Yes, my book emphasis the challenge of the energy transition we face, to the point of considering a number of scenarios for the transition away from fossil fuels, including the costs. I think we are so used to having inexpensive gasoline, kerosene, and diesel liquids that we forgot how amazing these how — how much energy they contain and how easy they are to transport. It is going to be difficult and expensive to replace them or make them ourselves rather than be able to extract them from the ground.

Dan Botkin

Best wishes
Red

It’s delightful to get such a thoughtful response. This is the kind of exchange that can be constructive and move us forward. To respond to some of your new points:

* I agree that the liberty ship program could serve as a model in the sense of a consistent design and a national commitment to resolving a major problem. However, it is also clear that we are in a stage of rapidly evolving technology, so we don’t want to get locked into just one design for every energy type.

* Fuel supply, my calculations are specifically about conventional, currently-in-use nuclear plant technology.
As I discuss in detail in my forthcoming book, every time I searched out information about one of the new nuclear powerplants, I was disappointed to find how much more work was needed before they could be built and put online, including siting and certification.

* The calculations I made comparing wind and nuclear are real-world, based on existing installations and their actual annual outputs, including down-time for wind.

* Wind is much cheaper to build today than nuclear, as cheap as a coal-fired power plant in construction costs, and not requiring the costs of fuel.

* Your estimates of the area required are contradicted by the actual large facilities now in operation across a wide range of locations. I was surprised by how small an area in the United States lower 48 would be required if the large majority of our energy came from wind and solar. The details, too long to go into here, are in my new book, but are surprisingly small.

* We disagree about nuclear wastes. That remains a huge and unresolved problem.

* In my book, I discuss the percentage of power that nuclear could provide; I don’t dismiss it nor any other possible source. Each is considered in turn.

Perhaps we could have an ongoing dialogue and continue this discussion. This website is certainly open to it.

Dan Botkin

Where you and I disagree about fuel supply is that you assume future power plants will be the same as those built according to 1960’s technology. In fifty years, nuclear technology has advanced, as one would expect. New designs will make full use of all the uranium in the ore. On those terms, the supply of uranium and thorium will last for thousands of years. Since you ask for information and not just assertions, please look at http://gwperplexed.niof.org/thecase.htm#p3; all the information comes from sources like DOE-EIA, IAEA, and OECD.

I suggested that you were taking information from political groups because of the subjective tone of your remarks about waste. Most dangerous waste products stay dangerous forever, so complaining that radioactive wastes last a long time is a red herring. Coal wastes are many times more dangerous, because the volumes are unmanageable. For example, a coal plant produces 300,000 tons of toxic waste per year, not counting the filth released into the atmosphere. A nuclear plant that generates the same amount of electricity produces 23 tons, about a third of a railroad boxcar. A quantity that small can be isolated from the environment. With recycling, the waste is reduced to only a ton, which loses its hazardous character in a few centuries. In fact, no person has ever been harmed by nuclear-energy waste. With all the things going on in the world that do serious harm to many people, concern over nuclear waste is terribly misdirected.

Here is some basic arithmetic on energy alternatives. Nuclear plants operate at capacity factors around 90%, and wind farms at something under 30%. We can say that 1.5 MW wind turbines are typical, although larger and smaller ones are installed. A new nuclear plant will be rated around 1.5 GW, so it takes over 3000 turbines to produce the same amount of electricity. Such turbines have to be spaced out at intervals of about 50 acres each; 3000 x 50 gives us 150,000 acres or 234 square miles. A high-efficiency (20%) solar panel yields less than 1 kWh/m2/day. A nuclear plant, on average, will yield 0.9 x 24 x 1,500,000 = 32,400,000 kWH/day, so the panel area required for the same amount of electricity would be 32,400,000 m2 = 32.4 km2 = 12.5 square miles. The proposition that either of these could replace fossil fuels faster than nuclear energy would be hard to defend.

But that isn’t even the problem. The essential problem is that people will continue to use fossil energy if clean energy sources are available only part-time. We know that’s true because it’s what people have been doing for centuries, ever since they learned that coal was cleaner than wood and more reliable than wind. There are no technologies that will overcome the problem of intermittency. For more on that point, please look at http://gwperplexed.niof.org/thecase.htm#a1. If there were such technologies, they would certainly drive the economic and environmental costs out of sight. Just consider the inefficiencies of storing and releasing large amounts of energy, by whatever means, aside from the costs of constructing the imagined facilities.

I have to say that it’s a pleasure to dialog with a person as knowledgeable and articulate as you. If there were more nuclear opponents like you and fewer bumper-sticker sloganeers, this whole debate would have much greater value.

As is typical with those who are so committed to one form of energy as the only solution, this writer makes extreme assertions that are not defended with any facts. But it should be clear to any engineer that building a nuclear power plant is more difficult and complex than building liberty ships. Add to this the widespread opposition, locally, to building new nuclear power plants and the time it takes to get them certified. I discuss this and other energy issues in my forthcoming book, “Powering the Future: A Scientist’s Guide to Energy Independence,” Pearson FT Press, scheduled for release March, 2010.

The writer is incorrect in his statements about the construction demands for wind and solar, which I also discuss in my new book. Estimated costs to build a nuclear power plant today are between $5 billion and $14 billion. To provide the same amount of energy on a yearly basis, wind turbine farms would cost $9.6 billion at today’s costs. And the area they require are surprisingly small, as I also discuss in my book.

The future for U. S. energy independence will involve a variety of forms of energy, including nuclear, but nuclear just can’t be the major source for reasons I discuss here and in my book.

Dan Botkin

But your main point here is that building enough nuclear plants is to arduous a challenge. Two points need to be made. First, your idea of the arduousness is overstated. When the US was building nuclear plants, it built a hundred of them in twenty years without any form of national commitment. If we are going to be serious about minimizing global warming we necessarily will have to commit ourselves to a major energy-conversion program on the order of a national mobilization. On those terms, building enough nuclear plants is easily achievable; look up liberty ships to see what is involved.

Second, the alternatives to nuclear energy are much more demanding in the way of construction. Consider that it takes some thousands of wind turbines spread over hundreds of square miles, complete with maintenance roads and underground power lines and inverters and transformers, etc., to yield the same energy as one nuclear power plant. Or it takes square miles of solar panels. And neither wind energy or solar energy can provide electricity on demand. People will never be persuaded to stay in their cold, dark houses when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. They will insist on going to work and they will expect to have power to run the lights and equipment when they get there; if they can’t get energy from clean sources they will take it from fossil fuels.

Thank you for this opportunity to respond.

Nuclear power enthusiasts also tend to claim that somebody else has answered all the problems and all you have to do is read their documents. I’ve been reading those other documents for years now. Readers, please continue to write comments, but please write more than assertions without any information defending them.

Dan Botkin

Dan Botkin