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Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Antinuclear activist

Self-Described Antinuclear, Pro-Renewable Former Vermont Legislator Claims “We were angels, doing God’s work.”

November 21, 2017 By Rod Adams 7 Comments

Tony Klein, a former Vermont legislator who played an important role in Vermont energy law creation during the last decade, recently gave a fascinating talk at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Vermont.

Fortunately for those of us with a deep interest in energy politics, the talk was competently recorded for posterity and world-wide distribution. Audience interest and participation in his talk was stimulated by an unplanned coincidence; he spoke about a week after Vermont, like most of New England, suffered from widely distributed power outages.

Klein’s talk lasts about an hour, but it will be time well-invested for those seeking to gain insights into how renewable energy advocates carried the water for Green Mountain Power in its quest to dominate Vermont’s electricity supply system.

What information did Tony Klein share?

Klein began his talk by describing his entry into the energy production conversation as an activist in the antinuclear movement and his personal development as a member of the ‘back to the land” movement.

Aside: That migration of liberal utopians to Vermont made a big impact starting in the late 1960s and 1970s with continuing influence ever since.

There is a reasonable chance that you will watch White Christmas in the near future. There is a revealing exchange about Vermont politics in that 1954 film.

Bing Crosby: “So tell me, what do you think would be a novelty up here in Vermont?”

Danny Kaye: “Who knows, maybe we can dig up a Democrat.”

It’s probably an understatement to note that “back to the land” movement helped to alter Vermont’s political leanings. End Aside.

Klein describes how he moved from his activist roots and began working in the energy industry as a marketer for Blue Flame Gas. One of his tasks there was to develop a program to convince customers to convert from electric water heaters to natural gas water heaters.

The company wanted to reduce the sharp swings in seasonal demand. He suggested a program to his bosses that would convert customers from electric water heaters to propane or gas water heaters. His company worked with electric utility companies that were interested in reducing electricity sales to provide new hydrocarbon-burning water heaters with financing repaid via electricity bills.

When he left that job he formed a lobbying group that represented independent power producers, Renewable Energy Vermont and Efficiency Vermont.

In 2002, he took advantage of an open seat created by redistricting and was elected to serve in the state legislature, representing east Montpelier and Middlesex. He held his seat for seven 2-year terms.

He began serving on the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee during his second term and was the chairman of that Committee for his final four terms. He humbly called himself a witness to Vermont’s energy system transformation. A more accurate term might be be “leading actor” or “player.”

At least three times during the talk, Tony claims that he and his compatriots believed that they were “angels, doing God’s work.” He expresses a fair amount of contrition for leading a energy supply revolution that seems to be failing with uncomfortable consequences.

He explains how he decided not to run for another term because he just couldn’t deal with all of the negativity and finger-pointing that was growing in intensity as the results of his numerous legislative efforts became increasingly apparent.

Just before the 19 minute time mark, he mentions that the room would not have been large enough to contain the audience if he he was still serving as Chair of the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee. He noted that there would be a “whole lot of people who didn’t like me and would accuse me of a lot of different things.”

During the period from 1998 – 2014, the Vermont legislature passed 18 separate acts that Klein describes as having had a major impact on its energy supply choices. He says, “they were all passed unanimously – except for 1, 2, 3 – 6 of them.”

Warning – please do not take a sip of hot coffee around the 28 minute mark. Right after that Klein claims that Vermont imported almost all of its electrical power in the 1990s.

Those of us who know where to find the data (p. 273) could point out to Mr. Klein that Vermont was a net exporter of electricity in 1998, with the vast majority of the electricity produced inside the state borders coming from a single nuclear power plant – Vermont Yankee.

As a direct result of that well-run, virtually emission-free plant, Vermont’s electricity supply was the cleanest in the nation with the following ranks among states (including D.C.) on reported polluting gases.

Sulfur Dioxide 51
Nitrogen Oxide 51
Carbon Dioxide 51

Klein also mentions that Vermont experienced an ice storm in the late 1990s that brought down the transmission line from Hydro Quebec. It took 5-6 weeks for that power line to be restored. During the outage, utilities in the state had to purchase their power on the open market and spent enough to “almost drive them into bankruptcy.”

The state is no less dependent today on power imported from Hydro Quebec than it was then. Some advocate even more imports via transmission lines from that distant power source.

That summarizes the first 30 minutes of the video. I hope it has whetted your appetite enough to encourage you to watch for yourself to see a master salesman explain away his contributions to the creation of Vermont’s fragile power system.

Filed Under: Tony Klein, Antinuclear activist, Politics of Nuclear Energy, Solar energy, Unreliables, Vermont Yankee, Wind energy

Confusing watts and watt-hours is a Gross Conceptual Error

November 7, 2017 By Rod Adams 92 Comments

It’s probably safe to say that nearly everyone who talks or writes anything about energy and power has made the mistake – perhaps only as a typographical error – of writing or saying “gigawatt” in a situation where the correct term is “gigawatt-hour”.

