of a given amount of Uranium. Additionally, because the Plutonium is recycled back to the reactor; you don’t have Plutonium in the waste stream. One of the reasons for the high cost of the USA’s spent fuel disposal repository at Yucca Mountain is because it is being built to survive thousands of years;
which is the lifetime of the Plutonium that will be entombed there.

If you get the Plutonium out of the waste stream, and recycle it back to the reactor to be burned; then the repository doesn’t have to survive for thousands of years. That’s because the longest lived fission product of any consequence is Cesium-137 which has a half-life of 30 years compared to the 24,000 year half life of Plutonium-239.

In a time span much, much less than that required to store Plutonium, ALL the radioisotopes in the nuclear waste will have decayed to a level of radioactivity LESS than the Uranium that was mined from the ground. If you aren’t concerned about the Uranium in the ground naturally, and its level of radioactivity; then you shouldn’t be concerned with fission products that are several hundered years old either.

Reprocessing is an EXCELLENT, and COST EFFECTIVE technology; and the USA would use it just like the other countries, Britain, France, Japan,…. but Congress made reprocessing ILLEGAL in the USA.

Dr. Greenman goes on to say……

WRONG AGAIN!!!!

The legislation that PROHIBITS reprocessing and recycling of spent nuclear fuel in the USA is almost 30 years old.

The Republicans were NOT in power when this legislation was passed.

The law that prohibits reprocessing and recycling of spent nuclear fuel in the USA was passed by a Congress controlled by the Democrats, and with a Democratic President in the White House; namely President Jimmy Carter.

NO WAY can the prohibition on reprocessing / recycling of spent nuclear fuel in the USA be laid at the feet of the Republicans!!

The legislation was passed by Democrats at the behest of the anti-nukes; and their hews and cries that nuclear power was horrible and that it was causing cancer and was going to kill us all.

President Carter wanted the United Kingdom and France to stop reprocessing, since he felt that reprocessing of nuclear fuel would encourage nuclear proliferation. So President Carter decided that the USA should “lead by example”; and that if the USA decided to forego reprocessing, that the United Kingdom and France would
naturally follow the lead of the USA. The United Kingdom and France aren’t lemmings that do whatever the USA does; and they pursued policies that are in their own interest.

That legislation has stood for nearly 30 years. Few politicians have had the courage to revisit it. At one point, President Ronald Reagan suggested a change, and that went nowhere. Politicians of neither Party have seen fit to revisit this issue and change it.

The current President Bush has suggested that this be changed, and the Dept of Energy is starting to look at the issue. You can see the response from the anti-nukes as shown in the links to “Union of Concerned Pseudo-Scientists” and Public Citizen that I cited in my previous post.

They are girding for a new battle with the current Administration over plans to revisit reprocessing and recycling technology as part of the GNEP – the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Is that for real? Nuclear power plants without 10,000 year lethal waste? No need for Yucca mountain? Also,  Dr. Greenman didn’t mention that by recycling/reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, the remaining world supply of fissionable uranium goes from 50-70 years to several hundred years. Interesting, no?

What is clear from this is that our future energy policy debate and policy making has to put all options on the table including the recycling of spent nuclear fuel. Anti-nuclear hysteria has to be tempered with bi-partisan pragmatism and an eye towards realistically achievable energy security. As importantly, rational fact-based scientific input has to be given a real place at the policy table while dogmatic ideology of both stripes is shown the door. It’s also about time we get a few grownups in Washington who can stand up and say to the nation that we can do some things just like those Europeans and Asians without losing our souls or national identity!