The positive characteristics of nuclear are easy to dwell upon if one is an exponent of growth such as John McCarthy http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/index.html or the late Julian Simon http://www.freedomsnest.com/simjul.html. On the other hand, they are likely to be ignored by Soft Energy zealots.
Regardless of the finiteness of uranium resources, nuclear energy must be considered renewable because of the existence of fast breeder reactors and the likelihood that their technological limitations will disappear over the coming decades. Therefore, nuclear power should be admitted to the competition with wind, solar, biomass, and other sustainable technologies. If there is some reason why nuclear energy is not sustainable, it has yet to be demonstrated. (What is not sustainable is growth itself – not nuclear energy.)
Suppose that we agree that the hydrogen economy means hydrogen from nuclear power installations (NPIs). Suppose that we agree that the hydrogen economy means hydrogen from nuclear power installations (NPIs). [However, see [http://www.phoenixprojectpac.us/user/Phoenix%20Project%20for%20America%20PAC.pdf] for a non-nuclear approach to the hydrogen economy.] In their article “Large-Scale Production of Hydrogen by Nuclear Energy for the Hydrogen Economy” [http://web.gat.com/pubs-ext/MISCONF03/A24265.pdf], K.R. Schultz, L.C. Brown, G.E. Besenbruch, and C.J. Hamilton suggest that hydrogen can be produced with a 50% efficiency by thermal splitting of water using a Sulfur-Iodine cycle in conjunction with the Modular Helium Reactor (H2-MHR). The efficiency of the H2-MHR bypasses the objections to using electricity as an intermediate step as discussed by Ulf Bossel, Baldur Eliasson and Gordon Taylor [http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/h2_eco.htm]. Other drawbacks of hydrogen have been addressed by Graham Cowan in his interesting paper Boron: A Better Energy Carrier than Hydrogen? [http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.html]
Also,
associated with the hydrogen economy and whatever residual industrial
tasks cannot be converted to electrical power are the huge changes in
our technological and industrial infrastructure associated with
conversion to the use of hydrogen for fuel. This
will
involve energetically costly re-tooling for the production of
different types of industrial equipment. Although the period
of
amortization can be prolonged, ultimately such costs must be charged
to the energy invested in nuclear energy.
The
cost of liquefying hydrogen might be paid in part at least by using
hydrogen to facilitate transmission of electricity through
‘high-temperature’ superconducting transmission
lines that might
run through the middle of liquid hydrogen pipelines. I do not
know if this is feasible nor do I have a reference for it as I have
no idea if it exists outside of my own imagination. However,
I
have noticed that the fractional losses of electric power listed in
the reference case from Annual
Energy Outlook 2005 (Early Release) (AEO2005),
published by the Energy Information Administration of the US
Department of Energy (DOE), are rather large so that the potential
savings, at least, are documented. (See Appendix A of
AEO2005Full.pdf.)
[Note. The term ‘high-temperature’ means
that, while the
temperature is still cryogenic, it is well above absolute zero.]
If the Energy Returned by NPIs is less than the Energy Invested, nuclear energy is infeasible. Therefore, the frequently discussed ER/EI analysis is crucial to this discussion. Probably, the ER/EI ratio for nuclear power is less than comparable ratios for fossil fuels, which is a drawback insofar as market penetration is concerned; however, so long as it exceeds 1.0 the introduction of nuclear energy is feasible. There are a number of factors, however, that point to the possibility that ERoEI is less than 1.0. In particular, elsewhere in this section, a number of requirements of NPIs are mentioned that might be easy to overlook in an analysis of ER/EI.
The
identification and quantification of every component, both direct and
indirect, of the energy invested in nuclear power is not a simple
thing to do. In particular, if any such study of Energy
Invested includes the ancillary business expenses, including the
expense of doing the very study in question, I have not seen
it.
But, in the American economy, for example, the energy consumed by
commerce is 22% of the total energy budget. This is
corroborated by employment statistics. (See
[http://stats.bls.gov/oes/home.htm].)
Computation
of Energy Invested by multiplying the sum of capital and operating
costs by the ratio of Total National Energy Budget over Gross
National Product (E/GDP) tabulated by the DOE provides an
approximation to the correct value that does not omit the energy
consumed by commerce. (See “Cash Flow in a Mark II
Economy”
[Mark-II-Economy.html].)
Using cost data from the Shultz et al. study
[http://web.gat.com/pubs-ext/MISCONF03/A24265.pdf],
the University of Chicago Study
[http://www.nuclear.gov/reports/NuclIndustryStudy.pdf],
and the MIT study [http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/],
I computed an ER/EI ratio of 4.63.
However,
it is not clear that all ancillary costs have been included, e.g.,
desalination of sea water, remediation of environmental change,
etc.
A pro-rata share of the costs of providing and maintaining railways
to carry heavy equipment, fuel, and waste, highways to transport
workers, conduits to transmit electric current, pipelines to
transport hydrogen, and easements through which electrical power
lines and hydrogen pipelines can be run must be charged to the
plant. Some locations for NPIs are unsuitable for this
necessary infrastructure, and, therefore, unsuitable for NPIs.
