What Keeps You Up Late At Night? – For Me, Tonight, It is the Unholy Alliance of Natural Gas, Environmentalists, and Renewable Energy Advocates
During my stint as a Washington DC bureaucrat, I noticed how certain phrases worked their way into the daily language. Most people were probably not even aware of how quickly they would adopt the popular phrases, but I have always been a bit fascinated with language and how it develops. I tried to take note and to studiously avoid sounding like I was just one more speaker who could provide a score in a game of “B. S. Bingo.” There are certain phrases, however, that became popular because they portrayed an original thought that was quite useful.
One of the phrases was “what keeps me up late at night. . .” For months, if not years, whenever someone giving a brief wanted to call attention to a really important topic of concern, they would start off with that phrase. Anyone who reads Atomic Insights and pays attention to the time stamp on the posts will recognize that I often have difficulty staying asleep because I have started thinking about a topic that is nagging me enough to want to share it with the world.
Last night, just before going to bed, I came across a smoking gun advertisement that helped me find a little more evidence that there is a long standing alliance that seems to be successfully implementing what I personally consider to be a dangerous strategy. They are convincing energy decision makers in many of the largest energy markets that the earth is so awash in easy methane that it would be a waste of time and money to work hard to build a new generation of nuclear plants anytime soon. Here is a screenshot of the ad.
When I first saw it, I had a feeling it was going to be a short night. For nearly everyone else in the world, such a ad would be easily overlooked. Energy conferences happen many times each month – so what? Who cares that there is one called “The Role of Natural Gas in a Low Carbon Economy” happening in Cancun, Mexico in December? Is it really important that the American Council on Renewable Energy is advertising a conference during a UN meeting on climate change that is jointly sponsored by the Worldwatch Institute and the International Gas Union?
Why would such an ad wake me up in the very early hours of the morning and make it almost impossible to go back to sleep without writing something?
I saw that ad immediately after reading articles and getting sent links from around the world pointing out how much money very savvy energy insiders at ExxonMobil and Chevron are continuing to invest into projects to extract and transport natural gas.
It showed up on my computer monitor within two months of posting a video showing Michael Eckhart, the President of the American Council on Renewable Energy grab a microphone at an energy conference to emphatically declare his organization’s official position that nuclear was not renewable. He made that dramatic – and rather rude – interruption immediately after a presentation by three knowledgeable people who described a partially blazed path to build systems that can recycle waste and capture the 99.5% of the energy value of natural uranium that we are currently storing as either “depleted” uranium or “spent” nuclear fuel.
Aside: Waste to energy (WTE) systems have been welcomed into the “renewable energy” club for years. Of course, they do not take much market share from coal, oil, natural gas, solar panels, geothermal energy systems or wind turbines. End Aside.
The ad entered my consciousness soon after writing about the drumbeat of pronouncements from people who claim that the world is awash in cheap natural gas that can fuel either easy to build power plants or underutilized power plants.
That drumbeat includes contributions from leaders in the electric utility industry like Chris Crane of NRG, Mayo Shattuck of Constellation, John Rowe of Exelon, and Armando Olivera of FPL who might otherwise be talking about their companies’ exciting projects to build new nuclear power plants. Those electric power industry decision makers, however, have announced that their nuclear construction plans are on hold while they take a look at this new shiny object called cheap natural gas. (They don’t actually phrase it that way – I am using a bit of poetic license.)
Here is a little more of the intrigue that I want to share with you before trying to get back to sleep. The Worldwatch Institute, which publishes a lot of information about its mission to encourage renewable energy development, is headed by Christopher Flavin. He is a former journalist who has been discouraging the use of nuclear energy, often based on an assertion that it is a market failure since at least 1983. In a 2007 USA Today article titled Some rethinking nuke opposition, Flavin showed up under the heading of “Some foes won’t budge”:
“I think there are a lot better carbon-free alternatives for producing electricity,” says Christopher Flavin, president of Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research group.
The Worldwatch Institute has often published articles indicating that it is part of a group of “clean energy advocates” that worries about the potential that their efforts might be “tainted” if nuclear energy is ever accepted under that definition.
I am going to try to tie this all together.
