China's Coming Nuclear Power Boom

Ramping up growth in the nuclear industry will be crucial to achieving China’s emissions goals.

Get ready for China’s nuclear industry to boom (no pun intended): The China Nuclear Energy Association (CNEA) predicts that eight new nuclear reactors will begin operation this year. If so, that will mark the largest single-year increase in nuclear power production in China’s history.

China is looking to more than double the number of nuclear power plants in operation — there are currently 23 operating, with 26 under construction. If all the projects are completed as planned, it would bring China’s nuclear energy capacity up to 49.9 gigawatts, compared to the current capacity of 21.4 gigawatts. Plus, CNEA expects an additional six to eight nuclear energy projects to be approved this year.

Zhang Huazhu, the chairman of CNEA, called 2015 “an important yet for China to resume its nuclear power program.” Like many countries, China slammed the brakes on nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in Japan; the industry in China is just beginning to regain its footing. A rapid expansion of nuclear power is critical for weaning China off of coal and reaching emissions reduction targets, but safety concerns (and public fears) continue to plague the industry. In 2014, China didn’t approve a single new nuclear power project, and investment in the industry dropped by 6.6 percent, Zhang said, speaking an industry conference in Beijing.

Currently, nuclear energy accounts for less than 3 percent of China’s total power generation. “In the coming decade, China will maintain a rapid pace of nuclear power development so that it can reach the target of nuclear installations by 2020 and make better use of energy,” Zhang said.  China’s stated goal is to have 58 gigawatts in nuclear power capacity by 2020, but that goal may be difficult to reach given the slowdown in construction after 2011.

Germany’s Nuclear Cutback Is Darkening European Skies

If Germany wants to phase out nuclear power, coal is the only realistic option

 Germany’s influence in Europe is unquestionable, but it appears that some of its neighbors may be adversely affected by recent German decisions; and Greece is not the neighbor in question here. France has been reporting heavy levels of air pollution which authorities in the country are blaming on diesel cars there. But the real culprit may in fact be the renewed German penchant for coal power.

Up until a few years ago, Germany, along with France, was at the forefront of nuclear power use. But after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, the Germans were quick to begin phasing out nuclear power. In some countries, phasing out nuclear power would be easy, but in 2011, Germany obtained 25% of its power from nuclear sources. This nuclear power generated no carbon dioxide emissions of course, and little in the way of other forms of pollution. But after starting the phase out of nuclear power, Germany still needed to find a source of replacement power.

Renewables like wind and solar sound great in theory, but the sporadic nature of power generation from those sources makes them imperfect substitutes for the consistency of nuclear. In that sense then, battery solutions like that announced by Tesla last week, or the solutions from General Electric, may eventually provide a solution for Germany. But as of now, the grid battery industry is still too nascent to provide serious help to Germany.

 

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Rethinking the U.S. Surrender on Nuclear Power

By

Eric McFarland

April 27, 2015 7:11 p.m. ET

 

The ghosts of Lenin and Mao might well be smirking. Communist and authoritarian nations are moving to take global leadership in, and profit from, the commercial use of nuclear power, a technology made possible by the market-driven economies of the West. New research and development could enable abundant, affordable, low-carbon energy as well as further beneficial products for industry and medicine

Yet outdated and burdensome regulations and restrictions have stifled nuclear innovation in the U.S. and other Western nations, and are pushing these opportunities to China and Russia.
China is joining Russia to build five new reactors in Iran—regardless of what becomes of the current negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program. Beijing and Moscow are also marketing nuclear technology and infrastructure to other Mideast and Asian nations. China and Russia have a clear commercial and strategic purpose in advancing nuclear technology abroad, technology that the West seems loath to exploit.

If the world is serious about shifting to low-carbon energy, nuclear energy is the most direct path. Nuclear power is the densest (in watts per square meter of land) and safest (in deaths per joule) form of energy known to man. Yet the expansion of nuclear power and other commercial applications of nuclear reactions have stalled in the West since the 1980s.

This is partly due to fears of unseen radiation and memories of accidents like the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, at a facility originally designed to produce weapons, in the now defunct Soviet Union. Mainly, though, what holds back nuclear power is its high cost, which is almost entirely due to government regulations and restrictions that have kept the industry confined to minor yet expensive improvements to existing reactor designs. Out-of-the-box thinking on new reactor concepts that could be far cheaper and safer is systemically discouraged. The most common retort to any new idea in the nuclear industry is along the lines of “that will never be approved in my lifetime.”

