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Atomic Insights

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

Atomic history

Atomic Energy Wells

January 12, 2023 By Rod Adams 15 Comments

Petroleum – a term includes oil, gas and derivatives – wells have been going dry for more than 150 years. Until the late 2000s, the solution to that problem of resource depletion has been to find a new place to drill. We now have the alternative of drilling deeper and using hydraulic fracturing techniques to reach previously known but inaccessible formations.

Though there is still a lot of oil left inside the Earth, it is getting more difficult to reach. Even the booming fields made available by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are beginning to degrade; people in the field are reporting that many of the best locations have already been exploited.

Even if there was an unlimited and magically refilling source of petroleum, it is becoming increasingly clear that the waste products from petroleum combustion, including CO2, are causing major damage to Earth’s livability. We need clean power sources with greater longevity.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminded all of us of the importance of a broad base of fuel suppliers that can overcome politically driven changes in global production and distribution. Low cost producers will always find a way to market their product unless there is a coordinated effort to prevent their output from being sold.

Few people would dispute the fact that the oil and gas that has been discovered and extracted so far is the most accessible portion of the available resource. It was relatively easy to find and it was located close enough to human populations or transportation routes that it was reasonably easy to deliver to the ultimate customers. The petroleum that is still left underground or underwater is the harder portion. It is more challenging to find, it is deeper underground, it is in tighter formations, it is lower quality, or it is located in areas that make it difficult to move to markets.

Petroleum alternatives – coal, wind, solar, biomass – have been available for hundreds to thousands of years. New technologies have evolved to make them more affordable and competitive, but those technologies have only partially overcome inherent disadvantages in many applications. Petroleum is still the world’s dominant energy source because it is readily transported, it’s more energy dense than non-nuclear competitors, it burns more cleanly and thoroughly than coal, its output can be controlled, and it has an enormous base of equipment designed to operate with refined hydrocarbons derived from oil.

The realization that the easy oil is gone has led to volatile energy prices that have tended to ratchet up for the past two decades.

Downloaded from https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/realprices/

Increased prices have put hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of petroleum producers, but they have not led to a large increase in production. An increasing portion of the slowly increasing petroleum supply is in the form of natural gas liquids (NGLs) and not conventional crude oil.

IEA, World oil supply and demand, 1971-2020, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-oil-supply-and-demand-1971-2020, IEA. Licence: CC BY 4.0

Petroleum producers know that there are not many opportunities to make major new discoveries so they are focused on maintaining their current production levels. In many cases, there is a growing supply of unused capital waiting for an appropriate place to invest.

Oil executives would be wise to consider investing their human and financial resources in nuclear reactors, which can be considered to be modern, near zero emission energy wells. When nuclear reactors are used as advanced heat sources to produce synthetic fuels and hydrocarbons, a substantial portion of the capital infrastructure and core competencies are directly transferrable from the conventional petroleum industry.

Short historical digression

When nuclear power first entered the energy market during the mid 1950s, several oil companies invested heavily into the uranium and fuels processing portion of the business. This was the portion of the new energy system that seemed to fit with their core competencies of finding and producing the raw materials needed to produce useful energy. For the most part, these investments were not successful.

Part of the problem is that the cost structure for nuclear power is different from the one historically associated with producing electricity with fossil fuel power stations. With nuclear, a most of the cost and risk is incurred at the beginning of the project. Once the plant is fully operational, the recurring fuel cost is minimal. With fossil fuel power plants, capital and operating costs are often minimal compared to the ongoing expense of purchasing new fuel. In some natural gas plants, fully 90% of the electricity production cost is purchasing delivered natural gas.

Building nuclear plants is analogous to drilling oil wells

The path that fossil fuel producers take between finding a promising new field and selling finished product from that field into the market is a tortuous one full of regulatory hurdles, government agreements, massive capital investments, and significant risk. That path description should sound familiar to nuclear professionals.

Once the challenging process has been successfully negotiated, the producer and his investors can look forward to an uncertain number of years worth of selling the product at an uncertain price that depends on a number of external factors. The incentive for making those up front investments and taking the risk is that sometimes those factors lead to market price increases. For an already producing asset, there is little risk that the actual cost of operating that asset will change very much, so price increases due to market conditions fall directly to the bottom line.

Fossil fuel companies have the necessary assets to make successful investments in nuclear energy wells. They can raise capital from investors that are comfortable with risk, work their way through the regulatory wickets, buy the steel and concrete, develop the necessary agreements with local governments and ensure that their suppliers meet exacting specifications. They live and breathe safety based on long experience with massive quantities of volatile materials. After their new energy wells begin operation, they can look forward to many decades worth of reliable production and sales – energy is not a fad and people will always find new ways to use whatever quantity is available.

