Challengers raised points that merit responses. Mine lead to one answer: degrowth.
The best intentions in the world will not stop the inertia of a heavy civilization that is rolling on its way. — poet Gary Snyder
In a recent essay I argued that replacing a 150-year-old fossil fuel system with a shiny electrical one in just 25 years to address climate chaos would come with monstrous ecological costs.
I also said it won’t get the job done given that climate change is just one symptom of a greater crisis: the excessive consumption of resources on a finite planet. You had to read deep into the essay to arrive at what I proposed we must do instead of embracing “clean tech” as the blessed saviour.
So let me put it straight here at the top, before I elaborate later: Any imperfect solution to our current civilization-threatening predicament must include dialing down our energy consumption rather than coming up with high-tech visions that keep accelerating it.
And that means reasserting human control over the technosphere now fragmenting us and imposing real limits on the algorithmic conquest of our thinking.
Grandiose dreams built on irony and paradox
In my article I summarized the work of geologists, journalists, physicists and energy experts — including Simon Michaux, Siddharth Kara, Vaclav Smil, Guillaume Pitron, Alice Friedemann, Nate Hagens and Tom Murphy — who have done the critical math. The ecologist William Rees, the physicist Antonio Turiel and oil analyst Art Berman also have all made important contributions to this conversation.
Their calculations, which respect biophysical realities and limits, show that humans will have to mine more metals and minerals over the next 30 years than have been dug up over the last 70,000 to build a “renewable” transition.
As a consequence, the global economy doesn’t have the metals, rare earth minerals, energy, time or money to make this transition, and we must consider other actions such as radical reductions in energy demand and material consumption.
The French journalist Guillaume Pitron summed up the dilemma cogently in his insightful 2018 book The Rare Metals War:
“By seeking to break free from fossil fuels and turn an old order into a new world, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new and more potent dependence.”
Since the 1970s, society’s growing addiction to toxic rare earth minerals (needed to make the magnets to run our electronic gadgetry from driverless cars to guided missiles) has largely gone unnoticed in the media. Technological society (and green tech is part of this self-augmenting machine) now consumes rare earth minerals the way steam engines once inhaled tonnes of coal.
In fact each digital gadget, including battery-operated vehicles, stimulates even greater demand, proving once again Jevons Paradox. Namely, whenever you make something more convenient and efficient, the energy savings will be lost due to greater demand and application.
In blunt terms the experts also pointed out that a so-called green world would look a lot like China, a leader in rare earth production and refining and so-called green technologies. But in championing China as a green pioneer, western environmentalists have neglected the hidden ecological costs: polluted villages, cancer-plagued citizens and piles of electronic waste.
Mining has not only ruined countless waterways but contaminated nearly a fifth of that’s country’s arable land with heavy metals. Meanwhile people drive electric cars powered by coal-fired electricity thinking they are making the world a greener place. Coal consumption has recently increased and powers 56 per cent of China’s energy.
China is living proof that civilization can’t electrify everything without mining the hell out of the Earth and our oceans. Because rare earth minerals are abundant but only in minute ratios to the overall Earth’s crust, they are ugly to extract. To create one tonne of rare earth minerals requires leaving behind more than 2,000 tonnes of largely radioactive waste rock.
My article didn’t gloss over the irony expressed by many technical researchers:
“Rare earths are essential to the growth of clean energy and related technologies such as electric vehicles, yet rare earths themselves are environmentally hazardous.”
Pushback from many angles
Readers greeted my article with a great deal of skepticism, doubt, angst and denial. Surely these experts I cited are paid stooges for the fossil fuel industry, noted one reader. (They are not.) How is it possible that there could be such a dark side to renewable energy, asked electric car drivers. Can’t we recycle our way out of this crisis? And so on.
Others misread the piece entirely. The National Post columnist, Terence Corcoran, concluded that if the mining of rare earth minerals for so-called clean technologies is just as destructive as fossil fuels, then maybe we should just close our eyes to depleted forests, degraded watersheds, collapsing biodiversity and the climate crisis and concentrate on meeting rising global consumption any which way. Or as he put it, “scrap both the anti-fossil and the anti-renewable movement and get on with the business of improving the lives of humans.”
Like most of the world’s politicians Corcoran embraces a kind of economic narcissism that rejects any limits to human growth. That’s because he doesn’t want to debate or consider the complicated and imperfect solution I proposed: shrinking energy demand and downsizing the economy. Who, after all, wants to sacrifice for future generations when daily propaganda assures us that we can banish climate change with more growth, driverless vehicles and relentless extraction?
In an excellent article for Truthdig, the U.S. journalist Christopher Ketcham recently explained the political aversion to scaling down and getting smaller:
“To win at the polls, says influential Democratic Party consultant Ruy Teixeira, one must always remember that ‘degrowth is probably the worst idea… since communism.’”
Successful politicians must offer an optimistic program that “technology can produce an abundant future,” that “the transition to a green economy is really only possible in a high-growth context,” with “expensive technological innovation and infrastructure development.” Ketcham calls such thinking a zombie future.
So let’s continue this vital conversation by addressing a few key questions from readers on scale, recycling and mining. And then we’ll get into what the real solution is.
1. The scale issue
The first concerns scale and time. Many readers simply couldn’t grasp why it is so difficult to transition from a global train pulled by a diesel engine to one run by rare earth batteries supported by new infrastructure composed of industrial solar farms and windmills — all dependent on complex digital technologies including AI?