Though nuclear energy is
clean enough to operate inside sealed submarines, traditional “renewable energy” advocates adamantly refuse to consider promoting it. Though natural gas explosions and fires kill people with depressing frequency and though burning it produces at more than 600 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour – at least 35 times as much as a pessimistic lifecycle evaluation of the emissions from nuclear energy – those same renewable energy advocates are willing to sign up as the co-host of a conference focused on selling natural gas.
Though electric power industry decision makers that were leading the charge towards new nuclear plants four years ago have decided that natural gas is cheap enough to encourage them to interrupt or abandon those building plans, companies that have been producing natural gas and petroleum for decades are making big, long term bets in natural gas production capacity. Those bets will only pay off if the price of natural gas rises more that what analysis available in the advertiser supported media claims to expect.
My advice to you: Recognize that the fix is in. You are supposed to believe that gas is cheap, that developing nuclear energy projects is too hard, and that the right path is to stop working to build new nuclear power plants.
As I wrote several weeks ago, I am deeply skeptical of the notion that the historical volatility in the price of natural gas has been overcome by the timely development of hydraulic fracturing technology. I cannot agree that methane is renewable or even abundant; a resource that will be consumed in 90 years IF speculative reserves can be developed AND IF we do not increase our rate of consumption simply does not qualify for either of those terms. It is not true that natural gas combustion is cleaner than nuclear fission, no matter what the people who make decisions for the Worldwatch Institute or the American Council on Renewable Energy want you to believe.
As an investor, I am going to continue to bet with the house and recognize that natural gas is inherently more costly for customers (and more profitable for suppliers in the near term) than nuclear energy. I also recognize that the best bet for consumer prosperity and environmental cleanliness is to build as many new reliable nuclear plants as possible. I will work with great dedication during my waking hours to contribute as much as I can to the successful development of new nuclear power plants. We are going to need them if ExxonMobil and Chevron are right about the future availability of natural gas.
Perhaps now I will be able to get a little more sleep before working on the challenging processes required to get a new nuclear power plant design licensed in the United States.
P. S. I was amused by the ad that Google decided to display for me while I was proofreading the above. It seems that the adsense page rank algorithm recognizes that the financial folks are in on the fix.
This is why nuclear energy will never make significant inroads in North America without the backing of a popular movement. There is no top-down solution because no amount of reason or logic can fight the sort of money that gas can throw around. What is needed is angry masses demanding nuclear energy, not now, yesterday, a movement that can put people on the ramparts like the German antinuclear militants recently showed they can. Short of that, there is very little hope.
Aside from the outrageous pitch of natural gas as “clean, green, renewable”, it is a dangerous “putting all eggs in one basket” plan. Are we supposed to charge our future electric cars with electricity generated from the oilfields? Have we forgotten the OPEC crisis, which led Jimmy Carter to promote coal as a replacement of natural gas?
One problematic thing is that the people in favor of renewables don’t see the connection to natural gas. There’s a talk radio show I have been trying to get on. It’s called Equal Time and supposedly they give “equal time” to unpopular viewpoints. For show about nuclear, they had three anti-nuclear groups on the air! I called the host: Interview Me and My Friends, if you are really giving Equal Time. I was having a nice conversation with the host (I used to work in renewables and basically favor them wherever they can be reasonably used.) Then I brought up the natural gas connection of Conservation Law Foundation and he just stiffened up and every remark he made after that was disparaging. He doesn’t want nuclear and he doesn’t want fossil and he wants electricity from renewables alone and that’s all fine with him.
I don’t think I am getting on the show.
If we were to go for what is best for *consumer* prosperity we would build nuclear for electricity, & build gas to liquids plants at the natural gas fields so we have reasonably cheap transportation fuels from natural gas.
The Federal government simply needs to mandate that all utilities in the US must produce at least 50% of their electricity from carbon neutral resources (nuclear, hydroelectric, urban and rural biowaste, wind, solar, geothermal, etc.) by the year 2020 and 90% by the year 2030– with the penalty of heavy carbon taxes on those utilities that fail to comply. That should push the utilities rapidly towards nuclear and renewable energy, ending their love affair with natural gas.
But as long as the major energy companies think the the US government is– not really serious– about moving away from fossil fuels, they will continue to flirt with greenhouse gas polluting fuels like natural gas.
