[Rhodes22-list] The Hydrogen Economy - Part II

[brad haslett]

This is a very lengthy but pursuasive article on why
we need more nukes.  Brad 

City Journal
Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power
Peter W. Huber       Mark P. Mills       
Winter 2005  

Your typical city dweller doesn’t know just how much
coal and uranium he burns each year. On Lake Shore
Drive in Chicago—where the numbers are fairly
representative of urban America as a whole—the answer
is (roughly): four tons and a few ounces. In round
numbers, tons of coal generate about half of the
typical city’s electric power; ounces of uranium,
about 17 percent; natural gas and hydro take care of
the rest. New York is a bit different: an apartment
dweller on the Upper West Side substitutes two tons of
oil (or the equivalent in natural gas) for Chicago’s
four tons of coal. The oil-tons get burned at plants
like the huge oil/gas unit in Astoria, Queens. The
uranium ounces get split at Indian Point in
Westchester, 35 miles north of the city, as well as at
the Ginna, Fitzpatrick, and Nine Mile Point units
upstate, and at additional plants in Connecticut, New
Jersey, and New Hampshire.

That’s the stunning thing about nuclear power: tiny
quantities of raw material can do so much. A bundle of
enriched-uranium fuel-rods that could fit into a
two-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen would power
the city for a year: furnaces, espresso machines,
subways, streetlights, stock tickers, Times Square,
everything—even our cars and taxis, if we could
conveniently plug them into the grid. True, you don’t
want to stack fuel rods in midtown Manhattan; you
don’t in fact want to stack them casually on top of
one another anywhere. But in suitable reactors,
situated, say, 50 miles from the city on a few hundred
acres of suitably fortified and well-guarded real
estate, two rooms’ worth of fuel could electrify it
all.

Think of our solitary New Yorker on the Upper West
Side as a 1,400-watt bulb that never sleeps—that’s the
national per-capita average demand for electric power
from homes, factories, businesses, the lot. Our
average citizen burns about twice as bright at 4 pm in
August, and a lot dimmer at 4 am in December;
grown-ups burn more than kids, the rich more than the
poor; but it all averages out: 14 floor lamps per
person, lit round the clock. Convert this same number
back into a utility’s supply-side jargon, and a
million people need roughly 1.4 “gigs” of power—1.4
gigawatts (GW). Running at peak power, Entergy’s two
nuclear units at Indian Point generate just under 2
GW. So just four Indian Points could take care of New
York City’s 7-GW round-the-clock average. Six could
handle its peak load of about 11.5 GW. And if we had
all-electric engines, machines, and heaters out at the
receiving end, another ten or so could power all the
cars, ovens, furnaces—everything else in the city that
oil or gas currently fuels.

For such a nuclear-powered future to arrive, however,
we’ll need to get beyond our nuclear-power past. In
the now-standard histories, the beginning of the end
of nuclear power arrived on March 28, 1979, with the
meltdown of the uranium core at Three Mile Island in
Pennsylvania. The Chernobyl disaster seven years later
drove the final nail into the nuclear coffin. It
didn’t matter that the Three Mile Island containment
vessel had done its job and prevented any significant
release of radioactivity, or that Soviet reactors
operated within a system that couldn’t build a safe
toaster oven. Uranium was finished.

Three Mile Island came on the heels of the first great
energy shock to hit America. On October 19, 1973, King
Faisal ordered a 25 percent reduction in Saudi
Arabia’s oil shipments to the United States, launching
the Arab oil embargo. Oil supplies would tighten and
prices would rise from then on, experts predicted. It
would take some time, but oil was finished, too.

Five months after Three Mile Island, the nation’s
first energy secretary summed up our predicament: “The
energy future is bleak,” James R. Schlesinger
declared, “and is likely to grow bleaker in the decade
ahead. We must rapidly adjust our economics to a
condition of chronic stringency in traditional energy
supplies.” Fortunately, some argued, the U.S. could
manage on less—much less. Smaller, more fuel-efficient
cars were gaining favor, and rising gas prices would
curb demand. The nation certainly didn’t need any new
giant electric power plants—efficiency and the
development of renewable sources of power would
suffice. “The long-run supply curve for electricity is
as flat as the Kansas horizon,” noted one
right-thinking energy sage.

In the ensuing decades, however, American oil
consumption rose 15 percent and electricity use almost
doubled. Many people aren’t happy about it. Protecting
our oil-supply lines entangles us with feudal
theocracies and the fanatical sects that they spawn.
The coal that we burn to generate so much of our
electricity pollutes the air and may warm the planet.
What to do? All sober and thoughtful energy pundits at
the New York Times, Greenpeace, and the Harvard
Divinity School agree: the answer to both problems is
. . . efficiency and the development of renewable
sources of power. Nevertheless, the secretary of
energy, his boss (now a Texas oilman, not a Georgia
peanut farmer), and the rest of the country should
look elsewhere.

