Nuclear is still one of the most controversial sources of energy on the planet, but it does have some key upsides, especially in the global push to tackle emissions.
The European Union stands completely divided on the issue of nuclear power as Scotland hosts the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow.
China is betting big on a nuclear future, aiming to bring over 150 new reactors online over the next 15 years. //

Other studies show that nuclear energy may not be the answer to climate change mitigation at all. A paper published in the journal Energy Policy August of this year argues that installed nuclear power capacity is simply too small now -- and still shrinking -- and will be too hard to scale up to have any kind of viable post-energy transition future, thanks to “technical obstacles and limited resources.” //

Beijing plans to bring 150 new nuclear reactors online over the next 15 years, which amounts to more nuclear capacity that the entire world has constructed in the last 35 years. “The effort could cost as much as $440 billion; as early as the middle of this decade, the country will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest generator of nuclear power,” writes Bloomberg.

This is an especially important development for China, given the size of the nation’s carbon footprint -- the biggest in the world. It’s also a development that only China could accomplish. “It would be the kind of wholesale energy transformation that Western democracies — with budget constraints, political will and public opinion to consider — can only dream of,” Bloomberg characterizes the plan. In fact, China may just be the only country in the world that can come up with the significant resources necessary to scale up nuclear so much so fast that it will put an end to the opinion that a nuclear renaissance will be “too little, too late.”

One of the nation’s largest symbols of carbon capture technology — the Kemper project — has collapsed into a pile of debris, highlighting the strategy of one of the nation’s largest utilities as it aims to decarbonize its fleet.

The project, which was half of a multimillion-dollar power plant in Mississippi intended to gasify lignite coal and store its captured carbon emissions, was imploded by Southern Co.’s Mississippi Power unit earlier this month because the equipment was no longer needed. The facility, Plant Ratcliffe, captured worldwide attention and was supposed to host the first commercial-scale carbon capture project on a large coal plant in the United States.

"They are a wonderful driving experience. But at the same time, they're an enormous burden in time and in energy in finding chargers and getting them charged," Anderson said. "And you’re not really saving much in terms of charging costs ... you may be paying more.”

Costs to drive an EV compared with a gasoline car are detailed in a report Anderson Economic released Thursday called "Comparison: Real World Cost of Fueling EVs and ICE Vehicles."

The study has four major findings:

• There are four additional costs to powering EVs beyond electricity: cost of a home charger, commercial charging, the EV tax and "deadhead" miles.

• For now, EVs cost more to power than gasoline costs to fuel an internal combustion car that gets reasonable gas mileage.

• Charging costs vary more widely than gasoline prices.

• There are significant time costs to finding reliable public chargers — even then a charger could take 30 minutes to go from 20% to an 80% charge. //

A mid-priced internal combustion car that gets 33 miles per gallon would cost $8.58 in overall costs to drive 100 miles at $2.81 a gallon, the study found. But a mid-priced EV, such as Chevrolet Bolt, Nissan Leaf or a Tesla Model 3, would cost $12.95 to drive 100 miles in terms of costs that include recharging the vehicle using mostly a commercial charger. //

“That’s apples to apples and includes the extra EV taxes, the commercial charging and the home charging and the allowance of driving to a gas station, which, for most Americans, is very short compared to driving to a commercial charger for an EV owner," Anderson said. //

The study differs from some reports that show it's cheaper to drive an EV than a conventional car. For example, a 2018 study from the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute found the average cost to operate an EV in the U.S. was $485 per year compared with a gasoline-powered vehicle at $1,117. Anderson said most studies include only the cost of residential electricity and don't factor in the four other costs that this study does.

CCTV went to China’s first compressed-air energy storage facility to show what it proposes to do. Instead of using increasingly precious and expensive lithium-ion batteries, the plant uses cheap energy to compress air in huge tanks. Its official name is quite long: National Energy Large-Scale Physical Energy Storage Technology Research and Development Center.

When there’s peak demand for electricity, and prices get higher, the unusual energy storage facility uses that air to propel turbines and generate power. According to CCTV, the facility can deliver up to 40 MWh of energy per day, enough to power 3,000 houses. //

CCTV describes this strategy as if the plan was to use it with any means of producing electricity and eventually mentions that it can avoid wasting electricity produced by renewable energy sources. Ironically, this may be the main application of such a solution instead of the mega batteries used in Australia and California.

