But Biden apparently doesn’t care, likely forcing “[r]efiners in the Midwest and the Gulf Coast…to buy more oil from adversarial states like Russia and Venezuela.”

In 2019*, from the beginning of the year up to this day in that year, all world nuclear power plants generated enough energy to supply low-carbon electricity (12 gCO2eq/kWh) to

534,564,060
French households during 1 year
(equivalent of 2,779,733,114 MWh)

If this electricity had been produced from
coal (820 gCO2/kWh)
, it would have caused the emission of greenhouse gases equivalent to those of

...
389,163,258
additional vehicles
in circulation
(equivalent of 1,945,816,291 tonnes of CO2eq)

Furthermore, this same electricity produced
from coal would have been
responsible for

68,409
premature deaths
(24.61.deaths/TWh, while the human toll of nuclear power and of modern renewable energy sources is below 0.1)

Electricity is at the heart of modern economies and it is providing a rising share of energy services. Demand for electricity is set to increase further as a result of rising household incomes, with the electrification of transport and heat, and growing demand for digital connected devices and air conditioning.

Rising electricity demand was one of the key reasons why global CO2 emissions from the power sector reached a record high in 2018, yet the commercial availability of a diverse suite of low emissions generation technologies also puts electricity at the vanguard of efforts to combat climate change and pollution. Decarbonised electricity, in addition, could provide a platform for reducing CO2 emissions in other sectors through electricity-based fuels such as hydrogen or synthetic liquid fuels. Renewable energy also has a major role to play in providing access to electricity for all.

As a whole, the US's utility-scale battery power is set to grow from 1.2 gigawatts in 2020 to nearly 7.5 gigawatts in 2025, according to Wood MacKenzie, a natural resources research and consulting firm. //

Globally, Gatti projects rapid growth in energy storage, reaching 1.2 terawatts (1,200 gigawatts) in the next decade. ///

We need ~ 100GW per year to combat climate change -- but this is only energy storage. Where does the energy come from?

In a 22 year period from 1977 to 1999 France built a generating system containing 58 reactors.

Its capacity was of similar size to Australia’s but generates only 40 gr CO2/kwh or less that a 20th of Australia’s emissions intensity. //

The initial scoping of the Australian Nuclear for Climate Project will reference the Westinghouse AP1000 of the type shown in Figure 1 with its electrical capacity of 1117MWe. This is based upon its recognised design merits within the Chinese and US markets, its current design approval in the US, Europe and China, its lower generating capacity and ready acceptance of US technology within Australia. This does not exclude other designs with similar power output.

HOW MANY REACTORS ARE REQUIRED?
Electricity Generation

In the remainder of this section we will provide a “broad brush” scoping of the size of the project which will be determined in detail within the actual study. The initial sites would utilise existing coal and gas generating sites and would also need to meet evolving environmental requirements.

Investors: We'd like to build zero-emissions, baseload power stations to provide affordable electricity to consumers.

Politician: There's no market for that in Australia. //

This article by James Fleay of DUNE – Down Under Nuclear Energy looks at investment in nuclear energy on the National Electricity Market.

Nuclear energy is clean, cheap, reliable and safe.

Like many advocates for nuclear energy in Australia, my colleagues and I believed that if the Federal Government would only repeal the ban on nuclear power, business or state governments would eagerly build nuclear power plants (NPPs) to rapidly cut emissions, reduce power prices and improve network reliability. In fact, this belief prompted the creation of DUNE a company formed to study the investment case and present the facts to politicians and power market participants.

After all, being thus informed, they would hasten to repeal said law…right? How wrong we were.

The federal ban is only the first challenge to deploying clean, cheap and reliable power in Australia. The second, and much bigger problem, is our liberalised, energy-only National Electricity Market (NEM) and the out-of-market subsidies that provide additional revenue to solar and wind generators. Dr Kerry Schott, the chief advisor the Energy Security Board (ESB) recently confirmed this in an article in The Australian. Among other things, she confirmed that the NEM was not functioning to attract much needed new investment in “always on” power generation. Despite high power prices and a need for investment in “always on” generation, our NEM market design will not support NPP investment[1].

Fission energy can change America's power for the better -- and we’re finally seeing progress in revitalizing the field across the country.