The U.S. today consumes about 100 quads—100
quadrillion BTUs—of raw thermal energy per year. We do
three basic things with it: generate electricity
(about 40 percent of the raw energy consumed), move
vehicles (30 percent), and produce heat (30 percent).
Oil is the fuel of transportation, of course. We
principally use natural gas to supply raw heat, though
it’s now making steady inroads into electric power
generation. Fueling electric power plants are mainly
(in descending order) coal, uranium, natural gas, and
rainfall, by way of hydroelectricity. 

This sharp segmentation emerged relatively recently,
and there’s no reason to think it’s permanent. After
all, developing economies use trees and pasture as
fuel for heat and transportation, and don’t generate
much electricity at all. A century ago, coal was the
all-purpose fuel of industrial economies: coal
furnaces provided heat, and coal-fired steam engines
powered trains, factories, and the early electric
power plants. From the 1930s until well into the
1970s, oil fueled not just cars but many electric
power plants, too. And by 2020, electricity almost
certainly will have become the new cross-cutting
“fuel” in both stationary and mobile applications.

That shift is already under way. About 60 percent of
the fuel we use today isn’t oil but coal, uranium,
natural gas, and gravity—all making electricity.
Electricity has met almost all of the growth in U.S.
energy demand since the 1980s. About 60 percent of our
GDP now comes from industries and services that use
electricity as their front-end “fuel”—in 1950, the
figure was only 20 percent. The fastest growth sectors
of the economy—information technology and telecom,
notably—depend entirely on electricity for fuel,
almost none of it oil-generated. Electrically powered
information technology accounts for some 60 percent of
new capital spending.

Electricity is taking over ever more of the thermal
sector, too. A microwave oven displaces much of what a
gas stove once did in a kitchen. So, too, lasers,
magnetic fields, microwaves, and other forms of
high-intensity photon power provide more precise,
calibrated heating than do conventional ovens in
manufacturing and the industrial processing of
materials. These electric cookers (broadly defined)
are now replacing conventional furnaces, ovens,
dryers, and welders to heat air, water, foods, and
chemicals, to cure paints and glues, to forge steel,
and to weld ships. Over the next two decades, such
trends will move another 15 percent or so of our
energy economy from conventional thermal to
electrically powered processes. And that will shift
about 15 percent of our oil-and-gas demand to whatever
primary fuels we’ll then be using to generate
electricity.

Electricity is also taking over the power train in
transportation—not the engine itself, but the system
that drives power throughout the car. Running in
confined tunnels as they do, subways had to be
all-electric from the get-go. More recently,
diesel-electric locomotives and many of the monster
trucks used in mining have made the transition to
electric drive trains. Though the oil-fired combustion
engine is still there, it’s now just an onboard
electric generator that propels only electrons. 

Most significantly, the next couple of decades will
see us convert to the hybrid gasoline-and-electric
car. A steadily rising fraction of the power produced
under the hood of a car already is used to generate
electricity: electrical modules are replacing
components that belts, gears, pulleys, and shafts once
drove. Steering, suspension, brakes, fans, pumps, and
valves will eventually go electric; in the end,
electricity will drive the wheels, too. Gas prices and
environmental mandates have little to do with this
changeover. The electric drive train simply delivers
better performance, lower cost, and less weight.

The policy implications are enormous. Outfitted with a
fully electric power train, most of the car—everything
but its prime mover—looks like a giant electrical
appliance. This appliance won’t run any great distance
on batteries alone, given today’s battery technology.
But a substantial battery pack on board will provide
surges of power when needed. And that makes possible
at least some “refueling” of the car from the
electricity grid. As cars get more electric, an
infrastructure of battery-recharging stations will
grow apace, probably in driveways and parking lots,
where most cars spend most of their time.

Once you’ve got the wheels themselves running on
electricity, the basic economics strongly favor
getting that electricity from the grid if you can.
Burning $2-a-gallon gasoline, the power generated by
current hybrid-car engines costs about 35 cents per
kilowatt-hour. Many utilities, though, sell off-peak
power for much less: 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The nationwide residential price is still only 8.5
cents or so. (Peak rates in Manhattan are higher
because of the city’s heavy dependence on oil and gas,
but not enough to change the basic arithmetic.) Grid
kilowatts are cheaper because cheaper fuels generate
them and because utility power plants run a lot more
efficiently than car engines.