Absolutely. It’s not as if we need to “find ways to burn all that natural gas” while we’re still completely dependent on foreign oil. This is something that to his credit, Pickens is pointing out: http://www.pickensplan.com/oilimports/
To use natural gas to make electricity is wasting a product we could use so much more effectively to offset gasoline and heating oil consumption.
I’d like to also sign on to Jim Baerg’s suggestion: I’m not anti-gas – I just think that we should think carefully about how we decide to *use* gas. Gas is used for home/building heating by a lot of folks, and can be used, in a liquified form, as fuel for cars, trucks, airplanes, boats, etc.
While, potentially, electricity from whatever source (solar, wind, tidal, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, coal, etc) can be used for heating, it does seem to me that for a lot of folk, burning natural gas in a furnace or water heater at the site where the heat is going to be used, is a pretty efficient use of gas (when you generate electricity from heat sources, you always pay a big efficiency penalty – which isn’t a real big deal with nuclear, but is for using electricity from any type of fossil fuel for generating heat).
It’s been said that we shouldn’t use food-sourced biofuels for transportation, because it creates a competition between the poor man’s supper and the rich man’s automobile. I’d say that when it comes to heat and electricity, a very similar argument holds: it would be much better to generate electricity from nuclear, and use gas, where necessary, for heat and transportation (although, once you have nuclear electric, I do think it becomes much more reasonable to use electricity for heat – *particularly* if you use a geothermal heat-pump system which is highly efficient.
I like the idea of LNG for transportation, because of all the reasons other people bring up: cleaner than oil, cheaper than oil, reduces our national dependence on foreign oil imports, but still has a lot of the transportability advantages of oil – you can put a small tank of LNG in a car, truck, boat, or plane, and get similar mileage as when using gasoline or diesel.
If we use it for electric generation, it will drive up the price for both heating and transportation uses as well – that whole supply/demand thing, or we will be ramping up production to such high levels that we more quickly deplete the gas we can ‘cheaply’ extract.
I know there are ways to get methane (which is, I guess, basically the same as Natural Gas?) from organic sources using bacteria or algae or something, but my understanding is that the processes, currently, unless there is some major technology breakthrough, are expensive enough that we should probably consider fossil-source natural gas to be a non-renewable resource?
In any case, there’s sort-of no such thing as ‘too much energy’ (well, in certain circumstances, like an explosion, there’s certainly such a thing as too much energy, but generally speaking. . .), so if we can get lots of electricity from nuclear, and use the gas for other applications which nuclear is not well-suited to, that just seems like a win/win.
Marcel,
Because we live in a representative republic, that’s most likely not going to happen in the USA. The truth is, a rapid (for the energy industry, where a plant once built is expected to operate for 40 or 60 years, 2 decades is rapid) transition to 90% non-carbon sources is just too economically painful. It would be practically economic suicide. We simply cannot afford such a dramatic, rapid transition.
I, for one, am against cap-and-tax proposals, because it would plunge our economy off a cliff, at the top of which we are already precariously perched. I am *in favor* of the government doing things like loan guarantees and other programs to assist private utilities in financing the construction of new nuclear plants, because I believe nuclear has the economics, long term, to truly supplant coal and other fossils; if nuclear power is cheaper (per kWh) than coal or gas, then all else being equal, utilities *will* choose to build nuclear instead of gas plants. You don’t need to legally force people or companies to do something, which is clearly in their economic interests; so you don’t reduce carbon emissions by taxing coal and gas, you reduce carbon emissions by having a more competitive energy source which *doesn’t* produce carbon emissions.
Actually Jeff the cost of coal pollution in is $120B per annum from early death and medical expense, and the US spends $800B per annum on fossils. With the cost of the $2500B in new factory produced nuclear dropping to under $1B/Gw in China, the rate of return on a public power investment in nuclear fossil fuel conversion approaches 40% per annum.
As we convert to nukes, NG electricity and heating applications would immediately convert to nuclear electricity. The freed up gas would be available to make CNG, methanol, DME (propane), and synfuel transportion fuels as we transition to nuclear produced synfuels and electric vehicles.
Call it the nuclear Picken’s plan.
Obama by embracing this national nuke conversion using FDR’s TVA and Bonneville models would overnight end unemployment, end the global warming/peak oil menace, save the live sof tens of thousands of Americans every year and create the greatest construction boom in US history.
