McCain's nuclear fetish

Just to clarify, McCain spoke specifically of ending imports from the mid-East and Venezuela. That's only 2.85 million barrels per day according to the WSJ (http://tinyurl.com/3lutyy); 3.4 mbpd if you include Iraq. Of course this does not invalidate your conclusion, it merely reduces the amount of oil McCain is pretending can be offset with the 45 nuclear reactors he is going to build immediately in fantasy land.

Um, so basically, Eric is sayinig that McCain was right, except that it will take a long time to build the power plants.

Wow, doozy of a takedown.

P.S. there are lots of technical innovations in nuclear power as well. But I'm sure you'll find a way to rationalize that fact out of your internal narrative. We wouldn't want you to have any doubts about your position, after all...

P.P.S.
"How many times do we have to point out the flaws in his logic before it sinks in?"

I'm sorry, but this is just absurd. You're implying that McCain reads your blog, and willfully refuses to accept your lectures. Are you really that self-absorbed?

"...building 45 new nuclear plants, power plants, right away"

OK - let's inject some reality here.

According to the respected journal The Bulletin, Sept/Oct 2008, p.23-25, the US can no longer make all the necessary equipment needed for nuclear power plants.

Also, no other manufacturer except Japan Steel Works can build the necessary 600-ton forging moulds to form the pressure vessels. Another mill, Sheffield Forgemasters, could make them within 3 years. Their ambitious estimate is that they can make 12 to 13 vessels between now and 2025.

Personnel shortfalls also currently exist - there are not enough qualified specialists to run the plants if they were to be rapidly built.

Cellulosic ethanol for $1/gallon?

"Are nuclear plants are good way to spend $300 billion?"
Sure. Better than spending $300 billion on gas, or on Wall Street.
Seriously, though, photovoltaics alone can't be the answer, either. PV processing involves many toxic chemicals, so the argument regarding "the costs and obstacles to waste disposal" is in no way specific to nuclear power. In fact, radioactive waste gets less radioactive with time, whereas silver and cadmium remain just as toxic as they ever were. Additionally, nuclear plants have the same efficiency, regardless of where they are. Ever try waiting for a sunny day in the north of England?
I'm not opposed to PV, wind, geothermal, hydro, or nuclear. You're absolutely right that the "problem" McCain envisages lies with the transportation industry, not in the power grid, and that any solution to the larger problem of oil dependency is still years away. But let's not speak ill of nuclear power just because John McCain likes it. If you'll forgive me for saying so, Kim Jong-Il is a fan of Mercedes Benz - does that mean we all have to start driving BMW instead?

First off, the $300B estimate is not taxpayer money, it is private investment: none of us have any business asking if the expenditure is worth it. The claim of vast nuclear subsidies is laughable: the nuclear energy appropriations of the DoE are less than $1B per year,

http://www.cfo.doe.gov/budget/09budget/Content/ApprSum.pdf

which compares rather favorably with the (my estimate) $83B/year or so worth of electricity US nuclear reactors generate. (811 TWh * 10.3c/kWh = $83B). It certainly does not seem as if the subsidies are essential, and I have no problem with getting rid of them altogether, if only to show up these hollow anti-nuclear arguments.

811 TWh: http://www.iea.org/Textbase/stats/electricitydata.asp?COUNTRY_CODE=US

10.3 c/kWh (June 2008, All Sectors): http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html

Second, building nuclear power plants takes time. We're talking upwards of 15 years from initial siting proposal through environmental and regulatory review to commissioning and construction.

Yes, and that urgently needs to be fixed. Ten years for bureaucratic review? Are you kidding me? The Japanese have built reactors in merely four years in the '90's, groundbreaking to power-up. Westinghouse claims they can do it in three. The construction time is hardly the issue. There's something seriously wrong in the American regulatory system when the process takes 15.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Rea…

http://ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/ap1000_glance.html

Third, nuclear reactors cost between $5 billion and $7 billion a piece, not counting the costs and obstacles to waste disposal.

That's cheap! Look at the damn numbers: the $5B figure you linked to gives 966 MWe, with nearly 100% uptime. That's $5.18 per watt capacity. Now look at the new wind farm in New Jersey: $1B for 350 MW capacity, but with only a fractional uptime. Take a typical capacity factor of 40% or so, and what's the cost? $7.14/watt, on the same order of magnitude.

$1B, 350MWe: http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews/i…

35%-45% capacity factors (offshore): http://books.google.com/books?id=IBCJNmvWWMQC&pg=PA55&source=gbs_search…

Now, an actually valid cost analysis would look at amortized lifetime and yield costs per kWh, not kW (energy, not power). It would have to consider all sorts of subtleties, from variation in fuel prices, to the lifespan of the power plant, to compensating for power intermittency, to economic effects like the discounting of future investment. Here's two examples of how it's done:

http://www.iea.org/Textbase/publications/free_new_Desc.asp?PUBS_ID=1472

http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/default.htm?Text=+costs+…

Your knee-jerk reaction to the cost alone, without looking at how much power capacity that cost creates (a million homes' worth), is rather silly.

