We need a real global plan for carbon mitigation

I’m in Japan this week, attending the 1st Asian Heads of Research Council Joint Symposium in Nagoya, with a follow-up workshop for training junior researchers later in the week. This is my fifth trip to Japan, but it’s always an exciting place to visit — and I have a special connection to this country, as my wife is Japanese. Today, after an intensive morning session at which I gave a keynote talk on my work on integrating bioclimate and population models to improve forecasts of species extinction under climate change, we visited the Ramsar-listed Fujimae Tidal Flats and the stunning Kaisho forest.

Reflecting on the energy situation in Japan and its chances for complete decarbonisation, this is a country with few natural advantages — almost no domestic fossil fuel reserves or uranium supplies (fast breeders anyone?), poor conditions for solar thermal (today was 32C and cloudy — such is the rainy season), and few suitable locations for onshore wind (offshore may be more viable for any serious expansion). Its hydro resource is mostly tapped. The Greenpeace [r]evolution scenario for Japan, for what it’s worth, demands huge gains in energy efficiency and conservation, and yet is still left with a disturbingly large dependence on fossil fuels (one wonders why they eliminated Japan’s nuclear power…).

Anyway, to the main point of this post — to reproduce the third in a series by Steve Kirsch on IFRs as a solution to the global energy crisis. Like the previous two articles, Steve published this originally on the Huffington Post. I’m mirroring it here because its material is obviously highly relevant to the ongoing BNC discussion on the prospects for IFR nuclear power — and Steve (now a good friend of mine via regular electronic  conversations!) has a real knack of asking the right questions about climate change mitigation. He, like me, is seeking a real solution, that will WORK, globally. Take it away Steve:

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How Does Obama Expect to Solve the Climate Crisis Without a Plan?

The climate crisis is the most important issue of all time. But the White House has no plan to solve it. How do we save the planet without a viable plan?

The ship is sinking slowly and we are quickly running out of time to develop and implement any such plan if we are to have any hope of saving the planet. What we need is a plan we can all believe in. A plan where our country’s smartest people all nod their heads in agreement and say, “Yes, this is a solid, viable plan for keeping CO2 levels from touching 425ppm and averting a global climate catastrophe.”

At his Senate testimony a few days ago, noted climate scientist James Hansen made it crystal clear once again that the only way to avert an irreversible climate meltdown and save the planet is to phase out virtually all coal plants worldwide over a 20 year period from 2010 to 2030. Indeed, if we don’t virtually eliminate the use of coal worldwide, everything else we do will be as effective as re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Plans that won’t work

Unfortunately, nobody has proposed a realistic and practical plan to eliminate coal use worldwide or anywhere close to that. There is no White House URL with such a plan. No environmental group has a workable plan either.

Hoping that everyone will abandon their coal plants and replace them with a renewable power mix isn’t a viable strategy — we’ve proven that in the U.S. Heck, even if the Waxman-Markey bill passes Congress (a big “if”), it is so weak that it won’t do much at all to eliminate coal plants. So even though we have Democrats controlling all three branches of government, it is almost impossible to get even a weak climate bill passed.

If we can’t pass strong climate legislation in the U.S. with all the stars aligned, how can we expect anyone else to do it? So expecting all countries to pass a 100% renewable portfolio standard (which is far far beyond that contemplated in the current energy bill) just isn’t possible. Secondly, even if you could mandate it politically in every country, from a practical standpoint, you’d never be able to implement it in time. And there are lots of experts in this country, including Secretary Chu, who say it’s impossible without nuclear (a point which I am strongly in agreement with).

Hoping that everyone will spontaneously adopt carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is also a non-starter solution. First of all, CCS doesn’t exist at commercial scale. Secondly, even if we could make it work at scale, and even it could be magically retrofitted on every coal plant (which we don’t know how to do), it would require all countries to agree to add about 30% in extra cost for no perceivable benefit. At the recent G8 conference, India and China have made it clear yet again that they aren’t going to agree to emission goals.

Saying that we’ll invent some magical new technology that will rescue us at the last minute is a bad solution. That’s at best a poor contingency plan.

The point is this: It should be apparent to us that we aren’t going to be able to solve the climate crisis by either “force” (economic coercion or legislation) or by international agreement. And relying on technologies like CCS that may never work is a really bad idea.

The only remaining way to solve the crisis is to make it economically irresistible for countries to “do the right thing.” The best way to do that is to give the world a way to generate electric power that is economically more attractive than coal with the same benefits as coal (compact power plants, 24×7 generation, can be sited almost anywhere, etc). Even better is if the new technology can simply replace the existing burner in a coal plant. That way, they’ll want to switch. No coercion is required.

Since Obama doesn’t have a plan and I’m not aware of a viable plan that experts agree can move the entire world off of coal, I thought I’d propose one that is viable. You may not like it, but if there is a better alternative that is practical and viable, please let me know because none of the experts I’ve consulted with are aware of one.

The Kirsch plan for saving the planet

The Kirsch plan for saving the planet is very simple and practical. My plan is based on a simple observation:

Nuclear is the elephant in the room

70% of the carbon free power in America is still generated by nuclear, even though we haven’t built a new nuclear plant in this country in the last 30 years. Hydro is a distant second. Wind and solar are rounding error. Worldwide, it’s even more skewed: nuclear is more than 100 times bigger than solar and more than 100 times bigger than wind. If I drew a bar chart of nuclear vs. solar vs. wind use worldwide, you wouldn’t even see solar and wind on the chart.

So our best bet is to join the parade and get behind supporting the big elephant. We put all the wood behind one arrow: nuclear. We invest in and promote these new, low-cost modular nuclear designs worldwide and get the volumes up so we can drive the price down. These plants are low-cost, can be built in small capacities, can be manufactured quickly, and assembled on-site in a few years.

Nuclear can be rolled out very quickly. About two thirds of the currently operating 440 reactors around the world came online during a 10 year period between 1980 and 1990. In southeast Asia, reactors are typically constructed in 4 years or less (about 44 months)

Secondly, the nuclear reactor can replace the burner in a coal plant making upgrading an existing coal plant very cost effective. Finally, it is also critically important for big entities (such as the U.S. government in partnership with other governments) to offer low-cost financing to bring down the upfront cash investment in a new nuclear reactor to be less than that required to build a coal plant.

Under my plan, we now have a way to economically displace the building of new coal plants that nobody can refuse. People will then want to build modular nuclear plants because since they are cheaper, last longer, and are cleaner than coal. No legislation or mandate is required.

My plan is credible since it doesn’t require Congress to act. Power companies worldwide simply make an economic decision to do the right thing. No force required.

My plan would provide huge economic benefits to the United States. We’d create jobs, improve our trade deficit, and get a nice on-going monthly cash flow from the plants we finance. So whether you believe in global warming or not, this plan works.

The only political impediment to overcome is to convince those countries that have a ban on nuclear to reconsider. However, this is not strictly required since the few countries that have such a ban have relatively small coal emissions compared to the countries that have no such ban.

Nuclear waste and proliferation issues are quite manageable. These issues are covered in my Huffington Post article “Climate Bill Ignores Our Biggest Clean Energy Source.”

Do we really think we solve our biggest crisis without a plan? That would be insane. If the White House doesn’t like my plan then they should propose a more viable plan, communicate it to the world, and start implementing it now, while there is still time.

Counterpoint – nuclear power and the low carbon economy

Recently, I was interviewed by Paul Comrie-Thomson for Counterpoint, a current affairs radio programme broadcast on ABC Radio National. The topic was the potential role of nuclear power in Australia. Below is the transcript of the interview, broadcast on 13 July, and a link to the original .MP3 audio of the broadcast. I’d be interested in any feedback you, as readers, have — not only on the content of the interview (remember, this was done off the top of my head, so there may be a few minor misstatements), but also on the effectiveness (or not) of this sort of communication strategy.

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When it comes to climate change and reducing carbon emissions Barry Brook challenges many in the environmental movement to think again about nuclear power. He says in the future we’ll need more energy, not less, and the only way to meet increased demands for power is an inconvenient solution — nuclear.

