Total energy independence in 12 years

Stepping aside for a moment from my six-part overview of Prescription for the Planet, I’ll briefly look at another interesting recent book on energy futures.

I’ve just finished reading “Total Energy Independence for the United States: A Twelve-Year Plan (Possible, Affordable, Sustainable)” (2008), by engineer and inventor, Robert M. Wical. It’s an interesting little (108 pg) book, and of relevance for a number of reasons. First, here is the publisher’s blurb:

“The Alternative to Energy Wars Like the One in Iraq…

What if the United States could be energy independent? It’s not just a good science fiction plot. In twelve years, the country could be free from its need of foreign oil, not only helping to level the international economic playing field, but also aiding in the repair of the effects of global warming.

Although it will take a Herculean effort, Bob Wical’s two-part Twelve-Years-to-Hydrogen Plan provides a detailed roadmap to change. The oil from phase one will satisfy the nation’s addiction and enhance national security by making the nation self-reliant for its oil supply. Tax revenues from phase one will finance phase two, allowing for the development of a hydrogen fuel infrastructure. Wical’s dual strategy is currently the most cost-effective, expedient, and safest plan publicly available.

Because of the growing tension in the Middle East and the climate changes that the planet has experienced in the past several decades, now is the time to act. Total Energy Independence clearly shows us how a hydrogen-centered plan is possible, affordable, and sustainable, guiding us to a cleaner, more environmentally friendly future.”

With an added note from the author, which summarises the main message quite succinctly:

“A 90% Self-Funding Answer to the U.S. Energy Crisis: If you find the solutions to the United States’ energy crisis currently being offered by our politicians to be half-measures sometimes bordering on ridiculous, then you will enjoy reading about the real, practical, viable solution to the U.S. energy crisis offered in ‘Total Energy Independence for the United States‘. We already have enough practically FREE fuel to power the Twelve-Years-to-Hydrogen Plan for 500 to 1,000 years. In the first six years of the plan, the U.S. becomes oil independent. By the end of the twelfth year of the Plan, there will be a hydrogen fuel infrastructure sufficient to power our national transportation fleet. Liquid hydrogen fuel would be available at the pump for 50 cents per gallon. The technology required to implement the Plan already exists and is well-documented. A bonus of the plan is that the approximately 60,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste stored in 125 locations throughout the U.S. will be safely consumed. This will essentially eliminate the problem of disposing of massive quantities of toxic nuclear waste. The plan is also a bargain for taxpayers because it is 90% self-funding. The total cost to implement the plan is estimated to be about $1.5 to $1.75 trillion. In other words, just a little more than the cost of ‘George’s War’.”

As you may have guessed from these two descriptions, one of the key technologies underpinning Wical’s plan is Integral Fast Reactor nuclear power, either as a sodium-cooled fast reactor (e.g. General Electric – Hitachi’s  S-PRISM blueprint) or another GIF-selected design, the lead-cooled STAR-LM (Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor – Liquid Metal; also being researched at Argonne National Laboratories). What is interesting to me is that Bob Wical seems to have come, independently, to the same conclusion as Tom Blees about the huge potential IFR (a third author has also done this — I’ll review his book soon).

Wical’s plan for achieving oil independence (written with the US in focus, but it’s broadly applicable to many nations which are dependent to a large extent on foreign oil — Australia included), depends on accelerated development and rapid  commercial up-scaling of the following core technologies and infrastructure:

– Integral fast reactors (SFR and LFR) — about 500 over 12 years for the US

– in situ conversion processes for oil shales

– electrolysis of water and electrochemical hydrogen compressor

– hydrogen distribution and dispensing systems

– hydrogen-powered automobile and truck technology

– proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells and parallel path magnetic technology

The plan is described as 90% self funding [plenty of details given], due to oil import and military savings and increased fuel-to-wheels efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell technology.

My overall assessment is that Wical has thought a lot about this plan, and his arguments for the feasibility of a ‘hydrogen economy’ (where hydrogen is the primary liquid fuel energy carrier) are reasonably convincing. You’ll find a lot of literature out there which criticises the ‘hydrogen hype’, and many of the arguments have merit. But it has always struck me that the critics of hydrogen seem to be massively overplaying their hand.

Yes, there are issues with the energy required to compress hydrogen and transport it over long distances, in the large size of storage tanks (due to its lower energy density compared to oil and gas derivatives such as petrol [gasoline] and diesel), and in the added expense in containing hydrogen leakage. But there are also advantages, such as its clean burning property (water is the combustion product), high efficiency of fuel cells (about 2.7 times that of the internal combustion engine), and the great strides being made in electrochemical (not mechanical) compression of hydrogen to 10,000 psi, based on a process with no moving parts!

