The folly of making perfection the enemy of excellence

Posted on 28 January 2012 by Barry Brook

Ben Heard of DecarboniseSA asked if I’d like to reproduce his recent post, to give it exposure to the BNC audience. Given that I’m still in Spain and will be for a while, I’m happy to oblige. I think it’s an excellent piece — as I’ve come to expect from Ben — and I hope you find it interesting and useful.

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The folly of making perfection the enemy of excellence: a visit to Beverley Uranium Mine

by Ben Heard

Today I visited the Beverley uranium mine in northern South Australia, operated by Heathgate Resources. Heathgate have been a client of mine through ThinkClimate Consulting for the last two years for the delivery of mandatory greenhouse gas reporting under NGER.

View to the foot of the Gammon Ranges, on approach to Beverley

It was clear skies on the flight in, showing an amazing landscape at the foot of the Gammon Ranges on the border of the Arkaroola pastoral lease. From the air the low vegetation takes on a wonderful patterned effect. It is a stunning view, with visible water courses snaking across the land. It is easy from that height to envisage that it was once covered in ocean.  In both the landscape of eroded mountains and the creatures that inhabit it, tell-tale signs of truly ancient history abound.

As you approach the site in from the air, the various locations that make up the Beverley operation begin to appear. Each is truly unremarkable in size, no bigger than a block you might find in an industrial suburb of Adelaide. Even taken together it is a small imprint on the land.

The main facility of Beverley (foreground) and accomodation (background). Image is from Australian Geographic and provided by Heathgate

From ground level you could be forgiven for thinking the landscape of the plains is a “barren desert”. Nothing could be further from the truth. On a simple site visit I saw wedge tailed eagles, nesting and flying, a beautiful small lizard whose name escapes me and a truly wonderful example of a bearded dragon basking on the road. This critter was too bold for his own good and was impervious to our best efforts to shoo him away. He simply was not afraid. A true highlight of the day was the head of Health, Safety and Environment picking this feisty fella up on a shovel and carrying him into the scrub, hopefully to safety.

The regular wildlife surveys reveal a multitude of birds, insects and reptiles, from tiny banded snakes to big lace monitors and woma pythons. After enough rain, the local water course, previously dry as a bone, abounds in a fish called the Spangled Grunter. As a word-lover, I am so, so glad to know of the existence of something called a Spangled Grunter.

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Filed under: Nuclear, Policy | Leave a Comment »

Saludos desde Mataelpino

Posted on 26 January 2012 by Barry Brook

I haven’t published an energy or climate-related article on BNC for almost a week, for a good reason:

Damien Fordham, Barry Brook and Miguel Araújo enjoy the cool Spanish mountain air

Yes, I am enjoying myself (but working too!). We (me, and some colleagues from University of Adelaide: Corey Bradshaw, Damien Fordham and Salvador Herrando-Perez) are visiting a research collaborator in Spain (Miguel Araújo). Our workshop is being held at the El Bosque Hotel in Mataelpino, a village located 1,000 m up in the Madrid Sierra.

We’re investigating the shifts in the geographic ranges of over 200 bird species in the U.K. in relation to climate and land-use change, as well as developing a multi-species population viability analysis metapopulation model on the predator-prey-habitat interactions of the critically endangered Iberian lynx, rabbits, disease and climate change.

Although it’s the height of winter here, the region is currently experiencing a drought, and so conditions are very mild for this time of year. As such, the weather is incredibly beautiful, with bright blue skies and crisp dry air. Yesterday we went for a hike (at about 2,100 m elevation) in the Parque Natural de Peñalara. There was some snow about, but not a lot. This is the area where some of the scenes of one of my favourite movies was filmed. It’s just like being in Cimmeria…

Barry Brook at Peñalara Natural Park, Spain

I’ll be back in Adelaide in the middle of next week, with some new BNC posts on sustainable energy and climate.Meanwhile, feel free to use the comments list of this post as an especially open “Open Thread” — one not necessarily limited to climate or energy topics! As for me, I’ll sign off with some more photos (taken by Corey): Read more »

Filed under: Open Thread, Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Burning energy questions – ERoEI, desert solar, oil replacements, realistic renewables and tropical islands

Posted on 19 January 2012 by Barry Brook

Late last year, Tom Blees, I and a few other people from the International Award Committee of the Global Energy Prize answered reader’s energy questions on The Guardian’s Facebook page. The questions and answers were reproduced on BNC here. Now we’re  at it again, this time for the website Eco-Business.com (tagline: Asia Pacific’s sustainable business community). My section is hosted here (Part I), and Tom’s here (part III).

Part II, which I don’t reprint, answered by Iceland’s Thorsteinn Sigfusson, covered the relationship between large-hydro and climate change, and why solar conversion isn’t used more extensively.

I’ve reproduced my and Tom’s answers below.

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Barry Brook’s Q&A

Sunil Sood: What are the “Real Energy Payback Periods” for Solar PV and Wind Energy Systems? Taking in to account the energy consumed during manufacture of components, balance of systems, transportation, installation, servicing and variations in availability of energy and usage patterns, actual life expectancy (not theoretical).  Are we consuming more of ‘Dirty Coal’ to produce these so-called ‘Clean’ energies?

Calculating true energy paybacks are tough. Every energy system has initial investments of energy in the construction of the plant. It then must produce energy for a number of years until it reaches the end of its effective lifetime. Along the way, additional energy costs are incurred in the operation and maintenance of the facility, including any self-use of energy. The energy payback period is the time it takes a facility to “pay back” or produce an amount of energy equivalent to that invested in its start-up. A full accounting of energy payback includes not only the materials and energy that are input into the extraction (mining) and manufacturing processes, but also some pro-rata calculation for inputs into the factory that constructed the power generation facility, some estimate for human (worker) inputs, etc. As you can imagine, it can be difficult to fully integrate all possible inputs.