From most publications and individuals with a platform from which to comment on such things, the coverage is breathlessly positive, merely reprints of glossy press releases in an impressive show of “suspension of common sense.”

Do electric airplanes fly? Well, of course they do! We’ve known that since the early 1970s. Spin a propeller fast enough, even if you use a giant rubber band to do it, and you’ll create enough thrust to get a light plane off the ground. The fatal flaw, that single thing standing in the way of effective use of electric-powered aircraft, is very well understood and easily summed up in two words—“energy density.’’ //

The amount of energy that can be stored and released on demand, be it in a battery or avgas or a twisted rubber band, per unit of mass is known as specific energy.

Es = E/m, that is, specific energy=kilowatt hours/pounds.

What this means is, the higher the specific energy, the more energy you will get out of a pound of whatever it is you’re storing it in. This is the “fatal flaw” I mentioned earlier. The specific energy of 100LL avgas is about 47, while the best lithium-ion battery around is about 1. Put another way, 10 pounds of battery will store 1,200 watt/hours of energy while 10 pounds (1.66 gallons) of 100LL contains 48,000 watt/hours. No clue on the rubber band. //

From a practical perspective, avgas gives you options. If you need to carry a fourth passenger in a 172, merely reduce the fuel load. Need to do that in an electric 172? Ah, no. ///

A gas turbine generator using just one of the two engines on a 737 puts out 30+MW.

I don't think that an airplane like the 737 can carry 100MWh of energy in batteries and still have usable payload.

Study describes passive cooling system that aims to help impoverished communities, reduce cooling and heating costs, lower CO2 emissions. //

A study published on February 8, 2021, in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science describes a uniquely designed radiative cooling system that:

Lowered the temperature inside a test system in an outdoor environment under direct sunlight by more than 12 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit).

Lowered the temperature of the test box in a laboratory, meant to simulate the night, by more than 14 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit).

Simultaneously captured enough solar power that can be used to heat water to about 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit).

While the system tested was only 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) squared, it could eventually be scaled up to cover rooftops, engineers say, with the goal of reducing society’s reliance on fossil fuels for cooling and heating. It also could aid communities with limited access to electricity.

Japan is set to fire up its nuclear power plants as it looks to expand its renewable energy offering amid a push to slash its emissions, its new industry minister has said today.

The efforts are a bid to cut 46 per cent of its carbon output from 2013 levels by 2030, while the country has also pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050.

“I would like to promote the maximum adoption of renewable energy, thorough energy conservation and the restart of nuclear power plants with the highest priority on safety,” newly appointed economy, trade and industry minister, Koichi Hagiuda, told his first news conference.

It comes amid a cabinet shuffle in Japan, as its government makes way for new prime minister Fumio Kishida.

One of the fossil fuel and plastic industries’ favorite “solutions” to the plastic pollution crisis may finally be coming under greater scrutiny from the federal government.

Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, formally announced it was considering tighter regulations for pyrolysis and gasification — controversial processes that are associated with “chemical recycling.” Industry advocates have named these processes as key steps toward building a circular economy — one that minimizes waste — but environmental groups have called them an “industry shell game” meant to keep single-use plastics in production.

How does the United States generate electricity currently?

Over the course of 2020, the U.S. generated 4,009 TWh of electricity, with the majority coming from fossil fuels. Natural gas (40.3%) was the biggest source of electricity for the country, accounting for more than nuclear (19.7%) and coal (17.3%) combined.

Including nuclear energy, non-fossil fuels made up 41.9% of U.S. electricity generation in 2020. The biggest sources of renewable electricity in the U.S. were wind (8.4%) and hydro (7.3%).

But on a state-by-state breakdown, we can see just how different the electricity mix is across the country (rounded to the nearest percentage). //

But for the U.S. to reach its ambitious carbon-free goal by 2035, the biggest impact will need to come from the biggest electricity producers.

That title currently goes to Texas, which generated 12% of total U.S. electricity in 2020. Despite being the most populous state, California generated less than half Texas’ output, and less than both Florida and Pennsylvania.

