The Redhunter

Nuclear power -- long considered environmentally hazardous -- is emerging as perhaps the world's most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it.

It has been 13 years since the last new nuclear power plant opened in the United States. But around the world, nations under pressure to reduce the production of climate-warming gases are turning to low-emission nuclear energy as never before...

From China to Brazil, 53 plants are now under construction worldwide, with Poland, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia seeking to build their first reactors, according to global watchdog groups and industry associations. The number of plants being built is double the total of just five years ago.

Not that all, or even most, liberal-left environmental groups have embraced nuclear power. Far from it. The Post story quotes David Hamilton, director of the Global Warming and Energy Program for the Sierra Club, as saying that "our base is as opposed to nuclear as ever." Greenpeace, perhaps more predictably, is also dead set against it.

In the United States, even liberals as President Obama talk about nuclear power as an option. Yet so far it has been all talk and no action. For the most part the left remains wedded to their "renewable energy" mantra, and the right focuses on "drill, baby, drill."

Where We Are Now

This chart of nuclear power plant orders in the U.S. tells the tale

Yet, as the Post story indicates, other developed and developing nations forge ahead.
But how much electricity do we need? The Department of Energy tells us that rate of increase in demand is at least slowing

Electricity demand fluctuates in the short term in response to business cycles, weather conditions, and prices. Over the long term, however, electricity demand growth has slowed progressively by decade since 1950, from 9 percent per year in the 1950s to less than 2.5 percent per year in the 1990s. From 2000 to 2007, increases in electricity demand averaged 1.1 percent per year. The slowdown in demand growth is projected to continue over the next 23 years (Figure 54), as a result of efficiency gains in response to rising energy prices and new efficiency standards for lighting, heating and cooling, and other appliances.

Where do we get our electricity now?

Source: Energy Information Administration

Nuclear Power Plants Worldwide February 2009

Nuclear power plants world-wide, in operation and under construction, as of September 2009

Apologies that these graphs may be hard to read. Follow the link below to the source for details.

Nuclear Share in Electricity Production 2008

Nuclear Reactors Under Construction Worldwide

Source: European Nuclear Society

All this said, power plants are not static. They can and are being upgraded. From the World Nuclear Association:

Numerous power reactors in USA, Belgium, Sweden and Germany, for example, have had their generating capacity increased. In Switzerland, the capacity of its five reactors has been increased by 12.3%. In the USA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved 124 uprates totalling some 5600 MWe since 1977, a few of them "extended uprates" of up to 20%.

Spain has had a program to add 810 MWe (11%) to its nuclear capacity through upgrading its nine reactors by up to 13%. Some 519 MWe of the increase is already in place. For instance, the Almarez nuclear plant is being boosted by more than 5% at a cost of US$ 50 million.

Finland Finland boosted the capacity of the original Olkiluoto plant by 29% to 1700 MWe. This plant started with two 660 MWe Swedish BWRs commissioned in 1978 and 1980. It is now licensed to operate to 2018. The Loviisa plant, with two VVER-440 (PWR) reactors, has been uprated by 90 MWe (10%).

Sweden is uprating Forsmark plant by 13% (410 MWe) over 2008-10 at a cost of EUR 225 million, and Oskarshamn-3 by 21% to 1450 MWe at a cost of EUR 180 million.

Further, there are applications for plants that are not reflected in the graphs above. Again, from the World Nuclear Society:

In the USA there are proposals for over twenty new reactors and the first 17 combined construction and operating licences for these have been applied for. All are for late third-generation plants, and a further proposal is for two ABWR units.

You can also browse by country at the Nuclear Training Center for more details.

How Did We Get Here?

Ian Murray, in a story titled Nuclear Power? Yes Please (paid NR subscription required to this and other stories in this post), which appeared in the June 16, 2008 print edition of National Review, outlines some of the history of the anti-nuclear movement. He shows how opposition started well before the Three-Mile Island in 1977, the the chart above bears this out. The reason was pretty simple; environmentalists exploited fears and convinced people to turn against nuclear as a power source. How did they succeed?

By creating a global zeitgeist -- an appropriately German word -- holding as an article of faith that nuclear power is a severe danger in all sorts of ways. Their arguments revolved around three main propositions: that nuclear plants are dangerous because they can blow up or melt down; that nuclear waste is extremely and persistently dangerous; and that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are intrinsically linked. All these arguments are overstated.