However, there are reasonable ballpark estimates for a range of technologies, including wind, solar PV, solar thermal and nuclear. Material inputs tells one part of the story, and some attempts are a standardized comparison are given here and here for a few technologies (wind, solar thermal, Gen III nuclear). As a short-cut for estimate of total energy-returned-on-energy-invested (ERoEI), we can use studies that have looked at the life-cycle emissions of alternative technologies, and then calibrate these against the emissions intensity of the background economy used to produce the technology. This gives us an approximate ERoEI. Based on a range of studies, the estimates range from 180 to 11 for Gen III nuclear, 30 for wind, 11 for solar thermal and 6 for solar PV. That is, your PV panels would repay their inputs 6 times over during their lifespan, and if they lasted on your roof for 25 years then the payback time is about 4 years. If a nuclear plant had a ERoEI of 50 and operated for 40 years, its energy payback time would be 10 months.

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Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Renewables | 26 Comments »

Could nuclear fission energy,etc., solve the greenhouse problem? The affirmative case

Posted on 14 January 2012 by Barry Brook

I have published a new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Policy with the title “Could nuclear fission energy,etc., solve the greenhouse problem? The affirmative case” (currently online first, DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2011.11.041 — it will appear in the print version, with volume/page details,  later this year). If you would like a PDF copy of the article, email me and I’ll be happy to send it to you.

My paper was written as a response to Ted Trainer’s (mostly) excellent 2010 article “Can renewables etc. solve the greenhouse problem? The negative case” — hence my particular choice of title. I explain the purpose of my piece in the introduction:

…In this context of needing to replace fossil fuels with some alternative(s), Trainer (2010) examined critically the adequacy of renewable sources in achieving this energy transition. He concluded that general climate change and energy problems cannot be solved without large-scale reductions in rates of economic production and consumption.

However, Trainer’s (2010) sub-analysis of nuclear energy’s technical potential involved only a cursory dismissal on the grounds of uranium supply and life-cycle emissions… In this paper… I argue that on technical and economic grounds, nuclear fission could play a major role (in combination with likely significant expansion in renewables) in future stationary and transportation energy supply, thereby solving the greenhouse gas mitigation problem.

Thus my aim was to critique the only substantive weakness I could identify in Trainer’s analysis — the short sub-section on nuclear energy.

The abstract provides the core thrust of my argument:

For effective climate change mitigation, the global use of fossil fuels for electricity generation, transportation and other industrial uses, will need to be substantially curtailed this century. In a recent Viewpoint in Energy Policy, Trainer (2010) argued that non-carbon energy sources will be insufficient to meet this goal, due to cost, variability, energy storage requirements and other technical limitations. However, his dismissal of nuclear fission energy was cursory and inadequate. Here I argue that fossil fuel replacement this century could, on technical grounds, be achieved via a mix of fission, renewables and fossil fuels with carbon sequestration, with a high degree of electrification, and nuclear supplying over half of final energy. I show that the principal limitations on nuclear fission are not technical, economic or fuel-related, but are instead linked to complex issues of societal acceptance, fiscal and political inertia, and inadequate critical evaluation of the real-world constraints facing low-carbon alternatives.

Below I’ll fill in a few details, but I’d of course encourage you to read the actual paper (contact details above for the PDF).

Read more »

Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear, Policy | 51 Comments »

The nuclear fission ‘Flyer’

Posted on 8 January 2012 by Barry Brook

Below is the foreword I wrote, on invitation of Chuck Till and Yoon Chang, for the book “Plentiful Energy” (I included a shorter version in my review of the book on Amazon).

In this short essay, I draw an analogy between the IFR and the Wright brothers’ 1903 ‘ ‘Flyer’. The idea is that successful technology — especially a revolutionary design — is built on the back of many learning-by-doing failures. Yet, once the initial problems have been solved, the remaining pathway for the technology’s development is one of incremental (but often rapid) evolutionary improvements.

I suspect that with just a few more years of serious investment in RD&D, the LFTR ‘Flyer’ could also launch. The molten-salt thorium reactor concept is extremely appealing, and the ORNL prototype, which ran in the mid- to late-1960s, showed real promise. In my view the Th232-U233 fuel cycle would make an excellent complement to the U238-Pu239 fuel cycle offered by the IFR, and both reactor types hold the promise of safe and inexhaustible energy.

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Foreword to: Plentiful Energy – The book that tells the story of the Integral Fast Reactor

On a breezy December day in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, N.C., a great leap forward in the history of technology was achieved. The Wright brothers had at last overcome the troubling problems of ‘inherent instability’ and ‘wing warping’ to achieve the first powered and controlled heavier-than-air flight in human history. The Flyer was not complicated by today’s standards – little more than a flimsy glider – yet its success proved to be a landmark achievement that led to the exponential surge of innovation, development and deployment in military and commercial aviation over the 20th century and beyond.

Nonetheless, the Flyer did not suddenly and miraculously assemble from the theoretical or speculative genius of Orville and Wilbur Wright. Quite the contrary – it was built on the back of many decades of physical, engineering and even biological science, hard-won experience with balloons, gliders and models, plenty of real-world trial-and-error, and a lot of blind alleys. Bear in mind that every single serious attempt at powered flight prior to 1903 had failed. Getting it right was tough!

Yet just over a decade after the triumphant 1903 demonstration, fighter aces were circling high above the battlefields of Europe in superbly maneuverable aerial machines, and in another decade, passengers from many nations were making long-haul international journeys in days, rather than months.