Download audio (ABC Radio National, Counterpoint, 13 July 2009)

Transcript

Paul Comrie-Thomson: First to nuclear power, the old bete noire of the environmental movement. Is it time for rehabilitation? Could nuclear power in fact be the technological answer to climate change? Three Mile Island and Chernobyl still linger in the minds of many, but Barry Brook, director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide, says it’s time to move past old prejudices. So, Barry Brook, just how safe are current nuclear reactors?

Barry Brook: Modern reactors are designed on the principle of being inherently safe, and what that means is they have a number of design principles that are based on the laws of physics. So in order for them to melt down or explode there would have to be an extraordinary set of circumstances where you would have multiple systems failing, and in the new reactors that are being proposed, even more than that, you would have to have the laws of physics being violated, which of course is not particularly likely.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: It’s not likely. So Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, given the new reactors, are now a thing of the past?

Barry Brook: Chernobyl was a special type of reactor built by the Russians to breed plutonium for bombs, so it had a graphite core and it meant that if you had problems in the reactor where the water flow would stop, it would actually run out of control. No American reactor can actually do that. And Chernobyl also lacked a containment building, which was another problem because when it started a graphite fire all of the radioactive material was dispersed into the air, another disaster. That also can’t happen in an American reactor.

Three Mile Island was a lesson where there was poor training of staff and a failed system for notifying the staff of actually what was happening. And so they made mistakes such as opening valves when they should have been shutting them and letting water in when they shouldn’t have. But Three Mile Island didn’t hurt anyone. There were no fatalities, there was no radioactivity of any note released into the environment. So even in that worst-case scenario for an American reactor there were essentially no problems. But of course the reactor was destroyed, it cost millions of dollars, and it set back the American nuclear program by decades really because of the effect on public opinion. That’s gradually changed.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: And also it happened 12 days after the release of the movie The China Syndrome.

Barry Brook: But of course what was speculated in The China Syndrome was that the reactor would melt completely through the floor of the building into the Earth and cause a steam explosion, it would spread radioactivity everywhere. It didn’t eventuate because of course that was a completely unrealistic scenario.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Yes, very convincing but unrealistic…convincing in terms of entertainment. Let’s explore a little more costs and build times. You say that we now have standardised modular passive safety designs which can be factory built and shipped to site. You say they’re game changes for the industry. How does it change the game?

Barry Brook: One of the biggest problems with the American reactor program and why it stalled in the ’70s and ’80s, Three Mile Island notwithstanding, was that the costs were escalating. When it cost $300 million to build a reactor in 1972 and it cost $6 billion in the early ’80s, something has gone terribly wrong. Part of that was the legal suits that extended the reactor certification time over to a period of decades. So part of it was the anti-nuclear movement that did that, but also a part of it was each design was different. So everything was built anew, new features were tried out, every design needed a special certificate to actually be built and then another certificate to be run. So the whole system ultimately was set up to fail and things became more and more expensive.

If you can have a system where you have a standardised design with components that are built to a particular specification, if you can have components that are built in a factory and shipped to site rather than everything needed to be constructed on site, if you have modules where they’re smaller such as they can be put on a rail car or on a large truck and taken to site and the many of these units put together to constitute a plant, then you can start to see that there’s huge benefits in terms of efficiency, the fact that you don’t need a standardised certificate for each and every new reactor, that there are economic benefits in building multiple units at a given factory. The places where this is happening is China and India right now. So although these have often been blamed as some of the worst carbon polluters, ultimately and ironically they could be the nations that lead us out of the carbon economy and into a low carbon economy based on nuclear power.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: The 2006 Switkowski Report on nuclear power in Australia, it hardly mentioned fast reactors. How do you see their potential?

Barry Brook: Fast reactors are an old type of reactor design. The first reactor, the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1 built in the US to work out many of the glitches in nuclear power production was a fast reactor, but almost every reactor that’s been built since and all of the currently commercial reactors in the US, in Japan and in France are what’s known as light water reactors. They’re basically two designs; a pressurised water reactor and a boiling water reactor. They use water to slow down neutrons in a nuclear reaction to make the fission of uranium 235 more likely…it’s a bit of a technical topic, I know, but basically it makes it a lot easier to generate power from uranium 235.

Fast reactors use a different technology where instead of using water to cool the fuel and transfer heat to a steam turbine they use a liquid metal. Sodium is often used, lead is another possibility. It’s hard to imagine that you could have a molten metal as the coolant in a reactor but that’s exactly what it does. And it has a number of advantages because you can not only burn all of the uranium 235 but you can burn the uranium 238 which people may have heard of as depleted uranium, the uranium that’s left over after you’ve tried to enrich it to increase the concentration of uranium 235. It’s the stuff they use in bullets and tank armour, it’s very common. If you can get the energy out of that, which is what fast reactors can do, then potentially you can unlock 100 to 300 times the energy we’re currently using out of uranium. And even better than that, we can take all of the spent fuel that’s been generated by all the world’s nuclear reactors to date and generate power from that, and change it from a 100,000-year management problem to about a 300-year management problem.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Which is why you say nuclear power is the world’s primary source of sustainable carbon free energy. It’s a big claim.

Barry Brook: Well, every source of energy currently requires carbon to construct it, but then there are a range of technologies that don’t actually emit any carbon once they’re generating power, and nuclear power is one of those. The great advantage of nuclear power is rather than relying on a diffuse and variable power source, which is what most renewable energies rely upon, it’s relying on an extremely concentrated power source. A kilogram of uranium contains about as much energy as two million kilograms of coal, and coal is already a concentrated form of energy. So it’s an incredibly concentrated form of energy if you can harness it to its full advantage.

I probably didn’t answer your earlier question completely in that you asked why there weren’t any fast reactors right now. The main reason is a simple matter of economics, that fast reactors require a special type of reprocessing of the fuel known as pyroprocessing which doesn’t separate plutonium, so you can’t use it to make a bomb, but it requires a little bit of extra money to close the fuel cycle. And in an era when uranium is very cheap, it’s not worth paying that. Once uranium gets above about $150 a kilogram or so, these become highly economical. So to date it’s been the abundance of uranium and the relative lack of concern about storing nuclear waste over the long-term that has I think stopped the commercial development of these reactors.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Many will say that this is all very well but renewables are the answer. But what role do you see wind and solar playing over the next decade?

Barry Brook: I think in Australia they’re going to play the primary role in trying to reduce our dependence on carbon based energy for the simple fact that it’s going to take ten years to get nuclear power here, and that process will involve getting public support, discussions on the merits of nuclear power and the potential problems (I don’t think we’re having that educated debate in Australia right now), right through to setting up an organisation that can certify reactors and getting the first ones built, which might take four or so years. So that’s a ten-year process, in which case we can give our attention to wind and solar and see what they can achieve.

My pessimism of wind and solar is not that they won’t have a role in our future energy supply but that they are not able to supply sufficient energy to power an industrial economy or indeed to allow the economy to continue to grow in that way. There are many problems with back-up, with storage of energy, with the sort of grid connections you’re going to require to remote areas to harness energy from these areas, because of course because of the diffuse and variable nature of these technologies they require a continental scale deployment to provide enough power for all of society. We’ve only done them on a very small scale so far. If you look at all of the power generated in Australia, it’s only just over 1% now that’s generated by the sort of renewables that we’re talking about which are wind and solar, what is often termed techno-solar, as opposed to other forms of renewable energy that we do rely on quite a lot which is hydro power and biomass burnings, burning wood and other forms of animal and plant generated produce.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: And of course looking at what people call the new economy or moving away from a carbon economy, people talk of desalination and electric vehicles, but you make the point that they’re energy-hungry enterprises, and so if we’re going in that direction we will need more energy, not less.

Barry Brook: Yes, that’s exactly right. Right now we have a convenient energy carrier that’s available for us to mine, which is oil and, to a lesser degree, gas. When we are depleted in that energy carrier, which we use for almost all of our vehicular transport and heating needs, we’re going to have to create one, and the way we’re going to create it is through electricity. So ultimately we’re going to become a 100% electrified society, notwithstanding the contribution that may be made from biofuels, things such as the aviation industry. So if we’re going to move from being about a 30% electrical society through to a 100% electrical society, it’s pretty easy to do the maths and find that at the very least power demand is going to triple.

