[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Reply to Tom Blees

[Bill Totten]

by Bill Totten (September 28 2008)


I received the following comment today from Tom Blees on my "Comment to
Mark Lynas on Nuclear Energy" posted here on September 26 2008:

"Bill,

"Having seriously practiced Zen meditation for years, I can appreciate
austerity, even asceticism. But expecting the public at large to embrace
attitudes even remotely resembling that would be a herculean struggle
that can only succeed if people are forced into what you andmany others
see as sensible behavior.

"So what happens if we build the infrastructure to provide all the
energy that everyone wants? If that can be done economically, and if
that energy can be provided without mining anything at all for several
hundred years, and if that energy would be free of GHGs and allow us to
eliminate fossil fuels, would that be a bad thing?

"Today many of us get a feeling of virtuousness from recycling, using
fossil fuels as little as possible, or driving a Prius and buying twisty
lightbulbs. Yet the only reason we have to do these things is because
our political leaders have yet to make the necessary decisions
that could free us from dependence on behavior modification in order to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"The fact is that many people couldn't care less about green issues, and
aren't about to make any effort in that direction. Yet we have the
technologies to make such human behavior immaterial. We can recycle
everything, even if people throw old drain oil and car batteries and
asbestos in the dumpster along with their poopy diapers. We have the
technology to provide unlimited energy for every country in the world
without mining or drilling a thing.

"Please check out my book, Prescription for the Planet. It's not about
how you can change your behavior to help reduce your carbon footprint.
It's about international policy decisions that can make dependence on
behavior unnecessary and solve some of the world's most intractable
problems. That's WAY more important than lamenting the attitudes of
those who are heedless of their energy use."

______

Here is my reply to Tom:

Tom:

Thanks for your comments.

I agree that it would be a herculean struggle to persuade the pampered
pigs in the world's richest nations to settle for using as little energy
as the vast majority of Earthlings use today and as those even in the
richest nations used until a generation or so ago. But, as John Michael
Greer points out {1}, perhaps a serious economic depression might
provide the necessary persuasion.

Your book, Prescription for the Planet: The Painless Remedy for Our
Energy & Environmental Crises (2008) apparently focuses on so-called
fourth-generation nuclear technology - better known as fast-breeder
reactors {2}. I'd love to believe in fourth-generation nuclear
technology, but I am not willing to "bet the farm" on unproven
technology and this seems no more proven than the Golden Fleece,
Philospher's Stone, Fountain of Youth, or Perpetual Motion Machine.

And from what I've read {3}, current problems even with
second-generation nuclear energy are too immense to give much hope for
fourth-generation nuclear energy in the foreseeable future.

I'll be happy to consider fourth-generation nuclear technology or
fast-breeder reactors when a few have been built and proven safe and
economic for several years. In the meantime, I'll place my hopes on
reducing energy consumption in the very richest nations toward as little
as the vast majority of Earthlings use today and as even those in the
richest nations used until a generation or so ago. We know this works in
the vast majority of the world today and did work in the richest nations
until a generation or so ago.

Bill Totten

Notes:

{1} "Rx: Depression" by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report
(September 24 2008), posted here earlier today.

{2} "Why greens must learn to love nuclear power" by Mark Lynas, New
Statesman (September 18 2008), posted here on September 26th in "Comment
to Mark Lynas on Nuclear Energy".

{3} "The NRC's Warning" by Harvey Wasserman, Z Magazine (September 01 2008)
http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/18705 (See below)

_____

The NRC's Warning

by Harvey Wasserman

Wasserman's ZSpace page

Z Magazine (September 01 2008)


A devastating blow to the much-hyped revival of atomic power was
delivered by an unlikely source, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC), which revealed in June that the "standardized" designs on which
the entire premise of returning nuclear power to center stage is based
have massive holes in them and may not be ready for approval for years
to come.

Delivered by one of America's most notoriously docile agencies, the
NRC's warning essentially says that all cost estimates for new nuclear
reactors - and all licensing and construction schedules - are up for
grabs and have no reliable basis in fact. Thus, any comparisons between
future atomic reactors and renewable technologies are moot at best. And
any "hard number" basis for independent financing for future nukes may
not be available for years to come, if ever.

These key points were raised in searing testimony before state
regulators by Jim Warren of the North Carolina Waste and Awareness
Reduction Network (NCWARN) and Tom Clements of the South Carolina
Friends of the Earth (FOE) - and by others now challenging proposed
state-based financing for new Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors. The NRC
gave conditional "certification" to this "standardized" design in 2004,
allowing work to continue. But as recently as June 27, the NRC issued
written warnings that hundreds of key design components remain without
official approval. Indeed, Westinghouse has been forced to actually
withdraw numerous key designs, throwing the entire permitting process
into chaos.

The catastrophic outcome of similar problems has already become
tangible. After two years under construction, the first "new generation"
French reactor being built in Finland is already more than two years
behind schedule and more than $2.5 billion over budget. The scenario is
reminiscent of the economic disaster that hit scores of "first
generation" reactors, which came in massively over budget and, in many
cases, decades behind promised completion dates.