Those of us who have real understanding of the topic, however, will either quickly correct the typo when it is pointed out, or we will think for a minute to recognize which of those two units is correct in the situation under discussion.

For some people who like to talk about energy, however, the problem is something more than just a typographical error. They really do not quite understand that a watt (whether modified by a prefix of nano, kilo, mega, or giga) is a unit of power while a watt-second (or gigawatt-hour) is a measure of energy.

They may not even recognize that power and energy are two very different and equally important items worth measuring correctly. They may even fail to understand the importance of using the correct units in any expression of a measured parameter.

The proper reaction a reader or a listener should have to anyone sharing an opinion about energy and power who stubbornly will not correct units or who can’t tell the difference between energy and power is to stop accepting that person’s words and work.

Aside Would you give any credibility to a financial advisor who casually confuses a weekly paycheck and a bank account total or who thinks that its just a typo to list say that your dividend will be 1000 dollars when it is actually 1000 yen? End Aside.

I came across a post this morning that stimulated the above musing. Titled Lying is Not Okay, it is a lengthy defense of Mark Z. Jacobson’s decision to file a lawsuit against the National Academy of Sciences and Christopher Clack.

Clack was the lead author – with 20 co-authors – of a peer reviewed paper that provided clear refutation of Jacobson’s influential paper.

That work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. claimed to demonstrate via modeling that transitioning our energy supply system – not just our electricity supply system – from its current mix of sources to a new mix made up entirely of wind, water and solar power would be achievable at a cost that is close to or less than the cost of business as usual.

The paper’s title makes clear its ambitious intent and its conclusions Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes.

A full telling of the saga surrounding Jacobson’s original work, the work to refute that work in the same academic journal that hosted the original paper, and Jacobson’s reaction to the criticism is beyond the scope of this post.

However, after reading the defense of Jacobson referenced above, I felt the need to respond. This is what I wrote.

Brandon

The issue that MikeN raised illustrates that you share a GCE about electricity and basic physics with Mark Z. Jacobson. (GCE – Navy Nuclear Power School lingo for Gross Conceptual Error.)

The difference between power (measured in watts – aka joules/second) and energy (watt-seconds – more simply just joules) is fundamental and extremely important for understanding how the systems that enable us to function actually work.

By definition, power is an instantaneous measure of a system’s output – right now – and power capacity is a system limit of the MAXIMUM that the system can produce at any instant.

If a hydropower system has a capacity of 1000 GW, it can NEVER produce more power. Even for an instant. That capacity is a function of a complete system that has pipes, valves, dams, transformers, wires, turbines, riverbeds, etc with fixed dimensions. At the rated capacity, the water is moving as fast as that system will allow and the wires are carrying as much current as they can without exceeding physical limits.

Adding capacity to a hydroelectric system is thus a completely non trivial task whether it is a traditional dam with reservoir, a run of the river turbine system, or a pumped hydro system.

If anything, the Clack et al response to Jacobson’s stubborn defense of his CGE is too respectful and deferential. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE to produce valid results from a model that includes such a fundamental error as failing to constrain output of hydroelectric systems to their rated capacity. If the demand on the system requires the hydro components to produce significantly more than their capacity for even an instant, the grid being modeled should only be able to remain operational by abruptly cutting off loads.

Failing to constrain any power source output to its rated capacity in a model purporting to balance supply and demand at all moments is such a serious modeling error that I am completely befuddled about why it took so long for the academic community to reject the work as being wrong. Many of us who are not academics and have no incentive to participate in its “peer reviewed journal article” process have been saying for years that Jacobson’s 100% renewable solutions project is fundamentally flawed.

We’ve done our best to try to convince Jacobson to revise or retract it. For whatever reason, MZJ has refused all assistance. His frequent response to criticism has been to summarily block them on Twitter.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Resume available upon request


Update: Posted November 8 at 0545

Brandon responded to my comment on his blog. Here’s what he wrote.


Brandon Shollenberger
November 7, 2017 at 7:49 am

Rod Adams, if you’re going to use rhetoric to criticize other people’s understanding of things, you should try to refrain from making simple mistakes yourself. You say:

By definition, power is an instantaneous measure of a system’s output – right now – and power capacity is a system limit of the MAXIMUM that the system can produce at any instant.

