Lorenzini rebuts Sovacool’s defense of nuclear bird kill paper as weak
By Paul Lorenzini
Mr. Benjamin Sovacool claims my earlier article misrepresents his works and contains factual errors. Let me respond. He states:
First, and most important: Paul has misstated the actual conclusion from my original study. It never advances the conclusion, as he claims, that “nuclear power causes more bird kills than wind.”
Au contraire. The 2009 articles states the claim pretty clearly:
“This article argues that conventional electricity systems, namely those combusting fossil fuels and fissioning atoms, present their own acute risks to wildlife and birds, risks that are far greater than those from wind energy”.
The abstract states:
“This article highlights that nuclear power and fossil-fueled power systems have a host of environmental and wildlife costs as well, particularly for birds”. Then, “Within the uncertainties of the data used, the estimate means that wind farm related avian fatalities equated to approximately 46,000 birds in the United States in 2009, but nuclear power plants killed about 460,000 …”
The second article sends the same message, estimating that “wind farms killed approximately seven thousand in the United States in 2006 but nuclear plants killed about 327,000.”
I will concede that Mr. Sovacool includes numerous caveats to his analysis, but he nevertheless purports to make estimates that have enough legitimacy to draw these sorts of conclusions, even if “preliminary”. Those conclusions are finding their way into the literature, being cited authoritatively for this proposition on Wipikedia – the citation that first got my attention – and hyped by wind advocates, as in “Why coal and nuclear plants kill far more birds than wind power”. We can’t know what was in his mind when he published these articles, but we can read what they say and observe how they are being interpreted by others. I believe my characterization was correct.
He also challenges another claim:
“… he writes that I confuse a uranium mining operator in Colorado with one in Wyoming.”
He’s correct here – I incorrectly implied he located the Canon City mine in Wyoming. He correctly stated it was in Colorado. However the same paragraph goes on to refer to “open pit mines in Wyoming” stating “it is not uncommon for these pits to kill 300 birds per year” without citation. He makes a similar claim in his 2012 article on p. 261: “Abandoned open pit mines in Wyoming have formed lakes hazardous to wildlife … one of these pits killed 300 birds during a single year”. Here he makes a citation to a 2008 US Fish and Wildlife report which states:
“In 1995, the Berkeley Pit proved lethal to over 300 snow geese which used the pit lake as a migratory stopping place.”
The Berkeley pit mine is located in Montana. As far as I am able to tell after reconstructing Mr. Sovacool’s analysis, there are only two mining locations that form the basis for his analysis in the 2009 article, one in Colorado and one in Montana, and only one in the second, the Berkeley Pit in Montana – an abandoned copper mine. Thus, while he makes reference to mines in Wyoming, none of the mines he used were in Wyoming.
That, however, is a rather trivial matter. Where they are located is not important. What is important is that Mr. Sovacool extrapolated from one-off data that was not at all relevant to uranium mining today, misused the data, and drew conclusions about avian deaths from nuclear power that have no basis at all. He takes a single incident from an abandoned copper mine and draws the conclusion that “it is not uncommon for these pits to kill 300 birds per year” based on one event in a single year, then extrapolates and applies this across the board to the entire uranium mining industry throughout the world. It is simply breathtaking. It is no escape to say they were just “estimates” or that they were “preliminary”. The underlying assumptions do not justify calling them either.
I wrote about Mr. Sovacool’s work for two reasons: first, it was being cited authoritatively for the proposition that nuclear plants kill more birds than wind power. I assume from his response he does not support that conclusion. Second, I felt he badly misused data and his underlying assumptions did not support his estimates. I see nothing that alters my conclusions.
PS From Rod Adams I’m encouraged by the recent flurry of requests from talented writers to publish their material on Atomic Insights so that it can reach an engaged and active audience. I hope you do not mind hearing from a wider variety of voices with differing points of view about the incredibly important topic of intelligently choosing how we empower the people that live on our shared planet.
What do Sovacool and Peter Bradford, former NRC Chairman, have in common ?
They both have to do with law at Vermont Law School and both are anti nuclear. You would think facts and intellectual rigor would be in scope in their arguments.
Vermont has a predominant supply of clean air thanks to nuclear. This is a fact. But every time I cross this state to go to Maine for my yearly pilgrimage to Ogunquit, I notice 2 things:
a) Vermont forbids billboard advertisements on its Interstate, probably to protect the scenery.
b) They shaved off their many mountain caps so that I can witness motionless wind mills. And I mean motionless.
@ Daniel, having met Peter many times, I’m honored to be grouped in a category with him. Peter isn’t so much “anti-nuclear” as he is critical of it – surely you can tell the difference? Peter’s argument pretty much boils down to “you can do nuclear safely, or you can do it cheaply, but you can’t do both.” Vermont’s supply of clean air, also, has more to do with imports of hydro from Ontario and its own sources of renewable electricity (hydro and biomass). Almost all of the Vermont Yankee power is sent to NY; it’s not used in the state itself.
Hydro imports from Ontario ? Not likely. I see you do not know much about energy at all. Nor would Mr Bradford who has not yet reckoned that nuclear plants are being built on time and on budget consistently in Asia.
Why ? Probably because Mr Bradford has a knack as a former NRC member to create unnecessary cost hurdles. Mr Bradford must be proud to have stopped nuclear plants from being built in the last decades so that more coal and gas residues can be stored in my tissues and lungs.
Nice going. And smart.
Anyone who says this has no idea how electrical grids work.
It’s true that electric power is fungible. However, the flow of power is completely unaffected by the billing; it moves according to phase differences between points, and the impedance (mostly inductance) of the transmission lines. No matter who’s paying for it, most power from Vermont Yankee (which, at 500 MW(e), was more than 2/3 of the total electric generation in Vermont in April) is used in Vermont.
@ Benjamin,
I think I should also include another Vermont Law School pal of yours: Mark Cooper.
Here is a recent thought leadership article of his:
http://www.vermontbiz.com/news/july/report-over-three-dozen-us-nuclear-reactors-risk-early-retirement
A breath of fresh air.
The summary doesn’t address the real problem at nuclear plants, which is skyrocketing costs driven by NRC over-regulation. San Onofre’s fate was sealed by the NRC decision to hold hearings for what should have been a rubber-stamp decision, and let us not forget the silly security around plants which are more or less impossible to use to harm the public no matter the skill of the attackers.
I would love to hear Mr Bradford’s opinion on this or anyone with tenure at Vermont Law School. He blames the nuclear industry for being costly and he was behind a cost plus system where bureaucrats were having an open bar approach to invoicing captive customers.
What did he do while at the NRC to denounce or fix these malicious practices?
What a guy. What a business model. What a genius.
A comment about something that is often done by nuclear opponents, and nobody seems to take notice. Perhaps because it is so common. That is–misuse of significant figures to give a false impression of accurate measurements.
327,000 bird deaths? Not “300,000”? Yeah. Sure.
From his limited data, Sovacool could really derive AT MOST one significant figure. Similarly, in a debate with me, Arnie Gundersen claimed there were sixteen shad in the Connecticut River. Not “Less than 100”. He claimed 16. (Actually, the latest shad run was in the Connecticut was great, more than 390,000.)
Here’s Gundersen on YouTube making his claim. A one-minute clip.
Nuclear opponents know that it LOOKS more accurate to use an odd number. Because if I tell you I have $123.77 in my purse right now, you will believe me. After all, where would I get such a number without counting? If I said I had “more than $100” you might believe me, or you might not. Clearly, I would be estimating.
I spent too much of my life as a working chemist. This kind of stuff makes me crazy. Killed “327,000 birds.” Extra significant figures as a rhetorical device. I consider it shameful, though most people don’t even notice.
@Meredith Angwin
I share your distain for extra figures beyond accuracy of the measurements. Here is an example quote from one of Benjamin’s recent comments:
“Indeed, evidence from Barclay et al. (2007) compiled from 21 separate wind energy sites suggests that bat deaths may be as high as 1.46 per GWh.”