At
the start of this exercise, I considered the notion that I might be
able to determine the feasibility of nuclear by looking at the energy
balance for France.
(http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/world/country/cntry_FR.html)
France produces about three quarters of her electricity from nuclear,
but France has to import about half of its energy. Is it
possible that nuclear power consumes more energy than it
produces?
Despite the inclination to prove the affirmative, I have not been
able to determine the answer to this question by looking at the
available data. In fact, France seems to be doing rather well
insofar as energy is concerned; and, therefore, is much less of a
problem for the rest of the world than is the United States.
Finally,
and we shall have to await a more thorough discussion of this topic,
the author wonders if the cost of restoring the land and the water
employed by NPIs to its pre-nuclear condition should be charged to
the Energy Invested even if there is no possibility that the
land will ever be used for any other purpose than nuclear power into
the foreseeable future. Clearly, decommissioning costs must
be
included, but does decommissioning include restoring the land to its
original condition as a beautiful, natural, wildlife habitat?
Quite frankly, I believe that it does.
Although the capital costs of NPIs are sufficiently high that market penetration under the standard short-sighted micro-economic model might be prohibitively difficult, as a fraction of the projected Gross Domestic Product they are quite manageable by a society that possesses the political will to manage them as we shall see in the sequel. The final irony might be that a capitalist-style market economy can be maintained under a centrally-planned socialist energy economy and only under such an economy.
Many people believe that the United States economy is in such bad shape, principally because of the trade deficit and the national debt, that it could not possibly support the massive spending necessary to install a hydrogen economy. If the government continues to run a deficit, the public costs of such a project might very well multiply that deficit by a large factor. While this may be true, it does not necessarily represent the prohibition of the Apollo Plan, so long as American workers are willing to accept government debt in the form of fiat money as payment of wages. This study shows that capital costs are well within the capabilities of the US economy. The results are presented as the final two computations done on the spreadsheet explained in the body of this report.
Unfortunately, nuclear facilities are operated sometimes for the personal profit of their owners, managers, and other stakeholders who might be inclined to place their personal interests ahead of other considerations such as good engineering practice and safety. Mere prudence dictates that we be suspicious of enterprises run for profit. Since it will require huge investments by the federal government to penetrate a market economy with current nuclear technology, the federal government might just as well own and operate whichever nuclear plants it chooses to subsidize. The Apollo Plan amounts to some sort of Socialism; hopefully, it will not be Corporate Socialism, i.e., Fascism. Thus, the evils of the profit motive can be avoided, but only by compromising Capitalism. However, as critics of Socialism will be quick to attest, this does not necessarily protect society from incompetence.
NPIs need fresh water. Many experts believe that we are even closer to Peak Water than we are to Peak Oil if we are not past both. Since some experts disagree, this must be regarded as an open question. If fresh water is used as cooling water, it must be returned to the environment at the original temperature with all contaminants removed and all nutrients restored. If fresh water is split to produce hydrogen, it may end up as atmospheric water only part of which will return to Earth as fresh water, in which case the losses in our fresh water supply will have to be replaced somehow. If some of our NPIs are used to desalinate sea water, the energy expended must be subtracted from the Energy Returned in computing ERoEI.
As
an example of water use by an existing nuclear power facility,
nuclear Plant Hatch in Georgia withdraws an average of 57 million
gallons per day from the Altamaha River and actually "consumes"
33 million gallons per day, lost primarily as water vapor, according
to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(http://www.cleanenergy.org/programs/water.cfm).
Plant Hatch, consisting of two 924 MWe reactors each with a capacity
factor of 0.8453, consumes water at the rate of 3.2903 x 1011
kgs/emquad.
Thus, if every NPI in the year 2100 used water at the rate Hatch
Plant did in 2000, we would need 1.1442 x 1015
kgs
of
water per year to satisfy the modest economic growth assumed in my
Reference
Case
for
the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario. According to
http://www.american.edu/TED/water.htm,
we have about 3 x 1015
kilograms
of renewable fresh water total. Thus, power plants would use
more than one-third of all of our renewable fresh water.
According to
http://oldfraser.lexi.net/publications/critical_issues/1999/env_indic/resource_use.html,
the US has 2.5 trillion cubic meters of water or 2.5 x 1015
kgs,
which corroborates the previous estimate. Also, see
http://www.worldwater.org/table1.html.
Some of
the energy produced can be used to desalinate sea water for reactors
on our East, West, and South coasts where the population is dense and
fresh water dear. Moreover, energy from ocean waves can be
used
to assist desalination.
[http://www.malibuwater.com/OceanWaveEnergy.html]
Let us compute a lower bound for the energy cost of desalination of
sea water to make the case against nuclear as conservative as
possible. According to Allan R. Hoffman (GlobalWater.htm),
“energy requirements, exclusive of energy required for
pre-treatment, brine disposal, and water transport, are: reverse
osmosis: 4.7 – 5.7 kWh/m3
and
multi-stage flash: 23 – 27 kWh/m3”.