What has this got to do with the topic of advanced nuclear power systems, I hear you say? Plenty. The subtitle of Till and Chang’s book “Plentiful Energy” is “The complex history of a simple reactor technology, with emphasis on its scientific bases for non-specialists”. The key here is that, akin to powered flight, the technology for fully and safely recycling nuclear fuel turns out to be rather simple and elegant, in hindsight, but it was hard to establish this fact – hence the complex history. Like with aviation, there have been many prototype ‘fast reactors’ of various flavors, and all have had problems.

Read more »

Filed under: IFR FaD, Nuclear | 25 Comments »

Plentiful Energy – The book that tells the story of the Integral Fast Reactor

Posted on 5 January 2012 by Barry Brook

Yesterday the hard copy of the book “Plentiful Energy — The story of the Integral Fast Reactor” (CreateSpace, Dec 2011, 404 pages) arrived in the post. It is wonderful to see it in print, and now available for all to enjoy and absorb. I was honoured to play a small part in its realisation.

The subtitle of the book is “The complex history of a simple reactor technology, with emphasis on its scientific basis for non-specialists”. Written by the two leading engineers and Argonne National Laboratory Associate Directors behind the integral fast reactor, Dr. Charles E. Till and Dr. Yoon Il Chang, it is a landmark in the sustainable energy literature.

The first paragraph of the Acknowledgements explain the authors’ motivation for writing the book:

In beginning this book we were thinking of a volume on fast reactor technology in general to be done in a manner suited to the more technically inclined of the general public. There had been advances in this technology that had not been adequately covered in the literature of the time, we didn’t think, and we felt that a book on this area of nuclear technology could play a useful role. However, at about this time the enthusiastic advocacy of the IFR in the writings of Tom Blees, Steve Kirsch, Terry Robinson, Joe Shuster, Barry Brook and Jim Hansen began to appear.

In books and articles they outlined the merits of the Integral Fast Reactor and advocated its urgent deployment. Written by these highly technically literate non-specialists in the technology, they provided a general understanding of the IFR and what its implications for energy supplies would be for the future. And they did this admirably, describing accurately and vividly the capabilities of the IFR and the reasons for urgency in its deployment. They could only touch on the technology underlying it, however, and the why and how of the technology that caused it to work as it did, and the influence of the history of its development on the development itself, were obvious to us as being very important too. These things then became the focus of our efforts in this book…

After visiting Chicago and Idaho Falls in 2009/2010, talking to Yoon and Chuck, visiting the EBR-II site, and really getting immersed in the background to the technology, I was delighted to assist in the production of this book by reading and doing a technical edit on the entire draft manuscript — and so I think I can claim to be the first person to have read it all, other than the authors!

More about the book is given at its CreateSpace publishing page, and you can purchase it at Amazon.com (currently for $US 18). Obviously, I thoroughly recommend that all BNC readers get a copy.

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Filed under: Hot News, IFR FaD, Nuclear | 31 Comments »

2011 on Brave New Climate

Posted on 31 December 2011 by Barry Brook

So the year 2011 draws to a close. What a tumultuous year it was, particularly for nuclear energy! For climate change, alas, the freight train just keeps gathering steam.

For 2012, I will expect the unexpected, but also hope to see some better signs of progress towards the downfall of fossil fuels. But really, let’s be honest, that is a decadal rather than year prospect.

Anyway, to the BNC year in review. Below I list some of the most read, most commented and most stimulating or controversial subjects of the past BNC year.

1. Fukushima nuclear crisis: This was the biggest story of the year for the blog. Read about the early diagnosis and explanation, ongoing reports, some technical speculation, an essay on what we can and can’t design for,  preliminary and considered lessons learned, what the INES 7 rating means, and the need to avoid radiophobia with some common sense (and data). Another highlight is Ben Heard in his pre-decarbonisesa.com days…

2. Renewables in the context of effective CO2 abatement. Some useful analyses on CO2 avoidance cost with wind, climatologist James Hansen admonishes use to get real about how effective (or ineffective) green energy has been to date at displacing fossil fuels, an adventure to energy debates in wonderland, a look at geographical smoothing, an argument that an energy strategy without nuclear does not have history on its side, Geoff Russell deconstructs the situation for India and Switzerland, and I do so for Germany.

3. More depressing climate trends. Sea ice declines and emissions rise, the cost of climate extremes, complications and realities, a plea to clean up the climate ‘debate’, why the argument of ‘no recent warming’ is statistically invalid, and a graphical review of the grim numbers. Read more »

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A | 19 Comments »

Global Energy Prize and Breakthrough Institute

Posted on 27 December 2011 by Barry Brook

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the 2008 International Global Energy Prize award ceremony

The Christmas to New Year period is traditionally ‘hibernation mode’ for blogs, when page views and comment counts plummet (my hits have dropped about 70% compared to early December!).

I suppose this is a time when people find better things to do than sit in front of a computer screen (family time, good food, beach/snow [depending on hemisphere], travel, reading, new games and toys, whatever). So during this activity lull, it’s as good a time as any to announce a few little personal triumphs.

Within the last month or so I received two tokens of recognition for my work in the sustainable energy space. To explain what, I reproduce below a short write-up done by the University of Adelaide’s media office. I’ve added a few relevant hyperlinks and cites, for further information.

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International recognition for Environment Professor

The University of Adelaide’s Professor Barry Brook — an environmental scientist who holds strong pro-nuclear energy views — has received recognition from two prominent international bodies.

Professor Brook, who is Director of Climate Science at the University’s Environment Institute, has become the first Australian appointed to the international award committee of the $1.2 million Global Energy Prize.