Time will tell how much of an impact hydrogen has for energy storage and transport in our energy future, compared to alternatives such as metal-combustion (my bet is that the latter will prove to be a superior technology, e.g., due to its avoidance of the chicken-or-the-egg syndrome — no fueling/distribution infrastructure is needed to kick it off) . But I do think that it would be grossly unwise to rule out hydrogen, produced by IFR energy, out on the basis of incompletely formed notions about the economic and technological viability of a hydrogen infrastructure today.

Wical recognises the urgency of dealing with global warming, but his primary motivation is to get the USA unhitched from the OPEC bandwagon as fast as possible. An element of his plan therefore involves a stop-gap exploitation of America’s Rocky Mountains shale oils (short-term Government lease of lands to oil companies), via in situ ‘cooking’ to release oil and gas (it has an EROEI of about 3:1). He envisages about 10-15 million barrels a day being produced by this method, using IFRs as the heat source, for a period of 15-25 years, until the hydrogen economy is fully realised. The danger in this approach is that this source of fossil carbon cannot be exploited if we are to have any chance of keeping CO2 levels to below 350 ppm by the end of this century, and that the ~1 trillion barrels of ultimately recoverable oil from this source will prove too tempting a target to forego, should initial exploitation by successful. My bottom line: there has to be other, better ways, to get the vehicle fleet off foreign oil without opening the Pandora’s box of heavy hydrocarbons, even as a temporary ‘fix’.

Overall, this is a well-researched, well-written road map for an alternative energy future. I’m fascinated that Wical has, like Blees, concluded that IFRs are the optimal energy source for rapid decarbonization. I have problems with some elements of the 12 year plan, but am quite impressed with the logical, systematic way in which Wical has treated the pathway to large-scale hydrogen-based fuel infrastructre. It’s certainly not pie in the sky. I honestly doubt that we’ll ever have a fully-fledged ‘hydrogen economy’, but I’m now far more convinced than before that hydrogen can, and will, be a useful energy storage and carrier medium for a post-fossil-fuel society.

I recommend you read Total Energy Independence if you wish to have a broader view of the hydrogen economy, or if you want another perspective on the possibility of IFR as a major future energy source. We need more people like Wical and Blees, who are willing to think big, and fast, on total energy solutions. Governments should start paying more  heed, if they really are honest about tackling climate change and peak oil before the worst in upon us.

Prescription for the Planet – Part IV – Show me the money!

We’ve now covered all the major technologies proposed by Tom Blees in the book Prescription for the Planet – Integral Fast Reactor nuclear power for electricity generation, boron-fuelled vehicles for transport, and plasma burners for recycling of waste. Set in the context of a legacy of ongoing problems, with stockpiles of nuclear waste and weapons, a rapidly degrading environment and climate system, world energy security standing on a knife edge, and a future of looming shortages as we struggle to make up shortfalls using zero-carbon energy, Blees says we either founder as a civilisation, or choose to re-invent ourselves and emerge renewed as an equitable and sustainable society.

Now that all sounds fine and dandy, but in the cold hard light of day, it’s not all that realistic… is it? I mean, the staggering cost of retooling our entire energy and transport industry, on a planetary scale, is just too high and too difficult, and the pay offs such change might yield are just not worth the pain of adjustment. Business-as-usual is surely the better, cheaper course, at least for now; we should let future generations sort out the energy problem since they’ll all be richer than us thanks to the magic of economic growth. Well, that, in caricature, is what the ‘fossil fools forever’ mob will try to tell you. Blees says they’re wrong — on both counts.

This post, part IV of VI, reviews chapters 8 and 9:

– Chapter 8: Check, Please! (pg 197-240)

– Chapter 9: Cui Bono? (pg 241-262)

I’ll give you the bottom line of these two chapters up front: it will almost certainly cost us less to power the world with IFRs (and whatever contribution renewable energy ends up making — sizeable, I hope) than it will to try and reinforce our creaking, aging fossil fuel infrastructure. Economic arguments pass muster.

Let’s start with the basics. If you are seeking solid ground on relative costs of delivered energy, the assessment of the real-world price of any energy technology can be grounded on three basic principles [you need all three]: (i) discounted cash flow analysis, (ii) scale-up capacity assessment, and (iii) recent experience.

Step (i) is always possible, but  can be prone to wild speculation when hard data on the model parameters are lacking or difficult to estimate in context. For instance, you really need all of the following: interest/discount rate for future value of money estimates, lifetime of infrastructure, capital recovery factor, installed capital cost including interest during construction, average capacity factor of power delivery, annualised capital and decomissioning cost, fuel cost, and cost of operation and maintenance.

Phew! Of course there are, in truth, many details besides these that are involved, such as relative baseload vs peak usage (usually subsumed with the capacity factor and annualised cost estimates), transmission connection (usually within installed capital costs), etc. But putting these complexities aside, the end product of such accounting really depends on whether you are able to get accurate operational data on each of these inputs, or alternatively, whether you pull some parameter values out of certain dark orifices.  Indeed, you can basically come up with anything, from quite reasonable estimates through to wildly under- or over-blown costings of long-term delivered energy (usually expressed as c/KWh). My advice — check assumptions carefully!

