Nuclear energy is crisis. The world could lose twice as much nuclear as it gains, between now and 2030. Can radical innovation save nuclear? Yes, but it must be more radical than anyone imagines, argues EP's Michael Shellenberger in a major keynote address to the American Nuclear Society. //

What is atomic humanism? I would like to offer three first principles that are meant as the beginning, not the end of the discussion of what atomic humanism should be.

First, nuclear is special. Only nuclear can lift all humans out of poverty while saving the natural environment. Nothing else — not coal, not solar, not geo-engineering — can do that.

How does the special child, who is bullied for her specialness, survive? By pretending she’s ordinary. As good as — but no better than! — coal, natural gas or renewables.

Like other atomic humanists of his time, Weinberg knew nuclear was special. But he could not fully appreciate how special nuclear was given the low levels of deployment of solar and wind.

Now that these two technologies have been scaled up, we can see that nuclear’s specialness is due due an easy-to-understand physical reason: the energy density of the fuel. //

Second, nuclear is human. Nuclear is people using tools to make electrons through fission. And yet the picture in our minds when we think of nuclear has no people. Where are the people? What about when we think of a nuclear plant’s control room? Now picture in your mind the cockpit of an airplane. You walk on board and you see two men. If we didn’t trust these men, we wouldn’t get on the plane. The airlines ask us to trust them, the air traffic system, and the pilots, and we do. Why then are we asking the public to trust our machines?

In the movie “Sully,” the pilot loses both his engines to bird strikes shortly after taking off. The entire drama of the film is whether Sully made the right decision. Should he have returned to La Guardia airport, or was he right to make a water landing in the Hudson? At no point did anyone suggest we should ban jet planes because they could crash. Nor did anyone demand meltdown-proof jet turbines.

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and Bill Gates’ nuclear innovation startup TerraPower are ready to demonstrate a “cost-competitive” advanced nuclear //

Key to the system’s cost-effectiveness is its tight energy system architecture, which simplifies previous reactor types. A typical Natrium site, for example, will span about 44 acres, with a nuclear island of about 16 acres. “When normalized to power rating, the Natrium system has a smaller footprint compared to other Generation IV reactors. Similarly, Natrium has a smaller footprint than most multi-unit plants with light water reactors operating today,” TerraPower said. One benefit of a plant with the Natrium technology the companies highlighted is its significantly reduced emergency planning zone, “which allows it to be sited in many locations without affecting local population centers.”

The system design also involves fewer equipment interfaces, which could dramatically slash the amount of nuclear-grade concrete by 80% compared to larger reactors. “Non-nuclear mechanical, electrical and other equipment will be housed in separate structures, reducing complexity and cost,” TerraPower said. “The design is intended to permit significant cost savings by allowing major portions of the plant to be built to industrial standards.”

Its most significant attribute, perhaps, is that the system can generate power with the heat produced by the SFR or store it using nitrate salt molten salt energy storage technology, which has the potential to “boost the system’s output to 500 MWe of power for more than five and a half hours when needed.”

Small reactors are seen as a key to reviving a nuclear power industry that's far from thriving now.

Nuclear power is the Immovable Object of generation sources. It can take days just to bring a nuclear plant completely online, rendering it useless as a tool to manage the fluctuations in the supply and demand on a modern energy grid.

Now a firm launched by Bill Gates in 2006, TerraPower, in partnership with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, believes it has found a way to make the infamously unwieldy energy source a great deal nimbler — and for an affordable price.

The new design, announced by TerraPower on August 27th, is a combination of a “sodium-cooled fast reactor” — a type of small reactor in which liquid sodium is used as a coolant — and an energy storage system. While the reactor could pump out 345 megawatts of electrical power indefinitely, the attached storage system would retain heat in the form of molten salt and could discharge the heat when needed, increasing the plant’s overall power output to 500 megawatts for more than 5.5 hours.

NuScale announced the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission completed final review of the Design Certification Application for its small modular reactor. //

PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NuScale Power announced today that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) completed Phase 6 review—the last and final phase—of the Design Certification Application (DCA) for the company’s groundbreaking small modular reactor (SMR) with the issuance of the Final Safety Evaluation Report (FSER). The FSER represents completion of the technical review and approval of the NuScale SMR design. With this final phase of NuScale’s DCA now complete, customers can proceed with plans to develop NuScale power plants with the understanding that the NRC has approved the safety aspects of the NuScale design.

“Additionally, the cost-shared funding provided by Congress over the past several years has accelerated NuScale’s advancement through the NRC Design Certification process. This is what DOE’s SMR Program was created to do, and our success is credited to strong bipartisan support from Congress.”