Really? Not 1.5 or “about 2” but 1.46 bats per 1,000,000,000 watt-hours. That is some amazing accuracy there – or just laziness in copying a number from a spreadsheet without proper analysis of the accuracy of the initial measurements.
@Meredith,
One of my first mentors I had as a newly minted engineer was a FANATIC about significant figures.
His first cut through a calculation was strictly to see how many significant figure errors he could find. If he found one then the calc was given back to us with a large red circle around each error and a note in bold red ink on the cover page to fix the calc. Those of us who worked for him were then also instructed to review the entire model or premise of our calculation to ensure we actually understood what we were analyzing.
His viewpoint was that if we did not catch those type of errors during our review process then all we were doing was punching numbers into a calculator based on a formula or letting the computer model think for us, not actually analyzing the problem.
Good lesson and excellent mentor as he forced us to work for his signature by proving our models from both the analytical side as well as the logic side.
Thank you both. In scientific communication, you use significant figures, data ranges, and standard deviations. You use these constructs to help you communicate the level of accuracy of your results.
In rhetoric, I guess you use whatever will advance your cause.
The 1-minute Gundersen video on 16 fish is embedded in this blog post.
http://yesvy.blogspot.com/2011/12/carbon-dioxide-and-nuclear-energy.html
This year’s shad run on the Connecticut River is here
http://www.fws.gov/r5crc/fish/daily.html
@ Meredith et al, I don’t disagree with the general tenor of your remarks about accuracy (why do I say 1.46 instead of “roughly 2” and so forth), but there is an important distinction to be made here about precision, which is a slightly different concept. Quoting the 1.46 deaths per GWh may not be accurate (the Barclay et al, study has a number of assumptions built into it), but it is precise. That is, I can’t misquote it as being 1.0 or 2.0 when, in fact, it’s 1.46. And besides, if I did say “about 2 …” then I’m sure Atomic Insights readers would be attacking me for fixing the numbers upward. When citing another’s work, it’s generally accepted that precision matters more than accuracy, in this context.
Thank you for the reply. I think you have (probably inadvertently) used the terms “precision” and “accuracy” in a non-standard way.
When these terms are used in close conjunction, it is usually to describe the difference between precision (how well several measurements agree with each other) and accuracy (how well the measurements agree with “the truth”).
Wikipedia is good on this difference. I say that speaking as one who has taught this difference in chemistry labs many times (University of Chicago grad school, Ithaca College, Illinois State University…not as a tenure-track faculty member, but still, lots of experience). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
When I read:
When citing another’s work, it’s generally accepted that precision matters more than accuracy, in this context.
I kind of held my head in my hands for a moment.
I think, however, you were actually working in another context, and mixing up the contexts a bit. You were not speaking about scientific “precision and accuracy,” but rather about accuracy in reporting.
I am a blogger, and I also have a daughter who is a reporter. With THIS change in background, from the chemistry lab to the newsroom, I think you meant to say:
“When quoting someone, it really doesn’t matter if THEIR statement is accurate, it only matters that you QUOTE it accurately.”
Which is true and important. So if you said: “The highest number given in the Barclay study is 1.46”– you were correct to write it that way.
However, from the discussion of your data, I still think that it was misleading for you to say “327,000” birds were killed. In my world, you only get to use three significant figures when the order of magnitude (10^6) and first two figures are solid. I see nothing in your discussion to show that those numbers are all that solid. You don’t have the data, as far as I can tell. You made your lack of data look good by reporting more significant figures than you have data to support.
I personally believe that there are more mistakes in the world than malfeasance. If you haven’t been dealing with data in certain ways (in the lab and interpreting lab results) it is easy to make a mistake in reporting.
Also, I want to say that I am aware that Gundersen’s statements about the shad are HIS responsibility, not yours. However, I also want to say that I have seen a pattern: nuclear opponents apparently do not think they need to be particularly careful about how they report data. I don’t expect you to fix Gundersen’s data on fish! Just report your own bird data in a more scientifically valid manner.
Thank you for your response. Thank you for being willing to engage on this.
@ Meredith, you’re absolutely right here – I am not using “accuracy” and “precision” in the “scientific sense,” I suppose we even have different notions of those terms. For me, when I say “accuracy,” I am referring to sort of “quality of another’s work,” is it “true” with a capital “T.” For “precision,” it’s whether somebody (me, a student, you) references it properly, or makes some sort of transcription error. So you can see quite easily how one can be precise but not accurate, or vice versa, but that this is very different than the chemistry notion. Thanks for pointing this out!
I think I may be entirely missing your point.
The accurate figure is 0.416 fatalities per GWh based on operating experience at 4 nuclear plants and two uranium mines/mills. Wind has a comparable figure (all things being equal) of 0.269 fatalities per GWh based on operating experience at six wind farms (and 339 turbines).
Yes … scaling these to the entire fleet of nuclear reactors and wind farms is problematical (but the problems are well documented in the article, which is why you are raising issues about them in the first place).
And if you are going to round 327,483 to 320,000 (as you suggest, and not 327,000) wouldn’t you basically have to round 7,193 for wind to 0. I’m not sure how this puts nuclear in any better light (or more accurate light) than wind given uncertainties available in the data as summarized in the article.
Again, the main takeaway from the article, as I understand it, is that we need to have better studies and look at this issue a little closer. Assuming wind kills more birds than nuclear just doesn’t cut it (and isn’t a particularly informative way to answer any question, regardless of whether significant figures are rhetorically involved with an assumption or not).
Round wind to zero bird kills because one might round 327,000 kills to 320,000?
Your mis-understanding of significant figures is profound. I suggest you read the article on significant figures in Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
This merely confirms my feelings that ignorance (in this case, ignorance of how scientific results are reported) is far more common than deliberate malfeasance.
Go thou and study! When you understand that rounding 327,000 to 320,000 does not mean rounding 7,193 to zero, we can perhaps continue this conversation. Until then, I simply don’t have time.
No doubt you will consider it wrong of me to be so high-handed about my knowledge of significant figures and scientific reporting conventions. But I don’t plan to be a private tutor on subjects that should be learned in physics in high school, or physics 101 in college.
@Meredith Angwin
Ok … so he should have listed nuclear as 327,000 and wind as 7,190. Do you really think this makes much of a difference to the reader (or to scientific precision)? I’m confused why you think this nullifies the argument of the paper (if that is what you believe). It’s clear it “makes you crazy” (as you specifically indicate).
First off, he doesn’t have the data for three significant figures.
Second, since you KNEW that your remark about “7000 rounds to zero” was wrong, since you actually KNEW something about significant figures…well.
That shows you were using these figures for rhetorical purposes, making remarks about “rounds to zero” to make a point, rather than attempting to a clear, valid presentation of results.
I will not continue a conversation with a person who chooses dishonest presentation of results. I also suspect you have absolutely no idea of why I would make such a decision.
Have fun and goodbye.
@Meredith Angwin
No … I believe the answer to your accusation is that “I learned.” It’s a pretty cool thing. Rather than accuse others of ulterior motives, and seek leverage via “gotcha,” why not just just be clear about your position (and expect the same of your opponent). You might be surprised we have a lot more in common than you presume.
@EL
But you did not show any proof that you have learned. Even after Meredith pointed out that 327,000 was a number with three significant figures that were not substantiated by the accuracy of the initial measurement, which was accurate to, at most, two significant figures (320,000) or just one (300,000) you repeated a comment indicating that you did not understand that the equivalent for wind should have been 7,200 or 7,000, not zero.
In fact, someone who is trying to accurately portray the results of exceedingly sketchy research stretched out to be portrayed as an average for a much larger population should have included both fewer significant figures and wide error bars.
Let me put this into terms that an anthropologist might understand.