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Nuclear Power’s Place in the Green Energy Market

By Lee S. Gliddon III

Nuclear power is becoming recognized as a “green energy” source more and more each day.  As environmentalists and the public at large become more educated in regards to nuclear power, the positive perception of nuclear power grows.

Considering the cost, emissions, carbon footprint, renewable aspects, and the improvements already present in new nuclear technology; nuclear power as a whole is an environmental advantage for countries that champion and move forward with it as a source.  These same countries are realizing an economic boom, while those abandoning nuclear power are falling into difficult economic times.  When economies falter, the environment often suffers greatly, this offers yet another reason for countries to embrace nuclear power.

Cost of Power

Nuclear power has been determined to be an inexpensive energy source in regards raw materials required and cost to produce.  

All energy production requires raw materials to create usable electricity.  Nuclear power, by a factor of millions provides the greatest multiplier from raw material to usable energy.   That fact; makes nuclear power incredibly “green”.

The actual cost of Nuclear Power to produce is significantly less than Solar, Coal, and Natural Gas with only Wind Power as a rival.  However, Wind Power does not offer the reliable and quantity of energy which Nuclear Power provides.

Electric Vision' by Robert Preston Sept 7, 2005 using figures from US Department of Energy, September, 2005.

Nuclear Power Has Saved The Lives Of Many More People Than It Has Killed

I’m sure that all of us informed and reasonable people already knew this: that nuclear power has saved many more lives than nuclear power has killed. However, it’s nice to have the calculations done properly, in a peer reviewed paper, and from NASA itself so no one can start arguing that it’s all a plot by the nuclear industry to confuse us.

The idea strikes me as being obviously conceptually true anyway: nuclear power plants, yes including the disasters like Chernobyl, actually release into the environment much less radioactivity than the coal burning industry does (yes, this really is true, collectively there’s a lot of uranium and thorium in the fly ash from coal burning). Therefore, even if low levels of radiation really does murder us all in our beds then we should all be dying from the coal burning and lives would be being saved by the nuclear power.

What James Hansen (yes, that James Hansen) and his colleague Karecha have done is look at something slightly different. They’ve looked at the air pollution that comes from coal burning and calculated (or, rather, looked up in the scientific literature) the number of people who die from that. Then they’ve looked at the number that have been killed by civilian nuclear power and we find that, very clearly, nuclear, by displacing coal fired generation, saves lives, not takes them.

The paper is here:  http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/notyet/inpress_Kharecha_Hansen.pdf

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Fighting climate change with nuclear energy

 Nuclear power is currently the only carbon-free energy source that can provide base load electricity, Stepp writes, a characteristic crucial to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and fighting climate change. Next-generation nuclear energy offers even more productive strategies for reducing carbon emissions.

In the last week, two news stories really captured the potential future for nuclear energy. The New York Times Matthew Wald reported from Georgia, where construction crews are slowly building the first two new nuclear reactors in thirty years. And National Geographic’s Will Ferguson reported from Tennessee that engineers and scientists are taking core samples and mapping regional geology as part of the early planning stages of building the first small modular nuclear reactor in the world. Both projects face unique challenges, yet they both represent the beginning of two potential nuclear paths for reducing climate-warming carbon emissions in the United States (and potentially the world).

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‘Knowledge’ about dangers of nuclear power not based on proper science

"There is no such thing as a ‘pro-nuclear environmentalist’,” says the US-based lobby group Beyond Nuclear. “Environmentalists don’t support extractive, non-sustainable industries like nuclear energy, which poisons the environment, releases cancer-causing radioactive elements and creates radioactive waste deadly for thousands of years.”

This was in response to a new documentary film, Pandora’s Promise, which charts the almost Pauline conversion of five well-known environmentalists from bitterly opposing to strongly advocating nuclear power. 

What’s most likely to get us into trouble, Mark Twain observed, is not what we don’t know “it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so”. There are few subjects on which so many people, from politicians to rock stars, NGOs and environmentalists, passionately and confidently espouse views that are so completely at variance with observed reality as nuclear energy.

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Nuclear Energy: Truth vs Fear

As I was thinking about what to write this month, I was invited by my dry cleaner to attend a protest in a nearby park against genetically modified food. This somewhat infuriated me as I know without doubt that GMO has helped millions around the world and had never killed anyone (although denial of these foods has), yet, as with nuclear power, opposition remains strong, especially in Europe.