If a hydropower system has a capacity of 1000 GW, it can NEVER produce more power. Even for an instant. That capacity is a function of a complete system that has pipes, valves, dams, transformers, wires, turbines, riverbeds, etc with fixed dimensions. At the rated capacity, the water is moving as fast as that system will allow and the wires are carrying as much current as they can without exceeding physical limits

Exactly what you are thinking is a bit opaque as the phrase “power capacity” is not a term which has any common meaning that I can find. Regardless, you’re wrong on even the most basic aspect of this. You say a facility “can NEVER produce more power” than its nameplate capacity, but that’s simply untrue. Nameplate capacity is the sustained load, over a long time, the facility is rated for. Nothing prevents a facility from going over that value for a period of time, except for the costs doing so would incur in things like repairs.

Beyond the fundamentals, what you describe is false as, again, nameplate capacity is about sustained loads. Facilities which store energy such as pumped hydropower stations, can store excess energy so they can tap into it when demand gets high. One can see the same behavior with capacitors. A circuit with capacitors can store energy in the capacitors then later discharge that energy to get a surge of power far exceeding the normal levels in the circuit.

You can jump up and down, throw around rhetoric and even insult people all you want, but waving your hands around and declaring things to be impossible doesn’t make them impossible. Facilities can have instantaneous discharge rates exceeding their nameplate capacity. There is nothing which prevents that.

Failing to constrain any power source output to its rated capacity in a model purporting to balance supply and demand at all moments is such a serious modeling error that I am completely befuddled about why it took so long for the academic community to reject the work as being wrong. Many of us who are not academics and have no incentive to participate in its “peer reviewed journal article” process have been saying for years that Jacobson’s 100% renewable solutions project is fundamentally flawed.

Anyone who shares your views has no idea what they are talking about. Nameplate capacity is a measure of the long-term, sustained electrical production of a facility. It is a long-term average. The instantaneous output of a facility is not a long-term average. It is the instantaneous discharge rate. The instantaneous discharge rate is in not bounded at the long-term average, or sustained, production rate.

If you wish to continue insisting it is impossible to have an instantaneous discharge rate exceeding the installed capacity of a facility, I suggest you do more than just demand everyone accept what you say as true. A simple step would be to try a small, hypothetical example. An obvious one is the one I alluded to above – capacitors in a system with a generator. Once the generator charges the capacitors. what will happen if the capacitors are discharged?

According to Jacobson, there will be an instantaneous discharge whose numbers could go higher than the “installed capacity” of the generator. According to you theory, there wouldn’t be.


Several commenters have attempted to correct Brandon’s continuing GCE. I also responded.


Rod Adams
November 8, 2017 at 5:27 am

Brandon

I was not using “power capacity” as a term. The nameplate capacity of a system is expressed in watts because that is the units by which power is measured. A watt is a derived unit, the root unit is joule/sec (energy/time).

When a system capacity is determined, it is the limit of energy per unit time that the system can deliver. As I noted in my original comment, it is a function of a number of system components that all have finite dimensions and can allow only so much fluid to flow or current to be moved.

Capacitors are components that can be connected to a power generation system to provide the capability of storing energy – up to a fixed amount determined by the physical design of the capacitor – that can then be nearly instantaneously discharged. The output of capacitors is generally not subject to any regulation, they are either in the mode of being charged, storing energy, or being discharged immediately.

Capacitors are not normally considered to be part of a power generation system. They are separate components that MAY be connected to the output of a given system.

Here’s an example that your readers might understand, even if you stubbornly defend your conception of how energy and power are related.

A Honda Civic might be sold with a 100 horsepower engine. Translating that limit into SI units, it has a capacity of ~ 75 kw. That number is the max power it can provide which governs parameters like acceleration and maximum velocity.

It can be sold with a 10 gallon gasoline tank. Since gasoline contains 40 kilowatt-hours per gallon, the tank can store 400 kilowatt-hours of chemical energy. The gasoline (Otto cycle) engine is roughly 25% efficient in converting chemical energy to rotational energy.

Running at rated capacity, a 75 kw (output) engine consumes 300 (75 kw/0.25) kw-hrs of chemical energy each hour. The system we are talking about could burn up the stored gasoline energy in about 1.33 hours if the operator had a place to run full throttle.

If the owner of that car wasn’t satisfied with the car’s acceleration and top end velocity, she could take action to increase the engine power by altering various physical components in the system to make fuel flow faster, add additional air, etc. There is not a fixed limit on how many such alterations are possible, but anyone suggesting that there is a low cost way to increase that Civic’s power by a factor of 13 to give it a 975 kw engine would not simply be laughed out of a garage.

They would be ignored, ridiculed or tossed out of the garage.

