Atoms for Peace!

[james_davis_nicoll]

Comments

[matgb]

He's clearly standing in that picture. The advertisers lie!

[monte davis (from livejournal.com)]

If historical irony had a halfway decent BTU rating, the Middle East would be even more central to global energy affairs than it already is.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a joke of history in advertising for you. Maybe Under the Influence can do something educational with this?

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

Gerald Ford was willing to let the Iranians buy a plutonium extraction complex, so Iran could extract plutonium from its nuclear fuel. Plutonium can of course be used for power generation, which is what the Ford administration claimed it was for, but the ability to produce it is handy if you want to build nukes. A 1974 CIA assessment concluded that the Shah would have started a nuclear weapons program by the mid '80s if other countries developed their own nuclear weapons programs. Of course if you told modern Republicans about this they'd probably blame Obama, or maybe Jimmy Carter.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Japan's current plutonium stockpile would be good for about 10,000 bombs, if I recall correctly.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

They'd have blamed Carter.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Because following the example of third world dictators is what will make America great. Where is our giant golden rotating statue of Obama, may I ask? Oh well, Trump will probably build one.

[ticktockman.livejournal.com]

So - why were the U.S. power utilities so eager to build nuclear plants in the first place? Guaranteed profits.

As regulated monopolies, they needed permission from their regulators both to set rates and to invest in new facilities. The rates they could charge were determined by a formula that would allow a fair profit in terms of return on investment.

The only way to increase profits was to increase investment. Nuclear power plants were by far the most expensive to build, and every dollar put in was guaranteed to yield a fixed ROI, because the regulators would give permission to raise the electric rates until revenue was sufficient. Under this arrangement, construction cost overruns were a feature, not a bug. The more money the utility put into building a plant, the more profit they could take out. And it wasn't their own money - they could borrow freely because the investors knew the regulators would approve rate hikes sufficient to repay the loans.

The only people who lost money under this arrangement were the ratepayers, that is, the consumers.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

One of the huge changes that has occurred since the 1970s is the rise of natural gas. You may not recall, but back then natural gas was viewed as a scarce resource, and it was illegal in the US (except Texas, I think) to use it to generate electricity. Deregulation stopped that, and remarkably gas supplies just kept going up.

Now, with fracking and shale gas, the US is swimming in methane and is starting to export LNG. Nuclear cannot compete with cheap gas.

The other thing that happened was efficiency of energy use went up and economic growth decoupled from energy consumption. The plans for hundreds or thousands of nuclear plants to supply ever-growing electricity demand were shelved.

Going forward, efficiency, gas, and renewables are going to be the energy sources (if you count efficiency as a source, which it is on margin.) For gas, there's an exciting new technology called the Allam Cycle that promises to increase gas's lead over other thermal cycles. It reduces capital cost, increases thermal efficiency, and (most importantly) delivers the CO2 from combustion in pure form at pipeline pressure for disposal without parasitic energy costs other CO2 sequestration schemes impose.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

There are no known effective sequestration mechanisms for CO2. (Not at the necessary time scales.)

All natural gas extraction and transport mechanisms are disastrously leaky, even if the gas to be burnt were to be hurled into a dead universe somewhere.

That cycle hasn't been demonstrated even at the subscale demonstrator scale, and there's a couple of obvious really difficult things involved even by the chirpy cheerful PR description you link to, notably the combination of "high-temperature heat exchanger" and "pressurized oxygen", on the one hand, and what to do with the "pipeline ready" CO2 exhaust, on the other.

We really do desperately need to stop lighting things on fire as a means of getting energy. I would even argue that carbon pricing that doesn't make nuclear competitive is definitionally too low.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

"carbon pricing that doesn't make nuclear competitive is definitionally too low."

Heh.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Eh, it's not obvious to me that that is the case. It could be that nuclear is sufficiently expensive that other low-CO2 alternatives would come into play before the carbon tax rises to a level that would allow nuclear to be viable on a large scale.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I don't think you gave the best counterargument there. Here's a better one (from the perspective of limiting CO2 emission):

If large amounts of relatively pure, compressed CO2 become available, the first and cheapest way to dispose of it will be using it for enhanced oil recovery. Tertiary treatment with CO2 of old oil fields (that have produced maybe 25% of the oil in place) can liberate another 10-15% of their oil content. So, this increases the total amount of oil that can ultimately be produced by ~50%.

EOR won't soak up all the available CO2, but that just means that many (perhaps most) oil fields will have enough CO2 available to be so treated.

The best scenario for CO2 sequestration is probably if the CO2 comes from biomass. This would be CO2 negative. Grow biomass, convert it to gas (for example, by anaerobic digestion turning it to a mix of methane and CO2), then sequester the CO2. This biogas could be burned directly in an Allam Cycle turbine if its nitrogen content is not too large. If the CO2 from this is put in the deep ocean this is just accelerating the process by which the oceans will come into equilibrium with atmospheric CO2 (and the deep ocean into equilibrium with surface waters.) Cost of ocean disposal of CO2 depends on circumstances but could be around $10/ton, IIRC.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

"Nuclear cannot compete with cheap gas."

Cheap gas that's subsidized by unlimited pollution rights, that is.