Al Gore's New Book

The last month has been bad for the struggle against climate change. The Pew Research Center's recent poll shows that Americans are almost evenly divided between those who think it's a very serious threat, those who think it's a somewhat serious threat, and those who don't think it is a serious threat.

APEC nations announced they would not sign enforceable limits on greenhouse-gas emissions at the Copenhagen meeting coming up in December.

And now we have Al Gore's much-anticipated new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

His first book was supposed to show the science about global warming and climate change, but he got the science wrong and thereby gave ammunition to the denialists. The best-known mistake was the graph that showed the correlation between global average temperature and CO2 concentration over the last 400,000 years. What he may have failed to notice, and certainly didn't point out, was that the temperature changes preceded the CO2 changes by hundreds of years, which contradicted his thesis.

So expectations weren't high when he published this new book, which deals with the solutions. And we were neither disappointed nor pleasantly surprised.

He covers all the important points in the subject. Some of the information no doubt is accurate and valuable. Unfortunately, it's poorly referenced so readers can't distinguish between solid information and his own opinions.

And we see grating inconsistencies. Our interest here is mainly in nuclear energy as an important part of the solution. He shrugs it off, saying only that a very great investment is needed to implement it.

His solution? Besides the usual exhortations to practice efficiency and conservation, he gives us only the usual tired nostrums: wind, solar, and geothermal energy. As we have shown here to the point of tedium, the investment required for wind and solar energy is higher than that for nuclear, and geothermal could at most provide only a few per cent of our electricity requirements. By his logic, nuclear should be at the top of the list of solutions; sadly, his information doesn't carry him to the right and obvious conclusion.

He does get credit for at least considering the problem of intermittency. Here again, alas, he falls down. He proposes that plug-in hybrid car batteries will solve the problem of storing enough energy to get the country through periods of low energy production from wind and solar.

We happen to know how much electricity has to be stored. As we calculated here, the US would have to store between 141 and 386 billion KWH, depending on how much comes from solar and how much from wind, based on current consumption rates. But Toyota's intended battery has a storage capacity of 202 volts x 13 amp-hours, or 2.6 KWH. Each battery costs around $10,000. The number of plug-in batteries required would be 54 billion to 148 billion, in a country with 306 million people. Or, if every person owned one battery and used it only for energy storage, the combined capacity would be only 0.2% to 0.56% of what's needed. For the storage to provide 5% of the amount needed would require technological improvements that aren't even on the horizon.

Ironies abound in the second half of the book. He points out the undeniable fact that the most effective way to limit population growth is to promote economic security in poor countries. "The most powerful contraceptive is the confidence by parents that their children will survive," he quotes Julius K. Nyerere, Tanzania's first Prime Minister and President. But he wants to limit their energy sources to the most expensive and unachievable ones.

He offers us this crucial conclusion: "The only meaningful and effective solutions to the climate crisis involve massive changes in human behavior and thinking." That clearly is true, and it's too bad he doesn't apply it to his own attitudes about nuclear energy.

He refers to the confusion over climate change mentioned at the beginning of this article. He blames the confusion on self-interested political groups that spread misinformation about the subject. They didn't have to prove they were right, they just had to create doubt about the truth. He quotes climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer: "What they've done is try to take scientific understanding and put it on the same level with political opinion." Why can't he grasp the fact that the same thing happened to nuclear energy?

As was the case for the first book, Mr. Gore's errors fortify the arguments of those who oppose his program. For some time, they've been pointing out that if the situation is as dire as he makes it out to be then he should be calling for massive nuclear construction. His demands for solutions that are more popular but less effective undermine his credibility and, it follows, his argument.

So that's the deal on his book. Certainly some of the information has to be good, but it's not referenceable. The pictures are good. If your public library has it, you definitely should read it.

Nuclear Energy Costs

Every responsible study has shown that nuclear electricity is as cheap as any of the non-fossil alternatives and is competitive with fossil-fired electricity.