Many people still assume, for example, that ditching combustion engines for rare earth battery powered cars will lower a great percentage of carbon emissions by 2050. But that’s not the case. Passenger cars only account for five per cent of global emissions. Rare earth battery-operated SUVs, if you can afford one, may animate the economy, but they won’t decarbonize the world. Or protect biodiversity. Or civilize our grotesque cities.
Meanwhile the making of four materials — ammonia, plastics, steel and concrete — account for a fifth of the world’s energy spending and a quarter of its greenhouse gas emissions. Try building a windmill or solar farm without them.
For years the energy ecologist Vaclav Smil has patiently explained that decarbonization won’t be easy or a short process because our civilization remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. Everything from building construction to industrial agriculture relies on “an extensive supersystem of fuel extraction, processing, distribution, storage and conversion” and “a complete displacement of it will directly affect every person and every industry, not least the growing of food and the long-distance transport of goods and people. The costs will be stupendous.”
Smil notes that fossil fuels composed about 86 per cent of all primary energy spending in 2000. Despite two decades of hype about clean energy technologies, the global economy still gets 82 per cent of its energy from fossil fuels.
So what are the chances of reducing that dependence from 82 per cent to zero by 2050 when it took 20 years to move the energy dial by four per cent, asks Smil.
And how can the world propel solar and wind, now representing just six per cent of the globe’s primary energy, to 100 per cent by 2050 without fostering a relentless mining boom all supported by oil?
Inertia is another unspoken hurdle. Civilization has used fossil fuels to create a great wheel of extraction and consumption that demands more energy to spew forth more stuff and waste. Even if the world stopped GDP economic growth (now around three per cent) the “long-term decadal-scale growth in resource demands and waste production will continue to accelerate,” researchers recently concluded.
They say,
“It is only by collapsing the historic accumulation of wealth we enjoy today… that our resource demands and waste production will decline.”
That is not a palatable message, but it’s the truth.
2. The recycling paradox
Many readers thought we could solve the problems of rising demand for materials and metal for renewable technologies with recycling.
Yes, let’s recycle solar panels, wind blades and rare earth batteries. Let’s also repair and reuse. But we must recognize society hasn’t even begun to address the scale of its waste problem.
The scale of electronic waste reads like a horror story. The global economy casts off about 51 million tonnes of toxic electronic gadgetry to landfills every year. Embedded in one million cell phones are 24 kilograms of gold, 16,000 kilograms of copper, 350 kilograms of silver and 14 kilograms of palladium.
Incredibly we currently recycle only 20 per cent of this waste. Moreover, the Gods of Economic Growth encourage the faithful to buy more and more digital gadgets. (Every American throws away an average of 20 kilograms of electronic waste a year.) Meanwhile the media floods our senses with glowing reports on the latest, must-have disposable digital objects — everything from cleaning robots to neck massagers and headphones.
As we indoctrinate the next generation to consume ever more electronics, some green energy boosters say recycling will save us. But we recycle only a fraction now and, according to the International Energy Agency, ‘green energy technologies’ contain new iron and copper alloys, that, ‘bring superior functionalities but result in energy-intensive recycling pathways.’ Photo by Nenad Stojkovic, Creative Commons licensed.
Recycling this electronic waste is problematic because a cell phone might contain up to 50 different metals and minerals. Separating out those materials takes energy, chemicals and capital.
It is much easier, for example, to recycle copper wire and aluminum cans because these metals already have well-established markets and recycling systems.
The International Energy Agency notes that electronic gadgets including “green energy technologies” contain new iron and copper alloys, that, “bring superior functionalities but result in energy-intensive recycling pathways.”
Scale poses another wrinkle. The geologist Simon Michaux points out that
“the majority of infrastructure and technology units needed to phase out fossil fuels has yet to be manufactured.”
You can’t recycle products that haven’t been made yet. And building a system to phase out fossil fuels will require an unprecedented and horrendous amount of mining. Period.
3. Mining versus the oil and gas industry
A few readers contended that mining doesn’t have anywhere near the impact of oil and gas extraction and that if mining for electric vehicles reduces extraction of fossil fuels it will be a big net gain. Said one, “I know oil extraction and mining aren’t apples to apples, but also note the world extracted 4.2 billion tonnes of crude oil in 2021, or 1.6 times as much as the world’s most mined metal (iron ore) and about 40 THOUSAND TIMES more than all lithium extracted.”
Okay. Let’s look at the numbers in context. They clearly suggest that you can’t separate the economy of mining for oil from mining for rare earth minerals. They are connected and part of the same industrial beast.
Every year the world mines and consumes 3.2 billion metric tonnes of metals along with 4.2 billion tonnes of fossil fuels. Human economies use those metals and fuels to mine another 20 billion tonnes of trees, fish and crops. As a species we revel in extraction.
But that’s only a small part of the Earth destruction story. The mining industry moves and digs up billions of tonnes of earth and rock to reach economic deposits of ores destroying watersheds and ecosystems. Mining then creates an enormous waste stream of acids, polluted water and tailings. The volume of waste grows exponentially as ore grades diminish.
For each tonne of copper or zinc produced, the industry vomits 20 to 200 tonnes of waste rock. The U.S. alone produces 1.8 billion tonnes of mining waste. Canada produces 800 million tonnes of solid mining waste, of which oilsands mining — which entails scraping and upgrading bitumen from vast amounts of clay and sand — is a major contributor.