To establish a minimum, I shall use 4.7 kWh/m3
to
obtain
i.e.,
an increase in Energy Invested of 1.6% of the Energy Returned, which
should not present a problem. However, if the higher value
for
multi-stage flash were the best one could do, the costs would soar to
nearly 9% of the Energy Returned. If the ratio of Energy
Returned to Energy Invested (ERoEI) were 5.0, the energy costs would
increase by 44.9% and the ERoEI would be reduced to 3.45, which would
certainly be an unwelcome surcharge on nuclear power. In
addition to the costs of pre-treatment, brine disposal, and
transport, the cost of desalinating water to be split into hydrogen
and oxygen would have to be borne. The cost of transport
might
be considerable if sea water were needed in Minneapolis, say, but the
scarcity of fresh water is most acute in places much closer to the
ocean. The calculation of these additional costs shall be
postponed to some future study.
The
final limitation upon economic growth is the area of the surface of
Earth. NPIs require a smaller fraction of Earth’s
surface per
unit of power generated than any of the competing technologies,
namely, wind, solar, and biomass – despite the fact that
solar and
wind power installations can coexist with other land uses.
Even
if every other obstacle to growth were removed, ultimately we should
run out of space – unless some means of miniaturizing NPIs,
for
example, should be discovered such that the rate of increase of power
density could keep pace with growth. (If emquads per square
meter increases at the same rate as emquads, we would be able to
produce the energy budget of the future in the space we use
now.)
Even in the unlikely event that NPIs could be stacked, a limit would
be reached after which they could be stacked no further without the
expenditure of more energy than an NPI can produce during its
lifetime. Also, there are limits to power density that, if
none
other could be found, would be set by the atomic nature of matter
–
although, admittedly, if the concentration of the space per unit of
power were limited by atomic considerations alone, growth might
continue for a very long time. Probably, though, by the time
the individual Earthling could wear an NPI strapped to his wrist like
Dick Tracy wore a radio, we shall no longer be living on Earth, a
situation to be deplored for other reasons as stated previously.
To
return, for a moment, to more realistic considerations, the land
needed for NPIs includes not just the plant sites and infrastructure
for transportation and power transmission but also the space occupied
by facilities for mining and enrichment, fabrication, maintenance,
recycle, hydrogen compression and liquefaction, waste management, sea
water desalination, fresh water remediation, and the ubiquitous
office buildings that seem to be a necessary part of every enterprise
engaged in the pursuit of profit. Engineers and scientists
will
need workplaces; and, if I am not mistaken, the greater the
complexity of our energy economy the greater the superstructure of
command and control, which, in the case of nuclear, must be multiply
redundant. Moreover, many areas on the face of the Earth are
not suitable for NPIs, namely, the tops of mountains, earthquake
zones, crowded cities (perhaps), and, if we wish to observe the
ethical treatment of animals, wildernesses, swamps, prairies, etc.
–
in
short, any place where humans have not yet evicted animals from their
natural habitats, which, for all practical purposes, amounts to
saying that future nuclear installations may be placed nowhere.
Finally,
it must be decided whether the space occupied by outmoded and
obsolete facilities can be reused for new facilities or if it must be
restored to the pristine condition in which Nature bequeathed it to
us. If the latter, the energetic costs will very likely
overwhelm the Energy Returned in the ratio (or difference)
represented by ERoEI, which brings me to the next point:
Quite obviously, while operating as designed, nuclear power plants do not contribute directly to Global Climate Change nor air and water pollution regardless of the effect of their ancillary facilities, e.g., mining, etc. When nuclear facilities are operated properly, the dangers are rather minimal; nevertheless, nuclear radiation is extremely dangerous. In addition to radiation poisoning, nuclear plants have a non-zero, but very small, probability of exploding; but, if there are many of them, the probability of explosion increases accordingly. Admittedly, there is no physical reason why the problems associated with pollution, radiation, explosions, waste, and decommissioning cannot be solved, however they must be solved; and, to the extent that they have not yet been solved, they represent impediments to the introduction of nuclear power and the hydrogen economy, which brings us to the next topic.
Nuclear power is the key to a much larger and complicated economy with much greater opportunities for unanticipated environmental catastrophes both because it makes a larger economy possible and because it makes a more complicated economy necessary to supply an energy budget that is growing exponentially. Now, the economy is sufficiently complicated in 2005 that the average person must necessarily depend upon the opinions of experts to determine which public policies are in his best interests and which are not. Moreover, experts disagree. The average man or woman is held hostage to the complexity of the economy, and this situation is not conducive to democracy. Soon enough, under a scenario of modest growth, this situation will be exacerbated many times over. The interests of ordinary private individuals will be taken out of their own hands almost completely. Presumably, a technocracy is better than a plutocracy (unless technocrats become plutocrats); but, in either case, it represents social degeneration – not progress.