Known as the “Nobel Prize of Energy”, this is the most prestigious international award granted for outstanding scientific achievements in the field of energy that have benefited the human race. From Wikipedia:

The Global Energy Prize is an independent award for outstanding scientific research and technological development in energy, which contribute to efficiency and environmentally friendly energy sources for the benefit of humanity.

The award was established in Russia, through the non-commercial Global Energy partnership and with the support of leading Russian energy companies Gazprom, FGC UES and Surgutneftegaz. Laureates are presented with their award by the President of Russia.

The Global Energy Prize promotes energy development as a science and demonstrates the importance of international energy cooperation, as well as public and private investment in energy supply, energy efficiency and energy security. It stands for the belief that advances in science and technology should serve the long-term interests of human development, improving social security and living standards of people in all countries.

Barry Brook

Professor Brook has also been made a 2012 Senior Fellow at the California-based think tank, The Breakthrough Institute.

The Institute is dedicated to “modernizing liberal thought for the 21st Century” and creating “secure, free, prosperous, and fulfilling lives on an ecologically vibrant planet”.

Both appointments are in recognition of Professor Brook’s work on energy policy. He holds strong views on the use of nuclear energy and alternative energy systems from an economic, environmental and scientific point of view.

“I’m honoured to have been chosen for the international selection committee of the Global Energy Prize and as a fellow of The Breakthrough Institute within a short space of each other,” Professor Brook says.

“Although many environmentalists consider nuclear power to be somehow anti-environment, it’s my firm belief that nuclear energy actually offers a viable low-carbon, low-impact alternative that cannot be matched by other low-carbon solutions.

Read more »

Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 29 Comments »

Feeding 10 billion in 2050′s sauna (Part III)

Posted on 21 December 2011 by Barry Brook

What future for agriculture on a hotter planet?

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous article on BNC was: Feeding the billions on a hotter planet (Part II)

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Welcome to Part III of my still presumptuously titled series on feeding the world in 2050.

I spent the first two parts of this series looking at global authorities like the FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation) with its predictive obsession and its policy associate IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute) with its meat obsession. Writing in a similarly obsessed country with far more cattle than people, I felt compelled to add a special section on protein and to also quantify the place of meat, particularly sheep and cattle meat, on the world food stage. Cattle are a major player in climate change, biodiversity loss and general environmental destruction but both they and sheep are globally irrelevant to food security. But worse than being irrelevant, their net contribution may well be negative. Here are some of the negative impacts:

  1. Reductions in the productivity of the land that produces real food. These reductions are via physical soil damage, consumption of crop residues which protect the soil, the deliberate burning of areas that are croppable to maintain them as pasture.
  2. Fouling water. Lack of clean water is the second biggest cause of malnutrition.
  3. Acting as disease generators. I mentioned Cryptosporidium in the last post, but livestock are also major generators of novel rotavirus strains. Rotavirus kills a million children annually, with vaccination not always available in the developing world. We don’t need new strains.
  4. The direct sickening and killing of children and women via the use of animal dung as a fuel.
  5. The reduction in the global food supply by making feed production more profitable than food production. The last impact doesn’t always apply to sheep and cattle but is more general. People with the perspicacity to easily recognise this problem in the context of biofuels are almost universally blind to its existence elsewhere.

Today, in the last of the series, I want to look some standout scientific work that breaks the predictive meat obsessed mould. This is work by Jonathan Foley and Navin Ramankutty and a sizeable group of associated researchers. I’ll call this the “FR” work, but keep in mind that there are many other researchers involved.

This work breaks the mold because it isn’t concerned with mere prediction, like that of the FAO. Nor is it obsessed with meat as a food but rather it recognises meat’s central role in reducing global food Calories.

Read more »

Filed under: Emissions, Future, Impacts | 51 Comments »

Fukushima and nuclear power, 9 months on

Posted on 17 December 2011 by Barry Brook

As many BNC readers already know, I was invited to write an opinion essay for ABC Environment and The Drum: Unleashed on the Fukushima situation as we approach the end of 2011. On the latter site, the essay was entitled “Fukushima, nuclear and the rational approach to energy” and drew >300 comments (many rather heated) before the post was closed after 24 hours. Anyway, here’s a chance for you to continue to conversation, and perhaps to provide a correction to some of the more… unenlightened… comments that appeared over on the ABC stream.

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It’s been quite a year for nuclear power. The dramatic events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in north-east Japan March and April 2011, following the Great Tōhoku Earthquake and tsunami, made headlines around the world. It constituted the most significant nuclear emergency in 25 years.

Nine months on, engineers continue to work to secure the plant and transition to a state termed ‘cold shutdown’, whereby the radioactively decaying reactor fuel is consistently cooled to below 100°C. The mangled reactor buildings now have new protective shells to keep out the weather, and an elaborate water purification system on site is working steady to decontaminate the large amount of contaminated cooling water that accumulated in holding tanks during the months following the accident.

The evacuation zone of 20 km around the plant remains in place, with more than 100,000 people displaced. There are medium-term plans to scrape away the topsoil in those ‘hotspots’ where radioactive cesium-137 was deposited (somewhat randomly) by the winds, following steam venting and the hydrogen explosions that occurred in the first week of the crisis. Once this is done, it is probable that residents will be allowed to return to the tsunami- and earthquake-ravaged area, to rebuild their lives.

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Filed under: Nuclear, Policy | 82 Comments »

Draft Energy White Paper – Discussion Thread

Posted on 14 December 2011 by Barry Brook

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Guest post by John Morgan. John runs R&D programmes at a Sydney startup company. He has a PhD in physical chemistry, and research experience in chemical engineering in the US and at CSIRO. He is a regular commenter on BNC.