In fact the mining industry produces 30 times more solid waste than municipal and industrial streams combined. Acid mine drainage can last thousands of years. Given that renewables only provide six per cent of the world’s energy, a transition to “clean tech energies” would exponentially grow the demand for metals and rare earth minerals and along with them the destructive prowess of the world’s mining industry.
In his book Extracted, the physical chemist Ugo Bardi noted that if every electric car owner had to accommodate the waste ore needed for the copper and cobalt in their vehicle’s batteries, the entry to their homes would be shrouded in several tonnes of waste rock.
So what is the answer? Degrowth
Given the destructive capacities of mining either for oil or rare earth minerals, many readers then asked, what do we do? If the task of replacing our fossil fuel system with an electric system dependent on rare earth minerals merely shifts problems around, where should we place our efforts? How do we manage an energy descent?
The energy ecologist Vaclav Smil provided a good answer in The Tyee back in 2013 but few seemed to like it.
What’s wrong with reducing energy consumption by 40 per cent and going back to living standards of the 1960s, Smil asked. He also encouraged political leaders to do what is doable, namely consume less, travel less, build less, eat less wastefully and design cities that do not demand lengthy commutes and that respect size limits.
But few pundits care for these low-tech solutions and behavioural changes. Politicians would rather champion “green options” that accelerate economic growth and mining of the planet’s last resources including fossil fuels.
Smil’s practical solutions are also rejected because they imply dramatic limits to economic growth. Economic growth does to the planet what the multiplication of cancer cells does to the human body. It overwhelms and destroys living systems. In blunt terms we need an energy strategy that pointedly shrinks economic activity over time the same way chemotherapy effectively diminishes a cancerous tumor.
Dare we imagine what comes after, the resulting new definition of life lived well?
A civilization that really gave a damn about climate chaos wouldn’t be chomping at the bit to replace every one of the world’s 1.5 billion vehicles with battery operated ones. It would advocate for fewer cars altogether, shorter transportation networks and localized economies. It would make cities smaller and more walkable. It would ban yachts, cruise ships, private jets and SUV vehicles, whether with battery or combustion engines, because they represent a decadent waste of materials and energy.
A competent civilization would also tax out of existence monster homes. They also represent another issue no political leader wants to tackle: rampant economic inequality.
A responsible civilization would also begin to radically limit air travel. (Do the readers of the New York Times really need to fly to Shanghai or Barcelona for 36-hour pleasure junkets?) It, too, would tax the oil and gas industry for every joule of methane that leaks into the atmosphere.
Where’s the political party pressing for these even these first-step changes? Where are the political leaders advocating for saner energy appetites?
Where are the philosophers decrying our materialism? Where are the leaders championing probity, humility and good livelihoods with less energy?
The tribal future
Faced with multiple crises the world appears to be rapidly separating into four camps, notes geologist Simon Michaux. The tribes consist of Old Schoolers, Vikings, Realists and Arcadians.
The Old School or business-as-usual crowd believes we don’t need to panic and that the rising chaos is just a blip. They believe that Normal just sits around the next corner like a dutiful dog.
In contrast the Vikings, astute opportunists, don’t want to change anything. They just want to take advantage of the great unravelling and do what Vikings do best: pillage.
Meanwhile Realists are asking hard questions about how we get out of this mess and ensure communities have the food and energy they will need in the next five years.
And then comes the long-term thinking Arcadians. They are asking, how do we learn to live with less and do better to prevent the exhaustion of the Earth’s resources? How do we acknowledge biophysical limits and address climate change as just one symptom of a graver overconsumption crisis? What technologies are appropriate, and which are not? How do communities prepare for collapse if we can’t manage a energy descent?
As I noted in my original essay, that’s the difficult conversation we need, and one that our Old School leaders continue to avoid. ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
Comments
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I’m seeing zero mention of nuclear power–which has the potential to displace a lot of fossil fuel mining with a relatively tiny mining and land-displacement footprint, without needing a lot of rare earths. That looks like either he simply forgot about what is already one of our largest sources of fossil-free energy, or that was a deliberate omission because it doesn’t help the degrowth argument.
There are lots of problems with nuclear energy, not least of which is the risks associated with meltdowns, accidental releases, the waste problem…. And it also takes a very long time to get from the idea of building a plant to completing construction and going operational. It can take a decade or more. So nuclear energy isn’t likely to help us reduce emissions in the near term. And that’s when we need to do so — as in right now.
“There are lots of problems with nuclear energy, not least of which is the risks associated with meltdowns, accidental releases, the waste problem….”
That’s kind of like saying nuclear has the problem of the risks associated with a core graphite fire after a power overspike blows apart the uncontained reactor with a steam explosion. And yeah, those were risks for a particular design (Soviet RBMK) but there are other ways of doing nuclear power that can eliminate those risks. In like manner, meltdown risk only applies to certain kinds of solid fuel reactors. It wouldn’t apply to liquid fuel or pebble-bed solid fuel. Take away the meltdown risk and the accidental release risk diminishes enormously. Bind the worst contaminants (iodine, cesium and strontium) into molten salts and the release risk zone shrinks to within the plant boundary. And molten salt fast reactors could convert existing spent fuel (and DU) into a much smaller quantity of moderately radioactive fission products which would go cold on timescales of a few centuries. And in the process, it could greatly reduce the need to mine fresh uranium for however many centuries it takes to consume the million+ tonnes of uranium that we already have in storage.