Kirk Sorensen stumbled across thorium while doing research on how to power a lunar community. Thorium is a cleaner, safer, and more abundant nuclear fuel—one that Kirk believes will revolutionize how we produce our energy.

Kirk Sorensen began his work with thorium while working as an aerospace engineer at NASA. In 2010, he left NASA to work as the chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering. In 2011, he founded Flibe, a company focused on developing modular thorium reactors.

Molten Salt Reactor and origins

Over the last decade, Michael and his colleagues have constructed a new paradigm that views prosperity, cheap energy and nuclear power as the keys to environmental progress. A book he co-wrote (with Ted Nordhaus) in 2007, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism
to the Politics of Possibility, was called by Wired magazine “the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,” while Time Magazine called him a “hero of the environment.”

History
Two-Fluid MSBR Core Designs
One-Fluid MSBR Chemical Processing
One-Fluid MSBR Core Designs
Denatured MSR Design Efforts

Molten salt mixtures were imagined for use in nuclear reactors by Eugene Wigner during the Manhattan Project. Successful use of uranium hexafluoride in the K-25 gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment facility near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, built confidence in the use of uranium in fluoride form, and in 1950 a mixture of fluoride salts in liquid form was proposed to solve some of the issues associated with the Aircraft Nuclear Program. A small, proof-of-principle liquid-fluoride reactor was built and operated in 1954 at Oak Ridge, and two years later under the encouragement of laboratory director Alvin Weinberg, a more significant examination began of liquid-fluoride reactors for electrical generation at terrestrial power stations. Weinberg also encouraged the examination of the thorium fuel cycle implemented in liquid fluoride reactors, and this work led to the construction and operation of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) at Oak Ridge. The MSRE operated from 1965 to 1969, when it was shut down under the orders of Milton Shaw of the Atomic Energy Commission so as to free up additional funding for the liquid-metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR) program. The molten-salt program continued for another three years at Oak Ridge until it was cancelled in 1972 under Shaw’s orders.

12 January 2021

Agreements announced yesterday between NuScale Power and Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) to facilitate the development of a project to deploy small modular reactors (SMRs) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) could lead to the placement of a first order for NuScale Power Modules in 2022.

Nuclear plants in the Netherlands require 570 times less land area than wind... and 370 times less land than solar. //

Nuclear plants in the UK require 2025 times less land than Wind... and 600 times less land than solar //

To power 16 lightbulbs per person in the UK, you would need either...

• 160 wind farms each of 100 square km
• 24 nuclear power plants of 2GW (1 sq km each)
• 3.5x Wales for biomass production (72,726 sq km)
• 8 solar plants of 2x greater London in the Sahara (plus power lines across Spain and France)
  -- David McKay

Fossil fuel-supporting Chicken Littles have done their best to spread fear of renewable energy, warning that relying on wind, solar and storage would lead to blackouts and economic devastation.

For years, I have denounced the propaganda promulgated by lobbyists financed by the oil and gas industry. Now, the latest data proves that the New Year will mark the end of the beginning for clean energy, and the beginning of the end of our reliance on coal and natural gas for electricity. //

The tipping point was revealed in the latest capacity report from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the grid operator that delivers power to most of the state. After several years of thinning reserve generation capacity due to coal-fired plant retirements, solar facilities are adding cushion. //

ERCOT expects to add 3,039 megawatts of utility-scale solar resources, 1,765 megawatts of wind and 816 megawatts of natural gas-fired generation next year. The grid will have 86,842 megawatts of capacity to serve an expected peak demand of 77,244 megawatts in 2021, the council said.

In addition, ERCOT is working on adding large batteries that will provide even more capacity during the hour or so every August when demand peaks. The reserve capacity in 2021 will be 15.5 percent, well above the target of 13 percent, and will rise to 27 percent in 2022, ERCOT said. //
No new coal-powered plants are planned for the United States. New nuclear power technologies are a decade away from deployment. New natural gas plants struggle to compete on price with solar and wind, even after renewables lose the federal tax subsidies that are phasing out over the next few years.

For decades, investment tax credits have helped speed up solar and wind development by lowering costs. Now, they could do the same for another form of carbon-free energy that became eligible for a 30 percent tax credit for the first time ever. It’s called waste heat to power, or WHP.