Energy minister Martin Ferguson has today released the Draft Energy White Paper 2011 (The Australian, ABC). The Government is soliciting submissions , so with a quick review, I’d like to open some discussion on possible material for a submission.

So what’s in the white paper? In short, lots of new gas development, energy market privatization, and “…the Gillard Government unambiguously does not support the use of nuclear energy in Australia”.

But Ferguson does seem to be determined to inject some ambiguity into the matter. Elaborating on this unambiguous position he explained:

Nuclear for Australia is always there as an option. We don’t have to invest in R and D and innovation on that front. Other nations are the specialists. But if we get to the end of this debate some years in the future and we haven’t made the necessary breakthrough on clean energy at a low cost outcome, then nuclear is there for Australia to blow off the shelf after a debate in Australia.

His Opposition counterpart Ian Macfarlane is singing from the same song sheet:

We haven’t had any active consideration of nuclear energy in Australia but the fact remains that nuclear energy is the one base load technology that is clean energy and until we find a better alternatives to clean, zero-emission energy than nuclear, then it’s going to remain on the agenda of other countries.

And of course the Greens are furious.

The white paper itself expresses this unambiguous position in remarkably equivocal terms. The full position on nuclear power is buried right at the back of the document on page 223 in a text box aside from the main text, where it is offered as a ‘contingency’ consideration. I will quote this in full:

• Australia’s plentiful natural endowment of a range of low‐cost energy resources has played a major role in shaping our energy generation base around coal and gas.

• Other countries have chosen to adopt nuclear power often as a way of diversifying their energy mix. As one of the world’s largest uranium exporters, Australia has respected and supported this right through trade under strict safety and security safeguards. Nuclear‐powered electricity generation currently produces around 16 per cent of the world’s electricity – around 10 times Australia’s total annual electricity generation. Undeniably this results in lower global carbon emissions.

Read more »

Filed under: Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 78 Comments »

The Guardian questions: thorium, shale gas, off-grid renewables, and much more…

Posted on 11 December 2011 by Barry Brook

The Guardian newspaper’s Environment Facebook page recently put the following to their readers:

Ask the Global Energy Prize‘s expert panel your toughest energy questions and they’ll be back here on Friday with their answers. What should power our cities, homes and industry in the future — renewable energy, nuclear power, or fossil fuels? How significant will shale gas be? And what role will oil play in our energy future? Just post your energy Qs here. 5 experts will answer the 10 best questions: Harry Fair (US), Tom Blees (US), Thorsteinn Sigfusson (Iceland), Barry Brook (Australia) and Klaus Riedle (Germany).

Below are the six questions put to me (Barry Brook) and Tom Blees — and our answers, of course! The original answers were not hyperlinked, but if you are curious about anything we mention here, try searching for the keywords on this website (e.g. type bravenewclimate.com/?s=thorium in your browser address bar), or on Google (e.g. type  ”ammonia site:bravenewclimate.com” in your search box).

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BARRY W. BROOK

Q1. Do you agree that Thorium power is a safe, plentiful, and viable energy source that should be investigated as a matter of urgency?

Yes, thorium power is an attractive prospect for the next generation of nuclear reactors, but then surprisingly enough, so is uranium.

For today’s reactors, it takes about 150 tonnes of natural uranium to fuel a 1 gigawatt (GW) power plant for an entire year (the total energy produced is called a gigawatt year, or GWyr).  One GWe of power (the ‘e’ stands for electrical power rather than ‘t’ for thermal power, or heat) is a huge amount. It’s enough to run 65 million desk lamps (assuming they used 15 W compact fluorescent globes), or more practically, to satisfy today’s electricity demand of a typical UK city of more than half a million people. For comparison, to deliver a GWyr of energy using a coal-fired power station, about 4 million tonnes of coal must be burned (the amount can vary depending on the grade of coal).

Most of the nuclear power stations in use today are called ‘thermal reactors’, or ‘light water reactors’ (LWR). They use ordinary (‘light’) water as a coolant, which take heat away from the reactor core. The water also acts as a ‘moderator’, slowing down subatomic particles called neutrons, which shoot out of the atom’s nucleus when a nuclear chain reaction is underway. These neutrons are responsible for causing unstable heavy atomic nuclei to split apart and release energy. Other reactor designs use heavy water (enriched in ‘heavy hydrogen’: deuterium) or graphite (a form of carbon found in pencils) to moderate the neutrons (the latter is used in the UK’s gas-cooled Magnox reactors, for instance), but the effect is similar. These nuclear power plants need, as fuel, a form (isotope) of uranium that has 143 neutrons in its nucleus, called 235U (or ‘uranium 235’). Yet natural uranium contains 0.7% 235U; the other 99.3% is composed of an isotope that has 3 additional neutrons, called 238U (or ‘uranium 238’). As a result, today’s LWRs are able to extract less than 1% of the atomic energy content of uranium. The rest is discarded, unused, either as spent fuel (‘nuclear waste’) or as depleted tails (the leftovers, composed mostly of 238U, after the fuel has been ‘enriched’ to raise the concentration of 235U to 3 – 5%).

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Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Renewables | 34 Comments »

Open Thread 20

Posted on 7 December 2011 by Barry Brook

The previous Open Thread has gone past is running of the recent posts lists and getting tough to find, so it’s time for a fresh palette.

The Open Thread is a general discussion forum, where you can talk about whatever you like — there is nothing ‘off topic’ here — within reason. So get up on your soap box! The standard commenting rules of courtesy apply, and at the very least your chat should relate to the general content of this blog.