In 2020, the U.S. produced 4,009 terawatt-hours of power (also written as 4,009 billion kWh, since one billion kWh is one TWh).

■ About 60 percent of that total came from fossil fuels like natural gas (40.3 percent), coal (19.3 percent), and petroleum (0.4 percent), all of which have CO2 emissions as an undesirable side effect.

■ Nuclear energy accounted for just under 20 percent. It is debated whether nuclear power falls under the category of “sustainable,” but at least it doesn’t emit any greenhouse gases.

■ So-called renewables make up the remaining 20 percent, the main ones being wind (8.4 percent), hydro (7.3 percent) and solar (2.3 percent). Smaller renewable energy sources are biomass (1.4 percent) and geothermal (0.4 percent).

Let me start by dispelling the notion that I think smaller, modular, manufactured nuclear power systems – often called SMRs or micro reactors – are the be all and end all solution to anything, including climate change or energy security.

Though not THE solution, they have the potential to be a crucial, uniquely capable part of a fully-integrated, 0% emission climate-solving grid.

The best of the breed build on lessons from aircraft manufacturing, submarine construction, electric vehicles, wind & solar and even computers. They are leavened with six decades worth of experience in building, operating and maintaining extra large nuclear systems. They address some of the public relations challenges that have plagued very large reactors. //

As former submarine engineer officer who also had the rare opportunity to plan and budget for fleet level nuclear power training, maintenance and construction programs, I have a personal understanding of how economies of series production and standardization work to help keep costs under control and schedules predictable.

It is enlightening to see how much costs fall when you can train a group of operators in a common speciality and send them out to several dozen plants that have identical equipment, spare parts lockers and layouts. It’s also easy to see how maintenance procedures can be written once and used by all and how alterations can be planned, reviewed and implemented. These are just a few of the examples I can list. Rules protecting confidential information prevent me from sharing quantified details. Space prevents me from listing other examples.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone who has made anything that people learn to do things with experience or that doing the same thing repeatedly produces better results the more often the task is done. Those learning curve-related improvements don’t require mass production of thousands or millions of units, they start improving cost and performance with the second unit. //

The modern renewable industry – wind and solar energy collection systems – demonstrate the utility of replication. Starting from the high cost systems of the early 2000s, the industry took advantage of tax credit and mandates originally designed to help them build markets and achieve scale economies. Their impressive cost reduction performance is more attributable to the economy of learning by doing than it is to technological innovations and new inventions.

"In order to limit global warming, we will need to install terawatts of solar panels," says Lennon. "This will require a lot of metal. Silver is a limited resource and as it becomes more and more scarce, its price will go up so the cost of producing solar modules will rise as well. Mining silver from lower quality ores also produces more emissions, making the problem worse. Copper is much more available as a resource, it’s cheaper and it’s also easier to recycle. The metal from copper-plated solar modules will be easier to recover from old modules and therefore may be more easily recycled in the future. This helps enormously from a sustainability perspective.”

The team's 25.54 percent topples the previous efficiency record for a commercial-sized silicon solar cell of 25.26 percent held by Chinese company Longi. Other silicon solar cells have pushed out beyond this in laboratory settings, but achieving such performance in a commercially-sized cell, using copper in place of silver no less, is a notable step forward for the industry.

Solar Panels Will Create 50 Times More Waste & Cost 4 Times More Than Predicted, New Harvard Business Review Study Finds //

Three years ago I published a long article at Forbes arguing that solar panels weren’t clean but in fact produced 300 times more toxic waste than high-level nuclear waste. But in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone, solar panel waste risks exposing poor trash-pickers in sub-Saharan Africa. The reason was because it was so much cheaper to make new solar panels from raw materials than to recycle them, and would remain that way, given labor and energy costs. //

A major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world’s leading energy analysts thought. “The economics of solar,” write Atalay Atasu and Luk N. Van Wassenhove of INSEAD, one of Europe’s leading business schools, and Serasu Duran of the University of Calgary, will “darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash." //

The solar industry, and even supposedly neutral energy agencies, grossly underestimated how much waste solar panels would produce. The HBR authors, all of whom are business school professors, looked at the economics from the point of view of the customer, and past trends, and calculated that customers would replace panels far sooner than every 30 years, as the industry assumes.