I can’t see any way around that if we’re going to decarbonise the economy which in my view is going to be required for multiple reasons. Whether or not you’re concerned with climate change, there are issues of pollution involved with coal such as particulates and mercury and heavy metals and sulphates that cause acid rain. We’d rather get rid of that if we can. There are certainly sharp limitations on the supply of oil and ultimately gas. So at some point we’re going to have to move our society away from fossil fuel dependence to other energy sources. I think that nuclear power is a sufficiently sustainable source of power to provide all of the growth in our energy demands that are going to come in the next million years or so.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: This requires a radical rethink and you said it’s time for green groups to become rational, promethean environmentalists. Is this call falling on deaf ears at the moment?

Barry Brook: I think it’s not. I’ve talked to many environmentalists who are greatly concerned about climate change and concerned about energy supply in the future and having a low carbon economy. Most of them are locked into the thinking that renewable energy can do it. I’m a supporter of renewable energy, I think we need to be pushing this, but I am not deluding myself into imagining that this is going to provide all or even the predominance of our energy supply.

And when I actually talk to most environmentalists about the benefits of nuclear power and the fact that many of the old myths and half-truths that hang around the nuclear power industry have either been…were never true in the first place or have been superseded by technological developments, they’re willing to listen. I would suggest there’s maybe 10% to 20% of people who are so ardently anti-nuclear that they’re immune to any such argument and they’ll never change their mind, but I think the vast majority of people who are concerned about the environment and, let’s face it, everyone is concerned about having a planet that’s fit to live on and fit to pass to our children, anyone who listened sensibly to those arguments is willing to consider the arguments for nuclear power. So I think it would be quite reasonable to get 80% of the population on board with this idea.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: And yet in Canberra we hear the cry ‘Do you want a nuclear power plant in your backyard?’ This is sort of thrown up…during the last election campaign it was said ‘Where are the nuclear power plants going to be placed?’ and so on. There’s a bit of work to be done there in terms of public debate, isn’t there?

Barry Brook: There is. Of course you could ask the similar question ‘Would you like a 30-metre wind turbine put in your backyard?’ or ‘Would you like a coal-fired power station next to you?’ and I think the answer would be no in those two cases as well. There’s always this NIMBY factor to overcome. With nuclear power plants the best place to put them is along the coastline so they can use cooling water from the ocean rather than using it from drinking supplies, although if you’ve got a large enough body of water even that’s not necessarily a problem. But I think ultimately the first reactors will probably be built in places where there are not a lot of people but where there are transmission lines.

One ideal place I can imagine is in places in WA or South Australia where there’s large mining developments, a huge demand for desalinated water which nuclear plants are very good at supplying, and a huge demand for power for mine expansion. If you can expand the mining industry on the basis of low carbon or zero carbon energy and supply those water needs as well, it just seems like a win-win scenario. It will prove to people the benefits of nuclear power in Australia, whereas people in Europe, in France and Belgium, are living cheek by jowl with nuclear power plants and have done so for decades and are extremely happy with them. I just think it takes a bit of time for people to demonstrate to people the advantages of having these reactors, which are very safe.

If you live next door to a nuclear reactor, there are a number of radiological studies done on a hypothetical person called Fencepost Man who’s supposed to have his house on the fencepost on the boundary of a nuclear power site. He would get approximately one millirem of radiation more than the general public, and that might sound like a lot but in fact the general public gets over 300 millirems of radiation each year just from natural sources. So essentially there’s no difference between living next door to a nuclear power plant and living in most other places in the world. And indeed, if you live on top of a granite intrusion you’d get about twice that. So people tend to be a bit irrational about radiation and we need to have a bit of an education campaign about that too.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Barry Brook, summing up your position, you’re painting a picture that we have nuclear power plants in coastal regions next to desalination plants in mining regions. It all sounds very agreeable. What main public problems and political problems do you see in this becoming accepted as the way to go?

Barry Brook: One of the problems people are concerned about is cost, that there are heavy costs involved in setting up any sort of new industry. In places like America there’s been a lot of speculation about how much their new nuclear plants are going to cost. I think we will know a lot more about costs in the next few years because China in particular are building a lot of reactors. They’re currently constructing 12 of them with plans for another 160 gigawatts of nuclear reactors within the next decade or so after that. We’re talking big numbers here. If the economics are favourable in China as a result of this build-out of nuclear power, then I think the arguments for replacing our current coal-fired power stations as they are retired or indeed retiring them early with nuclear power plants rather than renewable energy may become very relevant, because in this next ten years we’re going to find out the true costs of building a substantial amount of renewable energy to power Australia.

We’ve got ten years essentially to build 20% of our power supply, according to the expanded renewable energy target. We’ll know a lot about costs by then and I think that may well reframe the argument substantially and have people talking very seriously about nuclear power. But my warning is that if you haven’t started the process now, if you haven’t started the public discussions, the ideas for how you might get certification of these reactors here, where the suitable sites may be, having the public meetings, getting public support, it will take another ten years after we’ve found out that renewable energy can’t do it, and that’s just too late.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Barry Brook, thanks very much for talking to Counterpoint.

Barry Brook: It was a pleasure.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Barry Brook holds the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change and is the director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide.

Climate update – ongoing decline in South-East Australian rainfall

South-East Australia is suffering under an extended drought of unprecedented character. Although local rain events have relieved the worst of the conditions in places like Adelaide, the region as a whole remains parched and tinder dry, and parts of the Murray-Darling river system, such as the spectacular Coorong lakes system, is perilously close to ecological collapse:

“The Murray-Darling Basin is experiencing the worst drought since records began in 1891. Record low inflows to the River Murray through drought and over-allocation are having a significant social, cultural, economic and environmental impact on the Lower Lakes and Coorong region. The unprecedented situation now facing South Australia is that the quality of the State’s water supply could be at risk because of increasing water salinity levels and acidification from exposed acid sulfate soils on the drying lakebeds and wetlands.”

The state of Victoria is experiencing a particularly steep decline in average autumn rainfall, with a 40 per cent decline recorded since 1950 (25 % in South-East Australia as a whole). CSIRO climate scientist Dr Wenju Cai and colleagues have reported that this seems to be connected to rising sea level atmopheric pressure and a a decrease in alternating high and low pressure systems — with connections to climate change.

Now a new paper has been written by Dr. Bertrand Timbal, of the Bureau of Meteorology’s Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR), as part of the CAWCR Research Letters series, entitled “The continuing decline in South-East Australian rainfall — Update to May 2009“. It details the circumstances surrounding “the worst rainfall deficit in the region within more than a century long instrumental record.”

In brief, the mean annual (autumn) rainfall over the twelve-and-a-half year period Oct 96 — May 09 was 504 (100) mm, which is drier than extreme drought of Jan 35 — Aug 47, which averaged 512 (121) mm. For reference, the average over the entire 1900 — 2009 period is 567 (132) mm. Aside from the autumn decline noted above, a drying trend in spring is now emerging, with spring rainfall below the long term average 6 times during the last 7 years (2002-2008). There is a strong association of these conditions with the intensification of the sub-tropical ridge (STR), which may in turn be linked to the wetting trend and polewards expansion of tropical weather systems and Hadley circulation — a phenomenon predicted by global climate models to occur at a far slower rate than is being observed.

The conclusion to the Timbal 2009 paper sums up the bleak situation (some bolding highlighting and italic expansions by me):

The long-term rainfall deficiency since October 1996 across South Eastern Australia (SEA, south of 33.5ºS and east of 135.5ºE) documented by MT08 [Murphy, B. and B. Timbal, 2008: A review of recent climate variability and climate change in south-eastern Australia, Int J Climatol, 28(7), 859-879] was described as being severe but not unprecedented in the instrumental record. With an additional 3 years of below average rainfall, that statement is no longer true. The recent 12 year, 8 month period is the driest in the 110 years long record, surpassing the previous driest period during WWII [World War II]. The spatial extent of the deficiency covers most of the south-western part of eastern Australia and extends along significant orographic features eastward and northward. The seasonal signature of the rainfall decline has also evolved. It remains dominated by a strong and highly significant autumn rainfall decline, but has been supplemented by recent declines in spring, particularly after 2002. The spring decline is the dominant feature of the very dry 2006-2008 period.

