ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

The worsening nuclear crisis in Japan raises questions. What would be the consequences of shutting down nuclear reactors in the U.S.? In light of fresh doubts about the wisdom of nuclear power, is swapping out the U.S. vehicle fleet with all-electric vehicles realistic?

The chart below shows what the U.S. energy mix is today, and what the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects it to be over the next 25 years. The nuclear and coal part of the mix are expected to drop only a bit, coal from 45% to 43% and nuclear from 20% to 17%.

[Note that 43% of 5+ trillion kilowatt hours per year is a lot more than 45% of the 4+ trillion kilowatt hours coal accounts for today - meaning coal consumption in electricity generation is thus expected to increase substantially.  So much for doing anything about global warming.]

The University of California, Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology has published a technical brief which considers three scenarios for “maximum penetration” of electric cars into the market, projecting market share of new cars at 2015, 2020, 2025, and 2030 under differing cost assumptions.

The “market” in the above chart is defined as those likely to buy electric vehicles – 20% of the total market is excluded as not likely to buy electric vehicles.

Under the baseline scenario, 81 million electric vehicles would be on the road by 2030; under the operator-subsidized scenario, 151 million.

The U.C. study calculates that by 2030 the fleet of electric cars is estimated to require between 190 and 350 million megawatt hours of electricity per year. Currently, electricity generation in the U.S. totals around 4 billion megawatt hours per year. Powering an electric car fleet would require that the U.S. increase electricity generating capacity by 4.75%-8.75% by 2030. And that’s assuming no growth in electricity usage elsewhere in the economy, despite population and presumably economic growth.

In 2009, U.S. nuclear plants generated 798.7 billion kilowatt hours (or 7,987 million kilowatt hours) from 104 commercial nuclear generating units; “nuclear generating units” in the U.S. thus average 7.68 megawatt hours per year in output. The 602 coal power plants in the U.S. produce on average ~3.88 megawatt hours per year. Powering the projected U.S. electric car fleet would therefore require building 25-46 additional “nuclear generating units” by 2030. Or 50-90 coal-fired power plants.

Renewable sources, including wind and solar, currently account for about 10% of U.S. electricity generation – but two thirds of existing renewable capacity is hydroelectric, which is about tapped out and even under threat of decline. Solar and wind together account for only a little over 2% of renewable electric energy – about 72,000 megawatt hours per year. Powering the projected electric fleet from solar and wind alone would require increasing our solar and wind capacity by a factor of 2,500 – 5,000. Just to power electric cars,  nothing else: no growth, no phasing out of nuclear or decommissioning aging plants, no shutting down of CO2-emitting coal plants.

Phasing out nuclear power while we are still able so as to avoid catastrophic accidents, and phasing out coal  to save the planet as we know it, would seem to be of a bit higher priority than powering our go-carts.

Challenging times indeed. Replacing our gasoline-powered cars with electric cars should be about the last thing we should be focusing on.

An article by James Ridgeway in Mother Jones argues the idea of France as a model of safe, affordable nuclear energy is largely a myth.

France operates 59 nuclear reactors, which provided 78% of its electricity in 2007. But the civilian program has profited from direct and indirect subsidies, in particular through cross-financing with the nuclear weapons program. Nuclear’s cost accounting doesn’t appropriately take into account eventual decommissioning and waste-management costs, which remain quite uncertain. (In addition to post-fission waste, 46 years of uranium mining has left 50 million tons of waste for eventual cleanup and remediation, the cost of which is unknown.)  And the number of safety-relevant events has increased steadily from 7.1 per reactor per year in 2000 to 10.8 in 2007. This is a disturbing trend considering that the entire fleet is aging and such events are likely to increase with age.

The reality is that France is a landscape dotted with nuclear plants, traversed by trucks carrying nuclear fuel and waste, with its people exposed to health and security risks.

Gar Lipow at Gristmill runs the numbers and concludes that Gore’s proposal to decarbonize electricity over the course of 10 years is more than feasible, within the budget Gore proposes ($1.5 to 3 trillion).

But for about an extra $500 billion, we can phase out nuclear and biomass (which is proving to be devastating ecologically and disastrous for the poor) as well, while  shifting 85% of truck traffic to electrified rail, reducing oil consumption and emissions in the transportation sector.

Why is phasing out nuclear important? Amory Lovins explains in an interview with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now: expanding nuclear power will make climate change worse (transcript posted by Big Gav).