He’d likely be reelected!!!!
At least the Gassies are aggressively funding a public information campaign. The atomic energy industry (such as it is) is doing
But what does $1B/gW in China become in the US? We can’t do anything in the US as cheaply as they can in China for number of reasons, not least of which is that we don’t employ nearly as much ‘virtual slave labor’ in the US as they do in China.
Now, I’m not trying to downplay the idea that we can get the cost of nuclear down in the U.S. too – if we start to get the nuclear industry going again, 2010 will be looked back as the high-water mark in nuclear energy construction costs, I’m pretty sure. Right now, I think new plant construction is about as expensive as it could possibly get, for several reasons – I’ve been reading about why nuclear is so expensive, and the answers seem to be that, A) we build so few plants that we do not benefit from economies of scale, B) we construct the reactors mostly on site (though some components are made in factories, I think), so we are not getting as much cost reduction as we could if we used factory-made reactors, C) We are using designs with too much complexity in terms of part counts, numbers of welds, numbers of pipes, etc (although, from what I’ve read that is starting to change with some newer plant designs being constructed now, like the Areva EPR, and some of the other Gen III+ reactors, which reduce complexity), D) there’s too many regulatory requirements which greatly increase costs without significantly increasing actual safety, and E) it’s taking too long to build the plants, which increases the construction costs and interest/financing charges, due to too many lawsuits from anti-nuclear advocacy groups which tie up the projects for several years in court.
So, the point of all that is, I do think we can get the price down, but I don’t think the $1B/gW that China achieves is necessarily indicative of what we can get it down to in the U.S.? If you have links to any studies or papers by someone with expertise in relevant fields, I’d love to know what we can get the price down to – I believe if we could just get the price of new nuclear plants down from $12B to like $6-8B, they’d be very competitive vis-a-vis coal and methane, wouldn’t they?
I recall Mr. Flavin calling natural gas the “Prince of the Hydrocarbons” back in the 90s. The love affair with gas is nothing new. 🙂
Renewables are like the free printer at [name your favorite big box electronics store], it seems like a good deal until the ink cartridge runs out and the sticker shock sets in when you have to buy a new one. Like the ink cartridge, methane will be the expensive commodity that will be required to make solar and wind power work.
@Jeff – my whole point in this post is to point out that there are some people who are acting with interests that are completely different from yours, mine and our neighbor down the street.
You wrote:
If we use it for electric generation, it will drive up the price for both heating and transportation uses as well. . .
Let me rephrase that from the point of view of the gas pushers – aka the oil&gas executives and their marketers:
If we can convince the electric utilities to buy more gas, it will drive up both sales volume and sales prices. Think of the bump in our total revenue, our stock price and our annual bonus payments. Yippee! Let’s do it!
The people who have been impacted by the environmental impacts of the hydrofracking fossil gas rush hate this stuff: http://un-naturalgas.org/weblog/category/why-are-we-still-using-this-stuff/
Also high on the list of gas-haters are the people who live or work near high pressure lines who have experienced major leaks, explosions, or other mishaps: http://www.wfaa.com/news/Pipeline-Flying-Pig-crashes-through-Grand-Prairie-home-105387413.html
I say the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If the antinukes and progassies can make an alliance, the antigassies and pronukes should do the same.
Whenever another gas disaster raises its head we should not hesitate to point out on their websites how energy self-sufficiency can be sustained much more effectively and with far fewer environmental consequences using the uranium instead of the carbon atom.
Mr Jeff
Labor is only a small part of the cost of a nuke.
The Chinese are already building factory nuke modules.
Westinghouse and AECL both claim domestic modular construction in under 3 years at less than $1B/Gw.
We can build better airplanes cheaper than the Chinese in the most highly regulated industry on earth. We should be able to compete on nukes after America
@Rod, I totally know you know this stuff already. I also totally agree that from a gas company execs standpoint, getting gas used for as many different applications, and selling it as fast as possible at the highest price possible, is obviously very much in their self interests. I’m just saying we, as a nation, as a society, need to look at resources like natural gas, and not allow them to be managed solely on the basis of making as much money as possible as fast as possible for gas companies. We need to look at it for what it is – a large, but ultimately finite resource which we need to maximize the utility/benefit of that resource for the entire nation, for as long as reasonably possible.