The sort of things that belong on this thread include general enquiries, soapbox philosophy, meandering trains of argument that move dynamically from one point of contention to another, and so on — as long as the comments adhere to the broad BNC themes of sustainable energy, climate change mitigation and policy, energy security, climate impacts, etc.

You can also find this thread by clicking on the Open Thread category on the cascading menu under the “Home” tab.

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A new temperature reconstruction by Foster & Rahmstorf (Env. Res. Lett.), which removes ENSO signals, volcanic eruptions and solar cycles, and standardises the baseline.

I’m currently in Auckland, New Zealand, attending the 25th annual International Congress on Conservation Biology. A 4-day event, it’s a great chance to network and catch up with my colleagues, hear the latest goings on in the field of conservation research, and also give a few presentations (me and my students). I’m talking tomorrow on the impacts of climate change in Oceania — this covers a co-authored paper I have coming out in an upcoming special issue of Pacific Conservation Biology (which was actually the first journal I ever published in, back in 1997), entitled: “Climate change, variability and adaptation options for Australia”.

A conversation starter: George Monbiot has written a superb piece on nuclear power and the integral fast reactor over at The Guardian. It is titled “We need to talk about Sellafield, and a nuclear solution that ticks all our boxes” (subtitle: There are reactors which can convert radioactive waste to energy. Greens should look to science, rather than superstition). My favourite quote:

Anti-nuclear campaigners have generated as much mumbo jumbo as creationists, anti-vaccine scaremongers, homeopaths and climate change deniers. In all cases, the scientific process has been thrown into reverse: people have begun with their conclusions, then frantically sought evidence to support them.

The temptation, when a great mistake has been made, is to seek ever more desperate excuses to sustain the mistake, rather than admit the terrible consequences of what you have done. But now, in the UK at least, we have an opportunity to make amends. Our movement can abandon this drivel with a clear conscience, for the technology I am about to describe ticks all the green boxes: reduce, reuse, recycle.

George’s essay includes details on the integral fast reactor and the S-PRISM modules that GEH hope to build in the UK (to, as a first priority, denature the separated plutonium stocks, and thereafter generate lots of carbon-free electricity). The fully referenced version is here.

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Filed under: Nuclear, Open Thread | 389 Comments »

Feeding 10 billion on a hotter planet (Part II)

Posted on 4 December 2011 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous article on BNC was: Feeding the billions in 2050′s sauna (Part I)

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Welcome to Part II of my presumptuously titled series on feeding the world in 2050. Before concluding where we left off with the analysis of the foods which the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) thinks are globally important, we need a short prologue on protein.

Protein prologue

Any suggestion based on Calorie counts that the net contribution of beef or other meats to global food security may be trifling or even negative brings instant feedback about protein. The presumption is that it is adequate protein, particularly animal protein, which is the key requirement for beating malnutrition. This is inevitable for two reasons: first, the absence of medical malnutrition literature from the best seller list, and second, we have all spent our entire lifetime swimming in meat industry propaganda … much of it focused on protein.

We need some historical perspective on protein.

There’s nothing quite like being the first, and protein can lay good claim to being the first critical nutrient discovered in the early days of modern chemistry. Nitrogen is protein’s key chemical component and one of the first to be accurately measured. Consequently, quite precise measurements of protein utilisation in people have been around for almost 200 years.

Early investigators fed dogs pure sugar diets and watched them die. Absence of protein was the explanation they eventually settled on. What else could it have been? In 1815, vitamins (in any measurable sense) were well beyond the knowledge horizon, so there was really only one candidate. By 1842, protein was pronounced the only true nutrient and the sole provider of energy to the muscles. It mattered not that measurements on prison work gangs showed no differences in protein utilisation on rest days and hard treadmill days. The history of protein spin is a picturesque tale of arrogant opinionated people holding fast to beliefs in the face of overwhelming data. Not everyone was fooled. US Yale University researchers in 1907 took athletes and halved their protein intake during a mammoth 5 month piece of live-in research. Over the 5 months, far from fading away, the subjects got stronger by 35%. The protein myth charged on regardless, pushed by the then head of the US Agriculture Department who thought (seriously) that when people could choose food without regard for cost or availability, they would choose an optimal diet. i.e., the rich must know best.

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Filed under: Future, Impacts | 35 Comments »

Solar combined with wind power: a way to get rid of fossil fuels?

Posted on 30 November 2011 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Jani-Petri Martikainen. Jani-Petri is a theoretical physicist doing fundamental research in the field of ultracold quantum gases. Most of his current research activities are computational and involve bosonic or fermionic atoms in optical lattices. He has a lively interest on environmental, climate, and energy issues. He runs the blog PassiiviIdentiteetti, which is mostly written in Finnish.

Jani’s previous post, Geographical wind smoothing, supergrids and energy storage, focused on distributed wind alone. In this follow-up, he turns his attention to solar combined with wind.

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Earlier, I wrote on how crucially an unreliable sources of power such as wind depend on fossil fuels. Based on real world production data from around the world, I noted that even with massively distributed production wind power is very variable and necessitates a reliable backup power source (typically from fossil fuels) which must be able to produce essentially all the power society consumes. A way around this problem would be a massive energy storage, but I found the size of the required storage to be unreasonably large.

One typical response to findings such as these, is to brush them aside by claiming that even if true, the results will not matter since we will have many different renewable energy sources acting together (as if there is some “harmony” in two essentially random signals). Most importantly quite a few people base their vision of future energy production on a mixture of wind and solar power. For this reason I felt the need to return to this problem so that also solar power is considered. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a good source for real world production data for solar power. The best I have come up with are images (typically of the daily production), but raw data is better hidden.