Sea-going or floating nuclear plants are especially well-matched to the current infrastructure and skill set of fossil fuel companies. They will be produced in the same shipyards that currently produce off-shore platforms, tankers, support vessels, and barges. In some cases, the production platforms will closely resemble floating petroleum or natural gas processing plants.

There are increasing pressures on fossil fuel companies to slow or stop their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel companies can legitimately meet their fiduciary responsibility to maximize their investor returns by directing their capital budgets to a new generation of energy production and distribution capability.

That new energy production capacity should include:

  • Systems using heavy metal fission to directly supply heat and power
  • Installations that use fission to produce heat and power for synthetic fuel production that combines hydrogen from water and carbon that is captured from the atmosphere.

At Nucleation Capital, we are focused on investing in advanced nuclear energy, synthetic fuels and macro energy integration systems that can all help decarbonize our energy and power sources. The transition from hydrocarbons to clean energy will be challenging, but nuclear energy investments will enable its success with lower costs than attempting to complete the transition without nuclear energy.

If you are and accredited investor who is interested in opportunities in private companies in our target sectors, please make contact. We’re happy to help.

Filed Under: Atomic history, Clean Energy, Fossil fuel cooperation, Peak Oil, Process heat

Enough with “renewables!”

December 31, 2022 By Valerie Gardner 9 Comments

The American Nuclear Society posted an article entitled How a nuclear victory at COP27 started with a teen and a text reporting on the wonderful story of Ia Aanstoot. This is the 17-year old Swedish highschool student who effectively saved the day for nuclear at COP27 by alerting a WhatsApp chat group with the right people in it, that the final language being used by the COP27 negotiating team for its agreement used the term “renewables” rather than “clean energy” and so excluded consideration of nuclear. 

Through a chain of texts and resulting prompt action by senior US officials which were relayed back to the negotiating room, a potential clean energy disaster was averted. Given that there was a quick fix, it seems that the whole threatened exclusion problem arose less because of some deliberately nefarious effort by negotiators to exclude nuclear but rather was due to misguided if casual usage of the word “renewables.” The good news is that, as far as COP27 showed, nuclear energy is sitting at the clean energy table again.

The bad news is that many people, including top negotiators, don’t think about the implications of their use of the this word. If nothing else, this story highlights the confusion and potential pitfalls caused by using “renewable,” which is a form of jargon, rather than what is really meant. Some folks use this particular term to cause confusion and some use it because they are confused. In the COP27 case, the use appears to have been inadvertent. Still it seems wise to point out how use of this particular word causes confusion, problems and contributes to our inability to make good climate decisions.

We need “Clean” energy to address Climate Change

When it comes to choosing which types of energy technology to prioritize and build in order to address climate, we need to stay focused on low-carbon sources, or what we now call “clean” energy. Many people may not realize that all of what is “renewable” is not “clean.”

Renewable energy is defined to focus on types of energy that come from “sources that cannot be depleted or which naturally replenish,” an appealing concept but actually a red herring with respect to carbon emissions. Clearly, some types of renewables are low and non-carbon-emitting energy sources, such as wind and solar. But some renewables are highly emitting sources of energy, namely bioenergy, which includes burning ancient forests, also called biomass energy.

Technically, under the proper conditions and given hundreds of years, forests will grow back. But this is not going to happen in the timeframe which matters to humanity. We have an urgent problem and need to halve global emissions by 2030 and eliminate emissions entirely by 2050. We can’t afford to either lose more forests or wait for trees to grow. Thus, what really matters is knowing whether or not there are carbon emissions that come a source of energy and not whether it might eventually be replenished, even if too late to matter.

We can get this information by looking at the carbon-intensity of energy. We consider low-carbon-intensity “clean” and high-carbon-intensity “dirty.” Unfortunately, many simply assume that all renewables are “clean” but that’s not the case. Bioenergy emits as much carbon as fossil fuels. People applaud our progress when they hear that the percentage of renewables is growing. Yet, according to Bioenergy International, bioenergy produced more than 2/3rds of the energy labelled “renewable.” And that generates high levels of emissions, so this is actually not progress towards emissions reductions.

Lately, the large and growing bioenergy industry has been seen as contributing massively to deforestation. Yet, bioenergy has the burnish of appearing to be “green” because it’s made the political cut and is included as “renewable.” This means that companies cutting down trees have benefitted from the subsidies and incentives intended to increase clean energy. Fortunately, many are starting to be more discerning and are specifically excluding ecologically-damaging types of bioenergy as unsustainable and not worthy of prioritization with climate-focused subsidies.