Suppose you found the remains of a small group of people. Through sophisticated forensic analysis, you determine that the five people you found had the following heights 5′, 5’11”, 5’11.5″, 6’0″ and 6’1″. Carbon dating indicated that the remains were 10,000 years old. Would it be reasonable to publish a paper stating that your preliminary results from this dig indicate that you had uncovered new evidence showing that the average height of the human population of 10,000 years ago was 5.792 feet?
@Rod.
Entirely not. I corrected my error (I did not repeat it).
The response to your question is already clearly stated in my previous comment.
It seems reasonable to me to scale these results for entire fleet of reactors and turbines (when you say that is what you are doing): 327,000 for nuclear and 7,190 for wind.
Is this the actual number of birds killed … no. Is this the number of birds estimated to have been killed based on scaling results based on preliminary studies of 4 nuclear plants and six wind farms. Yes. Is 5.792 the average height of five people from 10,000 years ago measuring 5′, 5’11″, 5’11.5″, 6’0″ and 6’1″. No it is not. Their average height would be 69.5 inches, or 5’9.5″. If we scaled this to be representative of the height of the human population 10,000 years ago, does this mean the average height of the human population was 5’9.5″ 10,000 years ago. Of course it doesn’t. It means we have a sample size of five, and a projected estimate of entire population based on a sample size of 5.
I think I’m still probably missing your point (in which case … please indicate where I am incorrect). I don’t see where any of this nullifies or otherwise changes the basic scope of the argument (which has been presented as a very preliminary or “first order estimate to be (hopefully) reinforced by future research” kind of way). If you see ulterior motives in this, have you thought maybe it’s because you’re looking for them, and may be predisposed to see them at every turn (regardless of whether they are in the paper for others to see or not)?
@EL
Of course it doesn’t. It means we have a sample size of five, and a projected estimate of entire population based on a sample size of 5.
I am sure that you are aware that the error bars associated with a non random sample of just 5 individuals are so large as to make any projections completely meaningless.
That is my point – the results are not worth publishing, even with a whole host of caveats and waffles like calling them preliminary. Given the amount of information that I provided, it is entirely likely that all four of the people whose heights were clustered around 6 feet were from the same family since they were found in the same location.
Publishing the results would be roughly equivalent to writing an article projecting the results of an election after asking five people at a backyard BBQ who they thought they were going to vote for and describing the results as a scientific poll. It is like the famous “4 out of 5 dentists surveyed recommend…”
Given the methodology issues, small sample sizes and short sample times associated with the initial guesses of “0.416 fatalities per GWh based on operating experience at four nuclear plants and two uranium mines/mills” and “0.269 fatalities per GWh based on operating experience at six wind farms (and 339 turbines)”, a very likely reason to publish, to accept for publication, and to promote an article based on those numbers projected out to a far larger population of machines spread over a much larger time domain was to make misleading statements that start a distracting conversation.
If that was the goal, I have to admit that the tactic has been quite effective. Just count the number of words and imagine the number of valuable hours that have been spent in this small group of engaged thinkers talking about what is actually a minor issue in the context of choosing ways to supply reliable power to a population of 7-9 billion people.
I actually find this quote in the 2012 article (on page 256). And this is not how I read it.
As I read it, the author appears to be saying that the article “argues” against the consensus (as you suggest), but that it’s conclusions are preliminary (with respect to several explicitly stated shortcomings and uncertainties of the data) and need to be backed up by further research and data. As the author specifically states: “”… the study should be viewed as a first order estimate to be (hopefully) reinforced by future research” (2012:257).
The conclusion of the paper, as I see it is, is that nuclear power doesn’t absolutely cause more birds to be killed by wind, but that it might (and it is important to question and look more closely at what appears to be an emerging consensus in the literature that avian mortality for wind exceeds that of nuclear). The study does not definitely answer the question that has been proposed, but rather advances the conclusion that we need to look more closely at available studies and assumptions (especially preliminary findings from available research), and perhaps approach them with a greater sense of scientific rigor and thoroughness than has been done to date. And most likely, more studies will be needed to fully and more completely answer the question.
A quick scanning (or reading) of the article suggests that there are problems with existing research in the area, and that the conventional wisdom that wind kills more birds than nuclear may be wrong. A closer reading of the article suggests that we aren’t anywhere closer to answering this question, but there is a very good reason to give it greater attention and to do further research on the topic.
This is how I read it. It sounds like others likely disagree (in which case there appears to be a bit of confusion about how the article has been received).
@EL, thanks for this comment – you read my article the same way I do, and the way I intended it to be read. I’m not saying that those who disagree are wrong (people will always react to something based on their own experiences, training, etc.), but it’s nice to know at least a few Atomic Insights readers can appreciate my perspective.
Paul, thanks so much for taking the time to create your review. It is ironic that he gets paid and frequently cited as an expert to create such low quality work and you get nothing but a thank you for correcting him.
I give Sovacool a point for being one of few, perhaps the only, antinuclear essayist willing to argue his work on an open forum. A few others and I debated him on his deeply flawed nuclear CO2 emissions report, which is still frequently cited in anti nuclear propaganda.
http://www.scitizen.com/future-energies/nuclear-power-false-climate-change-prophet-_a-14-2136.html
I think we all become antinuclear early in life from being exposed to the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some people search out the facts to support their antinuclear leanings, learn the truth, and become supporters of commercial nuclear power.
Sovacool is smart and has done some homework, so I cannot understand how he can live with himself, making a living by trashing a technology that has so much potential to reduce human suffering.
@ Bill, for me it wasn’t so much Hiroshima and Nagasaki (I’m not that old!) as it was Chernobyl and Fukushima, and I “live with myself” because I honestly believe efficiency and renewables have more potential than nuclear power. I don’t think that makes me a bad person, nor do your beliefs that nuclear is the way to go make you a bad person. We’re both entitled to our views, right? And in the end, if we both get our way – our future energy system adopts both nuclear and renewables in equal measure – the planet will be much better off than if we continue to adopt fossil fuels. So why pick a fight with me?
This remark, as if Sovacool is the aggrieved party, shows the depth of dishonesty from which his report comes.
“I “live with myself” because I honestly believe efficiency and renewables have more potential than nuclear power. I don’t think that makes me a bad person, nor do your beliefs that nuclear is the way to go make you a bad person. We’re both entitled to our views, right?”
That belief is wrong. These are engineering questions, and the answer – which engineers can calculate – is that efficiency and renewables *do not* have more potential than nuclear. Live with it. Don’t pretend it is a matter of ‘belief’.
Certainly, Mr. Sovacool, you are entitled to your opinion. What you are not entitled to, IMHO, is to deceive other by writing clear lies and misinformation. The lies and misinformation in you reports and comments have been clearly shown by various commenters on Atomic Insights. Therefore, you are a bad person. You need to fully make amends and repair the damage your work has done by acknowledging your mistakes and lies, in order to stop being a bad person.
No … they aren’t just engineering questions, and perhaps this explains why you can’t see past the energy density of uranium. Investors find nuclear uncertain. Regulators find it challenging. Consumers find it unattractive. Developers find it costly (without public supports in low cost of capital, managing risk, research and development, siting waste repositories). Grid operators find it inflexible (at least when economic viability is a concern). Slow development of fast reactors, proliferation, availability of high grade ore, the list goes on.
Many people would like to see a modernization of our energy system, better technology (and reliable grid enhancements), dependence on “fuels” that aren’t running out (or causing as much environmental damage), have low risk, are easy to scale, easy to maintain, can be built anywhere, create new and more competitive jobs and business opportunities, and over time have high consumer acceptance and very low long term costs (real and externalized). We have seen many engineering breakthroughs in renewable energy (and a rapid lowering of costs). We are likely to see many more. Nuclear needs to catch up!
“Many people would like to see a modernization of our energy system, better technology (and reliable grid enhancements), dependence on “fuels” that aren’t running out (or causing as much environmental damage), have low risk, are easy to scale, easy to maintain, can be built anywhere, create new and more competitive jobs and business opportunities, and over time have high consumer acceptance and very low long term costs (real and externalized). We have seen many engineering breakthroughs in renewable energy (and a rapid lowering of costs). We are likely to see many more. Nuclear needs to catch up!”