“If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model,” they write, solar panels “can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than [International Renewable Energy Agency] IRENA anticipates.” //

The HBR authors found that the price of panels, the amount solar panel owners are paid by the local electric company, and sunlight-to-electricity efficiency determined how quickly people replaced their panels.

“Alarming as they are,” they write, “these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger.”

Beyond the shocking nature of the finding itself is what it says about the integrity and credibility of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency. It is an intergovernmental organization like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, funded by taxpayers from the developed nations of Europe, North America, and Asia, and expected to provide objective information. Instead, it employed unrealistic assumptions to produce results more supportive of solar panels.

IRENA acted like an industry association rather than as a public interest one. IRENA, noted the HBR reporters, “describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat.” IRENA almost certainly knew better. For decades, consumers in Germany, California, Japan and other major member nations of IRENA, have been replacing solar panels just 10 or 15 years old. But IRENA hadn’t even modeled solar panel replacements in those time frames. //

It’s now clear that China made solar appear cheap with coal, subsidies, and forced labor. And in the U.S., we pay one-quarter of solar’s costs through taxes and often much more in subsidies at the state and local level.

And none of this even addresses the biggest threat facing solar power today, which are revelations that perhaps both key raw materials and the panels themselves are being made by forced labor in Xinjiang province in China.

The subsidies that China gave solar panel makers had a purpose beyond bankrupting solar companies in the U.S. and Europe. The subsidies also enticed solar panel makers to participate in the repression of the Uyghur Muslim population, including using tactics that the US and German governments have called “genocide.”

Nations are coming to grips with their overdependence on renewables //

Over the last decade, energy experts repeatedly assured policymakers around the world that increasing the use of renewables, while shutting down nuclear plants, would make energy supplies more secure, while lowering prices. To make their case, experts pointed to radical declines in the price of solar panels, wind turbines, natural gas, and lithium batteries. //

But the heavy reliance on renewables in Europe and the United States has made electricity supply more vulnerable to a single commodity’s volatility. Today’s electricity grids mean that high gas prices cause energy price spikes and a return to the dirtiest forms of electricity production, including diesel and coal.

The return to coal was most dramatic in Germany. Electricity from wind was 20% lower in Germany in the first half of 2021 than the first half of 2020, resulting in a 24% higher use of fossil fuels and 28% greater emissions from electricity. Coal was the number one source of energy for electricity in Germany in the first half of 2021, comprising 27% of total electricity.

Illinois passed one of the most aggressive clean energy bills in the country on Monday, in a rousing success for environmental advocates that, unusually, also bails out some of the state’s biggest sources of clean power: nuclear energy. //

Importantly—and unusually for a bill cheered by green groups—the bill also contains a huge bailout for the state’s nuclear industry. It earmarks nearly $700 million in subsidies to prevent the closure of the Byron and Dresden Generating Stations, two of six nuclear plants in the state. Doing so will extend their lifelines by another 5 years. Exelon, the plants’ owners and one of the biggest utilities in the country, had set a deadline of Sept. 13—the day the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act was passed—as the day they’d need to start closing Byron without some help from the state. Doing so would have taken one of the biggest nuclear plants in the country offline. A report from nuclear advocates estimates that Illinois’s six nuclear plants currently provide 90% of the state’s clean power. Some analyses have shown that the plants’ closure would spur coal and gas plants to run more frequently to keep the grid operational, in addition to affecting the thousands of workers at the plants. //

The Illinois bill, on the other hand, clearly ties the nuclear bailouts to new provisions for clean jobs and environmental justice. Green groups like Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club have both supported the closure of nuclear plants in the past, and the Sierra Club has spoken out against subsidies for nuclear in Illinois. But both groups have cheered the passage of this new bill.

The success in Illinois doesn’t mean nuclear is suddenly on the table for green groups, however. “Illinois needs to transition away from dirty fossil fuels as quickly as possible to fight the climate crisis,” JC Kibbey, a clean energy advocate for NRDC in Illinois, said in an email. “Longer-term, we will transition away from nuclear because wind and solar provide a cheaper, safer and more reliable source of energy.