The gas tank and combustion engine won’t disappear
anytime soon, but in the imminent future, grid power
will (in effect) begin to top off the tank in between
the short trips that account for most driving.
All-electric vehicles flopped in the 1990s because
batteries can’t store sufficient power for long
weekend trips. But plug-in hybrids do have a gasoline
tank for the long trips. And the vast majority of the
most fuel-hungry trips are under six miles—within the
range of the 2 to 5 kWh capacity of the onboard
nickel-metal-hydride batteries in hybrids already on
the road, and easily within the range of emerging
automotive-class lithium batteries. Nationally, some
10 percent of hybrid cars could end up running almost
entirely on the grid, as they travel less than six
miles per day. Stick an extra 90 pounds—$800 worth—of
nickel-metal-hydride batteries in a hybrid, recharge
in garages and parking lots, and you can shift roughly
25 percent of a typical driver’s fuel-hungriest miles
to the grid. Urban drivers could go long stretches
without going near a gas station. The technology for
replacing (roughly) one pint of gasoline with one
pound of coal or under one ounce of uranium to feed
one kilowatt-hour of power to the wheels is now close
at hand.

So today we use 40 percent of our fuel to power the
plug, and the plug powers 60 percent of GDP. And with
the ascent of microwaves, lasers, hybrid wheels, and
such, we’re moving to 60 and 80 percent, respectively,
soon. And then, in due course, 100/100. We’re turning
to electricity as fuel because it can do more, faster,
in much less space—indeed, it’s by far the fastest and
purest form of power yet tamed for ubiquitous use.
Small wonder that demand for it keeps growing.

We’ve been meeting half of that new demand by burning
an extra 400 million tons of coal a year, with coal
continuing to supply half of our wired power. Natural
gas, the fossil fuel grudgingly favored by most
environmentalists, has helped meet the new demand,
too: it’s back at 16 percent of electricity generated,
where it was two decades ago, after dropping sharply
for a time. Astonishingly, over this same period,
uranium’s share of U.S. electricity has also
risen—from 11 percent to its current 20 percent. Part
of the explanation is more nuclear power plants. Even
though Three Mile Island put an end to the
commissioning of new facilities, some already under
construction at the time later opened, with the plant
count peaking at 112 in 1990. Three Mile Island also
impelled plant operators to develop systematic
procedures for sharing information and expertise, and
plants that used to run seven months per year now run
almost eleven. Uranium has thus displaced about eight
percentage points of oil, and five points of
hydroelectric, in the expanding electricity market.

Renewable fuels, by contrast, made no visible dent in
energy supplies, despite the hopes of Greens and the
benefits of government-funded research, subsidies, and
tax breaks. About a half billion kWh of electricity
came from solar power in 2002—roughly 0.013 percent of
the U.S. total. Wind power contributed another 0.27
percent. Fossil and nuclear fuels still completely
dominate the U.S. energy supply, as in all
industrialized economies.

The other great hope of environmentalists, efficiency,
did improve over the last couple of decades—very
considerably, in fact. Air conditioners, car engines,
industrial machines, lightbulbs, refrigerator
motors—without exception, all do much more, with much
less, than they used to. Yet in aggregate, they burn
more fuel, too. Boosting efficiency actually raises
consumption, as counterintuitive as that sounds. The
more efficient a car, the cheaper the miles; the more
efficient a refrigerator, the cheaper the ice; and at
the end of the day, we use more efficient technology
so much more that total energy consumption goes up,
not down. 

We’re burning our 40 quads of raw fuel to generate
about 3.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per
year; if the automotive plug-and-play future does
unfold on schedule, we’ll need as much as 7 trillion
kWh per year by 2025. How should we generate the extra
trillions of kilowatt-hours?

With hydrogen, the most optimistic Green visionaries
reply—produced by solar cells or windmills. But it’s
not possible to take such proposals seriously. New
York City consumes so much energy that you’d need, at
a minimum, to cover two cities with solar cells to
power a single city (see “How Cities Green the
Planet,” Winter 2000). No conceivable mix of solar and
wind could come close to supplying the trillions of
additional kilowatt-hours of power we’ll soon need.

Nuclear power could do it—easily. In all key technical
respects, it is the antithesis of solar power. A
quad’s worth of solar-powered wood is a huge
forest—beautiful to behold, but bulky and heavy. Pound
for pound, coal stores about twice as much heat. Oil
beats coal by about twice as much again. And an ounce
of enriched-uranium fuel equals about 4 tons of coal,
or 15 barrels of oil. That’s why minuscule quantities
contained in relatively tiny reactors can power a
metropolis.