“And it also takes a very long time to get from the idea of building a plant to completing construction and going operational. It can take a decade or more. So nuclear energy isn’t likely to help us reduce emissions in the near term. And that’s when we need to do so — as in right now.”
Nuclear power will probably be of modest help over the next decade while new kinds of nuclear are being developed. But several new designs are being tailored for modular manufacturing, which could greatly reduce the each-unit build time, and could greatly increase the simultaneous build rate. So, yes, it won’t help “right now”. But what about the timescales for the degrowth proposal here–in an article you called “valuable and important”? The article notes a serious degrowth proposal was put forward ten years ago–and we did actually experience a small amount of degrowth since that time–briefly–but only because of Covid. And how popular was that? How long did it last? Compared to 2013, we are now at higher rates of material and energy consumption, higher rates of mining destruction, *and* higher rates of CO2 emissions and coal pollution. Without the aid of a pandemic, the degrowth proposal crashes headlong into the global capitalist juggernaut powering in the opposite direction. There are at least multiple plans already in development for how to greatly accelerate the nuclear rollout with better designs soon. For the degrowth option to even have a chance, basically global capitalism will have to be replaced with some other economic system. And before that can happen, we’ll need to come up with a design for that other system. And to implement that system will require a new global political order. And to replace the reigning political order will take nothing less than global cultural and social revolution. So, is there a the plan for how to accomplish all that? If so, what’s the timeline for getting *that* done looking like? If not, how is this “valuable and important” degrowth proposal anything more than just a pitifully sad wish?
Sounds a little self-prophesying, to me. Nuclear only does electricity – maybe low-grade heat in proximity, but that’s it. That requires a grid, and we’re back to mining. My own country, NZ, uses 60% fossil energy, 40% ‘renewable’ (really: rebuildable). That would require a grid-and-a-half to be ADDED to our existing grid – which took over 100 years to accrue.
Can nuclear run alone, ex fossil energy? Probably not. Is it sustainable? No, it relies on draw-down.
“Sounds a little self-prophesying, to me.”
If that’s what we would call a self-fulfilling prophecy, then yes, there is an element of that in all technology innovation. Every developer is working to make their vision a reality. Every company projects confidence about their odds of success because if they don’t, no-one will invest in them. But positive feedback loops like that only make success possible. The real success will depend on actually delivering on the potential.
“Nuclear only does electricity – maybe low-grade heat in proximity, but that’s it.”
The only energy we harvest from nuclear fission is heat. The grade of the heat depends on the kind of reactor. And what we do with that heat is only limited by our imagination–electricity, propulsion, desalination, synfuel and fertilizer production, industrial process heat, etc. But fission nuclear has potential value beyond just the energy. Molten salt fast reactors, for example, could be used to consume spent fuel, and surplus or decommissioned bomb fuel, and wastes from bomb fuel production, and depleted uranium–and disposal services have value. Roughly 80% of the fission products will be stable in around 10 years. After that, we have uses for the stable isotopes, some of which are valuable. And reactors could also be used for making radioactive medical isotopes. But even if you are only looking at the electricity aspect, sources which can ramp up and down on demand with close to 100% availability are going to be more valuable than inflexible sources, or intermittent sources, or shallow-capacity electricity storage.
“That requires a grid, and we’re back to mining.”
So without nuclear power, you don’t need a grid?
“Can nuclear run alone, ex fossil energy? Probably not.”
Old tech nuclear is about as fossil carbon intensive as wind or solar. New kinds of nuclear could improve on that.
“Is it sustainable? No, it relies on draw-down.”
I don’t know what this means. What aspect of nuclear energy are you thinking could not be sustained for hundreds or thousands of years?
🤣😂😏😔😢WHY …can’t you understand?
I am only capable of understanding things that are comprehensible. There are a great many things I can’t understand simply because they make no sense. I can’t say which category the thing you are referring to fits into without knowing what it is.
Hello Jag,
In the interest of good conversation, could you please keep your comments to a reasonable size and responsive to what other people have said?
For an extended argument or explanation, you can use links rather than replicating them here.
I think we talked about this a couple of years ago, and I believe the quality of your comments improved after that.
Thank you!
The Mod
3) Climate scientists are not ipso facto experts in energy systems. Two different fields requiring different education and expertise.
The split in support for nuclear appears to be generational. Climate scientists who support nuclear tend to be older: people who grew up in the space age have a greater enthusiasm for and trust in technology in general, and nuclear in particular.
The climate scientists who sign public letters for nuclear power are mostly in their 70s and 80s. Prominent climate scientists who support nuclear include James Hansen (b. 1941); Ken Caldeira (b. 1960); Kerry Emanuel (b. 1955); Tom Wigley (b. 1940); Richard A. Muller (b. 1944); Richard Somerville (b. 1941).
GP: “The nuclear industry has a long history of over-promising and under-delivering.”
JL: The old-tech industry does. I’m not going to hold that against the new companies trying to do new ways of nuclear, any more than I’d hold the bad practices of the old auto industry against Tesla.
“Early in 2016 developers and potential customers for SMRs set up the SMR Start consortium to advance the commercialization of SMR reactor designs. Members of the consortium include Bechtel, BWX Technologies, Dominion, Duke Energy, Energy Northwest, Fluor, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, Holtec, NuScale, Ontario Power, PSEG Nuclear, Southern Nuclear, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and UAMPS.
