EU to Propose Considering Nuclear Power--but not on a Level Playing Field

It has been a long time since I was moved to write a blog, perhaps because I feel that I have already addressed many of the major issues, and I do not like to just repeat myself.  However, the recent reports that the European Union (EU) is considering allowing nuclear power and natural gas to be added to the list of "green technologies," but with "conditions," has me disturbed enough to break my silence.

 

As the Reuters article notes, the EU is responding to pressure from a number of countries to consider nuclear power and natural gas in its taxonomy of "green technologies," but it is trying to address the opposing pressures of the anti-nuclear countries by imposing conditions that appear to be tailor-made to make it extremely difficult for a country to comply.  Specifically, "the project has [to have] a plan, funds and a site to safely dispose of radioactive waste."  Since we know that disposal of radioactive waste has been a political football in many countries for years, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out what is likely to happen.  Or not happen. 

 

I can't object to requiring a technology to consider the full life-cycle impacts.  BUT...if nuclear power is required to do this, why not wind energy and solar energy?  While the wind and the sun may be free and clean, we can't get usable amounts of energy from them without creating a lot of other impacts.  Numerous reports have documented the rare materials needed, and the wastes generated, by wind and solar energy.  In fact, given the low density of these energy sources, the amount of materials that are required to build the structures and systems to capture these distributed energy sources is huge.  These materials need to be mined and fabricated to build windmills or solar panels, and disposed of at the end of the lives of the windmills and solar power plants. Some of the materials used may be scarce and are currently available largely from places like China, which we do not want to depend on for basic energy needs, and many are potentially hazardous to human health and to the environment.  

 

There are some requirements for natural gas plants as well.  They must replace something more polluting, which is a good thing.  And there are emission standards--at the power plant itself--that assure that more advanced natural gas technologies are used.  However, once again, they don't take the full life cycle into consideration.  Specifically, they don't include consideration of methane emissions at the point of extraction, and methane is a potent greenhouse gas.  And for natural gas, too, there is a supply issue.  With Russia being a major supplier of natural gas to some European countries, we have already seen that it can easily be used for political advantage.

 

If anyone who has followed my blog thinks that I have mentioned all of this before, indeed I have.  I probably wouldn't have addressed the issue again, except for the fact that the EU is about to go down a bizarre and counterproductive path.  Don't get me wrong.  I think it is fine if the EU wishes to consider the whole life cycle of energy sources.  And it's a good idea to require some plan to assure that there will be financing for end-of-life requirements.  In fact, these conditions are probably appropriate.  I just think that it is important for all energy sources to be treated equally, and that these same conditions are applicable for addressing the materials needs for wind and solar systems.  That would be the best outcome for the people of the EU and for their environment.  

 

But going forward with a plan that imposes requirements on one technology and not on another strikes me as the worst of all worlds.  The people of Europe are likely to be saddled with an energy mix that they believe is "clean" and "renewable," but that will turn out to be unreliable, costly, and that, in the end, will leave future generations with a huge quantity of highly hazardous waste.  And probably with nowhere to dispose of it.

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Challenges to Nuclear Power:

Not Always the Obvious

Most conventional wisdom has looked at the rising use of solar and wind power and concluded that these are the primary reasons that nuclear power plants have been shutting down in recent years.  There is a growing body of analysis, however, that refutes that claim.  A recent study by MIT has reinforced the findings of a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, showing that solar and wind aren't the real problems.  Natural gas is.

It's easy to see how such misperceptions have arisen.  Multiple changes have been occurring in energy markets in recent years--various incentives to encourage the use of solar and wind power, a reduction in some of the initially high costs of building solar and wind systems, the movement away from regulated energy markets.  And the growth of fracking, which has flooded the market with cheap natural gas.

Of all these things, solar and wind power have gotten the most press, so at times, it has seemed as if so-called renewable energy systems and nuclear power plants were enemies.

These studies show that this is not the case.  Looking at energy supply geographically, there was little correlation between where coal and nuclear plants were retiring and where new wind and solar capacity was located.

Rather, the closures seem to be correlated with cheap natural gas.  In the short term, that may look good to a lot of people.  After all, who doesn't like a bargain? 