Rod Adams


Filed Under: 100% WWS, Antinuclear activist

Moon Jae-in Making Friends By Promising To Buy More Gas

July 21, 2017 By Rod Adams

During his successful campaign to become South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in promised to dramatically increase South Korea’s natural gas consumption. Within weeks of taking office, he took several concrete steps towards fulfilling that promise. He announced the near-term closure of 10 coal plants, he allowed the operating license to expire as scheduled for South Korea’s […]

Filed Under: Antinuclear activist, Atomic politics, Fossil fuel competition, International nuclear, Natural Gas, Politics of Nuclear Energy

Credibility of Influential Paper On ‘100% Renewables’ Challenged by Peer-Reviewed Critique

July 5, 2017 By Rod Adams

A pernicious myth was forcefully attacked in June when the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a paper titled Evaluation of A Proposal for Reliable Low-Cost Grid Power with 100% Wind, Water, and Solar. The abstract of the new paper, which was developed during the past year by Christopher Clack and a team […]

Filed Under: Alternative energy, 100% WWS, Antinuclear activist

Spent Fuel Pools Protect The Public. Don’t Believe Skeptics

June 20, 2017 By Rod Adams

A two-page Policy Forum opinion piece titled Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era: Flawed analyses underlie lax U.S. regulation of spent fuel by Edwin Lyman, Michael Schoeppner and Frank von Hippel appeared in the May 26, 2017 issue of Science Magazine, an outlet that has a public reputation as a reliable source of technical […]

Filed Under: Antinuclear activist, Nuclear regulations, Nuclear Waste

Micheal Shellenberger tells Cal Poly audience how nuclear fear began. How will it end?

January 7, 2017 By Rod Adams 7 Comments

Michael Shellenberger, the director of Environmental Progress, recently gave a talk at Cal Poly titled How Fear of Nuclear Ends. As usual, Michael did a terrific job of presenting the talk and provides excellent graphics in support of his primary discussion points. There is, not surprisingly, more to the story he told. After all, he […]

Filed Under: Pro Nuclear Video, Antinuclear activist, Atomic politics, Diablo Canyon

Why are nuclear plants losing money at an astonishing rate?

August 18, 2016 By Rod Adams 24 Comments

Joe Romm recently wrote a piece for Climate Progress titled Nuclear Power Is Losing Money At An Astonishing Rate. In that post Romm exaggerates the amount of support that the New York Zero Emissions Credit (ZEC) will provide, absolves the massive build out of industrial scale wind and solar from any responsibility for contributing to […]

Filed Under: Antinuclear activist, Atomic politics, Business of atomic energy, Climate change, Economics

Warning: Amory Lovins is influencing national security decision makers

August 3, 2016 By Rod Adams 77 Comments

Amory Lovins recently visited the Pentagon. After a glowing introduction by the flag officer who is in charge of fleet readiness and logistics for the US Navy, Lovins told people who are tasked with looking into the future and planning budgets that human society is moving from an age of carbon to an age of […]

Filed Under: 100% WWS, Antinuclear activist, Nuclear Navy, Nuclear Ships

Atomic Show #256 – Tom Turner Talks About David Brower

July 26, 2016 By Rod Adams 21 Comments

David Brower had a profound influence on the Environmental Movement and its gradual transition from groups of outdoors enthusiasts and conservationists who focused on protecting public lands and establishing national parks to a powerful political movement with major influences on a variety of important industrial, economic and international policy arenas. The Movement has had a […]

Filed Under: Antinuclear activist, Atomic politics, Podcast, Politics of Nuclear Energy

Showing up and speaking up for Diablo Canyon and nuclear energy in California

July 9, 2016 By Rod Adams 10 Comments

The California State Lands Commission meeting on June 28, 2016 included a number of articulate, knowledgable, rational and emotional talks by people who took time to attend the meeting and to deliver their public comments. Some had carefully prepared remarks, others spoke directly from their hearts. Some had a prop or a graph, others relied […]

Filed Under: Aging nuclear, Antinuclear activist, Atomic Advocacy, Atomic politics, decommissioning, Diablo Canyon, Pro Nuclear Video

PG&E Agreed To Kill Diablo Canyon In Self-Protecting Deal

June 30, 2016 By Rod Adams 29 Comments

The first indication I had of the agreement to destroy Diablo Canyon in the prime of its life came from a press release issued by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It stated that they had signed a deal with PG&E, IBEW local 1245, the Coalition of California Utility Employees, Friends of the Earth, Environment […]

Filed Under: Aging nuclear, Antinuclear activist, Diablo Canyon

Corporate environmental contributions: Greenwashing or worse?

June 28, 2016 By Rod Adams 12 Comments

Ken Silverstein posted a thought-provoking piece on Forbes.com titled Being ‘Good Neighbors’ And Staying Out Of Print Motivates Companies To Be Environmental Stewards. The following quote stimulated me to provide a slightly different interpretation and expansion on the reasons why companies and investors large and small are often actively involved in the environmental movement. And […]

Filed Under: Antinuclear activist, Fossil fuel competition, Smoking Gun

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