Nuclear reactors generated a total 2657 TWh of electricity in 2019, up from 2563 TWh in 2018, and second only to the 2661 TWh generated in 2006, according to a new World Nuclear Association report. This is the seventh successive year that nuclear generation has risen, it noted.

Turns out that plugging a bunch of computers into our electrical grid that do nothing but draw current and hash through algorithms has had some negative environmental impacts. Recent studies suggest that Bitcoin-related power consumption has reached record highs this year — with more than seven gigawatts of power being pulled in the pursuit of the suspect digital currency. Today’s bitcoin mining operations can be as small as a single user running a dedicated desktop machine to 50,000 state-of-the-art rigs installed in a Kazakhstan warehouse with the goal of hashing through the Bitcoin consensus algorithm faster than your competition in order to maximize the number of block rewards you receive. //

A study from the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance released on Monday estimates that the global bitcoin mining industry uses 7.46 GW, equivalent to around 63.32 terawatt-hours of energy consumption. The study also notes that miners are paying around $0.03 to $0.05 per kWh this year. Given that a March estimate put the cost to mine a full bitcoin is around $7,500, the average miner still stands to make over $4,000 in profit from the operation. //

The current total amount of processing power dedicated to mining, known as the hashrate, is currently hovering around 120 exahash per second (EH/s). However industry analysts argue that that figure is soon to increase.

“By our assessment, the Bitcoin network can exceed 260EH/s in Hashrate in the next 12–14 months,” according to a July study from Bitooda. “Led by a modest increase in available power capacity from 9.6 to 10.6GW and an upgrade cycle that will replace older generation S9 class rigs with newer S17 and next-generation S19 class rigs.”

Log scales are for quitters who can't find enough paper to make their point properly.

Fuel energy density, in MegaJoules/kg

• Sugar 19
• Coal 24
• Fat 39
• Gasoline 46
• Uranium 76,000,000

The company expected to be the first in the United States to operate a small nuclear reactor is facing setbacks that have caused supporters to question whether the novel technology will ever realize its potential as a tool to combat climate change. //

Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, a group of small community-owned utilities in six Western states, cited a rise in expected costs for the NuScale reactors. The group is counting on the nuclear power to provide around-the-clock, zero-carbon electricity to replace a coal plant it plans to close, but its members say they won’t need the new cleaner electricity source until later than expected.

“The setbacks are not fatal,” said Erik Olson, a climate and energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute. “But if this project falls through, that would be an enormous blow to the promised next wave of nuclear power.”

Pick up almost any book about nuclear energy and you will find that the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive. This notion is widely accepted, but, if its roots are understood, it can be effectively challenged. //

There have now been 110 nuclear power plants completed in the United States over a period of almost forty years. Though accurate cost data is difficult to obtain, it is safe to say that there has been no predictable relationship between the size of a nuclear power plant and its cost. Despite the graphs drawn in early nuclear engineering texts-which were based on scanty data from less than ten completed plants-there is not a steadily decreasing cost per kilowatt for larger plants.

It is possible for engineers to make incredibly complex calculations without a single math error that still come up with a wrong answer if they use a model based on incorrect assumptions. That appears to be the case with the bigger is better model used by nuclear plant planners.

For example, one assumption explicitly stated in the economy of scale model is that the cost of auxiliary systems does not increase as rapidly as plant capacity. In at least one key area, that assumption is not true for nuclear plants.

Since the reactor core continues to produce heat after the plant is shutdown, and since a larger, more powerful core releases less of its heat to its immediate surroundings because of a smaller surface to volume ratio, it is more difficult to provide decay heat removal for higher capacity cores. It is also manifestly more difficult, time consuming and expensive to prove that the requirements for heat removal will be met under all postulated conditions without damaging the core. For emergency core cooling systems, overall costs, including regulatory burdens, seem to have increased more rapidly than plant capacity. //

nuclear power is no different conceptually than hundreds of other new technologies.

The principle that Ford discovered is now known as the experience curve. . . It ordains that in any business, in any era, in any capitalist competition, unit costs tend to decline in predictable proportion to accumulated experience: the total number of units sold. Whatever the product (cars or computers, pounds of limestone, thousands of transistors, millions of pounds of nylon, or billions of phone calls) and whatever the performance of companies jumping on and off the curve, unit costs in the industry as a whole, adjusted for inflation, will tend to drop between 20 and 30 percent with every doubling in accumulated output.

George Guilder Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise Updated for the 1990s, ICS Press, San Francisco, CA. p. 195 //

The Adams Engine philosophy of small unit sizes is based on aggressively climbing onto the experience curve. If a market demand exists for 300 MW of electricity, distributed over a wide geographic area, traditional nuclear plant designers would say that the market is not yet ready for nuclear power, thus they would decide to learn nothing while waiting for the market to expand.