But haven't we all fallen for something that looked like a bargain, only to find that it wasn't?  The cheap shoes that didn't last.  The bargain appliance that broke down quickly.  

Natural gas may well be the type of bargain that looks great now, but can cost us dearly later on.  First of all, cheap prices are only good if we can rely on them to remain cheap in the long run.  History has shown us that is a bad assumption.  Oil and gas have fluctuated dramatically in price before, and could do so again.  

Secondly, when natural gas plants replace coal plants, there is a net reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.  But when natural gas plants replace nuclear power plants, the result is an increase in carbon dioxide and other pollutants.  So our glee at our short term bargain may have health and environmental ramifications in the long run.

Cooler heads have always argued for maintaining a mix in our energy supplies, including renewables, nuclear power and natural gas.  A recent report by Jim Conca in Forbes looks at the recent "bomb cyclone" and shows the value of diversity.  A mix of sources offers a kind of resilience that no single source can offer.  It offers a buffer against short-term weather outages or transportation problems.  It offers some disincentive to any one source manipulating prices.  It offers some flexibility when bad things do happen. 

The MIT and national laboratory studies come at a critical time, when a number of nuclear power plants have closed due to financial pressures, and more closures are threatened.  Hopefully, they will help point the way to measures that can be taken to assure that the benefits of nuclear power are appropriately valued in the marketplace.

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Natural Gas:

A Flash in the Pan?

Several articles have been published in the past few days all addressing various aspects of the sudden rise in the prospects for natural gas, and the potential longer-term consequences of following policies that rely too much on what might be a short term availability.

The articles take somewhat different approaches to the problem.  Some of the authors, or the analysts cited, have their own biases as far as the alternatives to natural gas.  However, all have some common themes with respect to the long-term prospects for natural gas and the detrimental consequences they can wreak on other alternatives while the costs are low and everything looks rosy.

Two of the articles sum up the key issues:

Is Natural Gas the Next Bubble?  Has Fracking Promised More Than It Can Deliver?

The provocative title is a summary in itself.  The subtitle to the article succinctly states the conclusion:  New research shows that putting too much of our eggs into this energy basket could be detrimental to our future economic health.

The article goes on to provide several examples, for both coal and nuclear plants, where the cost competition from currently cheap natural gas is driving utilities to close the existing plants.  Although I take issue with their characterization of nuclear power as having "glaring environmental, safety and health issues," the authors are objective enough to recognize that substituting natural gas for nuclear power production has serious detrimental effects on carbon emissions.

Based on my own reading, I think their conclusions about the potential short-term nature of the natural gas boom are valid.  They provide a fairly detailed discussion of studies that verify the concerns, and speculate that, in the not-so-distant future, we may find ourselves facing exactly the same scenario that we face today with crude oil--"much more dependent and at a higher price."

Rise of Natural Gas May Mean Fall of Alternative Energy

This article reiterates the theme that the low cost of natural gas may be temporary.  The article also outlines various other concerns about natural gas, including the environmental effects of gas production.

The author outlines some of the paths that the current push for natural gas might lead us down.  He observes that, "Today the shift to natural gas in electricity generation is out-of-control, and consumers are going to suffer as a result. If you want to see the price of natural gas rise significantly, replace all coal and nuclear plants with natural gas over the next 30 years. We would wind up with a single fuel for electricity production just as we have one fuel for transportation. Consumers would regret it."

Although "alternative energy" for many people seems to be a code-word for "not nuclear," this article takes a broader view.  The author notes that:  "Advances in nuclear power and renewable energy sources would help maintain energy diversity. Small modular reactors built in a factory for a fraction of the cost of large nuclear plants could make a real difference in this country and globally. As we expand the use of intermittent renewable sources of electricity - especially solar and wind - base-load nuclear power will be needed to "firm" renewable sources when they are not available."

Other Articles

Still other recent items look at the same problem from other angles.  One, for example, notes that many wind farms have long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs).  These could keep costs low

and exert a downward pressure on rising gas prices.  While the article is focused only on wind, the same should, of course, be true of PPAs for other energy sources.  I am not sure what the terms are for PPAs, so wonder if these could possibly hold prices down for the longer term, but it may be one way we can buy time as the full dimensions of the gas bubble begin to take shape. 