This change in the relative contributions by the autumn and spring seasons now more closely resembles the picture provided by climate model simulations of future changes due to enhanced greenhouse gases. However, the growing magnitude of the rainfall decline is far more severe than any of the IPCC-AR4 model projections except for the lowest deciles from the model uncertainty range, forced with the highest emission scenarios occurring later in the 21st century (2050 to 2070) (CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, 2007).

The most important characteristics of the ongoing rainfall decline (spatial extension, intensification and change in seasonality) are well aligned with the recent evolution of the STR and its known influence on SEA rainfall. Other largescale influences were briefly evaluated. It appears unlikely that the ENSO [El Niño Southern Oscillation] mode of variability has contributed to the worsening of the rainfall decline in the last 3 years. On the contrary, it appears likely that the Indian Ocean mode of variability (with three positive IODs [Indian Ocean Dipole] in a row) may be linked to the strong spring signal in 2006-2008. However, that does not change the fact that the IOD is unlikely to be responsible for the largest component of the rainfall decline (the autumn part) and based on the limited evidence provided here, it is unclear whether the IOD is a contributor, or simply a covarying response to other factors. Finally, the long-term evolution of the SAM [Southern Annular Mode] remains unlikely to explain the longterm decline in SEA due to the seasonal nature of the influence of SAM on SEA rainfall but its role (both positive or negative) is visible while updating month by month anomalies.

You can download the full paper as a PDF here. It’s 8 pages long, and includes some highly informative statistics, analysis and revealing colour figures. I strongly suggest you take the time to read through it, if you wish to have a well-grounded scientific understanding of the worrying rainfall deficits that this part of the world is now experiencing.

El Niño and sunspots return, sea ice doesn’t

The two main reasons why 2008 was the coolest year since 2000 was that the Pacific ocean was in its La Niña phase, and the sun was remarkably inactive and showed us a blank face for essentially the whole year. Both of these factors (oceanic and solar) exert a mild to strong influence on year-to-year climate variability. The forcing effect of additional greenhouse gases is more subtle in the short term, but ultimately dominates because it is inexorable (until we mitigate our emissions) and accumulative (due to long residence times).

In the first half of 2009, La Niña conditions persisted, despite a brief excursion to a more neutral phase. Now, however, the relevant signs — such as the southern oscillation index (SOI) and Pacific sea surface temperatures — point to the return of El Niño in the second half of 2009 (and perhaps continuing through 2010). There are also clear signs that the sunspots are returning in 2009, after the particularly extended period of quienscence, which recently had some speculating that we may be entering a new Maunder-Mininum-like period (more here).

The Bureau of Meteorology in Australia runs an excellent webpage on the El Niño-Southern Oscillation , updated weekly, called ENSO Wrap-Up. They have concluded the following:

“More evidence of a developing El Niño event has emerged during the past fortnight, and computer forecasts show there’s very little chance of the development stalling or reversing…

Another adverse sign for southeastern Australian rainfall is the recent trend to positive values in the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), as measured by the Dipole Mode Index (DMI)…

The sub-surface of the equatorial Pacific has also continued to steadily warm through June. A large volume of warmer than normal sub-surface water is evident across the entire tropical Pacific…

All international climate models predict the tropical Pacific to continue to warm and to be above El Niño thresholds throughout most of the second half of 2009.”

Both the oncoming El Niño, and the positive values of the IOD, is bad news for the rainfall outlook in eastern Australia. As reported in The Age, “Such an event could send Melbourne’s water storages, already at a record low level of 26 per cent, plummeting well below 20 per cent by next year and force stage 4 restrictions. Rivers — especially the Yarra — farmlands and crops look set to be stressed further. The prediction comes as the bureau confirmed that Melbourne had a record dry start to the year, with just 126.2 millimetres of rain falling from January to June — eight millimetres below the previous record set in 1967 and less than half the long-term average of 307 millimetres.”

Look out for the next update of ENSO Wrap-Up in 3 days time (as of this post).

In related news, a recent paper published in Science has demonstrated that there are at least two distinct types of El Niño with different relative influences on hurricane formation in the Atlantic, with one type (El Niño Modoki) being more inherently predictable. Forming in the central, rather than eastern Pacific, it is associated with a higher storm frequency and a greater potential for making landfall along the Gulf coast and the coast of Central America. Read more here and here.

The return of El Nino suggests that 2009 and 2010 will be considerably warmer than 2008. An additional +0.01 to 0.05C boost in global mean temperature may also come from increasing activity in the sun over this period. Current predictions are for a smaller than usual peak in sunspot activity (the lowest since 1928) during cycle 24, maxing out in mid-2013. What’s particularly interesting is the proposition from solar physicists that they have uncovered a new mechanism which may be influencing the progress of sunspot activity — a migrating jet stream from deep within the sun.  To quote from the NASA press release:

“Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, used a technique called helioseismology to detect and track the jet stream down to depths of 7,000 km below the surface of the sun. The sun generates new jet streams near its poles every 11 years, they explained to a room full of reporters and fellow scientists. The streams migrate slowly from the poles to the equator and when a jet stream reaches the critical latitude of 22 degrees, new-cycle sunspots begin to appear…  Howe and Hill found that the stream associated with the next solar cycle has moved sluggishly, taking three years to cover a 10 degree range in latitude compared to only two years for the previous solar cycle. The jet stream is now, finally, reaching the critical latitude, heralding a return of solar activity in the months and years ahead.”

There is still not likely to be much activity in 2009, but as the report notes with regard to those Maunder Minimum fears, “The sun’s internal magnetic dynamo is still operating, and the sunspot cycle is not ‘broken’.“.

In other news, the Arctic sea ice is now well on its way to its summer minimum for 2009. A lot of people are interested to see whether the record low of 2007 will be beaten this year (we’ll know by late September), or whether there is some recovery due to the persistent effect of the cooler 2008. Current conditions are tracking about the same as 2008, and still fairly close to the 2007 level, so it’s really anybody’s guess as to what’ll happen next.

The rapid loss of old, thicker multi-year sea ice over the last few years is one major reason to be concerned that a tipping point in this system has already been crossed. My suspicion is that we’ll just miss the 2007 record this year due to the lingering cooler conditions of 2008, but that it’ll be broken in 2010. But such year-to-year records are really besides the point — the long-term decline in Arctic summer sea ice is beyond dispute, and the projections of total summer sea ice loss within the next 40 years now seem absurdly optimistic.

Brave new power for the world

Here is the follow-up post on the IFR by Steve Kirsch. The first can be read here. This is long (loooong), but it really says it all. Steve worked on a tonne of revisions to this piece before finally submitting this to HuffPo. It has been checked and confirmed by a bunch of the key IFR scientists. If you really want to know the real situation of the IFR story, and where it currently stands, take a deep breath, and read this!

———————–

Climate Bill Ignores Our Biggest Clean Energy Source (first published on The Huffington Post)

Steve Kirsch, Entrepreneur and philanthropist

Do you think our country’s energy policy is in good hands now that the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) climate bill has passed the House? I’m very worried and I think you should be too. Experts fret about balancing energy, environment, and the economy. But there is a way to have all three at the same time if we are willing to take a fresh look at an old technology. And that great solution is nowhere to be found in the ACES bill.

First, let’s start by assuming science of global warming is correct. We’ll see later that we’d want to do exactly the same thing even if we didn’t believe in global warming at all. 

To stop global warming, we must virtually eliminate the use of coal worldwide

Dr. James Hansen, one of our nation’s leading experts on global warming, is very clear about the necessary attributes of any solution: we must stop building new coal plants immediately and start retiring existing coal plants worldwide. If we cannot virtually eliminate coalworldwide within a couple of decades, then the sum total of all of our other efforts to reduce our carbon footprint will be like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The “worldwide” requirement is critical. The best way, and for all practical purposes, probably the only way, to get other countries to abandon coal is to give them a seemingly magical new technology that is lower cost than coal, with the same 24×7 baseline power reliability, but without the CO₂ emissions. Existing coal plants could be “upgraded” simply by replacing the “burner” with a the new technology.