What’s more, North America has vast deposits of
uranium ore, and scooping it up is no real challenge.
Enrichment accounts for about half of the fuel’s cost,
and enrichment technologies keep improving. Proponents
of solar and wind power maintain—correctly—that the
underlying technologies for these energy sources keep
getting cheaper, but so do those that squeeze power
out of conventional fuels. The lasers coming out of
the same semiconductor fabs that build solar cells
could enrich uranium a thousand times more efficiently
than the gaseous-diffusion processes currently used.

And we also know this: left to its own devices, the
market has not pursued thin, low-energy-density fuels,
however cheap, but has instead paid steep premiums for
fuels that pack more energy into less weight and
space, and for power plants that pump greater power
out of smaller engines, furnaces, generators,
reactors, and turbines. Until the 1970s, engineering
and economic imperatives had been pushing the fuel mix
inexorably up the power-density curve, from wood to
coal to oil to uranium. And the same held true on the
demand side, with consumers steadily shifting toward
fuels carrying more power, delivered faster, in less
space.

Then King Faisal and Three Mile Island shattered our
confidence and convinced regulators, secretaries of
energy, and even a president that just about
everything that the economists and engineers thought
they knew about energy was wrong. So wrong that we had
to reverse completely the extraordinarily successful
power policies of the past.

New York has certainly felt the effects of that
reversal. In 1965, the Long Island Lighting Company
(LILCO) announced plans to build a $75 million nuclear
plant in Suffolk County, to come on line by 1973; soon
after, it purchased a 455-acre site between Shoreham
and Wading River. A bit later, LILCO decided to
increase Shoreham’s size and said it wanted to build
several other nuclear plants in the area. Public
resistance and federal regulators delayed Shoreham’s
completion. Then Three Mile Island happened. In the
aftermath, regulators required plant operators to
devise evacuation plans in coordination with state and
local governments. In early 1983, newly elected
governor Mario Cuomo and the Suffolk County
legislature both declared that no evacuation plan
would ever be feasible and safe. That was that. By the
time the state fully decommissioned Shoreham in 1994,
its price tag had reached $6 billion—and the plant had
never started full-power commercial operation. To pay
for it all, Long Island electric rates skyrocketed.

What scared many New Yorkers—and thus many
politicians—away from nuclear power was what had
originally attracted the engineers and the utility
economists to it: nuclear facilities use a unique
fuel, burned, in its fashion, in relatively tiny
reactors, to generate gargantuan amounts of power. Do
it all just right, end to end, and you get cheap,
abundant power, and King Faisal can’t do a thing about
it. But the raw material itself, packing so much power
into so little material, is inherently dangerous.
Sufficiently bad engineering can result in a Three
Mile Island or a Chernobyl. And these days, there’s
the fear that poor security might enable terrorists to
pull off something even worse. 

How worried should we really be in 2005 that accidents
or attacks might release and disperse a nuclear power
plant’s radioactive fuel? Not very. Our civilian
nuclear industry has dramatically improved its
procedures and safety-related hardware since 1979.
Several thousand reactor-years of statistics since
Three Mile Island clearly show that these power plants
are extraordinarily reliable in normal operation.

And uranium’s combination of power and super-density
makes the fuel less of a terror risk, not more, at
least from an engineering standpoint. It’s easy to
“overbuild” the protective walls and containment
systems of nuclear facilities, since—like the
pyramids—the payload they’re built to shield is so
small. Protecting skyscrapers is hard; no builder can
afford to erect a hundred times more wall than usable
space. Guaranteeing the integrity of a jumbo jet’s
fuel tanks is impossible; the tanks have to fly.
Shielding a nuclear plant’s tiny payload is easy—just
erect more steel, pour more concrete, and build
tougher perimeters.

In fact, it’s a safety challenge that we have already
met. Today’s plants split atoms behind super-thick
layers of steel and concrete; future plants would
boast thicker protection still. All the numbers, and
the strong consensus in the technical community,
reinforce the projections made two decades ago: it is
extremely unlikely that there will ever be a serious
release of nuclear materials from a U.S. reactor.

What about the economic cost of nuclear power? Wind
and sun are free, of course. But if the cost of fuel
were all that mattered, the day of too-cheap-to-meter
nuclear power would now be here—nearer, certainly,
than too-cheap-to-meter solar power. Raw fuel accounts
for over half the delivered cost of electricity
generated in gas-fired turbines, about one-third of
coal-fired power, and just a tenth of nuclear
electricity. Factor in the cost of capital equipment,
and the cheapest electrons come from uranium and coal,
not sun and wind. What we pay for at our electric
meter is increasingly like what we pay for at fancy
restaurants: not the raw calories, but the fine linen,
the service, and the chef’s ineffable artistry. In our
overall energy accounts, the sophisticated
power-conversion hardware matters more every year, and
the cost of raw fuel matters less.