Replace the word ‘Nuclear’ in the last sentence with ‘Renewables’, and vice versa and what you write above makes sense. Otherwise, it is pure fantasy. Mere handwaving. People like you are the very reason things like air pollution, water pollution, energy poverty and climate change STILL haven’t been solved on this planet. The arrogance and hubris on display from you is criminal. I’ve spent more than a decade working on these *engineering* questions. What you have done is read science-fiction. You never calculated anything in your life, I’ll wager. Otherwise you’ll know that even in the best case, the ecological and economic costs of wind/solar are each at least *five times* greater than the potential of nuclear.
This is supported by the most recent scientific investigations, contrary to your fantasy.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/08/1221552/-GETTING-TO-ZERO-Is-renewable-energy-economically-viable
@EL
You wrote:
I cannot argue with most of your list of challenges, but all of them are far more amenable to solution than trying to make the wind or the sun reliable sources of industrial power.
Sure, investing in nuclear in the US or Europe today is a risky bet. So was investing in Apple in 1997, before the second coming of Steve Jobs. Regulators appointed by politicians for reasons other than technical expertise find nuclear “challenging”; those who choose useful courses of study and truly want to enable safe nuclear energy production find that regulating nuclear energy is one of the best jobs in the federal government. I’m not sure which consumers you are talking about who think nuclear energy production is “unattractive”, unless you are talking about the consumers in places where they are falsely told that nuclear is expensive or those who are forced to pay excess costs for delays caused by political maneuvering – like sitting on the Vogtle and Summer COLAs for five months after the staff had completed their analysis.
Developers certainly see risk at every turn, with the possibility of an inexperience worker or regulator halting the progress of a multibillion dollar construction project for months at a time even when the eventual answer was – I guess it is okay to have used the current concrete standard instead of the one that was in effect more than a half dozen years ago when it was documented in the tens of thousands of pages of fine print required to support a Design Certification Application. They are certainly worried about waste rules; the federal government has been dallying for decades and are further away from a solution today than they were in 1982.
Old plants are “inflexible” because they were designed to be inflexible at a time when most customers wanted rock solid base load power. Responsive nuclear power has always been an available design choice; please do not for a moment believe that nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are less responsive than their fossil-fueled cousins.
If you believe uranium supplies are a problem, you are ignoring market reality. The price of the material is stuck in the doldrums of around $40 per pound, about 1/3 of its peak price. There are huge deposits that are being purposely kept out of the market, partially in an attempt to get prices back up to a more profitable level – but even $150 per pound is still a level that has little impact on the price of electricity from nuclear power plants.
In the meantime, there is some disagreement about the benefits of wind coming out of the utopia in central Europe.
http://autonomousmind.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/germanys-rebellion-against-wind-power-picks-up-pace/
No, it’s not criminal. And you lost your wager. When you want to talk about substantive issues (instead of mindless chatter on personal character and motives) please let me know.
No. The market reality is not good for uranium.
My comment is about running plants on an economic basis (not whether they can be load following or on what engineering basis). If plant costs are already high and rising, how does producing less energy (as a load following plant) make them more economically viable and not less? Add in higher maintenance costs as well. Don’t we have France to look to as an example here?
I believe my comment is entirely pertinent to your point. Investing in nuclear is risky (particularly with aging plants and bungled upgrades in the news). Public support helps to minimize many of these risks (and the industry can do better). Results will make a major difference (and not promises and hopes). Nuclear needs to catch up.
Political maneuvering … everyone has to deal with politics. Nuclear is no different. If they are defeated by politics, have you ever thought that maybe they are just be very bad at it? I firmly believe that politics helps nuclear far more than it hurts. If you feel differently, and it seems you do, then I have to ask: “why aren’t they doing better?” They certainly spend about the same amount of money as anyone else on the lavish pastime (perhaps even more). There are plenty of stakeholders out there who would be more than happy to see nuclear succeed. Are they also equally sidelined and ineffective in revolving door politics and a Congress rife with political patronage and maneuvering (as you would seem to suggest).
I really don’t think conspiracy theories get us very far in understanding these things. Nuclear has been around for over half a decade, they really should have figured these things out by now (don’t you think)?
EL actually cites Michael Dittmar as an authority! Dittmar, the clown who claimed that low uranium MINING levels (due to downblended weapons-grade uranium from Megatons to Megawatts depressing the market for ore) meant there was no uranium out there, is EL’s idea of a “prophet”.
Uranium mining has gone to more than 65,000 tons per year, and the Chinese and others are building plants at a blistering pace. Obviously Beijing has no worries about uranium shortages in the 60 years of their expected lifespan. EL wants us to think that the anti-nuclear ideologue Dittmar knows something Beijing doesn’t. Hint, EL: we’re not as dumb as you look.
The risk in nuclear power comes almost entirely from the regulators. Regulators who threaten to hold up work on a plant for years can effectively cancel or decommission it. Take away that power to destroy or force the regulators to pay damages for wrongful delays and denials, and the excess risk in nuclear power will largely disappear.
@ Joris, putting aside your claim that I am “a bad person,” I take a fundamental disagreement with your point that “these are engineering questions.” If it was that easy, we would have solved society’s energy problem decades ago. No, in my opinion, we have a number of energy technologies around us that already “work” fine. The remaining issues are ethical, moral, political, social, and economic. For instance, why is it that one-fifth of our global society has no access to electricity whatsoever, while others (us) consume far more than the world average? We have enough “energy” to go around so that everyone lives a fairly happy life. There’s no “technical” answer to that question. And if you continue to see it only as an engineering challenge, you’re going to (a) miss a bigger part of the picture, and (b) remain frustrated when people don’t agree with you.
I don’t recall saying anything about a prophet. I recall citing a study that looks at mine depletion rates and available known reserves and projects a rising market price, and a supply crunch by 2025 that appears to be insufficient to sustain any significant expansion plans (in excess of plant retirements) in power plants.
And the Chinese are not continuing ambitiously with their plans as you suggest. They lowered their targets (by canceling plans for interior power plants), and they just abandoned plans for a uranium-processing facility in Guangdon province (as a consequence of local protests). This isn’t terribly encouraging news (despite any speculation about tea leaves, or those who are adamantly committed to such things as the power of prayer).
“And if you continue to see it only as an engineering challenge, you’re going to (a) miss a bigger part of the picture, and (b) remain frustrated when people don’t agree with you.”
The picture is vividly clear. It is not a matter of agreement. Nuclear is cheaper and cleaner than coal, and should have replaced it decades ago, but anti-nuke propaganda stands in the way of rationally and carefully proving that out on the ground, which is why coal usage is *still* skyrocketing, people are *still* dying by the hundreds of thousands from it, yearly, and the climate is *still* warming up form it, potentially catastrophically.
I hold people who work inside the anti-nuclear propaganda machine *fully* responsible for this course of events. Those people are criminals IMO and if it was up to me I’d see to it that they get what they deserve: facing a scientific tribunal and fittingly heavy handed sentencing. One of my long-time aims is to make crass, gross undermining of science and reason in the public sphere a criminal offence. And I’m not the only one who supports such thinking. Several educated, moderate politicians in my country are openly speaking about the ‘poison’ of opinion-based decision making, rabble rousing and anti-science populism that is rampant in our propagandised society, supported by the mass media, and the grave problems and threats it is causing for our people.
30 years of failure to stop rising GHG concentrations, and 30 years of failure to promote basic knowledge about the practice and promise of nuclear technology is enough. It it times for heads to start rolling. Perhaps not literally, but the sooner it starts happening the better. Certainly, Ben, you are on the wrong side of the divide here, so I recommend you get your act together. Change is coming. The German Energywende is about to implode, and with it, perhaps a new global consciousness will develop that puts the spotlight brightly and continuously on anti-science, anti-nuke propagandists like yourself.