In North and South Carolina, public interest groups are demanding the
revocation of some $230 million in pre-construction costs already
approved by state regulators for two proposed Duke Energy reactors. In
both those states, as well as in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia,
Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors have been presented to regulatory
commissions to be financed by ratepayers as they are being built.

This astounding pro-utility scheme forces electric consumers to pay
billions of dollars for nuclear plants that may never operate and whose
costs are indeterminate. Sometimes called Construction Work in Progress,
it lets utilities raise rates to pay for site clearing, project
planning, and down payments on large equipment and heavy reactor
components, such as pressure vessels, pumps, and generators that can
involve hundreds of millions of dollars, even before the projects get
final federal approval. The process gives utilities an incentive to
drive up construction costs as much as they can. It allows them to force
ratepayers to cover legal fees incurred by the utilities to defend
themselves against lawsuits by those very ratepayers. And the public is
stuck with the bill for whatever is spent, even if the reactor never
opens - or if it melts down before it recoups its construction costs, as
did Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island Unit Two in 1979, which
self-destructed after just three months of operation.

According to Warren and Clements, Duke Energy and its cohorts have
"filed some 6,500 pages of Westinghouse's technical design documents as
the major component of applications" to build new reactors. "Of the 172
interconnected Westinghouse documents", say NCWARN and FOE, "only 21
have been certified". Most of what has been certified, they add, relies
on systems that are unapproved and that are key to the guts of the
reactor, including such major components as the "reactor building,
control room, cooling system, engineering designs, plant-wide alarm
systems, piping and conduit".

In other words, despite millions of dollars of high-priced hype, the
"new generation" of "standardized design" power plants actually does not
exist. The plans for these reactors have not been finalized by the
builders themselves or approved by the regulators. There is no operating
prototype of a Westinghouse AP-1000 from which to draw actual data about
how safely these plants might actually operate, what their environmental
impact might be, or what they might cost to build or run.

As the NRC's June letter to Westinghouse noted, the company has been
forced to withdraw key technical documents from the regulatory process.
The NRC says this means design approval for the AP-1000 might not come
until 2012. The problem extends to other designs. According to Michael
Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, the
"Evolutionary Power Reactor" proposed for Calvert Cliffs, Maryland "is
way behind in certification" causing delays in the licensing process.
Similar problems have arisen with the "Economic Simplified Boiling War
Reactor" design proposed for North Anna, Virginia and Fermi, Michigan.
"All of these utilities seem to want standardization for the other guy
not for themselves, so most of them are making changes to the
'standardized' designs", says Mariotte. "Even the ABWR", being planned
for a site in south Texas, which has been built before, "has design
issues" that have caused delays.

Nevertheless, public service commissions like the one in Florida have
given preliminary approval to reactor proposals whose projected costs
have more than doubled in one year. Florida Power & Light's two proposed
reactors at Turkey Point on the border of the Everglades National Park
are listed as costing somewhere between $6 billion and $9 billion. FP&L
refuses to commit to a firm price and is demanding south Florida
ratepayers foot an unknowable bill for gargantuan projects whose costs
are virtually certain to skyrocket long before the NRC approves the
actual reactor designs. By contrast, the "huge" preliminary deal just
reached between Florida, environmentalists, and US Sugar to buy some
180,000 acres of land to save the Everglades is now estimated at less
than $2 billion, less than one-sixth the minimum estimated cost of the
two reactors proposed for Turkey Point.

In the larger picture, the depth of this scam is staggering. With no
finalized design and no firm price tag, a second generation of nuclear
power plants is now being put on the tab of citizens whose rates have
already begun to skyrocket. These reactor projects cannot get private
financing and cannot proceed without either massive federal subsidies
and loan guarantees or a flood of state-based giveaways. They also
cannot get private insurance against future meltdowns and have no
solution for their radioactive waste problem. Current estimates for
finishing the proposed Yucca Mountain national waste repository, yet to
be licensed, are soaring toward $100 billion, even though it, too, may
never open.

By contrast, firm costs for proposed wind farms, solar panels, increased
efficiency, and other green sources are proven and reliable. Some $6
billion in new wind farms are under construction or on order in the
United States alone. They are established and, in many cases, can be up
and running in less than a year.

The high-profile campaign to paint atomic energy as some kind of answer
to US energy problems has hit the iceberg of its economic
impossibilities. The atomic "renaissance" has no tangible approved
design and no firm construction or operating costs to present. There are
no reliable new reactor construction schedules, except to know that it
will be at least ten years before the first one could conceivably come
on line and that its price tag is unknowable. In short, the "nuclear
renaissance" is perched atop a gigantic technical and economic chasm
that looms larger every day, and that could soon swallow the entire idea
of building more reactors.

_____

Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.
solartopia.org. This article was originally published by freepress.org.

http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/18705


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