We invented a superior power generation technology in 1974, but killed it for political reasons in 1994

The good news is we have such a magical power technology. The big surprise is that it isn’t new. It’s old. It is a fast nuclear reactor known as the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) that was developed by a team of hundreds of scientists working for more than 20 years at our top government national laboratory for nuclear energy (Argonne National Laboratory, at its branches in Illinois and Idaho). 

The bad news is that the IFR development was abruptly canceled in its final stages in 1994. A decision was made in the early weeks of the Clinton administration by people who formerly worked for the oil and natural gas industry to cancel the project. The three reasons publicly given for canceling the program were all based on misconceptions. Since then we haven’t done a damn thing to exploit their marvelous invention.

The convenient solution invented at Argonne is simple: instead of spending billions to dispose of our nuclear waste, we can re-use that “waste” to generate power by using advanced “fourth generation” nuclear power technology. Using just our existing nuclear waste, we can power the entire planet for centuries.

Our uranium “waste” is our biggest and most valuable energy resource

Did you know that our uranium waste is our nation’s #1 energy resource? In fact, just in the depleted uranium (DU) waste alone (the stuff left over after natural uranium has been enriched), we have more than 10 times the extractable energy than we have from coal in the ground! 

Using fast reactors (a type of fourth generation nuclear), we can make use of this “waste” and extract enough energy to power the entire planet (at the current usage rate) for 700 years. 

Yet the Department of Energy (DOE), due to an admitted lack of funds to properly study the problem, currently plans to spend $428 million to permanently get rid of the DU. Such an action would be as nonsensical as Saudi Arabia suddenly deciding to pay someone to destroy all their oil reserves! 

Hopefully, someone at DOE will stop this from happening. It is directly contrary to the recommendation of a National Academy of Sciences committee (specifically requested by the DOE in 1991 to study this issue) that fuel retrievability should be extended to a reasonable time (on the order of 100 years) to avoid foreclosing alternative fuel strategies that may be in the national interest.

The IFR is superior to today’s nuclear technology in every respect

Fast reactor nuclear power designs, such as the IFR, are more than 100 times more efficient than our existing light water nuclear reactors (LWRs). The waste they produce is minimal, short-lived, and relatively easy to safely store: a factor of 500 less in space-time requirements than the waste from our existing nuclear reactors. If an American used nuclear power their entire life, they would produce enough nuclear waste to fill a soda can.

The IFR is inherently safer than existing reactors: they can’t melt down because the laws of physics prevent it. They are also objectively more resistant to use in weapons proliferation than existing reactors and also substantially more proliferation resistant than the far more expensive alternatives that we have already decided are perfectly safe (such as the $10 billion we are currently spending on the AREVA MOX plant in South Carolina). 

LWRs are very safe and the nuclear industry is one of the nation’s safest working environments. It is safer to work at a nuclear power plant than in the manufacturing sector and even the real estate and financial sectors! Yet, IFRs are better than LWRs in every aspect, including safety. Here are a few excerpts from emails from former Argonne Lab associate director Charles Till regarding the safety of IFR reactors:

These [safety] effects are not theoretical or subject to informed challenge. They have been proven by full-scale experiments in the assemblage of fast reactor test facilities in Idaho by Argonne National Laboratory.

The ultimate point is that no radioactivity will be released. Period. Under any circumstance. And under even very, very unlikely circumstances which would lead to a mess in other reactors, the IFR will not even incur damage.

IFRs also meet the four requirements (transparency, security, waste, and proliferation) that President Obama recently laid out as a pre-requisite for using nuclear energy. Till pointed this out four years ago.

Even though the initial capital costs of these plants are high, over the 60 year lifetime of the plants, they are a small fraction of the cost of generating power from renewables.

Other countries are building fourth generation nuclear reactors

Russia, China, and India are building fast nuclear reactors now and the French plan to begin construction in 2012 with completion by 2020. Japan plans to build a prototype fast reactor by 2025. 

Russians scientists independently found the same thing the scientists at Argonne have been saying for years: these plants are safer and less expensive to build and operate than existing nuclear plants and they solve the nuclear waste problem while providing a virtually inexhaustible power source. The Russians also realized a key point that the 2003 MIT report on the Future of Nuclear Power had missed: that if nuclear power grows faster than people think, large scale deployment of fast reactors will absolutely be required in as little as 25 years from now (see the first paragraph of BN-800 as a New Stage in the Development of Fast Sodium-Cooled Reactors). 

In the US, the complexity of understanding the science combined with an abundance of misperception and misinformation has stalled any progress on fast nuclear technology

Dr. Hansen and scientists at MIT are urging Obama to build fast reactors now. House Members Jerry McNerney (D-CA) and Judy Biggert (R-IL) agree.

But what about Al Gore? The environmental groups? What do they think? The problem is that there is so much misinformation in the nuclear space and the science is so complicated that it takes a reasonably large investment of time to really understand what is going on so you can sort truth from fiction. Al Gore has looked at fast reactors, but hasn’t taken a position on the issue and it’s likely he never will. The top environmental groups have either been too busy to be briefed, have no nuclear expert on staff qualified to be briefed, or have already taken an anti-nuclear position before the briefing and have no interest in impartially weighing the facts.

At the most recent Aspen Institute Energy Forum held March 25-28, the experts talked about how difficult tackling all three issues together: environment, economy, energy. Sure, I agree. It’s difficult to impossible without the IFR. But the IFR enables us to solve all three simultaneously. But it wasn’t brought up by anyone, even though the attendees acknowledged nuclear had to be part of the solution. This is a big problem that the “big thinker” experts assembled at Aspen seemed to be completely unaware of the world’s best nuclear design.

The former top civilian nuclear guy at DOE thinks we are nuts for not pursuing this technology

Ray Hunter was Deputy Director of the Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology in the U.S. DOE. At the time of his retirement in 1998, he was the most knowledgeable senior person in the government on civilian reactor research and development. He spent more than 29 years in DOE and predecessor agencies working on developing advanced nuclear reactors for civilian nuclear power applications. He’s seen it all. He’s heard all the arguments from every side multiple times. His conclusions are the same as Hansen; he thinks it is a huge mistake that we are not pursuing the IFR technology we invented at Argonne. 

On December 23, 2008, Hunter wrote a letter to Senators Reid, McCain, Bingaman, and Mikulski explaining that before his retirement, he was the Director of the Office of Nuclear Energy at DOE and pointing out that “the energy content contained in LWR spent fuel and depleted uranium resulting from weapons production and enriched LWR new fuel production exceeds all the known oil reserves in the world.” He pointed out that we have the technology to safely and securely harness that power and eliminate our nuclear waste at the same time. Hunter received no response to his letter; Senator Mikulski’s office thanked him for sharing his thoughts but did not respond to any of his comments. But I don’t blame these Senators at all. It’s unlikely that any US Senator ever saw Hunter’s letter; in each case, a staff person decided that his thoughts were not significant enough to bring to their Senator’s attention.

It’s not clear that we can rely on the DOE to make the right decisions

I recently wrote to the DOE offering to have the scientists who were directly involved in the IFR brief Secretary of Energy Chu on our most important source of energy. I received this email response from the DOE that a briefing was unnecessary as there are many people in DOE who are knowledgable about the IFR and that “the IFR definitely lives on.” I said if that was true, then how it is possible that DOE wants to dispose of all the fuel that could be used to power these reactors? I received no response to my question. 

I then asked Hunter how could it be that both Secretary Chu and DOE are saying fast reactors are good, while at the same time announcing plans to destroy the material that could be used to power them. I received the following response:

The main reason that nuclear energy development is so screwed up in DOE is that critical elements e.g. nonproliferation, waste, and nuclear R&D are in separate organizations all reporting to the Secretary. It requires real head knocking to integrate the pieces to have a rational program and there is no one in DOE sufficiently interested in nuclear to perform this task.

The problem is made worse by individual budgets requested and approved by Congress. In addition, the waste issue encompasses both civilian and defense waste. For example the depleted uranium stored as uranium hexafluoride at Portsmith, Ohio; Paducah, Kentucky; and Qak Ridge, Tennessee is a result of enrichment for weapons and naval reactors, enrichment for LWR commercial reactors and enrichment for DOE and University test reactors. The nuclear energy program should have requested funds to retain all of the material in a safe store condition as a future resource as you suggested. Since the material is under the waste program, funding was requested from Congress to dispose of it.