This is not a matter of armchair thought experiments anymore. People are dying in droves due to anti-nukery, according to James Hansen’s research, and their numbers will multiply with every passing year of non-resolution of this matter. Energy poverty (and with it food scarcity) is on the rise globally. Eventually, the people responsible for this disaster-in-the-making *will* be held responsible. They always are. There are only so many lies and so many deaths that the public will tolerate, no matter how ignorant they have been kept, history shows time and time again.
Engineering manuals and every major relevant scientific body explains clearly that nuclear energy is potentially the cleanest and the cheapest. Only politics and propaganda stand in the way of that being common knowledge. Not for long. The days of the care-free anti-nuclear free-loader are numbered. That is not a frustration, but a hopeful vision of the (near)future! 😉
“No, it’s not criminal. And you lost your wager. When you want to talk about substantive issues (instead of mindless chatter on personal character and motives) please let me know.”
I think you have a problem with projection. For all the few years I’ve been reading this site, Seeing your handle on the top of a comment because pretty much a guarantee that following it would be mindless chatter of the highest degree. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you acknowledge any of the many substantive rebuttals of your many-varied wrong claims on this site. If I’m wrong, feel free to point one instance out to me and I will retract.
Now you seem to be getting on the tired ‘not-enough-uranium’ bandwagon? Good luck with that. Years ago (long before the infamous and obtuse “Energy Watch Group” massacring of this non-issue, which drew on the even more idiotic and infamous StormSmith rubbish on the subject) it took me only about a day to find proof that uranium and thorium are effectively infinite energy stocks given that state-of-the-art in nuclear engineering. How did I manage to find that proof? It was very simple. I approached the question like I would any engineering question: seek out clear-eyed and vetted research on the topic produced by engineers and scientists, rather than base propagandists like StormSmith.
Concerning your presumably feigned interest in discussion substantive issues: Let’s see you retract your utterly wrong thinking about the availability of uranium supplies now. I’ll wager now that you will stick with your clearly wrong conclusions on display here, as you always do, in spite of the help given you by others more knowledgeable here.
If you are wondering why I am hounding you (and Dr. Sovacool) so much. It’s not a personal dislike. I’m sure you are great people. Many of my best friends and acquaintances are anti-nukes. All very nice people. But it is a matter of getting fed up with this endless barraeg of tired anti-nuclear nonsense. I feel at liberty to get fed up, since I read that the respected Dr. James Hansen supports such a stance.
http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/community-news/james-hansen-obama-climate-47010206
That was in 2009. Today, Hansen’s pro-nuke advocacy has only grown. People and you and Dr. Sovacool ignore this casually, and thereby discredit yourselves utterly. 🙂
@Joris van Dorp
That’s not correct. And you know it. I take full responsibility for the content and substance of my own posts. What others wish to do by way distraction, evasion, mocking, ridicule, personal character attacks, etc., is far beyond my control.
When I disagree with you (and we disagree often), I make every effort to back up my statements with substantive and independently verifiable information. I’m not a propagandist, and I don’t take these issues casually. I’m a professor (more accurately, a teaching graduate student) and I also publish and do research on a well known climate mitigation initiative in my city. I have been involved with climate mitigation and energy efficiency programs in my city for a number of years (as a community based researcher and policy advisor). I participate on the site because I am interested in wide ranging perspectives on energy (nuclear, renewables, environmental issues, communication strategies, the power of social media, economics, etc.). I also work in northern Canada, and work closely with communities directly involved with uranium mining (although this is not a focus of my work).
You are free to hound anybody you want, as you put it, or to ask tough questions and provide insightful and well supported commentary of your own. It is my goal that we get something out of these debates, however, rather have it devolve into something personal (without all the blather about ulterior motives, criminal behavior, and the like). This is how I approach my participation on the site. I would hope it’s how you approach your participation as well.
@EL
more accurately, a teaching graduate student
I guess I need to apologize to Brian Mays. I told him to back off and treat you with more respect because I thought you were already a professor and had completed the same level of education as he had.
Oops.
I’m confused. Are you saying that this means you don’t have to treat me with respect then?
I have a separate teaching fellowship. My courses are listed as part of the regular curriculum and all students (including graduate students) can take them. If you think this is undeserving of respect, at an institution of the caliber in which I teach, I’m not sure I have a response for that. I might have to revise my statement about internet “blogs” and the quality of discussion that is welcomed and encouraged on your site?
Oops.
@ Benjamin,
You said that your paper was peer reviewed. Were you crucified in the process ? I know I would have with the lack of methodological rigour that you are showing here in your discourse,
I concur with the other commenter. This isn’t a belief system. The NREL recently released a study purported to be “the most comprehensive analysis of high-penetration renewable electricity of the continental United States.” It found that by 2050, it might be possible, with a massive expansion of storage, hydro, biomass, geothermal, wind, and solar to obtain 80% of the 40% of our power that goes to electricity which is just 1/3 of our total power needs, leaving 2/3 of our energy needs coming from something else.
http://biodiversivist.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-we-dont-need-nuclear-energy-because.html
What does it mean to say that some outcome is “not uncommon”? Or perhaps I should ask, where might one draw the line between events that are uncommon and those that are not?
Clearly this depends to some extent on the frequency of opportunities for that event. If something happens once every year, is that uncommon? For plane crashes, say, I would say yes, because there are many many more flights that do not experience crashes. So for bird deaths, I would say that actually one mass-kill incident per year could still be described as uncommon.
But let’s stretch it a little, and say that in order to be uncommon it must happen only once every five years. Now the wild inaccuracy of the claim that “300 bird deaths is not uncommon” is apparent. A mass-kill of 300 birds has happened once in a period that certainly spans more than one decade. That is emphatically uncommon. There is no justification for regarding this as normal outcome of any kind of mining, never mind that the pit was not a uranium mine and the means of death were specific to the actual mineral processing concerned. Birdkill from in-situ uranium mining is effectively zero, and for unique uranium recovery rather than by-product mines that is now most common. We could therefore assign a very low value – say 0.01 bird deaths/GWh – to the mining and milling phase.
The weighting of direct power plant bird deaths bears some scrutiny also. Weighting a single bad year equally against an extended study mischaracterizes the data. So the two extended studies should have extra weight based on length of the study, and ignoring the misassigned Crystal River bird kill, the actual average operating birdkill should be just under 0.05/GWh.
All-in-all on this metric, nuclear power once again comes out as the most environmentally friendly option.
@Joffan, this is an excellent point, and I concede that “timing” matters. What complicates the numbers even more are that sometimes, birds seem to learn to avoid hazards. So what may amount to a “bad year” for a particular wind farm may be an anomaly, and not apply to its later years. Conversely, there could be “one-off” events, say forest fires or urban encroachment, that push birds into new flight and migratory paths that take them into wind farms where they have never been before. Similarly, some uranium mines and mills (almost always in the developing world) have chronic spills that recur and accumulate, whereas others (like many of those in the USA) operate safely. So in assigning probabilistic risk to these factors, we need to consider not only “magnitude” but also “frequency.” I’m not sure that means that “nuclear power once again comes out as the most environmentally friendly option” when we’ve counted everything, but it does mean our rough sketch becomes a more fine-grained image
Hello Paul, just getting to this. Since we’ve both already written pages and pages on this topic, I’ll keep this brief. First, as I pointed out in my response on Atomic Insights, and readers can see for themselves with the actual USFWS website link, the Wyoming argument comes straight from them. It is a paraphrase of their paragraph which starts with “Abandoned open pit uranium mines in Wyoming …” Connecting the 300 deaths in Montana with these mines in Wyoming is indeed a stretch, and a rough (and probably poor) proxy. That said, we do know (according to the FWS) that uranium mines pose hazards to birds. That is why I have asked you, Rod, and other readers to share with me data confirming or refuting this claim. So far, nobody has.