“In December 2020 the DOE announced initial $30 million funding under the ARDP for five US-based teams developing affordable reactor technologies to be deployed over 10-14 years: Kairos Power for the Hermes Reduced-Scale Test Reactor, a scaled-down version of its fluoride salt-cooled high temperature reactor (KP-FHR); Westinghouse for the eVinci microreactor; BWXT Advanced Technologies for the BWXT Advanced Nuclear Reactor (BANR); Holtec for its SMR-160; and Southern Company for its Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment, a 300 kWt reactor project to provide data to inform the design of a demonstration molten chloride fast reactor (MCFR) using TerraPower’s technology.
“…In November 2021 the UK government announced that it would contribute £210 million in grant funding to Rolls-Royce SMR to match private investment in this venture. Rolls-Royce Group, BNF Resources UK and Exelon Generation will invest £195 million over about three years in it.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx
Hmmm. Does that look a completely different cast of characters with a different mindset? Certainly some familiar names on that list. Can we really draw a line between the old and new nuclear industry?
New nuclear does not have a track record yet, so any argument for its commercial prospects rests on hope, not evidence.
“Nuclear Electricity: A Successful Failure”
https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/22.NUCLEAR-1.pdf
GP: “In the meantime, nuclear will soak up capital, government support, resources, and brainpower.”
JL: Yes, probably on the scale of a few billion a year. An amount like what we typically spent on Halloween would fund a deluxe development program supporting many teams.
A few billion a year. NuScale’s “old-tech” pressurized water SMR is now ringing in at $US 9.3 B and rising. That’s just the construction bill for just one reactor of the type we already know how to build.
Traditional silicon panels suffer from (relatively) high cost, low efficiency, (relatively) short lifespan, and energy-intensive manufacturing.
The “brainpower” I was thinking of is the brainpower needed in this and future generations (in university engineering depts) needed to improve the efficiency and durability, expand the applications for, and reduce cost of solar panels. Also improve re-use and recycling capabilities (closed-loop manufacturing).
Wind and solar already generate the cheapest watt in most of the world. Building transmission capacity is something we already know how to do. The big question mark is storage (of all kinds). We need a lot more progress on battery and other (P2X) solutions to bring down costs and increase capability and flexibility.
GP: “Carbon capture increases the cost of power generation, which is further boosted by transportation (pipeline) and storage costs. Who is going to pay?”
JL: Ultimately, the consumers.
Not consumers, but taxpayers. If the astronomical fossil-gas fixup bill falls to ratepayers, fossil gas ceases to be competitive (leaving aside externalized environmental, climate, and health costs). In practice, of course, these two groups have considerable overlap. But there is a difference.
Sticking ratepayers with the bill sends the price signal that fossil gas is uncompetitive; sticking taxpayers with the bill (same guy, different pockets) obviates the market mechanism. Taxpayer subsidy gives a life-line to the fossil gas industry it does not deserve, and hampers the competition.
“Does that look a completely different cast of characters with a different mindset? Certainly some familiar names on that list. ”
When Tesla came onto the scene, the old auto industry didn’t just disappear. The NuScale, Westinghouse, BWXT, and Holtec reactors are not next generation reactors. After Fukushima, the future of the old-tech industry was looking bleak, but that crack in their dominance created an opportunity for many who have long felt we needed very different ways of doing nuclear, and a host of small startups launched after 2011. And the new designs looked promising, and public interest increased, and suddenly, the old-tech industry saw a way to come back. All they had to do was repackage their old tech into a new form factor and try to fob it off as something new. But there are definitely new companies attempting genuinely new kinds of reactors. (Moltex, Elysium, Flibe, Thorcon, Terrestrial, and Seaborg for example)
“New nuclear does not have a track record yet, so any argument for its commercial prospects rests on hope, not evidence.”
The hope rests on fairly routine engineering development cost projections. The big unknowns are how bad the red tape will be, and how strong the competition will be. We should have more information after they get through demo phase.
“A few billion a year. NuScale’s “old-tech” pressurized water SMR is now ringing in at $US 9.3 B and rising. That’s just the construction bill for just one reactor of the type we already know how to build.”
Right. So that isn’t advanced reactor development research. The old industry may have the worse designs, but they still have money and their established political connections, and they would very much like to hijack the renewed interest in nuclear to continue feeding at the public trough. If they can crowd out the pittance funding for potential future rivals with better designs, so much the better. The biggest enemy of new nuclear is old nuclear.
“The “brainpower” I was thinking of is the brainpower needed in this and future generations (in university engineering depts) needed to improve the efficiency and durability, expand the applications for, and reduce cost of solar panels. Also improve re-use and recycling capabilities (closed-loop manufacturing).”
The current nuclear engineers would have nothing to contribute to that. And by your reasoning, what happens with future generations of engineers will be too late to be of any help.
“The big question mark is storage (of all kinds). We need a lot more progress on battery and other (P2X) solutions to bring down costs and increase capability and flexibility.”
Seems like thermal storage inserted between a heat source and an uprated generator could be one cost-effective option.
“Taxpayer subsidy gives a life-line to the fossil gas industry it does not deserve, and hampers the competition.”
Penalizing emissions and pollution would be the most direct way to address that market distortion, but politically and legally, that’s been a very tough nut to crack. But supporting the development of low-emissions best practices would make it easier in both politics and law to start penalizing the worst practices.