In the U.S., about 67 percent of our energy is squandered. Various inefficiencies in power plants, vehicles, factories, homes, and countless other places mean the majority of the energy we have access to is lost, often as hot air, or “waste heat.” But you know what they say — one man’s waste heat is another man’s untapped source of clean energy. WHP systems take some of that squandered heat and turn it into electricity, which can either be used on site or sent back to the grid.

“It’s a really terrific source of energy because there are no new emissions that are produced as a result of using it,” said David Gardiner, executive director of the Combined Heat and Power Alliance, which lobbied for the new tax credit. “You’re simply capturing the waste and putting it to good use”

With today’s technology, the best sources of waste heat that can be turned into electricity are industrial processes that release heat that’s at least 450 degrees F. A 2015 market assessment prepared for Oak Ridge National Laboratory found 96 existing WHP systems that generate a total of 766 megawatts of power, similar to the capacity of a single gas-fired power plant. Most of these systems are installed at chemical plants, refineries, and steel mills. There are also several WHP systems at compressor stations along natural gas pipelines. Many states have encouraged the technology by allowing it to qualify as clean energy under policies that set minimum renewable energy mandates such as renewable portfolio standards.

There’s potential for much more: The report identified almost 3,000 additional facilities in the U.S. that could install WHP equipment and generate another 8,840 megawatts of electricity, or roughly half the average hourly demand in New York state.

Princeton’s Net Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure and Impacts charts five challenging, tortuous, investment-intensive paths to “net-zero” by 2050. A presentation that contains 345 slides of text, colorful graphs and wide area maps provides details about the selected scenarios. The Princeton research team promises peer-reviewed journal articles in the near future.

According to sponsor organization promotional materials, the slide deck was released before the journal articles “in recognition of the urgency to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the need for immediate federal, state, and local policy making efforts.” There’s little doubt that the project sponsors and the authors have a strong policy-influence agenda.

All five chosen scenarios involve technology and infrastructure deployments “at historically unprecedented rates across most sectors.” They represent “expansive impacts on landscapes” that have not yet been planned in communities whose permission has not yet been obtained.
Overlooked path

The NZA study ignores a straight, wide, blazed trail. As documented in Goldstein and Qvist’s 2019 book titled A BRIGHT FUTURE: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow, several major electricity grids have successfully eliminated coal and been nearly completely decarbonized.

In those grids–France, Sweden, and Ontario–a combination of nuclear power and hydroelectricity did the job. In each case, it took about two decades of sustained effort.

None of history’s successful decarbonization efforts required a complete reordering of the economy. The nuclear energy portion of the country- or providence-wide efforts that now provide reliable, abundant electricity from non-combustion sources that do not dump carbon dioxide to the environment did not result in “expansive impacts on landscapes.”
Electricity can do most of the work

Though electricity is only a part of total energy use, the Princeton study makes the reasonable assumption that decarbonized electricity grids can be expanded to supply the energy services needed to decarbonize most of the rest of the energy supply.

That same assumption continues to work if the electricity decarbonization path includes a successful effort to improve nuclear energy products and projects. Unlike wind and solar, atomic energy is a thermal energy source that can directly supply heat energy useful for industrial processes. Some of the electrification expansions that NZA assumes to be necessary to supply all energy demands might be accomplished more affordably with direct heat use.

There is no organization or individual that is responsible for making sure that electricity is generated, transmitted and delivered to customers.

Various organizations, often with competing or conflicting interests, have shared responsibility for different parts of the system that includes generators, transformers, switchyards, transmission lines, distribution lines and billing systems, but “the market” has been assigned the responsibility of supplying wholesale electricity.

And that market is not the free market, but instead is a hybrid that is governed by an ever changing stack of layered rules where many of the important decisions are made by participant groups that do not include customers or even enabled representatives of customers.

A growing portion of the grid’s electricity is dependent on free, but uncontrolled natural flows. Another portion comes from generators whose fuel is delivered by capacity-limited pipes in a “just in time fashion.” When the natural flows are interrupted or something interferes in the pipelines’s capability to deliver fuel, generators stop producing power.

There are processes that can be called into action, but costs can skyrocket in times of scarcity. Some market players thrive in times of crisis and have few incentives to ensure those crises never arise.