The argument of piece I posted yesterday about the voodoo economics of nuclear power in Britain is repeated today in a plethora of pieces addressing nuclear power in the U.S.

David Roberts at Gristmill has compiled links to a number of different articles and studies that all point to the same conclusion: nuclear power is simply too costly and can’t be built without massive government subsidies.

And of course this sets aside concerns about safety, proliferation, and the stability and ability of governments to monitor and maintain deadly radioactive material over periods of tens of thousands of years.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress has a new two-part blog on nuclear power. Part 1 is about Romm’s study “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power” in which he attacks the widespread myth that nuclear power will be a dominant solution to global warming. Many more cost-effective alternatives are at our fingertips now, including energy efficiency, wind power, solar photovoltaics, and concentrated solar power.

Part 2 provides a link to a shorter version (but not shorter titled!) of Romm’s study, published in Salon: “Nuclear bomb: Nuclear energy, the sequel, is opening to raves by everybody from John McCain to a Greenpeace co-founder. Don’t be fooled. It’s the Ishtar of power generation.”

Romm’s closing comment says is devastating:

“As the article points out, back in May 2001, the Economist (subs. req’d) explained that nuclear power had fallen out of favor because it simply was “too costly to matter.” Today, nuclear power is nearly three times the price it was when the Economist wrote that.”

A new Friends of the Earth research paper by Paul Brown looks at the future of nuclear power in Britain – but its conclusions are equally applicable everywhere.

“New build will not be possible without large sums of taxpayers’ money being pledged, and extending the unlimited guarantees to underwrite all the debts of the existing and future nuclear industry.”

The Executive Summary contains the following definition of “voodoo economics”:

“1. Term coined by George Bush Snr to describe Ronald Reagan’s economic policy because it promised to lower taxes and increase revenues at the same time.
“2. Any use of economics based on contradictory ideas and gobbledegook.”

The sorry truth is that  no new nuclear power station has ever been constructed without government subsidy. Without government underwriting and
financial guarantees, commercial reactors simply cannot get the backing they need from investors.

Voodoo Economics and the Doomed Nuclear Renaissance: A Research Paper is available for download free at Friends of the Earth’s website here (1.36 MB pdf file).

New research by Australian scientists finds that nuclear power isn’t really low carbon when you account for the entire nuclear energy chain and concludes that uranium mining may require more energy and water in the future, releasing greenhouse gases in greater quantities.

A significant proportion of greenhouse emissions from nuclear power stem from the fuel supply stage, which includes uranium mining, milling, enrichment and fuel manufacturing. Others sources of carbon include construction of the plant – including the manufacturing of steel and concrete materials – and decommissioning.

New uranium deposits are likely to be deeper underground and therefore more difficult to extract than at currently exploited sites. In addition, the average grade of uranium ore – a measure of its uranium oxide content and a key economic factor in mining – is likely to fall. Getting uranium from lower-quality deposits involves digging up and refining more ore. Transporting a greater amount of ore will in turn require more diesel-powered vehicles, the major source of greenhouse emissions in uranium mining.
The Nuclear Energy Agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency estimate the total amount of known recoverable uranium reserves at around 3.5 million tons. That includes reasonably assured reserves and estimated additional reserves that can be mined at moderate costs. At the current rate of usage – around 67,000 tons per year – those reserves will last for just over 50 years. That’s before any additional nuclear plants are built.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain is pushing for the U.S. to pin its future on nuclear power, pointing to France as an example. France gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear. For nuclear to supply a similar proportion of U.S. electricity, we would have to build 700 plus nuclear plants – more than one a month for the next fifty years – at a cost of roughly $4 trillion.

There’s an interesting post at The Oil Drum: Europe examining the role of nuclear power in meeting energy needs.

Eugenio Saraceno, member of ASPO-Italy and consultant for energy sources management, compares the experience of France – which gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear power plants – with Italy, which dismantled all of its nuclear power plants following a national referendum 20 years ago.

Saraceno considers energy usage, costs, and future uranium supplies. He doesn’t address issues relating to safety or disposal of radioactive wastes.

His conclusion:

“In the end, we see that complete independence in energy production with nuclear power was not reached by France, nor Italy could hope to reach it by revamping its old nuclear program at this point. To reach the French level of nuclear energy production, Italy would have to build almost 20 GWe of nuclear power, spend over 40 G€ and this would take some 10-20 years. Doing so, Italy couldn’t hope to become independent from hydrocarbon imports since we see that France couldn’t do that, either, despite all her nuclear reactors.”