2) IPCC AR6 WGIII: Multiple low-carbon technologies have shown rapid progress since AR5 – in cost, performance, and adoption – enhancing the feasibility of rapid energy transitions. The rapid deployment and unit cost decrease of modular technologies like solar, wind, and batteries have occurred much faster than anticipated by experts and modelled in previous mitigation scenarios. The political, economic, social, and technical feasibility of solar energy, wind energy and electricity storage technologies has improved dramatically over the past few years. In contrast, the adoption of nuclear energy and CO2 capture and storage (CCS) in the electricity sector has been slower than the growth rates anticipated in stabilisation scenarios. Emerging evidence since AR5 indicates that small-scale technologies (e.g., solar, batteries) tend to improve faster and be adopted more quickly than large-scale technologies (nuclear, CCS).
The IPCC’s mitigation pathways to limit warming (Table TS.2) propose far larger growth for renewables than nuclear.
Renewables are a sure bet right here and right now. The nuclear option places a big bet on technologies that may or may not pan out decades down the road.
I consider myself a progressive — but on finances, energy, and survival I am a small-c conservative. Why make big bets if you don’t have to? Why bet the farm when a safe, sensible, affordable option is open to you? Why dive off the cliff — praying your nuclear and carbon removal parachute still on the drawing board will work — when the stairs are safe and accessible?
Load-following nuclear may be able back up renewables. (In practice, due to high upfront capital costs and relatively low fuel and operational costs, the majority of nuclear generators operate at full capacity.) Intermittent renewables cannot back up anything.
Nuclear will be backed up by fossil fuels (FF), not by intermittent renewables. So that’s a nuclear-FF combo, sidelining cheaper, ready-to-go renewables.
Nuclear will sideline and displace renewables. If you bank on and build out nuclear (over several decades we do not have), you don’t need renewables. Why expand intermittent renewable capacity if you have SMRs everywhere?
The nuclear option offers society the promise that we can just swap out FF for nuclear to power essentially the same unsustainable lifestyle. No change in behavior and expectations required. Just hop in your EV, and away you go.
If you find Nikiforuk’s argument persuasive, that vision for the future ignores the central problem, which is our profligate lifestyle, with massive resource consumption and waste. Our current growth model powered by abundant nuclear energy may or may not solve our climate problem (certainly not in time), but it makes our other environmental problems worse.
“IPCC … The rapid deployment and unit cost decrease of modular technologies like solar, wind, and batteries have occurred much faster than anticipated by experts”
Faster than expected doesn’t mean fast enough. Carbon emissions hit yet another record high last year.
“In contrast, the adoption of nuclear energy and CO2 capture and storage (CCS) in the electricity sector has been slower than the growth rates anticipated in stabilisation scenarios.”
Yes, expert forecasts can go wrong. I’m expecting new orders for old-tech nuclear to decrease in a few years as we approach the first new-tech demo reactor trials.
“The IPCC’s mitigation pathways to limit warming (Table TS.2) propose far larger growth for renewables than nuclear.”
The advanced reactor teams are expecting the future nuclear share to be much smaller than the intermittent renewables’ share.
“Renewables are a sure bet right here and right now.”
They are available here and now. Whether the fastest way to decarbonize the energy sector is to limit ourselves to only those isn’t a sure bet at all.
“The nuclear option places a big bet on technologies that may or may not pan out decades down the road.”
All new technology investment is that kind of bet. And the majority of new technology ventures don’t pan out. But all of our technology revolutions came out of the comparatively few successes.
“Why make big bets if you don’t have to?”
Same reason we fund innovation research generally. If it works, we might need it and the benefits could be huge.
“Why bet the farm when a safe, sensible, affordable option is open to you?”
When a farmer buys crop insurance, what he’s doing is betting the proceeds from a piece of his farm to protect the whole farm from a very bad outcome–while doing everything he can to make sure he won’t need what he’s paying for.
“Why dive off the cliff — praying your nuclear and carbon removal parachute still on the drawing board will work — when the stairs are safe and accessible?”
Trying to hedge against catastrophe is nearly the polar opposite of diving off a cliff without a parachute.
“Load-following nuclear may be able back up renewables.”
Yes, much like hydro.
“In practice, due to high upfront capital costs and relatively low fuel and operational costs, the majority of nuclear generators operate at full capacity.”
That has more to do with the neutronics of old-tech reactors. Hydropower has the same high capital cost and low fuel and operational cost and commonly varies its output. Flexible nuclear could be as flexible as hydropower and could operate like hydropower.
“Intermittent renewables cannot back up anything.”
Or at least, they can only provide intermittent backup.
“Nuclear will be backed up by fossil fuels (FF), not by intermittent renewables.”
Nuclear can be backed up by other nuclear.
“Nuclear will sideline and displace renewables.”
I expect it will never displace rooftop solar. It might displace some grid-scale battery storage. And I imagine it could eventually replace some hydropower so that we can restore some river habitat and migratory fish runs–after the big fossil carbon emitters are off the grid..
“If you bank on and build out nuclear (over several decades we do not have), you don’t need renewables. Why expand intermittent renewable capacity if you have SMRs everywhere?”
