Restarting Japan’s Nuclear Plants Causes Hyperventilated Opining

In the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, many people missed an important lesson staring them in the face.  Nuclear power’s CO2 emissions are small in comparison to fossil fuels, there is no doubt.  But safe nuclear energy is very expensive.  Japan has to decide which goals it wants to attain.  Do the Japanese want carbon-free energy, cheap energy, or safe energy?

I read an article at Grist that takes the new Japanese Prime Minister to task over his desire to restart Japan’s off-line nuclear power stations.  I doubt that Susie Cagle has to find a way to deliver power to an industrialized island nation with no energy resources of its own, which allowed her to take this tack.  The title of her post is misleading or biased, take your pick.  Fukushima isn’t damned in this decision:

The newspaper said making the necessary upgrades to meet the proposed guidelines would cost plant operators about $11 billion, in addition to improvements already made after the Fukushima accident. The agency has said the new guidelines will be finalized and put in place by July 18.

$11 billion to meet new guidelines doesn’t come across as ignoring Fukushima’s lessons.  The fundamental flaw in Cagle’s argument is an incorrect interpretation of risk.  How many nuclear power plant disasters has the world suffered?  How many plant-hours have those plants operated?  What is the ratio of disasters to operating hours or Giga-watts of electricity produced for people?  Astoundingly low.  How many people are killed in Japan or the US by motor vehicles per year?  Fatalities decreased to 36,000 in 2009, if you’re curious.  What replacement technology does Cagle and other anti-nuclear advocates propose?  Because one technology kills people every day while the other does not.

How will Japan replace 33% of its electricity generation if it keeps all of its nuclear power plants offline?  Natural gas has replaced nuclear since Fukushima, which still releases CO2 into the atmosphere and requires drilling and transport.

The Japanese government’s handling of nuclear safety was and is an issue (corruption infests regulation enforcement).  But Cagle’s article didn’t discuss the causes behind Fukushima (besides using nuclear at all) or offer solutions – about either nuclear safety or energy policy.  Does she really expect Prime Minister Abe to try to convince the Japanese people they shouldn’t have electricity or they should pay more for their energy when viable technologies are at hand?

Also missing from the article was the following.  As Japan and Germany add to CO2 concentrations by closing nuclear power plants and burning more fossil fuels, Japan’s coast faces rising sea levels in a warming world.  Cagle could have discussed the need to add sea-level change projections into Japan’s nuclear energy policy as they strengthen infrastructure.  How many additional billions of dollars might the Japanese need to spend to handle climate change effects?

Energy: Nuclear, Transmission, Efficiency

New nuclear electricity can cost as much as 3X as much as current electricity sources, according to a recent study.  Can nuclear power advocates provide an up-to-date, public cost study of their own?

To harness renewable energy, the American transmission grid needs to be updated and expanded.  Wind and solar farms will be placed further from urban centers than their coal, natural gas and nuclear counterparts.  A company have put together an idea for a national “transmission superhighway”.

One potential transmission build-out scenario that would allow the U.S. to obtain 20% of its electricity from the wind would include 19,000 miles of new 765-kilovolt (kV) transmission lines, for an estimated price tag of US $60 billion. (A 765-kV line is a high-voltage power line that can carry larger amounts of electricity — and with significantly higher efficiency — than most older transmission lines in use today.) These high-voltage lines would serve as the backbone of an interstate transmission superhighway.

While the size and cost of the transmission superhighway may sound large at first glance, it is important to keep these numbers in perspective. Given that electricity transmission infrastructure typically remains in service for 50 years or more, the cost of the investment for the average household would be equivalent to about US $0.35 per month, less than the cost of a postage stamp.

Those costs would be more than made up by the economic savings from replacing natural gas use with wind power generation, not to mention the benefits of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other pollutants. In fact, the DOE report estimated that obtaining 20% of U.S. electricity from wind would reduce electricity sector natural gas use by 50%. In addition, the DOE study found that the 20% wind energy scenario would reduce CO2 by 7.6 billion tons between now and 2030. Electric sector CO₂ emissions would be reduced by 825 million tons in the year 2030 alone, an amount equal to 25% of all electric sector carbon dioxide emissions in that year or the equivalent of taking 140 million cars off the road.

I don’t expect the natural gas industry to be thrilled with this plan (or anything that comes close to it).  Remember, they’re interested in their profits, not how habitable the planet will be in 100 years.  Kudos to the people that work on these kinds of studies.  They should have a prominent place in our national discussions of energy policy.

Efficiency Portfolio Standards should be as important as Renewable Energy Standards, as Joe Romm argues.  The latter has been much easier to popularize and enact.  The former are probably just as (if not more) important but haven’t received nearly the widespread acceptance they deserve.  Energy efficiency programs are among the cheapest solutions to our energy problems.  If enacted, they would easily reduce our energy usage significantly and immediately.