Step (ii) is really a topic for another day, but involves the costs and logistical challenges associated with going from small-scale to large-scale operation. For instance, wind power operates perfectly well on a fossil-fuel-based grid infrastructure when it contributes a small fraction of total power, but as it constitutes more and more of the total installed capacity, issues of energy storage or backup from other generating sources come into play. Such problems are not insoluble, but they do impact on the bottom line in ways that cannot necessarily be anticipated using simple ‘bottom-up’ approaches that work by costing each unit and then multiplying by the amount that would be needed.

The guts of Chapter 8 is lots of numbers — really big numbers. It even comes with a vertigo warning. There is a lot of material here, and so I can’t cover all of the key details in a brief review like this. Which is kind of a shame, because you really have to assess the logic of the chapter in full to appreciate the validity of the fundamental argument Blees is trying to make: it can make real financial sense to build IFRs on a massive scale.

Step (iii), recent experience, is the primary basis upon which Blees bases his costings. Perhaps some of the details can come out in the comments of this post, when folks here have specific questions. So, just the core points then:

1) Repeated studies from authoritative sources such as the OECD and IEA show nuclear power is highly cost-competitive with coal (indeed, cheaper 10 of 12 countries assessed).

2) Recent experience shows that modern nuclear reactors can indeed be built to a tight budget — in the range of $1.4 to $2.5 billion per GW capital cost.

3) Reactors become far cheaper if they have the following characteristics: (a) standardised blueprints, (b) simpler design, (c) factory-built modular units, which can be trucked to site, (d) a system within which legalistic impediments are surmounted by sound legislation (one of the big problems in the US).

Note: Standardisation and modularity are the game-changers for the nuclear power industry. For instance, Generation III and III+ light water reactors, which follow these principles, such as France’s European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), GE’s Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) and Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR), and Westinghouse’s AP-1000, cost around $1 to 2 billion per GW installed. Two ABWR were built in the late nineties in Japan for $1.4 B/GW within 36 months, and China has ordered 100 x AP-1000 units, carrying a price tag of $1 B/GW. These are likely to most closely reflect the price tag attached to an S-PRISM (Super Power Reactor Innovative Small Module — a sodium-cooled fast spectrum reactor with metal fuel). GEH estimates the cost of an S-PRISM at $1.3 B/GW, with a high-end estimate for fast reactors of $2.5 B/GW. As to a nation going nuclear in a big way, and benefiting, France is the stand-out real-world example on a per captia basis, with 59 light water reactor plants generating over 63 GWe (80% of supply). Their electricity costs are among the lowest in Europe, at around 3 eurocents per KWh.

4) If the world was to replace it’s energy supply with IFRs, the cost would be roughly $28 trillion (including transmission lines). That’s on the basis of a capital cost of $2 B/GW (so ignoring likely economies of scale that will bring prices down) and the need to supply around 8.75 terrawatts (TW) of generating capacity (for all energy use). For this, you’d need about 3,500 power plants of 2.5 GW each (using 8 x 380 MW modular reactor vessels within 4 power blocks). Any further energy supplied by renewables, geothermal and syngas (e.g., from plasma burners) would be a bonus. For reference, global electricity production in 2005 amounted to 2.3 TW, 16% of which came from nuclear.

5) What may be surprising to many is that the cost of business-as-usual energy development, or a gradual path to de-carbonisation, is about $26 to 35 trillion from 2010 to 2030! These are estimates that come from credible sources such as the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2008 and Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change 2006. This is for the cost of shoring up our fossil fuel infrastructure and upgrading/replacing transmission infrastructure (IEA), or investing 1% of GDP per annum on carbon mitigation (Stern).

6) At the height of its nuclear build-out phase, France was rolling out 6 plants per year. Six countries have a GDP higher than France and all already possess the technology to build fast reactors: USA, China, Japan, India (building one now), Germany and the UK. At France’s historical rate, these countries could together build 117 IFR plants per year, with no greater urgency than the French brought to bear on their road to energy independence. Indeed, China is rolling out over 50 large coal-fired power stations of equivalent size each year. So at this quite feasible rate, it would take 30 years to build 3,500 plants in 7 countries. For less than the cost of reinforcing our fossil fuel infrastructure.

7) There are further paybacks from an IFR roll out: we solve the multi-billion dollar nuclear waste problem fully, and we also save big $$ (and lots of lives and avoidable misery) by drastically cutting air pollution (renewables also achieves this) — a best estimate of $167 billion per year, each year, from the US alone (and a whole lot more from China — I can attest personally to the health effects of that Asian Brown Cloud).

Go and read the extended version in P4TP and see what you think about the credibility of the above analysis. It certainly looks robust to me.