For the next decade, advanced nuclear will contribute almost nothing. The renewables buildout will come first, so it will be nuclear which will have to conform itself to a renewables-heavy grid. And the reason that could work is because they can be designed for that exact purpose. Think about a solar thermal plant with molten salt heat storage. The storage makes time-shifting possible, but it only serves that plant. And what you typically have is a heat collector that is overpowered for the generator capacity, and the excess heat is put into storage for later, after the collector shuts down. But imagine such a plant could be coupled with a big space mirror so that the collector could run 24 hours a day. In that scenario, you could flip the way it works so that the generator now has a lot more capacity than the heat source, and the heat could go into storage when the electricity isn’t needed and the stored heat could augment the steady heat during peak demand periods. Now the plant isn’t providing backup for itself, it’s providing backup for intermittent sources. But economically, this plant would need those intermittent sources to sometimes take the load so that it has a chance to recharge. Otherwise, it would be forced to run at well below its generating capacity when demand is high and pricing is at its most favorable and there’s money to be made. Now replace the big space mirror and the solar heat collector field with a reactor, and it’s basically the same system.
“The nuclear option offers society the promise that we can just swap out FF for nuclear to power essentially the same unsustainable lifestyle.”
A big reason our lifestyle is unsustainable is because of fossil fuels. It looks like you are trying to argue we should not replace one huge unsustainable aspect of our lives with a very sustainable alternative because it cannot fix everything else about our lives which is unsustainable. That’s basically a demand for perfection or nothing. We don’t work that way. We tackle problems where we can, and we make progress a piece at a time.
“If you find Nikiforuk’s argument persuasive, that vision for the future ignores the central problem, which is our profligate lifestyle, with massive resource consumption and waste.”
I think he has some points, but I don’t think he’s put it into the context of how much worse the alternatives could be. Poverty-driven slash and burn agriculture is highly destructive. Wildlife hunting in the U.S. soared during the Great Depression. Empty the cities and the human land footprint will increase. Degrowth gone wrong has its own set of natural devastation risks. And one of the reasons our current waste profile is so large is that reprocessing the waste takes energy. If energy were cleaner and more abundant, we could do a lot more reprocessing.
“Our current growth model powered by abundant nuclear energy may or may not solve our climate problem (certainly not in time), but it makes our other environmental problems worse.”
Abundant clean energy might lead to growth in the short term, but in the long term, it could help us towards population reduction. Lower reproductive rates are strongly associated with higher standards of living. And it could definitely make some huge environmental problems a lot better in the short term. We don’t have any options which are 100% beneficial. So we weigh the benefits against the harms for our various options and try to find the most favorable ratio we can, and then we continue to try to improve from there.
1) Looks as if The Tyee closed its comments section, so allow me to respond to your last post here:
“Mr. Kerry said the deadline to watch is 2030. By then, the UN’s top climate panel says, the world will need to have nearly halved climate-damaging emissions to stave off the more devastating scenarios of global warming.
“‘We can’t let the wish or the hope govern common sense here,’ Mr. Kerry said. ‘If we know that we can get the job done by deploying more renewables and current technology, we ought to be doing that.'” (AP, 14-May-23)
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-business/article-kerry-challenges-oil-industry-to-prove-its-promised-tech-rescue-for/
Let’s be clear. If you are banking on nuclear — decades down the road — instead of renewables, you are abandoning 2030 and 2050 emissions targets. Blowing past dangerous warming limits.
From the day of the first new-tech SMR demo to wide-scale adoption is how many decades?
Betting on nuclear just punts emissions reductions down the road to the 2070s and beyond. That would make the O&G industry happy.
The nuclear option leave centre stage to the fossil-fuel industry for decades. (Kiss 2030 and 2050 emissions targets goodbye.) Which may explain why fossil-fuel boosters support nuclear.
The nuclear option implies a big overshoot past 1.5 C. Locking in decades, if not centuries, of warming and of climate disaster.
So you’d better hope that your as yet to be invented large-scale direct carbon-removal gadgets work. Otherwise, we are hooped.
Nuclear is a plan to fail.
Dollars governments spend on nuclear are dollars not spent on renewable and storage infrastructure / R&D, expanding grade capacity and interconnections, public transit, energy-efficient affordable housing, etc. Lots to do yet with carbon pricing, demand response, time-of-day pricing, indexing power bills to actual usage, reuse and recycling.
The renewables, storage, and grid build-out requires an all-out, all-hands-on-deck effort.
Even if you say you are going to do both nuclear and renewables, you are now fighting the climate war on two fronts. Dividing your forces, dollars, and energies. With little hope of real emissions progress on the nuclear front for decades.
“allow me to respond to your last post here:”
That’s up to the moderators, but they greenlighted your posts, so I assume they are okay with it.
“Mr. Kerry said the deadline to watch is 2030. By then, the UN’s top climate panel says, the world will need to have nearly halved climate-damaging emissions to stave off the more devastating scenarios of global warming.
‘We can’t let the wish or the hope govern common sense here,’ Mr. Kerry said. ‘If we know that we can get the job done by deploying more renewables and current technology, we ought to be doing that.’ (AP, 14-May-23)”
Also Kerry:
“Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said, ‘Nuclear energy, including small modular reactors, represent a critical tool in the fight against climate change…'” — VOA 6673879
“Let’s be clear. If you are banking on nuclear — decades down the road — instead of renewables, you are abandoning 2030 and 2050 emissions targets. Blowing past dangerous warming limits.”
The key phrase there is “*instead* of renewables”. That isn’t my position. And I don’t see any reason to conclude that investing in nuclear research and development now blocks, hinders, or displaces the rollout of the clean-tech options we have now. I think it is more likely that opposition to development of new nuclear will give aid and comfort to opponents of climate action.
“From the day of the first new-tech SMR demo to wide-scale adoption is how many decades?”