In contrast, atomic engine makers may see an opportunity to manufacture and sell 15 units, each with 20 MW of capacity.

A federal lab found a way to modernize the grid, reduce reliance on coal, and save consumers billions. Then Trump appointees blocked it. //

experts say power plants across the U.S. could be helping power California avoid heat wave-induced blackouts right now, if the U.S. power system was more interconnected. But Perry prioritized securing resilience by protecting coal and nuclear power plants, which store months of fuel on-site.

Unit 1 of the Barakah nuclear power plant in the Al Dhafrah region of Abu Dhabi has been connected to the grid and has begun supplying electricity to the UAE. The South Korean-supplied APR1400 is expected to enter full commercial operation later this year.

City Utilities of Springfield elected to add a 300-MW coal-fired plant to its fleet to meet rising demand for electricity. It was the first coal plant constructed by the utility since 1976. An extremely competitive construction market required the utility to adopt new contracting practices to meet a tight project schedule, an approach that proved very successful. The $555 million plant commissioned in January 2011 is expected to cover system growth at least through 2024.

“Apocalypse Never may be the most important book on the environment ever written.”

— Tom Wigley, climate scientist, University of Adelaide, former senior scientist National Center for Atmospheric Research

Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions.

But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.

Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas.

Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions. Those who raise the alarm about food shortages oppose the expansion of fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors in poor nations. Those who raise the alarm about deforestation oppose concentrating agriculture. And those who raise the alarm about climate change oppose the two technologies that have most reduced emissions, natural gas and nuclear.

What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.

Apocalypse Never summarizes the best-available science and debunks the myths repeated by scientists, journalists, and activists.
Some of those activists, scientists, and journalists have now responded to Apocalypse Never to defend those myths, including that humans are causing a sixth mass extinction and that climate change is making natural disasters worse.
Anyone who hopes to seriously evaluate Apocalypse Never for its scientific accuracy must read Apocalypse Never, including its over 1,100 endnotes, which comprise 100 pages of the 400 page book.
No book about the environment in recent memory has been praised by a wider and more prestigious group of scientists than Apocalypse Never. It cannot be dismissed. And yet that is what many of the critics of Apocalypse Never appear to want potential readers to do.
But in their haste to misrepresent the contents of Apocalypse Never, and make personal attacks, critics reveal that they fear people will read the book and discover the truth for themselves. I hope curious people do.

After Michael Shellenberger, leading environmental and climate change expert, presented his evidence-based testimony concerning energy policy in America in a congressional hearing Tuesday, Democratic house members mocked his findings.

Shellenberger was invited to speak at the special House Committee hearing to evaluate the Democrats’ proposal allocating $2 trillion to renewable resources and other climate programs.

Democrats were likely interested in including his testimony, Shellenberger said, because of his history advocating for a similar proposal between 2002 and 2009. After years of supporting climate change reform and other environmental legislation, Shellenberger is now an outspoken opponent of such policies for their unproductive and often ignored negative impacts.

Recently, Shellenberger published several articles and a book explaining his change in sentiment. Seeing the corruption surrounding climate alarmism and other environmental issues, he said he feels compelled to stand in opposition to what people expect in support of the truth. Serving as a climate change activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30, the majority of Shellenberger’s life has been fully dedicated to the pursuit of positive environmental change.

Despite his work, however, Reps. Sean Casten (D-IL) and Jared Huffman (D-CA) criticized Shellenberger for his testimony, discounting his qualifications as a well-known environmental expert.

“Mr. Shellenberger, I am not going to ask you questions because it would be a waste of time,” Caston said.

Rather than give him time to ask questions, the two congressmen used their time to criticize Shellenberger without giving him a chance to respond. Once Shellenberger referred to his book, which contains much of his energy research, during the hearing, Huffman accused him of using the testimony for his own promotion. //

Shellenberger argued during his testimony that nuclear energy is far more favorable to renewable energy due its cheap and ready supply as a clean source of electricity. There’s a more pressing facet of the nuclear argument as well, he said. Russia and China have proven to be leaders in this type of energy and the United States is falling behind.

“We do not have a National Nuclear strategy to compete with the Russians and Chinese. Every time a nation does a nuclear power project. It’s an extension of soft power…” he said. “I think the United States needs to step up its game and be competitive with the Russians and Chinese in building new power plants abroad, and that’s going to require building more nuclear power plants at home.” //

Several members claimed renewables are cheaper than existing grid electricity, so Shellenberger inquired about the billions of taxpayer dollars they supposedly require to operate.

“Instead of answering that question, Democrats claimed that solar and wind projects were somehow part of the battle for environmental justice. In reality, I noted, solar and wind projects are imposed on poorer communities and successfully resisted by wealthier ones.”