Chapter 9, Cui Bono? (who benefits?), explores the multitude of problems with the privatised portion of the American power industry, with special attention to the past litany of misdemeanours and cover-ups of some nuclear utilities and related problems with its regulator, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Basically, due to the regulatory framework in the US, energy utilities have the ability to gouge their customers with exorbitant pricing (under certain conditions), and most take full advantage of that opportunity whenever they can. Energy is like a societal drug addiction – we can’t do without it (even for a short while), and so we are acutely vulnerable to being exploited by ‘dealers’ when energy is not in abundant supply. Indeed, this goes right through from spot prices of energy delivered to cost estimates of new nuclear power stations. Remember Step (i) above? Well, in the good old US of A, nuclear utilities can have a field day with that number crunching, and charge customers for current power costs on the basis of these pick-and-choose models!

Being rather sympathetic myself to the benefits of publically owned service providers, I think Blees makes a strong case for full public ownership of nuclear power. It’s a form of socialism, to be sure, but before the free market ideologues start frothing at the mouth, consider where society would be without public ownership. Transportation infrastructure, public education, national defense, standards authorities, etc. It’s really a matter not of if public ownership is appropriate, but when. And when we are talking about something as crucial as oversight of nuclear power and a secure energy supply, well… I’ll leave you to judge (but after you’ve read the chapter, please!).

The message about ownership and oversight has a deeper purpose than merely bringing energy costs in America under control. Without something similar operating worldwide, the risks of rampant unmanaged global nuclear energy deployment could well outweigh the benefits it brings to individual countries — perhaps catastrophically so.

We need something GREAT to ensure a global rollout of IFRs is safe and equitable. That’s just what the next part of P4TP is all about…

Prescription for the Planet – Part II. Newclear energy and boron-powered vehicles

Put all energy cards on the table to fix climate change fully

Newclear energy and boron-powered vehicles Put all energy cards on the table to fix climate change fully Posted by Barry Brook on 16 January 2009 I know I’ve been pushing the energy supply bandwagon a lot recently, with relative little attention to climate science issues (and even less to the ‘pseudo-sceptics’!). I guess that in some ways reflects the ebb and flow of my perceived priorities, what I happen to be reading, and what I consider particularly urgent or crucial to communicate at the time. Anyway, as a heads up, I’ve got some interesting things (at least I think!) to say about climate sensitivity (’it’s nailed’), warming in the pipeline (lots), changes in species distributions (new modelling — a selfish promotion of my own research) and geoengineering (ranking options), among other things, which I plan to cover here on the blog in the coming weeks. But for now, bear with me for a bit more on energy policy, as I feel my thinking on this issue is sharpening and I’d like to continue to bounce ideas off you guys. This week I wrote an Op Ed for the relatively new opinions website set up by ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation — Oz’s national TV/Radio broadcaster). It’s called ‘Unleashed‘, and attracts a diverse audience, to say the least (that can be good and bad…). My article’s about the energy solutions required to ‘fix’ the climate crisis fully, and of course discusses renewables, energy efficiency and nuclear energy. Even before reading through the 170 or so comments this generated, I could see the need to write a follow-up piece in the coming weeks for the ABC site which explains the ‘newclear option’ in more detail. But before I did that, I had to set the scene/mindset about the fundamental requirement — solutions that fix the climate+energy bugbears completely, not half-measures that only delay the worst problems but end up solving nothing (I absolutely knew by doing this [ignoring the details of nuclear power] that I was risking a whole bunch of ill-informed feedback!). So here’s my first effort at broaching the nuclear issue to a different audience. Oh, and now I’m formally ‘outed’ as a nukie! So much the better. Judge for yourself whether my first piece would have convinced any ‘antis’ to look again at nuclear being ‘one of the cards on the energy table that makes up the royal flush’. ———————————————————- Nuclear power: a real solution (ABC Unleashed, 16 Jan 2009) The climate changes because it is forced to do so. That may sound a little strange, but ‘forcing’ is a real technical term for any pressure that causes the ‘average weather’ to shift. Positive forcings (e.g. increased solar activity, more greenhouse gases) induce global warming, whereas negative forcings (e.g. more low-level clouds, volcanic dimming) result in cooling. Climate system feedbacks (e.g. melting ice, more water vapour) act to enhance these processes. That’s the way it’s always been, throughout Earth’s long history. When the planet is thrown out of energy balance by a change in forcing, it must respond, by warming or cooling. It can’t be bargained with and it has no room to compromise. It will do what it must do. It’s the laws of physics. So there’s no point in half-fixing climate change. If this is our strategy, whether implicit or explicit, people may as well enjoy the Platinum Age (as Ross Garnaut calls the last few decades) and be done. Cap-and-trade systems to reduce emissions by some percentage are a good example of an ultimately useless ‘half-fix’ policy. Due to the long lifetime of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere (about 20 per cent of CO2 released today will still be airborne in 1000 years), it is only the total amount of CO2 released by humanity during the fossil-fuel age that really matters. We must limit total emissions. In order to stop forcing the climate system towards further warming – to avoid the worst predicted impacts of climate change – we therefore have to stop using coal, oil and gas. We cannot afford to burn all of the available reserves of these, and other carbon sources, such as tar sands and oil shales. But modern society needs energy. Lots of it. Although there is plenty of scope for more efficient use of energy in developed nations, the developing world is desperately striving for energy growth. The obvious source of energy for these emerging economies is the same source used by the developing world to build its wealth and prosperity. Wishing this weren’t so won’t make that fact go away. But if neither the developed or developing worlds can risk using coal, oil and gas, where does this energy come from? Renewable energy, for instance solar, wind and wave power, is clean, and there are huge amounts of it available. But it is diffuse – vast areas of land or coastline must be harnessed to use it on a significant scale – and it is mostly intermittent, so a distributed grid with plenty of storage and backup is essential. Scaling up renewables to be a viable replacement power source on a planetary scale is an incredible logistical challenge, and quite possibly not ever achievable. This above should not be taken to imply that I do not support expansion of renewable energy and widespread adoption of energy efficiency measures. In some places there are wonderful opportunities for these. For instance, Australia could cut its greenhouse emissions by around 30 per cent, at no net cost, due to the payback from lower power bills thanks to more sensible use of energy. Further, Australia has a wealth of renewable energy options at its disposal (huge deserts that are perfect for solar thermal power, long stretches of windy coastline for large turbines, and a large endowment of deep hot dry rocks that have the potential to supply baseload geothermal energy). Sadly, that isn’t the case everywhere. Some nations with large populations have few renewable energy sources available to them. And even for Australia, it will almost certainly be too difficult and costly to run our entire energy economy using renewable power, without sufficient non-coal backup. Nuclear energy may well be that backup, or indeed a mainstay for future energy generation. For instance, there is a technology developed at the Argonne National Laboratory USA called integral fast reactor nuclear power, which burns up 99 per cent of the nuclear fuel, leaves no long-lived waste, is passively safe (’meltdowns’ are exceedingly unlikely) and does not generate weapons-grade material (see Integral Fast Reactor [IFR] nuclear power – Q and A, for more details). It’s been researched for over 10 years and is ready for demonstration. It warrants further attention. One risks ire from many sides when discussing nuclear energy as a climate solution. Those climate sceptics with a vested interest in the fossil fuel forever status quo will say there is no climate or energy supply problem to fix, so why bother? Hardened environmentalists will tell you that nuclear in any form is unsafe, polluting, risks weapons proliferation, and is unnecessary given renewable power sources (even when briefed about how integral fast reactors solve all of these concerns). No matter. It is vitally important that everyone else, and that’s most people, understand the real issues. So my basic point is this. Do you wish to fully solve the climate crisis? Or alternatively, do you want a secure energy supply that is not dependent on foreign oil and other dwindling, polluting sources? If you are merely satisfied with half-fixing these problems, then sure, hold your ideological ground. But if you’re honest about seeking real solutions, it’s time to lay out all of the future-of-energy cards on the table, for open and rational discussion. Nuclear may well be the ace in the deck, or it may be the card that makes up the royal flush. Either way, don’t throw it on the discard pile.