For example, the International Energy Agency and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency determined the costs as follows:

Cost per MWH in US Dollars

Discount Rate	5%	10%
Coal	25-50	35-60
Nat Gas	37-60	40-63
Nuclear	21-31	30-50
Wind	35-95	45-140
Micro Hydro	40-80	65-100
Solar PV	~150	200+

The University of Chicago compared several detailed calculations with a range of discount rates and summarized the results thus:

Cost per MWH in US Dollars

Coal	37-49
Nat Gas	56-68
Nuclear (assuming old designs)	65-77
Nuclear (assuming new designs)	36-55
Nuclear (assuming advanced-fuel designs)	57-64
Wind	55-77
Solar PV	202-308
Solar Thermal	158-235

A question that immediately presents itself is, why do the two studies give different numbers? The answer is that every study depends on assumptions, such as interest rates and fuel costs. Both these factors, and other factors such as taxes, pollution controls, and equipment lifetimes vary in time and place. This introduces an opportunity to do mischief, since a motivated commentator can pick-and-choose results to bolster his intended conclusion. These numbers only have significance if they're calculated on equal terms and only if they're read relatively, not absolutely.

A common argument being made now is that nuclear construction costs have risen so fast they have rendered nuclear plants too expensive to build. This argument is anchored on a report about some calculations made by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) that allegedly show a cost increase of 185% between 2000 and 2007. Imagine, an almost tripling of costs in seven years! However, CERA doesn't publish the results in a public forum; nor does it show the calculations so they can be verified. Indeed, there's no way even to know what methods it used.

It is true, though, that costs have risen strongly since China and India began their notable advances in material progress. These cost rises apply to all kinds of construction and, in particular, apply to alternative energy sources.

Here is some information on the cost of windpower construction, which has doubled:


And some data (Oct. 28, 2008) on solar-electric construction. It has essentially held constant, but at US$4700 per KW rated power or over US$20,000 per average KW, it still is hopelessly expensive. What this shows is that the pressure on material prices has kept solar energy from getting cheaper.
Finally, here is some information from Power Engineering International on nuclear construction costs, which shows a cost increase of 125%, not much different from the increase for windpower.


What all these numbers show is what energy analysts have been telling us right along. Nuclear energy is as cost-effective as any non-fossil energy source, even ignoring the intermittency problem of part-time energy sources. But if intermittency is considered, then the comparison widens. There aren't any practical ways to overcome intermittency, as shown here. But if there were some way, the economic and environmental costs would drive the total cost out of sight.

As the world grapples with this issue, one other point has to be considered. A new generation of nuclear power plants is being born. These new plants use passive safety systems so the active systems can be simpler, thereby reducing costs. Furthermore, they operate at higher efficiencies, lowering fuel costs. As shown in the University of Chicago data, these improvements make nuclear energy cheaper than any alternative other than coal.

Energy Fuel Supplies

When energy is discussed, the subject of fuel reserves often arises. In particular, opponents of nuclear energy point to a few decades of proven reserves as a reason to abandon one of the very few effective countermeasures available against climate change.

The point that needs to be understood is that proven reserves are only a fraction of the resources that really exist. For example, the world has less than a three-years' supply of oil if only proven reserves are considered. No one really believes the world will run out of oil in three years. In comparison, projected resources show over 600 years' supply of oil, maybe a thousand years' supply of coal, and 30,000 years' supply of nuclear fuel. Even if all the world's electricity comes from nuclear energy and the rate of electricity use triples, nuclear fuel will last over a thousand years. Renewable energy and energy efficiency can stretch the supply longer. A thousand years should be enough time to develop other solutions, such as fusion energy and energy storage.

The best available information from the most authoritative sources can be found here.

My Coal Company

If I owned a coal company, my biggest fear would be that people would learn how much damage I was causing and make me pay for it. My second biggest fear would be that people would demand that power utilities switch from coal to nuclear energy.

What to do, what to do.