Too many unknowns. We don’t know what the regulatory and licensing landscape will be yet. We don’t know that the first demo design will be competitive. And how quickly any design rolls out will depend on how competitive it is against the other options we’ll have at that time–an unknown that includes the wildcard of how much state support countries like China and Russia will throw behind their designs. But just in terms of what is technically possible, Thorcon thinks it would take them about 2 years to go into production after a demo unit is approved. They are designing their reactor to be built with automated ship-building processes which already exist and which they have a lot of experience with. They figure just the idle production capacity in the industry right now could support a build rate of around 45-50 gigawatts per year electric capacity, and they think it would take the shipyards maybe 3 years to add another 50 gigawatts per year build capacity if their design proved popular. So the blue-sky potential is that one company could double global nuclear capacity in less than 10 years. Or, they could wind up so balled-up in red tape or so outcompeted that they sell zero units.
“Betting on nuclear just punts emissions reductions down the road to the 2070s and beyond.”
That is a false dichotomy between using options that are available now and developing new options for the future. We are not limited to doing only one of those.
“That would make the O&G industry happy.”
I’ve seen them happily invest in wind farms and solar fields. That doesn’t make those a bad idea.
“The nuclear option implies a big overshoot past 1.5 C.”
It is preparation for that contingency.
“So you’d better hope that your as yet to be invented large-scale direct carbon-removal gadgets work.”
Working on developing them now helps to ensure they will work if they turn out to be needed. We should probably be working up all our most promising geoengineering options too.
“Nuclear is a plan to fail.”
It is planning for failure. That’s a very different thing.
“Dollars governments spend on nuclear are dollars not spent on renewable and storage infrastructure / R&D, expanding grade capacity and interconnections, public transit, energy-efficient affordable housing, etc.”
And spending money on helping people buy EV’s is money not spent on schools or healthcare. It is trivially true that dollars spent on one thing are not spent on something else. But shutting down the spending on nuclear (including our national labs–which isn’t going to happen) doesn’t mean that any other line item will automatically get that money. Any government money not spent on something just remains in the general fund. It might get spent on anything in the budget (so, probably military) or it might just go towards deficit reduction and not get spent at all.
“The renewables, storage, and grid build-out requires an all-out, all-hands-on-deck effort.”
And any insistence that we should not be developing all our most promising clean energy options undermines that message.
“Even if you say you are going to do both nuclear and renewables, you are now fighting the climate war on two fronts. Dividing your forces, dollars, and energies.”
Just like when we divided our forces in developing both wind power and solar PV simultaneously. Do you want to argue that was a bad idea? This will be a war of many fronts. Electricity and heat, insulation, storage, demand response, concrete, steel, shipping, deforestation, agriculture, and on and on. When you find you don’t have enough resources committed to a battle, eliminating a few divisions on the battlefield so that you can rearrange the supplies isn’t the winning strategy.
“With little hope of real emissions progress on the nuclear front for decades.”
There could be significant movement in the 30’s. We probably won’t see much help this decade, but that is also true of geothermal, tidal power, sea current power and synfuel production. So should we shut down research into those too?
” A big reason our lifestyles are unsustainable, is because of FF. “… ..Again,you do not seem to understand the overall issue…CONSUMPTION. ANY resource we dig up, drill up or scrape up, cause DISRUPTION to habitats and ecosystems. There is no way around this ..when you are talking about the SCALE at which we do so, in order to supply ” stuff” for 8 billion people. Period. THAT says it all. When you make a log road through a forest..it separates the biome …kills off anything in it’ s way ..and is similar to what we experience with an ocean between continents for some of the living organisms. Then…you get the loggers working…dragging…etc etc.THIS is just one example there are so many I could never describe them all. OUR PROBLEM is not just what kind of energy we use…but what we DO with it. If we had,completely free and easily obtainable clean energy, we would rip through this planet…even faster than we already are. You see?
“Again,you do not seem to understand the overall issue…CONSUMPTION. ANY resource we dig up, drill up or scrape up, cause DISRUPTION to habitats and ecosystems.”
Yes, so long as there is consumption, there will be harms. But we aren’t going to do without consumption. Consumption is probably going to get worse. So all I see are choices between the kinds and amounts of damage that we’ll do.
“There is no way around this ..when you are talking about the SCALE at which we do so, in order to supply ” stuff” for 8 billion people. Period. THAT says it all.”
It isn’t just about the number of people. It’s also about the differences between our options. With reactors that can use the nuclear fuels we already have in storage, you could displace uranium mining, and lignite mining, and coal mining, and a lot of copper mining, and even some hydropower projects, and the stored fuels could last us for centuries.
“When you make a log road through a forest..it separates the biome …kills off anything in it’ s way … Then…you get the loggers working…dragging…etc etc.THIS is just one example there are so many I could never describe them all. OUR PROBLEM is not just what kind of energy we use…but what we DO with it. If we had,completely free and easily obtainable clean energy, we would rip through this planet…even faster than we already are. You see?”
The scramble for energy is a big destroyer of trees. Europe was recovering from their pre-coal deforestation until they started burning trees again. The now “green” Drax power station alone destroys roughly 70,000 tons of tree mass *per day* for fuel, including some old-growth forests. The Amazon is being cleared in large part to grow cane biofuel. Trees are a fairly easy source of energy. The way to save them is to have even easier and cheaper sources of energy.
Yeah, Andrew Nikiforuk is among my top favorite journalists. I have to head out midway through reading this, but it’s clearly a valuable and important article, and I’l be referencing it in some of my upcoming writing.
Yup yup yup. he’s got it all right.