Prescription for the Planet – Part II – Newclear energy and boron-powered vehicles

In Part I of this review, I talked through some of the logistical and ideological challenges facing society in trying to solve the climate and energy supply crises. All pretty grim. But with Part II of my review of the book Prescription for the Planet, by Tom Blees, we’re already through the nadir of depression and apparent helplessness, and on to the optimistic upslope.

The experimental sodium-cooled EBR-II nuclear reactor, which operated at Idaho National Laboratory for three decades (1964 to 1994).

This post, part II of VI, is concerned with chapters 4 and 5:

- Chapter 4: Newclear Power (pg 117-139)

- Chapter 5: The Fifth Element (pg 141-154)

The play-on-words title of chapter 4 pretty much sums it up. It’s a hand-holding walkthrough of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) nuclear power technology that I’ve already discussed on BraveNewClimate in two earlier posts. Blees reckons this is the new, clear choice for future power generation. First there’s some history — a description of the highly successful Argonne National Research Laboratory EBR-II reactor programme which spawned the IFR project (see diagram). Then there’s an excellent primer on basic nuclear physics for the uninitiated, which does a great job at describing how fission reactors work and the difference between thermal light water reactors (almost all present-day nuclear reactors are of this type) and fast-spectrum reactors (like IFR — though Blees tends to use the term fast breeder reactors, I tend to prefer the IPCC AR4 Working Group III terminology, because if avoids those negative historical connotations many people associate with plutonium breeders for weapons).