Politics, lobbying and powerful ideologic preferences are what have brought the term “renewable” into vogue in the first place. This also means that what’s included as renewable differs from place to place. California specifically excludes large hydro power but includes small hydropower stations. Not because large hydro emits more carbon or doesn’t rely on the renewing resource of rain but rather because California policymakers decided dams posed too great an ecologic impact and didn’t want to prioritize building more large dams. In other places, renewables includes large hydro. The fact that the definition of what’s renewable varies from place to place, contributes to confusion and lack of clarity. When folks in California hear that there are Canadian provinces running almost entirely on renewable energy, they may think that means they’ve succeeded in building out lots of wind and solar. In fact, it’s predominantly large hydro—which isn’t counted as “renewable” in California.

Nuclear’s Contributions to Clean Energy are Sidelined

The biggest problem by far with using the term renewable, however, is that it is invariably defined to exclude nuclear power. This causes the entire nuclear industry—which for decades has produced more clean energy than all other low-carbon sources combined—to be discounted and even sometimes excluded. Not surprising since nuclear has long been maligned and even demonized. Even so, the omission of nuclear as a renewable energy source, whether intentional or not, causes significant problems for those trying to use good data to address climate change.

We cannot make good decisions about how to invest in new energy generation if we don’t get good information about where our clean energy is coming from. Most energy agencies now include reports on levels of Renewables, because they are politically potent. They don’t create reports based on carbon intensity (such as by grouping the low-carbon energy technologies and the high-carbon energy technologies). Thus, people are not shown that their nuclear power plants are contributing to the clean energy being produced. This may induce them to think that nuclear is carbon-emitting—which it isn’t. They will think biofuels are a good thing for the climate—they aren’t. They will also think we have less clean energy than we actually do and agree to pay for more renewables. In certain areas, nuclear power plants are not even credited with producing carbon-free energy that counts towards the region’s clean energy goals! Which explains why folks (like in Downstate New York) are willing to allow craven politicians (like former Governor Cuomo) to shut down perfectly good nuclear power plants (like Indian Point). In short, the focus on “renewables” also produces misleading data.

New York is a perfect example. New York’s Independent System Operator, NYISO (whose stated vision is “Working together with stakeholders to build the cleanest, most reliable electric system in the nation”) provides stakeholders with two types of pie charts on its Real-Time Energy Dashboard: “All Fuels” and “Renewables.” You can see all of the types of energy that contribute to the fuel mix powering the state in the sample chart on the left but the chart doesn’t reflect carbon intensity, so you won’t be able to see which types of energy are contributing to climate change and which aren’t. (Click charts to enlarge.)

NYISO’s second chart, Renewables, also doesn’t show carbon intensity or provide information about what’s “clean” or not. This subset includes hydro, wind and “other renewables” (shown to include solar, methane, refuse and wood). In this example, hydro appears to be the largest source of clean energy for the state. Anyone could easily interpret these two charts to think that the first shows all types of energy and second shows those that are “green” (i.e. “clean”‘.) This of course is wrong and misleading. All the types of energy shown in the green color are not “green,” low-carbon sources. Additionally, the second chart omits showing the largest source of New York’s clean energy generation. Shame on you, NYISO. Rate-payers deserve to be shown all of New York’s low-carbon energy. Your job is to deliver less jargon and more facts! Such a chart would make it very clear that nuclear energy was producing the majority of New York’s clean energy, like the below mock up created by the Climate Coalition (and explored in an article called “NYISO’s Deceptive Reports“):

The Climate Coalition’s mock-up of the type of chart not provided by NYISO

New York is not alone in producing deceptive reports that mislead viewers and also serve to undermine support for nuclear energy. Most state system operators follow this same pattern. These professionals are all aware of the climate crisis and the importance of educating people about sources of clean energy—but they are under political constraints. It seems oblivious, if your goal is “building the cleanest and most reliable grids” then what people need are reports which show “Emitting/DIrty” energy vs “Non-Emitting/Clean” energy types. These agencies know that Petroleum, Natural Gas, Coal and Bioenergy (biofuels/biowaste/biomass, etc) emit carbon at very high levels. They also know that Nuclear, Large Hydro, Small Hydro, Wind, Solar and Geothermal have significantly lower emissions attributed to them and so do not substantially contribute to climate change, regardless of your politics. Yet even the US Energy Information Agency fails to provide data in a useful format that avoids jargon and provides an accurate picture of how well we are doing addressing climate change. Take this chart for example:

The EIA helpfully groups Fossil Fuels and Renewables together but doesn’t show what’s actually clean energy, so we know how well we are doing reducing emissions. Again, a more useful presentation would be one centered around carbon emissions rather than jargon. Here’s the same exact data organized by Nucleation Capital in a way that reflects CO2 emissions. It’s much easier to see the decarbonization achieved in these 12 years:

When I contacted the EIA and asked whether they had any reports that just show energy generation based upon relative impact on climate, I was told “we do not categorize energy sources subjectively as clean or dirty.” Hmm, why not?

