April Nuclear Energy Facts Report Available

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This is the latest edition of the Nuclear Energy Facts Report.  The Facts Report itself contains only facts that manifest in the physical world; no opinions, conclusions, recommendations, or attempts at consensus-building.  But we have found it helpful to precede the Facts Report with some explanatory material on energy production, and conclude with some comments on the historical context.
 
As always, we welcome input from readers.  This is not intended to be public relations document for the general public, but an interactive reference document, for people who work in, or report on, the energy production field.

Ted Rockwell

Comments

[Arnold Sabastian]

Ted and Jerry are great supporters of nuclear energy and people in the know know that. But, Ted’s “April Nuclear Energy Facts Report” contains a variety of comparative data – all cooked up to show the advantage of nuclear power. If nuclear energy needs this kind of brain washing, it is not worth having.
In the U.S., the taxpayers have developed, supported and allowed the industry to exploit it for profit. The industry as a whole (after receiving over a $150 billion in subsidies so far) wants to be eternal leaches on the public and that is why nuclear energy is having problems. Then we had diversions like the Three Mile Island incident. This was a big shocker rather than a great disaster. But, it was caused by the industry’s practice of hiring minimally qualified people to run a sophisticated technology. They still do.
If the industry can develop private capital showing the crazy statistics you have presented, then I will take my hat off to nuclear industry. If that happens, nuclear power industry will be a great success in the U.S.

[Rod Adams]

Arnold: You have expressed a view about the financial viability of nuclear energy and cast aspersions on the training and motivation of hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians, scientists, and accountants who have spent their professional lives learning to make beneficial use of materials like uranium, plutonium and thorium. As one of those "eternal leaches" for whom you have so little respect, I would like to offer you some thoughts.

I got excited about the potential for producing power from tiny quantities of uranium when I was quite young. My dad, a career utility engineer, showed me the difference between burning oil or coal and fissioning uranium without any smoke coming out of the stack. I decided to enter into the field by joining the Navy; my guidance counselor told me if I wanted to learn about nuclear energy, that was the best place to do it. I entered the US Naval Academy with the class of 1981 in the summer of 1977.

After college, technical training and two tours on submarines and a master's program between those two tours, I arrived at a point in 1991 where I felt compelled to spend a lot of time in a library. I needed to figure out why a significant portion of the world had turned away from the technology that made it possible for my sub to operate independently for months at a time without outside oxygen or a combustion product waste dump.

I had difficulty figuring out why anyone would willingly purchase a power plant that needed millions of gallons of fuel over its life when they could build an atomic engine that could produce the same amount of energy and run for decades on a few hundred pounds of material. I ran the numbers and ended up founding a company to design and build atomic engines.

Fast forward to today. People like Amory Lovins, Jim Riccio, and Joe Romm claim that nuclear is just too expensive to matter and point to the decisions made by "Wall Street" financiers. Setting aside for a moment the demonstrated poor judgement that those individuals have made for at least the past decade, I want to offer you some additional reasons why they might not want to finance large new nuclear power stations.

From the outside looking in, the reluctance to put up the capital for nuclear power plants may seem to be based on a fear of unpredictable project delays, regulatory changes that require construction tear down/rebuild in the middle of the process, memories of an operator error at a new plant that turned a billion dollar asset into a billion dollar liability, or memories of Shoreham, a plant that cost more than $5 billion to complete and license, but which got sold off for a buck without ever operating. (Long Island residents are still paying off that loan and breathing the emissions from the diesel generators and waste to energy plants that are providing the power that Shoreham should have supplied.)

I want to offer you a different, and potentially more sinister reason. In the financial world, nuclear energy faces the challenges mentioned above, but it is also unpopular because it is NOT a fast way to turn money borrowed from the lifetime savings of millions of pensioners into the immense returns favored by the "private equity" funds. Nuclear plants are long term investments that pay dividends in the form of clean, emission-free, nearly zero marginal cost electricity for many decades. They cannot be flipped or traded on unregulated exchanges.

Nuclear energy also poses a serious threat to the continued viability of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of already existing investments and debts.

The fossil fuel industry, including all of the discovery, extraction, transportation, and refining components that make it possible to operate a gas fired power plant in Maryland on a large quantity of reliably supplied molecules of fuel originally formed millions of years ago under swamps off the coast of Dubai and transported across the ocean in liquid form, is built on the notion that energy is scarce, but necessary. The scarcity keeps the prices well above the marginal cost of production - after all of the capital equipment is in place - and the necessary part ensures that there is a large, reliable market.

Now introduce a disruptive technology, one that can supply an entire city with electricity or push large ships across the ocean by breaking apart a few pounds of a relatively easy to find metal that the United States has in abundance, all while not producing any waste products at all that need to be dumped into the atmosphere.