In the first half of 2021, coal shot up as the biggest contributor to Germany's electric grid, while wind power dropped to its lowest level since 2018. Officials say the weather is partly to blame.
Despite efforts to boost renewable energy sources, coal unseated wind power as the biggest energy contributor to the German network in the first six months of 2021, according to official statistics released on Monday.

The data comes as Germany looks to speed up its exit from coal-powered plants after years of mounting pressure from climate experts and activists over the country's dependence on coal and its detrimental impact in fueling the climate crisis.

CR reveals where most of the plastic you throw away really ends up and explains what to do to limit its environmental harm //

One of four things happens to plastic after you’re done with it. If it’s not recycled—and it’s usually not—it is landfilled, incinerated, or littered. The EPA estimates that in 2018, about 16 percent of U.S. plastic waste was incinerated. A relatively small amount was littered. Most of the rest ended up in landfills­—including a lot of the plastic people dutifully put into recycling bins. //

Certain types of plastic, however, are economically viable and relatively easy to recycle, and even in high demand. These include PET plastic bottles, like the ones soda and water are sold in, and HDPE milk jugs (respectively labeled with a number 1 or 2 inside the recycling triangle). But just 29 percent of the plastic used in these jugs and bottles was recycled in 2018.

The impacted facility went online in December 2020 and features lithium-ion batteries from LG Energy Solution. Fire crews found scorched battery racks and melted wires.

The Independent System Operator for the New England power grid (ISO-NE) has produced a summary brief describing the challenges associated with Arctic Outbreak 2017-2018, a period of substantially below normal temperatures that lasted from Dec.25, 2017 until Jan. 8, 2018.

After describing the intensity of the cold wave with a number of graphs, charts, images and words, the brief made the following sobering statements about the fuel mix used to supply power demand.

Overall, there was significantly higher than normal use of oil
– Coal use also increased over normal use
Gas and Oil fuel price inversion led to oil being in economic merit and base loaded
As gas became uneconomic, the entire season’s oil supply rapidly depleted

China’s natural experiment in deploying low-carbon energy generation shows that wind and solar are the clear winners. //

2010–2020 Showed Strong Wins For Wind & Solar In China, Nuclear Lagging

In 2014, I made the strong assertion that China’s track record on wind and nuclear generation deployments showed clearly that wind energy was more scalable. In 2019, I returned to the subject, and assessed wind, solar and nuclear total TWh of generation, asserting that wind and solar were outperforming nuclear substantially in total annual generation, and projected that the two renewable forms of generation would be producing 4 times the total TWh of nuclear by 2030 each year between them. Mea culpa: in the 2019 assessment, I overstated the experienced capacity factor for wind generation in China, which still lags US experiences, but has improved substantially in the past few years. //

My thesis on scalability of deployment has remained unchanged: the massive numerical economies of scale for manufacturing and distributing wind and solar components, combined with the massive parallelization of construction that is possible with those technologies, will always make them faster and easier to scale in capacity and generation than the megaprojects of GW-scale nuclear plants. This was obvious in 2014, it was obviously true in 2019, and it remains clearly demonstrable today. Further, my point was that China was the perfect natural experiment for this assessment, as it was treating both deployments as national strategies (an absolute condition of success for nuclear) and had the ability and will to override local regulations and any NIMBYism. No other country could be used to easily assess which technologies could be deployed more quickly. //

My 2014 thesis continues to be supported by the natural experiment being played out in China. In my recent published assessment of small modular nuclear reactors (tl’dr: bad idea, not going to work), it became clear to me that China has fallen into one of the many failure conditions of rapid deployment of nuclear, which is to say an expanding set of technologies instead of a standardized single technology, something that is one of the many reasons why SMRs won’t be deployed in any great numbers.

Wind and solar are going to be the primary providers of low-carbon energy for the coming century, and as we electrify everything, the electrons will be coming mostly from the wind and sun, in an efficient, effective and low-cost energy model that doesn’t pollute or cause global warming. Good news indeed that these technologies are so clearly delivering on their promise to help us deal with the climate crisis.