However, since solar power (without storage) production is proportional to insolation we can use meteorological data as a reasonable starting point. US has a National solar radiation database which has large collection of insolation modelling data around USA. From this data they have also formed a “typical meteorological year 3 (TMY3)” datasets. (There are some quirks in the construction of TMY3 that I frown upon. For example, after El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo eruptions insolation was reduced, but these periods were apparently excluded from the TMY3 as atypical. Of course they were atypical, but they are still things that do happen and whose effects must be considered. However, I suspect that the effect due to eruptions was still minor in US.) As my insolation data I take the average of TMY3 data from six different class I sites (class I has the best data) in three different states: Prescott Love and Tucson Airport in Arizona, Arcata Airport and Fresno Yosemite Airport in California, and Denver Airport and Limon in Colorado. These sites have an average latitude similar to southern Spain. (Why did I choose these sites? Well, being lazy I started from the entries listed in alphabetical order by states and picked the first southern states I encountered.)

Somewhat annoyingly only hourly data is provided. We know from BNC among others that solar power (especially PV) can have large swings on shorter timescales. Therefore, this limitation may have important consequences. Nevertheless, let us ignore the torpedoes with an understanding that the solar power we talk about here is such that sufficient storage has been already implemented to smooth out hourly variation in production. So keep in mind, that the starting assumptions for solar production have a bias towards the optimistic side. Since the production data for wind power is given every 5 minutes I will linearly interpolate the solar insolation data to deduce the production of solar power every 5 minutes (link to the data here). As in the earlier study the data corresponds to one year starting July the 1st. and the consumption data corresponds to the Bonneville Power Authority load with a possible scale factors to suit my needs.

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Filed under: Emissions, Renewables | 111 Comments »

Summary of China’s fast reactor programme

Posted on 27 November 2011 by Barry Brook

China is looking seriously at a range of nuclear options. From the commercial side of things, the country is building over 25 light water reactors, including four of the new US-designed AP1000. The Chinese are also pursuing a range of advanced reactor programmes, including gas-cooled pebble-bed modular reactors (the 210 MWe HTR-PM), a thorium-focused research initiative based on the molten-salt reactor, and an ambitious fast spectrum reactor research, demonstration and deployment (RD&D) plan. It is the latter that I wish to discuss here.

Some of you would already know that the Chinese are in the late stages of planning the construction of two Russian-designed BN-800 sodium-cooled fast reactors, to be located at a site on China’s east coast. These are scaled-up (880 MWe) versions of the BN-600, which has run successfully in Russia for a number of decades. There is also the Chinese Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR), a 25 MWe demonstration unit near Bejing.

Before I get to the main point of this post, it is worth reproducing this WNA summary of the current Chinese builds:

In China, R&D on fast neutron reactors started in 1964. A 65 MWt fast neutron reactor – the Chinese Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR) – was designed by 2003 and built near Beijing by Russia’s OKBM Afrikantov in collaboration with OKB Gidropress, NIKIET and Kurchatov Institute. It achieved first criticality in July 2010, can generate 20 MWe and was grid connected in July 2011 at 40% of power, to ramp up to 20 MWe by December. Core height is 45 cm, and it has 150 kg Pu (98 kg Pu-239). Temperature reactivity and power reactivity are both negative.

A 1000 MWe Chinese prototype fast reactor (CDFR) based on CEFR is envisaged with construction start in 2017 and commissioning as the next step in CIAE’s program. This will be a 3-loop 2500 MWt pool-type, use MOX fuel with average 66 GWd/t burn-up, run at 544°C, have breeding ratio 1.2, with 316 core fuel assemblies and 255 blanket ones, and a 40-year life. This is CIAE’s “project one” CDFR. It will have active and passive shutdown systems and passive decay heat removal. This may be developed into a CCFR of about the same size by 2030, using MOX + actinide or metal + actinide fuel. MOX is seen only as an interim fuel, the target arrangement is metal fuel in closed cycle.

However, in October 2009 an agreement was signed with Russia’s Atomstroyexport to start pre-project and design works for a commercial nuclear power plant with two BN-800 reactors in China, referred to by CIAE as ‘project 2′ Chinese Demonstration Fast Reactors (CDFR) – in China, with construction to start in 2013 and commissioning 2018-19. These would be similar to the OKBM Afrikantov design being built at Beloyarsk 4 and due to start up in 2012. In contrast to the intention in Russia, these will use ceramic MOX fuel pellets. The project is expected to lead to bilateral cooperation of fuel cycles for fast reactors.

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Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear | 56 Comments »

CO2 is a trace gas, but what does that mean?

Posted on 23 November 2011 by Barry Brook

Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and most other long-lived greenhouse gases (i.e., barring short-lived water vapour), are considered ‘trace gases’ because their concentration in the atmosphere is so low. For instance, at a current level of 389 parts per million, CO2 represents just 0.0389% of the air, by volume. Tiny isn’t it? How could such a small amount of gas possibly be important?

This issue is often raised by media commentators like Alan Jones, Howard Sattler, Gary Hardgrave and others, when arguing that fossil fuel emissions are irrelevant for climate change. For instance, check out the Media Watch ABC TV story (11 minute video and transcript) called “Balancing a hot debate“.

I’ve seen lots of analogies drawn, in an attempt to explain the importance of trace greenhouse gases. One common one is to point out that a tiny amount of cynanide, if ingested, will kill you. Sometimes a little of a substance can have a big impact.  But actually, there’s a better way to get people to understand, and that’s to follow one of the guiding principles of this blog: “Show me the numbers!“.