This problem reflects persistant nuclear prejudice and the political popularity of renewables, despite their increasingly obvious poor performance at reducing emissions. This was the gist of a study that was published by Atte Harjanne and Janne M. Korhonen in 2018 entitled “Abandoning the concept of renewable energy.” They write: “In politics, business and academica, renewable energy is often framed as the key solution to the global climate challenge. We, however, argue that the concept of renewable energy is problematic and should be abandoned in favor of more unambiguous conceptualization . . . [as] the key problems the concept of renewable energy has in terms of sustainability, incoherence, policy impacts, bait-and-switch tactics and generally misleading nature.”

Again, it is important to distinguish between those who don’t like the types of energy labelled as “renewable,” and what we are suggesting here. We find that use of the term “renewable” is misleading with respect to the metrics that matter the most to the public and policymakers. The debate about whether or not we should be using solar, wind or biofuels is not what we are concerned with here. Those are worthy debates which endeavor to look at whether or not the amount of land, mined materials, manufacturing, installation, ecosystem impacts, and all-in firming and transmission costs are worthwhile investments achieving both our decarbonization and grid reliability goals. We are not even questioning the merit of considering certain technologies as “renewable” when forests are being cut down with no guarantees of being replanted. We are only questioning the merit of grouping a limited set of technologies into a catch-all term that is used as a proxy for “clean energy,” when it’s not. Confusing jargon that elevates some technologies, excludes others without true reference to emissions is not helping us make good decisions towards our carbon-reduction goals.

We need clear and accurate information on climate impacts as we make increasingly large investments in transitioning our energy systems, commiting us to energy projects that will have 20, 30, 50-year and longer life-spans. For this, we definitely should avoid anything that hints at ambiguity and stick with what we mean: clean energy. So, in 2023, let’s work to reject use of the word “renewable” and demand that we focus on the distinction that does matter: carbon intensity. Without clear language and understanding, neither the public nor those negotiating our future world agreements can be expected to make good decisions.
___________________

Citations

1. “How a Nuclear Victory at COP27 Started with a Teen and a Text,” by Amelia Tiemann, published by NuclearNewswire, December 15. 2022.

2. “Renewable Energy Explained: Overview and Types” by EnergySage.

3. “Drax: UK power station owner cuts down primary forests in Canada” by Joe Crowley and Tim Robinson, published in BBC News, October 3, 2022

4. “Under dinosaurs reign, bioenergy the largest renewable energy source,” by Bioenergy International, December 10, 2020.

5. “Australia rejects forest biomass in first blow to wood pellet industry,” by Justin Catanoso, published by Mongabay, December 21, 2022.

6. New York Independent System Operator “Real-Time Dashboard.”

7. ResearchGate: “Abandoning the concept of renewable energy”, by Atte Harjanne and Janne M. Korhonen, December 2018.

Filed Under: 100% WWS, Alternative energy, Atomic history, Biomass, Clean Energy, Climate change, decarbonization, Electric Grid, Grid resilience, Investing, rhetoric, Solar energy, Unreliables, Wind energy Tagged With: 100% renewables, Amelia Tiemann, ANS, Climate Coalition, Gov. Cuomo, Ian Aanstoot, Indian Point, New York Independent Serivce Operator, Newswire, NuClear, NYISO, renewables, US Energy Information Agency

Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear” – An optimistic look at a powerful tool for addressing climate change and energy security

September 15, 2022 By Rod Adams 5 Comments

By early 2019, Oliver Stone, a successful filmmaker who has created a long list of popular works of art, had become increasingly concerned and even depressed about what he had learned about the risk climate change posed to humanity. He’d watched Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” and paid attention to dire warnings coming from credible scientific […]

Filed Under: Atomic history, Clean Energy, Documentary review, Nuclear Communications, Politics of Nuclear Energy

China’s high temperature reactor – pebble bed modular (HTR-PM) achieves its first criticality