I would give money to my allies. All the groups that support renewable energy also support me. It's a simple fact of nature that renewable energy sources generate little or no power for hours or even days at a time and what they do generate is unpredictable. Furthermore, there's no way to save enough energy to hold people over from one power episode to the next. Anyone who does arithmetic can see that for himself. Some examples of the arithmetic can be seen here. That means backup energy supplies always have to be standing by when renewable energy sources are in operation.

In the short run, renewables will displace a few percent of my coal sales. But the economics of renewables make them unacceptable. That's because the backup energy sources required cost almost as much to hold in readiness as they do to operate. The result is that energy consumers pay for the same energy twice: once for the renewable energy and again for the backup. When people catch on to that their support for renewable energy will vanish.

There's also a second benefit. The political groups that pose as defenders of the environment ought to be pursuing me as Public Enemy Number 1. Even in the US, thousands of people die every month from coal pollution, as shown here. Worldwide, the deaths run into the hundreds of thousands every year, to say nothing of debilitating diseases, heavy-metal poisoning, and ocean pollution. But if I fund the political groups then they'll never make more than token objections. What they will do is attack my only competition with hammer and tongs. All the groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth will fall over themselves making up lurid and fantastic warnings against nuclear energy. All because of their infatuation with renewable energy.

That's enough, but for a few dollars more I can hire "consultants" who pretend to be scientists. They'll write articles and publish them in popular magazines that don't believe in peer review. They'll probably get away with it because most editors can't tell science from cotton candy. And in the remote chance some of these fake scientists are unmasked, most people won't hear about it anyway because journalists hate to admit they were wrong.

Yeah, that's the ticket!

S. 2191, The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2007

This Senate bill is the main legislation under consideration in the US for dealing with greenhouse-gas emissions.

Cap and Trade
Its most important feature is cap-and-trade covering utilities, industries, and motor fuels. It's aggressive enough, with ambitious goals, but it has so many escape clauses and offramps that its value has to be deeply discounted. Moreover, the emission rights will be auctioned off to support favorite causes, so it is actually a tax. Many analysts believe taxing carbon emissions is the only way to reduce them. Maybe they're right, but if it's a tax it won't fly. That's a given in US politics. People want the services and benefits that come from government largesse, but they won't vote for any politician who makes them pay taxes.

That pretty well makes the rest of the subject moot, but we'll proceed anyway because some other points have to be part of future discussions.

Carbon Sequestration
Another major feature is an emphasis on CO2 sequestration. It seems that CO2 producers will get credit for pumping CO2 into the ground. The bill contains provisions for determining the capacity of storage locations, but not for evaluating whether or not the CO2 will stay in place.

To date, no sequestration site in the world has been tested for leakage. Furthermore, no one knows how to conduct such a test.

On the subject of sequestration, Senator Jeff Bingaman makes this remark: "Currently there are no formal site selection criteria for carbon dioxide injection wells that will be used for carbon storage." He goes on to explain that the EPA has no clue how to set the criteria. That reflects the impossibility of sequestering CO2 with any confidence.

Under the terms of this bill, utilities can pump CO2 into the ground and act as though it never was generated, without any assurance it won't leak into the atmosphere some decades later. If it does leak, utilities will have paid large amounts for this program, all for no purpose.

Energy Supply
The US Energy Information Administration did a
study to compare the effects of the bill, under various scenarios. What the study showed is especially instructive.

The results seem obvious, but prove that nuclear opponents are wrong. Even under the most optimistic conditions, renewables won't provide the energy the country needs. The simple fact is that if nuclear energy isn't developed to its full potential, then the US will depend more on natural gas, a substance in great demand and short supply, and coal. Moreover, some of the coal combustion would have to be subject to carbon sequestration, an untested and dubious concept.

Future
One hesitates to criticize. The world faces an enormous challenge and it's only natural that practical people would turn to easy-sounding solutions such as carbon taxes and sequestration. Sadly, those won't succeed; one is political poison and the other is imaginary.