If it was "easy" to build new nuclear plants, why would anyone invest in new fossil fuel capital equipment? In fact, if it was easy to build new nuclear plants, how would the people who already owe hundreds of billions on capital equipment and mineral rights pay off their multi-decade loans? If you attend black tie dinners in NYC with friends who are on the hook for those billions, would you want to tell them that you just enabled their competitor's
construction process to become easier?

That is a topic worthy of some serious investigation. (BTW - I came by my thoughts after dozens of presentations to several different types of potential investors.)

Best regards,

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
(former Engineer Officer, USS Von Steuben, SSBN 632)

[Craig Schumacher]

@Arnold Sabastian:

Can you detail the $150G you claim as subsidies to US nuclear power, and can you provide details as to the current hiring of minimally qualified staff for US nuclear power fecilities? Thanks in advance.

[Ted Rockwell]

We don't have to argue opinions about the amounts of subsidies. That's why we made a Facts Report. As stated in my previous post, the Energy Information Administration keeps those figures, and nuclear comes to a lot more than Arnold's $150M, so don't beat on him! I don't know where it all goes, but I suppose our competitors say the same thing about theirs.

My point is, that when you compare the subsidies on a $/kwh basis--what they paid for what they got--nuclear was $1.59 and wind was $23.37. This pays for their share of the DOE and the NRC, etc.

We can argue all we want about these things, but it will be more enlightening if we argue just about actual facts.

Go to it!

Ted Rockwell

[Ted Rockwell]

In case it wasn't clear from my previous post, the same process as checking the subsidy figures applies to the competence of the operators. There is no official table of competence with numerical ratings. What is the real-world equivalent?

The bottom-line measure of competence of plant operators is how good a job they do. When you have hundreds of plants operating for decades continuously, at over 90% of full nameplate rating, that produces a pretty reliable database.

By that criterion, the nuclear industry compares favorably with any industry I know. Does anyone know a better measure of operator competence? Do you know an industry that out-performs nuclear?

Ditto for economics: If operating nuclear plants are being fined and taxed for being too reliably profitable, isn't that the real-world fact that measures long-term profitability?

We don't have to speculate about these things. The facts are in. And as better facts become available, let's bring them in.

Ted Rockwell
Ted Rockwell

[Ted Rockwell]

Whoops! I just noticed, that while the rest of us were talking $150M (or G), Arnold actually wrote $150B in his initial post. If he means billion, then he does have to explain why his figure is so much higher than the official one.

Ball is in your court, Arnold. Do you know something we don't know?

[Martin Nicholson]

Ted, congratulations on an excellent report which I found very useful.

There are couple of "facts" in the Summary that probably deserve some qualification. Please understand that I am not an advocate of wind or solar power in making these comments, I just think some of the facts may be unnecessarily misleading.

D3: Wind-farms are shut down > 60% of the time.

I think this statement is referring the capacity factor being below 40%. This low capacity factor comes not from being shut down for most of the time but running at below full output for much of the time. In most places the wind is blowing 80% of the time and the wind turbines could be operating 60% of the time and still have a capacity factor below 40%. I apologise if you think this is nit picking.

D14: Towers require space around, with access roads, no large trees > 300 sq mi = 1 nuke (< 1 sq mi.)

Potentially correct depending on the number of turbines but most of the 300 sq mi could be used for crop land and grazing. A fairer comparison would be the turbine footprint and access roads which turn out to be about the same as for a nuclear plant for similar energy output.

E5: PV panels on all US south-facing roofs could generate only a few % of the electricity output from one nuke.

This statement seems very difficult to believe. The IEA did a study on this subject in 2002 in which they calculated that PV on all US roof area could generate 1,662 TWh/year. You would need over 200 GW of nuclear plant to produce that amount of electricity.

www.iea-pvps.org/products/download/rep7_04.pdf

A possible improvement to the report (if I may be so bold) is to use international units as well as miles, pounds and gallons. Those of us who live outside the US have to translate the units into km, kg and litres.

Thanks again for an excellent report

Martin Nicholson
Author of Energy in Changing Climate
(and a strong nuclear advocate)

[RamonGustav]

Hi I liked your note, add your site to your bookmarks.

[Business Electricity]

Wondered how much electricity you are actually using? We use a lot and pay a ton (PG&E still paying off for deregulation misadventure). I've thought about moving to solar but want to be sure it's not a heavy investment that displaces only a fraction of use.

[Jeff S.]

Does anyone know if Ted is still alive and well? This Blog seems to have been inactive for quite a number of months now. I suppose he might just not have anything new to post, or be too busy with other work - perhaps with the new Nuclear construction projects taking off this year, he might be in demand as a consultant or he might be doing public policy work with some thinktank or industry group or something?