Blog Action Day

Well, long time no post. I hope all my readers are well.

So, apparently today is something called “Blog Action Day“, and this year the topic of interest is anthropogenic forcing of the climate system, and mitigating the potential thereof.

So, OK, I thought I’ll write a blog post about it. The day is supposed to be about action, as the name suggests, so let’s talk about specific actions, with a view towards making a significant mitigation, in a realistic way, of Australia’s anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.

Australia’s brown coal (lignite) fired electricity generators have by far the highest specific carbon dioxide emissions intensity per unit of electrical energy generated, since they’re burning relatively high moisture brown coal. They are the most concentrated point contributors to the anthropogenic GHG output. Therefore, these are the “low-hanging fruit” – a very valuable target to look at first and foremost if we want to make the greatest realistic mitigation of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions in a practical way, followed by black coal-fired generators.

Australia’s total net greenhouse gas emissions in 2006 were 549.9 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

If we look at the three main sets of lignite-fired generators in the Latrobe valley in Victoria, they represent a very concentrated point source of CO2 output, so they’re a very good case to focus on specifically.

In 2006, Hazelwood generated 11.6 TWh of electrical energy, and 16,149,398 tonnes of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.

In 2006, Loy Yang A generated 15.994 TWh of electrical energy sent out to the grid and 19,326,812 tonnes of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.

I’ll exclude Loy Yang B from this list for the moment, since its numbers are eluding me.

In 2006, the Yallourn power station generated 10.392 TWh of electrical energy sent out to the grid and 14,680,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.

If you look at the the total contribution of just those three brown-coal-fired plants combined, you’re looking at 9.12 percent of Australia’s total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. If you replace those with clean technology that can deliver an equivalent electricity output, you get a 9.12 percent reduction in Australia’s CO2 emissions. (When you include Loy Yang B, I think it’s approximately 11-12%.)

That’s not a bad target for Australia to implement for the relatively short term for a real reduction in CO2 emissions. It can actually be done, if the real political will exists to do it.

Now, I’m not interested in this “100% renewable energy by 2020″ business from the extremist any-excuse-for-a-protest Socialist Alternative set, because it is nonsense.

Replacing all the coal-fired and gas-fired generators in this country inside 10 years (and presumably only using wind turbines and solar cells, not nuclear energy of course since it doesn’t fit their para-religious ideology)? That’s complete bullshit, of course, because in the real world it cannot be done.

There’s a difference between setting a challenging target and setting a nonsense target. Unless you’re only trying to implement a political bullshit stunt instead of actually trying to hit your targets.

Of course, you don’t just close down the coal-fired generators. You’ve actually got to build their clean replacements first. So what do you use that can realistically replace a coal-fired power station? Nuclear power, of course.

Now, again, to be realistic, we probably can’t build LFTR/MSR, PBMR/HTGR, IFR/PRISM or any kind of nuclear fusion based generation capacity on a large scale to generate grid-connected energy right now. That’s not to say that pilot-scale research and development on those very cool technologies shouldn’t continue, but right now, getting more nuclear energy on the grid means advanced light water reactors – or maybe heavy water CANDU-type things, or conventional sodium-cooled fast reactors maybe. The most practical thing for serious deployment in the relatively short term is advanced LWR technology. In the slightly longer term, there is certainly a place to be encouraging both Gen. IV and fusion.

To get the same amount of energy as the total output from those coal plants, as above, which we’re talking about replacing, we need 4.56 GW of installed nuclear capacity, assuming a 95% capacity factor.

With 4 x 1154 MWe Westinghouse AP1000s, with a 95% capacity factor, you’ve got 4.62 GW, which is a little more than what’s needed.

You can easily have four nuclear power reactors integrated into one nuclear power plant.

Now, how much does it cost?

On March 27, 2008, South Carolina Electric & Gas applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a COL to build two AP1000s at the Virgil nuclear power plant in South Carolina. On May 27, 2008, SCE&G and Santee Cooper announced an engineering, procurement, and construction contract had been reached with Westinghouse. Costs are estimated to be approximately $9.8 billion for both AP1000 units, plus transmission facility and financing costs.

That gives you an idea of how much a nuclear power plant costs today, in the current financial environment, in the current regulatory environment.

If we double that figure of USD$9.8 billion, it’s AUD $21.4 billion. There will be some saving since we’re considering building four reactors at one plant, not two independent two-reactor plants.

How much that saving will be, quantitatively, I don’t really know. If the cost is reduced by 30%, we’re looking at 15 billion Australian dollars.

How long would it take? If the real political will exists to do it, 10 years is heaps of time. We could probably do even more in that timeframe if we really, really wanted to. AP1000 construction takes 36 months from first concrete poured to fuel load, if you ignore any political protest rubbish.

This is really just a base-line relatively achievable “base case”. After this decade, of course, the rate of nuclear power deployment – and related GHG emissions mitigation – could foreseeably accelerate.

What about the uranium input? About 600 tonnes of natural uranium per year total, for all four reactors. Australia’s present production, off the top of my head, is something like 10,000-11,000 tonnes. Australia’s present uranium production can very, very easily provide for Australia’s total electricity production even without expansion of uranium production – again, considering the inefficient once-through use of low-enriched uranium in conventional LWRs.