Instead, we have to commit ourselves to the hard work of reshaping our energy usage. Instead of auctioning off pollution rights, we have to outright ban the installation of fossil-fueled generating plants, either new or replacement capacity. New electricity demand must be met by a combination of renewable and nuclear sources, and offset by efficiency and the curtailment of low-return energy use. Vehicle efficiency has to be raised much more than the feeble changes Congress has mandated. Bureaucratic obstacles to synthetic fuels like Green Freedom should be cleared and, if it's necessary, subsidies that currently go to fossil-fuel producers should be directed toward offsetting the cost difference between petroleum fuel and synthetic fuel.

That's what it will take to beat this problem.

Bafflegab: Energy Subsidies

I've tried to keep the articles objective, except where the discussion requires some insights into the thinking of political activists. Even there, we're on reasonably firm ground because nuclear opponents have been staunchly consistent and have always communicated their opinions freely.

But the subject of subsidies is altogether different, and that is the point of this article. I am only covering the US situation; I don't understand what goes on in other countries. I don't fully understand what's going on in the US and I don't think anyone else does, either. But the reason this comes up is that nuclear opponents wish to prove that nuclear energy costs more than its price shows; that if it weren't subsidized it would be hopelessly expensive.

The first murky issue is, what constitutes a subsidy? A subsidy is supposed to be a transfer of money (or possibly property) to an economic entity as a financial benefit. No energy sources get subsidies. But a tax credit is the same thing, so all energy sources get subsidies.

In the current energy plan, the first 6000 MW of new advanced-design nuclear plants can receive up to 1.8¢ per KWH in tax credits for up to 8 years. Up to six new plants could qualify for a subsidy to offset the cost of designing and permitting.[source] Clean renewable sources can receive up to 1.9¢ per KWH for up to 10 years.[source]

So those seem clear enough. But plants are also offered loan guarantees. That clearly benefits the utilities that build them. It also benefits investors. But it only costs taxpayers if the utilities default on the loans. So is that a subsidy? And if it is, how does one evaluate the probability of a default?

Nuclear opponents always cite federal underwriting of nuclear insurance as a subsidy. That could be considered a benefit, but it only costs the taxpayers if there's an accident exceeding 10 billion dollars in damages. In the history of the program, taxpayers have never paid out a cent. Is that a subsidy? And if it is, how does one evaluate the probability of an accident?

Nuclear opponents consider money spent in the past on research and development to be a subsidy. But the R & D money went to make nuclear plants safer, not cheaper. In fact, the research achievements raised the cost to utilities because they had to upgrade their plants when new technology became available. It could be that the superior technology prevented expensive accidents, but the main beneficiaries were members of the public. So, should R & D expenditures be considered a subsidy?

But these considerations don't slow nuclear opponents down for a second. They throw numbers around as if they meant something, and never try to justify them. Here are some examples:

"In the last 50 years, nuclear energy subsidies have totaled close to $145 billion; renewable energy subsidies total close to $5 billion."[prwatch.org]

"Between 1948 and 1998, the federal government spent $111.5 billion on energy research and development programs. Of this amount, 60 percent, or $66 billion, was dedicated to nuclear energy research, and 23 percent, or $26 billion, was directed to fossil fuel research."[PIRG]

"Management Information Services, Inc. (MISI), conducting a study of the cumulative effects of energy subsidies, found that by 1997 Federal subsidies for energy had amounted to $564 billion (1997 dollars) over the last five decades, roughly half of which went to the oil industry in the form of tax expenditures. MISI considered eight categories of Federal activity and quantified subsidies in six. In contrast to other findings, MISI found that subsidies to renewable sources ($90 billion) outpaced those to natural gas ($73 billion), coal ($68 billion), or nuclear energy ($61 billion)."
[eia.doe.gov]

"While the bill's environmental objectives are a strong advance, one provision remains misguided. Despite the provision of billions of dollars in subsidies to the nuclear industry in the 2005 Energy Policy Act and over $85 billion in historical subsidies, the bill introduced today contains additional nuclear subsidies that NRDC continues to oppose."[NRDC]