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Energy Production and Paper Cups:

Measuring the Impacts

I was traveling through Harrisonburg, Virginia a couple of weeks ago and stopped for lunch with my husband at a local barbecue joint.  I ordered a glass of iced tea with my meal.  When the iced tea came, I saw some text on the side of it.  Now, I have always been a voracious reader, and I can't tell you how many times I've sat at the breakfast table and read cereal boxes and the like, so although I just expected advertising or something, I simply had to read the text curling around the cup.

The iced tea was in a foam cup, and the text explained that paper cups produce 148% more waste by weight than foam cups.  Sounds good, right?  Except that the last time I checked, landfill is limited by volume, not by weight, and paper cups are thinner than foam cups.  Furthermore, paper is biodegradable, and foam generally is not. 

Admittedly, advances are being made in foam products, and some are biodegradable, but the cup didn't boast of being biodegradable.  I can't be absolutely sure, but after touting its weight advantages, I would have to believe it would have broadcast its biodegradability as well--if it were biodegradable.  But it didn't.

So what does this have to do with energy production?  Too often, I have seen promoters of various energy sources treat their products the same way--picking out the positives without presenting the whole picture.  Thus, we hear about how much wind or solar capacity has been built, but we aren't told that the fraction of power supplied by these sources is much smaller than the built capacity.  We also hear about how solar or wind or nuclear energy produce no greenhouse gases, but we aren't always told that each of these produces some other forms of waste.  We hear that natural gas or "clean coal" is cleaner than oil or regular coal and is produced domestically, but we don't hear how they compare to nuclear or solar or wind power, and we don't hear that very little of our electricity is generated from oil-fired plants. 

I could go on.  But this is no different from all the other things we use in our daily lives--paper versus plastic bags, genetically-modifed versus non-GM crops, electric cars versus gasoline-powered cars.  And foam cups versus paper cups.

The point, as always, is that every source of energy has multiple dimensions, some very positive, some negative--and some that can potentially be overcome with further technology development.  Yes, this makes it complex and problematical to compare sources.  Yes, it means that there is no one perfect source that we should rely on completely.

The "right" energy solution, and the "right" solution for almost everything else we use, is likely to involve a mix of options, and is likely to create continual pressure to reduce the downsides of each of these technologies.

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Coal versus Gas:

No Clear Cut Winner

In the past few years, the "conventional wisdom" has been that switching from coal to natural gas for power production would benefit the environment. Not only does burning gas reduce particulate emissions, it also reduces CO2 emissions. Most sources acknowledge that natural gas is not as clean as nuclear power and renewables in terms of CO2 emissions, but having been promoting that option as an interim step, allowing the faster draw down of coal power plants.

Now, a report has come out that says "it ain't necessarily so"--switching from coal to natural gas would actually do very little to reduce global climate change. This report takes me back to a point of view I've expressed several times in this blog and elsewhere--the chemical and physical interactions involved in all our power sources and their interactions with the environment are incredibly complicated, and we cannot make long-term policy decisions based on simplistic models of the world.

I'm not a climatologist, so I can't say for sure if someone is going to come along in the next day, or week, or year and debunk this entire analysis. However, my point remains the same. Simply measuring the amount of CO2 generated in a bench-scale test of coal versus natural gas doesn't take into account all the emissions of both energy sources and all their interactions with the environment.

In a similar vein, I just ran across a letter in a recent issue of Science that challenged claims that electric-powered automobiles wouldn't reduce emissions because of the need to generate more power from electric power plants. The letter claimed that there was still a net savings because electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion engines and because electric vehicles obtain some of their power from regenerative braking. Again, I haven't done the math, but it makes sense to me that one can't project the net emissions without taking such factors into account.

So, what does this mean for energy policy and planning? I think we need to keep pointing out the following:

• There are no perfect solutions. Every option has some benefits and some drawbacks.

• Simple comparisons are apt to miss important factors.

• What your mother told you at the dinner table is right--"Everything in moderation."

In short, we need a mix of energy sources. We can't simply replace coal with natural gas so we can wait it out for renewables to be perfected, as some recommend.

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