Importantly I think, considerable space is devoted to explaining the difference between the proliferation-resistant elecrochemical pyrometallurgical processing and recycling, compared to the proliferation-promoting PUREX (Plutonium and Uranium Recovery by EXtraction). This is a key point, because from my wider reading, I’ve concluded that weapons proliferation risk remains one of the greatest hurdle to overcome in convincing most ‘anties’ (Blees’ shorthand for anti-nuclear types) that a large-scale uptake of IFR will not heighten the risk of a catastrophic nuclear exchange or a terrorist attack using nukes.

P131 has a schematic diagram of a ‘pool design’ for a Liquid Metal cooled Fast Breeder reactor (LMFBR), like that deployed in the EBR-II. It’s stunning in its elegance and relative simplicity. The design is also ‘passively safe’, in that the inherent physical characteristics of the metal fuel pins means that should they overheat (due, for instance, to a loss of coolant flow or heat sink), they expand, and in doing so decrease their density to the point where the fission reaction simply shuts itself down. No critical  dependence on getting those graphite control rods down in time!

Incidentally, other Gen III+ advanced reactors designs also use ‘walk away’ safety measures, such as having valves holding back emergency cooling water that are held shut by the power system (so if the power goes off for any reason , the valves automatically open and shut down the reaction). But the neat thing with IFR is that it’s the fuel that does the job — although a variety of other safety features are also inherent in the IFR design. Conclusion? The chance of one of these reactors melting down, Chernobyl-style, is virtually zero (something like one in a couple of hundred million per year). I could go on here, but really, it’s better to leave it to Blees — go read Chapter 4 if you want to know more about IFR!

Now if you thought the chapter 4 material was ambitious, then chapter 5 is no let down either. In brief, it’s a proposal by Blees to replace our liquid fuel dependence — mostly related to our vehicle fleet of cars, buses, trucks etc. — with an alternative, completely recyclable energy carrier. And no, it’s not hydrogen. It’s a pure form of the semi-metal, boron — element number 5 on the periodic table (now you know where the chapter title comes from). We’re into more speculative territory here, because most of the ideas upon which Blees bases his transport fuel vision is theoretical, but it has a solid physical grounding.

For instance, it has certainly been shown that metals can ‘burn’, and that they store an incredible amount of energy per unit volume. Boron, for instance, weight for weight, stores around 6 times the energy of petrol (gasoline for the Yanks). It’s just that the fuel tank gets heavier, not lighter, as you burn it, because the combustion products accumulate as an oxide rather than being released as an exhaust gas — so it about equalises with petrol in terms of overall efficiency. To get boron to burn, you need to ignite it in pure oxygen — an idea attributed to a regular commenter at BNC, Graham Cowan — perhaps he can add some further details in the comments section. To reverse the oxidisation, you need to supply energy. Electrical energy will do — derived, for instance from… yep, that’s right, IFR power stations. It’s hard to to this chapter justice in a brief overview — you need to read it yourself to appreciate the thought Blees has put into this nascent yet ultimately very attractive idea. But for another perspective, here’s Jim Hansen’s take on it from his Trip Report (if you recall, I cited his description of IFR prospects in an earlier posting).

Boron-Powered Cars and Greenwash (Jim Hansen’s notes)

Blees properly ridicules FutureGen, commonly dubbed NeverGen, as a greenwash construction of the coal industry, intended to make it look like they were working on cleaning up their horrendous environmental damage.

Blees suggests that hydrogen-powered cars are a greenwash of the oil and auto industries, while they continue to stick us with gas-guzzlers. That charge may be too strong, but it seems fair to say that they have not been looking at alternative vehicles as hard as they should have been. Also I need to point out a possible personal bias: I have been driving a hydrogen-powered car over the past two weeks [a BMW executive recognized me on an airplane and offered a free trial – for the first time I can look my Mercedes-driving lawyer friends on the level, even though it was just a trial – don’t get excited, the hydrogen cars are not for sale, would be very expensive if they were, and there was only one place, in Jersey City boondocks, where I could fill it up].

Blees thinks that there is a superior alternative to hydrogen. Here is the basis of the idea. If a metal is ground into fine enough dust, nanoparticles, it will burn. We could burn iron-dust in our cars, capture the rust-dust, take the rust home, and cook it to drive the oxygen off, thus recovering our initial iron dust, which we then could use to power our car on its next trip. We supply energy at the time of cooking. Iron is just the energy carrier.

So iron dust is an alternative to hydrogen as an energy carrier to power our post-fossil-fuel cars. Iron dust (unlike hydrogen) has the advantage of being non-explosive, but (among other things) it is heavy and gets heavier as rust. Enter a better idea: boron. It is much more energy dense than iron: it takes a quart of boron to match the energy in a gallon of gasoline. A tank (box) of boron would cost a few hundred dollars, but you only need to buy one tankful, when you buy your car. After that you just take the boron oxide to a store, a Seven-Eleven would be happy to serve, and trade it in for a box of boron (anyone can handle this material). Blees figures that processing boron oxide back to boron would cost only tens of cents. Even if he is too optimistic (or if Exxon/Mobil sees to it that he is put 6-foot under – they are not likely to appreciate competition from Seven-Eleven), it should be much cheaper than gasoline. If the processing from B2O3 back to B is done with carbon-free electricity, it takes care of the carbon emissions problem. Blees, as you might guess, envisages the energy coming from IFR nuclear plants.