My guess is there wasn’t any internal discussion on this matter. You might note from my resume that I had the assignment to address safety concerns about storage of the depleted uranium and an action planned was initiated to correct deficiencies and retain the material for possible future use.

Steve, I don’t know who you talked to or sent a letter to at DOE regarding the IFR, but the response you got is baloney.

Sadly, many people now at DOE are content to not make any waves. They just do what they are told.

The disenchantment with the DOE is not just from people inside the DOE, but the dysfunction inside the DOE is also negatively impacting the quality of talent at our national labs. I received this email from a scientist who spent 33 years at Argonne including 10 years working on the IFR:

I was there at the birth of the IFR, in late 1983, and still there at the cancellation in 1994.My main beat was demonstration of the pyroprocess fuel cycle, which morphed into “EBR-II fuel treatment” post-1994. I was on the U. Chicago bid team which competed for the INL contract in 2004.When BEA wonthe contractand assumed command of the entire Idaho site in early 2005, ANL-W went away and was absorbed into INL.To this day most of the ANL-W people, and I think ALL of the key people who haven’t retired or gone on, are very disenchanted with the inability to get much work done in the DOE environment.

I could only take it as an INL employee for nine months. When, on a Friday in November 2005 the Vice-President for Research at Idaho State U. said “Mike, you ought to just end this. Come on over to ISU full time”. I said I’d be there the following Monday. 33 years, and I resigned inan hour.It couldn’t have worked out better for me. I’m able to close out my career working with young budding nuclear engineers andbuilding research programs.

You asked about when the disenchantment began. I’d say around 1990. I think it was about then that the FBI rolled into Rocky Flats. Adm. James Watkins (retired, then DOE Secretary) became convinced that there was an inadequate “safety culture” in DOE facilities, and thus were spawned “Tiger Teams”– composed of literally dozens of consultants who would descend on a major facility for two weeks. Months of preparations went into their much-feared visit. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. All sorts of new DOE orders related to safety, environment, and QA began to appear. The workplace became so highly proceduralized that it was increasingly difficult to get anything done.

So in my first 20 years or so, being on the Till team meant you were working on important things, and the work was getting done, and the results were exciting. The conception of the IFR in the days following cancellation of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project, the birth or more accurately the rebirth of the pyroprocess, the EBR-II safety tests in 1986 — damn those were heady days.

Why are other countries pursuing our invention while we aren’t even talking about it? We seem to be pretty good at spreading misinformation and hanging on to old preconceptions especially when it relates to nuclear. 

When DOE evaluated all the nuclear technologies, the IFR came out as #1

When we look at things objectively, we get the right answer. When DOE adequately funds a study, they do great work (it’s when they don’t adequately fund a study like the DU disposal study cited above that they have problems). 

In 2001, as part of the Generation IV roadmap, the DOE tasked a 242 person team of scientists from DOE, UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, ANL, LLNL, Toshiba, Westinghouse, Duke, EPRI, and many other institutions to evaluate 19 of the best reactor designs on 27 different criteria. They spent a year doing this. So this wasn’t just “a” study. This was the mother of all nuclear studies; the most comprehensive comparison of nuclear designs ever done. The IFR ranked #1 in their study which was released April 9, 2002.

People outside the US have recognized the importance of fast reactors and the IFR

The Russians very clearly understand how significant the IFR invention is to the future of energy. Len Koch, who was the IFR project manager at Argonne, was awarded the Global Energy International Prize by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia in June 2004 for his work on the IFR. The prize is awarded “to assist international cooperation in solving today’s most important problems in the field of power generation.”

Koch recently sent me the following note:

A POUND OF URANIUM (ABOUT THE VOLUME OFA TENNIS BALL) CONTAINS THE ENERGY EQUIVALENT TO ABOUT 5,000 BARRELS OF OIL! And we have about a MILLION TONS OF URANIUM in storage (as waste), from which we have only extracted about 1% of the contained energy.

We understand what must be done to extract that remaining energy, but we quit trying to learn and demonstrate how to do it in an acceptable manner. We need to reinitiate the program that we started more than 60 years ago. It will require a the support and leadership of the Government. We do not even have an operational Fast Reactor in our Country now. The Government shut-down the two which we had.

People from other countries who have looked at the facts objectively came to the same conclusion Russia, India, France, China, Japan, and South Korea did. 

Prominent Australian climate scientist Barry Brook admitted that he spent months educating himself on fourth generation nuclear before he came to the same conclusion Hansen did. In fact, before Brook heard about fourth generation nuclear, he thought the global warming problem was intractable because his own calculations confirmed the observations of many others (including Energy Secretary Steven Chu, MIT President Susan Hockfield and US Senator Lamar Alexander) regarding the necessity of nuclear power due to the problems with renewables being able to scale to meet our energy needs. With fourth generation nuclear in the mix, Brook has gone from being a climate pessimist to being an optimist about our ability to replace our existing energy sources with carbon-free power. He’s written extensively about the IFR on his site, more so than any climate scientist on the planet.

The Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma

Noted UK environmental writer Mark Lynas did the same thing Brook did…objectively looked at the evidence. He came to the same conclusion as Brook and Hansen. He wrote about his “conversion” in an article in the Sunday Times on September 28, 2008:

Just a month ago I had a Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma. My tipping point came when I discovered just how much nuclear power has changed since I first set my mind against it. Prescription for the Planet, a new book by the American writer Tom Blees, opened my eyes to fourth-generation “fast-breeder” reactors, which use fuel much more efficiently than the old-style reactors, produce shorter-lived waste and can also be designed to be “walk-away safe”.

Lynas wrote how he was criticized by his peers for supporting nuclear, but privately some of them admitted that they agreed with him.

In our own country, GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy and a consortium of America’s major corporations (including Babcock & Wilcox, Bechtel, Westinghouse, and Raytheon) came to the same conclusion. They have a reactor design, the PRISM, that is ready to be built based on the original Argonne IFR design.

There is a lot of misinformation about nuclear

There is a tremendous amount of misinformation about nuclear out there. There are books and papers galore that appear to be credible citing all the reasons nuclear is a bad idea. I could probably spend the rest of my life investigating them all. Those reports that have been brought to my attention I’ve looked into and, after a fair amount of effort, found them not to be persuasive. 

Did you know that there is more than 100 times more radiation from a typical coal plant than a nuclear plant, yet the nuclear plant is perceived by the public to be a radiation hazard. 

Another example of misinformation is in Discover magazine June 2009 entitled “New Tech Could Make Nuclear the Best Weapon Against Climate Change” talking about the importance of the IFR to both greenhouse gas emissions and to our future energy needs. But the article implies the scientists want to do more studies and that an improved design will take 10 to 20 years. I keep in close touch with a number of the top scientists who worked on the IFR, including IFR inventor Charles Till, and they are saying the opposite…that we are 20 yearslate on building one and the sooner we build one, the better. 

We should build a $3B demonstration plant now to get started

We should be exploring all viable options to solve our energy problems and global warming. General Electric working with Argonne and/or Idaho National Laboratory (INL) could build a small prototype fourth generation nuclear reactor (311 megawatts of electricity (MWe)) for about $2 billion and $1 billion for a pilot commercial-scale pyroprocessing plant to recycle the spent fuel. That $3 billion one-time investment would settle once and for all whether this is a good idea or not. Following this demonstration, the deployment of dozens of commercial fast reactors and pyroprocessing facilities needed to handle the light water reactor (LWR) spent fuel could be economically competitive as electricity generators and their construction could be carried out by the industry using standardized, modular, factory built designs to reduce costs without any further government investment. Compare that one-time R&D investment to the estimated $96 billion cost of storing the waste at Yucca Mountain. Isn’t it smarter to spend a little money to prove we can recycle our waste and generate power than to spend $100 billion to bury it? Compare this one-time $3 billion investment to the $10 billion that will be spent on the AREVA Mixed Oxide (MOX) plant, which is being built to dispose of only 33 tons of plutonium. The MOX plant is a big waste of money. The IFR could denature the weapons Pu much faster and more cheaply.