Second, the quotes you give from my article above (in the abstract and the introduction) are called signposts. They are not stating the study’s conclusions, but instead previewing the structure of the paper and telling readers what its data will say. To see the actual conclusions of the study, you need to go to the aptly titled section of the paper called “Conclusions.”
Third, and lastly – it’s fair to accuse me of being sloppy in places of the paper, but do you have any defense for your own sloppiness, i.e. for missing the rebuttal to the Willis et al,. study? Curious how you missed that.
Hello Benjamin: I am happy to respond. At the outset, though, let me credit you for engaging and participating in this forum. That said, I will address your comments in the order you gave them.
First, it is fair to say the USFWS link has a paragraph discussing open pit mines in Wyoming, indicating some of the issues they pose, and obliquely stating:
“One pit lake in Wyoming contains over 100 parts per million (microgram per Liter [µg/L]) of selenium. Waterborne selenium concentrations greater than 2µg/L are known to impair the reproduction and survival of aquatic birds due to the high potential for dietary toxicity through food chain bioaccumulation.”
If you had made that reference and stopped there I would have had no problem. Instead you reference “abandoned open pit uranium mines in Wyoming are usually associated with strata containing high concentrations of selenium” (fair enough) followed a sentence later by “one of these pits killed 300 birds during a single year”, yet referring not to one of the uranium mines but a mine in Montana that is not even a uranium mine. That was simply not honest. There are a number of things you could have said – you could have said – “this is a threat to the survival of aquatic birds, though we have no data to quantify just what that threat is” – if you had said that, it would have been in the spirit you claim you had. Moreover, if you decided to use the Montana mine, you could have said that and been open about what you were doing. You chose not to do that either. Even worse, you (1) used the Montana mine as a proxy to extrapolate to all uranium mines globally, and (2) you made the unstated inference that this is the way uranium mining is done today. I have a hard time dismissing this as simply sloppy – it was inaccurate, misleading and fundamentally unscientific.
Second, you observe correctly that the quotes in the abstract are “signposts”, as you put it. Fair enough, but the issue in question is what your intent was. You stated in your response, “It (your article) never advances the conclusion, as he (Lorenzini) claims, that ‘nuclear power causes more bird kills than wind.’” I find that disingenuous as that is the whole tenor of your article. While the statements in the abstract are only “signposts” as you say, they give an indicative statement of what the article is claiming – that’s what abstracts do, and they clearly state that you are, indeed, making the claim that nuclear plants kill more birds than wind. That’s the plain English language. I will let others read the article and draw their own conclusions – you have stated your intent – some apparently accept that view, others don’t. My view is clearly stated.
Lastly you take issue with the fact that I missed the rebuttal to the Willis, et al, paper. Guilty as charged. Frankly I didn’t try to dig into the merits of that article since it went way beyond my depth. I was simply noting that a number of others had challenged your analysis on the merits (there were seven co-authors, all with academic credentials that appeared to qualify them to challenge your analysis). That said, I don’t see any equivalency between that error and the quality of the analysis you did – it wasn’t just sloppy to take smoke stacks from fossil plants and attribute them to a nuclear plant, or take a single abandoned copper mine and extrapolate to the entire industry, it is work that should not have ever merited publication. I will concede that you included caveats, but it wasn’t much of a concession. It is common to identify uncertainties that can be improved. The problem here is that you attributed enough legitimacy to your analysis to call your results “preliminary” – that’s far too generous. It wasn’t “sloppy”, and it certainly did not qualify as “preliminary”; it was misleading, lacked transparency, and made assumptions that could not ever be justified under any credible scientific analysis. Readers now have enough information to draw their own conclusions, but that was my conclusion and that’s why I wrote the article.
@Paul, fair enough: I think at this point readers have more than enough to muse on. I will also admit that the paragraph citing the USFWS numbers is, as you point out, misleading and very badly written. No excuse there except for sloppy thinking and/or writing on my part. But note how the argument has shifted from “that whole article is crap” to “that paragraph is crap.” Also, keep in mind that though the data in the article has its limitations, we now have literally hundreds of posts and comments here on this blog (if you add those up from your original article, my response, and your rebuttal). Despite my call to the Atomic Insights community for “better” data, not one of these commentators has provided it, nor has anybody emailed me. So maybe finding good data on this issue is more difficult than one may think.
Better data on what precisely ? Do you still remember the remarks by Keith Pickering https://atomicinsights.com/sovacool-vs-lorenzini/#comment-59221 that shows that we don’t need more data to conclude that the uranium mining contribution you calculated is wrong by many orders of magnitude.
And as said in the first post, it’s biggest contributor to your final number.
Also if you read carefully, you have been brought the information that all uranium mining currently mined in the US comes from ISL (In-Situ Leaching) so does not cause the risks to birds you described. The WNA documents that 45% of the world uranium is extracted from ISL/ISR :
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Mining-of-Uranium/In-Situ-Leach-Mining-of-Uranium/
As of 2012, open pit is only 20% of the world’s uranium production :
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Mining-of-Uranium/World-Uranium-Mining-Production/#.UehGHcooaAY
The second biggest contributor to your data is the Crystal River site. As said, it doesn’t have any nuclear plant cooling tower, which means that it’s not under the NRC regulation intended to reduce the number of birds killed by nuclear plant. That regulation reduced the number of birds killed at Davis Besse very significantly under the 0.0285/GWh number that you used, as a result of the site being identified from start as high risk. You have there been brought here links to an apparently more complete version of the testimonies showing that reduction.
I referenced also some document showing that the protected area around nuclear plant can serve as protection for willd life including birds, with many documented as nesting near Geoges Besse. This is not unique, the situation is quite similar near the Diablo Canyon plant.
So in all your original data, we only have the Limerick number left basically unchallenged which is around 10 times higher than Davis Besse (Susquehanna was 3 times lower that D-B). Well I’m going to tackle that one, separately.
Well I had not completed my Limerick comment.
So checking the date, the data Sovacool reports dates from before the unit’s completion. This means before there was any lighting like at Davis-Besse to reduce collisions.
After the completion, none of the Environmental Impact Statement reports any bird kill, and even the opponent to the station who were battling the renewal of it’s license did not list any bird kill amongst the worries they had.
What’s more even if the bird kill reported were real, the calculation is wrong. The proper result is 0.029 and not 0.261. It seem calculation is off by a factor 10, and then also not taking into account the load factor.
Ben, help me out here with your remarkable research ability. I am writing a paper on the tragedy of children killed every year on playgrounds by stampeding herds of pink elephants. I cannot find any good data on this important problem.
If nuclear power is killing as many birds as you claim, lots of people are involved in collecting and burying those birds. With over 7 billion people on spaceship earth, perhaps 2 – 3 billion are antinuclear. By now some antinuclear person, or pro nuclear person with a sense of ethics, would have blown the whistle.
The lack of data is the best evidence that your conclusion is wrong.
@Benjamin
“Despite my call to the Atomic Insights community for “better” data, not one of these commentators has provided it, nor has anybody emailed me. So maybe finding good data on this issue is more difficult than one may think.”
It occurred to me that your research has overlooked a large potential source of reliable data that is professionally prepared and reviewed by certified experts that are responsible for the quality of their review.
Did you know that every nuclear facility built or licensed since the early 1970s in the United States has been required to file an Environmental Impact Statement? Those legal documents all include analysis to answer questions about the facility’s effects on habitat and wildlife based on verifiable data sources. In order to obtain the license, those assessments have to show that the facility has a lower impact in these areas than other alternative courses of action – including not building anything.
Reviewing a sample of EISs for nuclear facilities might not help you in your efforts to gather data for energy facilities that do not require a federal operating license, but they might help you to understand why nuclear advocates have been pushing back so strongly to your assertions that our technology should be lumped in the same category as either wind or fossil fuel.
EL What would the price of uranium have to be to match the price of coal per kWh with conventional reactors?
What would the price of uranium have to be to match the price of coal per kWh with a molten salt breeder reactor?