My dry cleaner argued trying to tell me that 500,000 were killed in India due to GMO and, as you can imagine, there was no winning the argument.  Mark Lynas, who I have quoted in previous posts has recently taken a hard stand against those who oppose GMO.  Mark makes his position clear in his talk at Cornell University this past April where he opens with the following: “I think the controversy over GMOs represents one of the greatest science communications failures of the past half-century. Millions, possibly billions, of people have come to believe what is essentially a conspiracy theory, generating fear and misunderstanding about a whole class of technologies on an unprecedentedly global scale.”
It is no mistake that environmentalists like Mark have also changed their views on nuclear power and are now vigorously supporting it.  The simple reason is that Mark and others like Stewart Brand and George Monbiot, are taking positions that are founded in science rather than a set of beliefs that may feel right, but cannot be supported by scientific evidence.

Scientific evidence continues to increase its support while disproving widely held beliefs of many who oppose it.

For example, this past week (on May 23), a new study was reported on by the Canadian regulator (CNSC) looking at cancer rates near Canadian nuclear plants.  Not surprisingly, once again the results were clear.  No indication of any increases in cancer near nuclear stations relative to the rest of the province.  “The most important finding of this study is no evidence of childhood leukemia clusters in the communities within 25 km of the Pickering, Darlington and Bruce NPPs.”

Next I return to the study I wrote about last month published in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology by Pushker A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute.  They found that nuclear power has saved an estimated 80,000 lives annually – 1.84 million in all – since widely introduced in the 1970s and could save another 5 million if construction continues at a decent pace due to a reduction in air pollution.  Nuclear power has also reduced carbon emissions by 64 Gt over the same period.

And finally UNSCEAR has now released the results of its latest study on the Fukushima accident.  It clearly concluded “Radiation exposure following the nuclear accident at Fukushima-Daiichi did not cause any immediate health effects. It is unlikely to be able to attribute any health effects in the future among the general public and the vast majority of workers“.  But of even more importance this study also concluded that there are health effects from the Fukushima accident stemming from the stresses of evacuation and unwarranted fear of radiation.

So what does all this tell us?  Looking at these three studies we can confirm that:

i) operating nuclear power plants do not cause cancer to the residents of nearby communities from normal operations;
ii) over the past 40 years nuclear power has in fact saved almost 2 million lives through a real reduction in pollution by not burning fossil fuels and its resultant health impacts; and finally
iii) that after the biggest nuclear accident in the last 25 years, radiation has not harmed any of the people of Japan and is unlikely to do so in the future.

Considering these kinds of results, why aren’t we seeing this reported in the main stream media?  With this kind of story there should be universal praise of nuclear power and strong support for its expansion.   Frankly, if it were any technology other than nuclear that was reported to have saved millions of lives we likely would have seen it in the headlines at CNN, BBC  and other mainstream media.  So why are we primarily seeing these nuclear studies reported in trade magazines and blogs?  Why is the world not blown away by this fantastic evidence of the benefits to our lives of nuclear power?  As I was pondering these developments I came upon a chapter title in the book I am currently reading by Ben Goldacre called “Bad Science” (Good book by the way).  The chapter title is “Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things”.  The chapter then goes on to discuss many of the things we have discussed in this blog before such as confirmation bias, seeing patterns where there are none and a host of other standard reasons why people tend stick to their beliefs in light of strong evidence that they should consider alternatives.

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Nuclear is the greenest energy

Tom Horton's recent commentary on nuclear energy is excellent and provides the beginning of a rational discussion of green energy in Maryland ("Embracing nukes," May 23). He includes data which shows that wind farms on average operate at 30 percent of design capacity versus 90 percent for nuclear power. Solar power systems operate on average at 15 percent of design capacity. Wind and sun power are erratic. Nuclear plants operate constantly, and the 90 percent utilization factor is due to planned maintenance.

There is no current capability to store power on a large scale. In order to produce reliable power, generating companies that are forced to take wind power must have thermal backup power and cycle or spin their turbines, inefficiently wasting steam to instantaneously replace sudden decreases in wind power. Denmark, the poster child for offshore wind farms, shows essentially the same level of carbon dioxide emissions from 1999 when the country's frenzied construction of wind mill capacity began to 2007 with zero population growth. No thermal plants were shut down in Denmark when the wind farm was built.

The United Kingdom is another country where wind power can be isolated. Stuart Young Associates analyzed wind power from November 2008 to December 2010. During the study period, wind generation was below 20 percent of capacity more than half of the time, below 10 percent one-third of the time and below 2.5 percent of capacity one day in 12.