Dungeness B nuclear power station, which is in Dungeness nature reserve on the south coast, is home to numerous species and rare habitats. Visitors to this area will find Dungeness Bird Observatory in the shadow of the nuclear power station, and yet this same area is also popular with the Jack Snipe, Sandwich Tern, Peregrine Falcon, Black Redstart, Kittiwake and many more diverse and rare birds. ​Ecologists have found the​ Brown Carder Bee Bombus humilis​,​ a species​ that Buglife and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust get excited about​, ​within 0.5km ​of the power station.​ People also live happily next to the power plant. Despite what the RSPB claims will come to pass if Sizewell C is built, the area around Dungeness power plant is actually teeming with life.

Why is wildlife around nuclear power stations actually thriving?

One reason is that these sites often lead to habitat creation and increased protection, for example reptile mitigation strategies at Sizewell C when it goes ahead. I spoke to independent wildlife consultant Jonathan Cranfield about this. “Nuclear power comes with plenty of room for biodiversity, semi natural habitats and wildlife,” he told me. “The construction of Sizewell C offers significant opportunities for rewilding, habitat creation and management. It’s vital for local biodiversity gains, as it brings with it extensive ecological monitoring, plus clean and reliable power for millions of people. Several power stations around the country are in fact places that rare birds like peregrines call home.” //

On its website the RSPB states that: “our campaigning is underpinned by expert analysis, practical demonstration and conservation delivery — but we campaign as vigorously as we always did to ensure the next generation can enjoy wildlife as we do.” However, their stance on nuclear power shows the opposite to be true.

Just last year the RSPB approved a gas power station on its Saltholme reserve, 100 metres from a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Stockton. The charity appears to support gas, while opposing 30 energy projects in the UK, including onshore and offshore wind, wave and tidal projects, carbon capture storage (CCS) and nuclear.

As the planet warms, we will lose more and more species, many of them birds, unless we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions rapidly. We cannot do this without new nuclear.

Evidence shows that nuclear is much safer than the alternatives that we currently depend upon. The Sizewell B nuclear plant, which I visited this summer for a swim, is a beautiful place that is surrounded by wildlife. It’s rare that we hear the success stories of nuclear and nature, but consider the story of the manatees in Florida that benefited from the warm water around the Crystal River nuclear plant so significantly that when the plant was decommissioned marine biologists worried that the numbers of manatees would decrease.

I have come to accept that my previous advocating for 100% renewables (something that The Green Party, which I am no longer a member of, still does) is not based on science. Germany has invested heavily in renewable technologies while phasing out its nuclear plants, but research has found that it will have the EU’s fourth most carbon intensive electricity grid by 2030. If their energy experiment had succeeded, I’d be advocating for it.

There is abundant evidence showing how hydrocarbon interests have worked to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about nuclear power. Since the stories are spread over the 80 year period since atomic fission was discovered to be an incredibly dense source of heat, they can be overlooked or forgotten. For obvious reasons, there has been some effort to obscure the truth so researchers have to dig and keep working to get attention for their findings.

It’s completely logical to believe that at least some of the people whose jobs, wealth and power stem from one of the world’s largest enterprises recognize and respond to the competitive threat from nuclear energy.

It doesn’t take much of an exercise in deductive thinking to recognize that some of the people who have financial reasons to discourage nuclear energy will build support for their cause by making financial contributions to respected charities. Buying friends among groups that campaign for wildlife or for environmental protection is an investment that can provide major returns when it protects hydrocarbon markets from nuclear energy competition. //

Even though industrial civilization depends on energy and fuel supply enterprises are enormous, PROFITS from the business are elusive. It is well known to be a “boom and bust” business. Busts nearly always occur as a result of an overabundance (glut). When supplies exceed demand by just a few percentage points, it doesn’t take long for storage systems to fill up.

When that happens, prices fall precipitously.

Anticipation of a glut from new sources of supply can be enough to cause a substantial market price reduction. Conversely, anticipation of future shortages can produce almost unbelievable cash flows as prices rise when customers build inventories in fear of insufficient supplies.

Nuclear energy continues to pose the threat of making enormous capital investments worth less. When a entire countries like France or Sweden can shift almost all electricity production from coal and oil to nuclear over a 15 year period, it makes bankers, fossil fuel CEOs, sheiks, oligarchs, prime ministers, and others take action to prevent the possibility that others will “get it.”

I’m not sure how to overcome this obstacle to developing clean, abundant, reliable and affordable power, but I am hoping that increased recognition will help.