September 14, 2021 By Rod Adams 34 Comments

On the morning of September 12, 2021, reactor number 1 of the eagerly awaited HTR-PM project was taken critical for the first time. Initial criticality for any new reactor is a big deal for the people involved in the project; this one is a big deal for the future of nuclear energy. It might also […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Atomic history, Business of atomic energy, Gas Cooled Reactors, Graphite Moderated Reactors, International nuclear, New Nuclear, Pebble Bed Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

A Path from Coal to Nuclear is Being Blazed in Wyoming

August 12, 2021 By Valerie Gardner 37 Comments

Many of those who care about finding solutions to the physical distress that our climate is experiencing, as reported on this week in a landmark 1,300 page report by the IPCC‘s Sixth Assessment Working Group 1 (Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis), are not looking at Wyoming. But based upon the announcement made in […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Another Blogger for Nuclear Energy, Atomic Entrepreneurs, Atomic history, Atomic politics, Clean Energy, Climate change, Coal, decarbonization, Fossil fuel cooperation, Innovation, New Nuclear, Pro Nuclear Video, Smaller reactors Tagged With: Bill Gates, Gary Hoogeveen, GE Hitachi, Governor Mark Gordon, IPCC, Jennifer Graholm, physical sciences basis, Senator John Barrasso, TerraPower, Wyoming

Kenneth Pitzer blamed AEC advisors for slow power reactor development

January 18, 2021 By Rod Adams 2 Comments

During the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) earliest years, the General Advisory Committee was sometimes viewed as a source of discouraging, delaying advice. Made up of selected members of the scientific establishment, the group habitually sought more studies and inserted costly delays aimed at making the perfect next step instead of taking steps that were good […]

Filed Under: Atomic history

Why did the US Atomic Energy Commission kill Daniels Pile in 1947?

January 16, 2021 By Rod Adams 2 Comments

In January 1947, after more than a year of focused public attention and debate, the civilian U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) took control of all atomic energy matters from the Manhattan District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This takeover was a major victory for the atomic scientists and others who worked diligently to […]

Filed Under: Atomic history, Atomic Pioneers, Gas Cooled Reactors, Uncategorized

How did an oil shale investor hamstring his atomic energy competition? (Ancient but impactful smoking gun)

January 14, 2021 By Rod Adams 7 Comments

During the contentious effort that resulted in passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, Sen Eugene D. Milliken (R-CO) played an important role in establishing an attempted US government monopoly over all atomic energy information. During the House-Senate conference committee to resolve differences between versions of the bill passed by the two legislative bodies, […]

Filed Under: Atomic history, Fossil fuel competition, Smoking Gun

Atomic Show #277 – Simon Wakter, pro-nuclear engineer in an ambivalent country

May 30, 2020 By Rod Adams 1 Comment

Simon Wakter is a strongly pro-nuclear engineer in a country that passed a referendum officially phasing out nuclear energy since several years before he was born. He has to round up to be called a thirty-something. Simon works in the nuclear energy branch of AFRY, a well-established 17,000 employee, all-of-the-above. engineering company that recently adopted […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Atomic history, Atomic politics, Podcast, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Smaller reactors

Atomic Show #266 – Seeing the Light about atomic energy potential

March 8, 2019 By Rod Adams 4 Comments

Facing the immense threat of climate change, the need to power several billion more people and the continuing reluctance to use the most powerful tool available, Scott L. Montgomery and Thomas Graham Jr. realized that there was an information and perception gap about nuclear energy of roughly equivalent magnitudes. Their desire to help fill the […]

Filed Under: Atomic history, Climate change, Health Effects, LNT, Podcast

Documentary evidence that fossil fuel industry knew–by 1948–that it faced prospect that atomic energy would make it obsolete

August 26, 2018 By Rod Adams 3 Comments

No industry cheerfully accepts the prospect that a newly developed technology could make it obsolete. Executives and investors earn much of their wealth by constantly evaluating potential threats to their business. They invest time, energy and resources in conceiving and implementing response or prevention plans. “Inside the Atom” is a 1948 vintage snapshot of the […]

Filed Under: H. J. Muller, Atomic history, Atomic politics, Health Effects

Did the Nuclear Renaissance in the U.S. falter because people ignored lessons from the First Atomic Age?

April 11, 2017 By Rod Adams

During the ANS Student Conference 2017 in Pittsburg, PA, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison made the effort to find me and introduce himself. Among several other topics, he wanted to exchange thoughts about an article that I first published more than 22 years ago. The student indicated his interest in becoming an atomic […]

Filed Under: Atomic history, Business of atomic energy

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