O.K., let’s go back a step. It is widely agreed that electric cars can be a solution for a piece of vehicular needs, and plug-in hybrid-electrics are a partial solution for the remaining piece. We should start with those technologies because they are ready to go, and batteries will improve, even though it has been slow going. But we must have something other than gasoline for complementing the electric part. Hydrogen, used in a fuel cell as opposed to being burned in an internal combustion engine, has the great advantage of emitting only water vapor as an exhaust product. Hydrogen could be produced at remote sites where renewable energy, such as wind or solar, is plentiful (or by IFR). But it has technological challenges, as described well in Science a few years ago, and more so in Joe Romm’s book, The Hype About Hydrogen.

Automakers have been working hard on hydrogen for several years. Some of the technological problems must have been solved. All I can say is that the hydrogen-BMW drove great, better than any car I have ever owned, with enough getty-up for even a Texas cowboy (I am not a Texas cowboy). The car also had a gasoline tank, to avoid stranding with no hydrogen, and at push of a button switched seamlessly between hydrogen and gas.

In dismissing hydrogen Blees relies in part on a note by Tromp et al. (Science, 2003) suggesting that hydrogen leakage might threaten the stratospheric ozone layer. But Michael Prather (Science 302, 581, 2003) looked harder and found that it is unlikely to be a problem with realistic hydrogen leakage rates. There are greater challenges for hydrogen, though.

Getting the price of hydrogen vehicles down to a reasonable level is a big challenge and there would need to be a distribution system analogous to gas stations, perhaps replacing them. Boron must have challenges too, but maybe less. Blees says the boron must burn in pure oxygen, which requires miniaturization of an oxygen supply system for the car. I wonder if collecting the boron oxide and converting it back to pure boron is as simple as claimed? Also, the product of hydrogen (in a fuel cell) is water vapor, which we do not have to worry about. That is the big draw of hydrogen: zero pollution. I wonder if we can burn boron without tailpipe pollution?

Bottom line: Blees has stimulating, revolutionary vision. The jury is still out on hydrogen vs boron vs something else. But I am confident that there are better alternatives than fossil fuels. It is time to start working much harder on such alternatives.

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Part III will look at chapters 6 and 7, covering everything from nuclear batteries to gasified garbage!

Prescription for the Planet – Part I

As foreshadowed in my previous post on Integral Fast Reactor nuclear power, I recently ordered Prescription for the Planet, by Tom Blees (subtitle: The Painless Remedy for Our Energy & Environmental Crises). Well, it’s now arrived, and I’ve set about reading through it with a careful eye for detail. After 3 chapters, I can already confidently say that it’s GREAT (don’t worry, you’ll get the pun in later posts).

Anyway, I’ve decided to review this incredibly important book on BNC in 6 parts, because there is just so much useful material for discussion and dissemination [for readers interested in variety, don't worry; the part-book-reviews won't all come in a sequential stream -- no more than 1 or 2 per week]. This post is concerned with chapters 1-3:

- Chapter 1: A World of Hurt (pg 7-33, following a 5 page introduction)

- Chapter 2: Pie in the Sky (pg 34-109)

- Chapter 3: A Necessary Interlude (pg 111-116)

Blees has made the intro, chapter 1, and the first 2 pages of chapter 2 available for a free, appetite-whetting download, here. Here is the book’s blurb:

Solving our planet’s most pressing dilemmas requires more than simply setting goals. We need a roadmap to reach them. Technologies that work fine on a small scale cannot necessarily be ramped up to global size. Worldwide environmental and social problems require a bold vision for the future that includes feasible planet-wide solutions with all the details. Prescription for the Planet explains how a trio of little-known yet profoundly revolutionary technologies, coupled with their judicious use in an atmosphere of global cooperation, can be the springboard that carries humanity to an era beyond scarcity. And with competition for previously scarce resources no longer an issue, the main incentives for warfare will be eliminated. Explaining not only the means to solve our most pressing problems but how those solutions can painlessly lead to improving the standard of living of everyone on the planet, the lucid and provocatively written Prescription for the Planet has arrived not a moment too soon. There is something here for everyone, be they a policymaker, environmental activist, or any concerned citizen hoping for a better future.

So, what’s in the first section? The introduction talks a little about the zero-sum game played by the developed world. It goes something like this. The world, being finite, is like a pie (not a magic pudding!), whereby if you (a given nation) take more than your fair share of resources (a large slice), then there will naturally be less for everyone else (smaller slices). As Blees notes, “The lack of enthusiasm for helping to lift the poorest nations out of their misery can be traced to the nagging fear that enlarging their piece of the pie will inevitably diminish what is left for the rest of us“. But with energy, he reckons this need not be an inevitable corollary. This topic has been explored in a somewhat fanciful yet interesting way, in the comments section of an earlier BNC post on the Fermi Paradox.