@Bill Hannahan.
Mining companies need stable prices to stay in business, and cover significant exploration and long term development costs. One mine gets flooded (Cigar Lake), and uranium prices spike 700% on uncertainty about short term supplies. Many companies went bust on the downside, and prices settled at a new high. The market still looks pretty volatile and prone to rapid and uncertain swings to me.
Such bubbles are not good for nuclear industry, utilities (negotiating long term power contracts), or boosting supplies through discovery and development of new reserves. I suppose you are trying to tell me such uncertainties are good for an industry that already has very low investor confidence, and ready supplies of available fuel through non-proliferation and inter-governmental agreements (rather than mining developers and commodity spot markets)? I’d like to hear your argument. Please make your case.
EL I suspect that you know that most uranium is sold on long term contracts, so the average price paid during the spike was not as volatile as you imply.
Fossil fuel price volatility is hard on industries that use lots of fuel, airlines, trucking companies, fossil based utilities. It is not hard on nuclear utilities that can store year’s worth of fuel in a medium sized room, and for which fuel cost is a small part of the cost of doing business.
I notice you avoided answering the questions, so I have three questions for you now.
1. If the oil companies could make gasoline for 10 cents a gallon and their selling price varied from 50 cents to $5.00 would the volatility drive them out of business?
2. What would the price of uranium have to be to match the price of coal per kWh with conventional reactors?
3. What would the price of uranium have to be to match the price of coal per kWh with a molten salt breeder reactor?
@Bill Hannahan.
It’s my understanding new nuclear already exceeds the cost of conventional coal on MWh basis. I’m not sure what calculation you want me to do to suggest otherwise? At current prices, uranium makes up some 14% of the cost of a nuclear plant, and a doubling of the price adds some 7% to the cost of electricity.
If you have math you want someone to do … I suggest you do it yourself and include it in an argument you wish to make (rather than have others make your argument for you).
@Bill Hannahan.
Is this the number you are looking for.
At $225/kg nuclear loses it’s dispatch ranking on basis of operating costs to coal (MIT, p. 83). At top of uranium bubble in 2007, prices peaked at $300/kg (or around ~135/lbs).
Uuh, no, nice reference though, did you notice the conclusion?
The results of the study confirm that once-through LWR fuel cycles can sustain aggressive expansion of nuclear power and can remain competitive well beyond the mid-century mark; however, volatility of uranium spot prices is expected until uranium resource production/consumption equilibrium is reached
I am shocked you are having so much trouble answering my questions; I’ll help you out with one of them.
Fuel assemblies cost about 0.66 c/kWh. Uranium, at $130/kg, accounts for less than half that, 0.32 c/kWh.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Economic-Aspects/Economics-of-Nuclear-Power/#.Uebp71JZJuk
Minehead coal cost is about 3.2 c/kWh. So the breakeven fuel cost for uranium vs. coal would be about $1,300/kg.
Questions;
1. If the oil companies could make gasoline for 10 cents a gallon and their selling price varied from 50 cents to $5.00 would the volatility drive them out of business?
2. What would the uranium supply be at $1,300/kg.
3. What would the price of uranium have to be to match the price of coal per kWh with a molten salt breeder reactor? (Hint, conventional reactors need about 100 times more uranium per kWh than a MSBR?)
4. What would the uranium supply be at the MSBR breakeven with coal price?
I did … I find conclusion of study alarming. Once through LWR fuel cycle remains competitive to some unspecified point beyond the mid-century mark. Based on moderate expansion levels (doubling of consumption rates to 2050). And to get there, we have to endure serious short term obstacles and uncertainties: “the uranium market is in serious (production/supply) imbalance and vulnerable to price volatility until current efforts to expand production come to fruition in ten or fifteen years” (p. 97).
All studies are subject to review, updating, and close examination of assumptions (and MIT is not different). The paper from Dittmar, while not as thorough and detailed as others, is provocative for using an updated methodology for historical extraction levels on existing mines, and projected extraction estimates and benchmarks on newer mines (looking at whether these benchmarks are being met or not). Cigar Lake is still not in production (30 years after the deposit was discovered).
You’re leaving a lot out of your “break even calculations” … don’t you think? You’ve left out “waste fund” charges (15% of Nuclear Fuel Component Costs), and O&M (69% of power production costs) at nuclear plants. O&M is only 22% at a coal plant. The numbers in the MIT study look pretty good and well substantiated to me: USD $225/kg (break-even cost with coal), USD $500/kg (break-even cost with coal + CO2 capture).
You might want to redo your calculations with the relevant figures (you appear to be wildly overestimating them).
@EL
Papers about material resources should not be judged by the same standards as papers about human behavior. Cheering a paper for being “provocative” instead of “thorough and detailed” because it uses an “updated methodology” instead of a more accurate methodology exposes a bias towards controversy and interesting discussions rather than finding useful answers that reflect a measurable reality.
There is plenty of accessible uranium and thorium in the world. Markets will work to establish prices that are high enough to profitably and safely extract that material at the time that it is needed. The only way to stop that from happening is to erect artificial barriers and to overlook the negative realities of competing energy sources.
Your statement that “O&M is only 22% at a coal plant” is false and misleading. A more correct, but admittedly complex statement would be as follows. “Non-fuel O&M in a country that provides free waste removal services by allowing cost-free dumping of gaseous waste products is 22% at a coal plant.”
Hey, great trick question!
Answer: Uranium is recoverable from seawater for $2-300/kg. The prospect of uranium prices exceeding this on a long-term basis has to be regarded as not credible.
@EL
You have demonstrated a rather incomplete understanding of the cyclic commodity business with the following statement:
I will not point to any academic research papers. Instead, I would like you to go find some reasonably good databases of historical prices for any of several dozen openly traded mined commodities like copper, iron, natural gas, aluminum, etc. and plot those prices on a graph.
Then come back here and tell me how stable the prices have been during the past several decades.
I think you will find that if your statement was true, there would be few, if any mining companies in business in any industry and that none would ever make long term investments based on their understanding that prices often fluctuate and that many years worth of “losses” are often made up in a relatively short period by being ready to produce when the market is ready to buy even with sharp price increases.
Mining is NOT a business for wimps or for people who cannot take the long view.
I regularly follow prospects of mining companies in northern Canada. Commodity prices play a role. When companies go out of business, there are many people who are adversely hurt. You are right, it’s not a business for wimps. When you see local communities counting on such revenues (endure lengthy environmental assessments, and go through several early stages and business cycles), and go bust, it is not a pretty thing. You don’t build diversified, resilient, and sustainable long term local economies and jobs around such uncertainties. You build boom and bust cycles, and benefits are not equally shared.
Dr. Sovacool, I wonder if you could answer some questions I had about your metanalysis on life-cycle CO2 emissions, Valuing the Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Nuclear Power: A Critical Survey (Energy Policy, 36 (2008) 2940-2953). I’m following up on a comments by Lantzelot in the thread below Paul Lorenzini’s original post on your bird-kill article.
Lantzelot raised the issue of whether you might have inappropriately counted what is essentially the same Storm-Smith study as four independent studies in your averaging of 19 studies of lifetime nuclear CO2 emissions. He suggests that the three studies Storm van Leeuwen et al (2005), Storm van Leeuwen (2006) and Storm van Leeuwen et al (2007) are all just versions of one Storm-Smith study. He further notes that the study you cite as Barnaby and Kemp (2007b) is in fact a multi-chapter work, and that the specific chapter about nuclear CO2 emissions was written by none other than Storm van Leeuwen—presumably using the same research in the other Storm-Smith studies you included.
Your references to the SVL 2005 and 2008 studies, both titled “Nuclear Power: The Energy Balance,” only cite SVL’s website, which is vast. The specific 2005 study no longer seems to be there, but the website does have the 2007/8 study, “Nuclear power—the energy balance”, which it describes thus: “This report is the result of the original study by J. W. Storm van Leeuwen and Phillip B. Smith, of August 2005 and updated in February, 2008.” Many of the chapters in the 2008 version are actually dated 2007. (Unfortunately, I can’t download the report from the website because the file is damaged.) So it looks like the Storm-Smith 2007 study you cite may in fact just be an updating and elaboration of the 2005 study.