Nuclear is the elephant in the room, but the politicians are still ignoring it

Obama and Energy Secretary Chu have both pointed out that nuclear provides 70% of the carbon-free power in America even though we haven’t built a new nuclear plant in the US in 30 years! Yet in the latest House energy bill (HR 2454), in over 932 pages of text, the word “nuclear” appears only twice: once in a definition of “retail supplier’s base amount” on page 23, and once on page 351 where nuclear plants qualify for monetary awards if they use innovative means to recover any thermal energy. That’s it.

Now you’d think that a bill entitled “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009″ that proclaims to create clean energy jobs and achieve energy independence would have more than 2 words about nuclear since it is our largest energy asset and also our largest carbon-free energy source. There is no mention at all of fourth generation nuclear in the bill. I’d think they should at the very least acknowledge the omission with a footnote along these lines:

“Even though nuclear supplies the vast majority of our carbon-free power and even though fourth generation nuclear is more than 100 times more efficient as existing nuclear, and even though the waste products are minimal and short-lived, and even though these reactors have been demonstrated to be inherently safe, and even though these reactors can use our existing nuclear waste as fuel and virtually eliminate our $100 billion nuclear waste problem, and even though other countries such as Russia, China, India, Japan, and France are either building or planning to build these plants, and even though we can power our entire planet for thousands of years from our existing uranium resources without any CO2 emissions, and the energy content contained in LWR spent fuel and depleted uranium resulting from weapons production and enriched LWR new fuel production exceeds all the known oil reserves in the world, and even though the US Congress voted to fund fourth generation nuclear every year for 10 years from 1984 to 1993, we haven’t spent any time discussing the role of fourth generation nuclear in this Congress or in any Congress in the last 15 years and this is probably very short-sighted of us.”

After the bill was drafted, Lisa Price, senior vice president of GE-Hitachi testified before the House Science and Technology committee on June 18, 2009 about the benefits of IFRs. The bill hasn’t changed.

Today’s nuclear designs are substantially better than the reactors built 30 years ago. For example, the new Babcox and Wilcox mPower reactor can be constructed in only 3 years, is scalable (it can produce as little as 125 megawatts making it economical for smaller regions), air-cooled (so the water needs are minimal), and it can store its waste underground for 60 years.

Twelve reasons we should spend $3B to build a demonstration IFR plant today

Here are my top 12 reasons as to why the IFR (and pyroprocessing of LWR spent fuel) is the right thing to do now for the nation and for the world:

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. If you’re going to build new nuclear plants, IFRs are superior to LWRs in every dimension. Experts I’ve talked to agree that nuclear has to be an important part of the energy mix going forward. It’s hard to argue this isn’t the case since even 30 years after the time we built our last nuclear plant, nuclear is still supplying 70% of the clean power in the US. Fourth generation reactors such as the IFR are simply a “better” nuclear in every respect: lower cost, more efficient, less waste, all the waste is short-lived, inherently safer (it doesn’t need any active safety systems since the laws of physics shut it down if something goes wrong), and the nuclear material is unsuitable for use in weapons so it is inherently more proliferation resistant. That’s why the IFR ranked #1 in the DOE’s comprehensive study of alternative nuclear reactor designs.
         2. 
            
         3. 2. IFRs are the safest, most cost-effective solution to our nuclear waste problem. IFRs can efficiently consume the waste we’ve already generated from existing light water reactors so they are simply a cleaner, safer, and more cost-effective solution to “dispose” of our nuclear waste than any of the alternatives that have been proposed. Rather than trying to secure that waste for 10,000 years, IFRs reuse it and eliminate all the long-lived nuclear waste. The head of civilian nuclear at DOE spent years trying to get the DOE to do the right thing and failed for political reasons.
         4. 
            
         5. 3. In order to wean other countries off of coal, you must offer them a technology that is more attractive than coal or they aren’t going to switch.The IFR technology can achieve that. Renewables can’t (which is why Germany is still building coal plants even though they want to get rid of their CO2 emissions). China and India will experience tremendous energy growth and only the huge energy potential of IFRs are a realistic alternative to coal.
         6. 4. Even long-time vocal critics of nuclear power such as Amory Lovins agree that investing in the IFR now as a “contingency plan” in case renewables and/or carbon capture and sequestration don’t work out is sound public policy. Even ardent believers in renewables concede that we cannot take anything, including nuclear, off the table.
         7. 
            
         8. 5. The IFR (called the PRISM) has already been Authorized to Build by Congress in the 1992 Energy Policy Act. GE-Hitachi has had a design ready to build for years (the S-PRISM).
         9. 
            
         10. 6. IFR power is virtually inexhaustible and more reliable and predictable than renewable power. IFRs can supply humanity’s energy needs for millions of years if we are willing to mine additional uranium beyond what we already have on hand (which is sufficient for the next 700 years). Winds can change and die down. For example, a new report says that because of climate change, wind speeds are diminishing across parts of the United States, including a 10 percent drop in the Midwest over the last decade. The number of low or no wind days also has been increasing, according to the report by a team of scientists at Indiana and Iowa State universities. During the California heat wave and blackouts of 2006, wind’s output dropped to 4% of rated capacity during peak demand – so effectively required 100% fossil or nuclear backup. Solar can be obscured by air pollution (such as theAtmospheric Brown Cloud that grows bigger every day and is “dramatically” reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities). Hydro power can be diverted or dry up. But nuclear just keeps humming 24×7 for millions of years with no emissions. If you want a nice contingency plan for when renewables fail, nuclear is it. It isn’t dependent on any external factors. To ignore nuclear as an important part of the energy mix would be irresponsible public policy.
         11. 
             
         12. 7. Nuclear power is cheaper than power from renewables and soon will be cheaper than coal. A nuclear plant costs more up-front to build than a wind or solar plant, and they take longer to build, but they have low operating costs and they last 60 years or more making them a far better financial investment than renewable power typically by a factor of 2. For example, if you use this calculator to compare an AP1000 to GE 2.5 MW XL wind turbines with pumped storage for load management, in North Dakota you get $13 billion/GW for the wind option vs. a max cited figure for a US AP1000 (a new nuclear reactor from Westinghouse) of $7 billion. If the AP1000 lives up to its promises of $1000 per KW construction cost and 3 year construction time, it will provide cheaper electricity than any other fossil fuel based generating facility, including Australian coal power, even with no sequestration charges.
         13. 
             
         14. 8. The heat from IFRs can be used to reprocess transportation fuel practically for free. The IFR gives us more options for ending our oil addiction. If we move to boron-powered cars, the fuel can be recycled in a IFR for nearly free, since the high temperatures are already there. You can’t do that with a renewable plant.
         15. 
             
         16. 9. Existing coal plants can be economically converted into clean nuclear plants. No country has to abandon the huge investment they’ve made in coal plants. As Felix Salmon pointed out in his blog “Nuclear Power: Going Fast,” you’d just replace the burner and the control room. This makes the economics irresistible even if you don’t give a damn about global warming.
         17. 
             
         18. 10. To reduce the concerns about proliferation, the plants could be jointly owned and operated securely by the US and the host country. Or we can just restrict the technology to countries who already have nuclear power. However, there have been 0 people killed since the dawn of time due to nuclear proliferation from a power plant. An IFR would be the last place you’d go to get material for building a weapon because you’d have to invent technology that doesn’t exist to purify the material to make it suitable for a weapon.
         19. 
             
         20. 11. Nuclear can be deployed very rapidly. About two thirds of the currently operating 440 reactors around the world came online during a 10 year period between 1980 and 1990. In southeast Asia, reactors are typically constructed in 4 years or less (about 44 months)
         21. 
             
         22. 12. The amount of waste generated in an IFR is minimal; all the reprocessing is done on-site. With reprocessing, if an American used nuclear power their entire life, they would produce enough nuclear waste to fill a soda can.