What about the so-called “waste”?
Roughly 80-85 tonnes of used uranium fuel per year. 96% of that is unchanged uranium, so that 76.8 tonnes of uranium can be seperated and re-used. It’s just uranium, so it’s not going to hurt you.

The remaining 3200 kg is made up of the valuable, interesting and unique byproduct materials from a nuclear reactor – unique resources with all kinds of different technological applications, which aren’t all radioactive, which you cannot get anywhere else.

Anyway, that’s one scenario which I happen to think has a lot of merit.

Maybe you don’t agree – but if you don’t agree, I’d love to see you elucidate an alternative scenario which can deliver the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions mitigation – shown to be accurate in a quantitative way – within a comparable timeframe and within a comparable cost.

It will not be inexpensive, and it will not happen overnight – but I have yet to see any scenario which can honestly do the same job faster and cheaper, when some real quantitative analysis is applied.

Conspiracy at Three Mile Island…

I wrote this in response to a comment over at Brave New Climate (shameless plug), but I thought it was quite a nice little post, so as not to waste it, I’ll re-post it.

PS: Sorry about my lack of blog activity lately, sometimes real life seems to eat up my time. Extra apologies, especially, if you’ve posted comments that the software has kept from being posted pending manual moderator approval, and therefore your comments haven’t been getting through.
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Ah, the old Three Mile Island conspiracy theory, the notion that there were enormous amounts of radioactivity released, and people who experienced acute radiation poisoning, that was somehow covered up.

Let’s look, for a moment, at the Chernobyl disaster. When the Chernobyl disaster happened, we didn’t see the Soviet premier calling up Reagan to tell him all about this catastrophic accident and large release of radioactivity, did we? Of course, they tried to keep it a secret.
So, how did we in the industrialised world find out about the Chernobyl accident and this large release of radioactivity? We found out about it when all the radiological sensors and alarms started going off at the Forsmark nuclear power plant in Sweden.

As another example, we all know today that it is possible, if you live in an area of relatively uranium-rich geology, for significant amounts of radioactivity in the form of radon to leach into your basement naturally from the surrounding rock.
But how was this radon issue first discovered? It was discovered when a person employed at a nuclear power station in the United States kept setting off the radiological sensors when he arrived at work every day.

Those incidents show you just how sensitive the detectors and monitors used at facilities like nuclear power plants are.

In the modern world, if there is some sort of massive release of radioactivity into the atmosphere it is impossible to hide it or to cover it up.

If this massive release of radioactivity at TMI isn’t just a myth, then you would have recorded clear evidence of it on every bit of photographic film for miles around. After the accident, all such photographic film was collected and analysed by Kodak, and no such evidence was found.

There are many other nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania and neighbouring states which aren’t too far away from TMI. They would have recorded real evidence of a large cloud of radioactivity in the environment, if it was really present to that extent.

You’d record real evidence of it anywhere where photographic film is stored or used. You’d record it at every nuclear power plant, or anywhere else where radioactive materials are stored or used where health physics controls are implemented. You’d record real evidence of it anywhere where medical or industrial X-ray images are made. You’d record it anywhere where radioactivity is used for scientific or medical purposes. You’d record it everywhere where particle detectors are used for physics experiments. You’d maybe even detect it on every old duck-and-cover civil defence radiological detector that someone might have had laying around as an unpleasant relic of history.

But no such real physical recorded evidence to support the theory was ever recorded, anywhere. People went looking for it, but it wasn’t there.

There are people who claim they got sick as a result of the Three Mile Island accident, who claim that they exhibited symptoms consistent with acute radiation poisoning, and massive doses of ionising radiation.

There are also people who claim that they have been made sick by witches who put a curse on them – once upon a time, upon hearing these stories, we’d have them tell us the identity of the witch so the witch could then be tortured and murdered, based on these stories.

There are people who tell stories about how they’ve been beamed aboard the extraterrestrial flying saucer, and sexually molested by the aliens – but once again, as with the above examples, there are mere stories but there is no actual real evidence that stands up to scientific enquiry.

Shortly after the TMI accident, people like Helen Caldicott went and gathered up local residents and described to them the scary sounding symptopms of acute radiation poisoning from acute exposure to massive doses of ionising radiation, and implied that that’s what would happen to them. With that kind of fear and stress, it’s no surprise that we can see mass hysteria, and we can see people who say that they think they might be starting to exhibit those symptoms that they’ve been told about.

But instruments and detectors and photographic films and thermoluminescent dosimeter crystals aren’t subject to fear, panic and mass hysteria – and they recorded nothing.

A common claim of TMI conspiracy theorists such as Caldicott is that longer lived radionuclides, such as Cs-137, Sr-90, Pu-239 (or pick your favourite moderate-to-long half-life well-known reactor-produced radionuclide) were released into the environment at TMI, not just short-lived gaseous fission products.

But if such nuclides were released, you could go and take some soil from TMI, and physically show the evidence of such release, because those radionuclides would still, mostly, be there. They can show us real, undeniable, physical evidence today, if that hypothesis is true. But that evidence is never forthcoming.