He also listed numerous human rights abuses imposed by renewable energy resources in contrast to the jobs and opportunities that nuclear energy is guaranteed to provide for generations to come. He pointed to corruption among Democrats’ largest donors, including Rep. Casten, who depend on this bill to make a lot of money as renewable energy and natural gas investors.

“Now, if the Democrats’ $2 trillion climate proposal passes into law, a lot of very powerful people stand to make a lot of money, from winning tender for industrial projects such as building wind turbines and transmission lines all the way to the outright cash payments that we saw during Obama’s green stimulus.”

Everyone's heard of the carbon footprint of different energy sources, the largest footprint belonging to coal because every kWhr of energy produced emits about 900 grams of CO2. Wind and nuclear have the smallest carbon footprint with only 15 g emitted per kWhr, and that mainly from concrete production, construction, and mining of steel and uranium. Biomass is supposedly carbon neutral as it sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere before it liberates it again later, although production losses are significant depending upon the biomass. //

But an energy’s deathprint, as it is called, is rarely discussed. The deathprint is the number of people killed by one kind of energy or another per kWhr produced and, like the carbon footprint, coal is the worst and wind and nuclear are the best. According to the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Academy of Science and many health studies over the last decade (NAS 2010), the adverse impacts on health become a significant effect for fossil fuel and biofuel/biomass sources (see especially Brian Wang for an excellent synopsis). //

Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)

Coal – global average 100,000 (41% global electricity)

Coal – China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity)

Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity)

Oil 36,000 (33% of energy, 8% of electricity)

Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity)

Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy)

Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity)

Wind 150 (2% global electricity)

Hydro – global average 1,400 (16% global electricity)

Hydro – U.S. 5 (6% U.S. electricity)

Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)

Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)

It is notable that the U.S. death rates for coal are so much lower than for China, strictly a result of regulation, particularly the Clean Air Act (Scott et al., 2005). It is also notable that the Clean Air Act is one of the most life-saving pieces of legislation ever adopted by any country in history, along with the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) which established the 40 hour week, and Medicare in 1965. Still, about 10,000 die from coal use in the U.S. each year, and another thousand from natural gas.

Hydro is dominated by a few rare large dam failures like Banqiao in China in 1976 which killed about 171,000 people. The reason the U.S. hydro deaths are so few is, again regulation - specifically our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

Workers still regularly fall off wind turbines during maintenance but since relatively little electricity production comes from wind, the totals deaths are small. Nuclear has the lowest deathprint, even with the worst-case Chernobyl numbers and Fukushima projections, uranium mining deaths, and using the Linear No-Treshold Dose hypothesis (see Helman/2012/03/10). Again, the reason the U.S. death toll is so low for nuclear is our strong Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Two flashes of lightning in Argentina and Brazil have broken two world records: one for the longest reported distance for a single flash, and one for the longest reported duration.
Technically, the lightning records are for "megaflashes," or horizontal lightning discharges that can reach hundreds of kilometers in length.
In Brazil, the megaflash traveled a staggering 440 miles. ///

We don't need solar or nuclear, we just need to capture these!!

A new breakthrough could help engineers truly crack the next phase of nuclear energy. //

New research about chromium corrosion could help to advance molten salt reactors.

Molten salt reactors are cutting edge, with the growing pains that term suggests.

Studying each part in detail now will help engineers make better designs going forward.

Part 1 of 3.

"Why Nuclear Power Should Be Defended"
This speech was given in Los Angeles on March 15, 1980.

Dr. Beckmann's newsletter archives are available at:
http://www.accesstoenergy.com/

Since September 1993, AtE has been written by Arthur B. Robinson.

Petr Beckmann was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1924 where he lived until he had to flee the Nazis in 1939. During WW-II he served in the Czech squadron of the RAF, 1942-45. After the war he returned to Prague, received a B.Sc. In Electrical Engineering in 1949, a Ph.D. in 1955, and also a D.Sc. From the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1962.

In 1963 he was invited to the University of Colorado as a visiting Professor and refused to return behind the Iron Curtain. He became a U.S. citizen, married Irene Muller in 1965, and was appointed a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering.

In 1981, he took early retirement with Emeritus status, in order to devote himself fully to the defense of science, technology and free enterprise through his monthly newsletter Access to Energy. He founded the Golem Press in 1967, publishing more than 9 books. These included "The History of Pi", "Einstein Plus 2", and "The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear". He wrote more than 60 scientific papers and 8 technical books. Dr. Beckmann spoke at I.S.I.L.'s San Francisco Conference in 1990 where he received a standing ovation for his speech in which he attacked "sham environmentalists".