As for the Storm 2006 study, I can’t find any trace of it on the web, except for a slideshow from a Brussels symposium. That slideshow only provides CO2 data for construction, not for any other life-cycle stage emissions you list for it. The construction-related CO2 emissions the slideshow lists are not 13-36 g/kwh, as your paper has it, but 12-35 g/kwh—the same figure as you list for the Storm-Smith 2005 study (which I can no longer find on the Storm-Smith website.) So, again, it looks as if the Storm 2006 study might also be just a rehash, perhaps not even “updated,” of the Storm-Smith 2005 study that you have already included in the meta-analysis.
I looked at the Barnaby and Kemp study you cited, and the data there do indeed seem to come from the 2005 version of “Nuclear Power—The Energy Balance,” with the citation being to the Storm-Smith website. The total CO2 emissions are exactly the same, 84-122 g/kwh, which is a remarkable coincidence—except that your sum for Storm-Smith 2005 seems wrong, because the itemized breakdown actually adds up to 88-134 g/kwh.
So I’m confused by all this. It looks like four of the 19 studies in your meta-analysis–Storm 2006, Storm-Smith 2005 and 2008, and Barnaby and Kemp 2007b—may not really be independent studies, but just iterations and rehashes and tweaks of one Storm-Smith study. I hope you can clarify these matters, specifically:
1. Are the Storm-Smith 2005 and 2007 studies that you cite just refined and tweaked versions of the same study? If so, is it proper to count an updated iteration of Storm-Smith as a brand new study? Do the versions differ enough—different data-sets, orthogonal analyses—to justify including them as separate independent data points in your meta-analysis?
2. Am I missing the full Storm 2006 study? Is there some other fuller version than the Brussels slideshow? If not, is Storm 2006 just a slideshow rehash of Storm-Smith 2005? Are its data, analysis and conclusions distinctive enough to warrant inclusion as an independent data point in your meta-analysis?
3. Why have you not listed the Barnaby and Kemp study as a Storm study, since he wrote the chapter with all the CO2 research in it? Again, is this chapter distinctive enough from other Storm-Smith studies you have cited—different data, analysis and conclusions—to warrant including it as an independent data point in your meta-analysis?
4. Is it possible that inclusion of so many variations of Storm-Smith, with their high-end estimates of CO2 emissions, has biased your meta-analysis in the direction of exaggerating nuclear CO2 emissions?
Rod, I think the questions & remarks about Sovacool’s CO2 study would be really worth being promoted to a full post, what do you think ?
The remarks by Bill here were also made by Lantzelot earlier https://atomicinsights.com/2013/04/nukes-kill-more-birds-than-wind.html#comment-54543 , who also notes that Sovacool added the CO2 and CO2eq number in the Fritsche & Lim study instead of using one of the two, and made an average of the Tokimatsu numbers instead of taking into account that they show enhancements that have progressively brought it down to 10 g.
Sovacool could also realize that the UK DECC by analyzing the literature finds an average of 16 gCO2/KWh http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn_383-carbon-footprint-electricity-generation.pdf and notes that :
“Sovacool’s own analysis has been excluded from this study, for the reasons outlined by Beerten et al”
For his information the Beerten et al paper is http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2009.06.073 and makes the same critics as above :
“a critical assessment reveals that a majority of the studies representing the upper part of the spectrum are studies that can be traced back to the same input data and performed by the same author, namely Storm van Leeuwen […]
it must be concluded that the mix of selected LCAs results in a skewed and distorted collection of different results available in the literature.”
“Averaging GHG emissions from different studies, as performed by Sovacool (2008) is an improper manner to deal with life-cycle studies because it does not take into account these differences.”
I would also note that the German oeko institute that is known for it’s rigor but also a significant anti-nuclear slant, recognize the number for France should be 8g, even if it estimates the one for Germany at 32g , see here in German http://www.oeko.de/oekodoc/318/2007-008-de.pdf (I think the difference is due to France using CO2 free electricity for enrichment, though the German number still seems very high given that the plants certainly use fuel coming from centrifuge enrichment plants )
A last important point about the CO2 imprint of nuclear is that we can now officially say that gaseous diffusion for enrichment doesn’t exist anymore, since the last plant has been shut down, which means that analyses that reach a higher CO2 result by assuming it is used are irrelevant about today’s nuclear.
You mis-spelled “lying”.
Gaseous diffusion required on the order of 5% of the output of the LWR reactors to run itself. GD plants run continuously and nuclear plants are mostly used as base load, so the honest way to handle the issue of power consumption in enrichment is to multiply the other per-kWh emissions by (1/0.95). However, I’ve not heard of a single anti-nuke analysis which has done it that way.
Gas centrifuges use about 1/40 of the energy of GD, so the multiplier in that case would be (1/0.99875) or so.
On the Sovacool CO2 emissions study:
Jmdesp and Lantzelot, it looks like you’re right. Prof. Sovacool may have misinterpreted the Fritsche and Lim study. F-L seem to report total CO2-equivalent emissions from all greenhouse gases as 33 g/kwh, with CO2 alone comprising 31 g/kwh of that 33 g/kwh total. Sovacool apparently thought that the 33g/kwh figure was for greenhouse gases excluding CO2, so he added it to the 31 g figure for CO2 alone to get a total greenhouse emission of 64 g CO2-eq/kwh.
[The Sovacool CO2 metanalysis is here (http://www.beyondnuclear.org/storage/seabrook-renewables/seab_lra_10202010_exhibit_sovacool_nuclear_ghg_2008.pdf) and the Fritsche and Lim (2006) article Sovacool cites for his figures seems to be this English-language version (http://www.oeko.de/oekodoc/315/2006-017-en.pdf) ]
In fairness, the F-L paper’s wording is ambiguous, so it’s easy to misunderstand. F-L wrote:
“[T]he GEMIS model calculates some 31 grams of CO2 per kWh of electricity generated in nuclear power plants in Germany. These calculations are based upon data for the whoe life-cycle (complete production process including ore extraction, transformation, enrichment and construction of all facilities). As not only CO2 is emitted along the nuclear life-cycle, other greenhouse gases contribute to a total of some 33 g of CO2 equivalents per kWh-el from nuclear.”
I guess you can read the passage either way; either the non-CO2 greenhouse gases sum to 33 g CO2-eq/kwh independently of the separate 31 g of CO2 emissions, or they contribute an additional 2 g CO2eq/kwh to CO2’s 31 g to make a total of 33 g CO2-eq/kwh for all greenhouse gases. But from subsequent discussion and a graph it looks like F-L mean the latter.
But Prof. Sovacool’s treatment of the F-L data is still a bit puzzling.
In footnote b to Table 4 he explains his interpretation of the 33 g as denoting additional non-CO2 greenhouse gases, writing: “Study mentions a total of 31 g kWh for ore extraction, enrichment, and construction, and another 33 g kWh of other greenhouse gases other than carbon.” [sic]
But in Table 4 and Table 6, he apportions the 31 g figure to “front-end” (20 g) and “construction” (11 g), and then apportions the entire 33 g figure as “backend.” F-L don’t seem to assign the 33 g figure to any specific stage of the life-cycle; it’s implied that it’s mixed in with the 31 grams of CO2 that they accord to “the whole life-cycle….ore extraction, transformation, enrichment and construction….” The 33 g figure is the highest that Sovacool lists for “backend,” so it influences his mean for that stage of they life-cycle. But I don’t see why he assigned the 33 g to the backend stage.
Anyway, I hope Prof. Sovacool can clarify this issue as well as the other questions about his nuclear CO2 emissions study, regarding the treatment of the Tokimatsu data and the possible over-counting of Storm-Smith numbers.