But let's take the wildest of the these guesses, prwatch.org's 145 billion dollars. Spread over the 17,111 billion KWH nuclear plants have generated, the cost of this purported subsidy is 0.8¢/KWH. In contrast, the subsidy for geothermal, wind, and solar, using prwatch.org's 5 billion dollars spread over 485 billion KWH, would be 1¢/KWH. Or, if we use MISI's estimates, the subsidies would be 0.4¢/KWH for nuclear and 18¢/KWH for renewables.

If we were to believe nuclear opponents, they all are stalwart Defenders of the Public Purse. They are deeply concerned that taxpayers will have to support uneconomic nuclear power plants. Renewable energy sources are different, though. Taxpayers should be glad to support them.

But these numbers show that this is all a red herring. Even if we accept nuclear opponents' exaggerated projections of nuclear subsidies, most renewables still won't compete. On economic grounds, the choice is between nuclear and coal.

So why is coal so cheap? It's because the federal government has a deliberate policy of allowing coal-burning utilities to emit so much pollution into the air that thousands of Americans die every month, all in the interest of holding down electricity rates. Just counting deaths among adults over 25, the estimate ranges from 33,000 to 121,000 per year in the US [table]. Nuclear energy can't compete with coal and neither can anything else, not even conservation.

Subsidies for nuclear energy are not necessary. If air-pollution controls were adequate then windpower, nuclear, and conservation would all be cost-competitive. But if we set a policy that coal-burning utilities are free to poison the air, and we want at the same time to make them stop operating, then we can't just leave it up to the market to decide.

An Energy Plan

To start, we should look at some energy numbers. These apply to the US only. Here are the quantities of energy the US used in 2006, in quadrillion British thermal units, usually called quads:

Source	quads	%
Renewable	0.329091699	0.216726496
Hydro	0.987196598	0.650127793
Nuclear	2.686778447	1.769403728
Fossil-fired Elec	9.844436722	6.483148269
Other Fossil	137.9990426	90.88059371
TOTAL	151.8465461	100

Sources:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epates.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/convheat.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0103.html


Note, if you will, that fossil-fired electricity accounts for only 6.5% of the energy even though it accounts for 40% of the CO2 emissions.

This analysis comes in two parts. First we'll cover electricity. We know the rate of electricity generation will go up because a lot of the schemes for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions require shifting fossil-fuel applications to electricity: battery-powered cars, light-rail transit systems, replacing furnaces with heat pumps, etc.

Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar can't replace fossil fuels owing to their part-time natures. But they can greatly reduce the amount of fossil fuels being burned during the transition period while renewable and nuclear sources are being installed. So our plan includes both renewable and nuclear.



But wait, there's more! Electricity is a big part of the problem but not the only part. We also have to replace petroleum-based motor fuels. At this point, there are only two possibilities in view, besides electrified vehicles, bicycles, foot travel, horseback, rickshaw and some other specialized transportation modes. The two possibilities are hydrogen and hydrogen-enriched biofuels, as we discussed in the article, "The Dimensions of the Challenge." Our plan needs to include the capability of producing large amounts of hydrogen. This plan does that, because nuclear plants allow for thermochemical production of hydrogen, by far the most efficient technique available.

Once all the fossil-fired power plants are replaced, nuclear and renewables can complement each other. The nuclear plants can provide whatever electricity is needed during times of dim sunlight and low winds, or no sunlight and no wind. When the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and when demand for electricity is low, nuclear plants can divert some of their capacity to generating hydrogen.

This plan allows solar and wind to play their maximum part in providing electricity. Further, it allows them to contribute efficiently to the production of hydrogen.

I don't want to claim that this is the only energy plan that could work. But it is the only plan I've seen that could work. If you know a better plan we'll do it your way instead. However, if your plan doesn't allow for providing electricity when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing then you don't have a plan.