(And yes, PV is intermittent, but storage technologies are improving all the time, so let's not get into that argument.)

That's quite a cop out, isn't it? "It's an intractable problem, but future technology may solve it, so don't worry"? Pumped hydroelectric storage has a finite geological capacity, and I haven't seen anything else come close in cost.

Finally - if want an intellectually honest debate, do it with the raw ideas themselves, not with the politicians' words. It's pretty well established that McCain is a dishonest and incompetent politician and employs a crack team of professional liars. But that does not, or should not, effect how we discuss raw ideas and proposals which he and others discuss. Sure, it's great that you're showing up the blatant errors in McCain's nuclear plan, but why should that influence the discussion of nuclear energy in general? Nothing McCain can say can undermine or reënforce any policy position, in my view.

...let's hope they're not as wonky as the Iraqi intelligence..

Or corrupt!

Whoa, didn't you mean that the other way round.
I mean they started the war.

Jim Hansen had some thoughts on nuclear power.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080804_TripReport.pdf

Also, the blog 'Physical Insights" had this:

http://enochthered.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/green-heretic-environmental…

Maybe nuclear power shouldn't be dismissed too quickly.

Eric, if the goal is just to end import from Venezuela and the Middle East that should be achievable within a few months. There are other countries to buy from to a fairly modest extra cost. Not that it actually achieves anything useful, but it can be done.

When it comes to electricity replacing oil as transportation fuel, every renewable faces the same problem (apart from some biomass, which is itself questionable as far as renewability goes).

Electric cars are an obvious way forward - range isn't as much of an issue if you consider the average multiple car family, who would generally only need one long range (>100 miles) car. Synthetic fuels (Methanol and DME produced from carbon-based waste via off-peak electricity) are probably the best bet for replacing the more difficult to substitute oil applications.

Obviously, replacing heating oil with electricity should be a no brainer..

"Barack Obama for President"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR20081…

Pretty outstanding endorsement.

I wrote a long rebuttal to this post over 24 hours ago. What's with the moderation holdup?

Pierre pointed out one of the specific problems I didn't bother tracking down when I wrote the post: the global shortage of reactor pressure vessels. Here's a link to a good review of the problem:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=aaVMzCTM…

Basically, with just one factor cranking out a vital component of every single non-Russian light-water reactor now under construction or being planned, we have a problem. As the Bloomberg article notes:

Orders for nuclear generators are multiplying as electricity use surges worldwide and governments pressure companies to cut carbon emissions to fight global warming. As many as 237 reactors may be built globally by 2030, an average of more than 10 a year, according to the World Nuclear Association in London. That compares with 78, or fewer than four a year, started since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine.

Given Japan Steel's limited capacity, the math just doesn't work, said Mycle Schneider, an independent nuclear industry consultant near Paris. Japan Steel caters to all nuclear reactor makers except in Russia, which makes its own heavy forgings.

It goes on to say that it would likely take at least five years for a competitor to be in the position to produce a comparable product.

I find this kind of thing a compelling reason not to rely on any new energy strategy that includes a significant number of new nuclear reactors. We simply don't have the time to wait. As the IPCC chief notes, if we don't have our ducks in a row by 2012, it will be too late.

To Captain Obvious: Thanks for bothering to point to out that your rebuttal hadn't been posted. To clarify: I don't moderate the comments as this blog's readership appears to have few complete idiots.

However, all comments are automatically filtered by the Scienceblogs blog software (Movable Type) and every now and then a genuine comment gets tossed in the junk folder. I rarely check that folder, but anyone who suspects that might have happened is free to alert me by email: (jamesh (at) cyamid (dot) net

The pressure vessel manufacturing bottleneck is probably going to be reduced considerably in the next few years. With all the current interest in nuclear power, manufacturers are increasing their ability to produce very large forgings. See the World Nuclear News article on this here.

What would you goobers be doing if you didn't have the MANMADE GLOBAL WARMING farce to fret about? Sitting in the forest crying for dead trees? Trying to give CPR to a dead snail darter? morans.

"morans."

If the previous post isn't an attempt at parody,the irony is hilarious.

If you're really trying to present the minimum time for plant construction, remember that the "environmental and regulatory review" is optional so take that out of any crisis planning. For that matter, regulatory review can proceed during construction at the risk of investors not being able to use what is being built, as regulatory approval is not needed until startup time is reached.

Also, the percentage of transportation which can use electricity is affected by the price of electricity. Building cheap electric sources affects related markets and choices, so present infrastructure is only useful for back-of-the-envelope estimates.

And having cheap electricity also affects fuel production and disposal of PV wastes. With cheap enough energy, you could cook fuel from dirt and water (ranging from syngas to Fischer-Tropsch fuels) or separate heavy metals into pure and reusable forms.

Ian Gould - Don't be a plebian net newbie. Maybe google "Internet Slang" and educate yourself. Push your glasses up on your nose and sniffle first though.