We need a vision for the future of nuclear; one we can commit to long-term

The current funding for nuclear is fragmented without a clear direction. We need to establish a clear, long-term plan for advanced nuclear. We must make sure we have a clear understanding of why we are doing this so we don’t keep revisiting this issue and changing our minds. I think the only way to create such a plan is to assemble a very small team of people who really understand the issues involved. Ray Hunter could give you a list. It’s a very short list. The key to making this work well is in the selection of the people. Pick the wrong people and this is a terrible idea. Pick the right people and it’s brilliant. A key part of that plan should be to immediately appropriate the $3B to build a 311 MWe prototype fourth generation reactor and a pilot commercial-scale pyroprocessing plant

Listen to scientists, not ideology

Recently, Senator Barbara Boxer laid out six principles for fighting global warming that are “simple, but extremely important.” Number one on Boxer’s list is: “Listen to scientists, not ideology.” That’s a great principle and we should all be paying attention.

Nuclear energy is our largest carbon-free power source today. We have one US national laboratory that is run by the US DOE whose primary mission is to “ensure the nation’s energy security with safe, competitive, and sustainable energy systems:” Idaho National Laboratory. So why aren’t we heeding Senator Boxer’s advice and paying attention to what those scientists have accomplished and listening to what they are telling us today?

If for some reason we shouldn’t listen to ANL, then shouldn’t we listen to the 242 scientists from all over the country that DOE asked to evaluate which was the best nuclear technology? 

Finally, the main reason we are in this crisis situation today is due to our government’s lack of a long term vision and strategy with respect to global warming. So we need to be sure not to make the same mistake again.

The good news is that key members of Congress realize that this isn’t just a local problem. To stabilize the climate, we basically have to completely eliminate the emissions from every coal plant on the planet and we don’t have a lot of time to accomplish that.

The bad news is their plan to achieve that goal has virtually no chance of success.

Would you bet your planet on our current strategy?

Here’s their plan: we are going to invest in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) to see if we can make it work at scale, make it reliable, commercialize it, then export it to other countries who will adopt it for all their coal plants.

In short, they are banking the future of humanity on exporting a technology that doesn’t yet exist at scale, that may never exist, that even if it exists would likely be extremely hard to implement reliably, that nobody really wants (since it is only for the environment), that would be easy to cheat, that would probably raise the price of electricity to be unaffordably high, and that can be economically added only to coal plants that were originally constructed with CCS in mind of which there are none. 

Holy cow… that’s a lot of assumptions. Is that our official core strategy to save the planet??!?!?! I wouldn’t want to bet my planet on that strategy and I don’t think you should either.

The only realistic way to ‘win the energy game’ is to develop an energy source that is cheaper than coal

Fortunately, there is a smarter long-term strategy for getting everyone on the planet off of coal and it doesn’t rely on goodwill, mandates, and/or trade policy coercion. It relies on pure economics.

My plan is simple: make IFR technology so cheap that running a coal plant will be the dumb economic decision.

I’d start by focusing my resources on my most promising technology. So I’d invest in commercializing our IFR technology that we invented 25 years ago. I’d do that immediately while the people who worked on the original project are still alive. This would have a side benefit in that it would give the people in our national labs a fantastic project to work on: a project that is both important to the world and scientifically challenging, much like the 1960’s space program that put man on the moon. Once a few plants have been built, I’d invest lots of money to figure out ways to lower the construction costs through modularization and mass production. Then I’d have the US (in partnership with other countries we want to share the wealth with) finance construction of the plants in foreign countries, and make partnerships with the local government to jointly build and operate the plants so they would benefit too. In short, we could be the power supplier to the world if we are aggressive in investment and capturing market share.

My plan would displace existing coal plants because it would provide power at a cheaper cost than coal. It would be the equivalent of Wal-Mart moving into town and displacing the higher priced competitors. And of course, it will also eliminate the construction of new coal plants. Coal gets wiped out because a cheaper, more reliable, cleaner, and safer technology made it obsolete.

The heat from an IFR can be used for reprocessing a clean lower cost transportation fuel

There is one more thing I’d do. Instead of subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, I’d spend that money on commercializing technologies like using boron as a transportation fuel. The heat produced by IFRs can be used to reprocess boron used to fuel transportation at virtually no incremental cost. Using boron as a transportation fuel would take up as much space and weight as gasoline, but it’s a completely recyclable, clean fuel (more precisely an energy carrier) with no emissions. The price per “gas gallon equivalent” would be a tiny fraction of the price of gasoline. So we’d clean up the air, eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, save money on every tank of “gas,” and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. You can’t do that if you are building networks of renewable plants. By investing in IFRs, you have more options for future transportation fuels that can be used either as the sole fuel, or as the fuel in a boron-electric hybrid vehicle.

While we’re doing the R&D for boron engines we can convert existing internal combustion engines to run on ammonia, which has already been done. Ammonia in this case would work as a hydrogen carrier, the hydrogen being easily produced by electrolysis powered by IFRs and then made into ammonia (NH3) with nitrogen from the air. Ultimately boron would be a better energy carrier because of its lack of volatility, solid form, and energy density, but if we want to get off oil ASAP, ammonia-powered cars can help get us there faster. These engines have already been built.

In my plan, the benefits to the US would be huge: 

1. 1. we’d make lots of money (the return on our capital investment in the plant)
2. 2. we’d create lots of high paying jobs to build these plants and the parts for them and to operate them
3. 3. we’d reduce our trade deficit
4. 4. we’d get rid of our nuclear waste
5. 5. we’d help get industry going again
6. 6. by eliminating coal plants, we’d improve our air quality (for example, did you know that 25% of the particulates in the air in California come from China and that theAtmospheric Brown Cloud over China now has intercontinental reach with effects felt world wide)
7. 7. we’d wean ourselves off of gasoline onto a re-usable energy carrier (boron) that has no emissions that costs only 50 cents a gallon (see p. 146 of Prescription for the Planet). No more having to drill for oil.
8. 8. we could eliminate our dependence on foreign oil

The benefits to the world are huge in terms of CO2 reduction and air quality. It also solves the nuclear waste problem of other countries which, if left unchecked, could turn into a very messy situation.

The host country benefits too: they get cheaper power, they can prematurely retire their coal plants, and they get to clean up their air.

Everyone wins. And nobody has to debate whether global warming is a problem or not. Everything is justified on pure economics. What’s wrong with that?

Apparently nothing. We know that the Russians are, in fact, planning to do precisely the plan I laid out. They aren’t stupid. We shouldn’t be either.

The amount of space required to generate huge amounts of electricity is quite small. Here’s a picture of a completely self-contained 1.8GWe IFR plant including 6 modular reactors and an on-site reprocessing facility capable of powering 1.4M homes:
Under my IFR strategy, after a small government investment and a willingness to allow these plants to be built, you could simply let economics take over. No Congressional mandates are required. Not that we can get such mandates anyway. For example, the renewable energy use requirements in the energy bills in both the House and Senate have been watered down so much in order to attract votes as to be meaningless (requiring virtually no change from the status quo). 

Unfortunately, science, facts, and logic are simply no match for special interest money, perception, bias, misinformation, and beliefs. So I can have all the facts and all the most informed and smartest experts on my side like Hansen and Hunter and all the objective analysis like that two year DOE study showing the IFR was the best nuclear design, but that may not be enough.

Senator Lamar Alexander gets it. He is trying to revive nuclear energy in Congress. I hope he is wildly successful. 

There are so many benefits to reviving the IFR: global warming, low cost energy, climate change, nuclear waste disposal, powering clean, low-cost transportation, and so on. You could justify it on any single benefit alone. At $3B to build a demonstration plant, it’s a cheap insurance policy in case the official strategies don’t pan out. That’s pretty hard to argue against, especially when the stakes are planetary in scope.

My favorite argument for the IFR leaves my opponents completely unable to refute its logic and simplicity:

1. Nuclear has to be an important part of the energy mix. Even the biggest proponents of renewables have conceded that point.
2. The IFR is the best nuclear. The 2002 DOE study by 242 nuclear experts from all over the country selected by the DOE was quite comprehensive and definitive on that point.

Since nuclear is still our largest CO2-free power source (even after 30 years of not building a nuclear plant), I remain totally baffled why Congress isn’t allocating the $3B to build a demonstration IFR plant. When I make my 2 point argument and ask that question, I am greeted with “I’ll check that out with my staff” and then you never hear from them again. When you try to arrange a briefing with the staff, they are too busy to meet with you (or in the case of Waxman-Markey’s staff, couldn’t tell me who their nuclear expert was or even who might know who their nuclear expert was).