As to the safety of nuclear power stations, there is now a significant history to demonstrate that these concerns are no longer justified, even if they may have had some precautionary legitimacy in the 1970s. It has long been recognized that the Chernobyl accident was caused by features unique to the Soviet-style RBMK (reaktor bolshoy moshchnosti kanalniy -- high-power channel reactor). When reactors of that sort get too hot, the rate of the nuclear reaction increases -- the reverse of what happens in most Western reactors. Moreover, RBMK reactors do not have containment shells that prevent radioactive material from getting out. The worse incident in the history of nuclear power, Chernobyl killed just 56 people and made 20 square miles of land uninhabitable. (The exclusion zone has now become a haven for wildlife, which is thriving.) There are suggestions that hundreds or thousands more may die because of long-term effects, but these estimates are based on the controversial Linear Non-Threshold (LNT) theory about the effects of radiation.

A bigger problem is nuclear waste, but that's quite solvable too:

Nuclear waste is a stickier problem, but one that can be safely managed. In most American reactors, fuel rods need to be replaced every 18 months or so. When they are taken out, they contain large amounts of radioactive fission products and produce enough heat that they need to be cooled in water. Radioactivity declines as the isotopes decay and the rods produce less heat. It is the very nature of radioactivity that, as materials decay, they become less dangerous and easier to handle. The question is what to do with the waste when space runs out.

In most of the rest of the world, fuel reprocessing extracts usable uranium and plutonium. The highly radioactive waste that remains is not a large amount. By 2040, Britain will have just 70,000 cubic feet of such waste. This volume could be contained in a cube measuring 42 feet on each side. Moreover, most of Britain's waste is left over from its nuclear-weapons program. The British government has determined that "geological disposal" -- burial deep underground -- provides the best available approach to dealing with existing and also with new nuclear waste, arguing that "the balance of ethical considerations does not rule out the option of new nuclear power."

The best thing we could do here domestically is open up Yucca Mountain. Yes I know there are arguments on both sides, but in the end the ones fin favor of opening up the mountain for storage weight more heavily.

A Green Alternative?

China, Japan, and Germany are touted as models for "green" energy. Turns out that's not exactly true. Alex Alexiev explains:

China, (Obama) said (in his address to Congress), "has launched the largest effort in history to make their economy energy efficient." True enough, but that effort has nothing to do with renewable energy, and it's not even clear that it's working. To the Chinese, energy efficiency means more efficient coal-burning equipment, co-generation, coal liquefaction, and other improvements of their primarily coal-based energy industry. Despite marginal improvements in this area, China is now the largest carbon-dioxide emitter in the world and can, at best, slow down but not stop carbon-emissions growth for the foreseeable future. As far as renewable energy proper is concerned, its share of total energy production not only is minuscule, but has actually declined over the past two years, according to Beijing's State Electricity Council. There is, however, one clean-energy sector in which China is making a lot of progress and has even more ambitious plans for the future: nuclear power.

What about Japan? It does produce a lot of solar panels for export and subsidizes rooftop solar installation, but its renewable-energy production target for 2010 is only 3 percent. Instead, Tokyo plans to boost the share of nuclear power to 41 percent from the current 30 percent in less than a decade.

This leaves Germany as a model for our green future. At first glance, it is a renewable-energy success story and, to no one's surprise, it has become the poster child of the green fantasy universe. In just a few years, the country has become the world's powerhouse of green energy, currently generating nearly 15 percent of its electricity from wind power and solar energy, which already exceeds the EU target of a 12.5 percent renewable share for 2010. A heartwarming story, it seems -- until one starts asking questions as to how a country that has neither much sun, nor much wind, got there; how much it cost; and where it is going from here.

Alexiev goes on to relate how Germany only achieves it's "success" through massive government subsidies. In other words, "green" energy is ridiculously inefficient and cannot pay for itself so taxpayers pick up the slack.

If there were truly no alternative government subsidy might be a good idea. I am not saying that each and every thing that we do must be economically self-sufficient. What I am saying is that "green renewable energy" is not the best use of our energy dollar, and I mean this both int terms of efficiency power watt and for reducing pollution.

The answer, or at least one big answer, is nuclear.

As related above, nuclear offers many advantages; it's relatively clean, takes up little space, yes waste can be safely stored, doesn't pump CO2 or other pollutants into the atmosphere, and best of all we don't need to send any money to regimes that don't like us.

No we shouldn't put all of our eggs into the nuclear basket, but we do need to end the environmental hysteria, reduce the roadblocks, and start building lots and lots of nuclear power plants.