This in itself is great news for America. We’re good
at large-scale hardware; we build it ourselves and
keep building it cheaper. The average price of U.S.
electricity fell throughout the twentieth century, and
it has kept falling since, except in egregiously
mismanaged markets such as California’s.

The cheap, plentiful power does terrific things for
labor productivity and overall employment. As Lewis E.
Lehrman notes, rising employment strongly correlates
with rising supplies of low-cost energy. It takes
energy to get the increasingly mobile worker to the
increasingly distant workplace, and energy to process
materials and power the increasingly advanced machines
that shape and assemble those materials.

Most of the world, Europe aside, now recognizes this
point. Workers in Asia and India are swiftly gaining
access to the powered machines that steadily boosted
the productivity of the American factory worker
throughout the twentieth century. And the electricity
driving those machines comes from power plants
designed—and often built—by U.S. vendors. The power is
a lot less expensive than ours, though, since it is
generated the old-fashioned forget-the-environment
way. There is little bother about protecting the river
or scrubbing the smoke. China’s answer to the
2-gigawatt Hoover Dam on the Colorado River is the
Three Gorges project, an 18-gigawatt dam on the
Yangtze River. Combine cheaper supplies of energy with
ready access to heavy industrial machines, and it’s
hard to see how foreign laborers cannot close the
productivity gap that has historically enabled
American workers to remain competitive at considerably
higher wages. Unless, that is, the United States keeps
on pushing the productivity of its own workforce out
ahead of its competitors. That—inevitably—means
expanding our power supply and keeping it affordable,
and deploying even more advanced technologies of
powered production. Nuclear power would help keep the
twenty-first-century U.S. economy globally
competitive.

Greens don’t want to hear it, but nuclear power makes
the most environmental sense, too. Nuclear wastes pose
no serious engineering problems. Uranium is such an
energy-rich fuel that the actual volume of waste is
tiny compared with that of other fuels, and is easily
converted from its already-stable ceramic form as a
fuel into an even more stable glass-like compound, and
just as easily deposited in deep geological
formations, themselves stable for tens of millions of
years. And what has Green antinuclear activism
achieved since the seventies? Not the reduction in
demand for energy that it had hoped for but a massive
increase in the use of coal, which burns less clean
than uranium.

Many Greens think that they have a good grip on the
likely trajectory of the planet’s climate over the
next 100 years. If we keep burning fossil fuels at
current rates, their climate models tell them, we’ll
face a meltdown on a much larger scale than
Chernobyl’s, beginning with the polar ice caps. Saving
an extra 400 million tons of coal here and
there—roughly the amount of carbon that the United
States would have to stop burning to comply with the
Kyoto Protocol today—would make quite a difference,
we’re told.

But serious Greens must face reality. Short of some
convulsion that drastically shrinks the economy,
demand for electricity will go on rising. Total U.S.
electricity consumption will increase another 20 to 30
percent, at least, over the next ten years. Neither
Democrats nor Republicans, moreover, will let the grid
go cold—not even if that means burning yet another 400
million more tons of coal. Not even if that means
melting the ice caps and putting much of Bangladesh
under water. No governor or president wants to be the
next Gray Davis, recalled from office when the lights
go out.

The power has to come from somewhere. Sun and wind
will never come close to supplying it. Earnest though
they are, the people who argue otherwise are the folks
who brought us 400 million extra tons of coal a year.
The one practical technology that could decisively
shift U.S. carbon emissions in the near term would
displace coal with uranium, since uranium burns
emission-free. It’s time even for Greens to embrace
the atom. 

It must surely be clear by now, too, that the
political costs of depending so heavily on oil from
the Middle East are just too great. We need to find a
way to stop funneling $25 billion a year (or so) of
our energy dollars into churning cauldrons of hate and
violence. By sharply curtailing our dependence on
Middle Eastern oil, we would greatly expand the range
of feasible political and military options in dealing
with the countries that breed the terrorists.

The best thing we can do to decrease the Middle East’s
hold on us is to turn off the spigot ourselves. For
economic, ecological, and geopolitical reasons, U.S.
policymakers ought to promote electrification on the
demand side, and nuclear fuel on the supply side,
wherever they reasonably can.



		
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