Chapter 1 covers terrain that is mostly familiar to my regular readers. The world is hurting due to global warming (working up an accelerating pace), the overconsumption of natural capital, air pollution, oil shocks, deforestation and water wars. He also discusses the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation and the lingering problem of ‘nuclear waste’ — the byproduct of current-generation nuclear reactors that will remain dangerous and difficult to manage for hundreds of millennia (there is 50,000 tonnes of the stuff in the US alone). There was not a lot that was new to me in this chapter, but for those who are relatively poorly informed about the state of the sustainability emergency (all of the above constitute elements of this overarching crisis), this chapter provides an excellent primer. Blees writes with clarify and verve.

Chapter 2 takes a hard look at the potential for a range of possible low-carbon energy solutions, and ends up being similar in its approach to that of Ted Trainer (Renewable energy cannot sustain an energy intensive society). Blees includes fewer technical details and specific calculations on the limits to massively scaled up renewable energy, but (to my mind at least), he ends up being even more persuasive than Ted on the emergent conclusion: supplying most of our energy from renewable sources is NOT simply a matter of current-scale implementation x 1000 (or 1,000,000). It’s on a diminishing gains curve, and moreover, when all the hard-nosed estimates based on current implementation experience are worked through, the cost and scale of doing this are simply mind-boggling.

Blees covers carbon trading (ouch, he’s savage on this!), biofuels (not microalgal biodiesel I might add), ‘clean coal’, natural gas, energy efficiency (this gets a big +), electric cars (and who killed them), solar power (photovoltaic and thermal – a desert mirage?), wind power (with a note about subsidies), hydroelectric (not so safe),  geothermal (lots of potential but…), hydrogen (not likely or desireable), fusion power (eventually…), and current-gen nuclear fission (well, you know the story here). Some of the figures herein are real eye-openers.

It’s a huge overview, but incredibly valuable (if depressingly blunt about the limits of these options). In short, after reading this and other material, I’m now firmly in the camp of those who subscribe to the view that whilst renewable energy and related techs are going to provide a useful contribution to future energy supply, they are going to fall well short of delivering what is required if we (global society) are going to go carbon neutral (actually, carbon negative) within the next few decades, as the Earth system (and the limits of fossil energy) now clearly demands.

Read chapter 2, please. It is critical that everyone understand this information.

Then an interlude (chapter 3). A time to take a breather and look at whether it’s time for despondency (hint: it’s not), given the seemingly insurmountable climate, energy and resource challenges we face, and the starkly apparent inadequacy of renewable energy as a complete replacement package. The quote at the start of the chapter summaries the problem neatly: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function” (attributed to physicist Albert Bartlett) [As someone who has spent a fair deal of their research career modelling the resource constraints imposed upon natural systems, I say amen to that!] Blees then explores the impediment to alternatives. Here is an excerpt that captures the position of the climate change denialists perfectly:

“Our earth is a finite sphere, and thus it is undeniable that population must remain within some sort of limits. In a world groaning under the burden of billions of people, it is simply delusional to deny the threat that overpopulation poses to our planet. Yet even with the world’s population projected to increase 50% by mid-century, many of the world’s most influential leaders seem oblivious to the situation. This is illustrative of a general disconnect between scientific progress and the evolution of social consciousness. The advances of science seem to have outpaced humanity’s ability to adapt. Rather than encouraging people to examine pressing issues with logic and reason, an antagonistic anti-intellectualism has taken hold of many, certainly in America at least. So we find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand we have the seemingly unstoppable march of science, and on the other an anachronistic mindset more suited to life in the Dark Ages...”. (Remind you of any group in particular?)

He also has a go, quite rightly, at those who are at the other extreme:

“It would be deluded at best to pretend that energy conservation and self-denial are going to make a dent in this problem, yet that is about as far as some environists (environmentalists whose mental portion is substantially inoperative) are thinking. And it is every bit as foolish to believe that we can dramatically increase the world’s population while we maintain the fossil fuel power model. Self-denial is not a policy. Neither is denial…Neoluddites will have to be kicked to the curb, then hopefully most of them will be able to open their eyes to the reality and become part of the solution rather than remaining part of the problem. Likewise the fossilized thinking of the fossil fuel forever advocates must be abandoned, and not a moment too soon. Indeed, we can only hope it’s not too late“.

The above quote should not imply that Blees has dismissed the value of energy efficiency and energy conservation. They’re no-brainers, with multiple benefits — he (in chapter 2), I, and just about everyone else, agree with this. It’s just not going to deliver a solution to the climate or energy problem that is fully, or even mostly adequate, as is required.

Part II will cover chapters 4 (”Newclear Power”) and 5 (”The Fifth Element”).