In 2011, in a comprehensive study of U.S. wind power, "The Wind Power Paradox," Bentek Energy assessed emission reduction performance based on actual generation and emissions data across a variety of regions of the country. This study shows that actual carbon dioxide reductions through wind generation are either so small as to be insignificant or too expensive to be practical.

Denmark and Germany have high levels of subsidized wind and solar power with costs including taxes of 43 and 30 cents per kilowatt hour respectively, compared to an average of 11 cents per kWh in the U.S.
France is Europe's lowest cost power producer at about 6 cents per kWh before tax and 19 cents after tax. France has the world's most sophisticated energy policy, producing 75 percent of their power with nuclear plants. France reprocesses its spent fuel rods and is the leader in high speed electric rail transportation. France is also Europe's lowest producer of carbon dioxide on a per capita basis at about one-third of our production.

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Everything you thought you knew about the risks of nuclear energy is wrong

Kamakura, Japan—Chances are pretty high, based on prevailing public opinion, that you will think my wife and I are a tad crazy, maybe even guilty of child abuse. During the March 2011 accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, which is a couple hundred miles from where we live, we stayed put while thousands of others fled the Tokyo area and many foreigners left Japan for good. Not only that, we buy as much of our fruits and vegetables as possible from Fukushima Prefecture, the Connecticut-size jurisdiction where the plant is located (we even specially order boxes of Fukushima produce) while millions of others in Japan take extreme care to consume only food from the far west and south of the country. And yes, our whole family, including our 12- and 10-year-old sons, eats Fukushima food. We’re convinced it’s perfectly safe, and we like helping people whose products suffer from an unjust taint.

Are you recoiling in horror, perhaps even wishing the Japanese child welfare authorities would seize custody of our kids? If so, you are the ideal audience member for a provocative new film, titled Pandora’s Promise. This documentary focuses on five thoughtful environmentalists who were once terrified of radiation, and thought nuclear power was imperiling the planet’s future, but after educating themselves, they gradually realized that their assumptions were wrong. For people who are instinctively opposed to nuclear power but open-minded enough to consider evidence that goes against their predilections, this film will, and should, force them to question their certitude.

The five people whose intellectual journeys are chronicled admit the superficial incongruity between their environmentalism and their enthusiasm for nuclear power.

Thus, in some of the early scenes the five establish their Green bona fides. “The slogan was ‘No compromise in defense of Mother Earth.’ That was the original Earth First slogan. And it’s one that I still subscribe to at a very deep level,” says Mark Lynas, a British author and journalist, recalling his “hardcore activist” days. “Well, I [thought] nuclear power was evil. No doubt about it.”

Likewise, Gwyneth Cravens, a writer who participated in protests against the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, recounts the fear she felt when news broke in 1979 of the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania: “Are those rays coming out of Three Mile Island going to come to New York and harm my daughter?” And Richard Rhodes, whose 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, tells how he wrote a number of articles about the dangers of nuclear power for national magazines some years ago, but changed his mind by talking to physicists and other experts in the field “until it finally got through my head” that his basic premise was mistaken.

Making slick use of a pulsing sound track and camera shots of scenes from bustling metropolises in Asia and Latin America, the film engagingly explains why nuclear power, which is greenhouse-gas free, is so essential to the prevention of climate change. Michael Shellenberger, a consultant to major environmental groups who co-founded a center-left think tank based in Oakland, California recalls having “gotten the religion” as a student that energy efficiency and renewable sources could save the planet.

After scrutinizing the numbers, “I ended up feeling like a sucker. The idea that we’re going to replace oil and natural gas with solar and wind, and nothing else, is a hallucinatory delusion,” Shellenberger says, citing projections that global energy demand will likely double by 2050....

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Nuclear Power Saves Lives And Reduces Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Global use of nuclear power has prevented about 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and release of 64 billion tons of greenhouse gases that would have resulted from burning coal and other fossil fuels, according to a paper in Environmental Science&Technology.
Pushker A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen of Columbia University state that nuclear power has the potential to help control both global climate change and illness and death associated with air pollution. That potential exists, they say, despite serious questions about safety, disposal of radioactive waste and diversion of nuclear material for weapons.

Concerned that the Fukushima accident in Japan could overshadow the benefits of nuclear energy, they performed an analysis of nuclear power's benefits in reducing carbon dioxide emissions and air pollution deaths.
The study concluded that nuclear power already has had a major beneficial impact, based upon calculations of prevented mortality and greenhouse gas emissions for the period 1971-2009. Nuclear power could prevent from 420,000 to 7 million additional deaths by 2050, and prevent emission of 80-240 billion tons of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming, the study found.




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