In response to a recent post by John Cook on George Pell, religion and climate change, commenter Glenn Tamblyn pointed out an interesting fact: Every cubic metre of air contains roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of CO2. In scientific notation, this is 1022 — a rather large number.

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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Sceptics | 53 Comments »

Feeding the billions in 2050′s sauna (Part I)

Posted on 20 November 2011 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous article on BNC was: The Swiss army nuclear knife

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During the past few years, all the world’s major science journals have had a steady stream of papers on the challenge of feeding 9 to 10 billion people on a warming planet in 2050. They have been joined by reports from bodies with varying prestige and influence likeInternational Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), The World Bank and the Royal Society. CSIRO has a long history of interest in the issue and even billionaire packager Anthony Pratt is getting in on the act telling Australia that since it can produce food for 200 million people, it has a responsibility to do so.

All these reports pay swollen lip service to the food security issues of the poor. All rightly regard the current global levels of stunting and malnutrition … running at 30 percent or more in many poor populations … as unconscionable.

Do we simply need more of the same?

Most of these papers and reports fall into two groups. The first looks at population and food intake trends and guesstimates that adding 2 to 3 billion people by 2050 will require between 70 percent and 100 percent more food. They typically then suggest places where large buckets of money might be deposited to fund research directed at meeting these projections.

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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Impacts | 41 Comments »

The IFR vs the LFTR: An Exchange of Emails

Posted on 17 November 2011 by Barry Brook

With regards to Generation IV nuclear fission technology, most of the attention on BNC has been on the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), for reasons explained in this post, which I quote:

The focus of this series (IFR FaD) is aimed squarely at the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) rather than other Gen IV designs, such as the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) or Advanced High Temperature Reactor (AHTR). The reason for this is two fold: (i) I’m more familiar with the IFR technology (and I am in regular email exchange with the world experts on this technology, via SCGI and other links), and (ii) LFTR has a strong and welcoming advocacy group elsewhere, and I’d encourage people to go there to ask more questions about that technology … However, I should make it quite clear that I’m not “for IFR and against LFTR” — both 4th generation nuclear designs hold great appeal to me, and I will sometimes consider IFR vs LFTR comparisons in the IFR FaD series, as a point of comparison or contrast.

I think we need to be pursuing the final stages of research, development and commercial-scale deployment of all of these next-generation fission technologies, since it would require such a trivial input compared to the huge investment that will be required anyway in energy infrastructure over the next few decades (>$26 trillion globally by 2030). However, it is nevertheless useful to consider the relative merits of the individual technologies, and I hope to look at this from a number of angles in blog posts during 2012.

For some initial ideas and to initiate discussion, below I reproduce an email exchange on this matter, including aspects of commercial readiness,  that was recently posted on the Science Council for Global Initiatives website. The conversation is from three highly experienced nuclear physicists/engineers, Dr George Stanford, Dr Dan Meneley, and Prof. Per Peterson. I’m sure this will stir some debate! (And, as I said, I will have more to post on this in the new year).

I have also added a few hyperlinks to clarify terms that may be unfamiliar to the general reader; please note that the links and pictures were added by me (Barry Brook), not the original correspondents.

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G. Stanford wrote (11-29-10):

We’ll see what others on this list have to say, but in my opinion, Carlsen’s enthusiasm for thorium is premature, to say the least.  The ONLY significant advantage a thorium cycle would have over fast reactors with metallic fuel (IFR/PRISM) is its lower requirement for start up fissile.  That advantage is offset by the fact that the thorium reactor is at a stage of development roughly equivalent to where the IFR was in 1975 — a promising idea with a lot of R&D needed to before it’s ready for a commercial demonstration — which puts its deployment about 20 years behind what could be the IFR’s schedule.  The thorium community has not yet even agreed on what will be the optimum thorium technology to pursue.

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Filed under: IFR FaD, Nuclear | 133 Comments »

Energy Storage Discussion Thread

Posted on 13 November 2011 by Barry Brook

For high-penetration utility-scale wind, we'll need much bigger batteries than these...

Debate over large-scale energy storage is a regular theme in the comments on this blog. The post is intended to be a place to centralise this discussion. Some questions that might be considered in the comment thread:

1. What is the cost (per Watt hour, kWh, MWh, GWh — how does this cost scale up, and how does this scale as higher levels of reliability are required, e.g. energy delivered on demand 90% vs 99% vs 99.9% of the time)?

2. What is the energy density of the proposed storage technology currently, and what are its physical limits? (i.e., how good can it get, with perfect engineering, and how long can the energy store be held?)

3. If the storage technology becomes cheap, what is to stop baseload plants like coal and nuclear from undercutting renewables, given that they can charge large batteries in low-demand times and then sell the power during peak (high-price) periods?

4. What are the material inputs for the storage system, and how does this effect the energy returned on energy invested of the paired energy technology (e.g., what is the EROEI and life-cycle CO2 emissions of, say, a 2kW solar PV system with no storage vs the same system with 10 hours battery storage to cover nights [ignoring winter and long cloudy periods])?

5. Lifetime: how many cycles can the storage technology handle (100, 10,000, near-indefinite [e.g. conversion to hydrogen])?

6. Does the storage technology need its own power-generation system, or can it be paired to the original generating technology (e.g., a molten salt heat storage can create steam for use in the same turbine set as the solar thermal plant itself, whereas compressed air energy storage for wind requires a different generation system to the wind itself)?

(If people can propose some other general questions, I’ll add them to this list)

Anyway, to kick the discussion off, here is something sent to me by George Stanford, in response to the following missive:
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Filed under: Nuclear, Renewables | 214 Comments »

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