I think on this forum, most of us would be in agreement that using Nat Gas for electricity is, from a ‘big picture, national interest’ standpoint, rather a waste of a great resource.
@Jeff – perhaps you have not noticed, but “we” do not own much of those resources. We live in a capitalist, free market society where choices are not necessarily made collectively.
The only reason I am an optimist about the future is that I am pretty sure that nuclear fission is strong enough to prevail if it can attract enough tough-minded advocates and businessmen who see its potential. The only similar technical story I can point to is the transistor/microprocessor. Its invention completely overturned the established way of doing things in some very unexpected ways and shifted the economic center of the world to new and exotic locales like Sand Hill Road.
Fission has that kind of potential, but it is not automatic. It takes a lot of hard work and some clear thinking.
Well, it would be painful but we are at a historic cross roads now. Most of the old coal plants have reached the end of their effective life and need to be replaced. We could replace them with Nuclear now – especially small nuclear – for the same cost as building a new coal plant. Look at Duke Energy building a coal power plant in Southern Indiana – gasification coal for 3 billion for 650 MW. This is currently $4,615/ KWH and rising. The price for an MPower or NuScale has been priced at $4,500 KWH and their fuel is much less expensive!
@Seth – inefficient perhaps, but certainly not unsafe. The NRC is an effective regulator from a safety point of view. They demand high levels of performance that have actually helped to improve the safety and efficiency with which we operate the nuclear plants in the US.
There is certainly room for improvement, especially in the new reactor licensing arena. However, you are dead wrong about whether or not our regulators do a good job on safety.
The Japanese built the first two ABWRs in the Nineties for about $1.6B/GW, and they have higher labor costs than the USA and import virtually all the materials. So the idea that we can’t build plants for at least $2B/GW is unsupportable, in my opinion, especially once we settle on one or two standardized (and mass-produced) designs. By the way, I wouldn’t include the EPR as an example of simplification, but certainly I would include the AP1000 and ESBWR, the latter being due for final NRC certification in about a year according to the most recent developments). $6-8B/GW is still ridiculously high and due to a broken system, not to any inherent cost of nuclear power per se.
Nuclear expert Professor Bernie Cohen would disagree as he states in his paper
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
A nuclear power plant is a very complex system, and adding to its complexity involves a risk in its own right. If there are more pipes, there are more ways to have pipe breaks, which are one of the most dangerous failures in reactors. With more complexity in electrical wiring, the chance for a short circuit or for an error in hook-ups increases, and there is less chance for such an error to be discovered. On the other hand, each new safety measure is aimed at reducing a particular safety shortcoming and undoubtedly does achieve that limited objective. It is difficult to determine whether or not reducing a particular safety problem improves safety more than the added complexity reduces safety.
More recently
I too think that nuclear energy, once it reaches a certain, err, “critical mass” if you’ll pardon the pun, will prevail on its own merits, and doesn’t need to be mandated by the government. I only think it needs to be, I dunno, shall we say “encouraged”, or, at least, not trampled upon while it’s growing.
I wonder, I know that the U.S. has a fleet of nuclear reactors built during the 60’s-90’s. Most of those reactors should be reaching the point where the initial construction costs have been paid off, and they would be operating with fairly high profit margins? I remember reading something to that effect in Ted Rockwell’s “Nuclear Facts Report”. Anyhow, are there any companies which own several nuclear plants, which would serve as ‘poster children’ for a company which is making a lot of money off it’s nuclear plants, and further, which would have enough money from the existing nuclear plants that it would be well positioned to finance constructing multiple new plants, to supplement and eventually replace the old plants?
I don’t know, but it would seem like the most obvious people to have both the motivation, operational experience, credibility, and ability to finance new nuclear construction would be a company (or companies) who are making billions in profits off their existing nuclear reactors.
The NRC is short on experts and short on validated models of new designs. Back in 2006 I met an Air Force reservist who worked for the NRC as a civilian. We were both in a Defense Acquisition class and during one of our coffee breaks he attempted to recruit me. To make a long story short, he said they didn’t have anyone at the NRC who had been around when they were licensing new reactors.
@DV82XL – my strategy is to expose the hypocrisy and to build alliances among energy consumers. Some energy users are almost as rich and powerful as energy producers are – and there are a lot more of us than there are of them.